Before becoming the world-famous singer-songwriter, Jewel was a teen in rural Alaska surrounded by people in pain. Performing in bars with her father, she became acutely aware of the unhealthy ways people deal with their emotions. After leaving home at 15 and facing her own struggles including anxiety and bouts of homelessness, Jewel learned to prioritize mental health over everything else. In this special two-year anniversary episode of Keep Connected, Jewel sits down with David Siegel to discuss her mission to bring free therapeutic resources to those who need them most. Learn about using meditation to get perspective, staying present, and the profound importance of connecting with others.
Show Notes
This is the show’s two-year anniversary. We have a very special guest because of it. Jewel, the multi-platinum singer-songwriter, actress, New York Times bestselling author, and most importantly, a true mental health leader. This is an incredibly meaningful special episode.
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There are very few people that justify only having one name, and you are one of them. Welcome, Jewel. I want to start off by personally thanking you. On a personal note, I lost a college friend to suicide. At one point, I had to take a family member to a hospital. This mental health crisis that we face was only massively exacerbated by COVID. You’ve taken your fame and challenges. You do so much good. If we can start off and share a little bit about the early days of Jewel, your teen years, your challenges related to mental health, and how you’ve gone through that path, that would be helpful as background.
I was raised in Alaska. My family were pioneers. They helped settle the state. My mom and dad lived in Anchorage. When my mom was eight, she left the family and my dad took over raising us. He moved us to Homer, where most of my family is from. He began trauma-triggering. We didn’t know those words at the time. I just knew that his behavior changed radically overnight. We went from a quiet little family unit to my dad drinking, smoking, and becoming physically abusive. Clearly, it was very painful.
I grew up bar singing with my dad. I grew up doing five-hour sets in fishermen’s bars and lumberjack joints. I had a front-row seat to a pattern I began to know very well. What I began to see was that I was in pain. I was surrounded by and large by people that were also in pain. It’s five-hour sets for people that are bar regulars. Lots of people are dealing with pain in lots of different ways.
I had a front-row seat to lots of alcohol use, drug abuse, rage and relationships. I’m a very visual person. I remember being 8 or 9 and I learned about oysters in class, and how they take a piece of sand and make a pearl. I was like, “None of us is making pearls. We are covering this cut or this pain in this little piece of sand in what you would call now coping mechanisms.”
I saw them like layers of trying not to feel this hurt. You ended up having a mountain of pain and avoidance, and you still had that original pain you had to deal with anyway. You had to dig your way back down there and very few people ever did. I remember writing in my notebook, “Nobody outruns pain,” and it made me so curious. Why aren’t we taught what to do with pain? We all feel pain, every human. It’s hardwired into us. I don’t think that whatever created us made a mistake. There must be a way that we can handle pain. When did we forget to know what to do with it? When did we forget to teach about it?
Nobody outruns pain.
If you don’t feel pain, it’s incredibly dangerous. There are people in this world that don’t feel physical pain and they don’t make it past 30 or 40.
I then learned about the buffalo. It’s the only animal that heads directly into the heart of a storm, and that struck me that the quickest way is through. I made myself a promise at nine that I would never drink, I would never do drugs, and I would try to face my pain as it came. If I couldn’t face it and I didn’t know what to do, I would do what I called putting a pin in it. You would now call it compartmentalize. I found a way to move forward promising to come back to it someday.
I then moved out at fifteen. My dad became more abusive and I ended up moving out. I knew statistically kids like me end up repeating the cycle. It’s a very dangerous thing to do, to move out at that age. I wanted to do it believing that there might be a different outcome possible for me. I thought a lot about it and contemplated it a lot. I was struck by so many thoughts. One of which was as much as I had a genetic inheritance that might give me a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease, I was also given an emotional inheritance. That would give me a predisposition to abuse, addiction, rage, frustration, and all of these negative attributes that were being handed down generationally in my family.
I needed to learn a new emotional language, but I knew there was no school. I knew you couldn’t go learn Spanish. This wasn’t like that. I thought about nature versus nurture and began to wonder if my personality or nurture was so bad that it affected my nature. Would my personality be altered by the type of trauma that I had? I hadn’t known the word at the time. I set up on this ambitious mission to see if happiness was a learnable skill. Was it a teachable skill? Could I learn a new emotional language? What would that take?
At fifteen?
It gave me a lot of hope.
At fifteen, you were on a path towards figuring out happiness. I have to ask. There must have been some influence in your life that made you, at 9 and 15, make those oaths to yourself and that dedication. Was it fully inherent or do you think there were certain experiences that made you make those decisions not to want to live that life when so many other people that are exposed to that world don’t make those decisions? What do you think it was for you?
To me, it seemed logical and practical. Being a little girl in a bar is dangerous. You are aware of it. I wasn’t ignorant of what a dangerous environment is. I loved it too. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to be singing, but I also knew that being on a street in an inner city is dangerous. For some reason, it made a lot of logical sense to me. It was very obvious that drinking wasn’t helping anyone. I was seeing brutal lessons. I was seeing these regulars die and they never had the money for a casket. We would sing in a parking lot to buy a wooden casket for somebody.
I was getting huge, visceral, and real lessons about why this wasn’t a great path. I think it was those things that I decided to notice, pay attention to, and take seriously for whatever reason. Maybe because I’m a girl, things felt dangerous. I wasn’t lulled into thinking things seemed not dangerous. If I was to be inebriated in public, that would be very dangerous. I was around a lot of people that would take advantage of me. I wanted to feel safe and happy. I was so sincere and earnest. I always have been my whole life. I don’t know why.
Tell me about the sixteen-year-old happiness journey when you started writing some of the songs that you are so famous for now. Tell us about that.
Long story short, I went to boarding school. I got a full scholarship. I started having panic attacks there. I didn’t know what they were. I had them so often that I began to be able to get a little bit creative with them and experiment, and find things that helped me get out of my panic attacks that were so helpful. I did a guided meditation for myself that would use color and taste. Now, we know about the science. What I had stumbled on was helping my brain deal with color, sight and smell, which forces blood back into your frontal lobes. If you google imaging of the brain during a panic attack, you’ll see a brain go offline. All the blood drains out of the frontal lobes. It goes into the amygdala and it lights up.
It’s your fight or flight. It causes a different adrenal system and nervous system to kick in, all your excitatory neurochemicals, adrenaline and cortisol, but you are not logical. That’s why for people having a panic attack, it’s not a logical thing. It’s literally because there’s no blood in your frontal lobes practically. When I stumbled on with my meditation, what I noticed made me feel better was I would imagine while I’m in the throes of a panic attack that I was in a boat on a very stormy sea. It was black water and black skies, the smell of lightning in the air, and that electrical smell.
I would then let myself fall backwards out of the boat. I like water so this has worked for me. It would then get instantly quiet. Instantly I would taste that salt on my lips and I would watch the colors change as I drift peacefully down to the bottom of the ocean and feel the sand on my back. The blues change, the colors change, and shafts of light through the beautiful ocean. By the time I went through this process, I was usually calm.
Now what we know about that type of thing, and you can do this for yourself and you can do anything, is it’s forcing your brain to process information that makes blood go back into your frontal lobes, sight, color and cognition. When a friend of mine has panic attacks, he reads. He forces himself to look at the words and understand the words. It’s the same thing. It starts hacking your brain’s blood supply basically. This is also the age. When I was sixteen, I started shoplifting regularly. It was to get myself food and clothing but then went well beyond necessities into a full-blown addiction.
Fast forward, I graduate. I go to San Diego to take care of a sick mom. I wouldn’t have sex with a boss. My boss fires me. I can’t pay my rent. I start living in my car. My car gets stolen and I end up homeless for about a year. I would say it was during this phase that I developed a huge bulk of the exercises that I still teach to this day to CEOs, as well as at-risk youth. I became very aware that behavior drives our lives. Behavior drives it and you can do therapy or read a good book and have an a-ha moment. If you don’t know how to practice that and create a habit out of it, it’s dead to you. I started developing what I would call now behavioral tools during the year that I was homeless. It radically changed my life.
Behavior drives your life. If you can’t practice or create a habit out of it, it’s dead to you.
One of the things I love that I read about that you focus on is the concept of rewiring your brain, and that makes so much sense. Talk about that a little bit. I would love to hear your perspective on it.
The word mindfulness gets thrown around all the time. It’s hard to know what it means. I have a definition. It means being consciously present. Meditation helps to build the muscle of being consciously present for longer periods of time. Our society and our world are vying for our attention or I should say, vying for our distraction. What anxiety or worry does is take a past and project it onto a future that hasn’t happened, and so we are distracting ourselves. We are distracting ourselves with a scary story of what we are worried will happen. It’s an attempt to keep ourselves safe.
