Gay Hendricks | How Doing What You Love Unlocks Your Genius Zone

In my experience, the people that really, really do well in life are people that are happy with what they're doing. I mean, it sounds a little corny, but your personal development is so incredibly important.

Why do some entrepreneurs seem to thrive effortlessly while others burn out? Chasing success? In this episode, I sit down with Gay Hendricks to explore the inner side of entrepreneurship. Why your mindset, your relationships, and even your breath can make or break your success. We get into overcoming self doubt, tapping into your genius zone, and turning fear into creative fuel. If you want to grow your business without leaving your life or yourself behind, this conversation is for you.

My name is Dr. Philippe Maul, your co host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with none other than Gay Hendricks. Welcome, Gay.

Thank you. Thanks, Philippe. It's great to be with you.

So your journey as a transformational coach, an entrepreneur, and a teacher has really impacted probably millions of people. And I wonder if you could share a moment in your life, perhaps a pivotal moment that set you on a path to not only becoming a phenomenal teacher of body, mind transformation and conscious relationship, but also of entrepreneurship and a model entrepreneur.

I think I almost was a born entrepreneur because ever since I was a kid, I've loved setting up things. And actually the moment that comes to mind that kind of made me a lifelong believer in the power of entrepreneurism. It actually happened when I was 10 years old. You know, every neighborhood has a kid that sets up a lemon stand or something like that. Well, I was that kid. I was always setting up a lemon stand or setting up some kind of little thing thing. I had a little lawn mowing business. But I got this great idea one day. My next door neighbor, Mr. Lewin, was a watermelon broker. I lived in central Florida, which is big citrus and watermelons and that kind of thing. But I knew that Mr. Lewin always kept a bunch of watermelons in his garage in case any of the neighbors wanted one or anything like that. And so I came up with this idea. This will tell you how long ago it was. Fleet. I don't know if you've been around long enough to remember when gas was 25 cents a gallon. I think just about. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, gas I was driving then, but my parents were.

Well, in the year this took place, 1955, gas was 25 cents a gallon. And I happen to remember that because it was exactly how much you could buy a watermelon for. Nowadays, the gallon of gas will cost you five bucks probably anyway. And a good sized watermelon probably ten bucks. But anyway, I bought from Mr. Lewin. I proposed him an idea. I said, sell me four watermelons wholesale for 15 cents, and I'll take them down to the highway, which was about maybe 200 yards away, and I'll sell them to passing motorists in Florida, you know, who wouldn't buy a watermelon? And so my first day, I trucked in my little red wagon. I trucked my four watermelons down, and I stood there for all morning in the sun, holding up watermelons with my sign, you know, watermelon, 25 cents a piece. And I didn't sell a single watermelon. I had to haul my watermelons back up the hill to Mr. Lewin's garage again. And so I was kind of brokenhearted in a way because I had 60 cents invested in this operation, that it had been a total flop. But somewhere in the middle of the night, I think I woke up and I had this idea, oh, my gosh. People don't want to buy a whole watermelon. They want to see a piece of a watermelon. I want to make their mouth water. They've got to stop if they see a piece of watermelon on a hot day. That was my little chain of thought. And so the next day, I tried an experiment. I cut one of my watermelons into eight pieces and sold the pieces for a nickel a piece. And I sold out in about gosh, 20 minutes. And I cut up another wallet. And so by the end of the morning, I'd sold out all of my watermelon slices, and I had what I thought was a fortune in nickels. It turned out to be, I don't know, $3.75 or something. But I had more satisfaction counting out all of those nickels. But the thing was, what it taught me, looking back on it, is the power of a compelling offer, that no matter how good your product is, if you haven't got some way to display it or introduce it to people in a way that makes them want it, you might as well, you know, keep it in the garage. And so that was a huge moment for me. And I remember just racking up tons of nickels that summer. It was also very helpful, too, because I became a coin collector at that point and had a good little business going on the side where kids would bring me their piggy bank full of pennies, and I would go through it, and then I'd give them back the ones I didn't want, and then I would pay them for the ones I wanted, usually. Sometimes I would buy a penny for two bucks and then go down to the coin shop and sell it for five bucks that afternoon. But all those nickels, I found a number of them that were actually worth more than the nickel. Being a coin collector. Okay, so I don't want to get too long winded here, but you can see the point, which is, you know, just to keep tinkering until I found an offer. And to this day, I mean, that tickles me pink, is when I can find some way of sharing something really good with a person based on creating a compelling offer.

Well, you went right to the heart of entrepreneurship and selling, which is the key to any business, and having a compelling offer. Let's talk a little bit about. I want to talk about mindset and heartset with you a bit. You know, being an entrepreneur can be incredibly rewarding, both personally and financially if we're successful. It also has a lot of challenges, a lot of pressures, a lot on our shoulders. It's kind of up to us to succeed. We don't have any job security other than our own success. And in today's world, there's all kinds of pressures and the world's gotten ever more competitive and things move really fast and we have AI and everything that's going on. So what do you think is the most single, the single most important sort of mindset shift that entrepreneurs need to make in order to be successful?

Great question. I think it boils down to the same mindset and heart set that makes for a great life anyway, which is to see life as a journey. And it's going to have twists and turns and ups and downs, but it's all about our personal development. It's all about becoming the best possible human we can possibly do. And in my work, one of the things I do, based on the book you mentioned, the big leap and its related other projects, we try to get people in touch with what we call their genius zone, which is when an entrepreneur is doing what they love to do and doing what they are most suited to do. Wow. The sky's the limit, you know, because I've had the opportunity to work with some of the most amazing entrepreneurs on earth. Now I'm. I'm just thinking of Michael Dell. I spent a lot of time buzzing back and forth down to Austin, Texas, back in the 90s during a period of really explosive growth for Dell. And their stock was doubling every few months sometimes. But Michael Dell, I want to just draw a circle around him because to me, he's a consummate entrepreneur. He presented a compelling offer to his parents when he was a college kid. And he said, hey, I want to drop out of college and start a business and would you loan me a thousand dollars and you know, picture yourself in the parents point of view. You got this brilliant kid. And he said, hey, I want to drop out of college, you know, and in the meantime you've already planned his career as a doctor, lawyer, you know, but. And my daughter did the same thing. She said she wanted to go to art school and become an artist when she went to college. And oh no, Amanda, you know, do you know how many starving artists there are in the world? But she persisted and till this day, you know, she's in her 50s now, but she's a happy artist and I can't imagine her doing anything else. But anyway, Michael was able to do something by presenting a compelling offer. And I want to highlight this because the compelling offer in that case was to his parents. So he had a good listening for that. But I want to also make a point of saying when I present a compelling offer, whether it's writing a book or whatever, I think of one person at a time that I'm talking to or want to present that to. And I encourage that because a lot of people come to me and ask me about writing books and because I've written a bunch of books and they want to know how to do it and how to do it easily and I have to break the gentle truth to them that, well, if you considered going in a room by yourself for a few hours a day for the next year, easy, it'll be easy for you. That happens to be easy for me. I'm a natural writer, so I enjoy the process of writing, but not everybody's wired up that way. But anyway, I want to just highlight compelling offer and think of one person, not a million people first. But who are you presenting this to? If you're writing a book, your first customer usually is an agent and you want to sell them on selling your book. But if you're selling a new widget of some sort, a new coat hanger, let's say, then you have to think of what it would take to encourage one person to buy your coat hanger. And if you can figure out how to do that, oh, it's so scalable. But you have to start with that one. And actually I want to jump back to your question is very rich about, you know, what does it take in mindset and heartset. In my experience, the people that really really do well in life are people that are happy with what they're doing. I mean, it sounds a little corny, but your personal development is so incredibly important. I've had the sad experience a few times of people I worked with deciding not to make their unto entrepreneurial journey about themselves, you know, just to make it about business. And that didn't end well because there's a particular time in your business development and your personal development where you have to call forth on the resources of all of the things you found unlovable about yourself. Transforming them into a genuine source of creative energy is one of the art forms of a creative entrepreneurial life as well as a successful personal life.

Well, that's so incredibly important. I'm so glad you're focusing there. There's that famous line from, I think Buckaroo Banzai, wherever you go, there you are. And so, you know, no matter how hard we work to be successful in business, if we're now evolving as a person, we're sooner or later going to run into the limitations of our own personal work we've done. And one of the forms of that you talk about in your book, the Big Leap, is the kind of conditioning that we probably inherited from our parents or from the culture that creates these upper limits for us. The upper limit problem, you call it that. And I wonder if you could talk about that.

Yes. Well, one of the big things that any successful human being as well as entrepreneur has to do is clear out the limiting beliefs that you sort of soaked up by osmosis, usually before you even could think for yourself. So a lot of our limiting beliefs get laid in place even before we go off to elementary school for the first time because we soak up what's going on around us. One of the most limiting beliefs, probably the most prominent ones, and I've run into this with CEOs and juvenile delinquents and movie stars, so it's nobody's immune from. It is somewhere you get a belief that you don't deserve the good things of life. Somewhere in you, you feel like you don't deserve it. And so even if you override that and work your tail off and get successful, there's that little gnawing part of you that thinks you don't deserve it. And like I said, it doesn't matter what dimension of life you're in. I've walked down the hall with a CEO at a big company, you know, that hires 50,000 people, and I've talked to the CEO about this particular limiting belief and I've seen the eyes light up in his head. He said, oh, my God, I've been dragging that around with me my whole life and I just never had a spotlight shined on it. And that's the beauty of getting some good coaching, is even if you're operating at the top of your game, believe me, there's still going to be things you've overlooked. And I remember a great quotation from Carl Jung, the great psychiatrist. He said, this is my paraphrase. He was a very precise, German speaking person. But here's my paraphrase. The stuff you don't deal with in your own unconscious shows up out in the world and you call it fate. Oh, man, that's just fate at work. You know, I fail for the 17th time. Oh, fate. I'm cursed, you know, but it's finding that limiting belief and owning it and saying, okay, it's like shining a light on it. It's not hard. But a lot of us fear that light, you know, fear shining that light on ourselves. So that's one thing that successful people have to do, is overcome that fear of not deserving it. The second thing is a fear of not feeling like we deserve to be in the spotlight. Like, I have an older brother. He passed away several years ago at the age of 86 from Parkinson's. And he was very much, dearly beloved by me and his family. And so he was the older one by eight years. And then I came along. I was sort of a big mistake, but I was one of those midlife mistakes. But my older brother was much older than I was and was more of a father figure to me. And so he was the golden boy in the family. And when I was going through school, I went through a little school that both my brother had graduated from and my mother had graduated from a little school in Leesburg, Florida. And people all the way through school were always comparing me to Mike, who was brilliant at math and brilliant at science. And I hated math. I was lukewarm about science. You know, I'm a poet and a mystic and a movie maker and a guy like that. But don't give me math to solve, you know. And so if you've been compared a lot to a brilliant sibling, maybe you get that feeling that you don't deserve the spotlight. And I had to really overcome that. And I did it in a big way. I overcame that. But in first, I remember the first time I was on television. Oh, gosh, when I look at the tape of it, it was like a guy mumbling About. Yeah, I have this, I have this new book and it's a new breakthrough book and stuff like that. If you, you know, and it was like things I would. The way I was saying, everything is so different from the way I've learned to communicate now thanks to Oprah and other like her, you know, 30 or 40 years ago.

So you know this. Not only do we, you know, drag this around, these feelings of unworthiness and that we don't deserve success or the spotlight or limitations on how much we're allowed to make or our level of, you know, wealth and so forth, so we drag these around, but also they can cause us to self sabotage.

Yeah. When, when you're run by that limiting belief. Let's say you have the belief that I don't deserve love because you've had a painful past. Or you. Like one of my clients, brilliant college professor, he grew up in a family with four boys and mom had split when he was basically a baby. He never really knew his mother. She'd run off with someone and left dad with four kids. And he really saw his mother again. And so the father voiced distrust of women throughout his childhood. And I remember the light going on in this guy when I showed him how, hey, look, you learned a set of attitudes about women and a set of possibilities because he always said, you know, like I have a relationship for six months and then she runs, you know. So he was busily replaying his father's life unconsciously. So those old limiting beliefs cause upper limit problems. Because when we start getting some more love in our life, or you get a promotion or you get more money, it trips an old switch in us that says you don't deserve that or you need to sabotage yourself. And so that's where the upper limit problem comes from, and everybody's got it. Don't feel bad if you've got some upper limit problems because, you know, like I say, I've worked with CEOs and delinquents and movie stars, and they're all the same.

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So, you know, I know you talk about the Genius zone, which you referenced a moment ago as being. It's like we're getting in touch with really pure consciousness or reality as it is. We're getting in touch with the most fundamental energy of life. And one of the ways we get in touch with that is by actually just being with what is. And what we may be experiencing as entrepreneurs is a fear and self doubt and anxiety. So how can we, you know, connect with the felt experience, the embodied experience of these emotions like fear and turn that into a pathway to connect with the ultimate source of creative intelligence and what can allow us to be incredibly innovative entrepreneurs Instead of our tendency is going to be to want to push that away or numb it out or escape from it.

Right?

That is such a key thing. I appreciate you for mentioning this because almost everything in our journey depends on befriending fear and being open enough to your fear that you make a magic discovery. That right there behind and beyond and woven in amongst all your fear is what I call pure consciousness, which is that pure creative intelligence that lives within us all. It's that spark that doesn't go out when the wind is blowing. It's that part of ourselves that is eternally just because we're human. We're in this process of being all the time. But then often instead of savoring your being, what we do is we get busy so lost in our doing that we forget that we even have a being. And you know, gosh, I've worked with lots of successful entrepreneurs in their 30s, 40s, 50s, where they tell me basically, I left my soul behind somewhere there, you know, and I'm in a process of trying to figure out if I even have one now. And you know, just beginning to ask that question is a beautiful thing, but because it means you've had a little bit of a light wake up in your life and you said, oh, I'm operating out of an old program that's making me uncomfortable and maybe even sick. I'm operating out of an old program that's keeping me from being completely successful in my life. And that's why we've all got to get busy looking consciously for our upper limits and feeling our fear consciously, because that'll allow you to open up a conversation with your deeper essence, who you really are, that pure spark of creative intelligence. You know, I cultivate that. I've been a daily meditator now for, let's see, I learned meditation for the first time in 1971 or two. So 50 some years, I've been sitting down every day for a half an hour, an hour to kind of savor my inner experience. Not everybody's built like that, you know, not everybody can sit still and meditate for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or anything like that, but you can turn your whole life into a meditation. Like one of my clients as a personal trainer, who, when he first came in, was about the least spiritual human being you'd ever want to meet. You know, he'd spend his whole life pumping iron in a gym, but his job was to find out who the person was underneath all those weights he'd been pumping to try to get away from when he was 15 years old. You know, because a lot of people's journey is based on trying to get away from something in your past. And a lot of our journey, too, once you wake up a little bit, is based on kind of what you've pictured for yourself in the future, and it tends to pull you toward it. It's a much better form of manifestation to be pulled toward the future by a positive vision of yourself than it is to be pushed from the past by stuff you're trying to get away from.

Well, you know, again, you're pointing again and again to the inner dimension of the entrepreneurial journey. And I don't know, but some of the entrepreneurs in our audience may be thinking, you know, I just need to know how to do stuff. I need to know how to create a marketing plan. I need to know how to sell. I need to know how to improve my products. I need to figure out how to use all these tools. I gotta build a high performance team, I gotta manage a sales team. You know, all this inner stuff, I don't have time for that. I'm curious as to what you'd say for that, because I think people, you know, smart, clever people, can reach a certain level of success just through relentless hard work and determination. But in the end, I think they're going to pay a real cost for that. It often shows up in their relationships, their family, their own personal health. So I wonder if you could make the case of how the inner dimension of the entrepreneurial journey is not really a luxury, but a necessity. And even something that's really going to be the foundation for high level success. It's amazing when I read today and interview people and hear about other really successful CEOs and entrepreneurs and billionaires and so forth, almost all of them meditate today. It's amazing. Maybe I'm selective in who I know and what I hear, but it's amazing how many really famous people that are successful out there are honor that inner dimension of the work.

I'm always amazed when I discover that too. And a lot of people that are like Howard Stern meditates every day. Jerry Seinfeld meditates every day. A lot of people that you don't immediately think would be spiritually inclined have that to us. But here's the thing. I think finding our genius and finding out our essence and finding out, you know, learning to feel that pure consciousness in us is not a luxury. It's an essential thing. Because what is the journey of life really, but an opportunity to learn to love and embrace those things which you in the past have repelled and learning how to open up to do work you love. In a way, it's ultimate challenge for us all because many of us have learned that work has to be hard, you know, but work doesn't have to be hard. I've sat in Michael Dell's office talking to him, and I use him as an example a lot because he's an example of, you know, one of the most brilliant minds I've ever met. But also, you know, has a great relationship with his family and has great relationships all around him. So he's very well developed as a human being. That's not always the case, though, because some people have built a Persona on top of undealt with stuff that's taken them pretty close to the top. But sometimes it's a challenge too, you know, because we've worked with people at the top, having them enjoy it, getting them to a place where they can enjoy their success, you know, like, I remember having a. A big movie star in here, you know, and I was suggesting the possibility that he could remove some of the wrinkles from his forehead if he stopped doing one thing. And he said, what is that? I said, well, you try to control how other people feel, and if you could let go of that and let them have their own experience. And he said. He almost choked at that possibility because he said, well, wait a minute. I got 90 people that depend on me for their income. You know, I gotta. And I said, yes, but it's. You're taking extra responsibility. You know, it's like you're not only the owner of the store, but you're going around doing all the dusting and fretting and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, that was a beautiful moment because, like you, I'm sure I've had many, many moments where people let go of something and say, oh, huh? I kind of stick their head up from out of the cloud of the old conditioning and say, oh, okay, here's a new way for the world to look. What if I didn't think of having to control everybody's feelings all the time? So learning how to do work we love. I mean, what a genuine challenge to give ourselves. Learning how not only to do work we love, but to do work that makes a contribution to the world. To me, that's the sweet spot of a successful life. You're doing something you love to do, and you're doing something that makes a contribution to other people's lives. That's why I started focusing on for myself 45 years ago when I first started, started thinking about this. And to this day, it enlivens my life because here I am almost 50 years later and having a good time teaching about the same things I've been teaching about for 50 years. So to me, it's a great honor and a privilege to be able to share this sort of thing. I'm never going to get tired of it. You're never going to pick up a paper and see that Gay Hendricks has retired.

Well, that comes through loud and clear. So in a very incredibly authentic way. So along with your wife, Katie Hendricks, a big part of your focus has been conscious relationship and being relationship therapists and writing books on this and coaching people around conscious relationship. And so in the entrepreneurial journey, being able to have positive, creative, innovative relationships with our team, the people that work for us, the team we build, the company, is incredibly important. And then also our personal relationships are a really important source of our, you know, nurturing us and our resilience and our strength, our spiritual strength, our emotional strength. And yet, I think a lot of entrepreneurs get so focused on the business journey, being successful in business, that there's a danger of treating, you know, their team and their employees as kind of just, you know, pieces on a chessboard to get to where they want to go and then staying so focused on the business that they start ignoring their personal relationships and can find themselves on a pretty lonely journey. And that's not really much of a formula for happiness, but it seems to be really common in the entrepreneurial journey. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of relationships and how we could increase our capacity for healthy, conscious relationships both in the workplace and also in our personal life, sort of simultaneously. That is one thing. It's one human skill that we need to get good at.

Yes. And relationship is at the heart and center of everything. We are relationships because these quadrillion cells that we're entertaining inside our skin are in relationship with each other and doing very valuable things. Like since you and I have been sitting here talking, our livers have been busy doing more than 300 different activities. And we're run by a committee inside of millions and millions of people. And so our relationship first has to start with ourselves. And so a question, you know, do you have a loving relationship with yourself? That's a very big question, because a lot of people don't. But let me say also too, it's impossible to separate business or entrepreneurship from relationship because, for example, one of the clearest upper limit problems I ever saw, I worked with an executive who was in the technical business that supported the chip industry. And he had invented a machine. And it was an expensive machine. It retailed for about $350,000. So to buy one of these, the chip maker would have to lay out $350,000. So it wasn't a cheap piece of stuff. And so he'd work for a couple of years. And they launched it and it went great. And so he was making about 180 a year at the time. And his boss came in on a Friday afternoon at 3 o' clock and said, hey, it's doing great. The board wants to give you $150,000 bonus. And he hands him a check for $150,000. Well, it didn't matter if it was $15 or $150,000. Whatever it was was an amount that triggered an upper limit problem. In this case, getting $150,000 bonus. If you're only making 180 a year, that's a pretty big deal. Let's doubling out. What happened though? You would think he would spend the rest of the day celebrating, take everybody out for a beer, invite the wife in fact. But no, what he did was take off early and drove home to surprise wife and family with this. And instead he Told me he created the biggest argument that they'd ever had in 12 years of marriage. Oh, that hurts so badly when you go from ah, to like that, you know, from exaltation to misery so quickly. And it took them weeks to kind of dig out from under that because his kids got involved. It was a real messy thing. But as we looked at the thing, what was all about was not feeling like he deserved to have success and abundance. So he had to sabotage himself. That's the upper limit problem in action. So look for little ways you keep yourself from feeling good. You know, do you worry a lot instead of simply enjoying being alive and feeling grateful for being alive? You know, a lot of us don't put 10 seconds a day into gratitude and joy about just being alive. But we need to make that the background of our life. And, and to me, life is not worth living if we're not living it in love and gratitude. And so let's start there. Let's build the base of love and gratitude and then build our success on top of that.

That makes me think about as entrepreneurs, I think we're often focused on making things happen and we do need to make things happen, but it can become a very kind of mechanical thing. I just got to make this happen, make that happen, make this happen. And there's another part of it that has to do with kind of attraction and energy and manifestation. And I'm not talking about some woo woo notion that we can just think of something that's going to happen by magic, but there's some factor. Who we're being, how we're showing up, who we're being in our relationships, who we're being as a leader in our company is going to create an energy that if we combine it with doing the right things, is much more likely to lead to success. I think I'm curious about your. Your thoughts are the importance of kind of what is the energy I'm putting into the world, into my relationships, into the relational field, into the energetic field of my life? Is it one of fear and constriction, or is there some kind of a different way of being that's more attractive, that's actually going to attract opportunities and attract success?

Yes. I think one thing you're touching on there is something I feel is so important is that we talk often about letting go of something, you know, letting go of fear or letting go of our anger or letting go of our resentment at a particular person. But a lot of people think that means letting go means they have to drop it. Like something. But there's a whole other way of letting go, which is letting be, in other words, opening your heart and accepting it and letting it rest comfortably in the palm of your hand rather than trying to drop it like a hot rock. And so oftentimes, and you know, we talked about fear earlier, fear can only be dealt with by being felt, by being honored, by being ultimately accepted and loved in ourself. And that's a challenge because since the time we were growing up, a lot of people have been trying to talk us out of our feelings all the time. You know, when we were throwing a temper tantrum when we were two years old, usually our parents were concerned with making us stop, especially if we were doing it it public. And so a lot of the programming goes into how not to feel yourself at deeper and deeper levels. And so, you know, I always say the personality that gets you to 40 is not the personality that's going to get you to 80. Because, you know, a lot of times the first half of our life up to 40 is so built on finding our life and building our life and getting our life into order and. And things like that that we don't realize that that kind of effort is not strategically useful in the second half of our life that we have to go about, in a very real sense, dismantling aspects of our personality that got us here when we're around 40 years old. And, you know, that's just an estimate, 40, but could be when you're 42 or 38 or whatever. I mostly work with. I work with four young entrepreneurs a year or that's been my pattern. I'm working with a couple less now. I'm working with two. I should mention that I've been rehabbing an injury over the past year or two where I fractured my femur and have had a couple of surgeries and everything. So I'm kind of stepped back, but I'm working with two people right now, kind of getting back into it. And the people that come to me are usually pretty successful people that are in their 30s or 40s and are just about ready. They feel that big leap coming, but they don't know exactly how to do it. And so that's where I oftentimes get involved. And so I want to mention that because in developmental psychology we have this old Saying, in your 20s, your job is to experiment. In your 30s, you find your life. In your 40s, you build your life. And that is a good amount of truth to it, because oftentimes it's not until our 40s, we really see where we want to go. And if you take that to heart, this idea of finding our life in our 30s, building our life in our 40s, it's essential to build that life on something really solid that's not based on you stressing out all the time. And the only way that I know to do that is, is by gradually opening up to feeling who you really are, what you most love, your being level kinds of things. Because up until your 40s, it's often doing that has gotten a lot of your attention. And that's not to make that wrong. It's just a natural progression of life. But folks, if you are in your 20s or 30s and are listening to this or watching this, I want you also to begin to open up to your genius zone too, because you don't have to wait till you're in your 40s and have some kind of midlife crisis.

So a lot of the things you've been talking about, you know, being willing to feel some of the things, you know, if we have some feelings of unworthiness and these kind of things, the willingness to feel it, we're dealing with fear and anxiety, willing to go there, all the things that we're kind of conditioned to avoid. You're asking us to go there and feel it, and you're asking us to make this shift from doing to being and get in touch with that deeper dimension of our life and so forth. So how do we do that? So one thing I wanted to bring forward with you is because you've been a long time practitioner and teacher of breathwork, and you came out with one of the early books on breath work. Breath work is getting a lot of attention today, but you were really one of the early teachers. And I wonder if you could talk about breath work as a simple practice that can help us do a lot of the things you're talking about.

