EP#17 -- Getting Unstuck

Hey, this is Mike Koenigs, and I'm here today with Gay Hendricks, and this is the Big Leap podcast. We're going to be talking today about getting unstuck, getting your mind unstuck, getting a spouse or a partner unstuck with you, but also learning about gays. Two personality types that are really, really fascinating. What else? Gay?

Well, I really want to have people hear the part about personality one and personality two, because it can really save you a lot of pain knowing what your elements of both personalities are like and how those show up in relationships. So, yeah, let's make sure everybody brings a notepad, too, because you're going to want to take some notes on this one. It's got a lot of juicy stuff in it.

All right. All that and more in this episode of the Big Leap with Gay Hendricks and Mike Koenigs.

Hello, this is Mike Koenigs. Welcome to the Big Leap with Gay Hendricks. Hi, Gay.

Hey, Mike. It's really great to be with you again. I'm so excited about this one because we're talking about something that every single human being that is out there in the business world or in the relationship world really needs to know about getting unstuck.

And we both have had our trials and tribulations. We still do. It's part of the human experience. But the question is what kind of resources and tools need get you unstuck all the time? You've got tons of experience, and I had a recent experience that definitely helped unstuck my brain, unstick it. So let's talk a little bit about what it is and some of the techniques that you've been using to get unstuck. I'll share some of mine. And you have one of your big ideas, which is personality one and personality two. So you want to just explain what that is just to get going?

Yes.

It's okay to get stuck. Everybody gets stuck from now and then, and the question is how long you stay stuck. What I've found, after working with I don't know how many people now for 40 or 50 years, thousands, is that some of us are actually committed to staying stuck. We're unconsciously committed to staying stuck. And so I want to show even how you can move through that, but I've had to work a lot with people that really had a vested interest in keeping themselves unenlightened. And so I want to begin by talking a little bit about personality number one and personality number two. Once you understand that, it makes it a little easier to kind of forgive yourself for getting Stuck. When we come into this world.

For the first six months or so, the only thing we have to do really is to exude being. You know, we eat, we poop, we pee, and usually what happens is we have some people around us that when we smile at them, they smile back, or they smile at us and we smile back. So the whole intent of the first six months or so of life is to make friends, to bond, to get close to another human being, usually your mother, because that's where your doing a lot of your dining. And so the act of getting close to another person is what those first six months of life are all about. If you look into the textbooks, what they say is in the second six months of life you start individuating. So the first six months is for union. And then the second six months you begin to crawl. You can crawl away from your mother or father, you can crawl into another room and then crawl back to home base. And so it's about exploration. And so you have these two things called union and individuation that are going to go on throughout your life. Now some of us are more inclined to be union. We like to hug, we like to get close to other people. And then some of us are bigger in individuation.

We don't like to be hugged too much, we like to spend a lot of time by ourselves. Some people really over calibrate so they just don't have any close union based relationships. But most of us work out a combination of union and individuation. And so personality number one is largely based on what can I do to get recognition here? What can I do to get positive input? And for most of us in the first six months of life, we smile, learn to smile at people and we giggle when they tickle us and do all of the things that makes people like us in the first six. Because that's the intent of personality number one. It's the outgoing part of us. It's the part of us that reaches out for positive recognition. Now what happens though with personality two is inevitably there's a failure of personality number one. You smile at your daddy when he comes home from work, but that particular day he's had three martinis and he growls at you and swats you across the rear. So suddenly one day a failure to please. And what happens then is the intent shifts. Instead of an intention to be outgoing and connect in a positive way, you make a decision down in there that says, well, this is not a safe place for me. I have to be careful about personality number one. I need a personality number two to protect me.

And that becomes our big problematic thing, because what happens then throughout life is depending on the quality of our number one personality and the quality of our number two personality. You can have a pretty smooth ride through life if your personality number two hasn't got too many problems associated with it. But a lot of the problems in personality two are things like.

