The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 235: Dr. Gay Hendricks - How To Make The Big Leap

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Starting point is 00:00:58 Welcome, everyone, to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. reminder, it is mindful Monday. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2 in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world to discuss the latest trends and topics in the space of leading and serving others. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2. Now, on tonight's featured leader. He's incredible. It's Dr. Gay Hendricks. He's been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and body mind therapies for more than 45 years.

Starting point is 00:01:38 Written more than 40 books, many of them bestsellers, including The Big Leap. Also offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and TV shows, including Oprah. In addition to that, he's currently continuing his new mystery series, which he announced on this show. He just sold to Netflix to turn into a TV show. It's incredible.

Starting point is 00:02:02 A few of the topics we got into. The one key commonality that great leaders like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Dell possess. Then the four ways we respond to fear in what is most optimal in order to sustain excellence, followed by the four operating zones and the key tactic to operate in your zone of genius. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so good with Dr. Gay Hendricks. All right, Gay, thank you so much for joining me on the last. Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thank you very much. It's great to be with you, Ryan. So we were chatting a little bit pre-record, and I've found your background so fascinating,

Starting point is 00:02:49 and just where you guys choose to live in Ohio, California. So I'm curious, you've spent your time around really high performers, people who have sustained excellence. I'm curious from your perspective. What are some of the common characteristics of those leaders who sustain excellence? Well, I'll tell you what the number one one is, in my opinion, and this is based on, I've worked with about 800 and some executives and all the way from people like Michael Dell that you've heard of all the way to a fellow that owns a couple of tire shops. And up and down the line, I can tell you the one distinguishing feature that they all have is their openness to learning. It's a skill that I think needs to be taught almost from the time we go to school. not just learning, but being open to new learning, particularly. You know, like I've been in organizations that weren't working very well, and one of their characteristics is that people are kind of stubborn and dug in and not willing to learn new things about themselves or each other

Starting point is 00:03:56 or about business in general. But I find the people that are, I mean, I haven't worked with Michael in many years, but I used to go down to Austin quite a bit back in the 90s to do consulting down there. But one thing I found that really distinguished him from so many other people I worked with all around the world is he doesn't waste a split second being defensive or not open to learning. A lot of people, if you throw a new idea at him, they get defensive or find some way not to listen to it. but I've found that people at the top of the game just lose that defensive twitch that many of us have and they take a kind of a stance of radical openness to learning where they're open kind of 24 hours a day to something that might be useful to them and so I try to be that way myself of course but that's one thing

Starting point is 00:04:53 I definitely think that distinguishes great leaders also a second thing a commonality that I've found with people at the very top, is there often much better listeners than you would think? You know, you often think of people being a CEO of a big corporation as being a, you know, a dynamic talker and a leader and everything like that. But I found that so many of them are just great listeners, too. And that's a quality that I think we need more across the board. But I think some of the greatest leaders I've ever worked with were so good at listening to other people and listening kind of to the whole organization. They just had a kind of a stance of being open to hearing what was going on. Wow. So an openness to learning and fantastic listeners, you're making me feel really good about

Starting point is 00:05:45 the title of this show, Gay. I have to be honest with you, man. Okay. The Learning Leader shows what it's all about is the fact that you fully realize that you'll never have it all figured out, but we'll continuously try. And I've realized through doing this show for almost three years now is that the more that I learned, the more I realize that I don't know. And I think that's exciting to me and it's exciting to hear from you. And I just remember the talk I had with Adam Grant on the show, another great writer like yourself. And Adam told me the number one thing that he found is this strong dedication to constantly learning. And I just, I wonder why sometimes when you see people at the top of organizations

Starting point is 00:06:33 when they're not like that, when they are the, it's always been this way. So that's the way we're going to do it type of people. And you're the expert here. So I want to ask you, but I feel like you can always sense either a tinge of insecurity in those types of people. who are the, we've always done it this way, and this is the way we're going to do it moving forward types, and they're not really open to ideas or to reading or to thinking or to learning. What is the makeup of a person and why they wouldn't be open to learning?

Starting point is 00:07:02 Well, I think you've touched on it, Ryan, which is rooted in fear. And the fear can be of different things. Some people are afraid of something in themselves, you know, like they feel like they're fundamentally not as good as other people do to things that happened in their past. or the way they grew up, or they have a feeling of being a burden in the world, or they have a feeling that they need to keep their potential hidden so that they don't outshine other people.

