What Was Your Biggest Leap

Hi, this is Mike Koenigs, and welcome to the Big Leap. How are you doing, Gay?

I'm doing great. How are you today? All right.

I am awesome. And today we're going to be talking about what was your biggest leap in our first episode? I know one of the things that you talked about in the very beginning was most misery comes from the lack of a worthy goal. And in this episode, we're going to dive into not only how to figure out what your zone of genius is, but also how to feel it inside your body.

There was this one moment where I really got in touch with what I most love to do, and I formed a life purpose out of that. And I want to really make sure everybody knows how to do that for themselves, because it totally changed my life.

Right. And the other thing that we're going to talk about today is how to actually get into different parts of your body and know where and why you're experiencing negative emotions and how to get out of that break. So all that and more coming up in this episode of the Big Leap.

Gay Hendricks, how are you doing, my friend?

I am doing great, Mike. It's so happy making to be here.

All right. And I am super excited because this is episode one of the Big Leap. We've been talking about doing this for I don't know how long. We certainly talked about a project like this for a long time. Super excited. Because you've got a brand new book coming out in addition to the Big Leap. So for those who aren't familiar with the history of the Big Leap and the new book, why don't you give everyone a little background around that?

Very good. Well, the big Leap comes from 30 years of working with all sorts of people from I started out working with juvenile delinquents. 52 years ago, I saw my first client. Probably before you were born, young man. Oh, yeah.

Well, right around that same time. 53 now. Yes.

And I worked my way all the way up from working with juvenile delinquents all the way up to coaching people like Michael Dell and, you know, high powered folks like that. And so over the past 20 years, what's really turned me on is, well, first of all, there's an old Turkish proverb that says if a bald man finds a cure, he will certainly first use it on himself. And so I used all these principles on myself to create my own fortune and sense of fulfillment in life. And I made all my dreams come true. About 20 years ago, I had five big dreams for my life, which I can tell you about sometime. But I accomplished all of those. And so what really turns me on for the last 20 years is helping other people make their dreams come true. And so that's why I wrote the Big Leap. And then the new book has got a whole different dimension behind it. But the Big Leap is about two main things. It's about the upper limit problem, which is our tendency to run against a self imposed glass ceiling or brick ceiling sometimes because we can't even see through it. About how much we can accomplish or achieve, how much love and abundance we can receive, basically. The second thing the big leap is all about is what I now call discovering your genius. I have a graphic that I can show you in the new book sometime a genius spiral. I used to call it the zone of genius, but that's a little too limiting because it's a zone and really once you get into your genius, it functions like a really always expanding spiral. And so that's about the two things the big leap is all about. The new book is about a new discovery that I'm so excited about. It's all about uncovering your ability to have natural, organic, conscious good luck, good fortune. And I've identified eight different ways we can do that and we'll talk about those as we go along.

Okay. And I know one thing that I'm super interested in is first of all, you've had the good fortune of working with a lot of extraordinary people over the course of your career and highly elevated, highly conscious people. I know one of the people that we share in common, a friend is Susie Batiz from Poo Pourri. Really amazing individual. She's invested a lot in herself. And not long ago she was interviewed in New Yorker magazine and they recognized her as one of America's wealthiest self made entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs specifically. And she has done an enormous amount of work finding, first of all where her ceiling is and her biggest challenges are, but also about finding her true genius. Because she, like a lot of entrepreneurs, reach a point where they no longer serve their own businesses or the businesses no longer serve them. And it's like you, you grow beyond it, you evolve beyond it. So I want you to talk a little bit about.

When and how you found your zone of genius, when that big breakthrough was. And we can riff a little bit about discovering and finding that, because I think that's a huge part of what we're gonna be talking about here for our audience as well is how to get past. To discover your zone of genius, but also to get past the big glass ceilings that you reach in life.

