“Creativity has the capacity to surprise you. If you're washing dishes the same old way for the 365th time this year, there's not much learning going on there but if you shift your attention – let's say you're in a zen monastery and there washing has a different significance; it's about being present with each dish and with the task at hand. Even if washing dishes doesn't seem like a meditative experience, it is in that context.” – Gay Hendricks
Wellness + Wisdom Episode 411
Best selling author of The Big Leap, Conscious Loving, and his latest, The Genius Zone, Gay Hendricks Ph.D, returns to share how you can love your fear, spark gratitude through creativity, unlock inner peace, and use the power of consciousness for weight loss.
Discover how you can free up mind space to allow your genius to emerge, grow past your ego, and end negative thinking to thrive authentically.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”‘When we try to control our fear, we are blocking our experience of life. Acknowledge your fear, love it, and open yourself up to it rather than try to squeeze it out of your body.'- Gay Hendricks of @hearts_harmony ” quote=”‘When we try to control our fear, we are blocking our experience of life. Acknowledge your fear, love it, and open yourself up to it rather than try to squeeze it out of your body.'- Gay Hendricks of @hearts_harmony “]
Too often we live lives that we find unfulfilling, fail to reach our own potential, and neglect to practice creativity in our daily routines. The Genius Zone offers a way to change that by tapping into your own innate creativity.
About The Genius Zone
Dr. Gay Hendricks broke new ground with his bestselling classic, The Big Leap, which has become an essential resource for coaches, entrepreneurs, executives, and health practitioners around the world. Originally published as The Joy of Genius, The Genius Zone has been updated and expanded throughout, making it the essential next step beyond The Big Leap.
In The Genius Zone, Hendricks introduces his brilliant exercise, the Genius Move, a simple, life-altering practice that allows readers to end negative thinking and thrive authentically. By using the Genius Move, readers will learn to spend more of their lives in their zone of genius—where creativity flows freely and they are actively pursuing the things that offer them fulfillment and satisfaction. Filled with hands-on exercises and personal stories from the author, The Genius Zone is an essential guide to creative fulfillment.
If you are committed to bringing forth your innate genius and making your largest possible creative contribution, The Genius Zone will become a trusted companion for the journey.
Order The Genius Zone and complete the form on this page to receive Gay's free Genius Zone guided meditation, The Five Key Affirmations for Living in Your Genius .
Listen To Episode 411 As Gay Hendricks Uncovers:
[1:30] Sparking Gratitude Through Creativity
- Gay Hendricks
- The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity by Gay Hendricks
- 055 Love Vs. Fear: Body Intelligence With Katie & Gay Hendricks
- Hendricks Institute
- Hearts In Harmony
- The Big Leap Podcast with Gay Hendricks & Mike Koenigs
- The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks
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Discussing Gay's latest book, The Genius Zone, and that fact that he has written a book each year the last 50 years.
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Why we ourselves our Creators whether that's with ourselves, our partner, or with the Divine.
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How Gay would define the word, “creation,” and what it means to him at its core.
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What you can do to spark creativity and be more present every day even with tasks like washing dishes.
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Why our own wellbeing has a huge impact on our thoughts and emotions with different activities.
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The most important thing for Gay: to expand every day in love, gratitude, appreciation, and abundance while he's facilitating and helping people to do the same.
[15:30] The Power of Consciousness For Weight Loss
- Finding Joe | Official Trailer
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How we can move past trauma and negative thoughts in order to enter the genius zone.
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Gay and Josh's experience gaining weight during stressful moments as an external padding.
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What helped Gay get on the right path towards greater wellness and healing.
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How Gay was able to begin his weight loss journey and lose the extra 140 pounds by making every food decision based on pure consciousness.
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Why the body is connected to our subconscious mind and we need an internal self love barometer to help us heal.
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How we can begin to explore ourselves to help lead us to our genius zone.
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What the Upper Limit Problem is and why so many of us suffer from it.
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The fact that billionaires and celebrities actually have bigger upper limit problems compared to most people.
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What life means to Gay and the most important experiences or lessons we should have in our lives.
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Questions you can ask yourself today to help you realize what you really want out of life before you are on your deathbed
[26:00] Learning How To Love Your Fear
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One of the biggest takeaways Josh had from his first conversation with Gay: “You have to learn how to love your fear.”
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Why it is so hard for people not to love themselves and it is one of the biggest challenges they may face in life.
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How negative speech has such an impact on children's self esteem as early as the ages of 3-5.
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The power we have to either feed the positive “wolf” or the negative “wolf” in our minds.
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Why we get in the habit of putting so many negative thoughts in our head and how to turn that around.
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What steps you can do to get more and more into the Genius Zone every day and let go of the negative thoughts in your head.
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Why our late thirties and early forties are an especially crucial time because “the personality that got you to 40, isn't the same that will get you to 80,” as you unlearn and grow.
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The power of identifying where you feel fear in the body when that emotion comes up in different moments.
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How fear can block our experience of life if we allow it to always be present.
[36:30] Freeing Up Mind Space for Genius to Emerge
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Why trying to control everything actually leads to big issues and how we can begin to let go of that habit.
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How Gay let go of trying to control his weight and placed his attention on what he could actually control like food.
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Why the biggest barrier block on our path to genius is a habit of fear based negative thinking.
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How to learn to love yourself by asking yourself who is someone that you know for sure that you love.
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Why peace of mind will only come in through full awareness of what is happening within your mind and body.
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Our incredible connection to the universe, everything, and everyone.
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How to create space to allow your energy of genius to flow.
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Why we just give more and more energy to negative thoughts as we continue to criticize them.
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The importance of not staying in a positive only or negative only mindset but trying to be more neutral and observant of our thought patterns.
