Gay Hendricks | Genius Zone: End Negative Thinking & Live In True Creativity | Wellness Force

Oftentimes, the most powerful first positive thought you can have in any given area is that thought about, okay, I commit now to bringing forth my ideal body rather than my 300 pound body, or I commit to bringing forth my real creativity, my true creativity, the type of creativity that serves me and other people at the same time. I commit to bringing forth my genius so that I feel it and other people get inspired by it.

Gay Hendricks, welcome back to Wellness Force. It's been five years. You came on in the beginning and you're here now at episode, I think almost 420. Huge gratitude, huge respect for the work you do in the world. Thank you for being here with us on Wellness Force.

Well, thanks a lot, Josh. I really appreciate it. And thanks for living in your Genius zone for the past 400 episodes.

Oh, my gosh. And in the very beginning you were there. Our friend Lindsay connected us. And now today we're going to talk about, if you're on YouTube with us, the Genius Zone. This is not a book that Gay wrote one day when he was on the patio. This is decades and decades of your life's work. This is the breakthrough process to end negative thinking, which is huge, I think, that plagues so many of us, Gay, and to live in our true creativity. This book is the culmination of so many books you've written. And how many books, if you had to just guess right now, have been written from your books? And how many books have you written yourself?

Oh, wow, that's a great question. I never thought about how many books it inspired, but I'm sneaking up on 50. There's questions whether this is 47 or 48, this new one, but I've got a couple in the pipeline. But let's round it off to 50 and say, yeah, basically one a year for the past 50 years.

Okay, so I've never written a book in my life. One of my. We're going to talk about what the genius zone actually is. So as a stepping off point for creators, we're all either creating from self or co creating with our partner or co creating with the divine. When you look at that lane of creation, let's start before we even talk about what genius zone is. How would you define creation? So much of your work is creativity. And when you look at the word to create, what does that even mean to you? Obviously we can look it up in a dictionary and we could say, oh, yeah, you just do something. But what does creation, that word creation or creativity mean to Gay Hendrix?

Yes, creativity is something that has the Capacity to surprise you. You know, if you're washing dishes the same old way for the 365th time of the year, the there's not much learning going on there. But if you shift your attention, let's say you're in a Zen monastery and they're washing the dishes has a different significance. It's about being present with each dish and about being present with the task at hand. Even though it may not seem like a meditative experience, it is in that context. I heard a story one time, I can't remember who said this. I think it might have been Stephen Covey, but there was a traveler back in the Middle Ages that was riding along horseback and came to a place where there were a bunch of workmen getting stones, big rocks from down by a river and carrying them up a hill. And the traveler noticed that some of the work people had smiles on their faces and some had, you know, what looked like they were groaning and didn't have. Were having a good time. And so the traveler stopped one of the people that didn't look like he was having a good time and said, what are you doing? And he said, can't you see I'm carrying rocks up a hill? And then he stopped and asked one of the people that had a smile on their face and said, what are you doing? And that person said, I'm building a cathedral up at the top of the hill. So how you go about the same task has a huge amount to do with your own well being, your own wellness, because by doing that, are you not creating your own wellness force around you when you're being in the present and also loving and attending to the task you're doing, whether it's washing dishes or here giving a talk on your program, or sitting on the stage on Oprah or wherever I happen to be, it's all the same for me. Because when I sit down with a person, it doesn't matter if I'm sitting down in my office or sitting next to them in airplane. If they want to talk about the kind of thing I'm interested in, I'll talk to them for four hours if they're sitting next to me in an airplane seat. Because to me, the most important thing in my life, my life purpose, is to expand every day in love and gratitude and appreciation and abundance while I'm facilitating and helping and inspiring other people to do the same thing. So back to your question about how many books has the Big Leap and all those inspired?

We don't know.

Probably a couple hundred. Anyway, all Right.

Well, we don't know that. But we do know this. Most of us have, at some point in our lives, or maybe even more severely than others, battled with the dragon. You were in a film, I believe it was 15 years ago, and it was called Finding Joe. And Finding Joe, you talked about how you had padded yourself with. With fat. And I had done this too. I was almost £280 at one point where I use that weight as a way to keep. To keep me feel safe, to keep me feeling safe. And in order for me to keep feeling safe, I had to keep packing on this external framework of control. Meanwhile, the real work that led me to my genius zone, which I promise we are going to talk about this genius zone. But as a premise to this, the deeper work is always necessary. This ending of negative thinking and the way that we pad ourselves. Is there a space gay that you can educate us on between recapitulating the past filled with that capital T, lowercase T, trauma, or seeing things that have actually happened for me versus against me? In other words, how do we move forward in life so that we can be in our genius, so that we can create taking stock of the things that have happened to us to see them actually coming for us instead of spiritually bypassing.

Well, I really appreciate that. Great question. And I have several layers of things I want to say about that. It started for me. Well, first of all, you weighed 280 at your top. I weighed over 300 pounds when I was 24 years old and had.

How tall are you?

Six feet. Wow.

Okay, so we're the same height. Interesting.

And how are. I'm about 180 now. What are you these days?

Right now I'm 240. Because I've allowed. We're going to talk about this. I've allowed that padding to come back up. And so we're going to. We're going to discuss that later on.

So you went down and then have come back up some?

I've come back up, but my good weight is about 215. 220. That's where I feel really, really good.

