Our Biggest Leaps

In this episode, we're sharing about our own biggest leaps. I'll take you on a trip through one of my biggest leaps, which happened to take place at a party that I was trying to escape from. And in that moment, I learned something about my life that's changed it ever since. Mike also tells a couple of stories about his amazing life.

All right. One of them that really grabbed me is something that Gay calls big talk. So imagine if we came to your deathbed 50 years from now and imagine your life being a complete success. What would be the number one thing above all that made it the biggest success? That's the question we ask and answer in this episode of the Big Leap. Stand by.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Big Leap podcast. I'm Gay Hendricks.

And I'm Mike Koenigs.

And we're going to be exploring a really powerful subject today through the personal lens of some of our own biggest leaps. I have a couple of moments of my life without which I wouldn't be here, and I certainly wouldn't be successful. And I know Mike does, too. And so we're going to be exploring in some detail what made those happen, what made those possible, and how you can use those, the template for that to make big leaps of your own.

All right, And I think one of the ways I want to start this off, Gay, is let's go back to the whole purpose of the Big Leap book and what the biggest challenge is. For anyone who hasn't read the book isn't familiar with the basic backstory, because I think that'll provide a great frame to for where our biggest leaps came from. We're gonna turn back the way back clock and craft lessons and learnings and really a process to design and develop your best big leaps. And the oh, by the way is, if you haven't already listened to our other two episodes that preceded this, the first one in the series was, number one, your consciousness is your most valuable product. And the last one, which is everything you need to have a Big Leap year, where we go through, step by step, our formula for creating and crafting big le years. So back to you. Talk a little bit about the Big Leap, the book, the intention and the framing there.

Yes, the Big Leap is about two big concepts. Number one, it's about the upper limit problem, the tendency to sabotage ourselves when things are going well. And I collect a lot of examples in that, and a lot of them. I worked with a lot of high tech executives back in the 80s and 90s and to some extent up into this century. Also and in addition to other industries. But I specialized in working with a lot of high tech folks. And one thing that I noticed is they tended to sabotage themselves when things started going better. And so as I began to look into that and in my own life, I found that there are four or five basic fears that come up when people start getting more successful. And that our ability to negotiate through those fears then allows us to step into what I call the genius zone. Which is the second thing that the Big Leap is about, is about how to organize your life in your genius zone, where you're actually doing what you most love to do and what also simultaneously is your biggest contribution to other people. In my experience of people in my own life and working with a lot of people over the past 50 years, is that we are only happy when we are fulfilled ourselves and where we're providing the space for other people to experience fulfillment. So I don't think we can make a great life out of just the intention to be happy. But what if we make an intention not only to create happiness for ourselves, but for other people? So if we can make our lives be about our own success and providing success for other people, to me, that's life at its best. My own life purpose is to expand every day of my life in love, creativity, and abundance while I'm inspiring other people to do the same. That's been my life purpose now since I chose it in 1977, and I'm still doing it here in this moment. And it's very fulfilling to me because it's part of what's in my genius zone. And I started out before I wrote the big leap, probably 10, almost 20 years before I wrote the Big Leap. I was collecting examples of how people sabotage themselves and how they then move through that so that they can break free and get out into that genius zone. So I sat down finally about 10 or 12 years ago and wrote the Big Leap. And ever since then, it's probably the book that I've written. I've written 46 books, but the one that brings in the steadiest daily supply of thank you for writing this book is the Big Leap. Our other book on relationship conscious loving also does that too. For my wife and myself. The Big Leap folks are really special though, because they are often in the process of asking the big questions in life. And to me, being around people who are asking the big questions in life is like eating dessert all the time. It's in my genius zone to be there for those kind of folks, because that's who I am. You know, every moment of life, I'm doing my best to open up to whatever the learnings are that could be coming in from every which way. And I think that what I've discovered is the more open we are to learning, the more coachable we can make ourselves, the more we can make commitments that put ourselves on the line and then receive the wisdom that allows us to prosper and move through our stuff to the positive future that we want. To me, that's a thrilling life. That's what I get to live every day. And that's what I want for you, too.

Well, as I listened to you, I had a whole bunch of little ahas. And I'm going to respond with a couple stories. Gay.

