Jay Shetty Reveals How Mindset Matters | Impact Theory

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory we are back here on the set for the first time in a long time and nobody better to be doing it with than a man jay shetty jay welcome to the show man hey tom thanks for having me back i was saying to you i'm like i was so excited to sit in the seat again that that i couldn't do it any other way i i am happy to have you back in that seat we got tested we are here we are ready to rock absolutely and i am really excited to talk about the book think like a monk the highest praise that i can ever pay to something is that it's real in terms of if you use it it will make your life better if people are here for a self-help book on how to find joy to figure out what their passion is to reduce stress anxiety they're in the right place the book is really really extraordinary i want to know how close to encapsulating the notion of thinking like a monk can you get like how like if you were to give somebody just a nutshell notion of what that means what would you say i'd say it means to live a life in alignment and what that means is that you live a life where what you think what you say and what you do are aligned with your truer self and what i mean by your truest self is the self that was not given to you by your parents or by your education or by media or movies or not the self that you've created to function in the world so i think if you strip away all of those expectations obligations and opinions what you're left with if you live in alignment with that then you're thinking like a monk all right so that is the very thing i want to get to so dharma which is a word that i knew only from jack kerouac in the whole title of dharma bums which i have not read but that notion was always very interesting to me so one of the questions i get asked a lot probably the thing i get asked more than anything is how to find your passion and to me hearing you talk about dharma and identifying your essence it really aligns with that idea um can you explain like what is the definition of dharma is it different than finding your passion is it like what is one's true essence when those things are stripped away like how do you begin to to approach that as a person or a monk quite frankly so yeah the word dharma means a lot of things and it's always hard to translate ancient sanskrit words into modern day english but the closest two definitions are your true nature and your eternal purpose so it's almost like this is something that's already existing it's already almost part of your dna and part of your makeup and it's allowing that to be completely unleashed but i break it down in the book to make it really simple because just like you the amount of people that say to me jay what's my passion what's my purpose so i use dharma to be described as the word purpose and then i create this formula or this mathematical equation for how to unlock purpose and to make it simple and obviously people can dive into the book and do the questions and everything else that's in there it's passion plus strength plus compassion equals purpose and i'm going to say that again because i love to break it down because i'm going to break each of these down for you as well that passion plus strengths plus compassion equals purpose or dharma and this is also similar with the concept of ikigai in the japanese terminology which is reason for being so you find these in a lot of ancient traditions but now let's focus on the word passion how do you know what your passion is so to break it down i've been thinking that purpose is like an adult passion is like a teenager interest is like a child and curiosity is the womb so the birthplace of passion is actually curiosity and interest and i think we waste so much time trying to be like what am i really passionate about what do i really believe in that's going to take years to figure out and i've heard you say this too that's going to take experimenting it's going to take testing but the thing you can start with right now is the simplest form of what am i curious about what am i interested in let me take a course on that or let me take a seminar on that or let me go and try that or let me shadow someone who's done that and that experimenting process is the only way to unlock your passion so to me that's step one the other way of approaching your passion is through compassion so actually a lot of people find their passion through pain they find it through pain that they went through pain of someone that they loved and lost pain of someone who went through a physical ailment in their life or something that they went through and then that becomes their passion that they've seen the worst horrific type of pain and they never want to see it again and that becomes what illuminates their passion to them and so compassion is another way and actually sometimes a simpler way because we all know what pain we don't want to feel again and we all know what pain we don't want someone else to feel again why do you think so many people struggle with this and why do they struggle so much to find the answer for themselves to answer in that order i think we care so much because deep inside of us we know that meaningful work has a reward and i think we know that because we know that meaning less work has no reward and i think everyone at some point in their life has done some form of meaningless work whether that was you tapping away on the buttons in a corporate company whether that was you doing paperwork and filing an admin for that office job you did one summer or whether you were flipping burgers and doing you know frying fries or whatever it was like everyone's done something that didn't satisfy them and by the way all of those things i've just said could be really satisfying to someone else and that's the crazy thing about passion that it's not linked to a particular activity for everyone it could be completely different there's a great study from the yale school of management that i talk about in the book and amy vroznuski and her team tried to find work that they thought would be considered challenging and they found that they looked at hospital cleaners and hospital workers because they thought that might be some of the challenging and sometimes the the filthy work that people may have to do can you imagine like cleaning up after people pass away or cleaning up after they just like urinate or whatever it may be they're cleaning bed sheets they're cleaning toilets and so they asked some of the people that worked in these hospitals to define their job most of them as expected said meaningless insignificant low skilled and basically they read their personnel manual the interesting thing is they asked the same question to people different people doing the same job but this time the answer was different these different people doing the same job said that they did highly skilled work it was highly fulfilling and they saw themselves as healers they saw themselves as carers and they saw themselves as transformative in the healing process of their patients because they saw themselves in connection to someone actually recovering and being better the whole notion of dharma to me hit home really hard in that story in the book and you talk about one of the people in particular who was changing like the photographs out for people so that they had something new to see and somebody asked her like is that part of your job and what was