This Is How to Master Your Day | Time-Management Tips from Jay Shetty in 60 Minutes

If it's not in the calendar, it won't get done. It's not really a priority. You have to make sure that it's in your plan. It's in your day. That is my life this month. As you can see, it's color-coded, it's beautifully designed. And as I flick through this, what you'll realize is that every single day I have everything from workout time to meal times to scheduled off time all in my calendar. What this allows me to do is it helps me prioritize both personal and professional commitments and helps me see both things in the same place. If you haven't put something in your calendar, even if it's something social, I promise you, you'll either forget it or you won't plan effectively around it. When I know I have a really big podcast or a really big interview, or if I know that I have a big deadline on a day, I don't then surround that day with other difficult and challenging tasks. Sometimes I'll start my day with the most challenging task of the day because I feel that I need to start with a challenge. And sometimes I'll actually put it as the last most challenging task of the day because actually I want to build that momentum. When you have a schedule, you get context around how you feel. That way you manage your mental health and well-being a million times better, and you do more with less time.

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Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because you are probably the most ambitious person in your circle, but you know you're capable of more, and you get that push by surrounding yourself with the best. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Jay Shetty, and my take on his top 10 rules of success. Enjoy. Rule number 2: Focus on your breath.

A lot of us feel physical and mental pressure throughout the day, and one of the reasons why we feel that is because either our mind is ahead of our body or our body is ahead of our mind. So I'll explain what I mean by that. So often, how many times have you had it? Anyone who's listening right now, I'm sure you can relate. How many times have you had it where you're running to your next meeting So your body's moving really fast, but your mind's going, I wish we were still in bed, right? Your mind is still tired. Your mind's still feeling fatigued from the day before or whatever it may be. And sometimes we have it the other way around. Your mind's racing. It's saying, okay, we've got this to-do list, and now we've got this to do, and now we've got this to do. And your body's going, oh, why can't it just be Friday already? Why can't it be the weekend? Because your body's tired. So what we generally experience in our life is either our body's ahead of our mind or our mind's ahead of our body, and that creates that's a disconnect in our life. And we were just talking about this, that we feel alignment when what we think, what we say, and what we do— that's when we feel harmony, right? So the way to do that, one really practical tip— I do it all the time, especially when I'm rushing onto stage to speak at a conference, or I'm walking into a meeting and it's been a long day, or whatever it is— I focus on my breath. And what I do is that I breathe in for the same amount of time as I breathe out. So when you breathe in for a count of 4 and breathe out for a mental count of 4, and you imagine the numbers in your head— so you want to breathe in and count to 4 in your mind, and you want to breathe out and count to 4 in your mind— you're aligning your mind and your body, because now your breath is breathing in for 4, the count's in your head, and then you're breathing out for 4. And the counts in your head. So what you've basically done is taken either your body and your mind, whichever one was ahead or behind, and brought them back in alignment. And they're back in sync. Totally back in sync. And it works every time.

Rule number 3: use fear in a positive way.

I realized that fear could be healthy or unhealthy based on how I used it. And most of us don't realize that we get consumed by fear instead of using fear. So fear becomes our being in the sense that fear becomes what controls us. It tells us what we should do and what we shouldn't do. It tells us how we should think and we shouldn't think. It stops us from doing stuff that's really important to us, and it makes us do things that we would never ever do. It makes us say things to people that we love that we would never want to say to them. And on the other end, it stops you from saying things you really want to say to someone because you don't want to appear weak and your ego won't let you. So fear takes this really magnetic controlling effect on our whole lives. But fear at the same time can be one of the healthiest things because it's basically giving you a signal as to what's important. It's basically giving you a signal as to how you feel. And when you use it as a signal, not as a suggestion or a push, it changes everything. So let's make that practical. When you are in your home and if the fire alarm goes off, that gives you a signal to say, check for the fire, check if there's a fire right now. If you go, oh, just turn it off, it doesn't matter. Let's avoid my fear. Let's avoid it. Let's just turn it off. Let's forget about it. Your house could burn down. Or if you're lucky, there was nothing and it's fine. But the odds are that there could be a fire. Now, if you're someone who goes, well, let me inspect it, let me be curious about that. I am scared that there's a fire in my house now that I've heard the fire alarm, but let me be curious, let me inspect, let me check. Imagine we approached our fear in that way. Imagine every time I felt scared of something, I said, well, let me get curious about this. Why am I scared of this? Why is it affecting me so much? What about this scares me? Is it all of it, or is it just a part of it? When you start doing it, you start to break that fear down, and that's the healthy way of looking at fear rather than the unhealthy way of saying, forget about it, keep it away from me, I don't want to go there. And so for me, I really feel that fear is what blocks us from these beautiful breakthroughs in life. And it has such a chokehold on us. Like, it has such a strong hold on us. And I think most of us are living our lives because we're scared of what someone will say, what someone will think, or what someone will do. And that feels like something that we're gonna regret when we're at the end of our lives.

Rule number 4, let go of your phone.

