The Big Leap Read online

  In a letter to me, Dr. Jordan said, “In that phone call I waved good-bye to three million dollars in cash, salary, and incentives.” Fortunately, Dr. Jordan was able to learn from the experience. His letter continued: “Over the next few years I would awaken many nights with a knot in my stomach. Then I finally found the diamond in the dust. After much work and introspection, I discovered that what I was really saying to that man was ‘Wait a minute! Three million dollars! That’s way more than I’m worth. I cannot allow this!’” He decided to use the experience as, in his words, “the Three-Million-Dollar Gift.” He formed two wonder questions to use in his life going forward:

  How much love and abundance am I willing to allow?

  How am I getting in my own way?

  These questions cleared the way through his Upper Limit Problem, and ultimately he sold the business to another buyer. The story has a happy ending moneywise, but, more important, Dr. Jordan shows us how to turn dust into diamonds by understanding the Upper Limit Problem at work in this kind of situation. Another person might have continued to blame the other company or himself and gone on down that path to bitterness and despair. Instead, Dr. Jordan had the insight and courage to ask big questions and savor the big rewards that come along with them.

  FOCUSING ON YOU

  Now, turn your attention to yourself. Did you answer yes to those three questions I posed at the beginning of the chapter? If you did, you’ve taken the first crucial step in the journey. If you got a no or a maybe, let’s explore why you might resist the idea.

  When you consider the possibility of consistently feeling good and having things go well in your life all the time, you may find yourself thinking, “That’s not possible.” If so, I understand. I once felt that way, too. I urge you, though, not to waste much of your precious time worrying about whether it’s possible. I’ve proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is. The only relevant question is whether you will let it be possible for you. If you would be willing to accept that possibility, you’re on the way to experiencing real magic in your life.

  I’ve asked thousands of people if they would be willing to feel good and have things go well all the time, and I’ve had the great joy of watching what happens in their lives when they say, “Yes!” I would love for you to enjoy the same results, and it all starts with a sincere “Yes!” to those three questions.

  If you feel resistance and would like to explore it, you can begin by letting yourself know that it’s quite natural to feel that way. After all, human beings have very little experience with consciously cultivating the ability to feel more and more positive energy. There wasn’t a class in elementary school or college called “How to Tolerate Longer Periods of Success and Good Feeling.” I think it’s remarkable that we can go all the way from kindergarten to a Ph.D. or MD without anybody mentioning something so fundamental, but that’s the world we live in at present. We’re going to change that world, though, and we’re going to reap phenomenal benefits from doing it.

  There’s an even bigger reason you might feel some resistance about transcending your Upper Limit Problem. Speaking personally, I found that my biggest resistance was the fear of owning my full potential. As I explored this fear, I realized that making such a big commitment put everything on the line. It eliminated any excuse I’d ever allowed myself for failing to achieve what I set out to do. In the past, I could always say, “Well, I failed, but I wasn’t really trying hard. Maybe I’d have succeeded if I had really tried.” Or “I failed, but I might have succeeded if I hadn’t gotten sick.” But now, after making the commitment to going the distance, any excuse that crept into my mind sounded hollow, even ridiculous, as if Columbus had sailed back to Europe and said, “Well, we didn’t find land, but we might have if I hadn’t gotten a nasty cold.”

  Many of our fears are based on the workings of the ego, the part of us that’s focused on getting recognition and protecting us from social ostracism. In the Zone of Genius, your ego is unnecessary; living there is its own reward. In the Zone of Genius, you cease to care about recognition or ostracism. Once you make a commitment to inhabiting your full potential, your ego is suddenly faced with extinction. It’s been making excuses for you throughout your life. Now, if your commitment to taking your Big Leap is sincere, your ego will need to be shown the door. Unless you’re lucky, your ego will probably not go quietly. It has a lifetime of employment history behind it.

  Faced with annihilation, your ego will set off a smoke bomb of fear. It will attempt to sabotage you by telling you tall tales of the terrors you’ll experience if you take the Big Leap into your Zone of Genius. Using the smoke screen of fear as your own inner IMAX, it will project pictures of financial ruin and other disasters sure to befall you. All this is understandable, because fear is always about the unknown. This is unknown territory. Your ego has never been in this fix before. Ultimately, fear will be banished, because fear disappears when you’re fully engaged in the Zone of Genius. Until you get there, though, you’ll find yourself befogged more than once. Fortunately, this territory has been mapped out. There’s something to help you find a way through, although it is probably unlike any navigational tool you’ve used in the past.

  THE WAY THROUGH

  There’s only one way to get through the fog of fear, and that’s to transform it into the clarity of exhilaration. One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I’ve ever heard comes from Fritz Perls, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy. He said, “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. On the other hand, excitement turns into fear quickly if you hold your breath. When scared, most of us have a tendency to try to get rid of the feeling. We think we can get rid of it by denying or ignoring it, and we use holding our breath as a physical tool of denial.

