Live Without Regrets: Jodi Wellman’s 4000 Mondays Challenge

Follow Jodi Wellman's story as she uses '4000 Mondays', the reminder of life's finite nature, to motivate her to live life to the fullest and uncover empirical evidence that proves this morbid math can be a powerful tool for living intentionally and with purpose. Show Notes | Transcript "When we calculate how many of those Mondays we have left, could that be the thing that actually wakes us up to not just the finite nature of life, but that allows us to say, wait a minute, I have this remaining time. It's precious. How can I live it with the greatest intention?" - Jodi Wellman Jodi Wellman is a speaker, executive coach, assistant instructor in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, and founder of 4000 Mondays, a platform to help people live life without deathbed regrets. Jodi was inspired to learn about how to live life without deathbed regrets when she studied Temporal Scarcity at the University of Pennsylvania. Through her research, she found empirical evidence that living life with intention is useful and created a platform to talk about it. She proposed living life wider and deeper, and encouraged people to focus on having a sprinkling of experiences that make them feel alive. Jodi ultimately wants us to savor our days and not wait for a wakeup call in order to appreciate life and live without regret. In this episode, you will learn the following: How we can widen and deepen our lives to find the balance between pleasure and meaning What are the interventions and techniques to prepare ourselves to be resilient when faced with difficult life events Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: How to Live Life on Your Terms with Rachel Smets In this episode, Rachel shares the importance of knowing what you find meaningful. The Way to a Meaningful Life with Andrew Calderella Andrew explains what real happiness in life looks like and gives insight on how we can reach it. The Divine Light in You In this episode, Gloria Grace Rand explorex the divine light that illuminates your being and empowers you to create a life of purpose. Resources: Connect with Jodi here Take the Character trait survey here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand Namaste and welcome again to another edition of Live. Love Engage. I am Gloria Grace Rand, and I am, as always, delighted to have a guest with us on the show. And I met this woman recently at a publicity event, and I knew what she had to talk about was going, going to be perfect for our audience. So first off, before I tell you more about who she is and why I thought she'd be so great, I want to welcome Jodi. Wellman to live love, engage. Jodi Wellman Thank you so much. I am really excited to be here with you. Gloria Grace Rand Well, I think your topic is going to be well, it's appropriate any time, but I think especially nowadays, it seems like even more so. Let me tell you who Jodi is. She is a speaker, an executive coach and assistant instructor in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania and also the founder of 4000 Mondays. And I think I can say this even though she didn't use the word in her bio, but I believe probably that your mission is just to have people live squander free lives without deathbed regrets. So normally I start off our interviews by asking our guests to kind of share their journey and where they got here. And I have a feeling, since I know more about you than our audience does so far, if I asked you instead to talk about why is your company called 4000 Mondays? Because I know that that will probably answer that question of how you got to where you are today. Jodi Wellman We're going to connect to the dots pretty quickly. You're right when I give you the behind the scenes scoop. So 4000 Mondays is roughly all we get in life to live. And I don't know about you, but when we calculate that and see that and then what I like to do without it being overly morbid, I really like for it to be more motivational than morbid. But if we do calculate how many of those Mondays we have left, could that be the thing that actually wakes us up to not just the finite nature of life, which, yeah, that's unfortunate, but that allows us to say, wait a minute, I have this remaining time. It's precious. How can I live it with the greatest intention? And so that 4000 Mondays is the reminder of how temporary we are and then the impetus to say, let's figure out ways to make the most of it. Gloria Grace Rand So I appreciate that. And it is really a startling statistic when you think about it. What led you to calculate that. Jodi Wellman Right? Why that morbid math? Well, I have always been interested in the absurdity of the fact that we are unfortunately not going to live forever. And so when I studied it at the program at University of Pennsylvania, so I studied it within the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology. And I'm going to be super honest with you before you even say it out loud. Wait a minute, how is that related? Positive psychology is about wait a minute, isn't that the study of what makes life worth living? And then here you are talking about mortality. And that's where I just want to say, oh, but wait, give me 1 second, because I did find in researching this topic, this countdown idea that you can't imagine how giddy I got when I thought, wait a sec, there's actually empirical evidence that backs up that this is actually useful for us. And so that gave me, admittedly, a little bit more traction around, oh, this is a real thing, I can work with this. There's psychological science, there's a background to this. And so then I've just taken it and I've sort of overcharged super drive on making this platform to talk to. Gloria Grace Rand People about, well, I love that and I also love how giddy you are at research. I think that was very. Jodi Wellman A bit of a dork. Gloria Grace Rand Well, that's okay. I like that. I get that way about certain things. I'm fascinated by the study of the brain, for instance. So I love reading up on that. So I have the geeky side to me as well. So tell me a little bit, expand on this a little bit then about the research and the research that then correlates to this and why is it important for us to know about that? Jodi Wellman Okay, great. Thanks for asking. You know, I love it. And so the first chunk that I think makes this relevant, it's a concept called temporal scarcity. And what that is, is when you take something, any kind of resource, any kind of asset, and you say and you position it in such a way that it is elusive or rare or for a limited time only. Like if you're purchasing something, picture any informercial, I suppose there's a limited quantity. When we see something, anything in a limited light, it increases our perceived value of that thing. And so then I would think, well, wait a minute, this is more than a thing. And so there is research around the temporal nature, which temporal just refers to like, span of time, that they've really shown that people who are in college who are primed to recognize that, hey, your college years are going to be over soon. They all of a sudden get out there and start participating in activities in ways that those who are not primed to really stop and say, wait, you've got four months and twelve days left. They just take it for granted and all of a sudden, oh no, college is over. And that's just one study of many. But we do this in life, right? Like, when you're on a vacation, when it's Thursday night, you all of a sudden go, wait a minute, I'm going home on Saturday. I've really got a savor Friday and Saturday morning. And so this is the whole concept of seeing our lives through this lens again without dwelling on the dire part. Actually, we can. There's more evidence there too. But the effect of that countdown triggers for many of us a desire to do this thing right, quote, unquote, which we can discuss too, because there is no right or wrong, right? What's right for you is different than what's right for your neighbor and so on. But but temporal scarcity is really the backbone of why this concept works. Gloria Grace Rand Yeah, that makes sense. And I was just flashing back to my son, actually, when he was in school and how he would wait until the last minute to get things done because all of a sudden it's like, oh crap, I got to get this done. And I know sometimes we're like that in in other aspects of our lives too. And and having a deadline is a good motivator. And and for instance, I used to work in television, so I worked for a news program and so we had to get on the air every day at 6:30 at night, so you had to get things done in time. And the good thing about it is then nothing carried over to the next day or rarely, unless we were doing a series or something. And so then you get to start fresh the next day. And I wonder is how we can treat that, maybe treating each day in a way like that as well, because we never do know when our number's coming up, even though we say you might have 1000 Mondays left or whatever. But we can't really take that for granted, can we? What's your thought about that? Jodi Wellman Oh, my goodness. Yeah, we're on the same wavelength here. This is exciting because the more granular you get sometimes, the more aware you become. And then I think for most of us, it does put us into more of an action sort of orientation. Right? So there are thought experiments where you're commenting on each day being precious. Nietzsche had a thought experiment that I find fascinating. It was called The Eternal Return, where he had said that I won't do the full back story,...