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

Podcast on about 20 different platforms. Thanks for. Thanks for stopping by. Having to do this through my cell phone. Everyone else's, you want to get a slightly better angle. Happy to have you stay on TikTok, but if you wanted to go over to my Facebook page, even easier. You can just type in TJ Walker, Personal Development Trainer, or my YouTube channel, TJ Walker, Personal Development. Okay. Marceau. Everything else is good. The audio? Yeah, yeah, the audio's good. I'm just cuing everything up. When I send you this stuff for the production, it's gonna be easy as pie. I should have thought of that earlier. Just put creating a Google Doc. I'm gonna have everything lined up. It's gonna be very, very easy. When you sent me everything. What? For that selfie media program we talked about this morning. Once I send it to you, it's going to be easy as pie to do. Yeah, I'm putting it all in order for you. Okay, we're a few seconds till start. I will be once it's one o'. Clock. Oh, did I move the camera? Is the camera okay? Because I bumped it around and I didn't get to check. Okay. All right, it's one. Let's do it. And you're on. Welcome to the Habit Influencer. I'm your host, C.J. walker. Thanks for joining me today. We are live. It is Tuesday, February 11, 2020. Thanks for joining me. Whether you're joining us on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, IGTV, Twitch, mixed, you name it, we are happy you are here. This is the largest communist in the world online that meets live every single day just to talk about habits. Now, I can say that categorically because I'm pretty sure we're the only live community that meets together on every single platform every single day in a live format to talk about habits. There's a lot of great habit books out there, there's a lot of great habit blogs out there, and I'll be putting a spotlight on some of them later today. But what we try to do a little differently right here is be the one place where people can actually get together, talk in real time, text in real time, have real conversations about the latest developments in habits, how to build stronger habits, how to build good habits that help you fulfill your goals in life, your purpose in life, and how to reduce bad habits. That's what we're all about. Now. I come to you every single day prepared. This is a Monday through Friday show prepared with typically three or four big topics where we do a real deep dive. But I also leave time for you. So if you have questions about something, if you have a topic that you want to bring up, just let me know. You can post them right here on TikTok. And I see that Buy Now Insurance says you're awesome. I hope that's directed at me. Well, buy your own insurance. Thank you very much. I think you're awesome for stopping by and saying hello. Dennis the Apprentice is with us. Penguin Box has joined us. Straight up now tell me, do you really want to love me forever? Okay, I don't know if that's the name of a song or what, but certainly I'm happy to have the love from all of our regular viewers on TikTok and everyone else and on every single platform. So thanks for joining us. Our friends joining us on Facebook as well. Strong active community on Facebook of people who care about topics. Number of questions came in overnight from some of my online students about those of you who don't know. I teach personal development courses on a lot of different platforms on public speaking, media training, how to build stronger habits, not surprisingly, and other aspects of personal personal development. We'll be going to those questions in a little while, all in hour one of the program. We're here for two hours every single day, Monday through Friday. Coming up on the show today, there'll be a course Spotlight on the Complete Creativity course Unleash youh Innovation now, and a special discount for that. You can also see that in the show notes. In topic A, we'll be talking about do you have now the habit of over complicating your pleasures? Sounds like an odd thing to do, but believe it or not, it is a real issue. In topic B, we'll be looking at strong financial habits, including surprisingly, not owning your own home, at least in the United States. That goes against conventional wisdom. In topic C, we'll be looking about something near and dear to my heart. Are you planning planting your cues daily meaning visual audio reminders, text reminders that elicit a response in you to do the things that you want to do. You already know when you see Coca Cola signs, images everywhere that quite often you end up ordering a Coke or a Sprite or a Pepsi. These are because of cues we're surrounded with. You may be really diligent in setting out your gym shoes every day, the night before you go to bed so that when you see them in your gym clothes first thing in the morning, that's a visual cue to go to the gym. We'll be talking in more detail about how to Systematically set up cues throughout your day. And also, can you pick the better habits video? Just like yesterday, we're going to be showing you two different videos that I've created and my colleague Marceau has put together about habits. These are not two hour videos. These are shorter, tighter, five to seven minute segments. You get to decide which one is better and therefore which one gets additional promotion dollars, advertising dollars. It's kind of like your way of voting for American Idol or any other popular show where you get to have an impact on on who goes to the next round or what goes to the next round. We'll also be looking at one of my favorite bloggers in the whole habit space, Stephen guys. I'll be talking about his latest article and also a lot of other top stories in the news, including, you'll love this one. Which one annoys you the most? It's a list of some of the top annoying habits people have. I'm sure none of you have them and I have some unique solutions for some of those that I doubt you've heard of before. So all that and more today on the program. So get ready. We are in for a fun, fun time. At first I wanted to talk to you about a story that really caught my eye because in some ways it's sort of a normal story you would see in a place like the New York Times. It's sounds intelligent and classy and hey, who doesn't like to think of themselves as intelligent and classy? The title of the article is how to Taste Chocolate and it gives all sorts of advice like you must keep it the proper temperature, almost like a wine. You have to really look at your chocolate nicely. You have to sniff it first. First you have to put it in your mouth the right way. And by the way, I'm linking to this in the show notes as well, which if you're on TikTok, you might not see that, but you can see it if you go over to the Facebook page or the YouTube channel as well. And you're going to think I'm making this up. This is actually in the story. Is there a savory element like true prosciutto or olives? What's happened is the very same people who like to dress up and get overly fancy for wine have sort of taken over a lot of the chocolate world and it just over complicates things. My question to you is, do you really need someone to teach you how to enjoy chocolate? That leads me to the first big topic of the day. Topic A. Are we over Complicating our ability to enjoy simple pleasures in life. Do we have a habit of over complicating life's pleasures? The New York Times recently did a story giving you all kinds of tips on how to taste chocolate properly, how to look for the right hints of olive and prosciutto. Is this really necessary? Now, if you Google Chocolate plus blind taste test, what you will find is that if you just put a bunch of chocolate in front of people of varying degrees of so called quality and expense, the vast majority of people actually prefer inexpensive chocolate that you would find in any grocery store. All of this other stuff is just packaged marketing to make us feel good, to make us feel smarter, to make us feel intelligent, to make us feel superior. Yes, there are well educated, successful people who pride themselves in the quality of the chocolate they enjoy. But are they simply in the habit of fooling themselves now? Hey, I like chocolate and if you tell me something is an extra special fancy chocolate and it's in a nice wrapper, I'm a human being, I'll probably enjoy it more. But I at least go into this knowing that I am in a sense being manipulated by the packaging, by the imagery, by the surroundings, by the hype. I believe one of the best habits of a happy, fulfilled, well rounded person is they can strip away through all that. They can try to look at the world, especially simple pleasures, in a rational way, even if it's any irrational pleasure. But look at pleasures in a rational way and not let other nonsense clutter things up. Not let other marketing messages manipulate us. Because let's face it, if you're making a new chocolate, you don't really want to compete with the least expensive chocolate in the grocery store. They already have their shelf position. What you want to do is come up with something special, unique, different, and Instead of charging $0.10 apiece, charge $8 apiece. Because now you've got an extra $7 plus for marketing and to hire celebrity spokespeople and to put gold and silver wrap around it. Does that truly create better chocolate? Now unfortunately, this doesn't pertain to just the realm of chocolate. You can look at almost any category of consumer goods. Now, I'm really going to offend a number of you here and some of you may decide I'm never going to watch this guy again. He's crazy. He's insane. Wine. Do me a favor. After this show, do a Google search and put in Wine plus blind taste test. If you think you knew a lot about wine, if you think of yourself as a Wine expert. It will blow your mind. Because what you will find is that there are numerous, numerous examples of organizations putting together blind taste test, a double blind taste test with sommeliers with some of the finest wine experts in the world. And what they find is nobody can tell expensive wine from cheap wine, good wine from so called bad wine. When you actually do blind taste tests. There have been tests showing that amongst, even among trained sommeliers, they can't even tell the difference between white wine and red wine when they put food coloring in the white wine and adjusted the temperature the same. And yet people are absolutely convinced this wine is superior