Why You Screw It Up When Things Are Going Well with Gay Hendricks

Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

Susie Moore:

The author you Are about to hear From changed my life and marriage. This is not an understatement. Let me ask you this?  Have you ever heard of the Upper Limit Problem? It's spoken about a lot in coaching circles. And look, I hadn't either until I was reading this incredible book. It's one of my top books. Top Top, top reads called The Big Leap written by a man called the Gay Hendrix. I was reading it by the pool in Miami. It was before we moved here. We were on vacation and in that exact moment I was having an upper limit problem. Life was good, right? I'm on vacation with my man, got my breakfast, got the sun, happy with life, and I started a fight with Heath out of nowhere. Stick with me here. Okay, this makes sense.

An upper limit problem means essentially we only feel comfortable with things going really well in our lives for a certain period of time. We then hit our set threshold of happiness. Something inside of us says, you don't deserve to be this happy. It can't be this good. The shoe has to drop, right? And then we do something entirely subconsciously that cools our bliss and halts this delicious four trajectory of more joy. This is our inner saboteur, right? I loved having this conversation with Gay Hendricks because he broke down a few things. He breaks down in this interview the four causes of an upper limit problem, what they are, and we all have at least one the $20,000 question he asks his private clients. You really want to know this the secret to stepping into your genius zone with the work that only you can uniquely do in this world, and really sneaky ways we sabotage ourselves without even realizing it. This interview with Gay Hendrix is such a treat and I cannot wait to hear from you. Please DM me on this one. What are your thoughts about it on Instagram at Susie dot more and let me know. Upper limit style I now give you, Gay

Welcome Dr. Gay Hendricks. Oh my gosh, what an honor to be speaking with you after following your work for years and having had your work and some of the acronyms that you use Active in My Home, in My Marriage all the time. We talk about the Big Leap, the Good Old Upper Limit Problem, which we're going to be diving into, and I was also blessed to be featured in your recent book. Conscious Luck with Carol.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. Gave us a great story.

Susie Moore:

Yeah, I tell you, I mean all the books. This is my copy of The Big Leap. I lost the cover. This is how much it's been read.

Gay Hendricks:

Good. I like that. That's what an author likes to see is a good used book.

Susie Moore:

A very used book. Everything's doggy. I'm sure I've spilled 14 cups of tea over it over the years, but it's one of my most prized possessions. So thank you for writing it and being here with us. I would like to introduce you to our audience just by reading out a bit about you and then we'll dive into our questions. So we're very lucky friends. Today we have Dr. Gay Hendricks, who's been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and body mind transformation for more than 45 years. Wow. After earning his PhD from Stanford in 1974, gay served as a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Colorado. He's written more than 40 books. What a treat, including bestsellers such as Five Wishes, the Big Leap with no Cover, conscious Living and Conscious Loving ever After the last you co-authored with your wife, Dr. Kalin or Kate Hendricks. Gay Hendricks is also a mystery novelist for the series of five books featuring the Tibetan Buddhist private detective Tenzing Nobu. Is that correct?

Gay Hendricks:

That's right.

Susie Moore:

As well as a new mystery series featuring a Victorian era London Detective Sir Errol Hyde, his latest book, conscious Luck reveals Eight Ways to Change Your Fortunes Through The Power of Intention Gaze appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including Oprah, C-N-N-C-N-B-C, forte Hours and others. And his new book, the Genius Zone, will be published in June, 2021. Can't wait for that. That is fast approaching. Yes, it's just a couple of months. Lucky and lucky as to get you now as we lead up to that awesome book launch too. So Dr. Gay Hendricks, for those of us who don't know, I would love to dive straight into this concept that you coined the upper limb problem. We call it the LP at home here. We use it freely. I know you asked this a lot, but I would love for you just to explain in your own words what it means.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. The upper limit problem is the tendency to sabotage ourselves when things start going better, as if we have a built in upper limit on how much positive energy we can feel, how much love, how much money we can make, how much of a contribution we can make. Early programming puts these limiting beliefs in our heads about how much love we can experience or how much success we can experience. So later on in life what happens is things start moving better for you. You start learning some things, but then up these old limiting beliefs from the past and pull you back down. So what the book the Big Leap is all about as you know, is all about how spot those upper limits and what they're based on and how to clear them up so you can live in your genius zone all the time. And the Big Leap was about how to get into your genius zone and the new book, the Genius Zone is about how to live there 24 hours a day.

Susie Moore:

Oh, the genius. And I cannot wait to get my hands on that. One thing that I wanted to share with you is when I was reading The Big Leap the first time I was on vacation in Miami where I live now with my husband, and life was good in that moment, work was good. We were having a great time. We just ordered lunch and there was nothing to complain about in that moment. And I just picked a fight

Gay Hendricks:

That's the upper limit problem.

