Jonathan Fields Authenticity in Business_Final

>> Hello, hello, hello. Has this been an awesome day? [cheers and applause] Since lunch, I've started five side hustles, planted a hydroponic garden on the roof of the theater, started to figure out how to love myself, working on that, amazing, I love just the energy, the thoughts. I want to take you guys on a bit of a time machine. So I'm hanging out with you today right here, let's take a step back in time a little bit 'cause in a very past life, I lived very differently in the world. So I was a lawyer, recovered 20 years or so now. [laughter] Not that it not a career, it just wasn't my path. And I worked in one of these big firms in the middle of New York City where there was, you know, buzzing going all around, I was paid fabulously, wearing really fancy suits, and dying inside every single day, literally dying actually. I ended up on a deal, and as we worked more and more and more, and I went home less and less and less, and slept less and less and less, and survived on a diet of Chinese food, chocolate, and coffee, the three Cs right? [laughter] Special nutritional pyramid. So this was how I lived, and every day I was getting worse and worse and worse, and we were on a big deal, and the team descends on the printer, and there's like everyone is going like crazy, and we have a deal that we have to hit by a certain date. There's no wiggle room. And about three days before the end of that, I started to realize that there's something happening in the middle of my body that's not good. And I'm at the table and I'm struggling, but everyone else is in their own little private bizarro universe too. I have trouble standing up because when I do, there's a pain that starts to radiate out from the center of my body. But I keep working because this is what we get paid to do, the impossible under impossible time constraints. This is what I signed up for. So our heads down working, working, working, working, I can barely breathe when we're coming 24 hours to the deadline. I can barely stand up. I'm in an excruciating pain. But there's no turning back now. So I finally sit there, and I'm breathing, and I'm sweating, and nobody notices because everyone else is sort of like doubled over in this crazy non-sleepy universe as well. And we finally hit the button on the deal. It gets blurry what happen from here. I know somehow I end up in a cab going back home which then was the Upper East Side. I passed out for a couple of hours and I wake up and I realize something's really wrong. I go to my doctor's office, right? He looks at me, and I'm kind of physical about two months before and he was a little concerned, now he looks at me, he does a quick exam, and turns white, by the way when your doctor turns pale, generally not a great thing. He grabs me by the hand, rushes me to infectious disease to somebody else, and within a couple of hours, I'm admitted into the hospital because it turns out my immune system has essentially shut down, and an infection has turned into this massive abscess in the middle of my body and ate a hole through my intestine from the outside in. Now the good news is I was at a teaching hospital, so I had a lot of people attending to me. So when I think back on that time, thankfully everything came out okay. I had surgery within 24 hours, came out of that, and as I was recovering from that, one thing became crystal clear to me that this was a noble path for many but not for me. And as I recovered, I started to make a list of the things that I thought would be really cool to do with my life. And on that list was a blend of two different deep interests of mine. Entrepreneurship, I was the lemonade stand kid when I was younger. And wellness, fitness, I trained as a gymnast for the first half of my life and I was that oddball dork that used to sit on a beach with a 700-page kinesiology manual because I liked it. So I started to figure out, "Okay, what could I do to back out of where I was and then step back into a new path?" And I knew that it was pointing me towards entrepreneurship and the world of health and wellness. I also knew that I was going to take a huge financial hit making this move. So I stayed in the business for long enough to save some money. And then the first job that I took out of there was working as $12 an hour personal trainer which was a financial hit, but it was a bigger hit to my ego 'cause I had to get used to that. And I probably would have left earlier had I actually not been wrapped up in that. And part of what I was trying to figure out as I was doing this was what actually is going on in the world of health and fitness, especially in the industry and the business side of things because I'd been in and out of clubs and gyms in various different ways for my entire life, and I didn't find them comfortable places to be. I'm probably the only one to hear if it feels that way, right? Yeah, so my goal was, "Can I figure out a better mousetrap here?" Now I could have talked my way into some sort of management job, but I didn't want to, the reason I didn't want to is I wanted to understand what happens on the most fundamental level. When I sit down, if I'm training with the client on the ground and I'm looking in their eyes and they're sweating and breathing, what's the dynamic there? What's going right? What's going horribly wrong? Because if I don't understand that, I can't figure out a better way to actually do this, so I spent those first six months or so, training on the floor. A week into my training, I talked my way into this very shi-shi studio, and they were famous for running a $10,000 program, you know, $10,000 for 10 weeks. So a week end to this, I get my first client. What do you think is the first question, of course? "So how long have you been doing this?" How about those meds? So I dove in headfirst and I was trying to figure out from the fitness standpoint, from the wellness standpoint, from the business standpoint, what is working and what is not working. And I was devouring information, and a few things became clear to me. One of them, I didn't expect, and it's this, there were a lot of incredibly well-trained fitness professionals on the floor where I was. People who had master's degrees in exercise science, in physiology, kinesiology, in training. They were not the most busy ones on the floor by a long shot. They were something else that people responded to. They were something about when somebody walked into a space where they were radiating something. We've all felt that, we've all been that person in passing moments and probably don't understand how to get into and out of that state. But we know it when we see it. And what I realized was that the power of that in terms of your ability to serve and impact and grow a business, a practice, a profession is tremendous. But at that point, my thinking process is, "Okay, so where does this come from?" My immediate assumption was you got it or you don't. You know, there are some people who just have this, there are some people who walk into a room, they sit down at a table with a client, some people who walk onto a stage, and they just filled the room. And you either have that or you don't, it's a birthright, it's a DNA thing, right? I assumed that because I didn't have it. So it's a really easy out. So I kind of just left that to the side and I said, "Okay, so there's this thing that happens. People get lit up." And that is an astonishingly powerful asset in everything that we do in life. But you either have it or you don't. And I kind of moved on, and said, "You know, I'll do okay." And from there, after I learn the industry and I start to really figure out from the business standpoint what was going right, what was going wrong, and how to serve people, how do I do it better. I turned around and opened up my first facility, and we launched that and grew it. And within about 2.5 years, we were doing about 1,000 service sessions a month, we were generating more revenue per month on private service than the average big box facility 5 to 10 times larger was generating in a year. And I saw that same phenomenon happen with everyone that I hired and brought in. And there was an interesting ratio that kind of started to become fairly standard. That is it about 5% of the people would be booked solid and waitlisted. Another 15%, 20% of people would do okay, everyone else would struggle. My guess is if we look at this room, if we look at anyone in the health and wellness professions, if we look at anyone in any profession, that ratio will hold true. And it is not about what you know, it's not about the training that you've had academically in your domain knowledge. There's something else going on. And I got really curious. But not curious enough to really invest myself in it because I was running a business and my option... Like the thing I was doing there was I'm just going to hire people that have it and just try and do that. So we tried. So that 2.5 years, and the business was humming, and I was sort of looking at other projects. And I sold my interest in that company, and I took a step back, and I started to develop an interest in writing in human behavior, and I went deep down into why people do what they do. Why do they not take action on things that they actually want to do? All the things that you guys deal with on a regular basis, the psychology behind behavior change. And as I was doing that, I also got interested in my next venture. And I decided, "Well, okay, so what does a recovering lawyer/fitness professional do next?" Well, the obvious answer is open a yoga studio. [laughter] Right? I mean, that's what you do, it's the path. So I'm walking down the street in my neighborhood, I kind of like scanning, you know, 'cause I'm looking for spaces because I need a space, right? And four blocks from where I live, I look, and there's a second floor picture window with a for rent sign on, I'm like, "Yes!" Right? I run back home, I call up, I make an appointment, next day I'm back at this space, I'm waiting impatiently, guy comes, lets me in, I run up the stairs to go to the top. And I'm like this is going to be at the next big thing. Opens the door, I step into the space, it's a floor and a building, 115-year-old building and I look left and I look right, now this place was decorated in the style I would call cracked and chic, meaning it was perfect for a yoga studio. [laughter] So I look at it and I'm like, "This is going to work." And I go running home, right, and I tell my wife. Now here's the thing to understand about my wife and I, I'm the delusional visionary in the couple, she's the realist, right? So we go back, right? She comes up, she's like, "This could work." Couple days later I find myself, the top floor of one of these really fancy real estate buildings, and I'm signing a secure lease for a floor in a building. I'm married, I have a three-month-old baby, and I own a new home. The city is New York. The date is September 10, 2001. What do I do? So we moved ahead with this, but I also realized something, when I was looking at creating yoga studio, I knew the power of having people who are lit up, represent you and your brand. I knew the power of having those people interact with those you seek to serve. And what I realized in that moment is if I was going to move forward with this endeavor that the only people I wanted on my team were those people. Now here's what you do in the yoga world when you're looking for teachers, you interview them, but you don't just interview them, you demo them, right? They either come in and teach a class for you or they serve for somebody else, now we're a brand new yoga studio, so there wasn't a whole lot of selling available. Right, so they would come and teach