The Big Leap in Action

Welcome to the Big Leap podcast.

This is Mike Koenigs and this is Gay Hendricks. And we've got some exciting things to work on in this edition of the podcast. It's called Big Leap in Action. And it's all about what you need to do out in the world to express your genius in the real world. It's about how to also get luckier, how to dedicate a new part of your body, a part of your body that you may not have even discovered yet, to become an attractor field for good luck.

And one of the things that we're going to be covering in this episode are a few of Gay's steps, what he calls the eight different pathways to get and create luck. How to open yourself up to pure consciousness. I love that one. And a little exercise that I've been doing, which is called what about me attracts? And then finally, how to find your lucky tribe. That is one of the most powerful ways to manifest and create opportunity in your life. So all that and more this episode of the Big Leap.

Welcome to another episode of the Big Leap. This is Mike Koenigs, and I'm here today with my good friend Gay Hendricks. And this is the big Leap in action. So, hi.

Hi. Good being with you. And I'm interested in having everybody, by the time we complete our conversation today, be able to look in the mirror and say, I'm the luckiest person I know. Nice.

I know one of the things that we promised in this episode is some of the eight different pathways to get and create luck and how to open up yourself to pure consciousness. And we also talked about talking about reinvention and how to reactivate yourself. So I know you said you had a watermelon business story. Do you want to tell that? I don't know. It just came up right before.

Well, when I was in the fifth grade, I was 10 years old in the summer, and my next door neighbor, Mr. Lewin, was in the watermelon business. And I came up with this idea. I've always kind of been thinking up businesses ever since I was a kid. And so I went to Mr. Lewin and I said, I'd like to buy watermelons from you wholesale and take them and I'll stand down by the highway and sell them to people as they pass. And so Mr. Lewin, he went along with it. You know, he was a.

Kindly fellow. And so the first day, I bought four watermelons from him and I hauled them down to the. To the highway, which is about 100, 200 yards away. And There I stood all day trying to sell my watermelons. I think I sold one watermelon, and then I had to lug them all the way up the hill. And that reminds me that one of my mainstays of my philosophy, money wise, is the less something weighs, the more you can charge for it. And so that became a pillar. But I learned that the hard way, by carrying watermelons up, which is no fun at all, back up a hill. So my second day, though, I came up with an innovation. I said, nobody's buying my whole watermelons. What if I sliced them into eight pieces? Because I was buying them from Mr. Lewin for 15 cents and selling them for a quarter down on the. That was my big profit margin. And so I figured if I sliced them into eight pieces and sold the pieces, I could sell the pieces for a nickel and get 40 cents a melon farm. So I sold, like, $3.75 of melons at 5 cents a slice. That first day, I had to walk back up to the hill many, many times to get my melons. But I can remember being on the floor counting out my $3.75 worth of money that I'd made and thinking, this is it. You know, I need to go no further.

Millions. Million.

So, anyway. Now, fortunately, I sell things that weigh less and cost a lot more. But speaking of weight, I would not be here without a big bump in my life. When I was growing up, as a kid, I was very obese. I had something wrong with my glands and stuff, and nobody could ever figure out what the problem was. I was taking around different medical specialists and everything. But anyway, by the time I was up in my 20s, I weighed over 300 pounds. Right now, I weigh about 180 pounds and have have for many years, But I was more than 100 pounds overweight. And one day, I literally slipped on the ice and fell down. And I didn't knock myself out, but I kind of knocked myself. I call it having an out of Hendrix experience. I was out of myself for a minute. I knocked myself out of my ego. But it was a great moment of reinvention because it was a moment of saying, wait a minute. I don't want to go any further like this. You know, I don't want to be fat the rest of my life. And so I made a big shift that year when where I said, forget what the doctors are trying to tell me. I'm going to take this on for myself. And so I had this crazy diet invented for myself where I, for A year ate only things that felt like they fed my new body rather than my old body. And so I learned to eat fruits and vegetables and things like that. And so within a year, I dropped more than 100 pounds and so lost more over the years. But that was a huge breakthrough for me, a huge leap, because it was really a leap in claiming my own life rather than trying to live somebody's life that wasn't mine.

