I’m Great At This, So Why Do I Hate It?

[INTRODUCTION]

"Cristina Amigoni: I'm really good at this. I'm doing this. I'm getting promoted by doing this. I'm succeeding in, "Yes, you did a great job. Here's your star," or the three stars on the top of my document, but I wake up every morning, and I feel like I'm killing brain cells." 

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore. 

Cristina Amigoni & Alex Cullimore: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself, not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills, no makeup, just being.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. It is a host’s only episode. I'm going to avoid saying just hosts. Just going to go with the hosts only. 

Cristina Amigoni: It is hosts only. 

Alex Cullimore: So, welcome, Cristina. We are here again. And it's not Friday. In fact, it's Tuesday. 

Cristina Amigoni: I know it's wild. It is a new year. So, you never know what's going to happen. 

Alex Cullimore: It's a new year. We're changing things up. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: So, with a new year, one of the things I think it's important to think about in life in general, but it's always a good time to refresh it, especially when we have both new hopes and simultaneously some energy as well as some exhaustion going into a new year, is the idea of balancing energy. How do you find it in life? Where does it go? How do you know whether you're increasing your own energy or depleting it? 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, it's one of those things. It's like, outside of taking a one-month vacation, how do you keep tabs on the energy every day so that you can get to not burning out or not being exhausted and being surprised by it, which is a good combination of things. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, surprise burnout is not fun. And burnout is an interesting term because it applies to both types of energy. There's the idea of just physical energy you may be running low on. If you've packed your calendar and you feel like you've been running around a lot and you feel like you're out of energy, that can be maybe a physical draining. But there's also the more spiritual purpose end of burnout, which is, "Hey, I'm really feeling I'm not doing something that maybe is more meaningful." And it's not about necessarily getting break from work for a bit so much as reorienting yourself to a purpose and your values and getting some energy out of working towards those, because that can be very energizing even if you are expending physical energy to be part of it. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's the daily maintenance, for sure. It's not just, "Have I done too much of something?" But there's a bunch of quotes out there that says like a lot of the burnout is actually, "I have done too little of what fulfills me." That's the burnout. And one of the ways that we have helped ourselves a lot, and we have helped – I don't even know what the number of teams is at this point, very high number of teams, is by actually leveraging the 6 Types of Working Genius assessment and model by The Table Group and Pat Lencioni because it's a very good practical type of model that relates strictly to work. 

But I think it can also be related to life things because tasks are tasks. But it does help, especially in the workplace and from a team perspective, to understand. Like, "How can I at least – I may have to work many hours. But how can I and the team spend most of those hours doing something that's fulfilling?" So that it refills their energy as opposed to draining – even just the thought of some tasks can drain you. And so, how can we avoid that part of the burnout? 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, it's a great assessment. It's very easy. It's a 15-minute self-assessment that you take, and it's actually one of the most, I think, non-judgmental ones that I've seen taken. Not because like other ones are intentionally judgmental, but it's so easy to look at something like a strengths-finder and be like, "Well, I'd also like to have these strengths or something." Or look at your rigs or whatever and be like, "Well, here's the advantages and disadvantages." 

And Working Genius usually isn't about that. It's not about what you're good at or bad at. It's about where you find energy and where it's depleted. And to your point, it's important not only for when are you going to run out of energy, it's also important because it's about productivity. And it is listed as a productivity assessment. And if you want to work productively, I think the last study showed something like flow states can be up to five times as productive as any other state. You could spend your time, 1 hour in nonflow, or one hour in flow, and you get about 5 hours worth of output out of that, of work out of that, and generally enjoyments out of that. Because if you have workflow, you know that it's a very satisfactory way to work. You feel good about it. You don't notice the time going, and it can be very energizing to do. And the Working Genius is a great way of finding those areas of work in which you're going to find some of that flow, and you're going to find some of that energy, as well as identifying the ones where you're going to be drained, and you might avoid that more. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, for sure. And because it is a productivity assessment and a productivity model, what we found to be the true gem is in doing it as teams or doing it with other people. There's a huge advantage in knowing about yourself because there always is. It always starts with yourself and knowing what gives me energy. What drains my energy? Where do I find fulfillment at the task level, at the project level, at the work that I'm doing level? And understanding that. 

And we have a great example in Nicole on our team who took it before she started working with us in a team application way, and it relieved her of that judgment and guilt for herself quite a bit. And so that was already a good positive benefit of figuring out, "Oh, this is not about being good or bad at things. It's not about strengths and weaknesses. It's not that you're not capable of doing things," which I think it's where a lot of the judgment and the guilt could come in. Because, as much as we know, we can't be perfectionists. We all strive to be perfectionists and want to be able for other people to say that we're great at everything, and we're not. 

