#349 Finding Your Zone of Genius with Gay Hendricks

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am excited to be joined by Gay Hendricks. In this episode, Gay tells us how to find our Zone of Genius, which he talks about in his book, The Big Leap. Your genius is that activity or way of being that you are uniquely suited to do. Gay tells how to discover what you love doing and how to spend more time doing it. We also talk about the power of high quality questions.

Check out Gay's new book, Your Big Leap Year!

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Where are you sabotaging yourself?
• How to find your zone of genius
• What are the four zones of genius?
• What are wonder questions?
• What are the Five Wishes?
• What are high quality questions for cultivating consciousness?

ABOUT GUEST:
Gay Hendricks has served for more than 30 years as one of the major contributors to the fields of relationship transformation and body/mind therapies. Along with his wife, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, Gay is the author of many bestsellers, including Conscious Loving, At The Speed Of Life, The Big Leap, and the New York Times bestseller, Five Wishes. Dr. Hendricks received his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford in 1974. After a twenty-one-year career as a professor at University Colorado, he founded The Hendricks Institute, and later co-founded its charitable organization, Foundation for Conscious Living. He was also the founder of a virtual learning center for transformation and a publishing company and was a co-founder of a conscious entertainment company. Throughout his career he has done executive coaching with more than 800 executives, including the top management at such firms as Dell Computer, Hewlett Packard, Motorola and KLM. His book, The Corporate Mystic, is used widely to train management in combining business skills and personal development tools.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://hendricks.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hendricks.gay/
Website: https://foundationforconsciousliving.org/

***WORK WITH CHRISTA***: https://www.christabiegler.com/fss

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE: 

• Over restriction is dead; if your practitioner is recommending this, they are stuck in 2010 and not evolving
• Whole food is soul food and fed is best
• Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
• You don’t have to figure it out alone
• Do your best and leave the rest

EPISODE SPONSOR:
A special thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode. Get a discount on any of their products. Use the code lessstressed10

Transcript

[00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD: One day you're sad, the next day you're glad, one moment you're mad, and the next moment you're scared. We need to start looking underneath that and finding that pure, radiant state of consciousness. It's there for everybody.

[00:00:14] Christa Biegler, RD: You just have to stop and tune into it.

[00:00:16] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:46] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together. 

[00:01:04] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. Today on The Less Stressed Life, I have Gay Hendricks, who one of his very many bestselling books was gifted to me a couple of years ago called The Big Leap. And I remember reading it and, sometimes the right thing comes into your life at the right time. And I just remember that there were so many powerful questions in it.

[00:01:23] Christa Biegler, RD: So we'll talk about the power of powerful questions in a moment, but a little bit more about Gay, who has served for over 30 years as one of the major contributors in the field of relationships and body mind therapies. He, along with his wife has been the author of very many bestsellers, including conscious loving at the speed of life, the big leap.

[00:01:44] Christa Biegler, RD: And five wishes, he started with a degree in counseling from Stanford in 1974. And then after a 21 year career as a professor at the university of Colorado, he founded the Hendricks Institute and then later the foundation for conscious living. And he's still going very strong. He was a executive coach for companies like Dell computers, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, et cetera.

[00:02:08] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think he's got so much brilliance to share today. Welcome to the show. Okay. 

[00:02:13] Gay Hendricks: Thank you. Good being with you. 

[00:02:15] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. All right. So I think sometimes we read bios like that, or we arrive here at this point of life and we see everything that you've accomplished this, a success coach or high performance coach, bestselling author, but it wasn't always that way.

[00:02:31] Christa Biegler, RD: Could you tell us a little bit about your origin story and kind of the beginning of your awakening? 

[00:02:37] Gay Hendricks: Oh, sure. I had a rough start to my life in a particular dimension. When I was born, I had some kind of upside down glandular wiring. So even though everybody else in my family was skinny as a rail, I put on extra weight, even in my first year of life, I was one of those real fat babies.

[00:02:58] Gay Hendricks: And then I became a fat toddler. And so they were taking me around always. even up into my teenage years around to different specialists to see if they could figure out what was wrong with me, because I was basically eating the same food that everybody else was eating, but it was making me fat. So later on, medical science actually discovered the problem, but they didn't know about it at that time.

[00:03:21] Gay Hendricks: And now they would give me a certain set of Shots and things like that would correct the problem, but that wasn't known back in 1950 or 55. So anyway I started out as a problem basically. And although I was very smart in school and that kind of thing, being fat really made it, affects everything.

[00:03:40] Gay Hendricks: And so by the time I never got the problem solved in the medical way because nothing ever seemed to work until this one magic day when I was 24 years old and I decided to take responsibility for healing the problem myself rather than have somebody else do it. I had an amazing enlightenment experience of a certain sort that happened on this one day when I was 24, and it led to everything changing.

[00:04:14] Gay Hendricks: And what happened was right now, if you looked at me, you'd see that I weigh about 180, 85 pounds. I'm six feet tall. I look athletic. In fact, I just came from working out at the gym where I work out three days a week. And so I'm very passionate about staying physically fit. And, but if you had seen me when I was 24 years old, you'd see a person who weighed a hundred pounds more than I weigh a little more than 300 pounds at the time.

[00:04:43] Gay Hendricks: And I was also stuck in a really bad relationship that I was trying to get out of, but I didn't have enough money to move to another apartment. I had a really tough, stressful job as a kind of a wrangler at a school for juvenile delinquents. I was called a teacher there, but it was really like running a dormitory full of 24 juvenile delinquents and handling all their stuff and then teaching a couple of classes a day.

[00:05:10] Gay Hendricks: On a particular day, I went out for a walk and I slipped on the ice. It was a New England day and it was cold and it snowed and I slipped on the ice and I went wham down on my back and I hit my head but I didn't knock myself unconscious. actually had the opposite effect it knocked me conscious because it knocked me out of my usual way of seeing the world.

[00:05:37] Gay Hendricks: And during this incident. Two minute period while I was in this altered state, it was like the lights went on in my body and I could see where I was holding a lot of anger of stuff going way back to my father dying and things like that. I could see how I had all this sorrow and fear that I had never touched on and I just was oblivious to my inner world, but I saw something else in that enlightenment.

[00:06:07] Gay Hendricks: moment, two minutes or so, where I could see that everything, like all my emotions and everything, took place against a background of what I called pure consciousness. That I could see in this two minutes that there was this place in me that didn't have any programming on it, that was just Pure radiant consciousness, just like yours, just like the person next door.

[00:06:31] Gay Hendricks: We all have that, but most of us cover it up with other stuff and we don't really appreciate it. But in that two minutes, it was like the lights came on inside me and I could see who I really was. And so I think what saved my life, probably as I was coming out of that experience, I realized, Oh, I'm still lying on the ground.

[00:06:55] Gay Hendricks: I'm freezing. Oh, I want a cigarette at the time. I forgot to tell you I smoked heavily to two or three packs of Marlboros a day. And so I had the something thing. I don't know where the idea came from, but I said, I make a commitment to doing whatever it takes to feeling that pure consciousness all the time and being able to know who I really am.

[00:07:22] Gay Hendricks: And that commitment, I think, really changed everything because I came back to my regular awareness. I still had the same crappy job and I still had the same difficult relationship and I still smoked and everything at the time, but I started making changes on a daily basis. Like for example, I started eating only food that felt like it fed that pure consciousness rather than feeding my old 300 pound body.

[00:07:50] Gay Hendricks: And within a month, I lost 35 pounds. I lost a third of my excess body weight in a month just doing this new thing. And so that was where everything started to change. And then over the next year, I lost a hundred pounds. I got out of the relationship. I changed my life. I went back to school, got my master's in my doctorate in counseling And I haven't had a dull day since started writing books about it.

[00:08:18] Gay Hendricks: And so once I found my life, in developmental psychology, we say in your twenties, you experiment in your thirties, you find your life in your forties, you build your life. And in your fifties, you start to enjoy your life. Hopefully you're enjoying it all along, but most people get more light up, enlightened about their lives when they're in their 50s, but I got the great gift of waking up at age 24.

[00:08:44] Gay Hendricks: So I found my life in my 20s rather than in my 30s and I feel really blessed because of that even though it took, painful Falling down and almost knocking myself unconscious to actually get the process started. I think some of us just have to bottom out before we can start changing our lives.

[00:09:05] Christa Biegler, RD: As someone in my 30s, I do feel like I am finally finding my life to that point, but you brought up the concept of consciousness. So let's talk about it because I think something I feel really passionate about is awareness. Assessment awareness, right? That's what how I feel about consciousness.

[00:09:22] Christa Biegler, RD: How can we define consciousness tangibly? You had this somewhat tangible experience when you fell down and hit your head and all of a sudden not everyone. How does someone awaken consciousness when they don't fall down and hit their head? So what is it? 

[00:09:35] Gay Hendricks: That's why I wrote the big leap so you don't have to go around banging your head on the ground.

[00:09:41] Gay Hendricks: Yes. Such a great question. I just knocked my light over here. The first thing that we need to do is look underneath all of our transitory emotions. One day you're sad, the next day you're glad, one moment you're mad, the next day you're scared, and the next moment you're scared. We need to start looking underneath that and finding that pure radiant state of consciousness.

[00:10:07] Gay Hendricks: It's there for everybody. You just have to stop and tune into it. It's if you're listening to a symphony, learning to listen to the violin section, you can train your consciousness so that you're aware of that. So that's very helpful. A second thing is start noticing what I call in the big leap, your upper limit problems.

[00:10:27] Gay Hendricks: Start noticing where you sabotage yourself when things. Start being better. That is really was one of the big findings of my life. Is that how much we tend to sabotage ourselves when things start going better? And how allergic many of us are to feeling good for any length of time. So the upper limit problem is when you've Felt good for a day or two and then you get into an argument with your partner and oh, you've Got a big raise at work and then you went home and you've gotten an argument with one of your kids So it's that tendency to Sabotage ourselves when we're feeling a good flow inside ourselves And that takes some practice You know that old joke about a, somebody comes up to a cop in Central Park and says, excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?