Yeah, well, when I was playing high school football and trying to impress my high school girlfriend, I had no athletic talent, but I was solely out there to get girls. But when I was £225 at the time, then after I graduated, I continued to eat like a teenager, and that's what got me to 300. But it doesn't matter where you are or where you're starting. Here's what got Me on the right path. When I was 24, I actually, I had a slip and fall and I landed on my back. And I didn't knock myself unconscious. But I say what I had was an out of Hendrix experience because it kind of knocked me out of my usual way of seeing the world. And for about two minutes there as I was lying on this icy road, I had this new vision of myself where I saw my fat as the padding that was keeping me from feeling all these feelings underneath it, like anger and sadness and fear. Because if I focused all the time on how miserable I was about weighing 300 pounds, I didn't ever get to what was really going on under the surface. And so I started in that moment, I could feel all those layers of anger and sadness and fear. But the magic of it, Josh, was in that two minutes, I also felt what was at the center and bottom of everything, which is what I call pure consciousness. It's the thing you're born with. It doesn't matter about your programming. Your programming happens on top of that and can sometimes obscure it. But that clear, spacious, open sense of pure consciousness is there all the time. And it took a whomp on my back for me to find it. But how I lost the extra 140 pounds that I lost was I started making every food decision based on that pure consciousness. I would say, is what I'm about to eat going to feed my new body or my old body? Is it going to feed my past, my 300 pound body, or is it going to feed my new body? And I really started using it was actually almost a spiritual thing, I would say, because will this food feed my spirit, or will it feed my old programming, my current spirit? And so that became a huge question for me. And it may be that you're using some kind of the same idea to bring your weight back down. But for me, it was finding this amazing new discovery. All of these feelings that I had inside that I didn't know I had. And then the big surprise, which was feeling this clear, spacious place inside me that I'd never tapped into. So at this point in my life, I say being fat was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Because it led to that discovery. And that discovery has changed my life.

Wow, I got a full body resonance there. Because so many people, it's almost like the weight will come when the internal weight is heavy. In other words, the body is the subconscious mind. So our body is literally wearing our emotions on it. That's why for men, there's that gynoidal storage, you know, around the center or for women, it's on their hips. The body is the subconscious mind. So what we need gay, and I'm curious how you feel about this, we almost need like an internal self love barometer. You know, how long do I spend in the past exploring what has happened versus living in the present with peace? You've mentioned before, sometimes the universe tickles you with a feather. Sometimes the universe smacks you with a sledgehammer.

So depending on your openness to learning.

Depending on your openness to learning. So, so how do we, how do we begin to. To explore ourselves which leads to our genius zone at that middle ground of really the self love or the sabotage barometer?

Yes. Well, I appreciate you bringing up the sabotage issue because many people have read my other book, the Big Leap, which the new book, the Gen Zone, is a sequel to it. And in the Big Leap I talk about a problem that most of us suffer from called the upper limit problem. When you get to a certain point, you engage in some form of sabotage to knock yourself back down to a level that you're more comfortable with. And so I've worked with juvenile delinquents and I've worked with movie stars and billionaires and we all have upper limit problems. In fact, sometimes the movie stars and billionaires have bigger upper limit problems than other people because they've been so successful in one area and they feel so blocked in another area, like in the area of their own personal relationships. You know, I've worked with quite a number of very prominent people who have told me some version of I'd give up all my money and fame today if I could have one experience of being happily married. As a matter of fact.

Do you.

Remember at one time John Paul Getty, JP Getty was the wealthiest man in the world long before Bill Gates came along. He was an oil billionaire. He said at the end of his life he was 83. I think when he said this that he said, I'd gladly give up all of my millions for one experience of a loving marriage. And that to me, that breaks my heart when I hear things like that, even though I didn't know him or anything. But because to me life is about really, it's about a couple of big simple things. It's learning to feel a flow of well being and good feeling inside yourself. And it's also about feeling a connection with another person or more than one person where you feel that sense of connected, loving experience all the time. It doesn't go away if you have an argument or something like that, there's this always on unbroken flow of positive energy, love and good feeling going on between you and another person. To me, those are the two things we ought to measure ourselves on. I like that people read my books and everything like that. But imagine on my deathbed, am I really going to be thinking about that? No, I'm going to be thinking about the extent to which I was loving and felt loved. Those things. Having been at people's deathbed on more than one occasion, I can tell you it's the deeper things like that that people are thinking about, not why didn't I spend more time at the office. That never comes up in those late life conversations. So I think no matter, even if you're nowhere near the end of your life, it's important to have that kind of deathbed awareness about what do I really want, what do I want to accomplish? So that if somebody came in at the end of my life and said, was your life a success? And you said, yes, what are three or four or five things that made it so? You know that? What are the things that you really experienced or accomplished that made you feel like your life was a success? I'm lucky in a way. I started asking myself big questions like that when I was in my 30s. And so like in my 30s I began to ask like, why do I keep messing up all of my relationships? I mean, with women. Because I'd had one relationship after the other since I was a teenager and they all kind of ended up the same way. I say they were like the trajectory of the Titanic and that they would start with great fanfare and they would keep running into an iceberg. And it took me about a dozen of them to realize who the iceberg was. It was me, it wasn't the relationship. And I made this shift in my 30s that suddenly made it possible for me to have a good relationship. And for the last 40 years, I've had the great blessing and gift of waking up every day feeling like the luckiest man alive because I get to be married to Katie Hendricks. We're about to have our 40th wedding anniversary here in a couple of months.

Congratulations.

If you're in the neighborhood, be sure to drop in. Beautiful. We're going to have a big blowout. Because I never imagined in a million years that I would be able to create a successful long term relationship. But I just kind of put my heart and mind to it when I was in my 30s. And so, whoosh, here we are, 40 years later. Wow.

Wow. There's so much to unpack there. I really respect and love the way that you're able to speak from a spiritual place, an experiential place. And you also have the academic background, right, with your clinical journals and your studies. So everyone, if you're just learning about Gay Hendrix now, I don't know if you've been under a rock because the Big Leap has sold probably millions of copies at this point. Yes. Millions of copies.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah, probably millions.

I can talk with that.

But, yeah, not that that's the focus. The focus is the lesson. All these things that we. You know, I mentioned millions of copies because that's the impact that you've made in the world. And this is the moment that I've been waiting for. Gay. This moment with you right now. I've been waiting for this moment for five years. You came on Wellness Force five years ago, and you told me something that, honestly, I wasn't ready to hear, and it shook me to my core. I spent the next five years unpacking it, and the lesson was.

