Lewis Howes ON: How to Physically Release Trauma & Why You Should Focus On Discipline Over Motivation to Succeed

Today, I sit down with my friend Lewis Howes to talk about finding the courage to work on ourselves a little bit more. We share ideas on the dealing with the different seasons in our life and being present in each season, the level of discipline you have for yourself determines the outcome of goals you’ve set your mind and heart into, getting unstuck of the same pattern of familiarity that hinders personal growth, and the misconception of greatness and how it always starts within you. Lewis is a lifestyle entrepreneur, high performance business coach, a New York Times best-selling author, 2x All-American athlete, and keynote speaker. He hosts The School of Greatness podcast, which was launched in 2013, where he shares inspiring interviews from the most successful people on the planet—world-renowned leaders in business, entertainment, sports, science, health, and literature. You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 00:What did it take Lewis to finally focus on the path to healing? 10:04 This is how it felt growing up in a family with financial limitations. 14:46 When you finally find the courage to work on yourself, you become more authentic. 19:30 What is the difference between motivation and discipline? 23:21 Lewis explains what role our inner emotional state plays in our success. 25:45* The 3 P’s to help you figure out what you want to do with your life. 33:50 How does discipline keep you organized and focused on your mission? 36:37 What is the right way to get ready even when you don’t want to do it? 39:44 Why do we always get stuck in the same pattern of familiarity? 43:53 This is the reason why the fear of failure stops us from trying and doing our best. 50:48 The misconception about greatness that we don’t know about. 58:39 The more you become for others, the brighter your own path will be. 01:08:26 What are you looking forward to this year? 01:11:48 What does it truly mean “to live in the season that you have reached?” 01:14:50 Stop doing other things and start focusing on the person you are becoming. Episode Resources Lewis Howes | Website Lewis Howes | Instagram Lewis Howes | Twitter Lewis Howes | YouTube Lewis Howes | Books The School of Greatness Podcast Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/ 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?

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• 2:10Jay Shetty?

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• 2:25Lewis Howes?

  There was a moment where I was feeling this pain in my chest, kind of on and off. And I was telling you about this and other people, I was like, man, I just feel like this pain and feel like a clenching, like I can't, like, I don't know, something was holding me back. That was the fear. And I think when we can fully embrace it and say, this might happen and I may not like it, but by stepping into the fear, I literally felt the ball of pain in my chest unlock and like disintegrate throughout my whole body.

• 2:57Jay Shetty?

  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 become happier, healthier and more healed. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book.

• 3:40Jay Shetty?

  And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules. Go to jayshettytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences and more. I can't wait to see you this year. Now today's guest is a dear, dear friend of mine and what I love about having him on the show is you love it. Whenever we do something together, we get incredible feedback. I get the most texts ever. I get so many DMs from all of you because you love seeing us connect. Because he's someone who's happy to be vulnerable about his own challenges and journey. He's done that plenty of times on this show. But today he's here to talk about something that he's been really thinking about and working on for the next five years.

• 4:21Jay Shetty?

  So I want all of you to show your support for this incredible human, but also this Amazing book that he's written. I want everyone to go and order it right now. The link is in the notes and the captions. I'm talking about my dear friend Lewis Howes, who's a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and industry leading show host of the School of Greatness podcast, which is one of the top podcasts in the world with over 500 million downloads. Lewis was recognized by the White House and President Obama as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs in the country under 30. And his new book is right here. It's

• 5:01Jay Shetty?

  called The Greatness Mindset Unlock the Power of Your Mind and Live Your Best Life Today. This is the book that I want you to go and grab. Please welcome to the show my dear friend and brother Lewis Howes.

• 5:13Lewis Howes?

  My man. Thanks, Jay.

• 5:14Jay Shetty?

  Good to see you, brother.

• 5:15Lewis Howes?

  Good to see you, brother.

• 5:16Jay Shetty?

  This is exciting, man. It's like, you know, this is five years in the making. Like, for you to, you've had a podcast now for nearly 10 years. I saw that announcement.

• 5:25Lewis Howes?

  In two weeks, it'll be my 10 year anniversary.

• 5:27Jay Shetty?

  That's insane. Congratulations. What a, what a history and

• 5:30Lewis Howes?

  Thank you.

• 5:31Jay Shetty?

  Legacy of service and like, how many interviews now is that?

• 5:34Lewis Howes?

  Over almost 1400 episodes.

• 5:36Jay Shetty?

  That's insane, right? 1400 episodes over 10 years. Unbelievable legacy. You wrote your first book, The School of Greatness, your second book, Mask of Masculinity.

• 5:45Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 5:46Jay Shetty?

  On the release of that book was when we became friends.

• 5:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the day it came out, I went on your show at NASDAQ.

• 5:53Jay Shetty?

  At NASDAQ, yeah.

• 5:53Lewis Howes?

  In New York City. I just started hearing about you, maybe a few months before, and then you'd reached out. And I saw a couple of your videos and I was like, I really like your style. And when we met, I was like, let's just hang out all day.

• 6:04Jay Shetty?

  I know. It was amazing. I didn't expect that because I was doing, yeah, so for anyone who doesn't know, I used to have a show on NASDAQ Reads, which was called Follow the Reader. And I would try and sit down with authors and talk to them. And I was thankful enough, that's where I met Ryan Holiday, and it's where I met a couple of other people in the space. And I'd reached out to you because I'd always loved your work. And usually an author would come in, you'd do the interview, you'd promote the book and then they'd leave. And this was the day your book came out and you were like, well, why don't we just spend the whole day together? So we're like, we're in a coffee shop together, we're in a Barnes and Noble together.

• 6:38Lewis Howes?

  So fun.

• 6:38Jay Shetty?

  And that was the beginning of our friendship.

• 6:40Lewis Howes?

  It was amazing, man.

• 6:40Jay Shetty?

  And now we're here on another book launch day. And five years to write a book, like five years to be thinking about a book, five years to not. It's so easy to just put, for you, like with an amazing audience, amazing community, you could just put out a book whenever you wanted to.

• 6:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 6:56Jay Shetty?

  What were you working on? What were you thinking about for five years?

• 6:59Lewis Howes?

  I wanted to do this after The Mask of Masculinity. And this was the thing that I was like, this is the thing that I wish I would have had when I was, you know, 15, 21, 35. The book and the content that I wish I could have had to understand the pain that I was going through. And now having been through a lot of different healing journeys and healing a lot of different wounds that I had from my past. I finally felt like I was at a place of peace where I could create abundantly as opposed to forcing something. And when I wanted to start this five years ago, which I've been kind of researching and taking notes and having documents for a long time in my interviews about this. I had the content, but I didn't feel like I was at a place where I felt like it was a good coach to myself.

• 7:44Lewis Howes?

  I felt like I was still critical of a lot of things and still beating myself up emotionally and mentally. And I didn't feel like I would be authentic in putting the content out until I was healing at a level of authenticity internally.

• 7:58Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 7:59Lewis Howes?

  So after two years ago, I felt like I finally kind of had a tipping point for a portion of my life that I was struggling with my entire life. 10 years ago, I started opening up about healing sexual abuse and that type of trauma.

• 8:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Lewis Howes?

  And that set me on a journey of healing for the next five years, many different things from my childhood, from parent stuff, things like that. And it allowed me to evolve as a human, be more courageous, have more authenticity, all that stuff. Be less triggered, less reactional, all that stuff. But I still kept repeating certain patterns in relationships. And you've seen me in three different relationships now since I've met you.

• 8:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Lewis Howes?

  And you probably were able to witness a pattern from the previous two. It's so hard to see the things. Until it gets really, really bad sometimes. When things are good and when things are not so good, it's hard to see it. It's not until things get really challenging or some big breakdown when we start to wake up. And it was the last relationship where I was like, man, I keep repeating the patterns of something based on a wound. I keep choosing, I keep staying, I keep putting myself in these challenging situations that I don't feel like I need to, but I hadn't yet unlocked what that was. Whether I was afraid to face it or just not aware of it yet, I hadn't fully embraced that healing journey.

• 9:23Lewis Howes?

  And so I started down a very intensive, you know, coaching, therapy experience where I was doing five, six, seven hour weekend, uh, days on weekends every week, working with a coach to figure out what is holding me back. Why do I have this pain in my heart? Why do I feel like there's something like choking me on a consistent basis? Why do I feel like I can't catch my breath sometimes? When on the outside, I've got things going well for me, you know? It's like I'm able to accomplish things. I can create my goals and make them happen. I'm building a business, you know, all these things. I'm functional in a high level, but internally I didn't have harmony.

• 10:00Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 10:01Lewis Howes?

  I was kind of at the stage and we would talk about it all the time. I was like, dude, why am I struggling with this so much? Why am I going through this? And I was kind of at a stage where I was just like, I've got to figure out this part of my life in intimate relationships because energetically it's holding me back from friendships, family, creating my work, my mission, my health. It's draining, it's pulling from me. And that's why I always loved being single because when I was single, I felt free. But when I was in intimacy, I felt like I was trapped. So I had to go down the journey of, of really healing a lot of the different emotional wounds from childhood that put me in the programming of feeling trapped and feeling really like

• 10:44Lewis Howes?

