The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Suneel Gupta On Essential Practices For Success & Joy, How To Discover Your Passion, & Personal Fulfillment

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

616: Today, we're sitting down with Suneel Gupta, the author of 'EVERYDAY DHARMA: 8 Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do.' In his book, Suneel offers a path to personal fulfillment without sacrificing professional ambition. Sharing ancient wisdom reimagined for modern times, Gupta helps people bring career goals and inner peace into harmony through tiny, everyday habits. Today, we cover the 8 essential practices that he discusses in his book, and he gives us tips on how to find your authentic self, realistic pathways to finding your passion and incorporating it into your everyday life, and how to meet your goals without getting burnt out. WATCH The Podcast On YouTube Page HERE To connect with Suneel Gupta click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HEREFor Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential. Get 20% off everything on our Amazon storefront from Prime Day on October 10th and 11th. This episode is brought to you by Ibotta You can earn cash back on hundreds of online brands and retailers when you start Ibotta. Download the Ibotta app now and use code SKINNY to start earning real cash back. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog It's never been easier to invest in your dog's health with fresh food. Get 50% off your first box & free shipping by going to thefarmersdog.com/skinny This episode is brought to you by LMNT LMNT is a tasty electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio: 1000mg sodium, 200mg potassium, and 60mg magnesium. Get a free sample pack with any purchase at drinkLMNT.com/SKINNY This episode is brought to you by Wella Wella Professionals just released its most luxurious hair care line; Ultimate Repair. You can purchase The Ultimate Repair Miracle Hair Rescue at Ulta stores, or go to wella.com to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Drizly Drizly is the go-to app for drink delivery. Download the Drizly app or go to Drizly.com and use code SKINNY at checkout to receive $5 off or a $0 delivery fee on your next order. This episode is brought to you by Just Thrive These days, stress seems to hit us from every possible angle in any environment at any time, day after day. Enter Just Calm - the breakthrough new stress and mood support formula from Just Thrive. Get 20% off a bottle of Just Thrive probiotic + Just Calm supplement at justthrivehealth.com and use code SKINNY90 at checkout. Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. discussing my Prime Day picks. And you should know that the Skinny Confidential is on Amazon now. And all of the products are on Prime Day. So if you listen to this podcast, you can head over to Amazon and search the Skinny Confidential. And on October 10th and 11th, grab a bunch of the products. I personally would start with the pink balls. They are absolutely amazing. I have been chiseling and sculpting my face every single morning. Sometimes I put them in the refrigerator and sometimes I put them under hot water. You cannot go wrong with these balls. They're absolutely insane. It's like the best sculpting tool on the market and it's on Prime. So go shop it, Amazon Prime Day, October 10th and 11th, and go search The Skinny Confidential are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness.

Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. My grandfather left me with this one metaphor that I will carry with my heart for the rest of my life. He believed that the world was like a massive sitar. Sitar is like the string, the Indian string instrument. And he said that every one of us represents a string in that sitar. Sitar is like the string, the Indian string instrument. And he said that every one of us represents a string in that sitar. No one string is more important than the other string. We're all one string. Your job in life is really to figure out how to play your string. The beauty of that isn't that just that when you play your string, it plays wonderfully.

It's that when you can play your string, you start to harmonize the other strings as well. It's not just about us. When you can start to come into your own, when you can start to express who you are through what you do, it affects the people around you as well. That would be the one thing is tune into your string, learn how to play it well. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her show. Today, we have an incredible episode with our guest, Sunil Gupta, the author of Everyday Dharma, Eight Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do. In his book, Sunil offers a path to personal fulfillment without sacrificing professional ambition. This is an incredible episode for anyone looking for fulfillment, trying to find happiness,

trying to be happy where you are, making sure that your ambition doesn't overshadow living a fulfilled life. And we cover a bunch of different topics. Some of them include why success is a lousy teacher, what the arrival fallacy is, what your dharma is and how to find it, how to find your authentic self and know what you want in life, inner success versus outer success, and how to really find your passion. This one is jam-packed for anyone out there who's just looking to level up, feel good, better themselves, and all around be a great person. Lauren and I really enjoyed having Sunil on the show. We're probably going to do it again. We liked it so much. With that, Sunil Gupta, welcome to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show.

This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. Great guests, great content, hate the voices. Now I'm using my voice and my voice has changed. And hopefully- And they're going to be like, wow, we love the voice. Exactly. Well, listen, man. First, I got to give out a shout out to my friend, Jeff Berman. He, Jeff and I have worked together here in Dear Media for years now. Um, and it is rare that he says, Hey, you have to interview this person. You're one of those people. I'm very glad he set us up. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. There's a,

there's a lot of directions we can take this with you and we're going to get into it and go all over the place. But to start, I want to like maybe a little bit of background because you're a tech entrepreneur, you've done a lot of different things. Now you're an author writing a book. And I think just some context around how you even got here in the first place would be helpful. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, what I do for a living is I travel around the world and I, and I study, you know, what I consider to be the most exceptional performers in their different industries. But I try to find them really at their lowest moments, at the times when things were not

going well, when they had a goal that didn't come together. The reason that's fascinating to me is because I feel like it's in those moments of despair that we learn the most. We've heard the saying, success is a pretty lousy teacher, right? And failure teaches us so many things about ourselves. And that's where I spend my time. But for me, it's also been a personal journey. I spent a lot of time in New Delhi growing up. My parents are both, my dad came from India. My mom came from what is now Pakistan. She's a refugee. We would go back to

India to my dad's childhood home. And my grandfather would teach me a lot about this concept called Dharma. And it was the way that my ancestors lived. And Dharma is your essence. And when you are expressing your essence, you come alive in a brand new way. And when you're not, you can feel lost and you can feel depleted and depressed. And I think so many of us are feeling that way right now. And I'm like trying to absorb all this as like, you know, as a seven-year-old, you know, we go back to the United States. I grew up in Metro Detroit and I did everything that I possibly could to distance myself from being Indian. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, and I wanted to be as white as possible. I would overwear Bruce Springsteen t-shirts.

I would cake, at times, baby powder onto my face to make myself look more white, because I didn't describe it at the time this way, but I was ashamed of who I was. And so this whole body of philosophy, this way that my ancestors, even my parents sort of behaved and followed, I wanted nothing to do with it. And instead I adopted sort of this Western way of grit and hustle and all the things I think you and I both know and went out into the world and hustled my ass off. And either I found myself failing, I started two companies that both failed. I ran for public office and I lost. But even when I was succeeding, even when things were coming together, I wasn't finding the happiness that I actually thought I was going to together, I wasn't finding the happiness that I actually thought I was going to find. I wasn't finding the sense of joy from that. And as a result,

I was lost. I was depressed. I felt this emptiness. You know, there's this Sufi saying that, you know, the world breaks your heart, it breaks your heart, it breaks your heart, and then eventually your heart cracks open. And it's from that openness that you start to find love, you understand how to live. And I think for me, what happened when my heart sort of broke open is it developed a sense of curiosity about this body of work called dharma,

this thing that has existed for thousands of years that has helped people find who they are and express that to the world. And I wanted to return back to that thing. And that's what really brought me to this book. What was the like real epiphany, though, from you to go from putting baby powder on your face to completely embracing your culture? Like, was there like a moment where you were having success where you thought, I'm doing this the wrong way? Yeah, I mean, I think I was caught in what Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, if you follow his work, calls the arrival fallacy, right? I was chasing this moment of arrival. And what the arrival fallacy basically is,

is this notion of like, hey, we are in this belief pattern that one day we're going to reach a certain amount of wealth, a certain amount of status, a certain amount of success. And once we actually get there, then we're going to finally feel whole inside. And the problem I think that a lot of people feel is that even when you do start to accumulate some of this stuff The goalpost moves and then it moves again and it moves again and it can feel like this sort of endless chase You know for me, I wouldn't say that I was I was I was definitely failing more than I was succeeding But I was aware enough to know that even when I was getting those wins. I

Wasn't feeling any happier really as a result of that. It was just what's next and what's next after that. And when I looked around, what I realized is that so many people seem to be caught in this arrival fallacy. And I wanted to know, how do we get ourselves out of it? That's when I started to really kind of look back and embrace some of these ways of living that aren't new. They're thousands of years old, but I think they're more relatable today than I think really any time before.

