How To Get Un-Stuck

All right, welcome to episode nine. This is what to do when you're stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, out of time, frozen, and don't know what to do. Gay.

Well, a lot of people I work with probably like you, whether they're in a couple relationship or in a business relationship, don't get around to consulting you or me until they're massively stuck. And so over the past 30 or 40 years, I developed a whole map for helping people get unstuck. And I'm really excited to share that. And so it's very practical, but it also has a lot of cosmic overtones also.

Yeah, it does. One of the things that. That I really enjoyed about this episode, besides your map, you also really get into four types of fear, what they mean, and how they keep you in that cyclical stuck mode. But we also dive deep into the types of being stuck. You are one of the biggest ones and the most challenging is business partner stuck. So that's a combination of relationship, business, and money. Seems like all those show up in an ugly format sometimes. And being able to detect what's really going on, going on, both from your present, your past, and your programming and how to undo that.

Yes. And you'll also learn what I call a 10 second miracle, which is something you can do in 10 seconds to get things unstuck and moving again.

And I love to say this is the result of it's your $10,000 question or your $25,000 question. So you'll get all that and more in this episode. Episod.

Well, we're back again for another episode of the Big Leap. And this is about what to do when you're stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, out of time, frozen, and don't know what to do.

I hope you're never in those spaces, but I bet, like me, you sometimes get into them. And we've got a couple of good maps to show you for how to get unstuck when you're stuck. Whatever you're stuck in, whether it's a relationship issue or a business issue, I've had experience in getting unstuck from many of those kinds of things. And I would love to share with you what I know.

And one of the things that I was talking about right before the camera started to roll is.

Something I've noticed in a lot of people I've worked with, especially in their reinvention stages or when they just can't get going. And these are super successful people who have had massive financial success, business success, but they're at that point in their reinvention where a starting all over again. They'd rather be stuck than deal with the fear of not being as good as they once were. So being compared to that. And one, one example is Eddie Murphy. There's a lot of conversation about him right now. He was at top of his career, basically left, had a family, he's got a whole bunch of kids, made a bunch of basically rotten movies. Most of them were just junk but he made a ton of money and now he's out practicing standup again. And he's been open about the fact that it's. He wishes he would never would have stopped stand up because it's so hard. But now he's going to be compared against the way he was and that. So that's one side of this. The other side of it is meeting people who are stuck in a place where they just don't pull the trigger. So they'd rather stay in a place of confusion, overwhelm and not even going anywhere. And I've seen this over and over again from a professional perspective. So I know you've got some amazing stories this time around. Gay but at least that provides the basis for what we're. The path we're going to go down here.

Yeah. Usually what you feel stuck about is not actually what you think you feel stuck about but a lot of times what you have to do first of all is simply acknowledge that you're stuck. And that's hard to do for a lot of people. You know, it's why I think things in 12 step work so well for the people that it works for. If a person gets up there in front of the room and says my name's John and I'm an alcoholic, that's kind of calling it like it is. It's saying here's the way it is. I'm not going to try to climb you anymore. I own it. And that's a really important thing in getting unstuck because.

Oftentimes when you're feeling stuck it's because there are old programs running from way back, one of which is I don't deserve to be here. And a lot of people when they're feeling stuck haven't really chosen to be here because when you get, when you choose to be here that means you're open for business 24 hours a day to whatever needs your attention. And a lot of people aren't willing to make that kind of commitment. They'd rather stay in a kind of a low grade mediocrity all the time.

Yeah, yeah, I know you Know, growing up, I had. I struggled with one thing with which was with. With my dad, who's a very good performer, very good singer. And I know I always had a resistance and a fear of.

Being better than him. And I don't know if I could have been or would have been. He's a very talented singer, performer, entertainer. But I grew up in that environment where it was around me all the time, and I always found alternatives and ways I could compete without competing. And. And I think that's definitely something that shaped and I limited my own abilities. But I also, again, getting back to some of these bigger topics, which are the areas that we notice people are stuck in. So it's relationships, business, money, business partners, which is a combination of relationship money and business.

Yes.

Weight and diet, and ultimately the things that block that. So one of the things that I know you promised gay is a map for getting unstuck. And I'd like to explore that. And I'd also like to explore some specific stories and identify, you know, maybe go through a relationship, business, money, business partner. And you've got a one of your own business partner stories you were in not long ago where you felt stuck. I've got a couple as well. And let's use this as a means to conduct our usual form of alchemy to build systems that can be used by our watchers and our listeners.

