Josh Brody - 5 Ideas that can Transform Your Life

[Music] good evening everyone thank you so much for tuning in i'd like to of course to start by thanking project inspire for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts with you and would like to thank torah anytime for streaming the broadcast i think across the world every single person has one thing at least one thing in common and that's we all really want the same thing we want to live and lead happy and meaningful lives now of course that's very easy to say the job the hard part is getting from here to there and figuring out how to do it the mind flex topic this week is five ideas that can transform your life now whenever simple barnett first mentioned to me that this was going to be the topic it's a little bit hesitant because i think that for many of us and for most of us how we grow it can be personal personal the way we transform our lives it's going to be somewhat different for each of us but our brand says to me you know look just think of things that have had an impact on you so you know i thought back through it and thought the things the ideas that have had the biggest impact on my life now one word of caution i guess some of these ideas in fact probably all of them really deserve a full class in their own right and i'm not really going to do justice to them kind of cramming them all into one session but if any of these ideas resonate with you there's a lot more to be learned about each one of these topics and as always i'm happy to be contacted through project inspire with any questions growing up i had a certain view of hashem and i don't think this view was unique to me i think that's probably true for a lot of us and it actually really continued into most of my adult life and the view went something like this hashem is this big power in the sky and he sees all hears all and he has a set of rules and he wants us to follow those rules and if you follow the rules you'll get rewarded and if you don't follow the rules well you'll get punished you'll get zapped you know when thought about from this perspective the relationship with hashem is really just consequence driven right it's about the rules you're keeping the rules or you're not but as any parent or child will tell you if a relationship is nothing more than just based on rules on consequences then it's not real at some point the consequences just start to wear off they're not that meaningful anymore if the only way you can control your kids is by yelling at them eventually they just tune you out if the only way you control your kids is by bribing them you know eventually the bribes are just you can't afford it anymore because those bribes just aren't that meaningful so when i really started to think about it really started to bother me a little bit is that really all there is is it just that hashem is the power and we got to follow the rules in order to you know get rewarded or you know the opposite so i have this friend who is a very successful lawyer and he told me when he got started that he interviewed at this one firm and one of the partners who interviewed him was one of the senior partners in the firm the head of the corporate finance group he was a very very big guy in the field and my friend was very taken by him because he was very dynamic and seemed very genuine and my friend was like i want to work for this guy so he was lucky enough he got an offer went to work at that firm joined this guy's group but he kind of realized early on that it was very difficult to get anywhere near the guy because as nice and as meaningful as the guy was he was unbelievably busy and even just getting staffed on his deals wasn't so easy because everyone wanted to work with him this friend of mine found out that this partner used to go for a run most mornings at a park near his house and so this friend of mine decided even though he wasn't into fitness he wasn't into running he certainly wasn't getting up earlier than he had to but he wanted to have a relationship with this guy so he started running at this park in the mornings and sometimes the guy wasn't even there but he started seeing them seeing him on a regular basis and i guess at some point this partner recognized that my friend was both at the park and was also in the office and at some point they got the talking and he said oh you know i'll try to staff you on my next deal and that's what happened he gets stashed on the next deal and as time goes on he's getting more and more work and he's just getting crushed with work but it's okay because this is really what he wants and he's really starting to kill it at work and his career just really just completely took off years later he was talking with this partner who would become a a strong mentor of his and he said yeah you remember i used to i used to show up at the park you know just don't know if you know this i went there early because i wanted to see you and see if you would notice me when you were running so i could try to get you know start working with you and his partner says to him of course i noticed when i interviewed you i was very in favor i was the one who made sure you got an offer because i recognized some serious talent in you you know talent's not enough and i wanted to make sure that you really wanted it so i wasn't just gonna come over and hand it to you and you had to earn it and so i saw that you came to the park and became clearly you were there just to make sure that i would notice you so i started giving you more and more work and bringing more and giving you more and more responsibility on my deals because i wanted that relationship i wanted to try to make it happen but you had to put the effort in hashem didn't just hire us hashem put us here he created us and he did it because he wants to have that relationship with us he doesn't just give us rules to do things for him he says you know you're a finite physical human being on the infinite it's not so easy to build a relationship that way so what i'm going to do is i'm going to give you something i'm going to give you mitzvos and those mitsos that's where i am hashem says by doing the mitzvos we can create the relationship more than anything else that's what hashem wants every parent wants a relationship with their children not just about doing things for them or having the child