If You Feel LOST, LAZY & UNMOTIVATED In Life, WATCH THIS! | Jay Shetty

you'll get to where you want in life just not in the way you imagined and that's because the path that's paved up and down is far different to the path we pave i've always had friends who are older than me and i could see a lot of them in the most successful careers successful jobs beautiful partners whatever it was but i saw a sense of lack of fulfillment meaning and purpose in their lives and i've always been an observer and i would see these people who are like five years older than me seven years older than me maybe 10 years older than me and i'd be watching them and go is that the life i want and often the advice i give to people today is fast forward where you are look at yourself in 10 15 20 years time and ask yourself the question is that where i want to be if you're in a company look at the person who's 20 years ahead of you and ask yourself is that where i want to be if you're in a startup look at where other startups have got to in similar roles and go is that where i want to be and if the answer is no then you need to find a new path and for me the answer at that time from observing was no the path that my parents or society or the university i went to or the community i had that was carving out for me it didn't feel like the path for me so i was almost seeking an alternative or a new path i was just so fortunate that it happened to be an uplifting powerful path as opposed to something that could have actually taken me down the wrong road because that could have been possible too so walk me through the first time you step off the plane in india it's summer and so i'm living there i'm waking up i'm almost doing all the practices just as if you were shadowing a ceo i'm just shadowing a monk and so i'm just shadowing his lifestyle so we wake up he's he's like one of the most elite monks so we're waking up at like 2 a.m every day after sleeping at like 9 or 10 p.m and then we study these ancient vedas which are 5 000 plus years old together and we spend two hours and i'm studying with the best of the best here so he can like analyze and assimilate and i'm learning fast taking notes then 4 am we go to collective meditation we do those practices with the other monks as well 6 am we have personal meditation so i'm literally going through the life of a monk and falling in love with it step by step going wow i've never had this experience before i just threw myself in and i was practicing it to the t right it wasn't like oh no my back hurts when i sit on the floor i can't stay here for too long or you know today when people are like oh i can't meditate for longer than two minutes i was like no i'm gonna do it for two hours if that's what they're doing i'm gonna give it a go because i can only test the hypothesis will only be true if the experiment is carried out to the degree that they are so if the hypothesis is if you live like this you are happy more fulfilled then i want to do that all right so let's explore this then through the lens of creating one's own perfect life yes which is pretty interesting especially because interesting because i think this is so accurate to the way that most people are it's not like oh there's some grand missing thing in my life but you took that first action so codify this for me or or for anybody that wants they don't know what their ideal life looks like they just know that they're not living it yet so step number one is take it seriously to find out if the hypothesis is true or not you have to take the um the the experiment you have to do it sincerely what comes after that i think even one step before that is is opening yourself up to new role models and new experiences see we live in echo chambers we're just surrounded by the same thinking how often do you bump into a monk you know it just doesn't happen you don't have no one has a dinner party and goes oh yeah we just invited the monk you know from town like the local monk like no one ever does that and so we meet people who are just like us most of the time and we talk about this in business all the time if you want to be a billionaire spend time with billionaires if you want to be a millionaire spend time with millionaires if you want to be a tech startup spend time with you know that's that's the common rhetoric that we hear all the time but what if you want to find purpose and master the mind there's no one better than a monk who's mastered the mind so for me the first step is just opening yourself up to new experiences and new role models because most of us can't see ourselves in people so then we try and fit ourselves into the boxes that we do see and and i mean there's this beautiful quote that i've been saying it everywhere and i wish i wrote it but i didn't so it's by a philosopher and writer named cooley and he said that today i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am right and just let that blow your mind for a moment it's uh it's so powerful i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am so we live in this perception of a perception of ourselves hence my identity is made by what my parents think i should be my identity is made up by what my college or university thinks i should achieve while you're living in that bubble in that echo chamber getting to what you really want to do is impossible because maybe that just doesn't fit and i think so many people feel that way today that they don't fit into the current education system they don't fit with the three or four or five careers that you're taught exist so that process of self-excavation and actualization first requires being exposed you can't be what you can't see if i never saw a monk i would never have wanted to be a monk if i never meet a billionaire i wouldn't want to be one because i wouldn't know what that feels like i don't know what it looks like i don't know what it takes and i think that's the biggest challenge of our society that we're not exposed so that's the first step being exposed to unique experiences and role models second step is finding that experience or role model that you're passionate about and exactly like you said taking it seriously shadow their network with them spend time with them observe them even from afar it takes that observation being addicted to observing that person's lifestyle and then the third step is going yes or no does that work for me not everyone who's going to go off and become a monk is going to feel like the way i did and that's cool but not everyone is going to go and follow and shadow a billionaire and go that's exactly the lifestyle i want they may want the result but do they want the hard work that goes with it and so for me that's the third step it's observing focusing shadowing getting as close to the process of that individual and then going yes or no do i want that process not do i want the result everyone wants to be that monk who's fully enlightened you know can walk through has an incredible aura that people just gravitate towards but when you realize he has to wake up at 2 a.m every day and sleeps about four to six hours you're like ah you know i don't want to do that that doesn't sound like me all right so yeah a couple things one you said he's as powerful as he is yeah find power for me power being so from amongst perspective perspective the greatest power is to be self-controlled to be able to train the mind and energy to focus it exactly where you want it and when you want it to be you are completely detached and undeterred from external ups and downs you're able to navigate anything that seems tough challenging fun excitement with the same amount of being equipoised and balanced in equanimity without being too excited in pleasure or being too depressed in pain but knowing how to navigate every situation to me that's great strength and great power um i heard in one of your talks you were saying that if you look at um a literal lifeline a heartbeat for instance you know it's it's up and it's down and people have this sense that something like enlightenment would be that um the equanimity forever and just an even keel and you said but what what does that resemble it resembles a flat line when you die correct so what is it like what i love about you is you sort of went into the wilderness of being a monk but you brought it back to the real world because when you talk about a monk you talk about them being detached and that to me seems like the only real way to have that sort of super even keel existence which is not appealing to me personally so if you're bringing back that notion of power of having control over yourself not letting your emotions take you everywhere but knowing that life is is the series of ups and downs what does that power look like when it's brought back absolutely and actually that's the whole aim of monk training it's it's more like a training system than it is a lifelong commitment it is bringing that mindset into the real world where you get to test it now i got to do that for real when i left being a monk around five years ago and when i left it was like oh my god i'm in the real world now again real world i have to think about how to apply all this i'm gonna test for real all this stuff that i've learned and i was scared like i was nervous i was anxious and all those things that i've been trained not to be rushed back because for the first time in my life i had to really put it into practice and i love that feeling i'm so glad that i had to do that so for me actually the mindset is completely trainable to bring into the real world that's that's what i'm trying to do and what it allows you to do is it allows you to grain clarity and perspective when you need it because you know when you can just take a bird's-eye view from something you know when you need to get close into something you know when you need to pull back from something there's a beautiful verse in the bhagavad-gita that says that detachment is not that you owe nothing detachment is that nothing owns you and i love it because to me that summarizes detachment in a way that it's not usually explained usually people see detachment as being away from everything actually the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not letting it consume and own you and that's real power that's real strength how many people do we know that have had fame and then that fame has ruined them so for me that definition of detachment is possible to practice even in the real world rather than saying oh i'm just gonna have a really simple life i'm just gonna have nothing in life what was the best part about being a monk the best part about being a monk is that your morning routine and practices are so powerful that you can actually aspire for more incredible values in life because your mind is clear because your mind is clear and you have that ability to have more clarity so you can seek that which is which is higher so i'll give an example of what i mean define is that we're about to define what is higher yes exactly so for me being able to overcome ego being able to overcome envy being able to overcome jealousy being able able to overcome the negative of competitive state there's a positive competitive state and there's a negative competitive state today when people are looking on instagram or facebook or youtube all you're looking at is oh she got that many likes or he got that many likes she got engaged or he got married or oh my god look at her body or look at that and it's like that stuff's destroying us inside envy jealousy ego greed to be able to have enough clarity to purify yourself of those things is going to alleviate the biggest anxieties and depressions of our time and mental health problems and and we know that we know that because all the mental health research today suggests that things like isolation overexposure we now can have more pain consumption in one day because of what we're exposed to than the pain we would have had in a lifetime that's huge like that's ridiculous to think that in one day because of the media news and social media we consume more negative than we did in a lifetime for me being able to have time energy and clarity to focus on self-purification that is the best thing about being a monk because you have that time reflection and a process and an environment that only allows you to become more purified of those things so if i was the interviewer that i wanted to be i would have asked you this question when we were on the topic but i'm going to go back just because it's important enough um you gave us the three ways that you can really construct your ideal life but define an ideal life for me so an ideal life for me is a life and this applies to a company an organization and institution for me is an ideal life is when we all have a head a heart and a hand all three elements together working in alignment without one or the other we start to lose something if you only have a head and a heart you will find that life is stable and defined yeah sure sure sure so ahead is the clarity of vision what you want what you want knowing what you want the way you picture life and being able to navigate and make the decisions to get there that's a good head a good heart is being able to understand what your intuition and heart wants being able to connect and tap into that understanding deeper and beyond the vision you may have painted for yourself so i often say to people that you'll get to where you want in life just not in the way you imagined and that's because the path that's paved up and down is far different to the path we pave so you can have a great head and a great vision and a great mission and know where you want to go but if your heart's not able to have that resilience and be able to adapt and and have compassion and care and all of that then then you're not going to be able to make the toughest decisions without your heart but to be able to realize that we need to care and be sustainable and long-lasting requires a heart and a hand is that service wanting to pass that on that which you have wanting to give it forward pay it forward the idea of serving with what you have i often say to people your passion is for you your purpose is for others your passion makes you happy but when you use your passion to make a difference in someone else's life that's a service that's a purpose and that's the hand so those are my three elements of an ideal life i like that a lot and i when you first said it i'm glad you defined it because when you first said it i thought the heart was going to be the part about like you know just compassion caring for others doing something for other people but i like that the hand being tied to service so one thing that i think a lot about is deep fulfillment like really when i think about okay what is a life we're living honestly it comes down to neurochemistry for me and it comes down to experiencing this world in a way that optimizes for for sustainable pleasure which i'll differentiate between a bowl of ice cream a bump of cocaine those are pleasurable and i i haven't done the cocaine but the ice cream i can speak for okay i've done both good yeah so i'll trust that it holds up um but they they don't bring a lasting fulfillment it's not sustainable right so both of them end up creating this self-destructive loop and purpose really does become that thing that gives you something that is on a neurochemical level deeply satisfying absolutely and how much of this like how did you marry the deeply spiritual the often abstract oftentimes i'll hear spiritual speakers talk and and i feel them sort of drifting off into the ether how did you marry that to experimentation neuroscience practicality like one why do you find that interesting and then two what are you doing with that so i studied behavioral science at university so i've always been fascinated by why people do what they do and whenever i was reading these books that are 5 000 years old my greatest fascination was finding a principle and finding its relevance in modern science and i said to myself the day i can't find that i'll quit i won't believe in this anymore so i'm still doing that and i'm ready to quit if someone shows me a piece of science and i can't find a principle in these ancient literatures or actually what i like to call these timeless literatures then i'll give up my faith because for me it has to track forward and i'll give you a really basic example today we're in the gratitude movement there's like a million gratitude journals out there there's a million scientific studies on gratitude and gratitude has been linked to better mental health self-awareness better relationships i mean there's so many scientific studies on the on the neural level that shows that gratitude is great for your mind brain and fulfillment now i look back like gratitude is all over the timeless wisdom one of the first things we were trying to do when we were a monk was to pay our respects to the earth for what it gives us and you do that first thing in the morning what is that if not gratitude when you wake up in the morning you thank the earth for the food you thank the earth for the water you thank the earth for allowing yourself to walk you start your day with gratitude today the biggest tip on forbes and ink and everything is start your day with gratitude like where does it come from it's it's right there these things are old so i get fascinated i'm intrigued by the parallels and patterns because it saves you time it's the