TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Sa. Sam sa. Happy New Year. Welcome to this program. I am TJ Walker. This is your habit influencer. Now, I'm not the person who can influence everyone's habits. I'm here to help you influence your own habits. That's what this show is about. Now, this is an experiment. Don't know if it'll work. But you know what? You cannot succeed at anything unless you are prepared to potentially fail. This is going to be a daily show Monday through Friday, every single week of the year. Unless I'm traveling or off giving a speech somewhere, I'm going to be with you every day, 1 to 3pm Marceau. I'm not seeing it on our main screen here. Is it showing up for you? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So part of what I like to do with every show, for that matter, every video I do is just or a course. Hop right in with a quick win. I want to share something with you that I think has made a meaningful impact on my life. It's a Christmas present I got for myself. It's a little piece of plastic. And what this does is it allows me to microwave eggs. Now, if you've ever tried to microwave an egg, it's ugly. There can be explosions. You put the eggs in here, close it, there's a little pump, and you can microwave it. Now, I'm not selling this. I'm not an affiliate. I'm not getting any money from this. But I point it out because many of us after the holidays are looking for ways of losing some weight. And I never really thought about it before, but eggs are extremely low in calorie. One egg is 78 calories. So what I've been doing for the last week is I get three eggs, put it in here, stir it up, and about four or five spoonfuls of salsa. Boom. Two minutes later, I have a fantastic and delicious vegetable omelette. Now, it's tasty, it's quite filling. It's three eggs, but it's only about 300 calories. Now, you compare that to a bagel with cream cheese, it's going to be two, three times as much. You compare that to even something healthy like oatmeal. By the time I get through with oatmeal, putting in lots of cream and other nuts and all sorts of dried fruit, bowl of oatmeal, that the way I eat could be a thousand calories. So this is only 300 calories. Now, I just got this on Amazon. Again, I'm not promoting any particular brand, but I do try to look out for you to figure out what is the simplest way of making a habit come alive. And for many of us, we're looking to eat fewer calories, reduce our weight, be healthier. This is one of these tools where I think is not just a gimmick. Now you can ask me in six months or perhaps I'll report back to you. I may tell you I'm just so sick of it. But to have a really warm, tasty, incredibly filling breakfast for 300 calories and not have any processed food in it I think is a huge win. I know it is for me. It also reduces my desire to snack. Have that mid morning snack at 10:30, 11. I eat that at 6am and I am full. I want to welcome you, those of you joining us on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, I guess we're not quite on LinkedIn yet. On YouTube, we're on more than a dozen platforms. Welcome. This is the first official TJ Walker Chefs Habit Influencer show coming to you. This is going to be a regular right here in 2020, a daily conversation Monday through Friday, any day where I'm not traveling or off giving a speech, it's going to be right here on these platforms. Now I am going to come prepared to give you some specific ideas, some content, some helpful information, but I'm also going to spend a lot of time simply answering your questions. We're going to have a conversation. So at any point you have a question, post it. There may be times when I do like a five minute riff on something which I'll do in a moment and I will come back to you. We have the luxury of time here. We'll be here for at least two hours. Therefore we don't have to rush. It doesn't have to be 15 seconds. As much as I love my friends on Tic Tac where we are limited to 15 seconds and 1 minute on Instagram, we have the luxury of time. So if you ask me a specific question about how to build a more positive habit in your life or how to get rid of a negative one or a communications challenge, I've got the time to go deep in this and I do want to spend some time. And also the rest of you can chime in with your own advice, your own perspectives. Feel free to give comments anywhere on any social platform you're looking at this on. We are on a number of platforms today and I do see that Sandy has joined us on Instagram. Thanks for joining us. And I also see that Daniel has joined us on TikTok and my colleague Marceau, our producer, is with me today. Do we have our page set up so that we can see the people on Facebook and YouTube? Because I don't see it on my screen. I'm looking at it online. I just got to set it up, but there's nothing here yet. Okay. Okay, great. And thank you for those of you who are watching on YouTube and Facebook and any other platforms. So it's that time of year. It's January 6th. How do you make your New Year's resolutions stick? You may have been very sincere, very earnest, very excited. December 31st, you may have told your friends, family, people at a New Year's Eve party this year, I'm serious, this year, I'm going to do whatever it is. And then if you're like a lot of people, by perhaps even January 6, the resolutions have already been broken. Maybe you're more disciplined than that. Maybe you make it to January 15th, maybe you're in the top 5% and you make it to February 1st. But then they fold by the wayside. I want to spend a little time with you today, figuring out, how can we make our New Year's resolutions actually stick? How can we make them become more meaningful? The first thing I want you to do with any New Year's resolution is to actually write it down. I don't know about you, but if I'm thinking of a resolution at a party with a glass of champagne or two, it can be instantly forgotten. I want you to write it down. Just pull out your cell phone is really the best place, because that's the companion you have going through life. Write your resolutions down. Be as specific as possible. And when you're starting, it's perfectly fine to have a big, big goal or aspiration. I want to be healthy this year. I want to lose a lot of weight this year. That's perfectly fine as a resolution. Unfortunately, that's where most people stop. It's a vague, general, fuzzy resolution, and that's not meaningful. That's just the first step. But if you only go to the first step, you're not going to make any progress, and you'll be right back in the same place next December 31st. Looking at 2021, the next thing you need to do is to break down your goals and aspirations into as specific goals as possible. So being more healthy in general is fine. Exercising every single day is much more specific. Being a healthier eater in general is fine. Eliminating soft drinks from your diet is much, much more specific. So that's step two in this process. I need you to literally write down the specific, the specific goals and actions that you want to do. The next thing I need you to do, we've got to drill deeper and deeper if these resolutions are going to become meaningful. I need you to write down the easiest actions you can take on a daily basis. So, for example, if your goal is to lose weight, one specific action you might choose to take is to drink a large glass of water first thing in the morning before you drink coffee. Certainly if you have coffee with cream or sugar in it. It's not that water is the perfect magic elixir. There's a lot of hype about water, but if you have a giant glass of water, there is kind of a displacement issue going on. You're much less likely to have two or three large cups of coffee with cream and sugar if you already have had a giant glass of water. So that could be one highly specific easy, easy tip. I need you to write down as many specific, easy things as possible. Again, I'm just using the example of being more physically fit. Another specific, easy thing would be to do just one push up a day. The habits expert Stephen Guys talks about that. He's got a whole book on it, Many Habits about how easy it is to start off with a habit of just doing one push up. That's easy. I don't care how bad a physical shape you're in, you can at least do one modified push up when you're sitting on your knees, most likely unless you are bedridden. So break these habits down as specifically as possible. Write those all down. Now, here's the part that if you haven't heard me before, you probably have never heard this next technique. But I think it's the single most important part of this process. In the next technique, I need you to pull out your cell phone and simply talk through your goals and the actions you want to take on a daily basis. I call these selfie speak programs, selfie speak programming. So, for example, this morning and every morning I listen to my own voice saying, tj, you are healthy and you weigh your perfect weight. And that is why you start off every day drinking a glass of water and doing as many push ups as you can for just one minute. Now, I'm up to about 47 pushups right now. Before you feel like I'm bragging, let me tell you, I'm only doing three pull ups a day right now. So this is not some marathon, unreachable, unattainable thing that only those who are triathletes can do. It's easy, easy tasks recorded on an audio. It could be 30 seconds, it could be 20 minutes. Take as much time as you need to tell yourself exactly what habits you want on a daily basis. Be specific. Don't just say, oh, you're beautiful and wonderful. Be highly specific. Affirmations are fine, but the more specific you are, the better. Eat less processed food. Eat a salad every single day. Tj those are things I tell myself. Highly, highly specific items. And the key is one click. Listen to it every single day. Now, mine's only about 19 minutes long. And I'm essentially programming my entire life, including my New Year's resolutions. The next thing you need to do is to keep a checklist of what you're trying to do on a daily basis right on your cell phone. I know you have your cell phone. These days I've seen people practically end relationships over the idea of being separated from their cell phone for five minutes. So I know you keep your cell phone on you. Go to the notes section and list the daily habits you want that support your New Year's resolution. Remember, being thinner. Losing 35 pounds is not a behavior. No one in the world can snap their fingers and lose 35 pounds. But you can look at specific actions such as, I'm going to walk at least 6,000 steps a day. If you typically don't walk more than 2,000, that's a