The KEY TO SUCCESS Comes From DOING THIS Before You're READY! | Marie Forleo & Jay Shetty

starting before you're ready doesn't mean that you're going to throw your life into chaos but i think for anyone listening who feels stuck and you we all have felt that right we're just like oh like i really want to do it start before you're ready we'll kick-start you into action and action really is the antidote to fear and today's guest is going to help you do just that now i've been following her work for a long long time so for me this is a huge privilege i'm so happy to be sitting in front of her and you're about to see who that is and i just feel so happy because i've seen her interview some incredible minds of seeing her just build this beautiful show and to be able to interview her today about how that all came about and all the other stories around it is a huge honor for me she's a new york times best-selling author she's the founder of the b-school and the host of marietv and today's guest is none other than marie folio marie thank you for being here oh i'm so excited jay i feel like this has been like in the cosmic making for a very long time it definitely has and the reason why i wanted to reach out to marie to do this is her new book is out on september 10th it's called everything is figure outable right i love that title i was just telling her outside a moment ago i was like i absolutely love that thai tour it's out september 10th hopefully if you're listening or watching this it's around that sort of time that's the hope right now so you can go and get the book right now if you're listening and marie the first thing i want to ask you about because i love the title so much is what is the hardest thing you've ever had to figure out and what gave you this confidence in this bold beautiful title to literally say everything is figure outable yes so i think the way to answer that question is there's been hard things at different stages of my life which i feel like is true for most of us you know there was actually a time when i was um a young child i was about 13 years old and i didn't live with my parents so i was estranged from them i was kind of kicked out of my house and there were a few years that things were really difficult um i was in an abusive relationship like just everything felt like it was crashing in around me and so i think at that stage in my life that was probably one of the hardest things to overcome um and then you know fast forwarding a little bit i think most of us sometimes we find ourselves in college or university trying to figure out who we're supposed to be in this world right how can we make a living and make a difference how are we supposed to fit into society i struggled with that for years and i failed so much before i finally found my calling which is an extension of what i do now and then i think even moving on further you know there's been times with my relationship with josh we've been together 16 years and you know no relationship is easy and it's not all unicorns and rainbows and you know smiley faces and there's been times where we were on the brink of losing each other and that was devastating to me because he's the love of my life and this idea has helped me help us get ourselves back on track and so you know i've had other challenges with my family i've had challenges with the business i've you know self-confidence challenges so i know that's kind of a broad poo-pourri of of things to go through but those are some of the kind of things at different stages of my life that this one idea this simple little phrase has always helped me when i feel like nothing is working yeah and i feel a bit helpless it picks me back up and i'm like nah i'm gonna do this i'm gonna figure this out no matter how long it takes or no matter how many different areas i need to explore learn about test try until i can overcome absolutely and that's what i love about it so much is because we're going to need that thought in our lives again and again and again and again it's never going to be a time when you won't need that yes and that statement and you it is a simple idea but it's not it's deep it's it's like there's so much to unpack and that's what you do so beautifully in the book when i was reading it i was just like it's a simple idea but giving someone the confidence that it works yes is effort and that's why you've written this book because it's not easy enough for us to just keep saying oh everything's figurable and we can say that to ourselves as much as we want but it needs to be unpacked and that's what you do in the book so if one of the things for me when i'm reading it is when i'm thinking about my life and thinking about those times when i've needed this yes and i know for me it's always been like don't judge the moment like i've always said that to myself i've been like don't judge this moment like don't label this moment don't give it a bad name and one of the things you talk about in this book is that beliefs are sticky yeah right you talk about these beliefs being sticky talk me through some of the toughest beliefs that you think you developed at those times and how you stop them from being so sticky and why beliefs are so sticky too i think you know beliefs really are like the train tracks that underpin our lives that really decide where we're gonna go and how we're going to get there but so many times we don't understand that that's really what's running the show right some of our kind of deepest most kind of subconscious beliefs about who we are as human beings what we're capable of what we're not capable of how we feel about society men women marriage money business you know all of these things we don't often recognize that it's these deep-rooted beliefs oftentimes that we didn't choose for ourselves i think one of the most interesting aspects of beliefs is you think about us as babies you know we kind of pop out and we're pretty fresh and we're happy and as we grow up we're like little sponges absorbing the beliefs of our family our caretakers the media society you know women are allowed to do x or if i look like this i can only reach that or you know money is bad and evil or success means x y or c and so i think beliefs are sometimes so hidden to us that we don't recognize that they could be the thing that are holding us back and you know working and coaching people over the last two decades now i can't even believe i've been doing this for two decades which is amazing um here's what's something that's interesting many times in personal development people feel like you have to kind of unearth all of your negative and limiting beliefs and we all have them but here's what's awesome about the notion that everything is figure-out-able i like to describe it almost as the master key right it's like you don't have to go searching around the corners of your consciousness to find all those negative beliefs and fix yourself and change them if you absolutely adopt this notion that everything is figureoutable and i would encourage people to try it before you deny it we'll kind of walk down how we can do that but it's as though it's the first domino that you push and everything else becomes possible so you know for example for me early on in my career i had some really negative limiting beliefs around money and a lot of my beliefs around money were formed as a child you know my parents were going through a divorce i was about seven or eight years old and i remember just standing in my kitchen and my mom and dad had just signed the divorce papers and so the scene was this my mom was bawling her eyes out crying her face was red her eyes were bloodshot she was talking to her mom who was in florida at that time and she was saying i can't believe i've been this dumb i have nothing i have nothing and so the thing about my parents you know all their fights it wasn't about infidelity it wasn't about necessarily like substance abuse or anything like that it was always about money my mom feeling like there wasn't enough she had no control over it uh she you know