#130 My awesome guest this week is Gay Hendricks, a New York Times bestselling author and his books include Conscious Loving and The Big Leap.
His book The Big Leap had a huge impact on my life, and it’s certainly a book I highly recommend. I was excited to bring Gay onto the show to talk about his latest book: Conscious Luck – Eight Secrets To Intentionally Change Your Fortune.
What if you could create your own luck? What if living a charmed life―being lucky in love, lucky in money, lucky in your chosen work―was within your control? The good news is that it’s all entirely possible…when you know how!.
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About Gay: Gay Hendricks 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 Katie) 35 books, including the bestseller Conscious Loving, used as a primary text in universities around the world. In 2003, Gay co-founded The Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes inspirational movies and conscious entertainment to subscribers in 70+ countries.
Gay has offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including OPRAH, CNN, CNBC, 48 HOURS and others.
►Audio Version:
Learn more Gay Hendricks:
www.hendricks.com
www.heartsintrueharmony.com
www.consciousluck.com
TRANSCRIPT
Guy: Hi, my name is Guy Lawrence. And thanks for tuning into my podcast today. If you’re enjoying these conversations and you want to check out more of this transformational work, be sure to come back to guylawrence.com.au and join me as we go further down the rabbit hole. Enjoy the show.
Guy: Gay! Welcome to the podcast.
Gay: Thank you very much, Guy. It’s a real pleasure to be with you.
Guy: I ask everyone on the show, if a complete stranger stopped you on the street and asked you what you did for a living or was doing, what would you say?
Gay: It’s funny because somebody just did that this morning when I was playing golf, what do you do there? You know, and so, what I say is I’m a psychologist by training and I saw my first client in 1968 and my last one yesterday. And so the whole time, 52 years, I’ve really enjoyed being with people in some form or the other in a therapeutic way.
Gay: So I used to work, when I first started with juvenile delinquents and then I ended up working with corporate presidents and CEOs, and along the way, my whole life I’ve always loved to write. So whatever I’m interested in, I write about it. And so when I was doing a lot of corporate consulting, I wrote my book, the corporate mystic, and then, also wrote the big leap based on having worked with lots and lots of different people and helping them take those big leaps. And so I, I would introduce myself and saying, I’m a psychologist, but I mostly spend my time writing books and giving talks and doing what I’m doing right now with you.
Guy: Wow. Wow. You must, um, with working with so many people over that space of time, you must really have an idea about human behavior. I’m guessing.
Gay: I do. And I’m very hopeful about it. You know, if you read the papers and look at the television and everything, you’d kind of be a pessimist, but I actually see the other kind of thing. I live on a steady diet of miracles. I have so many people that have done so many amazing things in my experience that I can’t help, but be a total optimist about how human beings can make it through any situation we’re in.
Guy: Yeah. I was just needed to be given the right tools and sort of mentor right in the right direction and then change can occur, you know, and I just want to mention as well on the podcast as well. Cause we were speaking briefly off air about your book, the big leap, because my mentor recommended that to me back in 2012, 2013, when I was involved in my own last company, 180 nutrition, it was called. And I remember, honestly, I’m not just saying this, but it was one of those books. That’s sat with me ever since. And it’s a book I still recommend to this day, to people to check it out. Because when you talked about the four different creative zones and I’m thinking, how the hell do I get back both place? Thoughts on the creative genius? You know, and it’s something that gets my wheels turning every single, every single time. You know, if I’m.
Gay: I think it speaks to something that’s
Gay: Deep within human beings, which is a deep desire to bring forth our genius. There’s a wonderful quotation that I have in one of my other books, the joy of genius, it’s from the gospel of Thomas. And it says, if you bring forth, what is within you, what is within you will save you. We all have these things inside us. I think that we need to bring forth. We need to bring forth our genius in the form of whatever it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a genius, mushroom soup or a genius herb garden, or a genius symphony, whatever it is that calls upon you to answer the question, what do I most love to do? What do I most love to create? Those kinds of things is what I call genius.
