Skip to content
Jay Shetty PodcastJay Shetty Podcast

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS EXCLUSIVE: The Full Story of Her Daughter's Traumatic Birth

What happens when you spend your whole life chasing your dreams, only to realize peace was the real success all along? Five years after their first conversation, Jay sits down in person with global icon Priyanka Chopra Jonas for a deeply intimate and unfiltered dialogue about evolution, identity, motherhood, and the courage to begin again. What unfolds isn’t just a reflection on career milestones or public success, it’s a story about slowing down after decades at full speed, choosing peace over pressure, and realizing that the greatest luxury in life isn’t achievement, but time. Priyanka opens up about the ambition that defined her early years, dominating Bollywood, pivoting to Hollywood at the height of her success, and always chasing the next opportunity. In this season of her life, something has shifted. Marriage, motherhood, and hard-won self-awareness have softened the edges of perfectionism and control. Priyanka speaks candidly about feeling “cornered” at pivotal moments, moving continents during one of the darkest periods of her life, and rebuilding from the ground up in a new industry. Through therapy, faith, and the steady presence of her husband Nick, she’s learned to ask a powerful question: Is this thought constructive? In a world that celebrates hustle, Priyanka is learning to celebrate stillness. The most profound transformation, however, came with the birth of her daughter, Malti Marie, a journey marked by fear, fragility, and fierce devotion. Priyanka shares the emotional reality of welcoming a premature baby into the world, the long months in the NICU, and the moment her priorities shifted forever. It was a season that changed how she understood strength, not as control, but in letting go and protecting what matters. Through faith, family, and a steady commitment to her partner, Priyanka’s grown not just as an artist navigating industries, but as a woman more at ease with who she is and where she’s headed. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Pivot Careers Without Losing Yourself How to Stop Being So Hard on Yourself How to Handle Public Criticism Without Breaking How to Communicate Feelings Before Jumping to Solutions How to Trust the Timing of Your Life How to Protect Your Peace in a Noisy World How to Stay Grounded Through Trauma and Uncertainty How to Choose Gratitude Over “What If” Thinking Choosing family won’t cost you your dreams. Slowing down won’t erase your ambition. Keep going, keep growing, and most of all evolve on your own terms. Stream Priyanka’s new movie The Bluff on Prime Video today. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Bluff/0OSBVC1DKTXBVUO97CLO8DC5E1 With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty JAY’S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 00:23 Finding a Sense of Peace 03:39 Having Time to Lose not Spend 07:07 Seeing Nick Bare It All 10:03 What's Your Parenting Style? 11:45 Getting More in Touch with Your Own Feelings 15:46 How to Be More Patient When Things Don't Work Out 18:16 Forgive Yourself for Your Past Self 20:43 Stop Being Mean to Yourself 26:30 The Quiet Confidence 30:57 Trusting Your Partner to Take the Lead 34:02 Focus on the Good in Your Life 35:11 How to Not Let Mean Comments Affect You 40:52 Continue to Live Your Truth 54:27 Finding the Right People to Work With 58:04 Showing Appreciation for the People that Matter Most 01:03:19 The Thought of Almost Losing Your Child 01:18:16 A Letter From Nick 01:22:39 Would You Rather with Priyanka 01:30:25 Gut Reaction: Do You Actually Read Those? 01:37:07 Believing in People's Goodness 01:39:47 Turn Bold Ideas Into Real Opportunities Episode Resources: YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/priyankachopra Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/priyankachopra/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/priyankachopra https://www.instagram.com/jayshetty https://www.facebook.com/jayshetty/ https://x.com/jayshetty https://www.linkedin.com/in/shettyjay/ https://www.youtube.com/@JayShettyPodcast http://jayshetty.me

Priyanka Chopra JonasguestJay Shettyhost
Feb 24, 20261h 44mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Priyanka Chopra on motherhood, fame, faith, and career pivots

  1. Priyanka describes a major life shift from relentless ambition to valuing peace, family time, and the “luxury” of unstructured time.
  2. She explains how becoming a parent—and her relationship with Nick Jonas—helped her access emotions, practice patience, and replace self-criticism with more constructive inner dialogue.
  3. She recounts her career pivot from Bollywood to the U.S., detailing feeling cornered professionally, enduring loneliness and grief after her father’s death, and rebuilding through music and acting auditions.
  4. Priyanka shares the traumatic NICU experience surrounding her daughter Malti’s extremely premature birth, including being forced to announce the birth before knowing the outcome, and the daily ritual of showing up with strength, prayer, and teamwork.
  5. The conversation also covers coping with public negativity, the importance of appreciation while people are alive, and using entrepreneurial thinking to turn bold ideas into new opportunities.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Peace can be a skill you deliberately practice, not a personality trait.

Priyanka frames peace as allowing herself to slow down after years of running on ambition and survival-mode work ethic, choosing a pace she controls for the first time.

Replacing self-judgment starts with two mental checks: usefulness and reality.

Her tools are to ask whether a thought is constructive and to remember “thoughts are not facts,” which interrupts spirals of anxiety, fear, and self-berating.

Relationship conflict often resolves faster when you name feelings before solving problems.

She describes learning from Nick to separate emotional validation from solution-mode, finding that acknowledging “how we feel” changes the entire direction of an argument.

Public scrutiny doesn’t disappear—so boundaries and reframing become protective practices.

She normalizes gossip as timeless (“people always talked”) and emphasizes limiting the power of comments by remembering it’s not others’ business and filtering reactions through self-talk.

Major career reinventions require ‘erasing’ past status and focusing on craft.

In moving to the U.S., she describes starting over through auditions, accent work, English dialogue delivery, and coaching—using professionalism and skill as her competitive edge.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

It's having time to waste. What a luxury. Not spend, because it's a currency, time, I feel like with your family, with people you love or on the job.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

When you're holding onto something really, really tight, you know, you're, you're exhausting your muscles.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Thoughts are not facts.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

She was purple. Um, and, like, we didn't know.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

In that moment, I was like, "I will go to the ends of the earth to protect you." It's a feeling I have never felt before, and I think every first-time parent says that. But it's like your heart is beating outside of your body, and especially with her 'cause she was so vulnerable.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Redefining ambition as peace and time with familyUnlearning perfectionism and self-criticismTherapy tools: constructive thoughts and “thoughts aren’t facts”Marriage communication: feelings before solutionsParenting alignment and routines with a partnerPublic scrutiny, rumors, and boundariesBollywood-to-Hollywood pivot and starting overLoneliness, grief, and support teamsPremature birth, NICU trauma, and forced announcementFaith/spirituality as grounding (Lord Shiva, mantras, rituals)Gratitude, appreciation texts, and celebrating people while aliveEntrepreneurship, reinvention, and not “staying in your lane”New projects: The Bluff stunts; return to Indian cinema (Varanasi)

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome