Good Life Project - Gay Hendricks | Genius, Limits & Conscious Luck

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Gay Hendricks exploded onto the human potential scene in 2009 with his mega New York Times bestselling book, The Big Leap, where he introduced the concept of the upper limit problems and the zone of genius, which he’s now re-envisioned as a spiral of genius. These ideas, along with tools to help work with them, were based on decades of clinical application and explained so much about why, even when we succeed, we tend to revert back. And it gave us a structure for understanding, then devoting ourselves to the type of work that accesses our fullest potential. Along with his wife, Katie, he’s continued to write, lead workshops around the world, often focused on mind-body practices, cultivating potential and deepening relationships, and he realized something. Without intending it, he’d figured out a methodology to cultivate what he calls conscious luck. Hendricks began codifying this idea years back but got busy with other projects until as luck would have it, just the right person would land in his world to help him turn the idea into a book, fittingly called Conscious Luck (https://amzn.to/2MGmzbL). We explore all of these ideas, along with so many of Gay’s unlikely, yet profoundly rewarding twists and turns along the way in today’s conversation.You can find Gay Hendricks at:Website : https://www.consciousluck.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/hendricks.gay/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, my guest today, Gay Hendricks, really exploded into the human potential scene in 2009 with his mega New York Times bestselling book, The Big Leap. It was there that he introduced this concept that he called the upper limit and upper limit problems and something called the zone of genius, which he has now re-envisioned as a spiral of genius. And we explore that in the conversation. These ideas, along with the tools that he developed around them to really help work with them and help bring them into your life, they were based on decades of clinical application.

And they explain so much about why even when we succeed, we tend to revert back. And it gave us a structure for understanding and then devoting ourselves to the type of work that accesses our fullest potential. And along with his wife, Katie, he has continued to write, to lead workshops around the world, often focused on mind-body practices, cultivating potential and deepening relationships. And then he kind of realized something along the way. Without intending it, he had stumbled upon a methodology to cultivate what he calls conscious luck. So Gay began codifying this idea years back, but he got a little bit sidetracked. He got busy with other projects until, as luck would have it, just the right person would land in his world to help him turn that idea into a book,

fittingly called Conscious Luck. We explore all of the ideas along with so many of Gay's unlikely yet really profoundly rewarding twists and turns along the way in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. Yeah, actually, it's funny that you brought up Krishnamurti because I was curious. I do remember at some point along the way reading that he and his work were a strong influence on you, which is a curiosity of mine. I'm somewhat familiar with his work. And his lens on life and philosophy tends to feel not necessarily super well aligned with your sort of approach to life. It was very difficult for me to make that transition, but it changed my life. When I first connected with Krishnamurti, I was a much more intellectual person than I am now. I filtered everything through this little area here.

And after a while, I realized that that area was only about the size of a quarter or a 50 cent piece up there. And there was a great deal more to me than that. But Krishnamurti was very helpful to me in those early days of helping really straighten out my thinking. And one thing he said, actually, totally rearranged my whole approach to life. I was in the Masonic Auditorium where he was giving his talk in San Francisco in the early 70s. And it was the first time I'd really been to any of these lectures.

I'd heard him on audio and that kind of thing. He said this one thing that just electrified me. And he said, and first of all, you got to appreciate there's like 4,000 people in the place and 2,000 of them probably are psychotherapists of one stripe or another. So he says, there's one thing you can learn that once you learn it, you don't ever need therapy again. And so 2,000 people sat up in her chairs. And basically what he was saying is, you don't need to study your dreams or anything like that to find out about your unconscious, your unconscious, just look at the negative results you're producing in your life,

because that will tell you the unconscious commitments that you have. And so that was an amazing moment of insight for me, because I happened to be sitting next to my then girlfriend. And this was a really long time ago, because my wife and I are just now celebrating our 40th anniversary of meeting each other. So this goes way back into the 1970s. My girlfriend and I had this, this repetitive glitch, which was I always thought she was very negative and she was always looking at the glass half empty side of life. And I was getting my PhD at Stanford in the counseling psychology program. And there was a lot of positive psychology stuff we were working on. And so I was always kind of complaining at Jen about being so

negative. And then she was always complaining about me being so interested in the inner world, you know, you know, she was always just kind of leave it alone, you know, and so not the right kind of girlfriend for a psychologist to have, but I hadn't figured that out yet. So as I was sitting there, I realized, hmm, I must have an unconscious intention to produce a critical partner over here. Hmm, where would I have gotten something like that? Boom. It immediately took me back to the early days of my existence where I was conceived and born in such a way that wasn't exactly a good experience for everybody concerned, especially my mother and stuff she was going through at the time. And so I realized that I'd been kind of a focus of criticism from the very moment of my first existence. So no wonder I had

created that as the context to my relationship life. So that was a huge learning for me and enabled me, I think, several years later, after kind of being with that for a while to create the kind of relationship I have now with Katie, where we've had a great 40 year run of a dozen books co-authored together and visits on Oprah and 30 trips around the world and that kind of thing. So everything for me hinged in my relationship life on that moment though of kind of realizing that. Yeah. It's so interesting. It's like criticism was your comfort zone. So that became your set point. You just keep moving back to that. You were in Stanford mid-70s, right? Early 70s. Early 70s. Okay. So I'm fascinated by that you shared that there was a focus there on positive psych. Seligman didn't come and sort of pronounce to the APA that, gentlemen, we have a cake half-baked until I think it was 79-ish, right? So that was super progressive to actually be studying that that much in advance.

