Humble the Poet: Transform Your Relationship With Anxiety (6 Strategies for Overthinkers

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey everyone, It's Jay Sheddy and I'm thrilled to announce
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experience on purpose in person. Join me in a city
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(00:25):
spark learning, and build real connections.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
I can't wait to meet you.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
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greet with photos.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Tickets are on sale now.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Head to Jsheddy dot me forward Slash Tour and get
yours today.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Don't say I'm anxious, Say I feel anxious because and
that allows you to be a human having an emotion
and trying your best to figure out why. Sharing your
anxious feelings in a way that you don't identify with them,
that invites connection and now we can talk about it.
And once we start revealing it, that's really the first

(01:07):
step to healing.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
The number one health and well in the podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Jay Setty, Jay Sheddy, see Lenly Jay shet Hey everyone, welcome,
back to On Purpose, the place you come to listen,
learn and grow. Today's guest is on for his third time.
Came on in season one. I'm always super grateful to
my friends who showed up when we were this tiny
little podcast trying to figure out our way, and when

(01:33):
they come back with new exciting information, reflections, revelations, I
can't wait to have them back on the show. Today's
guest is none other than Humble the poet, an artist, rapper,
spoken word artist, international best selling author, and former elementary
school teacher.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
If you didn't know.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Known for his tattoos, beard, head wrap, and infectious smile,
he captivates audiences with thought provoking ideas that challenge can
conventional wisdom. Humble's dynamic live performances have taken him to
major festivals all across the world, and he's been featured
in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and

(02:13):
hulf Post. Humble is the author of Unlearned Things No
One Else Can Teach Us, and here to talk about
his latest book, which I want you.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
To grab right now.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
It's called un Anxious Fifty Simple Truths to help overthinkers
feel less stress and more calm. If your goal this
year is to manage and navigate anxiety better, this is
the book for you. It's called Out Anxious. We'll put
the link in the comments. Welcome back to on Purpose,
My dear, dear friend, one of the realist guys I know,

(02:43):
someone that I slouch around when he's here, and my
full self because we do this offline anyway, Humble the poet.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Humble. It's great to have you back then.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
That's great to be here. Thank you so much. That
was an awesome intro.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Dude, It's just it's so fun when, like you know,
I've really been thinking about that first season so much lately,
and it's because there's so many guests who've kind of
come back. So we just had doctor daniel Lehman on.
It's been his fifth time he's been on in six years,
which is insane. Chloe Kardashian just came back on for
the second time, and she was one of those first

(03:15):
people that really helped us grow. And so it's just
like people who believed in the show when it was
you know, finding its way, and you were one of them.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
So I'm very grateful to you.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
I appreciate you having me back then. It's always been amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
You're the best, all right. I want to dive in
because this book. You dropped so many bars in this
book that I was like, the only way to do
the book justice and for people to realize it's worth
picking up is me to read stuff from the book.
And right in the introduction you say something, and I
think it just sets the tone for the rest of
the book. You say, anxiety isn't something that needs curing.

(03:52):
Why was that important for people to know right at
the beginning.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
I think when I started the journey, it was really
about meeting people where they're at. And I think now
how that mental health is, like mental health awareness has
really become normalized. It may have gone a little bit
too far with people identifying with certain things that they're
struggling with. And it's like, anxiety is not a problem.
It's not a disease, it's not dandruff. It's not a

(04:15):
condition that we have to deal with. It's a signal
it's here to help us. And what we need to
do is reevaluate our relationship with it. Right now, where
we're at is we medicate, avoid, and distract, and all
of those are understandable coping mechanisms. They help us in
the moment, they help us feel better, but none of
that in the long term is going to help us
become better. And what it is is we just have

(04:37):
to pay attention to what anxiety and anxious feelings are
trying to tell us. And the big thing with that
is changing our relationship in a way that makes us
not think like, oh, because I'm having anxious feelings, that
must be weak, something's wrong with me. Nobody else is
dealing with this, and it's like, no, you are absolutely
normal for having anxious feelings. And to start that's the

(04:57):
first idea. We have to understand, treating ourselves with grace
that this is completely normal. And then once we get there,
we can start this journey going from managing it in
helpful ways and then also growing from it. We don't
want to just keep soothing anxiety. We want to gain
strength through paying attention and understanding what it's trying to
tell us.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
One of the things me and you talk about a
lot when we're having our offline conversations is this difference
in the idea of East and West. So the Western
ideology is I had anxiety, I don't have it anymore,
So everything's painted as this before and after, and we
know that the East, which we both take inspiration from,
is more cyclical, where it's like, well, wait a minute,

(05:36):
anxiety isn't going to go away. It's going to keep
showing up in my life in different ways. Now, if
anxiety shows up in the same way, it's because I'm
not learning, I'm not strengthening, I'm not hearing the signal
as you just called it, absolutely, and it's going to
show up in different ways because even if I hear
the signal of anxiety here, anxiety is going to show
up in another way over here. And so I love
that you really make it clear off the bat that

(05:58):
this isn't about solving a problem. Yeah right, it's not
about getting rid of it.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah. What I'm promising in the book is I'm not
promising to cure anxiety. I'm promising to cure the despair
around anxiety. And the despair is when we feel hopeless
because we don't think we have options. So this book
is full of options to better understand anxiety and to
go from managing to striving and growing and becoming stronger
from it. And because we feel hopeless, that's where we

(06:25):
stop and a lot of the tension that we carry
comes from resisting these emotions. It's not the emotions themselves.
Anxious feelings aren't harming us. Resisting and avoiding these anxious
feelings or what's actually doing the damage.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Oh, I love that. I love that.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
I think it resonates so strongly with me because I've
been thinking a lot about how when you're anxious about something,
you feel like you only have two options. So it's
like I either overcome this and my life's going to
be better, or I'm stuck with this for the rest
of my life and my life's over right. We kind
of get these two extreme options and the fact that
you're saying, well, wait, wait a minute, there's a third option, fourth,

(07:00):
and there's fifty in here. That's actually what we all
want to feel. I remember when I was anxious about
the fact that I hated my job, my career wasn't
really going where I wanted it to go. But then
I was anxious about leaving. I realized the problem was
my anxiety was all based on the fact I had
limited options.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
I thought, I.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
Either stay somewhere I hate, or I leave, and then
I'm lost because I don't know what's gonna come. And
as soon as I started updating my LinkedIn resume and
I saw other job offers coming in and there are
other options, I was like, oh, it's not as bad anymore.
But nothing really changed apart from the fact that I
could see a few steps further. What have you found
is the best way to open up your mind to

(07:41):
more options when you're in a position where you feel
imprisoned and trapped by your thinking.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
So I love the idea that curiosity is courage in disguise.
And what we realize is is often when we have
this kind of dualistic thinking, this is good, this is bad,
this will help, this will hurt, that's us limiting our scope,
as you said, and that's us being judgmental. And the
only antidote to that is to be curious, is to
ask more questions, to explore the gray between the black

(08:08):
and white. And as we start doing that, more options arise,
and we also start to realize often the fear that
I'm dealing with is related to a story that I've
told myself that I can only do this, or I've
gone so far, I've climbed this mountain, and now people
will seeing them a failure if I have to climb
all the way back down to find a new mountain.
So I realized, keeping our mind open, keeping our hearts open,

(08:30):
requires curiosity, and that really is what courage is. And
often we think this is a light switch. We think,
you know, either I'm confident or I'm not confident. I'm
going to fix this or I'm not. And it's like, really, no,
it's a dimmer and it's not simply a failing on
our part if we start to feel like this. We
live in a society that really encourages us to Okay, well,
if this is difficult, let's rearrange our lives to avoid it.

