#146: Making Room For Selfless Service With Jonathan Keyser

Thank you for having me, Adam. I appreciate it.

Yeah, very cool. Hey, listen, there's a lot there. What's not in that bio? What's not written Not something, you know, that I've just said, that you'd love for people in our community to know about you personally? Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com. resiliencerank.com. And find out just how resilient you are.

I mean, I think the thing for me is I'm on a mission, right? I want to change the world. I want to change the business world more specifically, and I want to show people that even in arguably one of the most ruthless, cutthroat industries in the world, i.e., commercial real estate brokerage, that you can actually create extraordinary financial success by helping others. I think there's this misnomer that somehow selfless service is this soft, squishy, weak, tuck your tail between your legs and let people trample all over you mindset. And for me, it's the exact opposite. To me, the biggest competitive edge in business is a culture of selfless service, is a mindset of selfless service, is an approach to business of selflessly serving other people around you. Now, obviously, that sounds all well and good, but how do you actually do that? And that's why I wrote the book, to take all the things that I've learned over my process of self-reinvention and have the reader be able to put those into practice for themselves in their own industries, in their own lives, etc.

Yeah. Listen, I don't normally dive into the sort of the, this granular level of detail, but I hadn't heard of occupier services. So, give us the down-low on what, what is occupier services commercial real estate?

Sure. So, if you think about traditional commercial real estate firms, the majority of their revenue comes from representing landlords, developers, real estate investors. It all comes from the supply side. The people that make real estate profits or profitability possible are the users, are the occupiers, are the tenants, are the ones that are utilizing this real estate that's built. And so, as a result, because these firms are heavily conflicted, trying to represent the landlords, but then also trying to represent tenants, just trying to get deals put together, tenants don't get a fair shake. And so, as a result, tenants have been traditionally underrepresented. And so, we created a firm to give tenants a real voice, to give the occupier of space someone who's exclusively on their side. So, we don't represent landlords, we don't represent developers, and all we do is give the power back to the little guy, power back to the user who needs the space to run their business but is not some big commercial real estate investor developer.

Right.

So, you're tenant advocates? Tenant advocates.

Way cool. That's good. Thank you for clarifying that for me. I appreciate it. One of the other things that I was really struck by when I was reading more about you was that Your place of business has been voted one of the 10 best places to work several years running. And I guess that's in Scottsdale, Arizona, right? Phoenix.

Greater Phoenix.

All right. So I'd love to understand better why that is.

Yeah. For us, culture is everything for us, but culture carries a lot of connotations. So I just want to make sure I'm clear. To me, culture is not ping pong tables or beer koozies. Culture is a created way of behaving within an organization. And a lot of Cultures are accidentally made where they bring people in and those people don't have a clear guiding north principle. For us, we've said from the very beginning, we're creating a company to change the industry, to prove that even in an industry like ours, you could create success by helping other people. So for us, we have a culture of selfless service. We have a culture where we all try to help each other succeed and we all try to help the people that we serve succeed. And while that may seem very almost rudimentary, and basic, for our industry, it's revolutionary. So the reason why— I remember the first time we were awarded that, and it was kind of a shock to me, to be honest, because we were so young. And they put the microphone in my face and they said, Jonathan, what is it that makes your firm so different from every other commercial real estate firm? And what came to me in the moment, I would answer to this day, is at Kaiser, everybody within the firm is trying to help everybody else succeed. At traditional firms, everybody's guarding their turf, they're fighting, scratching, and clawing for themselves. They're constantly fighting, negotiating, undermining over fees. For us, it's we believe that the more that I can help you, Adam, the more that we all collectively win, which also enables me to win individually. So it's this sense of collective well-being versus zero-sum game, and that's the culture that we created. And then there's a whole bunch of other things, but at its very core, that's what it all stems from. That's the heart of it.

That's very reminiscent of my days as a Jones Beach lifeguard.

