The Secret to Living and Thriving in Your Zone of Genius

Wishes the Big Leap, which is like my all time favorite book and Conscious Loving, which he wrote with his co author and mate for more than 35 years, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks. And in 2003 Gay Co founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle which distributes inspirational movies and conscious entertainment to subscribers in over 70 countries. He also just released his like that.

The easier things get on the outside. One of my favorite quotes from the writer Franz Kaska. He says basically that if you get yourself aligned properly, all you have to do is be and the universe will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Welcome to the Scale or Fail show. I am your host Alison Maslin. I am your business mentor and the CEO and founder of Pinnacle Global Network where where we help business owners grow and scale their companies all over the world. And the Scale or Fail show, believe it or not, we're like in our 10th year. I can't believe a decade has flown by. And what we do is we bring in some of the top experts to help you make your journey in your business and your life so much easier and so much more enjoyable. And so today you're going to get just that. That. I am so excited to have one of my favorite human beings on the planet on the show. So let me go ahead and introduce him. After earning his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford Gay, Hendricks served as professor of counseling psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He has written more than 40 books, including bestsellers such as Five how to.

Get established in your genius zone, where you're doing what you most love to do and what makes your biggest contribution to the world. And so as I began to work with people after the Big Leap came out on those ideas, more and more I came to see that there was this other thing that was kind of a sequel to the Big Leap that it's something that if you learn, it allows you to not only leap into your genius zone, but also stabilize there and learn to live your life from inside your genius zone. And so the big leap was about leaping into your genius. And the genius zone is about living there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And it's well worth learning because. Well, you know, when I first started thinking about this 40 some years ago, I figured that I was only spending about 10% of my own time in my genius zone. And so I started just working incrementally on doing a little bit more every day of what I most love to do and what made my biggest contribution and kept working it in and working it in and finally, by the end of the century, I was pretty much doing what I most love to do all the time. So I'd gone from 10% up to 100% of time in my genius zone without really efforting at it, just setting new goals, moving, making incremental steps. You know, life, I'm sure you found out from your work, is not just about boomer breakthroughs. That's a great thing to have, but it's that daily, systematic putting it into practice and learning how to get the support for your genius. I'll tell you, how many times in your life has anybody ever, first of all, asked you what your genius is? Nobody ever asked me that.

Nobody. Not really. Until I read your book and have been talking to you. And I think that most people have a lot of fear or feel like, can I even give myself permission to step into that genius zone?

That's really the first big barrier, I think, is that many of us have been functioning in our zone of excellence, or our zone of competence, or sometimes in our zone of incompetence for so long that we've kind of gotten routinized there and have to kind of have a big question of something big happened to get out of that. Now, many times, unfortunately, people create a health crisis or have an accident or something to kind of give themselves an impetus to ask the big questions, like, what am I doing with my life? But I think it's, why not? Let's be gentler on ourselves than that. Let's not make ourselves get sick or have an accident to get the wisdom of life. Let's make ourselves so open to learning that life teaches us as we go through it. You know, here at the Hendricks Institute, when we are working with executives, one of the first things we use is the 20 point openness to learning scale that we've used for many years that tells you at a glance how defensive you are or how open to learning. And it's a big surprise when many people come here and find out what things they've been doing that are actually defensive, that are not based on being wide open to learning. And one of the things I really, really point out in the new book is that we're given dozens of opportunities every day to tap into our genius. It's not like it happens once a year with a lightning bolt or anything. It's just constant. It's like genius is trying to get through to us, and if we can just get out of our own way for a moment, it has a chance to start expressing itself through us.

Oh, My gosh, everything you're saying is so resonating with me. I do believe. I mean, we've all had those massive wake up calls in our life, but, like, what if you could get into this without having to go through all the lightning bolts like you said, and actually live there? I mean, you know, what is it? I would imagine like 2% of the population lives there. So this is a gift. Yeah, yeah. And so do you. Is the. And I want to dive into all the pieces of it. But do you feel like people need to read the Big Leap first? Or you can, you can go read this and then go back and read the Big Leap. What do you recommend?

Well, you could start with the new book and go backwards. In fact, there's kind of a little summary in the new book of ideas from the big Leap. So you can start with the new book. Ideally, though, read both of them, because the genius zone is an extension and the Big leap kind of builds the foundation. And then the genius zone gives you that what I call soar like a hawk feeling. Here in my mountain valley that I live in in Ojai, I can look up at the SK almost all day long and see hawks circling on the wind currents up above my head. Sometimes I just like to sit out in the backyard and watch them. And one thing that strikes me about them is how little effort they have to use. You know, they can, just by making tiny adjustments, they can float for hours up there. And I think the least, the less we can work, the better our work is. Because if you can get into the sweet spot of doing what you most love to do, that will also usually be the thing that makes your biggest contribution. And it is the most rewarding thing in my life that day after day I get email from people who are taking those big leaps and are making a difference not only in their own lives, but in other people's lives. See, I think the best way to be in business is the way that prospers you and the people you care about and the stakeholders in your business and everything. But wouldn't it be nice if your employees and the people they know also were inspired by the people, even though they may not know you? And so I think if we set up our business lives from the inside out in the sense of making sure we're aligned in our values and making sure we're aligned with people who can support us and know how to ask for support in the world, the more you can do that internal, foundational, inside out work, the stronger the outer foundation gets And I actually, I've worked with I don't know how many now, maybe 1200 different C suite executives over the years. And one thing I found is that many of them make the mistake of handling the outside world and being really brilliant at handling the outside world, but haven't taken a deep dive into that place in themselves of alignment to find out whether they are aligned with their core values and with their most expansive beliefs about what their life can be. That's where the big leap comes in handy, because it shows you what the limiting beliefs are that hold people back and shows you how to unplug yourself from that so that you're not limited by those old beliefs from the past anymore.

It's life changing. I mean, Gay, your work has literally changed with that ripple effect. Millions and millions of lives. I really believe that. And everything you're saying is resonating with me. You know, it's all, I think, especially as your business grows and you start building a team as a leader, you know, you have to evolve and grow. Like, if you want your business to grow 40%, you as a leader need to grow by like 60%. And that's the. That's the inside work. You know, how we communicate, how we inspire the team so that they're aligned with the vision. You know, otherwise everybody's just going in their own, on their own way, and you're not gaining the power, you know, of that vision and the team together to make it happen.

That's such an important point. I'll give you a real example from one of my first big consulting gigs down at Dell Computer. Michael Dell was the first billionaire I ever worked with and was also at the. The CEO of the company. And I'd worked with lots and lots and lots of other executives at other levels of other companies and everything. But I mentioned the whole billionaire CEO thing, because by the time a person gets to be a billionaire, sometimes they're kind of hard to argue with or talk to or suggest something new to because they've crystallized the belief of how they got there. And so sometimes that takes a little cracking through. But not so with Michael. Wow. He was so open to learning. And so. And I could see that in other members of his executive team. Like, the number two guy at the time was named Mort. And I was working with Mort one day, and he's now long retired, but I was working with Mort one day and he was having an issue where some of his people that he worked with had trouble handling his anger. And to Mort, he grew up in Brooklyn and everything. Being angry is no big deal. Ten seconds later, he's off. It's forgotten about it. But other people had time to recover. Had to have time to recover from it. So I showed Mort something really interesting. I showed him that most of the time when he was angry, what he was actually feeling was disappointed, but he didn't know how to share those kind of tenderer feelings, so he would blow up at the person instead of. And it never got resolved because then the person was responding to the anger and the other stuff never got out. And so I was showing him how to deal with his sadness and disappointment and things like that. It was amazing. So we finished our session and he went off to meet with a bunch of other executives. And I drawn him a little picture of how the emotions are stacked up in the body. You know, that a lot of times we feel anger up in our back of our neck and shoulders, and we feel sadness down in our chest and fear down in our bellies. And. And I drawn him a little, kind of a stick figure picture of this, and it was laying on the desk there. And so I was working with another person, and Mort knocked on the door and said, you know, waved at me. I said, come on in. And he said, can I have that? And pointed to the piece of paper like it was the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence. Can I have that? And I said, sure. What are you doing? He said, I want to show this to the other guys that I'm working with. I mean, to me, that's openness to learning. Alison to be. At the time, Mort himself was probably worth half a billion dollars. And so, you know, just being able to not have an ego about those kind of things is so incredibly valuable because then that allows you to learn from every moment of life rather than being defensive.

