How to Break Free from the Prison of Fear and Anxiety | The Big Leap EP#88

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks. I really want you to tune in to this edition of the Big Leap podcast because we explore fear and fear not just as a concept, but how you can deal with it in a way that releases more and more of your genius. This is a time where a lot of people are feeling scared and anxious, and I think you'll find some real solutions in this episode.

And we deconstruct some of our greatest fears, which include loss of control, going crazy, fear of death and all. Also the way we react and respond to it, which is flight, fight, freeze, or faint. And our goal is to help you get in your body, overcome your greatest fear, explore what it is, and face it head on. And Gay is going to give you his formula for how he gets out of it, too. All that and a lot more in this episode of the Big League.

When I came out of the hospital, I looked down at my legs and they didn't look like my legs, you.

Know, but pretty soon, like, I'm losing my mind and forgetting who I am. And I became like, I remember licking the linoleum at my grandmother's house when I was crawling. And I've never remembered that before.

You know, William James said, the schizophrenic is drowning in the same water that the mystic is swimming in.

My best mechanism for getting connected with and resolving the anxiety is just laying down and meditating.

All right, Gay, you've had some really big breakthroughs happening for you, but there are different kinds of breakthroughs, unexpected breakthroughs. I do, too. But this whole episode is about stopping the fear and anxiety that block genius from happening. So I'd like to hear, what does that mean to you? What's the interpretation of that? So we start with the proper framing first.

Yes. Well, everybody I've ever worked with that has an upper limit problem that they're trying to break through. There's fear underneath that. And so anytime you're dealing with personal growth, you need to get to be best friends with fear, because it's at the bottom of a lot of things that bother people. And just recently. The reason I think this is a timely topic is, I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but a lot of people seem to be having a lot more anxiety and fear. Maybe it's the political Sturman drong that goes on all the time or whatever it is, but it seems like I hear more people talking about anxiety than ever before. And certainly nowadays, too, there's tremendous number of pills you can take and things you can do. For anxiety, we want to approach it from a different place. So I want people to understand their fear and be able to deal with it so deeply that they can hotwire around the need for any medications or anything like that. Because if you really know what fear is about, it's really no big deal. It's just something that you need to take care of. And so I want to talk about what you do to it and with it in order to let your genius break through. Because fear is always the thing that's right in front of you that needs to be cleared up in order to have your genius break through. So that's the general subject. And so I want everybody by the end of our conversation to have a lot more tools about how to deal with anxiety and fear in yourself and other people around you, especially how it relates to upper limits and blocking of genius. So that's the playground.

Yeah, I like that. And I think one of the things that I'd like to do is an exercise with you today. So I'm going to put on your. Have you put on your therapist hat. And what I'd love to do is have you can share a big anxiety creator and maybe a big win. I'll do the same. I'd like to hear your interpretation of what you see happening. And let's apply as many big leap principles that are big takeaways for our audience. And I also want to comment on your framing because when you just said lots of people have more fear, more anxiety than ever before, and there's lots of medication, one of the things that I've noticed is I'm really paying attention these days to people's addictions. And I think there are more hidden addictions, at least that I am noticing than ever before. And I talk to a lot of people, and I'm surprised at the number of people who are perfectly functional, seemingly functional. But when I have the real, real conversation with them, I'm astonished at how many medications and chemicals they regularly use. And I do think this, this is anxiety of the times. And maybe it's always been that way in terms of the addictions and the chemical usage, but not to my world. At 57, I'm learning a lot more about what people are addicted to that they've hidden from others. And the second side of that is.

And these are like using ketamine, they're basically fully functioning alcoholics or tons and tons of marijuana use, especially out here in California. But in most states now, it seems it's just prevalent. You know, you're driving down the highway and constantly smell weed, even on the highway, you know, and I felt the same thing. I was just recently in.

I went to Sundance for any a longevity event. And while I was there, I was surprised at how much weed I smelled in the Salt Lake area. Maybe I shouldn't be, but I was. And also in Colorado, which I know it's obviously legal, but it's just in Minnesota. I was just in Minnesota not that long ago. So I think that there's. It is a sign of the times. And I think all this pressure cancel culture. And there's no question I just came back from a big health event. It was JJ Virgin's mindshare event. And the buzz and talk about all the residual anxiety, depression, fatigue that the integrative doctors all believe was caused by.

The treatment of the lockdown disease. Okay, I'm not going to say the word in our interview here in case we get blocked, but, you know, there's no question that the general belief is they're profound effects from the medications and the treatments that were used.

Yes. Well, no question about it. As it happens, I've become a recent student of my own anxiety because.

