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

Don't make a big deal out of it. Just keep going. Chances are most people won't notice or they won't remember. I'm hoping a couple of minutes from now you won't remember my stumble because I couldn't say the word tricks. That is the sort of thing it's not most of what we do around here, but we try to make everything a learning opportunity. A lot of top stories today we'll.

Be covering.

In topic A, we're going to do a real deep dive into creativity. What really makes people creative. We're going to talk about the daily habits needed to feed your creative genius. In topic B, I'll be discussing the two best friends a bad habit ever had. And this is amplifying the 15 second video I did on TikTok, Instagram Facebook earlier today. But it'll be a deep dive. More like a 7 to 10 minute meditation on these best friends of bad habits. We'll also be talking about habits when it comes to shopping. People aren't going to stores anymore. I know I'm not. Macy's is shutting another 125 stores. Now we'll be talking about shopping habits, what that means and also looking in the news, looking at some of the top personal development websites across the globe and their take on procrastination, how to get better, what procrastination really means. Also geographic differences when it comes to health. Turns out people in Miami are in much better shape than people in Minnesota. On one hand, that's not that surprising. It's easy to walk around, go to the beach every day in Miami. In Minnesota, you're cold and bundled up for a lot of the year. But we'll go in a little more detail there later on in the program. So all that and more, plus your calls, your comments, your questions, you can always call us by just reaching out, connecting with us on Facebook, Facebook.com and then it's TJ Walker Personal Development. You can type it in that way or facebook.com tjwalkerspeaktoinfluence is the exact URL that plus questions coming in from my online students. Those of you joining us for the first time I talk about personal development habits, how to build stronger habits here in the program every day. This show also serves as the live office hours with the instructor for all of my online courses. I have about 140 courses and students get to ask me questions here. They email them in from time to time.

Speaking of courses, I want to start.

Right out of the gate giving something to you. I'm not selling this. This is a complete freebie. This is a free pass. It's only good for 24 hours. If you enroll in the course, you can use it for the next 50 years without charge, but you have to enroll in the next 24 hours. This is my complete creativity course, Unleash youh Innovation Now. So I posted it in the show, notes Marceau. I would ask that you post it to any other of our websites that are currently seeing the live feed so people can see this. This is a fantastic course on creativity, how to build habits of creativity. I'll be going into more detail in our segment A in the show today, but if you want to really dive deeply and you don't really have time to focus right now, I highly recommend this course. It has a 4.9 out of a 5 rating. It's the highest rated course on the number one platform in the world for online courses. So this is your chance absolutely free of charge. People sometimes ask, why do I do this? Well, you're giving your time to me. I appreciate that. We are still in the initial five, six weeks of this show. We just launched this show.

You've shown some faith in me by.

Spending time with me. I want to show a little faith in you. And sometimes people say, well, tj, I don't feel right just taking it for free. I want to pay you something. Don't worry about paying anything for the course.

If you want to help, the best.

Way you can help is leave a nice review because the Udemy platform, like the Amazon platform, like so many online retailers these days, very much dependent on review. So if you wanted to receive a favor from me and return a favor, you can enroll in the course and leave a positive review before we do that. Okay, so apologies folks. We're going to take about a 60 second break. My colleague Marceau is telling me we have a few problems with our audio. We're going to do a quick reset and I'll be right back with you. Thanks.

Sam.

The audio. Testing the audio. And sorry, our friends who've joined us on TikTok don't mean to show you old behind the scenes stuff, but we can't connect with you through our regular live stream, so we're doing it directly through my cell phone. So appreciate you joining me. And dance. Looks like dance has joined us. A Blaster Waco has joined us too. So thanks for being with us today. Okay, how are we doing?

That sounds pretty good. All right. All right, let's go back live again.

All right.

Okay. 1, 2, 3, 0.

Welcome back to the Habit, Influencer. I'm TJ Walker. Apologies some minor technical difficulties. Still working out all the kinks with the technology. I don't feel quite as bad when I see major political parties, even in the United States, taking 48 hours to.

Get their technology straight to count votes. So we don't have quite the resources of a major political party and we try to fix our problems in less than 48 hours. But that's the thing about technology, there to always be snafus. That's why a lot of people never try.

It's why so many people are afraid.

To use new technology. Oh, what if it doesn't work? I remember several months ago having dinner with a guy who got a very famous talk show host in the 80s and 90s in New York City listening.

To him at the time. And we said, you know, why aren't you doing a podcast? Why aren't you doing YouTube videos? You have an interesting voice, interesting lively mind talking about current affairs. And his response was, I don't even know how to open a toaster. He was too afraid to try new technology. He was only comfortable if he could just walk into the traditional old fashioned radio or TV studio and there's full time engineers and everyone's done it the same way for 50 years. Well, he had a good run, but I just feel sorry that he can't be contributing this voice now. Do I know all the ins and outs of technology? No.

But I'm not afraid to try. And I'm not afraid to occasionally fail as we did a few minutes ago, having to stop, start, redo the cameras, and then try to make it better. To me, that's the essence of learning, growing, creating. You have to be willing to fail. Now, I'm certainly no Einstein. There's definitely no Einstein.

I'm definitely no Edison.

Edison, of course, famously said he failed 10,000 times before making a light bulb. He learned 10,000 ways not to make a way of doing it.

He wasn't afraid of failure because he knew that is a part of the invention process. And that's what I'm trying to do right here with you and my colleague Marcel. We're trying to invent a new way of communicating by live streaming on every single platform that allows live streaming all at the same time. So thanks to all of our friends joining us on Instagram, Facebook, Periscope, twitch mixer, Instagram, etc. Marceau, how is our audio quality now? Marceau? Okay, I said, how is our audio quality now? And Marceau is our technical Producer in Jack of all trades, produces all the nice videos you see on other social media platforms that are not live. The quote cards and other things coming out under the TJ Walker Habit influencer brand. Great. So glad that's working out. By the way, if you're watching this show and all of a sudden it's crackling, send us a note. We want to know. We're trying to crowdsource this and make it better. I'm not asking you to send in tons of money. This is not a PBS pledge drive. But I would like your opinions. If you don't like the backdrop, you know, if it's summertime and I'm still showing the fire behind me, maybe you'll say, tj, time for new backdrop or new setting. If you don't like the volume of the music, let me know. If you think the music is too loud, too soft, let us know. If you're having trouble hearing the audio, it's not your problem, it's our problem. So I do want you to let us know and you can let us know live and just post your comments right there on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, any other platform. Or you can write them in. Enjoy getting feedback. Feedback. Reading feedback objectively is a habit. It's a habit that is an important habit to develop. The problem many people have is there's two main problems when it comes to getting feedback. One thing is they listen exclusively to negative feedback and they say, oh my God, I'm horrible, I'm no good. Let me just call. You may have had 99 positive comments. One person criticizes. So that's not a good thing to do, to just fixate on negative feedback. On the other hand, other people say, I don't care what anyone else says. Everyone else is just a negative naysayer. I'm not going to read criticism. You see this from Hollywood stars who say, oh, I never read reviews. They're lying. I think you want to read feedback and you're always trying to discern something useful there. And it's hard to do it when it's about yourself, but you have to learn how to be objective. For example, I'll show you an email I got today. This was a text comment on the TikTok platform. And this comes from the Belgian entrepreneur and I want to thank him. He says, TJ, you look 10 times younger without the glasses. My friend ever tried contacts? I can't wear them myself, unfortunately. Now, a lot of people might get a comment like that and say, well, that's rude. Saying, I look 10 times older normally. Is he trying to make me sound like an old man? I think you have to have a certain level of self awareness. I know I'm old. I'm certainly older than the average TikTok viewer. I am 57 years old now. I think I look great for 57, but I don't delude myself into thinking I look 27 or 37. I just don't. I like to look and like to think I look healthy and vibrant for my age. So the first thing is I'm not put off by this comment. I don't think the person was trying to be mean at all. He just pointed out he thought I looked younger without glasses. And by the way, I have these glasses specifically for doing TV and speeches and radio and not for radio but for media appearances because they cast the fewest shadows on me. There's really no frame on it, so it's just pure glass and a little bit of metal. So I do recommend glasses like this for people who do a lot on camera and don't want their glasses to be prominent on their face. So what did I do? I could have said how dare you say I look older than I do in any other situation. I could have gotten angry, I could have deleted it, I could have banned him. I didn't think any of those responses were the right thing to do. Instead I just looked at it and I did respond and said first of all, thanks for writing and watching. Second of all, I have tried contacts, used them when I was younger, it was fine. I tried again a year or so ago, didn't work, just was too irritating. I couldn't really read with them or see distance as well.

So I gave up on contacts.

