[00:00:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: All right. Welcome back to The Abundant Coach podcast. And I am so excited about who I have on for you today. I’m having a total fan girl moment, because our next speaker is someone who has a PhD in Counseling Psychology, along with his wife, Kathy, has trained thousands of coaches, written 40 books, including ones I know, you know. Conscious Loving, Five Wishes, The Big Leap. Has been featured on over 500 radio and television shows, including Oprah, no big deal. So, I’m thrilled to welcome, Gay Hendricks. Thank you so much for being here, Gay.

[00:00:34] Gay Hendricks: Thank you, Lauren. I’m so delighted to be with you.

[00:00:37] Lauren Brollier Newton: I want to start with a story that you told, that I had the privilege of hearing. I believe, you told it on one of Mary Morrissey’s programs when you were one of the guest speakers. And the story that you told completely changed my life, and I want to thank you for that story, and I want to invite you to tell it to our listeners.

[00:00:54] Lauren Brollier Newton: So, the story I’m referring to, I believe you were just dating Kathy, you go to a party, and [00:01:00] there’s a man, I think his name was Ed, who tells you about a near death experience that he had. And I think, he started by saying, I don’t like small talks. So, do you want to do big talk? Or you said that, or he said that. So, I’ll start the podcast by saying, are you down to do some big talk and tell us that story.

[00:01:15] Gay Hendricks: I’m totally always into big talk. And yes, that even though it happened, Kathy and I just celebrated, by the way, our 44th anniversary, of when we met each other in 1980. So, the story I’m about to tell is a story involved going to a party with Kathy, as a new relationship in a new town. And we were going to a party that I had mixed feelings to go.

[00:01:41] Gay Hendricks: Because it was the engagement party of a colleague of mine, another psychologist that I’d known for years, and it was to be his 5th marriage. And I had known him through number 2, number 3, number 4, and frankly, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in number 5. So, I [00:02:00] was mixed feelings about whether I really wanted to even participate in it. Turned out I was totally wrong.

[00:02:04] Gay Hendricks: They’re still together here. So, we go to this party, and I think it’s commonly known among my friends that I’m not a big party animal. And so, I usually stay at parties for a little while, and then mosey on off. So, I moseyed off to the library, it was in this beautiful mansion, the party. And so, I went back into the library and I was looking at all the beautiful books, and this man who was about 60 years old, at a time when I was about 34 or 35 years old.

[00:02:35] Gay Hendricks: He, shaven head and he came into the library and I can’t remember which one of us said, I think he said, you must not like small talk either and I said, yeah. So, let’s not have any, let’s have some big talk. And he said, I almost died 6 months ago. And I said, Oh, okay. That qualifies as big dog.

[00:02:55] Gay Hendricks: And he said, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It changed [00:03:00] my life. And I was just, wow, this came out of left field, and I could still hear the party roaring back in the other side of the house. But it was like we were in this little bubble. And we had the most amazing conversation.

[00:03:13] Gay Hendricks: It’s where my book Five Wishes came from. Because the man said, his name was Ed Steinbrecher, and it turned out, he was a famous astrologer. Although, I did not know that at the time, but that was why he was at the party. Because he was the soon to be wife’s astrologer, and he was there to, it was a blessing to the thing.

[00:03:33] Gay Hendricks: And he said that he’d had this new death experience. And the reason it was the best thing that ever happened was it because, it left him with a question that he asked himself and the answers to it changed his life. And so, by this time I’m hopping up and down, and I’m saying, what was the question?

[00:03:53] Gay Hendricks: And he said, here, I’ll ask it to you. And just like it was asked, like I saw it answered in my mind, and [00:04:00] I’m going to now, Lauren, ask it to you and all of your viewers and listeners. The question was, if you were at the end of your life, and I came to visit you, and if you had led a completely successful life, what would be the number one thing that you’d tell me that made your life a big success?

[00:04:22] Gay Hendricks: It was because, what, fill in the blank? And the moment he asked me that, I realized that I was in my mid 30s, and I’d never had a close relationship with a woman that really worked. I’d had a bunch of them since I was 20, 16, or 17 years old, but none of them had ever lasted more than a couple of years.

[00:04:45] Gay Hendricks: And I was beginning to say, why is it that a guy can get a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Stanford, and be a successful therapist, and write books, and everything like that, and still not be able to make a close [00:05:00] relationship work. It was beginning to really press on me at the time. And so, I said to Ed, okay, my number one thing that would make my life a success is, if I created a lasting love relationship with a woman with whom I could grow and change positively over the years. So, a long term relationship.

[00:05:24] Gay Hendricks: And he said, okay, that’s a great thing. And he said, you haven’t experienced that, right? And I said, no, but I think my life would feel unfulfilled if I never could make that happen. So, if my life were a success, that would be the number one thing. And then he said, okay, great.

[00:05:40] Gay Hendricks: If you had that, what’s number two? So, I went down my list and I filled it in later because, I couldn’t think of them all at the time. But what I came up with what’s in Five Wishes, which was number two, was to live in a state of completion with people I’m with, my friends and family, so there’s nothing unspoken or [00:06:00] unheard. You’re complete with them.

[00:06:02] Gay Hendricks: My number three was to learn to write from my heart, because I had written successful textbooks before, but I’d never written something that was from down in here. It was based on other people’s work or like, in a textbook, you have to summarize, research and all that.

[00:06:19] Gay Hendricks: But what was in my heart wanted to be expressed? There’s a beautiful old saying from the gospel of Thomas that says, that if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. And so, I really wanted to bring forth, and that was my number three.