Our listeners and viewers will remember that I broke my femur this spring and I'm still receiving treatment and in rehab for it. I'm. I use a walker around the house. I'm making a transition to a cane. But I had never. Until I had that freak accident and fell and broke my femur. I was not aware that I ever had a fear of falling. But after, since then, I. I had to go through. I mean, I would be trucking down the hall on my little walker and I would be visualizing possible ways I could fall and how to prevent that. And I mean, you know, my mind was way out in front trying to practice what would happen. And I had never seen that aspect of myself before. Part of it may be due to the fact that I'm 78 years old and one of the major causes of death in people my age is falling down. And maybe I haven't looked up the stats, but certainly major number of people get wounded and die each year from falling down and having complications of surgery or hitting their heads. That was one of the things in the hospital. People would come by and ask me and they must have asked me half a dozen times. When you fell, did you hit your head? And as it happened, I didn't.

Yeah.

So many people were concerned about the secondary effects of that. So I've been kind of studying in myself what to do about that. Because part of it may seem, part of it seems like a, a natural thing to do. My mind would be looking for solutions everywhere. But.

There'S a lot more of it, more fear and anxiety in my body that just relates to physical things than I ever felt before. Just today, for example, I, I was dry, I, I drive myself now and I was driving down to Ventura to have the surgeon take some.

X rays and give me my 300 mile checkup or whatever it is. 12 weeks or 16 weeks or something like that.

Yeah.

And. But I was just noticing that so many of my thoughts had to do with not making a mistake on the physical level. And so I'd like to do that without the fear. But maybe the fear is a natural component. But as I've, as I've kind of been with the fear more, it's receding and more like a.

A heightened awareness, something like that. Yeah. So.

But you know, it's unusual for me to walk around feeling scared because I've done a lot of work on that in my life. Way back in when I was first discovering the upper limit problem and everything. Every time there's an upper limit, there's a fear underneath it. So I studied lots of fears and myself and other people I worked with, so I'm really comfortable and knowledgeable about that whole area. But then a big fall when you're 78 awakens a whole new flurry of anxiety.

Yeah, well, it's sort of like to have your.

Mobility taken from you like that when it's out of control. And I know I've been doing these longevity experiences where we bring folks in for full body scans, brain scans, cancer scans, all that stuff. And.

The stats on this are 80% of all adults over the age of 40 have an undiagnosed asymptomatic health condition that will turn into a disease that will most likely cripple or kill you. And when I brought 18 people in, five out of 18, and these are really healthy, active people, one of them had undiagnosed asymptomatic brain aneurysm that would most likely kill him. A 32 year old had a chunk of calcium that is the same thing that it's a widowmaker, basically that killed his father and grandfather at 49, completely undetected. And then there were.

Four other people in the group that had pretty significant blood issues that two out of them, two out of the four didn't know they were problematic and that wouldn't show up in a normal medical test. So with that, I always say that you know, if I went to a country club right now, my pitch to them for a longevity program is the best way to create client retention is to first keep your clients alive and mobile.

Yeah.

So can you talk a little bit about, you know, the fear of what that means? So there's not just the fear of falling, but it's what it means. How do you interpret that in your un processed.

Non.

Therapeutic mind? Like what's the real, real?

Yeah, well, I remember one time early in my training, Fritz Perls, the great psychiatrist that invented Gestalt therapy, he said there are only two really big fears, and that's the fear of dying and the fear of going crazy. And, and if you think about it, they're two very different fears. It's not just going crazy, but exploding energy, having your mind feel like it's in fragments, not being able to think straight.

And.

My experience of that is that they're both forms of energy that like the fear of going crazy is fear of up rushing out, rushing energy taking you out of your body. And the fear of dying is descending, downward going energy taking you into space and oblivion. Oblivion if you're having a bad day in space, if you're having a good day. But yeah, there are two, if you think about it, there are two big. We're like a two stroke engine. One stroke goes inwards and the next stroke goes outwards. And so that, that was what I interpreted from what Fritz Perls was saying. And certainly this latest round of fear I've had is more related to the fear of dying because, you know, during the process of having the two surgeries, I was taken down into the land of general anesthesia, which is the next thing to dying. And yeah, and some people do die of the anesthesia that's given to them. So.

This latest round has been about that fear of disappearing, fear of going down, fear of not being able to move, being helpless, that kind of thing. And as I've gotten more comfortable in exploring that, it's, you know, it seems like a, a very natural adaptation to life at age 78, because I want to be more particular about focusing my awareness. Had I been a little bit more present, this whole thing might not have happened. But I was, while I was squatting down, I was also busily trying to open my pool cover at the same time and kind of in an awkward position. And so, you know, more mindfully I probably would have opened my pool cover just fine. But on that particular day I wasn't paying attention and my foot slipped and so that's a good adaptation to, I think, more functional awareness. Does that have to be accompanied by fear? Well, maybe in the beginning, but I don't want to have to rely on fear to drive my expansions of awareness.