(08:52):
You know. A personal story for example, this book was
inspired through one of our conversations when I was reaching
out to you to come on the podcast the Last Book,
and I explained that I feel a lot of anxiety
around asking for help and you know, and you said
many beautiful words to me to help soothe that, but
I didn't address the fear of rejection I had. I
didn't address any of that. And then I caught myself saying, well,

(09:14):
you know what, maybe this will be the last book
and I'll never have to ask for a favor. Again,
that is not healing. That is me rearranging my life
so I don't have to face the thing that is
giving me anxious feelings. And there's no growth in that.
That is me temporarily managing it because I'm going to
have to ask for help. And what we have to
realize is these challenges are an invitation for growth. Our

(09:37):
triggers are an invitation for growth. There's an opportunity here
for us to not only deal with them in a
healthy way, but then also to growth through them because
all of our growth happens outside of our comfort. And
that's a really interesting thing where I've realized, I'm like, Okay,
I can feel better by avoiding asking for help, or
I can be better by leaning into this and being
okay with that.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
It's powerful when you paint that picture. Because I'm sitting there,
I mean, I'm trying to think about all the times
I've avoided things that I didn't want to do. And
I remember at one point I just avoided working out,
Like I love playing sport, but I just didn't want
to work out. I didn't enjoy it. I come up
with loads of excuses. I arranged my life in a
way that I didn't have to do it. And as

(10:17):
I grew older and you realize the value of getting
stronger and taking care of your body, not just esthetically
but for the purpose of health, like to actually live
a healthy life, a strong life. You start going, well,
wait a minute, actually, it was only doing the thing
and turning up when I didn't want to that has
left me feeling better and stronger as opposed to when
I was running away from it, I was just getting

(10:38):
weaker and weaker.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
And that's exactly how we should look at mental health.
I think right now we're looking at mental health like
it's this very fragile crystal that we have to protect
from the world and like, oh, I'm going to avoid
this person to protect my mental health. No, and mental
health is a tool, it's a muscle. It's what allows
us to deal with struggle. Struggle isn't the enemy. Struggle
is the vehicle that makes us more of a that

(11:00):
makes us more emotionally strong, that makes us more self aware.
Every time we have a negative experience that we get triggered,
we're giving ourselves data. That data is a gift for
our self awareness so we can better understand who we
are and it's just like you said, if you want
to help me move a couch, working out at the
gym and voluntarily lifting heavy things, we'll prepare you for that.

(11:20):
It's the same thing with our mental health. We have
to voluntarily put ourselves in uncomfortable situations. We have to
challenge ourselves on purpose voluntarily, so when challenges find us,
we're more resilient, we're more confident, we'll feel more safe
to deal with that stuff.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, and this isn't about making your life harder. It's
being able to make your life harder in a controlled,
choice based environment. Like it's not like just like you're
not just training drama in your life. That's not the point.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Definitely not drama. But I think the name of the
podcast on purpose. When you discover your purpose, even if
you devote fifteen minutes to like digging in and picking
up as much weight with that purpose as possible, that's
going to energize you to a level that most of
us never experience until we figure out that thing that matters.
So it's really not about adding drama to our lives.

(12:09):
But it's really about carrying as much weight as we
can to see how strong we can be. We can
only get stronger through struggle, and if we voluntarily put
ourselves in stressful situations. And it could be even like
think video games. We're not going to buy a video
game if it's easy. You know. We want there to
be a challenge. We want to fall on our face,
get back up and try again. And it's the same
thing with life. It's this is how our batteries get charged.

(12:32):
It comes through choosing to do hard things voluntarily on purpose.
And that can be anything for some people. It could
be a specific art. It could be drawing, it could
be working out, it could be jiu jitsu, it could
be any type of challenge. And this is going to
charge our batteries so much more than a two week
vacation lying on a beach doing absolutely nothing.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, and it builds more confidence, right, because when you're
doing difficult things.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
I always say to people.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Someone asked me the other day, they said, Jay, how
do I feel confident before I do this? And I said,
I never feel confident before I do something. I feel prepared,
I feel organized, and I feel practiced. I feel confident
after I conquer it. So when I'm about to give
a talk, I don't feel confident before I give a talk,
But I know I've practiced, I know I've prepared, and

(13:17):
I know I'm organized. Now I give the talk, and
then I feel confident because I've built and you muscle
built a new skill, whatever it may have been. And
so this idea that I need to feel confident before
I do something, I need to not feel anxiety before
I do something is actually quite unnatural. How do we
get comfortable with discomfort? How do we get comfortable with

(13:39):
uncertainty when we're wired to want things to feel good
and be comfortable.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
I think it's recognizing that a we're wired for a
world that we don't live in anymore. So we are
getting way too much stimuli. We're comparing ourselves to way
too many people, we know way too many people. You know,
we're really wired to be in much smaller communities. And
bringing up this concept of confidence I think is really
important because it goes back to that idea that it's
not a light switch. I like to think about reading.
We didn't not know how to read, and then one

(14:06):
day know how to read. We started by learning the alphabet,
learning the sounds, two little words, three little words, four
little words, until we could all read big, complex novels.
That was like a fourteen to fifteen year journey. You know,
we may not have realized that was happening because it
was in school. It was fun. We may not have
had a choice we had to go anyways. But as adults,
the thing is all of our growth came from doing

(14:28):
the struggling with a book when you were reading it. Now,
as we become idols, we avoid all these things that
are struggling. And it's really reevaluating our relationship with difficult
things and challenges. And it's absolutely correct. Both motivation and
confidence they don't come before action. You can't wait till
you're motivated to do something. Doing something will make you motivated,

(14:49):
Doing something will make you confidence. And this also brings
up a really important idea that as we have this conversation,
this is really going to hit people logically like, oh
that makes so much sense. That makes so much sense.
But for the body to really believe this, you can't
make sense to the body. You have to practice this. Yeah,
you know, if I asked you to stand up and
fall backwards and I say I'll catch you, your brain

(15:09):
might be like I trust them. Your body is still
going to be a little bit nervous. Let's say I
catch you, and then I'm like, let's do it again.
You'll be a little less nervous, but you're still going
to have some nerves. We might have to do it
fifteen times for your body to completely trust the process.
We have to practice. Practice makes progress, and we have
to get out of this binary of like I can't

(15:29):
do it, or I'm perfect at it. I can't do it,
or I've mastered it. We have to just continually be
on a journey and celebrate the progress that comes from that,
and that progress is what builds our confidence and slowly
turn up that dial because that's the only way it's
going to happen.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
You say, anxiety overestimates the threat and underestimates our ability
to deal with it absolutely.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
What did you mean by that?

Speaker 3 (15:52):
So I heard a really interesting quote which was anxiety
is when your intelligence grows quicker than your courage.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Hmm, okay, yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
And oftentimes when when we're younger, we accomplish amazing things
that we don't know we're supposed to be afraid of it.
We don't even know we're be afraid of playing on
the street or what have you. What the stresses are.
You may have accomplished something where the odds were against you,
but you didn't know the odds, so you didn't feel
that anxiety. So when our intelligence grows, now all of
a sudden, our imagination is being used to invent threats,

(16:20):
right to detect threats, things that may or may not happen,
and then that holds us back from actually acting because
the triggers are at Magdalah. We have a little tiny
part of our brain, the side of an almond, called
the amygdalah. In the book, I call it our survival brain,
and it's like a very undertrained but loving bodyguard that
wants to protect you from everything. But its definition of
danger is uncertain, unrecognizable, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and these we know

(16:46):
aren't things that are actually dangerous. Struggle isn't danger, challenge
isn't danger. But when we come across that, we're gonna
speak ourselves out of it. So it's really important to
understand this kind of idea that we need to feel
the fear and do it. Anyways, resilientiance doesn't feel good
when you're being resilient, when you have to be resilient,
when you have to be strong, it's not going to

(17:07):
be a great feeling, and that's okay. Building resilience voluntarily
doing difficult things may not be a good feeling, but
that's okay because we're not here to live a life
without suffering. We're here to see our own potential and
see how much we can endure. And again, it's not
about putting yourselves in uncomfortable and dangerous situations. It's about
realizing that life is chaotic, life is random, most of

(17:30):
it is out of our control. Let's stop tensing ourselves
by trying to hold onto everything, let the chips fall
where they may, and trust ourselves that we can handle
whatever's come in our way.

