66. Gay Hendricks: The Art of Living and Unlocking Your Zone of Genius

Lessons from the man who named our self-sabotage, on love, genius, and waking up.

Whether it's a marriage of 47 years or a single afternoon in an office, the biggest leaps in our lives often follow the smallest moments of awareness…

Gay Hendricks has spent more than 40 years as a leading voice in relationship transformation and body-mind therapies. With his wife, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, he's authored bestsellers including Conscious Loving, The Big Leap, and the recently released Your Big Leap Year. He's coached more than 800 executives at companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard, and he calls himself, simply, "a cheerleader for wonder."

What he shared about upper limits, genius, and the art of living was deeply moving.

If you've ever wondered why things tend to fall apart right after they start going well, this conversation will serve as a well-rounded introduction.

Here are some of my favorite themes that we explored…

The universe teaches you with a feather first. The sledgehammer is optional.

Gay explained that life is constantly trying to teach us, gently, at first. If we're open and paying attention, the lesson arrives as a feather tickle. If we're closed off and defensive, it escalates until we can't ignore it anymore.

"If we're wide open to learning, we don't get sledgehammers, we get feather tickles."

The lesson doesn't change. Only the volume does. Whatever you're avoiding right now is getting louder, not going away.

Feeling good for too long is its own kind of threat.

Gay told me about the day he discovered what he calls the Upper Limit Problem. He'd just had an exhilarating lunch talking research with a colleague, dropped his six-year-old daughter at sleepaway camp that morning, and was sitting in his office feeling fantastic, when he suddenly became convinced she was lonely and miserable. He called the camp in a panic. The director told him she was outside happily playing soccer, and gently asked if it might be him, not his daughter, who was struggling with the separation.