When I keynote these days, I typically will tell stories about those days on the beach and our lifeguard corps is what we called it. And the fact that we had a got-your-back culture versus a watch-your-back culture. And that sounds exactly like what you've cultivated at your firm. People that are truly working collaboratively for the benefit of the team because everybody just wants one thing, right? Here's the difference between, let's say, a sports team. This is my observation. I want to get your thoughts on this. There's a difference between a sports team and a team at work, typical team inside of a company. Sports team has one goal and one goal only. What's that goal?

Win.

That's it. Win a game. That's all they want to do is just win a game. And at work, there are cross-purposes. There are other agendas other than simply winning a game, whatever winning a game looks like for the company. Would you agree with that?

I would.

Yeah. So what do we do about that? Because I think there's a lot of people, first of all, in this community who are in startup mode. We've got a lot of Small business owners, as well as a lot of executives and people that are working inside pretty large and very large organizations that sometimes think, you know what? I'm too small. It's just like— so for somebody inside of a big organization, they don't believe that they have the power to create a change, to have any real impact. Right. And somebody that's just getting started and maybe has 2 or 3 employees, or maybe they've only got 2 or 3 outsourced solutions, contractors, that kind of thing, they go, well, You know, I'm too small to be thinking about culture, man. That's, that's big boy stuff. I don't have the money to hire McKinsey, you know, come in and tell me what I should do to change my culture. I just need to make a buck and pay my bills kind of thing. What do you say to those 2 different groups?

Well, if somebody wants to just work out of their house and not interface with people, then truly culture doesn't matter. But if you have any desire to have any employees or to have any kind of organization that scales, then culture is 100% relevant. And if the smaller the organization is, the more potent the embedded culture within each of the individuals are. And so we also have the Kaiser Institute, which is in place to train, empower, and ultimately certify the next generation of selfless leader. And we do it both for individuals as well as provide certification processes for employers. But at its very core, the fish rots from the head. So what the heck does that mean? If the leader of the organization, which is all of you entrepreneurs listening right now, if you're not embodying If you're not living what you espouse your culture of your organization to be, you're never gonna have the culture you want. The hardest part about this whole culture stuff is that you actually have to live it. And so as part of the Kaiser Institute, we teach a 3 levels of reinvention process. Reinvention from the inside out. Start with yourself, right? 'Cause you gotta become the change. You gotta be the change you wanna see in the world. Then you create a company culture around it. And then you interface, as my good buddy John Mackey says, with all the external stakeholders, your partners, your clients, your vendors, your collaborators, etc. But it has to start on the inside. What a lot of people do is they say, oh, I just went to this nice seminar, heard this great leadership speaker, and he was talking about how I should be a selfless leader or how I should create a culture of whatever. And so here's our new mission statement, everybody, and onward go. And yet that individual, that leader, is not adhering to those principles, is not living it. And as a result, everybody calls BS on it and says, I'm not going to do that. Our leader doesn't do that. So for all you entrepreneurs, the The beautiful thing is, just like I did when I started my own company, I could build it from the ground up. I could build exactly the framework I wanted. I could build exactly the culture I wanted. I could hire the people that were aligned with what I wanted to build. And as a result, we were able to very carefully shape a culture that today has grown, that just continues to grow without me having to spark. But the hardest part for me is I actually have to live this stuff.

Yeah. It really is an essential element in the founder's vision. That you think consciously. This is about the conscious pivot, that this is a conscious planning for the kind of culture you want to see. It'd be no different than, you know, if you wanted a garden, you wouldn't just assume that certain flowers you wanted in that garden would grow by themselves.

Exactly.

Yeah. So I love the way you gave us 3 steps to that as well. I think it's really tangible is that this inside-out approach is very much about modeling. Again, I go back to my days as a lawyer, my days as a CEO or as a lifeguard, even every significant culture I've been part of from the top down, people were living the values. They weren't just things that were written on some plaque that hung in the break room or wherever else they have these things. It was something that was tucked away neatly in people's desks. This was something that they were literally living day by day and not living by the mere speaking about it, but the actual things you see people do, their behaviors, in fact, because that's very much what a culture is.