didn't have the kind of power to direct where it was going and so when they got divorced i was clears around money so my mom hung up that phone with her mom she actually turned to me and she bent down so she was my height she took me by the shoulders and she shook me and she said marie don't ever be stupid like i was don't ever give anyone control over your money don't ever give everything away to a man i need you to grow up and be independent and take care of yourself look at me i have nothing right now don't be stupid like i was and i gotta tell you jay like as an eight-year-old right you get imprinted and i just stood there and i was like so i formed these beliefs as a young child that you know giving anyone control over your money was like a really bad idea i also form the belief that giving a man control of your money not a good thing to do and those beliefs i had to wrestle with them early on in my adult life i remember being deep in debt i just had all of these kind of twisted conflicted notions around myself and money and worth and so the process of using this idea everything is figureoutable i used it then to go you know what i can figure money out i can use this as a tool to heal myself and to heal other people and to help others not have suffering in their lives so you know everything is figure out about really can be that master key that helps people wipe through anything that holds him back yeah absolutely thank you for sharing that as well so openly i think so many of us when i was listening to you and i'm hoping everyone who's listening or watching right now was doing the same when you're hearing marie describe what she was going through as a child put yourself back in that position too like go through that visualization with her because for me i was sitting back and thinking oh yeah what was i going through at 8 years old that has created a belief in my mind and it's so funny you brought up the money one because i can definitely identify with that and i grew up in a home where we always said we just have enough like we always have just enough so my whole adult life i grew up believing that i only needed to have just enough which always meant that we were always like just above having nothing yeah so we never had a lot and we never had nothing but we had just above nothing and that became my talking point so when everyone would say to me like how much money do you want to make up like yeah just enough like that would literally be like how i'd speak about it and then when i grew up and started to reflect on wanting to have a family and wanting to serve the world and even wanting to create content that i really believed in and wanting to serve the world in ways that i really valued and i started to think i was like wow if i have just enough then i can't i can only help the world just enough that's right right that's right and so getting back to your point about our beliefs that sometimes we don't even understand or realize how much they're driving us until you kind of pause and and recognize that they are running the show right so we have a simple formula in the book our beliefs create our thoughts and our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our behavior and our behavior creates our results and so if you want anything to change on the results level don't just go to the behaviors or the feelings or even the thoughts we need to go deeper to our beliefs because if we can handle that everything changes absolutely and so well i couldn't agree with you more because we're always messing around that stuff at the end yeah like i want to change my results or i want to change how i feel yes but then we never talk about the beliefs the beliefs underpin them all absolutely and now so this is also a belief like everything is figure out about yes is like you're saying the master key belief in one sense of like believing that everything's figurable you you alluded to it earlier when someone hears that and go marie it's easy for some to say come on it's easy for you to say now that things have worked out or wait a minute you know i was at a conference recently and someone stood up and asked me a question they were just like how does this apply to the kid starving in africa right like they they said that to me and my response to them actually was like well if i was speaking to kids who are starving in africa i wouldn't be saying what i'm saying to you i was like this is to you this is audience specific yes right my advice that i was giving i was like i know who's in my audience if i was speaking to kids starving in africa i'd be giving them something else that was appropriate appropriate and relevant and accessible to them at that point so but for us for everyone who's listening and watching right now tell us if someone's doubting you if someone and i know you know this but someone's doubting you someone's looking at you going marie that's easy for you to say easy to say oh that's a nice thought yeah but my position right now like the situation i'm in it's so bad like you have no idea that's right right okay so i want to dive into this and peel it back in a couple of layers because it's so important so number one i am very clear that i have won what warren buffett has coined this phrase as the ovarian lottery right i'm a white woman in the united states by no effort of my own i was born into a family that gave me an education put a roof over my head i had running water i had electricity all of those things there are millions if not up to a billion people that don't have those same privileges or access to some of those resources so i absolutely get that that's why it was imperative for me throughout the book to weave in stories far diverse from my own so folks from the developing world folks throughout history that don't look like me that did not grow up where i grew up with the same types of resources and privileges and advantages and they embody this spirit this notion that all of us have this innate power and wisdom within ourselves and when that awakens what we are capable of as humans is extraordinary so we have that all over the book we also have dozens and dozens and dozens of reader stories right so folks that haven't won nobel peace prizes or that haven't done these extraordinary things i've been talking about this idea for two decades you know here's a story yeah i was gonna ask you to tell me a couple because then absolutely and then i want to go to the rules because an eight-year-old actually challenged me when i was first writing this book and it came up with something brilliant so let me tell the story of jen you know a lot of folks are like well yeah everything is figuratible if you want to build a business or get your health back online or perhaps save a relationship but what if i'm facing something difficult and hard that isn't so a woman named jen wrote to us and i had first shared this idea with the world in a really public way um on oprah's stage she was doing a super soul one day event she had asked me to speak in it and the title of my talk was everything is figurative so oprah then put that talk online it's on her podcast and so folks heard it that i had never met before so a woman named jen wrote to us and said hey marie thank you so much for your talk this lesson that everything is figureoutable is something my mom who i love so much had been trying to teach me forever but i kind of really heard it from you and then i shared the talk with my mom and she loved it too but then everything changed my mom who is the most important person in my life was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and suddenly nothing seemed figure-out-able and she said but then i actually took a walk and i looked at it from a different perspective and realized it was for example i could find my mom nursing care that could go and attend to her even though she lived in this rural area number two i could figure out how to get my mom foods that she could actually tolerate number three i got medical equipment so that my mom could spend her last days and in fact her