Starting point is 00:07:33 So there's all sorts of fears that plague people. But if you look at, like, for example, what happens, you can see it under the microscope with an amoeba, or you can see it in a bug. If you poke it, it curls up, toward the center. It contracts toward the center. I watched a little bug do that the other day in my backyard. There was a gecko trying to get it, and it rolled up in a little tight ball so it wasn't, the gecko couldn't get it. The idea is that when we're scared, we contract

Starting point is 00:08:10 toward the center. We pull in ourselves. We tighten our bellies. We clench our fists. And a lot of times going back millions of years in evolution, that was a good thing because you needed to be able to kind of freeze in place and fight or flight and that kind of thing. But today in the modern world, we don't have many predators actually chasing us down the streets or anything that most of our fears come from social situations. So the fact is, though, that we still have the same nervous system that evolved millions of years ago to deal with wild animals and predators and saber-tooth tigers and other cavemen and things like that. But we're now in a modern situation where we can't really get up and run out of the room or punch the boss in the nose or we can't really

Starting point is 00:09:03 curl up in a tight ball in the corner. So we have to kind of find other ways of dealing with our fears. One way we need to do is to acknowledge those fears. And so when I run into super defensive people, I don't try to out argue them or out-fax them. I don't try to put more information into the system in an attempt to correct them or get them to see things my way. What I do my best to do is speak to our shared fears. And if you look underneath just about any kind of conflict you have in a human being or in an organization or in a marriage or in a family, what you'll see that fear is at the root of it. Because when human beings are scared, we tend to do one of these four things. We tend to fight or lash out. We tend

Starting point is 00:09:55 to run away or avoid the situation. Or we tend to kind of freeze and not be able to think straight. Or sometimes we tend to kind of space out and watch TV or dial up an old episode of Star Trek or something like that where we can kind of space out and get away from the problem. So fear is kind of trying to take us out of the moment. But what I think we need to do is stay right in the moment to be present with what's going on in the situation and speak to those fears. And so to try to get underneath any kind of conflict, you usually have to deal with what people are really afraid of. What are they anxious about? What are their anxieties? And once you start homing in on that level, I've found that a lot of conflicts that weren't

Starting point is 00:10:43 going anywhere suddenly start to melt and dissolve. Okay, let's jump in on the fear aspect. I just gave a talk at a university, and one of the students came up to me after this speech, and she said, I won't go into too many details. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but basically she said it was good,

Starting point is 00:11:07 and she asked if we could talk, and one of the things she said afterwards was, I'm really scared to get up and give a speech, but I need to do it, and I know my mentors have told me that I need to get good. good at this to progress in my career. And I think, you know, public speaking gay is probably a very common fear that a lot of people have. It's a little bit different than what we've been talking about

Starting point is 00:11:27 before, but maybe we can get practical here for a second. So you said fear tries to take us out of the moment. We fight or we run away or we freeze or we do something to not think about it. We watch TV, whatever may be. And you think we need to speak to that fear and understand it. So if somebody listening right now is very afraid of getting up and getting up and giving a speech in front of a group of two or 10 or 10,000, what's some advice you would give to them? I just thought of a personal example when you were talking that perhaps sharing that might reveal what I'm talking about. When I was, let's see, around 30 years old, my first book came out and it was a little book of guided imagery and relaxation activities for kids, for teachers

Starting point is 00:12:15 to use with kids in the classroom to help them get relaxed before. they took tests and that kind of thing. So it was called the centering book. I was very proud of it because my daughter, when she was in elementary school, I'd had the opportunity. I was working on my PhD at Stanford at the time, and I had the opportunity to go over and work with these activities in her first grade and kindergarten classrooms when she was just starting school. And so it had a lot of heart for me. So when the book came out, I got invited to speak in an education conference for the first time. And so I went from being an assistant university professor where I never talked to a class of more than, say, 15 people at a time. I was in a graduate school program for people who are

Starting point is 00:12:58 learning how to be master's degree counselors and therapists. So anyway, I get this thing, and I'm standing up in front of a group for the first time of about 150 or 200 people. It was the biggest group I'd ever spoken for. And so I went through my talk. And after my talk, a guy came up and said to me, you know, I really liked what you had to say. It wasn't so much the content of what you say, but it was how you said it. And so I was naturally intrigued, Ryan. I said, tell me what you mean. And he said, well, your voice shakes just as badly as mine does when I try to give a speech in public. And so that was my first experience. So on my second speech, here's how I solved that problem.