to that wine. This wine is no good, and this is the greatest wine in the world. And you could change the wine in the bottles and mix them and they would never know. You may think you really know a lot about wine, and you may technically know a lot, but I would submit, unless you're one of the 0.001% of tasters with unique taste buds on your tongue and a heightened sensitivity, you really can't tell the difference. Same could be said for beer. People get religious in their dogmatism about, oh, I like this beer, I hate this beer. Again, you do, Blaine, taste test. People can't tell the difference between other than a dark, dark, dark beer and a light beer. Other than that, people can't tell the difference between beers. Vodka, by legal definition is odorless and tasteless. And yet some people swear by, oh, Belvedere is the best and Smirnoff that's horrible will give you a headache. They're 100% chemically identical and they have no taste and flavor. We tell ourselves we get in the habit of buying into the cues other people have sent us. People give us the cue of, oh, this beautiful, sexy man or woman likes this vodka, so it must be good. Oh, this bottle is a beautiful piece of artwork. Therefore it's more expensive. Therefore it tastes better. Well, no, it doesn't. Hey, we're all irrational. I'm irrational too. The placebo effect can work on anyone and everyone. Actual research has shown when you hook up wires to people's brains and measure the pleasure intensity they get, they actually do get more intense pleasure from a bottle of wine. That's $100 bottle of wine versus a $10 bottle of wine. It could be the same wine, but when you tell the sheer act of telling someone that this is a hundred dollar bottle of wine heightens the sense of pleasure. On the one hand that gives you pleasure, that's great. On the other hand, if you want to maximize pleasure in life and you want to have the habit of being rational. I think it does not make sense at all to buy into the hype and to over complicate our pleasures to get to the point where you think, oh, that's not the highest quality of chocolate, I'm not going to eat that, or oh, this wine is not of the proper year, or I like the vineyard a hundred miles south. I think that's putting yourself into the habit of over complicating life and ruining life's simple joys. So that's my challenge to you. Can you in fact try to ignore the clutter, ignore the marketing, ignore all the cues and marketing messages and packaging that people give you and when you find a pleasure, enjoy it. I love wine. I love expensive wine and I can also enjoy a four dollar bottle of wine too. I enjoy the finest, most expensive chocolates and the Godiva chocolates. And I can enjoy an M and M too. Can you? And that's it for our segment one Today I do want you to give some thought to the habits we acquire surrounding what gives us joy in life. Because you need joy, I need joy. We all need joy. We all need pleasure. There's plenty of headaches in life, there's plenty of problems. Life is going to throw you curve balls. So when you find things that actually give you pleasure, let's not overcomplicate it, let's actually enjoy it and strip it down to its simplicity and not let other people tell us, no, that's not good enough because it's not this brand or it's not a foreign import or it's not. Ignore the clutter and enjoy what you can based on how it actually makes you feel. We are open for questions, we are open for business right here on the program. Every day we are live. We have friends joining us on Instagram today and up live as Well. I see Paulock9 has joined us. Sawad Gali has joined us from Instagram. We have a whole number of friends joining us on TikTok today. I mentioned Dennis by insurance. Distinct is with us. Distinct LC says. How are you? I'm fantastic, thanks you. Thanks for joining us. And oh, and Distinct also shared this live stream. Thank you very much for doing that. And I've been remiss in not occasionally asking you and my friends on Facebook and YouTube and other platforms if you're getting anything of value out of this show, please hit the share button. It's a little bit different on each platform, but I would really appreciate it if you could share this show and that way more people could come in. We create a stronger community, bigger and better community and we can continue to grow and help spread positive messages on how to develop strong daily habits to fulfill your life. Mine, your friends and your family too. Let's check in with some of our friends on Facebook. Peggy says hello. Peggy, good to see you as always. And Marceau has also posted at the top our Course Spotlight this is the Complete Creativity Course Unleash youh Innovation Now. Now, we don't stop for a lot of commercials on this program. I don't also hit you up for patronage at patronon and ask you to send in contributions like public TV or public radio. Nothing wrong with those organizations. But I do occasionally mention one or two of my online courses that I think might be useful to you. This particular course, Our Spotlight of the Day on Creativity, I share with you exactly what I do in my own life to create. Now, I'm not a da Vinci. I'm not a Michelangelo. My artwork is not hanging in the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City. But I am someone who makes a nice living from my creations. I'm not out getting by the sweat of my brow. I'm not having to do hard manual labor and I'm also not having to work under the thumb of a boss who's telling me what to do all day long. And I also don't have to have clients barking orders at me where I have to respond just to what they want. I get to create what I want. Which I have to tell you is a lot of fun. So whether you want to boost your creativity just for your own off hours enjoyment for art, or you want to be more creative in your business, or you want to go into a whole new field that is creative, I think you'll enjoy this course. I share with you the very same secrets that I use on a day to day basis in creating my 100 plus online courses. Again, I'm no Michelangelo, but my courses last year alone, just on one platform sold more than a million dollars retail. Of the courses, all of that didn't go to me. Some of that goes to the course providers. But something's working. My creations are being purchased by tens and tens of thousands of people all over the world. So if you're interested in how you can be more creative, check out the link there. And you don't have to buy the course, you can just watch the first handful of videos. They are available to you completely at no charge. So check out Today's course Spotlight. Let's check in. Jason Capel writes in and says it looks like hey but maybe hi on Facebook. Good to hear from you Jason. Willie has written in as well. It says what you watch and listen to shape what you think. What you think shapes what you do. What you do is who you are. Willy, extremely well stated. Willie's reacting to my 15 second short form video that I put out today on a dozen platforms. It was just a 15 second video where I say you are what you eat and what you watch and what you read. So it's not just about what you eat, it's about everything you put in your ears and your eyes. Willie correctly connected it to the next step. Step that affects what you do and that's what we're about here in this program. Your habits. Your habits are what you do on a repeated basis and then what you do often enough is who you are as a person. So they all connect. I couldn't do that in 15 seconds Willie, but thank you for connecting the dots to really what it's about because we all are trying to be certain type of person. We all have an image, a sense of self identity of who we are and typically our self identity does match our actions. At some point people can be perfectly happy in their life, everything is fine. Their country goes to war and their self identity as a patriot means they'll stop everything else they're doing and go fight, sometimes die in a war. The self identity is that strong and I'm not advocating that anyone go off to war now. But it's just an example of how strong self identity is, how it ultimately links to actions and then back to your self identity again too distinct. LC has written in on TikTok and says it looks like hi with a whole lot of eyes. So thanks for saying that. Penguin has joined us. Maga Dave and Harrison Williams joined us on TikTok as well and always happy to see friends joining us from a lot of platforms. Sometimes, occasionally. I know this is shocking. People can't be with us live. They have other jobs, careers or they have to sleep during the time of our show. So they actually write in their questions. And I wanted to share with you a couple of questions that came in overnight from some of my viewers and also online students. This one comes from Sergio. He is in my Soft skill complete Soft skills business course and he asks tj how do you deal with the but word when you're analyzing someone? TJ, you said in the lecture 69 that start with all the good Things. This is when you're critiquing analyzing someone. But in my experience, they say, okay, that sounds good, but. There's always a but. And it's like they are in a defensive mood. How do you deal with that? Sergio, you're absolutely right. If people are too defensive, then they're not open to getting meaningful critiques. They just want to protect themselves. So here's what I do. And there's different techniques, but here's a habit I employ. Every time I'm doing an in person media training workshop or public speaking workshop, someone will stand up and speak. For example, give a sample speech. We record it. I have them watch it. I watch it too. And I tell them, be prepared to critique yourself. Before I tell them anything, I say, critique just yourself. They watch it. I have them stand up to do a critique. And I say, well, here's the trick. I only want to know what you liked about yourself. Now this typically throws people for a loop. I only know what I don't like. Come on, be fair. A fair critic points out not just the bad, but also the good. So typically, after a little while, they'll come up with a few things they like. Well, my voice volume was okay, my speaking speed was okay. So it takes a while, but they'll start listing their strengths. Then I come on and tell them everything I thought they did. Well, I haven't said a word of criticism. There's not a single but that has come out yet. So I am highly specific. I don't just butter people up and