3 Secrets to Removing Your Barriers to Receiving

Well, this is the Big Leap podcast with Mike Koenigs and Gay Hendricks. And this is all about removing your barriers to receiving. And what does that mean? Well, what are your limiting beliefs, behaviors, actions, or habits that cause you to fear, to not take action, and to be unwilling to receive? And Gay unlocks some of his deepest thinking in this episode about how to make that happen. And I'm a guinea pig for him as well. So, Gay, what are some of the big takeaways you have in this episode?

One of the things you'll learn in this episode is how to look at your life as an unfolding series of opportunities to go beyond your upper limit all the time. And one way to do that is to focus on removing your barriers to receive, finding out what your fears are that are keeping you from receiving your full measure. So instead of working more on what you're putting out, spend a little time with us, working on how you can open up to receive more effortlessly and get more done without working any harder.

That's awesome. And one of the things that Gay does is he gives me some good recipes that I use on the fly. You get to witness it and use it in your own life as well. So all that and more in this episode of the Big League.

Hi, everybody. I'm Gay Hendricks, and we have got a doozy of a subject for you today. And my buddy Mike and I are going to dive deeply into something that has a specific result to it. A lot of the entrepreneurs I talk to, and just people in general, want to find out how to produce more results without doing more work. And so I want to share a big leap, a new Big Leap concept with you today. And that concept has to do with. With letting go of trying to get more customers or trying to get more presence in the world and focus instead on the other end of things, which is increasing your ability to receive. So our conversation today is about how can you increase your ability to receive, and how can I do that in the easiest, laziest possible way so it doesn't create any more work for you? So what do you think, Mike?

I love the topic, and I'll throw in just a little idea for you, and it's something you taught me, and I do it all the time now, which I hope fits into the conversation. But every single time I work with a client right now, and if we're in together in person, we're usually down at our beach place overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and I say, look at the ocean as dark, so it represents the entirety of the universe. And all of it is available to you. In other words, everything you could possibly need, want or have is inside it. And the question to ask yourself right now is, are you willing to receive all that the universe has to offer you? And then I asked one other question, which is, how can we make today this experience an 11 on a scale 1 to 10? So I find that that abundance mindset starts a whole different kind of collaboration. And it's like an improvisation, you know, it's a yes and experience. So that's what came to my mind when you talked about this. And I was super excited today to just hear.

What are the barriers to receiving? And more importantly, what do you find the highest performers struggle with letting go in order to receive more?

Yes, great questions, but I wanted to home in first and make sure I understood completely your first one, which is basically, how can I open up to. Well, give it to me in your words again.

So I ask him this question. Are you willing to receive all that the universe wants you to have?

So am I willing to receive all that the universe wants me to have? Yeah, well, that's basically what I'm asking folks to do also, which is to go beyond what they think they already know about how to produce bigger results and include that. Say, that's great, that got you here, but what could get you to the whole next level in the easiest possible way? And so, for example, if you're having trouble seeing the stars.

One way to do it is to put on a bigger set of.

Binoculars or whatever you call those things. Telescopes. That's the word I'm looking for.

I need my afternoon espresso. But easier to do that than to go into space and look at them up there. So what you're doing is inviting things into you by changing the aperture on yourself so that your receiver is bigger. And you know, here's the thing. Almost all the really top flight people I've ever worked with, and this would include people who are big in the acting profession or the music profession or in business, somebody that's done really deep work in the business realm. One of the things that I find they almost always have a block on, even though they've received lots of stuff from outside, is they haven't gone the rest of the way and let themselves fully receive it for themselves. That oftentimes their receiving has been done in the context of providing more abundance for more people and that kind of thing. But to go inside and say, what would make me feel 100% successful as I move through the world? And it's always something, Mike, that the person hasn't loved and accepted and opened up to in themselves. So I'll have a person over here in my office, just to give you a recent example, who's in the midst of.

Trying to learn how to gracefully receive 100 and some million dollars because.

He got dropped into his lap suddenly. And you'd think a person like that would say, wow, fantastic, thanks, and then go about his business. But instead, what it did was produce incredible backflips in him that were based on fear that. That were really based on feeling that he didn't deserve to receive, period. Plus, particularly didn't deserve to receive a gigantic amount of abundance that came from.

Writing a hit piece of music a while back. And so.

I think that what we all need to work on is how to ease up and open that inner receiver so that you have what I call nonlinear receiving. So it's not receiving for a particular reason. Like, you did a good job. That's a great thing to do, is do a good job. But it's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is a shift inside where you actually feel yourself as more valuable and therefore more willing and able to receive. And what often happens is that as you open that aperture, you run across one of several big fears. And the biggest one is the fear of being unworthy. The fear that you've done something or been something or come from someplace else that automatically limits your ability to receive the big stuff in life. And everybody's got their own different story about that. But what it boils down to is, I did something so bad that I don't deserve to receive, or I inherited something so oppressive and difficult that I can't get out from under it. So what we need to do is understand that our ability to open that aperture and receive is based on a voluntary choice and a decision. It's not based on anything that ever happened in the past. And that's what's so empowering about what I'm talking about.

Okay, I like that.

I have a little story to tell you. And I want to just transparently say I still struggle with this to this day, even though I pretend not to. Okay, so here's the backstory.

And I may have told you this story before, but I think it'll be contextually relevant. And like I said, I really realized it's still a thing. And the Tarantino of this is I still struggle with thinking really, really big. And.

Part of my fear is the burden.

Cost to my energy, my soul, My lifestyle that comes along with it, and then.

Receiving my way through.

A solution to solve that challenge. Okay, so in other words, I know I put up these unconscious blocks due to some old fears and traumas. So specifically, here's what happened.

When I sold my first real business, Digital Cafe. We got acquired by a billion dollar a year advertising agency, which, you know, that means they were netting 150 million a year or more. And they were owned by ipg, the interpublic group, which was one of the two largest consolidators of ad agencies and businesses like that in the world at the time. Massive publicly traded company.

So my new boss walked in the day after our transaction finished and he looked at me and he said, mike, it's Christmas time. I have an open checkbook. You can buy or do anything you want to grow this business. And at the time, we retained 30% interest in the company, so it meant we had a huge upside to it being successful. And I stood there and my jaw dropped and I froze up because I had spent so much time just scratching and scraping by maintaining an illusion of stability for our team and buying used computers or getting the cheapest deal or staying up late to whatever it took. And I literally didn't know how to dream big. For me, I could always do it for my clients.

And.

That scared me horribly. It set me in a depressed funk for sure days, maybe even weeks, because I felt like I had lost my ability to dream. And so I'm curious what your reaction response is and.

What the cure is to removing that block. And what do you suspect it is? What was the pain? Because I know plenty of other founders who are in the same situation.

Well, when you scan down there, deep inside in your body.

What does it feel like the fear is that's got you trapped in this particular level. What are you really afraid of when you think of coming out of that old fear place? But what is the central fear? I'm afraid that.

Yeah, I think so. I don't know if I can feel into the past that far because it's been 30 years, maybe not quite that long, but 25. And now when I feel into it, one of the things that popped up as you were describing it is.

Like I have a comfortable life now. My marriage is better now than it's ever been, and we successfully got our, our son off to college, like some of the big life things. And we've got an amazing quality of life. And I think now when I tap into it, I fear losing control of this quality of life. And Losing my perspective. In other words, when I had cancer, part of what brought it on, I believe, is I was so wound up, so busy all the time, just on this very unhealthy hamster wheel. And I think I was completely oblivious to it. And I remember saying, I will never let that happen again. I won't spin out of control. And I think that old programming shows up. That's the first thing that popped into my head.

So it's a fear of losing control. Yeah, you know, one of my mentors.

Said once.

That underneath, he said, you know, basically there are two big fears. One is the fear of dying, dissolving into space. And the other one is the fear of looping out, going crazy, or whatever you want to call it, losing control, flaming out, spinning out of control. And those are both wired deeply into the human organism. But once, then.

There'S another couple of fears that are built on top of those two big fears. And one of them is that fear of letting go. A fear of losing control, a fear of things spinning out of control on the social level, losing my perspective, losing my relationship with my loved ones, those kinds of things. And the thing is that you see it a lot out there in the outside world. So it's something that you can say, wow, there's a lot of reality to that fear.

Because you've probably seen tons of people get successful, get big and flame out in some kind of gigantic way.

I once made a joke, I was at a dinner, at a dinner with a couple of well known musicians, and one of them was kind of a newcomer and had just had a monster hit. And so I was joking with him, I said, what's next.

The burnout or the rehab?

Because a lot of people go in the rehab direction and a lot of people go in the flesh out direction. But fortunately he decided to stay in the nice sane path there. So he didn't do either one.

I know who you're talking about. So I think we've talked about this person before. So here's what showed up for me when you were describing that I don't think I'm afraid of dying because I faced as close to death as I could in the cancer thing and a couple other circumstances. And I know what that's like. And also, you know, you and I have talked about psychedelics before. One of the.