And I'm going to tell you a little bit about where my biggest leaps have occurred. And some of the biggest ones have been through where some of my biggest traumas and fears came from, which are running out, not having enough, not being enough. They're classic pains. And I've worked with some energy workers recently who say those are deep multi generational epigenetic wounds. You know, it's like, it's not yours. It came from a long time ago. And depending on how you look at that, whether it's deep encoded DNA or past life or whatever. Whatever. Or just like, shoot, maybe I was just shocked. And. And again, it's not real. Because the truth is, I came from. My parents loved me. I'm the oldest of four kids. I grew up in a lower middle class, but like, we never went hungry. There were times there wasn't much to go around. But my dad always was resourceful and resilient and worked his butt off. And my mom was there for us.

But I created a story about not having enough. And I also had enough situations where I overspent. And I was broke and in credit card debt and didn't feel like I had the resources and tools that I wanted. In other words, I felt like I didn't deserve my lot in life. And again, it was a story, but where my breakthroughs happened. And one of the first one is, and my biggest leaps came from creating money on demand and finally realizing that I had freedom from. And freedom to which are really big concepts. So I'm gonna tell you two stories about creating money on demand. And look at this on a level where it's not about the money, but it's about the mindset. But the money is the metaphor, right? So here's the story. It was probably my first big project and I was around 18 at the time. And I had been writing software in some way, shape or form. And my dad, who was a barber and owned a barbershop, you know, would talk about me and he'd say, yeah, that Mike, he really loves computers. And one day, one of the people in his chair was an insurance salesman. He said, really? Well, we just got a computer at the office and no one knows how to use it. And I said, do you think your son would come over and teach us how to use it? And he goes, why don't we just ask? I'll just call him up. So my dad called me up and said, hey, sitting next to Roger Elmquist here, and they just got a computer. He's wondering if you'd be able to come in and teach him and his secretary how to use it. And I'm like, yep, sure would. And I had no idea how to use any of the software they had. Like, but I'm like, and. And the answer is, do you think you could do it? And the answer was, yep, I sure do. Not do I know how to, but do I think I do, Which I think was really important. Do I? You know, I think I can. I think I can.

But what happened was I was over teaching and I learned word processing and spreadsheets and databases, and I started tinkering and tweaking. And of course I was making a hell of a lot more money than flipping burgers at Burger king or at McDonald's, which I never did. Fast food. But one day I was over there teaching and another insurance salesman comes in, this guy's mentor. And he sees me there and he's like, who's this kid? You know, and it's like, what's our computer whiz? He goes like, we got a bunch of PCs, no one knows how to use them. When you come over to my office too, I'm like, yes, I will. I didn't know how to use a PC. You know, there was a new operating system. But I sat down, figured it out, and as my friend Ed Rush says, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So I knew enough to be dangerous. And so, same thing. I'm sitting there one day, I got some new systems set up. I taught, got them educated, and of course, you know, you teach one nerd. Suddenly I had two eyes. And then I taught another person how to have one eye. And then, you know, soon people were self replicating. Well, a guy was in the, in the shop, comes in, he's one of their clients, says, who's this kid? Same thing. And this is a computer whiz. Yeah. I need a. I need some software for my trucking company. You think you can. Think you can help me with that? And I'm like, I think I can. Same deal. I landed my first. It was like an $8,000 contract, which at the time was at least.

I'd say, almost like nine months worth of income for me that I could earn in a couple. To make a long story short, I wound up learning how to program in that time. Pascal programming language. Built a huge library of tools and resources and really trained my brain to think right. But more importantly, the takeaway story was I learned how to create money on demand by. By the magic words, I think I can. But more importantly, selling with stories. I didn't realize what I was training my brain to do, but all it was is I could create a story about what life would be like for someone with something I would make out of thin air, get them to buy into it enough that they would prepay for it. And that led to really, the probably the grandest leap of my lifetime is.