  I had to abandon myself for someone to love me. And so I'd never truly loved my authentic self because I never felt like someone else would love me for who I truly was and truly accepted who I was. So that was just my personal journey where other people might struggle and trying to figure out how to get clear on their purpose or their mission or how to make money or how to get in shape. That wasn't my problem. My challenge was intimacy, trusting myself and being a hundred percent authentic and courageous in intimacy and not changing who I was to please someone else. But the need to please others who I loved and who loved me was a big wound and it caused a lot of pain.

• 11:30Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's so powerful you're hearing you say that because I feel like it's not worth becoming someone you don't know to please someone you think you love.

• 11:41Lewis Howes?

  One person, yeah.

• 11:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you just become someone you don't recognize. You become someone who you don't know, you don't understand, just to hope that that person will see that person.

• 11:50Lewis Howes?

  And accept you.

• 11:51Jay Shetty?

  And accept you.

• 11:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Jay Shetty?

  And.

• 11:53Lewis Howes?

  It's exhausting.

• 11:53Jay Shetty?

  It's exhausting. Yeah, you're always performing, you're playing a role.

• 11:57Lewis Howes?

  You're giving in, you're abandoning yourself. It's mentally, emotionally, physically draining.

• 12:02Jay Shetty?

  But what I love about all of that results in you being able to be creative, like you start removing all those blocks internally. It results in a book and a book, as we know, is like a lifetime's worth of work.

• 12:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Jay Shetty?

  Put into pages to help people find their greatness in their own lives. And I wanted to start with, I definitely want to dive into certain elements of the book because I think what you do in this book so well is you remove blocks for people. Like I think the way you were just describing you having blocks in intimacy and relationships, I think we know this and my community feels this and I felt this in my life, there were blocks in what I believed was true of my potential or blocks that I thought were true of what I could achieve within success or blocks around how I felt about judgment and failure. And so I want to dive into all of that.

• 12:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I remember the first year of meeting you.

• 12:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Lewis Howes?

  You were like, I don't think I could make, you know, six figures a year. You know, you're kind of like, I don't even know if that's possible or if I'm worthy of that or deserving of it, or if the work I'm doing, I'm supposed to be making that, you know, that much money.

• 13:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Lewis Howes?

  And that was kind of a block of yours for, I don't know, well, probably a long time before then, but for a couple of years until you really were able to work your way through that. What was the thing inside of you that allowed you to unblock the financial fear that you had?

• 13:22Jay Shetty?

  It's exactly that, right? Like I had grown up in a family where the language around money and the psychology around money was we have just enough.

• 13:34Jay Shetty?

  And generally, people who have money have done something bad to get money. So it's been like negative ways or like manipulative ways, or they must have done something shady in order to have wealth.

• 13:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Jay Shetty?

  And so people who are good don't have access to that kind of wealth because they're not shady people. And so I think when I grew up with that, I remember many days having zero in my bank account. You know, just living off of the last amount of money I had to pay off a bill or whatever it may have been. And I think what it really hit me as time went on was I was having all this impact. Like at one point, I still remember this, I had a hundred and fifty million views and I was four months away from being broke.

• 14:17Lewis Howes?

  Crazy, man.

• 14:18Jay Shetty?

  And, and I was just like, I can't make the stuff I care about anymore. Because I don't have money, like I can't, videos cost money to make like this. I always say to people like this podcast, this studio costs money to have like it costs money to have teams. And you know, right now we have producers behind the scenes and editors and, and podcast leads. And there's a whole team of people that make things possible. And when you're financially scarce, and I don't mean that in terms of how much money you have, but in your mind, when there's a scarcity around money or anything scarcity around love or scarcity around energy or scarcity around health.

• 14:56Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 14:57Jay Shetty?

  It, it just limits you. And so for me, what you just went through, I had to rewire my relationship with money.

• 15:04Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 15:04Jay Shetty?

  And we have a relationship with people, we have a relationship with money, we have a relationship with our body, we have a relationship with our mind.

• 15:09Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 15:09Jay Shetty?

  And so to me, it was that.

• 15:11Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious then, what was the, I want to tell this.

• 15:13Jay Shetty?

  Dude, this is not your interview, Lewis.

• 15:15Lewis Howes?

  I want to, I want to.

• 15:16Jay Shetty?

  That's what you always do.

• 15:17Lewis Howes?

  I want to tie it in.

• 15:17Jay Shetty?

  I know you're an interviewer, but.

• 15:18Lewis Howes?

  I want to tie it into bringing it back to me. I get it. But I want to tell the story of the exact moment when the block went away from me, from having fear around being trapped in intimacy after a five month journey of like intensive therapy and what it did for me. I want to share that story in a moment, but I'm curious, what was the moment? Was there a moment where something like you're unlocked in your heart, your body, your mind? Your spirit where you're like, oh, I'm deserving of money. I'm deserving of making more or having abundance or whatever it might have been and being free of that feeling. Was there a moment for you?

• 15:53Jay Shetty?

  I mean, I think I'm still getting there as well. There's a part of it where you're always still rewiring because when something's so deep rooted, it kind of like never like just leaves. But I'd say that I got more comfortable with it. That's a great question. When was that moment?

• 16:07Lewis Howes?

  Like, was there a breakthrough? Was it in a negotiation for a speaking gig where you're like, oh, I'm used to only making this much, but let me ask for more or something kind of unlocking inside of you?

• 16:18Jay Shetty?

  I actually think it was, and this, I haven't talked about this before, but I, I think it's, you know, and I'm sharing it because I'm with you and it is the answer to your question. I think it was the first year that I could give over six figures to a charity that I loved.

• 16:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:35Jay Shetty?

  That's what it was. It was that feeling of, and, and I knew that that charity would have died if it didn't have that much money.

• 16:43Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 16:43Jay Shetty?

  And they were doing really meaningful work that I cared about. And I realized that I was like, oh, wait a minute. And that's not like, oh, look how great I am. I saved. That's not the point. The point was I could only do that and I could only be a part of that because I'd rewired my mindset. So if I wanted to create meaning and impact in the work, and this is one way, there are plenty of other ways to give back through time and energy. But to me, I was like, oh, like I can trust myself that if I have more, I will give more. And I want to trust myself that, you know, we always hear that quote, I don't know whether it's from Grant or from Jordan Belfort, but the idea of like money only makes you more of who you are.

• 17:24Lewis Howes?

  Yes, it exposes who of you.

• 17:25Jay Shetty?

  It exposes more of who you are. And that idea that you're only going to become more, it's going to put a spotlight. We were just talking about that yesterday, like the idea that you don't change. And I felt for me, it was, that was me trusting myself. And I think when you rewire it, like you trust yourself. What you were saying earlier, like you get a trust of like, oh yeah, I will do good with this. Yeah. Because that's who I am at the core.

• 17:48Lewis Howes?

  That's powerful.

• 17:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Lewis Howes?

  Uh, but it sounds like it was a reflection process. It was you trying stuff. It was you being like consistent and practicing.

• 17:55Jay Shetty?

  And still today.

• 17:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:56Jay Shetty?

  It never goes away. Yeah.

• 17:57Lewis Howes?

  So what had happened for me, um, I was kind of just like, I'm sick of feeling this pain, this stuckness, this. Breakdown pattern that I'd continued to repeat and that I was fully responsible for in choosing certain relationships out of integrity and out of alignment of values and all these different things and then staying. And I, I was finally like, okay, I need to find a solution to this pain. And so I, I found a coach that does a lot of therapy and healing work. And I just said, I'm going to invest in six months. I'm going to pay in advance and I'm going to commit to my intention of finding the solution. I'm going to do the work. And I think that's step one is being like clear of your intention that you want to find a solution to

• 18:38Lewis Howes?

  whatever's causing you any type of pain or stuckness in any area of your life. Then I went all in on just being as real and authentic and vulnerable as possible. And I remember there was a weekend after about three and a half, maybe four months where I went away and I was not with my partner at the time, but I was with a different group of friends. And I felt free in this weekend and I felt seen and accepted for who I was. I felt celebrated for who I was. And I wasn't really feeling that in the relationship. And I remember being like, man, this is the type of life I want to experience consistently where I can be myself authentically

• 19:18Lewis Howes?

  around the people I care about and I'm accepted. But I wasn't feeling accepted in this relationship. And it's because I was willing to abandon myself over and over to try to create peace. I was trying to buy peace. You can't buy peace. You've got to own it. You've got to become it. And the, my coach, after many, many months of this, in kind of unpacking a lot of different things and doing exercises with her and reflection and all these different things, there was a moment where I was feeling this pain in my chest, kind of on and off. And I was telling you about this and other people. I was like, man, I just feel like this pain and feel like a clenching, like I can't, like, I don't know, something was holding me back.

• 19:59Lewis Howes?

  And she'd said something that finally clicked. She was like, Louis, you're not trapped. You're free. You can walk away at any time. You're not stuck in this relationship. Specifically now, you're not engaged, you're not married, you got no kids, but you are free. You can choose to walk away at any time. And I always was afraid of walking away because I didn't want to hurt one person. And I didn't want that one person that I cared about to not love me, to not like me, to hate me, to whatever. That was the fear. And I think when we can fully embrace it and say, this might happen. And I may not like it, but if that's the price I need to pay to create peace in my life,

• 20:39Lewis Howes?

  by stepping into the fear, by owning the fear, by accepting that it will happen potentially. Something happened in that moment. I can't remember if I told you the story, but it was like, I literally felt the ball of pain in my chest. Kind of unlock and like disintegrate throughout my whole body. I've never felt this sensation before. And from that moment on, I was really kind of like weirded out when I was talking to the therapist. I was like, something just happened. I was like, something just happened. It was kind of like months of practice, months of reflection, months of these exercises and working with this coaching, taking action and trying to integrate the lessons and then finally like unlocked in a moment. It was a lifetime of practice, but a moment that unlocked.

• 21:24Lewis Howes?

  And I haven't felt that pain or fear of being trapped or being stuck or being not enough, or needing to abandon myself to please anyone else since then. It doesn't mean I haven't had some like, you know, challenges or stressful moments, but I haven't had that. And I'm so aware of it because I keep practicing and integrating the healing journey. I think that's been the key for me is the ongoing integration of healing. So that I can keep expanding, feeling happier, healthier and healed, like you talked about for this show. And I think that's what everyone wants to feel happier, to feel healthier and feel like they're on the healing journey.

• 22:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. I mean, hearing you say that, you know, as your friend. I know how much time and energy you put into working on yourself.

• 22:11Lewis Howes?

  Man.

• 22:11Jay Shetty?

  I know that any conversation we have turns into a Q and A with the both of us going back and forth.

• 22:15Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:16Jay Shetty?

  I know any conversation we have, you will be talking about what work you're doing and who you're working with and who's in our teams to help us do that work. I'm talking about personal life. What is the difference then? Because I want to get into the greatness mindset because you are teaching people how to unlock the power of their mind and live their best life today, which is what you've been doing professionally and now personally over the last few years. What is the difference between motivation and discipline? Because I find that a lot of the time, people think like, oh, I'm so motivated by that. I'm so inspired by that. But what you just explained is far more of a dedicated discipline to the self-work, the inner work. Talk to me about the difference between those two and, and where do we find them?

• 23:01Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. I think motivation is for people that don't have a meaningful mission. Discipline is for people that are clear on their identity of who they want to become and the mission that they have that is meaningful for them, not only for them, but for those around them. And you know, when I was growing up, when I was growing up, I wanted to be successful. That was kind of the goal and the mindset is how can I become successful? How can I accomplish my goals as an athlete? How can I be a pro athlete? How can I make money? How can I get, you know, awards and all these different things? For whatever reason, that's what I thought of is I wanted to be successful. When I, when I turned thirty and started realizing how big of an ego I actually had

• 23:44Lewis Howes?

  and how selfish I actually was in life. I was a fun-loving guy, but my intentions were more for me to look good, for me to win, for me to be successful, for me, me, me. And this is one of the reasons I love you so much because your mission is about service. I started to realize at thirty that success was selfish and greatness was really about service. Right? Greatness was not about just me. It was about having an intention of a dream that I might have, but including others in the dream, where success is more about accomplishing goals and dreams for just you and not as much thinking about others. Maybe others are included, but the intention is really like, how do I look good? How do I get this award and make this money and get this credibility?

• 24:30Lewis Howes?

  And that's why 10 years ago, I said, I have to completely shift my identity. And it was an unwinding of like 30 years of of programming. So I had to shift the identity from, okay. And I love that you always talk about collaboration over competition. I was all competition, right? And there's fun, there's healthy competition and like sports and things like that. But in the game of life, we've got to be collaborators. We've got to be thinking about we instead of me if we want to go far. If we want to go fast, that quote, you can, you can. What is the quote? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together or something like that. And if you want to go fast, you can do it on your own quickly, but it won't take you far.

• 25:14Lewis Howes?

  And you typically burn out. Motivation, I believe, is for people that want only success. But discipline is when you shift your identity based on a meaningful mission. That's why I start the book with meaningful mission, because all the great people that we've interviewed, who have health, happiness and are healed. I think that's greatness. They have a meaningful mission that's beyond them. They have something more. And that is an identity that are, that has non-negotiables, where they're able to be disciplined because it's something bigger than them. Whereas success by itself needs constant motivation, right?

• 25:57Jay Shetty?

  I love that you just shifted that desire of like selfish goals or like self-based goals to service because that for me was the thing that switched when I met the monk, right? So I heard that at 18 and that was just to my 18 year old mind.

• 26:17Lewis Howes?

  You were like, what?

• 26:17Jay Shetty?

  What like, wow, like no one's ever said that to me before. And I would never have learned it if it wasn't for meeting the monk. And you're saying you learned it at 30 or that's when you realized that after being successful to some degree that you'd achieved then.

• 26:31Lewis Howes?

  Externally successful, internally suffering.

• 26:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  And no one wants to suffer, no one. It's interesting, I was just interviewing a guy before this today. And I said, on a scale of one to 10 of your inner peace and self-love scale, 10 being you love yourself, you have a lot of inner peace, one being you hate yourself, no love. Where are you? He said, I'm a five.

• 26:52Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 26:53Lewis Howes?

  And I said, and this is a guy with a massive company, extremely fit, shredded, like people around him, but internally a five. And it goes back to what you talked about. I love the intro, which is hap- is it happy, healthy and healed?

• 27:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Lewis Howes?

  Healing, which is, I said, why do you think you're a five? And he said, I haven't dealt with the inner stuff. I've dealt with the mental side of discipline and structure and organization and, and working hard and grinding. But the emotional side of healing your heart, I believe, is the game.

• 27:29Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't matter how shredded you are, how wealthy you are, how successful you are, how many cars you have. If your inner emotional state is suffering, you are losing. And when your inner emotional state is at peace and focused on service, it doesn't have to be changing the world, but service to the people in your life. That's when you are successful.

• 27:53Jay Shetty?

  A lot of people though will say, well, Lewis, I don't have anything to serve with. So shouldn't I want success first and then I'll find service? Because I don't have my meaningful mission. I don't have any money. I don't have access. I don't have a platform. Shouldn't I aim to get a platform first and then serve through it? How, how do you think about that?

• 28:16Lewis Howes?

  I mean, you served for many years before you got your platform, you know? And then you built your platform after really kind of figuring out who you were, your identity after leaving the, the monkhood, right? You started to figure out what did you want? And I think there's a, a period of time, a season of life, where we have to try a lot of different things and, and figure out what do we really love? What are our passions? Where are our talents lying with our power? And then what is the problem we're looking to solve? So it's the three Ps. And you can ask yourself.

• 28:45Jay Shetty?

  So the three Ps of passion?

• 28:46Lewis Howes?

  The passion, the power that you have.

• 28:48Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 28:49Lewis Howes?

  And the problem you're looking to solve.

• 28:50Jay Shetty?

  Love that.

• 28:51Lewis Howes?

  So I give a lot of prompts and questions in the book around the three Ps, where you kind of figure out your sweet spot of what could I be doing? So the passions are, and a lot of people say, I've heard a lot of people say, don't follow your passion. I don't agree with that. I think you should be. Thinking about what are you most curious about? What excites you? Whenever I ask people, what are you most excited about in your life right now? You mostly see people like look up in the sky and they're like, they take a deep breath and they get really excited and they're emotional about it. They're like joyful about it. You want to lean into that feeling and do those things and be in that playground of experiences. So I think you really want to be thinking about what is the things that I am most passionate about? And maybe it doesn't mean for a two to four year window of life,

• 29:36Lewis Howes?

  you're going to be able to work on it, but you can still be working towards it. So figuring out what interests you, uh, what would you do if money was no object? What would you just love to wake up and do in general and what excites you? Think about that. The second thing is, you know, when I was starting out, I didn't feel like I had any talents. So I can relate to a lot of people. When you left the monkhood, you were like, well, what is this transferable skill into the workforce?

• 30:01Jay Shetty?

  That's literally how I felt.

• 30:02Lewis Howes?

  And you said you got rejected by like a hundred companies or something.

• 30:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, forty, yeah.

• 30:06Lewis Howes?

  Forty companies.

• 30:07Jay Shetty?

  Forty companies, yeah.

• 30:07Lewis Howes?

  And it's like, I didn't think I had transferable skills. You didn't think you had. A lot of people probably don't think that way. And most people, when they finish university or college, they don't use that degree five to 10 years later. They're moving on to different things eventually, right? So even if you got a degree in something, you probably won't use it in five to 10 years fully in that area.

• 30:29Jay Shetty?

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• 31:31Jay Shetty?

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• 32:14Lewis Howes?

  And so I think you gotta figure out what are the, how do I describe it? Kind of like invisible assets, right? The invisible assets that you have acquired throughout your entire life that maybe you're not even aware of. For me, an invisible asset was curiosity. It's not like I have this tangible currency that I can like use to, to build an opportunity in my life, but it was an invisible currency, an invisible asset. I was so curious about other people. Another invisible asset, I was a pretty joyful human being. And anytime I entered a room and everyone was always older than me and more talented and more successful, I just said, I'm going to bring so much joy and curiosity.

• 32:58Lewis Howes?

  That doesn't seem like a transferable skill. People would be like, they just wanted to help me. And I was this 24 year old punk that was just like entering these networking events and these social media conferences and these rooms around all these kind of thought leaders. And, and really people that I was like, wow, they're like successful mentors of mine. And they're always like, hey, Lewis, why don't you come join us for dinner? Hey, that's pretty cool. You're doing this. Let me help you here. And I brought curiosity and joy. I never talked about myself. I would just ask questions that I was fascinated by. And people loved to share these stories about themselves. That was a currency. That was an invisible asset that I brought to the table. So you gotta think about what are the powers that you have that maybe you don't think you have?

• 33:40Lewis Howes?

  And also, I'm a big fan of figuring out where you are most powerless and creating a list of all your fears. I call it the fear list.

