Beyond The Big Leap Is Conscious Luck

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks. Mike and I had a great time talking about some really key fundamental issues. And I want you to pay attention, particularly when you listen to the podcast, to the whole concept of wonder and the power of wonder, what it can do for you. And also listen in for the power of saying no.

This is Mike Koenigs, and one of the things that Gay shared in this episode that I'm really looking forward to you experiencing is an exercise to get in into alignment. Gay's also going to share with you his five big goals. They're really, really important because when you think through his lens and some of the tools he's going to give you, he shares with you how it's possible to create and manifest luck. So all that and more in this episode of Big Leap.

Well, welcome to episode two of the Big Leap. My name is Mike Koenigs and I'm Gay Hendricks.

And we are ready for one major leap today.

All right, so this episode is called beyond the Big Leap, and it's Conscious Luck. You've got this brand new book coming out. Super excited. I've had the good fortune of being able to read it ahead of time. But first of all, what's Conscious Luck?

Gay? Well, I reinvented myself as a lucky person when I was 14 years old. And ever since then, I've been very interested in the relationship between good luck and hard work and how those two come together. Let me tell you about the thing that happened when I was 14. For some reason, my school was doing a fundraiser and sold tickets to a movie. And I'm not even sure what the movie was now, but we all went to this movie. So it was all full of, you know, two or 300 high school and junior high kids. And during the movie, they had us put our stubs in a bucket and they had a drawing to see who was going to win a watch, a wristwatch. And so I was sitting next to my friend, whose name Dewey deloach and still alive and well in Florida, where I grew up. And so Dewey leaned over and he said, watch this, I'm going to win this drawing. I said, okay. And sure enough, they pulled Dewey's.

Name out. He won the watch. And I said, how the heck did you do that? And he said, I always win those kind of things. And.

I decided to be lucky. He said, and so ever since I decided to be lucky, I win things like this. And I thought that was a very enlightened thing for a 14 year old to say. So I completely said, oh, God, that's Stupid.

But later on though, I. I decided, wait a minute. Why should I go around thinking of myself as an unlucky person? It's just as easy to think up yourself as a lucky person. So that was kind of my first little entree into the whole luck aspect of life. And I have tell you, I've asked many, many very successful people, do you think of yourself as a lucky person? And almost every single one of them have said some version of yeah, yeah. And I just wanted to ask you that. Are you a lucky guy?

You know, it's sort of interesting. I would say yes now, but growing up. So I grew up with really lucky people, my sister and my dad, if I'd sit down and play a game of luck with them. So anything that involved cards or dice or a shuffle of some nature, it didn't matter what that game was. I lost almost all the time. Okay. It just didn't happen. And when it came to, like, winning something at a raffle or something like that, it happened once that I remember probably from like, first through eighth grade. So, you know, mid teens. And then as it I've moved forward in life, I would say definitely yes. And.

My luck has come from preparation and relationships. In other words, I think I've created my own opportunities for luck by being present when more opportunities could happen. So if it's controlled luck, but purely random luck in the past, like when someone would say something like, oh, yeah, everything happens for a reason, I'd be like, what a pile of bs. I hated it. You know, it's like, nothing happens for a reason. It just stuff either happens or you control it. And I think as I've grown a little bit older, I've realized that the more I push, push, push and try to control the less successful I am, and the more I relax into it and really open up my day with something really intentional. So, for example, I had a really, really awesome week last week where I enrolled probably a half a million dollars worth of new business. And it all started with me feeling different about it. So I think the. The answer to your question is the more I paid attention to my feelings and trusted and stepped away from control, the more lucky I've become. So I don't know how that fits into answering your question or not, but that's about as good as I can do right now. I can't say I figured it out, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this episode, honestly. All right.

Yeah, well, there's a number of pathways I Think. First of all, one of the things you heard me talk about last time we were together was the importance of having luck worthy goals. And if you think about it, the way I put it is you've got to give luck a good reason to visit, that you want to have the highest quality possible goals for yourself. And then once you've come up with those high quality goals, start opening up to support for those.

Okay, can you give us an example of one of those or a story you can remember?

Yeah.

