Exhausted From Being a People Pleaser? Use THIS 0–10 Rule to Say “No” Without Guilt

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2:02And take a quiz for a custom hair care recommendation at moerie.com. Results can vary. Mori is not a substitute for medical advice. See website for more. How amazing would it be? I've been so fortunate to learn about these traditions that are 5 ,000 years old. They're not my teachings. They're not my wisdom. It's wisdom that I've gained from my teachers and mentors. How amazing would it be if these went viral and everyone for free could have access to these tools and skills? What an amazing world we would live in. What if compassion could go viral? What if empathy could go viral? What if the ideas that bring people together could go viral?

2:38The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty. So often we rush through life chasing deadlines, juggling responsibilities, and trying to keep up with everything around us. But moments like these remind us to pause, to reflect, and to remember what truly matters. Connection, compassion, and purpose. That's what makes this gathering so unique. Normally, On Purpose is where I sit down with incredible guests to share their wisdom with you. But tonight, the roles are reversed. I'm stepping into the guest seat, sharing my own journey, the lessons I've learned, and the practices that continue to guide me every single day.

3:23This isn't just another episode. It's an intimate conversation about resilience, reframing adversity, and discovering how we can make wisdom go viral in our world. And I'm so grateful you're here to be a part of it. we are blessed at iHeart to be able to work with hundreds of creators who change the game every day. And one of them is here tonight, a best-selling author. Last time I saw Jay Shetty, he was about to go around the world, like 40 cities with a book that he had just put out. The biggest mental health and mindful podcaster in the world and has been for several years running. and, candidly, just a dear friend of mine in iHeartMedia.

4:08Let's bring Jay Shetty up. Thank you.

4:26So some of this for me is origin stories. And I think everybody here knows who you are. But just in case, how did this happen? How did you get here? Tell us a little bit of the story of how you got here. Yeah, well, first of all, I'm so grateful to be here and wonderful to be surrounded by all of you, making sure I can see everyone all the way up there at the back as well. I have no idea how this happened. I'm like living in bonus land. And I had no idea that any of this was possible. I didn't ever believe that any of this would happen. I remember booking small college rooms and putting up posters to try and share wisdom.

5:18And I remember going to give my first talk and I waited for 10 minutes after the announced time, waited 20 minutes, waited 30 minutes, 40 minutes later, realized no one was coming. So I practiced my presentation to an empty room. And then the second time, same thing happened. Practiced a presentation to an empty room. The third time I realized I had to fire the person putting up the flyers. But that person was me. And so I couldn't really do that. And so I practiced empty rooms for weeks and weeks and years. And I had lived as a monk for three years before that. and I was just trying to share what I'd learned.

6:02And to be honest, I was lucky if five to 10 people would show up at an event in London on a Friday night that was absolutely free so that I could just share wisdom. I had a day job. I was working full-time as a consultant in the city just to pay my bills. And then I'd spend my evenings trying to share wisdom. And so that's how it started. And that led to one day putting out videos and then podcasts and books and everything else. But that's really the journey. That's really the work. More than five to 10 people here tonight. A lot of what you talk about, which seems appropriate to start here on a day like today, a lot of what you talk about is reframing adversity.

6:49You just told a little story about how you had a little adversity. You're trying to get a career going, an after hours career. we are running and gunning a lot of us marketers in the corporate world, hour in, hour out. We hit adversity all the time. We hit it emotionally. We hit it professionally. What I love about talking to you is how practical it gets so fast. Talk to us a little bit about what that means for you, reframing adversity and what we could do literally tomorrow morning, maybe to live a little differently.

7:24what's really interesting is there's this beautiful teaching that comes from the buddha that i love and it's called the second arrow so the buddhist talks about how if someone shoots an arrow at you and sadly it hits you it's gonna hurt that's what it feels like to experience adversity we all have that whether someone shouted at you someone said something mean on the subway, your boss is having a bad day, maybe a child said something to you, right? Whatever it is, like everyone's got their version of that. Your friend screwed you over, your boyfriend or girlfriend or whoever it was broke up with you for no reason at all.

8:07That's the first arrow. And the Buddha talks about how the first arrow hurts and you can't really change that. But the Buddha says, don't fire a second arrow at yourself. And the second arrow is the meaning that you attach to that first arrow. So, oh, they broke up with me because I'm not good enough. Oh, my boss is yelling at me because they hate me. Oh, that person snarled at me on the train because, you know, I just, I have that energy. And so you start giving meaning to that which doesn't exist. And that second arrow is where all of our adversity really begins. We're actually tough enough to heal from the first arrow.

