It Isn’t Illness, It’s an Upper Limit Problem
3 Ways Our Symptoms Are Keeping Us From A Taking The Big Leap
As women we often face challenges to our health that go so much deeper than just symptoms. What patterns of Self Sabotage do you carry in your life?
Welcome back to another episode of “Live and Lead with Heart.” Today, I delved into one of the most impactful books in my life, “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. The Big Leap explores the concept of the “upper limit problem,” which is essentially our subconscious mind’s way of keeping us within our comfort zones, often through illness or accidents.
The Upper Limit Problem: We each have a limit on how much abundance, success, and love we think we are deserving of. It’s like we each have our own thermostat setting for these things.
I shared a personal experience from the past weekend where I was extremely sick, which led me to reflect on how this pattern has shown up in my life. I realized that my body often reacts this way when I’m on the verge of significant growth. This time, it coincided with me processing deeply buried emotions from the past six to eight years.
I discussed the importance of integrating the heart into our personal growth journeys. While intellectual understanding is crucial, true transformation happens at the heart level. I introduced the concept of heart-focused breathing, a technique from HeartMath, which helps align the brain, nervous system, and heart, fostering a state of coherence where intuition and better decision-making thrive.
I also touched on how this awareness has helped me navigate significant changes, like taking on a new office space, despite the anxiety and fear that come with it. By connecting with my heart, I found the courage to move forward.
I encouraged listeners to identify their own patterns that hold them back and to use heart-focused techniques to overcome these barriers. The episode concluded with a teaser about upcoming guests who will share their journeys of living and leading with heart. If you are a lover of great books, I also encourage you to check out the Big Leap. After five read throughs, I still get something new from it every time!
Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to sharing more insights and stories with you next week. Never miss an episode! Subscribe to the Whole Soul List to get weekly content designed to help you reconnect with your true self.
Transcript:
[00:04] Dr. Alex: Welcome to live and lead with Heart, the podcast where we help entrepreneurs and leaders shift out of your head and connect with the intelligence of your heart. Join us for short weekly episodes packed with practical insights and inspiring stories designed to ignite your passion, renew your energy, navigate the hard stuff, and reconnect you with your purpose. It’s time to lead with empathy. Cultivate compassion, especially for ourselves. With heart. Tune in weekly to transform your leadership journey from the inside out.
[00:43] Dr. Alex: Welcome back to live and lead with heart. I wanted to share today one of the books that has made the biggest impact in my life. I’ve talked about it on various iterations of this show before, but someone was asking for recommendations and I thought of it again the other day, but it’s called the Big Leap by Gaye Hendricks, and in it, he really gets into some of the inner workings of our mind in what holds us back and talks about this thing called an upper limit problem and kind of goes into this detail of how we can identify when we’re, you know, in his world and community. They call it open when we’re going into an ULP, which is trying to avoid a breakthrough and go back to reset ourselves back to what is comfortable.
And this is something that happens in our subconscious mind. I’m going to kind of take us on this little journey of what it looks like to then bring your heart into this conversation, because this is something that has not been present in the first five times that I read through this book, each of which I got something amazing out of it. But you know, it’s definitely one of those things that I also have the experience of intellectually understanding, but it not necessarily taking root in a transformational way, which is where the heart level is.
Well, it does take root in a transformational way, but more in a way of understanding it than actually living it, if that makes sense. And one of the things that really stood out to me about that book and always has is this pattern that he talks about of illness or accident. And I’m just going to read you a little clip or a little section from this book. But when you suffer symptoms of illness or experience an accident, you often do so because you’re unconsciously trying to prevent yourself from having to do something you don’t really want to do and or protect yourself from something you don’t want to feel.
The illness or accident is your unconscious mind’s clunky way of doing you a favor. It’s a costly favor, though, and once you’ve learned how to operate, navigate your upper limits, you can move through the barriers in a much more friendly way than making yourself sick or having an accident. And this pattern in particular stood out to me as the one that has driven so much of my life and prevented much of my growth. And I can look back and not every single illness or accident, you know, injury I’ve ever had has been this, but a lot of them have.
It’s like things will be going really, really well and then I get sick or injured or, you know, I’m at the point of this major growth and I get sick or injured. And it had stopped being so obvious and so consistent in the last probably, you know, six to eight months. And then over this weekend, I was blessed, I’ll call it that, with the experience of expelling the contents of my stomach every 2 hours for five rounds in both directions. And it is the sickest I’ve ever felt, the sickest I’ve ever been, the most I’ve ever thrown up, the most diarrhea I’ve ever had.
You know, sorry to be gross on this episode, but that’s just what it was. And I also, you know, being mom was super just concerned that it was going to run through the house and everyone else was going to get it and like, doing that with the eleven year old was going to be horrible. And my husband and my son have been fine. And so I, you know, I’ve been thinking about this because it’s actually taken me a while to recover. Like, I’m still not, it’s, it’s made my food variety change because I’m hungry, but I don’t want to eat anything that I had eaten in the last like three days before that happened. So most of my go tos are like not something I want right now.
So that, that’s been cool.