same way as which if i say that this business person got invested by this company and that's why they're successful because they had the right investors etc that's a pattern so i know if i'm building a business in that area i'm going to look for investors like that it's the same thing that pattern saves you time rather than you trying to figure out does gratitude work how shall i be grateful creating your own process almost it's really interesting life has taught me to stop believing everything i think uh and the way that it's taught me that is by relentlessly punishing me every time i overinvest and being right and i remember when my wife and i first got together she used to get chest infections all the time and she told me it's because um of the ac and i was like that doesn't make sense and she was like no no my my grandmother used to just swear up and down if you if you're hot and you stand in front of a fan that you're gonna get sick and i was like that is the biggest load of like crap i've ever heard in my life that does not make sense like getting sick comes from either bacteria or virus like it's that simple and she was like i'm just saying this my grandma always said and it seems true to me and i was just like oh god this is exhausting and then one time i went to a doctor and i was like yeah and my wife is crazy and thinks that when you're hot if you stand in front of ac it'll make you sick and he goes oh yeah she's right and i was like hold on and he was like well she's sort of right he's like this is what's happening you have a mucous layer membrane in your throat that's it keeps it moist keeps germs from being able to break the break through the barrier and so they get trapped they go to your stomach they're killed by the acid or whatever and he said but if you get a crack in that then the the bacteria virus can actually get into your bloodstream and that's how you get sick and it's just drying her throat out and i was like whoa and it was one of those moments where i was like how many wives tales are true like directionally they're not accurate but they're true if that's what i mean yes and so that's how i think when you think of a book that's lasted as long as it as it has and i know you and i we've never talked about this but we share a real fascination for storytelling yes because it's a way to convey an idea that resonates emotionally and allows people to carry it on and pass it on and obviously this all starts long before we have science and can prove any of this but we see the patterns we need a way to encapsulate the pattern we encapsulate it in a story the story is in and of itself totally fake but now in a modern context we're getting lost in that the the story is fake even though the take-home message is incredibly powerful yes and so as i i mean it's the classic story right the more you learn the less you realize you know and just as i've gotten older and really started to understand the stuff and read as much as i do and quite frankly live and suffer and go through things like my wife having microbiome issues and at first thinking her all of her descriptions make absolutely no sense and then you stop passing a judgment on it and start saying what if everything she's saying is actually true like what how would we treat it then right absolutely and so there is something really fascinating there now i find myself i'm way more emotionally drawn to the science because when i can picture it i have a much easier time doing something about it so when you were talking about the things that you learned from meditation i've gotten tremendous value out of meditation but it's nothing like what you've learned so for me it was once i understood that diaphragm breathing made sense because it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system then because i understood it it like was the understanding becomes a force multiplier absolutely all right let's talk about behavioral science self-awareness watching your content which have you ever looked at how much content you've put out no it's a lot dude like when you search your name like to go because i normally try to watch like basically everything and i was like i give up it's just it's really incredible um and going through that stuff it seems really clear to me that you have massive self-awareness and what would you say like is a is there a process for people to gain more self-awareness and then what are from a behavioral um [Music] you know just human behavior level what are things that trip up the average person the first answer i mean i'm a huge fan of the book thinking fast and slow i don't know how if you've read it yeah it's a great book because for me it's got a really close pattern connection again to what i studied so just understanding system one and system two if anyone watching hasn't read it i highly recommend it just being able to differentiate between system one and system two as daniel kahneman calls it in the vedic philosophy we call differentiating between the mind and the intelligence knowing how to differentiate the voices in your head is the first level of self-awareness so break down what system one and system two are absolutely so system one is your initial response to anything that happens it's a stop that i can't really say so if you say something i don't like my system one naturally would be a face that i pull that i don't agree with that that's that's an understanding of what system one is it's your initial default reaction in the moment that can be positive often for example if someone pulls out a knife you feel scared and you run that system one that's a good thing it's it's safe for you but also system one is someone says something that hurts your ego and you start defending yourself immediately that's also that's a negative of system one that we would refer to as the mind it's built up of conditioning those responses are conditioned those default elements are all there because of habit and continuous practice the system two is more like the intelligence what i would say is more like the parent if you can consider system one to be more like a child system two is more like a parent it looks more at the long term it looks more at the bigger picture it processes that default reaction through a set of checking and metrics to decide whether that's true the child is the the one that wants everything right away impatient quickly responding straight away reacting when it doesn't get what he wants the intelligent parent and good one knows what the child wants and needs and what's better for in the long term just starting there and being able to reflect and observe the different voices inside of us is a great place to start your self-awareness because the biggest challenge is that most of us don't know what we're listening to and we don't most of us don't even know that there are more than one voice inside of us just getting over that line is a huge win because now at least you're trying to differentiate in what you're hearing and that's going to help you make better decisions in the future so that was answer one does that answer your question oh yes and second one was what um so that's awareness how can what are like typical things that trip people up that so in your answer just now it's like okay if you want to become more aware just know that those two things are happening right you're gonna have an initial response and then one that's more calculated now be aware of these two or three things that are also coming for you the biggest challenge is that there's just so much noise it's like have you ever had someone in your home maybe it's your wife or maybe it's a friend or whatever just play a really bad song too often right just playing a song that you really don't actually heard my wife laugh because she knows how guilty she's right okay there you go right there you go and you just play a song and just think oh turn that off and after a while it's been on for so long that you you become immune to it like it's just there and it's still on it's there in the back of your mind and you didn't manage to turn it off so the noise that i describe in life whether it's your parents expectations whether it's society's expectations whether it's your partner's expectations all of those are like noise in the background and that noise drowns out your ability to understand the mind and the intelligence that's one of the biggest trip ups i was looking at i gave a presentation called build a life not a resume it's also one of my popular videos but very good video thank you man thank you so much and when i did the research so you don't see this in the video because this research didn't make it into the video but the research that i was doing was around the most common resume lies the truth is over 40 to 50 percent of us lie on our resumes yeah if you don't you're missing an opportunity i'll just say that yeah there you go right so and and i started to dig deeper and i was looking at you know a lot of people lie about their dates of employment so instead of three days it's now three months you know whatever it may be now i dug deeper and i wanted to meet some of these people and speak to people and so i spoke to people who lie on their resumes and we know that at least 40 to 50 percent tell us they do you know the thing is no one was proud of that no one was like yeah yeah i know i'm gonna get really what it came down to is we're really insecure about our own abilities really what it came down to is we're not confident about what we have to offer what it came down to is a lack of self-awareness what it came down to is a lack of understanding what am i good at what am i passionate about what am i bringing to the table that's what people were really worried about they were worried about the job but when you dug beneath the surface the real behavioral trait that was coming out was insecurity and being unconfident about one's potential that that tells us a lot that indicates a lot about human behavior and human nature that the noise from outside makes us want to fit into a container and that stops us from differentiating between what is my mind saying and what is my intelligence saying and what happens is that noise becomes your voice so that noise becomes what you think is what you're saying and most people don't realize that until 10 20 30 years down the line how the hell do you like figure out so your analogy is great yeah song's on you don't even realize it's there anymore it becomes total white noise you're oblivious to it in fact you'll only notice it if it gets turned off correct so how do they identify that like do you have a process for that how do you hear the thing that you no longer hear so that you can shut it off yeah absolutely one of the biggest ones and we say this all the time but it applies mostly to this is switching your association is switching association to people that you hang out right it's like changing your circle because if you're only hearing the same thing from that circle the only way to turn it off without you having to do mass amounts of reflection is changing your circle where you start hearing we all ultimately find the things we want to hear right we know that the challenge is that we think things come with emotions feelings we think things come with feelings and emotions and guess what they don't so if you chase money well they might for a moment right or they won't i don't think they even do also it's such a false sense of feeling i don't know maybe for a moment but it's so short-lived that it's it's not even worth counting almost so it's like when you when you think that i'm chasing money guess what you will get money yep and that's great money is really important and money is a really important resource but guess what money is not now going to fill that gap that void that feeling that emotion that you're missing in your life what are most people missing we're missing a deep sense of love i think i think the biggest need in the world as we've heard many times before from all the ancient texts they they summarize it like this to love and be loved like that is the need of humanity to love and be loved and when we don't experience that we then start looking for status we then start looking for money then we then start looking for recognition just to help us give the feeling of false sense of love correct and the challenge is because most of us didn't experience that from our parents and this is the key thing what we crave in life is what we did or didn't get from our parents what our parents did give us is what we continue to crave what they didn't give us is what we continue to crave so you'll find that most people's love languages that they chase are things that their parents didn't give them so if their parents didn't give them time they now crave everyone's time if their parents didn't give them gifts they'd crave gifts if their parents didn't give them acts of service they're craving those acts of service so it's because of our childhood and if we don't learn to process all of that experience which most people never get the time to do and i empathize with that because i've had to go through that i've seen me repeating my parents patterns i've seen something you were craving so i would crave a big thing for me was i would crave surprises and gifts because that's your thing yeah that's my thing still it's your thing it's still my favorite yeah and and i did your parents not do that for you no they did my mom did a lot of it that's why you're still quiet correct so my mom would always every year on my birthday she'd always surprised me with the one thing i wanted and i wasn't support growing up i didn't have a lot growing up but she would get that one thing whether it was like a power rangers toy or whether it was whatever it was you know something yeah yeah things you want as a kid right and she would always surprise me with that and that became so deep rooted now i'll give you an example when i then married my wife you just expect people to know that that they're gonna do the same thing totally actually no because i'm expecting my wife to be like my mom in the sense of i expected a surprise or show me love in the same way and she doesn't know that she's not a mind reader i can't explain expect her to know that so it took communication it took time for me to explain that so anyway i think that's where it stems from that desire it doesn't come from any you can say it comes from society and education of course it does but i think the deepest place it comes is what your parents did or didn't give you that's that's where it comes from yeah now this was really cool i think uh right now there's a lot of anxiety there's a lot of concern there's a lot of fear in the world with coronavirus and just people concerned in general of the chaos of their life whether it's gronovirus or anything else that's happening people seem to live in this fear state of mind right now a lot you talked about the fear of fear and how you had to learn to let go of your fear of fear what does actually mean letting go of the fear of fear yeah so i talk about how we fear the wrong things how do we fear so most of us are fearful of how our friends are reacting what's happening on social media and what's the random bit of news that we heard none of it is fact based that's one of the biggest issues worry-based it's worry-based and it's also imagination based so we become fiction writers we've all watched too many movies now we start writing these beautiful movies in our head we're not beautiful scary movies in our head of what may happen so our imagination and seneca said it best we suffer twice one in reality and one in imagination right we suffer twice and this is what actually happens to us in the story we continue to tell totally now there's this incredible study in the book that i have to talk about so they took monks and they took non-monks and they competed against each other so they put this plate where you experience heat and so what happens is the non-monks touch this plate now this plate heats up gradually softly and then at one point it gets really hot for 10 seconds and it cools down and so what happened is that when the non-monks touched it the anxiety and pressure and stress in their brain just triggered straight away even though it wasn't that hot it wasn't hard it was heating but it wasn't hard to do anything major to you but the anxiety and stress in imagination or in anticipation went through the roof in the non-monks now this is what's fascinating when the monks touched it they showed that it didn't feel anything as it rose but as it got to its highest they felt physical pain but they showed no trigger of emotional pain because they did not assign any emotional element to that pain so my point with that is you can look at the news right now and you can get scared straight away and get incomplete freeze mode feeling stuck paralyzed whatever it is because what you're now doing is you're creating a story of what's going to happen and that story and you can cause sickness in yourself you can question just by the story so not actually the reality that the facts of the disease hitting you or something happening physically to you totally and that story again can be used positively so your story may actually be true but if it's going to be true now you can prepare and that shifts you away from being scared because now you're preparing and so the real you can be confident because you're prepared exactly and so we should be