Quotes from Gay Hendricks

Your worry-thoughts, particularly if you find yourself recycling the same ones over and over, are a flag waving at you from your Zone of Genius. Something is trying to get your attention.

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. —John Wooden

I took the Big Leap into my Zone of Genius, I might fail. What if I really opened up to my true genius and found that my genius wasn't good enough?

Frequently the whole book would boil down to a single breathing practice, with an entire philosophy wrapped around it. Sometimes, maddeningly, a book would spend two hundred pages promoting the spiritual value of a particular style of breathing, only to say at the end that it could not be taught in a book.

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.

One is in the cultural taboo against rounded bellies. Fashion dictates that both men and women must have flat bellies. The gaunt fashion-model look still has power over certain segments of the population, as does the ramrod-straight military-inspired look for men.

Criticism and blame are addictions.

commit to discovering my Upper Limit behaviors, and to having a good time while I'm learning about them.

Restricting the breath is a quick way of stopping an unpleasant, unwelcome feeling. The trouble is that it also stops your life energy in general.

Many people think there are two faucets, marked GOOD FEELINGS and BAD FEELINGS. They think you can turn on the good one and leave the bad shut off. There is only one faucet, however, and it is marked FEELINGS. YOU turn it on, take what you get, and after a while it becomes mostly positive.

mentioned earlier that most worry-thoughts have absolutely nothing to do with reality. That's true for criticism, too. In other words, 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. When

All other worry is just Upper Limit noise, designed by our unconscious to keep us safely within our Zone of Excellence or Zone of Competence.

notice myself worrying about something. I let go of the worry-thoughts, shifting my focus away from them. I wonder: what positive new thing is trying to come into being?

The seductive comforts of success, though, can lull us into accepting the status quo.

For a long time, I just complained that "women are all the same." After I saw the same patterns in half a dozen different relationships, I finally woke up and realized it was I who was "all the same." I realized I was committed to getting involved with women who were distant and who would eventually abandon me. Seeing that I created my painful dramas out of my unconscious commitments was a big wake-up moment for me.

diseases of unfulfillment." When people are not expressing their full potential, they often get illnesses that have vague, hard-to-diagnose symptoms. Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia are good examples of what I'm describing

link together the other two Ps—prevention and protection—because they almost always occur at the same time. Here's the bottom line on prevention and protection:

Lama Tenzing, we are all equal beings in the universe," he'd told me more than once. "If you hold others in the thought that they are victims, you rob them of their power. If you hold others as fully responsible for their own destiny, you ennoble them by treating them as equals.

Those who have the courage to discover and bring forth their genius break through to unparalleled heights of productivity and life satisfaction. Discovering your Zone of Genius is your life's Big Leap.

The temptation is strong to remain in the Zone of Excellence; it's where your own addiction to comfort wants you to stay.

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.

When I'm operating in my Zone of Genius, I am doing what I love to do and I'm enjoying what I have.

Behind every communication problem is a sweaty ten-minute conversation you don't want to have. However, the moment you work up the courage to have it, you collect an instant reward in relief as well as open up a flow of communication that will allow you to resolve the situation.

unless you were me, once again distorting reality so it would fit a negative mindset. I don't need any outside enemies. I have a perfectly good one residing right between my ears.