How to Shift Your Life Toward Success

See, you can't push yourself. You can't challenge yourself. You can't rise to your full potential unless every day you have clear goals. And what ultimately are clear goals? Well, it's certainly not hope. It's that a clear goal means you have a deliverable, you have a deadline, and you have a disciplined time in which to achieve it. There's so much happening at this time of year that this is a moment where every day you enter the day more intentional. Every day you just say, okay, I'm coming into this day. I know what I want. I'm going to push myself forward. I'm going to complete all these things. I know it's the holidays, it's the end of the year. There's so much going on. Let me guide you through it. See, I know a lot of folks, they end up incredibly stressed this time of year because so much is happening. You know, they're trying to travel or see family or buy gifts or get ready for the holidays or just wrap up the year in a place that they're happy with, that they're proud of, that they feel like, you know, they've kind of crossed all the I's and dotted all the T's. They're just trying to figure out, oh, my gosh, how do I end this year in a good place? But so often they lose themselves already at the beginning of the day. There's not enough clarity at the beginning of each day that sets them up for a week of success. And every day you have to have that clarity touch point. Because, see, you can't push yourself, you can't challenge yourself. You can't rise to your full potential unless every day you have clear goals. And what ultimately are clear goals? Well, it's certainly not hope. It's that a clear goal means you have a deliverable, you have a deadline, and you have a disciplined time in which to achieve it. You have a clear deliverable. It says a goal is, I'm going to deliver this thing. That's like a task, right? It's like, this is the thing that I desire. But we have to make it tangible. Not just an idea, not just a feeling, but something tangible. There's an output. Output. There's an outcome, something we're going to create. We got to give it a deadline. And once we have those two things, we actually have something that's sort of concrete. And then most importantly, a disciplined schedule in which we know we're going to do it. Lots of people say, I have a goal, Brendan, to write a book. Like you have. I'm like, well, I've written six. One. Because the deliverable is so incredibly clear. I know what it is. It's tangible. It's a book. And it's 12 chapters. It's under 400 pages. Let's go. It's a deadline. I know I have to deliver that deadline by so and so quarter. It must be done on this specific day as a first draft. It must be done on this specific day as a second draft. It must be done on this specific day, delivered to the agent. It must be done. And all the deadlines line up. And then the discipline schedule. Great. I will write every morning for at least two hours. Now, you might say that's crazy, Brendan. Well, I'm a full time. Like, this is what I do full time. I'm a writer, I'm a coach, I'm an online trainer. This is what I do in my influencer career. So I'm going to set up significant blocks of time to achieve my primary goals. What else do you have to do to push to achieve your potential to end this year strong? Well, obviously, those deliverables and those deadlines and those disciplined schedules, and then this week you just got to win at the boundaries game. You gotta set great boundaries with others who keep pushing in, who don't realize what's on your plate, who always want more from you, and they're totally oblivious to all the things you juggle. That's normal. Sometimes you get upset about that. You think, oh, my gosh, these people should know. No, they don't. I don't expect anybody in this entire world to have any understanding of what's on my shoulders. Nobody at all. That's between me and God. It doesn't mean I don't clearly communicate. It doesn't mean I don't share my pain or my struggles. It doesn't mean I don't delegate. What it means is I don't expect everybody to know what's on my plate, because who put that plate there? Me. You ever go to dinner and you're at a friend's house and you know you got a whole plate of food there. You don't have to explain everything on your plate to everybody there. You ever gone to a buffet and you go out with a friend who's at a buffet and they fill up their plate and then they come back and they gotta tell you about everything on their plate, why they chose it, why they like it, their childhood memories of that particular dish or food, and they just go on and on and on. About everything on their plate. Now, I'm being a little facetious here, but you get the idea. Do we really need to know? It doesn't mean that you can't, I guess, clearly communicate, but what I'm saying is you're the person in charge of the boundaries. You don't get mad when other people break them. 90% of the time, they have no idea they're breaking a boundary 90% of the time, unless you've clearly communicated, had the difficult conversations, and really walked through what's going on and in your life. So what do I mean by boundaries? I mean you've got to be the warrior at the gates of your attention. You've got to be the controller of your schedule. You've got to be the person who sets a boundary on yourself of how much time you allow for social media or Netflix. You got to be the person who sets all the boundaries. And that's hard to do. And most people miss their mark, fail to end the year strong and feel frustrated week over week, month over month, and quarter after quarter. Because they just won't say no. Because they won't say, I'm sorry, my plate is full of other projects and priorities that have been scheduled for weeks or months. I can't possibly finish it in. I hope you'll understand. Be well. They just won't say no. And they won't say no to themselves. You know, they feel that they know. They actually are very conscious of their distraction. Most people think that distractions are unconscious. The reality is almost always, you know, you're