So I just explained it, did not act upset at all. He then wrote back and said, didn't mean to sound like it was criticizing, you look great either way. It didn't escalate. I've seen so often when people get a comment and it can be interpreted as a negative online, they then fire back. They have a habit of defending by attacking and then things escalate, then that person feels attacked, they have to defend themselves by attacking. So I think the habit I really want to stress here is try to look at an objective. Try to use some self awareness and look on the bright side, someone is watching my content. I do appreciate that and giving a suggestion on how things might look better. I appreciate that. So thanks again Belgian entrepreneur. Your comments are always welcome here. And the habit influencer. I also wanted to thank Patrick, one of the friends on TikTok he says hey man, I want to thank you for your TikToks and being the person you are. Have a good one. Just a nice positive upbeat message. The reason I point this out is it's human nature to have the habit of just fixating on the negative. All you ever hear about these days on social media is how negative people are, how much bullying there is, cyberbullying, stalkers, negativity. I was guilty of it a little bit yesterday talking About Tim Ferriss 11 reasons not to Become famous. The stalkers, the death threats you can get. Thankfully, since I've been doing this show everyone has been very lovely to me. I appreciate that. And Patrick, thanks so much for your comments. I do want to take the comments of you writing in today, watching live, but first I want to go into and questions sent to me by some of my online students. This from the platform of Udemy Sagar writes in Tomorrow I have a client interview scheduled. Can you please provide me tips for the same? Thanks in regards Sagar now if you mean your client is being interviewed by the news media, my biggest tip for you is don't talk about the interview. Don't talk about what you're going to say. Don't waste time talking about practice questions that are going to come up. All of those for the most part, a waste of time. What I recommend you do, what I've done with clients of mine in the past is to just do a practice interview on a cell phone. Record your client answering questions, record it on your cell phone. I can't pick up mine now because I'm using it to talk to my friends on TikTok. But hold up your phone. You can do this in the back of a taxi cab and do a practice interview and then play it back and reinforce to your client what they're doing well and if they have a bad answer, let them look at it and just say how do you feel about that?

That is far and away the best way to help them. I think that's far more useful than trying to research everything the reporter's ever written about you trying to come up with 192 possible questions. Now what I don't know is if you mean a client is interviewing you.

About hiring you, if that is what you meant. Cigar by the question, my recommendation is you need to practice on video. I realize it's sounds a little bit similar, but it is exactly the same thing. What you're after is knowing that you look your best, sound your best, come across comfortable, confident, so If a client prospect is interviewing you, let's say you're a PR firm that says what's special about you? Or what do you do?

What would you do for me?

You don't want to be thinking of what to say for the first time in the interview. You want to have thought about it in advance and practice it on video to the point where you like what you see when you do that. It's virtually impossible to be nervous going into the real life interview. Excuse me. Kind of like yesterday.

I'm going to be taking a few.

More sips of warm tea.

I do have a bit of a.

Cold, so it is a little more difficult speaking for two hours. And by the way, this is what I recommend to my clients too, is when you are speaking whether you have a cold or not, you're far better off drinking room temperature water, which is.

What I have here.

Or warm tea, but not scalding hot. You don't want to gulp quickly, burn yourself, but having liquids. I don't have any sugar. This is green tea, so there's very little caffeine. I don't have any sugar, cream or anything else in it. It's just plain water in the one cup and plain green tea in the other. Maybe there's a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg. That's the most relaxing thing on my throat. If I wanted to take it up a notch, I might put some honey in it, but I didn't want to do that. So please bear with me if my throat sounds a little funny. I appreciate those of you sending me well wishes yesterday and I think I'll be back to normal tomorrow, so don't worry about that. I'll get to your questions in a moment. Those of you posting But I wanted to get to a few more questions from my students who were nice enough to write in and I wanted to address them directly. This one is from Renu Chaudhary. How do you overcome apprehensions of speaking publicly? How do you get over fear of public speaking? This is one of the most common questions I get. If you have a fear of public speaking, you are in good company. Most people have a fear of public speaking. Unfortunately, the number one habit people get into is avoiding it. It's natural to avoid things you don't like. If you don't like spiders and snakes, it's natural to avoid spiders and snakes. The difference is you can avoid spiders and snakes your whole life and really nothing bad will happen to you unless you're trying to become a zookeeper. But if you Avoid public speaking your whole life. So many opportunities never come your way, or they come your way, and you can't capitalize on on them because you can't take it to the next level. There's so many jobs, professions where if you can't speak to your clients, your customers, co workers, employees you manage, you'll never be considered for the job. So that's the big problem with the habit that might work for somebody. You may have a habit of not touching a hot stove. Well, that's a good habit, keeps you from getting burned. But public speaking is a little different because the, the biggest danger for most people when it comes to public speaking is not that they gave a bad speech. The biggest danger is they didn't get to speak in the first place. Anytime you have an opportunity to speak and you didn't speak, you got a zero. You struck out. Wayne Gretzky, the famed hockey player, basically says, I missed 100% of the shots that I never took. If you don't take the shots, you've lost. If you don't speak, you've lost out. An opportunity to really convince people of your ideas, your expertise, your passion, ways you can help them, reasons why they should want to work with you. So that's beating around the bush. You want to know, how do you get over the apprehension, the fear of public speaking? There's so much bad information out there. There are people who talk about, well, if you just stand like Wonder Woman for five seconds, you won't have apprehensions. People talk about for decades. Visualize the audience in their underwear or naked, and that will make you reduce your fears of public speaking. Well, that's horrible advice. Depending on your audience, it's either too disgusting or too exciting. You do not want to visualize your audience naked when you're speaking. Could probably get you in trouble in your HR department if you even mentioned that you were doing that. And given the spiraling rates of obesity in the US and around the world, I think especially these days, compared back to the 1960s when I first heard that advice.

You do not want to be visualizing.

Your audience naked when you're speaking. It's horrible advice. The next bit of advice, not quite as bad, but I still put it in the case category of bad advice. Practicing your speeches in front of a mirror, horrible advice. Complete waste of time because you can't speak and look at yourself in the mirror. As human beings, we see ourselves in a mirror. We're going to start judging ourselves. Is my hairline receding? Is my nose crooked? Is There something wrong with my face here? Am I getting more wrinkles? You can't actually focus on the speech if you're looking at yourself in the mirror. The number one thing you can do to get over your fear of public speaking, and it works 100% of the time. 100% success rate with my clients who do this. Here is the trick. Practice your speech on video alone. Watch it. And here's the part everyone always forgets. And keep doing this over and over and over again until you love your speech, your substance, and your style. Now, people hear me say, practice on video, and they practice it on video once and don't look at it. Well, that didn't do any good. Complete waste of time. Or they practice it once, look at it, pick it apart, critique it. That doesn't do any good. It only helps if you keep refining it, practicing it, redoing it again and again, until you can look at the video and say, wow, that's a pretty good speech. If I could be half as good as he is, half as good as she is, I'd be the best speaker at this event. And you're looking at a video of yourself. That is the number one way to get over your apprehension of public speaking. To get over your fear of public speaking. It costs nothing if you already have a cell phone, which I assume you do if you're watching this, and yet people don't want to do it. Teacher, I don't like looking at myself. Guess what? Nobody cares what you like. If you told your teacher in English class, well, I don't really like editing my own papers for typos and spelling errors. Here you do it. Do you think your English teacher would be very impressed? I don't think so. It's not about you. It's to make it easier for your audience to understand it. So we use spell check, we edit, refine to make it easier for our audience. What recording your speech on video does is it allows you to. To refine and critique and improve and edit how you're speaking. So, Renu, that's really the best habit I know it's not what you want to hear. People would much rather I say something like, twist your fingers like this behind your back and say, 3, 2, 1, and then you'll be great and you won't have any fears. The problem is you might still give a lousy speech. That's the problem with using hypnosis to. To just tell yourself you're going to be great, or to visualize a standing ovation because you might still be giving an awful, boring speech. But if you practice on video until you like it and you've watched, then you know you have a legitimate reason for being confident about your speech and not having the fear or apprehension. So Renu, thanks so much for your question and hope you have good luck with all of your presentations in the future. Special hello to our friends on TikTok joining us today, as well as our friends on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Periscope and many other places. So thank you all for joining us today. We've got a lot of great topics, some deep dives on several topics, and also I see some of you have written in on YouTube. Mr. Interesting name has written in how can we improve our interpersonal skills? Well, interpersonal skills can mean a lot of things. It can mean everything from how do you talk to your brother, how do you speak on a date, how do you talk at a business event where you're at a dinner. The easiest way to improve is to listen more to other people and to simply spend more time around people talking to them. That's far and away the easier way. The big problem so many people have these days, and I'm not picking on young people, although a lot of boomers like to do this, the big problem for so many people is if you spend all day long hunched over your cell phone typing and you never actually talk to a real human being, your interpersonal skills will atrophy. They will simply rot away and get to the point where they turn to dust and float away. Any skill is like that. If you don't use it, you will lose it. So my biggest piece of advice for you looking to improve your interpersonal skills, schedule it sometime every single day where you're talking to a human being. And it may be as simple as going to a coffee shop and purposefully leaving your cell phone at home. I know that sounds crazy to some of you, but just go out, whether it's to a coffee shop, to a restaurant, with the idea that you're not going to have this as the default of typing on glass. And yes, folks, I have a cell phone. And yes, I spend time typing and communicating on my cell phone. But one habit I do have, and it's on my to do list every day and it's in my Selfie Speak program. Every day that I listen to is I reach out and try to connect with one friend who isn't an immediate family member and talk to them every day. Sometimes we miss each other and it's just a text, but I try to reach out to somebody who isn't just a family member living in my home and that helps keep me polished up and keeps my interpersonal skills from rotting away. Because there are some people, believe it or not, who are really good speaking on camera and hosting shows and then you get them away from a camera, they talk to anyone or they're very, very quiet and difficult to speak with. I hope I'm not one. I don't think I'm one of those people, but Mr. Thanks for joining us on YouTube today. We'll be taking your questions from other format as well. Watch the Now I have a comment here on TikTok. It's not me, Anna. Watch me. Have you watched my recent video? I haven't, but if you can, I don't know, I guess on TikTok you can't post a link, but we'll make a note to do that. This is a program that's about promoting creativity and creation. So I don't mind at all that you're trying to promote your most recent video. So those of you who are on TikTok, TikTok especially after this show, head on over to It's Not Me Anna and see what it's about. And Anna, if you want to tell us a summary of what it's about, I would love to know. Also happy to see that Bdsuc K. Has joined us. Plus McMaff Holmes has joined us on TikTok as well. Let's check in with some of our friends on Facebook today. Mohammed has joined us and says the audio is perfect. Well we love hearing that but please don't be afraid to tell me when the audio is subpar. We want to know that because I might miss I sound fine to myself all the time. I can't tell Marceau it may sound okay to him. So if you hear a problem with the audio or all of a sudden the lighting is too dark or something, then please let us know. Peggy says hello. Peggy, one of our favorites here on the show, plus a respected personal development expert and trainer in her own right has joined us. And Shakti Sura Mohanti has joined us on Facebook too. So thanks to all of you for joining us. And we have a number of people joining us from Instagram and Up Live as well. Junid has joined us, Shiram has joined us. Loxani Arena Salar, Julie Kondo has joined us on Instagram from Up Live. We have Apple Nugget, Mahmoud Abdul and Hamza has written also sent us a crown. It's a crown of gold. Thank you very much. I believe that's the first crown of gold I've ever been given. So thanks so much. And Kadyar has sent in some thoughts as well. This is the Habit Influencer. This is the show where we talk about good habits, how to build good habits, how to build strong habits, how to reduce bad habits. I'm going to go through a couple more questions sent in by email from some of my online students about habits. Then we'll come back to yours as well in just a minute. This is from Jehan Abdul Gawad has written a question. Jehan is a student in my presentation skills course. I prepared a wonderful speech, but I can't memorize it word by word. What's a better alternative than memorizing word by word? My presentation is on the negative childhood programming. Most people keep running in circles because of childhood trauma and they're not even aware of it. This is the topic of my presentation. My goal is that my audience understand what went wrong so they can fix it. Well, Jehan, first of all, thank you for sharing and thank you for sharing this important topic. I hope your message can really connect and help a lot of people. Here's my biggest piece of advice. Never, never memorize a speech. It's extremely difficult. It's extremely dangerous. It is, in my opinion, a horrible habit to try to memorize a speech. Here's the problem. Once you memorize it, you're no longer in the moment. Your brain is sort of reading like a teleprompter, your brain. So all of a sudden you'll start sounding like this. And then I realized in my childhood that I was going to be beaten up frequently and it can make you sound robotic. Now you may say I'm overdoing something or caricaturizing it. Here's the thing. Everyone you're speaking to, everyone around the world these days is an expert on seeing great acting and bad acting. Everyone gets to see Meryl Streep and the best Bollywood actresses and the best actors from the London stage and Robert De Niro. People know what good acting is. So if you're trying to memorize words, even when they are your own and have them come out, it's going to sound like bad acting to people because you won't be able to put the same inflections, change of speech, speed, tone, pitch, volume, pause, all of those things are needed in order to sound natural. If you're memorizing it, all of those things get lost. My recommendation, if you're giving a speech, have a simple outline, two Three words and about five bullet points and a couple of words to remind you of the story and then just share your experiences. I'm sure it's a beautifully written speech, but there's no one word or phrase that's so important for you to say it. Exactly the same way. If you speak from the heart and you share ideas that are interesting to your audience and you care about them and you're telling personal stories with emotion, you will do a great job and be a fantastic communicator. So the best habit is again, you're going to complain I'm repeating myself. But people don't do it often enough.

And it really is the biggest solution.

Rather than memorize, work from a simple sheet of paper, a few bullet points. Practice on video speaking. Keep practicing until you love it. It can be a little bit different each time. That's not what matters. What's going to matter is the emotional impact you have on your audience. You're not going to have a strong emotional impact if you are trying to push something out that you've memorized. I've seen it happen a million times. People fail even if they think everything is going smooth. They look canned, they look robotic. The other problem is if you do make a mistake, then it's like going over a speed bump at 30 miles an hour and you're jostled and you kind of have to go back and it disrupts you completely. If you're just having a conversation and you stop and start or have half a sentence come out or you repeat, it's not going to be noticeable. You're not going to notice. Your audience isn't going to notice. But when you've memorized it, it becomes very noticeable. There's a mess up.

So.

So that is my advice. Don't try to memorize the speech. Don't try to use a teleprompter either. Very, very difficult to use a teleprompter.

Without looking fake and phony. Thanks very much for your question and.

I wanted to take a few comments from our friends on TikTok. We have Nick McMath home says, hey TJ, I learned a lesson today. Shoveling snow. My neighbor thanked me. Tender kindness is worth it. So sometimes some of the best experiences in life are just helping another human being, not expecting anything in return, and getting a thanks. You didn't demand a thanks. You weren't expecting a thanks or payment, but you get it and it feels good. That's kind of how I felt when Patrick wrote to me today thanking me for the habits tips and personal development tips I put out on various platforms and TikTok as well. Reminds me, I have a neighbor, great guy who without me even asking, comes over with a snow blower and completely blows clean my driveway sometimes after big snows. And I do thank him. But I should thank him even more because it is such a nice act of kindness. Let's hop in with another question. This is from Alter2, another one of my online students regarding PowerPoint presentations. This is from my complete PowerPoint presentation course. It's regarding free pictures. It says hi all, I'm Sammy, taking this course from Germany. Happy to have so many thousands of students in Germany and a number of you watching today from Germany. I just wanted to know how you can identify pictures on Google that are free and can be used. I mean pictures where one is not violating any copyright. Kind regards, Sammy so Sammy, a couple things. If you're getting something off Udemy excuse me, off of Google, you're never 100% certain that it's rights free. Somebody could have stolen an image from a famous photographer and coded it as rights free. So unless you've taken the picture yourself or purchased it from Getty Images or one of the really well known image libraries, you're never certain. Even then I've had situations where I purchased video images from Getty, the largest, most reputable image library in the world, and I still got into copyright problems. YouTube even removed another channel ad just tore the whole channel down because they thought I was violating copyright. So you're dealing with a subject that is near and dear to my heart because it's caused so much pain and too many people these days don't take seriously the issue of copyright. I had many years ago, a developer in Florida, where I lived at the time, make a website for my media training business, mediatrainingworldwide.com and it looked really nice, a lot of nice images. And I had kind of lost touch with the developer, hadn't worked with them.

In a number of years.

And then I got a certified letter from, I believe it was Getty Images saying you're using one of our pictures and you owe us $5,000. If you FedEx us $2,500 today, we'll call it even. If you take it off today, if you don't, we'll say we've never lost a court case.

Boom.

What am I going to do? I sent the check for $2,500 that day. So it can be a very painful experience. It's simple to say, oh, I grabbed it for free. Everyone does it. If you're a real business or you seem like you are not just a high school kid and even then it's not completely safe. But big corporations tend not to sue high school kids. But if you're doing this for any sort of business purpose, you need to make sure you have the rights. Now there is a way of figuring out most of the time if something is rights free on Google. I'm going to do it on my computer. Right now I'm just going to go to Google, I'm going to type in just something arbitrary, let's say Hammer. I'm going to type that in and then I'm going to hit images. Now I'm going to go to the far right called tools and underneath that five more pop up icons show size, color, usage rights, type and time. I'm going to click usage rights. Underneath that it says not filtered by license. So you could be stealing someone's image. There's also labeled for reuse with modification, labeled for reuse, labeled for non commercial reuse with modification and also labeled for non commercial reuse. So the safest one there is labeled for reuse because if it's labeled only for non commercial and they find out you're a business, they could sue you. So that's what I would do. The easiest way, frankly, what I do a lot of my own PowerPoints is take a picture. You got a cell phone, take a picture. If, if you can't do that, spend five bucks or ten bucks buying a picture on the Internet, then you at least have some protection and a paper trail. As a last case scenario, then and only then would I get something on Google. But thanks, thanks very much for that question Sammy and good luck with all of your PowerPoints. I'm T.J. walker. This, this is the Habit influencer. This is the show where we go in depth on habits. How to build good habits, how to decrease bad habits, and how to live a more meaningful, purposeful life. Everyone likes to talk about life purpose, life purpose. But if you can't even figure out how to get out of bed in the morning or you're preoccupied with the fact that you're not sleeping well or that you feel bad that you're 50 pounds overweight, it can be difficult to focus on higher level skills and higher level things like life purpose. So that's why it's crucial to try to get all of your daily habits not perfect. Mine aren't perfect. But how to get them in alignment so that you can live your purpose. I'm TJ Walker. We'll be back with more in just a moment.

We're going to take a short break.

Thanks. And my TikTok friends, we're staying live with you. Marcel? Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out if I want to go into my Topic A. Well, I guess so. It shouldn't be 15 minutes long anyway, so. Hang on one minute, okay? Okay. All right. Hang on one second.

You got 10 seconds left.

Excuse me. Okay, I'm ready. Welcome back to the Habit Influencer. I'm your host, TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. We are live. It is Wednesday, February 5, 2020. Happy to be here with you and all of our friends on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Twix. We're pretty much everywhere. There's a live stream today and happy to have such a large community of people who care about habits. Now, as a benefit to you, I mentioned this at the top of the show, but as a present to you, no strings attached, you don't have to get your credit card out, you don't have to pay for delivery, nothing like that. I want to give you access to one of my newest courses. This is the complete creativity course, Unleash youh Innovation. Now, I've attached the link to the course. It's in the Show Notes. If you're on a platform. And Marceau, if you could go ahead and cut and paste the course coupon onto TikTok.

If they allow that.

I can't remember if they allow that. Okay, so go to Facebook. Go to facebook.com and type in TJ Walker, Personal Development, Personal Development Trainer. And you will see the link to the show Notes. This is a great course, many hours long, and it's got all my best techniques for really helping you build creative habits. Creativity is not something you're born with. It's not something you've either got or you haven't got. It is a habit that can be cultivated and developed and built. And I teach you how to do that in that course. If you're interested, go away. You don't have to take the course for six months, but if you're interested in ever taking the course, today is.

The day you can get it.

Absolutely, because you sign in and there's a free coupon there and it will allow you to enroll at absolutely no charge whatsoever. This leads me to the big topic, Topic A in our show today. Before I do that, as you can perhaps tell, I have a little bit of a cold and I'm trying not to do what Bowl Speech therapists recommend you don't do. You don't want to clear your throat. That causes a lot of pressure and damage to your vocal cords. Instead, you're just better off swallowing and drinking water or tea. So that's what I'm trying to do. Some best practices for the throat and the vocal cords. So topic A. The daily habits you know need to develop creativity. Human beings are born creative. You look at any kindergartener and you give that kindergartener a crayon, they create. You put a 4 year old in.

A sandbox and they create. Human beings love to create. It's part of who we are. It's why so many children have a smile on their face every morning. It's not because they are rich, not because people are giving them gold and fancy cars. It's because the whole world is their sandbox. They get to create. At some point, that gets snuffed out of a lot of us. We grow up, we become adults.

We have seven in the morning and commute, get to an office, start filling out paperwork, responding to emails. We're tired, we're rushed, we're on phone calls and meetings, dashing home, you're tired. All you gotta do is sit back and watch Netflix. What did we do that was creative?

Absolutely nothing.

You put enough days like that together, they turn into weeks, months, years, decades and a lifetime. And you have sapped all of the.

Creativity out of you.

Well, it doesn't have to be. You can build a creative muscle. And no, you don't have to have a big expensive art studio built into your garage. You don't have to fly to Florence, Italy and spend three months as an artist in residence. You can do it at home. You can do it on the bus on the way to work. You can do it in bed with the lights out. Just thinking there's so many ways you can build your creative muscle. I'm going to share with you what I believe are the best habits to do on a daily basis. And it's really a two part process. You cannot be a good creator if you are not a good learner. You have to figure out some intake of new ideas. Every great musician spends a heck of a lot of time listening to other musicians. Every great novelist spends a tremendous amount of time reading other novels. Great scientists study other scientific literature. You cannot create in a vacuum. It's just not how it works. All creation is about combining other ideas that already exist in the real world, but combining. Combining them in new ways. So I believe there are seven main.

Spheres of daily Habits that control your destiny. Two of those spheres we have to talk about right now. Sphere one is lifelong learning. You have to learn your whole life, every day, if you want to be more creative. And it doesn't mean you have to quit your job and you'll get a master's degree at the local university. There's opportunities for learning everywhere if you.

Can turn off the radio, the TV, and entertaining videos on YouTube long enough. There's so many ways of learning. So here are the habits that I do every single day to help learn more effectively. Habit 1. I spend at least 15 minutes, typically a half an hour, just reading information about my particular area of expertise. Habits. Now, I do a lot of other reading, but I read everything online that's new about habits. Blogs, news, stories. I learn one new word every day. Not to dazzle you with a fancy vocabulary, but it just helps stimulate something in my brain that says, hey, brain, you're continuing to learn new things. The beauty of that tip, that daily habit, it takes about 2 seconds, maybe 5 seconds. Just go to a word of the day app or online. It's simple, it's fast. I read typically at least one electronic book every single day, and I try to do that throughout the day. Instead of going back to news and email, I listen to one audiobook per day. Some of you may be saying, well, tj, I don't like to read, or I don't have time to read, my commute's so long. Well, if you're driving or on a bus or a train or a plane, you have no excuse not to learn something new in an audiobook. And there's a gazillion free audiobooks out there, and there's tons of inexpensive ones. I use blinks. I use InstaRead. But there's many other services out there, so I'm constantly bombarding myself with new ideas. This is step one in the creative process. I read one aphorism a day. Just a thought of the day. An interesting quote from someone well known in philosophy or history or pop culture. I read all of, or at least the significant portions of a book every single day. If I'm working on a long book, it may take me several days, but I've also read a digital book and an audiobook the same day. But I try to complete an entire book every single day. I also watch a video on YouTube that is purely about learning something. It's not for entertainment purposes. That's often only two minutes every single day. I try to consume a great work of art every day. I just go to Google and I type in some well known artist and I just study the picture. It may only be for 15 seconds, but it's bombarding my brain with new information. It's creating more raw material. You cannot create unless you have a lot of raw material. I also read for one hour every night before going to sleep. So when you tell me I don't have time to read or learn or create, I want to look at your calendar because chances are you're watching the news, you're watching Seinfeld rerun, you're doing something, watching TV the last hour of the night, get rid of it. Read books or if you don't like to read, listen to audio books something or a podcast something where it's new ideas and it's not just entertainment. I like entertainment. But that isn't enough raw material. So that's step one. Step two is actually creating. They're daily habits that I think are essential for anyone who's serious about being more creative. These are the creative habits that I do every single day. Number one most important, get up and I dictate 500 words to a thousand words every single day. My thoughts on habits or some other aspect of personal development. It's a habit. I get in the habit of writing every day, in this case dictating. And it's just done. Sometimes it takes 40 minutes, sometimes it takes 10 minutes. I just focus on one idea. So it may only be 5:50 in the morning and I'm done. But I've already created something. I already have a sense of creative accomplishment. Next, I block out a three hour window every day for creative work. It's called deep work to get in the flow. So typically 9am to noon. I try not to take phone calls, many emails, things like that. And I can just focus on creating online courses, creating texts, creating information for this show. It's a focused period of concentration to allow me to create. I also write one question of the day. Those of you who follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, other social media will see these in quote cards. It's a a question of the day designed to get myself to think about some issue in life and to get you to think as well. I write one haiku poem every day. I don't share those with anyone. It just is something else that gets the pump pride to get creativity flowing. I do this every day. I write one aphorism, one quote of the day. Now these might not go down in history with give me liberty or give me death or other famous quotes from prominent literary individuals. But for me, it's just a way of summing up a philosophical sentiment in a pithier way that I do share with you. On all social media platforms. I also write one habit tip. This is not just a short little quote. It could be three or four sentences. It's a tip that I believe is helpful to myself and others and I share those with you. In social media, I also draw one picture every day and some of them are horrible, but it gets the creative pump flowing. Even though I don't fancy myself a great artist or even an average artist, I take a photo every day. Sometimes it's of my daughter, sometimes it's something pretty, sometimes I'm lazy and it's just my toes. But it's the act of looking for something interesting to take a photo of. It's another creative output. I produce a 15 second video every day that I post on TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat. That requires a lot of creativity because it's easier to speak for two hours sometimes than it is for 15 seconds. Every day I create a two hour show for you. You don't have to do that. I'm just sharing with you my own creative habits. Every day I try to write down, just for about 20 seconds, big bad ideas, crazy ideas. I try to write those down. I also write down the number one problem I want my subconscious to think about overnight. Could be things like, how do I build my YouTube audience bigger? Something like that. I ask myself every day on my to do list. Did I create something of lasting value today? And I put a W for win when I do it, and I do it every day. And I also challenge myself to think about building the best habits in the world. How can I help people create the best habits in the world? I make myself answer that question every day. That's how I create better habits on a daily basis. You don't have to use my techniques, but you need some daily habits to build your own creative muscle. I'm TJ Walker. That was topic A for the show. Lots more in hour two of the program. Don't go away. Our friends on Instagram, we have to sign off for a minute, but we'll be coming back at three minutes past the hour. That will be three minutes past two Eastern time. For those of you on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, for everyone else, wherever you are, those of you in India watching us in prime time, we're so happy to have you be taking your calls, your questions, your comments later on, plus more topics in the news. See you in three minutes. And my friends on TikTok, thanks a lot. We will be back. I think I missed some of you tips on how to do that after you're sick and homebound. And that is what is Kayla, I am. I'm not sure I understand tips on how to do that after you're sick and homebound. Do you mean about socializing with people? I'm not. I'm not sure. If you wouldn't mind clicking clarifying. We will come to that in hour two. Is it back?

