Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of your Zone of Genius - with Gay Hendricks - Episode 86

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, we have a special guest who has spent decades helping people transcend their limitations and step into their full potential and genius. This special guest would be none other than best-selling author, Gay Hendricks. Not only a best-selling author, Gay is a visionary psychologist and the mind behind transformative books like The Genius Zone, Conscious Living, Conscious Luck, and The Big Leap, which, by the way, sits in my all-time top five most impactful books that I've ever read. His work explores how we can shift from fear to creativity, from self-doubt to limitless possibility, and from ordinary to extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:00:39 His teachings have helped millions step into their zone of genius and embrace a life of conscious luck and lasting fulfillment. In this unique conversation, we'll be making sense of the principles that have defined his work. In this unique conversation, we're going to be making sense of the principles that have defined his work. We're going to learn how to recognize and. dismantle our upper limit problems and learn how to step fully into a life of purpose and expansion. So if you're ready to shift your perspective once again and unlock your genius and take that big leap into a more extraordinary life, stick around because this is some good shift. Let's get into it. Makes sense. Just want to let you know right off the bat what an honor it is to meet you.

Starting point is 00:01:30 I don't know about all the other people that have interviewed you, but got a very interesting backstory. I always say that I was messed up and now I'm blessed up. And a very, very large part of that was reading your book, specifically the big leap, one of the 40. What's really interesting serendipitously is how I found out about you. And I don't know if your assistant said that, but I had the opportunity of reading a big, thick book called The 15 Laws of Conscious Leadership. And sound familiar? Jim Dethmer ended up being someone that mentored me for a while through this company that I met him through.

Starting point is 00:02:07 And I just fell in love with his stuff and above and below the line and everything. And I remember in his book reading, and I also heard him say that you were actually the person that he credits for wanting to write the book. Is that true? Yes. He and Diana wrote that book. Unbelievable. That's one fun question right off the bat before we get into this. Did you know something like that would happen?

Starting point is 00:02:29 Did you know that somebody would write such a powerful book that's changed so many lives because of your book and your work? Well, I'm pleased, but not surprised because one reason I get up at 5 a.m. and write those books between 6 and 9 is that so more and more and more people can enjoy them and enjoy a good life because of them. So I'm really pleased, though, when I hear that my work has inspired other people that are out there doing great things. So I really appreciate that. That's awesome. I'll share with you a little bit when we get into the specific upper limit problems and things like that, but it's not the only book that I've read of yours, but that's how I found out about it. And I read a lot of books. I don't know if you know who Jim Quick is, but he's... Quick is a friend of mine, yes. I've known Jim for 25 years.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Well, last time I saw Jim, it was in a big house down in Beverly Hills where he was having a party. I was quite some years ago, but I remember Larry King was there. And I had a good talk about the Dodgers with Larry King, who's a major Dodgers fan. Oh, interesting. Well, that's an interesting story that I hear very often from him. He's armed and equipped me to read a lot of books, obviously. That's his thing and retain them. The book The Big Leap actually sits, and there's a lot of books in this category. It sits in my top five all-time most impactful books. And we'll hit that in a little bit. I'd love to just go back a little bit because I've learned a lot about you in preparation for this. I think he graduated from Stanford and then went right into this 21-year stand, I think at a university of Colorado. Was that what happened? Yes, I got my doctorate at Stanford in counseling psychology in 1974. And I went out to the University of Colorado as a lowly $13,000 a year assistant professor in the counseling psychology department and gradually worked my way up to being the chairman of the department in my 21 year career. I was only chairman for a couple of years because I found out I was a terrible administrator. So as quickly as possible, I admitted my defeat and passed it off to another more detail-oriented

Starting point is 00:04:28 colleague. But I had a wonderful time at the university there. I had great colleagues, and we had a very innovative program there. So I was happy to be there. But then Oprah came along and waved her magic wand over our book, Conscious Loving, and put us on her show a few times. And soon was not able to afford the luxury of having a university job anymore. I had to go off and set up my own university to teach to teach. So fascinating. And mind if I ask how that unfolded? You know, I'm a big fan of Dr. Bruce Perry, who wrote this book with Oprah recently, what happened to you. And he kind of had the same thing happen, too. You know, he got the Oprah Wand as well.

