#306 - THE BIG LEAP with Gay Hendricks

Published Nov 14, 2024, 4:00 PM

Today, I’m thrilled to share an inspiring episode of Your Dream Life podcast with a special guest: Gay Hendricks, the brilliant author of The Big Leap, a book that has transformed lives across the globe.

Gay dives deep into profound topics such as overcoming the upper limit problem, which often holds us back right after we achieve success, and stepping into our ‘zone of genius’—the place where our true power and joy meet.

You’ll hear about:

  1. What the ‘upper limit problem’ really is and how it shows up in everyday life.
  2. Practical steps to break free from self-sabotage and lean into sustained success.
  3. The secret to identifying your unique genius zone.
  4. How to view time not as an enemy, but as a friend that can expand for you when you align with your true self.

Whether you're looking to break free from your comfort zone or aiming for new heights in your personal and professional life, Gay’s wisdom will light your path.

Don’t miss out—this episode is packed with insights to fuel your journey. 

As always, I’d LOVE to hear what resonates with you from this episode and what you plan to implement after listening in. So please share and let’s keep the conversation going in the Dream Life Podcast Facebook Group here.    

Have a wonderful weekend… and remember, it all starts with a dream 💛

Enjoy! 

Kristina 💛

Dream Life & kikki.K Founder  

SHOW NOTES:

  • The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
  • The Wealthy Gardener by John Soforic: Kristina mentions this book as an inspirational read.
  • Buy your Dream Life Christmas Planner here: A step-by-step planner to help organize a calm, joy-filled Christmas season.
  • Join my virtual book club GROW for December where we meet weekly on Zoom to discuss and squeeze the learnings from Gay's brilliant book,The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level.
  • Join my Platinum Coaching Program - where in December the focus is What to Stop, Start & Continue in 2025. It'll be a clarity-focused month - helping you shape your 2025 vision with actionable steps, featuring insights from the inspiring Australian of the Year, Taryn Brumfitt, as your Super Star SpeakerLearn more here.
  • Dream Life Community Facebook Group: Connect with like-minded dreamers.

RESOURCES:

What would you do with your life if you knew you couldn't fail, if you had all the money, all the time, all the knowledge, all the resources that you needed. What would you do with your life if you simply knew that anything was possible for you? My name is Christina Carlsen, founder of global Swedish design and inspiration brand dream Life, an author of the book Your Dream Life Starts Here, and I love exploring these sorts of questions to inspire people like you to chase your own dream life, whatever that means for you. Many years ago, I wrote down a dream on paper that would one day bring Swedish design to the world and create beautiful, inspiring and meaningful product that would bring sparks of joy into the everyday lives of millions. Now that I have achieved that dream, I want to leave reach everything I've learned to help you dream big and to create a global movement to inspire one hundred and one million people to transform their lives and transform the world. In return, each episode will dive deep into the power dreaming and share real insights and practical ideas that you can use immediately to build a dream life of your own. Whatever that means for you. Hi there, and welcome back to another episode. Today we have an incredible special guest, and the inspiring guest is Gay Hendrix and he is the author of The Big Leap, a book that has transformed lives worldwide. And in this episode, Gay, we guide us through the profound wisdom he shares in his book, diving into topics like taking the Big Leap, embracing our zone of genius, and breaking through barriers that holds us back from our greatest potential. Whether you're feeling stuck in a comfort zone or yearning to make a bold shift towards your dreams, Gays Inside will encourage you to take that leap. This episode is all about stepping into true power and realizing what is possible when you let go of limits and allow yourself to thrive and dream. I am so excited to let you know that we're actually going to read his book in my book club Grow in December twenty twenty four. And if you are interested reading this book with a bunch of like minded people who are also ready to take the Big Leap in the new year twenty twenty five, please join us. We will read it, we'll discuss it, and we will implement it. I will link to it in the show notes, or just head over to your dream Live starts here dot com. So let's get started. Well, Hello, Gay, I am so thrilled to have you a very warm welcome.

Thank you, Thank you so much, Christine. I'm so delighted to be here.

I am so thrilled, as I was saying before we press record, when I read your book quite a few years ago, I absolutely loved it. And I have a coaching program and sometimes I see this upper limits problem, and I decided to read your book in December, so that's coming up in my online book club called Grow, and I had already already set that book. And then I thought, I'm going to reach out to you. But then I thought maybe you might be too busy for a smaller podcast. But I'm just so so thrilled that you decided to say yes.

So thank you my pleasure.

So before we get started, I ask a question to all my guests, and that is, did you have a dream as a child, something you wanted to do or have or become.

M I had a dream when I was a little boy. It wasn't a dream, it was a vision, kind of it was more like who I wanted to be, regardless of what I was doing. And I remember that I was out in the side yard.

In fact, I was.

Playing in the driveway of our house, and because there was a bunch of pine straw on it, and I forget what I was doing with the pine straw. But anyway, I got tired after a while and I lay down on the grass and I was looking up through the trees and seeing the sky. And my grandmother took me to a Bible class where they were talking about Jesus being the Son of God. And I was just I was probably five or six years old, but it was a summer Bible class at the church, and so I'd never heard of this idea of anybody being the son of God. And so what I was thinking was, well, wait a minute, why don't we all be the son of God? Either everybody is or nobody is. You can't be just one person. It sounds very precocious for a five or six year old, but I was looking the sky and I was saying, well, this is there's only one sky, you know. And anyway, it was this moment of oneness, of kind of feeling connected to everything and I always wanted to keep feeling that way. I always no matter what I did. You know, for a while I wanted in high school, I wanted to be a football player, but it was always had to do with that feeling of oneness and connection, and so you know, I went through all the usual struggles as a teenager. I was very obese, and I got into smoking and fourteen labs never interested in drinking, but I probably would have abused that.

