Dr. Stephie on Facebook Live

For today’s nugget, I want to share with you the video of the Facebook live event I did this past Tuesday. It is all about answering the question, “What is Brilliance Mining?” I also gave a brief introduction of myself.

Here are some of the questions that people asked and I answered:

1. How can Brilliance Mining help me grow my small business?
2. I’m trying to write a book; could this program help me?
3. How can Brilliance Mining help me sell my business for top dollar?
4. What sets you apart from other business consultants?
5. Can this help me create a training system for my employees?
6. I have an employee going on maternity leave, but she has a wealth of knowledge that I’m afraid we won’t be able to train just one employee to take over. Can this system help?
7. How can I find out what my “critical knowledge is?”

I’m Curious

If you have additional questions, please let me know. I will be happy to answer them.

Transcript

This transcript is edited to make it more useful to you:

Introduction to the Facebook Live Event Hello, everybody. Welcome to the “Ask Dr. Stephie” live Facebook live event. I will introduce what Brilliance Mining is and then tell you a few things about myself, just enough so you have an idea of who I am. Then I’ll start answering your questions. Let’s make this as interactive as possible. I love that, and let your brilliance shine.

What is Brilliance Mining in a Nutshell?

• You have a lot of things in your brain: expertise, experience, even wisdom. It comes from your entire life of living and working. I call that “Brilliance.”
• Sometimes, people think brilliance is something like what Elon Musk has. Yes, that is brilliant, too. But what I’m talking about is a much broader definition. You have much more brilliance than you think, which is really important.
• But what about the mining part?
  • We’ve got brilliance defined, but what about mining? There is brilliance in you, and some of it you’re aware of, and some of it, you’re not because you learned it, and then you forgot that you learned it. You just do it automatically.
  • When you drive your car, are you really conscious of all the things that you’re doing, like braking and looking? Remember what it was like when you first learned how to drive a car, having to be conscious of all these things that you now do unconsciously? Sometimes you wonder, how did I get from point A to B? I don’t even remember consciously driving. We’re like that in lots of different places.
  • That is also how we become pretty lousy trainers. It’s hard for us to pass on our brilliance. We have a couple of problems going on.
  • One is that we’re not even aware of all the brilliance we have. We don’t think we have any, or not very much, a lot of the time, and that’s just not true.
  • The other part is that your brilliance is invisible. It’s invisible to others because they can’t just look into your brain.
  • Some of it is also invisible to you! Those things are unconscious to you. They just bubble to the surface when you need them, and only can you see them.
• Brilliance Mining is literally like treasure hunting in your brain.
  • I often compare brilliance to diamonds. It’s like diamonds in your brain. We go into your brain. Trust me, it doesn’t hurt. Through conversations and observing we pull out these diamonds from your brain. Now, they become visible and actionable to other people.
• We have been trained to be experts. When you’re an expert, you get paid more, have more value, and are indispensable. That’s great and flattering, too. However, there is also a problem with that.
  • Being an expert can be like wearing handcuffs; you can’t get away because you are always needed. What if you want to go on vacation? What if you want to get a well-deserved rest? The more you know that only you know, the less that will happen.
  • It’s about delegating and being able to delegate. It’s also about enabling further growth because each person has a limited bandwidth.
  • You’ve probably heard that expression. “If I want to get something done right, I’ve got to do it.” That’s exactly the problem we’re talking about.
• Let’s say you have a business or a nonprofit, or maybe you’re doing great things in your community or family. The longer you do this work, the more you run into the problem that your brilliance is hard to pass on. The hardest part is the part we don’t even know we have.

In a nutshell, Brilliance Mining involves making your deep, often unrecognized knowledge visible and actionable. This enables you to delegate, grow, and share the fruits of your labor – be it in a business or a nonprofit.

A Few Words About Myself

Please keep thinking about what questions you may have. In the meantime, I will say a few things about myself.

