You Are The Magic
You Are the Magic helps high achievers reignite their passion by tapping into the power they already possess—without adding more hustle to their plate. Hosted by Christine DeHerrera, a seasoned business coach, PR pro, and writer with over 20 years of experience, each episode blends mindset, strategy, and a dash of woo so you can create success that lights you up and makes your wildest dreams feel like your new normal.
You Are The Magic
The Toxic Trap of Excellence--Free Your Magic Challenge Day 2
Think excellence is the gold standard? Think again. In today’s episode of the Free Your Magic Challenge, Christine DeHerrera reveals why “toxic excellence” may be the sneaky culprit draining your energy, keeping you stuck, and pulling you away from your true genius. If you’ve ever been rewarded, praised, or even paid well for doing things you’re great at—but still felt unfulfilled—this episode is a must-listen.
Christine pulls back the curtain on the dangerous trap of excellence, explains why it’s the enemy of your soul’s work, and shows you how to reconnect with your unique zone of genius—the work that lights you up, magnetizes opportunities, and gets you paid exponentially. Along the way, you’ll get practical exercises, personal stories, and the encouragement you need to stop over-functioning and start reclaiming your magic.
By the end, you’ll see that being “excellent” isn’t enough. Your genius is waiting to be rediscovered—and devoting even a few minutes a day to it can change everything. Press play now to uncover the toxic trait that could be holding you back from your next level.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
From Chaos to Mastery: Navigating the 5 Stages of Business Growth--Episode 10 Listen on apple or Spotify
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Thank you for listening and just remember, you are the magic!
Welcome to day two of the Free your Magic podcast challenge. How did yesterday's challenge on toxic positivity land for you? Did you learn some interesting things about how our fascination with constantly looking on the bright side can actually keep us from feeling our feelings and taking action to make the change we really desire? If you didn't get a chance to listen to that episode yet, definitely go back and hit play, because it's an important, foundational piece of what we're doing here in the challenge. Some of you reported back that looking at positivity in a different way was really eye-opening and led to an even greater realization about where your attention is going and why you're taking an action to begin with, which was just amazing feedback to get. I'm so excited for you if that was the case, so make sure you send me a text here in the podcast feed or DM me on Instagram. I'd love to hear what this challenge is inspiring you toward and what changes you're already making and the results you're already getting, because even just one day, it sounds like some of you have been having some amazing results. Toxic trait this is becoming the toxic trait challenge, which is pretty funny because it is these things that we're doing that we think are super useful for us that are holding our magic down, keeping our energy stuck, keeping us from moving forward. So, as we lean into day two, let's revisit your intention that you set yesterday and the lens that you're using to work towards this intention.
Christine DeHerrera:So, for me, I wanted to create a podcast challenge that was going to help people get unstuck, help people kick off the fall season. The lens that I'm using to do this for me is fun. How could I make creating this podcast challenge as fun as possible? And I've done something I've never done before, which is I'm actually not recording these episodes in my office where I have my mic, my big mic and all of those things set up. I'm actually recording these on the go in order to bring more forward momentum, energy and just to make it more fun. And normally I have a podcast editor and I'm editing these myself because if you've been following along on the show, you'll know, before I ever launched my podcast, I learned how to edit podcasts on like three different software, because that's how we do things over here and I'm super glad I did. It's useful. I'm editing this podcast because I wanted to keep the momentum and the flow and the fun and, believe it or not, producing these challenge episodes myself is actually really fun for me, but shout out to my podcast editor, don't worry, you'll be getting a full season.
Christine DeHerrera:So what is the lens that you are working on your intention through? We just have to revisit those things. I don't know about you, but I have to revisit all of these things constantly throughout the day, or I find myself wondering what am I actually doing? So our toxic trait today, I think, may surprise you as much as toxic positivity might have surprised you yesterday. Our toxic trait today is toxic excellence. I'm just going to let that land for a minute, because excellence, that's a good thing, right? Well, maybe not.
Christine DeHerrera:So I don't know if you have read the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, but he identifies four quadrants of things that we're doing in our life and our job. The two that I'm interested in are working in what he calls your zone of excellence and working in your zone of genius, and excellence is the enemy of genius. Now, excellence is rewarded highly in our culture, right? If you're excellent at something, by definition you're in the top 10% at producing, performing, whatever your work is. It means you get paid well and people will notice that you're excellent at your work. The challenge is you get stuck in your excellence versus your genius. Your genius is something that's inherent in you. It is your soul's blueprint of what you were made to do here. This is your unique point of view on something you love. Your zone of genius gets you paid exponentially. Your zone of genius gets you into a whole new stratosphere, and we're going to dig into this a little bit more.
Christine DeHerrera:Examples of my own zone of excellence I am really excellent at creating publicity and advertising campaigns for clients and I'm really excellent at creating customer experience. To counter that, in my zone of genius, I see the potential of my clients Due to being an empathetic and empathic person. I see potential. I can see these unbelievable outcomes. I can see your zone of genius and this is the important part I know how to create the environment to bring out that genius, through both energetic and strategy. So, in the language of Jennifer Kim, the author of Unicorn Team, which you should 100% read, I am a strategizing visionizer. So I see the vision for you and your life and your work and I know how to create a strategy around it, and for me, strategy is always both the energetic piece and here's what to do and when to do it. So those are two specific examples. For me, as I mentioned before, excellence gets you paid handsomely and people will notice that you are excellent and they may send people your way for that excellence.
