It's Time to Develop Mental Resilience

See, if you just show up each day and you live in reaction, you tend to feel terrible. But that's what most people do. They just show up in the day. Oh, let me see what emails came in. Oh, let me compare myself to all these people on social media. Oh, let me look at all these haters and obsess about them. Oh, let me fight. Oh, let me deal with this. Another emergency and this. And they're just taking life in a reactive way so they feel terrible. That's not emotionally intelligent way to approach life. You know, if you've ever been with me, that power of intention we're always talking about, right? That to be a person who has intention for how we want to experience life. I need you to develop greater vision again. Hey, everybody, it's Brendan. Hi, all. Hi. All right. Hello, everybody. Listen, we've got people from all around the world today. Hi, everybody. I'm Brendon Burchard, and it is my great joy and my great honor to be with you here today to dedicate yourself to personal development, to personal growth, to dedicate yourself to growing into your full potential, to being the best leader that you can be. To being the person who you know in your heart you are destined to be. That strong, capable, caring, empathetic, compassionate, creative leader who not only leads your family, not only leads other people, but you lead yourself. You know, this is an incredibly exciting session today. We're gonna take on advanced emotional intelligence, and we're doing it in a way you've never done before. So get ready for an awesome session. Can I get a round of applause and one of these things like, who's excited for today? Obviously, I'm excited. I wish I could be there with you to give you double high fives and big hugs. So our way of doing that virtually is for you to participate today. Your personal growth matters more now than ever. You know how hard of a year this has been? So really tune in. Get engaged right here. Like, be here today. Participate. Bust out your journal. Get ready to take some serious notes. This is a. This is a day of self mastery for you. This is the day you get to set your intention for the month. This is the day that you get to set your goals for the month, realize what you need to overcome, get some support and help with the worldwide community of people who care about you succeeding. This is an important day, growth day, and we're here together. So please make sure you bust out your journal to take some specific notes on this. Okay, who's excited for today? Give me a round of applause. Let's get going. Let's get going. All right. I can't tell you how excited I am for this session because I just think this is so needed right now. I just think this is so needed right now. So many people, including myself, have really struggled this year. You know, this has been a tough year, a challenging year. So much chaos and turbulence. And just think for a minute how often the stress of overwhelmed you this year. How many times, you know, your anger or your outrage kind of overcame you and you just weren't able to focus. You weren't able to get things done. You weren't your best with your spouse or your peer or your co worker or the people that you lead. It's been a hard year. And why has it been so hard? Because change is new? Because chaos is new. Because concerns are new? Well, no, it's because it's brought up so much emotions so many times that at some point those waves of emotions can knock us off our feet. So today is not just some kind of like touchy feely conversations about emotions. Today is advanced emotional intelligence. I'm going to go beyond the basics of research to share with you what I have learned in coaching some of the most extraordinary people in the world. I'll share with you how I personally do deal with a lot of the struggles emotionally that come up for all of us as we're trying to lead and serve, express ourselves, make our differences, build our businesses and take care of our teams and our families. It's a big session today as we're going through this. Write down a ton of notes because I'm going to give you multiple frameworks today on emotional intelligence. I mean, because if you know one emotion that I'm always after, it's how do we bring the joy? How do we make our life experience joyful, fulfilling, connected, vibrant? That's what today is going to help you achieve. So I'm going to begin right now on this topic of advanced emotional intelligence. I want you to make sure you write the date in your journal or in your piece of paper or in your napkin, wherever you're writing. Okay? I want you to write the date. I want you to write advanced emotional intelligence because this is going to be changing day for how you manage your emotions, the emotions of other people, and how you really sense and feel this life. I'm going to begin with just a few points about why I believe most people don't have more emotional intelligence and why this topic isn't more valued in not only, you know, the greater world. Or our educational system or our political system, or, you know, in some of our organizations around the world, or even some of our teams and some of our families. But I really believe that comes from just a few ideas here. Number one is the unfortunate reality that a lot of people think emotional intelligence is a, you know, touchy feely, you know, over sharing, you know, sense of vulnerable, weakness stuff. And they don't realize emotional intelligence is the secret to better decision making and better influence. It is the secret to overall mental health. It's the secret to mental strength, mental toughness, mental resilience. You want to be awesome in life and feel awesome. You want to care for others and set the tone and the energy of your culture or those that you lead and you serve. You need emotional intelligence. Because emotional intelligence isn't just about how I feel. It's about tapping into a deeper understanding of what's happening in your biological system, what's happening neurobiologically and what's happening in the social environment so that you have greater mastery of it. Not just to be aware of your feelings, which is absolutely critical, but also to know the difference between emotions and feelings. To also know the difference of when someone is sad versus when they're discouraged, and knowing what to do with all of that. That's the power of emotional intelligence. So this is not just some, like, you know, I think what has happened in pop culture, people think emotional intelligence is just like, you know, touchy feely, cotton candy hype stuff. No, it is literally the foundational principle of having a great life. You have to be more engaged, aware, and greater in your personal power related to your emotions. Especially now, these are difficult times. So we're gonna really dive deep into this and we're gonna make it about mental toughness and mental resilience in this year. Not just about, like, touchy feely. Second big thing is I really believe the reason that most people aren't more