I hardly wait to hear what it was.

The lesson was, you told me that in life, in order to have peace in self and to really be a loving, integrated human being, you have to learn how to love your fear. And when you said that, I was like. In my mind, I was like, what the hell is this guy talking about? What is this guy talking about? You have to learn how to love your fear. And you said, you know, Josh, like, you know, if you have someone in your life that you care about, you love them. You have to give that same love to the things that scare you, to the things that bring you to fear. And, you know, it brings up a lot of emotion in me right now because I never thought I'd be here with millions of downloads and having my business be something that I meditated on and focused on. And I did the work. I looked in the mirror. I threw up in ayahuasca ceremonies, I did the breathwork. I've done all the things, but I had to go through the gauntlet of really understanding what you shared with me, man. And it makes me. It's a pretty cool moment with you because I really understand it now. I really understand what you meant. But it's not easy. It's simple what you shared, and a lot of what you share in the Genius Zone is simple, but it's not easy. So first of all, gratitude. Thank you. And secondly, can you unpack that for people that didn't hear us five Years ago, yes.

First of all, I want to appreciate you for hearing the message and putting it to use because that, of course, that's all you. It's one thing to hear me say something, but it's you taking 100% responsibility for it and bringing it into yourself and working with it. That's where the real magic occurs. So I appreciate very much being appreciated by you and I want to give the appreciation right back because that's where it belongs. And I feel that it's. What you just said is I get a lot of emails about that subject, you know, appreciating me for turning them on to that. And it took a long time for me to figure that out. But one of my particular gifts of my genius is I've always been able to explain really complicated things in a really simple way. And so let me start out with kind of the 1 minute, simplest version, that of the problem called not learning, not loving ourselves. There was a study once where they hung little voice activated microphones around the necks of kindergarteners and preschoolers. So these are like three, four or five year old people and you know, with their parents permission and everything, they just left those recorders on and they turned on whenever the kid said something or somebody said something to the kid. And then they analyzed all of these thousands of little conversations and 85% of them were of a negative nature. Don't do that. Stop doing that. If you do that again, I'm going to fill in the blank. But that to me was shocking because there is the raw material of where our self esteem problems come from. In part, not all of them, because a lot of people might have heard the same messages and go out and win a Nobel Prize, but a lot of us. You mentioned negative thinking and why the new book, the Genius Zone focuses on that so much. It's like we have two types of thoughts going on in our heads. One, the negative ones, which are full of blaming ourselves, criticizing ourselves, why aren't I more this? Or why haven't I done that? Or oh, why did I do that again? Then we've got the other positive thoughts that are going on, hopefully, which are things like, you did a good job on that, or what a great day to be alive or wow, I can't wait to get up so I can start working on fill in the blank. So there's all sorts of things swimming around in our heads. And you know, it's like the old Native American story. The boy went to his grandfather and said, it's like I have these two dogs in my mind, one is a good, obedient dog and the other is always barking and biting.

I think it was the two wolves, right? It was the two wolves, yes.

Dogs.

Well, dogs came from wolves. Same thing.

Yeah, right. And so. And the grandfather just said simply, which one do you feed? Because if we put energy into the negative, then that's obviously what's going to grow. Because one of the oldest psychological principles is what you put your attention on tends to proliferate. So here's. Human beings are brilliant problem solvers. But if you give your mind terrible problems to solve, like if you go around thinking, oh geez, what's wrong with me? Your mind will happily spend all day telling you what's wrong with you. Because its job is to solve your problem. But if you could turn that around. See, here's how I start by turning it around with people. I ask them to start with the simplest possible idea. Like for example, with the genius zone. Try on this idea and whoever's watching and listening, just try it on. Like you try on a new blouse or a shirt or. The idea is I commit to bringing forth more of my natural organic genius every day. Or even simpler, I commit to bringing forth more of my genius every day. Try on that. It involves a commitment that you're committing to it. You're putting both your heart and your mind on the issue. So you're committing to it and you're willing to bring it forth every day. You don't need it to be something that drops out of the heavens like an 18,000 pound pearl. It just needs to be incremental feeling of expansion into your genius every day. That's what makes us feel radically alive, especially along about midlife. Most people define midlife as starting in the early 40s and going through mid-50s, like 40 to 55 somewhere along in there. And so it's a crucial time in your life because in psychology we say in your 20s, your job is to experiment. In your 30s you find your life. In your 40s, you build your life and for the rest of the time you enjoy your life. Hopefully from 50s on, you enjoy your life, but the 40s are of absolutely crucial time. Late 30s into your 40s are crucial because the personality that got you to 40 is not the personality that's going to get you to 80. In a lot of ways, it's unlearning the stuff that you learned from 0 to 40 that creates the space you need to invent your life on for the rest of your life.

Wow, Gay so much there. I mean, Honestly, everyone watching, hit, pause, rewind it. Listen to that a couple times. I mean, what you just said in the past five minutes with the spark question, how do I love my fear? The things you unpacked right there. We're going to do a deep discussion in the community just about what you shared with us. And I want to pull the E brake and go back to that initial question too. If people don't understand that concept of loving their fear, what does that actually mean to somebody that maybe doesn't want to get involved with esoteric speak? Maybe they're just beginning their spiritual or their self development journey. At least for me, five years ago, my soul drove me to start this podcast to interview you, to now understand the lesson that you shared with me. But if somebody's at that beginning road, what's a simplistic way to unpack that incredibly complex piece of loving their fear?

Here's another great place to start with the fear itself. Notice where in your body you feel fear when you feel it. Most people, if I ask them, that will point to their bellies, they'll say, I feel butterflies in my stomach or I feel a clutch of anxiety up around throat. So first of all, find out what your particular fear signature is, and here's a way to go about loving it. See, the problem with fear is, the problem with it is our attempt to control it. If you weren't trying to control it, you just look down and you'd say, okay, I feel some fear in my body. Why am I feeling that? And if there's some good reason for it, let's say you're walking toward an elevator in a dark parking garage. Well, go ahead, feel some good.

