The Wize Way

Episode 175: Why Most Accountants Never Reach Their Genius Zone (and How You Can) with Gay Hendricks

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 2 • Episode 175

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Most firm owners try to “fix the business” without ever fixing the real ceiling that’s holding them back. The result? Burnout, endless busyness, and a business that feels more like a cage than freedom.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Gay Hendricks, best-selling author of The Big Leap, shares powerful insights on:

✅ The Upper Limit Problem that keeps even successful people stuck
✅ How stored emotions and limiting beliefs sabotage growth
✅ What life looks like inside your Genius Zone (and why most never get there)
✅ The simple daily commitment that can unlock extraordinary results

If you’re ready to stop hitting invisible ceilings and start operating in your zone of genius, this conversation is a must-listen.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 4 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:

1. Download our famous Wize Freedom Strategy Map for FREE - Find out the 96 projects every firm owner must implement to build a $5M+ firm that can run without them - Download here

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3. Book a 1:1 Wize Discovery Session – Spend 30mins with our Wize CEO, Jamie Johns, a $7M firm owner who is ready to give you his entire business plan to build a firm that can run without you – Find out more here

4. Work with Jamie and our mentors for 8 weeks - Build a custom business plan for your firm - Apply here

SPEAKER_03:

Welcome to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit, and freedom and a business that can run without them. I'm Brent Ward, your host, and each week we deep dive into the real stories, proven strategies, and battle-tested tools from successful firm owners just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and systemised their way to freedom so you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode. Gay, welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. I'm uh happy to be with you. So, for everyone listening, it's Brent Ward here from The Wise Way, uh, and I'm very honored to have Gay with me here today. Uh, he's a bit of an outsider to our normal uh lineup of uh conversations on the Wise Way. And for your context, Gay, Wise is uh is a bit of a passion project to start with. So I, along with my two wonderful business partners, uh Ed and Jamie, who are in that poster behind me uh on the wall there, um we went on this mission seven years ago to help public practice accounting firm owners uh originally in Australia on a journey of kind of getting themselves out of the prison that they'd built for themselves that they called their business and helping them take steps towards being able to stabilize that business and then just step away from it and have more choices in life, ultimately achieving whatever their version of freedom was. And uh, you know, three Aussie blokes, I was here in Ireland and the the two other guys in Australia, and we never thought you know, we were happy if we got a couple of firms, you know, listening into us and and uh implementing what we suggested. But before we knew it, we had this incredible community in over 40 countries listening in and then starting to tell us that we were actually helping them make dramatic change in their business, which we're incredibly grateful for. Um so now, seven years on, uh, we've got this thriving community of uh accounting and bookkeeping firm owners. We've got an amazing team across the world. And we're really passionate about helping our community uh achieve their goals. And for the conversation today, and um I was listening to something that you said last night where your journey started as a healer, healing yourself. My introduction to you started uh from that journey myself of healing myself, and it really resonated with with me and had a massive impact. Um but I I just see so much of what you talk about in so many of your books really having an impact on our audience. And I'd love for you to touch on a few of those things today if you're okay too. Totally okay with that. Brilliant. So before we get stuck into some of the the tactical stuff, if you like, I wanted to go a little bit high level. And for for the audience, those who may not have had the pleasure of coming across uh one of your 60-something books, um, I wanted to ask you. We're very passionate about mentoring um and having a mentor in your life. And I just wanted to ask you, looking back over your life, was there a mentor or a significant guide in your life that had a such a profound impact or or a specific impact that has stayed with you and has seen how you've lived out your life?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I have. I've been blessed to have several folks like that, but the one that comes to mind immediately is um Dwight Webb, who was a professor of mine in 1968, 69, and 70 when I was getting my master's degree at the University of New Hampshire in counseling. And Dwight Webb, the late Dwight Webb now, he passed on a few years ago and lived a rich life until 88 years of age. And um Dwight Webb, he was one of my counseling professors, and he did several things for me that are just I wouldn't be here without him. Uh, because one thing he did is he spotted that I was a creative writer, and but that I was kind of bored writing normal theses and papers and that kind of thing, because I could do it in my sleep. And he said, Well, why don't you write a creative master's degree thesis? And I said, Well, what do you mean? And he said, Well, you like to write poetry, which I did. And he said, Why don't you write a number of poems about the counseling process and have that be your master's thesis? That just opened up a huge possibility for me. And then some magic happened. I turned in, I believe it was 37 something like that, poems about the counseling process. And Dwight picked out three of them, and he said, you've got to send these in to Leo Goldman at the counseling journal, the journal, uh the big counseling journal at the time. And that had not occurred to me, the idea of publishing them. And so I sent them in to Leo Goldman, and he published them in the journal. You know, it was the first poetry they'd ever published, and but it was uh a significant breakthrough because like at the next um annual conference, I did a seminar on the poetry of counseling, and I had something like 300 people wedged into this big ballroom. And so they'd started publishing more and more creative things in the journal. And so I feel happy about uh kind of setting a trend there. Uh so Dwight was responsible for that, but here's the real magic. Two professors at Stanford in the uh PhD program there saw those um poems and that I was at the University of New Hampshire. And then Dwight Webb ended up recommending me to go to Stanford for my PhD. And that was a huge breakthrough because they only took something like three students a year. And to be one of those, it was just like, you know, uh having the Mount Olympus of educational opportunity there and the program at Stanford was just incredible. So I was there for three years, and but Dwight Webb, you know, every step along the way, he was there. And then later on, I got to help him get one of his books published, and that was so satisfying to be able to have the circle come around.