Starting point is 00:13:44 I got invited to another big conference, and I stood up in front of the group, and I told him that story, and I said, so I'm nervously standing here, giving my second talk, hoping my voice is shaking a little bit less than it was a month ago in Kansas City. So that's what one of my friends calls painting it red, that if you have some kind of fault or flaw, go ahead and paint it red so everybody can see it, speak to it, open up to it, find out what it's all about. You know, after two or three talks, I don't think I had that problem again. And so, you know, now I can sit here and talk to you and I can stand up in public and I can even, you know, the scariest thing of all for me 30 years ago, when I, 25 years ago, when I first went on Oprah,

Starting point is 00:14:34 suddenly realizing, oh my God, I'm talking to 10 million people, not just this 150 people that are in the studio audience here. And, you know, I remember feeling a kind of a slight panic about that. But, you know, once I got into the situation, it was all fine. But it's probably like an athlete before a big game, even though you've played the game a thousand times, you're probably going to feel a little bit wound up before the Super Bowl. And so I think that we need to simply speak to these issues that come up, whether they're in ourselves or someone else, and move through them through transparency rather than trying to avoid them or push them under the table. It's interesting you brought up an athlete before a game. That's one of the reasons why I've

Starting point is 00:15:22 leaned into the public speaking aspect of what this platform and this opportunity, the opportunities that have come up because of this podcast and said yes to those speeches gay is because, you know, I played games, I played football growing up and in college and a little bit after college. And you talk to any athlete who's done that and you've played in front of 100,000 people in a big stadium. I think you'd be lying if you say you don't miss it from time to time. And the interesting aspect of it is the moments right before giving a speech to a lot of people, they do feel kind of similar to the moments before running out in front of 100,000 people to play a football game. The difference with the speech is that usually it's just you.

Starting point is 00:16:02 And you don't have any of the teammates. You're not wearing a helmet and shoulder pads and relying on some teammates. It's just you with no armor on. And I think sometimes it could be more nerve-wracking. But also, like anything else, and you said this after a few times you kind of settled in, like anything else, the more repetitions you get, the more comfortable you feel. You'll still feel those little, I don't know if you call them butterflies or those anxious moments, but you'll feel it. And if you don't, maybe something's wrong, but then the more reps you get prior to that every time, I think you feel better and better and better.

Starting point is 00:16:36 You know, that's funny because I just last week had an experience, and I can tell you that that feeling never goes away because I've been playing golf on and off for 20 or 30 years, probably. And I'm an okay golfer. I'm a 14 handicaps, so I usually shoot in the mid-80s somewhere. But last week, I signed up to participate in the Ohio Cup tournament where the golfers from my club, the Ohio Valley Inn, play the other big golf course here in town, which is called Soul Park. So every year, the two teams face off against each other. And I'd never played in it before, but I got inspired to do it this year. A friend of mine played in it last year and said it was a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:17:19 So I signed up to represent my team of 16 players from the Ohio Valley Inn. And so it was my, I had a lot of good experiences early on in my life. I played high school football. And then I was on a squash team for a while. And so I love the feeling of being on a team, you know, being for other people and having people be for you. And it's just, you know, in my life, one of the better feelings I can remember. So I had the opportunity to now, after not having been on it,

Starting point is 00:17:49 any kind of team probably for the last, you know, 30 years or so, to be on a team for the first time. And not only that, play in my very first golf tournament at age 72. And so before I went over there, my wife was asking how I was feeling. And I said, believe it or not, I feel kind of nervous. And she said, oh, gosh, I want to see this. I haven't seen you nervous in quite a long time. So, in fact, I found myself on the first tee that, you know, they would do this saying like, Now representing the Ohio Valley Inn, Tony Glassman and Gay Hendricks, and we would go up and take our bow and hit our balls. And I remember when I was waiting to be introduced,

Starting point is 00:18:26 I could just barely hear what the announcer was saying because I was so freaked out. But fortunately, I hit a good drive on my very first shot, so right away the anxiety melted. It's like in football I like to get that one hit. I hope it's not a sack, but maybe I carry the ball as a quarterback and get hit. Same thing with hitting that good T-ball.