Starting point is 00:05:08 How did that happen? Very simple. I wrote Conscious Loving in 1988. And by the time it went through the publishing mill, it was about 1990 or so. And just when the book was about to come out in hardback, hardcover, the Persian Gulf War started. And we got bumped off a million different shows. And so it wasn't really until the. paperback came out some months later or maybe even a year later that our publicist actually made

Starting point is 00:05:34 kind of history in a way she called the Oprah show and booked us on there with her first phone call and so it was just a I always say you know if you're operating on the right path and you're doing what your heart loves to do such auspicious coincidences are bound to occur occasionally things will just come along that look like they drop in your lap and truly we went from working with a dozen couples in our living room and then jumped on an airplane the next day and flow out to Chicago. And then we were working in front of 10 million people. And so we went up by a factor of a million or so by doing that show. And so it was amazing that to have such an impact because we didn't really know, quite frankly, here's a little secret. I had never even seen that show

Starting point is 00:06:22 until I was on it because, you know, I was usually busy teaching or working in the afternoon. And so I just had not sat down and watched daytime TV, and I was unprepared for the huge impact it was going to happen. But it was really, you know, as far as numbers go, I know you're a numbers guy too. We went from selling, I think, 5,000 copies a month to selling 10,000 copies an hour after her show. And that's what you would call a quantum jump, you know, an unthinkable kind of a big leap. It's a big leap. It's a big leap. And yeah, those were actually, very fascinating days because we then ended up, both Katie and I did about a million frequent flyer miles during the 1990s going and doing workshops and relationship workshops all over the

Starting point is 00:07:10 world. And that was really useful time because we came to find out that it didn't matter if you were in Bombay or the Beverly Hills or Bronx or wherever. Everybody had the exact same relationship problems. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. Actually, those were the days too when I began to think about the big leap, writing the big leap. Because I was also at the same time working with a lot of CEOs. And I discovered that like us regular ordinary folk, they have this thing in their life called upper limit problems where they get to a certain place and then they get the urge to sabotage themselves. Let me ask you a question. And by the way, I guess this would be some of the validation of living in your zone of geniuses. You might meet Oprah. I wonder if you would have even

Starting point is 00:07:54 moved into that conscious space to write the big leap had that not unfolded. That's interesting. You use these terms like upper limit. How did you come up with those things? Like, it's one thing to identify something that's happening in relationships, for instance, but it's another to be able to describe it in a way that everybody get it. Well, thank you. I appreciate that because that gets into the heart of one aspect of my genius, which is I've always been really good at a certain thing, which is explaining complicated things. Interesting. in a very simple way. Well, that's perfect for my podcast that's called Make Sense.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Uh-huh, makes sense, yeah. And so I come from a family of wordsmiths. My grandfather, he was a wordsmith. My mother made her living as a writer and newspaper columnist. And so I have a lineage to me making up a new concept that people can go, oh, I recognize that. That's like eating dessert for me. Yeah, it's yummy.

Starting point is 00:08:49 It's yummy. I don't really know the moment I thought about the upper limit problem, but I remember there was this one person that I was working with. He was an executive, and he designed a piece of machinery, a high-tech piece of machinery. And it had turned out to be a good success for the company. And on a Friday afternoon, his boss came in and said, this thing is selling better than we thought. The board wants to give you a bonus. And he handed my guy a check for $150,000. At the time, my guy made about $180,000. So it was a pretty significant amount. But it triggered an upper limit problem. He had his best day ever at work. And then he drove 12 miles home and had the worst argument with his wife.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And then it involved his children, too, that he'd ever had in a bunch of years of marriage. So how does that work? And as we kind of picked that apart, that's where I think I first used it. I said to him, you know, you have a upper limit problem. When you hit your upper limit of how good you can feel, you do something to sabotage yourself. And he said, oh my gosh, he says, I've done that all my life. And then he told me this history of times he'd done that. So I think that was one of my first moments where I saw it in action. On a personal level, here's a huge example of the upper limit problem. I used to be overweight and I lost a bunch of weight and I had about a month of feeling great. You know, I felt exhilarated because I'd gotten to the weight and everything. And so I was walking down the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Starting point is 00:10:27 and I was on my way to the Harvard bookstore because I was going to buy a bunch of books. I taught at the time and was a counselor at a school for delinquent boys up above Boston in New Hampshire. And I did that for two years, which was great ground training as a therapist, you know, to work with 100. kids who, you know, were being sent to the school purely because they had broken the law. And so it was kind of like a boom training in counseling because I started there when I was, I think, 22 years old. But it didn't matter if I was working with juvenile delinquents or myself or these executives. We all had the same problem. And like with my overweight thing, I'm walking down the street and I looked in the window of an ice cream shop and I saw a family of four eating this huge

Starting point is 00:11:13 ice cream Sunday with bananas and everything. And I completely went unconscious. I mean, the fact that I just lost the 35 pounds or whatever it was, and I was feeling great, I went totally unconscious. And I went in there and I ordered one of these for myself. For yourself. Yeah, not a family of four, a family of one. And I plowed through much of this thing. And for about 20 minutes, because of the sugar and everything, I felt like the king of the universe. And I was walking down the street, Lopping along afterwards, wow, you know, still riding the sugar high. All of a sudden, it was like I got punched in the belly by Muhammad Ali or something. I got the worst stomachache of my life.

Starting point is 00:11:54 And actually, I was doubled over on the sidewalk. And people were streaming by me. It was a busy Saturday. And this one lady said, are you okay, sir? And I'm going, oh, I'm just got a stomachache. That's all right. So classic example of an upper limit problem because some part of me didn't think I deserve to feel good all the time. And so I felt good for a month. And then all of a sudden, being sabotaged. And so I started researching that with now about 1,200 executives, I think, or maybe more than that now. And regular folks, too, because a lot of people come here for relationship work. Like they'll come from out of state or out of country and they stay here for a few days and they come over, you know, and do sessions here. And but that's why I say you can be from Beverly Hills or the Bronx or Berlin. And you're dealing with exactly the same relationship.

Starting point is 00:12:43 problems. And if you're an entrepreneur in any of those areas, you're dealing with the upper limit problem too, because it's something that's wired into human beings. And I feel very blessed and I was able to kind of put my finger on it and give a good description of it. I get letters every day from our email now, from entrepreneurs, you know, telling me about some glitch they overcame as they read the book and that enabled them to go to the next level. Exactly. And that's the sweetest thing you can ever get into an author's ear. that you use their material to change your life. You know, that's a dream come true.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Yeah, as somebody that does a lot of writing and a lot of help in, I mean, I've come up with my own thing. You just don't know about it yet. You know, I call it the interface response system. But when I hear somebody break through, I often wonder who's getting more out of it, them or me, you know. So here's another question. I mean, we just jumped right into the upper limit.

Starting point is 00:13:36 So just, first of all, just to add some clarity to this conversation, just in case there is just this one random person. that hasn't read your book. How would you just, in layman's terms, explain what an upper limit problem is? An upper limit problem is an artificial limit you've put on how much love, positive energy, money, good times you can receive and let through in a graceful way, let through and move through your life in a graceful way. So an upper limit could be as simple as a flurry of worry thoughts. You're feeling real good one day or cruising along and all of a sudden something triggers you. And you go from feeling good to feeling bad.

Starting point is 00:14:20 I live in a little town of about 10,000 people, Ohio, California, but it's a popular town in the sense that a lot of people from Hollywood live up here. If you make it big in L.A., you often buy a place up here in Ohio. So it's a full of artists and writers and folks like that. And so we have this lovely jewelry store here that's been here for years. And in the window of the jewelry store were these beautiful rings. And I was walking by that. I had no intentions of buying any jewelry. In fact, I was on my way to the department store to get something. And I stopped and admired these rings. And I thought, how beautiful they are. And I made a note in my mind to come back when I had more time and maybe go inside. But as I walked down the street, even before I got to the store I was going to, I found myself thinking, about something that happened 40-some years ago where I was sitting, I had made a trip to India, and I was sitting on a bank at the end of my journey, and I was kind of getting ready to go back home, and I was sitting on this riverbank, just watching the river flow.

Starting point is 00:15:30 And I noticed across the river, there was a group of kids, and there were no more than about 12 or 13, and there probably was about 50 of them. and they were carrying rocks up a hill. And I found out that a guru, a local guru, was building a temple. And these kids had the job of carrying stones from the river up there. In any other time and place, it would have been called child labor, right? I mean, these kids should have been in school. And I went through my judgment about that. And then this other guy that was sitting on the riverbank, too, I started getting into the salt thing, oh, man, you know, what a screwed up world we live in. Oh, and then I found out that these kids were getting paid one rupee a day, which was at the time

Starting point is 00:16:15 worth a dime. And so these kids had this awful job, and it was about 98 degrees. Anyway, a guy sitting next to me, I was kind of moaning about this and complaining and everything and saying, what do we do about it? And it was getting royally bummed out. And he said, hey, look at that other group of kids down there. You know what they're doing? And I hadn't even noticed them.

Starting point is 00:16:34 And they were a bunch of kids, maybe 50 more. And he said, those were kids that couldn't get the kids. the job. Right. You know, there's 50 children waiting to take a 10 cent a day job that they can't even get. Anyway, it sent me into this real spiral. Here's the thing. I saw the jewelry and then I thought, oh, I wonder how many children were involved in digging those out wherever they came from. And then that led me to that memory of that time in India. So within 10 seconds, I went from, oh, Oh, what a beautiful day. Oh, what beautiful rings to. Oh, what a terrible world is. You know, so it can be in that amount of time. But here's the thing. It doesn't matter how many times

Starting point is 00:17:20 the upper limit problem happens. The important thing is how quickly you can let it go and get back. That's why you've got to think of your growth in life as being like the automatic pilot on an aircraft. If you start off in New York, you set the automatic pilot for L.A. And it doesn't get there in a line. As a matter of fact, if you actually look at the instrumentation, it wanders off course many times a minute. And it does this little thing where it says, okay, we're wandering off course to the right. Let's correct a little bit. Okay, we're wandering off to the left. Let's correct a little bit. And the machine does this effortly so the pilot can sit there eating a grilled cheese sandwich while it's doing all this because it recommits. It knows how to recommit to ask at hand.