Usually during that quality time with Riley, I'm not on my phone, I'm not on my devices, but it's at this point that I finally turn my phone onto airplane mode. I find that this habit is a game changer and a lifesaver at the end of the day, because it can be so addictive to just mindlessly scroll through Instagram or TikTok just before you're about to go to bed and literally fill your mind up with so much stimulation that it can be really difficult to switch off. I found that letting go of your phone an hour before you go to bed allows you to have so much more stillness and calm internally and externally. I really believe that if you can master this one habit of not looking at your phone before you go to bed, it will truly change how you feel the next morning.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 5: Use visualization.

One of the reasons why I love this one is everyone from Lewis Hamilton through to David Beckham has used visualization. So Lewis Hamilton would visualize the racetrack before actually driving in a Formula One race. David Beckham would visualize a free kick before taking a shot at a World Cup tournament. And this visualization allows you to deal with the pressure and stress before the actual activity. What it does is it allows you to fast forward. It's almost like time dilation. You're fast forwarding an experience and bringing it to the present where you're not experiencing that pressure and stress, right? So that you can engage with it better. So if you're scared, for example, for if you've got a really big meeting or a big pitch coming up, if you live that meeting and visualize that meeting now and visualize yourself walking in with confidence, visualize yourself not falling over on the stage, right? Visualize yourself starting that first word that you say with composure, with eloquence, with effectiveness, then when you actually walk into that space tomorrow, you're going to carry that energy with you. And this is one of the biggest mistakes we make, that we stress before, right, but we don't prepare before. And so visualizing what's about to come reduces, reduces the stress because it lets you deal with it now, and it lets you plant thoughts and energy into the future. And that's really what a visualization is doing, right? It's letting you plant the energy of feeling composed and relaxed now into that feeling. So what I do before I'm about to go on stage, I always visualize myself walking on the stage. And I do that to make myself feel comfortable and reminding myself I'm not going to trip on stage, you know, which we all fear as speakers. And, and it allows me to feel confident before I walk on. So visualizing any experience, a meeting, a lecture, an exam, whatever it may be, a test, whatever it is you're doing. And it's like mental rehearsal. Totally, that's all it is. The mind doesn't know the difference between something you vividly imagine and something that's real. And most people could use that superpower, if you will, for something negative, like visualizing something they fear was going to happen, and then they're actually practicing that in advance also. Totally, yeah. And that's what we mostly do. We mostly mentally rehearse what could go wrong, right? So we mentally rehearse tripping up on going— how would you do that? We do that because we think, we think dwelling on our stress and pressure helps deal with it, right? But it doesn't. Dwelling on anything increases it. Yeah. So the only way to deal with it is to reprogram ourselves. You've just been speaking about this, to reprogram ourselves to deal with it how we want in the aspirational sense.

Rule number 6: know when to quit.

I, from a very young age, just felt there was this strong inner voice, and I believe everyone has it. This isn't me being religious or spiritual or woo-woo. This is me saying that there is a voice that we all hear in our minds, in our hearts, in our heads, wherever you want to say it is, it's there. And the challenge that happens is in our early years, you're told to tell it to be quiet. So every time that voice says, well, maybe— no, no, no, no, no, just do what they're saying, do what they're told. Get on that conveyor belt, get on that assembly line, stick that barcode on your back, become a machine, go be a robot. And, and it's almost programmed. And so that voice that is not machine-like, that voice is the human inside of us, is being trained to be a machine. And so we start treating ourselves like machines. And machines, you just program them and then press enter, and then it gives you what it wants. But we don't function that way. We're a conversation in the universe. We're not a program. And so if you're a conversation and you're an interaction, you're dynamic, that inner voice becomes so squashed that now by the time we're 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, whatever age you are, you can't hear it anymore. So you say, oh, that's some spiritual mumbo-jumbo stuff because I don't hear that voice.

Rule number 7: Keep a journal.

This is probably one of the highlights of my evening, is taking out my 5-minute journal, the Genius Jay Shetty version, and filling out the rest of the reflections for the day. I found that this is one of the most calming and centering moments of my day because it gives me an opportunity to appreciate what I have, to remember the incredible moments that have happened throughout my day. See, we have so many highlights in our lives that we forget simply because we don't take a moment to allow them to go inward. For me, this is like taking a mental and emotional picture of a moment that I never want to forget. And as you can see, today I had the pleasure of interviewing Jocko Willink, who fascinated me with so many insights, Guy Raz from How I Built This, and then finally just getting to spend so much quality time with my team. I purposely try to do this in a separate space, in an area that has that grounded energy. Remember, time has memory and location has energy. When you do something in the same space every day, it builds a habit, it builds an energy, it builds a space. And so for me, creating that environment that helps me be reflective and introspective and grateful is really a big part of Now, you may have heard about something known as decision fatigue. I first came across this concept when reading The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. It's the idea that we make so many decisions first thing when we wake up in the morning that we run out of energy to make the most important decisions of the day. So usually when we wake up, we're trying to figure out what do I have for breakfast? What am I going to wear today? What do I have to do today? What tasks do I have to finish today? And then by the time you start the tasks, you've already run out of energy.

Rule number 8: Set monthly goals.

