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Don't miss it!
Mike has an insanely valuable resource to share with you today - one that's going to blow your mind wide open and put you on the fast track to unleashing your full creative genius.
As you know, Mike's brilliant co-host, Gay Hendricks, is the legendary author of “The Big Leap” and other transformational books. Well, he just released a groundbreaking new book called “Your Big Leap Year,” and the conversation about it was truly next-level.
Gay lays out a power-packed "owner's manual for your mind" to help you make daily expansions into living from your highest creative potential. He shares insights like:
⭐️ The two "sacred elements" that define true genius (and how to embody them)
⭐️ A shockingly simple commitment to transform your whole life
⭐️ His life-changing morning ritual (after 52 years of daily practice!)
⭐️ How to create the time you need to unleash your unique brilliance
⭐️ Visceral techniques to "feel" commitments in your body (not just think them)
⭐️ A shockingly simple commitment to transform your whole life
⭐️ His life-changing morning ritual (after 52 years of daily practice!)
⭐️ How to create the time you need to unleash your unique brilliance
⭐️ Visceral techniques to "feel" commitments in your body (not just think them)
This isn't just theory, either. Gay draws from his own personal journey transforming from a broke, overweight smoker in a toxic relationship to international success as a pioneering author and human consciousness guide.
He's spent over 50 years mastering how to unleash the creative fire burning within each of us. “Your Big Leap Year” is his masterful recipe book for activating that spark, with 367 profound (yet simple) daily experiences to stoke your genius flame.
Do yourself a favor and take the first step on “Your Big Leap Year" by checking out this episode now. You will walk away with powerful mindset shifts and a clearer vision of your genius.
Key Takeaways
- (04:05) "Your Big Leap Year" breaks down daily self-improvement tasks.
- (08:34) Embrace change, find your real potential!
- (13:02) Commit to focusing on your genius daily.
- (17:08) It's all about finding and ditching limitations.
- (18:40) Being amazed by life's wonders and creativity.
- (24:09) Helping people break through limits and shine.
- (29:32) Genius is about doing what you love and making a contribution to humanity.
- (34:41) Discovering and nurturing your genius, that's the theme.
- (37:30) Make time for wonder, then boost it.
- (50:19) Commit to being aware and expressing yourself!
Additional Resources
- Click here to get Gay’s New Book: www.BigLeapPodcast.com/BLY
Ready to unlock the power of Ai to 3-10X your productivity and enhance your team effectiveness while growing your revenue? Take a moment to schedule a conversation with Mike's team. They can answer any questions and walk you through exactly what they can do for you AND your team. Click here: https://www.MikeKoenigs.com/Talk
TRY THIS! Mike's fully-automated system will capture and enrich leads and follow up with hyper-personalized custom websites on any channel (even WhatsApp): http://www.DigitalCafe.Ai
Creators and Guests
Host
What is The Big Leap?
The Big Leap is about two main things; one, Your Upper Limits. How much we can accomplish or achieve? How much love and abundance we can receive? And two, Discovering Your Zone of Genius. The difference between stagnation and success lies in the decisions you make in the moments that matter. This podcast is about those turning points -- the single decisions in life and business that change everything because the difference between stagnation and success lies in the decisions you make in the moments that matter. Gay and Mike will talk about business, relationships, limiting beliefs, and creating freedom and from time to time, you’ll also meet some of their favorite thinkers, thought leaders and celebrities and hear about their Big Leaps.
Mike Koenigs [00:00:00]:
All right, welcome to the big leap. This is a celebratory episode of Gay's brand new book, the Big Leap Year. And in it is an operating system. It is how Gay Hendrix operates and how you can have your own big leaps. There's 366 of them inside this book. And if you want to have a great day every day and live in a state of gratitude, this is an owner's manual for your mind. And you're going to receive some nuggets you didn't even know you wanted or you needed. For you, Gaye, what were some of the big takeaways that you loved in this episode that you even learned about yourself?
Gay Hendricks [00:00:39]:
Well, that's great that you mentioned that, Mike, because one of the things that happens almost every time that I'm around you, whether we're on the air or just walking down the street talking, is that I often discover things about whatever we're talking about that I didn't even know, I thought or didn't even. I hadn't articulated yet. And there were several moments in our conversation where that happened, and I really love that, because to me, life is about constant learning. And, you know, doesn't matter if you're 79 years old like I am, or 50 or 60 or whatever you are, you know, it's about 57. Yeah. How open you are to learning. And I want to keep getting opener and opener and opener all the time.
Mike Koenigs [00:01:27]:
You know what? One of my favorite chapters, and the book is day five, the power of Wonder. And I would say that is one of my other favorite things about gay Hendrix. He loves to live in a state of body wonder, feeling more. So I would say if you want to feel more and wonder more and learn more and be curious more and have 366 experiences of all those, this is the episode you're going to love probably more than any other episode we've made so far.