When my daughter was in the first grade.

I was in the habit of going over and sitting in her classroom to help the teacher out. And they like to have, you know, parents come in and do various things. And so I spent a lot of time in her classroom. And one thing I noticed, I was still in graduate school at the time, working on my PhD, and I started noticing that the teacher, teacher spent a tremendous amount of time just getting kids organized and sort of herding them from place to place and getting them calmed back down after recess and that kind of thing. And by my observation, the teacher was spending about 50% of her time not doing anything that related to teaching. And she complained about that. And I figured, okay, how could I solve this problem? And so I created this little book of what I call centering activities that you could do very quickly with kids that would get them refocused and centered again. And so I started making these notes and I happened to bump into a. Another Stanford professor, a Stanford professor named Jim Fadiman. And he said, what are you interested in these days? He said, you know, you're about to finish your PhD. What are you going to be working on? And I said, well, I got this great idea. I'm putting together this little package of relaxation and centering activities for kids. And he said, really? I said, yeah. And he said, well, you know, I just started work as a scout for apprentice hall books, and I bet they would be interested in that kind of thing because this very forward thinking editor there named Lynn Lumsden wants to do kind of new things like that. So by the time I walked back to my little grubby graduate student office, I'd already put together the outline of a book. And in my mind. And that night I stayed late. And back then the IBM Selectric typewriter was brand new and it was kind of like the Rolls Royce of typewriters and only the secretaries had them. And so I stayed late and used IBM Selectric to type up a book proposal. So within, you know, days of hatching that activity, suddenly I didn't know this guy was a scout for Prentice Hall. So within a month or two, I had a book contract while I was still in graduate school. And that book, when it first came out, ended up selling something several hundred thousand copies over the next few years. So it changed my poor graduate student life slightly better.

Note to young people, if you want to get really wealthy, don't try to do it through writing books. Find a way to leverage your book, you know, because the books are really good. But unless you get lucky like I did and get on Oprah and a couple of things like that, it's hard to make a gigantic big living out of them. But what writing a book did for me in that case was really, you know, it was so great an example of manifestation where you come up with an idea and then if you're willing, it gets supported.

It's really good. So I'm curious, then let's dive a little bit more. That's one good example of conscious luck. To me, that's just about leading with intentions and connecting with people. Because I remember one thing that I always loved. Brian Tracy would often say, our lives are changed by the people we meet and the books we read. And I'd also say in the events we go to, which are also tied to the people we meet. But.

What are some things that you think people prevent themselves from achieving or receiving conscious luck? And I purposely grabbed that word, receiving conscious luck. But again, you've had the good fortune of working with thousands and thousands of high level executives, very successful people who've gotten to the there. And also, I know in previous conversation you said that a lot of them always say, yeah, I'm super lucky. So we know that that is a common, at least a mindset. But what prevented them and what do you see people who just are constantly stuck not being lucky or are busy doing.

You know, I think a lot of it has to do with getting trapped and just repeating old patterns that are based on limiting beliefs. A lot of people have a belief inside that I talk about in the big leap, which I call the fear of outshining, where they're afraid that if they really let their light shine, that it would somehow take love away from other people that deserve it more. And so they keep themselves tucked back inside and don't let their light fully shine. And so that's one example of a limiting belief. And I think a lot of people get trapped inside addictions also. And they keep running an addiction that eats up their creative power and keeps them from making their Big breakthrough. I've known a number of people that hit on their genius and found a way to amplify it. I was just thinking of a dear friend of mine for 25 years or so, the singer Bonnie Raitt. She, in her early days, she's quick to point this out, had a lot of issues with addictions. And there was this one moment though, where she got a positive vision of herself.

Where she saw herself winning a Grammy and being appreciated by a whole auditorium full of people. And lo and behold, a couple of years later, she wrote her album Nick of Time and ended up winning a bunch of Grammys. And I think she's up to something like 19 of them now, last time I heard from her. And so she went from kind of. See, when you, when you have addictions, you're basically trying to solve the same problem all the time. You, you're stuck with this one particular problem you're always trying to solve, which is how to get more, how to recover afterwards, how to go around apologizing for all the things you did during it. So it's pretty much a full time job. As a matter of fact, many years ago, a heroin addict said to me, he kicked it. And he said to me, you know, my big problem. I said, what's that? And he said, what am I supposed to do with my time? You know, he said, I used to spend all my time with my addiction. Now what am I supposed to do? Well, the big answer, of course is addictions cover creativity. And the moment you can break through whatever addiction it is, there's this huge world of creativity inside there. And like with Bonnie, for example, she and some of her close friends at the time, like Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Hyatt, they all really did their whole sobriety thing at the same time. And their careers just went whoosh afterwards.

It's really interesting too, so. And that comes down to having a great community. So I'll tell you a little story about how my luck has changed over the past probably four years. And I can talk about this publicly. So starting about five years ago, it began with JJ Virgin, my wife Vivian, her new husband, actually boyfriend at the time, and another couple. I don't have permission to use their names right now, but they're very visible in the, I'll say, the personal development space. And we started doing manifesting New year parties. And what we do is we'd get together and talk about what we wanted to manifest for the new year. And I think that's an important word first of all, which isn't not what we wanted to get or have, although I think looking back energetically and the way I was psychologically, I was still in that mindset. It was just like I put a sticker on top of the same old thing. It's evolved since. But the second year, we started working on our word of the year, and it'd be one key thing that we could focus on and remind each other of. But we really got into where we wanted to be, and it wasn't like just writing down goals, because to me, goals still feel kind of shallow. I wanted something that I really felt on a deep, deep level and then could simplify it with that one word. And I mentioned this in episode one, my word for last year was simplify. My word for this year is.

Ease. Ultimately, it's about being able to receive it easily and effortlessly. Actually, the word is effortless.

And that is not my standard MO at all. Because in the past, I came from an environment, I think, epigenetically. My dad grew up very, very poor on a farm and came from generations of very poor Germanic farmers who immigrated here. And.

My dad was. Used to work for this and get that as a barber. You know, everything happened in 20 minute increments. There was zero leverage there. And I looked at that and I said, I'll be damned if I do not want that life. I love my dad. He's my hero, and I don't want what he has. And so my mindset really revolved around how do we gain leverage but also not have to push, push, push, grind, grind, grind. And now I spend a lot of time not doing. And it's not procrastinating so much. But I'm not writing a bunch of stuff down. I'm not driving my life by lists. And I know that that's part of a phase of life. You're in a different phase of life. But I'm curious through your lens. You're about 20 years older than me.

If you look at, through your phases of. Of the actions you took to manifest conscious luck and build your mindsets that have gotten you from point A to point B, how. What have you acquired? What have you let go of? And what do you observe in some of the other folks that you've coached and worked with?

I think a lot of times it has to do with alignment, finding out what's out of the line, and then lining it up. One of my physical therapy people, when I had my knee replaced, she said, if there's pain, you can assume misalignment. And so when you start feeling pain, look for how you're out of alignment. And so that's a physical example. But in a way, the same thing applies to us up and down the line, because human beings are. We're part spiritual and we're part material, and we're part psychological and we're part emotional. So we have all of these different layers inside ourselves. And if you think about it, it's alignment in each of those areas that really makes things happen. So if you find out you're out of alignment in your relationship, for example, if there are things that you have issues with your partner that you haven't cleared up, well, that can create a huge wobble. I've been there. And same thing with. On the spiritual level, in a way, if you're not acknowledging the spiritual part of you, if you think of yourself purely as a meat sack that's having an experience of life, then you're cheating yourself. Because in the realm of the spirit is where a tremendous number of life satisfactions live. Your ability to feel a presence with the cosmos, your ability to feel connected to the earth, those kinds are deeply spiritual things that you'd get to experience in your material body. So I think that, like, in working with people, I like to look for, where's the pain? And that's going to tell me where the misalignment is. And then you need to get back into alignment in some way.

Okay. So in our first episode, we did an exercise that was really, really power. And I'm curious.

Now, what's your process or system for getting into alignment? Do you have either a meditation or a system or a process that you've taught or you've used yourself?