Starting point is 00:18:09 See, here's where human beings get kind of messed up, though, because if we were doing that job, after the other person said, okay, you're making a mistake now, correct a little to the left, okay, you're doing it wrong again, do it. We'd have a meltdown. But here's the thing. In life, you get to your destination by a series of recommitments. Nobody gets there all the way. So powerful.

Starting point is 00:18:32 You know, like if you look at me today, you might not have guessed that I used to be very overweight because I'm a very athletic-looking 6-foot- 190-pound guy. And if you pass me on the street, you wouldn't think, boy, that guy lost a lot of weight. You'd just think, okay, there's a reasonably healthy-looking guy. The problem is we see it from inside ourselves. And I can still identify situations where I still see a piece of food and say, oh, I probably shouldn't eat that because it makes me gain weight. Wait a minute. I don't have to eat the whole piece of cake.

Starting point is 00:19:01 I can just eat a homeopathic taste of it. That's great. Little pebble. That's funny. By the way, if somebody's never actually gone through the process of reading the book, what's so cool about the book is that it's going to help you find something. You may or may not know about it at all, but it's kind of like sits in the peripheral because typically it's in a blind spot

Starting point is 00:19:23 because nobody would consciously try to stop themselves from enjoying life. There's different types of breakthroughs, but the gay Hendricks breakthrough that I had, I refer to it as a frustrating breakthrough. I was like very happy about it, but at the same time, I wish that I never had it. You know what I mean? What I'd love to ask you is, how did you identify those four? That's fascinating to me. Anybody that I've referred this book to, which is a lot of people, they typically come out of it with some sort of an alignment with one of them, but they always say, but all of them, you know? So how did you identify those four? Because it sounds like the first one was the one that you identified in yourself.

Starting point is 00:20:02 and then how did you find the other three? You're talking about the four limiting beliefs. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I did it entirely by looking in here and working with people. I'll just mention briefly that the first one that I touched on is kind of like the overall belief that I'm not worthy of the good things of life. I don't deserve to be successful.

Starting point is 00:20:25 I don't deserve. And these are not conscious decisions. These are things that are stuck in our heads from way back usually. Oftentimes before we hooked up our little lunch pail and walked off to first grade or kindergarten, a lot of our early programming gets into how we feel we deserve the good things of life. The second one is a lot of people have a fundamental belief that they're supposed to support other people but not be supported themselves. They don't feel like they deserve the spotlight, that they're number two or number three in life

Starting point is 00:21:00 and their job is to support a number one or be a disciple of a number one or something like that. But I think that almost everybody needs to be willing to occupy the spotlight, you know, to be willing to be the star of their own life. Even if you're the third down the line, fry cook at a fast food restaurant, that's not the only place you're going to go in life. You know, the way you go about it is the way you go about it. And I have found that those two account for a lot of people holding themselves back. They don't feel like they deserve the good stuff.

Starting point is 00:21:34 And they feel like they don't deserve the spotlight to be a real star in their own life. There's a third one, though, that a lot of people are hooked to the past so that they feel a sense of disloyalty. If they're growing past what people used to believe in their past, you know, their parents or their friends and that kind of thing, that a lot of people also have a belief. they've seen examples of success being a burden or a bad thing. When they're kids growing up, you know, they've heard maybe rich people disparaged or like one of my clients, poor fellow, he'd been through so many relationships by the time he came to me when he's in his 30s. He'd been through over a dozen relationships that only lasted like six months or so before the woman would just split and nobody ever gave him the real reason they would just

Starting point is 00:22:23 disappear. So he can't, he says, I'm beginning to wonder if. it has something to do with me, you know, with him. And because it had happened so many times. Well, he had never even thought of this. But in our work, even in the first session, we uncovered that his father had programmed him so thoroughly about relationships, but not in a good way. His mother had split when he was four years old and left the father with four little boys to raise. And she just ran off and disappeared and he never actually saw her again. And for some reason, it hadn't computed to him. And then his father had spent this old childhood talking about how women can't be trusted.

Starting point is 00:23:04 They'll run off and leave you, you know, never trust a woman, son. And he'd gotten so programmed with this and then basically repeated those instructions throughout his adult life. The happy end of the story, though, nice thing about human consciousness is that once you see and understand your patterns, oftentimes you don't feel compelled to repeat them. And it's just like when I was a kid, I remember one night I got really scared. scared because I thought I saw a monster in the curtains of the room. The wind was kind of blowing the curtains around a little bit. And I got scared. And my mother, smart psychologist that she was, not she wasn't. Psychologist as a mom. Yeah. And so she brought in a little flashlight and said,

Starting point is 00:23:44 let's look for the monster and see if we can find it. And we couldn't find it. Of course, it was just a wind boy. And she said, here, you keep this in here. You know, before you wake me up, basically. she said, use the flashlight and see if there's a real monster. And I'll come in and help you if there's a real monster. Okay. That took care of the monster problem because I shined a light on it. And that's a beautiful thing about human consciousness is oftentimes once you see your upper limit problems in action, you're not compelled to repeat them anymore. That's why, you know, a $10 or $15 book can be one of the best investments in your life. You know, I've had even books in the old days. It costs $0.65 or 95 cents. I don't know if you're old enough, but paperback books used to cost either 65 cents or the