Gay Hendricks [00:01:57]:
I really had a great time with this. Even though I know the book inside out, I learned things about it that I didn't even know before we started talking.
Mike Koenigs [00:02:05]:
It's a great one. This is a ton of fun. And you're really, really gonna go deep into how gay thinks and why he wrote this book and who he root it for, which is probably you. You will meet you a better you inside this episode. Gay Hendrix, you've got big news. What is it?
Gay Hendricks [00:02:36]:
Right? I've got big news indeed. I have a new book out, and it's a day by day book, which takes the big leap into something you can do every day for a minute. Or two or five. So it's called your big leap year, and it's just making its birthday this month. And so I really would love it if everybody got out there and started practicing the day at a time. Big leap, it's got 366 different activities in it. Why 366? Well, it's because some years are leap years, like this one. Fortunately, you don't have to start this one on January 1 or any particular time.
Gay Hendricks [00:03:19]:
You just start whenever you want to start it with day one, and then you work through it from there. But I'm very proud of it in a, in a special way because it's something that people were asking for for years and years and years. And every time I thought about doing it, I always had something else to do. But this year I thought, wow, I'm going to do that. So I took six months and worked all of this out, and here it is out in public, and it's got a number of different components to it. For example, it's got three cycles of going deeper and deeper. So you start with the first cycle, then you go to the second and the third. And they all have to do with different big leap themes.
Gay Hendricks [00:04:05]:
Like, for example, a whole section is on overcoming your upper limit problems, and then there's a whole other section on owning your genius and another section on the power of commitment. So all of the things that are in the big leap are broken down into tiny bite sized pieces, something that you can do every day. And so I'm very, very happy with it because I'm a sort of a day at a time guy myself, in the sense that every day I go through certain rituals, I meditate every day, have for 52 years now, haven't missed a day in 52 years. So I meditate every day. And I have other therapeutic rituals. Like I like to sit down after I meditate and do some gratitude. You've heard me say every day that I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations. It turns out to be a really good day.
Gay Hendricks [00:05:02]:
Well, I work on getting my gratitude up first every day, and then I go out into my day, hopefully with my gratitude higher than my expectations. So that's a big part of the big leap. Your big leap year also is establishing a new ground of being where you're really living in your genius and therefore living in a state of gratitude all the time. So I really ask me some questions about it. I'm just starting. I'm just starting to do all the pr on it right now. So be a good interviewer.
Mike Koenigs [00:05:41]:
I will. So the first thing that would you. So when you think about it, so you got 366 is it segments, chapters, and how long is each one? Why don't you give us an example of a juicy nugget that you think is super representative of what the experience of reading the book is like? Let's just begin there.
Mike Koenigs [00:06:09]:
Yes. So if you're watching this on a screen, I'll hold up a picture of the first page. It just says day one.
Mike Koenigs [00:06:16]:
Day one.
Mike Koenigs [00:06:17]:
And if you're listening to it, each day has, I mean, sorry. Each page has a different day. So you start with day one. It's called beginning your big leap year. I'll just read your section because it's begins with a very bold question. Would you be willing to make this day the first in 365 days of positive leaps in your life? So that's the big question. So most people will say yes to that. With your willingness and commitment, you can transform this day and every day to come into a journey to your highest creative potential, what I call your genius.
Mike Koenigs [00:07:00]:
Over the course of the next 365 days, you'll have the opportunity to clarify and manifest many goals of your own as you bring your own chosen desires into reality. You'll also get a thorough grounding in the meta goal of this book to assist you in making your whole life an expression of your genius, ready and willing. If so, today's leap sets your journey to genius in motion. So each day has an activity, and sometimes it's something you do in your mind. Sometimes it's an affirmation, something you write down, perhaps. So here's the first day. Use this comprehensive commitment to guide each day of your journey. I commit to expanding my genius every day of my life.
Mike Koenigs [00:07:46]:
Say it to yourself several times right now to get a feel for it going forward. Say it in your mind and out loud throughout the day. You don't need to know what your genius is yet. You'll have many opportunities to map it out as we go along. Committing to your genius first allows you to bring forth the details of your genius in the perfect time and place. So I want to flesh that out a little bit, if I may. See a lot of people stop because they haven't figured out what their genius is, and I'm saying that's where you should start if you've got a good idea. If people come in with a real good idea of what their genius is, I ask them to set that aside so they don't have any reconceptions.