Good. Well, let me first of all tell you that one time I had an experience with a client over the phone when I still lived in Colorado that really showed me how to get unstuck. And it was something that just occurred to me spontaneously in the moment. But I'll tell you what happened. This guy, he was probably 35, 40 years of age, and he called me and he was really depressed. Things hadn't been going well. He'd had a couple of business setbacks and that kind of thing, and he was classically stuck to the point where his voice even sounded kind of slowed down and depressed. And I. I talked to him for a little while and just kind of listening to him, that kind of thing. But he didn't get unstuck from it until a particular intervention. He asked me if I had any suggestions. And. And something popped into my mind. I said on the way home today, you were thinking about all this, right? And he said, oh, yeah, I've been thinking about it for the last couple of days. That's why I called you. And because I couldn't figure out any other way to get unstuck. And so I said, when you were on your way home today, did you notice anything that caught your attention? And he said, well, that's odd that you should say that, he said, because when I was coming.

To my apartment, to my condo, I passed by, I know an elderly lady that lives on the condo beneath me. And the front of her area, the front porch and everything was kind of cluttered up and had some leaves on it and that kind of thing. And it occurred to me that I could brush it off. And then I forgot about it and I said, okay, go downstairs right now. I'm going to stay on the phone. Take your broom down, clean off her stuff. Don't even bother to tell her. Just clean it off and then come back up and tell me. And so he was gone for five or 10 minutes. He came back up and he sounded totally different. His voice had upticked to where he no longer had that kind of slow depressive sound to it. What had occurred to me was he had gotten so caught up in recycling his own negative thoughts over and over again that he had forgotten to do what I call taking the out breath. In other words, you should get so busy.

That you never go ha and take action out into the world. So you recycle your inner stuff over and over again and forget to take action out in a place in the world where it could make a difference. And so this was a really simple thing. But what it did was by asking him to think about something that he could do for someone else, it popped him out of all the self reflection, preferential thinking that goes into getting stuck. Yeah.

Oh, man, that really hits home. I can tell you that in my experience, when I meet people who are depressed, the best cure. You know, Vivian's been doing this work in Uganda with just like my child. Now it's in South Dakota with the great Sioux Nation and then also in India. And she started bringing along the sons and daughters of wealthy donors. Of course. Yeah, the mass majority of kids these days, they suffer from some form of anxiety, depression or some sort of inward focus thing, which is. I'm going to go on a limb here and just call it what I think it is. Massive selfishness. And it's like. And it's so apparent and obvious and of course it's, you know, the parents are so used to the grind and then the kids are practicing selfishness all the time that once they get into an environment where these kids. So you have to share because there's usually one thing to go around and there's no sense in fighting about it because there's just that one thing. And you can't steal anything because if you have that one thing, you could sit and covet and hide it, I suppose. But there's nowhere to put it right. So a lot of the problems that humans have by having too much stuff are immediately they disappear. But Zach ultimately created this documentary about how a lot of western kids are so completely self absorbed and depressed and have so much available to them and take it for granted. And then these kids are really happy and you know, they're part of a community and you know, the act of doing great works for someone else is a great way to get out of depression. It's. It's like go out and give away your time and however that manifests. But that is really interesting that in this particular case it was a great way to break that state as well. So.

It makes a ton of sense. And.

If I were going to go back to this notion, I know you have another example of a business venture that you were involved in where you got and were stuck in and things turned weird on you.

Yeah. Well, here's a good example of how the results you get depend on the quality of the question you ask yourself, because I got stuck. This goes back about five years now and up until this particular thing that I'm going to talk about, I really hadn't had any business conflicts in many years. I created the Spiritual Cinema Circle and took it to great success and then sold it to a another business. And so I'd been working on that and then a friend of mine called me one day and asked me if I would invest a little money. It was 25 or $30,000 into a project she had going and she was running. She'd done the classic entrepreneur's trap of spending all your money on development and then having a couple of bucks left over for marketing. Oops. I'm sure you've seen that a few thousand times. But anyway, she had stepped in the classic entrepreneur's trap. And so anyway, I gave her some money to do that with and ended up with a piece of the business.

