Complete to Create: How to Stop Having Unfinished Business w/ Gay Hendricks
🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode explores the transformative power of completion
—the practice of letting go of past regrets, future anxieties, and unresolved emotions to create space for presence, creativity, and connection. Gay Hendricks shares practical tools and profound insights on how to live in the present moment, embrace life's wild creativity, and manifest your fullest potential.
Notable Quotes
- If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.
– Gay Hendricks, quoting the Gospel of Thomas.
- Completion is about letting go of what you can’t control—whether it’s the past or the future—so you can create from the present.
– Gay Hendricks
- I’m making up a little story, and I’d like to run it by you to make sure what I’m experiencing is true.
– Sophie Chiche, on opening non-judgmental conversations.
🌀 The Power of Completion
- Gay Hendricks explains that incompletions—unresolved feelings, unspoken words, or unfinished tasks—drain energy and block creativity.
- Completion involves letting go of attachments to the past and future, which are often fueled by fear and the illusion of control.
- He shares the two files
framework: categorize situations into what you can control and what you cannot. Most of life falls into the latter.
💡 Living in the Present Moment
- The present moment is where creativity and transformation happen, but many avoid it due to fear of change or the unknown.
- Katie Hendricks emphasizes the importance of living in discovery,
where each moment is an opportunity for co-creation and connection.
- Practical tip: Notice physical sensations like tightness or anxiety as signals that you’re stuck in the past or future.
🗣️ The 10-Second Sweaty Conversation
- Gay Hendricks introduces the concept of a 10-second sweaty conversation
—a brief, unarguable expression of your feelings (e.g., I feel sad about what you said
).
- These conversations clear emotional blockages, fostering intimacy and creativity in relationships.
- Katie Hendricks suggests starting with, I feel scared to share this,
to ease into vulnerable communication.
🌊 Letting Go to Manifest
- Letting go doesn’t mean ignoring emotions but embracing them without attachment. Gay Hendricks advises befriending feelings like anger or fear to use their energy creatively.
- He shares a metaphor of surfing: if you focus on past waves, you’ll miss the next great one.
- Manifestation thrives when you release the past and future, allowing the present to guide your actions.
🌟 The Courage to Pursue Dreams
- Gay Hendricks recounts stories of people who avoided their dreams due to fear or misplaced priorities, like a woman who didn’t travel because of her sister’s coffee ritual.
- He urges listeners to prioritize their potential and not delay their dreams, as unfulfilled desires can lead to regret.
- The key to a fulfilling life is expressing your unique genius and making meaningful contributions to others.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
Most people are either rehashing the past or obsessing over the future - never living in the present moment.
The result? Walking around with major incompletions that keep us from connection, creativity, and wholeness. Carrying unfinished conversations, unspoken words, unresolved feelings, and unfelt experiences.
And that robs us of something precious…all the incredible things we could be creating right now!
Completion isn’t about perfection or checking every box. It’s the deep, often uncomfortable practice of letting go of past regrets, imagined futures, buried emotions, and the need to control what can’t be controlled.
When we learn how to complete and release, we create space for what’s trying to emerge right now, and that’s where the richest experience can be found.
Why is it so hard to live in the present moment? How do we detach from the past and the future?
In this episode, Gay Hendricks returns to talk about one of life’s most powerful skills: knowing how and when to let go. We discuss how to complete things and why that makes room for essence, energy, presence, and genius.
Things You’ll Learn In This Episode
-Why we stay in the past (or worry about the future)
What’s really behind our resistance to being in the present moment? Why are the past and future safe distractions from the wild creativity of now?
-The hidden cost of incompletions
How do unspoken feelings, unfinished business, and mental replays block our ability to manifest new ideas, deepen relationships, and feel fully alive?
-The 10-second sweaty conversation that changes everything
What’s the one unarguable sentence that can complete years of stuck emotion, tension, or confusion in a relationship, in just seconds?
Guest Bio
Gay Hendricks has served for more than 30 years as one of the major contributors to the fields of relationship transformation and bodymind therapies. Along with his wife, Dr. Kate Hendricks, Gay is the author of many bestsellers, including Conscious Loving, At The Speed Of Life, The Big Leap, and the New York Times bestseller, Five Wishes. Dr. Hendricks received his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford in 1974. After a twenty-one-year career as a professor at the University of Colorado, he founded The Hendricks Institute and later co-founded its charitable organization, Foundation for Conscious Living. He was also the founder of a virtual learning center for transformation and a publishing company, and was a co-founder of a conscious entertainment company. Throughout his career he has done executive coaching with more than 800 executives, including the top management at such firms as Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and KLM. His book, The Corporate Mystic, is