I have this friend that every single time I go out to dinner with him, he's like, I'm going to be happy when. I'm going to be less stressed when this happens. I'm going to be relaxed when I get this. And like everything he was saying was like when he gets something, he's going to feel a certain emotion. I think that's a lot of people. And no, it speaks to what you're saying. It sounds like a lot of people are like that. When you tell me all this, what I've found that's worked for me, and I would love to know

what's worked for you, is I just try to find happiness in little moments that are really simple. So like taking my son for a walk and it's like warm out and doing a meditation that to me makes me like really feel happy. That's what's really worked for me. The more successful I've gotten is to find the little boring moments and make them feel special. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like Jim, Jim Carrey has a lot of funny things, but he has that one and i'm gonna butcher this but he has that like saying where he's like his dream is that he hopes that everybody finds all the riches and success and fame that they that they're looking for to see that it's like basically not the answer and i think a lot of people listen like easy for you to say if you you know you've had resources you've become successful maybe you're struggling

to pay your bills but some of the most miserable people i've encountered in my life are some of the most accomplished and it's it's a weird fallacy when you see that you're struggling to pay your bills, but some of the most miserable people I've encountered in my life are some of the most accomplished. And it's a weird fallacy when you see that you're like this on paper, this person has quote unquote everything. Why can't they be happy? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, even if we haven't gotten to this point of sort of success, I think it still is about the next client, the next deal, the next thing, even that climb, we're all, I think sort of, at least in the background, aware of, hey, like, it is a bit of a sort of a unquenchable thirst. I think what you're saying is so interesting. You know, I think it is the little things. When we were coming up with the title of this book, even,

you know, one of the options was to call it Dharma. But the thing about, you know, even a concept like Dharma or purpose is sometimes it seems so all encompassing. Like it seems like, you know, you almost have to quit your job and move to Paris and become a painter or go backpacking through the Himalayas. It's overwhelming. And, you know, for most people from, you know, most of us were paying the bills, we're dealing with kids, we're dealing with aging parents. We have back-to-back meetings and commitments. I mean, that isn't really an option, you know? And so the question, I think, isn't about how to find dharma through escape, but it's

through alignment. Yeah. And it's those little things that I think sort of take us further and further into who we are. Dharma isn't what you do. It's who you are and how who you are gets expressed through what you do. And even if you can make these one inch little gains, these 1% little gains, where you feel like you're expressing just a little bit more of who you are through what you do, it starts to open you up in a brand new way. You're so right though. People

get so overwhelmed. They're like, I need to move to Paris. I need to change my whole life. I need to go live in a foreign country for three months. And it's like, if you can't find happiness in the little pockets throughout your day, what makes you think that you're going to move for three months somewhere else and find it there? Totally. It's so confusing if you really think about it. It's almost not thinking A to Z, but just A to B every day. So that makes total sense to me. When you were interviewing all of these incredibly successful, high-performing people, and you said that you wanted to talk with them when they felt low, what were they feeling low about exactly? What was the common denominator between all of them yeah it's usually it was usually about a missed goal it was usually that they wanted to start something that they you know start a company or start an organization or take a shift in their career or try to find a promotion in a role they already had and they didn't get it you know and

they missed and you know typically it was people who, you know, when I, when I talked to people who are like, you know, Oscar winning filmmakers, for example, that, you know, had a couple of hits, what was the best year of your career? And I stopped asking that because I felt like usually what it led to was like, oh, well, we hit the chart on this or we, you know, that was a really sweet victory. Instead, I asked people, what was the most meaningful year of your career? And usually when I ask that question, the vast majority of the time people answer with a loss. It was something that went wrong. It was something that they tried to do and they their path. In the book, I call this the magic of a missed goal. We set these goals and we sort of feel like if we don't hit them, we're done. It's all failure. But I think the reality is that it's through these moments of missed goals that can ultimately lead us to even better things. I don't know. Is that something that you can relate

to? No, no, no, for sure. And I think I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he was saying, hey, like the last 10 years in this market, I look like a genius as an operator because everything's been going well. And all of a sudden now it's like, you know, it's a little bit of a shit show and people don't know.

And he was saying it's been like a huge defining moment for him because all of these things he wanted to do have been derailed just by the conditions of what's going on in the world. And it's helped him refocus. And I think for me, I've had such a weird and eclectic career of doing different things at a young age, but the only time I've ever learned anything or figured out like, Hey, that's my purpose. That my passion is when something has gone wrong. It's never like

things are going like things when things are going right. You, you actually, you almost don't think about it as much. You're like, Oh, this is just, you're like kind of on autopilot. It's those moments when you get buckled to your knees. You're like, okay, I gotta like figure out really who I am and what I actually want. Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes a promotion or an advancement can feel like a departure. You talk to people who got to that partner level within a firm and now they're like actually miserable because they're like oh i am actually further away of from what i actually want to do right even though on paper it seems like i'm humming along or i'm

like i'll just talk like financially every time i've hit another milestone i remember being a kid and like wanting to hit these milestones i give these numbers in your mind like when i get there i'm going to be able to do this and every time i like i now that i reflect i'm like it's it's your point it's always moving the goalposts further and i and i like i now that i reflect i'm like it's it's your point it's always moving the goalposts further and i and i like self-analyze i'm like why do i like these like this goal that i told myself years ago i'd be content with i'm not content with why is that so you want to keep the drive and you want to keep the ambition but at the same time you have to find happiness without that material stuff yeah right and if you don't do that i think you're just going to be on this constant hamster wheel of looking for more and

more and more but you also have to enjoy the process too yeah everyone's so obsessed with the getting there you have to enjoy the process yeah and the patience of the process i think that people miss that too if someone's listening and they're feeling burnt out, they're feeling low energy, they're feeling just not fulfilled, where do you start with that person? What are some quick tips that they can apply tomorrow? Yeah. One of the things that I sort of thought about when I first started talking about dharma and started learning about dharma was that it was something that I had to go find on the outside. And how do you define dharma exactly? So dharma is your, it's your inner calling, but I like to think of it as your essence, right? It's this, it's this thing about

you that sort of wants to express itself. And when you're expressing it, you feel alive, like you feel confident, you feel creative, you feel caring. And when you don't, you, you feel lost, you feel alive, like you feel confident, you feel creative, you feel caring. And when you don't, you feel lost, you feel depleted. And we use words like purpose as sort of these flowery terms, right? But the reality is purpose can hurt like hell, right? If you're not expressing this thing, it feels agonizing. The way I think about dharma is that either it's going to light up the world around you, or it's going to burn a hole inside of you. You get to choose which one, but no one really escapes that choice. So the act is starting to come back to what is my essence and then how do I express that to the world? And, you know, the good news is that your dharma isn't something you have to go find.