Starting point is 00:24:26 really good ones were 95 cents. Now they're 699 and 799 and so on. But I can remember books that cost 65 cents that changed my life 50 years ago. And so people need to take advantage of the wisdom that we have. It's all around us now. And that's one of the things that Jim and is very passionate about. And so am I, I mean, when I say I read a book every week, sometimes too, I read a book. actually have these books. That's the problem, though, if you're reading that many books to find out where to put them. We have a problem here in California. I get such a stack by the side of my bed that it becomes an earthquake hazard. And I have to lower it now. And then I don't know, what part of the world do you live in? So right now I'm in a place called Greenwich, Connecticut,

Starting point is 00:25:09 but I'm from France. My wife's from South Africa. We just lived in Africa for almost two years, yeah. I don't think, no if I've ever heard you say that. I know that you're very big on asking people, are they willing to allow themselves to experience happiness? I love this idea of, are you willing to be the star of your own life? And it made me realize that if somebody hears that statement, that might be an awakening to realize that somehow they've allowed other peoples to be the stars over their own life. So what happened with me, I've got a crazy, crazy story with a lot of childhood trauma that came out later, later in life.

Starting point is 00:25:44 And when I could look at it through the lens of consciousness that I developed. But what I noticed is that I was going through many, many phases of growth, but I noticed that I never got to the next level. This is before I knew about your book. I actually heard Jim Dethmer talk first. I wouldn't have found your book that time unless he was crediting you at the time. So what attracted me to the book is that's what I was seeing in my life. I was frustrated. You know, I knew I had the talent.

Starting point is 00:26:13 I had the skills. I had everything I needed, but I just wasn't finding my way, whether it was my health, my mindset or my financial success. So I go get your book and I'm reading it and it was the first time, and you'll know which limiting belief I discovered as my primary one, it was the first time that I realized that I was on autopilot leaving my post of what I was doing for myself to say yes to everybody that asked me for help. Sound familiar? So in that moment, in my work, I call that a snap moment where like in an instant everything made sense that's the concept of my podcast and i realized that that was an abandonment issue and i was just not going to let anybody ever feel abandoned so to a fault

Starting point is 00:27:00 i was saying yes to everybody it was i wasn't getting paid for it whether it be family friends or freeloaders of any of any sort and that was affecting my relationships as well you know i was i was being ridiculed for why do you have to help everybody and everything? And I never knew why. So I credit you for that. And I remember in your book, and sometimes I wonder if I actually read things or heard you say things or I made them up. So you'll have to confirm this. But I remember you said something in light of what's the solution when you identify that. And I'd love you to go into that a little bit. When you read the book or you identify a limiting belief or an upper limit problem, what's the solution? Because Tony Robbins like mindset would say, breakthrough to the, you know, new you. But you just said, well, give yourself a raise. Isn't that what you said? And I just thought that was just delicious. So let's talk about that a little bit is. Once you've identified what your limiting belief is, your upper limit, what's next?

Starting point is 00:27:57 What do you do? Well, in a way, the human mind and does work a bit like a computer in the sense that it's possible to take out one old program and install a new program. Right. You know, like there was once a moment in my life where I really really. I was thinking very negatively about money. This goes back way back. Because I grew up in a family where everybody had been wealthy, some generations before, and owned vast lands and that kind of thing. And then they got on the losing side of the Civil War. And they all had to move from where their

Starting point is 00:28:33 plantations were and everything down to Florida and set up a new homestead down. And they eventually, everybody was successful in everything. But I grew up hearing about how wonderful things used to be and how rich people own all the land. Now the rich Yankees came down and they bought up all the land. It was like reliving the civil war every day when I was a kid growing up in the South. And even my grandmother, she didn't really believe that the Yankee money was any good. I mean, I came across millions of dollars of Confederate money that my grandmother had kept from her grandparents. And she just never trusted that, this whole Yankee thing was going to work out well, you know, but it was a strange situation

Starting point is 00:29:18 because I could hear it around me, but I couldn't quite identify. But what people were doing was re-inoculating themselves with the beliefs that they thought needed to be believed to survive. Cognitive bias. You know, I mean, it's like they protect their position. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like the emperor's new clothes kind of situation. You know, somebody points this out and says, hey, wait a minute, the emperor is not wearing any clothes. And then everybody gets very upset. You see it in politics all over the place today. So it got me in a lot of trouble when I was a kid, but I think I was a precocious budding psychologist, even at a very early age, because I remember getting in trouble once when I was probably around

Starting point is 00:30:01 seven or eight. We came back from visiting my grandfather and grandmother, who actually only lived a hundred yards away. And we came back from a visit over there where we were all sitting around. And I remember asking my mother, why do granny and granddaddy hate each other so much? I mean, because I'd seen them just being so unpleasant to each other. How old were you? I was maybe seven years old, something like that. I grew up in one of those families where you got slapped. But if it was worse, you got a belt on the backside.

