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

Welcome to the Habit Influence here. I'm TJ Walter. Thanks for joining me today. This is the program where we talk about how to build your good habits and how to minimize bad habits. It's all about creating a more fulfilling life for you. We don't talk about politics here, political philosophy, macroeconomics. It's just about personal habits to make you have a better life. Things you can control. We can't control what goes on in London or Vienna or Beijing or Washington D.C. we can't control what goes on right here in our own bodies, our own minds. That's the fundamental principle behind the show. I'm T.J. walker. Thanks for joining me. I am Habit Influencer. This is the Habit Influencer show and it's really about helping you influence your own habits. Not that I have some Svengali like power over you or anyone else. It's about a community of people getting together, trying to figure out best practices, tips, tricks and techniques on how to build strong habits. We all want good habits and yet we often do things that are contradictory. For example, health. We want good health. And a part of being healthy is having a good, positive mental attitude, telling yourself, I'm a healthy person. But can that go too far? I'm sure you've noticed someone in your workplace or perhaps in your school who came to work sick, coughing. They should have stayed at home, but they had this attitude, well, I'm going to tough it out and I never get sick. Meanwhile they're coughing all over people. That's not ideal. It's always a fun fine line. Some people are hypochondriacs and tell themselves, well, I'm just sick and poor little me, woe is me. And they spend half their life in doctors. That's clearly not the ideal. But other people refuse to admit they are sick and it can jeopardize the health of other people. With so many folks worried about the coronavirus spreading around the world, this is of an even greater concern than it is right now. I'm thinking about this issue because I had to make a judgment call today. Do I call in sick or I go to work because I have a bit of a cold? You might not be able to tell or care, but my throat is scratchy. It's a little bit hard for me to speak now. What's different about me calling in for sick is I do work from home and anyone I would have contaminated, my wife, my daughter, my mother in law would have already gotten them sick because we do live in the same house. So it's a little bit easier for me to go to work when I'm not feeling great because I don't have to worry about the contagion. Of course I try to stay away from family members if I feel like I'm being contagious, but it's not that decision of do I venture out? Is it a good habit to be tough, to tell yourself you're resilient and to prod your way through to work, or is that bad habit? Should you just take the habit of get back to 100%, don't jeopardize anything, get maximum amount of rest, Is that the better habit? It can be a fine line from time to time. So I hope to spend our normal two hours today, but if for some reason my throat conks out, I may have to truncate the show, make it a little bit shorter. And Marcel, I'm getting a little bit of feedback. If we can hit the mute button on your end, that'd be great. Did you have your mic on? Do you have your laugh mic on? Okay, apologies to Marina and Carindon on TikTok to everyone else in our haste did not have my microphone and I should have remembered. And Marcel, you need to remind me of this. Okay, so we have a few technical problems there today here. I mistakenly thought the problem with the audio today would be my voice because I have a cold and it's harder to speak. And no, that wasn't the problem. The problem is I'm a dummy and I forgot to put my microphone on. And Marceau, I'm still getting massive feedback from the phone. I'm going to need you to hit mute or I've got to turn the phone off. Okay, so somebody just did something right there that deserves a little bit of scrutiny. I just called myself a massive dummy. On the one hand, it's nice not to be arrogant, to be self effacing. On the other hand, many people go a little too far in that extreme. When you call yourself a dummy, your brain hears yourself calling yourself a dummy. And there is a school of thought. I don't know if I think this is a hundred percent true in every situation, but there is a school of thought that says that's a negative affirmation and it does long term damage. You hear yourself call yourself a dummy and after a while you believe in fact that you are a dummy. I don't really think I'm a dummy. I think I was absent minded for a second for not putting my microphone on. But too much of that negative language, too much of that put down language can erode self esteem. I happen to think I have a pretty healthy self esteem in a normal, healthy way, positive way. But if you don't feel like you're completely confident, filled with self assurance in most situations in life, I urge you monitor your self talk. There's a book I found very instrumental in my own thinking and was really a part of the foundations of my selfie speak programming that I've come up with for my own courses. It's a book called Self Talk by Shad Helmstetter. I would recommend this book to you. It's available on Amazon and it is considered one of the classics of the whole self help and personal development genre. So you may want to check that out. We got a lot of exciting topics today. Special hello to our friends on TikTok joining us and we still have you through sort of the side feed with a cell phone. We can't connect you in the regular way, but we're very happy that you're here. Special hello to all of our friends on Uplive joining us. Happy to have so many hundreds of you joining us yesterday just from that one platform and our regular friends on Instagram, Periscope, Facebook, YouTube and all the rest. Now this show is a little bit different than a lot of shows. Typically the host comes on, gives out their big ideas of the day and I do that sometimes. But this is more of a community. It's a way for us to all share and be a part of it. So rather than me starting, I wanted to start with you and some of your comments. Here are a couple of emails sent to me from some of my online personal development students and my online students plus all of you who are part of this show. You take precedence. So when you have questions, comments, topics you'd like to address, let me know and we'll typically go to you first ahead of the plan. Topics I wish to discuss and I've got several big, big topics I do want to talk about today. But first let's go to Joanna, who is one of my online public speaking course students. She writes she has a question about my theory that when you're giving a speech, you should limit your ideas to literally a handful. A handful of key messages for any speech or presentation are your top five things delivered per presentation with headings and covered as what you will learn at the start for each. For example, mine would be for a two hour presentation. Number 1. Gratitude 2. Mindfulness 3. Habits 4. Mindset 5. Self care can you create subcategories within Key points or is this where you cross the line into too much information? Joann, I'm so thankful you asked this because this really goes to the heart of the fundamental dilemma most people have when they are preparing presentations and that is they've got so many great ideas they want to share with people. They get in the habit of just dumping everything out there and trying to cover more, more, more, more. And the attitude is quite often if I tell people everything I know, I'll be even more useful and they'll like me and think I'm smart. So I'd ask you to back up before even coming up with your top ideas. What is it the one thing you want your audience to do after hearing you? Now, there's different types of presentations. You mentioned a two hour presentation. If it's a classroom and you're the teacher and you're testing them, that's a whole different type of presentation. In that case you can go into more detail. Most of what I do in my online presentation schools and courses and in person is helping people give presentations outside of the class classroom. So there's no teacher there grading you and controlling your life. So that's why I ask you to start off with define in one sentence what is the one thing you want your audience to do after listening to you, then come up with no more than a handful of key messages to motivate them to do the one thing you want to do. A message is not a theme. You listed things like gratitude. That's not a message. That's a word. That's. That's not a message. If it's, you should have gratitude for specific good things in your life that might be a message. But your five things Gratitude, mindfulness habits, mindset, self care. That's. You could write 5,000 page books on each one of those. A message is something that has a subject, a verb and an object and it has a specific meaning to your audience. You mentioned subcategories. You can have subcategories in a book, in a white paper, in I guess, a movie. But when it comes to a speech, as opposed to a college lecture where people are writing down all the notes and studying it for a test, I don't believe you can have any such thing as a sub point. Now this may sound confusing at first. Let's step back for a minute. Joanne, I want you to think of the best speaker you've seen in the last five years outside of the classroom. And forgive me if you're a student, but you've seen other people speak Politicians, perhaps members of the clergy. You've seen other civic leaders, you've seen people give speeches and presentations. Now tell me every message, idea number fact you remember from the best speech you've ever seen. Now, I've asked people this question for years. I've never had anyone come up with more than five ideas they remember from the best speaker they've ever seen. Again, I'm not talking about a classroom or your CEO and you've seen this person speak once a week for five years. I'm talking about someone who spoke once and you heard their whole speech. Can you really remember more than five ideas? I've never found anyone who can do that. Quite often people remember nothing, or one idea or two or three. Once every six months, somebody remembers five. So, Joanna, that's why I urge you to really think first and foremost. What do I want my audience to do then? What ideas are going to get them to do it? So if you're speaking to an organization about personal development and you only have two hours with them, I wouldn't try to cover all the five things you're talking about. If habits is really important to you, then have five messages that just relate to habits. Don't even try to talk about gratitude or self care or mindfulness or any of these other things. Your final question to me that you were nice enough to write in is, is this where you cross the line into too much information? Yes, it is. The biggest problem most speakers have, it's the number one habit problem that gets them into trouble. When it comes to speaking, the number one habit that harms people is not saying uhs or ums. The number one habit is not flop sweat. The number one habit problem is not. Oh, I forgot what I'm going to say. The number one habit problem is giving too much information, too many ideas. I don't mean speaking too long. I mean using that time to convey way too many facts, too many numbers, too many things that are just disconnected. So you need to narrow your focus to literally just a handful of ideas. Even for a five hour presentation, or in your case, a two hour presentation, a handful of ideas. Use the rest of your time to tell stories, to tell examples, case studies really drive home your five ideas so that someone can look at it, taste it, touch it, feel