[00:06:38] Gay Hendricks: And my number four was, to experience as much of the creator force, God, Spirit, whatever you want to name it. But it’s the thing that we’re all aspiring to connect with is this larger force, the creator force. And I said, I want to have as much as I can learn about that, but I want to learn it experientially.

[00:06:57] Gay Hendricks: It’s not just as a thing, a mental thing. And [00:07:00] because I’d had that with religion growing up and everything, but I never had connected with anything in my heart and soul. And then my fifth was simply to learn how to savor life, to be there as life unfolded. And I’d recently had an experience taking my little girl out for Halloween, and she had this beautiful costume on.

[00:07:21] Gay Hendricks: And yet, we went from house to house, and I realized, when we got back that I was only there about half the time because, I was working on this book or article or something I was working on in my head. And I was kind of time sharing with that, and I wasn’t fully there for this beautiful. So anyway, that’s what this conversation had.

[00:07:41] Gay Hendricks: And it’s interesting, that I never thought about writing a book about it, until many years later. And I think your listeners and viewers will appreciate this. I was at a dinner one time, about the 20 years ago with a Neale Walsch sitting next to me, the [00:08:00] conversations with Neale Donald Walsch. And he is about as allergic to small talk as I am.

[00:08:06] Gay Hendricks: And he could literally sit there for 3 hours without saying a word just because we agreed right away that we were going to exchange some life stories. And so, I told him this story, and he said, my god, Gay, have you written a book about that? He said, it sounded like you were telling the story for the first time.

[00:08:23] Gay Hendricks: And I realized, yeah, I am telling it for the first time. And he says, you’ve got to go home and write a book about that, man. And so as soon as I went home, and I literally wrote the book in about 3 or 4 weeks. And then, I spent the next 6 months, a few months expanding and stuff, but I told a story and immediately the company that published The Power of Now and The Peaceful Warrior bought it and it became a bestseller.

[00:08:50] Gay Hendricks: But that was the actual moment that led to it. Thank you for asking that, I hadn’t had a chance to tell that story in ages.

[00:08:57] Lauren Brollier Newton: The first time I heard it, I think the power of that story, and this is [00:09:00] something that I’ve noticed about you in particular, that always just expands my heart or opens my heart to the sky is, the way that you ask questions, the way that you develop questions that we can ask of ourselves.

[00:09:11] Lauren Brollier Newton: And when you ask yourself the question, what would have made my life a success? It automatically beams you to this macro place that maybe you haven’t thought about before. And when you look at the five in your particular case, there’s so many different ways to fulfill that.

[00:09:27] Lauren Brollier Newton: It’s not like, my one purpose is to be a life coach. And my one purpose is to be a writer, in the way that I believe spirit, or your connection to your own creative forces connected you to your own particular answers. There’s so many different ways you can learn how to save her. There’s so many different ways that you can write from the heart.

[00:09:44] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love that question for it opens us to such a greater purpose than maybe we were looking for. I think sometimes, with our coaches here in particular, they want to feel like their purpose is just their career path. So, it feels tight and neat and cozy for them. Like, I want to hear [00:10:00] the answer, life coach, and then I’m good to go.

[00:10:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: But when I asked myself this question, and I want to thank you for the question and for sharing the story, because it truly changed my life. The top 2 things that I heard were, I want to really help people, and I want to have a love for the record books.

[00:10:14] Gay Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:10:14] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so, those two things I’ve been able to serve every day since I heard you tell that story in many different ways. And it’s so empowering that there’s not just one pathway that I can take with either of those things. So thank you.

[00:10:26] Gay Hendricks: You’re bringing to light, Lauren, something that’s incredibly important. And that is that coach partly by what they know, but mainly, by who they be. Any kind of work you can do on enhancing your being, your presence. That is the thing that really makes a difference in coaching, or therapy, or medicine, or whatever you do.

[00:10:51] Gay Hendricks: I have clients who are medical doctors, who are tired of the old paradigm of being the perpetually in a [00:11:00] hurry doctor that sees people 2 minutes at a time and that kind of thing. And they want to learn how to be present for their communications. Their colleagues all think that it will slow things down, but it actually makes things go better, because if you’re really present with a person, that’s what makes a difference.

[00:11:19] Gay Hendricks: It doesn’t matter if you’re there with them for 10 minutes, or 8 minutes, or 6 minutes, it’s the equality of the presence. If you feel that it’s a person, in whom you can trust your confidence, and that’s why any movement a coach makes toward developing their own insight into themselves, their own appreciation of the causal events that made them who they are, and their own appreciation of how they dealt with those events.

[00:11:49] Gay Hendricks: Because here’s the thing, like you mentioned, I’ve trained thousands of coaches, therapists, psychiatrists. Now, when I was at the university in Colorado for 21 years, I was in the Counseling [00:12:00] Psychology Department there, and we trained about 1,200 counselors and therapists over the years.

[00:12:05] Gay Hendricks: So, based on that experience, I can guarantee you that, coaches who develop their presence don’t burn out, but coaches who don’t. The burnout rate is awesome, it’s scary, 50% or something like that will not be in that profession in a few years. And so, if you want to beat those odds, they’re beaten not by accumulating more knowledge.