Mike Koenigs [00:08:34]:
Like this morning I did a two hour intensive with a person and it was really beautiful because she came in with a certain set of ideas about what she wanted to do. But everything took a different direction over the 2 hours where by the end of it, she was saying, oh, my God, I never knew I could feel this Free and this Good. This is so much better than what I came in wanting. So sometimes you have to dismantle what you come in with IN order to really grow beyond that. But in this particular case, start with a CommitmENt to your GeniuS first, and then let it come. You may have an idea. Like when I first started, I knew I was a good writer. But then later on, as I refined that, I realized that my GeniuS is a CeRtain kind of from the Heart Kind of writing.
Mike Koenigs [00:09:33]:
And I was trained in the academic model where you never involve your heart. And so I wrote a book that came from my heart. And it was a real leap because I came from that academic model and I was at the time a professor at a major university. And so suddenly I'm coming out with a book called learning to love yourself. You can imagine the jokes I ran into in the faculty room. You know, everybody would say, hey, let's give Hendrix a few minutes to love himself. Ha ha ha. You know, and then to top it all off, a couple of years later, I wrote a book called Conscious Breathing.
Mike Koenigs [00:10:12]:
You should have seen the looks I got from my colleagues then. It became the best selling book in the world on breathing. And so, you know that old saying about keep on plugging because, like, the first 16 things you're going to hit are points of rejection, you know, or people that make fun of your genius or people that don't think you can survive with your genius, but you got to keep committing to it. I use that example of the automatic pilot on the plane. Set yourself in motion toward the destination of owning your genius fully, of expressing your genius fully in the world. And then be like the automatic pilot. When you drift off, just come back and recommit again. When you drift off, come back and recommit.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:03]:
Most of your life is going to be spent drifting. It's just knowing how to recommit and get back in the groove again. And, you know, like a friend of mine, he comes from a twelve step tradition. He was a major alcoholic, and he said that he was sober for nine years, and then he got cocky. And one day he said, you know, one glass of chardonnay is not going to hurt anybody. I've been, you know, sober for eleven years. What's one glass of wine, you know? And he woke up eleven years later, basically his life went down the tube for eleven years. And so lots of people, lots of our people listening and will have taken some pretty big detours in their life.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:56]:
You know, I hope you didn't take an eleven year detour into addiction, but maybe you did. But at some point you got to forget all that and just recommit and leave that all behind. And I've had people in here that have had maybe seven or eight different bankruptcies and then found their genius and went on to success. And I've also had people in here in their seventies that didn't have that, that hadn't gotten around to their genius and to see how miserable they were and how despairing they were in life by the time you wake up, usually you're in your thirties, you spend a lot of your time in your twenties experimenting and thrashing around. And most of us aren't born enlightened. We have to thrash around a little bit in life. And we do that often in our twenties and our teens. But then usually somewhere along the line it dawns on us, oh, I've got to take responsibility for my life.
Gay Hendricks [00:13:02]:
And that begins a real path, not always successful, but it's a starting point. So at some point, my position is at some point, no matter where you've begun, where you've been, declare your commitment to your genius, make a heartfelt commitment to your genius, that you're going to spend a certain amount of time each day just focusing on that. And here I ask people to write it into their calendars. You know, I have exercises in this new book that get people to keep focusing on that over and over, but not in a critical way, just in a, in a celebratory way, a way that invites aliveness and celebration. That's another thing that's I was careful to do in the new book, Mike, and that is to honor our shadow side, but also focus on the positive things you can do, the things that take 10 seconds or 30 seconds or a minute. And the most you'll have to do in this book is maybe ten minutes of sitting down and writing some stuff down. A lot of the things you can do in less than a minute. So I know for a fact that moments of enlightenment are great, but it's the dedication to putting them into life.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:28]:
Regular, old, ordinary life. Day after day after day is where really things stick.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:34]:
Well, man, there's a lot to unpack there. Okay. And I have a couple more questions. So first of all, I just want to make sure for anyone list for you listening and watching. There is a link that www.bigleapodcast.com bly, which stands for bigleap year. That'll take you right to Amazon to get the book. So we'll make sure everyone gets the book. I'm curious, when you put this thing together, is there a frame? You said there's three cycles of going deeper in terms of the themes, but is there any other framework or structure? Just tell me about if you go from day one to day two to day five to day 30, did you give that thought in terms of the journey you're taking people on, or is that not relevant? Because we've talked about so many things over the course of this podcast, and I don't know if I've really, we've talked about habits a lot, but was there an overarching hierarchy that you or your publisher agreed on or you felt was important?