it, hold it up to the light, try it on, and have a thorough, deep, rich understanding of your idea. That's your message. That's the best way to spend your time. So Joanna, thanks for writing in and good luck with all of your future presentations. Special hello to some of our friends joining us on TikTok. We have Samanen has joined us, Nathan has joined us, Marina has joined us on TikTok. Thanks so much for saying hello. We've got other questions written in this one from Bramina Francis Xavier and it relates to the interview skills course. And this is about a situation. Many of you might not have had this before, but it does come up occasionally. What happens when you have a job interview over a meal? For more executive positions, this is quite common. It's also common typically, not as the first interview, but for sensitive positions. Higher level executives, quite often they want to see how do you perform in social situations. If part of your job is going to be entertaining clients and you're sticking your napkin in your neck and slurping your soup all the time, they may want to know that if you can't go to dinner without drinking three bottles of wine excessively, prospective employers like to know that. Now I'm exaggerating. Typically that's not what people do in a job interview over a meal. Brahmina writes in about the food. What if I prefer the food they all ordered? That sounds easy. Also, could ordering different food from what they all ordered affect you in a positive way or in a negative way? Here's my recommendation on food. If it's a job interview, yes, you're there to have a meal, but the primary focus should be ease of speaking and not being distracted. Some foods are just more difficult to eat than others. I would probably avoid things like French onion soup because the cheese is sort of stretchy and gooey and can be quite messy. I would probably avoid a difficult shellfish like lobster. If you're cutting things and you don't want to splatter. The person who's interviewing you, they may think it's amusing, but they may think it's rude or that you're uncouth. So I would opt in favor of simple foods and foods that are relatively easy to eat. That's really my only recommendation. Also realize big company, they're picking up the tab. Don't say, wow, this is my chance to have everything. Let me have the two cocktails and the appetizer and dessert and everything. I would kind of follow the lead of the person who's interviewing you. This doesn't mean you have to order the same thing. That might even look like pandering if you get exactly the same thing. Oh, you're having this appetizer. I'll have it. You're having this cocktail that seems like you are Trying too hard. But if they pick something that you're going to get anyway, I wouldn't steer away from that. Now, if your person, your host, who's interviewing you and called you together and invited you for this dinner meal, doesn't order a glass of wine or a cocktail, then I wouldn't either. I would follow their lead. If they order a glass of wine and you don't have any health or moral or religious reasons against wine, then I would probably order a glass of wine. If they order a second glass of wine, I. I would stick to just one glass of wine. That way you don't have to worry about any loose lips or anything else. Certainly don't act embarrassed. If you don't want a glass of wine, you don't have to give any reasons why. Just be happy to have a glass of sparkling water or whatever it is you want. If you have certain dietary restrictions, my recommendation, don't talk about it. Nobody cares. Just order what you do want. Don't tell people what you don't want. Now, if you're ordering something and there's a chance the kitchen could put something in that's going to give you an allergic reaction that would harm your health, okay, it's fine to ask the kitchen or the waiter to make sure the kitchen doesn't put that in. If there's any way you can order something that's simple, so you know there's typically no chance of anything you're allergic to getting into the meal, then I think that would be the best habit, the best practice in that particular situation. Now, if someone wants you to eat something and you just don't want to, don't act embarrassed about it. If you're a vegetarian and they're like, oh, try this steak. It's fantastic. I just think you should say, no, thanks. Be polite. Don't say, I don't eat meat. That's murder. Just politely say you don't care. Try to follow them. And remember, the main purpose of this meal was for the job interview for them to get a better sense of who you are. Here's one last tip. Don't go starving. I know when I'm really, really hungry, I'm ravenous. And it doesn't necessarily impress my family or friends when they see me wolfing down food, sometimes too quickly. But the stakes are higher if you are on a job interview and it's over a meal. So I might go as far as to recommend that you eat a light snack beforehand so that you're not worried about scarfing down your food. Maybe you're used to eating appetizer, dessert and an entree and the person interviewing you only has an entree. In that case, I would follow the lead. It's easier for the sequencing of the meal and the conversation if you each just have an entree. Again, it's helpful to eat a little bit beforehand so you're not acting in a gluttonous manner. So Brahima, thanks for the question. Good luck with your job interviews. I hope you get the job of your dream and I hope all of your interviews go brief. Well, thanks again for writing. So again, you can post your comments right here in the social media platforms regardless of whether you're on Instagram, Up Live, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok. Our friends are with us. You can post your comments or questions anywhere. We'll try to scoop them up and deal with them right away and address them. Say hello to our friends on Instagram. Fortune Tribes has joined us. I can feel some changes in your voice. Yes, I have a bit of a cold. I think I'm past the age where my voice changes necessarily, but I do have a bit of a cold. Yes, thanks. Thanks for the concern. Web Developer writes in and has joined us. Glad you're here. And Perez Eduardo has joined us. I believe that's on the Up Live platform. Just sent a little heart. Well, thank you so much. If you're a first time viewer. Very happy to have you. So happy to have all of our new friends from UP Live. Captain Black has joined us also from Up Live and someone else where I don't see a name, I guess it is some form of Asian Alphabet so I'm not able to make that out. But happy You've joined us. Chantal7379 is with us today on Instagram. RK Shing has joined us. Asma, our good friend in India and one of our top students and also a top personal development trainer in her own right has joined us today. Asma, good to see you. And applenugget has joined us switching over to the Facebook platform. I see that Alexander has joined us. Alexander, a colleague and collaborator. Glad you're here. Joan Appandi is here, says hello. Obadiah has joined us. Hello brother tj. Yes, thanks. Thank you brother Obadiah. And Mohammed is with us saying hello to me and Marceau and everyone else. So thanks for all the hellos. We will be coming back to you, your questions, your comments throughout the day. I am going to take a little more time doing this. Just some nice warm tea to sort of soothe my throat so I can stay with you for the entire two hours. Today we've got a number of interesting topics in topic A. Today we'll be discussing building good habits the passive Cinnabon way, believe it or not. Topic B, do finances really take care of themselves? The answer may surprise you. Also, organizing your data for security. We're not a political show, but there is a major political party in the United States today that is having a bit of an embarrassing situation because they can't count the votes for a very important election. And it does bring up the question of how can we as individuals take better care of our own data. And we'll be looking at some in the news segments, top stories around the globe on issues related to habits. We'll be checking with CNBC and their reviews of the best alarm clocks to help you go from sleeping to not sleeping and being as active and energetic as possible. JLo Jennifer Lopez continues to get attention, mostly very positive attention, from her halftime performance at the American Super Bowl. Again, apologies to those of you outside of the US but it's a huge cultural phenomenon in the United States where people watch this thing that we call football and there's a lot of entertainment in the halftime. We'll be talking about further analysis there, plus a review and critique of the top seven calorie counting apps. I'm not necessarily endorsing calorie counting apps. Some people use them, swear by them. We will be reviewing that. Also, some interesting new data in on the habits of old people over 50, like some of us and the media consumption habits of young millennials. The divide is getting bigger and bigger as far as traditional media consumption versus digital media consumption. All that and more coming up on today's Habit Influencer. I'm TJ Walker. I'd like to thank you for joining me again. As always, we are open to you. If you have questions, you can post them on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, whatever platform you're on. This show is unique. We are, to my knowledge, the only daily personal development show in the world specializing in habits that's being broadcast simultaneously on, depending on the day, a dozen to 20 different live streaming platforms. So our audience is growing every single day. Happy for our regulars to come back, but also very happy for brand newcomers joining us today. So thanks so much. Let's dive right in with topic A. Building good habits. The Cinnabon way. You ever been walking through the mall, minding your own business and then all of a sudden it hits you in the nose? That scent, it's the cinnamon, it's the sugar, it's the fresh dough. And before you know it, you find your feet moving in a new direction. You are walking toward that Cinnabon stand. And if you have tremendous, tremendous willpower, you keep walking. Because you probably realize as I do, that one of the worst things you could ever put in your body is a Cinnabon. It's nothing but sugar, salt, fat, the worst kinds of processed carbohydrates with forget zero nutritional value. It's got, you know, minus about 500% of the recommended daily allowance of anything in a Cinnabon. But it takes willpower to walk past it. Cinnabon wants to motivate you to take an action. It's trying to influence your behavior. Cinnabon is trying to influence your habits. They want to build a habit in you of every time you walk in a mall and you smell them to go over and buy one. That's their business model. I'm not knocking that. And yes, I've had one before, it's been a number of years, but I've had a Cinnabon. They are tasty. But look at what they do. What Cinnabon is doing when they are trying to motivate your behavior, change your behavior, influence your habits, is they want you to not think. They want you to be passive and to simply react. Cinnabon wants you to become a regular customer. They don't send you affirmations in the mail and say, please repeat the following affirmations. I love Cinnabon. I love Cinnabon. I deserve Cinnabon. Please say this three times a day. That's not what Cinnabon does. They don't ask you to write on a placard I love Cinnabon and put it on your mirror. That's not what they do either. And they certainly don't invite you to attend a three day workshop where you walk over the hot coals of a Cinnabon oven and practice visualizing getting to eat Cinnabon. They don't do that either. All of those things require work. Thinking, intellect, rational