And then she took the business off in a different direction than I had originally understood. And I saw the reasons why she was doing it, but I never really liked the way it was going and I sort of went along for the ride and she got some other partners involved, one of which I developed a real conflict with. And he got angry a lot and was always coming. Even though he teaches prosperity, he was coming from this place of massive scarcity all the time, you know, didn't want to spend a penny on development or anything like that. And so I was gradually getting disenchanted with being in the business and so getting out of it. I ended up sort of buying my way out of it. And so that was my solution to dealing with it. But what got me to the solution was sitting down on the floor one day and just. Or sitting down in the corner on a cushion and just kind of breathing and being with it and asking myself a whole bunch of questions. And one question I asked myself is, of all the possible things I could be creating right now with this, why would I be creating conflict with this particular person? So that's a high quality question. Because it takes it. Because up until then I. The question I'd been asking were low quality questions like, why is he doing this to me? Why is he such a pain in the butt? The guy's 75 year old, so quit acting like a 2 year old, you know, and. Because he would literally throw temper tantrums when things weren't going his way. But anyway, the long story, I mean the long and shot of it was that asking that question popped me loose from thinking it was somebody else's issue. And it put it in touch with why did I create this? My answer to that, I realized, went way back into my childhood, that he reminded me of a couple of rigid authority figures I'd had to interact with in my life growing up. My father died before I was born, and so I never. While my mother was pregnant with me, so I never knew my father. And afterwards, a succession of male authority figures. I saw a lot of authoritarian, angry southern men around. And a stuck Southern man is not a good thing, you know. And so I kind of grew up with this things with male authority figures. And this guy was, you know, 10 years older than I was and that kind of thing that I got stuck with. And so I saw the kind of, the primal pattern of why I would create conflict with that. But the whole thing didn't really smooth out until I asked that big question of, hmm, why would I be dreaming this up? Why would I be creating this particular reality? Soon as that cleared up, boom. It became very clear to me that all I needed to do was just write them a little check for my chunk of the business and let them go their separate way. And I was happy with it. And actually the day after I got my part of the business back, I ended up selling it to some. Someone else their portion of it for like 10 times what I had had to pay for it. And so it turned into a big win for me. It's fortunately the last day business conflict I've really had, or relationship conflict for that matter. But the point I want to leave is it's all about the quality of the question you ask. And keep your questions out of things that involve you. Like why is it your fault? Is not a good question. Right.

Right now. That's super powerful. I think what Vivian and I have really been working on lately in our lives and is paying attention to our rules. What are rather our values, our value system and being rigid with our value system about what's important and not important. And then anytime. And this is something we learned from a therapist we've been working with who instead of ever blaming the other person or talking to them about their behaviors, just say, here are my views values and here's how I feel. And I can't compromise my values. And when this happens, here's what I'm experiencing and I can't allow this to occur. So then it's, it has nothing to do with the other person. And due to that, I cannot, I can no longer participate in this part of the relationship. So one of us is going to have to go and either I have to walk away.

Or you can live with whatever the consequences, but just know that I can't behave or participate in this experience or in this feeling any longer. And that's a great way to analyze, like are there some, some specific values that you simply can't live with that you, you see exhibited in another party?

That's really an important thing though, because I love that. Because asking yourself what are my values and how am I compromising my values in this situation? That's another one of those powerful self reference questions to ask yourself.

Having heard that, I realized that.

I got out of the business because it did offend my principles. You know, there were things about that were going on that I don't deal with. And so I tried to put up with that for a while, but I'm not good at putting up with things. You know, I can put up with them about 10 seconds.

Yeah, I think I've mentioned that in a previous episode. You know, you always have walk away power. That'll be like, I don't feel right right now. And you just get up and go, that'll be the end of that. It's a, it's a, it's a, it is a very powerful character trait that I know you've spent a lot of time developing. So let's go down another level. And this is something you told me right before we started recording this episode, which is the things you complain about the most are the things you are most committed to. Wow, is that a heady one. So I'm going to repeat it again and I'd love you to tell a story to introduce this and then let's dissect this because I think this will be a way to get to again some of these different kinds of stuck. So the things you complain about the most are the things you are most committed to.

The things you are most uncomfortable consciously committed to. Usually. Because if you ask, well, I, I used to be overweight and when people would ask me why was I fat, why was I overweight, I had some good ready reason for that. Oh, I have glandular problems. And I never said to another person, it's because I eat too much of the wrong kind of food. You know, I was 24 when I realized that finally, you know, and then within a, within a year year I lost 100 and some pounds and got to my current weight. And so but it's that what are you resisting? What kind of feedback are you resisting, you know, about yourself? I also, I want to tell another story about how to get unstuck that involves complaining about something because I was once working with a couple and we have in our institute, couples will often come from out of town or out of state or something to work with us for a day or three days sometimes on their relationship. So we had a couple and his complaint was.

