May 22, 2026 • 27 mins
Today, Jay breaks down seven mindset shifts that have fundamentally changed how he approaches pain, relationships, purpose, and growth. This isn’t surface-level inspiration. It’s the kind of perspective that stays with you, reshaping how you think in hard moments and how you show up every single day.
Jay challenges the idea that clarity comes before action, showing instead that purpose is built through movement, experimentation, and courage. Most people don’t fail because they lack discipline. They fail because their environment quietly shapes their habits, energy, and identity over time. From the stories we tell ourselves to the relationships we choose, Jay reveals how our internal narrative drives everything, from resilience to self-worth.
In this episode you'll learn:
How to Heal From the People Who Trigger You
How to Stop Waiting and Start Moving Forward
How to Build an Environment That Supports Growth
How to Recognize the Patterns Keeping You Stuck
How to Create Stronger Relationships Through Daily Habits
How to Practice Mindsets That Actually Change Your Life
The way you think shapes the way you live, and even the smallest shift in perspective can begin changing the direction of your life. You do not need to have everything figured out to move forward. You only need the courage to take one honest step today.
With Love and Gratitude,
Jay Shetty
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What We Discuss:
00:00 Intro
01:20 #1: Pain Is Temporary, Don’t Let It Become Your Identity
04:57 #2: You Are Not Your Thoughts, You Are Your Response to Them
07:26 #3: The People Who Trigger You Are Your Greatest Teachers
11:29 #4: Clarity Comes From Action, Not Overthinking
14:44 #5: Your Environment Shapes Your Life More Than Motivation
18:59 #6: The Most Powerful Story You Tell Is the One About Yourself
22:12 #7: Real Love Is a Daily Choice, Not Just a Feeling
26:19 Mindsets Only Change Your Life When You Practice Them Daily
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want to be honest with you about something before
we start. Most mindset content is forgettable, not because the
ideas are wrong. Some of them are genuinely good, but
because they're delivered like fortune cookies. They're punchy, quotable, and
gone by Tuesday. You read the book, you highlight the line,
you feel something shift, and then life comes back. The argument,
(00:21):
the deadline, the three am spiral, and the highlight in
the book means nothing because the idea never got deep
enough to actually change anything. You might see yourself feel
this way, You're still reacting the same way. You're still
choosing the same kind of people. You're still telling yourself
the same stories about why things aren't working. The mindsets
(00:41):
I'm going to share with you today are actually going
to shift something and change something for you for real.
They're the ones that, when they finally landed, really landed
in the body, not just in the head, change something
that stayed changed, changed how I see a difficult conversation, changed,
how I moved through failure, changed how I love people.
(01:03):
There are seven of them, and I'm going to give
you them straight, with the science, with the wisdom traditions
behind them, and with the stories from my own life,
and with the specific way you can use each one immediately,
not next month, not when things calm down. Immediately, let's
get stired. Mindset one. Pain is a postcard, not a
(01:24):
permanent address. The first mindset that changed my life sounds
almost insultingly simple when I say it out loud, but
I need you to hear what's underneath. Pain is a postcard,
not a permanent address. Here's what I mean. When I
was at my lowest, when the career I thought I
wanted had fallen apart, when I had moved back home
(01:45):
after failing at the monastery in a way that felt permanent,
when I was surrounded by people who had expected more
from me, and I had expected more from myself, I
made a mistake that I think almost everyone makes when
things go badly. I moved in, not literally mentally. I
(02:06):
took the painful chapter and turned it into my identity.
I stopped treating it like something that was happening, and
started treating it like something that was true, Like the
failure wasn't something I'd been through, like it was something
I was. And here's what the neuroscience says about that distinction.
Because it's not just poetic, it's biological. The psychologist Martin
(02:29):
Seligmann spent decades studying what he called explanatory style, the
way people explained bad events to themselves, and he found
that when people experience setbacks, they tend to explain them
in one of two fundamentally different ways. Some people explain
setbacks as temporary, specific, and external. This happened in this
(02:52):
situation for these reasons. Others explain them as permanent, pervasive,
and personal. This is who I am, I am, this
is what always happens. This is what I can always expect.
The first group recovers faster, more completely, and often stronger
than before. The second group gets stuck, not because they're weaker,
(03:16):
because they moved into the pain and started decorating. The
Vedic tradition has a concept that maps onto this perfectly,
a nitia, the Sanskrit word for impermanence. Nothing is permanent,
not the good and not the bad. The ancient teachers
weren't saying this to comfort you. They were saying it
(03:37):
as a precise description of reality. Everything passes, everything, including this.
The postcard mindset is this when pain arrives, and it
will it always does. You read the postcard. You sit
with it, you feel it fully, because unfelt pain doesn't leave,
(03:59):
it just goes underground. But you do not unpack your bags,
You do not redecorate, you do not forward your mail.
You're a visitor in this moment, not a resident. This
too shall pass. Here's how you apply this immediately the
next time something painful arrives, a rejection, a failure, a loss,
(04:20):
a conversation that goes badly, ask yourself one question before
you do anything else. Am I feeling this? Or am
I becoming it? Feeling it is healthy, necessary, human Becoming
it is the decision, often unconscious, always costly, to let
(04:41):
a moment define you instead of shape you. You are
allowed to feel everything, you are not required to become it.