• 33:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I want to get into that.

• 33:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes, this is the place where you feel the most powerless. So for me at the time, I felt like my biggest fears and where I felt most powerless was standing in front of a room of peers. I could not stand up and speak in front of five people without stuttering, stumbling, sweating, and just forgetting everything that I wanted to say. So I always felt insecure when I had to stand up and present in front of people. And I always felt like, man, I'm just messing up and people are laughing at me and I'm not good. I'm not as smart as everyone else. I'm not as good as presenter as everyone else. So I had this incredible crippling fear. And yet I knew one day I wanted to be able to impact people in some way,

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  whether it was a career or something else. And so I found a mentor who was a professional speaker. I found a mentor with a model that I wanted to mimic. He was a professional speaker and he said, you gotta overcome this fear. A way to do that is go to Toastmasters, a professional speaking class that you can go to. And he told me exactly what to do. I want you to go every week for a whole year. It's gonna suck the first few months. You're not gonna feel good. You're not gonna like it. It's gonna be embarrassing and you're not gonna feel good about yourself. But I'm telling you, if you do this every week for a year, you will create unbelievable things in your life.

• 35:14Lewis Howes?

  And it was true. Never in my wildest dreams would I think I get paid what I get paid to speak publicly now. So what was once something that made me feel so powerless?

• 35:26Lewis Howes?

  I made it a superpower. But the only way I could do that was finding someone or some model or mentor to give me some guidance or that I could mimic. And then taking action on the fear over and over again, until I embraced it and became the Batman of public speaking. You know what I mean? It's like you've got to, whatever the fear is for you, you, you've got to become Batman in that experience.

• 35:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Lewis Howes?

  You've got to live in the dark. You've got to wear a bat suit and embrace that fear a hundred percent until you can sit there peacefully, for me, on a stage in front of an audience. And that took years.

• 36:02Jay Shetty?

  Years, yeah.

• 36:03Lewis Howes?

  You want to develop more superpowers in your tool belt. You want to lean into that. And I had a ton of fears and a lot of insecurities. So it took me many years to start practicing on this and overcoming it. And I still get to step in more of them. The work never ends.

• 36:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Lewis Howes?

  Um, so that's the second thing. You've figured out what you're interested in, your passions, your powers, and overcoming your fears to make them superpowers. And the third one is figuring out what problem do you want to solve? This is something you talk about so much. And one of the reasons why I love your work, Jay, is because you're always asking people to think differently. You don't have to be the one who's the entrepreneur or creating the thing. There are so many great causes, teams, businesses and companies that have missions that you can be a great team player and use your passion and your power to support that problem. And I think that's what you got to be looking for. And it may not always, it may not always come to, you know, in your twenties, early thirties. It may evolve.

• 37:03Lewis Howes?

  There are different seasons of life that you can use these passions and powers to solve problems. So you don't have to have it all figured out at 25 or 31. You know, just like give yourself a break and keep enjoying life along the way.

• 37:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I, I love the three Ps and I hope that everyone, when you get the book, I want you to spend a really big chunk of time figuring out those three Ps.

• 37:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Jay Shetty?

  And, and I think what you said is true. I've, I've heard that rhetoric too of don't follow your passion. It's a waste of time. It's bad advice. And I think what people get confused is Your passion with doing what you like all the time, every day. There are lots of things I have to do every day that I don't like, but they help me do what I'm passionate about.

• 37:47Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 37:48Jay Shetty?

  And I think it gets confusing when people are like, well, do your passion means every day, all the time, you'll just be doing what you love. And I'm like, well, that's not true because I have to do plenty of things I don't love in order to do what I do love.

• 38:00Lewis Howes?

  And that's why you've got to use discipline. You know, you've got to use discipline to keep you organized and consistent on certain things that maybe aren't as fun. We'd all love to sit around and play games all day, you know, but it takes discipline to see a meaningful mission, mission come to fruition.

• 38:18Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Lewis Howes?

  And I think that's the key. When you get clear, a lot of people that aren't clear on their meaningful mission for this season of life, they're confused, they get depressed, they have stress, they have overwhelmed, they feel lost, they feel frustrated, they feel like something's off. And it's because you're not clear on the meaningful mission for this season of life. And so that's why it's just so important to get clear on what you want and how you want to include others in this season.

• 38:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I love how you keep saying season of life because it's not like you've got to find your meaningful mission for the rest of your entire life.

• 38:52Lewis Howes?

  No, and I think that is too much pressure for people.

• 38:54Jay Shetty?

  How long is a season? How, how, how long, how much time do you think people think about it?

• 38:57Lewis Howes?

  I mean, there's different types of seasons and I look at it as sports. And sports in a year.

• 39:02Jay Shetty?

  You're an athlete.

• 39:02Lewis Howes?

  In a year, there's four seasons in the year of fall, summer, spring, winter. In sports, there is a preseason, a season, postseason and the playoffs, right? There's kind of these four seasonal moments and there's always time to reflect on, okay, I did this thing for nine months or a year. Do I still want to keep doing this thing, right? Take time to reflect. You take a month off every year to reflect what works.

• 39:29Jay Shetty?

  You just came back from it.

• 39:30Lewis Howes?

  You just came back.

• 39:31Jay Shetty?

  It was amazing.

• 39:31Lewis Howes?

  And you look relaxed.

• 39:32Jay Shetty?

  It was amazing.

• 39:33Lewis Howes?

  Sometimes we're so in it all the time that we don't have the, the moment to reflect on, do I still, am I still excited about this? Is it still what I want to do? Do I feel like there's a new season coming for me? Like I, am I shedding something and stepping into something that I'm ready for now? Just like this book, it wasn't the right season five years ago. I didn't feel like I was. Had figured out what I needed to figure out internally to be authentically sharing the message that I have now. And I felt like it would have been a fake if it came out years ago. I knew the concepts, but I didn't know it inside of me.

• 40:07Jay Shetty?

  How did you know? Like, that's a great point, right? Like, I feel like there's a lot of people listening. They want to launch a podcast. They want to write a book. They want to build a new idea inside their company. They want to take a new idea to their boss. They want to, they want to start something fresh or new in their area. They want to start a charity, right? Whatever it may be. And I think there's always that period of not feeling ready.

• 40:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Jay Shetty?

  And then doing it. And I feel like that's the part where most people are stuck. Where like in their head, if you talk to them, and I'll talk to lots of people, they kind of know what the logo looks like, and they're kind of thinking about the website, or they kind of put a bit of the presentation for their boss together, and they're thinking about it. But what's the difference? Or what is the right way to go about feeling ready? Or getting ready even when you don't feel it? Right? Like, because you didn't want to wait 10 years.

• 40:59Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 40:59Jay Shetty?

  But you didn't want to wait five days, right? Like, how did you? Yeah. And obviously, this is a book, so it's a bigger thing. It takes more time.

• 41:05Lewis Howes?

  I think there's this concept that we've all heard that is like, face it until, what is it? No. Fake it till you make it. Right? That's the concept. Fake it till you make it is what a lot of people hear. And I really started to think about, I don't really like that.

• 41:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, neither do I.

• 41:19Lewis Howes?

  And I think it should be face it until you embrace it, right? Or face it until you embody it. And so when we take the concept in the, in the greatness mindset of, okay, writing it down, writing down a list of your fears, your fear list, then you face the fear until you embody and overcome that fear, until you embrace it, you embody it, and it doesn't have power over you anymore. And really, for me, it's, it's about having the perception of like, it, it just kind of depends what you value in life. So many times for me, I think about how much I could die at any moment. You know, I think that my life could be over at any moment. Will I be proud of

• 42:01Lewis Howes?

  who I am if I didn't launch this thing that's been inside of me for a while? I knew on this, I didn't have the fear of writing a book, right? That wasn't a fear of mine where a lot of people, they have a book idea for 10 or 20 years and they just never launched the thing.

• 42:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Lewis Howes?

  That wasn't my fear. My fear was being like inauthentic.

• 42:20Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 42:21Lewis Howes?

  To who I was and, and being, I don't know, is it a liar or just not feeling like, okay, something was off inside of me and I want to put something out there.

• 42:31Lewis Howes?

  And so I knew, okay, I know this book is going to be my best work ever, but I don't feel like I'm the right messenger yet to put it out there. So what do I need to face until I can embrace the person I want to be to be able to put this out there?

• 42:50Jay Shetty?

  Got it.

• 42:51Lewis Howes?

  And that to me was after two and a half years of researching this book and taking tons of notes and interviewing experts and me being, me checking in with me at the end of every year being like, why am I still talking about wanting to write this book, but not having the courage? That's when the therapy and the coaching sessions and diving in deep into my wounds and the emotional traumas, I was like, I need to face this part of me that I'm still afraid of. That was the thing on my fear list that I had resisted for decades. And when I faced it and felt like, wow, I'm actually able to feel healing. I'm actually able to feel calm around this situation in my life.

• 43:35Lewis Howes?

  In other areas I felt calm, but not this situation. I'm actually been facing it consistently every week and doing the work emotionally, revealing myself and exercising and coaching and getting feedback and all that stuff. Then when I felt freedom internally, that's when I was able to create and launch.

• 43:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's a great insight. I think a lot of us are hoping that our fear will just go away. Or like you said, we just try and fake it and then it doesn't feel right or it doesn't align with us. And really what you're saying is you have to face the fear. You, there's no other way. There's not like a different route or there's not a different pathway.

