Eliminating Your Deepest Fears with Shared Consciousness

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks welcoming you to this edition of the Big Leap podcast with me and Mike Koenigs. We've got a very exciting one today because we're looking at the whole issue of shared consciousness and how you can open up your consciousness in such a way that your fears, your deepest fears recede into the background and you have a greater ability to contact your creative essence. Big stuff. Join us.

All right. So Gay, you were telling me before we started rolling today that you've been working with a high value entrepreneur and as a coaching client who's getting ready to sell their business, but they're dealing with some of their deepest fears right now. And you've got a system and a process. You're going to guide us through leveraging shared consciousness to get through this. So can you talk a little bit about what's going on and what set this thing up in the first place?

Yes. Well, first, the whole thing.

The current situation is very similar to something I learned many years ago in a conversation with Ed McCracken, who was the founder of Silicon Graphics and big high tech company in the Silicon Valley area at that time. And he was telling me about a moment where they had a hundred. They were $100 million apart in a deal with a movie studio. And.

They kept running up against one problem after another. But there's something that we always say, especially in the relationship counseling world, is the problem is never what you think it is. Like, if you think it's a problem with money, it's not really. It's about something else. And if you think it's a problem with the kids, it's maybe, but it's something else. So you always have to look under whatever that something else is. And fortunately, Ed's wife was and is a yoga teacher and very used to meditation and everything like that. So I believe he got this counsel from her about how to deal with the stuckness. So they're all in a hotel room, big hotel room, and his guys are over here and other people from the movie studio are over there and they could not make the deal come together. And suddenly Ed realizes, oh, maybe the problem isn't what we think it is. And so Ed got them, all his people anyway, into a meditative state and they all sat together and said, okay, what's the real issue here? And suddenly they realized, oh.

These other guys are afraid we don't like them. We're from such different cultures that they're afraid that we sort of disapprove of their movie type culture and that kind of thing and do they like us? Was the real issue.

And so they had to go down through levels of. Well, there are some aspects of them we don't like. And then they kind of went down through that and they kept opening up to their different feelings about it until they got to a place of clarity, kind of that place of what I call pure consciousness. That's down underneath all your emotions and down underneath all your thoughts. There's just the basic pure consciousness. And so they focused. Instead of trying to argue with them on a numbers level or anything like that, they just went underneath the whole thing. And suddenly the deal came together. Suddenly the hundred million dollar thing just evaporated and they got the deal done within 20 minutes. That was the thing that really impressed me because they'd been beating their brains out for three days in these hotel rooms. And then when they finally got to that place of shared consciousness, of really understanding what they were feeling and what the other people were feeling, took 20 minutes to seal the deal. Now why that's up in my mind right now is because I've been coaching one of my people. I mentor four or five people a year and they're usually entrepreneurs in their 30s and 40s. And so I've got a great batch of them this year. They're doing some just amazing things. And so what happened?

The person that I'm working with, one thing I always tell people is once you start doing the practices that are in the big leap and in the genius zone, you speed up time. You go into a nonlinear time place where something that you think ought to take six months or a year can be done in two or three weeks. And what happened with this business sale, which provides a real insight into the process, is that he. We set the intention of selling this business within the next year. And so we kind of worked on it for a little while and suddenly, whoosh, out of the blue, a company comes along and offers him pretty decent chunk of money from it. And they're in the negotiations now. So what's happening though? As each place in the negotiations are hit, it awakens more and more old stuff that people have to process. And the reason I say the problem is never what you think it is, is that as I was working with this fellow, actually just a little while before we started recording, I had a time for a quick 10 minute quickie conversation with him and he was feeling very stuck again. It was the end of a long day and so he was tired. But what I had him do was once again go down through the layers of feeling in himself and just declare them and acknowledge them until he got to that place of clarity that's down at the bottom of all of our experience. The reason we don't get to that state of pure consciousness a lot of times is, Is because we're unwilling to face and feel those things that are in the way of that. And I always tell my students that in business, there's no problem that can't be solved with 10 minutes of sweaty conversation. But sometimes that sweaty conversation has to be with yourself inside, where you're. You're opening to things that you've been closed to before. You know, like in the example I just used of Ed McCracken suddenly realizing when his team realized, oh, these guys are afraid, we don't like them. And so let's just tune in and get to a place where we acknowledge the places we don't like them, and then acknowledge that we do like them. And that sealed the deal. So the practical value of that. Two things. One is, once you start doing that, it speeds up time because it eliminates barriers, sometimes that you didn't even know were barriers. And the second thing is, not only does it speed up time, but it eliminates problems that look like intractable recycling problems. It gets underneath them the moment you open up and realize that you both are the same consciousness, just different expressions of it.