How many of you feel like the months are just passing by and it's crazy to believe that we're over a quarter of the way through the year? But this is what happens when we don't have really clear goals, targets, and tasks. This approach has really helped me manage my time better. I have big monthly goals. I have 4 weekly targets, and I have one daily task. The one daily task is the baby step towards the weekly target, and the weekly target added up, all four of them, leads to the big monthly goal. So what you're doing here in essence is breaking down something that feels quite unachievable, impossible to do, and quite challenging into small manageable chunks. Sometimes you can be sitting there thinking thinking, wow, I don't know how I'm going to get that done by the end of this month. If you've ever felt that way, use this model. First, come up with how can you break that big goal down into 4 separate tasks. Once you have these 4 weekly targets, now all you need to do is divide each weekly target into a daily task. So basically you end up working on something daily that you achieve weekly, which helps you achieve something monthly. Now you've completely deconstructed this impossible, unachievable idea into something very simple and manageable.

Rule number 9: Schedule time for you.

The first thing you want to do is put something in your schedule, in your calendar, which is time for you. If you look at your schedule, you would never cancel an important meeting with someone else, but we don't even schedule one with ourself. There is nothing in the calendar that's time with myself, time for me, time for you, time for just this, this whole thing that's going on right now. Literally put it in for 5 minutes a day. If you can't do 5 minutes, do it for 2 minutes a day. Just put it in there, because if you start putting that in there, you might then tomorrow go, okay, well, what am I going to do with this time? I've got 5 minutes. Wow, okay, what am I going to do with it? So start putting it in there. That's the first step. The second step, I would say, is definitely focus on your breath. I think the breath is just something we can all relate to. It's tangible. By the way, athletes have to learn how to control their breath. Musicians have to learn how to control their breath. Whether you're Adele or whether you're a football player, you have to learn how to breathe in order to perform. Me, you, and everyone, we're all athletes in different ways. We all use our bodies, we all use our minds, whether you're a business person or whether you're an actual athlete playing on a, on a court or a pitch. But are you saying that I don't know how to breathe? I am saying you don't know how to breathe. Yeah, and not you specifically. I'm saying that most people don't know how to breathe, and I didn't know breath until I was taught how to breathe. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but how many times a day do you get out of breath? I know there's times a day that I get out of breath. How many times of the day do you feel that when you're experiencing an emotion, your breath changes? Like when you're crying or you're sad or you're upset, your breath changes. When you're happy and elated, your breath changes. So our breath is connected to every single emotion. So if we want to navigate our emotions in our life, we have to train our breath. So I would just say to everyone, take out 2 to 3 minutes and just take a moment to breathe in and out and breathe in for 4 and out for 4. Just try it as simply as that. Now, if you're someone who struggles to get to sleep, which can often be something that I think everyone struggles with, that's when you want to breathe out for longer than you breathe in. So if you're breathing in for 4, breathe out for more than 4 to relax and rest your body. And if you're one of these people that goes, Jay, I've got, you know, I've got, like you said, I've got to do a delivery today. I've got to run to this meeting. I've got to get to this. And you need more energy, breathe out for less time than you breathe in. So you may breathe in for a second and breathe out for a millisecond. It's a really sharp breath out. And if you do that, you'll feel this pumping energy in your body. And so to me, it's— these are really practical tools that I think we all need to sleep. So everyone knows their meditation for sleep. We all need to get energized. So that's a simple meditation for energize. And we all need to just feel like we're not rushing. Yeah. So I think those are hopefully quick things that feel practical to anyone and everyone.

And rule number 10, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is set your intention.