emotionally strong, intelligent, resilient, is because there is this dynamic in our culture that is often avoid difficult feelings, avoid difficult conversations, avoid those times when we don't understand our feelings. So let's drown it out with, you know, addiction, alcohol, distraction, Instagram scrolling, whatever it is, right? It's like, oh, I don't feel good. You know what happens for a lot of people? They don't feel good about themselves or their relationships or their businesses or their teams or their life. So they pick up the phone, they go scrolling for life. Do you know what that is? That's an emotional intelligence thing. What's Happening is they don't know how to cope. And so they pick up tools for coping versus understanding. Coping is here. They externalize coping, seeking coping mechanisms outside without understanding how to navigate the difficult emotions of our lives. And so I think more people, you know, haven't mastered this area of their life better because the easiest answer is to avoid it. You know, think about all those difficult emotions you've had in personal relationships. Somebody, maybe you have a relationship right now, you know who you really, you love somebody, you're in relationship in an intimate way, or you're a parent or you're leading a team and there's all this difficult emotion to manage right now. People are discouraged. There's a lot of vitriol and outrage out there. There's a lot of just fear of all this unknown. How have you engaged that? Have you had conversations with them? Have you checked in? Did you understand where they were at? Did they feel heard and seen, validated, appreciated by you? Or are you so struggling just to deal with yourself that you even forgot other people? Because that happens too. But we're going to go from this conversation of avoidance to engagement today. That is the fun, like the foundational tool in all of emotional intelligence is engaging it, right? Engaging those difficult emotions, engaging those difficult conversations, engaging those difficult people instead of hiding. This is that important time to be doing that. You know, I get how easy it is to say, I don't want to deal with that. You need to learn how to deal with it straight up. You need to get at level 9 out of 10 in order to navigate these next few months well and lead others. And you got to give yourself an assessment. I'm going to ask you to do that right now. I know so many people, they don't understand the importance of scoring different skill sets of their lives. And so they just kind of go through life hoping to get better. But one thing that we know from high performers is they're willing to score themselves. They're willing to on a consistent basis. They give themselves grades or scores about how they're doing. How have you handled your emotions this year on a scale of one to ten? One. You just not good. I mean, okay, let's call zero dead. Okay, one. It's been a struggle and just you've been, it's been terrible. 10. You feel like impressed by yourself. This year has been pretty good. Like you've handled all this emotion pretty well. Where have you been? 0 to 10. Now let me ask you about how have you dealt with the emotions of others on 0 to 10. 0. I totally. They freak me out. I don't want to deal with them. 10. I've been doing pretty good, Brennan. Thank you. I've been a great leader, a great parent, a great caregiver, a great manager. I've been doing real good. Where have you been? You know, you got to think about that constantly, like, personally, how am I managing my emotions and socially. And the more that we're aware of these things and evaluating these things, the more our brain's gonna go, let's get better. Like, your brain is great at gamifying, right? When you give yourself a score, your brain goes, I want to get better. I would like a higher number here. Especially if you're on something like this with me here at Growth Day. I mean, it's like, duh, like you want to work on yourself, right? So I know that sometimes it can be discouraging when we talk about measuring yourselves or giving yourself a score here. Some people say, brennan, I've been a level five with my emotions for a decade. I feel crappy. Thanks for making me score myself. Okay, but listen, that's going to lead to this next point. Many people confuse emotional intelligence with a conversation about who they are versus skill set. What do I mean by that? Well, emotional intelligence is a skill. It's not about yourself or even just your overall personality or identity. It's a skill, right? It's an area of your life to be managed, improved upon, navigated, and it doesn't represent you. So many people think when they're, you know, they have or experience sadness, that, oh, I'm a terrible person. I have all these reasons to be happy. Why can't I just be happy? But I'm feeling sad right now. What a piece of crap I am. And they literally start speaking negatively of themselves because they have or experience or feel an emotion. But an emotion is not you. An emotion is not you. And what most people do in this category of emotional intelligence in their life, they say things like this. They say, oh, well, you don't understand. That's just how I am. I'm just not one of those joyous people like you, Brendan. I'm not like your students who are so heavy. And what they do is, well, I'm not like that. Thinking that managing your emotions, navigating your emotions, and activating a full suite of positive emotions in your life is related to their identity and who they are. No, we're talking about a specific topic in personal development. There's lots of things we can talk about that isn't you Right. Your car is not you, and your emotions are not you. Your dog is not you. The things you own or control or have or are not you. It's okay when you have an emotion that you don't like not to hate yourself for the emotions you're experiencing. Some of you had a really tough year. It's like, this has not been an easy year. And so many people get down on themselves. Down on self versus recognizing. Oh, I don't have a real strong skill set here to navigate this difficult emotion. You follow? You don't need to get mad at yourself or down on yourself. If you score yourself in a way you don't like, you say, oh, I need to develop more skill here to be able to do that better. Right? If I go out and you and I go out and we hang out to play tennis and I'm not good at it at first, I don't say, oh, I suck at all sports. I say, I'm not good at this tennis thing. I need to figure out how to hold this racket and make sure this ball gets over that net. And when it comes back to me, you don't hit me in the eye. You know, it's like you have to realize your emotional life and navigating it. It's a skill set. And when it's a skill set, you can get better at it. Obviously, that is why you're here, but I want to remind you of that, because I'm going to hear, I can tell you right off the bat how good you are with emotional intelligence. Are you ready? Okay, some of you ain't gonna like this, and I