[00:11:22] Gay Hendricks: And the cop says practice. It's the same way with consciousness. Consciousness is, it's there. We just need to stop covering it over with everything else. So there is that part of us that's pure awareness that's on all the time. But then there's What I would call maybe the shaped awareness or focused awareness.

[00:11:47] Gay Hendricks: If I ask you right now, as I do with many clients, I say, let's pause from our conversation and tune into what you're feeling in your chest right now. Or. Tune into what you're feeling in your belly right now. It's that willing placement of attention, the direction of consciousness that has a great deal of clinical power to heal ourselves.

[00:12:10] Gay Hendricks: Because once you learn I give you a great practical example. Katie and I have seen probably close to 5, 000 couples now in our seminars or here in the office. And one of the things That all of them pretty much come in with is they know how to communicate their anger and they keep communicating about it all the time, but they don't get to the sadness or the fear that's underneath and it's really driving the anger.

[00:12:43] Gay Hendricks: And so a huge breakthrough comes through. I've seen it hundreds of times in here where a person says, Oh, I've been expressing anger at you. But what I really am is scared you're going to leave me. Whoosh! That's a huge moment because I always tell my Coaching students that the biggest journey any human being ever makes is 12 inches from here down to here from their head down to their heart.

[00:13:13] Gay Hendricks: Because the moment you get underneath what your head is telling you and say, Oh, I'm scared or, Oh, I'm sad. And I've been sad since I was seven years old when my father died. There's part of ourselves that tucks Another part of ourselves away and it doesn't come up until much later that maybe you're in a close relationship when you're in your 30s and suddenly up come old fears when you were two years old or seven years old and that kind of thing and we need to know about that so that we can communicate about that straightforwardly rather than creating arguments that recycle over and over.

[00:13:55] Gay Hendricks: We've had people in here that have been having basically the same argument for 30 years. Because it's always based on the recirculation of anger. And the other thing that gets couples in trouble is that all arguments between couples are a race to occupy the victim position. One person says, Hey, I'm the victim.

[00:14:16] Gay Hendricks: You're making my life miserable. And then the other person says, wait a minute, you're the one that's making my life miserable. I'm the victim here. And I've literally seen people take years and years in that victim drama. until somebody sticks their head out of the clouds and say, Oh, I take responsibility for that.

[00:14:33] Gay Hendricks: I see what I do to contribute to that drama. The moment you have that breakthrough, the moment you poke your head out of the clouds of the old trance, you get a whole different view of life, because there's a very different view of life that comes from You're wrong. And I'm right. That's one view of life.

[00:14:53] Gay Hendricks: But the other view of life is to come back home with your responsibility and say, Oh, wow, why do I keep creating the same argument over and over again? Of all the possibilities that were open to me. Last night. Why did I pick a fight? You begin to take responsibility and claim agency and power over your own being that changes everything in life because that relocates the location of your control.

[00:15:24] Gay Hendricks: It puts it over here on you rather than other people having to change to make you happy. 

[00:15:31] Christa Biegler, RD: There's so many important things here. You just talked about the most important journey you'll ever make is from your head to your heart. And in very many recent interviews, this has come up in different ways about, and so really the point of me saying this is just that concept of success leaves clues.

[00:15:46] Christa Biegler, RD: You hear the same message. And I remember I had a guest say recently in Eastern cultures, they would say think less feel more, right? And they would do these bottom up or heart based therapies, where in the Western world, we're still very much practicing getting out of our head and into our heart into that feeling on the note of relationships.

[00:16:03] Christa Biegler, RD: I often feel that some of the biggest sources of our stress is our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others. And So often, as we talk about these types of topics that will group into development of self people say how do I help my partner or my children cultivate consciousness?

[00:16:24] Gay Hendricks: I think the first way to answer that is to say the best type of teaching. is through modeling. Like a while back, somebody told me an argument that started in their family when her partner went in to meditate, but then Got into a screaming match with the kids about can't you kids see I'm trying to meditate in here 

[00:16:47] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:16:51] Gay Hendricks: I think we all have in one way or the other and But teaching through modeling through demonstration is ideal.

[00:16:59] Gay Hendricks: Of course, however, also There are certain skills that parents can really teach kids that are really useful, like I was out walking one day with my friends, Ed and Mary, and they had a toddler at the time, and we were walking down the street, and their little boy, Gabe, tripped over a place on the sidewalk, and basically did a face plant.

[00:17:26] Gay Hendricks: And I noticed that what he did was look around to see how his parents would react to that. And so they said, Hey, Gabe, what's happening? And he shook it off. He, like a dog or cattle shake off a little trauma. He shook it off and said, Oh, I fell down, which is really a great thing.

[00:17:50] Gay Hendricks: Like they didn't make a drama of it. They just create a condition for him to learn something. Now you can imagine another set of parents, helicopter parents that would have started screaming and say, Oh my God, are you all right? And clustered around it and turned it into a drama. And so It's oftentimes that kind of message we give to kids that has a lasting impression is seeing how we handle something.

