1011 Do This Exercise to Find Your Purpose

On today's 5-minute Friday, we wanted to revisit a process Lewis learned from Dr. Ivan Joseph, a sports psychologist and high-performance coach. This exercise can help you identify what really matters to you, and then figure out how to chase it. Listen to the full episode with Dr. Ivan Joseph: https://lewishowes.com/982 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Here's a quote from Mel Robbins. "The time is now. Stop hitting the snooze button on your life." Dr. Ivan Joseph is a high-performance coach, a sports psychologist, and the author of You've Got This: Mastering the Skill of Self-Compleness. He also gave a TED Talk on the topic that has received 19 million views and counting. We had a truly enlightening conversation on mental and physical routines that are essential to success. And in this episode, we talk about using a simple exercise to find your values and your purpose, and this was powerful, how to avoid the simple things that ruin people's pursuit of greatness.

• 0:53Lewis Howes?

  I think you're going to love this episode, so please share this with someone who you think needs to hear it, and let me know what you think about it while you're listening.

• 1:03Ivan Joseph?

  There's two factors I've always seen that derail a young athlete or a young professional's career. Number one is their self-doubt, right? Their inability to believe in themselves. And interestingly enough, number two is the people that they have surrounded themselves with that become distractions that take them away from their goals. Over and over and over again, they fall into the wrong crowd, they get with the wrong partner.

• 1:27Lewis Howes?

  The wrong advice.

• 1:28Ivan Joseph?

  Yes.

• 1:29Lewis Howes?

  So how do we make sure that we get out of that? When we're such social creatures that we don't want to hurt people's feelings, that we, it's hard to go meet new people. You know, this is your comfort zone, these are your boys from the past, like, they've been with you. How do we get out of that and say, "Hey, guys, like, I'm going to do this thing over here instead"?

• 1:47Ivan Joseph?

  Oh, I wish I could give you the gospel on that, because that is harder to do than what I'm going to say. But here's where I always believe, and every time I have not done this, I have faltered. We all have that little tiny voice in our head. Whenever I don't listen to that little tiny voice in my head, I falter. And to me, that tiny little voice is... I don't know, I'm gonna now use some voodoo language. You know, you got your head voice and you got your heart voice. Whenever I make a decision purely logically, I always am bitter, right? If I buy the cheap car instead of the one I want, if I do like the practical decision instead of the emotional one, I'm always bitter. And then you got this little heart that's sitting there, that little self-conscious piece, that's telling you when you know when you're going south.

• 2:31Ivan Joseph?

  I don't know if it's your crap detector or your holy smoke detector. There's no science behind this. But anytime I don't listen to that voice, when I fall off my values and my principles, I go south. And it's cost me money, it's cost me friendships, it's cost me opportunities.

• 2:49Lewis Howes?

  How do you determine what your values and principles are when you're not sure?

• 2:54Ivan Joseph?

  Ah, it's a good question. I'm gonna walk you through a little exercise. I call it my purpose exercise. In the last eighteen months, what's the most important decision you've made? I'll do mine, right? And we'll share it for thirty seconds. In the last eighteen months, I gotta be careful with this one. But I've made a decision to take the vice president's job at Dalhousie University. I was the king of my fiefdom. I had all the freedom, all the things I want. And I made a decision to take that job.

• 3:21Lewis Howes?

  A decision I made was to get into a relationship.

• 3:24Ivan Joseph?

  Ah.

• 3:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, a new relationship in the last eighteen months, yeah.

• 3:28Ivan Joseph?

  You got now seven words, only seven, to tell me why you made that decision. And so I could be nice and fluffy. It was time for a new challenge, seven words. I could say, I had outgrown the job. I was bored, whatever it is, but seven words.

• 3:44Lewis Howes?

  She made me a better version of myself.

• 3:47Ivan Joseph?

  Ooh, nicely done.

• 3:48Lewis Howes?

  I don't know if that's seven, but...

• 3:49Ivan Joseph?

  Yeah, that's pretty close. Why her? So for me, why this job? The one word, and it's gotta be of value, the challenge.

• 3:57Lewis Howes?

  One word?

• 3:58Ivan Joseph?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Lewis Howes?

  Why her? Uh, vision. Five years ago, I had done a guided visualization of the dream person I wanted to be with.

• 4:06Ivan Joseph?

  Yeah.

• 4:07Lewis Howes?

  And she was the image of that.

• 4:09Ivan Joseph?

  So now, we've just found two values, right? One of my values is challenge. Hmm. One of your values is growth, vision, whatever that word is, this, you saw it. And so when you start asking yourselves these questions, what's the most important decision you made in work? What's the most important decision you've made in your family? What's the most important decision you did for yourself? What's the most important decision you make when taking on a conflict? That's the exercise I do to help me find my North Stars.

• 4:35Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 4:35Ivan Joseph?

  And whenever those things are in alignment, happiness, confidence, success, performance goes up. When they're not, sick days go up, disease goes up, conflict arises.

• 4:47Lewis Howes?

  Poor choices, yeah.

• 4:48Ivan Joseph?

  Right? And so those are the things you need to think about. Now, that's the exercise I use, but I find it very, very helpful.

• 4:57Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this Five Minute Friday. As always, check out LewisHowes.com for more School of Greatness inspiration, and find me on social media @LewisHowes. You can always text me the word PODCAST to 614-350-3960 to get weekly inspirational messages directly to your phone from me. And I'll leave you with this quote. Napoleon Hill said, "Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit." Remember, you are loved, you matter, and you're worth it.