Yes, well, for that too.

The risk for you right now is sarcopenia, which is, you know, loss of movement and muscle mass and being able to regain that, that's really the, the big threat here. Yes, because, you know, being not being able to move for that long, it's amazing how fast that muscle mass goes away. And I know Vivian, some time ago, it's been a couple years now, we were down in Mexico and we've never had problems in Mexico before and we're at a really high end resort. She ate some sort of seafood and that's the only thing we can match it to. But I had the same stuff. But anyway, she got this weird virus and she lost control over the left side of her body for a little while and she couldn't raise her arms, she couldn't do yoga and she lost an enormous amount of muscle mass on one side of her body because she had to overcompensate for it. And it was terrifying for it because she's like, am I ever going to get this back? And she ended up doing all sorts of treatments, HBOT and that kind of thing. So it's just.

And for you right now? I was just looking it up. I'm like, okay, what are all the treatments? And some of it is, you know, just resistance training. Which is hard for you to do right now.

No, I go to the gym. I go to the gym three days a week for resistance training. So I even now, oh yeah, I got back on my. I've been doing it for the last 12 years, three days a week. And as soon as I could get out of the house, that's the first place I started going. Even Katie would have to take me down. But I do a good, vigorous, mostly upper body workout. But you're absolutely right. I, when I came out of the hospital I looked down at my legs and they didn't look like my legs, you know, they looked like they were much skinnier. I've gained some weight back now, but I lost a lot of weight. I looked very scrawny for the first few weeks I was back. But fortunately my magnificent mate is very committed to my well being and made me all sorts of good things over the past few months that have filled me out a little bit.

Yeah, that's great. There's also some fantastic peptides that help with muscle growth and mass, which are not hgh, you know, they're not as risky physically. So I got a couple other comments here, which, as I'm listening to you talk about death versus going crazy, you know, when I went through my cancer scare, that really scared the death fear out of me. You know, I really had to live with the fact that it probably could and would happen. And I walked, walked around like a walking statistic for quite some time. And then of course, there for the first five years, you're like, well, is it going to come back? Is it going to come back? Because the second time, at least with colorectal cancer, it ain't good. You know, there's only a few cancers that are as bad in terms of their aggression. If they're. If they come back and get you.

So I'm a lot more afraid of going crazy and losing control than I am of death, at least for now. And I'm going to tell you something that almost no one knows. So here we go. My public declaration. I had something happen a couple months ago, and it was the most inopportune time. But I've shared this with before, with you before. I cannot have thc. I literally go nuts, and I go into a pure state of hell. And there was someone who I worked with who is saying, and I'm a good sleeper, but once in a while I don't, especially if I have a lot going on. I'm really wound up, and I'm about to travel or I'm traveling. They said, oh, you gotta get these CBD gummies, and they'll just knock you out and help you go to sleep. So I just took the link, I ordered them, and I got them. And the night before, I was going to Tony Robbins house to speak, which was about four months ago now, I just decided to tear off half of these things. And I ate one, you know, because we were going to be getting up at like, five in the morning to catch a flight and all. Once I'm like, really drowsy, and I'm just fine, but I start getting the boop, boop, boop, boop, blip, blip. And I decide, well, whatever's going on, I'm just gonna go to sleep. But then I woke up a little while later having panic attacks. And it's clear that whatever this was clearly had THC in it. And I later found out it was a hundred milligram THC gummy, which is a lot. And I took half. But pretty soon, like, I'm losing my mind. And forgetting who I am. And I became like, I remember licking the linoleum at my grandmother's house when I was crawling. And I've never remembered that before. And all once I started going backwards, like pre birth became fundamental particles of the universe. I remember seeing what I thought were like atoms rolling around and then I just dis. I mean it was a total death experience. But when I popped out of that, that was the pleasant part. All once I thought I was going to die. And then I was becoming suicidal and murderous at the same time. Like dark energies were telling me the only way out of this is you're gonna have to go out and kill people. I mean it was that kind of danger. And I was, I woke up Vivian, I'm like, just. And I had been going upstairs, taking cold showers, doing push ups, jumping up and down, doing jumping jacks, just trying to stay in my body. Finally I woke her up and I said, just talk to me, talk to me, keep me conscious, keep me awake. Here's what happened. And I'm rising out of the cycle of hell. And eventually I was like, I gotta get outta here because I was going to be a danger. I said, call the cops and call an ambulance. I'm going nuts. And I was. And in between those severe panic attacks, she's biting me to keep me conscious and awake until they finally arrived. And I said, put handcuffs on me, you know, like I locked myself in a bedroom. I mean it was bad. So they ended up taking me to the hospital, gave me some lorazepam and two hours later I'm on a flight. The next morning I'm speaking at Tony Robbins.

