Episode #358 – Uncap Your Potential: Gay Hendricks on solving the Upper Limit Problem

This is episode 358 of the Brilliant Balance Podcast, uncap your potential gay Hendrix on solving the upper limit problem. Well, you are in for a treat today, my friends. If you have been a longtime listener of this podcast, you may remember that I had the opportunity to interview Gay Hendrix, author of The Big Leap and the Originator of the Upper Limit Problem Idea a while back. Actually, it was a couple of years ago, and I was thinking about this whole concept of the upper limit problem and fondly sort of remembering my conversation with him, which I think it was in 2020 <laugh>. So it was, it’s been a minute since this conversation, and I decided that rather than trying to paraphrase my learning from him and do an episode on this idea that I would just re-Air the original interview, it’s so good, and I really don’t wanna try to capture the essence of it when I have the opportunity to just give you the whole thing.

Cherylanne Skolnicki:
So this is one of the topics that I think I have been personally reflecting on a lot lately, and the idea of where are we self imposing limits on our upside, on our potential, on our success, on our happiness, and what would it look like if we really uncapped that and just gave ourselves the opportunity to continuously move up into the right, so to speak, in our lives. So, without further ado, let me give you this pre recorded interview with Gay Hendrix.

Well, gay, I am so delighted to have you on the show today. I have shared with this audience before that my purpose is to help everyone I meet stand in their brilliance and achieve their full potential. And there’s nobody I’d rather be talking to than you about this topic. So thank you for being here today.

Gay Hendrix:
Thank you so much, Cheryl Ann, it’s a real pleasure to be with you.

CS:
Awesome. Your book. Now, you have a number of books that we’re gonna talk about a couple of them today, but your book, the Big Leap, really gave me a new framework for how to live this out, and it’s through the concept of the zone of genius. So I think that’s another way of saying brilliance, and I’m curious through your words, like what is the zone of genius and why, why don’t we all choose to hang out there?

GH:
Great question. Well, I think it’s because first of all, we are scared of our true genius, our true brilliance. And so I think many of us have to kind of go through a gateway of fear, and I talk about what those fears are in the Big leap. But the zone of genius, your genius zone is when you’re doing things you most love to do that also are your biggest contribution to others. So it doesn’t matter if you’re making a genius soup or writing a genius symphony, it all comes out of the same place. I watched growing up, I grew up in a single parent family where my mom was a working professional, so I was raised somewhat more by my grandmother who lived next door. But both of them in a way taught me things that I didn’t even get to learn later in my PhD program at Stanford.

GH:
You know, that they had such a practicality, they were both such practical psychologists, and I admired them so much. And one of the things that both of them, both my grandmother and my, my mom impressed in me, was the idea of always being yourself. And I really appreciate that advice now that I’m the age they were when they gave it to me. Because inside us all, we have this place that I call genius. That’s our place where you’re doing what you most love to do. And lo and behold, when you find that you’re doing what you most love to do, it’s also a big contribution to other people or your family or the world around you. So your genius zone has another quality too. When you’re in your genius zone, you actually have time in a different way. Time disappears. Yes. Do you ever remember when you were a kid where you could be playing with something and somebody would say, oh, it’s dinner time, and you’d say what? Huh? You know,

CS:
Who’s hungry, right?

GH:
Yeah. And, um, I’m that way with writing, writing happens to be a big passion of mine. Uh, just this morning, as a matter of fact, I’m, uh, I’m working on a, uh, sequel to the Big Leap, um, called the Genius Zone. And so it’s a, um, it’s an elaboration and got different stories in it and some different tools in it. If I may go back to the Big Leap for a moment, I mentioned fears. A lot of people think when they, they kinda get scared of fear, but it’s just another thing that’s happening in another place in your body. Just like if you feel sad, you might feel cloudy in your chest or compressed or something. Or if you feel angry, you might feel your shoulders tighten or the back of your neck tighten up. Well, fear has been around for millions of years, and it’s designed to teach you if you’re feeling under some sort of threat.