Learning that how you think you make money isn't really how you make money. Because I spent so much of my life doing to make money and knowing things that help me make money. But only a couple years ago truly learned that my beingness is where the money was at. My beingness was crafting stories starring the person I'm talking to, sharing a compelling future where they get to be successful and have something predictable happen. In other words, a transfer of certainty, of stability, of clarity, and them sitting in that place going, yes, I love that feeling that I'm getting right now when I listen to your voice. And I am willing to reward you in advance for that gift. Now, of course, the hard work still has to happen, which is building the damn thing. But inside of this, I know now if I would have really understood the nuance of what I just shared 20 years ago or 30 years ago, I'd be a billionaire now, because I would have spent all of my time in crafting those compelling stories pre selling, getting the money and then figuring out how to do it later and handing that off to someone who loved operations and HR and getting the hell out of the way and moving on to the next compelling story. So I'll have another story in a little while, which is the day I first made a million dollars in 43 minutes. And that was the next time where life changed dramatically.

Well, I was thinking of a moment in my life that took me Into a whole different dimension. One of my biggest leaps happened in 1981 or 1982, and it had to do with a conversation I had with a man at a party. And I was at a party, which was an engagement party for a colleague of mine who was getting married. And it was for, I think it was the fifth time he was getting married. And I'd been around for marriages three and four, and so I didn't have a lot of high hopes for number five. Oddly enough, they are still together. So that's, I guess, the fifth time.

There was a child. And they all lived happily ever after.

So anyway, there was this party going on and I've never been great at parties anyway, and so I never quite know what to say. And so I wandered into the library. It was in this big mans. And I wandered into the library and I was looking through books on the shelves and this tall man, about maybe 6, 4, 65 with a bald head came into the room. He was about 60 years old and his name turned out to be Ed. And so he said something about, you're escaping from the party too. And I said, yeah, I'm not much of a party animal. And he said, neither am I. And I said something about small talk. I said, I kind of am allergic to small talk, so I never know quite what to say. And so he said, well, since we're here, let's not have any small talk. Let's either say nothing or have some big talk. And I said, okay. And he said, well, you go first. Say something in big talk. And I couldn't think of anything to say. And so I said, well, how about you say something in big talk? And he said, well, I almost died six months ago. I said, oh, okay. Well, that's pretty big talk. And he said, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And so that kind of took me back a little bit. And I said, why? And his answer turned out to be something that really had a powerful effect on my life. He said it was so valuable because he was on his deathbed and he had this vision. If someone came to him while he was on his deathbed and said, ed, was your life a complete success? And if he said yes, the person then said, well, tell me what was the thing that made it the biggest success? And so he said he found out what the things were that were most important to him. And some had already happened, but some he was busy about making happen now. And he said that each human being had the capacity to change their lives by having this kind of deathbed conversation with themselves. And so that made a huge impression on me. And so in that moment.

He said, well, for you, if I came to you on your deathbed, say 50 years from now, and I said, gay, was your life a complete success?

And if you said yes, what would be that number one thing?

And as I thought about it, the one thing that I would say was number one wasn't something that I had experienced. And what I said was the one thing above all that would make my life a complete success would be if I created a lasting, long term, loving relationship with a woman with whom I could grow and change overall, a long period of time, a lifelong relationship. And that would be my number one thing. Because by then I already had my PhD from Stanford and I was already had written a couple of books and was successful in a bunch of areas and was a university professor and all that. But I really hadn't felt like I had.

Earned a PhD in my heart. You know, I still hadn't felt like I'd had a complete love experience. I'd had a whole bunch of relationships and they always started out like with the fanfare of the Titanic, but they always ran into the same iceberg after six months or so and sank away. So I was on the verge in my life where I really wanted to create something big and significant. And at the time, I was just beginning my relationship with my wife Kathleen, also known as Katie. But I hadn't made a commitment to that relationship yet. And that was another moment where I learned the value of commitment. Because I kind of had one foot out the back door. I didn't know if the relationship was going to work. I wanted to kind of preserve my escape hatch. And I realized it was never going to work unless I made a complete commitment to it. And so I did. I made that commitment to having that relationship become that number one loving, lifelong relationship. And it has. We've been together 40 years now. And then he said, each human being has the power to make five big dreams come true. So what would your other four big dreams would they be? And then we got interrupted by somebody came in to ask us if we wanted a drink or something. And we never got to complete the conversation. But later on I went home and I went through this carefully and I created these five things that I wanted to experience in my life. And most of them I had not experienced at the time, but I now all of them have come true, but I'll run through them Quickly. And you can see why they had such a big change in me. So number one was the relationship. Number two was what I call living in a state of completion where nothing was unsaid or unlistened to with the significant relationships of my life. Number three was that I completed a. That I learned to write from my heart. That I'd written books before, but I felt like I hadn't really touched my true power to write from my heart. So that was my number three. My number four was to get as big an experience as possible of the Creator, force, spirit, or God or whatever you want to call it. But where do we come from? But I didn't want to know that as an idea. I wanted to kind of feel that in my bones. The fifth thing I wanted to learn was just how to savor life, how to be there.