SPEAKER_03:

That's incredible. Dwight was one of the people who I who tapped into that creativity or allowed you to express that, which now we're sitting here with 61 books published.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So far, I've got nine in the pipeline.

SPEAKER_03:

Wow. Um, so touching on that, gay, 61 books, um, 500 TV shows, like it's an extraordinary creative outlet. Um, you said you got nine books in the the pipeline. What what at this stage, what really stokes your fire about having these sorts of conversations and the books, the nine books that you've still got left to go?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I love taking advantage of any new technology or new channel or outlet or platform to get our ideas out into the world because um, you know, like I come from a time when there was no self-help books. I started out before there were self-help books. And so there were, you know, to see that channel develop and to contribute a number of self-help books and then to see people like me getting on television, you know, whoever heard of a psychologist or me and Katie, a couple uh getting on a show like Oprah, you know, the next day after Tom Cruise had been on it. That's a whole different thing. Also at the University of Colorado, where I taught for 21 years from 1974 to 1995 in the counseling psychology department there, they asked, they said, we're gonna start a TV thing for people who can who aren't around the campus but want to take a course, you know, 300 miles away across the Rocky Mountains. And, you know, and would any of you guys be interested? Boying up with my hand, you know, because here's an opportunity to talk to people in a hundred different communities on television. And so I I taught that first course. I had like maybe 40 or 50 live people in the room, uh, but it was really great to be able to craft things so that people at home could be able to do what the people in the room were doing. So it always turns me on to take advantage of getting the ideas out in a new format. Um, you know, same thing with downloads and videos and um things like that. And um, but um that that's always turned me on. And also, I remember being at the University of Colorado, and I was in a department where there was a bunch of us on a long haul. Um, there may be 10, 20 different professors, and I was the first person to get email. And I remember a couple of the other professors coming in and looking over my shoulder while I was doing email because I told them, this is going to change the world, guys. This is fantastic, you know, this is a great. And um uh it takes all the drudgery out of you know, licking an envelope and stuffing, and um, especially for research, because you can trade data back and forth. In those days it was very clunky to do it, but now it's very easy. But um anyway, getting back to my point, I remember two professors looking over my shoulders and at me doing it, and both of them saying, I don't think that'd be very useful to me, you know, and walking out, you know, there's Hendrix doing this crazy new thing again. And so anyway, that's the I think that's one of the things that I I love to do podcasts and things for because they're kind of a new way I can, and thanks to uh technology, I can sit here in my magnificent uh home and with my cat on my lap, not at the moment, but uh um and actually at this very moment Katie is out in our studio doing another podcast with someone.

SPEAKER_03:

It is incredible and it still blows my mind. You know, I can talk to my business partner 18,000 kilometers away instantly on this tiny little device. Like I just it still doesn't comprehend it. But um without going too far down the rabbit hole on that conversation uh or that topic, you've you've seen some pretty big technical technological revolutions uh in your time. What's your uh what's your look outlook on the current massive uh phase we're in with the AI revolution, evolution?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, my response to it has been to include it in our work because for the past no four or five months, I've had a team led by Steam Steve Ray um from um MIT. He lives in Chicago now, but he's an MIT guy, and um he's been in charge of developing our AI tool called the Coaches Portal. Right. And then just over the past month, we've been working on developing the voice aspect of it where you know let's say you're walking along in Ireland and um and you all of a sudden want to know what gay and Katie think about oh what? Um telling the truth in relationships, let's say, because you're in a squabble with your girlfriend. You can say, hey, gay Katie, what's your big take on whether it's a good idea to tell the truth? And how do I tell the truth in a way that's gentle to my partner? Broom, then you get us talking to you in uh your ears while you're walking along there in Ireland. And so that that's what we're doing with AI, is we fed our um our proprietary training materials. We have a 900-page training manual, and uh gradually uh when people get it, you know, they can barely carry it away. But now we fed it into the AI portal, and so anybody can with that subscribes to our AI portal can pull out anything they want to do from our tools and techniques. And um, there's 200 videos in there, so if you want to have us explain something to you on video, you can just say, show me a video of you talking about how to take responsibility or how to tell the truth or how to appreciate someone or whatever the or how to breathe. Uh, we we're big on uh somatic processes here. We we include the whole being in our work uh because so many things that come up in relationship are old things that are stored down in the body somewhere up in your shoulders or down in your chest or in your belly. Um and so unless you're willing to become a kind of a master of your whole being, it's hard to have a good relationship because if there's any part of unloved part of yourself, you can bet it's going to come out in a close relationship.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. And on that topic, uh it would be remiss not to mention your wonderful partner who you've shared this journey with, Katie. Uh, and I think from what I saw, you said October is your anniversary month and you celebrate the whole of October. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Well, thank you for picking that up. First of all, um, you must have done some research on this. Yeah. So, yes, we got married three times in the month of October in 1981. So this um, I believe is our official 44th. Uh, we met we met in January 1980. So we've been together 45 plus years. But anyway, why we got married three times in the month of October is that the first one was an official one, you know, with a judge and all of that. And then a second one was with our cells privately up on a mountaintop. And that's where we made our vows, the ones that are in conscious loving in our other books. Uh, that's where we made those original uh vows, like promising to do our best to take responsibility when things came up rather than blaming and speaking honestly rather than defending and all of the things that are valuable to a close relationship. So we spoke those to ourselves up on a mountaintop, and that was quite a magical moment because Incredible. Yeah, it was it was beautiful there in Colorado. It was this glorious day. But when we did that, Katie looked up into the sky and said, Oh, look, and there was a hawk circling around above us. And we said, Oh my goodness, a blessing, you know, and so we and had we spoke our vows, and then we looked up again, and there were two hawks circling up there, and so we didn't miss the cosmic significance of that. Um, but then we got married in a sensational climactic way on Halloween in the month of October in California with our California friends. And in that, we feel so blessed because it was a wonderful event, but in that one of the people, Mary Graham, found a poem that she read to us by the Union um Sheila Moon, called The Fool and His Bride. And it is a poem that sounds like it was written for me and Katie. We were just, everybody was just stunned by it. And at the time, Sheila Moon, I couldn't thank her in person for it because um she had um gone into Alzheimer's, bless her heart, and uh then she has since passed away. Um, but I feel like that poem, which we put in Conscious Loving, in our book Conscious Loving, right at the f uh first part of it, was such a blessing to our relationship that we we still get that out in the month of October. And uh so anyway, we stopped trying to remember was that the ninth when we did the judge thing, or the tenth when we went up on the mountaintop. So we just celebrate the whole month and then we come to a big climax on Halloween.

SPEAKER_03:

I love it. I love it. It's a great tradition. Um with your journey with Katie and everything that you've achieved together and done together and worked through together. I I thought when I was looking at uh the questions, I I I really wanted to dive in with you. Quite a few of them are tactical with the the business owners within our community, which I think is important. But there was one that just stood out for me that I feel transcends both working with business partners and also into our personal lives working and growing with our partners. And I just wanted to get your insights on looking at over years, we grow as individuals, we change as individuals. Um and where we may have been aligned in the past on things and our principles and our values, they may change over time as well. Um how do we how do we keep ensuring that we come back together on that journey? Um, because there's a certain fear, certainly, with the business owners that we work with that if they actually achieve the success that they they really feel they want to, they may grow apart from their significant other or their partner. So any any thoughts on what you'd say to someone asking that question?

SPEAKER_00:

Very much so. And I've been blessed with that question many hundreds of times in various ways. Well, I want to interject um a couple of things into our conversation. One is something that we discovered in ourselves and in relationships and out there in the business world too. We call it here the upper limit problem. And the upper limit problem is the tendency to mess up or sabotage yourself when things have started to go even better. And so we kept noticing this, especially in our corporate consulting, because a classic example of the upper limit problem would be uh we had a client who uh was a middle-level engineering manager at a firm and had developed a big product that they finally released and it was making money hand over fist. And one Friday afternoon, the CEO came by my VP's office and said, Congratulations, at a boy, we love you, and here's a bonus check for$150,000. At the time, the engineer that we were working with was maybe making$180 to$120,000, something like that. So$150,000 in his hand was enough to trip a switch. Now I've worked with billionaires since then that it takes a lot more than that to trip their switch. There's always a switch and it always gets tripped. What happened was he felt like a, you know, the king of the world. And the boss said, take the rest of the afternoon, go home and tell your wife and family the good news. You know, it was Friday afternoon. And so he gets in his car at two o'clock in the afternoon, drives to his beautiful home, parks, goes in, and proceeds to have the biggest argument with his wife that ultimately involved the kids that he'd ever had in 12 years of marriage. How can that be? Well, that's I kept seeing things like that over and over. And it sometimes it would be the other way around. Like uh another, I keep picking on high-tech entrepreneurs, but that's who I end up seeing a lot of times. Okay, but it's in other businesses too. But it's just that over the last 20 years, I was around when Silicon Valley got started at Stanford. I was still a grad student there and then became a research psychologist at Stanford. So I got to work. Yeah, it was very close to home. And so I have a kind of a uh a love in my heart for high-tech folks that oftentimes, you know, can get to be a billionaire while still carrying around the emotional maturity of a 19-year-old, which is when they started to get rich by dropping out of Harvard, let's say, you know, and uh so a lot of times having a lot of money when you're young is not exactly a friendly thing to your nervous system. But so sometimes, like one of my high-tech guys uh had a lavish wedding, you know, 150 guests at a faraway location and all of that, and then came back to work, and his entire executive team blew up at him. So he'd had this gigantic high. Then he came back into the quote real world and bloom, had this big blow up. Now, what accounts for that kind of thing? I started looking into this 50 years ago because I kept seeing it happen. I kept seeing it happen in my own life. I was fat at the time, and I would go on a diet, and things would go great for about three days, and then I would get an overpowering desire for something I didn't even think about much before my diet. You know, I'd suddenly get peanut butter lust or something, you know, and I'd just have to have it, and I'd blow my diet. So that's the upper limit problem in action. So here's what's underneath the upper limit problem. And why this is so important is it's everywhere. It's not just in business, it's at home, and it's in our health. The upper limit problem is triggered by old limiting beliefs that we store way down in the basement of our minds and bodies. And they're literally in our bodies as well as in our minds. And so you have to take it on kind of as a whole person project rather than just a it's not like software where you can install a new program in and everything runs differently then. It doesn't work quite that way because it's whole body software that has to be installed, not just in your mental apparatus. And so, for example, we have three feeling zones of our body that carry a lot of stored feeling. Like one is the shoulders and back of the neck and a lot of places that flare up when we get angry. If you, you know, the hackals on a cat. Yeah, yeah. And but they don't teach that in school. I had to become a graduate student before anybody ever told me that, you know. Like, you know, if a person's talking to you and they're touching the back of their neck a lot and everything, take a wild guess that they're angry about something. Or if they're touching their chest a lot, take a wild guess that they're sad or hurt about something. Bellies is a fear zone. So I want to teach people that in the first grade, you know, because there's no reason why you shouldn't. And so underlying the upper limit problem, what's underneath it, what's that makes it keep happening, is old upper limit beliefs that are stored down there. Like I don't deserve the good things of life for whatever reason. I'm the wrong color, I'm the wrong weight, I'm the wrong height, I'm the wrong whatever. I don't have enough smarts, I've got too much smarts, whatever it is, I don't deserve the good things of life because of what happened to me in the past. Or be so that's a limiting belief because it's not true. That you could easily have the past you have and make a commitment to enjoying the good things of life now. And the second thing that's underneath all upper limit problems is not only negative beliefs, but also old feelings that we haven't owned in ourselves. Like a lot of people just haven't ever owned their anger and they haven't ever owned their grief. My mom was a heavy smoker. And I don't think she ever let herself feel the grief of her husband dying. And unfortunately, he died while she was pregnant with me. So my whole upbringing, I think she was just going further and further into addictions to keep from owning that grief feeling it, you know, because she had such a a stricture on not letting anybody underneath her strength, you know, and so she had to smoke it away instead. And so addictions run rampant in a lot of people's lives, including my own family. And I feel uh very blessed to uh escape that in myself, although I had my overweight problems earlier in my life. So fear is big underneath our upper limit beliefs. So pay attention to fear, because anytime you're hurt in your heart or angry, you're also feeling scared about something. But it's a feeling that you can't cry out fear, or you can't pound pillows to get you rid of a fear. You have to uh embody it and put it to a good use. And the use I want to put it to is fueling your uh genius in you. Um you know, energy can't be destroyed or um created, it's there. The energy of our feelings is always there, and we have to turn that into something productive. There's no value to keep on being angry for 30 years about something that happened 30 years ago. You can acknowledge it, but you don't want to carry it around in the back of your neck, you know. But we we get people all the time here who are having daily headaches because they're trying to carry around their emotions stored in the back of their head. Usually anger is a tough one for that area and low back pain also. A lot of people um stuff low back, I mean, stuff anger in the low back area of their life. Uh yeah, in fact, if I could give a book recommendation, John Sarno, M-D-S-A-R-N-O-M-D, fabulous study of low back pain. He was the Rusk Rehab low back guy in New York for 40 years and just a genius of curing low back pain. And he treated most of it as stored anger and got people comfortable with their anger. And so a lot of his famous clients, like Howard Stern or Rosie O'Donnell, give him a lot of credit for you know having them transform their rage into something that was useful to them in their life.