The penultimate thing that I do just before I go to bed is to pray and set my intention. This prayer usually involves thanking God, thanking my teachers, thanking my mentors, and it also is a prayer of wanting to be of service, of resetting my intention to not be distracted from wanting to serve. To have a positive impact on others, to be kind and loving, and to be an ambassador of compassion in everything I do. I often repeat the affirmations just before I go to bed to help me rest better. They are: I am happy, healthy, and focused. This is how I'm trying to program my mind the night before for how I want to wake up the next morning. Remember, when you set an alarm, you set it the night before the night before so that it wakes you up in the morning. You also program your mind in the same way. You set the intention or the affirmation the night before, and you wake up with that energy. I'll sometimes add the affirmation, I am energized, nourished, and ready to get on with my day. I want to wake up feeling that way. And often when we wake up, the first thing we say to ourselves is, I'm tired, groggy, or drained. So we're programming ourselves to feel a certain way and helping our subconscious mind prepare itself. I really want you to think about how envy is the art of counting another's blessings, not your own. Start with compassion. Don't judge yourself, don't criticize yourself, don't compare yourself, don't complain. Get rid of the 3 C's: comparing, complaining, and criticizing. Get get rid of them out of your vocabulary. Get rid of them out of your mind. Just totally remove, right? Anytime you see yourself compare, complain, or criticize, stop doing it. Notice it. That's your mind. Your mind wants to compare. Your mind wants to complain. Your mind wants to criticize. Your intelligence wants to care. It wants to be compassionate. It wants to choose with confidence. It wants to be confident, right? Let's replace those feelings with that. Let's replace them for that. Take the next month, take the next 30 days, and every weekend plan a new activity, workshop, seminar, course, book, podcast to listen to, person to shadow, person to experience with. Take a Saturday and Sunday and try it out. You've got 8 things that you can now test. There are 8 days, 8 weekends in a month roughly. Test something new on each of those. Go and actually do something. So this is no more thinking, no more reflecting. If you want to be a chef or you think you want to be a chef, Go and do a cooking class. See how natural it was for you. See how much fun you had doing the process. Take 8 different things and try them out. When you do both of those together, within 30 days you could figure out what you genuinely are passionate about as a starting point. That may change, it may evolve, but at least you've got somewhere to start. And the biggest mistake is we're sitting there doing a personality test trying to figure out what our passion is. Obviously you're not going to know. This is the time to really question the intent behind what you're chasing, to really question what you want and your intent behind it. Because so often our wrong intention for the right thing will lead you down the wrong path. And I think we don't realize that when we keep talking about alignment, that beautiful statement you shared about, you know, it's not the achievement, it's alignment. Alignment means, is my intention aligned with my action? And when I'm saying aligned, I'm saying, am I looking for the right thing in the right way? And sometimes even if you're looking for the wrong thing but in the right way, you'll still get there. That's why intention is so powerful. Like if you're planting seeds in your garden and you by mistake water the seeds, but you water a weed next to it, because you're still watering, the seeds are still going to grow and you'll spot the weed. So that process of watering needs to continue. I want you to think back to a moment where you felt you were in your element, where you felt you were in flow. It may have been a challenging situation, but to you it felt somewhat effortless. You were performing an activity. You were doing some sort of teamwork with another group. Now, the challenges that we usually think of when someone asks you to think of your passions, we immediately start thinking of hobbies like art, music, drama, right? Science, whatever it is. We start thinking of containers because for a long, long time in our lives, we've been trained to believe that everything comes in boxes, everything comes in containers. We think of careers as containers. We think of careers as boxes. But the incredible thing about finding your passion is that our passions are more like environments that we thrive in, right? Our passions, or our natures as they're called in ancient traditions, is actually environments, a group of elements coming together that means someone can thrive. It may mean for you that you work better in teams. It may mean for you that you work better alone. Those are environments, environmental signals that you can find if you're just conscious and aware of when you're in flow, when you're excited, when you're making a difference, when you're making a change. Harvard did a table which I really believe is what mindful speaking is all about. So what is this? So it's called the— it's called Harvard List of Emotions, but I kind of changed the name to Emotional Vocabulary. Because I think it sounds better. So, an emotional vocabulary, if you look at all of the world's emotional vocabulary, it's very limited. We use 5 words to describe pretty much everything. Good, bad, okay, fine, hmm. So, it's like, how's your week going? Good. How's your day been? Bad. How are you feeling? Okay. Literally, like, we use such limited words. And that may be okay for the majority of people. But in your personal relationships, it's so important to expand your emotional vocabulary. So this table that Harvard has made, which anyone can find just by typing in Harvard list of emotions on Google, what that does is that it shows you that when you say you're sad, what do you actually mean? So it gives you all this list of emotions that sit under the word sad. Are you irritated? Are you offended? Are you disappointed? Have you been let down? The more you expand your emotional vocabulary, the more you can diagnose how you feel. Interesting. And the more you can tell your partner or your friend, this is how I'm feeling, this is how I'm actually feeling. And this is one of the biggest mistakes with words, is that we think our words mean the same thing. Now, when you say love, you might think forever, and when I say love, I might think for tonight, right? And that is literally how the word The word love or care or marriage or forever gets misused, abused, and thrown about because we both mean different things. And our meanings are based on our backgrounds, our beliefs, our beliefs, but how we were born and how our parents, our culture, experience, everything. Yeah, it forms our meaning. So I really believe that in a relationship, in our communication with Words define words. When you say, yeah, we're best friends or friends, what does that mean to you? When we're business partners, what does that mean to you? A contract in a financial legal sense is to define the terms, right? But in our emotional sense, we also need to define the terms, and we don't do that emotionally enough. And