4 Breakthroughs: Productivity Flaws, Vision, Recovery, and Adventure

Foreign It's Brendon Burchard and welcome to four Breakthroughs. It's an honor to have you listening today on my podcast. Whether you're listening on the Brendon show or High Performance Habits podcast, these four breakthrough sessions are all about me sharing. Hey, what's some things that I've learned throughout the week in my own journey and adventures and struggles in trying to maintain high performance in my own life. This week we're covering productivity flaws, expanding vision, recovery basics and the qualities of great adventure. If you enjoy this session today, do me a favor, go on to Apple Podcasts and give me a rating or a review. Tell people what you think of my podcasts. I would love to hear your own feedback because I'm still trying to get better and better at this format. This is my most personal episodes that I do, these four breakthrough episodes. But as you can see from, you know, High Performance Habits podcast season one is my entire audiobook of my Wall Street Journal bestseller, High Performance Habits Habits, my book. And in the Brendon show, I'm always posting the best of trainings that I do with some of my best clients or at live events or through live broadcasts. So enjoy that one too. But for here today, do me a favor. Just make sure if you enjoy this, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. Leave a rating, leave a review. Let us know what you think of the podcast. It helps me so much. Today I'm recording on a new microphone because I am actually on the road. So I hope you enjoy this episode and I apologize for any weird audio clicks or clacks or movement you hear. I think you're really going to enjoy this four breakthrough session though. So let's get into it. Part 1 Productivity flaws. You know, I just spent this last weekend with 2,000 people in Phoenix, Arizona over four days at my famous High Performance Academy seminar. Shout out to all of those who were there. It's one of the most advanced and I would say certainly science backed personal and professional development programs in the world. Great to see 2,000 people there really, really thrilled by it. And one of the conversations I had with a client there was a conversation about productivity and they were getting down on themselves and getting upset with themselves and they didn't feel like they were doing enough at this stage in their life as they had made some big strides earlier in their career and always had these big leaps forward and then suddenly didn't feel the same kind of momentum and they were just like, and you could see it on their face that it really bothered them. And I think we've all been there in some way or another. And it inspired a session I did just the other night with some of my Mastermind members. If you didn't know, I do private small groups with Mastermind members where we get together a couple times a year and we kind of do business brainstorming on their brands, on what they're doing. I share some of my latest strategies or tools or techniques I'm not sharing in the broader public. We really work together to improve our own lives and our abilities to reach high performance on a consistent basis. And so I did a session the other night Live and it was about a three hour session for my Mastermind members. We do it via Zoom, where I go basically on a weekly basis with my Mastermind members and just train, teach, coach, share. And it's really inspiring sessions. Sometimes they're an hour or two, sometimes three. But in that particular session I took on that topic of productivity in a way that got so much feedback, I thought I'd share it with you here. Now, obviously that was a three hour session. This is just about maybe, I don't know, five or ten minute cut of it, but I'd love for you to listen to it because you might be in a place where you are in transition in your life. And if you're in transition in your life, you have to perceive productivity in a different way than when you're in other times of your life. So I'm going to zoom you in right now into the middle of that conversation, listen to it, and then we'll come back and discuss other productivity flaws that people commonly make. I love this one. Because everyone's got a different definition of what good productivity is like in their life. Like for this week for me, if you compare this week for me to any other week of the year, I could easily be sad. But I am very happy about how productive I was considering for me, this is a recovery week. So I go, okay, based on recovery week, how would I gauge my productivity? And I think this is very important for you. Some of you are measuring your productivity each day or each week based on how you produced in your 20s. And that's not fair. It's not fair. People get down on themselves. Well, you know, I used to be so much more productive. Yeah, well, you also used to be 30 and single and that's different now that you got four dogs, six kids, seven bedrooms in the house, two cars, a mortgage, a business, a team, and ten more pounds on your butt. Like, calm down, now it's OK that you're not as productive as you used to be. Chill out a little bit. People are too hard on themselves. My hope for you, look, if you get your psychology, your physiology lined up and you're productive, awesome. But get your psychology and physiology lined up anyway so you feel great even on the weeks that you aren't superhuman productive, you deserve that. You deserve to feel great about yourself at this age, regardless of how much you're SWAT teaming. And I know that's hard to say because when we go through these sessions, I'm emphasizing be the SWAT team. Go kick some butt. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, come on now, you got to give yourself some credit along the way. And you know what? Live a little. It is. There is no part of the goal of high performance just so that you can work 17 more hours more mindfully. Because remember what we learned in the study, and I didn't know this, I didn't used to teach it in this way, was that high performance is succeeding beyond standard norms consistently over the long term while still maintaining well being and positive relationships. A lot of people can be super productive, but they wrecked their relationships. That's not high performance. A lot of people can be super productive, but they wrecked their health, not high performance either because they won't be able to maintain it consistently. So there is no conversation here of productivity just for productivity's sake. Just to say I did 10 more items. No, it's like, hey, do we feel like we are consistently progressing towards the life that we desire for ourselves? Do we feel like each day we did some meaningful things? Do we feel like each day we had a little sense of fulfillment? Because yeah, we did complete a few items that were important to us, not did we complete everything on earth today? I know some of you personally and you are so hard on yourself and I just say, you know what, if you made it through 12 sessions with me doing this, I just, I want to celebrate you and I want to give yourself permission to enjoy more of your week. That should be scheduled in. I think high performance productivity includes scheduled in free time, scheduled in dork time, recovery time, hobby time, wandering around Portland, Oregon time. Like it's got to be built. Like you got to build that in for yourself. I feel like I productively wasted a great amount of time this week. I feel really good about it. I very productively wasted. I planned it. I said just like that I'm going to block myself in this room, Block time. I'm going to block myself in this room drop the shades, not shower and for six hours consume garbage on television. Let's go. This is going to be very productive session. Brennan and I felt great. A very high sense of completion. So I really want to encourage you that some of what should be productive is your free time, your screw off time. That productivity just to accomplish more tasks isn't the point. Productivity to live a better quality of life with more enjoyment, more meaning and more progress. That's what we're after. That's the kind of productivity that I think is intriguing. I'm not after a greater to do list. I'm after a more fulfilling, progress driven, engaged life. And so for those who guilt yourself so much about the time that you take to read something that you didn't need to read but you enjoyed it, to have that two hours with the kids, even though you know you could be doing other things, but you have the hours with the kids, let yourself do that. Stop being so hard on yourself. I really believe we've become society because of social media. Really addicted this idea that we got to be going 24 7, grind, grind, grind. That's why you've never heard me. I never, I just did an entire seminar, four day personal development seminar. I guarantee I'm probably the only cat in the who has a social media sort of influence at this level who could pull off a four day personal development seminar and not use the word grind. I purposely didn't use it for four days because I don't want life to feel like that. It doesn't mean that there aren't times we've got a SWAT team and yes, you know, grind hard to get things done. But why is everyone espousing having a life full of grind? I'm like, that's your outcome. That's not what I believe high performance productivity is. At least it's not from what the research showed. The research very clearly showed that high performers are positively engaged and they are joyous. They are enjoying the journey. They don't feel like it's a grind. They feel like it's more. They would more relate with the concept of flow than they would grit and hustle or grind. And that's their word choices in the surveys, not mine. So I don't think, I hope, at least I'm not framing it, that those things are wrong. What I'm trying to reframe is maybe there's a different outcome to why you need to be productive and to how to approach it and feel about it and celebrate it. And for a group like this Knowing so many of you personally from the mastermind, I do desperately hope that you give yourself some credit as you move forward these next couple months, because so many of you are in transition, and your productivity in transition looks very different than productivity in certainty. And so just like you can beat on yourself for. I was more productive when I was in my 20s. And many of you feel like you're not productive enough right now in transition. And I got to say, well, yeah, of course you were more productive when you knew exactly what you were doing, because you did it for 20 years and there were known outcomes and everything was very clear and everything was predictable. But you're in transition now, so it's okay that your productivity looks like a longer line than it used to. It's, you know, what you used to. You feel like. It used to feel like in 20 minutes, I could get all these things done. Yeah, but you knew what they were. When you're in moments of transition, you have to honor the fact that productivity does take longer because there's more unknowns. More unknowns. The longer you have to allow yourself. And that's why I want to say it to you all as this parting session, is to give yourself some credit, because some of you are hurrying yourself right now. Hurrying yourself right now. And I'm. Okay, hey, look, I'm gonna. Look, I believe life is short. As you know. I wanna get a lot done. I wanna move towards my goals and fulfillment. But I'm incredibly patient with myself because in unknowns, that time elongates a little bit. And so be okay with that. I know you might have achieved a different project 10 times faster in a different world or a different situation or different setting, but now you're in a new place, and you're sitting at your house or in your new office, and you're going, I wonder what the hell I am supposed to be doing. So when you're seeking clarity, meaning you don't have it precisely, you don't have certainty. Productivity, time extends, and you have to dance with that and be okay with that. Because the worst thing you can do