Pain is a postcard, Read it, learn from it, then
put it down. Mindset too. You are not your thoughts,
you or what you do with them. This one took
(05:03):
me years to actually understand. You may have heard it before,
but I don't just want you to understand it intellectually.
I understood the theory almost immediately, but to actually understand
it in the way that changes behavior. Here's the version
I was living before this mindset. I believed that because
I thought something, it meant something that because a thought arrived,
(05:27):
you're not good enough. They don't really respect you. This
is never going to work. It was delivering truth. I
was taking delivery of every thought like it was a
certified letter from reality. I was wrong and it was
costing me everything. The cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck, the founder
of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most evidence based
(05:49):
psychological frameworks, we have identified something he called automatic thoughts,
rapid reflexive mental commentary that runs continuously below the level
of deliberate thinking. And he found that in people experiencing depression, anxiety,
and relational difficulties, these automatic thoughts shared consistent characteristics. They
(06:12):
were distorted, they were negative. They were experienced as unquestionable truth.
The thought arrives, it feels true, therefore it is true.
Beck's entire therapeutic revolution was built on one insight. The
thought is not the truth. The thought is a hypothesis,
(06:34):
and like any hypothesis, it can be tested. Marcus Aurelius
wrote in his Meditations, you have power over your mind,
not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.
Here's the immediate application. It's three words and I want
you to use them. Every time a thought arrives that
(06:56):
feels like an indictment. Is this true? Not? Is this possible? Not?
Could this be true? Is this actually demonstrably, evidentially true?
And if you can't answer with concrete evidence, if the
thought is a feeling dressed as a fact, you are
not required to take delivery. You are not your thoughts.
(07:17):
You are what you do with them, and what you
do with them starts with the radical act of questioning
whether they deserve your belief. Mindset three. This is a
rough one. The people who trigger you the most are
your greatest teachers. I hate this one. It hurts me,
It pains me, it worries me. I'm like, God, do
(07:37):
I have to learn it that way? And I need
to be careful with this one because it can be
misunderstood in a way that causes genuine harm. I'm not
saying that people who hurt you deserve a medal. Just
to be clear, I'm not saying abuse is a lesson
you should be grateful for. I'm not saying that toxic
behavior is secretly your spiritual curriculum. What I am saying
(08:00):
is something more specific and more useful than that. The
emotional reactions that hit hardest, the ones that seem disproportionate,
the ones that linger longer than make sense, the ones
that make you behave in ways you don't recognize as yourself.
Are almost never fully about the present moment. They are signals,
(08:22):
and the person who triggered the signal is pointing without
knowing it, at something that was already there. Here's the
psychology behind this. The concept is called transference, first identified
by Freud, but significantly developed and validated by modern relational therapists.
Transference is the unconscious redirection of feelings from a past
(08:46):
relationship onto a present one. When someone in your life
provokes a reaction that feels too big, too intense to immediate,
too hard to let go of, it is frequently because
they have activated a wound that predates them entirely. The
partner who dismisses your feelings isn't just a dismissive partner.
They are also for your nervous system. Every person who
(09:08):
ever dismissed you, the parent who didn't have the emotional bandwidth,
the teacher who made you feel stupid, the friend who
chose someone else. The reaction you're having right now is
the sum of all those reactions, which means the most
triggering people in your life are giving you a map,
a map to the places that still need your attention,
(09:31):
a map to the wounds that haven't yet healed, a
map to the patterns that keep repeating, not because you're broken,
but because the nervous system keeps seeking resolution for what
was never resolved. The Youngean concept of the shadow is
essential here. Carl Jung believed that every person carries a shadow,
(09:52):
the parts of themselves they've disowned, suppressed, or refused to acknowledge.
And he observed that what he most disliked in others
is frequently what he most refused to see in himself.
The person who infuriates you with their arrogance? Do you
have arrogance you've been trained to suppress. The person whose
(10:14):
neediness exhausts you. Do you have needs you've convinced yourself
not to have. The person whose anger frightens you. Do
you have anger you've never allowed yourself to feel. This
is not accusation, This is cartography. You're mapping yourself through
your reactions. Here's how to use this sensitively. The next
time someone triggers you, and I mean really triggers you,
(10:37):
the disproportionate reaction, the one you can't shake. Instead of
asking why are they like this, ask two different questions. First,
what specifically is being activated in me right now? Not
what did they do? What got activated? Name the feeling
as precisely as you can. Second, where have I felt
(10:57):
this before? Not in this relationship, earlier, younger, way back?
When When was the first time you felt this particular
flavor of hurt. The answer to that second question is
not the person in front of you. And when you
know that, when you can see that trigger as a
door to something much older, you stop trying to solve
the present moment and start attending to the actual source.
(11:21):
That is where the real healing is. And the most
aggravating person in your life is often the one holding
the door open mine Set number four. Clarity is not found,
(11:53):
it's built through action. This is for anyone who's waiting,
waiting for the sign, waiting to feel a ready, waiting
for the path to become clear. Take the first step.
I have to tell you something that I wish someone
told me ten years earlier. The clarity is not coming
before the action. The clarity is the product of the action.