So I had a lot of experiences while you're describing this Gay. And I have a couple ideas. One of them is something that when you talked about going through the layers and how when you do big leap exercises, you speed up time.

And I think one of the ways of speeding up and slowing down time. So in my mind, I've been doing Joe Dispenza meditations lately, just because I did a workshop. And one of the exercises he does to get you into a really cool space is by having you become aware of the infinite space, like between your ears and imagining your body or your being being timeless and in an infinite space and just experiencing space beyond just this flesh container. And I found that the more time I spend there, I become a lot more sensitive to my surroundings, sound, being present, and the more present I am. The sense, like our perception of time varies depending on how conscious we are. Right? And you can be a lot more effective with that time by being more conscious. And.

So I've noticed something that ties on to what you said. So when you talked about how the problem is never what you think it is, and going into your feelings and experiencing that pure consciousness, that's where you have that multiplier effect. And of course, if you're around other people, you get to collaborate on what's really going on. And so one thing that has happened a lot more frequently for me, and I don't remember who originally told me about this, but.

When I'm working on a really big deal with a really complex person who I regard as being.

Very accomplished, very conscious.

And I sometimes run into a roadblock, like something doesn't happen that I thought was going to happen.

I really pay attention to how I'm feeling. And I ask myself, is this their stuff or my stuff? And whoever the mentor was who really made me conscious of this is sometimes you can feel totally, totally whole, totally fine. And then you get into an environment, you're on someone once, you just feel off, and you're like, what is this? And it's not you, it's them. It's their discomfort. And.

And I found that the more I create, like, a safe container for myself, it eases.

The letting go of being attached to a result and also helping them. So I am able to stand up and ask better questions. And I found that relieving whatever that pressure is and knowing it's not mine has produced better results that are exponential, not linear in nature. So I'm curious what your take is on that and how you help coach someone in recognizing what is mine and what is someone else's.

Yes, that's a great question.

For starters, the way I say it is, in space, there's no time, and in time there's no space. Because if you think about opening up and owning the fullness of all the space inside yourself, that takes you out of time into a timeless place where things can be invented and come to fruition much more rapidly than they do when they're following the boundaries of normal time and space. And in time, there's no space in the following sense that let's say you're in a hurry, you're feeling a time pressure. Well, in that sense of time, you don't feel any space. You've come out of space and glommed on to something that's in the world of time. And so the way I looked at, I think that the space that you're talking about and Joe talks about is the same thing I'm calling pure consciousness, because it's a matrix that holds everything else in it.

And just like if you look outside yourself, there's a tremendous amount of space in the world. Like, if you look up into the nighttime sky, you can see lots of twinkling little things. But there's an immense amount of space that's between all of those things. And, you know, one of the most profound of all metaphysical saying is, as above, so below, in the sense that everything is connected and everything is made the same basic way. And so if you think of looking outside yourself at all that space and then transfer that looking in yourself, we've all got the same amount of space in us. In fact, we're mostly space, although it doesn't actually feel that way at the time because we've got lots of other things in there too, that we give our attention to. But what it sounds like you're learning to do in that meditation, which I think is fantastic, is you're expanding beyond and deeper than your spirit, your physical body, and your emotional body and your energy body. There are only three things going on. There's mass, energy in space, in this universe. And most of us get locked into the mass of things, our bodies and other people and materiality. That's mass. To get underneath that and feel the energy and. And then to get underneath that and feel the space. That's a fantastic new place to come from because it's much easier to come at life from a sense of spaciousness, because you don't feel so compelled and you don't feel at the effect of things. Because if you're experiencing that type of inner space, you also have let go to the extent that you're not trying to control things that are outside your control. That's a beautiful, elegant place to go through the world from.

