The Big Leap

Imagine being on your deathbed years from now, looking back at your life, and having the satisfaction of knowing it was a COMPLETE success.  What would be the number one thing, above all else, that made it great?  That’s the question we ask and answer in this episode of The Big Leap.  Gay and Mike are going to examine a really powerful subject through the personal lens of some of their own biggest leaps.  Gay and Mike have both had moments in their lives without which neither of them would be here and certainly wouldn't be as successful. They're going to be exploring in detail what made those possible and how you can use those templates to make big leaps of your own, this week on The Big Leap podcast.  Let’s talk a little bit about Gay’s book, “The Big Leap” and the intention and purpose behind it. Especially for those who aren't familiar with the basic backstory because it will provide a great frame for where our biggest leaps came from. They're going to turn back the “wayback clock” and craft lessons and learnings to design and develop your best Big Leaps.  The Big Leap is about two major concepts:  * The Upper Limit Problem: The tendency to sabotage ourselves when things ARE going well. There are four or five basic fears that come up when people start becoming more successful. Your ability to negotiate through those fears allows you to step into what Gay calles “The Genius Zone.” * The Genius Zone: Organizing your life into your Genius Zone, where you're actually doing what you most love to do while simultaneously making your biggest contribution to other people.  In both Mike and Gay’s experience in working with hundreds of people over the last few decades; people are only happy when they are fulfilled themselves while providing the space for others to experience fulfillment at the same time.  It’s impossible to make a great life out of just the intention to be happy. If you make an intention, not only to create happiness for yourself, but for other people too… if you can make your life be about your own success AND providing success for other people… that's life at its best.  Gay’s life purpose is to expand every day of his life in love, creativity, and abundance while inspiring other people to do the same. It's been his purpose since he chose it in 1977 and it’s very fulfilling for him because it's part of HIS Genius Zone.  He spent about 20 years collecting examples of how people sabotage themselves, then move through it and break free to get into their own genius zone. The Big Leap book is the result of that research and out of the 46 books that he’s written, this is the one that brings in the steadiest daily stream of “thank you for writing this book.”  To hear more personal stories about where their Biggest Leaps occurred including Mike working through some of his biggest traumas and fears and how he built false stories around some deep, multi-generational wounds about running out, not having enough or being enough, listen to this episode! We’d love to know what your Biggest Leap is - would you text “BL” to (858) 434-5316 and share yours?

What if you were able to overcome your barriers to happiness and fulfillment? What if you had a clear path for achieving your true potential and attaining not only financial success but also success in love and life? What if this was YOUR YEAR to take the big leap, make ALL the changes and make them STICK for good this time??! This week on The Big Leap, Gay and Mike are going to give you EVERYthing you need to have a Big Leap Year! We’ll cover a 5 step process that Gay and Mike developed to help you have that “Big Leap Year” including one of a concept called “The Mary Kay Formula,” PLUS… ways to increase your longevity. There are a lot of examples in this episode that are all grounded on their own personal experiences and working with people so everything we’ll share has been kitchen tested, bedroom tested and boardroom tested in every possible situation you can think of. Gay spends about 30 hours a month doing interviews with various podcasts and radio programs talking about the concepts in the big leap. From those conversations, a lot of people have asked him, “how do I get started if I wanted to turn this next year into my big leap year, how would I go about doing that?” And as he’s worked with many people over the years, he’s come to see that there is no substitute for willingness and commitment. Anytime you entertain any kind of change the first thing that happens is a sense of willingness and that gets you in the door of whatever needs to happen but it's commitment that makes things work. Unless a person can put themselves on the line and say, "this is what I'm willing to do, this is what I committed to doing," there's very little magic that's going to happen. Therefore, if you're going to create a big leap year for yourself, you have to begin by cultivating a really good sense of willingness and commitment IN YOUR BODY.  Ask yourself, is this something you really want to do? Do you actually want to transform your life? Do you actually want to live in the genius zone? The goal is to get a whole-body yes. That’s how you know you’re committed. There’s so much more to uncover in this episode like the genius behind The Mary Kay Formula, how Mike taught himself programming at age 14, was writing software for vehicles and meeting with GM executives by age 18 and how being open and “coachable” is SUPER important to bringing your Big Leap into being.

