Increase Your Happiness Levels

Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the brendon show. These best of episodes feature training that I have done live, sometimes on online to tens of thousands of people or live on stage where I was speaking on some stages across the world. Or these might be some of my monthly training programs and highlights of those that I do every single month with our monthly students. So I know you're gonna really enjoy these because these are a little bit more of a deep dive look at some of my training as a personal and professional development trainer. You know, I focus so much on helping you find that deeper level of motivation and start practicing some of those high performance habits with. Well, you hear me talk about many of those concepts in these special episodes here. These are my best of trainings only and exclusively right here on the brendon show. So I hope you enjoyed them. Please note that as you hear me speak in many of these, you'll hear me reference something because sometimes I'll have been training live or on video or on stage or through a broadcast. So you might not be able to see something that I'm suggesting or motioning to or maybe even drawing out on a flip chart or motioning towards on a presentation, but you'll get the gist of it. So make sure you bust out your journal. Take some good notes here because this is really valuable insights on the mindset or the strategy that you need to adopt in order to improve your life. And if you want to go and get more content like this, but much more deeper and have more of an interactive relationship with me in this type of training, make sure you join our high performance monthly training program. That's our monthly subscription program where I go live with you and our high performance students every single month and I try on a new topic or a new piece of research that we've created from the high performance institute and I train on that and then I do q and a and actual live coaching, interactive coaching with people every single month. That's called high performance monthly and you can Access it at brendon.com monthly. That's brendon.com monthly B-R-E-N-O-N.com monthly to get deeper dive training similar to this. So if you like this, you would love that training program. But without further ado, let's jump in right now to one of the brendon show's best of trainings.

I think what's most important, the reason we work so hard to master Our psychology is so that we can be more happy. Anyone agree with that? How many feel like you could get much better at bringing the joy? Yeah, it's hard to bring the joy if you don't keep elevating your levels of happiness. And we all know from positive psychology that you can dramatically increase the happiness you experience in life. From simple things. Gratitude journals. From simple things, sharing with friends what's going well in your life. Simple things, taking a moment to be mindful of what worked today, what you've learned, what is going well. All these things are simple. We're going to take a little bit more advanced and deeper look into it. Because what we do know also about happiness is that there's usually your enduring state of happiness comes from the way in which you perceive your past, your present and the future. Right. Lots of people can be very happy in the moment now, but if they're unhappy or still hanging on to something in the past, it creates that baggage that it's hard to feel free in the moment to be happy. Right. Lots of people are excited about their future, but they're dreading today. So they don't feel alive, they're just not feeling it and they don't know why. So we're gonna do some activities today to help you work through each of these areas of your life. And then this becomes a checklist. Just like if you don't feel motivated, just like if you have bad habits, just like if you're struggling in your high performance, you come right back to this and go, what's going on with me? Especially for happiness, I wanna give you a framework to really work through. Because how many of you feel like at this stage of your life, you deserve a lot of happiness? You know, you've been through enough. So we've got the past, the present and the future. We're gonna work through through those today and hopefully give you a new, empowering way to look at your overall life. Because, look, happiness is ultimately an overall measure of our satisfaction, our joy, and our ranges of positive emotion. And you deserve more of it. Everyone in this room deserves more of it. But what happens, just like we talked about yesterday with your high performance, sometimes you don't get to experience more of it because just like your ambitions, you take your eye off it. You don't really think about it for a moment. You're just going through the motions through the day. And you go through the motions day. And then one day, you know, a week went by and two weeks went by and you're like, have I Been happy? Have I been enjoying life? I mean, most people do the majority of their deep work in the happiness on their birthdays, usually birthday end with a zero, and then on New Year's Eve. And that's about where they really gauge it. Some people who have more of a meditative practice or a spiritual practice or a religious practice, they might do a more close look at it on a recurring basis. For me, it's just one other part of my Sunday routines, right? I got about an hour of Sunday routine that I run every single Sunday to keep me on track. Just simple things that I'm looking at. Some of the things we've talked about here that I'm just scoring myself on to make sure I know where I'm at. Because I don't want the worst thing about the past, especially is yesterday also counted as the past. And so that if you rack up five or six bad yesterdays, it's very easy to be unhappy now. And for that unhappiness to stick, meaning happiness also has a momentum to it. How many of you ever had maybe just several months, or maybe even you were experienced several years and you were just happy, like you remember those times, with just real deep connection and fondness, like you just had a role. It was just a couple weeks or maybe a couple months, and it was just. You were almost like, man, I wonder when this streak is gonna end. It's so good. If you didn't experience it in the last couple years, where is that coming from for you? Because was there something causing that? Or was it like Viktor Frankl taught us with the concentration camps, that the last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose one's own attitude. Now, trust me, I know I border on the edge of being flippant. When you tell someone who hasn't had happiness in several years, it's your choice to experience some happiness. That sounds like you know a bad thing from someone to say, except we know it to be true. When you do an analysis of people who've suffered severe trauma and those who are able to regain their happiness, you find over and over and over again it wasn't that some new situation entered their life and gave them that happiness, because often they were still sick, often that person was still gone. Often they were still broke. Often things weren't great, but something inside switched to the meaning in which they were giving the journey. It didn't mean they weren't enduring difficulty. But how many of you did have a role of happiness in the last couple years or months? And yet you were still able to. To deal with a lot of struggle and trauma and difficulty, but you were still able to maintain the role, Meaning you had very difficult circumstances and you were still able to touch onto happiness. Anybody? Okay, so here's what I'd like to suggest. There's only two things I can do from a stage up here, because, remember, I'm not a psychiatrist. What I would suggest is if you had years of a run without a sense of happiness, you may need to go get professional support. You may need to go seek therapeutic support. You may have a condition biologically that is preventing you from experiencing the range of emotions that other people do. And in our society, we don't take that seriously enough. But also throughout lifetime, depression strikes so many people. And not just like, I have a bad day, like clinical depression. But I will suggest this. You got two routes. One, if you have not had that role of happiness for a while, number one, seek professional support. But number two, change your habits. You gotta change your mental thinking and the application of your energy to support that role. You can do happiness. Every area of my life. This is the most important metaphor that I've learned and I've sort of owned in my lifetime, and that is this. The power plant does not have energy. It generates energy. To be more accurate, one of my students actually taught me this. Brennan actually, generate is maybe not the exact term. I said, okay, tell me about that. He said, well, what a power plant actually does is it takes energy from one source, then it transforms that energy into another kind of energy. Then it transmits that energy, which is what you call generating the energy. That process of transformation to transmitting, I just call it generating energy. But that's what it's doing. So in the same way, we don't have happiness, we don't have joy, we don't even have energy. We are taking energy or just consuming it and letting it land on us. And we are transferring or transforming that energy into what we want to experience and transmit in the world. And that's why I said yesterday, we, we have to be responsible for the energy we bring into our families. Because guess what? They do, especially when they're young, they don't know this metaphor. So what do they do? They just take the energy that hits them. They don't yet have the tools to transform that energy and be who they want to be. They just take the energy. So when you get around people who are either unconscious or children, and sometimes it's the same, you really have to manage your energy, right? How many of you have ever Been in a negative mood and it completely set off somebody in a way you did not anticipate. Right. You know why that person did not have the tools to deal with your energy. How many of you ever been that person? Someone's energy completely set you off. Right. We've all been there. But the thing is, you gotta learn how to deal with that. When I was in college, I got certified as a peer counselor. And I focused specifically on peer mediation was my license. So I had peer mediation training. And it was the best thing I could ever get because it taught me that when you get around two people, they're gonna fight a lot. And I had to mediate those conflicts. But I'd have two people and I was an official permeator. So I was a court referred. So they would refer. I remember I'm at this time 20 years old, court referred. So I would get a couple that was married and going through divorce mediation. I'm a 20 year old kid, this is over 20 years ago. Look how young I must have looked, right? Oh my God. And they would come and they would scream at each other. They would just be like freaking out on each other and I got to deal with this. And I remember, I mean, my first two or three sessions I went to my advisor who was one of the great communication and conflict trainers in history. Bill Wilmot was my mentor and he wrote one of the most important books I ever read in that topic. I think it was called Artful mediation. And he said, Brendan, you gotta learn to just be Zen. When other people are fighting around you. Their energy is not your energy. Their energy is not your energy. You have to. He told me this phrase, I never heard it ever before. He said, you have to self will how you want to feel. You have to self will how you want to feel. And that was such a profound effect on a 20 year old kid. Cause at that point in my life, I still was a child, I was still consuming the energy of the world. And it could tip me off in one way or another because I especially, I grew up around a lot of anger. So just short fuses, bam. Short fuse, bam, you're smacked. Short fuse, bam, you're in a fight. Very short fuses. So that was what I had consumed and what I was trained to. So I would get angry fast, very fast. All throughout high school and all throughout college because I had martial arts training, I was in fights, constantly in fights. My friends and I, we would go out and sure enough, one of them would start a fight and then they come and Grab me to end it. You know, all throughout school, I mean, just tons and tons of fights me and I'm proud. I have not been in a fight since I was 21 years old. And the last fight I was in was just to end a fight that was happening that I could be of service in. That was it. That was it. And so. But I had fought a lot in my lifetime, right. I didn't want to do that anymore. And part of my journey was learning to deal with my own anger issues, my own energy. That wasn't right. And I knew it wasn't right. So you have to be very conscious of your energy and self will it. That's why I started teaching myself. I gotta learn to bring the joy. And I would say it over and over and over to myself. I'm like, look, if I'm gonna bring energy into a space, it's going to be joy or it's going to be love. And for me it's the same thing. So I wanted for me to make sure that no matter what I did, that was the energy I was gonna bring into space. So I started training myself on that with my phone triggers. I started training myself on that by just deciding, okay, every time I walk through a door, what's the feeling I want to bring into here? One of my doorway triggers. When I walk through a door, I say to myself, I am entering this room as a happy man ready to serve. I am entering this room as a happy man ready to serve. I've said that to myself tens of thousands of times every door I walk through. So I'm setting up a trigger cue for me to remind myself to be happy. Because if we don't remind ourselves to happy to be happy, we won't self will ourselves more often to be happy. Now some people say, well, this is just an affirmation. Stupid. I'm happy, I'm happy. Actually, it's not. It's something that we know from habitual training in behavioral sciences. Cue, trigger, reward. Cue, trigger, reward, over and over and over again. Ultimately, you set up that practice, it becomes a higher level of practice and mental discipline. So let's return to this conversation about happiness. If you have not had that role of happiness, get therapeutic support. But also at the same time start practices that will make you happier. And you have to teach your family to start practices to be your happier. It can be simple as a Friday night dinner where you say to the kids, what made you happy this week? You need to start giving the vocabulary of happy to your families. You have to start giving the vocabulary of happy to your teams. If your teams are never talking about what makes them happy, what kind of workplace is that to be in if you're not having conversations and dialogues? I say it to people all the time, Are you happy? How's it going? Are you happy? How's it going? I ask it all the time, are you happy? How's it going? Because by asking the question, I'm cueing it. Just like the doorway trigger. I enter this room as a happy man, ready to serve. And when I say I enter this room as a happy man ready to serve, it makes me more intentional. Makes me more what? And these little triggers that you set up in your life, it makes you more intentional. Like you. Those little reminders, they mean so much to us, we forget to do them. But your happiness is important. Your happiness is very important. Just like your self identity is important, Just like how you want to treat people, all of that is incredibly important. We just forget to set up those triggers. How many of you could do a better job setting up your life for some happiness at this stage of your life? So much of our happiness comes from whether or not we feel fulfilled, connected, joyous, happy about our past. So let's talk about it. We know from the research, in order to get somebody to be more happier, we have to release three levers about their past. Right? We've got to activate these three levers. It's like you pull all three levers. Usually people will look to the past and they'll be more satisfied and happy about where they've been, which will make them more happy in the moment too. So let's work through some of this stuff. Now, I'm not here to do any therapeutic action with all of you. I'm not a professional psychiatrist or psychologist. I'll keep saying that. I think it's really important. However, here's what it's very important for you to know. All work of professional therapy. All work of professional therapy where they go back into your childhood way deep, or back into last week's bad meeting with you, or back into how you felt yesterday. All outcome of professional therapy is ultimately to get the client back into the present moment to make healthier decisions and choices and have healthier relationships for themselves. Now, all therapy is to bring you back to now so that you can better make choices for yourself now that are healthier and right for you. Now that's what it's about. So for those who fear like therapy, no, it's about bringing you back to now. So you make better decisions for yourself. So even as I'm about to talk with you about your past, it's only so you can get back to today and then tomorrow, and then Saturday and Sunday and Monday and. And make better decisions for yourself. Cause you deserve more happiness. Is this true? Everyone say, I deserve more happiness. But I'll have to create it. I have to create it. Power plant doesn't have energy. It generates energy. That's why we must self will the feelings we want to experience more in life. And we have to train ourselves to do that. One way that I do that is with my Sunday review. I look back to the week and I pull that first leverage, that first lever of looking at the past is called acceptance. It's the hardest one, the most difficult one. If you had a bad week and you just bumble into the next week without processing that week, that stuff stores in you. It weighs on your heart. It weighs on your soul. None of my clients would I ever allow them to go into the next week without processing the previous week. So for me, part of my Sunday review is I sit down and I go, what happened this last week that I did not like that I must accept happened so I can release it and let it go. I ask that every Sunday what happened in this last week that I did not like, that I can accept that it did happen, release it and let it go. I do this every Sunday. Imagine how many things happen in my life, you