Mike Koenigs [00:15:58]:
Well, my publisher and I didn't really. I mean, he knew I was the guy that wrote the big leap, so I was the source of the material. So he didn't really have anything to say. You know, I would send him a batch now and then to see if he had anything to say about it. And usually it was something like, you left a comma out of the sentence on page 30, and so it wasn't big stuff. But yes, there's a theme and a sequence to it. And in a way it replicates nature in a way, because like part of life has to do with what I call the in breath. Like how much can I let in? How deeply can I allow myself to love, how much financial abundance can I allow myself to experience? In my view, those are in breadth questions like how deeply an inbreath, how deep an in breath can I take? How much can I let myself receive? Then there's another sequence.
Mike Koenigs [00:17:08]:
That's the out breath. That's how much can I allow myself to express. So if you think of these two twin parts of the breath, the in breath and the out breath, so part of a cycle would be, what do I need to clear up? What limiting beliefs do I need to clear up so that I can take that full in breath, so that I can allow myself the full measure of life's goodness? See, like in the big leap, I talk about these limiting beliefs, like, oh, I encountered two this morning in my work with this individual that I was working with. Shes a 56 year old female executive and very successful in many aspects of her life, but wants to go to the next level. Shes 56, and she sees that theres this immense world between now and when shes going to retire in 15 years or so. So what can she do with that? And thats a great question to ask. The essence of personal growth is wonder and curiosity. Anytime you begin to wonder, you get out of your fixed way of looking at it and say, I wonder what needs to happen for ex individual to transcend their current difficulties.
Mike Koenigs [00:18:40]:
A pure wonder that gets out from under all your knowledge about the situation and that kind of thing. It's only possible through the technology of curiosity and wonder. And so once you begin to open up, wonder is part of that, in breath part of that, I say going from, ah, to awe, you know, going to wow. You get the awe of life, but then you get the awe of life, the magnificence of creation, and the fact that we human beings, I mean, think of how creative you are just down in your cells. When you left your daddy's penis, there was about a quarter of a million of you. You were in a race with a quarter of a million people. So imagine being in a race with half the population of San Francisco, and you're running across the Golden Gate Bridge, and you got to Marin county before the rest of the 249,000. Does that make you a winner or a loser?
Mike Koenigs [00:19:57]:
Yeah, big winner. Big wiener.
Mike Koenigs [00:20:00]:
Yeah, you're a big wiener. So what happens? You win this race, and then you cruise into the egg, and your head explodes. The head literally comes off and blasts all the genetic material in. And then that starts a whole other thing, because as soon as you're one, you're connected to the egg. You're one thing. What does that egg begin to do? Divide. And then it divides again. And so you're never in one place for very long, for a long time on planet Earth.
Mike Koenigs [00:20:43]:
But here's the thing, Mike. Imagine how blessed and lucky we all are that we were the winner, first of all, of the sperm race. But even going beyond that, there's, what about, I think, about 9 million species on this planet. There's maybe five, 5 million of them are bugs, okay? So let's forget about them. They only live down somewhere. And most of the time, they're not bothering us. They stay to themselves. But there is, most of the things on earth are bugs, okay? And then there's a whole bunch of animals and mammals and fish and everything.
Mike Koenigs [00:21:25]:
But you landed. I landed in the one that can sit here and talk about a new book. So that's an incredible, great gift to receive. So that's what I mean, moving from awe to awe. Start out with just ah, oh, I'm feeling scared right now, or ah, I feel sad right now. Just any kind of self awareness that's internal in yourself or, oh, I just had a bunch of thoughts about x, y and z. But the more you can own your experience and come from down in there in that big broadcasting station that we are, the closer you get to opening up to what I call pure consciousness. First you have to kind of open up and own your upper limits.
Mike Koenigs [00:22:14]:
And then you open up and learn more about the feelings you didn't know you have and open up more. All of that's part of the in breath opening up to see how much I can receive, how much money am I going to allow myself to earn? But then right away, we shift into things that have to do with the out breath. How much of my genius can I express? How much of my self can I express? Can I go to somebody I care about and say, I felt angry with you the other day. You may not have ever talked to them like that before. This morning, for example, I had this very successful person in who's successful in her excellence zone, but she wants to get into her genius zone and she wants to live there. And she came across two big limiting beliefs. One of them was, I don't deserve to be here. I don't.
Mike Koenigs [00:23:16]:
I'm fundamentally flawed. I'm screwed in life because of my unfortunate family that I landed in, with addictions and all the stuff, poverty and that kind of thing. Fortunately, she didn't let that stop her. She worked her way out of that and, and showed up successfully in life. But still, there was this old limiting belief that says, you don't deserve all the good things of life because you are flawed. And so I had her kind of work with that one until she felt free of that. And then she had another one, too, which is, I don't believe I deserve the spotlight. I'm supposed to hang back and support other people, but then this other part of her wants to be in the spotlight.