SPEAKER_03:

Rosie O'Donnell's our neighbor here now, and there's still a good bit of rage going on with uh certain friends in the States.

SPEAKER_00:

We haven't seen what the new skinny Rosie is up to. We we know what the chubby Rosie is up to, but uh bless her heart, she's uh making changes in her life, and um in her heart, I have some of the same sympathies that she has. And uh so um I wouldn't I would be the last to condemn anything that Rosie does.

SPEAKER_03:

No, she's uh she's brought some life to the community here, that's for sure.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay. Okay, when we have um you know ordinary good people, you because everything you've just spoken about there, it's it it's not a certain subsection of the human population, I'm assuming it's everyone. So we're all in that camp. We have great ordinary, hardworking business owners knock on our door, and they normally knock on our door really frustrated. They're they're burnt out, they're stressed out, they're they're anxious. The end of their tether with this thing that they've created and the impact that it's had on their life. And often the first thing they want to do is fix the business. You know, it's all about fixing the business. It's all about better marketing and better team and better, better this and that. And having now been in the space for 15 plus years and you come across the work from the likes of yourself, it's like we can we can fix the business. We can work on the business as much as we like, but for some reason, we always bend up back in this position of I still don't feel free. I still feel stuck, still don't have time. So what what do you say to that person knocking on our door at Wise, that that accounting firm owner?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, first of all, success in business is only partly about the business stuff. A lot of it has to do with your underlying intentions and any old programming that's getting in the way of you living out your full expression. The way we put it here is that everybody has four zones that they're operating in. And one of those is the zone of incompetence, where you're doing things that you're not very good at and you don't like. We say as quickly as possible, get rid of those, delegate those, find some way out of that. The second zone is the zone of competence, where you're doing things that you're good at, but somebody else could do just as well. In my Big Leap book, I talk about the moment of enlightenment where I'm standing in the line at the post office at Christmas time waiting to mail a package, and there's 15 people in the line and one clerk, and everybody's got a package. And I realized I'd already spent 15 minutes in the line. And I realized, well, at that time I was charging$1,000 an hour for my consultations. And so in 15 minutes, I'd eaten up$250 worth of time to mail a$10 packet. And so that was a moment of, oh my gosh, here I am in my zone of competence. I've never done that again, by the way. And the second and third or third and fourth zones that are so important, though, the third zone is the zone of excellence where you're doing stuff you're good at. You're getting lots of atta boys and atta girls, and yay, and they're electing you chairman and say, do more of this. And your spouse is saying, oh yeah, we like the new country club. And oh, can we fly first class again this week? You know, and all of those kinds of things are beginning to mount up in your life. And so that's a problem that you stay in the excellence zone too long. And what's beckoning, though, and what I've helped people discover fortunately thousands of times now, millions of times, I guess, now, including the books, is that we all have within us a genius zone. That's the fourth zone. You haven't topped out in your zone of excellence. There's this other thing that's beckoning, and it's made of two components, and you can tell right this minute where you are with both of them. One is you're doing what you most love to do, and you're doing something that makes a contribution that feels satisfying to you. These are deathbed issues. It doesn't matter if you're a young sprout such as yourself or an old geezer such as myself, you've got the same problem, which is to express and it and make the biggest contribution you can. Because, I mean, I've had the I guess you'd call it the pleasure of being at the deathbed of people when they're exiting this life. And I can tell you, nobody's, even if it's a billionaire, nobody's talking about the office or how much money or how well they're stocked at. Oh, no. They're saying, oh, why did I disown my brother 40 years ago because he was an alcoholic? You know, oh, why did I do that? Why couldn't I have been more compassionate? You know, those kinds of things. So what I'm talking about are the big issues of our life. And one of them is, can I get out of my own way? Can I get my programming out of the way? And it's all upper limit programming, you know, and I show in the big leap about all the different ways that show, you know, the different limiting beliefs and how those impact different um lack of success later on. And so we need to take it on as an inside job. A place to start is starting with commitment, because commitment, you can tell at any given moment whether you're living a commitment to something. If you think you're committed to your health, but you're smoking two packs a day, you know, your body's gonna give you feedback on that eventually, on that lack of integrity. Or, you know, like this is a great example of back pain, too. We had a business, I mean, a uh executive here who owned owned a big chain of resorts and hotels and things like that around the world, and they lived in a foreign country. And um, in the course of our work with them, when they finally came here, he had had back pain for years and he'd had something I'm thinking of like 175 chiropractic adjustments over that period of time and some large number of massages, you know, you've got a massage every week and acupuncture to make his back going away. Well, my treatment took 10 seconds, and if you're willing to go radical, a lot of things can be solved in 10 seconds. My 10-second treatment was what did you start lying about three and a half years ago? And what are you still lying about? Um, you know, it was like reading a comic book. It was so obvious. Three and a half years ago, he'd started having sex every Tuesday with his secretary, and that got worse, but he couldn't fire his secretary, and he couldn't tell his wife, and so here he is acting out this thing every week and gradually trying to fix the back pain. You know, but and I'm not saying that all back pain has to do with infidelity. Don't everybody run home and confront their partner about that. Um it has to do with lots of different things. But the interesting thing was two things. Wow, still blows my mind. His back pain went away after the big confession, and it blew up their relationship for about three months. They gradually worked it out, but during those eight months, she lost like 40 some pounds. Wow. And she didn't even go on a diet, it sort of fell off her. And how many times does stress cause our addictions, you know, like a lot. I remember my friend David Hubbard, who's a great neurologist uh down in San Diego, when he was in medical school, I remember him excitedly calling me because I was still at Stanford in the graduate program and he'd gone on to medical school before I graduated. He said, I just finished my first day in the hospital and I learned something I'd never known before. And I said, What is it? And he said, I learned why everybody's in here. And I said, Oh, you know, because I thought of as a complicated set of diseases. And he said, everybody in here is because of smoking, drinking, obesity or stress. Wow. Wow. That was a wake-up call to me that all of our health dollars are into fixing three things mainly. I mean, you know, smoking kills a thousand people a day here in the U.S. anyway. And um, when I've been into Ireland, uh, I don't think they've got less of a problem than we do with that over here. We're up there. Yeah. Um so um um I think that so many of the things that we blame on physical illness have to do with how we live our lives and the lifestyle choices we make. And one of those is in the area of relationship. And so, hey, by the way, I should, given your audience, I should say that I narrowly missed being an accountant in my life. Uh, I'd probably be in the world's worst, but when I was a little boy, I remember asking my grandmother, who I was very close to, she lived next door and she pretty much raised me. And um she uh I said, you know, you you've seen me around and I was, you know, nine or 10 years old, and I was trying to figure out what do I want to do with my life? Because this was Leesburg, Florida, 10,000 people. There was nothing like a psychologist or a psychiatrist in town, you know, there were 10 Baptist ministers, they were all doing pretty well, you know. Um, but this was in the deep south. And um, so my grandmother said, Why don't you become an accountant? And I said, Oh, and and uh I said, I'm not especially great at math. Why would you say that? And when I pinned her down about, she says, during the Great Depression, they all had jobs. Oh, you know, I didn't realize that I was being uh giving guidance counseling by somebody that was uh you know working out of the Great Depression. Yeah. Fortunately, my high school counseling uh teacher gave me a test and made me realize suddenly that there are three things I should avoid in life. The absolute thing I should really avoid is being a farmer. The absolute other thing I should avoid is accountancy or anything to do with numbers. And the third was anything to do with working outside with your hands. And um uh so I've avoided all of those things.