Interesting. I'm curious, so other than. So you just adopted healthy eating and you were eating bad Southern food. Is that what was happening?

Yeah, I grew up in the south, and I, you know, for me, a meal wasn't complete without some kind of meat, and it usually had to be fried. You know, it was a sausages in the morning and burgers for lunch and a steak at night or fish or something. But anyway, it was a. Now I can't believe that I ever ate like that before. Now, my wife that I've been with, Katie for the past 40 years, she's a incredible chef, and she also cooks really pure food. So for the last 40 years, I've had the great blessing of being able to eat, really. And she loves to cook. And so we usually eat just one meal a day, basically, and that's lunchtime, and then we don't eat dinner. But I learned to eat a whole different way, and boy, am I glad, because in those days, I also probably put away at least a pint of ice cream a day. So that'll.

That'll make for a big boy, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, so I'm curious, too. One of the things that we promised in this episode was some of the eight different pathways to get and create luck. And I was trying to think of a clever transition from that story to this.

Other than you and I, what we promised ourselves before we started rolling was we were going to tell a bunch of reinvention and transformational stories. And this might be the way to do that, is talk about some of the eight different pathways to get and create luck and think about some of the transformational stories and again, making this relevant to the listener and the watcher and for it to be fun for us, too. So what you think for a moment of some of the pathways, because this is relevant to.

The book conscious luck as well, but think about one of the core ones, and let's open up with a little story about some of the pathways. First of all, what's a pathway to get and create luck?

Well, all the people I talked to before I wrote the book in addition to my own life, I found that some people get there through changing something in their mind, and that makes them luckier. They identify that. They said, one day, I stop thinking of myself as a victim and started thinking of myself as the owner of my life. And then I got luckier. So that would be a good example of a limiting belief shift. So some people get there through a leap of the mind, a big leap in their mind. Some people get there through a big leap in their emotional life. Like a lot of people I've talked to, and I'm one of them, had a feeling that they carried around with them. That wasn't a very pleasant feeling. In my own case, it was a kind of a sense of shame that I somehow had inherited. I remember it even when I was a kid. You know, it was part. Part of my life growing up in the south was, there's a lot of shame dealt out. Shame on you. You should be ashamed of yourself. I don't know if they do that in Minnesota.

Yeah, they certainly did in Minnesota. My mom, that was. She'd be like, for shame.

Yeah, it's just about the worst thing you can say to somebody. And so I grew up with this. I don't know, it was just kind of like this always on feeling down in my body that there was something I was ashamed of. So one day, when I had this experience when I was 24 and had this kind of falling down on the ice and reinventing myself, one thing I realized was I have a lot of space in me that's occupied by shame. I could actually feel it. I could feel it in my chest and belly and down in my legs. And I thought to myself, well, why don't I just replace the shame with an attractor field for abundance? I've got the pathway laid out down there.

And how old were you when you had this moment of.

I guess I was in my 20s. Okay, yeah. Maybe 24. Yeah, I think I was 24.

A bit of magic happened actually, within a day or two. How. You know, see, here's the thing, Mike. I really think people need to study carefully the results they produce in their life. Because any. Any result you're producing that you don't like is the product of an unconscious intention.

So at some level, if you're creating pain and misery for yourself, you've got an unconscious intention to hurt yourself, to be in pain. And then what we have to do is find out, why would I have an intention like that? Where would that come from? And when I did that kind of inquiry in myself. I realized, wow, I've been operating out of that sense of shame my whole life up until that moment. And so I.

My, my idea was since all this space is already alive with shame, why not drop something more appropriate into it and dedicate that field in me to abundance and being an attractor for abundance instead of shame. And so that's an example of a kind of a heart shift, an emotional shift. So that's another pathway that I work on in the book. And there are lots of activities to do it and we can touch on some of those. But the main thing is that you begin to take responsibility for the luck you create in your life. It's always great just to have something come out of the blue, but why not open your heart and your mind to being lucky so that you come at life as a openness to have lucky things happen.