know you're all gonna light up here in a minute here, but you might not like it. Your emotional intelligence is directly correlated with how hard you have been on yourself this year. Right? If you've been so hard on yourself this year, then this is a great session for you because you need to develop greater emotional acuity, greater emotional strength, greater emotional resilience, greater emotional intelligence, right? And if you've always been hard in your life, but you're like, no, no, no, but I understand my emotions. No, because if you're constantly hard on yourself, that's coming up because of emotions. You feel an emotion you don't like, you take the emotion and you describe it to self. This is why you keep getting it wrong. I'm here. I wanted to help you do this. Separate yourself from. From the skill set of managing emotions and just go, you know what? I'm kind of not managing that well today. I can Understand that I don't manage things great every day and every time without saying I suck. Okay, parents out there, you know this, right? You can be a great parent, a good parent, a loving parent and caring parent. But sometimes when little Johnny or Sally or whoever comes in and you lose it that moment in dealing with that child right there, it might not be your best, but it doesn't take away from the fact that you're caring, giving parent, right? You don't take individual interactions with that child when it doesn't go right and globalize it into you're terrible. That's globalization and catastrophizing. You follow? Well, don't do that with your emotions either. Right? Don't do that with your emotions. There's days don't tell nobody but Brendan Burchard, the motivation manifesto guy, which is currently the best selling motivation text so far of this century. With motivation the title, there's days I'm not motivated. That doesn't mean I'm like, oh, I'm a terrible person. Look how incongruent and awful I am. Oh my God, it's like, you know, I didn't manage my focus and my energy well today. I wasn't clear with my intentions. I didn't energize my mind and my body to get excited about my purpose. I didn't do the things that are necessary to summon and sustain the emotion I wanted. Instead, I just accepted what landed on me. Feel crappy. And now what do you do when you feel grappy? These are the things we're going to talk about today. So I hope this is helpful. And I'm kind of going over why people really struggle with this. And I know it might feel really negative up front, but I'm trying to tell you this is why more of our culture doesn't talk about it. This is difficult. When I'm asking people to score themselves, they're like, what? How can you do that? Well, I'll share with you one last big idea about why I think people really struggle with this topic is because they think the conversation about emotional intelligence is some way that like emotions are irrational or not as important. You know, it's some of those people who quote unquote, feel way left brained or. No, I'm more of an engineering mind, Brendan. Emotions don't get into my thinking process, you know, and they're more like they feel like emotions or are irrational or not important or not a priority or are weak. When the reality is your wellness and your decision making and your interactions with Others is predicated upon your ability, your ability to have holistic contemplation. What do you mean by that? You can't make a decision if you X out emotion. There's the logical and the emotional and these things are always talking to each other. You can't separate them. And the more you try to separate them, the more life becomes miserable. Because what happens is you become an incredibly analytical person who doesn't feel anything, or you become an incredibly feeling oriented person who's not taking the time to think through things. And so consequences on either side aren't good. We want you to be incredibly holistic in your contemplation, your decision making. And that means your whole body, mind, life comes into how you live and experience life. We want you fully activated heart, mind, body, soul to enjoy a great life. That's part of emotional intelligence, right? But we don't say that often. So people go, ah, emotions. And it's like, oh, no, no, no. If you've been a person like ah, emotions, I bet your happiness meter is lower than you think it is. I bet if you took a life satisfaction score or you really contemplated about where you're at, you'd realize life should feel better. Do you know how many people I know and coach who they're so successful. I mean, they have it all and they're so smart and they're completely unfulfilled. They're unfulfilled, they're disengaged and they can't quite explain why. It's because they haven't been managing their emotions well. They haven't brought emotion into life. It's like they have relationships, but the relationships don't have pop and vibe and spirit and joy, right? It's like they do tasks every day, but they don't feel the day. And that's what I'm always sharing with you guys. It's about feeling the day. After you have everything you wanted in life, what do you want more of? You want to feel the day more. A sense of connection and meaning and fulfillment and satisfaction and intimacy and joy and vibe and pop. Right? That's what we want. So emotions aren't something to crowd out. Emotions are something to navigate. Emotions are something to summon. Emotions are something to spark with others. And emotions are something to utilize and to sense the wholeness and the beauty of life. Because now I'm really gonna jump into a framework that I know you can remember because we're talking about emotional intelligence. And I was trying to teach this one time to this executive group. Wasn't going so good. Okay. There's kind of one of those situations I'm in there like this. You know, they paid a lot of money and I'm there, and they're like, okay, is this another hype guy? And. And luckily, I'd been able to tour their offices that day. And what I noticed was that their culture just didn't feel good. I mean, there was no good vibes there, right? And we all want good vibes. And I was talking with them, and I said. And I literally asked them, I said, what do you guys think about the vibes in this culture? And they're like, vibes? What are you talking about? And we started talking about it, and they realized their teams, they didn't really gel and feel, like, engaged or excited about the work they were doing. They realized that if they were going to lead through a big transition that they were having, that they had to lead that energy better. Right? We all want to create good vibes on our teams. Think about your family right now. I mean, think about the vibes we're all going to feel again when we all can get out there and return to. To life kind of as we knew it. Although it will never return exactly the same way. But, like, go out and be with each other again. Like, good vibes are gonna be everywhere. So your framework for today, and I want you to write this in your journal, is