thought. As Sinban realizes, that's their enemy. If you stopped and thought about, hmm, is this really giving my body the fuel it needs? You would not buy the Cinnabon if you actually thought about, is this going to make me feel healthier? Is this going to make my waistline improved? Is this going to make me more energetic for working out later? All of those rational thought processes would guide you away from the Cinnabon? And that's not what they want, they want a pure reaction at a gut level, not at head level, not an intellectual level, not a thinking level. But they want you to be passive and just, oh yes, positive reaction in being in a positive state. So we know that's what really works. There's certainly one technique that does work effectively. My challenge to you is whatever habits you are trying to build in your life, you've got to be just as aggressive at engineering the cues, at engineering these habits so that you can then do it passively without having to think about it. And I realize it's a little bit hard to come up with a smell that's going to instantly motivate you to go to the gym. It's hard to come up with a smell to make you instantly want to read a great book rather than watch trash tv. So I'm not suggesting you have to rely on the olfactory sense. What I do want you to think about is how can you somehow galvanize action in the part of your body, your hands, your body, whatever body parts you need to do this? How can you organize your body and influence it to do something without having to think to just make it sort of an automatic response where you're doing it passively? I try to set these things up in my own life on a daily basis, on a regular basis. So I want to meditate everything every single day. I want to meditate first thing in the morning for 10 minutes. But I want to make it as passive experience as possible. So for starters, I have an automatic email reminder that comes to me telling myself, tj, it's time to meditate. So if I do have my phone on, and I'm not dogmatic about never having a phone on in the morning, I'll see. Oh, there's a reminder. I've got to listen to my and do my meditation. The next thing I do to make it really passive and easy for me, I have a 10 minute meditation session already recorded. It's just my own voice, it's just very simple where I say tj now it's time for meditation. Empty your head. Don't think of anything. Just focus on breathing in through your nose. Slowly relax and then exhale through your mouth. Clear your brain, don't think of any. I'm basically just repeating that. I recorded it on my cell phone once. 10 minutes long. But it's so much easier for me to do the meditation rather than just finding a quiet, quiet place in the room and having to think and then hearing a squirrel outside or a dog bark or all these other. It eliminates all those other distractions. Plus I don't have to use any other commercial app where they might interrupt things and ask me to give them more notifications or upgrade or buy something else. So it's just my own voice guiding me through meditation and I make it really easy for myself so I can sort of passively just slide right through it. After I do the meditation, I quickly I'm already there in the app with my audio, so I just hit one other button. That's my selfie speak program where I then listen to my own voice tell myself what habits I want. It's easy. I can be eating breakfast, just keep the headphones on. I can be checking out news, I can be looking at news stories on habits preparing for you. I can be doing anything and I'm just sort of sitting back listening to this audio recording, reinforcing the positive habits I want to have and practice on a daily basis so I can be passive. I don't have to sit there and write it all out and think about it, cogitate and reflect first thing every morning on what habits I want. I'm being bombarded with audio reminders of what I decided I wanted days, weeks, sometimes months earlier. But I can be half asleep and as long as I have enough strength to do this boop. Hit the play button for the next 20 minutes. That's how long my audio selfie speak program is. All I have to do is not hit the off button. And I'm continuing to get the benefits from it because I'm getting constant reinforcement to help me figure out how do I want to maintain habits on a daily basis. So that's my challenge to you is we might not be as crafty as the good folks at Sam Cinnabon to make what we want mouth wateringly good. But you've got to figure out some way to make it easy for you to do the things you want to do. Even hard things. We have to somehow break it down and make it easy for you. You know it's really easy for me to get up at 6am and without an alarm clock. Is it because I have superhuman willpower and I'm incredibly disciplined? No. Is it because I'm one of these crazy people who only needs four hours of sleep? No, it's because I made it really easy for myself by going to bed at 10 o'. Clock. Now you might not want to go to bed at 10 o', clock, that's okay. But I want you to make it easy for you to do Things you need to do. Chances are you need eight hours of sleep. If you're a normal human being, you can kid yourself that, oh, I can get by on four or five. No, you can't. You might not die, but you're not operating at full capacity. So the easy way to get up when you want to, fully refreshed and energized. I mean, that's the goal. The goal is not to get out of bed at a certain time. It's to get out of bed feeling rest, rested, relaxed and ready to go. Make it easy for yourself in the back end by going to bed eight, eight and a half, maybe even nine hours earlier. You do that and it will be just as easy, maybe not as tasty, but just as easy as anything else. It'll be just as easy as buying that Cinnabon. Okay? And I've lost. I've lost Marceau, my colleague. We're going to take a quick 30 second break. We'll be right back. I'm TJ Walker. This is the Habit Influencer. Okay. And Marceau, if you can call me back. And our friends, Sam. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. This is the Habit Influencer. This is the program where we talk about building good habits for you individually. As individuals, we're not building societal good habits, although one of my operating theories is the more individuals have good habits, the better off any society will be. So there is a societal impact. I want to thank you for joining us. Our good friends on TikTok are with us and happy to see. Looks like Kyle has joined us. Amar and Bozeman has also joined us. Plus Jackson on TikTok. And you're getting the side view today. Sorry about that. A number of good friends joining us on TikTok and also Instagram plus Facebook. And Tracy has joined us. Good friend Tracy Liu has joined us today. Thanks so much for being a part of the program. Rayaz has joined us. Venue, Arsenal has joined us. Plus Benedictus and Ravinda. Always happy to see such a multicultural audience. We have a huge following here in New York and the United States, but often a larger following in India, specifically South India. And happy to hear from our friends from Egypt, the Middle east, many African nations and European nations represented in the audience as well. So thanks so much for being a part of the show today. Billings has joined us on Instagram. Thanks. What is cinema you're writing? I'm not sure. Supman. Oh, you're saying sup. Not sure quite what that means. And we have other Folks have joined us on different platforms. So wherever you're watching us from, really appreciate you joining and spending a little time with us. If you have a particular question that relates to habits, personal development, then please let me know. Post them. We do give you preference around here. I come to every program. Oh, what is Cinnabon? Okay, so one of you wrote in reference to a topic I was addressing a little earlier today about Cinnabon. Cinnabon is a corporation. I believe they're based in the United States, although I have seen them in airports and facilities and malls around the world where they make very tasty cinnamon buns, hence the name Cinnabon. And they're often in a different place in a mall than all the other food places. They're typically not in the food court because their scent is so distinctive. They don't like their scent to get caught up in all the other scents in the food court. So they're often separated and they, they're known primarily for selling one thing. They're cinnamon buns. They are tasty, but a nutritional horror show. So that's what we were talking about earlier. And the whole point there is those of us who care about our habits, building habits on a positive basis, need to really look at where other major influencers in the world, where do they succeed? Cinnabon succeeds in influencing us. They've influenced me before. Not through rational thought, not through getting us to focus more, intellectualize more, although those are all good things, but by triggering in us through a cue, something that creates an automatic response to do something. In this case, it's not something healthy. What we have to do as human beings who want to control our own lives is figure out how do we structure our daily lives, how do we commit to daily habits that make us healthier, that make us happier, that really help us fulfill the goals we want. And there's a lot of tools out there. Some may be leading us in the right way, some might not. I want to share with you one that did grab my attention, that just came out in the last day. Part of what I do to prepare for you always is to try to find the very best stories that relate to habits. This is one from cnbc, and it purports to show that there is a science now on the best type of alarm clocks to help you get up in the morning. Now, some wildly successful people brag about how early they get up. CEO, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, supposedly gets up at 4am The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, even earlier than that, believe it or Not Former first lady Michelle Obama allegedly gets up at 4am I'm not an advocate of that at all. I think that's crazy unless you just happen to wake up at 4am but there's been some new research done and there was a study published, and CNBC has amplified it. But Stuart McFarlane was the lead researcher and here's what he says. Imagine a scenario where an athlete will perform better when they warm up. Melody may warm our brains up more effectively for the day's activities rather than being shocked into action. So that's the theory that you shouldn't have the it's too jarring, it's too annoying, and it doesn't really help. Why is this? Well, the researchers hypothesized that the combination of tones that rise and fall in a song's melody promote arousal within our system, which in turn may lead to increased alertness. That according to the lead researcher. And so that's the theory behind this. So they're suggesting that you want something that is not the startling alarm because that can confuse brain activity when waking up. They're still trying to do more research on exactly what songs can best help people, especially in what they call sleep inertia, to transition from sleep to awake. But the researcher suggest incorporating tuneful sounds that you can hum or sing along to a couple of the songs that were believed to be very good for waking up. The song Good Vibrations by Beach Boys and Close to Me by the Cure. These are recommended. What do you like to wake up to? Let me know. Go ahead and share that with the audience and you can post on TikTok Facebook. Anything else? I am still extraordinarily skeptical about the use of alarm clocks at all, and I don't want this to be a regular recurring show bit here. But I do think that if you're using an alarm clock, that's by definition showing you're not getting enough sleep, you're