Creating a hassle for somebody, Being a problem kid, getting sick, having accidents. They're all ways of protecting ourselves from losing. So the intention of personality number one is, what do I need to do to win here to get positive recognition? But when that fails, personality two kicks in, and it has a very different intention, which was, how can I avoid pain? How can I avoid losing? So it's about avoiding losing, avoiding pain, not about reaching out for positive connection. And so what happens when we get stuck is that personality number two gets into the picture and gets a grip on us, and then we don't know how to get out of that grip. So this show is dedicated to how to get out of the grip of personality number two and get back into the flow of personality number one again.

Okay, so I've got a couple questions. One of them is.

So people who are stuck a lot more have more of a dominant personality 2 than a. Than a personality number one. Is that fair to assume?

Yes. And what happens is often personality number two gets more attention than personality number one. I'll give you an example. I was in a store, we were doing some grocery shopping, and there was a mom pushing a cart around with a little boy who was maybe 18 months to 2 years old. And we happened to be on the same aisle, and he wanted some cereal, some flashy breakfast cereal.

Can I have that? And his mom didn't pay any attention to that. She just kept on pushing. And then he started a louder, more aggressive, I want cereal. I want that cereal. I want those cocoa puffs or whatever. And she started getting a little irritated at that point. And then suddenly he let out with a corker of, you know. And then she reached over and grabbed the cereal box off the shelf and gave it to him. Okay, so you can imagine now what's going to get locked in.

The rotten animal gets fed. Yeah.

Personality number one. He realized, well, that didn't work. I reached out, and then it didn't work. And then I used personality number two, and I got my way. So that's a kind of a simple example of it. But in one way or the other, what happens? Like, I remember my Very first client I ever had when I moved to Colorado and became. I went to Colorado in 1974 to become a professor in the counseling psychology department there at the University of Colorado. And we also were encouraged to have a private practice one day a week. And I remember the very first client that came in was someone who had gotten stuck in a whole marriage situation where she wanted to move forward in the marriage to start doing more adventurous things like going to therapy and stuff like that. But her husband was one of these guys, therapies for sissies.

And.

We probably all met a few like that. I know I did in my clinical practice.

But. So what happened was she had gotten colossally stuck. Because the more he dug in, the more it engaged her personality number two, which was a kind of.

Dental drill of criticism that she would apply to him. And of course, the more she would do that, the more stuck he would get. So, of course he wouldn't come over to see me. But she came over, and she was so stuck. It was almost like she'd been in this frustration for so long that she seemed almost ready to pop or get depressed. And.

What saved the day, though, were actually things that I had learned in my own personal transformation. And I simply applied the following idea to her, which is the first thing we have to do before we can get unstuck and is to love and accept ourselves for how stuck we are. To just lovingly accept ourselves for what the current situation is. Because what happens is we forget to do that. And then we start doing all sorts of other things and forget that what we really need to do is just to be in a loving space with ourself first. Before we can be in that loving space with another person.

I can remember this exciting time with her where.

I simply had her sit there and breathe and be with that part of herself that was so stuck. And as we breathed our way into it and experienced our way into it, she told me about things she was angry about. But what often happens is when you're angry, what you're really.

Is scared. In other words, underneath.

Anger, exclamation or blow up is something that you're actually scared about in personality number one. And then personality number two kicks in and expresses it in the form of abuse or anger or some kind of.

Outlashing kind of thing. And so.

I saw this change come over her face. Instead of trying to be somewhere else, she simply loved herself for being where she was. And I had found that to be such an incredibly important part of my own life that I spent a Lot of my early life kind of out in front of the moment, you know, trying to be something different or trying to figure out how to be something different than what I was. But it wasn't until I came back in here and really loved and honored and accepted myself for who I really was that I began to actually make some big, powerful changes in my life. And I saw a miniature representative of that in this first session. Because what happened, she came in looking very stuck and unhappy. But after 15 or 20 minutes of encouraging her to feel her way down into and accept different layers of herself, her anger, her grief, her sadness or confusion, what happened was then immediately she started seeing some solutions that bubbled up spontaneously. So I didn't have to come in with any fancy solutions that I thought of because it invoked her creativity. The act of being with her own pain and acknowledging her stuckness opened up a direct dialogue with some creative part of herself that began to bubble up once she was able to love herself for being where she was. So what that left me, Mike, was really an unshakable conviction that there is a tremendous power in simple loving acceptance. It opens up the moment we can lovingly accept something about ourselves or another person. The glue begins to dissolve and it's a direct entry point to a new creative way of being.