You went out of town and you had a one night stand and broke our marriage vows. That was the coming in problem. And her response to that for the past six months had been apology, apology, apology. But he was still in that self righteous anger. It hadn't gone anywhere. And so they, they came in, flew in and we worked with them. And the first day didn't go really well because he was still stuck in that you're the you, you ruined my life kind of thing. You ruined our marriage. On the second day we had this huge breakthrough when I brought up this question and I said to him, of all the possible things that you could be have created over the past six months with your wife, why would you you think of created the situation of your wife going out of town and having a one night stand. And first of all.

I always say, be sure you're charging an appropriate amount of money when you ask that question. You know, so anyway, in those days it was a $10,000 question I asked him because he got $10,000 worth of anger but once he settled down, really what happened was he realized, he said, oh, does it have anything to do with this? And then he said, when I was four years old, my father ran off with another man. And my, I mean, my mother ran off with another man. And my father raised the four of us afterwards as a single parent. And he said, every day of my life I heard, women can't be trusted. Women will dump you, women will cheat on you. And anyway, this guy had kind of absorbed that as a child, and it came to light now, 30 years later. And that's the power of early programming. You know, something gets down in your skin and bones like that and then it just happens to you. And you think the world is doing it to you, but you don't realize what the real issue is until you say, hmm, why would I be dreaming up that particular reality? Here's the amazing thing that happened. As soon as he had that realization, he also remembered, oh, I guess I got to tell you, I had a one night stand myself one time a couple of years ago. Boom. You know, now she went off like a fourth of July.

Cherry bomb. Boom.

And so bang, bang, bang goes the trolley. Ding dong dong. Or however that song goes.

So anyway, 18 hours later, when they finally walked out the door, they had both taken responsibility for dreaming up the conflict and were committed to going off again and recreating a positive relationship. It had a happy ending that time. We get a happy ending about one time out of five with couples that come to us. And I'm, I'm happy with that statistic. I used to feel a little, I wish I could help everybody, but I went out of five, people come in and either they've let it go too long, they can't revive it relationship, or maybe they haven't let it go too long, but they're not willing to do the work that needs to be done to dig out of the trough.

Oh, yeah, no, that's.

I really get that on a profound level. Having, having danced in the, you know, like negotiating all aspects of, you know, I was married, I had a starter marriage. And having gone through that and then Vivian and I have had our stack and share of crazy.

Crazy challenges and testing our boundaries. You know, after 18 years, you really, you're gonna, you're gonna test a lot of stuff. And as I like to say this, this means a lot of things. But being able to have an honest conversation and with the willingness to renegotiate every part of your relationship, even the ones that terrify you most.

That is a Hard ass conversation. And one thing depending on, we'll come back to it. But I do want to get back to this whole idea of the things you complain about the most, because I can see how you can have some epigenetic programming or some generational programming or recency programming or childhood programming and enter into that where having a father playing back a bad record over and over, you may find a way unconsciously to create a circumstance to make that truth real.

Yes.

And that's really what you're talking about here.

So the secret to enlightenment is to listen carefully to the things you complain about and then ask yourself, why would I have dreamed those up? Where would I have gotten unconsciously committed to creating a lack of success or creating misery in my marriage? Where would I have gotten that idea? That's an innocent wonder inquiry. Notice I'm not saying what's wrong with me or why am I being like this? It's got to be done in a, in a ceremony of innocence. The inquiry has to be done from wonder rather than fear or anger.

Well, I guess this comes back to that tone that we talked about in a previous episode, which is.

Yeah. Being able to align the two halves of our brain simultaneously and have a moment, which.

That'S almost done.

I think one of the reasons that they invented mantras and things like that is because they unify the hemispheres scientifically. If you hum, you're getting action from both sides of the deck. One of the things also, you know, we talked about fear a lot of times, but it's down at the bottom of a lot of the things that really bother us. And even if you look at how your body is assemble motion wise, a lot of your anger muscles that tense up when you're angry in your jaw, shoulders, back of the neck, they're up in your body.

Yeah.