me and teach, you know, like a couple of other people who we were slowly building into our team, and what we started to learn was that pedigree does not equal impact. Right? Is that that energy, the light that radiates from somebody when they walk into a room is not represented by what's on your resume to different capability? What I realized was that we were seeing a lot of extraordinarily well-trained teachers, but the light wasn't there. Some there were, but many there weren't, and I realize we actually had to make our own commitments. So in the very beginning, we decided to start training our own teachers even before we had any business training our own teachers because I knew that if I can find people who showed up with the light, we could give them the skills. And if we could actually create that, then we would be able to create a community that would affect people on an astonishing level. That became my vision. That became my quest. But notice the underlying assumption here still, the assumption is that you either have it or you don't, it's not trainable. Turns out that assumption is wrong, turns out it's not a birthright, it's not a DNA thing. Put another way, it's not a trait, it's a state, trainable like almost any other energetic and emotional state. And the way that I realized this was because we would bring people in who weren't lit up, they were beacons of light, they were these forces of nature who would walk into a room and own it. People would flock to them, students would flock to them, teachers would flock to them, managers would want them, sponsors would want to attach themselves to them. And six months later, they weren't that same person. There was something that was shiftable. So the question becomes, "How do you train that? How do you train it?" If it's trainable, what are the elements of that? This became my quest. And I started to really try to deconstruct it. The thing is I had gone deep into yogic philosophy at that point, into Eastern wisdom, into Western wisdom, I was the weirdo who like I said would study the kinesiology manuals and also the Bhagavad Gita. You guys probably know that mindset in here better than anyone else. It's the merging of two worlds, right, because that's where so much of the greatest wisdom comes. So from there I just said, "Okay, what actually is happening here? What's happening here?" And I began to deconstruct the state. And then along the way, I taught more and more and more, and I sat with more and more teachers, and I moved and I breathed with more and more teachers. And over the last five years, this became part of my actual vocation. My quest is to deconstruct states that allow you to do in the world what you very often can't and what often nobody else can. How do you cultivate that? How do you sustain it? We've all felt that probably for passing moments, but how do you sustain it long enough for the world to rise up and support you? Turns out by the way that this isn't all sort of metaphysical woo-woo BS, who knew? It was actually really interesting research data around the phenomenon. There's a phenomenon called emotional contagion. Anyone ever heard of it? Yeah, it turns out that if you take a leader, leader of the team, a group, a class, a family, whatever it may be, and you put them in a room and you show them a couple of minutes of horrific images, and they come out, and then they go back into the community within a matter of minutes, the entire community has been brought down to the same energetic state, their mood is in the same place. The exact opposite happens, if you take a person and you put them in a room and you show them a couple of minutes of, okay, so what are the videos we're going to be showing them? Puppies and kitties. [laughter] Wild cats, babies, right? Basically the stuff that 90% of the universe spends their time looking at online these days, and you send them back into the team, they will infect the team with that exact same energy. And it is astonishing quickly where that impact actually lands. So what is this about? You know, I've sat down now with some of the most accomplished creators in the world, entrepreneurs in the world, professionals in the world, and learn from them, and people who have built an empires, people who have built huge followings, people who've impacted people, the bestselling authors, documentary producers, you name it. And I'm thinking two things when I sit with them, one, how do you cultivated this in yourself, and two, what can you teach me about the way that you live in the world. What I came to is a pretty simple realization that the answer is actually pretty straightforward, but the execution is little more challenging. We're going to walk through that. The answer is very straightforward. When you align your actions with your essence, then amplify your presence, you become a beacon, you radiate light and you also exert a gravitational force. You want me to repeat that? >> Yes. [laughter] >> When you align your actions with your essence, then amplify your presence, you radiate light and exert a gravitational force. One more time? >> Yes. >> Okay, I'm gonna walk through it. When you align... Your actions... With your essence... Right? You become a beacon... And amplify your presence, yeah. So sounds great, right? This is where we come to the first stumbling point. What's my essence? Right, so if it was this straightforward, if it was literally this easy, then I mean, wouldn't everybody be doing this... Because apparently, everybody isn't. So let's deconstruct it. How do you actually act in a way that represents, that becomes a conduit for who you are, what you care about in the world, what lights you up, and what does not let you up. How do you do that? Right? So it turns out that what you want to do is actually aligned the way that you live in the world, your actions with three key metrics. They are