that's why we feel emotionally like someone broke the contract, and you have nothing to hold them to because you never made a contract. You never communicated. You never communicated the meaning of these words. Exactly. And that's why words are so powerful, but they're only powerful when we agree on the definition. Turn off your notifications and turn on chill, relaxing work music. I've done this for such a long time where I have a playlist that I listen to that allows me to just get into the zone. What I find music does is especially instrumental music. That's what I focus on. I try to stay away from popular music that I may listen to in the car or while I'm in the gym. What that does is it gives the mind enough distraction, enough rhythm, enough pattern, enough momentum so that you can actually focus your mind on the activity at hand. Now, some of you may prefer silence or working to chatter, and that's fine too. You can even put that type of music on. But for me, instrumental beats and rhythms are a fantastic way of getting into the zone. Turning off your notifications is just a no-brainer if you're really trying to do some deep work. If you're someone who finds that you're always procrastinating, you're always overanalyzing, overthinking, and you're struggling to get stuff done, this video is for you. The first step is identifying why we procrastinate. How many of you have ever wondered, why do I overthink? I want to get this done. I want to make progress in my life, but for some reason I just can't seem to stop. Alexander Rosenthal, who's a procrastination researcher, explains the 4 types of trigger. We procrastinate because of expectancy, value, time, or impulsivity. People procrastinate because of a lack of value associated associated with the task, or because they expect that they're not going to achieve the value they're trying to achieve, or because the value is too far from you in terms of time, and finally, because you're very impulsive as a person. What's interesting about understanding where your procrastination comes from is that it allows you to understand what the challenge is and what the issue is without blaming yourself, without thinking that that something is wrong with you. And actually, the clearer you get about the value you're going to get from the task, the amount of time you do have to dedicate to it— don't judge yourself. So many of us, when we procrastinate and overthink, start to feel that there's something wrong with us. We judge ourselves, we make ourselves feel guilty, we say negative things about ourselves to ourselves and to others. We start saying things like, I'm so lazy, I'm so worthless, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough. This doesn't make you more productive, more proactive, or more effective. How many times has putting yourself down made you lift yourself up? I don't think those two things go together. What ends up happening is that when we judge ourselves for being procrastinators, we create a prison of guilt. This It becomes a space that we actually can't break out of, and it's how procrastination keeps us trapped by making us believe that we can't do anything, that we're no better. So we need to stop judging ourselves. How do we stop judging ourselves? By letting go, realizing that we all make mistakes and that we're going to leave that all behind and we're going to turn over a fresh page, that we're going to start anew. When you're with loved ones, when you're with family, when you're with your friends, make a vow to not use technology. If you need to have— I've seen these around where you have a technology jar and everyone puts their phone in it at the start of a dinner and takes it at the end. Make a vow that when you're with your friends, when you're with your family, that you will not be on your phone. And leave your phones in the same place, in one area, so that none of you can I just get that sneaky moment, I have to take a look at it. When you first start, you may be worried that you're gonna be bored of each other. You might even be worried, well, how's this person going to compete with my phone? How are they gonna entertain me? I mean, my phone has access to every form of entertainment. Sit in that discomfort again, and in that discomfort, you're gonna learn something new about that person. You're gonna become more curious. Your mind actually has the opportunity opportunity to start building a different bond. Earlier I mentioned that you want to create no technology times in your home. You also want to create no technology zones in your home. In mine and Radhi's home, those spaces are the dining table and the bedroom. Those are two areas that we want to be technology-free, that we've designated as important areas of connection. And so the dining table and the bedroom becomes places and zones in my home where we don't use technology. The pressure of finding your purpose is crazy. We'll stop you from finding your purpose, literally. And the pressure is so heavy. And that's why it's not about finding that. It's just starting with the basics. What am I good at? And I talk about it, and I break down dharma in here, and I talk about what are your passion, what is your expertise, what is your compassion, because that's really important. What is your compassion for the world? Like What problem do you want to solve? I often— people will say there's so many things I could do. There's so many things. I'm like, my question is not what causes you the greatest joy. Sometimes my question is what is— what causes you the greatest pain? Make that your purpose. Make that your purpose. If you don't know what your joy is, you definitely know what your pain is. What do you not like in the world? What do you not like? And so for me, go serve that thing. 100%. So for me, the greatest pain I see in the world is people not reaching their potential. That is— that causes me more pain because I believe that there is someone out there who is stacking shelves who has the cure to cancer. There is someone out there— Or is a talented singer. Is a talented singer. There is someone out there who's not living to their potential. And I think we're better people, we're better partners, and we're better parents when we live to our potential. So that's what I'm trying to solve. And I'm not saying that's the biggest thing. Sure. I'm just saying it's my thing. What is faith to you? Faith to me, like the two polarities, is the day-to-day practices and the map. So it's the thing that's guiding every decision, right? It's the thing that's guiding every direction that I move in. It's the thing that guides who I want to be friends with, who I want to connect with, the type of work I want to do. But then it's also what I do daily. And to me, that's what's so beautiful about faith, that it can be practical and simple, but then it can be philosophical and spiritual. Yeah. And so to me, faith is both, because if I'm not practicing on a daily basis, how can it last, right? And if it's not the governing thing behind all my decisions, then how is it true? Like, how is it real? And how is it your moral compass also? Exactly. Yeah. So for me, it's both of those things at all times. And so it's everything I do in the morning. So my meditation practices, my prayer, the way I communicate, how I speak to my wife. Like, I think all of those things— how I speak to anyone. I think all of those things are my faith. And at the same time, it's like, do I— am I doing this out of love? Am I doing this out of service? Am I taking this decision just because it pays the bills and just because it makes money, or am I doing this just because I think it'll be cool? It's the same as— it's so funny you asked me this question because I was speaking to someone about you just before coming on the show today. Really? Yes. I was saying one of the things I love about Ashley and why I think we get along so well and we find it so easy to connect is because we both have such deep faith. Yes. And I said I always find it easier when you meet someone who has their faith, and it may be different, but they're open. Yep. And then you just connect. And that's how I feel with you, that when we first started talking and meeting, I felt it straight away. The people who are really rooted in their faith and that comes before anything else, I always connect. Yeah. 