How To Set Up Your Life For Success (35-Min+ Class!)

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. Just ask that question, like, who do I want to be each day? I'm thrilled to spend some time with you today to talk about maybe one of the most important frameworks that I use personally to manage my own motivation and my own drive. I want to celebrate you guys. A bunch of notes about what we'll be covering today. We'll be talking about why personality is not something that you can blame for your success in life. Meaning you can't say, well, I guess I'm an introvert or I'm an extrovert, and that's why my life is the way it is. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about some things that you can do to set up some practices in your own life and to perform at higher levels. I hope you're going to have a great day either way. All right, so here's what I want to talk about first and foremost. You know, right now, I'm getting a lot of feedback and a lot of questions while I'm out on the road about people just maintaining their focus and enthusiasm. Right now, there's a lot of people kind of getting sucked into the drama and the negativity of the world, whether it's politically or economically or just in their own social world. But I think also right now that's coupled with a challenge where 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 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, you know, I've lost my focus. And when we start talking about it, what we really. 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. 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 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, if you're just flowing through your days all the day, 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, 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, is talk about how this simple framework might help you get that momentum, that focus, that enthusiasm all back from one thing. Let's talk about the framework. Here's. We're going to do a little bit of math today, which I know you should never do with Creatives, but I hope you enjoy this. Okay, we're going to do a little math. If you read the Charge, you remember there was the baseline human drives and the forward human drives. Okay? So there were 10 baseline human drives. These are the human drives that we just. We have to have to have any level of contentment in our life at all, right? We've got to have control, self control, right? We've got to have congruence. We've got to have caring. We've got to have the feeling, that sense of connection, et cetera. Okay? If you read that book, then in the forward drives, these are things that kind of push us, right? Those forward drives, we all want change. As an example, we want creative expression out in the world. We want challenge and contribution and consciousness. These are things that we all want. But people always ask me, Brendan, if I have to focus on any of them, which ones would you choose? Which is kind of a weird question because it's like, well, if you had three children and you ask that question, it really doesn't quite work out, does it? You have three kids. Which do you focus on? All of them. These are your human drives. You have to pay. All of these have to be real for you, okay? You can't kind of poo poo on one and forget the other one and not pay attention to. Because that's when people become upset. So if you haven't read the chart, just read that book. It will give you a good baseline for what I'm talking about today. But let me share with you some simple things to get your level of focus and enthusiasm, vibrancy back into your life. We're going to start with this simple model, okay? 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 incongruence 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. Just 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. I promise one of our bullets today that we'll cover is some of my, you know, practices that keep me high performing. One of them is intention. In this area 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 four. 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 4 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. I recently worked with a client who by every measure, is an incredibly successful person. Amazing family, on covers of magazines, extraordinarily wealthy, doesn't have to worry about money or reputation the rest of their life. Just, they got it. They're good, right? But not happy. Felt like they were going through the motions. One of the reasons we got in, 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 your 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 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 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. 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 over 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 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. And here's my morning simple daily practice. I wouldn't. I shouldn't call it my morning practice. I would call it my more of my, like, important moment practice. Right? Important moment practice. 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 where I think about something. And often I'm just trying to get, like, get congruent with who you are. Brendon 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 is 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. Now if we can take congruence and we can add on top of it a couple things, we'll start really building some momentum here, right? And this is really important. This one is one of the baseline human drives, but one of the most important. Connection, right? Connection. I mean basically in three ways. I mean, connection with self, right? So I can feel and sense myself. Self awareness is a type of connection, connection with another person that I'm with and then connection with what I'm doing. Okay, three different ways. Self awareness, social awareness, and what you might call task awareness. Okay. When people talk about being mindful, that's a general way to talk about connection, right? And what I want you to do in this area is take a good look at how connected have you felt? I mean, how connected have you really felt to your wife, to your husband, to the kids, to the work, to your craft, to your art? It's not easy when you are a high performer because you take on a lot of new things and it's easy now you piecemeal connection out, right? You kind of connect with your partner once in a while. You kind of connect with the work once in a while. You kind of connect with team once in a while. But you're so spread thin that overall not only do you feel dissipated, you don't feel connected. You know, it's like something, you feel like something's missing. Even though you're giving so friggin much everywhere, you lose that connection. And it's easy for everyone to. I do it too, right. I'm working on, as you guys know, this book, it's been a two year research project. It's killing me sometimes I'm like, when is this thing ever going to get done, right? It's just constant. And there's times that I've sat down, well, I got to work on the book now. And I'll be just typing along and I'll be like, you know what? This is probably not the energy I need to put in this book. Let me get up. Because my focus is bad, my enthusiasm is bad, my energy is bad. And it happens for everyone because I've got so much other things and I'm okay, I don't want to connect with my book in this way. I'm going to get up, I'm going to go walk around the block and I'm going to focus just as I walk around the block on deep breathing. That's all I'm going to do. Every step is a deep breath all around the block. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going to come back into my house, I'm going to drink some water, I'm going to do a couple vinyasa flows, maybe 5, 10 vinyasa flows, sit back down, close my eyes, set an intention for the work, open and go. And so what I want to do is break that down for you first. I was self aware to recognize, not feeling a connection to this work right now I'm not feeling this connection. And when what a lot of people do is they go, well, I guess I don't feel it. Today I quit. Let's go to the bar. Books are fun, Bars are better. Here we go, right? You could totally do that. Or you could say, you know what? The creative divine energy didn't hit me today. I guess it's not meant to be for me to work on my book, right? You could do that too. Or you could also just power through it, but not really bring your A game. What you have to do is have the self awareness to stop, stop and interrupt yourself. So first know when you are disconnected, where in your life are you feeling disconnected? And in that moment, stop yourself. And immediately, as fast as possible, remove yourself from the situation as fast as you can, right? Remove yourself from that situation, whatever it is. I do networking events a lot, right? I'll be out with a bunch of people. And when we're networking and talking with people, sometimes I'll be in a conversation and I'm just not feeling connected to them. I'm not feeling like I'm bringing my A game. I'm just, I can tell, you know what I mean? I can tell and I'll remove myself, I'll Be like, hey, guys, you need another drink or something? And they'll say whatever they say and say, okay, And I'll go, literally, I'll go find a room that's empty, or I'll go find the bathroom where there's a stall and I can just get myself centered then return to the situation. Now, of course, you can't always do that. That's what people say. Well, you can't always do that. I'm like, hey, look, I'm not looking for an always. I'm like, get up to bat more often. Doesn't have to be every time, but more often. Remove yourself from where you're not feeling connected and find that connection for me and for everything that we read in every modern emerging parts of psychology and neurobiology we know without any question. If you activate your body, you'll activate your brain. If you activate your body, you'll activate positive emotion. If you activate your body, you'll interact better with people. If you activate your body, you'll contribute better art. So activate your body. So go away, whatever you have to do. Stretch, move, breathe, walk, jump, Jack. I don't care what it has to be, but reactivate the body. Then return to the thing, close your eyes, set an intention, and go. Now. If this all sounds way over complicated, let me just share it. That just becomes your life. Your life becomes you. Conditioning yourself to be your best in the moments that matter. That's what my life is. I'm not always great. I'm not always perfect. I got on the stage in front of, I know 6, 800 people and I just landed and I was kind of discombobulated from the plane. I was maybe a little more dehydrated than I would usually be because it was a really long flight. And I remember getting on the stage and I felt discombobulated. I was on the stage and I couldn't go anywhere right in front of the people. So it's not like I'm going, hold on, guys, and go backstage and do my thing. I'm there. I have to find that moment. And I can tell you this. I could have never found that moment if I hadn't