Susie Moore:

Oh my gosh. And I was reading the book and I'm like, huh, I know this is true. The words that I'm reading immediately and then I had an idea that we should be doing maybe something else that day. We shouldn't just be lounging around before we should be active vacationers and Heath. My husband was like, what's wrong with you? We're having a good time. And I'm like, it's as simple yet insidious and invisible as that.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes, it is. It's like a glass ceiling that you don't notice until you bump up against it. And the interesting thing about it is that in my own case, I started, I found this in myself when I was, oh, probably now 30, 35 years ago, I started noticing my own tendency to upper limit myself. The first thing I noticed, I was overweight at the time and I was trying to lose some weight and I would be on my diet, really do well for about three days. And then it was almost like I unconsciously would kind of go into a trance and eat a whole bunch of things that weren't good for me and then I'd lose a pound or two over the few days and then I gained it all back. And so I started, why am I doing that? And I realized ultimately, and it's a realization that has kept the weight off ever since, is that I had some kind of upper limit on how good I could allow myself to feel.

And I guess I imprinted that at an early age because every time I got to a place of feeling really good, I would do something to mess it up. And I noticed at the same time, this was in my pre Katy days before I met my wife and my girlfriend and I, we would get along well for a few days or sometimes even a week or two, and then one of us would pick a fight and there it would go, and then we would de down into a spiral for a few days and then it would take us a while to get out of it. I've never been one that could just snap out of it. It sort of takes me some healing time after I've been in a big domestic drama of some time. And so I started noticing that and that's when I began to call it the upper limit problem.

And fortunately at the same time I was doing a lot of therapy work with some really brilliant people that were being sent to me. And at the time, I was just coming out of Stanford where I got my PhD and I was still working there in the Bay Area for a year after, before I went out to Colorado to take a professor job out there in the counseling psychology department. And I was working with a lot of these high tech executives that were in those early companies that are now huge companies like Hewlett Packard and Intel at the time in the 1970s, they were just kind of getting underway, but they had these most brilliant people and in therapy I discovered one after the other. They would have a big breakthrough and thought something would go well at work, then they'd go home that night and have a huge blowout argument with family. Yes. Why is that? So that's when I started really looking into where the upper limit problem comes from and particularly how we can fix it.

Susie Moore:

This is revolutionary if you allow it in, right? Because sometimes we think, oh, this is just how life works or Well, of course you fight. That's just what spouses do. Or sometimes you lose money or sometimes you have a DU, I mean, whatever it may be. I was actually just when I've written about your work gay, I've mentioned that I call it sometimes referring to the Oscar's curse. Have you heard of the Oscar's curse where you win the golden statue and it's a very high probability that you're going to get a divorce?

Gay Hendricks:

Oh, I didn't know that.

Susie Moore:

Yeah, so an actor or an actress often who wins this coveted Oscar often gets divorced. There's been articles about it, there's been weird statistics on it or otherwise they'll have some type of DUI or some type of issue with substances that becomes public and I'm like, it's that upper limit problem. That's what I keep coming back to.

Gay Hendricks:

I follow golf, I watch golf tournaments sometimes and I play golf. One of the things that, it's the same thing that a player will win a million million and a half dollars one weekend and then the next weekend they won't make the cut to even get in to the tournament. So what happens during that, I was able to predict something I predicted. People always ask me, I published a little book called Conscious Golf way back in the nineties, which happened to coincide with Tiger Woods Getting Well-known, and I made a prediction at the time. I said, tiger Woods never had an adolescence look out for him to blow it out big time by doing something adolescent stupid in his twenties.

Susie Moore:

Well, wow.

Gay Hendricks:

And in a way, now this is an even better version of it, but not as dramatic. Jordan Spieth won the $10 million FedEx Cup and then for the next few years didn't really do as well as he before he won it. So what happens there, in his case, he wasn't out partying or drinking or anything like that. I don't know what had happened, but he didn't have a big blowup like Tiger Woods did. But still, there's this tendency to have things happen right after you've had something good happen. So we've got to be really on the lookout for that. Now, if you read the Big Leap, you probably noticed that I trace it all down to certain fears that many of us carry around with us,

Susie Moore:

Four of them.

Gay Hendricks:

Exactly. I'll tell you what they are. Even I know you know them probably I do.

Susie Moore:

I'm so excited to talk about these.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes, one of them, which I bet almost all of us, particularly your viewers and your listeners and my viewers and my listeners that buy my books and everything, almost all of us suffer from what I call a fear of outshining, which is as kids, we maybe saw that we were maybe a little brighter than some of the other kids and we got told not to shine our light too much so that other people didn't feel bad. And so we developed this fear of outshining other people. We want everybody to shine just as much as we do, and everybody else wanted everybody else to shine just as brightly as we did, but it didn't work all that way all the time. What happens is the case of a lot of gifted people internalized this fear of really being fully out there, fully realized, fully expressed, because they don't want to steal the light from everybody else.

And I want to put that to rest. I just want to look everybody in the virtual eye here and tell 'em that it's okay to shine your brightest because it doesn't make other people feel bad. What it does is inspire other people because we need more genius on this planet. We need more people who are willing to go all the way to their full creative contribution to humanity. We're in a time that cries out for genius, and that's why I had to write these two books, the Big Leap in the Genius Zone, because I just feel like if I ended my life without really making this very clear, I wouldn't be expressing myself fully. So these books almost wrote themselves. I was sitting there doing it at 5:00 AM in the morning, but they felt like they were coming through me rather than being thought up by me. And that's the best thing to happen as a writer when you feel like you're being used to write something that's even bigger than you are. And that's the way I feel about the Big Leap in the Genius zone

Susie Moore:

And the crime about Shining. I know in your book you speak about your relationship with your brother and how that was one of your limiting feelings. I don't want to be too big. What about him? What will my parents think? So if you go through the book, that's the fourth, the Crime about Shining, can we touch on the other three too?