Experiences you have, depending on which psychedelic you take, like mushrooms, are you're losing, you're letting go. So that is a little bit of losing control and just trusting that you're going to go to Wherever and return to this. I think. And in a way, when you have the death experience, a chemical death experience from 5 Meo, DMT or a lot of psilocybin, you do lose your ego, your sense of self, and you're experiencing what people say is an ego death. And.

I'll have to say letting go is harder than the like death is my least of the concerns. Going crazy is what I fear. Even more so letting go and going crazy, which feels like the same thing while it's occurring, or in a super high stress situation where you're dealing with a real disaster and going, how did I wind up here? Or maybe just the universe decided to shake some bad dice that day.

But I don't know, how does that fit into the barriers to receiving in the formula?

Yeah, I think that.

You'Re illustrating it really well that you have a fear there of going to your full level of success or your full ability to manifest things because you're afraid of kind of rocking the boat and, you know, causing upsets on the level of the ocean. And you've gone to great lengths to create this life and you've gone to great lengths to create the relationship with Vivian. So, you know, that's a lot of stuff to lose. And so what I would suggest that you do is recontextualize the whole thing that.

It'S about welcoming that fear into yourself. It's about opening up and owning it and being with it and letting it just kind of be with you and you be with it. Because one of the evolutionary tasks of us human beings is to welcome our bodies into our minds and welcome our minds into our bodies. In your particular situation, what this would mean, like, is to go ahead and let yourself feel down in your body the fear of losing it, the fear of spinning out, the fear that's admitting your mind down into your body and at the same time admit and welcome your body up into your mind so that you're okay with those feelings of fear. That those feelings of fear occur within the bigger context of you as a spiritual being, for example.

Okay, well, let me present another idea that it.

I don't know if it troubles me, but it's a distinction. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on it, which is.

Again, I'll openly say I've always felt this way as long as I can remember, even as a young child, that this feels like a dream, you know, like life feels like a dream. And the Buddhists in many spiritual practices often say, you know, this is a hallucination or it's an illusion. And for most of my youth and into my adult life, everything was about achieve and grow. A fear of being poor, a fear of not having enough, a fear of not being enough. And I just worked and worked and worked and worked to the point where it just about killed me. And then.

When you make your first million, you realize that it really isn't that much.

It doesn't matter how much you have. It's like, well, I could burn through that in a year. If you got 2 or 3 million bucks in the bank liquid, you're like, yeah, I could piss that away in two years. It wouldn't be hard. And I can remember when a million meant a lot to me. And I can remember something flipped in my head a few years ago when I was like, first of all, it's not a race to the end. If I could have given myself good advice when I was younger, it's like, everything's going to work out. Don't grind so hard. It's going to be fine, and you'll have plenty. You've never really gone hungry in your life unless you did it to yourself intentionally, right? And so what troubles me at times is I lost my.

Need for more. Like, I'm really content now. I mean, I'd be happy with more. You know, another three or five or $10 million would be great, but it's not what it's about. But also, I realized that I'm really attached to. And I love this hallucination. I fear losing this illusion of who I think I am and the dream I live in every day. I really like it. I don't want it to go away. And it's not a fear of death so much as when you're oscillating between your waking self and your sleeping self. So, again, inside of the context of receiving and recognizing these fears or these feelings, what's your take on that?

Well, you brought up early the matter of perspective.

To me, the work that I've done on myself has.

Changed my perspective in the sense of the more I open up and more I own of myself, I feel like.

My perspective is one of many perspectives that I could occupy, but they're all in the space of this gigantic ocean of consciousness. And so when I go to expand and own more of myself, I go more into just kind of letting this little version of myself be supported by this vast ocean of consciousness, as if I'm, you know, to put it in water terms, I'm, you know, kind of a perspective bobbing on the surface of consciousness. If I put it in sky terms, I'd be like a space person in a space suit, you know, getting more and more comfortable with being at one with the cosmos. And so that's what I mean by kind of going this deep within to discover the matrix of the whole thing. And at that point, you see that your perspective is just one of many, many, many perspectives that are like little fractals of the main thing.

Okay.

So if we go deeper, that makes a ton of sense. I think more and more it's easy. It also is a great exercise in compassion and empathy when you've practiced that.

So, in fact, that's a great point to make too, because it's about loving that part of yourself.

It's about expanding in your ability to love that part of yourself. That's the move that you can make in this moment that changes things.

As your love grows, as you open up more and grow your love for that crazy part of yourself or that scared part of yourself, then it transforms in a way, because you're no longer afraid of going into it because you've gone into it and found out that it's all surrounded by pure consciousness anyway. You can't make any mistakes by going into that. You've already been as crazy as you're going to be in this lifetime.

Yeah, well, hopefully, anyway, you have to talk to my wife about that. I think she prefers this version of Mike than the 15 year ago version.