Yeah, I mean, that in itself is life changing. But you have to take responsibility first. Right. You have to be willing to say, okay, you know, it's up to me to make that change and get out of the place of victimhood or blaming. And, I mean, there's so much pressure, I think, that business owners can be so hard on themselves, really. And they have a lot of people depending on them, and, you know, they're very driven and goal oriented. And so how is with the genius zone? How can it help them to get out of their own, like, negative thinking or doubting themselves? Can you tell us about that a little bit?

Yes. Negative thinking is one of the big things that I think entrepreneurs get plagued with, where you start running Scenarios of all the things that can go wrong. And then of course that leads to more things that can go wrong. See, the human being, our species, were problem solvers. And here's something interesting though. We take on unsolvable problems and then beat ourselves up because we can't solve them. Like for example, most of the things people worry about are about things they have no actual power to control or change. People get tied up in thinking about whether somebody likes them or not or, but there's no power in us to be able to change how somebody thinks about us. There's power in being able to pick up the phone and call that person and say, hey, I was just thinking and worrying about whether you like me or not. Could you just give me an honest feedback about that? How do you feel about me? That's a useful thing to do, to pick up the phone and actually talk to you have control over that. But oftentimes it doesn't occur to us for a long time. I once counseled an executive, a woman, very powerful woman executive, who could make multimillion dollar decisions during the daytime but at night put up with things that I wouldn't have put up with in a million years, particularly the things she consulted me about. She was a widow and her former mother in law who was, you know, maybe 20 years older than she was, she was maybe 40. My, my client had been widowed early and her mother in law was maybe 60, 63 years old. But her mother in law would have a few too many drinks at night and then call my client up and berate her about not being a good wife while her husband was, while her son was alive and you know, things that are just kind of real obnoxious to do. And by the time she told me about that, she'd already done it maybe a dozen times. And I said, well, there's a very simple solution to that. It's very, I promise you it will work, but you're going to have to be a little gutsy about it. And she said, well, what is it? You know, like I was about to reveal the secret that at the end of the Indiana Jones movie or something, you know, and I said, watch me. And I picked up the phone and I went clunk. You know, I said, any other person, what if somebody, what if your next door neighbor called you at 11 o' clock at night drunk and started berating about you, about what a bad neighbor you'd been back then? What would you do? And she said, well, I'll hang up. And she said, I can't do that with my mother in law. And I said, well, just try it once and watch what happens. So she tried it once and the most amazing thing happened. Her mother in law called her the next day and apologized in tears, effusively and said she realized what she'd been doing. She'd been expressing her grief inappropriately for the past whatever it had been year and a half since her son had died. And anyway, they cleared up the conversation. I always say problems are never more than a 10 minute sweaty conversation away from being solved. You know, sometimes you have to have that 10 minute sweaty conversation where both people are talking about and listening to things they may not want to listen about. But sometimes that's the only way to handle those kind of things. In that particular case, it worked great. You know another thing too that caught my attention, about your work too, that I just wanted to ask you about. You work big in the area of scaling. That's your particular niche, which is a great place. Is it true, I've heard this said, that the most dangerous phase of any business is the rapid expansion? And I'm not a specialist in the area. Is that something that's actually accurate or is that just an old saying?

No, I think it's very true because you know, you can grow really fast and if you don't have, you know, a strong foundation or you don't have your leadership intact, or you don't have your vision intact, you can actually implode. So you can grow too fast and you know, making sure that you are bringing people in that are in alignment with your vision. But you know, when you're growing that fast, sometimes you're just like, oh my God, we're out of bandwidth. We just need to fill these positions. So, you know, we, we like to scale and we like to grow fast, but it's also doing it smartly. And that's where all of the work, you know, that you do and in this book, the Genius Zone and the Big Leap helps so much because I think a lot of times with CEOs, they're afraid when things start really growing, that it's going to go out of control. And I did a poll a few years back and one of the biggest fears was that it would fall apart and they would feel embarrassed. Isn't that interesting? Like they would feel like a failure. And so there's so much mindset. It really is the number one thing. It's the one thing that a lot of people don't want to work on. But I feel like it's the most important thing in success.

It really is. You know, you've heard me say several times about alignment, and alignment comes about through little moments of practice, like, am I aligned with my genius? Am I clear on what my genius is? Am I clear on how much time I'm giving it on a daily basis? The more you can align at the deeper levels like that, the easier things get on the outside. One of my favorite quotes from the writer Franz Kaska, he says basically that if you get yourself aligned properly, all you have to do is be and the universe will roll in ecstasy at your feet. You know, it's like we get so caught up in the pursuit and the over efforting part. I was giving a talk to a YPO group, Young Presidents Organization group a while back over in Santa Barbara maybe a few years ago. And you know, YPO is made up of young presidents who are upwardly mobile. They're heading for this for the stars. And one of the principles I teach is the absolute need for any person to take what I call an Alpha Day once a week. An Alpha Day is when you're not doing business of any sort. And that's a day where you are devoted to learning, but not learning about your business. You're devoted to being with people, but not being with people about your business. You're backing off for a day from even answering a phone call about your business, unless somebody has died or is stuck in an elevator or something that you have to attend to. But anyway, here's the thing. When I bring this up, and I probably spoke to maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 ypo groups over the years, I'm not picking on them, but it's just this particular demographic, very upwardly mobile people. Their work has often become like a drug to them. So that when I suggest stopping thinking about it for one day, oftentimes the whole room will erupt, you know, and some guy will stand up and say, you know, I've thought about my business 28 hours a day for the last 17 years and I'm not going to take a day off. Are you crazy? And so I've had that same person in my office or a person like them when they were 45, saying, Hey, I just had a coronary and I'm getting a kind of big wake up call.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And so what I'm looking for is when you occupy the sweet spot of your genius and are really focused on doing what you are most suited to do, that opens up a space then to move through the world in a much more easeful way without accumulating stress as you go along. And to me, that's got to happen because, wow. Have you noticed how much things have speeded up just over the last 20 years?

Oh, my gosh. It's. Yeah, it's supposed to help us save time, but I think it just gets everybody in this fast forward kind of frenetic pace. But it does. It affects your health, it affects your relationships. It just like your overall joy in life. You know, I started a couple years ago, Gay. And your work has had a profound impact on this. But taking one week off every single month. A whole week off every single month. I know when I tell that to my clients, they're like, oh, my God, you know? But I'll tell you what, our business has never been better. It grew faster. I was more inspired. I had more resilience to handle different things going on. Got big ideas that have made such a positive impact to the company and to be able to be the CEO, you know, working on the business instead of in the business. And so, you know, and in fact, after this interview, I'm going, I don't. I think you knew that I'm a trapeze artist. I think I told you that.

Yeah. I've actually seen evidence of that. Yes.

Yeah. On Instagram, I think. So I'm going to fly on the trapeze this afternoon. So I take your advice to heart every single day. Because that's a big leap. That's definitely a big leap. And you can't be thinking of business up there. You could have a very bad accident. Like you really need to be in the present. So now you Talk about this 12 inch journey from your head to your heart when making decisions or setting goals. And making decisions are really kind of a big deal for business owners. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Yes. One of the things that we say in our seminars is and teach in our seminars is how to get a whole body yes or a whole body no. Because sometimes you can say yes from up here in your head and your body is not aligned with it. It's not something you're truly committed to. I learned this hard way. My mother was the mayor of the town that I grew up in. And so I would. She'd be off in another part of the house or outside, and I would be the one that picked up the phone and somebody would be saying, I got to speak to Norma right this moment. Or I got to speak to the mayor, or I need the mayor's opinion on this. And so I would hear my mother say yes to things, to agreeing to do things, and then get off the phone and have a hissy fit about that. Somebody had asked her to do that. And I was the obnoxious little kid that would always say, well, did you need to say yes to that? Did you need to agree? She didn't like that line of questioning very much. So I learned the hard way not to push that too much. But I was a budding psychologist. Even as a little boy, I was always asking people about themselves. And when I was four or five years old, I got a tricycle for my birthday and it was raining outside. And so my grandmother let me ride it around her big living room. And the first thing I did was I got my granddad to help me move a cardboard box into the office of her. Into the side of her living room. And that became my office to sit in. And I would commute on my tricycle to my office, and I would sit in my office in the cardboard box and dispense advice to people. So I was practicing at a very early age.

Yeah, it sounds like it. And she probably knew you were right. So that was hard for her to admit. And I do think, isn't it crazy how we do things that we don't really want to do, and then we're mad at ourselves for doing it when we have the choice? But I guess it does take courage to step definitely in your. In your genius zone. Right. Why do you feel like it's so hard for us?

I think it's so hard because there's a lot of fear involved that people don't ever acknowledge with each other. I think I looked at some of the basic fears in the Big Leap, like that fear of outshining other people so you turn down your light so you don't outshine other people. Or the big one, I think, is the fear a lot of people feel that they are fundamentally flawed in some way. And so as I've worked with people at this stage of the game, you know, I started out working with juvenile delinquents and incarcerated people. 52 years ago, my first client was a juvenile delinquent in an institution I worked in. And then a couple of days ago, I was working with a person that's kind of on the other side of life in the sense that they are a person of great distinction and they're wealthy and everybody knows their name, but it doesn't matter whether you're that juvenile delinquent or that well known wealthy person. We've all got these fears that run us until we can kind of shine a light on them and unwind them. And I think, you know, physical fears are much easier to deal with than the internally generated fears about whether we're going to succeed or are we going to fail. Those are social fears, they're not physical fears. But social fears have a bigger grip on us these days. In the beginning of human development, you know, millions of years back, it was whether you could outrun the cave person from next door or whether you could throw rocks at a woolly mammoth. But now we have to make our way through this incredibly complex world of relationships. And that has a lot of fear and anxiety associated with it. So I think that one of the things you have to do as an entrepreneur, especially if you're going to succeed in the whole growth aspect and not drive yourself nuts, if you're going to thrive in the growth path of your business, you've got to be willing to constantly be renewing yourself and reconnecting and finding out more about yourself all the time. Because if your growth does not go along with the growth of the business. I've seen people pull a colossal upper limit problem where they actually tank an entire enterprise because they couldn't resolve an internal issue. I almost did it myself one time. I created a very successful entrepreneurial. The end results were fantastic because point A was I created a business, a little movie business, the Spiritual Cinema Circle, for $100,000 I put into it to get it off the ground. And I sold it three years later for million. So on the surface that looks good. And maybe not to a scaling expert like you, you know, but to me it was pretty darn good at the time, in only three years. But along the way, about the halfway point, we almost tanked the whole thing because things were growing so fast that I made this big unforced error of saying yes to a project that I didn't have a whole body yes to. I said yes to please an important person in the business. And by not getting clear on that whole body, yes, that project got out of control and almost tanked us. So I had to get on the phone and give away a couple of expensive chunks of my business to get a couple of Wall street people on board to keep the place afloat so that fortunately it all worked out. But I didn't get to keep all of my $10 million because I had parceled off a couple of pieces along the way. But regardless of the money, whether it's a million dollars or $29, 95 cents. The principle is still the same that often when you start expanding, it brings up these fears. And then unless you deal with them and get the support necessary to help sort through those and move through those, a lot of times, that can really put a crimp on the business. I'm an investor now in a number of businesses, and so I get to see up close and personal how people deal with this particular issue. I went all the way from being one of the five people in the kitchen that tested out a little product called Cavita, all the way to selling it to Pepsi Cola for two hundred and some million dollars over the space of five years. And so I've had the chance to look inside at any number of businesses as they sc. And I really appreciate what you're doing because you keep people focused on this inside out aspect of things, always making sure you got inner alignment. And if there's one thing I really want people to get out of the genius zone, it's that we are carrying around genius all the time, and it's right there under the surface waiting for us to open up to it. And it may seem like a miracle, but it actually makes perfect scientific sense that as you open up to more of your genius, more of your genius will start to flow and be called upon. And so I recommend starting out here. We start people with 10 minutes of pure genius. When they come here for one of their intensives, they go in a little room by themselves for 10 minutes, and the first thing they do in their $25,000 day is spend 10 minutes doing this. They go in a little room and they say, what do I love to do more than anything else? Three easy breaths and then repeat that question. What do I love to do more than anything else? Keep homing in on that sweet spot of what you most love to do, because that will tell you how you can begin to. To wind that into other aspects of your life so that you can like. I started out as a 10% genius and ended up spending all my time in my genius zone over the period of 10 years or so. So I know it can be done.

Yeah, that's incredible. I'm going to do all the exercises in the book, and I definitely know I still have a lot of room to grow, to fully step into my genius. And I think two, as you get older, what you thought maybe was your genius, you know, you're learning more things about you. I had a client recently who's been with me for a number of years in Pinnacle, say to me, alison, I've been wanting to tell you this, but when you're on stage, like, you, you are. There's just such a difference from when I saw you before now, because you're just. You're stepping into your. She didn't say genius, but your potential. You just. You're so much more natural. You look like you're having so much more fun out there. And so I would imagine it just sort of continues to evolve.

It does. And once. I always say genius is the most addictive substance on earth, because if you go in a room and just spend 10 minutes today focusing on that question, or focusing. If you already know what your genius is focusing on that thing, well, it's going to want to happen 12 minutes tomorrow and 20 minutes the next day, and pretty soon you're going to end up with a life where all day long you're doing what you most love to do and what makes your biggest contribution to the world. I think that's what people see when they watch your videos. I certainly see that coming through. That's where I first saw you, long before I met you, was with your videos on Instagram. And, you know, for people who know how to look, you show a kind of authenticity and a sincerity that's hard to find in the world. So I'm glad people are taking advantage of that.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Hey, I like what you said earlier about a whole body. Yes. Like, that resonated with me. And I would imagine when it's a whole body. Yes. That could be a clue, right. That you're in that genius zone, or it's the right move or the right decision or the right place to be. Can you. What do you mean by whole body? Yes.

Yes. Suppose. Well, your mind, see, often has learned to run free of your body, because oftentimes when you're growing up, you know, somebody says, what do you want for dinner? If you said, well, I want a bowl of ice cream followed by a nice piece of chocolate cake, and then I want to end up with some chicken soup, people would say, wait a minute, wait a minute. You can't have that. And I'm not suggesting you serve that to your children or anything, but I'm using that as an example about how often we lose touch with what we actually want, because we're in situations where we're being programmed to want what other people want. So it's very natural. There's nothing pathological about that. It's just the way life works. But at some point, you got to make that big breakthrough of actually trying it on in the wholeness of yourself rather than just do I want that in my mind trying it on in your body and say, will that create the kind of body feeling that I want? And that becomes really important in a couple of areas of life. One is business decisions. Being able to get a whole body. Yes. From a business decision or particularly a whole body. No. One of my mentors, Jerry Jones, said, the best deals you'll ever do are the deals you don't do.