last five weeks on this planet where she wanted to be which is in her home and she said i can tell you without reservation that yes everything is figureoutable and thank you so much for sharing this idea because it made a difference to two women on the other side of the world and so we have other stories of folks who have used this idea of facing addiction facing loss death grief diagnosis that are life-changing in terms of how long they will be on this planet and how they will exist on this planet so those are all embedded in there so i just want to share that another frame i invite people to try it before you deny it i do not claim to have all the answers nor do i think this book has all the answers but within it you will find a set of tools and practices and frameworks to find or create your own yes and finally i'll share the story about the eight-year-old so i was telling a friend when i was first writing this book we were like all having a brunch on a sunday and my friend's son asked me well what's your book about and i said everything is figuratible and he's like no it's not and i was like awesome tell me more and he said well you know i can't grow working human wings out of my back and i was like that's very true you can't do that yet i said but we humans can indeed fly and he was like oh yeah that's right he's like well you know i can't get my dog who died when i was two we can't get him to you know be back alive and has like some pet cemetery right there but um i said you know what that's true i said but scientists are working on cryogenics and there's people who have cloned dogs and he was like oh yeah that's right i said look just because something scientifically hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it's impossible there's an amazing book called the beginning of infinity by a quantum theorist named david deutsch and he has this incredible quote which says everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable given the right knowledge so i would invite everyone listening you know you don't have to take a quantum theorist word for it or my word just experiment with this live this idea and see if it doesn't help you become more capable and courageous and resilient and persistent in the face of whatever problem you're looking to unpack or whatever dream you're working to achieve yeah i love that and and try it before you deny it sure like with everything right like even if i told you when you came in they're like oh we have this juice and it's the best juice in the world yes and you could just deny it be like no i have the best juice in the world at home and it's something as basic as that like we can't even do it to do with food and juice what to speak of wisdom and knowledge and and ideas so yeah anyone who's listening and watching i highly recommend that you try this out the way marie is saying it and and what marie's done and what she's so beautifully articulating is she's done the research to prove to us that this works and she's giving you the process to practice it that's right that's what the book's doing it's proving to you all you through these stories and it's giving you the practice gone and i you know i'm definitely not sitting here going like i have everything figured out and i'm just you know what i mean hanging out going like it's all done no i use this every single day i use this when like i run a company and there's 30 people and you know things crash someone quit someone gets sick i am using this actively every single day of my life and it's what helps me continue to engage with a sense of curiosity and courage and a fearlessness to walk into the inherent groundlessness of reality like let's just be real about this there's so much in our lives that we cannot control right and for someone who will raise her hand to being like i like to be in control i like to have those plans i like to know what's coming up the nature of reality is chaos yes and the nature of reality is groundlessness which could evoke a lot of fear or it could evoke a lot of curiosity and so what i also like about this notion if everything is figure out able you don't have to grasp onto anything but your own innate wisdom and capability to show up and dynamically be appropriate to what occurs in this moment yeah absolutely one of the things i really wanted to ask you because this is something i'm fascinated by is when someone's living through that process of the belief that my life and everything that happens to me is the worst yeah right and i hear that a lot you see it a lot on social media you see it a lot on people's profiles where people are just like i'm going through the worst day my life and we have this belief that we're victims and we have this belief so strongly that i'm going through the word how do you start rewiring that from your perspective like how do you start the process of getting out yeah you know it's interesting and i think all of us have to you know we need to give ourselves permission to have those bad days because we all have them you know people often ask me they're like you know you seem so confident all the time you seem like you have everything together and i'm like well you don't see me when i'm struggling like you know i'm like on the phone with a friend going like i don't know if this is any good or i don't know if x y and z is working or you know kind of those things that we just do in in private quite frankly so i think knowing that all of us have bad days and you can be like oh this is the worst but to answer your question i think it's understanding that we have the power to assign any situation either an empowering meaning or a disempowering meaning so let's take a really simple example right so we're not going to get too heavy we're going to do it just right on the surface because sometimes that's easier to see like the juice example totally so let's say i am a first-time writer and i've sent out my manuscript and i got rejected again i can take that very neutral fact and assign a meaning or a story to it that says well i'm a failure no one likes my and i should just give up and i should stop being a writer clearly because here's another rejection letter so that is what i would categorize as a disempowering meaning you're not going to feel good you're probably not going to take a productive effective action from that state of mind and you may not ever reach your ultimate dream of being perhaps a published writer you could choose to assign that same neutral fact an empowering meaning which could be and we can come up with tons of them maybe it's like you know what every rejection means i'm one step closer to success because i'm actually getting my work out there and if i'm getting my work out there that means that i could possibly be published you could assign an empowering meaning like this that particular article or story wasn't right for that publisher they're not rejecting me they're rejecting the work let me go find another publisher that might be aligned with this particular story you could also make it mean something like this you could say you know what i remember that jk rowling got rejected 12 times and i think stephen king carrie got rejected like 30 times i just need to keep going and build up even more rejections and this isn't about being pollyanna it's understanding the power that we have of perception and our ability to assign a meaning to any fact that presents itself to us and i think there's something interesting there's this great quote life is ten percent what happens to me and ninety percent how i react to it chuck swindle right pastor i love that because there are going to be hard truths in all of our lives and i feel like the only thing that we can control is how we contextualize what happens and therefore how we respond to what happens does that answer that question definitely answers that question i love the multiple ways in which you gave of rewiring that same thought with different meaning and stories well i think that's it forces us to be creative right so it's like we have to challenge ourselves to see the same exact thing from multiple points of view one of the things we'll talk about this a little later but i also love showing people optical illusions where you can see multiple things in the same exact lines or drawings because it proves that we can all look at the same facts and have a completely different interpretation which therefore proves that the situation is not what is bad or good but the labels and the context and the stories that we lay on top of it totally totally i couldn't agree more i think that's a great answer because what you've triggered for me is that we used to make when we don't find a creative understanding of what's just happened and we don't think more objectively about why this has happened what's the reason behind it we're basically good at making broad generalizations based on very specific situations yes right we make this broad generalization based of a very specific situation like when you said it could have been because you applied to the wrong job with the wrong type of work with the wrong experience right which is a very specific situation yes and you make this broad generalization like i'm not meant to make it that's right like i'm done i mean you can look at the same kind of thing let's say two people lose their job which is absolutely not a good thing for most of us right we want to have a living we need to have the income we have the responsibility to our families one person says that's it i'm washed up i'm never going to work again i'm irrelevant that and just starts being and feeling down about themselves sitting on the couch sleeping in late not doing anything productive to change the situation same person loses the job says you know what this is awful and this really hurts and maybe this is the opportunity that i've been looking for to start my own business or maybe this is an opportunity to find a job that's going to value me more and that i'm actually going to like different context create different actions create different outcomes 100 i love that great answer there's a there's a part in this book that i really loved and it's you talking about the difference between fear and intuition yeah and how we tell the difference oh i can't wait to talk about it and i love that section because i think that's something that people struggle with so much like being able so it's so funny we talk about when we label things wrong and one of the biggest things we label wrong is the voices in our head like getting to be able to be aware of wait what who's saying that in my head and where is that coming from talk me through that because i i love that but so fear versus intuition so many of the times what stops us all from figuring something out is we're afraid right we're afraid maybe we won't be able to do it or we're just afraid of the area that we need to walk into in order to figure it out and then people often have asked me you know how do i know the difference between healthy fear that would be very good for me to move through versus my intuition or a gut instinct or a hunch going no no no no no that's actually going to be a show right like what that's just going to be it's it's something you should not do and that's a really important question here's what's awesome you don't need to go asking other people for the answer you have all of the wisdom you need inside of you and just to step back and to create a context for why what i'm about to share is so important for all of us to practice and i still practice it to this day we live in such a sedentary culture right we're spending 8 10 sometimes 12 hours a day sitting staring at our screens so we're living from the neck up and many of us have lost touch with the wisdom and the intelligence that exists in our physical bodies because simply we're not moving enough and as someone who's been a nike athlete fitness is a big part of my life movement is a huge part of my life i see very clearly when i am moving consistently i have access it's like a channel opens up where there is so much intelligence and and so much insight that is has not to do with my logical reasonable brain it has to do with another plane and when i don't i get up here and it all gets twisted and then i'm unclear so if you are facing an opportunity a possibility to say yes to a job a speaking engagement a date who knows it could be any realm of life and you're not sure whether you should move ahead with it here's what you need to do get to a place where you're quiet nothing's around make sure that there's no technology and i would invite people to close their eyes while they do this so ask yourself does the idea of moving ahead with this of saying yes to this make me feel expansive or contracted in the nanosecond after you ask yourself that question your body will have a physical response so let's walk through what expands everyone who's listening and watching right now do this with us yes so expansive and i'll just give some possibilities but yours might show up differently so expansive may actually be as though your shoulders are relaxing and your chest is opening up expansive may feel like even your physical body is moving ahead in space expansive may feel like a twinge or a tingle of excitement or joy or anticipation even if the notion of this feels intimidating to you or like something you've never done before there is a lightness a moving forward a ever so subtle visceral yes whether it shows up in word form or merely through the movement of your body that's expansive now let's look at the flip side if you ask yourself this question does the idea of saying yes to this make me feel expansive or contracted and in the nanosecond after you ask that question you find a pit in your stomach or a sense of dread or your shoulders kind of hunching forward or even your body just shaking back in space or your head saying no that's your intuition trying to save your butt and tell you don't move ahead with this and here's why this is so important jay because often when we're faced with an opportunity that our ego thinks we should move ahead with right um either there's a significant amount of money on the line or some type of opportunity that we feel will give us an edge something beyond the competition or put us on a level that we're playing in a field that we're like yeah now we've really made it and it looks good on paper but something inside is like not right that's when we need to listen to this most and use this test because i don't know if you've experienced this when you override those little feelings of dread even though everything looks so cool on paper that's when we get ourselves into trouble and get off track that's completely completely i've experienced that in the same way right i can completely everything you just said i was just like and and it's often the way i describe it is i say to people like stop trying because people always ask me do i listen to my head with my heart and i'm like listen to your gut like listen to the physical yeah the physical indicator there are neurons in there which you know that are that have so much intelligence and i think that all of us have access to this innate wisdom this inner knowing if we have the courage to be still and to listen to it and again that takes some practice in a culture that is constantly like this and this and that's always like well what do you think i should do or you know what's the money or what's the opportunity or what am i going to get from this rather than trusting that you have this innate tool inside that is designed to guide you to your highest and best everything absolutely that's such a beautiful onset i'm so thank you for guiding us through that too like i just everyone who's listening and watching make sure you do that again and again and expansive or contracted exactly anytime and you can just you know it straight away that's the most beautiful thing about it and no one has to tell you you know and you'll feel it and then you'll be able to see patterns in that feeling right you'll be able to be like i felt that when i dared that guy that i