Know Your Aptitudes to Direct Your Career with Confidence
Episode 522 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Betsy Wills
Here’s how identifying and honing your innate aptitudes could take your career from exhausting to energizing.
In recent years, we’re seeing an undeniable trend from workers: more and more of us are dragging ourselves through our jobs rather than feeling energized by them. Our careers have become a fundamental and overarching part of our identities, so this is a concerning course, and one that can be tricky to diverge from. But what if there were a science-backed approach to realign yourself with your career path?
After an aptitude test helped pull Betsy Willis out of her own bout of discontent, Betsy set out to make that game-changing evaluation available and affordable to all. Her company, YouScience, now proudly offers these aptitude assessments—which are so much more than personality tests—in 25% of U.S. high schools and hundreds of universities. Earlier this year, she co-authored Your Hidden Genius to help all of us uncover our innate aptitudes and how they can lead us to a more satisfying career and life.
The intersection of aptitudes, interests, and personality
If you get an uncomfortable feeling when you think about taking an “aptitude test,” it could be some latent anxiety from your high school years. When the SAT was first created to identify what students had learned, it stood for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The problem was, you don’t learn aptitudes—they’re innate, beginning to emerge around age two, and are soundly fixed by puberty. In the 70s, the government rebranded the ubiquitous exam as the Scholastic Achievement Test, but the correlation persists.
Another misconception comes from the multiple-choice surveys you’ve probably taken, online or in the backs of magazines. Almost all of those are personality tests, and while they’re interesting, they fall short because they rely on self-reported data, and humans are notoriously bad judges of ourselves.
These nuances don’t mean aptitudes are all that matter, however. As Betsy explains, a combined understanding of our ingrained aptitudes, our ever-changing interests, and our personality traits is needed to uncover the throughline that everyone dissatisfied in their current career path should get a handle on.
How we end up in jobs that don’t satisfy us
There’s no shortage of influences that can impact our chosen career paths—for better or worse. Traditional gender roles result in a failure to encourage spatial and computational knowledge in young women, despite data showing that women have two to three times the aptitude for these skills. Huge court cases get national news exposure and there’s an influx of LSAT takers. Hospital dramas take off, and suddenly every other recent grad is pre-med.
There’s a child-rearing factor, too. Parents coax their kids toward or away from certain professions, or they tell them they “can be anything they want to be,” which Betsy points out isn’t actually true, because we aren’t all equipped with all 52 measurable aptitudes. But every subset of innate knacks comes with a long list of exciting potential careers.
They aren’t all obvious, either. Someone who shows strong patterns for architecture-type aptitudes tends to share that realm with people who excel in fine art photography and department store management. In other words, narrowing down your aptitudes doesn’t pigeon-hole you; it just helps focus the pursuit on arenas we’re more naturally cut out for.
It’s about more than just a career
In Your Hidden Genius, Betsy and her co-author help you identify the intersection between what you want to do, what you’re good at, and what someone will pay you to do. Betsy confirms that, practically speaking, aptitude and interest aren’t enough to build a career on if no one is willing to pay you for the work.
Those interest/aptitude overlaps—the ones that won’t actually turn into paid jobs—are essential to explore, too. We’ve talked about this in past episodes, the importance of pursuing hobbies outside of work, so that you don’t expect your job to be the sole provider of your happiness.
Betsy acknowledges that not all jobs are going to be wonderful. If changing companies or careers just isn’t an option right now, finding those non-work endeavors is vital to our mental well-being.
It’s never too late to get introspective about work
You might be saying to yourself, “This is all well and good, Emilie, but I’m not a teenager anymore, and I’ve sunk 20 years into this career. I can’t just start from scratch!”
Your Hidden Genius and Betsy have your back. First of all, she warns not to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, that devil-on-your-shoulder voice that says a past commitment of big money or big time means you have to stay the course.
Second, discovering your aptitudes and the work they highlight for you doesn’t mean you have to go back to school or even change jobs. Sometimes, it’s a matter of shifting just a bit in your current position. An aptitude test, and Betsy’s book, can give you the vocabulary to start advocating for changes to your day-to-day work and pushing for those small shifts.
