my best friend took his own life and i'd seen him two weeks earlier jay two weeks earlier and you know what i said this is the saddest most disappointing life experience learning i've ever had he's going through his depression and i'm saying just be happy choose happiness i didn't understand mental illness i didn't understand depression i didn't
understand what i was saying why i was saying it and then he was gone and then i'm speaking at his funeral and i fall apart [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen to learn and grow now you know that i love reading books i love diving
into people's minds and stories but what i love especially is when someone had a different career they had a different journey but they found a way to use their platform for a higher purpose using their incredible talent their skills their gifts their lessons to have an impact in the world and today's guest since i've had his book in my home even
before i've met him has been doing just that i'm speaking with none other than scott o'neill the author of this incredible new book called be where your feet are seven principles to keep you present grounded and thriving now i had this book sent to me and even before i read it i read it now but before i read it i would look at this title every day
and it became an affirmation it became a mantra it became a part of my life so when i picked this book up i was already excited to dive in and today we get to sit down with scott who's here with me in the studio and scott i honestly have to tell you from the moment you walked in through the door with your friends that you've kindly brought and introduced me to as well and
people you work with i felt nothing but presence intentionality groundedness and it's beautiful to see that and how aligned you are with what you've just written but thank you for being here well jay i'm humbled first off and you've taught me how to think like a monk now i want to try to be like a monk and i hope i'm like that in this podcast
this is a dream come true you are truly one of the great thought leaders of the world and talking about using a platform you're influencing people you're driving change and you're helping us be more grounded and more present so thank you for all you do now thank you so much i hope your wife doesn't listen to this part of the podcast that monk thing the
monk thing i'm going to be massively in trouble for it next thing you know you're going to shave your head and leave leave home and that's that's definitely not that's why i think like a monk don't live like one one of the stories you told that i just absolutely love is when you were sent back on the path to find something new to me
that is a b way your feet are moment and i think you found a rock a stone or right and and you said and what i loved most is you said and i placed it back there for someone else to find it and i just thought man could you imagine if we spend our entire life being present so we can discover new things i say put your phone down get your head up
and i'm not i'm far from perfect in fact being in the sports business you know we've lost our fair share of games i have a competitive issue and problem and i remember coming home one night and uh lisa's my wife's name and uh the sixers we were on we we um we famously went through this thing called the process trust the process where we took the team down we lost more games
over a three year span than any team in nba history and um for an effort to now we're the number one team in east so it for a purpose purposefully intentionally kind of having a long view of the world which i like i like the sense of you know if you want to go to the moon don't bring a ladder type of mentality and i came home i was anxious i was
upset i was frustrated we'd just been booed off the court and i was stomping around the house like a child and my wife says hey uh you doing okay i said yeah i'm doing fine it's like no no what's going on here and i said well did you see the game say yeah no i watched the game did you see the fourth quarter it's like yes i saw the fourth
quarter did you hear us being booed she said scott i didn't even need to have the tv on to hear those boos and i said right so i'm i'm a little fired up i'm a little frustrated and she raised her hand at me and says this is not gonna work it's not gonna work for me and it's not gonna work for the kids and i said well um she said how good is your team i said
hon you know we're not gonna win a lot of games she's like you need a new system you need a new process this is a family and it really struck me it struck me like am i being present am i the dad i want to be am i the husband i want to be when i come home and how am i letting these outside forces impact and influence who i am and who i want to
be and how i want my energy to show up so i was talking to a friend of mine and he said it's a great line he said i have a worry tree i said what's a worry tree he said well i come home i put my hand on this tree right outside my house all my worries float up into the tree into the universe and i walk in my house and i said to him
i don't have one of those trees that's funny where do i get one right yeah and um but but i i did use that philosophically when i'm in the car i go silent i don't listen to music anymore i i try to find some peace and silence if i'm frustrated i howl at the moon if i need an outlet i call a friend but that time is my time to decompress because when i walk in
that house i want to be the best version of myself i love hearing that often what happens is i think we carry that from the car into the home and then we expect someone at home to carry it or like you experienced you were just lashing out in your own space and then your wife or your kids are experiencing that energy and it reminds me recently the first
thing i thought about when you were saying that is england losing in the final of the euros and what was fascinating to me is that the city of london looked terrible even before the game so it wasn't even that we lost and then everyone chucked trash on the ground it was like there was already trash on the ground right and then it got worse and
worse and worse and it's incredible how you know i've seen studies that show how like domestic abuse rises when england loses and even when they win and so you can see that these issues that you're talking about for you it was just the experience of your wife noticing you feeling angry and stomping your fee but some of these
things can get quite extreme when we're dissatisfied and when we're disappointed with our lives yeah no i think you're right it reminds me of a great story um in camden new jersey which is arguably the most violent city in america and a good friend of mine in 2012 was named police chief named scott thompson incredible guy and he had a very different philosophy
on people and policing and he would put all the police officers in the back of a swat vehicle driving around drop one quarters he says hey if you have to go to the bathroom you better get to know the neighbors if you're hungry i hope you know who's a good cook on this block because i'm picking you up in 12 hours so good luck what he was saying was was
we have to be part of this community part of the fabric of the community and so the police officers started to get it they started to reclaim the streets they started to roll back the open air drug markets so instead of 50 there were now two so they're contained they added infrastructure and i.t so they could be smarter some great technology
and then unfortunately a young teenager was was killed by a stray bullet from some gang nonsense and so they came in two in the morning on a saturday morning or sunday morning and um all those lieutenants were saying the same thing let's break out the swat let's go get him let's do what we have to do and he says no i don't think that's the right answer
and he said let's lock down let's go door to door let's find who did this and so he sent everybody home it's three in the morning and he walked over to a 7-11 and got an ice cream imagine three in the morning and um he went back to his office and he went into there's a little safe where they keep money that they take when they arrest somebody
and he ordered two ice cream trucks and the next day they drove from trucks trucks the next day he drove these two trucks on both ends of the street because people just retreating to their house when there's violence and he had the police officers give out free ice cream for an entire day and to me that's and by the way crime is down 65
murder rate is down 48 and so can you is it because of the ice cream no it's because his intention is to love people his intention is to have the community have the citizens control their destiny yeah and get it back i just again the the notion of my wife if i pick up a phone and i'm talking to her saying like i'll wait you know do we have people in our lives
that will tell us the truth they love us enough to tell us the truth and give us feedback so we can stay present if you're a police chief in a really dangerous city how are you going to be like how are you going to change the world because the reality is is like we keep throwing the same solutions at the same problems yeah and nothing's changing you said something
really important there you said that you know we need to surround ourselves with people who can be honest with us and tell us the truth but we also have to be able to receive that often a lot of us have people in our lives that are honest with us i'm sure there's many people's wives or husbands or partners or kids that have looked them in the face and
said i need you to think differently about your life what have you done differently on the receiving end of that feedback and how have you processed that feedback uniquely so that you don't retaliate with your ego or your insecurity of like well you don't know how how hard i'm working you don't know how hard it is to run a team and do this and start you know start
noting down all your wins and all your achievements how do you do that without ego i think that a common language helps um in our house um if you walked into our house and you were leaving the back door you would see api zoom positive intent the letters api etched into stone outside of our house all of our daughters have api carved
into rocks sitting on their dressers and um and every truck we have chalkboards in our house it's a house of girls and there's api written on every single one of them so that's assumed positive intent we also use the term palms up meaning you're literally your palms are up i'm open to listening learning and loving i'm not closed off frustrated i don't
know everything i haven't solved every problem i'm palms up and so if there's an issue if there's an issue in our house if there's an issue at work an executive might come and say scott because they know i'm very emotional scott i need you api and i need your palms up and what they're saying to me in their own way is i know you're emotional
