8 Steps for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome & How to Be a Continuous Learner

Jay Shetty graduated from business school—and decided to become a monk. Not only was this an unusual move, but it was met with strong disapproval from his family and friends. But Jay followed this calling. Today, he's a #1 New York Times bestselling author, hosts a leading health podcast, and is lauded as a mindfulness leader by millions worldwide. Shortly after obtaining a degree in business, Jay Shetty decided to become a monk. Not only was this an unusual move, but it was met with strong disapproval from both family and friends. Still, Jay felt compelled to follow this calling, and today Jay is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, hosts a leading health podcast, and is lauded as a mindfulness leader by millions of people around the world. In this episode, Jay tells Alex about feeling completely lost at multiple times in his career, and how holding true to his values helped navigate his way through immense imposter syndrome and nearly running out of money. Listen to more episodes of Imposters and subscribe here: https://link.chtbl.com/WfYlurno Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 03:43 What was childhood like for a young Jay Shetty? 08:11 Clash between self awareness and low self esteem 10:08 We are living two lives 16:24 Loving the process and accepting the result 24:38 Don’t get discouraged if you are behind 27:15 Asked to speak in front of colleagues 29:47 Navigating through Imposter syndrome 34:48 Be open to risks, welcome mentorships 42:39 Everything in the world is made up of energy 46:07 Preserve the purity of your heart Like this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally! 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?

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• 0:45Jay Shetty?

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• 1:28Jay Shetty?

  and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free.

• 2:12Jay Shetty?

  Orange Theory Fitness: helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow. Now, this episode is a conversation with Alex Lieberman, who's a co-founder of Morning Brew. And on his podcast, Imposters, I think we got into some really interesting topics that I don't always get to dive in. I got to open up about my entrepreneurship journey. I got to talk more about social media and business. You're also going to hear my insights on when I feel anxiety and when I feel like an imposter. So to me, this is a really deep dive into my mindset

• 2:57Jay Shetty?

  from the perspective of an interviewee. And I think you're really going to enjoy this episode, especially if you've been listening along every Friday, hearing my insights. So don't skip this one, don't miss this one. You're gonna love it. Thank you for lending me your ears, whether you're walking, running at the gym, walking your dog, cooking, whatever you're up to. Thank you for listening to On Purpose. When I finally got a job after 40 rejections and I met people and they were 21 and I was 26 now, by the time I started my first job, I was 26 years old. I realized that I had actually had the greatest advantage, which was I had massive self-awareness. I knew what my strengths were. I knew what my weaknesses were. I knew what I had to offer and I knew what I wanted to do.

• 3:40Jay Shetty?

  And I was just like, I just took the biggest risk, potentially one of the biggest career risks in life by becoming a monk. I shouldn't be scared of anything anymore.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Welcome to Imposters, the show where I have revealing conversations with world-class execs, athletes and entertainers about their personal challenges and how overcoming those challenges has shaped their careers and lives for the better. And I hope that it helps you along your personal journey. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe and click the bell so you get notified every time Morning Brew drops a new video. Let's dive in. My guest today is Jay Shetty. Jay is the host of the podcast On Purpose and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Think Like a Monk. For the past several years, Jay has been working hard to, as he puts it,

• 4:36Speaker 01

  "make wisdom go viral", which he does by sharing insights with his millions of followers on Facebook and Instagram, and with his over 7 billion views on YouTube. Jay's wisdom has been lauded by powerhouses like Oprah and Ellen, and has been named on Forbes's 30 Under 30 list. But Jay's path to success has been anything but linear, as we'll discuss in our interview. In fact, to get to where he is today, Jay had to take some incredibly hard and unconventional career risks, and overcome massive amounts of imposter syndrome. Jay Shetty, thank you so much for joining Impostors.

• 5:10Jay Shetty?

  I want to say thank you to you. I mean, we've been working towards this for a long time. So I'm so grateful for all your love online. I love connecting with someone over Twitter. I think that's what we connected over?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we connect over Twitter at first, then a few times on Instagram, a few times over email. But it's just interesting, the world we live in, where I have so many friends that I've never actually met in life, but I feel a closeness to them in so many ways.

• 5:32Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, definitely. I feel that warmth towards you too, and I'm glad that we're finally meeting in person, but thank you for the opportunity.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So I don't know how else to say it, other than it feels like you've had seven careers in your life. Like, it feels like you have just experienced so many different things. And people, I think today, know you as someone who's making wisdom go viral, is a podcast host, is someone who's written a book, does all these things. But you've had so many other experiences in your life that have kind of informed where you are now. And so I would love for you to take me from the beginning. What was childhood like for a young Jay Shetty?

• 6:08Jay Shetty?

  So I did this interesting activity recently where I sat down, and I realized I'd been working for around 20 years now.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And how old are you now?

• 6:16Jay Shetty?

  I'm 34.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:17Jay Shetty?

  And so around 20, 22 years. And I just, I was like, wow, that's, that's an interesting number. And I sat down and I wrote down every job I'd ever had. I have it in my notes section on my phone.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  How many jobs?

• 6:27Jay Shetty?