Okay, that makes a ton of sense. So when.

Can you help bridge the process, then, between what you Learned with Ed McCracken and then this big client, and where is he experiencing the biggest breakthroughs? What is he learning as you go through the.

Process?

Yes, well, where he got stuck recently, in our most recent call.

He got stuck when the numbers guy kept pushing him for more and more and more details on the numbers. And he's got a numbers guy on the team, but he's not the. You know, he's a visionary. And so I think when I look at the situation from a distance, I think the CFO that's badgering him for numbers and more details is in there partly to see if he can expose other aspects of due diligence that needs to be done. You know, how quickly do these people get pissed off and what do they do when they get pissed off and how do they respond? Because there's going to be a year or two after they buy the company where they're all going to need to work together for a while. And so that's the reason I say the problem is never what you think it is, because you think the problem is, oh, man, I got to bust my buns to get all these numbers in. And I've got to hire on another person to go down into the accounting and dig up this and that and the other thing when that may not be the problem at all. The problem may not be providing more numbers that you don't want to provide. Maybe it's backing off from there and actually going down through the layers of his own emotion first. So, like, during our conversation today, I was saying, okay, tune into your body where you feel anger, okay? And then we'd go a little further. Tune into where you feel sad, tune into where you feel scared. That's where the big act. Excuse me, that's where the big action is, often is in the zone of fear. Because fear actually has a lot to do with the other emotions. Because when you're angry at somebody, you're also scared about something. And when you're in grief or sad about something, you're also scared about something. And it happens that fear is further down in your body. It's down in your midsection, down in your belly, down in that same place where you also feel hunger pangs. And that's why so many of us overeat when we're scared, rather than dealing with the issue itself. What I'm getting at, though, is we're kind of a parfait of different emotions. And I took this guy down through them in a quick, sort of a guided meditation sense. But what the payoff of that is is once he acknowledged all of those feelings, there's that big open space. Because the open, open space is there underneath and behind and beyond all of our different emotions. It's just there. And once you can open up and identify with that place rather than identifying with the emotions, you're in a much better place to steer yourself, because you're not hooked into old things that were meant for other times and other places, things you're scared about, things you're sad about, etc. So that's, you know.

Space, inner space particularly, has tremendous cash value in the sense that once you can open up to that space, things can rearrange themselves on the surface, so that problems that looked intractable an hour ago now can resolve themselves quickly.

Okay, I had a big aha here. And something that I used to do, and I forgot to do it, and I used to create A container. So if you think of the human body, the human soul, your energy center is a big vessel. And that thing can be filled up. It can be. And it's usually split at any given time with chaos and opportunity. But you can't have opportunity where there's chaos. And when I started working with and coaching people, I'd ask them about all the.

Chaos in their lives, what frustrates them, bothers them, what holds them back. And I'd make a big list of it. And then I'd say, what are all the opportunities that are going on inside your life right now that you wish you could take advantage of, but you can't or are happening? And my goal is, as I show them the balance of those. And the whole idea is, how many opportunities do you think you could take advantage of if this chaos was gone? And it's really easy for them to see it right away. And it also leads to a deeper conversation of things they might not be noticing that are in their way. So I'll tell you a little story about something that's very relevant to this whole thing that happened recently. And I'm working with a CEO of a company right now, and he overheard me telling a story about how several years ago, I just reached this point point where my soul hurt. I had outgrown who I was, what I did, why I did it, who I did it for. And I was just in an immense amount of pain, and everything should be fine. But ultimately, that's what really drove me to sell everything, restart, do a different business altogether. And I told him that my soul hurt, and he actually started to cry, and he goes, that's exactly where I am right now.

I just got to quit doing what I'm doing. It's literally killing me. And he went on, and the story went deeper and deeper and deeper than that.