I use what I call wonder questions, which is if I notice some pain. Well, let's just start with physical pain. Let's say I'm walking along and I start noticing some pain in my hip. That just happened to me yesterday because I was walking on the beach, which I don't usually do. I used to live on the beach, but now we live 11 miles from the ocean. And I. When I was here yesterday, I was walking on the beach. And, you know, the ground is variable there. And so my hip was starting to hurt. And as soon as I realized that, I said, okay, how am I out of alignment? Hmm. So it's a wonder question. And so I began to see how I was out of alignment and corrected it. Suddenly, my hip's not hurting anymore. And so, for example, my wife and I, you know, the books we originally got on Oprah for And everything were our relationship books like Conscious Loving. And it's really abundantly clear in a relationship counseling situation. We've worked with 4,500 couples, I think now. And it's really clear when you're sitting in a couples counseling situation that where the misalignment is because people's body language reads it out. So you can see how one person is scared and pulling back, or you can see where one person is scared and trying to dominate and control. So the misalignments can be seen in the body if you know what to look for. And that's what I recommend that people really do is think carefully about this whole misalignment creates pain thing, because that really will tell you, you know, if you can see where the pain is and feel where the pain is. Like we always say, what you can feel, you can heal. But it's that opening up to it and awareness and saying, what's this about? How am I out of alignment?

It's interesting. I know years ago when I went through my cancer process, someone recommended the book you Can Heal youl Life by Louise Hay.

Yes.

And Louise talked about specifically what part of the body, what was the emotional cause of a physical disease. And for me, I had colorectal cancer, which was repressed rage and anger. And then she gets into blood diseases, for example, or heart disease, breast cancer, et cetera, et cetera. So through your lens, are you aligned with her perspective and her diagnosis, or what's your feeling on that?

Well, Louise Hay, I think.

I was at her 80th birthday party some years ago and I had the opportunity to tell her this. I said, you were such a great. On a mass level, you were able to get people looking inward and finding out why and thinking. But my beef with Louise, and I was very public about this at the time, is I think people can carry that to an extreme and it makes them feel guilty about their disease. You know, that's not what she wanted. She wanted people to open up and inquire into things. So, you know, Louise was, you know, she was very convinced that there was this kind of one to one relationship between disease and what you were feeling inside. But see, there's lots of other ways to get disease too. There's a lot of environmental diseases going around. For example, if you look up and down the Mississippi river, you'll see that people have more cancer up and down the Mississippi River. Why is that? Not because they have a bad attitude. It's because they're drinking water that has bad chemistry, bad chemicals in It. And so we need to be aware of other things other than our own internally driven attitudes. But I think that's an important place to include. You really do need to orient yourself and I would say ground yourself in the question of what's this cold trying to tell me I got the flu? What's the message here? That's a really good thing to always be inquiring into.

Okay. And that's. I like that. I like how that feels. So I want to talk a little bit now about changing your luck.

And also the limiting beliefs that stand in your way from preventing you from changing your luck or how to manifest it. So we can either take it through the lens of what do you need to subtract, what do you need to add and create. Because when I look at.

My life, this is one lesson I've learned from a pure business perspective, which is the more enrollment conversations that I have going on, the higher my income. The more I speak, the higher my income, the more events I go to, the higher I income or my income. And the more I make it clear to people what I'm doing and what I'm excited about right now. The same way, you know, it's, people want to participate in a successful movie. And when you present what you're doing, and not a showboaty way, but as I'm thinking of life more and more as theater.

And I love to create an experience or an opportunity for other people to participate in mine and me and theirs in a way that not only feels good, but is visibly fun and exciting. Because that's what I look for now is I want to create transformational experiences with people I love. It's like even what we're doing here today. To me, co creating with you is a beautiful exercise in manifestation. And one of our outcomes is we're going to do some big leap experiences. We're going to bring in high frequency aliens to have awesome experiences with us.

Hello, aliens.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And those. Everyone I ever say that to gets it right away. You know, they resonate with that message. And to me, that is the same as creating luck and manifesting. But. Oh, and I would first of all test it. Do you see things the same way? And then what's your perspective on changing your luck, increasing it and adding and deleting, subtraction and multiplication Perspective mindset.