Starting point is 00:30:34 And if it was really, whatever you had done was really bad, you got what we call being switched, which was my mother would cut a branch off a tree and hit us in our lower part of our legs with it. And so you do that now. You're going to get a lawsuit from your kids. Exactly. You know, but that was the way it was done. But anyway, I got whacked for that comment because it was a family secret, you know, that nobody wanted to blow the whistle on.

Starting point is 00:31:03 And finally, I got my mother cornered sort of years later. And my brother did, you know, like cornered my grandmother and said, you know, you were married for 63 years to granddaddy. Why were you guys so obnoxious to each other all the time? Right. And my grandmother said this mind-boggling thing. She said, well, I think it's because I hated him from the moment I first met him. And I'm. Oh, my goodness.

Starting point is 00:31:33 I remember thinking, you know, this explains quite a lot. Quite a lot. Yeah. And the real story was, though, that my grandmother had been born to be an aristocrat and then had the rug pulled out from under them and ended up having being the last unmarried woman in her particular part of Alabama. And then my grandfather rode through high school graduate completely below her station, you know, in life. But that was all she could do. And so they ended up creating a life together. At what cost, you know, there was a lot of friction that went into that.

Starting point is 00:32:07 So when I really got it, it turned out that it had been going on for a year. And I've been amazed in my life at how long people can put up with suffering. We had a couple came in from Europe one time to work with us for three days. And they'd read all our books and everything. And it turned out they've basically been having the same argument for 30 years. You know, that would just happen every week or two. And then they did it repaired in some way. But nobody ever got the problem. You know, it's like you're sitting on a burr trying to ride a horse and you keep trying to get a better pair of reins to fix the problem or a better horse to fix the problem. You know, but you don't deal with the thing that's right underneath you. And so, you know, that's our specialty here, of course, is we find the thing and help people get free of it. And sometimes it doesn't take all day. Sometimes it's a fairly short process. But it always involves the same thing. You always have to shine the light on where the glitch is and then help people come to terms with understanding and ultimately loving that glitch.

Starting point is 00:33:16 You know, I've come to love that person that was bad. Because I now understand what made him eat so much, you know, the pain that it causes that kind of obesity. And so now that I feel that about myself, it makes it more easy to feel that kind of love and compassion for other people when they're. are going through their stuff. I think it all begins, though, we need to begin at some point, if we're going to be really at our best in life, we have to find out what we love to do. That's right. And find out what makes our biggest contribution to other people. And if we keep our attention on those two sweet spots, you know, it's like relationships go a lot easier if you're not hating everything you're doing all day. And, you know, I have people come in all the time. They say,

Starting point is 00:34:03 You know, I'm the best personal injury lawyer in Kyok, Iowa. I make 12 figures a year or whatever. And yet, I feel like I'm killing myself. Right. I feel like I'm denying myself something that I really need. And I think it's this touch of genius that we each have this touch of genius inside us, something we love to do and that makes a contribution to other people. And if we can kind of tune into that and find out what that is,

Starting point is 00:34:32 and then do it, that makes a beautiful life. I've been doing that life now for more than half my life, and I can't recommend it highly enough, because to this day, I see about four people a month now, four or five people a month. You know, I used to see a lot more, but now I'm in my golden years. I'm 80 now, and I don't like to work quite as hard, and I like to do some time for my own studies and reading and friends and family and things like that. But still to this day, it really turns me on when I see a person come out from under the cloud of illusion and suddenly realize, oh, there's a whole new life I could create out here if I weren't repeating those same old patterns all the time. And so that's still life at its best when I see somebody have a breakthrough

Starting point is 00:35:16 like that. You probably wouldn't know this unless I told you, but my brand is that I wear these glasses all the time. And most people don't know this, but they have no lenses. Oh, I hadn't even noticed And, well, but it's kind of a gimmick, but what's interesting is I can actually see better with them on now. One of the reasons I took the lenses off is because people like you taught me that my old lenses no longer served me. It's kind of like an anchor and a reminder. I had never met you before this day, but I talk about you all the time. And I've reviewed your book. And it's kind of like, I work with thousands of people that are coaches of sorts. And I always basically tell them, they're always like, How do I build my business?

Starting point is 00:35:57 And I'm like, read the big leap. Because if I don't know what their thing is, like you said, we're going to oscillate in so many different ways. So I often refer to you as a thing detective because it's kind of like what you do. It's like I would assume that if I came out there one day, your goal would be like, so what's your thing? You know what I mean? You help us unveil that.