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. Another big one is a lot of people fear success, fear going to their full success for, I'll put two of 'em together. One is because they fear that success will bring a bigger burden. They already feel burdened and they think, okay, if I get bigger, it's just going to be more burden. The second one is a lot of people limit their growth because they feel like if they really opened up fully and went all the way to their full genius, it would cause them to abandon or leave behind people that were there for them in the past. And I have not found that to be true personally. I've worked with a lot of people that have won Oscars or won Grammys and things like that, and it really doesn't cause them to leave people behind. What it often does is cause those people to start feeling weird around the person who's been more successful and it brings up stuff in them.

And so I want us to use successful people as an inspiration to us to find out who we really are and what we have to offer in the world. See, I think there's something deep in human beings that wants to come out, that genius that we have inside us, it wants to be birthed into the world, it wants to be released in the world, and if we don't, we don't feel good inside. So I think there's a health benefit to opening up to your genius because the more you can feel that kind of whole body, soul depth exhilaration in yourself about what you're doing, it's bound to be good for your health. I know I haven't had, since I dedicated myself fully to living in my genius full time, which was about 25 or 30 years ago, I haven't had a cold or the flu in 25 years, which I think is unusual because I used to have a couple of times a year and often get the flu whatever was going around.

But I think something about the way, if we use ourselves fully, something happens inside us that is a health-based kind of thing, that kind of a benign exhilaration that's good for us at the very core of ourselves, even physically good for ourselves. So knock on wood, hope this year isn't the one I get a cold and blow my whole 25 year record. But in the new book, the Genius Zone, I quote a quote that has become so central to my, it's a quotation from the gospel of Thomas, which was one of the apocryphal gospels that didn't make it into the official Bible. It had, I guess too much radical stuff in it that they didn't bring it into the official Bible. But if you go back and look at it, there's a lot of, there's a great book by Elaine PA called Gnostic Gospels. That's a lot about the gospel of Thomas, but here's one thing it said.

It says, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you, but if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. And I'll tell you, that may sound a little harsh, but I found it to be absolutely true that I've been working with people. I saw my first client in 1968. I'm not much good at math, but how long ago was that? Is that about a long time ago? It's 50, actually, somebody's flashing me a cue card here that it's 53 years ago.

Susie Moore:

Wow.

Gay Hendricks:

Yeah. So

Susie Moore:

What's within us? Oh, sorry. Yes.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. So in the past 53 years, I've had the opportunity to see about 20,000 individuals and about eight or 900 business executives and about 5,000 couples. And based on that experience, I will tell you that there's a yearning inside to bring forth our creativity and it becomes more important the older we get. In fact, Katie and I, my wife Kathleen Hendricks, Dr. Kathleen Hendricks is also called Katie around the house here, and you can call her Katie also. And we've co-authored a dozen books together and our most recent co-authored, one is called Conscious Loving Ever After, and it's a book for couples at midlife and beyond. Forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, up into the eighties. And one of the key premises of the book that we discovered from interviewing tons of couples in that area is that creativity after the age of 40 and particularly after the age of 50, becomes absolutely essential to a marriage, a relationship, as well as to your own individual wellbeing. In fact, the way we say it here is that every breath you take after you're 40 is a choice between creativity or stagnation, creativity or stagnation. Which are you going to breathe with this very moment, I implore everybody that's within my eyesight or earshot to choose creativity because it becomes more and more of a big issue in your life if you leave behind your creativity in your forties, fifties, and sixties.

Susie Moore:

And when it comes to being creative, a lot of us can feel afraid. We can say, oh, what if this is a risk? What if it fails? What if people think I'm silly for creating this? For example, right now, I've launched something completely new. I just felt called to do it creatively because I stopped drinking at the beginning of this year as an experiment and I experienced a lot of upside and I put together a workshop because I know people want to do an extended break, and I launched it. It's really fun. I'm in the launch phase right now, and I thought to myself, sometimes I think even drinking too much if that ever happens, and it happens a lot that is that also an upper limit, right?

Gay Hendricks:

It is absolutely an upper limit problem. In fact, I ask anybody who partakes more than a minimal amount of alcohol to ask themselves to check in and find out if it makes you more creative or less creative, because I suggest that in 99.9% of the cases, it makes you less creative. Here's the thing, Frank Barron, who is a real student of creativity, Dr. Frank Barron, he wrote books on creativity and everything, and he did some of the early work on psychedelic psychedelics like LSD and things like that, psychological effects of those, and somebody asked him, what's the best drug you've ever taken? And he said, it's alcohol for 15 minutes, and people just keep trying to go back for that 15 minutes every time. And of course it doesn't work because

Susie Moore:

Few that does.

Gay Hendricks:

Yeah, they say the same thing about cocaine too. Cocaine makes you feel like a new man, and what does the new man want? More cocaine,

Susie Moore:

Right?

Gay Hendricks:

I've never had a taste for alcohol, so I'm kind of in the dark about that one. But I was an early pot smoker and I also used to smoke cigarettes when I was in college and I've kicked cigarettes and I've kicked those other things, but I'll tell you the hardest one to kick was sugar.