shifting our fear energy into preparation energy because what fear does is it keeps you locked there right we just feel stuck i'll give you an example when you were preparing for big games when you used to play in the nfl right and you're playing american football against some of the biggest athletes in the world it's like you can either sit there and be scared that you're going to play this game on the weekend or you can prepare and your confidence is in the preparation so when people go how do i feel confident right now are you preparing are you putting the reps are you putting the wraps are you building your immunity are you taking your vitamins are you drinking lots of water are you drinking lots of water are you taking the steps that are needed to prepare for whatever's coming you will feel more confident that way yeah so how do we learn to let go of the fear of fear though like how do we say okay we're only going to allow it to hurt us when it actually hurts us and not the fear of it is there a process is there just an awareness of this that when you're in anxiety worry stress fear you you just breathe and meditate then what's the process of letting go of the fear of fear yeah so meditation mindfulness powerful tools but i'd say the process and i want to be as tactical and strategic as we can the thing is to get really close to that fear so what we usually do is raise it embrace it get close to get intimate with it we become the bat we're in we run away from fear we like to run away and go oh it's not coming with me and or what we do is we hear one thing and we define the whole understanding of our fear based on that one thing so it's like someone and i'll give you a normal example in a normal life scenario someone says to you in the office you know that you know that they're going to cut a few people and you don't even check you don't even know and now you just made it real and now you're running with it and you're trying to run away from it so you're trying to avoid conversations with your boss you're trying to avoid any conflict you're trying to you know you're just thinking you're just trying to avoid it and so actually what you need to do is go okay let me actually discover that fear let me go intimate with that fear let me ask myself where's that fear coming from what am i really scared of what am i really scared of am i really scared of losing my job am i scared of not having any money what am i really scared of and when you get to the root and i call it the y ladder in the book so it's asking yourself what am i scared of and then go why am i scared of this why am i scared of this why am i scared of this and when you can't ask why any longer you've got to the answer and that's what you have to deal with most of us are not dealing with what we're actually scared of so that's how you let go you let go by keep asking yourself so i'll give an example of mine like if if i heard that or if you hear that in your office that people are getting cut it's like you just get scared and panicked but the question is why am i scared of that am i scared of that because i haven't been working hard for six months am i scared of that because i've been skipping meetings am i scared of that because i know my boss will probably fire me first or am i scared because i've been performing really well and i'm expecting a promotion knowing which one it is sets you up to build the path forward not knowing that just puts you in this panic frenzy i think also like doing all the things you talked about which is discovering within yourself being aware of it but then also just have the conversation run it with your manager your boss and say hey listen i heard some rumors that there might be some cuts and i want to let you know that i'm 100 committed to doing whatever it takes to help this company grow yes i believe in this mission more than anything here's what i've been doing the last three months and here's what i want to continue to do is there anything else i can do totally like show them to like why you shouldn't get cut exactly and that's you know how to approach that discussion when you know which side you're on yeah what your fear is i remember as a freshman playing football i was playing division two football minnesota they usually redshirt all the freshmen and i went into this with a big ego thinking like i'm gonna start or at least i want to play right so i went into it with an ego in the first place but i also which wasn't good but i also went into it with some things that were good from this conversation i told the coach straight up like i know you don't play freshman but my intention is to play what is it going to take for me in order to get on the field you know do i need to get her early do i need to stay late can i sit here in the office with you after the uh uh before practice and go over game film whatever it was and he was he told me yeah i need you to come in the office every single day and watch game film with me i need to be with your receiver coach every single day beforehand and doing reps and i just did it and i eventually started to play my freshman year i didn't start in the beginning but i started to start at the ends and that for me it was powerful it's like i dressed it because i wanted to play and i was afraid i wasn't going to play at all and just waste a year of practicing like every other freshman would do there that was my ego going like i need to play but i was also like i'll do whatever it takes and i'll practice and i'll confront it with conversation and say this is my intention this is my vision and i'm gonna do whatever it takes for you and so i think that that's a perfect example yeah you're in a workplace you've got to be confronting it and be proactive in your company correct and that's a perfect example of getting close to fear rather than running away from it spot on man for me my whole mission in the last year in moving forward the next projects i'm working on are all about belief in yourself i believe self-doubt is the killer of dreams and i believe that and you have this amazing graph in here it's about ego versus self-esteem how do we build self-belief self-esteem self-confidence while also not allowing our ego to be so big and think we can just do anything how do we balance ego and self-confidence so they don't hurt each other yeah absolutely and what we experience most of the time is extremes so the two extremes that most of us experience are either i have to think i'm the best i'm the best in the world i can crush anyone like i'm like gonna show everyone what i'm like or most of us experience the other extreme which is i'm the worst i'm the stupidest i'm the dumbest i'm the most worthless i'm the biggest loser notice how that's both ego yes why is the negative so the ego wants to be the best of the best or the ego wants to be the worst of the worst the ego won't accept being in the middle really the ego wants to feel the deepest sense of being the lowest and that's why victim mentality is actually a subsequence of ego really yeah that's how it's explained in the bhagavad-gita because the point is that you can't deal with just being bad you have to be the worst my pain is the worst i think um jada talked about this on your podcast where she was like you know i had to tell people why my hurt was more painful than their hurt and they could never understand how bad it was exactly exactly right yeah that's ego as well so you see these two sides of ego keeping us locked away and so the only way to get with that and the only way to balance it and bring it all into one is genuine self-honesty honesty is the best place to be the best thing about honesty is i'm really good at this i'm really average of that and i'm really bad at that and the challenge we have with that is most of us have no idea we just have zero self-awareness about what we are good at what we are better than what we're average at so we think i'm pretty average at everything i'm pretty good at everything and when i hear those answers i'm like simple things just go and talk to people that know you yeah what am i great at awesome what's my superpower what do i do differently what do you think i do that is different than no one else does and guess what i guarantee you if you ask a colleague if you ask a friend if you ask a family member if you ask people they'll say different things but you get to learn about yourself so real confidence comes from knowing your strengths and going all in on them your confidence does not come from just standing up the right way or just saying the right stuff to yourself yeah that's and that's important i i'm a big believer in all of that but what i'm saying is that that doesn't build real confidence real confidence comes from thinking i'm really good at this i know i can do this and i love doing it and really this is the most important bit confidence comes from serving other people when you see the impact you have on others and this is the biggest issue the reason why we have such low self-esteem today in the world is because people are not serving others so they don't see the profound impact they have on others when you put out a video or a podcast and people tag you on instagram and they say louis you stop me from depression or you help me out of a divorce or people when they watch my content they'll be like that stopped me from committing suicide or whatever it is when you see that you get such a deep sense of self-worth that you matter and guess what everyone matters whether you matter to one people or one million people everyone matters but if you see your impact on someone's life you will feel such a deep sense of self-worth and so whether you're serving at a giving out free food or whether you're serving at a local charity place or whether you're serving through your work serve serve serve because when you take that step you you get a boost of self-esteem but why do so many of us live in fear and desire mode as opposed to duty and love mode why is that like why we still focus on self as opposed to service it's conditioned it's conditioned right i've said this before that we're wired for generosity but we're educated for greed i think i just said it to you two it's like and when i said that and the statement it was yeah and it's so true we're wired for generosity but we're educated for greed because what happens is when we're kids you'll see kids you want to share go out their way they want to share part of my candy bar whatever right yeah and then as we get older we're told that there's less and this is what the key is as we get older we're told there are finite numbers of how many kids get made on the basketball baseball team yes we're told there's a finite number of college spaces we're told there's a finite number of how many tickets there are we're told there's a finite number of people that are successful guess what in the theater of happiness there are infinite and unlimited seats and there is a seat with your name on it there is a seat with your name on it in the theater of dreams in the theater of happiness but you think that because you think that there are only a hundred people allowed in that if someone else makes it before you that you don't get in and guess what is there a cap on how many billionaires there are in the world no no is there a cap on how many millionaires around the world no is there a cap on how many happy people there are in the world no and that's why i really am encouraging forms i want forbes forget printing of rich lists we should do that we should do that serving the most in the world wow that'll be competition based yeah yeah sure i gave more than you get and that's why it should be serviced based on time energy and money because we should start showing how much time people give how much energy people give mother teresa i don't think she gave any money to her charities right but you get a lot of time and energy yeah you know you look at all the people who made a change in the world martin luther king gandhi like they may not have given a lot of money to stuff they gave time and energy you don't have to give resources but your resourcefulness your love your time your focus your attention your compassion love that uh you know resourcefulness of the of the heart not of the wallet i think i love that and you don't need to have a lot of money to make a big impact you don't there's and and this is the training see we've been educated for greed because we've been told everything's limited there's limited number of this limited number of this number and every time you play in numbers and i think it was bob marley who said it every time you play in numbers you'd always be dissatisfied because guess what someone's always saying someone's always gonna have more i was speaking to a friend recently and and it's me and and this friend was telling me that he uh you know bought a home which is very expensive very very expensive and he went to a party at someone else's house and he told me that when he was getting a tour of this party he found out that this person had a painting on his wall which cost the amount his house cost and so he was joking he was like that that guy's painting in the house he's got my house on his wall wow and and that just puts things into perspective and you think about that like and then you look at something like jeff bezos and you think oh well he's the richest man in the world but does he have the most fame no he doesn't does he have the most beauty subjective decision does he have the most strength or power maybe not and so no one has the most of everything so when you measure yourself by numbers you'll always be second third fourth fifth in something and i think by measuring yourself by needing to have the most of anything is probably a recipe for unhappiness i'm like well okay i'm not gonna have the most of anything but i'm gonna have the most money you're still gonna be unhappy even if you have the most of something doesn't mean you're gonna be happy totally i think it was albert einstein who said it best that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted and and i love that because it removes this belief that things are finite and limited and they're not if you want to be happy and successful if no matter that there are 700 000 podcasts if that is your dharma if that's your calling if that's your purpose like you can do that there's no cap on on how many successful soccer players that can exist at the same time or how many books are out in the world there's no cap there's no one stopping you and that's the mindset that we're educated for that scarcity and greed and what's the difference between the monkey mind and the monk mind yeah i'm glad you brought that out so the monkey mind is what we experience on a day-to-day basis the monkey mind is restless the monkey mind is jumping from branch to branch the monkey mind's trying to find a bigger banana the monkey mind is constantly just like feeling flustered dissatisfied scarce and overthinking everything the monk mind is the exact opposite the monk mind is calm and composed among my knows to be focused and aware among my nose so everything in this book and everything that we're talking about is the transformation from the monkey mind that we experience to the monk mind the monkey mind is almost the enemy to the monk mind it's the opposite yes the monks start with identity and at the root of the issue because a lot of what we experienced in the world today as you know and and i know how holistic you are in the way you advise your patients when you were speaking on my podcast i was so impressed by you and how you're able to tie in so many psychological and natural practices and relational exercises that can improve people's health and well-being overall i remember you talking about encouraging your clients to see more friends as a way of changing the way they feel and i was thinking wow this person's got so many great ideas and the reason is because rangan you also have that monk mindset or you go to the root of the issue it's really easy to just say oh well just take two of these a day or try this or you know maybe you need to do this but when you think about it from the root perspective where do our challenges arise and our challenges arise by how we see ourselves and what i believe rangan's referring to is there's this quote that i begin my book with and that i've shared in interviews for the last few years and it's from a writer named charles horton cooley who wrote this in the 1900s and what he said is that sorry i think it's in the 1800s at the end of the 1800s towards the 1900s and he said and and bear with me and you've got to really listen closely to this so what he said that the challenge today is i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am now just let that blow your mind for a moment i will explain it i promise i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am which means we live in a perception of a perception of ourselves so i'll break it down if i think rangan thinks i'm smart i'll say i feel smart but if i think rangan thinks i'm not smart then i'll say i'm not smart and so the challenge is that we're basing how we feel about ourselves on what we think someone thinks of us and and the greatest challenge with that is how do you have any idea if what you think someone thinks about you is even true and whether that's even the best place to start so that's where our identity struggles we start pursuing things in life because we think other