Eckhart Tolle made a book a while back about the power of now, and then Ram Dass many years before, Be Here Now. But it's really true, you know, that John Lennon song about life is what's going on while we're busy making other plans. I wanted to be there for life instead of always being up in my head. And so that became my fifth big goal for my life. So I hope that will be helpful to you. But for one thing, I want everybody to do is have that deathbed conversation with themselves where I say, okay, if I were on my deathbed, however many years in the future and my life was a success, what am I drawing on that? I'm thinking I've made it. What are those four or five things that really made it a success? And then get busy about making those come true.

That was a big wow. In fact, it was so big, Gay, that I've decided that a future episode of the podcast is going to be called Big Talk. And I have an ask for our listeners right now, and that's this. We want to know what your big talk. What's your one big thing.

That you've either had or you want? And so here's the question. If Gay and I visited you, doesn't matter if it's 10 years from now, 50 years from now, on your deathbed, and Gay looked at you in the eyes and said, for your life to be a complete success, what would the number one thing be? And what we'd like you to do is you can text that to us. So the number to use, you have to start by just texting the letters BL that stands for Big Leap to 858-434-5316, you'll get a little. It's a message system. This is a service that we use. It's the same one that Ellen and Oprah and a bunch of celebrities use for communicating with us. And we get these messages, but we'll be able to see them and just send us that message. So it'll welcome you and send you a link to our transcripts for these episodes. But more importantly, now you've got a way to communicate and give us feedback directly in the future. We're actually going to have an app to do that. But in the meantime for gay is, first was a lifelong relationship. Number two was living in a state of completion with nothing unsaid in the significant relationships in his life. Number three is he wanted to learn from his heart, not from his head. And then four is to get a huge experience of creator force, of God force. And then finally was to feel that he could savor life and always be there. And I know I'm not hitting that precisely it gay, but those are the. Those are the key ones. And when I. I was thinking as you were talking about, like, what is mine that made it a complete success?

You know, I didn't look at things like this. The truth is.

I think I set out.

To be.

To never experience the pains.

That my grandparents and my parents and my. And my. My parents felt, to never be in a state of lack or in a place where I felt like I was dependent on someone else. But to be a reliable, successful provider. I mean, as shallow and simple as that sounds, it's to never be a burden and never live in fear. And, you know, once I attained that.

I was so scared to be a father. And if it weren't for my wife Vivian.

Really communicating in a way that I could hear how valuable it would be to be a father.

And my life became so much more meaningful to be a dad and to experience love in ways I couldn't have communicated. And frankly, I'd. I'd cut myself off from for a variety of reasons that I think, as I think about it, I haven't even fully explored yet. But I didn't have the wherewithal to be as articulate. Articulate as you to say I wanted this relationship. I think I felt too broken to really face how fearful I was to enter into one and make it successful. And I spent so much time running away from feeling responsibility or shame. And I don't mean this to be a comparative, but I did not have the ability to articulate what you just did. Certainly not as young as you did. I just want to acknowledge and congratulate you for having that moment as young as you did.

I was 34 at the time, so that didn't seem very young to me at the time. It does now. Yeah.

Isn't that funny? Well, for me, I didn't get married. You know, I had a starter marriage and then my real marriage. And I was about 36, I think, when. When we met, maybe a little bit younger, but in that. In that time frame. And. And I think Maybe I was 36 or 37 when Zach was born, so maybe it was earlier. But.

Yeah, it's. That is really powerful. And. And. And even when I look at the. The stuff that enabled me to experience consciousness, it was sort of like I had to get.

Ancient traumas.

And to feel comfortable in my own skin enough, you know, because I was running away from so much fear. And that was a. Something that inhabited me for a long time. And really mine. My desire was so simple. It's just like, I just want peace. I just don't want to live in a state of fear. And it was only a couple years ago I had this experience.