What IS consciousness? What does it actually mean? “Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you.” (Your awareness is subjective and unique to you. If you can describe something you are experiencing in words, then it is part of your consciousness.)  What if you could harness your consciousness to be your best-self and live the life you’ve always DREAMED of?  This week on The Big Leap, Gay and Mike show you how your consciousness is actually your most important product and how to work with and refine it to make your goals and dreams come true faster.Why is your consciousness your most valuable product?Most good businesses are in a constant state of refinement. (think about the thousands of people that sit in rooms at Apple or Google and work on tiny little refinement of a very big machine.) We want you to think of your consciousness as your biggest product, your most important asset because it's the thing that everything else depends upon. We need to be in the process of constantly upgrading your consciousness. When Gay was young, he needed thick glasses and was very, very overweight. This is the story of how a slip on his head changed his life forever. When he was 24, he weighed 320 pounds, (today he weighs 180 pounds, and has for many years) smoked two or three packs of Marlboros a day and was in a bad relationship with a horrible job. He hadn't created anything of real value or made any big contribution to the world by age 24. He was beginning to feel a lot of pressure, especially with his weight because his father had been incredibly overweight and died before he was born. Somehow Gay was living out his father’s life who died at 32, was very obese, smoking heavily in a bad relationship.  He had a moment that same year that shocked him into a different state of consciousness. The way his unconscious chose to do that was to arrange to have him slip on the ice and slam down really hard on his back on an icy road in New England.  He didn't knock himself out but he had what he calls “An Out of Hendrix Experience” because it knocked him out of his normal way of seeing the world and for about two minutes he laid there on the ice, shivering, but out of his usual state of consciousness. In that moment something happened that affected the rest of his life.  He landed about six inches from a jagged rock and as he was realizing, “wow, if I could have died in this moment… what would my life have been?” He realized it would have not been a very interesting movie to watch and in that moment he had the experience of being able to see himself all the way down to the center of his psyche.  He understood how he ate to deal with his emotions when he was lonely, scared or in any kind of emotional upset. In that moment he felt into a state of pure consciousness (consciousness without any stuff on it.) He realized that's our birthright. That's what we get as human beings and as he was laying there, Gay made that same commitment to experience that state of pure consciousness every day of his life going forward.  As he came out of that experience he felt himself thinking, “Oh, no, here I am in my old body, I still weigh over 300 pounds, I want a cigarette and I’m still wearing glasses,” and feeling really sad for a moment. But he had made the commitment of always feeling that state of pure consciousness, so he began to think of his whole existence and refining that consciousness so that there wasn't anything in the way of that showing up out into the world. Over the next year by keeping a focus, he lost more than 100 pounds and quit wearing glasses. That ONE moment changed everything because in that moment ...

Most people think that “charisma” is just something that you’re born with. It’s not something that can be taught.  That’s where you’d be wrong… Charisma CAN be a learneed skill!  But how do you develop it? What do you have to let go of in order to open up to the kind of charisma that makes people really want to be around you, even if you’re not there?  That's precisley what Gay Hendricks and Mike Koenigs are talking about this week on The Big Leap. They’re also going to cover something they are both super interested in and that’s how you can turn ON your charisma for the stage, meetings, video, and sales all while remaining absolutely authentic and true to who you are.  And yessssss….this works virtually, on Zoom, Skype or whatever your favorite virtualized platform is...  Understand that all the world's a stage and you have to become an embodied being and great entertainer if you want to influence people and create massive impact.  They’ll give you some very fundamental principles and share some great stories from their professional and personal lives, plus Gay and Mike discuss who they think some of the most charismatic people that have ever lived and deconstruct their core character attributes.  Gay and Mike are both super fascinated and interested in the idea of “celebrity” and people who have that “it factor.” You've heard it said many times before, when a famous actress or actor walks in, they suck the energy out of the room. You could feel them the moment they walk in. They’ve both witnessed it.  Our goal is to understand exactly what “IT” is and if it’s possible to cultivate and replicate it.  Mike knows how he can activate his and Gay definitely has the ability to charm and seduce as well. But how do you turn that special thing on? Cultivate, curate and express it?  “It Factor” has to do with not only what you're putting out into the world, but who you are inside.   Gay shared a great story about charisma about his good friend, Leonard. Leonard went to a party with his wife who is a nurse supervisor at a big hospital. They were going to meet a lot of people that his wife knew but he didn't. He made the decision ahead of time that instead of saying anything about himself at the party, he was going to listen to people and reflect back to them what they were saying. He put his attention on listening rather than talking.  He “actively listened” to person after person at the party. Somebody would be talking about something they were very enthusiastic about and he’d say “Tell me more!”  Here's the funny thing that happened. Leonard is not the most charismatic guy in the world. You wouldn't pick him out of the crowd but on Monday after the party people kept coming up to his wife at work and saying, “your husband… he really has something! He's so charismatic.”  This was all based on a conscious move that Leonard made. He was helping people reveal their magnificence rather than talking about his own magnificence and as a result, they then projected that back onto him.  The big question is… can charisma be taught? What do you have to do to learn that kind of thing?  In this episode you'll learn what you need to do to bring forward your natural charisma plus more of Gay and Mike's personal stories! 