Pretty much all the way down. And sound really, really good.

Well, but we want music.

I guess the frequency of music interfering with the frequency of the microphone and causing that bubble to happen.

But didn't we have some good days where we had good audio and good music?

I've got an idea though for put the music on. I think I was playing in the background.

What's that?

I said I've got a good idea for the music. I think I'll just play it instead of playing it through obs. I think I'll just play it through the computer since I've already got it downloaded.

Well, use your judgment. I. I can't think about it for now. Let's just try to make it as high quality as possible.

Sa. Sam.

Welcome back to the Habit Influencer. I'm your host, TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. We are live. It is Wednesday, February 5, 2020. Thanks for stopping by. This is the program, the community where people get together to talk about building good habits, building strong habits, not just health habits and diet habits, although those are important habits for every aspect of your life, whether it's habits on how to be more creative, how to be better at lifelong learning, how to have stronger financial habits. Every sphere of life, they all connect. They are all related. So what we try to do here is have an integrated approach to helping you have a more fulfilled life by developing habits that support your aspirations, your identity for yourself. So thanks so much for joining me. Special hello to our friends on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and I somehow missed one of the comments from our friend Sean on TikTok who was writing how do you do this after being sick and homebound? And I think you may be related to the question of about interpersonal skills. Certainly if you're sick and homebound, your interpersonal skills can atrophy if you're simply not around people. And it can happen to anyone at any point in their life. I'm fortunate enough to have never had that happen to me, really, but it certainly could at some point. That is kind of the beauty of modern technology where you can be homebound. But rather than typing text messages to people, how about FaceTime? How about Facebook video? That can be a more personal way because when you're seeing someone's face, there's so much more information that comes through than just your voice. And there's a lot of interpersonal communication and skills that are more apparent when you can see someone and they can see you rather than just typing or rather than when they just hear you. Speaking of video and communication, we do make it available here for you, Sean, and anyone else to communicate with the community here in a video format. Now, most people don't like to do it. We don't truthfully get a lot of videos sent here. But if you want to make a video, if you want to post a video in a question format or just simply make a statement or submit a title topic for discussion, you can make a video and then post it right on Facebook. In fact, Marceau, I believe we had a comment from one of our friends on Facebook on this very issue. If you could pop that open a moment.

It was about submitting a video, right?