And I'm really also interested in finding out about some of your big leaps too. Sure, I've heard about some of them, but I'm sure I'll learn about more. Yeah. Well, I can trace almost everything to this one moment in 1977. I was just a little over 30 years old at the time and I was actually a realtor was showing me a house and really nice guy, never met him before. And he said, oh, I just heard the greatest thing on the radio. And I said, what's that? And he said that he was listening to some motivational tape. And at the time I had listened to zero motivational tapes or never read a self help book or anything like that. So he said that this speaker, and I don't even know who it was, said that most human misery is caused by the lack of a worthy goal. And I thought, wow, that's a very interesting idea. And I started thinking about that and I realized that at age 30 or whatever I was, I didn't really have a chosen life purpose, what I wanted to do with my life. And I was already, you know, psychologist and everything, but I never really found the thing. And so I sat down on the. On the floor on a cushion of my apartment at the time in Colorado and I just started asking myself, what is my true purpose? What's the purpose of my life? And over the next hour I came up with this idea that the purpose of your life is to refine doing what you most love to do. And the path to finding your genius is through going through the gateway of finding out what you most love to do. And so that really made a big impact on me. I just sat on the floor until I got clear on that. And I came up with this sentence that's still in the Big Leap, the book, the Big Leap, which is that I expand every day in love, abundance and creativity as I inspire other people to do the same. And so that became the driving purpose of my life. And I've basically spent every day of my life since then doing some version of that. And it had a tremendous organizing principle on my life. It kind of coalesced all of my energy. And so I can pretty much tell my whole success journey jumped out of that moment.

And would you say that that is your zone of genius or your particular genius, that specific action or activity?

It is. It has to do with inviting forth the genius of other people and myself to serve their genius. And I also have a skill and I don't know where it came from. It's just a natural skill for being able to explain complicated things very simply. I think people come up to me on the street or something when I've read one of my books. And that's one of the things they almost always say is they didn't really understand something until they saw how I'd expressed it. And so that's a great compliment for an author to have because I'm always wanting to be in the business of taking the very spiritual and metaphysical things and making them down where we can practically use them.

Well, I'll tell you what. I just had a little aha moment, which is I realize one of the reasons why we get along so well and always have is you are a simplifier. I am an amplifier. And very often when you find people who are operating in their zones of genius who complement each other very well, you're going to find one and the other. That's a very common thing. So I'd like you to share, if you can think for a moment, a story, a specific example of where you nailed your zone of genius. You became someone who expanded and you inspired others to do the same. So what's a great example in a story of a transformational moment when you knew you had your big aha, you had reached a point of excellence. And also it started turning into abundance in your life. It actually showed up as physical abundance, whether that's financial or otherwise.

Yes. Well, I remember. And this gets into the realm of relationship too. One of my proudest accomplishments in my life is a great 40 year marriage to Kathleen Hendricks, also known as Katie. And we just celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. And we've been together 40 years as of this year. But in the early days of our relationship.

We didn't have much money. And so one day I was riding my exercise bike and I was reviewing in my mind, do we have enough money to get through to the end of the month? And something about that conversation caught my attention. I realized, wait a minute, that was a conversation I heard around me all the time when I was growing up. Have I simply perpetuated that conversation in my head? And I realized, wow, what if I just retired that conversation and started a new conversation? And so I came up with this idea and I ran into where Katie was sitting and I talked to her about it. Why don't we just make up what we want for our financial life instead of doing anything that's related to the past? And so we sat down and we made up a little list. And you got it. This is going back 40 years. This will crack you up. But our very first thing on the list was, wouldn't it be great if we had $1,000 somewhere where we didn't even touch it, you know, like a savings account? And that seemed like to us, whoa, you know, that seemed like a big stretch. So once we got our attention on it, it manifested very quickly. And so then we said, wow, wouldn't it be great if we had $10,000 like that? And so we worked on that for a while and manifested very quickly. So we kept working on expanding the numbers, but the other thing we did was work on going inward because, you know, like you, I've spent literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in my life on self improvement kinds of things. Meditation retreats, trainings, everything you can think of. I'm my own best customer. And so we started focusing on going inward and opening up more space in ourselves for our creativity to develop. And out of that came a whole unexpected amount of abundance in the stock market and places like that that we had never even imagined in a million years. And also have to give a big shout out to Oprah for putting us on her show with our first book, Consciousness, because that really helped.

Can't hurt for sure.

But that all came after figuring out what my purpose was.

Okay, that's really, really interesting because I go back to.