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(19:07):
years I'd given talks about how failures are stepping stones
to success and how like you got to feel the
fear and do it anyway. And then I remember when
I went through some real stuff and I was like, oh,
and at the same time, I remember that I'd been through,
like you just said, real stuff when I was younger,

(19:28):
and I never gave myself credit for it because I
just assumed that that's what life was. I didn't realize
how much hardship i'd been through in my early years
because to me, it was just normal. And I think
that's true for a lot of people. And then there's
the other side of it, where it's like I may
talk about these ideas, I may hear them, but then
life's going to throw a challenge at me.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Where I actually have to apply what I've learned.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
And you say something in the book where you say
home is where the anxiety starts. I think a lot
of us feel that we felt the anxiety of our parents,
we felt the anxiety of our siblings, we felt the
anxiety of the extended family, and we kind of just
ingested all of it.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, and then it's only.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Decades later that you kind of even realize that you
might be sitting at like a dinner table at a
holiday dinner at your parents' house, or you're sitting around
with your family and you go, wait a minute, everyone
here is carrying anxiety, and you can actually see it,
but then you realize you've kept onto it for decades.
What do you do when you feel like you've been
carrying the baggage of anxiety that you picked up when

(20:30):
you were a kid and you have an unpacked for
twenty years.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
I think the first thing is be super super nice
to yourself. You know, imagine eight year old you is
dealing with these complex adults with their emotions, and they
grew up at a time or emotional intelligence and being
able to communicate an emotion wasn't a thing. So your
coping mechanisms and your survival mechanisms, your your mental health
tried its best to adapt the best it could with

(20:56):
your limited eight year old nine year old brain, and
then those coping mechanisms became habits. And then as adults,
we continue those coping mechanisms even though we have access
to more helpful ones. And instead of looking back and
being like, well, I'm a product of all this trauma,
or I'm a product of I made all these poor
choices and now I'm stuck in this habit loop, just
be like, look, my mental health has always been on

(21:16):
my team. It's always been helping me. Now we just
need to upgrade it with family. I do view them
as the ultimate boss in this world of anxiety because
it's like they can push our buttons because they install
the buttons.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah, I love that point.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
And there's that and I always think about even in
my household words like I have a lot, I get
along with my family great. Just stepping into my childhood
home brings up anxious feelings. It reminds you of versions
of yourself that you don't want to remember. And I
think the idea that really helped me realize this was like,
if you learn the lesson, you won't be afraid of

(21:51):
the test. So I think what ends up happening is
when we have these feelings again, these are signals. It's
like the smoke detector going off. Instead of pulling out
the battery, ripping the smoke detector off the ceiling, putting
a piece of tape over the light, let's look for
the smoke, you know. So when we're at home and
these anxious feelings start coming up, this is an opportunity

(22:12):
for us to start exploring and figuring out what it is.
And as simple as feeling the feelings, you know, and
maybe in a moment it may not be the best
time for you, So do whatever you do to suits.
You know, if it's if you got to go and
look at your phone, please do what you got to do.
Look at your phone. If you've got to go distract yourself,
if you've got to medicate, you got to go have
a cigarette, whatever you normally do. Cool. But the next day,
when you're well rested, you've had a glass of water,

(22:34):
you're hydrated, you know, you haven't read a bad text message,
your bad email. Yet you're in a good place. Voluntarily
go back into that. Maybe pull out a journal and
be like, what is it about my family situation that's there?
And now you're in a good place to peel back
these layers and voluntarily lean into a trigger. And once
we lean into it, that's the way it's actually going
to heal. And then once it heals, we'll have room

(22:57):
for something new to come. It's never going to be
I've healed and I live ever after. We're not. We
don't live this linear life. It's a cycle. And as
you said, like you thought you can handle stuff until
something new came. That's not a feeling on your part.
That's the next level for you to build that strength
and then as you as you've come out of that,
which I've definitely seen you have, and you've come out
much more wise, much more strong, and much more compassionate,

(23:19):
much more kind to yourself and other people. Now something
new may come, a new curveball may come, and as
you continue practicing your swing, you'll be able to handle
that as well. And that's what I believe our mental
health should be, should be this confidence that, hey, it
will be hard, but I'm not afraid of heart. Having
a hard day does not mean I've experienced trauma. Having
a person that is difficult to be with doesn't instantly

(23:41):
make them toxic. You know, we've got to this point
where mental health awareness has increased, but we may have
swung the pendulumvel too far where now we've created identities
out of these things. Let's not create an identity. It's okay,
things are going to be challenging and let's train and
trust ourselves to handle it. And that's only going to
come through practice.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
So in England, I remember when I was at school,
we'd have fire drills, right and even here you have
a fire drill and it's like that fire drill may
or may never come like the real thing may or
may never come, but you're prepared, yes, and now you
know that even in the face of a fire drill,
you know what to do, you know what the exit is,
you know what to take one not to take, you

(24:19):
know where to line up outside school, whatever it may be.
And I think that's what it is for life. It's
almost like you can't fire drill everything, because that's where
anxiety comes from too, because you're like, I'm going to
prepare for everything possibly bad that could happen, and that
could be an unlimited list. But at the same time,
it's having the confidence that I've built the skills to
know I can deal with certain things. And by the way,

(24:41):
there will be curveboards that I don't have a clue with.
I want to go back to what you said about family.
What do you do when the family that, as you said,
installed the buttons, when they push them, what do you do?

Speaker 3 (24:53):
I think immediately in terms of managing them, you know,
before we worry about growing through it. The magic word
is going to be boundaries. And I think what's important
is we define boundaries in a way that matters. Boundaries
is teaching people how to be with you and your
boundaries can be universal. For example, I can have a boundary. Listen,
if you were gonna remind me of my age and

(25:14):
that I haven't gotten married and had any kids yet,
and that you know I'm not living out my purpose
in life, then obviously I'm not gonna call this much mom,
you know, But if anybody else does that, it's going
to be the exact same thing. It's teaching people say, listen,
this is how I expect to be treated. I'm not
telling you what to do, but if I'm not treated
this way, I probably won't be around here. And this

(25:37):
is what my I'm setting a standard and I'm really
teaching you how to be around me. And I think boundaries,
at the end of the day, are saying I care
about you so much that I want to improve our dynamic.
And I think that's a really important thing when it
comes to family, because that's the hardest place to set
up boundaries because everybody is so used to it. And
I'll be completely honest when somebody has hit me with boundaries,

(25:59):
it was uncomfortable for me. You're still used to things
being a certain way. Sudden change for anybody is not
going to be comfortable, and we have to approach this
with a lot of grace, grace for ourselves and grace
for other people. So I think boundaries is generally the
first place, and then also having context and just being like, look,
they really did try their best. When I worked with
the therapist, they were always reminding me, listen, your parents

(26:20):
were in survival mode. They may not have been the
most emotionally nurturing, but they were trying to put food
on the table. They were trying to make sure you
were good, you were safe, and like, that's what they
were doing. That's all the tools that they had. And
I think it's really important because what I realized, especially
in the last year, is the kinder and more gracious
I am to myself, the kinder and more gracious I
can be to other people, and vice versa. The more

(26:43):
I put an effort to be more understanding and kinder
to other people, the more effort I can put to
be kinder and more gracious to myself. And that's removing judgment,
which takes us back to courage through curiosity.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
And that's the thing that even when you set boundaries,
that person's still going to break your boundary. If you
set the boundary, which I'm just going to use you
as as an example. If you talk to me about
getting married and having kids in all this traditional way
of living, I'm going to talk to you less. You
may find that even when you make an effort to
talk to that person, they still bring it up. You

(27:16):
may find whenever they get an opportunity they message you
about it. So they're going to do that anyway. I
think the challenge people have is they feel guilty for
not loving their family, not being seen as a good person.
Maybe they even feel guilty for not delivering on the
promise that they're or the expectation that their parents have,
and then that guilt and shame, which you call like

(27:37):
anxieties BFFs, Like it's really weird because you're like, now
going you're breaking your boundary to make yourself feel better
for how you take care of that person or because
you just love them, but now you're breaking it. But
then they upset you again, so it gets really messy,
Like how do we really define it in a way
that we go, Yes, that makes sense, now I know

(27:58):
why I'm going to keep it that way.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
I think it's not even guilt. I think I realized
over time it's people pleasing, it's abandoning ourselves for somebody else.
I think true guilt is when we abandon who we
are based on our own values.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
You know.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
Let's say you were having a bad day and you
spoke to somebody that you cared about in a way
that you don't normally do, and then a little bit
time goes by, you're like, I really.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Wish I didn't do that, And that's guilt.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
To me, that's authentic, that's great, that's betraying who you
authentically are. Now the idea of like, oh, well, I'm
speaking to Jay and he keeps bringing up these things
I don't want to talk about, but I really don't
want to let him down. I don't want to make
him upset because he doesn't hear from me anymore. That's
me trying to absorb your pain. That's me thinking because
a lot of us do that in childhood. We absorb

(28:48):
other people's pain because we don't believe in their resilience either, like, well,
I can handle it. I'll handle their pain. I don't
want to make my mom upset. I can handle their pain.
I'm robbing you of the resilience that's going to come
from you dealing with that challenge, and I'm betraying myself,
increasing my own anxious feelings. And so I think, what
we really need to do, And I have a quote
the book, you can't guilt a caterpillar into becoming a butterfly.