called VIBES V I B E S. And I'm gonna give you just a little acronym for thinking about emotional intelligence with this framework called VIBES V I B E. Okay? Vibes. Okay. So we're going to create some good vibes. Let's use that as our framework for emotional intelligence. Vibes. The V stands for vision. Here is something I never hear all these experts and academics talking about emotional intelligence. It's so much about self awareness here or about emotional regulation there or managing other people's energies here. But listen, if you don't have a philosophy of life, if you don't have a vision for what you want to feel and what you want your relationships to be like and what you want your team culture to be like, if you don't have vision and you don't have vision for not only most people think about vision as where we're gonna go. I'm like, vision for how we want to feel. I remember talking to a buddy of mine. He was telling me about this horrendous road trip he took with his family when he was, like, a teenager. And so much conversation was had in the week before they Took that road trip about where they were going, about what they were going to see, about the milestones along the journey, about where they were going to end up at the coast. There was never a conversation about what's it going to be like in the car together. Okay, clearly a little bit of lacking of emotional intelligence. This is what we do in our lives. We are so outcome driven. I'm going there and vision and strength and that's where we're going. And yet sometimes we forget to talk about what should the journey feel like here to share with you? If you've really struggled with emotions most of your life, you may never have developed a vision, a clear vision for what you wanted things to feel like. And when I say things, I mean, you know, if you've been with us here in my community of coaching for a while, I'll often talk about the different aspirations we all have. We all have being aspirations, right? The aspirations of, of how I want to feel. I want to feel like engaged with life, energized with life, proud of who I am, congruent with who I am. So being aspirations, we talk about relational aspirations. I want to have great relationships and connections with other people. I want to have creative aspirations. I want to create good things, do good work and really engage with what I'm doing. I want to have growth aspirations. I want to grow into this type of person or develop these skills and this type of mastery. We want to do all this so that we can feel connected to life and to give back. Well, guess what? We need to have a vision for those areas. We had a vision for how I am being each day. See, if you just show up each day and you live in reaction, you tend to feel terrible. But that's what most people do. They just show up in the day. Oh, let me see what emails came in. Oh, let me compare myself to all these people on social media. Oh, let me look at all these haters and obsess about them. Oh, let me fight. Oh, let me deal with this. Another emergency and this. And they're just taking life in a reactive way so they feel terrible. That's not emotionally intelligent way to approach life. You know, if you've ever been with me, that power of intention we're always talking about, right? That to be a person who has intention for how we want to experience life. I need you to develop greater vision again. What should your life feel like now? You've been through enough. You've been through enough. It's time to clarify. How do you want to feel what should the day feel like to you? You know, I had to set this in my personal life after being depressed and suicidal for a year when I was a young man. And I had to go, you know what? I want to live, love and matter. I want the day to feel vibrant. So I started looking for reasons that the day could feel vibrant. Then I learned to bring vibrancy, which we'll talk about. I started thinking, I want to love because my heart would have been broken. And I had to think about how do I connect with other people? Because I wanted that feeling of my full heart being engaged. I had to think about how I was going to matter. I wanted the day to feel like that, live, love, matter. I wanted the day to feel like it was vibrant, connected with other people, and then it mattered. I did something. I made a difference. I wanted the feelings that come from all of that, right? And so that vision, once I was on my radar, guess what? Your brain is so good when it has a vision, it kind of orients itself to that. It starts looking for that. It starts honing in, right? It starts homing into like, oh, that's what I want. But if you show up in the day and you're scrolling all day or reacting to all of your team's emergencies all day, and every day is firefighting, no wonder you don't enjoy the day. No wonder it feels like everything's out of control. No wonder you have so many bouts of overwhelm and sadness, because there's not a higher orientation over looking to where you do want to go so that you can see those things. Vision. Vision. Emotional intelligence doesn't begin in reactivity and regulation. That's like second and third. Not even, like, emotional. Intelligent life begins with a visionary life. It begins with, oh, what do I want to feel in my relationships? And how do I cultivate those things? And when we're off track, how do I get back to those things? Because, listen, if you get off track and you don't have a destination in mind, you will wander the wilderness for years. You got it? We need vision again, especially this year. This year, it feels like every day is a new, you know, 20 crazy headlines. It feels like every day you're getting attacked by 10 or 12 more mean people on the Internet. It feels like every day, work changes, you know. No, you're working remotely now. You're using Zoom. Not you're using this new thing. Yep. No, we're rolling out this new software. Oh, yeah, we laid off these people. So here's 10 more things for your plate. And you're like, ah. And if every day is like that, you're not choosing, defining how you want to feel and experience that day, I promise you, of course it's not going to feel good. So what else can we do? Okay, let's think about each of our key relationships in our life. Think about if you're a team leader, you think about the people who you lead, and you think about the emotions and the energy you want to create between you and them and among them so that, like, oh, this is what we want to feel like here. I'm here to tell you, most leaders in most organizations today are really struggling because they have not had this conversation with their teams about what they want the place to feel like they're adapting. And sometimes when you're adapting, you're firefighting, and it becomes task, handle this, handle this, handle this, handle this. Instead of like, how we all doing here, what do we want work to feel like in this organization? What do we want it feel like between each other? What's the vibe we want to create here? And without shared