say, oh, you're great, you're wonderful. I give highly specific feedback on what they're doing. Well, excuse me, excuse me. That doesn't typically happen. Marceau is giving me a blessing. Now, you may ask yourself, how come I never see anyone sneeze when they're doing the newscast or being interviewed? Typically, you can't sneeze. If you have any heightened sense of, of any adrenaline flowing, any sense of excitement, it's typically not a problem. You typically can only sneeze if you are very relaxed. And I'm very relaxed with you. I always have a good time with you and all of your other colleagues, whether you're on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. So I apologize for that. But when you have to sneeze, you have to sneeze. So typically, if you're really listing exactly what people do well when you're praising them, whether it's their speaking skills or any other skills, and you're highly specific, your credibility goes up, their tension goes down. Your credibility goes up. So then here's what I do in my own context of teaching people habits on how to be better speakers. I then won't tell them anything that they're doing wrong yet. I also tell them that I'm going to be rude and interrupt them if they try to criticize themselves. I only want to establish a groundwork of strengths before we move to negatives. Then what I tell them is based on your own assessment of what you saw and didn't like. Try to focus on making just one improvement. So maybe if their voice was too soft, they try to speak louder. If they're speaking too quickly, maybe they slow it down. But I tell them, don't even tell me what it is. Try to improve one specific thing and stand up and speak for a minute. We record it, I play it back, and then I say, watch it. You tell me, did you make any improvement? And 98% of the time, they made a specific improvement. So already they feel good about their base level of skills. They feel very good that they on their own were able to diagnose a problem, and they feel good that they corrected it in just one take. So now they're feeling up. Now is when I can come in and say, if you do this, it'll be better. I don't say you're good, but for the fact that this was awful. I don't even use the word. But typically I just focus on. Here's one area. If we try it a little differently, I think you'll like the results better. So that's how I do it. And I realize you might not be teaching people public speaking skills, but some of what I do will apply in any situation. You can't speak too long cataloging someone's strengths if it is real and meaningful. You can't just butter people up. They will see through it at some point. But if you're telling people specific feedback on how to get better, they will appreciate it. Your credibility will rise and they will no longer be covering themselves up, trying to protect themselves from harsh, withering criticism. And that gets rid of the defensive mood. So, Sergio, I hope that helps. Good luck. Sergio has another question. What happens when you don't have time to prepare for your presentation? Let's suppose your boss is going to do a speech and you're there as a companion. But there your boss says, hey, I can't make the presentation. I just got an urgent call from my boss. I've got to leave. And you have no time to rehearse. You could literally be at the table. Let's say it's a banquet hall and you don't have time to excuse yourself and go rehearse. Is there a trick to do because you would not have time to do the video and review it? Is there a quick tip? Well, a couple scenarios. Let's say your boss does it the day of a speech, so it's not. You're not there in the room, sitting down, about to get introduced. But let's say it's the same day, so you don't have time. And it's a 50 page PowerPoint slide deck. You obviously don't have time to redo the whole deck. Plus Marceau. Did we lose our connection, Marceau? No, we're good. I'm just improving a couple things. Okay, great. Forgive me, we're having a little interaction. I'm just seeing different things on the screen than I normally do. So excuse that. Excuse that interruption. So if you're told same day you've got to give the speech, you still have a little time. For starters, I would ask your boss, what is the one thing you want this audience to do after they've heard this speech? Now, there's a good chance your boss won't know because most people do a horrible job of planning from that as their starting point. But ideally, your boss does know. Your boss may say, I want them all to come up and give you their business cards and ask to set up appointments because we want to follow up and try to sell them. If that's what it is, then you know what the desired outcome is. The next thing I would do is read the whole speech quickly to try to get the thing processed in your brain. And then what I would do, even if there's only, you know, 10 minutes before you have to leave for the event. Try to figure out what is the most important idea in this presentation and figure out how in your own words, you can talk about it just for a couple of minutes. And if you got 50 slides, just come out and talk to people for a minute or two. Really summing up that most important point before the first slide goes up, that's what I recommend is the best. How habit to get into if you have to give a speech at a moment's notice. Now here's some bad habits I don't want you to fall into. I don't want you to stand up there and complain. Nobody cares that your boss didn't give you time to prepare. Chances are, unless your boss was really, really famous, nobody cares that your boss isn't there so never complain about the fact that you were just told you would give this speech. Never complain that it's not your speech. Never complain your boss didn't give you enough time. Nobody cares. Instead, just spend every second you can trying to make some idea that's in this deck somewhere interesting and memorable to your audience. Here's the thing. This may seem like a bad deal. Your boss threw you into this. It's actually a great opportunity because if your boss finds out that you gave a presentation and everybody was, well, receiving it and you got a great impression, then your estimation, in the boss's eyes, is going to go up. You're going to be seen as someone who can react under pressure, who can handle a crisis, who can speak at a moment's notice. That's a skill set that is highly valued in the upper echelons of any corporate or organizational entity. So keep that. I'm getting notes that Marceau says I'm a little crooked. Was this the correct left or to the other left? No, just off center a little bit. Okay. And for those of you just joining us today, this is not a brand new show, but this is only the second month of our show. We are just in our sixth week of doing a live daily show, so we're still experimenting on. Should I stand over here? Should I stand over here? And darn it, the backdrop is frozen. Again, we're going to try to figure out. This is my actual living room and I am broadcasting to you today from my house, but I'm in a studio in my first floor. And this is a video loop on a TV behind me from the epiphone. And for some reason the video is frozen. So we're trying to reduce those kinks as well, trying to make small incremental improvements, because I think that that's the habit of successful people. They don't go and start off with the first thing to do is perfect, because you'll never start if you wait for something to be perfect. What you do is you start with your minimum viable product, and then you try to make small incremental improvements, ideally on a daily basis, which is what we're doing here. And you can even see in a moment the font size will be a little different on the graphics because we're still trying to tweak whether it should be a little bigger, a little smaller. Will be experimenting with different backdrops as well. Now, I'm not perfect. And if you want a full list of ways of my bad habits and imperfections, perhaps we'll invite my wife on for a couple of hours one day. But I do try to demonstrate best practices. I do try to practice what I preach as often as possible. I try to be self. Aware. But you know what? When you're not self aware about something, you're the last to know. So you may have to call me on it. So let's dive in with a few more. Oh, I wanted to give another scenario to Sergio on this question of what happens if you have to give a speech. Let's say you're already in the meeting. You're at a big convention, three day convention, annual sales convention, A thousand of your most important vendors or suppliers are there. You're there sitting next to your boss. Your boss is giving the next speech. In about 45 minutes, you have to be in that room to speak and all of a sudden your boss doubles over and says, I'm suddenly nauseous, I'm going to be sick. I have to leave. You're going to have to give this speech. What do you do then? Again, my recommendation would be try to read the speech silently and then try to get the gist of what it's about. Even if you have to end up reading and going through the slides. Try to start off the speech by walking out in front of people. Not hiding behind a lectern, not staring at a slide, not apologizing. Just start by saying something interesting from the speech that you didn't even write. Share that to the audience. Look at them. Look like you're happy to be there. Look like there's nothing else in the world you'd rather be doing, and that you had been planning this and preparing for this for six months. Get through the first minute, make a great impression. Then if you do have to read or whatever, that strong first impression is going to be the most important impression. You leave with a lot of people and you'll still come out smelling like a rose. It might not be the best speech of your life, but it's so much better than getting up. Oh, gosh, this is awkward. My boss just got sick and told me I had to do this and I'm really not prepared. And this isn't going to be very good for any of you. We've all seen people start speeches like that. You might feel sorry for the person, but if you're in the audience, it doesn't help you. It's not particularly interesting or useful to you. So don't tell other people about your problems. Just focus on whatever you have that can help them and you'll make the best you can of admittedly less than ideal situation. And we'll be coming to your questions in a moment too. And I see that Lex has joined us and has now followed me on TikTok