depriving yourself of sleep. People love to talk about, oh, Paleo diet, let's do Paleo. What do people do in simpler time? Well, when it comes to sleep, we know what people did. They went to bed when it got dark out and they woke up 8, 9, 10, 11 hours later fully rested. They didn't have artificial alarm clocks disrupting sleep and destroying sleep patterns. So I'm still in the camp that says you, you should never use an alarm clock. Now, I understand there are extenuating circumstances. Occasionally if I have to catch a plane and I've got to get up at 4am and I cannot miss it without losing thousands of dollars. Sure I'll use an alarm clock. But as far as a daily practice, it is an extraordinarily unhealthy thing because you're depriving yourself of needed sleep. Your brain needs sleep, your body needs sleep to recover. If you need an alarm clock to wake you up, by definition you did not get enough sleep. It always seems odd to me. Very few people say deprive yourself of needed protein, deprive yourself of obvious needed vitamin D or vitamin E, deprive yourself of soap and water. And yet people feel perfectly free to advocate depriving yourself of sleep. Which if you ever use an alarm clock, that's, that's the whole reason for an alarm clock to deprive your body of sleep. You need, and I understand not everyone is as fortunate as I am to work from home and to be able to control my own schedule. And if you have to work a graveyard shift from midnight to 8am it's extremely difficult to reorient the body. And there may be extreme situation. But the average person who has a 9 to 5 job, at least in a lot of western countries and you've got to be on the road by 8:15 to get to work. The idea that you're just going to stay up watching TV till midnight, one set the alarm clock 6, 6:30 and routinely get two hours less sleep than you need. And it's somehow going to be fixed by an alarm clock on the right music or some other alarm clock. I think that's barking up the wrong tree. But I will try not to make alarm clocks my hobby horse on this program. Thanks so much for joining us. I see Jackson has joined us. 90 minute intervals. This is the key. Those diets are pseudo slow science. And let me go back up here, but I think I missed something. Jackson says what about simulated lighting? I have seen some people have, I guess an alarm clock that brings back lighting the way of the sunrise. This mimics the sun to stimulate the hypothalamus. See, Jackson likes to hear reggae music. I do love reggae music, but I don't, don't need it. In an alarm clock, Jackson writes 90 minute intervals. So there certainly is a school of thought that is documented by a lot of science and evidence that there are sleep patterns. And when you wake up in a certain range in your sleep pattern, it's much better, more restful than other period. I do get that. I do understand that. Here's the problem. I just found find that 99.9% of the world is either too lazy or too incompetent or not diligent enough to really track their sleep patterns. To figure out, I need to be getting up exactly 7:14 and that's the optimum time of the alarm. I think it's impractic. It's kind of like calorie counting, which we'll talk about later. And you simply. For most people, most. There are exceptions. For most people most of the time if you simply go to bed earlier and you stop watching anything on a screen an hour before you really need to go to sleep, you'll wake up feeling perfectly rested and you don't need to do the cycles in the right 90 minute step or stage of that sleep cycle. And I'm just, I'm very skeptical that most people can really pull that off long term. I do think it's very simple to pull off the concept of don't look any in any phones or screens or laptops or iPads an hour before you go to bed and you'll get a much better sleep. You also fall asleep much, much earlier. People tell me all the time, oh T.J. i can't. I never go to bed before midnight. I can't possibly go to bed before midnight. I say, oh really? Have you tried reading a book in bed at 9pm? Oh TJ I couldn't do that. I'd fall asleep right away. What does that tell you? If you fall asleep at 9am or 9pm reading a book in bed, that means your body needs sleep. Then go to sleep at 9pm what's the worst that could happen? Somebody thinks you're not cool because you went to bed at 9pm Know. Guess what? Unless you're in high school or maybe college, who cares? Nobody cares if you're cool or not. You need to be focusing on your health. What makes you feel great? I actually did. Typically I go to sleep at 10 o' clock at night. I actually did fall asleep at 9 o' clock last night and I woke up at 5:30. I felt great. I don't know that I felt cool, but I felt great and I felt wonderful, well rested, even though I do have a little bit of a cold. So that would be my advice there. So C. Jackson writes in this is the Key. Those diets are pseudo science. I don't know if you're talking about the diet of a particular prescription for music on an alarm clock or the lighting if you're talking about back to the food. And S. Carlos Garcia says, what about the deep sleep cycle? Thanks. So yes, there is a Lot of scientific research on sleep cycles, and we go through REM stage, other stages of sleep, and it is better for you to wake up at a certain point. So if you had your own team of sleep scientists monitoring you all the time, in theory, it would be better to wake up at a set time in a set part of your cycle. Again, I just find it's too complicated. Part of the test I have for any habit in your life is, is it easy, is it simple, is it fun? And does it give you some reward pretty quickly? If you can't say yes to most of those, it's not going to happen. That's my problem with, with trying to wake yourself up at an exact time is it gets too complicated and people don't do it. And the next thing you know, you're just back to that alarm clock at 7am and hitting snooze buttons for an hour and being incredibly unrested. And C. Jackson writes, REM cycles occur earlier when sleep deprived. So I agree with you. And by the way, it's perfectly fine to disagree with me. From time to time we're going to disagree. And full disclosure, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a PhD in nutrition. What I do is try to apply a rational approach to looking at the best information out there through the lens of what habits are most likely to create a better lifestyle, a better health. If your issue is health, more financial success, if that is what you're after. So I'm trying to use a systematic approach of helping you figure out the easiest way, the fastest way to build habits, to send you in the right direction. And that's why the issue of diets come up. It's very complex because, yes, you can lose a lot of weight on keto, yes, you can lose a lot of weight on Atkins. Yes, you can lose a lot of weight eating 5mms a day. The problem is they're not easy to maintain. That's the element I should have mentioned earlier. Not only should a habit be easy, it should be sustainable. If you can't sustain it in the long run, what gut is it? It's just going to set you up for failure. Let's check in with some of our friends on Facebook. Mohammed simply writes, I love Cinnabon. Yes, it is tasty. And it's a part of reality that many of the worst things for our bodies, many of the worst things for our brains are bad for us. As a kid, I used to love watching professional wrestling. Ric Flair. I grew up In Charlotte, North Carolina, where you could see Ric Flair in the shopping malls, because that's where he was. That's where a lot of wrestlers were based. But I don't continue watching a lot of professional wrestling these days. It's just not something I find uplifting. Cinnabons are very tasty. There's no doubt about it. Snickers bars are really tasty. I do eat them occasionally, but it's about proportion. It's about what is your standard operating procedure, what is your default? Yes, I occasionally. But my default dessert is fresh fruit. I had lunch right before this program started, and my dessert was a bowl of raspberries, blueberries, strawberries. And yes, I did sprinkle a few chocolate chips on top. And yes, there's processed sugar in the chocolate chips, but it's such a small. There's so much less refined sugar in a dessert like that than even a little Snickers bar. So, again, I like sweets. I'm not trying to tell you you've got to become perfect. What I am looking for ways for myself and for you to engineer our lives, to design our lives, to have habits that support our goals. Our goals. If you're like me, you're going to be healthy. You want to be more or less your ideal weight. You want to have the strength you need to do what you want, to live the kind of life you want. That's why it's important to have proper rest. That's why it's important to eat proper food. Doesn't mean 100%, doesn't mean, oh, wow, I had a Cinnabon, I had a chocolate chip. It's the end of the world. I'm a horrible, horrible person. I'm a failure. I deserve to be sick. Now. I'm not a fan of ever feeling guilty about what you eat, how much you weigh, what you look. I think guilt is largely a useless emotion for people who want to improve. But I do think it's important to figure out, what are your goals and then how do you get there? And typically, the way to reach your goals is to break it down into very specific habits you can do on a daily basis. Nobody became obese because of one action overnight. Nobody goes from obese to being their ideal perfect weight overnight or in one action. It's about daily habits. Daily habits made you obese. Daily habits can make you probably proper body weight or whatever weight you want. I'm not telling you what you should weigh. What I'm telling you is I want you to decide how much you Weigh how you live every part of your life and then design backwards. Once you've figured out what the goal is, what are the habits that will get you there? And that's what this show is all about. We've got a lot coming up in hour two today, so you're not going to want to go away. And we're going to click program note our friends on Instagram. We have to shut off for a minute. We'll be coming back at three minutes after the hour. So if you lose us, just tune in a couple minutes after three minutes after two and we'll be back with a whole additional hour of the program. And in hour two we be going to Big topic B, which is finances. Do they really take care of themselves? Popular conception. No. Finances don't take care of themselves. I have a bit of a contrarian view on that. Also in topic C, organizing your data for sanity. A lot of people in the United States today going crazy because one of the major political parties had a big vote last night and they can't organize their data. They can't count the votes, they can't say who won. Now, we're not here to talk about politics, but it's a good reminder of how important it is to organize our data. And I'll be giving you some best practices, some tips on how to do that, even as simple as just how to organize your email. All that and more coming up in hour two of the program. I'm TJ Walker. This is the Habit Influencer show. We are in our second month of the show. This is a bit of an experiment. We come to you every single day, Monday through Friday, 1 to 3pm and it is a community. It's a group of people who get together and we talk about best practices for how to build stronger habits to lead a fulfilling life. Not about any political party or any religion or anything. You can be anywhere you want. Because I believe all human beings have a fundamental interest in having more control over their own lives and of leading fulfilling lives on their terms. That's what I want, is for you to live life on your own terms. So that's what we're about. And it's a free forum so you can participate. You can text comments on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, on YouTube, anywhere and everywhere. And forgive me, I think I unfortunately ignored a couple of our friends on Instagram on TikTok. Jackson says, I love how you integrated your content so widely. Well, thanks a lot. What I found is habits really affect everybody. Everything you can break almost any part of life down whether it's good speaking, good media skills, down to habits. It's Michael here has joined us, Poppy has joined us and C. Jackson again, nice comments. You're doing a good, good work, my friend. Well, C. Jackson, thanks so much. Appreciate friends like you being a part of this. And TikTok Bimbo has joined. Interesting name. Thanks so much for that. It is the top of the hour. We'll be back in about three minutes at three minutes past the hour for hour two of the Habit Influencer, I'm TJ Walker. See you then. Sa. Sam. One second. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Welcome back to the Habit Influencer Hour 2. So happy you could be with us. A lot of top news stories that relate to habits, plus your calls, your comments. When I say calls, you can record yourself on video and just post it on our Facebook page. If you are watching from another format, you can always just go to facebook.com and type in TJ Walker Personal Development. One of the advantages of going to the Facebook page is there's a lot of freebies and a lot of extras that are posted there. In fact, just yesterday I posted, and it's still good today, a link to a discount on one of our new online courses. So if you're at all interested in personal development courses, you can often get free passes for courses that have just come out and you're sort of my test group. So that's a reason to head on over to the Facebook page. TJ Walker, Personal Development Even if you prefer watching on TikTok or Up Live or any other format special hello to our friends joining us on TikTok. And Jackson writes by process, I mean how you curse, curate, how you develop content like this because you really are on to something. Well, I hope so. And Jackson, here's my theory. I mean there are tons of great personal development books in the world. There are tons of great books just on habits. I love the Power of Habit by Charles Duhig, New York Times writer, but he's off busy writing New York Times columns all the time. And I love Atomic Habits by James Clear. He is fantastic, but other than an occasional podcast or seeing him on tv, you don't really get to ask him questions on a daily basis. Stephen guys is another great expert on habits, but I just got his latest book last night and started the first 10 pages. Elastic habits. He's fantastic. But then again, other than occasional guest appearance on a podcast, I don't see these other experts on habits doing something like this where they can be a part of a real conversation in real time with real people about habits in their daily lives. So that's what I'm trying to do a little differently here. I don't know if I'm the best at it in the whole world, but at the moment I seem to be the only one doing it. So it's always good to pick a sphere where you have little competition. That's essentially what I'm trying to do. Hello also to yktv, Matic has joined us. More friends have joined us on Instagram and Snapchat, Periscope, Twitch Mix and a whole lot of other sites. So happy all of you are with us. I wanted to hop right into the news the beginning of this segment. There's a story out on Campaign Live, it's a European news website, and they look at the news consumption habits of generations. Here's the interesting thing. In 2015, the difference between older people and they're defining that as 55 years and older versus younger people 16 to 34 were not that different. So for example, in 2 2015, for adults who were over 55, 42% of their media consumption was digital. Online publications, podcasts, things like that, 56% was, excuse me, 58% was non digital. Traditional newspapers, things like that. Now in2019, it's 50 50. So it has moved more towards the digital. It's gone from 42% digital to 50%. But things are a little bit different when it comes to younger people age 16 through 34. So in 2015, it was still, even five years ago, a majority digital daily habits. When it came to media consumption, 59% of media consumption of younger people, these were millennials. Plus a few years they had a 59% digital media consumption, 41% non digital things like paper, books and newspapers. But in 2019, the digital has grown to 73%. The non digital is only 27%. So it's now 27.7percent non digital for younger people. Whereas for older people in my generation, it's still 50% who are consuming non digital media. What are the implications for this? Well, in the political world, it's very clear that it's much, much harder for politicians to speak the truth, to get the truth out. For politicians willing to lie, it's much easier because lies spread like crazy on social media. The bigger lie, the better lie, often the more effective it is. Again, we're not here to talk about politics or any one party or certainly any one candidate. But there's also, in the last five years as the media world has shifted from traditional media with hierarchies and traditional forms of journalism to the free for all of digital, there's been massive changes in the political scene around the world. Not just the United States, but in many democracies around the world, vast changes of power and things that previously many thought could not have happened. It's being enabled by different type of media and different types of media consumption because especially young people under the ages of 34 years old quite often have never even read an editorial page of a major newspaper. I'm not saying in and of itself that's a bad thing. There's a lot of bad editorial pages in the world. But it's never been easier to only hear what you want to hear and to only hear information that reaffirms what you want to believe. This, I think is troubling not only for democracy, but it's also troubling for the the standpoint of personal development. Those of us who want to build habits because what we're seeing now, especially as it relates to diets, some of you on TikTok and others were commenting on various diets. We've seen conversations about diets sort of mimic conversations that have happened around politics. You have tribes of people who are so passionate, of course, you have to go keto. And anyone who doesn't do keto is killing themselves basically. And you have other people equally as passionate. And the truth is there's a lot of different scientific information out there that is contradictory. And it's easy if you decide you only want to do the Tim Ferriss diet, or you only want to do the Mediterranean diet, or you only want to do the, the Paleo diet. It's going to be easier and easier to surround yourself all day long with digital media to just reinforce things that you want to hear and that make you feel better about what you. What you already thought. This can be a problem. It can be a big problem for individuals who trying to get better because you've got a particular selection bias. You're only selecting things that are telling you what you want to hear. So we'll be talking about that more on this program in the weeks, months and years to come. By the way, I do hope that this show continues for years. One of the interesting things about talk shows is that when they work, they can work a long time. Now you need to be interesting. You've got to have your heart into it. But I'm going to bring up a name I don't normally like to reference politics at all. But there is a host, a well known American, forgive me for those of you outside of the country U.S. because most of you are not in the U.S. there's a very, very famous political talk show host in America by the name of Rush Limbaugh. Now he's highly, highly polarizing and truth be told, I don't like to get into politics here, but he and I don't really share the same politics. But I do admire his work ethic in the sense that he has done a daily three hour radio show now for about 31 years and interestingly one of his first initial stations when he started syndicating live 1987, I guess it's about 33 years now he's been on and was one of his initial stations was a station, tiny station in Tallahassee, Florida where I happened to be a host and I was making the princely sum of $5 a day hosting a one hour political talk show. Things turned out a little better for him. He's now made billions of of dollars. He's in the news this week. He's announced that he has advanced lung cancer and is going to have to take some time away from his show, but is stressed he's not retiring. And that is one of the things I find interesting about talk show host is once they have a show and they like it and they have a relationship with their audience, they don't ever retire. John McLaughlin, another American political talk show host host, died just a couple years ago and he had broadcast a show on Sunday and he died like on a Wednesday. He was on the air till the very and he was about that many days away from turning 90. Pat Robertson, another very famous American talk show host and broadcaster, also of the political and religious right, has been doing a show almost daily since 1960. So he's almost 90 years old. My point is there's something about actually talking to people, sharing a worldview, trying to help people understand things, even if you dislike. I'm giving some political examples that are highly controversial with the US So I'm not advocating any of their stances. I'm simply saying the sheer act of speaking to people, reaching people, connecting to people, seems to keep people alive a long time and keep them very engaged and enjoying what they do. Now we don't all have to become talk show hosts. And yeah, maybe you do need a bigger ego than most to do this for certainly two or three hours a day. But I do think we as human beings need a creative outlet. There's something about creating ideas, sharing them with the world. Every talk show host does that, every artist does that, every novelist does that, every software developer does that. What's the passion inside you that is burning where you want to create something to share the world? I do think that not all good habits are equal. Some are more important than others. And this habit of creating on a regular basis is such a good habit, it often creates a ripple effect of 30 other good habits. For example, I like doing this show. I'm trying to do the best I can, but the sheer fact that I'm doing this show forces me to organize everything else in my day, forces me to read another dozen books on habits every week, forces me to read every other story about habits, forces me to. Or there's so many things I can't do poorly anymore if I'm going to do this one thing of hosting a show for you. So I'm grateful to you for spending time with me today. It helps me. I'm hoping it helps you too. Let's check in and see what other friends have joined us. I see Ryan has joined us on TikTok. We have other friends on Facebook who joined us. Plus on TikTok, on Instagram as well as Up Live. Sam Cole has joined us. Novel, Apple, Nougat and Team TJ 2020 now that's. That's not a. Is that Marceau as well? I like the name of that. I hadn't seen that before. So great. So that's Marceau's, my producer's new handle, so he can keep a handle on what we're doing here. Okay, still lots to go in this hour. I'm going to take a little more a few more sips of tea today because I am getting over a cold. Topic B Do finances rather really take care of themselves? You've probably heard for years you've got to manage your money. You've got to manage your money. Money doesn't manage itself. You'll simply lose all your money. And if you don't watch every single penny, you'll