  I think I can say it from my memory. Let me go through it. I don't know the number, but, so it was... Newspaper boy, like paper delivery dude, uh, worked in a grocery store stacking shelves. Then worked in retail, selling like women's clothes, denim, that kind of stuff. Then was a tutor. I coached students at college to make extra money in younger years in things like economics and psychology and philosophy and things like that. And then I lived as a monk for three years. Then I worked as a digital strategy and innovation consultant at Accenture. Then I was a senior hosting producer at Huffington Post.

• 7:08Jay Shetty?

  Then I started my entrepreneurial journey, which now has led to books, podcasting, media, everything else. So at least eight.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Which I think is such an important thing to, to call out because I think people will look at you today and be like, God, this guy, he, he has it all. He's in his mid thirties, super wise. He's built a massive audience. You know, he has all these different lines of business. Like clearly he has it all figured out. And I think just by you laying out these, whatever it is, nine, 10 jobs that you've had, it has been anything but a linear path to get there. And I'm sure from your perspective, it's like you don't have it all figured out at all. You're just working the best to do it.

• 7:45Jay Shetty?

  No, I haven't completely figured it out, actually. No, yeah, no, no, not at all, not at all. And, uh, and yeah, it's just fun looking back that way.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:52Jay Shetty?

  And trying to piece it out. But sorry, I'll answer your question. I just thought that was interesting. And, and I recommend everyone does that activity. I think we often also think about our careers as when I graduate from college. And like, but that's, that's not your career. Like your career starts whenever you choose for it to start. Uh, the question about my childhood or where the first job began?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Your, your childhood.

• 8:10Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. I'd say that I was born and raised in a family where obedience, discipline were top priority, performing well at school was really important to my parents. And so despite me going to a fairly rough school where education wasn't a priority of my peers, my parents were emphasizing homework, after school work, extracurriculars. I was being trained from the age of eight to get into a grammar school, which is a school you have to take an exam for, that gives you a private level education without having to pay for it. My parents didn't have the money. Money to send me to private school, but they wanted me to work hard in order to do that. And so I felt like I lived a very disciplined life.

• 8:51Jay Shetty?

  Obviously, when you're a kid, there's moments where you accept it as normality. And then there's times when you're like, oh, I just wanna hang out. And now I look back and feel really grateful that my parents made me do that because I think it gave me a certain way of working that I wouldn't have developed otherwise. And I was pretty much a teacher's pet up until about age fourteen. And then age fourteen was when I went off the rails, started to rebel, started getting involved in the wrong groups, wrong circles, getting involved in activities that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 9:22Jay Shetty?

  Everything from experimenting with drugs through to uh violence through to, you know, just nefarious stupid activities. And stuff that I think most kids do, but I think we just got into it really young, like fourteen was a bit young for that. And then by the time I was eighteen, I was kind of done and I'd kind of exhausted all of the craziness. And it was actually my dad who started handing me biographies and autobiographies. So my dad was worried that I didn't like reading, and so was my mom. I really hated reading fiction.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  I was the same way.

• 9:56Jay Shetty?

  Hated reading fiction. So I don't think I read a book until I was fourteen. My dad started giving me biographies and autobiographies and I read Malcolm X, I read Martin Luther King. I also read David Beckham and Dwayne The Rock Johnson because I was a big wrestling and soccer fan growing up. And so I was reading these really diverse biographies and autobiographies and I was thinking, wow, these people have all done something phenomenal with their life. And that's where I started to get fascinated by personal development and personal growth without knowing what that was.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  So two questions. One is when you were going through kind of this phase after fourteen of being more rebellious, um of just experimenting, what was it inside of you that was driving you to do this? And do you think at that point in your life, you had a sense of who you were, what you wanted to be?

• 10:40Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, there was a certain self-awareness at the time that I could hear as a little voice in my head or my heart that was like. You don't wanna do that. You're not good at that. Do this. And it was actually healthy. So my parents wanted me to do medicine, or science, or, you know, law, or engineering. And for me, those things scared me. I was like, I'm not really interested in those things. And I could have that voice inside of me that was like, do art, do philosophy, do economics, do design, like those are the things I gravitated towards. And it was almost like I started to listen to that voice. And I started to not ignore that voice because it was so strong. And I almost had this rejection towards anything else that wasn't that. At the same time, I think there was a bit of

• 11:25Jay Shetty?

  me being naive. There was a bit of wanting to fit in. There was wanting validation, wanting to be cool, wanting to be liked. And then that part of me was seeking the wrong activities or the bad circles. So it's like this weird juxtaposition of your self-awareness, which is guiding you in the right direction. But then your low self-esteem, which is guiding you in the wrong direction. And so you've got these two things pulling on you. And you obviously don't know this as a sixteen year old. I can only say this in hindsight. But at the time, I just thought, yeah, I fit in here. I'm trying to look cool here. I think people will like me if I'm this way. And then it's like, but wait a minute, I don't wanna be forced to do things I don't care about. So that's, I was grappling with that.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm interested, you know, as we move forward in your life, you ended up going to school, to university, thinking you were going to work in, whether it's financial services or consulting. And then kind of in, by happenstance, you were introduced to the, the work of, of monks. And ultimately decided after, you know, three summers of visiting the ashram to become a monk for three years. How hard was that decision? When you just had talked about during your rebellious years, at least a part of you was driven by kind of the need for validation. It, I would say it wasn't actually a popular decision to become a monk. Like, it wasn't something that was familiar to other people.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So how were you able to kind of withstand, call it the pressure from others to do what was expected of you?

• 12:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Jay Shetty?

  I think we're always living two lives. One is the life you want and the other is the life you think others want you to live. And we get stuck in between those two lives. And often we feel like we're living too far off the edge of what other people want us to live. And often we feel like we're living too close to the version we want to live. And that dance is really fascinating as life goes on. And what I found at the time was I was being drawn closer and closer and closer to my own values. And I was being drawn closer and closer and closer to what was important to me. So at that time, if you asked me what I thought I was gonna be, I would have said something like, "I'm gonna be a rapper, right?

• 13:40Jay Shetty?

  I love spoken word. I love writing lyrics. I loved music. I played the drum kit. I played the piano growing up. I can't play anything anymore." And I was highly into music and I was like, "I want a career in music." That's what I probably would have said. And then as time moved on, I would have moved away to being, "Okay, let's be more realistic, Jay. You can't do that. That's not real for an Indian kid growing up in London. Let's be more realistic." And I was like, "Well, maybe I wanna be an art designer or an art manager at a magazine." Because I loved art, loved design. And then it's like, "Oh, no, no, Jay. Be more realistic. That's not really a career path because everyone who you're surrounded by is doing far more serious and real careers than that.

• 14:24Jay Shetty?

  Okay, let's go and get a business degree, right?" Yeah, totally. It's like you literally go from, "This is the truth of what I want", to let me water it down a bit and then to let me completely water it down. So I remember telling my art teacher, who I was really good friends with at college, telling him, "I'm turning down my offers to go to like art school", which is what I thought I wanted to do, "to go and do a management science degree, you know, at Cass Business School." Yeah. And, you know, he was joking around. He was like, "You're such a sellout." Like, "You're such a sell..." I was like, "I am. I'm a sellout. That's terrible." And that's kind of where I ended up. And it's really fascinating that I went there because I was like, "This is the safe thing to do." And then I do the least safe thing in the world by becoming a monk. And so it's really fascinating how I went on that end of the spectrum and then I wanna go back. So...

• 15:09Jay Shetty?

  I think what happened is there's only so long you can stay away from your true calling. And you can push it down, you can ignore it, you can suppress it as much as you like. But it's going to keep showing up in really uncomfortable ways. And it will start quiet, but it will get louder. And for me, it got really loud at twenty one. When I thought to myself, which life do I want to live? Do I want to live a life of chasing success? Or do I want to live a life of service? And I would say that that decision at twenty one became easy. Because of the three years of experience before. And I think people look at that as like, that's a big change. But that big change was easy. Because there were lots of small experiences that led up to it.

• 15:54Jay Shetty?

  And so every summer, like you rightly said, I'd go to live with the monks. And that mini experiment every summer. Made me confident that if I did this long term, that I would enjoy it. And I think people think, oh, no, you just changed your life. It's like, no, I didn't. So, and you're right, I'm glad you raised this because a lot of people say to me today, they're like, Jay, you really like use this monk thing as part of your story. And I'm like, trust me, becoming a monk is not a story. Like, when you're twenty one, becoming a monk was the least cool thing I could possibly do. My, my friends, and this is honest, just my guy friends thought I was gay. Like literally, that's the response I got. That's how far behind things were like, you're gay, right? Like that's, I'm like, how is this? Like, how is that even connected?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 16:36Jay Shetty?

  But that's what they thought. Girls didn't want to talk to me anymore because they thought they weren't allowed to talk to me. And, and what was happening in my path. And then my family thought that I'd wasted my parents' investment in me and my education.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:49Jay Shetty?

  And so everyone's saying you've committed career suicide, you're never going to get a job again. And you're ruining your parents' life.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And it's just so interesting, again, just thinking about your own development and your own awareness. That you were able to get to a place where despite all of that, you know, people saying, oh, you must be gay, or you can't see women, oh, it's career suicide. That somehow you had gotten to this point in your life where you felt enough connection to your values or what you deemed to be your calling, that you were willing to do that. Because I would say that is very difficult at any stage of life. But it's exceptionally difficult as a twenty one year old, when there is so much social pressure.

• 17:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I give all the credit to my monk mentors and teachers and guides because it's not, I didn't have that resilience, but they'd given me an experience of something and I believed that that experience was more powerful than my feelings or what I was hearing. And that's why I think we try and make decisions in our head. And we try and figure everything out in our head and we're like, if I can figure this out in my mind, then I'll figure it out in life. And it's like, no, go and have a real life experience. Go and do the thing for a short amount of time and then you'll know what to do. And so I think you can only spend that much time in your head figuring out personality tests and conversations and questions and reflecting and introspecting. And after a while, you just gotta go do the thing. And if I never went and spent those summers

• 18:10Jay Shetty?

  living as a monk, I would never have wanted to be one because I wouldn't know what it feels like.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Totally. I'm interested for you to talk in a second about when you went to become a monk, the work you did and how you knew that you enjoyed that work. Because what I've even realized, right, after selling a business in the last few years and thinking about what's next,

• 18:31Speaker 01

  I always will intellectualize, how do I know if I am enjoying the things that I'm doing? Do I love this work? Am I passionate about it? And the issue is, the more that I overthink, am I passionate about this thing? The less I feel passionate about it because I'm intellectualizing the experience. So tell me, you know, what was it like to be on the ashram for three years? And how did you know at least some part of that work was truly what your calling was?