That I would regard as one of my other biggest leaps. I promised the story the million dollars in 43 minutes. It seems really tiny and insignificant now. Maybe I'll bounce back to that. But here's the short version. I was doing some work with some, I'll say, spiritual coaches that were doing some very deep work that I still don't fully comprehend or understand. And one of the exercises involved doing a Chinese detox. And I don't know what this stuff was, and I don't have the packages, I don't have the containers, but it came straight off the boat. And I took these things, and what they cause is a flush of all of your systems, organ by organ. So, like, when you have an. If you've ever done a gallbladder flush before, have you done those before where you. Basically, what it does is it's usually like olive oil.

Lemon juice, and something else doesn't taste good, and your stomach rumbles, and all of a sudden, whoosh, you have a big flush. But out comes what looks like wasabi peas, which is stuff that's in your gallbladder. Okay. Well, it turns out whatever these Chinese crazy people have done, they figured out different substances that you're drinking at different times that flush all of your organs, including, like, stuff that's supposedly in your heart, in your spleen, like, literally out of you sometimes will be something that looks like your spleen. It's like just a bunch of, it's toxins and stuff. And it's about a 24 hour process. It is not pleasant and. But in the midst of it I had this weird like hallucination that happened. And I can remember coming out of the bathroom at one point. It's 20 hours in, I'm exhausted. And I was doing a bunch of other exercises that had left me just emotionally and physically spent. I was just going nuts. And I felt a presence exit my body. It was like I was inhabited by an old familiar phantasm. And I hallucinated an object exiting me. And for the first time in my awakened life that I can remember, or maybe one of the first times, I felt a stillness I had never had before. And it was as if I had a bag of grenades duct taped to a jackhammer that had been inhabiting me forever. Stopped. And suddenly I felt still and quiet and peace and. And I call that one of the first days of the rest of the rest of my life.

Yeah, but.

That was a huge moment when I really felt comfortable releasing a lot of old attachments, a lot of old stories. It was like this restart and this rebirth. And you know, since then I know there's a lot of mechanisms and vehicles. You can do deep therapy work, you can do deep meditation, or you can do plant medicine. And I know in another episode we're going to venture into the world of plant medicine and microdosing. But that was. I didn't even remember that until I heard you talk about these, these steps. But that was what popped into my head as I heard that.

Well, how long ago was that?

Probably two and a half years ago now. It wasn't that long ago. It was right when I was going through a very dark night of the soul that I intimated in the last episode about when I felt trapped and I had outgrown who I was, what I did, why I did it, who I did it for. And if I didn't get through this, I die. That's how.

Yucky I felt.

And how does this Turn into the 43 minute million dollar. Is this related to that?

It's not. I'll tell that story now just to.

Kind of circle it around, because that was actually the beginning of the last life I released, you know, my last reinvention. But here's how it went. So. So grew up, small town and all that, not a lot to go around. Oldest of four. So I think there was some old trauma of not getting attention and stuff. As a baby, when my sister came along there's all kinds of, like, whatevers, and, you know, my parents were busy, busy, busy, just trying to hold. Hold everything together. But I went through building and selling a business. A lot of ugly crap in there, a lot of feeling broke and almost losing it. You know, quarter million in the hole. Went through his divorce. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Well, we get to about 2008, and we had been building what was Traffic Geyser Instant Customer, and crafted an amazing offer. And at that time, affiliate marketing was working like crazy, and we had just hit the big credit crunch, if you remember in 2008 when the banks and everything else blew up. And at that time, there was credit available but at a lot of people lost their butts in real estate. So we created this offer. It was at the time called Main Street Marketing Machines. We had crafted beautiful launch videos. I was experimenting with how to do online video sales live. So it was before there were real webinars and stuff. We were using live broadcast using a technology called Ustream, which was early in an infant. But I had a nice studio, multiple cameras, and.

But we made these videos. And it was launch day, so we had just sent out mailings and promotions, and the orders started coming in. And I got a text message from our bookkeeper accountant at the time, and he said. He sent me a number. He said the launch opened up, and I just started welling up inside, like. And. And it was. You know, we were still struggling up and down, financial craziness. But I saw this message, and I immediately called up my mom. And I remember it was on the brand new iPhone. So I'd just gotten the new iPhone, and I called my mom, and I was crying, and my mom said, what's wrong, honey? And I said, mom, it's not what's right. It's not what's wrong, it's what's right. She goes, oh. And I said, you remember how forever I've always said I wanted to be a millionaire someday? And she said, yeah. And I said, well, we just made a million dollars in 43 minutes. And she goes, wow, that's great, honey. You want me to go get your dad? I go, yeah, yeah. So mom, dad was at home, and she says, he's out in the garden, and the grandkids are coming over for lunch in a little while. And I go, great. So I could hear my mom open up the door, say, bernie, Mike's on the phone. So dad comes in, he goes, what is it, son? I go, well, dad, we just. Just made a million dollars in 43 minutes. He goes, oh, that's great, son. What is it exactly you do again? It's something with computers. I know. And they go, just a second. The grandkids are pulling up and they're outside talking and it's like they couldn't give a crap about the money. And that's when I really, I mean, I didn't get it. It about how lucky I was that I didn't grow up in an environment that was driven by that. But I saw it as a pain, you know, so it was this huge eye opener and awakener. But what wound up happening, we're just kind of going back and forth chatting and, and they're just talking about Eagle Lake, Minnesota, like, who cares about all this money crap, Mike? But it was a. An hour and 14 minutes later I got another text message and it was like we just broke $2 million. And then over the course of the week, we had a $9 million week. But it was just imagine, you know, seeing $3,000 orders come in every minute or so. It was non stop and it was life changing to say the least. And that's again where I had that experience of holy crap, just what imagination and wonderment and relationship can do. And there were bajillions of moving parts. You know, recreating something like that was very, very, very difficult in the future. But it was a big moment where I could finally release and have this sense of, you know, where most of my life was in this constant state of holy crap. Yeah, it worked right now. But we're two hours away from ruin or a week away or a month away from, from ruin. This is all going to fall down and someone's going to try to take it from us or we're going to get sued or some story was always in the background. I never felt any peace, no matter what was in the bank account.

Yeah, there's not a good correlation between net worth and self worth. They function independently. Well, this is really big stuff. And actually I want to talk about a couple of other big leap moments, but we'll save those for the next episode or one after that. But I, I want to just say a word in favor of being open at any moment of any day for enlightenment to strike, because I've never been able to predict when wisdom is going to come in. I think the best thing we can do is to be open to learning in every moment and then let life bring us the stuff that is going to make the most difference.

You're absolutely right. And that's As I listened to you, I thought how many times even walking into this, what I thought was important in the notes I had for this episode, seeming suddenly became insignificant when I listened to what your big things are. And this really goes to show how critically important it is that you surround yourself with like minded people, but at different, different evolutionary states in your life just to get you to rethink and recalibrate where you think you are and also being willing to be coachable and open as well. And I think what I also want to just let you know as a listener, as a viewer right now, if you're feeling as though it's time for you to have your biggest leap or to have a big leap year, or to elevate your own consciousness, I'm going to just say head on over to bigleappodcast.com because gay and I are doing a program and we're going to invite you to apply to that. We're going to do it for a limited number and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity where Gay is committed. This is part of his own longevity strategy. He told me, I want to look forward to something for a year.

And this is a chance for you to learn everything that Gay has to offer. Everything I have to offer in one place. And you can also learn more by texting BL to 858-434-5316. In addition to sharing your big talk, you can enter into a dialogue with us and learn more too. So Gay, anything else you want to add to that before we wrap this baby up?

Well, I'm grateful to everybody who's in the conversation with us. It makes a huge difference and I really appreciate all of your commitment out there to making these big leaps in your own life. And I promise you that everything we have to say here has been well tested in the biggest laboratory of all our own lives.

All right, so think about someone who could benefit from this message today. Who you think needs to hear this exact message, share this with them. Just one or two people. Head on over to itunes. Rate this Review this this the way this podcast grow grows is with your help and your support. And Gay as usual, I love manifesting, creating and wondering with you. This is always a highly elevated part of my life.

Me too. I love it. I love batting ideas around with a guy that I often describe as the smartest guy I know.

All right, I'll accept that gift. I love who you are, my friend. This is the big leap.

Sam.