#193: The Hook Point: How To Make Your Brand Stand Out Amidst The Digital Noise With Brendan Kane

Thanks for having me. It's a true pleasure to connect with you and everybody that's listening to this.

I think our community is going to really love this conversation. But before we dive in, I want to ask you this question. What's not written in that bio, in the intro I just read, that you would love for people to know about you? One thing that's not in there that you'd love for people to know about you.

Well, I think that most people that do know me know me from the 1 Million Followers book and see me as really a social media expert or whatever you think. But it's much bigger than that. Social media is one thing that I do, and that's why I really decided to spend the past 2 years putting together the information in the Hook Point book. Because I'm always looking at how can I provide people the most value and help them on their journey to be the most successful. And I really had to dive deep into myself to understand what is the best way that I could express that. And that's really the concept of a hook point and really standing out in a very noisy world that we live in today, a very oversaturated world that you've got to find ways to win attention. We live in this world where attention is the biggest asset in terms of growing your brand or sharing your message or whatever impact that you would have on the world. So I think that that's— a lot of people would just get caught onto that 1 million followers concept and book, and then all they see is social media. But I really want to help them with much more than just that.

Yeah, it may even be sort of obvious or self-explanatory, but explain if you could for folks what a hook point is.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's start with what the problem is. The problem is we live in a world today where there's over 60 billion messages sent out on digital platforms between social media, text messages, emails, All of that accumulates to a tremendous amount of noise. There was an interesting Forbes article that did research that said the average person is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 ads a day. So what that really means is the average person's ignoring 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day. So you as a business person, or just even somebody that wanted to share your message, you're no longer fighting against your direct competition. You're fighting against every piece of content. Like it or not, you're competing against LeBron James. You're competing against The Rock, Netflix, CNN, Fox News, whatever it is, you're competing for that attention. So a hook point is designed to grab that attention. And there's 3 core pillars to a hook point. One is getting somebody to stop in those first 3 to 5 seconds so that you can win the first part of that conversation, just getting them to stop so you can get to the second core pillar, which is your story. What is it that you want to express? What is the message that you want to share? What is it You want to talk about your product or service or the value that you provide. And then the third is, do people trust it? Do they believe it? Does it come off credible? And all 3 of these have to play together because if you don't grab somebody's attention the first 3 to 5 seconds, you'll never get to your story. If you grab somebody's attention but your story is not good, if you don't retain that attention, you've automatically lost it. And then third is if you have a great hook and get somebody to stop and you have a powerful story but people don't believe it, doesn't come off credible, then it falls apart. So that's really what, in the essence, at a high level, what a hook point is.

Right. Now I know there's no one-size-fits-all. We do a lot of marketing and knowing sort of the timing would help. So very important that you establish that sort of a connect, that you get people to pause or stop in 3 to 5 seconds. How long for the story and the establishment of trust would you say? Is it fair to say it's 2 minutes? Is it 3 minutes? Is there any rule of thumb about that today?

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say there's no rule of thumb for it. It's— and people ask this a lot, especially when it comes to social media, is how long should my content be? And to me it's like, well, how long can you retain that attention? Because if you only feel like your message is strong enough in 15 to 30 seconds, then deliver it in 15, 30 seconds. If you feel like you can hold attention for 20 minutes and you're providing value, then you'll go off and do that. And I wanna distinguish the difference. Like we live in a micro-attention world, but that doesn't mean You can't hold their attention for long periods of time. What it means is you need to capture their attention and fight for that attention, that first part of the conversation. That's the hard part. And then when you get past that, retaining that attention, obviously you have to be a good storyteller, but there's prime examples. You look at Joe Rogan or you look at podcasts in general, you can maintain attention for hours. Like people will listen or engage in content. It's really just winning that first part. That's really the tough part in getting you to stand out, but there's no real rule of thumb. When it comes to like, it has to be this length of time for your story. And then credibility, I'm sure you can answer this just as well as I, is like, that can come off in the first 10, 15 seconds, but you can lose it 20 minutes in if you say something that doesn't hold true. So I think a lot of trust and credibility is built very early on in that process because it's not just what you say. People look at your facial expressions, your body posture, your tones. Exactly. All of that and seeing if it comes off authentic and people believe it.