When I started asking him questions, this is a guy who's very successful. He has all the money he ever needs to take care of him and his family. So he's. He's hit that brass ring, and he's still struggling inside of the same trauma from his childhood, the same framing, the same mental framework, which is, if I don't do this, this will happen. And it's this constant loop. And he hasn't just ever said to himself, and I looked to him, and I said, when is the last time you honestly could tell yourself, I won, I won the game, I hit the finish line, everything's okay. Congratulate yourself for that, and realize you are now playing a completely different Game. He broke down again. He started crying. He's like, it's never happened. I've never had anyone say that to me. I've never said it to myself, and I'd never seen it before. And so I think a big part of eliminating your deepest fears.

Is asking yourself, am I still playing the same trauma record over and over again? Because I know for me, what drove me for so long was, I'm not enough. I'm going to run out. I don't have enough. And it still is a nagging little tiger that I have to recognize. It's not like it's gone. It's just at least I see it when it rears its head. And I'm like, I just know everything's going to be fine.

And I remember hearing many, many years ago about billionaires who are terrified they're going to run out, not have enough. And I'm like, how in the hell could you possibly be that way? Don't you see what's in your bank account? But it's just like, that's what drove them to get to where they were and thank God for who they were. But now that's the demon that doesn't allow him to ever feel any relief. So again, I want to turn to you and ask, talk about that.

Just brought up that memory of working with a billionaire couple where he was always on her case. When she would buy the organic peanut butter rather than the $3.79 kind from the supermarket, you know, she'd buy the $7 one from the health food store, the organic one.

And also.

She liked to buy the super upscale things like really good toilet tissue and that kind of thing. And his point of view was, you know, the 97 cent brand is just as good, you know, given what you're doing with it, you know. But anyway, I remember this moment of had him get out his calculator and we figured out that he could buy lifetime supply of toilet paper for every human on earth.

Same thing with the peanut butter. That he could buy a jar of peanut butter for everybody and still have plenty of change left over. So, anyway, that's a good example of the problem isn't what you think it is. It's not peanut butter, it's not toilet paper. It's control. And in that particular case, a lot of people think they have gotten to where they have gotten by massive amounts of control and keeping the lid on things and squeezing things tight. And often that way of getting places can get you up to your 30s, maybe, maybe into your 40s but after a while, life does not like that approach. And I always say the personality that gets you from 0 to 40 is very different from the one that gets you from 40 to 80, because oftentimes the thing that got you to 40 is the same thing that's going to give you a heart attack unless you find somebody to modify it. And I appreciate you the way you kind of got the message and did something about it and reinvented your life. But I can tell you I've had some very sad conversations in here by people that came here and I basically told them and gave them a new script to follow.

That was going to take them away from having their heart attack and that kind of thing. But they didn't follow it. You know, they went ahead and had the heart attack. Because I guess some people need to really bottom out before they get the message. Because I've had people come back here and say, wow, I wish I had done this 10 years ago like you told me to do, rather than doing it now after I beat cancer, after I had the heart attack. I appreciate the fact that you got the message very early and did something about it.

Well, I don't know if I've told you this before, but, you know, I'm 56, so you've got a couple years on me. But I look at it, I'm like, God, why did it take so damn long?

So it's all relative, but I think that's the distinction between comparing our progress from where we were a year or five or 10 years ago and celebrating that versus having an unattainable ideal that we never reach and comparing. Comparing to what? And if it's a moving target and you never get to the horizon line.

That is a bad place to be in. And I think it's where.

All high performers are, but it's also.

What makes us miserable. And just one little add on to that gay that I've noticed, and it scares me a little. But when I can, and I do this all the time, I'm just like in a deep state of gratitude. And I practice. Like, I've been riding my electric bike a lot lately. Every weekend I go out for like 40 to 60 miles. So I just get on the bike and I ride around Mission Bay, all the bays in San Diego, the boardwalks. And I'm around people and just seeing the beauty and smelling the smells and it's fresh coffee and food and the sounds and kids playing on the beach. And then I go downtown. I mean, all over the place. I can Cover a lot of the city and.

All I do is rest into how perfect everything is. And I don't need anything else. And that has been the best medicine for not needing to like for a long time. I compare myself and I say, why aren't I writing another book right now? Why aren't I? Why aren't I? And I was gotten into this loop of everything I need to do and I realized.

