Certain Success™ Podcast

How to Live 100% In Your Zone of Genius with Gay Hendricks

September 12, 2023 • Matt Fagioli • Episode 19

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Living in your "zone of genius" is a concept popularized by the book "The Big Leap" by Gay Hendricks.

It refers to that sweet spot where you are not just competent or excellent, but truly exceptional at what you do. It's where you experience a deep sense of fulfillment, purpose, and joy in your work and life.

In this episode, I’m honored to have Gay Hendricks himself joining us to explore why this concept is so crucial and how you can fully embrace it in your life.

We talked about how to identify and tap into your genius zone, what the upper limit problem is and how it can hold you back, and practical steps to make sure you're spending more time doing what you love.

So get ready to be inspired, because this episode is a direct invitation to unlock your fullest potential and experience a life that's nothing short of extraordinary.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Identifying and embracing your zone of genius
  • Overcoming the upper limit problem that hinders your success
  • The correlation between accessing your genius and leading a fulfilling life

Links from this episode:

Gay Hendricks [00:00:00]:

For this long period of time. I've been on a journey. And the journey started with I was in a terrible job that I didn't like, and I was in a terrible relationship that I didn't like, and I didn't like where I lived and certainly didn't like my 300 pound body, and I wore big, thick glasses at the time. So pretty much everything was out of whack in my life. You.

Matt Fagioli [00:00:31]:

Hey, guys, welcome back to the Certain Success podcast. I'm your host, Matt Fagioli, and today is such an incredible treat. I get the distinct privilege of interviewing a hero of mine. I'm a voracious reader. I love books, and I particularly love to read books over and over and over again. When I find one that has a massive impact on me and a book called The Big Leap, I would put it in the top five books in my life. I've read it over and over and over and over again. And today I got to speak to the author of The Big Leap and about 50 other books, Gay Hendricks. And our conversation was life changing in some ways for me and I think will have a massive impact on you as well. In fact, I'd be grateful if after listening to this particular episode, if you would drop me a note and let me know if it impacted you in particular how it may have impacted you. And if you've read The Big Leap, I want to hear that from you. And if you've never read The Big Leap, I want you to run to your computer and either get a physical copy from Amazon or elsewhere or get the audiobook on Audible and read it over and over and over again because it is top five books that can change your life right now. So with that said, please enjoy the Certain Success podcast with Mr. Gay Hendricks. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Certain Success podcast. I'm your host Matt Faggioli, and today I have the distinct honor of interviewing the author, author of many books, but one in particular that I hold in the highest regard, top five books in my life that I've read over and over again called The Big Leap. So let's welcome Gay Hendricks. How are you, Mr. Hendricks?

Gay Hendricks [00:02:43]:

I'm great. Thank you very much for inviting me in, Matt. I'm always love to talk about these subjects that we're going to be addressing today. I should also let you know that I'm in the midst of rehabbing a broken femur. A couple of months ago, I had a slip and fall out by our swimming pool and I cracked my femur in several places and had to have lots of bolts and screws and rods put in and everything. So I've been really applying the basics over the last couple of months, like learning how to walk again on two legs and things like that. So I just wanted to let you know that so if you see an occasional grimace on my face as I move my body around, it's probably because I still get quite a few twinges out of my right leg.

Matt Fagioli [00:03:32]:

Oh my goodness. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. And now you've got me curious how that experience has played into your perception of the big leap and all of that. So if you would please, for our audience, give some sense of I know you've written a bunch of books and done a lot of things, but could you just give us a quick little intro?

Gay Hendricks [00:03:58]:

Sure. I'm 78 now. I grew up in the back in central Florida, and I come from a very quirky family. My mother is a writer, also a newspaper journalist for 50 years, but she was also the mayor of the town that we lived in, so I couldn't get away with anything. She was on first name basis with the police force and everybody. But I come from a third generation Southern family. My grandparents moved down to Florida after around the turn of the century, and then my mother and her sisters were born there. And then I was born there in 1945, and I left in when I was about in my twenty s. I moved up to New Hampshire, and there I had a signature experience that changed my life. When I was growing up, I had a medical problem. I was taken around a, umpteen, dozen different medical specialists because from the very early on, even my first year of life, I put on a lot of weight. And I was the only fat person in a family where everybody else was skinny and I was eating the same food they were eating, so nobody could figure out why I kept putting on weight. So finally it was discovered that I had a rare glandular disorder that basically happens during pregnancy that due to stress or something, some hormones get jiggered around. And my mother had had a classic stress when she was pregnant with me. My father, my 32 year old father, died suddenly, and so she was left on her own with a new baby to come and also my older brother Mike. So she became a fiercely strong single parent and raised us both under trying conditions. In the south of that time, there wasn't a lot of feminist attitudes around, but she even managed to get elected mayor of the city and all that. So anyway, I'm very proud of my Southern heritage, even though I did have this medical disability, by the time I was 24 years old, I weighed more than 300 pounds. Today, I don't know if you're seeing this on video, but today I weigh about 180 pounds or so, and I'm 6ft tall. So if you were to look at me on the street that you'd say, hey, there goes an athletic looking old guy. And so when I was 24, though, I was anything but athletic looking. I looked like a pear, P-E-A-R kind of pear. And also, I could have fit a pair of humans inside me, too, at 300 pounds. So one day this is a formative moment in my life one day in 1969, I went out for a walk, and I had a slip and fall on the ice, and I came crashing down on my back. And I don't know if you ever thought about it, but a 300 pound person weighs approximately what a refrigerator weighs. So I went down on my back, and I hit my head, although I didn't knock myself out. And so in this very lucid state, for about two minutes, I saw myself in a whole new way. I don't know how it happened, but for about two minutes, it was like I was looking at a microscope. Down through all the layers of myself that I'd never seen before, I could see that underneath the layer of fat was a layer of really excruciatingly tight muscles that I've kept locked up all the time. And underneath that was a whole bunch of emotions that I'd never talked to anybody about, things I was angry about and sad about and scared about, and I just had never considered them. And there they were down there. But then here's the real magic. As I continued kind of looking through the microscope at myself, I saw that at the bottom of everything in me and everyone else is what I came to call pure consciousness. Some people might call the soul or spirit or like the Tibetans have 200 different words for different states of consciousness. We don't have very many in English, but what it was like was seeing it was like an ocean of consciousness or a pure sky of consciousness, and that everything else was like little boats floating on the surface, like my feelings or my interactions with other people, that they all underneath had this pure consciousness. And that was a brand new thing for me. I'd theologically heard about that sort of thing, but I'd never kind of seen it with my own two eyes. And so once I saw that, I realized I want to be in touch with that all the time. And so I had this beautiful moment as I was kind of coming back to consciousness again and saying, you know, I commit myself to living with awareness of that pure consciousness all the time. I want to feel that way all the time. And so that started me on a journey. And, boy, what a journey it's been for the last, well, let's see, 1969, subtract that from 2023. It's a long time ago. Okay.

Matt Fagioli [00:09:51]:

My math skills well, I can do that math pretty easily because I was born in 68, so I'm 55, so probably 54 years.

Gay Hendricks [00:09:59]:

Okay, 54 years ago. Well, thanks for the math help there. So for this long period of time, I've been on a journey, and the journey started with, I was in a terrible job that I didn't like, and I was in a terrible relationship that I didn't like, and I didn't like where I lived and certainly didn't like my 300 pound body. And I wore big, thick glasses at the time, so pretty much everything was out of whack in my life. So I just started applying that pure consciousness to everything. Like every bite of food I eat, I said, Would this feed my pure consciousness or would this feed my old 300 pound body? And after doing that for a year, I lost more than 100 pounds by just changing the things I ate. Like, I started eating an apple instead of a candy bar that was really know because a Hershey bar, boy, that's like an addiction. And I was addicted to that kind of thing. And cheeseburgers and vanilla malts and all of these kind of things were just part of my daily. And now I love organic vegetables. And my wife is a magnificent chef. In addition to all of her other areas of genius, she makes these exquisite salads for us and exquisite soups for us. And so over the past 50 or 60 years, I've just completely reorganized my body so that I'm unrecognizable from what I used to look like. And so along the way, many, many things came into my life. Like, for example, I learned to meditate, and I learned different ways to pray that involve more of my whole body rather than just mental kinds of things. And so I discovered all of these different things. One of which you've seen in The Big Leap is called the upper limit problem, because along the way, I had so many upper limit problems. Like the very first one, I lost 35 pounds. The first month, I was on this new radical only eat food that fed my consciousness diet. I lost 35 pounds, I think, and I was feeling like a million dollars. And I was walking down the street, and so I went right in there and whoosh, I ordered one, and I just plowed through it, and for about 20 minutes, I was high as a kite. But then I got the worst stomachache of my life. I was on the street outside of the store walking down the street afterwards after I had the ice cream sundae, and I literally doubled over on the street. I mean, it was like somebody hit me with a gigantic fist in my belly. That was my first upper limit problem because I went from feeling fabulous to feeling miserable in about 20 minutes based on something I did. So I really thought about that. I thought, wow, this must mean that part of me is allergic to feeling good all the time. I must have some old beliefs down there that says I can't feel great all the time. I have to punish myself if I feel great. And so I started looking for these deep, old unconscious beliefs, the ones that I wrote about in the big leap. And I always say I'm my own best customer because long before I wrote the book the big leap, I used all of those principles in myself to totally transform my life. So people sometimes ask me, how long did it take you to write the big Leap? And I said, well, it only took me about a year, but I'd been thinking about it nonstop for 30 years. When I sat down and write the book, it came out very easily, and I hope yours does the same.

Matt Fagioli [00:14:17]:

Matt well, thank you. You're mentioning I said to you before we started recording, I'm writing my first book, and I'm about nine months into it. It's very challenging, and I have the newfound utmost respect for you and everyone who's done it at least once. And I don't know how many books have you written, gay.

Gay Hendricks [00:14:39]:

I'm coming up on an even 50, and here is a shameless plug. Next February, a few months from now, I'm coming out with the follow up book to the big leap. It's called your big leap year, and it's got 365 daily leaps you can take and occupy yourself for a whole year of genius. And so that'll be out. You can pre order it now wherever you get your books, amazon, et cetera, and stand in line for it overnight if necessary, at your favorite bookstore in february.

Matt Fagioli [00:15:18]:

That is awesome. Well, I will be front of the line for that one. There's so many things I want to cover with you. I've just started reading genius zone, and I want to hear more about that. But before we leave the big leap, I guess, can you just explain to the listeners the premise of zone of genius and how that well, you've carried that into it to another book, so maybe you obviously considered that to be well, I considered that to be the centerpiece of the book. Tell me if you think that's true as well.

Gay Hendricks [00:15:54]:

Yes, I think in the big leap, there are two big things, and they're the ones that I get the best emails from. I always say I have the best inbox in the universe because every day I get to wake up to people all over the world writing me about their big leaps. And so it's a very rich, wonderful way to start the day for me. But the big leap is about two big things. One is the upper limit problem, which is our human tendency to sabotage ourselves when things start going better or when things start going well. And I want to talk about all that, but the leap is about is about your genius zone. And I also have a new book called the genius zone, which explains this in more detail. So let me go back and talk about the upper limit problem. Everybody has experienced this. I've had people sitting in this room the biggest pop star in the world or one of the biggest actors in the world or one of the biggest politicians in the world. And I've also had juvenile delinquents in here. And so everybody's got a version of the upper limit problem which is something that's holding back from being your fully expressed genius in your life. And so I discovered that there are only three or four big limiting beliefs that people glom onto early in childhood. One of them is, I don't deserve to have the good things of life. I don't deserve it for I'm with the wrong skin color, I'm the wrong height, I'm the wrong weight. I come from the wrong side of the tracks. Whatever it is, there's some limiting belief I have that says I don't deserve to have the good things of life. So that's a big one. The second one is a lot of people grow up in such a way they believe they don't have permission to have their light shine in the world. I call it a fear of outshining. And oftentimes it happens in families where there's a kind of a golden boy or golden girl and you're not it. Maybe you're number two or number three or number four down the pecking order. But number one the golden boy, golden girl. They know it's okay to have their light shine all the time. And the rest of us, though, a lot of times, have to say, okay, it's okay for me to have my light seen and appreciated in a world. So that's a big one. A third one has to do with misplaced loyalty. And a lot of us feel like we're handicapped because we're kind of trapped in the family we grew up in or in the family consciousness we grew up in. In other words, a lot of people feel that it's not okay to grow and change because that would be disloyal to your family of origin. And not everybody has that. But a lot of people have that to the max. And so there are only a handful of these limiting beliefs. But once you start really looking into them, you really start seeing how it affects every moment of your life. So I spent a long time researching all of these old beliefs, and I started working with my clients. And I really had a good group of people to work with at first because I was right in the heart of Silicon Valley and I got referred a lot of brilliant tech know, like the CEO of well, I don't want to mention, you know, big companies. And these were people I mean, you can imagine somebody that can run a company like Hewlett Packard or Varian or intel. They have to be off the scale brilliant in some ways. However, here's the thing that would happen. A lot of these folks would have a big breakthrough at work, a big win. Then they'd go home. That night, and they would get into a knock down, drag out with their family and mess up the whole thing. They'd come in the door, hey, we got the new government multibillion dollar contract today. And instead, their family is saying the spouse is saying, well, how come you forgot to pick up Kevin at soccer practice at 530? And the coach had to call me today. So there would be a clash between this good feeling and then won't. And so it was the other way around. Sometimes, like, sometimes people that have a great weekend with their family and then come into work on 730 monday morning, and boom, some bad thing happens. And so I started looking at this and calling it the upper limit problem. And as I worked with people to overcome it, what happened, to my great surprise, was that they started getting more creative, and they got more creative to the extent that I started calling it genius. That what would emerge from them after they started clearing up their upper limit problems and getting rid of those old limiting beliefs was they would start coming up with genius level ideas and genius level books and projects and things like that. So that's where I came up with this idea of the genius zone, that each of us has a genius zone inside us, but it's kind of murked over by a lot of the old limiting beliefs and things like that that keeps the light covered up.

Matt Fagioli [00:22:05]:

Well, I think the zone of genius, to me, struck me immediately as a powerful idea, and I've always been A kind of ready, fire, aim, always for the big idea, always for a bit of a leap. But this idea that you can do what you love and that you're absolutely best at, I heard you more recently describe staying in that zone eventually 100% of the time, and I think that that is just a foreign concept to most of the world and is incredibly powerful. So can you expand on that?

Gay Hendricks [00:22:54]:

Yes. When I first started looking into all this in myself and with my clients, I realized that there's a time factor in here that's really worth measuring, and that is to ask yourself, of the 8 hours or 10 hours I spent in my occupation today, whether it's being an obstetrician or the CEO. Of apple, the 10 hours or 12 hours I spent on my occupation today, how much of it was spent in my genius zone, doing things I love to do and things that have the biggest impact on the world around me, on my family, on my city, on my community, on the world. So genius zone has two big items to it. 01:00 a.m. I doing what I love to do, what I'm most uniquely suited to do, and number 02:00 a.m., I doing something that has some kind of positive impact on the world around me. If you can answer Those two questions, yes, you're in the sweet spot of life, in my experience. Now, here's the thing. When I first started thinking about this, I realized I'm only spending about 10% of my time in my genius zone, even though I've got this fabulous idea I'm only accessing it an hour a day rather than eight or 10 hours a day. That was very humbling when I actually sat down and calculated it. And everybody that comes here or takes one of our trainings, we ask them to go calculate that, to actually figure out how much of your time you're doing, what you most love to do and what makes your big impact on the world around you. So I started measuring that and gradually bumping it up all the time just by choosing it, by choosing to do things that were more in my genius zone. So I started thinking about it in the 1980s and started working with clients in the 1980s. And by the time I got to the end of the century, I had gone from 10% up to 90, some percent. My goal was to hit 90% by the end of the century. I didn't figure anybody could do 100%, even myself, so I wanted to give myself 10% slack in there. However, I got really radical this century and started saying no to everything that wasn't. If I didn't love to do it, I said no to it. And so I started being really rigorous. And so I've spent the last 20 years or so only doing things that I love to do and only doing things that, in my view, have the biggest impact. And it's incredible because it allows, like, my relationship. Katie and I are just about to come into our 45th year together. We met in 1980. And so we've had this wonderful, magical relationship where we've co authored a dozen books together. We'd been on Oprah together. We'd been around the world a bunch of times together, and teaching seminars, hundreds, maybe thousands now different seminars together. And having that kind of relationship, I believe, is directly related to the amount of myself that I've been able to devote to. Because if you feel good all the time, if you're coming back from 10 hours of work, having spent 10 hours doing what you love to do and has a big impact, you're going to be a different person when you walk in that door or when you take Kevin to soccer practice. You're going to have a whole different way of coming at life if your life is dedicated to your genius. And so I'm a big advocate, cheerleader for everybody, doing whatever is necessary to uncover that genius zone inside them.

