Mashup: 4 Powerful Secrets for Massive Success

Competence and confidence are very correlated. We call it in high performance work the competence confidence loop.

Right?

The more you learn, the more you're willing to try. And the more you're willing to try, the greater confidence you gain. The more confidence you gain, the more you're willing to try new things, which teaches you even more. So this confidence competence loop is the secret to lifelong success. What's up, Team hpx? It's Brendan. I'm back in Puerto Rico and just pumped about shooting this video for you, talking about the four secrets to success. And I can tell you, like, these were not easy to learn along my path. But because I grew up in a town that was not near the ocean, because I didn't have a lot of abundance when I grew up, because I struggled a lot throughout my life, the great lessons really came from just a.

Lot of hard work, a lot of.

Study, and a lot of consistency in the contributions I want to make in life. And along that path, I had the blessing of working with and knowing and studying and coaching some of the world's most successful people. And these four things always show up in their life. And honestly, I kind of wish I figured this out like 10 years earlier so I could focus on them versus kind of bumbling in dumb, which is what I did. So I hope in sharing my experience with you, you understand how important these four things are to your success. Number one is competence. Competence. It means you should focus on getting absolutely competent at the skills that matter for your long term success. Whatever your dream is, think of it like, what's your dream? Break it down, say, okay, if that's my dream, what skills would I have to master, really master, to be able to have that dream for me? As an example, speaking with you right now, I don't know how many of my videos you've watched or whatever, but you know, we've had a quarter billion video views. And I was mortified to speak. Some of you guys have been in my seminars before, like 2,000 people, 10,000 people, 30,000 people in an arena. I was mortified. I was terrified to get up and speak in front of people. And so you're like, well, how did you develop that and learn that? Well, I had this dream to make.

A difference in the world and I.

Wanted to impact a lot of people in the world. And I said, if I'm actually going help a lot of people in the world, I need to learn how to communicate.

Because where I grew up, there wasn't.

A lot of emotional expression or a lot of communication.

I mean, If a dude raised his.

Hand in an emotional expression above his waist, it meant he was gonna punch you in the face. That's where I grew up with. I didn't grow up with people being, like, outwardly expressive and joyous and like, facial expressions and moving their hands. I didn't grow up with that. I had to learn, like, how do I communicate and make an impact with people and share what I want to share? I had to practice that and learn that, but I had to become competent in that if I wanted to make my difference. And I think that's really important. The greats master their skill. Think of any musician you love. They mastered their art, their voice, their instrument. Think about any person you really admire. In business, they had to master business building. They had to master the process or the product or the thing. Think about anyone you admire. In their health and wellness, they had to master their own body. Think about the happiest people you know, they had to master their mind. How did they do that? They learned. They studied, they studied, they studied. They applied, they applied, they applied. Competence is the thing that we know in high performance gives people the edge. When you are more informed, more educated, more experienced in the things that matter most to your career, you outperform everybody else who's just going through the motions, who's just showing up, who's. But when you're learning in those dark hours of the night, when you are trying, when nobody else is watching and you are developing skill, guess what? We know from psychology that competence and confidence are very correlated. We call it in high performance work the competence confidence loop.

Right?