Well, in those days, it didn't even have that name. What they were calling it at the time was behavioral humanism. That's why when I got to Stanford, that was what I went there to study. And my PhD was this new thing called behavioral humanism, which later sort of morphed my main professor there, Carl Thorson. He and John Crumbolds were the two founding members of the program. Carl Thorson was good buddies with Marty Seligman. And later on, that kind of morphed over in that direction. And I'm very grateful to Marty for kind of putting it on the map because I think behavioral humanism was a clunky phrase that was

definitely 1970s. Yeah. Although in the culture of the world of psychology back then, it probably landed with more gravitas than something like positive psychology. So I can kind of understand why you would frame it that way. Yeah, it's just like in the early days of medicine. If somebody came in with a leg twitch, the doctor would say, oh, you have nocturnal myoclonus. And the guy said, oh, really? What's that? That means your leg twitches at night. You know, but having, he goes home and says, honey, I've got nocturnal myoclonus. And the guy said, oh, really? What's that? That means your leg twitches at night,

you know, but having, he goes home and says, honey, I've got nocturnal Myoclonus. Sounds like a real diagnosis. Finally, somebody, somebody understood me. Right. That's great. You went from, from Stanford, you ended up at CU for quite a while, right? Was that CU Boulder or a different campus? No, I was hired to be one of the two founding members of the new branch of the graduate school in Colorado Springs. And they were opening up a new graduate school branch down there. And the counseling psychology master's program was going to be housed down there. And so I went to the Colorado Springs branch and I ended up loving

Colorado Springs so much. It was just the perfect place to live for me because I'm an avid mountain biker and my wife and I skied a lot at the time. And, you know, it was just like the dream place to have a career for me. So I never, I never went up to the Boulder campus except for faculty meetings every month or so. So I was very happy to be in Colorado Springs graduate school branch. Yeah. I mean, you stand in the middle of that town, just looking at, you know, Pikes Peak at 14.1 and it's, it's kind of magical, really breathtaking breathtaking actually and the garden of the gods there too that's one of the most beautiful places on earth i've ever been it truly is yeah it's it's an amazing place so the the early years for you i know was um was i guess more of a focus on

working with with individuals working with with troubled populations. Eventually, though, at some point, your practice really tends to seg much more towards the performance end of the spectrum, working with super high-level people, working with CEOs, high-level executives. Curious about the shift over time to that and whether there was something that happened that triggered that interest or whether it was just a gradual evolution? Yes, there were several little key points. Talk about conscious luck. I talk about conscious luck all the time and people say, what is it exactly?

And I say, it's being in the right place at the right time for everything good to happen to you. And there are several moments in my life where I was just such in the right place at the right time for everything good to happen to you. And there are several moments in my life where I was just such in the right place at the right time for these magical things to happen. And one of them was that my wife and I used to work with like six or 10 couples in our living room. And then we decided one night in front of the fireplace, this is such interesting stuff we're doing.

And these techniques are so unusual. We gotta go big time with this. And so we wrote our book, Conscious Loving. one night in front of the fireplace. This is such interesting stuff we're doing. These techniques are so unusual. We got to go big time with this. And so we wrote our book, Conscious Loving. And right away, almost overnight, we went, we got invited on Oprah and we went from working with six or eight couples in our living room to working with 10 million people on the stage out there in Chicago. And suddenly everything kind of went with a whoosh. And we became more known in the relationship area. Although kind of both of our hearts and souls are in the area of body-mind wellness. My wife is a master movement therapist, and I trained a lot in breath therapies and Reikian therapy and things like that in early stages of my career.

So we got interested in relationship work, though, and then continued to write more books in there. And at a certain point, I can even remember the day I walked into my office in Colorado. I was still a professor there, but I had a separate building that we did our therapy work in. And I walked into the office and the secretary was on the phone and she says, she named off a very famous rock star. And she said, rock star is on the phone and would like to buy a box of 50 conscious loving books. Can I give him a little discount? And I said, discount? Give him the whole box. And so he gave our book Conscious Loving to everybody that you could think of.