I in preparation for this podcast. Today I asked my. Well, Vivian and I have been married 18 years now we're going into our 19th year. And I asked her, what do you think my genius is? Because I know what it is and shifted over time, but most of it stayed fairly static. And her response was. And actually wrote it down here. She said, you're a prognosticator of technology trends and the applicability to help other people express their unique gifts, what tech is coming and how you can immediately leverage it. Now, put simply, it's like I'm good at predicting the future, but as it's coming, figuring out how to use it and how to profit from it and how to amplify other people.

Yeah, As a matter of fact, I've heard a rumor that you invented YouTube before YouTube was around. And I forget the other thing. You invented electric cars before Electric, I mean, not invented them, but came up with the idea before they became popular.

Well, it was. It was more like, here's what happened. I think it was popularized it. So the YouTube thing came from. I started a company called Traffic Geyser and I started studying video marketing very early. And before There was a YouTube, there was Google Video. And prior to that, if you made a video and you wanted to put it online, it cost a lot of money. I was doing video marketing for a hospital and our hosting costs per month to just put videos on our own servers and then allow people to click on a video link and watch a video was like $20,000 a month. And Google started experimenting with something they called Google Google Video, which was hosted video. You could upload it onto their servers and then copy a little piece of code and put it on your website. And even it ended up having a little logo that said Google on it. But it was free. So I immediately saved the client $20,000 a month. But I also noticed something interesting happen, which is when I named the video keywords that got searched for frequently. So in this case it would be alternative cancer care or alternative or integrative cancer treatments. For example, it show up.

On Yahoo, Google lycos all the search engines within 15 or 20 minutes. That was a big discovery because at the time if you wanted to get traffic on a website, you had optimize or do what's known as search engine optimization, which got fairly complicated. And I had been learning a lot about that and doing it for years for people, for money. But I figured out I could take a video and upload 10 versions of the same video, call it different names, and I could dominate search engine results. So I created a platform that optimized mechanically that became Traffic Geyser and it ended up becoming a huge multi, multimillion dollar business that eventually got bought by a publicly traded company. The electric car thing just came from popularizing, so I think I was one of the very first people to buy a commercial electric car. So that was the Tesla Roadster at the time and also retrofit my house with solar panels and then quote, unquote, get off the grid. In other words, my goal was to have no gas or electric bills. So I ended up doing a documentary called Life with Tesla that, you know, Elon eventually saw. And I got support from Tesla, the organization. And that was in, you know, 2002, 2008. Ish. And I know at the time it was, it was one of the first of its types where I was telling a story and saying, I really think this is important. And you know, I of course have, I'd consider myself environmentally conscious, but I was more interested in and independence. I always love the idea of being able to publish independently, being able to earn money without infrastructure in my way, and also being able to leverage someone else's multi billion dollar Networks.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's really important. Also, one of the things I respect about you so much is how you make things very practical. Things that are very conceptually difficult for me to understand. As a non techie kind of person, you have a great way of explaining them. I don't know if I've ever told you, but one time somebody asked me to name the smartest guys I'd met in my career. And right away I said Michael Dell, Mike Koenigs and Maynard Webb, who used to run ebay. So I want you to know you're in very good company there. That's very.

Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it. And I feel the same way about you because I know a lot of people, especially you and I have known each other now the better share of at least 15 years. I believe it might even be longer than that, somewhere in that neighborhood. And oh yeah, it's been at least that long. But what.

I think I say the same thing about you. Because after working with lots and lots of successful people, behind every successful person, there's always a coach and there's always someone looking through the future lens of how to evolve and prevent your own extinction, not to mention the extinction of an industry or business. But we are pushed now just because of integration of all the technologies, emerging technologies. We as human beings have to evolve beyond just being a human being. I call it evolving to a super being. And.