GH:
And it could be a mental threat or it could be an actual physical threat. But, you know, nowadays we don’t have saber-tooth Tigers chasing us around as much as they did when, uh, fear was invented way back a couple of million years back. But now we have our boss criticizing us, or our mate yelling at us or something like that, that brings forth those same kinds of fears. With regard to the big leap, though, what allows people to take their big leap is when they can identify one of the fears that’s holding them back. And some of the big ones I point to in the Big Leap are the fear of outshining other people. Many people have a kind of an overused Yep, yep, yep. I know, I think you’re one of ’em, and I bet many of our listeners are too, because in a way, it’s a good thing because, you know, you wanna be a compassionate person, you wanna have your heart open to others, but I think many of us have learned that somehow we need to temper that and be smart about who we open our heart to. And I know it took me <laugh> 35 years to learn that, but once I did, I had much better relationships and mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, by the way, my wife, uh, Catherine, Katie, uh, just and I are just celebrating our 40th anniversary together. So when we met 40 years ago in 1980,

CS:
I love it. I love it. So fear about shining is fear about

GH:
Shining is a big, yeah. Yeah. A second one is probably the most prevalent one. As many people carry around a fear that there’s something fundamentally flawed about them or something fundamentally wrong or bad about themselves. And, you know, these are what some of my colleagues like, uh, Tom Ferguson calls an imaginary crime because it’s, you feel like you did some kind of crime, but you don’t know exactly what it was. Yeah. And the reason is because it’s not a crime. You were just doing what you were doing, but somebody else labeled it a crime. And so one thing we need to do is get out from under those kinds of old fears, like the fear that there’s something wrong with me or the fear of outshining or another big one. A lot of people feel like if they make big changes in their life, they shouldn’t do that, because it’ll make them disloyal to people that were there for them in the past, perhaps.

GH:
Or if you change your beliefs, it’s disloyal to people in your past. But I always like to look at it the other direction, you know, if you’re really, like a friend of mine, uh, who was a Buddhist who went to visit, uh, her parents out in, um, the Midwest who live on a farm. And when she came back, I was asking her, what did you learn from it? And she said, well, I learned that if I tried to talk to them about Buddhism, they hated it. But when I acted like the Buddha, they loved it <laugh>, and

CS:
That’s awesome.

GH:
Yeah. So the big leap is to get into that genius zone as soon as you possibly can in life. I’ve had people in my office really who didn’t even start thinking about that until they’re 65 or 70 years old. But it’s never too late because that genius is ready to be awakened at all times. It’s there whether we like it or not, or whether we listen to it or not. And there’s a beautiful quotation too that I use in another one of my books. It comes from the Gospel of Thomas, which was one of the apocryphal gospels that, um, didn’t make it into the later official Bible, but it has some wonderful quotations in it. And one of ’em says, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. And it’s a way of saying that we all have something inside us that needs to be brought forth, whether it’s our ability to, like I said, cook the transcendent soup or write the transcendent poem, or whatever it is. There’s a creative flow inside us all, and we’ve got to learn how to listen to that. Because if we don’t, things don’t go right in our lives and we don’t feel good.

CS:
Yes. So, let’s unpack a couple of these things. ’cause I, I could, I think I could probably talk to you all day when you say, we have these fears, and the fears are what’s keeping us from really stretching forward to that zone of genius. Instead they’re keeping us in a different zone. Right. And you unpack four, you talk about the zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, the zone of excellence, and then kind of pen, ultimately the zone of genius. I think a lot of my audience hangs out in the zone of excellence, things that they are good at rewarded for, right. Maybe financially compensated for, but aren’t necessarily connected to purpose or calling or contribution in the way that their zone of geniuses. So is that a common stuck place? Is the zone of excellence, especially for high achieving individuals?

GH:
I would say it’s probably the stuck place for high achieving individuals, because many of, uh, where I learned a lot of this was when I finished my doctorate at Stanford in 1974 in the counseling psychology department. And then I worked there for a year in the school of, um, education, counseling, psychology. And I worked a lot with what would become Silicon Valley. They didn’t even have a name for it at the time. But in the 1970s, there were all these companies springing up like Intel and Hewlett Packard, and, you know, all these different ones that were making high tech products and Apple later. And it was very exciting to work with these guys. And a lot of ’em, I would say the three out of four of ’em were engineering men. And one outta four of ’em were women that were involved in management or HR or something like that.

GH:
And what, what they all had in common were, they were extraordinarily intellectually brilliant, but the other thing they had in common was they were largely cut off from the rest of themselves. They didn’t know their life purpose. They couldn’t talk to you about their feelings, you know, it was like a giant blank spot in many of ’em. And I actually remember one fellow saying his wife was, she basically was saying, I’d like you to listen to my feelings more. His response, which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, was young man. He said to me, I was about 30 at the time, a young man in my work, feelings are human error.

