The Big Leap Quotes

“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.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“The temptation is strong to remain in the Zone of Excellence; it’s where your own addiction to comfort wants you to stay.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“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.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Unfortunately, our thermostat setting usually gets programmed in early childhood, before we can think for ourselves. Once programmed, our Upper Limit thermostat setting holds us back from enjoying all the love, financial abundance, and creativity that’s rightfully ours. It keeps us in our Zone of Competence or at best our Zone of Excellence. It prevents us from living in the ultimate destination of the journey—our Zone of Genius.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“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.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Many of our fears are based on the workings of the ego, the part of us that’s focused on getting recognition and protecting us from social ostracism. In the Zone of Genius, your ego is unnecessary; living there is its own reward. In the Zone of Genius, you cease to care about recognition or ostracism. Once you make a commitment to inhabiting your full potential, your ego is suddenly faced with extinction.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“How am I getting in my own way?”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“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.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“To get to that level of undefended openness to learning, we have to practice as diligently as a master skier or a master cellist.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“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. 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.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Second, when you say, “I don’t have time to do that right now,” you’re telling a polite lie to avoid saying, “I don’t want to do that right now.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“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. When you shine the light of awareness on the underpinnings, they disappear.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“pausing even for lunch, they turned the car around and headed”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“However, going into your inner depths, where your most deeply held beliefs about what’s possible reside, counts in my book as a radical act.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“All of us can find and nurture the capacity for positive feelings now, rather than waiting until some longed-for event occurs.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“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. In fact, 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.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Make sure you take plenty of time for yourself, in a space apart from your partner. It could even be in the next room, so long as the intention is to nurture the independent part of you. Human beings have twin drives of equal power: the urge to merge and the urge to be an autonomous person. For a relationship to thrive, both drives need to be celebrated.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Much of the energy in troubled relationships is drained through power struggles about who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s the biggest victim.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Instead of focusing on the past, we need to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives now. If we don’t learn how to do this, we suffer in every area of our lives.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“get”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Many of our fears are based on the workings of the ego, the part of us that’s focused on getting recognition and protecting us from social ostracism. In the Zone of Genius, your ego is unnecessary; living there is its own reward. In the Zone of Genius, you cease to care about recognition or ostracism. Once you make a commitment to inhabiting your full potential, your ego is suddenly faced with extinction. It’s been making excuses for you throughout your life. Now, if your commitment to taking your Big Leap is sincere, your ego will need to be shown the door. Unless you’re lucky, your ego will probably not go quietly. It has a lifetime of employment history behind it.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“If you don’t know it’s OK to feel good and have a good time, you’ll do something to mess up when things are going well.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“excursion”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“On Judgment Day, Mr. Lewin said, God will not ask, “Why were you not Moses?” He will ask, “Why were you not Sam Lewin?” The goal in life is not to attain some imaginary ideal; it is to find and fully use our own gifts.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“There are four of these barriers:

The first barrier is the false belief that we are fundamentally flawed in some way. If we carry this feeling within us, we sabotage our success because we think we're essentially bad. If something good happens, we must mess up to offset it, because good things can't happen to bad people.

The second barrier is the false belief that by succeeding, we are being disloyal to and leaving behind people in our past. If we harbor this feeling within us, we sabotage our success because we think it's disloyal to our roots to soar too far into the stratosphere.

The third barrier is the false belief that we are a burden in the world. If we carry this feeling inside us, we sabotage our success so that we won't be a bigger burden.

The fourth barrier is the false belief that we must dim the bright lights of our brilliance so that we won't outshine someone in our past. If we hold this feeling inside us, we tend to told ourselves back from expressing the full potential of our innate genius.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“The first barrier is the false belief that we are fundamentally flawed in some way. If we carry this feeling within us, we sabotage our success because we think we're essentially bad.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“PERSON A: Why are you making me so miserable? This problem is entirely your fault.

PERSON B: Wow, thanks for pointing that out. I agree completely. It's clear that I'm the perpetrator, you're the victim, and your misery is entirely my fault.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“Isn't it boring if you don't argue?" That's kind of like asking, "Isn't peace boring? Don't human beings need wars to spice things up?" We can definitely testify that having a great time creating things together is anything but boring.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“When we criticize something, it usually doesn't have anything to do with the thing we're criticizing. When we blame someone or something, we're doing it because we've hit our Upper Limit and are trying to retard the flow of positive energy.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

“When things are going well, or when you're feeling particularly good, you can always bring yourself down by manufacturing a stream of worry-thoughts. Once you've brought yourself down by worrying, it's very tempting to inflict those worry-thoughts on others. If we're in the grip of worrying while someone around us isn't, we seem to have an almost uncontrollable urge to criticize that person until he or she jumps into the stream of negativity with us.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level