The Big Leap EP #42 - How to Get into Your Genius Zone

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks. I have been looking so forward to this particular session of the Big Leap podcast because my new book, the Genius Zone, is now out into the world. And I'm going to take you through a number of different key concepts in this session about how to plug that into your life so you can soar like an eagle in your Genius Zone.

All right? And a few things that I really love about this episode is number, number one, Gay talks about not only how to overcome negative thinking and how to get and stay in your Genius Zone, but also he's got a new roadmap for success that he describes in here. And because Gay has written this as an extension to the Big Leap, you're going to get some information that's brand new and never been available before. It's been a fun episode. I can't wait to share it with you.

Foreign.

Hey, welcome to a great episode, a super exciting episode of the Big Leap. I should call it the Genius Zone because, yes, Gay Hendricks is well known for the Big Leap, but he has a brand new book that's out right now. It's called the Genius Zone. There it is.

For those of you that are watching this, here's a picture of it, but I'm holding in my hands. I opened a box the other day and there was the first copies of my new book, the Genius Zone. So right now it's all the pixels are flying through the air and the books are on their way to your hands. And I'm really, really grateful to have a what is essentially a 10 year process. A 10 year birth actually happened longer than an elephant birth. Oh, yeah.

Well, and here's one thing that if you have followed Gay's work and you know, the Big Leap, it's written about and recommended on many, many websites. I see it pop up all the time on Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine, et cetera, et cetera. But let's just dive in, Gay, and talk a little bit about what is different about this book and why have you continued to evolve and develop? Because your last book that came out about a year ago was conscious luck.

So, yes.

What's the Genius Zone all about? Why is it so important?

Well, the Genius Zone is a sequel to the Big Leap and it continues the work that I was presenting in the Big Leap. People asked me how long it took me to write the Big Leap and I said, well, I thought about it for 30 years and then it took me a year to write it. But I actually, I'd finally sat down. I'd been wanting to Write the Big Leap for years, and then I finally sat down about 12 years ago and wrote it. And so. But my work has continued to evolve. And so I've worked with I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of people since the Big Leap came out. And I began to take use different techniques that were more time efficient even than the ones in the Big Leap because it's more speeded up world now. We need to get results quicker. And so as I began to use these new tools and techniques, I realized I got to write a sequel to the Big Leap. And so after 10 years of thinking about it, I sat down this past year and wrote the Genius Zone. And so glad to have it out into the world because it really completes a way of thinking that the Big Leap, you know, first set a conversation. The Big Leap was really about two big subjects. One was how to overcome your upper limit problem so you don't keep running into your own self imposed glass ceiling all the time. And then also how to open up a conversation with your own inner genius. Your own what you most love to do and what makes your biggest contribution in the world. And so the Big Leap got up. You know, I think it had such a great reception and has continued to grow over the years because these are two essential conversations that every human being needs to have. I mean, who doesn't need to know how to get out of their own way? And that's really what the Big Leap is all about, is what are the moves that allow you to get out of your own way and then what are the moves that allow you to anchor down in this new zone I'm calling the Genius Zone. So everybody needs to know that. Now here's where the, the new book comes in. Because once you've got those two areas mapped out a little bit, the next thing you're going to want to do, I guarantee you, is you're going to want to learn to live there all the time. And so the Genius Zone is really about how to make the moves that allow you to live in your Genius Zone rather than just poking your head into it from time to time. It's like I watched a nature thing the other day. I love nature shows. And I watched the birth of these beautiful little hawks. And I happen to live in an area of California. I live in a mountain valley where you can look up into the sky just about any time and see hawks because they love the wind currents here in this area. And so oftentimes I sit in my backyard and I watch hawks and hawks use so little effort because they know how to ride the wind currents. I watch them, and they almost look like they're doing nothing. But they take these nice big swoops and turns, and just by making tiny adjustments. And the Genius zone is the equivalent of that. It shows you how to make the little adjustments you need to make from day to day that keep you in your Genius zone. And so that's kind of like the. The Big Leap is kind of like a space shuttle ride. It's kind of like Jeff Bezos going into space for a short period of time. But the Genius zone kind of shows you how to stay there all the time. And that's why I think it's essential reading, especially for people who have opened up the territory with the Big Leap.

