Introduction
LIVING IN YOUR GENIUS ZONE
Welcome to one of the most important conversations a conscious human being ever has: how to live your whole life in a continuous upward spiral of your creative genius.
I’ve been richly blessed to have had thousands of conversations about genius with students and colleagues around the world. In my book The Big Leap, I shared the key findings from my first three decades of exploration into how human beings can optimize the gifts they have been given.
Since The Big Leap came out, I’ve discovered several powerful new tools for evoking your genius. Specifically, I want to give you detailed instructions on how to use the most essential technique, a tool you can use in a split second to stop recycling problems and create a life centered in your genius.
The Meta-Tool
In the first part of this book, you will learn how to spot what I call the Genius Moment and how to use a specific tool called the Genius Move. The Genius Moment is an opening, an invitation to bring forth your highest potential. You get hundreds of Genius Moments every day, each one an opportunity to make the Genius Move and step through into the life you really want to live.
The Genius Move is a body-mind tool you can apply in the blink of an eye. Each time you use it you create more open space through which your genius can be accessed and expressed. Think of the Genius Move as a meta-tool, one that makes all your other tools work better.
The rest of the book will show you how to apply the Genius Move to accomplish two major goals: ending your specific type of negative thinking and increasing the flow of your authentic creativity. You’ll see how to use the tool in your close relationships, your business dealings, your health, and other important areas of life.
In The Big Leap we opened up a conversation on discovering your own inner genius. In The Genius Zone, we take the conversation to a new level; here you will find out how to live your whole life in the boundless realm of your genius.
The question I want you to consider throughout the book is this: How can I spend the majority of my time doing what I most love to do while making my greatest contribution to the world?
This question is a premier example of what I call a wonder-question. A wonder-question is something you sincerely, deeply want to know. It evokes genuine wonder in you. It’s such a big and essential question that the answer to it would change your life.
Experiential Pause
Pause right now to savor the question. Wonder to yourself: Hmmm, how can I spend the majority of my time doing what I most love to do while also making my greatest contribution to the world?
Ask it a few times in your mind to get the feel of it.
As you repeat the wonder-question in your mind, notice the vibrational sound of the words as well as the meaning.
After you say it a few times in your mind, say the question out loud a few times, complete with a hum: Hmmm, how can I spend the majority of my time doing what I most love to do, while also making my greatest contribution to the world?
My own research into this question led me to an unexpected conclusion: our ability to live in our Genius Zone full-time depends on our skill with the meta-tool you will soon learn, the lightning-quick action I call the Genius Move. Once you learn the Genius Move and how to apply it on the fly, you have a practice that can work genuine magic in your life. Even though I have used it thousands of times in my own life and have taught it to thousands of others, the simple power of the practice still fills me with awe when I see it in action.
The Genius Zone
As your skill with the Genius Move grows, you enter the new dimension we’re mapping out: the Genius Zone. Ultimately, you will come to see that the Genius Zone has no upper limits: it’s a spiral. The Genius Spiral is an ascending path that takes you into higher and more productive refinements of your creative expression. As you get nimble at applying the Genius Move in your life, you will likely discover the same joyful secret I did: after you live in the Genius Zone awhile, the Genius Zone lives in you. Your genius wakes up every day before you do.
That’s what I want for you. I want you to feel the joy of living in your Genius Zone all the time. I want you to feel the soaring exhilaration of the Genius Spiral every moment of every day. I want you to go through every moment of your life with the deep sense of satisfaction that comes from bringing forth your true creative gifts. If that’s what you’d like, too, let’s take the first essential step.
Important Recommendation
You will see activities throughout this book designated as “Hands-On.” The best way to master the material is to pause and do the Hands-On Activities on the spot when you encounter them. For example, if I invite you to pause from your reading and write something out in longhand on a piece of paper, please stop reading and do it then and there. Doing the Hands-On Activities as you move along produces the mind-body integration necessary to master the use of the tools.
1
THE ESSENTIAL FIRST STEP
If you embrace the ideas in the book and follow through with a bit of dedicated practice, you will likely notice two striking results. Both of those results can create revolutionary positive changes in your overall well-being.
The first thing you will likely notice is a sharp decrease in your habitual negative thinking. That’s a great boon to your inner harmony, but the second result is even more important. As you turn off the background noise of habitual negative thinking, you open up space for the emergence of new forms of creativity. You make room for your genius.
Genius and Love
Your genius is discovered by looking closely into what you most love to do. Whether it’s writing a poem or sailing a boat or cuddling a newborn, if you love to do it, it’s got the essence of your genius in it.
Your genius is the way you go about doing those things you most love to do. When you are living in your Genius Zone, you bring a certain quality of attention to whatever you’re doing. You pay attention in a way that’s different from when you’re doing things you’re merely good at.
To use a personal example, I love what I’m doing right now. I love the act of writing and have as long as I can remember. As I sit here, just past six in the morning, doing what you would find me doing almost always at this time of day, I feel a sense of calm exhilaration and deep satisfaction. That feeling is an essential nutrient in my life, and I feel incredibly grateful that I get to feel it every day. It’s what originally inspired me to write The Big Leap. Once I found my own genius and created my life around it, I felt compelled to share the possibility, first with my clients and later in the book.