It's something that's already inside of you. But it's been buried. For a lot of us, it's been buried. And it's been buried under other people's expectations, other people's judgments. It's been buried under the priorities and realities of life. And so Michelangelo would look at a block of marble and he would say, this sculpture is already inside.

All I have to do is chisel away the layers that are hiding it. And dharma is very much the same way. We can start to chisel away the layers. And even these little things, even these little chisels can make a huge difference. So let me give you an example. There was a project manager named Mila that I talk about in the book. And Mila was, you know, she was inside a big company. She was earning a good salary, but she was miserable. Like she didn't like her job and she really wanted to become a teacher. But the problem was that her family relied on her healthcare insurance. They relied on her salary. She didn't have the liberty necessary to like quit her job and go back to get her teaching certificate. So she, like a lot of us, I think she felt trapped

in her job. And then one day a mentor sits down with her and says, I just got this very simple question for you. What is it specifically about teaching that you love? And as Mila goes deeper into that question and goes beneath the title of teacher and into what she really loves about teaching. What she decides is she really loves helping people grow. That's her thing. She loves to help people grow. And yet teaching was one way to express that, but there were many other ways to express that as well. And so she ends up making a relatively small shift into the training department inside her own company. And when that happens, everything changes. She goes from dreading her job to waking up with energy and enthusiasm. She becomes a rising star within the company. Her husband sees her light up in a brand new way. Their kids see

their mother come alive. The myth, I think, is that we have to abandon our life in order to transform the way that we live. And I think oftentimes our dharma is right within the reach of where we are right now. So the simple thing, one of the most simple things you can do if you are in a place right now that you don't like, start to think about what that dream job or that dream role really is. But don't just stop there. Look underneath the hood of the dream itself. You go beneath the title, go beneath the salary, and ask yourself specifically, what is the essence of that job? What is it about that thing that actually makes me tick? Because when you can go there, what you can start to realize is in Mila's case,

for example, was helping people grow, that you might be able to take the essence of that thing and pull it into your life in some shape or form, right? Even right now. I think you can apply that to a marriage though, too. It's like, people think the grass is always greener on the other side. My mother-in-law tells me this all the time. She's like, the grass is not greener on the other side. What's that it's where you water it if you are having troubles in your marriage maybe change your approach within the marriage and find things that you used to connect on i just think like people are so quick to like burn this down to go to the next thing but it's so to your point it's like she was working at this place and she found something else within the

place. Yeah. I'm going to butcher something, but is that what you call the Sukkah? Yeah. That's why you start there is figuring out who you are, what you actually like, what you want. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So Sukkah is your authentic self, you know? And so, you know, the practices inside the first couple of chapters are really about sort of these chisels, these things that we can use. And sometimes they're as simple as questions that we can ask ourselves. One of the most basic questions, and it may sound cliche, but I think it does help is, what would I do for free? What would I do if I wasn't compensated for it? That's a good one. And that's not to say necessarily that you have to work for free,

but if you can clearly answer that question. It's so funny you say that because Lorne and I started the show for free out of our living room and we did it for two years for free. But if you can clearly answer that question. It's so funny you say that because Lauren and I started the show for free out of our living room and we did it for two years for free. And I would still do this every day for free because I think like our thing is we like to meet people like yourself. We're curious, like to talk to them. And luckily, unfortunately, we've been able to build a business around it. But even without the business, I would still want to do this thing. I would still want to be sitting here with you talking about all this stuff. I love that. And it shines through. I mean, because I think when you're doing that thing, the level of creativity, the level of energy you bring to it, I mean, just far surpasses. I mean, the irony of all of it is that, you know, there's

outer success and there's inner success, right? And outer success is wealth, it's achievement, it's all that. Inner success is this joy that you're getting from the process, right? And I don't think there's anything wrong with outer success. I think there's a lot of sort of shame out there of I shouldn't want the nice things. I don't think that that's true. And if you like nice things, there's nothing wrong with that. I think the myth though is that outer success is somehow going to lead you to inner success. And that almost never happens. What you can do is reverse the flow, just like you did, which is you start with something that really, really matters to you. And if you start with something that really matters to you, you bring a higher level of energy to it. You bring more

creativity to it. You bring more enthusiasm to it. And that in a lot of cases will lead to outer success as well. Yeah. I think like the way I look at it is like outer success should just be a by-product of doing the things that you love and you're passionate about. But, you know, one question we get all the time on the show, especially from younger people is how do you find your passion? And I think a lot of them, they haven't done this work to discover their essence. I mean, it's a hard question to answer. It's like, hey, you know, whenever someone who's found their passion early says,

oh, just chase your passion. Yeah. I think that's easy for some of those people to say. But if you're one of these people that's confused about it and hasn't discovered that and doesn't know how to do that, I think it's difficult. And I don't know, maybe you have some insight on how people could figure that out.

I think that we are in, you know, I was, and I think a lot of people are stuck in an occupation mindset where we feel like our passion is a specific job title. So my passion is to be a lawyer. My passion is to be a doctor. My passion is to be a podcaster. What we, what we needed to do, I think, is go a little bit deeper than that to, okay, what underlies all of that? Do you love to tell stories? Do you love to nurture people? Do you love to nurture people? Do you love to help people grow in the case of Mila, right? Because when you can go to that essence level, what you start to realize is that there are many different ways to express that

essence, right? And all of a sudden, this feeling of like being fixed and trapped and stuck starts to dissipate because what you realize is, gosh, there's so many different ways for me to show up in the world. You know, like for me, I was in a technology role, right, inside Silicon Valley and I fucking hated it. You know, but I wanted to pretend like I liked it because it seemed like that's what the cool people were doing. The people who were making money were doing that and I was chasing what they had without realizing that that wasn't actually who I was. When I started to realize that, I started to say, all right, what is it that I really enjoy doing? And what I came back to was I love to tell stories.

That was my essence. But now all of a sudden I find myself in this technology company, right? And I know that I'm a storyteller in my essence. What do I do? Those are two different worlds. But the way that I started to align who I am with what I do was by really digging into customer stories. I started to spend more of my days listening to customer stories. I started to spend more of my day telling and sharing those stories with the people

around me. Right? And just do that. Just do that act. It would seem small, but just do that act. I was waking up with more enthusiasm for my day. I love my work more. And it put me on a path where, hey, maybe I can start to double down and triple down over time being a storyteller.

The reason I'm an author today is because I discovered myself as a storyteller inside a company, you know, and, and, and, but I think one path can lead to another. Yeah. And to your point, if you just, if you define in this case that you're a storyteller, there's so many avenues that you can work within. Podcast, author, speaker. There's so many, so many different ways. Yeah. As opposed to just defining, like, say you're like, I'm going to tell stories on a podcast and then you you start doing a podcast, like, I hate doing this. Maybe you're better at speaking or being an author or doing video, whatever it may be. You have an essence, but the way that you express that essence can change over time, right? And when we start to come around to that, I think all of a sudden it liberates us.

I mean, I think, you know, one of the things I love about dharma, like, is that dharma was never meant to be a transformation. You're not trying to fix yourself. You're not trying to necessarily change yourself. You're trying to liberate yourself. There's a part of you that wants to come alive and wants to come out. And there are so many different possibilities of how that can be done. And that's ultimately what the book is about.