Intrigued? You can take YouScience’s assessment online, anytime. And if you pick up Your Hidden Genius, you’ll get a code to take the test for free!
Now, talk to me about your own aptitude adventure. How has insight into your skills, abilities, and traits shaped your job path? And let’s get real together: do you feel aligned and energized at work right now, or are you faking that big smile for the Zoom meeting? Trade takes and tips on taking control of your career in our Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn.
Related links from today’s episode:
“Your Hidden Genius”, by Betsy Willis and Alex Ellison
Learn More About Betsy’s ArtStormer Blog
Episode 456, How Connection Can Cure What Ails Us
Episode 510, Directional Living for Aligned Fulfillment
Episode 511, The Engagement Crisis Impacting Young Workers
Episode 515, How to Re-Inspire Yourself Out of a Career Slump
Episode 516, The Power Pause: Rebranding the Stay-at-Home Mom
Episode 520, Using AI in Your Job Search: What You Need to Know
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Stuck in a career rut? This LinkedIn course
will help you find that forward momentum:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 522. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. Whether you call it burnout, disengagement, quiet quitting, or as we've talked about here before, job hugging, however you want to label it, way too many of us are dragging ourselves through through work instead of feeling energized by it.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
But what if the key to long term career wellness and fulfillment wasn't about working harder or pushing through? What if it was about uncovering the genius that you already have inside you? Today I'm joined by Betsy Wills, co-author of Your Hidden Genius, to explore how you can rediscover yourself, your purpose, and tap into your unique strengths to design a career that sustains you, not drains you over the long term. Betsy, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
BETSY: I am thrilled to be here.
EMILIE: We're so glad to have you here. And tell us a little bit about you, science, and the book Your Hidden Genius: The Science Backed Strategy To Uncovering And Harnessing Your Innate Talents.
BETSY: Well, you've picked my favorite subject. Not hard at all. You know, the history of this for me goes back to 2000. I had two children. I was fortunate enough at that time to be home with them. That was a different era, I understand that. But I looked at a picture of my daughter who had four great grandmothers living at the time, and I realized when I looked in the mirror one day, hey, I'm going to live to be 100, okay?
And at the time, you know, I don't know how most mothers feel, but I had a three and a one year old and I felt like I was pushing a wheelbarrow through a muddy ditch while everybody else was racing by me in Ferraris on the superhighway. I mean, I just felt like everything had come to a screeching halt. I was happy, by the way. It was a very happy time, but it just wasn't a time where I felt like I had a lot of control. And so, you know, I think a lot of us hit that point and you want to look up and realize, you know, you're maybe on a really nice trip, but you're not driving.
EMILIE: Right. In the book you describe it as sort of feeling like you're in the passenger seat. And I absolutely have felt that way before. We just had Neha Ruch on the podcast talking about women leaning into motherhood full time too. And sometimes, especially for ambitious women who have derive a lot of sense of Fulfillment from our work, whether it's in the paid workforce or not. Like, whether it's a moment around motherhood or other critical intersections in our life, like that feeling of not being the agent of change in your own life, not being behind the steering wheel is very disorienting.
BETSY: Yes, it is. As happy as you may be. And I was, and I still am. But this prompted me. I was talking to a friend and she said, you know, if you want to, you know, think about the next chapters of your life, one thing I would recommend is that you go have your aptitudes assessed. And I was like, what in the world is that? That sounds scary. And I went to a place called Johnson O'Connor, which is, has been around since the 1940s and it really changed everything for me.
Now, full disclosure to go is about $1,000 and it takes two days. Because it's not like a personality or an interest assessment. You can't game it. You have to actually do things. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but it changed everything for me. And that led to, in a, uh, later time, 10 years later, my co-founding of a company called YouScience that brought this very expensive, well researched, science backed assessment into an online environment and brought the price down to practically nothing. And you can do it anytime on your computer. So now that's in 25% of all U.S. high schools. It's in about 600 universities. We've had 5 million people take this assessment.
