Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #154 BITESIZE | How To Find Your True Values and Live The Life You Really Want | Jay Shetty

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of optimism and positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 122 of the podcast with the former monk Jay Shetty. Now, so many of us these days are living lives that are not truly ours. And in this clip, Jay explains why finding out what our true values are is so, so important. He talks us through his value audit exercise, which will help all of us on our way to living the life we really want. If we've spent a lifetime living someone else's life, how do we in our 30s or our 20s or our 40s

Starting point is 00:01:56 or our 50s, how do we just decide, oh, I'm going to start finding out what my life is? I don't want to make this about you not getting your goals or not having pursuits or not wanting to become something because I want to do all those things too, but it's about why you're doing it. And it's also about making sure they're truly motivated by your inner desire, right? Like that's the point. If you want to be a doctor, become a doctor because you think that's how you're going to serve humanity, not because you think people will be impressed. If you want to go to Harvard or Princeton or Oxford or Cambridge, go there because you really want to study how to solve the world's problems, not because you think it looks good on your resume, right? That's the point that we're

Starting point is 00:02:39 going after. So where do we start? One of my favorite ways to start is looking at what we value. And values are a very intangible word. And so there's a very easy way to figure out what you value. There's two things you have to look at. You look at how you spend your money, the most painful thing you can possibly do, go through your bank statement and look at where your money is being spent. That is what you value. The other thing that we spend, just like we spend money, is how we spend our time. Those are the two most perfect ways to see what you currently value. Your value isn't what's in your head, isn't what's in your heart, it isn't what's in your mind. It's how you spend your money

Starting point is 00:03:22 and how you spend your time. So the question we have to ask ourselves is, where am I currently spending my time? And where do I want to spend it? Now, studies also show that people, everyone has to go to work. So this isn't about what you do for work. People who had more meaningful, purposeful lives and were healthier, wealthier, more meaningful, purposeful lives, and were healthier, wealthier, and wise, invested their time in education over entertainment. The smartest, the wealthiest, the most healthiest, the wisest people in the world were reading books, watching documentaries, taking courses, listening to podcasts, learning to better themselves. And so that's the first place to start. The second place, when we look at that value audit,

Starting point is 00:04:10 is I want you to write down three things that you're currently pursuing in life. It might be a promotion. It might be a new home, whatever it is, whatever it is that you are currently pursuing. And then I want you to ask this question. Is that your desire and your dream, or is it coming from something outside of you? Is it coming from a pressure of a dream? Or is it coming from something outside of you? Is it coming from a pressure of a family member? Is it coming from an expectation because your friend just bought something? Where is that desire truly coming from? And the third and final question you want to ask yourself is, do I still want to pursue that? Or do I want to change how I pursue it? Or do I not want to pursue it at all? And if you go through that three-step questioning process, you'll get to the truth of what you truly want

Starting point is 00:04:51 to pursue and stop yourselves from building a sandcastle, which the waves of time will eventually wash away. And so that's what we get lost doing. We get lost building castles that we don't even want to live in. Yeah. It's so profound. And I really think that there's something unique about the times in which we live now. There really is this dissatisfaction, this lack of contentment. And so I really think you're tapping on something that is really out there at the moment. And really, if people can get their heads around this, I think it can transform their own lives, but also transform the lives of the people around them, which I think is really, really exciting. A lot of people, and I probably include myself in this, have got an idea of what we think our

Starting point is 00:05:40 values are. But unless we actually go and audit the process of what are we spending our time and money doing, we have no idea if we really are living those values. So I really like the term audit because it's not your perception of how you think you're actually spending your money or spending your time. It's the reality of it. Is this a common thing do you think for people that there is a gap between their desired values and their actual values? I genuinely believe that people are well-intentioned and want to do good in the world. I believe that. I believe that people have a good heart. They're smarter than we think they are. They want to do good in the world and they want to do good in the world, and they want to put out good energy. But you're exactly right that that intention needs to be converted and transferred into real behavior. And this is where