Right. The nonverbal cues are a really big important thing in that, and those are done, as you say, from sort of inception. So again, this is maybe a tough question to answer, but the 3 to 5 second piece, if somebody says, okay, I get that, I gotta grab somebody's attention in 3 to 5 seconds, are there any rules of thumb about that?

Well, I can steer you to where people go wrong because I think that's one of the helpful places. So first, People treat that first 3 to 5 seconds as their story or their product. They almost overwhelm the user in that first part of it when you've just gotta think about what is gonna get them to just stop the scrolling, stop on a busy street or stop in a meeting to pay attention to you.

Stop the scrolling.

Yeah. I mean, that's the big thing.

That's a good hashtag, don't you think? Stop the scrolling. Yeah.

I don't know if you saw the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, but it's kind of the perfect analogy of this, of the algorithms are favoring the content that gets people to stop and pay attention. So what most people do is they skip that step. They skip the first core pillar and they just go into their story, or they even just go into sell mode right away when that's not really the world that we live in today. You've gotta earn the right to do that. The second biggest mistake people are making is, is saying the same thing in the same way as everybody else. So one of the analogies I'd like to talk about is if we were launching a meditation app or a meditation retreat, meditation has been around for thousands of years. You type meditation into Google, you'll get billions of results. And yet people will say the same thing is meditation is the key to stillness or meditation relieves anxiety or meditation is the key to contentment, all of those things. And if you say that in the same way as everybody else, what happened in your subconscious is like, I already know what this is going to say. I'm just going to scroll past it. Not to say that you as an individual don't have a different expression or provide unique value is people have, again, endless content that they can go through. And if they think that they've seen it before, they're just going to skip it. So to give you an example of how we could fix that is we talk about pattern interruption a lot. So you've got to imagine if you're in Instagram or anything like, let's just take Instagram, for example, you just watched LeBron James dunk. You just watched the latest Netflix trailer, you just watched a news clip of something that's going on in the election, and then your clip comes up. What is going to break that pattern to get them to stop? Now, one of the tools that we use sometimes is called subverting expectations, flipping something on its head. So in the example of meditation, the 3 core pillars may look something like this: is I may start the video with a headline, or I may say meditation is a scam. To get that stop. And then I'll go into the story and say, have you ever felt like meditation is a scam? If that's you, I feel your pain because when I first started meditating, I couldn't get it to work for me. I had people telling me I needed to sit down and completely clear my thoughts in my head. And every time I sat down, my mind would race. Is that something that's happened to you? Well, if it is, I want to share a few strategies that I learned early on that allowed me to turn a non-meditator, somebody that didn't believe in it at all, To somebody that now meditates every day for 10 years. So will you click the link below to check out these strategies that I want to share with you? So what I did is I subverted the expectations. I flipped it on its head, but I'm not doing clickbait because it plays into the story that I'm going to tell by trying to attract people that haven't meditated and what's kind of going on in their head. And then I share the story that I feel their pain. I've been in their instance, and hopefully by me relating to them and doing it in an authentic way and just sharing my experience, That will create the trust and credibility enough where they'll take the next step on the journey. So that's an example of that. There was another— the 2 examples that we did from an organic perspective, from subverting expectations that went viral and worked really well. One was the old saying, don't sweat the small stuff, as we've heard that millions of times. So we created a video that started off saying sweat the small stuff. And then we dove into like an inspirational thing of why you need to kind of pay attention to the details. And then there was another one, uh, where the headline said WARNING in all caps on the top with exclamation points, and it said, SAFETY IS DANGEROUS. So again, it's flipping that perspective on its head to just get people to stop, to win the first part of the conversation so we can get into the story and the real information that we want to share with them.