i know you're very competitive i know you're very driven i know you want to quote unquote win but what i need is i need your ideas i need your love i need your understanding and i need your solutions so come play with me and so that's helped me the most kind of overcome my own human frailty of emotion and ego and all that other crap that doesn't allow
us to be the best version of ourselves i love that so you talk about it in the book obviously api i thought that was beautiful i'm going to start putting that in my offices inspired by you and sharing that with everyone i me i i absolutely loved that when i read about it and just for anyone who who missed it assume positive intent i think that is such an incredible way
to live how did you learn to live that way i'm sure you've had experiences where you've assumed positive intent people have taken advantage of you and or people came in with malicious intent or people came in how did you continue to practice that i think a lot of people who are listening they'll be thinking right now i love that but too many people have
taken advantage of me sure how have you continued to do that throughout your career in family and professionally it's such a different way to go through life i always say when you have that one finger pointing out you've got these three pointing right back at you and i love to spend more time focusing on the guy in the mirror we spent so
much time blaming or assigning blame or looking for excuses or finding 10 reasons why i can't or this guy took advantage of me or this woman was too nasty and how could i assume positive intent she was mean assumption has nothing to do with her attitude it has nothing to do with how malicious she is this has all to do with me because i am in control i have the
right intentions again i perfectly say this i'm not i'm not perfectly perfect in this area of course yeah but in i'm leaving living my best self i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt every time what's the alternative the alternative is is that jay you said something i didn't like last week or i was in church and a woman was up
talking and she said something i didn't like or my sister took my shirt or my teacher i got a bad grade on a test and so what does that do well well jay i don't want to talk to you next time i talk to you when you come in i'm walking out the door your boss sends you a text and immediately your blood pressure rises that is not a great way to any sort of
success it just isn't yeah um personally and how you go through the life and life is better you're happier you're more grounded the interactions are better but we've all been uptight with that one person right that one person that gets your goat you know for a teenage girl or mother like your mother can say anything to have three teenage daughters her mother
can say hey do you mind grabbing that uh that sweatshirt off the cl off the stairs what mom because i'm a mess because i can't clean my room we're like no i just wanted you to grab the sweatshirt so no one trips on it yeah i've got an awful story about that i'm gonna share it it's completely on the edge okay please tell us so i haven't my
oldest daughter is alexa she's 21 years old and when she and she's wonderful when she was a teenager she wasn't so wonderful she was always wonderful but not wonderful with her mother and amazingly i have this wife who's just terrific she is balanced and smart and driven and intellectually curious and tough and strong and she's just wonderful
those two together when my daughter was a teenager she wasn't so wonderful okay so i would walk in the house and i'd be like they would be arguing over nothing and i would say can you two just go away just separate like i knew two wonderful people just boiling water and argued about everything for nothing and so one particular thanksgiving i've never told
this story publicly it's gonna be awesome i love it one particular thanksgiving my mom was there and my sister my sister's a single mom with her son and they're in the kitchen we're all making potatoes and all the stuffing and all this stuff and lisa sounds something like this alexa get downstairs and get your clothes off the stairs and i'm like
looking at her like i don't know i don't think i've ever heard a razor voice this is gonna be awesome and alexis says mom what did you say i'm like oh boy here we go now my mother is here so i kind of look at my mom like i love you sorry so they go back and forth get down here right now she goes you want me to come here right now yes right there get down
these stairs right now mom i'm like she walks down the stairs not a single article of clothing on completely naked walks down the stairs picks up the clothes looks my wife dead in the eye turns around and walks upstairs and the only thing my mother could muster say is well she is confident hon now in that particular story nobody's
assuming positive intent yeah except for my mother yeah i'm not you know i'm like lisa stop alexa just stop and they're not with each other and i wonder like how many interactions like that do we have in our lives that we can change and fix by worrying about us not the people we're dealing with give them the benefit of doubt clear your head
going empty-headed and ready to engage into conversations yeah thank you for taking us there because i i'm so glad you told that story because we always assume that we have positive intent so often we assume in any given scenario i've got good intentions everyone else i'm not so sure about but the example you just told us no one had good no intent apart from your mother as you
said and i can't see that as a dad just like yes yeah i'll never see that and i love that idea of when you think you're stopping someone you think that's a positive intention right but actually there's something much deeper happening and one thing that you said that i was literally talking about this morning with a friend was the idea of why we're so addicted to
the news and i was speaking about this with someone else saying the reason we're so addicted to the news is because it makes us believe the problem is out there it makes us believe the problems over here the issues over here the challenges over there that that place that country they've got issues it stops you from having to actually take a look
at the person in the mirror as you said yes and it just keeps telling you everything's going on out there all the problems all the enemies all the challenges all out there and let's be scared of out there but you then never get a chance to say well what am i going to work on today you know what do i need to do such a great insight and i feel
like that with with my friends that live all over the world is if we had you know something happening is it really dangerous there i'm like yeah no or i'd talk to a friend of jerusalem and i'll say is everything okay like yeah no there was a bombing it was last week it was tuesday i you know you know or my friends in china they're
like is it really bad they're like no it's actually wonderful here it's really interesting yeah those snippets and news are impacting us and influencing us yeah and again i'm not saying don't want to news be informed i'm just saying that that mentality for sure of of what you were saying getting lost in blame discontent yes feeling like the issues
there there are issues there of course there are but as you're saying it's about starting with us i wanted to tell you a little bit i was telling you before that i was in mozambique which is one of it's the third poorest country in the world wow terrible um employment rates abject poverty i went over there with my 17 year old daughter kiara to help build
a school this incredible organization called heffy he fy i don't have any discernible skills i can barely hold a hammer i am worthless around the house um that makes me feel a lot better okay good nothing yes my wife's a million times better than it's really humbling um and my father my father-in-law grew up you know building
houses so a bad story is not growing up anyway nonetheless i'm at this worksite construction site the foreman doesn't speak english and i don't speak portuguese and neither did any of the teenagers were with and so i volunteer for unskilled labor i'm thinking like that's the safest place put me in the cement mixing so i'm in this little cement mixing area and just
mixing cement i mean it's not hard but it's simple it's you know you carry these 110 bag pound bags of cement 100 yards you drop four for every two wheelbarrows of sand you put in and you mix water and i'm nine hours okay of doing this i'm thinking like there's a lot of things going through my mind and i can barely sit still for 10 minutes
and it's hard work and i just kept thinking about the water and how that might be reflective of of us because if you put too much water in the cement it men's worthless it just runs away and it becomes nothing and if you don't put enough water into that cement it becomes hard also worthless and i thought about that in relation to us it's like what are those things in our
lives that we do too much of you know the simple ones when you're talking to teenagers are really simple it's like put your phone down stop at the social media enough for the tick tock videos um it might be and then what aren't we doing enough of are we spending time intentionally meditating or praying or reading scriptures if that's something that you
do are you taking care of your body are you taking care of your mind what are you learning today are you practicing gratitude um you know so i think like to me i had so many moments in mozambique in particular on the construction site where i was like huh what what how analogous is this for life when i hear that it sounds like
sometimes we have to get out of our own comfort zones areas that we think we learn get out the classroom almost like that that seems like an amazing classroom even though you didn't go there for that lesson or you didn't sign up for that course or program but you went there and that's the lesson you took away what have you found over your whole
career do you think you've learned more lessons away from classrooms and i don't mean schools or universities or colleges i mean have you learned some of the biggest life lessons when you're away from home team or you know home stadium i consider myself a lifelong learner i love to walk through the world thinking about how i might grow or learn
that's how i where does that come from boy i grew up with two parents both phds uh we didn't have many means when we were young um and they were entrepreneurs so i saw a lot of things i mean i was calling my parents became uh management leadership team building type uh trainers for xerox and adp and texaco and big big companies around the world
eventually as i got older so i was collating books i saw my mom present when she was in i don't know i was probably 12 years old to xerox all white men at the time that's that was the the day and age in the 80s and i see this little five foot two italian woman and making them laugh and making him cry and making him think and pushing them and i just remember just wanting to be her
