Moving into Your Zone of Genius with Ruby Marsh
Welcome back to Coffee on Leadership, I’m sharing another well loved episode again – Moving into Your Zone of Genius with Ruby Marsh.
In this replay episode Ruby and I talk about the twists and turns in Ruby's career as she moved from being a successful architect to a speaker and coach for creatives. Ruby is also sharing her commitment to helping others find their "zone of genius" and how generosity is part of her leadership style. If you’re looking for more balance and fulfillment in your work, this episode is for you.
On this episode you’ll hear…
Why Ruby decided to leave her very successful career as an architect to become a coach for creatives, speaker and podcast host
Honoring the ambitions and plans that our parents have held for us while simultaneously doing what’s best for ourselves
What your zone of genius is and how Ruby uses this in her coaching work and how Chaili relates this to the idea of flow
Why listening is synonymous with generosity to Ruby and how she cultivates this in her coaching practice
About Ruby:
Ruby Marsh is an Architect turned coach for creatives, speaker and host of the career-focussed podcast True To You. Her mission is to guide high-achieving women to unlock their creative bravery and do work that feels meaningful. Through her 1:1 coaching and group program The Create(her) Club, Ruby helps early stage business owners learn tools to attract dream clients and be paid for their innate genius without burning out in the process.
Ready for more?
Listen in:
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** This is a raw, unedited transcript
Chaili Trentham 00:00
Ruby, thank you so much for joining me today.
Ruby Marsh 00:03
It's a real pleasure. It's really fun to be chatting to you, across the oceans.
Chaili Trentham 00:09
Welcome to the coffee on leadership Podcast. I'm Chaili, Trentham higher education practitioner and Professor trends consultant, guiding leaders in cultivating creativity and wholeness through learning and development. And this podcast is a whole lot of that fit in the short segments, you can listen to over a cup of coffee. Meet me here as I design conversations around leadership that you can authentically integrate into the spaces where you lead and have impact. Cheers. I'm so excited to chat with you today about leadership because you bring such a unique story to the table. In your background, would you share a little bit more about your background all the way from being an architect forward? I would love for people to know a bit more about you and the twists and turns you've taken taken in your career.
Ruby Marsh 00:56
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's always funny when people ask you about your story, because I think I've told it a few times now. So I I'm very I'm very excited to share. But you know, you're always like, Oh, really is my story that interesting. But I think because I've had such an unusual career transition and coming from a prestigious career like architecture into what I'm doing now. which I absolutely love what I'm doing now, but it people is very curious. So I yeah, I came to Australia. I'm actually originally from New Zealand to study architecture. And after I graduated, I moved to Sydney, and worked for a very, very well known very celebrated firm down there who worked with amazing clients top top 1% clients, so very prestigious, looks good on the resume, and projects that are really dream projects, in terms of the finishes, the quality of the detail, the budget, all of those things, everything was great on paper, right?
Chaili Trentham 02:12
Yeah. And so why.
Ruby Marsh 02:16
And so I got to this point. And I think I was I was five years in, I was registered, I had ticked all the boxes, and was looking at what my next steps were going to be. And I guess I was lucky to grow up with parents who were very multi dimensional, and have had a couple of careers themselves. And my dad is a really interesting person in that both him and my mom didn't go to university until they were in their 40s. And maybe the late 40s. They were they left high school at like 15 and 16. Most people would say that they they wouldn't go on and do the careers that they've had. But very much my my father, he from a young age was very industrious, and went from job to job. And then once he got educated, again, did the same. And really every step built on the next thing. So I had this example modeled for me that, in some ways, gave me some freedom to choose. But on the other side of it, it's also we carry a lot of expectation around living up to our parents, examples and the fact that they'd worked hard to get me to university and all of these great things, I felt a real obligation to stay in my career. And so my my choice to try something different, which actually looked like stepping into working for Lululemon, which is a company that we both absolutely love. And I thought at the time, okay, I'm going to go into a design role, this, this move is really a stepping stone into a design role within the company. And that that type of role would have also meant either a move interstate or overseas to potentially somewhere like Vancouver. So I knew that that that could have been a possibility. But what was really interesting was that I knew, Lululemon was much more aligned with my values. And I was finding that whilst everything looked good on paper with my work and architecture, there was some dissonance there and there was a bit of uncertainty as to how well it said sat with me. And at the same time, I must also say that I had gone through quite a lot of health issues and burnout and high functioning anxiety. And so I wouldn't say I was a mess. But I could hold it together and I could continue my career. But deep down, I was like, there's gotta be more to this. And being someone who always prided herself on being athletic and achieving in that arena as well to not be able to live at your full capacity was really hard. And so in making that move to Lululemon, I regain some balance. As you know, we get to sweat with our team several times a week, and all of those good things, I felt like I had really met my people. And from there, I kind of followed my father's way of, I guess, taking these opportunities by listening more to my gut and feeling my way through the next steps in my career, which was so foreign and something I really had to train, I really had to regain that sense of intuition and what it actually meant to make decisions from that place and from the heart. And what what happened was, it actually led me to leadership roles within a store level coaching and training and really diving into that side of it. And then, at the time, we had owned one business, my husband and I, and then we owned a second one. And then I decided, I think I need to start coaching women individually. And I would love to help them work on their careers and potential career changes, because that's what I knew how to do really well and feeling right successfully, I thought, and so that's where I started out with my coaching. And a lot of it in terms of the leadership was very much that self leadership. So here I am today, and I'm now coaching small business women and back to working in the creative scene. So I work with designers and architects and interior designers. And it's all come full circle in it's really, really fun to partner in the businesses, but also not have to own the business.
