The Art of Collaborative Experiences

Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Big Leap. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here today with my good friend Gay Hendricks. And this is the Art of Collaborative Experiences. We're going to talk about great ways to solve any challenge, any problem you have, and also get into a unified collective consciousness state. And I'm going to introduce something super powerful. I call it the Reverse Mastermind. Gay.

Yeah. This is an opportunity for you to learn more about what really goes on underneath the surface and how to use the power of shared consciousness to make miracles happen very effortlessly.

All right, get ready for another episode of the Big Leap.

All right, here we are, Gay, on a topic that I know is one of our favorites, because we love to express ourselves creatively, create things, make things. And one of the best plays of doing that, best ways of doing that is with collaborative experiences. And we're going to talk about collaborating, getting the most out of working together. But also I'm going to introduce something that I call the Reverse Mastermind. It's a really, really powerful way to get decades of wisdom from really, really smart people by accessing improv. And so I thought we'd kick it off. And I really want to get your perspective on what you're in, what your definition of a collaborative experience is, and how you've used them to create creative gold.

Yes. Well, it's a big topic, and it's really worth paying some attention to, because when collaboration goes well, I mean, really miracle things can happen, and I've been part of that. But on the other side of that, when collaboration doesn't go well, boy, it can be just a gigantic weight around your neck. And I've had them both ways. And so I've got some ideas about how to optimize. One thing is.

I always say that you get to success as much by saying no as you do by saying yes. Learning how to say an enlightened no.

Is that is the hardest thing of all to do. Yeah.

Yeah. But I'll tell you, my life got infinitely less cluttered when I got to say no. Because I used to say yes to things that sounded so good at the time. But then I'd get up closer to him and I'd say, oh, geez, why did I ever say yes to this? I would guess you've had that happen a few dozen times, too. And I've had people that I didn't do enough kind of emotional due diligence with. When I started to collaborate with them, I went in not firing on all cylinders. And then when stuff came up in them. I didn't know how to deal with it. So I've spent a lot of time in my life learning how to spot and say no to things that are going to be trouble later on for me. So that's a whole subject in itself. But here's the best thing about I've learned about collaboration. The more I as a person can own myself in the sense of.

Being in touch with the things that are driving me, being aware of my intentions, being aware of things I'm afraid of, being aware of that whole inner world. The more I'm open to that, the easier it is for me to collaborate with other people because I'm open to it in them. You know, we have an old saying about you never love another person unless you love yourself. That the extent to which you can love another person is dependent on your ability to love yourself in relationships. And there's a lot of truth to that. And it goes way beyond loving relationships too. That in business too, I've gone into situations with major blind spots and things I didn't know about myself then when they came up. Learning how to sort through those is one of the big challenges. And it took me a while to figure this out. But I think that the major thing that goes wrong in business problems almost never has anything to do with business. You know, it's not because of a clash of the numbers or a clash of the budget or something like that. It's because one person or the other is dug into some old issue that goes way back into the recesses of their early life. And I've actually saw a very famous person once in a boardroom situation, get down on the floor and have a temper tantrum. There's almost nothing that would be awesome.

That would be the best Instagram video ever. But yes, okay.

This, this happened to be in the days before everybody could shoot a cell phone video of it. Thank goodness it is probably be out there on the Internet. But I'm always saying, whatever you think the most astonishing thing is that you've ever seen in business, just wait till the next one. Because I never thought I would ever see a 200 pound famous person throwing a 2 year old temper tantrum. But it happened. And that was pretty obvious, you know, that.

There'S nothing harder to deal with than a billionaire who has the emotional intelligence of a two year old. That's a challenge. And that's why it's so refreshing when I got to work with people like Michael Dell, because he's the exact opposite of that. You know, his emotions are held in a space of consciousness and so things like that don't occur. And so I guess the big point I'm making though is that in business, that business problems are almost never about business. And to be open for what that other thing is is incredibly important because it means you're open to knowing what you don't know you don't know. And being open to what you don't know you don't know is so incredibly enriching because that opens what I call the apertures of your learning mechanisms, the openings in you to learn. It opens them wide. And here at our institute, we have a 20 point openness to learning scale we have people take and use. And it has 10 points above the scale and 10 point, I mean 10 points above the line and 10 points below the line. But things like above the line are things like listening to a person with open body language rather than having your finger or, you know, having your arms crossed across your chest and a scowl on your face, which is how a lot of people in business listen. And but to even do things like to give the other person your full attention, that hundred percent of you is engaged in the conversation. Whereas things below the line are things like listening from a preconceived position, like listening to argue with somebody or listening to fine thought what they're saying. Those kinds of listening intentions cause a lot of problems in business. So the big point is, as much as possible, if you can keep your own openness to learning cranked up to the max, you can move really fast because you're not bumping along, getting defensive about things as things come at you.