I don't need more stuff. I don't need to accumulate this treadmill. And I watched it now because I've been around friends and I know you have too, of people who work, work, work and then they die. And they were working for the time they could have enough and finally retire in the do I have enough conversation. And instead of saying, holy cow, I won the game, I can't compare myself to the old programming. And that is a hard loop to get out of. And, and again, I want to ask you if you were guiding a high performer through the. Some sort of a thing that would break that loop and shatter the illusion.

Which I think is ultimately, it's fear driven, it's trauma driven. That's at least been my, my experience is your something happened that caused that to make you a high performer in the first place. At least that's my experience. A lot of high performers just aren't aware of the circuitry. And I'm just curious, in your experience, how often is that? If you had to guess on a percentage basis. And how do you break that frame? How do you break that loop and create a conscious.

Interrupt?

Yes. In solving any problem like that, any life problem, the first issue is usually dealing with commitment. And I, I look at commitment in two ways. There are conscious commitments where you say, okay, I want to create $100 million in revenue this year. And then there are unconscious commitments that people have that go back into childhood. Like a commitment to prove to my father that I'm not really a screw up. That's an unconscious commitment that gets in a lot of people's ways. Or another unconscious commitment is to.

Prove to the world that I'm okay, that I fundamentally deserve to be here. But you know, none of us have to prove that. It's actually a non issue. But somebody grabs onto that when they're a kid and uses that as a motivational force. One thing that I end up explaining a lot that is really important is that.

Fear comes in four flavors. And some people when they get scared, fight, some people when they get scared, flee, they pull back. Some people faint in the sense of kind of getting all spaced out and not being able to figure out what to do. And some freeze, like, you know, they get anxious and can't figure out what to do. So we call them the four Fs here. Fight, flee, freeze and faint. If you look at which one of those you tend to do in modern life, most of us don't, we just get a little spaced out and go watch an old episode of Star Trek. You know, that's a version of kind of spacing out in front of the tv, something like that. So I help people identify what one of the four Fs they're actually producing. And that's very helpful because when people realize that fighting is just an expression of fear, and then you get down and talk about what am I afraid of? And what is the other person really afraid of, that gets you down into a useful conversation because you're not then having a conversation that's trying to drown out or take the attention away from the fear. But the conversations I have with people take them further down, down, down into themselves until they find that genius.

Their real G spot, their genius spot that can help you learn how to do everything that you do from a space of love and from a space of contribution. That's, to me, the real genius zone is when you're doing what you love to do and doing what makes the biggest contribution to other people. And often, though, that brings up the biggest fears because it triggers old fears of am I worthy or not, or do I have what it takes? Do I have a genius in me? You know, I have people ask me that all the time. And the answer is, yeah, but you got to go looking for it. You got to be open to it. You got to be open to learning. My old mentor Jack Downing said that the mistake that most people make is thinking there is one faucet called pleasure in another faucet called pain. And you try to keep the pain off and the pleasure on. And he said it doesn't work that way at all. He said there's only one faucet, and it's called awareness. And the more you open your awareness, sometimes this stuff is positive and sometimes it's negative. But it's the being open to the whole thing that makes it possible to transcend all of those old emotions and get into that space of pure consciousness from which we real powerful decisions can happen. And the other advantage of, as I've said, being from that space is that things don't have to take time because they don't come from a timeless place. So they can be speeded up enormously. Like my guy that suddenly, within a couple of months, selling a business that he thought was going to take him a year.

That's really interesting. And I have an idea that I'd like to explore in another.

Episode. But you reminded me of it when you were describing things about how things don't have to take time. They come from a timeless place. And one of the things that I contemplate a lot, I imagine a lot, is when I experience what I consider pure creative genius. And one example of that is the Beatles. I think the Beatles music was.

Some of the greatest creative genius this planet has ever seen or witnessed. Unique and progressive and so differentiated. And I believe that humanity has a mechanism of being able to transcend time and space and access a universal consciousness of.

Pure creativity and pull from it. And music is one of those, because music follows.