SPEAKER_03:

You'd narrow narrowly escaped and narrowly escaped.

SPEAKER_00:

I I do this heavy lifting with my fingers called typing.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, yeah. And uh I love my cohort, but uh we we had we had you escape to the right place. So we're we're not happy we we lost you to we we we're okay losing you to the profession, I should say. Um okay, I I'd really like to um I know we can't do the upper limit problem in the genius zone a whole heap of justice in the time that we've got together today. But I wanted to send people on their next step of their journey if they haven't been down the road of the big leap or um some of your your other books on the topic. So for me it's about creating awareness. So a lot of the things that you've mentioned today starts to spark up the idea of maybe the the neck pain or the back pain or just starting to have a bit more awareness on maybe there actually is something here and it's not a business tactic that I need to fix. So what in the spirit of creating more awareness and sending them on this journey, where where should we look to what questions should be asking? What things should we be doing to go on the journey?

SPEAKER_00:

I want to hark back to a point I made about commitment. Because commitment, almost nobody understands the power of commitment because you know, like you make a commitment to going on a diet and then you blow it in three days, you say, okay, well, uh, I guess I'm destined to be um that weight. And so what happens is commitment gets a bad name because it doesn't include a second factor that's even more important than commitment itself. And that is how to make a recommitment once you slipped off. And here we stress recommitment because it's the ability to get back on the horse after you've been dumped off. That's the key thing. You know, because all of us are going to get dumped off the horse and we're gonna have losses and things like that. Uh, as a matter of fact, let me just take this opportunity. I've never had this opportunity to, I've never been on an accountant's program before, but let me give a great deal of heartfelt appreciation to our accountant, Mr. David Ellis, uh, who has been working with us for many, many years and happens to be freshly on our mind because we had a massive influx of cash a couple of years ago. And uh we were looking at, you know, like a half a million dollar tax bill. And so David crafted it out. So, you know, it's uh it's still, you know, plenty of money, but it's not as sizable, but not as painful. So uh appreciations to David and everybody who labors to uh do good for folks like myself. Um I had an author's dream come true a a year or two ago where a big company offered me a giant chunk of cash for the rights to collect my royalties after I'm no longer on the planet.