do things for the parents they want the relationship the child doesn't always recognize it not only so easy to child to see some of the difficulties that happen some of the challenges sometimes a parent says no why it's all because the parent wants what's best for their child it's exactly what hashem wants he wants to have that relationship with us he wants what's best for us and every single thing that happens in our life every single thing that comes from hashem is there because hashem wants us to grow hashem wants us to have that relationship everything we do all of our life is about that relationship when you view life this way things change very quickly because now you realize that everything that's going on it's coming from somewhere it's coming from somewhere from someone that wants to have a relationship with you that wants to be close with you it makes everything that we do keeping this vote and even dealing with the challenges a little bit not just easy but you know what's important now of course even knowing this it doesn't always quite feel that way right the reality is that sometimes challenges don't feel like hashem wants to have a relationship with us you know it's almost you know to quote tevye the milkman from fiddler on the roof hashem i know we're your chosen people but maybe you could choose someone else every once in a while and i think part of the problem is that we don't always see the connection between the difficulties or the challenges that we're going through and things that we're doing you know if someone's out driving their car and they sideswipe somebody and this they drive away they don't they don't leave a note they just drive off and then you know a month later somebody does the same thing to them it's pretty easy to see the connection you can sort of look up look at hashem and say yeah i guess i deserve this one but when things happen things go wrong that we don't expect and we can't see an immediate connection we look at it and say why i mean i how am i supposed to deal with this this difficulty with this challenge everything's supposed to be because it's better for me why does it have to be so difficult all the time why can't it be easier when the jewish people left egypt and they were in the desert so already that first day hashem they had mana from heaven right manufa fell fell from the sky and that was what they ate and moshe tells them that first day you're going to have this month is what you're going to eat do not leave anything over for tomorrow mormon will fall tomorrow don't leave anything over it will just get rotten well not all the jews listened and the next morning they came and said hey moshe you know this mun fell and we left it over and it's it's rotten now and moshi gets angry at them that's kind of an interesting response you know sometimes you tell your children you know don't do that it's going to make a mess not going to go the way you think and they don't listen and it goes wrong and you don't get mad just like well what do you expect i told you this is what would happen i would wish to get mad at them why wouldn't you just say to them i told you so what did you expect why was he getting angry it was this great documentary that came out last year called the last dance it's about the 97 98 chicago bulls growing up in chicago this is really a fascinating thing for me to watch but one thing in particular that really struck me about it was you get to see what michael jordan's psyche was like and you know you think oh it's all about winning and that's only partially true it's not just about winning for him it's about being the best he wasn't interested in winning if he couldn't show that he was the best person out there if he didn't want he never wanted it to be easy he always wanted to make sure that he was guarding the other team's best player he always wanted to be the one to do the hardest thing that needed to be done he didn't want easy he wanted to show that he was the best and he knew that he'd only get better every step of the way of his career if he was always trying the hardest if he was always going up against the best most difficult challenge that's what he needed in order to become great when the jews left egypt they had nothing and hashem was sending them mon from heaven but part of that was hashem was trying to train them to recognize that they needed to have bittah they needed to have faith in hashem and one of the ways that moshe wanted them to do that was it said don't leave anything over and he didn't want them to even try it because when the second that they left something over and they saw that it was going to be rotten the next day well you know when you go to sleep at night with nothing in the cupboard nothing to eat all you have is your faith that's hard but if you know that there's nothing you can even do about it because the food that you have right now if you even if you leave it over it's going to be rotten it makes it a little bit easier to get rid of it because you know it doesn't do you any good anyways motion didn't want them to have any crutch they have any training wheels on learning about bitter home moshe wanted to be as challenging as possible because that's what life is all about life is about working fighting getting through the challenges through the difficulty if life was always easy if everything always went right we would never get anywhere i mean as funny as this sounds what kind of life would it be if everything i always wanted to do went the right way i never missed a bus i never missed a flight my work was perfect my boss loved me every project worked out i landed every single client my white relationship with my spouse was perfect my kids did everything i say i got the exact seat i wanted to ensure everything was perfect nothing ever went wrong what kind of life would that be you'd never get anywhere you'd never have any growth the challenges that we have are not challenges there are opportunities for us to show that we can do this to show that we can get past this that we're bigger than that even the things that we don't expect and when these challenges come along we have to view them that way and recognize that see them see them for what they are they're opportunities when i'm standing on the platform and the train that i'm waiting for i get to announce that the trains canceled and now i'm gonna miss the next meeting that i had at work and i don't know what to do about it instead of kicking myself what am i gonna do it's okay this is an opportunity that hashem has just sent me an opportunity for growth if it always went the right way we'd never grow at all sitting on the beach all day someone serving your margaritas it may sound good for a week but eventually you get nowhere we need those challenges in our lives in order to actually grow now of course even knowing that even knowing that hashem only wants what's best for us we can have a relationship with him and he gives us these challenges as opportunities in order to help us grow it still doesn't always quite feel like it we can have the knowledge but feeling it sometimes can seem a little bit challenging and not just challenging a friend of mine one time went through a pretty significant career setback he lost his job and it was a very very challenging time for him and i was talking with him was trying to you know just give him a shoulder to lean on and he said to me he's like josh look i know i know this is for the best but i'm so overcome with fear with worry that i i just don't know what to do like how am i supposed to continue to go on and put on a brave face for my kids and for my wife and i'm so worried about this i i just don't even know how to live my life i almost feel like i just want to stay in bed all day but i know it's the right thing i don't feel it you know it's one interesting story when i was i don't know how many years this was one of my kids was at their bar mitzvah so i just made a partner at my firm and i um with that message bar mitzvah party the night of his bar mitzvah and everyone at work knew that i was my son's bar mitzvah night because you know we were a lot going on and i wanted people to know that was going to be unavailable for uh for a little while that evening and as we finish pictures and we're about to you know start guests are starting to arrive my cell phone rings and like a complete i decided to answer it in part because i saw there was someone from work that was calling me and i answered it and it was one of the other partners in the group someone who was senior to me and he starts yelling at me about something he doesn't understand this issue what is he supposed to do about it why didn't i take care of it and i'm just and i was kind of angry like why are you calling me now call somebody else call this guy i know he can take care of it for you you know where i am and my sense of myth i can't believe you called me and i don't know and i'm standing there just like shaking because i'm both angry can't believe this guy called me but i'm also worried because this is an issue that's going on and i'm worried there's going to be blow back on me from it when i get back to work the next day and i'm starting i'm like going over to my son's part of the party like walking through this one area where they were taking pictures over to where all the guests were coming in and i just stopped i said okay look this is my son's bar mitzvah it was my oldest sons of mermaids actually this isn't gonna happen again i need to focus i need to push that aside these negative thoughts these worries these concerns i need to focus right now on making sure that i'm enjoying this otherwise i'm going to be kicking myself years from now one of the things that we often make the mistake in thinking is that our fears that our worries they're part of who we are so if i'm worried about something it's inside it's part of me there's nothing i can do about it i just have to live with it but the reality is we can control our thoughts we can control our fears we can control our feelings but it takes work it's very you know not you know every nowadays it's like oh it's how i feel reality is we can control that hashtag gave us the ability but first and foremost we have to stop and recognize that we actually can do it because if you think you can't then you'll never be able to another question of course is how do you do it how do you actually learn to control your feelings so a couple of different actual techniques that i've learned over the years that i found to be incredibly helpful people often talk about one exercise they do call the gratitude journal where you write down certain things that you're happy that you're thankful for and it's an exercise you do to help teach you to learn gratitude and be thankful to enjoy the things that you have there's another type of journal you can often you can actually use as well anytime you have a worry a concern doesn't matter what it is it can be that you're going to get to the store and they're going to be out of what you're looking for it can be you're afraid that you're not going to land this client your boss is going to be mad your wife's going to be upset whatever it is write it down and write down what you're worried about keep track of it and go back at times and look at it and you'll see that very often in fact probably most of the time the thing that you're worried about doesn't turn out the way you think it's going to what we often do is when a worry comes into our head when a concern pops up we so often jump to the worst possible scenario and that's it we're under its control we're done we're now something bad has happened my co-worker my boss is mad at me it immediately turns into i'm getting fired and we let that negativity takes over so quickly that we're dead we're stuck we have to learn to train ourselves that no no we can't jump to the worst possible scenario we have to be able to actually stop hashem gave us the ability to stop take control and say no no i'm not worrying about that it's not going to work out that way and if you take time and look at it you'll see that most of the time that's what happens actually you know one other technique that i've learned for many many years most of my life i had no problem flying turbulence that didn't bother me at all just slept through it no problems and one time my wife and i were on a flight back from florida and i'm kind of like starting to fall asleep and suddenly i feel this massive bump i'm like oh i guess we landed already except we were only about 15 minutes into the flight and the turbulence just went crazy plane was shaking up and down felt like it was dropping 50 feet things were falling out of the overhead