8:51Every single one of you has healed from the most difficult things, things that I'm not aware of, things that you may never share, whether you've lost a loved one, whether you went through a really difficult health challenge when you were younger, whether you grew up without a parent, like whatever you've been through, You've been through really, really hard things. And you can do extremely hard things moving forward. And so the first thing you can do waking up tomorrow to Connell's point is, make a list of every hard thing you've been through. It will only make you more confident. It will only make you more courageous.

9:25Make a list of every difficult thing you've done in your life. And the second thing is, stop giving negative meaning to hard things that happen. Stop firing that second arrow yourself. Those are the two things I'd do. just to repeat it like it it conversations with you whether whether it's in private before we come on or here in front of a crowd it's i find it so helpful um i'll i'll tell sort of a candid moment of a couple years ago we were sitting and doing a q a together and after the q a i said yeah my son's going off to college in a in a year and i'm i'm sort of freaking out about it and i think he's on a trajectory that he's trying to figure himself out.

10:06We all are. And your instinct, this really happened. Like your instinct was, let me call him. Let me call him. You want me to talk to him? I'll talk to him. It'd be cool. I won't make it weird. And it was so, you're so of service. But I thought to myself afterwards, like, God, that's got to be exhausting to constantly be helping, and you really are. What do you do for yourself to reboot, to reinvigorate yourself because you are constantly in service like that, in some sense, taking on other people's stuff so much? What do you do to keep stable, going okay? What do you do? I'll try and be brief about the things that I think are obvious.

11:00So I meditate daily. I exercise five, six days a week, eat healthy. I have a very disciplined regimen when it comes to all of that stuff. So that helps a lot. But on a deeper level and to take it a step deeper, because I think all of you are here today and we have this intimate space to be more open and vulnerable. For me, I've been really fortunate that my teachers are like a reservoir of joy and I get to be with them deeply often. And so my monk teacher is 75 years old this year. He was in New York actually earlier this week. So I would finish my work day and spend Monday and Tuesday evening with him for like three, four hours.

11:47And he is just full of wisdom. He's full of light. He's full of life. And I'm just in his aura, just like soaking it in. And he's just truly one of those people that you meet and you're just like, I feel like he's looking through me. I feel like he sees all my flaws, but I feel loved and I feel held. And I've known him ever since I was 18 years old. And for 20 years, he's been my guide and my mentor and being in his presence is just unmatched. And so I'm spoiled. I'm overwhelmed with love for him. And then the second part of it is really beautiful because when you are of service, when you're trying to give, I don't, when I'm trying to be helpful, you actually receive really beautiful stories.

12:27And so I talked about this, I was on the Today Show this morning and I was talking to Chanel, who sadly, one of the hosts who lost her husband to cancer. She just came back after six months of taking care of him during that time and while he passed away. And she asked me a similar question. and I immediately thought of two people that I met while I was on tour so this year we took on purpose across 15 cities of North America and Canada and I met two people that stayed with me I met lots of people but two people stayed with me deeply one was a navy seal who was just back from deployment that weekend and said to me that when they're at deployment they listen to on purpose and I just was like wait a minute how does that even happen like I'm just like explain that to me.

13:16And it was just humbling. It just felt bizarre and ridiculous. And I was like, teach me, like, tell me, tell me about you. I'm so much more interested in learning from you. And the second person was this 19 year old girl who is a world champion cheerleader. And at 16 years old, she's world champion across America. And she had a freak accident where she had a really bad fall and she had a disruption in her spinal cord, which has left her paralyzed, which includes her hands. She was in a wheelchair when I saw her three years on. And she was the most vibrant person I'd ever met in my life. She was beaming.

14:02She was smiling. She was joyful. She was telling me a story with full of life. Her name is Michaela Noble. and I was so inspired by it. And I was like, what, how did you do this? Like, how can you be that positive? Like, I was like, if I listened to all my advice, I wouldn't be like you, right? So explain to me how you did this. And I meant it, I was like, explain to me. And she explained to me that she's believes in God and that God reminded her how beautiful her family is and just how that's been her source of shelter and love. And I have never forgotten that moment I shared with, I met her for like 10 minutes or something, but I can't stop talking about it and thinking about it because she was showing me how vibrant, energetic and beaming someone can be when they can't walk, they're in a wheelchair and they've lost their dreams.