Guy: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, why do you think it elludes us so much in times of cause when you speak to a lot of people, they almost surrender into not following that, that aspect of themselves. You know, we settled for a lot less quite often. I know I was guilty of that for a long time.
Gay: Well, me too. And I think that’s fortunately many of us wake up from that. Well, here’s what I think it is, Guy. And that is that genius is scary in a way, because if you open up to your creativity, you never quite know where that’s going to take you. You know, how would I have known when I was 24 years old? Because when I was 24 years old, I’d grown up with a lot of medical problems. I was very obese as a child and it wasn’t until I wish, I, in fact, at one point I weighed 320 pounds. I weigh 180 pounds now, which I don’t know if you guys translate into stone or not, but I’d say that’s about maybe 13 stones, something like that. And so, but I used to weigh 320 pounds, whatever that is and stone 20 some stones. And so one day I had a moment of enlightenment and I’ll never, ever, ever forget it because it changed my entire life.
Gay: And that was that in a moment I had had an experience of seeing down through and feeling down through all those levels. Like underneath all that extra weight I carried, I could feel all of these emotions that I’d never tapped into things I was angry about and things I was scared about things I was sad about. And as I tapped into those and felt those, I also felt down at the center of everything. There’s this vast ocean of pure consciousness. This it’s like the open sky and we are a little stars within it, but we’re in the, in the embrace of this huge consciousness and that if we can open up and tap into that consciousness, that’s who we really are. And from there we can reinvent our lives. And so I tapped into that and when I was 24 and within a year, I lost more than a hundred pounds and I let go of having to wear glasses and I quit smoking and got out of a terrible relationship.
Gay: And now, you know, my wife and I have been together 40 now I’m in a great relationship and I know I’m in good health. And that kind of thing is, I don’t know what would have happened if I would have headed on that down that other path. And so I want to help as many people as possible, wake up out of whatever trance, you know, a lot of times we get into these trances of just settling for less in life and not asking ourselves the big question about what do I really want to contribute during my short time on earth, we get about 25,000 days here on the average. And I want to see make people make the absolute best of every one of those 25,000 days.
Guy: Ah, brilliant. I can feel your enthusiasm from your just we continue, you know, when, when you, um, tapped into something like that, a 24, like, do you think you had, you had to be at your lowest point at that time, the pain, or do you think looking back that you could have redirected it without having to go through that difficulty? I guess?
Gay: No, I think I had to bottom out really. I think, I don’t know, maybe I was stubborn or something, but I don’t think I would have gotten the message if I hadn’t driven my life into the wall and said, well, wait a minute. What am I doing here? And yeah, well, here’s the thing when that happened, when I was 24, I’m so grateful for it because my father died when he was 32 and he was grossly obese, smoked heavily was not in a good relationship at the time. And, you know, I just realized that could have been me and, uh, maybe I was even doing it faster than he was, but I’m very grateful for the opportunity to that human beings have to rebirth ourselves and take ourselves into an entirely different direction.
Guy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then which leads me on to it, cause I want to definitely talk about your new book, conscious luck and, and it feels like, you know, looking at the career and the success and everything you’ve paved out for yourself, you know, it’s no accident at the end of the day, but, but there’s, there’s still something behind it. And, and for me, what resonated when looking at your book is what you now compacted into this to help people guide somebody into actually creating a lifestyle they want. But at the end of the day, there’s a, there’s a level of serendipity and support that comes along with that. Um, would that be fair to say
Gay: Yes. I think part of conscious luck is being in the right place at the right time, just steering through life. Have you ever noticed that birds have, there’s an invisible way that birds follow across the sky and you can’t see it, but somehow they’re finding their way, you know, like I was reading and I think it was in a national geographic about these hummingbirds in Guatemala that swim all. I mean, that’s fly all the way across the ocean to Alabama every year. And they go over 500 miles of ocean without stopping to eat anything. There’s nothing to eat out there. And this is a bird that weighs about three or four ounces. How do they do it? You know? Cause it takes weeks for them to fly. And it’s, it’s mysterious to me how these things happen. Once people tap into this deeper force that I’m talking about, or another example I use is that there are these turtles in Argentina who swim 1500 miles out into the ocean to this little Island called Ascension Island.