Yeah, it's good old lorazepam.

Oh my God. So I did. The good news is I was fine. I've been fine since like when that happened to me when I was 18. I was having panic attacks for years, having flashbacks. And at least this time I was more mentally prepared for what I didn't know then what happened to me. Now I know it was, you know, just clearly some sort of a reaction. But the point of all that is, is I've basically experienced what I think is going completely crazy, insane and losing control and drifting out of a state of consciously knowing who I am and having an identity. And then I know now what it's like when you see crazy people walking down the street, bobbing up and down and moving a certain way. It's. What I remember doing is it's sort of like I have to follow a pattern because if I fall out of that Pattern. Something horrible is going to happen and something's going to die or I'm going to die or I'm going to be stuck here forever. It was that thought process and then it would start again and my brain was telling me I've been looping in the same place for all eternity and I'm always going to be stuck here, except I'm going to be conscious while it happens. And it was just hell.

Wow. Yeah.

All right, well, Hendricks. Yeah, me too. I don't ever want to remember that again, but it's happened. Like I've accidentally been gotten a contact high before from being in a room full of weed and I start having bad thoughts. So I'm triggered really, really quickly and easily.

Yeah, well, with something like that, that's a clear, you know, allergen. The number one. The number one strategy is avoidance. Of course. That's. That's number one.

For the rest of my life, I don't need to be remembered again.

No. You know, William James said, the schizophrenic is drowning in the same water that the mystic is swimming in. You know, that if you kind of learn to go with that dissolution into space.

You know, sometimes you can get through that organically. But it sounds like. See, there are basically only a couple of big issues that drive people. One of them is control. And control is a very big thing because if you think about it, what was your first training on this planet with control? It was toilet training. And that's hardly any fun for anybody. And if you're in a crazy not.

Being naughty, but yeah, that'll be it. I think I was probably trained to not be naughty before I was actually toilet trained and conscious of it.

But yeah, yeah. So.

Learning to control is such a big thing that later on in life, a lot of people say there are two big issues. One is approval, and the other is control. In other words, that way down inside ourselves, a lot of our early learning about control affects us for the rest of our life and so does our early learning about how to get approval. You know, so one person.

Like my trainer, for example, he got abandoned when he was. He and his brother got abandoned when he was a teenager, 11 years old. His father left him and his brother with his sister and said, I'll be right back. And turned out it was 11 years later because where he was going was to prison. And so.

But one of the brothers became a trainer. Successful person, has many well known clients such as myself and his brother is. Had the same experience and he went in the direction of kind of becoming a vagrant or homeless person, you know, the kind of person that you see on the street and drugs and that kind of thing. So it's a real mystery about how we.

Go in different directions there. You know, like, my brother and I responded to a similar situation, our father dying in two totally different ways. You know, my brother launched himself into mechanical things and model airplanes and fixing cars, and he spent his whole life fixing things in one, but they had to be mechanical things. I went in the other direction of fixing humans. Humans and with their emotions and things like that. And my brother, till the end of his life, basically made fun of that sort of thing. You know, even though I had bestsellers and Oprah and Multimillionaire and all that kind of stuff, he thought that was just ridiculous. The kind of. He thought I was getting away with some kind of scam.

Yeah, you're charlatan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sleight of hand, magician, huh?

But what everybody can do with that is right now, look around your life and say, how am I blocking myself because I'm afraid of losing control, and how am I blocking myself because I'm afraid of disappearing or dying or dissolving. Those are two big fundamental things. See, also, when you get into genius, there are a couple of specific fears that really block people. Number one is that fear that I don't deserve it, that I'm fundamentally unlovable, or I don't deserve to be here, or I don't deserve to have the good things of life. I had a really interesting conversation the other day. One of the guys that was helping me with my physical therapy, I struck up a conversation with him.

He has tattoos. He's a Hispanic guy, very stocky guy. And if you looked at him out on the street, you'd say, well, there's a gang banger or that sort of person called all the tattoos and everything. So here he was doing physical therapy, and I struck up a conversation because he was studying philosophy at the local college. And he asked me what my degree was in, and I said, psychology. But he said, do you know anything about psych philosophy? A little bit. And he brought up the subject of the Stoics, like Epictetus and Seneca and people like that. Well, that was very fascinating to me because, you know, suddenly he didn't look like a gang banger anymore. Suddenly now he's talking to me about Epictetus, you know. Well, here, listen to this. He grew up in a family where basically everybody was a criminal and everybody had had this disadvantaged past. And they were, you know, had come across the border illegally, and so they had all of these strikes against them. But listen to what this guy did. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I invited him over to have a cup of coffee after I got out of the thing. I said, come by sometime and I'll give you one of my books and inscribe it for you and we can talk about philosophy. So he came over for coffee last week and he told me that when he was 15, he'd already been busted a few times and gotten tattoos and everything like everybody else in his family. And one day he had a out of nowhere realization. He said, wait a minute.