people value them it's almost like let's think of the most playground version of this if i remember wearing high-tech shoes from bhs to the playground right i remember my mom because my parents didn't buy me nike uh trainers or adidas trainers which i always wanted you know we didn't come from that background i couldn't i couldn't afford them and my parents didn't want me to have them so i'd walk in with my high tech trainers from bhs they were about 10 quid or whatever they were and and and you know to me it didn't make a difference i didn't really know at that time whether high-tech was good or bad they were just trainers that my parents bought me now everyone the cool kid at school had the latest nike trainers all of a sudden i start thinking that he's now surrounded by everyone everyone's talking about his trainers everyone's giving him adoration everyone's giving him respect everyone's talking about his trainers so now i think that if i want to have that same experience and love from people that i need to get that not realizing that i may be able to get deeper love from people by being kind and compassionate that i may actually be able to build a real relationship with people if i'm loving and and considerate and empathetic and it's so crazy how your life can become about pursuing something and that's why jim carrey puts it best and i'm paraphrasing he says you know everyone in the world should achieve everything they've ever wanted and accomplish everything they've ever pursued just to realize that it's not the point now that doesn't mean the monk mindset is not about not pursuing your goals it's actually about pursuing your truest goals your truest self and your most authentic aligned goals so it's not about not having goals it's about making sure that your goals are actually yours yeah and you know i get shivers when you say that cooley quotes oh me too and i think i've had it i've had a flashback i think i can't say for sure where it was when i heard that interview but i think i was on a train from manchester to london or london back to manchester and i think i pressed pause and i think i wrote it in my notes i think i'm pretty sure i wrote it and i i rewound it i played it and i thought hold on i've got the first part the second part what's that third part i really had to sit with it for a while and i would urge people if they need to press pause right now listen to it and really think about it and i think you know it's really interesting you know hearing that and i reflect on my children who i know you had a very brief lovely conversation with just before we started i might put that in at the end of the podcast maybe it was beautiful but i i think about this as they go through school and you know they start to see what other people have got and you know um we my wife and i were very keen to try and not put value on those things because i know i also had experiences like that when i see oh god man they're wearing those things i want to wear those because if i wear them i'm going to be happy i saw a maybe a year ago or so i saw a gary vaynerchuk video online when he was um telling someone at one of his conferences he was you know he was talking about a bmw and he basically said to the guy in his in in you know in his inimitable way which is wonderful um that i think you own a bmw because of what other people will think of you when you drive that bmw and the guy literally you know in that clip he just sort of sat with it and he said yeah i do i mean it's what it symbolized is to to people around him and again i'm not having to go anyone who who might be doing that you know we all do things at times to get that um that validation or what we think is a validation from people around them but i think what you're trying to get at is how do we find our own identity how do we live our own lives so so jay how do we do that if we've spent a lifetime living someone else's life how do we in our 30s or our 20s or our 40s or our 50s how did we just decide oh i'm going to start finding out what my life is yes absolutely and and i love the tone you're sharing this in rangan because my tone's the same like you know i'm not i'm not coming at this from a point of view of you know we're wasting our lives or i've got it figured out like i i don't want to make this about you not getting your goals or not having pursuits or not wanting to become something because i want to do all those things too but it's about why you're doing it and it's also about making sure they're truly motivated by your inner desire right like that's the point it's like if you want to drive a bmw drive a bmw because that's the car you love don't drive it because you think if you want to be a doctor become a doctor because you think that's how you're going to serve humanity not because you think people will be impressed if you want to go to harvard or princeton or oxford or cambridge go there because you really want to study how to solve the world's problems not because you think it looks good on your resume right that's the point that we're going after so thank you ranga for like re-centering that that tonal piece and i i appreciate it so where do we start one of my favorite ways to start is looking at what we value and values are a very intangible word and so there's a very easy way to figure out what you value there's two things you have to look at you look at how you spend your money the most painful thing you can possibly do go through your bank statement and look at where your money is being spent that is what you value the other thing that we spend just like we spend money is how we spend our time those are the two most perfect ways to see what you currently value your value isn't what's in your head isn't what's in your heart it isn't what's in your mind it's how you spend your money and how you spend your time and so just to give you an overview and i share this in the book that research was done on how we spend our time and the research showed that we spent 33 years in bed right 33 years of our life in bed and seven years of that is spent trying to sleep not even sleeping right we spend one year and four months exercising across our whole lives these are by the way we spend more than three years on vacation and we spend a bunch of days trying to get ready and we spend a bunch of time you know standing in lines and queues and so much of our time just gets spent so the question we have to ask ourselves is where am i currently spending my time and where do i want to spend it now studies also show that people everyone has to go to work so this isn't about what you do for work people who had more meaningful purposeful lives and more healthier wealthier and wise invest their time in education over entertainment and rung and your your audience is lucky because they get education and entertainment in one place but but that's the goal right like that's the goal that you're creating an opportunity for people to find education the the smartest the wealthiest the most healthiest the wisest people in the world reading books watching documentaries taking courses listening to podcasts learning to better themselves and so that's the first place to start the second place when we look at that value audit is i want you to write down three things that you're currently pursuing in life it might be a promotion it might be a new home whatever it is whatever it is that you are currently pursuing and then i want you to ask this question is that your desire and your dream or is it coming from something outside of you is it coming from a pressure of a family member is it coming from an expectation because your friend just bought something where is that desire truly coming from and the third and final question you want to ask yourself is do i still want to pursue that or do i want to change how i pursue it or do i not want to pursue it at all and if you go through that three-step questioning process you'll get to the truth of what you truly want to pursue and stop yourselves from building a sand castle which the waves of time will eventually wash away and so that's what we get lost doing we get lost building castles that we don't even want to live in yeah it's so profound and you know i really think that there's something unique about the times in which we live now there really is this dissatisfaction this lack of contentment you know you put it so beautifully at the start of this conversation i don't know if you've seen the documentary minimalism or not which i think you'd absolutely love it i i really really enjoy it i've seen it a couple of times i've watched it with my kids again recently but again it's these two guys in their 30s who you know they've got success by society's definition they've got the job they're earning good money you know but there's a hole inside there's a feeling of is this all there is to life and so i really think you're tapping on something that is that is really out there at the moment and really if people can get their heads around this i think it can transform their own lives but also transform the lives of the people around them which i think is really really exciting now you call it a value audit and i thought that word was really interesting because i have been sort of i had i had sort of nearly three weeks off social media until two days ago like i didn't post i went offer i made a thing of it and i found that i i found it a lot easier to go inward in my life it was just one thing to switch off a bit of noise for me that i i'm not saying everyone has to do this it's just something i personally find useful i also like to i think it's a nice example to set to people that you can do it uh if you want to but what was really interesting is i've been doing a values exercise with myself i've been trying to write down five core values that i want to live my life by and it really struck me that a lot of people and i've probably included myself in this have got an idea of what we think our values are but unless we actually go and audit the process of what are we spending our time and money doing we have no idea if we really are living those values so i really like the term audit because it's not your perception of how you think you're actually spending your money or spending your time it's the reality of it and i think it's something that i haven't done it and i think i think i'm going to do it i think i would actually see oh is it aligned with what you say you stand for are you actually spending time like that so is this a common thing do you think for people that they have a there's that there is a gap between their desired values and their actual values i genuinely believe first of all ranga thank you for sharing that too and i i genuinely believe that people are well intentioned and want to do good in the world i believe that i believe that people have a good heart they're smarter than we think they are they want to do good in the world and they want to put out good energy but you're exactly right that that intention needs to be converted and transferred into real behavior and this is where you'll find you know you'll hear a friend or someone you know say oh you know i really value loyalty and and i really don't like gossip and then you find out that that person was gossiping about you and how does that feel it completely feels like someone's broken your trust and so often the way we see ourselves or want to see ourselves is amplified compared to how we actually behave so we'll spot something and there's a there's a beautiful story that i share in the book and there's lots of these across the book but there's these there's these old ancient indian and zen stories and there's this story of the evil king that goes to meet a good king so the evil king goes to the the castle the quarters of the good king and the good king being a good king invites the evil king inside for some dinner they sit down these servers bring out the plates the plates are placed in front of the evil king and the good king and they're just about to eat and as just about as they're about to eat the evil king switches the place and and the good king goes what's going on like is that some ceremony in your time like why are we doing this and the evil king goes well i don't know you might have poisoned my food you you might be trying to kill me you might have poisoned it and the good king just passed out laughing he's just like really like come on this like i've invited you for dinner like this is my team like you know whatever it is like let's start eating right now and just about he's about to eat the evil king swaps it back again and the good king goes well now what then and he goes well i don't know you might be double bluffing me and that night the evil king doesn't eat the good king happily eats his plate the point is that so often we think we don't have some of the mistakes that we make but we see them and everyone else we see those mistakes in other people so we'll say oh this person's not doing this right or i don't like the way he or she talk to that person but if we really do an audit in ourselves we'll realize that we have a lot of those same challenges and feelings that we may think others have and so for me it's sometimes a really scary and daunting task to do that values audit but it truly truly is a beautiful process that we all need to go through to really realign our map and get our compass right and start moving in the right direction i mean is it the sort of thing that people do once or is it the sort of thing that people should revisit and i guess you know if i was to ask you when was the last time you did that exercise on yourself yeah great question so i'd say that you have to revisit like gardening if you look at your garden outside and i can see a bit i can see a light little glimpse of rangan's garden but if if you have a garden how often do you have to garden maybe you mow the lawn i don't know once a week once a month i don't know you know whatever whatever you yeah i'd say once a week i like a nice you know shortish lawn i don't like it when it gets too long so there you go once a week and so i'd say that you have to treat this exercise like gardening because when you do a values audit what you're really doing is gardening your values and what that means is you're pulling out the weeds and you're planting new seeds that's really the activity that's happening here you're planting seeds in your mind values that are good values that are going to grow into fruits and trees and give shade to others and help other people or if you don't garden once a month let's say rangan leaves his he doesn't bother for the last six months during kovid he just lets it be there what's gonna happen that garden's gonna be full of weeds it's gonna be full of stuff that he doesn't want there right it might attract bugs or other things that are there that he doesn't want and that's what happens with our values that after a while our values start to attract dust they start to attract uh being covered over by so many other desires so i would say it's a regular habit i'd say that i do a refining values and intention exercise on myself about three times a week i used to do it every day but probably about three times a week and i'm not saying anyone has to do it that often i do it that often because i feel i live a life that is constantly moving constantly challenging and i'm presented with a lot of options and opportunities that i never imagined i'd have and so i have to really train my mind to to focus on these value audits but i also know that every year i spend two or three years two or three weeks and i go back to the monastery in india and i spend time in the ashram with monks and so i feel this is both an activity that happens weekly or monthly i'd say once a month i i'd say the best way is to treat it like your accounts and your taxes look at it every month look at your bank statement every month and then once a year when you have to do your taxes and you're going through that tax return and getting it all right you kind of do a deep dive on it so i'd say if everyone could spend three days a year five days a year going really deep and then one hour a month a couple of hours a month that would be a great way to build it into your practice yeah now i just want to contrast it with taxes and accounts which can often be quite tedious and um you know tear your hair out type exercises for people full of pressure i would sort of say that the kind of practices that are that your book is jam-packed full of practical tools for people i once you get into this way of thinking once you start thinking like a monk these practices become fun yeah right yes yeah i think sure you know like a lot of you know as a doctor one of the things that frustrates me is that everything around health let's say working out for example tends to be around you know punishing yourself and pushing yourself and suffering and so we start to associate things that are good for us as being difficult and as being punishing but actually all the tools in your book are going to be good for everyone they're really going to help people but i would actually say that they're fun and if i just speak to my own experience over the last seven years of really again since my dad died diving into personal growth not because it was like oh dad's not here now i'm going to do some personal growth no it was just in the trauma of dad's death in the sort of emptiness i felt afterwards that's where i went i i would i sort of