Gay: That’s only a few miles long and somehow out of the vast ocean that every year they find their way to it lay their eggs and then swim back 1500 miles. How does that happen? You know, but I think that human beings need to understand that even though we can make sense of certain things in life, there are things that guide us that are way below the surface, you know? And so the best thing we can do, like we lay out these eight things you can do in conscious luck to make it more likely that luck is going to strike. We like to say that luck, isn’t like a lightning bolt or anything like that. It’s like the wind that’s always blowing and that you have the opportunity to arrange your sales or arrange your wings so that you fly along with the currents rather than fighting the currents all the time.
Guy: Yeah. Right. How do you, um, no, it makes total sense. How do you learn to trust that side of things? You know, because, because as human beings and I’ve just again, speak from my own experience, we love an element of control. We love an element of, of staying safe and, and, and I think that’s what can stunt that flow, you know? And, but at the end of the day, leaning into an unknown aspect and uninteresting that, that luck and things would come into to support you, to allow you to tap into your genius and allow you to move forward. How do, where do we start to really trust them?
Gay: Yes. Well, the starting place for any type of serious personal change is commitment. And like the first chapter we work on that particular subject, we work on a commitment to actually being luckier. How do you do that? Well, you know, here’s a ten second version of it right now. Just try on the idea that I commit to being luckier every day of my life. Just making that commitment. Is it something you could say yes to? Is it something you could believe in because everything starts with commitment and unless you have a commitment to something you’re kind of going to be wandering all over the place. So in the book we have a whole chapter laid out of specific ways to make a really solid commitment to being luckier every day of your life. And we are having so much fun since the came out, there’s a Facebook group.
Gay: Now that’s called the conscious luck global community. Highly recommend people, join it, read the book and join it because it’s a, a group of people that have already gathered together that are exchanging stories about the things that happen after they make that commitment to being luckier. And it’s really wonderful to wake up every day and read these stories of people that are doing these amazing things. So, but it starts with commitment. Um, ICOs morning, I was playing golf with a friend of mine, been a friend of mine for many years, and he has many years of sobriety and, uh, in alcoholics anonymous. And he’s told me that the thing that really got it started for him was that one moment, 20 years ago, when he stood up in front of the group and said, hello, my name’s John. And I’m an alcoholic just saying that to the group, you know, just opening up and admitting it, but then making a commitment to not taking a drink that day.
Gay: You know, that’s all they ask for is one day at a time. And so now he’s 19, 20 years later of those one day at a time. And so that’s the power of commitment. Another great example is I have another friend Scott, who was, uh, had a corporate position for many, many years as an executive. And like a lot of executives, he began to grow a spare tire around his middle. He gained about 30 extra pounds. And, uh, so when he retired, he decided he wasn’t going to carry those 30 extra pounds into his sixties and seventies. So he, he made this deal with himself that he would do one chin up a day for a week and then see where he got to. And so he went to the gym and he did one chin up a day for a week. And then the next week he committed to doing two chin-ups a day. And so we did that for a week, but by the end of the year, he’s doing 52 chin-ups from the beginning. He could barely do one. So gradually he changed his life and there went the 30 pounds. Now, you know, he’s in great shape. And so you don’t have to, you can take small steps. You don’t have to jump out the airplane, pull the rip cord. You can kind of take it easy, but it starts with this commitment that I’m talking about.
Guy: Yeah. I love it. It, um, there’s, there’s a shift once you decide you own it. There’s a, there’s a shift that comes in from that point forward.
Gay: My telephone just went off here. I don’t know why I haven’t turned off. It must be an Amber alert or something like that. We get these alerts in the United States, if there’s a child abduction or something like that. Yeah.
Guy: Okay. Um, so cause I want to speak about that shift, cause I know you talk about core shifts as well within the book and it is the commitment then of making, making that commitment. The first step to shifting core shifts. Cause we saw a betrayed by our own belief system, our patterns and our behaviors that kind of keep us stuck in the past when we want to move forward.