(12:16):
You do not think your way to a clear life.
You live your way to a clear life. The path
doesn't become clear by just looking. The path becomes clear
by putting one foot in front of the other, and
then it appears. Here's the science. The psychologist Mihi Chick
sent me High, whose work on flow states we've referenced before,
(12:39):
found that people most commonly experienced their deepest sense of
purpose and meaning not in moments of reflection, but in
moments of engaged activity, not when they're thinking about what
they want to do, but when they're doing it. This
maps directly onto what neuroscience now knows about how the
brain generates meaning. Meaning is not a conclusion the brain
(13:01):
reaches after sufficient contemplation. It is a byproduct of engagement,
of doing, creating, building, moving. The brain makes meaning retrospectively
from the raw material of lived experience. You cannot think
yourself into a meaningful life. You have to live yourself
into one. The ancient Sanskrit concept of karma is entirely
(13:26):
misunderstood in Western culture. We think of karma as cosmic justice.
What goes around comes around, and there's truth to that,
but in its original philosophical context, Karma simply means action.
Karma is the act itself, and The Bug with Ghita
is perhaps the world's most sophisticated treatise on action, specifically
on the relationship between action, identity, and liberation. Christna's central
(13:50):
teaching to origin in the Geta is not figure out
your purpose and an act. It is act without attachment
to the outcome, and purpose will reveal its self. Listen
to that again, write it down. Think about that. The
action comes first, the clarity follows. So many people are
paralyzed waiting to know, waiting to be sure, waiting for
(14:13):
the vision to be clear enough before they risk moving
toward it. And the painful irony is that the waiting
is the very thing preventing the clarity from arriving. Here's
the immediate application, and it's simply enough to do today.
You don't need to know the five year plan. You
just need to know your next five steps. You don't
(14:34):
need to know where you'll be in ten years. All
you need to know is what you're going to do
next today, whatever it is, whether it's a phone call,
an application, a conversation, and hours spent doing the thing
instead of thinking about the thing. The clarity you're waiting
for is hiding inside the action you keep postponing. Stop
(14:57):
waiting to know, start doing. Find out. Mindset five. You
don't rise to your goals, you fall to your environment.
This one changed how I designed every aspect of my
daily life, and it is the mindset that I think
most people resist the hardest, because accepting it means accepting
(15:17):
something deeply uncomfortable. Your willpower is not the problem. Your
environment is. Let me say that again, because it runs
counter to everything productivity culture tells you. Your willpower is
not the problem. Your environment is. The psychologist James Clear,
building on decades of behavioral science, articulated something in atomic
(15:38):
habits that has now been validated across hundreds of studies.
Human behavior is far less driven by conscious intention than
we believe, and far more driven by environmental cues. What
we see, what's accessible, what surround us, what the people
around us do. These are the primary drivers of behavior,
(15:59):
not goals, Motivation not discipline. The person who wants to
eat better but keeps their kitchen full of food that
undermines that goal is not going to succeed through willpower.
The person who wants to read more but keeps their
phone on their bedside table instead of a book is
not going to succeed through discipline. The person who wants
(16:19):
to grow but surrounds themselves exclusively with people who are
comfortable with stagnation is not going to succeed through intention.
This is not pessimism. This is power, because if the
environment is the primary driver of behavior, then designing your
environment is the most powerful thing you can do for
your goals, more powerful than motivation, more powerful than a
(16:42):
vision board, more powerful than any amount of willpower. The
ancient Indian concept of Sunger understood this completely. Sunger or
sut sung literally means the company of truth. This was
the practice of deliberately sourrounding yourself with people whose presence
(17:02):
pulled you toward your highest self, not just people you liked,
people who, by virtue of who they were and how
they lived, made it easier for you to be who
you were trying to become. The tradition understood that humans
are profoundly inevitably influenced by their environment, especially their social environment,
(17:24):
and rather than fighting that influence through discipline, the wisdom
was to design the environment so that the influence worked
for you rather than against you. Research by social psychologist
Nicholas Christakis at Yale confirmed this at scale in a
landmark study tracking thousands of people over decades. He found
(17:44):
that behaviors including happiness, obesity, smoking, and even loneliness spread
through social networks like contagion. You're not just influenced by
your friends. You were influenced by your friends, friends, friends,
three degrees of separation. The environment is that powerful. Here's
(18:05):
the immediate application. You don't have to quit on all
your friends. Three questions to ask about your current environment. First,
does your physical space make your most important behaviors easier
or harder? If you want to meditate, is there a
clear quiet space that invites it? If you want to create,
is your workspace organized around creation or is everything arranged
(18:28):
around distraction? Second? Does your social environment the five people
you spend the most time with make you more or
less likely to become who you're trying to be, not
whether you love them, whether their orbit is pulling you
forward or holding you in place. Third, what is the
single easiest change you could make to your environment today,
(18:49):
right now, that would make your most important goal more likely?
Not a dramatic thing, The smallest possible environmental adjustment that
removes friction between you and who you're trying to become.
