In the Zone
Your Zone of Genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do. They draw upon your special gifts and strengths. Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to greater success and life satisfaction.
The journey to the Zone of Genius requires “benign vigilance,” or paying keen but relaxed attention to what you are doing in every moment — especially when you’re exhibiting Upper-Limit behavior. When you’re engaged in these behaviors, or “Upper-Limiting,” you’re crimping the flow of positive energy. Fortunately, there are not that many ways we Upper-Limit ourselves. Pay attention to which ones are familiar to you. The most common one is worry.
Worrying is usually a sign that we’re Upper-Limiting. It is useful only if it concerns a topic we can actually do something about, and if it leads to our taking immediate and positive action. All other worry is just Upper-Limit noise, designed by our unconscious to keep us safely out of our Zone of Genius. There’s a good way to know if a worry-thought is something you should heed. Just ask yourself: Is it a real possibility? Is there any action I can take right now to make a positive difference?
When you find yourself worrying, there is something positive trying to break through. 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. Look beyond the worry-thoughts and you will often find a new direction that’s being laid out for you.
For example, I’m walking down the street of my town and pass a jewelry store where my wife, Kathlyn, and I have bought beautiful pieces over the years. I admire some of the pieces in the window. About 15 seconds later I notice some worry-thoughts about money. Specifically, the worry-thoughts are about whether we have enough money to help a gifted young member of our family go to the private music conservatory she wants to attend. So, I notice the worry-thoughts and let them go. Then I wonder what positive thing is trying to come through. Seeing the jewelry has reminded me how much I love my wife, and how I wish there was some piece of jewelry that could really express the depth of those feelings.
I pick up my phone and call Kathlyn. I tell her the sequence I just experienced, from the glance in the window to the worry-thoughts to the delicious moment of letting myself feel the overflow of love and appreciation for her. I say, “Let’s make sure we take more time to celebrate what we have.”
Another way we Upper-Limit ourselves is through blame and criticism. When we blame someone or something, we’re often doing it because we’ve hit our Upper Limit and are trying to retard the flow of positive energy. Self-blame is part of the same Upper-Limit pattern as blaming someone else.
I once coached a billionaire who often bugged his wife because she bought the most expensive brand of toilet paper. In a situation like that, it’s pretty clear that tissue’s not the real issue.
I asked him to get out a calculator and figure the actual costs of the toilet paper if his wife went on a binge and bought a hundred rolls a day for the next 50 years. He punched in numbers and came up with the cost of her lifelong extravaganza: $1.5 million. I asked him how much his net worth varied from day to day due to ordinary stock-market fluctuations. He said that it would sometimes vary by as much as $100 million from hour to hour. I pointed out that even if his wife bought 1,000 rolls a day, it still wouldn’t amount to a single day’s fluctuation. “Given that,” I said, “what’s the real reason you’re criticizing your wife?”
We discovered that, deep down, he didn’t feel that he deserved to be wealthy and loved. He had grown up in a wealthy family, and his parents constantly bickered about money. He was carrying on that tradition in his own marriage.
I asked him to call a complete halt to criticizing his wife about money. And when they came in for their next session, they both looked about 10 years younger. They had even taken the assignment to a higher level, both of them deciding to eliminate criticism in general from their relationship. He told me that they had spent a delightful week “celebrating what we have rather than carping about what we don’t have.”
Chronic criticism and chronic blame are the behaviors we really need to eliminate. My assignment to you: Become a keen observer of critical statements that come out of your mouth or fly through your mind. Begin to sort them into two piles: Pile One contains all the criticisms about real things you plan to do something about (“Hey, you’re standing on my toe! Get off!”); Pile Two contains all the others. I predict you’ll discover that Pile Two towers over the paltry stack in Pile One.
Deflection is another common Upper-Limit behavior: We crimp the flow of positive energy by avoiding it altogether. Think of how many times you have heard conversations like this:
Joe: You did a great job on that presentation.
Jack: Nah, I ran out of time and had to leave out some of the best stuff.
Deflection keeps the positive energy from landing, being received and being acknowledged. The art of getting beyond our Upper-Limit Problem has a lot to do with developing an ability and willingness to feel and appreciate natural good feelings. By natural I mean good feelings that aren’t induced by alcohol, sugar and other short-term fixes. Letting yourself savor natural good feelings is a direct way to transcend your Upper-Limit Problem. By expanding your ability to feel positive feelings, you expand your tolerance for things going well in your life.
Arguments also bring you down when you’ve hit your Upper Limit. If you learn to see arguments as Upper-Limit symptoms, you can move beyond them. Arguments often are caused by two people racing to occupy the victim position in the relationship. Once the race for the victim position is under way, each person must find some way to out-victim the other, rather than find room for compromise.
Finally, when things are going well, some of us have a pattern that is pure Upper-Limit Problem: We get sick. To find out whether some of your illnesses are due to the Upper-Limit Problem, take a moment to think back over times when you’ve fallen ill. Ask yourself if it occurred during or just after a big win in business or a period of good times in a relationship.
Years ago, when I was a university professor, I shared an office for a while with a brilliant colleague named Dr. Smith. Once a year, each of us made a presentation of our work to the other faculty members. In these presentations, we described our current activities and talked about where we were going with our work over the next year. On the morning of Dr. Smith’s presentation, he showed up with laryngitis. I expressed my sympathies and remarked that I couldn’t recall his ever missing a lecture due to illness. He confided that he and his wife had spent a wonderful weekend celebrating a decision he’d finally made to break out of his university job and work in the private sector. An opportunity had opened up in a neighboring state, and over the weekend he had decided to take the job.
As Monday loomed, though, Dr. Smith had to face sober reality again. He didn’t want to tell the university yet, because there were still some key details to work out about the new position. He was happier and more excited than he had been in a long time, but he didn’t want to talk about it yet. Instead, in his presentation he had to appear enthusiastic about research he didn’t want to be doing at a university where he no longer wanted to work.
The solution Dr. Smith’s unconscious mind came up with was laryngitis. But, halfway through our conversation, the laryngitis disappeared and his voice returned to normal.
Not all illnesses are Upper-Limit symptoms, of course, but if you are keenly interested in moving to the Zone of Genius, you will want to examine everything that brings you pain and suffering as a potential Upper-Limit symptom. So many of us ignore the effect of our minds and emotions on our physical health, but the payoff for paying attention is well worth it. You may find that you can be a lot healthier than you ever imagined.
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To internalize these ideas and take them to the next level, be sure to check out Self-Esteem Meditation, Gay’s best-selling app for iOS. For the Android version, go here.
Gay Hendricks, Ph.D. has been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and bodymind therapies for over 45 years. After earning his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford, Gay served as professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He has written and co- authored (with Kathlyn) 35 books, including the bestsellers The Big Leap and Conscious Loving.
Gay has offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including OPRAH, CNN, CNBC, 48 HOURS and others. In addition to his work with The Hendricks Institute, Gay’s most recent book, co- authored with Kathlyn, is Conscious Loving Ever After. Gay and Kathlyn have also launched their own talk show on Amazon: Conscious Love Stories.