And so that's how we kind of made that jump into the working with people that were, you know, well known in the performance art kind of things. And it kind of turned out to be a subspecialty of ours, particularly in the movie, I mean, in the music area, a little bit in the movie area, but we kind of became the go-to therapist in the rock star field. And so I always said, Katie, if we ever want to write a tell-all book, we're going to have a bestseller on our hands. Right. That'll have to be the last book you write though. Yeah. It's so interesting how people's paths sort of part meander, but part you use this phrase conscious luck, which we're certainly going to circle back to in a much more intentional way. And I'm always fascinated by the moments along the way that shape these significant shifts in people's journeys, you end up really focused

a lot on the relationship side of things, on the positive side of things. How do we go from okay to really good and then really good to extraordinary? Your work first comes onto my radar with probably the way that for a lot of people, this book, The Big Leap, which eventually I just keep having friends tell me, hey, have you read The Big Leap? And I'm like, okay, so after the fourth person or fifth person saying no, apparently I'm supposed to read it. So I read it and it's fascinating because you lay bare in really simple language, the experience that I think so many people have when trying to step into a life that they feel they kind of see, but it seems like it's always just out there and just out there.

And even they'll set themselves up to have a taste of it. But as soon as they do, like we were talking about earlier, like that set point, right? We tend to revert back. And that book was a really fascinating exploration of that phenomenon. I appreciate you saying that because that was, again, a personal discovery of what I started calling the upper limit problem that I called it in The Big Leap is that tendency to knock ourselves back down when we kind of put our heads up through the cloud of our conditioning and things start going better. And so what I tried to do in the big leap is document the reasons why we do that and how to move through that system of limitations. The other thing that I really got a

big boost out of was very early in my career when I was still at Stanford before I went out to the University of Colorado. It was just when the big Silicon Valley firms were beginning to roll and there was Intel and Hewlett Packard and all sorts of firms that serve those big things. And so I ended up, because I was still at Stanford there, I ended up getting a lot of referrals from high-tech executives. And so there was a whole long 10-year chunk of my life there where I also worked a lot in the business field with a lot of very talented people. I ended up being a consultant to Michael Dell and his top two executives there for a couple of years in the 1990s. And so it gave me a look into extremely successful people's lives, as well as people like I started out working with

juvenile delinquents. So I kind of went the full range, but I found out that everybody has the same kind of dynamics in the sense of we all have those upper limit things that we do to ourselves. Like what would happen classically in the Silicon Valley area is some executive would have a big breakthrough at work and then go home that night and have a terrible argument with the family or with his partner. Or it could be the other way around. Somebody would just have a breakthrough at home and things would be working better at home and then they'd have a mess up at work. And so I started analyzing all of that and trying to figure out why we did that. And so that I was really, I feel so blessed with The Big Leap

because it's one of those unusual books that actually sells better now than it did 10 years ago when it came out. And so I'm very happy that so many people have taken it to heart. Yeah. It's interesting when you see something like that, right? Because on the one hand, it tells you that you've hit on something which is pervasive in the human experience. And on the other hand, there's a certain almost sadness to that as well, because it tells you that 10 years later, if there's this one phenomenon that millions of us experience that hinder our ability to live the lives we want to live, that it is still there as nearly pervasive, as present as it ever was. And I wonder if these

days even more so to a certain extent. Yes. Well, later I've begun to think of it, I called it the zone of genius and the big leap, but I no longer think of it as a zone anymore. like as you move through your different upper limits, what's going to happen is you're going to pass by the same issues every time you go by on the spiral, but you're going to pass by them from a different, more expanded space. And one thing that I think is so important right now is that if you look back through millions of years of evolution, both with human beings and other organisms, when we get scared, we tend to contract toward the center. Your muscles tighten, you fold toward the middle, you squeeze down when you get scared. And you can see that in other creatures and amoebas even. You can watch it. If you go to an amoeba on YouTube, you can watch amoebas doing the same kind of thing. And so I'm after something different, though. We've got that mapped out

evolutionarily for millions of years. We know how to contract when we're scared. But what I want to have us learn is a new input into our nervous systems, which is the ability to expand when we're scared. And that's why my wife and I made up a new saying called sheltering in space. And what we mean by that is instead of hunkering down into contraction for your safety, to open up and expand in through your fear. You don't want to ever disavow your fear or you don't want to not acknowledge it. You want to acknowledge it, accept it, and even love it so that you can move through the barrier of it into that open space that we all have inside ourselves.

I mean, when you look around in the world, it looks like a very spacious place because there's a lot of space between us and other things usually. But we have that same space inside ourselves. We're made of the very same thing. And although we live in a compact little skin tube, we have that same kind of space inside ourselves. And it's important, I think, at this stage of evolution, particularly to open up a new skill, which is the ability to open up and expand into your not only your fear, but other emotions, too, so that you might, you know, just normally default to as something which contracts you and sort of say, okay, so it's not about not feeling it, you know, it's about feeling it fully, but sort of asking the question, you know, like, is contraction, is shutting down, is closing off the only story I can tell about it. Is it the

only appropriate response or is there another way to interact with it? Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. I had a very powerful experience when I was 24 years old. I don't know if you know this or have read these books, but I used to be very overweight. I was born, had some things glandularly wrong. So I was very fat by the end of my first year of life. And then I continued to be a fat little boy and a fatter teenager. And I was taken around to all sorts of different medical specialists to try to find out what was wrong. And they put me on amphetamines one year when

I was in the ninth grade and I buzzed all the time and made stray days, but I couldn't sleep at night. But it never really got handled until this one magic moment when I was 24 years old. I was really stuck at the time. I was not only overweight, but I smoked heavily cigarettes. And I was in this really toxic relationship that I'd been in for a couple of years. And I didn't like my job. And I was working with juvenile delinquents. And I liked the work with them. But dealing with the administration and everything was a total nightmare.

And so I wanted to go back and get my PhD, but I felt really stuck. And so one day I went out for a walk and I was just kind of wrestling with all this. And I slipped on some ice and I went down on my back. I kind of whacked my head. I didn't knock myself out. Now I call it having an out of Hendrix experience because something happened to me in those couple of minutes that wasn't like being knocked out unconscious, but it was like being knocked out of my normal sense of myself. And what happened is I became aware of things inside me that I hadn't ever been aware of before. One was my whole world of feelings, my fear and sadness and anger and joy and all those things that were kind of underneath in there, but I never really talked

about them or anything. But I could feel them in this moment. But what I really could feel was that at the center of everything was this huge kind of oceanic expanse of what I started calling at the time pure consciousness. And I'd never done any meditation or yoga or anything like that. But the following amazing thing happened the next day. But I had this experience and I was, you know, had this whole new conception of myself. And a good friend of mine named Neil Marinello called me in the afternoon. It was a Sunday afternoon. And he said, hey, I'm going up the road from where you live to hear a talk by an old Harvard professor of mine. He was my favorite professor at Harvard,

but he's gone to India and he's on some weird new trip and I want to find out what he's up to. And so I said, sure. And so we went and it turned out to be Ram Dass in his robes, freshly back from India. And see, I was an English major in college. I wanted to write the great American novel. And then I got involved with these juvenile delinquents. And I realized that helping people was what I was really born for. Interestingly enough, here at the other end of my life, I've started writing mystery novels, which is sort of what I wanted to do from the beginning. Anyway, I had this amazing experience with Ram Dass, where I listened to him talk for three hours without any

notes. And I went up to him afterwards, and I said, where do you get this stuff from? You know, because when I go into a class, even to teach juvenile delinquents, I've already got my notes in my head, you know, I know what I'm going to say during those 50 minutes. And so he said he picked up a picture of his guru, this elderly sort of gruff looking fellow, said, if I get stuck, I just look at him and then everything begins to flow again. And that sounded like the strangest thing I'd ever heard in my life. But fortunately, I asked him, I said, you look like a very perceptive fellow. Why don't you just kind of scan me and give me some suggestions? I told him about this experience I'd had the day before. And he sort of looked at me and went, you know, he said in India, they do breathing exercises and yoga and things like that, body oriented things,

instead of trying to figure out everything up here. I said, what? I said, where would I learn about something like that? And he said, he's kind of made us, he said, oh, don't worry, something will come to you, kind of flapped his hand like that. I said, okay. The next day, I was at the grocery store. And I was checking out and I looked to my left, and there was a little paperback book that almost seemed to jump out at me. And it was called Yoga, Youth and Reincarnation. And it was just a compendium of yoga postures, a whole chapter on breathing, a whole chapter on meditation. It was just one thing after the other of what Ram Dass had asked me to do. And so I bought the little book. And I'll tell you how long ago it was.

Paperbacks used to cost either 65 cents or 95 cents. And this was one of the big 95 cent ones. I bought the book and I just went home and started doing it about three o'clock in the afternoon. And by the time it got to be midnight, I was at the meditation chapter. And I was already high as a kite from all the stuff I'd been doing, the breathing and the yoga and everything. But I did the meditation chapter straight through using all these little generic meditations, such as saying Ram to yourself. And I had exactly that

pure consciousness experience that I'd had slipping and falling on the ice a couple of days before without banging myself on the ground. And so that really taught me that there were these ways that we could access the deeper parts of ourselves through natural, organic body, things that we didn't have to go out and rent or buy special shoes for. So that was kind of my introduction to the whole thing that I now think of as body-oriented transformation. Yeah. It's so fascinating because you were, up until this point and even after, very scientifically rooted. You had studied this, undergrad, master's, PhD eventually, which to this day, well, I guess it's changed a certain amount sort of with the third wave approach. It was very cognitively oriented. It was very, you know, like it,