That's.

I've got a couple observations and something I've recognized in my own getting unseen stuck, which.

I've gone through a. A slightly different process. So it first started not from loving myself or accepting myself, but first of all recognizing the demon when it got and it came in and it started taking control. So I'll give you a.

Did you do that by. Did you do that by a body cue or what is it that you noticed?

It was when I'd lose love, I'd lose connection. So I'll give you a real life example and I've done a lot of deep work on this. But I've had a tendency in the past.

To.

Be a provocateur or be a funny guy or attention getting in an uncomfortable situation. So I'd get my love by getting attention. Now this stemmed from behavior that I learned from my own dad, who is very talented entertainer, but he'd also say way inappropriate things at way inappropriate times and do inappropriate stuff. And because he was so charming, he'd get away with it. So I learned how to charm my way even when I do something just ridiculously stupid.

And.

But there's always going to be a certain percentage of an. Of a group or an audience who Won't say anything, but are like, I'm never going to let this guy near anything, you know, near me. Right? So. And there's some people who'll laugh and think it's funny as hell. And they're like, they love the outlandishness or the craziness. And other people are like, that is dangerous behavior. So I think where it came from is my wife Vivian, when she'd observe it, she would have a shame response and she's like, don't ever do that again. But I would dance on the edge, you know, some it'd be somewhere between being funny and almost shaming, but not quite, you know. And again, I wasn't even conscious of it. It was like this adaptive need. And finally she had enough conversations or I talked to someone. I also started talking to an energy worker, really.

Helped me with it. And. And it came down to feeling when that sense was bubbling up inside me where I knew I was gonna act out and recognizing it. And it's like, oh, I recognize that old friend who, who's done damage. And I'd say, I see you. I know you're there, and I'm going to just set you aside for now and not react or respond. So I wouldn't love it necessarily. I just would acknowledge it.

And I think that I'll call it the demon, because that's what I would call it. I'd call it one of my demons. I would say, hi, demon, I see you there. I recognize you. I'm just not going to give you power today. Now, I didn't go so far as to say, I love you for the gifts you've given me. Because during the crazy times, I also know that that little demon's been responsible for my ability to improv and solve problems and also.

Help people when they're in a very tough emotional states. You know, I could break their state very rapidly by introducing some inappropriate humor, for example, or something that would be outlandish enough where no one else would have thought of it or done it.

And I think that's.

At least a technique I found, which is just learning how to observe the demon. But what it took was recognizing the feeling that it was about to emerge. It's sort of like giving birth to something undesirable, you know.

So the. The second version of this is something I notice in my own marriage, for example, when you were talking about the marriage example, where.

As we all become sensitive to our partner's frailties and we know when not to activate them. And I think it was you who told me once that you've made a point to love all the time or be in love all the time and to feel good all the time. So you've got variations of that. And I believe it was you who just said, I just simply never do anything that could ever harm my partner to Katie that would be insensitive or otherwise. And I think Arielle Ford has said something along those lines. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. Katie and I have been together 40 years, so we've had quite a long time to work out a lot of patterns. So. But in the first few years of our marriage, we used to criticize each other a lot. But now in the last 20 years of our marriage, neither one of us have said anything critical to the other person in 20 years. I happen to know that because we moved into this house 20 years ago and we sometimes joke that nobody's ever said a harsh word to anybody in our house, which I want to keep it that way. And what allowed us to make that move was a lot of kind of studying of our patterns. And what you're talking about, different patterns of, of alienating each other and that kind of thing. And where we got to is a sensitivity that if there's any kind of break in the flow of connection between us, we don't put it off, we sit down and talk about it. And usually takes 10 minutes at the most if you catch it in time. You know, I always say that you create breakthroughs in relationships 10 seconds at a time. There's something you need to say and you don't say it. And then a whole bunch of karma comes out of that. You know, you really need to make an important 10 second communication. Like, honey, I just need to let you know I had a one night stand with somebody two weeks ago. You know, that's a very difficult thing to.