It’s a coping mechanism.
The problem is it’s inaccurate. You can’t successfully take past data and project it into a future that hasn’t happened with a great outcome. It keeps you busy and distracted, which is a mechanism for helping you cope with the uncertainty of life, which I get. We need ways to cope, especially if we’ve come from abuse. You’re the hyper-vigilance. I get it. I’m the hyper-vigilance queen, but it isn’t that effective. Could I find another strategy that was maybe more effective?
I was reading a lot of philosophy at the time. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” I decided it was, “I perceive what I think therefore I am.” I realized if I could perceive that I was sad, I was something other than sad. I was the observer of it, which was interesting. If I could use a car as a metaphor, let’s say your body is a car and your brain is not the driver. It’s a steering wheel. Who is the driver? It’s the observer.
Meditation helps us build the capacity to observe in real-time and to be consciously present in real-time and observe things as they are happening. This is important because future thinking or hyper-vigilance is like leaving your house to keep it safe. It’s like leaving your house to go look for robbers. It might be better to stay at your house. It’s probably a better strategy.
Meditation is a tool that helps you build the ability to stay in your house presently and consciously for longer and longer periods of time. That’s incredibly calming all on its own. What I realized was meditation, which was life-changing, didn’t get me the level of change I was looking for. Again, if I could use the car as an analogy, meditation helped me get off of neurological autopilot where my brain is pre-programmed according to how I was raised, and all the stimulus and my assumptions about all of my upbringing, which may or may not be true, and I have a knee-jerk reaction when something happens and I confuse that for my personality. It isn’t. It’s more of your programming.
How do you break that trigger?
You start to break that by using the muscle. I look at meditation like a bicep curl. It’s going to the gym. It’s building the muscle of learning to get present. When I noticed I’m upset or when you notice you are triggered, that muscle should kick in and it should go, “I’m aware I’m inordinately bothered by what this person is saying,” as an example. “I’m going to stop and I’m not going to engage.” That is a life-changing skill. Now you are in a position to respond instead of reacting.
If I could go back to the car analogy. I’m using meditation. I’m getting present. I’m able to get myself off of autopilot. I’m able to now push pause before having a knee-jerk reaction that probably isn’t the healthiest. Now I’m going to stop. I’m going to get curious and I’m going to contemplate. I think mindfulness has two stages personally. There’s learning to meditate and become present. Once you are in position, it’s like getting that car out of autopilot and into neutral. Now you are neutral, and that’s important.
Now you have to think and be thoughtful. Where do I want my car to go that’s new and how do I do that? That’s where skill-based tools come in handy because now I’m present. I notice I’m triggered by so-and-so saying something to me. I want to tell him to F off. I’m pausing and I’m not doing it. Now I can form a thoughtful response. I can think about it, I can calm down, and I can have an action that’s going to give me a much better outcome, and that’s all by showing up.
Impulse control.
Meditation teaches impulse control.
I continue to need to work on that in life. The challenge is a lot of times, people who are ambitious, driven, and “very successful” do shoot by the hip. Some of those impulses are what got them to the place that they are in. They don’t realize the negative consequences of doing that as well. It’s a great call out. One of the things we love to say is we use technology to get people off of technology.
One of the things that you built back in 2016 was the Never Broken platform and helping to build a community for those in need. We are going to get to the Not Alone Challenge as well and the community that you are building. Can you talk a little bit more about the power of community for yourself and for others around mental health challenges? Keeping connected is what this show is about. Not just for a reason, but because we deeply believe in it. I would love to hear your perspective and any suggestions around it.
Connection cures if I could make a simple blanket statement, which is never overly helpful. If I was to try, I would say that what we are suffering from as a society is an acute distraction and an inability to connect to self and others as well. The world is vying for our distraction and we are learning how to advocate for our connection. Using mindfulness tools, walking in nature and connecting to other humans are all tools to help us connect. It’s healing. It’s an incredibly healing thing to be able to connect to yourself and others.
As a society, we’re suffering from an acute distraction and the inability to connect to self.
