How to Win the Morning

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Hey, my friends, it's Brendan Burchard. And welcome to the Brendan Show. This is a podcast about helping you reach high performance in your life, in every area of your life. It's about staying more motivated, more confident, more disciplined and on purpose. You know, the high performance experience is really about feeling more vibrant, more connected, more excellent, more fulfilled in your life. But it's also challenging you because you and I both know it's difficult to reach those levels of high performance without support, without ongoing commitment and dedication to your own personal development. So welcome to our HPX community. Thank you for joining us here on the Brendon Show. I'm super pumped for today's episode. Before we begin, I want to let you know that we have specials right now on our HPX nutrition line. If you didn't know it, I rolled out three specific products to help you with your performance. These are three specific supplements that will.

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You have to win the morning with the right questions. High performers ask themselves questions in the mornings. It's how they orient themselves towards the day. And it's not just the basics of like, what am I going to do today? You know, it's a little bit more precise. When we get in their psyche and ask them, what are you really thinking in the morning? What do you journal? You know, we made them journal as an example in the morning to find out what are they writing about or thinking about. I mean, it's really precise. I'm gonna give you the questions that you might start asking in the morning. Maybe you already have some. Maybe you ask, what am I grateful for? Awesome. Maybe you ask, what's the main thing I should focus on today? Great. I'm gonna give you a set of questions that I encourage you to start asking tomorrow morning so that this becomes a very tactical training. Like, literally tomorrow morning, I want you to start asking yourselves these questions. If you'll do that, you'll start noticing that you orient yourself to the day better, because high performers win the day. Now I'm going to talk about the questions as one of the main habits here. These questions, if you'll ask yourself that, you'll get more focused. For example, one question you might ask. The outputs that matter most for me to get done today are the outputs. What is an output? An output is an artifact of your productivity. It's an artifact of your productivity. It means if you worked all day and I showed up to your house, you could point at something that you created or produced or did today. It's not just, well, I ran errands. Running errands is not an output. Running errands is an activity. An output is you made something, you created something. Something physical, tangible, or. Yeah, it can be digital. I mean, it could be, you know, hey, Brendan, here's a podcast I recorded today.

Great.

Good job on the output. Nice work. Or you could say, hey, Brendan, I created a presentation today. Great, Brendan, I wrote my sales script today. Great, Brendan, I made this thing for the kids today. Great. But an output that I can see, right? That's why we call it an artifact. Like archaeologists, when they go to study, like, tribes or cultures, and they look at the things that they created, the things that we create reveal what was important to us. It reveals what our lives were about. You know, it's why, you know, if I show up at your house and I look around your house and the way you've set your house up and the way you've designed it and the things that you've done there tells me a lot about you. A lot. And so if I can just pay close attention to. To those things, I can start to discern something about you, well, what would I learn about you with what you've created over the last five days? What is demonstrably important to you because you created that output? And if you don't come up with an answer pretty quick, you've probably been sucked into a world of reaction and distraction. And I say that with all due respect, but with certain accuracy, because I've been blessed now to coach and train and work with and interview some of the most extraordinary people on the planet. And when I ask them that question, they got a pretty ready reply. I created these specific things. I did that. And you ask them why, and they go, because it really matters. That's what my job is. That's what I need to do. So what outputs have you created? And if you don't know the answer, it's probably because you're not starting your morning with that focus. What do I need to create by the end of the day? What do I need to create that will really matter? Again, I don't know what that is for you, but you need to know what that is for you. For some of you, that's a widget, because you create things, you're a craftsman. For some of you, you're a thought leader. So that's a presentation, a podcast, a blog post, an article. For some of you, you're a leader. So you created some new. For you, your output is. Might have been new expectations or documentation. What you might have created in your output might have been that team meeting that's tangible that you can tell me about. You created that, and these messages were communicated there. I don't know what the output is for you, but if you're not aware of the critical outputs that will move your career forward, that will advance your artistry, your craft, your sense of fulfillment or achievement, then you're living a life of reaction. And I say that with respect because I've been there. I mean, I remember when I started this career trying to be a thought leader. I mean, I was doing everything. I mean, I just. I was doing all these tasks and activities and I never had the guts to ask, does that. Does that matter? Does it matter? So what are the outputs that matter for you to advance your career? And if you're not focusing on those, as we're going to talk a lot about today, then it's going to be difficult to help you achieve more. That's why I want you to start in your morning right with that one. What's the output that matters? Now, again, I'm talking right here about productivity basics. Some of you are like, but Brendon, you're the grateful guy. How come you're not saying wake up and drink some water and go stretch for 20 minutes and meditate for things you're happy about for 20 minutes. Hey man, get on with your bad self and go ahead and do that too. I'm just giving you one habit that you would add to your morning with asking your morning ritual of routines of asking great questions. You can do all that too. But Brendan, what about my avocado toast? Do it, man. Hey, it's fine. This is just one new habit you can add. Okay? You can have lots of other things. I'm just trying to give you the ones that we know really help focus you towards productivity. Number two, the five major moves that would help me progress swiftly toward accomplishing my dream are and something I can do to move towards one of those today is I think it's really important. And this is a big topic of high performance habits is knowing our five major moves. And this wasn't something cute I came up with. It came from our structured interviews with high performers. And when I was trying to understand how they project planned or how they got so much more done than other people and I dug into their psyche here, they tended to see out about five major moves. Not like everyone wakes up and does a checklist, right? Like what do I got to do today? You prioritize. You write down the activities. That's good. But what they're doing is they're thinking like in leaps. Okay, the next thing I need to do over this next 90 days is this. That's move one. Then I got to do this. That's move two. Then this move three. Typically I found there was about five I rarely found. People looked out way beyond that or shorter than that. It was like they were zoomed in on five major moves. Not tasks, not activities, not the day's priority, but like they thought of.