[00:18:18] Gay Hendricks: And that's what I tried to do with my own daughter. Although she's big now, she's in her fifties. So hopefully she's learned those kinds of things. But I'll tell you though, I've worked with couples now for, Katie and I have been working together since we got together and we've, we just celebrated our 44th anniversary of the day we met back in 1980.

[00:18:40] Gay Hendricks: And one thing I've kept track of is what do couples really fight about? It's basically only three or four things. Kids, chores, money, or sex. And I'll tell you something, you can put this in the bank,

[00:18:56] Gay Hendricks: sex problems are never about sex, money problems are never just about money, problems with the kids are never just about money, and problems with the chores are never just about the chores. Something else. Is driving especially any argument that's happened three or more times, just file that away in your memory bank, any argument that's happened the same sort of way, three or more times, it's telling you that it's not about what you're arguing about.

[00:19:29] Gay Hendricks: There's something else going on down in the basement that needs to be looked at. Like about a year into our relationship, 40 some years ago. I hadn't figured that out yet. There was this one magic day where I was criticizing Katie for something and as I heard myself sounding angry or irritated, I realized that, oh, I'm feeling afraid down in my belly.

[00:19:57] Gay Hendricks: I'm actually anger. And so I just stopped and I said that. I realize I'm criticizing you and nagging you, but what I really am is scared and I stopped and I turned into that I, oh, I'm afraid I'm going to lose you, we had our relationship only one year and we were going through a big learning curve of whether we were going to stay together or not.

[00:20:22] Gay Hendricks: And particularly whether I was going to make a big decision. Full level commitment to her and that moment of seeing what was underneath the surface that really changed everything because you should have seen like her eyes suddenly. Oh, because she was listening to me. Criticize her and all of a sudden I'm talking authentically to her and it made such an impression that we began to just do that more and more in our relationships talk about What was going on beneath the surface and we spent the 1980s Doing that and coaching other couples and then there was a magic day after we wrote conscious Loving where the Oprah show called and, we literally went overnight from working with 10 couples in our living room to working with 10 million couples on Oprah's stage.

[00:21:16] Gay Hendricks: But in a way it was the very same process because human beings get ourselves stuck in only a small number of ways. One is by not being honest, not telling the truth or not being willing to listen to the truth from another person. A whole bunch of us get ourselves stuck by getting into that victim position and getting entrenched there and just being right All the time and thinking we know what our problem is and we spend our time doing that and not enough time doing Why am I creating it like this?

[00:21:52] Gay Hendricks: Taking responsibility, but a big third one i've found with couples is that When people aren't feeling creatively fulfilled, like in the big leap, I talk about finding your genius zone, what you love to do and what you most feel passionate about. When people aren't doing that, they don't feel good inside.

[00:22:18] Gay Hendricks: And that not feeling good about their creative expression causes a lot of rattle in the other areas of life. Arguments, problems with your eating, weight, addictions, all of those things have one foot in the bucket of unfulfilled Things that we need to keep bringing out of that bucket and bringing into real life.

[00:22:47] Gay Hendricks: And that becomes a big issue in your 30s and I'm glad you're already in your genius zone in your 30s, but it becomes a really huge issue when people are in their 40s or 50s. If they haven't begun to tap that deeply creative part of us that I call your genius. For all of those in your, who are listeners in your 20s or 30s, good on you for figuring out this so soon, but if you're in 40s or 50s, get a move on, read the book again, listen to it on Audible, buy the new one.

[00:23:17] Gay Hendricks: Oh, by the way, I need to put in a plug for my new one, which is called Your Big Leap Year. It's a day book, one day at a time book. And I want everybody to know about that because People have been asking me to write it for 15 years, and I finally got around to doing it this past year. So I'm really delighted that it's out into the world.

[00:23:37] Christa Biegler, RD: We're not going to give the impression that I know my full zone of genius. We'll come to that in a moment. We'll go talk about zones and fears, which I think are really important. But I've got to ask a When you worked at that juvenile detention center and I spent 8 years. Also, I live on the territory of a reservation and there's some hard stuff that happens here. And I worked in a medical center for 8 years and a lot of. Health practitioners come in with very good intentions that get very quickly burned out, and there's a lot of generational trauma, garbage, and disparities of all types going on there.

[00:24:14] Christa Biegler, RD: And I'm wondering, when I think about, there's, Working on yourself, and then there's also, as you think about the impact on the world, and you look at a very broken thing, and you start to wonder, Oh, is there help? What is the answer? Like, how do you bring consciousness to this culture or concentrated area where there is so much victim?

[00:24:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Victimhood, generational trauma, et cetera. So that's an extremely hard question. I don't expect you to really actually have an answer because I've resolved that I don't know an answer as I've turned that over in my head many times over the years. 

[00:24:47] Gay Hendricks: I've been asked that a lot and I have an answer and I hope it's satisfying, but it's a start.

[00:24:53] Gay Hendricks: Anyway I work with a lot of people who come, they want to work on their genius, but they're still in a job. And sometimes the job is a real fancy job. Like yesterday I was working with a person who's a surgeon, and he makes 7 a year. Doing surgery and yet it's not what he really wants to be doing.