I thought one thing that we should go down a path is some of the toughest decisions you've had to make in order to stay in your zone of genius. Because I think saying no is more important than saying yes. And it's also limiting yourself and staying focused. So why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Listen up, entrepreneurs. The best deals you'll ever make are the deals you don't make. Your power as an individual and as an entrepreneur grows out of your ability to say no in increasingly discerning ways. And your ability to say no grows your power. Because every time you say no to something that's not in your genius, you open up space for something that is in your genius. And a good example of that would be, I probably listen to sometimes 50 pitches a year of young entrepreneurs who come and sit and say, here's this world changing thing I want to do. Will you give me some money to do it? And 99.9% of the time the answer is no, because for one reason or the other, but sometimes I say yes to them. But one good example of one that I said no to that really opened up. My genius was I was in a business for a while with a bunch of people whose names I probably can't say for fear of being sued, but some of them are prominent people in the motivational fields. And I got involved in a business with them that started to make money and everything, but was such a pain in the butt to deal with on the personality level that at a certain point I just.

I'm going to just step away from this at some cost to myself, actually. But the interesting thing that happened was, was about.

Two days after I stepped back from that, I was able to get involved in another business that I eventually put a small amount of money into, maybe $100,000, but ended up having a $2.4 million payoff. And I wouldn't have had bandwidth, I'm sure, to get involved with learning about a whole new investment and everything had I been. Which I'd been kind of doing for a few. A few months.

Yeah, I will mirror that because over the past, in my particular instance, I let everything go, disintegrated, dissolved.

Probably 20 years of professional career momentum, and decided to get out of the online marketing business and training business and event business because it no longer served and because the psychic noise became overwhelming and just stopped feeling good. And I know in the past, and I directly believe that one of the causes when I, When I was diagnosed with cancer was I ignored that message for so long. And I think that bad energy becomes a disease and bad in the. Your. Your energetic body, your physical body surrounds that disease with tumors. And so in my body.

My body manifested protection for a lot of bad practices over time, at least that's the way I like to visualize it, whether it's true or not. But at the end of the day, I know in doing so, my life became so much simpler. And my word of the year last year was simplicity. My word of this year is effortless. And I know when I focus on those words, those two words, and practice no. And anything that just feels yucky from the onset, I just pay attention to it. It's like, if this doesn't feel good, the answer is no. And I'm making so many more decisions that way. And on one hand, it certainly doesn't fit the left brain. Build a funnel, create a this, be scientific and do a whole bunch of things and stuff and push, push, push, push, push. But instead, adopt a no attitude, an effortless attitude, and a simplicity. And if simplicity and effortlessness aren't there, the answer is always no. So I'M curious, through the lens of the big leap and through your experience, how do you, what are some of your decision making criteria? How do you determine what's an absolute yes or an absolute now?

Well, like you, I've identified and I hope everybody does eventually. A sense of where you can feel a sense of flow in yourself, where things are moving easily. I know the psychologist Mikhail sent me high wrote that book called Flow and he's investigating it in a scientific way, but just on a purely personal level. As I sit here, I can feel a streaming flow of positive energy in my body. And that tells me that what I'm doing is what I ought to be doing. You know, because it feels good, it has a ease to it. I'm not in a hurry, I'm not trying to get anywhere. I'm just trying to be who I am and be where I am and be what I'm doing. And that to me feels so delicious. I use that as a barometer all the time in myself. The other thing too is I think most of us need to get really good at. I wasn't very good at this a long time ago, but I've gotten to be kind of a master of it is noticing when the energy is toxic or turning bad or when there's fear in the environment. Okay.

So while you're going there, I can't help but ask, can you describe a little bit about, for someone who's not familiar with developing that practice, how to first of all focus in on your body and also how to detect that toxicity? Like how long did it take for you to build that into a daily practice? And was there an exercise that got you there? I'm very curious.