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. Um, you're just amazing. I mean, Tommy, you're literally explaining my book for me. I'm just like, this is like the biggest masterclass 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 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 asked— the reason why we struggle to find our passion is because the world has constantly pushed us away from our strengths. We've constantly been told to focus on your weaknesses. Oh, you've got 3 A's and a D, you should be working on that D. Let's get that add 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— and English. I was always in the top half, if not in the top quarter, if not in the top 5, 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 1 or 2 or 3 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, 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 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 trophies. 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, you're average at, or what you're bad at, where would you put your money? And so if you take 100%, 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 people on the planet will say theirs is 100/0/0 or 80/10/10. 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. Yeah, so hard skills are things like Excel, math, product design, using a video camera, scriptwriting, 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, we're actually the other way around. We put all our emphasis on getting better at our weaknesses weaknesses in 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. I just really have had to build up rules around my social media use. You have? So my rule is never look at the phone first thing in the morning. Oh my gosh, I am really trying. This is my biggest one. Like, I think if we did this, we would conquer our lives. I have now not looked at Instagram first thing in the morning. I just look at like the text, the email. Okay, we're good. That's good. Yep, that's huge. It is for me. That's huge. At one point, I actually used to put my phone and my laptop locked in my car downstairs. Well, because that was the only way I could truly convince myself not to look at my phone. And I think we have to go to that extent sometimes, or that extremity, to really push ourselves out of it. So I don't look at my phone until I go down to the gym, which is 2 hours after I meditate and wake up and everything. So I try and avoid looking at my phone for those first 2 hours, and I find what that does is is it gives your mind time to warm up. You don't start your mind on someone else's reactive schedule, right? When you wake up and you look at that email and you look at that notification, you're now thinking about everything everyone wants you to do, not what you want to do, right? You're not thinking about who you want to be or what you want to achieve. You're thinking about, oh, Mary wants me to get that right, you know, Julie wants me to do that, right? Like, whatever it is, like, you start thinking about everyone else's schedule. And then the third thing that happens is— and I've said this before, but I think it's really powerful when you think about it— and I think about this in the morning, it really stops me. None of us, and I mean literally none of us, would let 100 people walk into our bedroom first thing in the morning. That's true. Ever. Before doing your hair, before you do maybe your makeup, getting clothes on, having a shower. You would never do that. But we let 100 notifications enter our mind. That's literally trying to shake our consciousness awake, right? It's like really trying to wake your mind up. You're expecting your mind going from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5 seconds when you open up Instagram or WhatsApp or emails. And it's so much pressure on our minds. That's really all it is. It's pressure and stress for your mind to have to wake up and warm up way quicker than our bodies do. So that's been a huge one for me, that rule. There was a CEO of a very large car manufacturer, and he was known to be extremely successful, very productive, very effective. But the one thing he was failing at is that his employees employees really didn't like working for him because he worked late. How many of you feel that way? Oh, perfect. That's good. So no one here finishes late, or everyone's managers are in the room. Whichever way you want to take it, it's up to you, right? It's up to you. I don't know. So that was one of his challenges, that his employees hated working for him because they all left late because of him. He used to work till 10 PM every evening, so they would leave just after him. True story, right? They used to leave just after him. So One of his assistants, she came and said this to him. She said, you know, morale's a bit down. Everyone's struggling at work. You know, we're losing a few people. A few people are quitting their work. You know, people, they're not well. They don't feel like their health is being taken care of. They're not spending enough time with their families. You really need to consider this. He said, OK, leave it with me. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. From the next week, on a Monday, this gentleman who left at 10:00 PM every night got up out of his desk at 6 PM. He packed his bag, switched off his computer, left the office, jumped into his car, and all the employees at this time are like peeking out the window, you know, just like making sure, like figuring out where is this guy going. He pulls into his beautiful car, pulls out, and drives away from the building. It was the first time it had ever happened at 6 PM. They all decided to wait till 7 PM before they left. They waited and they left. And Tuesday, the same thing happened. They looked out the window again. He He left at 6 PM again. This time they waited till 6:45 and they left. They did the same thing. And this happened for 3 months where he left at 6 PM every day. 3 months later, his assistant who'd made him aware of this challenge, she came back to him and she said to him, "I'm really confused about something." She said, "You've been leaving 4 hours earlier every single day, but you're not behind on your calls. You're not behind on your emails. And you're still performing at the same level, if not better, than when you were leaving on time. And she said, how are you managing to do this? Are you working at home? How are you managing this? He said, let me tell you something