A pattern, a universal rhythm that we observe. We can see in fractals. And when you see psychedelic art, for example, you really see the patterns of the universe. And when you experience it, you certainly do. And being able to enter the deepest realms that transcend our ego, our sense of self, and then we're able to bring it back. And I think great artists are able to dive into that pure consciousness and bring back structured stuff which could be art and language and poetry and architecture. I mean, all these things, they all come from.

A place of pure universal consciousness, love and pattern. Right. And so.

Again, we don't have to go into that right now. But I think, like, our deepest fears are earthly in nature. Again, I think they're traumatic, and they get instilled on us, whether it's epigenetic and going back generational, or if it's something that happened due to our environment or conditioning or whatever.

But then at another time, I'd love to explore this notion of universal creative consciousness. But just to satisfy that little nugget, what would you say about that very notion of being able to transcend and be able to dip in? And again, this would be a fun conversation to talk about where your greatest creative seeds have come from. But can you maybe tease us a little bit with that?

Yes. Well, I have a lot of thoughts about that, and I'll share. One main one is that I think that the reason I love meditation so much and things that take us inward, you know, long walks in nature and things like that, is because the creative process thrives on deep cycles of rest and expression, rest and expression. And a lot of us don't go all the way with either one. Of those, we don't go all the way with our full expression, and we don't go all the way to let ourselves deeply rest, because we've got all this noise and chaos we're focusing on in our minds. But one thing I've learned in meditation is to regard life kind of like breathing, in the sense that there's an in breath where you let things come in, and then there's an out breath where you let things go out. And if you can let things in all the way, like rest deeply, let other people in deeply, let yourself be intimate with other people deeply, if you can go inward, then that gives you a greater ability to go outward into the full expression of your genius, your full potential. And so learning how to see life and each actually each moment as a cycle of expression and rest. Expression or rest, that's a very useful thing to do because it takes you out of the mindset of.

Rush, rush, rush, rush, work, work, work, work. Not quite good enough rest. Not quite good enough rest, Rush, rush, rush, rush. You know, kind of living in that intermediary zone where you really don't let go fully enough to let go of things, to have that creative rebirth that everybody needs. And I think we all need it on a daily basis, really. And so I know we're going to be talking other times about meditation and ways to get there. But another payoff I want to talk about on a future conversation is the effect of that on business and the effect of pure consciousness on the ability to practically get things done in collaboration with other people. And so let's kick that one around someday soon.

I agree, and I will just flat out say that is and will be our next episode, which is the art of collaborative experiences and how we specifically create collaborative experiences that have exponential results. So that is in an episode coming up. So with that, what do you say we wrap this baby up?

Yeah. Well, there's lots of stuff to think about here. And I'm inspired to quote my favorite American poet, Walt Whitman, from the 19th century, when he said, I am large and contain multitudes. So let's just think of ourselves as very, very large, with a large amount of multitudes and especially an immense amount of space inside us.

Fantastic. And I think this is a great place to put in a little mini commercial, which is if you're in a position right now where you want to eliminate your deepest fears and access shared consciousness and get to whatever your next version of yourself is, Gay and I are putting together something we call the Big Leap experience, and you can Learn more about that by visiting bigleappodcast.com apply or there's a button right on the website. Or you can also text the letters BL to 858-434-5316. We're going to be putting that together. It's a great place to collaborate with us and also meet people that you want to collaborate and connect with. An extended family you get to choose versus one you're born into. I like to look at it like that. That's really one of the great things is when you find and connect with like minds who are on the same path. They have the same values as you. Magic happens. And Gay and I are going to lead you first of all to introduce you to some remarkable people, but also go through some processes that help you personally, professionally, emotionally, spiritually and take you on an adventure that you will never regret going on. So with that, Gay, anything else you want to finish up with?

Let's just take a moment to celebrate exactly how far we've come and give yourself a big appreciation out there in the world for what you've accomplished already and how you've refined your consciousness and open up your learning apertures wide open to take yourself to the next level.

Right. Well, thanks for joining us. Gay and I really appreciate it. And of course, we always appreciate it if you forward this to someone you think would benefit from it and give us a like and a comment on Apple, itunes or wherever you are consuming this material. So we'll see you in a episode very soon. Bye bye.

Thanks a lot, everybody.