What's Your Zone of Genius? (Katie Hendricks, PhD)

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Many of you will be familiar with Katie Hendricks, and her husband Gay, who run The Hendricks Institute together. Katie’s work is vast. But essentially, she helps people use their body’s innate intelligence; and she helps people get friendly with the unknown, as she says today.

Katie and I talk about how to befriend and work with fear because, well, we can’t really conquer fear or get rid of it. Katie takes us through her fear-melters for when we get caught in fight, flee, freeze, or faint mode. In the show notes on my Substack, I’ll also link to these physical movements so you can start experimenting with them. I’ve found them to be so, so helpful.

As Katie explains, these fear-melters help wake up your body’s intelligence so that you're able to get messages from yourself.

Katie shares a few more tools, like playing with your pace so that you’re able to get present, instead of just feeling at the effect of everything coming at you.

She explains the loop of awareness, which is a tool for shifting your attention and getting the nourishment of somebody else’s aliveness.

And she explains why she sorts life into two files every day: the things she cannot change or control—which are typically very compelling, unfortunately. And then there’s the much smaller file of things she can actually change or influence, which is where she tries to focus her attention.

We also talk about the zone of genius, which is ideally where most of us would spend the majority of our time. And we talk about how to incrementally work up to this 51%, and then perhaps beyond.

We finish the conversation by talking about persona work—and why I’ve found it difficult, but also fun and powerful.