Think about it as like if you.

Had five major projects to get something done right, what would those major activities be? Those major projects be to accomplish the big dream. I'll give you an example. Five moves for me, publishing a best selling book. If I want to publish a best selling book, there's lots of things I could do today.

I could do some research here.

I could read a bunch of other things about how to write. I could call my friends. I could poll my readers about what.

They want to hear.

All those little tasks and activities that could all be just a jumbled hot mess of things. Or I can strategically figure out what are the five major necessary moves that would get me to a best selling book? As an example. And I'd have to discern what are those major moves and what are they not. For example, many of the things that you would think about like oh, well, I would have to do a book tour or I would have to get major media or I would have to get a fancy person to endorse my book or someone to write my foreword or I would have to appear on a national morning show. I've had three New York Times best selling books and advised hundreds of people become New York Times bestsellers. They didn't do any of those. So those aren't the major moves, those are things. But you could do it without those things. What are things you have to do? Well, major move number one, finish writing great book. Major move number two, decide whether or not to work with an agent and a major publishing house which would say write proposal or self publish. Okay, discern how to self publish and set up the schedule for that. Major move number three, finish book. Get it out to promotional partners and other people who can help me promote this. Major move number four, be collecting and be putting tons of free stuff out there to collect tons of emails. Because emails will be critical to, to the success of the accomplishment of a book that I made happen into a bestseller versus like, well, I got lucky. Because you don't want to hope that you get lucky in your major moves. You want to discern strategically. What can you control to make that thing happen? Right, to make that thing happen. Number five, do a proper launch for that book, meaning an online marketing launch. These days, that's what it's about. And now under each of those major moves I can figure out tasks, activities, details, deadlines, delegation. But if I don't know the five major moves, I'm just juggling tasks. So every morning I force myself to ask, what are the major moves that are going to move me towards my most relevant dream right now? Okay, what could I do today to move towards that? In other words, every morning there's a sense of strategic thinking about what it's going to take to achieve what I'm after. Does that make sense? If you begin the morning without strategic thinking, then you're just reactive thinking and you'll get pulled more easily into other people's dilemmas and agendas. You'll get pulled into distraction faster, you'll struggle and you know that to be true. So I need you to focus each and every single morning right into. Okay, what are my strategic moves right Now. And if you keep going too many mornings without being strategic in your thinking, you'll just end up, like, busy but exhausted and frustrated. I mean, how many of you ever related with that? Like, you were doing so much and then one day you thought, oh, my gosh, I'm doing a lot of things, but they're not moving the needle for me forward. That's because in the morning, you probably weren't orienting yourself towards a question like this.