[00:25:12] Gay Hendricks: And how do you get out from under that? My suggestion always is to start with something doable and what I start people with is 10 minutes a day pencil 10 minutes a day Into your calendar, whenever you can get it, just start every week and pencil that in where your 10 minutes is going to be and honor that scrupulously.

[00:25:34] Gay Hendricks: Even if for that 10 minutes, the only thing you do is just sit there and say what is my genius? What do I really love to do or what would really serve my genius? So you might not even do anything with your hands during that period of time, but at least you're focusing directly on that question about what is my genius and how can I express it?

[00:25:54] Gay Hendricks: So start with 10 minutes, put it in your calendar. Here's what will happen if you do it, because I've had people do this for years. Wants to be 20 minutes the next week and that 20 minutes wants to be 30 minutes and what people do is gradually build up more and more time of in their ordinary regular job, doing more of the things that they most love to do.

[00:26:18] Gay Hendricks: Now, that's a great thing to do because it's a constructive thing rather than sitting around thinking, I'm not doing my genius. Oh, I'm I got to do another hip replacement. I've done a thousand hip replacement.

[00:26:31] Gay Hendricks: Like I had the famous case that I write about in one of my books with his permission of the dentist who came to me, very successful dentist made several hundred thousand dollars a year. But he was a poet at heart, and he always wanted to quit being a dentist and put his attention on, going back to school, getting a master's degree in creative writing.

[00:26:52] Gay Hendricks: But I just had him start writing poetry about being a dentist. And, he actually getting a few of them published in dental journals. Imagine that. And Wow, to me, that's genius because it's taking something that already is, a profession or a job you already have and beginning to inject a little more consciousness into it.

[00:27:17] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. So I'm going to come and ask you about the types, the zones here in a moment, but you were just talking a little bit about injecting consciousness into a challenging environment.

[00:27:30] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think that's what it is that people often think, Oh, I've got this situation. And you earlier talked about modeling. And so when I think about a challenging environment, like a whole. Town of what seems like an entire town of people that need consciousness what I hear is modeling and injecting that in there.

[00:27:50] Christa Biegler, RD: And this also comes, I think this is also important because so often as we look at burnout so often the recommendation is, or the fear maybe is, oh, I'm afraid to quit my job. And so instead of quitting your job, what if you can somewhat have everything at first. Bye. 

[00:28:06] Gay Hendricks: That's I think the way to start because there's an old saying from the spiritual tradition, the Sufi tradition.

[00:28:14] Gay Hendricks: They say, once you embark on changing your life and becoming more conscious, you have to learn to do your work with your other hand. The work, if you're a potter or that saying came from a time when, People had very simple jobs, one person was a potter, one person was a shepherd, that kind of thing.

[00:28:32] Gay Hendricks: So you need to begin to do that work. with your other hand, you still do it, but you're putting a lot of focus on adding your consciousness to the mix of whatever you're doing. 

[00:28:45] Christa Biegler, RD: We were just talking about a little bit about the zone of genius. Can we talk about the zones. The four zone.

[00:28:50] Christa Biegler, RD: Yes. 

[00:28:50] Christa Biegler, RD: Probably one of the most underrated nutrients I use in practice is potassium. Low potassium can be a huge factor in energy, relapsing gut issues, thyroid function, and even regulating blood pressure. Now your blood test for potassium will look normal most of the time, otherwise you'd feel faint and maybe like you're going to pass out.

[00:29:09] Christa Biegler, RD: But your tissue levels of potassium will decline With an increase of the stress hormone, cortisol big picture. I find it's just really hard for humans to get enough food based potassium in their diet, unless they live in a tropical place. And I'm usually recommending my clients get at least 4, 000 milligrams of food based potassium per day.

[00:29:29] Christa Biegler, RD: That's why I really commonly recommend Jigsaw's Pickleball Cocktail to help my clients. It's one of the only electrolyte products on the market with a hefty dose of potassium at 800 mg per scoop, when most electrolyte products only have about 200 mg. Making it really hard to reach those high doses of food based potassium I recommend per day.

[00:29:51] Christa Biegler, RD: Plus, it's automatically the best choice if my client is dealing with swelling, which can be related to imbalances of sodium and potassium in the tissue. I'm a potassium evangelist, and Jigsaw's Pickleball Cocktail is one of my most used tools of the trade. You can get a discount on any of jigsaw's amazing products, including pickleball@jigsawhealth.com with the code less stressed.

[00:30:14] Christa Biegler, RD: 10. That's three S's, less stressed, 10.

[00:30:20] Gay Hendricks: In my work, I. Uncovered four big zones that people spend their day in. And the first two are zones that. When I describe them, know that I'm imploring you to get out of them as soon as possible. Okay. Because the first two zones are your zone of incompetence. Where you're doing things you're not very good at.

[00:30:43] Gay Hendricks: Or you don't enjoy. And the second one is your zone of competence where you're doing things that you can do, but somebody else could do them just as well. So those are two zones that you really want to place a focus on. Like in The Big Leap, I think I talk about the story of the day I was standing in line at the post office to send a package, and I stood there for 15 minutes in a line that was creeping forward at a glacial pace, and they had one clerk on duty that was handling all this.