her response i thought this this summed up dharma for me in a really visceral way yeah it was it's not part of my job it's how i see my job right it's how i perceive what i do and the term is job crafting where you have assigned meaning to the task you've assigned meaning to the experience that you're now fueling that work rather than letting the job description be your only definition of it yeah when she was stepping into that and saying like okay i knowing who i am and knowing how i feel and what it means to me to take care of this person to look at a small detail like that and to imbue this thing which somebody else might think of as you know sort of a gross job or whatever but to bring the beauty that i want to bring to it um it it's me recognizing she didn't use the words dharma but it's me recognizing my purpose it's me like not asking what's the definition of the job but instead how do i bring my truest purpose the unique way that i would do this job and bring that to this situation now this is where your book got really interesting for me is this interesting interplay between there's a uh a sense of your essence who you are and then there is bringing that into the things that you do and so you could take something you talk about like cleaning the um the monastery like in the tiny tiny little ways but how what you would do is you would think about cleaning this i imagine myself cleaning my my own heart and so now it becomes not actually polishing a monastery it becomes like the spiritual pursuit of recognizing one that even as you get to the end of cleaning it's dirty again and so it's this continual thing but that was that that being able to begin to tease those things out that some things will seem really boring and dull but you can imbue them with meaning and then there's this thing inside of you that when you align to the things that you like and that you enjoy is like the the sort of raw response is there but you can also create a response yeah and how do you help people like bring those together you talked a little bit about it with job crafting but how do you get people out of a woe is me mentality into you know finding ways to to make their life beautiful i really believe that you have to seek the love and the beauty that you want in what you have now because that way you're training yourself to extract meaning right now which means in the short term if you can like those hospital workers we're doing if you can fill that role with meaning and your true passion and what's coming from you then that's going to lead you to discovering the power of it and i saw that in my own life when i came back from being a monk and i worked in the corporate world i was teaching meditation and mindfulness and the things that i talked today in the corporate world and i remember in 2014 i was invited by one of our executives to teach mindfulness to a thousand of my peers at twickenham rugby stadium and i was speaking in between the ceo and will greenwood who won the rugby world cup with england and and i'm sitting there in the audience as a complete nobody and completely around people who are my same age we all make the same money no one knows who i am and there i'm sitting there going how am i going to share mindfulness but after doing that experience i realized that even though my job was digital strategy and social media innovation and i was a consultant i was bringing my passion to the workplace which actually gave me confidence that i could do this outside of the workplace and that's how the two ideas connect that when you find how you can apply it to your small world you then get the confidence and the courage to take it out and make something real of it whereas i think a lot of us are waiting for that break to get into doing it in reality but we actually haven't even tested it or experimented on it in a small space where we can develop our own confidence and courage around it so i think there's there's two things that um are going to be important for people to understand if their your book reads like a how-to manual which to me is is the ultimate power in a book and there's two things you touch on that play into this and one of them is the monkey mind and then the other is what you just talked about with strengths now the reason i see those two things is coming together is a lot of times people they don't know what their strengths are or maybe they haven't even spent time developing their strengths and the monkey mind is either saying it's unfair that things are so hard for you that you have to develop them it's unfair that you know at the ashram i was because i know that you had health trouble at the ashram which sort of began this process of maybe i'm not meant to be here forever and so some people are going to be it's unfair that that happened for me and that i find myself you know now at accenture which is exactly what i was trying to avoid and and or it's the thought of speaking between the ceo and this famous rugby player spins them off into um impostor syndrome and i'm never going to be able to do this and the anxiety takes flight and then they just aren't able to do it so how do you help people develop their strengths and recognize what their strengths are in the first place and calm that monkey mind so that they can see clearly this is this is why i love tom you're just amaze i mean tommy you're literally explaining my book for me i'm just like this is like the biggest master class of the book it's great uh no and you're spot on that the monkey mind is what we all experience every day so the monkey mind is jumping from branch to branch it doesn't want to focus on the root of the issue it wants to find the next banana it wants to find the next excuse it wants to find the next instant gratification right that's the monkey mind and so the monkey mind is never going to help you focus on your strengths and the reason going back to one of the earlier questions you ask the reason why we struggle to find our passion is because the world has constantly pushed us away from our strengths we've constantly told to focus on your weaknesses oh you've got three a's and a d you should be working on that d let's get that up to an a right i remember in my school they had this excruciating exercise where you'd be ranked 1 to 180 on every subject every year and they'd send the list home to your parents so there were 180 students in my year group and every subject art math english science geography history you name it you were ranked 1 to 180 in every subject based on your test results and scores and that was like painful when my parents received that and the crazy thing was i would always outperform always in art design philosophy and economics i was in english i was always in the top half if not in the top quarter if not in the top five right of my whole year group and stuff like science and geography and math i was kind of like in the middle and and towards the bottom end of my year now granted i went to a competitive school so i was still okay at those things but the interesting thing was that my parents and my friends parents would never look at what you came one or two or three in they'd be looking at the things you came 90 100 and 110 in and so we've all been programmed to say oh your strengths are they're fine they're good the way they are but why are you not performing at this and so the one way to know your strengths is to ask yourself what do you do that you feel the most confidence doing and it could