You don't rise to your goals, as James Claire says,
you fall to your environment. So build an environment worth
falling to. Mindset six, The most dangerous story you tell
(19:13):
is the one about yourself. Every person walking the planet
is a narrator of their own life, and like all
narrators were, unreliable. We edit. We emphasize certain chapters and
minimize others. We assign causation where there's only correlation. We
cast ourselves in roles, sometimes the hero, sometimes the victim,
always the protagonist, and we mistake those roles for truth.
(19:36):
The story you tell about yourself is the most powerful
force in your life, more powerful than your circumstances, more
powerful than your talent, more powerful than your opportunities, because
the story decides which opportunities you see, which risks you take,
which relationships you believe you deserve, and which version of
(19:56):
your future you allow yourself to move forward. The psychologist
Dan mccadams at Northwestern University has spent his career studying
what he calls narrative identity, the story each person constructs
about who they are and how they came to be
that way, and his research has found something both obvious
and profound. The content of yourself narrative predicts your psychological
(20:21):
well being, your resilience, and your capacity for growth more
reliably than almost any other variable. Not what happened to you,
how you story what happened to you. Two people can
go through almost identical experiences, the difficult childhood, the professional failure,
the painful relationship, and construct completely different narratives from the
(20:44):
same raw material. One person stories it as evidence of
their damage, the other stories it as the origin of
their depth. The experiences were similar, the narrators made different choices.
McAdams identified what he called the redemption narrative, a story
structure where difficult chapters are told as leading to growth, insight,
(21:07):
or strength. He found that people who naturally organize their
self narratives around redemption are significantly more psychologically healthy, more generative,
and more resilient than those who organize around contamination, where
a good thing was ruined, where a hopeful beginning led
to a bad end. The difference is not in what happened.
(21:28):
The difference is in how it is told. Here's what
I want you to do with this immediately, think of
the story you most consistently tell about yourself, the one
that comes up in therapy or with close friends, or
at three am when you're being most honest, the one
that explains why things are the way they are, why
you are the way you are. Now ask is this
(21:49):
the only story the evidence supports or is it one story,
one edit, one emphasis, of many that could be constructed
from the same facts. What would the story look like
if you're telling it as evidence of your strength rather
than your damage, as evidence of your wisdom rather than
your wounds, as a chapter rather than a conclusion. You
(22:12):
are the narrator, the raw materials fixed, The narration is yours.
This isn't toxic positivity. Choose a story that is honest
that gives you somewhere to go. Mindset seven. Love is
not a feeling. It is a daily decision. A student
once asked a teacher, what's the difference between I like
(22:32):
you and I love you? The teacher replied, when you
like a flower, you simply pluck it, but when you
love a flower, you water it every day. Love is
a daily act, a daily decision, not just a feeling.
I've saved this one for last deliberately because I think
it is the most important, and I think it is
(22:55):
the most misunderstood, and I think getting it wrong is
responsible for more human suffering than almost anything else I
could name. Here's the story our culture tells us about love.
Love is a feeling that arrives, a lightning bolt, a chemistry,
a sense of recognition there you are, that happens to
you rather than being made by you. And when the
feeling is there, the relationship works. And when the feeling fades,
(23:19):
which it inevitably does because all feelings are temporary, the
relationship is over because the love is gone. This story
is everywhere, in every rom com and every love song
and every dating app designed around the initial spark. It
is so pervasive that most people have never questioned it.
The psychologist Robert Sternberg at Yale developed what he called
(23:40):
the triangular theory of love, a framework that identifies three
components of genuine, durable love passion, intimacy, and commitment, and
his research found that of the three, passion, the feeling,
the spark, the chemistry has the shortest lifespan. It peaks early,
often within months of relationship beginning, and it declines predictably
(24:03):
regardless of how compatible, how suited, or how deeply in
love two people genuinely are. This is not a bug,
This is biology. The neurochemicals responsible for the early intensity
of romantic love, dopamine uropanephrine, are designed to initiate bonding,
not maintain it. They're a starter motor, not an engine.
(24:23):
The relationships that last, the ones that deepen rather than erode,
are built on what remains after the starter motor quiets,
And what remains is not a feeling. It is a
series of daily, often mundane, often imperfect choices. The choice
to be curious about this person rather than certain about them,
(24:45):
the choice to repair the rupture rather than catalog it.
The choice to see them fully, not just the version
you fell for, but the complex, contradictory, sometimes maddening, a
whole person in front of you, and choose them anyway.
The difference between a relationship that survives and a relationship
that dies is not the absence of conflict. It was
(25:07):
the presence of what John Gotman calls bids for connection,
the small, daily, often trivial, attempts one person makes to
reach toward the other, a joke, a question, a touch,
a look, and the critical variable was whether those bids
were met, turned toward in Gotman's language, rather than turned
(25:30):
away from. The Relationships that lasted were not the ones
with the most passion or the best compatibility scores or
the fewest arguments. They were the ones where both people,
most of the time, in the small moments that feel
like they don't count, choose to turn toward each other.
That is not a feeling, That is a practice. Here's
(25:53):
the immediate application. Think of the most important relationship in
your life right now, and ask what is the smallest,
most available, most concrete bid for connection I could make
toward this person today. Not a grand gesture, not a
difficult conversation, the smallest genuine movement toward them. A text
(26:14):
that says I was thinking of you, A question that
shows you've been paying attention, five minutes of eye contact
without a phone in the room, the choice to be
curious rather than reactive in the next disagreement. Love is
a daily decision. Make it today. Here's what I know
about mindsets. They don't change your life by being interesting.