[00:12:32] Gay Hendricks: That’s important, you need to stay fresh, you need to stay open to new techniques and things like that. And it’s about the quality of your being. We must never forget that because, anything we can learn to deal with, and accept, and learn to love, and make new choices about in ourselves, gives us an automatic ability to communicate that knowledge to people. But also, knowledge is knowing that [00:13:00] tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

[00:13:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: Exactly. And I think, there’s a level of, it’s one thing to impart knowledge, but it’s another thing to transmit an energy. So, that actually brings me to one of the questions I had written down for you is, I noticed what can be a hard part for coaches? And I think this is what you’re speaking to.

[00:13:19] Lauren Brollier Newton: I noticed that as we coach our coaches here at Brave Thinking Institute, the number one thing that stands in their way, and this is probably not true for coaches. This is probably just true for humankind, but the number one thing that stands in coaches way of putting themselves out there, going and helping more people is oftentimes, just navigating their own inner world.

[00:13:36] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I’m curious when you’re saying about, mastering your being, what would be some of your tips for how do they start exploring that in a way that’s going to support them and the being, and not just the doing?

[00:13:49] Gay Hendricks: One thing to just know is that life itself, whether in the form of your clients or whatever, life is always going to be bringing you the one thing that [00:14:00] needs to be mastered at that moment. For you to move forward and like, having this early in my practice way back more than 40 years ago. When I was a budding young psychologist, three people in a row brought in father issues.

[00:14:17] Gay Hendricks: And I realized that some of those same things were coming up for me in my own life. And so, life will be presenting you with things for you to work on as well as for things for you to help your clients work on. So just stay open, because life is very happy to teach you lessons by tickling you with a feather.

[00:14:38] Gay Hendricks: But if you’re not paying attention, as I well know from personal experience, it’s very easy. It’s just as happy to teach you by whopping you over the head with a sledgehammer if you’re enough to those feather tickles.

[00:14:49] Lauren Brollier Newton: That’s so true. I have to tell you, I was listening to a couple of different podcast episodes that you did yesterday. And in one of them, you asked a question. I believe the question the [00:15:00] podcast host asked you was something about navigating a relationship patterns. And you were talking about how oftentimes in relationships, both parties are vying to play the victim role.

[00:15:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: And one of the questions that you said that people can ask themselves, and I heard it and I went, Oh, that’s just another way to look at things is you ask the question, just ask yourself, how is this familiar? And I thought that was such a brilliant question.

[00:15:21] Lauren Brollier Newton: This is what I mean about you’re such a gift and talent for posing a question that really opens us up. So last night, I know you can’t tell for those of you who are listening, you can’t see, but if you’re watching on youtube, you can’t tell by looking at me, but I’m actually 9 months pregnant right now.

[00:15:34] Lauren Brollier Newton: I’m about a week from giving birth. And so last night, I was with my husband in the baby’s room and we were trying to put together the mattress, and the sheet, and we were first time parents. So, we have no idea what we’re doing, really. And I found myself getting angry, not at my husband, I ordered the wrong size sheet and I couldn’t figure out how this worked with the little changing pad fit on the dresser.

[00:15:53] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I noticed myself getting angry, and I noticed myself saying, they said, this is a standard size crib sheet and [00:16:00] blah, blah, blah, and I’m getting angry about it. And I laughed, because it hadn’t been 15 minutes since I was listening to your podcast. I said to myself, Oh, how is this familiar? It was mind blowing, just this want to blame something else, or push something else. And then, I remember the question that you asked, which is usually you’re just scared.

[00:16:20] Gay Hendricks: That’s important to know because, underneath all of those kind of incidents is something you’re afraid of. And oftentimes, though people mistakenly express their fear in the form of anger. And don’t express it in the form of fear, but there’s a what you were working on last night, that, there’s a lot of things to be scared of in there, and I’m notoriously awful at putting things together and operating screwdrivers and things like that.

[00:16:47] Gay Hendricks: So, I’ve been known to cry actually trying to get things to work like that. And my wife, on the other hand, is grew up in a family of father, brother, and other brother, are all engineers. And [00:17:00] she knows how to fix anything. And so, if you’re one of those klutzes like myself, who’s not good at the physical world, get yourself a life partner that is, because it can really save a lot of tears.

[00:17:13] Gay Hendricks: I wanted to mention something else, you touched on something that triggered a memory in me that, I was on a talk to one of Mary’s groups, and I was describing something that I think, your listenership and your viewership might benefit from too, which is a paradigm for transformation that we use here.

[00:17:31] Gay Hendricks: It’s a 4 step paradigm. A set of steps that no matter what kind of coaching you do, or what kind of therapy, or what kind of psychiatry you’re practicing. It’s going to have to involve these 4 steps in order to make something successful happen in the transformational world. And it we express it in the form of a word, F A C T.

[00:17:56] Gay Hendricks: F stands for facing. So, the [00:18:00] first step in any kind of transformational process is the person has to face it, has to say, okay, I’m willing to spend some time learning about that, or working on that, or whatever, but It’s an act of facing. Sometimes, it’s very dramatic, like people at a 12 step group. When they say, hello, my name’s John and I’m an alcoholic, that’s a very radical form of facing it because, you’re standing up in public and saying something.

[00:18:28] Gay Hendricks: Sometimes for the first time, like a friend of mine that I was just texting with last night. He’s been sober now for almost 20 years, and he said, the most important moment of his transformational life was just standing up for the first time and declaring himself an alchemist. Because up until that point, he’d been defensive.

[00:18:46] Gay Hendricks: Nope, I can handle it. Yeah, no problem, I can quit tomorrow. But the moment he just faced it as it was. So, that’s the F of facing. You’ve got to turn around and look at something just straight on. [00:19:00] Sometimes the second step though, is equally important is acceptance. A stands for acceptance because until you’ve accepted something at the level of deeply lovingly accepting it.