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Number three. I need to avoid distractions today because. Meaning you need to tell yourself psychologically, why am I going to avoid distractions today? Today, distractions are so paralyzing for people's progress, but they kind of hope that they get through the day and they avoid them. You know, if you say, are you trying to avoid distractions? Oh, yeah, how are you doing it? Well, what do you mean? Are you trying to avoid distractions today? Oh, yeah. How?

Well, I don't look at my phone.

I mean, they have no strategies for avoiding distraction. You need to have a lot of routines and strategies in place to avoid distraction. And you won't do that if you're not motivated to avoid distraction. So in the morning, every day, I tell myself, okay, And I learned this from a high performer. So I'm not like, hey, look at me. I learned this. I was like, okay, why is it important for me to avoid distraction today? Oh, because today I have this livecast that thousands of people are going to be on and they need me to be at my best and I gotta get all these things in. I need to create these specific outputs. I need to be really focused and dialed in and accurate. I can't look at this, all these things, okay? And then I ask myself, and some possible distractions could be, oh, here's what's going to be possible. Distractions. Lots of people are going to be texting me about this thing. Lots of affiliates will Want that. Lots of the media want this. My team will ask that. My parents, my friends, my siblings, other people will be asked. Like, I prepare for the distractions of the day. Does that make sense? Like, if you're going to go in an office today, what distractions might you face in that office? Are you ready for them? Are they going to win? Are you going to win? If you don't consciously think in the morning, what's going to distract me today? You lose. You lose. What's going to distract me today? Oh, these things. Why am I going to avoid those distractions? Oh, because this is where I need to go. Now, I know this might be more detailed than you were thinking I would be delivering today, but I just. I'm amazed how many people don't think of this one simple thing. What will distract me today? How will I overcome it? Number four, the number one strength or skill I want to demonstrate today so that I crush it is the number one skill that I want to demonstrate today or strength that I want to demonstrate today. Right? Because it's different, right? There's different things. Like for me, I got to demonstrate different things on a broadcast like this than I might when I'm on a stage or when I'm on the radio or when I'm with my team or with a client or with a prospect. Very different. So what I do is I think about, okay, what's coming today. Okay? And early in the morning, I'm putting in my brain, oh, I'm going to demonstrate this skill in that meeting today. I'm going to demonstrate this strength in that performance today. Oh, I'm going to demonstrate this strength in this conversation with this person. This is priming myself so that I'm going to do excellent in upcoming situations because I'm actually thinking through them in advance. Huge difference maker, right? Huge difference maker. I want you to identify that in the morning. Okay? Today, when I'm dropping the kids off at school and all hell is breaking loose for me, my strength that I'm going to exhibit is that I am the calm, cool mom. And no matter what they do, they're not going to throw me off. They just won't. I'm going to be calm, cool mom today. That self talk, as you'll learn later, can change your life, change your relationships with people, make you perform better in everything that you're doing. So how you been doing with that in the morning? Have you been really thinking about what you're going to exhibit in certain activities? I'm going to go and work Today. Okay, I'm going to go and work today. There's going to be a lot of distractions. But you know what I'm going to show today? I'm going to demonstrate the strength that I have of paying attention to details. Today it's about the details. That's my skill. That's my strength. I'm going to zero in on the details because right now I'm reviewing a lot of things. That's the self talk I'm talking about. You won't do that self talk unless you're cued. These questions are just cues for your excellence. They're just questions that cue your higher levels of performance. And I know you might go, duh, Brendon, I've been, you know, I ready myself in the morning all the time. But my question is, are you following these distinctions? It's these distinctions that made the difference for people. Remember, they had other things they do. Like lots of high performers do yoga, but lots don't. Lots of them have a morning routine that's built on physical activity or meditation or making that perfect shake with the avocado and the chia seeds and they got the blueberries in there and that perfect vanilla flavoring thingy that they like. Hey. But lots of people don't. The highest performers, though, are actively consciously sort of revving up their pre game by asking questions like this. And number five, someone I can ask for help today is. And my ask of them is this was a big one. I didn't know this until all the interviews were going on. How much high performers are thinking about asking for help. And they think about asking for help not just in the moment. That's what most of us do. I was guilty of this too. I would just kind of go into my situations or go into my meetings or go on to some project and if I got stuck, I would ask for help. You know what? If you're only thinking about asking for help when you get stuck, you're too late and you don't even know you're behind. It's so funny. What the top 15% were doing was they were proactively thinking of what they were going to ask for help well before they needed it. I don't just mean help as in like delegation. Like I'm going to need help with that project. They did that too, but they were much more strategic. Maybe because they were thinking of their five moves. They were thinking of who do I need to reach out to today for some help in this area? Who's an expert, a mentor, somebody who's been there and done that, that can support me. I mean, they're very strategic about it. I was surprised how important that was. So what would your morning be like if you just started winning in the morning? Because a lot of people, they wake up and their first thing in the morning is, like, coffee. First thing in the morning is. They're like, well, I got to organize the kids. I got to organize, you know, the lunches. I got to organize myself to get outside the house. And we're like, if you could just take a beat, this could literally take you 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 4 minutes, just sitting down and thinking about the questions. But this will make you more productive because think about what happens when you don't do these things. This is where the power of this comes in. You might have been like, yeah, yeah, Brendan, I know it. But just be careful. Never be a yeah, yeah person. You know, a person who's like, yeah, yeah, I've heard that before. Because it's not. Common sense is not always common practice. How many mornings are over the last 90 days did you start really focus on identifying the outputs that mattered that specific day? How many days did you strategically start your morning thinking about those five major moves coming up in the next couple weeks or a couple months? How many days did you proactively say, this is what's going to distract me. These are the reasons I can't get distracted, and here's what I'll do when that distraction comes up. How many days did you decide in advance? This is the strength, this is the skill that I'm going to focus on? And how many days did you proactively think of who you could ask for help to further help you grow, to help you advance even faster? This is a simple thing. I know it's basic, but if you could win the morning with the right questions, you win the day, you win the day, you win the week. You win the week, you win the month. You win the month, you win the quarter. You win the quarter, you win the year, you win the year. You're on a roll, baby. So start a new habit. Would you do that? Whatever your basic routine is, ask these specific questions. I know I've hit on it very long in this opener for you, but I just found how many people have a horrible morning mentally, right, they might be doing all the right thing. The good shake, the good workout, which I hope you're doing those things, too. The big drink of water, which I have to take, make sure you do that. It's what helps you get Ahead. All right.

Hey, it's Brendan. I hope you enjoyed that episode and I hope it helped you reach another level of hyper performance in your life, whether it's just a shift in your mindset or shift in your habits or a shift in your intention for the day. I really honor you for listening to the Brendon show and I'm deeply thankful. So could you do me a favor? Could you just go onto itunes or Apple podcasts and rate and review this episode or any of our episodes? And also while you're there to help.

Me, just download the last five episodes.

Onto your phone because you know, Apple really cares about the downloads and the rating and reviews, and I've never really asked for that in six years of podcasting. And finally my friends convinced me to ask you to do that for me. I've never asked anything on my podcast community ever, but I really, really appreciate if you could do that. Also, if you would like some more in depth training, please don't forget that every single month I go live for two hours and teach new and original personal development research new frameworks to my entire virtual community in our HPX coaching program. And you can just go to hpxcoaching.com that's hpxcoaching.com to learn all about the different options there. But listen, I'm live two hours every single month with literally thousands of high achievers from around the world who tune in to get these new frameworks for reaching high performance in their life. Sometimes we talk about relationships. Sometimes we talk about breaking bad habits. Sometimes we talk about achieving another level of confidence or discipline or goal attainment. But we are there every single month. And I'd love for you to join us. Just go to hpxcoaching.com to see all of your options and really join us. Dedicate yourself to personal mastery. Dedicate yourself to this journey, not just once in a while with an episode.

Here or there or a book there.

But literally a program that could change your Life. It's called HPX Coaching and you can go to hpxcoaching.com until next time, my friends, please remember every single day you can choose to be average or ordinary or just kind of go through the motions, or you can be more intentional, more disciplined, more excellence driven what you do, because you know you need to serve those you love and those that you lead. You can choose to be extraordinary. So my friends, go out there today and be extraordinary.