interesting. He said, every day I get into my car at 6 PM, I drive out. He said, I take a drive for an hour. He said, I take that drive, I listen to music, I re-energize. He said, I sometimes go for a bit of a walk at the park as well. He said, I come back fresher at 7 PM and I work for 3 more "more hours." And he said, "If it helps them knowing that I've left at 6 PM so that they can have a better life and have the values that they want and value what they want to give their time to, that doesn't mean I've got to give up what I value my time to." He said, "I love my work. I love being here till 10 PM. I'm extremely ambitious. I love being here. But they should also love being where they are." And that to me is an incredible example of how someone actually lives forgoing the perception of others. Even though he changed his own life to help other people, they'll never perceive him that way. They just think he's changed his mind and he goes home early. They don't realize the struggle that he's putting in. And that's what I've realized. Whether you're putting in struggle or sacrifice, never look for the validation or approval of others to validate that sacrifice or that struggle, because they don't need to understand anyway. It's always been your inner journey. It's always been part of your inner growth. And I remember I remember when I made the decision to become a monk after business school, all my friends were like, "What the hell are you doing?" Right? We just finished and everyone was going off to work at Goldman Sachs and different banks and consulting firms, etc. I think a few people came to Google as well. And they all said to me, they said, "What do you mean you're becoming a monk? Like, what does that mean? Like, who graduates and thinks about that?" And I remember having to detach. And when I reflect, and I'd love for you to do this, reflect on some of the best decisions you've made in your life. Ask yourself, what decision did you make? What did people say about it? And what was going on in your mind? I've learned through doing that exercise— it's a much longer exercise. It can take days, and we do it in our coaching exercises. I've learned that the best decisions in my life have been the biggest risks. Everyone's disagreed with me, but I've been hell-bent on making it happen. And so now when I see an opportunity like that, I do it. Because I've realized that that's the pattern of the philosophy of my life. When I make decisions that are big risks, no one agrees with me, and it doesn't fit with what society is saying, those work out to be my best decisions in life. And I'm not saying that that's your pattern. I'm saying that you have a pattern and a rhythm as well, and it's part of your journey to find it. After I've completed my workday, when I finished all of my tasks, the last thing I do is check my schedule for the next day. Now, I'm one of those people that follows their schedule to a T. Tea. I believe it makes life simple. When I get my schedule out and look at the next day, I can think about how I'm going to feel. Have I got too much or too little on that? Do I want to add or edit something? It gives me perspective and allows me to get a glance on the next day so I can rearrange or reorganize based on the energy I feel today. Sometimes we feel so tired and exhausted, but without making that change and editing it, we take that exhaustion in the next day. The other reason why I like looking ahead is that it gives me an opportunity to mentally prepare. I may have a podcast the next day, and there's a guest that I'm really excited about, and I may have to calm my nerves. Or sometimes it's an event or a meeting that I'm looking forward to, and I just want to go over the bullet points before I go to bed. It gives me an opportunity to rehearse the day in advance, and often I'll even sit and do a short visualization just to imagine how tomorrow will look. Terry Pratchett, a famous author, whether you've read his stuff or not, a famous author, he said that people feel that stories are defined by people, but actually it's the other way around. People are defined by stories. When you're listening to me today, I've shared so many stories with you because we define ourselves by the stories we tell ourselves on a daily basis. The story you wake up to will be the story that will be the story of your day, right? If you wake up and you tell yourself a positive story, you'll have a positive day. You wake up, tell yourself a negative story, you'll have a negative day. Positive and negative thoughts are like seeds that either grow weeds or plants, right? They grow inside of us throughout the day. Anytime you plant something, it's like planting a seed, and the more you water it, the more you think about it, it grows. And of course, if is negative, it's like a weed and it starts to grow and grow and grow and of course won't bear fruits. So really think about that. Tell yourself the right stories, connect with the right stories, because ultimately the universe is made up of stories, not atoms and numbers, right? We all love stories, we breathe stories. Your life is a living story that you're writing every day, and I genuinely mean that. I spent years of my life working really hard from Monday to Friday only to have to wake up on a Saturday to do all my cleaning. Not only did that take up the whole day, it made less time for social interaction, for connecting with friends and family, and even time to work on my passions. And what ended up happening is that by the time it was Monday again, the house felt unclean and I felt like I'd made no progress. Initially, we all believe that doing it in one day seems like the best method. It's out of sight, out of mind. You don't have You don't have to think about it for the whole week, and in one day you get it sorted. The challenge with that is that in your mind it also feels like a bigger mountain to climb. Scheduling it out during the week makes all the difference. Tackling small tasks, putting things back immediately after using them, washing a plate immediately after eating something makes it so much simpler. One of the best ways to do this is to create days dedicated to specific things. This makes it feel like a challenge or an experiment. So, for example, a Wipe Down Wednesday, knowing that all you have to do is wipe down your surfaces, may take no more than 5 to 10 minutes. I also really love Floor Fridays. Now, the floor can sometimes take a bit longer, but still scheduling out around 30 minutes to do that could make all the difference. And if you live with more than one person, you can divide these days and these areas between you so that you can make it simpler and easier to handle and tackle. There's quite a few benefits to this. When we do the same thing at the same time on the same day every single week, it becomes so much easier for the mind to tackle that task. When we divide and dissect our tasks up in this way, we avoid burnout. We avoid feeling like we have this big, huge mountain to climb and solve, and we start tackling elements every single day. When you're feeling anxious, what's happening is that your mind is either it's rushing to the past, or it's predicting and projecting the future. So you're either anxious about something that you experienced before, or you're feeling really nervous and anxious about something that might or could happen in the future. The best way to