They change your life by being practiced, by being returned
(26:37):
to again and again until they stop being ideas you
agree with and start being the lens through which you
automatically see. That process takes time, takes repetition, takes the
courage to keep applying an idea even when the situation
is hard and the easier thing is to react from habit.
Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you'll
(26:58):
share this with a friend, and I hope you'll choose
a mindset to practice for the next seven days. Remember
I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.
If you enjoyed this conversation, you're going to love my
episode with Arnold Schwarzenegger on how to make your visions
of reality and how to stop having a limited mindset.
I never believed in Plan B. If I start having
(27:21):
a Plan B, that means now that I'm saying, well,
maybe this isn't working out.
I want to be honest with you about something before
we start. Most mindset content is forgettable, not because the
ideas are wrong. Some of them are genuinely good, but
because they're delivered like fortune cookies. They're punchy, quotable, and
gone by Tuesday. You read the book, you highlight the line,
you feel something shift, and then life comes back. The argument,
(00:21):
the deadline, the three am spiral, and the highlight in
the book means nothing because the idea never got deep
enough to actually change anything. You might see yourself feel
this way, You're still reacting the same way. You're still
choosing the same kind of people. You're still telling yourself
the same stories about why things aren't working. The mindsets
(00:41):
I'm going to share with you today are actually going
to shift something and change something for you for real.
They're the ones that, when they finally landed, really landed
in the body, not just in the head, change something
that stayed changed, changed how I see a difficult conversation, changed,
how I moved through failure, changed how I love people.
(01:03):
There are seven of them, and I'm going to give
you them straight, with the science, with the wisdom traditions
behind them, and with the stories from my own life,
and with the specific way you can use each one immediately,
not next month, not when things calm down. Immediately, let's
get stired. Mindset one. Pain is a postcard, not a
(01:24):
permanent address. The first mindset that changed my life sounds
almost insultingly simple when I say it out loud, but
I need you to hear what's underneath. Pain is a postcard,
not a permanent address. Here's what I mean. When I
was at my lowest, when the career I thought I
wanted had fallen apart, when I had moved back home
(01:45):
after failing at the monastery in a way that felt permanent,
when I was surrounded by people who had expected more
from me, and I had expected more from myself, I
made a mistake that I think almost everyone makes when
things go badly. I moved in, not literally mentally. I
(02:06):
took the painful chapter and turned it into my identity.
I stopped treating it like something that was happening, and
started treating it like something that was true, Like the
failure wasn't something I'd been through, like it was something
I was. And here's what the neuroscience says about that distinction.
Because it's not just poetic, it's biological. The psychologist Martin
(02:29):
Seligmann spent decades studying what he called explanatory style, the
way people explained bad events to themselves, and he found
that when people experience setbacks, they tend to explain them
in one of two fundamentally different ways. Some people explain
setbacks as temporary, specific, and external. This happened in this
(02:52):
situation for these reasons. Others explain them as permanent, pervasive,
and personal. This is who I am, I am, this
is what always happens. This is what I can always expect.
The first group recovers faster, more completely, and often stronger
than before. The second group gets stuck, not because they're weaker,
(03:16):
because they moved into the pain and started decorating. The
Vedic tradition has a concept that maps onto this perfectly,
a nitia, the Sanskrit word for impermanence. Nothing is permanent,
not the good and not the bad. The ancient teachers
weren't saying this to comfort you. They were saying it
(03:37):
as a precise description of reality. Everything passes, everything, including this.
The postcard mindset is this when pain arrives, and it
will it always does. You read the postcard. You sit
with it, you feel it fully, because unfelt pain doesn't leave,
(03:59):
it just goes underground. But you do not unpack your bags,
You do not redecorate, you do not forward your mail.
You're a visitor in this moment, not a resident. This
too shall pass. Here's how you apply this immediately the
next time something painful arrives, a rejection, a failure, a loss,
(04:20):
a conversation that goes badly, ask yourself one question before
you do anything else. Am I feeling this? Or am
I becoming it? Feeling it is healthy, necessary, human Becoming
it is the decision, often unconscious, always costly, to let
(04:41):
a moment define you instead of shape you. You are
allowed to feel everything, you are not required to become it.
Pain is a postcard, Read it, learn from it, then
put it down. Mindset too. You are not your thoughts,
you or what you do with them. This one took
(05:03):
me years to actually understand. You may have heard it before,
but I don't just want you to understand it intellectually.
I understood the theory almost immediately, but to actually understand
it in the way that changes behavior. Here's the version
I was living before this mindset. I believed that because
I thought something, it meant something that because a thought arrived,
(05:27):
you're not good enough. They don't really respect you. This
is never going to work. It was delivering truth. I
was taking delivery of every thought like it was a
certified letter from reality. I was wrong and it was
costing me everything. The cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck, the founder
of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most evidence based
(05:49):
psychological frameworks, we have identified something he called automatic thoughts,
rapid reflexive mental commentary that runs continuously below the level
of deliberate thinking. And he found that in people experiencing depression, anxiety,
and relational difficulties, these automatic thoughts shared consistent characteristics. They
(06:12):
were distorted, they were negative. They were experienced as unquestionable truth.