Chaili Trentham 07:14
So, yeah, I love I just love that story of how things came full circle. And you you use every experience that you had, though, I think from the outside, right, somebody would hear architect and think, why and how does that relate to coaching? And how does that relate to leadership right now. And then when you see the progression of it, when you tell those stories, it makes perfect sense that you brought your strengths and skills and all along the journey, right? You brought it to every role and then picked up new skill sets and tools along the way to really lead you where you are right now.
Ruby Marsh 07:45
Exactly, exactly. And I remember someone once telling me when I was considering starting coaching that, for the most part, it really great coaches, that's a very natural thing for them. And they've probably always been doing it. And I think it's definitely something that you can train, don't get me wrong. I think people can learn it. But I think there's that innate empathy, that capacity to listen and really tune in to what the other person's saying. And I realized that I've actually been doing that and probably been more excited by doing that during my architecture career, whether it be with my colleagues or my family. And so it's funny how that the universe leaves clues. But you don't always see them at the time. And you don't always listen to how much you're really being lit up by something.
Chaili Trentham 08:43
I love that. You talk a lot about zone of genius, would you be willing to share a bit more about your expertise and helping others find their zone of genius?
Ruby Marsh 08:55
I love this topic. This is something that I think was really fostered at Lululemon because even though they wouldn't use that term, specifically, although they may encourage people to read into Gay Hendricks as work who first coined the phrase sign of genius from, from what I know, he was the first person to really use that and unpack that for people. And I remember my husband telling me, you should read this book. And it was probably five years after it was published. And I don't know why this book was in front of me before then, but this is how things work. And and I read this book and I was like this, this is b this is the work that I want to help my women with I want to help them tap into that because I really saw the potential both energetically for these women. A lot of the women I work with, they do I have the perfect situation to start a business where they have all the time and the money in the world. And they might have children, they might have another job perhaps that they're phasing out in order to go full time in their business. And so understanding that, that a lot of it is about maximizing the energy, I realized, okay, in order to maximize your energy, what what do you need to be doing? Well, you need to be working more in your zone of genius and zone of genius is not easy to spot as well, because it is that quadrant that sits very closely to your zone of excellence. And most people probably sit in their zone of excellence, and probably even in a lot of roles. Unless you've really got someone that's that's developing your true core strengths, then you'll probably be sitting a lot in zone of competence. And so if you sit in your zone of competence, after a while, you're going to get pretty bored, you're not going to feel challenged, and therefore you'll probably be, you know, lose energy as a result, because you're not being fulfilled and lit up. And it does not mean that you need to create a role that's 100 percents in that zone of genius quadrant, really, the starting point for people is, let's identify what sits in there, what skills, what strengths, perhaps even ways of being how you show up in different situations, that's really, really unique to you. And you know, when you when you are doing those things, you're absolutely at your absolute best, and it's easy for you to achieve too. And so identifying those things, and then realizing, okay, how can we shift your work? How can we shift your business as well, so that you're spending more time in there? What does that look like in terms of how you structure your week? Do you need to start outsourcing parts of your business to other people get employees and slowly but surely, as they make some of those leaks, which are a little scary, because you you don't have all the control over all of the pieces, but they certainly begin to feel much more fulfilled and excited about the future. It's not that monotonous day to day that we can feel so that's in short, what zone of genius is and what it offers you. So there's there's a lot more complexity of this. Yeah.
