Best Of: The Key to Your Most Productive Day
15 Sept 2018 · 13 min
Brendon TEST Burchard shares his approach to building a productive day through removing distractions and establishing high performance habits. He focuses on the routines and practices that separate productive people from the rest.
Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the Brendan show. These best of episodes feature training that I have done live, sometimes on online to tens 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, 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 enjoy 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 d 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.
Have a first practice at work. If you are in a career or you're an entrepreneur or you do anything to contribute to the world. Once you start to do that, you need a first practice. What is a first practice? It means when you come in and you sit down at the desk, before you turn the computer on, before you look at the inbox, you have a first practice, what are you going to do? Right? To develop a discipline, a routine at work as well. You woke up and you had a personal routine. When you get to work, when you're waking up the fibers of your being to contribute and to work, what's your first practice? What do you do? What is it? You gotta have one. If you don't, we can measure that you're losing productivity throughout the week. Lose productivity, intention throughout the week, lose success. Isn't it true? It's like the next level for you is more intention and much more productivity. But to do that you got to get really focused. And to get focused you need discipline. To have discipline, you need to have a routine that you're running. Just like Olympians and the greatest NBA players in the world and the greatest athletes in any given area that I've been blessed to work with. Guess what they do? They got their routines, man, when they walk on the court, they do something right. They have a specific routine that they are running that they are doing every single time. And it's giving them not only that anchor of a mental state to get there, but it's just putting them into the right rhythm. It says, oh, it's game time here. Now, for me, what I do, as many of you know, if you study my work at High Performance Academy, I have my one page productivity sheet. My first practice, before I turn the computer on, I have this sheet and I ask myself these questions. And that sheet guides my day so I don't derail during the day. I know what my day is going to be about. I have intention there. And so I'm beginning the day at work not in reaction, but in intention. And by doing that, I get more productivity done. I get more into my zone faster than just reacting. What's everybody need? Because if you're always reacting to fire drills, your life becomes daily drills of giving up your agenda, giving up your life. So what's that first thing you're going to do when you get to work or you go to contribute and give, what is it? I've worked with senior executives who they take that first practice when they walk into the office, they close their eyes and maybe they meditate just to get clear about what they want it to be. Some they call in the team and they start off with sharing what's successful or what's happening in the team or in the business. Some they pick up the phone and they call the most important person in their life or in their business. But it's a routine. They do it. And because they do it, they have more success. Your first practice is not to fire up the computer and check your inbox. No matter what your role is, even if your customer support, you have to be wait, what is my intention for this day? What do I want it to be? Even if your job is answering emails, before you do that, think about what you're moving towards, how you want to answer email, what's the intention for email, what communication themes you're going to develop and convey about your company, about yourself, about your team, about your product. Just be more intentional at the beginning. It will help. Distraction removal do you have a habit for it? I love this question. Prove to me that you're removing distractions from your life. Prove it. Show me five things you've said no to in the last two weeks that you could have said yes to, but you said no to because you recognize it as a distraction. If you can't do that yet, we got a whole. I mean, this is going to change your life, right? Getting better at removing distractions. Saying no about new projects that don't align with what you desire, what you're moving towards. Saying no to everybody's emergency. Saying no to all those blue links you could have clicked. I mean, look at all those videos you could watch online. Look at all the YouTube things and all the podcasts and all the blogs. Don't be really disciplined at setting up a qualification system criteria in your life of what you're going to pay attention to, how you're going to evaluate decisions. That's going to change your life. If that's a habit for you, I've got a habit. If a decision comes up or an opportunity, I should say opportunity comes up. I look at it, I got this criteria, I filter it through. Yes, no, boom, I'm moving on. I've got a habit of being very efficient with making decisions. That's part of distraction removal, right? I used to just call this focus, but now people, it's like, no, we got to name it what it is. Focus is really just distraction removal. Today. There's so many distractions and you've got to turn them away. If you're going to achieve your dreams, what do you really want to accomplish this year? Are the major things you're doing every day moving you towards that or do you find out that your busy work is taking over your life's work? You need to get rid of some things in life. Every spiritual precept that we know often comes back down to simplicity, to getting back to just the basics. And for a lot of people, their lives are really overcomplicated. They said yes to too many social things, so they're wiping themselves out. They're not getting sleep because they went to seven parties this week. You know, they're in constant yes mode to everybody. So they're pleasing everybody and avoiding themselves. We see that because they said yes to so many things. Their plate is so full, and they live each day stressed, knowing that they're really kind of drowning in all the obligations that they shouldn't have committed to. Nothing can be better in terms of your productivity and your stress levels than learning to say no, to recognize a distraction as a distraction. I name them. I'm like, that sounds amazing, but that would be a distraction right now. I say that to people, and I've offended people because of that. Now, I know at this point in this video today, you're like, boy, Brendan, you're kind of a jerk today. But I'm telling you, it's important. This is how you get your life back. You got to set up some successful habits. And I'm trying to convey it with passion today because I just know how important, and I've just seen it over and over change people's lives such powerful ways. I mean, if you did any of these better, your whole life is yours again. So what are the distractions now? Let's do the hard work. If you're really successful, what do you need to remove right now from your life to go to that next level? Be honest. What activities, responsibilities, obligations, and commitments have you taken on that you need to really question whether or not you should be doing them? Some of those activities, you just need to outsource. Some of those activities, you need to delegate. Some of those activities, you need to stop them immediately, even before you complete them. Sometimes we can quit things without completing them, and that gives us a lot of freedom in our lives to realize, well, yeah, I could keep nose to the ground and work to finish something that's not right, or I could stop it and start marching towards something that is right. Same amount of time. One moves me ahead, one gets me behind. We have to make the tough choices in our lives, and part of them is identifying our distractions.
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 the brendanshow because when you do that I can look you up and we can find you on Instagram and post that on 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 bit 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.