1: For more than two decades, Jay had been “shaming himself for his drinking, always apologizing and promising to do better,” Gay Hendricks writes in The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity.
For twenty years, he’d insisted to his concerned family and friends that he wasn’t an alcoholic. He told himself he could control his drinking.
“All the while, though, he had kept creating messes in his life that told a different story,” Gay notes.
Then the moment came when he said the words that would transform his life:
“My name’s Jay, and I’m an alcoholic. And I have no idea how I’m going to stop drinking,” he said to the AA group.
Instead of trying to control his drinking, he stated it was out of his control and surrendered to something larger than himself.
Not only did he change his life. Since then, he’s sponsored more than six hundred recovering alcoholics over many decades.
Reflecting back on that moment of clarity, Jay says, “I suddenly felt lighter than air, like I’d been released from carrying a heavy burden up in my head.”
2: Last week, we explored Gay’s ideas around what he calls “The Genius Move.”
“The Genius Move,” he writes, “is when we let go of our effort to control the uncontrollable and feel the new space of creative aliveness open up inside us.”
To experience the Genius Move and the corresponding surge of good feelings, we simply do the following:
Step 1: Notice we’re feeling unhappy, whatever the reason.
Step 2: Wonder, “What am I trying to control that’s actually impossible for me to control?”
Step 3: We get an insight about what we’ve been trying to control. Or, if not, we let our minds continue to wonder about it.
Step 4: Acknowledge that it’s outside of our control, whatever it is. Let it go and let it be.
Step 5: Think of a positive action we can do right away, something we actually have control over, and take the action.
Reflecting on Jay’s feeling of “lightness,” Gay observes: “It was so similar to what had happened for me. The moment I let go of trying to control all the things nobody can control, I actually felt two forms of lightness come over me.
“My whole inner world lit up,” he notes, “as if I were emerging from the shadows of my old negative thinking. I also felt the kind of lightness Jay mentioned–the sense of shedding a heavy load I’d been carrying around for a long time.
“When I first began to uncover the tools I’m sharing with you in this book,” Gay shares, “I was twenty-four years old and weighed three hundred pounds rather than this morning’s one hundred and eighty-five. I couldn’t go more than twenty minutes without a cigarette, I hated my job, and I felt trapped in an awful relationship.
“Within a year or so after the discovery, I dropped my addictions, shed more than a hundred pounds, got out of the toxic relationship, and embarked on a new career. To say it changed my life would be an understatement. It gave me my life.”
3: We spend a lot of time criticizing ourselves. This fear-based negative thinking blocks our path to genius.
“Paradoxically,” Gay notes, “our struggle with negative thinking ends only when we declare we have no control over it.”
Let’s say we are flooded with a stream of negative thoughts. Option one: We can continue to focus on them. Option two: We can seek out a way to get out of the stream.
“That’s a key moment,” he writes, “because what we decide to do determines whether we’ll be happy or not.”
Many people follow option one. “They go into some form of combat with their negative thoughts,” Gay explains. “One type of combat is to criticize ourselves for our negative thoughts, attempting to shame ourselves into submission.”
But we can’t eliminate negative thoughts by peppering them with more negative thoughts. Gay realized that “trying to kill off my thoughts of disappointment and misery by firing off a constant rat-a-tat of shame and blame at them” leads nowhere.
The answer? “The moment we quit fighting our thoughts, they will quit bothering us,” Gay writes. He calls this a “paradoxical miracle. . .
“The only way to change negative thinking begins with acknowledging that we have no control over it. By this application of the Genius Move, we are able to withdraw the energy we’ve been expending trying to control negative thinking.
“Then, we can redirect that energy to those things we actually have the ability to change.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I holding on to things I can’t control, and how might letting go create more lightness and possibility in my life?
Action: Identify one area where I’m struggling for control, acknowledge it’s beyond my power, and take a positive step with what I can influence.
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