needed that pain on one level to then get me to start asking questions but i love the process of getting to know myself better i love doing these audits i love trying to figure out my values i i like potentially almost getting addicted to it like it feels good and then you start to i feel you start to switch off from the the noise around you and you really start to become tuned in yeah to who you are and what makes you what makes you tick learning about ourselves is actually the most fun thing in the world it's the most enjoyable thing in the world when you find out about a new way that your mind works and how this value is going to unlock this opportunity in your life wrong and spot-on it's it's such a exciting thing to do and and i would encourage you to make it fun so i have i'll tell you an example of some of the fun activities that i love in the book so one of my favorite ones is i sometimes set my set self the challenge of not comparing not complaining and not criticizing and the way i like to do this test is i keep a jar of uh post-it notes of every time i compare complain or criticize i'll i'll put it in there and then i have another jar of every time i'm collaborative uh supportive to others and grateful and what i love doing is always doing a competition with myself because i love being competitive too i love engaging that in a competition with myself of how often can i make sure so what you find is the first day you realize oh no i i complained ten times today the second day you're like oh i only did seven times today and the third day you're like i only did four in the fourth day you're like oh only once and then on the weekend you binge complain again and it all goes up again but the point is that you make it fun and enjoyable because what you understand is that you are not your criticism you are not these negative thoughts you are not these negative beliefs they've just become conditioned and habits just as your garden is not weeds and what happens is we start thinking that we are our pain we start thinking that we are stress right we say things like i am just a stressful person right i am just a negative person and the truth is you're not you're just going through a negative space and time you're just adopted a negative habit or a negative thought but you are not a negative person it's just in the same ways you are not unhealthy you've just adopted unhealthy habits and i think when you start making that disconnect between you and the habits you have you start to realize oh if i change the habits i naturally change but you are separate from that so never get into that never get into that rhetoric with yourself of i am a negative person or i am a failure or i am a loser or whatever it may be yeah i think it's so important that jay that our thoughts are important our words are important and i think many people once you become tuned into it when when you start to identify where you're using negative self-talk it it becomes so easy to identify and everyone around you you know it's it's something that i spent a lot of time thinking about both for myself personally for bringing up my children it's something we talk about a lot at the dinner table about how we're saying things because words are powerful you know words become thoughts right and they that they sort of can you know you mention those things people often do think that they are their pain they are their feelings without realizing that these things are transient they come and go and you are actually separate from that but if you define yourself by that it becomes very hard to change um you know you mentioned you know i guess a lot of words that people who have a victim mindset um may say why and i want to explore this because i i want to be super clear i think one thing i love about your approach um and certainly the approach that i i sort of try and take is one of compassion it's not one of judgment of other people it's understanding if someone behaves in a certain way there's probably conditioning or reasons that has led to that so what i say victim mindset i i really don't mean that in a demeaning way i mean that in a a lot of people say oh this always happens to me oh god you know that i never get that promotion right and so the way we think and the way we talk how influential is our childhoods um and you know what can we do about it if we spent a lifetime practicing that yeah what a great what a great way of uh guiding this conversation into because you i think you're spot on that the the words we use create all of our reality right we we all experience that we know that and there's a few things that i want to touch on here actually one is the understanding there's a harvard study that i refer to in my book and it's called the emotional list or list of emotions but i call it emotional vocabulary and what i've realized is that we all have a very limited emotional vocabulary for example if you ask someone how things are going there's literally five words that we use more often than anything else okay good bad fine so someone goes how's your day going okay how's your week been good is everything going well right it's like literally like those are our responses and what this harvard emotional vocabulary list does is that it shows you that inside every word that you say there are so many more meanings so let's take the word sad for example and what it does is it shows you other feelings of sadness that help you better pinpoint how you actually feel so the question then is do you feel sad or do you feel offended do you feel upset do you feel disappointed do you feel irritated do you feel like you've been let down the challenges that we don't diagnose how we feel effectively therefore we can't articulate and communicate to the people we love effectively about how we feel and therefore we don't get what we expect from others and so we almost create and run and you probably see this all the time imagine someone tries to diagnose their health condition without seeing a doctor it becomes really really challenging and the challenging with the mind is sometimes you have to diagnose your own feelings because you can't just walk in to a doctor's office and expect them to do it because it's a little more intangible so we have to get much better at understanding and articulating ourselves and diagnosing our challenges and what we experience but when you spoke about childhood there i thought that was a really important point because literally there are so many studies that show that our belief in ourselves our desire for love our understanding of ourselves is formed in our childhood so recently i recorded an episode about the psychological concept of the three attachment styles or there are four but the three prominent attachment styles that people experience in relationships and they are avoidant secure and anxious so all of us either have an avoidant relationship uh attachment style we have a secure attachment style or we have an anxious attachment style and i'll explain what they are if your parents were avoidant of you if they didn't give you attention if they didn't give you presence and intimacy then you often will crave that from your partner so what you want from your partner is exactly what you did or didn't receive from your parents so sometimes you receive something from your parents and now you demand it from your partner and sometimes you didn't receive something from your parents and you demand that from your partner the secure attachment style is when your parents or one of your parents or a father or mother figure in your life gave you substantial amounts of love so you feel secure so you trust your partner naturally and the third and final is anxious that's when your parents were kind of there kind of not there kind of let you down sometimes we're there you are confused about their love approach to you and therefore now you have this anxiousness around your partner and you're not sure whether they love you or not now notice how all of that comes from our conditioning at childhood and so the first step we have to do is we have to be aware of this right no one's ever been taught about this in school i saw so many negative patterns that i'd adopted from my childhood that i was projecting into my relationship and by the way i don't blame my parents or anyone's parents for any of this i think the point is no one ever knows how to be a parent and what they're doing and everyone makes mistakes so this isn't about questioning your parents or being bitter towards them it's about developing the emotional skills your parents didn't have and that first of all requires awareness are you even aware of what patterns you've adopted from your parents that you like or don't like do you behave in certain irrational ways and when you think about it you're like that's exactly how my dad used to talk to me well that's exactly how my mom used to talk to me i often talk about a positive thing so i love surprises i love surprises like from for gifts and birthdays and events and the reason is my mom always surprised me with the toy i most wanted on my birthday every year growing up so when i met my wife without explaining this to her i expected her to know that and she would never surprise me because it wasn't in her parental background so i used to feel on my birthdays when we first met that she didn't love me and i know this sounds crazy but it's literally true it's like i literally felt like she didn't care about me but that's because i never understood why i like surprises where that came from and i never communicated that to her does that make sense wrong hey more sense than you you would know for sure i mean you know i i can think back to my own relationship and think to all kinds of ways that actually and i i recently spoke to esther perel on the show and yes you know really sort of opened up about a lot of those things um and i think the thing i'm i'm sort of i'm hearing from you telling that story and when i think about my own relationship it's that we often have expectations because we're used to things a certain way so we think that's the norm but of course someone else has got their own idea of what is normal and you know we we we've explored this ourselves and i think um as your communication gets better as you learn as you said to have the vocabulary around these things as you learn to articulate them suddenly there's understanding on both sides and a lot of that friction no longer arises because you can communicate and i guess now your wife will go oh you know jay likes gifts you know even though that's not my thing for example it's kind of like oh maybe i'll get because that's how he experiences love my wife always has two surprise parties for me in the last two years and she got me both times like she she organized these two incredible and and that's what it is wrong and like that's what it is is that we're just you know in every relationship you have the ability to set the level of joy you expect and the level of pain you'll accept but the problem is that we never tell the other person what that expectation and what that acceptance level is and we never communicate that and we expect them to be mind readers and expect them to know and that's really where all of relationships go wrong with our parents our children our spouses our partners that there is no communication on what we expect and what we're willing to accept and and that creates so many issues that you then think you broke up over something big when actually you broke up over words and definitions uh one of the ones i like to talk about is the definition of love when think about the first time you said i love you to someone wrong like think about the first time you said it to someone and everyone is listening and watching think about the first time you told someone you loved them what did you mean did you mean i really like you did you mean i hope we can spend the night together did you mean i want to spend the rest of my life with you i'm guessing that you meant different things at different times and now think about when someone says i love you back to you have you ever asked them what they meant by that because chances are you projected your belief onto the word love even when someone said i love you back so if you said i love you and you were thinking i want to spend the rest of my life with you and that person said i love you you projected that they were saying they want to spend the rest of their lives with you as well but actually what they were saying was they just want to spend the night with you and now all of a sudden you're in this complete misalignment of values and and we end up in those scenarios because families define words differently people define words differently and different words mean different things to different people at different times and so you really have to understand how that person described even being clean and tidy and organized everyone has a different definition like this you know my room may seem clean to some people and my room may seem chaotic to some people because everyone has a different definition of what clean and chaotic is what you can do right now is find meaning in what you do make what you do meaningful passionate and purposeful you don't need to suddenly look to become an entrepreneur or start a side hustle or find some more time find meaning and the way you find meaning as you genuinely stop press pause for a second and go what am i living for like what am i living for right now and if you're living for your child and if you're living to provide and put food on the table that is a beautiful thing that we should celebrate more and sometimes it takes us a moment to stop and celebrate that and so i would say find meaning because you can't always find happiness you can't always find positivity but you can always find meaning in that position so i'll give an example like i lost someone really important to me a mentor a few days back i can't be positive about that you can't be happy about that yeah it's hurtful you feel sad you feel lost but guess what i can find meaning in it because i can make a list of every lesson he taught me and make a plan to try and live every one of those lessons wow that's beautiful and and so if you're in a really tough situation right now don't look for positivity don't look for happiness look for meaning that's a good one not trying to and not trying to get yourself out of pain too quickly or discomfort or frustration yeah which i've been a guilt of being like just be positive or whatever to people but i think it's like you know have your experience yes live your experience and find meaning as quickly as possible and create a commitment to how you want to use that meaning moving forward okay i may not be great tomorrow maybe not with next week next month but i'm going to use this meaning to serve other people to continue to do what i love continue to be great to my friends my family in the best way possible and when you start doing those small things with love and kindness so much more opens up it's like when you when you can be trusted with the small things and the small moments you get trusted with more and more and more and so like it helps to just in that moment and it's in those painful moments that you realize how powerful you are we all know that like you really recognize it and and what you said was beautiful about not rushing through the pain because and and you know this example's probably been shared before but if you have a wound and you've cut yourself it's like you can't rush the healing you can't rush it if you broke your arm i mean and you've been through so many bodily injuries you can't rush the process it's going to take six weeks minimum to heal broken oh yeah and you've got to sit through that it's hot there's no injections you can take there's no videos you can watch there's nothing you can listen to but our challenge is we try and rush through the pain rather than reflect through the pain we try to rush the healing process try to rush the healing and you can't rush healing and healing is meant to be slow because it buys you time it buys you reflection it gives you so much space to slow down to slow down and that's what your body is calling out from this is our emergency like how many times have you heard it where you slow down you slow down and that's when you fall ill because guess what your body has been trying to tell you to slow down when you feel pain so i write about it and think like come on pain makes you pay attention yeah that's what pain's for pains notice this notice this notice me look at me it's crazy it's like a crying baby craving for attention when a baby's crying you don't just go eyes crying you just go oh yeah we'll just put it in another room and forget about it right like you go to it you find its needs whereas without pain when something's painful we're just like oh yeah i'll just forget about it i'll escape from i'll do something else you have to go into that i'm not the person the pain that's said or whatever yeah a hundred percent that's that's usually our response is what can i do to numb this work more have sex more drink more whatever's more whatever it is rather than let me actually become alert and guess what the pain just gets higher and higher and higher and higher because unfortunately until it really hurts we don't stop or you need more and more to numb it with so true and so you go down the extremes of life so true now what's been the most painful