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No questions asked. You have nothing to lose. Drink element dot com slash skinny. What are the eight essential practices? Can we go through each one? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. I have them all here. So we just covered the Sukha. Is that how you describe it?

And I'm going to, is it Bhakti? Yeah, yeah. So full-hearted devotion. Yeah, so Bhakti. Bhakti is full-hearted devotion. And it's all about how do we start to bring ourselves out of this time mindset that we're in right now, where we feel like when we have a passion or purpose,

we have to spend every hour of every day with it. And instead, put ourselves into a full-hearted mindset where we might not have a chance to spend every minute of every day with our passion or purpose. We might have a chance to spend only a few minutes with our passion or purpose every day, but we want that to be full-hearted. And the punchline is that it is way, way better to be full-hearted and partly scheduled than it is to be half-hearted and fully scheduled. And we know that because we've seen it in our own work. And my wife and I, we have two kids.

We have an 11-year-old and a six-year-old. And we joke about how like at 6.45 every morning, the house goes absolutely berserk, right? And our time, and you guys, three and a half-year-old and one and a half-year-old. Yeah, we're in it. You're in it, right? So our time is done beyond a certain point.

And even at the end of the day, after the kids are asleep, like that's just not, that's not good connected time. Like we're both exhausted from our days. So what that practically means for our relationship is that we have this window in the morning from like 630 to 645, where it's just the two of us and the house is quiet. And what we do is we put away our phones during that time and we just have a cup of coffee with each other, right? Like one connected, good cup of coffee, or I get to look at her, she gets to look at me and we get to just hang out, right? And that 15 minutes is the bedrock

of our relationship, right? It's full hearted. And every once in a while we get date night and maybe every year or two, we get to sneak away for a few days at a time, right? But that 15 minutes is ultimately where it's at, right? And the same thing is true, I think, for dharma is that you don't need to be spending all of your time. Like if you're in a job right now because you have to pay the bills, that's fine. But there are little pockets, there are little moments in your day where you can start to express that dharma. The question is, how do we do that in a full-hearted way? And that's really what this chapter is about. Next one, prana, energy over time. And we've

talked, someone covered this on the show before, but I would love for you to dive into it a little bit more. Yeah. So prana is really about sort of the energy, the extraordinary energy that we can bring to our sort of our work. And, you know, oftentimes it is exhaustion that brings us out of our dharma. One of the fallacies I think is that you can find purpose. And once you find your purpose, you're like lit up with energy and you just have abundant amounts of it. And that's not always true. Part of my role is on faculty at Harvard Medical School. And I talk to and I teach people who are, I think, clearly living their purpose.

They love what they do at their heart, but they're also burnt out. A lot of them are nurses and physicians and they're really kind of exhausted. And if you're exhausted, it's really hard to sort of feel like you're living like a purposeful, intentional life. So what that means, practically speaking, is that in order to stay in our dharma, in order to live a life of dharma, we have to also take care of this level of energy we have. One of the things we realize about high performers is that they're not waiting for vacations. They're not waiting for long breaks in order to take moments of rest. In fact, the average high performer is taking somewhere around eight breaks every single day. This is so funny, but this girl went into my facialist and says, does Lauren really do all these wellness practices that she posts on Instagram? And the girl was like, yeah, she, my facialist was like, yeah, she does. She does them all. The girl said, Lauren must be exhausted from doing all these wellness practices. And my facialist says, no, the wellness practices actually give her the energy to be efficient when it's time to go for my career.

And it's so true. It's like you have to do the self-care and the wellness to be effective. And if that means stopping in the middle of the day or taking a walk while you're on a conference call or saying you need a break, I'm all about that. Totally, totally. Like, let's do it. I think this is the reason. This is what you're describing, I think, is the issue that I have with the term work-life balance. Because I think what

it's basically saying is like, you have your time for work and you have to have your time for life or joy or wellness, right? And those two things are separate, right? We're balancing them off of each other. But ultimately, I think what you're saying is they fuel one another. I can't be effective as a performer within my company if I don't have the space and the time to think. But I do want to say I have not always been perfect at this and I'm not perfect now. The balance thing has been really tough and I'm sure you know this with your studies, like it's a really tough thing to find, but once you find it and you sort, it sort of checks into place, it's really hard to get off of it.

Yeah. I agree with what you're saying is I don't think, I don't think it's like one or the, I think they have to be integrated. Yeah. You know, like Lauren and I, when we got to,

we obviously worked together and she was saying, okay, well when we get home, like we gotta be able to like turn this off or like turn this on i'm like over time that's not gonna work like so much of our life is doing this and then being together we're gonna talk about these things i can't like we can't just like shut i just don't want to be having sex with you and you're asking yeah a spreadsheet nobody that's true integration i think a lot of i think a lot of people i agree with you i don't believe

in this term work-life balance i think you have to figure out how to integrate your life with your work and have them be complimentary it's hard to find though i mean there was for 10 years i was completely unbalanced i felt so i mean it's not like something that's natural you have to actively look i'm with you have you ever found somebody that's balanced? So I think people who find that balance, they're not waiting. They're not waiting for, okay, let's think about it. Let's think about it as a traffic light, red, yellow, green, right? I think what most of us do, and I certainly did this, is I would wait until I got to turn red, right? I was in the red in order to find recovery. I'd be like, hey, I need to take a pause. I need to take a break, right? And then I would sort of downshift in my work, right?

And oftentimes at that time, my work would suffer. So I was burning really hard for a while. And then like I would just downshift or worst case scenario, I was just completely burnt out. And I'm like, I need to go find another job, right? Because it's just not working anymore. And I think a lot of people do that, right? I think it's like over 60% of the workforce right now

is looking for their next thing. And what the data tells us is that within three to six months of being in a new job, we're already starting to think about our next one. So it's this constant cycle, I think. And I think burnout has a lot to do with it. We burn hard for a while, like and all of a sudden we start to deplete ourselves.

In the book, I talk about this practice that worked for me, and I've now seen it work for others, called the 55-5 model, right? 55-5, which is that whenever possible, and it's not always, but whenever it is, for every 55 minutes of work, you're taking five minutes of focused, deliberate rest. And that five minutes, you could be doing anything. You could be sipping on a cup of coffee minutes you could be doing anything you could be sipping on a cup of coffee you could be chatting with each other you could be taking a walk so long as it's deliberately non-productive like you're not trying to squeeze a little bit of productivity

into that five minutes and i think that if you're listening right now what you might be thinking because i thought this was that that's shrinking your amount of output, right? Because if you're shrinking each hour by five minutes, multiply that times a nine hour day or whatever, that's 45 minutes lost, right? So you might be thinking, hey, I'm already scrambling for time right now. And you're telling me to shrink my output by 45 minutes. Like, isn't that going to reduce, isn't that going to put me further behind? But what the data and the science almost like always shows is that every one of those five minutes is making the other 55 minutes far more productive, far more energetic, far more creative. And that rubs off on the people around you as well, right? And I think the mind,

the mindset shift is that we, I think, have been conditioned to treat rest as a reward. Like you're rewarding yourself for something that you've just done. And I think what you're saying, Lauren, in a lot of ways is it's not a reward for what you've just done. It's almost a preparation for what you're about to do. I really try to approach now. This is now. I have not always been good at this. My business, like an athlete, it's like I have to prepare to be the sharpest, clearest person when I show up. And I've gotten to a place,

and I don't know if it's after having kids, where I do not feel guilty saying no. I do not feel guilty taking space for myself. I do not feel guilty meditating, taking rest, doing a sauna, a cold plunge, whatever it is. I I'm like this is what I'm doing and I need these tools yeah and I also not not just need I want to do them so I can feel my best I think there's like also two camps with this when it comes to becoming a parent in my case I always figured when you have children your productivity is going to slow down because you're going to be busy with the children but I think in my case it's gone up and it's because what's happened is having the children, anything that takes me away from them, I have to be so focused now on utilizing as much of that time. Yeah.