Well, I know in the past I. I'm going to misquote this, but the concept is more important than the. Than the details about how you know the difference between good, great, outstanding, and superpower. You know, like, at your very, very best is a nuanced, just tiny fraction. So where your big multiples come from in terms of super and ultra high performance is in the nuance. And I think that's what these little micro adjustments do. So that makes a ton of sense. All right, I've got the next question prepared for you because.

One of the big topics that you talk about in the book is overcoming Negative thinking. And it doesn't matter where you are in your life and your development, of course.

We all suffer from it. And if you don't think you do it, it's probably because you're not paying attention to it. So you've got a unique way of eliminating negative thinking. So can you talk a little bit about what that is and how it works?

Yes. Well, the subtitle of the book is the Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity, and to tie those two things together.

The breakthrough moment is when you find a way to stop a train of negative thought in its tracks. Then there's another second level of that, which is to stop them from appearing altogether. But the first task we need to do is learn how to hit the pause button on a stream of negative thoughts. And a way to do that. As a matter of fact, the. In my opinion, the only really genius way to stop yourself from negative thinking is to realize that your negative thinking is pointing the way to a genius moment that's trying to break through the only reason you're having negative thoughts about a given thing. Let's say you're having thoughts about, oh, I doubt if I can make my financial goal this month or what the heck is wrong with me. I keep making the same mistake over and over again.

So.

To realize that the only reason you're having a negative thought in a given area is because you want to have a breakthrough in that area and you're just habitually running these negative thoughts and they may not have anything to do with the present. As a matter of fact, to drop a 118 pound pearl of wisdom on everybody here, the fact is that 99% of your thoughts.

Especially worry thoughts, don't have anything to do with worrying about something that you could actually make a difference with.90 I, I promise you, do a big study on your thoughts and you'll come away with this shocking realization that most of my thoughts aren't about anything that I'm actually trying to accomplish or do or change in the world. They're simply recycling little loops left over from situations in life that never quite got resolved. And some of those routines go way, way, way back. In other words, sometimes we get programmed in negative thinking before we can even think, really, because we grow up in an atmosphere where there's a lot of negative thinking. Let me give you a great example of that. Katie and I, when we were first together, we broke through our financial limitations with this one little moment that happened. We were about a year, year and a half into our relationship and I found myself running through my mind the thought, do we have enough money to make it through to the end of the month? And I suddenly realized, wait a minute, that's exactly the same conversation I had around me all the time. When I was a little kid. My mother was always, you know, kind of at the top of her wits or whatever that say or wit's end about at which end make it through. Because, you know, she'd been left widowed at the end of the Second World War with two kids and $300 in the bank and an unpaid for car. And so she was really starting from scratch all over again. And so, but I, here I was 30 years later, I was conforming my life to that conversation. And so I went in and I told Katie very excitedly about that. I said, hey, you know, if I got programmed one way, we could reprogram ourselves an entirely different way. And we actually sat down on the spot and created kind of a new replacement positive mantra instead of the mantra about do we have enough money to get through to the end of the month. So we created this mantra, kind of a piece of wisdom that we rotated through our Minds, which was that we always have plenty of money to do everything we want to do. And so we just kind of beat with that and kind of recited it back and forth and chanted it and felt it inside. And by golly, that started to happen. And.

I can't even remember any time since when we've had any real financial problems. You know, in any business, you'll go through one year you'll make $1.2 million, and the next year you'll make $0.8 million or whatever. But the. The actual substance of things hasn't really changed since we changed our minds and our hearts about it. So that is really a good thing to know, because in. Especially in regard to genius, Mike, you have to kind of, like, permit yourself to get into your genius by first giving yourself permission. Nobody's going to come along except maybe me and say, hey, it's a good idea to connect with your genius. But the moment you permit yourself to do it, the moment you say, okay, my life is going to be about now, partly the emergence of my genius. That's what I'm going to make my life about. As a matter of fact, one of the first chapters, I think probably the first chapter in the book is all about how to make a commitment to your genius. And I go through a bunch of exercises and things that will take you some time, 10 or 15 minutes to do on your own when you read the book. But for right now, just hear my passionate plea. That commitment is the way to get going. So right this moment, open up a dialogue and say, would I be willing to commit to the full emergence of my genius and just kind of open up to that possibility? And I can only say good things that happen after you make that commitment.