huge, huge improvement. But that's something you can hold yourself accountable to. I want you to do that and I want you to keep a checklist right on your phone. Hold yourself accountable every single day. I do that for all of my New Year's resolutions and all the normal habits I want. Today I only did three pull ups, but I wrote it down. Today I did 47 push ups. I wrote the number down. It only took again, less than a minute. I limit myself to most of these easy actions, something that can be done in one minute or less. As many of those daily behavioral habits you can build into your schedule, the better. It's easy. It only takes one minute and you get sort of that sense of accomplishment of checking things off that you in fact did it for the day. Now it's your turn. What are your New Year's resolutions? What are you trying to do better this year? I'd love to hear from you. If I can give you some specific tasks to help you implement positive habits, I'd be happy to do so. As I mentioned, I'm going to be here with you till 3pm each day. So we have time here, folks. We can go in depth. Don't think you're taking up my time or your question isn't valuable enough. If it's something interesting to you, important to you, a behavior you're trying to change, a habit you're trying to acquire or get rid of, chances are a lot of other people might be able to relate that as well. I want to say hello to our special guest just joining us and hello to the folks on Facebook. I see that Peggy has joined us. Happy New Year, Peggy. Thanks for being with us. And Ajmal is here. Thanks for joining us. Ajmal writes, I'm glad I took the class with you on Udemy. It's a great class. Thank you. And Ajmal, which course are you in? I do have 1244 personal development and communication skills courses on the platform Udemy. Now I'm on about 50 different platforms, so I'm somewhat platform agnostic. So you can find me on almost any platform that sells online courses these days. But interested to know in which one of my courses you're in and what specifically you got out of it. By the way, I will be mentioning a little later on in the program a special course, my newest course on Udemy that I do think is very helpful to people, especially this time of year because it's all about how to acquire new habits in the fastest, easiest way. And that will be posted in the show notes, a link to that course, if it's not already there. Marceau, were we able to post the show notes yet? Oh no, you got to send them to me. I did. We'll get those up during the break, so don't worry about that. Plus anything else I reference in the show, I typically try to give you a link and then that way you get more background information yourself. And as of right now, these aren't affiliate links. I'm not selling anything other than my own online courses. But any other link you see, it's not because I'm selling something. I'm not trying to sell you this plastic microwave egg container. It's just something I got a lot of value out of and I thought you might as well. Some more of our friends have joined us on TikTok. I see. Natalia has joined us on TikTok as well as Erica George. Tony has joined us and slglubin has joined us. Special hello to all my good friends at TikTok. Of all the platforms I've been on in the last 15 years, and I've been on pretty much all of them, I am been pleasantly shocked and surprised at how engaged the audience is on TikTok. So those of you who are perhaps a little closer to getting gray hair like I am, you may have heard TikTok as a platform just for 10 year olds. I can tell you there are a lot of people my age on TikTok and there are a lot of people of all sorts of ages and they are coming prepared, ready to communicate, ask intelligent questions, give thoughtful answers. So it's not just a platform for kids lip syncing and doing entertainment, although there is a lot of that as well. Sam has joined us on TikTok as well. For all of my friends, Whether you're on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, I am taking your questions today. So you have any questions about any aspect of how to make your New Year's resolutions stick, how to build new habits, other aspects of personal development or growth, I will answer you in real time. This is live Today and if you are watching this on demand, realize if you post your questions here, then I will be able to watch them and read them and go over them tomorrow's show. So that's typically the format we'll have if you post your questions on any social media. If I don't get to you live today, then I will get to you the next day. We've had some more friends join us on Instagram and it looks like Sabrina has joined us. Thanks for saying hello. Amir has joined us as well as Harsanyi and forgive me if I'm mispronouncing anyone's name, certainly not intending to. And Marcel, do we have anyone, do we have the interface that would allow me to see if anyone has joined us on YouTube? We are still experimenting. We're kind of working out the rough kinks, getting all the pipes connected because we are doing something here that as far as I know has never been done. Certainly people have done live streaming shows before, but a personal development show that is live streaming on every available platform that takes live streaming is a little bit more of a complicated process. So we're still putting together all the different pipes and connections to make sure those work. I do see that we are on YouTube if you are joining us on YouTube. Thanks so much. YouTube was really my very first social media platform that allowed for video, believe it or not. This sounds almost sad. Way back in 1998, I was doing a daily video blog. They didn't even call it blogs back then about politics and current affairs. And I would record the video, upload a link, do all sorts of Bizarre, complicated things that would allow someone to download the video for like five minutes and then watch it. I'm glad those days are over. It was so complicated. And guess what? I didn't become rich and famous from that technique. It was a little, little too early. But I have been on YouTube since I think about eight months after it launched. So it's been more than a dozen years, I guess about 14 years now. So I'm very happy to be today live with the oldest platform I've ever been on, YouTube, but also the newest platform I've ever been on, which is TikTok, which I've only been on for about 10 weeks. Very happy, excited about the fact that there have been about 200,000 views of my videos on TikTok in the last couple of months. Excuse me, in just the last month alone. So it is a vibrant, vibrant community. Eddie east has joined us. Also user830 has joined us on TikTok. I see that Big Alk has joined us on Instagram as well as Leif Bashker on Instagram. So happy to see so many of you have joined us. I want to hop into another New Year's resolution that many of you may be thinking. We'll come back to the questions after this segment. But I know that so many of you have a resolution. This year you're going to get your financial house in order. This year you're going to get out of debt, get closer to reaching your financial dreams. Now, for some of you, your financial dreams may be you've got to have $10 billion. Others, your financial dream may be to have $1,000 in your savings account. There's no one right answer. But I do want to give you another approach to reaching your financial resolutions and to have a systematic way of doing it and to do it to give you some ideas that you might not have heard every other place when it comes to financial gurus out there. Step number one, I'm not going to ask you to never go to Starbucks again. One famous financial manager and organizer says if you just don't go to Starbucks every day, you know, you add all that up, plus interest over 30 years and you, you've got $100,000 or something like that. All well and good, but you've heard that before. You don't need me hectoring you to take away perhaps the one thing that you look forward to in your life in a busy day, the one thing that gives you a little bit of joy, that Frappuccino, whatever it is, I'm not going to ask you to put that away and just drink cold water, although water is a good idea. But my plan for you to help your finances in 2020, it doesn't relate to you depriving yourself of a cappuccino, mochacino, frappuccino. And in fact, it's not about cutting back at all. It's a slightly different approach. I'm not going to ask you to cut the cord on Netflix again. It may be the only part you really enjoy in a day is watching movie with your family a couple of times a week. And it's a great social time. So I'm not going to ask you to save that 12 bucks, whatever it is these days to become richer. The goal isn't to just have more money because you live like a hermit or a monk. No excuse or no offense to you monks out there watching. Although I doubt there are a lot of ascetic monks watching this show. So it's not about cutting back. Cut, cut, cut. I want your focus for your own financial health, your own financial future to be about investment. Now, I'm not selling you a mutual fund today, nor am I ever going to sell you a mutual fund. I want you to invest in something that frankly has a lot less risk than the stock market. And I do invest in the stock market and index fund funds, but that's not what I'm talking about here today. I want you to invest in something where there's a much higher, not a guarantee, but a much higher chance of getting a great rate of return. And what I'm talking about is to invest in yourself. That's really what I want you to do. You've heard this before, but I don't think most people truly grasp this. You invest in yourself not just by going to a fancy, expensive workshop on the other side of the country. It's not just about buying some guru's $3,500 tape program or a $30,000 coaching program. You could do that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about breaking things down to their most fundamental level of you need to learn more every single day about something you have a passion for that you're interested in, but also is of interest to other people. So if the only thing you care about is Giants football, it's going to be very hard for you to ever monetize your expertise about Giants football. And for those of you outside the United States, I'm talking of about a professional athletic team that is not what we call soccer, but where they tackle people and beat each other up. So you may have no interest in that. So you've got to learn something every day. I think the easiest way to do that is by reading. Now, you might prefer listening to podcasts, you might prefer watching YouTube videos, but be careful. You