It's interesting. So as I was listening to you.

This is, I don't know how profound it is, but I know in the past my technique for getting, having, being, becoming was always what do I need to do in order to get, have, be. It was always doing oriented and that would be. And I noticed that in many of the people I coach and advise is they are stuck in doing mode and creating mode and that becomes a trap inside itself. It's really, they're going to create their way out of it. And the truth is creating is an addiction and it's so easy to get into the create, create, create and never do anything with it. So a direct translation of that is you spend so much time creating, you're never marketing or selling. And my mind shift came from.

Who.

Do I need to meet, who is great at manifesting, creating, creating connections or would find massive value in what I have to provide or share. And I got out of a mindset and a thinking that I call the shallow and wide versus the narrow and deep, which was.

For so long it's like, oh, I'm going to need to access thousands of people in order to sell this thing to them. And I realized that one deep, meaningful relationship would make all the difference in the world. And that led to a huge transition in my life which was for years selling tens of thousands of subscriptions or products and doing it online and using complicated funnels and lots of people to working with. The way I frame it now is a dozen high frequency aliens a year that I can help make their dreams come true. Very, very different language pattern and the people I'm attracting with that message and that context is very, very different. As well as woo woo as it sounds. And just yesterday, not yesterday, but last week, the end of last week, I got a referral from, just to go be super transparent. I did some plant medicine the first part of the year, met these people, they made an introduction to someone and I had one conversation with them. He said yes to a massive investment. You know, it's a quarter million dollar investment to work on himself even more, more than that and develop a platform. And it came from a very unique way of engaging. And even my mindset going into it was I opened and started the day with what is my intention? And I don't write proposals any longer. I only have conversations. And it breaks every rule of traditional business and even the mindset of, of closing and pitching. I don't close, I just have a conversation and I call it an alignment conversation. Now. That's the messaging I have in my own mind. And that combination of things has dramatically shifted every single relationship, business engagement I have and even what happens in my home. So I don't know if you can give me any, any your take on it, your psychology take.

I think you've, you've made the.

Breakthrough to finding out that it all starts in here and flows out. That's why I say you really need to look at not only what your conscious intentions are, but look at the results you're creating that you don't like and say, what are my unconscious intentions? Why would I be trying to punish myself? Or why would I be trying to fail in this area? So there's always something down in there that's driving us, whether it's an unconscious intention or a conscious intention. And you've done a really good job in your life of opening up and eliminating unconscious intentions. I'm sure you're still discovering more like I am every day.

Yeah, sure.

But you discovered the magic of doing it from the inside out, and that's a lot easier. And it's the lazy person's guide to enlightenment. Because if you're working really hard out here, work, work, work, in order to have, have, have and be, be, be.

Then you kind of miss out on that. The being part of me. What do I really want to create? I call my practice now for the past 10 years, doing favors for friends, and some of my friends I've never met before, but I'm always in the process of saying, what kind of favor does that person really need? Is it an introduction or is it a piece of information? But then if I'm, I'm in the business of bestowing Favors rather than trying to get something or make something happen.

That's interesting. So as you were describing this right now, I realized, first of all, I like this lazy approach to manifesting, and I really subscribe to that. That feels really good to me. How about tracking this? I have not built or set up any kind of a tracking device as far as what's working, what isn't working. So, for example, I wear an Apple Watch now, and I track a lot of my bio data. I wear a heart rate monitor when I'm on my peloton. And the peloton is a giant sensor gathering gadget. And we live in a world. Now, I just came back from CES not long ago, and the show is about sensors. So nowadays the trend, the technology trend, which I see, the internal version and the external version, the external version is with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and what they call Internet of Things. That's dozens and gadgets and billions of devices that read and sense data, gather it, and then feed that into artificial intelligence and machine learning systems to make sense of it and look at it in real time. And the breakthroughs we're getting in our physical world right now, but in the investment world, you know, is. Is very profound. On a negative side, in China, they're using this to more monitor their populations and crack down on problems before.