end up in the poor house. Your parents may have told you that. Other financial experts have told you that. And certainly it is easy to lose money. And it is easy to go in debt, especially with credit cards given out like candy these days to almost any citizen with a pulse and an address. It's easy to run up massive amounts of debt. But I did something just earlier today I wanted to share with you periodically. I completely redo my daily selfie speak program. That's the audio where I tell myself what habits I want to Have I record it once every few months and then I listen to it every day. So this time I organized my selfie speak program according to the seven spheres of life where you have significant habits. As I organize these, self control, agency over yourself. That's the first sort of overriding sphere of life that involves your habits. The second one is health. The third, love, friendship, relationships with people. The fourth, lifelong learning. These are all major spheres of life where you have to have daily habits to support them, to make them all work. The fifth one, creation, creating, demonstrating your purpose in life to others. That is what I think is the fifth great sphere of life where you need habits. The sixth one, leisure, what you do for fun, what you do to relax. That's the sixth one. The seventh habit, wealth, finances. And I put it there as the. As the seventh one, not because I think it's unimportant. If I didn't have any money, the other six categories would all be in worse shape. Without money, I wouldn't be able to eat healthy food. Without money, I wouldn't be able to create things like online courses because I wouldn't be able to afford this studio and camera. So money is critically important. It fuels all the others. But when I found out I put these things in hierarchy, it just naturally came in seventh place. The first place was self control. If you can't control yourself, your own schedule, your own agenda, your own ability to control your body, nothing else really matters. So that one was obvious. First place. The second one, health to me is obvious because you ask people about habits, the first thing they think of typically is do you exercise, do you eat? Right those habits because if you're feeling pain, it's hard to do anything else. Well, in life, if your health is so bad you die well, then everything else is obviously completely irrelevant. So I outlined this for those of you who were able to tune into last Thursday show in some detail. We'll be reposting that segment very soon if you really want to get a sense of my overall philosophy of the seven habit spheres of life. But here's what I found out this morning. I went through my list of every single habit I do on a daily basis and I have about a hundred of them. These are a checklist I keep right here on my cell phone. And what I did is I cut and pasted my. I just somehow hit the Siri button on my iPad. Excuse me for that. So what I did was I looked at every single daily habit I have. And so I wrote down things like for number one in My self control agency. I wrote specific things down, like listen to my selfie speak audio every day. That's one of those things written down. Empty my email box every day by the end of the day. Specific actions, daily habits. So that's what I have. For example, for sphere two, the health. I have things like get eight hours of sleep, drink a large glass of water every day when I wake up, have no more than one cup of coffee. I do 20 jumping jacks every morning. Now I'm saying these not because I'm telling you these are the perfect things to do and you need to do them. I'm just giving you exactly examples of specific habits I have in my and who knows, if there's enough interest, I may share with you this whole list. These are the hundred habits I do every single day. My category for love, friendships and relationships. I have things like have dinner with my entire family every night. It's just a daily habit. Lifelong learning. I read a book a day. I listen to an audiobook a day. I read abridged ebooks every single day. So those are things and then the creating. I have very specific creation habits on a daily basis. I write 500 words a day about habits. Some of those I use for segments here, some for books, some for online courses. I write a question a day. I write a poem a day, an aphorism a day, a habit tip a day. I have very specific goals. Leisure goals. Leisure, pleasure and relaxation. I meditate for just 10 minutes a day. I try to read one joke a day. It only takes about five seconds. But I have a whole bunch of little tips there. So what I found is by the time I got to number seven, well, habits. Look what what was on the page? Absolutely nothing other than the category. Now what I conclude from that is not that you can't have certain good financial habits. Of course there are good financial habits like pay cash, don't go into debt for anything other than perhaps a small mortgage or education. And even education is dubious these days. Don't spend more than you have. Live within your means. Upgrade. There's a lot of different in general, habits you can have over the course of a month or for a year. But when I came down to daily habits to really help my wealth, what I found my finances, what I found is the other habits. If I just stuck with the other habits, it solved my problem for finances as well. Because if I'm creating on a daily basis, then I'm making more money for my online courses. If I'm doing things like reading books and going to bed at a reasonable hour. I'm not out spending a fortune out on the town. If I'm constantly trying to build my mind, then I'm not spending a fortune on the casino down the road. There is a casino several exits away from me in Long Island. I've never been to it. I'm not opposed to casinos. I'm not trying to shut them down. They just don't appeal to me. Have I ever put $5? Sure. But I don't think I have in the last 15 years. Because I'm focused on what I want, because I'm focused on learning, creating money comes out. If you're spending your time learning new stuff every day, as I try to do, through reading, through, communicating with you, trying new things, experimenting. I mean, what Marceau and I have learned in the last six weeks just on the technical aspects of trying to do a live stream show on 20 different platforms. That alone is a master's degree in electronics and information technology. If you're focusing your energies on learning new things, hard things, and creating things of value, in my experience, it's virtually impossible not to see your finances grow for several reasons. You become more valuable in the marketplace. More people seek you out. More people want to purchase your services. Services. Or hire you, or buy your courses or books or whatever it is you sell. We all are selling something. That's a part of it. Part of it is it squeezes out your time to waste money. If I'm spending my time learning and creating, I simply just don't have the time to go to New York City and do a lot of shopping, to buy a whole bunch of new suits or whatever. It just doesn't interest me. I don't have time. So that's what I want you to think of if you are trying to improve your own financial position. Sure, wasting $5 on Starbucks is better than wasting $5 a day at Starbucks. Sure, having a 24 hour cooling off period before making a major purchase on Amazon or anyplace else is good. But I would ask you get the other spheres of your life in shape first. Focus on that. Get your health in shape. You know, there's a lot of information out there about how poor people are more obese because they don't have access to good food. And certainly there are situations in some neighborhoods where the stores just have packaged products, processed, sugary food, and McDonald's is a lot cheaper than nice restaurants with great salads. But in general, I find it's actually less expensive to eat healthy for a lot of people in a lot of parts of the world than it is to eat garbage. For one thing, it's very easy to go out to a restaurant and have an entree, an appetizer, a dessert, three or four drinks. Spend $100 in the US at not a fancy restaurant, but just go to a chili's and spend 100 bucks. If you're not eating the appetizer or the dessert and you're drinking water instead of five sodas or five beers, it's going to cost you a lot less money. And you'll be healthier. When you are healthier and you're getting proper sleep, you can think better. You'll probably be more productive at your job. You're more likely to get a promotion or to at least not get fired. When your health is out of whack, you're not going to be as worthwhile to any employer or anyone who's hiring you. So it's all connected. Make sure your health is in great shape. You'll be more valuable in the marketplace if you're learning more. You'll be more valuable in the marketplace if you are actively creating new ideas, new projects, new books, new courses, new blog posts, new anything to help other people. There's a million ways of monetizing it now. This wasn't true when I was a kid or even a young man growing up, but in today's modern economy, it you are creating ideas that are useful to other people. Whether it is a blog post, whether it is podcast with advertisers, Whether it is YouTube with advertisers, whether it is an online course, whether it is an ebook, you can make money from your ideas. So if you simply focus on creating more, that helps your seventh sphere of finances. So that's what I want you to think about. If your finances are not where you want to be, if you don't have the money you need and want to live the lifestyle you want. Maybe it's not just about getting that magic stock tip. Maybe it's not about your friend cutting you into some bitcoin deal. Maybe it's about you focusing on these other six spheres of life. Make sure you're really healthy. Make sure you can control your own schedule and your own agenda and your own daily habits. Make sure you're healthy. Make sure you are learning new skills every day. I have friends who bemoan the fact that they're not as rich as some of their relatives and other friends, and yet the only thing they spend time learning are the new sports scores from a football or basketball or hockey game last night. Why would anyone pay them more money for their profession or whatever they do when they're just learning trivial information? And if you like sports, that's fine, but that can't be the only thing you put as new information in your brain. Be a lifelong learner, but don't stop there. Don't just learn. Don't just be the eternal student. Take that learning and make something useful to other people. If you do that, your finances will in fact magically solve themselves. That is topic C. So if you want to care to dissent. I don't mean to make it sound like it's easy and believe me, I'm not selling. You know, for $19, I guarantee you this program is going to make you fabulously. Well, no, it's not that simple. It's about daily habits over a period, weeks, months, years, decades. And it involves things like when you meditate and think about your own life and your own values, you're much less likely to want to make purchases just to be be like everyone else. The other day we had some friends over and they have a fabulous brand new Tesla and the wings go up and down and they make all kinds of music and it was a beautiful car. And in fact I had other friends at a party and they had a Tesla and I thought, wow, if I were like a lot of people, I would say to myself, I gotta have a Tesla. And they do look like nice cars. But here's the thing. I'm not a car person. I don't really care about Teslas or any other car. Therefore I don't have to buy that car. I just saved myself 40 or $100,000. You've got to live your life for you. Now, you may want a Tesla, go out and make the money to buy it. That's perfectly fine. I'm not preaching anti capitalism or anti on materialism. Where people get themselves into trouble is not having a clear identity of here's who I am as an expert, here's who I am as a creator. Instead it's I'm just sort of an average person going with the flow. So I have to distinguish myself by buying fancy things to impress others. That's what gets people into financial trouble. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. We have still fun to come. We're in our final half hour of the program today. This is live. It is Tuesday, February 4, 2020. We are in our fifth full week of daily broadcast here at the Habit Influencer. Let's check in with A few of our friends on Facebook. Peggy writes in. One of our regulars and also an expert trainer and personal development leader in her own right, Peggy Bell has joined us and she's missed the first half of the show. Well, that's, that's okay. We appreciate every day you can stop by and any part of time you can spend with us is much appreciated. Doctor's appointment. We're not going to require a note, but I do take your word for it. I should perhaps be at the doctor myself since I have a little bit of a cold, but I think it's a minor thing and I'll be back to normal tomorrow. And also checking in, we have, I think we had perhaps a friend or two joining. Marceau responded to Peggy there. Great. And we have a number of friends. Okay. And we have a whole lot of friends on Upstream joining US and Instagram, TikTok and many other places. Marceau, I'm getting the echo. If you could hit the mute button, that would be fantastic. A lot of other stories grabbed my attention in the last day about that relate to habits. One in particular that did catch my attention relates to body image specifically. And this was a story in the New York Times and it relates to something that happened over the weekend with the Super Bowl. Again, for those of you in another country, it's kind of like the World cup, only just in America. And instead of people in shorts, it's people running around and trying to kill each other and give themselves dementia. Forgive me. If you're a football fan, you might not appreciate that summary of what American football is about. But they always have a big halftime show and it's usually a well known celebrity. I don't know if this is still the case, but traditionally they never paid the halftime talent. The talent just got the payment in terms of the spotlight and, and the sales went up for whatever new project they were on, a movie, a book, typically music downloads and albums. So a lot of attention has gone to the halftime performer this year, Jennifer Lopez, who is 50 years old. And the reason that's being commented on is many, many people just thought that she looks fantastic. And some have praised her for that. Some feel, some have mixed feelings. So I want to share with you a comment from Jennifer Wiener. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. The title of her column is I Feel Personally Judged by J. Lo's Body. Are we supposed to look this good at 50? Now, the columnist is a woman basically the same age as Jennifer Lopez and says, here's Jennifer Lopez who. And you can google her. I've also linked to the story who does I think by any objective societal standards of beauty is quite beautiful. Thin in shape during the halftime show, she reprised certain scenes from a very popular movie she appeared in earlier this year as a stripper on a stripping pole. Now, she wasn't stripping, although she did have some rather revealing costumes. I'm not passing judgment there. What's interesting, though, is the colonist theory is that at some point, should you not have to worry about what you look like? The colonist point is, I thought at 50 years old, I didn't have to worry about looking good anymore. My gray hair, I could put on pounds. No one's judging me anymore on how I look. And now I can't do this because Jennifer Lopez has ruined it all and it means I've got to change my habits and continue to be super healthy and try to look my best at all times. I wanted to tease that apart. I don't think that human beings, male or female, should feel obligated to dye their hair. And I realize many people do. As you can probably tell, hair dye sales don't do particularly better. When I walk into the store, I don't begrudge anyone for wanting to dye their hair, but I don't think it's a bad thing to want to look as attractive as you possibly can at every age. Now, some of you have heard me say this before, but just a couple of years ago I was about 35 pounds heavier. I now weigh roughly the same as I did when I was about 16 years old, not that much different from when I was 13 years old, because I haven't grown since I was 13. I didn't have to get surgery or anything like that. I didn't get my stomach stable. I simply tried to start living healthier, eating healthy horrible portions and healthier food, and got to roughly my ideal body weight. It's not about vanity, although, hey, I've got as much vanity as anyone else. Truth be told, probably a little bit more. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to be 50 years old or 70 years old and want to look the best you can. Now, you don't have to want to be a sexist and be up on a pole somewhere. I mean, even if I got in substantially better shape and got washboard abs, you would not see me parading in a Speedo bathing suit down a Runway at a fashion show or the super bowl or anyplace else. And I'm sorry if that the concept of that image made you lose your lunch. But believe me, you're not going to see me in any fewer clothes than this right here. But I don't think it's a bad thing to want to keep yourself together to be fit, to just not let yourself go. Here's the big problem. In the United States and many western developed countries around the world, the concept of relaxing and not being superficial and letting yourself go is really the concept of eat what big mega corporations are telling you to eat lots and lots of sugar. Haagen Dazs with lots and lots of sugar and fat. Maybe if you're 55, 60 years old and affluent and doing well, you're not eating fast food at McDonald's, but you're still going to fancy restaurants and eating food with lots and lots of extra fat, sugar, salt, processed carbohydrates, and it's making you overweight, it's making you obese. And okay, you don't have to wear a bathing suit, a tight bathing suit to go to the beach. Okay, that's fine. I don't want you to. You don't need to. But the idea that you've somehow earned the right to let yourself go, I think is one of the reasons why for the first time in really the history of the world, we've seen economies go up in a society as we've seen the United States and life expectancy go down. Now, it did go up by one month according to recent statistics from the United States government over the last four year period. But starting in about 2015, until just a few months ago, the average lifespan in America went down. People live longer in 2014 on average than they do now. Part of it is because we tell ourselves, well, I'm 50, I don't have to worry about it anymore. I don't have to go to the gym or run or eat. Right. I've earned the right to do whatever I want. Yeah, you have the right to, but is that really what you want to do? Is that what's best for your life? Is that the best habit that is going to empower you to live a full, active, energetic life? That's really the question I have for you. So what do you think about this whole Jennifer Lopez controversy? We try not to delve into topical news. This is not a political talk show here today. But I am interested in whether you think it is a negative thing for a 50 year old person. It could be man or woman being seen as the height of a sex symbol the way she is. Certainly society is used to 50 year old men appearing in James Bond movies and other movies with a partner 20, sometimes 30 years their junior. That's not unusual. It is historically less usual to see a 50 year old woman held up as the apogee, the absolute peak of femininity and beauty. That's a little different. Some would say that's empowering. That's a good thing. How do you see it? Go ahead and post your comments. Whether you're on TikTok, whether you are on Instagram, Facebook, I'd like to know. And I realize this is a little out of the normal conversation for what we do here on this program, the Habit Influencer, but I do think it's relevant. We are all subjected to influences from pop culture. It affects our expectations. It does affect our habits as well. So if you have any opinions on that, please feel free to weigh in. But meanwhile, we got to go to topic C. This is also something from the news, but I don't want to. I don't want to in any way seem like I am turning this into a news show. It's occasionally just a way of starting a conversation. And the reason this is brought up is in the United States, there is a presidential election going on. One particular party is trying to find itself nominee right now. And they had a type of election yesterday and here it is a day later. They can't count the votes, they cannot control their data, they can't organize their data. And this is a big problem for a democracy, It's a big problem for a political party. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in you personally and me personally. How do we organize our own data? So that leads us to topic C. Organizing your data for sanity. Now, I don't mean just organizing your data for security, of course you want to keep your credit card numbers, sacred banking information safe. But I'm talking about the broader issue of organizing your data to be sane. Have you ever come back from a vacation, you're relaxed, you're comfortable, and you fire up your computer and wow, you've got 10,000 emails waiting. Now this is assuming you didn't spend five hours a day on your vacation answering emails. But let's assume you got away from it all, didn't answer email for a week or maybe a few days, and now you got all this stuff. How are you organizing your data so your head doesn't explode? This is a big, big problem. And that's why I believe that one of the seven keystones of daily habits deals with this whole sphere of how you organize yourself how you organize your life, your day to day schedule. What is it you actually do? I'll share with you. So what I have is daily habits is my email box has to be empty at 3:59 each day. That's when I officially end my work day. Now I do other readings, I do other things that benefit my work, but I try to get away from the computer. Literally turn the computer off at 4pm and I envision a little Fred Flintstone whistle blowing at 3:59 saying that's it, work over. It just helps me focus my energy, my attentions get more done during the day. But how do I get rid of the email? Part of it is you've got to be really aggressive at not even signing up and giving your email address to people or having an email address that you give that you don't check that isn't your primary email. That's a part of it. Part of it is being very very aggressive at unsubscribing from email and from deleting email and putting email you don't want into spam. Now it's been a long time since I've hired anyone but I certainly remember there was a school of thought. I won't tell you whether I did it or not. I'll let you guess. There was a school of thought, you know, five, 10 years ago that if you want to hire someone, someone you should have them show you their email box. If it's full of lots and lots of emails and some of them from three weeks ago, that's a sign in of itself don't hire them. They're not an organized person. Their mind is not organized. I like having that clean email box. Part of it is imposed, a discipline. I try to look at each email no more than once, then handle it. Either