could start off learning something on an educational YouTube video for three minutes and before you know it, you're watching absolute nonsense and kids following you on banana peels for the next two hours. But that's the next really important step. You've got to spend some time every single day building your brain. We live in an ideas economy. The more you build in your brain, the more attractive and valuable you will be in our economy. Now the next step. This is where most people get lost. When you're learning something every day, you now need to create something every day. Now here's where I may be losing some of you. You're thinking, well, what is he talking about? I've got to create a 30 foot painting. I've got to write a novel every day. No, I just want you to create something every day. It could be one drawing, it could be one haiku poem where it's only a handful of words. It could be writing for a blog post, it could be writing for your book. Give yourself a quantifiable goal. A goal I've started for 2020 is that I write 500 words about habits every single day. As soon as I get up, might take me eight minutes, it might take me 25 minutes. I don't look at the clock, I just write at least 500 words. Now, sometimes I can't stop and it's a thousand words. Other times I stop at 470 words and I have to really think for five minutes to get over that hump. But by giving myself specific quantifiable goal of creating daily, I'm helping my own financial future. Because the content I write can be used for books, for online courses, for blog posts that could generate money from Google Ads. They could be templates for YouTube videos where I could get money from YouTube ads. I don't have to worry about it when I'm creating, because I'm creating every single day. And that is what is increasing my own economic value in this worldwide marketplace. It's also what is helping my financial future. Here's the thing. For most of human history, that advice was worthless. You could paint, you could write a book. If you didn't, you could have the right gatekeepers. If you didn't have the right networks or publishers backing you, it was Impossible to make any money from it. Those days are in fact over because now you can make money. I'm not guaranteeing you riches, but you can make some money. Imagine if you wrote just hundred words a day every day. You'd certainly have enough content for a book within the next two or three years. And let's say you're 35, you come up with a new book every three years for the next 30 years. Well, you or 30 some years, you got a dozen books in retirement. Wouldn't it be nice to make say $1,000 extra a month from your book sales? Now I think there are a lot of other ways you can make more money, specifically through online courses. But I'm not here today to sell you on why you should make online courses. What I'm here to do is to sell you on the idea that if you want the best and brightest financial future for yourself, you need to invest in yourself. You need to build your mind. You need to learn new, hard, complicated stuff that is of value to other people. That's step one, step two, step start creating. Put your ideas out into the universe. There have been times when I've published a new online course and a year later I made $5. But you know what? The lessons I learned from those failures have also helped me get better at other online courses, some of which have made six figures. If you're constantly learning and constantly creating, I believe your financial future is going to simply get brighter. It's not always a perfectly up hockey stick trajectory, but you will end up in a better place. Plus you'll have a lot more fun in life and a lot more joy than just sitting around thinking about, well, did I not eat my Starbucks coffee today that I really wanted? Did I get rid of my favorite magazine subscription? Yes, there certainly are things that we do to waste money that if we just didn't spend it in the first place, we'd be better off financially. But the biggest waste of all is here. Your own brain, your own mind. Every single day where you're not learning something, creating something, you've thrown away economic value and you've thrown away value to your life. To me, that's a far bigger crisis than spending five bucks on a sugary fatty drink at Starbucks. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for being with us today. We're going to be here with you for quite a while. It is 1:40 Eastern Time right now, so we're scheduled to be with you until 3 o'clock today. I've had some prepared segments here for you. But something I'm doing here that I think is a little different from the typical podcast where it's recorded on demand, where you have a host and some, you know, everyone wants Tim Ferriss and the same, you know, Malcolm Glenn, everyone wants the same 10 guests for their podcast. This show isn't going to be about a special famous guest. It's going to be about you. So questions you have are really the star of the show. This is really about building a community of like minded people who when I say like minded, I don't mean you have to agree with me on everything. But it's about people who are trying to improve their habits in life, learn from personal development and learn in a positive, nurturing environment. That's what this community is about. That's what this show is about. And that's the whole theme of habit influencer. I'm not here as the all knowing guru to influence your habits. I hope I can be a catalyst. But ultimately I want to teach you and help you learn how to influence your own habits. I want you to, to be your own habit influencer. See Maddie has joined us again. Nugan has joined us again on TikTok. If you have any questions, please let me know. And I think Marcel, I may have missed one because it's slightly cut off. Nugent says yes, daily creative habit. Did I miss a question or comment or. You can't see it because you're on a different screen. Nugent, if you see Facebook. No, this was on the TikTok platform. Oh yeah, I can't see your. So Nugent, I apologize if you had asked a question earlier about creative habits. If you could repost that. I am glancing at my iPad now which is how I'm seeing the TikTok platform. Also I want to thank my friends joining us on Instagram today. And I see late Bash Basharan has joined us, says hi. Dear TJ, thank you so much for joining us. And 4, 6, 8, the Himansatkar has joined us and is waving thanks for the wave as well as salr6226 on Instagram. Very happy. You know Instagram, I'm ashamed to say is one of these platforms. I somehow I got signed up for eight years ago. Never really went. I was way, way behind the curve there and then did start adding content and participating really just in the last month. So I was a classic example of a bad participant and a bad member on Instagram, but never too late. And we've got some comments and questions on Facebook. Ajmal says I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that. Oh, it's scrolled down. I'm going to have to. Can you scroll that up for me, Marceau, so I can see what I missed? And I am looking at three different screens now. We're trying to work out the kinks so we can simplify the interface so I can look at one screen and that way I don't accidentally leave anyone out or treat anyone unfairly. So Ajmal says. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned. I'm taking the public speaking class on Udemy. I've gathered all my ideas. In the near future, I will be producing a video so I can post it online. Well, Ajmal, that is music to my ears. I do have. Sorry if this sounds like I'm bragging. The longest, most comprehensive, and most of the time the number one best selling course on public speaking in the world on the number one most popular platform. But if you don't want to buy the course, that's okay. I can sum up everything you really need to know in just really a handful of steps in less than a minute. Number one, figure out what is it you want your audience to do after listening to you. Number two, come up with no more than a handful of messages to motivate them to do that. Number three, come up with a story for each message. Number four, practice on video until you love it. And number five, test it to make sure it works. That's the 42nd version of my 30 hour course. But if you do that, I guarantee you'll be a great speaker. Ajmal, my one tip to you though is don't wait too long producing the video. Don't think of it as producing a masterpiece. I want you to think of it as just a whole series of rough drafts. If you want to be a great speaker, the easiest thing is do a really bad speech, look at it, figure out what you like, don't like, do it again, couple tweaks, do it again, do it again and again and again. The real secret many of the greatest speakers have, and the TED Talk speakers you love so much, is they may be practiced 200 times on video until they loved it. The easiest way to get rid of your nerves, to get rid of this sense of, oh, maybe my speech isn't very good, is to practice it on video. You can just hold your cell phone until you love what you see. Peggy, you've been very patient and you are one of your regulars here. Peggy was nice enough to come to some of our dress rehearsals we had for this show. Back in December. So Peggy, great to see you. I hope you had a great holiday and a happy new year. Peggy says, I started a channel on YouTube. How do you suggest I get more followers? Well, that is the number one question most people have when they're starting something on YouTube because we hear all these success stories. You go on, you go to the New York Times and it seems like every other day there's a success story about a six year old in Korea who's making $30 million a year for his family. And every video of him sliding on a banana peel gets 30 million views. And it looks so easy. And then we go out, produce a video that we think is good, helpful, intelligent, and it gets not 30 million videos or 300,000 or 30,000, but often it gets three views. Now, I don't know how recent the statistic is. I once heard that the average video on YouTube does get in fact just three views. I can't back that up, so don't quote me on that. But the way to get more viewers for starter, got to be consistent. Put the greatest video out there and if you don't do anything for two weeks, you're not going to build followers. So the number one frequency I think a lot of YouTube stars do is once a week or twice a week. Some do daily as of today, going to the mode of daily videos on YouTube. But figure out what frequency works for you. The other thing is you've got to build an audience yourself. So if you put a new video up on YouTube, you're proud of it, you