EMILIE: Oh my goodness.
BETSY: Yeah, so it's, you know, that was the journey. And then the book was written so that many more people, adults, working adults, people who are stay at home moms, anyone could access this great, powerful tool.
EMILIE: Amazing. And I want to talk more about the assessment, but before we dig into this whole concept, I want to clarify our terms a little bit. You already mentioned the term aptitudes. And I think of aptitude testing as being kind of a scary thing for high schoolers, right? But what is the difference between aptitudes, interests, and personality traits that you really hit upon in the book?
BETSY: Well, they're very distinct. And I will say the term aptitude has been conflated because originally what we know of as the SAT was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. And that's why people think of that term. But even that was wrong. And the College Board, which owns that assessment, rebranded later in the 70s to be called the Scholastic Achievement Test because it wasn't about aptitudes, it was about learned skills. Aptitudes are not learned. They're innate. So that's why people don't understand the term. They think it's something you have to study for, or it's hard, or scary.
EMILIE: Yeah, that's why I have this stressful association with it, probably. [LAUGHTER]
BETSY: Exactly. So everybody can relax who's listening. So aptitudes, there actually are 52 aptitudes that can be assessed and school celebrates about two of them, which are short term memory and a couple of math things, okay. But there are 52 that you can learn about. And that's what aptitude assessment is all about. It's your innate abilities that you're born with. And anybody who has children, and especially if you have two children, you know, they're like chocolate and vanilla. They're not the same, okay? And that's the wonder.
So aptitudes are innate abilities. There's 52. They range from spatial ability to, some people recognize color more easily than others, and certain hues musical abilities and even reasoning abilities. So that's what aptitudes are. And they emerge when we're about 2 years old. They start emerging and then they're fixed by the time we go through puberty. So these are the seeds of our skills, not the skills themselves. Okay? It's how we learn quickly and easily things.
Then interests are an ever changing array of things. Interests are the things we've been exposed to. And your interest will really be reflected in, in a snapshot in time. So the more you're exposed to, the more interest you may adopt or have. So that's interest.
EMILIE: That can sort of be a reflection of your curiosity at any moment, right? Like, what you're drawn to? Okay.
BETSY: Yeah. And, and really though your circumstances and one of the goals we have is, you know, to help people expand and explore. Not to pigeonhole ourselves into a finite number of things. But when you understand your aptitudes, you're going to be pretty excited to do that. And then personality are things like the Myers Briggs strengths finder, those types of assessments that really act like surveys. Anytime you're in a, and 90% of things are really personality tests that you've taken, like Myers Briggs, StrengthsFinder, Enneagram. They're really valuable, but the way they're tested is, you know, they give you a question like on a scale of 1 to 5, do you like this or that? So you're self reporting those things. Okay? So it acts more like a mirror than a door. You know, you see yourself through how you report yourself. And most of us are really poor judges by the way of ourselves and even worse of others.
EMILIE: Yes. I can imagine. The subjectivity there is always interesting. And you in the book, say that aptitudes, interests, and personality traits kind of combine to help direct you on this through line that's relevant for career pivoters, for those listening who are craving a sense of fulfillment and engagement at work, who are feeling maybe a little lost. And what's the relationship between understanding these aspects of yourself and feeling satisfied at work?
BETSY: Yeah. So satisfaction is derived really from your aptitudes, doing things that come naturally and easily to you. Okay, that's the satisfaction piece. Your personality may rule, like what type of environment you want to be in, you know, the types of people you want to be around, the, you know, sort of the number of people that are surrounding you all day. Extroverts love lots of people. Introverts, you know, can handle it, but they need to kind of crawl into a closet after work sometimes to regroup. That's personality. And then interest, again, are ever changing. But you know what's really changing?
EMILIE: What?
BETSY: The world of work, what the world will pay you to do. And that's where aptitudes are really playing a huge role now in helping guide people.