Everybody here has agreed on the same sort of stuff. We all agree that we have to live in poverty and we have to make our money by ripping other people off. He said, what if we just put that in a bubble and put that behind us? And then went out now and decided what we wanted to make of our lives? Wow, guess what everybody's reaction was? Oh, no. They basically drummed him out of the family. But he didn't let that stop him. He went to college, he's working his way through college. He's got loans up the kazoo and everything like that, but he's plugging right through. And he was doing this internship and learning physical therapy. Well, anyway, I was so blown away by that. That to me, if you're going to make a museum, you ought to make a museum of people like that that took the crap that life handed them, you know, and transformed it into something magnificent. So anyway, I was just so impressed by that that I wanted to share it with you.

Yeah, well, it goes to show, like when you have two identical twins and they wouldn't even have to be separated from birth, have completely different outcomes because each one of them.

Interpret what something means differently. You know, it's one of my favorite Tony Robbins quotes is we're meaning making machines and the meaning we give something gives us seemingly justification for our evil deeds or bad actions or justification for taking, stealing, hurting, harming, inflicting pain, and someone else would completely interpret it, you know, because it's framed differently. You know, it's. It's like. And I would assume that if you do some deep work and say, you know, what's the first memory you have? Or what's the moment when XYZ happened? And it's like, I remember exactly why I decided, you know, or what. What was that feeling you had? There's. I just finished doing some interesting work.

Find the book here it Is.

I don't know if you know Dr. Lise. Janelle. No, she was. I met her at TLC. She has this book called Conversation with the Heart. And we actually worked with her to help her with some of her branding. And she has this. This process that.

It's going to sound like a big claim, but I. She did it with me, she did it with Zach, she did it with Vivian, and I watched her do this. She just asks you a few questions, and they're deep feeling questions. And ultimately it's like, when's the first time you remember that happening? You know, what did that mean to you? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's as though you've done.

Some deep, deep psychedelic work without the psychedelics and without the risk. And she very frequently creates some profound shifts in behavior, consciousness, awareness, and perception with a single session, which could take years of therapy to unravel and undo. It's quite profound. And some of her stuff is derived. She partners with John demartini, so she's got, like, a whole series of different tools she's put together. But after spending a few days with her.

I found it profoundly useful. And a couple members of my team worked with her, too, because we're trying to figure out what's going on here, what's this mean?

And.

I found it to be really freeing and powerful, and it's something you can do yourself. You don't have to be therapized to get some pretty profound shifts. So that's a shameless plug for her.

But I'm curious through your lens, when you run into these challenges and if you look back in time at where.

You'Ve been able to.

Pattern and interrupt yourself, create a process or a system to stop anxiety and fear, and we haven't even really talked about blocking. Genius. I have my story of transformation I want to share with you, but can you think back to any particular tools, techniques, resources other than the classic meditate, sleep well, that have been like, boom for you?

Yes. Well, I'm after things that people can do for themselves in 10 seconds. Something you really. Yeah. In my experience, when I work with anxious people or people who are scared, the first big challenge is to help them locate it in their body. Because, as you well know, the human mind can fragment like crazy, and, you know, thoughts are bouncing off the walls. Sophocles, the great Greek playwright, said, when you're scared, everything rustles. So, you know, you're scared, and everything out there looks like it's scary. And you can kind of see how that evolved over the millions of years. Because, you know, when an animal gets scared, it only has a few strategies. Lee, run like crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

Fight back.

Flight. Flight or fear.

Yes.

Flight or fight.

Freeze or faint. Four Fs. Bite. Flee, freeze or faint.

My cat, yesterday, we gave her a bath, which she doesn't like, but she has to have once a month. And so she went and hid in the back room afterwards. She wasn't going to have anything to do with anybody. So that's one that could be called the freeze or faint strategy, where you kind of go down deeply into yourself. But there were times during her bath where she, you know, did a little bit of fighting, too. But think about which of those modalities you tend to do when you're scared. Do you kind of make a snappy remark or say something sarcastic? Yeah, that. That would be in the fight mode. Or do you pull back and hide a little bit and swallow whatever you're thinking or feeling? That would be the light mode. Or some people. When you say freeze or faint, it's not necessarily fainting, keeling over. It's just like spacing out and getting a sudden urge to watch an old Star Trek episode or something like that.

Yeah.