Wow.

Boy, did that years back when I heard that because he's a pretty successful guy. And so we've got to learn how to have that whole body no too. And not just say yes because we think we can make some money doing it, or yes, because we want to please the person. But is this something we genuinely feel like we can get our heart behind? That's why I say that 12 inch journey down to here, because here is where your commitment lives. You can say I, you know, to my daughter, when she was little, I used to take her to the stables all the time to ride. She was from the time she was about 10 to the time she was about 14, she thought of little else but horses. I'm not a horse person. I was the chauffeur that was a designated driver back and forth to this table. So sometimes three or four trips a day on the weekends. But anyway, as you know, I did that. I don't care for horses, but I wanted to support my daughter because she was in the middle of a rich learning experience that still serves her here 30 years later. She still has that memory in her body of those horse years. And so a lot of times our mind is committed to something, but our heart is the one that gets you actually in the car and takes the person to the lesson. You know, you can think it's a good idea, but your heart has to make a commitment to it. You have to get behind it. And same thing is true in. See, I work with a lot of. We have a program called Attracting Genuine Love, which is for single people who want to manifest a mate. And so we work a lot with single people who are creating their mate. And one of the big things in the program is we have people identify their three absolute yeses and their three absolute nos of what they want in a relationship. And people have an easy time coming up with absolute yeses. But sometimes it's really hard to get people to figure out what their absolute no. And eventually everybody has them. It's just a question of whether you can identify what they are. But if you think about it, what is business but a set of relationships where the focus may be different than it is at home or in romance or anything like that. But it's really a series of conversations. It's a conversation with reality. When you look at your books, it's a conversation with empathy, when somebody comes to your office hurting. But it's a series of conversations that go on inside ourselves and outside ourselves. That's why here we teach so much about relationship skills, because it's not covered enough in MBA programs. If I had a nickel for every MBA who had been here with a troubled relationship, you know, I'd be wealthier. But. But I think we need to focus more on the relationship aspect of life if we're going to be truly, in a heartful way, successful.

Wow, that was so profound. Really, it is. We are always in relationship, whether it's relationship in our mind, the conversations that we're having continually, right. What you wake up with, what you go to bed with, the people that you're having conversations with, you know, unless you live in a silo. And you can't really build a business in a silo or have a relationship or a healthy relationship in a silo. So this is really, this is the key to happiness and, you know, and to make the kind of impact that you, that you want to have in the world. Now you have a process in the book about the power of completion. Can you tell us what you mean by completion and why that's important?

Yes, completion. A good example would be, let's say you and I made an agreement. I said, allison, I'll get that chapter to you tomorrow by 10 o'. Clock. Let's say you and I are writing a book together. And so I say, I'm going to do that. And you say, okay, that'll be perfect. Let's say it gets to be 10:15 tomorrow and you haven't got the chapter. That's an incompletion. And completion is I call you and I say, oh, Allison, I'm really sorry, I'm stuck in traffic. I'm about 10 minutes away from my office. I need to change that agreement. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get it to you by 10:30. Okay, so that would be one way of completing. But a lot of people go around letting agreements be unkept promises, unkept communications incomplete. Let's say you walk away from a conversation and there's still stuff you didn't say to the person. I had kind of an anger blow up with the dean one time where when I was a university professor, I was the chairman of the psychology department. And we always took people away at the beginning for kind of an off course campus retreat. And it was very useful part of our program. But one year the dean says, we've decided to forbid things like that. We're not having off campus retreats anymore. Somebody broke their ankle and is suing the university on one of those, you know, so it was one of those where I felt angry about it. Later on I realized what I didn't communicate was how important this was to, to us. I got defensive and started hassling him out of my rebellious child. You can't tell me what to do. You know, I'm the chairman of the department. But, you know, I came at it like a 12 year old, really. So I got lost in that shuffle. And so it wasn't later that I had to go back in and say, look, I want to tell you about this. What we do. This is not, you know. And so we worked out a compromise. But what I'm getting at is completing those communications. Because if I just left that alone, that's where kind of things fester and you start not trusting each other.