EMILIE: Yeah, I mean, you have this interesting visual in the book. I'm looking at it on page 33, which kind of reminds me of the Japanese ikigai overlapping Venn diagrams here where you say, look, the best fit role is going to have some intersection between aptitudes, interests, and occupations.
BETSY: Yeah. So you can have the aptitude to learn things quickly, in certain areas, and you can have the interest, but perhaps the world won't pay you to do it. And that's called a hobby. Okay. That's a hobby and an advocation or volunteer work. And those are really, really important, by the way. So we uncover that as well. But you want that intersection of interest, aptitudes, and what the world will pay you to do when it comes to your career.
EMILIE: Yeah, that's the rub, isn't it? And that's where I see the, like, college guidance counselors or the high school guidance counselors saying, okay, and we do need to, like, find a way to make a living here.
BETSY: Oh, yeah, everybody wants to sleep indoors.
EMILIE: Yeah. I mean, the cap, the whole capitalist situation that we find ourselves in some, you know, requires some fluidity there. And yet the world of work, to your point, is changing very rapidly. You know, in the opening sections of the book, you talk about, look, work has replaced family and hobbies as the primary source of meaning and identity, for better or worse. And that resonated so deeply with me. I know so many of our listeners care deeply and relate intrinsically to the work that we do.
So how can understanding yourself like that introspection be a way to guide your career exploration as opposed to just trying to respond to the market and just say, what do you need from me? I'll be the square peg for that square hole. You know what I mean? Like, there's something like, around, especially job seekers who are listening, who are like, look, I will be whatever I need to be to get this job. And I think there's a different take when you think about your innate aptitudes and interests like that introspection first. How do we navigate that or how can that help you navigate the modern job market?
BETSY: Right. Well, let's get back to why we end up in jobs in the first place that are not good fits. You know, a lot of it is because we are influenced by so many things. So if you knew the number of people who applied to the CIA when the Food Network came out, you would believe what I'm saying, or went to law school when LA Law was a huge, you know, television show. We're influenced by things, and so we take a lot of wrong turns, a lot of zigging and zagging, because we're just trying to put ourselves somewhere even if it's wrong, you know?
So the steps we're skipping in today's education system are, you know, kind of not spending time understanding ourselves well enough. And when you understand what your innate abilities are, you can eliminate what I would call the tyranny of choice of too many options. Because we tell our kids, hey, you can be anything. I mean, that's just a lie, okay? But the group of things we can be are incredible. So it kind of gives you a track to explore among many, many things when you know what your aptitude pattern is.
So, for example, people with certain aptitude patterns for architecture also end up having this, the pattern for maybe a department store manager or a fine art photographer or real estate developer. Those are often the same elements. And so it's not like there's one thing or one perfect job, but there are kind of a perfect area of things to explore for you. And to know that is really valuable because you can kind of get to it.
EMILIE: Well, it's sort of like you can spend your life trying to be something that you're not, right? And you can certainly go to law school even if every fiber of your being is not aligned with that, but it's not going to feel very good, right? It's not going to like. It's, it's, it's hard to keep that front up your entire life of trying to be something you're not.
BETSY: Well, I mean, you'll burn out. You're going to burn out if that happens. Now, not every job's wonderful, let's face it. And that is where hobbies and avocations come in. So knowing what your aptitudes are can help you manage that instead of putting your job always on the witness stand like you're the problem.
EMILIE: I almost think of it like we expect so much of our jobs. I mean, you wrote in the book about how you launched a blog while also launching this company. Explain the meaning there.
BETSY: Well, I was working in an investment business and that's not exactly the most creative area, but I did know that I had the aptitude for art. And not to do art, but to appreciate it, to curate it. And I also love technology. And so I thought, oh, well, I'll just try this new thing called blogging. This was back in 2011 and I just did it every day. And I was just blogging about art. I would put an artist up every day. It was called Art Stormer, it's still going. And I did it for 11 years and I ended up with like a million people on that blog.
EMILIE: Oh my gosh.
BETSY: And I was like, darn, I should have done this for money. But it was joy. And that's what made me, you know, my work life really wonderful too, because I looked forward to exercising that part of myself.