SPEAKER_02:

Amazing.

SPEAKER_00:

And um, so I uh I thought about that. I thought, hmm. At the time I was 79, I'm 80 now. At the time I thought, hmm, I'm 79. What would be the downside of taking a bunch of money right now instead of having somebody collect it after I'm dead? And so I gave it about 0.2 seconds of thought. But anyway, David Ellis is has been working on it all year long. He's in the Christmas party. He came came up last night with the magic number, and Katie and I uh breathed a sigh of relief.

SPEAKER_03:

That's amazing. They are they're they're great people that do great work. Um but they also suffer in silence a lot as well. Because I I do feel with our profession that there is a uh a false perception that they need to show up as the business owner. You know, accountants have to have it all together because we're giving advice to every other business. Um so there is pain behind the curtains of it because they don't have it all figured out. And a lot of them do aspire to be in a position working in their genius zone, whether they know it to be that or not, of helping their clients more, like like David's done with yourself, uh as opposed to working in that chaotic rhythm of tax and compliance. So to move towards that genius zone, is it fair to say that we can't step into that zone until we've really identified and addressed the ceiling that these upper limit problems place on our potential?

SPEAKER_00:

Say first, make the commitment. Make a simple commitment. And here's one I use, and I'd love for you all to take it on. And the idea is I commit to expanding my genius every day of my life. I commit to expanding my genius zone every day of my life. So make a commitment to that and write that down on a little piece of paper and stick it on your dashboard or stick it on your mirror because you need repeated inoculations of a good idea in order to get it established in you. But if you could just make this miny, minor, tiny adjustment of making a commitment to it, that opens up the door. And then occasionally you'll say, Oh, I realize I forgot that. And I have been looking at it on my mirror for two weeks and haven't even seen it, you know, and then you'll see it again. And so gradually keep introducing this new idea to you and then begin to look at what's under the hood, what's beginning, what's under there that's making that ticking noise that starts ticking every time I get to 90 miles an hour, you know, and so gradually fixing those things, using, you know, I've tried to write my best guidebook in The Big Leap, but there may be other tools and technologies you could use to do that. Um, but whatever it is, take it on as an inside job and make a commitment to expanding your genius zone and get willing to remove all the little glitches and itches and limitations that are in your way, uh, that um that life wants you to be a genius. That's the way I like to think of it.

SPEAKER_03:

So for those aspiring to head in that direction, give us a taste of what the genius zone feels like. Like what is life like in the genius zone?

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, well, let me just tell you uh I live in a place that I love living in, a house that I love living in, and a part of the world I love living in. I've lived in it now for 25 years, and it has magnificent plantings all over it. And um, so I live in a place I love. So I wake up every day loving my life. And then carefully, about 30 years ago, I started making choices is this in my genius zone or not, when I would be offered whatever it was. And I gradually started only doing things that was in my genius zone. So for the last 20 or 30 years, I've only done things that I love to do and that, in my opinion, make my biggest contribution. And so um, that's what I've been up to. I just don't do stuff that I don't like to do or um don't feel that I'm suited to do. I get, at this stage of the game, offered tons of stuff that are not exactly in my genius zone. You know, a big Europe.

SPEAKER_03:

That's an easy answer.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh yeah, you know, I well, I I give you there's a a piece of candy that you've seen on uh on uh counters all over Europe. And they came to me at one point and they say, we're opening up the United States, and we're looking for a person to be our spokesman. And you wrote a book called Learning to Love Yourself. And we've decided that our whole pitch is going to be learning to love yourself by eating our chocolate. And here's a bunch of money. We'd like to get you on our side with this, you know. And uh so, oh and so I had to go through a little bit of anguish about that, you know, because at the time they offered it, I wasn't living quite the life I was living now. Uh but anyway, that that's a second thing that I think that everybody needs to do. Is so I've been doing that. I've been teaching my or uh what do you call it, uh applying my own methods for the last 30 or 40 years. There's an old Turkish saying that says, if a man finds a cure for baldness, he will surely first use it on himself. And I use my own medicine to create, you know, a life where I, you know, we, you know, we we have a little bit of light planning we do every year, where we sit down on New Year's Day and usually go out to a particular place we like and sit on a bench in uh a place we like and think about how we want to craft this year. You know, what do we want? And so we do yearly stuff, but we also do bigger things that last a lifetime. Like one of our uh our mantras that we live out of is that all of our investments are paying good dividends and doing good in the world. That's the idea. And so at this stage of the game, you know, we have a large investment uh portfolio that we want to be doing good in the world. And so we've crafted investments that we like what they're doing. And uh so we feel good about that. So the idea is to get yourself really aligned with your deepest values and what you really deeply want in life. And then things really start flowing much easier once you're on the right path. Like in the beautiful Kathleen Rain's poem, The Invisible Way, she said, birds have an invisible way across the sky. How do they do that? Well, we can have the same kind of thing. We can get on the right wavelength in life, according to our own values, by simply aligning with what we most want. And my big suggestion in the big leap is to focus on what your genius zone is. You may not know it at first, but a little bit of inquiry, gentle wonder and inquiry will be able to uh reveal that for you.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, I think that's a a perfect place to land a plane on. Um I must say the the big leap had a significant impact on my own life. Literally the first few pages where you say, if you're reading this and you're thinking about this, and I was just like, yes, yes, yes. And I just got absolutely addicted to the book. And creating that awareness around the upper limit problems and um heading towards that zone of genius has had a profound impact on my own life. And I I I really wanted to share that message with our audience. So thank you so much for doing that, and thank you for the work that you've put out. Um I have one final question to to ask, if you don't mind. Um, and I thought I'd throw a bit of a curveball at you. Because you've done thousands of these interviews and uh podcasts and everything. But I was curious, what's one question that you wish someone would have asked you, but no one ever has?

SPEAKER_00:

Um whoa, that's a good one. Well, let me just think of what the question would be. I know the topic would be, it would be tell me about how to use wonder as a practical tool. Um what what's the ultimate power and use to which you can put wonder? And uh so uh you can't see it from here, but on my wall over here, there's a photograph of me uh with the big word wonder written beside it. And uh the uh some photographer was making traveling around the United States making pictures of people, and uh he he asked me if I would let him take a picture of me. And then at the end of the picture session, uh he said, write a word that's sacred to you here next to your picture. And I wrote wonder. Amazing. And here's why. Because wonder, I believe, is an unused superpower. That when you wonder, genuinely wonder about something, you're free from your past conceptions about it, and you're free from whatever these future use of it might be. You can't sit here and wonder, oh, I wonder what the best thing I could create would be to make me a million dollars tomorrow. You know, it it wonder doesn't work like that. Wonder is good for solving problems that nothing else can solve. Like Einstein in his notebooks, he wondered about a particular problem for 27 years straight every day, until he finally, oh, I got that. You know, so be willing to go straight to the universe with an open heart of wonder, like, hmm, what do I need to do to transform my marriage? Or, hmm, what's happening at work that I'm not seeing that's causing this little niggle in me, this little stressful niggle in me at the end of the day. You know, asking big questions, but leaving huge room to answer them in. So you're not coming in with your old past preconceptions.

SPEAKER_03:

That's amazing. Thank you so much. Uh, and thank you to Katie. So I wish you both uh a wonderful anniversary month. Look forward to the the next nine books coming out. And for for anyone who's wanting to uh go down the path of exploring more about your work and some of the books we've mentioned today, how do we best find you?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, yes, and I I should also mention that in about a week or two, and I don't know when this is being broadcast, but um in October, in the month of October, we're going to be releasing my memoir. It's it's called Loving Life. Uh it's uh the subtitle is Tales of My Wondrous Journey. And Loving Life will be out, I think, on October 14th, but you'll be able to find it. And um I'm very excited about that because I've been working on it on and off for 10 years and uh gradually finally able to get it out into the world. Uh that makes two of us. Yes. And um so um the second thing is uh Hendrix.com, H-E-N-D-R-I-C-K-S.com, was um uh one of the um first websites on the internet, I'm happy to say, way back 30 years ago. And so it's now in its 116th interaction, I think. Uh and we're very proud of our website. We got tons of stuff there and lots of things that you can do there and lots of free videos and things like that. So Hendricks.com.

SPEAKER_03:

Perfect. Gay, thank you so much for your time. And again, it was an absolute pleasure to have you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much. It was great talking to you too. I hope you enjoy your uh life there. And uh, if you are a Guinness man, uh sink a pint for me sometime.

SPEAKER_03:

I will. And if uh you're ever in this part of the world, you're uh more than welcome to clink a few pint glasses together.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, good. Well, I don't know if I will be or not, but I I certainly will look you up. I have a bunch of invitations along that line. So uh I it'll be a massive Guinness-filled weekend if I do come to town.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get that to your inbox every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.