Right. And then getting the most out of it that I may be in some ways, quote unquote, working less than I used to before I had all these obligations, but the productivity is more because I'm more focused. Sure. Bringing a lot more energy to it. But before you're like, you're kind of like, oh, okay. Like I don't really have anybody relying on me. I can just like float around instead of a task that, you know, really could only take me an hour. Maybe I can spend like two hours or an hour and a half because there was no, there was no crunch. And I feel like it kind of fits in with what you're saying here which is there are these periods of time where I'm taking a lot more time away but then when I'm there I'm

like it's all energy and all focus yeah yeah I think too when like it it has to be worth it to be away from the children so you got to squeeze the orange so tight that you get all the juice out of the orange because when you go back you're probably not going to be able to be productive yeah but you know even do like if I take my podcast hat on i put my executive hat on running this company you know we have a lot of people that work here and what i always tell them was like you know i always want to create an atmosphere where you can be the most productive and happiest and i want to you know if you leave i want you to leave better than when you came all that yeah but what i also tell people is like i cannot be the person that's going to help you like that is going

to make you happy like if you're if you're somebody in your career and you're constantly looking for the next thing because you can't be happy, like there's some work that needs to be done within yourself. It's not just like the next thing is not going to be the thing that triggers it or the next thing or the next thing. It has to come from within. Yeah, yeah. What I also love about what you're saying is like, look, you know, I talk to a lot of company leaders right now, and well-being is obviously a big topic. I think the shift, though, is that in the past, this idea of well-being was like a benefit. You know, we want to give people more vacation time. We want to give people some room in their schedule.

We want to sort of compartmentalize meetings so that they have time for wellness, right? But it almost in some ways felt like we're doing this as a benefit to you. Or I think the most enlightened company leaders are coming around and say, actually, it's not just a benefit for you. It's actually a benefit for me, for the company as well, right? Because you are showing up in a much, much better frame of mind. Makes sense. It's contagious.

You show up with better energy. It affects everybody around you, even through a digital screen, right? And that is, I think, a really promising, I think, shift. Because now, if it's not just about an employee benefit, but if it's about the bottom line of the company, that's where I think the well-being sort of revolution really takes off. Yeah, I mean, like, not that I can tell anybody in the business how to conduct their life. But what I try to do with this show and in my my own life is like, I would be tickled to death if everybody in the business said, you know what, I got to develop a really strong wellness routine,

fitness routine, all these things that's good, reading routine, whatever it is so that they can, when they show up here, they're just on point, right? Like if somebody came in this business was like, Hey, I'm sorry, I'm a little late. I was just working my ass off in the gym and like getting really prepared and read this great thing. I would be super pumped as an employer because that person's going to come with more energy. They're going to be healthier. They're going to be more focused, you know, all of these things. I don't think a policy of like, Hey, take more vacation is going to solve anything for anybody. Right. That's, I mean, we have all that, but it's, you also have to do the work to set yourself up to be

a happy, productive, healthy human being. Yeah, yeah. The everyday. Yes, the everyday. What is the next essential practice? This one I'm going to butcher. Upeka. Upeka.

Yeah. This one, and I love this one, and we talk about it a lot, comfort and discomfort. Yes. Yeah, comfort and discomfort. There's this great Buddhist parable. I love it. I tell my kids it. Sometimes they're like, what are you talking about? But maybe one day it'll make sense, which is that it's called the Tale And what they realize is that when they're close together, they're needling one another, right? They're pricking one another, right? And it's uncomfortable. And so they disband and they go out into the cold, but they realize that they can't survive out in the cold. They have to be together. So eventually these porcupines come back together

to the den to help keep each other warm. and they find ways to deal with the discomfort of them needling one another. And it's such a metaphor, I think, for life, which is like, look, no one makes it alone. We don't make it anywhere without other people. But the fact is that we're going to be in interactions that are annoying for us. We're going to irritate one another. We're going to make each other uncomfortable. And even if it's not other people, it's other things and situations. We can either hide from the pain or we can find ways to have comfort in the discomfort, just the same way that the porcupines did. And so this chapter is really about what are those ways. And for each of these chapters, I really, really tried to say, all right, I know that anything that is sort of Eastern wisdom is going to find an echo in the halls of Western science. It almost always does. There was an example of that. Yeah. So in this case, it's Viktor Frankl, right? It's man's search for meaning. And Frankl, as a neurologist, as a Holocaust survivor, you know, and as somebody who went really deep on the research around meaning, you know, one of his big punchlines was that in between something that irritates us and the way that we respond to that thing is a space.

And inside that space lies our freedom, right? And so if something irritates you and your reaction to it is like this, right? It's just, they're very close together. You don't really have freedom. But what we can start to do is we can start to elongate that space over time. Oh my God. Next time you get irritated by me, I'm going to say, oh, you don't have any space. This is such a good one. You don't have any freedom. This is literally such a great manipulation tactic. Thank you for that. What I love about it is it doesn't shame the anger that we have inside of us, right? Because anger is a natural emotion, right? Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk, he would really surprise

his audiences when he would get up in front of them and he would say, I have a lot of anger inside of me. And they'd be like, well, what do you mean you have anger inside of you? You're a Nobel Peace Prize nominated Tibetan monk, like Vietnamese monk. Like, how are you, how do you have anger? And he said, no, no, I do. And we all do. But the goal isn't to remove our anger or try to like rip it out of us. The goal is to lengthen sort of the wick, right? So if we have explosives inside of us, it's a lengthen the wick from the moment that it's lit to the moment it goes off because inside that space is where we can actually start to have some choices about the way we respond to it. And so this chapter is literally about what are some

of those little choices, little things we can do to elongate the wick? One of the simplest ones for me is to just have a home base, what I call a home base, right? And this can be a mental image or it could be a physical gesture, something that you do when you're in these moments of discomfort. Like my 11-year-old, you know, we lived in, she spent half her life in Metro Detroit and we moved back to a neighborhood very close to where I grew up. And again, pretty all white, you know, neighborhood. She got bullied a lot. She had brown skin. She got bullied a lot.