thing you've had to experience since because i know leaving the monk hood was painful for you because this was a mission of yours that you wanted to have for your whole life and i think you were there for three and a half years so what's been the most painful thing i guess in the last six or seven years since that time that you've had to reflect back on take notice of pay attention to and reevaluate that's a great question i think for me it was in 2016 i moved out to new york so just let me paint a picture of 2016 i moved three jobs i got married wow i moved country and i just just started a whole new life like my life just transformed so we went to all of that with my wife in one year and by the way all of that was surprises the job chains were surprises yeah the country change was a surprise the marriage was not a surprise we planned but apart from everything else everything was a surprise now i said i like surprises so i can roll with it but my point is that's a lot of transitioning so much transition and i felt the burden of being in a new city where we had no family we had no friends and my wife who loves being around her family and no one understands just how close she is to them i felt this burden on me that i had taken away her time with her family and now she was alone so i was going out to work and she'd be crying at home and i was thinking she's got no friends she's got no support and i know you can relate to this with moving and relationships and so much going on and so it's like i'm dealing with that and guess what six months later i have to leave and move on and work on a new career to build everything myself and then i'm four months away from being broke and so on top of all of this i've now got four months away from being broke i've got enough money money saved for four months to pay for rent and groceries and that's in new york city and that's it and guess what even on top of that i've got 30 days before my visa runs out and i'm kicked out of the country so i can't even live here anymore so not only have i just got married moved job three times changed career again had to move into apartment four months of being broke and i might get kicked out in 30 days and my renewal for my visa cost fifteen thousand dollars oh so that's going to eat into those four months i have probably never been under that much emotional physical and and mental pressure in my life like genuinely i felt it and i thought my body changed my my breath was more stressed i would be breathing faster shorter breaths not deep breaths heartbeating faster not working out you get into lazy habits you start craving junk food i'm living in a 500 square foot apartment with my wife which is which is tiny like everything's in that space and guess what we both work from home so i'm now sitting at a desk hunched over trying to figure stuff out she's trying to cook in the same room like i'm trying to just just trying to figure out what to do and i remember the next morning sending like a hundred emails to people and just being like this is who i am this is what i can do how can we serve and that was the same year that i ended up meeting you later in that year and the beginning three months of that journey was so stressful like they were so stressful because i was like what if i have to move back to london what am i gonna say to her parents i mean i just took their daughter away like uh just got married i've lived in new york city for six months and my life's falling apart like you know so much and i've got all these views but there's nothing there's nothing happening here we met you also you also i mean at this time you're also growing so much how are you able to create and reach this impact with your videos as that's growing while you're under so much stress and uncertainty and i stopped a bit of that time like things slowed down like things slowed down i remember i wasn't crying as much as i was because i don't enjoy creating from stress or pressure and i don't think you can really create something from stress and pressure so we really slowed down at that time and when i was creating i was creating from a place of recognizing that i could share what i had learned and what i had grown in so far so anything i was sharing was like this is what i've learned so far so that was the biggest pain that i've been through in the last seven years for sure and all i can say is that i remember coming home to my wife knowing that this was going to be the truth and i came and i said to i said to her i guarantee you this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to us what the pain the pain i said that to the night i came home and then she gave out i literally came up i looked in the eyes and got this is the scenario and i just want you to know that i guarantee to you this is the best thing that's ever going to happen to us and i said this is this is a monk statement that we used to repeat i said to her i'm just not going to judge the moment don't judge the moment because what we do is we try to label moments as good or bad and when you label the moment as bad it now does not have the opportunity to become good i'll give an example if i go i don't like this book this book's bad right and i don't and i love this book but if i say that guess what i will never pick it up and recognize the value that's inside of it because you've labeled it yes and we label stuff like we label oh that restaurant's bad but when you label them emotions that person's bad now you can't learn from that person oh great one that's a really good one as soon as you start labeling people or anything is good or bad you limit it you stop it from being something else and here's the truth every moment can evolve into being anything if you give it the opportunity to right but as soon as you say it's got no value anymore you lose it and so for me i had to say to myself don't judge the moment and i'd keep repeating that don't judge where you're at don't judge what's happening yeah don't judge it as negative don't don't just start saying it's negative because guess what we've all been in positions where a gift turned into a curse and a curse turned into a gift it's true right we've always our dreams came true and it ended up not being what we wanted exactly it fell apart and it led us into our dream tony why is it that so many people that win the lottery go broke gifts can turn into curses too but because we label them as the best moment in our life or the worst moment in our life whereas when you approach things to neutrality and just what you have on the table you can be like okay what am i going to do next that's why the greatest quarterbacks are neutral energy they'll get a little excited they'll get a little fist pump in there every now and then but they're not hyped every play and they're not negative every play they have this calm they see the field they you drop a pass and it's like a little bit let's go but it's very neutral even when you score a touchdown unless it's maybe the super bowl or a big championship at the end of a game in the middle of the game you want to keep it pretty like even keel paced so you can prepare for the best or the worst that's great yeah but always up and down it's like your energy levels will go up and down and you'll be exhausted you need to have energy in life totally and if everything is tied around a story of this is bad this is wrong i'm in a bad place i'm messing up i'm going broke that energy is going to pull you away from service exactly or creation or creativity of how do i get out of this place so i think it's really i love that and i used to have a coach and i think a lot of coaches use this or at least he used to say to us he would be like if you if you lose cry for a day and if you celebrate if you win celebrate for a day yeah and then move on the next day get back to training don't don't let go live in the past don't live in the past and what we do is when we lose we cry for a month and when we win we just move on which means that our negative experiences hold us back and weigh us down more than our positive experiences so we're actually allowing because we don't immerse ourselves in winning and growth we only submerge ourselves in negative experiences we need to celebrate also we try to celebrate i've been uh you know that's been part of my life as well as like moving on too quick and now we try to like let's enjoy let's go to lunch or dinner and really like appreciate this moment and celebrate this moment even have a dinner with some friends and family otherwise what are we working so hard for 100 and we almost feel like we can't we can't do that because that makes us complacent right but but that's my point it's never good enough exactly but if you win celebrate for a day if you lose cry for a day move on simple and you've learned so many lessons over your years as a monk you learned a ton of lessons moving to you know getting married moving into a new country building building companies launching products and books and you've had ups and downs what's been the biggest lesson in the last 12 months for you because you've learned you've created so much in the last 12 months you've done so many things what's been the biggest lesson for you in your life oh that's a great question i think i'd have to say that it's a and i was saying it to a friend on the phone this morning when i was on the way to you and i was just i was just sharing it with him because he was having a moment in recognizing this there's a wonderful verse in the manusmithi which i talk about think like a monk it's a monk book and in the verse it says when you protect your purpose your purpose protects you now i wanna i wanna unpack that what i mean by that is your purpose is like a rare jewel and a rare gemstone and imagine you were walking around with the most expensive diamond or jewel in the world how would you protect it you want to just like you want to just wave it out yeah yeah you wouldn't just wear it on your chest like this like a baby holding it yeah putting a pillow around a blanket you'd be like yeah protect it you'd protect it and so your purpose is like that and guess what people are going to tell you every day that that jewel is not worth anything they're going to tell you that that jewel is actually valueless it doesn't have any impact on your life they're going to try and take away that value they're going to tell you that there's another jewel out there that you need to have more value and what ends up happening is you don't i love the word look at the wording protect your purpose you have to protect it so what happens is your success grows you get more opportunities more ideas more things coming your way temptations but they can all take you away from your purpose distractions and to me i'm repeating this for myself because i'm like i just want to stick to what i was born to do and i'm so grateful that i get to do it i'm so happy i get to do it and i want to keep protecting it i don't want to get lost in the waves you know you don't want to just get chucked in the waves of the ocean and just get lost and just not know where you're going so for me when you protect your purpose your purpose protects you so that's been your biggest lesson that's my biggest lesson why do you feel like your purpose has been maybe distracted i don't think it has but i'm saying it so it doesn't like reminding you yeah i'm reminding myself like i'm preaching to myself right now especially being in hollywood and the temptation of all these opportunities out here totally and i think for me it's a bigger lesson also because it gives me more faith so i always encourage and this is actually actually this is why it's my biggest lesson i encourage so many people that i coach so many people i mentor obviously everyone in my community and audience and everything to go and follow that go and live that purpose and i see time and time again that when i see people trying to live their purpose they are protected that it things work when you're playing in your dharma and your purpose things work things move you feel momentum they happen and i'm not saying they happen without effort but they happen they move whereas when you're not you just constantly feel like you're grinding up against you know a war i know challenges just just constant so what is your purpose and when did you discover it good question what is my purpose is simple it always has been since not since the beginning because i discovered it afterwards my purpose is making wisdom go viral and i've stuck with that and i've kept it that way because to me and there's more to it making wisdom go viral through entertainment i would say is my purpose because i believe that that is something that is uniquely my goal impact and service and the beautiful thing is i'm not limited to a platform so that could be books it can be podcasts it can be tv shows it can be moved it's not limited and this i learned by reading i was reading after and this was after my videos started to to get seen this wasn't before i did it wasn't like i sat down and i wrote this fancy tagline i was reading saleem ishmael's book called exponential organizations and in this book he talks about something called an mtp a massive transformational purpose and he says that every major person organization in the world has an mtp so an mtp has to be aspirational it has to be massive and it has to be service and purpose based so google's is organizing the world's information notice it doesn't say we're an seo company notice it doesn't say we do google ads they're organizing the world's information that's how big they're dreaming and when you're organizing the world's information you can do driverless cars you can do google glass you can sell google ads whatever it is and so ted's is ideas worth spreading that's what they are that's what they're about so jay shetty is making wisdom go viral that's what i'm dedicated to so when did you discover it because it wasn't when you were it wasn't difficult it wasn't when you were 21 college i'd say i was 30 probably two three years ago so i'm 32 now so i'd say like two three years ago is when i discovered 30 years old is when you discovered your purpose correct so what was your purpose before that my purpose before that was finding my purpose like it's like that process of just like my purpose before that was 14 years so i've been online for four years i've spent 10 years offline talking about the same stuff sharing the same messages in talks in universities in small seminars in coaching and mentoring like i've been doing the same thing for 14 years but i didn't realize it was my purpose until very recently but i just did what i enjoyed and naturally try to get better at it so if we don't know what our purpose is and we're working towards finding our purpose it's okay that's actually where you're gonna spend most of your life discovering what you're purchasing totally and that's the best bit because i think a lot of people are like well i don't know what my purpose is totally that's why i just should i find it the pressure of finding your purpose is crazy will stop you from finding your purpose literally the pressure is so heavy and that's why it's not about finding that it's just starting with the basics what am i good at and i talk about it i break down dharma and here and i talk about what are your passion what is your expertise what is your compassion because that's really important what is your compassion for the world like what problem do you want to solve i often people will say there's so many things i could do there's so many things i'm like my question is not what causes you the greatest joy sometimes my question is what is what causes you the greatest pain make that your purpose make that your purpose if you don't know where your joy is you definitely know what your pain is in the world and so for me go serve that thing 100 so for me the greatest pain i see in the world is people not reaching their potential that is that causes me more pain because i believe that there is someone out there who is stacking shelves who has the cure to cancer right there is someone out there or talented singer he's a talented singer there is someone out there who's not living to their potential and i think we're better people we're better partners and we're better parents when we live to our potential so that's what i'm trying to solve and i'm not saying that's the biggest thing you're saying it's my thing whenever i work with people i'm always telling them to find your purpose focus on what you're most passionate about or what you you have the most pain around they go it's the same thing like do the thing you love the most keep doing it until you either discover that's it or maybe i don't love that anymore like i played so many sports growing up i used to love baseball i used to love soccer and i got bored with it i got burnt out by it it wasn't a love of mine anymore it wasn't a passion and then i switched to football and it was like oh this is a passion and i'm actually more gifted physically for this sport than it would be for soccer i was too big for soccer kind of run seven miles a day right now on the field but i think you need to try lots of things and you might think it's a passion but you might get burnt out and discover i don't love it anymore what else is there and keep trying the things that you said eight new things a month yeah until you discover it might take you to take a 30 40 50. right it doesn't and that doesn't