Leaders, right? Because most leaders have a perception of their own behavior. That's significantly different from external perceptions of their behavior. And so as a result, as part of any culture, you have to have feedback mechanisms that don't have any kind of negative loop associated with it, because otherwise you suppress all the information that would help you improve as a leader. So part of this means you have to actually be vulnerable to your entire team and say, this really matters. I'm committed to this. And oh, by the way, every time you catch me not doing it, call me out. And so we have here at Kaiser, one of the things we have is we call it a Courage to Disagree Award. And if it is designed specifically for me, now you could give it to another leader, but it's designed specifically for me, for someone to go, Jonathan, you said you're committed to blank. We just saw you doing blank. That's out of alignment. When those kinds of things occur, we celebrate those things here. We have them stand up at our monthly meetings and we give them the award and everybody claps and we tell the story, right? So for us all to achieve this kind of idealistic optimum level of culture, love, and service that also To create success, people have to be willing to be transparent, to be vulnerable, and hold each other accountable. Because a lot of times people just want to keep their opinions to themselves. But those opinions, if they're received, have the opportunity to actually shift the entire culture on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute, second-by-second basis as they occur.

Yeah. Oh gosh, I love that. I love the fact that you guys give out an award for that. Reminds me of something I read, I think with Patrick Lencioni some years ago about healthy conflict, about how healthy conflict is so important because it really ultimately is the way that People are seen and heard. I mean, if you— because you're not going to agree all the time. And in so many ways, a company is not a democracy. I mean, I've said this, I've been a CEO a long time, and I sometimes get a little agita from folks when I say this on stage, in fact, is that it's not a democracy. Yeah. Leaders are going to have to make difficult decisions. That's a part of being a leader at whatever level you are, even in regard to your own self-leadership. But you can't make those decisions and have people buy into what you decide if they haven't been heard. And sometimes what they have to say is, that sucks, man. I think that idea is going to rot. There's no way it's going to work, or, you're being self-interested, or, you're unaware, whatever it is that the feedback is on whatever it is you're talking about. If people don't feel at liberty to express themselves fully, well, first of all, it will be reflected in the culture. And secondly, today they walk. This is what millennials will do. They immediately just like, you know, 18 months in, they're gone.

Yeah. I think what'll be very interesting just on that point, Adam, is I think when there is a shift in the market, I'm not talking real estate market, I'm talking the general economic situation we're in today, which is obviously high, high growth and low unemployment. It'll be interesting to see. Today, there's almost this pressure for CEOs and HR leaders to develop cultures because talent is so competitive. It'll be interesting to see when that pressure valve is released a little bit, how companies react because My inclination is, if you're doing it only because of economic motivation, it's probably not sustainable. So I think you're going to see this race to culture discussions while the job market is tight, and I think you're going to see a loosening. And I think that's where you're going to be able to separate the truth from the riffraff, from the people that are just putting it forward, because that is the biggest problem with culture from what I see is, Either it's just utter delusion, which I cannot believe leaders are that delusional, but sometimes I'm sure they are, where they really believe they've created this amazing culture and other people go, dude, are you kidding me? This company sucks. Those exist, but those are the extreme examples. I think what I'm really describing is there's a lot of leaders who artificially want to project this image of A, being a great leader, B, having a great company culture. And so I think part of the challenge The challenge with all of this discussion is there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of fake conversations. There's a lot of stuff that—

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes and it's Our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