be something as simple as i'm great at organizing birthday parties it could be like that may be your skill right that may be your strength or it may be something like i'm really good at putting on makeup or it could be that i have a great sense of fashion it could be any of those things and if you don't know it yet you can also do an exercise where you sit down with a colleague a family member and a friend because you need people from all areas of your life and you ask them what do you think i do that i excel in that i stand out in or if you could trust me to do one thing in your life for you what would that one thing be and when you ask that to people in a reflective way really asking for that presence you might be surprised by what they say and that's such a powerful question to ask because someone may actually say something like to you like jay i think your greatest strength is just knowing what to say to me when i most need it and you may think well that's not a strength you can do anything with but it is it is a strength that you can do a lot with if you are okay with accepting that of course i want someone to say to me oh jay you're you're an athlete like cristiano ronaldo and you could play football and get the ballon d'or and win all these trip but that's not my reality and so i feel that that's the place that i would start with strengths and there was a great study done on the healthy wealthy and wisest people in the world and they were asked if you could invest in what you're good at your average at or what you're bad at where would you put your money and so if you take a hundred percent how would you divide that as a ratio and if you ask this i want everyone who's listening and watching at home right now to do this exercise and you may write down 33 33 33 you may write down 40 40 20 you may write down 10 10 80. whatever you write down the most healthy wealthy wisest successful people on the planet will say theirs is a hundred zero zero or eighty ten ten they go all in on their strengths because they know that if they go all in on their strengths they can become exceptional at it now here's the caveat when it comes to your hard skills focus on your strengths but when it comes to your soft skills focus on your weaknesses now you got to tell me which is which yes so hard skills are things like excel math uh product design using a video camera uh script writing speaking these are all hard skills in the sense that they're very clearly defined very tangible you can really measure them it's almost like a skill that's measurable your soft skills are like emotional intelligence listening compassion empathy these are all soft skills or considered soft skills and those are where you focus on your weaknesses because they can actually end up tripping you up while you're trying to become the best at doing the hard skill so you may be the best videographer in the world but if you don't know how to listen to your community and your team then no one's going to want to work with you and so to me that's the missing link that we're actually the other way around we put all our emphasis on getting better at our weaknesses and our hard skills and we think that because we're empathetic and good people that that will be enough and it doesn't work that way that's one of the things that i loved about your book is there's a real so you spend three years in an ashram removed from everything but end up coming back and obviously had spent your entire youth thinking that you were going to go on the same path that most people growing up and london or any other industrialized nation is going to end up not taking that path think it's forever end up coming back and so there's this real understanding of the duality of you have a spiritual life but then you also have to pay bills and keep the lights on and so that um the way that you handle the collision of those two elements i found really really interesting no for sure and and i mean it dude the book is usable like if people put it to use in their life their lives really will be better and part of what i like is the way that you're walking people through this is how you identify your strengths right so asking your friend your colleague your i forget the threat yeah family thank you um and beginning to you're giving people things to do in order to get to the things that they're going to need in order to move towards fulfillment now i'm putting that word in your mouth i actually don't you don't harp on fulfillment a lot in the book so if you had to say what the punch line is like why are people working this hard what are they working towards exactly i think the two things that we're all working towards is a sense of peace and a sense of purpose peace is for yourself and purposes for the world and i think we all exist in both places and i think where we go wrong is that we try to live life in an either or and this was one of the most beautiful lessons that i learned as a monk the life was about self and about service there was no either or it wasn't disconnected or divided you couldn't live a life of complete selfishness and expect to be happy that wouldn't work even if you look at like hedonism if you look at it as a philosophy of life or hedonism however it's pronounced here but if you look at that as a philosophy of life which is let's just accumulate let's just hoard and let's just celebrate on my own we know people and stories about people who will not be satisfied that way to just have you're one of them you and lisa and i and i can say this honestly and i said this to liz the other day are two of the most generous loving people and humble people that i know despite all your success and incredible achievement and that's what endears people to you it's not what you have that endears people that may endear some people to you but what keeps the right people around is that you both have these human qualities because you want to serve you want to help you want to support and collaborate and so for me i feel like we either live and then we leave the opposite the other opposite life is our life is just about giving it's just about service it's just about helping that's not sustainable either and so to me i've discovered through real monk wisdom that life is actually embracing polarities it's actually about doing a dance and knowing which way to go at the right time so i believe as much in strategy as i do in sincerity and i believe in much as generosity as i do in generating value for myself and i believe as much in giving as i do in growing and i think as soon as you start to say no it's either or you have to choose i think that's where we start to lose a part of ourselves and that's why i add that compassion to passion because i know a lot of people who do what they are passionate about but actually lack meaning and purpose in their life because they haven't turned it into a service tell me some of the stories about the way that monks tap into purpose and service it's something service is something that comes up in the book a lot what is the power of service and how can we without going to an ashram how can we take our strengths and really give them purpose and meaning yeah so one of the biggest things with service in the ashram is service is a part of your daily routine so there is no choice about whether you serve or not so that's a really great way to live because you're almost exposed to lots of different types of service so some of that would be cooking for the homeless or