bins people are screaming it was absolutely terrifying and after that i was just a nervous wreck every time i would fly i just the littlest bump i you know if the pilot started at the beginning of the flight said we know we're expecting some turbulence i was terrified if he said it should be a smooth ride i was terrified maybe he's wrong so if we did not he's not expecting it it was just i couldn't win i was absolutely terrified and then i learned this exercise that was unbelievably helpful and it's a little bit counterintuitive but it goes like this you lock yourself in a room for 10 5 10 15 minutes and you set your time on your phone no distractions otherwise and you spend that time doing nothing but thinking of the worst possible thing that can happen on the next flight you're on all you do is focus on the terrible things that scare you timer goes off turn your phone back on go out of the room and go back about your day you do this enough what starts to happen is your brain starts to recognize that it can turn the fear on and off at will you can train yourself that you don't actually have to be thinking about this something a brain thought that props in your head yeah i'm not doing that right now i'm turning that off and so the next time that i flew after doing this a few times it started to get easier because i realized hey these fears i'm happy besides the fact these things rarely ever happen but i can control how i feel about it and this works for almost any type of fear things that we think control us we actually have the ability we can train our minds to actually be able to not let the fear overcome us and then of course if all else fails one thing's at work and it's just again i don't know why but it works sometimes you need to be yelled at by ourselves stop it's fine it'll be okay i'm not worrying about this now and you move on with your day sometime that jolt of just saying it out loud actually gives you the ability to control it so we have to know and recognize that these fears sometimes they're real but they don't have to control us we can absolutely control them we just have to recognize that we have the ability to do it now even if we're not necessarily being held back by any sort of fear and we're again recognizing that it's called coming from hashem for our benefit and these challenges are for our benefit and we can control how we feel about them sometimes we just sort of think to ourselves look i just don't necessarily have the capacity for that level of growth that level of greatness you know that's just not me we see certain people we look at them and say wow that person is amazing you know that's charlie harrari he's awesome and he's incredible but come on i'm that that's him i'm just me i'm not ever going to be able to be like that and we just think that we don't really have capacity for that type of growth or that type of greatness and so we just kind of leave it to ourselves it's a really fascinating mitzvah in the torah torah says kadoshan to you you should be holy but the torah doesn't just stop there he says kadoshan to you you should be holy kika doshani because i hashem am holy and when i was growing up one of the big ad campaigns that was huge was be like mike be like michael jordan and there's every kid wanted to be like mike i'd sing the jingle but uh i don't want to embarrass myself but be like mike and it was the gatorade commercial it was like super super popular just everyone wanted to be like making you see this commercial all these kids like trying to pretend like they're dunking and putting sticking their tongue out like michael jordan used to do you know a few years ago somebody pointed out to me in some respects how ridiculous that commercial was but be like mike i'm a short jewish guy i'm not going to be the world's greatest basketball player that's just not going to happen i wouldn't even be like mike that seems absolutely ridiculous hashem tells us be holy because i hashem holy well yeah you're hashem of course you're holy holiness is what you are i'm just a human being i'm flesh and blood i'm completely physical i can't be holy why are you telling me to be holy just because you are it seems like a ridiculous comparison how could it possibly work out in what world how can i possibly as a human being actually achieve this level of holiness so hashem says to us you know what you're right on your own as a physical human being you couldn't be holy so in order to enable you to do it i'm going to give you something i'm going to give you a gift i'm going to give you hashem says a piece of me every single one of us that's born implanted imprinted in our souls is literally a piece of hashem on our own we couldn't do it but hashem gives us something gives us this ability this innate ability to be holy to be great to be god-like it's already there we don't have to go searching for it we don't looking for it somewhere else it's already contained within us when you know that you have this capacity already you can't say it's not me it is you it's exactly who we are we have this ability we have this capacity it's already down we just need to uncover it in a few weeks from now i'm going to sit down at the passover seder the pesach center and one of the things we're going to point out we're going to mention is hashem is going to say that hashem was the one himself who redeemed us and took us out of egypt hashem says and not an angel now why did it have to be that way why actually couldn't hashem have been the one to actually take us out well i should have to take us out of egypt why couldn't have been an angel hashem used angels all the time why did it still hashem have to do it so the rabbis explain in egypt was such a spiritual darkness it was so overwhelming and so overpowering an angel had he gone into egypt would not have survived as great as holy as spiritual as angels are they would have been overwhelmed and overtaken by the spiritual darkness that existed in egypt so hashem had to be the one to do it he was the only one that could but here's the thing an angel couldn't have survived in egypt but we did we managed to you imagine you see a you talked to a jew on the street in egypt back then you know ask him what his life was like and say well you know physically my life's pretty tough and the reality is i was born a slave i've been asleep my whole