Jay Shetty Says This One Hack Will Radically Change Your Day

What happens when you close your eyes and sit alone with your thoughts? It can be scary, but celebrity podcaster, author, and life coach Jay Shetty believes this practice is critical for discovering your true calling. Shetty’s influence has grown significantly in recent years. So much so that his podcast, On Purpose, is embarking on a 15-city tour in May. 

This week on Transform, hosts Sami Spalter and Sami Clarke welcome Shetty, their dream guest, to discuss finding purpose through life’s uncertainties. Listen intently as he shares wisdom on mastering your thoughts, confronting tough days, and deciding which relationships to keep close. 

He opens up about walking away from a “checklist” life to become a monk and how saying “yes” to uncertainty transformed his path. He also shares tools for self-understanding, finding clarity and purpose, and the value of holding a daily meeting with yourself. 

Stepping away from a ‘checklist life’ 

At 22, Shetty became a monk—a decision he considers his best life choice 15 years later. Before his monastic life, which he left 12 years ago, Shetty had a “checklist”: education, career, marriage, family.

“Monk life was the interruption to that path. It was the intervention I didn’t know was coming,” Shetty explains. “I thought to myself, ‘If I fast forward 10 years ahead and look at people on this journey, I don’t think they’re happier, they know themselves, or have mental clarity.’”

But when Shetty looked at monks, he saw that they had mastered their emotions and were helping other people. After comparing the two life paths, Shetty committed to monastic life: “I knew that would be a far better investment and a far better choice.” 

Say ‘yes’ to detours 

According to Shetty, fear of people’s opinions prevents people from following their heart. He explains, “If you do what you want, people will misunderstand you. If you do what they want, if you do nothing, or if you do something, people will misunderstand you. People are going to misunderstand you no matter what you choose to do, so you might as well do what you love.” 

To evaluate whether you are living in your calling, ask yourself: Is this going in the direction I want? Am I truly living a life aligned to my values? Shetty says you can never quiet the outside noise: “You are never going to get people to understand you or think you are making the right decision. But you can just follow what you are hearing from within.”

Meditation: ‘A daily meeting with yourself’

When meditating, Shetty says he realizes that he only needs to be happy within himself. “When I close my eyes, that’s the person and the space I want to be happy in. That is the person I go to bed with and I wake up with. When my eyes are closed, can I feel peaceful and happy? Not when my eyes are open. If I am living life and doing something I hate, that means when I close my eyes at night, that’s going to affect me. I don’t want to end my day and think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’”

If you’re new to meditation, Shetty recommends framing it as a five-minute meeting with yourself at the start and end of each day: “We schedule everything these days, but we never schedule a meeting with ourselves.”

Questions are powerful forms of meditation. In your morning session, ask: What is the one thing I need to do for myself today to make today a great day? At the end of the day, reflect: What’s the one thing I experienced today that made today great? Shetty says the goal is to see the answer unfold throughout the day, not force the answer.

On navigating uncertainty

Growing up, life is mapped out. In school, everyone progresses similarly. But Shetty says that adulthood  becomes about comparison and competition

This shift prompts challenging questions: Will I find love? Will I start that company? Will I pursue my passion? “You realize someone is going to get married first, and someone is going to get married last. Someone is going to start their dream first, and someone is going to start their dream last,” he says.

For Shetty, success is measured by mastering emotions, serving others, and pursuing what he loves. “Suddenly after you finish school, you have to create your own metrics, which you have never done before. So we have to have grace for people as they figure it out. I know that if I don’t have my own grading system, I’m going to live by someone else’s,” he explains.

How to handle hard days 

According to Shetty, there are four internal seasons—each with a different calling: a school to learn, a hospital to heal, a movie to experience, and a mountain to climb. “When I think of a bad day, I think of it like a hospital. I am being called to heal,” he says. “I may want to move, hustle, and work, but life is saying heal, slow down, think.”

If you’re going through it right now, know that it’s more than okay to spend a day healing. On hard days, Shetty has learned the importance of taking time to diagnose what is going on and getting to the root of it. “If you ignore this and you try to just shrug it off, it’s going to happen again and again. I have to sit with it and be with it. I can’t just fill up my schedule and be busy. At some point, you have to just sit in it.”