all of the interventions and solutions existed from the neck up. And to have this experience where through a very short, brief physical trauma, which thankfully like was minor, but it, it literally, it's almost like it knocked you out of your mind and into your body and gave you a felt sense of experience rather than a thought sense of experience. And it's fascinating to me that you then took that and basically ran with it and said, it's almost like it knocked you not just into feeling, but also realizing there's something else that I haven't wrapped my head around quite yet. Yeah. I always say that the longest journey anybody ever makes is from their head to their

heart, 12 inch journey from there to there that really changes everything because I don't think at the time, well, I had another very powerful experience right after I moved to Colorado, which opened up a whole new dimension for me. I was about to teach my first class as a graduate school professor, and I had a kind of a panic because I realized I knew everything. I knew every intervention. I knew every technique. I knew every approach. But I didn't really know anything down inside that I could say was actually a tool that I knew reliably worked, except kind of tuning into ourselves and being open to whatever was there. But on this particular day, I got somewhere out of the ether, a download in a moment of wondering, I was walking around in the woods outside Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. And I had a moment, I was kind of feeling this panicky feeling, oh my God, what am I really going to talk about in my first class? And I realized I'd always gone outside myself for the answers to things

rather than going this direction. And on this particular moment, I just stood there and I said, okay, what is it? What is the one thing that human beings are doing wrong that if we cleared it up, we could move through life with more grace and ease. So that was kind of the first part of the question. And instead of going home and reading a book about it, I sat there and wondered about it. Hmm, what is it we're doing wrong? And then I immediately got a download, but in the most unusual way. I expected it to kind of come in a mental printout, but what happened was I got this kind of a freight train, benign roar of energy that went through me. It was like, and I remember just

being kind of electrified by it and staggering around out under the trees. And what I had realized in that moment was the one thing I'd been doing wrong is I'd been kind of standing separate from my experience. I had that deep experience when I fell on the ground, but I hadn't really been able to find a technique or any way to kind of access that again, other than through meditation. But what do you do when you're walking around in life? You know, you can't just sit down on the ground and meditate every time you kind of feel something you're uncomfortable with. well, what to do with it? And I realized the one thing that I had never done was simply accept myself or things as they were and love them as they were. My intent was always to change them

rather than simply accepting them and loving them as they were. And so I just stood there under the trees and I started doing that with different things in myself that I didn't like about myself. Things I didn't like about my body and things I didn't like about the world and, you know, all these things. I started feeling love for them. And that lasted probably, I don't know, I think I staggered around out there for 45 minutes. And by the way, this was on no drug stronger than decaf coffee. So I wasn't in the grip of a psychedelic or anything. But that moment taught me that it's our distance from ourselves that causes the problem. That if we can get in the habit of fully owning and feeling and being with the things that are actually going on with us, it helps us move through those because

they stay in place until we've loved and accepted them as they are. And so I learned this in this little moment. And almost immediately, I had the opportunity to try it out in a clinical setting, because I got a call from a colleague of mine's wife. And I was just starting at the university, so I didn't know her very well. In fact, I'd only met her at a faculty party, kind of the intro to the new faculty party. But we'd had a nice conversation. And so she called me and said, could she come over and talk to me about something? And so I said, sure. And so she came over and it turned out that her husband, my colleague, had been having an affair with a younger woman.

And it had brought up all sorts of fear and anxiety in her. And she didn't know how to deal with it. It was overwhelming her. I mean, she had just learned about this a couple of days before. And so it was big and fresh. You know, part of me said, oh, my gosh, what am I getting into here? Because I just landed at the university, you know. But in this working with her, I had this moment of trying out what I just learned up in the woods. So she told me about all of these fears she was having. And instead of trying to talk her out of them, I simply guided her into them. I asked her to feel it and breathe with it

and open up to it and move with it. And instead of trying to make it go away, celebrating it. And ultimately, I helped her to love it as it was and accept it as it was. She'd been fighting it, trying not to feel it. So of course, she couldn't sleep or anything like that. But as soon as she accepted it, this look came over her face that was radiant. And it only took about 15 minutes for all this to transpire. That was amazing to me, because I don't think until that moment I'd really seen in the counseling sessions I'd done lot of therapy and corporate coaching and things like that was to help people find out what they were resisting and open up to that so that it disappeared and they moved through their upper limits and went on to whatever the next level they needed to get to. Yeah, which is so counterintuitive on the surface because you know you think to yourself well if there's

something i really don't want if whether it's a circumstance around me whether it's something about myself and it's really bothering me it's really upsetting me and all i want to do is for it to be different or for me to be different you know the idea that the the first step to allowing that to happen is to actually fully accept the state of things the way they are now is so counterintuitive because, well, on every level almost. And it's not, I mean, interestingly, it's what you're saying. Isn't that just accept the fact that this will be your faith for life. Um, that's not what we're saying here. What we're saying is, you know, acknowledge and own the fact that this is the state of things in this very moment and find a way to be find as much grace as the way things are. And something happens when you do that, something happens, which triggers a set of changes in

behavior, changes in circumstance, whatever it may be, that somehow then unlock the ability for this change to happen in a more organic way. Is that giving it any kind of justice? Yes. I think that's a very good way to put it. There's something about whole body acceptance. And you can go one step and say whole body loving something as it is, that has a powerfully transformative effect. And I think it's the same kind of thing. Like I have a good friend of mine here, who has 17 years of sobriety and made a huge change in his life through 12-step work. And he was telling me about this particular moment, the first time he stepped up in front of a group and said, hello, my name's Jack, and I'm an alcoholic.