Starting point is 00:18:46 when you're your first tee shot when you're in a term like that. That is that's great. Gay, I love to dive into now your book that's had a profound influence on me and that's called The Big Leap. And you've written 40 plus books. But this is one that I've thought a lot about because of what's going on in my career. But if you're cool with it, I'd like to go into the parts that I made notes and go a little bit deeper in some areas and see what questions arise out of based on what you say. Is that cool? Sounds great. What's the upper limit problem? The upper limit problem is something I spotted first in my own life and then in working with people

Starting point is 00:19:25 that almost everyone has an upper limit or a point in their success or their happiness that if they go past that point, they do something to knock themselves back down to where they were before. And it's kind of like a governor or a thermostat on your speed or your positive energy or you success where due to unconscious old beliefs that have usually been around since childhood, you place an artificial limit on how good you can feel or how much success you can have. So when you start hitting that upper limit, your unconscious mind kicks in and says you don't deserve that and then you find a way to mess up or get sick or have an argument or something

Starting point is 00:20:11 that knocks you back down where you were before. Like if you went on a, like if you went on a diet and you lost 10 pounds the first week and you're feeling great and then you go out and have a triple-decker bacon burger deluxe with the 32-ounce fries and you sabotage yourself and gain four pounds back in one day. So I've heard so many stories like that in my life that I started calling it the upper limit problem and I started looking at what causes it. And you remember a little while ago, I was talking about the importance of fear and acknowledging fear. What's usually underneath the upper limit problem are some fears that keep people locked in a certain zone, which is either, you know, it's often their zone of excellence where they're doing pretty good

Starting point is 00:21:01 in the world. They're using their skills, but they know deep inside they're not using their full potential. Real quick, I was just looking at the zones as well. Can you describe the four zones, the four main operating zones. Then we'll talk about the difference between each one and the zone of excellence first, as I think you're referring to, the zone of genius, to make that leap. Yeah, break it down into four zones, four things you do during the course of the day. Sometimes we're doing things that are in our zone of incompetence. We're not very good at them.

Starting point is 00:21:34 Like I was just doing one just before we got on the air today because my wife bought this cool, new earpherson. microphone set and I was trying to figure out how to plug it into my computer and I found out that it doesn't work on my particular, it doesn't have the right kind of plug. So I'm in my zone of incompetence. So I then had to run get my regular little earbuds from the other room and so I got back just in the nick of time. So that's my zone of incompetence, doing something that I'm not very good at. Number two, a lot of times we're spending time in our zone of competence. Maybe you're standing in line at the post office. Well, you can do it, but somebody else could do it just as well.

Starting point is 00:22:19 And that's the zone of competence. Most times, people need to learn how to delegate things that are in their zone of incompetence and their zone of competence so that they don't have to spend much time doing them. You know, like I mentioned in the book, my consulting buddy who spent, I think it was 13 hours of his $1,000 an hour consulting time trying to install his printer. You know, so the printer only cost $600, but by the time the day was over, he had almost $15 grand in the thing. And frustration, too, because he ended up having to hire a kid down the block for $100 to come put it together for him. So that's the zone of competence and incompetence. most of our listeners probably today are in the zone of excellence or they touch into their

Starting point is 00:23:09 zone of excellence where they're doing things that they're better than most people at. Like right now, you and I are doing something that we're better at most people at. If you got the average person on the street and stuck a microphone in his mouth and said, you're on a podcast, bud, you know, they wouldn't be able to handle the situation very well. But now, because you do the podcast, you could walk out on stage on Oprah or whatever the show was and you could sit down and it would come as a matter of course because you've had this experience. You might feel a little bit of buzz. I always say being on Oprah was like having 10 shots of espresso before going on stage. The second time I was on it, it was only like

Starting point is 00:23:49 four or five shots of espresso so it's possible to improve even in that kind of thing. But I imagine before Tom Brady goes on the field at the Super Bowl, even that guy has some anxiety coursing through his body. So anyway, at this stage of my game, I think I've counseled about 20,000 individuals and about four or five thousand couples and like I said, about 800 and some business executives. And so based on that experience, most of the people I've talked to are in their zone of excellence, but they don't know it maybe, but they really are chafing to get into their zone of genius, to get up there where they're living their genius on a day-to-day basis. First, that requires finding out what your genius is.

Starting point is 00:24:38 So you have to do a little research into yourself and ask yourself questions like I have in the Big Leap, like, what do I most love to do? And what do I do that when I do it, time just flies by? Those are good questions to find out what your genius is. But now, as a matter of fact, I'm working on the sequel to The Big Leap, which is about living full time in your genius. So once you kind of get your foot in the door a little bit, you want to do that more.