One of the things I love that you called out is the importance of first connecting to yourself and making yourself whole prior to looking to help others and build a community for others. I think there are people who are unselfish. That unselfishness sometimes is more of a challenge for them than a positive because it means they haven’t figured themselves out enough first. I will ask you this question. Where do you feel like you are now in connecting to yourself and how you are? It’s obviously a lifelong journey, but how do you feel you are right now because you continue to evolve in music and everything that you are doing in life?
Once a person learns that moving toward pain is more rewarding than moving away from pain, life begins to change. You stop making excuses for reasons you can’t be happy. They all might be true by the way, but now what? What do you do about it? What are you willing to do about it? It always starts within. If there’s one paradigm shift I could encourage anybody to have, it’s this idea of beginning to change your life from the inside out, not from the outside in.
No matter how much yoga you do or how many times you get in nature, which are such good habits to have, or no matter how many times you blame something unhealthy in your environment, it won’t take the place of you learning how to engage from the inside out. I believe that when you can get good at moving toward the uncomfortable feeling, getting curious about the anxiety, and asking, “Why don’t I like being alone? Why do I have such a visceral reaction to that thought?” All that questioning will change your life.
One thing that’s so apparent about you is your comfort in being vulnerable. I read in one of your interviews around Never Broken, you wrote, “I feel that my life has been painful, but many people suffer much worse than I have. That’s what I want people to see in the book,” your New York Times bestselling book Never Broken, “An honest look at things that have been difficult for me, which might help others.” You are so incredibly comfortable being vulnerable. We know how important that is in the healing process for people to ask for help in the first place. Has that been a challenge for you? What do you say to people that that’s a challenge? It’s such an important step in the healing process.
I’m 48. I have been doing this for a long time. If you met me when I was eighteen, it would look different. Writing forces you to get in touch with essential parts of your nature. I think that was a real gift in my life. It gave me a front-row seat to very intimate feelings, and then the urge to share those or to share that poem or whatever. With that said, you don’t move out at fifteen because you trust adults. I was incredibly guarded and a very scrappy street kid. Still, when I get triggered my go-to is to hit you hard with some sarcasm, some left and right witty little comments to help check people and keep them at a distance from me. It’s still my favorite go-to to this day.
It’s been an evolution. I think about it a couple of ways. One is what I call brilliant resilience. A natural resource I had as a human. We all have our gifts. One of my natural resources was independence. I was always independent. It made sense to me to move out. It was in me. I used that to survive, and that worked for me until it worked against me. When I realized that my independence was me disconnecting from other humans to a level where I was suffering, that became painful. Now, it was an unhealthy coping mechanism. It was keeping me from being able to experience joy and connection. That’s painful.
I did make a real conscious effort when I was eighteen to share. I started singing. I was homeless and I was like, “F it. I’m going to share the most brutal songs and poems.” Nobody knew I stole and I was homeless. I was like, “Here we go. Let’s do this.” I was rewarded luckily. I had two surfers in this coffee shop where I did this. They cried and I cried. It was a rewarding experience. For my career, I have been rewarded for being vulnerable. I’m lucky and it’s a unique thing.
For me, being able to deal with fame was like, “If you fake how you are, they will find out,” and then it’s this terrible fall from grace. I’d rather beat people to the punch. I’d rather tell people what I’m bad at, what I suck at, and my flaws because it made me feel a lot less pressure in the public eye. It made fame handleable or manageable for me. It’s something that people learn in layers. There are still places I don’t like to be seen. I don’t let people see if it’s something’s real fresh. I’m protective of that. We learn these things in evolutional series.
Fame is the ultimate emotional health challenge. I can’t even fathom what fame does for a person. We have seen so many thousands of examples of people who have fame far less than yours and be destroyed by it. How were you able to use that fame to grow in emotional health, and grow in mental health when so many people have challenges when it comes to what famous can do for a person from every perspective, from an ego perspective to a financial perspective?
When I got discovered, I was homeless and I was figuring out how to get happy. This year was so transformative in being homeless. With the skills I was developing, I started to heal my agoraphobia and my panic attacks. I learned how to stop shoplifting. Even though I was homeless, I had started to feel so empowered and so free inside my body.
When record labels came, it almost was very frightening because this is like that kid that moved out at fifteen. Here I am eighteen. The emotional baggage and trauma that I had. God forbid, I become famous. It’s like every movie you’ve seen of every celebrity. I had a very big statistical chance of being a statistic. I had to come up with a strategy. I didn’t rush into it. I thought about it. I thought about turning it down.
You thought of turning record labels down.
I did. I didn’t think I could handle it. My psychological footing was so fresh and fragile that I didn’t think I could withstand it. I knew the cost of not having good psychological footing. Nothing was worth it. When you realize that you can be happy homeless, what do you need in life? What did I want? I stopped and asked myself. I loved singing and I was ambitious and I wanted lots of things in my life, but not at any cost. I had to stop and go, “At what cost? What am I willing to pay?”
Meanwhile, there was a bidding war over me. Every label started coming down. I had one of the biggest bidding wars in the history of music. It was crazy. Every label is outbidding the other one, racketing up this price. I was offered a $1 million signing bonus as a homeless kid. I did a couple of things. First, I went to the library and bought a book about how the music business work, how deals are structured, what an advance means, and what a signing bonus means. What does this mean? What’s happening?
The other thing is I gave myself a whole list of questions I had to answer like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What do I want? At what cost?” What I realized was valuable. I realized that I could sign a record deal on one condition, and that condition was that my number one job would continue to be learning how to be a happy whole human, not a human full of holes. My number two job would be to be a musician. Under that, I had a subcategory. I wanted to be an artist more than I wanted to be famous.
What this did was give me North Stars to navigate and make decisions by because decisions are hierarchical. Life isn’t all linear but some things are. I had to have a decision to make or process for making decisions. Knowing I would always put my emotional health first was non-negotiable. I’m very proud that I’m 48 and I have never ever let that down. I have done years off of my career. I have turned down massive opportunities because I didn’t believe I could psychologically handle them. It cost me a lot. It cost me fame and money, but it didn’t cost me my sanity.
It would have cost you a lot more.
It would have, and it was unheard of at the time. There weren’t mental health breaks or I don’t think mental health even existed yet. It was like, “Jewel took two years off at her height.” It was shaming somehow. Having that hierarchal decision like, “I want to be an artist.” Sometimes it doesn’t jive with fame. It also does jive with fame. It’s each case by case. You have to look at it individually.
Those kinds of things are important. I don’t think we ask ourselves. I had to have metrics around my happiness. How do I know when I’m happy? How do I know when I’m not? If you make a business and you have a business plan, you create resources and you make sure you have enough time. You’d never invest in a young startup CEO that didn’t want to dedicate his life to it. Why don’t we do that with our happiness? Why aren’t we more practical and logical about what you want? How do you know when you have it? What does it look like? How can you audit it? For me, that’s what I spent a lot of my time doing. It was creating those metrics for myself.
People need to have metrics around their happiness.
Often people set goals and those goals go out the window or they aren’t constantly revised in the context of every major decision that one needs to make. Having those goals on top of mind at all times is amazing. Speaking of goals, you have accomplished an amazing goal and what you are in the middle of the Not Alone Challenge is truly extraordinary. I would love for you to share with our audience a little more about the Not Alone Challenge. I have participated in it myself. Someone is going to be taking me out to launch and I’m looking forward to it. Share a little bit more because it’s a movement that you are building right now. Talk a little more about that.
First of all, thank you for your participation. If everybody doesn’t know, he donated six-month mentorship in our launch. It’s an incredibly generous thing to do for somebody. It’s incredible. Thank you. #NotAloneChallenge was developed to try and move beyond raising awareness around mental health to arming people with tools.
Fifty percent of the population that needs mental health tools doesn’t have access to them, and that’s not okay. What do people do if they can’t afford therapy? It’s a hard thing. That’s what we set out to solve in my youth foundation. I love therapy, but it’s just not available to everybody. Are there tools, systems, and curriculum that can help you get significant help with your mental health if you don’t have access or if you fall through the cracks of traditional systems?
Those are the tools that as we start raising money. What it is? I guess I should start from the beginning. People like yourself would make a video on social media saying why mental health matters and what their auction item is. They nominate somebody else, and then people can bid on that auction item. When we combine everybody that we have participated in social media reach, it would have been 1.2 billion media impressions. Isn’t that crazy? I know. It seems impossible. It’s cool. It’s been neat, especially to get people from all walks of life, athletes and every socioeconomic and political background. This is something we all share. We all have to find practical tools to feel better.