I think sugar accounts for a lot of people's upper limit problems because if you think about, I don't know if you've ever taken one of those glucose tolerance tests at the doctors where you drink a glucose thing and then they measure you. I did one of those one time and it was pretty revealing because they give you this little glass bottle of a very sugary liquid to drink and you kind of have to chug it down. It's gross tasting, but you chug down this thing like six ounces of liquid or something like that, but it's packed with sugar and then they measure your blood sugar over the next six hours. And for about the first half hour, I felt like the king of the world because I had this sugar pumping through my system. A half hour after that I wanted to take a nap, and then a half hour after that I wanted to, so it took me about two hours to recover my sort of normal state of consciousness. That was a long time ago, and I began to monitor my sugar intake a lot more carefully, and I found that eating is probably one of the main ways we upper limit ourselves. So it doesn't have to be an addictive chemical like alcohol or cocaine or pot or anything like that. It can be just regular old sugar candy bars, anything that blood sugar,

Susie Moore:

Blood sugar, seemingly innocent things that just surround us that people do. We often just don't question it. I think it's like, well, this is normal. It's normal to drink or it's normal and no criticism here. If someone drinks, that's their decision. Each sugar that decision, always personal. But I think sometimes this awareness of an upper limit, I feel like for a while when our business has grown a lot, we've moved here, we are making a lot of positive changes. I was like, what could another upper limit be? And I'm like, cool. I wonder what could happen if I release this? And creatively now doing a workshop on it, choosing the creative way of just going for it versus overthinking it. I always just like to come back to what story am I telling about this in terms of being an upper limit versus just kind of going with it and trusting and seeing what shows up. And what I love with your work is there's this bias towards action, a bias for more. You're coming from this place of Yes, yes, please more please. I touched on my fourth too. I think this is an important one because we said there are four main reasons we hit our upper limit. The crime outshining thinking success brings another burden, believing we are being disloyal or abandoning people from our past and then feeling fundamentally flawed as humans.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. I usually like to say that for last because it is in a way the most compelling deep and darkening aspect of our belief system that if you feel like you're fundamentally wrong, bad, sick, or stupid, any of those, anything you feel bad about yourself becomes a self perpetuating prophecy that then brings more experiences like that. It's like this game my brother and I used to play when we were kids about spotting cars when we were on vacation, my brother would say, okay, pick a color of cars and whoever gets the most over the next hour wins. I forgot what we played for, but he would always pick white. We lived in Florida. He knew something that I didn't know because in Florida, rent a cars are about 99% white, and so there would always be in Florida, tons of white cars on the road, and I would usually pick some color. I liked blue or red, and there would never be any of those, but he would always rack it up. So if you're looking for a particular sort of thing in life, either consciously or unconsciously, you're going to see that thing and block out other things. And so that's oftentimes what happens when people feel fundamentally bad about themselves. Or to be more specific, a lot of us feel fundamentally undeserving of love that something has happened in our past. Somebody has convicted us of an imaginary crime like being unwanted or

Susie Moore:

Making a mistake. That was unacceptable. Yes, I come from a family, we were on welfare, we lived in different shelters at different times, and I always thought, oh, people can't know about that because that's not okay. So that's why I love to talk about it. Now I'm very open about it because I'm like, if this is the truth and a lot of that wasn't my fault and there were blessings there for sure, then maybe that helps, right? It helps me. It helps others.

Gay Hendricks:

I know. And it's amazing, isn't it? How you would start there and end up doing what you do in Miami, Florida. That's a miracle in itself.

Susie Moore:

I know, and I always think with my upper limits now, I'm like, what else? And I love this question. I mean, I don't even need to look it up, but I just want to just read the exact words here, but how much love and abundance am I willing to allow, right? Sometimes I'm like, oh, I allow all of it, but I'm like, do, because sometimes you'll pay attention to the critics, you'll read the comments, you'll check your likes, you'll get some bad feedback, and it can unravel you for a couple of hours

Gay Hendricks:

Or a couple of days sometimes

Susie Moore:

If you

Gay Hendricks:

Bad rejection of some sort,

Susie Moore:

And you actually list a lot of upper limit behaviors here, which I love, and my friends, let's be honest with ourselves, worrying, blaming and criticism, getting sick or hurt, squabbling, hiding significant feelings, not keeping agreements, not speaking significant truths to the relevant people, deflecting. In fact, sometimes I even think not being able to receive someone's generosity is an upper limit problem. Would you agree with that?

Gay Hendricks:

I would totally agree with that. I think I tell a story in the Big Leap, maybe it was books about trying to give my mother-in-law a compliment about her pie, and she was very closed to that sort of thing, and I kept Polly, that pie was delicious. And then she would say, oh, I don't think so. I don't think I put enough, whatever it was, pumpkin in it or something. And I said, no, it was just perfect for me. And then she would say, no, you should have seen what my mother used to be able to make. I can't make a pie to save my neck. And so finally, I just gave up

Susie Moore:

Receive it.

Gay Hendricks:

But you touched on something really very important here that we all need to look at. See, I think a lot people in our field are stuck on the receiving part of the equation rather than the giving part of the equation that most of us that enjoy conversations like this, that enjoy transformation, that like to see positive things happen. We're on a certain wavelength, and I think being on that wavelength makes us a certain way because interested in contribution and we're interested in making a positive difference. But what we need to get also is to get good at receiving because how many life coaches and people like that do that are just barely scraping by, they haven't really had a wave of abundance in their life. So here's the thing, is you have to start where you are and say, okay, where I am right now is the amount of abundance and genius I'm willing to live in.