Okay, so I've got two implementation ideas, and as I was listening to you.

That can help a group in a collaboration environment eliminate the preconceived notion and either an emotional stack or get people in the right unfiltered mode so they can create together. And one of them, and you said something before we started recording that was genius, which are three heads are better than one. So I'm going to give you a couple frameworks that I use whenever I can. And one of them I've done before and I'd never given it a name until today because right before you and I started recording today, I was meeting with a business owner. Right now he's going to break over 100 million in revenue this year. And he's very young, he's only in his 30s, and he's really done it.

With the brain he has. In other words, he's a high fact Finder. And he's built his business on incremental improvements just by paying attention to the details, grinding it out, doing the hard work. And he's first and foremost a great copywriter and an influencer, and that's given him the ability to build this business and learn what he needs to on the fly, which I give anyone who can do that a lot of credit. The unfortunate thing is he's built this on a specific strategy and technique, and at any given time, an outside force could break one of the three legs of the stool he stands on. That's about as much as I can reveal. But.

I'm going to give you the two stories, the two formats. One of them is a unique business mastermind, and the other one is the one that I just gave a name to today, which is the reverse mastermind. So I'm going to give you number one. And it just happened recently, and I organized something that I wanted to do, something fun. So my. My phrase for the year is work is play, and play is work. And I only work with people I want to play with. And it was Vivian who. She and I were brainstorming one day, and she said, what would you love? And I said, I want to fish more, and I also want to spend more time with groups of business people and collaborate, create collaborations. And she said, why don't you do fishy business? And I'm like, what's that?

She said, that is a genius title, by the way.

Isn't it great? Yeah, I figured you'd love it. And so. And I got it right away. So what I did is I immediately, like, I created an offer, made a video, built a landing page and a webpage in a day, and sent out links to a bunch of people that I sought would be fun people to play and invent with and collaborate with who also needed to know each other. So really, when you create relationships and connect people who need to know each other, it's massive value. So I had room for about 10 people total and organized a trip to Mexico in the Baja that included fishing on a yacht. So, I mean, it was really nice on stable water, and it would have a sandwich. So you come down there, we'd meet, we'd connect, and then have a day of masterminding, a fishing day, and another day of masterminding. And interestingly, I opened up, took everyone out for dinner, and we all drinking margaritas at this nice little palapa covered bar right in beautiful Baja, Mexico. And the question I asked for everyone to answer to get to know each Other was, how could we make this experience an 11 on a scale 1 to 10, everyone went round robin. But one of the people there, his name's Charlie Epstein, one of my favorite people, and he said, I would love to find a way to invent something and collaborate together, something we all walk away with, that we create together. Like, wow, it's pretty profound. And it created a higher level of thinking in the group for all of us to see and find and spot opportunity together. And then there were some other little mini exercises, and they're all created to eliminate these preconceived notions, to get everyone into an improvisational yes and mindset. And then I asked everyone to present something to share that they've learned that could shortcut other members by, like, 10 years. So we had someone there who was really knowledgeable about longevity, for example, and talked about ways of extending life by 10 years or more. And he's working with some of the top longevity experts in the world. Another guy was also in the.

Nutrition world, and he designs custom supplements that give you energy without having a crash. So custom ingredients. And he had some really unique insights on having and getting and more energy. And another guy had designed a way to deliver.

Knowledge. And especially within the financial world, he works with financial advisors and built a VR platform. And his whole thing was, it's hard as hell to get people to say yes to meet with a financial advisor, but if he invites someone to to go to Mars for a meeting, you get their attention. So he's actually delivering a preloaded VR headset, and then you meet there with a whole bunch of experts in a cool environment. Really cool, right? And it went on and on and on. There was another guy who is an Instagram expert. And then we just went round robin and asked people, you know, what's a challenge you have? What would you like to solve? And we collectively did it. And just again, because there were some fun exercises that got you into a new mode of collaborating, it started to wash away the ego that oftentimes happens in these kinds of environments where you're posturing and people don't want to show their weakness. And ultimately, some great things happened. And as a result, one of the people there, who runs an artificial intelligence hedge fund, raised money from one of the members over a million dollars. And two guys who've known each other six years created a collaboration that they initial initially thought would be worth a hundred million dollars, Then it turned into 250. And then less than a week later, they met again and they realized they're Sitting on a half a billion dollar opportunity just by creating a connection with people already in their networks and they created the offer. So the point of this is exponential growth happens when you take people in completely different business environments with different knowledge and wisdom, and you combine it all together and, you know, you just create a fabulous cake that you couldn't get anywhere else. And that was. I'm really grateful. But more importantly, everyone there said they made lifelong friends and connections that they wanted to continue the relationships with. So that's the first one, which is the collaborative business mastermind. So I'm going to stop, see if you've got any comments, questions, thoughts, and then I'll tell you about the reverse mastermind next.