What’s beautiful about it is there are so many things that disunite our country and people. Ending the loneliness and helping new people connect. Providing resources for so many people in need is something that unites everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are at the extreme right or extreme left progressive. There’s pain everywhere. I have heard a lot and read a lot about Innerworld. It’s something that you are working on right now. I would love to help our audience to understand additional resources to go to and what you are working on. Please share a little more about that. That would be great.
We launched Innerworld. It’s a virtual reality mental health community. It works with Oculus goggles or without them. You can do it on your laptop and it works fine. It’s a peer-to-peer community where you can go to learn a lot of things I have been talking about here. You can learn anything from meditation to skills like when we have people with social anxiety, we teach a skill called Solve Ahead. It’s when you think of the worst-case scenario and then you solve it, make a plan for it, and then you think of the best-case scenario and you make a plan for that.
It helps calm your anxiety. It lets you anchor into the fact that I know I have a plan in place should something go wrong on my trip to the grocery store or whatever? If people want to go there, we would love it. It is a for-profit. It’s a subscription model. $200 a year for one therapy session. That’s the same price. We launched. We are brand new and we are excited. You can go in there and test it for free and see what it’s like and get into the community.
As we said, we need to go where people are and technology is where people are. We need to use that technology for good rather than for challenges that people oftentimes have. Is there an age group that you think is the most vulnerable right now in your mind that you want to make sure that as many resources go towards? Is it the post-college, college or high school? If you can impact one age group, what age group would it be? Let’s start with that.
It’s hard to say because when you look at the numbers, suicidal ideation is up across every demographic. It’s at historic unsustainable highs. White highly educated men, people of color, marginalized people, and college kids. What’s happening on campuses is horrifying. I think that’s what we are finding. My real passion in solving for is how I can create tools that work for every category. Practical common-sense tools that work whether you are 14 or 80.
A quick story that I heard about someone from Meetup. When the pandemic hit, we have 60 million people that were on Meetup that didn’t have anywhere to go. They lived by themselves. Twenty-five percent of people live by themselves. In 1950, it was 1%. It has changed dramatically. The risks during COVID of when people live by themselves are so significant. Numerous people created Meetup groups during the pandemic and kept them open 24/7. There was always a person that they could go to that could talk with if they felt vulnerable and scared. We have had emails and social media posts from people who said that Meetup save their lives. It’s something that is incredibly deeply important to me and our team.
It’s a beautiful thing you guys are doing.
Thank you. If you have a person who’s struggling, it depends on what they are struggling with. If you could tell them one thing, what would be the one message that you would want to share with them that could help them take that next step?
Probably the idea of emotional impermanence. It’s not forever. How you are feeling is intolerable. It is excruciating if you had to feel this way for the rest of your life. It would be unmanageable. For me, I learned this lesson. I was depressed. I was in Alaska. I was sitting on a cliff watching the tide go out. They are huge tides in Alaska and it took 6 or 7 hours. I was sitting here watching the tide go way out and come way back in.
The idea of emotional impermanence is not forever.
It was very slow, but I sat there long enough to watch that it indeed came back in. I suddenly looked around me and started laughing because the culmination of physics has changed. Every single thing in the universe changes, whether on an atomic level or on a universal huge scale. It was funny that I was sitting there thinking I was the only thing in all the universe that wouldn’t change, and that my bad mood would be there forever. It’s categorically untrue. It’s scientifically impossible.
For me, I felt odd hubris. What an odd arrogant thing to think I alone in all the universe will not change. I realized that I’m part of nature and I can relax in that. It has to change. I don’t know how. I don’t know when, but it has to change because that’s physics, and maybe I could help it change. Maybe also I could start to pitch in and get curious about what things could help it change quicker. Do I have an influence over it?
A lot of times, we can. We can have a real influence over these moods that come across us in our lives. If you get curious, there are answers and there is change. We have been working with suicidal kids for 21 years. We have never lost one, and more importantly, I have never seen a child not change. Categorically, every single child has come to me weeping with joy at some point. They never thought they would laugh again, much less weep with joy.
This is through the children’s foundation. I want to know.
It’s called the Inspiring Children Foundation.
Derek Jeter said a line that I always think about and it’s, “Don’t let the highs get you too high and the lows get you too low.” I’m sure there are many songs with those lyrics in them as well. You talked about the lows not getting too low and that it’ll change, but also know that the highs get you too high. That’s dangerous as well. It’s almost like taking an out-of-body experience, and looking at that and perceiving when you are having that high, and knowing that too will change and that’s okay. That’s healthy and good.