It's truly inauthentic, and a lot of the people that champion themselves as the greatest leaders are often the worst. And so I think part of what I'm trying to advocate for is Is this idea of authenticity. I am the farthest thing, Adam, from a perfect dude. I'm not an amazing leader in some ways, and I'm an amazing leader in other ways. But truthfully, I'm so tired of all of us trying to be perfect. That's an impossible thing. I make mistakes every day and I embrace them. And if you have a culture, like one of our cultural premises is we never punish mistakes, right? Because to fear mistakes makes a person timid and keeps them out of bold, fearless, massive action. And that's exactly where value is created. So from my perspective, it's like what I'm really trying to usher in is an era of authenticity where we all give each other a little bit of a space, a little bit of a break. Okay, screwed up there. I'm not going to try to crucify you. How about, okay, you made a mistake. Let's learn from it and move on. And I think that part of the problem as it relates to culture is everybody is so afraid of what being said, hey, there's gaps in your culture. People don't— leaders don't want to acknowledge that because in their mind it makes them appear as if they're somehow a less than leader. But to me, it's It's like, I want to know all those things. Tell me where I suck. Tell me where I could improve. I'm not saying I'll do them tomorrow, but I'll start working on them. And I think that's that authentic conversation that guys like you can help get out into the world is helping leaders realize that it's okay to let down their guard. It's okay to not pretend to be perfect. And that the very thing that they think is going to alienate their people from them, showing them their flaws or their fears, those are the very things that make everybody want to rally around you as a leader and go, let's go and take the hill, because they can finally sense that you're authentic.

Thinking about a few different things. One is this book, Karmic Management, which I read years ago. One of the authors' names— 3 authors, but one of them, last name is Roach. You can look that up, but we'll have it in the show notes as well. And Karmic Management really looks at all of your karmic business partners. And so why I'm thinking about that is in listening to you, I'm thinking this is about your stakeholders. I actually, in Pivot, I referenced this as well, that how important identifying your stakeholders are. And often in a corporate context, stakeholders are your shareholders or they're the board of directors or the owners, etc. And what you're saying is really, I think, incredible because you're looking at your own employees. You're looking at the people inside the company as the stakeholders. And that's key because it's those stakeholders who can reflect back the kind of leader that you are. They can be transparent and brutally honest, or sometimes we like to say, give you feedback that's laced with ruthless compassion.

Oh, I love

that. And what's great about that is that it's the truth. It's transparent. There's no BS about it. And if that's what's encouraged, that's what's rewarded even inside of an organization, then you're not going to have people walking around demonstrating the emperor's new clothes. And that's the worst thing that can happen because those are massive blind spots that can easily lead to a lot of really unpredictable bad results in a company. I'm curious about this. You're in the commercial real estate space and you're really on the side of standing up It's a big brother. So I think you're already positioned from the services side in a way that allows you to own a higher ground, so to speak. That fits. Real estate's always been a leading indicator in my mind. I was in commercial real estate myself as an attorney and worked with a lot of folks on the transactional side, as well as on the finance side. So do you believe that the real estate market, commercial real estate in particular, is an indicator of what's happening in the economy as a leading indicator or as a lagging indicator? What's your thought?

Leading, typically 6 to 9 months. Depending on where you are.

All right. So, I'm going to put you—

this is not that kind of show, but I think folks, if they're following the thread as I am, would be curious to know what you think. What is the commercial real estate market telling us about where the economy is 6 to 9 months from today?

Strong. I mean, we have never been in this kind of sustained upturn since well before you and I were born. And so, We're in new territory today. And I think there's—

So, the demand for retail space and the relative—

Office, industrial, healthcare. I mean, even with all the changes in retail and all the Amazon effect, you still have retail popping up all over the place. You still have all kinds of new concepts. Like, we have this one concept that my kids go to now, and it's like, it's sort of like what you and I wish we had as a kid. It's everything from scooter parks, To trampolines, to climbing things, to everything you can imagine. So there's all these entertainment things, but that's just in the retail space. I think if you're just speaking macro, from a macro perspective, people are not fearful. People are not one foot on the gas and one foot on the brakes. There's obviously massive uncertainty with the election. I think there's a lot of fear in business of a Warren candidate.

Yep.