And, you know, she would ask me, like, what do I do? And it's like this heartbreaking moment for like a parent to like have to coach like a child about like what to do with bullying. And I didn't have all the answers for sure. But one of the things that I told her was that when I was getting bullied, when I was trying to figure this out myself, I just had this physical gesture, which is putting my hand over my heart, right? Just like this, just learning to do this. And just that simple thing, even if you're not getting love from around you, you can find little ways to give yourself love in those moments, right? And so for me, it's this physical gesture. It's this home

base. For other people, it can be mental, right? Like a lot of people that I coach now have like a place that they go to inside their head. It could be a place they really enjoyed as a child, or it could be their favorite vacation spot, or it could even just be like petting their dog, right? But it's this mental image that they sort of bring to mind in these really uncomfortable moments. And again, it doesn't make that moment go away. That's not the goal. The goal isn't escapism,

but the goal is starting to create a little bit more of that distance, right? Just a little bit more of that wick so that you can start to give yourself options. Because when you give yourself options you give yourself freedom yeah when i think the myth is believing that one day everything's going to be comfortable or that comfort is something to aspire to right i mean you all like people i think a lot of people get excited about going through this process in life of work and then one day being able to retire and have absolute certainty and

have everything figured out and i think in many cases cases, people find a lot of unhappiness when they get to that place, right? I think what I try to tell people that I'm working with or my siblings is it's okay to be uncomfortable consistently and to realize that that's just part of life. And to your point, to find comfort in those moments, knowing that that's what part of life and to your point to find comfort in those moments knowing that that's what helps you grow yeah next practice lila yeah i play yeah so lila is lila is my favorite and it's my favorite in part because i think it's the toughest for me to to really kind of bring into my life but But Lila means high play. And basically, the idea behind Lila is separating, you know, and starting to now blur the lines between work and play, right?

Because work and play, we are conditioned to keep them so separate from one another. You know, when you are working, you are expected to behave and act in a certain way. And when you're playing, you behave and act in a completely different way, right? But what was interesting about, again, finding sort of echoes of Eastern wisdom in Western science, this chapter takes us into the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

who authored Flow and did so much work around that. And ultimately, you know, his punchline was like, we all have two sides of our personality. We have an exotelic side and we have an autotelic side. The exotelic side of us is really obsessed with the goal, right? The goal, the deadline, right? And we wake up and that's kind of what drives us. And the autotelic side is much more about the process, right? And ultimately, we are not one or the other, we're both, but we tend to lean one way or the other. And I think that there was an assumption for a long period of time before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's

research that the highest performers were people who were exotelic in nature. They were the people who were goal-driven, they were deadline-driven. What he was starting to find is that there were top performers everywhere that were also autotelic. They were as into the process as they were about the goal or the deadline, right? And not only did they sort of, were they into the process, they actually enjoyed the process. And when they were able to find some joy in that, some everyday joy in what they were doing, right, independent of the result, that's when the best performers were emerging. And, you know, it's like Alex Lowe, the mountain climber. Somebody asked him, hey, you're in these life and death situations up there. What is it that separates the best

mountain climbers? And he said, it's pretty simple. The best mountain climbers are the ones who are having the most fun. And so you see this across all of these different industries as well, is that there's this blurring of the line between work and play. And so for me, it's been just as simple. I mean, the chapter is full of these sort of different practices and how we can blur the line. But for me, I really think the simplest practice is before you walk into a moment, especially one that might feel intense or right? Or feel serious or feel high stakes. Just simply asking yourself, how do I have fun with this? I do this all the time because I actually have a tendency to like get like serious and gritty, like in these moments. And sometimes like I just have to say,

how do I, how do I have fun with this moment? And almost like inevitably when I do that, I loosen up. And when I can loosen up, I end up getting the best out of myself. Makes a ton of sense. Seva, forget yourself to find yourself. So Seva is all- Seva, see I butchered it. That's all right.

So I butcher ladies as well. Oh, well, Michael's pronounced one word wrong. I've pronounced every word wrong. Here comes the negative review. But you did it with such a great voice. I know, God. When am I gonna get this voice back? My hair has never been thicker, which is saying a lot because after I gave birth both times, I experienced a lot of shedding, but now I have upgraded every aspect of my hair care routine.

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But Gandhi, in a lot of ways, was sort of an embodiment of Dharma, right. And the book that he carried around with him was the Bhagavad Gita. And the Bhagavad Gita was one of the first texts that really talked about dharma. And when I talk about Gandhi to my students, I always sort of get this eye roll in the room. Because he's like this holier-than-thou sort of figure. He's somebody who I think people look at as naturally, like he was naturally kind of like, he did things right from the beginning and he was right from the beginning. But the reality is that Gandhi actually, he struggled a lot. He was very shy. He was very timid. He started out his career as an attorney and he was so scared of public speaking

that he actually, during his first court case, like sweat through his clothes. He ended up running out of the room, right? He never came back, abandoned his client right there and then, and was never able to get work as an attorney after that. And it's part of the reason that he actually left India and went to Africa to start trying to find work. And that part of Gandhi's story is not really told. And the reason that

it was important for something like Dharma is because the way that he transformed himself from this person who was shy and timid, really into somebody who was able to lead large crowds, like hundreds of thousands, millions of people eventually, was through this act of seva, which is that he stopped trying to find himself through himself, but he lost himself in the service of others. Through service, he was able to figure out who he really was. And one of the techniques inside this chapter that I think that we can all use is what I call the spotlight switch, which is pretty simple. When you are walking into a big moment, like whether it be, you know, a meeting or whether it be a presentation or be a podcast

interview, whatever it is, it often is tempting to feel like the spotlight is on you. And when you feel like the spotlight is on you, the pressure increases, the stakes feel higher, right? You can feel nervous because again, you're sort of caught in your own head, right? And you're making it about yourself. The spotlight switch is literally in my mind. What I will do is I will make like a click, click noise, like a click, click. And I will imagine the spotlight shifting to my, for myself to them, right? Like in this case, it's on you. It's on the two of you, Michael and Lauren. And it's also on anybody who's listening right now. Like The spotlight is on them. It's not on me. And for me, I actually get scared. I get scared if I'm in front of an audience. I get scared when I'm doing something like this spotlight is truly on me. It's on you.

This is what Gandhi used. And as it turns out, a lot of high performers will use this spotlight switch to not only, I think, give themselves some freedom and some ability to be light in situations, but to find better results. Another example is Bryan Cranston. We talk about him in this book. And Bryan Cranston talked about how for a long time, he was going from callback to callback, and he was not getting the part. And it was really frustrating for him. And he talks about how he shifted from this idea of getting, getting the part, to giving, this shift from get to give and when he was able to shift from get to give things started happening for him so instead of walking into you a moment and saying i want to get the part he'd say i'm going to just give them a great performance i'm going to give

them a unique take on something that's when people started to gravitate towards him. It makes so much sense because it's getting outside yourself. And it's almost, in a way, selfish of us to be like, I'm so nervous. I'm sweating through my clothes. I don't know if I can do this. And like you said, taking the spotlight off yourself and putting it on other people. Yeah, I've never heard it described that way. And I've talked about it on the show. My biggest fear going into this before we started this was public speaking. Really? I would not have expected people. Yeah, I've never heard it described that way. And I've talked about it on the show. My biggest fear going into this

before we started this was public speaking. Really? I would not have expected that. No, no. And I did not want to do it. Oh, now we can't shut him up. Yeah, now you can't shut me up. But going on stage,

same thing, you get the butterflies. And I still get that a little. But now what I do is I think about the audience and what they're there for and what they're going to get. And then I also think about if I was in the audience, how I'm really...

Nobody sits in an audience and is judging every aspect of the person speaking. You're just there to hear a performance or a keynote. I thought as soon as I started thinking about it from their perspective and what they were getting, it completely takes it away from me. It's really not even about me anymore. It enabled me to obviously never shut up now.