If I'd liked the taste of it.

I never did, but anyway, I at one point, when I was about fifteen, my girlfriend at the time, Alice, was in a club called Future Teachers of America FTA, and she invited me to come with her to the meetings. And I didn't realize this, but if you were in the Future Teachers club, whenever there was a teacher that maybe had to go to a doctor's appointment, they would call one of the future teachers to fill in for.

A couple of hours.

And after doing that a few times, I enjoyed so much, even though I was only a like a sophomore junior in high school. Maybe I really enjoyed interacting with the kids, even though some of them were pretty much my age. And so that's when I developed the idea of being a teacher, and that really appealed to me, and that was my images from then on. And I saw myself getting my PhD by the time I was twenty eight years old, and I wanted to get my PhD in counseling psychology, and I set my mind to it, and I got my PhD within two weeks, in the words, two weeks.

Before my twenty eighth birthday.

And so that also let me know that, you know, we can create whatever. It took, you know, years of work to get there, but it came out of this original vision. I don't know why I picked twenty eight, but I said, Okay, I'm going to finish my studies by the time i'm twenty eight, and then I'm going to go do my life in my thirties and become a university professor. So that was kind of the formal version of how I became a teacher. Once I became a university professor, I realized that about ninety percent of the interesting stuff that I wanted to teach people wasn't in the curriculum, you know, it wasn't me and I enjoyed it though. I was a professor at the University of Colorado for twenty one years, and for a while I was the chairman of the Counselingology department there, and then for a much longer period I was a professor in the counseling psychology department. But once we were on Oprah and wrote Conscious Loving and a couple of other books, I suddenly realized there's this big old world out here, and I can create my own university or learning center. I don't call the university, but it's a learning center for learning the truly essential things of life, like communication, meditation, and how to work with people who are going through difficult times and those kinds of things. But a lot of times, with all due respect to the big institutions like the university that I work for, a lot of the bureaucracy, it's like it squirted glue on the creative process of people. You know, It's kind of slows down the machinery. And so I didn't like that part of it. But now it's, you know, the best of all worlds, because like we have this afternoon just as a matter of fact, it's starting in about fifteen minutes one of our big online courses where we have people all over the world who are studying our processes that we use and relationship and in the big leap, and you know, my wife and I will be sitting in our home office doing that.

And to me, that's a beautiful situation.

Yeah, I absolutely love it. And I can so relate to so many of your things. Having that big vision was always something when I started my first business, having that clear big vision was so important for me to kind of get there. And then now when I have a new business, because the same as your university experience, with bigger business comes more challenges with people and challenges with all the systems and things that I have now started a new business and I'm going to keep it small.

I'm going to keep it online.

And you know, I'm.

Doing similar things to you in a different way, and it's just the best. And before we started the podcast, you were saying also that you now are putting a lot of effort into your garden, which I think is such a beautiful thing to kind of combine work and passions and fun and enjoying life as we are doing life.

I'm really having a wonderful time. I didn't grow up around. I mean, I didn't enjoy and appreciate nature when I was younger. But we found this wonderful home about twenty let's see twenty two, twenty three years ago, here in this little mountain valley that we live in, Ohio Valley in southern California. And everything will grow here. We didn't realize that when we moved here. But I'm just having a tangerine tree planted this afternoon, and an avocado tree, and I'm going to grow passion fruit and that kind of thing. So I'm kind of a late life gardener, a conjurt to gardener in later life.

Oh I love that. Have you read actually completely side note her. Have you read a book called The Wealthy Gardener? No, I'll send you the link after, but it's a beautiful book. So it's basically he's been on my podcast as well. And I just happened to find that book, you know, a couple of years ago, and it was it's about a guy from the US and he he wanted financial freedom, but not you know, not millions of dollars, just enough to cover what he wanted. And so he decided he was a chiropractor and then he became a real estate investor, and the book is about how he made that all happen. But it's half fiction and half nonfiction, and the fiction side is about a wealthy gardener. And I think you will really I think you will really enjoy reading it. It's a beautiful book. If it's one of my favorite books. It's very much like a modern version of Think and Grow Rich in my opinion.

Oh good, well, yeah, I'd love to have the link to it. I Interestingly enough, my mother and my aunt were avid gardeners when I was a kid, but they would get into these long discussions and arguments.

You know.

One I would say, why don't we grow hyrocantha this year? And I'm oh, no, let's grow hydrody. I was just all these jumble of words and I just kind of turned my back on the whole thing. But now I really love it.

Oh that's fantastic. So let's get into talk about your amazing book, The Big Leap. It has inspired so many people to break through their limitations. Could you share kind of the core message of the book and how it encouraged us to leave our zone of genius?

Yes, The Big Leap is about two big things. One is how to get out from under what I call the upper limit problem. Your upper limit problem is the ways you sabotage yourself to keep you from growing, or to stop you from growing after you've had a breakthrough. And so you know, I've been around the world now a bunch of different times, like one point two million frequent flyer miles, and I've talked to people in India, China, wherever, and everybody has their own version of the upper limit problem, like down in Australia where you live. My Australian clients talk a lot about the tall poppy syndrome. You know that the idea don't be the tall poppy, don't stick your head out above the crowd, because the farmer will cut your head off. And in your home territory of Sweden, do you remember the word logum?

Sure do. I don't like logum.

And then tell them what logum means in Sweden.