Yeah, I see genius. When we tap into our genius, it puts us on a pathway. That's really what I call the genius spiral. If you think of a spiral, it has no closed end to it. It just keeps going and going and going. And I think continuous self renewal is such a creative, an important part of our creative life. You know, being willing to always be letting go of what was working yesterday, but may not be fun and working today and proceeding along as life being a surprise all the time, that's really an important thing. I also want to point out too, this dips into the painful side of luck. But I did a whole study when I was writing Conscious Luck, I did a whole study of lottery winners. And.

Some of them are very interesting because something did happen just before they won the lottery that seemed to have a positive effect. But the thing that I learned more than anything else is the downside of doing things like winning the lottery. There are many, many people that have, after they won the lottery, their income ended up worse than it was before they won the lottery, after everything was said and done. So I think that one of the important things that human beings need to do to make ourselves luckier is get that sense of open spaciousness inside that I like to cultivate through meditation. There may be other ways to get it, but like for example, when Stephen Simon and I had been both very interested, he's a movie producer and we were both very interested in producing enlightened movies. And we beat our brains out back in the 90s down in Hollywood trying to pitch to big people, let's, let's do a book of conversations or let's do a movie about conversations with God, or let's do the movie of Richard Bach's book Illusions. And we got thrown out everywhere, nobody wanted to listen to us. And everybody kept saying the same thing. Nobody wants to watch those kind of movies. So one day in meditation one morning about 5am all of a sudden the idea popped into my mind just kind of dropped in from nowhere. Hey, instead of trying to convince Hollywood studios to make those kind of movies, let's go find the movies at film festivals, put them on DVDs and send them out to subscribers. And so within a couple of years we built a multi million dollar business, the Spiritual Cinema Circle. And ultimately I think I'd spent less than a hundred thousand dollars, maybe even $50,000 to launch it. This is back in the early days of the 2000s, maybe 2003, but ended up selling it for around $10 million a few years later. But I think the important thing is, and it's continuing to this day, by the way, I don't happen to own it anymore, but it's continuing to this day. And so now it's being turned into a nonprofit kind of thing. So we have found a whole new way to do it now in the era of streaming. The point I want to make, though, is that it came out of space and a wondering. Creating an open space and a wondering, how could we do this differently? And so I want to kind of promote the value of creating something that creates more spaciousness inside yourself. I love meditation, but not everybody's going to sit down for 20 minutes twice a day and do meditation. So whatever it takes for us to get that, I think it's really important.

So what I really got out of that was.

How wonder really is the fuel for manifesting and creating luck. And that really deeply resonates with me because I look back at my own creativity. Every business that I've developed, every product I've created.

Even the best people I've met have come from wondering. I wonder what it would be like to. I wonder what it would be like to make something that I wonder what it would be like to meet, visit, experience, learn. And.

There'S a beautiful exercise inside of that. So I'm going to spend more time consciously thinking about the word wonder between now and the next time we record a session. So is there anything else that you can think of? And specifically, as you get the book Conscious Luck, which is, as of right now, it's coming out very shortly. So if you're listening to this or watching this podcast, depending on the date, it may or may not be out. But first of all, why don't you talk a little bit about the book Conscious Luck and why you decided to write that after the Big Leap.

Well, after the Big Leap, it's been about 10 years now since the Big Leap came out, and I continue to work with more and more people. And I came up with one of the things about the way my mind works is I can look at something and almost get a printout of the principles that are involved. And I've been able to do that since I was a kid. And so I started thinking about luck that way. And eventually I got my print out of eight different pathways that people, lucky people, go to to get their luck. So eight different things that people can do. And I hope in future conversations we'll be able to get down into all of those. But the main thing I want to just leave everybody with is that we do have the capacity. There is a space in us, I call it pure consciousness, that if you can open up to it, it's underneath all of your programming. It's the ground floor of everything. And it's the place from which your life can be rearranged much more efficiently because you have this open spaciousness that's underneath all of your programming. And so I want to encourage people to do whatever they can do through breathing, meditation, running, whatever they can do to taste and cultivate that open spaciousness inside. Because to me, that. That's the miracle place where all the. That's the miracle spring where they bubble forth.