underprivileged children who don't have access to warm meals some of it would be building sustainable villages inside which people can live and villagers can find a home and an economy so you're always connected to doing something for others but here if i was gonna ask a monk why are we doing this what would they say they would say because i believe that you have to see how you can be useful to others so the dalai lama probably puts the best that really we're born to help others and if we can't help them at least don't hurt them and to me that really sums it up that we're born to help others we're born with different gifts with different geniuses with different talents to improve the lives of others and the question i always get from someone in the audience who wants to ask me an awkward question will be and there's always one right and so the person will say well jay how does someone who has nothing in india or africa do this like someone in in like a really slum situation or a village situation and they're always they'll always pick on india and africa i'm not saying those and i'll be like no but this isn't for them i'm speaking to an audience that has education that has resources that has network like i'm speaking to people who can make a difference so anyone who is in that area of society has a responsibility so anything that you're given in life you're seen as a caretaker of and the way you take the best care of it is that you use it in the service of others and that purifies you from becoming attached to it and it feeling like it actually eats you alive and feeds your ego as opposed to you now being purified and cleansed of wealth success fame status or time or whatever you have an energy and you're now using it for the highest cause so that's what they would say they would say it's the highest cause of using what i've been given in the service of others whatever you've been given there's a couple things in there let's see if i can get to them both so one in the book you do talk about somebody mother or something she was a woman she was married at 12 she ends up having multiple children at she's abused yeah so at one point she's pregnant he puts her in a cow barn she gives birth in the the umbilical cord with a rock and then ends up going and living on the street now this is somebody who has nothing nothing nothing yeah but yet ends up finding joy in being able and she starts begging for other people yeah because she can see just how hard other people have it so when you were telling that story that you know people are trying to sort of pin you down of like you know what can the the lowest of the low really do even there because there's something so ingrained in the human condition that neurologically you are going to be rewarded for helping somebody in whatever way even if all you can offer them is a smile there really is like just a neurological feedback loop which is super powerful yeah her name is sindhutai sakpal and oh her story is just heart-wrenching like that story should be a movie maybe we need to make that into a documentary movie because that story of like literally as you described it like she's pregnant she's kicked out of her home her husband abuses her while she's pregnant she then gives birth on the street like you said cuts with her umbilical cord with a rock and then goes on to build an orphanage and allows her husband who ends up being broken on the streets into her orphanage as one of the orphans not as her husband i mean it's it's a mind-blowing story and it's real and she's just this sweet old lady and she's not done that as a personal brand or to like you know she doesn't that's not her video she's like the sushi is and and to me it's like that is such a beautiful reminder to us all that even feel even when you feel like you have nothing to give you still have something to give and i think that's one of our challenges that we're not exposed to enough stories we're not experiencing enough of these amazing stories of incredible human feats and that's why the book is full of other people's stories not just mine of people that inspire me every time i go through pain i think of sindhutai right like that pushes me through yeah that that to me is it was a perfect example of something you say explicitly in the book which is the answer is always service you're like whatever you don't have to tell me the problem the answer to service yeah like if you're having a bad day service you know if you're winning service it's like whatever's going on service is the thing that's going to make you i don't know if you said feel better but i that was how i interpreted it when i think about one of the things you talk a little bit about joy explicitly but i would say an undercurrent through the whole book for me was hey everybody reading this you have a monkey mind and that monkey mind really makes [ __ ] hard you can be winning you can have everything and you're comparing yourself to somebody else and that's dragging you down or you could be doing it for the wrong reasons so it just feels sort of dark and icky and it's like ah you're like i'm not even passing judgment on that i'm just saying i know the way the human mind works and so i know where people are going to struggle because i have struggled and continue to struggle and it's some of this is just a recognition of the human condition and coming at it from a place of i can just predict that wherever you're at if you lean into service then it's going to change things but what i like is that angle of leaning into service with skills that are unique to you and that became really powerful i'd love to hear the moment where you seek counsel because you're thinking not sure that i'm meant to stay in the ashram and the advice you get and how you sort of re-conceive of your own identity as you transition out yeah so it's it's weird the way it sounds but becoming a monk was my biggest dream growing up from that time period that i made the monk 18 which we spoke about the last time i was here and so that became like my identity from 18 to 22 and then 22 to 25 when i lived as a monk so it's like that's been my identity for seven years at least in my heart in my head and so when you get to the end of a self-awareness journey which is actually the beginning but you get to the end of it because you're like oh i'm not a monk anymore and i'm sure you've gone through similar things like oh i'm not a ceo anymore of this right of a business that does this or someone else may go through i'm not married anymore i'm now divorced i am now not single anymore or i'm not uh alone i've got kids right it's like we all go through these identity transitions in our life and to me going from being a monk to not being a monk was the hardest transition that i'd been through at that time and the question that i'm having is i'm having reflections on who i truly am and what my skills are what my strengths are what my passion is what my compassion is and i'm saying i want to share all of this in like a cool way through entertainment and i love movies and that's what the book's full of like pop culture references and it's it's a it's it's who i am and what i love about myself and then i'm going but this doesn't align with what monk life is meant to be in a sacred way and that is like looking in the mirror and going oh like i'm not comfortable with that so when i share that with my teacher and we're having this discussion he's his advice and i think this is the part that you're