First of all, I want to thank each and every single one of you of my own purposelessness for making this show possible with every episode you listen to, one of my most important goals for the new year is continuing to shape and improve on purpose to be an inspiring and relaxing listening experience for every person who honors me by listening to make this show possible, we work with some truly incredible sponsors that me and my team spend hours ensuring are a good fit for the on purpose mission and the interests of my listeners.

But in this New Year, we want to hear directly from purposelessness about what they want to hear on each episode. So go to pod survey dot com forward slash purpose and take a quick, anonymous survey that will help us truly understand how we can make all parts of the on purpose experience truly excellent. And not only will the survey help us, once you submit, you can enter to win a hundred dollar Amazon gift card terms and conditions apply again.

That's pod survey dot com forward slash purpose. Thank you so much for voicing your thoughts and I can't wait to hear them. Let's be honest, 2020 was tough. It's challenged us in ways we could have never imagined, but now we're stronger, wiser and ready to start 2021 on the right page. This is the year we're going to dig deep, love big and change the world by changing ourselves. Join me on January 20th, 2021 for my New Year.

New Habits, a five day program. I'll be going live for one full hour every day for five consecutive days, discussing the ways in which you can change your life from the inside out to register. Just go to jail.

Shaddai Genius Dot com forward slash 2021. Transformation begins with you and I can share with you tangible skills and techniques that are going to help you create the life you deserve. Five days, five workshops, one new beginning. Together we make 2021 our best year yet. Go to Jedi Genius dot com forward slash 2021 to register today. After the year we've had. I know everyone is eager to let go and start a new January gives us the opportunity to start over and I'm so excited to start that journey with you.

I can't wait to see you all on January 20th. Hundreds of thousands of you around the world supported things like a monk, my first ever book, and it's been incredible, you made it a number one New York Times bestseller. It was named on Put Down a Bull by Amazon because of each and every single one of you. But I know that as many of you that still haven't got it and some of you have been thinking about giving it to your friends, if that's you head over right now to think like a monk book dotcom, and you'll be directed to all the great retailers and stores and places that you can get the book right now, whether you want to copy for yourself or want to give to a friend, head over right now to think like a monk book dotcom.

We made it. Can you believe it? I know some of you are saying no, Jay, I really can't believe it, but we're here. We all know 2020 was tough, but we're here now. And I'm so delighted to be here today with you and starting 20, 21. Right. And I'm so extremely grateful that we're sharing this experience together. And we're going to get started for an incredible year. It's the day we've been waiting for.

Right. A fresh start. But just like all of those New Year's resolutions we make by a few weeks into the year, maybe by February or so, lots of us could be starting to get off track with our intentions. So today, I want to share with you some really positive and really powerful insights so that together we can set ourselves up to truly take advantage of this fresh start for 2021 with some strategies and tactics designed to stick. Alan Dorfman is the author of the book Change or Die The History of the Innovator's Aphorism and a writer for the magazine Fast Company.

In an article for Fast Company, Deutschman cites data that shows that given the choice to change our behavior or die, most of us would not change. Dr. Edward Miller, dean of the John Hopkins Medical School and CEO of the John Hopkins Hospital, describes how many patients who receive a heart bypass because of a dangerous blockage could implement lifestyle changes, such as lowering negative responses to stress, exercising more and eating healthier. That would likely prevent a future need for another bypass.

So here's a little quiz of these people. What percentage do you think actually made the recommended lifestyle changes? This was within two years of their first surgery. Was it a 10 percent? Was it B twenty eight percent or was it C, 38 percent? The answer, unfortunately, was a 10 percent. You heard that right, 90 percent of people who had told they could likely avoid another major cardiac event or the need for another major surgery by changing their lifestyle did not change their behavior.

Does that mean these people have given up? Did it mean they didn't want to live or want a better quality of life? Not at all. Most of us actually want to change something in our lives. But as I'm sure you know, and I definitely do, wanting to change and actually being able to change or making that change are two very different things. There was another study with serious heart patients, this one by Dr. Dean Ornish, who you've likely head of.