But outside of that or some big 9/11-type event, There appears to be some pretty smooth sailing for the next year, 18 months. Now, that said, there's also—

Because there's always a sort of a boom-bust cycle when it comes to commercial, right?

Always. And that's what I was just going to say is like, anybody that's telling you they can predict when the next downturn is going to happen is just guessing at best. All the experts are saying the next year to 2 years looks pretty good and maybe in the next In 18, 36 months, maybe there'll be a correction, but that's guesswork. And there's so many macroeconomic factors and political and global events that could occur.

Mm-hmm.

The only other comments I'll make is one of the things that drives me crazy is this sort of prediction bias, right? This idea that somehow I better be the first one to predict a downturn because if I'm not, I'll look like the idiot that didn't. And so everybody starts doing that and then everybody starts getting fearful and then we create our own reality. So I think that there is a possibility, I'm not saying it will, but there is a possibility that we can be thoughtful about what we're speaking into existence and plan for the best or plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Sure. Makes sense. Well, I think this is a decent segue, maybe better than decent, to talk about resilience because having been through a number of those cycles myself personally and my professional life and some of which were in hindsight predictable. Just like the 2008 financial crisis was predictable if we'd been looking in the right places and listening to the right people and we weren't. So there you go. So who knows what's really happening now that we'll only be able to know and write about and see as obvious 5 years from now, right? But we do know one thing, all markets operate in cycles. Just like as much as you want to hang on to summer wherever you are, you cannot. Yes. It's like you may want to live in winter. You may not like the snow melting, but rest assured the snow is going to melt and all the other things are going to happen. Change is the only great constant we can count on, and it's a wonderful thing we can count on. So change is going to happen. And my own sort of the essence of our brand is in terms of what we consult about and train about is resilience and how important it is that you actually create a resilience inside of the company or even a culture, let's call it, of resilience. What's the importance of resilience to you? How do you define it? Is it something Is that something that you're very intentional about as a leader of an organization, that you want to create resilience before you need it, that kind of thing?

Yeah. So going to my story a little bit, because I think it sets it, I was raised by parents who taught me to love and serve. I was actually a Christian missionary kid. My parents hauled me off to Papua New Guinea where I grew up. And when we came back to America, I had this realization that I was poor and I had no concept of being poor before. And I decided at a young age I didn't want to be poor. So I got into commercial real estate because I wanted to make some money. And as I got into commercial real estate, I realized really quickly, wow, this is a cutthroat industry. So kind of like, you know, boiling the frog, I became ruthless. And one day I woke up and went, wow, I do not like who I've become. Found a different way, reinvented myself around it. I think what gets lost for a lot of people in that's to look to the end and go, okay, cool. Now he's like kicking ass and taking names and he's got a successful company and he's, you know, interviewed at all these places and blah blah blah. But there it was, a long hard road of reinvention. When I decided to go from being this ruthless, cutthroat commercial real estate broker to someone who lived his life to serve other people. It took me 5 years to reinvent myself. In the process, I went broke. Everybody questioned me. And there were so many times when I'd be staring up at the ceiling, just looking up and going, am I crazy? Should I change course? And in that moment, that's where my resiliency kicked in. It's, I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up. I'm going to keep moving towards the goal that I've And there's been a number of those points across my life where if I hadn't, if I didn't have this deep down determination that no matter what external feedback is coming my way, I'm committed, I've decided this is what I'm going to do. For most people, that's the thing that keeps them from greatness, in my opinion, because, you know, that whole adage, it's darkest right before dawn, is like, that is a very true statement. When I first got my first big referral, I almost couldn't believe it had been so long. It had been so long since I'd made any money. And I was just like, wow, this side, and then more and more and more. And so I think that there's an element of intentionality that goes into it, of willingness to stand in the face of no results and continue what others may think is— but that's how anything great has ever been created, right? If you're just doing what everybody else does, you're not creating. So to be bold and to do anything big in the world requires resilience. So for me, resilience is one of those things that's a very personal trait. And it's something where if you have an organization, you say, our culture is resilient, and you fill it with a bunch of people that don't even know how to spell resilient, you're probably not going to have a resilient culture. But yeah, one of our principles is we are disruptive. We embrace change and we're forward-thinking in all that we do. We continuously explore and integrate new tools and innovations with the goal of maximizing personal efficiency and providing best-in-class service to each and every client. So our mindset is constantly about like, we embrace change. We welcome change. We always want to be improving and growing. But I mean, if you don't have resilience, when things get tough and you're tempted to quit, you're probably going to take the easy way out. And it's right— it's through that struggle, it's through that pain, it's through that toil, that's where greatness lies.