Starting point is 00:25:08 You want to get out of your zone of excellence, and you want to get into that space where you're doing what you most love to do. You're usually already doing a little bit of it in your zone of excellence. Now what I encourage people do is just bump it up by about 10 minutes a day at the beginning. Like if there's something you really love about your work,

Starting point is 00:25:28 do it 10 minutes more today. And then next week, maybe you'll want to do it 20 minutes more. So kind of bump it up. You don't have to quit your job and run away to a foreign land or meditate in Tibet or anything like that. You just need to kind of start where you are and gradually opening up yourself to have more and more of your genius move through your life. It's so funny you are talking about this. So maybe you can counsel me a little bit here, Gay, okay? if you're cool. Sometimes live riffing is fun. So I started this three years ago. I told you some of the

Starting point is 00:26:07 opportunities that have come up because of it speaking, consulting, coaching, creating our own kind of mastermind groups. All this has kind of happened where I was doing that 10 minutes and then that 10 minutes became more and more and all the while I'm working a full-time job at a big corporation moving my way up through the corporate ladder like a lot of people listening are currently doing. And one of the main questions I would get routinely is when are you going to do just the podcast and speaking and consulting and that type of work full time? And I always said I didn't know. And I felt like as I read your stuff, I'm on this zone of excellence first trying to get into my zone of genius. Because the question you ask is, what do I most love to do?

Starting point is 00:26:47 And what we're doing right now is one of the things I most love to do is learning directly from brilliant people like yourself and then sharing it with an incredible audience, listeners at the Learning Leaders Show. And so within the last month, I've left the corporate world and now have partnered with a business to create and help build upon some of the work that my great partners have already done to form this leadership advisory practice as part of a firm. And so I feel like the reason that I'm making this big leap, part is because I've learned stuff from you and from others. And because I wanted to try to find a way to build a life where I can spend only. almost every second of it doing what I love to do and find a way to, as Jim Collins would say, like create my own personal hedgehog and understand that, right? What do you love to do? What are you really good at?

Starting point is 00:27:39 And what will people pay you for and make that happen? And so I'm curious of somebody now who has literally just recently made this leap, what advice do you have for me as I'm doing this? Well, first of all, congratulations on making that leap. Thank you. I imagine already you felt a gigantic upward surge in freedom and happiness and life satisfaction, although it's, of course, comes sometimes with some anxiety that comes along with that. Yeah, I mean, it's an incredible feeling. It really is. But like you said, there's still an immense amount of pressure because now it's time to, it's not at your side hustle anymore. It's the full-time gig, so you got to rock and roll, you know. And so I think it's a little bit of both. But I think the feeling of like we're, we're, we're, we're, driving for the stuff you love to do and to do it all the time. And I have a team too. It's not just me.

Starting point is 00:28:32 I think is just an incredible feeling. It almost doesn't feel real quite yet because it's still pretty new, but it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, well, first of all, like I said, congratulations, because we need more people like you in the world who are willing to stand up and walk your talk. And I did that big leap myself many years ago now, but I tell you, it was so rewarding because, you know, I was worried would I make as much money if I jumped out there on my own as I was being a university professor? And in actual fact, I tripled, I think, my income my first year because I was focusing so much on what I most love to do, the money almost became an effortless byproduct of expressing my genius. In fact, I think that's the way it actually works. You know, if you go out to pursue money,

Starting point is 00:29:23 often you'll be disappointed, but if you go out in pursuit of expressing your full genius in the world, the money often comes along almost spontaneously. I remember a great quotation I wrote down when I lived in Colorado. I was a professor there for 21 years at the University of Colorado, and there was a Tibetan Buddhist named Choyam Trunkpa who came to Boulder. He'd been born in Tibet, I believe, even then moved to India and then came across Europe and found himself eventually in Boulder, Colorado, and he started teaching, and people were drawn to him. And so he, you know, had a larger and larger contingent, but they didn't really have a meeting place or anything like that. And one day, one of his followers gave him a check for a million dollars to build a center there,

Starting point is 00:30:13 which is now Noropa University, been there many years. And Trump has now passed. on back in the 80s, I think. But I remember the moment when it occurred because he said something really amazing. They asked him how it felt to go from being basically a poor monk born in Tibet and having to flee Tibet to suddenly having a million dollars to build his dream little monastery with up there. And he said, if you work quietly and with passion, such auspicious coincidences are bound to occur. And I love that because the emphasis was on working quietly and with passion.

Starting point is 00:30:56 And then suddenly these auspicious things that are almost like coincidences, but they keep happening more and more because I think life rewards the expression of true genius. And so if you're centered in yourself and doing what you most love to do, not only are people drawn to that, but I think the universe itself has a way of of supporting that. That's absolutely, at least the way I see it in the work I've been doing for the last 30 or 40 years and what I see in my clients is once they start

Starting point is 00:31:30 really putting their attention on their genius, suddenly money becomes kind of a side issue and ultimately a non-issue. In my own life, I worked away and then suddenly the more I started expressing my genius, and as a matter of fact, in the early 90s, I decided to make a major commitment to my genius, and I set the lofty goal at that time

Starting point is 00:31:55 of spending at least 30% of my time and my genius. And so it took me a year or two, but it happened faster than I thought because suddenly that was when the Oprah stuff happened and all sorts of other things started happening. So even without even really doing any effortful or doing anything different, suddenly things were happening in a bigger way.