discussion around that. I promise you, I promise you, you can't build a culture you can't build a culture without shared discussion about the emotions that we want to feel and sense around here. Same thing happens for your family. When's the last time you sit down with the family or one of the kids or your spouse or partner and you said, can we talk about how it feels to be us? Can we talk about what we want that to feel like? Not just on vacation, not just on Sunday, but every day? Like, what are we after in this family? You know, I've seen people put out mission statements for their families, but never talk about how we want to feel. And it's like, it's not just about live your values, it's also about how do we feel together? What should this feel like? What should this father, son relationship feel like? What do I want my child to feel in this household in their relationships with me? What do I want them to feel when they're struggling, when there's a lot of changes? Not that you can just give them the feelings, but if you don't have that intention, you certainly can't guide when you think about, like, your creative work. Let's go have some vision in your creative work area. What do you want work to feel like? I remember my life used to feel. My work life used to feel like hell. It was, show up, sit at the computer, crank, have my back hurt, eat crank. It was just work Work, work, work, work, work all day. And I was like, I don't like that's, you know, what that's going to feel like over time. Burnout. That's not. You're not in this game of life for burnout. You're not. You're in this game of life to feel it, to engage, to enjoy. I said, how do I make sure I enjoy my workday? What would I need to do to enjoy the work day? I really started diving deep onto that. And so I structured my whole day of little things that I do, which we'll talk about, to make sure that I'm summoning and feeling the emotions that I want each day, not hoping to achieve them one day and retire. Got it. What about how you feel about your own development? See, most people don't feel like they're touching the rim of their potential and they feel like, you know, the best of who they are is back in high school or back in that other relationship or that other job or is maybe in some future place. They've never felt their full potentialities alive, now felt blessed for the strength and the power they have now stepped into their confidence and their courage. Now they've never been in a moment of full emotional connection with who they really are. Isn't that why we do personal development? So it's about having a vision for that. I was like, I don't want to do personal development so I can end up somewhere in 10 years. I don't do personal development because I want to feel amazing throughout the day, even when it's hard. How can I set that up? That's the stuff that we're going to be talking about here today. But please hear me, this all begins with vision. Anyone who speaks about self awareness and doesn't use the word vision, I'm like, they're just not my. They're not advanced enough for me. It's just like, I'm like, ugh, they forgot. If you don't have a life philosophy or a life ambition in these areas, then you're just fighting fires of reaction. And reaction is not the. That's not the end game or the real discussion around emotional intelligence, but because it has been. It's one reason this incredibly important idea of mental toughness, mental resilience, mental strength, emotional strength. Emotional resilience is why we don't talk about that enough in the public sphere outside of, you know, some, you know, positive social leaders. What happens is those things got put in the backlot and the conversation became, let's just talk about Whether or not you're, you know, reacting well to the stress, we got to go beyond that. We need a new vision for life. Last month, did you define how you really wanted to feel, or did you just bumble into the month and it didn't turn out so good? Because that should not carry on anymore. That should not carry on anymore. The more vision you have for each month, the more your internal guidance system aligns to that. We'll react to that. We'll summon that. So, please. Vision, I said. The framework is Vibes V I B E S. Vision. Spent the most time on this one. Vision. Vision. Vision. Vision. Every morning, I want you to connect with this. I want you to journal around it. I want you to think about it. It's like the more it's on your mind, the more you orient your day. Most people, as I always say, it's not that they. Most people think, oh, I lost my motivation. No, you lost focus on what matters most. Same thing with, oh, I lost the vibrancy and the joy and the energy in my life. Nope, you lost the focus of what you wanted in those spaces. So we didn't create them. And I know this might sound judgmental, but I'm your coach. I'm here to give you a little bit of, like, a few of these to say, hey, let's realign. I love you. If I could give you a hug, I'd do that, but it's a little hard. But, you know, you're all here with me. I hope. Vision. You know what? Do yourself a favor. Just chat down below. Vision. Just type all caps. Vision everywhere. I don't know. We'll blow up the chat. Sorry about that, guys, but it's like, I want you to even write it in your journal and put a circle around it or square or star or something. Like, really highlight it. Maybe put it with a marker, like vision. Vision. That's going to get us back. Second thing. So Vibes V I B E S V is for vision. I is for insight and interpretation. Insight and interpretation. Okay, this is where you hear about emotional intelligence. Always beginning with self awareness. That's insight. It's. Oh, well, let me begin with what am I feeling and why? What am I feeling and why? Most people are not aware of what they're feeling. They just kind of go through the motions of the day, and then once in a while, an emotion catches up to them. Right. They don't really know what their ongoing emotional palette looks like. And so they are, again, more in reactive mode. And we want you to Be in more of a insight mode and where you start monitoring your emotions, feelings and moods. Monitoring your emotions, feelings and moods. And so write that down. Emotions, feelings and moods. And I'm going to tell you the difference between them. Emotions, feelings and moods. We're going to monitor our emotions, feelings and moods. Then we're going to ask why are we having those emotions, feelings and moods? Why? Then we're going to say, what are the consequences? What's the consequences of those emotions, feelings and moods? And then we say, what would be better? What do I want? What's the vision for my emotions, feelings and moods? And then we'll ask what can we do to get those. That's insight, right? Insight isn't just like I wonder what I'm feeling here. No real insight, deep insight comes from the simple thing says, huh, what are my emotions, feelings and moods? Like what are they? Like every day being aware of those things and then having