Things that you feel when you're feeling sadness are more down in the center of your chest. You might feel kind of a heaviness or a lump in your throat kind of feeling. And then fear is way down there where those butterfly sensations are and where that tight belly is. And so I think of the body being stacked with emotion like that and fear being down at the bottom of it. We had, one fellow told us that, in fact, I think it's on one of our websites somewhere that the word. He changed his marriage with one word that we taught him. And it was, I pointed out to him that every time you're angry at your wife, Robert, you're also scared, but you rag on her all the time with the anger. And you never tell her what you're sad about or scared about. As soon as he started saying to her, honey, I'm scared that instead of I'm mad that you're. It took him out of that pointing the finger kind of thing. And they could actually solve some problems because nobody likes to have the finger pointed at them. The moment a person says, you're to blame for my problems, what are you going to do? You're going to look back at him and say, you know, you're absolutely right. I am totally to blame for your problem? No, you're going to be defensive. You're going to say, no, you've got a stake in this too.

Okay? There's a really important distinction. Two of them that popped up here. One of them is, I'm going to go back to what you just talked about, where your emotions get stacked inside your body. In episode eight, we talked about the emotional genius dashboard and the whole idea of learning to decode what's going on inside of you, meaning the non physical you. In other words, I think of this as the body, as a dashboard. You can learn to read and see the distinction between your soul, your spirit, or whatever it is that is the real you versus the outward, physical you. And I think that's a really important thing. If you haven't listened to episode eight, definitely go back to that. And the next one when you're just talking about being honest with your emotions. So this is back to what happened with our son Zach. So where we've been stuck for a long time with him is this negotiating. He's a really good negotiator. You know, if you just imagine being brought up with Vivian, who can spot everything that's going on, and she's, she's like.

She can predict the future and she sees what's going on long before it manifests. And of course, she tries to head most disasters off of the past before they occur. But that also means restrictive behavior as a parent for Zach. So he's been well managed for a long time. And there's going to be a natural amount of pushback, resentment, or in his case, he negotiates and he negotiates on the tiniest, tiniest, finest points. And I'm pretty matter of fact, as a father, you know, it'll be like, yep, if you don't do it this way, you don't get this. Simple as that. And I just walk away. I leave it, you know, there's natural consequences. Yeah, yeah, man. A few words when it comes to that stuff. And And I don't mind being the bad guy. I'll be like, look, here's the. Here's the best way to make things work in our relationship. Don't piss off your mom. If she's happy, I'm happy. And I'd rather just do fun stuff with you. However, I'm the bad guy here, and you need to understand I'm the enforcer. So when bad news is going to come, it's going to come from me, and I'll enforce it. So we've kind of got that down. However, when we started managing based upon values, which is a brand new thing with us, one of the things that Vivian started doing is she'd say, okay, for me, I'm not going to compromise who I am and my values. And there are consequences to operating outside of our value set in this family. And you can do whatever you want to do. You're almost an adult.

And if these things don't happen, we're not going to invest in the extras in what we consider to be.

You.

Know, the non essentials, in other words, the car, the phone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we're going to pick you up and drop you off. We'll take away the phone because we're not going to invest in the privileges. And these are investments for us.

And anyway, what happened that really turned things around besides not giving him a foothold, because our values are our values. But she would be honest about how she felt. She said, when this happens and my values are compromised, I feel fear. The way you show up scares me, and I don't like the way I feel. And when I've compromised myself and I subject myself to this because I've compromised my values. And that opened up a whole new layer of conversation and adult like behavior. And Zach suddenly really, really got much more sensitized to how his behaviors and actions and how similar his values are with ours and how that would affect his mother. And it didn't come from a place of manipulation. It was purely pure truth. And it's really opened up a big, deep possibility in our relationship as a family, you know. And so I bring that up because in thinking about getting unstuck, one of the hardest things to manage is a relationship with a teenager. I can't imagine what it's like with a teenage girl. We're lucky with a teenage boy who's, you know, pretty easy by all standards. But I don't know if you have any commentary on that, but yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's been a While. While. But yes. Well, I remember the famous psychiatrist, hypnotist, Milton Erickson was a great influence on me. One of his colleagues pointed out that the reason Milton Erickson was such a great psychiatrist is because he had two marriages and four kids in each marriage. And so he had an adolescent in the home for something like 25 years. God.

He was a genius.

Apparently this guy's never heard of Harry Carey before.

For her.

Yeah. So the thing you have to understand about teenagers and the thing I didn't know about myself when I was a teenager is that I was so hungry to be gone. I was. I was desperate to be out of there, but I felt so incredibly powerless at how to get out of there, you know, and so I. I think I was. I ate myself up more. I didn't act out so much, but, you know, I really made myself miserable and I made my mother miserable, arguing all the time with her. I was a pretty good negotiator myself. I imagine she had sort of Old Testament values that my liberal soul rebelled against.