The thought arrives, it feels true, therefore it is true.
Beck's entire therapeutic revolution was built on one insight. The
thought is not the truth. The thought is a hypothesis,
(06:34):
and like any hypothesis, it can be tested. Marcus Aurelius
wrote in his Meditations, you have power over your mind,
not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.
Here's the immediate application. It's three words and I want
you to use them. Every time a thought arrives that
(06:56):
feels like an indictment. Is this true? Not? Is this possible? Not?
Could this be true? Is this actually demonstrably, evidentially true?
And if you can't answer with concrete evidence, if the
thought is a feeling dressed as a fact, you are
not required to take delivery. You are not your thoughts.
(07:17):
You are what you do with them, and what you
do with them starts with the radical act of questioning
whether they deserve your belief. Mindset three. This is a
rough one. The people who trigger you the most are
your greatest teachers. I hate this one. It hurts me,
It pains me, it worries me. I'm like, God, do
(07:37):
I have to learn it that way? And I need
to be careful with this one because it can be
misunderstood in a way that causes genuine harm. I'm not
saying that people who hurt you deserve a medal. Just
to be clear, I'm not saying abuse is a lesson
you should be grateful for. I'm not saying that toxic
behavior is secretly your spiritual curriculum. What I am saying
(08:00):
is something more specific and more useful than that. The
emotional reactions that hit hardest, the ones that seem disproportionate,
the ones that linger longer than make sense, the ones
that make you behave in ways you don't recognize as yourself.
Are almost never fully about the present moment. They are signals,
(08:22):
and the person who triggered the signal is pointing without
knowing it, at something that was already there. Here's the
psychology behind this. The concept is called transference, first identified
by Freud, but significantly developed and validated by modern relational therapists.
Transference is the unconscious redirection of feelings from a past
(08:46):
relationship onto a present one. When someone in your life
provokes a reaction that feels too big, too intense to immediate,
too hard to let go of, it is frequently because
they have activated a wound that predates them entirely. The
partner who dismisses your feelings isn't just a dismissive partner.
They are also for your nervous system. Every person who
(09:08):
ever dismissed you, the parent who didn't have the emotional bandwidth,
the teacher who made you feel stupid, the friend who
chose someone else. The reaction you're having right now is
the sum of all those reactions, which means the most
triggering people in your life are giving you a map,
a map to the places that still need your attention,
(09:31):
a map to the wounds that haven't yet healed, a
map to the patterns that keep repeating, not because you're broken,
but because the nervous system keeps seeking resolution for what
was never resolved. The Youngean concept of the shadow is
essential here. Carl Jung believed that every person carries a shadow,
(09:52):
the parts of themselves they've disowned, suppressed, or refused to acknowledge.
And he observed that what he most disliked in others
is frequently what he most refused to see in himself.
The person who infuriates you with their arrogance? Do you
have arrogance you've been trained to suppress. The person whose
(10:14):
neediness exhausts you. Do you have needs you've convinced yourself
not to have. The person whose anger frightens you. Do
you have anger you've never allowed yourself to feel. This
is not accusation, This is cartography. You're mapping yourself through
your reactions. Here's how to use this sensitively. The next
time someone triggers you, and I mean really triggers you,
(10:37):
the disproportionate reaction, the one you can't shake. Instead of
asking why are they like this, ask two different questions. First,
what specifically is being activated in me right now? Not
what did they do? What got activated? Name the feeling
as precisely as you can. Second, where have I felt
(10:57):
this before? Not in this relationship, earlier, younger, way back?
When When was the first time you felt this particular
flavor of hurt. The answer to that second question is
not the person in front of you. And when you
know that, when you can see that trigger as a
door to something much older, you stop trying to solve
the present moment and start attending to the actual source.
(11:21):
That is where the real healing is. And the most
aggravating person in your life is often the one holding
the door open mine Set number four. Clarity is not found,
(11:53):
it's built through action. This is for anyone who's waiting,
waiting for the sign, waiting to feel a ready, waiting
for the path to become clear. Take the first step.
I have to tell you something that I wish someone
told me ten years earlier. The clarity is not coming
before the action. The clarity is the product of the action.
(12:16):
You do not think your way to a clear life.
You live your way to a clear life. The path
doesn't become clear by just looking. The path becomes clear
by putting one foot in front of the other, and
then it appears. Here's the science. The psychologist Mihi Chick
sent me High, whose work on flow states we've referenced before,
(12:39):
found that people most commonly experienced their deepest sense of
purpose and meaning not in moments of reflection, but in
moments of engaged activity, not when they're thinking about what
they want to do, but when they're doing it. This
maps directly onto what neuroscience now knows about how the
brain generates meaning. Meaning is not a conclusion the brain
(13:01):
reaches after sufficient contemplation. It is a byproduct of engagement,
of doing, creating, building, moving. The brain makes meaning retrospectively
from the raw material of lived experience. You cannot think
yourself into a meaningful life. You have to live yourself
into one. The ancient Sanskrit concept of karma is entirely
(13:26):
misunderstood in Western culture. We think of karma as cosmic justice.