Now let me begin to expand from here, and what we do is we ask you to simply expand first 10 minutes a day. When people come here to work with us for a full day intensive or a three day, we do something where corporations will sometimes send a CEO or somebody here to kind of get a big one day hit, and it's a $20,000 package they get, but the first thing they get for their $20,000 is 10 minutes. We ask them to go in a little room by themselves, there's not even a picture on the wall, and sit there and ask themselves for 10 minutes, what is my true genius? What do I most love to do? There's a little $20,000 gift for all your listeners and viewers just go in a room and take 10 minutes. Because a lot of times these people that run big companies, they'll come walking out with a look in their eye and they say, man, I wish I'd done that 30 years ago.

It's the first time they've ever really asked themselves that kind of a question. And that's the beauty I think of life, that spiritual growth and manifestation don't have to move linearly through time. You can have a sudden awakening where you say, oh my goodness, I do deserve love. I deserve full abundance, and you kind of wake up out out of the trance of your upper limits. That's what I did 30, 35 years ago, is kind of wake up out of my own upper limits trances, and what I did was just begin to take baby steps. I think first I set the intention of having spending 30% of my time in my genius zone where I was doing what I most loved to do, and that took me a year or two to get up to there, but then I set 50% of my time. That was a big, bold one.

Then in the 1990s, I set the intention of by the end of the century, I'd be spending all my time in my genius zone, and I made it by the end of the century and have been for the last 20 some years. I spend 90% of my time that there are some things I do. I mention in a book like I'm boss of the kitty litter here in this house, and I'm boss of taking out the trash bins and that kind of thing, so I have my chores. I wouldn't say I'm a genius at kitty litter maintenance, but I do it because I love my cats. So, but 90% of the time during my waking hours, I'm doing something like this, or if you'd looked in my window at 6:00 AM you'd see me writing until seven 30. And so I'm doing things that are in my genius zone pretty much all the time. Wow, that's a good feeling. Yes. Yeah. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Susie Moore:

I feel like for some people it would be like, that would be so amazing and yet not possible for me. They'd say, but I have to do this. I can't afford to outsource this or that yet, all these things I need to do. And sometimes I know that we can clinging to the behind the scenes stuff or the stuff that isn't unique to you because it maybe feel safe. There isn't a creativity piece that's required. It doesn't require any courage. Do you believe too, that that's also just an upper limit believing what's possible in terms of how we can spend our time? Because it's a rare thing to meet somebody who's like, oh, yeah, can I pretty much do things I love? That's my week. What do you do? Oh, I love my career. Oh my gosh, I get to whatever it may be. This is by far the exception versus the rule in terms of how people just show up. Even people who run their own companies, a lot of them are my friends, and they'll be like, oh, but I have to manage the team and I have to do the p and l and I have to. So how do you approach those kind of just very fixed beliefs?

Gay Hendricks:

Yes, I recommend that people study carefully any of their, if only I didn't have to

Because how many people have you met that say something like, I'd love to write a book if I didn't have to fill in the blank. And it's something real if I didn't have to work eight hours a day or if I weren't exhausted from taking care of my kids all day or if I wasn't out of a job. But that's why we start with 10 minutes a day because everybody can find 10 minutes a day to focus on their genius. And if you focus on it 10 minutes a day, you'll find it is a positive addiction. You'll want to spend 15 minutes in your genius, then you want to spend an hour, and as your genius unfolds, the means to keep it going will reveal themselves. For example, you'll see somebody who's doing a good job at something you hate to do and you'll say, Hey, can I hire you for five hours a week to do? That's how we started. We started out with one halftime personal assistant way back. I think it was in the days before, personal assistants even were called personal assistants,

Susie Moore:

Right? Aries? Yeah. Yeah.

Gay Hendricks:

But this was more of a gopher person, a person who would go for coffee, go to the coffee shop to make copies. This was in the days before we could afford our own copy machine,

But I invite people to be very, very aware of those if only I didn't have to is because they can be seductive traps. So sit down with a good listening friend or a good counselor or a good therapist or a good life coach and say, I want to spend an hour getting clear of all my ifs buts, shoulds, and have tos that are in the way of expressing my full genius. I bet you could in an hour of concentrating on that, remove 90% of them. Because here's the thing, most of 'em are in our heads. They're not in actual reality. I know of famous I woman who writes romance novels and she writes 'em under an assumed name, so I'm not going to even tell you, but she does it from midnight to four.

Susie Moore:

Wow.

Gay Hendricks:

Midnight to four.

Susie Moore:

Wow.

Gay Hendricks:

I can't even hatch a reasonable thought after about 10 o'clock at night.

Susie Moore:

I can't even watch TV at midnight. I know

Gay Hendricks:

My wife has shows she watches at 10 o'clock. I hear 'em out of my ear while I'm asleep. I very rarely make it till even 10 30, even if it's a very exciting detective show. So here's the thing, she has another job. I mean, not a job, but she has a

Susie Moore:

Other commitments.