The exercise to start with that I found most useful was to take three breaths and change my body position and just try it right now, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, even if you're driving along listening to this, there's nothing wrong. You've been breathing all the time. So it won't hurt you to take three big easy breaths and then move your body around a little bit and just notice as a result of doing that, do you feel a little bit more sense of streaming, ease, flowing ease in your body? And that's what got me started. I've now, well, gosh, 40 years ago I learned to meditate. 40 some years ago now I learned to meditate and I do that every day. Highly recommend you have some form of meditation, some kind of quiet stillness in your life. So that's an important part of my day. But I think ongoing body awareness is really where it's at, just being present with whatever you're feeling. Nature has equipped us with three big feeling zones in our body, one in our belly. That tells us when we're hungry and it also tells us when we're scared. Unfortunately, because some people eat when they're scared instead of when they're hungry. I used to be one of them. But there's fear in our bellies and there's sadness in our chests. There's also joy and compassion in our chests. There's also anger up in our jaws and in our shoulders and the back of our necks, the places that get tight when we're holding in our angry. But if you think about it, those are just three zones or locations. The rest of us is potential extreme feelings of ease and flow as we go through our day. So it's actually possible to maintain that sense of ease and flow. When you start to lose it, just take three easy breaths, change your body position a little bit. Maybe notice if you need to meditate or relax or something like that. But I think just on the move in life, your breathing and your conscious movement is where to place your attention.

Love that really practical.

Example as well. And I think another thing that I've been wanting to ask you for a while is about lifespan. One of the things that when we decided to do this podcast, I asked you, what do you want and what are you interested in right now at this phase in your life? Because I'd said, what's left? What do you want? And you'd said, well, I pretty much accomplished everything of thing I want, which most people can't say that first of all. But do you remember what your answer, your reply to me was, by any chance?

I don't. I hope it was very wise and good, though.

Oh, yeah, no, I wouldn't do anything except elevate you. So you just said, I want to have fun, I want to feel good. You have a philosophy, a life philosophy that I've since adopted, which is, you told me, I want to feel good all the time. I feel good all the time. I thought, what an interesting life philosophy, that it forces you to check in constantly. And we really just talked about co creation because that was something that you were very motivated by and innovation. And I believe that right now, at our stage in human history and existence, that there are five important core values, which are innovation, creativity, co creation, enlightened leadership, and then transformational experiences. Those are some concepts. And you and I talked about that quite a bit. And then from that, that evolved into the Big Leap. And we started brainstorming a little bit on what should we call this new podcast? And it became abundantly clear after not too long that not only should it be the Big Leap, but then what we're evolving into. And in our next episode, we're going to be talking about your latest book, Conscious Luck, and that was going to be the focus. So, having said that, what I wanted to ask you is talk about.

Lifespan and the formula to getting to.

Grace and staying in that space of feeling good all the time. And I think this is a natural extension from the last topic we were just talking about.

Well, in developmental psychology, we have a saying that in your 20s, your job is to experiment. And so you try out different jobs, maybe, or you try out different relationships. Then in your 30s, you find your life. Because in your 30s, you're often faced for the first time with taking you're kind of out of the realm of your parents and program, early parent program, and you're realizing, wow, I have to take responsibility for my own life. And so it's a decade of opening up and discovering more about your own feelings and that kind of thing and what you really want to do with your life. Like my experience in 1977 was a classic 30s experience. Sitting down on the floor and figuring out, what am I really doing here? So that's finding your Life. In your 40s, you build your life, you build your life. You find new systems to do things, you take on bigger projects, you raise a family, those kinds of things that are about building. And then the saying is, in your 50s and 60s, your job is to enjoy your life. Well, I think now that we're living to 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, I think our job is to enjoy our life all along, because even when I was in my 30s, I certainly didn't want to suffer in the name of my growth. I've never seen the value of suffering. To me, if you get the message of it, great. But if you can suffer for 10 seconds and get the message that you would have gotten from suffering for 20 years, do the 10 second version. That's all you really need to do sometime is to open up to whatever the suffering is and you get the message and move on. And so in my Life.

Well, I'm 74 now. And so over the past 10 years or so.

In Hindu psychology, they have the breakdown of the lifespan into child, student, householder, and forest dweller. And so I'm in the forest dweller stage of life where I'm really putting my attention on enjoying things. And like I said, the turn on for me is like recently I drove a 40 foot boat for the first time. And anybody that knows me knows that I absolutely loathe boats. I don't go out on the ocean, I get seasick anyway. So what am I doing driving a boat at age 74 for the first time? The reason is because the person and his wife who owns it, I helped finance the boat. It was their dream. They wanted to move to a boat and they didn't have quite enough money to do it. And they're friends of mine and so I helped them get established on this liveaboard boat that's absolutely gorgeous now and they've built it all up and everything. So they invited me down to see it and I actually got to drive it for the first time. So to me that was such a big turn on. I'll probably never drive a boat again. So. But now I've driven a boat and for the very best possible reasons.