What goes around comes around, and there's truth to that,
but in its original philosophical context, Karma simply means action.
Karma is the act itself, and The Bug with Ghita
is perhaps the world's most sophisticated treatise on action, specifically
on the relationship between action, identity, and liberation. Christna's central
(13:50):
teaching to origin in the Geta is not figure out
your purpose and an act. It is act without attachment
to the outcome, and purpose will reveal its self. Listen
to that again, write it down. Think about that. The
action comes first, the clarity follows. So many people are
paralyzed waiting to know, waiting to be sure, waiting for
(14:13):
the vision to be clear enough before they risk moving
toward it. And the painful irony is that the waiting
is the very thing preventing the clarity from arriving. Here's
the immediate application, and it's simply enough to do today.
You don't need to know the five year plan. You
just need to know your next five steps. You don't
(14:34):
need to know where you'll be in ten years. All
you need to know is what you're going to do
next today, whatever it is, whether it's a phone call,
an application, a conversation, and hours spent doing the thing
instead of thinking about the thing. The clarity you're waiting
for is hiding inside the action you keep postponing. Stop
(14:57):
waiting to know, start doing. Find out. Mindset five. You
don't rise to your goals, you fall to your environment.
This one changed how I designed every aspect of my
daily life, and it is the mindset that I think
most people resist the hardest, because accepting it means accepting
(15:17):
something deeply uncomfortable. Your willpower is not the problem. Your
environment is. Let me say that again, because it runs
counter to everything productivity culture tells you. Your willpower is
not the problem. Your environment is. The psychologist James Clear,
building on decades of behavioral science, articulated something in atomic
(15:38):
habits that has now been validated across hundreds of studies.
Human behavior is far less driven by conscious intention than
we believe, and far more driven by environmental cues. What
we see, what's accessible, what surround us, what the people
around us do. These are the primary drivers of behavior,
(15:59):
not goals, Motivation not discipline. The person who wants to
eat better but keeps their kitchen full of food that
undermines that goal is not going to succeed through willpower.
The person who wants to read more but keeps their
phone on their bedside table instead of a book is
not going to succeed through discipline. The person who wants
(16:19):
to grow but surrounds themselves exclusively with people who are
comfortable with stagnation is not going to succeed through intention.
This is not pessimism. This is power, because if the
environment is the primary driver of behavior, then designing your
environment is the most powerful thing you can do for
your goals, more powerful than motivation, more powerful than a
(16:42):
vision board, more powerful than any amount of willpower. The
ancient Indian concept of Sunger understood this completely. Sunger or
sut sung literally means the company of truth. This was
the practice of deliberately sourrounding yourself with people whose presence
(17:02):
pulled you toward your highest self, not just people you liked,
people who, by virtue of who they were and how
they lived, made it easier for you to be who
you were trying to become. The tradition understood that humans
are profoundly inevitably influenced by their environment, especially their social environment,
(17:24):
and rather than fighting that influence through discipline, the wisdom
was to design the environment so that the influence worked
for you rather than against you. Research by social psychologist
Nicholas Christakis at Yale confirmed this at scale in a
landmark study tracking thousands of people over decades. He found
(17:44):
that behaviors including happiness, obesity, smoking, and even loneliness spread
through social networks like contagion. You're not just influenced by
your friends. You were influenced by your friends, friends, friends,
three degrees of separation. The environment is that powerful. Here's
(18:05):
the immediate application. You don't have to quit on all
your friends. Three questions to ask about your current environment. First,
does your physical space make your most important behaviors easier
or harder? If you want to meditate, is there a
clear quiet space that invites it? If you want to create,
is your workspace organized around creation or is everything arranged
(18:28):
around distraction? Second? Does your social environment the five people
you spend the most time with make you more or
less likely to become who you're trying to be, not
whether you love them, whether their orbit is pulling you
forward or holding you in place. Third, what is the
single easiest change you could make to your environment today,
(18:49):
right now, that would make your most important goal more likely?
Not a dramatic thing, The smallest possible environmental adjustment that
removes friction between you and who you're trying to become.
You don't rise to your goals, as James Claire says,
you fall to your environment. So build an environment worth
falling to. Mindset six, The most dangerous story you tell
(19:13):
is the one about yourself. Every person walking the planet
is a narrator of their own life, and like all
narrators were, unreliable. We edit. We emphasize certain chapters and
minimize others. We assign causation where there's only correlation. We
cast ourselves in roles, sometimes the hero, sometimes the victim,
always the protagonist, and we mistake those roles for truth.
(19:36):
The story you tell about yourself is the most powerful
force in your life, more powerful than your circumstances, more
powerful than your talent, more powerful than your opportunities, because
the story decides which opportunities you see, which risks you take,
which relationships you believe you deserve, and which version of
(19:56):
your future you allow yourself to move forward. The psychologist
Dan mccadams at Northwestern University has spent his career studying
what he calls narrative identity, the story each person constructs
about who they are and how they came to be
that way, and his research has found something both obvious
and profound. The content of yourself narrative predicts your psychological
(20:21):
well being, your resilience, and your capacity for growth more
reliably than almost any other variable. Not what happened to you,
how you story what happened to you. Two people can
go through almost identical experiences, the difficult childhood, the professional failure,
the painful relationship, and construct completely different narratives from the
(20:44):
same raw material. One person stories it as evidence of
their damage, the other stories it as the origin of
their depth. The experiences were similar, the narrators made different choices.
