Join me for an inspiring conversation with Gay Hendricks, PhD in Counseling Psychology and renowned author of The Big Leap. We discuss the keys to creating a successful and fulfilling coaching career while living a purpose-driven life. Gay shares his life-changing experiences, the importance of understanding and overcoming upper limits, how to stop self-sabotage, and techniques for enhancing presence and connection in relationships.

Whether you're a new coach or experienced, this episode is packed with insights into foundational concepts for personal and professional growth, as well as strategies for maintaining motivation and balance as a coach. Tune in now!

[00:00:34] Gay Hendricks: Thank you, Lauren. I'm so delighted to be with you.

[00:00:54] Lauren Brollier Newton: So, the story I'm referring to, I believe you were just dating Kathy, you go to a party, and [00:01:00] there's a man, I think his name was Ed, who tells you about a near death experience that he had. And I think, he started by saying, I don't like small talks. So, do you want to do big talk? Or you said that, or he said that. So, I'll start the podcast by saying, are you down to do some big talk and tell us that story.

[00:01:41] Gay Hendricks: Because it was the engagement party of a colleague of mine, another psychologist that I'd known for years, and it was to be his 5th marriage. And I had known him through number 2, number 3, number 4, and frankly, I didn't have a lot of confidence in number 5. So, I [00:02:00] was mixed feelings about whether I really wanted to even participate in it. Turned out I was totally wrong.

[00:02:35] Gay Hendricks: He, shaven head and he came into the library and I can't remember which one of us said, I think he said, you must not like small talk either and I said, yeah. So, let's not have any, let's have some big talk. And he said, I almost died 6 months ago. And I said, Oh, okay. That qualifies as big dog.

[00:03:13] Gay Hendricks: It's where my book Five Wishes came from. Because the man said, his name was Ed Steinbrecher, and it turned out, he was a famous astrologer. Although, I did not know that at the time, but that was why he was at the party. Because he was the soon to be wife's astrologer, and he was there to, it was a blessing to the thing.

[00:03:53] Gay Hendricks: And he said, here, I'll ask it to you. And just like it was asked, like I saw it answered in my mind, and [00:04:00] I'm going to now, Lauren, ask it to you and all of your viewers and listeners. The question was, if you were at the end of your life, and I came to visit you, and if you had led a completely successful life, what would be the number one thing that you'd tell me that made your life a big success?

[00:04:45] Gay Hendricks: And I was beginning to say, why is it that a guy can get a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Stanford, and be a successful therapist, and write books, and everything like that, and still not be able to make a close [00:05:00] relationship work. It was beginning to really press on me at the time. And so, I said to Ed, okay, my number one thing that would make my life a success is, if I created a lasting love relationship with a woman with whom I could grow and change positively over the years. So, a long term relationship.

[00:05:40] Gay Hendricks: If you had that, what's number two? So, I went down my list and I filled it in later because, I couldn't think of them all at the time. But what I came up with what's in Five Wishes, which was number two, was to live in a state of completion with people I'm with, my friends and family, so there's nothing unspoken or [00:06:00] unheard. You're complete with them.

[00:06:19] Gay Hendricks: But what was in my heart wanted to be expressed? There's a beautiful old saying from the gospel of Thomas that says, that if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. And so, I really wanted to bring forth, and that was my number three.

[00:06:57] Gay Hendricks: It's not just as a thing, a mental thing. And [00:07:00] because I'd had that with religion growing up and everything, but I never had connected with anything in my heart and soul. And then my fifth was simply to learn how to savor life, to be there as life unfolded. And I'd recently had an experience taking my little girl out for Halloween, and she had this beautiful costume on.

[00:07:41] Gay Hendricks: And it's interesting, that I never thought about writing a book about it, until many years later. And I think your listeners and viewers will appreciate this. I was at a dinner one time, about the 20 years ago with a Neale Walsch sitting next to me, the [00:08:00] conversations with Neale Donald Walsch. And he is about as allergic to small talk as I am.

[00:08:23] Gay Hendricks: And I realized, yeah, I am telling it for the first time. And he says, you've got to go home and write a book about that, man. And so as soon as I went home, and I literally wrote the book in about 3 or 4 weeks. And then, I spent the next 6 months, a few months expanding and stuff, but I told a story and immediately the company that published The Power of Now and The Peaceful Warrior bought it and it became a bestseller.