• 18:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, so there's there's two parts to any work we do. There's the process and there's the result. And loving the work you do means you love the process and you accept the result. Whereas the way we've been trained in modern society is all that matters is the result. If the result is good, then you must love your job. If you see someone win an Oscar, they must love their job. If you see someone make lots of money and sell their company, they must be happy. So we define someone's happiness based on how the result is, whereas all ancient wisdom would suggest is happiness is based on how much you enjoy the process. And the process is as enjoyable as you believe it's aligned with your values and what you care about.

• 19:41Jay Shetty?

  And so at the time, my goal of becoming a monk was simple. I wanted to learn to master my mind, my ego, my envy, my jealousy, my comparison. And my illusion and I wanted to serve. I wanted to improve the lives of other people. I wanted my life to make a difference in other people's lives. So I knew that as long as I was doing work in those two areas, no matter what activity you do, you'd be happy. And I think that's another challenge we do. We get locked up in the activity. Do I like being an interviewer? Do I like being a writer? Do I like being a podcaster? And if you ask me, I'm like, I would use any tool possible to master my mind and improve the lives of other people. I'm not attached to what medium or forum.

• 20:26Jay Shetty?

  I only use social media because it was the last option. It was the last thing I wanted to use, but there was no other option that I had because no one else would give me a chance. So I'm not attached to the medium or the role. It's like you're focused on what do you want to bring to the world? And what intention are you bringing in? So to me, it's about figuring out what you're truly trying to create for yourself. And so during my time as a monk, I was waking up at four AM. We were meditating for four to eight hours a day. You're sleeping on the floor. You don't have a bed. All your possessions fit inside a gym locker and you do that every day. Do I enjoy that? No. Am I passionate about that? No. But I believe it's going to help me master my mind.

• 21:11Jay Shetty?

  Okay, I'm in, I can do that, right? Every day we were out in the sun. It's a hundred and ten Fahrenheit, right? It's it's hot. You're out there laying bricks. You're out there doing agricultural work on the farm. Do I enjoy that? No. Do I really love that? No. But do I believe that that it positively improves the lives of other people that we're serving? Yes. Okay, it fits. And so I enjoy the process because I trust the process is giving me what I need, but I don't have to enjoy that direct activity.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:42Jay Shetty?

  Because that's pleasure.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Well, I feel like that's such an important nuance, right? Because you talk about enjoying the process. And if someone hears what you're saying like, no, I didn't enjoy laying bricks. I didn't enjoy agriculture. They'd be like, but isn't that the process? And I think this, the distinction you make is there are activities that sit within this process. It's not necessarily about enjoying those. It's about how do these serve ultimately what you're trying to accomplish, the values you're trying to live out.

• 22:06Jay Shetty?

  Correct. And that that, yeah, I love that you're making that distinction. And I maybe I can articulate it better. I didn't love the activity. But I loved what was happening to my intention while I did the activity.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:20Jay Shetty?

  And that's what you're falling in love with. And I get that that's a really like meta ethereal idea, but it's like you are looking at that going, I do this because I know what's being built right now while I do this. That's loving the process.

• 22:36Jay Shetty?

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• 23:19Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car or just sit back and enjoy your favorite podcast. Choose a seller or Northeast Regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip. This episode is brought to you by Vinted.

• 24:00Jay Shetty?

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• 24:45Speaker 01

  I think what Jay is saying here is so important. If you have a clear sense of your own values and you're able to see how the work that you do serves those values, it can feel easier to embrace the sometimes mundane or tedious or completely unenjoyable aspects of your job. Sometimes taking a second to step back and remind yourself of your intentions and why you're doing the job that you're doing can have a really powerful effect on your willingness to push through the worst aspects of it. We're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, Jay gets into why he decided to leave the ashram and how he navigated feeling behind professionally from his peers to ultimately finding success. This episode of Impostors is sponsored by Sakara.

• 25:26Speaker 01

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• 26:07Speaker 01

  That's sakara, S-A-K-A-R-A, dot com slash imposters. So let's talk about, you spent three, three years on the ashram. You decided to ultimately leave. Why did you leave? And what was the response when you left?

• 26:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, so lots of reasons why I left. I was really experimenting with my health. I was experimenting with longer meditations, longer fasting. I was really pushing the limits of how far meditation could go to replace sleep, how far meditation could go to replace physical energy. And I, and I really took my body to, Lent's that broke my body practically and that wasn't a fun feeling at all. I ended up in the hospital, you know, I talk about this in the book, of course, I was in bed for like 14 hours a day for plenty of time. It was, it was really tough and it was all my own doing. It was all my own experimentation. That was part of it, but really, that was what was happening outside.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:07Jay Shetty?

  And what was happening inside was as you are practicing being a monk, you get more self-awareness and you get more introspection. And I started to realize that my desires were not aligned with the desires of long-term monks. So I would sit and talk to monks who'd been there for ten, twenty, thirty years. And I'd listen to them and I'd be like, do I wanna live like that? And the answer was no.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  What were their desires versus your desires?

• 27:30Jay Shetty?