Well, it's I actually don't really know how to explain it, but it's like not too much not too little in you know, somewhere in between. It's but it's a beautiful thing in terms of you know, self care and all that kind of stuff. But when it comes to kind of business, you don't want to be logum no.

Yeah, So every culture that I've been in has some version of the upper limit problem, and we need to really become keen students of that in ourselves, because if we don't, we're operating out of limiting beliefs that often got put in place before you could even walk off with your lunch pail and go to kindergarten. You know, they're often in your bones kind of at an early age. And so The Big Leap first explores the upper limit problem and what it's based on. And it's always based on a fear of some kind, and it's based on limiting beliefs like I don't deserve to have the good things of life, or I don't deserve to be a star, or I don't deserve to be wealthy. It's about I don't deserve to fill in the blank.

And so that's one of the limiting beliefs.

So I explore that in The Big Leap, and what that's all about and leads to is opening up more space for you to occupy your genius zone and your genius zone once you get some of those upper limits cleared away. Is a combination of two things. It's what you most love to do and also what makes your biggest contribution to people around you. And so the second big principle in the Big Leap is about opening up your genius zone.

And learning how to live in it.

As a matter of fact, I didn't bring it in here with me, but I have a new book called Your Big Leap Year, which is like a day at a time book, three hundred and sixty six days of Big Leap, so you can kind of go through it a day at a time, and the purpose of that is to help you kind of stabilize in your genius zone, because most people they kind of wake up and get into their genius zone, but they don't know how to stay in it for a long period of time. So anyway, those two ideas are at the heart and soul of the Big Leap and what I've been doing as when these first ideas began to come into my mind, I was just finishing my PhD at Stanford and I was about to start working there. They offered me a job to fill in for my major professor who was going away on sabbatical, and so I went immediately. For being a starving graduate student. As soon as I got my PhD, I stepped into being a well paid It was a great way to start my academic career. So I filled in for him for a year, and then I began to look for some other place to go because where Stanford is in the Bay Area, it's extremely crowded and it was kind of smoggy, and I was getting tired of traffic jams, and I wanted to live in a more serene place, and so they flew me out to Colorado to look at a job out there, and I remember stepping off the plane and breathing, oh, my goodness, this is what hair.

Is supposed to smell. It's not any for a few years. And that's also a beautiful thing about where I live now. It's very unpolluted.

It's in a little mountain valley, and we get a lot of good breezes through here that keeps the hair all cleaned out, so we don't suffer from any of the smog that gets la enshrouded sometimes.

Yeah.

Wow, I actually didn't know that you had a second book about the Big Leap, so I'm definitely going to get that. So one of the key concepts in the big leap is the upper limit problem. How can our listeners recognize when they are self sabotaging and what kind of small step can they take to overcome that in their daily life. So I didn't realize that you had a new book. So I'm definitely going to link to that as well, and I'm going to read that. But I love to for the listeners to just have some tips on how they can how they can actually overcome that before they read the book.

Yes, well, there are several things that are important. One is to recognize your upper limits. So here are some common upper limits. So probably the most common one is worry thoughts, particularly worry thoughts about something you have no control over or.

Ability to change.

I'll give you an example, a personal example. There's a beautiful art gallery here in my little town, and they always have some beautiful things in the window. And so one day I was walking past, and I stopped to look at these beautiful rings that were in the window, and.

So I was caught up in the beauty of that.

So I started again walking down the street and ten seconds, within ten seconds, I was thinking about all of the poor people in the world who could never afford to buy any jewelry like that, and that led me to think of, you know, people who were starving anyway, So I went from Oh what beauty to oh what misery in ten or twenty seconds. So that's the upper limit problem at work. Maybe someday I'll get to the point where I can enjoy that beauty all the way to the end of the block. But that's an example of I'm only seventy nine. I'm just getting started at this stuff, you know, so I.

Have long to go.

But first I first realized the upper limit problem when I was I mentioned I was obese. I was a medical problem. As a little boy, I was taken around a different medical I was the only fat person in a family where everybody else was skinny as a rail, and so something was wrong, and so I was carried around a different even as a baby, around a different specialists and put on different diets and given different shots and anyway. I never did get the problem solved medically because the reason that I had the problem was something that didn't get discovered until later on when I.

Was grown up.

And now it would take a few injections to kind of treat that part of the brain, which was making me fat, but in those days it didn't exist. So, to make a long story short, I was very obese, and I went on this amazing self generated diet where I was in my twenties, in my early twenties, and I decided to eat only food that I'd never eaten before, since everything else had made me fat. Forget medicine, forget the whole field of medicine. I'm going to do this myself. And so I remember the first thing I started eating were blueberries, because we had this big package of blueberries and the freezer from the previous summer. And I lived on those blueberries for about three days, and at the end of the month, I was eating vegetables and things that I'd never eaten before. I lost thirty five pounds and so I was feeling like a million dollars. And I was walking down the street in Cambridge, Massachuset, and I looked over to my left and there was an ice cream shop and there was a family of four eating this big ice cream concoction that was bananas on it and everything, and I completely went into a trance. It was like I had never been on the diet or anything. And I went in and I ordered one of those for myself and I just slammed amone, you know, ate away on this thing for about twenty minutes. And so for a little while, I felt like the king of the universe, you know, call I had that sugar pouring through me.

Wow. But I was walking down.

The street after that and it was like somebody punched me in the stomach. I get the worst stomach ache I ever gotten in my life. And I actually was doubled over on the street with people passing me by, and I remember one lady saying, are you okay?

So are you okay? Well?

I was literally not okay. But it wasn't just a stomach ache. But what had happened was I had been living so purely, and I guess part of myself said, you don't deserve to feel this good. You know, some old unconscious program in me kicked up and maybe ordered that Sunday. But I didn't make that mistake again.