It's so interesting because our company trains public speakers and people specifically that want to deliver high-stakes talks like a TEDx talk, for example. And it's one of the things that's the death knell to public— to effective and impactful public speaking is to be predictable. And it's really the same thing we're talking about. It's just using different terminology. But we say that it's not so much about being a boring speaker, even though people call it that. It's about being unpredictable. That's how you maintain a person's attention is by not playing into what is the natural instinct. And really what we've adapted to is to be able to see how things are going to turn out very quickly. Like, you could see an ad or you could see something, you see it coming and you know where it's going. And as soon as you know where something's going, it's no longer interesting. It's not novel, it's not unique, there's nothing to learn, and you're off checking your Facebook again or whatever it is you're doing that's distracting you habitually. So I think it's really important that you've given us 2 things that— and I want to language it a little differently just because I think it's important that you look at opportunities to take something that might be considered conventional wisdom And to do what you just said, turn it on its side. Where can you do that? That's a tangible takeaway for people right now is, for your marketing or talking about something that's important relative to your content is where can you debunk a myth? Turn something that's conventional wisdom on its side, not for the purpose of just being sort of marketing savvy, because I don't buy that. I think that's going to play into the social dilemma stuff that I want to get into with you, but really just to see where it is that you can take a unique perspective on someone, genuinely take a unique perspective on something that's been beaten to death. Like for example, I mean, we had the wife of, I think it's John Carlson, I might've messed that up, but Carlson's the author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. I think there were 2 authors for that book. But anyway, yeah, that's a really conventional thing we've heard over and over and over again. So to say that, we're immune to it, right, Brendon? I mean, it's like it doesn't get in.

Yeah. You've got to find a way to stand out. And it's not to say that there's not value in that message. And when we're working with clients, we're not changing who people are. We're not changing their core message. We're contextualizing it in such a way that we can get people to pay attention. Another big distinction where people go wrong is understanding the difference between what people need and what people want. Because a lot of times when we're creating companies or books or whatever that we're trying to push out into the world, we're so entrenched into it that we cannot see the forest through the trees. That we know it so well that we know what our core customer audience needs, but they may not be there yet. We may need to bring them on a journey to get them to what they actually need. So for example, with my first book of 1 Million Followers in 30 Days, that's playing to what people want. That's a hook. Everybody wants followers. So that's what brings people in. But really the substance of the book, yes, I teach people follower growth, but the real journey I take them on is what you need to really know to be successful on social media, which is how to test properly, the proper mindset, how to create shareable content, how to leverage strategic partnerships. But if I would've started with any of those things, like the title being The Art of A/B Testing on Social Media, or How to Create Shareable Content on Social Media, it wouldn't really have the impact of creating a hook, a pattern interrupter to say, this is how I generated a million followers in 30 days. So I can get them to stop So they can take them on the journey of what they need. And that's really, I think a lot of people, especially the people that are super brilliant, super smart, they're so in their head and it comes so intuitively and easy for them that they forget that they need to convey that in a way that can bring the largest audience in to pay attention to what they have to say.

Yeah. Brendon, what's the difference between contextualizing and manipulation?

Again, contextualizing is positioning in a way that people can actually hear what you have to say. We're not manipulating the decision. We just want to get people to pay attention. This is what we're offering. This is how we can provide value in your life, in your business, whatever it may be. And then they make the determination whether it's the right path for them or not. Manipulation is trying to convince them of doing something that they may not want to do, or maybe is not the right fit for them. And that's where that credibility and trust comes into play. Listen, are there narcissists or people out there in the world that are really good at just manipulating people? Yes. But those people are few and far between. Most of us with the amount of content that we consume on a daily basis, we can see between the lines or we can see if somebody really has value or somebody does not have value.

Right. Another way of sort of getting at the question is ask what the ethical dilemma is, because not everybody maybe has seen The Social Dilemma. I recommend it. I loved it. I thought it was— yeah, loved is a strong word. My eyes were opened by it. I thought I kind of knew a bunch about a lot of these, uh, how it is that social media has been used. And parts of it are documentary-like and parts of it are, are more fiction, or at least from the standpoint of it's been set up, not strictly reporting on facts. But I'd love to get your beat on what is sort of the ethical dilemma around things like hook points or around figuring out the equation to effective marketing because on some level, it is like finding— figuring out a complex math problem or an algorithm. And that once you do figure it out, I'm not saying you figured it out for good because I know you're in this space and I'm sure if you just went to sleep for the next 4 months, you'd wake up and you'd have to figure out some things you didn't plan on figuring out. But let's just say— Yeah. You've gotten a certain tipping point in your understanding of how this stuff works, it can be used for really manipulative things. I mean, I'm not going out on a limb to say that that's what's happened. So just get your thoughts on the ethics of it.