It's really important as you go along in your journey to make it a mind, body, spirit journey, not just a mind journey and. Or a body journey. Like I mentioned, my trainer client who was 15 years old, he was homeless on the streets, and he walked past a gym one night and they invited him in and he became a bodybuilder and a famous one. But it was built on top of a whole bunch of stuff at age 15 that he had never dealt with. And so that was holding him back. Once he learned to embrace the whole, then life began to open up magically. And so it's important for us to remember that we are breathing Beings, we are moving beings, we are emotional beings. And all of those things are things that are felt in our bodies. And, you know, I work with people all the time that have kind of of cut themselves off from themselves. So when I say something like, when you feel fear, where do you feel it in their body? They'll say, huh? What do you mean? And later on, they're able to say, oh, I feel it as a spreading wave of butterflies and a tight belt like feeling around my stomach. Well, you know, that's a good description of fear. But to do that means you've got to go in there and. And savor all that stuff a whole bunch of times and appreciate it and be with it. And so breathing is one of the easiest, best ways to do that. And for a kind of an interesting scientific reason, too. If you look at the breath science over the past 30 or 40 years. When I first started, way back 40 or 50 years ago, I reviewed the entire literature on using breathing for improving your mental health or physical performance or anything like that. And it took me about 45 minutes because there were a very small number of those. By the time I got out of graduate school, there was something like 300 studies had been done. So it was a catching on in the zeitgeist. Now, if you go, like a few years ago, a friend of mine went to an American Medical association convention down in. I think it was Fort Lauderdale. And he came back and he said, I was blown away by the number of workshops they had on things like breath work and stretching. You know, all of these things that people would have laughed at 50 years ago if somebody said it contributed to your mental health. Well, here's a great little secret that almost nobody knows is that it only takes three or four easy breaths to begin to melt the stress chemistry out of your bloodstream. And what I mean by that is if you can slow your breathing down to a certain pace, it actually turns off the stuff in there that's making you anxious. And so one of the first things I invite people to do, in fact, I'll give you guys a $25,000 gift. When executives are come here or sent here for a day of work with us, it's $25,000. But the very first thing we do is we ask them to go in a little room by themselves for 10 minutes and simply say one thing out loud or in their mind, and then take three easy breaths. And we coach them to have the breaths slow down till they're about six or seven of them a minute. And that Means that it takes five seconds to breathe in and then five seconds or so to breathe out. To make it one whole round trip that takes 10 seconds. And so there's a big clock on the wall that they can see what 10 seconds look like. And so the thing we ask them to say in their mind or out loud is we invite them to say, breathe. And then in your mind or out loud say, I commit to loving myself, finding out what I most love to do. And then three easy breaths. Now here's something at the end of that 10 minutes, people have come out and said, I'm going home now. Tell them to fire up the jet. I got everything I needed by 10 minutes past 9 o'. Clock. Now I. Well, we keep them here for the whole day anyway. But that's the impact because a lot of people have never done anything remotely like that. They never had the thought of that. Life could be about learning to love self, others and learning how to do what you love. That's a life path that I know makes people happy. And I'm absolutely comfortable inviting people to make a commitment to doing that, that. But here's the interesting thing. I'll ask people, you know, what happened during that three easy breaths. And they'll tell me, first of all, I had trouble doing it. I, you know, my breath was a lot faster that. But then they get it down to slow down to the pace that turns off the chemistry. They'll tell me that they started getting mind chatter back. That was about that thing they said. Like they'd say, I commit to loving myself and doing what I most love to do. And then immediately their mind would kick in. Oh, don't be ridiculous. That's girly stuff, you know, that's touchy feely stuff, all that kind of stuff. So I've actually had macho men, you know, tell me that's girly stuff and it's everybody's stuff because you've been acquainted for many years and studied Buddhism and everything. You know, I think at one point I remember a quotation alleged to be made by the Buddha where he said that in order to develop as human beings, we need to come into harmony with. I think it was 34 masculine elements and 34 feminine elements of ourselves. But it was all about expanding to embrace the whole. And that is something that I will tirelessly teach all of my life. Because I've been in a place where I, I didn't accept all of myself. I've been in a place where I hated myself. I used to weigh a hundred Pounds more than I weigh. 50 years ago I lost a hundred pounds by discovering myself and finding out my being and learning to accept my emotions and kicking all my addictions like smoking cigarettes and getting into unpleasant relationships and eating terrible food and all of that. But you know those things as well as I do. Everybody knows what we shouldn't be doing, but how to uncover the part of ourself that wouldn't even dream of doing one of our addictions anymore. You know, I don't have dreams about smoking a cigarette at age 80 now. I just turned 80. I turned 80 a couple months ago. I've been thinking a lot about my life because also my best friend, 82 year old best friend, died just before New Year. And I had the opportunity to sit with him as he was passing out of this existence. And it really brought up in my face a lot of things that we're talking about today. And I'm glad we're talking about them because they inform entrepreneurism just as much as they inform the living as a successful life in other ways.

I'm just sitting here enjoying ecstasy, knowing that all the wonderful entrepreneurs, our audience, are getting a chance to listen to this and listen to this wisdom. And I just so hope that people will embrace this and even just start giving a little bit of time to this in their lives. A little bit of time to being, a little bit of time to meditation or breath work or inner work, or a little more time to the relational part of our lives. Right. Because the payoff is just huge. You know, it's been said that, I know a number of well known entrepreneurs and teachers of entrepreneurship have said that we can only go as far as our own personal evolution, we can only go as far in success, only go so far as our own personal evolution. And it's also been said that our equal, our net worth, and of course, you know, that's really important in entrepreneurship is develop good networks. But that's all about relationship and who we're being and what we're attracting. Right? So everything you're talking about here is just so important. And you know, despite our best efforts to do this, the world can be really challenging. Business can be really challenging. And I wonder, you know, I think you've been pointing us in this direction, but how to develop the resilience so that when the tough stuff happens, I mean, you recently had an accident that you've bounced back from, you shared with me, you're out playing golf now. So developing that resilience that we're going to need, you know, it's inescapable. No matter how well we try to orchestrate our lives, we're going to run into major obstacles, especially if we're entrepreneurs. And so I wonder if you could just say something about developing that reservoir of resilience that'll help us get through those tough challenges.