The human quest to contact and express our genius often takes us on a journey with many twists and turns. I’d like to share a key conversation at the beginning of my career that set me forth on such a journey. It documents the unpredictable ways that genius often reveals itself.
I already knew I wanted to be a writer by the time I got to college. My dream, like that of thousands of other English majors, was to write the Great American Novel. In those days, though, newspapers were the main place writers found work, so I set my sights on getting a newspaper job until I could get my novel written. All went according to plan, and the year I turned twenty-two I went to work for a newspaper and also began to work on my first book, a novel about a rock star who was coming unglued. However, after only two weeks as a newspaper reporter I hit a major snag: I realized I hated the job. I found it excruciating to sit through a three-hour meeting of the local fish and game commission in order to write a story that would get whittled down to two paragraphs in the paper.
I encountered a different snag with my novel. About a hundred pages into it, I came to the sad conclusion that I didn’t yet possess the skills to write even a halfway decent novel, much less the Great American one. So, I quit the newspaper job, put my novel aside, and got a teaching job at a school for juvenile delinquents.
A few weeks after starting my new job, destiny intervened in the form of a suggestion by a gifted teacher, Dr. Dwight Webb. I attended one of Dr. Webb’s counseling classes at the University of New Hampshire, as the guest of a friend who was working on his master’s degree. The two hours of that class turned my world upside down. More accurately, it turned it right side up.
What I experienced in the counseling class was completely different from any educational experience I’d ever had. Instead of being presented in a lecture format, the class was organized into small groups of about half a dozen people. Our first assignment was to take turns talking for fifteen minutes about something significant that was going on in our lives, while the others in the group focused on listening nonjudgmentally to what was being said. At the end of each person’s allotted time, the listeners were simply to offer a brief summary and ask if they’d heard the speaker accurately. We were invited to pay attention to urges we had to criticize, evaluate, or judge what the speaker was saying but not to make any such comments.
The task sounded easy, but it turned out to be maddeningly difficult for me. As I tried listening nonjudgmentally to one person after another, I realized to my great surprise that my head was jam-packed with judgments. As soon as people opened their mouths, my mind started critiquing their voice, personality, appearance, and whatever else I could come up with. The insight jolted me; I saw that most of the time I was not just listening to people, but I was listening to find fault with them.
Then it came my turn to talk about something significant for fifteen minutes. My mouth dry with anxiety, I stumbled through a superficial description of my daily life, not mentioning anything meaningful, such as the fact that I hated practically everything in my life: my job, my apartment, and the body I lived in—which at the time was overweight by more than a hundred pounds and addicted to two packs of Marlboros a day. To top it all off, I had recently gotten married and was already realizing I had made a terrible mistake.
In short, I was ripe for some serious life changes.
I’ve seen a quotation chiseled in stone on the front of libraries: THE TRUTH SHALL SET YE FREE. To be completely accurate it should probably come with another verse, something like, “but first it shall keep ye up all night.” I couldn’t sleep for a week after the class. Night after night I replayed the class in my mind, thinking of all the things I could have shared with that group of nonjudgmental strangers. Those sleepless nights drove me to a sad conclusion: I had structured my life around hiding who I really was rather than bringing the real me forth.
Finally, I worked up the courage to enroll in the class and join the counseling program. After class one day I talked to Dr. Webb about a dilemma I couldn’t sort out. I told him about my passion for writing and my newfound enthusiasm for human transformation. Should I pursue my writing dreams or put my energy into a career in the counseling field?
He said, “Why not combine the two? Put all your powers of creative writing into real-life things that go on in the counseling process. Nobody’s really done that.”
His suggestion nudged me out of my either-or thinking and brought forth an outpouring of creativity. Over the next month, I wrote twenty or so poems and prose pieces about the process of counseling. I submitted the poems to a counseling journal, and six months later I got the thrill of seeing my first professional publication in print.
Being in the counseling program helped me experience a magical flip in my attitude toward my job, too. It was stressful work, teaching English and psychology to a hundred kids from rough backgrounds during the school day, then riding herd on them at night as the resident counselor in the dormitories. One of the reasons I’d taken the job was because it came with a rent-free apartment. I’d overlooked the fine print, which said that the apartment was attached to a dormitory that housed twenty-four juvenile delinquents. It was my responsibility to keep the peace in the evening and overnight, a task that involved breaking up fights, combing the hills for runaways, and other activities not conducive to a good night’s sleep.
Once I became interested in counseling, I realized I had an abundance of opportunities to apply my newfound skills, such as listening with empathy and sharing honest feelings. As I tapped into more depths of myself—particularly feelings I’d never acknowledged, such as fear, anger, and sadness—I could perceive greater depths of my students’ emotional worlds. I began weaving my counseling skills into my teaching and found that it worked wonders. I realized that all of us, even the most belligerent teenager from the harshest background, liked to be listened to nonjudgmentally and spoken to with honesty.
After a while, my attitude toward the job changed completely. Instead of thinking of myself as a glorified prison guard, I saw myself as head monk in a monastery of unruly monks in training. Rather than feeling like a headache-inducing chore, my job took on a new aura: a continuous opportunity to practice counseling skills and grow as a human being at the same time.
Copyright © 2021 by The Hendricks Institute
