The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

by Gay Hendricks

To make the kind of leaps Michael Dell makes, we must practice a specific skill. That skill is to identify and transcend our Upper Limit,

It makes no sense to take your Big Leap into greater financial success in such a way that it destroys your relationships, your inner sense of yourself, and your connection to your inner wellspring of creativity.

Life is at its best when love, money, and creativity are growing in harmony.

“How did I go from feeling good in one moment to manufacturing a stream of painful images in the next?”

I manufactured the stream of painful images because I was feeling good! Some part of me was afraid of enjoying positive energy for any extended period of time.

The thoughts I manufactured were guaranteed to make me return to a state I was more familiar with: not feeling so good.

The pattern was simple: enjoy a period of feeling really good; then do something to mess it up.

The problem: I have a limited tolerance for feeling good. When I hit my Upper Limit, I manufacture thoughts that make me feel bad. The problem is bigger than just my internal feelings, though: I seem to have a limited tolerance for my life going well in general. When I hit my Upper Limit, I do something that stops my positive forward trajectory. I get into a conflict with my ex-wife, get into a money bind, or do something else that brings me back down within the bounds of my limited tolerance.

“Fear is excitement without the breath.” Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.

When scared, most of us have a tendency to try to get rid of the feeling. We think we can get rid of it by denying or ignoring it, and we use holding our breath as a physical tool of denial. It never works, though, because as Dr. Perls has pointed out, the less breath you feed your fear, the bigger your fear gets.

The best advice I can give you is to take big, easy breaths when you feel fear. Feel the fear instead of pretending it’s not there. Celebrate it with a big breath, just the way you’d celebrate your birthday by taking a big breath and blowing out all the...

The goal in life is not to attain some imaginary ideal; it is to find and fully use our own gifts.

if you make a spectacular leap in one area of your life, such as money, your Upper Limit Problem quickly enshrouds you in a wet-wool blanket of guilt that keeps you from enjoying your new abundance. Guilt is a way our minds have of applying a painful grip on the conduit through which our good feelings flow.

People often experience big breakthroughs…and then find a way to avoid relishing their achievement. They receive an award at work and then have a screaming argument with their spouse later that same night. They get the job of their dreams and then get sick; they win the lottery, then have an accident.

the Upper Limit Problem cannot be solved in the usual way we solve problems: by gathering information or replacing one set of information with another. The Upper Limit Problem must be dis-solved, not solved. You dissolve it by shining a laserlike beam of awareness on its underpinnings—the false foundations that hold the Upper Limit Problem in place.

being smart doesn’t keep you from doing dumb things.

You’re competent at the activities in the Zone of Competence, but others can do them just as well. Successful people often discover that they expend far too much time and energy in this zone.

You make a good living in your Zone of Excellence. For successful people, this zone is a seductive and even dangerous trap. To remain in this zone is to hobble yourself from taking the leap into your Zone of Genius. The temptation is strong to remain in the Zone of Excellence; it’s where your own addiction to comfort wants you to stay. It’s also where your family, friends, and organization want you to stay.

Your Zone of Genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do. They draw upon your special gifts and strengths. Your Zone of Genius beckons you with increasingly strong calls as you go through your life.

when you attain higher levels of success, you often create personal dramas in your life that cloud your world with unhappiness and prevent you from enjoying your enhanced success.

If you make more money, your Upper Limit Problem may kick in and create a situation that causes unhappiness, ill health, or something else that blocks your enjoyment of your enhanced money supply.

you have a tendency to follow big leaps forward in your success with big mess-ups. These mess-ups rubber-band you back to where you were before, or sometimes some place worse.

Six months into a close relationship is about when the big issues begin to surface. At that point, most of us don’t say, “Oh, I’m about six months into this wonderful relationship. It’s about time for my big issues to come up and cause me to sabotage the relationship.” Instead, most of us go to the opposite extreme: we herald this time of deepening by seeing a fault or flaw in the other person, then studying it so microscopically that it expands

The Four Hidden Barriers all have something in common: although they seem true and real, they are based on beliefs about ourselves that are neither true nor real. The fact that we unconsciously take them as true and real is the barrier holding us back. We take them as true and real until we shine awareness on them.

These fears and false beliefs cause us to live our lives out of a success-limiting mantra that says: I cannot expand to my full potential because ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.

The fear of being fundamentally flawed brings with it a related fear. It’s the fear that if you did make a full commitment to living in your Zone of Genius, you might fail. It’s the belief that even your genius is flawed, and that if you expressed it in a big way, it wouldn’t be good enough. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small.

Behind every communication problem is a sweaty ten-minute conversation you don’t want to have. However, the moment you work up the courage to have it, you collect an instant reward in relief as well as open up a flow of communication that will allow you to resolve the situation.

The key to the art, he said, was what he called “benign vigilance,” or, paying keen but relaxed attention to what your car and the other cars were doing in every moment.