Yeah, well, resilience is something that I think some of us may be instinctually born with that and everything like that, but I think most of us have to cultivate that by repeated experiences. Like, for example, one of the valuable things about meditation is it starts out for me anyway, where I'm using a mantra. And very soon it gets down to a place where, you know, there. There's no more thought, there's no more feeling, there's just that pure consciousness. And that's one of the reasons I do that. In one way or the other, we all have to learn to do something like that, which is be comfortable going inside. Because if we're not, we're going to do something on the outside that interferes with that. Like Hollywood producer that wrote a beautiful essay, Ken Hecht is his name, and he weighed 120 pounds more than he wanted to weigh. And he kicked it, so to speak, the habit. One night in front of the refrigerator, he had this insight. Wait a minute, I'm feeling anxious and lonely. What if I just let myself feel anxious and lonely and didn't open the refrigerator and put something in on top of that to make it go away? That was a brilliant, amazing insight. And he did it. And 120 pounds later, he was still doing it. In other words, when he would feel that anxious, lonely thing come alive in him that he used to stuff with food, instead, he just let himself feel that and keep feeling it. And sometimes it lasted 20 seconds, sometimes it lasted two minutes. But he said it never lasted all day. I mean, that's what we fear, I think, is if we open up to something like that, it'll just be there the rest of our lives and we'll be in a perpetual rage or sadness or fear or whatever. But it works the other way around. If you open up to something with clear intent and a curiosity and a wonder about it, wow, it just reveals itself quickly. Wonder is our underused superpower, in my view, because the act of wondering about something puts you right close to pure consciousness. Wonder means I don't know, and I really want to know. If you genuinely wonder about something, it opens up incredible space because you're acknowledging that you don't know and you're acknowledging that you want to know. And so in that, that tension comes this opening of pure consciousness.

Before we started the interview, we were talking a little bit about you met my Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, and he grounded all of his teaching in his framework of not knowing, bearing witness. And then what could end up being loving action, compassionate action, or even business. I've taught this framework in business. It could be effective action that we let go into not knowing, into wonder, into awe, and then we just willing to be with what is. And out of that, that creative intelligence always arrives and shines a light on the way forward. So, so glad you brought that forward. So Jay, I'm just curious if there's any, any last kind of message you would like to share with the audience out there for people that are considering starting a business, being entrepreneurs, or maybe they're, they're on their journey already and they're having some struggles or not sure how they're going to scale to the next level. But just any kind of last piece of wisdom you'd like to share with our entrepreneurs? I mean, I love entrepreneurs, I'm an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur. I just love the, there's something about the energy, living in a sense of possibility, but we can lose that, we can get bogged down. And I'm just wondering if there's any last thing you'd like to share.

Yes, well, that's beautiful too. Also, keep in mind the body, whenever you're considering yourself to really open up to what you're feeling in your body. So number one, make friends with your body, make friends with fear, make friends with anger, make friends with sadness. All of these things are organic. Things like fear has been here longer than we have because if you look at other forms of life, they still had the tendency to contract under stress, which we often still do. But I think we're at a stage of evolution now where we need to learn to expand under stress and expand in wonder and openness and say, where can this lead me? So to me, entrepreneurs are blessed with an occasional problem they can't solve. Like I just had a great conversation with a 38 year old woman entrepreneur that I've coached for a couple of years and she called me in a panic and said one team member had quit and something or other had happened and was going on. And the first thing I said, well, I said if you're an entrepreneur and things don't feel like they're falling apart every six months or so, you're probably not taking on a big enough task in your life. Because when you're really, if you're riding in an ox cart at.05 miles per hour, you don't have to pay much attention. But if you're operating a Ferrari or a whatever at 180 miles an hour, you gotta really pay attention to what's going on. And to me, entrepreneuring gets to be big fun if you're taking on big projects and taking on things that give you a stretch. And just the thing I want to tell you is remember there's going to be a stretch. And so greet it with openness, love and consideration. And do your best to notice when you get scared and then can savor that and move beyond that.

Wonderful, absolutely wonderful place to leave our audience at the end of this interview. So thank you so much. This has been illuminating. Gay gay Hendricks, Ph.D. author of Conscious Loving and many other books like the Big Leap and the Corporate Mystic. Where can people find out more about your work?

Well, Hendricks.com is always a good place. H E N--R-I C K-S.com also have a new book out called you'd big leap year that 365. Or actually 366 daily meditations. Cause there's a leap year occasionally and so we put an extra one in for leap years, but that's got all of this stuff we've been talking about broken down into one day at a time kind of things. So hendricks.com is good. Foundation for Conscious Living is our nonprofit organization that has a lot of videos and things like that there if people would like to look at those.

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Thank you Fleet.

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