The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Figure Out Your Life’s Purpose, Improve Your Concentration, & Develop More Willpower with Dandapani

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

I’m excited to welcome Dandapani to the podcast. Dandapani is a former monk, Hindu priest, and entrepreneur. After spending 10 years at a monastery in Hawaii, he now works with top world athletes, entrepreneurs, and companies, including Nike, McKinsey, and Bloomberg, helping them understand and leverage their minds. His TEDx talk on the power of focus has over 6.4 million views and his book The Power Of Unwavering Focus was released in early 2022. On this episode, we talk about: the benefits of living a focused life, from a former monk’s perspective  the real cost of distraction on our relationships (that you might not be realizing)  what everyone gets wrong about pursuing happiness the one thing you need to figure out to know what your purpose in life is pragmatic action steps for uncovering your life’s purpose an exact script for getting to know yourself better how to concentrate on whatever you WANT, and let go of things you don’t want to focus on  a genius tip for building your ability to concentrate without adding any new tasks to your life the specific way to use social media to limit its negative impact on your brain three ways to develop more willpower the number one lesson he’s learned about living a meaningful life in years of being a monk & Hindu priest and so much more!  We would LOVE to hear from you any thoughts, reactions, or takeaways you have as you’re listening, so definitely screenshot and tag me @lizmoody and Dandapani @dandapanillc on Instagram.  To enter the giveaway to be one of the 10 winners of Dandapani’s new book, The Power of Unwavering Focus, comment on my most recent post mentioning something you loved or learned from the episode, and follow me @lizmoody and Dandapani @dandapanillc on Instagram.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by Seed. You can get 15% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic by going to https://seed.com/daily-synbiotic and using the code LIZMOODY.  This episode is sponsored by AG1 by Athletic Greens. Visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  This episode is sponsored by Paleovalley. Head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. This episode is sponsored by Ritual. Get 10% off your first three months of Ritual when you visit ritual.com/healthier and add the Essential Protein to your order.  Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to set better boundaries, hearing from a doctor about fighting burnout and getting more energy, or busting aging myths to add literal years to our lives. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. I have not been able to stop thinking about today's episode since I recorded it.

It's truly transformed how I think about things in my daily life, and I have been applying a lot of what we talked about in terms of practicing concentration, and I've also been thinking about the reverse, practicing distraction, and building willpower in my daily life. I also think it's such an important conversation to have because the question ultimately being posed in this episode is, do we want to live a meaning-filled life? If so, this conversation and the teachings of my brilliant guest generally are such critical steps in that journey. I am so excited to welcome Don DePonni to the podcast. Don DePonni is a former monk who is now a Hindu priest and entrepreneur.

After spending 10 years at a monastery in Hawaii, he now works with top world athletes, entrepreneurs, and companies, including Nike, McKinsey, and Bloomberg, helping them understand and leverage their minds. His TEDx talk on The Power of Focus has over 6.4.4. million views and his book, The Power of Unwavering Focus, is absolutely brilliant and goes much deeper on a lot of the concepts that you will hear about today. On this episode, we talk about the benefits of living a focused life, the real cost of distraction on our relationships that you might not be realizing, what everyone gets wrong about pursuing happiness, the one thing you need to figure out to know what your purpose in life is, pragmatic action steps for

uncovering your life's purpose. An exact script for getting to know yourself and your needs and your wants and your desires better. How to concentrate on whatever you want and let go of the things that you do not want to focus on. A genius tip for building your ability to concentrate without adding any new tasks to your daily life. The specific way to use social media to limit its negative impact on your brain. Three ways to develop more willpower. The number one lesson that he's learned about living a meaningful life in years of being a monk and Hindu priest and so much more. Dandapani and I would both love to hear your thoughts as you're listening and I really want to know what advice sticks with you the most and what questions you're beginning to reflect on from

the episode. So definitely share and tag us both on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody and he is at Don Dondapani LLC. We also have a huge giveaway for this episode that I know you are going to love. So make sure that you stay tuned till the end to find out how to enter. If you know anyone in your life who either needs support and focusing on what matters, concentrating on daily tests, or finding their true purpose in life, please send them this episode. I feel like there is so much in this world pushing us in the other direction that these tools are more critical than ever.

So please send a link to friends, family members, or coworkers that you think would benefit. Okay. Are you ready to transform your life? Let's get right into it with Don DePonnie. Don DePani, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm so excited to chat with you. I would love for you to kick us off by just sharing a little bit about your story. What was it like to be a monk and why did you leave that world?

I'm so curious. Most people's understanding of a monk or monk life would probably gather from what they've read in a book or seen in Hollywood. And that was mine too before I joined the monastery. I wanted to be a monk since that's about four or five years old. ever since then it was a quest to find a teacher that could teach me and train me. And even though I met with any wonderful teachers along the way, it wasn't until I met my guru that I found him to be the right person for me. So I decided to join his monastery and it was located in Hawaii and it was a traditional hoisted hindered monastery. So when you join, you literally give up everyone and everything in your life.

You ordained as a monk, you take boughs and you live a very strict discipline life. And that was my life for 10 years. What inspired you leaving that world? It was the toughest decision I've ever made in my life. My guru unfortunately died three years after I joined the monastery. And after that, I felt we weren't quite aligned anymore, the monastery and me. And I stayed for seven more years. And when my vows came up for renewal, I decided not to renew it.

So I made the difficult decision to leave. And I grew up in Australia. and instead of going back to Australia, I moved from Hawaii to the mainland US, actually landed in Los Angeles and spent the first night in a backpack and motel in Santa Monica. I didn't have anything. I just had my two sets of ropes. They gave me $1,000 cash in a MacBook Pro to get started in the world. Wait, they gave you a back book pro?

Yes. All the monks in the monastery had a set of ropes, a set of beads, and a Mac. We were very tax-savvy. I wouldn't have thought of that. Was it when you landed in Santa Monica, did everything? feel unbelievably overwhelming compared to the life you'd been living for the last 10 years? No, I think I was more overwhelmed with the grief of leaving. So the world didn't really bother me as much of the fact that I made the difficult decision to leave. Is there any way

that you processed that grief? Over time, gaining clarity of what it is that I wanted in life what was important for me and aligning myself to that. And that was always, the reasoning for me as to why I left. And grief gets process over time. You can't grieve in one day and move on, you know. But I've embraced a life outside the monastery. I'm no longer a monk anymore. I'm a Hindu priest. And what you may see in a photo of me in my traditional outfit is a traditional garb of a Hindu priest. And it's Hindu priest. You can actually get married and have a job. So I'm married. I have a wife and a daughter. And I'm an entrepreneur, like it's an advisor to athletes and entrepreneurs and companies, helping them

understand the mind and better leverage the mind to be better at what they do. Do you think that the teachings that you learned in your monk life or that you learned in your becoming of a Hindu priest still apply or apply even better? Like, how does that work within this world where we're all incredibly busy? We have so many distractions. How much is our environment something that matters there? They apply incredibly well because they really are timeless. They're kind of based on universal truths.

It's like gravity. It doesn't matter what timeline you are in human history and gravity always works the same way. And the same way in terms of understanding how the mind works. We all have a mind. We just never taught how it works and therefore we struggle in harnessing it and directing it. And the same way with focus and concentration, we get told to focus, but we never get taught how to do it. And monks were trained in understanding how the mind works.