[00:31:18] Gay Hendricks: And so I was there for 15 minutes and I and people were getting irritated around me too. I wasn't the only one because this one elderly fellow started yelling, get more corks out here at the top of his lungs. But I realized. Oh, I've spent 15 minutes doing something that somebody else could do just as well as I am.

[00:31:38] Gay Hendricks: And at the time I charged 1, 000 an hour for my coaching services. And I realized, wow, I've just invested 250 plus in sending a 10 package to somebody. That's the last time I've ever stood in line at the post office. From then on, I resigned from that function. So maybe you can't afford a personal assistant yet.

[00:32:04] Gay Hendricks: Around here, we have an army of them and but we started out with just one. And I always said my life was getting too complicated when my personal assistant came to me and asked me if they could handle hire another personal assistant for themselves. So when your assistant needs an assistant, beware, you're getting into kind of murky territory there.

[00:32:25] Gay Hendricks: But fortunately I have a genius manager in my office that can handle anything. Margaret, my dear Margaret has been with us for the last 10 or 15 years and she's a masterful organizer and lover puller. So I don't even have to think about that kind of stuff anymore. By the time it would occur to me to mail a package, it's already in the mail.

[00:32:47] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. So that's a zone of incompetence, right? 

[00:32:50] Gay Hendricks: The zone of competence, get out of that one too, because you can be easily replaced. If a boss comes along and says, Oh, there's two people doing the same thing. Why do I need that other one that I just hired? You set yourself up for easily replacement and a lot of boredom too, if you're doing something that you're good at, but doesn't challenge you.

[00:33:10] Gay Hendricks: So if you're in one of those two zones delegate, get out of there, maybe you can't afford a personal assistant, but what you can do is maybe barter with somebody. That's what that's One of the other of my clients did in the early days was just do some trading for what you need.

[00:33:29] Gay Hendricks: What you want to do though is also focus your energy on the top two zones, which is your zone of excellence, And your zone of genius, the zone of excellence is when you're doing stuff you're good at, you're doing stuff that gets you raises at work and at a girl and at a boy and good things happen to you as a result of doing that thing that you're really good at.

[00:33:56] Gay Hendricks: It has a giant trap in it though, because the better you get at your zone of excellence, the more people will want you to do more stuff in your zone of excellence and stay in your zone of action, because a problem and I've worked now with, I think, about 1800. Executives in different firms of different kinds over the past 50 years.

[00:34:19] Gay Hendricks: One of the things that top flight people have a problem with is they're so good at their zone of excellence that everybody wants them to stay there, and they get an unfulfilled yearning to spend more time in their genius zone. And so that's incredibly important to honor that, because if you don't.

[00:34:44] Gay Hendricks: Burnout and rust out are big factors for people who don't listen to that yearning for genius. So a lot of the times I've been walking down the halls of, in fact, I just have one memory of walking down the hall in a big company in the Midwest with the CEO. And I was describing to him that I would like him to pencil into his calendar 10 minutes a day.

[00:35:14] Gay Hendricks: Of just doing nothing but reflecting on his genius and how he could spend more time in his genius zone. And here's this guy, he was probably at the time worth at least 40 or 50 million dollars, top of the line executives. He said, Oh boy, if only I could do that. Who's boss here? He's the CEO of this company that has 50, 000 employees.

[00:35:42] Gay Hendricks: And if he's not taking care of himself, what is that broadcasting down the line? And were walking down the hall. Okay, do a 180. We go back to his office. We just sit there and do that for 10 minutes. And it started a real habit for him of taking his 10 minutes of genius time every day.

[00:36:03] Gay Hendricks: And I know that it's addictive. Your genius is addictive and will keep wanting you to do more and more of it all the time. Ultimately, he got out of that corporate job and created with a couple of his buddies, his own private equity. Outfit so he never has to do anything that he doesn't want to do anymore And I started thinking that way in the 1980s And when I first figured it out I realized I was only doing an hour a day in my own genius zone.

[00:36:34] Gay Hendricks: And so I started bumping that up and By the end of the century I started out trying to get to 30 Then that took me a couple years and then I got to 50 that took me a couple years And then I made this big bowl thing around 1990. I said, okay, by the end of this century, I want to be a hundred percent living in my genius zone, not doing anything that I don't love to do.

[00:36:59] Gay Hendricks: And it took me a lot of, attention over the next 10 years. But by the end of the century, I'd eliminated everything that I don't love to do. So where are we now? 24, I've had, 25 years basically of only doing what I most love to do and Katie too and our students, it's a magical thing you have happened and it just requires, like you say, a little bit of application of consciousness, expanding your consciousness is a certain area.

[00:37:28] Christa Biegler, RD: It feels like compound interest almost like just put away 10 minutes or 10 a day and then in 25 years, you will have everything you want. It's really that simple. And I think there was a couple huge things in the big leap that really struck me. And I felt very seen or very triggered or very exposed.