[00:19:14] Gay Hendricks: Not just accepting it like, Oh, I can accept that today is Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever it is, it’s accepting it. Down in yourself where you’re accepting it with love. So that’s F and A. The C and T stand for choosing and taking action. Because it’s not enough just to greet yourself with loving acceptance.

[00:19:37] Gay Hendricks: It’s important to then translate that into action and make a new commitment or choice. So, C stands for choice or commitment. So, making a new commitment to how you want it to be now. Then T stands for taking action. That it’s always going to feel incomplete until you do something, even a ten second thing, that translates it [00:20:00] into action. So, put that in the background of your transformational work with people, and I hope you find that as useful as our students do.

[00:20:08] Lauren Brollier Newton: Love that. So they’re facing, they’re accepting, they’re choosing, or they’re making a commitment. How would you help someone know, or discover what that action would be to take at the end when you’re going to take action to it, sounds like ground to the process?

[00:20:22] Gay Hendricks: What I recommend is, people generate some options and then use their body to communicate, how they feel about that? Because if you write down, what would be a typical problem? Can you throw out something that you’d like me to use for an example?

[00:20:38] Lauren Brollier Newton: Sure. So, perhaps a coach or their client is procrastinating on something that they want to do.

[00:20:44] Gay Hendricks: Okay, so you’re working with the person’s procrastination. Okay, so the 4 questions then you need to ask is, what is it that needs to be faced here at the deepest level? And you can go through these any number of times, because what will happen is, oftentimes the [00:21:00] person will get stuck on one of them and not be able to get to the next.

[00:21:05] Gay Hendricks: So the example you gave, you said, let’s say the person has faced, and accepted, and made a choice, but is having trouble taking an action. Let me say something really important about that. If they’re stuck on the 4th thing, it’s usually because they’ve done an incomplete version of the 3rd thing.

[00:21:23] Gay Hendricks: In other words, they haven’t really made the decision. The key commitment yet, or they haven’t really made the commitment to what they want. So go back, you can always go back one step and find out what’s missing there? The other thing is to use your body to help you discover what you’re passionate about.

[00:21:43] Gay Hendricks: So let’s say, you list 3 choices there. And when you ask, we always teach our students how to recognize an absolute yes and an absolute no in their body. So for [00:22:00] example, I don’t know anything about, you’ve never met you before, I don’t think, but let me help you find an absolute yes and an absolute no. Do you like oysters?

[00:22:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: No, absolutely not.

[00:22:11] Gay Hendricks: Okay, great. I picked a good one then. I have only 3 or 4 that I can ask people that get a rapid response, but if you don’t like oysters, by golly, you know, you don’t like oysters. So, use that as a body signal, see, your body knew that almost before I got the word out of my mouth. Because your body reacts in a 20th of a second, compared to by the time it gets up to your brain to form a thought about it.

[00:22:42] Lauren Brollier Newton: Okay.

[00:22:43] Gay Hendricks: Your body is already remembering maybe, looking at an oyster or tasting an oyster or something, and it knows right away. So the next time, Lauren, you face a question, ask yourself, okay, here’s an option. Should I go to the [00:23:00] Bahamas for my anniversary? Or should we stay at home and redecorate the backyard and replant the backyard? Both exciting options, perhaps, but only one of them makes your body light up with an absolute yes. For example, do you like vanilla ice cream?

[00:23:21] Lauren Brollier Newton: I do.

[00:23:21] Gay Hendricks: Do you like chocolate ice cream?

[00:23:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: I do.

[00:23:25] Gay Hendricks: Okay, and if you were to choose between the two, which would you pick?

[00:23:29] Lauren Brollier Newton: Chocolate.

[00:23:30] Gay Hendricks: Chocolate, for sure. Okay, that would be your number one. And how about, do you ever eat chocolate, like dark chocolate, or something like, pieces of chocolate?

[00:23:39] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah, if I was going to eat a piece of chocolate, it would be like See’s Candy or something milk chocolate.

[00:23:42] Gay Hendricks: So next time you get faced with a question, ask yourself, do I feel a good? Absolute milk chocolate? Yes.

[00:23:53] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love that.

[00:23:56] Gay Hendricks: And it doesn’t have to be just with food. Name me a favorite [00:24:00] place you’ve been sometime on the beach or on a mountaintop or something. Can you think of one?

[00:24:04] Lauren Brollier Newton: Oh yeah. I live in Wyoming and so, I often go to Yellowstone Park.

[00:24:07] Gay Hendricks: Oh, I’ve ridden my bike across there, going to the sun road and all of that. Yeah, that was a tough ride too, because I had about a 50 mile an hour wind against me coming back.

[00:24:18] Lauren Brollier Newton: I bet. There’s nothing like the Wyoming wind actually.

[00:24:20] Gay Hendricks: That’s one of the most gorgeous places on earth. So, when you face a choice, is it a choice that makes you feel like in your favorite spot in Wyoming? That’s yes, or does it feel like an oyster?

[00:24:33] Lauren Brollier Newton: This is so brilliant, because I think as we’re training coaches, we often train them in how to help both themselves, and their clients notice for expansion and notice for contraction. But that can be very abstract, and something like this makes, they can actually feel it in their body in the moment.