as well. Thank you. Other friends are joining us on Facebook and Instagram. We'll be coming to you in a moment. But first I want to read this question from Cameron. Cameron is in my complete personal development course, how can we find our real creativity? Thanks for the nice course. That's the course I actually mentioned earlier today. That's a coincidence, as you thought. In lecture 232 I'm asking a question from you. There are many things in my mind that I consider a candidate for Creativity. Creativity. How can I find which one is my main area of interest and power and should I focus on that one and not the others? Well, Cameron, I find with a lot of creative people and myself included is. You don't have to limit yourself to one. You may limit yourself to one professional area of creation. My main professional area of creation is. Well, two main ones really. Creating online courses. Creating. Creating online content like this show right here. But I have other creative interests. I write a poem every day. They're not very good. I don't read them to you, but I do create a poem every day. I do a drawing every day. In fact, I'll show you one if you promise not to laugh. This is one I did today. It's just to have a little bit of a creative muscle. It is a picture of a man who is not a very good looking man. It's not a self portrait, but this is one I only took about 30 seconds to do. And I do it every single day. I write in my journal every single day. These are all I write. A quote of the day, a question of the day. These are all things I do of a creative nature. But I don't say I'm only going to do this one thing. So Cameron, I find creativity as a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. And many of the most creative people in the world cross pollinate. I mean Michelangelo didn't just stick to sculpture. He ended up painting a time or two as I recall, and the whole ceiling and all that. So great creative people find the more you create from different fields, quite often your creativity expands. Now Cameron, if you're trying to decide what is the best way to perhaps monetize your creativity, then I would in a systematic way try different things and test, sample, create an online course. Test it out. And if you make more sales in an online course on, let's just say personal productivity than you made in two years of writing a book of poems, then maybe you make more online courses. Doesn't mean you can't write more poems. But if you're looking for something creative that also is a part of your livelihood and reaches even more people, then double down on what works. I mean, the most successful people in the online world today, in the digital world, if you scratch their history and dig a little, you'll find that so many of them failed at a dozen different things before they found something they were successful at. I failed at dozens of talk, political talk radio shows and TV talk shows and books before I sold my first million dollars worth of online courses. There were a lot of failures in the creation space. The beauty today, the joy of living in 2020, as opposed to when I was coming out of college and a young man 40 years ago, is you can fail so much faster today in your creative ventures. You can come up with an idea, create it, test it, even do a small ad, buy in a weekend and figure out if something is popular or not in a way that you perhaps would have spent a year doing in the past. So, Cameron, that's my biggest piece of advice to you, is try, try frequently. Try something that you're proud of but is the minimum viable product, whether it's sculpture, whether it's painting, whether it's a book of poetry or a new app. Get something out there that you created. Get feedback. See what people like, what people don't like. See if you're building momentum, getting positive feedback so you can double down on it. Marceau and I experimented with doing this show. We did our first one maybe in November, a few in December. And what we found was that I like doing it, Marceau liked doing it. A lot of you seem to like doing it, gave me encouragement. So then we expanded it to doing it every single day, Monday through Friday for a couple of hours, which is much bigger project than what most people do when they're trying to do a simple Facebook live once a week for 10 minutes or something like this. It's a much bigger scope. But I'm doing it because I tried a lot of different things, a lot of different creations. And when I see something that gets positive feedback and you enjoy it, then do more of it. So that is my advice to you. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining us today. This is the Habit Influencer. This is the program where we try to help you. I try to help you, and you try to help me influence your habits to give you the life you want. Ultimately, your life is a function, is a sum of your daily habits. You can have the greatest goals in the world and you can aspire to be a billionaire and be famous. But if your daily habits are just going to work, going with the flow, watching a lot of news, watching a lot of YouTube videos, coming home, having a beer and watching Netflix, you're not going to get there. You're going to be completely average or perhaps worse if you have the daily habits, what average people do. So that's what we're all about right here. Special hello to our friends who've joined us on TikTok, one of my favorite platforms. We have some new friends joining us on YouTube today. Matt's Food Insider says it says hello, thanks a lot and team TJ Marceau and a few others have responded. Remember, anytime you want to comment on YouTube, Facebook, anyplace else, typically read your comments right here live and try to answer them to the best of my abilities to give you my advice based on 30 plus years as a personal development trainer helping people with their habits, whether it is in public speaking or any other aspect of personal, personal development. I'm here to help you and doesn't cost a thing. You don't have to call me up and hire me for $10,000 a day or spend $1,000 an hour. You can just get this at absolutely no charge. So it's a pretty good deal. I feel good about it. Let's check in with our friends from Instagram. Our good friend Sy and our colleague friend of the show Sai is with us today from South India. Thanks for stopping by. 888 has joined us from Uplive. Kasem has joined us. Walter, by the way, I have to confess to our friends at Uplive, I have not been to your platform and I appreciate so many hundreds at this point. Now thousands of you have come stopped by the show at some point. For those of us unfamiliar with uplife, can you tell us what's different about your platform? Is it primarily for gaming? Is it about cooking? What has brought you to that platform? Feel free to share because I'm happy to cross pollinate. Maybe there's some people who are TikTok friends here who would like to know more about your channel there. I see Upadkon has joined us from Up Live. Other people. It looks like a Korean language Anyaseo come to hanede da. That's extent of my Korean expertise. Nimanatha has joined us on Up Live as well. Plus Search Solaris and Search Solaris just sent a It looks like a moon. I'm assuming that's a good thing. Who doesn't like a moon? My daughter's one of my favorite things in the world for my daughter are moons. She loves spotting that moon. Rosa Kin says. Very good. Thanks for joining us. Fall off has joined us. Benchogo has stopped by Mohar and Robert just sent me a crown. That's the second crown I've received. I do like that crown. I don't know if it would look good on me or not, but I appreciate the crowns of gold. Very nice. We see Matzbacha has joined us, it looks like from the Middle east and Humadad has joined us and Edil Potter as well as Big Ache, Pollock and so many others. So really happy that we're getting such a big community from so many different platforms all over the globe. That is the joy of what we're doing today. And it relates to the question that came up just from Cameron a little while ago about what you do to create the beauty of living in 2020 is you can create something that 99.999% of the people don't care about, don't like, and are not interested in. But through the Internet and through connecting with social media platforms and live social media platforms, you can find teeny tiny audiences around the world that add up to something meaningful to you. Where you can a, you can have fun and just share your experiences, your knowledge with people, but B, you can actually make a living out of almost any niche in the world. If you can find a thousand people out of 7,8 billion people in the world who are truly interested in your subject. There's a lot of ways you can make not just a subsistence living, but a very nice living and have the money of your dreams and the lifestyle of your dreams. So that's the beauty of creativity in 2020. Let's say hello to some more of our friends on Facebook who checked in. Dwayne Marlow, one of our longtime viewers and students and a great trainer in his own right, Ravinda has signed on and says hello and a lot of other friends on Facebook. I want to point out we've got some great topics coming up in hour two. Plus, following up on yesterday, we're going to show you a couple of different habits videos I've created. And then you get to vote for which one you prefer. You get to decide which one we promote through advertising budgets and which ones will get the biggest push out there. I want to share with you a moment. Going into the top hour, another planned search segment that relates to financial habits. And a lot of people get very anxious and uncomfortable talking about finance. And the topic of home ownership is particularly something that brings out strong, strong passions in people. But that's what we're going to discuss in the next subject. And I'm referencing here an article that I given you the link to Loving the Simplicity of Renting Over Owning. This is an article by Dan Erickson and it's on his own blog, danerickson.net and I've supplied a link to the article for you. He talks about all the good things that have happened to him since he sold his house. He says, as a homeowner, I was strapped. I could barely pay my monthly bills. I had to borrow money most months in order to get by. I had more than $30,000 in consumer credit card debt, along with a mortgage and a car payment. I had hours of yard work to do every week. And at least twice a year I was surprised by some kind of