So I define full engagement as the intentional, it's intentional, the intentional investment of your full and best energy right here, right now. And that is a skill and it's very hard to do, but we get better with practice. And we've looked at, there's physical energy, when you're out of physical energy, you cannot be fully engaged. When you are all cut up in anger and frustration and cynical and sarcastic and so forth, that compromises your ability to be fully engaged. You can't multitask, you got to be right here, right now. And this moment in time, you can feel my energy coming to you and then I can feel intensity. There is an intensity in the energy that's coming because I can sense you care about it and you're giving it right here, right now. That is what we've built the whole program around. That notion of how fully engaged are you in life? And who and what is getting that full engagement of anyone? And is that full engagement aligned, fully aligned with your deepest values and sense of purpose? That's the secret that alignment and understanding this is a skill set that were teaching youngsters very early in life to try to develop and hone this because that's how they become great investors in life with their greatest sense of purpose and with this ability to invest full engagement. That's the secret. To me, if there's a secret to life, that's it. >> It's the secret to living a big life. And as we've talked about before, purpose is a central self-organizing life aim. So purpose kind of tells you where to put your energy in a way. >> Right. >> Right? >> Exactly, exactly. >> Yeah, I want to shift a little bit to students, both high school and maybe even younger students but also college students. I'm a professor at a university, at the University of Michigan. And I've been teaching for 25 years and quite honestly, I've never seen students as nervous as anxious as depressed as I have over the last few years. And in fact, over the last ten years, research has shown that suicidal ideation among students, thinking about ending your life, within the last 12 months, have you thought about doing that? Has doubled over the last ten years? Severe depression as measured through a standardized test of PHQ-9 has doubled over the last ten years among college students. And yet, purpose has declined among college students. A significant interest, in fact, saying it's extremely important to make a lot of money has increased a lot and yet, happiness has not increased at all. In fact, it's declined. What's going on with college student suicide? >> So it's very troubling and it's very real. I think your experience at the University of Michigan is the experience that almost everyone's having across the country, maybe worldwide. So there are a couple things to consider. One is, you have to have a deep sense of purpose or what you get is emptiness. It's like, if you don't have hope, there's nothing to fill that void. It's hopelessness, it's depression. And so the first thing you have to have is a purpose, but you also can have the wrong purpose. Your purpose has to be the right purpose. So I spent a lot of time with a lot of athletes and they were chasing fame, money and some of these athletes achieve such extraordinary success, number one in the world. And what came with it was unbelievable money, all the money, they could never spend it in their lifetime. Unbelievable fame and every title, all the titles they ever dreamed of having and all the privileges- >> Adulation. >> Adulation. >> Yeah. >> And they are in many ways became almost as bankrupt emotionally and mentally and spiritually as a lot of the kids today. They began to question. What is this all about? This is it? This is what life is about? And it was because it's preoccupation with themselves. This is the danger, you can have a purpose but if it's the wrong purpose, it could lead you just as powerfully in a direction that will lead to almost as detrimental as having no purpose. >> So we're playing with fire here too. When we help people find purpose, thinking about understanding what kind of purpose we should build is an incredibly important. >> It's a huge factor. >> Yeah, I talked a fair amount about Friedrich Nietzsche, who used in the beginning of this zarathustra, this wonderful metaphor that begins with a camel. And the camel says load everything on my back, load all the sorrows of the world, the pain, but also the joy and the love, in other words, educate me. And then the camel transforms into a lion, the lion goes out into the wilderness and finds a dragon, where on every scale are the words, thou shalt. The lion slays the dragon and then metamorphosizes one last time into a child. And the whole idea is that you need to become a lion, but you start by being a camel. And I find that my college students need to be camels. >> Camels. >> I want them to take a gap year and learn about the real world, not just go to Paris or London, but literally go to sub-Saharan Africa, how other people live. >> They need to really find something that they have to work really hard at and understand what discipline and hard work and appreciate all the wonderful things that they now have that they didn't really earn, but now they're having to really understand what it takes to get those things. >> Then they can become a lion and then they can go ahead. >> Right. >> But I often feel that people jump into trying to be a lion too early. They're not educated, and that leads to terrorism. It leads to all sorts of horrible things where people actually do have incredible purposes, but in the complete wrong direction for humanities. >> That's why it's so careful, it's so terrible. You have to really look at where this purpose is going to take you. So I spent a lot of my life, a lot of