(29:11):
You know, we can't speed any of this up. So
I really think sometimes when we use this word guilt,
it really goes around us romanticizing some of these things.
But really what it is it's people pleasing. It's wanting
people to like us at the expense of us ever
actually experiencing any real love. Establishing boundaries and then honoring
your own boundaries. That's being your best friend, that's protecting

(29:32):
yourself to a level. And as I said, this is
just the beginning to manage it. At the end of
the day, the secret here isn't to avoid these people,
is to open a dialogue, open more vulnerability, build the connection,
figure out where they're coming from, and strengthen the relationship. Accordingly,
it's not we don't want to get to this point
where anybody who presents any type of struggle or challenge
for us we just continually cut them off from our lives,

(29:54):
because this is just us rearranging our life to make
it easier. No, we got to lean into the challenges,
but just immediately, the boundaries got to be the first step.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
That's a great redefinition like that understanding. I don't think
I've ever heard anyone say that before about that difference
between authentic guilt and people pleasing.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Because you're so right.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
That resonated completely, that idea that if I was if
I was rude to someone, I would think about that
the whole day because I'd be upset because I know
that's not who I am. It's very different to like, oh,
I want to make sure that that person likes me again,
and that I hope that they Yeah, it's such a
such a great redefinition and one of the biggest places
we fit it as home, as you say, but we

(30:34):
also feel it with our friends. And you talk about
how anxious friends equals anxious you. To challenge today is
a lot of our friends are anxious. If we get
rid of all of our anxious friends, we may not
have any friends left.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
So what do we do?

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Because I feel like, also all of our friends have
different anxieties. Someone's anxious about their career, someone's anxious about
their relationship, someone anxious about their appearance. Someone's anxious about this,
how do you deal with an anxious friend?

Speaker 3 (31:02):
When we started talking about the specifics of like I
have anxious feelings around my job, anxious feelings around my parents,
what we're still saying is, you know this anxiety around
things out of our control, anxious feelings about things that
remind us of previous danger, anxious feelings about things that
feel unfamiliar. And I think these become the headings that
we can connect on if I'm vulnerable with you. When

(31:23):
I share a vulnerable story, I'm generally going to be
nervous about it because I'm afraid that you're going to
judge me. And I'm sure your listeners have been in
that situation. But the vast majority of the time that
we're vulnerable with somebody, we're inviting them to be vulnerable
with us. In the book, I talk about this idea
of my friend in Berlin inviting me to a spa

(31:43):
and I was excited to go to this spa and
had hurt my shoulder dragging a broken suitcase. And we're
on the way to the spa and he goes, I
love how open minded you are, and I was like,
why are you thanking me for being open minded. And
then I realized he mixed up the word spa with sauna,
and we are going to an all nude sauna and
I'm about to see and this is the longest friendship

(32:05):
I've ever had. I've been his friends since we're three.
So I'm about to see him naked and a whole
bunch of other people naked in Berlin and the voices,
and I realized I wasn't afraid of being naked. I
was afraid of being judged and afraid of standing out,
afraid of not understanding a custom. How this is going
to work. I'm in a different continent. And the first thing,
you know that helped was admitting to him because he

(32:28):
had just propped me up, saying, you're so open minded.
I love that you're willing to do this. I didn't
want to let him down. My people pleasing started to
come up, but I'm like, look, now that you've clarified
what this is like and this is not just a
candlelight massage, I'm very nervous. And his response was I'm
nervous too, and we strengthened the connection and it wasn't
the easiest experience. But we got through it and it

(32:48):
was a funny story, and you had to realize every
thing that makes us interesting is a challenge that we've
made ourselves go through. And I think the first step again,
and I'm always gonna say this is the first step,
not the absolute solution. It's going to be sharing your
anxious feelings in a way that you don't want identify
with them. I'm encouraging people and I got this from
Melo Robbins. Don't say I'm anxious, say I feel anxious

(33:12):
because and that allows you to be a human having
an emotion and trying your best to figure out why
I feel anxious because I'm about to be naked in
front of you and a whole bunch of other people
in this country, and I don't know if people are
going to judge me or what have you. And I
think that invites connection and if you get and someone

(33:33):
else will be like, oh, I feel anxious because I
don't know if I have job security. And now we
can talk about it, and once we start revealing it,
that's really the first step to healing, you know, jay
Z said it, because you can't heal what you don't reveal.
And we all know there's a value to this, because
every single person has felt super stressed in their brain
about how much things they have to do, and then

(33:53):
they're write down the to do list and it's like
three things, and they're like, why did that feel so
heavy in my brain? It's just getting it out is important.
And we are, again in a society that structures a
lot of individualism, a lot of isolation. We need community.
It's not, as I said, it's not about cutting off
your friends who feel anxious. Everybody feels anxious, and we

(34:14):
probably shouldn't label them as our anxious friends. However, if
they decide to cling onto the identity and they are
more interested in proving how hard life is versus looking
at it as an opportunity to improve from it, then
that definitely is a friendship worth reevaluating.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Explain how this friend did not know the difference between
his spat.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
I believe it was.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
You know what, yeah, he I honestly believe. He had
lived in Germany for eight years at that point, born
and raised in Canada, across the street from me. He's
of Jamaican descent, and he had gotten married and they
both moved to Berlin together, and I guess maybe eight
years of him not speaking English every day, but it
was most definitely I remember it vividly taking one of

(35:00):
my parents' suitcases back then, because this is when I
just started traveling, and you know, my parents bought us,
you know, like six pieces for like thirty bucks, like cheap.
Don't buy cheap luggage. There's a reason. And the wheel
broke off and I was in London and I was
dragging it up the stairs from the tube and I
had pulled a muscle in my shoulder and I was
so excited for a massage and he said. I remember,
She's like, yeah, we're gonna go to the SPA. It's

(35:20):
gonna be great. It was definitely him not speaking enough
English for eight years, and it totally and it ended
up becoming a situation where you know, now it's a
great story, but all the emotions were there and it
didn't get easier the moment I was there. The longer
I stayed there, the more my body was able to trust, Okay,
this is the thing again, and this is the big thing.
Our brains will understand this immediately, our bodies have to

(35:43):
catch up. And the way to reinforce it with our
bodies is through practice. We have to practice this. We
can't just hear an inspirational quote once and be like,
all right, I figured it out. We have to practice.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
So you're encouraging everyone goes to it needs fun.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
Definitely going to go to an as but definitely, yeah,
ud do the things we're like, I can't do this.
When you voluntarily do something that you think I can't do.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
It's the same as sitting in the cold. What you did,
I mean.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Sitting in the cold. Definitely want of those things. And
even that, what I've realized too is like, you know,
got to go to poland got to train in the cold,
you know, at the invite of Lewis house, and the
irony of that was like, you know, sitting with Mike
Poulsner in the ice for ten minutes freestyle wrapping, feeling
like I'm the most resilient person ever. Fast forward six
months ago, I am in asana with Lewis and we're

(36:29):
just chatting. He goes, you want to take a dip
in the pool. So this is October in la and
I went in the pool and I couldn't stay in
for ten seconds because I didn't keep practicing. Yeah, there's
a value to the practice, but if you don't keep practicing,
and in terms of having self compassion, that's okay.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
I used to be able to sit in the ice
for ten minutes. Now I can take a cold shower
for three seconds. But I can get back there through practice.
My doll just went back the other way, and I
think that's really important. We have seasons, seasons where we
can be more resilient and build more resilience, and then
we have seasons where it's like, no, I'm just in survival.
I can just do the bare minimum. And I think
that's absolutely okay.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
I agree.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
Yeah, we create so much extra tension with these expectations
we have of ourselves, and it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
Help, especially when you lock in a new habit. Then
when it breaks, you're just beating yourself up about not
having that habit. So like, I've been working out consistently
this year, probably like four or five times a week,
and I feel great, and then last week I was
on the road and I genuinely just couldn't work out.
I was in a different city every day, I was
barely in the hotel. I would have been having to
work out like ten pm or something, and I prioritized

(37:31):
my sleep over my workout, and there was a part
of me that was just beating myself up, going, ah, man,
you just missed four days. You didn't work out, Like,
oh man, you know you have got the discipline.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Whatever it is.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
That doesn't make you want to get back on it,
That just makes you feel worse. Whereas then I gave
myself grace by the end of it, and I was like, look,
you know what, I needed some time off. I also
slept really well. I also didn't get sick because I
wasn't pushing myself. And by the way, I'm really excited
to get back to working out this week when I'm
home because I've had a bit of break and my
body needed it while I was traveling, and all of
a sudden, you're refreshed. And so there's so much truth

(38:05):
in the fact that guilt blocks growth. You don't guilt
yourself into becoming better. It doesn't work that way. You
encourage yourself, like you got to talk to yourself. I
think they've done studies where they looked at how teachers
talk to students, and you used to be a teacher.
Teachers who just told their students that they weren't small.
They didn't figure it out. That never made a student better.
Student who believed that their teacher believed in them made

(38:29):
a huge difference to their result in their psychology.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
Absolutely, the big lesson that we were taught when speaking
with children was addressed the behavior, not the student. So
if a student was doing something that they shouldn't be
doing it, you'd be like, hey, that choice. I'm not
a fan of that choice. Can we can we crumple
up that choice and throw it in the garbage. You
you're a great person, but I can't see how great
you are when you make that choice. And I realized

(38:52):
that when we speak to ourselves, we're still speaking to
a little eight year old inside of us. There'sn't in
a child there that needs to be spoken with love
and grace. It's not coddling, it's actually realizing that we
have to be our own best friend. We have to
be our own biggest advocate and viewer through the lens
of is it helpful? Is it really helpful? Especially for
folks who are like self employed, are trying to do things?

(39:13):
Is it helpful to continually guilt yourself to do stuff?
Do you get better results that way? Is it taking
you where you want to go? Or can we have
the conversation of like, hey, okay, you know what, you
were making a lot of progress working out. You know,
you were seeing great things happen, and now all of
a sudden you got to go on tour and now
it may be eating room service and it may be
sleeping in different time zones, and that's okay, that's what

(39:36):
this requires, and then we'll get back to the other
stuff and that's totally good. And for me it's always like, hey,
maybe one more game of FIFA before we start. And
then for me, the big one was like, hey, let's
go back in our history. You've been humbled upon with
self employed for well fifteen years now. Have you ever
played too many video games and messed up? Did you
ever mess up a deadline? Did you ever mess up

(39:57):
an opportunity because you played too many video games? No? Us,
trust us. Let's trust ourselves. Go back into your own
history and let that be the support and to speak
to these words because a lot of these voices are
not ours. They sound like us. They were both written
by other people, these criticisms for somebody else, and they
just sound like they're our voice. And we give them value.
We don't have to believe everything we think, because those

(40:19):
thoughts are often there just to keep us in staces.
It's like, well, we're going to try to scare you
guilty to stay where you are because if you try
something new, we consider something new dangerous.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, and it's not.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
It leads nicely on the next thing I wanted to
pick out, which you said, don't should all over yourself.
So I should be more productive, I should be happier.
I should have this figured out by now. I should
work out five days a week even when I'm traveling.
I should never make mistakes. I should be in a
relationship by now. I think we have so many should

(40:50):
and should, as you clearly say, doesn't create a shift.
None of us do more when we think we should
do something. And you know what, don't you feel this
way that we all know what we need to do.
Even when I'm giving a keynote, I'm recording a podcast,
it might I'm thinking everyone already knows what they need
to do. Most people, unless you do something specific, like

(41:11):
I'm trying to figure out how to build a business
and I need to I don't. I may not know,
but most of us know what we need to change
in our life, like we're actually quite aware of it.
What is the block? From I know to I am?
And in the middle, it's like, the should is what
ruins it? Almost right, we keep saying I should work

(41:31):
out four times a week because we know we should.
But then why is the should the block?

Speaker 3 (41:37):
I think the should is the language of perfectionism, And
you know, it's the idea that everything needs to be
perfect because we're afraid. And one thing that we do
to try to counter this fear is have control. So
it should become the language perfectionism. Perfectionism gives us the
illusion of control, but the reality is perfectionism isn't about
making things better, it's about finding flaws easier. So what

(42:00):
we start to do is constantly look for flaws and
that way that keeps us from having to do stuff right.
So a lot of it's the same way I'm saying,
curiosity is courage in disguise. A lot of this is
fear in disguise. You know what it really what we're
really just addressing is the fact that we're scared. And
here's the thing, It's okay to be scared. And what
I would encourage anyone to look at is like, maybe

(42:21):
the step you're trying to take is just too big,
and maybe we've got to break it down in something
a little bit more manageable, into baby steps. And if
those baby steps feel too big, let's do micro baby steps.
Then let's do micro baby tiptoes. Let's keep going smaller
and smaller until that next step feels manageable, because the
only thing we have to do is know what that
next step is and try it. And I think this

(42:42):
goes back to having grace for ourselves, and this is
why we overthink again. It goes back to this idea
that we're so afraid that we're gonna trick ourselves to
think that we're solving a problem by constantly running it
on a treadmill and going through loop and now we're
just inventing new problems to solve them. And all of
that results in nothing, but it comes to anxious feelings.
You can't think your way out of them. You have

(43:03):
to act your way out of them. You know, there
is something brilliant about Nike's saying, just do it. It
really is. Just do it. It really is feel to
fear and do it anyways and again, these are catchy
lines that we've heard a million times. Our body isn't
going to immediately accept them. We have to start small
and practice that every day and say, you know, for
five minutes, I am going to just do it.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
I do jiu jitsu.

Speaker 3 (43:24):
And it was really interesting because this actually helped, and
probably because I was in a physical situation. I'm rolling
with somebody who has many more years ahead of me,
and we're rolling and in the middle of the roll,
he goes, you're thinking too much. It's okay, we all
make mistakes. And instantly it was like, okay, stop strategizing,
just trust whatever I'm doing, knowing that I don't have

(43:46):
a chance against this guy regardless. But what he was
addressing was the pauses and the avoidance that I was
doing in real time. And now when I'm sending a
text message, sending an email, making a request, I keep
hearing his voice. It's like, stop thinking so much. We
all are going to make mistakes. The fear is the
mistake I might use, I might say the wrong thing.

(44:07):
If I ask Jake for this favor, let me reread it,
approveriate at forty five times, let me run through chat JPT.
Let me do all of these things, and it's like,
what what we're just doing is ruminating to avoid the discomfort,
and what we're really saying is this is hard. I
don't want to do it. And that's okay, this is hard,
I don't want to do it. That is a normal
human feeling. But we have to go through that in

(44:30):
order for us to grow. We'll start by being kind
to ourselves and like, it is hard, let's take a break,
but less address it. And sometimes it might be like, hey,
we'll do it first thing in the morning when we're
the most fresh that concept swallow the frog, will do
that now. Or it could be like, hey, maybe this
is too big of a step. Maybe today step one
is this and that really and it is a reflection

(44:51):
and go back to the people that we're around. If
we're around people that we can share this stuff with,
and they speak to us with that same level of grace,
which is like, no, like you did a lot today,
it really matters. And I remember this. In the beginning
of my career, I came up with Lily seeing you
know who we both know and as you know, one
of the hardest workers I've ever seen, one hundred percent

(45:11):
and it really signaled to me how hard I needed
to work. And it was always this idea that if
I wasn't working hard enough, she may think less of me.
And then fast forward during the pandemic, I remember this
having a call and she's like, look like you're your
only job right now is like, stay healthy and stay
in a good place. Don't try to be productive. We've
been signaled that we need to be productive all the time.