• 44:11Lewis Howes?

  And you can't, and you can't outanalyze the fear.

• 44:15Jay Shetty?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 44:16Lewis Howes?

  I understand the concept, you've got to experience it.

• 44:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and that's scary.

• 44:21Lewis Howes?

  Horrifying. It's horrifying. It's the, you know, it's something that held me back for decades and it's what causes us as human beings to repeat the same patterns of familiarity. We get stuck in patterns that are familiar, even when we know it's not right. This is why you hear so many people, specifically women, who say, on my wedding day, I knew it wasn't right. Like, I knew something was off. When like three, four, or five years later, they got divorced. And you ask them, did you, did you ever think something was off? They were like, on my wedding day, I had a feeling, but I was afraid. I was afraid to let people down. Everyone was already there. The invitations were sent. We had already put the down positive down. I didn't want to ruffle feathers and I thought maybe we'd just try to make it work.

• 45:05Lewis Howes?

  A lot of us have that fear of letting others down. And that's the thing that holds a lot of people back.

• 45:10Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. And I love it in the book because you break down the four fears that we all experience. So I want to go, I want to just give people this.

• 45:18Lewis Howes?

  Three main, three main fears.

• 45:19Jay Shetty?

  Three main fears, sorry, three main fears.

• 45:21Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 45:21Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, failure, success, judgment. Sorry, three main fears. I want, I want to just touch on them because I think that these top three fears are really well articulated and I, and I've experienced all of them. So I want to reflect on them myself too. So I remember when I was thinking about, like you said, so I'd been doing what I do today. I've been doing it now for seventeen years, seven years online, ten years offline. And the ten years that it was offline, there were no followers, there was no courses, there was no business aspect to it. It was just service and it was me learning and me sharing my passion with five to ten people that would show up or fifty people that would show up.

• 45:58Jay Shetty?

  And when I finally realized that I wanted it to reach more people and that was a internal calling I had that I didn't want to live in a world where only five to ten people had access to these ideas. Because these ideas changed my life and I felt, wait a minute, I met a monk. That's a very specific experience. Not everyone's going to go through something like that. So how do we speed that experience up for more people? I was scared of failure because I was looking at.

• 46:28Lewis Howes?

  Why were you scared of failure?

• 46:29Jay Shetty?

  Because I was looking at social media and I was looking at. Content and I was looking at things people were doing and I was scared about what my friends would say.

• 46:39Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 46:39Jay Shetty?

  I was scared about me uploading something and not getting views, getting criticism, or getting like people in the comment section saying, oh, this is trash or whatever. And I was scared of failure. I was scared of no one's gonna care, no one's gonna watch, and it doesn't, and it's not gonna matter. And that probably lasted as I was researching, learning and thinking for two years, where I felt like that before I actually.

• 47:07Lewis Howes?

  You wanted to, but you didn't do it.

• 47:09Jay Shetty?

  Exactly. I wanted to in my head, and often at those times I find that's when you start becoming critical too. So you're kind of looking at what everyone else is doing and you're finding holes in it because you think you could do it better. Or you, you know, you get kind of like that and you realize that's not how you want to live either. And so I find often, when we're the most inactive or stagnant, that's when we're the most critical or judgmental of others who are doing something and trying their best.

• 47:33Lewis Howes?

  No, no authors are writing negative reviews on other authors' books. It's just the people who have never written a book who's like, this was the worst book ever, right?

• 47:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and it's, it's hard. And so I remember feeling that way, like where, you know, I was starting to notice. I remember even years ago when, when my friends were really into music and we'd be like laughing at the rapper on screen or like whoever it may be and be like, oh, like he thinks he's got rhymes and we could do better. And it's like, but that guy's actually gone and done it, right? That person's doing it. And so, yeah, talk to me about, let's talk about that first, because I think the fear of failure, and I love the way you put it into failure and we'll talk about success and judgment. Fear of failure is the number one thing that blocks us from trying. And that's the part, right? It's not about stops us from succeeding, it stops us from trying.

• 48:20Lewis Howes?

  I was trying to figure out what is the thing that holds us back? What are these fears? And it was, and it became clear to me that it was failure, success and judgment. And I started, I didn't understand failure and success personally, but I started to ask people and kind of brainstorm it and workshop with people. Because for me, as an athlete growing up, I was conditioned that failure is a part of success. Yeah, that makes sense. So if I, I wanted success and the pathway there is failure. Like every day in practice, you fail. You make a mistake, you give the wrong pass, you turn the ball over, you drop the ball, you miss the shot. So I would watch Michael Jordan fail a hundred times a game, but still win the game. You know, or whatever it is, you know, it's like miss a ton of shots.

• 49:05Lewis Howes?

  And it was never like the worst thing. It was like, I don't want to fail in my sport. I want to be perfect in every play, but I know that this is the path towards success. And it's how I get feedback to get better. So failure was feedback. It was information telling me what I needed to do to improve. So I understand that concept. Success, I also did not understand why people were afraid of success. But as I started touring and speaking and asking people, who here is afraid of failure? Most of the room would raise their hand at some point in their life, they're afraid of failure. And I'd say, how many of you are afraid of success? Thinking everyone wants this. So almost half the room would also raise their hand for success. And I go, but this is the thing people want.

• 49:49Lewis Howes?

  So if you want something you're afraid of, why would it come to you? Why would success come to you if you're afraid of it? Why would money come to you if you're afraid of it? Why would love come to you if you were afraid of it? So I never understood that concept. But as I started to talk to people and realize, oh, actually I get it. Because the weight of gold can be so heavy for so many people. There's actually a documentary called Weight of Gold. That is about Olympic gold medalists who go on to commit suicide afterwards, who go on to have extreme depression, mental health challenges, lose friendships, go bankrupt, all this stuff. Because the pressure, once you succeed, to stay there.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  Everyone expecting you to be a certain way. Everyone expecting you to be perfect all the time, the perfect role model. Everyone expecting you now to have money to just give to your friends and family. And not knowing who really cares about you for you versus your success. So, and also.

• 50:49Lewis Howes?

  It's just a weight that takes a lot of courage to be able to lean into and manage. And I think it's a skill set to understand and manage success. But that's something I always wanted. So I was like, bring it on, you know, I'll take it. The fear for me that has been my kryptonite over the years was judgment. And the need for other people to like me. And specifically to matters of the heart and intimacy. And that's why I kept repeating the pattern. Cause I wasn't afraid to enter a relationship. You know, I wasn't afraid of that. I wasn't afraid of it doing well. I wanted it to do well. But I kept abandoning myself to try to please one person to accept and love me. I was terrified of the judgment.

• 51:33Lewis Howes?

  And that crippled me. It was a big, you know, kryptonite in my, my entire existence until a couple of years ago. And that's the thing, we've got to identify which one of these fears holds us back the most. And again, in the book, I talk about kind of the process of uncovering and unpacking that. So that if you can have clarity and awareness, you talk about awareness is the key. Once you are aware and clear, then you can create a game plan on how to embrace it, overcome it. And make that fear and insecurity a superpower. And I, and I truly think we're just going to be, have something off inside of us. We're going to be unfulfilled. We're going to be frustrated, you know, disconnected until we figure out what the fear is for us.

• 52:19Lewis Howes?

  And figuring out how to fully accept ourselves at the center of all of these fears is I'm not enough. I am not lovable enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not talented enough. I'm not enough. And when we can finally get to a place where I say, I am enough. I can go back to all the different periods of my life that I'm not proud of, that I'm ashamed of, that I'm insecure about, that, that I hurt people, that other people hurt me, that I haven't forgiven. If I can go back and reconnect with those broken elements of my, my mindset from the past and complete, create healing and wholeness, then I can accept and love myself today for where I'm at. And that's when everything changes.

• 53:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and and I can sort of relate to all of those as you're talking about them like. I remember after I had my first viral video, I didn't want to make any videos.

• 53:10Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 53:10Jay Shetty?

  Because because you're scared of success, like you're scared of.

• 53:13Lewis Howes?

  But weren't you excited? You're like, oh, fifty million views.

• 53:17Jay Shetty?

  You get, well, that's the point, right? Like, at one point, it has to become about more than the success or failure. And that's where the meaningful mission, it comes back to that, right? It always comes back to that. And I was talking about this with our friend, and we talked about you too. It's so funny. I was talking to Stephen Bartlett recently because I was in London. And we talked about you too, because we're talking about relationships. And he was saying what he'd learned from you and the conversations you guys have had. And and now I'm talking about him to you, but he, I was, I was talking to him about the idea of just like getting comfortable with the idea that at one point, we all have to embrace insignificance and irrelevance in a public sense.

• 54:01Jay Shetty?

  But that in an internal sense, the meaningful mission was what was carrying you.

• 54:05Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 54:05Jay Shetty?

  So if you stop because people stop following, or if you start only when people are following, then there isn't a meaningful mission. Because the meaningful mission is what you were doing, whether people were following or not, because it's what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be. And so I think it comes back to that, that if you only play when you're winning and you stop when you're losing, or you don't pivot and learn a new way to serve, then there isn't a meaningful mission at the bedrock of it. And so I love that the meaningful mission is at the heart of everything. Because there will always be changes, like your, the platforms will change, the algorithms will change.

• 54:47Lewis Howes?

  People will come and go.

• 54:48Jay Shetty?