and wanting to grow and be different and interesting and interested and i mean i i was literally that was probably the first moment in my life where i'm like okay i need to know more um but i i do love i walk through the world thinking about what i can learn what i've found is and i'd be interested in your insights in there i seem to
learn a lot more when i trip and fall you know i ended up i wrote this book when my best friend took his own life like he yeah he's my best friend i'd seen him two weeks earlier jay two weeks earlier and you know what i said this is the saddest most disappointing um frustrating life experience learning i've ever had is he's going through his depression and i'm saying
just be happy choose happiness hey will you're going to be fine um go serve people but i'm sad i serve people like i had no idea i had i didn't understand mental illness i didn't understand depression i didn't understand what i was saying why i was saying it and then he was gone and then i'm speaking at his funeral and i fall apart um and i fall apart in a way that
you know i i couldn't get out of bed i couldn't fall asleep or i couldn't get out of bed and then i'd be in a meeting at work and someone would say something completely unrelated i would burst into tears and walk out for three months didn't raise my hand no i need help didn't raise my hand and i started to write to heal and what i started to write
was all around stories of where i slipped and fell and fell down and learned and um and one of the things that i've come to which i'm i'm interested in in bouncing off you and seeing where you're what your thoughts are but i m i have a formula for mental health and it's you do something for your mind something for your body is something for
your soul every day you get the right amount of sleep you practice gratitude and you be where your feet are meaning you put your phone down and get your head up now something for your mind to me sounds simple but people don't do it because we're on the treadmill and all we do is work or whatever we're doing we're doing and you've got to have an interest
outside of work you have to have a passion you have to be learning it doesn't have to be complicated it can be a ted talk it could be this podcast it could be an article but you've got to be learning and stretching your mind in different ways your body you have to take care of yourself and i you know for me i it's pick up basketball or a peloton if i can't get a
run in i'm on the peloton for 45 minutes and i'm not advocating for anything for anyone and if you haven't haven't worked out and you're more happy sitting on a couch go for a walk for 20 minutes get the heart rate up a little bit and then the soul at work is easy to talk about on your podcast harder at work in work environments but you know
you have to feed your soul and for me that's prayer and scriptures and going to church and having a strong faith and i know that doesn't work for everybody that's okay but you need to find stillness and that stillness can be meditation it can be yoga it can be sitting out and listening to the birds chirp in the morning and sleep is is the most misunderstood
superpower you can ever have because when i was growing up in the business world it was sleeps for the week money never sleeps you need four hours get back to work and when i found him we've brought in sleep experts with our athletes with the sixers and devils and they all say the same thing you need sleep sleep lets the
mind body and soul heal and so you need somewhere between six and a half and eight and a half hours depending on what your dna is and your makeup and your lifestyle and then gratitude i know you talk about gratitude but i was when will passed away died took his own life i wanted to move from grief to gratitude but that was hard for me
and it was the one thing that lifted me up every day and i have this practice and when i speak to corporate groups i always tell them i start the session every time and i say okay take your phones out because they think i'm gonna say put your phones down i said nope get your phones out i want you to text your mom and i want you to tell her that you love her
why you appreciate her is something you learned from her because when i did that to my mom going through my own healing process my mom said the worst thing you could ever hear from your mother hun are you okay and we need to be better and do better yeah but practicing gratitude so my challenge is is 60 seconds a day said the note of gratitude love or appreciation to
someone in your life 60 seconds not 60 minutes not 60 hours not 60 months 60 seconds a day and then be where your feet are is put your phone down and head up and we all need rules because we can't regulate yeah it's very hard now our rules like my teenage daughters hate our rules because their phones aren't in the phones and electronic devices are not in
their rooms yeah and they're not in the kitchen so no bedroom no kitchen for all of us um we have regulations on how much social media they can actually watch i know nobody wants to say it and do it and i wish they could regulate but you know what i've been the victim of some really tough criticism on twitter and reddit okay i've been attacked and come
after and and i consider myself very confident very self-assured stable and i fell apart a few times and i wonder like if that's happened to me what's happening to a 14 year old girl yeah who's seeing her friends at a party on on um instagram that she's not invited to she's falling apart she's not feeling good about herself she's not
feeling good about her body she's figuring out what she has to wear how she wants to do it but we have to set if if we can't regulate ourselves we need to put rules in i go out to dinner the other day what happens my friends are sitting at the table on their phones guys we haven't seen each other in here what are we doing put your
phones in your car yeah and so i think it's going back to simple do something for your mind something for your body something for your soul every day get some sleep practice gratitude and be where your feet are i love that i i completely align with you the the thing that i loved about what you were saying that stood out to me which i appreciate
is you calling out toxic positivity so i appreciate you calling out toxic positivity because you saying that hey when will told me that he was sad i just told him to be happy when he was struggling with this i told him well this is what i do why don't you just try it and i think that's such a valuable conversation to have what were the conversations you learned
after you lost him that you felt you should have been having with him or could have been having with him and that our listeners could be having with people because i think what's also happened is that there are so many people in our lives that are now considered the drain or they're like oh god i don't want to see them because they're a headache they
always drain me it's always about them but you never know what someone's going through after my cement mixing days i got quote unquote promoted to wheelbarrowing cement okay so now i'd hit the big time and the way you you you wheel cement and i'd done it as a 14 year old when i was digging pools is you you know you get this heavy
wheelbarrow and you just cruise it down this little two by four and there's a hard left it goes up on the sidewalk you move it down to the classroom or building and two kids pick it up and you wheeled into the classroom pretty simple but it's heavy i'm like a relatively fit guy now i'm a man when i was 14 i could barely you know i could barely play but i was like
i got this covered so the first time i get this wheelbarrow and i am cruising down a little faster than i'd hoped down the slope and i go to make the left turn and i can't move it and i go right into the sand okay into the sand at speed or at speed yeah okay no no no cement comes out and now i'm moving it at probably like
an inch every 10 seconds and i'm like just leaning in with my thigh just to kind of push it forward and these uh two teenaged girls one of which was my daughter come and they're like hey scott you need help sure they pick it up put me back on this 2x4 and i'm on my way okay that's my first trip so the lesson and how it relates to your question well one is is
that path to me that two by four that's life and guess what life's messy and life's hard and we think like we have this fairy tale when we're growing up we have this vision of who we want to be and where we want to go and what we're going to accomplish and me i remember someone telling me uh every ceo gets fired i was like i'm not getting fired every startup guy goes
bankrupt that's not gonna happen both happen to me okay and so so i'm sitting in this sand and i get the offer to help and and you might say like how humbling was that to have two teenage girls help you i was like no i have a house of teenage girls i know how strong they are i'm not smart they didn't bother me at all they put me back
on but but i thought about that whole analogy of like how hard it is to be on that two by four and then i thought about and and for me two by four is going through my six steps something for myself for my body something for my soul sleep gratitude being where my feet are okay living the right way making the right decisions having high integrity
serving others having true purpose and developing people because we all have need and i know you talk about this in your book a lot it's like we all need our why our own personal why and so if i'm living that it's hard okay but you know what's harder not living it that's the irony that you don't think about yeah right because now i'm in the sand
and the sand for me is sin or mistakes or bad decisions or not assuming positive intent we're not focusing on what's most important in my life that's the sand you know what i needed just like will needed i just raised my hand hey guys ladies can come help me here and um and when someone's suffering from depression and really struggling they
need help i i'm not going to be able to help someone he needs to check into a facility i use professional help yeah and medication and and he'd done that before and and i will you know that's something that i think about a lot quite frankly and thank you for sharing that and thank you for writing about in the book and creating the book from that place because
you know it takes a lot of courage to say that what you just said and what you're sharing and even sharing all of this based on a loss because there's so much self-reflection that comes with that and when you were saying that journey from grief to gratitude was you know the most difficult journey and obviously will continue to be in the book you also talk about
how to create presence and your four steps for creating presence and i wanted to talk about them individually because i find these to be really deeply profound and insightful if we can really get if we can really go there let's try and so the first one's find perspective and i find like that is something as you talk about in the book when you're