(45:35):
There's honor in suffering, there's honor in burning out. It's
a badge of honor. And it's like, it's not a
badge of honor, it's a warning sign that we're abandoning
ourselves by doing too much, especially in the society that
we live in, where there isn't the word enough doesn't
exist when it comes to our productivity. So it's really
important to surround yourself around people who are doing the
same work, can have the same language, even if you're

(45:57):
the first person to start these conversations, when what kind
of to someone else will encourage them to be kinder
to you as well.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, and I think it's hard because I'll give you
an example, Like I landed at Sunday, I would have
gotten to bed by like one am, and I knew
I had to work out at a am in the
morning scheduled, and everything about me was like, I've been
on the road, I'm tired, I've been working. It's all work.
I gave four keynotes in four days podcasts. But what

(46:26):
was really interesting is that I'm at a place in
my life where I've actually realized that waking up and
working out actually sets me up to have more energy
throughout the day. So now I'm fully convinced. Now if
this was literally three or four years ago, I would
have said, no, I need to have grace on myself.
I'm gonna let myself lie in. I'm not gonna work out.
Maybe I won't even work out for two three days

(46:46):
because I deserve a break. The thing is that actually
didn't make me stronger or more resilient. It actually made
me more sluggish. It actually slowed me down. So sometimes
grace is actually choosing something that good for you, even
if it doesn't feel good.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
Absolutely, as I said, it's not coddling, like, hey, you
don't want to go to the gym today, you don't
want to work out with the trainer, Let's just go
for five minutes and if you don't like it, you
can go home. Yeah, and then once you get in,
you know continue Yeah. And I'm definitely like that. Whereas
you know, I'm doing all the mental gymnastic oh i
ate and it's only been forty three minutes. I can't

(47:23):
go to jiujits. I might throw up on somebody. I can't.
You're making all these excuses and then the graceful voices like, hey,
just show up, try it out for a couple of minutes.
If you don't feel good, sit against the wall. We
see people doing it all the time. And the truth is,
and then I go back into my history, you have
always not wanted to go. You have never regretted going.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Yes, exactly, even when I've.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
Gotten hurt, I didn't regret going. And I think that's
the really important thing when it comes to this grace.
We're not coddling ourselves. We're being our best friend, and
we're encouraging ourselves to do it. And you're absolutely right.
And this is how I would like us to view
mental health. The same way. Let's train it. Let's constantly
pick things that are different, the same way you're lifting
a heavy weight to tear your muscles. And then have

(48:05):
them healed to grow bigger. Let's continually put ourselves in
challenging situations, whether it's a cold shower, whether it's holding
a yoga pose, whether it's doing you know, calf phrases
until you're feeling in the burn, any type of movement,
any type of challenge where your mind is like I
can't do anymore, Like, hey, let's just try to stay
in a little bit longer. Let's do these things because
this will help build resilience. And it's one of the

(48:25):
things in addition to creating connection, in addition to practicing
that we do and we're realizing I don't want to
do it, totally understand that you don't want to do it,
but try it and see how you feel afterwards. Because
just like working out, the harder the workout, the easier
the day. Yeah, and let's apply that to our mental health.
Let's treat our mental health like a muscle. The more
we work it early, the easier the rest of the

(48:48):
day will be.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
I've always been saying that there's like there's two types
of people. One needs to do the easy thing first
to build confidence and get to the hard challenge, when
there's other people that need to do the hard thing first.
They need to throw themselves into the deep end in
order to build confidence. And it's really important to know
which one you are because some people. If you are

(49:11):
someone who needs to do the hard thing first, and
you keep trying to build up confidence through small things,
you actually never ever get to the hard thing, or
you'll feel like you'll take on a challenge that isn't
big enough. Yes, And if you're someone who's like, oh
my god, I need baby steps, and now your friend
over here is lifting like ten times as much as
you are, now you're pushing yourself, you won't do it either.

(49:32):
And that's why it's such an individual journey. But I
find so much anxiety is around timelines. It's all around comparison.
And I was thinking about this. When you're at school,
the one thing you don't have anxiety about as much
is people being ahead of you or people having figured

(49:53):
something out, because everyone goes from seventh grade to eighth
grade to ninth grade. All of a sudden when you graduate.
Now someone's getting promoted first, and someone's getting promoted last.
Someone's getting engaged first and someone's getting engaged lost. Someone
got the beautiful new apartment and someone is still living
with their parents. All of a sudden, now there's this

(50:15):
timeline effect where I'm now anxious because I'm not thirty
and married and making six figures and whatever it may
be building a family. How do you deal with that
existential anxiety? Because this anxiety is more than the anxiety
of just I'm anxious about talking to these people, I'm
anxious about this friend. This is like this existential anxiety

(50:38):
that sometimes we just don't even want to think about,
but it's in the back of our mind. Crap, I'm
thirty and I'm not married, I'm fourteen, I don't have kids, right.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Yeah, I think the first thing most definitely, And I
love that you talked about school and how that was
our world. The classroom or maybe the side of the
school was our world, and that made a lot of
sense for maybe, you know, up until the last twenty years,
social media has expanded our world where now we are
endlessly being exposed to people who are living lives completely
different from us, and now we're comparing ourselves to that.

(51:08):
And so when we hear the cliche line comparison is
the thief of joy, we're constantly stealing our joy by
spending time on social media and comparing ourselves to people,
and we're not even comparing ourselves to a real thing.
We're comparing our behind the scenes to this highlight reel
of what we put on social media. So the first
thing I would say is reduce the amount of exposure
you have to compare yourself to other people. I would

(51:28):
definitely make efforts to reduce my social media consumption. That
would make a huge thing. I think also, the more
we commit to understanding who we are, the more we
start to realize that we need to design and develop
a life for ourselves. I think currently we're just trying
to deal with life. And I think as we commit
to a mental health journey and voluntarily doing challenging things,

(51:51):
we start to develop life and we start to understand
what matters to us, for you, for me. As we
go through these different challenges, we're like, wait, this is
the shoe that fits me, this is the one that doesn't. Oh,
I can afford the fancy sports car, but I realize
that really isn't for me. But I definitely want to
make sure I have a great hotep or I want
to definitely make sure I have you know, I have
a friend who just sold the company, and I was like, Oh,

(52:12):
what are you going to do? He goes, I'm going
to get my mom a personal trainer so she can
open a jar until she's ninety. And it's like, this
is someone who knows his priority. That's the first spand
with the money, and that only comes through self awareness.
Self awareness comes through paying attention to yourself and collecting
information that's going to come when we have these anxious feelings.

(52:32):
These are revealing things, you know. Triggers are a roadmap.
They're telling us where the work can be done. So
we have to abandon these ideas that like, oh, trigger warning,
I have to avoid my triggers. Oh I have to
constantly be in a safe space. That's just us rearranging
life to never gain and we're denying ourselves that self awareness.
So I really think self awareness is going to be

(52:54):
the first thing. So now and again, this is not
going to make it all go away. I still get
jealous when I see people on social media. I think
the other thing we have to realize is envy helps
us understand what authentically matters to us. Let's say, for example,
I watch you Know, I watch the show regularly you
got a couple of guests on, then all of a sudden,
a certain guest comes on, and let's say Rick Rubin

(53:14):
comes on. I'm like, oh, I am so jealous. I
wish I was in the room with Jay. I wish
I knew this was happening. I wish I could have
called j I wish I could have stood in the
corner when I had that. What that is doing is
that's not a bad thing to experience. That's teaching me that, Okay,
something that Rick says matters to me, So I should
go deeper into that because it teach me what's important
versus if you have another guest on who I'm like, Oh,

(53:36):
that's cool, but I'm not really excited about that. So
I think there's something there that I think is really important.
And I think the other thing that's really important is
realizing are we trying to catch up or are we
trying to improve? Are we trying to keep up with
other people? And I think very often in going back
to our families, it really often isn't to We're not
doing things to make our family happy, We're doing things
to keep them off our back, right, And I think

(53:59):
there's there's definitely this when it comes to like, you know,
being out here, going to advanced dressing up, all of
this is like are we doing this to even stand
out at the party? Are we doing this to make
sure we don't feel irrelevant that we were falling behind?
And I think paying attention to that will challenge us
to go back to what are our unique values? What
are the things that we actually care about? And the