Chaili Trentham 12:46
Ruby, I love this as you're talking. So I'm not very familiar. I I've heard the term zone of genius a lot. But I'm not I haven't read Gay Hendricks book. And now I need to, because I'm realizing that very similar to chicks than me highs work in flow, which many listeners of this podcast know that's one of my favorite spaces to look at. But when he when he uses quadrants for kind of mapping energy, he uses the axes of skill set or talent and task at hand. But it sounds like the zone of genius quadrants are broken up in a way that it's like skill set or talent and time, like you're the best use of your time. Is that accurate? Is that accurate?
Ruby Marsh 13:31
Yes. So I guess that's how you would assess whether something sits in that spot. And also, like I said, most of us can really rattle rattle off very quickly, things that sit in our zone of competence, things that sit now zone of incompetence, we know pretty clearly what we're not good at. And, yeah, and then
Chaili Trentham 13:57
technology, technology is not.
Ruby Marsh 14:01
And then and then our zone of excellence. If we're I think this is where the biggest distinction happens for high achieving women because they, they often sit in a zone of excellence. And as a high achiever, you know what you need to get to the top to get to that certain level to achieve. But to then take it to that next step where you're really fulfilled by that achievement, sometimes looks a little bit differently and can be a bit scary because it might be moving you out of your zone of excellence and really into your genius. And so genius is also looking at your career, not not for the next year or two years. But what does this look like across your lifetime? It's not an overnight shift. It is a step by step thing,
Chaili Trentham 14:53
right? No and I love that that distinction of a variable between the zone of excellence incentive genius being fulfillment, right? Because a lot of us get to that level where we, we know we're in, we've achieved excellence. We've done everything by the book, right? And we've reached a point in our career where we're all of a sudden standing there looking around us, like, I worked so hard to get here. But something's still missing. Right? And so I think so many women, like you said, especially high achieving women can can often get to that point, because we've followed the steps perfectly. We've we've done everything we need to do. And then we get there and we look around and we're like, but am I truly happy? Am I fully fulfilled? Why do I feel so tired? Why am I experiencing burnout? If I worked so hard to get here and I'm, I'm achieving at a high level, and I'm excellent in my work. And what might be missing is that fulfillment, that calling that everyday purpose that lands us in the other quadrant, right, this quadrant, I cannot wait to read. I've loved this conversation, everyone needs to follow you. And because you've just given us so much wisdom packed into this, this short and sweet episode, I asked people who come on to the podcast to describe their leadership in three words, and you said, you were generous, fair, and the developer. So I want you to speak just quickly on how you embody those words in your leadership, daily.
Ruby Marsh 16:20
generosity, for me, is about listening. Really, I think listening is one of the most generous things that you can do. And as a coach, I constantly have to remind myself that I need to listen more. It's not that I judge myself on it, but by listening more, you're inviting more to come out of the session, more to come out of the person. And it's really easy. There's a great book called The Coaching Habit, and he talks about the advice monster. And so I think, realizing that giving advice is not always the most generous thing. The other one fairness that's that's just an innate quality in me I am I'm Yes, I think it is a quality, but I really, it's more I like to see everyone have their voice be heard, I think is the biggest thing from leading teams, it's really evident that some people can naturally because of their confidence, or because they don't feel worthy, slip into the shadows a little bit and not have their voice heard. So for me Fiennes is about ensuring that everybody feels like they, they can speak up. Yeah. And then the third one where it was
Chaili Trentham 17:49
clear that you are a developer, it is abundantly clear that you are consistently developing yourself and others and I love love those three words that you selected because it's you embody those in the way that you approach your work. Thank you so much for your wisdom that you have shared on this episode. I'm so excited for people to listen and really listen. Because truly I think everything you talked about, about finding our zone of genius about planning while managing our energy and really seeking out how we find fulfillment, all of it all of it is such an important part of our leader development. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining all the way
Ruby Marsh 18:32
from Yeah, it's been my absolute
Chaili Trentham 18:35
I don't know if I said that on the on the front end of episode but joining us yeah. Thanks for listening to the coffee on leadership podcast. Take a few moments to reflect on how you will integrate today's episode into your life. And let me know if it was helpful to your leadership. Reach out Visit my website or leave a comment. And don't forget to share with colleagues and subscribe for future learning. Until our next cup of coffee together. Cheers