CS:
Oh,

GH:
No. And so you can see if you’re starting out from that point that, see, we’re all wired the same emotionally, we all have the same wiring for fear and anger and sadness. It’s been around for a long time. It was here before we were <laugh>. And so we got to inherit this body that’s been around for millions of years. It has its reactions. So if you consider the reactions of that body, all human error, you know, that, that you’re gonna also just make everything wrong, basically, that human beings do. So that’s an extreme version of it, but in a way, we all have that kind of split in ourselves between what our minds do and what our bodies and our emotions and that kind of thing does. And we need to get back into harmony within the two, otherwise we’re gonna be kind of wobbling around, split off from a large part of ourselves.

CS:
So that’s fascinating because what I hear is there’s an integration in the zone of genius, right? Mind, and then you’re saying body and spirit are sort of, they’re in heart. Is there an integration in the zone of genius that maybe isn’t there in those other zones where you can play just outta your head and just out of like a skillset, but maybe don’t have the heart connection?

GH:
Well, your zone of genius is always going to be an integration, because I always say that the longest journey any human being ever makes is the 12 inch journey from their head down to their heart. And even though it’s only a foot of territory, it’s everything in a way, because my wife and I have seen maybe 4,500 couples now in our office here or in our seminars. And one thing that troubled relationships have in common is people don’t really listen to each other. I mean, some of the most fundamental things that we need to be able to listen to in each other, you know, things about what we want or what we’re afraid of, or what we’re upset about, you know, we need to listen in a generous, open-hearted way. But almost nobody ever learns the skills of how to do that until sometimes it’s too late.

GH:
But I can tell you that when people come out of relationships and split up, one of the main reasons they give is he or she never would listen to me. And it’s astonishing that we don’t teach good listening in the first grade, for example, I’ve actually been in schools where they did that. You know, they had a social emotional curriculum where they did things like teach kids problem solving and how to listen and things like that, which I think is really brilliant. Many of the things I didn’t get to learn until I was a PhD student or things that I could have easily learned in the first grade.

CS:
Yes. So, and that is, that’s, it’s an insight I hear a lot from the women I work directly with, is the disconnects in relationships that are, that kind of get exacerbated as you’re trying to stretch toward this new level. I think we’re all on that journey toward our own zone of genius. And if that starts to create a fork in the road and we’re not getting back on the same page with that heart connection, it can drive divisiveness. The other thing that can drive us away from the zone of genius is our discomfort with happiness. And this, when you shared this in the Big leap, was a radical concept to me. I had to really sit with this for a while and, and test it to see, do I agree, have I experienced it? And your, your key question is, are you willing to feel happy or to feel good all the time? And you’d think it would be such an easy thing for people to say yes to <laugh>, right? I mean, wow. But the more you sit with that question, and I would, I would invite you to sit with that question, are you willing to feel good all the time? Or where, where maybe is your inner thermostat set? So unpack that a little bit for us. Like, why aren’t we willing to, and how does this inner thermostat get in the way?

GH:
Yes. Well, I think many of us get a thermostat to put on our good feeling at a very early age, because we’ve got direct, you know, you, you may get excited about something and somebody says, don’t get excited. Or you <laugh>, you know, you’re bouncing up and down with delight about something and people say, sit still. So there’s a lot of shoulds and oughts. There was one famous study way back where they hooked little microphones around preschoolers and just recorded everything that was said to them for a week. And when they analyzed it, 85% of the messages that were coming in were negative. Don’t do this. Quit doing that. And so that, when I first saw that, I said, wow, you know, but my own daughter was maybe five or six years old at the time, and I realized that I too communicated to her a lot of times and don’ts and that kind of thing, rather than dos.

GH:
Um, so it’s a big tendency, I think, in human life to focus on the negative. So that’s one thing we have to kind of get out from under a second thing, is that I think people are allergic to happiness <laugh> in a way because they think there’s maybe something wrong with it, or it, it, you know, that a lot of people have told me, if I let myself really feel happy, something bad would happen. And I always trace it with them back to a time in their life when that did happen. But that was then <laugh>, you know, that might’ve been 58 years ago. There’s no reason now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so I think that all of us are in a constant learning experience with life around us. And I, I tell my students, I say, life is going to teach you either by tickling you with a feather, or if you’re not paying attention, it will be happy to do it with a sledgehammer or a cream pie. <laugh>.