Starting point is 00:06:33 you'll find, you know, you'll hear a friend or someone you know say, oh, you know, I really value loyalty and I really don't like gossip. And then you find out that that person was gossiping about you. And how does that feel? It completely feels like someone's broken your trust. And so often the way we see ourselves or want to see ourselves is amplified compared to how we actually behave. So often we think we don't have some of the mistakes that we make, but we see them in everyone else. We see those mistakes in other people. So we'll say, oh, this person's not doing this right, or I don't like the way he or she talked to that person. But if we really do an audit in ourselves, we'll realize that we have a lot of those same challenges and feelings that we may think others have. And so for me, it's

Starting point is 00:07:20 sometimes a really scary and daunting task to do that values audit. But it truly, truly is a beautiful process that we all need to go through to really realign our map and get our compass right and start moving in the right direction. I mean, is it the sort of thing that people do once? Or is it the sort of thing that people should revisit? And I guess, if I was to ask you, when was the last time you did that exercise on yourself? Yeah, great question. So I'd say that you have to treat this exercise like gardening because when you do a values audit, what you're really doing is gardening your values. And what that means is you're pulling out the weeds and you're planting new seeds. That's really the

Starting point is 00:08:03 activity that's happening here. You're planting seeds in your mind, values that are good values that are gonna grow into fruits and trees and give shade to others and help other people. Or if you don't garden once a month, let's say Rangan leaves his, he doesn't bother for the last six months, he just lets it be there.

Starting point is 00:08:21 What's gonna happen? That garden's gonna be full of weeds. It's gonna be full of stuff that he doesn't want there. And that's what happens with our values that after a while, our values start to attract dust. They start to attract being covered over by so many other desires. So I would say it's a regular habit. Once you get into this way of thinking, once you start thinking like a monk, into this way of thinking, once you start thinking like a monk, these practices become fun, right? I love the process of getting to know myself better. I love doing these audits. I love trying to figure out my values. I like potentially almost getting addicted to it. Like it feels good. And then you start to, I feel, you start to switch off from the noise around you and you really start to become tuned in

Starting point is 00:09:07 to who you are and what makes you tick. Learning about ourselves is actually the most fun thing in the world. It's the most enjoyable thing in the world. When you find out about a new way that your mind works and how this value is going to unlock this opportunity in your life, Rangan's spot on. It's such an exciting thing to do. And I would encourage you to make it fun. So I'll tell you an example of some of the fun activities that I love in the book. So one of my favorite ones is I sometimes set myself the challenge of not comparing, not complaining, and not criticizing. And the way I like to do this test is I keep a jar of post-it notes of every time I compare, complain, or criticize, I'll put it in there. And then I

Starting point is 00:09:53 have another jar of every time I'm collaborative, supportive to others, and grateful. And what I love doing is almost doing a competition with myself because I love being competitive too. I love engaging that in a competition with myself of how often can competitive too. I love engaging that in a competition with myself of how often can I make sure? So what you find is the first day you realize, oh no, I complained 10 times today. The second day you're like, oh, I only did seven times today. And the third day you're like, I only did four. And the fourth day you're like, oh, only once. And then on the weekend you binge complain again and it all goes up again. But the point is that you make it fun and enjoyable because what you understand is that you are not your criticism. You are not these negative thoughts. You are not these negative

Starting point is 00:10:35 beliefs. They've just become conditioned and habits just as your garden is not weeds. And what happens is we start thinking that we are our pain. We start thinking that we are stress, right? We say things like, I am just a stressful person, right? I am just a negative person. And the truth is you're not. You're just going through a negative space and time. You're just adopted a negative habit or a negative thought, but you are not a negative person. It's just in the same way as you are not unhealthy. You've just adopted unhealthy habits. And I think when you start making that disconnect between you and the habits you have, you start to realize, oh, if I change the habits, I naturally change.

Starting point is 00:11:21 I naturally change. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new

Starting point is 00:11:42 bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #154 BITESIZE | How To Find Your True Values and Live The Life You Really Want | Jay Shetty

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.