We're trained to harness the mind and then were trained to focus the mind. They were taught how to focus. They were taught to practice focusing and therefore become good at it. It's something that's just never been taught in the world and we all struggle as a result of it. I love the idea too. You wrote this in your book that the reason that focusing feels so hard and exhausting is because we don't practice it and the reason that distracting ourselves feels so effortless is because we've practiced that for our entire lives.

I found that to be a very hopeful concept because it does. It feels really, really hard in the moment to focus. And I feel like I can get distracted all day long. Yeah, I have a friend who's a yoga teacher and she used to train one of the NFL teams in yoga. She would get them to lift their hands above their heads. And it would kill them.

They couldn't hold it up for longer than I don't know how long, you know. But it's just because it's a position they just never. held or needed to do, you know, whereas the basketball player could lift his or her hands above her shoulders above her head. So it's the same with us. We can do something well if we do it all the time, whether it may be cooking or typing or sitting in front of a screen for 10 hours a day, coding. That makes a ton of sense. For a programmer, it's going to be super easy. For somebody who doesn't sit in front of the screen, it's going to be like torture. And the same with distraction and focus, we are master's a distraction because that's what we practice all the time. It's

effortless. We struggle to concentrate because we don't practice concentration and therefore it's something new and the mind hasn't done it enough. We're going to get into a ton of the specifics about how to create that practice, how to integrate that practice into your daily life. But I would love to start at the beginning, which it seems like you're saying is figuring out why we want to live focus lives. So I would love for you to kick us off with what you think the benefits are of living a focus life? Well, we have to make the case as to why we want to focus, because if we don't make the case to ourselves, then it's something we're going to listen to. We might be going through a challenging time in life and go like, you know what, I really need to focus mode. And then you do it

for two, three months, and then you abandon it and move on to the next thing. So unless we sell it to ourselves, we make the case ourselves, we're never going to adopt it as a lifetime practice. And the greatest impetus for me for leading a focused life is that we have one life. Regardless of your philosophy that you subscribe to, whether you believe in reincarnation or one life or not, you have one life on this planet. And there's a clock that's ticking and it's going to end one day. Your ability to focus allows you then to engage with the people and things that you love, which then allows you to fully experience those people and those things.

the byproduct of which is that you feel happy, you feel content, you feel uplifted. If we spend time with the people we love but we're so distracted, how can we fully experience that? We walk away having spent two hours with our child or a loved one, a best friend, and only experience a fraction of those two hours and then walk away going unfulfilled. And that's the cost of distraction. The benefit of focus is that you go through life, experiencing all that you want to experience, and life becomes fully rewarding. Fast forward to the point of death, you look back on your life and you go, like, wow,

that was pretty amazing. You talk about in the book the sentiment that life is finite. I loved the concept that that was better than life is short. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah, because when you get into a car in L.A. and you drive and you get stuck in traffic jam for three hours, you don't say it's short. Oh, it's only three hours. That's not too bad, right?

You go, my God, three hours is a long time. So if you get to live for three hours, that's a long time. So I think people say things all the time because that's just a common phrase. Our life is short. It's not short. It's actually really long. Because someone told me I was going to jail for a day. I'd go like, oh, I can manage that.

Going to jail for 10 years. And I went, oh, that's a long time. So if I get to live for 10 years, that's a pretty long time. And especially if you can stay present. And now a lot of people talk about being present, but they don't. realize that being present is a byproduct of being able to be focused. If I can concentrate on the conversation I'm having with you, the byproduct is I'm present in this engagement with you. And now I get to experience all these moments in life fully. And then 10 years, 20 years become

like 40 years. And you go through life having this amazing experiences because every minute you're present in each of them because of your ability to focus. Yeah, I feel like if that's not motivating for you, I don't know what would be. You have this one life and you either get to live it or you don't get to live it. It's hard to imagine who would pick the latter, but it seems to be something we're all doing on a daily basis subconsciously. And we don't like to think about it, right? Because there is no clock. It's like if you're trying to catch a flight and you're at TSA and you got four hours left before your flight and someone wants to get in front of you in the line, you go like, sure, go ahead, take your time.

You know, no rush. But if you're at TSA and you have 30 minutes before your flight leaves or 15 minutes, you're bolting as quickly as you can through the airport. And when I look at my life, I go, there's a clock that's ticking and counting back. I just don't know how many days, weeks, months are on it. But I realize it's counting back. And regardless of how I live my life, that clock is not going to stop. So I need to make a decision right now.

I've been given the most precious gift in life, which is the gift of life itself, and how do I want to use it? I want to use it well, because there are hundreds of people out there, thousands of people out there whose lives are ending this very moment. And I'm sure most of them would wish for another hour or another day with the person they loved. And they can't get it. And I have that. So I'm not going to squander it. To me, that's my great impetus for leading a focused life. That's incredibly powerful. You also have a line in the book that completely jumped out to me. It was happiness should never be pursued. Rather, one should pursue a lifestyle where the byproduct of living that lifestyle is happiness, which I just found fascinating. It's a concept. Can you explain your thinking behind that in greater detail?

I grew up in an Asian culture where Asian parents always tell the kids, you know, mom and dad only want you to be happy. And putting in your mind that that's what we should pursue in life, but happiness is a byproduct. of an experience. I spend time with my wife, my daughter. I'm happy. I spend time with my loved ones, my friends. I'm landscaping in a botanical garden. I'm happy. So how do I craft a lifestyle where the byproduct of that lifestyle predominantly results in the feeling of happiness? Look, I can't be happy 100% of the day. It doesn't work in life, but I can't try and get 75, 80, 85% of the day to resolve in happiness. The same way, I can also craft. a lifestyle where the byproduct of that is misery. Hang out with energy vampires, hang out with horrible people, you know, do things that get

me in trouble. The end of the day, if we realize that the end result is always a byproduct of how you're living your life, how you're thinking, how you're acting, how you're speaking, then the goal is not so much to focus on the end product. We define the end product, but then we craft a lifestyle that will give us that outcome. The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like, if it's off gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life. And most conventional mattresses are loaded with synthetic foams, flame retardants,

microplastics, and more. Plus, if it's not comfy, you're going to be tossing and turning, you're going to be really hot. And sleep is the foundation of health. It is so important. Because of all of this, if I were not going to invest in any other part of my house, no other things in my house, I would invest in my mattress. And in fact, I have four years well before I had much money to spend on any of these things because it is such a big needle mover.

The birch mattress is incredible. It is made with organic cotton, natural latex, and ethically sourced wool. So it has literally no off-gassing. You can not smell anything right when you unbox it. It has no micropastics, no synthetic foams or flame retardants. And the wool makes it so breathable, which if you've listened to this podcast for more than five minutes, you know that I run very, very hot. Like I am a furnace. Zach has basically accepted that sleeping next to me is like sleeping next to like a little fire. And the birch mattress has been a

game changer for that. It's made me sleep so much better. Like I can see my sleep score going up because I'm not hot all night long. It's also hypoallergenic, which is really worth paying attention to if you find yourself waking up stuffy or congested. Dust mites in a conventional mattress can actually impact your breathing and your sleep quality without you even realizing it. And again, we need to need to be able to breathe to get good sleep and getting good sleep is the foundation of our health. And then comfort-wise, Zach sleeps on his back and then I sleep on my side and my stomach. So we have two completely different sleep styles and we both wake up feeling really good, no aches and pains. CNN actually named the Birch mattress, the best mattress for side sleepers

and Wired named it the best organic mattress period. So there you go. Birch has options for every kind of sleeper in your household. They have three firmness layers. I like the Lux Natural, which is the medium one. And then parents, they even have a Birch Kids natural mattress. Birch ships right to your door. It sets up in minutes and it comes with 120 night risk-free trial. So if it is not for you, they will pick it up for free. You have nothing to lose here.