That's rational fear.

That's rational. However, if you're making love to your beloved and your mind is still back in the parking garage, that's a problem. Because then you're using your fear as a way to block your experience of life. And so the first thing we need to do is, is simply acknowledge our fear. Let ourselves open our hearts to it. That's an initial step. It's just letting it be something that you're not absolutely trying to squeeze out of your body. Because if you look at people trying to control their fear, they squeeze their belly muscles and they tighten down in an attempt to try to keep from looking scared. I can't remember if it's in the new book where I wrote about it, our big leap where I talk about going to make a speech for the first time after I wrote my first book. Do you Remember?

Well, I think it was in the genius zone.

Yeah. Well, I wrote my first book when I was still a starving graduate student. I used a borrowed typewriter in the borrowed office. But I wrote this little book called the Centering Book, which is a book for teachers to use with children to help them relax and get centered before tests and things like that. And so it took off and became a surprise little bestseller, which I was very, very pleased with it because I was living about $300 a month fellowship at the time. And so I remember I got my first advance from the publisher, which was $800. And I thought, you know, it's like, I'm a millionaire now because I've been living on 300 bucks a month as a starving grad student. But anyway, I got invited to go out and do some speeches on the conference circuit. And the very first one happened to be in Kansas City, Missouri, and with 150 teachers in the audience. Big education conference. So I gave my talk, and everybody loved it. They clapped. A guy came up to me afterwards, and he said, you know, I really loved your talk. And I brightened up, you know, since it was my first one. I. All right, thank you. What did you like about it? And he said, well, it wasn't what you said, it was how you said it. And I said, oh, what are you referring to? And he said, well, your voice shakes just as badly as mine does when I try to speak in public. Okay. You know, it kind of deflated me, but I. I thought about it. Why was my voice shaking? And I realized it was because it was the first time, but it was also because I was trying to control what was going on in my body. If I just gotten up there and said, hey, gang, this is my first speech at a conference like this. Listen to my voice shaking. And you know what? I flew out to Berkeley to give the second talk at a conference the next day, and I did that. I stood up in front of this big group and I told them that. I said. I told them the experience from the day before, and they howled with laughter. I said, so I noticed my voice is shaking less today. And maybe it's just because the second time I've done it, but I want you just to listen and know that if my voice shakes, I'm not trying to hide it from you. You know, I'm nervous. I want you to like me. And I don't know if I'm going to be any good at this new gig called going out and giving speeches. I'm a university professor. What Do I know about giving speeches to large conferen? So at the time I was a university. I became a university professor at Stanford and thereafter I mostly worked with very small groups of students, like a dozen clinical psychology students. So it was very unused to me to get out and speak to a large group like that. So anyway, I think the key issue there is to unconceal and let be whatever is there. The new book, the Genius Zone talks a lot about how the attempt to control stuff that we can't control gets us in a whole bunch of trouble. And the moment we stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Like you stopped trying to control your weight. I stopped trying to control my weight and put my attention on something I could control, like what I put in my mouth. I had total control over opening my mouth and putting something in it. I did not have any control over when I stepped on the scales, what it was going to say. That's a key distinction to make because so many people go around freaking out about their fat and their weight that it drowns out what really needs to happen, which is little choices that go in their mouth or little choices that happen when you're wearing your sneakers.

Okay, so much to unpack there. And it brings me. Actually, it's a perfect point. Freeing up mind space for genius to emerge. It's page 75 in the Genius Zone you talk about. Here's another piece of wisdom it took me a lifetime to learn. The biggest barrier block in our path to genius is a habit of fear based negative thinking. Now we all know that on some level we understand that. But what you just did, where you shared with us about de armoring, opening up to the fear. It's so counterintuitive. Gay. It's so counterintuitive to move closer to the thing that my subconscious or my ego is telling me is causing me pain. What's the reality of that dichotomy? What's really going on there?

One thing that occurs to me out of just what you're sharing there, Josh, is that some of us, a lot of us, probably a lot of people listening and watching, have children or you have a pet, someone that you're attempting to nurture. Well, in learning to love yourself, I ask people to think of someone you know for sure that you love. And many people can think of a child and they know for sure, they love it. Or a pet, they know for sure. And so there's that feeling inside. And let me just ask you, since we're speaking, when I asked that Question. Did you come up with somebody inside that you know for sure you love.

My newborn son, Nova? That's why we had to reschedule our podcast because he was in the NICU for 10 days. I mean, the amount of love that we went through. And I now know love in its purest form because when I look into his eyes, I actually see God. Not a bearded dude in the sky, but the omnipresent, all compassing being that controls all things. So that's the kind of love that you're talking about?

Yes, a beautiful example. It brings tears to my eyes and blessings to your family and to.

He's healthy, he's happy now gay.

That's great. Well, he's a wellness force.

That's why he's.

He's a card carrying member now.

He is. He's in the vortex.

Yes, he's in the vortex. Well, the reason I ask that is because you have in your body and many people that are watching and listening have in their body that experience of loving someone else, even if that person screwed up.

Yeah.