People probably even realize what's about to happen. I mean, it's scary what's about to happen there. But on a positive note, and again, how it would apply to our internal journey is.

What do you do to track your progress or your mindset or your shifts? Is this all intuitive or do you journal in a certain way? Is there a way that you really review stuff after the fact and make sense out of it? Like, what's been your technique and what's it been in the past and what is it now, and what have you watched super successful lucky people do?

Yes, there's a key moment in my life, and I can even remember where I was standing when I had it. And that was that I was standing outside the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco after a lecture by Krishnamurti, the. The great Indian philosopher Krishnamurti. And this was before he passed away. And he said this profound thing that it took me until after the lecture, till it really dawned on me. And he said, you don't really need therapy if you understand one simple thing. And everybody perked up in the audience. What is that one simple thing? And he said that the results you produce tell you what your True intentions are. And so a lot of people get balled up inside thinking that they're unconscious, thinking that the negative things that happen to them don't belong to them. And so it was a moment of realizing, oh, my unconscious intentions are what drives these things in my life that I'm complaining about. And I happen to be standing next to my then girlfriend. And I applied this to my actual moment to moment experience because one of the big contentions between me and her was that she was very critical. And I was always complaining about her being critical. I was always being critical about her being critical, but she was very critical, not just to me, but lots of things. And so it was just one of the things that bugged me about it. And so as I was standing there at the auditorium, I realized, oh, I have an unconscious intention to be criticized. And it was a moment of tremendous liberation, because up until that moment, I'd blamed it on her. She criticizes me too much. But then I realized, oh, I must have an unconscious intention to receive criticism, otherwise I wouldn't keep doing it and keep complaining about it. So that was this huge moment of then wondering, where would I have gotten something like that? And then I realized it was kind of woven into my bones because I started out in life as kind of a gigantic mistake. There was a lot of good reasons to feel that criticized feeling from the moment of my first existence. So I'd apparently carried that around with me, though, and I was creating that in a girlfriend. Well, it's amazing now because for the last 40 years, since I met Katie, she is the most uncritical person and just very, very positive. I've never even seen her in a bad mood, really, in 40 years. And so that's what I look for, is how to track. Look at the results you're producing, because that tells me that I eliminated my need for unpleasant criticism. And so there's a difference between criticism and feedback. You know, feedback is about something you're doing, maybe that you've done, but criticism is that kind of dental drill.

Thing in the background all the time.

Interesting. So I realized one of the things that I've used for a long time, whenever something bad is happening, I'm not getting the results I want. I ask myself the question, what about me attracts blank, which is the negative, and what am I doing to attract that into my life? Because I think ultimately we're attracting or repelling all the time. And that same mindset really helped me shift how I manage my time, which I know is one of our upcoming Episodes, we're going to talk about Einstein time.

But let's talk a little bit more about.

Reactivating yourself and.

Turning on some of these luck pathways. So what's another luck pathway that we can delve into? One of the eight from the new book.

Yes. One of the most important ones is, and you've touched on this a little bit, I call it finding your lucky tribe. You know, there's no law that says you have to spend time around people that make you miserable. I learned that. And so I've gone to great lengths now to surround myself with really positive, upbeat people that represent the best to who I want to be. But there was a time in my life when I didn't have people like that, you know, that they were reflecting the part of my life that didn't believe in myself. And so I remember one of my mentors said to me many years ago.

Find five people whose faces light up when you walk in the room. Find five people that make your face light up when they walk in the room. Room. And let those be the people you hang around with. And fortunately, now I probably have 500 people like that. But I started with just finding that little lucky tribe and building from there.

All right, so I have an interesting idea because I always like. So I have an idea to create massive value for this tribe, the Big Leap tribe, and for us to think about. And we don't have to execute on it, but at least think about it. Imagine.

What it would be like if we had a workbook filled with ways to measure your luck, attract more luck, and build more of these opportunities. So one of them would really be a list of 5 and 5. So it'd be 5 for your core and then 5 for the bonus of people like that. That would be a great exercise. Another one would be to, you know, I'd asked you, are there any tools for tracking.

Your. The shifts, the changes, the improvements? But it's like, I know having little reminders like this would be super valuable for me in my life. And maybe as we're doing the podcast, we'll come up with little exercises we can stick in a guide or a workbook to use for not only the Big Leap experience when we do the. The live event experience, but also a supplement as a workbook. So thoughts on that one?

I love it. Yeah, it's really important. I think, you know, we've touched on this a couple of times. The idea of coming from the inside out. There's such a pressure in our society and everywhere in the world to go from the outside in. You know, if you have the right lipstick or the right eyebrow liner or the right shirt or whatever, you're, you know, you enhance your chances of success. Well, that may be true at a certain level, but, you know, at a certain point, you've got to realize it really is an inside job. And to start, you know, people talk about mindset, but that's only part of it. It's heart set and soul set. You know, you've got to have the. Have your intentions embodied down in your body.

It's very powerful. And I think when we were talking about finding your lucky tribe, I've got one little story about that. It's an extension of this.

New Year's Eve celebration we do. So this last one, I think there were like 40 or 50 people at this party. So in five years, it's grown from four couples to close to 50. And it's interesting how when you start attracting those people, one thing I can tell you is every single person in that room would fit.

That description you have. They all light up. We all light up when we see each other. And it's not just our faces light up. You can see their souls shine and brighten up. They're like little stars or big stars. And another.

Part of that is that I made a determination this year ago or so when I really started doing these narrow, deep experiences. When I work with executives, for example, and I build their brands, one of my goals was I wanted to play with the people I work with, which broke some of my taboo rules in the past. Because when I was wide and shallow and a lot of my time was spent on stage, I had a Persona, you know, sort of like guru Persona. And I was very careful not to mix my business and my product business with my personal life. Or once I flipped, it was sort of like you get one or the other. It was hard to work with people that were clients or have friendships with them at the same time. And it wasn't an always, but it was almost always. And I decided to blur that line and see what would happen. And it's been actually a delightful shift towards the narrow and deep. And I had something, a fairly profound thing happened. It actually occurred at this New Year's Eve party. There's a person there, runs a business that is over $100 million in revenue. So substantial. And for years, we'd been trying to find some way I could support or grow, but I was pursuing it. In other words, I was trying to do make it happen. And in this particular case, we ended up Just having an adult beverage together and went out on a dock and I happened to love to fish. And in Florida there's a lot of fish. And so this property is on the water and we're looking at fish. And started talking about crabbing and fishing. And he said, I had no idea you like that kind of thing. I like, absolutely. You know, if I. And I brought a fishing pole out there, I was casting the line and I get a call the next day saying, hey, Mike, I really want to know if you can help me with this blank on my business. And the truth was my wife even told me this guy said to her, I just had the best conversation with Mike talking about crabbing and fishing. It was not about business. And in the past, again, my direct response marketer, push, push, push, modality. I know now that that personality stood in the way.

Yes.

So when I said earlier, what about me attracts what I don't want or is not attracting? It was the modality, what these people really wanted. When you shift out of becoming a product focused person, any service oriented and everything being about business to pure relationship, it's people want to have a connection with you. It's not about the thing you're delivering necessarily. I mean, the relationship goes that much deeper. And I know for a fact it's created a full dimension, like a factorial dimension to the quality of connection I have right now. And I know what I reached a point of wanting to run away from in my life that hurt a lot was I couldn't see myself getting off the hamster wheel of doing for the rest of my life. I felt really trapped. And I think that that really connects with all the things we've. We've discussed in the previous episode so far. And I hadn't put all those things together until I was listening to you just now.