Mike Koenigs [00:24:09]:
But then she has this limiting belief that says, you don't deserve it. So we worked with that a little bit. So by the end of the session, having transcended those limiting beliefs, she's got a look on her face like, wow, you know, and that's. That's what I live for. I never get tired of that. I've seen that I don't know how many thousands of times now, but I never get tired of people coming out from under their limits and shining the way they want to shine in the world. And so the book basically takes a cycle of going down through your limiting beliefs and things you need to learn to love and then releasing your genius and then learning how to express it in the world. So there are three cycles of that in the book, of going deeper and then expressing your genius, and then a second cycle where you go even deeper and express even more of your genius, and then a third and final cycle, which kind of takes you all the way.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:08]:
And so just show up every day and do your page. And that, that's our best advice to you.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:17]:
I love it. I mean, you've always been great at recipes. You know, I think of you as a genius on recipe maker. So another question I had for you is, like you talked today about the person you were coaching and how you live for those big leap realizations and those moments, those aha. Moments when you wrote this book, who are you writing it for? Did you have a specific person in mind? Or when you've got, you know. I know for me, I always have an audience. I literally design my books, and I've got an audience of, like, ten people or a specific audience that I'm performing for. And that's actually how I write, is I perform my content from bullet points, and I speak to the camera, I'm performing on microphone, and I'm imagining myself doing the equivalent of a TED talk.
Mike Koenigs [00:26:18]:
Every chapter is a TED talk. But for you, what was, how was this book? Yeah, first of all, who is the audience? How is this book different for you versus, like, your others? Three questions.
Mike Koenigs [00:26:35]:
Okay, great questions. Well, for one thing, the starting point for me, oftentimes is to go into a bookstore even before I write the book, and I go over there and I stand in the section and I get into the mindset as best I could of who would buy a book like this. And so I kind of create a sort of a psychographic or a demographic. And for me, most of my books are written for people who are already getting successful, or they may be already successful in one dimension, but they want to go to a whole new level. You know, like, Bonnie Raitt is a good friend of ours, going back for decades and decades, and she would be a good example. She was a fantastic club singer. She could work two or 300 nights a year, you know, working in clubs. She was a good blues musician, and she was just a person you always went to see in the club every year.
Mike Koenigs [00:27:36]:
But she wanted to go to a different level. And so she did the work and did the work of clearing a pathway and then opened up a deeper relationship with her creativity. And then she wrote that great album, nick of time. And at that time, there was a new president of Capital Records, and, you know, loved it. And suddenly, you know, like Clive Davis says, one night you're singing in clubs, and the next night you're singing in stadiums, and that's the way success often goes. And so I'm writing for a person who's already had a glimmer that they can be successful or a good taste of it. So I get a lot of my, I guess you might say, fan mail from people in their thirties and forties. You know, in developmental psychology, we say, your twenties, your job is to experiment.
Mike Koenigs [00:28:36]:
In your thirties, you find your life. In your forties, you build your life, and in your fifties, you enjoy your life. And so a lot of the people that come to me are sometimes in their late thirties, forties. They've built some stuff, but they now are beginning to suspect that there might be something even beyond. And, you know, like, I've given 50 talks to groups like YPO and the young presidents organizations and other organizations like that over the years. And so many successful folks have a yearning to express something they can't even name yet. That's what I'm calling genius. But I've worked with a lot of folks who look on the surface like they're successful, but they have this yearning that's not being fulfilled.
Mike Koenigs [00:29:32]:
And if all goes well, I can help them satisfy that yearning, because I know what it looks like. Genius is doing what you love to do, and genius is doing something that makes a contribution to now and the future. So those two elements to me are the two sacred elements of genius. I don't want to create people who are just some mad, crazy genius that doesn't ever produce anything useful. You know, we want people who are productive geniuses who make things, you know, good for humanity. And I believe very much that it doesn't matter. Like one of my old mentors, Abraham Maslow, used to say, it doesn't matter if you're making a genius soup or writing a genius symphony, you're still drawing on that deeper part of yourself. The soup may be for five people, the symphony may be for 50 million people, but it doesn't matter because it's coming from that part of yourself, that curious, inventive wonder part of yourself.
Mike Koenigs [00:30:48]:
Okay, I'm going to continue on with the other two questions, which was what? How was creating this book different? Because I didn't feel like I got that answer out of this. How was it different? How was it similar? To your other books. In terms of the writing process, the intentions behind it, and how it was.
Mike Koenigs [00:31:10]:
Created, this is very different. I decided to do a different way since it was a day at a time that I would write several days, let's say I would write five or ten days, and then I would send it over to a couple of my friends to look at and give me feedback on. And then I would send it over to a friend of mine, Carol, who does my editing, and she would edit them. And I would do my own editing, too. But when I do that, when I wrote books before, I never let anybody look at it while I was working on it. I was just in that creative tunnel, in a sense, with it. And I wanted to write it from beginning to end before I let anybody else look at it. And so with the big leap, for example, I was with that book like, 28 hours a day for, you know, six to twelve months.