Like at this stage of the game, if Nova pees in his diaper, you don't stop loving him. It has no relevance to that. It's in a different realm. And the thing about it is, that's how I want you to love yourself. I want you to love yourself just like you love Nova. I want you to have that. And this is going to last you the next five years until we talk again five years from now. This is your new five year plan, is to get yourself thoroughly loved as much as you love Nova, so that there's one unbroken connection between dad who loves himself so thoroughly, and Nova, who gets to love himself so thoroughly as a result of you and your partner and other members of your family pouring that love in. So that's what I get people to do. I say, okay. With your fear, it's hard to love at first because you've been used to pushing it out of your body. You've been used to not liking it. When something hurts, you want to get rid of it quickly. But with fear, it works the other way around. Peace of mind comes only through full participation with what's going on in your body. So for peace of mind, you have to admit and allow into your mind fear, anger, sadness, all of those things. See, because we make a mistake to think. There's one faucet called pleasure and one faucet called pain. There's only one faucet, and it's called awareness. And you turn up the faucet called awareness. And life, big life starts to come at you. And sometimes that life has fear and anger and sadness in it. But what's also coming is the power of this awesome life energy that we all have access to. We all have access to this enormous creative presence, this creative space inside us. I read in a scientific journal one time that there's a place out in the universe astronomers tell us about where the universe is giving birth to 32 new Suns per second. They're like our sun up in the sky. But imagine 32 of those spewing out every second. That's creativity. Wow. And we're all made like that. We all have this creativity pouring through us because we're made of that same stuff that's creating those things. 32 new Suns. There's only one type of stuff here in the universe. It's us. And we're all made of different versions of it and different configurations of it. But we are literally all one thing. And we have imbued within us all of the creative power of the universe. And giving ourselves permission to enter that zone, that's a really big, powerful thing. Then the task becomes, how can I love my way through all those oodles of negative thoughts I have? And how can I. Like in the new book, I talk about how to let go of trying to control those things so that you don't keep attached to them. Because, you know, it's that. Like that old story from the Hindu tradition. Two monks are walking along and they have a river to cross, and they've taken a vow of chastity, poverty, and all of that. And there's a woman that needs to be carried across. And one of the monks picks her up and carries her across, and the reverend puts her down. And the two monks walk on. And one monk says, horrified, how could you do that? We've taken a vow never to touch a woman. And the other monk says, well, I put her down back on the river. You're still carrying her. You know, the idea is that we don't have to carry these things.

Yeah, that's very clear. That's very clear. Gay. What a beautiful. This is something you've done multiple times in our culture. Conversation, which I've loved. You've used the art of story to share a complicated lesson. A what could be complicated lesson. And that is what this book is filled with. This book. And I want to go back to this question. Here on page 75 in the Genius zone, you talk about clearing out. Because to tell the art of story, there has to Be spaciousness. There has to be creative flow. There has to be energy. There has to be space for it. But you talk about this paradox changed your life. Because at first, it really flummoxed my mind. It never occurred to me the only way to stop my negative thinking was to let go of trying to stop them. That one concept right there. If all anybody gets from this book is that one concept and they take inspired action from it that could change their life, can you unpack that a little bit?

Yes. It's the act of trying to control things that we don't have any control over that gets us all bollocks up. And if you just watch your mind, one of the reasons it keeps pumping out negative thoughts is because you're always criticizing those negative thoughts, but what you're really doing is giving energy to them. Because if you have a negative thought that says, oh, why are you doing this? Again? And you counter that with another negative thought about, oh, that's because you're a OCD person, or just any kind of conversation you have with your negative thoughts feeds more energy into them. And it's like, you know, throwing meat to the wolves all the time. They just get more frantic. The only way you can get out of that is letting go of trying to control them and say, oh, okay, there's one, you know, just kind of having that watching a bird fly by in the sky, you're not jumping to try to control its path. And so that keeps us in that state of kind of a neutral mind. You know, if you think you have one mind that's kind of pumping out positive thoughts and another one that's pumping out negative thoughts, work that way. Your mind is just pumping out thoughts and will kind of go with the ones that you favor and the ones you put more energy into or the ones you feed.

The parable you shared about the Native American.

Yeah. And one of the great beauties about being a human being, especially having that space of pure open consciousness and especially is it's the perfect launch pad for creating a new life. Because if you get down underneath all of your positive thoughts or all of your thoughts and you say, okay, here's what I want to put my focus on. I want to put my focus on creating more time in my genius zone. Once you get your focus on something like that, if you're sincere, if your heart and mind are in harmony about that, that begins to happen. It's just because if you tell your mind, there was this thing my brother and I used to play when we were kids, In a car, you pick a color and then you look for that type of car. And it was a way of making the exceedingly boring miles go by sitting in the back of a rattletrap station wagon. And so my brother was smart, though, because he always picked white. I did not know it at the time. He was a teenager and had figured out that all rent A cars in Florida are painted. And so he always picked white. And I would come up with some color like red or blue, and he would inevitably win just because he knew the rules. But it's what you place your attention on that begins to happen. I didn't even place my attention on having a healthy, loving relationship until I was 34 years old. I really sat down and figured out, okay, what are the three things I want and what are the three things I do not want in my relationships from here on?

What were they gay? Do you mind me asking?

No, I'll be happy to tell you. December 1979. Okay. Just about the time you were getting ready to roll onto this planet, I was having a big argument with my A woman that I'd been in an on and off relationship for five years. We were in argument and I had a download during that. I don't know where it came from, but I had this suddenly realization, oh, my God, this is not our 500th argument over the past five years. This is our 500th replay of the exact same argument. Whoa. And the arguments all went the same way. One of us would not tell the truth to the other person about something. Something. You know, like I'd be mad at her about something, or I would feel hurt about something, or she would feel hurt. But we wouldn't talk freely to each other about it. We kept it stuffed inside until it would kind of boil over sometimes. So that was number one. I saw how I messed up relationships by not being transparent to my feelings. Particularly the second thing, we ate up a tremendous. A lot of energy playing the blame game. I would get mad at her and blame her for something. Then she wouldn't just say, oh, yes, you're right, you are the one to blame. She was here. Wait a minute. I'm not the one to blame. You're the one to blame. So she would then blame me back and we would get into this loop where we'd be fighting about that sometimes for days at a time. Just remembering that makes me feel exhausted right at this moment.

I can feel the endless well of anger energy spent.