referring to he says to me that there's students that come to university and then they become professors and there are students that come to the university and then they go out and become entrepreneurs or go out and work and he says which do you think are better i'm like i mean neither really like i can't really choose what makes someone better and he was just like that's the point you you came here some people stay at the monastery and go on to become senior monks and teachers and some people will go out and do what they do outside and he goes but neither is better and it was the simplest advice it's one of those pieces of advice that it's all about the person that says it and not necessarily what you're hearing but for me it just clarified the judgment i had the attachment i had that i could only be happy and purposeful in this way and that's really what we're all struggling with that currently we all have a projector screen up here that goes this is what life's meant to look like for it to be happy and then down here we have the reality version of what life actually looks like and we go oh no they don't match that doesn't match that's not working that means i'm going down the wrong direction the funny thing is the version you have doesn't exist at all it's just an imagination it's it's virtual reality and the reality that you're experiencing could actually be getting you closer to that goal than you even think but you just don't want to go down that path because it doesn't look like the one you imagine and that's where i was at i was having to go down a path that i didn't imagine looked like success but then the question is well what does success look like then and it definitely doesn't look like the version in your head so to me i started to realize and i genuinely believe this and your affirmation is very useful to me the three years of my life living as a monk were like being at monk's school and the last seven years have been the exam and everything in this book is stuff that i've tried and tested in the last seven years i learned it among school but i tested it in in reality and i'm only sharing what in the last seven years it's perfectly worked for me to feel like i'm exactly where i need to be that doesn't mean i don't have off days that doesn't mean that i'm happy all the time it doesn't mean that i don't get angry it doesn't mean that i don't get upset but i'm going in the direction that i want to be going in so speaking of that it doesn't mean that i don't get upset i think this is a really important thing it it it is what makes you so accessible and what makes you such a powerful voice in this generation where it's like for me growing up in my 20s a monk was somebody bawled in robes that maybe you bumped into at the airport who gave you like a flower and then asked for a donation like that was a monk right so now seeing somebody like you who's integrated into the real world but you tell the story in the book which i i really won your super open vulnerable maybe has weird connotations but you were just not worried about whether the story made you look cool or not you were just like this is the thing i struggled with and i was worried about that whatever and this is my sort of recursive why why do i want this what am i worried about um and you begin to realize the things that are bothering you and one thing happened early on when you got there and you said that you were hurt that you were giving yourself to other people and you didn't feel like it was being reciprocated the the way that the monk came back to re-contextualize that for you i found really important and this is staying on the steam of the monkey mind which we're gonna come back to here in a second so but if you can tell that story i think it'd be really powerful yeah i think we all get into these scenarios in the world where we think we're trying our best to help and love other people so i think majority of people feel like they give more than they get and i think anyone who's an empath or feels like they care for others will feel i give out so much love but i don't get as much back and that's how i felt sometimes in the ashram now the interesting thing is that i'd forgotten lesson number one in the ashram and the first lesson in the ashram was this is a hospital there are doctors and patients but remember the doctors are also patients and sometimes the patients may teach the doctors but remember that we're all in the same space in this hospital where everyone is going through a process of purification so that was very clear the ashram was not meant to be heaven it wasn't meant to be this idyllic place where everyone was perfectly zen and calm it was a place where you had to learn to develop that even amongst the challenges that were there just like in reality so i'd forgotten that and i was going well i'm giving out lots of love and no one's giving me any love and it was really emotional for me because i just felt like i was investing in people and helping people and supporting people and and i'll never forget that conversation and even till this day it's become one of those conversations that stays with me and i remind myself of regularly hence i put in the book the monk said to me he said just as there are people that you love and don't love you back there are people in your life that are investing in you and loving you that you've forgotten about and it was one of those like stop moments of just is that true and i would encourage everyone who's listening and watching right now to really think about that think about that person you've been chasing whether it's a friend a potential boyfriend or girlfriend a potential husband or wife or whatever it may be your job and then ask yourself has someone ever chased you in life or if someone ever pursued you in life or if someone ever tried to love you in life and you didn't even give them a time of day the answer is true i could agree with it i can completely agree with that there are people in my life who have done more for me than i could even begin to try and do and that isn't just parents and family members i'm talking about people professionally that i just can't repay and so he spoke about it as a theme called the circle of love that you will always get the love you give out you will always get it back or whatever you give out you will always get it back you just won't get it back from the same people you give it to and that was really fascinating to me because i also realized that i may have caused hurt to people and they may not have hurt me back but i've received her from people that i never heard and so it works both ways both with her and love and when you see it on both ends and that's ultimately karma in a in a tiny nutshell it's completely grounding in saying yeah let me take a real look at my life and and where those blind spots are about who i'm not being grateful to who i'm missing who i'm not expressing thanks to i want to pull some of these threads together now yeah okay so i love it you've got the what i'm shorthanding to the monkey mind which is beliefs that don't serve you the nature of the mind to want to covet to compare like all these things that are going to take you down we're probably going to need to get into values of values down values but putting that in the monkey mind category the things that drive you nuts that worry you that wake you up in the middle of the night and then you've got this idea of beginning to unlearn like so much of what is the the