actually a whole set of metrics that I look at now, but there are three sort of force multipliers that I'll share with you right now. One is what I call sparks. Sparks are the things that light you up. They are the drivers for you to do what you do in the world. They become a source of purpose. When you act in alignment with your sparks, you radiate the light of purpose. When you act in alignment with your sparks, you radiate the light of purpose... Which begs the question, doesn't it? What are the sparks? Five of them, and I'm gonna have a little fun with this because I'm trying not to have any fun up until now. So I'm going to share them with you, but then I want to hear what you guys are thinking about this stuff. So five sparks, one is what we call a curiosity spark. Now a curiosity spark is fundamentally the manifestation, the pursuit of a burning question or the solution to a problem. You wake up in the morning, and there is a question that is burning inside of you, you cannot let it go. It's almost a near obsession. Or you wake up in the morning and you see there is a problem that a lot of people have, I need to solve it. I need to solve it. Curiosity spark, they very often come, they rise out of the ashes of personal devastation. Either your own crisis or a crisis of somebody you care deeply about that you have not been able to help. And you say to yourself, "This is a question that must be answered. This is a problem that must be solved. This is what I'm devoting myself to, maybe not for life, but for this season, for this moment in time." When you are sparked by curiosity, the light of purpose channels through you, so that's one. Second is fascination, a fascination spark. Now fascination spark is when there is something that you are... >> Fascinated by. >> Fascinated by. It's almost five o'clock, I get it. It's okay. Yeah, fascination spark happens when there's something when you're like, "Oh my gosh! I'm madly obsessed with this, like I literally, I will pay to learn this thing even if there is no commercial application, no justification, it's taking me away from all sorts of other stuff because I'm deeply fascinated by it. I can't tell you why, I just know I am. I've got to learn more about it. This needs to be something. I'm deeply devoted to learning more about this," right? So fascination sparks very often arise as we are kids and not unusually stay with us for very long periods of time, it doesn't have to be your whole life, but very often substantial seasons of our lives, we devote ourselves to going deep into a body of knowledge or body of wisdom. You guys, very likely, many of you were driven to acquire the knowledge that put you in this room today because of the fascination spark. And fascination sparks are very often are coupled with curiosity sparks. Very often you start with a deep fascination with the topic and it leads to a burning question, and they work together. The third one is a mastery spark. Mastery spark, so what is that? A mastery spark is when you look at something and for some reason, there's something inside of you that says, "I want to be awesome at that. I want to be the best at this, maybe not the best in the world, but the best that I'm capable of being. I want to pursue, I'm compelled to pursue mastery. I don't want to just kind of know about it, I don't want to just dabble, I don't want to be decent. I don't want to be the person who is the Health Coach, it's kind of, you know, like I'm okay, I'm okay at it. No, I want to blow people's minds. I want to transform their lives on a mass scale, and I need to get incredible. I'm going to... If there's an assignment, I'm going to read everything on the topic because I need to master this body of knowledge. I need to master skill set." Fourth one is an immersion spark. We are driven to immerse ourselves in a particular activity or pursuit because simply doing it with nothing else, we get lost in, become absorbed in. This is as close as you might think about the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who spent his life studying the phenomenon of... Anyone know what he's known for? Flow states. Flow states. When the nature of the activity itself is so intrinsically rewarding that you become absorbed in it, time fuse, you lose a sense of deflation between yourself and the activity, and that alone, you don't care, there's no question you're trying to answer, there's no topic you're trying to learn about, there's no sense of mastery that I want to get better, you just want to do it because it feels amazing to be in it. That is an immersion spark. The fifth one is the service spark. Service is the spark that you feel when you look at a person, a community, anyone that you feel that you can help and you can't not help them. Now some of us are simply wired sort of more generically for service, we wake up in the morning, we don't care who we help, we just want to help. Others of us are much more selective. We look at someone in need and we say to ourselves... "Wow, they need some help." [laughter] "I got to find somebody for them," right? Busy. But then, we're like, we literally, you know, like, we look two steps further down or eight pictures down on Instagram stream and we see, you know, like there's a nature preserve that's about to be plowed over, you know, there's a shelter where animals are in need and we will literally, we will suffer, we will give our resources, time, money, energy in the name of being of service to that particular person, entity, being, or community, so service spark. These are the five sparks. Now here's the thing... We generally at any given time have the primary spark. Of those five, in any given moment of time, we're usually led by one. Very often it's complemented, there's a close second. So I shared before, very often, we have a curiosity spark, but it's not unusual for there to be a fascination