Yeah, I don't know if that's. That'd be a 10 second bomb. That'd take longer than 10 minutes to work out.

Is 10 seconds. Because if you don't have that 10 seconds, then a lot of bad karma happens out of that. But I've actually, in the course of working with, I think about 4,500 couples now, I've seen lots of things, but one of the most astonishing things was hearing a 10 second communication between a couple which was, I need to let you know that I had sex with your maid of honor two hours before our wedding. Boom. You know, things like that are healing, but it's the fallout from them that needs to be worked with. And massaged so but you know, really it depends on willingness because even in that situation, both of them were willing to work it out. And so they're still happily married, even though it had been 12 years that that secret had sat inside their relationship creating all sorts of swirls all the time. The moment that truth was outed, whoosh, a whole new relationship began. So now they've had 20 years since that original stuck. So that's a great thing. And so I'm a big believer in catching things as quickly as possible. To do that, you have to become sensitive enough to know when you're not feeling that flow of love toward yourself or toward another person. And that's why I asked you earlier if it was a body cue. Because for me, what always cues me into it is a kind of an off center feeling inside where I'm not feeling loving toward myself or anybody else else. It's just kind of a weird feeling like I'm suddenly out of alignment with myself. In fact, that's what it is. It's a feeling of being out of alignment versus feeling a flow that's going on all the time. Like as we're speaking right now, what I pay attention to is I have this streaming flow of pleasant positive energy kind of going up and down my body. And I draw on that to know what to say. But if I'm saying something that's not in harmony, not in alignment with that, that feeling goes away just like that. That's the reason I know. Okay. Oh, I see. I've gotten too much into the theoretical. I need to get back into the practical. You know, so there's these little moments of life where you have to make these little tiny moments of correction. Their individual signal system for how you know you're stuck is something that you need to identify inside yourself and it's a wavelength. And one of the things we're going to be working on a lot in the big leap year is how to find and feel that wavelength and then connect up with the wavelength of other people so that you can communicate with them. And also you find out who your magic partners are as you proceed through life. I don't know if you ever remember reading the books of Kurt Vonnegut. Did you ever read any of his back in college or anything?

I've read all of Vonnegut's stuff. He's one of my favorite authors of all time. Breakfast Champions. One of the funniest. Venus on the Half Shell and, and, and, and, and. Oh my God. Yeah. Never laughed so hard from any other writer ever than him.

I love, I loved him very much too. And I, at the moment I think it was in either Cat's Cradle or I can't remember which one it was in, but it was a concept that there are these entities of people that you kind of move through life with and you may not even meet all of them, but there are certain people that are on your wavelength, some of whom you connect up with and some are just out there doing their own thing, but you don't connect up with them in person. But, but I see our big leap year as getting on that frequency, that wavelength that puts you in touch with the most beautiful elements of yourself and the most beautiful, creative, productive elements of other people. And to me, to have a year long voyage of that, I am so incredibly excited about that because we go beyond ideas, we go beyond concept and content to what I think of as the pure vibration of creativity. And I've done a lot to map out that territory and I know you have too. And what excites me is the possibility of getting a whole bunch of people in that same wavelength and finding out what kind of miracles we can perform for ourselves and for the world in general.

I am all over that. So as you've been talking, I'm going to go back a little bit. First of all, I'm excited about this because I think what many people want and need is will you just give me a system to help me get along better with my spouse, my significant other, with my team, communicate more effectively and be able to keep me centered in that place like what you talked about. And as you described it, it.

One of the things I've been practicing and I'll even go back to our previous episode, we did our plant medicine episode. The moment of the deepest connection I've ever experienced in my life as a human being was during that DMT experience. That pure love disillusion of self. It was beautiful and not scary at all. And prior to that experience, what I look for, like when I'm in feeling really intimate and connected with either Vivian or my son or someone I really care about, even a client when I'm doing work is I'm like, am I in my heart? Am I at my very best right now? Is my body aligned? You talked about feeling centered.

And being able to recognize when something's just off a little bit, when it just doesn't feel like you're right, right in the money.

Right.

And I love the idea of making that one of our, our focal points in the big leap year, being able to be in and stay in that. So this is just a, a shameless plug. If this is something you're really, really interested in doing, make sure you head over and apply because Gay and I are very specific about who we're going to allow in the big Leap year program. That's an experience to spend a year with us in your own transformation, personally and professionally. And you can also text us to get more information. You just text the letters BL to 858-434-5316. That's a way to actually have a text conversation with us. So again, or you can go to bigleappodcast.com and just click the apply button. So I'm going to add one more thing here, Gay.

And it just happened this morning, in fact. So I've been married now almost 20 years, half as long as you. And I was reflecting to Vivian today, I just told her how much I loved her. And she said, why? And I said it's because we've invested so much time understanding each other, deeply, caring about each other and being able to negotiate our own traumas and frailties always in a positive way. Like we do not argue, we don't fight, we don't raise our voices.

To each other. Although this morning I made a mistake.

And I knew it when I did it and I recovered from it rapidly. But I criticized her and here's what it was. So I have this thing about turning off the lights in the house. I just hate it when the lights are on and I'm constantly turning off the lights and Vivian doesn't notice the fact she just doesn't turn them off. And I'm like, I literally walk around the house turning them off all the time. So what I did finally is I invested in lights that turn themselves off automatically. I've got wifi light switches now and sensor based ones. So now it's really I that way I'm not going to be angry or frustrated about it and I'm not going to be blamey, but.

And I got them and the problem was they hadn't been programmed yet, so they were automatically turning on in the middle of the night or when we'd walk to the bathroom, they'd turn on because it had a light switch and I had to have them set up so they, they only turn themselves off. They don't auto turn on depending on where they are in the house. And we also had a cat here which would walk around and of course they'd turn on in the middle of the night. And you'd see the light come out from underneath the door. It was just like, damn it, you know? And I had a stacked frustration, which is we have a house manager. And I had explicitly said, get them installed and program them. Here's what I want done. And he avoided getting them programmed. And he doesn't know the meaning of what done Done done means, right? An employee does. Done Done done is what makes the difference. Done done done is when you don't think about it anymore, it's really done. So I was like, just pissed off this morning, still carrying around that, that, that anger energy. And we were sitting down and she turned to me and said, well, why did you do this in the first place? And my flip reaction was, because you never turn off the lights. And she goes, oh, I never turn off the lights. So she's got a story about how I don't turn off the lights or how I don't. Oh, I don't put my dishes in the dishwasher. So it activated this old chisel between us. And there's two things about my wife. One is she does not like to be blamed or fault found or shamed. And her shame gets activated. You know, if she's like, she can. She forgets her stuff everywhere she goes too. Like, you know, she'll leave her sunglasses behind, her purse. She has to go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, you know, that kind of stuff.

And I don't let it bother me anymore. Now I just find I'll be like, I'll always have something with me to pacify the time while she goes back and forth. And I'm like, it's just a thing. It doesn't have anything to do with me. It's nothing I can fix. It's just the way she's wired. And it's okay. But it took me a long time to get to the point where I was in a place of acceptance for the frailties.

Well, yeah, I think it does. And also what happens is.

Like in that kind of a situation, at a certain point you have to ask yourself, why would a light cop type person.

Create a mate who's not a light.

Who is the exact opposite from a light cop who doesn't see the light.

Oh, that's interesting. Say that again. And what's your interpretation of that?

Okay, well, first of all, I have to say that I too am a light cop. I'm the guy in my house that goes around turning off the light. Now, my wife Katie has a slightly different story because she would probably Say that it's because we have solar, that I shouldn't be so concerned about turning off the lights. It doesn't really matter, but sort of it does matter.

