Best Of: How Congruence Works

Foreign hey, my friends, it's Brendan Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the Brendan show. These best of episodes feature training that I have done live, sometimes online to 10 of thousands of people or live on stage where I was speaking on.

Some stages across the world.

Or these might be some of my monthly training programs and highlights of those that I do every single month with our monthly students. So I know you're going to really enjoy these because these are a little bit more of a deep dive look at some of my training as a personal and professional development trainer. You know, I focus so much on helping you find that deeper level of motivation and start practicing some of those high performance habits.

Well, you hear me talk about many.

Of those concepts in these special episodes here. These are my best of trainings only and exclusively right here on the Brendon show. So I hope you enjoyed them. Please note that as you hear me speak in many of these, you'll hear me reference something because sometimes I'll have been training live or on video or on stage or through a broadcast. So you might not be able to see something I'm suggesting or motioning to or maybe even drawing out on a, on a flip chart or motioning towards on a presentation, but you'll get the gist of it. So make sure you bust out your journal. Take some good notes here because this is really valuable insights on the mindset or the strategies that you need to adopt in order to improve your life. And if you want to go and get more content like this, but much more deeper and have more of an interactive relationship with me in this type of training, make sure you join our high performance monthly training program. That's our monthly subscription program where I go live with you and our high performance students every single month and I train on a new topic or a.

New piece of research that we've created.

From the high performance institute and I train on that and then I do Q and A and actual live coaching, interactive coaching with people every single month. That's called high performance monthly and you can Access it at brendon.com monthly that's brendon.com monthly B-R-E-N-O-N.com monthly to get deeper dive training similar to this.

So if you like this, you would.

Love that training program. But without further ado, let's jump in right now to one of the Brendon show's best of trainings.

How do you get back that vibrancy and that connection when you've lost it because either you're overwhelmed and stressed, or you're just so busy you're kind of going through the motions. And even going through the motions in a positive way, let's say you're just flowing through your days all the day. Right now, people are feeling so overwhelmed. You know, they're feeling like there's so many opportunities to chase, so many courses to take, so many new initiatives they want to try, so many new products they want to create, so many new people they want to hire or fire, you know, and so they're in this challenge of just dealing with it all.

And.

And sometimes when you're there, you find yourself doing one of two things. Either you're going through the day as a complete stress ball, or you're going through the day and just going through the motions. And in either of those two places, that's where I usually hear this concern. Well, Brendan, I've lost my focus. And when we start talking about it, what they really mean is they lost their drive, or they say, well, Brendan, I've lost my enthusiasm. When what they really mean is they just haven't had any time to get enthused about something. They haven't spent some time just ruminating and thinking about the things that fire them up. You know, it's the same thing in a relationship. If you're in love with somebody and, you know, if you never really think about how they're feeling or think about how great your relationship is together, you can kind of lose touch with that relationship, lose touch with that person, and most importantly, lose connection. There's. Well, the same thing goes for life. If we're not being attentive to our life, if we're not paying attention to how it feels and how it goes and what we want to put into it, we can quickly lose connection. And so what I want to do is talk about this bigger conversation about how to get that back. That's going to be the focus today. How do you get back that vibrancy and that connection when you've lost it? Because either you're overwhelmed and stressed, or. Or you're just so busy, you're kind of going through the motions. If it gets too easy for you, then you lose a little bit of the edge and a little bit of that excitement, a little bit of that drive, and lots of people are there. I bring this all up because I just finished kind of a whirlwind tour, so I've been in front of a lot of audiences. I've shook a couple thousand people's hands in the last five days, I washed.

Don't worry.

But it was, like, a lot going on, and a lot of people were just sharing this thing with me. And what I'd like to do to help you come back to it is talk about how this might help you get that momentum, that focus, that enthusiasm all back from one thing. We're going to start with this simple model first. We're going to start with congruence, okay? Congruence is that psychological need we have to live in alignment with who we think we are, okay? That's congruence. It means if I think I'm a good person, but I don't act like a good person, then I'm going to have this, like, dissonance inside. I'm going to be frustrated with myself, upset with myself, stressed with myself, disconnected from myself, and ultimately, some bad things happen from there, okay? That's called congruence. We all want to live with congruence, with who we think we are, how we want to interact with other people, and what we want to give to the world. So just let's baseline on those real fast for you. Are you living the best of who you feel like you are right now? And if you're not, that's not a place for you to feel sad or upset about necessarily. It's just to acknowledge it and to accept it and then take some personal accountability and say, okay, what would I have to do? What thinking patterns or new behaviors would I have to start to start tapping into the best of who I am again? Because when people often say they've lost focus or enthusiasm or vibrancy, what they're really saying is, I don't feel like me anymore. I don't know why. And sometimes it's just because they haven't been focusing on themselves, not in a narcissistic way, but really focusing on themselves to ask that question of, like, who do I want to be each day? People are always surprised about how much time I spend on this. Each day, I'm consistently wondering who I am and who do I want to be? We just finished a study. We were trying to figure out, do high performers think differently about the future than other people? And if they do, what categories of thinking or topics, if you will, are they paying attention to?

And here's what it came out to be.

We call it the future 4. The future 4 is high performers think more. They literally think more in terms of time.

Because we ask the question, how much.

Time do you spend on thinking about all these different questions? And one of the Things that we found, they think about the future 4. These four things, they think about self, and they don't think about self like, what are my strengths and my weaknesses and what am I good at today? They think about self into the future. They're thinking about, this is my ideal self. How do I move towards that? And they actually think about that more than, let's say, underperformers. And we can measure that by time. So it's not a generic thing.

I'm telling you.

It ends up being, on average in these future four that we'll talk about. High performers spend over an hour a week more thinking about these four things than underperformers do. That's pretty significant. Okay, so let me give you an example. The future four is self. Thinking about the self. Ideal projection in the future. This means think about your future. Again, where does enthusiasm come from? Enthusiasm comes from your orientation to the future, right? I'm enthusiastic about this next moment. You can be enthusiastic about now. No, you're not enthusiastic about now. You're appreciative about what's now. You're joyous about what's now. But enthusiasm has a forward lean to the future, right? So I want you to be thinking about if you feel like you've lost some enthusiasm, maybe you've just lost connection that you used to have with looking into the future. You know, it's why a lot of people get so excited around New Year's, right? They're so thrilled to be thinking about, oh, where am I going? What's my life going to be? And there's a lot of optimism that happens. It's not just because of Christmas just happened.

Maybe it is.

There's a lot of giving spirit there. But you head in that New Year's, and there's an optimism every year. Look, look at the stock market every year, goes up in January every year. So what I want you to do is think about the future again. Just sit there and I don't mean once, you know, a quarter. I mean daily. What do you want your life to be like in the future? And a lot of people don't want to do that because it brings that dissonance. They go, oh, well, I guess my life's never going to be like that. And I know you don't think that because you probably wouldn't be in this audience if you did. But sometimes as we get so busy, we stop visiting that sometimes when you're a high performer, when you're so good you can go through the motions and what ends up Happening is you're so good, you're going through the motions. Nobody else kind of sees it, but inside, you start feeling bored or restless or just detached. But no one sees it. You're still crushing it, but no one can see it because you know you're good, and you really don't even recognize it. And often when you're really good, you stop thinking about the future because you're just, like, handling stuff you got right. You're good. So you've piled onto the plate, and the plate is so full, all of your focus and effort ends up just doing stuff. And you're a SWAT team every day.

You're amazing, right?

You're kicking some butt every single day. You're just crushing it. But you lose your enthusiasm because you took off that hopeful lean towards who you could still become. One of the most. The highest dangers for a higher performer is to think, I'm good. I'm complete. Everything's good. You are a whole person, and you are a good person. But none of us is done in our development. So you have to be asking yourself, okay, am I giving myself any time to dream of the person I could become? That's what I want you to do. Because sometimes when you have that level of enthusiasm or the connection there, you will focus more, you will feel more vibrant. You'll feel a pull of hope, a pull of idealism, a pull of growth again. So if you have any sense about you that's lost, that it's really an issue of congruence. The flip side of congruence is sometimes we can live to a level that's below us because we're living congruently with our negative thinking. We're living congruently with what they told us we're supposed to be and do. We're living congruently with low expectations. That's why you can't let your social environment ever dictate how you're supposed to live or be or what you chase after. And that will always happen. Your environment will always take over unless you discipline yourself to visualize who you want to become. You have to remember that the social environment will always take over.

It's like a garden.

You know that garden? You can have the greatest things all planted around, but if you leave it alone for a month, the stuff starts coming in. After a couple months, it's overgrowth, it's weeds. And that garden that could be something beautiful and bountiful ends up being taken over. It's the same thing in our social life, right? If you are not Disciplined with your own mind about who you want to become. Suddenly you start living your spouse's life, you start living your parents life, you start doing what all your other peers are doing, not what you really desire to do, but you're not even sure what you desire to do because you won't take a second to think about it. So my urging to you is to focus on this area again and do it with a future lean. Okay, I'm going to decide who I want to become and I'm going to start living in congruence with that more than I have. I'm always asking in important moments, who do I want to be in what I'm about to do. And it requires me to get that performance level up. You know, like this one before I shot, before we do this, you know.

I always take a moment for myself.

Before we do something, live like this, where I think about something. And often I'm just trying to get like, get congruent with who you are. Brendan because sometimes it's easy to be frazzled. You know, I'm probably dealing with physical jet lag right now. I've got a bunch of new friends in the house, we're in a new place, shooting. There's a lot to get frazzled by. So you have to find your moment, remind yourself of who you want to be and then show up. It's not easy, but it has to become a practice. My trigger is moments that matter, right? Whatever. I define that as. If I'm going to see my wife after a really long day, I'm going to know that's a moment that matters when I meet her with what kind of energy. So no matter where I'm at, I'm going to ask, okay, who do I want to be now? And that's going to help me be better. That's all conversations around congruence.

All right, my friend, I hope that you enjoyed that best of episode. Was that inspiring? Were you fired up? Did you love it? If you did, make sure you do me a favor, go out on social media somewhere and share that episode. Just go out, post it somewhere, post yourself, listening to it. Make sure you hashtag the Brendan show. Because when you do that, I can look you up and we can find you on Instagram and post that on the social media. And sometimes we do all expense paid trips to people we find. We just randomly select people, we send them gifts, autograph books, swag T shirts, all expense paid trips to some of my seminars. So make sure you let us know, share what you thought about this episode out there on the social media worlds and then we can find you and celebrate you. And also I would love to invite you to join us in our high performance monthly program. So just go to brendan.com monthly. That's brendon.com monthly. That's where we do deeper dive trainings.

Like you just heard.

But we do that every single month. And there's some live Q and a there and I do some giveaways and we give students in that monthly program tickets to my seminars and some extra special training on leadership. So make sure you check it out@brendon.com monthly. I appreciate you being part of this community of so many people dedicated to finding that deeper drive of motivation and practicing high performance habits so that they can become extraordinary in their careers. In your personal life, in your health, you can live an extraordinary quality of life. And sometimes you just need a little bit more training and a little bit more nudge, a little more energy, a little bit more drive and consistency. And I'm hoping that being part of this community with the Brendon show, I'm providing that to you in some way. So thank you, my friend, for listening. I look forward to seeing you or listening with you on the next episode of the B r e n d o n show.