Well, yeah, And I bet the same thing is true for her, too, that you appreciate things about her that you could have never in a million years appreciated 15 years ago.

Yeah. Thank God we made it to 20 years. Because I think now, and you and I have talked about this before because you, you've been together with Katie. How many years is it?

42 years.

42 years. Okay. And I would suspect. Well, I'll just speak for myself.

I feel like we've just entered a space of full acceptance of each other. And I'm more excited now to be with her than I. You know, like during the initial, maybe couple months, you know, you got that flaming fire, but then you settle in a little bit and then there's doubts and annoyances. And now it's like, I can't believe how compassionate we are to one another. You know, like stuff that would have just been like. It's just like. I'll bring it up. Like today we had a little thing. She did or said something to me and it just kind of. I was like. And I just told her, I said, you don't have to change. I don't need anything fixed. I'm just going to express myself right now and tell you how this thing you did affected me. So you're aware of it. And she's like, okay, thanks for that. You know, I was. That was basically the. There were a couple little barbs for a moment, but we didn't have the capacity to even have that conversation a few years ago. Not at that level. Oh, so.

Well, we didn't either for the first few years of our relationship, either. We had to build a whole new vocabulary and a whole new set of things to do when we got upset. And fortunately, we wrote them all down and put them in our book, Conscious Loving. And then Oprah read Conscious Loving. Next thing I knew, Whoosh. Those were just all things that we discovered about our relationship in the first few years, but they all work. You know, here we are, we just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary and actually met 42 years ago this past month. Wow, Congrats. Well, you know, that's a big subject, Mike. And so we're going to be going into this because this a lot more on a subsequent podcast, because it's one of the big things I'm working on this year is helping people learn how to receive more and undo the blocks that are in the way of them going to their full ability to receive. So.

It'S a big adventure and appreciate you for putting yourself onto the hot seat.

No, I thought the best way to do this because I was imagining, as you were describing, wanting to do this today. I thought, well, how could I make it interesting? And I know every time I ever get raw and super real, that's where I get the most feedback. We hear back from people. Maybe just to pull this thing together, to wrap it up. If you are going to describe a formula recipe for removing your barriers to receiving, both based on what we spoke about and what your observations are and thinkings, what would you tell our listener or viewer?

I'd say if you're going to remember one big thing, it would be that to make a commitment to releasing the barriers, whatever they are, to you receiving fully in your life, on the spiritual level, on the emotional level, on the financial level, on the level of love, how can I open myself to receiving the absolute maximum that I'm here to receive? And so if you can live in that kind of commitment, that opens up the space for life itself to become a series of learnings about how to do that.

And what I would read into that is you don't need to know the answers to make that commitment. So by asking that open question, your brain will find answers. You'll be open to receiving the answers in the first place. Is that.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, you can't possibly know the answer because it all comes from opening yourself to the unknown and making a commitment to let your life be a life of discovery, learning things about yourself and how to be in the outside world as a result of those new things you learn about yourself.

Love it. Okay, well, I think this is a good place to close this chapter. And we will go even deeper because you're working on this, I assume. Is it part of what could be your next book right now? Is that.

Question. Oh, I don't know if I'm going to be doing any more books. I may do some more audio books, but I'm getting to a place in my life where.

Sitting and writing for three hours in the morning.

It'S not as charming as it used to be.

Yeah, the golf course screams a little louder, huh?

Yeah. Plus, I'm blessed with some arthritis in my hands for having written 50 books over the past 50 years. And so I'm trying to be a little kinder to my hands these days.

All right, all right, fair enough, Fair enough. Well, let's keep the dialogue going, but I think this is a good place to put a pin in it. And yeah, let's go deeper on removing your barriers to receiving. And for you, listening, watching, send us comments, visit the website. And of course, if you're interested in receiving more, consider joining us when you go to the bigleapodcast.com and applying to join the Big Leap Year. It's a program that Gay and I have been putting together, and there's an opportunity to apply for that and learn more about how we can help you receive even more. Anything else you want to finish up with, Gay?

Well, it's a big thing to start looking into this in yourself because it's kind of like taking a first big breath and then realizing you have even bigger breaths you can take. And I love it, though, because to me, life is about lifelong learning and the exhilaration of learning more and more every day. That's how I feel younger at 77 than I did at 67 or 56 or 47.

That's fantastic. Well, you're always a model. You're like, I have an alternate operating system running in my head all the time. It's, what would gay say? What would gay do? What would gay think? So I drop that in all the time, and it's super useful for me to have that because I'll say that having that wisdom, that added wisdom makes a huge bump in my life. So thank you.

You very welcome.