Like last month, and unless you have a battery system. Yeah. And in California. And, and, And. No, I understand that argument. I will say I don't buy it either, so keep going.

Okay.

I also, one time.

You remember the comedian George Carlin, one of my favorite.

Human beings of all time, one of the greatest.

Well, you. You'll be happy to know, in his private life, he was an extreme light cop. He would go around the house turning off. He called himself Electric Light Guy. That was his Persona in his household. You know, he was Electric Light Guy.

So you and I are in good company.

Oh, that's great. I should. You know what? I just thought of a good anchor to help this. It'd be like, get a picture of George Carlin, put it next to every light switch, and it's Electric Light Guy says, remember, remember, remember, or something like that. I wouldn't be obvious about it. It would just be an anchor. Keep going, please. I'm enjoying this.

Okay, good. So what I'm getting at is why would you, as an electric light guy, a light cop, manifest a partner in your life who's extreme in the other direction, that doesn't care about that?

And so that's what I'm asking you. What could you possibly learn from that? What's the larger thing you got into this relationship for?

Well, I think there's an old thing about the splinter in your eye compared to the log in yours. It's a Jesus Christ parable about something about the speck in your eye and the log in yours, Something like that. I think one of them that I've really learned in this relationship, not specifically to light switches, is just how every time I'm about to open up my mouth with the faintest criticism is I just think about all of the flaws, my own personal flaws that I have, that I know she's well aware of and that she's sensitive to. And that is an anchor to just shut my damn mouth.

From a lesson perspective.

The way I reflect it is before I react, it'll be like, what is it that I need to work on first of my own before I even have a right to criticize or find a flaw.

And.

Yeah, but I'm sure there's something else as well. I mean, I could probably find a metaphor, a stacked metaphor here. But what's your observation? What would you say if you were my therapist?

Okay. I'll put it in personal terms. When I came into my relationship with Katie, I was not a very physically demonstrative person. I didn't grow up in a huggy family.

And Katie is all hugs all the time. She is really physically demonstrative. And so when we got together, that kind of freaked me out because we'd be walking down the street and I'm walking down the street, and suddenly she's got her arm around me or something like that. And I just wasn't used to that amount of physical contact. And for a while, I held it as her problem. She was too touchy feely. But then one day I realized, why would a guy that's not particularly huggy create a relationship? Of all the 3 billion women out there, why would I single out one that's extremely huggy?

That question.

Yeah.

I realized suddenly, oh, intimacy issues. Yeah. And so I began to kind of look at it and that what can I learn from her? You know, how could I? You know, rather than making my way of being right, which was very tempting because of course it is, but instead of being right about it, I could simply say, okay, I've got something to learn about hugs here. And so that's how that worked. Now, in your particular situation.

I'm encouraging this little of wonder. And you. Why would I, a light cop, create a person in my life who's the exact opposite? What can I learn from that? What is something that her essential way of being gets expressed in not being concerned with turning off light?

Well, one of the. The immediate one is like, that little stuff doesn't matter. Just pay attention to the big things that actually matter. That would be one of them.

That's a good one. Yeah.

And.

Now if I got all esotericy about it, it'd be like, hey, I could use this, as this is what Ariel does. She used to complain about Brian leaving crumbs all over the place, and it drove her nuts. And finally she said, oh, these are like reminders that there's someone here in my house who's living with me, and it's a sign that he's alive and I'm not alone.

Oh, that's. That's a great reframe.

Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that great? So mine could be, thank God she's here and I know she was here. So there's someone leaving, like, a crumb of love for me. I could reinterpret it as that.

Let's see. Here's what's another way I could reframe or reinterpret it.

So here, let me jump in there. Yeah, go for it. While you're busily thinking about that. And if you take a personality test, you would probably score very high in the conscientious category. You tend to be pretty impeccable about keeping agreements. You're careful about not making agreements you can't keep. You're pretty good at monitoring other people and confronting them when they don't keep their agreements. Those kind of people show up in the conscientious category. And the downside of the conscientious category is the obsessive compulsive, the ocd.

