How to Set Yourself Up for Success

Define the feeling, not that you want to experience when the thing finally happens one day out in the future. Describe the feeling that you want to sense as you are striving for that external outcome. That's what's so important. Today's topic is all about one of the most elegant questions that I ever heard in personal development. Now by now I'm sure maybe you know, my story, that I got into personal development at the age of 19 after a car accident really helped me realize I wanted to live a more intentional life. It helped me realize that, you know, I really wanted to live and love and matter and I hadn't been doing those things. I'd been depressed and sad and unsure. And at some point I remember picking up a personal amount book and, and I wish I could remember which one it was, but it was such a simple, elegant question followed by an audio program I listened to a couple days later. Do you remember audio programs? They used to come out on tapes. I don't know if you remember. It was like two back to back experiences. And I noticed it years later in one of my old journals. I had noted it on one day associated with the book and the next day associated with an audio. And it was like, wow, it's the same question. And it must have hit me profoundly at the time. And it's such an elegant question. And it's very simple. What does success look like? Or what will success look like to you? I know it's so basic, so let me cover this. What will success look like to you? What does success look like to you? And before you hit pause and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it, Brendan, I'm going to break down this into five areas that most people don't actually plan for or have intention for. And that's why they work hard and they're high achieving, but they're burning out, or they're overwhelmed or feeling unfulfilled, or if they do have some passion and one day they achieve their outcome and they feel pretty good about it. A week later they're looking around going, now what? Who am I? And that moment of transition or compression happens where we just don't know what to do with ourselves. Now, I'll cover five areas here that might help you think through this. The first area, when people think about success, of course, and the sad truth about our Western society is it starts usually with what we would call more in psychology, goal attainment. It's oh, I want to complete this task or activity or achieve this desired end goal and then I will feel Good, right? This is outcome, intention. You know, my outcome is to achieve X task, X activity, create, you know, this deliverable. It's to shoot that course, film that video, launch that thing, build that business, you know, you know, have this exit or do this thing in the relationship or go visit that place together. It's simple. We think of what's the thing that we want to quote, unquote, achieve. And unfortunately, that first level of understanding is as far as most people get. But there's a whole lot of other levels, aren't there? First and foremost, nothing wrong against goal attainment or trying to achieve great things or have great exits or do amazing things with family members. All of that's great. But those are, of course, external rewards, extrinsic rewards. We do those things, we feel good. But if we peg our success to all the external things that might happen, sometimes we don't get the task or the business doesn't sell for what we wanted, or we don't get that promotion, or the medical report doesn't come out the way we wanted. Our identity can fall apart. We don't feel good. And so it's important to realize we have to go beyond just what is that specific goal? And so what does success feel like? Point number two is feeling. Define the feeling, not that you want to experience when the thing finally happens one day out in the future. Describe the feeling that you want to sense as you are striving for that external outcome. That's what's so important. That's probably one of the things, like secret to how I experience my life so happily and joyfully and engaged, even as I'm working hard, even as it might be difficult, even as a struggle. I have this intention every day about how I want to feel because I want a sense of aliveness and presence, of gratitude, appreciation, of joy, of passion. And I want that connected, alive feeling every single day. Even when I'm doing the mundane thing, even when I'm doing something I've done a bajillion times. Hey, you might be new to my world, but this isn't the first audio I've recorded. You know, I've been blessed to have what, probably 500 million downloads of my audios out there. So I'm in a pretty good position to say I've done this before, but I still show up with this intention to have this feeling of passion and engagement and presence as I'm doing this right now for you still, to this day, after 20 years of doing this, because my definition of success is a feeling of summoning and cultivating passion and joy and presence and aliveness in whatever I'm doing. If it's something I've done a million times before, if it's something new, if it's something hard, if it's something. Something I don't even like, I'm going to bring emotion and feeling into that thing. To me, success has a lot to do with our consistent emotional states. It has a lot to do with our enduring meaning that we draw from the feelings that we have as we are going throughout our day, our week or month. Because so many people, they're doing great things, they're actually on a successful path, but they feel like crap. Maybe they haven't done the work yet. Maybe this whole conversation is new to them and that's okay. But one of the most empowering things we can ever learn in our life is that, hey, we get to take command of our feelings. And not just in a reactive state that we can better respond to stimuli, but also in an intentional state that we can summon that very feeling we want to experience and imbue the environment, the moment, the relationship with that feeling. To me, I think it's important that you've defined and written down in a journal somewhere. How do you want to feel on a continual basis? How important is that? I'd love for you to journal about that. One of the things I've learned in our research at High Performance Institute was something very simple, is that most people want to feel a greater sense of aliveness, connection and meaning or fulfillment. And they might define it or use different words, but they'd like to feel those things on a consistent basis. And sometimes they call that connection love, or sometimes they call that connection presence. Sometimes they call that meaning or fulfilling endeavor, something that brings joy or truth to our spirit. We all have different definitions of what aliveness means. Some people, it's passion, enthusiasm, excitement. Other people, it's a grounding energy. It's different for everybody, but you should know it. Third part of success is what do you want your lifestyle to be about? And don't worry, I'm not one of those guys who thinks that this is about your lifestyle, meaning what it became in the last 15 years. Last 15 years, lifestyle has all been about the Lambos and, you know, the McMansions and do you have a pool in your yard? And are you taking your laptop on the beach to work? Which, by the way, is just not, I think, a preferable way. I'd rather have you just enjoy the beach. But let's get back to it. Lifestyle in the last decade has really come to equate with that first part of success, which is that idealization of an external goal, that goal attainment. To me, lifestyle means something different and it means something more old school personal development. But I'll use some new school language to describe it. Lifestyle is about what is your day to day rhythm and experience of life? It is what are the recurring events of your life, what I call rhythm. And do you like that? Do you like the lifestyle that you live? Because listen, a lot of people have a big fancy house, but their lifestyle sucks. A lot of people have tons of money in the bank and as much bitcoin as they could have fallen out their ears and they're still miserable. Wealth does not equal lifestyle, Instagram. Instead, lifestyle is about your day to day events and experiences and whether or not you're happy with those. So for example, for me, my lifestyle is not a lifestyle you might like. My lifestyle has a lot of creation or research in the day that really is like my moments of just completely geeking out and doing the work. It's researching in psychology, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy. It's trying to understand more about human behavior and social movements so that I can hopefully make a positive difference in this world. I spend a lot of time just reading and trying to understand humans. And that's a big important part of my lifestyle. Has nothing to do with my bank account, does it? A big part of lifestyle for others is, well, how much adventure do they have in their monthly life or their quarter life or their yearly life? That variety is the spice of life thing. Is important to their lifestyle. Again, that might be unmarried from their number of cars in the garage. You know, I don't mean to tease too much, but in the social media world, bling became the definition of lifestyle or lifestyle businesses. Rather than do you enjoy the recurring events and new adventures of your life? Is there a rhythm there that you're okay with, that you enjoy, that you have purposely and consciously designed? It's not about how much you have, it's about what you are experiencing and whether or not you are sensing that aliveness, connection or fulfillment from it. Fourth big idea. Success. No matter what you call it, no matter what that end game is, we always have to remember that we are a social species. And so success is always measured in some way or another in relationship to others. This is fourth idea. If you're striving for some big external goal, I'll often ask my coaching clients, okay, you've got this big great goal. Tell me about the relationships you have right now that you want to cultivate, create or deepen on the way to climbing that mountain. Because especially in our western cultures, we often think of climbing that mountain solo. And I'm more about, Tell me about your climbing crew. Tell me about the pod of friends or coworkers you're going to create and what your experience is going to be together as you climb that mountain. The experience you have together as you climb the mountain, the relationships you form and is way, way more important and much longer lasting in our real lives than just hitting the summit. Because guess what? After the summit, you come down, you go back to your real life. What are your friends like there? Do you keep in contact with all those people you climbed with? Who we are in relationship to others is a measure of success that most people don't fully appreciate until they're much more mature or they're, you know, finally hitting those big zero numbers, those 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 1/ hundreds. They start to realize just how important relationships really were. The fifth big idea success. How would you measure it? What does it look like to you? Well, I certainly hope that a measure of that for you is growth. Did you grow as a person? Did you grow? Did you learn? Did you become a better version of yourself? Did you reach your full potential or a higher potential? Did you continue becoming a better mom, dad, caregiver, servant, leader? That's the question. So that no matter what your final aim is in your life, no matter what the things are on your to do list, no matter what those big goals are, I hope you'll say, okay, let's go a few layers deeper on this. I know what my goal is, but what are the feelings I want to cultivate and experience on that path? What's the lifestyle, the recurring events or the rhythm or the adventures that I want to have as I strive? What's the relationships I want to experience or create or deepen as I'm striving for that summit? And ultimately, how would I like to grow? Who would I like to become? What would I like to be like and ultimately grow into through this experience? This is how you set better goals. This is how you define success. This simple activity. When I was 19 year old kid, I didn't have this framework that I just gave you. All I had was a simple sentence, what does success look like to you? And I broke it down further for myself and it led to a pretty good run. Maybe you have other categories I didn't even include. Just start capturing. Consider there are different areas of your life. Maybe you have different definitions of success in your health or your relationships, maybe different ones in your career or your hobbies, maybe different ones in how you're developing spiritually. But I hope you'll take these categories or this framework I gave you about the outcome or the goal, the feeling, the lifestyle, the relationship and the growth, and you'll deepen that self awareness. It's compounding. It's adding up and compounding in ways that you don't even know right now. But it is preparing you for something more remarkable in your future. I see and I sense something remarkable coming in your future as you become more intentional today. Keep dreaming, journaling, keep scoring yourself. There's so much, so many touch points that you can do something, something every day. You can do one thing, one thing to get better, one thing to keep developing because we are all growing into the best of who we can become and the more consistent we are in visiting, touching something of personal development. I promise we'll understand just how powerful this experience is later on as these effects compound and compound and compound. And we'll look back and we'll go, you know what? Those were great days to grow. I'm glad he kept telling me, every day is a great day to grow. Today's personal development topic is what I call your zones of attention. I'm going to share with you four different zones of your life from this week that you can look to and try to evaluate. Because if we don't sometimes look back and reflect, we can't really evaluate our performance, can we? Part of high performance is having the guts to evaluate our performance, to being honest enough, to being truthful enough, to having the integrity and the accountability to say, hey, you know what? I did good here, I could improve there, and I'm committed to doing that. So these four zones of attention I'll describe as areas to evaluate in your last week just to know, oh, that's why I got where I'm at. And then I'll end the audio with some simple ideas of what you can do to use the tools to finish strong. So to these zones of attention. Now, I'm going to just start into these and I'll explain what I mean by the word zone here in a moment. So the first zone we're going to think about from this week is what I'm going to call your zones of flow. Your zones of flow. What I mean by this is there were moments this week, and sometimes maybe it was 15 minutes for you, sometimes half an hour, an hour, sometimes it was half day. Sometimes it was a creative block, sometimes it was just a relationship or a conversation you were in where you found yourself in a zone of flow. And before that zone, something happened that triggered you into the zone of flow. And then when you were in that zone of flow, something was happening that was magical and great that made you feel like you were engaged, like fully engaged, and that you were fully engaged in a positive mindset, willing to do something, willing to be present, willing to try. You were just in flow, and then something happened to take you out of that zone. Another trigger or another event or another moment that took you out of it. Right. Whenever we think about, like, a positive emotional range, I like to think, well, there were moments leading up to that, then there were the moments of that, and then there were moments after that. What led into that? What created the criteria that made it good? And then what was a thing that broke that state or broke that flow? Broke that zone, if you will. That's how I like to think about my week. I don't just go, okay, what good meetings did I have today? What went well? No, I think, okay, what were the zones of flow? Where were the moments in time this week where I was just in that zone of flow? And I break that down. And so you might open up your journal and really think about this and just try to capture, okay, my zones of flow, what was going on for me, what was happening at that moment. But for me, I really like to think about that. I mean, think about it. Has something come to your mind? Was there a specific meeting you just loved or a specific block of time where you were being creative? Or was there a specific time when you were with your family and it was just going so good? Capture those moments of flow and ask, what were the conditions that created that? What were the conditions that sustained it? What were the conditions that stopped that? You know why you want to do this? This is going to help over time. It's going to help you identify the areas that you are passionate about, the areas that bring authentic challenge and real, positive engagement. And you'll start to recognize, oh, wow, I can put myself in and out of these states by understanding the triggers into them. And something's magical. Like, for example, I was filling mine out this morning, and I noticed one of my favorite creative blocks of time this week. As I thought of my favorite moments of this week of flow, one of my most creative blocks of time was immediately preceded by a snack and a little walk up the hill nearby this house I'm staying at So I just had a snack, walked up the hill, came back and had this. Big breakthroughs. Okay, no doubt. But now I learned some conditions to get in that state of flow, didn't I? That zone of flow. Second zone I love for you to think about today are your zones of effort. Your zones of effort. You had times this week where you really brought. You did real work. Like you hunkered down. And maybe it wasn't flow, because sometimes a lot of people associate flow with just, you know, positivity, full engagement, your challenge. The world kind of disappears. And other times you're kind of grinding, you're just working. It's like, it's like hours of effort that you're just like, ah, trying to like, just make it happen. And where were those? How many did you have? Did you have enough zones of effort this week or did you get super distracted, which we'll talk about later? Did you find those moments where you just felt like, wow, I got so much done, right? The first zone, the zone of flow, is a state of being, a sense, a feeling of presence, and full engagement that we want to identify those magical moments. But effort is just, hey, there were blocks of time. You crushed it. You just got a lot done. And what was going on then? Had you scheduled that hour? Is that something you should do on a consistent basis? Did you just have a sudden burst of motivation or obligation to get that thing done? What was it that led to some of your best zones or moments of effort this week? What led into those moments of effort? Why we were able to sustain it, and what caused it to end? Third big idea is I'd love for you to think about those zones of distraction. You know, those times where you just like, you lost an hour. Is there any time this week where just it was like a time zone that disappeared into a black hole? It was just like an hour or two that went by. I mean, you opened up your Instagram, you screwed around on that, and then it was TikTok over there and then this message over here and. And then the kids came in over there and just like, oh my God, two hours went by and you're like, I had things to do today. Where did those distraction zones happen this week? Really think about it. Where did they happen? And again, what led into them, what sustained them and what ended it? So you got back to getting focused. This might sound like over tedious, I know, trust me. I've been in personal development a long time. And a lot of times people say, geez, Brian, this is a lot to Think through and a lot to do. And I'm like, yes, do the hard work of personal development. Yes. I'm not here to make it easy on anybody. I'm here to say, do the hard work of personal development. It's by really thinking through these. I had the blessing of working with a lot of Olympians in my career. And when they look back to a race, they break that race down at unbelievable levels of fine detail. They think about their thoughts getting up to that block. If they're a sprinter, they're thinking about what was how, you know, what they had eaten, what they had thought, how they stood at the blocks, how they felt themselves, arch in readiness. They think about who they saw, what was out their left and out their right ear when that gun went off to start. I mean, there's so many, like, every single first step, second step, third step, they can tell you how it felt on the left ball of their foot on that fourth step. And why. Because so many times in high performance in the past, they broke it down. They thought through what was going on. So I know you're like, oh, my God, I gotta break down now. My distractions, what went into em, why? The distraction lasted and seems tedious, but I'm like, yeah, and it's gonna make you world class. So be honest about those distractions. Last idea. Which is also no fun. Which is why I just gave you that pep talk, is because I'm gonna ask you about your zone of discouragement. Did you get discouraged anywhere this last week? Maybe you lost an hour. It wasn't really a distraction. It was just, you got bummed out, sad. You didn't feel like you were maintaining enough momentum or keeping up with the Joneses. You had someone hurt your feelings, and instead of going back to the project, you just kind of sat around. Who? Or maybe that's what led into that zone of distraction. A lot of people are led in zones of distraction, not by technology and those big bad guys in Silicon Valley distracting us, but because they were in a state of being already that was discouraged, and they would have taken anything that came along to get them out of that feeling. And so were there any moments or any zones of discouragement where you thought, ah, maybe tomorrow, or we thought, ah, I'll just give it up. Or maybe you thought you weren't good enough or you weren't earning it, or you weren't going to be capable, or you weren't like that other girl or like those people, and now that's why you don't feel like doing Anything. Those are important to break down too. This kind of gutsy self reflection helps you discover patterns. You know, a lot of people discover doing activities like this. Oh, every week I can think back when was I discouraged? What led to that? Oh, I was thinking this. Oh, I compared myself to that person. Oh, I was getting down on myself because these reasons and once, you know, you're like, oh, look at me. I have a pattern of saying these things to myself in my brain, in my head, and that makes me feel bad and then I get distracted and that breaks me out of my flow. And that's why I don't feel like I'm getting enough, you know, hours of effort doing the thing I want to do. I mean, these things can all be connected, but at the end of the day, there are these triggering events, emotions, thoughts, feelings that lead us into these zones. And there's things that happen when we're in them and then things that take us out and we can use those for good. You can think about all the good ways to set yourself up for a zone of awesome, you know, and to maintain that zone of awesome love longer. I had one day this week. It was an entire day. I mean, it must have been, you know, it's definitely like a 10 or 13 hour zone of awesome. I was literally just, I couldn't believe it. It just was complete flow, high effort, just in the zone. And I did a lot of things to maintain that. I recharged throughout the time. I ate really well that day. Throughout the day I had tons of water. I had set up that day and really thought through the blocks of time. When I felt discouraged, I gave myself a little pep talk and went and did like 10 jumping jacks and 20 air squats and 15 push ups and then a bunch of stretching and I was back at it. There's something there, isn't it? You're developing your own routines by analyzing pre game, during game and post game. Makes sense, doesn't it? Finishing a day strong, being proud of yourself that you gave your all. Even if you didn't complete everything, even if not everything is perfect because you know, we're always in motion. But finish this. Stay strong, my friend. It's a great day to grow.