External results are phenomena of process. If you put yourself worth outside of yourself, it gets you to go on a roller coaster ride. When you don’t have a song that performs, now you don’t have any self-worth. When you do have a song that performs, now you have worth. All of that is outside of my control. That means I have given away my esteem. I have given away my power to know my worth independent of performative behavior.
It’s very dangerous. We want to contemplate and think about who am I consistently, no matter how things are going. If I took away my job title. If I took away that I’m a parent or musician, what am I? Who am I? What is my most essential self? When you can get in touch with that, you are very dangerous in a good way because nobody can leverage you. You know your worth and value. You know sometimes things work and sometimes things don’t work, but it doesn’t make your value less intrinsic.
A lot of studies on happiness have been done and they found that one of the largest contributors towards happiness is exactly what you said, which is having an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. The happiest people are those that have an internal locus of control. The ones that don’t blame outside influences are therefore why my life is bad, etc., or I define myself by how many likes I have on my Instagram feed or whatever. How people tend to define themselves. Thank you for sharing that. That rings home for me and I hope for many in our audience. I will ask you one last question and then it is a wrap. What do you ultimately want to be most remembered by?
It’s an internal posture for me personally. I want my life to be my best work of art. I don’t want my art to be my best work of art. I hope I live artfully. By that, I hope I parent artfully and that means I have to gain skills, go to school, gain mastery, and be thoughtful and artful in my parenting. I have to do that in my relationships. I have to do that in my art, my songs, business or anything I’m doing. I hope to do it artfully, but it has to be my whole life.
There’s a song I wrote on my first album called Painters and it said, “Because he’s a painter and he’s painting himself a beautiful world.” That would probably be what I want to be written. I was a painter and I was painting myself a beautiful world. I’m trying to create a world from the inside out that has been pleasing to me.
Jewel, there is so much more paint left. It seems like there’s almost infinite paint left and infinite canvases that you are going to be painting. Just an acceleration of everything you are doing, I wanted to thank you so much for being part of the show. Thank you for your friendship with Meetup. Thank you for all that you do in this entire world and for your fans and people who should be your fans, not only for your music but for who you are. Thank you.
Thank you and thanks for everything you are doing with Meetup. I can’t wait to integrate into the community further. It’s incredible.
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Thanks for tuning in to this episode. When my team told me that Jewel was going to be on the show, I was in shock, and then I became very nervous. I didn’t know if I would be able to connect with a person of such notoriety and fame, someone who sold 30 million-plus albums. She is someone who is so incredibly down to earth and who has gone through tremendous pain. Who has tremendous fame and understands that both can be fleeting, and it’s about knowing who you are and driving happiness out of who you are as a person, and not being defined by those around you. If you enjoyed this episode, remember to subscribe and leave a review. Remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together. Thank you, Jewel.
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I have something important to share. Check on my new book, Decide and Conquer to get to know my story at Meetup. The hardest thing about community leadership is making tough decisions when the stakes are high. I will tell you that they were never higher than when Meetup was owned and sold by WeWork. In my new book, Decide and Conquer, I will walk you through a counterintuitive framework for decision-making and the epic journey of Meetup’s surprising survival. Good leaders deliberate, and great leaders decide. Order my book now by visiting DecideAndConquerBook.com or anywhere books are sold. I think you’ll like it.
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About Jewel Kilcher
Jewel Kilcher is an American singer-songwriter, actress, and author. She has received four Grammy Award nominations and, as of 2021, has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Jewel was raised near Homer, Alaska, where she grew up singing and yodeling as a duo with her father, a local musician. At age fifteen, she received a partial scholarship at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where she studied operatic voice. After graduating, she began writing and performing at clubs and coffeehouses in San Diego, California.
Based on local media attention, she was offered a recording contract with Atlantic Records, which released her debut album, Pieces of You, in 1995; it went on to become one of the best-selling debut albums of all time, going 12-times platinum. The debut single from the album, “Who Will Save Your Soul”, peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100; two others, “You Were Meant for Me” and “Foolish Games”, reached number two on the Hot 100, and were listed on Billboard’s 1997 year-end singles chart, as well as Billboard’s 1998 year-end singles chart.
Last modified on January 4, 2023