Okay, that was awesome. A bunch of things came to mind. I'm going to make a little statement. First of all, I'm going to ask you another question, give you some time to think about it while I tell you what I was thinking about when you were talking about that. And it's relevant to the next question as well. So next question I'm going to ask you is, what's the big payoff for eliminating negative thinking? But while you think about it, first of all, there are two things I want to add. One of them is for you who are either watching this or listening to it right now. You can go get a copy of Gay's new book@gieniuszonebook.com and gay also has a special meditation that he's put together that revolves around being in your genius Zone. And towards the end of this episode, we're going to talk even more about how you can spend 90 days in your genius zone. So with that, I'm going to tell you what was going through my head was listening to you, which when you talked about specifically how we have all these little subroutines running around in our head all the time, these little negative chattery things that oftentimes go back a long, long time. I just recently started intensely meditating again. I've been kind of an on again, off again meditator for a long time. And one of the things I've been noticing is I've been really, really paying attention to that little nippy voice in the back of my head and realizing that some of that character, because it is, it literally is a character that I way outgrew a long time ago and it saddled me and become truly an enemy. Meaning it's kept me stuck in a place. But also, much like you and you, when you were worried about do I have enough to get by. I have an old fear cycle which is terrified of running out and not having enough. Even though Vivian and I are, we're technically could be set for life, you know, I mean, we're doing fine and depending on lifestyle we might not need to work. But I can't tell you how terrified I am month over month and completely oblivious and unaware sometimes of that nagging fear cycle that goes back much like what you described, to growing up with not enough decades where I felt like I was on the brink of ruin all the time. And you know, and I've had a patchwork of programming that alleviated those fears, but I wasn't aware of a couple of those nippy things. And now that I'm much more conscious and aware because I've spent more time in a deeper meditative state outside of my own ego.

It doesn't have the control over me unconsciously that it did before. And this is recent stuff. I mean I'm. I'm embarrassed and kind of, I'm really embarrassed to talk about it because I, I like to think of myself as, ah, figuring this stuff out. But ah, there's a, there's an endless supply of challenges that I see in my old programming that I really want to eliminate. So I can't wait to go through all your exercises.

Well, one thing too, I was just listening for as you were talking about this and check out if this feels accurate for you. But a lot of people I've worked with.

Find that these old programs in a sense wake up before they do in the morning. And you don't realize you're running them right away. You may be running them all day before you wake up to it. But here's the thing about that, and the reason they wake up before you do is because they were in place before you were way back in your life. And so if you would just go back one generation and then two, if you have access to your grandparents. Did you ever meet your grandparents?

Yes, I had, I did. All, all. Fortunately, all of them. They, my grandfathers died when I was probably like 8, 9, 10 or so. So I mean, I wasn't even a teenager, but my grandmother's.

Lasted longer.

Yes. And so the reason I'm asking that is that usually it's good to take a three generational approach to whatever issue you happen to be thinking about because.

Your mother.

Was present inside your grandmother.

From the very beginning. So that goes back a hundred years or so because the programming that your grandmother was enduring and going through was transmitted directly to your mother genetically because she was being gestated in the midst of that, then your mother was being born and nursed and brought to life in that field. And so whatever that field was, I've done a lot of exploration of those past generations. And amazing to me how so many of the problems I thought were my problems actually started long, long ago, before I even walked into the picture. And that's a healthy perspective to have on that.

Yes, well, that's. I know, at least what I understand that to be is epigenetic programming oftentimes. And there's no question that I've carried.

Plenty of that going back to multi generational poverty. You know, it's my, my. I don't know if you and I have talked about this specifically, but my dad grew up on a very, very poor farm in Iowa. And in some ways he was an indentured servant until he ran away to the military. And then my mom came from, you know, a line of, you know, my grandfather, her, her dad was a philandering alcoholic. So. And she grew up with no certainty and her mother was lobotomized. So I mean, just like. And bipolar. So there was some crazy in the family that goes back and prior to that it's like poor farmers in Europe. So I'm certain that there's the seeds of deep, deep rooted challenges inside there.

Well, that's important to know because opening up and acknowledging that that this is a multi generational issue you're dealing with keeps you from taking it quite so personally. And that's actually a healthy move is when you stop taking it personally and realize, oh, that was a party that was already well underway by the time I walked through the door and came into it. And so I was born into a conversation of never enough. Do we have enough to get through to the end of the month? And rightfully so. They often didn't have enough. And so. And going back generations, you know, when your grandparents were alive, there was no such thing as welfare. You know, you didn't go down and get yourself a welfare check if you ran out of money that month. You went around and borrowed some corn from your neighbors, maybe, or something like that. But anyway, there's a lot of hard scrabble in all of us, or most of us anyway, for sure. Well, let's back to the original.

Yeah, what's the payoff for eliminating negative thinking?

Right. That's what I was coming back around to. And the payoff, first of all, just imagine for a moment your negative thought stream just coming to an end. Imagine the amount of space that would open up. Instead of being like a Los Angeles freeway at rush hour, it would be like a horse and buggy out on a road in Amish country or something like that. Very spacious.

Or maybe like, oh, yeah, that thought stream was taking up a lot of my energy because I couldn't stop watching it. I just felt compelled to watch that thought stream every time. So the reason it happens over and over again is because it has something that's undealt with or unfelt about it. And so the actual way I take you through a bunch of processes in the book, but the actual way you bring that negative thought stream to an end is opening your heart to it, letting yourself off the hook for having it, trying to control it, keeps it in place. So the moment you open up to it, acknowledge it, look at it from a different position, it stops driving you nuts. And, you know, I had this great experience with a Tibetan lama one time, and.

Lama Oli Naidal was his name. I asked him, what is the absolute essence of Tibetan Buddhism? And he said, richness. And I said, what do you mean by richness? Because he was not rich in my terms. He was, you know, a Tibetan llama. And they didn't have much. And he said, richness is because we're getting a constant stream of thoughts in our mind for nothing, for free. And I'm rich because of that. Look, I'm not doing anything. And these thoughts are coming. But you see, the reason they didn't drive him nuts is because he was just kind of watching them go by. And if you watch them go by for a while, the unpleasant ones start falling off. And the big payoff is that you get this open space window into your creativity, because underneath any stream of negative thinking is this genius breakthrough that I'm talking about. And if we can get those quieted down for a moment and create that open space, then into that space rushes this organic creativity that I'm talking about.

Very powerful.

Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, that was. That was great.

And I think, you know what popped in. It's sort of like, what are the things that drive you nuts? What are the things that drive you nuts? And. And they can be immense motivators to get better, but sometimes they drive you so crazy, you can't do anything about them. You're stuck.

In a loop. And I can totally see that. Again, this really is one of the beauties of meditating. So let's get into the next one. Something I know about you, Gay, is breathing. You and Katie spend a lot of time on emotions and breathing, and you have a whole section in the book about that. So why is that so important? And how can that be a gateway to.

So much more, to getting in and staying in your genius zone?

Yes, it's very important because, first of all, you breathe 20,000 times a day. And if you know how to breathe, you stay vital. If you don't know how to breathe, all sorts of problems stem off of that, but specifically to your genius. The reason we work with it so much here is because breathing is an antidote to fear. That if you start feeling scared, that all you need to do is take two or three easy breaths, and it begins to quiet down the fear chemistry in your body. Usually what happens, though, is people, if they get scared, they start breathing shorter and shallower breaths up into their chest, and that just fires off more fear juice in their bodies. And so what we need to do is learn how to drop our breathing down a notch so that we're moving our bellies and our chest when we're breathing. Especially when you're scared, because there's a tendency when you're afraid to suck in and tighten the belly muscles and, you know, hold them so you don't feel as much fear. But the antidote is to actually take some big, easy breaths when you're feeling anxious or scared. Here we quote Fritz Perl saying, fear is excitement without the breath. Once you learn to open up and breathe a little bit with your anxiety and fear, it turns into excitement juice rather than fear juice. So that's the big reason we use breathing a lot. I think I may be the only person on earth who has written three books on breathing. I'll proudly wear that distinction. My book Conscious Breathing, which came out 20 some years ago, has been, was for a while the world's best seller on breathing for many years. And then I wrote two other little books, one about breathing and sexuality and another one about just general vitality. But I'll tell you just in the terms of the things I've learned in my transformational journey, learning how to be with my emotions through my breath has been one of the most powerful things. Because, you know, a lot of times it's so easy to get stuck inside a particular emotion, like stuck inside your grief or stuck inside your anger, or stuck inside your fear where you're not really breathing with it, you're just kind of operating from down inside it. That's a very dangerous place to be because then you repeat the same negative patterns of behavior over and over again. And this is probably a good place to.