(54:21):
more we discover that, the more we can share that
with people. And for me, that also brings me into
the thought of the gap between fitting in and belonging.
We create so much stress trying to fit in, and
we have to wear masks to fit in, and that
is definitely going to feed anxious feelings. Instead, if we
have a better understanding of who we are, if we're

(54:41):
constantly exploring this universe inside of us, we know who
we are and we can find people that we feel
comfortable being around where we belong to the quote in
the book that I say, everybody is a social butterfly,
and maybe you're just in the wrong garden. And I
think that's really important versus the self idea of I'm
socially anxious. It's like or you're just in the room

(55:04):
with the wrong people.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
So good.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
You know, if you really enjoy Dungeons and Dragons, go
in a room full of people who play that game.
All of a sudden, there won't be as much social
anxiety as you may feel if you're in a room
full of people who work in finance or full of
Hollywood stars. And I think that's the really important thing,
is like, go where you belong. Focus on where you
authentically belong, and that requires a depth because they may

(55:27):
not just be like, oh, well, I'm South Asian. I
should be around South Asians. It's like, no, who am I?
You know? I enjoy art. I should be around more
folks who love art. I enjoy MMA. I should be
around more folks that love MMA. I enjoy playing certain
video games. I should be around people play those games.
It's the deeper you understand yourself, the more you can
share it. And it's really important because we want to

(55:48):
be seen, we want to be heard, but the only
way we can authentically be seen and heard is if
we show people who we authentically are. And you can't
be yourself if you don't know yourself.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
I mean that is such a big one because I
hear that so often, and I think you're so right.
Most people are going to events that they don't even
want to go to to hang around people that they
don't want to hang around, and then we're wondering.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
Why we're socially anxious.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
And we also say that person's an introvert or they
feel like an introvert, and someone who knows them goes,
they're not an introvert. They're really loud around their people,
and that person is wild around their people. It's just
right now, they're not around their people. And you have
this beautiful quote in here, you say, the only way
people can accept the real you is if you show

(56:32):
them the real you. And I think that's what it is,
is that sometimes we don't even know the people that
are around us because if that's not their vibe, if
that's not their crewer people, they're never showing the real them.
And I know that for me, even in a crowd
full of people, I'll try and find the person who
wants to have a deep spiritual conversation. The amount of

(56:54):
time me and you and Jeremy are good friends end
up together at parties, right, So when we're at a
party and I know humble and Jeremy are going to
be there. I know we're going to find a little
corner to have like a conversation, a discussion, a debate,
a thought like that's what's going to happen. And that's
why I don't feel out of place at the party.

(57:14):
But if you expecting me to just kind of have
two second conversations with lots of people and just hang
around that, that's not my That's not how I like
to spend my time. And I've got to look for
I can still be at a big party and look
for my community. And I think again, it goes back
to what you're saying. It's knowing yourself. Where people just go,
oh no, I just don't like big parties. It's like no, no, no,

(57:34):
But there's a way in every space, in every world.
It's kind of like people who have judgments about New
York or LA or London or whatever it is that
we can have these broad strokes judgments. It's like, no,
you can create what you want here. It does exist.
It just depends on if it exists in the way
you want to create and how it works for you.
But let's not sit around here and go I'm just

(57:56):
not going to it's not possible in this place, because
that's like saying one day you can get to the
point where you go, this is on no one's my
type on planet Earth. Yes, right, And it's like that's
not a healthy mindset to have.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Absolutely, And it goes back to the idea of judging again.
We start to judge, which is a language of fear,
and we start to limit. We're like, oh, no, I've
met three people at this party. This isn't my crowd.
And also for folks listening who are thinking, well, what
about you know, I'm at work or I have to
wear a certain masks to survive with places, I completely understand, right,
And the best way to counter that is, when you're

(58:29):
done with that, go to what place you belong. We
all have to be in places, and we all have
to play the game to fit in. Sometimes it's not
you know, we have to survive, and that might be
part of the game. But then to counteract that, to
avoid burning out by doing that, go ahead and be
in a situation where you belong, be with your people,
be with your tribe. And again, it still starts internally

(58:49):
by figuring out who you authentically are.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Well said, there's one quote that I picked out here
just because I loved it. You said our broken heart
is an open heart, and said so much to me
because I felt that if my heart's ever been broken,
it's only led me the more compassion, more context. But
I wanted to hear what why you inspired to write

(59:14):
our broken heart is an open heart.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
I think for me specifically, it's this idea that when
you know the idea in your head doesn't match the
idea in front of you, like our expectations of life
don't match the reality. That's kind of when what we
define is unhappiness, And I think that's an opportunity to ay,
you know, on a lower vibration, feel sorry for ourselves
and reaffirm that life is so challenging, life is so difficult,

(59:39):
But there's also an opportunity to grow, you know, when
once we let go of that idea, like, well, there's
something to grow from here. So when our heart is broken,
when everything that we thought was is no longer the case,
whether it's a broken relationship, whether it's losing something you
care about, losing an identity, losing money, whatever it may be,
there's an opportunity to grow in there.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
It's almost like a broken heart is an open mind,
like that idea that now I can actually allow for life.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
It's like now you're, oh, now we're paying attention. All
of a sudden, things aren't moving according to plan, and
now we're actually focused and we're present and we're paying
attention to things, and there's a lot of opportunity there
versus just assuming everything was going to be on autopilot.
This idea of that happily ever after you know these
linear ideas, it's like, no, we're going to continually be

(01:00:28):
in these cycles and anticipate things happening. And everybody listening
knows how transformative that first heartbreak was, whatever it may be,
and how much resilience can come from the moment it happens.
I can't be here anymore. I can't deal with this,
and then as time goes by, we start building resilience
from it, and then all of a sudden, we are

(01:00:49):
a much more rounded, three dimensional version of ourselves because
of it. These hard times that form us and formulate
us as people. And this is why it's the idea
of like, look, obviously I don't want to have super
heavy days every single day, but I got to be
able to trust myself to deal with them, or at
least try my best to deal with them and at

(01:01:11):
the very least not sabotage myself by not sleeping enough,
not eating the right food, not drinking enough water, not
hanging out with people that give me energy. And I
think that there's something important there, so I always look
at it, especially as as my life has progressed where
it's like the things that are breaking my heart right
now are absolutely out of control. The people that I
care about who have health issues, there's nothing I can do.

(01:01:33):
I catch myself avoiding messages getting updates on some of
these folks because it just it breaks my heart to
think about. And it's like, this is me avoiding because
it's so overwhelming. But I speak to myself with grace
and say, look, it's overwhelming. Let's get you back to
where you got to get to. Let's feel better, and
then we're going to lean into this. We have to
lean into this because there's going to be some growth

(01:01:54):
that comes from it. The fact that this impacts you
so much, it's a sign that you care, beautiful, because
we need to care about more things in this life.

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
I think the anxiety around aging and death for ourselves
and the people we love. Is, without a doubt, the
anxiety we avoid the most right the anxiety of, oh
my god, I'm getting older, Oh my god, someone in
my life is unwell diseased, God, someone just died. Like
there's such an anxiety around that. What have you found

(01:02:25):
to be helpful at that time as you're going through it?
What would you wish you would have been told? Or
what do you wish people would hear in order to
help soothe that anxiety.