EMILIE: Well, it is a good reminder for those who are navigating burnout. And I talked to this among some of my high achievers who are burning out, my high income earners who are burning out. Like, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Maybe we don't need to remove the job. Maybe we need to add pleasure, you know?
BETSY: That is, okay, so early on I was, I started this program called The Brain Spa. This is back before YouScience and the company started. And I thought, I'm going to help all these women who like me, want to come back into the workforce. And so I started this whole program and it ended up the number one group of people who called me were 40 year old male lawyers.
And that's when the light bulb went off for me. Like, everybody goes through this. It's not, you know, anything. And they would be like, oh, I'm miserable. And I was like, you're not quitting your job, okay. Please do not quit your job. What you really need to do is take on something that will utilize these itches that need to be scratched that we've uncovered.
So like, I knew one lawyer who started going to garage sales, believe it or not, because he had a huge spatial ability and he would, he bought a big Lego set. He would do, I mean, he was a master Christmas Eve of putting the bike together without the instructions. But he would buy broken toasters and bring them home and undo them and then put them back together. It was fun.
EMILIE: I know people like that. I'm so glad you mentioned this actually, because gender is sort of like the backdrop upon which this whole conversation plays out. And in the beginning of your book you talked about how sometimes gendered stereotypes can direct people into certain career paths, right? Like men think they need to go into more masculine fields and vice versa with like, the caring professions.
And I think we're having this conversation that's long overdue now as a society around like, the masculinity crisis in our country, like, bring back male friendships and hobbies, like, that's all important. Women have had our own fair share of burnout and institutional sexism in the patriarchy that makes, you know, striving in the workforce difficult and carrying the mental load of our households also difficult, let's be real, right? But it is interesting for you to bring up, like, when you think about aptitudes, these are not, this is not like a women's issue, right? You think about career wellness as something more all inclusive, right?
BETSY: Mhm. Oh yeah. I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about with burnout. And you know, as career wellness is really about, you know, choosing a career that you can succeed in, of course, and that matches as well as it can, your aptitude pattern. But also nurturing the things outside of your work and not waiting, not thinking like, I'll put that on the back burner. It's now, you know, there's no reason to wait. So, when you kind of have your full picture of what your innate abilities are, you can start directing your learning. You can deploy them in different ways. You can keep learning through a really questionable job market. So keep upskilling, keep skilling.
But yeah, women and men, as far as, what we know with all the data we have from the assessment, is that oftentimes women report very low interest in certain careers like computer science, manufacturing, construction. Yet when we look at their aptitudes, they are like three times as equipped for them. And so the earlier you can tell them that the earlier they can start pursuing it. And these are really high paying jobs that we're leaving on the table. So we don't really have a talent gap. What we have is an exposure gap.
EMILIE: Ooh, that's such an interesting point. There was until recently, thanks to our federal government and some recent changes, there was a women's bureau within the Federal Department of Labor that was working to sort of fix some of the siloed, gendered, or rather, what would they call it, to fix some of the gendered silos in our workforce right now that speak directly to that.
As a parent, I have a little girl and a little boy and I'm obviously like a raging feminist. I think when you were talking about exposure expanding and exploring through your environment, like, do you see part of the parental responsibility here for equipping our children, by exposing them to just like a variety of options or for the parents listening, what, what advice would you give us?
BETSY: Yeah, no, I mean, I think for sure just this realization that, you know, we are conditioned, we can't help it. Everything around us conditions us around our gender role in one way or the other. And there's, by the way, nothing wrong with that. But I think the earlier you can open people's eyes to what those possibilities are going to be for them and the breadth of them, the better.
I'll just give you an example, like, spatial ability. I was talking about it earlier. School doesn't celebrate that. It's not that they wouldn't celebrate it if they knew how to, it's just they don't uncover it early enough. So think about a lot of the careers that are, you know, spatial ability is demanded in which would be like engineering, computer science, you know, medical device, that type of thing, real estate, architecture, manufacturing. The earlier you can say, hey, you've got this spatial ability. If you do have it, why don't you try this course? Or have the confidence to try this course, you know? And conversely for men, by the way, I mean, we uncovered in our data too, so many men would be really well suited in the nursing profession, for example, and so many others. We don't need to pigeonhole anybody.