[51:30] How To Grow Past The Ego
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What helped Gay better understand relationships by thinking about the 3 things he wanted and the 3 things he didn’t want in them.
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The moment Gay realized that he and his partner were in this continuous loop of having the same argument over and over by neither of them being honest and transparent with one another, always blaming each other, and her not allowing him to have a space every day for his creativity to flow.
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How the ego can get in our way of creative flow and how Gay defines this word.
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Why our early childhood experiences have such a great impact on who we grow up to be, our thoughts, and our habits.
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The fact that your personality is made up of two factors: 1) Everything that you do to try and please other people and 2) how to avoid pain.
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What the unconscious mind does to try and avoid pain and “losing at the game of life”: Get sick and have accidents or not play the game and be apathetic.
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Why amazing things will happen when you grow and go beyond the two factors of your conditioned childhood personality.
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How the ego comes into play as that part of you that is busy always making other plans as life goes on.
[1:07:30] How to Commit to Your Genius
- The power of commitment to help you move forward with positive change.
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What you can do to commit to your genius every day.
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How consciously committing and saying, ‘Yes,’ to your genius will invite barriers so you have the chance to overcome them.
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His work with helping people say, “Yes,” to their genius and overcome their egos becoming angry when barriers come up.
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How old emotions can easily be experienced when we are moving through new transitions.
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What “tall poppy syndrome” is and how it keeps people back from fully stepping into their genius.
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What wellness means to Gay now compared to 5 years ago from his first interview with Josh.
- Cured Nutrition – Get 15% off of your order when you visit wellnessforce.com/cured + use the code ‘WELLNESSFORCE'
- Organifi – Special 20% off to our listeners with the code ‘WELLNESSFORCE'
- Paleovalley – Save 15% on your ACV Complex with the code ‘JOSH'
- Belcampo Meat Co – Save 15% on your first order with the code ‘WELLNESSFORCE'!
- Seeking Health – Save 10% with the code ‘JOSH'
Power Quotes From The Show
[click_to_tweet tweet=”‘Turn up the faucet of awareness and you will start to experience this awesome life energy that we all have access to; we all have access to this enormous creative presence inside us.' – Gay Hendricks of – @hearts_harmony ” quote=”‘Turn up the faucet of awareness and you will start to experience this awesome life energy that we all have access to; we all have access to this enormous creative presence inside us.' – Gay Hendricks of – @hearts_harmony “]
Beginning To Love Your Fear
“How can we love our fear? The problem with fear is our attempt to control it. There is rational fear like when you're walking alone in a parking garage and irrational fear like when you're making love with your beloved and your mind is still back in the parking garage. That's a problem because then you're using your fear as a way to block your experience of life. To love your fear, the first thing we need to do is simply acknowledge our fear and let ourselves open our hearts to it rather than try and squeeze it out or our bodies.” – Gay Hendricks
The Power of Positive Thinking
“Often the most powerful first positive thought you can have in any given area is, “Okay, I commit now to bringing forth my…” and you fill in the blank. Whether it's your health goals, your true creativity, or your genius, commit to it so that you feel this energy and inspire other people. Those kind of positive thoughts are the place to start any new pattern from because they cancel out all of the other things. Once you put in this new idea, your mind will automatically start to naturally go to it. Until you do that though, your mind will automatically go to the least painful, negative idea and start working down from there. The universe is very happy to teach us with the tickling of a feather or hit us with a cosmic wham.” – Gay Hendricks
How to Unlock Inner Peace & Creative Space
“Fear is hard to love at first because you've been pushing it out of it body for so long; when something hurts you, you want to get rid of it quickly but with fear it works the other way around. Peace of mind comes only through full participation with what's going on in your body. For peace of mind, you have to admit and allow into your mind fear, anger, sadness – all of those negative emotions. We make the mistake of thinking there's one faucet called, ‘pleasure' and one faucet called, ‘pain,' but there's only one true faucet and that's called, ‘awareness…'
…You turn up the faucet of awareness and life – big life starts to come at you. Sometimes that life has fear, anger, and sadness in it but what's also coming is the power of this awesome life energy that we all have access to; we all have access to this enormous creative presence and space inside us.” – Gay Hendricks
Links From Today's Show
- The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity by Gay Hendricks
- 055 Love Vs. Fear: Body Intelligence With Katie & Gay Hendricks
- Hendricks Institute
- Hearts In Harmony
- The Big Leap Podcast with Gay Hendricks & Mike Koenigs
- The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks
- Finding Joe | Official Trailer
- Leave Wellness Force a review on iTunes
- Cured Nutrition – Get 15% off of your order when you visit wellnessforce.com/cured + use the code ‘WELLNESSFORCE'
- Organifi – Special 20% off to our listeners with the code ‘WELLNESSFORCE'
- Paleovalley – Save 15% on your ACV Complex with the code ‘JOSH'
- Belcampo Meat Co – Save 15% on your first order with the code ‘WELLNESSFORCE'!
- Seeking Health – Save 10% with the code ‘JOSH'
- Gay Hendricks
About Gay Hendricks
Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., has been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and bodymind therapies for more than 45 years. After earning his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford, Gay served as professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He has written more than 40 books, including bestsellers such as Five Wishes, The Big Leap and Conscious Loving (co-authored with his co-author and mate for more than 35 years, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks), both used as a primary text in universities around the world. In 2003, Gay co-founded The Spiritual Cinema Circle,which distributes inspirational movies and conscious entertainment to subscribers in 70+ countries.
Gay has offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including OPRAH, CNN, CNBC, 48 HOURS and others. In addition to his work with The Hendricks Institute, Gay is currently continuing his new mystery series that began with The First Rule Of Ten.