[00:37:48] Christa Biegler, RD: That's what I felt when I read it. And I was like, Oh, I'm in my zone of excellence. I am very much in the zone of excellence. I think one of my questions was how do you access the zone of genius, which you do have, you talk about in the book, but then you've actually created many more resources about, but you've talked about it here.

[00:38:05] Christa Biegler, RD: Just start with 10 minutes and reflect on it. And there's so many ways to do this. You can just do nothing. An exercise I like to do that I feel like fosters this along the way is. I love drawing a line down a piece of paper and writing down what is killing me inside and what is filling my cup, because to your point about burnout, I feel so strongly about this.

[00:38:26] Christa Biegler, RD: I feel so strongly about not being burned out and about burnout as a topic. And I agree with you completely that it's like there's a dead part of yourself that's not feeling creatively fulfilled. Inside. And I think that's such an important thing. And I think it boils down to asking yourself good questions, which was the other, I think one of the first things that started to move me in your book, because at that point I'd already decided that the quality of your life was related to the quality of your questions and not very far into the book, it's just full of great questions.

[00:38:56] Christa Biegler, RD: It's am I willing to increase the amount of time that my whole life goes well? Am I willing to feel good and have my life go well all of the time? And it's oof. All right, let me answer these questions, right? And yeah, questions 

[00:39:10] Gay Hendricks: are so powerful questions are one of the great superpowers that human beings have, but a lot of times we have them focused on the wrong kind of questions like, what's wrong with me?

[00:39:22] Gay Hendricks: Why did I get drunk again on Friday night and start an argument? That kind of question. What we teach here are what we call wonder questions that would change your life if you knew the answer to them and questions you really don't know the answer to. And for example the new book I give a, every day I give some kind of a little meditation or something to say in your mind or a wonder question.

[00:39:47] Gay Hendricks: And the first one that starts it off is, I commit to expanding my genius every day of my life. That uses the power of commitment. The power of wonder is one of those super powers, like the power of commitment, where you turn that into a wonder question what do I need to do this day to expand my genius?

[00:40:11] Gay Hendricks: Wonder questions. We like to begin them with a hum for two reasons, because It's a wonder statement, but also when you hum, it integrates the right and the left hemisphere of your mind. So if you go you're putting your right and left hemispheres together to work for you. What would I like for lunch today?

[00:40:30] Gay Hendricks: What would feed my genius? What can I contribute to the world before sundown today that would make everybody's world a better place? Begin to ask yourself those kind of Open ended questions that will tap into your genius. It's a super powerful technology. 

[00:40:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Wonder questions that would change your life.

[00:40:51] Christa Biegler, RD: If you knew the answers to them. I love that because I'm always on the lookout for water. Some high quality questions we can ask ourselves. I feel like that's such a really good place to land, but before we do. The issue with before you can take the big leap, before you can be in this place of living in your zone of genius, you're held back by fear.

[00:41:15] Christa Biegler, RD: And I don't think we really talked about those fears. I think that's a huge part of the big leap. And so why don't we cover what those four fears are? 

[00:41:24] Gay Hendricks: Yes. Upper limits problems are caused by old limiting beliefs and all those old limiting beliefs are rooted in fear. And so let's say that you. create some kind of upper limit problem for yourself.

[00:41:42] Gay Hendricks: You trip and fall like I did, or you start an argument, or you get enrolled in an argument, or you perform an addictive act. of not being over on the side cheering for somebody else, but being the person that other people are cheering for, that willingness to step up into the light.

[00:42:01] Gay Hendricks: It's not that everybody has to. Be as charismatic as Oprah or somebody like that. It's just you have to be willing to be the star of your own show, that you have to be willing to take a stand for opening up to the love you need and the wisdom you need and the all of the access to the powers in yourself that you need.

[00:42:26] Gay Hendricks: So to me, life on this planet, nobody knows. exactly what the true meaning of life is, but I can absolutely guarantee you it's not to have a bad time. Whoever made up that rule that life is about suffering and having a bad time, they need to go spend a little bit more time in the meditation room because life is really whatever you dream it up to be.

[00:42:55] Gay Hendricks: Like Walt Disney used to say, if you can dream it, you can do it. And that's, as a matter of fact, I worked in Orlando, Florida, when Disney bought the first land there that was going to be Disney World, way, many years in the future. And I remember I, like a lot of people, saying, Disney bought 30, 000 acres of swamp?

[00:43:22] Gay Hendricks: Because that's basically what he did was he bought a lot of swamp and then turned it into stuff that wasn't quite as swampy and everybody was just flabbergasted, but he had a vision of something that he was going to do with that swamp. And so it took him, you know what, I think maybe seven or eight years to do it from the time he bought the land.

[00:43:44] Gay Hendricks: And I found that human beings have the capacity to Not just do one or two big things with their life, but many big things, like a big thing is to have a close loving relationship. A big thing is to get a profession. A big thing is to have kids. To me, I'm after people going all the way in having everything they want and need and doing everything they love to do.

[00:44:13] Gay Hendricks: And then teaching that to the rest of the world too. That's what I've made my life about. And I haven't had a dull moment in the last 40 or 50 years. 

[00:44:24] Christa Biegler, RD: And that is, if we were going to ask The audience to take one thing or take one action step. One thing I've heard you say on other interviews is decide on some of these big things.