moving at 115 miles per hour when you've got all this going on finding perspective is the thing that we never do and if we do it we do it once maybe for our new year's resolutions or maybe on our birthday if you're lucky how do you truly stop to find perspective what has helped you when you've been at your busiest hectic most
chaotic weeks days months and years for me it's it's coming home and the humility of being a father helps a lot it really does changing a diaper helps taking out the garbage helps i love hearing going to grab groceries helps but you know we all have those moments in our life where we truly find persp where we truly find humility and perspective and and um
i don't mean to go back keep going back to mozambique but i'm going to it's like i'm in houses without any running water or electricity and i'm thinking and i'm i'm looking out over a work site and the kids are under a tree in the shade with a blackboard and a teacher and i'm thinking like life isn't fair yeah there's a story in the book about uh dave schaller who's a
dear friend who um grew up in a trailer park and was mad you know it's like why do why is this my lot in life his dad had some addiction issues and was at a shelter and they were going to pick him up and he pulls up to the shelter and he remembers even at a young age he's got three younger siblings and he's feeling mad not awkward not embarrassed mad
and as his dad is walking down the stairs he looks to the left and there's a woman with a blue duffel bag and she's got three kids and instantly he finds perspective she's got nowhere to go he's not a trailer she's gonna have a crappy astro van to take me home and she's got no dad to pick up even with all his issues this is it for her and for him that was
that grounding moment for me quite frankly my faith has given me so it's put my feet on the ground you know the humility to get on your knees and be prayerful and and humble and and understand kind of your role your your place your the the dot you have in the universe and has really helped trips like mozambique i've had daughters one of my
oldest daughter the one that i told you about about her episode she's served in a syrian refugee camp in athens she's been with orphans in zambia living on a dirt floor you know i'm thinking like good for these kids yeah our next gen our gen z's they're special they're different and they're special and they they have this incredible light and life and
social contract which is different for employers and for all of us um and i love how they're global citizens and i love how they don't see the world like we do it and i love how their expectation is that that we do things differently and that we help each other and that we serve one another and that we love one another and that's the expectation and if you don't
if you're an employer and you don't do it they'll just leave yeah they don't have cars no houses they don't care yeah they don't know their jobs i love the way the world is going and i know a lot of people are they're down they're down they've been down in america or they're down in the world or they're down in the next generation or it's not the same i don't
i don't agree i i love this i love this country um and i know we struggle but we struggle out loud you know we struggle with free press we struggle with being better we struggle with like meeting the ideals that we have that are so unrealistic and so high and not attainable and we struggle to get there i love that struggle yeah
i love the fight and i love that there are sides i wish we did it differently i wish we didn't curate our own media so much and create all this friction i wish that we had a vision for so for doing something better and being something better together but i do i do i am grateful i am grounded and i have perspective and a lot of that um is intentional a lot of it's like
where how are you spending your thanksgiving yeah you know how are you spending your summer vacations how are we raising our children are we willing to learn from our children or we learn to listen to them they know they know how to treat each other so i think they're a whole it's a whole host of questions and a complicated answer to
a really complicated question yeah no i i mean i asked the question because i think as soon as you answered it it was really clear what your perspective is what your focus is and you can go on instagram and find a very different perspective or you could be following places of charity service work and you could get that perspective too the thing
is today you can go on youtube and search mozambique building schools and you can find an incredible video about the inspiring stories that are right there you don't have to visit you don't have to have the means to go over there and help to be a part of this and we found that uh this year my wife and i led a covered relief for india that's
amazing because india was going through just so much we knew that one person was dying every five minutes the resources and the infrastructure didn't exist my wife and i are heritages from india my monk life was spent in india so i feel a certain level of responsibility towards india and what i saw was that everyone's perspective was dialed in like our social media
community raised five million dollars in one weekend and that to me showed just how incredible the perspective is when people are dialed in i know how amazing my community is i love that and it showed me the power of when everyone's like oh social media does this and social media i'm like we couldn't have done this without social media right but your
intention is pure and so is our community and your community is pure and you're and the love that you show and have and the way you even celebrate your listeners and who comment like i that community is it's a jay shetty community i mean it's wonderful and full of love and i agree it's like when i say pick up your phone and text
your mom or text someone you love or i'm going to use my social media platform for good that intention that like how you set your day i'd love to talk about that too it's like i'd be so interested in how you set your day every day i mean we talk about doing it through through a leadership constitution yeah or a mantra but they're like i don't know i just invite i'd be
interested like do you say like do you read something do you say something how do you how do you set your intention for the day yeah it's changed over time and now i always try and find a pattern because i like patterns and i like routines and i like commitment and so it's changed over time at one point this was truly one of my favorite
morning routines every day i would wake up and i would listen to steve jobs his commencement speech at stanford and i listen to it every day that's great and i listen to it every day for nine months and i promise you not only did i know the words off by heart but the words like started to really affect my heart to the point that i realized that all
the choices i made were all based on his voice in my head now i didn't know steve jobs i don't even know anyone who knows steve jobs but i feel like i know him because i've spent so much time studying his life and listening to him and and reading through his work so that that was something i did i don't do that anymore but that was something i did
recently we had matthew mcconaughey on the podcast and i told him that at one point i listened to his speech from the oscars when he won for dallas buyers club i think that was the movie you want for and it's a five minute speech and it says oscar's acceptance speech it's rooted in faith and god and and and growth it's beautiful and i listen to it every day
for 30 days and that was my thing that i did first thing in the morning so those have been certain things that i really like that are practical for people without learning a new habit or learning a new skill or learning how to meditate but the primary focus of my schedule now is when i wake up the first thing i do is i have a small post-it note on the
side of my bed and it says what am i grateful for and so that's the first thing i see that's great and so the reason i do that is because so often my first thought when i wake up is i'm tired ah right that's so it's such a natural autopilot thought oh let me look at my schedule oh my gosh got so much to do today right like that's such a
normal thought and i've read so many studies about choosing our thoughts and my belief is if that the first choice i make in the morning is to choose a grateful thought and that will transform every choice i make for the rest of the day if you choose to love your child the first thing in the morning you're more likely to love them throughout the day if you
choose to plant a beautiful seed it's more likely to grow into a tree and a fruit by the evening so for me that's been the first thing i do straight after that i go to my meditation practice which has always been montreal meditation for many many years and i've developed this i don't recommend this to anyone i meditate for about one and a half hours
to two hours every morning it's the first thing i do and for me that's my connection to god it's my spiritual connection it's my faith connection it's me learning to be an instrument to purify all of the impurities and issues that i have so that i can actually be a vessel of service and so that's what that does for me and then it's very similar to what you
said mind body straight after that i'm out playing tennis so tennis has been my exercise uh consistently now for maybe the last year and i started to realize i didn't enjoy gyms but i love sport i love competition i love play and there was a beautiful quote from richard branson that stuck with my head and i probably read this when i was 16
i remember reading his books when i in my teens and i i read this when i was 16 and it's funny because now obviously i'm not old but i'm older than i was when i was 16. and he said we don't stop playing because we get old we get old because we stopped playing and that's what drew me to town i was like i need to add more play into
my life and then uh straight after that i'll sit down and set an intention for the day so i'll look at my schedule and i'll think what energy do i need so today i've got a day of interviews i'm sitting with people some people have met some people i haven't met and so my intention is how can i truly serve this person the best so that they can serve humanity through
what we're doing and so now when i'm sitting here with you all i'm thinking about is just i cannot wait for everyone listening to read this book not only are you a great author you're a phenomenal storyteller i'm sitting on this podcast going scott i had no idea you were this good a storyteller and and i'm loving it i'm enjoying that because
i'm appreciating just how much people are going to be moved when they finally get to dive into your work and so that's that's my general morning routine every day that i follow and that that works for me i love that i would love to tell you my youngest daughter eliza who's 14. um every night before she's gone to bed now this is a four-year practice every day