know, serving this many millions of people around the world. A lot of stuff comes our way. I gotta release it. I gotta let it go. Acceptance doesn't mean you approve of it. Acceptance doesn't mean you wanted it to happen. It is just being an adult and saying it did happen. And now I choose to let it go. Acceptance means you don't give it weight emotionally anymore. That's what it really means. I think if you ever met or worked with spiritual leader, or specifically for me, getting to meet several times, the Dalai Lamas, I told you yesterday, I mean, he was walking on air because he has a practice. And one of his practices is letting things go. Like a big part of Eastern philosophies, including Buddhism or Daoism, are letting things go. It's being accepting of what happened, not approving of not okay with. Not like, okay, I'll find the perfect meaning. I'll take joy, right? Is it true? It's not. We all think one of the reasons people are scared of getting therapy is because they think, oh, they're gonna make me go back to that childhood Incident and say it's okay, I'm alright with it. And they're gonna make me define a positive meaning of it. That's not always true. It really was a difficult time. It was a bad thing. It was something you did not want to happen. And it's not just about going back and saying it was okay or now I can understand that other person's perspective. We fear that because we think, well, I'm never gonna understand that that person did that to me. And so it's okay for you to have had upset about that. It is okay for you to have defined that thing as a negative thing. That is absolutely okay. If something negative happened in your past, okay to say that was a negative thing. That's what an adult would do. It's like that was bad. I wish that didn't happen. It's also though important to make sure that it's not negative on you now. How many follow? That's the real difficulty of traumas and challenges of our past is to ensure they're not on us now. It happened then, it's not here now. It was gone yesterday and gone the day before too. That the negative circumstances of the past, they are no longer here unless we carry them here. That person might not even be in your life anymore, but are you still carrying them that situation that might have been gone 10 years ago or are you keeping it here because we've all heard it. This too shall pass. I love that saying, this too shall pass. But one of my favorite other sayings is that too did pass. We say this too shall pass to deal with the difficulties of this moment. Right? It's challenging right now. I know this too shall pass. But I think we also must tell ourselves that that too did pass as well. That's gone. I let it go. I am not gonna let that weigh down on me anymore. We all have something difficult in our lives. And to be really free, we gotta let those things go and accept them. Acceptance is it happened. I accept the reality that that happened. I didn't like it, didn't want it, wish it didn't happen. Don't understand it, don't approve of it. But you know what? It ain't gonna stop me now. Ain't gonna stop me now because now this is a new day. This is that fresh sheet of paper. This is what I really believe. Deep in my soul is one of the most important parts of my message. That every moment is a second chance. That every day is a new blank page. You got to wake up today and choose who you're going to be. You get to choose now how you're gonna feel. And I say if you get to choose how you're gonna feel, you should bring the. Yeah. If we all get to choose, if we have the power of choice, which I believe is the greatest gift from on, I free will. Come on. That's pretty amazing stuff, right? That's pretty incredible stuff. If we have any amount of choice in our life, choose good for ourselves. Choose to release the pains. Choose to embrace the beauties. Life suddenly changes. Choose to release the pains. Choose to embrace the beauties. Life changes. That's what we have to do. See, you might have been mad at your parents five years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 50 years ago. I don't care if they've changed, you change. I don't care if that situation changes. Change situation happened. You can't change it now. What you can change is now are you free?

All right, my friend. I hope that you enjoyed that best of episode. Was that inspiring? Were you fired up? Did you love it? If you did, make sure you do me a favor, go out on social media somewhere and share that episode. Just go out, post it somewhere, post yourself, listening to it. Make sure you hashtag the brendanshow because when you do that, I can look you up and we can find you on Instagram and post that in the social media. Sometimes we do all expense paid trips.

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We just randomly select people, we send them gifts, autograph books, swag T shirts, all expense paid trips to some of my seminars. So make sure you let us know, share what you thought about this episode out there on the social media worlds and then we can find you and celebrate you. And also I would love to invite you to join us in our high performance monthly program. So just go to Brendan.com monthly. That's Brendan.com monthly. That's where we do deeper dive trainings like you just heard. But we do that every single month.

And there's some live Q and A.

There and I do some giveaways and we give students in that monthly program tickets to my seminars and some extra special training on leadership. So make sure you check it out@brendon.com monthly. I appreciate you being part of this community of so many people dedicated to finding that deeper drive of motivation and practicing high performance performance habits so that they can become extraordinary in their careers. In your personal life, in your health, you can live an extraordinary quality of life and sometimes you just need a little bit more training and a little bit more nudge, a little more energy, a little bit more drive and consistency. And I'm hoping that being part of this community with the brendon show, I'm providing that to you in some way. So thank you, my friend, for listening. I look forward to seeing you or listening with you on the next episode of the b r e n d o n show.