I'll tell you.

I went on to lose all the weight, and you know, have been a good weight here for many years. So that was fifty years ago, and if you look at me now, you would never suspect I'd ever been obese because I'm an athletic.

Looking six footer.

But it was very important to my creating my system in a way because I realized that no matter what we're doing, and oh that's I wanted to mention the thing at Stanford because at the time, Silicon Valley was getting underway, and we used to get a lot of referrals over at our counseling, et cetera at Stanford from those new industries like Intel and Hewlett Packard, all these names that you take for granted. Now we're just getting started. And they had these brilliant engineers, some of the smartest people I would ever meet in my life, but they were often so emotionally undeveloped that they would do something like, well, the typical upper limit problem was one of them would get a big at a boy and a raise at work, and then they'd go home that night and have the biggest fight with their family. They ever had one guy where I really saw this for the first time. His boss came in at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon and sort of did the aquimalin to put his arms around him and said, you've been doing great, and I'm going to give you a bonus, and he gave him a check for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and you know, like my ice cream Sunday. For about twenty minutes, the executive was in you know, in exty and his boss said, go ahead and take the rest of the afternoon, go home and take the family out for dinner. Well, not only did he not take the family out for dinner, he ended up having the worst fight he'd ever had in twelve years of marriage with his wife that night. So that's the upper limit problem at work. And so pay attention to things you worry about. You're often upper limited when you notice yourself worrying, say hmm, what new potential? What new aspect of my genius am I trying to let through right now?

So worrying?

Well, a second one is illness and accidents. Many people upper limit themselves by having illness and accidents. Like every year, I work with four mentorship people that I take on as their mentor, and all of them are brilliant people that run big organizations. And so one of my clients, even though she can work with a board meeting brilliantly with twelve people, but several times a year, she has to get on the video machine and talk to twelve hundred people all over the world that are representatives of the company, and that gets a grip on her throat. And so in working with her, I sent her to one of these organizations. I imagine you have them down south there where you live, too, but up here there's one famous one called Toastmasters, and you go in every week and you give a little speech, you give a two minute speech or and there's two or three others that operate, and I just don't remember their names, but I think it's a brilliant idea because you go in and you give a bunch of little two minute speeches. And even though it didn't exactly cure my client, it was a good step in the right direction. But anyway, we worked on this whole issue of her and what she was a frayed about and everything, and so she was looking forward to this big talk where she was going to be sitting at her desk, you know, on video conference, with hundreds of people thousands around the world, and she was actually looking forward to it. But on the morning of the talk, I get this panikey call from her where she's losing her voice, and she got right, and it turned out she felt like she was getting laryngitis and coming down with a cold and so on. Are the things I talk about in the Big Leap. Just remember the three peas. When you get sick or make yourself sick, or have an accident or something, ask yourself if it's one of the three peas. Is it something you're punishing yourself for, or is it something you're protecting yourself against, or is it something you're preventing yourself from doing. So guess which of those three p's she realized, you know, she realized, Oh, I'm protecting myself from the fear of having to go in there. And so, you know, even though we talked about that half a dozen times, she'd completely forgotten about it, as we will do when we're in the grip of our stuff. But anyway, as soon as she started laughing actually, and she said, oh, I'm opening myself. Around here, we call upper limit problems alps ULP, which is a good word that our students made up because it's the same thing as ope. You know, I've just messed up. But anyway, she said.

Oh, I'm opening myself or not?

And I said, yeah, and I can't hear any of the laryn janets in your voice either, So anyway, to make a long story short, she went ahead and did a brilliant speech and that.

Had a happy ending.

It took a lot of work for her to get to that place. So I'm not going to suggest to anybody that these are overnight quick fixes, but a lot of times when they read The Big Leap. One of my favorite things that I look forward to every day is what's in my inbox, because I say I get the best inbox in the world because people write me about their big leaps and some of the most amazing stories that I would never think of in a million years, of people doing.

Things that they had not been able to do before.

And I'll tell you, you know, there's nothing better for an author then to have somebody write you or come up to you and say, hey, you know your book changed my life. I mean, that's what it's really ultimately to have that moment is. Even though I've had it many times, I never get tired of that because to me, that's what it's all about. Because I started writing books so I wouldn't have to keep it explaining the same.

Thing over and over again. Now, three hundred and.

Fifty thousand people have read The Big Leap or Leash have bought it, and they pass it on to other people. And they say that for every you know, one hundred thousand books, you get a million readers because they pass it on to other people. So I'm delighted to think when I wake up every day that you know, a couple of million people are making their lives better because of something I You know, that took me a year of my life of work, but still once it was over, it was over. And so that's a great thing about writing too. You know, you can put everything you know in the form of a book and then send it out into the world. And is a very good feeling of completion about that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I wrote a book to call Your Dream Life Starts Here, and we sold one hundred thousand copies. So it's good to hear that you said that that means a million. But I never get.

Sick of it.

And a lot of people say you must be sick of it to hear this, and I might never get sick of hearing. How you know, some of the tools can change people's lives, so I so so can relate to that. So thank you for writing it. And I'm so excited to read this book with you with not with you, but with the group and discuss it and we implement it and it's.

Just so fun.

But I want to talk about finding your zone of genius, that sweet spot where our talents and passions intersect. For those struggling to identify these, what advice would you give them to help discover and develop their unique genius.

Yes, well, here's what I did. Commend that everybody do something like this.

I actually sat down one day for an hour and just.