GH:
It’s our openness to learning that makes the difference. Yeah. And in fact, here at our institute, we have an openness to learning scale that we use with executives and folks like that about just how open are you to learning? Are you willing to learn from life itself with a tickle of the feather? Or do you need a kick in the seat of the pants? And so I’ve had both, by the way, <laugh>, I’ve had times in my life and I’ve been thick enough, uh, in fact, I probably wouldn’t be here without a major swot on the back of my head. I suffered from a lot of childhood obesity from pretty much the moment I was born. I was the only fat person in a thin family. So I was taken around to a different specialist to try to figure out what was wrong with me and put on different pills and diets and everything.

GH:
And I really never got it dealt with though, until I was 24 years old and weighed 300 and some pounds. I weighed 180 pounds today. Yeah. I’m six feet tall. And so think of me though with 140 extra pounds wrapped around me. And on that magic day, I slipped and fell. I didn’t knock myself out, but I kind of ended up laying there for a long period of time just realizing, gosh, there was a rock over here to the six inches from my head. What if I landed on that rock? I coulda killed myself. Mm. And I had this moment of realizing who I really was, and I opened up, and I, I think I felt my feelings for the first time on that day, what I was angry about and scared about, and all of that. And out of that, though, I rebirthed my life and I’m so glad I did. Because within a year, I’d lost more than a hundred pounds and got out of the relationship I was in at the time and got out of the yucky job I was in and kind of found my life. I hope it doesn’t take a whack on the back like that from most people. I hope most of us can learn with the tickle of a feather. But I suspect some, some of you folks in the audience have had a whack or two in your life, uh, like I have.

CS:
Yes. I mean, what a compelling story, right? That wake up call moment. But what, the thing that struck me about what you said was I maybe felt my feelings for the first time in that experience, and that as a gateway to unlocking the next level is so authentic to the work that you’ve shared through your writing, right? That notion of connecting deeply, that integration of feelings with thought gets you, that’s the unlocking to that next level of life. Because if our capacity for, or our threshold for joy and happiness and goodness and abundance is, is set, if there’s a set point, something has to shake it to reset that thermostat. Right? And, and can we do that consciously, gay? Can we just decide to increase our threshold and capacity?

GH:
Yes. In fact, if you use those statements I give you in the big leap like willingness statements, you know, or I commit to feeling good all the time, or I commit to feeling good half the time even. And just to, like, when I started thinking about all this, that was in the big leap, it took me about 30 years actually to write the book because I had to think about all this stuff and work it out with a lot of people. But one thing I noticed is that almost all of us, no matter what, you know, if we were the CEO or something else in the company, most of us had some sort of upper limit on how good we could feel. When I started, I was only spending 10% of my time in my genius zone. And that shocked me. ’cause I was saying, wow, this is such an important thing.

GH:
Let me actually calculate how much time I spent this week working on my genius, 10%, you know? And so that was 35 years ago. So I started making incremental increases. First I wanted to get 30% and then 50%, and then by 1999, I got to 90% where I was spending 90% of my time in my genius zone, and the other 10% getting around or changing the kitty litter or whatever I was around there. And, uh, but I’m not a genius kitten kitty litter, uh, maestro. But I got the job done. You know, I’d say it’s in my zone of excellence, <laugh>, by the way, I do have a couple more things I wanna say about the zone of excellence, if I may. Sure. The reason it’s such a big trap, you mentioned a couple things, is because you’re usually so richly rewarded for it. I’ve probably had a hundred, at least a hundred attorneys or medical professionals, doctors in here over the years who had some version of the following study.

GH:
As a matter of fact, one of I counseled a while back as a woman, a doctor who has a presence on the internet and television and that kind of thing. And I was working with her, and she was basically telling me a classic zone of excellence story. She was saying, you know, I’m making more money than I ever thought I would. And I’m, you know, reaching more people than I ever thought I would. I started out as, you know, working in a clinic and a, you know, working with 25 people a day, and now I have this big presence. But she says, I feel like if I keep going at this speed, I’m gonna kill myself. And what do I do? And the way I look at it is around midlife 40, 42, 45, around midlife, somewhere, you have to start growing a new personality to deal with the second half of your life than you did with the first half of your life.

GH:
Because if you keep that push, push, push that she was talking about, it does have a burnout capability. Yeah. And I had a gillions of people in here that had gone past that burnout point. You know, they hadn’t paid attention to that, and they’d gotten themselves sick in some way. And so I really think that we need to pay attention closely to ourselves because we ourselves are the instrument that’s getting our work done. And if we’re not paying attention to honing our instrument, to making our instrument more sensitive all the time, you know, where are we gonna be? Because we’re in the consciousness business, you know, but where is our own consciousness? And so we need to constantly be focusing on that.