[00:24:51] Gay Hendricks: Yes, you can. Then that’s what you want. Do you want to feel that absolute yes or absolute no. And again, though, if you can’t take the [00:25:00] action, go back and look at the commitment. Are you really deeply committed to it? Are C commitment has to be a body, mind, soul event. It can’t be just in your mind. It’s the difference between sitting on the bench and being out in the field, out on the field where the game is taking place. You can’t commit to being back there on the bench.

[00:25:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: This is so true. This seems like a great time to talk a little bit about, for coaches that haven’t heard of this concept. I think this is something that, if we personally as coaches overcome it on our own life, we can be such a power in helping our clients, would you be willing to describe, what an upper limit is? And how to identify that in ourselves?

[00:25:44] Gay Hendricks: When I was 24 years old, that made a lasting impression on me. I won’t give you a whole background, but I was losing some weight, and I’d lost a bunch of weight and I was feeling exhilarated. Like, I’d lost 30 pounds in a month or something [00:26:00] like that.

[00:26:01] Gay Hendricks: And so, I was on my way to my goal weight, and I was walking past on the street. I was walking past and I’d look to my left and there was a family of 4 in this ice cream shop, Brigham’s Ice Cream Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Don’t know if it’s still there or not, but was at the time the kind of cool, popular upscale ice cream place.

[00:26:19] Gay Hendricks: And so, I looked in the window and there was this family of 4 devouring this ice cream sundae with bananas on it and 3 flavors of ice cream. I’d eaten purely for a month, and I was feeling great. And I went in there and I ordered one of those for myself. And I just, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:26:37] Gay Hendricks: And for about 20 minutes, because of that sugar high, I felt like the king of the universe while that sugar was burning through me, especially since I hadn’t had any in 30 days or so. But 20 minutes after that, I was walking down the street and I got, it was like somebody hit me in the stomach with a punch.

[00:26:57] Gay Hendricks: I got such a bad stomachache that [00:27:00] I doubled over in the street, and people were asking me, are you okay, sir? And, Oh man, I was just so sick and it took me actually 3 days of healthy eating to get back to feeling good again. But I didn’t even have language for the upper limit problem, but the upper limit problem is when things are flowing and then you do something to mess that flow up.

[00:27:24] Gay Hendricks: So, it could be a flow of good feeling in yourself, like I was experienced, like the exhilaration of having lost a bunch of weight and feeling better. Or it could be the flow of connection with another person, like you’re feeling a good flow and then somebody makes a critical remark. And then that leads to an argument.

[00:27:46] Gay Hendricks: I have couples all the time come in and tell me that. For some reason, they always have a fight on Friday night. And finally, why are we fighting on a Friday night? It’s the upper limit problem. You’re there, you’re feeling [00:28:00] good. You’ve got a whole weekend and you don’t know how to sustain that, but you do know how to fight.

[00:28:05] Gay Hendricks: You revert to the familiar and I know, I’ve done all those things myself. It took Kathy and me. Wow, let’s see. We’ve been together 44 years now, and I’d say, it took us a good year or two into our relationships into our committed relationship. Before we really begin to see all of the ways we were upper limiting ourselves.

[00:28:26] Gay Hendricks: So, it’s not an overnight solution. You can learn the difference overnight, what an upper limit is, but then, you got to spot yourself doing one. That’s really the key to it. You’ve got to realize, I’m in an argument right now. I was feeling good 2 minutes ago. What happened?

[00:28:44] Gay Hendricks: And all couples arguments, by the way, you’ve probably learned this in your own relationship. All couples arguments are a race to occupy the victim position. One person says, if you’d quit doing X, Y, and Z, I’d sure be a lot happier. The other [00:29:00] person doesn’t automatically go along with that point of view. They say, wait just a doggone minute here. If it weren’t for you, I’d be a whole lot happier.

[00:29:09] Gay Hendricks: So, they dig themselves into the victim position. And then, it becomes this kind of ugly ping pong match of outvictiming each other. Because then you have to bring in historical precedent, like you’re acting just like your mother. I’ve seen your mother do the same thing. Either way, men, I do not recommend saying that in the heat of the moment, don’t go there.

[00:29:30] Gay Hendricks: I personally not benefited from using that particular strategy. But the point I want to make is, look at your upper limits as interrupting the flow of good feeling in you, and interrupting the flow of good feeling in your relationships. And it doesn’t have to be just romantic relationships, but your relationships at work, more people have relationship upper limits at work than they do at home. Why? Because it’s 8 or 9 hours a day there compared to only a couple hours at home.

[00:29:59] Lauren Brollier Newton: [00:30:00] That’s very interesting. So, would you say that an upper limit is, you could also describe it as a form of, I got a little too happy and then I self sabotaged.

[00:30:08] Gay Hendricks: That’s exactly it. I got more happy than I’m used to, or I got more abundant than I was used to. That’s a common one, because so many heartful people go into our field, but you also have to be heartful and soulful to make it as a coach. But you have to be mindful in the sense of, working on constantly ways of attracting more and more to you of the kinds of clients you want.

[00:30:40] Gay Hendricks: And that’s not always done by an Instagram ad, or running an ad in the paper. It’s cultivating a being and a feeling of worthiness. That you’re worthy of having people attracted to you. That’s a big deal.

[00:30:53] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. I’ve had this experience myself when I was building my coaching business and I know a lot of our coaches have this experience [00:31:00] that, they’ll have something happen that’s new and fresh and exciting. Like, I just enrolled my first VIP client, or I just had a wonderful workshop and everybody was raving about it.

[00:31:13] Lauren Brollier Newton: And then Monday morning comes and here comes the upper limit of, however it appears. When you identify it. So, I’ll say to myself, Mary trained me to do this. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard her story about seeing Joe sock on the floor. But you notice an upper limit.