like it, tell all your friends, create an email list, post a link to that on Facebook, promote it on Twitter. Now I've been on YouTube for a long time. The early days, it frankly was easier. I could do an analysis of a debate. I remember the 2008 Presidential Vice Presidential debates. I would do analysis, sometimes live analysis on I think they were letting live then but did it right after the debates and sometimes 10,000 views right away. Not that easy anymore. There is a lot of competition. You've got to figure out what your niche is and you need to own it. I have recently narrowed my niche to habits. So everything I do is about habits. It could be good communication habits, but it's about habits and I use those keywords and I use those tags. One book I would recommend to you, it's a book called YouTube Secrets. Again, I'm not getting any affiliate commission. These people are not friends of mine. The author is Sean Cannell. You'll see it on Amazon. That is Your single best resource right now for anyone who's starting a YouTube channel. So I would recommend that book. And Peggy also writes in I thought you could only stay on TikTok. Well, right now I'm on TikTok for a few seconds. How are you doing it live there? Ah. So tick. Most of what people think of as TikTok is just a 15 second video and that is how most people experience TikTok. They have fairly recently changed it to allow you to do one minute videos too. I occasionally do one minute videos, but I do at least one 15 second video, TikTok every single day. At some point, I don't know how long ago, they switched to a system where Once you have 1,000 followers on TikTok, you can go live. I don't know yet if there's a time limit. So if I stop abruptly in a few minutes without saying goodbye to my friends here on TikTok, the reason is there's an artificial limit of say, an hour. So if I do lose you, that is what happened. I see Lizzie's joined us on TikTok as well. Aristotle is my friend now. That's a great name. I was a philosophy major in college. I spent a fair amount of time studying Aristotle. Great example of innovation in videotaping live to all platforms simultaneously. Can you do a TikTok on that? You know, I'll think about that for tomorrow. It is harder to talk about the complexity of live streaming everywhere in 15 seconds. Now, I certainly could do it on the 1 minute 1. So Aristotle, I'll give that some thought. But I believe that we are in a time of abundance. I grew up in a time where you wanted to get on tv. You had to have a whole bunch of money, a big corporation to buy ads. Now you can get in front of everyone if you're willing to work and hustle. And I'm sort of parroting a guru. Many of you may be familiar with, Gary Vaynerchuk. He is, I think, the world's greatest evangelist for social media. And basically berating people saying if you're not creating content every single day about your business, you're thinking throwing away millions of dollars of TV advertising and media advertising. He says you need to be doing 64, 100 pieces of content a day. Most people can't figure out how to do that organizationally. I haven't figured out how to do hundred pieces a day, but I'm doing a lot more than I used to starting today. So I certainly will be talking about some of these themes on future TikTok videos. I'm hoping that Aristotle, if you see something you like here today, maybe I can encourage you to check out my YouTube channel from time to time. Since there the videos I'm doing are more likely to be seven to 10 minutes long, same as my Facebook page. There will be longer videos there. And again, I'm sorry if this sounds nakedly self serving, but one of the reasons I'm here giving 15 second clips and 1 minute clips is the hopes that a tiny percentage of you, I really only need less than 1%, but if less than 1, fewer than 1% of you like something about what I said and you go on to buy my online courses, then you can really go in depth and that pays all my bills. You benefit and the other 99% can continue to learn and not have to pay anything. I mean that's kind of how the new world economy works and the idea economy and the whole social media infrastructure. The more you give away, the more you get back. And a lot of creators and trainers and consultants and authors and frankly, people my age have this sort of fixed pie mentality. Oh, the pie's only so big. If I give it away, no one will respond me. And I'm not giving anything away. Everyone's got to pay me for everything. The problem is those people don't gain in stature, they don't gain a larger audience and they don't build a tribe of people who care about what they're doing. So I take a different philosophy which is basically give everything away. So when people do pay something for me, whether it's one of my books or whether it is from one of my online courses, it's because it's the absolute fastest, most efficient way for them to accomplish an objective. I give away and already have given away a lot of public speaking tips in this live stream today. And I do all the time. But sometimes people are in a hurry so they might pick just my one hour public speaking course on Udemy because they figure this will save me time. So that's kind of the, the economics of how this all works. But Aristotle's giving me the thumbs up. Thanks a lot. June is the one. Thank you for joining us too. It's your boy Jaden has joined us on Instagram. Great names. And my good friend Fortune Tribes on Instagram has joined. And Fortune, thanks so much for being one of the earliest people to kind of say hello and interact with me on Instagram. And as you might have heard me say earlier, I kind of ignored the platform the first eight years or so and only in the last month or so have started posting. So I've certainly enjoyed our interactions there. And fortunately, if you have any questions you want me to answer, I'm going to give you. I'm going to put you to the head of the line because of your participation. Now I see that you have. I too have many business ideas based on completely free service for public. So fortunately, that's great. If you want to share your ideas or even share your link, I'm happy to promote your business. A lot of people like the idea of being free because they think of themselves as not. They don't want to be pushy marketers and pushy salesmen and money grubbing and all that. And that's fine. But at some point you do need a business model. So in the interest of transparency, my business model is big corporations around the world, governments, United nations agencies, hire me to conduct training seminars. I mostly do public speaking workshops, media training workshops, and public development workshops. So that's one big chunk of my income. Another big chunk of my income online courses where in any month or so I sell more than 10,000 online courses. So that's where my revenue comes from. And when I do things like these live streams every day, it just builds my overall brand. So that if I get another few inquiries for a speech, as I did this morning, interest in having me do a speech in Dubai, or if it's a workshop in Budapest, which I think I have to go to next month, that's how it all works out. The problem many people have when they take the attitude, I just want to do free stuff. If you are, let's say, writing about your love of crafts, you make crafts from nature objects found in nature, wonderful niche. If you're not also selling your crafts or selling a course on crafts and you're just hoping someone gives you money, you might be working for 10 years and not receive anything. So I would ask you to give some real thought to the business model in advance. Now, sometimes people just start creating something and they see where their passion takes them, that can work too. But I wouldn't do that for more than a year or so. Because if you have a passion and it takes money to create the thing, and it's all of a sudden not as much fun. It's easy to quit. If you're talking about your passion, creating it, writing it, doing it, and you're getting positive feedback and you're making money, it's a lot easier to make it grow and grow and grow. So fortune thanks for sharing that. And it says free, meaning not free. I run ad. Okay? Advertising is one business model. I would caution you, there's so much inventory in the world. There's billions of blogs, websites, YouTube channels, all trying to grab a piece of the advertising revenue. That advertising cost per thousand has just been going down constantly. So the most successful people I know may have advertising revenue as a part of what they do, but they don't rely exclusively on advertising revenue to share their creations to the world. Now you can get direct patronage. There's patron on where people who love your stuff can just give you money. You can take a subscription model. You can tell people, okay, if you want my content on Instagram or YouTube or anyplace else and you don't want to see any ads, I'll give you this version here ad free. But you subscribe for say 6 bucks, 9 bucks a month. There are many, many models of monetizing your creations. And to me, if you can be a creator and create on a regular basis, almost by default, so many other good habits come about in your life. If you're creating every day, you almost can't. But help to read more day, read more each day, absorb more content each day. You have to schedule yourself better. If you're making any kind of video or doing anything where you show yourself, it's easier to get motivated to be physically fit because we all have some level of humanity. If you know people are looking at you, easier to try to be as physically fit as possible. So I love having creation and creativity being an extraordinarily high value for people. Doesn't matter what, you can be an engineer and be creative, you can be a dentist and creative. But if you're constantly creating new ideas, new ways of helping people, it's going to make so many other habits in your life go. Well, let's hop over to YouTube. My good friend Daniel Madrid is here and says great tips and happy New Year to you, Dan. Thanks for being one of our regulars on the YouTube channel as well. Rathindra writes in hello TJ. I want to know about how you decide to give proper pauses in between words in your speech. The main thing, Rathinda, is I'm not thinking about it. What I'm trying to do is to just when I'm talking to you right now is to be natural. When people are completely relaxed and having a conversation and there's no video cameras around and there's no audience, it's just two people. There are pauses. Pauses are the punctuation of speech we all know that if you're writing a document, there's punctuation. There can be a comma