wasn't sure about and then i felt it again when i hired that person that wasn't meant to be in my company right like oh my goodness that's you just you laid up perfectly some people often say well i don't know how to hear my intuition i'm like oh but you do if we go excavating through your past just a little bit and we start surfacing up times when you said yes to something but you kind of felt a little off about it and then afterwards you're like what did i say yes to that for look at all of those times that was your intuition trying to save your butt absolutely absolutely i love that no and i love that and thank you for sharing that and thank you for making it so practical and and physical and real because i think we get like you said we just get lost up in here and i would say in addition to that too if someone still if they do that exercise and they're not quite clear on you know expansive or contracted do something physical that has an intensity to it so i often go to a spin class if because i it's dark and i can really sweat and i can challenge myself in a safe environment or dance or run or walk around the block i find that when i engage my physical body the interior channels open up that tap me into a higher source of intelligence that otherwise i can't access i think learning to trust and hear your intuition quicker and earlier in your life and being able to spot the patterns of good and bad yes and i started to do that very early on i started to notice that my intuition was always guiding me right when i was going against the grain doing things that no one else thought were a good idea and i was fully sold and confident about it so i remember i took a gap year before i went to university and that was all my friends went straight to university and i was like what are you doing wasting time and this is gonna be and it was one of the best years of my life and then i chose to become a monk when all my friends went and worked at big companies and again it was against the grain and it was and these were patterns i started to notice in my life so now when i come to make a decision and i'm going against the grain no one agrees with me and i'm really confident about it i'm like oh yeah that's my intuition like that's okay exactly instead of second-guessing every time and going oh well shouldn't everyone agree with me if this is a good idea and so and i've noticed that even now and i make that mistake now there are times with certain things where i think i have less knowledge yes external knowledge yes and i'll go against my intuition because i'll have less external knowledge absolutely because you assume and i went through this even with the process of writing the book you're like oh well so-and-so knows better because this is their business and it's almost like you give yourself a back seat and you abdicate responsibility i've done that where you assume i've done that so many times where i've you know wasted money like really good money and really good time and you know creative resources same thing thinking that someone else knows better because i'm less experienced i love that you brought that up and of course we're all open to feedback and of course we're all open to learning but i think when you have those inner little red signals and flags going off you trust yourself yeah exactly trust yourself and and and otherwise if you made the mistake make sure you note that down yeah like write that down somewhere like i remember even something as basic as if i do well in my exams at school i would never write down why i did well and then the next year i'd be wondering how did i revise last year that made me do well yes right and if you've done badly and you write down why you did badly the next year when it comes around to doing something again you can avoid that same thing so i just think it's so important i'm so glad that you wrote about that in the book and for anyone who loves this theme that me and me and maria both fall in love with talking about it's better in the book there's so much more in the book so much more in the book yeah i mean yeah we have so many exercises and things for people to do to dive even deeper yeah whichever which i'm really excited for people to check out one of the things that i love that you have a chapter on this book is that it's called start before you're ready yes and when i read that and i was just like yes this is exactly the advice like this is what people need to hear yes because i think because of school and because of our education system and because of even when we used to go to school we'd be like are you ready to go to school it was always about being ready right it was like do you have your uniform on have you packed your bag have you got your pencil case like first day of school syndrome and it's like are you ready to go to school and it's almost like we're always in this mode of like i'm not ready yet yes right whether it's educationally whether it's emotionally whether it's mentally and that kind of becomes one of our biggest excuses to ourselves of i'm not ready and i feel i was reflecting on where did this come from when i was reading the book and for me i think it came from the education system of always being ready before an exam being ready before a test everyone so tell me a bit about how you came to this place in your life yeah and how you saw people at other people and their stories of starting before they were ready actually be the tool absolutely in my own life you know when i was first training in terms of wanting to be a coach and becoming a coach it was so much in terms of personal development work and it was awesome i loved working with clients i was like 23 24 years old and not only was i helping folks try and get results in their own life i was also doing this work on myself and one of the things i realized was that defining myself as a coach for straw it never really quite felt right to me it felt very limiting and narrow and not quite on but i admitted that i had this dream to dance now let's set some background no dance training whatsoever never taken a formal dance class in my life and it was like i was around 24 25 which sadly in the professional dance world it's a little over the hill to start right that's a very very late start and anyway i finally got real with myself that i wanted to do this and so i started taking professional dance classes in new york city and it was amazing i found myself coming alive and coming alive and this was great and so i um was taking class at crunch fitness and my teachers were like you're actually really good and i remember jay i was literally like are you talking about me i was like like i don't have any technique they're like no no you should really consider start teaching and i was like yeah which given the fact that previous to that i had you know failed on wall street i had failed in the magazine industry i had all these failures and i was keeping myself alive quite frankly because i wasn't earning a lot of money as a coach by bartending and waiting tables so the fact that someone thought i was good at something was that just little grain of like oh you are kind of good at something it was great cut two i said all right i'm gonna try out and become a substitute teacher at crunch i'm going to teach these hip-hop classes i had no idea what the hell i was doing oh you're so cool so i love that it was just sheer passion right and i was just doing everything i could just trying to make it through one of my first classes ever that i taught on my own someone came up to me after class and she said you're really good and i was like thank you that means the world to me she's like you know i work for mtv and we're working on a new show and we are looking for a choreographer slash producer you should come in and jay it was a moment like this was my first real class ever again so like nervous and awkward and unsure of myself so what came through my head you're not ready yet that it was like i was even praying i was like universe why did this have to happen i am certainly not ready i'm not