matter like it doesn't matter like it the fun is in the growth and the journey and like for me the last 10 years before this happened and my life changed is like those were fun i was happy i wasn't unhappy because of that because i didn't know the exact point yeah exactly and now i'm very clear on it and i'm happy for it to evolve too like i don't think it has to stay the same i may sit with you in two years time and tell you something completely different right and i'm okay with that but i can only work with what i have now and i think we start trying to postpone our purpose or find a date by which you have to you put a deadline on your purpose doesn't make any sense like if if you really care about it how can you put a deadline on it you just keep working towards it it was this understanding that i had believed that the romance that i saw in the movies was what romance and love was about because again how many of us are our beliefs are set by movies media and music so many of our beliefs and what we expect in a relationship are based on a false show and if you think about it movies always end with happily ever after where the wedding just happened so it's almost like you see nothing after the wedding and the funny thing is that after the wedding is exactly what life is about like that's where life actually starts like life didn't start when you started dating but movies end with happily ever after and they don't tell the story and so we all have this honeymoon happily ever after version of love and i had that too so my first date with my wife i thought oh you know she want to go to a fancy restaurant you know she'll probably want to dress up she'll want to do this because that's what i thought from nowhere like she'd given me no indication of that and so again no checking of expectation no checking of communication just complete me on autopilot and so i booked i got this reservation at this fancy restaurant i'll never forget the name it's called la canda locatelli and it's like this really posh restaurant in london it's like david beckham goes there and that kind of thing and so i'd saved up to take my wife to this restaurant and she it was the worst date we've ever been on and it was our first date and she was just like you could have walked me down tesco's like the food isle at tesco's and i would have been happier she loves she loves uh she loves going shopping for food so any sort of tesco's or whole foods or waitrose or whatever that she loves it and so and it was so interesting to me to think i was like well i put all this effort in and that's what happens you start thinking your ego goes well you put all this effort in she doesn't appreciate it and actually you realize no it's just you know me speaking to her in a language she doesn't understand and and this part's the biggest part about her media and i've got to share this story so rangan do you remember how much do you remember any guidance on how much you spent on your engagement ring because this is really like profound for me but do you remember anything when you proposed to your wife yeah i you know what i can't remember an exact amount but i i remember thinking oh how much are you meant to do and i thought really that much that's like i can't remember what happened in the end but i yeah but but i know that's out there isn't it there's there's a rule by society on what you should do yeah so i so so that was the thing so i remember wanting to propose to my now wife and i remember speaking to a bunch of my guy mates who were proposed or were married and they all said you spent two months salary on your engagement ring i was like that sounds like a lot i had the same reaction as you and i was like okay that's what you have to spend so i remember spending two months salary on my engagement ring for my wife i didn't make a ton at the time and i worked in a corporate job and so i did that and then when i started sharing more ideas and stuff i really started looking into that and this is the craziest thing i found a de beers commercial in from 1991 and in that commercial it's a black and white commercial i don't know why but it was chosen to be black and white and in that commercial a man proposes to a woman with a diamond engagement ring it's a de beers commercial and at the end of it it says this catch this this is what it says it says the diamond engagement ring how else could two months salary last forever and i was sitting there going are you kidding me that that was literally the tagline in a commercial and so many men took it seriously that by the time i proposed that was 1991 i proposed in 2014 and so it's like from 1991 to 2014 it became a rule when actually it was just a tagline in an adverb just showing you the power of media's ability to implant and and really that's inception at its best if you've never seen the movie inception check it out but that is literally inception at its best that that idea was planted in our mind in 1991 and in 2014 i'm still operating by that idea and i don't even know where it's come from that's the power of an idea and and that's why it's so important that we plant powerful ideas into our mind that are useful to us and that's the the the value and and how powerful um stories are and narrative even stories that we tell ourselves so that then starts off as maybe the idea if one advertising executive in a company somewhere who gets is getting paid to do this commercial does it and then it becomes a reality for millions of people around the world who are then stressed out trying to think oh if i'm going to be a real man i have to spend two months salary on this ring yeah and it's it's it goes back to everything you're talking about it's about identity it's about stories it's about how can we start creating the stories that are gonna start to help us you know gonna nourish us and feed us rather than the ones that are gonna keep us trapped and in prison and i think there's two things i think your book really like when i think about it big picture what it offers i mean there's so many things but the two themes i already think about are one awareness i think every single chapter people are going to start thinking and there's just start gonna because you you've shared so many lovely stories as well in it which i think really brings it to life people are gonna start to see their own life in them and i think you're gonna help bring awareness to people and of course without awareness there can be no change awareness is that first step um and often awareness is all you need i find sometimes and of course there are lots of practices you can do to help but sometimes just being aware means oh i can change that now because i know where that's coming from but the other thing i think your book offers people is freedom because you you get true inner peace and mental freedom to live the life that you want to not the life that other people have set out for you or an advertising exec has sort of implanted as an idea and then you know if we sort of start to go in some of these practical tools you mentioned some exercises already you mentioned gratitude and gratitude has come up uh on the show before but what i loved about your take on it was was if i remember the chapter right there you said gratitude is a daily practice that's the easy part i want you to be grateful in every aspect of your life and i love that and i've been sitting with that idea for the last week or so what if you could expand on it jay yeah beautiful i'm really glad um you're asking me about gratitude before we do that though you sparked another thought do you mind if i kind of go back if you're okay with yourself where you want to go you're sparking so many great thoughts in my mind i can't ignore them this is such a you're such a great interviewer it's so much fun like i really feel like you've just we've gone in so many directions that i didn't even plan so thank you so much but uh when when you were talking about the stories we tell ourselves i think that's so important because there's a there's a great study that i talk about the book by amy vroznusky from the yale university and what they found is that they tried to find a career that they felt people may find not sharing a positive story around and they found that hospital cleaners or hospital workers potentially have one of the toughest jobs and wrong and you're a doctor and you know i'm sure you've seen people having to do that work and it's a tough job and so they asked hospital workers how they define their jobs and the majority of them defined it as low skilled defined it as um you know insignificant defined it as just a way to pay the bills and that their job wasn't useful or their job wasn't important and their role was basically describe like the personnel manual but then they asked another set of hospital workers the same people who did the same jobs different people who did the same jobs and they said how do you feel about your jobs and these people had completely different views they felt they were healers they felt they were caretakers they felt that they were able to transform the energy of the actual hospital they felt that they were carers for the people there and what they found is that these same people sorry different people who did the same job were telling themselves a different story and therefore they saw their role as integral to the healing of the patient and because they saw their role as integral to the healing of the patient they found the work that they did to be extremely meaningful and that's crazy to think about it that different people doing the same job could say different things about the same work they're doing the same exact thing daily but someone thinks it's meaningless and the other things it's so meaningful and this was a term by yale that was called the call was called job crafting the ability to assign meaning where you see it and all of a sudden your life becomes meaningful so if you're sitting in a job right now that you hate or if you've got a boss that you really don't like or if you're in a relationship that you don't want to be in if you can't leave for whatever reason right now because of kovid or lockdown or whatever it is financial difficulties if you can't leave and you really want to one of the things i recommend you do is called job crafting from the yell school of management you start asking yourself where can i find meaning in this what can i learn what can i adopt what is this trying to teach me and that's actually where gratitude can be applied to every place because you start going there is some value in this i remember when i wanted to leave my corporate job and i wanted to live my passion and do what i do today but i'm so grateful i was at my corporate job because i learned so much there that is so useful to me now and we find it very easy to be grateful when things are going our way but we find it very difficult to be grateful when things are not going our way but what we have to learn to realize which is a really hard lesson to realize is that things are always going your way if you're moving in the right direction things are not going to always look like they're going your way and they could still be going your way we've all seen curses turn into gifts and gifts turn into curses but the problem is wrong and this is the challenge we have a projector up here of what we want life to look like and then we have the reality of what life actually looks like so there's this big discrepancy and so sometimes you're actually going in the right direction but because it doesn't look like your picture and your image of what it should look like you work less you become lazier you become complacent you try less harder because this doesn't look like the right direction but you get to where you want in life just not in the way you imagined it if you keep going if you keep pushing if you keep learning and that's what it means to be grateful in all areas of your life is trying to even in the toughest moment even in a challenging situation not gratitude like i'm so thankful to you for causing me the pain that's not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is saying to yourself where is there meaning in this where is the lesson in this so i don't repeat this again if i can be grateful in this challenging situation and i can experience gratitude at all times then i'm always going to be coming at things from a positive space and positive energy yeah so powerful jay um would you recommend people start off with a particular daily practice as a way of getting good and developing the skill before they can start applying it let's say to you know aspects of their life that maybe aren't going as well as they want to where they have to reframe things i mean what has been your experience in trying to teach people about gratitude and how they should start that process yeah so you always develop your muscles in the training center and in the gym you don't go out and develop your muscles on game day right like no one gets thrown out onto the pitch and says oh yeah go and play a world cup final and you'll figure out how strong you are you'd never do that you you train in the gym you prepare you get ready and then you go you don't go i want to learn how to run maybe i should run in the marathon next year right you don't that's not how it works and so rangan's absolutely right that it starts in small bouts so i want to get more practical because me and ranga have spoken about a lot of concepts today when we talk about practicing thankfulness or gratitude and i talk about four habits in the book one of them one of the key daily habits or daily practices is thankfulness now thankfulness isn't just about feeling thankfulness isn't just about thinking it's actually about expressing so when rangan messaged me a few weeks back and he told me that he'd been reading my book he i sent him an early copy because he was going to interview me on the podcast and he sent me that message i was i was so grateful to him like genuinely because he was expressing gratitude to me and that's the amazing thing instead of just feeling gratitude let's say rangan felt it but he didn't say it to me if he didn't say it to me he would have not had the experience a of sharing it be of receiving my gratitude back to him and our relationship deepening based on that simple message he sent me and so gratitude becomes more powerful when you express it daily so every day ask yourself who's a person that you want to express gratitude to and go and tell them secondly what's a place that you're grateful for and spend more time in that place and what's a project that you're grateful for in your life and if you write these down every single day before you go to bed who's the person i'm grateful for and why what's a place that i'm grateful for and why and right now it may not be a place you can go to maybe a place that you visited and you're so grateful you got to go there before covert and the third thing is a project in your life and so when you express gratitude make sure that it's specific so i'll give you an example let's say rangan throws a party with his wife this weekend at their home and their friends come over and one of his friends uh rangan give me two friends names in your life and we'll pick on them for a bit uh okay i'll say jeremy jeremy i think he'll be listening yeah um you know what i'll go gareth okay so let's say gareth and jeremy and again uh i'm just gonna add a disclaimer none of this reflects gareth and jeremy in real life but let's say gareth and jamie come to this party that uh ranga and his wife throw and it's just you know just a gathering to get people together the next morning rangan wakes up he doesn't look at his first thing in the morning his phone that's not what rangan does rangan looks at his phone about three hours later after he's exercised meditate spend time with his kids and then he looks at his phone and he sees these two messages from gareth and jeremy gareth sorry about this but here we go so gareth had messaged him saying thanks mate it was great right that was gareth's message and jeremy's message was rangan thank you so much like you and your wife just threw an amazing party and i loved all the games we played your kids are adorable and oh by the way you know you know that food how did how did you both make that the food was amazing thank you so much uh thank you for letting us have this moment together so those are two messages a or b which one do you think causes rangon more joy now running the grateful person so we'll be grateful to both of them but he's more likely and honestly all of us are going to be more grateful to the to jeremy in that scenario because he's gone into more depth and being specific about what he actually liked and learned and because of that he is now going to attract more love and gratitude back from rangan as well so that's why expressing gratitude is actually the key and if we can express gratitude to people places and projects we start to develop more gratitude in our life and that's something we can do daily and it can be an email it can be a voice note it can be a text it could be a video call but it can be as simple as just a text message but specific gratitude is scientifically shown to be better for you and better for the other person yeah i mean jay thanks so much for sharing that because you know gratitude gets spoken about a lot these days but i think that specificity piece i think that example beautifully demonstrates just