Starting point is 00:36:20 And I just love that. I want to just touch on another book that I think is relevant. So you wrote a book called Conscious Love. which I think is just a funny name of a book. I just thought that's so funny. Right now, let's just be honest. I mean, I'm like a connoisseur and a Somalié of Gay Hendricks work, right? But the average person that's listening to this podcast is going to be like, what's in it for me? What can I do with this? You mentioned that luck is something that can be cultivated. Without taking a manipulative approach, you know, just assuming that people are going to be ethical

Starting point is 00:36:51 and moral, how can you utilize, I mean, it's one thing to be in your sense. I mean, it's one thing to be in your zone of genius. You could shed on that. But how does this work help people find success? Well, let me say that genuine success is kind of like genuine beauty. It often lies beneath the surface of what's going on. Because I've walked down the hall of a company with a billionaire that has a company that has 30,000 employees. And I've sat in an office with a mom and pop operation where they have seven employees. And in a way, billionaires have tougher problems to crack through because they've often been so rewarded for their success outside in the world that they've neglected a lot of things on the inside. Interesting. And so, you know, it's not surprising that often very

Starting point is 00:37:50 popular and very successful-looking people have relationships that would make your stomach ache if you got within 60 feet of them. If you only knew. It's a problem that people have everywhere. And if you look at the classic example of that is people who win the lottery. Right. And the statistics are really terrible there because half of them or so are worse off within a few years than they were. before. You know, something comes over them and they can't sustain. They don't have whatever the

Starting point is 00:38:26 inner thing is that can sustain having that much money and having that much of a good time and that kind of thing. And it's the same energy that you see if you try to give someone a compliment. Right. And they say, oh, no, you know, I couldn't possibly be that. And so what we need to do is, in a way, start from the very beginning and clear out everything that we know. There's an old fire sign theater album that's called Everything You Know is Wrong. And I had that feeling when I first started looking into my own programming, I realized, wow, most of the stuff I know, especially about relationships. It just ain't so. Completely wrong. You know, like, for example, in my relationships, I had a big fix it program. I thought men were supposed to be.

Starting point is 00:39:16 be the fixers. Right. And a succession of women told me they would say, I feel tired. And I would say, well, why don't you try da, da, da, da, da, maybe that'll pep you up a little bit. But it was all based on fixing them, you know, the idea that they needed fixing. That was part of my programming. And that's a bad idea if you're going to be in a relationship. Because what I realized, especially with women a lot, is it's the moment of connection that's more important to them a lot of times than the content. And so no matter how much content I would try to tell them how to fix themselves, it didn't matter because it was coming from that intention that there was something that needed fixing. So, Pady really was great at setting me straight on that early in our relationship.

Starting point is 00:40:05 By the way, we just celebrated our 45th anniversary of the day we met recently. Congratulations. And so that's how we know these ideas work, friends. Time testing. But I remember early in our relationship, Katie said something like, I've got a headache or something. And I say, oh, why don't you do da-da-da-da-da? And she said, you know, when I tell you something like that, I'm not telling you that because I need to be fixed. I just want to be listened to and know that you resonate with me about that.

Starting point is 00:40:36 And I remember my jaw just kind of, huh, you don't need to be fixed, huh? what am I supposed to do that? What's my job? Listen to you? And she said, yeah, that's a start. Just listen to you. I've got two boys and we just adopted a little girl. And that's another thing that you should know is, you know, when a dad, you know, and a husband

Starting point is 00:40:56 and a son learns your stuff, you know, some other people benefit from it as well. I like to think that my boys, I watch them and hold the door and learn some of these basic skills that most, I didn't learn as a kid, you know, just this idea. of like, well, maybe you should just listen to her. We're coming to the end of this and I want to make sure that I get these two questions out. I'm so curious to know, and I've kind of found out a little bit about this with you, but what are some daily practices that Gay Hendricks does to help him stay in the zone of genius? Yes, well, there are several, but like...

Starting point is 00:41:30 Give me your top three maybe or something. Yeah. One thing I do every day and have done every day since I learned back in the 70s, I always meditate twice a day where I sit for 15 or 20 minutes and just sit in stillness and my wife does it too. And so we're both daily meditators. So that's a great way to bring in a little piece in your life, you know, to start each day and end each day with a period of meditation. So that's one thing I always do. A second thing I do, I do a lot of breathing and moving work. You know, one of my early mentors, Jack Downing, who is a great psychiatrist in Palo Alto, California now passed on. He said,

Starting point is 00:42:07 that if people danced an hour a day, you could close down all the mental health centers in America. I heard someone say this the other day about dancing. They go, you know what's fascinating about dancing? Is dancing is not going anywhere. It's a way to live in the present moment. Really is. And so I do a lot of movement and dance and breathing and things like that that are designed to kind of keep the pipes open in here. A practice that Katie and I have done, though, for in our relationship, which I think accounts for our relationship success is we have a relationship of no secrets, no nothing withheld. And if I feel angry about something, I just say I'm angry about it. Or, you know, I don't need to throw a temper tantrum about it anymore because, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:52 I've learned how to communicate it more simply. Or if Katie feels sad about something, she said, I'm feeling sad about something, you know, that happened. Like recently, we lost one of our best friends who passed on at age 82. And, you know, we were, We're there with him at the last, you know, and we've tried to be there for his wife and everything. Things like that happen in life. And human beings need to communicate about those kinds of things. And Katie and I have many times over the past month or month and a half since Jim died have, you know, talked about, hey, I'm feeling another wave of sadness. You know, I was just thinking of something I wanted to tell Jim and then I realized he's not there.