is in moments of transition, beat yourself up about your own productivity. Because what your mind will start doing is playing a trick on you. It will start your mind, go, you know what? I don't like this. I don't like myself in this situation. I'm not as productive. And then your brain plays this trick where it starts blaming the new thing you're trying and saying, well, this thing's not right for me because I'm a productive Person over in this situation. I used to get all this done, and now I'm kind of waffling around a little bit. And so your brain goes, it must be the situation. We're in the wrong space. We're trying the wrong thing, wrong goals. This isn't for me. Oh, my God. And you bail on something that, in fact, could be right for you. It's just that you didn't understand that in transition, you have to elongate that productivity line and take a breath in. You know, whenever I start something new, I go, you know, I'm probably going to be a hot mess at this for about two years. I really do. I just feel like. And I just give myself that allowance. I'm like, huh, this is probably going to take me two years. And maybe some of you have been on this journey with me. You've seen me at a Mastermind over a year ago, break out of vlogging camera, right? Some of you were there with us in Phoenix when I got this new vlogging camera, and I was toting it around the Mastermind room, and I was all excited about it. That was over a year ago. And guess what? Look at my YouTube channel. I've done, what, four vlog videos in that year. Some people say, well, Brendan, you are not a productive person. I have, but I don't feel that way because I'm okay to elongate my. It's not that I wasn't implementing and trying and practicing and learning new things. It wasn't that I wasn't studying, getting perspective. And if you look, the last two vlog videos on my YouTube channel, they both got over 200,000 views because I did them well. But it's not like those were my first ones. It took me. Those are a year, like, learning how to shoot and how I do it. I took, like, about a year and a half to figure out for me. And so I could say, well, Brennan, you usually implement faster than that. Yeah, that would be true in certain circumstances in which I understand the foundation, I understand the outcomes, there's certainty. But in a moment of transition, I go, you know, Brendan, you're going to suck at this for about two years. That's okay. And I hope this is really hitting well with you all, because I know some of you in the Mastermind, who I care so deeply about, you're so hard on yourself, and you're not recognizing you're in that transition time in which productivity lines do extend time has to extend what you acquired wisdom in. And the last thing was so you know, you had years to do that. It's going to be that way in this one. You got to give yourself, you'll learn it faster than you did last time in general. But you can't really speed up wisdom that much. You can speed up learning, you can speed up best practice, you can speed up acquisition, you can speed up implementation. But like real in your heart, competency, knowing with a capital K, knowing time, my friend. So give yourself some credit. I hope you enjoyed that. Listen in on one of my sessions with some of my Mastermind members. It's the first time I've ever actually broadcast something like this from one of our private sessions. But I got so much feedback about that one where people are like, oh my gosh, I've been feeling so down on myself, I didn't realize I was doing something new. I need to give myself some more time. Brendan. Oh my God. Breakthrough. Ah. So I hope you enjoyed that. Listen in and don't make those productivity flaws in your own life. The ultimate productivity flaw is measuring yourself inappropriately, you know, being hard on yourself when or not recognizing what you should be measuring and moving towards. And so I say one last thing on productivity flaws. Just because you get a lot of stuff done, don't always think that that means you're doing the right things. I think this is a good time of year for people to take a step back and say, hey, am I on the right path this year? I mean, yeah, maybe I've been doing a lot of things, but are those things the ones that matter? You know, I always say there's a big difference between busy work and our life's work. And our goal as high performers is to bend more of our days toward our life's work, towards things that are mission driven, heart centered, the things that make us feel fulfilled, satisfied, joyous. It doesn't mean that we don't have little menial tasks. Hey, listen, after I'm done, after I'm done doing this right now, this podcast, because when I'm filming this, my team is unavailable. So I'm doing this by myself. I'm going to go back through, I'm going to listen, I'm going to do all the cutting, I'm going to upload, I'm going to post it, I'm going to do the social media on it, I'm going to get this podcast out. A lot of that, yeah, I could outsource. But it is all, instead of getting angry that I got to do all that today versus some big team or whatever, I Recognize every little step of that is fulfilling and serving my mission. Even as some pieces of it. I'm like, gosh, I could outsource this so much easy and save some time. If what you are doing is adding to the direction and the thrust of your mission, congratulations, my friend. Give yourself some credit. You're marching along. You're on your own path. Stay on that path, Keep doing the things that contribute to and serve your mission and serve others, and you'll start to feel more productive, more fulfilled, more high performing. Part 2 Expand your vision if you saw my YouTube video this week, I dropped a new vlog. And in that YouTube vlog, I did my first unboxing ever. I kind of started behind the scenes at my High Performance Academy event, but I sort of zapped into my home office and I had a box and I took it over to my table and I unpackaged it on video. And in that box was something really exciting for an author like me. It was the contracts for about 10 