I get it.

I get it.

All right, so you ready for the next thing that you talked about? The four expressions of fear and how they show up and keep you stuck. So that's really where I want to get back to again, the big ones through my lens, which are relationship, business, money, business, partner, weight, diet, and I know there's a whole bunch of other places. For me, I see it in a form of reinvention from a professional perspective. When people want to relaunch. They've been in a career a long time, they want to do something different, but they return to the comfortable. I call it the poopy diaper syndrome, which is most people would rather smell their own poop than change their diapers. And that's just like they'll just sit in their filth or they'll return to their filth because it's the smell they know.

Yeah, it's the upper limit problem. In a way, if you start feeling a little more juice through your system or through your marriage or through your business, a lot of times if you haven't done some work on yourself, you'll shut yourself down with an upper limit. Well, the reason fear is so important is because it has fear. Four different ways of showing up. Everybody's heard about fight or flight. In other words, some people, when they're scared, they come out swinging around. Some people, when they're scared, go the other direction, they shrink and run away. But what a lot of people don't understand is that fear has Two other ways that show up, and we call it the four Fs. Freeze, flight, faint, flee. In other words, people are either freezing. In other words, they get, and they can't think of what to do when they get scared or sometimes they get fainty, they get spacey in the head, they get the urge to go watch an old Star Trek episode or get the urge to smoke a joint and space out. It's a version of fainting. And certain animals do this when they're under stress. You know, like they'll roll up into a ball and go to sleep. Yeah. So they won't get bothered. And so you got to look at which one of those four expressions you tend to operate out of. So on the dashboard, let's make sure we have a thing of Am I in faint right now? Am I in freeze right now? Am I in flee or am I in fight right now? Because all of them can be dealt with by what I call a 10 second miracle, which is to open your mouth and simply say it like it is. I'm scared right now. And sometimes it's I'm scared and I don't know why I'm scared. And I remember this conversation recently with, see, your teenage children can also someday be 45 or 50 years old. Because I was having a conversation the other day with my 50 year old daughter and it was basically around a similar issue, you know, like how she was telling me about something that wasn't going right in her life. And I was asking her, okay, what kind of fear are you feeling right now and what are you dealing with it? And so we got down into what the fear was. And like I say, it's down in the bottom of your feeling zone, down in your belly. And so it's a very primal kind of thing. But once you can name your fear and also realize what expression of it you're coming forth with, you're better equipped with more awareness next time you go into a troublesome situation.

Yeah, that's very powerful.

So talk a little bit about fear of outshining as well and how that keeps folks stuck.

Yes, it's a big problem, especially with people in, if you're in a transformational field or just about any field. And I always say.

Usually you've grown up with brothers and sisters if you have a fear of outshining. Because often the early programming is about not outshining one of your other family members. Sometimes it can be your dad, sometimes it can be your mom, but there's a, often it's about brothers and Sisters, like there'll be a golden boy or golden girl in the family. And you're not supposed to outshine that person. So that's a common theme in a lot of people's background. But even if you didn't grow up in that circumstance, you can develop a fear that if you shine, you have a belief that it detracts from other people's shining. And so the antidote to that is to give yourself permission to shine fully and also let that inspire other people to shine. Take it out of the self referential part of it and extend it out to other people.

Okay, here's another one. Let's talk about money stuckness. And there's a variety of them. So I'll give you a couple scenarios. One of them are a fear of investing. For example, fear of losing money, which you hear often of someone who's older, who loses all their savings. They get a scam or some sort of a bad investment or something like that. And to me, one of the things that's happened is they've resolved the fact that they're no longer useful or they can't get it back or what that represents. It's the story. You talk about your money, but also think about fear of investing in. And here's, here's a grand example. Look at an economy, for example. You look at history for lifetimes. The economy's always gotten better in the grand scheme of things. And if you just invested constantly and stayed in the game, you'd be ahead, statistically speaking, for the most part. Right?

Yeah. And if you bought a share of Warren Buffett back in the 50s for $13, it'd be worth $225,000 right now. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, totally. And.

The list goes on. But I'm curious, looking through the lens of fear and complaining and getting stuck and looking at the map, talk a little bit about money through that lens of either not being able to ask for it, the fear of loss, fear of making it back. Like, what have you found in your years of therapy and observation? Also getting over your own side because you've got a great relationship with money.