[00:31:27] Lauren Brollier Newton: Mary, she’ll say, Oh, Mary, you got just a little bit too happy there. In that moment, Gay, what would you say? So, the coach has this great workshop, maybe enrolls their first client. Monday morning comes and there’s some sort of upper limit that appears.

[00:31:41] Gay Hendricks: What happened to one of my people, I mentor the Monday morning thing was suddenly getting an unexpected tax bill for $8,000. Because they’d changed their rules on something that she didn’t even know about. And so, she went from, I just did my first three [00:32:00] day seminar for VIP clients and made $52,000 or whatever it was.

[00:32:05] Gay Hendricks: And suddenly, Oh my gosh, now here goes a 5th, or a 6th of that, that unexpectedly. So, that’s a classic upper limits. A lot of them are going to be in the form of money related, or material related things. Kathy and I went, teaching a seminar about upper limits, when the front foundation fell off our house, our hundred year old Victorian house, the soil shifted underneath it.

[00:32:34] Gay Hendricks: We lived in an area where there are a lot of old gold mines under the surface. And so, sometimes the soil gives away and something changes, as well. The front part of our foundation fell off and our house sitter called us and said, by the way, this just happened. And so, we were right in the middle of teaching an upper limit workshop. So anyway, we found a way to build it in. But even the people who teach about it are not [00:33:00] immune from having upper limit problems.

[00:33:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: So in that moment, you enroll the VIP client, you have the 3 day workshop, you get the tax bill. What do you do with your inner world that helps you to not shrink back to this old pattern?

[00:33:14] Gay Hendricks: Put on your listening ears, everybody, because what you do is you make an instant judgment about whatever it is. And the judgment is this something that’s in, within my power to control? Notice that about 99% of them will be in that category. But is this within the power to control? If you come up with a yes, what is it that needs to be done? What is it that needs to be done? But the first sort needs to be is this within my power to control? Because you got to get good at focusing on the stuff that you have the power to make some kind of difference with.

[00:33:52] Gay Hendricks: Otherwise, you’re going to be spinning your wheels. And I bet you know, and have seen lots of evidence that once you start [00:34:00] spinning your wheels in thinking about things that you have no control over, then you’re go from one to the other. And oftentimes, the spiral goes downward.

[00:34:09] Gay Hendricks: I just had not long ago, an example of that myself, an upper limit. I was walking down the street. And I looked in the window of a jewelry store called Primavera Gallery, which has beautiful things in the window. And sometimes, they’re rings or necklaces are pieces of art, but they’re always something interesting to look at.

[00:34:30] Gay Hendricks: And so, it’s common for me to pause there and just look at what’s in the window. And I’ve purchased things there as gifts before and things like that. So anyway, I’m going down the street and I look in the window as I often do, and I’m by myself. And I just paused there, and I looked and then, I started walking again toward my destination, which was at the other end of the block.

[00:34:50] Gay Hendricks: I found myself suddenly thinking, I went from, Oh my gosh, that was so beautiful to, Oh my gosh, there are so many people in the world who [00:35:00] wouldn’t be able to afford anything like that to, Oh my gosh, there are a lot of people in the world that don’t even have enough to eat today. And within about 10 seconds, I’ve gone from, appreciating beauty to focusing on worldwide misery. I don’t have any power to control that. That’s not within my power to control. So there’s absolutely, unless I make a memo, send a donation to something, make a memo on my phone to do that. There’s no benefit to continuing down that particular rabbit hole of things that one thing leads to the other.

[00:35:33] Gay Hendricks: So, make that sort everybody. Get good at making that sort about is this within my power to control or not. Because here’s the thing, there’s 2,000 years of history behind that suggestion. Because the first self help book that was ever compiled for human beings was about the same time as the Bible. But it was a short book that was compiled over in the environs of [00:36:00] Greece by a bunch of students who wrote down the sayings of their teacher, a guy named Epictetus. And they wrote down into a handbook that was called the Enchiridion, or The Art of Living. And they wrote down things that Epictetus said, and the number one thing they wrote down that he said always was, notice is within your power to control.

[00:36:21] Gay Hendricks: Focus on things that you have the power to control. And here it is, today, I bet a million people around the world will say at an AA meeting, they’ll say the serenity prayer, which is based on that, single principle. And so, that concept has saved and changed so many lives. And like I say, it has 2,000 years of clout behind it. So, really take that seriously and start doing a constant sort about those two things.

[00:36:51] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. That’s so powerful. So, for the couple who always fights on a Friday night, when they ask themselves, is this something in my power to control? They’re going to get a yes.

[00:36:59] Gay Hendricks: The first thing [00:37:00] they need to do is face that, we don’t know how to deal with this Friday night fight situation. That’s F in facing, and it’s surprisingly hard sometimes to get two people, even very smart people, focused on. Let’s focus on the problem rather than telling you what a bad person you are.

[00:37:20] Gay Hendricks: Because sometimes, when people come in, they’ve been telling each other what a bad person they are for the last 29 years without having any kind of breakthrough about it. But another good thing to know is that, everybody’s fighting for the victim position and the only way out is for both people to identify what am I really afraid of?

[00:37:40] Gay Hendricks: What haven’t I told the truth about? You’ve got to go down and face those inner gates that need to be open, like the gates to your own feeling and the gates to saying whatever’s important to you. All significant communications between couples takes place in 10 seconds or less.