Worry Worrying is usually a sign that we’re Upper-Limiting. It is usually not a sign that we’re thinking about something useful. The crucial sign that we’re worrying unnecessarily is when we’re worrying about something we have no control over.

When things are going well for us, our Upper Limit mechanism kicks in and we suddenly start worrying about things going wrong in some way. We start justifying those worry-thoughts with more worry-thoughts, and soon we are busily manufacturing scenarios of things falling apart, coming un-glued, and devolving toward imminent doom.

If you notice your worry-thoughts—really study them carefully for a couple of days—you’ll find something that may surprise you: almost none of your worry-thoughts have anything to do with reality. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you make a cup of coffee in the morning, put it in a to-go cup, and rush off to work. You’re speeding along, happily sipping your brew, when suddenly you worry that you may have left the kettle boiling on the stove. That’s a reality-based worry-thought. It’s worth worrying about, for two reasons: first, your house could burn down; and second, you can do something about it.

money arguments never have anything to do with money. Money arguments are always about something deeper,

I encourage you to make a careful study of your worry habits. I’ve seen a lot of lives change, including my own, when people drop their addiction to worry. And yes, worry is definitely an addiction.

worrying is like playing a slot machine in a gambling casino. Occasionally the worrier will hit the jackpot and be rewarded for something that actually happens. If you worry long enough about the stock market crashing, you’ll eventually hit the jackpot, because from time to time it’s always going to crash.

If you took a random look inside any person’s mind, chances are you’d find some worrying going on. If you suggest to the person that those worry-thoughts are simply ways to avoid feeling the flow of positive energy, chances are the person won’t say, “You’re right.”

It’s a sequence of moves that will reliably get you out of the worry trap. Let me take you through the moves step-by-step and then follow with a real-life example. I notice myself worrying about something. I let go of the worry-thoughts, shifting my focus away from them. I wonder: what positive new thing is trying to come into being? I usually get a body feeling (not a thought or idea) of where that positive new thing is trying to come through. I open my focus to feel that body feeling deeply. I let myself feel it deeply for as long as I possibly can. Later, I often get an idea of the positive thing that was trying to come through.

Criticism and blame are addictions. They are costly addictions, because they are the number-one destroyer of intimacy in close relationships.

If you want to find out if your Upper Limit behavior is an addiction, here’s a quick experiment: Try to stop it for a day and see what happens. If it’s not an addiction, you’ll be able to stop right away.

Self-criticism and criticizing others are one and the same. In other words, self-blame is part of the same Upper Limit pattern as blaming someone else. Both criticizing yourself and criticizing others are highly addictive and very popular ways of busting up the flow of positive energy.

Arguments are caused by two people (or two countries) racing to occupy the victim position in the relationship.

Each entity in a conflict has 100 percent of the responsibility for resolving the conflict. In other words, person A is a whole and complete 100 percent, and person B is a whole and complete 100 percent. If two people are involved, there is 200 percent responsibility to be divided up. The fatal mistake is thinking that there is 100 percent of responsibility to be divided up;

Committing a breach of integrity is one of the quickest ways to bring yourself down after an excursion past your Upper Limit. The most popular integrity breaches are lies, broken agreements, and withheld truths.

when you hide feelings inside yourself, you start seeing them in other people. This is especially true with sexual feelings.

Simply put, if you have some emotion within you that you don’t know how to manage, you seal that emotion away and start trying to manage other people’s versions of it.

Here’s something I’ve learned from many experiences of helping people resolve conflicts. Under the surface of most conflicts, you’ll find that the warring parties are actually feeling the same deeper emotions. Two people may be locked in an angry conflict for weeks. When they get beneath the roiled surface of the issue, however, they discover that the real issue is that they’re both sad about something they’ve both kept hidden. They’ve been so locked into proving each other wrong that they haven’t taken a moment to contact the true heart of the issue.

Out of a roomful of fifty or so people, only a half dozen of us seemed to be genuinely happy with the way our lives were going.

What was especially striking to me was that the professors envied the private-practice people, who in turn were envious of the professors. From the professors’ viewpoint, the private-practice people had it made, with their big salaries, plush offices, and absence of faculty meetings. To the private-practice crowd, though, the professors were the ones with the cushy jobs. They got a steady paycheck, free office space, short hours, and plenty of time to write. As

none of these complaints were actually caused by pigheaded bureaucrats, lack of parking spaces, ungrateful clients, or anything of the sort. In other words, none of these brilliant, well-meaning people were upset for the reasons they thought they were. Their complaints were all symptoms of not taking the Big Leap!

After listening to a complaint, I would ask, “If outside influences like money or insurance companies or bureaucrats were not a problem, what would you really love to be doing?”

Most people have a carefully crafted, well-justified story about why they can’t take their Big Leap.