Starting point is 00:32:17 So I then went really big. I said, okay, if that's working at 30%, I want to spend 50% of my time in my zone of genius. And that one took me a while, but I got there eventually. And then I set this big goal of 70%. And so it took me a few years to get there. But here, here, after 25 or 30 years of doing it, now I spend 90% of my time in my zone of genius. I don't consider myself a genius at loading my dishwasher or, you know, tidying up my cat's kitty litter or anything like that, but it's part of what keeps life good around here. And so that contributes to my genius too. So I'm either in my zone of genius or doing things that help contribute to that all my life. And so when I first started, I was spending 10% of my time in my zone of genius if that.

Starting point is 00:33:08 And so now to go the other way to flip it around, to 90%, that really feels very juicy. He said something really amazing. If you work quietly and with passion, such auspicious coincidences are bound to occur. Life rewards the expression of your true genius. If you're doing what you most love to do, not only are people drawn to that,

Starting point is 00:33:43 but the universe itself has a way of supporting it. What is your zone of genius? My zone of genius is to be a model of how to expand in love, abundance, and creativity every day while I inspire others to expand in those areas themselves if they're interested, if they're drawn to that. I would add to that and say that I have a gift that I've carefully honed over the years of how to explain really complicated things in a very simple way. Because there's probably a hundred books written on the fear of success and all that, but none of them get to what's really underneath it like I did with the big leap. And so that ability to explain complicated things in a very simple way is something that I spend a lot of time focusing and honing that ability. Why did Oprah first call you? Oh, in 1980, I wrote a small book called Learning to Love Yourself, and it became a surprise bestseller.

Starting point is 00:34:59 I think it was 1982 when it finally came out. But anyway, it became a surprise bestseller. and so for many years I gave presentations on that subject to all sorts of different organizations and workshops and things like that. So it was a common thing I did. When Oprah first went on the air out in Chicago, her show wasn't really nationally syndicated, I don't think, but one of her producers gave that book to her and it made an impression on her. So when she got her big show, they called me to find out if I would come on and talk about that book. As it happened, I may be the first author in history to have to turn them down for the first time because I was actually just stepped

Starting point is 00:35:45 off the plane in Hawaii and I was on vacation when they called me and they wanted me to come back to February in Chicago. I said, I don't think so. And so, but fortunately, another year or two later when our book Conscious Loving came out, they were back in touch with us again to talk to us about that. It was a book about relationship that's still popular among relationship counselors. I love the Oprah stuff. I'm big fan of hers. Can you talk to me a little bit about we were discussing before we started recording about accessing creativity and your genius, specifically for people who may be a little bit more experienced in their career. The people who email me, gay span from 18-year-olds and on way up past that. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on some of

Starting point is 00:36:38 that advice you've been giving lately when it comes to accessing creativity and your genius. Yes. Well, one thing we found, my wife and I were busy over the past few years writing our book, Conscious Loving Ever After, which is a book for people at 40 plus 50, 60, 60. 70s. I think the oldest person we worked with was 81. But anyway, people from 40 to up into their 80s are faced with a singular problem, which is how to access more and more creativity every day. There's an old saying by one of the great developmental psychologists, Eric Erickson of Harvard, who said that every day after 50 is a choice between creativity or stagnation. and we all know the problems with stagnation, you know, that's saying about sitting as a new smoking and that kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:37:36 You really do need to use it or lose it, to move it in life to, and I'm talking about physical movement, but also I'm talking about keeping your mind alive by letting it move and play with new ideas. Let me tell you something really amazing. When I was 65, which is now seven years ago, I took up resistance training for the first time. I started working out with a personal trainer and lifting weights, and now I do it three days a week. At the time, I started doing it one day a week, and then it got feeling so good that I started doing it two days a week. Now I do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the last five or six years. And it's become a very integral part of my life. And the reason I recommend it so highly is because it allows you to keep more.