[00:37:59] Gay Hendricks: [00:38:00] And they never involve you as the starting point of the sentence. They sometimes involve you as the last, I love you, or I want to marry you. But they never start with you.

[00:38:15] Lauren Brollier Newton: So, this leads me to a question. I’m just watching you share with me all the different things that you’ve shared. And I think, you’ve been doing this for a really long time, decades and decades of this work. And yet, the joy that comes through you as you share these things, which you’ve probably in some way shared a million times is inspiring.

[00:38:32] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I know, one of the coaches questions that we get a lot is, I have this mission. I want to help people. I’m heart centered and it’s very hard for them to stay motivated or to stay connected to that purpose. And so, what would your tips be for a coach that does somewhere deep down inside feel this calling. But the idea of attracting clients, and being an entrepreneur, and these other things seem to pull them off track from that mission. How would you stay motivated?

[00:38:59] Gay Hendricks: You need [00:39:00] to learn the art of recommitment. If you’re going to thrive in our world, or in any world, really, and the example I used is that we need to think of ourselves. Like, the automatic pilot on an airplane works because you set it toward the destination. You say what your goal is. You get your intentions out there loud and clear, that’s important. That’s commitment, like the pilot says, today we’re committed to flying to Honolulu.

[00:39:28] Gay Hendricks: And they put in the particulars about we’re going to Honolulu, but the plane doesn’t get there. The automatic pilot riffs. And then makes a correction, it drifts. It says, we’re going toward the right. Let’s correct a little bit to the left. It does that thousands of times a minute, makes little tiny corrections. Each one of them is a recommitment and unfortunately, human beings often think of commitment as a one time only thing. They blow it when they’re doomed, but I say, it’s go [00:40:00] out and blow it as soon as possible so you can make the recommitment to getting back on the path again.

[00:40:05] Gay Hendricks: Like Kathy and I, we set ourselves the task in 1980 of eliminating blame and criticism from our relationship. So, there was zero blame or criticism ever. And it took us years to make that happen. But on the other hand, now for the last. Gosh, 30, 35 years, nobody said anything blameful or criticism to the other person, and so it’s possible.

[00:40:32] Gay Hendricks: And same thing with doing what you love to do. When I first thought about that, I said, Oh gosh, I need to make a living. I can’t do what I most love to do. And then I started doing what I most love to do an hour a day, and pretty soon that led to 2 hours. And pretty soon I was doing that, but it took me years of just bumping it up all the time.

[00:40:54] Gay Hendricks: But by the end of last century, 1999, I was doing what I loved [00:41:00] all the time. And so for the last, 25 years, I’ve only done things that I love, to do things like what I’m doing with you. And if I’m doing what I love to do, I’m excited about it. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing it on Oprah or I live across the street from a junior high school that sometimes, I get invited to come over there and make little kids and I’m just excited about doing that. I wish I’d had somebody like me to come in and talk to me when I was in junior high school.

[00:41:25] Lauren Brollier Newton: Absolutely. I love that. One of the things that Brave Thinking Institute, even though we all work virtually, we’ll often say Mary or Mat, we’ll all say to each other, I’ll see you around campus. And one of the things that I hear around campus at Brave Thinking Institute. Mat Boggs, absolutely loves you as his mentor, adores you. And one of the things I’ve heard him say, actually multiple times about you is he says, that there’s something about the way that you, and I don’t know if he used this expression, but I’m going to use it. Cause it’s a, you know, common expressionn, is your work-life balance, that he admires your level of work-life balance.

[00:41:56] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I’m curious if that was something that was hard to give [00:42:00] yourself permission to do. If you ever have faced hard work, I better go back to my desk kind of paradigms, or how do you give yourself permission to, for 25 years, it sounds like you said, you love your calendar. How have you developed that level of permission in a society that’s often glorifying the busy, overworked?

[00:42:19] Gay Hendricks: I’ll tell you how I deal with that, but I want to tell you an extreme version of that. Sometimes, I get invited to speak to groups like the Young President’s Organization, YPO, which are very popular. And you have to be, I think under 50 to be in that organization. And so, there’s a lot of go getters in the room and most of them are there, because they are very passionate about their businesses.

[00:42:43] Gay Hendricks: One of my principles I teach in business, is the principle of having your highest work priority day be, what I call an alpha day where you do nothing at all with your business. You don’t return calls. You don’t [00:43:00] respond to the text. You don’t do anything that regards your business. And when I get to that part of my presentation at the YPO, I’ve actually had people stand up and start yelling at me, waving their fist at me.

[00:43:14] Gay Hendricks: That’s impossible, and I always point out it’s the same energy that I used to get from drug addicts when I would invite them to not take their drug for the day. And so, you can use your work world as a drug. But here’s my personal solution to it. Go back to Five Wishes, go back to that question about my deathbed. If I’m on my deathbed and my life has been a complete success, what’s the number one thing that made it? It’s not that I’ve written 51 books. It’s not that I’ve, become a multimillionaire doing what I do. I didn’t think about that when I started.

[00:43:57] Gay Hendricks: It just happened, and I’m happy it [00:44:00] happened because if you’re ever faced with the choice in life of being wealthy or being poor, try wealth. Just once and see if you want to go back. I’m all in favor of abundance to your own specs. Wealth to you might be having air conditioning rather than not having it, or it might be having a car that works, or it might be some number of numbers in your bank account, but whatever it is. It’s not going to be your number one priority on your deathbed. It might be 2 or 3 or 4, something like that. But if you’re honest with yourself, it will be something that feeds your heart and soul, not just that feeds your mind. The thing about my life is, I know that my number one priority is my relationship with Kathy.