EMILIE: Totally. Especially when the caring professions are growing at such a high rate, tick right now, when other parts of the market are shrinking. What would you say to the person who's listening, who's thinking, well, I'm a lot farther along in my career than high school senior, so is it too late for me, you know,...
BETSY: No.
EMILIE: …to be more aligned?
BETSY: No, it's not. No, it's not. I mean, again, I was 32 when I first took this assessment. And then I ended up going on to work for a hedge fund and, you know, wrote this book. I've done lots of different things. Everybody can, you know, start again. There's no problem with that. I would say going back to school is an expensive proposition. There's no doubt about that.
EMILIE: Yeah.
BETSY: But, you know, by doing this, I think people get a new language of how to advocate for themselves. Even shifting a little bit to the right or the left within their current career can make a huge difference. And, you know, every day is a new day. And by the way, the jobs that, you know, we're doing today probably aren't going to be here. [LAUGHTER] So everybody's changing anyway, so no problem. You know, we're going to all be retrained.
EMILIE: Let's speak to that. Because it does feel like half the jobs we have today didn't exist 10 years ago and probably won't exist 10 years from now. You know, before we hit record, we were talking a little bit about AI. AI is on everyone's mind as it relates to career coaching or thinking about your aptitudes. One of the conversations I recently had here with Marlo Lyons, who wrote a great HBR article about making your career sort of AI resilient, was thinking about your unique capabilities as a human that differentiates you from a robot. Where do you kind of fall on this spectrum of optimism to pessimism when it comes to the future of AI and our ability as humans to carve out a sense of meaning in the workforce?
BETSY: Well, sense of meaning, that's sold separately, let me say that. I mean, everybody has to decide that. [LAUGHTER] But as far as AI, number one, you know, through every major shift in our economy, from the agrarian society to industrial, to, you know, what we saw happen in 2000 with the Internet to now, it's really actually created more jobs than it's destroyed.
EMILIE: So you're an optimist.
BETSY: I'm an optimist, absolutely. But I'm also, you know, I think there's never been a more crucial time to see your education and development of your life as, you know, something you need to have agency over. And that agency begins with knowing who you are. You don't want to be ping ponged around, you know, just skittled around the billiard table all your life zigging and zagging. You can have some agency over this. And, so knowing what your innate abilities are is the first step to knowing how to advocate for yourself and to kind of direct your training not randomly, you know, but with real purpose and intentionality. And we give you those, you know, direction to do that.
EMILIE: I love that. I mean, you're speaking my language here. I'm all about being the boss of your own career, right?
BETSY: Yeah. You're going to have to be.
EMILIE: No one can lead your life for you. You absolutely have to take responsibility. And what I'm hearing you allude to is this idea of, like, we all have to be lifelong learners, right?
BETSY: Yes. I mean, of course. And, you know, I saw a magazine cover back, I think it was 2015, that it was Time magazine. The COVID said that one person a day was being born who lived to be 150.
EMILIE: Oh, my god.
BETSY: I know, I know. Now, I don't know if I buy that exactly. I'm not sure I buy that exact thing. But I will say, statistically, we're living a lot longer. We're working a lot longer. We're going to need to. But work doesn't have to be bad, you know, it can be awesome. It really can be.
EMILIE: Well, that's. I mean, that's such a key point, right? When we talk about. I was just presenting on burnout prevention to a room full of attorney women. And when we think about our identities being so intertwined with the world of work. I remember there was like a moment in my presentation where there was like deer in the headlights look in my audience, and I said, if you don't figure out who you are separate and apart from your title, then you're kind of setting yourself up for an existential crisis because at some point, perhaps retirement or perhaps because of life circumstances that come for you first, right? Like, you and this title are going to be separated. And so you either build a sense of self beyond this title, beyond this role, beyond this firm, or you're going to be forced to reckon with that gap in your identity, you know, at some point down the road.