showing a pause. A period is a slightly longer pause. A paragraph break is a longer pause. A chapter break is a longer pause. All of these are transitions to help the reader. When you are speaking, the pauses are critical. When you speak and pause, you're letting the audience think for a moment, reflect. You're telling somebody, okay, I'm going to stop for a moment, let you think. I may be thinking about it, but here's the thing that I found. Because I videotape people speaking all over the world in my training workshops and, and many of the times early in the day, I train them without them realizing it. As a part of the workshop experience, everyone pauses naturally when they're just having a conversation. When people are nervous, all of a sudden they start speaking at the same speed and they figure, I'm nervous. I want to be professional. Let me hurry up and finish this and get out of here. And they sound like robots. Now, do you see what I did in that last sentence? In order to punctuate certain words to put more emphasis, I said they sound like robots. I paused more between each word to sort of put an exclamation point. No talent in that. I'm not acting. That's simply how human beings talk. So the challenge for most people who are trying to figure out they give a once a week speech to the staff meeting or once a quarter speech at a trade convention, you're trying to figure out how to put those pauses in, and they're spending all of their time still looking at paper or text on a screen, typing in, do I pause here? Pause for two. Too complicated. The way you will be able to pause is to practice your speech out loud on video. Just get your cell phone, record it, play it back. Chances are, if you're like most people and you're not a professional speaker, what you'll notice is you're speaking faster than normal and you're not pausing. And if you practice again and again and again, that way you will be able to bring the pausing back in. I wanted to say goodbye to our good friends at Instagram. They just signed off and perhaps we've hit the up. I believe we hit the upper limit of one hour on Instagram, so don't get to say goodbye, but to our Instagram friends when they come. Okay, well, sure, we'll try that. You know what, let's. We're going to go ahead and take just a 2, 2 minute non commercial break to do a couple of tweaks. Please don't go anywhere. And if you have posted a question, I guarantee you, unless it's an oversight on my part, I will not leave today until your question is answered. So go ahead, post your questions. I will be back in just a couple of minutes. Sam. Sa. Sa. Sam sa. Guys, tj, we're back for more. We had to take just a quick couple of minute tech break and relaxation at the top of the hour. We are going to be with you for just a little less than one hour longer every day. We're going to be coming to you live 1 to 3pm Eastern time. I am here in New York. If you're watching this on demand, please realize that I do value your experiences, your time as well. So if you have a question, a comment, feel free to post it. If you have a question about some aspect of personal development, habit acquisition, post it. And if I don't answer it today, I will answer it in the next show. If you have a comment, post it. You think I'm saying something stupid or giving bad advice, feel free to share it. I will not censor you unless you're just being obscene or doing something that's just beyond the pale. I do want a diversity of opinions here, but this is a friendly environment. This is not a place to talk about Brexit, Trump, other more contentious issues in the news. We are here talking about personal development that obviously touches upon broader macroeconomic, philosophical political issues. But the focus of this show and the Habit Influencer is really about personal habits. In fact, I'm not the first person to point this out. Many famous wits have noted if you want to change the world, the first place to start is with yourself. Make yourself better. That's quite often the place where you can have the biggest impact on those around you and the rest of society as well. So that's one of the operating maxims behind this show and really everything I'm doing with my online courses, books and everything else. So welcome back to our friends on Instagram. We got cut off because apparently there's a one hour time limit on Instagram so we had to sign off and sign back on again. Fortune writes how to make anyone to fall in our conversation by making them mesmerized. Now I'm here in New York City, so I have seen some of the most world famous hypnotists, magicians in the world. So I know what you mean when you say mesmerize someone. But I hear people use these terms and terms like so and so has charisma. To me, it's getting way too complicated. We live in a world where the vast, vast, vast majority of colleagues we work with, business people, politicians, business executives, everywhere, when they speak, are boring. Marceau's laughing. I hope you're not laughing because I'm boring. But that's just the reality. So if you want to stand out is so much more interesting than anyone else. Just say something interesting. Don't talk about yourself. The big problem so many people have, whether it's a one on one business meeting or a speech to a thousand people, is they want to start off talking about me, me, me, me. Hi, my name is this, my title is this. Today I'm going to talk about xyz. Who cares? Nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. And so if you want to be more mesmerizing to people, more charismatic, just say something interesting to another person. I mean, that's really my advice. Fortunately, don't even focus on being mesmerized. It's kind of like sometimes people write to me and say, tj, I want to give a speech where I have a standing ovation. And my question is, why? Isn't that just about your own ego? I know speakers who generate standing ovations all the time, but five minutes later, nobody really remembers anything from what they said. It was just kind of emotional, feel good, fluff. And one person stood up and the rest felt like they had to. And yet I know other speakers didn't get a standing ovation, but the audience remembers their message. Months, years, sometimes decades later, their audience was moved to action. I believe as a speaker, as a communicator, what you should really focus on is not being mesmerizing, charismatic, getting standing ovations, but instead, can you really help that audience member? If you can help someone, that means you spoke to them about something was interesting to them, they understood you and they remembered your message. If you do that, that's the ultimate and that is relatively easy to do. Thanks so much for your question and comments. Let's head back over to YouTube. Daniel has written in and says, TJ, what is the best tip to avoid procrastination? To me, what's critical is you have to break the task down into something easy. It's human nature. Human beings are lazy. I say this not holier than thou looking down upon anyone. I say it because I'm lazy. A little more than a year ago, I was more than 35 pounds overweight. I don't like to eat less. I love to eat. I Don't really like to go jogging. I hate going to gyms. But I'm 35 pounds lighter today. If I had just said, today I'm going to be fit each day, I would have procrastinated that forever. Instead, I broke my tasks down into simple, simple things that I could do that were easy. So, for example, instead of telling myself, this week I'm going to run 10 miles, or this week I'm going to get ready for the marathon, I gave myself a simple task, which is, TJ you're going to run as hard as you can, 10 miles an hour, but only for 60 seconds. That's really easy to run. 60 seconds. By the time I'm walking onto the treadmill, it's basically time to leave. It's easy. And you know what? I've done that virtually every day for a year. It's hard to think about getting into a car, packing a bag, going to a gym, getting a locker, changing clothes, going to the gym and then showering there. That's two hours. Sometimes the whole thing. It's much easier to say, okay, I'm going to do push ups as many as I can just for 60 seconds. If I can only do one, I'll do one. So a little more than a year ago, I started doing push ups. I think I could only do two to begin with. Now I do 47. But the trick is I only do it as many as I can, either in a minute or until I get tired. So I'm never going to do more than 60. But at 47 push ups, I'm already able to do better than probably 98% of men my age. So it made tremendous progress. But not at one day, not in one week, and not in one month, but over time. So the key to me was making it small. A small specific discernible action that I could do a check mark to. The other thing is, as you've heard me say before, Daniel and some of our newer viewers might not. I tell myself in my own voice every single day, T.J. you are going to do as many pushups as possible as you can do in one hour. I record it once and then I don't change the recording for months at a time, but I listen to the recording every day. All of us are consuming marketing messages all day long. Drink Coke, buy Coke, eat McDonald's. We hear these things all day long and our brain reacts to it. I took my daughter and my wife to an amusement park over the holiday. Kind of a mini, like a Six Flags, kind of a Mini Disney World called Carowinds in Charlotte, North Carolina. Every single store, restaurant, convenience store had Coca Cola emblems everywhere. We went to the movies later that day. What do I see? Ads for Coca Cola. You go out to get a drink. If you want any other cola, it's not there. The only thing you can get is Coke. Coke is bombarding you with advertising messages every waking moment. So many of us buy Coke without even thinking about it because we've been bombarded with messages to do a specific action. So, Dan, my suggestion to you is you've got to figure out a way of bombarding yourself in a repetitive way with messages for you to do the things you need to do. Now, sometimes procrastination can work in your favor because your brain needs more time to think about it. There are some writers who wait to the last minute and come up with brilliant essays and brilliant ideas. Sometimes it's a signal that you're in the wrong career, wrong profession. If you're procrastinating, going to work every day because you hate being a lawyer and you really want to be a software developer or an artist, you maybe need to figure out how to get out of the law profession. So there's a lot of different factors there. Daniel, thanks for writing. We have some other questions on Facebook. So Ajmal writes in English is my second