Gay: Yes. Well, if you remember from reading the big leap, my earlier book, I talk a lot about what I call the upper limit. Yes. And if you look at, and that’s been a valuable concept to a lot of people because in the book I show what’s underneath it and what’s underneath are a whole bunch of fears and fear keeps us blocked. Oftentimes we get scared about something and sometimes we don’t even know what it is. We’re scared about. Like in the big leap, I talk about three or four big fears that human beings carry around that keep them that keep us limited that keep, uh, keep us how old and outside of our genius zone. And one of those fears is the fear that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Gay: You’re something you’re afraid that there’s something fundamentally bad or something fundamentally flawed about you inside and that you don’t deserve love, or you don’t deserve the good things of life. And that’s just a limiting belief. That’s gotten there through some reason. It’s not any reality to it. There’s nobody on earth that either deserves love or doesn’t deserve love. It’s not something that you have to work for. You don’t need to earn love it’s there and we need to learn how to use it. And so one of the things that I really recommend that people do is get good at learning to love themselves for the things they discover about themselves. Particularly those old fears that we carry around. Another fear that people in our field have oftentimes is what I call a fear of out shining. You know, many people in our field are very compassionate, well meaning folks.
Gay: And that’s a good thing, but oftentimes people who are compassionate and well, meaning hold themselves back because they’re afraid of stealing love and attention that they think other people need worse. You know? So I want people to realize that you don’t have to hold yourself back. You don’t have to hold yourself back out of that fear of out shining. If you let yourself shine, it inspires other people to shine themselves. And so I really want everybody to take on that task themselves, a finding out what your inner genius is and learning how to express it. Same thing with conscious luck in a way genius and luck kind of go along with each other because what they both require is you to go down inside and change your fundamental belief about yourself and what’s possible. So the very moment you open up and say, you know, I could be a very lucky person. I don’t have to go around with these old limiting beliefs in my mind, I can put in some new beliefs. It’s just like, if you have a, a, a new computer, you don’t want to run it with the old software on it. You want the very latest software. And so a lot of times our emotional software was installed when we were before we could walk. And so we need to sometimes take it out and restart our hard drive.
Guy: Yeah, totally. How much does gratitude play into this as well?
Gay: I appreciate you ask that because in fact, the last chapter in the book is about gratitude and it goes, I think gratitude is the launch pad, as well as the payoff. You know, how better to launch anything in life then by starting with being grateful already for what you have. It’s interesting yesterday afternoon, my wife and I teach something in the summertime called creativity camp. And now it’s on a video conference. It’s on zoom. Uh, in the past, it’s been alive thing that people come here to our beautiful little town for five days to work with us. But I was just working on this yesterday with the creativity folks. And I was saying the same thing that creativity, the launch pad for creativity is gratitude. Being grateful for what there is already. And then adding to that by what you want to create. Now, a lot of people kind of go around trying to dig out of the past, instead of just saying the past is the past. Whatever happened there is over. There’s no control I have over it now, what do I want to create this moment? That’s a powerful place to be in.
Guy: Totally. I, I just to speak, I wanted to raise that as well, because until I started to really embrace what I had in my life, in that moment, things didn’t shift for me. And it was coming back to the, to the, to that really allowed me to, um, overcome myself in so many areas
Gay: As well. And we have so much to be grateful for so much to be appreciative of. For example, do you know how many species there are on planet earth off the top of your mind? I have no idea. I looked it up and there’s argument, but one good number is 8.9 million species. So in other words, there’s almost 9 million other things like us, some of them that have four legs and some of them that have six legs and some of them that have eight legs, but there’s 8.9 million of us. How lucky is it that you and I should land in the one, one species that can sit here and have a conversation about conscious life? That’s pretty darn lucky. You know, the Buddhist say that the chances of being born as a human being, the odds are the same as a turtle who only comes up and sticks his head up once every hundred years.
