I recently completed the book Think Like A Monk by Jay Shetty. This book is divided into three
parts - part one, part two and part three. In this video, I'm going to summarize part two of
this book. If you missed my summary of part one, you can watch it - the link will be in
the description below. Hi this is Supreet. I'm an engineer turned leadership trainer slash Youtuber.
I upload new videos about meditation, personal growth and occasionally, parenting. You can follow
me at GrowWithSupreet on facebook, instagram and twitter. This video is a long video, it is
divided into topics or chapters. You can either watch or listen to the entire video, or you can
go in the description and click on the timestamp of the topic that interests you. Part two of the
book starts with talking about purpose - finding your purpose or your dharma. according to jay,
when your natural talents and your passions which is your verna connect with what the universe needs
which is seva and become your purpose, you are living your dharma. if we keep our minds open and
curious, our dharmas will announce themselves. but sometimes it can take years of exploration to find
your dharma. it's not that the dharma hides from us but sometimes we have to wait patiently for
it to show itself. it took me a very long time to find my dharma which is to help and inspire
people on their personal growth journey. if you're interested in watching a video about my career
change story from engineer to leadership trainer and youtuber, the link to that video will be in
the description below. another thing about dharma or purpose is that it evolves with us. so it can
change. as much as it is important to live a life of purpose, this doesn't mean that every activity
which is outside of your dharma is a waste of time. for all of us, there are activities which
are competence building and there are activities which are character building. for example when jay
was at the monk school in india, he had to give talks and giving these talks was aligned with
his dharma of helping people and he enjoyed that and this activity was competence building for him.
but there were some other things that he had to do for example taking out the trash,
as a part of the duties of of a monk, and he did not enjoy that but he realized that
some activities are competence building but other activities like taking out the trash are character
building. so both of these activities competence building and character building activities
are important. we need to work on both in order to serve our souls and a higher purpose. considering
how much laundry and dishes i do, i must have built a lot of character! morning routine. looking
at your cell phone first thing in the morning is not good for you because you're starting your day
with overwhelming yourself with stress and anxiety and guess what? when you start your morning
with high pressure and high anxiety and high stress activities, that sets the tone for the
rest of your day. so throughout the rest of your day whether it's your work or your conversations
or your meetings or your appointments, you're going to carry that high stress that high pressure
mindset with you. jay suggests to wake up one hour earlier than you do right now.
starting a more meaningful life starts with getting your day right and getting your day
right starts with getting your morning right. you will probably have to use an alarm but if you do,
then make sure to use a gentle alarm and make sure that the lighting is low and you can play
quiet music if you want to. so the point is to gently wake yourself up as opposed to
jerking yourself awake with high pressure and high stress situations. for the past two months
i have been waking up at 5 00 am and this is something i've struggled a lot with before
and i can tell you that already i'm seeing such a difference in how i am so calm in the morning
and i am a happy mom and i do not stress out my kids when i get them ready for school. so just
noticing how much calm i am and also how the rest of my day goes so smoothly - all that is going to
make me stick with this change and continue to wake up at 5am for the rest of my life.