BETSY: That's so well said, Emilie. That's really well said. I wish that audience. Can I take that?
EMILIE: Thank you…
BETSY: It’s really well said.
EMILIE: …I'm just riffing here, but it's true, right?
BETSY: It’s true.
EMILIE: Like, I think a lot about identity, and I just think it's a very precarious position to be in when we over identify with our careers. And it makes me think about my mom, for instance, who's a nurse her entire life, this caregiver identity is, like, so prominent. She's also such a caregiver in my family and her extended family when she retires, which is coming up real quick. I can already see her behaviors exhibiting a little insecurity. She's like, looking to apply for part time jobs and I'm like, mom, what's going on here? You know, and I think she's having trouble envisioning herself beyond the paid workforce, right?
BETSY: Well of course, and you know, who knows what she'll do? I mean, I'll tell you a story. One of my friends was a graphic designer. She started her career before really the Internet was the platform to do that. And I don't know if anybody in the audience knows this, but used to cut out things and use X-Acto knives and lay out the, you know, the forms on a table. And she got into it because she was really good at that. She loved it.
And then she adopted the technology around. Speaking of lifelong learning to do it online, of course, that everybody does now. And now AI will do it for you practically. But anyway, she adopted that and she found all of a sudden she really wasn't happy. She wasn't satisfied at all. Because what she missed was using that tactile spatial ability, small hand coordination, which are all aptitudes, separate aptitudes. And so, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, she actually took up quilting as a side note. And then she started selling all these quilts. So then she had two jobs. But I mean she, she kind of replaced the things she missed and then kept her paycheck.
EMILIE: We love that.
BETSY: Yeah. And I think that's the case with a lot of things. Like, my uncle was a bond trader, which is, plays into another aptitude called inductive reasoning, where you like, you know, time pressure, decision making.
EMILIE: What a unique kind of person that is. That's not me. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
BETSY: Yeah. Well, I'm just talking about your mom here. So when he retired, he started riding around with EMTs. EMTs responding to emergencies. And he wasn't really, you know, giving people, you know, the AEDs or anything like that. He was just kind of hanging around the basket and helping out, comforting people, that kind of thing. But he loved that environment.
EMILIE: And I think you're right, like having an inner compass that is directive can be so helpful in that.
BETSY: Intentional.
EMILIE: Yeah. To help you be intentional with that, I just took. I know we're just swapping stories at this point, but it's illustrative. I just took my soon to be four year old to the Colorado Railroad Museum and they had like a day out with Thomas the Engine. It was very fun. And I was noticing, this is maybe the third or fourth time I've been to the railroad museum, and I noticed throughout the museum there's a bunch of octogenarians who are volunteers, right?
BETSY: Loving those steam engines and the whole history of that.
EMILIE: And there's. There's big model engines, like model train sets that are very meticulously set up. And, like, you can just see these older gentlemen who are just, like, loving every second of this. And I've realized they're all volunteers. No one's getting paid for this, right? This whole place runs on volunteer labor. So I asked the gentleman who was overseeing one of the tents where there was like, a hundred kids playing with model trains. I said, how long have you been volunteering here? And he said, since 1990.
BETSY: Wow.
EMILIE: And I was like, good god, man, it's 2025. And he's like, yeah. You know, and he started telling me about his experience. And you can just see how meaning is derived through understanding your unique strengths and abilities and what draws you to those environments. And that can be so satisfying to be able to direct that attention properly.
BETSY: Yeah. And I think we lose our imagination of what is possible for us. Unfortunately, we get, you know, dug in. And that's sort of where you have to step back and do something to kind of have a reappraisal of what those possibilities are. Again, we've been influenced. Like, if you ask somebody what they first wanted to do when they grew up, you know, if you ask me, I wanted to be a nun. Okay. Until I found out about some of the things I would have to commit to. And then I got, [LAUGHTER] but I liked the outfits. I had a name picked out. Sister Merry Christmas. I had it all worked out, you know, when I was six.