Matt Fagioli [00:27:21]:

That's amazing. Let me ask you, Gay, how do you coach people, or do you, who just can't even get their head around that concept, say, I can't be in my zone of genius that long. I have to do I have to mop the floor. I have to whatever the other things are. I have to cut the grass. If that's not part of what you love, all those things, how do you coach me through that?

Gay Hendricks [00:27:46]:

Well, it's exactly the same way I coach a CEO, because if you think about it, resistance is resistance. It doesn't matter if it's coming out the mouth of a billionaire or out the mouth of a 22 year old who's trying to get her life or his life going. And so what you have to do is keep focused on the positive, keep inviting the person to I know you don't believe you have a genius, but I just want you to for a moment open up to the possibility that there might be one there. And so I don't get this much anymore, because by the time a person gets to me now, they've not only put down a healthy chunk of money if it's a corporate thing, but they probably are highly motivated to be here. But in the beginning, it was harder than pulling teeth, because a lot of these people like you don't get to be the CEO of a major high tech firm without having a lot of ego that you can draw on. And if people put that to their genius, that's great. But if people turn that on, their limitations. But here's the thing. I've been blessed. Starting in 1996, I used to go down to Austin, Texas, Round Rock, where a Dell computer is, and I had the great pleasure of coaching Michael Dell and his top two people at the time, one of whom was named Topfer and the other Kevin Rollins. And so I spent several visits down there, and I came back with really a big conviction. And that is openness to learning is a crucial variable in life. And I came from one company where the CEO was a very egotistical kind of guy who had a lot of resistance. I flew down to Austin and worked with Michael Dell for the first time, and it was like, completely different because he didn't have any resistance. If I gave him a new idea, even one that was quite different from the one he had been holding on to, he would look at it, yeah, okay, I see that boom. And he would implement it on the spot. It was the darndest thing I'd ever seen, at least in a big corporation like that. And so he became my high water know, and I respect the heck out of him and am not surprised that he's built a massive company, but also massive impact in the world through his foundation. He and his wife Susan have a very powerful foundation that like, if you go to Austin, Texas, you get to be at an arts center where they funded. And so there's beautiful downstream impact from people who are opening up every day to their genius zone. And so I just say, do whatever is necessary to have your first little peak of possibility that you might have something to offer the world and that it might be something that's related to your genius. I don't have a magic solution to that, but you just have to kind of keep coming back to the basics.

Matt Fagioli [00:31:29]:

Sure. Well, thanks for entertaining that question. I'm sure that by the time people make it to you that they're bowing and you're like, oh, my gosh, it's the most amazing thing. Like me, like, everything is the most amazing thing. Gay, let me ask you this. Does your zone of genius move over time? And has yours?

Gay Hendricks [00:31:48]:

Yes and yes. Because here's the thing. It's not a fixed place. It's a way of going about things. At 35, your genius may be focused on a whole set of things that it's not focused on at 45. And the elements of it are probably quite similar. Like, for example, in every really successful person who opens the door to their genius, they have a quality called curiosity. They also have an even more precious quality called wonder, and that can be cultivated. I work with people all the time, opening up and increasing their sense of wonder. Wonder is one of the most powerful, untapped creative modalities there is. And here's why. Because when you open up to wonder, you free yourself from the limitations of the know. So Michelangelo or Leonardo, one of those brilliant folks from the hmm. I was reading the notebooks of Leonardo where he describes a pretty good first version of a helicopter. So nobody had ever seen anything like that before. And so here was a person who in the 15th century or whatever, said, human beings have been getting around on two legs, but look at how these birds do it, and look at what could happen if you went around whirl things around in a circle. So the original design of the helicopter came from 500 years ago, and now it's an improvement on that design that somebody had the first idea about. And to me, these are great heroes of humanity. Like the first person to discover that a fish tasted better when you put it in the fire than it did when you just jerked it out of the water. I mean, what a day that was. And then there was the old fashioned folks that said, no raw fish is good enough for me. All sushi, all the time.