One of the things that's helped me in terms of the multiple pivots I've had in my life and those personal reinventions, professional reinventions, which can be very tough, and I couldn't agree with you more that there's no egg timer or a predictable There's no predictable egg timer for how long it takes to reinvent some area of personal— your personal life or any aspect of your business life. It takes how long it takes. For us, it was 2.5 years, and that was in the first major pivot out of practicing law, etc. So there's no question that you've got to sustain yourself in those times. And to do that requires a number of things that you've mentioned, and I'll add one to them, and that is your rituals, the rituals that you've got. In fact, there's a great Harvard Business Review article that studied the highest-performing professional athletes and Olympians with very successful business operators, executives, etc. And they found that they all had one thing in common. These athletes and these business folks had one thing in common, and that one thing were the rituals that they had to create resilience. And there wasn't— these weren't just physical rituals, for example. They weren't just about endurance. It wasn't just sort of perpetuating the idea that you have to be like Rocky Balboa, and every time you get hit, you You get back up until ultimately you end up looking like Rocky and you don't even win the freaking fight. That's not the goal. It's physical for sure, but it's also mental. It's also emotional. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Emotional and even spiritual in a lot of ways. So I'd love to know what one or more of your rituals, the things you do on a consistent basis to be at your best, what's one of those that you can share with our audience as we're wrapping

Sure. So I believe in morning rituals. I believe in the creation of myself daily. So I have written what I call I am statements. And my I am statements are a coupling of things that you create for your future, like everybody can get from Rich Dad Poor Dad, to states of being that I want to create for myself, to who I want to be with my family. And I have those written out and I have And so in the morning I like to do spin. Spin's kind of my workout of choice. And so on the spin bike I can go through my morning I Ams 3 times. So by the time— so for 45 minutes in the morning I get 45 minutes of cardio and then I get 45 minutes of me creating who I am. And that's how I start, start my days.

Yeah, beautiful. I love the fact that you're integrating multiple different disciplines or different parts of that holistic concept of resilience into that one practice because obviously you're doing something physical. It's

good And if you can't see it, you can't create it, right? So for me, the I ams are, what do I want my life to be? And then speak it into a tense, and lo and behold, it starts to show up.

Yeah, beautiful. Give us a couple examples of those I am statements.

So one of mine is, I am JK, and who I am is far more real than anything outside of me. So that means that everything that I'm about to say, no matter what feedback comes in from the outside world, I decide who I am, right? And then my next one is, I'm the best there ever was and forever will be. Now, that does not mean I'm better than someone else. That means that for me, in every situation I walk into, I want to bring my very best self, channeling the very best that anyone could ever do in that situation. And if that's my mindset, whatever I do in that is going to improve materially.

Yeah, it makes sense. As somebody— one of our students years ago, we've done a lot of seminars over the years, and somebody brought me an I Am box which had all these I Am statements inside of it, which was really, really thoughtful and profound. And and it's so interesting because those statements of I am are, as you said, they're very powerful no matter when you use them, and certainly I think ultra powerful when you start your day in that respect. I'm going to share my start of day ritual in a second, but I'll just say that even just this past weekend we were leading one of our speaker training and keynote speaking and TEDx speaking is something we train people for, and we have an I am statement that you'd appreciate, which is that people before they even begin they state their name and they say I am. World-class speaker. And it's really remarkable to see, and some of these folks have been speaking for years, you know, we get experienced folks and CEOs that have been speaking to groups and in high-stakes situations for a long time, and then people that are just beginning. But to see the physical transformation, and I do mean in a moment when somebody owns that statement, stands up in front of other people and says, I am a world-class speaker, you could see physiologically there's a change that just occurs. Something just completely snaps and changes inside of them where they realize, you know what? I want to own that.