Gay: And on the year that it sticks its head up through a life preserver. That’s how many, the chances of being born as a human being. So that’s one thing we very seldom celebrate is just the fact that we are here in this nervous system. If you go back in evolution, 50 million years ago, we parted company with our whale, brothers and sisters. They decided to stay in the water and we decided to walk up, right? And here we are 50 million years later with these amazing skills that we have, but do we use them? You know, one thing that just drives me nuts is how people don’t use their full potential. It’s like we’re born being a Learjet. And then we use our Learjet to plate, top potatoes with we drive it up and down the field as a, as a potato flour. And so what I want us to do is learn how to get out of that potato field and ask ourselves the big questions in life.
Gay: Like what do I most want to create here during my time on earth? And what do I most want to accomplish both in my body and my soul? What are the most important things that I want to experience here? How can I live my life? Doing what I most love to do? That’s the challenge I want to offer people because to me, I started focusing almost 40 years ago now on doing things that I most love to do and saying no to everything else. And I’ve gradually created a life. So that by 20 years ago, I’m spending 90% of my time doing only stuff I love to do. And the other 10% I spend getting around or eating or sleeping or something like that. But most of my time for the last 20 years or so is been spent doing what I’m most loved to do.
Gay: So that’s like being on vacation all the time. If you’re doing what you most love to do a lot of years, Katie and I even forget to go on a vacation because we’re having such a good time doing this and teaching seminars and doing the other things that we love to do. I really want people to uncover their passions in life and conscious luck is a great way to do that because I always tell people it’s a lot better to be lucky than it is to be good. It’s hard to be good. You have to work at it consciously. I think you should be good too. I’ve been practicing my writing for 50 years now and I still love it. So I’m never going to get as good as I want to get at it. So I’m continuing to practice, but I’ll tell you there’s nothing better than creating a life where you wake up in the morning, knowing that whatever you’re going to do all day long, it’s stuff you love to do.
Gay: Totally. I remember reading the Seth Gordon quote, um, I, I about creating a life that you don’t want to escape from essentially. Uh, and it really resonates because I think so many people just think that’s out of reach and, and actually don’t make the conscious decision to start pursuing and following that and we settled for something less and it’d be a shame to live life. I think without, at least get into that place where you really feel that you’re, you’re connected to your heart and you’re living from this, this place of gratitude daily. And what starts to come into your life is then a, because you’re already
Guy: Cultivating those, those feelings of gratitude and joy and love from the inside out. And you’re not waiting for that external event to influence that.
Gay: Well, I’m really glad you’ve discovered that at a relatively young age, you know, cause a lot of people don’t wake up to that until they’re in their sixties or seventies. I’ve had people in my office here 75 years old and it just kind of woke up to what you were just talking about. So blessings upon us, if you can wake up a day earlier than that, you know? And so, uh, I really think we need to celebrate our expansion of consciousness constantly in life.
Guy: Yeah, totally. What would you say to like when you pick up a book in conscious luck, like, cause there would have been a part of me say 10 years ago would go, uh, you know, I’d be a bit skeptical if you were Whoa. Yeah, exactly. A hundred percent, you know, uh, now, you know, I was singing from the rooftops, but I always remind myself for the old self as well. So what would you say to somebody that would be listening to that would be like, Hmm, I’m not so sure.
Gay: Yeah. Well I’ll tell you, I come from exactly the same place and you know, I was an English major in college. I wanted to write the great American novel and psychology when we will stop. You know, I didn’t go into that at all. But then I had a personal experience that woke me up. Now I say the longest journey a human being ever makes is the 12 inch journey from here down to here from their head to their heart. I had to make that journey. Everybody at some point has to make that journey. The question is, do you make it willingly or do you put the brakes on all the wire? A lot of us use our minds to defend ourselves against our feelings instead of using our minds to help embrace all of our feelings and the feelings of others. So I would say to that person, I wish somebody had said to me, go ahead and love your skeptic, but don’t take it too seriously. Don’t run your life on it because a life based on skepticism is empty of the heart.
Guy: Yeah. Yeah. Do you think more people are reconnecting to that heart? Do you think like it’s becoming more prominent now in society?