  Well, their desires were complete surrender, complete service, no personal creativity or personal expression. And for me, I was like, but I wanna share what I'm learning in this way. And I can see the link between this scripture and this movie. And this song lyric reminds me of this verse in the Vedas. Like, to me, I was like, I'm a kid growing up in London who loves music, loves movies, loves life. And I'm seeing all the correlations and connections. And I'm saying, I wanna make those connections for people because then maybe people can live these ideas in their life. And so I always had that, where I wanted to make wisdom more practical, accessible and relevant because I saw its power and I felt called to do that. And it was as much a realization that I wanted to do that as I wasn't a monk.

• 28:15Jay Shetty?

  And that's hard because, you know, you feel married for three years, literally, and then you feel like you're getting a divorce. And that's actually how it felt for me. I felt like I was divorcing the love of my life. It felt like a breakup. And it was really tough leaving because it almost felt like I went back to all that noise where everyone was right. You're not gonna get a job. How are you gonna fit in now? You've lost all your friends. And now you've gone back to a world where your friends are like twenty-five, twenty-six years old. They're, you know, in relationships. They're potentially buying their first home or like, you know, moving into a fancy apartment. Or they're now promoted to their next position. They're doing well for themselves.

• 28:59Jay Shetty?

  And you're thinking, oh, I am behind. And so that's how I felt when I got back. I'm behind, I'm lost. And I didn't think I made a bad decision. I just, I was like, how do I catch up now?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  And so how did you catch up? How did you work yourself out of? I would say a very rational thought of I've almost been stuck in time. Everything's accelerated. How do I accelerate?

• 29:18Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I didn't know who the Prime Minister of England was. I didn't know who won the World Cup. Like, I didn't know. I had no idea. And so I was truly behind. I spent nine months when I left. Well, the first month, I always talk about the first month was my worst month, where all I did was eat chocolate, listen to music, catch up on all the TV. I remember watching every episode of How I Met Your Mother. I went and found a list on IMDb called Movies to Watch Before You Die, and I watched every movie on that list. Like, I literally went into full, like, lazy.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the pendulum just swung in the exact opposite direction.

• 29:50Jay Shetty?

  I wasn't waking up early, none of that. And then I was like, okay, this is not sustainable. So for those, that time I started going, I started dressing up, going to my local library, turning up, reading books. I was reading scriptural books, monk books again, and then reading business books to try and figure out what I'd missed out on. In life, I was dressing up as if I was going to work. But if you asked me what helped me catch up, it was when I started work, when I finally got a job after forty rejections. When I finally got a job, and I met people, and they were twenty-one, and I was twenty-six now by the time I started my first job. I was twenty-six years old. And I realized that I actually had the greatest advantage, which was I had massive self-awareness.

• 30:32Jay Shetty?

  I knew what my strengths were. I knew what my weaknesses were. I knew what I had to offer, and I knew what I wanted to do. And I was just like, I just took the biggest risk, potentially one of the biggest career risks in life by becoming a monk. I shouldn't be scared of anything anymore. Like, that was the scariest decision that I made at a time when things were more vulnerable. I shouldn't be scared of anything. And so I became fearless. And so that fearlessness led to me making big scary decisions in a big scary organization, which paid off because I now wasn't ready to follow what everyone else was being told to do. And everyone else who was twenty-one, who was still following the rules from college and university, they felt,

• 31:16Jay Shetty?

  all right, we need to follow the rules. That's what we're being told to do. And my thing was, well, no, I'm not going to follow that rule because I think I'll do a better job this way. And thankfully, that paid off. Now, I had people in the company, senior people. Some of them were my biggest champions, who I love and I'm so grateful to. And some of them were massively intimidated, even though they probably made twenty X what I made at the time. But they were intimidated and they were trying to control and trying to manipulate. So it was tough living there. But I'm really grateful that I did.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And so if I remember correctly, you were both working within Accenture, but then you were asked at some point to give a talk on mindfulness to a thousand people within the company. Then you started traveling around the company, right?

• 31:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, so this credit goes to a lady named Gillie Bryant. She's left Accenture now. But she was the head of all the new hires in London, so about a thousand of us. And she noticed that on my like fun fact about me, I'd said that I lived as a monk and I meditated and that I used to teach meditation. And at the time Accenture was taking, and they are, taking mental health very seriously. And so she reached out to me and she said, Jay, we have this big event coming up at Twickenham Rugby Stadium. Would you mind talking about social media, which is what I was doing at work? And talk about mindfulness and meditation on stage and potentially even lead a meditation? Now, at the time, I had no brand, no social media, no one knew my name.

• 32:38Jay Shetty?

  I was asked to come on the stage in between Will Greenwood, who is a rugby World Cup winner with the England national team and the CEO of the company in the UK. So I'm already having massive imposter syndrome because I'm going, this guy won a World Cup for the country, this person's the CEO of the company, like what am I gonna say? And these are a thousand people who are my peers, who have no respect for me and there's no authority here. And that is a beautiful position to be in because you start realizing that you you're not living off of influence, so you're not living off of a position. You live off of who you are and how you hold yourself. And so I went up on stage, I was nervous to the point I went on. And I led a meditation and the feedback I got was they'd never seen a group of a thousand people

• 33:22Jay Shetty?