One of the cool things that I've been— I put into practice a few years ago that is my favorite part of my morning routine is I love to drive my kids to school. And my kids have all written their own personal I Ams. So we have family I Ams. First, we start with a breathing exercise. Then we have our family I Ams that we all recite together. And then each child creates their future. Those are theirs. I don't dictate them. They get to decide what they are. And they're held with reverence and solemn appreciation for each child. What kind of cool way to go to school in the morning when most cars are filled with screaming or radio or whatever? They're getting to create their future selves with accountability to their siblings. It's probably the favorite thing that I do is be a part of that process.

That's so cool, brother. You and I are simpatico. As we said before we turned on the show that we both have 4 kids and we've got 3 girls. I got

the opposite.

The exact flip script of that. So one of the things that I've been doing for a number of years that has certainly infected in the best possible way, infected our kids, our family, and thank God a lot of other people as well, is the simple way that I wake up in the morning. In fact, this was the subject of my own TED Talk, was about in the midst of the chaos, in the midst of all the change, in the midst of challenge that's going on. In fact, I want to use your words. You said standing in the face of no results. In the midst of standing in the face of no results, as we all know what that's like from time to time, you know, can you actually love your life? Can you love life, your being alive? Can you be grateful for that? Can you appreciate that at a deep level, even in the midst of the shit flying? And so those words for me are, can I love my life no matter what? And my simple waking ritual every day is 3 simple steps. The first step is to wake up, and I'm going to just check in with you, brother. So did you wake up today? I did. I

did, I did.

Yeah, and we know that waking up, Jonathan, is not just physical too. It's waking ourselves up on multiple levels to be a little more aware, a little bit more awake, a little more conscious today than yesterday. I think that's a good trajectory for any of us. Nobody's perfect, but if we're on that trajectory, I think things are going well for us. So that's the first piece, wake up. Second is, in that moment of waking, can you have, can you have a realization of truth? It's hard to call things truth. That's pretty audacious. I don't know. I dare not do that very frequently, but I will say that this to me is truth, that in the moment that we are taking a waking breath like we did this morning, which wasn't guaranteed when we went to bed the night before, of course, but when we wake up, there are people in that moment that are taking their last breath. That's the truth of the situation. And so knowing that that's true, can you find something in that moment to realize and to be grateful for that you've been given that new day, even if that day is going to be tough? That you've been given this opportunity to do something that other people don't always get and didn't get in that instance. So second piece is gratitude, to be grateful, even if it means just sitting there in 10 seconds of anything that feels like gratitude. And lastly, if you're inclined to say the words out loud, these words can be said from bed. They can be said when you hit the floor with your feet or on the way to the restroom or whatever. I love my life. These 4 simple words just changed so many things for me. I love my life. I love my life and comma, no matter what. So I'll ask you, Jonathan, do you love your life?

I love my life no matter what.

I knew the answer to that question before, before I asked you.

That's beautiful. I love that. I agree on the gratitude side. I try to get my kids as part of it if we have time to say what's one thing they're grateful for in their life. We did that this morning and then why, you know, it just changes everything.

That is so cool. Hey, listen, I've enjoyed this conversation. I know our folks have. They'll have full show notes. You can check out more about Kaiser. And their work in the world and about Jonathan in particular and the books and ways that you can just be learning more, because I know we've all learned a lot and appreciate your time today, Jonathan. Thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it very much.

Okay, everybody, remember to do one amazing thing for yourself today. Create that I am statement. I think it's a great place to begin, and I'll just say ciao for now.

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