Christine DeHerrera:The downside of excellence is it keeps you out of your zone of genius and often it requires over-functioning and over-responsibility, which depletes all of your energy and makes your personal genius slowly slip away, whereas genius puts you in a category of one and gets you paid exponentially, and this is the fuel for your life. Right, your genius is what keeps you up at night and gets you up in the morning and lights your soul on fire and makes you magnetic to everyone around you. Now here is something that I think I don't know if I've ever heard this talked about. We all have many zones of excellence and we all have many zones of genius, and our genius and our excellence change over the course of our life. Because, yes, I personally believe we have a soul's blueprint that we came here to work on, but our lived experience and how all of this is processing through our body changes our excellence and genius, and it's okay to change along with them. I feel like another myth around excellence and genius is that there's just these one or two things that you might be a genius at, but that's not true in my opinion. And what you were attached to when you were 20 years old versus 30, 40, 50, 80, 90, we're all gonna be living a very long time. That genius can change as well, so don't be afraid to lean into your zone of genius. I wanna give you a couple more examples on my side, because this will help you get to thinking about them when we get to your homework Again.
Christine DeHerrera:If you listen to the show, you know how my publicity and advertising business started, and it did start with my genius. At the time. I was writing, loved media and I loved research and I was a horse person. I am a horse person, so I spoke horse, and learning how to speak the language of your zone of genius is part of the process of bringing your genius to life. And all of those things coalesced with a person I was interviewing for an article, asking me to write a press release for her, and that is how my business started. And if you haven't heard that story, you can scroll back down to some of the earlier episodes for a little bit more about that. But I'll never forget exactly where I was, in my house, on the phone with this woman when she asked me to write a press release, and it was like an aha moment. Even though I didn't totally understand what a press release was, in that moment I knew that it was media and I knew it was writing, and that changed everything for me. And then my zone of excellence kicked in, because I started delivering publicity and advertising campaigns at the top 10% level and won tons of awards. And again I can remember exactly where I was when I found out that my agency so me and my team had won the All Industry Best in Show Award over advertising agencies from the big city, and what a feeling that was. That's an amazing success in my zone of excellence. So I'm a genius at helping people get paid for what they love and who they are and how to bring all of that into storytelling, and if I'm not careful I can trip into focusing just on my zone of excellence, which people love to pay me for too.
Christine DeHerrera:The exercise I want you to do for today is to ask yourself where am I living and working in my zone of excellence and just write it all down. You may be so excellent that people ask you to be on the PTA at your kid's school. You may be so excellent that you're helping your entire family organize all their health care and medical needs. And by whole family I don't mean just you and your immediate family, I mean you may be helping all of your brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents that may. You may be excellent at that and might be a little toxic, for example. So make the list of where are you living and working in your zone of excellence, remembering that people love to see you work from there. And once you have that list, you can start asking is this draining all of my energy? Is this becoming toxic excellence? I also want you to make the list of your zone of genius. And here's the kicker. If you've been spending the vast majority of your days and weeks and hours in your zone of excellence, your zone of genius may be hiding out by itself somewhere, just standing around waiting for you to remember it was there. So if you can't think of what belongs on your zone of genius list, do not be disturbed or dismayed.
Christine DeHerrera:Start by just making a list of what do I love. I love to read romance novels. I love to listen to podcasts I love to whatever and slowly but surely you can start to unravel that and see where you can bring more of that genius into your life. Start with what you love. What you love is the key that unlocks the zone of genius. Everything that you need is within you. So start by taking just 10 minutes a day to do absolutely nothing. I'm talking lie on your bed or on the floor or under a tree and do nothing. And at first your mind is going to go really, really fast and it's going to give you a list of all the things you need to do. And it's often helpful to just write those things down, because then your mind will relax. Then you can start to daydream again and remember what your genius says I told you today was going to be a doozy.
Christine DeHerrera:Toxic excellence is the enemy of your soul's work, your genius. So gently identify where you've been stuck in your toxic excellence and begin to devote time to your genius, just a few minutes a day. And if you're running a business and you're very successful those first years I wrote there's a whole podcast on that. I'll drop that episode in the show notes. It's the one about phases of business. If you're running a successful business.
Christine DeHerrera:Most likely you started in your zone of genius but then you drifted into your zone of excellence, and that's required, in my opinion, for that first phase of getting a business off the ground. So don't beat yourself up on that. You're going to need to, because you're going to wear all the hats, including your zone of excellence, and it's in that next phase that you start to pull back on your zone of excellence, you start to hire more people to do those tasks so that you can stay focused on your core genius in your business. And if that's something you're interested in getting help with, because that's the phase where businesses go to die sometimes, which is the saddest thing, because if you've gotten a business off the ground and it's working, and then you just completely burn out and you end up having to go back to working for someone else For me personally, that's the saddest story in the entire world Well, one of them.
Christine DeHerrera:So if you're in that phase where you've built something off of your genius but you recognize hey, I'm stuck in my toxic excellence era then it's time to get help. And that is one of the things that I work one-on-one with clients. So if you're interested in that you can book a free discovery call. I'll drop the link to book one of those calls in the show notes as well, and I'm really excited to be back tomorrow with another doozy. That's all I'm going to say. You got to tune in to see what it is, because if you think toxic positivity and toxic excellence are like what You're going to love this one too. Thank you so much for listening and just remember you are the magic.