has not missed a day she writes down 14 things i have no idea why it's 14. that's she's 14 years old she is okay that she's grateful for every day okay that's allah has never repeated once never incredible so now think about what that says to you for the next day because now you have to be in tune as to what you're being grateful for much like
you do in the morning i like it better in the morning like you do but i love the notion of that the other thing she does which is i think it's the cutest she'll be embarrassed if i ever say this i'm gonna say it but it's the cutest she has a happiness clicker happy thoughts clicker so if you go by her room at night you'll hear click click click
click click click click and it just warms my heart to hear someone who's actually having happy thoughts and rewarding herself for the happy thoughts is that beautiful scott i think we have the wrong person on the podcast she sounds amazing those are by far two of my fa you have just there's there's two things that you've just shared and i can't what's
her name eliza eliza okay eliza when you listen to this if you ever do if you watch this i just want you to know you have taught me something two incredible lessons today that i'm gonna share with so many people i'm gonna quote you on it i'm going to put it out there because you've blown my mind first of all i love that piece of advice that she has never
repeated one that is incredible that's amazing that is so easy because you remember at first you're like mom dad my house my school yeah just right the first oxygen first month right like yeah that's but to not repeat right that's amazing it's like this beautiful sorry i saw that now you're actually digging and looking yeah i love that i
love that and then the second one that you said so don't repeat your gratitude i think that is such a beautiful message and the reason why i love the happiness clicker is because i was i was literally quoting a study yesterday the study on our thoughts shows that we have 60 to 80 000 thoughts per day and 80 are not only repetitive but negative
and so the fact that your daughter is counting her positive thoughts and we both know i mean you know better than anyone if you don't measure something it's not going to grow it's not going to change the fact that she is counting her positive thoughts that gives her a tally to try and live up to the next day and grow i love that i love that too that is
genius i've it's funny i was actually thinking about it i wanted to i was speaking to someone about this a few months ago and that's why i love that so much i was talking to someone about how measuring how many steps they took change their lives right like whether you use a fitbit or an aura ring or whatever you use uh the idea is that measuring that you
did your ten thousand steps and i saw families getting into these league tables with each other and kids and families competing and i literally said this to a very close friend of mine who we've had on the podcast as well and i said to him i said how cool would it be if you could measure someone's positive thought ah that would be so like if we
had a device that could track your thoughts and could say to you every day you're three thousand thoughts away from having ten thousand positive thoughts right and you could measure someone's positivity that would engage them to like no one wants to have ten thousand steps we just do it when we know we're eight thousand you're like alright two thousand more i
can do that but i wonder if we could you know i have this notion that negative self-talk yeah um especially again i'm with a lot of teenagers yes yes they they say things um and i had this notion that when you say something it's not how you intuitively think you say it and it goes into your subconscious yeah and um you know i'm a product of you
know two phds hippie hippie parents and they were all about you know positive affirmations yes you know we got away from that you know the last few years but but and we replace it with a mantra or a leadership um constitution i love positive affirmations right yeah but like i wonder if those positive thoughts is something that we can be
saying in the morning yes like get them out there because it'll make you happier yes it'll make the world better it'll make your interactions better it'll help you assume positive intent it will help you focus on what's most important do all those positive things that we need yeah you know and like writing them down is good saying that matters yes yes
eliza you have uh i i'm never gonna forget those two statements i'm gonna be sharing them a lot with people they're so powerful they're so powerful and there's so much wisdom in that and that's writing down what you're grateful for is such an overused tip and it's great and that's why i love what you said share it express it that 60 second text to your
mom like that's where it starts working but it also works when it's not repetitive so i think that's that's incredible thank you so much eliza uh the the second step is seek authentic feedback this one i i think is become more and more difficult for people to do because seeking authentic feedback means you have authentic relationships
yes because you can only seek authentic feedback from people you genuinely have a relationship with or that understand you tell us about your journey to tell me about a time when you sought authentic feedback and examples of both types of feedback you received inauthentic or authentic you know what happens in a career is hard when you're young you have mentors
and then you start hopping over your mentors and yes and then you get a big job and even the people that you love the most and have worked with side by side for three companies or two companies or those that you've groomed since their early days and they're now your direct reports and they're not going to tell you the truth and then you're bored in my case
or your boss is they're not going to tell you the truth anyway and you're not sure you want it you know and so so that becomes really complicated um i've found a couple places that are you know solid there's a group called ypo young presidents organizations which puts you in a room with eight to ten other ceos and you have what they call form
confidential meetings where nothing comes out and you talk about things that you can't really talk about you know issues at home troubles with a child troubles at work negotiating a contract not like who are you going to call so that that was an incredible source of strength for me for the last 15 years uh my forum at ypo so that's one group where
they they love me they don't judge me they're honest they're strong they're my peers so i think that formula whether it's ypo or some other group of your peers is good my brothers are incredible sources of strength and my sister my three brothers and sister all running companies but they love me too much you know and they'll always take my side
always my wife not so much and and she loves me but she'll tell me yeah you know and and i imagine for you for your wife she sees jay shetty okay jay said jay do your laundry yeah okay you know and and and there's a partnership that is critical and that um i'm sure your wife is strong or you wouldn't you know my wife is strong and i needed a strong woman um
and so and we have complete division of labor and you know but there is an expectation that when when i need it she gives it to me whether i ask for it or not which i absolutely love i'm a little more delicate just in terms of style with her yeah i see it a lot nicer yeah um i think i do the same yeah that's a good tactic 25 years yeah uh
together that's good it's working it's working um and she's been amazing so so those are my two sources um ypo and then and then my wife i love those those are great how about you how does it work for you so is it hard because you're a celebrity and star like is that like so different you know what i'm really fortunate and and i made this a conscious
like intention as as my life grew is that i'm always the poorest least successful and least wise but you know least wise person in the room uh and so i try and surround myself by people who are far ahead of me in every way i possibly can and they're not always the same rooms right because you don't necessarily find people across all three of those in the same room you
might be getting harder on all three fronts for you definitely those rooms are getting smaller no no definitely not not as small i feel like i feel like the higher you go you realize how big the world is big people's visions are uh when i when i want the wise i go to the monks i was i was just talking to about this the other day i shared this with randy
actually and uh i was saying that i was coaching uh i was working with someone recently and i was speaking to my monk teacher about who i was working with so my mom teaches 70 years old he's been a monk for 40 years he's lived life he's like got every life experience he's coached children since they're born to go on to become incredible people he's coached
you know heads of societies and states and you know he's he's had an amazing life and so when i go to him and he's 70 years old and you know i'm half his age and you know it's you you start recognizing just how much more there is to life and how much you still have to learn and live and i was telling him i'm coaching this person on this and i'm
working with this celebrity on this or whatever it is and he goes he said to me said he said i'm so happy for you because i'm so happy he said i'm so happy because you get to help everyone with your problems and it was like that humbling reminder i was like you're getting to coach people on what you need coaching for and that is god's gift to you that you're
getting to help people with what you're going to need help with and so i think you know that wisdom that i get from these the monk teachers that i have that i still am very much in touch with uh they're always very humbling and grounding and i think my sister you were saying family so my sister what you were saying my sister whenever
i start speaking to her she'll be like stop going all j shetty on me like she'll literally say that it's amazing and my sister loves me and i love her she's one of my best friends she's four and a half years younger than me stop giving me a j shetty video like i just want my brother like and i'm like this is me like but she has to say that
to me in it you know in the beginning it used to hurt me now i find it cute and and adorable and then my wife your spot on like there was an interview that robert downey jr did and he talked about how they were like how do you stay humble you're iron man you built the marvel universe i mean this guy's you know he's crushed it over the last few years with
all the amazing movies he did and he just said he said you know what when i get home you know my kids are not like oh my god it's iron man you know he was like my wife's like take the trash out and he was just like what you said same thing like you know your family and i think that's a beautiful thing i think often this is what i'm sharing with a lot of