Just to kind of get out. But see, what you got to do with fear is feel it in your body. That's number one, is to get down into your body, because the moment you locate it, it becomes no longer an amorphous, fragmented thing. You say, oh, I've got a tight belly, or, oh, I've got a bunch of roiling feelings in my belly, or, oh, I've got kind of a escalating feeling of panic in my chest. But as soon as I can help people get down into their bodies, everything works a lot differently. I had a physician call me a while back, a fellow that I had known in graduate school, and I'd kind of lost touch with him, but he called me having a panic attack, actually. And as I was talking to him on the phone.

Finally, what did. It was when I was able to say, you know, and exactly where are you feeling that in your body right now? Yes. And finally he got down to the place where he could name. Okay, I've got this very tight feeling in my chest, and I've got a very butterflyish feeling, like a bunch of dancing butterflies in my belly. And so when you're able to come down into the physical sensations of fear, that's often the first step. Also, it's important as soon as you can to name your fear. You know, is it a Fear of, because you don't deserve to be here. A feeling of, I don't deserve to be playing the game that I'm playing. Or is it a fear of.

I don't have confidence in my talent, or I don't have confidence. I don't deserve to shine in this world. I'm not good enough? So lots and lots of people have a fear that can be named. And in the big leap, I give you some of them, like that fear of being fundamentally flawed and the fear of outshining some of them. You'll have to kind of go down into it yourself and say, what am I exactly afraid of? Because everybody's a little bit different. We share a lot of common things, but so it's between us and our bodies. We're often trying to think about a solution to fear, but it's not in the realm of what you can think about, because if you could think about it, you would have already have figured it out. And so what happens is just your mind spins and go off. Goes off into fragments and fractals. And.

So to take that dazzling, fragmented quality out of fear, it's bringing it down into your body.

Yeah, okay. And naming it, I think being able to give it a causation and an association and knowing when the first time is, you know, all that. That's. That's, you know, very similar to Lee's process as well. That.

That's so good. So let me share.

Let me share something that just happened, and I'll. I'll set this up.

Where I had a big win this weekend, but leading up to it was terrifying. So if you go back about six, seven years ago, the reason I sold my last business, the one that was you everywhere now with all the books and speaking and all that, is one day I just woke up, and I didn't want to be a dancing bear, be on the road so much. I felt that like, it was killing me. Not just my body, but my soul. It was eating me alive. And I didn't want to do another webinar. Cold traffic or. And I felt very, very violated by the California government. It's super, super business hostile to have employees, especially if they're contractors, because basically California said, you can't have contractors anymore. Everyone's an employee. It was just. And I just was like, you know what? I'd rather just start the whole thing on fire. I'm not gonna be a slave to an evil system that steals from me. And that's the way it felt. That may or may not be healthy. Thinking. But that's what my feeling experience was. And I wasn't gonna deny what it was doing to my body and my brain. And I just needed a break anyway. I'd been working my ass off for so damn long, but transitioning was hard. And one of the things I told myself is I'd never do another information product again because it's just hard. You know, the illusion is, oh, it's so nice to have that passive income coming in. There's nothing passive about it. You know, it's hard.

So.

What happened though? And I know, I know that one of the most powerful.

Tools that I have on myself is a risk of reputation, fear of losing reputation. But also it's hard for me to say no to people I love. So I got a call. I'll just use the names because she won't mind that I'm sharing this with from JJ Virgin. And she said, I really want you to come and teach AI to my mindshare event, which is her big mastermind. There were going to be 400 people there and there are a lot of them are like integrative doctors and that kind of thing. And you know, she's like, what are you going to sell? And I wasn't going to be able to really promote or market my big ticket thing. You know, it's really high end and expensive with this audience. And I thought against my better judgment, we created an information product. So it's basically AI for healthcare businesses. And so I went to work and created this whole presentation and a demo.

And you know, the price of this thing is fairly high. It's $7,500. But I was gonna be like, I'm not gonna do a cheap thing. I gotta do something that's really good, that I feel good about and that's usually like significantly higher than a typical information product. So. And I had a couple speaking opportunities and the first two were ones where you couldn't have an offer. It was pure teaching. And the third, I could pitch, but I only had 30 minutes. And.

The first two went really well. Everyone's like so happy, so excited. And I started doing a couple little. I did a little workshop for lunch and during a breakout and I got people really enrolled and interested. But finally I made my pitch and it was crickets, no sales. And I'm like, just to get here, like by the time I paid to my team and I built out this product and took. I mean, I did it at the expense of taking work and some opportunities. It cost me at least 50 grand in hard and probably $150,000 in missed opportunities at least. Okay, so I'm out a hard 50, if not 200. And I'm like.