respond, delete it, file it, put it in a Salesforce database, but don't let it sit there and come back to it and come back to it. It's a horrible system for organizing other things that I try. I haven't done this quite as well. I haven't completely mastered it. It's one of my goals for this year. This comes courtesy of Tim the four hour work week. You heard me reference him from time to time on this program. He used to have this plan where he only checked email once a day. I believe it was 3:30 and he would send out an automatic responder to people saying if it's urgent you better call because I don't check this email but once a day. I'm Trying to force myself to look at email just twice a day. I'm not quite there yet. But that is one of my own habit goals. Goals for 2020. That's right. Even the habit influencer is trying to influence himself with even stronger organizational habits. Other things I try to do every single day just to be better organized. Eliminate clutter. When there's clutter around you, it clutters up your brain. It's harder to focus. I don't know all the circumstances as to why the votes were not counted in this United States election in Iowa yesterday. But at some point there's too many data points. There's too much clutter somewhere. It could all be digital. But I like to free my brain to think more clearly by reducing clutter. So I try to eliminate every scrap of paper from my desk by the end of the day. Now during the day I may have things going and there's activity. And yes, there are some rare exceptions. The absent minded professor who's got clutter everywhere and you ask them for something, they know right where it is. But most human beings are not like that. If there's clutter everywhere in their desk, on their computer, then it clutters the brain. You are less productive. I know. Personally, I am much more productive. If I can sit down at my desk first thing in the morning and the desk is clean, there's nothing to focus on other than what is most important. I even, and I didn't used to be like this. I even like to empty my trash every, even if there's only one or two pieces of paper. And I like to end the day where everything is clean. Right now I have a number of papers and notes for you for this show. As soon as they're done, I'm going to put them into this recycling bin right underneath my table in the studio so I don't even have to look at the extra clutter tomorrow and sift through the papers. There used to be a time I'd come in, put a paper down and now it's lost with all these other papers. I like to use a Salesforce database. Now I'm not shilling for Salesforce. I'm not an affiliate of Salesforce. You don't need. There may be a million reasons why Salesforce is awful. I don't even know. But you need something to organize yourself. So when I have a prospect, write to me and I send them a proposal for a personal development workshop or in place, an in person media training workshop or public speaking workshop, I create an entry for them. In the Salesforce database. I note that they wrote to me, I cut and paste that, or I email that email into the database. I then send an email to them and it automatically goes into the database. I then click on when I want to follow up. It might be in two days to see if they receive the proposal. It might be in a week to follow, it could be three months. But I put it in the database and I put it in a specific time for me to look at it again. And then I don't think about it and it automatically pops up on my computer screen that day when I'm supposed to follow up because I have the automatic setting on my Salesforce to show me everything that is past due and due. And typically there's nothing past due because I keep it up to date. You might be able to do all of that on a Rolodex, a piece of paper, an old fashioned catalog. You don't have to use technology for that, but you got to use something if you want to be, I believe, a fulfilled person, a serious person, a person who accomplishes things. You have to control your own data. All of us are swimming in data all the time. Friends, names, friends, addresses, friends, phone numbers, clients, customers, things to do. When are you going to go to the Sprint store to get your cell phone renewed? There's things you've got to do to control data. It's essential to being a human being in 2020. A lot simpler two or three hundred years ago when all you had to worry about was planting your corn and keeping your cow healthy and keeping your horse healthy. Not saying it was better than or easier than, but it was simpler in terms of managing data. To be a human being in 2020 and to be someone who can accomplish things, to be the fulfilling, purposeful life. I believe you need a system for managing data. And if you don't have it, it quotes causes so many other problems. I was reading an article just this morning and I've referenced it in the notes section, but it's from an expert who says there's certain things you can do to really stand out and be more successful in your career. And this one expert mentioned that he keeps the name of every single person he's ever worked with. Every association, get every colleague, and he sends every single person a Christmas card every year, no matter what, even if he hasn't seen the person in 10 years and you may give out a few Christmas cards. We do it some, but not in that systematic way. And this person says, yeah, he spends a couple days every Year. It's a massive, massive project. It's now thousands of cards that go out and there's some expense. But he says, you know what? Anytime I need something, anytime I want something, when I call or write someone I send a Christmas card to every year for three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years, they always take my call. They always respond right away. That person manages data well. I'm not suggesting you have to do things just in a cynical. For a cynical purpose, purpose of getting what you want. It's not a quid pro quo in his case. He's just sharing good feelings with everyone he knows. And then whether it's 5% or 1% or half of a percent of the people on his card list, at some point he reaches out to. It's a warm, warm feeling they get from him because he remembered them. And again, I'm not great at doing that. I send out Christmas cards to close friends and family. I have not done it. Holiday cards, we should say. I've not done it with certainly every associate, every client, every colleague I've worked with before. Probably a good idea. You can't do it if you don't manage your data. It's a problem at societal level when political parties can't even tell you who their nominee is. It's a problem at a personal level if you can't manage your own data. Certainly those of you job hunting, many of you are in my job Interview skills online course. If you can't figure out where you've been and who you're talking to, you get confused and you don't know what's going on. You're much less valuable. You're much less likely to appeal to prospective employers. So please keep that in mind. My name is TJ Walker. This is the Habit Influencer. This is the program where we talk about how to have better habits for every aspect of life, how to improve your habits in a way to make you more fulfilled, and how to give you tips on easy things that are sustainable and manageable. That leads me to my next story, because it relates to some of those things, but I'm not sure it relates to all of those things. What I'm talking about is this is a review of major apps for calorie counting. This is a review of the seven top calorie counting apps. This is on a website, developgoodhabits.com Now, I like that title for that website, developgoodhabits.Com and they're reviewing seven different apps. The number one is my fitness Pal, and it grades them on each use, how well it works, how it integrates with other fitness apps. This is $9.99 a month, $49.99 annually. I'm not advocating fitness apps, I'm simply sharing the information. I would like to know from you if you use any calorie counting apps and if you find it workable. Another one number two on the list is Life. LifeSum is another calorie counting app. You can pay between $22 and $45 for first time subscribers. The main attraction for most users for this one is the diet plan feature and you can choose between Clean Eating, Mediterranean or Ketogenic. The third app is My Diet Code Coach. Now I've linked to this story in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself and tell me what you think. Here's my bigger problem with a calorie counting app or any device that helps you count calories, it can make it easier to count calories. That's good. It certainly is a good thing to count calories if it stops you from going above the 2500, 2000 to 25 to 2700 that your body size needs to maintain its healthy weight. So that's good. It's cheap, that's good, it's simple to do. That's good. Sounds great. So what could possibly be wrong with calorie count? In my experience, it's not sustainable. No one counts calories in the world long run. If you had the discipline to count calories on a regular basis, you already have the discipline to probably have washboard abs. I realize there are exceptions. Some people never cared about what they ate their whole life, then had a massive heart attack, almost died. They saw the error of their ways and now have become obsessive with counting calories. So sure, one out of a thousand people, it might work fine. But I found anyone I've ever met in my entire life and I've known people for half a century who were trying to lose weight at some point. And I remember back in the 70s, some family member was putting stuff on a little scale and measuring it and counting calories and looking it up. This is before the Internet, obviously. Nobody does that after a few months. It is too tedious, it's too much work, it requires too much effort. It is therefore not sustainable. So for me, counting calories flunks the sustainability test. I am a big fan of calorie eyeballing and what I mean by that. And you don't need an app for that. You can just sort of tell you go to an ice cream store and you see there's small size, like a cold screen, a cold stone creamery, like their smallest size of an ice cream cone is about the size of your head. Well, common sense will tell you if you eat that, you're basically guaranteed to gain 3 pounds of fat that day. It's just mathematically impossible not to gain a lot of fat if you're eating a dessert that is 4 or 5,000 calories. Now, what I try to do, certainly in ice cream stores, ask for the child, the smallest child's portion, which is still bigger than what adult portions were in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s. Portion size gone out of control. If you're at a big chain restaurant in many places in the United States, at least they tell you the calories. So when you see that it entree is 5,000 calories and an appetizer is 2,000 and the dessert is 3,000, well, now you can see it's 10,000 calories. You've just had a week's worth of food. You don't need some app to tell you, well, I probably shouldn't eat 10,000 calories today if I want to maintain my proper weight. That's what I like to call calorie eyeballing. So that is my counter to the calorie apps. But if you use them, I would love to hear from you. Drop us a line and we're out of time for today. But you can always post your comments about anything to do with this show on our main Facebook page, facebook.com and then just type in TJ Walker Personal Development and I'll be sure to see it. You can also just email me tjwalker.com that's it for the Habit influencer. Thanks so much for joining me today. We'll be here Tomorrow, same time, 1pm to 3pm Eastern. May all your habits bring about a fulfilled life for you. This is the chicken beat production. Sa. Saki production. Sa.