CS:
Yes, that resonates so deeply with me that you can be really good at something, but it’s a slog. You know? It is, it is taking every ounce of your energy because you’re telling yourself it’s worth it. Because look at the rewards. But that is, it’s insufficient over time. You know, it is, that’s not enough. I want the divine compensation that comes back from being aligned with my genius and my purpose, not just the financial compensation that anyone will pay me to do something I’m good at. You know?

GH:
Yeah. You wanna feel that whole body satisfaction, that whole person satisfaction that can only come from fully using yourself to know yourself and fully using yourself to make your big contribution in the world, whatever it is. Right?

CS:
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CS:
And I think when I look at my own story, and I look at this, the success stories of women that I’ve had the opportunity to work with one-on-one or in one of our groups, there’s an element of recognizing the opportunity when it comes, and then the courage to step in alignment with it to say like, these are my greatest gifts. This is a gaping opportunity I see in the world. I’m gonna connect those dots. And you have a new book and you play in this territory, you call it conscious luck, right? It’s it’s kind of preparation meeting opportunity. So what’s the role of luck in all of this in really being able to stay in that zone and have the lives we’re meant to have and make the contributions we’re meant to make?

GH:
Yes. Well, one of the things I talk about in conscious luck is that luck isn’t a matter of luck if you really, I’ve, we’ve interviewed dozens now of people who consider themselves very lucky. And that’s one thing they all have in common is they’re quick to tell you that there are some things that make them lucky. And if they don’t know what they are, sometimes we can help them find out what those things are. But one of the things that we, uh, came across in the act of, uh, interviewing a woman named Tina Sig, who’s a Stanford professor, she says she studies conscious luck as part of her work at Stanford. And she says that luck is like a wind that’s always blowing that many people think of luck as something that kind of hits them, like a lightning bolt or something they were born with.

GH:
But she said it’s not like that at all. That what it really is is a wind that’s always blowing, and that we need to kind of open our wings and our sails so that we catch the wind at the right time, and it steers us around to be in the right place at the right time for good things to happen. And that’s kind of my personal definition of conscious luck, by the way, is always being in the right place at the right time for the best thing to happen. I’ve had so many instances in my life, a lot of ’em I talk about in conscious luck, but I think we’re always given these opportunities. It’s just like the shifting of the wind. The day my wife and I got married, we had our own, we had a public wedding ceremony, but we had a private one up on the top of a mountain in Colorado.

GH:
And as we were saying, our vows to each other, Katie said, oh, look up. And there was a hawk circling around in a spiral above our heads. And as we said our vows to each other, at the end of them, I looked up again and there were two hawks circling around, and they, it was just like a blessing of our vows. And they kept circling around until they basically disappeared so high. We saw ’em only as tiny dots. But it left such a big impression on me that in, um, in one of my books, I talk about the genius Spiral Spiral. And part of opening up to your genius is claiming your good luck opening up to the possibility that your life could get luckier and luckier. And what we found, Carol, my co-author and I, we found in interviewing a lot of people that there were these eight different things that they did that made them luckier.

GH:
And we just kind of lay out what those things are. And they’re really cool, simple things. Like almost everybody that we talked to who, who is lucky, had a moment in their lives where they kind of took charge of their own luck. They said, okay, I wanna be one of the lucky ones. And I tell the story in the book of this thing that happened to me when I was 14, even when I was at a movie theater and this kid next to me, they were gonna have a drawing, and he said, watch this. I’m gonna win a prize. And sure enough, they drew three tickets out of a goldfish bowl. There were 250 of us in the audience. He won the top prize, a wristwatch. And I asked him afterwards, how did you do that? And he said, I always win stuff like that.

GH:
He said, I just decided one day that I was gonna be one of the lucky ones. That’s his word, one of the lucky ones. And I thought about that a lot, and I decided I was gonna be one of the lucky ones too. And right after that, I had this amazing thing happen where I found a coin collection on the street in a briefcase, and I took it back, restored it to the owner, and got a big prize for it, and got my name in the newspaper as the boy who found the fortune in coins and returned it to its owner. And it was, uh, had this big payoff to it just after I shifted to be one of the lucky ones. So it kinda left a lifelong impression on me that we can take charge of our own luck.