  It never works, though, because as Dr. Perls has pointed out, the less breath you feed your fear, the bigger your fear gets. 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 find it very empowering to know that I’m in charge of the exhilaration I feel as I go through life. I bet you will, too.

  When you reach the end of your life and are wondering whether it’s all been worthwhile, you’ll be measuring whether you did everything you possibly could with the gifts you’ve been given. When I was growing up, my next-door neighbor Mr. Lewin shared a powerful bit of wisdom with me. I’ve kept it in mind for more than fifty years. On Judgment Day, Mr. Lewin said, God will not ask, “Why were you not Moses?” He will ask, “Why were you not Sam Lewin?” The goal in life is not to attain some imaginary ideal; it is to find and fully use our own gifts. The meaning of that saying was clear even to a ten-year-old (who sends long-overdue thanks to Mr. Lewin, a successful seventy-year-old businessman when I knew him, for his willingness to shoot the breeze on many a Florida afternoon with a philosophically inclined kid).

  MOVING BEYOND THE HARDEST PART

  If you say yes to taking the Big Leap, you have done the hardest part. Your sincere commitment to going all the way to your Zone of Genius is the entry gate to the garden of miracles we will explore in this book. My intention is to show you exactly how to free yourself from the self-imposed limitation that is keeping you from your ultimate success. If you are already successful yet sense there is a quantum jump in your success that awaits you, you can take that quantum jump with the tools in this book. I guarantee it. That may sound like a bold claim, but this method has been taught to hundreds of people who were already achieving ordinary success and then took the Big Leap into the extraordinary. Later, we’ll meet several of those people. Some
of them are famous, some are not, but they all have one thing in common: they learned what I’m going to tell you about, and they transcended ordinary success to a level they hadn’t imagined possible.

  HOW THE UPPER LIMIT PROBLEM WORKS

  Let me show you specifically how the Upper Limit Problem holds us back:

  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. We’ll explore these zones in more detail later in this chapter. For now, though, what you need to know is this: if you make a spectacular leap in one area of your life, such as money, your Upper Limit Problem quickly enshrouds you in a wet-wool blanket of guilt that keeps you from enjoying your new abundance. Guilt is a way our minds have of applying a painful grip on the conduit through which our good feelings flow.

  In childhood, our Upper Limit Problem develops in acts of misguided altruism. Specifically, it develops with our attempts to take care of the feelings of others. Children are uncommonly skilled at reading body language. Perhaps you notice that the smile disappears from your mother’s face when you outshine one of your siblings. You quickly learn to pull back a little from shining to take care of your mother’s feelings. Many years later in adult life, you may find the very same pattern operating even though there is no mother around whose feelings you need to protect. In the next chapter, we’ll explore in great detail the underlying mechanisms of the Upper Limit Problem.

  A RADICAL IDEA

  Take a close-up look at how guilt operates in conjunction with the Upper Limit Problem. It shows up when we’re feeling good (or making extra money or feeling a deeper loving connection in a relationship). When we’re feeling good, we may come up against the hidden barrier of an old belief such as “I must not feel good, because fundamentally flawed people like me don’t deserve it.” The churning froth of these two powerful forces clashing with each other is the chief constituent of the irritating, itchy, slow-drizzle feeling of guilt.

  When the old belief clashes with the positive feelings you’re enjoying, one of them has to win. If the old belief wins, you turn down the volume on the positive feeling (or lose some money or start an intimacy-destroying argument with your partner). If the good feeling wins, congratulations! Your practice in expanding your capacity for positive energy is paying off. Your capacity expands in small increments each time you consciously let yourself enjoy the money you have, the love you feel, and the creativity you are expressing in the world. As that capacity for enjoyment expands, so does your financial abundance, the love you feel, and the creativity you express.

  Take a moment to appreciate how radical this idea is. Most people think they will finally feel good when they have more money, better relationships, and more creativity. I understand this point of view, because I felt that way half my life. What a powerful moment it is, though, when we finally see that we have it the wrong way around. All of us can find and nurture the capacity for positive feelings now, rather than waiting until some longed-for event occurs.

  If you focus for a moment, you can always find some place in you that feels good right now. Your task is to give the expanding positive feeling your full attention. When you do, you will find that it expands with your attention. Let yourself enjoy it as long as you possibly can.