sleep - if you want to have a good morning routine, it starts by establishing a healthy
restful evening routine. so in the night when you notice the first sign of fatigue
you need to go to sleep then. amazon ceo jeff bezos says that he makes it a point to get eight
hours of sleep every night. "getting less sleep might give you more time to be productive but
the quality will suffer". something new i learned was about the human growth hormone or hgh which
is a hormone that is responsible for cell repair and it it can even help us to live a longer life
and research has proven that 75 of this amazing hormone is produced when we sleep and even during
that sleep the highest bursts of hgh are produced between 10 pm and midnight. so if you're awake
during those hours you're cheating yourself of hgh. before you go to sleep, figure out or write
down what are the first things you want to achieve tomorrow. knowing what you're tackling first will
simplify your morning if you're spending your morning making trivial decisions like what to eat,
what to wear what tasks to accomplish first you're wasting your useful energy in these decisions. so
it's better to decide the night before all these things so that your morning energy can be better
utilized in being productive. settle into patterns and make decisions the night before. jay says that
the emotion you fall asleep in the night is most likely going to be the emotion that you wake up
with in the morning. for this reason when he goes to sleep he says to himself i am calm,
i am relaxed, i am focused, i am energized, i am productive. routines root us. routines ease our
cognitive burden so we have space for creativity. jay says that location has energy and time has
memory so if you want your routines and habits to stick try to do them at the same
time and same place every day dedicate specific places in your house for specific activities
even if you have a tiny apartment you can still dedicate certain areas for certain activities
multitasking jay advises against multitasking and advocates single tasking doing one thing at a time
on that note let me remind you to hit the like button and subscribe to my channel
while you're watching this video and also make sure to click the notification bell so you don't
miss my summary of part 3 of this book which is coming very soon. to make single tasking easier
jay and his wife have no tech zones in their house for example the dining room and the bedroom
is a no tech zone and also they have no tech times so between 8 p.m and 9 a.m the next morning they
try not to use technology i am myself trying to curb my addiction to technology and giving myself
no tech times and no tech zones but they are nowhere near what jay and his wife are doing
going all the way jay says that routines become easier if you've done something immersively jay
says that he has had many friends complain to him that they have been meditating for five minutes
a day for seven months and it is not working so what does he say in reply to those friends
he says that immersion takes time and practice he gives his own example of
when he first started to meditate it took him about 15 minutes just to settle physically
and then another 15 minutes to settle down the mental chatter and he has been meditating for 13
years now for one to two hours a day and it still takes him about 10 minutes to settle down his mind
so the advice he wants to give to the friends who were saying that meditation is not working
is that even though it is hard to time hard to find time to meditate try meditating for one hour
or try to go on a one day meditation retreat because when you've done it immersively like that
then after that when you go back to your 5 minute or 10 minute a day practice
it's going to be a bit easier speaking of immersing yourself completely into something if
you're finding that the summary is not enough for you and you want to read the entire book yourself
the amazon links are in the description below if you use my link it helps me earn
a small commission but you don't have to pay anything extra it allows me to continue to
make videos like this one the mind this is one of my favorite chapters from the book
the bhagavad-gita states for him who has conquered his mind the mind is the best of friends but for
one who has failed to do so his very mind will be the greatest enemy visualizing the mind
as a separate identity helps us to improve our relationship with it we can either visualize
the interaction with mind as making a new friend or negotiating peace with an enemy a beautiful
analogy that jay shared is that the monkey mind is like a child and the monk mind is like a parent
i found this analogy and its explanation to be very useful and i want to share it with you but
i'll share that in a separate video because i don't want this video to become too long
also in the mind chapter there's so much wisdom so much gold about how to make your mind your friend
how to reframe your negative thoughts i would love to make a separate video about that as well
so let me know in the comments if you would like me to make that video anxiety and living in the
present we spend most of our times living in the past or the future we are rarely 100 present in
the present moment jay says that realistically you will never reach a point in your life where
you're 100 present all the time and that's not the goal either after all thinking about the
good times we've had in the past or the lessons we have learned in the past and also thinking
about our future and planning about our future are excellent uses of our mental bandwidth but what we
do not want to do is waste our time in regret and worry a certain amount of planning is useful and
it's a good preparation for the various scenarios in the future but when it tips into a cycle of
repetitive worry and anxiety or maybe unrealistic aspirations that's when it becomes a waste of time
jay says when your mind continually returns to thoughts of the past or the future look for clues
in the present is your mind seeking to shield you or distract you instead of thinking about what
mattered in the past or what the future might hold gently guide your mind back to the moment
ask yourself questions about right now what is missing from this moment what is unpleasant about
today what would i like to change i would like to change the number of calories in chocolate to zero
detachment jay says that a quote from ali who is the cousin and son-in-law of prophet muhammad