life bondage and suffering has been all i've known so my physical life is pretty cruddy spiritually look i know god exists but the reality is that i serve idols pretty often and you know we don't have mitzvoth and i probably do plenty of other things that i shouldn't be doing because look that's just this it's the way i am notwithstanding all that not understanding that his physical life was terrible and his spiritual life wasn't so great either he did something that an angel could not accomplish he managed to survive and stay with it in egypt to continue the recognition that hashem was the one through all that i mean somebody who thinks he's done nothing with his life even all the challenges that we go through the difficulties that we have just the fact that we're continuing to survive should tell us something should tell us the innate unique greatness that each one of us has we can't sell ourselves short we have such incredible abilities that hashem gave us he gave us a piece of himself we just need to recognize it we need to stop from it and say i can get through this i can become greater i can't continue to push forward because it's not just me that's doing it i've got a human side of me that's propelling me to that greatness [Applause] you know a number of years ago i've had this you know the the criminal merits and blessing he'll go on trips to israel with project inspire with uh with momentum and one year i came back and there was one thing particularly was focusing on the trip that really was something that i had been struggling with and it really struck a chord with me and i was very inspired to try to actually fix this problem for myself and so i had the inspiration i had the willpower i came back and i started working at it and i started to see some success and i started to feel like i was really making progress at one point i kind of felt like i had sort of conquered the issue and then i flopped and i couldn't understand what the problem was i'm like okay and i flopped again and i didn't understand like what's what's the issue i have the will i have the inspiration this should be working out for me why isn't it working king solomon tells us become that a righteous person falls seven times and then gets back up now i think typically we understand that to mean that because he's righteous he has the ability to get back up to work through it to get past the times that he falls down but for the rest of us look you know i'm not a righteous person when i fall out i'm gonna i'm gonna stay down we make the mistake of thinking that growth is linear right that just goes on a straight line and as we get better at something and as we grow it's just going to continue and there's not going to be any problems but the reality is that just like with challenges in our lives with our spiritual growth with our personal growth it can't all come easy at a certain point it has to get harder you have to fall down at some point a righteous person isn't righteous and therefore he gets up a righteous person is righteous because he gets up because he works his way through it that's what makes him into that righteous person we need to recognize that we're going to be inspired by something we're going to want to grow and at some point we're going to plateau and we may even fall off and we can't look at that and say oh it wasn't me i tried thought it was working didn't work i'm done we have to recognize those moments as those are the times where it's time to pick ourselves back up and continue the growth in a lot of ways it's like a trampoline you know the higher you want to bounce on a trampoline the lower you have to get pushed down into the trampoline because that's what sends you higher those moments where we fall those aren't failures that's the beginning of the next step up and in fact hashem recognizes this the balchemtov gives a incredible muscle incredible parable a parent is teaching his child to walk so you know he's holding the kids hands as the kid is walking and the kid's starting to take some steps and then what does the parent do he lets go and he backs away and the child falls down now you can imagine the child's view at that point like what are you doing we were doing great why'd you let go now i'm back on my sitting down in my tush when i should be standing up and walking why'd you let go but we let go because we know that the only way you'll ultimately be able to walk is by doing it on your own hashem says i'm going to help you along and you're going to feel like you're growing and then i'm going to let go and when you have that moment which feels like hashem's let go like you thought you had it you can't figure out why it stopped that's the moment when the next stage of your growth is going to start we have to be prepared and recognize that growth just doesn't go straight up it plateaus it dips and then it goes back you have to recognize those moments when things do go south you don't get discouraged by it you see it for what it is it's the beginning of the next step in fact it's really interesting the caduceus slavery i believe yitzhak from verdict says that hashem knows that we as human beings get the most pleasure the most enjoyment out of growing but if the growth doesn't stop like the law of diminishing returns it stops being quite as enjoyable so he explains hashem actually at times kind of pushes us down he doesn't just let go he actually pushes us down because he wants us to know and experience the ultimate pleasure the ultimate benefit of continued growth that requires falling down a little bit so we have to recognize this when we get involved in personal growth that there's gonna be those moments where it's not going so well and even so that's not the end it's really just the beginning you know we're coming up on a very auspicious time it's gonna be the time of pesach the time that we were actually redeemed and the rabbis tell us that just like we were initially redeemed in the month of nisan the final redemption will come in the month of nisan as well so i hope with some of these ideas maybe you hopefully found them a little bit helpful but some of these ideas we can focus on turning our lives and making them even better and building that relationship with hashem we should all merit that this year should be the year the last pesach that we have outside of the land of israel