So if the. Whoever that person was and, oh, it's in the inbox. Okay, so if you wrote a question about submitting a video, feel free to. You can, you can, you could email it. The easiest way is just to be on the Facebook page and you can just push a button recording a video and have it go right on live. And then we can play it live from our Facebook page. It feels more nerve wracking to do do that. But you, but you see, you know, you see CNN do it and political debates and town hall meetings. So big networks can do it. We can do it too. Don't be afraid to speak out. One of the habits that is most effective and really it relates to one of the questions that came up in the last hour. How do you get over fear of public speaking? One habit is to use every single opportunity, speak out. All of you have opportunities right now to speak out. You can just hit record on your cell phone, your iPad, your computer. Record a question, you're speaking, post it here, and I can play it for everyone. That's a type of public speaking. The more you do that, the more comfortable you get speaking, the better you get. And it builds on itself. This is why it annoys my family sometimes. But if I'm walking into a grocery store or in a mall or if I'm in New York City. And I just happen to be walking past through Bryant park and I see a TV camera. I always just walk up to them and say with a big smile on my face, hey, what's the story today? And about 95% of the time they'll tell me some topic and then they'll say, can we interview you? And I've gotten on major broadcast outlets like the Today show, which at the time was the number one rated morning show in the entire United States. And I've been on a lot of other shows like that. Now, did that really build a whole career? Did I get discovered? It's not about that. It's about building a confidence level so that anytime you have an opportunity to see speak, anytime there's a camera, anytime there's a microphone, to me it's as easy as breathing. It's as easy as talking to one friend. I'll never forget I was having lunch with friends in Bryant park. And this is right behind the New York City Public Library. Fabulous, fabulous facility in midtown Manhattan. Gorgeous library and park behind it. Bryant Park. I'm about to walk back to my office from lunch. I see a camera crew. I said, what's the topic today? They're like, oh, we are about to start running the Munsters TV show at 11 o' clock at night after the news. We just want to get responses from anyone who liked the Munsters tv. The Munsters TV show, well, that was a very well known popular sitcom from the 1960s where it was this family. They all looked like monsters and all the hijinks that happened. I happened to be a regular watcher in the 60s of this show. So I said, sure, I'll talk to you. And I gave them a lot of colorful sound bites and they put my video in advertisements that ran every single night for the next six months. Friends and family saw it. It's kind of amusing. Again, does it really matter? Did that help me sell a million copies of a book? No, but it helped solidify a habit of I'm someone who can speak. I don't have to hold myself back. I'm someone who can speak in a comfortable, confident way anytime, very easily. And that's a habit I think is worthwhile while promoting a sitcom. Doesn't really matter, but being able to speak and share your views and opinions on the world, I do think that is empowering. It's a great habit to build. And it's one of those things, simply doing it builds the habit, makes it stronger for the next day and makes it easier. Let's check in with some of our friends on Facebook. Sai says hello. Hello means namaste in India. Yes, namaste. Glad you're with us, Sai. Joining us from southern India, Peggy writes in do you do a particular search to find new information in your niche? How do you trust what's being printed online as true? I need to start doing the same. I've been listening to podcasts each night. So these days, I mean, we've heard a lot politicians talk about fake news, fake news. And the truth is it's a golden era for misinformation. There's a lot of nonsense out there, it's a lot of bad information. So I deal with that several ways. I do give a preference to news organizations where I know they have an established culture of fact checking. Now I'm going to say something here that sounds like it's going to be you're into politics and I'm trying not to be a political talk show, believe me. But when I see new scientific information, perhaps a study on productivity apps and how they've been reviewed, if it's in a reputable mainstream media organization like the New York Times, I know they have a team of editors and a team of fact checkers and serious journalists. So I feel a lot more comfortable with that. Doesn't mean I'm going to buy it and agree with it, but I'll at least feel comfortable sharing it with you. The other thing I do to be transparent is what I try to do, Peggy, is any news source I'm using give you the link and you can check it out too. So I'm not asking you to just accept at face value what I say. So here's my way of looking for new information. For starters, I have an RSS feed, really simple syndication. So There are about 100 different bloggers who write about habits and personal development and a few other topics that go into my RSS feed every day. So I go into that, I look at that. I have general news sources I go to just to find out what's going on in the world where I have the strength limitation of 30 minutes a day. And those tend to be again from reputable, well known brands. But sometimes they're aggregators. I've gone to the Dredge Report every day for about 22 years because it's a great aggregator of interesting stories that tend to dominate political news cycles here in America. But beyond that, I go to Google, I type in the word habits, I click the word news, and then I click last 24 hours. So I'm always looking at the top stories that have come up that I think would be relevant to you. Interesting fodder for this talk show and others and just interesting information that would be useful to you. I also want read a lot of books. Now some people don't like to read books and some people are wildly successful like Gary Vaynerchuk, who claims he's read about two books in his whole life. He likes to get information just diving into the Internet. I like to read books and I find it's genuinely higher quality. Someone had to really think about something typically for a year before it got turned into a book. So I am try and read a book a day and often buy a couple of books a day. In fact, you hear the doorbell ringing. It may be Amazon bringing me a couple more books. So Peggy, that's how I prepare. You've got to come up with your own system. You may love doing a review of all the best podcasts in your niche. For me, I occasionally listen to podcasts, but I just don't have the patience to listen to podcasts. I like to be able to read at my own speed and to look at just the parts that interest me. So I'm not a huge podcast fan. But everyone is different. The main thing is you have a system where you're constantly looking for the very best information to share with your community. So Peggy, good luck with your creations. Let's check in with a couple of other friends. Claire Clinton says hello. One of our favorites is tj. You're such a blessing to all of us. Well, thank you. And Clinton says www.win okay, I guess that's just a polite way of saying you're a winner. If I missed that, let me know. And Mr. Sh had another question as well. Suppose you're in an interview. The interviewer asks you to self introduce without including your name, personal details, family background, your education background. Then how will you introduce? I'm going to assume you mean an interview for a job. If that's the case, just start talking about your skills and expertise and how you've helped other people and do it with the understanding that the person interviewing you may be most interested in that same skill. So if someone asked me to do let's say I'm being interviewed to do a media training and I was given the same restrictions as you and I could tell someone's a little nervous I might launch right into a story. A number of years ago I'm in a hospital in Houston, Texas and I'm with a surgeon and I put him on camera, he instantly freezes. But then I turn the light off and he thinks I've turned the camera off. I said, how does that feel? And he says, oh, T.J. that was awful. That was horrible. I'm still recording it. I then play the camera back. I said, what do you think of this guy? He was laughing. He was practically in tears. He says, wow, T.J. i came to you thinking you were going to teach me acting skills for the camera. Instead you taught me. I already know how to act. I just have to be myself and I'll be fine. That's what I teach people to do. That's what I can teach you to do. So it's only about a minute. Maybe that was 70 seconds. But I can tell a story where I'm not talking about myself, my name, rank, serial number, trying to be interesting and useful. Give useful, relevant information to the person interviewing me. That is what I think is your best option. Even if they don't tell you, you can't talk about yourself. By the way, if someone's interviewing you for a job and you start talking about your name, where you went to school, that's all on the resume in front of you. So when you do that, you're telling the person you're boring, that you don't follow social cues because they can see all that right in front of them. So my advice, regardless of any restrictions given to you in an interview, a speech, a presentation, the best habit to build is always to start off by saying something interesting to the audience. So don't talk about yourself. Talk about something interesting to the audience. Do that and you'll be in good shape. So, Clinton, thanks for the questions. Thanks for all the questions on all the social media platforms today. I've got a couple of other big stories that I want to get to. We try to mix it up in this show. I've got typically two, three big topics I want to do a deep dive on and do a little more of a planned monologue. And the rest of the time we can have a conversation, you get to ask questions. We can have more of a free for all. But I do want to hop into topic B. This was the the topic of my TikTok video and my 15 second videos on social media this morning that some of you might have seen. But topic B, the two best friends a bad habit ever had. What are the two best friends? Number one, you being in a bad mood. Number two, you being tired. When you put those two things together, bad habits are in business. It is so easy If I'm a bad habit to come after you and convince you, indulge in me. If you're already in a bad mood, if you're already really tired. Because if you're in a really good mood and you're energetic, it's easy to be motivated and positive and then you're going to go for that run or lift weights or do that thousand word blog post. But if you've had a lousy day, an argument with a family member, friend, colleague, and you're just feeling lousy and you're a little bit tired, that's when it's so easy to say, to heck with that exercise I was going to do. I was going to walk 12,000 steps today. I'm at 8,000 now. Forget about it. Let me just veg out and watch tv. I was going to eat that healthy salad. You know what? I'm so annoyed at a family member, I'm going to eat that big bowl of ice cream. I'll show them. This is why it is so crucial. It's not self indulgent. It's actually a positive thing for you to actively try to put yourself in a good mood. A lot of people like to make fun of affirmations. Stuart Smiley on Saturday Night Live was a caricature of that. I'm wonderful and doggone it, people love me. It sounds silly, a lot of affirmations do. But you know what? If it makes you feel better, you are more likely to then follow the good habits you want to follow in your life. If you're in a bad mood, it's just really easy to say, to heck with everything. Let me eat a whole pint of ice cream. To heck with this. I'm not going to walk to work today. I am just going to hop in a cab. I don't have time for this exercise. Bad moods foster bad habits. So you may think the whole idea of positive affirmations being optimistic is cheesy and not science based. I don't know about the science as far as just telling yourself I'm happy and wonderful and beautiful, making you live 10 years longer. But I do think there is a connection between telling yourself that you feel good and then being less annoyed and less bothered and less depressed at life and less being in a bad mood. And once you're not in as bad a mood, it's so much easier to focus on good habits. Same with being tired. If you're tired, it's so easy to say, ah, to heck with healthy eating. Let me eat this whole bag of Doritos because they're just sitting here in the drawer not getting any fresher. I'll start the diet tomorrow after a good night's sleep. How many people have gotten themselves into trouble late at night? Let's say you're traveling, you're in a hotel, different strange people, you are in a bad mood, maybe bad business dealings, and you're really tired. You put those two together, especially when there's alcohol involved, well, that's when a lot of people get themselves into profound trouble. It's the combination, the bad mood and feeling tired. So that's why I believe it is fundamental that you actively do things to put yourself in a good mood. I do something every day in one of my habits. It's on my checklist, it's in my selfie speak program. And I just say, smile right now and decide to be happy about one thing. And I write down what that one thing is. It sounds stupid. First time I heard someone doing that, I thought, that sounds stupid. And then I gave it a try. And for me, at least, it seems to work. Now, if something horrible happened, your dog just died, your best friend just got run over and is in a hospital, I'm not telling you. You've got to smile and say, oh, this is the greatest day ever. I'm not asking you to have a cultish, fanatical, fake smile on your face at all times. I'm asking you to try to focus on things. Just think about things in a positive light to make you go into a better mood, to make you feel better. Even a little bit will increase the odds that you can then take the next step and do a good habit rather than sliding back into bad habits. If your boss is yelling at you and annoyed, and a family member sent you an email asking why you forgot to do this or that before you left the house today and all of your colleagues are going to McDonald's or some other hamburger joint, and you've already decided you're going to be a healthy eater and not eat hamburgers and French fries and milkshakes for lunch. If you're in a bad mood, it's just that much easier. Say, what the heck, let's just do it. And if you didn't get enough sleep and you're tired, you're thinking, well, you know what? Let me justify the Coke, because it's got a lot of caffeine in it, or mellow Yellow has even extra caffeine, so I'll drink a lot of this sugar water with caffeine because I deserve it because I'm tired. All that sugar and garbage in soft drinks is poison for you. It's a bad habit. Again, I'm not saying you can never have a soft drink in your life, but it needs to be an occasional rare treat, not something you consume on a daily basis. So I want you to give thought to how you can make yourself get into a better mood on a daily basis. I do things like I read a joke every single day. I write a joke every single day. They're not that good. No one's asked me to do stand up comedy yet, but it's almost impossible to try to write a joke without bringing a smile to your face, without trying to look on the lighter side of things. And I do this early in the morning. Helps get me in a good mood. That plus getting enough sleep. You've got to experiment and do what it takes to get enough sleep. If you are worried when you do an inventory of your daily habits that you are simply not doing enough good daily habits and that you're doing too many bad habits. You're eating bad food, you're not exercising enough, you're going through the motions at work, you're not creating, you're not improving your finances, you're not meeting friends often enough. If you are doing a serious inventory of your habits and the good ones you're doing, the bad ones you're doing and you don't like the proportion. Too few good habits, too many bad habits, then I would start by looking at these two areas. Are you doing enough to put yourself in a good mood? And if not, look for some simple, easy things. Could be as simple as a joke app where you spend 10 seconds a day reading a joke. Could be as simple as doing a little doodle a day and laughing at your own childlike drawing. The other thing is get more sleep. If you're grumpy and you're not happy with your life and you're not happy with your habits and you're not happy with that proportion of good habits to bad habits. Just this one thing alone could completely change your life. And this one thing is go to bed one hour earlier than you're going to bed now and turn off your cell phone and all screens. Read a book. If you can't fall asleep, read a boring book. You will fall asleep earlier, you will be more rested and that way you can keep these best friends of bad habits further away. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. That was our topic B for the day of the best Friends Bad habits Ever had more to come. Plus your comments, your suggestions and your thoughts. All that and more. We've got the final 25% of the show. We have another 30 minutes left in our two hour show. We'll be back in just one minute. See you then. Okay. And our friends on TikTok, you get to stay with us through the break as well.