I want all of you to enjoy a deep, restful night sleep with a new mattress from Birch. Go to birchliving.com slash Liz Moody for 20% off. That is birchliving.com slash Liz Moody. and you're going to get 20% off birchliving.com slash Liz Moody. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from?

Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline, and what I've learned has genuinely shifted

how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here is the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushy, more, we're like noticing these things, and we're adding in more protein, we're trying to fix it with more supplements, we're trying to do harder workouts, and those things do help. But timelines research

suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, Mitopure, does. It contains Erolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondria increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithin A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A,

which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally, that's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopier gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. And is the idea that doing that instead of just kind of having the goal be, I want to be happy,

that happiness isn't this concrete, it's harder to pursue. And in essence, you can pursue a lifestyle that happiness is a byproduct in a much more pragmatic way, I feel like, than you can just pursue happiness as a concept. For sure, I lived as a monk for 10 years, Liz, in a monastery, in a cloistered monastery with 26 other monks, woke up at 4 in the morning, went to bed at 9, we meditated, we worship divinity.

I didn't walk around blissful all day in the state, of perpetual happiness. It was our practice each day, the way we lived our lives, the food we ate, the exercise we did, the people we surrounded ourselves with. All of those lent to leading a happy life. Obviously, eventually what happens, the lifestyle starts to reshape your subconscious, your mindset, even your nervous system, your body, which then all absorb that way of life that results in the majority of feeling happy. Like, I can eat, people. pizza all day and then feel very unhappy at the end, you know. But if I learn to moderate my diet and exercise well and sleep enough and do all those little things, then my body starts to feel

happier. That makes a ton of sense. So how do we decide what the best things for us to focus on are? Like, you seem to know your path at this incredibly early age, but I know a lot of people out there who are just struggling to figure out what exactly is worth their time and their attention. You have to know your purpose in life. You have to define your purpose. That's hard. It's not, it's only hard because we've been never taught how to do it. When we're growing up in school, no one teaches us that we need a purpose in life. They teach us math, science, geography, how to read, write, biology, chemistry. But who sits there and goes, hey, you need to define your purpose in life. The purpose defines the direction that you're going in. We do this with everything else in our life. Businesses have vision. statements, mission statements. Most people don't know their purpose in life. I want to say for two reasons. One is no one has ever taught them that they need a purpose in life. And second is, they've never been taught how to go about discovering that purpose in life. The first step is the desire for wanting to know one's purpose in life. And unless you have that desire,

you're never going to get it. I've had countless people say to me, it's like, oh yeah, I want to find my purpose in life. And then two days later, they're off doing something else. They're not serious about it. So you have to want to know. Because when you live a purpose-focused line, the byproduct of that is incredibly rewarding. Once you know what you want in life, one of the greatest blessings is you know who and what you don't want in life. Making decisions become super easy.

You know who to hang out with, what to eat, what not to eat, what to drink, what not to drink, what music to listen to, what books to read, what shows to watch. All of those decisions become really easy, what to wear, because you know clearly your purpose. And most people also don't know their purposes because they never spend any time with themselves in self-reflection. So if I wanted to get to know you, I could listen to your podcast, I could stalk you online, or we could go and have coffee every Friday for an hour and a half every week. and a year later, you and I would get to know each other really well, because we're spending time 90 minutes a week in conversation,

getting to know each other. But people don't spend any time with themselves. I have people say to me, every night I walk my dog, that's my alone time. I'm like, no, that's picking up dog poop and avoiding traffic. That's not alone time. Self-reflection is you sitting down in a room quietly by yourself, not walking, not reading journals, not listening to me.

music and getting to know you. And you can't get to know yourself if you can't focus. So if I sat down in the room by myself to self-reflect and have a conversation with myself, they go like, so Dundapani, are you happy? What do you want in life? I really should have pizza tonight, you know I? I haven't had pizza in forever. That margarita pizza from that star is amazing. Okay, back to purpose. So I'm saying, what is my purpose in life? Oh, you know what? I got to send show that email. I haven't sent him that email yet. I bet you he's waiting for it. I'm going to do it after my self-reflection time. And that's how people sit down for five minutes and then they get up and go, it's like, oh, I haven't discovered my purpose. Because you can't focus. If you can't focus,

how can you be in a state of self-reflection long enough to know what it is you want? You started that mental conversation with being like, hey, are you happy? How are you feeling? are there questions that we should be asking if we're spending that time with ourselves? Like for somebody who has never spent quality time with themselves, what would the baby steps be? Can you guide us through it? So I would say do it first thing in the morning. Don't look at your phone. Wake up, find a quiet spot in your house.

You sit down. This is not a meditation, by the way. No music, because music guides you awareness to different areas of your mind. You want to get to know who you are. don't read any books, don't journal, just sit down and have a conversation. So now the question is, what is the conversation? Well, if I was having coffee with you, Liz, the initial questions we would ask each other would probably be a very surface level.

So are you married? How long you've been married? How old's your kid? You know, how long you've been living in Costa Rica? What are you doing? But after a few weeks of meeting every week, the conversations would probably get much deeper. So what made you go to the monastery? What inspires you in life?

What are some of the most difficult times in your life? Or what some of the most beautiful times in your life? So you could start there, initially go, am I happy with my life? Am I okay? Am I happy with where I'm living, what I'm working, what I'm doing? If I could change something, what would I change? Am I happy with the people that I'm surrounding myself with? So those are simple questions you can ask,

and then as each day goes by and you're spending five minutes with yourself, just five minutes in the morning having a conversation. You can even write those answers down every time you ask yourself a question. And sometimes you may not have an answer, and that's okay. The next day, you can ask yourself the same question. Sometimes the mind needs to be prompted with the same question over and over again before I can provide you an answer. You've seen movies on TV where they're interrogating someone. They ask a question.

The person goes like, I don't know what you're talking about. And two hours later, okay, okay, I'll tell you everything you want. And the mind works the same way. you keep asking the mind over and over again the same question every day and eventually it will give you an answer because all the answers are within you, you just haven't discovered them yet. And when you say we're looking for our purpose, this again probably sounds very nuanced and specific, but are we looking for like a sentence that's like my purpose is to start a podcast or my purpose is to be a great mom or do we have different purposes and different

areas of our lives? I would say my two cents, I would say everybody should have a core purpose in life and everybody should have sub purposes in life. And your core purpose in life shouldn't be dependent on someone or something. So if you say my core purpose in life is to be a great dad, and what if aliens kidnap my daughter? Then I would have no purpose left. I've had people say to me, my purpose in life is to be a great entrepreneur. Well, you're not going to be an entrepreneur your whole life. Trust me. At some point, you're going to give it up, whether it's 70 or 80 years old or whatever it may be, then you have no purpose. So your core purpose could be something that is not bound to someone or something. So you could say my core purpose in life is to be the best version of

myself. So you're always working to improve yourself, knowing that version 2.1 of you is a better you that has better experiences in life, has better relationships with the people around you, and has better experiences in the world. And when you say that my core purpose in life is to be the best version of myself, you could be on your deathbed, have three months to live, and still be working on yourself because you could be laying down going like, oh, I thought with my uncle Joe when I was 20. I hate that idiot. But maybe it's time I forgave him. You know, it has been 60 years. So why don't I work on that right now before I die, so I'm not taking it to wherever I'm going. So it's something that you can keep working. You know, I've seen in my life, my extended family,

my relatives, had a grandma who was an amazing mother, amazing. grandmother, amazing wife, and, you know, at some point in the life, in the late 80s, her husband passed away, and then her children had grown up and had grandchildren of their own, and all of a sudden she was kind of lost because her whole purpose was her family. And when her husband went away, and then the kids grew up and had kids and grandkids, and all of a sudden she goes like, oh, what do I do with my life now? And that happens a lot of this. It really does. It happens so much. we don't quite often experience it maybe in your 30s or 40s or 50s, but as light goes on,

you'll start to feel the world kind of moving on without you. And discovering your purpose creates a North Star and how you direct your life. And then everything else is defined by your purpose of life. And you say that that doesn't maybe happen in your 20s, 30s or 40s, but I do think that a lot of times we tie our purpose into our identity, whether that's a specific job, whether that's a status in a relationship. I know a lot of my friends right now are experiencing the transition from not having kids and that being a fundamental part of their identity to having kids and having that completely shift the core of their identity. So I do think that learning to deal with that loss and not having your sense of purpose tied into an identity that is transient is a core learning regardless of the phase of life you're in.

And you use the perfect word transient, right? your core purpose shouldn't be dependent on something that's transient in nature, whereas your sub-purpose can be. So one of my sub-purpose in life is my wife, another sub-purpose is my daughter, another sub-purpose is my project here in Costa Rica, where we're creating the retreat center and the spiritual sanctuary. Any of those could go. There could be an earthquake tomorrow, and it swallows the whole place that we have. I can move on. I have a call purpose in life. And is your core purpose to be the best version of yourself, or what would you say your core purpose is? My core purpose is self-realization.

And let me answer a question you asked before, which I think is a really good one. You asked, should it be a statement or one-liner? I think eventually it can be a one-liner. I think eventually at the start, you'll probably end up it being a short paragraph, and then you'll just edit it down to my call-purpose is blah, blah, blah. But it will be very hard to get it to a one-liner right off the bat. So you may write down a few things and then start to edit it down and just narrow it down to maybe a one single statement that says, hey, this is why I'm on this planet.

And then you build everything around that, your whole life around that. And that core purpose is what you're most aligned with, right? When you're aligned with your core purpose in life, everything else flourishes in your life. It's the same way with companies. You find the right type of client. The more clearer you are who your client is, what kind of products you're creating, what kind of services,

the better the company does. When you start to steer away, that's when the problem happens. unless you're stirring away for right reasons. But I found over the course of the last 12 years, having left the monastery, the clearer I got as to who the niche my client tells us, the better my business did. That makes sense.

Okay, so your one-liner is... Self-realization, which you could say in another word is enlightenment. What the heck does that mean? In the philosophy that I subscribe to, and a simplified explanation would be, We believe that God is in all things. God is pure, intelligent energy that permeates you, me, the trees, the stones, everything around us. And through deep meditation, I can go within and experience divinity inside of me.

How does that fit with any moment in which you're not deeply meditating? Is that just serving other sub-purposes? Yes, it is. And because I can't be in a state of meditation 24 hours a day. I mean, I've got to pay bills and eat and take care of a kid. all that kind of stuff. So yes, the rest of the day is fulfilling all the other sub-purposes. So, you know, spending time with my wife, spending time with my daughter, working on a project here in Costa Rica or my business.

These are all sub-piposes of mine that I put energy into. But all of those things also fit into the core purpose because I love all those things. I love all those people. They all bring me a great sense of joy, my friends, my family, which then, helps me to go within because I don't have drama in my life. So when I said to meditate, I'm not going like, oh, he's an idiot, my neighbor, you know. I would imagine then the problem that people would run into is if they say their core purpose, they say their subpurposes, but then they look how they're spending their time day to day and it actually doesn't

align with any of those things. Exactly. And that's why you're always cause correct. Right. But how would you cause correct, Liz, if you did. even know what to correct you. I'm not a pilot, but if I was flying a plane from New York to L.A., I'm assuming I just don't fly in a straight line. I have to deal with wind and turbulence. I'm probably getting knocked off course all the time and probably have to make little adjustments as I'm heading to L.A. The same way in life, you know, if you didn't have a purpose, you don't know where you're going, what would you adjust to? How would you course correct? You couldn't. That's why defining purpose is so critical, but you can't find purpose if you can't focus long

enough to even know what you want. And that's why I start with focus. In the first page of the book, I talk about this conversation. I have a friend of mine in Germany where he asked the same question. You know, he said, like, you talk about how important finding purpose in life is, but then why do you always talk about focus? And you're like, well, if you can't concentrate, how would you even self-reflect for two minutes to even know what you want in life?

And I hope those of you who are listening realize that ultimately the greatest impetus for doing this is that you have one life. don't waste it. It is such a precious gift. Once you can figure out your purpose, and it's not as hard as you think it is, because again, no one's taught you how to do it, so you struggle the same way with focus. Once you know that, then you live your whole life in alignment with that purpose, the byproduct is you live a crazily rewarding life. And how amazing is that? And who doesn't want that? I mean, I certainly want it. So let's get into some of those tools that we can actually use to improve our focus. I would love to start with some steps that we can use to train where

our awareness goes, but I know that you think it's critical that we really understand what our awareness is. So maybe you could start off by sort of defining what we really mean by awareness, and then we could get into some tips for training where it goes. Yeah, so I look in understanding the mind, there's two things. There's the mind and there's awareness. And again, how I define the mind and awareness is just in the context of me teaching and learning, right? Another educator speaker would define it differently. So I defined the mind as a vast space with many different areas within one area could be angry, anger, happiness, joy, food, text, photography, technology. There's so many different areas of the mind. And awareness, you could look at awareness as a glowing ball of light,

for example. It is you in essence. You are pure awareness traveling through different areas of the mind. So when your awareness goes to the angry air of the mind, that ball of light lights up. the angry area of the mind, you become conscious of being angry. Are you angry? No, you are in an area of the mind having an angry experience. Now, awareness could move to the happy area of the mind. Awareness is glowing ball of light, lights up the happy air of the mind. You become conscious of being happy. Are you happy? No, you're in an area of the mind called happiness, having a happy experience. You have pure awareness functioning in this area of the mind. At any given point in time, Either you are in charge of where your awareness goes in your mind or your environment is,

and I define environment as the people and things around you. So someone could move your awareness to a happy area of the mind, someone could move your awareness to a sad area of the mind, or something could do it too. You see a picture of a politician on TV moves you to an upset area of the mind. You see something else. Awareness goes to a sad area of the mind. Similarly, you live in Los Angeles now.

you could be in an uplifting area of Los Angeles or you could be in an unuplifting area of Los Angeles, right? It's your choice where you go. Wherever you go, you're still less, but you're having a different experience based on awareness you are in L.A. And awareness in the mind is no different. And you said that if you're in the angry area of the mind, for instance, you can't also be in the happiness area of the mind. Is that right? Like you kind of can't be in two areas at once? Correct.

In the book, I give the analogy of, looking at the mine as a huge mansion with hundreds of rooms. One room is anger, one room is jealousy, one room's happiness, one room's food, whatever it may be. If I go in the walk in the angry room and I close the door behind me, I'm in the room that's angry in that room in the mansion. I don't experience what the room next to me is or the room further down the hallway. Now, if I come out of the angry room, I close the door behind me, I walk down the hallway,

I opened the door to another room, walk into it, close the door behind me, and I find myself in the happy area of the mansion. But I can only be in one room of the mansion at any given point in time. Is switching rooms of the mansion about switching your environment or switching yourself or some mix of the two? It's switching yourself. It's moving your awareness. And that's what essentially multitasking is, right? When people feel like I can do two things at once, they're basically running up and down the hallway between rooms. So if I'm a lot of it, I'm trying to do A and B at the same time, my awareness is on B, then I switch to A. I'm on A for five seconds, then I switch to B. I'm with B for 10 seconds, then I switch to A.