The more you learn, the more you're willing to try. And the more you're willing to try, the greater confidence you gain. The more confidence you gain, the more you're willing to try new things, which teaches you even more. So this confidence competence loop is the secret to lifelong success. Keep learning, keep applying. Because as you master new skills that matter to the direction of your life, towards your dreams, then you get more confident. As you get more confident, you try new things and you get more success. Number two. And this is really key, a contribution, mindset to not begin the day with me, me, me, me, not to look at your life with, I hope to get this. I hope to survive. Take your mind off survival, take your mind off getting for yourself and ask, how can I give? Right? It's biblical to ask, you know and you shall receive. But also it's ethical to give and you shall receive. When you change your mindset from getting to giving, when you Change your mindset to contribute. When you think about your day, your work, your mission, your life as a way to contribute, instead of going into work to complain about your job washing dishes, you say how can I go do this and help contribute to my team? Help contribute to somebody else's day. Help everyone else who's working in the kitchen. Let's all have a great day. Contribute positivity, contribute like energy to the world. Because even if you're not doing great things yet you can do the little things with greatness if you approach it with the mindset of service. Like the contribution mindset is what always makes the difference. Because think about it. Is it true that some people become really successful, rich, famous and you know, have everything outwardly there one wants but is still miserable? It's because they're not feeling the satisfaction and the fulfillment of service. They did everything they needed to get something, they became something but they never felt fulfilled because they didn't utilize that or along the way give and serve others. The contribution mindset can change your life. For me, what I learned along the way too is the third C is about community. And where I grew up I didn't have a lot of people who are trying to really better themselves. I know and I appreciate you because you're here for your personal development. People watch my videos because they want personal professional development and so I appreciate you being here. I call you guys team hpx. HPX stands for high performance experience because I believe that not everybody wants to live the high performance experience. Not everybody wants to reach the next level. Not everybody wants that extraordinary vibrancy and connection and excellence that comes from trying to be your best. But those of you who do while you're here. My belief about team hpx, about us is we've learned we have to build the tribe necessary to succeed and enjoy life. You can't just take the energy and the people you have in your life. You need to strategically build the people around you to have the community you need to succeed and, and enjoy life. And often that brings up for people. Well, but Brendon, my spouse doesn't support me. You know, people make fun of me. The kids at school don't understand. The people at work shoot down my ideas. And it's not that you have to kick everybody out who's negative. It's not that you have to get rid of all these people because sometimes that person is your spouse or your brother, your sister or your friend. It's not that you have to get rid of them or judge them in Any way, what you can do is limit your time and exposure to them. And even if you can't do that because that's the person who you are in love with right now, what you can do is separately build what you need. In other words, successful people build the community they need. They don't hope to have it, they're not born from it, they don't always have it in their current circle, but what they do is they go build it. So ask, what's your dream? What do you really want to achieve?

And what's the type of people you.

Need to be around to have that, experience that and accelerate towards that? For me, I had to start shaping new friendships. I had to do more networking in my industry to meet new people. I had to get myself around others. I went to seminars and workshops, networking events. I got myself around high achievers. I wasn't born around many of them. I had to get myself around them. And by getting myself in that proximity of a peer group, that was positive, ambitious, service oriented, competent at what they do, it raised my game. Right, Other people can really inspire you. So build the community you need. And I think the last thing that I've learned that's so important is that successful people take command of their life. They take command of their thoughts, command of their emotions. They take command of what they're doing during the day. They're less reactive than other people because they say, I'm going to be the captain of my ship. And that sense of command is the difference maker in their lives. Where most people, they take their circumstances, they blame, they complain, they dread the struggle. They people who've taken command of their lives, they honor the struggle, they bring the joy. They decide what their day is going to be about. They work diligently towards their dreams instead of being distracted or run by impulse.

They are focused and they choose discipline.

Like they have commanded their life at.

Levels most people don't. Because listen, you and I both listen. Anyone can have a bad day and come home and be like, you know what bad day, Netflix and Chill. And they give up their day or the next four hours to tuning out. What I learned about successful people is when it is struggle, when it's easy to discourage, when it's easy to go, I guess Netflix and Chill, they go, no, man, you know what? You had a bad day. So take command, do something positive for yourself. Take the next two hours and create, work, connect, be with the family. Like they reset themselves consistently. And that's what I mean by command, right? Because we can't control everything isn't true. We can't control everything. Some days someone's gonna be a jerk to you. Some days the project's gonna fall apart. Some days it's not going to go the way that you want. But what successful people do in those moments is they reconnect to their personal power and say, okay, what did I learn? What can I do next? What's my next right? Action of integrity. They take command of themselves. They don't let themselves feel sorry for themselves. They take command of themselves. Don't let other people tell them exactly what to do. They say, what should I do now? Versus I guess I'll give up. So these simple ideas. Get extremely competent at what you want to succeed at in your life. Learn all the skills around it. Second, adopt that contribution mindset that says, okay, I know what I'm going to to do here. And that is give. Give good energy, serve others, take care of others, contribute things that are excellent. Third, build the community that you need. And fourth, take back command of your life. You do these things and all of a sudden, success won't be secret, it will be strategic.