He's a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and the founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. Dr. Ornish and his team took 333 smokers with severely clogged arteries and helped them not only quit smoking, but also to switch to a vegetarian diet with less than 10 percent of their calories coming from fat. Pretty strict, right? You'd think most people wouldn't be able to stick to that. And yet, three years later, guess how many patients had stuck with the diet along with other lifestyle changes?

Was it, A, 57 percent? B, 67 percent or C, 77 percent? The answer is C, 77 percent, that's a huge difference from the 10 percent that Dr. Miller saw. So what was the difference? Dr. Ornish says it boils down to how you frame the change, scaring someone with the possibility of death. The data shows is less effective for most of us than motivating us with something more positive, such as a vision of a healthy, joyful life.

The other aspect, Dr. Ornish says, was important was to not just make changes to eating, but to provide psychological and spiritual support to. And how did they do this? By introducing the study participants to activities including meditation, relaxation, yoga and aerobic exercise. Everything we do in our genius community, the people felt so good from all of these changes that it motivated them to stick with it. The longer they stuck with it, the better they felt.

And so they continued to stick with it. We all want to change something right? We all want a fresh start in some area of our lives or to change some behavior or add a new behavior or build a certain strength. Well, today is a great day to start on that journey. And we're going to do it, like Dr. Ornish said, and frame it all from the positive to focus on the journey you want to take this year and what you want to experience more in your life.

Sound good?

Let's get started. We're going to prepare for our 2021 journey in three specific ways. I call the mindset mechanical and math.

OK, so our first way to prepare for a fantastic fun full of learning twenty, twenty one is to look at our mindset. Now, I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but I know a ton of my friends have and I've done it myself. Have you ever had that vacation that you've been getting ready for that you've been so psyched out about, maybe planning for months or even the whole year? And by the time you're packing and you're getting ready to leave and it's about the beginning, what's happening?

Visit that scene in your mind with me. What are you seeing? What are you feeling? Stress, right. What do I pack? Did I forget anything? Did we put out a note for the pet sitter? Would it really be as good as we thought he was going to be? Oh, no. Is the plane going to be like, where's our rubber? What a way to start a trip. Right. I have a friend who says that as a kid, when a family was getting ready to go for their annual week long trip to the beach, which they did every summer, she would essentially pack her suitcase, drop it off with a dad who is in charge of packing the car and then hide until it was time to leave.

That's because our parents were so stressed getting ready to go that everyone was just miserable. And I bet some of you are nodding if you've had those family trips or that's what happens with you and your family now or you and your partner. I know my wife and I can have our moments when we're both trying to tie things up and get ready for some time off. So as we set out on our 2021 journey here and now, let's make a deal.

Let's agree to not start it that way. Instead, let's spend some time and energy deliberately setting and choosing our mindset. And here's how we're going to do it with gratitude. What I love about gratitude is that in so many ways it wipes the slate clean, it shifts our perspective and gives us that fresh start. That's why in my book Think Like a Monk, I encourage you to start every day with gratitude or thankfulness. It gets our minds right.

It helps us start from a place of feeling abundant and supported. Now, I've talked and written a lot about gratitude, so chances are you're not surprised. I'm recommending that we start here, but there's some new research about gratitude I want to share because it's so cool and just so beautiful. And it really addresses a challenge. I know a lot of us ended 2020 with and might still be carrying into 2020. One writer, Marcel Proust, once said, let us be grateful for the people who make us happy.

They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Now, you might have heard me talk about the work of Kelly McGonigal. She's a professor and researcher at Stanford University and author of several books, including The Upside of Stress. Her research on stress is life changing, let me tell you. And it centers on this idea that stress itself is neither good nor bad. It's a reaction to stress in how we process it that impacts our mental and emotional health.

