Margaret and David discuss how blurry vision can teach you about your Zone of Genius.
Margaret shared how she’d been living with completely incorrect eyeglass prescriptions for years. A wake-up call that mirrors how leaders often keep their true potential “blurry” out of fear or habit. We explore the difference between your zone of excellence (what you’re good at) and your zone of genius (what makes you feel alive), and how somatic coaching, the heart-mind connection, and confronting mortality can sharpen your leadership vision.
For five years, Margaret Katz Cann kept telling her eye doctor something felt off. For five years, she was told her prescription hadn’t changed. Turns out they were wrong about that. When she went to a new optometrist, she learned that every prescription she had (contacts, glasses, distance, and reading) for both eyes was incorrect.
She only found out because she got sick of her outdated driving glasses and wandered into a new optical shop chasing a cute pair of frames. What she walked out with wasn’t just sharper vision. It was a metaphor she couldn’t ignore.
This story sparked a conversation about a question worth sitting with: what are you keeping blurry in your own life, on purpose or not, because clarity feels too risky?
Why do we keep our own potential blurry?
Margaret didn’t intentionally sabotage her own eye care. But she noticed something important in hindsight: some “wise and crafty and strategic part” of us is often very good at keeping us from seeing clearly what needs to be seen. It’s not always a conscious choice. It’s a coping mechanism, and it shows up far beyond the optometrist’s office.
For Margaret, the blurry area was career-related. As a fundraising coach, she loved her work. But she’d long suspected there was a bigger arena she could play in. What lit her up with her fundraising clients wasn’t the money she helped them raise. It was watching people find their voice, heal old patterns, and step into leadership. She started to wonder: why limit that impact to people who happen to need to raise money?
David had already made a version of this shift about a year and a half earlier, narrowing his focus to leadership coaching after years of being told, like Margaret, to “niche down.” That advice is how the two of them met. But narrowing your niche and expanding your impact aren’t opposites. David describes it as opening the aperture and focusing more intently on helping leaders, regardless of their industry.
What’s the difference between your zone of genius and your zone of excellence?
Here’s a distinction worth stealing for your own self-assessment: your zone of excellence is where you’re good at something, but it leaves you feeling “meh.” Your zone of genius is where two things happen at once. First, you know you have real gifts to offer. Second, it makes you feel lit up. Alive.
Most leaders spend enormous energy in their zone of excellence because it’s safe, proven, and rewarded. Fewer make the leap into their zone of genius, because it usually means admitting the thing you’re excellent at isn’t necessarily the same as the thing that fulfills you.
Margaret’s zone of genius, she realized, sits in the arc of a coaching relationship: someone shows up with a basket of shame or exhaustion, and together they find where the real block lives. Often it’s not the surface problem (trouble raising money, for instance) but something underneath it, like discomfort with taking up space or imposter syndrome.
How does somatic coaching help leaders break old patterns?
New narratives alone don’t always stick. Margaret found that when she brought the body into her work with clients, the change held. Anchoring a new behavior in the mind is one thing. Managing the old pattern in the body is what keeps you from reverting.
This isn’t abstract. David shared a moment from his own recent jiu-jitsu training. He’d set up a sweep, a move to flip his training partner, and then had to wait. No amount of thinking was going to make it happen. Then his partner shifted his weight by maybe two inches, and the sweep executed itself. There was no thought involved. He felt it before he understood it.
Margaret sees the same principle at work when a client stands in front of the fridge and gets a clear body signal about what they actually want to eat, rather than what their brain has decided is “correct.” Letting the body lead, even briefly, creates more breath and more space. It’s a small, repeatable practice: notice the signal, don’t override it immediately with analysis, see what the body already knows.
Yoga offers a gentler version of the same lesson. Instead of asking your body to perform, you ask what it wants: how far does the downward dog want to go today? That’s an invitation, not a demand. If you’ve never used movement this way, the dynamic duo encourage you to try one yoga session with no goal beyond noticing what your body tells you, without editing it.
Why does the heart matter more than the brain in leadership presence?
David raised a detail worth sitting with: research shows that the heart’s electromagnetic field is roughly 100 times stronger than the brain’s. Think about what that means for the leaders you’d call magnetic. Their pull rarely comes from being the smartest person in the room. It comes from operating out of the heart, not just the head.
This isn’t a call to abandon the brain. Margaret is careful to name that reintegration, not replacement, is the goal. Magnetism, as she frames it, comes from inviting the body and heart into how you lead and show up, rather than running leadership exclusively through analysis. Buddhist tradition has a word for this integration: heart-mind, a concept that’s been around for thousands of years, long before neuroscience had the instruments to measure it.
David connects this directly to a failure he’s watched play out in the medical industry. Margaret’s five years of inconsistent eye care were at a private-equity-owned practice, where she saw five different doctors and never saw the same front-desk staff twice. That’s a system optimized for cash extraction, not care. The same dynamic can quietly take root in any organization that rewards rational output while starving the human connection underneath it.
What can imagining loss teach you about what matters?
Both Margaret and David had recent experiences where a loved one’s health scare forced them to briefly imagine life without that person. Margaret calls it “a little time with the Ghost of Christmas Future.” It was unwelcome and clarifying. It reminded her, instantly, why the daily noise she gets tangled in matters so much less than she treats it.
This lines up with a practice found across Buddhism and Stoicism: deliberately imagining a loved one’s death and letting your heart actually break in that moment. Your brain will resist this. It doesn’t want to feel that. But sitting with the heartache, even briefly, tends to deepen love rather than diminish it.
There’s a useful diagnostic hidden in this exercise, too. If you imagine losing someone and feel something closer to relief than heartbreak, that’s information you need. Don’t look away from it.
Bring your body back into your leadership
Margaret and David’s conversation keeps circling back to one idea: clarity isn’t just about what you can see. It’s about what you’re willing to feel. The blurry prescription, the unexamined career niche, the body signals you’ve trained yourself to ignore, the heart you keep benched in favor of the brain. These all point to the same habit of avoidance.
Here’s something to try.
Start smaller than a total career pivot. Notice one moment this week when your mind is overriding a clear bodily signal, and pause before overriding it. Ask where you feel a decision in your body before you think your way through it.
If you want to go deeper into the somatic side of this work, Margaret Katz Cann is the person to talk to. If the spiritual dimension of leadership is calling you, that’s David’s focus, detailed further in his new book on the seven practices of leaders on a spiritual path.
Either way, the invitation is the same: stop waiting for your prescription to “just not have changed.”
Go find out what you’re actually seeing.