But awareness can only be on one thing at a time. And there's so many studies coming out now that show this, I mean, everything I share is from what I've been taught and my own personal experience, but a lot of scientists and research is being done now to show that the mind or awareness can only do one thing at a time or be in one place at a time. And multitasking is a myth. And that's what distraction is at the end of the day as well. It's my awareness of switching between two things so quickly or jumping from thing to thing. Would that give people heart who maybe they are in a bad environment that they can't get out of or they're going to be confronted with pictures of politicians that send them straight to the angry room? Like is the idea that even if

you can't shift certain aspects of your environment because you can't. use the tools that we're about to get into to shift your awareness that you can still control which room of the mansion you're in? Exactly. Just say, for example, last week, I was walking down New York City and someone mugged me, and it was a horrible experience. That experience is sitting in my subconscious unresolved, and I've been letting my awareness go to that experience over and over again.

Now, if I had enough control over my awareness, my ball of light, I can prevent it from going to that experience. I can hold my awareness in a different area of the mind and decide when exactly I want to engage with that unresolved experience. I can say to myself, next week on Tuesday at 4 p.m., I have a session with my therapist, and at that time I'm going to allow my awareness to go and get engaged with this experience and talk to her about this. Until then, I'm not going to engage with this. The beautiful thing about learning to control awareness, quite often people miss. understand it by thinking like, oh, if I don't let my awareness go to that room, does that mean I'm avoiding that? No, what you're doing is empowering yourself with the choice to choose

when you want to engage with something in your mind. And most people don't have that choice. They have an argument with someone at work or at home, and every five minutes, they're rehashing it in their head, having a mental argument. I can't believe she said that to me. What a chick. Can you really what a person she is? Horrible. and then they go back to writing a couple of emails. Two minutes later, like, oh, the nerve of that woman, oh, my God, she gets run over by bus, you know, and then go back to writing another email,

and then two minutes later, awareness goes and engages with the same problem again. And this happens over and over again. It's so energy consuming. If you can control awareness, you can say, no, I'm just going to do email, and then during my lunch break, I'm going to take half an hour, go and sit in a park and engage with the problem. and try and resolve it.

So what are some really pragmatic action steps, like things that we can start doing today to start controlling our awareness? Well, you have to learn to concentrate and you have to learn to develop willpower. And those two things help you to move awareness within the mind. So I'm just saying we're having a Friday coffee and I'm sitting and having a conversation with you, you're talking to me, my awareness starts to drift away and I'm looking at somebody walking down the street. I use my willpower to grab my ball of light and bring it back to you.

I use my power as a concentration to hold my ball of light, my awareness on you. My ability to do that, is my ability to focus. Concentration and willpower, the two things needed to control where awareness goes in the mind. But you can't do that until you understand that awareness in the mind are two separate things. The goal is not to control the mind, but rather to control where that ball of light goes into mind. You don't control the mansion. You just decide which room of the mansion you walk into. You live in Los Angeles.

You don't control Los Angeles. You just decide which parts of L.A. to avoid and which parts L.A. to go to. Let's start with concentration. What are some tips that we can use to improve our concentration? I would say the first thing is practice doing one thing at a time. Because that's what concentration is. Concentration is my ability to be engaged with who and what I'm with. So every time you're speaking with someone, every time you're doing something, keep your ball of light, your awareness on that.

If it drifts away, bring it back. It doesn't get any more complicated than that. And that's where, you know, I lose most people is because people are expecting a more complicated answer. You know, it's really, really simple. Understand how awareness and the mind work. Your awareness drifts away, bring it back. And eventually it learns not to drift away. That's it.

End of focus class. So you say it's not like that crazy of a concept, but actually I thought it was really interesting and a little bit more systematic and broken down than that in the book, where you talk about kind of like picking these recurrent tasks and putting your focus on those tasks. And I love that as a concept because it just makes it a little bit more manageable. And then I also love the idea that if we keep our focus for five minutes on a call or in a conversation or when we're reading or when we're doing all of these things, we're actually building up to something larger than that initial moment we're in.

It feels so hard in the moment. So if you're having this building up to this idea that, oh, it'll get easier. I'm building something here. It makes it feel more doable and less just like depressing and hard. For sure. I think there's two things here. I think there's a concept out in the world that if I do my breathing exercise in the morning, if I meditate in the morning, then the rest of the day I'm going to be good.

It doesn't work that way. You have to start with your lifestyle. So where do we start? In the book, I talk about identifying the non-negotiable reoccurring events. So in my case, one of them would be every day I speak with my wife. It's non-negotiable and it's reoccurring. So in an average day, I might speak with my wife for two hours, a cumulative total, right? Find that 10 minutes, 10 minutes, stay, half an hour there, one minute here. Every time I speak with her, I give her my undivided attention. Now, I'm leveraging something that's already occurring in my life in order to practice concentration, as opposed to creating something new. All of us have plenty to do in life. We don't need one more new thing to do. So why don't we just leverage what's already occurring in our life

and use that as an opportunity to practice? So if I practice the piano two hours a day, I would assume after six months, I would be better at playing the piano, but two hours of practice a day. If I'm practicing two hours of concentration every day, after six months, I would naturally become good at concentrating. So if you ask yourself, for example, with you, what's someone or something that you do every single day that's non-negotiable? I talk to my husband. I brush my teeth. I make myself food. Okay, three things here you've got. So cumulative total in a day, how many minutes do you think you speak with your husband? Oh, probably more than he would like, probably like two or three hours cumulatively.

Okay. So just say two and a half hours. I'll say brushing feet maybe four minutes, two minutes in the morning, two minutes a night, roughly, and then making food, right? But now between two to half hours with your husband, four minutes of brushing teeth, just that you spend another 45 minutes making food or an hour between breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever it may be, you up to about three hours plus. of practicing concentration a day. Naturally, after six months, you'd be good at it. People practice

three and a half hours of distraction every day and look how good they are now. Well, it's wild because when I read that part of the book, it was this unlock for me. Like when I'm brushing my teeth, I literally scroll on TikTok because I'm like, oh, it's so boring to brush my teeth. So I might as well entertain myself. But I'm literally practicing distraction. It just felt like this glaring example of practicing distraction in my life. And here's the problem, right? So now, when you go and talk to your husband or your best friend, your mind is trained to do something else. Your awareness is trained to do something else because what you've trained, not you, and people in general, saying that every time I'm doing A, don't take A seriously, you can go do B.

And the same way, like if I'm watching Instagram Reels all day or TikTok and it's only maybe 30-second videos or 60s, 60 second videos, I'm training my awareness to be concentrated for 60 second blocks. So now I'm talking to my wife, after 60 seconds, my awareness is ready to move somewhere else because that's the pattern I'm creating. A whole life is based on patterns and repetition. Whether it's good or bad, it doesn't matter. Whatever we repeat, that's what we become good at, lower practice. So maybe this is the willpower point, but in that moment, it can feel really boring. Like when I'm brushing my teeth, because I haven't practiced focusing and doing nothing in that moment, I feel almost antsy.

And then I think there was the person in your book who is like it feels really exhausting to focus all the time. And so I think we have that hope for the future, right? That if we do this regularly, we'll get practiced in this and it'll be great. But in the moment, is there anything that we can do to make focusing, like, less boring, less exhausting, less difficult feeling? By changing our perspective and relationship to the tasks that we do in our day, you know, people look at the mundane things that we do throughout the day, like brushing our teeth,

putting our clothes away, washing dishes, as painting the ass stuff that we have to do as part of living, we were trained in the monastery by my guru as looking at those things. as part of our everyday life. So why don't we just leverage them as an opportunity to better ourselves? So when I brush my teeth, I wash my dish, I give the dishes my undivided attention. My goal is to wash the dishes really well and brush my teeth really well. Knowing that all those things helped me then be fully present and engaged with my wife, with my daughter, with the people I love, with the things that I love. My guru died three years after I joined the Monster, and it was a horrible experience.

losing him. And I'm glad that in the three years I spent with him living with him that I gave him my undivided attention and he gave me his undivided attention. Looking back now, I'm going like, wow, that was well worth it. Should I lose someone I love today? I can look back and go, I'm so glad that every moment I was with them, I gave him or her my undivided attention. And I got the most out of them in this life. And that to me is rewarding. There's no regret. then, how would you be able to regret? Because you were fully present. And so many people regret in life because they didn't do things.

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Instagram for a little bit. Or I know that my awareness is wholly, it's really good at focusing, but it's focusing in a negative direction almost. Like it's focusing away from me and I'm justifying that as an act of self-care. Does that make sense to you? Totally fine. I scroll through Instagram Reels. I go on the thing and I spend five minutes, maybe 10 minutes even sometimes, just scrolling,

looking at things that I want to look at on Pinterest, looking at garden photos, rock walls, how to build a bridge or a plant, something, lay concrete blocks, whatever it may be. And I'll do that for 10 minutes and it's totally fine. But when you're on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever it may be, then give Pinterest or Instagram or TikTok your undivided attention. that's the key. Let's say I feel really full and satisfied, but I have this cookie on my counter and all I can think about is this cookie and my brain is like, well, you've had, you know, several cookies today, Liz. And I'm like, yes, but cookie. And like my brain is in the cookie room.

And I want to put my brain in the full and satisfied room. Is there anything I can do or my brain is in the Instagram room, but I really want my brain to be in the working on my book room? Is there anything I can do to actively shift it away from one thing? And, into another room in that moment? By learning to control awareness throughout the whole day. Okay. So the practicing all day, like the brushing my teeth with no TikTok, will help me move from the cookie room to the full and satisfied room.

And that's the thing people don't realize, right? This comes in handy when shit hits the fan, you know, when things are going wrong in your life and you need to take control of your life, then I will look back on your life and you go, I'm so glad I was practicing that for years, a weeks, a month. Because now I can control my awareness. I'm in a situation that's an emergency or that's a crisis. And instead of my awareness running all over the mind freaking out,

they can keep my awareness centered and go, okay, I can take control. I can choose how I want to react and respond. But you can't do that unless you've been building that muscle over weeks and months and years. It's not something you just turn on and off. Like anything else, do you need to practice? Okay. So for now, maybe I'm just self. forgiving myself for those moments or I'm eating the cookie but really focusing on the cookie,

living into the cookie, being aware of the cookie. I'm scrolling on Instagram, but I'm really trying to do it consciously. And then I'm getting excited for the day where I'll be able to choose what room I go to because I've practiced my focus for so long. Exactly. And then everything throughout the day when you're on Instagram, just immerse yourself in Instagram. And if you feel like you get too caught up in it, then maybe set a timer for five minutes and say, okay, that's as soon as it goes, off, I'm going to put the phone down and switch to something else. But if you go through the day just doing one thing at a time, keeping your awareness on who it's engaged with, what is engaged with, that's how you build your power of focus. And it helps you then when it comes

later in the day, later at some point in life when a crisis comes up or when you're experiencing fear or anxiety or stress or worry. That's when you need your ability to control your awareness in your mind. Like when you have those intrusive thoughts that are just kind of like, what if, what if you have the power to shift from room to room, you can shift away from the room with those thoughts, essentially? Exactly. If someone said to you, I'm going to sue you for this. And then you're like, oh my God, I'm freaking out. This person wants to sue me. They want to take me to court. They want to just like, no, okay. I'm going to move my awareness here. Tomorrow afternoon at 2 o'clock, I have a conversation with my lawyer about this. And during that time, I'll talk to her about the

situation. Until then, I'm not going to let my awareness engaged in this. And if you didn't have control over your awareness, and you'd be thinking about it every five minutes. I love this idea you have of like scheduling a time for later to worry about things. You've said it a few times where you're like, oh, like, I won't do that now. I'll do that tomorrow at 2 o'clock. I like it because it's not denying that something is perhaps worrisome or is bothering you. You're not like, don't feel that. Like, watch it pass through like a beautiful cloud. You're like, no, no. You can focus on that, but just do it when you want to do it instead of being overcome by it. Exactly.

And you can only do that if you can control your awareness because you have to understand how the mind works, right? You have an experience. That experience gets registered in your subconscious. It is sitting in some location in your subconscious mind. It's always there until it's resolved. Every time your awareness goes and gets engaged with it, it stirs up everything in that location from that experience and you relive the whole thing. and you relive the whole thing again.

But if you can prevent your awareness from going to that area of the subconscious mind, then you're not engaging with it. It doesn't say it goes away, but you can choose when you want to engage with it. And you can then engage with it maybe with the support of someone in your life or a professional that you hire or whatever it may be. But people who don't have control over their awareness will find themselves engaging with a problem every two minutes, every five minutes, every 10 minutes.

And that becomes an absolutely exhausting way to live. And this whole notion, like New Age thing or spiritual thing, of like, oh, let's watch it by, let your thoughts go by and watch your thoughts go by. This is a bullshit. It doesn't work that way. I'd tell you from having lived as a monk. When you're monking all day, what are you thinking about? Whatever we're working on.

Like at that moment. Exactly. That was our job. The monastery that I lived in were divided into five groups, the monks. And some worked outdoors, some worked in the temple. Paul in the rituals and some worked on publication where we put teachings in the books and online. Some worked on finance and paying bills and things like that and administration. We were trained to always keep awareness on whatever it is that we were engaged on that moment.

Whether it's sweeping the floor, designing a book, milking the cow, doesn't matter. Whatever you're doing, focus on doing that and focus on doing it really well. It's funny, it sounds so simple, but also there's a teeny part of my brain that's like, oh, I want like a crazy hack or some really different unique approach. But it's also like if you can literally do that, like if I focused moment to moment throughout my entire day on every little thing I was doing, it would change my entire life. Like I can see that from where I'm sitting right now. It would completely change your life. And it's not about being present because being present, again, it's a byproduct of the world. your ability to focus. You see this cute little Instagram things that say, be present, live in the

moment, be in the here now, you know, be focused. That's what you should be doing. When you're focus, you can be present. If I can't be focus, I can't be present. Now, here's one thing I can point out with. So if I'm having this coffee with you on Friday, I'm sitting with you at a cafe, sitting across the table from each other, I am physically present with you. My physical body is always present wherever I am. Right. So if I'm sitting with you, I'm sitting with you, I'm physically present. Now, have you ever had anybody say to you or ask you, where are you, Liz? Yes, for sure. Well, the correct answer to that question is, well, I'm sitting here right in front of you. Based on the book, the technically correct question would be, where is your awareness?

Because physically, I'm sitting here, but my awareness is long since left this conversation has wandered off to another place in my mind thinking about, I don't know, what I should be scrolling on TikTok while your mouth is moving. Yeah, and maybe if I spent less time scrolling on TikTok while I brushed my teeth, nobody would ever ask me that again. Exactly, because then you'd be always engaged. And then you could bring your awareness back to that person you're having a conversation with, and then you would be present. So being present, being mindful is all a byproduct of being able to focus. You can't be mindful if you can't focus. You can't be present if you can't focus. And that's why I've emphasized so much on this practice of focus and not meditation

or all these other things, all of which I believe in deeply. But this is the first step where we need to take a structured approach in taking control of our mind. If we don't take a structured approach, we would fail. There's a lot of sexy things I could have written about meditation and breathing and doing this chanting on a mantra, you know, it just wouldn't help anybody. Does it matter if the thing that you're focusing on is objectively more boring than another thing you could be focusing on? Are we developing this ability no matter what? Yes, no matter what it is you're doing. And there are things in life that you will do till the day you die that are objectively boring and you'll have to do it. I do things that are barring.

I run a business and stuff that I do that are boring that I must do that I don't want to do, but no one else is going to do it, so I have to do it. And that's okay. Change your perspective on how you're doing it. And when you change your perspective and say, yeah, this task is not the most exciting thing on the planet, but I'm going to focus on it. I'm going to do it really well because it's going to help me handle other things in my life much better. And when you change your perspective, then your engagement with it changes.

To the point of we're training our brains to engage with these 30 to 60 second pieces of information with things like TikTok or Instagram, do you think we should all not be on these apps? Or do you think it's fine as long as we engage with them in a focused way? I think two things. I don't think we shouldn't be on them. I think we should engage in them in a focused way. And I think we should minimize how long we engage with them. I'm watching Reels, 30-second Reels, for three hours or five hours a day, then I'm training

my awareness, my ball of light, to only be in one room in my mind for 30 seconds before it moves to another room. Now, I watch Instagram Reels. I watch it for five minutes, seven minutes. I'm scrolling through things. That's okay. If I eat two Cheetos a day, I'm not going to die. If the rest of the day I'm eating healthy. So look at it that way. You want to watch Reels for five minutes. go ahead. You want to watch TikTok for five minutes, go ahead, laugh, enjoy, cry, whatever it is, it's totally fine. But just understand that whatever you do in repetition, and how often you do it, you start to create patterns. So if you do it in moderation, enjoying five, 10 minutes a day, that's okay. Because now you've got 23 hours and 50 minutes of practicing focus and 10 minutes

of training awareness to be in something for 60 seconds. Does it make a difference? Do you see that? I do. I will say that Cheetos are literally engineered so that you can't just eat two Cheetos. And similarly, TikTok and Instagram are literally engineered so that we always want another hit. So I think that brings us to the willpower conversation. So what are some things we can do to actually develop willpower in our lives? We should have a Cheeto eating competition and see who has the strongest willpower. You've been a monk for your whole life. I would eat the entire bag. You would be sitting there on your first half of Cheeto and being like,

hmm, the orange coating is really beautiful in my mouth and the light and puffy. And I'd be like pushing handfuls into my mouth. My mouth would be watering the whole time. I can tell you that much. Yes, and practicing willpower. And again, willpower is something, you know, none of us have been taught how to do. We've never been taught how to develop. We might have heard the concept.

Say like, yeah, I've got to use my willpower. But until I met my guru, no one taught me that I. I could develop more willpower. And I'm like, you can? Why didn't there someone tell me this like 20 years ago? And in the book, I shared three ways to develop willpower, which is, you know, finish what you begin, do things better than you think you can, and do it a little bit more than you think you can.

And all of those three things help you develop willpower. And the more willpower you develop through your day, it's the same willpower that you use when you're in a crisis, right? when awareness goes to a fear area of a mind, you can use your willpower and grab that ball of light, move it out of the fear room, and move it to another room and say, okay, I understand this is happening in my life. I'm not going to engage with it right now. I'll engage with it a little later when I have more support or whatever it may be or I'm at home or something like that. Could you walk us through maybe one real life example of each of those three things?

Yeah, so for example, with focus, I was saying, you know, identify the non-negotiable reoccurring events in the day. Same with world power. Every day I sleep. Before I sleep, I floss and brush my teeth from my pajamas on. I go to sleep. When I wake up in the morning, I finish what I begin. I finish the process of sleep.

I do that by making the bed. So every morning I make the bed. And then it says, finish it well beyond your expectations, do a little bit more than you think you can. So some days I double fold the comforter like they do. do at the four seasons. Some days I fold at an angle like they do at the W hotel or whatever it may be, you know, but I make the bed every day. So sleeping is non-negotiable. I have to sleep every day. I can't live without sleeping. So now I finish that, do a little bit more than I think I can.

I do it better than I think I can. Same way, if I wake up in the morning and have breakfast, I have time to make breakfast, I have time to eat breakfast, I have time to finish breakfast, which is wash the dish, put it on the rack to dry or put it in the dishwash, washer, clean the counter of crumbs, put everything away, and finish what I begin. And I bring that into everything that I do throughout the day. We've been, I think, sold, I would say, at least in the West, that we need to do really sexy stuff like breath control, or yoga, or meditation, or this or that, or green juice, or soul cycling in order to grow and improve, it'd be better.

And I'm not saying any of those things are bad, but in the way we were trained as monks, we looked at life as a training ground. The simple things, you know, they look at everything that I do as an opportunity to grow and build all these qualities of willpower, controlling awareness and concentration. Then you can do those other things too. And so those were finish what you've started, do it better than you think. And then what was the third one? Do a little bit more than you think you can do a little bit more than you think. I think I think I think it's interesting. I feel like I'm going to be going through my day looking for those little opportunities. And I've seen it come in to play in my life already where you'll have like a few minutes left in a workout and you'll be like, oh, it doesn't matter. I've gotten my workout in. I might as well just stop now. And like I have a really busy day. I might as well get started on that. But it's interesting to think about the conversing. of that, which is this is an opportunity to practice willpower. So maybe I should go a minute longer and then I should clean up my workout space and then I should take a cold shower to

take it to the next level or something like that. Like what are the little ways I can actually go overboard instead of, I think, my natural tendency, which is to go overboard, if that's a word. I think it is officially. But also don't dismiss all the small things, right, like brushing your teeth. Put the toothpaste on your brush. You put the cap on the toothpaste. Put the toothpaste back. where it belongs, brush your teeth, put the brush away. The counter is a little bit wet, maybe wipe it down. Because every day you brush your teeth. And that whole exercise may be two and a half minutes a day or three minutes a day.

But that's okay. That's important. All those three minutes and two minutes and one minutes add up. To say you don't wear your flip-flops at home, we don't wear shoes in our house. So when we come home, I can just kick my flip-flops off my feet into one corner. Or I can take them off and arrange them neatly. and come in the house, which means I have now finished the process of going out.

I've returned. I've done it better than I think I can by taking an extra maybe half a second to arrange them neatly and step in the house. Now my whole day becomes a ritual, right? My whole day is a beautiful act of rituals that help me control where my awareness goes in my mind. My husband is going to love you.