Thought about it and worked on it in journal I'm a big journal or. I get a lot of my ideas from just sketching something out on a piece of paper, you know, just the ideas, how they flow from one to the other. So I started doing that, and I soon realized that the upper limit problem and the zone of genius is something that's in the conversation of almost everybody, but almost nobody knows how to access it. And so here's the way to access it. Go sit down and ask yourself some what we call wonder questions. Hmmm, what do I most love to do? Hmmm, that's probably the most important one. What do I love to do so much that if I had plenty of money, I'd do that all day long?

Hmm?

What do I love so much that when I'm doing it, I go into a timeless place? And so those are questions that I think all of us need to be answering all the time. So to me, the inquiry into what is your genius can turn your whole life around, because I mean, go just stand in a public place like a my favorite place is in Airport bookstore, and just listen to the conversations around you, because one thing you will hear is victim related conversations like I couldn't believe my husband said to me yesterday. No, And then her friend will say, I know you wouldn't believette are you here some guy talking about the stock market? You know I lost my ass last week, And another guy all chime in, you know, hitting and offul and so we could just throw these bombs out the White House and get the next bunch of bumps in. So I found that people are always inoculating themselves with their upper limit problem, as if they injecting themselves over and over and over again with their conversations and so one thing that my wife and I did. Oh, by the way, we're just celebrating our forty third anniversary this week.

Oh yeah, congratulations around them withall that's amazing.

Thank you.

Yes, we met in nineteen eighty and got married in nineteen eighty one, and have had a wonderful celebration, written twelve books together, and been around the walls thirty five times giving relationship seminars, and turned down a couple of kids along the way. Then the whole catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek says. But actually, at this very moment, Katie is in my back office of my house teaching our big class, our big Internet class, while I'm sitting here in another part of the place using the same old internet.

To talk to you.

So I think it's a kind of a miracle to me, the modern technology that we have. I remember, this is how far I go back. The chairman of the department came to me one time, way back forty years ago and said, we want to start offering a class on cable TV, and what do you think most people would be interested in? And I kind of generated a class on the spot. You know, they'd be interested in basic counseling skills, they'd be interested in basic psychological principles. And so this was a graduate school class that needed to plug in three credits for a master's degree. And it turned out that I was the only person. He brought it to the department, and I was the only person in the department. I mean, it's like sixteen people something like that that said I want to do it. You know, the idea of reaching that many people. I felt just incredibly stimulated by it. So I ended up offering this class and it became more and more popular, and so for many, many years I offered this class through cable television in Colorado. And then somebody from some strange named talk show in Chicago, some lady named Oprah something never heard of the name before. A producer happened one day to be spending the night in Colorado and turned on my show in the cable TV and next thing, my wife and I are in front of ten million people on Oprah.

And yeah, it was really a wild dream.

I hadn't quite gotten to the point of dreaming about the ten million part, but that was certainly something that I accepted with open arms once it happened. And so that was with our book Conscious Mobbing in nineteen ninety one, I think it was, but we were on there more times than that later on in the decade. But so Oprah lives about twenty miles from me now, So if you're over there listening telepathically, thank you dear.

That is so nice.

So you mention that time can in your book, you mentioned that in that time can expand for us when we're in alignment with our true selves. Can you expand on this idea of Einstein time and how listeners can use it to feel more in control of their lives.

Yes, well, only if you promised to have me back on time for a whole hour to talk about Einstein time. Okay, I'd love some time to really massage it.

Okay, here's the basic thing again.

If you listen carefully to people what they're talking about about time, you'll notice that it's often from the victim position that they perceive that there's not enough of it. That's probably the number one complaint you hear. Oh my god, I can remember my mother saying this. My mother was a newspaper columnist who had to get her newspaper column so it could be in the newspaper in the morning, you know, and so everybody depended on she was on the front page of the newspaper. Everybody looked to see what Norma Hendrix was saying about it. She was, you know, the local political pundit as well as being the pundit of everything else. And she was the mayor of the town later. So that's the kind of person we're dealing with here. But she was frantic about time. And I can remember her saying at least a thousand times when I was a kid, there's simply are not enough hours in the day, you know. And she always had an unfiltered cigarette and in one hand and a couple coffee on the other hand, and so she went at it all day long. But most of us have some kind of complain about time that involves thinking of time as the enemy. Wow, what a perception that is, because imagine, I mean, time is such an important part of life. Imagine if you went outside and thought of air as the enemy or gravity as the enemy. But time is the same kind of thing. But people go around complaining about time all the time. You don't worre anybody complaining about gravity. Nobody else goes around shaking their fist at the sky and say quite sucking on me, goddamn it, you know.

And so but we.

Complain about time all the time. It's like a habit that nobody can break. Now I want you to break that habit because I found that your addiction to time scarcity is kept in place by knocking relating yourself over and over again with your conversations about it. So quit talking about time as a victim. Next time somebody says, here's how I respond to it. Somebody says to me, oh, man, I've been so busier. I've been crazy busy lately. I will say to them, well, you know, I've found that being in a hurry is a sign of incipient mental illness. And even though I've said this hundreds of times to people, that what but if you think about it, what is being in a hurry. It's being out in front of the universe. It's trying to get somewhere before reality sets in. You know, Like I was in a traffic jam a while back in LA and I was just sitting there and I was breathing and listening to music and that kind of thing. Because I've found that getting agitated about a traffic jam does not actually help the traffic move Can you believe.

That any ropes? Especially LA drivers know this.

No amount of anxiety will speed up the person in front of you. So a friend of mine, Mary Morrissey, who teaches courses like this too, she just happened to call at that time and she said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm sitting in the zen monastery of an LA traffic jam. Because if you think about it, any situation in life is an opportunity to expand to embrace whatever is happening in the moment. So in the traffic jam, you're not going anywhere, but what can you reach out and embrace stillness? I hope people all over the world listening to your podcast aren't saying that guy's crazy, which may apply, but try it sometime before you dismiss it out of hand. If I'm still, instead of not liking being still, go ahead and embrace say, oh, stillness. I have the opportunity. I'm sitting among five thousand people right now, all of whom are driving expensive cars, and we've created a moment of stillness together.

Wow.

And so what I'm getting at here is the embrace of time as your friend, and here realizing that you can make up all the time you need to do the things you really want to do. But here's the big butt, and it's a big button. Most people go around thinking that the way to get more done is to get busier or take on more responsibilities, whereas it actually works the other way around is to go down inside and find out what your true genius is and start investing moments of your life in doing your genius. And your genius is the answer to the question what do I love to do and what brings about the greatest contribution. Hey, when I say contribution, you don't have to be writing a symphony or a book or anything like that.

Us.

A contribution could be the five people that are going to eat your soup tonight. Just happened to be thinking about that because a little while ago, my wife is a brilliant chef. In addition to writing books and going on Oprah and all those kind of things, she is spectacularly good cook. And she made us soup for lunch which was a mean and bacon soup which was absolutely delicious. But there were only two of us. So here's this genius and two people appreciated the genius, but so what you know, it brought forth her genius as she was making the soup. And so whatever it is that really turns you on that you could spend all day doing if somebody else paid your bills for you, those are the kind of things that you can actually start doing for your living.

You know.

I have files full of people that quit their job as a fill in the blank and created their own business. I mean, especially now that the Big Leap has been widely adopted as kind of a textbook of entrepreneuring in many schools and things like that, And so many people write me with their things that they've invented and gone into business. For probably a quarter of the time, I don't even understand the business, you know, Like somebody invented a little algorithm, can know, And I sold the algorithm for one point two million dollars to somebody. It was a bunch of mathematical symbols, you know, but somebody felt it was valuable enough to buy from them. One of my clients also, I mentioned that I do this mentorship thing with entrepreneurs a year, and most of them are entrepreneurs in their thirties or forties, And the reason I mentioned that is because in developmental psychology, we say your twenties are about experimenting, your thirties are about finding your life, and your forties are about building your life, and your fifties are about other things too. But I mean, most of the people that I accept for my mentorship program are people that are really going to town in their thirties or forties, and there's some little thing holding them back, you know, And once we find out what that thing is, then things just expand organically, not because they've been working more frantically, because their heart and their mind and their spirit has been open to a deeper form of creativity that moves through you once you start having a conversation with your genius, and you can start that conversation at any time with a ten second question, what is it that I'm most love to do? What is my biggest contribution that I like to make to other people?

Yeah? I absolutely love that, And I'm so aligned because I often pinch myself. So I run a coaching program, I run a book club, and you know, I get to call that work like reading books that I love, books like yours. And I also started running retreats because I love going away on my own and a lot of people felt really uncomfortable going away on their own. And then so I started running retreats on how to do that. And it's just amazing when you find your genius and you just get to do what you love every day. I just I'm just so so grateful that I found that, and that's why I now have a big dream to inspire one hundred and one million people to write down three dreams they wanted to make happen. Because when I did that, I completely changed my life. So thank you for sharing that. I wanted to ask you before I ask a couple of quick questions. One is some for anyone listening and they want to start the big leap and really embrace it. So what are a couple of tips they can get started with before they read your book.

Yes, one thing they can do, and you just touched on it really nicely too, It would be to sit down quietly and make a list of three to five things that you want to accomplish in your lifetime. I wrote a little book some years ago called Five Wishes, and it's about the process of developing the five things that you most want. What I call deathbed goals. So if you're on your deathbed fifty years from now, and I combine.

Visit unlikely but is possible. I comebine.

I say, Christine, was your life a complete success? And without batting an eye, you say, yes, it absolutely was. And I say, well, tell me one thing that made your life an absolute success because you accomplished or experienced blank, my life was a success like for me. When I first had that thought, I was in my early thirties, and I immediately said, oh, I don't have a relationship, an ongoing relationship with a woman with whom I can grow and change over the years. During my twenties, I had a you know, I'm teen different relationships and they all lasted six months through a year or two years or something like that. But I always say my relationships in my twenties resembled the trajectory of the Titanic. You know, they would start with great fanfare, but within a very short period time they would hit the iceberg and sink. And I didn't realize until I was in my thirties that the iceberg was me, and.

I realized I was really my own.

I sat down and I made a list of five things that I wanted to accomplish in my life before I died, and that was one that was number one, And so that led me to my relationship with Katie. As I said forty four years ago now, and so dreams really can can come true. But first I agree to just get a picture of them, or at least jot them down in some way, so you have a steering mechanism for your life.

Yeah, absolutely love that. Thank you so much. So I just want to change gear a little bit. I wanted to ask you. I'm very passionate about my morning ritual because I feel that when you start your day in the most beautiful way. For me, that means I meditate, I love nature as well as I go for a walk, and I love journaling. So there are three things that I when I say daily most of the time, it's I do miss every now and then, but very rarely because it's just it's just part of my day now and it's one of my favorite things to do. So I am curious, have you got a morning ritual? And yet, if yes, what is it?

Oh? I certainly do, thank you for asking. Well, let me just say what happened this morning. It's a pretty much the same thing. I woke up around five AM.

I don't use an alarm clock.

I just wake up whenever I wake up, and it's oftentimes around five or five thirty something like that. And my wife likes to sleep in. She likes to sleep until often eight o'clock or so. And I'm an early riser. And so I get up and I make some coffee, and I make coffee.