But I mean since then I had lots of different iterations. And then you. You pick a lane, you know, maybe you're 22, you pick a lane, or maybe you have a family and you're really committed in that lane of course, and happily so. But you might stop thinking about, yeah, what's possible. So, shaken us out of that. And again, back to the AI we might get shaken out of it ourselves. So one way or the other, external or internal, you know?
EMILIE: Right. Well, you talk about in the book sunk cost bias will keep you going like an object in motion, right? It'll just remain in motion if you're like, I'm already dug into this career. I'm already. I have so many responsibilities I can't change. And then life comes along and forces change upon you, right?
So, you know, whether the career you love abandons you because of AI and technology or you decide to make the difficult decision to, like, pivot. You're saying, know thyself and to thyself be true, right?
BETSY: Know thyself, yeah. Another thing I talk about in the book is defaulting. And I think that's basically the same thing where we don't spend enough time investing in our choices. What we do is we put it off too long, or we just pick something and then we dislike it so much, hate it, whatever it is, so we just want out. And so we continually just keep defaulting because we're just trying to get out of whatever we were, the bad choice we made before. It's sort of like marrying the first boy you kiss. You know, you wouldn't do that. But people spend very little time really thinking hard about, you know, their fit for certain jobs and roles.
EMILIE: Well, you know what's interesting? I've been thinking a lot about that, Betsy, because our time is very valuable to big tech, right? And so I'm a little like, nervous about how many of us are glued to our screens all the time, myself included. I've had to like, download apps to keep myself off of Instagram 24/7, you know, a day. And the time that we might normally have reflected or talked things out with a friend or loved one, is being harvested for our attention and our eyeballs to go to social media. Because there's a lot of money to be made when all of our eyeballs are on a screen instead of in a journal reflecting on our deepest desires, right?
And so I think half the battle is like carving out time. Can you tell us, as we start to wrap up here, like, how folks who want to take your aptitude assessment, who want to devote their time, and energy, and attention, which is so limited and so valuable to themselves, and to reappraise perhaps where they're going in their careers. How can they make that a priority?
BETSY: So wrote the book, with my co-author, Alex Ellison, Your Hidden Genius. And because I was the co-founder of YouScience, I am able to offer anyone who purchases the book a free code to take the assessment. So the assessment is about $50 if you go online to youscience.com and it is fantastic. But you can get it with the cost of the book, which is about $20 on Amazon. You get a free code to take it. So that's the step that I can offer people. And as I said, this assessment has been well researched since the 1920s. It's really the gold standard for understanding what your aptitudes are. And I'm just excited to give people that opportunity to.
Once you take it, it opens up this entire career platform for you, like jobs you'd be suited for, but also ways to use AI to write your LinkedIn, LinkedIn about section or interview using your results, and we give you instructions on how to do that as well. So there's tons of information, almost too much in there, but I know just, you know, it's something that was so valuable to me and I'm glad that everybody can have access now.
EMILIE: That's amazing, Betsy. And to go back to this concept you started us with, which around the tyranny of choice, right? Like, understanding yourself can help provide focus to the options that are out there.
BETSY: Exactly. And again, give you permission to try some new things.
EMILIE: I love that, Betsy. Thank you so much. Where can our listeners keep up with you and all the great work you're doing? We already mentioned YouScience, but where else do you hang out? Where can we follow you?
BETSY: Well, you know yourhiddengenius.com, just come on there and you can read all the resources available to you and you can read all about us. So thank you.
EMILIE: Awesome. Thank you so much, Betsy. For more links to everything Betsy and I just spoke about, including a complete transcript of our conversation, head to bossedup.org/episode522. That's bossedup.org/episode522.
And now I want to hear from you. How has your own insight into your skills, your innate abilities, your traits, your personality, how has that shaped your career? Do you feel aligned and energized by the work you do each day, or do you feel like you're faking it and having to sort of pull yourself up every day to get the job done?
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I'm dying to hear from you. So let's keep the conversation going as always in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together, let's lift as we climb.
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