Come in for a landing mic. I know we're going to do another whole session on the genius Zone part two, but probably what I would like to do is have people really work on their breathing more than anything else when they are just going around from place to place. Because if you notice at any point you're not feeling good, or your body feels off center, or your mind is afraid or something, check out your breathing because I will promise you that a good bit of the time when you're feeling off center, you can fix that right away with a few easy centering, nice deep breaths. We call it LSD breathing. Long, slow, deep. So take some LSD breaths next time you're feeling out of sorts or uncomfortable. And I love to hear, you know, people probably come up to me on the street and they say one of three things to you. Thank you for turning me on to my genius, or thank you for showing me how to breathe. Or sometimes, if it's a relationship issue, thank you for saving our marriage. But one of the things I feel happiest about is I get to teach a lot of people how to change their lives through just something simple like breathing.

Very, very good. Well, this is a good breaking point because one of the things that we've done is we've placed planned another upcoming episode. And the upcoming episode has to do with getting into your creative genius zone. We're going to talk about how to spot and find opportunities, but also to get and stay in your creative zone using some of the strategies in the book. And I do want to point everyone back to a. To learn more about Gay's new book.

Which is all about your Genius zone. That's@geniuszonebook.com and then there's one other thing that I think is important that we talk about Gay and that is an opportunity to get and stay inside your genius zone. And that is to learn more about the Big Leap experience that we have planned. And we're going to spend 90 days of that helping you get and stay into your genius zone. So you want to talk a little bit about what we have planned?

Yes, I'm very excited about this because I've, in the years that I've been working on the Genius Zone, I've never ever done a big training on it. And same thing with the Big Leap. You know, I've given I don't know how many dozens, hundreds now of talks on the Big Leap, but I've never really done a big systematic training taking people through the whole. And so you and I have been working on for the last year or so an experience where people can actually get into their genius zone and learn the moves that allow them to stay there for 90 days. And it's a big deal. You know, it's, it's something that's going to require people to really take a stand for themselves because to put yourself in that kind of an environment is a tremendously evolutionary and revolutionary thing for you to do, even if you do personal growth stuff and life change stuff professionally. So, you know, it's a profound thing and we've got a lot of attention going into it. And I know you have a tremendous amount of mind and heart energy on it. And I do too, because it'll be my first time and my last time actually that I will do something in that particular format. So this is going to be a one time only event and I am really profoundly committed to it and excited about opening up the possibilities when we start getting real serious about getting people in the front door.

Well, and there's two ways to learn more about it. One of them is you can pull out your mobile phone now and, and just send a text message to 858-434-5316 with the two letters BL which stand of course for Big Leap. And we'll follow up with a message and some details about that. And you can also go to bigleappodcast.com and click on the application button and learn more there. So that's two ways to learn more. And is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners or viewers with before. Before we finish this episode out?

Well, I'm really looking forward to having a whole bunch of people using these new tools that are in the genius zone. So to me, one of the most exciting things in life is to watch people do things and be with people, do things that change their lives, and then, you know, to look at those smiles and look at those positive things come out of all of that. So now that the book has been launched, I'll be getting a kind of a steady inflow of great feedback from people. And I'm very much looking forward to that because it's all for me, you know, like you, I could have easily retired, you know, a quarter of a century ago, but I love doing what I do. And there's nothing like that look on people's faces when their lives change. And that's what I'm in it for. So I hope to be doing that until I go clunk and take my last breath.

I like the idea when death catches you by surprise. And, well, and I don't have anything else to say except it's been a blast, as usual, Gay. And for you, if you're listening, watching, and you want to leave gay any feedback, any comments, or you have a question, you can go ahead and text it to us again. Just text 85843.

Start with the letters BL because that will actually get you a greeting message from the big leap. And then you can text a straight message and we will get those and follow up with you as well. So that's what we have for this episode of the Big Leap. Thanks for listening, watching, and can't wait to see you in the next episode, which is part two of how to get into your genius zone. We're going to call it get into your creative genius zone.

Thanks a lot, everybody.

Sa.