For better or worse, according to Dr. McGonagle, one of the most effective ways we can deal with stress and Meynet for its potential positives is to practice gratitude, but not just any kind of gratitude. Specifically, she says that it's the gratitude that focuses on others and their impact on our lives that's most effective, just like Proust is, quote, about the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Here's the other thing that's really cool, Dr. McGonigal says that stress is designed to motivate us to get us to do something.

In the case of the stress of loneliness, which I know so many of us have experienced. It's designed to move us to connect. And that's positive, right? We're not going to sit there and just keep feeling lonely, meant to do something about it. That's why it feels so stressful. But it can be hard to get going when you feel that way. That's where gratitude comes in. Dr. McGonigal says that when we can connect with and express gratitude for things others have done for us, it helps us feel more hopeful and not only willing to seek help and support, but also to offer help and support for others.

So we're going to kick off 20 one with a new gratitude practice every day for a week, each morning when you get up. I want you to spend three minutes diving deep into one beautiful or meaningful thing someone has done for you in your life. It could be your mother for supporting you as a kid, but try and get even more specific. You're grateful to your mom for all the amazing home cooked food she made your family or just showing up at your tennis matches or helping you with your homework or even to one specific time.

You're grateful for your best friend in fifth grade. For that time, he stood up to someone who is bullying you, and I want you to tell them. And it definitely can be something more recently. You're grateful for your boss for providing that mentorship and guidance on that project last month when you were struggling. You're grateful to your sister for tutoring your kid for their math test, and I want you to tell them so again, spend the next week, at least every morning, taking three minutes to deeply reflect on one thing someone else has done for you in your life, get as detailed as possible remembering sights, sounds and smells and what was said and send it to them as a text message, a voice know, a video message, whatever you feel like, express it.

If you set your mind set for gratitude and connection in that way, those will be things you'll feel more in 2021 because you'll be literally rewiring your brain to look for an emphasis on those things when they happen. OK, so the next week we're going to prepare for our 2021 journey is to get a tune up when you're going on a long car trip, especially if you've just spent a lot of hard driving over bumpy roads, you take your car to the mechanic, right.

To get things recalibrated and realigned. That's our second end. How are we going to recalibrate for this? Twenty, twenty one journey is to pause and take a look at ourselves, where we are and who we are. Neuroscientist David Eagleman says that as far as our brains are concerned, as adults, we're more like our peers than our childhood selves. And yet when we construct our understanding of who we are, we mostly based on our past selves.

We're using totally outdated data. So we're going to recalibrate our understanding of who we are by getting some fresh data. Now, there are lots of ways to get in touch with yourself that I've shared in past episodes. And in my book you can make a list of your values and where they come from. You can write down your wife or everything you want. Right now in life, you can spend 20 minutes every day in meditation and just see what comes up in your mind.

Those are all great. But today I wanted to share with you something new. This method is really effective, but it also fosters another opportunity to make deeper connections with your friends, family or co-workers to recalibrate your understanding of yourself. You're going to go on a little data gathering expedition among those who know you best.

I want you to pick one person from your personal life, one from your professional life and one from your family. And you're going to ask these people about skills and abilities that they find in you. And I want you to be really, really specific about what they understand. You want to ask deeper questions, like tell me a time when you thought I was at my best or when was the time that you really saw me perform or what was one of my qualities that you wish that I could work on more and develop?

You want to find really actionable, practical data such as I love the way you use humor to make other people feel welcome and comfortable, or you have this ability to take our discussions deeper by bringing in insights from lots of other fields. When I didn't do well on that geography test last month, you didn't make me feel stupid. You helped me learn a different way of looking at the material that made me feel like I could do it. Now you're starting to get real up to date picture of yourself, right?

You're starting to see yourself from others eyes. You're starting to see what's working and what your strengths are that you can go deeper on and maximize and what makes you uniquely you know, it's totally fine to ask people for the other kind of feedback as well on what you can do better. And I like to do that from time to time with people who I really trust to answer that question, both honestly and with care for my feelings before today, starting out this year, I want us to take that supremely positive approach, ask what am I doing right?