major repair heaters, air conditioners, refrigerators, roofs. I hated it. Ownership felt like living in a deep hole where all my creditors shoveled dirt on me. It was like being buried alive. It got so bad that I had to refinance my house. That wasn't enough. I was still fighting for air. So in July 2019, I sold my house and everything changed. The next big bolded headline Selling My House Was the Best Thing Ever. If you have your house paid off, you might want to hang on to it. If you have loads of equity and no other debt, owning might be a smarter option. But when you feel like you're drowning, selling could be better. That's what I did. He talks about how much simpler renting is, how much better for his cash flow. And this leads us to the big topic B. Are your financial habits in line with what really help you? Or do you have financial habits that make you feel good to impress other people? Hey, everybody likes money. I like money. Debt is a problem worldwide. Here in the United States, some 40% of Americans don't even have $500. If they need it for an emergency fund, they'd have to go get a loan for 500 or $1,000 with a minor health care problem or fender bender. So? So there are problems even in affluent societies where people have debt and make poor financial decisions. Are you in the habit of making decisions that are based purely on your own self interest? Or are you simply being manipulated? Are you simply being cued the right way so you take an action to make someone else rich. Case in point, home ownership. In polite society in the United states, even in 2020, it's considered rude to question home ownership. Of course you should own a home. Renting is just throwing money down the drain is the conventional wisdom. You would hear that at any cocktail party. There's only one problem. It isn't true. Yes, there are some financial incentives, there are some tax breaks for owning a home, but there are a tremendous number of negatives that no one ever likes to talk about. That money that you put into a down payment for your home is money that you could have put perhaps in an index fund in the stock market in the last few years. Some years up 20, 30%, you would have made six. So much more money in the stock market. Now, I'm not here selling you stocks and I'm not here as your financial advisor, but once you factor out inflation, decade by decade, you look at home ownership prices around the United States, it's flat or at Most it goes up 1%. Yes, I understand you can cherry pick certain locations in Northern California or New York where somebody 1961 bought a house for $20,000 and they sold it for $3 million last year. I understand you can cherry pick the data. But in general, the vast, vast, vast majority of people who buy homes do not see, once you factor in the holding cost of your money, inflation, expenses and everything else don't really make money on home ownership. Now, if you find a home and it's your dream home and you want to live there and they're not willing to re rent it to you and you can afford it and you don't care about being locked down, you may want to buy the house as a luxury, but don't kid yourself, it's not necessarily the financially prudent thing to do. It's not the best financial habit to do. I believe if you want strong financial habits, you have to question everything, everyone. You should question me. But you need to question everyone else. Every mortgage broker, every real estate broker, every real estate investor, anyone who owns a home. Everyone has an incentive to tell you, you got to own a home, you got to own a home, you got to own a home and no one ever gives you the other side. Full disclosure, I do own a home, okay? So I am guilty of that. Now, a couple of things I think give me a little bit of an excuse. I'm now at the point in my career where I know I don't want to be moving around. I don't care about career options in Silicon Valley, because I know I want to be in the New York area. And I bought a home because it had a number of unique things that I knew I just couldn't rent from anywhere. But if you have a typical home that looks pretty much like most other homes, a very strong case can could be made that it's simply not a sound financial habit to buy that house. If you truly do an apples to apples comparison with what you could do with that money elsewhere. New York City is one of the worst places in the world. Yes, if you bought an apartment during a recession in 1983 and held onto it for 30 years, your $40,000 slum hovel may have been sold for $2 million. But that is the exception. It's not the rule. New York City is one place I am familiar with. It is so much less expensive to rent versus buy. When you look at what your mortgage payment would be, plus all the other expenses of maintaining a place, it only makes sense if you could look into a crystal ball and see that your apartment is going to double or go up 20% a year for the next 10 years. Guess what? You don't have that crystal ball. I don't have that crystal ball. Now. There's no perfect asset class. Stocks can go down, but in general, over the last hundred years, the stock market has dramatically outperformed the housing market again. If you actually look at it and subtract inflation and true cost, people don't make money investing in their house. It may be a source of savings, but the money you put into your house, you could spend a lot less on rent and take that down payment, all that additional money, all that roof repair money, all the other things you do and invest that, whether it is in an index fund, whether it is in other securities, there's a lot of other ways to invest. Smart, financially savvy people don't just do what everyone else does. And in so many parts of America, at least in the United States, it's just unquestioningly, you have to buy a house. You have to buy a house. A big downside of owning a house is if you own a house and all of a sudden you lose your job and you're in a career field where there's a lot more demand on the other side of the country, you feel trapped. You feel like, well, I can't leave because I have this house here, it anchors you and it can destroy your career mobility. That's one reason why you I didn't buy a house until I was almost 50 years old. Other than briefly owning a tiny, inexpensive house in Florida 30 years ago, I wanted that flexibility for my own career. I sometimes didn't know, am I going to be in Miami next week or Tampa or Washington D.C. or New York or Alabama? I was bouncing all over the place. And I'm definitely glad I didn't try to buy other houses along the way because it would have kept me down. So my big challenge to you, whatever you're doing with your money, whatever you're doing to protect your finances, question it. Everyone telling you to do something quite often has their hand out for a take. Every mutual fund manager, every financial planner, they all want your money. I'm not saying you can never use a financial planner, but you need to question every annuity salesman. You need to question all the expenses, all the fees. And you need to compare it not to will you make money? But will you make money in relative terms with less risk and less headache and greater return than other available options? And by that definition, real estate is a big loser for most people most of the time. I realize that's strong language, but if you analyze the data, that's what the data will tell you. Build strong financial habits by questioning what other people tell you are strong financial habits. And ground zero for that is questioning the need to buy a home. You can rent a home and typically make a lot more money in other investments. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. We've got a lot coming up in hour two, and I should say I'm not a registered financial analyst for you or anyone else. So consult your own financial planners, your own financial analyst. This is not no official means of giving you financial advice. Invest at your own risk, especially if you're thinking of buying a house. We've got so many great stories, topics coming up in hour two. Please don't go away. For our friends on Instagram, we're going to take a quick break, so we have to disconnect. Then we'll be back. So at three minutes after the hour, we will be back with everyone. See you then. And my good friends on Instagram will be back. We're going to stay connected, but you'll, you won't hear me talk to you for about three minutes. Okay? Marceau, how we doing? Everything is in tip top shape. Audio sounds great, video looks great. I don't know what you're doing on your end, but don't stop. Okay? Do you have two videos lined up for them to critique. It? Sorry about that. See, like, I had a lot on you up Live, 400 on Up Live. And only nine from all the others. Oh, it's 203. We gotta go. Hey, we get. We gotta go. It's 203. Let's go. Welcome back to hour two of the Habit Influencer. I'm your host, TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. This is the place, in fact, the best place in the entire world right now to be. If you want to discuss habits, how to improve your habits, how to get better habits, how to minimize bad habits, this is the place. We're coming to you live across 20 platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Uplive and many, many others. So regardless of what platform you're on, we're happy you're here. And I want to offer you an official hello and welcome. If this is your first time here, and to remind those of you, whether it's your first time or you've been with us every day for the last month and a half, this is a show for you. So I come prepared with certain segments and topics in deep dives, but it's also a place for you to introduce topics you wish to discuss that relate to habits and personal development. You can type in your comments on any platform you're on. If you feel like we're missing it somehow, the easiest thing is to go to the Facebook page, facebook.com and then just type in TJ Walker, personal development, and you'll find my business page that supports this show. We'll definitely see the comments there and I would do respond to each and every comment, question and subject. Special hello to our friends who've just joined us on TikTok. OkLarry has joined us. ReKid7568 has joined us as well as Tula. And a special hello to all of our new friends on Uplive, a fantastic platform that has been very supportive, sending us so many hundreds of great viewers and community members here on a daily basis. Just joining