my male friends i said especially as men i think often we want our wives to validate us for what we achieve and not who we are right and we forget that they chose my wife has been with me since i didn't have a job you know and so my wife my wife's parents took way better care than i did of her in the first three years of our marriage and what i
could offer her was far less than what her parents could offer her but i think we forget that is we want to be validated for like being that singer or that athlete or being a speaker or like can't you see i'm a number one new york times best like but dad you don't want to be loved for that no you're so right you know what i was thinking of that you
said that i thought was really interesting and i forgot to mention i've had three great coaches i'm tristan adolf and spencer holt and then brendan broussard most recently and i didn't realize you worked with yeah just with him too you're kidding me i didn't realize that we were lit so brendan just we're all part of the same mastermind and we just literally were with brendan
oh that's it for four days i love friends he is he helped me rediscover what it meant to be a leader again wow and i think that's the gift that coaches can give you and they they he he does not dance around issues either so he gave me some incredible feedback over time but helped me get there on my own which i loved like we had so many fascinating
conversations and he's been a being a true recent source of strength amazing i love hearing that please tell me about the first two because i got excited about brandon trisha um is amazing she is a little bit like bohemian and i was at madison square garden and struggling with all sorts of things personally professionally and she had this big notion of like
you want to be a warrior i'm like yes i want to be no she's like no no scott scott scott sit down i'm like no no i do want to be she's like no you want a hunting kill i'm like right and she's like no you need to grow you need to go into that sage phase i'm like but i don't want to be a sage you know now i was 38 okay and she said well you're gonna have to
get there because if you want to lead an elite level the reward isn't you anymore yeah and that's where i am you know i i told her i i sent her notes every once in a while that i found it you know and she always sends me funny ones back but i i now get my my joy my win is seeing someone become a vice president for the first time or
leave me and go run an incredible company and be an extraordinary leader or you know someone that goes and can change the world in their world or you know someone who leaves me and goes and builds this incredible foundation and is changing things in the world that is now my killer my win so i think she i hope she would say she's proud that i just
didn't go in her pace yes but that always stuck in my mind and and i had some classic fight back and arguments and pushback with her and she she i remember her saying scott you need to meditate in like the sweetest smartest tough woman and i'm like i can't sit still for five seconds stop telling me to meditate help me with my job you know
and uh and of course i learned how to meditate over time because i need to find stillness and peace and it helps me sleep it helps me go to sleep it helps me live better and so she was a wonderful source and spencer whole who's been long time friend as well great guy smart guy and um and he helped me on two transitions and i think i think transitions are hard for people
um you know i've been out of work out of luck and out of money and i've been out of work and really comfortable and i like the latter a lot better than the former of course but when you go on these walkabouts in life you have an opportunity to step back see the world for what it is reflect back on the decisions you made why you made them the impact they had
good and bad the lessons you learned the people you met and you just had this overwhelming sense of gratitude yeah for life even the mistakes you made because they taught you such valuable lessons and then you get to take all that in and look forward and say why am i doing it it's actually my wife says like scott why do you do this
because every time i leave a job i'm like i'm never doing this again you know every time and she's like okay but why do you do what you do i said well i want to help i want to help develop the next generation of great leaders yeah and i want to build a platform so i can leave the world better than i found it and and i want to help my church quite
frankly grow and so and she's like well that's why you're in these platforms i'm like yes that's why i'm in these platforms and so that's why i keep signing up you know and i keep getting the rush and going through the pain and the fun and the exhilaration and the torture and all that together but it's these walkabouts these years like the year that you take
off that really gives you that freedom that most people don't have in life and i know i'm blessed to have that opportunity to go do it um but that that's the time i'm in now and i i feel like i'm fresh and different and in a in my version of a zen state that i can actually see the world as it is i love that i love dan while you were
sharing that the thing i was thinking about was when you look at the sage versus the original mindset as you as you put it in the warrior warrior yeah the warrior and it's it's like that hunt and kill changes to seek and grow yes that's better better and seek and grow doesn't sound attractive like when you want to be a warrior right like when you
want to be a warrior seek and grow it's like a much rather hunt and kill but we realize hunt and kill if you even look at those words they all lead to an end terrible they're aggressive but when you were when you went to to become a monk at first like what i was surprised when i was reading reading think like a monk was that you had a struggle because
i know people see you as like you know it's like your sister's coming don't jay shetty on me like okay i have it all figured out like i i do this i coach the stars i you know have this incredible influence on podcasts like is that something you anticipated and expected or did that surprise you when you were there and went through that struggle
my whole life is a surprise to me i'd say everything's been a surprise i never thought i would become a monk if someone told me two years ago before i became a monk no not two years ago but if someone told me 18 i decided 21 22 i became a monk so if if someone told me it's 16 jay one day you're going to be a monk i would have probably thrown a bottle of alcohol at
them like you know like that's that's the state i would have been in because that's how i was at 16. and then when i became a monk it was hard because living with that level of discipline isn't easy for anyone especially just an average kid from london who's not grown up with that level of military style discipline which is what a monastery is
and then to leave it all to come back i mean i thought my life was over then when i came back i was just like well that's it i guess i guess i'm just going to figure out how to pay the bills and life's going to go on because all the feedback i had from everyone was just like who cares that you were a monk and what's that got to do with anything and
what transferable skills do you have you can sit still and be silent like our company doesn't need that and so it was it was fear and insecurity and doubt at every step and so today when i get to do all the cool stuff you said i'm just feel blessed every day and grateful and of course there's been strategy and there's been thought of
course of course there has but i'm saying that the initial seed of that but when you were a monk yes and you're like you know they said like no you need to do x and you're like it felt like when i was reading your book like sometimes you rolled your eyes like oh yeah again i did i did because but that's your version of the warrior phase right yes
yes and i think i still have that and that's partly why i had to leave and what i've realized is that some of us don't have it naturally and some of us have to engage it for a higher purpose to purify it oh that's that's so not everyone can just give up the rep like i'd say the rebel is very much part of my dna i have that some of that yeah i'm
a rebel like even more than a warrior i'm a rebel like warrior still feels like you want to i never wanted to beat anyone else i'm just a rebel i don't like going with the flow and i want to go against the grain and i think i know how to do things differently but that doesn't make me better or worse than anyone i've just i've always seen
it as me but i realized that i had to engage the rebel in the service of humanity to purify the rebel to try and aspire to be a sage whereas if you try and what was often called in the monk society as monkey renunciation so what that means is monkey detachment is if you offer a monkey a banana it will give you whatever it has and then if you offer it a credit card
it will trade you back the banana and if you give it so the monkey will keep swapping with you because it doesn't really know what it wants and it doesn't matter it will just give it up without thinking about it and as humans sometimes we feel forced to give up who we are as opposed to saying well let me engage this and use my skills to help
people like it's like you saying all right i'm just going to go off and become a monk at 38 instead of building what you've built and now getting to have the impact through your book your work the mozambique work that you get to have that's right that's your journey uh you know when i sit down with there were teachers like there were
there was a point where the beatles they were members of the beatles that wanted to become monks and their teachers told them your journey is to make spiritual music like your identity is to share the message of god through your music your mess your your destiny is not to become a monk you're going to rob millions of people right of the impact that you
could have and that's the same with you right if you traded it right does that make sense yes yes so so i think they said so for me it's been that journey of purifying my impurities by giving them in service or trying to use them for something better than yesterday so that's always been the philosophy of the of the monkhood that i studied in which
was don't force people to change who they are and become someone they're not get them to use who they are for helping and serving others and the world will become a special place all right so there's this concept in the book called wmi what's yes i love it yeah let's talk about it and brendan says that it's brendan breschardt he says that
high performers spend 65 percent of their time on the three things that matter most at work yeah okay so i broaden that a little bit and i say like work yes we should talk about work but what about your home like what matters most to you at home what about your relationships what are those three key relationships and then at work what are those three things that matter