lessons that you do in the book and that you've been saying here today are often not so much as as giving you something but taking something away and saying you're you're thinking about it in a way that's not helpful that feeds the monkey mind instead of feeding peace to get back to your earlier the pursuit that we're after is peace tell me the zen story the pouring of the tea which is so illustrative of i think exactly a large portion of what your book is meant to convey so the zen story about the tea and i love zen stories and the books full of them as as you know uh the zen story is where a student approaches a zen master and a teacher and is complaining about all the challenges in their life and everything they've got going on and feels like they also have a sense of ego if they know everything that's happening and zen master sees a cup that's full there and starts pouring tea into this cup and the cup just starts overflowing and the students looking at it going like what are you doing like how does this make any sense and and the zen master says well you're just like this cup right i can't put any more in you can't take any more in because you're already full like you think you're full you think you're done and and that's the point that you have to always go back to that student mindset you have to always go back to that emptiness and i think one of the reasons why we struggle with that is we think that when we're full we're safe our ego makes us believe that when you're full when you think you know it all that's when you're safe the craziest thing is that's when you're at your weakest and i think that's what we all miss that when you think if you think of any company that's ever thought that they had figured it out that is when they were at their most weakest point if there's a fighter in a boxing match that thinks that they have perfected this game that's when that their weakest when you're in a relationship and you think oh my life is perfect and everything's going great that's when you're at your weakest but we find safety in certainty when actually that's what makes us complacent and lose the plot so that story illustrates the need to always reconnect not that we're empty that we have nothing but that there is so much more to gain there is so much more to learn yeah that that idea of if you if you already think you have all this figured out then i'm not going to be able to help you so if somebody is watching this right now with sort of a cynical eye to yeah i've heard this before been there done that tried that you know i'm suffering from anxiety depression but jay doesn't know my circumstances one of the things you talk about is is how people can begin to slide into a victim mentality how how do you help people around that why some people really do have it bad so why do you advise them still to not adopt the victim mentality yeah so there's a study that i talk about in the book that looks at people who have a victim mindset and by the way that is a condition that's adopted you are not a victim person like you're not a negative person you just have adopted a negative sense of thoughts and habits and beliefs and the study looked at people that had those beliefs and looked to people who didn't and they were asked to think of a time when they felt they were the victim and the other people were just asked to think of a time when they were bored after that these two sets of people were asked if they'd like to take part in an activity of just helping the team that had created the experiment and i think the people that were the victim mindset were 25 percent less likely to offer to help and be a part of this change and to the degree that sometimes they left trash behind and even took the pens that they were given by the experimenters to the point that you get so lost in that mentality that you don't even think about helping and getting out of it so the reason why the victim mindset it is real in the sense that there are definitely people in the world that have a harder situation than others that's fact there's no debating that point that there are people who have it are harder than other people there are people that have hired it harder than me but there are also people that have it easier than me so i've had it harder than some and same with you and in our small bubbles our hardship feels like the worst thing that could ever happen and that's the craziest thing about pain is that you only think pain is bad when you're really going through it and we compare our pain with other people's pain we say oh that person's pain can't be that bad that person's pain that's probably a bit less than mine you know we because we've never experienced it so the reason why i encourage people to get out of that mindset is because that's just a one-way ticket to a lifelong commitment to sadness disappointment lethargy complacency and feeling stuck and lost there's nothing gained out of feeling sorry for yourself i don't think there's anyone that i've ever heard say and i'm open to it but i've never heard anyone say to me that feeling like a victim my whole life actually helped me find a victory in life like i don't think i've ever heard that i've never read that in a book i've never heard in a documentary i've never seen it anywhere so if it's out there i'm open to it but when you look at that and you go is this the life i want to keep living do i still want to feel this way you look at someone like sindhutai you look at all of these incredible people that have broken barriers you look at people who are told that wilma rudolph was told she would never walk again properly or run at age nine and went went on to be a multiple olympic gold medalist when you hear that you're like what really but that's what's possible and so no one in the victim mindset has ever seen growth from that mindset but everyone who has traded that victim mindset for a mindset of acceptance a mindset of healing and a mindset of perspective has found their way out and the mistake we make is we take tell people what it's almost like toxic mindset advice or it's like oh stop stop feeling sorry for yourself just go out there and do the work that doesn't work either because that person needs to accept that they've been through something painful for themselves so you can't belittle or devalue someone's pain and often people try and belittle and devalue their own pain to get out of it but that actually just slows down the process and then they're back to square one again so you've got to accept the pain you went through you've got to accept that you want to heal it one of the best ways to explain this is how what we search for in our partners or in life is what we did or didn't get from our parents that's interesting like literally what we search for and i've i've analyzed this in my life a ton and others if you look for what you look for in your partner or for what you look for in life through your bosses any authorities anyone who has a position of power in your life is what you didn't or did get from your parents and so you're creating a life based on your past trauma or your past challenge that doesn't lead to a positive relationship i found myself projecting the patterns the negative patterns that my parents had into my relationship with my wife that doesn't create a positive experience and by the way i'm not blaming any parents in the world everyone's figuring it out so i'm not even blaming my own but we need to have the awareness of developing the