INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Your Big Leap Year!
First, take a moment to celebrate yourself for making a life-changing choice. You’re beginning a year with unlimited possibilities for developing your highest potential. Your Big Leap Year offers you the opportunity to take 365 daily leaps forward to your genius—even if you only have a few minutes to invest.
You may have already read my book The Big Leap, the original inspiration for this daybook. If not, let me introduce you to the two big subjects at its heart. First, The Big Leap shows you how to eliminate your Upper Limit Problems, the ways you sabotage yourself when things start to go well. Then, it shows you how to live your daily life in the Genius Zone, where you’re doing what you love to do and what makes your best contribution to the world. Your Big Leap Year gives you daily tools for accomplishing both of those goals; it’s a yearlong sequence of the wisdom and skills I’ve found most essential for living a life of genius.
Your Big Leap Year Begins When You Do
Some daybooks are designed to start on January 1. This one isn’t. It begins the day you decide to take the leap. Rather than following the calendar year, Your Big Leap Year is organized around key themes that build on each other as your year proceeds.
The Genius Spiral: Three Cycles
Think of your path to genius as an ascending spiral. As you go around and up the spiral, you discover an ascending set of concepts and skills, all of which build on each other. That’s the way Your Big Leap Year is organized. The first cycle of the spiral contains leaps based on The Big Leap material in the order it appears in the book. For example, you begin the spiral with the commitments that give you a solid foundation for the journey to come. Later in the year, you will revisit the subject of commitment, as well as all the other Big Leap concepts, in a second and third cycle, as you go higher and higher up the spiral. By the end of Your Big Leap Year, you’ll know everything I’ve found of value about how to live full-time in your Genius Zone.
What To Expect in Your Big Leap Year
There is nothing like the power of systematic daily practice to bring forth your genius. Even if you get wisdom in a dazzling flash of enlightenment, it’s the daily practical use of it that makes a difference. Your Big Leap Year gives you an ideal step-at-a-time way to go on a journey to your genius.
Here’s what a typical day of Your Big Leap Year looks like. First, you get a paragraph or two of essential wisdom on one of the key themes of The Big Leap.
Themes include:
How to discover your geniusStories from my own questThe power of commitmentOvercoming your Upper Limit ProblemsGetting from the Excellence Zone to the Genius ZoneBreaking free of your limiting beliefsLiving in your Genius ZoneHow to create the time you need for your geniusBringing forth the genius of your relationshipsAfter the day’s theme, you get a practical process to put the wisdom to work for you. Among the processes are transformational activities such as:
Commitments that invite specific aspects of your geniusWonder questions that tap your deepest creative sourceAffirmations to establish new positive ideas in your mindJournaling and other tools for awareness and explorationThe book proceeds one day at a time through multiple rounds of the Genius Spiral, each theme and activity taking you higher and higher toward the full expression of your genius.
Keep in mind, sustainable change happens gradually. This journey is made up of focused, psychological shifts that might seem small at first—but if you commit to each Daily Leap, you will look up one day and find yourself miles ahead of where you once were.
Bonus Leaps
Every leap year, the number of days in a year changes—in the same way, each person’s Big Leap Year will be unique. There may be days when you don’t feel the day’s leap applies to you or your situation. Or it may be that your Big Leap Year falls on a calendar leap year and you need one more Daily Leap. If that happens, I’ve provided Bonus Leaps for you to use. You can find them at the back of the Daily Leap section.
Getting Back on Track
None of us are perfect. We forget, we get busy, and sometimes we simply don’t have enough energy. If you find that you’ve missed a day or two (or three or four…), that’s okay! Take some time to think about why this journey is important to you, why you started it in the first place. Review the last few leaps leading up to your break and check in with yourself: Do you still have these phrases internalized? Do you still have answers to these questions? If yes, jump back into the next leap! If no, backtrack until you find where you are psychologically, and start from there.
Journaling
For those interested in journaling, I encourage you to add a writing component to each leap, whether it’s writing down the phrase of the day, an answer to the day’s question, or simply how you’re feeling that day. Journaling can help you keep track of your progress and revisit your answers to important questions.
From My Heart to Yours
When I set out to write this book, I had one goal I’d never developed for any of my other books: I wanted to write the book I wish I’d had to guide me on my own journey. You’ll be the ultimate judge of whether it’s useful, but I can guarantee you this: every day of this book has ideas and tools that not only changed my life, they also sometimes took me years to figure out. If I can save you a year, or a month, or a second on your journey to genius, I’ve succeeded to my highest expectations.
One of my principles is to begin every new enterprise in a spirit of gratitude. As we begin this journey together, I’d like to express my sincere appreciation for you. You have my deepest respect for choosing to invest your time and energy in your genius. In my view, the world needs more genius. It needs your genius, your special contribution.
Your choice to embark on a journey to your genius is deeply moving and deeply personal to me. When I began my own journey, I chose a life purpose to guide me along the way. My chosen life purpose is to expand in love, abundance, and creativity every day while I inspire others to do the same. Every day you work on your genius, making your own dreams come true, you are also making my dream come true. It’s a double blessing, and I’m very grateful for it. My best wishes to you as you set off on the adventure of a lifetime!
DAY 1Beginning Your Big Leap Year
It begins with a bold question for you:
Would you be willing to make this day the first in 365 days of positive leaps in your life?
With your willingness and commitment, you can transform this day and every day to come into a journey to your highest creative potential—what I call your “genius.”
Over the course of the next 365 days, you will have the opportunity to clarify and manifest many goals of your own. As you bring your own chosen desires into reality, you will also get a thorough grounding in the meta-goal of this book: to assist you in making your whole life an expression of your genius.
Ready and willing? If so, today’s leap sets your journey to genius in motion.
YOUR LEAP FOR TODAY
Use this comprehensive commitment to guide each day of your journey:
I commit to expanding my genius every day of my life.
Say it to yourself several times right now to get a feel for it. Going forward, say it in your mind and out loud throughout the day. You don’t need to know what your genius is yet. You’ll have many opportunities to map it out as we go along.
Committing to your genius first allows you to bring forth the details of your genius in the perfect time and place.
Copyright © 2024 by The Hendricks Institute, Inc