You Are One Mindset Shift Away From Achieving Everything You Want - With Light Watkins

0:00You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com. What if this was the year that you truly transformed? Whether that's that mission to get into the best shape of your life, to write that book that you've always wanted to write, to create the relationship that you truly want to have, whatever it might be for you, what if this was the time to truly transform? Now, with that being said, it is a huge aspiration to say, I'm getting in the best shape of my life this year. You can absolutely do it. But if we're looking at history and we're looking at our society at large, we set these new year resolutions, it doesn't tend to work out for the majority of people.

0:48And today we're going to break down why that is and actually look at a structured, intelligence, science-backed way to make it to that destination of getting in the best shape of our life. Or again, whatever context this is for you, whatever you have on your heart that you want to achieve this year, this is going to provide some insight on how to actually get there. I love the sentiment that if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. And so sometimes we have to think differently. We have to take a different approach. And that's what today's episode is all about.

1:26And without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day. Light Watkins is a bestselling author, speaker, and mindfulness expert who's all about helping people to find presence and fulfillment from the inside out. He's the author of five books, including Blissmore, Travel Light, and his newest book, The Year You Transform. Light has spoken on stages for Fortune 500 companies, led workshops on nearly every continent, and built a thriving online community called The Happiness Insiders. And he's here today to show you how this will be the year that you transform. Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only Light Watkins.

2:07Just feeling so inspired. So right now, especially this time of year, people are excited about transformation and opportunity. And this can be the year that people actually transform. The person listening, your life can actually change this year. Starting today, this could be the catalyst. And what you're doing with this new book is you are really enlightening us on why this doesn't tend to work out for most people. So let's start off with that. Why is it a struggle for most people to actually make the changes that they want to make? Okay. So there are three paths to change and most people opt for one path or they are a victim to another path.

2:53And I'm introducing a third path. So the one that people usually opt for because we are hyper connected and exposed to social media. and as we talked about earlier, what you oftentimes see in social media, what the algorithms favor are extreme cases, black or white. So blow up your life. If you want to change, get out of your job, get out of the relationship, become an entrepreneur, become a nomad, move to Bali, go to India, join an ashram, right? All these extreme things. I call it the eat, pray, love approach. No shame to eat, pray, love. I read the book and I saw the movie. So, and I love Elizabeth Gilbert, but that, that approach is for normal people, regular people.

3:42I put myself in this category. It's very extreme and it's more of an outside in approach to change. Meaning when you get back from your, your eat, pray, love, your version of eat, pray, love, oftentimes your life hasn't really changed all that much because nothing really shifted internally. So that's one approach. The approach that people end up finding themselves being victimized is what I call the crisis approach to change, which is you don't do anything because you have analysis paralysis. And so you stay in the dead end job, you stay in the dead end relationship, you stay in the status quo too long, and then it starts to implode.

4:28And then through the implosion, you get forced into some sort of change where you have to change your diet. You have to change your lifestyle, right? Because you waited until the thing started manifesting itself physically, and you just can't, you can't operate in the normal way anymore until you take care of this, this thing that's going on. And there are a lot of people who are subject to that. And so this third approach, I call it the tortoise approach to change, which is where you, first of all, you acknowledge that we live in an ever-changing world. So change is not something you have to necessarily decide to be a part of.

5:09You're already a part of it. The question is, are you proactive? Are you proactively engaging in the change or are you denying the change? And so it's calling people forward to proactively engage in it, but to engage in it in a more sustainable way, which is inside out approach to change. Now, all change, what change essentially means is you have to leave the center of your comfort zone and you have to start moving in the direction of the sort of edges of your comfort zone. And the closer you get to the edges of the comfort zone, the more uncomfortable the change is going to become. But when you're forced in that direction, it's uncomfortable times 10.