emotional skills that our parents didn't have so again reminding ourselves of being aware that we're literally creating lives that will continue in the same direction unless our mindset changes all right so if we know that people are struggling with the monkey mind they um they're telling they're filling their cup up with a lot of things that are self-destructive maybe too big of a word but it's directionally correct that things that aren't leading them to joy to peace um how do we bring the ashram to them how do we go about you know beginning the process of healing i know a big part of your journey was questions questions questions questions questions what are the right questions do we have to meditate is that optional do we have to give up sex like where where did we fall when you got to that part in the book i had to laugh out loud so what how do we bring the ashram to people how do we help them like now start doing things specifically to empty their cup to refill it with something that's going to lead to to peace and to joy and yeah the first thing i'd say is i think everyone needs the feeling that they can just come up for some air life can often feel like someone's literally drowning you and you feel like you're drowning and floundering especially if you're in an extreme case of anxiety or stress or depression and i feel like you just need to feel like you can just come up for a tiny bit of air so for that in the book i talk about the 3s model which is your sights sense and sounds what we see what we hear and what we smell has a profound impact on our mental state and we actually underestimate our sense and i'll give you an example all of us have been walking around with masks and someone said this to me the other day and it hit me they were saying to me that now that we all were lost and do this the whole time i think my mom's over there they were doing this all the time they realized they couldn't hear people properly and the reason they couldn't hear people properly is they realize they don't use their ears they use their eyes to see people's lips and so actually they're not even using their ears that much they're using their eyes to follow the lips and know what someone's saying so actually we depend so much on our eyes in every interaction how many times have you been looking at someone attractive and you forgot what they were talking about right you're just so engaged with your eyes that you completely even forgot to listen right or you're so lost in in the vision of something again and you're in a daze you can't smell anything you can't taste anything so we've got to learn to reactivate our senses so i'll give an example of what i mean as monks our life was sight designed sound designed and scent designed what's the first thing you see when you wake up in the morning for 80 of people the first thing they see in the morning is their phone and the last thing they see at night is their phone that is poor sight design because you don't even choose what the first message of the day your mind receives that actually made my stomach drop that's a gnarly thought it's true yeah right imagine the last thing someone sees is not their partner or their spouse the person they sleep with they see their phone and the first thing in the morning they look at is their phone and guess what it's not a good site because you're looking at a message that you didn't design for your mind you're looking at a picture or an image that maybe came through on your instagram feed that you didn't choose for your mind so now you've started your jay with envy jealousy comparison competition collab like all of the all of the monkey mind stuff and the monkey mind is excited the monkey mind's on the monkey mind's like yeah we're ready to go and now you started the day with the monkey mind so my advice is start your day with a quote that you love start your day with a picture of someone that you love or your family start your day with a work of art that inspires you start your day with seeing the first thing that you see make it so closely connected to your soul and your goal and your purpose that your monk mind naturally comes alive so as monks the first thing that we saw was sometimes a teaching that we'd keep next to us it might be a spiritual text where i just ripped it out of a book and stuck it there next to my bed so i woke up to that just wake up to something that you actually want to see when you wake up and make it intentional and make it focus it could even be a reminder on a sticky note i remember for a long time i had one when i was a monk that said i am not this body just to disconnect from the fact that i was more than this body and because we didn't have mirrors in the ashram it was very easy to forget i was this body or i've had other ones where that say to me i'm exactly where i need to be and i've read that in the morning and that just reminds me because so often i wake up feeling anxious that i'm behind on my day or i'm late and then i actually make up a mess whereas if i read i'm exactly where i need to be and i remind myself i can start my day there so that's sight this and that's simple easy for anyone to do you don't have to change your mind you don't need to meditate you don't have to do anything the second one is let's talk about scent design now one of the things i've been missing during quarantine is going to a spa or going to like a resort because i love massages and i love spas and like me and my wife love getting away and if you think about it whenever you go into a spa or a massage space or whatever they're called or a resort you can always feel relaxed from the moment you walk in just through the power of scent it could be the most basic room in the world but a scent can literally illuminate a whole room so sense like eucalyptus lavender sandalwood if you've got a diffuser or a candle and you can make this a part of your routine before you start your work day just have a candle that you breathe in for four seconds and breathe out for four seconds have a diffuser in your room that just makes you feel calm because as soon as you walk in one thing i've been doing is putting eucalyptus drops into my showers and turning into a natural steam and i just feel like completely relieving all my sinuses and and feeling calm these are just really practical things you can do to just ease yourself into it and the third one's sound this one's so powerful sound is underestimated because now we just have music playing all the time in the background and the music may not even be intentional and the lyrics are all over the place and you've got instruments that are not being played well or in harmony and you get a pump or like a boost out of it and i've i learned about sound in the ashram and we had sound design we would wake up to nature sounds and nature's so aligned with your body and mind if you look at nature if you breathe in with the ocean your breath will just be exactly where it needs to be if you allow yourself to just be present with the wind you'll feel your body just slow right down and be calm nature just has this amazing way of teaching so many lessons and so when i lived in new york city i often found myself getting exhausted and i started looking into it i was thinking what is it i work out i do all this stuff and i realized that especially in new york we deal with a lot of insignificant sound you know something called cognitive load where your brain is processing irrelevant insignificant sound of trucks