Gay: Well, I think two things guys. I think that I I’d say yes, but I would also say this is a time that it looks like to me that some people are getting better, very fast and some people are getting worse very fast. It’s almost like a, a divergence of, you know, a lot of people are waking up at an incredible rate and doing things that just blow my mind with a hopeful possibility. And then I see a lot of people heading toward the cliff, you know, just blindly running towards the cliff. And so that’s heartbreaking in a way, but I want to put my attention on the folks that are waking up and realizing who they are and what they want to here. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Um, I got one other question for you before I move on with, with everything else, but um, and I always ask everyone, what do you, might’ve already answered this though, but what’s been a low point for you that’s later become a blessing.
Gay: Yes. Well, one of my students the other day made a, uh, a little collage of a picture of me when I was in the fifth grade. Oh wow. Oh my God. So how do you get from there to here in a very short lifetime? Well, I’m, I’m very grateful to him because I learned things through being a fat boy and I learned things through being humiliated or bullied or taunted. I felt I was able to feel what it feels like inside to be in pain and to have things that aren’t going our way. And I think that that later on gave me compassion and empathy that I can be with somebody, you know, I’ve seen now 20,000 people in the office here or in our seminars. And I can’t think of a single one of them that I was not able to connect to, you know, cause I’ve been there myself.
Gay: I felt that kind of deep sadness, that deep fear, that deep anger and myself. And so I feel like I can connect with other people in that area because before, when I was closed off to those areas of myself, I didn’t really have any close relationships in my life. Even though I had girlfriends or my first wife when I was 23 for a few years, we were married. Well, those kinds of relationships early on like that, I don’t feel like I was really there. You know, I was another person and I feel sad about it now that I went through entire relationships where I wasn’t really the person I am now, but I didn’t really discover who I was until a little bit later. And so for me, in a way, it doesn’t matter, the moment you wake up, it’s what you do after you wake up, you know, do you make some changes in your life and get your life back on track again?
Gay: Or do you just say, uh, you know, do you say no to the possibilities and, and go back to sleep again? Well, I’m here to say that waking up is where the big fun is. You know, cause I’ve, since that moment when I was 24, I’ve had 50 years or so of just amazing, good times and success because I dedicated myself to bringing forth who I really am. And that led me into making a connection with Katie 40 years ago. Because if you don’t love yourself, you’re going to bring people into your life who don’t love themselves. But the moment you open up and start loving and caring for yourself here comes a person into your life who loves themselves too. And so two people together and then generate love rather than friction. Yeah.
Guy: Beautiful. I was going to say, do you think it’s, um, the way we being not, not so much from the, from the mind, but the way we being moment to moment, that’s who we end up attracting and the life almost mirror says mirror says back,
Gay: Oh, that’s exactly the way it works. That we are always getting, what’s being mirrored back to us. I tell the story. I can’t remember if it’s an unconscious lock or the big, I think it’s an unconscious look about going through the Dallas airport, this huge airport. And I was, my plane had arrived an hour late. So I was running madly through the airport and it’s about a mile from end to end. And I was running along, pulling my little wheelies and all of a sudden I realized, man, I am I’m in a hurry. I’m out of sorts. And I just kind of let that go and eased up. And it said on the, uh, on the sign that the plane was already boarded. And so I just took it easy and I walked down there and I got down to the kiosk and there was a guy throwing a temper tantrum with the poor clerk and he was yelling, you can’t treat me like this.
Gay: I’ve got a ticket on that airplane and I’m going to get on it. And she was saying, I’m sorry, sir, but we called your name. Now the Gates closed the plaintiff’s fool. And it’s about to take off. There’s nothing I could do. Would you like to book another flight? And so he’s pounding on the thing and he goes up to goes up the Concourse saying, I’m going to Sue you people, you know, you know, just having a nasty meltdown in the airport. So I stepped up to the counter and I said something compassionate to the clerk, something like rough day. Huh. And she said, ah, you know, you wouldn’t believe it. And I said, well, I heard what you said. Uh, but I also would love to get on the plane. But, uh, it sounds like it’s not happening. And she said, yeah, but then all of a sudden here comes another flight attendant running up and whispers in her ear and they’ve miscounted and there’s a seat in first class.