That's great. I don't know if you knew this or not. I lived on a boat for almost five years, 46 foot boat. So I, I happened to love them. And there's that old saying of the best two days of boat owner's life are the day you buy and the day you sell it. Which is true as well because I've owned two large boats and having lived on one too, it was some of the best time of my life.

I had the same feeling about. I always wanted a Rolls Royce when I was growing up. For some reason I took a fix on a Rolls Royce. And so when I first had some money together, I bought this Rolls Royce. And it was one of those things like the two best days of my life, you know, it was the day I unloaded it onto the next poor sucker. My daughter lives on a boat up in San Francisco Bay now and this is her second winter on it. And I'm wishing her well. At the end of the first winter she said, well I think I'm going to sell the boat. So she's starting her second winter. I'm eager to see what happens.

Yeah, that's very fun. Well, I lived in Minnesota in fact on the Mississippi river. So it was super cold and it was was a year round liveaboard. So someday we can go down that.

But.

Well, the way I would like to take this right now is the focus of this particular episode was what was your biggest leap? And what I'd like to ask you right now is if you think through.

Your history and some of the amazing people that you and I talked about, because we've talked about doing a Big Leap experience, and we made a giant list of all the people we wanted to invite. And some of the people included celebrities that you've worked with, multi billionaires, some exceptionally successful people, but also folks that are still cooking like we all are. Right. The nice thing about all these people is they're still students to this day. You never want to be embarrassed about who you get in front of. But if you would think through the history of working with people for 40 years or so and what their biggest leaps have been, what would you say the core challenges are that you've helped people get through that are their biggest leaps and the blockages that prevented them from getting there. And I thought that'd be a great way to end this episode, but also seed our next episode, which is beyond the Big Leap. And also talk about your next book, Conscious Luck.

Yes. Well, one of the things I've noticed, as you were saying, that I had a flicker of a memory of sitting in Michael Dell's office, working with him with a friend of mine, Kate Ludeman, who's another coach, and.

Observing, working with him for the first time, how quick he was to, how open he was to learning. You know, some very accomplished people have massive egos. They like being right. They don't like admitting to be wrong. They don't, you know, like that. And I bet we've all been able to meet a few of those in our life. But some of the most amazing people I've met are people that are just lightning quick with saying, oh, tell me more about that. You know, and I've had that experience many times with Michael and other people at that level as well. And the one thing that distinguishes them and is that openness to learning piece. Because it's always the limiting beliefs that get us stuck. But unfortunately, it's the limiting beliefs that we don't know we have. You know, because if we could identify them, we'd say, oh, okay, goodbye. But most of the time, we're operating out of a set of limiting beliefs that we don't know we have. And how to find out what those are is incredibly important. And I want to get into that next time. Fantastic.

Well, I think that is a great place to break this off because again, next episode, beyond the Big Leap, Conscious Luck, how to discover how to get past that. And as usual, we're going to get into some great anecdotes and stories and transformations. You've been through, but also the how to side of it as well. And then in upcoming episodes, we're going to be interviewing other folks as well who've gone through some big leaps. You've got an amazing.

Rolodex of incredibly fascinating people that you know. And the same for me that I've been talking to about this podcast are like, yeah, I'd like to participate in that. And you're gonna open up their hearts and be more transparent, probably than they've ever been before.

I'm looking forward to it.

All right, so with that, thanks so much for listening to and watching the Big Leap and. And make sure you head on over to itunes and make sure. If you would please comment and vote. Give this podcast five stars. One of the best ways to get the word out is, of course, by sharing it, too. Is there anything you'd like to leave our listener and our viewer with?

Breathe, move, Love. That's what it says on the little wristband that we give out at our trainings. Breathe, move, Love. Because those are the things that. That keep coming back to you that will always increase the amount of flow in yourself.

All right, well, thank you very much. This is Mike Koenigs. This is the Big Leap.

Gay Hendricks with your Big Leap, and.

We will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening and watching.