by Gay Hendricks

Here’s a key to vanquishing that one problem that’s keeping us from ultimate success in love, financial abundance and creativity.

Whether I’m coaching a billionaire CEO like Michael Dell or a 12-year-old piano prodigy, I base my approach on the following bottom-line insights. They’ve been gleaned from my 30 years of work in the field of relationship transformation and mind-body therapies.

First, it helps to understand that successful people operate in one of several zones: what I call the zone of competence, the zone of excellence or the zone of genius. Most people stall out in the zone of excellence. Those who make it big and are the happiest go all the way into the zone of genius. Achieving that transition is what I call, “the Big Leap.”

The reason most people don’t make it into the zone of genius is because of “the Upper Limit Problem.” This problem is the one obstacle that prevents us from attaining success and true happiness in all aspects of our life. It occurs because we all have an inner thermostat that determines the amount of love and success we allow ourselves. When we exceed our setting, we tend to sabotage the grander experience, in order to return to the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.

The trouble is that the thermostat was set before we could think for ourselves, in early childhood. Later in life, when we hit our upper limit, we often unthinkingly engage in self-defeating behaviors; we provoke arguments, get into accidents or become sick, in order to bring ourselves back down. Catalysts appear as feelings of guilt, stress, doubt or worry, which we routinely manufacture when we feel we have reached an upper allowable limit of positive feeling.

The good news is that if we can learn to spot and transcend our upper limit, we can make a rapid transition into our zone of genius. Asking ourselves four questions can serve as our personal launching pad. Answering these questions honestly begets telling new perspectives that just may set us flying skyward into the big leap. The four questions are:

·    What do I most love to do? ·    What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work? ·    In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to the amount of time spent? ·    What is my unique ability?

All of us deserve to experience wave after wave of greater love, creative energy and financial abundance, without the compulsion to sabotage ourselves. We start with the heartfelt desire to eliminate our Upper Limit Problem—if we commit to clearing it out of our consciousness, we’re more than halfway there.

Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., is the author of numerous bestsellers, including The Corporate Mystic. He taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years before founding The Hendricks Institute in Ojai, CA. For more information on The Big Leap: Conquer Your Fears and Take Life to the Next Level, visit Hendricks.com.