Gay Hendricks:

She has a special needs child, I'll put it that way. That takes up a tremendous amount of hands-on energy. And then to sit there from 12 to four and crank out in the morning and crank out fantasy, I mean romance novels, that's mind boggling to me. That's how human beings can get committed to their genius. And so one of these days, romance novels is probably going to take off and there may a movie out it or something and she'll be, yes, it will like JK Rowling living in a castle or something. But until then she's happy to just fuel her creativity with some extra coffee and do it till 4:00 AM and love, I admire the heck out of that.

Susie Moore:

Me too. And we need to seek out these stories. We need to see what is happening and pay attention because no one else is going to do this for you. I mean, sometimes we'll think, okay, so spend 10 minutes saying 10 minutes, my friends 10 minutes, the things I could do if only I didn't have to come up with a list. Let's look at our reasons. No one else is going to do this for you. There's not a day of reckoning where someone's going to come to your house, knock on the door and say, okay, zone of genius time, my friend. You have been hitting a hard too long, doing too much, taking on too many burdens. It's your time. You have to do this, and 10 minutes this question. It's surprising how rarely we even think that this is possible, just tapping into what is available and it's just another way of being.

But that's also an apple of it, right? That's also, oh, I can't do that. That's people who have the luxury of help and the luxury. It's like 10 to four with a special needs child. There are people who are out there doing the things that we dream of doing because they're giving themselves the permission to go for it. They're not seeing the limit that we are seeing. And they, one thing that I love that you explained in the book is the Russian Doll method of looking for your zone of genius. Are you able to share that for a moment?

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. You know how these little Russian doll sets are a doll within a doll within a doll, and you have to go looking for your genius that way because down in the center of everything is the sweet spot of what you most love to do and what will bring you the greatest abundance and life satisfaction though that is the creative essence of ourselves. That's the pure little nugget that's down there of gold that we're looking for. But in the meantime, you may peel off layers or go through layers of what you think are your genius, but you have to keep going deeper and deeper until you find that sweet spot. For me. I got trained as a traditional clinical and counseling psychologist. I got my doctorate at Stanford in 1974, and I went on to become a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. And then as my wife and I put it one day, Oprah waved her magic wand over a couple of university professors and suddenly we were on her show with our book Conscious Loving and Life turned into a space shuttle ride for the past 30 years.

But there was a time when I remember this conversation with one of my professors at Stanford, and he was saying, which are you going to head toward? Are you going to head toward being a private practice psychologist or are you going to head toward being a university professor? And I said, well, sitting in an office for 40 hours a week seems like suicide to me. I'm never going to do that. I could not possibly pull that off. Some people are just born to sit in their office for 40 hours a week, and I'm born to sit in my chair for about as long as it takes me to do this interview. Yes, I got to do something else. So I spent my entire elementary and high school looking at the clock to see when the class was going to be over. So I said, that's not going to do for me.

I'm going to be a university professor, but I'll tell you what I'm really interested in. And he said, oh, what? Because in his mind, that was it. There was only these two paths that he trained people for. And I said, well, I think we're in a marketing phase. We need to get this stuff out to the people we need to be doing shows on cable TV and PBS and says, this was long before they started having those kind of shows on public television. And this was even before there was such a thing called a self-help book. So I was around when the first self-help books were actually written, wrote one of the first ones of myself. But in the conversation I'm talking about long before that came along, and so I said, I can see a day where we're out doing seminars on these kind of things, not like teaching university classes, but regular people that don't even have a high school degree could learn in a room that PhDs and MDs are sitting in.

It doesn't matter. We want to, and here was my magic word, I said, we need to democratize therapy and transformation so everybody can get hold of it. So you don't have to just go into an office somewhere. And I remember the look he was giving me, it was almost like I was saying, suggesting public nudity in America or something like that. He was looking at me, what are you talking about? And well, God bless him. He had come up in a particular tradition, and so he only saw the world in two different life paths because he'd trained a hundred other PhD students and they'd gone into one of those two life paths. So anyway, what I'm saying is no matter where you are, be asking yourself the big question about how could you see it actually being different? What would it take to really turn you on?

Well, I became a university professor, so I took that path, but I became the first person at the university to teach a class on developmental psychology over their cable TV system that they had. And so I was able to have people all over Colorado in my class rather than just the 40 people that were sitting in the studio with me. And suddenly that became very popular because the dean suddenly realized, wow, I had 80 paying customers in that class, 40 of which weren't even in there, not even taking up space that could work. And so pretty soon they're offering degrees online that,

Susie Moore:

And here we are. And here we are in 2021 where you do a live television segment from your home.

Gay Hendricks:

Oh, I know it. I love It.

Susie Moore:

National television, it's incredible. But isn't this because we've had to lose, I mean, when you think about your vision back then and it's like psychiatrist or professor, it's very easy to adopt other people's limits for us too without being conscious.

Gay Hendricks:

Absolutely. In fact, that's where most of 'em come from. We just take 'em by osmosis. We just kind of grow up living inside a certain limitation and then we take that on. A colleague of mine tells a story about she was at Thanksgiving or one of the holiday dinners with her mother, with her sister, and her sister was carving off the end of the ham to put it in this pan, but it was actually the pan was big enough to hold the whole thing, but she carved off the end of it, set it beside the ham, and my colleague said, why do we always cut the end off the ham? And they ended up calling the mother way back in Florida someplace and said, why do we always cut? You always cut the end off the ham. And she said, oh, it was because granny, her mother, the pan didn't fit, the ham wouldn't fit in the pan. So they got three generations of ham hacking because of one person's ill-fitting pan a long time ago.