us for the last week or so. So we're very happy to have you coming up on the show, you're going to have your say. I'm going to show you two different videos we produced that we push out and promote on YouTube, Facebook, other places. You get to decide which one you like better. That's the one we are going to spend advertising dollars behind to push out to reach wider and larger audiences. So here's where I want you to be critical. You know, one of the writers, one of the students writing me earlier, said, what's the best way to be critical? Here's your chance to be critical. You can rip apart a video, you don't like it, or you can simply say why you prefer one over the other. And you're going to decide. I don't get to decide. Marceau doesn't get to decide. You get to decide which one of these produced videos on a habits topic will be pushed out to a much broader larger world. So all that coming up, plus a lot of top news stories that relate to habits, plus an interesting survey on the five most unappealing habits people have. And I have a unique tip on how to break one of those. So you're not going to want to miss that. That. But first, I want to do a deep dive and this is part where I'll have a bit of a monologue. So if I don't come to your questions quickly, it's not because I don't see you, but I want to get through this segment and then we'll open it back up to questions and calls. I say calls, you can always record a comment, a statement, a question, and just upload that video right to Facebook. I realize it's not that popular for most people to do it, but you see people doing that on CNN town hall meetings. We have the technology to do it on this show as well. So the easiest way is to just head on over to our Facebook page, record a video with your question and we can play that video right into the program. So for this hour, the topic, for this hour, topic A. Are you setting up your cues properly? It's well known among people who discuss habits that human beings are pretty much all the same. We may react differently, we may have different behaviors, but at some level we experience a cue. We look at it, smell it, hear it. Something cues us that creates a reaction, an action, and then we get some reward. So if you look at and smell a nice fresh chocolate chip cookie, that's a visual cue and an olfactory cue, it creates an action. You eat the cookie, you get this tremendous reward because it just tastes so good and you get all this dopamine in your brain. I'm getting excited just thinking about and truth be told, one of the joys of my childhood. I don't know if now what we know about nutrition, it's a good idea. But when I came home from school every day as a kid, typically more days than not, my mother had fresh baked chocolate chip cookies for me. And I love them. I still love chocolate chip cookies, but I don't eat them very often. Why? Because it's not a habit that supports larger life goals of mine, doesn't support my health goals, doesn't support my appearance goals, doesn't support my energy goals. Because there's not a lot of nutritional value in chocolate chip cookies. But that's the importance of our topic today. Are you doing enough to control your kidney cues? So many habits experts act like we're just still in 2020, kind of tossed out in the jungle and it's totally random. As to whether we see a saber toothed tiger and get scared and run, or see some nice tasty fruit and stop and eat it, well, it's not random. You can in fact control your cues if you decide you want to. Now, most experts give the example of you want to go to the gym more. You set out your gym bag the night before. You have your shoes out, your sneakers. First thing you see when you get out of bed, it's a visual cue to remind you to go to the gym. But unfortunately for most of us, we are bombarded with cues all day long that are not of our choosing. We see ads all day long for McDonald's and Wendy's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. So if you've eaten fast food in the last not because you made a rational decision that this was the healthiest thing for you or the best thing for you, the most nutritious thing, or the thing that would energize you the most, or the thing that would make you look your best or feel the best, at some level, you were manipulated because of cues put in front of you that we've all seen thousands of ads in the last month for McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca Cola, and Wendy's. Depending on what country you're in, this affects our behavior and that's a problem. That's how we end up eating fast food for lunch. We all see tons of ads every single day for Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, and a handful of other carbonated beverages. And you may say, well, I don't like Coke. That has no impact on me. I'm above that. What do you drink? Oh, I drink Pepsi. Someone might say, chances are, unless you are a very healthy person and have gotten to the point where you try to just drink water. If you go to a restaurant or a party or any social event and someone says, what do you want to drink? There's a great chance you or at least your friends and family will say, coke, Sprite, Pepsi. Why is that? It's because we have had cues put in front of us all day long in the form of billboards, ads, commercials, radio Ads pop up, ads on websites, email ads. We are bombarded with these advertisements and it affects our behavior. We're kidding ourselves if we aren't. We are simply reacting. And that's a huge, huge problem. If you really want to control your life, then you have to proactively get better control over your cues. You have to actively decide what cues to put in front of your eyeballs, what cues to put in front of your ears, what video images to see, what pictures to see, what t text to see. Because you have control over your cues, most of us don't exercise it. Most of us just react as the world swirls around us and we're giving up all control. This is a huge, huge problem. I believe that if you want control over your own life, if you want good habits, if you want to control your habits, the starting point has got to be you have to control your cues. What is it that's creating a stimulus to get you to do something in particular? I try to control not all of my cues. No one can do that unless you live in a bubble somewhere or live in a pod. But I try to control as many cues as I can every single day, especially the first couple of hours of the day. And that's why every morning I spend my latest selfie speak program audio where I talk to myself and I cue myself is only 13 minutes long. I have a new selfie media program and it's less than two minutes long. But it's images, it's photos in a photo album where I look at cues that I want to do for the behavior that I want. And that is what is critical, is you have to be proactive. The other thing I do every single day is I give myself text cues. I actually read right here on my cell phone a list of 100 habits that I'm trying to. I'm using the term habits and routines. 100 habits. Routines that I try to do every single day. So I don't just listen to it and say, oh, I got it. I don't just look at pictures that remind me. I also look at the text every single day because I want to take control over the cues that go into my eyeballs, go into my brain, go into my ears, go in my nose. I want control over those. Speaking of no's, that's why. And when I'm in the mall and I smell the Cinnabon, I try to walk in the opposite direction. I try to walk at least on the other side because I don't trust willpower. I don't trust myself not to buy Cinnabon. And maybe the Cinnabon isn't as big a competition for me, but those fresh chocolate chip cookies in a mall can be. I try to walk further away from it to give myself less exposure to cues. Now life is random for a lot. There's some things we cannot control. We can't eliminate all the randomness. But for the average person, this person receives thousands and thousands and thousands of cues every single day. Every billboard, every bus, every TV ad, radio ad, the pre roll of every YouTube video. All of these are cues attempting to entice us into taking an action that by and large has nothing to do with what's in our best interest. Everyone else in the whole world is trying to grab our attention, trying to get us with cues to buy something, buy a product, buy a service that makes them richer but impoverishes our life many times in some way. That's why it's critical you take control over your own cues. You must be proactive. If you don't plan your cues, someone else will and they're coming after your wallet. I'm TJ Walker and that was our topic A for this hour in the program. Thanks so much for listening to me. We do have a number of people who've joined us. Let's see on TikTok we have Bernabaji has joined us. Author CGF has joined us. By the way, if you're an author of a particular book and that's your creation, share with us what your book is about. We're all about putting a spotlight and sharing attention on anyone who's displaying a good habit of creating something so you won't be banned as being overly promotional or spam. Just don't start selling us Viagra pills or something like that. We don't want to get in the business of promoting that. And we've got some more comments. Jason has stopped by on Facebook. Sy has written. I found out my niche is incorporated interview skills. Sy is a trainer and also a friend of the show and a colleague who helps us with many different things going on. How can I develop my content on interview skills because my niche is interview skills. How to take it too long to one long term niche as interview skills? Could you please answer? T.J. well say this is a good topic. I happen to have a course course on interview skills and it is I believe the longest course in the world on it. It's almost 30 some hours but that's not a full time niche for me and corporations don't hire me to Conduct interview skills training for executives. Typically, this may be a great niche for you. My advice, start creating content every day. Ideally, content you're getting from your own experiences. You've been on job interviews. Well, then share your experiences. What worked, what didn't work? I can tell you right now what people absolutely love are examples of what not to do. Disasters. One of the most successful videos I ever did was an interview I was doing for a network created to help people pitch new businesses. And I had an investor on and he was someone I'd already been friendly with and we knew each other well. It was already a joking relationship. And the interview was so incredibly horrible, I thought, how can I make something of this? So I cut about seven minutes out of that interview and I just labeled it worst media interview ever. And it got tens and tens and tens of thousands of views. Now, the main video I created was posted on a channel that doesn't exist anymore. But it's still, if you go to my main channel that many of you are watching on now, if you just type in TJ Walker Personal Development and you type in worst interview, you will see this interview. And it's embarrassing. And the person I interviewed doesn't look that good. But frankly, I don't look that good because I'm flustered by the whole thing too. Don't be afraid to share your vulnerability. Don't be afraid to share your weaknesses. The problem a lot of experts have and trainers and consultants is they feel like I have to be perfect at all times. If I'm less than perfect, I'll lose credibility. No nonsense. People love it when you can put a spotlight on your mistakes and get them to learn from your mistakes and, and let people know, hey, I'm not perfect. If I ended up okay and I learned how to overcome this, you can do so si. One of my big tips would be, for starters, it's absolutely crazy that you're not making at least one 15 second video every single day for TikTok and posting it on Instagram and Snapchat and Pinterest. Just one quick tip. Interview tip of the day. Boom Talk. The other thing I'd recommend you do is get a couple of friends together and do some simulations where you are interviewing someone and do one where you think they really do a good job and then you can highlight what they did well, but also do one that you think was awful. I did another one, this was now probably 14, 15 years ago with a young colleague who worked with me where I interviewed her. It was a simulated. She did Everything wrong. She was playing on her cell phone, checking gum. And again, it got thousands and thousands and thousands of views on YouTube. I don't know if that one is still around, but the subject matter of interviewing skills is something almost any human being can relate to. Because you're either going on a job interview at some point or you're interviewing for something. You could be going for an interview to be approved to buy a co op in an apartment building, you might have to interview someone. You're not quite sure your role of all that. And it's a particular type of speaking skill. So, Si, I'd recommend you start making content every day. You should be writing about it every day. You should be tweeting a tip every single day and own that space. That's a space I'm in. But I make no pretense to owning the space of interview skills. If you own that space, I guarantee you you can make a lot of money. Might not be your goal or objective, but it's certainly a possibility. Sy, thanks for the question and thanks for everyone joining us. Now we're going to switch gears a moment and you get to be the boss. Marcel and I have created a couple of different videos that relate to habits and we do this every day. We have seven videos a week come out, even on the weekends when we're not here doing the work live show. But we also try to buy ads and promote the best videos to the wider world so we can reach a broader audience. So what we're going to do right now is show you two videos that we've made in just the last couple of weeks and let you vote on which one you prefer. So I want you to leave comments, anything you like, anything you don't like. Which one do you think more interesting to people? Which video are you more likely to share with a friend? Which one do you think other people are more likely to share with? That's what we're looking for. We're trying to bring as many people into this community as possible and one of our main ways of doing it is having a 5 to 10 minute video every day that's produced a little more produced than this, some video images, maybe a little more music, and then people can watch these anytime on YouTube, Facebook, other platforms. So right now, Marceau, what is the topic of the first video we're going to watch? Marceau. And I've somehow lost. Okay, so Marceau, what is the topic of the first video we're going to watch? Here it is. Make it a habit of taking time for yourself. Okay, so make a habit of making time for yourself. That's the first one. And certainly if you haven't done this already, I would really appreciate it if you could subscribe to our YouTube channel. And that's just you type in my name plus personal development, you'll find the channel quite easily. And then if you like the video, literally click the like button and you can like it on Facebook as well. Another social media, social platforms. But whatever you do, let me know after this one what you thought of it. We're going to play another one and then I want to know which of the two. If you had to reach into your own pocket and spend your own money advertising and promoting it to a larger audience, which one would you pick? Now, I'm not asking you for any money. I'll be spending our own money here. But I want to know your opinion. Marceau, let's roll the tape. You must listen to yourself today. The biggest asset you have is your attention. And we live in a modern economy where our digital overlords are making fortunes out of us by controlling our attention, by selling our attention, our own eyeballs, our ears to marketers at Amazon, and I love Amazon at Facebook, and I love Facebook and YouTube and Google and Instagram and Netflix, everyone is going after your eyeballs, your attention. And it's extraordinarily easy to go through every waking moment surrounded by other people's ideas, other people, other people's content, other people's information, what other people want you to look at. The problem is, if you do that, you can't really listen to yourself. You cannot listen to other people's ideas, other people's content, and listen to your own brain foam in ideas, gestate ideas, play with ideas. All you can do is react and absorb other people's ideas. So it is critical. It is absolutely critical. I believe if you want to be a successful person, an intelligent person, a well rounded person, a well adjusted person and a fulfilled person, to carve out certain sections of your tide each and every day so that you can only listen to yourself. And what I mean by that is time when you're not looking at any screen. And I do realize there's a certain irony here, because I'm asking you to look at this screen right now and listen to me. But I do want you to figure out, you can put it on your schedule, set times every single day when you can just listen to yourself, that own voice in your head telling you what you think about the world, ideas, your profession, your personal listen to Yourself. So many people get obsessed with the idea. I can't possibly be bored for even one second. The second I get up, I have to look at email. The second I get up, I have to check social media. The second before I go to sleep, I have to see how many likes my most recent post got on Instagram. And what that does is it just destroys your ability for your own brain to communicate with you, for your own brain to even create new ideas. And it makes you and me willing pawns in other people's games, in other people's life success stories. Now, I have no problem with other people being successful. And yes, Mark Zuckerberg deserves to be a billionaire. But I don't just want to help other people. I want to help you and I want to help me live our own lives. We can't do that if we don't sit down and fundamentally listen to what's going on in our own brain, listen to our own ideas, personal percolating up. So let me give you some very practical tips of how I do this. And so much of it just revolves around carving out time where you know, you're not going to be looking at a computer, at a cell phone, a screen, an iPad, or even listening to music. You're going to be listening to yourself. That is key. So I'll just walk you through a typical day. Mine for starters, early in the morning, after I get up to have one cup of coffee, no sugar, I will meditate. Now, this is slight aberration from the other things I'll tell you about because I do have headphones on. I am plugged into my cell phone, but I'm listening to a meditation tape that I made in my own voice where all I'm doing is telling myself to breathe in, breathe out, to relax, think of nothing and just focus on my breathing. It's just 10 minutes long, but it's a classic meditation technique where I'm trying to just clear my mind, not think of anything. Do other thoughts pop in? Sure. It's about trying to push them away and to just focus on the breathing in and breathing out. So that is one part of my day right at the beginning where I'm not looking at any other screens, I'm not letting anyone else's ideas in my brain. I am just meditating. Absolutely. An important way to kick off my day. Now, typically after I do this show with you, I try to do a one hour walk without a cell phone. Seeing nature. Some people could call this a meditative walk. I don't know if it's that intense. But the whole point is I'm in my own thoughts and I take a little pad, I think I have one right here. I just take an old fashioned piece of paper, a pad and a tiny little pen. And when I have ideas, I write them down, people. So that's one of the most important parts of my day, going for that walk. Hour, hour and 15 minutes a day. It's great exercise too, but this is where I can listen to myself come up with creative ideas. Absolutely critical. Now, you might not have the time or interest in walking for an hour and a half a day. For you it could be just sitting in a chair, closing your eyes and not listening to any kind of music or sound or looking at any screens. There's different ways of doing it. I relax in a hot tub and the bubbles on full blast. I try to do that for 15 minutes a day. This I have found helps me sleep a lot better. I used to when I'm in the hot tub, check iPads and cell phones and make calls and all sorts of things. Now I don't do that. I give this time to myself to just think, relax, focus on big picture issues, reflect and listen to myself. Now moving towards the end of the day. You've heard me mention this before. In order to foster good sleep and sleep patterns, I do not look at any cell phone, any screen, any electronics one hour before going to bed, typically 9 o' clock at night. I then read a