Matt Fagioli [00:34:18]:

That was the old days. Has your zone of genius moved in a way that you can articulate? I understand what you're saying about it being more of a way of adopt, looking at things, but has that whole thing shifted at all for you?

Gay Hendricks [00:34:33]:

Well, it's broadened hugely, but I think the fundamentals may stay the same. My way of going into a problem is not to try to think, solve it logically. I do that, of course, if it looks like it's that kind of problem. But I now know how. To wonder my way into things and to let go of any thoughts I have about how it's supposed to be. And so I've developed tools for how to expand the sense of wonder in my life. And it's a job for me, in a way. Like, I work at it. I stay in the backyard sometimes and just look around at things and wonder, wow, what it would be like to be that gecko family that lives underneath that bush over there and just kind of feeling the world as an inch long or four inch long gecko. So that, to me, is my best creative think time, because I'm directly working on the mechanisms of genius. So how much time are you doing that every day? How much time are your listeners and viewers doing that every day? Put that up as a big question, because I can guarantee you one thing. After seeing thousands of people go through the process over the years, people who uncover their genius are immensely more happy than those who don't. So there's a happiness factor to it. And I always say, I don't know the exact purpose of human existence, but I can guarantee you it's not to have a bad time.

Matt Fagioli [00:36:26]:

Everything you said just blows my mind. And I think that part of what you were describing. The way I heard it was sort of the ruthless elimination of preconception and going backwards towards the wonder of childhood, where you just didn't have all these rules that you've applied.

Gay Hendricks [00:36:52]:

Yes, well, that's true. And so they tell us that children are capable of 3000 different movements before they start school. By the time they're a senior in high school, this has all been measured. They're down to 300 movements. Where did all that immense body consciousness go? It got trained out of us. That's where it went. And so there was a famous study some years ago where they hung little voice activated mics around the necks of kindergartners and first graders and then had them go about their day at home and at school. And then they just transcribed what was said to them, and it turned out that 85% of the messages were negative. Things like Quit doing that, stop that this minute, get over here, those kind of things. Only 15% were here, do it this way or Here, try this with catch upon it. There's different ways to present something to a person rather than Stop that right now. And so as people learn to do that to themselves first, certainly, I think we're our own worst critic, and that we have to put a lot of attention into learning to love ourselves in order to be fully functioning as human beings. I have one other thing I wanted to mention. I have a good friend who's a wonderful country singer, partly Americana singer. I would call him more Ray Wiley Hubbard. You can listen to his music on itunes and all those kind of places. But he has a wonderful song called Mother Blues, and at the end of it, he went through a recovery process. And at the end of Mother Blues, he said that one thing he's learned is that when he can keep his gratitude higher than his expectations, he has really good days. And so I like to think about that too when I've got my gratitude out there in the world, more thankful than all the things I may be complaining about. Well, those are good days that forecasts a really good day. So that's how I like to start the day. Every day is thinking about all the things I'm grateful for, including my broken leg, actually, because I've gotten to learn things from breaking my leg. You see, before, I'd never broken a bone before in my body, 78 years, and I live a pretty clean life, so I hadn't even had a cold or the flu in 25 years or so. So I'd kind of forgotten what it felt like to be sick or to have somebody take care of me. And boy, have I had to learn that with this broken femur, because there was two weeks when I couldn't even move my leg. I'd basically stay flat on my back 24 hours a day, which seemed like about 46 hours a day. And fortunately, they have these magic pills they can give you while you're in the hospital. Otherwise, anybody that would be lying on their back for two weeks would be screaming 24 hours a day. But they kept me well supplied with whatever the cocktail of medicines they were feeding me. But it's been a really amazing opportunity to open up, to really letting myself be taken care of and not resisting it and not saying, oh, I got to do this physical therapy thing. Instead. I've worked around this, took some physical, mental, emotional, spiritual work, was getting around to the place that I'm grateful to every moment, even if my body lets me know it's hurting. I'm learning things from the pain that I guess I couldn't learn any other way because I'm smart enough to say, okay, if I could figure out some other way to do it, I wouldn't create pain. And so I figure, okay, there's messages there. So it's enhancing my ability to really focus on opening up to the moment with that attitude of what can I learn here?

