Fix Your Mindset in 3 Steps
7 Aug 2025 · 17 min
Brendon TEST Burchard walks through how to build a positive mindset using daily aim, consistent practices, and resilience. He covers mental habits that help you recover from setbacks and stay motivated.
Each day we're going to develop our mindset. A practice is we're going to improve the thing. We're going to improve the thing consistently. Motivation, first and foremost comes from a reason, a future orientation to act. We need to get you back into time of aim, get back up off the mat, even when it's difficult. We're going to develop our mindset and it's a very specific way to do this and I think this will help you apr we need to start with AIM each day we need to get back into thinking about goals, future orientation, dreams. Again, not on New Year's, not on your birthday, not just the first of the month. On a daily basis. I need you to live in dreamland a little bit. I need you to lay in bed, think about positive things, visualize future orientation, future things that you want, that you desire. We need to get you back into time of aim. People don't sit up all day long and aim too low. What happens is they rarely think about higher aims when. So that's why they rarely have higher aims. They're just operating in reaction. Reaction always leads to low aims. Intention, dreaming, visualization. That is the ascendant path. We need you back onto an ascended path. We need to take your eyes myopically off the problem. We need to open up your perspective to a bright horizon line called the future. And most people have no aim in any area of their life. What area should you have aim in in your life? We're going to try to aim our lens into self, social and world. I need you to. What are your aims for yourself today? What are the goals or the objectives or your intention for yourself today? For your goals, your dreams, your livelihood, your emotions? What do you want to experience and and move towards today? Would you write that down? What do you want to experience and move towards today? For you, for you yourself. We need to adjust our aim for our social. What do I want to aim towards or have a goal today? For my wife? For this interaction I'm going to have with one of my students, for the kids, for the team, for other people, for this next meeting. Not having an aim for the next meeting and wandering into each meeting is why you should get fired like that's just terrible. People without intention and aim, why are they around you? It's very important to understand these have social consequences. Isn't it an aim for the world? What's the difference I want to make in the world? What do I hope for the world? What do I want to experience and move towards in the world? And what do I hope for? Well, what do I really want? And if we can aim here. This often gets people out of their own worldview or their immediate relationships and they go, oh, right, I need to think about the progress and morality of the world. How can I contribute to that? And now we have a different level of connection. So I'm going to tell you this. APR is so important and I always start with this. It's like when someone says, I have a terrible mindset. I'm like, you don't have a terrible mindset. What you are lacking is conscious aims that would energize a mindset. You're lacking conscious aims that would energize your mindset. This is so important. Like where does your motivation come from? Motivation first and foremost comes from motive, a reason, a future orientation to act. It's so important. It's like, oh, I need to have aim each day because if I can orient back towards future, orient towards making things happen. As I have aim in self, social and the world, I am going to develop more agency. Great. Second way to develop your mindset is you need to have a set of practices, a set of practices that enhance two things. Number one, your ability to get those aims and number two, your well being. Well being. I need you to have practices. These are habits or rituals that you're going to enact on a continual basis to move you towards your aims, your dreams, your future orientation, the ascendant path, and practices set up to enhance the ability for that aim to happen and to enhance yourself. This is so important because when you care for yourself, when you have a yoga practice, a meditation practice, a workout practice, when you have practices that enhance your wellbeing, your mindset goes, I have positive intent for myself. Look, I've enacted agency and control for myself. Your mindset improves as you have discipline towards practices that move you forward and care for self. When you have practices, rituals and habits set up that you continually improve upon. That's why I'm calling a practice here, not just a habit. A practice is you're going to do the thing and you're gonna continually improve that practice. Like a meditation practice. It's not just a meditation habit. A meditation habit, you drop in, you do the same thing every time. A practice is, we're gonna improve the thing. We're gonna improve the thing consistently. So if I am improving, remember growth mindset is about the belief and the assumptions that something can be improved that is malleable. Okay, great. So I'm gonna improve the thing. I'm Gonna improve how I move towards something so I improve. How do I, for me, I'm always thinking, how do I improve my speaking practice, my training practice my coaching practice in the ways that I show up, how do I practice it? Not just do it automatically, but practice it to continue perfecting it. Never to perfect, but to practice in the forever seeking of perfecting. Not to perfect, perfecting, getting it better, practicing, practicing, practicing. How do I practice my training? And then as I'm doing it, how do I care for self? The more you care for yourself and you've set up practices that show care for self, you enhance well being, the more you tend to lift the perception of self because you did good things for yourself. When you do bad things for yourself over and over and over and over again. How do you think that shapes your mindset in life? It's why when you get somebody and they're on a downward spiral of negativity, of bad mentors, somebody's gotta come in and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me interrupt this pattern. This pattern you have is a downward spiral. We need to put you on practices that put you on an upward spiral, an ascendant path. This is why it's important to get around high performers, get around role models, get around exceptional people because they'll spot you doing that, like, go, whoa, whoa, whoa. They set higher standards for you, they have higher beliefs for you because they believe in change. They've seen it happen for themselves. So you got to develop great practices that move you towards your aims and enhance your well being. Okay? And then the R is resilience. This is, I need you to be highly conscious of when you fall to the floor, when you quit, when you lack perseverance and grit. I need you to be conscious of it. But when you're conscious of it, you're not zooming in, I suck, I'm terrible. You just need to be aware. You just need to be aware. And instead of beating up on yourself, go, hmm, interesting. I fell on the floor, I got knocked down, I quit. What would be the mindset I would need to get up and move forward in a positive way again? What do I need to condition in my thought patterns right now to get off of this mat Right. When you're knocked down, it's very easy to go, oh my God, this is a problem. I'm the problem. This is going to last forever. I'm going to stay here. Punishing yourself or you go, okay, what's a motive? What's a reason for me to get up? What's a reason for me to engage again. Let me start again. I know this makes so much sense, but I want you to be more aware of your resilience levels. Like, do you get down in the morning when something bad happens at work and you just can't come back to work after lunch? Get back on it. That's a resilience issue. That's a grit issue. That's a perseverance issue. That's a self regulation issue. That's a mindset issue. Right. There is nothing fundamentally stopping you from at lunch, reorienting your mindset and coming back with fierceness in the afternoon except your mindset. You got a bad email. The bad email is there. But does that bad email stop you from doing something in the afternoon? I mean, outside of true extremities, I mean, extreme events, like, you know, really bad things happening, something happens to your kid, something happens with life or death, something happens that's just like catastrophic. Those are extremely rare events. Those sure. Do you have to take the afternoon off? Do you have to recalibrate? Listen, I'm not like that disciplinarian who says you always have to be perfect. You always have to get up immediately. But I'm here to say you have to teach yourself instead of going hours, days, weeks and months and years without getting back into the fight. That is a mindset thing. Over a period of time, in the short time, that might just be called dealing with it, right? You might have to deal with something and that can knock you off track for a certain amount of time. That's real, that's coping, that's dealing with it. That's like being shocked. All of that's normal, right? Especially in extreme circumstances. But nine out of 10 times in most people's lives, it's literally their mindset is playing victim. And their mindset is attaching negativity to themselves, to the world, to others. And so you know what, I'm just, why try? They're not resilient because they lack strength. They're resilient because they're in the why even try Mindset. And I need you to get back in the game faster. That is a goal I want you to have for yourself. That's truly something I want you to be aware of and intentional about. Happens for me, like, listen, running as many products, programs, people being so responsible for so many people in my life. Family, friends, team, all my mentees, all my investments, at any given moment, there is a ton of going wrong every morning. This morning I got like five emails that all Said, like, basically, emergency, emergency, emergency. Every day of my life, someone's having emergencies around me. Every day of my life, somebody's texting me. Something bad happened because my network's large and I try to make a lot of impact and I have so much content out there every day, something. There's so much negative inbound, so much difficulty every day. If I didn't have the approach of, you know what? I'm not operating my life on reaction. I'm not going to feel that that is unfair. I asked God for great impact and responsibilities. I asked for it. So let me recalibrate my aim right now. Right now, my mindset just kind of sucks. I'm negative because all this emergency came in. I feel bad about myself because I didn't handle this and I neglected that. So this came over here, or I hired this person, or I did this wrong or I shouldn't have done that. And I can attach self to it and I can be just like, you know what, Let me just. Let me just stop for the day and come back tomorrow. But that's really punishing myself from avoiding progress. And so I got to recalibrate my mindset. I need you to recalibrate your mindset faster. And I know lots of people say, no, Brandon, you're not dealing. You know, you're not allowing people to cope. I'm like, listen, I understand cope. I understand trauma, I understand grief. And let me tell you what, you don't need decades for that. You don't. We live in a culture that believes that all these problems we have take decades of work, decades of dealing with it, decades of therapy. And I'm here to tell you that's just not true. What that's called is the lack of effectiveness in the practice that's supposed to change and help you. It's called you falling back to the mean too many times and allowing yourself to do it. It's you not sticking yourself to a higher standard for the most part. I do understand that people have lifelong difficulties and challenges. I'm not taking away from that. But remember, nine out of 10 times, that's not the issue. Nine out of 10 times, it's the mindset training we've been through. Because remember, it's your beliefs, your assumptions, how you interpret and engage with the world. That's mindset. You can have a suck morning and get back to it in the afternoon. You can have a terrible Monday. I'll allow you all Monday, all Tuesday. You can still finish Friday strong, right? You can move forward. You can still Progress in some way towards aims, even if in the short term your aims lower a little bit, you can still be aware of the difficulties and the negative patterns and still be establishing new positive patterns. These are not binary. You can have active recovery from life's difficulties, dramas, traumas, awful upsets. And what I need is a higher level of resilience. And I'm here to tell you, if you want high performance and outstanding results, but also greater mental health, we need to improve that speed of resilience for most people. Nine out of ten times, again, I'll allow for the extremities, so don't say I'm being judgmental, lots of bad things happen. But nine out of ten times on someone's normal Monday through Friday, there's great opportunities for progress there. Get back up off the mat even when it's difficult. It is why you're so inspired when you watch a Rocky. It's why you're so inspired when you read great biographies. It's why you're so inspired when you. When you see somebody get back up and engage the world today, even though they had a difficulty in the past. Listen, I work with vets, I work with people who've been disabled, I work with people who've had the worst possible things happen in their life and now what are they doing helping other people now what are they doing writing their books? What are they doing? Having a positive influence, building their business, creating great marriages, playing on courts even though they're disabled. You're like, what is happening? The human ability for resilience. If you believe in that, that's what I taught you earlier, that is the belief in changeability. I believe you can change. I believe you can change your approach, you can change your timing, you can change your progress, but you have to get resilience back in. So this is apr. How do I improve my mindset? Brandon's taught me a lot. There's a lot going on. What should I do every day? Aim every day, set of practices that move you towards your aim and care for your well being every day. When you sense you're down or you get upset, be aware of that and just ask, how do I be resilient through that? How do I get back in the game? What can I do here to get back in the game? That's all I want you to do. I want to get back in the game. When is the time? Right? I can actively get back in the. I might not be able to get back in the game and dunk, but can I get back on the court and dribble. Can I do that? I just want you back on the court, back in the game. That's all I need every day. Because you know what? You'll develop self respect. That way you'll have progress in the world which make the world feel better. And when you do that, I promise you, your mindset will shift and this is going to develop so much capability for you over a period of time. Wow. I am capably moving towards my goals. I am consciously moving towards my goals. Even when it's hard, even when I get knocked down. As I'm moving, I'm caring for myself, I'm moving towards things. As I'm moving towards things, instead of hiding, my self esteem rises, my self efficacy rises, my mindset moves into growth mode. All of a sudden I'm in a different state of being. Not just state of mind, state of being in the.