  As you get more practice, you will be able to use this radical act of appreciation in other areas such as money and love. Instead of waiting to feel good until you have all the money you want and need, go ahead right now and appreciate your current money supply. All it takes is a few seconds. Find a place in yourself where you can feel good about the money you have. Give your full attention to that place of satisfaction. If you can’t find any place in you where you feel good about money, create a positive thought about it in your mind. Float a new thought through your mind such as “I enjoy the money I have” or “I always have plenty of money to do everything I want to do.”

  Try it out in the area of love. Instead of focusing on loneliness or stagnation in a relationship, find a place in yourself where you can feel good about the love you have in your life. Give your full attention to that place of joy or satisfaction. Feel it expand as you give awareness to it. As you get more skilled with this practice, you discover that your positive feelings, your abundance, your love and creativity all begin to expand. Then, the outer aspects of your life change to match the expanding good feeling inside you.

  Because few people understand how the Upper Limit Problem works, many of us believe we are flawed, not destined for greatness, or simply not good enough to deserve the dreams we want to achieve. Others miss out on big-time success and chalk it up to bad luck or bad timing. Millions of people are stuck on the verge of reaching their goals, can’t seem to scale the wall, and are struggling under a glass ceiling that is completely within their control, waiting to be removed. But here’s the good news: You’re not flawed or unlucky or anything of the sort. You’ve got the Upper Limit Problem, and it can be transcended in the wink of an eye—if you’re equipped with the right tools and a willing heart.

  Here’s a deeper look at how the Upper Limit Problem keeps us trapped: When you push through your Upper Limit thermostat setting by making more money, experiencing more love, or drawing more positive attention to yourself, you trip your Upper Limit switch. Deep inside your mind a little voice says, “You can’t possibly feel this good” (or “make this much money” or “be this happy in love”). Unconsciously, you then do something to bring yourself back down to the thermostat setting you’re familiar with. Even if you do achieve a glorious new height, it is often short-lived.

  If you want some real-world evidence of the Upper Limit Problem in action, take a look at the studies of lottery winners. One study found that over 60 percent of them had blown the money within two years and returned to the same net worth as before their big win. Some were even worse off financially than before they won the lottery. Add to their financial woes the large number of divorces, family squabbles, and conflicts with friends that lottery winners often experience, and you have a classic example of the Upper Limit Problem at work. A man named Jack Whitaker, winner of more than three hundred million dollars in the Powerball lottery, has been extensively studied because of the litany of disasters that have befallen him after his big win. Here are some (but by no means all) of his post-win misfortunes: his wife left him; he was robbed of $545,000 cash when he passed out in a strip club; his granddaughter died of a drug overdose in his home; he has been arrested for drunk driving and assaulting a bartender; and he has had more than four hundred lawsuits brought against him by friends, family members, and others. Ironically, he was already a millionaire when he won the three hundred million dollars, so it is quite clear that the massive infusion of new wealth pushed him past his Upper Limit thermostat setting.

  Each of us has an unconscious tendency to trip our Upper Limit switch, and each of us can eliminate that tendency. We deserve to experience wave after wave of greater love, creative energy, and financial abundance, without the compulsion to sabotage ourselves. That’s what I want for you, and I hope that’s what you want for yourself. If you want to eliminate your Upper Limit Problem—if you will make a commitment to clearing it out of your consciousness—you’re more than halfway there.

  THE UPPER LIMIT THERMOSTATS OF FAMOUS AND HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

  Once, as a young man, Bill Clinton stood in line to take a tour of the White House. He casually
said to an attendant, “I am going to live here someday as president.” And he achieved that goal. But then his Upper Limit Problem kicked in. He self-sabotaged his success by getting involved in a sex scandal that led to impeachment and disgrace. He failed to understand his Upper Limit Problem, and it kept him from enjoying fully his place in American history.

  Here are a few more prominent examples of the Upper Limit Problem in action. John Belushi rose to enormous success quite rapidly; at his peak he had a number-one album, the top-grossing movie, and a hit TV show. Then, his Upper Limit Problem got him; he self-destructed as meteorically as he had risen. Then, there’s Boris Becker, who won Wimbledon at the remarkable age of seventeen. Almost before the trophy was on the mantle, though, his Upper Limit Problem kicked in. He decided to fire his coach—the man who’d taken him to tennis greatness. The next year Boris hardly got in the door at Wimbledon before getting beat by the seventy-first-ranked player. The actor Christian Bale starred in the Batman movie The Dark Knight, which had one of the most profitable openings in movie history. In London for the movie’s premiere, he got into an altercation in his hotel room (with his mother and sister, no less) and ended up with assault charges filed against him.

  People often experience big breakthroughs…and then find a way to avoid relishing their achievement. They receive an award at work and then have a screaming argument with their spouse later that same night. They get the job of their dreams and then get sick; they win the lottery, then have an accident. The newfound success trips their Upper Limit switch, and they plummet back to the familiar setting they’ve grown used to.