  People will come and go. And you see the people that have lasted the test of time. It's usually people who have a meaningful mission, as you were saying, who want to keep serving, keep giving, they feel. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive. Safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected and more engaged with your drive. So you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand.

• 55:34Jay Shetty?

  Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.

• 55:51Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for. Like skills, certifications or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed. According to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast.

• 56:37Jay Shetty?

  Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Have that.

• 56:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and they're not, they're not worried about how famous or relevant they are.

• 56:47Jay Shetty?

  Correct.

• 56:47Lewis Howes?

  You know, and I think I, I loved your conversation with Kevin Hart about how like fame is like this ultimate drug. And if it's not used wisely or managed properly, it will ruin you.

• 56:57Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Lewis Howes?

  And I think, you know, the idea of being relevant or having followers or views or something like that. If it's not managed properly, it'll probably stress you out and overwhelm you.

• 57:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Lewis Howes?

  And make you go a little crazy unless there's some foundation of, hey, yes, I want to impact more people and yes, I want this to do well, but the mission is to serve. And I remember when I wrote my last book specifically about, you know, masculine vulnerability, I remember thinking to myself. This may not do that well.

• 57:28Jay Shetty?

  No one's gonna, yeah.

• 57:29Lewis Howes?

  You know, at that time in 2018 or 2017, whenever that was, I was like, I don't know if men are ready to start talking about being vulnerable. It was kind of just like barely happening, right?

• 57:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Lewis Howes?

  And now, now everyone is talking about that, not everyone, but you see that a lot.

• 57:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Lewis Howes?

  But I remember being like, I could, I really don't care if this sells a million copies or one. If it sells one and that man is impacted and he has a deeper relationship with himself, where he heals, he has a deeper relationship with his wife or his partner and his family. He heals and mends some relationships and he finds more happiness, health, and he heals. Then I was like, it's worth it. It's worth the two years of research. It's worth all the pain that I went through. It's worth the, the, the fear of opening up about sexual abuse that I was afraid of years before that. Because I want another guy to feel the same way.

• 58:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Lewis Howes?

  And so I think when we go into it with, yes, we want things to do well. When we put effort and energy into launching a project, a business, a company, a book, a podcast, of course you want things to go well. But if you have the meaningful mission as the bedrock, where you're just like, it's about we, it's about us, it's about service. It's not about me getting more famous or building something of more followers. That's when I think it's more sustainable energetically.

• 58:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. When, when people are sitting with that and we kind of skip, not skip over it, but we, we used it and moved forward. Like, I think when I use the word purpose or when, when you're using the word meaningful mission, it's like, it can feel quite heavy for certain people because they're like, I don't care about it. Like, there's nothing that I even care about that much. Like, I don't know, or I want to, I wish I cared about humanity or animals or whatever it may be that you care about.

• 59:17Lewis Howes?

  You gotta know your season. When I was broke on my sister's couch, I couldn't think beyond getting off the couch. So I was like, my meaningful mission is to make enough money to live on my own.

• 59:28Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I remember that. I remember that, yeah. Paying rent and paying groceries like was, was where I started.

• 59:33Lewis Howes?

  If that's your season of life, you gotta focus on that. And you got to focus on getting to a baseline where you can start thinking beyond yourself.

• 59:41Jay Shetty?

  But you're doing that with the hidden feeling of like, I want to do service.

• 59:46Lewis Howes?

  Hundred percent.

• 59:46Jay Shetty?

  But right now, I just need to focus on this. That's, it's kind of like, I love that you said that because that's what I found too. It's like, I never stopped wanting to do service. There were just moments in trying to do service with the immediate need. It's kind of like saying, you have an apartment. There's a fire in the apartment, but you're trying to do your interior design, right? Like, or, or you want to have your friends over.

• 1:00:10Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:00:10Jay Shetty?

  You're like, no, but my apartment's to have my friends over. And it's like, no, no, no.

• 1:00:13Lewis Howes?

  It's burning.

• 1:00:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, burning. Like, I want to serve with my house. I want to have my friends over. And it's like, no, no, no. Just solve the fire. And then, and then use it for that.

• 1:00:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and I think it's, uh, it's, it's understanding where you're at. And that's why I said, like, listen, when I, you've got to have a season of overcoming your fears as well. Like, for a few years, I was just like, I'm so crippled by insecurity and fear.

• 1:00:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Lewis Howes?

  That all my energy is going towards public speaking class. I'm doing salsa lessons because this was a fear of mine and I wanted to.

• 1:00:42Jay Shetty?

  Oh, you're such a good dancer.

• 1:00:43Lewis Howes?

  That's better. But I was like, there's so many, and I was like, and I was in research mode. I know you love to read and research and teach. I was in just research mode for hours every day. I was researching. I was learning online. I was building relationships. And I was overcoming fears. That was the season while I was on my sister's couch for a year and a half, trying to figure out, who am I? In this world? What is the point of all this? What is my identity now that I've lost my dream and my athletic dreams? What am I going to do the rest of my life? I was in a season of researching, of building relationships and overcoming fears. And, but I still, I was being in service to the people I was working with. I was bringing curiosity. I was bringing joy.

• 1:01:26Lewis Howes?

  I was bringing moments of fun. And that's just as much service as it is feeding the homeless or changing the world or curing cancer.

• 1:01:35Jay Shetty?

  That's a great answer. Yeah.

• 1:01:37Lewis Howes?

  It's the, it's a, greatness is not about.

• 1:01:41Lewis Howes?

  Changing the world, it's about changing the world around you and changing the world within you and being in that evolution of growth and transformation and saying, how can I continue to level up myself and the people around me? That might be three people.

• 1:01:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Lewis Howes?

  But if you're doing that, it's making a ripple on so many more.

• 1:01:59Jay Shetty?

  You know what? And you lived that. And that's what I love about you. There's a couple of things that I want to point out, not, and I want to ask you how you've done these things sometimes. Uh, I was talking to, I remember I went to lunch with Matthew Hussey, who's a dear friend of ours. And you know, you've been friends with him a lot longer, but you always told me I'd get along with him and we do. Uh, and I went for lunch with him and you guys had just all been on Red Table Talk for an episode. And it was you and Stefan

• 1:02:24Lewis Howes?

  and Devon Franklin.

• 1:02:25Jay Shetty?

  And Devon Franklin and, and Matthew. And Matthew was saying that the whole time, because there were so many of you.

• 1:02:33Lewis Howes?

  It was like eight of us around the table.

• 1:02:34Jay Shetty?

  So many around the table. There were lots of questions. And it was like, everyone obviously had so much value to add. Everyone on that table has, has beautiful insights, but you were kind of like doing layups for everyone else. So it's like everyone was sharing their insights, but you were the guy who was like passing it to everyone on the thing. And you have loads of great insights too, but you were happy to play. And I just want to say that that's, and that, you know, that's, you practice what you preach and that you do that even when you have an opportunity to shine, you're happy to pass the ball. Like you're happy to pass the ball and go, no, you slam dunk. You take the three pointer. You take that. And people notice that, right? Like the right people who are aware, they noticed that and they recognized that, oh, this person actually is meaning what they're saying.

• 1:03:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Jay Shetty?

  And that was just a private lunch I was having with a mutual friend of ours. It wasn't like a show or anything. And I wanted to share that. But, but the other part of what I see in you, you're so good. And you talk about this in the book about enlisting support. You're so good at finding a coach, going to a class, getting a teacher, doing a course. I give that advice all the time. And I think we give that advice all the time. We're like, just start doing a course. Like do this, do that. Like, right? And because it's real, because we've experienced in our own lives. Like, by the way, I only, I'm only a public speaker because. My parents forced me to go to public speaking classes. So I've been to seven years of nine hours a week with exams of public speaking training from age eleven to age eighteen.

• 1:04:01Lewis Howes?

  That's great.

• 1:04:02Jay Shetty?

  It's courses, right? It's like, anything in the world is trained, is learned, is built. And I think we live in a world now where we think, oh, that's a God given talent, or that, you know, or you don't have it. When you actually start to realize that, oh, the person you think that can dance, yeah, they might have had some cool skills.

• 1:04:20Lewis Howes?

  I could not dance.

• 1:04:21Jay Shetty?

  You could not dance at all. But now, like, when I see you, when I've seen video and stuff, I'm like, you're a great dancer, right? And I think people could say the same for speaking, business, you've talked about dyslexia. Yeah, like so many things. So let's talk a bit about that because I do think that education and training are the pathway to transformation and growth. Reading a book is that crossing the line. Like, I was saying to someone yesterday that I have this habit where I look at what my block is every season almost, using your language. And I will go and find books, interviews and podcasts on that problem.

• 1:05:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:05:03Jay Shetty?

  And so I was in so many bookstores over Christmas because I love bookshops. And I was just walking around and I would walk around, just as like, I was giving this example yesterday, I was like, if you're out of milk at home, you go to buy milk.

• 1:05:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:19Jay Shetty?

  You don't just go, oh, I'll just use washing up liquid instead, right? But if you're out of discipline, what we do is we go, yeah, go find some, go buy some discipline. Like what we do is we go, oh, I'll just watch Netflix then, right? And it doesn't solve the gap. Like if you're out of cereal at home, you don't just go, oh, I'll just eat like chips for breakfast. You, you go and buy cereal. And so I look at my life in that way, like a grocery store, and I go, what is it that I need in my life? Okay, maybe right now I need to become a better leader. Okay, maybe right now I need to become a better husband. Right now I need to become a better interviewer, whatever it may be. And then I'll go and look for that. And it sounds like you do the same.

