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Felecia Hatcher is the granddaughter of a Jamaican sugar cane and yam farmer and the daughter of a construction entrepreneur, and she says she has spent her entire life building things. Once told by a high school guidance counsellor that her low grades meant she wouldn’t make it, she went on to co-found the venture-backed food brand Feverish Pops and write five books, including Genius Jam and Start a Business on a Ramen Noodle Budget. Today she is the CEO of Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition Opportunity Inc., where she has invested in over 157 entrepreneurs who have collectively raised more than $100 million. She is also the first to say she has been burned out three times.
The night she didn’t get on the flight
Felecia had raised millions of dollars in support of her work, and she was doing everything for everyone while not listening to her body. Getting ready to board a flight one night, she heard a voice louder than it had ever been: if you don’t sit down somewhere, you’re not going to make it through the night. This time she listened, and missed the event she was due to speak at. Resting for a few days, she finally opened a book she had been carrying around, Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap. She went on to study with Gay and Kathy Hendricks for about two years.
A process of elimination
You can’t pull your genius out of thin air, Felecia says. You have to take yourself through a process of elimination. Your zone of incompetence holds the things you are worst at, and doing them causes more harm than good, because time is the one commodity none of us get back. Your zone of competence holds things you can do, but other people do better. Then come your zone of excellence and your zone of genius, where work flows so well that hours feel like minutes. To make it practical, she layers the Eisenhower framework over the top: do what sits in your genius, decide on what sits in your excellence, delegate what sits in your competence, and delete what sits in your incompetence.
The velvet cage
The zone that catches most high achievers, in Felecia’s view, is excellence. You have probably built your entire career there, and you can live a very comfortable life in it. That is exactly the danger. Your zone of excellence is a velvet cage, she says: you hit the target, but you never exceed the goal. Stay too long and you become complacent, and your body tells you, with an itch or a tension in your shoulders and back, that you are not doing the thing you are supposed to do. Her simplest test is trust. Ask yourself, do I trust myself in this? If you can honestly answer yes, you are in your genius.
Get out of the way
Even knowing her genius, Felecia has slipped out of it. Having run a gourmet popsicle company for seven years, she invested in a hip hop ice cream shop and did what she does best: the pitch deck, the partners, the messaging. Then, on opening day, she was at the front register trying to scoop ice cream until her business partner told her, Felecia, get the heck out of the way. She describes herself as a first quarter person in a relay race, the catalyst who comes off the block, and says too many of us hold a baton for far too long, often out of ego. Pass it on, she says, whether to a person or an AI tool, and stay in the part only you can do.
Pretending to be a nobody
Felecia offers a reframe on imposter syndrome: if you think that you are an imposter, then you are, because you are pretending to be a nobody when you have something of value. The same honesty shaped her recovery from burnout. Therapy helped her separate her identity from a company she had built for seven years, and her third burnout taught her that bath bombs and massages were not enough. Raise your hand, she says, and say something, even if it’s a whisper.
Felecia left us with three shiny golden nuggets. First, do the zone of genius audit to understand your zones of incompetence, competence and excellence, and truly get to your genius. Second, write yourself a permission slip to come back into your body and rest, and to get clear on what you want without any external validation. Third, use rest as a reset strategy: audit your calendar in 30-minute increments and realign your time for more joy and freedom. As she puts it, burnout is not a badge of honour.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube
Find Out More About Felecia Hatcher
Website: https://www.feleciahatcher.com/
Genius Gap assessment: https://geniusgap.ai
Instagram: @feleciahatcher
YouTube: @FeleciaHatcher
Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/