worked so hard in other moments that mattered less to condition myself to get there. Does that make sense? So you need to start finding the small moments to get higher connection. If that means that small moment is you, you come home from work and before you go in to talk to your family, you get yourself in a good place. Before you flip on the video camera, before you sit down, do the work, you got to learn to set those intentions and get in that space so that when the next time it happens where you can't go. I remember meeting, I got to have a four hour sit down with one of the US Presidents, George W. Bush at the time. And it was basically going to be me, him and a couple people. And I was just kind of in a funky place. And not from just a political standpoint, but just like it was an awkward time and you know, we had to go through so much security to get there. There's a lot going on, a lot to be frazzled by. And I just remember thinking, I got just this amount of time here, I don't have the choice not to show up. And having tried to show up so many times in my life, which showing up, you know what that means? Connection. That's all it means. When they talk about flow, all that means is it's a different, it's a higher level of connection. Right? When you think about love, that's just a higher level of connection. But most people just like congruence, where they let their baseline be going through the motions. Most people with their connection, they're letting the social environment dictate their energy. So their energy around their spouse is the energy their spouse is bringing in their connection with what the work is. Whatever just happens, they feel that day. And I'm saying use your conscious mind to override that, use your body to, to override that, to deliver the best of what you have. Because life is short. You know, you show up crappy to your spouse for a couple weeks or months in a row and then something happens to them or something happens to you. You regret those crappy weeks. And I can share that. Having been with a lot of people in their last moments of life, they know their track record. You know what I mean? You know your track record. How have you been showing up to your work, how you've been showing up with the people that you love, how you've been showing up for yourself. Your connection matters to you in the end. So I want you to focus now on asking this question. How can I connect more in this next moment with what I'm feeling and sensing to get more body awareness? But what they're feeling, what I want to contribute here to those people, to what I'm doing with the work, if we can get your connection up, everything shifts. And I know some of this is basic, but this is what you guys have been asking too, because think about it, I lost focus. No, you lost connection. You lost connection. With either your. Why? You lost connection with your process. You lost connection with your energy that would give you the focus. You lost connection with the outcome of what that thing could be. You didn't lose focus because you know what? Your focus went to something else. Focus went to the phone, to the games, to the tv. Focus went to the drama around the office. You didn't lose. The focus is still there. It just got shifted away from what matters. Right. How many people I've told that to. They don't like when I say that, by the way, but it's accurate. If somebody told me that, I'd be like, you know, I'd give them the bird. But you know what? It's true. You didn't lose focus. You lost focus on what matters. Very different things, and you know it. So I'm busting you on it because it's my job to get you to a little higher level here, isn't it? Okay, then, last piece here. Let's add this to it. One of the human forward drives. Contribution, contribution. And when I think about the contribution, when people say, I lost enthusiasm, they forgot how fun it is to give. That's what happened. They forgot. That's all right. They made contribution too big of a thing. Well, you know, I don't have a building with my name on it yet, Brendan. I literally just had the conversation with the guy on a jet he owned, and he was upset that in this part of his life, there's no buildings with his name on it. This was his thing. This is rich people problems. I'm like, this is your. This is. This is a thing for you. He actually had a lot of motion to it. Now. He had ambition and he had given and he'd done lots of things, but his contribution was tied to something that didn't really matter that much, though. He thought it mattered. But notice what the contribution was. The accolade, the reward, the award. The name on the building was what he was after. I said, well, what does the name on the building give you? He says, well, you know, it gives me a sense of success. I said, why? He says, well, you know, just. It gives me some. You know, it's just such a public showing that I've done something good. I said, okay, what other public showings that you've done something good could be. And he said, well, you know, I host a fundraiser and. And I said, well, are there any public showings of you doing good? Of you actually, you know, getting your hands dirty and doing good? He goes, what do you mean? I said, you know, doing good. Like, you volunteer. He hadn't volunteered in 15 years. He wrote a lot of checks, but he hadn't been a Soup kitchen in 15 years. Contribution. Sometimes we think is the building and we forget it's serving the dish. We make it too big, and so we feel disconnected from it. And then spiritually, we feel upset. Well, I'm not making my difference, People say, because to them, making difference is this highfalutin big idea. It's the thing on the building. It's the million dollars of the cash. It's Brendan. I can't believe I've been working so long. I haven't built any schools in Africa yet. I'm like, dude, you'll be okay. It's not about the schools in Africa. It's not the name on the building. Those are good things. I'm not discounting those things, per se. I'm saying if that's your measure of a sense of contribution in life, you'll always feel unfulfilled. Because you know what? You're gonna put your name on that building, and then they'll build a building across the street that's bigger with another guy's name on it. And you'll be like, damn. So don't tell me it's about the building and it's not about the school. Because they'll put up the school, and then they'll build another town and they'll put up another school, and the kids will go over there. Like, it's not about that. It's about the act of giving. And so what I try to do to people, I say, oh, you want enthusiasm and vibrancy back to your life? Scale down your thoughts of contribution. Scale it down to daily acts of contribution. Daily acts. You know, you had those people who you posted your Instagram thing, and they said some nice things to it, and you were like, oh, that's really nice. And you don't look at it again when you could have said, hey, thank you. You know what? Let me send you something. I appreciate that. That's a small, daily act. Giving to somebody. That's it. Simple, right? Small daily acts. Teaching your kids to give small little things. Opening the door, getting the cup of coffee, helping people arrange something. Little small, daily things. Like, I want you to get eyesight onto your day of giving. How can I give just little things? Because, look, if you're not doing the little things, you won't feel the big things when you finally get them. Let me say that again. If you're not doing the little Things you won't feel the big things, when they finally happen, it won't be what you wanted. But the little things, those give, you'll sense them. There'll be something that's magical to them, that makes a difference. All right, now let's do that math I promised about. We're going to take all of this. Apparently, when you put parentheses around something, it makes you take the sum of what's in the middle, right? If this was one plus one plus one, that would be three. Three. As part of this grouping of mathematics, this is really advanced stuff. Let me tell you what, for the kid who never went to algebra class, okay, then all I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what that multiplier of all this is. It's another human drive. And it's the thing that sometimes if you're doing pretty good in these areas, you're like, yeah, I'm kind of who I am. Good. I'm happy with my relationships. I'm giving. But you're, like, not feeling the vibrancy or. Or the fulfillment or the growth from all of that, or that enthusiasm and focus, as I promised we'd be talking about today, that's kind of gone. It's like, it's easy to lose focus when any of this is going through the motions or normal for you, right? But what we know from psychology, if all we can do is add that drive that we love so much as a multiplier, now we take all this and we just layer it right now. Congruence. Challenge yourself again. Now connection. Challenge yourself again. Now contribution. Challenge yourself again. So I'm in Puerto Rico, and I'm sitting down at this by myself. I was down there for a writing project, so I went and disappeared. And I'm sitting at this table, and this couple across the way recognized me for my work. And they said, hey, you're Brandon Burchard. I said, yeah. And I said, cool. And we just started talking. And I said, well, why are you here? And the wife said, I don't think she was a wife. I think they were engaged or something. But it was not like a honeymoon trip. And it wasn't like a good trip either. They needed it. She said, we really needed this time together. I said, why? And she was really polite, and he was very silent. And I'm watching this. And I finally said, so you, like, this is a trip that's really important to you? I said, yeah. I said, is it because, you know, things suck between the two of you? And they were like they kind of looked at me like, what? And I went there because I thought, well, they kind of know what I do. I might as well, you know. And so they said, she said, oh, no, no, no. I said, well, I mean, if you needed the trip, is he not giving you something you really want? And this guy looked at me like he was going to smack me off my table. He's a big dude, too. And she just said, well, no, no, no, it's good. And I asked him, I said, well, do you sense it's good? And he goes, yeah, it's good. I said, well, why'd you need the trip? I mean, you could go out to. Why didn't you go like, hey, let's go to our favorite restaurant. Why did you have to escape something? So did you have to escape yourselves to find yourselves here differently? What was going on and what happened was they just got as a couple. They'd been together long enough that they weren't trying anymore. And Puerto Rico was a place for them to try. You know, I mean, they went down there to give themselves some psychological ease that says, you know what, let's try. Sometimes you feel like you have to remove yourself from things to try again. And that's what they were doing. Now. They didn't have to spend all the money, go down to Puerto Rico. You know, they could have, you know, found a way to do that back at home. But I think it's really important that we recognize that what they were really doing was challenging themselves to connect again. Puerto Rico wasn't a vacation. Puerto Rico was a challenge. Can we get back together? They were challenging themselves. And in so many ways in our life, we have to do that. We have to. If we want more here, we have to push. Because you know what, as we go back to homeostasis, which is a good place to be in many ways, there's a lot of contentment that can happen in homeostasis. But remember the problem. We frame this with focus, enthusiasm, vibrancy. I feel like I lost those things. Brendon, what do you do? What do you do is you become more self aware of these things and then you push. And a lot of people don't like the word push when I say it right. They're like, well, okay, we'll become more mindfully assertive. How about that same thing? Challenge, push, whatever you want to call it, however you want to dress it up. The reality is if you lost focus, no one's going to fix it for you. If you lost enthusiasm, no one's going to fix it for you. If you're losing vibrancy, you're not going to wake up tomorrow and feel better. It doesn't work like that. You got to take back command of the ship. You got to take back discipline. You have to take back your own paying attention to what counts. And I know that doesn't always sound like you're like, geez, Brent, this is kind of heavy. Where's the balloons and stuff? It's like, I don't want to just fluffy up with motivation. I want to tell you, this takes work. This takes real work. And if you're not measuring yourself in some way on a daily and a weekly and a monthly basis, you'll fall back into going through the motions. And by the way, I don't have any problem with going through the motions. So if it sounds like I'm this guy who's like, push, push, push, push. No, I'm answering the question. The question is, Brenna, I lost focus and enthusiasm and vibrancy, and I'm just here to say, well, you're the only one who's gonna get it back. It's gonna take work and focus. Right? There's great times of our life where we do just go through the motions and things are good, but if they're not and you're aware of it, the most important thing you can do is to put these types of concepts back on your mental dashboard and measure them, watch them, pay attention to them, seek to actively challenge yourself in each of these areas. In general, you should have challenges in your life. I like to tell people all the time, you know, if the only challenges you have in your life right now are the challenges that life threw at you, you're living a reactive life. A proactive life puts challenges in front of us on purpose. Like, literally, if the biggest. When I tell high performers all the time, the biggest. The biggest challenge you're facing in your life right now, assuming life didn't throw something at you, is a challenge you place on yourself. And I'll give you this last example, because a lot of people. Yeah, Brendan, that easy for you to say or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't understand. My big challenges are this. I get it. I get it. And when I was out on the East Coast, I had some time to sit with a young girl who's going through cancer, and. And she's in her hospital bed, and she's got maybe four, six months from what the doctors say. She and her parents have a longer vision for her life, but she's a Teenager on a hospital bed. She knows life isn't good. Now, life has thrown her the ultimate challenge, hasn't it? But her biggest challenge isn't cancer. She could make it that. We could all make it that. Well, yeah, Brendan, sure. You say you should set the biggest challenges in your life. Sure. It's easy for you to say, my husband's being that we're going through this in the business. I've had this health issue. Well, this teenage girl dealing with cancer. When I walk in the room, all around her bed are all these books. And so when I start talking with her, I said, well, what are all these books about? She says, oh, I'm learning Spanish. I said, you're learning Spanish? She goes, yeah, I, I've always wanted to challenge myself to learn Spanish. Now think about that for a moment. How beautiful that is. Life threw her the ultimate challenge, mortality. And yet here she is in the crux of the biggest challenge she ever got, setting her own challenges. That brings you back to life. And that's what it was doing for her. So if you're lacking a good challenge in life, set one up. Even if that's just asking, how can I be a better person? Connect more and contribute more. If these become the challenges, great. If you need another challenge, great. But set that up so that you feel that focus come back in. Because challenge gives you focus, challenge give you something to grow into, spurs that enthusiasm. Challenge gets you fired up to focus, to do good, to be there. All these things I hope will help you reach higher levels of performance. Hey, it's Brenda. I just want to thank you for watching my channel. There's so many other teachings and trainings on this channel, so please enjoy. Thanks for being here. Also, for those who want to go to another level, I have an upcoming Certified High Performance Coach Certification week. This is where I teach you and certify you to become a world class life coach. We call them certified high performance coaches. You can click the link in the description right now to apply and learn about our upcoming certification week. If you want to go to another level as a life coach and you want me to certify you and help you, make sure you click that link and take advantage of it right now. Enrollment is open today.