McAdams identified what he called the redemption narrative, a story
structure where difficult chapters are told as leading to growth, insight,
(21:07):
or strength. He found that people who naturally organize their
self narratives around redemption are significantly more psychologically healthy, more generative,
and more resilient than those who organize around contamination, where
a good thing was ruined, where a hopeful beginning led
to a bad end. The difference is not in what happened.
(21:28):
The difference is in how it is told. Here's what
I want you to do with this immediately, think of
the story you most consistently tell about yourself, the one
that comes up in therapy or with close friends, or
at three am when you're being most honest, the one
that explains why things are the way they are, why
you are the way you are. Now ask is this
(21:49):
the only story the evidence supports or is it one story,
one edit, one emphasis, of many that could be constructed
from the same facts. What would the story look like
if you're telling it as evidence of your strength rather
than your damage, as evidence of your wisdom rather than
your wounds, as a chapter rather than a conclusion. You
(22:12):
are the narrator, the raw materials fixed, The narration is yours.
This isn't toxic positivity. Choose a story that is honest
that gives you somewhere to go. Mindset seven. Love is
not a feeling. It is a daily decision. A student
once asked a teacher, what's the difference between I like
(22:32):
you and I love you? The teacher replied, when you
like a flower, you simply pluck it, but when you
love a flower, you water it every day. Love is
a daily act, a daily decision, not just a feeling.
I've saved this one for last deliberately because I think
it is the most important, and I think it is
(22:55):
the most misunderstood, and I think getting it wrong is
responsible for more human suffering than almost anything else I
could name. Here's the story our culture tells us about love.
Love is a feeling that arrives, a lightning bolt, a chemistry,
a sense of recognition there you are, that happens to
you rather than being made by you. And when the
feeling is there, the relationship works. And when the feeling fades,
(23:19):
which it inevitably does because all feelings are temporary, the
relationship is over because the love is gone. This story
is everywhere, in every rom com and every love song
and every dating app designed around the initial spark. It
is so pervasive that most people have never questioned it.
The psychologist Robert Sternberg at Yale developed what he called
(23:40):
the triangular theory of love, a framework that identifies three
components of genuine, durable love passion, intimacy, and commitment, and
his research found that of the three, passion, the feeling,
the spark, the chemistry has the shortest lifespan. It peaks early,
often within months of relationship beginning, and it declines predictably
(24:03):
regardless of how compatible, how suited, or how deeply in
love two people genuinely are. This is not a bug,
This is biology. The neurochemicals responsible for the early intensity
of romantic love, dopamine uropanephrine, are designed to initiate bonding,
not maintain it. They're a starter motor, not an engine.
(24:23):
The relationships that last, the ones that deepen rather than erode,
are built on what remains after the starter motor quiets,
And what remains is not a feeling. It is a
series of daily, often mundane, often imperfect choices. The choice
to be curious about this person rather than certain about them,
(24:45):
the choice to repair the rupture rather than catalog it.
The choice to see them fully, not just the version
you fell for, but the complex, contradictory, sometimes maddening, a
whole person in front of you, and choose them anyway.
The difference between a relationship that survives and a relationship
that dies is not the absence of conflict. It was
(25:07):
the presence of what John Gotman calls bids for connection,
the small, daily, often trivial, attempts one person makes to
reach toward the other, a joke, a question, a touch,
a look, and the critical variable was whether those bids
were met, turned toward in Gotman's language, rather than turned
(25:30):
away from. The Relationships that lasted were not the ones
with the most passion or the best compatibility scores or
the fewest arguments. They were the ones where both people,
most of the time, in the small moments that feel
like they don't count, choose to turn toward each other.
That is not a feeling, That is a practice. Here's
(25:53):
the immediate application. Think of the most important relationship in
your life right now, and ask what is the smallest,
most available, most concrete bid for connection I could make
toward this person today. Not a grand gesture, not a
difficult conversation, the smallest genuine movement toward them. A text
(26:14):
that says I was thinking of you, A question that
shows you've been paying attention, five minutes of eye contact
without a phone in the room, the choice to be
curious rather than reactive in the next disagreement. Love is
a daily decision. Make it today. Here's what I know
about mindsets. They don't change your life by being interesting.
They change your life by being practiced, by being returned
(26:37):
to again and again until they stop being ideas you
agree with and start being the lens through which you
automatically see. That process takes time, takes repetition, takes the
courage to keep applying an idea even when the situation
is hard and the easier thing is to react from habit.
Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you'll
(26:58):
share this with a friend, and I hope you'll choose
a mindset to practice for the next seven days. Remember
I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.
If you enjoyed this conversation, you're going to love my
episode with Arnold Schwarzenegger on how to make your visions
of reality and how to stop having a limited mindset.
I never believed in Plan B. If I start having
(27:21):
a Plan B, that means now that I'm saying, well,
maybe this isn't working out.
Host
Jay Shetty
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