I'll give you three principles for greater discipline, and then I'll tell you the actual three things to do to generate more discipline in such a way that your personal growth grows, that you feel like alive and connected and meaningful and joyous on this journey, because that's what really matters. I mean, discipline sucks. Unless in some ways the outcome is progress, greater engagement and aliveness of life and greater success in whatever way you measure that. So the three principles of all of, like discipline comes down to number one, mastering your schedule. I know that sounds so boring, but it is so absolutely fundamental to your focus, to your progress, to your health, to everything. It doesn't matter if you say, okay, I only want to schedule one thing today, that's fine with me.

I'm not trying to own every hour.

Of your life, but that one thing better be awesome and it better be a needle mover. So scheduling, show up when it's scheduled. And then the third thing, which is most important as a principle, all of discipline. No discipline happens on a real consistent basis unless you have social connection. All of the research shows the most productive people, the most focused people, the people who are most fulfilled in doing meaningful work have attached a meaning that their focus, intention, their hard work is attached to social connection. Meaning I'm going to show up for this because it's going to make me a better mom or parent. I'm going to get healthy. So I have more energy for the kids. I am going to do this project so my team and company grows so we serve more people and we make an impact. It's like the hard work must be attached to impact. But the impact isn't just self like, oh, I'll get this. It has to have a social connection. Like you have to have a reason to show up over and over and over for others. That's why we always teach in high performance.

You have to have a little card.

That says, who needs me on my A game today I am disciplined because I wouldn't be less disciplined doing a morning show.

I'm more disciplined doing morning show because.

Jamie's there, she's waiting on the other end. If I don't get there, I feel like a chump.

So that's important.

You know there's three principles, right? Schedule it, show up, attach social connection.

But now here's the things I would.

Do if you said, Brendan, if you could only be disciplined about three things, what would you do? And it's not what you all think. It's totally not what you all think. And this is very much that makes me happy and progressive in life. So they're not sexy. The number one thing, if I could give anyone a discipline to always do on the first of every single month, you do a whole life review. When that calendar hits one, as in the first of the month, you look at every major area of your life. You score yourself, you ask how you'd like to improve that and what could you do this month? Because most people never improve their life because they never face their life. Yeah, you have to look at it. So every first of the month. That's why, that's, that's for those who are new to us. Growth day began with Growth day actually began because I said, let's do it on. Let's do our personal development on the first of the month. So I go live for two weeks hours in Growth Day. So if you're not member, go to growthday.com because I do a full personal development seminar on the first of every single month. Because I feel like if we start the month off, we nail that. We start it with good attitude, energy. But also you're looking into the month and asking is the way I've scheduled this month going to help me move towards the lifestyle I want or the accomplishment of the major three projects I'm working on in my life?

And also if we don't do this, I feel like it is so easy and how many people can relate to this where if you don't do this, all of a sudden you blink and you're like, oh, it's halfway through the month. Or, oh, three months have gone by. I don't even know what's. How did this even happen, Right? How many times have we done that? Like, wait a minute, it's Thanksgiving. Like, wait a minute, it's spring break. And it's like your life flies by in a blur.