Right. What am I already doing? Really, really well. I want you to do that in January so that you can focus on it in February. You can even convene a feel good roundtable of resume with several people. Will you go around and tell each other honestly and in detail some of your greatest strengths? That way? It doesn't feel weird because you're doing it for each other and you're offering feedback as well.

OK, I'll find a way to prepare for our twenty twenty one journey and take advantage of our fresh start.

So we've got our mindset and our mechanical adjustment. Now, what else do we need to get going? We need some idea of where we're going. A map you've just learned about all these great things you've got going for you that you want to double down on. But no doubt you always have an area or two or twelve. That's me where you'd like to grow. So we're going to create a map and plot a destination. And the specific way I'm going to encourage you to do that is to pick a mentor, someone who embodies that quality of those qualities you're looking to grow this year.

You know, I'm big on mentorship. Here's the great thing. You don't even have to know your mentor. You mentor doesn't even have to be alive. But we can learn from their example. One of my greatest mentors is Martin Luther King Jr., the way he inspired people for a meaningful cause and connected people to his powerful words. Plus, he was deeply spiritual. All of this really inspires me, and those are things I've sought to cultivate in my life.

Maybe if you want to become better at relating to others, your mentor is Oprah Winfrey. Maybe if you want to be more strategic and thoughtful when it comes to business, it's your father or mother. That was the case for John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. His father was his business mentor for many years. Maybe if you want to cultivate innovation, patience or persistence, your mentor is someone like Sir James Dyson, who created more than 5000 versions of his famous cyclonic vacuum technology before finding the one that worked.

Once you've identified a mentor, you want to figure out basic, simple ways to connect with their example regularly. If it's not someone you can actually connect with in real life, you can read their work, watch videos of them speaking if they're available, read about their lives, tape, an inspiring fact about them or quote from them above your desk or put in your wallet. Some of you see it regularly enough that you won't forget it or you can put a picture of them up where you regularly see it.

In my office, I have photos of a. Inspiring people all over my walls and I made a bit of a hobby collecting powerful quotes like this one from Martin Luther King, life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others? Steve Jobs is another one of my mentors. For one year, I watched his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech every single day. I've also read his biography and pretty much everything else I can find about him.

Your mentor can help to provide that map for your journey. It's not that you want to mimic them or imitate them. You want to be yourself and combine those strengths you're developing with those great strengths you already have in place. But if you look at some of the geography your mentor has traveled, it can help provide you with your own map for developing those strengths. According to Harvard professor and author of the book The Rise, Dr. Sarah Lewis, when Martin Luther King was at seminary school, he actually received mediocre grades in public speaking.

I find that especially inspiring because as a kid, I was terrible at public speaking. In my book, I tell the story of being at school and forgetting my lines and literally getting laughed out of stage. If you want to learn how MLK took that journey to being a great speaker, you can identify some really actionable steps by simply Googling him and reading about his journey and watching videos of him speaking. So to create your map, think of one to two strengths you'd like to grow this year and find one person who represents those to you.

Then get a picture of them, write down a quote and start researching how they got that way.

And if it's someone you know, you can ask them, OK, so those are three exceptionally positive ways we're going to prepare to embark on this twenty, twenty one journey and make it a year to remember four great things for learning, for connection, for growth, for gratitude and for service. I'm so excited to be taking this journey with you. Please let me know how it's going, dropping out in the comments. Let me know how you're doing with your mindset and that gratitude practice.

Tag me on Instagram and let me know how you're going to find that mechanical adjustment. And your mentor. I'd love to hear from you and leever of you as well. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next week.

This podcast was produced by Dust Light Productions, our executive producer from Duss lt is Moesha Usif. Our senior producer is Julianna Bradley. Our associate producer is Jacqueline Castillo. Valentino Rivera is our engineer. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions and special thanks to Rachel Garcia, the dust like development and operations coordinator.