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

by Gay Hendricks

Once you understand the one problem and how to solve it, you can do far more than increase your net financial worth: you can make quantum shifts in the amount of love you feel and the amount of creativity you express.

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

if I argue for my limitations, I get to keep them.

There’s only one way to get through the fog of fear, and that’s to transform it into the clarity of exhilaration.

Fritz Perls, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy. He said, “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.

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

My intention is to show you exactly how to free yourself from the self-imposed limitation that is keeping you from your ultimate success.

Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.

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.

All of us can find and nurture the capacity for positive feelings now, rather than waiting until some longed-for event occurs.

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.

The best way to handle most things in your Zone of Incompetence is to avoid doing them altogether.

One thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of observing: 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.

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

Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction.

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

I use the phrase “gently and gracefully” for a particular reason. If we don’t heed the call and make a gentle, graceful move into our Zone of Genius, we often get painful life whacks that tell us with blatant clarity that we’re not paying attention to the Call.

There is something important you should know about the Upper Limit Problem: 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.

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.

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?

money arguments never have anything to do with money. Money arguments are always about something deeper, and it was certainly true in his case.

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

golf is very much like life itself, which awaits your intention and action before revealing the mysteries of the outcome.

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.

after an excursion past your Upper Limit. The most popular integrity breaches are lies, broken agreements, and withheld truths.

To be in integrity meant you were whole and complete. To be out of integrity meant a breach in your wholeness had occurred; there was a gap in your completeness.

Would you be willing to consider that your conflict is not about what you think it’s about?

in your Zone of Genius, time doesn’t fly—it flows.

What do I most love to do?

What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work?

In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent?

What is my unique ability?

I expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.

For your life to work harmoniously, you need to develop a harmonious relationship with time. Most people have a difficult time balancing all of their priorities.

The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves.