4 Practical Ways To Think Like A Monk & How This Powerful Mindset Will Reset A Difficult Year For You

Are you looking for stillness and peace in your life? Is a life free from baggage and anxiety on your mind? Jay Shetty believes that adopting a monk’s mindset can lead you to the calm you desire. Jay Shetty brings you wisdom from his new book, Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind For Peace and Purpose Every Day. Today you'll learn the four reasons to think like a monk, then preorder your copy of his new book at www.thinklikeamonkbook.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too? Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised yourself you'd pick back up. It can feel like your whole life is recalibrating. And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet,

• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:30Jay Shetty?

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• 2:16Jay Shetty?

  And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and is clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1

• 2:59Jay Shetty?

  Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose. The goal of monk thinking is a life free of ego, envy, anxiety, anger, and bitterness. It's a life free of baggage. And the way I see it, adopting the monk mindset isn't just possible, it's necessary in order to find that calm, stillness, and peace we so desperately want for ourselves and in our lives.

• 3:40Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. It is getting so close. I am so excited. If you know, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't know, wherever you've been, you're gonna find out in this podcast. So, people often ask me how they can cultivate more focus, how they can find inner purpose, and how they can experience more meaning and less anxiety in their lives. As you know, in my work, I love to incorporate the latest brain research and neuroscience, along with advice from leaders in their respective fields. Business leaders, musicians, entrepreneurs, financial predictors, and philanthropists.

• 4:22Jay Shetty?

  And throughout those interviews, you've heard me talk a bit about my own life, including some of my experiences living and training as a monk. But now, for the first time, I'm going to take you even deeper. If you've been following me for some time, you know that my first ever book, without a doubt, the most exciting launch of my life, Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day, comes out in just a few days on September 8th. So in line with the release of Think Like a Monk, I'm going to take you on a journey into the world of monks and show you how your life can change if you learn to think like a monk.

• 5:07Jay Shetty?

  And remember this, you don't have to live like a monk to think like a monk. I'm not expecting any of you to start wearing robes, to shave your head, to move across country or whatever it may be, or to leave your jobs and leave your lives. I want to help you access that stillness, that calm, that clarity from exactly where you are right now. Now, you may say, Jay, can I really learn all that much from monks? And here's my response to that. According to research data reported in The Telegraph, only three in 10 people surveyed feel happy and satisfied with their lives. Just three in 10.

• 5:51Jay Shetty?

  Meanwhile, the man dubbed by brain researchers as the world's happiest man is someone named Matthew Ricard, and guess what? He's a monk. If you want to dominate on the basketball court, you'd look to someone like Michael Jordan. Or on the football pitch, to someone like Cristiano Ronaldo, right? If you want to learn more about innovation, you'd look to people like Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson. If you want to up your finance game, you'd look to Warren Buffett or maybe Suze Orman. If you want to be a captivating writer, you might look to people like Maya Angelou. That makes sense, right? But when you're interested in learning something or growing a skill set, you look to who is the best at those things.

• 6:36Jay Shetty?

  Well, if you want to train your mind for peace, calm, and purpose, if you want to master your mind, as so many of you have told me you do, your greatest teachers will be monks. The goal of monk thinking is a life free of ego, envy, anxiety, anger, and bitterness. It's a life free of baggage. And the way I see it, adopting the monk mindset isn't just possible, it's necessary in order to find that calm, stillness, and peace we so desperately want for ourselves and in our lives. Now, I want to be clear.

• 7:18Jay Shetty?

  In the podcast, I'll be touching on principles and ideas from Think Like a Monk, my book, but I'm not going to spoil the book for you, okay? You can think of these next few episodes of the podcast as an extension of what's in the book. The other thing is that if you ever worked on a book, you know that you can never include everything you'd like to. So here on the podcast, I'll get to share some of my favorite stories and research that didn't make into the book. To start off this journey, today I'm going to share with you four reasons to learn to think like a monk. I'm going to talk about four ways that learning to think like a monk will increase the quality of your life and your life satisfaction. In case you still doubted me, now, there are many more reasons than that, but I'm just going to focus on four today. So let's jump in.

• 8:03Jay Shetty?

  Now, when I was a monk, and I call myself a former monk now because I'm married, though I still keep up with many of the practices. But when I was living as a monk, I studied with Hindu monks. These monks use teachings called the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita as their foundational text. The title is from the Sanskrit word Veda, meaning knowledge. One of the things I find fascinating about this text is that even though these teachings are thousands of years old, they are still incredibly relevant today. People throughout history and into the present day have long sought wisdom from monks, luminaries in science, philosophy, art, and on. Credit the Bhagavad Gita, for example, as being highly influential on their lives and work.

• 8:49Jay Shetty?

  Here's a story you probably haven't heard. I'm sure you probably know of the inventor Nikola Tesla. And if you don't, just so you know, the Tesla Company is named after him. And also, there's a great movie called The Current Wars, which shows the competition between him and Edison. But you probably wouldn't associate him with monks. Well, when in his late 30s, Tesla was introduced to a Hindu monk named Swami Vivekanand, who was very well-known in his own right. The two met in New York backstage at a play. And as they got talking, they realized they had a lot in common. For his part, Tesla had all of these grand ideas about the nature of physics.

• 9:33Jay Shetty?

  And listening to Vivekanand helped to validate and clarify some of these early concepts. Tesla realized while listening to Vivekanand that many of the ideas he was formulating were already expressed in the Vedas. Tesla ended up attending several of Swami Vivekanand's lectures in the States. And from him, learned certain ideas about energy, matter, and time, which in Sanskrit Vivekanand described as prana, akasha, and kulpas. The two stayed in touch for years, and Tesla even began to use Sanskrit terminology when describing some of his work. And some say that Vedic concepts led Tesla to the idea of transmit electrical power wirelessly

• 10:17Jay Shetty?

  through what became the Tesla coil transformer. So you know, maybe we actually have the Vedas to thank for Wi-Fi. Maybe, just maybe. Throughout the next few weeks, I'll share more stories about current and historic figures who've learned from monks. But I wanted to share just one more today. Many of you are probably familiar with monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a Buddhist monk and spiritual leader. In 1967, Thich Nhat Hanh was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by none other than Martin Luther King Jr., who in his nominating letter wrote, "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam."

• 11:00Jay Shetty?

  But not everyone knows that the two were actually friends. In fact, in the same year, King made a landmark speech titled, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam." It was shocking. Even some of the king's advisers begged him not to take a stand against the war, fearing it would negatively impact his civil rights work in the US. Yet, King became a vocal critic of the war. And it was in large part because of his relationship with the monk Thich Nhat Hanh that he began to think this way. Pretty amazing. As I said, we'll get into more stories about monks and well-known historical figures on future episodes.

• 11:42Jay Shetty?

  Right now, I want to get to the four reasons you'll want to learn to think like a monk and how it will transform your life. Now, one of the topics you've heard me talk about before and talk to experts about is focus. How do we create more focus to be more effective and impactful in our lives? Well, monks are masters of focus. And if you learn this skill, you'll actually be able to overcome your procrastination, your overthinking, and all of those challenges that we face in really creating the life that we want. From a monk's perspective, the greatest power is self-control, to train the mind and energy for total focus. Monks cultivate the ability to be detached and undeterred by external ups and downs.

• 12:27Jay Shetty?

  They're able to navigate anything that seems tough, challenging, or even fun without being too excited by pleasure or too depressed by pain. Check this out. A team of researchers once bought an EEG machine, which measures electrical impulses in the brain, to a Japanese meditation hall and measured monks' brain activity while they were meditating. The researchers, wanting to see how good the monks were at staying focused, so they played a series of repetitive sounds and told the monks to stay focused on them. For the most advanced meditators in the group, their brain responded just as strongly the first time they heard the sound as the 20th time. The reason that's remarkable is that our brains reflexively turn down the volume on

• 13:11Jay Shetty?

  repeated input. We start to ignore it. To help you understand that, I just need to say two words: car alarm, right? Especially in urban areas, car alarms are so ubiquitous that we just ignore them most of the time. But when we train our minds, like those monks, we can build the ability to stay focused on whatever we want, regardless of distractions. Here's another amazing example of focus. Tupten Jyopa is a former monk who used to work as the Dalai Lama's primary English language translator. A translator's work is impressive to begin with, but Jyopa has been known to be able to seamlessly translate up to fifteen minutes' worth of speech at a time. Imagine that for a second.

• 13:56Jay Shetty?

  Someone talks for fifteen minutes, and you not only have to remember what they said, you have to translate it. Jyopa credits his incredible feats of memory to his monk training, where he memorized difficult texts written in archaic languages. But don't worry, you don't have to be a monk to develop monk-like focus skills. Some research shows that even after just a few weeks of meditation, or in some cases, a single session, our brains can start to change. So if you'd like to learn to focus more, so you can achieve your goals, work more productively, or be more present, you want to learn to think like a monk. I'm going to get into some details about how to do that in the weeks to come. Okay, the second reason to learn to think like a monk

• 14:40Jay Shetty?

  is that monks are masters of self-awareness. As Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari said, on this show, actually. So if you missed that episode, go back and catch it. It was great. As Yuval Harari said, many of the new technologies that are out there enable corporations and governments to essentially hack our brains and manipulate us with marketing. He warned that if you don't feel you have the time to get to know yourself, to uncover your true desires and motivations, these external companies do. And as Harari said, if they get to know you a little better than you know yourself, game over. They can manipulate and control you, and you will not even realize it. Now, none of us want to be at the mercy

• 15:25Jay Shetty?

  of marketers or corporations, right? Nor do we want to be at the mercy of what others think of us. And yet, that's how so many of us feel. So many of us don't feel that we truly know who we are and what matters to us. And that's something especially powerful we can learn from monks, how to connect with our true selves and our values. One of the things I learned in my monk training is to look at my conditioning, to uncover my beliefs and where they came from, so that I could discover the real me. We're heavily influenced by projections, both those we have for ourselves and those others put on us. Research by social psychologist Claude Steele and his team, which is described in his book Whistling Vivaldi,

• 16:08Jay Shetty?

  focused on something called stereotype threat. That's the fear that you might do something that could reinforce a negative stereotype about a group you're part of. The researchers conducted a series of studies where they took Stanford undergrads of mixed races and gave them standardized tests. Only they told some of the black test takers that the test measured intelligence. Those students consistently performed worse on the test than all other students, including other black students who were not told the test measured intelligence. They did similar studies with women taking advanced tests in math. The researchers told one group that men and women tend to score differently on the test. Those women did worse on the test.

• 16:52Jay Shetty?

  In this phenomenon of stereotype threat, when we're aware of a negative projection on a group we're a part of, no matter how untrue it is, in this case, a very untrue stereotype that black people are not as smart, or equally untrue, that women are not as good as in math, it messes up our performance. We're afraid to confirm that negative projection or that stereotype. To counteract others' projections, monks cultivate a deep relationship with ourselves and we take time to determine our values, what's important to us and what we want in life. This helps to insulate us against others' projections. I mean, you wouldn't imagine the Dalai Lama losing sleep over what others think of him, right? How many likes he got on social media?

• 17:36Jay Shetty?

  When we learn to think like a monk, instead of mindlessly absorbing others' projections, we make it a project to learn who we are, to become self-aware. And again, I'm going to give you some details about just how we do that in the weeks to come, and of course, in the book. Reason number three to learn to think like a monk is that monks are masters of compassion. I've had so many people tell me, Jay, I want to be more compassionate and understanding towards myself and others, but it's so hard sometimes. And I get it. And that's something else we can learn from monks. And that is really what the world is crying out for right now. Isn't the world crying out for more compassion, more love, more understanding? Here's some brain research to back that up.

• 18:19Jay Shetty?

  Tanya Singer and her colleagues scanned the brains of experienced monks who'd practiced loving kindness meditation. When the monks were shown pictures that depicted immense suffering, they were not as triggered as normal people. It was easier for the monks to generate and maintain feelings of warmth and loving kindness in spite of the images. Singer refers to these monks as expert compassionists. But maybe you feel that monk-like compassion isn't compatible with being successful in the everyday world or in your work. I once asked Radhanath Swami, a monk who's been a monk for around 40 years now and is also one of my teachers, how we can balance our spirituality with our desire for success.

• 19:01Jay Shetty?

  He said, "We can still work hard to succeed, but not with arrogance, greed, and fear. The foundation of what we do can be compassion." You know, I talk a lot in this podcast about finding your passion. Swami's response to that question showed me that in the way we focus on finding our passion projects, we should also focus on finding our compassion projects. Having greater compassion for others as well as ourselves helps us to be more understanding and forgiving. It helps us stay more present and helps us manage difficult situations more easily. Research shows that those who practice compassion are better at dealing with difficult circumstances instead of falling apart under pressure.

• 19:45Jay Shetty?

  So in the weeks to come, we'll also be focusing on building those compassion muscles. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision making, and that extends to the practical stuff too, like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are, and they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food,

• 20:30Jay Shetty?

  you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors, high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Home should be a place that feels like a sanctuary, a space that truly reflects who you are. But it can be challenging to balance style, budget and endless options. I was looking to create a dedicated calm space for my morning meditation and reading,

• 21:13Jay Shetty?

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• 21:56Jay Shetty?

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• 22:03Jay Shetty?

  Okay, the fourth and last reason that you want to learn to think like a monk is that monks are masters of mindfulness. Mindfulness is kind of a buzzword right now, and people are learning what monks have known for thousands of years. That mindfulness dramatically increases the quality of your life. In fact, it actually helps you be more focused, self-aware, and compassionate in addition to helping us manage fear and anxiety. As a young boy, Buddhist monk Mingyur Rinpoche, in spite of a happy family life, began to suffer regular bouts of anxiety and panic attacks. He says, "Panic followed me like a shadow."

• 22:45Jay Shetty?

  His father, a meditation instructor, taught him techniques to try and deal with his fear, but nothing worked. Because as Mingyur says, he hated to meditate. Maybe that sounds familiar. When Mingyur was 13, he asked the head of the local monastery if he could join a three-year retreat that was about to start. During the retreat, he spent most of his time in his room, perched on a small box of meditation. But his panic only got worse. Finally, he decided to try flipping the script, and instead of allowing panic to be his boss or his enemy, he would try to befriend it. As he says now, "If you totally transform your panic into your best friend,

• 23:27Jay Shetty?

  then you can transform all your problems into your friends, and everything becomes support for your happiness." And mindfulness helped him do that. I learned something similar in my training when it came to dealing with fear, about befriending fear. And I talked about that in the book. And now you know, you might be thinking, "Jay, that's great about the monk, but I don't want to become a monk. So how can mindfulness and presence help me?" Well, what's the polar opposite of a monk? You'd think it was a soldier, right? But listen to this. Ben King is a former US Army sergeant who was deployed to the front lines of Iraq as the leader of a psychological operations team. When he returned home, like many service members,

• 24:10Jay Shetty?

  King struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. King began to struggle with chronic pain in his back, along with racing thoughts and insomnia. Soon, he was having five or more drinks at a time and downing Tylenol PM just to get to sleep. Then, during a chance encounter at the grocery store, a friend suggested mindfulness. He attended his first class a week later. Using mindfulness and breath techniques, the same ones we practise as monks, King began to feel a sense of perspective, security, and even contentment that helped him deal with the traumatic memories he had of his deployment. As King says in his own words,

• 24:51Jay Shetty?

  "The military teaches you to armour up, to prepare your mind for battle, but when you come home, they don't teach you to armour down." His meditation experience led King to develop a set of mental and physical practices to help veterans like him. He created an organisation called Armour Down that helps veterans, as he says, "demobilise with mindfulness." Incidentally, the US military is now also encouraging mindfulness practice to help with post-traumatic stress because it works. I wanted to leave you with at least one practical piece of advice today. Something you can do to start to think like a monk. And it relates to mindfulness, as monk Mingyur Rinpoche and as I learned,

• 25:34Jay Shetty?

  and that is to acknowledge your anxiety or your fear as a friend. It's a common misconception that monks don't experience feelings, that we suppress them. In fact, we do the opposite. We acknowledge all of our feelings. We just don't let them control us. So when it comes to fear or anxiety, we say, "I see you, my fear." Or "I see you, my anxiety." And we actually welcome these uncomfortable feelings as friends. Try that next time you feel fear or anxiety, because these can be important messengers. If you acknowledge them and even invite them to tell you why they're showing up, you can start to diffuse them. Because when we avoid something, it tends to magnify. So that's one basic monk practice I wanted to share today.

• 26:19Jay Shetty?

  There are so many more in the book. And those are four reasons you'll want to learn to think like a monk. And I hope now you're even more excited about taking this journey with me over the next few weeks. What I'd love for you to do is go and grab a copy of the book from thinklikeamonkbook.com or any other website. Come and join me. I'm going to be leading a live book club every single day on Instagram and Facebook, starting very, very soon. Don't miss out on that. And we'll be diving into all kinds of incredible stories, wisdom, and of course, science that you can apply to living with greater peace and purpose every day. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Share it with everyone that you possibly can, and I can't wait for you to read the book. Thank you so much.