Gay: And so I saw the clerk look up the Concourse at where that guy was walking upstairs. And then she looked at me and said, would you like to get on? You know? And I said, yes. And so one minute it’s impossible. Then the next minute I’m sitting in first class and nothing happened there, but just a shift of attitude, you know, coming up and saying, Oh, here I am. How can we make the most of this moment instead of pounding on the table? Well, that’s a metaphor for life because what happens is we get ourselves all worked up about things. And that puts us out of that centered frame of mind, that being in the presence in a graceful way, that where all the stuff happens and then our minds run away with us. And then we reflect back these kinds of things that happen that are just chaotic in our lives because of the chaos in our minds. And so I think that every moment you spent breathing, meditating, doing yoga, things like that to really center yourself paid off enormously. Because if you, um, if you know how to steer your own boat, you can, you know, you can really get along places in life.
Guy: Yeah, totally. The one thing that Sean for me then is that he wasn’t attached to the outcome either,
Gay: Right? Yeah. That’s important because all the magic happens in the present, but if you’re way out in the future with your mind, or way back in the past, trying to relive the past, you can’t be there in the moment where the good stuff happens.
Guy: Yeah. Beautiful. Um, all right. I got a couple of questions for you before we wrap it up. And um, the first question is what does your morning routine look like?
Gay: Well, I’ll tell you, I usually wake up around four 30. I go to sleep usually around 10 or 10 30 and I wake up around four 30 and I, and my wife likes to sleep in. She usually likes to sleep until seven 30 or eight o’clock. And so, um, I get up and I get all of my writing done in the morning. I’ve written, I believe now, 46 books. And I think just about every one written between the hours of five and eight in the morning. That’s my creative.
Guy: That’s incredible. That’s incredible. Yeah.
Gay: Before I write every morning, I usually have a cup of coffee and then I’ll stretch like this morning, I went out front of my house and a beautiful morning and was just getting light and I did some stretches out there and breathing and that kind of thing. And then I come in and I meditate. I usually sit in this chair back here. I’ll just show you kind of a, uh, easy chair. And I sit there and meditate. And there was a cat sleeping on that chair until just a few minutes ago. Uh, so we have two cats. We don’t have kids at home anymore or anything. So it’s just us in the cats. And so I usually sit there and meditate for about 20 or 30 minutes. Then I write for the next two or three hours. And that’s my morning routine this morning after I finished Katie and I, once Katie gets up, I make her a cup of coffee and we sit around and talk and then she gets into her day. And then I went off to play golf today. And so at 10 o’clock this morning, I teed off over at my golf club, which is about Oh, a five minute drive from here. And, uh, that’s what I did the rest of the day to day. That’s amazing
Guy: With UT. And so many people you must say here, this, I don’t have time. Like, what would you say to someone that always says they never got enough time?
Gay: Oh, go back and read the chapter on Einstein time and the big leap everybody, because that’s one of the biggest things you can do for yourself is to get out of your victim with time. We can make up as much time as we need to do the things we really want to do in life. I just promise you that if you really want to do something, if something is passionately important to you, you will create the time to do it. We create the amount of time we need to do various States. Here’s where we get into trouble. Though. People do a whole bunch of things that they don’t want to do, or don’t like to do. And there’s never enough time to do all the things you don’t really want to do anyway. Just like there’s never enough money to buy all the things you don’t really need anyway.
Gay: And so we need to get in our lives a, a life purpose. That’s about creating what we most want to create in our short time here on earth. And so I think that, um, there’s never any excuse for not having enough time, because we’re where time came from. There’s no such thing called time out there that you can go visit. You know, it doesn’t work that way. And so we make up the amount of time we need to do the things we really want to do. So my suggestion is forget about time, but your attention on what you want to accomplish in yourself and out in the world and keep your attention there. And you always have plenty of time to do what you most want to do. A beautiful answer. You’re certainly making the most of your time. It’s brilliant. I love it. Um, if you could have dinner with anyone from any timeframe, anywhere in the world, one, two, three people who do you think it would be and why?