5:59When you consciously choose to move in that direction, it's uncomfortable times three, right? Just to put a number to it. So in other words, it's still uncomfortable, but there's something that happens internally when you choose it that makes it a little bit more exciting. Right. And so that's what the book is about. It's about getting people to move in the direction of their growth zone by taking small what I call hops of faith instead of big leaps of faith that are scary that you have to blow up your life. Just start with a little hop of faith. I like that. so obviously during this time of year new year changes it's usually that category one yes where it's like radical change i'm gonna do all of these things i'm going to the gym every day i'm gonna stop eating sugar i'm gonna stop doing this that and the other yeah yep and then the other version being basically change through pain you know pain driven resolutions don't work for me i'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing.

7:00Yup. And so whether it's like everything breaks, basically break down, right? Breakthrough through breakdown, which that's a powerful way to change. I've been there. I've been there. They call it rock bottom. Yeah. That's not what we would want to consciously choose. Right. And to consciously choose a version that is truly sustainable is the approach that you're recommending for everybody. And I love this in the book, you talk about the paradox of choicelessness. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. So I advocate for, instead of adopting a goal that is indefinite, which is I'm not drinking alcohol anymore, or I'm not eating meat anymore, or I'm working out every day, right?

7:46to set a goal that is only seven days. And I'm introducing the reader in the book to 10 seven day challenges, right? So for instance, taking a cold shower every day for seven days, not even seven days in a row, but just however long it takes you to get through seven days, because it's just a really doable goal for people not complaining for seven days. See if you can go a full day without vocalizing or typing out a complaint. You can think about complaints all you want. You can't really stop what you think about, but you can control how much you express the complaint. And it's like shocking. That's one of the hardest challenges in the book.

8:35Being grateful, practicing gratitude for seven days, practicing stillness, overcoming an addiction, purging things you don't need, choosing to do something that scares you. I call it the scary yes challenge. So you have all these seven day challenges. And then the next instruction is to choose an action step that fits into your average busy day. So forget about your perfect day in your mind. I'm going to wake up and do this, that, and the other, wake up an hour early. Like, do you have anything in your history illustrating that you are able to do that on a consistent basis? Most people don't, but maybe you can limit your scrolling to 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes, right?

9:25And then that leaves you with an extra time to work on these other things that you may want to do, or maybe there are ways to combine them with other things that you're already doing. So it just gets people to really be intentional about the thing that they say they want to do. And when it comes to the freedom of choicelessness, what I'm suggesting is that people introduce some sort of really small restriction in their day. And so we normally associate restrictive behavior with a lack of freedom in our society. My favorite football coach, Nick Saban from Crimson Tide, Roll Tide, he says, if you want to be elite, you really don't have that many choices because it takes what it takes.

10:16And so when it comes to the change process, going from normal to elite in your life, restriction really is the only road. road. And so again, we're talking about a very doable restriction, seven days, five minutes a day that's combined with something else you're already doing. So that's a restriction, right? But it's a doable restriction. And what you find is that when you commit to those seven action steps, it actually frees you up because now you're not bartering with yourself. Do I have time? You know, do I have to do it today? And all the things, all that energy that we spend around talking ourselves out of doing things or into doing things or negotiating and bartering.

11:06And we just kind of have agreed, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take the cold shower. I'm going to wake up and I'm going to take the cold shower. It's just going to be 30 seconds. I'm not going to like it. But after the fact, I'm going to love that I push myself that much further out of my comfort. and you're going to have a big smile on your face. And the next morning you're going to have to, you know, go do it again. But each time you do it, the smile is going to be bigger. And your ability to do uncomfortable things at work and in your relationships and in your friendships and in your lifestyle is going to become a lot greater because you practiced it.

11:46It's no longer just a idea or an intellectual concept. It's your lived experience. And that's why it becomes a lifestyle that ends up ultimately changing your life within the span of a few months or a year. Yeah. Obviously today we have a lot of FOMO. Yeah. There's so much to do. There's so many things to try. We all want to journal and to meditate and to eat well and to get 10 ,000 steps in and and to lift weights and to the list goes on and to be a good mom and to, you know, the list goes on and on and on. And what you're doing, and it's, I mean, this shouldn't even be as profound as it is because it's so obvious, but you're breaking it down into one of the most remarkable things that we have as human beings, which is the ability for us to focus on one thing, right?