best explains the monk idea of detachment and the quote is detachment is not that you own
nothing but that nothing should own you how beautiful is this quote by the way the book is
full of amazing beautiful transformational quotes and i have collected my top 30 of those quotes and
my sister has made them into a pretty pdf if you want a free copy of that pdf you can get it by
clicking on the link in the description below. like most monk endeavors, detachment is not
a destination one arrives at but a process one must constantly consciously undertake experiments
in discomfort which the monks often do like fasting silence meditating in heat or cold
they are all done to help with detaching the body from the mind they make you realize how much of
the discomfort is only in your mind so these are some challenges or austerities that the monks
undertake but if you want there are lots of challenges and austerities for you to choose from
for example you can try to refrain from sugar or alcohol you can do fasting you can perhaps
try to cut down your tv time or your social media time or you could take on a physical challenge
maybe you can try to refrain from gossiping or complaining and comparing whatever time you
free up by not indulging in let's say tv or social media then you can decide what you want to do with
that new found time so if social media was your way of relaxing and decompressing find something
else that would help you achieve the same goal my suggestion would be meditation and you can
also use your new found time to complete projects that have been on the back burner for a long time
ego this is another one of my favorite chapters from the book jay says that insecurities make
us want to convince ourselves and everyone else that we are special so we a dishonest version of
ourselves in order to appear more knowledgeable more accomplished more confident we present this
inflated self to others and we do everything we can to protect it the self we want others
to perceive there's a meme that shows warren buffett and bill gates standing side by side
and the caption says 162 billion dollars in one photo and not a gucci belt in sight here's another
line i love about ego that jay says the ego craves recognition acknowledgement praise to be right
to be more to put others down to raise us up the ego doesn't want to be better it wants to be seen
as better there's so much more that i'm so excited to share about ego and there's an exercise to help
you transform your ego but again i don't want to make this video very long so if you want me to
make a separate video about ego and transforming your ego exercise let me know soliciting feedback
on the topic of soliciting feedback jay says that we usually tend to make two mistakes when asking
for feedback we either ask everyone about feedback about one problem or we ask feedback from only
one person for all our problems so in the first case when you're asking 57 different people about
one problem you going you're going to end up with 57 different opinions and you're just
going to end up being overwhelmed and confused and lost and on the other side if you only go to
one person with all your problems you're going to overwhelm them with all your dilemmas and hence
they are going to be confused and burnt out when you receive feedback or criticism from someone
an easy way to check if it's in good faith is to see if the person is actually willing to invest in
your growth are they just going to criticize you or are they going to help you improve if not by
themselves helping you at least in suggesting you ways in which you can improve yourself
humility too often when we do well we feel good we live well and we say i got this
and that's when we fail jay says that instead of letting your achievements get
into your head detach from them feel gratitude for your teachers and what you have been given
sharing the success with them keeps you humble remind yourself who you are and why you're doing
the work that brings you success you are not your success or your failure aiming higher and higher
beyond ourselves to our community our country our planet and realizing that the ultimate goal
is unattainable is what keeps us humble rather than seeing your achievement as a status think
of the role you play in other people's lives as your greatest currency power of visualization jay
has given some examples in his book which shows how powerful visualization can be and i'm going
to share a few of those examples with you imagine that you hated the last thing that you said to a
parent who has passed away and now you have this guilt and regret when you visualize yourself
telling them how much you love them it's not going to change the past but unlike regret unlike
nostalgia it does start your healing process while meditating if you visualize a place that makes you
happy and relaxed your breath starts to shift your pulse starts to shift and your whole energy starts
to shift and even though you're feeling relaxed and happy in your visualization you actually draw
that feeling into your reality scientists at the cleveland clinic showed that people who imagined
contracting a muscle in their little finger over 12 weeks increased its strength by almost as much
as people who did actual finger exercises over the same period of time our efforts are the same but
visualization creates real changes in our bodies one important note about visualizations is that
we want to visualize positive things not negative things because negative visualizations will tend
to trap us in painful images and thoughts i'm going to visualize that pumpkin pie is zero
calories very soon i'm going to be uploading my video which is the summary of part three of this
book to make sure you don't miss it make sure your subscription and your notification bell is turned
on also if you want to download your free copy of my pdf version of the top 30 quotes my favorite
top 30 best quotes from this book you can get it by clicking on the link in the description
below if you're already on my private email list that pdf should be in your inbox. keep growing!
the link to that video will be in the in the description below is most likely going to i
think that is quite im i think that is quite impressive i think that is quite impressive i
found this analogy so these kind of challenges are for the monks or so these kind of challenges are
so these are some chat and so you're living with to make sure you don't miss it um