good i don't know what the hell is going on but this is amazing opportunity because i grew up on mtv so i couldn't say no right because again i could hear my inner clock going like girl you're not getting any younger so you might as well say yes so i said yes to this opportunity and i remember standing outside of the viacom building in new york city the day before i was like when i was about to go up for this interview that afternoon and jay i wanted to throw up like i was so nauseous i was so not ready like i was actually thinking should i throw up in this like metal trash can or should i like go inside and go to the bathroom so that i can clean myself up before i actually went to the interview so i went to the building and i stood in front of the boss's door the the person who i was going to interview with and i like shook myself out and i just said you are not ready but you're going to start before you're ready because it's an incredible opportunity and no matter what happens you're going to feel good about yourself that you just went for it and i went in for that interview and i booked the job wow and so it was this experience of me putting myself into kind of this whole world that i was in over my head so let's be clear i was working with dancers that had decades more experience than i did they were talking about dance terms that not only could i not perform i didn't know what the hell they were but i made my way through by showing up as professionally as i could by being honest about my inexperience but also by bringing my gifts that i did have to the table and that one opportunity dancing and choreographing and producing for mtv that led to fitness videos that led to this increased learning curve where i got to learn basically three to four years worth of experience in like three months which eventually led to me choreographing commercials for reebok and then eventually becoming one of the world's first nike elite dance athletes all because i was willing to start before i was ready and every single area of my life i still do it in business to this day there's so many things i say yes to that i'm like somewhere in the back of my mind is like you're not ready yet and i'm like that means i gotta go that means i gotta strap myself in and go like we're doing this i will learn as i go so this idea of starting before we're ready it doesn't mean that we're irresponsible doesn't mean that we don't do our research and it doesn't mean that we override our intuition that if perhaps you know there was years ago and i'll say this that people approach me to write a book yes and i legitimately wasn't ready yet but it was because my focus was in other areas i had other priorities i knew from a deeper level it wasn't about the fear it was about trusting my own timing yes but when you know you want to do something and you're clear that this is your path using the mantra start before you're ready is an amazing way to beat procrastination to leapfrog over your fear and to get going yeah and to push out of that desire of perfection yes and planning and what was going on earlier of like just having this addiction like perfection addiction of like yes everything's gonna be perfect before i start yes everything's gonna be in right in place and and i can so so agree with you i remember getting my first book offer to me after my first ever video and one of my first viral videos and i was approached by an amazing publisher that i would have dreamt of being published by before and they were like we'd love you to do a book and when i sat there and and it wasn't that again same as what you're saying i just knew at that time that my focus had to be something else yeah it wasn't and and it was that i wouldn't i didn't really know what i'd want to write a book about in full like that's how unready i was like it wasn't like i had no idea yeah i was like but i want to focus on this i want to build this and then i will come to that rather than like actually i'm not going to do anything right now because i'm not ready yet that's right and i think that that discernment and and digging into this nuance is so important for people to hear because yeah you know starting before you're ready doesn't mean that you're going to throw your life into chaos but i think for anyone listening who feels stuck and you we all have felt that right we're just like oh like i really want to do it start before you're ready we'll kick-start you into action yes and action really is the antidote to fear 100 100 and you have this graph in your book as well you this little squiggle oh yeah exactly and it's true like when you start before you're ready yes you are going to have a lot more of this yes a lot more of this yes but if you don't start you're not going to have anything right like you're just there like you're this dot i think people have this mistaken notion that if you're making real progress legitimate progress towards a particular goal people see it as a line that goes straight up on a graph so like you start at the bottom start up from the bottom and now we're here right but it's like all neat and tied together in my experience and what i've seen just working with so many people is progress actually goes up and then it reverses and then it goes down and then it goes in some circles and then it reverses and then it goes up and then it goes down again so progress is this squiggly line and so many of us feel that if we fall on our faces which i've done so many times we feel that if we hit a wall which i've done so many times that we're not making progress but that's untrue can i tell a quick story yeah please i'd love to see so um one of our b-schoolers so so b-school is a program that i've been doing for a decade it's it's online business school for modern entrepreneurs we've had over 55 000 people go through the program so it's about thank you amazing thank you for that i want to tell a story about one of our be schoolers because she's so perfectly illustrates what we're talking about so a woman named molly she had seen a video i did with another grad where this grad was going like i had my first thirty thousand dollar a month and so molly saw that she was like wait what like i had never even knew that was possible so it opened up a possibility for her that she had never recognized before i think that's why it's so important for us to witness each other and what's possible because sometimes you can't see what you don't you know you can't become what you don't see so molly said i would love to have my own business she didn't have an idea for business she had no business experience it was just this little seed of a dream like many of us have around a relationship or our health or a creative project we don't know how we're going gonna do it we have no experience doing it but we want that thing like dance for me so molly did the program fine fine fine she worked for two years jay and she kept failing business wasn't working she was do she showed up in the program she's trying everything not working not working not working and she wrote to us and she was so disappointed in herself and we said hey don't be like you're you're actually making progress hang out like we gave her some coaching we advised her to go into our member area and talk with the community she actually took the feedback from everyone she retooled and then we didn't hear from her from a little while cut two year three be an email for molly you are not going to believe this and we're just like okay what's happening girl in one month she had more than doubled that she's like i just brought in 66 000 she actually had a real working business she had completely surpassed what her original inspiration was that was so far beyond anything that she could have comprehended at that point but it didn't happen until well into year three and the reason i want to tell this story is this so many of us have this mistaken idea that in that year or that two years that we're not actually making progress but we are yeah right yes and if she hadn't kept going she would have never realized