This podcast episode explores topics such as the fear of asking for help, epigenetic trauma, and the speaker's love of gold. They share personal stories, including one about working with Bonnie Raitt. The importance of visualizing outcomes, dreaming big, and overcoming the fear of rejection is emphasized. Also, listeners are introduced to the Living Miracles Deck and how it can offer quick solutions and wisdom.

Do you feel STUCK in your life, business or relationships?  What does it REALLY mean to be stuck?  What if FEAR was actually the source of your stuckness?  What if you had a super simple map that could help you get out of the fear and “stuck” mode SUPER quickly?  On this episode of The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks and Mike Koenigs get into four types of fear, what they mean and how they keep you in that cyclical, stuck mode.  They’ll also dive deep into the types of being stuck you could be, (one of the most challenging being business-partner stuck, which is a combination of relationship, business and money) AND they’ll share a very practical map that Gay has developed over the last 30-40 years of consulting his massively stuck clients to help them get UN-STUCK.  You'll also learn what Gay calls a “10-second miracle,” which is something you can do in 10-seconds to get things unstuck and moving again. (This is the result of his $25,000 question.)  Something Mike's noticed with a lot of people he's worked with, especially those in their reinvention stages, who have had massive financial and business success, is that they'd rather be stuck than deal with the fear of not being as good as they once were or being compared to others.  One example is Eddie Murphy. (There's a lot of conversation about him right now.) He was at the top of his career, left to have a family, made a bunch of rotten movies and a ton of money but now he's out doing stand-up again. He's been open about the fact that he wishes he would never have stopped stand-up because it's so hard and now he's going to be compared to the way he was at the height of his career.  That's one side of this but the other side is people who are stuck in a place where they just don't pull the trigger. They'd rather stay in a place of confusion, overwhelm, and not going anywhere. We've seen this over and over again from a professional perspective.  Usually what you feel stuck about is not actually what you think you feel stuck about.  A lot of times what you have to do first is simply acknowledge that you're stuck and that's hard to do for a lot of people but it's VERY important. Oftentimes, when you're feeling stuck it's because there are old programs running from way back, one of which is, “I don't deserve to be here.” A lot of people when they're feeling stuck, haven't really chosen to be here.  When you choose to be here that means you're open for business 24 hours a day to whatever needs your attention. A lot of people aren't willing to make that kind of commitment. They'd rather stay in a kind of a low, low grade mediocrity all the time.  Gay recalls an experience he had with a client a few years back who was really stuck. The client was really depressed because things hadn't been going well. He was classically stuck to the point where his voice even sounded slowed down.  Gay talked to him for a while, just listening. When he asked if Gay had any suggestions to help, this is what he said. “On your way home today, were you thinking about everything that’s going wrong?” The client said he had been thinking about all of it for the last couple of days and that's why he called because he couldn't figure out a way to get unstuck.  Gay asked there was anything else that caught his attention on his way home. The client thought it was odd that he asked because when he was coming up to his condo he passed an elderly lady that he knew and lived below him. He noticed that her front porch was cluttered with leaves and it occurred to him he could clean it off, then he forgot about it.  Gay told him to go down stairs right now, take your broom, clean it off, don’t tell her you’re doing it then come back up and talk to me. When he got back on the phone he sounded totally dif...