12:40And so you share in the book that seven days is the sweet spot of transformation. It's a sweet spot. And what you're doing is instead of me saying, okay, I'm gonna commit to meditate every day, just take a seven day challenge. Just do it for seven days. You can completely stop after that. You can keep going. It doesn't, just commit to a seven day challenge for yourself, right? Five or 10 minutes, whatever that looks like for you, right? And what that, and you don't try and change everything else. You don't have to do Qigong too. You don't have to do the 10 ,000 steps. Just commit to that seven day challenge for yourself that you're gonna meditate every day, just for seven days.

13:21I love that because it's so approachable. It's an easy on-ramp. I don't have to turn my life upside down to do that. And you also recommend within that is, it's still gonna be based on you. And thank you for saying that earlier about the discomfort because any change is gonna bring about discomfort. You gotta adjust to it. but you're not saying, for example, this applies, and I want everybody to hear this. This applies to whatever your goal is for yourself, for you to finally transform this year. So this could be drinking less. This could be, you know, changing the way that you're eating. Making sales calls.

13:59Sales calls, relationships. Yeah, anything. So with that being said, if somebody, and we're not talking about in the severity of an alcoholic, but if somebody's like, you know what? I don't want to drink as much. I want to, I want to step away from alcohol. You can do seven days, seven day challenge. You also give the advice about being mindful of your own life though. Like, do you want to do that when you go on vacation to take your seven day challenge, you know, or whatever you're going on a cruise ship with your friends, like do this in conditions that are about your normal life. Right. And just commit to those seven days.

14:35This doesn't mean that you don't drink ever again. But, you know, same thing with, okay, you want to, you know, get those 10 ,000 steps in. Just do it for seven days. Just take on seven days. You can go back to 2000 on the eighth day. Right. It's funny because yesterday, you know, I don't live in Los Angeles, but yesterday it was 430. I looked at my step counter and it was like 800 steps, which is like, it just blew my mind because normally by 430, I've got 11 ,000 steps where I live in Mexico City, but just being back in the US and having to drive around to different podcasts and stuff, it's just like, it's so funny how you have to be really intentional about getting those steps.

15:21But yeah, man, we live in a best intention society where everyone has the best intentions. Everyone has, you know, I definitely want to optimize for this and, you know, become mentally stable and all these things. But when the rubber hits the road, you know, we were talking, okay, it's great to do these things on a retreat or on, you know, some other experience where you can just focus on that. But really we want to put ourselves in a position where we're able to do the things that we ultimately want to do and change life and change our life in the way that we ultimately want to change it on a regular basis.

16:02And so when it comes to things like walking and meditating and, you know, eating a certain way and not drinking and all that, one of the things that I advocate for is you have an idea of how many steps you want to take. I want to do 10 ,000 steps. Okay, fine. Why do you, why are you saying that? Because that's the magic number that you hear on social media a lot, but guess what? 10 ,000 steps is not really sustainable if you're in a society where by 4.30 in the afternoon, you only got 8 ,000 steps and you got a family and you got a job and you have other responsibilities. So maybe you just become really intentional about 1 ,000 extra steps or 2 ,000.

16:44Now that sounds like a lot of steps, but when you really think about step math, right, if you go to the doctor and your doctor says, you know, this year, in order for you to get healthy, I want you to do seven marathons. Somebody will have a heart attack, right? Seven marathons. I don't have time. Guess what? Seven marathons is a thousand steps a day. If you walk a thousand steps a day, every day for a year, effectively you have completed seven marathons. So every thousand steps is seven marathons. So I walk an average of 10 ,000 steps a day, sometimes even 12 ,000 steps a day. So every year I've done 70 to 80 marathons, which is crazy if you think about it like that, right?