Yeah, I love the idea, although I'm not a fisher person by any means, and I actually have a tendency to get seasick out on the big ocean. But having said that, I love the idea of creating something like that around a thing, you know, like fishing or. You know, I once took a bunch of people to a baseball camp where they got to play baseball with some of their favorite baseball heroes. And, you know, it's something like that, you know, let's say it costs $5,000 to do it, but the person is never going to be the same again, you know, that he shared a locker with his baseball hero, you know, and so.

I guess it's whatever takes you out of yourself and takes you out of your normal way of looking at the world. I think that's why also so many people have written to me over the last few months since we did that episode on using psychedelics and psychedelics in business and that kind of thing, shared our experiences with that. I've gotten a lot of input from people who have made big business shifts while they've been taking mushrooms or one of those other ones like ayahuasca or something like that that people are taking a lot these days. And, you know, you don't usually think of having a big consciousness experience and then sort of making money off of it or having a big business breakthrough, but, you know, took you out of yourself. And so that's oftentimes what needs to happen is just kind of let go of all the ego stuff and be in that pure, spacious place for a while. And then when you come back into form again, you've got a whole different set of ideas about what you need to do. That's happened to me many times in my life, by the way. I've.

Had, not with psychedelics, but with once just being out in the mountains by Myself for a few days. I thought up a whole new business that I ended up running and selling after several years. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of anything that you can do to. In my case, I call it having an out of Hendrix experience where I kind of get completely out of myself. Like Bob Proctor often says, the instructions for how to get out of the bar box are written on the outside of the box. And you have to, a lot of times enlist other people to help you lift yourself.

That's so true. And, you know, just last week I was engaged with a very good friend of mine who.

Went through a massive transformation that began with some plant medicine work, actually.

And.

I'll actually have to admit I enrolled him in his first.

Experience and that helped him and his wife. And then he subsequently started going down and doing some other stuff. And now he had been in the money business for a long time and he is now about to release a Netflix comedy special. It's done. It's remarkable. I'll just. Between you and me, I'm going to forward it to you, to him, to you, so you can see it. And he's performing here soon. And then he started playing guitar and really expressing himself artistically. And his biggest takeaway is.

About he. He's not afraid of the pain, any kind of pain of growth. And, and I'm not articulating it as well as he did, but that's what he got from going through these journeys and really realizing just how precious life is and how fear is an illusion. And he's just been blasting through it at a remarkable pace and doing it.

Incrementally. You know, it's like every time I talk to him, every quarter, he's got a new breakthrough, something he's doing that is much bigger than he ever was in the past. And I'm sorry, such, I mean, really in awe of his courage and confidence that he's gotten. So that's great. I love it. That was a great bit of feedback. So you're ready for the next one, the reverse mastermind?

Yeah.

Okay, so here's the basic idea is in a traditional mastermind, generally speaking, the format is there are little exercises to get people synced, connected, to create deep relationship. Eliminate the me, me, me and the positioning and posturing. Get people really authentic, really real. And then give everyone an opportunity to do what is usually like a rotating hot seat. What's the biggest challenge you have to solve? What would you like to do? And then getting the collective wisdom of everyone there and then stacking that with the collaborative energy that occurs where you play improv. Yes, and yes and yes and and you say stack it. The reverse mastermind is when it is all about you. And so in this particular instance, again, I was talking to this business owner at around 60 million this year, wants to do 120 million yesterday, next year, and has been doing so incrementally and linearly and, and doubling almost every year. I mean, remarkable growth. And his goal is exponential growth. And I just told him, first of all, you won't reach exponential growth by doing things incrementally. You're going to need to get hockey stick mindsets in a room and you're going to have to stack wisdom. And there's a way of organizing a collective mindset and creating a unified like a God brain by creating the right environment. And so one of the ingredients in this is by first of all finding right fit people who first of all have been around people who've done what you want to do. That goes without saying. I like getting people who are outside of your business type because if you get a, you know, there's a natural incest that happens in a lot of organizations where everyone's doing the same thing in the same business and you don't realize how incestuous your mindset and your thinking is. But in his particular case, because he's in the world of.