It's really pretty profound when I. When I listen to you and think about it. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. So let's. Let's plan on diving into that in episode three is talk a little bit about the eight different pathways to get and create luck and also how to open yourself up to that pure consciousness. I know that that's something that I'm interested in doing, and I can't imagine everyone else wouldn't be as well. So with that gay, do you have any.

Words you want to leave our listeners and our viewers with in terms of an exercise to practice? Something to think about besides wondering, really thinking about how you wonder and diving into that. That's going to be mine. But do you have any big takeaways?

Well, one thing I mentioned in one of our talks was that I had come up with five different main things I wanted to accomplish or experience in my life. And I would really love to encourage everybody to come up with a specific, like three or five. Come up with the ones that feel like a satisfying whole experience of life for me. My five had to do with number one. I wanted to create a certain kind of relationship that I'd never seen before.

And I did. And the second thing was to learn how to live in a state of completion so that I didn't have anything unheard or unsaid with the people in my life. My third one was I wanted to learn how to write from my heart. I've always been a writer ever since I was a kid, but I was writing textbooks and scientific journals and things like that early in my career, and I wanted to learn how to write from my heart. The fourth thing I wanted to learn how to do was to have an experience of real life, real time, right now in the body of experience of the creator force in life, spirit or God or whatever you want to call it. I wasn't interested in the theology of it. I wanted to feel what that felt like. And so that's kind of how I've set up my spiritual life, is toward things that have the actual experience I can perceive right Here, the fifth thing I mapped out for my life was I wanted to savor everything. I wanted to be right here for the moments of my life. I tell the story in one of my books of going out with my 10 year old daughter when she was in the 5th grade and she had this wonderful costume, Halloween costume and house to house we went, everybody would get so excited about her costume. And I realized halfway through as we were going around that that whole time I'd been working on my mind on a journal article I was writing on. So I was sort of halfway there with her and halfway in my head. And I remember afterwards saying, wow, I missed out on a good bit of this experience tonight because my head was somewhere else and it made a kind of a jolt in me. And so that really shifted me around, around wanting to have a savoring experience of life.

I love that. It's really powerful. I can't say that I have had the five, like they weren't super focused, but I know looking back, mine have revolved around especially when I almost took it away from myself multiple times, right? Loss of a marriage, almost loss of life a couple times in my case and also some big bumps in my current marriage that I've had a few times self inflicted of course, and also not being present or conscious for my son. So those are the negative sides. On the positive side, I had some very specific financial goals that I achieved.

Some fame, visibility goals that I achieved and then, you know, the intimacy with my wife, being able to have a best friend and I think that's very close to you and I are very aligned with the relationship and mine have evolved now into my five values. They all have to do with co creation, innovation, being present and relinquishing, never living in a space of fear. So on a positive level, being able to, to manifest on demand and always realizing that I'll never run out. And that's been an ongoing internal battle and a realization. So being able to stay in that state.

And the truth is achieving that level of fame, that was actually a gift I could have given myself at any time. It never came from the outside world. I had to award myself the same sense and the feeling. And that's why I know of very successful people, at least visibly, who are still stage chasers and stage addicts who are never satisfied, never satisfied and never happy. And this isn't about comparing, but now I see my old self inside of many other people. So I think it's going to be really interesting to go down this path a little bit. Further when we dive into episode three. So as we wrap this one up, any parting words?

Well, I think that.

Many wonderful things can come from wondering what it is that I most want to accomplish and achieve in my life. It only takes a few moments to wonder your way into a really magical life and it's absolutely free. Wonder is free for the taking.

Beautiful. So to wrap this one up, the summary of this episode beyond the Big Leap and Conscious Luck is make sure you show up for episode three when that's released. Next, head over to Apple itunes and please give us a rating. Some comments Gan, I read all of your comments and we'll also keep you up to date on some Big Leap experiences that we have planned in the future as well. And of course keep your eyes open for the book Conscious Luck. So between now and our next episode, thank you so much for listening and watching. This is Mike Koenigs. Thank you so much for being here with Gay Hendricks and myself.