CS:
I bet that I, I wonder if those solidifying experiences, like you make the decision and then kind of it works, help anchor into, oh my goodness, I think this act, there’s actually something to this. The consciousness, the conscious decision to be lucky, be a winner, have good things happen, gets reinforced early, and then, you know, you’re, it kind of makes it stick. Is that, is that in the research?

GH:
Yes, definitely. And also, uh, toward the end of the book too, we talk about how to kind of see it as an ongoing activity of always adjusting your sails so that you catch the wind directly. Interestingly enough, I, I am interested to find out if your audience has found this true too, is that in many cases, gratitude is a path to luck. That being grateful in a, in this moment for what you have opens you up more to good fortune in the future. Many of the people that we interviewed in the book, and I feel this way in my own life, feel like gratitude is one of the main gateways to open ourselves to good fortune. And the nice thing is, you can do it, even if you’re sitting in a traffic jam, you can sit there and in your traffic jam, be grateful for what’s going on. I remember getting a call from a colleague of mine one day when I was stuck in LA traffic. And, uh, he jokes about me, uh, this with me to this day because he asked me how I was doing, and I said, I’m in the zen monastery of an LA traffic jam. <laugh>

CS:
<laugh>.

GH:
That’s lovely. I used to have an office down there, and I would drive down two or three times a week. And so I was kind of a connoisseur of how to be in a traffic jam. Now, I, uh, stay at home mostly up here in, uh, Ojai 90 minutes away from la. So I don’t get into it as much as I used to.

CS:
I love it. You know what it makes me think of, I had this realization a number of years ago as a parent. My three children are 16, almost 13 and 10, almost 16, 13 and 10. And they are such a lesson in how some of these principles play out. So I was thinking about if my child is grateful for the toys they’ve already gotten, how much more willing I am as a parent to give them the next one. Right. Because they’re appreciative and there’s this sense of they get it, and there’s no entitlement, and there’s a, there’s this joyful exchange, right? If you were given something and look at how grateful and appreciative you are, and you’re not actually like out scamming for the next thing. Right. And I, I see this gratitude practice very similarly in my own life of, well, why would more come my way if I’m not already grateful for what I do have? So it’s such an interesting metaphor or analogy for me that I always seem to see these examples through parenting of the, the kind of greater principles of the universe at play.

GH:
Yes, definitely. I think that our children mirror our lessons. I know that my daughter always mirrored back to me lessons that I needed to learn myself that enabled me to help her learn hers more at different stages of her life. And I think also that at Harvard, Gordon Allport, a professor at Harvard used to say that every psychologist needed a child and a dog, <laugh>,

CS:
It’s probably true.

GH:
The child, the child is foreseeing your unconscious in daily life, and the dog is to love you anyway. <laugh>

CS:
Unconditionally. Yes. Oh, that’s awesome. Especially as a new dog owner, that makes me very happy to hear <laugh>. So these concepts of luck, the way that we condition ourselves to have more luck, ultimately I would think, kind of work symbiotically to help us achieve our zone of genius and kind of stay in that, you know, having the life of happiness and joy and abundance that we deserve. Yes. They work together. Awesome.

GH:
Yes. One of the first things we do here when people come in for an interview is we invite them to go in a room for 10 minutes by themselves and meditate on a series of what we call wonder questions. Here, a wonder question is a, a question that you really don’t know the answer to, and the answer to it would change your life. So that’s the definition of a wonder question. And so we invite people to just sit quietly and wonder about questions like, Hmm, what do I most love to do? Hmm. So spend 10 minutes wondering about just that one question and repeating it over and over again. Hmm, what do I most love to do? We always invite people to start a wonderful question with a Hmm. Because a hum integrates the two sides of your brain when you’re humming your left and your right hemisphere or in conversation.

GH:
So start in a place of integration. Hmm, what do I need to do now so that this impasse in my relationships can be cleared up? Hmm. What do I need to feel in myself that would allow me to feel good more of the time? So, questions that have a, so one of the biggest ones we always invite people to work on is this question of what is it that you most love to do? ’cause if you think about, like even in your work, if you assess all the minutes and days and hours of your work, what about that is what you most love to do? I was once sitting coaching the president of, uh, Dell computer at the time, about 25 years ago, and a really bright gentleman named Kevin, and I asked him to go through that and once start identifying it, you realize, wow, I could be doing this thing.