Mike Koenigs [00:32:17]:
And nobody even. I mean, I would talk to Katie about it sometimes, but I never let her read a word of it or anything like that. And then I came out, because that book particularly felt like it was all of a piece. You know, it was one. It was one whole in breath and out breath. Same thing with learning to love yourself and also conscious loving. So a lot of our bigger books have had that kind of one breath feel to them where I wrote them from beginning to end, kind of like in one long six months or twelve month period.
Mike Koenigs [00:32:57]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:32:57]:
I did this book differently because I really needed and wanted feedback on every one of my exercises that I put in there. Some people would come back and say, one of my friends was always on me for, can you make this simpler? And can you take this page and a half and make it a page? And so that's one way to. And I was grateful to that. That was always useful. Sometimes I would get back and say, nope, that's as lean as I can get it. But oftentimes I was able to trim a third of a page or something out of it. So that was a great type of feedback. I got another person that I often sent things to, another writer friend of mine that I often read her work to, that her feedback was often on the.
Mike Koenigs [00:33:57]:
You need more personal stories. And so you'll notice in this book, there's a tremendous number of times when I refer to my own journey. So this book has a lot of my own journey in it, too, because oftentimes I've found the best example I can use is if I've experienced something, I'll use myself as the example, because I know it inside out, and so why not? And so I. That was an important part of it, too, was to bring more of my own story into it. And so that's where I am.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:41]:
That's great. Well, while I've been. So I looked through the book while I was listening to you right now, and here are the themes, and this is really my last question about the framework, but here were the themes that we had in there. How to discover your genius stories from my own quest, the power of commitment, overcoming your upper limit problems, getting from your excellent zone to the genius zone, breaking free of your limiting beliefs, living in your genius zone, how to create the time you need for your genius and then bringing forth the genius of your relationships. So, and then the frameworks go on to commitments that invite specific aspects of your genius. Wonder questions. You talked about that and then affirmations. So I'm curious if you had, like, one big tip about how to create the time you need for your genius.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:43]:
You talk about yours, which begin with your meditation. And I'm just curious, if you had, like, after working with the thousands of people you've done one on ones and your trainings with you, and you're working with high functioning people and you're providing feedback and ideas for the super high performers, how do you help them create even more time for their genius? Living in their genius, what shows up for you when you that the number.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:23]:
One thing to do is to take a piece of time? I start people with ten minutes and I have them actually pencil it into their calendar so they know that tomorrow at 1110, they're going to be spending ten minutes focusing on their genius. And so I get a commitment from them where they agree to do something for their genius during that ten minutes every day. That's the starting point. So ten minutes, because I say, if you're not willing to commit ten minutes a day to your genius, go work with somebody who wants to keep you in the comfort zone. That's not me. I want to have people that are willing to make commitments and follow through on them and spend some time taking good care of themselves. There's a good reason, they say on the airplane, put your own oxygen mask on first. You know, so you really need to take care of yourself first, especially if you're in the entrepreneuring world and creative world.
Mike Koenigs [00:37:30]:
So tip number one, pencil it, put it in your calendar, and do some thinking about when is the perfect time to do that. Start with ten minutes and then bump it up to 20 minutes after a month or so. And maybe the only thing you do during that ten minutes is sit there with your eyes closed and say, hmm, I don't know what my genius is. What is my genius if, like, ten minutes of wonder will change your life about anything? You know, like Einstein, according to his notebooks, spent every day for 27 years, he would spend part of each day wondering about a particular question that he had never been able to. And then 27 years, he's walking on the beach, I believe, over here in Santa Barbara, and boom, he gets the answer. And, wow, I. You know, that kind of thing tickles me pink, because if you look on my wall here, I have a big sign that says, wonder. And to me, wonder is sacred.
Mike Koenigs [00:38:41]:
It's a sacred tool that we've been given that most people underutilize. They live within the known, you know, and what we need is freedom from the known so we can get out there in the world of creativity and directly connect with the universe, and it's brilliant way of creating new things in us.
