On Purpose with Jay Shetty - 6 Ways to Transform A Negative Mindset & How to Overcome Fear and Anxiety

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Today, I am excited to share how we can switch our minds for better growth and resilience. We will learn about the 3-step formula monks use to train themselves to be more mindful and present in the moment, the achievable steps to help improve our focus, and how to teach our mind to adapt and learn faster.      You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:38 How to monk-switch your mind for growth and resilience? 05:52 Train yourself to equate change with opportunity 09:30 We become better at learning things as we grow older 10:03 The 3-step formula to help reshape our brains and improve our focus 14:15 "When you choose to see stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage." 16:03 Step #1: Clear and intentional goal 17:43 Step #2: Focus 19:37 Step #3: Motivation 21:28 Step #4: Service 23:13 Step #5: Create a supportive environment for your development  26:54 Welcome to the Daily Jay! Like this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally! Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The monks which I learned to train was constantly asking myself why. Every time I wanted something, I would trace the why. Is it because of a societal expectation or ego pursuit or a deep value? That three-letter word is a skeleton key for unlocking your self-awareness. And self-awareness is at the root of self-mastery. the root of self-mastery. Hey everyone, I'm so excited because we're going to be adding a really special offering onto the back of my solo episodes on Fridays. It's my short daily series on calm, the daily J. And let me tell you, it's unlike anything else I'm doing. It's part story telling,

part mindfulness, with a wide range of unique actionable insights and it's also the only place you can meditate with me each and every day. I absolutely love all the wisdom we're sharing, all the lives we're changing. And whether you want to improve your mindset, your habits, all your relationships, whether you want to work on developing more focus,

presence or equanimity, building a daily J routine just 7 minutes every day can make a huge impact. So make sure to check out the session at the end of the podcast and then subscribe to Calm for your daily dose of the daily J. Go to Calm.com forward slash J for 40% off your membership today. This week we're tackling the topic of mindset and how to approach life with focus, perspective and positivity. Of course, if you want to listen to the daily J every day, you have to subscribe to Khan. So go to calm.com forward slash J for 40% of your membership today. Hey everyone, I'm so excited to be speaking with you today about six ways to monk switch

your mind for growth and resilience. There has been a lot of research involving monks that shows how monks are really masters of the mind. I detail some of it in my book Think Like A Monk. For example, several years ago, a monk named Jonge Mingyue Rinpoche traveled from Nepal to a research facility in Wisconsin so the scientist there could observe his brain activity while he meditated. They put a device that looked like a shower cap on him and fixed hundreds of sensors to

his skull, and they had him cycle in and out of meditative states on cue. Now if you've ever tried to meditate, you sit down and what happens. To second, you try to clear your head, your mind floods with thoughts, right? It takes most of us at least five to ten minutes to settle down mentally and get into that meditative space. If we're lucky. So, knowing this, the researchers in Wisconsin were astonished by what they saw, which is that whenever they gave them the signal to start a meditation cycle, his brain immediately went into meditation mode. It was like flipping a switch. They had never seen anything like it. He was able

to switch in and out of meditation mode again and again, just like that. And here's the thing that's important to understand. This monk wasn't special, no offense to him. What I mean by that was that he wasn't following some exclusive special training program. All he was doing was he was living the regular life of a monk. These same scientists, along with others, have run many exhaustive detailed studies on long-time monks

and other seasoned meditators, and they all show the same types of results. An astonishing degree of mental control, whether in the form of focus, compassion, and even the brain indicators for happiness. Monks spend so much time training their minds that when challenges arise, whether it's dealing with external challenges, like what we're all experiencing now, or internal ones, like struggling with ego,

that's when their training kicks in. Like Young Emingu Rinpoche, we can learn to monk switch our minds so that the practices we've trained automatically kick in in times of stress and struggle. Today I'm going to share with you six ways to monk switch your mind so you can feel more resilient and experience a greater sense of meaning and purpose, especially in the face of massive challenges. Now, at the monastery, monks have what is mostly a controlled, immersive environment for their training. And so you're probably thinking,

but Jay, I'm not a monk and I don't want to be a monk. So how can this apply to me? This time where in can be your monastery or your roshroom. And in a few minutes, I'll talk about some ways you can actually create more peace in your own surroundings. I'll talk about some ways you can actually create more peace in your own surroundings. So if you're ready, here we go. Now some of you know I'm massively into movies. I already refer to one movie, now I'm going to bring in another. I especially love Christopher Nolan movies and his movie Memento is one of my favorites. If you've not seen the movie, it's about a man who has a very specific type of amnesia, a brain condition where he can no longer make new memories, and the story is told starting with the ending then working backwards.

Now since that movie has a neuroscience theme, and I'm about to delve into some neuroscience, I thought I'd do it momento style. We're going to start at the end with where you want to end up and work backwards to how you get there. For most of us, it relates to resilience. We want to feel that no matter what happens, we can handle it. That we have the tools to deal effectively with whatever life throws at us. That's our target.

Now, that might be individually and it also might be from a relationship perspective or from an organizational perspective. You're an entrepreneur or a family person. Whatever type of resilience you're focused on creating, he's the thing. In order to change your external experiences in life, you have to master your internal experiences first. There are indisputable facts about what's going on around us right now in the outside world. But on the inside, we're all experiencing it differently. Some of us are filled with fear and anxiety, while others are finding a way to navigate

it with more equanimity, and even make progress in their lives with their organizations or relationships. Some couples are leaning in and becoming more of a team. Some individuals are using this as a growth opportunity. Some companies are creating new service lines. Take ZockDock, an online service for booking in personal medical appointments. The company had a massive amount of momentum coming into 2020. But by the end of March, they saw bookings declining anywhere from 50 to 90%.

Co-founder Oliver Carras was advised to lay off staff and lay low for the duration as many companies have done. Yet Zockdog did the opposite. They expanded. Instead of trying to weather the storm, Carras says he saw an opportunity to build windmills. Instead of initiating layoffs, the company tasked their staff with creating and implementing a telehealth platform so patients could get remote care from their doctors. It was a massive effort, but within two months the company had done the

impossible. They pulled off a successful launch of a brand new telehealth platform that, under other circumstances, Karris says would have taken them two years to create an introduce. One of the greatest monk switches out there is to train yourself to a quite change, especially a change that seems negative with opportunity. Monk David Standell-Ras talks about something he calls grateful living, which is a way of cultivating trust in life and in all that's happening in the external world no matter how it feels.

As Stindel-Ras says, when you receive every moment as a gift, you ask yourself, what's the opportunity in this moment? And that's exactly what Zockdog did, And that's what you can learn to do to find the opportunities that are present in these otherwise challenging moments. But I'm sure you know countless other examples of organizations and people who are doing the opposite. They're struggling. And that's understandable. I want to acknowledge that this really isn't an exceptional time for a soil. And most of us are experiencing some combination of personal loss and financial loss or stress. That's very real. Yet, as Dr Andrew Hooberman says, part of what determines whether we struggle or find a way to thrive depends largely on

how we frame stress. Hooberman is a professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford University, who studies, among other things, brain plasticity or our brain's ability to learn and progress. He says, perhaps, the biggest determined of how we will weather storms from the pandemic down to everyday stresses is whether we run from our fears, whether we freeze, or whether we move towards what we're afraid of. In fact, neurologically, it's only really in conditions of discomfort that we can train our brains to learn to thrive from stress and become more resilient. So we have our goal. Now, to uncover how we get there, along with how ancient wisdom figures into the equation, let's take a step backwards

and look at some of Dr. Huberman's research on neuroplasticity. It used to be that we thought that once you hit about your mid-twenties, your brain couldn't change much. You can't teach an old dog or even thirty-five or old new tricks, right? But thankfully modern research shows that's just not true. In fact, in some ways we can actually become better at learning difficult things and performing at the leading edge of our ability, especially if we understand how our brains work. Unfortunately, according to neuro research, there's a pretty predictable formula for it. The first part of the formula involves three things. These are the three elements you need to be able to learn to raise your level of performance. First, you need clear intention and

direction. The second thing you need is intense focus and the third thing you need is a strong motivation. The next step in the formula for learning and growth is that you need to apply direction, focus, and motivation continuously for an extended period of time. Think about it. If you lose your direction, you'll go off course. If you lose focus, you'll be ineffective. And if you lose motivation,

you'll disconnect from the emotion that was acting like a propeller pushing you forward. Imagine a marathon runner during all those days and miles they log when they're training. If they lose sight of their direction, they won't train properly. If they lose sight of their focus, they can get distracted by all the other things that'd rather be doing, like hanging out with friends and eating pizza instead of running 15 miles in the pouring rain. And if they lose their motivation when they're out on the road or the track, they won't have the heart to keep going.

So you need to be invoking all three over and over again, just like that runner training day after day to run that marathon. And there's another part of the equation. The progress you make doesn't reshape your brain and create actual learning of skills. You can repeat until another element is added. And that element is periods of deep sleep or rest. So direction, focus, motivation, sustained along with deep rest. That's the formula for how we can reshape our brains, and it explains why young

Gamer Mingo Rinpoche showed those incredible results in Wisconsin, because that formula is essentially how a monk lives every day of their life. In focused, directed, intense effort followed by periods of rest. Fortunately, as Huubimun's research shows, you don't have to live like a monk to change your brain. You do, however, have to understand how to overcome some neurochemical hurdles. In that first part of the equation,

direction, focus, and motivation, your brain is releasing two main neurochemicals to assist with the performance and learning processes. Those are acetalcolin, which will help to make those actual changes to your brain when you rest, and noradrenaline. The noradrenaline, as you might guess from the adrenaline part, gets you amped up. Think about how you feel when you're about to compete or about to give a presentation or about to sit down to an intense work session. You might feel anxious or excited or fidgety. Many of us interpret these feelings

as negative, but as Huberman points out, some amount of agitation or even a feeling of frustration is normal to the process of getting ready to do something that's at the edge of your performance zone. It's what the initial stages of growth feel like. But many of us let these feelings of agitation sidetrack us. We can't get focused, we say. In actuality, part of the Nora Drenrenals role is to help you get focused. So instead of allowing yourself to click over to Twitter or text a friend, you need to train yourself to just get started. In a few minutes, the agitation will pass as you get into the next phase of the process, which is the sustained effort portion. So that's where that stress response comes

in. When you feel that stress of agitation, that's a time to monk switch your mind. When you feel that anxiety, your hands maybe go a bit cold or you get fidgety, tell yourself again and again, I am about to learn or I'm about to grow. Over time those body signals will cue those thoughts automatically. As Stanford researcher and stress expert Kelly McGonagall says, when you choose to view your stress responses helpful, you create the biology of courage. How powerful is that? Literally when you choose to see stress as useful. Now remember once we step over that stress threshold and start learning or performing we're in our presentation or our high stakes meeting we're working writing our book

or we're running that marathon we have to sustain the effort and this is where another neurochemical you're probably familiar with kicks in dopamine.amine, little hints of dopamine signal us that as human says, we're on the right path. And that's what draws us forward. Otherwise our brains would become too saturated with noradrenaline, and eventually it would make us give up because we'd be worn out. Occasional dopamine hits actually balance the noradrenaline

by giving us a chemical and emotional thumbs up and that keeps us going. That's why marathoners will tell themselves, just make it to the next water station or to the next intersection. Or it's why people tell you instead of focusing on writing an entire business plan to chunk it down into smaller pieces and just focus on completing one at a time, then giving yourself a mental high five. Those smaller milestones give us a boost of dopamine when we achieve them. There are other ways to get dopamine hits as well. Recess from Huberman's lab shows that things like laughter, a sense of group cohesiveness, a feeling of being supported,

or a sense of playfulness among others, gives us that dopamine that sustains our effort. So now let's backstep again and I'll show you how a monk would approach that formula for growth, learning and resilience. The first element was a clear intention or goal. For monks, a GPS that points us in the right direction is our value system. We look to our values to direct us. So I intention or our goal would link to our values.

For example, I tell a story in my book of a time when I was walking with my teacher, and we came across a monk who was an incredibly accomplished scholar. I was so impressed with how many verses and passages from the ancient text he had memorized. I turned to my teacher and said, I want to do that too. And he asked me,

do you want to do that because you want to be known as someone who did that? Or because you want to actually put in the hard work of doing it? So for monks, what we might have a goal in mind, say memorizing books or verses, we would link our goal to a deep value such as learning, rather than a deep value such as learning rather than a surface

pursuit such as ego. Did you catch the monk's wits there? It was a bit hidden. The monk's wits I learned to train was constantly asking myself why. Every time I wanted something, I would trace the why. Is it because of a societal expectation or ego pursuit or a deep value? That three-letter word is a skeleton key for unlocking your self-awareness and self-awareness is at the root of self-mastery. So train yourself to ask why for a week. Every time you want something, ask yourself why, even if it's just a type of food. Where does that want come from? If you do this with regularity, you'll start to do it automatically, and

the practice will help you connect with value-directed goals. The second component in the learning formula is focus. How many of us have sat down at our computer with the intention of doing something? we're finally going to start that course, and then five minutes later, on an Instagram, or texting a friend to see what they're up to. Without the ability to bring your focus fully to a task and sustain it, you will not make progress. There are several ways a monk cultivates focus, one of which is through mindfulness. You can think of mindfulness simply as noticing what is in the present moment without judgment. Here's a practice you can use to train that.