Do you ever feel STUCK? Like you’re just not going anywhere in life? Like nothing has changed, moved forward or inspired you in a REALLY long time?  It almost feels like you're actually going backwards sometimes?!  Whether it’s in your business, relationships, health, finances or creativity, it really sucks feeling this way.  What if you could access an unbounded source of creativity inside of YOURSELF at any given moment? What if you could use your own natural body resources to feel good ALL the time?  Imagine being able to use your body as a dashboard that tells you exactly what's going on in your life.  Gay Hendricks and Mike Koenigs have an episode of The Big Leap they think you’re going to LOVE. Especially if you’re interested in learning how to turn ON your deepest creativity, plus a very practical process that Gay uses to get unstuck.  They’ll also talk about a big distinction between your zone of genius and your zone of excellence and how to get yourself there AND a really practical tool that Mike only uses with his $35,000 superpower accelerator vision days clients. (and how he activates their energy and get in sync. So they create together!) It's a never fail process!  Gay’s notion of your “emotional dashboard” and thinking about how to read your body in ways you may never have done before, is something that’s had a massive impact on Mike. It’s a superpower visualization you'll be able to start using today.  Something people really need to be doing right now is learning how to open up and let more of their true creativity emerge. There's a difference between ordinary creativity where you're using your creative skills to do things for other people and true creativity where you're using your skills to do things for other people that benefit yourself.  A lot of people get stuck in what Gay calls, the big leap, zone of excellence, where they're doing stuff they're good at, but they're not drawing on their genius. He’s spent a good bit of his career creating the space that invites fourth genius.  When Gay is working with a private client (in addition to visioning) he spends a lot of time beforehand creating a space inside himself for connecting with that person, knowing something about their journey and making space for that. Dedicating himself to serving them is incredibly important.  When Mike is working with his high-end clients, he always asks them to go out into an imaginary future a year from now, look back at where they are now and ask themselves, what will it take to get to this other place. Sometimes the act of simply shifting them out of the present and looking back at where they are now is enough to kind of pop loose the creativity because Mike suggests that creativity is sitting there waiting to be invited.  So what are some of the resources and tools for pulling out your inner genius? What are the techniques that we've used with our highest-level clients over the years to activate that center and get them in the right fit space?  You’ll have to tune in to this episode to find out AND to hear some powerful questions that you can use to elevate your relationships with people you care about and how you can elevate anyone you come in contact with. 

What are you afraid of? I mean, what REALLY terrifies you to the core? Is it dying? Being alone? Not being “enough”? Running out of money or even worse… not being useful or loved?  Living in a constant state of fear is really not living at all.  What if you could get out of fear FOREVER, though? How would that change your life? What would you do with your time? How would you spend your money?  Would you go skydiving? Tell that person you love them? Build that business? Make the move into the home of your dreams? What’s the biggest risk you can imagine taking?!!  Without FEAR your life and possibilities are ENDLESS.  On this episode of The Big Leap podcast, Gay Henricks and Mike Koenigs discuss the fear of death and how it has a direct relationship to how connected to openness and your creativity can be. They both come out of the same toothpaste tube. Most people are scared of their own creativity because you have to go through a layer of fear to get to the good stuff and the biggest chunk of fear has to do with the fear of dying.  We're not just talking about dying like when your physical body disappears but the death of old ideas that you have about yourself and the death of your ego. (the little ball of activity that goes on in your brain all the time about survival and succeeding)  But it’s important to get comfortable with the idea of death.  Gay says “you can't avoid the void.” At some point you have to open up to the void, because that's where your creativity is coming from and for many people, “void” means death so getting comfortable with dying in every moment actually opens you up to living in every moment.  Do you love deep thoughts and ideas?  Mike's going to share something here that he definitely never talked about publicly. Recently he chose to participate in a psilocybin experience in a ceremony with a group of people. He had never done “magic mushrooms” (psilocybin) before because he was terrified of doing it.  Mike slid into the primordial ooze and felt a profound release and relinquishing.The biggest thing that came into his mind as he oscillated between the physical and energetic realms was, “wow, what an old familiar place. It felt like forever.”  So as he's becoming part of the forever and he can remember emerging out of it feeling, this is so beautiful to come from forever and still have retained his identity in between. He didn't go so deep that he lost all of who he was, which was the fear of death.  Death is something he's no stranger to. Seven years ago cancer nearly took his life. He became as comfortable as he could then. This was different. It was beautiful.  No wonder why there’s so much scientific proof that psilocybin is being used to defeat anxiety, depression and addictions in study after study. Every major university and hospital has either opened a research branch to study psychedelics or is partnering with another.  And, in case you didn’t know this, “Mario” and Nintendo wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fact that the founder took and used psilocybin regularly to inspire and invent his games. Now you know why the mushroom was a character in every game.  It seems to Mike that his experience with psilocybin was like walking away from his ego, becoming part of this bigger thing where he felt like he was part of creation or God (or whatever your belief is). He remembers feeling very safe. It wasn't like there was a loss or a true death going on. It was just a movement. It felt very normal and natural. He imagines that's part of creativity and feeling part of the whole.  Gay recalls a conversation he once had with his friend, Ram Dass (author of “Be Here Now”) about death. He said, “It's absolutely safe. Just let yourself know it's absolutely safe.