Speaker 3 (01:02:37):
There was something beautiful I heard from a scientist on
Instagram and I don't remember her name. She said, you know,
life was not beginning and ending. Life began once, you know,
and we're all a part of it. We don't have
a life, we are life. We're dropping this ocean, and
I think there's something really beautiful about that, which is,
you know, this is depending on your belief, this can

(01:03:00):
be a vacation from not existing, and we can choose
this existence to be whatever we want it to be.
And I think for me it's been realizing. And actually
have a tattoo on my chest inverted so I can
read it in the mirror says that any moment you're
dust and it was inspired by a friend who had
said it, but another friend and I specifically remember where

(01:03:21):
I was when he said, he goes our problems are
only real because we forget we're going to die, and
when we think about all these things were zooming in
so much into our lives. But it's like we've heard
the cliche, well this matter in five years, ten yures,
Will it matter in ninety years? Will it matter in
two hundred years? You know, any of us making out
of this alive. And I think there's something really beautiful

(01:03:41):
about that, where it's like we can only enjoy a
movie because we know what's going to end. You know,
if it was going on forever, if it's one of
those TV shows that go on forever, we may not
appreciate it as much. It's the finiteism of it, and
I think that has to do with life as well.
In the book, I make a lot of jokes, and
one of the big jokes is the secret pill to
get rid of anxiety. I make up a joke about it,
but at the end, I'm like, the actual magic pill

(01:04:04):
is remembers you're going to die when you're in these
moments that just feel completely overwhelming. If you can remember
not just with your brain, but with your body that
you are going to die. And we have so many
examples of that in history with people who have experienced
near death experiences and then have thrived because they realized,

(01:04:26):
I'm here for a deeper purpose. I'm here for a
bigger purpose. I survived, you know, fifty cent survived nine
shots and all of a sudden thrived in his career.
It's like, that's the worst they can get me, not existing,
So let's go. It's not no longer fear of embarrassment,
fear of rejection, fear of not being seen, because some
of these are the things that we just forget. We're
living creatures that won't be here forever. And I think

(01:04:48):
reminding yourself of that is really important. And there's a
Buddhist and Eastern philosophy around Make it your goal to
remember your mortality five times a day and watch the
quality of your life improved. Allow that, make that part
of the mantra, Make that part of the daily affirmations
that I won't be here forever. Pick the year that

(01:05:09):
you know, like in the year twenty two to thirty five,
neither of us will be here. Okay, let's remember that
when we're worried about sending a text message and not
getting a reply, or when we're worried about putting ourselves
out there and potentially getting rejected, or when we worried
about anything else. And I think that's really important. This
isn't to minimize anybody's problems. It's to minimize the unnecessary

(01:05:30):
stress that we may come with that. And then we
can realize that the stress isn't holding us back. The
stress can actually stretch us to reveal our potential of
who we can actually be. Pressure builds diamonds. We can
really become something beautiful and massive from this, when we
no longer view challenges as an attack on our existence,

(01:05:51):
but instead an opportunity for us to grow, for us
to thrive, for us to increase our capacity to not
only be amazing to ourselves, but being amazed with other people.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
And there's the reason why stoicism has memento moury. There's
a reason why Buddhism has the statement you shared. There's
a reason why these wisdom traditions will remind us of
that impermanence and insignificance to some degree. And again, I
loved what you said it's not in a negative way,
it's not in a morbid way. It's actually to free
yourself of the pressure and stress you put on yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
Absolutely, And I think even now we have these we
have these concepts of like legacy, you know what I mean,
there's there's also this stretch of like, oh, I want
to be alive after I'm not alive, And it's like,
these are stories that were being told that we think
are important. And I remember seeing an interview with Alex
Ramosi where he spoke about it, like when's the last
time you thought about the Queen of England? You know,
she was really popular and then she passed away and

(01:06:47):
we're not thinking about her. On we don't need to
have legacy, you know. Let's enjoy what we have while
we have. The only thing we have is the present.
Especially when we speak about Eastern philosophy, especially for people
listening here, it really is us having to unlearn a
lot of the stories that we were told. We were
told these linear stories. Do this, do this, do this,
get over this hump, and then everything will be smooth sailing,

(01:07:07):
It will be happily ever after you can ride off
into the sunset. Everything will be great. And it's like, no,
there's always a day after, halfily ever after, And instead
of wishing for an easier life, let's work towards being
able to hold more weight, because the weight's going to
keep coming. And just as you're working out, fifteen years
from now, the amount of effort you put working out
will have to increase just for you to maintain where

(01:07:29):
you're at. So it's the same thing with our mental health.
Right now. Our avoiding, our distracting, our medicating is us
maintaining and by all means maintained. But at some point
we want to get to the point where we're actually
growing from it, and that's going to require us leaning
into things being more difficult, having more difficult conversations, acknowledging
difficult realities like our.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
Death home of a poet.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
The book is called un Anxious Fifty Simple Truths to
help overthinkers feel less stress and more calm. As always,
I love books humble because the way you divide up
these fifty lessons is so beautiful and it's so easy
to digest, easy to understand. There's highlighted statements, there's quotes.
Each section of the fifty is like, you know, two

(01:08:13):
three pages thank you for always making complex, big difficult
topics simple, easy and accessible for everyone to understand.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
Congratulations than you.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
I just want to thank you like you. This is
also a moment of like closing the loop for me
because it's you know, you gave me a beautiful blurb
on the book, but it was because I was brainstorming
the ideas to you over dinner and you were having
authentic reactions to them, and it was like this journey
for the last two and a half he was writing
this book. There's also just these moments of you coming

(01:08:46):
to visit in New York US, having a meals tia,
a lot of FIFA and and just for the record,
I want everyone to know Jay is the most frustrating
person to play FIFA with because whenever you score on him,
he'll congratulate you. He'll be like, great job, that was
an awesome goal. He'll still beat you, but he'll do
that so it's like you can't even like talk crap
to him. It's so frustrating to like play somebody who

(01:09:09):
beats you but doesn't hold space for crap talk. Instead,
he'll just like he'll, oh, let's watch the replay of
that goal you got on me. That was so good,
and then he'll score five more goals on me and
it's so extremely frustrating. And but one thing that you
said the last time we played is I had music playing.
I had the volume down, and then you're like, this
feels different if we turn the music off and we

(01:09:29):
put the volume on the game. You're like, Ooh, I
like this, this gives me the right type of anxiety.

Speaker 1 (01:09:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
What I realize is while writing this book, I just
have all these milestones of having all these different hangouts
with you and running these ideas with you, and then
I feel like today, having this conversation with you, having
the book in your hand right now, it's this full
circle moment. We kind of closes the loop, and I
think it's that journey. It really is that journey that

(01:09:54):
matters less than oh I have a book out now
and I have to worry about how the book does.
It's like, No, I got to have so much fun
doing this with some of my favorite people, and you
definitely are one of those people. So I deeply appreciate
you for being endlessly supportive of this and all my projects.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
Man, No, man, it was fun.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
It was the best thing is hearing about your friends
working on stuff and working on it with them, and
you do the same for me and just I think
that is the joy of it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
And you're right, that is the best part about it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
Yeah, and the fact that now people can dive into
it is beautiful. And yeah, I wrote on the front
cover three pages in, you'll feel a thousand pounds later,
And I really feel that way. It's just made so simple,
It's made so easy and digestible, and I think that's
what we all need right now. The world's complex enough.
You talk about that in the book Family Life. It's

(01:10:42):
all complex enough. We don't need growth to be complex.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):
Yes, especially now with change. It's just please remember it.
The change isn't the enemy us. Resisting this change is
what's going to give us more anxious feelings. The change
is going to happen regardless changes of promise. It's a
constant wherever you are in the world. We're all experiencing
a lot of change, and that's okay, and if it

(01:11:05):
gets overwhelming, that's also okay. But please, the more we resist,
the tighter we hold against it, the more that we're
just doing damage to ourselves. It's not going to be helpful.
So let's embrace the change that's happening. Be curious about
the change because that's where our courage can.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
Be well said, and grab a copy of the book.
I'm anxious it's available right now. Make sure you follow
Humble across social media if you don't already and Humble
I hope you come back many many more times to
have more of these conversations and a commay to hang
this weekend and chat more as well, my friends.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
So thank you, brother, thank you so much, appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:38):
I'm super proud of you and really grateful for what
you're doing in the world and excited for BEEO able
to read this.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
Thank you, Thank you brother.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
If this is the year that you're trying to get creative,
you're trying to build more, I need you to listen
to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break
into your most creative self, how to use unconventional methods
that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving
what you do. If you're trying to find your passion
and your lane, Rick Rubin's episode is the one for you.

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
Just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value,
Like as an artist, if you like it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:12):
That's all of the value.

Speaker 2 (01:12:13):
That's the success comes when you say I like this
enough for other people to see it.

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Host

Jay Shetty

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Dateline NBC

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Humble the Poet: Transform Your Relationship With Anxiety (6 Strategies for Overthinkers