the guts to say, where are those coming from? Why do I feel them? What are the consequences of feeling that? Is that what I really want? Could I improve and what could I do? That to me is the process of the. Not self awareness as a concept, but self awareness as work. Like the nitty gritty. Get in that psychology and do the work. This is what I do with a lot of my coaching clients, right? We just dive deep, we just go way deep into these topics so they understand like what's going on for them and what do they want? So the differences, emotions, feelings and moods, okay? Emotions mostly in the psychological world, in psychology we imagine emotions to be more like automatic emotions. Like they're automatic, reactive physical things, right? They're sensations, perceptions that you just, you feel they, they kind of hit you, right? They kind of come like a wave and they just like. It's like you have the emotion of fear and you just, you don't have to summon the fear, it just happens, right? Or you see something that's beautiful or the kid says something, you just feel this emotion of joy. You don't have to work for the emotion. And the emotion is automatic, it is immediate, it is physical and biological, right? That's the way of most people talk about emotions. And you can see emotions happening in people's brains in like milliseconds from stimuli, right? From stimulus. So what's the difference between an emotion and feeling? Well, if you've studied with me before, feeling tends to be the longer term interpretation, the emotion, right? I always use the same metaphor because it's the only one I ever found people understand if you and I went to a haunted house together, and we were walking through the haunted house and somebody jumped out and scared us, and we jumped and we screamed. That immediate, immediate, automatic biological sensation of fear is there, right? But later on when we go home, we don't have to still feel fear, right? And if we go home and we're wandering around and all of a sudden we start feeling, like, unsafe, it might have been something that was triggered. That feeling, ongoing nature of something was triggered by an earlier emotional event. And so now we have to reinterpret what's happening here. Oh, the feelings I'm having in this context, they're not the same as what was happening over here. And so feelings tend to be interpretive meaning. It's where you take the emotion, you apply meaning to it, and you make it stick, right? Emotion might come up and go biologically, emotions come up and go really fast. You're talking about most people. Most experts would say somewhere, you know, between maybe a minute to maybe five minutes, an emotion might be there biologically. Doesn't mean all the neurochemicals don't, you know, suddenly dissipate. But in general, emotions are also fleeting. What's not fleeting is the feeling. The feeling is the interpretation and the meaning you put to that thing, and now you carry that feeling. A mood is now happening because of those two things that are similar on an ongoing basis. That's the way I think about it. Moods are established. They're a pattern of those things happening more often. Now, I know I'm not getting this exact. And there could be lots of debate about these things, but for me, categorizing those just a little bit gives me a little bit more, like, acuity. Like, oh, I felt this. I defined it that way. And I keep defining those types of feelings this way. And I'm feeling this mood today because these interpretations are all telling me this direction, right? My energy emotionally, physically, spiritually is all going in this direction, and it's leading to a current ongoing mood. And we'll spend less time on just mood and more time on those first two pieces because that gives us a little bit more immediate sensation of emotional intelligence, and it directs our moods. Because if I can see, summon great emotions, I can interpret things in ways that my feelings are more positive on ongoing nature. My moods tend to be elevated over time. So I said vibes, V, I B E S Vision, inter. I'm sorry, Insight. Asking those questions, interpretation. This is the most important concept. If you've ever seen me teach this. I still think it's the most important concept to understand the way we feel, right? The way we feel. An emotion might spark it, but it is our mind that interprets it that makes that feeling really stick. And most people feel terrible because their interpretations are off. Their interpretation is, something happened. I immediately felt this emotion. They apply the emotion to their identity. Their identity, if they're not careful because becomes reactive or egoic and they impulsively react. We got to learn to slow that down. We have to learn to say, oh, how can I have something happen, a stimulus. I slow down that response time. And what I do is I step it through versus going react like this. Step it through, okay, what happened? Uh huh. And then interpretation comes in. What information came in? What does that information mean to me? That's what interpretation is. What does that information mean? That's interpretation. What does that information mean? Then we say, what does it mean to me? That's where we apply it to identity. And then we say, what should I do? Intention, right? But most people, here's where they struggle with emotional intelligence. Whatever happens, they immediately go interpretation. They say, bad, catastrophic, terrible. Then they say, applies to me. This is meant to attack me. This is meant to be harmful to me. This is awful. How dare it. My self righteous, awesome self doesn't deserve that. Intention is react to the thing to fight, freeze or flee. Instead of what's my philosophy of life here from my best vantage point, what's my vision for how to deal with this? So I'll give you an example. You know, teammate comes in, says something and you hear them say something and you immediately think it implies that you're not working hard enough, right? They say something like, I work so hard here. Don't you understand? And you're attacking. Listen, your intention becomes you attack what they said versus your vision of how you treat people. Got it? Raise your hands if you've got this. What happens is we're in the wrong mode. We have intention to react to things people say or they do versus a vision of how we conduct ourselves. And this is why the world has like, it feels like it is like collapsed into reactive, immediate outrage of judgment and justification. I can judge you immediately for your poor behavior here and I can justify me being a jerk to you because what you did justifies me being a jerk versus a vision for self. I don't treat people with disrespect versus a vision of myself. I'm not thrown off by other people's actions. I'm not responsible for their reactions and their actions. I am responsible for how I hold and conduct myself and how I'm going to manage this relationship, not just deal with the thing. So it's almost an elevated perspective. You follow? I don't know if I'm explaining it