So on a really great point, I mean, it can be used for good, it can be used for bad. To me, I choose to use it for good. So the only ethical dilemma that I see is, are you using this to better the world? Are you using this to really enhance somebody's life? Provide value to them to overcome a significant challenge in their life or their business, or just world humanity as a whole, versus are you just selling something that's not really going to help better the world or better somebody? That to me is the dilemma in all of this. Now you can say what you want about the social dilemma, or, you know, a lot of this marketing has been around for 100 years. We're just kind of repackaging it for today's world and today's society. To me, I look at the world and instead of fighting against what it is, I try and understand how things work and then use it for the benefit of putting positive things and positive messages and positive products into the world. Because you look at the social dilemma, for example, I don't have a solution for it. I'm not that smart, nor am I the person to solve that. I'm the person to look at understanding how all of these things work. And ensure that the people that have the ability to transform the world in a positive way, that have a positive message, that have a positive product or service or retreat or whatever it is, rises above the noise, all the negativity. That's the way that I look at it.

Wow.

The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new, but the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken and And all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Do you think the genie is out of the lamp when it comes to how to solve the big issues that are raised in that movie and other documentaries on that topic?

It's very difficult to solve, but you're also talking about some of the smartest people on the planet, so it is solvable. I think that— and they posed it in the film— I think the biggest part of solving it is looking at the underlying business model about how they make money. That's kind of the biggest challenge.

Maybe this isn't a fair question for you, and if not, you know, we'll punt on it. I'm just curious whether the form— because I've looked at it and said to myself, look, if this If this is a private company and they simply decided, you know what? Yeah, we let the genie out of the lamp and now we're going to retrieve it. We have the ability to do that because it's our technology and we control data and the users and all that kind of thing. But when it's a public company, I just thought to myself, putting yourself in the shoes of any of these CEOs, if they wanted to just go rogue, get a conscience, grow, decide, hey, listen, we started with the most egalitarian ideals at the beginning and now we realize it's being subverted. Talk about subversion, right? It's being subverted for things that are causing great harm to a great many people, so we're do something about it. That CEO of a public company, they'd probably get the boot the way Steve Jobs got the boot if they tried to change a business model that would ultimately cause harm to the company financially because that would drive down stock price. And then all of a sudden you've got retirees living in Florida or someplace going, I have a third of my portfolio invested in your stock and now I got to go back to work at age 75 because you decided to change your business model. For whatever reason. So I just look at it and go, this is a— it feels like a catch-22 when a company is public and the number one driver is shareholder value. Tough, right?

Yeah. I mean, the only blessing in this is that all the people running these, the big winners right now, the YouTubes, Twitters, Instagrams, Facebooks of the world, they understand that if they just make a drastic shift without looking at the long-term play, somebody else, some young startup, will just use the same principles that they did to game the system and make people addicted to it and keep going. So there's a larger shift that needs to happen of what is the future of these platforms? How are they structured? What is the business model? All of that, that needs to come into play. Now, whether they solve it or not, I don't know. I can tell you that Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is taking this seriously. You can say what you want about him, but I see the changes. I'm in these platforms every day, especially from an advertising perspective. I don't know if you saw that they banned political advertising. for at least another month where you cannot promote anything. And they've taken away certain targeting parameters and things of that nature, and they're trying to get smarter and better. But you've got to understand, and people don't give them enough credit, it's like the level of scale that they're dealing with is unprecedented. You're dealing with billions and billions of users. Yeah. And billions of content. You've got billions of users each creating content, and to police all of that and then stay in line with free speech, it's really hard. It's a really difficult problem. I'm not saying it's not solvable. I'm not smart enough to solve it. I think it can be solved. Will it be solved? I don't know. And I think that the people in charge, I think they do have a good heart. They don't want to like destroy the world. I think they're just trying to navigate themselves through a very unprecedented problem that they're facing.

I agree. I really don't think anybody thinking rationally would think that that's the case. There's so much they have to be grateful for. I mean, these folks have created something that really is life and world-changing. And yet— and I'm sure they're concerned about their legacy, not just their financial legacy, but their legacy as well in some— in historic terms. I hesitate to even say this because I'm not a big fan of regulation, but it almost feels like helping these guys out means—

Yeah, but is the government the right person?

It's tough because I don't— right, exactly. It's almost like if you could create an independent think tank of some kind of the brightest people from each of these companies. Let's say each company, almost like when we used to do pickup games when we were kids in the schoolyard, and you say, look, I'm going to take one from you, one from you, one from you, and everybody brings in their best, their smartest, and their brightest to independently think about how you police some of the things that we're talking about or regulate them in some way. Maybe that's the thing. But let me pivot for a moment to just drop that term in. Brennan, resilience in the moment, in so many ways is just that much more important. We've got a book coming out next year called Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Create Long-Term Success, Build Long-Term Growth. The book is really a book about resilience. And originally when we were pitching it to publishers and before we had the right one that was a good fit for us, it was called Radical Resilience. And that the underpinning of this book is really about resilience. So I'd love to get your take. In fact, you can see I've got this little graphic if you're watching on YouTube, where it's the fortune cookie, which is you've got to develop your resilience before you need it. That's been my— if there's been something I could say again and again in my own business career that's really worked well for me is that I've been able to deal with change before change dealt with me. Let's put it that way. I think a lot of people got wiped out by the wave of COVID by the wave of change, drastic moving from working in an office to working virtually, a business that might've been shut down and any number of other Myriad things. Your business must have been impacted like all of ours were. I'd love to get your beat on how you define resilience for yourself personally, and then maybe if you did have to pivot in the last 6, 8 months as a result of any of these things, we'd love to get the sense of how you did that. What was your mindset about it? And then tactically speaking, what did you do to get about taking advantage of the opportunities?

Yeah, so resilience to me is everything. I mean, without it, you're really going to struggle to succeed because The analogy that I like to use and started telling people is being an entrepreneur, it's like getting punched in the face and getting back up. It really is. On a weekly, monthly, sometimes on a daily basis, you just get punched in the face with new challenges and you've got to find your way through it. And if you don't, you're not going to last as an entrepreneur or business owner very long. And for me, a part of it is not thinking forward too much and just trying to tackle the challenges day by day in front of me because I used to think forward too far and it gets way too overwhelming. So the— I worked with the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and the guy that founded it talks about success momentum.

Is that Robert Cialdini or is he—

No, it's BJ Fogg. Interestingly enough, there's a clip of him speaking in The Social Dilemma. They don't talk about it, but the guy that trained all of these— Tristan and the founder of Instagram is BJ Fogg. And he talks about— he created a program called Tiny Habits where You form a new habit, you choose 2 habits to form over 7 days, and that habit can't take more than 15 seconds. So the example he gives you is if you want to get into the habit of flossing your teeth, you floss 1 tooth a day for 7 days, and then you celebrate after you do it. And what he says is in the subconscious, what it does is it allows you to tackle bigger and bigger tasks the more you do it. And that's something that I've really held onto. In addition, and this is just for me, but I don't see any other option. Like there's that story of the Vikings showing up on enemy territory and burning their ships behind them and not giving them any other option. I don't see any other option for myself. Like I'm not going to go work another job. I don't have that in me. I will never do it. It's not rewarding to me. So I'm always, no matter how hard it gets, and even, and I'm not going to say that I don't have thoughts about giving up and quitting, but then I ask myself, what am I going to do? Like, okay, I quit tomorrow. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna go live on a beach someplace? I'm gonna go to Thailand or the Philippines? I'm gonna get bored in 2 seconds, and then it's not gonna be—

You'll have other problems. It's not like quitting this problem scenario puts you in a— escaping this room doesn't mean you're not in a room of some other kind.

Yeah. And I'm not sitting here saying this is easy. I still get challenged with it all the time, but I decide to just move forward. And a lot of times What happens, and I think this is just for all entrepreneurs, is we get into something because it truly excites us, but we really don't know what it takes to pull it off. And if we really knew how much work and time that it took to pull it off, we probably would never—

Never get started to begin with.

Yeah, we would never get started. So that's kind of the point.

Being an entrepreneur is like being Rocky, like Rocky in the first Rocky movie. You're just getting hit in the face all the time.

And you are— Mike Tyson says is everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

Right. By me.

And that is so true for entrepreneurship.

By Mike Tyson.

Yeah. It's such a relevant thing for entrepreneurship. So for me, my resilience comes from, A, I love learning. I love learning new things. I get into experiences because it excites me without really understanding the amount of work that it goes in. And then I have this mentality of I don't have any other options. The only option I have because I burned the bridge or I burned the ship behind me is just to keep moving forward to find the path.

You're no longer employable, Brendon.

I'm not.

I know. Same with me. I don't know when that happened, but it is kind of a weird thing I don't hear a lot of entrepreneurs speak about, which might be an interesting chapter in a book or something. How unemployable we are.

Yeah. And I think that that's a good thing.

Yeah. In a bad way at all. And I'm not implying that anybody who is employable is somehow less in some way. There's just— once you've crossed a threshold, and I don't know what that threshold is, which would be interesting research. For me personally, it was— it's those ships have been burned. You know, the book I wrote, Pivot, is all about how you pivot without burning ships. It's a commitment device for sure. But through making those small changes, and that's what Pivot really is about in so many ways, is those micro changes create momentum. And then you find over time that you've created something that can replace the thing that's causing you the misery, etc. But I agree with you, at a certain point, you just recognize my freedom There's an element of personal freedom that comes in working, doing your own thing. But you've got to be able to endure the punches. But you've also got to be able to recover. And that's what our research on resilience really has disclosed, is that it's a little less about the Rocky model and that ability to just take the punch, get back up as many times as it takes. There is that level of tenacity that's required. But long term, the performance and the finding— because you've not only just been able to endure. I mean, you're not— Rocky don't look too good at the end of that movie, right? He wins our hearts, but he's all banged up. You're looking pretty good. And I don't mean that just because you're looking pretty good. You've stayed in the game long enough to figure things out. And that's my experience in entrepreneurship and in any area of business. You've got to be in the game long enough to figure out what works. And you've got to go through a lot of shit and a lot of not— things that don't work to be able to, at some point, figure out what does work. And that's a long-term game. That's a marathon game, which you can't just get hit in the face and hit in the face and hit in the face and not recover from that and still be able to play the long game. And I know you and I, we were talking about this before we turned this thing on, is that thinking about where you run your business and the options to run it remotely now more than ever before, don't have to be tied to a particular state or even a particular country, may play into how it is that you create that longevity. Because if you can't recover, if you don't have the sort of mental— when we look at resilience, we think of it mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It's all of those things. And so it's so important that you are able to be in it for the long run. And I love what you said, man. I mean, you're addicted to learning. What better thing could life be about than just constant, never-ending learning?

Exactly.

No question there. But I do want to get a sense of when it comes to your own resilience, do you have a ritual? Because you brought up BJ Fogg and Tiny Habits. And I gave a TED Talk a couple of years ago, which was at a certain point you and I had talked about naming it, how to name it. And one of the things, one of the titles we ultimately settled on was doing this for 10 seconds. can change your life because it's a 10-second habit. And so I'm just curious, do you have a 10-second habit or a longer habit that you use kind of each day on a ritual basis to help you to maintain the resilience you were talking about?

Well, I think the fundamental base of it is, is when I first started out being an entrepreneur, is when a challenge or obstacle or one of those times you get punched in the face happens, sometimes it would take weeks or months to get past it. But with each time that you experience a challenge, you start to understand it's a part of the process. And the more that you understand it's a part of the process, you can cope with it and deal with it much easier. So all the way up to today, if I run into a big challenge, at max it impacts me for a few hours. Sometimes it's only a walk around the block that allows me to deal with it. So you just get better and better at it. I would say one of the things that, and this is more recent, is I've Spent the past 6 or 7 months retraining my breath and just, I think I've been breathing wrong my entire life and just doing breathing exercises throughout the day to keep my mental clarity, to keep my energy up, which also allows me to relieve stress. I mean, it's truly amazing that most of us don't even focus on it when it's something that we do 18,000 to 25,000 times a day. And that has really helped me immensely. And then on top of that is just having a support system. Having people that you can call to talk through something or just listen helps tremendously because if you internalize too much in yourself and you don't get it out and you don't express it, it can just build up and really eat you alive.

Letting go is definitely a class that we all missed in elementary, middle, high school.

Which is crazy.

Right? Think about that.

It's like, I don't understand, like school's just so focused on science and math and history. It's like They don't teach us the fundamentals of how to deal with mental health and just challenges and things of that. It's really baffling to me.

To me too, brother. Well, listen, I've so enjoyed— I knew I would. I knew our folks would enjoy listening to this conversation. And, and I want to just give you sort of an opportunity if there's something else. Of course, everybody knows, if you've not subscribed to the show, please do and let a friend know as well. If you think this is an episode that people would enjoy, please pass it on. We have full show notes so you can go to adamarkel.com/podcast. And this episode will have full show notes where you can find out more about Brendon Cain, about his work, the kind of clients he serves, and as well as the books that he has available. Hook Point is available right now, brand new book, as well as A Million Followers in 30 Days. So Brendon, is there something that you want to leave us with? Some just information that we didn't cover today that you'd feel more complete if you shared?

I think we've covered a lot of really amazing topics. I would just really say that You know, just keep taking one step at a time. Because if you really want to achieve something, just don't give up at it. And I know that's a cliché thing to say, but that's really the determining factor of whether you're going to be successful or not in anything, is just take it one step at a time and just keep learning, keep challenging yourself. And see a challenge, or if you do get punched in the face, just know that's a part of the journey. And it's not a negative thing. It's just a learning experience. It's something that we all go through. And just know that you're not alone in that journey. We all experience it. We're all human beings. We all have feelings and emotions. We know what it's like to be challenged and to face obstacles.

Yeah. It's just such true words, Brennan. We're not alone. And I know it can feel that way. And loneliness isn't something that any of us have the corner on the market of. So we all feel lonely from time to time. And it's so important. In fact, I was on a call, a Zoom call earlier with an organization that's hiring me to do a keynote for them. And they wanted— among the things they really wanted me to focus on was the fact that so many of the people in their ecosystem feel like they have to do it alone, that they're not reaching out to people. for help. They're not communicating where they're looking for support. And so what a grand opportunity is to bring that to the table for that particular talk. And I think— I was thinking that that kind of thing is cultural. So it comes from the leadership in any organization to actually give people permission to ask for support and to reach out and to recognize, as Brendon was saying, that none of us are alone. I really hope you're enjoying this episode. of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. As we wrap things up, I want to close an open loop. Earlier, I said, just referred to that TED Talk I gave and that 10-second strategy, which To me, it's the waking ritual. And it's the waking ritual I engaged this morning when I woke up. And God willing, I get to wake up again tomorrow. I'll do it again. And it's 3 steps. It's really simple. First, wake up. Waking up is obvious, right? If I ask 100 people, did you wake up today? And you get some laughs. You know, not everybody feels awake, right? I need another cup of coffee. And if I say, do you intend to wake up tomorrow? And everybody's hands, you know, like 100%, right? And waking up is not just physically. It is a mental waking up, an emotional waking up, a spiritual waking up that we're talking about. It's metaphoric. That's the first piece of it. Just wake up. And secondly, and of course, when you realize that you're waking up, you can also recognize that it wasn't a guarantee when you went to bed last night. I didn't have a contract when I put my head on the pillow last night. Brendon, did you have a contract that said you were absolutely going to wake up today?

Nobody does.

Nobody does. So regardless of what you're waking up to, it could be challenges in your life or your business or whatever that looks like, your waking up is a blessing. It's a gift. It's not promised. It's not guaranteed. And so in that moment of waking up, that's first. You can feel gratitude. That's second. Be grateful and appreciate the fact that you've been given a brand new day and a brand new start, I would say. And thirdly, lastly, for me anyway, is I put my feet on the floor and I recognize what a blessing it is just to be able to do that. And instead of feeling the anxiety and even the dread that I used to feel 10 years ago when I put my feet on the floor, now I put my feet on the floor, And I make it a point to say something out loud. I say 4 simple words, I love my life. No matter what, I love my life. So I invite all of you to create your waking ritual tomorrow. Wake up first. I know everybody's going to agree to that. Find something in that moment to be grateful for and feel appreciation for. And lastly, say something out loud. We create our lives by what we say. We're constantly bringing our lives into being by what we say. The words we speak are self-fulfilling prophecies. So what are the words that you want to start your day with? You could start with, I love my life, but you don't have to. It could be anything. I had a woman on the show a couple of months ago, beautiful lady, who said her first words are, I wonder what miracles are coming. Judy Whitcraft. And you can check out that episode as well. It was really a cool conversation. So choose your words carefully. And lastly, as we say goodbye, anybody that's looking to figure out and get more clarity on how resilient you are and maybe even how resilient people that work with you are, you can take a free assessment. We have a tool There's nothing to sell. All we— in fact, what we're giving away are tremendous resources once we find out what your score is, once you find out what your score is. It takes about 3 minutes is all to fill out this assessment. You can go to your.resilienceculture.com, your.resilienceculture.com. 3 minutes to take the assessment. Then you'll get your score and a whole host of free resources to help you, meet you where you are. Because as Brendon said, it is the most important thing right now for ourselves personally and professionally to develop the skills of resilience and resilient leadership. All right, everybody. Ciao for now. Thanks so much. Brendon, again, thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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