And so it's not about that. It's really about you could be really good at one of your – what's called working frustrations, one of the things that drains your energy, but not find fulfillment. And so if you're in that area, then you're exhausted. You're exhausted at the end of the day. You wake up in the morning, you don't want to do the work. You hope that you could go on a 3-month sabbatical vacation because you really don't want to do it. You procrastinate on it. 

I remember years ago in one of my first jobs where I did learn a lot, but I remember thinking every day I would tell my co-workers sitting next to me, it's like I'm killing my brain cells doing this work. But back then, I didn't have the language or understanding of why do I feel this way when I'm really good at this. I'm doing this. I'm getting promoted by doing this. I'm succeeding in, "Yes, you did a great job. Here's your star," or the three stars on the top of my document, but I wake up every morning, and I feel like I'm killing brain cells. 

Alex Cullimore: Oh man, I'm so glad you brought that up because I've had that experience before many times in my career. There is something where you've been asked to do it, you start to get good at it, and you just begin to loathe doing it. I think those were actually some of the scarier times I had early in my career, because I was convinced that like, "Oh god, this is what it's going to be like for 40 years." I'm going to have to get to retirement on something that is so draining. It was just a lot of, frankly, inexperience at that point of not realizing a lot is going to change every couple of years. And you can just make it change every couple of years. And I didn't have that understanding. 

And so I would have these moments of exactly that, where I was like, "Oh, I'm getting good marks for this. I'm exceeding expectations. And my god, if I have to do this another week, I'm going to poke my eyeballs out." And I remember being terrified all the time of like, "Oh my god, this is going to be it forever. This is going to be it forever." 

And that's what I really like about this. This is why I mentioned not being a judgmental one, because it is such a good way of finding what personally helps fulfill you or drain you without that judgment and that worry and that constant, "Oh no, I'm not doing it right, or I'm going to have to do something that I really hate forever." 

Cristina Amigoni: And from a team perspective, you now have a common language team where that guilt and that judgment are taken out. And now you can find ways, and we've seen it over and over and over working with multiple teams, hundreds of peoples on this, that you can find ways to reset expectations, re-calibrate the work, the tasks, and actually find ways for people to live in that fulfillment area, in that flow area at least a good significant amount of the time. And also have that understanding and humanity and empathy when they're not showing up as their best selves. 

In one of our most recent workshops, which had hundreds of people in the room, one of the feedback and the questions from somebody in the audience was a reflection from a team perspective to think about, "Hey, we know this person is really struggling, and that those are her tasks. And we know she can do better. Maybe we should rethink with the tasks that she's responsible for because she's really good at them, but she's not happy. And it's obvious that she's not happy. How can we as a team, as leaders, rethink about what her responsibilities are?" Because it may be that we're sticking her in a working frustration area. It has nothing to do with skills. It has nothing to do with strengths. It has nothing to do with motivation. It's just she's being responsible for the wrong kind of tasks, or too many of them at least. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, that's I think a huge benefit of it is that it's not even necessarily about your role. Your role might emphasize some parts of these, and you can probably find ones that align a little better and a little worse. But generally, it's how you approach work and what kind of work you're doing within it. We've seen this happen multiple times. I like that example of like, "Hey, this person's really great at this. I mean, do you really want to lose your high performers, or would you like to reorient this towards, "Hey, they can do something even more?" This is somebody who's willing to do something they're very frustrated by. What if you could plug them into what they're passionate about? And what couldn't they do at that point? And that's the best part about doing this as a team: you get to know who else on your team can help when you're in those periods of frustration. 

And just as an example, personally, for us, we've done this multiple times. The Working Genius splits work out into six general phases and goes from ideation all the way to the implementation and finishing all the last details of it. And so when we took this as we're only two people and everybody has two geniuses, two competencies, and two frustrations, we were inevitably going to have gaps. 

Even though we do have a good spread between the two of us of a good amount of the six covered, we do have ones that we don't have covered. And unfortunately, we also have ones where we're both frustrated. There were ends of the spectrum and parts of the whole spectrum of work that were very difficult for just the two of us to get through when it was just the two of us working and building Siamo. 

And so we learned fairly early on that we could actually redistribute our work based on what we enjoy. We ended up building programs a lot faster when we could lean into the parts of work that would help us. And when we knew that the project was reaching the place that we would both dislike, we knew we could split that up a little more, or find the support for it, or be able to share the load a bit because we understood what was going to happen to both of us. And so that was incredibly helpful to do this with more than one person because you get that chance to lean on everybody else, and everybody enjoys work more, and you get so much more done, and everybody feels so much better about it. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Exactly. And there's so much more empathy for not just the other people, but for ourselves. It's like, "Hey, I'm about to go into a frustration task," a tenacity task in our case, "great. Need to clear the calendar." This is a task that, yes, somebody that has a genius of tenacity or even a competency of tenacity could do in like two hours in between meetings. I'm going to need the whole day of nobody talk to me, because I'm going to spend the first half of the day motivating myself to actually sit down and do it. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: And then I'm going to feel the pressure of the deadline and get it done. It's going to be done well. It's not a quality issue, but it's going to be one of those things like, "Oh, look, I could iron my clothes. Or there's dishes in the sink, or the cat wants to go outside, and now the cat wants to come back in. I could just spend the next 20 minutes at the door opening and closing it." I mean, it's one of those things that you find yourself following any object that doesn't even have to be shiny to not do the frustration task because you know it's draining. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. One of the best tweets I ever saw about writing was, "My favorite part of the writing process is the hour and a half of cleaning my apartment before I start." That's exactly the kind of feeling that you'll find. Once you know the language, you could start to realize which types of tasks you're procrastinating on and why. And what you can do to help support yourself or get support from your team to balance that out. 

And it's a really important thing to think about in the beginning of the year when we have so many goals and aspirations, and we are at risk of just trying to jump in and complete something very quickly without taking the time to consider how do we fairly divide this? How do we make sure we're doing this well and to everybody's geniuses? 

And if I had one bone to pick with the table group, I would say that even though I love the term Working Genius as a title, I think it gets a little confusing because people start to think, "Oh, that's the thing I'm really good at." 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: It's not about what you're good at. You probably will end up getting good at it because you get a lot of energy from it, but it's not to say that you're not good at the other things. And I appreciate that they called it working frustrations on the other end, because it's just something that is frustrating. Not something that you're bad at. It's just something you don't want to do. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. You just don't want to do it. You're frustrated before, during, and after. It's just this internal thing that doesn't go away. I always talk about one of the examples that I bring up when we are explaining this in our workshops is the example of taxes. I've now been doing my personal taxes for 30 years and our business taxes for 20 years in some form or another. And it is a very high working frustration task because it's a very high tenacity task, you got to have all the details. They have to be correct. You have to check them a million times. You got to go through all the statements, all the Quickbook lines, all the emails of somebody telling you, "Here's your W-9. And here's your 1099. And here's this." And no matter what the advertising of like, "Do your taxes in 20 minutes in TurboTax," it takes me two days. It is a quick full 2 days.

Alex Cullimore: Back when it was just a W-2, I guess. Sure. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Exactly it. Just a W-2, maybe. But just the number of questions take longer to read than 20 minutes and number of screens. And so for that, I usually wait until the very last minute. Every year, I wake up, I'm like, "I'm going to do my taxes on February 1st when I have all the forms that are sent to me on January 31st." And every single year, it's March 15th or March 14th for business and April 14th for personal. When I'm panicking, I have to cancel all my plans. I have to pretty much send my kids away and say like, "You don't talk to me for the next two days because this is coming up." But now they know. 

The minute I start showing up in our very giant dining room table, and I start bringing out folders and papers, and they look at me, they're like, "It's tax time, isn't it?" I'm like, "Yep." "We're out. See you in two days. We can feed ourselves. We can get ourselves to our friends. We can go to bed ourselves. We don't need you." 

Alex Cullimore: I remember last year or the year before, you sent me a picture just tying the Working Genius to it of like a W-I on April 14th. It's a picture of like a guy buried by a bunch of papers and stuff. And I literally didn't have time to answer you because I was in the middle of being buried by papers and trying to take out my own taxes. It very much is that case. It's so much of the detailed things of rechecking and checking. And it's not a lot of the the big picture inventing things. There's not a lot of creativity you get to have with taxes because the IRS doesn't like that. 

Cristina Amigoni: There is some. As in, "Well, this could be this or that. Which way do we want to go?" 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, you could have a tiny bit if you get too creative. 

Cristina Amigoni: Very minuscule. 

Alex Cullimore: That's a great example of a task. And it's not to say that there are people who necessarily enjoy taxes, but there are parts of it and ways that you would get through it that other people would enjoy more, or they are more diligent about, or they get some energy from doing those things. And we thankfully now have people on our team that are very good and diligent about a lot of details. And that has been a huge saving grace. That is why something like the Working Genius is super helpful to both balance out work, and then everybody's somehow enjoying it, and we're all getting more out of it. It's an amazing double whammy where you don't feel as drained by work, and you're giving it to people who also don't feel drained, and the things getting done. It's amazing. 

Cristina Amigoni: Fast and really well. 