[00:44:51] Gay Hendricks: So, if I’m looking at something, I’m busy and she comes in the door. I stopped [00:45:00] being busy on the moment. And I focus on her because it’s my priority and I had to overcome a lot of programming in order to get there. Because I was one of those people that, I was looking all the time in my mind, even though I might have been sitting there talking to somebody in my family, and because I wasn’t just being there.

[00:45:21] Gay Hendricks: I was being there to store up something that I could use in a book. And that’s a nice thing about writing self help books. Every conversation becomes a possible occasion. Get your priorities on what feeds your heart and soul. So, it doesn’t have to be a thought through choice at any time. So, you just know that’s what your priority is, if you’re busy playing this, playing the piano and you notice out the window that your child falls flat on his or her face and is crying, you immediately go to that [00:46:00] priority.

[00:46:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. This is so powerful. And it goes back to the power of asking yourself that question and knowing what your five are, because then you have a north star or a measurement of the choices are the decisions that you’re making that may or may not be life giving to you. Yeah. So, I want to share a kind of a funny story with you.

[00:46:16] Lauren Brollier Newton: As I was evolving my own life and looking at some of your work, I watched a seminar of some kind that you and Kathy were doing. And I had been divorced, and I just met Mary, and I’m learning all these concepts and these visioning. And I decide on a recommendation, I’m sure from Mary to watch something of yours and Kathy’s.

[00:46:32] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I remember, I was newly divorced and newly forming a new vision for my life of what love could be like. And I remember watching this video of you and Kathy, and the way that you look at each other, you can see the love, you can feel the love. And there was a part of me, this is what Mary would call it, little me, that I went, goo goo gaga over each other. Like, didn’t want to believe it, or wanted to dislike it.

[00:46:55] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I realized, of course, because you’re talking about in the material was about [00:47:00] relationship, like, Oh, there’s a part of me that’s scared that I’m not going to have that. And so, I have to say something about it in order for me to feel like, I’m safe cause I’m never going to have it. And so, that was one of my first interactions with watching your material or feeling your material. Now that I’ve evolved much more and I have created, know that for me also, a love for the record books is my top priority and I’m married and happy.

[00:47:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: I want to ask, this is a selfish question now. So, for all the coaches out there, this is my question for myself. My question is, how do you take something that’s already so good and so deep, and continue to expand it in such a beautiful way?

[00:47:35] Gay Hendricks: Thank you. I appreciate that being seen because in every conceivable way, our relationship deepens constantly. I think one thing we do, which is almost a ritual for us, is at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, I will ask Kathy, is there anything I could be doing or saying that would make you feel more loved and treasured? And being [00:48:00] able to just ask, 9 times out of 10, there is nothing. She just says, no, just keep doing what you’re doing. But sometimes there is something that she’d like me to do differently. And I asked her this and she asked me the same question. I think going to the deeper level of that, it’s living, making your whole life about wonder, about how could this be better?

[00:48:22] Gay Hendricks: How could I feel better? How could I feel better in my body organically? How could I organically feel more love and connection with the other person? And those are deep inner questions that if you get the answers to it, life becomes an unfolding experience of magnificence.

[00:48:42] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes, comes back to the power of those questions. The power of asking yourself those questions. I love it. So, I always ask each guest one final question. I really have two final questions, but this first one is the deeper one. So, if you had to build a coaching business from the ground up, so you can’t take your [00:49:00] email list with you or anything like that.

[00:49:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: You’re building it from the ground up. You can take your awareness, but not your assets that you currently have for your business. What would be the first thing you would do if you were building a coaching business from the ground up?

[00:49:11] Gay Hendricks: I would sit down and either meditate or do something to quiet your mind and get a good flow of feeling in your body and then ask yourself, what do I most love to do about preaching? I would focus in on finding out what I most love to do. And then first make a heart offering of that to the universe to make use of however it wants.

[00:49:40] Gay Hendricks: Like I always tell my clients and my students, think of yourself as you’re in private practice and the universe is your client. And that, your job is just to invite in the kind of people you most love to work with, the kind of things you know most about, the [00:50:00] things that attract you passionately. And so, I would get that as an attractor factor inside myself first before I put an ad out there, or express that on Instagram, or however you go about bringing yourself out to the public.

[00:50:14] Lauren Brollier Newton: Beautiful. So, the final question is, where can our listeners find you if they’d like to find you and connect with you?

[00:50:21] Gay Hendricks: We’re all over the place. We have all the usual web stuff like Hendricks.com. H E N D R I C K S.com. There’s a whole bunch of good stuff there and also Instagram and all of those things. We also have a great nonprofit foundation. I want to blow its horn a little because we have a lot of free resources there.

[00:50:43] Gay Hendricks: Thanks for couples to use thanks for individuals to use. That’s called the foundation for ConsciousLiving.org. And so, the foundation for Conscious Living has a lot of great resources there. And of course, we’re in all the bookstores and everything. Look for The Big Leap, look for the new [00:51:00] book, Your Big Leap Year is out now. And yeah, we’ll try to keep showing up at all the good places.

[00:51:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love it. thank you so much for your wisdom, for the way you’ve changed my life, for the way you’ve impacted the world. Thank Kathy as well. And it’s just been such a pleasure and a privilege to have you here today. And we’re really grateful.

[00:51:18] Gay Hendricks: Thanks, Lauren. Blessings to you for finding your own genius zone.

[00:51:22] Lauren Brollier Newton: Thank you.