He's going to be so grateful to you for having this conversation me. But it's funny because I think I get caught up in the identity of like, well, I'm just a messy person or like, ha, ha, I'm a hot mess and I'm chaotic and all of these things. Then on the same breath, I'll complain about something like a lack of willpower or why am I so distracted all the time or why can't I do the things that I really want to do and pay attention in a way that I really want to pay attention. And it's interesting picturing my life is all these little opportunities to practice

willpower. There's like a beautiful sense of completion. And like you said, the word ritualizing of the everyday normal moments that I'm denying myself. And we all have them, right? No matter who we are on this planet, we could be a king, a prime minister. It doesn't matter. We all do those little mundane things throughout the day. You know, we brush our teeth, we take a shower, we wipe ourselves, we hang the towel up nicely.

You know, whatever it may be, all day. We spent a significant amount of time doing these so-called mundane things. What I'm saying here is leverage those mundane things as opportunities to develop real power and concentrations with the purpose of controlling where awareness goes in the mind. Because where awareness goes, energy flows, as I say in the book. And where energy flows is what's manifesting in your life. And that's critical to understand. The things that manifests in our life is what we're investing energy in, or what we have

been investing energy in. And one way to control where energy is flowing is by controlling where your awareness that all of light is going in your mind. So learn to do the mundane things well. So you can control awareness. When you can control awareness, you can control awareness. You can control energy. When you can control energy, you can control what's manifesting in your life. Can you share one or two other life lessons that you've learned over the years in your priesthood, in your monk life, about living a meaningful life, like things that you really carry with you or you come back to on a regular basis that shift how you approach your days? I would see another critical thing would be managing energy. I talk about life being finite. I would say also that your energy is finite because

come a seven time at night, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, I'm exhausted and I'm ready to go to bed, which means I have no energy left. And depending on how well I sleep, my energy bills back up again. The next day I go out, I invest energy into people and things around me. What most people don't do is they never evaluate who and what they investing energy into. So if I gave you $100, and I said, that's all you have this week, Liz, to spend. You're not going to go out for $80 meal. you might go like $100, I might buy a sack of rice and a bag of potatoes, and hopefully that

gets me through the week. You'd be very conscious of how you spend that money. We're not conscious of how we spend our energy, which is wildly give it away, and not realizing that whatever you invest energy in is what's growing or manifesting in your life. So I would say that would be a big thing that I try to be very conscious of throughout the day. Where am I focusing my energy? because I only have so much of it in the day. I think sometimes we leave those things that we say are the most important to us, like our relationships, our time with our family for the very end of the day with whatever energy is left for the day.

And obviously some of that is by necessity. You know, we all need to go to work and have jobs. But I do think it's interesting that then we're like, oh, why are these things not flourishing when we're just giving them our last little drips of energy? Yeah, when energy drops, levels drops, so it's harder to focus. We're tired, we're cranky, you know, we're short, we're snappy, and that's what we give that love once. And all this at the end of the day, Liz, boils down to the fact that we think we're going to live forever. This is an exercise I do in my workshops, in-person workshops that I have. It's typically like a three-hour workshop or

full-day workshop, I'll ask people, if someone were to walk in this room and say, everybody in this room has one hour to live, how many of you would stay for the rest of this workshop? I've never had a single person put their hand up. And everyone was very clear where they would go and what they would do. And the constant answer I get from almost everybody is that I'd go right home and see my family or pick up my wife from work or husband from work and go and pick my kids from school and go spend time with them. And then I asked them on your way home, if you saw your favorite store, had a big sale going on with you swing by to pick up something.

They go like, no. When you realize your time is finite, your family becomes a priority. When you realize that when you live a life where you think you're going to live forever, then you take your loved ones and you chuck them at the bottom. Why? Because they have a greater tolerance level, right? I can ignore my wife. I can be short with her, with my daughter.

they're still going to love me tomorrow. My wife's not going to leave me because I'm snappy with her. But if I was snappy with a client, then I go like, you're not talking to you anymore. So all of a sudden, the people that are not important become a priority, and the people that are important are not a priority

because they have a greater tolerance level for your BS. And you think like, you know what, I don't need to spend time with my husband. I'll see him tomorrow anyway. I'll go hang out with these other people. But if someone told you, Liz, you only had an hour to live, you'd end this podcast right now and go spend time with your husband.

Maybe they would listen to the healthier together podcast with their husband, you know. Exactly. And I also want to share that. I don't live my life every day thinking that I'm going to die, but what I do think about every single day is that my life is finite, meaning that I don't have a short period of time. I have a finite amount of time on this planet. every day I think that and I realize, okay, how am I going to utilize this time that I have?

Who's important? What's important? Those are my points of focus. Can you tell us a little bit about your book in your own words and where to find you on the internet? Yes. Find me at my website, which is daupani.org. And the book is called The Power of Unwavering Focus. You can get it in most bookstores and most online stores as well. Amazon has it Bons and Nobles. The English translation is out now and then next year it will be available in 20 other languages. I hope you enjoy it, but really, I would say when you read the book, take a highlighter, write down notes, highlight things, cover to cover, and then go over chapters 3 to 5. Those are the most important chapters. All right.

I'm going to go back and reread chapters 3 to 5 when we finish this conversation. Awesome. Is it the awareness part? Yeah, because at the end of the day, it's all about controlling awareness in the mind. because if you don't control your awareness, your environment, which are the people and things around you, is going to control where your awareness goes. And unless you understand that, how the mechanics of something works, it's going to be a struggle. Most people can drive an automatic car.

They can't drive a stick shift car, a lot of people. But if I taught someone how to clutch works and how to drive the gears work and how to drive a stick shift car, then they can harness it, they can control it, and they can direct it to where it wants to go. Life is the same way. If we don't understand our mind and how it works, then we can't control it and we can't direct where it wants to go. And if you can't do it, then someone else is going to direct your mind for their own personal benefit, not your benefit. So here it's really about getting you to understand how you work so then you can make choices on how you want to go forward in your life. Well, that is a powerful sentiment. I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today, Dundapani.

Thank you. And thank you for being such a good reader and asking such great questions. I just love this episode. I don't know if it's because of where I am in life right now, but I truly think this is just such universal, important knowledge. All day, every day. I've been thinking, what am I practicing right now? Am I practicing focus? Am I practicing distraction? and I've been trying to build willpower by doing things better and longer than I would have. It's just there's so much good stuff in here. Okay, two quick things before we wrap up. If you haven't already, go join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group.

The posts continue to just get better and better. And it's just the most wonderful, welcoming, intelligent, lovely community. I think on the entire internet, I will link the group in the show notes. Or you can just search Healthy Together Podcast Club on Facebook. It should come right up. The in-person clubs have also kicked off so you can get more. information on those in the Facebook group as well. And then finally, we have an amazing giveaway for this episode. Don DePonni is giving away 10 copies of his new book, The Power of an Wavering

focus to the healthier together community. Just comment on my most recent post mentioning something that you loved or learned from the episode. And then follow me. I am at Liz Moody and Don DePonni. He is at Don DePonni LLC on Instagram to enter. The post doesn't need to be about the episode. Just mention Don DePonni so I know what you are entering. If you'd like a bonus entry, you can also take a screenshot of the episode and share why everybody should listen and put that in your stories. Just make sure that you tag me and Don DePonnie so that we can both see it. This is a wonderful book. It goes so much deeper on everything that we talked about in this episode and you definitely want to get your hands on a copy.

If you're new here, make sure that you're subscribed so you do not miss out on any future episodes. We have really, really good ones coming up, including one on overcoming fear of death and ask the doctor blood sugar adjudy. addition and a really fun one about astrology that I'm definitely going to send to my dad and be like, Dad, you need to listen to this and stop making fun of my interest in astrology. So definitely subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss out on anything that's coming up. Okay, I love you and I will see you next week on the next episode of the Healthier Together podcast. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products

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