spark that goes along with it. I'm deeply driven to solve a problem and to help me solve it. I become fascinated by this particular field because I need to learn that field to solve the problem, right? Immersion sparks and mastery sparks also tend to go hand-in-hand because to master something very often takes such a fierce devotion to deliberate practice that the only way we will reach the level of mastery is through deep immersive experience. So they very often go hand-in-hand. And service, that goes with everything. That goes with everything. So my curiosity actually as I offer these out is I'd actually really love to hear from you guys a little bit. Curiosity, fascination, mastery, immersion, service, I'm really curious, is one of these standing out as a fierce driver of your actions in the world today? So I'm going to just come down, this is why I have their fancy-pants electric microphone. They told me I'm allowed to come off the stage. They have steps or else there would have been like a flying Jonathan pretty soon. So I'm curious, share with me, share with me. >> Hi, everyone. I'm Martina from Switzerland. [cheers and applause] I'm a beauty and life coach and I help women feel beautiful inside and out. And I just realized, as you mentioned these five points, that I basically, I do all of them which is great, which I think is on the right path. But I had an experience on my way here that I want to share. I was flying from Switzerland, so I was in the plane, and a lot of women I work with are not confident at all, so they don't believe they're beautiful, they don't believe they're good enough, and I'm also interested in how the media affects everyone, especially young people in the way they think about themselves, and I was in the plane and there was this ads going on from Breitling. Breitling is like a very expensive watch company, and basically it's all about a pilot, and this jet flying, and then it goes down, he meets a woman, and he has like this post-it paper in the plane with the name of the girl, and the time that he meets her. And then he meets her, and then he takes off again, and he pulls that post-it note, and there is the name of another girl that he's meeting afterwards. So and it was, you know, the flight was like eight hours or so, and it was displaying several times, and I was thinking so first of all this company is displaying, you know, this image for women, so for men, it's okay to have several women, and women are just, you know, sex objects and can just be replaced one by another. And second of all, there's an airline that displays this over and over and there is all kinds of people who see that, and it's not only impacting women, it's also impacting men how they, you know, young boys learn how they should be. So I had this special moment, I was like, "Oh, I really need to write about this. I need to write a blog post or do a video, a live video or whatever to share this experience," because often we think it's just... We see publicity of maybe, you know, girls with bikinis and photoshop bodies, but really big things happen also in publicity like this or in ads like this where we don't see obviously what's going on, and it really just inspired me, gave me this curiosity to share more about this with the world too. >> Great. Thank you. So and I just want to make... Thank you. That was great. So this is a deep interest, right? That led to curiosity and the identification of a problem. There's a problem here. This has to be solved right now. The question is for you, what are you gonna to do with this? 'Cause right now it's interesting to you, in 48 hours it may not be. The question is for this to rise to the level of becoming a true spark that you will devote substantial energy to it over time that it will then start to light you up from within and give you a sense of purpose that you radiate, it's got to be something more. So the question that I would leave you with the invitation is where are you going with that and how much are you gonna commit to actually solving the problem. >> Hi, my name is Cindy Santa Ana. And I have been curious for the last probably two years on why we have so many children today with autism and Aspergers, why we have so much autoimmune disease in the United States, 55 million Americans have autoimmune disease, 1 in 65 children are expected or do have autism. So my curiosity led with that, so I started digging deeper. The first obvious place I looked at was vaccines, and then I drove in, I got deep, and I started doing the research, and I made it my mission. And so for the last year, I have been fiercely researching and reviewing peer-reviewed studies and trying to find a link between them and the diseases, and I've made it now my community, my service to share this message and this information with as many people who will listen because I found the proof and I found the information that they are dangerous, and they are causing disease, and I want to help. And I even now work in a doctor's office, and they're even saying, "Yes, there is a connection. Yes, we are seeing kids with heavy metal toxics getting parts of their brain that aren't working... Because of them." And I came across as fanatical and crazy with family members, but I don't care and I put that aside because I'm motivated, and I'm driven to share this message with as many people who will listen. >> Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. One more? No? Down here. Feel like Phil Donahue for all the older folks in the room like me. >> Hi, my name is Vinny, I'm from Queens. And... [cheers and applause] I just got back from India, I was studying the Bhagavad Gita, immersion, and I've connected with the service spark. My curiosity that started it all was why are people not honoring themselves, and treating ourselves so poorly, and ingesting toxins in our food, and what we look at, and what we