Simply sit in a comfortable position, breathing in deeply and then out. And then again, and now instead of trying to totally clear your mind, just notice what comes up. Acknowledge it. Release it. Like, okay, I noticed some anxiety around work. Okay, I acknowledge you, anxiety. Now I realize you and I bring my mind back to the present moment.

If it comes back, acknowledge and release it again. There's no need to get upset at anything that arises. The goal is to not have an empty mind. It's to be where you are, practicing, noticing and releasing. The monk switch you're training here is that when you sit down to start that course, when the inevitable distractions arise, you can simply notice them and release them,

coming back to focus on your project. Essayist and novelist Pico Ayah said, in an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And I love that quote because that's a way we can hack our focus, but reframing it, not as something that's hard, but as a treat, as a luxury, as he says it. Now the third component is motivation. As I write in my book, according to a Hindu philosopher named Tucker, there are four fundamental motivations, fear, desire, duty and love. Everything we do sits in one of these four motivations.

However, a monk would say, I just talk her, that fear is not sustainable over the long term. You're in Zion, T, may motivate you now, but it's going to exhaust your body and your mind. Also, fear limits your access to creative thinking and decisive creative solutions. And when we're motivated by desire for personal gratification, we may be happy

when we first get that new car or whatever it is, but we all know that feeling quickly wears off and we'll need more to achieve the same pleasure. However, when we're motivated by duty and love, these motivations create meaning. Love is the ultimate motivation and the ultimate why. And as American football coach Bill Walsh once said, if your why is strong enough, you will figure out how. So when you're thinking about what you want to do, you want to align your motivation with duty. Such as getting a better job so you can support your family or love, such as helping others, or the simple love of learning and improving.

When they opted to create a telehealth platform, ZockDock had the strongest why. Of course, the company wanted to remain profitable, but more than that, they wanted to protect their staff and their jobs. They wanted to support the medical providers who suddenly couldn't see patients in person, and they wanted to support people who were abruptly cut off from medical support during an international health crisis. When ZocDoc created their new platform, they even offered it for free to doctors

who are not ZocDoc providers. See, here's the single most important thing I'm going to tell you today. Service is the ultimate hack. When you tie your work or your goals to love and service of others, it's the most powerful way to game your brain to strive and grow. Because service not only feels good, it also boosts our self-esteem and creates connection with others.

And service is a self-reinforcing motivation. We want to keep working and to keep serving because we get so much satisfaction from it. And so we want to keep expanding their effort. Service has its own built-in reward system. For monks, our lives revolved around two distinct and intense areas of focus. The self and the not self. We'd spend the

first half of our days meditating, learning, classes, otherwise training and mastering ourselves. The rest of the day we would spend in service of others. Service was our highest purpose. For me it still is, it motivates me deeply. So that's another monk switch. Whenever possible, figure out how to switch your work from total focus on self to service. Whether it's service of your family, your community, or your company, it will help you for motivated, directed, energized,

and like you can make a real impact, even when it feels as if everything is around you is crushing down. Remember this. Emotion will follow action. Even if at first you're feeling down and defeated, if you're not sure how you're going to move forward, if you can use these steps to just get going, just start learning, just start growing, just start serving, the positive emotions, the sense of motivation of accomplishment, of connection, of satisfaction

will follow. Now here's the last back step. I promise I'd give you a monk tip on bringing some of the ashram-like peace to your everyday training grounds. You want to make your environment supportive of your development. So you want to remove or limit as much as possible the things that are putting you in an anxious reactive straight rather than a calm proactive state. One of the easiest ways to do this is to pay attention to the three S's, the sights,

sounds, and smells in your environment. Let's look at what we see. How do most of us start and end our day, not with the case or a kind word for a partner or even brushing our teeth? It's checking our phones. Data from Asurian says that the average American checks their phone 96 times a day. It's usually to check social media or our email.

And how do we feel after we do that? Agitated, negative, lonely, frustrated? Month training would be much more difficult if monks had smartphones, trust me. So one thing you can do is to try and control what you see, at least as much as possible, at least first thing in the morning. And that includes minimizing your interaction with your smartphone. So you may be printing a beautiful image or motivational quote that you put next to your workstation or your bedside table. You may scribble it down on a postent note. You may look outdoors.

That's one of the reasons monks are so tidy in Ashrem's and monasteries are typically in natural settings. We support the cultivation of internal beauty by creating and enjoying external beauty. When it comes to smells, sense evoke emotion. In fact, they're the most powerful link to memory. That's why you remember someone's cologne or perfume, the smell of cunt grass or linen hung out to dry,

because sense have such strong triggers. You want to try and expose yourself to sense you enjoy or that calm you or energize you as needed. Lavender Eucalyptus and Sandalwood are three of my favorites. The final S is sounds. When I was living in bustling New York City, I would usually end my days exhausted and maybe even a little cranky. Now that I'm in LA, which is a little more chill, it's a different story.