But I also have just been processing like, okay, what, what happened? Because I haven’t been around anyone who’s had this big. Kids maybe had it, but it was like two and a half weeks ago. So that seems like a long incubation time for some sort of flu or virus. And what I realized is that in the last two weeks I have been unearthing and processing and learning how to feel a lot of really deeply buried emotions that I have from the last, you know, six to eight years of my life. And they’ve been hard things to feel and I know I’m ready and I’ve cried and it’s been, been fabulous. I hadn’t cried and, you know, really truly cried in like six years.
And I did that and I’ve been doing all this stuff, but then it’s like my body just went into this major stress ball flight mode over the weekend and literally expelled everything from my body. And, you know, I now I have friends and other people that I’ve connected with that I agree to some extent. It’s like getting rid of all of that toxic stuff and just like, hey, we’re ahead. We’re literally starting over and. And doing something new. And I also know that it can be this pattern with me where it’s a way that I avoid processing or going to that place or allowing myself go to the next level.
And so I wanted to share this just to help you navigate, you know? And I also truly could have just had the flu. Right. But it brings up these questions of, like, where am I trying to run away or hide right now? Like, what am I not wanting to address or what feels scary in my life? And the books, like the big leap and a lot of other things I’ve read and a lot of the personal growth and development I have done over the years, as many of us have, tend to be processed in our mind and very intellectualized. And so talking about living and leading with heart, bringing heart into this, really connecting with your heart, and just pausing for a moment to breathe in and out through your heart.
It’s called heart focused breathing. It’s a heart math technique that I do with a lot of my clients now and myself. You know, that was one of the things I had to bring myself back to because getting scientific on you, like, my heart rate variability is something I measure coherence, which is when our brain, our nervous system, and our heart are all in sync. And that’s this place where I. We really thrive, where intuition flows, where we make better decisions. Like, everything is just really clear and we feel good. We’re in that flow state, if you will.
I was way out of that over the weekend, and it’s taken a couple days to get it back. And not like anything is bad or wrong. I was just really like, wow, that is crazy how much that getting sick in that way impacted that. It’s not that we always have to look for the deeper meaning or any of that, but I just wanted to bring awareness because, you know, for me, this is something I’m aware of, is that I get sick or injured when I’m on the precipice of some major growth. And I now have access and tools to still step into that growth without too much stress. And just allowing my body to kind of, like, do its freak out thing and then be like, okay, what’s really important? And not allow myself to be stopped. I have a friend who’s contemplating a significant change in her career right now, but she’s also feeling really stopped because of anxiety and fear of the change itself, and it’s keeping her from maybe even submitting the application. And I had been feeling a similar anxiety around taking on an office space again, which is something I’m doing at the beginning of August, because it’s just time to come out of hiding from my virtual business in my house. And, you know, I’m actually really excited about it in a lot of ways.
But I made myself, you know, the day Monday, which was two days post this whole expel everything from my body experience, I went ahead and sent in the application, and that was one of those things that, like, you know, in my heart, I know it’s right. And so I did it even though my head is freaking out. And this is where if you identify those patterns in your life, I think our access to it is not necessarily gay. Hendrix gets into taking control of our thoughts and rewiring our thoughts.
And yes, all of that happens and is something that needs to happen in order for true change to happen in terms of neuroplasticity and rewiring how our brain works and how our body responds physiologically. But a much easier place to access that is to actually just go from your heart and connect to your heart and ask your heart for guidance on what you need to do and what’s the next thing. And so my heart has been telling me through this whole thing, like, just be gentle with yourself and believe in yourself.
And that’s something I haven’t done in a long time, actually, is have that unwavering just belief in me and what I’m capable of, which is odd because I talk about it a lot of times and help other people do it, but, you know, that’s really what’s been underneath there. And so just embracing, like, my body had to freak out. I tried to go into my pattern of getting sick or injured to take myself out of the game and not letting that stop me. So, you know, I want to leave you with again.
These are short but deep, you know, thoughts for the week, like where. Where do you feel yourself pulling back? Or what is your pattern? It doesn’t have to be getting sick or injured. You know, there can be other things that just cyclically will take you out of the game when you’re on the verge of growing and really stepping into a more powerful and aligned version of yourself in any area of life. So what are those for you? How are they holding you back?
And then play with this is about living and leading with heart. So play with instead of getting trapped in your mind, if you find yourself thinking about all the things and the worries and the, you know, just stuck there in that pattern and loop, slow down your breathing.
Put your hand on your heart if it feels good, if not, don’t. But focus on the air moving in and out of your heart.
Find something you can appreciate.
Feel compassion for love, care, joy. Like just access one of those moments where you can connect with that kind of emotion and ask your heart for guidance in the situation and you might find that you can act differently.
So for me, instead of running and hiding and I being sick for the next three weeks and you know, not doing the things that I know I’m really meant to be doing, I’m still able to take action. I’m recovering, I still don’t feel great, I’ll be honest. But I’m recovering and my body’s catching up and you know, things are starting to feel better and my heart is leading me in the direction I know I’m supposed to go. So with that, we’ll end for this week. I’m excited to announce I’m going to have some guests coming on to kind of share their perspective and enjoys and stories of what it means to live and lead from the heart, with the heart, you know, with your heart connection and lust from your head. So those will start coming out in the fall and otherwise we will see you next week.