[00:08:57] Lauren Brollier Newton: The first time I heard it, I think the power of that story, and this is [00:09:00] something that I've noticed about you in particular, that always just expands my heart or opens my heart to the sky is, the way that you ask questions, the way that you develop questions that we can ask of ourselves.

[00:09:27] Lauren Brollier Newton: It's not like, my one purpose is to be a life coach. And my one purpose is to be a writer, in the way that I believe spirit, or your connection to your own creative forces connected you to your own particular answers. There's so many different ways you can learn how to save her. There's so many different ways that you can write from the heart.

[00:10:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: But when I asked myself this question, and I want to thank you for the question and for sharing the story, because it truly changed my life. The top 2 things that I heard were, I want to really help people, and I want to have a love for the record books.

[00:10:14] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so, those two things I've been able to serve every day since I heard you tell that story in many different ways. And it's so empowering that there's not just one pathway that I can take with either of those things. So thank you.

[00:10:51] Gay Hendricks: I have clients who are medical doctors, who are tired of the old paradigm of being the perpetually in a [00:11:00] hurry doctor that sees people 2 minutes at a time and that kind of thing. And they want to learn how to be present for their communications. Their colleagues all think that it will slow things down, but it actually makes things go better, because if you're really present with a person, that's what makes a difference.

[00:11:49] Gay Hendricks: Because here's the thing, like you mentioned, I've trained thousands of coaches, therapists, psychiatrists. Now, when I was at the university in Colorado for 21 years, I was in the Counseling [00:12:00] Psychology Department there, and we trained about 1,200 counselors and therapists over the years.

[00:12:32] Gay Hendricks: That's important, you need to stay fresh, you need to stay open to new techniques and things like that. And it's about the quality of your being. We must never forget that because, anything we can learn to deal with, and accept, and learn to love, and make new choices about in ourselves, gives us an automatic ability to communicate that knowledge to people. But also, knowledge is knowing that [00:13:00] tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

[00:13:19] Lauren Brollier Newton: I noticed that as we coach our coaches here at Brave Thinking Institute, the number one thing that stands in their way, and this is probably not true for coaches. This is probably just true for humankind, but the number one thing that stands in coaches way of putting themselves out there, going and helping more people is oftentimes, just navigating their own inner world.

[00:13:49] Gay Hendricks: One thing to just know is that life itself, whether in the form of your clients or whatever, life is always going to be bringing you the one thing that [00:14:00] needs to be mastered at that moment. For you to move forward and like, having this early in my practice way back more than 40 years ago. When I was a budding young psychologist, three people in a row brought in father issues.

[00:14:38] Gay Hendricks: But if you're not paying attention, as I well know from personal experience, it's very easy. It's just as happy to teach you by whopping you over the head with a sledgehammer if you're enough to those feather tickles.

[00:15:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: And one of the questions that you said that people can ask themselves, and I heard it and I went, Oh, that's just another way to look at things is you ask the question, just ask yourself, how is this familiar? And I thought that was such a brilliant question.

[00:15:34] Lauren Brollier Newton: I'm about a week from giving birth. And so last night, I was with my husband in the baby's room and we were trying to put together the mattress, and the sheet, and we were first time parents. So, we have no idea what we're doing, really. And I found myself getting angry, not at my husband, I ordered the wrong size sheet and I couldn't figure out how this worked with the little changing pad fit on the dresser.

[00:16:20] Gay Hendricks: That's important to know because, underneath all of those kind of incidents is something you're afraid of. And oftentimes, though people mistakenly express their fear in the form of anger. And don't express it in the form of fear, but there's a what you were working on last night, that, there's a lot of things to be scared of in there, and I'm notoriously awful at putting things together and operating screwdrivers and things like that.

[00:17:13] Gay Hendricks: I wanted to mention something else, you touched on something that triggered a memory in me that, I was on a talk to one of Mary's groups, and I was describing something that I think, your listenership and your viewership might benefit from too, which is a paradigm for transformation that we use here.

[00:17:56] Gay Hendricks: F stands for facing. So, the [00:18:00] first step in any kind of transformational process is the person has to face it, has to say, okay, I'm willing to spend some time learning about that, or working on that, or whatever, but It's an act of facing. Sometimes, it's very dramatic, like people at a 12 step group. When they say, hello, my name's John and I'm an alcoholic, that's a very radical form of facing it because, you're standing up in public and saying something.