14:53She'll never be able to cheer again. And so that's how I get inspired. The people who I've learned from, and I find even the people that say they're learning from me, they're actually inspiring me more than they know. I think a lot of what we strive for as marketers, as professionals, is when we're working on that one idea, that one campaign, and it goes viral. And we're like, wow. In marketing speak, you've got a lot of earned value, earned media on your hands. But you use this term, making wisdom go viral, which I can't imagine anything more timely than this as a goal. Just walk us through that.

15:33What does it mean for you? Why do you talk about that a lot. Yeah, I read a book before I started creating content by Salim Ismail. The book's called Exponential Organizations, published by the Singularity University years ago, really old book. And it almost talked about how Uber and Facebook and how those early companies had their rise. But he talked about how all amazing companies or organizations or people had an MTP or a massive transformational purpose. And he talks in the book about how Google's MTP is organizing the world's information. Their MTP is not building Google ads or Google AI or Google glasses.

16:16It's organizing the world's information. It's massive, it's aspirational, and it allows them to do anything. It's not like we can just have a Gmail account. And he said, Ted's was ideas worth spreading. So I spent a lot of time thinking like, what's my MTP? And I came up years ago now, like maybe eight years ago with making wisdom go viral. And it really stuck for me. And it really stuck for a lot of other people. And then COVID came and viral had a whole new meaning. Then everyone's like, maybe you should change that. And so we didn't use it for a few years. It's kind of having a comeback now.

16:50But MTP, talking about why that's important, what it means when i started creating content there were only like three or four things that went viral so it was cats which i love any cat people yeah all right okay dogs didn't know that we were going there yeah dogs dog people yeah number three babies baby people yeah all right so cats dogs babies and then people taking their clothes off so those are the people taking their clothes really we don't get a chance so those are the four things that went viral when i started creating content, health and wellness, mindfulness, meditation, wisdom didn't really exist on the internet.

17:31Like it wasn't viral. It was there, but it wasn't viral. And so I thought, how amazing would it be? I've been so fortunate to learn about these traditions that are 5 ,000 years old. They're not my teachings. They're not my wisdom. It's wisdom that I've gained from my teachers and mentors. How amazing would it be if these went viral and everyone for free could have access to these tools and skills? What an amazing world we would live in. What if compassion could go viral? What if empathy could go viral? What if the ideas that bring people together could go viral? Because I wasn't seeing that. Until this day, On Purpose's mission is, I promise you, we will get the same or more views than any of our peers in this place without using clickbait.

18:15That's our mission. That's my rule. I will never ask a clickbait question because I don't want to, because our mission is we're going to prove to you that if you serve the word world healthy food but looks good and tastes good then they'll take it but if you serve the world junk food of course they're going to eat it it's obvious and so my push to myself is always how do i ask the least clickbait question and get it to go viral which annoys my team because they're like jay if you just ask them about kanye it would help and i'm like yeah i'm gonna go through this whole interview and not mention Kanye.

18:49And I did that and yeah, it still works. So that's kind of where I come at it from, which is, yeah, how do we truly make wisdom go? I'm totally not going to ask my next question about Kanye.

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20:36we at iheart are a multimedia company um broadcast radio podcasting of course is our bedrock but uh we are everything from from iheart radio music festival in las vegas to jingle ball yes, Jingle Ball if you want to see how loud our company gets it's Jingle Ball but it always it always warms my heart to talk to creators like yourself or Malcolm Gladwell or Questlove who are partners with ours for whom audio in particular is very, very specifically important uh Malcolm Gladwell puts it in a way when I was talking to him and he said you know it's funny video for me comes in through the eyes but audio goes straight for the heart and he said I swear it's not I'm not making this up he's like I've seen I've seen audiences react differently to the stuff I do as a creator where why is audio such a huge part of your focus particularly podcasting with the on purpose podcast what itch does it scratch what what need does it serve why does it play such a big role in your life you can't just quote Malcolm Gladwell I grew up Malcolm's like my hero I grew up as reading all his books so it's uh it was so wonderful to meet him in Qatar I love Malcolm uh his works incredible and I love that I love that approach.