language. I always have the fear of being judged for my pronunciation. What should I do to get rid of this feeling Now? Ajmal, I work with, in any given year, hundreds, if not, well, at least hundreds of people face to face around the globe because I work in 35 different countries and I can tell you most people feel exactly as you do. And I work with hundreds of thousands of people around the world online. And this is a question I frequently get. Here's my advice to you. Focus first and foremost on an idea you have that will help your audience. Then use whatever words come to you and chances are you'll be in great shape if you mispronounce a word. A lot of people like me, I'm the typical ugly American. I only speak one language, English. It's embarrassing, but it's just, it's true. And now I don't have the motivation to want to learn five more languages to make myself more well rounded. So when I hear someone speaking in a language of English and it's not their first language, my first thought is, I'm impressed. I instantly think, well, they're probably five times smarter than I am because they speak five languages. I only speak one. And then people give you credit for it. Here's the thing. I ask people all the time, how often have you heard a speaker and English wasn't their first language and they messed up a word and they didn't get the word right and you thought poorly of them? I asked that question. Typically not a single hand goes up in the room. Sometimes one hand out of 50. But then I ask another question. How many of you have seen a speaker who spoke in English? English was their first language and they bored you to death. Guess how many hands went up. That's right. All 50 hands went up. So the far bigger problem most people have is not that they're using the wrong word or the wrong pronunciation, but that they are boring. Now I'm going to say something that will shock you a little bit. I actually believe that if you're speaking in a language that is not your first language, it's a benefit to you, it's a plus. And that is because if it's not your first language, you are likely to know fewer words in that language. And the best spoken communicators, the best speakers use smaller words. They use a fewer number of words when they're speaking. Let me give two political examples US based on across the spectrum, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton. Most fair minded observers would say they are both two of the best three or four speakers in the English speaking language US based of the last 50 years they also used the smallest words, the simplest words. What gets people into trouble is trying to search for the perfect word word. And I'm asked all the time teacher, what do you do if you can't find that perfect word you're looking for in a speech? My advice is never search for a perfect word. Instead focus on the idea you want to convey and then simply use the first word that comes to you and you'll be in great shape most of the time. Plus you'll sound conversational. And if you do get one or two words wrong, here's the thing. Most of the time no one will notice and no one will remember because everything else will be in sync. Your speech, your tone, your body language. Thanks for the question. Rathinda writes. Never mind. For my above question I already got the answers to these questions as you read on YouTube. Okay, sorry if I missed that one. I another question. How do you do well in group discussions as in India, group discussions is kind of a process of selection for various jobs and management colleges. So Rathindra, I am not an expert on the interview process in India. Now I have worked in India. I've been there several times. I've worked with some of the most famous high level interviews, officials in your government. But I'm certainly not an expert on all the group dynamics of job hiring and communication in India. So every culture can be a little bit different. So I don't want to give you one size fits all and say I'm the guru, do this in every culture. No, you have to take any advice from me or anyone else and filter it through the lens of your own unique culture. I could tell you the biggest problem most people have in group discussions is they just sit back and don't say anything. They feel intimidated, they feel nervous, they feel like, well, if I were just one on one I'd say this or two people, I'd say it. But there's always people looking at me and the insecurity creeps in. And when you're insecure, we all become little bunny rabbits. We freeze, we're very quiet and we don't say anything. And if you're not saying anything, well, it's true, you're not necessarily making a bad impression, you're not saying anything stupid. But you're also not building your reputation. You're not adding your ideas, your expertise to the well, I do think that it's not the same thing as a speech. It's not the same thing as a presentation, a briefing. I get that. But in any group discussion you're going to be in, especially as it relates to jobs there, you certainly have some inkling about topics that could come up where someone might ask you a question or where you might simply want to share your expertise with the group. In that case, I recommend you rehearse in advance, even though it's not a speech. But ask yourself if someone is really likely to talk at the next staff meeting or my next job interview. How do we integrate different silos from our corporation? A more effective way. If I know that's a topic, then how would you answer it? Don't just write it out, don't think about it. Hold up your cell phone, record yourself talking out loud on that subject and then just look at it. And you may look at it and think I sound like a blithering idiot. That's okay, no one else saw it. Practice it again, watch it again, keep doing it until tell you like what you see. This will give you tremendous confidence when you do have to speak about that issue in front of other people. Here's the thing though is even if a slightly different topic comes up, the sheer fact that you have seen yourself Speaking confidently on something related will give you much more confidence when you're speaking on another topic. That's what holds people back quite often is this sense that they don't know if it's going to sound stupid or does this make sense so they hold themselves back? Please. Unless there's a political dynamic where you have a boss who just wants people to shut up all the time, try to say something interesting and memorable in every meeting. That's the philosophy I have. By the way, when you are giving a speech or a talk it is for more than five or 10 minutes. Don't be afraid to occasionally have a sip of tea. Have a sip of water. Marceau is asking me what I recommend to drink. I do recommend water now I'm breaking my normal practice today because I have ice in the water because this studio can get warm. Typically the best thing to drink when you are speaking in front of people is room temperature water. It's the most relaxing thing. But some of the most successful stand up comedians in the world can be speaking in a Coliseum with 30,000 people watching them. In the middle of their stand up act, they drink water. Don't act embarrassed, don't act bothered by it and no one will even remember it. Let's take a look at a few more questions here. Ajumal writes in thank you so much. Appreciate it. I'll see you tomorrow. Great. Happy to have you come back regularly. Now if you can only come once a year or once a month, we're happy to have you here on the TJ Walker Habit Influencer Live Stream show. But if you can come back every day, even better. Part of what we're trying to do I have in this window, this two hour window of 1:00pm to 3:00pm Eastern Time US Time in New York is to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. You may have a coffee break at 3:15 to 3:30 and you can pop in for 10 minutes. I hope you get some value for that. You may be able to work from home and have this on the whole time. Love to have you for that too. So we're here for you. I'm here for you. So I do want to thank you for joining. Thanks also to my friends at TikTok. I see that Prince has joined us, Trimix has joined us, Adam's also with us and user 808 by the way. Especially to any of you. And now I am going to look at you on my TikTok friends. The reason I'm looking off into space is that we are simulcasting today's livestream on more than a dozen platforms, and the software that allows me to simulcast to those doesn't let me to do it to TikTok. So I just have my iPad here set up for you, but I don't want you to feel neglected. If you have a question or a comment, post it and I will definitely not leave today until I've answered your question. The same goes to my friends over on Instagram. Fortune's with us and Najjal as well. Now Fortune, you ask a question. Try looks like Try animal workouts or I'm not sure I know what that is. Or fixed band exercises you may find interesting. Now by animal workouts, do you mean taking your dog for a walk? That is a great way to motivate people. That's a perfect trigger. If you know your dog is scratching at the door first thing in the morning and wants to go out, that could be a great way for people to get exercise. So that reason alone is a great reason to have a dog. I don't have a dog, but I grew up with one and certainly have fond memories of one now. Stretch bands Many people do like stretch bands. My mother, believe it or not, had a Jack Lalanne stretch band I remember from the 1960s and so I was able to play with it then. So many people like that. There's this myth out there that you either have two choices in life, sitting on a couch and watching TV all day or driving half an hour to an expensive gym somewhere to exercise. No, you can exercise in your own home. Now I have lived before and still tiny studio apartments in Manhattan and I didn't exercise a lot there, although sometimes I had dumbbells. Now I have, let's just say a lot more room than a studio apartment and have a relatively small home gym. But what I have found is the equipment I enjoy the most. One I just got was a simple pull up bar. I got it off of Amazon new for $19. I have dumbbells and I do have a treadmill and you can get those inexpensively and some weight machines. But just simple dumbbells you can have in a small studio apartment. If the stretching bands work for you, that can be an excellent way to make it easy. Again. Everything I look at when it comes to habits. Can you make it easy? Can you make it fun? I love playing tennis. I played tennis yesterday almost one but it's easy for me to get motivated to play tennis because it's fun. It's hard for me to get motivated to run a marathon because