quite right, but I think that is what's made a big difference for me in my life. Being able to elevate the position in my mind from I'm going to react to the thing to how do I conduct myself in life. And the more we can raise, maybe write this down in your journal. Would you do that? How do I conduct myself in life when that is like emotionally centered, when that is something that I have vision for and I'm connected to that versus reacting to the immediate thing. I don't send the mean email. I don't say the terrible thing that I think is so sarcastic and witty when will make them, you know, bleed with the pain of my smartness. No, I just don't do that. And so it's where are we connected? Are we connected on the reaction realm or the vision realm? So now we are interpret things differently, right? Whatever is going to happen, I'm not going to interpret as something I need to like immediately attack. Instead I'm going to say, okay, what do I understood to happen here? I'm going to take a breath, I'm going to breathe. I'm going to connect to my belly. Take a deep breath in say okay, how am I defining this from myself? How would my best self deal with this? How would my best self deal with this? Not what impulsively feels right right now. Arrow how would my best self deal with this? What is my intention for this relationship globally, not just in this moment. And now that's where you see those parents who I admire. Their kid can be doing something really bad and they're still, they still are cool. They still handle it, they still get the behavior change. But you can tell there's respect between the child and the parent because that's been how they do that versus just reacting to every little thing. Now I know this sometimes can sound like I'm judging and I want to let you know I don't pretend any of these things are easy. Team Mean People Children out of hand I'm not making any of that easy. What I'm saying life is harder if you don't address it emotionally, intelligently. That's all I'm saying. This should be an aspiration, a vision for us to get better at these things. It's important. So vision first, then insight and how I'm interpreting Things. Excuse me. Then the B stands for bring it. You know, I'm always teaching this. You got to learn to bring the joy, not hope the joy lands on you. Can I get a round of applause for this? You got to learn to bring the emotional energy that you want. Listen, the more you teach yourself to bring the emotional energy that you want, the more you're able to summon that when the world falls apart on you. If the world falls apart and you never trained yourself to summon the emotions, the feelings and the moods that you want on a recurring basis. It's super hard. So how do you do that? How do you bring it? First, obviously you have the vision for, for that. But then on everyday simple circumstances, you ask yourself, how do I bring this emotion into this? So for example, when I'm doing email, I say, how do I bring curiosity and fun into doing this? And all of a sudden I might say, well, let me get away from my computer. Maybe I'll answer this on my iPad over here. Or maybe I'll go outside and take my calls. Walking versus sitting here and feeling my back hurts sitting here. I'll do something to do the same. Like the task has to get done. But how do you do the task? Engaging it, drawing meaning from it, making it fun, collaborating with other people. See, it's that old thing, you know, in Taoism or Buddhism, of learning to carry the pail of water and the firewood with joy and meaning in each step versus just like, oh, I gotta go get the firewood and the water again. It's learning to make the activities and the tasks of our lives things that we don't bemoan but we appreciate and that we bring the energy we want into it. But I love going out to restaurants and watching couples. You can see the couples who chose to bring intimacy, to bring passion, to bring curiosity, to make the date night fun versus who just are obligated to show up on date night. Right. I know you've been with somebody in a relationship or you've been in a meeting where people just like, they have no intention to bring participation there. And listen, your job is to do it anyway, to bring that intention. Listen, I know you're going to. Everyone I know. I already know where you're going to go with this in your head. You're going to go, yeah, well, I do and he doesn't. Or I do and those people didn't. Doesn't matter. It's about you here. Do not sacrifice good emotions in your life just because other people aren't demonstrating them. Summoning them, doing the work. Because many of you here, you are the high performers in your community. You are in your family, on your teams. It's okay that not everybody wants to have the same level of vibrant, joyful, awesome connection that we all want. We can't change everybody. That's not the goal. It's about this changing inside, changing within, and making the experience the best that you can. And I know someone's gonna say, well, what if they never do? We'll get to that later. Make sure I get to that. Okay? So bring it. Have that intention. Bring the energy you want. Change it up so that the energy, the emotions are there, the feelings that you want are there. Remember, you can control the feelings, but by controlling, like, what information comes in, what does it mean? What does it mean to me and what do I want to do here? And the more you aim those questions towards a positive outcome versus bemoaning life, it just gets better, okay? Vision, insight and interpretation. Bring it. Bring the energy that you want. And then E of vibes, the acronym, the E stands for Energy management. Energy management. This is the colossal mistake our culture has made. Not teaching energy management in schools, in primary and first educations, in colleges, at the workplace, that we have allowed people to be so exhausted, so burnt out, without ever inserting a conversation about real health and wellness. It's why people are so fatigued and so overstressed and so in poor health, and they're stunned that they don't feel good. And it's this conversation of like, we've all been there, listen, we have all not felt good, but if we can manage our energy and our health, what I just call energy management, to me, everyone's like, why do you work out, Brendan? I'm like, it's not like I love lifting the weights in the gym and stuff. It's like, for me, I want to have energy. I want to have this energy I have right now, and it's just here. I don't want to have to force life. So I need to cultivate energy. I need to do the cardio and the weightlifting activities. I need to eat well, I need to sleep well. I need to make sure that I take time to power down and I make time to power up when it is appropriate and it meets my goals. In other words, I need to mitigate and manage every area of my life that I can to store up energy so that when the stuff happens, when the stuff hits the fan, I tend to feel enough energy to deal with it versus bemoan it. The Number one reason I care