Starting point is 00:38:25 moving your body and challenging your body and kind of working against things and using resistance to build muscles. So the kind of thing that I would have laughed at, in fact, I think I said, somebody asked me in an interview 30 years ago what kind of exercise I did. And I said, I love to ride my bike, I love to play golf, love to take walks, love to play squash. The one thing you'll probably never see me do is going into a gym and lifting weights. So how ironic that in the later part of my life, I become such a devotee of it. But here's the funny thing that happened at the same time. Out of nowhere, I suddenly got the urge at age 65 to write a mystery novel for the first time. And so I think the kind of the increased exercise and blood flow and that kind of thing must have

Starting point is 00:39:15 opened up some new space in me, or at least it happened at the same time, where suddenly I started getting ideas about how to write a mystery novel. I'd written, you know, as you said, more than 30 books in the self-help and transformational area, but I'd never really written a novel. And so I got the idea of writing a mystery novel about a Tibetan Buddhist private detective where he could also communicate a lot of psychological and spiritual wisdom at the same time he's solving real-world crimes. And so I invented this character named Tenzing Norbu, who goes by the nickname of 10, and I wrote of his first book. It's called The First Rule of Ten. And I've since written five or six more, and the cool thing that happened is that just a week or ten days ago,

Starting point is 00:40:02 I got an email from our agent saying that she had just sold the line of mystery novels to Netflix to turn into a television series. And so it went from this out-of-nowhere inspiration seven years ago to now I might be able to sit down and watch a Netflix series based on my character. And so I just want to sensitize everybody that it's never too late to start accessing whole new areas of your creativity. And I don't even think I could have written that kind of book when I was 40 years old or 50 years old. I didn't have the life experience, the chops, as they say, to actually craft a mystery novel and to make it interesting and to develop the characters. And so I want to say however old you are, whether you're in your 20s or 30s or your 80s,

Starting point is 00:40:52 to put your mind on how you can keep generating and creating more, how you can keep making choices toward creativity to avoid that kind of stagnation that costs us so much in life. That is such a cool story, man. I love that you started this at the age of 65 and seven years later Netflix is buying the rights to make it to show. I mean, I love that so much. I mean, congratulations. That's so cool. I can't tell you how good it feels.

Starting point is 00:41:27 I bet. Yeah. And one thing I love about being an entrepreneur and a writer is to create something out of nothing, you know, to just kind of make up an idea and sell it to the world. It's one of the most satisfying things. Whenever I watch brilliant TV shows, I don't know why I'm thinking of this TV show, billions on Showtime, maybe because I'm a big Brian Coppulman fan,

Starting point is 00:41:48 the guy who wrote that, I just think, wait a second, this was created from nothing, nothing. And these guys sit in a room and write it up, and you do that too, in addition to these other books where you're helping people in so many other facets of their life.

Starting point is 00:42:02 Now you're creating something that's sold to Netflix and could become a show, which is great. All right, Gay, just a couple more questions. one, I couldn't help but ask this. You know, I'm very fortunate to have found what I think is the most important decision you'll make in your life is who you decide to marry and they can lift you up or, unfortunately, they can bring you down.

Starting point is 00:42:22 And I found one that's the biggest uplifter in the world, in my opinion. And I'm very lucky, but I'm curious, what are just some of the key few pieces of advice you'd give to have a long, fantastic, great marriage? Yes, well, number one is commitment, but committing to the right things. You know, they used to say in the old-fashioned wedding vows, I promise to love, honor, and obey you till death do us part. But those are problematic types of commitment because you're committing to something that doesn't give you much information about how to do that. So we came up with all sorts of different commitments that we have in our book Conscious Loving and in some of our other books too. But for example, here's a commitment, one of the most important types of commitment you can make to your beloved is I promise to tell you the truth, always and in all ways.

Starting point is 00:43:21 That's important because I've worked with thousands of couples now with problems. and at the root of almost every problem is some lie that a person is either telling to themselves or telling to the other person. And so you got to look for anything, if there's problems in a relationship, look first for anything that they're not telling the truth about or anything that you haven't been telling the truth about to yourself. Give you an example. I've had a couple in here that had been having a recycling set of problems for six years,

Starting point is 00:43:57 So I go in search of what was the lie that somebody was telling six years ago? In that case, one of the people had been telling a lie to herself. The truth was, I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. There were some abusive elements in the relationship and that kind of thing. And the truth was, I don't want to be here anymore. But she hadn't been outwardly speaking that truth. So in a way, she'd kind of been lying to herself. to herself and have been gradually causing more and more problems.

Starting point is 00:44:30 And so what we need to do is first make a commitment to being absolutely honest with each other. A second thing, more relationships are killed through blame and criticism than anything else. And so chronic blame and criticism, if you have that going on in a relationship, the couple needs to learn how to take responsibility rather than defaulting to blame when problems come up. because you've probably noticed in your counseling and coaching in your own life, Ryan, the people that complain most about the other person are usually the perpetrator rather than the victim. But the key to the whole thing is learning how to take personal responsibility, not blaming yourself, but claiming responsibility for what's going on in the relationship.