So of course I go and Vivian's with me. And I'm like, this is the first time I've failed this hard after being in this business so long. So the good news was I had created a little WhatsApp group from stage, saying, I'll give you all my tools that I've talked about here. And what I started doing is inviting people to come for breakfast at 7:30 in the morning before the doors opened. And then during lunch, I just do little. Ask me anything hot seats. And I had a TV monitor so I could demonstrate. And at the end I'd say, well, this is what it's like to work together in this product. And all. Once we had like eight sales and then 15 and then, you know, 16. And then what we did is a lot of people, their. Their objection was, well, I can't start right now. I'm booked and busy with my practice until the first of the year. So I was like, well, we'll just do a second cohort and you get both for the same price. Which wasn't going to be anything anyway because they were going to be promoting us again. And bam, bam, bam. We wound up with lots of sales, plus some people converted into our other things. Make a long story short, this is a huge. It was a huge win multiple, six figures right already, and it'll push way beyond that soon. But more importantly, on the last night, they do a big fundraising auction and they auctioned me off to spend a day. And all that money went to a nonprofit and we raised $100,000.

For this nonprofit. So it was one of her. I think it was her biggest nonprofit collection of revenue. So I walked away feeling, first of all, terrified of getting into something that I had learned to hate and stayed away from and then failed hard to me visibly to getting back and saying, I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to allow it to hurt my reputation or the relationship with someone I love so much. And I can't let myself down. So the bad thing was I didn't get a lot of sleep. The good news was we turned this thing around and it was like Lazarus from the grave. And all of my conscious fears became tools to overcome some of my most feared weaknesses. And I know consciously, like in my dreams, I feign or faint, I disappear. But when I met one on one, I fight. If I'm in a group.

My reaction is. Is flight. I'll just stop in place. And I'm like, don't look at me. Don't look at me. Don't look at me. I don't want to be that one. So I know in a crowd, I'd be a coward. If I'm cornered, I fight. In my dreams, I fainter or freeze, you know, and in this one, in this real life, I couldn't do any of them.

Wow, that's a great story, though. It has so many elements to it. But I particularly like that you kind of bottomed out at the beginning and then said, no, wait a minute. I'm not gonna stop here. Because you could have turned around and gone home and just said, you know. But it's really interesting, too, because the whole thing was based on a.

Violating a personal agreement you'd made with yourself. Yeah. You know, because you'd made that strong declaration, no more information products. And suddenly. Okay, I'll just grab one more, you know, and.

You mentioned dancing bear. It's really, you know, the best definition or the best comment on fame I've ever heard is that fame is like dancing with a bear. At first you say, wow, this is fantastic. I'm dancing with a bear. And then after a while, you want to stop dancing, but the bear doesn't want to stop dancing. You know, you. You have to dance as long as the bear wants to dance. And.

I think that's. You probably learned that one the hard way.

Yeah, well, that and my definition of the dancing bear, because the industry one is if you're the dancing bear, in other words, when you're not dancing on stage, you're not making any money.

But once you are a dancing bear.

There'S something very attractive about it. Like, this year, I opted and accepted going on the road because I was at the right place, the right time with this AI message. And so many big names reached out to me and said, will you come speak to my audience? And, you know, I. It's hard to say no to Tony Robbins or Peter Diamandis or Dave Asprey, and because it's such a powerful stage, and I understand why rock stars become addicts and because that love and that outpouring is support.

And. But it's also that when you start doing that, you know, if you're not dancing, you ain't earning. And I give up a lot of my body, my relationship, and my income. Time to go speak. And it really costs me money against earnings to go speak, even though it does power a gigantic flywheel that does spin off residual, but. And you know that. I mean, you had to do it back before there was the Internet. For a long time. I did for a little while. But yeah.

In. In the old days or the really old days, when I first started, it was, put all your books in the trunk of your car and go out and hit little radio stations and things like that, you know, it was. And. And Wayne Dyer was out doing the same thing. He would be out there in some little RA radio station in Nebraska or someplace, you know, with his books in the trunk of his car, and he'd speak on the radio and then go into town.

I know his is my favorite story.

Yeah, Yeah, I did the same thing. I had my girlfriend in my VW bus, my camper bus, and I'd load a couple of boxes of my books and we'd go out and turn a vacation into a road tour. And, you know, I'd hit every little.

TV station or newspaper along the way. We're drifting away from our central subject of fear, though. I want to say a few more things to kind of wrap it up.

Yeah, sure.

When I was talking about get down in your body, that's the number one thing I want everybody to get out of this. Because you'll never solve fear up in your head. You solve it by being with it down in your body and learning how to not hold it separate from yourself. Because if you try to hold it separate from yourself and pretend it's something else, it hangs on and proliferates. But if you accept it as part of yourself and what something your body is doing, then it takes the sting out of it and allows you to be in more of a friendly relationship with it. So my big message this year is make friends with your fear, get friendly with it, talk to it, name it, feel it, speak about it, and that hopefully will keep less of it out of your body and more of it into your creative space.