Yes. Well, one thing to keep in mind, I always tell people that money problems don't have anything to do with money and sex problems don't have anything to do with sex. And then I say, well, here's why. When you're dealing with money issues, you're really dealing with things like control. You're not dealing with money. You're dealing with a fear of being out of control or a Fear or a need to be too much in control. Control. So it's an issue that got laid down. The tracks for it got laid down early on. And you're just projecting it onto money. I've met tons of people who have lost tons of money, and it never had anything to do with the money itself. I had a fellow come in one time who had inherited a trust fund, and it was not a massive amount of money. I think it was something like $750,000. And yet he had made these little investments and his accountant said it was like the financial equivalent of the Vietnam War. You know, the guy just put more and more money into these stupid things. And he invested in his friend's business and then he invested in his Aunt Martha's dada da and his cousin Jed's used car lot. Anyway, by the time I got him, he had whittled it down to a couple of hundred thousand dollars. And here was his great one liner. He said, I'm beginning to wonder if it had something to do with me.

Well, that's a start, you know, just beginning to wonder, hmm, let's see. 17 women have left me in the past 13 years. I wonder if it has anything to do with me. So we looked into that. What could it have to do with? And I asked him my big magic question, my $10,000 question or 25,000 or whatever the person is paying. It's, hmm, how am I responsible for dreaming up this? Of all the scenarios with my money, why would I dreamed up one where I whittled off 500,000 of my inheritance from my father? And we massaged that issue a little bit and the following awareness came up. Oh, I hate my father.

Duh. Suddenly, oh, what's one way I can deal with my hatred for my father? He's obsessed with money. So why don't I waste all the money he gave me through that trust fund? That'll really show him, won't it?

Yeah, that bastard.

Bastard. I'll get him with my $500,000 I'm investing in proving he's wrong, you know, and so looking at it from that perspective, it's something that his unconscious intention was not to grow his stash of money. It was to get back at somebody and use it to get back at somebody. And so you got to look, if you're creating negative results.

Of all the possible results, why might I be creating that particular result with my money? When that first dawned on me, with my own money supply, I was, I was busily recycling a conversation in my head 40 years ago, which was, will I have enough money to get through to the end of the month? You know, And I saw that conversation echoing around in my head and I realized, oh, I'm recycling a conversation from 30 years ago that were circulated by people who just gone through the Great Depression and had just recovered from getting beat in the Civil War. You know, so they were three generations. I was the third generation away from people who had been run out of town by losing the Civil War and had to move to a whole different state. And so naturally, I think early I was broadcasting out into the world an unconscious intention to prove that there was something wrong with money in the world. And I go back to my grandmother's famous statement where she didn't trust the greenback because it was Yankee money. The guys in Washington made it, and these were the guys that beat Robert E. Lee, her great hero. She worshiped only one person on earth and that was Robert E. Lee. And my grandfather was about 325 down on the scale from that. But that was her gold standard of human beings was Robert E. Lee. So anyway, I had a lot of programming that was causing me to chase away money. And once I drop that, I always say, if you'll just slow down and let go of your programming, money will catch up with you. And if you stand there for a while, it'll really overwhelm you.

All right, beautiful. And if there was a way looking at this, the grand formula then for getting unstuck begins with asking the $10,000 question. That's the next one. Becoming honest with the fact that you're afraid and really feeling into, you know, you can connect with your genius dashboard, your emotional dashboard, of course, what kind of fear and how do you react and do you respond to it? And then from there really understanding the origin of where this programming came from and how that's showing up. So is there anything else that I'm missing here? If we were going to summarize our.

Grand lessons here, another way to get unstuck that I mentioned, with the guy sweeping his.

Person downstairs, condo, front porch, the idea of getting something outside yourself, going, doing something for someone else, or what I call taking the out breath. So you get so stuck on that in panic and everything that you don't go and complete that. And so whatever it takes to complete something, sometimes it's a 10 second communication to another person that will get things unstuck. I remember a couple that came in one time from a neighboring state who had had 29 straight years of recycling the same argument in their relationship. Oh, how do people put up with it? Because they raised four kids and, you know, and so actually it was the kids leaving home that brought them in because as long as they were focused on raising the kids, they didn't have to look at the image issue. But as soon as they departed, it was suddenly them sitting there looking at each other across the dining room table. And so. But here's the cure for that. It was looking each other in the eye and learning to say things like, I'm scared that or I'm sad that. What had kept them entrenched in the argument for 29 years was both of them always running for the victim position. Because when he would criticize her and she would criticize him and it would go round and round and round and they get there. You know, people can get adrenaline from hassles and arguments. That feels sort of like being alive, but it's not. The feeling of genuine aliveness is totally not about adrenaline. Yeah, you can run on adrenaline maybe up until you're about 40, but by golly, you better figure out quickly when you're in your midlife area about finding another source of. Of energy, because that stuff will burn you up.