Gay: Well, I have over here on my wall, I have an autograph. One of my treasures, my wife gave me one year for our anniversary, a autograph picture of Albert Einstein. So I would definitely have Albert Einstein. I would probably, uh, either Heraclitus or Epic. T-TESS two of my favorite philosophers Heraclitus and Epictetus Epictetus wrote a little book 2000 years ago called the end Caribbean. And the first line of it says the secret of happiness is knowing that there are some things you can control and some things you cannot control sounds familiar. And you know, it’s the heart of the serenity prayer and those kinds of things. So I’d probably have Einstein Epic. T-TESS maybe somebody from the present, uh, maybe Barack Obama, huh? That’d be a good dinner party. Wouldn’t it be a very good dinner party. Yeah. Yeah. Let me know when you’re having it. Absolutely. Last question. What’s one thing about yourself. Most people wouldn’t know. Uh, let me show you ha you know, I saw that earlier. I’m glad you brought it up. Wow. Most people don’t know that I love to play different musical instruments and this year I’m learning to play trombone
Gay: Office. Um, if you look around my office, you’ll see lots of musical instruments. I have adult summer over there and, uh, Shaku, hachi flute over there and wow bass over here and a guitar and bass ukulele. So, uh, I love to just plink around on different musical instruments. And I probably play about 40 different musical instruments that I can pick up and play a little bit off. And, uh, I played drums too. I, uh, I could probably play drums in a rock and roll band. Although the last time I was actually on stage in a rock and roll band playing drums was 1968. So it’s been a while, but I could probably still do that. Fine.
Guy: Fantastic. I love music. You’ve inspired me to pick up my guitar again. It’s been sitting next to, in the living room there for, I don’t know how long
Gay: So that’s having your guitar around is a good way to really get your mind organized, you know, just fiddling around with a guitar or any musical instrument, because it puts you in a different side of your brain than just figuring out things logically also, um, Kenny Loggins is a good friend of ours used to be a neighbor of ours before we moved over here to Ohio. And we were sitting around one afternoon and we both agreed that there’s certain chords. You know, like if you pick up a guitar, I don’t know what a couple of your favorite chords is, but I pick up a guitar. The first thing I want to do is hit a G chord. There’s something so satisfying about a G chord. It just hits me. Right. You know, maybe yours is a C or an effort, a E or something like that. I also look like a good I-Corps too. I like blue. So I like that kind of bluesy sound, but there’s something about music that has that resonance to it that takes you out of your intellectual mind for a little while. And I find it really valuable.
Guy: Yeah. So Susan, yeah. That’s amazing. Good. Um, last question. And I ask everyone on the show with everything that we’ve covered today, what would you like to leave the listeners to ponder on,
Gay: Leave you with the one empowering idea that comes from conscious luck? The very first big idea is that you can actually take charge of making yourself luckier and in the book, we show you eight different ways to do it. But even if you only did one of them, they all work really great. When I will work for somebody when I’m will appeal to another person. But in there is the ability to lift your life up and begin to follow those winds that are always blowing. They’re always blowing. And once you learn to ride them, who knows where you can go. Yeah.
Guy: Yeah. Perfect. Amazing. And for anyone listening to this, if they want to grab a copy of a book or a little more about you and your work, where’s the best place to send them?
Gay: The best place to do is to go to consciousluck.com. If you go to consciousluck.com and get the book there, you can buy it through Amazon and all those places right there on conscious luck.com. But the nice thing there is that you can put your receipt in and get these free meditations audio meditations that go along with the book. And they’re very useful in helping you really get yourself on track with conscious luck.
Guy: Beautiful, beautiful. Well, they’ll be linked in the show notes for anyone listening to this composed, pause the audio and just scroll down on the, on the links will be in there anyway. And okay. I just want to thank you for coming on the show today, sharing your enthusiasm is very contagious and, uh, and everything that you’ve done, you’ve certainly had an impact on my life over the years, and I greatly appreciate it. So thank you.
Gay: Thank you, blessings to you.
Guy: Thank you.