The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity

By Gay Hendricks, PH.D.

Too often we live lives that we find unfulfilling, fail to reach our own potential, and neglect to practice creativity in our daily routines. Gay Hendricks's The Genius Zone offers a way to change that by tapping into your own innate creativity.

Dr. Gay Hendricks broke new ground with his bestselling classic, The Big Leap, which has become an essential resource for coaches, entrepreneurs, executives, and health practitioners around the world. Originally published as The Joy of Genius, The Genius Zone has been updated and expanded throughout, making it the essential next step beyond The Big Leap.

In The Genius Zone, Hendricks introduces his brilliant exercise, the Genius Move, a simple, life-altering practice that allows readers to end negative thinking and thrive authentically. By using the Genius Move, readers will learn to spend more of their lives in their zone of genius—where creativity flows freely and they are actively pursuing the things that offer them fulfillment and satisfaction. Filled with hands-on exercises and personal stories from the author, The Genius Zone is an essential guide to creative fulfillment. If you are committed to bringing forth your innate genius and making your largest possible creative contribution, The Genius Zone will become a trusted companion for the journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250622617

Gay Hendricks, PH.D.

GAY HENDRICKS, PhD, has served for more than forty years as one of the major contributors to the fields of relationship transformation and body-mind therapies. He is a New York Times bestselling author and his books include Conscious Loving and The Big Leap.

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The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity by Gay Hendricks

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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For Katie—mate, muse, and best friend

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