different languages around the world for either high performance habits or my book, the Motivation Manifesto. And it was such a fulfilling sort of moment, opening that overall, I'm in over 40 languages around the world across my six different books that I've put out so far. And I shared that because, you know, I learned along the way that you have to expand your vision. You've probably heard me say, raise your ambitions before, but sometimes it's not just about becoming more and more successful in terms of ambition, but really allowing different parts of your life to expand your vision. You know, you're in a different stage of life right now. Maybe you can open up that next field of opportunity in your own mind and expand the vision for what's possible for you and your family right now. It's what I'm kind of doing as an author right now and looking around the world and thinking, gosh, my book is in 40 different languages. And, you know, my vision has always been to be a personal development trainer and speaker and coach. And in that vision, I've always wanted to make sure that, you know, I attain a level of personal excellence that both inspires other people, but makes me challenge my own self to keep getting better and better and better and better. And yet most of that vision has been, for me, limited towards my own capabilities and my own language of English. And while all these translations of my books have happened, I didn't have the vision earlier enough to say, hey, you know, I know people from around the world watch my YouTube videos. I can see people from around the world listen to my podcast, I can see people from around the world access my Facebook and my other social media platforms and people are reading my books around the world. But I hadn't yet translated any of my online courses yet into other languages. And the question of course is, well, why not? And I've been asked that a lot recently. Brendan, why, why don't you have all your online courses in this language or that language? And I'll share a little bit of that. First part of the reasons that we don't expand our vision is because we're so focused on the next step or the next year and implementing our goals that fulfill a certain vision from a certain type time of our life, but not necessarily expanding the vision. Let me give an example. You know, for us, we've still been evolving the business model of my online courses and this is probably something I'm most known for. If you say, well, what's different about Brendan versus, you know, 50 other motivational speakers or thousands of social media influencers, it's that hands down, I've created more personal and professional development curriculum than any of my peers times 10. You know, I've got 13 major online video courses and these are comprehensive curriculum built courses. And we've been doing this since 2006 with online courses. Our first online course actually was on sale in 2007. And that might not sound like a lot 13 of them, but in one genre that's quite a few. And when you consider 2 million people have either taken online courses or went through the video series associated with those or those promotions, it's a pretty big segment of people into some online courses and I'm pretty well known for that. But I'm still evolving the model. For example, many of you, I hope you've heard about our all access program. That's where every single month I give you access to a brand new personal development course. And many of these are multi week courses. So it's not like a new video or just one thing. It's like literally a multi week course, four weeks or five weeks or six week course that I unlock for you every single first of the month all year long. And it's sort of been called the Netflix of personal development by the industry and my students, which I'm super stoked about. And I tell you that though. And by the way, if you're interested in that, just go to brendan.com access and that's a redirect link. It will get you to the page to learn about that. For a dollar trial you can unlock $600 of courses right now and then every month I'll still mail you or email you access to a brand new one. So that's brendan.com forward/access. That's what we call the Netflix of personal development. Or you know, in my company we just call it the All Access program. But I shared that with you because we just got there with that All Access program. I was selling them all a cart for the last 12 years. And so what happened was I was so focused on selling each one individually, which to meet my goals and to build out my team to be able to do that and to build out the funnels to be able to make sure those are selling all year long. We have the most popular courses in the world in motivation, habits and confidence right now. And I think what happened though is sometimes in the goal to automate something, the goal to make something successful, the goal to make something work, you know, sometimes we miss the bigger picture. I should have in parallel, as we were, once I completed those courses, I should have immediately expanded my vision and thought, wow, what if we could serve people around the world on this one? Let's get these translated right away into these five other major languages. Instead I was just trying to implement them and automate them and scale and sell those here in US or I should say English languages worldwide. And so in other words, my vision was limited by my very next goals. Does that make sense? My vision became limited by my very next goals. It's great to have goals, but you have to look beyond the goals to the bigger picture. And so where could you expand your vision? Maybe it's not reaching customers globally, or maybe it is. Maybe it's not the same as, you know, working through these languages. But maybe there's a part of you or part of your vision that's been limited just because you're so focused on the next thing. So let's think about it for a moment. Let's skip the next thing and let's jump out five years from now. So if we left five years from now and you had, let's say, you know, an extra 5 million bucks in the bank now what would you choose to do? And now let's go beyond the pleasure seeking things. Well, I vacation, I travel, I do my fun things. That's cool. But for your mission, if you could now have more unlimited resources, what would you do? How would you scale or how many more people would you serve? In what way? If you didn't have to worry about resources? Now I know that's a pipe Dream. In some ways we could say, well, we'll always have to worry about resources. But you get my thrust here. It's, hey, let's expand your vision a little bit. Let's jump beyond the next goal. Let's jump five years out for you and your family and your team and the people you're serving. What are you doing in five years from now? You know, as I'm recording this, part of the reason I'm recording on this new microphone and again, I apologize if it's not the same sound quality as usual, but you're gonna have to put up for this for a couple sessions because I'm on the road and I'm about to go on an extended international trip. Only Montana, say international. So I'm excited about it and I'm about to go on a couple of week trip internationally to expand the brand in other parts of the world. And I'll tell you more about that as we go through that and we complete that process. But it is an exciting thing and it's expanding my vision to be represented in other areas around the world without me having to go there. And I've also been recently expanding my vision beyond just, you know, direct to consumer. As many of you know, I provide, you know, personal development training for you or through my students or others. But listen, I've also been developing this huge offering where we fulfill the personal development needs for, for major companies. So it's more of a B2B offering where we go in and we say, hey, listen, unless you get your teams and your employees towards, you know, practicing high performance habits, you're just going to struggle. You can keep measuring their personality and having these, you know, conversations around tables of what's your strength? And hey, what's your strength? And you can keep focusing on things that don't relate to proven performance improvement. Or you can now say, okay, let's get performance improvement. Let's really focus on the habits that will make that happen. And so a lot of companies, they don't really have a personal development source. And part of that is nobody has really provided this level of curriculum development in the past than we've done here at High Performance Institute and what I've been able to do over my last 12 years. So we've taken some of what I have over the last 12 years, some other work from psychologists that we've been working with here and some of our coaches and consultants, and we're providing the total solution for major companies where their, you know, month, their, their employees get monthly access to Some of my courses to some original research that we do where we have train the trainers, go in and train their HR departments on how to roll out leadership. High performance type training, where we do professional, you know, scalable assessments for their executive teams, where we provide coaching to their teams. And that's a big part of what we do at High Performance Institute moving forward. And I share that because that's expanding the vision. See, my immediate task on any day given basis is, you know, I'm doing my social media each day. That's a goal. I got to get that done. I got to do these podcasts, I got to do my, you know, my vlogs. I'm doing all these things. But I'm also running this huge company and running this company has expanded my vision, right? Because now it's not just worldwide in other languages, it's also having that ability to think at a bigger level of getting into major organizations. I've spoken to major organizations, I've coached major organizational leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, I've helped a lot of mid size and larger companies develop and grow with some leadership type curriculum. But this is different. It's getting in there. I mean, it's doing assessments, consulting, coaching, training, providing resources and tools, doing special broadcasts for their employees every month. That overall service offering is very unique in the marketplace, especially when you consider the number of resources and tools we're able to bring it to it. Because not only do I have my own obviously personal development courses, but I've got access to most of the industries, so I'm able to piece together solutions that are really specific for organizations. That wasn't really part of my vision five years ago, but that's where I'm at now. And I've had to start broadening that vision every single year. Like, okay, let me make it a goal. Expand your vision, Brendan, five years out, what would you do? Expand your vision, Brendan, five years out, what would you do? And so I hope you get a little inspiration from that thinking about your own career. Go beyond the next goal, my friend. Expand that vision. You deserve it. You'll serve more people and it will fully engage you once more. Part 3 Recovery Basics I get asked all the time, Brennan, how do you recover from these crazy events? And I know it's been a conversation that you hear a lot in our High Performance Habits podcast and these four breakthrough sessions, it will continue. Because a huge part of my life is active recovery. If I don't take care of myself on the daily, I cannot serve on those big stages. I can't do these podcasts with energy and vibrancy and hopefully some pop, you know, I can't do those vlogs and survive them. I can't do those coaching sessions virtual and in person. I can't lead my team. I can't serve as a role model for those who are trying to come up in this industry. So it takes a lot to recover, you know, so much. What I'm always teaching is the tactic or the strategies to, you know, build your brand or your business or become high performing. And a lot of people know me for that kind of sort of strategic stuff in our industry through Experts Academy. If you've never been Experts Academy, we've got one coming up here in just another month in California. If you're interested in learning how I do my overall career from how I, you know, get books published and promote and automate book selling and how I do, you know, paid speeches or how I actually make money doing seminars or on or creating online courses like the actual craft of being a thought leader today and how to commercialize that. That's called Experts Academy, the longest running thought leader training in the world. That at least is cross disciplinary in terms of writing, speaking, coaching, training, seminars, et cetera. If you're interested in that, go to brendan.com forward/live brendan.com live that will take you to our upcoming Experts Academy page where you can learn about dates and details. But all of the craft of doing this only works if I recover. And I really believe that people have left recovery strategically absent from their day, but not by any other thing than just complete neglect. You have to put recovery back into the strategy of your day and your week. It just has to be in there. You know, when I begin my day and I finally look at my schedule, I know where I'm going to fit in a meditation, a nap or workout. When I plan my seminars, I plan every little element of how to survive that, as you've heard from other 4 Breakthroughs podcasts, from how I prepare the week before to how I survive at the event and then afterwards, I basically follow four simple guidelines of recovery basics. So let's imagine I just finished High Performance Habits last Sunday at 1:00pm and here's what I did over the last five, six days to recover. Number one, active recovery workouts. What does that mean? It means literally the day after a seminar where I've pushed and gone and gone 90 miles an hour. The next day I make sure that I hit the elliptical, the rower and the bike really hard so that I Don't completely crash that. If I was full exertion physically for four, five days, the next day I can't just stop and lay on the couch or bed. I'll feel terrible and I'll probably get sick. So I've got to have an active recovery where that next day I'm really focused on continuing movement throughout the day. So I might do, you know, a 15 minute HIIT training in the morning and then the afternoon, a long walk and then towards the evening a quick, you know, cycling session and, but all fairly, you know, the first one's very intense. Like I would be at my vent and then kind of by the end of the day, you know, making it simpler, you know, from walking to a simple bike. So in part of each of those then also includes the active recovery basic of mobility and flexibility training. So you would see me, you know, pretty much on the floor, stretching, rolling out with foam rollers or medicine balls and sort of rolling on top of them and sort of just trying to open up and bust up and move around that fascia and keep my, my, my body and my mobility open. Because if you go intense for five days and then you just stop, your body will get so stiff and it will hate you. It's not just in the moment like most people think, well, I shouldn't just sprint and stop because it'll build up lactic acid and cause, you know, pain or inflammation. It's like, hey, that, that's true the next day and the next day and the next day. I mean, the body really does need time to recover. So it's really important for me to have those active recovery workouts and that goes on for days. Okay. That's a really important part of active recovery workouts. Mobility, flexibility, and what I call a metered workout, where, you know, it's as equal and intense the next day and then you meter it down to easier workouts over the course of the next three days to give your body time to recover, but you're still active. The second thing I do is I have no scheduled work, meaning I finish Sunday at 1. I tend to not schedule any work whatsoever Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Now, it doesn't mean I might not do some work Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, you know, here or there, or solve a specific need or a problem from the team. But in general I try not to do any Monday and Tuesday, and then I ramp myself up on Wednesday, meaning I give myself a nice 48 hour recovery time. And I think that's really important for people. If you've gone Hard and intense, literally for five days. I mean full on, full out, high performance style. And then you, you need to give your mind a break. You need to take 48 hours away. And what I mean by that when I say away in that time, I don't do much or any social media, I don't consume the news, I'm not reading unless it's reading just for recreational pleasure. I'm not doing any research, I'm not doing much if any email. I'm really just trying to do my active workouts, take walks and you know, give my mind a break. You know, a lot of people's burnout isn't necessarily physical burnout, though that's true for many people who don't focus on their sleep and their nutrition. A lot of people's burnout is mental and visual fatigue like eye strain causes unbelievable physiological fatigue. Eye strain, but then also lack of sleep, lack of good proper nutrition. I'll talk about that in a moment. But lack of a break is the real killer for people. So if you go hard five days, I'm telling you, give yourself, you know, a two day recovery. I'm not saying you don't do any work. I'm at that stage now in my career. I've really tried to build that in and that expectation in. So there's no scheduled phone calls, there's no scheduled projects due to. It's just off the grid. It doesn't mean I might not, you know, react to some things, but in general, I mean, I'm really off the grid. I even force myself to go in my home, you know, sort of living room theater, lock the door and sit and watch, you know, two or three hours of television, which is a big deal for me, you know, just to turn off. And so that's about making sure if I showed up in your life and we looked at your calendar, when you're going hard, is there some time that's not scheduled for you to recover and be a human again? If not, you're waiting towards burnout. And frankly your mission deserves better than you keeping allowing yourself to burn out. Number three is I move towards what's majorly an anti inflammatory diet. I don't consume a lot, if any of breads, white starches, sugars, alcohols, for a period of usually about a week after my events, just like I don't in the week before the event and the week of the event. So obviously my events are keeping you really healthy. By doing seminar training events, it forces you to be in great exceptional health and so that's really good. And that anti inflammatory diet, I get asked a lot about that. It basically means a ton of plant based kind of approach. It's fairly vegan. I might throw in some, you know, salmon, some fish, some plant based protein shakes. But in general I try to knock out as much inflammation as possible. I don't have acidic drinks. I, I really take care not to cause further inflammation than the five days of intense period I just did. And number four is love and fun. You know, if you're recovering, part of that recovery should be celebration to feel like, oh yeah, you know, all that crazy work was worth it because now I get to chill a little bit. So what I do is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I'm recovering, I might start working a little bit more Wednesday or Thursday and then Friday I try to make sure that I go out with friends, family, or take my lady out on a date and just enjoy connection, to celebrate and talk through what was accomplished and experience and feel it. Because I really think that your recovery must include celebration. Otherwise you're just back at the grind, if you will. And like you do that too many times, over and over and over again, you lose the sense of satisfaction and meaning and joy from work. We have to socialize our wins. And if you, I mean, what's the point of all that productivity if at some point you're also not getting to have more free time with your family and your friends? I mean, isn't that what it's all about? You know, remember the definition of high performance is succeeding beyond standard norms consistently over the long term while still maintaining well being and positive relationships. And so the goal, the outcomes is health is positive relationships because that's not only what's been proven to obviously help with longevity, but with, you know, immediate senses of satisfaction, immediate senses of happiness. In a day to day and a week by week and a month by month basis. It's important that we're connecting with other people. And, and I really believe that connecting with other people helps us recover from the challenges. I think it's important that you know, if you go in really hard and you're doing social things like I'm doing where you know, I'm with 2,000 people those days afterwards. I'm basically by myself or with my wife. I don't talk or socialize at all until I get my voice back on Wednesday and I'm just pretty silent and I, you know, I go inside and I meditate and I calm myself down, I recenter and and get ready to serve again. But you Know, like I said, by Thursday, Friday, I'm out with friends playing racquetball or going out on the town or out with my lady at a restaurant and socializing as a celebration. That re energizes me to go at it again. Part four adventure. You know, I'm recording this right now after, I think it was my third time today, maybe my fourth time in my entire life having done hot yoga. You know, it wasn't bikram yoga. It was a hot yoga that was really warm, super intense. I mean, I sweat like, you know, usually after three hours of playing racquetball, level of sweat in just one hour. It was a super heated room, probably, I don't know, 40 people in there. It was packed. And we had an instructor who really moved us through the motions. I mean, it was, it was people who were more familiar with yoga in that room than certainly I am. So a lot of mine just kind of gawking around like, oh, what are we doing now? And just trying to keep up, frankly. But it was fun. And my wife asked me to do it literally yesterday. And I had all these plans, including this podcast and the vlog and the newsletter and replying to some clients and closing a deal and preparing for this huge trip I'm about to take. But she said it and I was like, you know, that wasn't on the plan, but yeah, that sounds great. And it is exercise. And I was gonna exercise anyway, so yeah, let's go do it. And having that mentality, I think as we get older, you know, I'm in my 40s now, I think it's important to say yes to things that we haven't yet tried before. And honestly, one hot yoga experience I had before wasn't good. But I think it's important not to sort of cross out things that we tried once before at a time in our life when things have changed now, we might perceive them differently. I have someone who I care about a lot who, who is very anti camping. And as an example, I said, well, why don't you like camping? They said, well, I just never liked it. I said, when's the last time you did it? And they're like in their teens with their parents. I'm like, that's. You can't even assume that you do like it or don't like it until you've done it. So sometimes it's saying yes at different stages of our life. You know, I know friends who, they hated roller coasters when they're teenagers now they love them. I know people who, you know, hated this type of restaurant. And then we're like, wow. I had a friend who just discovered this thing called sushi. He's like, oh, my gosh, he's in his 40s. He's discovering sushi. I think he should have said yes to it at another stage of his life at some point. And I think that's what happens. We lose senses of adventure, little senses of adventure, by saying no based on assumptions. Like, I could have said no. I don't. I had hot yoga one time. I didn't like it. I was like, you know what it can get in the day? Sure, let's go try it. That mentality. Sure, let's go try it. Put some more of that back in your life. Remember the joys of discovering things. If we're going to live a fully charged life, we have to have spontaneity and surprise in there. But you can't have spontaneity and surprise unless you say yes once in a while to some things that maybe you weren't you, maybe you didn't like at a different time of your life, or maybe things you didn't plan for. And I think it's really important that a sense of adventure, just that sense of a sense of adventure on a daily basis is as important as the scale of an adventure. Right? As an example, me going to hot yoga today was just as adventurous as me choosing to go to, you know, Asia tomorrow, which is what I'm doing. I don't think Asia is any bigger, more than an adventure than I just took today in a hot yoga class, because it's ultimately, you know, whatever we do in our life, it's ultimately a journey within anyway. No matter how far we go, we just keep discovering new pieces of ourselves each time. Every time we go on a trip, we discover our backyard's a little different. Every time we go on a new experience, we learn a little bit more about ourselves. And it's why it's important to keep putting yourself out there, keep saying yes, keep trying new things, keep trying to expand. Keep trying to expand your social circle so you meet new people who introduce you to new things. And I know some of you right now in your life, you're like, I am tired of new things, Brendan. I've been trying new things for months and months and months, years. I just want a sense of certainty and everything else, I'm like, okay, I get it. There's time to batten down the hatches. Time to really focus. I hear that, too. But listen, I'm an extremely focused and disciplined guy. But I make sure that I keep opening my life to yeses, to new things because I've seen so many people burn out in their careers, especially in my industry, who lose the vibe and lose the joy of it. The mission in the heart was real, but they overscheduled themselves and they got into a place where it was all routine, all procedure, all task, all get things done, all to do lists. And they lost the heart and the vibe and the joy and the power of a new day. You know, it reminds me of something that Ralph Waldo Emerson said. He said, we are always getting ready to live, but never living. And so that inspires me to say, open up that sense of adventure again, my friend, because it could really change everything for you. It has for me my entire life. It's kept me spontaneous and fun and alive. And that mission, that part of me that loves and yearns to be disciplined and to be excellent at things, really also thanks that other free spirited part of me that seeks to go beyond routine and discipline and habit into the unknown once in a while for adventure. Because ultimately adventure is also another recovery technique. So I thought I would end this for break breakthrough session with a reading. If you've read my book, the Charge, this is the opening sort of preamble of that book. It's something I wrote called Out There the Charged Life. The truly lived life is not a routine existence in some quaint picturesque village of safety and certainty. No, the life worth living is out there in the wooded wilds of the unknown, on the craggy battlefields that test our wits and wills in the daily fights with our own demons. It is found during the long onward slog through the storms and strife when we hear only the whispers and taunts of foes and opponents stronger than we. On the ground where we are knocked sprawling and forced to face our own weaknesses, and on the mountaintops that we reach only because we pitted our every ounce of virtue, strength, character and courage to keep climbing. No matter the slings and arrows flung at our backs or the barriers thrown up before us. It is out there that we come face to face with the best in ourselves and with our destiny. It is out there in a new world of uncertainty and adventure that we push ourselves, better ourselves, realize ourselves. It is only in the Herculean quest for something more that life fills us with wisdom and meaning, but only after we have paid with our sweat and at times our tears. It is in the marching on, when we are tired and weak and fearful, and in the camaraderie of those warriors we have striven with, our brothers, sisters, family and friends who cheered us on and toiled with us despite the messiness and apparent madness of it all. It is out there on the path less traveled, an uncharted path chosen by each of us alone, an often meandering, overgrown path that leads only to another unpaved road or open field of opportunity where we must strike out once more with the same hope for vision, victory and transcendence. It is out there when we have the guts to stand naked before the world as who we truly are, when we peer into the souls of those around us and finally see in them the image of the divine that we plunge ourselves bravely and unconditionally into. Love that has no bottom or boundary. It is out there, outside the confines of our comforts and the pleasures of our accomplishments, accumulations beyond our architecture of the routine, that we slip the bonds of our limiting beliefs, soar magnificently above our own shortcomings and express our highest selves. It is out there, in a world rich with choice and challenge and fear and freedom that your greatest gifts and adventures await you. Listen. It is out there that destiny calls. Be bold. Ready yourself. It is time to charge once again. I hope you've enjoyed this session of four breakthroughs. If you did, do me a favor my friend. Go on Apple Podcasts. Make sure you subscribe, rate and review this podcast either on the Brendon show or on High Performance Hobbits Podcast. It is your support that is helping this inspiring message reach more people every single week. Thank you for helping grow my message, my podcast, my books, my seminars, my videos, my vlogs. I appreciate your support every single day of my life. It is doing this work for you that fires me up each time. Until next time my friend. As always, go live your life this week. Love others openly and go make a difference today.