• 1:05:57Jay Shetty?

  How have you found the ability to, a couple of things. The first thing is find good classes and coaches and mentors. Because I think a lot of people struggle with knowing, like, do I trust this? Do I not? Good question for people to ask. And second part is, how do you commit and stay on top of it? When naturally like it's easier to just sit at home and watch TV.

• 1:06:18Lewis Howes?

  Two things.

• 1:06:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Lewis Howes?

  How do I commit and stay on top of it? I pay in advance.

• 1:06:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, right. That's a great one.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  I pay my nutrition and fitness coach in advance.

• 1:06:28Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Lewis Howes?

  I pay my, my therapist and emotional coach a year in advance. And we schedule it every two weeks for the year.

• 1:06:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Lewis Howes?

  So I've got money invested. I've got time and calendar organized, committed.

• 1:06:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. So it's not like, oh, I'll pay you every week. When I come, we'll see when the meeting gets set up.

• 1:06:46Lewis Howes?

  It's not one class at a time. It's a, a block of time in advance. It takes time.

• 1:06:52Jay Shetty?

  Force discipline. Yeah.

• 1:06:53Lewis Howes?

  Force discipline. And when you're invested in it, um, you pay more attention to it. As our friend, Dean Graziosi says, he says, uh, you pay attention to what you pay for. Right? And you'll pay more attention when you pay more money typically. I'm not saying you need to spend tons of money. A lot of things that I've gotten from free mentorship, whether it be people just giving me time, me learning from podcasts, books, videos, courses, things like that, that were free and available online.

• 1:07:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Lewis Howes?

  But I've always seen accelerated results when I invest in something.

• 1:07:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Lewis Howes?

  When I invest in someone, something, and I know I've got to do a period of time to complete it. That's number one. Number two, and how do I find them?

• 1:07:33Jay Shetty?

  How do you know who to trust?

• 1:07:35Lewis Howes?

  How do you know who to trust? I, I typically ask people that I respect. So I'll ask you, hey, hey, do you know someone who could help me in this? So I trust and respect you. If you have a referral, then, then I'll probably trust that person, or at least I'll jump on a call. But otherwise it's, you know, you can find a lot of people online and see what they're creating, how their energy is, their vibe and things like that. You can consume some of their information. You can see testimonials. You can check in with those testimonials or referrals. So I just kind of follow that process. And I'll always do like an intro session with someone if it's like coaching to see like, do we really connect before I commit a year in advance or three months in advance? So it's making sure that they've got results that I respect.

• 1:08:16Lewis Howes?

  And they've worked with people and helped them overcome challenges that I respect as well. Then it becomes more, more of a thing that I, that I trust diving into and to. To go back to what you were saying just before that about kind of giving people layups and stuff, I wasn't like that until 10 years ago. I mean, in some ways I was, but I wasn't, it wasn't until 10 years ago when I had this kind of initial transformation of letting go of big parts of my ego, where I said that I have to be extreme in a sense the other way because I was so competitive. I wanted to be right. I wanted to win. I wanted to be number one at everything.

• 1:08:57Jay Shetty?

  I can't imagine you like that, dude. I can imagine. I know you're competitive in sport, obviously, but like as an energy, that's, yeah, I didn't know you then.

• 1:09:04Lewis Howes?

  Maybe people didn't feel it, but internally that was driving me, right? In a lot of ways. And it was all based on a wound that I hadn't healed yet. Once I started to heal, I was like, oh, wow, I've had this all wrong. Everything was win lose to me as opposed to win win. So 10 years ago, I actually learned the concept of win win for the first time, or at least I understood it for the first time. Maybe I'd heard it as a kid, but I didn't embody it until I was able to face that and wake up to it. And that's why I was like, okay, I'm gonna start this show. It's not going to be about me. It's going to shine the light on everyone else. I want to practice this. I want to overcome this consistently. And I was really inspired by Oprah where she

• 1:09:49Lewis Howes?

  just always shined the light on others, right? For 20 something years. And she's talked about it before. It's like when you shine the light, there's always a reflection of light back on you. And the more you do that for more people over time, you become brighter in return. And that's not the goal to become brighter necessarily for selfish reasons, but it naturally happens. You're reflected the light back on you. And I think that's a beautiful thing, you know, something that you do so well by lifting others up. It's something that I try to do really well by lifting my friends up like we did on Red Table Talk. When, you know, Jada is asking a question, I'm like, gosh, I know Stefan has the perfect answer for this because I've heard him

• 1:10:29Lewis Howes?

  say this three times. So I go, Stefan, you know what to say here, you know, when Matthew had a different perspective on something else. I was like, Matthew, man, you said this amazing thing about this before. Can you share what this is? Devon, I've heard you say this. So. You know, I learned this early on because I didn't feel like I had the answers or I was smart in my early twenties. So I wouldn't speak a lot from my perspective. I would just ask curious questions. And after a couple hours of meeting with someone, I never really spoke about me. I would just ask about them. At the end of the conversation, they were like, man, you're the most interesting person I've ever met. And I was like, I didn't share anything about my life. I just asked you questions.

• 1:11:10Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Lewis Howes?

  But people want to feel that you're curious and interested in them, and then they'll think you're extremely interesting.

• 1:11:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, I, I, and I feel like it's also just something that you, you also naturally listen. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of these things are often used as techniques.

• 1:11:27Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:11:27Jay Shetty?

  And they don't come across as genuine because you, if you ask a question, you actually have to listen. And then you actually have to remember, and then you'd ask a follow up question. And I think sometimes you can, you can tell when it's disingenuous or.

• 1:11:41Lewis Howes?

  You can feel what it's off.

• 1:11:42Jay Shetty?

  You can feel it from a mile off.

• 1:11:43Lewis Howes?

  Or manipulative or something.

• 1:11:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, when you feel like it's a technique where someone's coming at it, like, you know, whenever, you know, people used to give the advice of like, oh, reach out and do something for free for someone.

• 1:11:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Jay Shetty?

  And then someone would do that for you, but then they come back with like this, and then you're like, oh, wait a minute.

• 1:11:57Lewis Howes?

  I thought you were doing this for free.

• 1:11:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I thought you were doing it for free. And you start realizing just like, it has to be done so genuinely. And people will respond to that. I had a, you know, I had a rule that, and I, and I still have it too, like, I never took pictures with celebrities unless they were on the show or in a meaningful connection. It was never a clout grab. Like, it wasn't like, I'm in this place, I've seen this person, let's get a picture just to like, show off who you're hanging around with. Like, it was like, no, if I have a relationship with that person, or they're on a podcast and there's a meaningful interaction, or we're doing something together. Because it's just like, when, when people feel used and you're using people in that way and there's no genuineness, it kind of just like. It feels really cheap and it comes across that way too.

• 1:12:44Jay Shetty?

  And it actually blocks you having a real relationship.

• 1:12:47Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:12:47Jay Shetty?

  And so when you're asking interesting questions, and I know you do that all the time. But I also know you're listening because then we'll bring it up again in another conversation. Or and so I think there's a real truth to that. I also, my own personal coaching practice, I set a new rule and this was something that took me a while to understand, but it really helped me. So anyone that I privately coach, we have a fee of my time, but the entire fee goes to charity of their choice.

• 1:13:13Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:14Jay Shetty?

  So I have a fee, we count up the hours like I would in any coaching practice, but the amount goes to a charity of their choice.

• 1:13:19Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:20Jay Shetty?

  And it became a way that I could feel I was serving and I could give myself. And I wanted the person to also feel like they were getting the feeling of giving back rather than always paying for stuff.

• 1:13:32Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:32Jay Shetty?

  Because I found that a lot of people always felt that they could pay for anything and they could buy anything. And I wanted them to feel the opposite.

• 1:13:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:13:39Jay Shetty?

  Where it's like they weren't buying anything, they were getting to give away.

• 1:13:42Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing.

• 1:13:42Jay Shetty?

  And yeah, so I've never talked about it before, but I wanted to say it with you because it was just something that I was thinking about like. I wanted to find a method where I could give my heart to someone. And they could give their heart to me. And I found sometimes that money got in the way of the heart.

• 1:13:57Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:13:58Jay Shetty?

  And so like in friendship, there's no money exchange, hence there's a heart space. And so in coaching, I had to find a way. Yeah, and that was my way. And it's like been a beautiful commitment and.

• 1:14:08Lewis Howes?

  It's great unless it gets like overwhelming with coaching clients and you have no time.

• 1:14:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, of course. And I don't, right? Like I'm very, I don't have, I have like six, seven people that I work with. So it's not something that I'm looking to grow in a business sense.

• 1:14:19Lewis Howes?

  Where are you looking to grow in your life right now? After a month of reflection of this end of year season of last year of being your, honestly, your biggest year ever. And in so many ways, from the business to success, to speaking, to the podcast growth, to YouTube, to video. Celebrity clients, all the talk shows you've been on, all these things that have happened. What was the big reflection for you and where do you see yourself moving in this next year?

• 1:14:46Jay Shetty?

  So obviously this year, the new book is out, A Rules of Love. So my heart's in love. Love the tour is happening for the first time. I'm like, I'm really excited to like hug people and hold their hands and look into their eyes. I think I'm like, I've always been a hugger. We just hugged for like.

• 1:15:00Lewis Howes?