Yeah, you know what? I love this too. Because when something's hanging and it hasn't been resolved or come to completion, like you said, those are the things that just fester in our mind and become way worse than it would be to just confront it. And like you were talking about before and having those difficult conversations, just like, you know, going towards the elephant in the room in a sense, and being able to have the completions. And again, I think that takes courage. But it's always way worse in our mind gay than it is in reality.

Yeah. Because things escalate in your mind. You know, the. I heard a joke when I was a kid about this person that wanted to go next door and borrow his neighbor's lawnmower. And then he started thinking, oh gosh, what if he says no? And then, oh gosh, you know, what if it breaks while I'm mowing the lawn? Finally the guy opens the door and the neighbor says, keep your damn lawnmower, you know, and walks off without even asking because he's gotten so tied up in his mind about it. But it points to a real interesting phenomenon. John Lennon says, life is what's happening while you're busy making other plans. And there's a tremendous amount of power in being in this moment. And a lot of the machinations in our mind take us into the Past or take us into the future. But the magic happens in this right now moment.

Well, I mean, this is an amazing moment for me. Anytime I get to talk to you, gay is. You know, I'm soaking in every. Every ounce of every second.

Thank you.

And so, as we wrap up here today, what is one big takeaway you would like people to get from the genius zone? And by the way, you guys have to, you know, immediately order this book and give this to all of the people that you care about. You know, with the big. We're going to be doing that with all of our clients. The big Leap. We have been. We have. We have literally bought thousands of the big Leap. I have to tell you, because we give it to all of our clients, you know, at all of our events. But what is one big takeaway you'd like people to get from the genius zone? Your new book.

Yes. Well, the big takeaway is that you have a genius zone. Anybody that's listening or watching to this right now, you have already a genius zone inside you. And you get many opportunities to open up to it. And the book shows you some kind of magic tricks and keys about how to open up to it. But it's never any harder than just being willing to have your genius flourish more every day. So if there's one thing right this moment to take away, it's take a moment, this moment, and invite your genius to come out and play in a way that serves you and serves people in the world around you. That's the best thing I can invite you to do today.

Wow. Well, that's been such a gift. This is a gift for all those that are listening, definitely for me and that, you know, we're born to be happy and to live in that place of our gifts and what really lights us up. So thank you for what you do in the world and the impact that you make. Thank you so much for being here. And is. Is there anything else that you want to share as we wrap up?

I like to begin and end anything I do in a spirit of appreciation. So I want to appreciate you for doing the work you've done to open up your genius and learn how to live in your genius in a way that has a powerful beneficial effect on hundreds of thousands of people out there. And so I want to salute that and appreciate that in you. And let's just open our hearts and minds and intentions to have everybody else on the planet discover their genius, too.

Yes. Let it be said. Let me let it be done. So gay. Thank you so much. For being with us today. And so I hope that you all enjoyed this episode of Scale or Fail. I know that I did. And so share this with people that you care about and get out there and elevate yourself. Step into your genius zone because you deserve it. All right, thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye. So if you enjoyed this interview with Gay Hendricks, then you're definitely going to love this interview with John Assaroff on all of the mindset stuff and how to break through right over here. I'll see you there.

And that happens whether I'm traveling, whether I'm not. It makes no difference. I don't care where I am in the world. I have my routines that are my success rituals and routines and I don't like to change them because those are my default mechanisms. And I've built constructive, positive routines that create what I call is predictable results that I want.