and i went through the audit okay so so i love the audience oh it's so painful okay so you go to you take your calendar and then you map okay where am i spending my time and the reason i add the personal stuff is because especially with coven the line between work and home and home and work work home in church or work home and play
it's all the same totally it's just like life and so we have to be more disciplined we have to be more organized and we have to learn the magic word of no which is very hard for me because i'm a people pleaser but i go through my audit and i'm at 23 and i was embarrassed to tell them like i didn't i just buried it um but but then i just asked myself like
i said like okay i got a choice 23 at home no 23 of my calendar was spent on what i said it was 65 which is what he said yeah okay that's not great i literally i'm like talking to myself and i'm saying okay i need you to change what's on this paper or change the way i do do so my question for you is is how do you with all the demands on your time and
pulls because i imagine you could speak anywhere you want to whenever you want you probably get 30 calls a week to go speak somewhere you got probably you could do tv you could do a whole bunch of things how do you focus on what's most important to you i fail all the time that's the honest answer it's so hard it's it's uh yeah it's so hard isn't it it's i agree
with you it's so hard to say no because i feel like there's so many transitions so let's talk about those transitions and why it's hard to say no because i think everyone can relate to yes and you can why don't we do one each you tell me why you think it's hard to say no and i'll tell you why i think it's hard to say no so i'll start and then
we'll go back and forth i think one of the reasons why it's hard to say no is because at one point in time that would have been something you died for some of the opportunities i have today that come my way that i have the now the opportunity to say no to at one point in time i would have begged to have had that opportunity so you feel a sense of guilt you feel a sense of
responsibility you feel a sense of am i ungrateful am i now becoming you know do i think i'm too good for my like i think i go through that yeah does that make sense that's an internal struggle i would say one for me is that i feel like i can help people and and for me to not help it feels like a tug on everything that i say i stand for yes and so what's simple
for me might be really hard for somebody yes and so to say no it's it's counter to what i who i aspire to be yeah yeah i love that i love that one and i think a lot of people can relate to that i can definitely relate to that i feel like i'm like it's only 10 minutes of my time i can't make a difference to someone it's worth it
another reason why i struggle to say no i'd say is apart from your one which i agree with too it's another reason internal struggle of why i struggle to say no is because i do want to be liked i was that was my mother makes me happier like it's the same thing but but like i you do want to be like yeah you want you you know and i have to
monitor this and that's what i'm saying the reason why i'm i'm sharing these with everyone listening is because if you haven't articulated them it means you're not aware of them right and so if you haven't put it down on a piece of paper and you haven't written down why you struggle to say no you don't know why you don't say it right so i literally said
i just finally said like i'm gonna eliminate inter informational interviews yeah okay now it's like the kid that comes in it's your friend's son or your nephew or the cousin of so-and-so and and i just don't i said no yeah and for me can you imagine like your best friend calls you is like it's my son yeah no i'll get him to somebody like yeah can't you spend 10
minutes and i'm like nah i can't yeah and that to me was like awful it's awful like the feeling is yeah and so now on my walkabout like my constraint is no longer time which i'm sure for you is impossible right now but your constraint is time yeah and mine is i was constantly trying to outsource the only thing i was able to do and
that was something that i probably spent too much money on in 12 months on where i was constantly trying to hire for what is my superpower and i was hoping that i could find someone to do that so i could do more superpower stuff right but i kept trying to find someone i kept hiring someone and no matter how much i paid and where we looked and
whatever we did i realized it wasn't possible to outsource that specific skill and i finally owned it and i said well i need to do that for myself so i actually didn't make a lot of mistakes on that but going back to your question i see as the three most important things but i see them in order so i like that yeah chronological correct priority okay so we had a set of rules
in the monastery which i still completely connect with and the three words uh one of a couple of them are sanskrit one of them's english but it was health sadhana savor these were three words and it was always in that order so it was considered these are the three most important things and the good thing is you can't do one before you finish the other one
that that's that's great and so the rule is health is first and that includes your physical and mental and spiritual health and you give beautiful examples of how to do that so before you have moved in the morning you can't do any of the others so if you haven't done your yoga you haven't done your tennis you haven't done your
workout whatever it is you can't do anything else you're just not allowed right because without you being of health without you being of everything you mentioned already who are you going to serve right what energy are you giving them you haven't even got your own mind right how are you going to inspire a young man no matter how whatever you have or a
young woman the second thing was sadhana sadhana was your personal rituals and practices your personal eating of yourself like when you were going out mozambique you can't build a school if you haven't worked on your own fitness and you haven't eaten a meal how long are you gonna last so the second thing was once you've made sure your
body and mind are right have you prepared your soul exactly as you said have you prepared your consciousness should have been a monk have you prepared yeah you should have basically should have been a teacher have you prepared your intention and the final savor is service that's the final giving to others is the final not that it's the least important it's the most
important right if you look at any tree around you if it wasn't watered properly if it wasn't taken care of properly you look up it's got no fruits what fruits are you giving to people you're giving people rotten fruits and that's where you start so it's not that service is the least important it's the most important and therefore you're
to water the roots well so for me that's how i think about what's most important is by first taking care of the first two so that the third can be done to its best but don't say yes to an opportunity for the third before you've done the first two does that make sense it makes so much sense it reminds me of the story there's this tree tree of tannery have
you ever heard of it no i haven't okay sahara desert this tree lives to be 350 years old it used to be a wooded area but then the climate changed and became a desert and only one tree survived tree of tenere and the roots went down hundreds of feet into this little watering hole in a state and then unfortunately like it was on maps
because it was the one tree you know hundreds of miles around and uh and a driver came with a truck and and hit it knocked it over and that was it for the truth and then i always contrast that with pando and pando is the second largest living organism in the world 80 000 trees in utah in the us 80 000 trees and it's been around for 70 000 years so
here's one tree okay that can survive for 350 years in ridiculous conditions and i always say like that's incredible but then one driver out done see you later sayonara now with 70 000 trees and they share a common root system yeah okay i always think about that when you when you were saying that i just kept thinking pando panda okay kept going with my because
we need each other yeah and we need people yeah and we need to connect and that that to me is like you know that is the secret sauce today yeah in a world where isolation is our kryptonite yeah the connectivity of roots and the connectivity of people and how you j shetty are able to bring us together through a common language and that your
monks three-step process i mean that it's so it's it's pure it's genius and it's so um intuitive yeah it's brilliant and even what you're writing about in the book i s what you just said you today have more of a luxury of time in your life today yes obviously that wasn't how it was at all i do not have a luxury of time and at this current stage of my life as a
monk i did more so for sure what i've realized is time is the wrong metric and the wrong divisible so we divide our life by time we say okay i need time with my family i need time with my partner i need time with scott i need time with this i need time with that and i realized a few years ago no one wanted my time everyone wanted my presence and everyone
wanted my energy so if i could give 10 minutes of my time but a hundred percent of my energy that's what someone wanted and i started changing how i looked today looking at the ratio of my energy versus my time and saying how much time can i give at a hundred percent energy and sometimes the time went down to 60 seconds
and that was fine because i realized that people would rather have a hundred percent of my energy than one percent of my energy in a hundred percent of my time giving someone an hour being on my phone all the time as you were saying when you got with your friends no one wants that right no one wants to see me and you both on our phones right
now and have a couple of questions about your book people want to hear us have presents right jay that's why i say be where your feet are and not get balanced if you're just like how do i find balance i'm like let's let's talk about that okay about it yes it's the first question i get in particular with young people i talk to high school kids or colleagues i can't
believe kids are asking that question everyone that's worrying everyone how do i find balance i'm like get to work yeah but i i literally say like i think about my life and i think about home well how do you have such a good strong relationship you seem focused on your faith and your family and work and how do you do it i was like hey here's the thing okay let's