For my wife to have later.

She likes it a certain way, and so I make it a certain way for her to have later.

And I'm kind of a.

Coffee that I grind my own beans, and you know, kind of a little ritual out of it. And I've been a customer of Pete's Coffee in the Bay Area for fifty years now. I get mail to me now, I always say I should send Petez a donation sometimes because they help get me through Stanford. Because they'd be riding my bike to Stanford. I would stop at Pete's Coffee and have a cup of their coffee rocket fuel, and then I would get my brain up to Stanford standards. But I make my coffee and then I will maybe I have two cats.

They're not in here with me.

At the moment. But I have two British short hair cats, and I'll goof around with them a little bit, give them a couple of these little treats they call crunchies. And so we always have our little morning time with me and the two girls. And then I go meditate. I have not missed a day of meditation in fifty two years. I learned meditation back in nineteen seventy two and it made such an impression on me that I've done it every day since rain or shine. And so I meditate. And then after I meditate, I start doing something creative. If I'm writing something, I'll jump right into my writing. Like this morning, I did a little bit of creating, but I was mostly organizing some things that I'd done before that I wanted to kind of get them where I could reference them easy and easily. And then I wrote a little bit. And oh, I should tell people too. Part of my creative process is if I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't give myself a hard time or fret about it or toss and turn. I just start working in my mind on something creative, Like I've been looking novel in my mind now for probably two or three months now. You know, when I wake up in the middle of the night for a few minutes, have a drink of water, tee or something. You know, I'll just when I'm going back to sleep or I'm lying there, I will work on a little bit of the novel, just write a few sentences or plot out a scene in my mind, and then I go back to sleep again.

But I find it.

I really kind of like stitching together the conscious and the unconscious world, like I do most of my writing in the morning. Interestingly enough, I used to be a night guy. I used to be a night owl in my twenties and my teens and into my thirties actually, and then somewhere in my thirties I kind of flipped around, so I really started enjoying doing all my creative writing in the morning. So I've written I think fifty two books now published books. I've written a lot more that are still hanging out on my computer and some kind of unpublishable. Here's another little tip. I have a file on my computer that says books I make it around to writing someday, and there's probably fifteen different you know, paragraphs or titles or maybe even a couple of pages to give me the sort of the voice I would use if I were writing that book. To me, half the trick of writing a book is finding the right voice for it, you know, just how do you talk to the reader? You know, in my case, I talk to the reader just like I would talk to a person across the table from me in a counseling session. That they've got my full attention. I'm giving them everything I've got and holding nothing back. And so I think of every moment of writing as a kind of a sacred session that.

I'm tapping into.

I'm getting the gift of this opportunity to spend two or three hours in this creative space.

And to me, still to this.

Day, writing is magic, you know, putting something down on deeper for the first time, you know, like making something where nothing was before. And I find that entirely joyful and pleasurable. I can understand why my mother is a newspaper columnist. You know, every day was having to bang out something, and I don't remember her ever enjoying it. You know, I'd pass her and she'd have a scowl on her face and cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth and pounding away on that big, old underwood typewriter.

But I want to go.

About it in a whole new way. Now I don't want to I don't want to be a starving artist. I like having plenty of money. One of the greatest tips I ever got in my life when I was first writing poetry. The first things I ever got published were poems, and I consulted a famous poet. He was a very practical guy, great poet, but he said, you can't make any money writing poetry, but you can make a lot of money going out explaining them to people. I love that because later on after I well, I turned it, immediately took the idea and I was going to a counseling conference, and I proposed a section of what you call it a workshop, called the Poetry of counseling, and that we were each going to read some poetries, but everybody was going to write poetry about the counseling process. I estimated that I would have twenty five people. By the time the day rolled around, they had three hundred people had signed up. They had to move the room two or three times because we had three hundred people in a room writing poetry about counseling. I mean, that happened a long time ago, but I can remember the atmosphere of that. It was so beautiful because people their hearts and their minds and their spirits involved. So maybe you're not a poet, maybe you're listeners and viewers aren't poets, but they do something, you know, that's that's creative like that, And my goal is to help people kind of breathe.

On that and bring that forth.

And one of my great quotes that I have in my office is from the Gospel of Thomas. It says, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. And yeah, so that idea, I mean it, I mean it is so true. You know that people get reborn creatively all the time by finding out what it is in them that they need most to express. And when we find that, I mean, that's to me, that's life at its best, when you have found.

What you much love to do.

And what makes your contribution. I haven't had a dull moment in fifty years. I love that.

That is so great to hear. Thank you for sharing that. And the other question that I have is is it one book maybe a favorite book, but it's really hard if you read a lot, but a book that had a big impact on your life.