Oh, not me.

So I carefully winded my way into it by calling you conscientious to start. But I think you need to lovingly accept the OCD part of it.

I'm totally good with it. I'm OCD about certain things and not about others. But, yes, I'm a.

You know. Yes, that's absolutely true. Like, I'm very precise in my expectations and how I hold other people to my standards. No doubt about it.

Or, I mean, my judgments.

So take this moment. So take this moment to just give your OCD part 10 seconds of pure, pure loving acceptance.

And everybody that's watching and listening do the same thing. Find your part in there that's hard to live with, and just give it 10 seconds of pure, loving acceptance.

I'm big at loving things out of our body, not beating them out of our body. Yeah.

Let's resonate those two halves of the hemispheres.

Start a hemisphere fire.

A hemisphere.

All right.

Okay. So. So that's what I would say, is that down under there, you need that conscientious OCD part of your personality tempered by more being at ease.

With things not always going right. You know that there's. In the second half of your life here or the middle third of your life between 50 and 100.

That part of the lessons is learning how to balance that OCD part with just at easiness.

Yeah. Yeah. And.

I'm a hundred times better than I used to be. And I still got a long way to go, so I'll. I will definitely acknowledge that. And. And, yeah, And I think part of it, what I just realized, I think my double OCD comes from the fact that, like.

You know, in Vivian's case, she genuinely thinks that she's good at turning off lights. And I'm like. And I've got this whole deal of. If I kept a rule book and a logbook and I really tracked it, it'd be like, no, not at all. Let me just show you and prove it. But that would be a stake in the old relationship. So it's incongruence that gets me even more than the obsessive compulsive. And I've got to really find a way to look at that a little bit closer, too. And I know that that's my own.

My own demon, which is. I know I'm incongruent. I catch myself that way plenty when I get called on it. You know, that's what wives are for, to call you on your incongruence.

Well, I always think one of my old mentors said, you're either going to have toe prints or heel marks on your butt. If you are good at kicking yourself, you're going to have heel marks on your butt. If somebody else has to do the kicking for you, you'll have toe marks on your butt. On your butt.

You've got Vivian's high heel marks all over your butt.

I got both, man. I got both. And I'm. It's. I'm. I'm a lot more okay with it than I used to be, because I can laugh about it. I can laugh at myself, and I can see it, and I'm like, oh, geez, God, I got a lot of work to do. It's. And I joke about this all the time. It took until becoming. Getting to my 50s that I actually became a decent human being. And I still don't know how indecent I am. I'm sure there's so many flaws I don't see.

Yeah, well, fortunately, if you have a big Instagram or Facebook following, people are always ready to point you out in there any flaws you might have had. But going back into.

Your last incarnation, I wanted to give another example. When I first got into my relationship with Katie 40 years ago, I just didn't notice certain types of messiness that she noticed. She grew up with a mom and a dad and a mom that stayed home and was a homemaker and spotless household all the time. And I was off the other end of the spectrum. My mom, you know, she was a writer, a journalist, and after a while, she became the mayor of her city. But she was totally not concerned with a lot of those things. And fortunately, we had maids. I grew up in the south, where it was very common at the time to have maids. And so I never had to even think about making my bed or washing a dish or anything like that. And in fact, when I went away to college, I was happy to discover that my college, my little liberal arts college in Florida, Rollins College, also had a.

