PNTV: The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks (#11)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. As always, great book, Philosopher's Notes. We've got some my favorite big ideas packed into this six page PDF. I'm really excited about this note. Gay is a close friend and mentor of mine and also a business partner with Philosopher's Notes and, and this book is awesome. One of, I think 30 books he's written over the last 30 plus years. He got his PhD from Stanford, in fact, the year that I was born. And he's been meditating every day for longer than I've been alive, which is over 35 years, which is pretty cool. But the big Leap. The subtitle is conquer your hidden fear and take life to the next level. So it's all about making the big leap into what Gay calls our zone of genius. And I first met Gay because we both sold our businesses to a company called Gaiam. And we met at a strategy meeting and he shared with us a model that's part of this book. And it's all about going into our zone of genius. So imagine this. Imagine you have a quadrant, right? So four squares. And in the lower left quadrant you've got your zone of incompetence. Then your zone of competence, then your zone of excellence, then your zone of genius. So your zone of incompetence really quickly are the things that you can't do that well, right? Most people can do them better than you. Then the zone of competence is stuff that you do, okay? You're pretty good at it. You can do them as well as most people. Then your zone of excellence is the area where you really excel. You're better than most people at certain things, right? That's your zone of excellence. Then we want to make a big leap into our zone of genius. And this is where we were born to play. It's kind of our destiny, our dharma, our highest purpose. It's where our deepest strengths match our passions and match the world's needs. Now most people get stuck in the zone of excellence, right? Or the zone of competence. It's where society really rewards us to play. We get paid pretty well. Everything's comfortable here. But it's not our destiny. And if we want to really live full out, we've got to make the big leap into the zone of genius. And that's what this book is all about, is what gets in the way. Gay calls them upper limits. We have upper limits that kind of catch us on that leap from the zone of excellence into the zone of genius. And we're going to talk about some of those things right now. So here's a bunch of big ideas. And this book is a really quick, simple read packed with with goodness. But let's look at a few of them. So he starts the book by talking about and asking the question, are you willing to feel good all of the time? Right. He has a few questions that come before that, but he winds up with the question, are you willing to feel good all the time? And most people think that's kind of an absurd thing. Of course I'm not going to feel good all the time. There's going to be some down times, I'm going to feel crappy sometimes, whatever. And his thought is he likes to say, no, no, no, we need to stretch our sense of what's possible. And he tells a story that's pretty funny to demonstrate how limited we are in our thinking. Apparently back in what must have been the 19th century, when they were just coming out with steam powered trains, really smart people of the day, the learned scientists of the day actually wanted to cap the maximum speed that trains could go at 30 miles per hour because they were convinced that human bodies would explode at speeds greater than 30 miles per hour. How funny is that? Thankfully, some brave souls went for it and they discovered that in fact we can go considerably faster than 30 miles per hour without exploding. He says we're at essentially the same place in our own development in terms of how much goodness we can sustain, how much bliss we can endure, how great we're willing to feel. So really cool idea. Are you willing to feel good all the time? We go off on that more in the note and of course in the book, Gay goes off on it. He also talks about the idea that we've made a handshake deal with the universe. To live our most extraordinary life, to really play in our zone of genius. And we can try to forget that, but we can't. Because the deal was made when we were born that we were going to live an extraordinary life. And we suffer to the extent that we don't go out and really become all that we're destined to become. I mentioned Abraham Maslow here. You might remember the prior episode. In one of these other notes we talked about Abraham Maslow self actualizing human being. And what he discovered is that what one can be, one must be. There's this impulse within us to become, to actualize, to express ourselves fully. As Gay would say, to play in our zone of genius. And to the extent we're fulfilling that. We feel good to the extent that we're not. There's this gap between what we're capable of doing, what we're actually doing, and stress and anxiety and disillusionment and depression play there. So we want to close that gap and honor the handshake deal we made with the universe. That's a really awesome idea. He talks about the fact that we have thermostats of just how good we can feel, and those thermostats are set too low. We. We talked about this in the PNTV on happy for no reason. Right. And we all have a set point of happiness. Scientists have discovered this. In fact, we have a set point. And it's kind of like your thermostat. If your thermostat is set at 70 degrees or 68 degrees and it gets a little bit colder than that, well, it will bring it back up. But if it gets a little bit warmer than that, it'll bring it back down. Same thing with us in our happiness. We have a thermostat and it's set too low. And. And when we start to feel really good, we do things that tend to sabotage us. We come back down to the level of happiness we're content and comfortable with. So the idea is we want to raise our thermostats, and we do so by embodying all the ideas we're talking about in these episodes and in these notes, and I'm going to share a couple more of them with you. So. And also, I'll say the upper limits are what come into play. That's the phrase that Gay uses in this book. Upper limits. Those are the things that get in the way of us making the big leap. It's almost like a glass ceiling that just. We bump our head up against things we do to sabotage ourselves. One of the big ones is fear, right? When we have fear, a lot of times we're upper limiting ourselves. And Gay has some great ideas about fear. First of all, he says we don't need to get rid of it. Where would they go anyway? We can't get rid of it. Don't worry about that. Just make friends with it. And he says, breathe into your fear. He quotes Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, who said that fear is excitement without the breath. So whenever we're afraid, that's just excitement without the breath. So next time you're feeling fear, see if you can breathe really deeply. And Gay says, imagine you're blowing out birthday candles and take that fear and Alchemize it into excitement. And the more we do that, the more deeply we breathe and really let out a deep exhale, our fear turns into excitement and turns into exhilaration. Really big idea. We talk about this in a bunch of different books. We're going to talk about another time. Gay also talks about breakthroughs and then stabilization and integration. Oftentimes we have breakthroughs where we make a great distinction and we feel fantastic. Then we kind of go back to where we were. So the idea is we want to make the breakthrough and then we want to stabilize and integrate the lessons we've learned. So such that that becomes just who we are. We're going to talk about that more when we do. Ken Wilber soon he calls it states and stages. We have states of experience that are really expansive. But until we make our stage of development equally expansive by practicing the things we know to be true, then we just experience something nice and go back to where we were. So we want to have breakthroughs. Then we want to stabilize and integrate. And we do that through practice and making this an actual habit. He has a great big idea here. Gay is an expert in relationships. He and his wife Katie actually live about a mile down the street here and they're phenomenal relationship experts. We're going to do some more work on their stuff in another episode. But he says that behind every communication problem that you have is a sweaty 10 minute conversation you don't want to have. So all you need to do is muster up the courage and have that sweaty 10 minute conversation you've been avoiding. And a lot of the communication challenges will literally dissolve. So my question for you is, do you have a sweaty 10 minute conversation you need to have with someone and figure out when the good time is to have that? What else do we have? How about worry? He says worry is another great example of upper limiting ourselves from that big leap. And worry is useless unless we can do something about it and we're moving toward and actually taking action to do something about it. Otherwise worry is useless. It's an upper limit to making our big leap. So that is a really quick look at some of these big ideas. We've got a lot more in the note. The book is phenomenal. Highly recommended, Totally transformative for me. Yeah. As Gay says, go all the way and inspire the world with your full expression. How can you make the big leap into your zone of genius more today? Whatever idea that most resonated with you today, I hope that you go out and rock it and hope you got something meaningful out of this. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you.