GH:
I love to do more in my work, but I get lost in X, Y, and Z. And you know, he, he, one thing he told me always stuck in my mind, he said that a lot of running a business is just plain boring <laugh>. Yes. And I’d never allowed myself to say that or think it, you know, but it’s true. Yeah. And so, uh, I think to avoid boredom, we often create dramas around us just to not have the boredom. But anyway, I think that one thing that I invite people to do and that people do when they come here with intensives is to find more and more things they love to do and just do them more and more. Because to, to reinvent your life, you don’t have to quit your job and sail away in a sailboat to Tahiti and live on coconuts or anything like that. What you need to do is 10 minutes a day of innovation in your life, 10 minutes a day of doing your genius every day that will lead to 20 minutes a day, that will lead to 30 minutes a day. So grow it incrementally. That’s the way it’s done. You don’t go to a gym the first day you join and do 600 pull-ups. You know, you work it up. And so that’s what I recommend people to do, take this slow and easy approach rather than the lightning bolt approach

CS:
Oh, so wise, because it’s so easy to get shut down and end up overwhelmed when we try to change too much, or we never start because it feels like this impossible hill to climb. So helpful Gay. I think everything you’ve shared today about the big leap, about the zone of genius, the upper limit problem, and how to get through it, you know, conscious luck, these are such important concepts. I, new one for me was the wonder questions. I’ll be playing with that for days. So I, I really love everything that you’ve shared. Do you have time for a quick speed round of questions?

GH:
Oh, absolutely. I’ve been looking forward to it. I, I deliberately asked you not to tell me what, what it was all about so I could have it for the first time, which is

CS:
Always my favorite pure spontaneity. So there are five, and we will, we will get these through and then we’ll make sure people know how to find you and your work online. Okay. First question is, what makes you feel brilliant?

GH:
Hmm. Great question. I feel brilliant at this moment because I spent two and a half hours before we started talking this morning. I woke up at four 30, which is my usual time of waking up. Just naturally I don’t have an alarm clock. But since four 30 this morning, I’ve been working on basically three pages of writing that I’ve been trying to polish, and I’ve been polishing it all week. And so I, I, I basically finished it this morning and I’m in the glow of fresh creation. I just took it in a little while ago to my wife to read. And ah, so that’s, that’s one thing that really turns me on is being in a creative project and then bringing it successfully to completion. That’s delicious.

CS:
Love it. What’s your favorite time saving or productivity hack?

GH:
Hmm. One thing I do <laugh>, I don’t know if this is good, bad or what, but I always do the thing I least want to do first. If I have a to-do list of five things on it, I carefully think through which one of these do I dread doing the most, and then I get that one out of the way first. And that’s just my technique for doing it. I don’t make a long list. Uh, when I worked with, uh, Michael Dell down and, and his, uh, team down at Dell Computer, I got very much inspired. Michael always carried this little three by five card in his pocket with his schedule on it, so he didn’t have, you know, his secretary would give it to him, and then he would just look and see, what am I doing at 10 o’clock and put it back in.

GH:
It was just so easy. Or what do I need to do next? You know, it was just right there. And so I started doing something similar in my own life at the time. I figured, heck, a person who’s worth a few billion dollars might have a few things to teach me. And so, uh, <laugh>, I learned that, uh, long last the art of simply making a simple to-do list of what I had to do and what I needed to do, what I wanted to do, the calls I needed to make. It takes me about two minutes to do it, but then it saves me a tremendous amount of time. Okay.

CS:
I love that one. That is my practice, so I love it. Third one, what have you learned to say no to?

GH:
Ooh, lots of things. I think the art of saying no is as important as the art of saying yes. As a matter of fact, in our training, we teach a process, we call your three absolute yeses and your three absolute nos. So I say no nowadays to people who clearly are not interested in opening up their zone of genius. That’s my specialty, that’s who I work with. And so I put people through sort of a rigorous process to get here, to make sure that they’re really interested in the same kinds of things that I’m interested in. So I say no to 99% of the opportunities I get to do work. I say no 400 times a year probably, that I need to, for people that want me to write blurbs on their books, God bless them. But I just, if I wrote 400 blurbs a year, I wouldn’t have time to, I’m, I’m pretty stingy about my time in that regard.