That would come in every day and make our beds and everything like that. So I never even had to doing that stuff in college. So later on, when I got into a relationship, it was like I had a set of blinders on and just didn't notice a lot of stuff like that. I expected somebody else would pick it up for me. And, boy, was that a rude learning experience in the early days of my relationships with women, living with women. But when I got into my relationship with Katie, I'd learned a little bit about that. But she's very tidy about those kinds of things, and she just couldn't believe that I was oblivious to things like a pile of socks over in the corner or the dishes not being put away or things like that. But it was like it took me a while just to learn to see them. And so. But now, interestingly enough, I've kind of flipped around where I like to tidy up the kitchen, for example, it's kind of my putting away the dishwasher and getting them out of the dishwasher. That's my domain. And when people try to help me with it, I don't like the way they put them away and stuff like that. So I've kind of taken over the tidying the kitchen. And so I've made a real flip in that regard. It's a Zen thing for me now, you know, to have overcome that part of my oblivious personality and actually be able to produce a result that I like, which is a tidy kitchen.

I can appreciate that. That's. I too. So I always had to clean up, but I had zero aesthetic. And it took a while to develop that, that little nuance. And it's something that I think in general, most men have poor aesthetic, in my experience anyway.

And cleaning and paying attention to what makes your partner happy also. And it doesn't necessarily go. It's not a sexist thing, because I know some women who have no aesthetic as well. I've seen it on both sides. But yeah, I can really appreciate that one for sure. For sure.

Well, to summarize a few things as we kind of wrap things up here.

Let's do it.

We're talking about getting unstuck. And one way to get unstuck, first of all, is to simply acknowledge that you are stuck and give some loving, accepting attention to the fact that you're stuck. Because underneath that is a bunch of positive things.

That particularly important in relationships. Because, you know, Katie and I have seen both in our seminars and in our private practice, we've seen so many couples that have waited so long before they come in and say we're stuck. You know, sometimes they've been stuck for literally years. And so my plea to everybody is to find some ways of identifying when you're stuck and do something about it quicker. Because it really has a cost to your well being if you stay stuck for very long. And I know for sure it has a cost to relationships and marriage if you stay stuck too long. Because out of staying stuck too long becomes a kind of contempt for each other. That's one of the most difficult things to ever break through. Then so get it before it festers, be with it, accept it, lovingly acknowledge that you're stuck and move through it as quickly as you possibly can using the tools of love and acceptance and authenticity.

Yeah, and my stack on that Gay that I really think a lot about is when you talked about personality one and personality two, how they evolve and they develop, there's a layer below that which are really learning and recognizing what your fears and your sensitivities are and what you avoid and why, what is the underlying fear. And the deeper the work you do, the more willing you are to pay attention to your thought process. And I think we all have core programming. It's like, if this happens, then I'll do this. If this happens, then I'll do this. That's that for the most part, we're all unaware of that core deep programming. It requires not only work, but coaching and someone who's really honest with you. That's coming from a place not of trying to instill pain and create pain and make you wrong, but teaching you how to see and observe and work on that aspect of you so you can elevate to the highest level of yourself and hopefully also.

Save yourself decades of evolution and pain, which maybe there's nothing wrong with that. But I know that if I understood what I'm talking about right now, 20 years ago in my 30s, I would have avoided any enormous amount of pain in getting there and experience a lot more intimacy, connection, love, respect, appreciation and gratitude along the way. So that's just another reason, by the way, if you just take away from that, that should be good enough. But if you want more of this, definitely again, head over and learn more about the big leap year that Gay and I are preparing to do. And you can apply for that, spend some time and really experience some massive breakthroughs both personally and professionally as a result of that. Two gay. So anything else that you want to add before we land this aircraft carrier?

Yes, please. If you like what you're hearing, give us a review. Let us know how you like it. And also feel free to correspond with us. Mike has a number you can text if you want to communicate with us. And what is that number? Remind me again, Mike.

Right on. It is 858-434-5316. Just text the letters BL, which stand for Big Leap. Of course, you'll get a little special message from Gamy. And this is a text service that we can see your messages that you send to us. You also get a direct link for the application to learn more about the Big Leap year. So that's what we have. In the meantime, make sure you comment, leave feedback, share this with someone you know who could benefit from it. Maybe a spouse who needs to hear this or a partner. Maybe you don't want to tell them what we told them. And they could hear this because it might come from a couple of different mouths.

Good. So may you all have many big leaps before we talk again. Thanks for being with us.

You got it. Bye. Bye.

Sat.