  hold silence for that long. And it was a really like reassuring, comforting feeling, like it wasn't like, yes, we did it. It was more like, wow, this stuff works in the real world, people care. And so, yes, then I got invited across the company to teach mindfulness and meditation, uh, set up mindfulness Mondays, mindfulness meditations before meetings. Uh, I got really involved in the, I was so grateful to Accenture for championing a personal skill set in a big professional organization with five hundred thousand people.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  It's interesting because it sounds like something that helped your imposter syndrome in that moment was kind of the internal validation you had after you saw this entire group of people sit in silence. You were told that this was the longest they'd ever sat in silence. It was reassuring to you that the work that you were doing could be really meaningful. I'm also sure that this wasn't the only time you've experienced imposter syndrome in your life and given the name of the show, given so many people experience this. I'm interested how you think about navigating imposter syndrome. And I'll even say from my perspective right now, like I feel massive imposter syndrome hosting a podcast with you as a guest where I'm just like, how do I host a podcast talking about vulnerability and challenges in people's lives and being a sounding board for them

• 34:39Speaker 01

  when the person in the seat across from me is someone who literally spent three years as a monk and has done so much more work to truly understand people? How do I do it? And so I can just imagine how many people experience imposter syndrome in their life.

• 34:53Jay Shetty?

  Well, first of all, that's very kind of you and I don't think of it that way at all. I think every question you've asked me has been so heartfelt, has been so sincere, so genuine, you know, everything that you've shared with me today, even before today. I already knew I was gonna love you before today, like, because all the interactions we had on Twitter and you think like, how can you do that on Twitter? But you can when you're as genuine and sincere as you are. So I was excited to be here. I'm grateful to be here, honestly. I would say that I don't think you ever stop feeling imposter syndrome if you're growing. If you're growing, if you're learning, you will always feel imposter syndrome.

• 35:34Jay Shetty?

  Because what imposter syndrome really is, is a sign that you still have a skill to learn or an experience to have. So I still feel it on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. And I don't ever want to stop feeling it because it shows me that I need to grow and I need to learn. I connected to a beautiful book called Flow. And Flow talks about how to experience a state of flow, which musicians experience, which artists experience, which singers experience, is when your challenge meets your skills.

• 36:12Jay Shetty?

  But what most of us experience on a daily basis is our challenge is above our skills, which means we get scared, we get threatened, we get confused, we feel lost. Or what we experience is the opposite, where your skills are above your challenge. Then you feel bored, you feel tired, you feel lethargic, you feel complacent. So really what imposter syndrome is saying is that your skills are not as high as your challenge. But you can fill that gap if you truly deeply want to. You can make that leap if you want to. And so now, when I feel a sense of imposter syndrome, I ask myself, what skill is being highlighted to me that I don't have?

• 36:56Jay Shetty?

  It's not a feeling, it's not an emotion, it's a skill. Like, I'll give an example. If I'm sitting around a table of people that I feel are more qualified than me in a certain area. Let's say I'm sitting with a group of people and they're all amazingly deep into real estate, right? That's their thing. I'm gonna feel like an imposter because I'm not that deep into real estate. And then I have to ask myself, so what skill do I now have? Okay, real estate investing. Do I want that skill or am I happy being in this space, for example? And so the question isn't not only what skill don't you have, what do you want that skill? Because often you can get pursuing a skill just to impress people.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 37:36Jay Shetty?

  And so I think that's what I would encourage people to do with imposter syndrome is, take it away from this feeling of like, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not this enough. Yeah, you're not smart enough. Figure out what you need to get smart at, right? And that's how I see it. I'm like, okay, I'm not qualified to this. Do I want to be qualified?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Totally. I think in a lot of ways, what you're doing is you're putting control back in the hands of the person themselves, right? So it's all about reframing it as, this is actually a great thing because you're pushing yourself into an area of discomfort where you now have the choice of there's a gap between your skill and the challenge that you're facing. And you have that choice of if you want to close that gap. And by the way, you can make the choice not to close that gap if you don't want to do it.

• 38:16Jay Shetty?

  Exactly, exactly. So when I first started my career and I was mainly known for creating video content, which were like four minutes, we then built the podcast. I felt like an imposter when I launched the podcast. Now, we've done the podcast for three years and it's very natural. And then when we launched the book, it was like, that was scary. And then now we're doing a book here and that doesn't feel scary. So every time you make a new leap, you'll feel imposter syndrome. But that's great.

• 38:41Jay Shetty?

  Because that means you're growing, that means you're trying something new. I would never feel imposter syndrome if I never tried anything new. And that means I would live a boring same life, and I don't want that.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thinking about your experience within Accenture, it feels like this combination of just

• 39:00Speaker 01

  amazing kind of harnessing of an opportunity you were given to use the experience you had in the ashram to spread kind of what you learned throughout the company while also kind of being on the forefront of social media. You know, while you say you were a little bit late to it because you didn't have a Facebook until whatever age, you still were early now in retrospect within what's happened with social. When you reflect on kind of almost like these two amazing kind of skills you were able to build up that informed where you are in your career now. How much do you think about your own experience as skill and hard work and grit, and how much do you think of it as luck? And how do you think about that relationship broadly in career?

• 39:44Jay Shetty?

  I would say that, and I'm gonna be honest because I think that's the only way to do it. I would say that

• 39:52Jay Shetty?

  my greatest skill is knowing that I can learn something if I want to. And that if I apply myself to it and I really deeply care about it, that I will find a way to get really good at it. And I don't think you can separate that from impact. Because impact means, there's a beautiful quote by Bruce Lee, where he said that, "I'm not scared of the person that has practiced 10,000 kicks one time each. I'm scared of the person who's practiced one kick 10,000 times." And that's the switch that we have to make is that,

• 40:33Jay Shetty?

  are we willing to practice this one kick, this one move, 10,000 times or whatever it may be? And that to me is the difference maker. So I would say that there's a lot of strategy because now it all makes sense, like social media, meditation, oh, that fits. It didn't make sense when I was collecting those. Skills and so as Steve Jobs says, you can only connect the dots. Uh, looking backwards, you can't moving forwards. To me, when I was collecting, I was just like, I love people. And I love connecting with lots of people. So social media would be useful, maybe. That's literally all I had as a thought. It wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna learn this, then I'm gonna learn this and then we're gonna, it wasn't that thought through. And at the same time, when I became a monk, it wasn't like, oh, one day I'm gonna write a book about being, it wasn't that, it was.

• 41:15Jay Shetty?

  Hey, I think this is what my calling is. So it was a naive, innocent following. Of what I'm being called to do at the time. Then matched with what do we do with this now that we have it as a skill? And taking a risk based on that. So I would say it's. It's. I don't know what you call that, whether it's discipline.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels, it feels like the combination of like intuition and action when an opportunity presents itself.

• 41:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's better than what I was about to say. So I'll take that. Intuition, action. Yeah, I just came up with this intuition, action. Uh, and, and I would add a massive sense of being open to risk again, again and again. And. And then I would say it's brilliant mentorship and guidance. So I give all the credit to the people I met. If I didn't meet really. Critical people at different times. And I didn't form a relationship with them and they didn't invest in me and I didn't invest in them. That was everything like for me especially. So that you could say was luck. That was the luck. The luck was that these people came into my life. And we clicked at really specific times and that was the luck.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Well, and I would say the skill there was, you know. My, my intuition is that when you were building these relationships. It wasn't doing so in a way where you were getting something out of it. You were getting into these relationships because. You love the people, the people that they were and you wanted to just be closer to them.

• 42:41Jay Shetty?

  I'm still friends with every one of those people. Yeah, like deeply, like I message them all the time and they're still involved in my life in so many ways and. I, I, all the credit goes to them. I'd say any career success I had, I'd, I'd give it to them because. It's not that they told me what to do or how to do it or invested money or it wasn't those kind of things. It was people who just. Change the way you thought.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:04Jay Shetty?

  By planting simple seeds and planting simple ideas at different times in my life. So yeah, I would say there's a mix of luck, strategy, intuition, action. But ultimately, I think it comes down to three things. Passion, strengths and service. That's ultimately what it comes down to is the passion to learn anything and everything. Developing an actual skill in the subject matter you want to do. And then wanting to serve through it, which is where the fulfillment comes from. And so to me, I'd narrow it down to those three things.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  So something you talk about in your journey as being one of the more stressful points in your life is post Accenture, you had decided that you wanted to kind of create these videos. You ended up creating them, I believe, in London at a time and day where there's no streets on the road. So it was perfect moment. You tried to pitch all these media executives on being able to do it. Ultimately, you were given an opportunity with Huffington Post. And the videos absolutely crushed it upon publishing. I think the first week, like the first video did a million views, then it was a million in 24 hours. But then you talk about at a point in the journey of Huffington Post where you were working there, it was going great, but you were within

• 44:17Speaker 01

  four months of not having money to live. Talk about just that period in your life and how you worked through it.

• 44:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and even getting, everything you just described is just such a tough time because I was getting, I got married, changed job three times, moved country all in the same year. And that was that year that you just described in. So that was a fully intense year.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  What year was that?

• 44:40Jay Shetty?

  That was 2016. Yeah, 2016. And this time that you're talking about was coming up to 2017. When my, my work at Huffington Post ended. Ariana Huffington had led to start Thrive Global, who's, she's still a dear friend and mentor and wonderful human being. But my work there was ending. She'd left, she'd moved on, my position kind of wasn't there anymore. And I was four months away from being broke and 30 days away from my visa to America being taken away because it was attached to my work visa. And so not only did I have to figure out how to sort my visa out, I had to figure out how to pay for more than renting groceries beyond four months. And.

• 45:23Jay Shetty?

  I always used to have my mentor, Thomas Power, one of them, would always say to me, "You only discover your potential when you're in pain." He'd always keep repeating that. And I'd be like, "Nah, I'm proactive, like, ah, whatever, like, I'm one of the hardest working people out, whatever." And then I was put into pain, like, that was real pain. And I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna discover my potential in the pain. Okay, I'm gonna discover my potential in the pain." The next day after learning that I only had four months left in the bank for rent and groceries, I got up and I emailed, DM'd, tweeted, and messaged every person that I'd ever met and said, "I will edit videos, I will record videos, I will film videos, I will do anything you possibly need me to do at this time." Me and Paul, who's sitting right there, we were doing corporate videos for other clients.

• 46:08Jay Shetty?

  Paul, do you remember that office we went in? We did all this question videos? And so me and Paul went into this corporate company. I'm producing corporate training videos. That's not what I wanna do. That's not my passion. That's not my life. But it was what I needed to do to survive.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  You didn't have an option.

• 46:22Jay Shetty?