horns construction work and drilling and so when your ears are trying to make sense of insignificant sound you're losing energy in an irrelevant way and so sound design means every room in your home have a song that plays or music that plays in that room that gives you the feeling you want it to have another easy way to do that is before you start work or while you're working have a song or a playlist that really gets you into the mode that you want to be in when you're doing that sound is a beautiful accomplice to any activity you want so those are three simple ways that anyone starting today can bring the ashram to their home by sight scent and sound design because that's how our lives were designed now what about things like the taking a chore washing dishes um servicing the animals like should people build something into their day where it's like i'm gonna do this thing that i don't necessarily like but i'm gonna imbue it with something to remind myself that even in a task as mundane as washing dishes i can be fully present i can um you know find the joy in doing it well and i think you talk about watching it go you know from grease cover to you know just sparkling clean and just sort of re-contextualizing is that a powerful thing that that people should work in like i want to create that like perfect day like we're you know like how do we how do we make full monk use of our quarantine i love it i love it yeah no absolutely i think i'm trying to think of things that everyone does i think washing your dishes is something everyone does every day or it's a common thing that people do and you've got to realize that what you're doing is not washing the dish like in terms of that's not actually what you're doing what you're doing is training your mind for presents and the reason why that's so powerful is because most of us when we're washing the dishes i need to watch that netflix show i've got 30 minutes before you know like i'm going to sleep late if i don't see it so now you're already trying to figure out what you're doing next and that bleeds into the rest of your life so now when you're finally on that guess what this is it everyone's going through quarantine and lockdown going i need to travel i need to travel i need to get out and when you live like that when you're traveling you'll be thinking i need to do work i need to get back to work i need to get my career back on track and when you're at work you're going to be like i need to get away again and that's literally the repetitive cycle that we're all living in so when you're just washing your dish in a present way you're not washing a dish you're training your mind to be where you physically are and the best way to do that is give it meaning like you said or do something that makes you more present at the time you could if you really wanted to wash the dish and listen to your favorite song you could watch this and listen to this podcast you could watch the edition do something that is good for your mind that helps you be more present and conscious at the time so you may say i don't have enough time to wash the dishes for 10 minutes like one dish for 10 minutes and i'm not asking you to do that what i'm saying is don't constantly be in a rush to get onto something you want to do because then when you're doing what you want to do you'll be in a rush to get on a thing you have to do and that cycle never stops and and i think that's the never-ending cycle that we're in that we always feel we're ahead or behind we always feel whenever we're meant to be and that's the root of all of our suffering in life is that i don't feel i am where i actually are meant to be jay your book is such an extraordinary piece of showing people how to create a road for themselves how to empty the cup and fill it up with something that really really has a shot at walking them somewhere extraordinary and beautiful dude i was way impressed we have only scratched the surface of what's in the book so i hope that people will really give this a shot obviously i did the audible version which is you actually reading it which is really fun hearing you you have that four word phrase that you give people in terms of the meditation that you repeat which hearing you actually saying it there there was something uh deeply comforting about that so i think that yeah that people really get into it thank you for coming thank you for writing the book dude i think that if people read it put it to use that it really will be transformative so yeah gladly wrote it i'm glad that you're putting it out now i know it was probably tempting to wait until the world had gotten back to normal but maybe now more important than ever um so well played my friend where can people find you where can they get the book yeah the best place is think like a monkbook.com that's the website for the book and the book's actually going to be released in around 40 languages so if you want to read it in your own language you can find that too so you can find it on amazon in your own language if you prefer that uh we had it of course translated i do not speak every language so there's no order there's no audible version in the 40 languages it's only audible in english but think like among book.com and you can get everything there and i want to say thank you to you tom because you know i i feel like the preparation you do like just for everyone who doesn't know and obviously you can tell from the interview but if you don't know this about tom tom listened to the whole audiobook before this interview so he's done 10 hours of listening because he listened to on double speed to actually do this interview and that is just it just shows he doesn't have to do that we're friends like tom could have flicked through the book and he could have asked me a few questions and he knows me well enough to talk about this stuff anyway he doesn't really need to read the book like genuinely he doesn't need to read the book he knows me well enough to ask me good questions and he's a great interviewer but the fact that he goes through that just shows you what level he wants to play on and i think that should not be underestimated i think it's so easy to get to where tom is in his career and to wing it to just go for it and i've seen this at conferences where you stay out the last you turn up the first i've seen it again and again man and uh i just you're relentless in in the most amazing gentle way and and i love you for it i think your audience is so fortunate to have an interviewer like you and have a have a host like you because you're really putting in the work so i want to thank you from the bottom of my heart as a friend also know as an admirer and a fan and uh yeah hopefully we've done your community justice today so thank you dude i'm sure that we have he talks about values in the book and all of that is because i have a value uh that aligns with all that stuff so guys trust me when i say an extraordinary life can be yours he gives you a blueprint a road map if you will for exactly what to do to bring the ashram to you so get it read it put it to you so it will change you and speaking of things it will change you if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care look at yourself in 10 15 20 years time and ask yourself the question is that where i want to be and if the answer is no then you need to find a new part to just get to understand yourself you don't know what you need in your life until you figure out who you are you