that little seed of a dream that was originally there that was real but she had to go through the squiggles like we all do before we keep getting to that next level so i just want to tell that progress not perfection if you are making progress in any regard if you are learning something even if it's a tough lesson if you are moving forward if you are making adjustments and evolving or iterating guess what you're making progress yeah keep going absolutely absolutely this is one of the things when when we were monks the way we were it was we were trying to rewire our brain this way was planting seeds and so when you actually plant a seedling and then you water every day and you make sure it gets sun you realize that thing doesn't grow no the days it's under the surface it's under the surface because the roots having a spray yes trying to grow underneath the foundation and you're going god when is this thing gonna grow and then you finally see it grow yes and then it looks like this little weak thing and you're like oh god like that's never gonna grow into anything significant and then it grows and grows and grows and finally it grows and then you see flowers and then you see fruits and it's almost like that fruit you're never gonna get that fruit if you gave up watering it on day two or you picked out that little seedling on week three because you're like man it's not working it's not going fast just neglect it yeah yeah you just ignore it and it's just like you have to rewire your brain for that patience and persistence and what you're saying progress not perfection that's right because you're not gonna get that fruit that flower that paycheck that sixty six thousand dollar whatever you know reward whatever it is yes if if you're impatient and forcing it you can't force it to grow i could actually i could even over water it for one day and that would actually destroy its growth you'll kill it yeah yeah and and that's and and so that's where i always wonder when and how do we figure out if we've pushed too much spent too much money and now it's like maybe this isn't for you or is the goal wrong or is the process wrong or tell me about that other stream i love this so this is kind of getting into the nitty-gritty so i would say um the conversation that we had a little bit ago about intuition is really important here because it's going to be different and i think it's also important to make the distinction that giving up isn't the same thing as moving on there is something known as the power of positive quitting so another quick story so i remember earlier on in my career before i had a team and had resources and again i've been doing this for 20 years so we're talking like back in the early days when i was still doing all my own customer service it was basically me and like a virtual assistant that was it i had this idea to build a custom membership site and this is way back in the day when that's like unheard of and i think the thing cost me like five thousand dollars which was like five thousand dollars that i did not have at that time so that was an enormous first of all that's still a lot of money and it was an enormous scary investment for me at that time it was a new coaching program and um i had was so excited that a bunch of people said yes to this coaching program and they were starting to log in and jay the thing melted down it crashed it was such a hot mess and i was just not only was i mortified but customer experience and customer service and taking care of people is everything to me like that's my heart and soul and i just remember going like you know this is not gonna work this is it like i i'm going to quit not as a coach but i'm going to get people off of this really shitty platform i'm going to put them on a hosted platform i'm going to over deliver and take care of them but i'm not going to keep pouring money into this or beating myself up because you know this thing crashed and burned i'm going to take the lessons from it and i'm going to pivot and move on so i think when it comes to understanding whether or not you're kind of done with something and you're ready to move on i think people have to get honest with themselves about their motivation so one of the things that i've seen especially as it relates to career and especially business when folks start a business purely to make money that's when it never works so i always like to invite people never start a business to make money start a business to make a difference and all of us as entrepreneurs and creatives and multi-passionate creatives we need to stay nimble and evolve because the market's evolving technology's evolving we're evolving as humans and as is the market but if you're trying to push something that in your heart of heart you're not truly committed to and you're just trying to get some external reward like fame recognition the dollar bills whatever it could be it's not going to work definitely i'm so glad that you spoke about that because i couldn't agree more i always say to people like if you're pushing to make something happen and you're doing it to make a difference or an impact or a service that actually keeps driving you yes and if you've lost that drive for something it's probably because that's not the reason why you were doing it right because otherwise you wouldn't lose the drive for it if it was that meaningful to you and so i've always said to people i have right now i probably have and i'll be i'll give a genuine honest number i won't give an amplified number i probably have ideas for three other things i could be doing yeah that i think could be huge financially yeah like i'm convinced that i have three ideas that have been verified by venture capitalists and all the rest of it that i know would be financially very successful but i couldn't die for any of them like i don't really care if i did them yeah like someone else could take them and make money from they'll be okay like yeah but what i'm doing right now what we're doing right now that's something i'm willing to die for like that's something that i'm committed to it's something that i've worked very hard to do and i've been driven by that service yes would that impact that difference completely and i think that for all of us you know if someone's thinking about you know oh god have i hit the ceiling on it that's the really good litmus test between you and you you know again i had side jobs for seven years as i was starting this business i mean everything from bartending waiting tables cleaning people's toilets i taught a lot i did anything i possibly could because the coaching and the creating and the writing and the connecting with others like that was my dream and no matter how long it was going to take i didn't even know if it would eventually work that's the truth of it i had no idea but i was fine eating my mac and cheese and my peanut butter and jelly because i was really doing the thing that i felt like i was meant to do in the world yeah i love that i'm so glad you did that i'm so glad you pushed through and i'm so glad and this is what i said to everyone it's like when i'm hearing you say all of that i'm just like i'm so glad because it just makes the story better right like all those situations and what i mean by that is not from a marketing point of view not from a sales point of view but that's what we can all connect with yes there are multiple jobs at the same time like the multiple rejections yes and the downs that's what everyone's story is but for some reason we look at all these posters and we think oh yeah but they didn't have that and that's just because we don't do enough research i feel like we don't actually dive so deeply into the people we admire and really look at their back stories and really look at their failures and rejections because otherwise then we'd see that we're on the same path the same exact path and i think one of the things you've probably noticed this too because you've had such incredibly rich conversations with just so many incredible people you know is every person on the