Susie Moore:

Oh, and think about, I mean this is ham. That's not that serious, right? You lose a bit of meat. But when you think about our lives, I grew up hearing rich people are evil, money doesn't grow on trees. The only way out of a situation is if you have a bit of luck, you need a little bit of luck to help you get by. And that always just felt a little bit wrong. I'm like, well, I'm a human being on earth. And back in the day, we used to get a lot of donations from Sunday schools or from churches. And so we went to Sunday schools and I remember listening even just to some of the different services, you can do all things. We are powerful. We are all equal. And I remember thinking that just doesn't fit with what I hear from my family. And it's funny how I feel like young us is wise. Look, when you see a child, I want to be an astronaut and I'm going to do that and I'm going to marry Leonardo DiCaprio, actually Justin Bieber, whoever may be, it's like it's kind of what we believe, what we believe is possible, however frivolous it sounds then, but it's almost like an unlearning, the big leap, unlearning some of the things that haven't been helpful to fulfill why we are here. That's how I look at your work.

Gay Hendricks:

Well, thank you. One of the things that I think is one of the biggest factors in human growth is openness to learning. If you can keep yourself open to learning from every relationship, interaction from things that come your way, that's really the best stance to take toward life. Kind of an attitude of, here I am, here's what I'd like and I'm open to whatever can happen to assist me in that. To me, life only begins once we get beyond our upper limit problem because before then you're running on somebody else's limitations. It doesn't have anything to do with you, it has to do with somebody else's life. But the moment you can break through and start asking yourself some big questions like What is my genius? What do I most love to do? What brings out the best in me? What am I happiest while I'm doing? And start focusing a little more of your life on doing those kinds of things. It has a kind of liberation about it that's hard to find anywhere else in life.

Susie Moore:

Oh yes, because I work a lot of people when it comes to growing their businesses and becoming more visible and fulfilling bigger goals, making more impact. What would you tell someone gay who says, I really want just say it's to become an author like your friend, to become a very successful author and impact people with my just say it's fiction to move people and entertain them with my fiction. What if our desire for that and our belief that you just can't, can't reconcile. It feels too out there. You recognize you have an upper limit problem and you recall your desire, but your desire doesn't bring you joy because you're like, definitely it's my vision, but I dunno how I can get there. The programming, it still feels too heavy or there just still feels like there's an ocean between you and your dream. In your dream. How would you start to chip away at that? Or what would it be your method for beginning

Gay Hendricks:

Trust baby steps, focus on baby steps. Focus on things that you can do this moment or things that you can do within the next 10 minutes that foster your genius. Go in a room by yourself if you've got 10 minutes and doodle the doodle the question, what is my genius? If you don't know what it is, just open up that dialogue with your genius baby steps 10 minutes. Or

I always say, all you need is one positive thought about a given area, and that points you in the right direction. So at some point you said to yourself, Hey, wait a minute. Just because I started out poor or living in a shelter doesn't mean now I can't live in a great place or it doesn't mean I can't have a great life somewhere. You got the idea that that sort of didn't matter, that you could invent something in the present. And to me, that's one of the most powerful things in life is that unless you're being tied down and have people piling on you under a blanket or something, almost all of us have the power to say, what do I want? What do I most love to do? It's part of our freedom that we don't often take advantage of. I'm in the habit of asking big questions even when I'm sitting around.

When I used to fly on airplanes a lot, not for the past year or so, but when I used to go on airplanes all the time, I have some of the great conversations in my life with somebody sitting next to me. I once sat next to the head of the company that makes ramen noodles, those little packages that used to cost five for a dollar. And I was asking him, how the heck do you make something and get it to the supermarket, five of those for a dollar? And he says, oh, I lose money on every one of those I sell. I said, oh, how you stay in business? And he explained a whole bunch of things to me over a two hour flight that I would've never thought of in a million years about loss leaders. He's willing to lead with a loss to get something else into the supermarket. And I mean, it was levels of genius about business that I had never in a million years occurred. So go through life with that kind of, Hey, what's, what can I learn attitude? What can I learn? While it turned out he gave me an MBA in business and a two hour flight we were on.

Susie Moore:

I like to talk to people on planes too. I just love people. One thing that I loved about your, which I just really feel is so sometimes lacking a little bit out there, which is something that I always strive to do too, which is to sometimes make things that feel very heavy and big and insurmountable, a little easier, a little lighter, a little bit, a little bit more possible. And not through doing deep heavy work necessarily. But you said one positive thought not long ago. I was just speaking with someone who's like, I don't know how. And I'm like, you don't have to do it alone. Haven't there been other times you didn't know how to do things? And then you take a first step, clarity comes through action bit by bit, right? So it's so interesting how quickly we just abdicate our power and say, no, this is it for me. Nothing left to learn. Oh, I'm at a certain age. This is my future. We are so willing and happy to do that when we are just such powerful beings. And I think human ingenuity, like human innovation, our ideas, isn't this the gold?

