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

by Gay Hendricks

I found that my biggest resistance was the fear of owning my full potential. As I explored this fear, I realized that making such a big commitment put everything on the line. It eliminated any excuse I’d ever allowed myself for failing to achieve what I set out to do. In the past, I could always say, “Well, I failed, but I wasn’t really trying hard. Maybe I’d have succeeded if I had really tried.”

“Fear is excitement without the breath.”

and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it. On the other hand, excitement turns into fear quickly if you hold your breath. 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.

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 candles on your cake. Do that, and your fear turns into excitement.

When you reach the end of your life and are wondering whether it’s all been worthwhile, you’ll be measuring whether you did everything you possibly could with the gifts you’ve been given.

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

Your capacity expands in small increments each time you consciously let yourself enjoy the money you have, the love you feel, and the creativity you are expressing in the world. As that capacity for enjoyment expands, so does your financial abundance, the love you feel, and the creativity you express.

If you focus for a moment, you can always find some place in you that feels good right now. Your task is to give the expanding positive feeling your full attention. When you do, you will find that it expands with your attention. Let yourself enjoy it as long as you possibly can.

Instead of waiting to feel good until you have all the money you want and need, go ahead right now and appreciate your current money supply. All it takes is a few seconds. Find a place in yourself where you can feel good about the money you have. Give your full attention to that place of satisfaction. If you can’t find any place in you where you feel good about money, create a positive thought about it in your mind. Float a new thought through your mind such as “I enjoy the money I have” or “I always have plenty of money to do everything I want to do.” Try it out in the area of love. Instead of focusing on loneliness or stagnation in a relationship, find a place in yourself where you can feel good about the love you have in your life. Give your full attention to that place of joy or satisfaction. Feel it expand as you give awareness to it. As you get more skilled with this practice, you discover that your positive feelings, your abundance, your love and creativity all begin to expand. Then, the outer aspects of your life change to match the expanding good feeling inside you.

“stuck on stupid.” It meant that you kept doing the same dumb things over and over without learning from them. I felt a bit like that when I first realized how much time and energy got consumed when I was doing things I was not good at.

In the Zone of Excellence are the activities you do extremely well. 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.

Your Zone of Genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do.

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.

There’s a good way to know if a worry-thought is something you should pay attention to. Just ask yourself: Is it a real possibility? And… Is there any action I can take right now to make a positive difference?

One moment the thoughts have a grip on you; then you suddenly realize it’s you who have the grip on them. You release the grip, and the thoughts disappear. They come back again, and you release them again. With practice, they disappear and don’t come back, if you give your mind a more productive thing to do. The productive thing to do is to look for the positive new emergence that’s trying to happen. In other words, when you find yourself worrying, know that there is something positive trying to break through.

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

When people step out of the victim position and take 100 percent responsibility, their marriages and their businesses flourish.

Many physical symptoms such as headache and back pain are warning signs, like the flapping and wobble of a flat tire when you’re driving on the highway. The symptoms are saying, Slow down, stop what you’re doing, and pay attention, because there’s something out of integrity here.

The surface pain is often caused by resisting the underlying positive message. Sometimes the positive message is a message we’re afraid to hear, such as “It’s time to quit my job and do something else.” I’ve sat with dozens of clients as they made this kind of discovery, realizing that they had unconsciously preferred dealing with the pain of the chronic headache or back pain rather than the fear and uncertainty of the underlying message. The bad news is that pain can last a long time if we’re unwilling to pay attention to the hidden message. The good news is that the fear and uncertainty last only as long as it takes us to hear the underlying positive message and begin to act on it.

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. If you will begin to focus your keen awareness on those three behaviors, you can make huge strides in transcending your Upper Limit and establishing yourself in your Zone of Genius.

To find these breaches and restore wholeness, we need to get good at asking questions like these: Where do I feel out of integrity with myself? What is keeping me from feeling complete and whole? What important feelings am I not letting into my awareness? Where in my life am I not telling the full truth? Where in my life have I not kept my promises? In my relationship with _____________________, what do I need to say or do to feel complete and whole?

We’re born into stories that keep us from accessing our genius.

Make a list of your Upper Limit behaviors. Here are some of the most common ones: Worrying Blame and criticism Getting sick or hurt Squabbling Hiding significant feelings Not keeping agreements Not speaking significant truths to the relevant people. (If you’re mad at John, he’s the relevant person to talk to. It doesn’t help to tell Fred that you’re mad at John.) Deflecting. (Brushing off compliments is a good example of deflecting)

When you notice yourself doing one of the things on your Upper Limit list, such as worrying, or failing to communicate some truth, shift your attention to the real issue: expanding your capacity for abundance, love, and success. Consciously let yourself make more room in your awareness for abundance, love, and success. Use the resources of your whole being, not just your mind. For example, feel more love in your chest and heart area. Savor the body feeling, as well as the mental satisfaction, of success and abundance. Embrace a new story that tells about your adventures in your Zone of Genius. Find a new mythology, or make up one of your own, that shows you enjoying your life in the full radiance of your expressed potential.

I commit to living in my Zone of Genius, now and forever.

Here’s the first Genius Question: What do I most love to do? (I love it so much I can do it for long stretches of time without getting tired or bored.)

Now let’s render “what I most love” into something much more specific. Here’s the second Genius Question I’d like you to ponder: What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work?

(I can do it all day long without ever feeling tired or bored.)

In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? (Even if I do only ten seconds or a few minutes of it, an idea or a deeper connection may spring forth that leads to huge value.)

This morning, and every other morning for the last couple of decades, I sat down for a half hour of meditation and free mind play. I do this before I engage in any “official” work such as e-mail, writing, or project planning. To me, if something has the highest priority, it means I do it first.

What is my unique ability? (There’s a special skill I’m gifted with. This unique ability, fully realized and put to work, can provide enormous benefits to me and any organization I serve.)

“What do you think your unique ability is?” I explained that a unique ability was a special gift, something you were really good at that was also helpful to people around you.