about to enter the death zone of distraction. You're like, ooh, one more episode. I really shouldn't. I should get back to work. Oh, that's what happens. You have to be the controller of the gate says, nope. You had to smack your own hand and go, nope. You know what? Yeah, I know, I know. I could easily jump into this, you know, this. This very, very, very long string of swiping through a million tiktoks. But right now, I have things to do. There's a close of year coming. I got to be on my A game for myself, for my teams, for my family. I got to set some boundaries here. Let me get back at it. But hey, don't let me take away all the fun here. I think for me, one of the things I've learned about the highest performing people in the world is that they don't just honor the struggle, which is a concept I teach about a lot. And you probably read about it in high performance habits. But they actually take joy in the struggle. They don't get discouraged when they struggle. They actually look forward to it because it's going to be the thing that's going to challenge them. Like, for me, the end of the year is like, here we go, let's go. There's no way in my mind sometimes I think I can do it all by the end of the year. But every day I enter that day with a good attitude and I go, all right, this is going to be fun. Let's see what I got. Let's see how good I am. Let me see if I can show up. Let me see if I can best my personal record of what I can do today. And don't worry, I'm not someone here saying you have to work, work, work through the holidays. I'm actually here to share with you that if you get your goals right and your boundaries right and you can take joy in the struggles of trying to coordinate a lot of things, do a lot of things, achieve a lot of things, then you actually end up with more time. See, that's a beautiful thing about discipline. Discipline always ends up giving you more time. People want more free time and they realize, oh, the secret to more free time is actually more clear goals, deliverables, deadlines, disciplined schedules, better boundaries. And then realizing that almost everything you do could, could be perceived and felt a little bit like free time. If you could find that conscientiousness in the moment to be present, to be self aware, to be grateful and to be in flow with what you're doing, even if it's difficult or tedious. There's lots of things I got to do by the end of this year for some huge announcements coming to the Growth Day community in the new year. Just monster new feature releases, monster new efforts and partnerships and schedules and amazing things and so much also going on in my personal life that I'll share later. All of that, all of that to me is a gift. I love it. I love being in motion. I love that effort to reach full potential. And I know if you are relating with this, you're a leader out there. And if you're not relating with this, please, maybe there is a place you could set up some more boundaries in your life so that you can do the things you want to do this month as well, so that you can have a little bit of time to do the important things in your life this time of year. Yes, family, friends, travel, holiday spirit, gift giving, all the goodness of being around people that you love or serving others or Being generous this time of year, I love that stuff. That's why I'm so focused. I'm so focused right now. Let's be focused. Let's have clarity. Let's go into the week strong with goals, boundaries and joy. And I tell you what, this could be a remarkable week. The best injection I believe we can give anybody is self improvement. You know, help somebody improve their life. There is fuel in that, there is strength in that. There is something that creates, you know, so much, so much goodness. I really believe that giving the gift of personal development is the greatest thing. Clearly, that's what I try to do every day for you guys. All we're trying to do right here is serve this mission of bringing personal development to the world. All we're trying to do is inspire each and every single individual to make self improvement a way of life. Because if we do that, we not only change their life, we change their family lives, their friends lives, their team's lives, and we change the society and the world. One person at a time, one self improvement spark at a time. Let's be the persons who spread the holiday spirit of self improvement so that everyone can have a remarkable next year. Let's be that spark. Let's do that. Work together. Today I'd like to share four of those personal life decisions I told you about. The first personal life decision that was critical to me was simply deciding that intentional living was important to me. I know that sounds kind of basic and almost silly as I say it, but when I was a young man, I was an unhappy person. And after my car accident, I realized I had no idea how to live or love or matter. I had no real direction each day. I mean, I kind of just went through the motions each day. I went to the classes I was supposed to go to. I had a job I had to go to to pay the bills and buy some food and pay for tuition in college. I just. I don't know that I was an intentional person yet. And so I was reactive, I was angry. I was conditioned to believe who I was or what I was capable of. And I didn't really know what to do each day. You know, I didn't have the intention of. Oh, let me develop clarity of who I really am. Let me develop clarity of how I want to treat people. Let me develop clarity about the skills I'm trying to build. Let me develop clarity about how I want to deliver the services that I'm going to provide to the world so that I'm on my calling or in a Passion or following a purpose. I just didn't have intention guiding me. And I think that's what the car accident gave me. A big knock in the head and say, hey, kid, life is short, life is precious. So get really intentional about who you are. And that's going to be a lifelong effort. You're always going to have to be examining yourself because conditions change, times change, you get