I hate running marathons. So I don't waste a lot of time telling everyone my New Year's resolution is to run a marathon. I'm so cool. No, I just don't do that. Because it's no fun doesn't mean everything in life has to be fun all the time. But if you want to maximize your chances of building strong habits, building habits that support your aspirations in life, your goals, I want you to first focus on what is easy and what is fun. Now, I don't mean well, it's easy and fun to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos and watch tv. I don't mean that. I mean of the habits you could do to make you get closer to your goals, the better. And just as Tribes mentioned, using certain stretch bands as a form of exercise easier than weights may be the trick for you. And forgive me if I didn't quite get the nuance there. I am looking at the screen for Instagram, so if you want to correct me or put another comment, please do so. Remco writes I love using my cross trainer in the attic. There's no one perfect piece of equipment I might tell you about a chin up bar. For most people, it's complete waste of time. You'll just hang clothes. I'm not telling you to get a chin up bar. The perfect piece, and I'm not original for saying this, the perfect piece of exercise equipment for you. One that you'll actually use. I use my tennis racket, so that's a great piece of exercise equipment for me. If you hate tennis, buying a tennis racket is a complete, utter waste of time. Pick something that's fun for you and it's easy. And that's frankly why I am not a big fan of what so many personal development gurus stress and habits experts stress, which is get to the gym. Go to the gym three times a week. I don't like to belong to many gyms over my life, but for the most part it's boring to go to gyms. It takes a lot of time. I'd much rather just leave my house, go for a walk. And I'm fortunate enough to be able to exercise in my own home gym. But I don't have to drive anywhere or change clothes for it or it's just right there. So always look for what's easy as well as what's fun for you. First and foremost, you master those. Then if you want to train for the triathlon or the decathlon, be my guest. But for the rest of us mere mortals, if we could just do these simple tasks on a daily basis, we would be physically fit, reach our ideal weight, and avoid so many health complications that do occur from inactivity and overweight, being overweight and obesity. So thanks for the comments there. Remco also points out Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't go to the gym when his body wasn't in good condition. Well, sometimes you do need just rest. I mean, you may be referring to the time Arnold Schwarzenegger had art surgery needed to recover One mistake many people make, and I'm ashamed to say I was guilty of it, is trying to rush back from an injury prematurely. Six weeks ago I tore my left calf playing tennis one morning and it was very painful, but after a day or two it started healing. After about four or five days I felt like, wow, I'm really making progress. I'm going to be able to play tennis this Sunday with the guys and I pushed it too hard and I re injured it and I think I tore it more. It hurt and it was really another five weeks. It was just yesterday when I was able to play tennis again for the first time. So there are times when you do need complete rest and relaxation. Thanks for the comment. I see that Ruth has joined. Ruth, thanks for joining us. Good to see you. I've seen you on Instagram from time to time and thanks for being a part of this. If you have any questions on any aspect of habits, personal development, please let me know. And did I miss any questions from anyone on any other because I have more content that I really wanted to share with people. We will come back to questions, but there were a couple of other things I specifically wanted to share with you today. One of them is from a story in one of my favorite news outlets, Vox.com, v O X.com and it's under the headline of Ultra Processed Foods. It seems like every single day the case against ultra processed foods is getting stronger and stronger. A couple of new papers published earlier last year that talk about the tremendous cardiovascular problems that are coming to people who eat ultra processed ultra processed food. Things like hot dogs, typical desserts you see in a box at a grocery store. When you look at the labels and there's you know, 270 different ingredients and many of them end in fructose and oats and ox and all sorts of chemicals. They did a couple of randomized controlled studies at the National Institutes of Health on people and what they found is that people who eat ultra processed food also eat about 500 more calories a day than people who eat real food. So it's not just that a salad is better than a granola bar. It's that the granola bar has so much processing in it, you're still going to eat more and more and you'll consume an extra 500 calories a day. And over the course of a year, that can be many, many pounds. And over the course of a decade, it can be the difference between being a healthy weight versus obese. So more and more insights on the real dangers of processed food. Processed meat is some of the worst. And hey, I love bacon, although I typically eat turkey bacon. Now that's, that's just a huge, huge problem. Because the processed food, that's what gets the advertising, that's what gets the marketing. You don't see the Grape Council spending billion dollars urging you to eat grapes typically, but McDonald's hamburger, that's another matter. Heavily, heavily processed, designed to taste good. And because they have a monopoly, McDonald's has a monopoly on McDonald's hamburgers. They can then justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence your behavior so that you in fact eat more. So that's, that's the real challenge. And by the way, if you're interested in that story, if it's not up yet, this story is linked in. Oh, it's in the Show Notes now. So if you're on Facebook, YouTube, most of the other platforms, if you go up to the Show Notes, you'll see a link to that story. Something else I like to do on this show, we did it in our sort of our opening, our practice sessions, our rehearsals in December. So I like to put a spotlight on the creator of the day. Now typically it's somebody you've never heard of, that I've never heard of, who has somehow stumbled across a niche. And now they have millions of followers on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok and they're making tons of money and having the most fun of their life. The spotlight today is on someone a little bit different. Someone you've already heard of. His name is LeBron James. And as busy as LeBron James is, as famous as he is, as many multi million dollar contracts he has with Sprite and other major corporations, he is actively on his cell phone every day, almost every minute of the day, making posts, sharing his life with his fans because he does see this as something that has huge financial benefits to him long term because he knows you can't play forever. And the sprites of the world, the PepsiCo's of the world don't necessarily want you to be their spokesperson forever, but if you build a relationship with the public, with an audience, with a trust tribe, and you stay in constant communication with them, that is something that can have real longevity. So he talks about this and it's a quite in depth story about LeBron James. Interestingly, he talks about his son too, how he's trying to help his son do. His son really has an interest in building a following on social media. And he said, who knows, my son may want to be a billionaire, just a businessman, nothing to do with sports, but I can really help him build a foundation for a brand. It's so interesting because previously you would think of someone who is a world famous athlete and a celebrity who's made hundreds of millions of dollars over a lifetime, who knows, maybe a billion dollars by the end of his career. You would think of that person leaving a legacy for the children and grandchildren through estates and foundations and getting them into Harvard and things like that. That's in the past. What rich people have done, successful people, to help the next generation. It's a relatively new phenomenon to think about how to help your child build a brand independent of your own name, but helping them build a relationship with an audience. Now, I'm not going to talk politics, but there's obviously some parallels to that with what's going on in the US political world with a certain family. But it's something I can relate to as well. My daughter is six years old, she has a love of public speaking and some of what I do is rubbed off on her. And she has an interest in art and cooking. Last year we did a little sample series, just a five episode series of healthy cooking for kids starring Rossa Walker. You may want to check it out just to give her a taste of being her own performer, being the star, being a producer of something, being creative. And she liked it. And soon she's going to start doing a daily or a weekly, not a daily show, a weekly show on art where she just does one painting, one drawing, one day a week. And I'm a lot more interested in helping her find her talent and her voice and a way of communicating it than I am a certain number of dollars in the bank account whenever I croak. I'm sure she wouldn't mind that too. But I also think helping her learn how to navigate the modern idea economy, how to build a brand of her own, is frankly going to be a lot more valuable than any money she gets from an estate or anything like that. So please Give that some thought. Again, I am here for you. If you have questions about any aspect of personal development or habits, this show is mostly for you. I do have some other things I want to share with you. You specifically sharing with you some items from my own reading list. Each show I like to share with you a new book I'm reading, but also a classic from the personal development world that I think is still relevant and insightful today. I'll be sharing those with you in a moment, but I do want to give an opportunity to our friends on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram, TikTok, any of the other platforms. If you're seeing this, if you have a comment, a criticism, a question, or you'd like to nominate a topic for discussion, I am here for you. We will be here with you for another 15 minutes till the top of the hour, which is 3:00pm Eastern time. Okay, I want to go to my bookshelf now and share with you a couple of things. For starters, I like to go into one of the classics. This is a classic