Mike Koenigs [00:39:05]:
Yeah. So I'm going to tell you something that I, when I've worked with you for the past however many years or as long as I've known you, which is, I think it's quickly approaching 20 years, believe it or not. And something that always struck me is how much time you spend feeling in your body, like checking in to see how things feel. And when I look through the days in the book again, I've been doing this. I've been, while I've been listening to you, I've been looking through the book and looking for patterns. And a lot of the days are about feeling into a feeling as a reinforcement of whatever the lesson is.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:01]:
Yes.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:02]:
So talk about the connection to big leaps and paying attention to body sensations, because that's just, to me, a big, big core of your genius and how you incorporate that in, you're always checking in. It's like, hmm, let's feel into that for a moment. Hmm.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:23]:
Yes. Well, there's a good reason I do that, because I use my body and its sensations and particularly the flow of positive energy in my body as a barometer. So if I start to eat something, even before I swallow it, I might feel that energy stopping. And I've been known to spit something into my napkin because my body was already telling me, don't swallow that. So I don't even question that anymore. But let me give you a great example that's woven throughout the book. There's a lot of people talk about commitment, the concept commitment. I've worked with people for 50 years now.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:12]:
And I found that there's a trick, a secret to commitment that almost nobody knows, and that is to connect up the commitment in your mind with a heartfelt sense of the commitment in your body, actually feeling the commitment. So, you know, if I ask you, are you committed to your wife? You say, yeah, well, I've been married how long, 20 years or 30 years, something like that.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:42]:
Yeah, going on 24 for us.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:44]:
Yep, going on 24. And I've been with Katie for 44 years now. And so I have, at one level, a great commitment. But if I ask you now, feel how you're committed to Vivian in your body, feel that, the quality of that commitment, feel the heartfelt commitment. That's a very different thing than just thinking about the commitment in your mind. And so I'm always looking to connect up mind, body and spirit ultimately, because ultimately, human beings are a conscious organism that's interacting with the environment and constantly learning, learning, learning, learning. That's what we are. We're a gigantic learning machine.
Mike Koenigs [00:42:33]:
That's how we got good at where we got to in life. I was once in an aquarium in New Zealand, and I saw a spectacle. They had a thing there called a hagfish, or also called a slime eel.
Mike Koenigs [00:42:51]:
Yes.
Mike Koenigs [00:42:51]:
And it had not changed in evolution. In 300 some million years, there had not been a change. If you go back into the fossil record, hagfish are exactly the same. They've not changed. And I got to see why, because there in the water, they just swim in a figure eight. That's all they do all day long. They swim in a figure eight. And if somebody tries to catch them, they exude slime.
Mike Koenigs [00:43:22]:
So they're very protected. They don't have to worry about predators. Nobody wants to. Even a big fish doesn't want to get a mouthful of slime. And so they don't have a lot of, so they don't have any challenges. And they've gotten into this stereotyped figure eight pattern of swimming, and that's how they've been for the last 300 some million years and haven't changed. Be careful, human beings, be careful about replicating the hagfish in your life, you know, going around the same things all the time, because human beings are meant to invent. And especially when you get up into your forties and fifties, creativity comes a calling, big time, because, like in your fifties, the creative, I mean, the developmental challenge, every moment, creativity versus stagnation.
Mike Koenigs [00:44:17]:
Creativity or stagnation. I bet you've met, and I bet people who are watching and listening have met lots of people who've been stagnant for a long time. They've been going through the motions for a long time. To me, that often calcifies in people's fifties when they stop reinventing themselves. So I'm a big cheerleader for constant renewal and always challenging your beliefs. You know, like my wife and I started, Katie and I started focusing on eliminating criticism from our relationship in about 1982 or three. After we'd been together for a couple of years, we figured out neither one of us enjoyed criticizing the other one or being criticized. So we started to eliminate it.
Mike Koenigs [00:45:10]:
And it took us a number of years to actually get it down to zero. But here's the magic. Since the turn of the century, neither one of us have said a critical word to the other one. So we eventually made good on that commitment, even though it took us a bunch of years to do it. But I'll tell you, imagine living for the past 25 years or so where nobody criticizes anybody ever. Yeah, you know, and it makes for a great, wonderful, rich type of creativity. So to me, creativity is the solution for just about everything. And human beings don't give ourselves credit for the amount of creativity we have inside us.