And so I realized, okay, if I were completely honest in my relationships and If I took full responsibility and didn't blame. And the third thing was that caused problems is I'm very creative person and I spend two or three hours a day writing. Rain or shine, it doesn't matter. Winter, summer, fall, like this morning, I always wake up around 4am Just my natural waking time. I sleep from 10 to 4. And so right around 4am I woke up. So by 5am I'm usually working on whatever writing project ever my book. And right now I'm working on a memoir. And it's really fun because it's all stories, you know, and I'm having so much fun with it. But from 5 to 7:30, I write. If that's not okay with the person, if that's not okay with the person I'm in relationship with, with. That's a daily problem for me. And I've been in relationships where the person would say, oh, you know, like, come on, can't you just one day not do that and let's do something else, you know? And I would say, no, I want to get my writing done first. Then let's go for a bike ride. So anyway, there was always hassle about my creativity. So I said, okay, number three, I want a relationship where both of us are equally passionately committed to our creativity. So that's never a problem again. So here's the great thing that happened. I figured that out and I had a couple of very magical things happen right away. The first one was I said to the universe, right after that, I kind of said. I was sitting by myself in the corner of my little cottage and I said to the universe, here's what I want these three things. And if it's not in the cards for me to have that, okay, I'm willing to live without it. But I promise you this. I will never settle for less. I'll never have another relationship where those three things are not present. So here's what happened. The first magic event happened the next day. My partner, former partner. Oh, I forgot to tell you what happened in the argument. I got this download in the middle of the argument about this is our 500 version of the same argument. And they're always caused by one of these three things. It just went kind of. And I said to Carol, she said, what's going on? Because I've stopped kind of in the middle of the argument. And I was just kind of standing there and realizing this.

Were you shaking your head like that?

Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Like the Matrix. The Matrix glitched all of a sudden.

Yeah. And by the way. That's one of my favorite series of movies.

Me, too.

One of the few movies I've ever walked out of and called. I have a friend that's a musician friend of mine that we've been friends for half our lives, Kenny Loggins. And whenever I see a good movie, he kind of relies on me to be his movie scout. And so I walked out and I called him on the phone, and I said, come down. I'm going to see the movie again. I want you to come down and see me with it. That's how powerful that first movie affected me. It rearranged my brain cells, frankly. And anyway, back to our subject at hand. So I. Carol came to the door of my cottage, and she and I had a very powerful sexual connection. And that was one of the things that always got us back together, frankly. And. And so she was there in her radiant glory, and she said, I have changed my mind. Those things you were talking about. Because I'd said to her, I just had this download of these three things, and if we stopped doing them, we'd have a great relationship, and can we suddenly make this change? And basically she said, no. And I was shocked because I thought it was such a great idea. And I asked her, well, why? What? And it basically turned out, I'm so glad she was honest with me. She basically said, I only want to be in this relationship if we can agree that you're the one that's at fault when we have problems. And, you know, I said to her, I always suspected that, but I never actually.

You're like, I already knew that, but.

I never heard you be honest about it. And so that was a huge moment for me because I said, I can't do that anymore. Thank you, but no thanks. Let's talk again in another time. Well, here is another. The second big magic that happened is I went to California. I was living in Colorado at the time, where I'd been a professor at the university there for 21 years. And so I taught seminars wherever I did on my weekends. And so I flew off to do a weekend seminar in Menlo Park, California, at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. And in the room, I was giving kind of an introductory talk to about 50 or 60 people, which was all of their PhD students and their faculty. And there was a woman across the room that kept catching my attention. First of all, she laughed at all my jokes. And she also was the most gorgeous human being I'd ever seen. And she just looked perfect to me. And so I made a note Got to find out, talk to her, because I knew she was one of the faculty, she happened to be on the faculty, but she was also getting her PhD there at the same time. So she was trading teaching for some of the money she had to pay to finish her PhD. Anyway, long story, but she was the movement therapy teacher there at the school. So I made a note, I got to talk to that woman. So during a break that night, I walked over to her and she walked over toward me and we struck up a conversation and I made this very bold move. I said, I'd like to ask you out for a cup of coffee. But I just had this huge realization about how I mess up relationships and how I want to create my relationships from now on. I said, are you interested? And she said, well, of course. And I said, well? Well, the three things I said, I see where I only want relationships where both people are absolutely honest and transparent, and I only want relationships where people take responsibility when stuff comes up rather than going automatically into the blame game. And number three, I want a relationship where both people are passionately committed to their own creativity as well as creating a space for the other person's creativity to flow. And on those terms, would you like to have a cup of coffee with me? There was about 15 seconds where her eyes rolled back in her head and she got a blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. And then she said, yeah, how about lunch? And so she even took it further than coffee. And that was 40 some years ago now. So that was my all time best pickup line. If you ever want a great pickup line in a singles bar, you could do no better than that.

If you're at a yoga studio and you want to conscious pickup line, that's the one. Like, hey, do you want to actually meet in all these trifectas of emotional intelligence together and then build a life from there? Hey, let's get lunch. I mean, it's not exactly a casual one, but I really love your stories. Yeah, so I'm so enjoying this. And the whole time that I read the book that I've been unpacking, the question that I asked you and that the answer you shared five years ago, there is this element of ego, ego that arises for me. You touch on the ego and the genius zone. You talk about the comfort zone, which is the place where really most people get stuck. But the ego is so subtle. Sometimes it can be such a subtle foe, it can wrap around people almost like an octopus and pull them down just when they're about to get to the top of the water. How do you define the ego personally now, with all of your experience? And has your definition of the ego changed over the course of decades?

Yes. Your ego is made of two streams of thought that get put in place at a very early age. Let's say every person has a personality number one in their ego, and personality number one gets laid down in the first year of life, which is the first year of life is all about learning to bond and learning to be in union with another person. And if things going on during that first year of life interrupt that process, whatever it is, whatever the stuff is. In my own case, I happen to be born right after my father had died unexpectedly during my mother's pregnancy with me. So she went into a downward spiral, unfortunately. We lived near my grandmother, so she took me over. Otherwise, I don't know where I would have ended up. But so I was very blessed in that regard until my mother could kind of get her feet on the ground again because she had my brother that she was also taking care of, who's eight years older than I am. But so I didn't get a good experience of that because of all the chaos that was going on. That may have been another factor in my overeating to try to, you know, somehow feed that old bond or try to get that original connection.