i can feel it the difference you know you can you can feel it viscerally as you as you hear it it does something different and i remember so clearly i think i left you a voice a whatsapp voice message because i was literally i was thinking oh he's probably asleep now but he won't have his phone on at night you know there's that bit of insecurity at first i thought no just express the damn gratitude you know you you know i think the the wrong enough a few years ago possibly wouldn't have done it out of insecurity or will this be taken the right way or the wrong way or whatever but the that i would say the person i am today having done a lot of the work and having practiced a lot of these tools um you know there is so if not only did i as you're sharing does it feel good for you to get it but it feels nice to share i said i'm doing a lot of voice notes these days i'm finding i'm going to whatsapp pressing the the mic in fact someone told me during lockdown that you can actually press it and flip it up uh which is my friend jody thanks jody i didn't know you could do that i said you can talk without actually holding it i didn't know that either i hold it down thank you thank you so much that's actually jeremy's wife so it's all coming it's bringing it back together for those guys but you know i i find it's really so i'm a vocal kind of person i like talking and sometimes i find it hard to express what i want to want a text message so i'll just do a whatsapp voice message and um yeah i think gratitude's super powerful one thing i'm going to add well i'll ask you actually do you do your gratitude practice by yourself or do you also do it with your wife so i do my gratitude practice by myself but then the expression may lead to me expressing it to my wife if she's the person that day that i'm being grateful for and now i'm probably grateful to my wife every day and so i express gratitude to her every day but i really find spending some time by myself to figure out my mind first it's almost like if you're both trying to solve a problem together you can help each other but one person can sometimes take shortcuts because the other person kind of carries the weight and it's really important to really be clear about who you're grateful for you can do it with your partner of course but make sure one of you are not kind of relying on the other person to come up with all the answers and do all the hard work when it really needs to be a personal feeling so you know yeah for me it's for me i feel gratitude is the easiest gift you can give someone and the easiest gift for someone to receive especially when it's genuine and specific and rangana i would encourage you not just with me but with anyone you know it was so genuine and specific that you know i recommend you continue to do that uh sharing of gratitude as you saw and you said it's visceral it is it boosts your mood when you're grateful to someone in a specific way and then you feel they love that do you feel or do you think as i do that many people have got hang-ups and insecurities and therefore to do what i did to actually express gratitude to someone they're fearful about doing it because insecurity is i think we all face insecurities right and how would you help someone who says hey jay look i want to do that like i'd love to tell my work colleague that you know she was so helpful to me yesterday and she got me out of this jam and helped me do something but you know what will it come across wrong i don't really know what will they think i mean what would you say someone like that yeah i think you are right i think some of our insecurity comes from sometimes our insecurity can come from our ego which is blocking our gratitude so the ego says well i don't want to recognize that someone else is doing something good because it makes me feel inferior that's one of the ways that our ego can block us from gratitude and i believe in some traditions and in some circles i've heard ego being translated to eliminate gratitude out right it's like a limited ego so you know you can you can kind of lose gratitude through ego because you think oh if i tell them that they're good then that means i'm not good which is not true at all uh the other way the insecurity comes in gratitude is like well what if they think i'm just trying to uh i'm just trying to like get close to them or i'm just trying to say something nice for the sake of it or i'm just lying or pretending like what if they think i'm just trying to suck up to them right like is that the reason and so sometimes we hold back how we feel what i'd say to you is i'd say that expressing gratitude if genuine if from the heart and if well explained and thought out should always be shared even when you feel uncomfortable because when it's shared from that place you've already got the benefits of feeling grateful and then if that person does or doesn't react in the way you expect them to and by the way there shouldn't be a need for them to react because you're just thanking them for what they've already done you're not thanking them for what they're about to do you're thanking them for what they've already done so now if they respond in an ungrateful way you haven't lost your gratitude because you're grateful for what they did in the past not what they did in the future so don't then go oh well they didn't even deserve me to be grateful because they did for that moment of what they did for you so share it because it's good for you don't worry about how they respond yeah and and i guess also if they do respond in that way or if they do think that that's their own issue right yeah yeah that's not your issue that you you've expressed it from your hearts how they react is kind of out of your control right and that's another key learning i think on this path to thinking like a monk i would guess is you know you're not in control of other people's thoughts right not at all and that's you know that's the biggest lesson is that you're not in charge of the results how people respond or what they think you never are so wasting your time trying to change how someone thinks of you is can actually be one of the most worthless pursuits in life but changing how you think about yourself is probably one of the most worthwhile pursuits in life but the one we spend less time on we're constantly trying to change how people think about us and we think if they think highly of us then we'll feel better about ourselves but that's not the case the case is we can change how we feel about ourselves by changing our behavior and being more in aligned with the person we want to be with our values as rangan said going back full circle so don't get lost in trying to change other people's perceptions of you because that could be a never-ending journey and and a journey that you never reach the destination of because you never will truly be able to control it yeah it comes full circle that's that coolly quite right i mean that is it is such a powerful quote because everything we talk about you can jen just back it up straight into that and it and and again it brings out the the meaning of that quote so much more but jay when you were when you were just talking there about the insecurity that some people may feel when tron expressed gratitude um i i was really i was struck by something i wrote down from your book and i can't remember which chapter it's in but you say it's impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others yes i'm quoting daisaku ikeda who's a buddhist philosopher who says that statements i believe i can't remember which chap i think i start the negativity chapter with that quote so it's daisaku ikeda buddhist philosopher and he says exactly that that you can't build your own happiness on the unhappiness of others and i think what that truly means is we often believe that we can only be superior if someone else is inferior so we feel better when we say oh you know that person did you know that couple's getting a divorce ah did you know that marriage only lasted like two years and what you're really saying is well we we've somehow managed to stay together for eight years like we've done pretty alright right and you're you're kind of gossiping about them or another way it goes is like what did you hear about him he's totally messed it up like he's getting fired next week and all you're doing is you're making someone feel inferior to make yourself feel superior that doesn't create happiness it creates more uncertain ground because now you're constantly looking for someone else to feel inferior for you to feel superior and guess what god forbid someone's now out performing you you're now feeling inferior and you're feeling all the insecurity of what you felt about someone else so it's never a stable ground right i believe it's in the bible but you know you you can't i think it's that you can't build your home on shifting sands but in the same way you can't build a stable identity of yourself on the gossip or the mistakes of others and so you've got to be really careful about not building a ground for yourself imagine you the ground you're standing on is built on blocks of superiority bricks of gossip and mud and cement of criticism that's not gonna hold and so you don't want to create your joy because other people are struggling or suffering you want to create your joy because you know how to deal with struggle and suffering yeah so so so beautifully explained and and i think we often write the quotes down that really mean a lot to us and i certainly feel for me that was something i spent a lot of my adult life really trying to come to terms with and realizing you know i used to be so competitive you know you know if i won a game of snooker or table tennis or you know it would it would literally elevate me and if i lost man i would be down in the dumps like it would and i've really explored this and you know given the time we've got left i sort of probably can't go down this rabbit hole but you know i i know one component is that as a kids um you know how i did at school you know and and again i don't know if this is the same in your household i know a lot of immigrant families have this sort of mentality if you you know if you've got 98 it's like well why was it not 100 yeah you know you were like oh what you came second in that test why what happened who was first why didn't you come first yes and you know i actually think whilst i um and my mom will say because i've spoken to her about this recently said well i knew you were capable so i wanted you to be the best you could and okay and i think she was doing the best she could i would say for me the way i interpreted it was that i could only be loved i can only be um feel good about myself when i'm number one and really i'd say the last sort of five years that's pretty much almost gone from me now i i'm pretty i'm pretty okay with it now like i don't feel and i think that that is i think it's such an important quote that you've shared because i sort of think now and we should probably talk about social media a bit because you know you you're pretty much the king of social media uh in in so many ways and i think i'd love to know some of your thoughts on social media um but with respect to that quote i think one of the negatives and they've no doubt been a lot of positives to social media um you know you have shared such amazing wisdom in your videos to millions of people around the world which potentially may not have happened without social media right so it's not about saying it's either good or bad but i do think for some people it can magnify those insecurities so if you feel that you can build your happiness uh on the unhappiness of others people can get very focused on follow accounts and likes um and i certainly know in the in the uk medic world uh there's a lot of medics feel a pressure to be building up their profiles and if contacts we say you know i'm not sure what to do and you think wow it's causing such discontentment and it's just a metric that in so many levels i'm not i'm not going to say it's meaningless of course it's not meaningless but if you're trying to do it because how you'll be perceived by others going back to what we've been talking about throughout this conversation what are you posting for what are you hoping to achieve by posting is it in service is it to help people or is it to elevate yourself you know i don't know maybe you can untangle that some forest because i'm sure some people listening will will be thinking that yeah there's there's there's very few creators of content on social media that started out with a follow account in mind so me included a lot of my peers in this space a lot of people that i know that are extremely successful on different platforms none of them started at least the ones that i know none of them started to get followers they all started because they had something to share whatever that was whether it was comedy whether it's wisdom whether it was a workout plan a fitness plan whatever it was like they had something that they did that they were passionate about that wanted to share and i can only speak to myself fully but when i started i thought i was going to have a full-time corporate job and i was going to make videos on the evenings and weekends to share a message that's genuinely all i believed and i it after my first month i had about a thousand subscribers on youtube about four videos i'd made on youtube had about a thousand people that had subscribed to my channel and most of my friends were like great jay that's where it's gonna end like congrats well done like you got a thousand subscribers you kind of just crept in there in 30 days like well done that's cool like how far is this gonna go and that's really the reality of what it felt like and the interesting thing is the question was never how do i get more followers the question was always how do i make more content that impacts people because and and that's the question with everything it's like if you make more content that genuinely impacts people you'll get more followers if you build a business that serves more people you'll make more money if you help a lot of people through your talents and gifts you will be famous and known for it like it's it's a byproduct of doing something properly and that's why i love the definition that peter diamandis gives that we should redefine the word billionaire to be someone who impacts the lives of a billion people why is jeff bezos the richest man in the world because he's created a product that we all say we want and that it solves a problem that we really need and so if you want to get followers don't look at the number ask yourself are you really creating the value that's going to help people and they're going to naturally want to follow you and and they're going to want to love your work and share it because to me that's the worthwhile pursuit in life because when you do that work that work is humbling when you do that creativity that's the part that makes you grateful for the success that you get because you go wow like people actually care about what i have to say but if you're just obsessed about numbers and metrics without being obsessed by the content the creation and the the service then then you'll never be satisfied because there'll always be someone better than you so for me when i set out to write this book so many people are like oh so do you do you want this book to be a bestseller and i said i want this book to be a bestseller of course i do but i'm not going to focus on it being a bestseller i'm going to focus on writing the best book in the world that i can possibly write given the skills that i have and that's why when i talk about dharma in the book which is helping everyone find their purpose dharma is broken down dharma means purpose loosely and has many different meanings but one of them is nature and purpose your true nature and the three aspects that i'll share now for the and there's more depth in the book the three aspects of dharma are your passion your skills and your compassion that's what it means when you have your passion plus your skills plus your compassion that equals purpose but for most of us if we're just looking at numbers and metrics and data i mean you'll be dissatisfied that and i'm saying that as someone who really values numbers i understand the value of followers social media i get the value of all those things and i'm highly strategic but i'll be completely honest with you i'm not focused on the number i'm focused on making content and and that's the message that if we're focused on really creating value in the world all of the other stuff will come naturally if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here there's no such thing as a bad experience there's experiences you don't like and they hug and they hurt right but to define something as a bad experience

Channel: Jay Shetty Podcast

Views: 1,047,787

Keywords: Jay Shetty, Jay Shetty Podcast, Jay Shetty Interview, On Purpose Podcast, Jay Shetty Inspiration, Jay Shetty Motivation, Jay Shetty Video, Self help, Self improvement, Self development, entrepreneur, success habits, purpose podcast, Jay Shetty relationships, jay shetty if you feel lost, jay shetty manifest, jay shetty law of attraction, jay shetty speech, jay shetty interview, jay shetty tom bilyeu, jay shetty lewis howes, jay shetty rangan chatterjee

Id: _qU3LmhSJW4

Length: 136min 53sec (8213 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022