Later I learned about something called cognitive load, which you can sort of think of as programs running in the background on your computer that you don't actually need to be open, but are using up resources, except it's happening in your brain, right? So now I make a point to, again, as much as possible, control the sounds around me. You can't have the news on the background and wonder why you feel negative. You can't have people talking all day

and wonder why you can't find stillness. Now when I have to set an alarm, I set it to soothing sounds, instead of a blaring sound that will start on me. Try to cut down on any extraneous or unpleasant noise so you can have access to more of your brain's energy. So now that we've arrived at the beginning, here's your assignment. In addition to training your monk switches, I want you to make a list of 15 opportunities

that are present for you right now. Now, 15 might seem like a lot and it is, but that's the point, to make you stretch and get creative with how you're viewing this current time. From those opportunities, start with just one goal you want to pursue that will get you closer to that skilled, resilient, powerful version of yourself. You now have a science and monk-tested formula that skilled, resilient, powerful version of yourself.

You now have a science and monk tested formula for how to make it happen. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have an amazing day, and I hope to meet you soon. Today's mission, rewired the brain to focus on the positive. Today's tool, self-talk. The next seven minutes are about you and reframing your inner monologue. I'm Jay Shetty. Welcome to the Daily Jay. It's nearly impossible to reframe

if we're rushing ahead. So let's take a moment to slow down and get centered with three deep Breathing in and out in feeling the stomach expand and out arriving here in the present. Let's dive in. Half a century ago, the conventional wisdom said that the adult brain couldn't change. But that was half a century ago, when TikTok was just the sound of your clock in the hall. Scientists have since discovered that our brains are never done growing and reorganizing. They're never done rewiring. It's called neuroplasticity and it's led to some major medical breakthroughs. But it also has huge implications on our daily lives.

Believe it or not, we all have significant influence over how our brains continue to develop. To quote an eminent neuropsychologist called Rick Hanson, the details are complex, but the key point is simple. How you use your mind changes your brain for better or worse. Whatever we do consistently becomes an unconscious mental habit, like leaning into gratitude or dwelling on our fears. The challenge is, the brain is actually biased toward negativity, so it's really important

to take intentional steps toward changing it for the better. Okay, so how do we do that? Well there's emerging evidence that self-talk is an agent of neuroplasticity. When you shift your thinking from negative to positive? And you do it often enough, you'll move your brain in the right direction. And self-talk is an incredible tool to shift your thinking.

Self-talk both reveals and then affects how you view yourself with compassion or criticism. But today, I want to discuss your self-talk in relation to feelings and emotions. Let's take the example of being tired. It happens to all of us, right? When you're in the middle of your day, but you already feel exhausted? In that moment, you could say two different things to yourself. You could say, I'm so drained, why I don't have any energy, I can't believe I still have all this stuff to do to so many hours before I can relax. Or, I'm going to make sure I get to bed early tonight

and get a good night's sleep. Only a few more hours to go, I can do this. Basically, do you complain, or do you make a plan with a positive outcome? Frustration, hunger, discomfort, it doesn't matter. Any feeling or emotion can be met with a complaint about the problem or it can be reframed to focus on the solution. Of course, it might take some work to fight back on negative impulses

and approach self-talk constructively. But ultimately, that process of reframing will rewire your brain for positivity, and you'll feel better in the moment too. Now how many of you want some more good news? Practicing meditation has also been shown to boost the brain, which is yet another reason we close with the moment of stillness. So get comfortable wherever you are, settling into your body, seeing if you can find a position that brings you greater ease. Close your eyes if you're able to.

No worries if not. of not, just try getting as present as possible. And now let's tune in to the breath. If your mind gets caught up in any negative thoughts, see if you can reframe them in a positive light and then return to the breath. We're not judging those negative thoughts, they're natural and we want to accept them. But let's see if we can move to a more positive place. And now let's open this up by reflecting on feelings or emotions that we tend to complain about. For me, it's when I feel overworked. Now you may notice that there's often a pattern to your negativity. So how can you reframe things to break that pattern?

How else could you improve your self-talk to rewire your brain? Change might not happen overnight, but there's no rush as long as you're heading in the right direction. If this session helped you reframe your thoughts today, think about who you could share it with to help them with theirs. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so grateful you're on this journey with me, and I'll see you again tomorrow.