I could name a novel too, but the first one that sprang to mind is a little book that was extremely popular in the sixties and seventies. I'm sure it's still around, but you have to work out it a little bit. It's called The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, and it's written by a fellow now passed on named Thaddeus Golas g Las. I picked it up once in a little bookstore. It was by the cash register, and I remember it was sold for a dollar fifty, which was rather inexpensive for books, you know, But it was this beautiful, little produced book called The lasy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. I think it's eighty pages long, but it will change your life. It is some of the most brilliant stuff. And it's where I first learned to think of love as an active healing agent. That it hadn't occurred to me that things in myself that I'd been criticizing I could just as easily love them. And as I learned to love myself more, suddenly my relationships with other people became better and so there's this beautiful synergistic relationship. Thadias says, the universe is our relationships with other people, and so that at each moment we're called upon to either contract away from love or open up in love. Sometimes the loving thing to do is not to be of the relationship, you know, the loving thing for yourself. But it's all about this process of opening up, to lovingly accepting the things in ourself and then inventing new things in the direction of our conscious dreams. So that would be the Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment was one for sure, but I got to put on a plug for another one. It's interesting that both of these have men in the title, although neither one of them had anything to do with men, so to speak. Gurdjief's book kind of an autobiography Gerjief. I'm going to spell it out because he's hard to find. G U. R. D j I E. F. F. Gerjief, George Ivanovitch Gurdjief. He wrote a book many years ago called Meetings with Remarkable Men, and some of whom were women. I don't know, maybe hundred and ten years ago, So maybe they didn't think books with women in the title would sell as well back then. But anyway, don't be put off by the men part. But what it's all about is he went in search of various features back one hundred and let's see, back around the turn of the last century, so around nineteen hundred and he went all over the place and met all these amazing people that are in meetings with remarkable men. But it's really about the search, you know. It's really about the journey. And to me, the journey is sacred, you know, the journey continuing to open up that spark of consciousness, to celebrate that creative spark of aliveness in them. That's sacred territory to me. And so those two books really lit up that territory. I also, just because I love to read novels, I was absolutely mesmerized by Gabriel Marquez's novel One hundred Years of Solitude.

I'm getting a little short.

Of time here, but I got to tell you how I came across one hundred Years of Solitude. I was traveling around Asia as a backpacking law hair back in nineteen seventy nine, I think it was or eighty. So picture me with long brown hair and my granny glasses and a poncho and a backpack and a girlfriend and we're on top of a bus in Nepal, and it was this brutally hot day and we were going on this one hundred mile journey on the bus. But it was like one hundred and twenty degrees inside the bus and about one hundred and twenty people in a bus that ought to hold about fifty people. So we were sitting up on the top, which is a popular thing to do in Asia. You get up on the top with the baggage and everything, and they have these rails so you're not going to fall off usually. And I was up there with a bunch of other people that I didn't know. And one of the things we did at that time was trade paperback books. If you finished reading a book, you say you got anything to trade. And so I had just finished reading the book Watership Down, which I loved by Richard Adams. If you haven't read that one, what a fabulous book. So I held up this book and we're rocking around on top of this bus going down this road in Nepal, and I said, I got this one. And he said what it's about, and I said, well, it's sort of about rabbits, but it's not really about rabbits. So I traded that and he gave me this book, One hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Moore Kiss and I picked it up and I started reading it, and it was like I dropped into this other world, you know.

Then I came.

Out and you know, I'm still rocking around on the back of the bus. But it was about fifty miles later. And how many books do that to you, you know, how many books dropped you into this world that's like no other world you've ever seen before. But anyway, so long winded answer to your question.

I love it.

I love it.

And you know, one of the favorite parts from that I hear from our listeners all the time is when people give book reccommodations. So thank you so much. I have written them all that I'm going to read all of them as well, so thank you. The last question I have is knowing what you know, now, what kind of advice would you give yourself, say, in your late teens, maybe early twenties.

I would say two things, Feel what you're feeling, and learn to tell the truth about that. Learn to say I'm scared or I'm angry or I felt hurt by that.

I could not do.

That in my teens, and the concept was so foreign to me that I remember even the first time I came up against it in my very early twenties, when I was about twenty two, and I started realizing that I don't think I'd ever had fifteen seconds of genuine intimacy with another person of just being able to say, you know, I feel angry right now, or I feel sad, I feel scared, I feel happy about that. So learning how to feel what was real and learning how to tell the truth about that, that's some advice I would give. I don't know if i'd take it, because I was a stubborn I like a lot, because I remember my girlfriend at the time, my high school girlfriend, would say thanks to me, like you never talked to me about anything that's important, And I would say, what are you talking about? What are you getting at? And it was like I was trying to understand a foreign language, you know, but that's exactly what you're saying about.

It's so beautiful. That was such an amazing one hour discussion. I absolutely love it. So first, thank you so much for all their wisdom you shared not just on this podcast, but throughout your life and in all your books. I'm excited to read more of your books now, So I'm going to.

Orders on this afternoon.

And then I just want to say thank you for saying yes to come on the podcast, because I know how much this will mean for the people who are actually reading the book to actually get a little bit more deeper before we start reading the book. So thank you so much for your time. And if you ever come down, we have really good coffee in Australia as well, so if you ever come down here, let's meet for a beautiful coffee. Oh.

I bet you do. I bet you do.

I've met so many wonderful people who've come up to take our trainings up here in this part of the world, so I've definitely got Australia on my bucket list. Amazing.

Thank you so much, thank you.

Wow.

Absolutely loved this conversation. What a wonderful human Gay is. And I want to let you know he is seventy nine and is just thriving. And I know a lot of you are thinking about your age. Is it too late to start creating your dream life? It's never too late. You can start anytime, And I thought, and he was saying to me that he was seventy nine, one of my dreams is to become a yoga teacher, and I have that kind of pencil in when I'm eighty because I just don't have the time to do that before, and I actually don't want to teach, I just want to do the course. So I just thought, if I'm as great as he is, I'm going to do that. And I want to encourage you, regardless of your age, to start now. As I mentioned in the intro, I'm so excited to be reading his book in my book club Growth in December. If you are interested in reading it with a bunch of beautiful, like minded people who are also ready to take their big leap in the new year, join us. We will read it, discuss it, and implement it. I will link to it in the show notes or just said over to your dream Lapstu's here dot com. As always, I will be back on Monday with another quote for you to think about maybe implement in your own life. So I'll see them.

BA