Featured Genius: Meet Elana

An Every Day Genius Interview

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This week, I wanted to do something different. I want to introduce you to Elana, the Every Day Genius mascot and logo.

She is named in the spirit of élan vital — the vital impulse, the life force that animates and propels. She’s a composite: every person who has ever felt the tension between knowing something deeply and not yet knowing how to move with it. This is her story, in her words.

She is the spirit of Every Day Genius.

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Michele Jennae: Hi Elana, thank you for joining me. Before we get into the interview, didn't you show up for me early on? You sponsored the podcast for a few months? You didn't have a name yet.

Elana: <Laughing> Yes, I guess so. You used to say something like, "Brought to you by the butterfly."

Michele Jennae: That's right, although I didn't know at the time just what you'd become.

Elana: Well, I headed South for the winter back in January when you rebranded, but it's Spring, so I guess I was due back.

Michele Jennae: And boy, are you ever back. I hope you're here to stay. We're creating a lovely garden of Genius. Everything looks better with you here.

Elana: <Blushing as only a butterfly can> Thank you.

Michele Jennae: Let's get to know you better. When you enter into a room, what’s the first thing that happens for you?

Elana: I read it. Before anyone has said anything worth saying, I already know where the energy is. Who’s holding tension they haven’t named. Which idea is trying to get born in the middle of whatever agenda is on the table. It’s not a skill I practice or practiced. It’s just how I arrive.

It’s very useful, but it’s also — honestly — sometimes very exhausting. Because once you feel the current of a room, you can’t unfeel it. And sometimes you just wanted to have lunch.

Michele Jennae: I can relate. <laughing> Speaking of entering a room, there’s a shape that describes how you move through the world. Can you tell us about it?

It came when you, Michele Jennae, were studying polarity maps — the frameworks that show how two opposing forces cycle between upsides and downsides without ever truly resolving. The original map is a simple figure eight. Clean, useful. Two loops, one crossing, an infinity symbol.

But sitting with it, you reached for a shape that felt more right. It wasn’t a correction, but an instinct.

Michele Jennae: That’s right, I drew four lobes instead of two. It felt right to loop each quadrant in, and then I realized I had before me, you. A butterfly.

Elana: It's like that moment was really when I emerged from the cocoon. Sure, I existed conceptually back when the podcast started, but in that moment, I became real.

You drew the shape, the loops with a vertical axis and a horizontal one, both held at once, and you saw the shape of a butterfly.

Michele Jennae: Yes, that's right.

Elana: And at the center, not just a crossing “point” but a crossing. An X. Four wings meeting at a single place.

That’s the Butterfly Cross. And that’s my map.

The X in the center isn’t incidental, though it may have felt accidental. It’s actually the source, of my power, you could say. It’s where my wings connect, where the energy moves between them, where flight becomes possible at all. Everything I do — the knowing, the depth, the moments when I’m most alive — runs through that center.

Michele Jennae: I love that. Tell us about your two wings. Right and left. What does each one give you?

Elana: My left wing is Intuition. It lifts me fast. I see around corners, connecting things other people haven’t put together yet, moving with a kind of knowing that I can’t always explain in the moment but that usually turns out to be right. When I’m flying on that wing, I’m electric. I make people feel seen. I feel seen. I move quickly and land well.

My right wing is Depth. It’s slower, quieter. When I use it fully, I ask the question that changes everything — not the obvious question, but the question underneath the obvious one. It's the one that wakes people up.

With that depth, I can sit with complexity without needing to resolve it too soon. I can give ideas room to breathe.

Michele Jennae: I like to call that sitting with questions. We reach for answers far too quickly, I think.

Elana: Yes, I agree.

Michele Jennae: And what effect does that have, giving ideas room to breathe?

Elana: People leave conversations with me feeling like they finally understood something they’d been carrying for years. But it didn't come from me. It came from inside them.

Michele Jennae: Oh, that's beautiful. And both wings together?

Elana: Together, they make me someone who can feel the shape of an idea and hold it long enough for it to become something real.

That’s the gift. When both wings are moving, the energy flowing through the Butterfly Cross. I don’t have to choose between knowing fast and knowing deep. The motion carries me through both.

Michele Jennae: And what happens when one wing takes over?

Elana: When Intuition runs the show alone, I move too fast. I’m three steps ahead while the people around me are still looking for their seats. I make the call before the room is ready. I get the outcome right and lose people along the way — and then genuinely can’t figure out why nobody followed.

The drag sets in as frustration. Then impatience. Then I get this quiet certainty that I just work better alone. Which isn’t true — it’s just what one wing tells itself when it’s tired of waiting for the other.

Michele Jennae: That’s an important insight.

Elana: Oh it gets better, and worse. <laughing>

When Depth takes over without Intuition, I disappear into the thinking. The idea gets richer and richer inside my head and nothing moves. I research when I should be acting. I refine when I should be releasing.

From the outside it looks like diligence, and I can start to believe that it's diligence. But I know what’s happening. I’m waiting to feel ready. And I never quite do.

Michele Jennae: Ouch. And what does it feel like when you’re grounded — when neither wing is moving?

Elana: I go quiet. I stop offering the thing only I can see in the moment. I stop being me. I do the task in front of me and I call it enough.

The light is still in there. I know it’s there. But my wings are folded, and somewhere along the way I’ve convinced myself that this — this smaller, flatter version of moving through the day — is just what responsible looks like.

Michele Jennae: What responsible looks like?

Elana: But, it isn’t, you see. That’s a lie we’ve been told to keep us from getting too far out of line. The status quo world doesn’t know what to do with Genius, mine or yours or anyone’s.

To be grounded and stay grounded is to lose all of my vibrancy. I begin to take on sepia-toned hues, and that’s not good, because I was meant to fly.

Michele Jennae: How do you find your way back?

Elana: I remember. I always remember. It’s never as dramatic as I expect it to be, though I do have some grand epiphanies from time to time.

Usually, it starts small. A conversation that sparks something I’d stopped looking for. A question I can’t put down, usually accompanied by a "tired of feeling tired" feeling. The spark is ready to ignite.

It's a moment where Intuition flashes and instead of outrunning it, I pause. I let Depth catch up.

And something lands — not in my head, but in my body. That’s the EDG Point. The center of the Butterfly Cross. The place where both wings connect and the motion becomes one continuous thing.

Not a balance between two forces, but - and this is important - a single flight. I stop fighting the flow, and it becomes effortless.

Michele Jennae: What do you want people to understand about the way you’re built?

Elana: I want them to understand that the tension isn’t the problem. You can spend years trying to resolve it — trying to be more consistent, more linear, more like people who seemed to move through the world without the current running under everything.

I want them to understand that they’re really built the same way.

The tension isn’t the problem; it’s the power source. It’s only when I am out of flow, focusing on one wing to the exclusion of the other, that tension becomes stress.

The two wings aren’t opposites I have to manage. They’re the same surface, moving continuously, passing through what looks like its opposite and returning to where it started. Like a Möbius strip. Like a breath.

An inhale and an exhale with an imperceptible turn.

That’s what flight feels like from the inside. Not dramatic. Not effortful. Just — continuous.

Two wings. One crossing. One Elana. Every day.

 What are your two wings? What’s your butterfly’s name?

The map already exists. You drew it the moment you were born.

You’re just learning to read it.

I hope you've enjoyed meeting Elana. Find out more about the Butterfly Map and how to map your Genius with the Free eBook. Two Wings.

🩵 Michele Jennae