Yeah.

No, that's. That.

I know.

When I. When I hear that.

I. That's precisely where I went with all of this. So getting back to what happened, like all the anxiety I was experiencing, my best mechanism for getting connected with and resolving the anxiety is just laying down and meditating. I. I go into a.

Semi conscious state. It's like right before you fall asleep kind of a state. And that's when I can let all.

That go and spread out into space kind of. Yes. Say, pardon me, Mike, I'm gonna have to let my cat out here. So. No, how about pausing for a moment?

She's no problem.

Got bathroom on her mind.

So let's bring this ship home and let's give folks the step by step, if we can. I like ending with some action steps on how to let this go. And my interpretation of what I've heard is really just finding out where in the body you feel it and take us through the process.

First of all, just make friends with fear, because fear has been around a lot longer than we have. Long before there was Homo sapiens, there were other folks like us. They were shorter and had different shaped heads and things like that, but they were enough like us that they're in our history. And you can imagine the fear that those people had. And millions of years ago, I mean, it was just a daily confrontation with adversity and survival. And to this day, we have evolved so that we have a lot more nerve endings for pain and adversity in our body than we do for pleasure and exaltation and ecstasy and that kind of thing. But so make it your friend. Understand that it's. It's part of life. And actually, I think that when you really allow yourself to feel it and be with it and accept it and love it, it's a great teacher because it will tell you also where your upper limits are and where you need to break through and express more genius. So think of fear. Instead of something scary and bad, think of it as a signpost to your genius. Just kind of a little wink to let you know that you're evolving. And the job is to go ahead and breathe through your fear and stay on track with what you feel your genius to be.

Oh.

Yeah, I love that. My. My version that I use myself and I've used now for other people is find a way to reinterpret that and reframe what it means to you. And also find out what your greatest fear of loss is and turn it into your greatest source of power. So in my case, it's loss of identity, it's loss of intimacy in a way at its rawest, rudest level. It's fear of banishment and fear of abandonment.

And I lean into that and I say, how can I find my power in this deepest moment? And then how can I create and innovate my way out of it? Because those are my superpowers. That's my unique ability. And also for me, my zone of genius. And I know that if I turn my brain on and I sleep solve, so I create an intention before I go to bed and I dream into, how can I create a dream solution and wake up with the answer that overcomes this. And my subconscious goes to work and I dream about it and how I turned that into the power. And I made this really okay because again, my. My pain that I had with the info product and creating and getting back in this game was.

To spend my time creating something. And then I solved things by performing the solution. So I built a story that would excite me, and I knew it excite an audience to get them to see a bigger, brighter, better future, a better life for themselves with me as their guide, not as their savior, but as a partner. And. And it was hard. It took me a long time. Up until 48 hours before I walked on stage, I didn't know what the hell I was going to do or what I was going to say, but I let the pressure, you know, it was a pressure box. And I know when I go back over 20 years plus now that's what I've been able to do every time. And just know that it always works out and it's always going to be fine. And when you listen and innovate and spend your time in the muck. I was talking to a young entrepreneur right before we got on Today, who I've been mentoring, who's in his 20s, and I said, you got to put your fingers in the pig manure. You got to be willing to get really stinky fingers. And it's in the dirt, it's in the pain, it's in the stink that the solutions show up.

That's interesting that you should say that. One of my favorite quotes from Ben Hogan, the great golfer. As you know, I'm an aspiring golfer.

And they were always asking Ben Hogan what his secret was, and he said, the secrets in the dirt. Dig it out. Like I did.

That's right. That's right. I love that. Well, I think that's a great place to stop and end. So any other last minute thoughts before we wrap this one up?

Fear can be your worst enemy. But once you learn to breathe and let it through you, it can be your best friend. Wow.

I agree completely. All right, well, here's where we'll bring it home, which is you've been listening to another episode of the Big Leap with the great Gay Hendrix and the always happy to listen to the wisest man he knows, Mr. Gay Hendricks. And this is Mike Koenig. So if you know someone who's dealing with some crazy anxiety, some crazy fear, and you think that listening to this or watching it can make a difference, make sure you send a link and we always appreciate those five stars and those great comments on itunes or whatever platform you're watching or listening to. This is and gay. I'll give you the final word.

Yes. A lot of people think that F E A R means false evidence appearing real. And that's not a bad way to look at fear, too, because when you're scared, like Sophocles said, everything rustles. I love it.

All right, well, thanks for another great episode, and thank you for being with us when we get to just do what we love to do, which is talking to you and exploring experiences, feelings, and how we can reach our next big league.