about health is because I care about mental health. And my physical, biological health is directly related to my mental health, to my life satisfaction, to the quality of my relationships, to how much money I earn, to how long I live. These things matter. And so I'm here to tell you this. If this year you did not make a conservative, disciplined, committed and clear goal to get in the best health of your life, please do that in the next 12 months. I've issued this get in the best health of your life challenge now since 2002, to everybody around me, I say, listen, you know, even if you don't want to do it forever, one year of your adult life, you must say that is going to be the best health of my life. And what you will do by making that, the decision that full year you will learn all the behaviors and all the habits and all the tricks of what you eat, how you sleep, how you care for yourself, how you work out what works for you, that that will have lasting, positive impact forever. Well, if the pandemic didn't do it for you, here's what should do it for you. The emotional quality of life. You know, when you are tired, you react worse. You know, when you're hungry, you're more quick to become hangry. You know that when you don't feel good physically, it's easy to be mentally off your game. I'm not here to say all health people have great emotional management technique. Not at all. I'm just saying it's easier. It's easier to be more motivated to remember what's important, to not be like stressed, burnt out and on edge. And I know you all know this, so I think that's just important. Energy management. So vibes, vision, insight, interpretation, bring the energy or emotion, feelings that you want to the experiences. Energy management, taking care of yourself. And then last thing. S. Vibes Service Service. A lot of people talk about social intelligence or social acuity. To me, the whole reason to have that is to be of service to other people. To demonstrate empathy, understanding, compassion, caring, love, patience. I only demonstrate those to other people because I believe that that I am here to make a difference with other people. I believe we do those things because we all know they are right. But when we don't do those other things, we have no vision for ourself and we're just reactive. When we don't explore ourselves and we just interpret everything as negative or catastrophic, when we don't intentionally bring good energy in, we don't take care of ourselves with energy Management. We can't be of service to other people, not at our full capacities, not even close to our half capacities. But if your intention is to be of service to other people, here's what you do. You start paying attention. What do they want for themselves? What's their life philosophy? What are they trying to achieve? What's their vision? We start paying attention. Oh, when I say this, they interpret it this way. And now we can have a conversation about that. I've noticed when I say this, you get really angry. Can we talk about that? Because I might mean it in a different way. We start bringing the energy and emotions to them that we hope that we could cultivate together versus going, well, when they change, I'll finally love them. You know what I'm saying? We start making sure we care for ourselves, to be as an example to them. And then we have the discussions when they're down, we have the discussions when they're hurt, we have the discussions when they're bored, when they're discouraged. Meaning you address the emotions, feelings and moods that you see with other people not in a way in which you're judging it. Remember, I'm the guy who teaches judge less, feel better. But in a way in which you acknowledge, explore, ask how they're navigating. Ask how you can be of service, meaning great emotional intelligence when socially applied means curiosity and caring. Curiosity. What's going on? How are you doing? What's been going on? Compassion, empathy. That to me is caring. And so that when someone sees that you feel sense, acknowledge, care, validate, appreciate them, that changes the energy. You do that more and more and more and more and more and more, you serve as a role model doing what we've talked about more and more and more and more and more, you have discussions with them more and more and more and more about how you want to feel together, and it starts shifting that relationship. I'm not here to say you can do it in an instant. Sure, you can jump and do jumping jacks and silly, funny things to make people happy or smile, and that's all, all good. But I want you to have a vision for a relationship and be willing to steer it patiently over time. So that's for those who say, oh, I've tried everything. And he's like this or he's like that. Everyone who ever says, I've tried everything, Brendan, I'm like, show me the list, show me the list. What do you mean? Well, if you've tried everything, surely there's an Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of Rows of everything that you tried, followed by another column of how often you tried it, followed by another column of the duration of each time you have tried it, followed by another column of whether it's mutually exclusive, followed by another column of how well it worked. If you don't have that, don't possibly even think you've tried everything. What you tried is you went on three date nights and you tried to be more positive, but he didn't change. So. What a bastard. No, that's not sufficient. Well, I tried to have three meetings with people and. And tell them to be more emotionally vulnerable and share with me, Brendan, and they just didn't seem to be emotionally vulnerable. You tried three times? Yeah. How'd you do it? Well, I passed around a piece of paper and I told them to share the most stressful thing of their life. Okay, maybe we need to change your approach. Okay? So when you're trying to be of service to people, you have to realize it's going to take time and be okay with that. Be okay with that. Your impatience with other people is not demonstrating your emotional intelligence. Can we put a quote card somewhere for that? Your impatience with other people is not demonstrating your emotional intelligence. You got to be patient with other people. Remember, you can't change their emotions because emotions are automatic, physical and biological. You can change their feelings, how they interpret things through discussion over a period of time. And yet you can change the triggering emotions by not freaking them out. There's things that you can do, as you can see here. I had so much fun with you here today. I know this was a lot in one session, but listen, go win this month. This was your day to grow. Go keep growing. Every day is a good day to grow. That's what I'm always saying. Every day is a good day to grow. So make this an excellent month. As Denise is always saying, every single day, you have a choice to be ordinary or extraordinary. So please, go be extraordinary this month and feel this month. Life is here. Enjoy it, Sam.