But no, but it was that thing where I was always thinking about myself in the act first yeah and it disabled me from being able to do those things and now yeah it was a good is a very good explanation i think being in your own head is the quickest path to burnout too you know when we're in our own head like we just so much more prone to like getting exhausted right because we make it about ourselves. I'll give like another, and maybe this might sound a little controversial, but if you work in an organization and you're constantly thinking about what's my path, what's my raise, what's my title change, what's my growth, as opposed to thinking like, how am I contributing

to the organization? What can I give to my department? What can I, you know, give back to the customers, whatever it is. Like those are the people that typically rise the fastest. It's the ones that have a focus on self that typically struggle the most. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that this chapter is all about the many, many examples of that. Or even, you know, when I'm saying I'm signing a new podcast here at Dear Media, the first question is how can I make money? How can I do this? I'm like, that's not the right question. The question is like is, how can I make money? How can I do this? I'm like, that's not the right question.

The question is like, how can you serve an audience? How can you get people interested in what you're saying? How can you bring guests on? Like, if you do that, the other stuff to your point earlier will kind of take care of itself. Yeah. The money, the growth, all of that. But if the focus is like right from the beginning, like what do you get?

Yeah. I think those are the people that struggle the most, at least in this medium to kind of grow. For sure, for sure. And the thing about sort of service is that it is an everyday sort of thing. You can start to feel that every day, right? But accomplishment is not, right? Like if accomplishment is what is driving you, and again, there's nothing wrong with achievement or accomplishment, but if that's the thing that's fueling you, the feedback loop on that is pretty small, right? Or it's actually, it's pretty infrequent, I should say. Like if, you know, so day in, day out, you're not going to be able to apply to their own life to better whatever station in life they're at or whatever

they're doing in life it's not like huh i'm going to get this download and then advertisers going to come knock on the door right like if i if that was my that would be a very difficult feed loop feedback loop to grow in right like i was just like i hope some advertiser hears this because some they got so many downloads and they come buy something on the show it's like no it's like you have to provide a service to people and then the rest of the stuff kind of just happens organically i love that lauren's like let's move on to the next i want to know what the next one is letting go and taking charge that one's a good one yeah yeah so i mean for me this is really east meets west you know because when i was in temple or when i would be in India, like there was always this point of view of letting go, right?

Like letting go is a big part of Hinduism. It's a big part of sort of my culture and tradition. But as soon as like the temple doors would swing open and I go back into like Western society, it was all about taking charge, right? And so I would constantly find myself sort of waffling back between these two worlds of this is who I am, but this is where I am.

What I began to realize over time is that letting go and taking charge, they don't have to actually be so different. They can actually sort of come together in a really interesting way. It's this idea of force and trust. So how do we apply sort of enough force in our lives, but not too much, right? And also the same term trust. And, you know, so for me, I'll come back to public speaking and our fear of it, you know, to get over my fear of public speaking, I would over-prepare. Like I would sort of, I would be all force, right? I would like, I would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.

I would often take my lines with me up on stage. Oftentimes that meant I was standing behind a podium instead of coming out from behind the podium. But I was forcing as much as I possibly could into a good performance. And the reality is it was never a good performance because I was rigid, I was tight. What I started to do is I started to figure out like, how much can I let go of just a little bit at a time? And what ultimately

helped me here was what you might know as the 85% rule. And the 85% rule came out of Carl Lewis in the sprinting world. And there was a sprint coach who studied Carl Lewis because Carl Lewis was very unusual. He would start out at the back of the pack and he would almost always finish at the front of the pack. And that was very unusual because usually when people would start at the back of the pack, they would almost never catch up to the front of the pack and sprinting. So what is going on with Carl Lewis? And this coach took it upon himself to study him. And what he found is that Carl Lewis was almost always running at 85% capacity. He was starting at 85%.

He would continue at 85%. And he would finish at 85%. He was just an 85% sort of guy, right, the entire time. So it wasn't like he was 0%. It wasn't like he was effortless. But there was this looseness about him. And what would happen with other sprinters along the way is a lot of them would tighten up, they would get rigid, and he would sort of whoosh back by them one by one. And he became this, you know, amazingly gifted

Olympic like icon. Is it because they would start at like a hundred percent? They start at a hundred percent and they would lose steam, they would lose steam over time. And I think the 85% rule has been shared across all of these different industries. And people now as like top performers are sort of starting to embrace this idea of like, do I have to be so rigid, right? Do I have to be so tight and forceful in order to really get things done? And again, the answer isn't no, you should completely let go of everything. It's more kind of like, let's find that balance between force and trust, right? The mudra in Hinduism, it's like, looks like this, right? And I've now started to realize that that's effectively what it is. It is

force and trust. You've got these two fingers here that are kind of pushing against each other. That's the force. And you have the other three fingers that are sort of loose, right? That's the trust, right? And this to me has sort of been my kind of everyday sort of symbol of like, coming back to you, okay, I think I'm forcing this one a little bit too much right the immediate practice right what's something we can we can do is like literally before a moment any moment like whether it be with your kids whether it be with your whether it be with your co-workers ask yourself like how much force do i actually need in this situation like how much effort do i actually need in this situation? Like how much effort do I actually need to like bring to this situation? Because you're expending your energy.

You're expending your energy as well. And oftentimes the answer for me is I need to bring like 70%, right? I need the force for like 70%, right? But if I feel like I'm like in this mode of like 90%, like I feel like I'm like really amped up, I will go do push-ups. I will go do jumping jacks. I will go do something to get that energy from that 90% effort level to 70% because I just don't need it, right?

And when I can bring myself to that sort of like level that is actually needed in the situation, it's not just like relaxing for me, but it's relaxing for everybody else around you. Like no one likes the person who comes into a room and is like at 100%, right? Like when the situation doesn't call for that, the situation calls for something much more mellow. People get defensive almost. Yeah.

Like it's subconsciously, it's a body language thing. It's not disarming. That makes sense to go do pushups to like work off the energy so you don't come in hot. Sometimes I come in a little hot in the morning. Oh my God, maybe you need to go do push-ups to work off the energy so you don't come in hot. Sometimes I come in a little hot in the morning. Oh my God, maybe you need to go do push-ups. Might have to do some push-ups in the morning. That's a good idea. I think you do do push-ups in the morning.

I should. I mean, I do push-ups, but I shouldn't do push-ups. I'm a morning person. She's maybe not. And so I come in a little hot sometimes. Yeah. I'm a morning person, but like I... You are not a morning person.

Not even close. I'm a person who likes mornings i just like need to like get my space like your own more i need my bearings she needs a warm-up period yeah i can't like like he's like sometimes when i'm in the gym working out he'll come up behind me and whisper something in my ear about work i'm like i gotta sit my coffee and like work out like give me some space he'll like whisper something i have to do in my ear don't forget we have to do this i'm like get oh no i grew up in a household i joke about this all the time that was like there was there was not like there was no warm-up in my household when i was growing up it was like lights on go out of bed get moving yeah and that's just my yeah that was I have to work on it now. I grew up in the same household, Michael.

Yeah. There's no like, hey, let me pet your head and like warm, cuddly wake up in the morning. It was like, get up and get out. Did we go through all eight? No, we got one more. We have one more. Kriya.

Yeah. Because I have another question after that. Okay. Last one, action leads to courage. Yeah. So action leads to courage. This is Kriya. We can't live our dharma by sitting on a meditation cushion, right?