older, family changes, career changes, health changes. You always have to ask, who am I now? What do I want of life now? And live each day intentionally to bring the energy that you desire into that day. And those were big decisions in my life. Second big life decision for me was the idea that I had to invest in growth education. And what I mean by that is I just put, you know, kind of quotation marks around that growth education phrase. It just means that I knew I was going to have to study personal development, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, behavioral economics, spirituality, if I was ever going to get anywhere. Because I didn't have the education for self mastery in my high school. I didn't have the education for self mastery in my immediate community or friends. I did not have that path to self mastery, kind of just with anybody I knew. I mean, I had role models in my parents and maybe two teachers at school and one friend's father who actually believed in me. But I knew that I'd have to go read stories of great people, so I'd have to read some biographies. I knew that I didn't know how to control my emotions. I was an angry young man, so I had to read books about that. I knew I didn't know how to communicate with people. I was awkward, so I had to read books on communication. I call that growth education. You have to invest in yourself, and you cannot play small in that area. Like be a major investor in your life. You should be the primary investor in your life, and your primary investment should always be in your development. I know people who spend more on bed sheets each year than they do on developing their mind into a tapestry of great thoughts, powerful and positive thinking. I know so many people who spend more on the most trivial things, knickknacks that mean nothing two years from now. But if they'd taken a course or gotten a coach or gotten a mentor, it would have shaped their next 20 years of abundance and power and greatness and ability to serve and lead and contribute. I'm very passionate about this topic. You must invest in your personal development, period. You know, you read about the founding fathers of the United States of America as an example Deeply steeped in what we would call growth education, most of them had purchased libraries themselves. And those libraries were usually older texts, often in Latin, often from the Greek or the sort of the Roman Empire era. They were learning from Stoicism, they were learning from Christianity, they were learning from great works, even eastern cultures, trying to understand how the world of thought, philosophy had developed. They were working on themselves, constantly investing. Their proudest things were their books and their libraries. Today, the proudest thing I got, when I get to be around people, they're like, what's an app? You're like, I open my phone, I show them growth day. I'm like, check this out. This is how I'm a happy person. And they're like, wait, what? I mean, yeah, I'm continually. If I'm on my phone, I'm not in social media. I tend to be on growth day or in podcasts. That's about it. Because I really believe we have to have that intentional living and to go to another level, we have to invest in ourselves. I remember the first personal development thing I ever bought was books. Bought a whole bunch of books, like six or seven books. And then the next thing I bought was a bunch of audiobooks. They back then were called tapes and CDs. And then one of the first major things I ever put on a clip credit card was to go to a seminar, a personal development seminar. And my dad actually had to put the other half of it on his credit card and sent me down and it to just to learn from a conference that was happening with a bunch of motivational speakers. Totally changed my life. Third thing, inspired action. I decided to act each day from a place that was not just intentional, but also, I think, in alignment with the best of who I was, in alignment with my passions, a purpose, a calling. But I adopted this phrase, take the next right action of integrity. Take the next right action of integrity. That's what I call inspired action. It's, you're going to take that next action and you're going to do it in alignment with the best of who you are, with your ideals, with your values, with the beliefs that support something positive in life, with a morality in who you are. And that was important. I said, you know what? I don't want to just have an intention to be great going through the day or going through the, you know, have an intention to make me make money one day. It was like, no, I want to be proud of myself. I want to be congruent with the best of who I am and go to bed at night and put my head on the pillow and be like, that was me today that showed up. That was the best of me that showed up. And if it wasn't, let me do the reflection of how could I have been better without the self hatred, without regret, without guilt, without shame. Just to kind of observe how I was going through through the day and asking, is that the best Brennan showing up? And if it's not, coach myself. You know, really coach myself. And I think that was important. I suppose the last great big life decision for me at this stage of my life is you guys. It's a different type of investment. It was for me investing in building something that would have a ripple effect beyond myself. And I don't know how to describe that one exactly, but I hope that whatever you're creating in life and whatever you're building or architecting or working hard towards building your family, creating your art, seeking to leave a legacy, I think that all of those things are all about how can we leave things better than we found them? How can we leave a ripple effect of goodness into our family, through our teams, through our art or our creations? How can we leave that ripple effect of goodness? That's the things that made the difference for me. I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope you crush it this week. Let's go. You, you know and I know it's a great day to grow.