I can relate. Yeah.

Yeah. And so the personality number one is made up of all the things you learn to do to please other people. So you learn to smile, you learn to hug back, you learn to make little noises that make everybody happy during that first year of life. The problem is also those things don't work all the time. And so personality number two comes into being when you have pain that you don't know how to deal with. So personality number one is all about how to get positive things. And personality number two is how to avoid pain. And therein lies a problem, because there are three or four ways that we human beings try to avoid pain and try to avoid losing at the game of life. And one of those ways is to get sick or have accidents. So one way to manage our pain, manage our negative feelings, manage to negative thought, manage to get the connection we need is to have an accident or an illness. And so our unconscious mind learns that another way that we avoid pain and the pain of losing in life, losing connection, is to not play the game, just to kind of go apathetic and not produce anything in life that anybody's going to have any reaction to. You know, you live a life of quiet desperation. You're just Going through the motions and not having any larger aspirations for your life. On your tombstone it says, here lies John Smith. Potential fully intact. You know, did not express any of that potential during life. And. And so there are a number of things our unconscious mind does in that realm of personality number two. Personality number one and personality number two are essentially your ego, because your ego is based of the things you do to get goodies and the things you do to avoid pain. And so those kinds of things go into your ego. The interesting thing is that the biggest big juicy good stuff of life happens when you're beyond both of those personalities, when you realize that both of those personalities were just products of your conditioning. If you'd grown up next door, you'd have a different stack of number one and number two personalities, but it'd be the same thing. You would still be trying to figure out what to do for positive goodies on this planet, and you'd be figuring out what I got to do to avoid pain and suffering on this planet. If that involves staying in bed all day, being sick, well, that's one choice people make, or all the different variations of what I call the upper limit problem. So John Lennon said in one of his famous sayings is, life is what's going on while you're busy making plans, making other plans. And in a way, your ego is that part of yourself that's always busy making other plans instead of just being with the moment itself. And put your attention on what you can do in this moment to bring out the very thing that you think your ego is doing. You know, like, open.

I just had. Gay, I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just had, in real time, a consciousness expansion moment with you that I'd love to share.

Wow.

I thought about in my life and so many people and even clients I've worked with in business and health, they want the plan so that they can trust that if they follow the plan, they won't get hurt. Hurt like the two personalities you're talking about. So if I have the plan, if I have the perfect PDF, if I have the perfect guide, just tell me what to do. Government, tell me what to do. Teacher, tell me what to do, mom and dad, and I'll do it. And that way I won't have to feel pain. I mean, holy schnikes. Wow. I mean, that's really the two personalities you talked about. They are just wreaking havoc in our world right now. And it honestly hurts my heart to even feel into how these two personalities are literally running the show with the fear based narrative in the media and everything else. Please continue. And please can you unwind that just a little bit for how you're managing that yourself and how to your community you share how we can all make sense and make consciousness out of the compression we're in right now as a society?

Yes. Well, it's going to have to be done like a positive, conscious wildfire of possibility. But just like with any other wildfire, it starts with a spark. And your particular spark, like mine, will always begin with you choosing to have one conscious positive thought about some particular thing that you're thinking and feeling about. So the tendency is to immediately go into personality number two. When we start feeling angry about something or start feeling sad about something, very rarely do we. When you feel, do you say, oh, I really appreciate this experience I'm having in my body because it's showing me where I feel something unfair is happening in my life. You know, most often we go to, oh, I'm pissed off and if I can just get rid of Sally, I'll stop being pissed off. Or if I can just get rid of my boss, I'll stop being pissed off. We put it external to ourselves. And so I mentioned commitment earlier. Oftentimes the most powerful first positive thought you can have in any given area is that thought about, okay, I commit now to bringing forth my ideal body rather than my 300 pound body, or I commit to bringing forth my real creativity, my true creativity, the type of creativity that serves me, me and other people. At the same time, I commit to bringing forth my genius so that I feel it and other people get inspired by it. Those kind of positive thoughts are the place to start any new pattern from because they cancel out all the other stuff. Once you put in this new idea, your mind will automatically start to go to just naturally will. Until you do that though, your mind will automatically start going to the least painful negative idea and then it'll start working down from there. It's like I said, you know, the universe is very happy to teach us with the tickling of a feather. And then we say, oh, okay. Or if we're not paying attention to those feather tickles, look out. Wham. I've been hit by any number of cosmic whammies in my life, as you probably have too. And it's like, like I always say, conscious living is like that Bobo doll they used to have that you knock it down, you pop back up, knock it down, you pop back up. And what gets you popping back up is letting yourself feel just where you are, and then accepting that as it is and loving that as it is as best you can, and then choosing a new path with one positive thought that sets you off on a new direction.

But you've shared in your work before, and I don't even need to look at any books or notes you've shared. That commitment is something that will be a. Of your authenticity, of your real wanting and true desire to have it. So if I make a commitment and that commitment falls through, then maybe I just wasn't being sincere enough. Maybe I just wasn't being authentic enough about why I truly wanted that commitment to come to fruition. Can you share that a little bit more?

Yes. So the results you produce tell you what your true commitment is. So if you want to, if you make a commitment to not having relationships with people who are addicts. I had to do that one time because I had a bad pattern early in my relationship life. I'd grown up around quite a bit of addiction. And so in some part of my unconscious mind, when I fall in love with somebody, one of the requirements is she has to be an addict of some kind. I think that was my unconscious programming. And after doing that a few times, I realized one day, okay, one thing I want is to be in a relationship with somebody that doesn't have a chemical addiction. Okay, so one painful learning after another leads to a wake up moment where I become clear. But do you think it was overnight? No. Next person I felt attracted to. When I got to know her a little deeper, I found she was a Valium enthusiast. Not an alcoholic or not a smoker, but a Valium enthusiast. I said, okay. There was something misaligned about my commitment. I didn't have it deep enough from my heart. So I produced another relationship with an addict. So I kept working on that and loving the part of me that felt like I needed that kind of a relationship, which led me into loving quite a bit of early pain and opening up to that. Once I did that, I stopped producing relationships with people with addicts in them. So that let me know that my conscious commitment had won out. So one of the big things about commitment is saying yes to your genius, saying, I commit to bringing forth my genius every day. What that will do also is invite forth any barriers to that so you'll have a chance to deal with those. That's a good thing. You want to bring those up. You want to say to your deepest parts of yourself, send up any of my barriers to expressing my full genius, because that's what I want. And I'm willing to clean out whatever's in the closet there that's stopping me from expressing my full genius.