talk about life let's talk about real life not you know the huxtables on tv let's talk about real real life okay here's what real life looks like for me i get up in the morning it's chaos i call it the ncaa tournament we just survive in advance we are trying to get out the door without a nuclear meltdown you borrow my shirt i can't find my
you're in charge my computer all that crap the girl's good to school okay how many meaningful moments can i have at that point how about zero i have to be okay with that because it's not happening yeah okay one can't get out of bed the other one's up at five in the morning i mean it is you know it's chaos then i go to work they go to school
they've got cheerleading they've got basketball they've got boyfriends which we do not want to talk about ever we have homework i have work i have events we come home they how much time talk about energy how do i how do i be present how much time do you have 45 minutes your family the people you say you love most that matter most in your life an hour
two hours and you're luckiest person in the world so what are you gonna do with that one hour and i say let's create some meaningful moments let's create a memory let's have a real conversation and by the way what's great today there's so many things to talk about the world is falling apart we have social unrest we have challenges to the core of faith and and the church
in this country we have the education system we have a political system that's a complete adventure we become global citizens we have all these topics that we can talk to our children or you know what we can do write them a love letter or you know what we can do tell them three things you really want them to remember or you know what we can
do tell them everything you ever want to tell them but haven't spent the time yet because those moments are what they will remember and will matter go on a family walk oh it took an hour and we actually left our phones in the house and we went to go walk for 45 minutes that time that's what we have to protect that's what we have to put our energy
and effort on that's where our intentions should go this notion of balance what are we gonna do sit around watching reruns or binging on netflix or sitting around watching a show typing on our ipads messing around on our phone and eating licorice okay because that's what life looks like yeah literally for me it's like be present i love the notion of energy over time i'm
gonna steal that yeah no it's it's been game changing for me i found obviously i don't have children yet so i'll have to come take notes from you my wife and i one of the things we did especially as things were taking off for me i started a new routine with her where every 30 days i realized that the notion of what you just said if you're lucky of two hours a
day to spend with the people you love the most and that's the same with me when when life was when when i was putting in the work and i was working 18 hours a day to build everything that we we have today it i didn't have that luxury of time with her so every 30 days we would take three days and we'd go away together somewhere
three hours away from where we live we'd pack the car drive up get a bed and breakfast get an airbnb get a small motel hotel whatever whatever you could afford and we'd be there for two nights and three days and we would lock our phones in the safe and we'd just spend time together that's wonderful and i realized that doing those three days every month had a
bigger impact on our relationship than if we sat in front of the tv every day for two hours oh i love it it just didn't it didn't compare because of what you just said yeah yeah that making a memory making an experience that's what we all want in life no one's gonna count and be like dad i know you spent 10 hours with me this week no
one's counting that there's no no one's keeping a clock of that but my wife remembers oh remember that weekend we're going to spam springs i remember when we went to temecula we rode those e-bikes around for the whole day or do you remember when we went up and we went to santa barbara and we just walked on the beach like those are the things you
remember yeah they're so true and they weren't expensive none of those they were expensive or they were all free walk by here's here's a real free one you can add go for it we have my wife and i when things are good and we're we're in our in our zone we go on one walk a week that we call non-transactional nice think about like life is transactional and
non-transactional transactionalists okay we got the kids got this oh she's got practice oh there's a game on tuesday okay okay um what are we doing this friday none of that we just talk and we stay in the moment and we stay present and when we do that i feel like our relationship is more solid we are more grounded and we're more connected
mm-hmm i love that and it's our version of your three-day trip which is non-transactional i love that that's and that's hard i'm sure with kids yes like that's harder and harder as you have more people to talk about and their lives and their minds and their challenges and their boyfriends that should not be mentioned all that kind of stuff like that gets
harder i'm sure how do you how do you honor the time so that you don't get distracted i find it so easy to you you say that but then when you get there you just got off a phone or you you spoke to how do you really honor that how have you found how have you tried to do that best the best thing for me is is is abstinence i leave my phone in the house right yeah
and i know that sounds crazy and i wish i were more disciplined and i wish i could keep in my back pocket and walk for 45 minutes i don't have to i don't have the i do not have the gear i don't yeah that's why i leave it if we go to dinner and i know i need to focus it stays in the car now someone's saying right now i would never leave my phone
in the car why where is it going what are you missing what is your espn notification telling you what is the tick tock video you're gonna miss what's the text you're gonna miss what's the cnn notification it's okay yeah you will be okay the world will move on without you you are okay you are not gonna miss anything i think we just have to be
where our feet are we have to just like it goes back to something that you said more what is your intention and can we be more intentional about what we are and how we live and and be more grounded scott i could talk to you for hours genuinely this has been so much fun uh and i count podcasts now as i do them more and more and we've
done them for a couple of years in interviews i count when i'm having fun on a podcast as the best indicator of a good conversation terrific and i've had so much fun today and i also know and i just saw the clock when i was looking i was like we're about to beat our record of like this is in the top three longest episodes we've ever done that is also
fun when you don't look at the time but i want to encourage everyone and what you just said now with such a beautiful no i want to encourage everyone who's listening to go and grab a copy of be where your feet are seven principles to keep you present grounded and thriving we have not even touched some of my favorite chapters in the book like we
haven't even gone over the concepts of some of my favorite chapters in the book we've touched a lot of the a lot of my favorite ones but there are still some more and we have just scratched the surface on what's really inside this book what scott has to offer and scott i'm hoping that not everyone not only does everyone read your book i hope everyone goes and
follows you i hope everyone stays connected with your journey and story like i'm excited to do i would hope that we turn this podcast into a long friendship i've learned so much from you today i've deeply enjoyed your company and i can't wait to meet your eliza 14 year old daughter who's taught me so much in in such simple ways
but i highly recommend we'll have the link in the caption and everywhere please go and grab a copy of be where your feet are i couldn't recommend it more highly uh as you know scott we end every episode with five fast five final five questions these questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum uh so if you're ready scott we'll do it
let's do it fast five all right so the first question i have for you is what is the best advice you've ever received be present what is the worst advice you've ever received money never sleeps what's the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night first thing i do in the morning is say my prayers last thing i do at night is say my prayers
beautiful i love that what a what a great life that's that's so simple as well patterns are great okay question number four how would you describe your current purpose in life at this stage of your life my current purpose in life is to help develop leaders whole mind-body soul leaders both personally and professionally i love that and i'm excited to see you
do that i think this book is going to be the manual for leaders i really do i really believe that because it's about who you are and it's how what you've done but it's how you show up and it's i love how simple you've made it yet how profound it is and i think that balance is is exactly what's needed and the fact that you've sat in those meetings board
meetings phone calls that have caused you so much stress and anxiety and found that the answers and antidotes are actually the amazing principles that you've laid out in this book i really think it's going to be a manual for leaders so thank you this has been a gift you are a gift to the world and it's no accident that this is the number one
podcast for your health thank you thank you and i've got one more question go ahead final one if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be be nice to each other that'd be an amazing law i really hope that everyone does try and follow that even when it's really hard just be nice and smile and take care of each other
and serve others and love others and assume positive intent make the world better yeah there's too much angst in this world and you have to do your part and if we all do our little part life gets better for everybody i love that everyone scott o'neill please go and get the book be where your feet are seven principles to keep you present grounded and thriving
we'll have all the links and go and follow scott across social media and what i really want you to do as you know i love it when you do this i want you to tag me and scott on any platform you're using instagram twitter facebook whatever you're on and i want you to tell us what scott said that's going to resonate with you that you're going to
practice maybe what eliza said maybe what his wife said whoever said it i want to know please tag me and him on your post i'd love to see him feel all the love uh for this next phase the next chapter that he's doing in his life of going out to help build conscious leaders uh scott we're so grateful to have had you on on purpose uh and i'm
really really happy that we spent this time together so thank you so much thank you if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today