Yeah, you know, as I, as I listen to those stories too, I keep coming up with something that I also touch on in the book and that is letting go of control. You know, that there was a part of me that, that thought I was able to control things. But so much of life happens after you let go of thinking that you have control over things. And so I realize now that the part of me that was trying to get ahead or sell or that kind of thing, that was being operated by that part of me that was actually scared in there. And to open up to that and just own that and get beyond that has been incredibly liberating.

That makes a ton of sense. I definitely resonate with that deeply. So as we get we're wrapping up this, this episode. One of the things that we're going to be talking about in the up in an upcoming episode is what we call Einstein Time. We're also going to talk about money and investing, something that we both love and we enjoy.

I would love to know we've oh, and the third thing is we're going to be doing Big Leap experiences soon. And I just want to seed this right now for you. If you're a listener and you want to learn more about what Gay and I have planned for you, definitely head over to bigleap experience.com there you can learn about a couple opportunities Gay and I have for doing workshops that revolve around manifesting, leveraging, taking advantage of what's inside, both the Big Leap and also Conscious Luck, the new book. But do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things we've talked about creating in terms of experience, the Big Leap experience?

Yes. Well, one of the main nutrients of my life over the past 20 years has been seeing the look on people's faces with when they break through and have their Big Leap. To me, that's like dessert. And I've had the opportunity to experience that many, many, many times. And so I've been over the past 10 years or so.

I've not been doing much, if any, coaching. And sometimes I'll kind of come out of retirement and do an event with someone. But I've been kind of hoarding up my time and attention to do something really big and different and worthwhile, something that gives people a direct experience of their genius and then enough momentum and clear direction about how to express that better in the world. Sometimes your genius breakthrough has to do with relationship. Sometimes it has to do with shifting something in your mind that you didn't know was blocking you. But I'll tell you, the grand result of it all is from my perspective, I get to see this big look of liberation come over people as they have that Big Leap experience. And so I've got this idea that maybe we put a bunch of us in the same room and do that, the same thing that happens in my office, but do it with a whole bunch of people at the same time.

I love it. And I think when we started talking about the podcast, this seemed like a natural extension of it and a great way to.

Co create, innovate, produce results, but also learn some of these little secrets and techniques. And one of the things that this is a big tease, but there is the ninth missing chapter part of the book which is the ninth step of the new book in Conscious luck. And that's something that is only going to be shared at the Big Leap experience.

Yes, here's the thing about that. I got to the end of the eight things and I realized that there was this other thing that I didn't know how to communicate except in person. And I'm a pretty good writer, but I couldn't figure out how to put it in there. And so I thought, okay, we'll use the 8 to get people up to the. Up to speed. And then I want to create some way where we can interact about that ninth thing in person or on video or something like that. So we're working on it, but I'm just picturing being able to share that in the same room with a bunch of amazingly creating people and watch what will go off in the room as a result of having that experience. So, yeah, the ninth thing.

Yeah, I'm super excited about that. So why don't we wrap up this episode and again, the preference or just to pre frame you for what's coming next in episode four, which is Einstein Time, our big promise is how to double your productivity in half the time. Both Gay and I are huge, huge advocates and proponents out of, first of all, enjoying more time with our bodies, our families, our loved ones, and also the people that matter most. And a commitment to simplicity and effortlessness and also feeling good. That's something that always shows up for you. So we'll be talking about that in the next episode. But is there anything else that you'd like to share as we wrap this up?

Well, for me, I keep coming back to this item called wonder. That wonder in life is the lubrication, I think that makes your creativity flow. And so all the things we've been talking about, about in this and the other episodes too, all boil down to us being willing to wonder our way through life. And so let's always keep the focus on that.

I love it. Wondering versus wandering.

Wondering versus wandering.

All right, well, well, this is another episode of the Big Leap. Thank you so much for listening or watching. And please head over to itunes. There you can rate, review, share, share this with someone you know who can benefit from it. And of course check out Big Leap experience to learn more. And this is bigleappodcast.com thank you again so much for listening and watching.

Thanks everybody.