  I didn't have an option. So that year, the year when I thought I was gonna struggle to survive, I made more money in that year than in my whole career combined up until that point because I was so stressed that I wasn't gonna be able to pay my bills. But that's because I was living under that pressure and that fear, it catapulted me and incentivized me to another level. And all of a sudden, I'd broken my own ceiling and I was like, "Oh." I had no idea what I was capable of until that happened. And so I just kept stretching every single year. And so for the past five years, we've just been stretching the capacity every single year. And it blows my mind because I would never have believed any of it was possible. And it's only been possible because that pain forced me into a accelerated period

• 47:07Jay Shetty?

  that I never imagined I'd would have got into if I didn't end up in that pain.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  So one last question I have for you is, how do you deal with the difficulties of having the brand that you have today? And I mean that in two ways. In one way, when people say...

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Jay has commercialized mindfulness and is making a lot of money off of mindfulness, something that generally the focus isn't on material things. And the the second is for your own work, for your own self, how do you continue to have the mind that you want to have while working with, let's say, platforms that are built for serving external validation that is addictive?

• 47:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. So I can honestly say that my intention from the beginning has always been to purify myself and help serve the world. I've always wanted to solve the inner conflict and the inner pain and the inner challenges, and then help other people do that. On that path, I realized that in order to scale, accelerate, and truly provide this message to as many people as possible for free, you had to figure out how that lived as a business. Because what I do every day requires, we have 50 people across the world doing different things right now,

• 48:35Jay Shetty?

  and I need each and every one of them to have the impact that we have. And without each and every one of those team members that plays such an important and vital role, I wouldn't be able to do this. And what I got fascinated by is I grew up with the belief that money was the root of all evil. I grew up with that. I also grew up with the belief that people who had money did dodgy things to get there, because that's the environment and the family I grew up in. I had to rewire my whole relationship with money. And when I lived as a monk, we were trained to recognize that everything in the world was simply energy, and that energy can either be used for good or used for bad.

• 49:17Jay Shetty?

  So all I can say is that I'm honestly trying to give the resources I have to be used to serve and support not only myself and my family, but to serve and support.

• 49:31Jay Shetty?

  Tens of people right now on my team that I believe are living their purpose and feel very purposeful and meaningful coming to the workplace. And then the millions and billions of people that are being impacted. And we've always made a commitment, if you look at our video content, it's always been free. Our podcast has ads, but the podcast is free. We have, and we're very selective over who we work with and who we partner with. And then, you know, my recent partnership with Calm, where I've taken on the role of Chief Purpose Officer, the annual subscription is like forty two dollars a year for the whole year. And so my goal has always been, having lived as a monk where you do things for free all the time, it's like my goal has always been that.

• 50:16Jay Shetty?

  My goal was to accelerate the impact and give access. And ultimately, I'd say if anyone who does have that perception of what I'm doing, they're fully entitled to that. I'm so okay with that. I'll take it all day. I have nothing to debate on. I appreciate you for how you think about the world. And so I let people have their opinions and I have my intentions and I hold on to those. Second part of your question was, how do I do that for myself?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:44Jay Shetty?

  I just got back from spending about two weeks in India. And I was back at the ashram that I lived at. And I go back there every single year. I didn't get to go back the two years of the pandemic, but every single year since I left. And now my wife and I go back every year and will be there for like two weeks to potentially a month and will just outlive like a monk again. And I love being back in that environment because they don't care what I'm doing, what's been achieved, what hasn't been done, what the numbers are, they just don't care. And so I'm constantly around people who demand more of me than what the world does. And so one of my teachers, I remember him saying to me, he asked me for an update.

• 51:27Jay Shetty?

  So I was telling him what I was doing. And he said something that has always stayed with me and it really like, it was, it hit me and it almost scared me because it was so much harder. He said, Jay, for all these things that you're doing, I have no expectations for this in your life. He said, my only expectation is that I simply demand the purity of your heart. He goes, that's all I want. And that's way harder.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  That is, that is a monk mic drop right there.

• 51:53Jay Shetty?

  That was a monk mic, my monk teacher said that to me and. That's way harder. Everything else is way easier. And so that's kind of what keeps me on track is I'm constantly surrounded by people who don't live in this environment, who don't value these things, who don't care about them, who who aren't who who loved me before, during, and will love me after. You know, and and even my wife, I think my wife gets a lot of credit for that. My wife doesn't care. You know, she she's just that's not her life and it's not who she is. And being married to someone that way. I used to be upset at my wife for not loving me for what I've achieved. And then I realized she actually loves me for who I am. And I felt really stupid.

• 52:35Jay Shetty?

  And and I realized that that was so much more special to have someone who's been with me through being broke, through moving country, through having lost it all, to having it all, to being in between. And I'd take that history with her any day over someone praising me for what I've done.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Jay Shetty, thank you so much for joining Impostors. This has been awesome.

• 52:56Jay Shetty?

  Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to you and I really enjoyed my time with you. I'm excited to connect a lot more.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.

• 53:03Jay Shetty?

  Thank you.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Thank you guys so much for watching this episode. I hope you enjoyed and I'd love to hear from you. Share in the comments your favorite part of this episode and also what guest you would love to see on Impostors moving forward. And finally, like and subscribe so you get content from this show every single week. I'll see you guys next time.

• 53:24Speaker 02

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• 53:50Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 53:55Jay Shetty?

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  Digger, see the trailer online, only appears October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.