What if you could control your creative state at will and innovate on demand no matter what? Do you have that level of control?  WHAT IS CREATIVITY? Are you under the impression that only artists, musicians, actors and photographers possess creativity? Well, we’ve got news for ya’... it’s not true.  Each and every one of us is a highly creative being and believe it or not creativity is essential in building successful businesses, relationships, bank-accounts and lives. Maybe your understanding of the word “creative” is a little skewed? Here’s what it truly means to be creative:  CREATIVITY IS TAKING HOLD OF AN IDEA, SUGGESTION OR INSTINCT, PULLING IT TOWARDS YOU AND HAVING THE COURAGE TO EXPLORE IT TO ITS END-POINT WITHOUT PRECONCEPTION.  Inside this episode of The Big Leap podcast is a whole new way to look at your creativity and how to open up space for more of it to flow through. Gay and Mike will talk about how once you get that space opened up, it becomes an easy thing rather than something that causes you stress or pain.  Gay also reveals specifically how he gets into a creative state, how he meditates and also when he's most creative and Mike shares his own process as well. Gay also gets into is how he oscillates between creating his books (46 to date) and doing novels and screenplays.  Also, SPOILER ALERT... Gay and Mike are going to design an event in real time, so you're going to see how they collaborate and create together and how you can model that as well.  Gay has worked with a lot of people in theater, music and movies and something he’s noticed is that oftentimes they are wildly creative but don't know how to channel it. A lot of times they’re the kind of people who have 15 creative ideas that they couldn’t possibly ever act on them all.  He thinks that creativity is the reason a lot of people fall into addictions too. They don't know how to turn off wild creativity so they use alcohol or drugs to tamp it down.  The reason we say you're a lot more creative than you think, is because your thoughts are what's keeping you from opening up your creative space because the space to create doesn't have anything to do with thought.  Thought is a subset of creativity but the actual thing that's happening that's incredibly important about creativity is turning nothing into something. In other words the place where space suddenly becomes material. Let's call it alchemy.  Creativity is scary to a lot of people. The idea of opening up to your own individual genius can be really scary because in a way, you do have to go down through layers of fear to access your real creativity.  It’s one thing to create from your ego. Sure, you can make millions of dollars with your ego and build gigantic skyscrapers, but at a certain point everybody wakes up (hopefully before they're on their deathbed) and says, “wait a minute, did I leave myself behind in the process?”  Oftentimes the answer is yes.  Getting out of your way is SUPER important but first, you've got to be willing to say no to everything else in life and asking yourself, “what do I really want to do?” “What do I really want to create?”  Listen to this episode to hear Gay and Mike's perspective on clearing the SPACE to be creative AND listen as they create and design an event together in real time! 

What if money flowed to you so easily and often that it almost seemed unfair? What if you had such an amazing relationship with money that you were able to give it away freely without ever having to even THINK about what your checking account balance was? It’s 100% possible but there’s something you need to understand first. Money is not evil or only for the greedy, the 1% or those born with a trust fund. Money and wealth is a GOOD thing that’s meant for EVERYone and meant to be shared. BUT WHAT IF WE TOLD YOU THAT YOU ARE THE ONE BLOCKING YOUR OWN WEALTH FROM COMING TO YOU? This week on The Big Leap podcast we’re going to cover our personal wealth building strategies plus how much your attitude and inner energy creates your NET worth as well as your SELF worth. Gay Hendricks and Mike Koenigs will get into some transformational moments that we’ve had around money, the notion of “the seasons of money,” slowing down to create opportunities for income and wealth and a few philosophies that have enabled me to completely change my investing strategies.  Plus Gay talks about how to go from poor to rich without ever having the budget or a business plan based his own experiences. Money is like religion or marriage or any other BIG THING that has a vast amount of energy bound up in it. People either define themselves by resisting that energy or opening up to it. Gay shared a memory about when he finally opened up to the energy of money. He caught himself (in his head) having the same conversation about money that he heard growing up. He was about 35 years old at the time and had the realization that he was replaying the same old story of, “are we going to have enough money to get through to the end of the month.” A conversation that was always around when he was a kid. A month didn’t go by without somebody having that conversation out loud. Once he made the realization he changed the conversation. He wanted a different life and a better relationship with money.  Gay and Mike have both had several breakthroughs when it comes to money. For Mike it sometimes felt like he was drowning or barely keeping a float because he was blowing through it SO fast. He didn’t have good saving skills and certainly no investing skills.  To make things worse, he was raised in the environment of “perform a task and get paid,” versus wealth accumulation and an investor mentality and more importantly, the notion of never creating a job for yourself when it comes to earning money. (A big concept they'll also cover on this episode)  But once Mike finally got his head above water it was a euphoric, dream like state. He felt ALIVE for what felt like the first time!  Tune in to this episode to hear the rest of their conversation and learn more about the energy of money and how to make it work for YOU.