breathe, and just not honoring ourselves. So I have found yoga to be my calling. So in September, seven months into IIN, I quit my nine to five, and I've opened a yoga studio out of my home in Bay Ridge. [applause] And thank you... So I'm sharing the power of meditation, postures, and sitting still, and hearing yourself, and honoring yourself with as many people as I can. And thank you. >> Awesome. [applause] So the thing that happens when your spark is that there is a light of purpose that radiates from you that people react to. The deeper you get into it, the more sparked you are, the fiercer the energy of purpose sort of like just comes off of you and people want to know what's going on. But we're not done, there's more. Right, so spark is one of three things. Second is what I call sacred values. Now we probably all done sort of different types of values, exercises, and they're all great, right? The value is basically asking the question of yourself, "What's important to me? What's important to me?" And if you google values, generally you'll see lists of all sorts of words from family, to honesty, to integrity, to creativity, to truthfulness, to all these different things out there. And those are awesome, those are great values. I'm interested in identifying things that guide your behavior though, not just labels. As a general rule, if I say family is important to me, well, that's great, and it is. But how do I wake up in the morning and let that guide my behavior in a way where I can align my actions with what is important to me. It doesn't tell me what to do. So what I want to invite you to do is add two things to the typical exploration of value. Instead of just saying what's important to me, go one step further. So let's take that same example, and I'll come down, we'll work through with one or two people too, right? Actually, let's just do this now, right? Come on. Hi. She's like... Are you okay if we talk? >> Me? >> Yeah. Okay, so if I ask you what's important to you, just throw out a couple words for association. >> My children. >> Okay. So can we get more specific than that even? >> Giving out the message that educating children about healthy eating and giving love to them from the moment they are born, it's super important. >> Okay. Is that going to guide her behavior? >> Yes. >> Yeah, right? Just the statement children, is that going to guide behavior? No, we know children are important, but it doesn't let us wake up in the morning and say, "This is going to tell me how to act in the world in a way where I'm going to be lit up and people will resonate with that," right? So tell me your name? Ana. So Ana added two things which are really, really, really critical. One, specificity, and a verb or a verb phrase, and that's what I want you to do. Right, so think of what's important to you. Somebody throw another just word that's like what's important to you? Right, so we had children, what else? >> Happiness. >> Happiness, right? That's a tough one. >> Family. >> Family? Okay, let's start with family, okay. How can we get more specific with family? Who said family? >> To continue her point, like we have to allocate the moms. >> Okay. >> And trying to tell them that don't be practice, like they buy boxed foods and everything like processes them, they send their lunchbox to their kids, and they are like full of chemicals. We need to try to tell them that it's fun to cook healthy, it could be like easy and... >> Okay, so this could be, we could say this is a different take on children or we could actually say this is moms, like what's really important to me? Supporting moms, and making decisions that are really healthy for them and their families because moms live crazy, hectic, busy, overburdened, maniacal, overwhelming, anxious lives. I don't know if there are any moms in the room, and if that resonates... [applause] Right? But if we just say moms, that doesn't guide behavior. So if you add, what you added, right, we get more specific what types of mothers and then add a verb or phrase, add an action phrase to that. What that allows us to do is wake up in the morning and it guides our behavior, I'm like double-miking myself over here. [laughter] And that's really, really, really powerful when we do that, right? So we've got two things now, we've got your spark, and when you align your actions with your sparks, you radiate with life of purpose. When you align your actions with your sacred values, you radiate with the life of the light of the meaning, meaning, and they're different. Purpose is more focused on accomplishing something like, "I am here on a mission to do something, meaning it's a sense that I feel as I exist in the world today, I have a sense of meaning that I am filled with the reason to be here. My existence matters. It's more generalized and more pervasive and more long-term, it's a state. We're still not done," right? So the third thing here is what I would call super skills. This is basically the answer to the question, "What I am awesome at?" Right, now thankfully, Elizabeth DiAlto is here right before, so we're all comfortable answering that question right now, right, because we love ourselves. But it turns out that actually a lot of people are not comfortable answering that question, a lot of us say, "Well, I'm okay at this. What am I really awesome at? What am I really, really, skilled at?" So if you're having trouble... I mean, if something comes to mind right now, that's fantastic, write it down. If nothing comes to mind, ask some different questions. "What do people thank me for?" And if you can't answer that, then you do my killer app exercise, which is you email people and you ask them what do you thank me for. [laughter] It's okay, I'm easy, I'm a New Yorker. Yeah, so we actually, we literally, we want to find out. Some of us know what we're good at, some of us have been working really hard