17:33Because that's a massive win just from adding another thousand steps. Now, Now, how long does it take you to walk a thousand steps? Every hundred steps is, takes you an, well, every hundred steps is about a minute of walking. So if you walk an extra 10 minutes a day, that's a thousand steps. If you walk 20 minutes a day extra, that's 2 ,000 steps. That's a mile. So you've walked a whole mile from just walking an extra 20 minutes. So now if you think about your day, okay, my gym is a two minute drive down the street, or the place where I like to have lunch is a two minute drive. A two minute drive is probably going to be about a 10 minute walk.

18:22So you have an opportunity there to walk. You can listen to the model health show on the way there and you're getting your steps, right? Or you can use that time to call your family member or a friend. So by all means, multitask, make it fit whatever else you got going on. And then you get back and you don't even realize, you just walked a mile. You just walked 2 ,000 extra steps. Do that seven times, right? Now, this is what I tell people in the book. Take as much time as you need to get those seven action steps, but if you happen to do them all within the same week, back to back, add another thousand steps.

19:04So you don't add more until you've already demonstrated for yourself that you can be consistent. So then you add another one, right? And then it may take you six months, may take you two years to walk 10 ,000 steps a day, just building it up slowly like that. But guess what? it becomes seamless in your lifestyle. And if you have another 30, 40, 50 years on the planet, two years is nothing because you're being proactive every day. Instead of thinking, oh, I need to start doing it now because it's January, whatever, right? And then you fall off by March because it's not sustainable because you haven't really fully integrated into your lifestyle.

19:45Then it leaves you feeling shameful. Oh, I'm not one of those people. I can't do it. You absolutely can do it. You can start meditating one minute a day and it may take you two weeks to get one minute a day, seven days. But if you happen to do it one minute a day, seven days in a row, now it's probably leaving you wanting more. Add two minutes. Don't jump to five minutes, just add two minutes. And then if you do that for the next seven days in a row, add another minute like that. It may take you nine months to build up to a 15 minute practice that leaves you wanting more. And it gives you time to learn about it.

20:22It gives you time to work out the best practices. So you can apply that to every single activity. And then the last challenge in the book is create your own. I show you how to do it for anything else you have going on, like you said, so that you can keep thinking about your life in terms of growth. And that's where change is. Right. So powerful. So powerful. So simple, but we don't do simple, especially today. And so I love the advice again of just like pick one thing, just pick one thing and take on a seven day challenge for yourself. It's the principle as you talk about less is more. Can you expand on that a little bit more?

21:00Because that, I thought more was more, less is more. So, you know, I'm primarily known as this meditation expert, right? That's where a lot of my, I put it in all my books because I love taking the inside out approach to change. And one of the instructions that will exponentially increase the quality of your meditation experiences is doing less. A lot of times people, and we talked about this on our very first podcast interview, like four episodes ago, where I talk about there's too much focusing happening in meditation, and that's what's causing the monkey mind experience. So if you want to get rid of the monkey mind experience, you want to start to do less, do least, and ultimately you want to do nothing.

21:53In fact, you want to take what I call the anti-focus approach, which is you allow your mind to be free range. And we talked about this in our last episode, free range mind, which means you're not thinking about your thoughts like clouds in the sky. You're not concentrating on your breath. You're not envisioning the white light. You're not doing any of that. You could be sitting in meditation, thinking about sex, drugs, rock and roll, people you hate, conversations that didn't go well and all that. And you could still have a very powerful and profound experience. And you come out of those experiences is having had time lapses, like the time went by faster than what you could recall.

22:34And that's what makes meditation actually feel great, not trying to control the mind. But there's something else that's happening. The more you can practice doing less, doing least and doing nothing in meditation, it creates a carryover effect. When you go into life, you become less controlling of the things that are happening. And now what's interesting about that is without even trying, what being less controlling does is it allows you to be more present. Because you're not, what causes you to not be present, what yanks you out of the present moment is this idea that this shouldn't be happening.