[00:44:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Maybe if you want to expound on that just a little bit. Yeah. 

[00:44:38] Gay Hendricks: One of my books actually is all about this. It's called five wishes and it's about how to ask yourself a question that gets at what your five big goals or wishes are for your life. When I did it, I came up with, and that this goes back into the 19 way into the early 80s.

[00:44:58] Gay Hendricks: I hadn't yet made a commitment fully to Kathleen, my wife, Katie, we call her. And I realized my big dream for my life is I want to have a partner that I can grow and change with over a long period of time. And I hadn't realized how important that was, that was the number one thing. Because I jokingly said what good is having a Ph.

[00:45:24] Gay Hendricks: D. in Counseling Psychology from Stanford if I can't learn how to get along well with one other person? And so I created all sorts of relationship dramas in my teens and twenties, but none of them had really ever led to anything lasting. And so I made that commitment. I'm, that's number one for me. And that was really helpful because on the way home from that party where I realized that, I made that commitment to Katie.

[00:45:54] Gay Hendricks: And it's, 40 some years of magic since we did that. And Katie and I got in the habit. See, I think if I mentioned one other thing in relationship, not only do you have two people who need to get in touch with their own individual genius, I think every relationship has the genius of the relationship that needs to be released.

[00:46:21] Gay Hendricks: Why is this couple together? What are they there to produce for the world? Cause a lot of people, if you really looked at it, you say the only thing they really produce is they have a job and they make each other. miserable, but not so miserable that they get a divorce for 30 years.

[00:46:38] Gay Hendricks: A lot of times that's what the situation when people come here to work on their relationship, they're tired of recycling the old dramas. I think that, if I go back to my own five wishes, one was to have a close relationship. One was to learn how to write. From my heart rather than just from my head, because at the time having a PhD at Stanford was great, but I can guarantee you, they did not mention the word heart 

[00:47:03] Christa Biegler, RD: there, 

[00:47:03] Gay Hendricks: It was a very heady, difficult Counseling and clinical psychology program, but it wasn't about learning how to write from your heart or anything like that.

[00:47:12] Gay Hendricks: But I realized that even though I could write articles and things, I'd never really written anything that came from inside me. And so that was my number two or three. And then another one was to learn how to live in a state of completion. So I didn't have anything unsaid with important people or unlistened to.

[00:47:30] Gay Hendricks: And a fourth one I remember when I wrote down my list of five was that I wanted to learn how to, I wanted to learn as much as I could about spirit and the creative force in life, whether you call it spirit or God or great spirit or whatever, it's that animating force of the universe. I wanted to learn as much as I could about that.

[00:47:51] Gay Hendricks: And the fifth thing, and I still celebrate it to this day. is I want to savor my life. I want to be there for the important moments of my life. I want to be there for every moment of my life. Remember that old John Lennon saying about life is what's going on while you're busy making other plans. You know that so many times we're up here Where life is going on out here and we're not really participating with it.

[00:48:20] Gay Hendricks: I want to be here for every moment of my life, whether I'm talking to 10 million people on Oprah or 10, 000 or a hundred thousand or whatever, listen to your show, I want to be there for the whole thing. And that's an art that you have to practice in life because I came from a place of. Not being there a lot of the time, not being in the moment, not being in the here and now.

[00:48:44] Gay Hendricks: And that's where all the good stuff is for being there for the moments of love and juicy communication and creativity and all those kinds of things. It's a very magical place to be. I highly recommend that everybody put that on their big list is coming up with the five things that you most want to accomplish or experience in your life.

[00:49:08] Christa Biegler, RD: When I read in your bio that you've written 40 books, I think to myself, how do you have content for 40 books? But because you made this big thing about writing with your heart, I think it makes much more sense on how that has happened. And so now I know that the five wishes is on my list because you said it's all about asking yourself these good questions, which I think is the, it's always, I feel like I'm always on the hunt for that.

[00:49:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Where can people learn more about your work? Any last things that you want to say as we wrap up? 

[00:49:39] Gay Hendricks: Yes. The best place probably is our main website, Hendricks. com. And there you can find out all about our trainings and our books. Our books are on sale everywhere. The new one, your big leap year just came out a couple of weeks ago.

[00:49:53] Gay Hendricks: So that's available everywhere. Our other website is Foundation for Conscious Living. And Foundation for Conscious Living is our non profit branch of our institute where we have a lot of free resources like videos you can watch on how to solve relationship problems and how to lose weight consciously and every sort of thing.

[00:50:14] Gay Hendricks: You can do searches in there and find out what we said about all sorts of things. Enjoy that and then just make your whole life a quest for. Expressing and experiencing more and more of your genius every day and watch the magic unfold. 

[00:50:28] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I couldn't think of a more beautiful mission and ripple effect in the world.

[00:50:35] Christa Biegler, RD: And I'm glad I'm able to just be a little teeny tiny droplet in the ripple at the moment. So thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:50:42] Gay Hendricks: Thank you for getting into your genius zone and showing other people how it's done. 

[00:50:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Thank you.