our whole lives to get good at stuff. Some of us have devoured the knowledge that allows us to be in this room right now. We have absolute... We are killer at consulting, at advising, at coaching, at solving really complex nonspecific pain in the body, right? Own that, that is your super skill. When you act in alignment with your super skills, you radiate the light of esteem. When you act in alignment with your super skills, you radiate the light of esteem. When you'd esteem, esteem... I'm gonna put this on the floor. So we've got these three things, right? Sparks, when you actually go out and you do what you learnt with your sparks, you're filled with a sense of purpose, right? Sacred values. When you act in a way that is aligned with your sacred values, you're doing only what's important to you and you are radiating the light of meaning, super skills. When you actually take those things that you are really good at and you own the fact that you're really good at them and you take every opportunity you can to actually use them, to utilize them, you radiate the light of esteem. And when you radiate those three lights together, they blend to become a beacon, that becomes mere irresistible for everyone around you. Resources flock to you, clients flock to you, partners flock to you, sponsors flock to you. And it's not, again, I'm bit of a science person, and what I would call spiritually open but skeptical. So I've come to these ideas from the place of a skeptic and seen them now manifested over and over and over and represented in the world that these things are incredibly powerful. To cultivate this in addition to whatever knowledge or expertise you have in your field, to be able to move through life and sustain this energy is transformative in nearly every circumstance that you will enter, right? It's not about magic formulas, it's not about manifestation, it's not about laws of attraction or unattraction, it's about you behaving differently in the world in a thousand different ways and people feeling that and responding to it in very real practical ways. Ways that change the way that you can operate and impact people. So why don't we all do that? Well, part of it is that we just don't know these things, but now even if you know this what I can tell you is that there's something else going on that stops us. What do you think that is? Can you say it louder? >> Fear. >> Yeah, louder. >> Fear! >> I think like the loudest thing you guys have said all day is fear. "We fear, man, really. Now give us the answer, please." Yeah, so I'm going to let you guys know a little bit of secret. So when we started my yoga studio, I had already spent a chunk of years getting certified and teaching all sorts of different fitness type of things, I was a decent teacher, but still pretty new as a yoga teacher. There were two of us when we opened and people were coming in pretty quickly, which means I was teaching yoga and I was still trying to figure out, "Okay, I didn't have my voice, I didn't really feel like I was where I needed to be. So what did I do?" Well, I went on the "Amazons" and bought what were then the top ten bestselling yoga videos. And one day, I was Rodney Yee. The next day I was Baron Baptiste. The next day, I was Shiva Rea. And it rotated like this for a chunk of time because I was afraid that if I actually stepped out and stood in who I was, I wouldn't be accepted, that if I actually showed how I was different and quirky and weird, it wouldn't be okay. So I hid behind proven successes and I adopted their styles, their voices because I was terrified of being seen. You cannot align your actions when you are afraid to be seen. The weight of hiding doesn't let you be a beacon in the world. You can't be that person when you're hiding. A little while back, I had a chance to sit down with the author Elizabeth Gilbert, and we were recording an interview actually. And we sat in the studio for about an hour, and it was magical. It was like, "Oh, my God, can I just be in a room with you every day?" Something happened and I felt that same energy with other people, Brené Brown is one of them. There's something magical. There's joyfulness, there's an unapologetic joyfulness and lightness. There's a radiance that happens. But I couldn't figure out what was going on there. So I actually had the entire thing transcribed, and it wasn't until I saw the transcript that in understood, I started to understand what was happening, there in the transcript, Liz Gilbert laughs at the rate of one laugh per 30 seconds, no, per 60 seconds. There is not a minute that goes by without her joyfully just being like... [mimicking laughter] And trust me, I'm not funny, she wasn't laughing at me. [laughter] She was cracking herself up. And then we said, "Why can't we all be that way? Why can't we all be so just unapologetically joyful, so light, why can't we just let the light come out like that?" And what I realized is you cannot be unapologetically joyful until you are unapologetically you. [cheers and applause] Yeah. And that's where Liz was, and that's where Brené was, and that's where so many other people where we see them as luminaries in the world, as people who are bringing light where we trying to be like, "Oh my God, I want to be in their presence." What's really going on is they're aligning their actions with their essence and they've dropped the facade. They're no longer carrying the weight of being somebody else, they're just letting it all out. And that is so rare that when we experience it, we cannot get enough of it. Have you guys felt that? Yeah, it's intoxicating and it's trainable. You can stand in that place yourselves, but we're still not done. There's one thing I still haven't circled back to and that's that last part of that sentence that I offered at first, right? Align your actions with your essence, then amplify your presence. So