The Big Leap book summary

Here are my notes and takeaways from the book.
By Gay Kendrick.

what is UPL:

The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves. The Upper Limit Problem is caused by a too-low thermostat setting on our ability to achieve and enjoy our ultimate success. The thermostat gets set low early in our lives, at a time when we could not think for ourselves. Later, as we dream about big goals and move up into realms of love, abundance, and creativity that are above our old thermostat setting, we bump up against the artificial lid that was placed on our success through unconscious childhood decisions. Unless we solve the Upper Limit Problem, we will keep finding ways to bring ourselves back down when we’ve blown past our old setting.

I say it is the only problem you really need to solve. The problem, though challenging, brings a priceless gift hidden within it. The gift reveals itself as you explore and solve the problem. The gift is a special kind of relationship: a living connection with the source of genius within you.

Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure. Unfortunately, our thermostat setting usually gets programmed in early childhood, before we can think for ourselves. Once programmed, our Upper Limit thermostat setting holds us back from enjoying all the love, financial abundance, and creativity that’s rightfully ours. It keeps us in our Zone of Competence or at best our Zone of Excellence. It prevents us from living in the ultimate destination of the journey — our Zone of Genius.

There is something important you should know about the Upper Limit Problem: when you attain higher levels of success, you often create personal dramas in your life that cloud your world with unhappiness and prevent you from enjoying your enhanced success. This is the Upper Limit Problem at work. In other words, the Upper Limit Problem crosses the boundaries of money, love, and creativity. If you make more money, your Upper Limit Problem may kick in and create a situation that causes unhappiness, ill health, or something else that blocks your enjoyment of your enhanced money supply. If you meet and marry the love partner of your dreams, your Upper Limit Problem may kick in and cause setbacks in your financial life.

About FEAR:

“Fear is excitement without the breath.” Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.

Ultimately, fear will be banished, because fear disappears when you’re fully engaged in the Zone of Genius.

The best advice I can give you is to take big, easy breaths when you feel fear. Feel the fear instead of pretending it’s not there. Celebrate it with a big breath, just the way you’d celebrate your birthday by taking a big breath and blowing out all the candles on your cake. Do that, and your fear turns into excitement. Do it more, and your excitement turns into exhilaration.

I notice myself worrying about something.
I let go of the worry-thoughts, shifting my focus away from them.

I wonder: what positive new thing is trying to come into being?
I usually get a body feeling (not a thought or idea) of where that positive new thing is trying to come through.
I open my focus to feel that body feeling deeply.
I let myself feel it deeply for as long as I possibly can.
Later, I often get an idea of the positive thing that was trying to come through.

Arguements:

Arguments are one of the most common ways of bringing yourself down when you’ve hit your Upper Limit. When things are going well, you can crimp the flow of positive energy quickly by starting a conflict. Then, the conflict develops a life of its own, lasting for hours, days, or even years. The net effect: you drop back into your Zone of Competence or your Zone of Excellence. Genius takes a backseat.

Understanding the physics of arguments will reveal how conflicts — whether between a couple, board members, countries, or religious groups — can be resolved. In fact, it’s the only way I’ve ever found that will resolve conflicts permanently. The key insight: each entity in a situation represents 100 percent. Each entity in a conflict has 100 percent of the responsibility for resolving the conflict. In other words, person A is a whole and complete 100 percent, and person B is a whole and complete 100 percent. If two people are involved, there is 200 percent responsibility to be divided up. The fatal mistake is thinking that there is 100 percent of responsibility to be divided up; this approach requires each person to take some portion of the 100 percent. It’s a massive thinking error that causes massive problems, because it leads to endless jockeying for the victim position.

When both people are not taking 100 percent responsibility, it is an entanglement, not a relationship. There is only one way to transform an entanglement into a relationship: both people must drop projection and see that they are 100

Questions to ask:

Where do I feel out of integrity with myself? What is keeping me from feeling complete and whole? What important feelings am I not letting into my awareness? Where in my life am I not telling the full truth? Where in my life have I not kept my promises? In my relationship with _____________________,

what do I need to say or do to feel complete and whole?


Play with your UPL.

“I had an ULP today” and “I caught myself in the midst of an ULP this afternoon.” I encourage you to adopt this kind of playfulness toward all your ULPs. An attitude of playful wonder is characteristic of people when they’re operating in the Zone of Genius.

Make a commitment to keeping an attitude of wonder and play while learning about your Upper Limit behaviors. Say this sentence in your mind as often as you like. It expresses the attitude I’d like you to embody: I commit to discovering my Upper Limit behaviors, and to having a good time while I’m learning about them. You can learn a lot more with a spirit of wonder and enjoyment than you can with an attitude of criticism.

When you notice yourself doing one of the things on your Upper Limit list, such as worrying, or failing to communicate some truth, shift your attention to the real issue: expanding your capacity for abundance, love, and success. Consciously let yourself make more room in your awareness for abundance, love, and success. Use the resources of your whole being, not just your mind. For example, feel more love in your chest and heart area. Savor the body feeling, as well as the mental satisfaction, of success and abundance. Embrace a new story that tells about your adventures in your Zone of Genius. Find a new mythology, or make up one of your own, that shows you enjoying your life in the full radiance of your expressed potential.