[00:18:46] Gay Hendricks: Nope, I can handle it. Yeah, no problem, I can quit tomorrow. But the moment he just faced it as it was. So, that's the F of facing. You've got to turn around and look at something just straight on. [00:19:00] Sometimes the second step though, is equally important is acceptance. A stands for acceptance because until you've accepted something at the level of deeply lovingly accepting it.

[00:19:37] Gay Hendricks: It's important to then translate that into action and make a new commitment or choice. So, C stands for choice or commitment. So, making a new commitment to how you want it to be now. Then T stands for taking action. That it's always going to feel incomplete until you do something, even a ten second thing, that translates it [00:20:00] into action. So, put that in the background of your transformational work with people, and I hope you find that as useful as our students do.

[00:20:22] Gay Hendricks: What I recommend is, people generate some options and then use their body to communicate, how they feel about that? Because if you write down, what would be a typical problem? Can you throw out something that you'd like me to use for an example?

[00:20:44] Gay Hendricks: Okay, so you're working with the person's procrastination. Okay, so the 4 questions then you need to ask is, what is it that needs to be faced here at the deepest level? And you can go through these any number of times, because what will happen is, oftentimes the [00:21:00] person will get stuck on one of them and not be able to get to the next.

[00:21:23] Gay Hendricks: In other words, they haven't really made the decision. The key commitment yet, or they haven't really made the commitment to what they want. So go back, you can always go back one step and find out what's missing there? The other thing is to use your body to help you discover what you're passionate about.

[00:22:09] Lauren Brollier Newton: No, absolutely not.

[00:22:42] Lauren Brollier Newton: Okay.

[00:23:21] Lauren Brollier Newton: I do.

[00:23:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: I do.

[00:23:29] Lauren Brollier Newton: Chocolate.

[00:23:39] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah, if I was going to eat a piece of chocolate, it would be like See's Candy or something milk chocolate.

[00:23:53] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love that.

[00:24:04] Lauren Brollier Newton: Oh yeah. I live in Wyoming and so, I often go to Yellowstone Park.

[00:24:18] Lauren Brollier Newton: I bet. There's nothing like the Wyoming wind actually.

[00:24:33] Lauren Brollier Newton: This is so brilliant, because I think as we're training coaches, we often train them in how to help both themselves, and their clients notice for expansion and notice for contraction. But that can be very abstract, and something like this makes, they can actually feel it in their body in the moment.

[00:25:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: This is so true. This seems like a great time to talk a little bit about, for coaches that haven't heard of this concept. I think this is something that, if we personally as coaches overcome it on our own life, we can be such a power in helping our clients, would you be willing to describe, what an upper limit is? And how to identify that in ourselves?

[00:26:01] Gay Hendricks: And so, I was on my way to my goal weight, and I was walking past on the street. I was walking past and I'd look to my left and there was a family of 4 in this ice cream shop, Brigham's Ice Cream Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Don't know if it's still there or not, but was at the time the kind of cool, popular upscale ice cream place.

[00:26:37] Gay Hendricks: And for about 20 minutes, because of that sugar high, I felt like the king of the universe while that sugar was burning through me, especially since I hadn't had any in 30 days or so. But 20 minutes after that, I was walking down the street and I got, it was like somebody hit me in the stomach with a punch.

[00:27:24] Gay Hendricks: So, it could be a flow of good feeling in yourself, like I was experienced, like the exhilaration of having lost a bunch of weight and feeling better. Or it could be the flow of connection with another person, like you're feeling a good flow and then somebody makes a critical remark. And then that leads to an argument.

[00:28:05] Gay Hendricks: You revert to the familiar and I know, I've done all those things myself. It took Kathy and me. Wow, let's see. We've been together 44 years now, and I'd say, it took us a good year or two into our relationships into our committed relationship. Before we really begin to see all of the ways we were upper limiting ourselves.

[00:28:44] Gay Hendricks: And all couples arguments, by the way, you've probably learned this in your own relationship. All couples arguments are a race to occupy the victim position. One person says, if you'd quit doing X, Y, and Z, I'd sure be a lot happier. The other [00:29:00] person doesn't automatically go along with that point of view. They say, wait just a doggone minute here. If it weren't for you, I'd be a whole lot happier.