When you come back, we have, we have comments on Instagram.

Okay.

Looking great out there. Do you have any, like, cough drops?

Well, not that I can get in the next two minutes.

Okay.

I'm ready whenever you are. So if you have a job, I would be reluctant to turn it down for now. If you're really passionate about training, do it. Handle your other clients, evenings, weekends, vacations, until it's too much. Also realize that you may have five clients today, but if they're hiring you for the day and that's it, there's no recurring revenue from them. If it's a regular job and you get a paycheck every month, that is much more valuable. Even though on a daily basis what someone might pay you for a day of training is much higher. Because in the training business, until you're really established, you can have five clients in one month and make three times as much money as you did in your old job. But what happens if you may, if you have no paying clients for the next two and a half months, which could happen. Also remember that outside training budgets and consulting budgets are the first thing to get cut quite often in a recession. If you're already there as a full time employee, you might be there and can weather a downturn. So especially if you're young and I know you're very young, I'd be very reluctant about turning down a job, especially if it's from a well known company and you can learn from it. But good luck in your career. I'm glad to hear you are getting clients nonetheless. So thanks for joining us. Sai and Marcel. Do we have another comment or question from any of our friends on Instagram or Up Live or Facebook that I might have missed? Okay. And a special hello to John Ixigas, who has joined us on TikTok today, as well as Aidan Teardrop have all joined us on TikTok and unfortunately we can't talk to you through the main feed. So that's why you're kind of seeing me up and sort of the behind the scenes look. But we're very happy you joined us. I love TikTok and please, if you do get a chance on TikTok, like check out some of my 15 second videos there. I do typically post every single morning seven days a week. Lets dive right into topic C and this relates to the story I mentioned with shopping topic C. Is it time to rethink retail shopping habits? You see this in the news every single day. Item may, season ounces. It's shuttering 125 stores worldwide. Item Ikea shutting down a major store in Coventry, England. Putting 325 people out of work every single day. We see more and more stories like this and yet people still invest in retail stores. And it makes you wonder what's happening. I well remember Blockbuster video coming out mid-1980s in the state. I lived in Florida at the time. Even then I was thinking, aren't they going to go out of business when people don't want to use VHS tapes any longer? Blockbuster had the option of buying Netflix at a very low amount. They passed on it. Blockbuster could have hired the team to build an infrastructure so that they could be distributing video online and through the mail. They chose not to. They said, we're a retail store. We're going to stick with being a retail store. And by golly, we're a retail store. And they did that until they went bankrupt after 25 years. And it certainly appears that the Macy's of the world are headed that way now. Some retail stores are migrating to online. Walmart is doing, I guess better than a lot with its online presence. But let's face it, they're basically all being destroyed by Amazon. And is Amazon a perfect company? No. But I can't be a hypocrite and tell you Amazon is awful. Don't use Amazon. When I buy from Amazon virtually every day, it does raise the question of what is the best habit for consuming. There's pros and cons to both. If you get in your car or you walk to a store, the pros are you're really looking at something. You got to make an exact precise decision. It's worth hauling home. You can sort of hold it up. If it doesn't fit, you don't have to buy it. You don't like how the shoes feel, you don't have to get it. In some cases you could make the case that you might spend less buying in a store. Just the wait in a line alone may make you decide. Let's come back another day. In some ways, it's too easy to buy online. One click on Amazon. Boom. One click, boom. Someone mentions a book I like, boom, click. I don't even think about it. And There are times when I overdo it and I get a book and I read it two pages and I think, what was I thinking? Why didn't I look in more detail at the reviews? I could tell this was not going to be a good book. And I wasted my money, plus I wasted the paper, plus the shipping cost and the driver coming all the way to me and the environmental cost of the shipping and the truck and the paper, packaging it, the box, packaging the paper. So there are environmental problems with more and more online shopping. How do you regulate your own shopping habits? That's what I'm interested in. Post your comments here. I would say other than groceries, and if you want to account, going to a restaurant is a type of retail. It's retail food at some level, although I guess governments classify it a little differently. But other than spending money at grocery stores and restaurants, that in a typical month, almost between 1% and 0% of my consumption patterns are at stores, traditional stores, brick and mortar stores. What percentage do you have and are you happy with that? I am more or less happy with buying things through Amazon. It might not always be the best bet, but their return policy is great. The delivery is great. But yes, there is the environmental problem of all the boxes and the packaging and someone making a special trip just to my house and the gas, the fuel, the truck to get it there. It is better if everything could just go to one store. Is it time to change our habits? I can tell you right now, if you are in a career and you are working at a store, it is time to go deeper. What we were talking about earlier today, lifelong learning. It is time to learn a new skill. Because the days of being a sales clerk or a sales manager at a department store is risky at best. It's kind of like being a truck driver. Estimates are that artificial intelligence programs in automated trucks are going to completely eliminate the jobs of about 3 million truck drivers in the next 10 to 20 years, just in the United States. I mean, here's a rule of thumb I have, and forgive me if this sounds in any way condescending. I don't mean this to sound condescending. If you are in a job and you're doing something that somebody 100 years ago who had a fifth grade education was doing, you got a real problem. Because chances are your job is going to become obsolete and you're not going to have a job in the next five years. I'm not assuming a robotic apocalypse where the robots take over everything and 98% of the world is unemployed. I'm not saying that in the short term, I think employment could even go up as people learn new skills, more and more opportunities. Certainly I have more opportunities to work all over the world essentially with clients who benefit from my expertise. And I benefit from them because I can reach them through artificial intelligence programs and software programs through my online courses. So it creates more opportunities for some, but it takes away opportunities for others. And that's the problem with driving. Fine, to be an Uber driver, to be in between a couple of gigs or you're trying to figure out something or a side hustle, but you just can't convince me that every Uber driver will be out of business business in five to 10 years because Uber wants to make money. And if they can make more money by just licensing and being a go between of artificially intelligent self driving cars, boom, they save 70% of their cost right there. Not having to pay a driver. Uber, believe me, they do not care at all about drivers. They care about money. That's what a corporation is supposed to do. But especially a corporation like that where they don't have drivers as official employees. Stores like Macy's, department stores, even the Tiffany's of the world, which is doing very well in the stock market and has a strong brand, by the way. We don't give stock tips on this advice. I'm not telling you to go buy Tiffany's. Nothing in this show is ever about securities. Regulated advice. Let me put that caveat out there. If you're in a store showing people an item that they could see online and giving them facts that they could see online and telling them information about a product they can see online, you got to ask yourself, what is your plan B three to five years from now? What habits you cultivating right now so that you're ready for the day when your boss comes and says, hey tj, you're a great guy, we love you. Everybody here on the showroom floor likes you. But unfortunately we just got word from the bosses at headquarters from the big city and this whole store is being put out of business and we're closing our doors in 30 days. Nothing we can do about it. You have to be prepared for that day and whatever country you're in. I certainly hope you take advantage of any social net that is provided you and training programs, but don't rely on government. I'm not bashing government. I'm not here preaching a libertarian philosophy. Regardless of whether you are in a high safety net place like Copenhagen, which is a beautiful place, or a place like the United States, where there's not as much of a safety net. Nobody really cares about your career as much as you. Nobody really has as much of a stake in your life, your well being, your financial well being, your ability to make money from working than you do. So you got to take it seriously. And that's why I am intrigued by these continual patterns of stores going out of business. I mean, we've certainly seen it with bookstores for decades now. There was a Borders and so many Amazons have gone out or not Amazons. So many of the Barnes and Noble stores throughout the United States have gone out of business. There's still a few left in New York City, but they used to be a mainstay in malls all over the country. And we've wondered for the last dozen years, who buys a book in a bookstore? I like to go to a bookstore. I like to read through books in bookstores. But I don't want to carry around a book the rest of my day or take it to a restaurant and spill coffee on it. I buy the books online. And you may make the case that that's bad for a lot of reasons, but I know I'm not alone. And that's why the Barnes and Noble retailers have for the most part, gone kaput. Now what Barnes and Noble has done and what some smart, nimble retailers are doing is they're trying to create experiences. They have author book signings. People will still go to a bookstore and buy a book if the author's there, and that's sort of the price of admission. They have things like coffee shops. I don't want to buy a bagel and a lunchtime snack online yet. If I want to get out of the house, I'll eat there. So that's