And people, people, yeah, well, I mean, that was one of the things that like, you know, the reason that this practice of dharma is literally, you know, centuries, thousands of years old, it is because way back in the day, there was sort of a divide in South Asia. And this divide was of people who really wanted to sort of just spend their time contemplating and spending time doing yoga and meditation. You had other people in this golden era of South Asia where they wanted to spend time building and creating. And it was almost like if this divide was you had to choose one side or the

other, right? But there were a lot of people in the forest who were contemplating and meditating who said, you know, I kind of miss the world of creation. I kind of miss the world of building. How do I do what I'm doing right now, but I do it through that, right? As opposed to needing to escape it. And that's really where dharma came from. It was a method of action. Dharma does not exist without action. It is purpose in action. And so one of the things that holds us back, though, I think from action, is I think three words, which is I'm not ready.

I'm not ready to... Or I'll be ready when. Right, or I'll be ready when. And so I'm not ready to... Or I'll be ready when. Right. Or I'll be ready when, right? And so like, I'm not ready to speak my mind. I'm not ready to step into that role. I'm not ready to run with that idea. And, you know, what this chapter really talks about is all of the people who we think were sort of naturally courageous, right? They naturally had enough courage that actually were scared, like had a lot of doubt, right? And Dr. Martin Luther King is one of the sort of the central examples of somebody we see as in front of a podium commanding like hundreds of thousands of

people with their attention. But ultimately, the people who were closest to him would describe him as very, very scared. He was full of doubt and he had a lot of uncertainty. And I think when we can sort of connect with the truth around the fact that people who are scared can actually do great things, that empowers us to do the same. It empowers us, I think, to not have to wait for courage in order to take action, but to take action and let courage catch up along the way. I think a big part of that is people are worried about what other people think. Or they're worried about public failure. Yeah.

Or what their family will think or what their friends will think or what the world will think if you're dealing with social media. I was listening to this guy and I can't remember who, it was just like a clip I saw. And he was talking about how high performers get ahead in life so much faster than other people and it's not like oh someone's so

smart or has all these things he was he said a lot of times they're much faster at making the decision to take multiple actions quicker than most people so if say there's five or four decisions you need to make in a month a lot of high performers will make the decision to take the action right away where some people like, I'll take a week to make that decision or two weeks. I'm going to wait till the end of the month to make the decision. And they don't take the action and follow through on the 76. So people that get far ahead, they make the decision and they go regardless of, is it going to work out or not? They kind of figure it out along the way. One of the things that I think is helpful is in the book,

what I call two-way doors. And two-way, came out of actually Jeff Bezos, a shareholder letter that he wrote about the fact that like, we can sometimes mistake decisions as one-way doors when they're actually two-way doors, right? And if it's a one, if it's truly a one-way door, meaning you, when you walk through it, you take that action, you actually can't walk back, then by all means, like deliberate on it, figure it out, muster up enough courage before you do it. But if it's a two-way door and you can walk back through if it's wrong, then don't spend that much time on that. If it's something that's calling to you, calling your heart, then just go do it. And ultimately, it was two-way doors that sort of freed me to run for public office. I moved back from, you know, I was

living in Silicon Valley, I was working in tech. I wasn't happy with what was happening in, you know, sort of the political landscape and especially back in my hometown in Michigan. And I moved back in 2000, after 2016 and gotten really involved and ultimately decided to run for office. And, you know, it was an unlikely sort of journey. And I had a wife, I had two kids. We were pretty stable where we were in San Francisco. And it took a lot to convince them to come with me and do this. But one of the things that ultimately got us over the hump is this, it ultimately was a two-way door, right? I mean, if I went out there and if I ran and I failed, as public a failure as that is, I can still like come back through, right? I can

still come back to the other side. It's not like I'm locked out there somewhere in some world that I don't understand and can never make sense of. I can come back. And I think that that ultimately is what freed me. And, you know, it was a public failure. And it was one of those things where, like, when I lost, my neighbors knew. And I would drop my kids off at school, and, like, the teachers knew. But you learn a lot, too. You learn a lot from those experiences. And I think that, you know— It makes you tougher.

It does make you tougher. It gives you grit. I think it really totally gives you grit. And I think it sort of comes back to that Sufi saying that we started with, which is like, the world will break your heart and break your heart and break your heart. But eventually the heart does crack open. And when that heart cracks open, it frees you to start living and loving the way that you actually really want to. And so, yeah, I lost my election, but like losing that and realizing that like the world wasn't over

is kind of what freed me to start taking more risks, right? Like I always wanted to write. It was something that I always wanted to do, but I always felt like, well, who the hell is going to care about your books? I mean, there's so many books out there. I just, you know, after running for office and losing, I'm like, all right, well, that wasn't so bad. So if I start writing books and nobody cares and that won't be so bad either yeah I

think like as you're talking I was trying to think of more examples of one-way doors but I I would assume actually people think that the majority of these doors you describe are one-way doors but I would assume the majority are actually two-way doors everything almost everything is a two-way door like I mean they're they're they're certainly door. I think to me, one-way doors is saying something very harmful to somebody. Words are very hard to take back. But the vast majority of things out there are decisions or two-way doors. Yeah. I was talking to somebody who was contemplating leaving a stable job and starting their own thing. And what I was saying, I was like, listen, you can always go back

to the stable thing later, maybe at a different company or a different organization. But if you have that skill set, you can go back and figure out to get back to that place where you are right now. But you never know

what's going to happen if you go and try that other thing. Worst case is you just go back to where you are, right? And it was like this moment where they were looking like, oh, I was like,

it's not that hard to come back to where you are. It's hard. It's harder to make the leap. It's hard to make the leap. And certainly obviously like it's harder when 20 years have passed by and you sort of look back on that and you say, Oh man, I wish I would have done that. We should have tried that. You know, I think like, you know, two things come out of it, no matter what. Number one is you never, you don't die wondering, right? But the second thing is like it comes with growth no matter what. Like you win, you lose. You win, you lose.

But no matter what happens, you grow. 100%. If you were to leave our audience with one piece of advice out of everything you've learned through writing this book, what would that be? Oh, wow. My grandfather, my Bauchi, left me with this one metaphor that I will carry with my heart for the rest of my life, and I will hopefully pass this down to my kids, which is that he believed that the world was like a massive sitar, right? Sitar is like the Indian string instrument, right? And he said that every one of us represents a string in that sitar.

So you, Lauren, are one string. Michael, you're one string. I'm one string. And we're all one string. And no one string is more important than the other string. We're all one string. Your job in life is really to figure out how to play your string, right? And the beauty of that isn't that just that when you play your string, it plays

wonderfully. It's that when you can play your string, you start to harmonize the other strings as well. When we live our dharma as a journey, it's not just about us. When you can start to come into your own, when you can start to express who you are through what you do, it affects the people around you as well. Like there's nothing, there's nothing more inspiring than seeing somebody and meeting somebody who is tapped into who they are and they're expressing that on an everyday basis because it gives you permission to do the same. So that would be the one thing is tune into your string, learn how to play it well. That is such a good piece of advice.

I think it's so cool that you went from suppressing your culture, the baby powder, to literally leaning into it and embracing it. That must feel really good. It sounds like you're living your dharma. Thank you for coming on. Where can everyone find you, your book, Everyday Dharma, Eight Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do? Tell us where to find you. Yeah, just go. You can go to sunilgupta.com. It's S-U-N-E-E-L. I spell it with two E's.

G-U-P-T-A.com. And there'll be some stuff out there and including a way to get the book. I love it. And what's your Instagram? Oh, at Sunil Gupta. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. Don't forget to shop The Skinny Confidential on Amazon Prime Day. Just head over to Amazon on October 10th and 11th and search The Skinny Confidential. Thank you.