There was something about just the acceptance of that, he said, that changed his life in that moment and enabled him then to make a commitment to not drinking that day. And now he's racked up 17 years of making a commitment every day not to drink that day. So, but it starts with that moment of whole body acceptance. And then I think out of that acceptance comes an ability to make a more meaningful commitment that actually changes your behavior. Yeah. I mean, it's similar to me to things, some of the language that I've heard from Thich Nhat Hanh about,

you know, where, because it's almost very Buddhist in nature. And yet even he reached a point where he said, you know, he saw so much violence and so much suffering on such a vast level that he could no longer work from that place. And he had to be much more intentionally active in inciting change and in giving voice. And I guess, so part of my question is, if you look around at the state of things in the world right now, is it possible to apply this type of process, experiential process, thought process, to really profound societal inequities, things like violence against certain

groups of people or races of people, cultural problems where everybody looks at this and says, this is not right. This must change. And there may be real risk of loss of life and freedom and wellbeing. Is it possible to expand a concept like this on that scale? Because I feel like people would really... I struggle seeing how could you do that on that, with that level of intervention, potential harm and scale? Yes. Well, I think that first of all, yeah, we really want to acknowledge, I think, in everything that you and I say that we're not suggesting easy solutions for anything. And I just, you know, I can tell you something magical that happened in a therapy session, but that's very different than solving a particular societal problem. But in a way, though, they all start in the same place.

They start down inside one person. And then the same kind of thing catches fire. Like, for example, I happen to do some research on the notorious Saddam Hussein. Now, most people thought of him as a tyrant, a terrible person. And, you know, there was lots of evidence that he was, apparently killed his first person when he was only 10 years old. So, but if you look further, his mother used to run through the streets of the village when she was pregnant with him, screaming, somebody stabbed me, I'm carrying Satan in my belly. You know, so did it start with him? Did it start with her? Did it start with something else? Did it start with the terrible circumstances with which he You know, if you start looking at society, you come down to one person certain ways and change and transform and are reborn,

that we have the opportunity now to steer our own evolution in a way by bringing in some new ideas about how to go through the fundamental things of life. And human beings have magnificent learning capabilities, but we're also rather slow to learn because we struggle with the upper limit problem. But I think like Martin Luther King said about the arc of history bends toward justice, from what I've seen in human beings, the arc of our history bends toward more and more consciousness, not less and less consciousness. And so from that point, I have a great deal of hope. And for example, my wife, Katie, just this morning on the internet teaches a big worldwide thing that's sponsored through our foundation free for anybody that wants to take it about how to

deal with fear and so she takes people through a process we call fear melters that has you get in touch with all sorts of different ways fears show up in the world and so you know here we've got people from south africa to israel to new zealand that are getting up at all sorts of strange hours of the night to do this thing that we do here at nine o'clock in the morning, not every Monday morning. And so to me, that gives hope that as we begin to learn some of these more fundamental processes of how to move through life more gracefully ourselves, it has a contagious effect. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Yeah, I love the idea of bending towards consciousness, which also kind of circles us back to something that you shared earlier in our conversation and is now actually the focus of your newest book, Conscious Luck. Interesting phrase, right? Because tell me, well, first,

when you offer that phrase, conscious luck, what do you actually mean by that phrase? Yes. It means choosing to take charge of your own luck. It means choosing, and you don't know how to do this yet, but just choosing and making a commitment to being in the right place at the right time for the perfect thing to happen. And it starts with commitment. In the book, we spend a whole chapter talking about how to commit yourself to a luckier life. But I'll tell you, for me, conscious luck began in a moment when I was 14 years old. And there was a kid sitting next to me in a movie theater, a kid I called Danny in the book. And they were going to have a drawing on stage. And there was 250 people there. And they

had all our names in a goldfish bowl. And were going to draw out three names and the top person won a watch a wristwatch so this is in 1959 you know so a wristwatch was a pretty big deal back then and so Danny leans over to me and says what's this I'm going to win the watch and I said okay sure enough when they pulled the ticket out, it was Benny's name and he won the watch. And later I was talking to him. He lived around the corner from me. I said, how did you do that? I didn't know him real well. How did you do that? And he said, well, I just made up my mind one day that I was going to be lucky. I realized I wasn't lucky. And I decided, heck, I'm going to be lucky. It's just as easy to be lucky as it is to be not be lucky. And that was the first time I heard of something like that. And so I started playing with the idea then and I loved it then. And the more I kept playing with it, the luckier I got. And then