something that Barnes and Noble has done. And frankly, Macy's and a lot of other stores all have a lot of restaurants now too. Is that the future? I want to know from you. What is the future retail and what habits are you worried about? A lot of people are very self disciplined about not going to the mall and coming home with 20 packages. You'd feel embarrassed walking in the house. And family members or spouses saying, why do you have 29 boxes but it's late at night and all you have to do in the comfort of your own bed is click, click, one click, one click, one click. And the boxes come delivered at different points over the next several weeks. That somehow can be easy, sometimes too easy. What are your retail habits? Do they need to change? Feel free to share with me on that. You can post on TikTok, you can post on Periscope, Twitch, Facebook, YouTube. We are here and open for business on every single platform. And let's check in, see if we have a couple of friends who have added anything. I see we have a lot of people participating on Instagram today and Facebook and YouTube. I wanted to go over a couple of other big stories of the day and share with you, but I wanted to make sure I didn't leave anyone out. I'm going to address a habit here that may seem very mundane, But so many habits are mundane. And ultimately how you live your life is often a function of how you do a dozen, several dozen mundane little things in every single day. I wanted to share with you a story from thriveglobal.com this is a great website founded by Arianna Huffington. This is what she went to after the Huffington Post. And Thrive is all about giving people upbeat information on how to improve their lives, how to essentially thrive in the world. This is a story called these genius strategies for improving your posture will help you stand straighter, feel better, and get more done. The Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy got famous from a TED talk where she talked about simply having posture where you stand like Wonder Woman, very upright. You can't see my hands are on my hips, fills you with certain level of confidence and makes you feel better and is something that can give you confidence. There's some controversy about that study and how it was replicated in subsequent studies, but in general I think that there's some validity to wanting to have the best posture you can. When you see people all rounded, shouldered, making themselves smaller, it sends a message. I'm not confident. People like to deal with confident people. And if your posture is bad, can make you feel less confident, can make you less inclined to speak, can make you not project the level of authority you want, and it might make you less credible, less successful, whether you're trying to make a sale, whether you're trying to convince someone to hire you. So it's a minor thing, but I do think it is an important thing. I've got some tips of my own posture, but I also wanted to share with you some tips from the good folks at Thrive. Here's one suggestion they have Roll up a scarf to make a do it yourself lumbar pillow. And a physiotherapist from London, Samantha McPherson, gives this advice. I tend to slump when I drive and it makes me tight and crotchety. So I ball up my scarf and pop it behind my back to Keep my spine neutral and my chest and shoulders open. It's simple, yet so effective for a long commute. So here's another tip that I had not heard, and I hadn't heard of that one before. I'll share with you mine in just a moment. This one is pinch your shoulder blades together. When I begin lifting weights, I discovered that the muscles around my shoulder blades were not as strong as I thought. And as a result, my posture wasn't great either. To lift weights safely, I began practicing pinching my shoulders to develop stronger shoulder muscles. I'm gathering he just means like this. Oh, that does. That does something. I think I almost pulled a muscle there. That is a. That's an interesting stretch. This not only helped strengthen my muscles for my workout, but I discovered it helped my health and mental state. Today I pinch my shoulder blades while at my desk before walking out on stage or walking anywhere. Improves my energy, my focus, my confidence and my mood. That's from Francine Tone, an attorney based in California. Another tip, visualize an anti slouch posture. After years as a ballet teacher and gym instructor, I can say that using imagery is a great way to help change your posture. And it can be done anywhere. Whether you're sitting at work or walking, it's just a matter of finding the right imagery that works for you. A couple of my go to visualization exercises that I've used with clients and students. Imagine yourself as a puppet with a string attached to the top of your head, pulling you straight. Or imagine you're wearing long dangly earrings and try not to let them touch your shoulders. This is Jill Lister Martin. She's a health coach in Wellington, New Zealand. So that's great imagery of really trying to have good posture. I'll tell you something I do because this is something that has been a problem of mine in the past. I don't think it was because of any insecurity. I think it happened because as a child, not so much now, but as a child I was much taller at an earlier age than other kids. So I would lean down to talk to them. I'm not an abnormally tall person now. I'm about 6ft tall. But as a kid I was often 5, 6 inches taller than everyone. So I think I sort of leaned down and it built a bad habit even to this day. So I do two things every single day for my posture and this is going to look silly, and I've showed this to you one other time, but I do a 60 second exercise where I go up to a wall and I put my feet about two feet out from the wall, and then I simply lean backwards. You can't quite tell in this angle, but if the wall were behind me, I'm leaning backwards, my hands just fall down. And I do this for 60 seconds every day. What happens is it completely realigns the body. Once you stop and stand up and walk, you feel 10ft tall. It completely realigns because there's so many things all day long, kind of forcing us to curve forward. Our cell phones, our laptops, our computers, plates on a table. So we're asked to bend forward all day long. This way, I'm bending the other way. And it's not physically, it's no great exertion. I'm not sweating. It's no lifting of weights. It's a simple thing, but it completely realigns my back, everything. And I feel like I have perfect posture. The other thing I do, and I'm not advocating any particular product, I bought this on Amazon. I. I have a back shoulder brace for posture. You can look on Amazon. You strap it on, you tighten it, and it just sort of forces your shoulder blades back. And I do this. I put it on in the morning. It takes about 15 seconds to put on. Typically do. I keep it in the kitchen. Typically do it when I'm making some coffee or getting a healthy breakfast. And I just leave it on for 15 minutes or typically 30 minutes. I don't have to do anything. I can be sitting, I can do other things, but it helps realign my back and my shoulders. So that's what I do every day for my posture. Because I do believe that when you feel you're at your full height, you'll be more confident, you'll exude confidence, and that's just more attractive to everyone, whether you're trying to sell an idea, a product, a service, or yourself. So good luck with improving your posture. I said Peterson. The reason I mention that is there's a very famous psychologist named Peterson from Canada who is quite controversial because of his stances on male female relations. But he's a big proponent of posture and having strong posture. That. That is a gateway into many other good habits. It's also a gateway when you have bad posture to bad habits. We're coming up near the end of the show, but I wanted to just say a special hello to a few more of our friends. Peggy says. Oh, Peggy wrote an article for Thrive Global. So Peggy, thanks. Feel free to share a link. I would love to see it. So share a link on our Facebook page. I realize you can't do that if you're watching us on Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, and I believe Snapchat. But if you ever want to share an article that relates to habits, especially if something we're talking about, I'm not going to consider it spam. So we'll definitely, definitely be happy to take a look at it. So, Peggy, feel free to post it there. Sy writes in what is the one single habit that changes lives? Sy, that is a tough question. It's very hard to come up with just one. People have asked me that before. To me, it comes down to making a fundamental decision that you're going to think for yourself. If you think for yourself, it motivates you to become a lifelong learner. If you're a lifelong learner, it's very hard not to be a creator because if you think for yourself, you're going to be thinking, I can do this better. If you think for yourself and you create for yourself, your finances are going to go up. If you learn to think for yourself, you don't just automatically go with the flow of what every advertisement is telling you. Eat Kentucky fried chicken, eat McDonald's, drink Coke. We're bombarded all day long with messages of big companies to buy their stuff that's bad for us to buy everything on Amazon. If you learn how to think for yourself, solves those problems. And questioning everything. Even questioning me, Si, you should be questioning me. That's how you learn. Ultimately, I believe that's how you will have more fulfillment in your life. Bertrand Russell is one of my favorite philosophers and if you read his works, especially as they relate to questioning pop culture, religion, things of that sort, you'll get a better sense of my own view. So we're pretty much out of time today, Cy. That is a big question. We could easily spend an entire two hour program on that. I'd like to thank Sy, Peggy, all of our regulars, plus our newcomers for joining us today. Special hello to all of our friends on Uplive, our regulars on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and every other platform. It's been a great show. I've had fun. I always have fun with these. It's fun talking about habits, building stronger habits, building better lives. As always, we're here for you. If you have a topic for tomorrow, you can email it to me. TJ walker.com you can send comments, you can send praise, you can send criticism, you can say what you think of this shirt. I do read the comments. I don't necessarily change everything because of any one comment. But I do respect and listen to each and every one of you. I'm TJ Walker, the habit influencer, hoping you become your own own habit influencer on every sphere of life. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow. All right, friends on TikTok. Thanks a lot. We're going to sign off. See you tomorrow. Okay, Marcel, I'll call you in a minute. This is a chicken introduction.

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