many of you probably have not heard of, but some of you may. This is a book called As a Man Thinketh and you can find this on Amazon. I didn't provide the link today, but it's easy to find on Amazon. This is written by James Allen. It was written way back in 1903 and if you've never heard of this book, but you have heard of the Power of Positive Thinking, the Secret, anything from Dale Carnegie, they all borrow heavily from this concept. I mean, I call this a book. It's really a pamphlet. It's really only a couple dozen pages, but it's referred to as a book. I just want to share with you a couple of bear in mind, it was published in 1903, so it's not the most inclusive when it comes to language and gender. As you would imagine, the body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed. Thought is the fount of action. Life and manifestation make the fountain pure and all will be pure. So James Allen was definitely a proponent that you are what you think. And if you think negative, nasty thoughts all day long and you think depressing thoughts and negative thoughts, well, your life will be negative and nasty and depressing. I think there is a lot to do that. He also thinks that if you focus your energy on positive things, happiness, wealth, then you'll get all those things too. I do think there is a lot of truth to that. I don't think that applies in all situations. Certainly if you are one of the bottom 800 million people on the planet today in terms of wealth and you make less than $1.60 a day, you can have all kinds of positive thoughts. Life is going to be pretty miserable and horrible just to survive, and you might starve to death tomorrow. So I don't think that this fits all the time, that we are always simply a function of our thoughts. But I do believe that human beings have a lot more power over their life, their successes, their happiness, based purely on their thoughts than most people realize. And I can't go so far as to say I highly recommend this book. But if you are a student of personal development and a student of the history of personal development, this is a cornerstone. So many other books that are much more wildly famous than this one and more modern than this all pull from this book. Whether they realize it or not, it was highly influential. Now, let's talk about something a little more up to date. This is a book called Mini Habits for Weight Loss. It's written by an author, Stephen Guise, and he's also the author of Many Habits. Now, I've read probably, like a lot of you, dozens, if not hundreds of books on diets, health, exercise. And when you look at this book, it's not really laid out that well. I don't know if it's self published, but it's definitely not a big publisher. He's not an academic, he's not a medical doctor. You look at all the things that most people have in their checklist for what might make a great book. None of it's in here. But I have to tell you, it's the best book I've ever read on diet, weight loss and health and exercise all combined. Made me jealous. At some point, I am going to write a book on health, and I want to make it better than this. But as of right now, this is the best book. I see the way he uses simple reason to debunk myth after myth after myth. He points out, you know, after everyone is trying to sell you something and get you rich, you've got people selling you on, oh, it's all the carbohydrates that's the big evil. And then he points out, well, there are 2 billion people in China and India who eat nothing but carbohydrates. They're all skinny. Obviously, carbohydrates are not what's causing the massive obesity epidemic in this world. Well, it's all fat. If you just eat no fat. Wrong. There are people in Scandinavia, who get the vast majority of their calories from meat and fat, and they're not obese. You go on and on and on. What he puts his finger on is the processed foods and your relationship with food. If you tell yourself, I can't have a cookie, I can't have a cookie, I'm bad if I eat the cookie, it gets you fixated on cookies and you're going to eat more cookies. What you have to do is build mini habits to get yourself to like to eat certain things like carrots and salad. But you can't tell yourself you're forbidden to ever have a snack food because that gives all the power to the junk food. And if you tell yourself it's forbidden and it's evil, it will make you want it more. So it's a fascinating psychological approach. I wanted to share with you just a brief excerpt from it. The person who loses weight by superficial ploys like diet pills, surgery or starvation may feel excited at early results, but they won't feel overwhelmed with joy about how they got those results. And they'll feel terrible when they inevitably regain results the weight. When you orchestrate a real and lasting improvement in your life, you'll be surprised that the outer change actually takes a backseat to the joy of inner growth, which alters who we are. Internal growth affects our identity. You may not believe me now, but that will ultimately matter more to you than the scale Gail ever said. Again, this book, Mini Habits. I recommend both of his books, Mini Habits and Mini Habits for weight loss. Stephen Guise G U I S E I found it on Amazon. You can probably find it there. The thing he does really well that most diet books skip on is he's constantly looking for the long term studies of any one of these diets. And what he finds, and it's consistent with everything I've ever noticed, is that long term, short term, every diet works. You can go on a diet of eating two gummy bears a day. If that's all you eat is you will lose weight eating two gummy bears a day. But nobody can stay on a diet for a lifetime or even eight months of two gummy bears a day. Therefore it's completely worthless. His assumption, which I share, that it is an absolute waste of time to build a new habit for a diet. If the habit is so extreme or weird or bizarre, you can't follow it in the long term. Because if you can't follow it in the long term, then you go right back to where you were before you revert to your old habits. Typically it's going to make you heavier and worse off than before. Why start something if you know it's going to make you worse off than when you started? And then, hey, I'm guilty of having tried fad diets. I love Tim Ferriss. I tried the Tim Ferriss diet of, you know, avoid everything white and avoid bread and once a week eat whatever you want. It does work for six months, but nobody in the real world can go years never eating anything white, never eating bread. If you had that much discipline, you'd never be heavy in the first place. So that's my problem with all the gimmick diets. This guy is the least gimmicky person I've ever seen in my life. Which is why I have to recommend the book to you. We are coming up to near the end of our first regular show for 2020. I want to thank some much of you for being with me. We do have time for a couple more questions and comments if you have any on TikTok or Instagram. Happy to respond to you. And on YouTube we have Sri is saying hello Sri, thanks for joining us today. If you're joining us on any other platform, if you want to double your because I might miss it if you you post on some of the platforms. If I don't check every day. If you want to have me answer your question on tomorrow's show and you want to really increase the odds, then I would urge you just send me an email tjwalker.com and I do read every email. I'm happy to look at your question there and then address it in tomorrow's show. You can also post it on my Facebook page which is TJ Walker Speak to Influence is the Facebook page. If you post it right there, I'll definitely be sure to see it as well. I wanted to leave you with really just a couple of things today and one of them was my. Question of the day for you and that is what needs to happen to you to make 2020 the best year of your life? What needs to happen? I want you to think about it. You don't have to share the answer here, but if you do want to share the answer, please do so. I'm happy to share it with the community if I have any suggestions for you on how to increase the odds of that thing happening here to share that with you as well. I also did want to share with you some questions that were sent to me. These were questions from some of my online students. We won't have time to get to all of them today. But I did want to share with you just a couple of more questions from students. Ben wrote in to me yesterday to get tj. What is the best way to become an online instructor? More and more of you are seeing people like me with a large following for our online courses. You hear about people making a lot of money with online courses, and not every instructor does. But it can happen that you can make a lot of money through online courses. My first piece of advice would be start the easy way. Go to the number one platform that has the most students and around the world, that is Udemy. Now, long term, you should be able to sell courses on your own site. But start the easy place, fish where the fish already are. Udemy has 40 million students. You might as well start there. Set up an account for free. But here's what I would do. I would spend 120 bucks buying the top dozen courses of people who've made courses on how to do an online course for Udemy. That's what I did the second time. The first time I went on to Udemy, I just said, I know everything. I made a whole bunch of courses, and I made virtually no money. And then several years ago, I studied what all the other successful creators did. And then I started my courses from scratch. I had to be humble. I'd realize I may have been successful in the offline world, the real world, but I was not successful in the online world. So I had to study what those existing masters did. That would be my advice. So, I mean, I do have a couple of courses, Ben, on how to make online courses and how to be a successful online instructor. And I certainly have you take mine. But there are dozens of others, and probably the best is from a guy named Ben. And I can't believe my mind just went blank on his last name. Type in Ben, an online course on Udemy and you will find it. Sorry, Phil Ebbinger. There's a B in the Ebbinger. Phil Ebbinger. He has the best course on how to make a course for Udemy an online course. So I would recommend his course. That'll be very helpful to you as well. A few more questions, which we'll have to get to tomorrow. We're closing up on the top of the hour. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me for this first regular episode of TJ Walker's online show, Habit Influencer. I hope to see you again tomorrow. Thanks a lot. Sa.