[00:29:30] Gay Hendricks: I personally not benefited from using that particular strategy. But the point I want to make is, look at your upper limits as interrupting the flow of good feeling in you, and interrupting the flow of good feeling in your relationships. And it doesn't have to be just romantic relationships, but your relationships at work, more people have relationship upper limits at work than they do at home. Why? Because it's 8 or 9 hours a day there compared to only a couple hours at home.

[00:30:08] Gay Hendricks: That's exactly it. I got more happy than I'm used to, or I got more abundant than I was used to. That's a common one, because so many heartful people go into our field, but you also have to be heartful and soulful to make it as a coach. But you have to be mindful in the sense of, working on constantly ways of attracting more and more to you of the kinds of clients you want.

[00:30:53] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. I've had this experience myself when I was building my coaching business and I know a lot of our coaches have this experience [00:31:00] that, they'll have something happen that's new and fresh and exciting. Like, I just enrolled my first VIP client, or I just had a wonderful workshop and everybody was raving about it.

[00:31:27] Lauren Brollier Newton: Mary, she'll say, Oh, Mary, you got just a little bit too happy there. In that moment, Gay, what would you say? So, the coach has this great workshop, maybe enrolls their first client. Monday morning comes and there's some sort of upper limit that appears.

[00:32:05] Gay Hendricks: And suddenly, Oh my gosh, now here goes a 5th, or a 6th of that, that unexpectedly. So, that's a classic upper limits. A lot of them are going to be in the form of money related, or material related things. Kathy and I went, teaching a seminar about upper limits, when the front foundation fell off our house, our hundred year old Victorian house, the soil shifted underneath it.

[00:33:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: So in that moment, you enroll the VIP client, you have the 3 day workshop, you get the tax bill. What do you do with your inner world that helps you to not shrink back to this old pattern?

[00:33:52] Gay Hendricks: Otherwise, you're going to be spinning your wheels. And I bet you know, and have seen lots of evidence that once you start [00:34:00] spinning your wheels in thinking about things that you have no control over, then you're go from one to the other. And oftentimes, the spiral goes downward.

[00:34:30] Gay Hendricks: And so, it's common for me to pause there and just look at what's in the window. And I've purchased things there as gifts before and things like that. So anyway, I'm going down the street and I look in the window as I often do, and I'm by myself. And I just paused there, and I looked and then, I started walking again toward my destination, which was at the other end of the block.

[00:35:33] Gay Hendricks: So, make that sort everybody. Get good at making that sort about is this within my power to control or not. Because here's the thing, there's 2,000 years of history behind that suggestion. Because the first self help book that was ever compiled for human beings was about the same time as the Bible. But it was a short book that was compiled over in the environs of [00:36:00] Greece by a bunch of students who wrote down the sayings of their teacher, a guy named Epictetus. And they wrote down into a handbook that was called the Enchiridion, or The Art of Living. And they wrote down things that Epictetus said, and the number one thing they wrote down that he said always was, notice is within your power to control.

[00:36:51] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. That's so powerful. So, for the couple who always fights on a Friday night, when they ask themselves, is this something in my power to control? They're going to get a yes.

[00:37:20] Gay Hendricks: Because sometimes, when people come in, they've been telling each other what a bad person they are for the last 29 years without having any kind of breakthrough about it. But another good thing to know is that, everybody's fighting for the victim position and the only way out is for both people to identify what am I really afraid of?

[00:37:59] Gay Hendricks: [00:38:00] And they never involve you as the starting point of the sentence. They sometimes involve you as the last, I love you, or I want to marry you. But they never start with you.

[00:38:32] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I know, one of the coaches questions that we get a lot is, I have this mission. I want to help people. I'm heart centered and it's very hard for them to stay motivated or to stay connected to that purpose. And so, what would your tips be for a coach that does somewhere deep down inside feel this calling. But the idea of attracting clients, and being an entrepreneur, and these other things seem to pull them off track from that mission. How would you stay motivated?

[00:39:28] Gay Hendricks: And they put in the particulars about we're going to Honolulu, but the plane doesn't get there. The automatic pilot riffs. And then makes a correction, it drifts. It says, we're going toward the right. Let's correct a little bit to the left. It does that thousands of times a minute, makes little tiny corrections. Each one of them is a recommitment and unfortunately, human beings often think of commitment as a one time only thing. They blow it when they're doomed, but I say, it's go [00:40:00] out and blow it as soon as possible so you can make the recommitment to getting back on the path again.

[00:40:32] Gay Hendricks: And same thing with doing what you love to do. When I first thought about that, I said, Oh gosh, I need to make a living. I can't do what I most love to do. And then I started doing what I most love to do an hour a day, and pretty soon that led to 2 hours. And pretty soon I was doing that, but it took me years of just bumping it up all the time.

[00:41:25] Lauren Brollier Newton: Absolutely. I love that. One of the things that Brave Thinking Institute, even though we all work virtually, we'll often say Mary or Mat, we'll all say to each other, I'll see you around campus. And one of the things that I hear around campus at Brave Thinking Institute. Mat Boggs, absolutely loves you as his mentor, adores you. And one of the things I've heard him say, actually multiple times about you is he says, that there's something about the way that you, and I don't know if he used this expression, but I'm going to use it. Cause it's a, you know, common expressionn, is your work-life balance, that he admires your level of work-life balance.

[00:42:19] Gay Hendricks: I'll tell you how I deal with that, but I want to tell you an extreme version of that. Sometimes, I get invited to speak to groups like the Young President's Organization, YPO, which are very popular. And you have to be, I think under 50 to be in that organization. And so, there's a lot of go getters in the room and most of them are there, because they are very passionate about their businesses.

[00:43:14] Gay Hendricks: That's impossible, and I always point out it's the same energy that I used to get from drug addicts when I would invite them to not take their drug for the day. And so, you can use your work world as a drug. But here's my personal solution to it. Go back to Five Wishes, go back to that question about my deathbed. If I'm on my deathbed and my life has been a complete success, what's the number one thing that made it? It's not that I've written 51 books. It's not that I've, become a multimillionaire doing what I do. I didn't think about that when I started.

[00:44:51] Gay Hendricks: So, if I'm looking at something, I'm busy and she comes in the door. I stopped [00:45:00] being busy on the moment. And I focus on her because it's my priority and I had to overcome a lot of programming in order to get there. Because I was one of those people that, I was looking all the time in my mind, even though I might have been sitting there talking to somebody in my family, and because I wasn't just being there.

[00:46:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. This is so powerful. And it goes back to the power of asking yourself that question and knowing what your five are, because then you have a north star or a measurement of the choices are the decisions that you're making that may or may not be life giving to you. Yeah. So, I want to share a kind of a funny story with you.

[00:46:32] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I remember, I was newly divorced and newly forming a new vision for my life of what love could be like. And I remember watching this video of you and Kathy, and the way that you look at each other, you can see the love, you can feel the love. And there was a part of me, this is what Mary would call it, little me, that I went, goo goo gaga over each other. Like, didn't want to believe it, or wanted to dislike it.

[00:47:24] Lauren Brollier Newton: I want to ask, this is a selfish question now. So, for all the coaches out there, this is my question for myself. My question is, how do you take something that's already so good and so deep, and continue to expand it in such a beautiful way?

[00:48:22] Gay Hendricks: How could I feel better? How could I feel better in my body organically? How could I organically feel more love and connection with the other person? And those are deep inner questions that if you get the answers to it, life becomes an unfolding experience of magnificence.

[00:49:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: You're building it from the ground up. You can take your awareness, but not your assets that you currently have for your business. What would be the first thing you would do if you were building a coaching business from the ground up?

[00:49:40] Gay Hendricks: Like I always tell my clients and my students, think of yourself as you're in private practice and the universe is your client. And that, your job is just to invite in the kind of people you most love to work with, the kind of things you know most about, the [00:50:00] things that attract you passionately. And so, I would get that as an attractor factor inside myself first before I put an ad out there, or express that on Instagram, or however you go about bringing yourself out to the public.

[00:50:21] Gay Hendricks: We're all over the place. We have all the usual web stuff like Hendricks.com. H E N D R I C K S.com. There's a whole bunch of good stuff there and also Instagram and all of those things. We also have a great nonprofit foundation. I want to blow its horn a little because we have a lot of free resources there.

[00:51:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love it. thank you so much for your wisdom, for the way you've changed my life, for the way you've impacted the world. Thank Kathy as well. And it's just been such a pleasure and a privilege to have you here today. And we're really grateful.

[00:51:22] Lauren Brollier Newton: Thank you.