Nutrition, for example, it's going to come from people who have a history of shortcuts and have huge Rolodexes and know that the way out of a how is by bringing in the right who's. And so what I proposed we do is organize a trip where I get, I already know some of the people I want to put in the room and I know who to ask to get the other who's in the room and effectively say to them, I'd love you to meet someone who I think will be a great collaborative partner you probably get great business from, but also someone you really want to know. And I'm going to bring other people that you want to know in a room. This could be lifetime quality relationships. And.

Not only do you have a chance to have a great vacation together for a few days, you're going to invent some new fun things and we're going to focus all our attention on this person. We're going to eat great, we're going to drink great, and I'm going to pay you too. And if he likes you, he'd like to suggest that you'd be on his advisory board and ride with him into exponential growth. And so the structure of these then are usually it's a half a day of fun and connection and it's unstructured. That's much like what you talked about. It's getting in that rest mode. And then the second half is all about getting super focused on solving a problem and playing improv games which are, you know, you start with what, what do you think would be the best thing to do? And someone actually raises and does a yes and and adds a resource or a person to that, a who to that. And you are, you're building a giant list of who's who can provide exponential resources. And then again you're building this layered cake of.

Hockey stick growth. So again I'm going to stop there and say gay.

How would you add to that and what are your thoughts?

One thing I would add to that is to find out what barriers he's hit along the way and find out if there's a common theme of those barriers or what I call upper limit problem, where you hit a place where you get off track or you hit a place where things come to a screeching halt or you get a distraction guy going down a down doing some project that's off the central mission. That's a common thing that happens in the lives of entrepreneurs. So that will give you insight into what his central fear is. Is he afraid of if that if he gets to 120 million that it'll be more of a burden? That's one of the common fears. Is he down in there afraid that he doesn't have the inner resources to do a doubling of the business? Is it a confidence issue? So by getting a little track on what kind of barriers he's hit along the way, that'll give you insight to what his particular upper limit structure likes then or is locked into and is programmed to him. And once you understand that, then he can more easily get out from under that upper limit problem. And once he's not tied that old barrier.

Okay, I love that, that's really good. And also I found that one of the secrets to making these accelerate is pre framed introductions. In other words.

A great phrase to answer is why should I know? You answer that question and it really forces you to go deep and think about, you know, like what's the big value I have to offer? And also doing introductions. Here's why I think you should know so and so, you know, a little bio and here's where here are the opportunities and the connections and the collaborative.

Opportunities that I think you could share together. Nothing beats a warm intro that is meaningful, authentic, and accelerates, you know, hours of trying to figure out what your mutual connections are and, and what you have in common too. So that's really good. I'm going to take that to heart because I'm actually proposing that we do a reverse mastermind. So was there anything else that you'd like to add before we wrap up this segment?

I think the kind of the spiritual principle of masterminds is really great, the idea and it gets to this thing I talk about about.

Shared consciousness because the more you can open up with yourself to kind of own everything that's within you that gives you ability to do the same thing with other people. And at a certain point you realize that we're not only all the same, we actually share the same consciousness and that it's just a kind of a quirk of our minds that make us think of ourselves as individuals. But if we can let go of the idea of our individuality and our ego for a moment and own that other part of ourselves that's connected to everything in the universe and other people, it's a much better place to come from. It helps us understand ourselves better and it certainly helps us understand and open our hearts and minds to other people better.

Yeah, that is absolutely true. I think something that I'd love to look at for a future episode is some shortcuts and techniques to get people fully synced and in that mind space and be able to access that unified consciousness and be able to amplify and accelerate their creativity at the same time. So I'll make a note of that for a little tickle concept for the future. How's that?

Sounds good.

Okay, well, let's wrap this one up and one big ask I have for you. If you've been listening to this and going, man, I would love to join something like that. Remember that Gay and I have put together the big leap experience. It is a highly, highly conscious mastermind experience. You'll be coached by Gay and me to help accomplish some of your biggest goals, break free through and through your upper limits challenges, and also be around high vibe people that you need to know. People that can become lifelong friends who are committ committed to the same values of growth that you are and that we are as well. Gay, is there anything you'd like to add to that?

It's an experience of that kind of shared consciousness that I find so valuable that once you've experienced that, it opens up a whole new world of ability to collaborate effortlessly with other people.

So to learn more, you can head on over to big leap podcast.com apply or just go to bigleappodcast.com there's a big button on the page, or text the letters BL to 858-434-5316 and in the meantime, share this episode if you found something really powerful and know of one or two people who could benefit from it. Best way to share this knowledge, of course, and wisdom is by giving it to someone you care about and love. So with that, thanks for being here again, Gay. It's been an absolute pleasure as usual.

Yours to your genius.

And yours. Thanks.