  And by the way, everyone watching right now are listening. When you hug Jay in person, just whisper in his ear and hug him long and say, this was from Louis. Cause that's what I do with Jay. I hold him so long and I whisper in his ear like, I love you.

• 1:15:18Jay Shetty?

  But, but there's a, there's a joy in that. Like I love physical connection. Like I love the idea that I'm actually gonna like, you know, I, I feel so grateful that for six, seven years I've been doing this, I haven't met 99% of people. You probably feel the same way. And I just like, I feel so grateful and I wanna kind of like outpour all of downstairs to everyone who's gonna be there because there's so much gratitude built up in me that I haven't been able to, me saying it in a microphone doesn't do it justice. And traveling around and doing a hectic schedule and doing all this craziness is really an output. It's totally from a gratitude point of view because there's, there's nothing else to it of why you'd go on tour. So I'm excited for that.

• 1:15:59Jay Shetty?

  And then if I'm completely honest, I'm excited for rest, study and creativity. I'm really looking forward into the next half of the year where my plan is to go more internal and learn and study again and research and read more. I do that all the time, but I mean, do it even in a more obsessive constructive way. And, and spend more time just being creative and being present because I feel like I've been really going all out for like the last six, seven years now. And it's been so meaningful and powerful and beautiful, but at the same time, I'm conscious that to have the next seven years be even better than it's been, it's going to require this pit stop. And my monk teacher would always say,

• 1:16:43Jay Shetty?

  if you wanna go three steps forward, you have to go three steps deep. And so this is the time to go three steps deep in order to go three steps forward again. And so I feel after going all this forward that I've done, it's time to go deep again. And, and I feel that internally. It's calling me. So.

• 1:17:01Lewis Howes?

  Well, you're about to spend the next, what, three to six months going hard.

• 1:17:04Jay Shetty?

  Hard and forward. And that's great. And I, and I'm ready for that. And I'm ready for that after this month off, but after that, I'm already planning.

• 1:17:13Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious. I know this interview is about me, but, but I can never not ask you questions, no matter when we're doing this stuff. I'm curious if you could fast forward in your heart and your minds one year and just imagine everything that has happened. You're pouring your energy into everyone, the gratitude you're going to give to all this community, you know, tens of thousands of people that are going to be in person over the next few months, supporting you, seeing you. And make sure you guys, if you haven't bought the book, get his book right now as well. What do you think is going to be the lesson you're going to learn at the end of this year? If you could be in the future, what do you think your soul is going to tell you that is going to be the lesson and the thing for you to step into or let go of into the next year?

• 1:17:58Jay Shetty?

  I think the lesson will be to, and everyone needs to do this, and it comes back to your point of season, is to live in the season that you have reached. And what I mean by that is that there was a different energy that it took to get here, and it will be a different energy to move forward. And I think it's really interesting, because I think we often stay in the same energy state multiple years of our life, because we got used to it, or we got familiar with it. And then years go by before you realize you needed an energy shift. And I think when you

• 1:18:36Jay Shetty?

  see people who are burnt out, lost, or confused, or feel like they wasted time, it's because they never realized that they stayed in the same energy state that they were in when they started. And you have to accept that time has changed, and life has moved on, and you've learned new things, and you've gained new clarity. And so I think that will be the lesson. And letting go, I think, will be, I want to do, I feel like to get to this point, I had to do a lot of what I didn't love. And I think that that should always get less and less and less. So I think a healthy life isn't one where you only do what you love, but it's a life where you do less and less of

• 1:19:21Jay Shetty?

  what you don't love. And so I feel like my life's always moving in that direction. And I think in a year from now, I have all the clarity and all the opportunity. To start afresh as opposed to continuing to just exist in the world of repeating what's been done.

• 1:19:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Jay Shetty?

  If that makes sense.

• 1:19:41Lewis Howes?

  It's good insight. Your future self is wise.

• 1:19:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, hopefully, hopefully. And now I've got to live up to it. No, it's good. Well, this is a beautiful question. It's could you make me make me vocalize it? And I hope everyone's getting to see how good Lewis is at what he does and what he does for himself, too. No, the question like that's great because it gives me something to live up to that I that I aspire for, right? And it reminds me of that Matthew McConaughey speech.

• 1:20:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, ten years out.

• 1:20:02Jay Shetty?

  I love, I love.

• 1:20:02Lewis Howes?

  Chasing my hero ten years away.

• 1:20:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's just like, it's the Oscar speech. If anyone doesn't know Dallas Buyers Club, he won the Oscar for Best Actor and he gives one of the best speeches of all time, in my opinion. And yeah, it's that idea of just, yeah, it gives you something to chase, which is yours. It's you. It's not chasing like, and I love that, right? Like, and I think the question you just asked is the question you're asking yourself, which is why your life is going in the right direction, because the question isn't, where do you want to be in a year? Like, what do you want to achieve? Because that starts to like set, you know, there's there's usefulness in that. I'm not saying it's not useful, but the internal question is far more gratifying. So you've given me something to chase and pursue.

• 1:20:44Lewis Howes?

  It's awesome to have goals and dreams, but I think what's more important is focusing on the person you become on a consistent basis to create those dreams and also being so proud and at peace of who you've become, even if the dreams don't come true. And there's been a lot of things that I've chased after where the dreams didn't come true.

• 1:21:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Lewis Howes?

  But the life was a dream come true. Who I got to meet, what I got to experience, what I overcame, the lessons I learned, the the memories I created.

• 1:21:25Lewis Howes?

  Certain dreams didn't come true, but it was a dream come true.

• 1:21:28Jay Shetty?

  Totally, totally. And oh, I love that. I love that so much. That's such a like, that's such a powerful statement. And it's so true. Like, I have so many projects that haven't worked out.

• 1:21:40Lewis Howes?

  Didn't work out.

• 1:21:41Jay Shetty?

  So many pitches, even we went to some pitches together that you've set up for me that didn't work out. But the network I built through that relationship building, the connections.

• 1:21:49Lewis Howes?

  Who you became.

• 1:21:49Jay Shetty?

  Who I became, like skills I had to learn, like.

• 1:21:52Lewis Howes?

  There's so many, you know, there was, there was a lot of things. I'll give an example. There was a lot of goals that I accomplished as an athlete that I was extremely proud of. And I was like, man, I set an intention for this goal 10 years prior and I made it happen.

• 1:22:05Lewis Howes?

  But there were certain goals, like I wanted to be an Olympic athlete, right? And for eight and a half years, I played with the USA national team. And I never made the Olympics, right? And I haven't played with the team for about three years since, uh, right before the pandemic. And I can look back and say, I spent eight and a half years of my life sacrificing, committing, dedicated, disciplined, traveling the world, spending time, money, energy, money and energy, playing a game to represent the USA to try to make the Olympics. And I failed, and I failed it and I fell short. Or I can look at it as, man, what a life journey and experience I got to have for eight and a half years. I have so many great friends, memories.

• 1:22:50Lewis Howes?

  I traveled the world, wearing USA across my chest, getting to play against Olympians. As a, you know, thirty five, six, seven year old, I was like, I didn't accomplish the dream, but it was still a dream come true. And I think when we look back on things that didn't work out, but find the meaning and the memory and the magic in those experiences, it's still an incredibly beautiful life.

• 1:23:14Jay Shetty?

  The meaning, the memory and the magic. I love that. I love that. Because often we look for meaning, but you're so right, the memory and the magic. Lewis, how's everyone? Lewis, that was, that was special, man. That was really beautiful. I want everyone who's listening and watching right now to go and grab a copy of this book, The Greatness Mindset: Unlock the Power of Your Mind and Live Your Best Life Today. It's available right now. If you're listening to this episode, make sure you go grab it. Where would you like them to get it from, apart from obviously Barnes and Noble, Amazon?

• 1:23:45Lewis Howes?

  Anyway, yeah, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever.

• 1:23:47Jay Shetty?

  Perfect. Yeah. Make sure you go grab a copy. The audiobook as well is in Lewis's voice. Lewis reads the audio, so make sure you go and grab the audio if you like listening to books as well, because I know so many of you are audio listeners. And follow Lewis on YouTube. Subscribe to his podcast, The School of Greatness, and follow him on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter, on every single social media platform that you use. As you saw today, Lewis practices what he preaches and also what he shares is highly life-changing. So make sure you go and grab it.

• 1:24:19Lewis Howes?

  I appreciate it, man. And real quick, before you finish it, I appreciate you talking about the book. And I want to give a call to action to people.

• 1:24:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:24:27Lewis Howes?

  If you're going to buy my book, which I'm deeply grateful for, I want to see if you haven't bought Jay's book yet. Make sure to buy both of us at the same time. Take a screenshot.

• 1:24:39Jay Shetty?

  I love that.

• 1:24:40Lewis Howes?

  And tag both of us on Instagram, letting us know that you got both books at the same time.

• 1:24:44Jay Shetty?

  That'd be so cool.

• 1:24:45Lewis Howes?

  That'll be awesome. And I'm sure we'll reshare some of those on Instagram.

• 1:24:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:50Lewis Howes?

  Buy it on Amazon, take a screenshot. If you've got them both in your hands, do that. Put it on Instagram for us to see and we'll, we'll share both of those out.

• 1:24:58Jay Shetty?

  I love it. I love it. Lewis, thank you so much, man. So grateful, brother. So grateful. If you love this episode, you will love my interview with Kobe Bryant on how to be strategic and obsessive to find your purpose.