about 10 years ago, I decided to actually research out what I thought were the major variables. And I came up with eight of them that are in the book and that we found eight different pathways that some people somewhere have used to get luckier. And so now there's a whole, you know, there's a whole scientific research community on conscious luck, including my old alma mater, Stanford. One of the professors there, Tina Selig, has become quite famous through her TED talk about conscious luck and through doing research there at Stanford. But she's just one of many people that are now actually taking this concept seriously and saying, what do we need to do to create ourselves as luckier in life? Yeah, I love also you reference in the book a thought from, which is, and I'm not going to get the exact quote, right. But the fundamental idea, the way that it landed with me is that we have this conception that luck is a moment in time, that it's a lightning strike, I think was the language,

right. But she describes it more as a wind that's sort of constantly blowing. And the conscious part of it is, okay, so what is the process by which I might construct and raise the sail so that I can sort of like be in the right place and catch it if and when it blows? I love that phrase. We use it a lot. Yeah. The idea that luck is a wind that's always blowing and some people know how to get their sails up and get them positioned so that you move through life without efforting. There's a wonderful phrase from a James Joyce book. I forget which one right now, but it was Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. The idea that we often kind of live away to the side of ourselves instead of coming home and realizing, like Walt Whitman said, I am large and contain multitudes. And so once we embrace our large multitudes and really own the wholeness of ourselves,

I think what happens is it opens us up to a new field of being in which luck just automatically happens. So in a way, the book has eight ways to kind of get out of the way so luck can happen, so the wind can take you where it needs to take you. Yeah, I love this idea also. A couple years back, I stumbled upon some research by a professor named Richard Wiseman. And he was researching this idea of luck. And he said, can I identify something that would allow people to be more or less lucky? And so he took a group of people and split them into two groups. One group self-identified as being very lucky.

And the other group self-identified as being very unlucky. And then he sat them down in front of a newspaper and said, count the number of pictures in the newspaper. And then he timed how accurate they were and how long it took. And the unlucky group took about three minutes and came up with, I think, 42 pictures. On average, the people who self-identified as lucky took about three seconds and came up with the same 42. So this was not a normal newspaper. On the inside front cover, on two-inch block letters, he had printed, stop reading. There are 42 pictures in this newspaper. And what he found was that the people who self-identified as being unlucky were so narrowly focused, not expansively focused, not open to the possibility, but so narrowly focused on this one, one constraint that they literally wouldn't allow themselves to

see any of the print, only the images, whereas the people who I sent self-identified as being lucky just kind of went, they went into it in a much more open stance. And they just said like, whatever happens, happens. And they saw it much more frequently. I thought that was fascinating. That's a wonderful example of one of the last chapters in the book, actually, because one of the things that we found in interviewing people is that people that go looking for luck to happen have more luck. It's just like if you go looking for blue cars on the road, you're going to see more blue cars than you did when you weren't looking for them.

And so I think that that's part of having your sails up to catch the wind is kind of looking for where the currents are taking you. Yeah. Another thing that you speak about is an awareness of negative conditioning towards luck, which I think is pervasive. I know my mom and my mom and I are wired very similarly in a lot of ways. And I remember earlier in life, her once saying to me, you know, Jonathan, we both pretty much always get what we want, but not without a lot of suffering, you know, which is another way of saying we're, we're, we're in a way we're lucky in that we always get it in the end, but we're unlucky in that it always comes with a lot of suffering. That's just our lot in life. And in fact, that is the way that most of my life

had unfolded for a long time. I would always figure out a way to accomplish or achieve or whatever it was, this thing that I wanted, but I always felt like there was a lot of blood in the water along the way. And so, this idea where you share that of becoming aware of our own negative conditioning towards luck. It was kind of fascinating to me. Yeah. One of the things that I think that we need to do is break ourselves of the habit of speaking about ourselves in unflattering terms. Richard Bach in one of his books said, argue for your limitations and sure enough, you get to keep them, you know, because a lot of us will go around proclaiming ourselves. Oh, I wish I'd, I wish I'd been there yesterday, or I wish

I'd bought that stock two weeks ago before it exploded. So I found the same thing. I used to work a lot with executives who had time issues. They were either so frantically hurried all the time that they were making themselves sick, or they were missing appointments. They were either so frantically hurried all the time that they were making themselves sick or they were missing appointments. They were over-calibrating on the wrong side of time and being too slow. And so I developed this concept I talk about in The Big Leap I call Einstein time. And I'll tell you, the big problem with helping people overcome time issues is people speak about themselves as a victim of time all the time. They say, I've got to rush over here and do this, or I'm sorry, I don't have time to do this.