Starting point is 00:43:30 You know, things like that. The rich flow of communication is so important in relationship. There are only three or four feelings that people trip over. One of them is they don't know how to communicate when they're angry. And so they kind of stuff it until they blow up in some way. And sometimes it's the body that blows up with a headache or back. A second thing that people are not very good at, and I've had to learn it like crazy in my life, is how to gracefully take responsibility for something, but not in a blame state.

Starting point is 00:44:01 You know, like, oh, what a miserable jerk I am. That's on me. Right. Now it's like, oh, I take responsibility for that. It's not a burden. It's a joy to take responsibility because the moment you get out of the victim position and quit blaming other people or the world, the moment you say, hey, I'm going to make it up the way I want it here. Wow.

Starting point is 00:44:25 That's a big leap. And that's really what I want people to do is kind of come out from under the old fog of their programming and stick their head up into the sunlight and say, hey, how do I want it to be? Because if there's one thing I see about human beings, is we have a tremendous hidden power of ability to manifest what we want and need once we get our attention fully on it and keep repeating the problems of the past. That's very exciting to think about. So last question, you know, you mentioned that you're only having four people out there a month.

Starting point is 00:44:58 I would assume that that creates a waiting list of sorts. but what is Gay Hendricks working on? Is there anything else that you are looking to manifest and create? What are you working on? What I'm working on is how to receive more and more of the things that are nutritious for me. Like, for example, I don't need any more stuff since 1995. How long ago is that? Oh, 30 years. That's right. That's exactly 30 years. For 30 years, we've been kind of We don't call it downsizing. We call it right sizing because 30 years ago we had a business building in a townhouse and a mountain house and a beach house and all that kind of stuff. And one day we realized Katie and I, we're spending all our time solving real estate problems. You know, because I'd walk in

Starting point is 00:45:50 the door and she would say, oh, just got to call the solar panel on the mountain house just got destroyed by hail. And so we started getting down to what do we really want. And so we got down to one house we love here and we just take lovely care of it. We, you know, it's a beloved, our gardens and our home is a beloved part of our life. And just have one of them. And same thing with cars. Just have one of them. And it's a fine one, but it's an electric one. And so we, drive around mostly on electric energy, which makes us feel good. And so I'm a big believer in refinement in life. And what do I most want to need? And I've found that what I most want to need is a free flow of easygoing positive energy in my life around the house. And what I also need

Starting point is 00:46:51 is to keep doing things that, in my view, help other people make breakthroughs in that. their life. You know, I have plenty of stuff. You know, I'm still involved in the getting rid of stuff phase because we've had a big foundation now. We have a nonprofit foundation. So like, for example, our house is going to be donated to our foundation when we get through living in it. And so our foundation will have a few million extra dollars that they can pass out to people. And I like, that makes me feel good now. Yeah. I'm not a big, any kind of believer in. life after death or reincarnation or anything like that, I think that heaven and hell are right here. We're always just a breath away from it in our own daily life.

Starting point is 00:47:37 You can choose either any day of your life. The incarnation goes. Forget that one too because I think that breeds a kind of laziness. If you think, well, I've got a few hundred lives, I can work this out later. I can go ahead and be nasty to people now. I'm sure I'll work it out a few lives from now. You know, that leads to a very lazy way of thinking. and leads to lots of gurus who end up having problems with sex and stealing money and all the

Starting point is 00:48:03 things that gurus often get accused of. So that problem is taken care of if you become your own guru and just begin to study your own life. Everything is right here where we wanted if we're just willing to open up and look at it. That's wonderful. Hey, such an honor and a privilege to spend some time with you. You're a miraculous human being and everything that you're working on. and attempting, you know, to create in your life, it's manifesting through others. I mean, a lot of the things that you're doing now, I'm a 53 years old. I'm trying to do those things

Starting point is 00:48:37 with my wife and in my life, we're minimalists and, you know, like we're getting rid of things already. So hopefully you'll keep paying that forward. Lots and lots of gratitude. Our listeners love you and our community loves you. And this is going to be a very, very nice treat for them to listen to. Thank you so very much for all of your work and also for this hour. Really, truly, this was an honor. You're somebody that has legitimately transformed my life. So I want to thank you. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. And many blessings to you on discovering your own genius zone and bringing that out to assist people in leading happy, healthy lives.

Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of your Zone of Genius - with Gay Hendricks - Episode 86

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.