23:15So in other words, you have an expectation. This should be happening, not this. And whenever you're expecting something else to be happening other than what you're currently experiencing, you are just diminishing your ability to have present moment awareness, which means there could be all kinds of coincidences and synchronicities and really beautiful serendipitous moments happening all around you and you're missing most of it. And so what people ultimately want by taking the extreme approaches to change is they want presence. That's what you want. You want more presence. Just like when you go to Thailand or you go to, I don't know, you know, some very exotic or foreign place.

23:56The reason why those experiences become memorable is because you're more present there than you are in your neighborhood. Because you've been in your neighborhood. You know, you've seen the things in your neighborhood a million times. They're not that interesting. And but when you go to this exotic place, everything is interesting. Everything. the menu at the restaurant, the people on the streets that you're passing by and the way they get in the rickshaws and the temperature of the weather. And so we crave that contrast experience because we think it's because, oh, we just wanna be well-traveled and it makes us, we like tasting different foods, but really it's just because we're addicted it in a really beautiful way to presence.

24:44But the great thing about this is that you can create that where you are. But you have to do it from the inside out. You can't do it from the outside in. So that's why practices like stillness and gratitude and all that, they help you become more present. And it'll help you see the things that you have passed by a million times in a new way, the more present you become from the inside out. So as you practice that stillness, it literally expands your ability to stay connected to your familiar space more and more each time you come out, which is really beautiful. And it's all about doing less. Yeah.

25:29Thank goodness we finally understand how our sleep is deeply impacting our metabolic health and our health overall. In fact, the latest science is affirming that fat loss is sleep dependent. An incredible randomized crossover study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago found that when people were getting adequate amounts of sleep, they lost 55 % more body fat than when they were sleep deprived. And not only that, when they were losing weight through this process, people were losing more muscle mass when they were sleep deprived. All right. We want to avoid this to the best of our ability, get high quality sleep.

26:08But we've got to understand the number one thing that is messing up our sleep today is the newest thing in our environment today, which is our technology, our screens. We love them so much. Our phones and our TVs and our laptops and our iPads and this and that. We're inundated, we're surrounded by technology and they're awesome, but they're not awesome for our sleep quality. In fact, research from Brigham and Women's Hospital suggests that using light emitting electronic devices specifically in the evening. So again, our tablets, our smartphones, TV, laptops, in the hours before bedtime negatively impact our health overall, impact our alertness and disrupt our circadian clocks.

26:55And studies have suggested that specifically the blue light that's coming from these devices is especially powerful in suppressing our melatonin production. So, yes, we absolutely want to have some screen free time before bed to let melatonin start to get produced adequately, reduce our cortisol. But also today, thankfully, blue light blocking technology has come so far as well. This has been a part of my sleep wellness protocol for years. When the sun goes down, my blue light blocking glasses come on. And most brands, and this is something that a lot of people don't know about, most brands of blue light blocking glasses do not block blue light efficiently, nor are they lab tested to be effective, and they don't block other known spectra of light that have been proven to disrupt our sleep quality, like green light.

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28:28That's bondcharge.com forward slash model, B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E dot com forward slash model. Again, use the code model at checkout and get your hands on the very best blue light blocking glasses in the world so that you can sleep more soundly. Enjoy. And now back to the show. I've had this experience in my neighborhood, you know, where walking down the same block, little cul-de-sac circling around over and over. And it's just like, I've seen the same tree, but I haven't really seen this tree. You know, especially again, I'm new. The tree is new. The environment is new every single day, every minute.

29:10And it's just, how can you get it tuned into that? and it just creates this like this freshness. And I'm so grateful that you said this because it's so much easier when we're implanted into a different environment to where everything is new to our senses. And so it's like, it's kind of forcing you to be present or to, yeah, to be present to what's existing now. But we can find that anywhere. It could be a sound, it could be a smell, it could be, you know, again, the difference with the tree. So thank you for sharing that. And for us to, again, these practices unlock more of life that already is, we just kind of detach ourselves from it in a way.