But one of the stories I tell in the Conscious Luck book is one day I was rushing through the airport to try to catch a plane that my other plane had been late for. And I saw on the board that my plane was boarding. But then I later saw as I was still rushing madly, that it was at boarded and the gate was closed. And this was at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport, which is vast. And so I realized I was hurrying in an uncomfortable way. And I was making myself kind of frantic. And so I just kind of eased up and I just had a nice ramble on down

to the clerk at the end of the jetway. And as I came up, this other fellow was throwing a temper tantrum because he couldn't get on the plane. And so after a while, he finished his temper tantrum and rushed on off shouting at them. And I stepped up into his place and it looked like there was no possibility of getting on the airplane. But I said to the clerk, I said something like, rough day, huh? And the person looked up and said, yeah, you wouldn't believe it. And so I had this little moment of connection. And the next thing I knew, one of the flight attendants came rushing up from the jetway and they had a little whispered conversation and it turned out they'd miscounted and there was one seat left in first class. And so I went from having no possibility of getting on to sitting in first class, you know, in this one little move

that I think it worked really well for me to ease up and walk down there slowly and not hurry because that allowed that other guy the time to blow his stack and everything and then move out of the way so I could slip into the right place at the right time. Yeah, you hear things like that on the one hand, you're saying, well, but how could that be anything but just pure coincidence? And then you meet people who adopt a certain lens on life and set of practices where things like that seem to keep happening to them. And I confess to becoming less and less skeptical with each passing decade of life to things like this, as I see them unfold. What occurred to me as I reflected on the eight elements of this thing you're calling conscious luck, and the metaphor of luck being a wind that's constantly blowing and us building and raising a sail so that we can be in the right place and then have something to catch it, is that about half of those eight elements

are really about building the sail. They're more about like shifts in state of mind, shifts in state of being that open you to a place of possibility. And the other half are really, it's the sail. It's putting your boat in the right place and then like actually catching it. And they're more sort of action-oriented, more practice-oriented. These are sort of like ways that you step into your life on a daily basis that effectively amplify and expand the number of opportunities to just step into that

slipstream. That's a very good way to put it. That's exactly what we intended in the book, to have the first half be about how you get your sails up. And then the second half be about how to steer your sails so that you get the optimum speed through life and have the most fun too. Because it's not just about being a speed demon toward your goals. It's having a good quality life as you're getting there. Yeah. I'm very visually and physically inclined. So the whole metaphor just really stuck with me as I sort of explored these things. And it's interesting, it's a very straightforward process, so straightforward that it almost leads somebody to doubt that any of it could be effective. A dear friend of mine, Mel Robbins, speaks all over the place and

has this book called The Five Second Rule. And in the first probably five to 10 seconds of her talk, no matter where she is, she basically tells the audience, listen, I'm about to tell you something that is going to sound so simple and so stupid, your first inclination is going to completely be just doubt it and write it off. It couldn't possibly work. Suspend judgment. In kind of an interesting way, I felt that way about this because there was no groundbreaking paradigm that I learned. There was no sort of complex science behind it. It was a simple set of ideas and practices that make sense, but almost feel too simple to make a difference. And then I found myself saying, well, but what's the harm in just stepping into it and seeing what happens? Really? Because, yeah, that's kind of how I am too, because I come from a very skeptical

scientific background. And my granddad was from Missouri. He always said it's the show me state, you know. So he's a very hard-headed guy. And I learned a lot of my life skills from him. I grew up without a dad. So my granddad was my male role model. He was a crusty old guy, but he had a lot of really great ideas. And one of them was, too, was the idea of taking charge of your life in whatever

way you could. And so I think taking charge of our luck is just kind of an extension of the whole idea of really deciding to come up with your own goals in life, for example, rather than accepting the goals that other people put on you or just letting life blow you around without any goals. In the book, we talk a lot about developing what we call luck worthy goals, that if you were the luckiest person in the world, what would that allow you to do? You know, so you want to create goals that are big and juicy enough that they pull the good luck out of you. And so I think every human being needs to orient themselves to three, four, five, maybe really high quality goals that are the things that really make your heart sing. Yeah. Love that. And I'm a believer in big goals like that. Jim Collins in Built to Last,

his first big book, came up with this phrase he called BHAGs, B-A-H-G, which was short for Big Hairy Audacious Goals. You use that in our seminars. Oh, do you? Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, I think it's interesting to tie all of this into something big, something deeply meaningful to you. It feels like to a certain extent, part of what you're doing is rewiring your brain towards

possibility, getting specific for what you hope an outcome might be. And then rather than forcefully moving towards it, opening up to any of the myriad of possibilities that might get you there. And which is, if it gets you to that same place, part of my thought is, what a kinder way to live your life as well. Yes. Wouldn't it be great if you thought of yourself as the luckiest person you know, and you hung around with people that all considered them the luckiest person they know?

That's a pretty magical life. Yeah. Rather than brute force, space and grace. Space and grace. I love that. Yeah. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So as we sit here having this beautiful conversation

in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live big, to love big, and to do big things. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes.

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