Starting point is 00:45:18 So we work a lot with couples about that. A third thing that's absolutely crucial in a relationship is maintaining a flow of communication regarding appreciation and gratitude. So keeping a flow of appreciation going is super important. So my wife and I, you know, like we'll always be saying little things to each other like, oh, this morning I said to my wife as she was leaving, I really appreciate you doing this. and what she was doing was I had helped her pack up one of our two British short hair cats, our beloved girl, Allie, and she's going in today to have her teeth cleaned.

Starting point is 00:46:00 And my wife was going to be driving her over to the vets to get her teeth clean because my wife was also going out to breakfast with a friend of her. So it made sense for her to do it, but I appreciated her for it anyway. I thank you for doing that. And so she said, oh, great, you know, I appreciate that. So it was a little moment of appreciation. And if you add up 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 of those a week, you've got a whole different kind of relationship.

Starting point is 00:46:28 So we need to be looking always for what is right in a relationship rather than commenting on what's wrong. I like what you at the very end, just saying thank you. As parents, my wife and I, we try to, you know, your kids are going to follow what you do far more than what you say. And so the only way for them to sometimes do the things that we want them to do is that we have to model that behavior. So our daughters need to see me constantly thanking my wife for everything she does.

Starting point is 00:46:56 So if that's, you know, helping me prepare for a speech and she does that, if it's cooking, she's great at that. It's just constantly saying, saying thank you or picking out an outfit, thank you. You know, it's so simple, but it means a lot. It makes a difference. I think she'd say the same thing that I, the phrase I use with our girls is you can never say it too much. much. And also, I think when you're in that state of mind of being grateful for things, I think was Tony Robbins. He said it's really hard to be hateful if you're grateful. And that's a nice way to live life as opposed to the opposite of blaming and speaking negatively about

Starting point is 00:47:34 other people behind their back and those types of things. If you're grateful all the time, that those negative things don't tend to happen as much. Gay, this has been a fantastic man. I really appreciate you being here. One thought, though, when you saw you're going to join a show called The Learning Leader Show. I'm curious of the thought that you had in your mind when you saw it was called Learning Leader. Well, here's a moment of absolute honesty, Ryan. I may not have actually seen what the title of the show was before I got on it. So let's take it back then. You learned it as you're getting on. What did you think about 50 minutes ago? I thought it was a great title. I think it's a great title, by the way. I mean, you've put your finger right on the

Starting point is 00:48:17 most important thing. I think, I believe the first thing I said was that the thing that distinguishes a great leader is their commitment to learning from the moment, you know, learning right what's happening in the moment, what kind of feedback is coming in, go ahead and at least listen to it, you know, don't immediately push it away. And so I think you're touching on the key thing. Awesome. I love it, man. Hey, Gay, where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? I would send them first to Hendricks.com, H-E-N-D-R-I-C-S dot com. That's kind of the mothership. And my wife and I are proud to have been one of the very first people to ever have a website.

Starting point is 00:49:01 And back when the Internet first got underway, and so we're very proud of the amount of resources that are on our website. So there's lots of good free stuff there, videos of us, and different techniques and tools. We also have for our relationship work a whole different website called heartsinharony.com, hearts in harmony.com. And that's where you can find out all about our couple stuff and work with relationships over the years. Great. Well, thanks again, Gay, for one, all the work that you've put out and that you've helped so many people. You've been a mentor of mine.

Starting point is 00:49:35 You didn't even know it. And I'm appreciative of that. And certainly thank you for investing your time with me here today. and I'd love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. Thanks, Kay. Okay, thank you, man. Bye. Again, subscribe, rate, review, iTunes, Apple Podcasts.

Starting point is 00:49:52 I would greatly appreciate it. And thank you so much for being here. Can't wait for the next one. See you next week. This episode is brought to you by Workfront. Workfront is a work automation platform that allows you and your team to do your best work. Focus on the right work and complete that work faster than ever. Workfront connects all the phases of your workflow from planning corporate strategies to tactical execution.

Starting point is 00:50:22 And they go beyond just project and portfolio management. It delivers an operational system of record for today's largest and most innovative companies, including fossil, cars.com, and old navy. And they also work with Focus Brands, whose C-O-O-Cat-Cole was featured on episode 78 of The Learning Leader Show. Workfront, because work matters.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 235: Dr. Gay Hendricks - How To Make The Big Leap

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