when you start to do all the stuff that we've been talking about, you will walk into a room differently, people will experience you differently. And that alone can be transformative to the work you're here to do in the world, but there is something else that you can do. If you think about a lighthouse, does anyone know how big the bulb in a lighthouse is? Like lighthouses throw light from miles out into the fog in the sea. You know how big the actual bulb in the lighthouse is? Really tiny. But there's this massive reflector behind it, it's actually called a fresnel lens which amplifies and magnifies that light fiercely and sends it out into the world. And it turns out that we can do things in our own lives that take this beacon light that we're starting to cultivate and amplify it. Stuart Wilde has this great saying, he said, "If you want to make more money, raise your energy. When you raise your energy, more people will show up. When they do, bill them." [laughter] So what I want to invite you to do is actually cultivate something a little bit stronger, and the way that we actually raise our own energy, it's all stuff that you guys have anybody in the world are intimately familiar with, right? So the framework that we use with the community in Good Life Project is what I call the Good Life Buckets. Think of your life as three buckets. One is called contribution, that's the work you do in the world, that's a general rule. One is called connection, that's all about cultivating deep and meaningful relationships, right? And one is called vitality, that's about optimizing your state of body and mind. A lot of what we've been talking about here, this is all about filling your contribution bucket. When you align your actions with your essence, you are madly filling your contribution bucket, you're contributing to the world on a level that's near impossible to do without that, right? But very often when we're doing that, we abandon the connection bucket, love, friendship, belonging. They'll be there, we'll go back, right? The invitation is to continue to do little things every day to fill that bucket because it may not be there when you choose to go back. And finally, the vitality bucket, optimizing state of mind and body, right? Now you guys know so much of what this is, this is a lot of Joshua's primary foods, right? Right? It's movement, it's mindfulness. Mindfulness, most important to me because mindfulness cultivates the awareness to be intentional. And if you don't have the ability to be intentional, you cannot choose what to say yes or no to in a way that is aligned with anything we're talking about today, you will live your life reactively, and you will be lived rather than live. So really for me, that's one of the huge unlock keys. I'm going to come full circle here as we start to wrap up. There's one other thing that's a little less intuitive that I love, that I think is really powerful, vitality bucket filler, which is sort of like allows you, when you feel your vitality bucket, your contribution bucket, your connection bucket, it's like everything just starts to rise, your overall energy elevates, everything that you're engaged in and building and creating, it just takes you to a completely different level. It amplifies your presence. And this one extra thing that not a lot of us think about is generosity, the tremendous research now on how giving rewires us. It changes our physiology, our psychology, our endocrinology, our electrical system in really, really powerful ways. Chunk of years back, I was living at New York City post office. And as I was walking out, it was one of those cold days, I was really grumpy because I'm a New Yorker. [laughter] And looking down because I'm a New Yorker, right? And I pushed through the top doors, and there's a little kid, like maybe nine or ten years old in a blazer, and he's selling chocolate. And I'm like... Really? But I felt like, you know, I was grumpy, my karma need a little bit of a zip, so I'm like, "All right, here is a buck." I gave him a dollar, feeling pretty good about myself, right? I just... I did a solid, little kid, right? I push through the other doors on top of the steps, and I see about six steps down on the street, there's an elderly gentleman, maybe in his late 70s, silver hair, leaning on the cane. He's looking at me. Again, this is New York, we don't do that. [laughter] Right? I have to go down and past him to go where I want to go, so I'm walking down the steps, he's still looking at me. And his leaning, he's starting to smile. I'm like, "This is getting weird," right? I get a little closer, and he's really smiling, he's looking at me. And as I get like almost where we I would need to go to get by him, his hands starts to raise. I realized he's pointing at the little boy. He looks to me, and says, "It's my grandson. Thank you." >> Audience: Aw! >> Yeah, you guys said aw, I burst into tears. [laughter] Right. There's a ton of science behind how generosity changes us, and we tend to think we have to have these big moments of giving to actually make a difference, tiny little moments all day, every day will profoundly change the state of your life in a way that would change everything. So as we come full circle, my invitation to you is this. You can study all you want to study, you can become, you know, absolute master in the domain of all the knowledge you're going to learn here, and any other courses, any other programs, any other change you do, that's fantastic, do it. But do not neglect the other part of the equation. You have an opportunity to cultivate and experience that you bring to an interaction to a room, to the world, which will leave people in a profoundly different place than simply sharing what you know. You have the opportunity to become a beacon right now, right now. The world needs that more than ever before. Thank you. [cheers and applause]