This is so powerful in that moment when the barriers arise. Have you found in working with clients or in feedback from your books that people actually, instead of accepting the barrier is arisen, that their ego will become angry that a barrier is there?

Yes, I just had that happen yesterday. As a matter of fact, I was in a meeting and I got a text from a man who's the CEO of a big Wall street firm and I'm helping him sell one of his businesses and kind of coaching him through the process of that. And what always happens in any kind of big deal, and this is a big deal, this is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And so there's lots of people at stake. What always seems to happen is the principal person, like my client gets stuck on some feeling that they don't know how to deal with. So it's almost never a business problem in this situation. And they are having to provide lots and lots and lots of different numbers and everything. But that's not the real problem. The real problem was down underneath in him, up was coming an old fear. Old fear that's been around since he could walk pretty much. And even though the conscious, brilliant part of his mind knows lots about business, the two year old part of his mind still doesn't know how to deal with that particular type of fear. And so of course it's going to come up when he. He's taking a step into a bigger version of himself. And so what I did with him, which, you know, moved him through it very quickly, was I had him do what I would do with anyone else, which was just feel his way down through the parfait of different feelings, like things he was angry about, things that he was sad about, things he was scared about. That's the bottom usually for people, once they understand what their fear is really about. So when he contacted and figured out what his fear was, that related to things in his early life and that kind of thing. A fear of outshining other people, maybe a fear of, you know, being richer than the other people in the neighborhood.

Or being a tall Poppy.

Being a tall Poppy. It's funny, I was just on an Australian podcast yesterday and all I had to say was tall Poppy. And the people started bobbing their heads up and down. They know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. And so he has a classic example of the tall Poppy syndrome, a fear of really stepping into the full stardom of his life. And it always what clears the space is the same way it will clear the space for you and me and our other people in our community today, which is to simply acknowledge where you are and what you're feeling and take the brakes off trying to control that, be with your feelings. Open up. Because I know that on the other side of the most contracting fear is the most expanding place of that pure consciousness. It's the matrix that holds everything in ourselves. And that's nothing we get taught in the first grade.

I think we should get taught in the first grade. No, I mean with you. Gay. Just like five years ago, but now so much more profoundly so. This has been an emotional intelligence masterclass. I've so enjoyed our time. I've so enjoyed your book. Tell people where they can get the book. And I have one final question for you, but please, please, right now, everyone get this book. This book is less than 200 pages. It is a beautiful jumping off point for you to begin the deeper work that will produce these lasting results so you can be free, so you can be your genius and be in your zone of genius. So tell them where they can get that, please.

The best place you can order it from all your book stores, like Amazon and everything from our page called geniuszonebook.com and if you go to geniuszonebook.com, the reason you want to buy it there is because the. There's a 15 minute downloadable meditation, a guided meditation that I created to go along with the book. And so if you use that meditation, it helps really get those principles into your body. It has five different affirmations that are from the big leap or the new book. And it brings them all with a kind of music that helps kind of get it down into your body and mind. So Genius Zone book is the place to go get it. And somebody sent me a picture the other day on Instagram of herself in her bikini reading it on the beach. And I love that. But I also want you just to sit down in your office with that book for an hour. So it's like a conversation with me. And so give it an hour or two and it'll change your life.

Absolutely. And thank you for your work. Thank you for coming on the show five years later. It's been incredible to. I've been waiting for this. Gay. I knew it was going to come, like one day in the future once I truly feel like I've embodied the lesson you shared about loving my fear and also recommitting to whatever is there that arises like the barriers you've talked about. So this has been a surreal and really fun moment for me. And the parting question before we say goodbye is with everything that you have learned in the past five years, and of course, all the years leading up to that, the hundreds of thousands of people that have consumed your work by now, in the nexus of this physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health, mental intelligence, mental wellness that we all walk, there is wellness, right? That nexus where everything overlaps, where we're in our genius zone, where we're flowing, where life is good. With everything that you've learned, how would you define that now? What does wellness mean to you now in 2021?

I use as my own barometer of wellness two things. One is, do I feel an easeful flow of good feeling in my body? So that's one thing. If I don't, I figure out, where did that disappear, when did it disappear or what did I eat? That's not, you know, so now I've been doing that for, you know, more than half my life. So I. It's been a long time since I've eaten something, for example, that disturbed that flow or been in a conversation that's disturbed that flow. But that's kind of the barometer. And my other barometer is how much feeling of loving connection do I feel to the people around me, to my wife, to my family, to my friends? How much of a flow of connection do I feel? So it's that inner flow and then a feeling of outer flow. And I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about some stuff that had felt that was disturbing the flow between us. And we had a kind of, how we say, life, life proceeds as a result of 10 minute sweaty conversations that sometimes you have to have. And so he and I had a 10 minute sweaty conversation and then we got things flowing again. I've learned that problems in the bedroom or the boardroom very seldom take more than 10 minutes. If you know what you're doing during those 10 minutes, if you have the.

Courage and the skills to navigate and facilitate. Gay. Great answer. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your work. Thegeniuszonebook.com Huge bow, hands together, heart open. Gay Hendricks, thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you very much. Let's not let it be five years. How about let's make it be more often this next year? Yes.

Well, let's do it in a year. So until Gay and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

Sam.