Alex Cullimore: We've accomplished so much more as a team by really focusing on either meetings, projects, task level, language on, "Hey, okay, we're here to invent. Great. Everybody knows their role." And so that happens, and then we can move to the next stage. The speed and the quality skyrocket. 

Alex Cullimore: And that's the same success we've seen with all the executive teams and small teams we've worked with, as well as the larger ones. The larger ones we get to do on – we've done up to like 200 people with this. But the smaller ones you really get to see. You got six to 12 people on your executive team or department leads or whatever it is. A group of peers that have to work together. And they suddenly understand who they can lean on, who to divide this towards. And people are shocked sometimes by, "Wait. You enjoy that? I hate this part of our job," or whatever. And people are like, "Oh, yeah. Well, I hate that part." And people find out that someone else really enjoys that. And suddenly, you're distributing work. And suddenly, you're not burning people out. And they're relying on each other more. You've got better cohesion. It's a very fun, very gentle transformation. 

That's why I keep reiterating it's just not judgmental or shameful. It's an amazingly non-defensive way to approach work. And that's one of my favorite parts about it because people get so engaged with it so quickly without feeling like, "Oh, I'm bad at something. Or I still want to make sure people feel like I can do my job." Everybody can. Everybody will be asked to do all the types of work, but this gives language to what parts you enjoy and how you can lean on each other. That allows for just better teamwork, and way more enjoyment, and way more productivity. 

Cristina Amigoni: I love how it gives language to the parts that are more difficult as humans to deal with. For example, it gives the ability to ask for help in a way that it's not about me because I am a lesser human, or I'm not good enough, or whatever the gremlin and the demons that we fight that stop us from asking for help. It's really, "Hey, this is the tenacity task. I'm going to burn out. I need help." 

It becomes about the thing, not about me as an individual, as a person, and my worth. And so that could help a ton. Because we know one of the biggest problems in teams and in work and in life in general is it's the ego getting in the way of asking for help. And so nobody asks for help because that's a flaw. And sometimes people are punished if they ask for help. So then they keep learning not to ask for help. 

But that psychological safety, which is very much the cornerstone of high-performing teams, this helps create that psychological safety because now it's the language. Like it's not me, it's not that I'm not good at it, it's that I'm going to get burnt out. So I'm going to ask for help for this task ahead of time. Or afterwards, I can reflect and say, "Hey, I really burnt out during the last month." Oh wait, look at those tasks, which now that's another thing we do internally, is we actually label tasks by which Working Genius and frustration they are, so that we can preemptively look at be like, "Oh, you're about to hit a week of really working frustration tasks. Can we redistribute? Or can we support you in other ways so that you can have rest time and ways to maybe balance out with some genius time to get the energy for those tasks?" 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, I think that's the perfect way of describing it. And it is such a helpful retrospective tool to help you plan for the next thing, too, to know, like, "Oh, this is why I was burnt out." Or, "Oh, this is what we could do differently next time." And it just gives so much clarity in things like structuring meetings. We've had people use it. We use it to set up what we're going to do in this meeting. What is the point of this one? Who will best help lead this? It's a very easily digestible framework to help reorient work. And you don't change what you're getting done. You don't change the projects. You just change how you're going through it. And you can get so much more out of it. That's what I really enjoy. 

And I keep harping on the idea of energy balance in my head and in LinkedIn posts lately because it's just an incredibly important portion of life. You can only give the energy you have. So why not learn things like this to figure out where you can get more energy? Where are you going to lose it? Where are you going to find it? And how are you going to help balance that? Because whether you're at work, at home, whatever you're doing, you only have the energy you have. So learn how to manage it and give yourself a leg up. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. And if you want to learn more, we are doing a webinar, a free webinar, to talk more about this and really going through the model and spell it out. We'll find details in the show notes and on our social media if you want to learn more and get some experiential experience with this as well. Experiential experience. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, it's an experiential experience. 

Cristina Amigoni: It's an experiential experience. 

Alex Cullimore: It's one of those experiences that's experiential. 

Cristina Amigoni: Experiential something. If you want to experience an experiential experience, join our webinar and maybe bring in those words for me. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If you could give us some synonyms, that would be great. We'll all experience it together. No, it is a good way of just engaging with the tool. And there's lots of ways to engage that with the teams. This is one of the things that we have a lot of fun delivering to teams, and teams have a lot of fun engaging with and have gotten so much out of. So, thanks to the table group for creating it. And thanks to everybody for listening. We wish you all the best in managing your energy in this, our new year 2026. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We are Siamo. That is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. And if you'd like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is wearesiamo. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. And we'd like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you, and Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score. 

Alex Cullimore: Thank you, guys, so much for listening. Tune in next time. 

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you.

[END]