come back into the present moment is the 5-4-3-2-1 method. You want to start off by looking around wherever you are and noticing the 5 things you can see. It could be the windows, the walls, the ceilings. You then want to focus on the 4 things you can touch. It could be something you're wearing and you really want to feel the texture. It could be what you're sitting on, just noticing it and really grounding yourself and holding on to that. Then it's about 3 things you can hear. It could be nothing. It could be white noise. Then the 2 things you can smell, inhale. It could be a scent you're wearing. It could be a flower. And then finally, the one thing you can taste. When you practice this, it brings you back into the present moment and helps you not focus on the anxiety or the nervousness, but on taking action from exactly where you are. A lot of the time we're trying to control anxiety up here, and what I find is hard about that is that if you feel like you've got brain fog or you're feeling cloudy, it becomes really difficult to find clarity. I find using external things can be huge. For me, I love diffusers and candles because a diffuser is infusing the whole environment with a beautiful scent, and it truly changes your mind. If you walk into a space, just think of a spa. As soon as you walk in, you feel different because of the scent. It could just be a normal room with the scent of lavender Sandalwood. Any of these essential oils can truly calm your body right down. Some people feel that silence creates anxiety, and some people feel that sound creates anxiety. Sometimes I like complete silence. It helps me relax and really hear my thoughts and the thoughts that I want to focus on. And sometimes I need to turn on some meditation music, some ambient music, just to have that impact. It on me. Please use music in your environments, in different rooms in your home, to help you achieve different emotions and feelings that you want to feel at that time. 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 villages can find a home and an economy. So you're always connected to doing something for others. But if I was going to ask, yes, 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're 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 an 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 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, and 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. The Zen story about the tea, and I love Zen stories and the book's full of them, as you know. 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 sense of ego of 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 student's 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 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 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 they're 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. I've always had a rule since I started that all my videos are 70% complete. So that's my rule. Yes, it's 70%. That's all you're getting. Yeah, there's words that I say wrong, there's fumbles, there may be a few mistakes here and there, the editing may be slight, but it's like my was 70% because that journey from 70 or 75 to 99 could take decades. Yeah, you can never— it could— I would never release something. And I remember in 2016, after my first ever video went— one of my first videos that went viral, I actually got so scared because it was almost like, oh, I have to live up to that now. So I remember not creating. Yeah. And so I went from creating one video a week to creating one video a month. And guess what? I learned less. I was engaging less to connect with my audience, to understand what they needed and what I was giving. Yeah. And I was trying less ideas, which meant that I wasn't learning. You weren't learning as much. I wasn't growing at all. I wasn't progressing. And the world was being taken from getting more beauty from it, which came from a place of not thinking like that, which came from a place of not trying to be perfect. Exactly. The original video that did well came from a genuine place of just wanting to serve and trying to figure it out. And then all of a sudden we're serving anymore. So good. And so I was like, okay, this doesn't make any sense. And I was like, actually— and then last year when we started making more videos, I can honestly hand on my heart say that when we started doing 3 videos a week, I started to learn so much more. Yeah. I was like, oh, I really like it when I write like this, and I really like it when I create like this, and the audience really responds when I share it this way. And I was learning so much more. Yeah. And I was feeling more fulfilled by making more mistakes but learning more. And so my mistakes increased Yeah, but your learning increased too, which, which was a much more fulfilling place to be, even though it was tough at times, but it was fulfilling. The ego makes you think you're untouchable, and the ego makes you think that you are, you know, that nothing about you can, can ever go wrong, or you're, you're perfect, or not even that, but nothing can bring you down, nothing can hurt you. Correct. When the moment you think you can't be brought down You will be brought down. The moment you think that you can't— that one of my teachers would always pray that he never— and he's been a monk for 40 years— he would always pray that he would never fall to his temptations. And we said to him, you haven't fallen to your temptation for 40 years, why do you pray for that? He goes, I haven't fallen because I pray for it. Wow. Like, he was like, because I pray for it, because I'm aware. I think it's gonna— yeah, he's aware. And there's a beautiful story of Benjamin Franklin, where he talks about before he died, I believe he had 13 or 14 precepts. These were qualities that he wanted to live by and gain. So they're like simplicity, integrity, virtues, all these powerful things. And he was asked when he was on his deathbed which was the one he didn't accomplish, and he said the last one. That was humility. This is the beautiful thing that happens when you say thank you to someone who's kind to you. It does 3 things. The first thing is you recognize kindness. So now you are triggering your mind to start recognizing kindness, and you're now recognizing kindness in them. The second thing you do is you reinforce kindness in them. They realize, they're like, oh, when I'm kind, people appreciate it, right? So I'm going to be more kind. So you've now reinforced kindness within them. And the third thing is you help them repeat it. Now that you've shown them that their kindness is reciprocated, they're now going to be kind to more people. So when you recognize kindness in someone, it reinforces that belief that kindness is amazing, and then they repeat that kindness to other people. So now you've started this domino effect of kindness just by thanking one person.

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So it's a special celebration. If you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you like this video and want more Jay Shetty, check out another top 10 that I made on him. The link is right there next to me. I think you'll enjoy it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Visualization, the recreation of images, sounds, and environments before it has happened, is one of the most powerful skills in the world.