Gay Hendricks:

It's incredible. Taking back that power, taking back the power over. I was just thinking about a good friend of mine that I play golf with sometimes. He said that speaking one sentence changed his entire life 17 years ago after 20 years of blackout drinking, he got up in front of a group of people and said, hi, my name is Jim and I'm an alcoholic. And he'd spent years denying that he had a drinking problem. But that sentence, just getting that sentence out of his mouth and making a commitment to not take a drink that day, that's the kind of one positive thought that I'm talking about. Just one step in the right direction can often. Now here he is, 17 years later, he is a multimillionaire. He is playing golf whenever he wants. And so things like that to me are just the most juicy things about human life. I get to live on a steady diet of miracles because of the work I do. But still, when somebody tells me something like that, it still just warms my heart.

Susie Moore:

Me too. And I think to myself, sometimes you even just look at the earth, we are 80% water the earth itself, and we don't know 90% of what's in the ocean at beneath a certain level.

Gay Hendricks:

How can we be cynical?

Susie Moore:

We don't even know enough. We dunno anything. And we're so quick to know everything and to be like, well, that's wrong. This is a problem. There's another problem that's coming up. Wait, did you think about that problem? It's like your study diet of miracles. I feel that way too. The fact that sunrises every morning

Gay Hendricks:

Or just think that you, and I mean there are almost 9 million species on this planet, and you and I are the only one that can have a conversation about upper limits and luck and things like that. I mean, half the species are bugs. So we have this exalted position. We can do these amazing things. It's like I said in the Big leap. It's like we are born as a Learjet airplane that can fly at 40,000 feet, but we use it to plow potatoes with up and down the potato field instead of soaring to our heights that we can soar to.

Susie Moore:

And the question that you love to ask is, how good are you willing to feel?

Gay Hendricks:

How good are you willing to feel? How much love are you willing to feel? How much abundance are you willing to feel?

Susie Moore:

And do you believe too that when we open ourselves up, the world will then just match it? The world could match our level of openness to what it is we're willing to receive. Is this what you see in your work?

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. There's a wonderful quotation from the author Franz Kafka. He says, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to. All you have to do is sit still very quiet, simple and ordinary. He says, the universe will roll in ecstasy at your feet if you just allow yourself to receive. But most of the time we're out there in front kind of pushing on hustle, hustle,

Susie Moore:

Hustle.

Gay Hendricks:

And it's like says in the James Joyce novel, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body because we're always out there out in front of the moment kind of hustling, trying to get to the next thing when we need to just drop back into this moment and appreciate the miracle of existence itself. And that invites a flow of blessings that I haven't ever managed to. I can't conceive of the magnificence of that because it's happening all the time around me.

Susie Moore:

I completely agree. And I also love to ask whenever I'm even just speaking with a group or whoever it may be, or a stranger, how many of the blessings of your life just came to you? Right. Many blessings too. We take the action, the great things happen, but also I met my husband at a concert. We both almost didn't go. A lot of the ideas that I have, they come to me when I'm walking and or opportunities, they flow. Yeah, I can do my reach out. And I love to take the action for sure, participate in my own blessings. But also the biggest opportunities have been like a phone call, an email, Hey Susie. And I'm like, aha, look what I've allowed. I love, I had somebody, maybe it was you actually that said this. Exchange the word achieve and accomplish with allow, look what that person's allowed. I

Gay Hendricks:

Don't know, but if I did say it, I'm glad I said it.

Susie Moore:

I Love that.

Gay Hendricks:

It's a lot about receiving. Tell me, what kind of a concert was it?

Susie Moore:

Oh, it was an Australian band. When I was living in Sydney, he was living in Sydney, a band called Sneaky Sound System. And like I said, we both almost didn't go. And it was a complete chance encounter. And I mean, another friend of mine unexpectedly, she found out she's pregnant recently. She was a bit surprised at first. Now she's like, what a blessing. That just happened. So many things. They can just happen to us, but we have to be open. That's our work to remind ourselves of who we are. I mean, gay, I could talk to you for three hours, clearly nonstop about many things, but already it is been an hour has lapsed. Is there anything you'd like to leave us with? I of course want to talk about all of your links and the genius then, which is coming up shortly. But is there anything that you'd to leave this conversations with for us to think about.

Gay Hendricks:

We're only a breath away from our full magnificence every moment. So just keep taking those big breaths in favor of your creativity and your genius, and allow to happen what happens. And watch the miracles unfold.

Susie Moore:

Watch the miracles unfold. Oh my gosh. Okay. Thank you. Truly, thank you so much. What a blessing to me. This has been spending time with you. My gosh. I've been looking forward to it for so long, since we planned it. So the Genius Zone coming out in June, available for pre-order now everywhere books are sold.

Gay Hendricks:

Yes, it is. And thanks a lot, Susie. And let's reconvene maybe after the new book is out,

Susie Moore:

Please. Absolutely. And if someone wants to work with you, work with your team, hire you in some way, hendricks.com, is that correct?

Gay Hendricks:

Yes. hendricks.com. H-E-N-D-R-I-C-K s.com. And also, I should mention our website that has our relationship e-course and things. It's called Hearts in harmony.com. Hearts in harmony.com. That's where you can find out all our things for singles and couples.

Susie Moore:

Oh, thank you so much, Gay. What a pleasure and a privilege to spend time with you. I cannot wait to hopefully speak to you again and continue our fabulous conversation. So thank you very, very much.