Mike Koenigs [00:45:57]:
The universe is creating things like crazy all the time, and that's what it does. You know, every year the oak tree drops itself, what do you call them, one of those round things? Acorns. Yeah. Every year, you know, it drops its acorns. Yep, I know, because our gardeners have to scoop them up by the bucketful every year. And yet the oak tree, you don't hear the oak trees out there saying, oh, no. You know, another year I got to go through getting rid of my acorns. You know, it's just part of their, their surrender to their creativity.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:35]:
And human beings are like that, too. Let's surrender ourselves. Let's open ourselves to our full time creativity and giving my book one more plug here before it's over. See, the book just gives you a way to do that every day without having to dig it out of the book yourself. And so I'm really, you know, it was, it wasn't always fun because I had to. You know, writing 366 of anything, even, even one sentence, is a challenge. But I'm so glad we took the time to do it and get it all edited right, because now it's really like a one year of constant growth in a minute a day. Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:31]:
My take on it is this is after knowing you for as long as I have, this is very much.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:43]:
A.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:43]:
Best of gay Hendricks owner's manual for your mind. And I've watched you, I've listened to you for a long time, and you always have a big idea, a big nugget, and it's like a shortcut to a destination you didn't even want to go to or you didn't know existed. So there's the typical mindset of how do I make more money? Or what's the best thing to invest in? Or, um, this one is one of them. Day 41 is believing that success brings burden. That's a really big, heavy thing. And I would say most people aren't even aware of the fact that that's what they think about. And it's a prevention from instead of a release to become better or freedom to become. When you realize that that's some negative programming you have.
Mike Koenigs [00:48:55]:
So that, to me, is inside of here. To have 366 of those is. It's really like just a bucket of jewels. And you get to discover there are jewels that exist in the universe that you may not be aware of. So that's what my take is on this book. So maybe a way to wrap up today. Is there something I should have asked you that I didn't, or is there some other yummy thing inside here that will be a surprise you didn't even know you needed or wanted?
Mike Koenigs [00:49:40]:
Well, when I had my first big wake up moment that set me on my path to expressing my genius, I smoked two packs of Marlboros a day. I was 100 pounds overweight. I was in the worst imaginable relationship that I've been in, a toxic relationship. And I had, like, dollar 39 in the bank. So I couldn't even get out of the relationship. I couldn't afford to live anywhere else. So I was about as stuck as a human being as I've ever been. So out of that one big commitment, I believe saved my life and changed my life.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:19]:
And it was a commitment to bringing forth more of my consciousness every day, to becoming more aware. And I didn't know it at the time, but later, one of my mentors, Jack Downing, he always said that people mistakenly think there are two faucets in life, one called pleasure and one called pain. And you're trying to up the pleasure and turn down the pain, he said, but there's only one faucet, and it's called awareness. And if you will commit yourself to becoming more aware, the terms, I put it is you commit yourself to expressing more of your genius every day, if you will do that one thing, make a commitment to that. That opens up territory that you wouldn't imagine. Here I am 50 years later. You know, it only took me a year to lose 100 pounds. I was overweight, but it took me a lot longer than that to overcome other obstacles.
Mike Koenigs [00:51:20]:
But in a way, it doesn't matter, because if you know in your life that you're on the path to releasing your full genius, that's hitching your wagon to a really good motivational source. And that's what I recommend that people do, rather than being pushed around by forces in the world. Like, how much money can I make? Put your attention on how much of my genius can I express? And I'd be willing to bet that you'll get a lot richer doing that than you would focusing on money.
Mike Koenigs [00:51:54]:
Oh, that's good. That's good. Well, I'm going to give you one more nugget, which is another shining example of how to become more like gay every day. And day 67 is authentic speaking. And one of my first experiences of working with gay Hendricks is he's really specific about how he's feeling right now. And I know that when I walked away, I thought to myself, how kind is it to someone when you can speak authentically, how responsible that is to you and the other person, and how clarity creates closeness and love and connection. And so that's the day 67 lesson in the book. And that's where I.
Mike Koenigs [00:52:53]:
I wanted to leave us today. So gay. I'm going to just tell our viewer listener right now, again, to go to Bigleap podcast.com Bly for Bigleap year. Grab the book there. You're going to love it. It's just a whole lot of gay Hendricks all in one place. And out of all the episodes we do, big leap year. I researched this in the background.
Mike Koenigs [00:53:17]:
That's one of our most consumed episodes we ever did. So the fact that that was, I think, 60 some episodes ago is a testament to how well I believe this book will do, given the fact that over 350,000 copies of the original big leap is out there and sold. And I did a little research in the background, and already big leap year is all over the Internet. It has an enormous amount of traction, the book itself, and that's Macmillan, who released it. So congratulations again on just, like, having another big, successful book with a big, successful publisher. It's St. Martin's essentials imprint, which is a great partner to have. So I'll leave you with the final words, gay.
Mike Koenigs [00:54:14]:
Anything else you want to leave everyone besides go get that book right now.
Mike Koenigs [00:54:20]:
Do whatever you can to increase the amount of organic good feeling in your body and do everything you can to express your authentic feeling to other people and watch the magic that unfolds in your life.
Mike Koenigs [00:54:35]:
Awesome. Well, share this episode with someone who can benefit from their own big leap year besides you, and post any big leaps that you have over at iTunes when you rate this podcast and share it with your friends. And of course, if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you give it an up vote and share it with someone you know too. So thanks again for another great episode.