22:12It's beautiful. It's for me, audio feels like you're on a phone call with someone, which feels so intimate because no one calls anyone anymore. And so there's such an intimacy in feeling like someone's in your ear. It's so close. It's so vulnerable. It's so personal when you're letting someone into your ear. And I see that in the different communities I have. If someone watches me, they know a certain part of me. But if someone listens to me, they know me far more deeply. I know the difference when I meet someone who listens to On Purpose regularly versus someone who follows me on Instagram. It's completely different conversation I'm going to have with that person.

22:59And if someone's listening to my audiobook, book, same thing. It's so meaningful because I think we all consume more deeply through our ears. We could be looking at something and looking at a million things. And when you're watching something, like Malcolm said, like when you're watching something, you're looking at the characters and you might look at their hair and the bag that they're holding and their fashion, and then you forgot what they said. But when you're listening, all you can do is listen to what someone said. There is zero distraction. So the intimacy, the vulnerability, the personal connection is just unmatched.

23:32And I feel so lucky that I get to live and sit with people, whether they're at the gym, whether they're on their way to work or back, whether they're walking their dog, whether they're trying to walk their cat, whether they're cooking, like, you know, it's like whatever you're doing, like you're a part of someone's life. If you think about that, audio is the only thing you really do while doing everything else. So you're a part of someone's life. Whereas you sit down to watch a show, you're not doing, you might do a bunch of things and watch, but when you're doing a bunch of things and you're listening, it's like, there's just this beautiful captivated connection.

24:04And so I, and I feel that with someone who people, when I meet them and they listen to the podcast, they'll often come up to me and say, I feel like I know you. And my answer is you kind of do. You know, and it's, it's, it's different from someone saying, I follow you on Instagram. I feel like not talking about artificial intelligence, we would be remiss in not hitting it at least for a second. We have a pretty incredible research team at iHeart, and they are laser focused on this topic today. What does it mean to make human generated content versus AI generated content? This is a challenge we all as marketers are grappling with, figuring out, is it a tool?

24:44Is it a friend? Is it a foe? What do I do? You know, nine out of 10 humans in the United States still feel like it is very important to me that the content I consume is made by a human. 82 % of those people are uncertain of, concerned about AI. It can mean a lot of different things, but generally, it's a position of anxiety. It's not yet a position of, let's go, this is going to be great. how do you process that? How should we think about that? I think fear around new technology is always normal and expected. And I think we felt the same way about social media and if not more today than we did when it was founded and same at the internet and same with color television and probably everything else.

25:37And so the fear doesn't surprise me and it feels like a normal human reaction and probably the most justified ever because AI is definitely the most scary and the most potentially dangerous one out of all of them. And I think it seems like it's got worse every time. So it's fair and it's real. I think at the same time, we've seen that the technology is not going to go away because we're scared. It's not going to disappear because we don't like it. And sadly, we're not smart enough as humans to end something before it ends us. and so we're going to let it take course. We'll make a documentary in 10 years' time.

26:20The next book in 12 years will be about how you to get your kids off of AI instead of phones and we'll do the same thing again because as Mark Twain says, history never repeats itself, but it always rhymes. So you see that happen again and again and again. So what do we do, right? So what do we do? If we take all of what I just said and that's just what humans do, then what do we do with that? we only really have one choice, which is how do we learn to engage with it effectively and not let it use us? And when I think about creativity, I fully agree with you. There were a couple of brands in the last couple of weeks that launched fully AI campaigns and it was rejected completely.

26:57I even see fellow creators who are making brilliant storytelling videos on TikTok with AI, with Vio. And the comments are just like, oh, I guess we're using AI now. And And I'm flabbergasted because the storytelling is brilliant. Yeah, it's beautiful. But all the comments are like, why are you doing this? And I'm like, oh, interesting. Not me, we're not making them yet, but friends of mine. And I'm like, oh, interesting. Like what's going on here? So I think that's not going to go away. And I think the big question I keep getting asked at conferences when I'm especially talking about mindfulness and consciousness is will AI ever have a soul?

27:31My answer to that is I don't know, but I just hope that the people using AI have a soul. And I think that's what I would encourage marketers and creators to do, that it's soul plus AI. It's not AI. Because you just told me, and I won't share what it was, but you just told me about a beautiful story your friend made into a movie. And that story is only a great story because it was real life. And so now more than ever, art imitating reality is all we have. And it's what we've been fascinated about. It's why we love true stories. It's why we love stories that are based on a true story, because art imitating reality is what captures humans.