1: Gay Hendricks had just delivered his first speech to a professional audience.
A man approached the podium and said, “I really enjoyed your talk. It wasn’t so much what you said but the way you said it,” Gay writes in his book The Genius Zone.
Gay had always been nervous about public speaking, so the compliment lit him up. “What did you like about the way I spoke?” he asked.
The man replied, “I could really relate to you. Your voice shakes just as badly as mine does when I try to speak in public.”
Ouch.
“My mood fell like a punctured soufflé,” he recalls, “but his odd compliment did me the favor of unleashing a flood of realizations. Later that day, on a plane bound for the Bay Area to give another speech, I spent the bumpy ride trying to figure out what made my voice shake. I was obviously afraid of something, but what was it?”
Gay realized he was afraid of all the bad things that might happen when he delivered his talk.
“We unconsciously project unpleasant images on our inner mind screen,” he writes. “We go out into the future mentally to imagine the audience booing us or arguing with us or storming for the exits. This horror-movie display of negative thinking occurs in the space between our ears, stirring up fear in our bellies and sadness in our hearts, tensing the anger muscles in the back of our necks.”
This insight sparked a life-changing realization: “My voice shook because I was trying to control my fear and hide it from the audience,” he writes.
2: Gay suggests we gather the following materials.
- Two file folders
- Two pieces of paper
- Two pens: one that writes in red and another that writes in green
“Now it’s time to take the idea out of our minds and put it in our bodies so it can start working miracles for us,” he suggests.
We begin by taking out the two folders. “On one, write the following in big, bold letters with your red pen: THINGS I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CONTROL.
“On the other file, write boldly in green: THINGS I ABSOLUTELY CAN CONTROL.”
Next, take out one of the pieces of paper and write the following with your red pen in big, bold letters:
PERFORM THE GENIUS MOVE WHEN I THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS:
1: What people think about us.
2: The past.
3: The future.
The reason these items go in our Red File? Because we cannot change or control them.
“Many people waste a great deal of their time and mental energy being concerned about what other people think of them,” Gay explains. “They manufacture mental images of other people criticizing them for such things as their looks, their intelligence, and their actions.
“What a relief,” he observes, “to come to our senses and realize we have absolutely no control over what other people think of us!”
What else do we have no power to change? The past. And the bad things that can happen to us in the future. Like the audience booing Gay after his speech.
“Many of us squander our mental energy thinking about the past,” Gay observes. “We squander more energy thinking in unproductive ways about the future. Most thoughts about the past and the future are about things we have absolutely no power to change. . .
“If we study our self-critical thoughts carefully,” he notes, “we’ll notice that many of them are critical comments about things we did in the past. Other self-critical comments are pegged to the future, to things we haven’t actually experienced yet.”
Now we turn our attention to the Green File.
“The best way to stop thinking about things we can’t change is to start thinking about things we can change,” Gay notes.
We pick up our second piece of paper and write this on it in green:
THINGS I CAN DO IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES THAT COULD CONTRIBUTE TO MY OWN HAPPINESS AND THE HAPPINESS OF SOMEONE ELSE
Examples:
Pick up the phone, call a friend or family member, and tell them how much I appreciate them.
Sit down for a few minutes and write what I’m feeling in my journal.
Instead of the past, think about what I want to create right now and take action. Example: Convert small bedroom into an exercise room. Or organize photos for a memoir. Or write a song for my wife’s birthday.
“Over the coming days and weeks,” Gay suggests, “be on the lookout for other things we can add to our Red File and our Green File,” Gay writes. “Go on a joyful but relentless search for all the things we’ve been trying to control that are actually not ours to control. Replace those fretful, frustrating, and fruitless thoughts with ideas about what we can change right now, and watch the magic reveal itself.”
3: So, what happened after Gay’s first speech in front of a professional audience and his life-changing realization about trying to control his fear and hide it from the audience?
“The next morning, I stepped onstage to give a speech to an audience of about a hundred and fifty teachers and counselors,” he writes. “Instead of trying to hide anything from the audience, I went to the opposite extreme: I told them the story of what had happened the day before in Kansas City. They roared with laughter and later rewarded me with a standing ovation.”
Rather than attempt to control the past or the future, he realized “all I had to do was speak honestly about what I knew and what was going on with me. All I really needed to focus on was that every word I spoke resonated with my inner experience. I didn’t need to control my feelings or how the audience reacted to me.”
Since that day, he has given more than 2,500 talks, seminars, and media appearances.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where am I spending energy trying to control things I simply cannot, and how might I redirect that energy toward actions I can take right now?
Action: Create my own Red and Green Files, listing what I cannot control and what I can, and commit to taking one small, positive action from my Green File today.
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