Quotes from Gay Hendricks

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.

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.

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.

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.

pausing even for lunch, they turned the car around and headed

The odds are great, so great as to be almost impossible. But they are no greater than the odds against a soul landing in a human incarnation. And you," Rinpoche was staring right at me, "you have beaten those odds. And so I ask you, what are you going to do with this opportunity?

May answers come to me by easeful attraction rather than stressful pursuit, and may all beings benefit from these inquiries.

For every in-breath there is an out-breath, and as these two currents meet in the nose, a fine microclimate is set up.

All human unhappiness comes from not facing reality squarely, exactly as it is. —BUDDHA

May I be mindful both making and keeping commitments that they be springboards to liberation, instead of suffering, for all sentient beings.

The joy of the journey itself is not only a key goal, it is the goal. The outcomes of the journey, whatever they are, will always be in the zone of the unknown. While you're getting to where you're going, though, you will have the opportunity to enjoy the greatest show on earth, the moment-by-moment process of consciousness itself.

When any problem occurs, you have two choices: you can get upset about it, or you can simply figure out what needs to be done. Getting upset has a seductive quality to it; there is rich drama to be had there. The cost is that there is no happiness to be had. Happiness opens up when you drop the drama and start looking for what needs to be done. Any relationship improves when both people shift from complaints to statements of what they want.

Usually when I feel like there's no time, it really means I haven't made time for myself.

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.

let go of expectations, for expectations lead to suffering.

listen so intently that people bring forth their own wisdom.

The art of getting beyond our Upper Limit Problem has a lot to do with creating space within us to feel and appreciate natural good feelings.

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.

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.

To get to that level of undefended openness to learning, we have to practice as diligently as a master skier or a master cellist.

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.

You're where time comes from.

Once the race for the victim position is under way, each person must find some way to out-victim the other.

The key insight: each entity in a situation represents 100 percent. Each entity in a conflict has 100 percent of the responsibility for resolving the conflict