• You’ve probably noticed that I have an accent. I am from Germany. I came to the U.S. in 1989 and was studying chemistry. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry.
• Initially, I thought I would stay in academia, but then I changed my mind. The work you do in academia is great. We definitely need that kind of basic research that expands our pool of knowledge. However, what I felt more drawn to do was to create a more immediate impact.
• That led me to more applied research and development. I worked with a high-tech company in San Diego for eight years to develop novel detectors. We worked on detecting explosives in luggage and landmines. I even got to go to Bosnia, believe it or not, right after the attacks on Kosovo in 1999. We tested and demonstrated our novel landmine detector in Bosnia. That was an exciting gig!
• Along the way, I realized there was a big gap between innovation on one side and gaining traction with the people who could use it. You must somehow cross that gap to make innovative, visionary ideas a reality. You need to cross the gap to have the kind of impact that led you to create this innovation in the first place.
• Fast forward, I helped some companies grow, scale up, and turn around some companies. Quite accidentally, I slid into my first company turnaround. I discovered my abilities there. I think I ported my skills as a scientist into that area, but I also did a lot of self-development. I was never satisfied just to learn something in one discipline. I had to go into the neighboring discipline and then into not-so-neighboring disciplines. My ideal job is to learn all day long.
• That’s what I get to do in Brilliance Mining. I get to look into people’s brains and find the fascinating brilliance they have, lay it before them, and help them create a training system, flow chart, graphic, checklist, book, or whatever it may be that they then can use to create a bigger impact and more money too. I think the impact comes first, and the money results from that impact. Wouldn’t you agree?
• The Importance of Delegating and Growing Your Business Taking a vacation without worrying about my business sounds amazing. I know a lot of us are working on that. Me included. I’m now teaching what I do. Everything I share, I have done myself or am doing right now.

Brilliance Mining as a Three-Step Process

1. It starts with Brilliance Mapping. Think of this as mining for diamonds. First, you have to find out where the diamonds are. The diamonds are your brilliance. What kind of diamonds are there? Are there rose-colored? Are they totally clear, or do they have a light blue hue to them? Right. That’s my metaphor for brilliance in different areas. Now you have your treasure-hunting map. We will figure out with you which kind of diamond you want to go after first.
2. Then we go after it; that’s the Brilliance Extraction part. That’s like picking up the diamonds. Some are lying on the surface where they can be picked up easily. Some are partially buried in the soil. Yet other diamonds are buried more; you have to dig deeper.
3. As we unearth the diamonds, we start to sort and polish them so you can put them to use. I call that Brilliance Replication. That’s where essentially you’re cloning yourself, not in a spooky way.
   1. That’s how you can go on vacation. You have gotten enough of your brilliance extracted and polished that you can pass it on. But the cool thing is that we can do this pretty quickly. Don’t strive to make it perfect because perfect doesn’t exist. Let’s make it functional first, and then we make it better over time. All along, you are testing because as you’re training other people with the extracted brilliance, that’s where you will see what gaps you might have overlooked,
   2. I sometimes compare the process to building housing: Let’s say you want to have a roof over your head. You envision a nice castle with turrets and everything a fancy castle should have. But building such a castle takes time, and it might rain tomorrow – you need some housing right now. How would we start with a tent? Now, you have a roof over your head. Next, you might upgrade to an RV and then a house. Now, building your castle is in sight. But all along, you have a roof over your head. That’s the philosophy we typically take with Brilliance Mining because we want you to have the impact of your extracted brilliance as quickly as possible. Oftentimes, that is just a few weeks or even faster.

Answering Questions

• How can Brilliance Mining help me grow my small business? Brilliance Mining makes your brilliance, i.e., your experience, expertise, knowledge, and wisdom visible. You can make it visible as systematic training. That way, someone else can do the things only you can do right now. And you can handle more clients or customers; you no longer have to do all of it.
  • When we start a business, we do all the heavy lifting. Business owners often can’t pass on their brilliance completely when they add more people to their teams. Of course, that is especially true for the parts the business owner is unaware of (their unconscious competence). Therefore, there are still a lot of tasks only the business owner can do.
• I’m trying to write a book. Could this program help me? Yes, absolutely. The cool thing is that Brilliance Mapping is basically like outlining the chapters of a book. The other thing that’s really great about writing a book is the information you have in the book can also become a course. It’s awesome; you can use and reuse your brilliance in multiple ways. Yes, absolutely. We’ll help you write a book.
• Can brilliance mining help me sell my business for top dollar? Can brilliance mining help me sell my business for top dollar? Definitely.
  • Let me share a quick story about my client and friend, Bill (not his real name, for anonymity). He owns a staffing company and focuses on creating perfect matches between job candidates and companies seeking top talent. He believes that if a match can be broken, it eventually will be. Bill identified five key criteria necessary for these unbreakable matches. However, training others in his method proved challenging, like repeatedly hitting a roadblock.
  • This situation called for a paradigm shift, requiring a deeper extraction of his unique knowledge – the secret sauce – and making it teachable. Bill, who was handling many of the crucial tasks in his business, realized the need for change when considering retirement and selling his business.
  • Discussing with a business broker, he understood that his company’s value significantly depended on how much his company depended on his involvement. This is a common issue, as about 70% of businesses face challenges in selling due to heavy reliance on the owner’s expertise.
  • Bill changed his approach. We worked on extracting and applying his secret sauce. Within the first year, he anticipates doubling his business, valued at around $6 million.
  • We achieved a functional system in about six to eight weeks and began transferring his knowledge to others.
  • When he decides to sell, his company will stand out as best in class because they have systematically captured and replicated the owner’s unique brilliance.
  • This approach is crucial, especially now, with a surge in businesses for sale, often referred to as the ‘silver tsunami’ due to the retiring baby boomer generation. Brilliance mining can absolutely enhance the value and sellability of a business.
• What sets you apart from other business consultants? Great question. Well, I am kind of a “chameleon.” What I mean is: How many people do you know who is a Ph.D. chemist, have done research and development in practical detection areas, gone to Bosnia to test a novel landmine detector, turned around businesses, then became an executive coach, and finally, created Brilliance Mining as the area of specialty? I never just consult. I never just coach. I do whatever it takes to get you to your goals and dreams. If I think that I can’t help you, or I think what you are talking about doesn’t make sense to me, I will ask you many questions. I won’t jump to conclusions, but I only work with people I think I can help. It’s got to make sense, regardless of the money involved. With me, what you see is what you get. I love working with the people I work with. It’s always a peer-to-peer relationship. I don’t see them as people I need to help and pull out of some ditch. Even if it’s a business turnaround or some desperate situation, we’re always peer-to-peer. That’s how I work.
• How can this help me create a training system for my employees? Absolutely, it can. This approach is about turning the brilliance we’ve uncovered into something teachable. We need to consider who we’re training, kind of like how a bus driver thinks about their passengers. You’re the bus driver, and your employees are the passengers getting on the bus. You’ve got to make sure you’re stopping at the right stops for them. When setting up the training, it’s important to think about what your employees already know and what they can easily understand. We need to get the level of the material just right – not too advanced that it’s confusing, but also not too simple that it’s patronizing. Getting this balance is key to a successful training system.
• I have an employee that’s going on maternity leave. She has a wealth of knowledge I’m afraid we won’t be able to train just one employee in all of it. Yes, it’s a real concern. The first step is to find out what that wealth of knowledge is. We should also look at your company’s other resources and devise a plan. Luckily, we can do this pretty quickly. Any preparation is better than none; the more we can prepare, the better off we’ll be. The key is to start as soon as possible. The timing of when we start preparing, especially with her going on leave, really matters. But the good news is, we can make big strides in just a few weeks. Brilliance Mining will definitely help in this situation!
• How can I find out what my critical knowledge is? That’s a fantastic question. Identifying your critical knowledge requires a fresh perspective, ideally from someone familiar with the concept of brilliance mining. It’s about delving into your mind to understand what you truly know. I’ve penned a declaration of brilliance that begins with a thought-provoking preamble: “Your life, you’ve learned so much, you’ve forgotten how much you’ve learned. Your expertise is second nature to you. It is you; your life’s work is your baby. You have nurtured and grown it in good times and in bad. It makes a difference. Future proof it, scale it up, and protect it.” Can you see yourself in that description? Often, we undervalue our knowledge, thinking it’s nothing special. We tend to oversimplify our expertise when delegating tasks, assuming it’s easy and straightforward. But we often fail to realize that we’re skipping steps – what’s obvious to us isn’t always so to others. When we delegate, and the results aren’t what we expected, leading to frustration on both ends, it’s a sign. Situations where you had to step back in and take over are clues to your unique knowledge and skills. The Declaration of Brilliance emphasizes, “Your knowledge is brilliant. Even if you cannot patent, trademark, or copyright it, your brilliance is remarkable, even critical.” I won’t read the entire declaration here, but another key point it makes is, “Losing the brilliance in your brain is like a double death. Do not take your expertise, your passions, what makes you tick to the grave.” Reflect on what you’re passionate about and what shouldn’t be lost – that’s a pathway to discovering your critical knowledge. Remember, it’s not just about the financial aspect. It’s also about the joy and service that comes with sharing your brilliance. By identifying and sharing your critical knowledge, you’re contributing to your success and the happiness and growth of others.

Dr. Stephie

P.S.: I appreciate you commenting and sharing this with others. Thank you!