Yeah, that's. I know what my observation is, and in many people I've been around and with is the movement from one mini drama to another or external stimulation drama.

It happens in marriages too, for sure. We have a word we use. Couples oftentimes fight instead of having good sex. They have very stimulating arguments but very boring sex. And it's because they're having what I call war gatherings. They're having their adrenaline rush when they're having an argument instead of having a whole body rush of aliveness when they're having great sex.

That's good. That's good. I love that one. That's very powerful.

Don't settle for wargasms, kids.

Yeah, yeah, you, you meddling kids. I love that. That's very good. All right, so let's. Let's bring this back around, which is I've got an ask, and I know you do too. One of them is you've got this new product. It's Living Miracles. And I want to incentivize our audience to head on over and rate and review the podcast. We're going to select someone to send this deck to. Can you describe what this deck is and what it's about?

Yes, it's called Living Miracles. And one of my wonderful graduates of our program and just a wonderful entrepreneur in her own right named Suzie Batiz.

From Poo Pourri.

From Poo Pourri. Yes. She invented this great business, and we've known Susie for many years, and she's been to all of our seminars and had a number of times to talk to me on the phone and FaceTime and that kind of thing. And as a celebration of my 75th birthday recently, she spent a half a year having a team put together this deck of living miracles. It's essential wisdom from Gay Hendricks. And it's all about a whole bunch of different categories where people get stuck in and things I've said to get you unstuck, like relationship and money and weight and all of the kinds of things that you might get stuck in. You can pull out a card and it has a piece of living wisdom on it that's helped somebody change their lives. And so it's got hundreds of different things in it. And I love it because it's just so beautiful to look at.

Yeah. Great art.

So much fun. You can pull out cards that have to do with the categories and. And that kind of thing. I'm having trouble extracting them now because.

Zip it out. Because I actually popped them back in.

Yeah. I have arthritis in my thumbs from typing 55 books or whatever it is over the years, so I have trouble gripping.

There's a stack.

Yes. Okay. So, like, for example, here's a stack called the Joy of Genius. And you just open up to it and pull out a card and say, hmm.

You might look at one that says, genius is addictive. The more you express it, the more you want to express it. That's why we ask people to start with 10 minutes a day of just sitting still and asking themselves, what is my genius? What is my joy? What is my true genius? And don't focus on the answer. Focus on just wondering the question. And to me, all problems boil down to a sweaty conversation you're trying to avoid having with another person or with yourself. And this will help take the sweat out of those conversations.

I think they're brilliant. And what, again, I wanted to just encourage you to do is head on over to itunes, look up the big leap, give this thing a rating or review Gay and I, or a member of our team will look at it. First of all, we're going to read all your reviews as they come in. But it's an opportunity. We're going to capture it, connect with you, and get you a deck. And we'll be giving away at least one deck for every episode. And then the other thing to learn more about is checking out Big Leap live because one of the things that we've been requested to do, Jay and I have talked about, is actually conducting an event where we're going to put together a group of, well, let's call them what they are, high frequency aliens like us to create an enlightened experience where we work on all the aspects of your life that are covered in the Big Leap and also in conscious luck and how to increase your luck and teach the ninth Principle. The one that isn't written about in conscious luck. It's something that can only be shared and expressed in a. In a right fit live environment.

Gay. Yes, and I'm very eager to talk about that. I to explain that a little bit. Where the eight things that are in conscious luck are the things that I knew how to communicate in writing. But there are some things that that you have to create a vibrational experience in order for people to really get. And that's why I'm so excited about the ninth Principle. All right.

And here is that book, of course. Ta da. Available on Amazon or anywhere that books are sold. So let's wrap this baby up. This is another episode. I am having a blast here, Gay with the Big Leap. So thanks. And when we come back, we're actually going to be talking about in episode 10, Pride. Fear of asking for help, support and not feeling far enough along. It's another one of those upper limits challenges that everyone, no matter where you are, either deals with on a regular basis or this is when you get past that overcome many, many growth potential challenges.

I love it. Can't wait to talk about that. That.