Matt Fagioli [00:41:27]:

Well, I guess part of wonder is just receiving everything. Well, like, I wonder what this bit is about. Can I ask you two more wonder questions in closing? Sure. In your more recent book, the Genius Book, you talk about wonder and you talk about I think the way I received it was sort of asking the biggest questions possible of yourself. And so what do you think is the biggest question of wonder that you're asking yourself?

Gay Hendricks [00:42:06]:

Well, it can vary from person to person, but for example, I worked with a really brilliant medical doctor who had never really created a successful relationship, and he'd had any number of disasters and a couple of expensive disasters along the way. But after some work, he came up with the following question, which is, how can I open up and receive the love that I really want and need? That's a pretty big, brilliant wonder question, isn't it? Because it's got a technique to it. How can I open up to and receive all of the love that I want and need? That was magic to him, because I think it was less than a month after he hatched that question that he struck up a relationship with the woman that then became his wife and the mother of his daughter for 35 years. And so 10 seconds under can lead to ten years, 30 years, 40 years of bliss enjoyment, learning. And because wonder takes you out of the past, he didn't say, how can I go back and get my high school girlfriend to love me again, the one who dumped me when I was 14? That would be a very limited question. But to go to the extreme of getting down to the root of the matter, how can I expand and receive that? Well, that worked so fast, it made our head spin. I've seen, umpteen, I don't know, thousand now different versions of people getting down to the big questions inside. And sometimes it's work related, like, how can I uncover my true contribution in my work? But it's a one person job between you and the universe to get humble enough in yourself, to give yourself that 10 seconds of wonder that frees you from the past.

Matt Fagioli [00:44:55]:

That last 10 seconds was the gold. There I was thinking when you were describing this doctor, like, what growth of maturity it had to take for him to even ask the question honestly of himself. That's so powerful. All right, last question. I'm a bit obsessed with longevity, and I bet you are, based on some of the things you said about the way you live. And so my question is, have you decided a number for how long you're going to live? And if so, what's the logic behind that?

Gay Hendricks [00:45:32]:

I consciously have. Like I don't know if you've ever read Mary Oliver's poem When Death Comes. It's such a beautiful poem. I can feel tears coming to my eye as I think about it. But I won't quote the whole poem. But she says, when death comes, I want to be wide open to it. I want to be a bridesmaid of wonder, a bride married to wonder or something like that. But the idea is of just opening your heart so fully to the process that the process itself becomes a spiritual gift. What I think people need to do is not come up with a number, but get their old numbers out of their head. Like, for many years, I unconsciously thought I was never going to outlive my 32 year old father, who died at age 32. I just had that somehow that I wasn't going to make it even to his age. And then I spotted that and I realized, whoa. And I think I was my 27 or 28, something like that, when I first saw that. But then for a long time, I was very close to my grandmother, and she died when she was in her early eighty s eighty two, I believe. And for a long time, I think I held that as a good lifespan because she lived a wonderful life and taught me how to love and probably helped me survive on this planet. I don't know if I'd be here without her. She kind of took me on in the early days of my life when my mother was going through hard times. For a while, I think I had, oh, I'm going to live into my early 80s. That's a good time to go. Now I'm 78. I just don't know. I want to be a bride, married to wonder. Yeah, that's who I want to be.

Matt Fagioli [00:47:59]:

That's so awesome. Gay, thank you so much for all of your time and your joy and the wonder that you've brought to my day and everyone who hears this. And thank you again.

Gay Hendricks [00:48:13]:

Thank you. Many blessings to you. And thank you for the work you do. 

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Matt Fagioli

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