my career, a lot of my energy working with coaches, coaches in sport and working with young players in sport, young people. And [COUGH] so, they start out, they have a dream, they want to become number one in the world. And they wanted me to play- >> The tennis of the golf or whatever. >> Whatever it is. >> Yeah, right. >> They want to become a professional athlete and soccer or hockey or they want a college scholarship or whatever. And when you look at the odds of that actually happening, they're almost non-existent. They're almost zero, a few make it. >> Yeah. >> But maybe they started at the age of four or five, at some point this young boy or girl begins to realize, this isn't going to happen. But the parents are still out there pushing them and they're inside their loin. >> We've seen that a lot. They're still pushing them and going, well, you're not trying hard enough. You got to give more, you got to work hard. We're going to take you to another academy. You better coaches, you need better this, your gymnastics coach is not good enough, and on and on and on. And the youngster inside begins to realize, this wasn't my thing in the first place. This is not what I want. >> But now, I'm going to disappoint my parents. >> Now, I'm going to disappoint the parents. I've been given all these wonderful things and it's been great. And then I have a conversation with them and I say, okay, so this is not your thing now, you're doing it to please other people. So I usually get to this place, which is really an interesting place and say, what if the reason you went into this sport and you suffered all the losses, all the injuries to become a more disciplined, a competitor and all the stuff that you've been through. You virtually not known anything else other than this sport. What if all this was, was to help you grow up and become a stronger more fully functioning person? What if that was the gift? >> Wow. >> There you go. I say, are you capable of more now as a human being than you were when you started? Maybe this golf, this tennis, this hockey, maybe that was the gift. Forget what your parents want. If you're going to stay in this, let's grow up. That's a thou shalt dragon, your parents. >> Yes. Take the resume your parents wrote for you when you were five and tear it up. >> Now you're in this, every day is a day to get stronger, being able to be more resilient, to manage mistakes better, to be kinder, to be a better person, to be more character-driven. In every day, we're going to make a journal where you're going to grade yourself on that. And if you become one of the world fantastic, but that's not your purpose. That's a secondary, tertiary, its way down the chart. Right now, you're just going to grow up so that one day you might get your kids involved, but not to become number one in the world, to grow up and become a better person. And the whole thing changes almost on a dime. And so, I work with a lot of coaches and you walk out and say tennis coaches and they're out there feeding balls and their mind goes to, and they're going, my God. And I go, if all you're out there doing is you really want to create champions and you got all these kids out here, none of them are going to make it. You are a failure. But what if your role in their life was to help them become better, more fully functional human beings and that you model all these things that you would like for them to become, fully engaged, 100% effort, disciplined, kind, resilient in life, and that's what your purpose is here. And that every day you have a chance to interface with them and to help them grow as human beings and at the end of your life, how are you going to feel about that as opposed to how many champions that I produce? One is empty and one is filled with life, and everyday you train so that you can have full engagement with every one of your students and then come home and be fully engaged with your family. And all of a sudden, everything makes sense. And that's how I end up getting with a lot of those people. >> Can parents do this as well? >> And you do the same thing with parents. >> Let's think about a purposeful family, could parents instill that type of advice? >> So when I'm working with parents I say listen, let's just forget this business of getting a college scholarship, if it happens, they're going to be playing the world stage and all this. Let's just figure out, I want you to reflect on this question. Your son or daughter is chasing something. They're chasing golf, tennis, some sport, soccer, hockey, field hockey do you like who they are becoming as a person as a consequence of the chase? That's the only thing that matters. You are not to be a coach, you are not to be anything but the mother or the father because that can never be replaced. And your job is to make sure that they're becoming a better, more character-driven human being because of their exposure better able to handle the forces of life or get them out. It's boondoggle and I say it really strong. And I said if you think this is about getting the money back that you invested in this black hole of hoping that someday they're going to give you a bunch of money and buy you homes and cars because they're stars, forget it. It's not going to happen. The only way you justify the investment is that they've become a better human being and you made all the sacrifices in getting them to and from practices, giving up all your summer vacations and everything for one reason. Not to get them to win more but to become a better human being, better equipped to deal with life as they get older. And it changes their behavior because they have a different purpose. So we need a purpose but we need the right purpose. And when you get those two right, things change almost immediately.