book. Now that's not completely listening to myself because I am looking at the ideas that someone has put forth in a book. But at least I'm getting away from screens and it's a more contemplative experience to look at a book. You can stop, think, write down a note and then the final act. In many ways the most important act is once I go to sleep. Absolutely no electronics in the bedroom. I don't have a cell phone, I don't have an iPad. Well, TJ, how are you possibly going to wake up if you don't have your iPhone alarm right there. Well, guess what? I go to bed in time so that I can wake up naturally. I'm not sure short changing my body's natural rhythm of when it needs to sleep and wake up. So you don't need an alarm clock if you actually go to bed at the right time. Are there medical exceptions? Sure. But the vast majority of the world, I would venture, 99% of the world, if you just went to bed when you should, you won't ever need an alarm. Clock. Therefore you won't need that cell phone in your bedroom. Electronics free. No screens in the bedroom. So that's really nine hours because this is the hour before I go to sleep and then eight hours of sleep. So when you add it all up, there's a lot of time every single day when my brain has the luxury of not being bombarded by other people's ideas. From cell phones, from laptops, from ipods, from iPad. I'm dating myself. Ipod, iPads and TV screens. This allows me to listen to myself, to come up with my own ideas, to figure out what's important to me, to try to plan my own lifestyle, to design my own lifestyle, to figure out what habits do I want to keep, what do I want to get rid of, what do I want to create new for you so that you've got new courses and books that I have to offer to help you, which also helps me. That's why I believe it's critical for everyone, for me, for you and anyone who wants some semblance of sanity in this world to carve out time where they can listen, where you can listen just to yourself. You cannot listen to yourself and be listening to other voices coming from the black mirror, from your cell phone, from any other electronic dev. Sa. There has been this concept that willpower, it was like gas in a car that you fill it up, you've got it, but when it runs out, that's absolutely it and you're out of luck. And now there's new research suggesting that's not really the case. They did a study and it's the theory of ego depletion. This idea that you make enough tough decisions in one day, after that you can't resist temptation. And I'll use an example, I don't mean to offend anyone, but it's supposedly why someone who's very moral and well disciplined in the morning, if it's now 8 o' clock at night, they're tired and had a tough day, they're having a few drinks, they're traveling away from their spouse. This is when they're more likely to fall into having an affair. They've depleted their ego, they just don't have enough left. That was the theory. So here's what they found though. And this was a very specific study done on a number of test subjects. And what they found is it all came from the beliefs of the individuals they were studying. If someone believed that they had limited supplies of willpower, that they were powerless to say no to that donut after 8pm or that piece of cake or that fifth drink. The sheer act that they believed that they had limited amounts of ego and limited amounts of willpower made them lose their willpower and that people who felt strongly that they were in charge, that they controlled their own lives, did not see their willpower reduced. So it depends a great deal on your own self identity. And a lot of what we've been hearing for a long time is simply no longer considered valid by a number of social scientists. So let's talk about habits as they relate to personal finance. Get real with yourself about what truly feels good. So many people start diets that they know they're going to hate, that they know it's going to feel like torture. And then you just give up a week, two weeks, three weeks, sometimes six months. But it's simply a waste of time to start diets if you know you're not ever going to feel good about it and it's going to be torture the whole time. If you had the ability to withstand torture, you wouldn't need to go on the diet in the first place. You would be at a perfect weight in the first place if you're able to torture yourself. The second big concept from Mind bodygreen is it's critical to embrace routine. This idea that, well, I just exercise when I feel about it. When the muse hits me, it doesn't work. If you want to be healthy with diet, with exercise, with your finances, you need to do things on a regular basis. That can include saving a percentage of your paycheck every single month. That can include exercising at the exact time, every single day. So routine is something you need to embrace. The third big concept from this particular blogger is schedule yourself and put your name on your calendar. So many of us, and I was guilty of this in the past, we put everything on our schedule revolving around what a client wants, what a customer wants, what a neighbor wants. We pencil things in where we have to be to react to other people and what we should be doing first is putting our own name on the calendar. I'm going to be going on a walk at the beach for two hours Saturday morning or I'm going to be at this museum for a three hour Sunday. You've got to put your own name on the calendar first. The next concept this particular writer advocates is set boundaries. You need to graduate from glorifying busy schedules. People like to oh, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. Someone tells you they're busy. What they're really telling you is I have no priorities I'm disorganized. That's really what it means. If someone says they're too busy, they're too busy. And the other annoying thing about people who talk about how busy they are is they spend so much time talking about how busy they are. They could have done the thing you asked them to do if they just stopped talking about how busy they are. You've got to set boundaries with your time and your energy. This will allow you to have more energy for what is truly important. That's why it's critically important to say no now. The fifth one jumped out at me, and perhaps it's my own perspectives and thought. I am married and live with a wife and daughter Make a Loneliness Game Plan Feeling lonely, the author contends, can be extremely triggering, leading many of us to turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Come up with a plan of concrete things you can do when the loneliness starts to creep in. By the way, you can be lonely and being married and living with people. I don't mean to make it sound like that's an automatic out for me. Be honest with yourself about your weak spots. Mine, the author contends, is online shopping and trying to buy the experience I wish I was having. So don't revert to your usual crutches. And for other people, it's mindless snacking in front of a television. Certainly I can remember single days every so often thinking, I'm not going to be around anyone. I can just eat as much ice cream as I want, drink. Being completely alone can sometimes trigger negative habits because you don't feel accountable. You feel like no one is looking. So be careful of those. He's a fabulous communicator and an incredible communicator and science expert. So I'm not Bill Nye the Science Guy, although I have tremendous respect for him. It is funny, as you get to a certain age, I guess everybody sort of looks like one of the 10 characters. So I do find it more common that people say, oh, are you Steve Jobs? Especially if I wear a turtleneck. And I think it's just because if you're old and gray haired and balding and wearing a turtleneck and wear glasses, people say, oh, you're Steve Jobs. First time I've heard Bill Nye, but not offended by it at all. So thanks so much for that. And that was from Hamden, so thank you for joining us, Hampden. I do appreciate that and forgive me if I don't get to you by the time of this show ending, which we only have A few minutes. But you can always post your comments here. You can post your comments or questions for tomorrow's show in advance. Get to the front row for tomorrow's questionnaires and topics and you can also just send me an email and get to the head of the line that way too. TJ TJ walker.com In our remaining time, I did want to put a spotlight on a story that caught my attention. This is from a very well known blogger, Internet TV personality Marie Forleo. And you've probably come across her at some point. She is just killing it when it comes to being an online creator. Her shop has millions and millions of audience. Her blog is well populated. She's got books, she's got the whole thing. She came from a media background, I believe in New York City, then became a life coach and became so wildly successful at that. Has a huge, huge practice. I'm linking to her story in the show notes today, but she gives very specific tips on what to do if you're making a career change at 30, 40 or 50. Because she made a career change. I mean she wasn't an old person, but she wasn't, you know, 22, deciding to go from pre med to pre law. She was a little bit older. So she asked herself the question, is it too late to change your career in your 40s, 50s or 60s? And she comes up with a very specific set of things people need to focus on. And the first big key is you got to get over this whole attitude that it's too late or I'm too old. I mean, Colonel Sanders was 65 years old before he started the chicken company. You can start at any age. Big tip number two, you've got to learn how to market yourself. Big tip three, you need to bias towards action. Too many people just stay paralyzed. That's all the time we have for today. I'm TJ Walker. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. This is the Habit Influencer. We come to you live every single day, Monday through Friday. If you're looking to build better habits, stronger habits, then I urge you, come back, learn from me, learn from others, learn from the community. When you have extra tips on how to build better habits, share them with me and the community too. I'm tj. Thanks so much for spending time. See you tomorrow. All right. Tick tock friends. Thanks so much for sign off now. See you tomorrow. This is a Chicky Bee production. Okay, Marcel, I'll tell you in a few minutes or you got to go right now or okay. All right. Nothing urgent.