We all need to be on the lookout for signs of our Upper Limit Problem every day of our lives. It’s a constant quest, because we’re always raising the bar on ourselves. The better we get, the better we want to be. Part of us wants very much to live in our Zone of Genius. Yet at the same time, we’re tied down by forces around us. The people around us want us to stay in our Zone of Excellence.

Zone of Genius:

In your Zone of Genius, you don’t feel like you’re working. Even though the time you spend there produces great financial abundance, you do not feel that you are expending effort to produce it. In your Zone of Genius, work doesn’t feel like work. In your Zone of Genius, time feels completely different. Time seems to expand to support your activities. You have plenty of time to do what you most want to do. You’ll learn more about this unusual phenomenon in chapter 6, “Living in Einstein Time.” For right now, though, just know that in your Zone of Genius, time doesn’t fly — it flows. How about it? Will you make a commitment to living in your Zone of Genius all the time? If you do that, I can promise you as much real-life magic

In coaching people to discover their genius, I’ve found that it’s essential to begin with a commitment to living in your Zone of Genius. Your commitment must come before you know how to make good on it. The image that comes to mind is from the third Indiana Jones movie, in which Indy must step out into thin air, in a gesture of commitment, before a bridge magically appears beneath his feet. The power of your commitment brings forth the means necessary for you to live in your Zone of Genius.

I commit to living in my Zone of Genius, now and forever.

Your sincere commitment is the entry gate to the Zone of Genius. Now that you’ve stepped out into the unknown, the bridge can appear under your feet. The bridge to your Zone of Genius is a set of questions to ask yourself. Actually, ask doesn’t quite capture the flavor of how I want you to use the questions. I want you to wonder about them. These questions are designed to bring forth hidden treasures from deep inside you.

Genius Question no. 1 Here’s the first Genius Question: What do I most love to do? (I love it so much I can do it for long stretches of time without getting tired or bored.)

Genius Question no. 2 Now let’s render “what I most love” into something much more specific. Here’s the second Genius Question I’d like you to ponder: What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work? (I can do it all day long without ever feeling tired or bored.)

Genius Question no. 3 Here is the third question I’d like you to entertain in that vast playground where your heart meets your mind: In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? (Even if I do only ten seconds or a few minutes of it, an idea or a deeper connection may spring forth that leads to huge value.)

Genius Question no. 4 Take a deep breath, and expand to embrace a new conception of yourself. The fourth Genius Question invites you to think of who you are in most unusual terms. It asks you to identify a unique and priceless gift you carry within yourself. Your exploration into this aspect of yourself is not about self-flattery or expansion of your ego. It’s a clear-eyed look at a deep, innermost quality, with the intention of applying that quality to make your own life and the lives of others more valuable.
Here’s the question: What is my unique ability?

(There’s a special skill I’m gifted with. This unique ability, fully realized and put to work, can provide enormous benefits to me and any organization I serve.)

Ultimate success mantra to whisper in your meditation.

I expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.

TIME:

EINSTEIN TIME When we switch to Einstein Time, we take charge of the amount of time we have. We realize that we’re where time comes from. We embrace this liberating insight: since I’m the producer of time,

I can make as much of it as I need! By getting the truth of this statement, we make a major adjustment in ourselves. We heal the dualistic split embedded in the Newtonian relationship with time. We are no longer in an us-versus-them relationship with time. We’re the source of time, and by realizing that fact we become the truth of it.

Quit thinking time is “out there.” Take ownership of time — acknowledge that you are where it comes from — and it will stop owning you. Claim time as yours, and it will release its claim on you. The best way I’ve found to do that is to become nimble at asking a specific question. The question allows you to seize the controls of your time and your life. There’s no trick to the process. You could probably take ownership of time without the question, simply by claiming time as yours to invent as you wish. You could do it by saying something to yourself like “I acknowledge that I’m the source of time.” Look in the mirror and say, “I’m where time comes from.” Or, if you’re one of those folks who like to lecture themselves sternly, say, “There’s no such thing as time ‘out there,’ meathead. It all comes from inside you. You are not time’s victim!” However, the question makes it simple and easy. To generate an abundance of time, ask yourself,

Where in my life am I not taking full ownership?

What aspect of my life do I need to take full ownership of?

“This is my problem and I’m committed to resolving it,” you can work genuine miracles. I’ve seen such miracles hundreds of times.

As you know by now, the essential move we all need to master is learning to handle more positive

energy, success, and love. Instead of focusing on the past, we need to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives now. If we don’t learn how to do this, we suffer in every area of our lives. One area that suffers spectacularly is our relationships. As we bump into our Upper Limit Problems, relationships are one of the key areas that suffer greatly. In fact, the greater success you achieve, the bumpier your relationships tend to be.

John Cuber and Peggy Harroff conducted one of the few in-depth studies ever done on the relationships of successful people. The authors found that 80 percent of the 437 successful people they studied had unsatisfying marriages and long — term relationships.

Only about 20 percent of the couples had relationships the authors called vital. The other 80 percent had three main styles of unsatisfying relationships: 100 percent the creators of their reality. With the energy saved from banishing power struggles, much more can be co-created than the partners could have created on their own.