GH:
I say no also to just generally, um, I don’t spend a lot of time around people that I need to convince about anything at this stage of the game. You know, maybe 40 years ago I was desperately interested in convincing my mother that <laugh> of things like, you know, she lived in the south and, you know, the very racist society and everything. And I used to argue with her about all that kind of stuff. But no, I still wanna be in the vibrational field of that kind of conflict anymore. So I’ve, I’ve, uh, I’ve kind of, I’ve got a circle of people that I know and love that I like to send things around to, to read that I’m working on and that kind of thing. So I’m, I’m surrounded by many, many people that, uh, I appreciate and love. I always tell people that your social life needs to be no bigger than four or five people whose faces light up when you walk in the room. And so I say, you don’t need 400 friends, you need four that, uh, make your face line up.

CS:
Oh, it’s your high vibe tribe, your little, your circle. What is a dream that you’re chasing today?

GH:
My main dream is we’re building toward a $20 million endowment in our nonprofit foundation. Katie and I have been very blessed financially, and we seeded our foundation with a couple of million dollars of money. And now we’ve invited other people to join us. And we, um, are doing, we’ve done lots of things that we fund, lots of research projects on, loving and living. We fund movies, we fund, um, scholarships for people that want to do various interesting things in the world. And so, um, we do lots of good work with it, and we are spending the money in very creative ways. So that’s one thing I’m really working on and opening up to. I’d say I’ve, I’ve accomplished everything I really want to accomplish in the material world and, uh, quite a long time ago. And so now it’s important for me just to keep my creative juices flowing in various ways and do what I can.

GH:
I do a little bit of mentoring with, uh, particularly young women entrepreneurs. I have, uh, one as matter of fact, who just made People magazine this weekend. Oh. So I’m proud of her. Susie Batis, uh, she invented a thing called RI and has a big company. She’s my prize pupil of the week here, <laugh>. Uh, but I have other, um, entrepreneurs that I coach, um, a lot of women in their thirties, forties, and fifties that, uh, I, uh, and a couple of men too. But I grew up in a family of all women and my father was dead. So I grew up mostly with my mother and my, uh, grandparents and my, my, uh, aunts. And so I have, um, it’s easy for me to talk to women, I think. And uh, and I think that, uh, a lot of my mentoring, because I watched my mother, you know, she got to a certain place in her life, but I could see how her upper limits kept her from going all the way to fulfilling her dream. And so I have a real passion for people fulfilling their dreams.

CS:
So endearing. I just, it makes my heart so happy to hear you say that last one. What’s one song, this might be hard for you. What’s one song you turn on when you need to get in the zone?

GH:
Well, it’s gotta be Led Zeppelin, <laugh> <laugh>. And I would say probably if I had to pick one, it would be a whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin.

CS:
I love it. I was teasing gay before we started taping because my husband is so jealous of his concert history and his music. My, it’s, it’s very fun. We’ve just been watching your Instagram feed and my husband was deeply resonating with all of your music taste. So he will love that answer. I am sure you are a delight and such a gift. Thank you for investing in our community and sharing your wisdom with us. I know there will be people who want to go further and find your work online and get your books. So we’ll link everything in the show notes. But what’s the very best place for people to find your work?

GH:
Hendricks.com. H-E-N-D-R-I-C-K s.com. And we have a whole range of activities there. And then you can find a jumping off place to our nonprofit foundation or learn about our ongoing training here. Um, we’re just about to launch a new virtual course this summer, uh, course on creating relationship miracles. So we’re, uh, doing all sorts of new, uh, things online as well as, um, maybe next fall we’ll start having in-person training again. But for right now, we’re doing a lot of work online, so hendricks.com and if they want to find out about conscious luck, it has its own website, conscious luck.com. That’s a good place to go. ’cause it has some downloads there, like free meditations that you can listen to. And so it’s a good place to have in the back pocket.

CS:
Amazing. Well, we will make sure everyone can just scroll and click to get there. And thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

GH:
Thank you so much, Sheri. Thanks for your work too.

CS:
Okay, my friends. Was that not fantastic? I just love having the opportunity to talk with these thought leaders and Gay was really a treat for me personally to have a chat with and then to get to share that conversation with you. So giant, thanks to him for pouring wisdom into all of us. And thanks to you for spending a little time with us today, listening along. If you want more of a brilliant balance in your life, the best way to connect with us is in the Facebook group. So all you do is go to Facebook search groups and find brilliant balance. And listen, if you’ve heard me say that before and you just haven’t done it, make today the day, just scroll down in the show notes, we link it right there and you can come join us in the group. There is so much good two-way dialogue going on inside of that Facebook group. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, I would love it if you would rate the show and leave a short review. If you have a moment to do that, we would appreciate it. Have a terrific week. And until next time, let’s be brilliant.