planet has their own struggles even right now no matter what you're seeing like people are battling things privately and that's their right to you know not everyone has to share everything but you know no matter how much perceived power or fame or money someone has it's like they're having hard times too and they have the self-doubt and they have the fear and they have their own versions of of struggles and i think when we realize that we stop putting people on pedestals and start recognizing that we have so much more in common than we do in terms of our differences absolutely thank you maurice so i've end every interview with final five questions these are a final five rapid fire round quick fire rounds so you have to answer with either one word or one sentence maximum okay i'm up for the chat and and and i'll go off tangent if i feel if you say something and i'm like oh it's usually me who ruins it for the guest but here we go so the first thing is first thing you say to yourself when you wake up in the morning good morning i like in that voice kind of like in my own head i don't say it out loud and i'm like all right good morning girl i love that uh the last thing you say to yourself before you go to bed so tired i like it thank you for the honesty yeah third question the best advice you've ever received that your heart is the strongest part of you nice uh fourth question the worst advice you've ever received hmm i've the sentence i'm gonna say i feel like my brain must have deleted it because i literally have nothing right now oh yeah that's yeah i like it that's awesome and the fifth and final question is what are your what are three truths that you live by so one is obviously everything is figurative everything is figure-out-able um the next truth is there is nothing more important uh in this world for any of us than the quality of our relationships and our connections that and i think that um the third thing clarity comes from engagement not thought explain that i want to hear more of that so so many times for many of us we have these notions of what could be possible or what we might want to do or what something could feel like but we spend so much time in our minds rather than actively engaging to discover it so rather than pro con lists or rather than you know sitting on the couch kind of going oh i don't know if i should i think living by this idea that clarity comes from engagement not thought gets us out into the world gets us physically engaged and activates this open channel within to feel our way into our truth rather than think our way into what we you know have a notion is this going to make me happy or not and i feel like when we lead from this when we lead from our heart and we tell our truth from engagement it's where the magic is that's great advice i love that thank you so much marie was telling me and this is interesting to me because i'm working on my book right now marie was telling me that there was a ton of stuff that actually didn't make it into her book now whenever i hear stuff like that i'm like that's the stuff i really want to know about because if an author creates something and it doesn't get in there not because it's not good enough but because it's context space whatever it is tell me tell us about why yeah so it was this amazing chapter that i had worked for weeks on and my publisher who i really trust in my editor they're like oh we felt the natural ending was here and no no and i was like at first i was crestfallen it felt like a punch in the gut and then when i re-looked at the material i was like oh no i think i could actually teach this better if i had the benefit of my voice and i had videos and i actually had worksheets and could actually coach people through it so it was this acronym this little formula i created to help people embed the belief everything is figurable into their consciousness into their mind into their soul in a really organic way so i said to myself okay i actually still want to give this to folks but i want to do it for free and just teach everyone there's no upsells there's no anything it's just another part of the book that just didn't make it into the pages that i actually feel will be more effective if done collectively and done online so there's behavioral science there's neuroscience that backs all of this up and so it's free it's happening october 14th if you just go to everything as figureoutable.com you'll see a little link and if you're interested you can totally take the course completely on me and with um you know tens of thousands of other people and you'll learn this five-step formula that will help you figure everything out and embed the belief into your mind and soul i love that that's so awesome i'm so glad you're doing that especially with the point of embedding it into your yeah psychology well because my friend asked me she's like well this is great because you learn this belief as a child which we talk about in the book and it's been my own internal operating system for so long and she's like yeah but how can you help it be mine and i was like oh i got you i got you and so that's what we did we created a little system for people and i talk about it like it's an emergency first aid kit or like a life preserver if you ever forget that everything is figure-out-able or you find yourself feeling stuck or overwhelmed or just unsure how to move ahead you'll have this wonderful little tool that you can use for life and it's free and it's all yours amazing and when and where do they sign up so go to everything is figureoutable.com and there will be a link about the course and again it's a hundred percent free you can invite your friends just come do it everyone who's been listening and watching let's give a huge round of applause in our hearts for marie that was amazing thank you so much thank you for having me on everything else figure out about is out on september 10th if you're listening to this right now i'm guessing the book is already out or about to be out make sure you go and pre-order if you are hearing this before and if it's already out make sure you go and buy the book to dive deeper into this conversation if you want to overcome your fears if you want to understand how to get started before you're ready if you want to know how to make progress even without feeling that you're perfect which none of us are and if you actually want to start driving towards your dream this is the book for you make sure you go out and get it don't hesitate to buy this book this conversation should have given you the insights into the kind of things that are inside there's so many more incredible stories that i've read inside the book that i can't wait for you to hear because the more you fill your life up with those stories the more you'll be able to believe that everything is figurable so thank you so much again marie thank you jay thank you thank you for who you are in the world you're so amazing i adore you thank you thank you sweet thank you for watching and listening everyone make sure you share this episode what i'd love for you to do is find the one thing the one thing that marie said that you're not going to just think about or post on instagram but you're gonna experiment with i don't do want you to post it across instagram facebook twitter wherever you're active and share what it was that she said that you're testing out this week go get the book and i can't wait to see you again next week thanks for listening if you want even more videos just like this one click on the boxes over here and if you want to continue seeing these kinds of stories you can subscribe by clicking the link right here

Channel: Jay Shetty Podcast

Views: 76,815

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 speech, jay shetty interview, on purpose podcast, marie forleo interview, marie forleo speech, marie forleo no excuses, marie forleo, success advice, wisdom, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, wealth

Id: tpaJYGyDIao

Length: 60min 29sec (3629 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020