This is the. For those who have the High Performance Planner, you know this page super well. This is your monthly review section in the High Performance Planner. And what it does is it makes you look at the 10 major areas of your life, from health to mental, emotional partner or love, family, friends, mission, experiences, spirit, finances, learning, growth. It helps you reflect on the things you learned in the last month. Learn about others, learn about yourself, what you're grateful for, the main priorities coming up, the decisions you needed to make or could make. Your monthly review. And orienting yourself to your year goals and three year goals. Like, if I don't do that on the first of the month, what happens? Is the middle of the month, I don't. What am I doing? I might be showing up, but I'm showing up in a hot mess all the time because I don't have direction. So if I could give you anything, start the first of the month, super clear about that month. If that's all you did, I promise you'd be more engaged with your life. Second thing I do, I believe another review is needed every Sunday. So Sunday, do your weekly review and your weekly planning. I don't care if it takes 10 minutes, an hour. I think it's important to go okay on Sunday. Is this upcoming week.

Am I clear about what I want of that?

Am I clear about how I can serve? Am I clear about these little slots of time? Do they make sense to me? I mean, just that it can take so fast. So, third thing. Yeah, all right, listen.

If I could give you three things.

To move the needle in your life. Number one is a month through on the first of the month, look out. And Lois, please don't think that this or the Sunday review, which is the second point, is just about your schedule. You are reviewing the major parts of your life. You're connecting with them, you're scoring them. You're asking what more you desire there. And what's something simple you can do to improve that area of your life each month? It doesn't have to be huge life transformation. Because, look, transformation takes time. You might just like little. This little thing this little. This thing, but being aware of it, that's important. So the monthly, then the Sunday, and then you have. I just. I know everyone's already wrote this in their things and they just know it to be true. You've got to win your mornings again and bring intention for, I think, two things every day. If we can bring intention for two things every day, we win that day. To me, the first one is I'm going to bring the joy to this day. I'm going to choose my attitude. I'm going to develop a mindset that is unshakable, that is joyful, that is.

I'm going to be in every room.

It doesn't matter if I'm the loudest. I'm going to try to be the most generous and grateful person in that room. I'm just going to bring good energy. Be responsible for the energy you are projecting onto others and into this world. So I think for me, that intention of. I have an intention to have joy. Each day I'm gonna have some fun. I'm gonna make that happen. Because sometimes life doesn't do it for you. They just hasn't. So I'm gonna bring the joy. So that's my. That's an intention. So what I'm saying is the third discipline is every day you have intentions for feeling life. Yeah. For me, feeling life means bring the joy. That's number one, I'm going to bring the joy. And number two, I'm going to make a moment with somebody today. Maybe I send them an audio. Maybe it's the way I look at my wife. Maybe it's the thing I call up my mom or I sense a beautiful appreciation email or text to somebody. But every day I'm going to bring the joy into the day and I'm going to make a moment. Because at the end of your life, I learned this face my death twice in my life, you remember these moments and scenes with other people. It's so important to realize that. And so you have to ask, are you going to have enough of those moments and scenes? Are they going to be at the.

End of your life?

You kind of. It's true. If it's true. You see a movie, what are the scenes of that movie going to be? You get to direct that. And I promise the scenes in the movie almost always have these beautiful connections with others. It's like most people don't realize the ending movie of their life is love scenes and connection scenes with other people where, like these, like, meaningful moments, if you will. Let's just call them meaningful moments. That's what you see at the end, meaningful moments. So if that is true. If it's true, then you have to purposely structure and build in meaningful moments. So you love the movie at the end. You know that you love the movie, that you want to watch the movie again, that you appreciate that you're going to bust out the good wine and have that good popcorn with that meaningful movie. And so every day that's now that's mine. I'm going to bring joy to this day and I'm going to make moments.

Yeah, that's so good.

You might have different intentions.

Maybe your intentions, like, I'm going to.

Do this thing as a mom or as a leader or as a whatever. Doesn't matter to me. But if you don't have the intention, the days just blaze by. Nothing. You could be working hard. You can show you can get your schedule down. You can have your calendar prioritized with all the tabs and all the different marker colors and everything else.

But if there's no intention for feeling.

You were a good robot today.

Yep.

But you didn't.

We've all had days like that where we feel like a human doing right, not a human being. That's so good, Brendan. That's so good. And a moment, a meaningful moment can be different for every single person. But how many days do we go through and we forget and a meaningful moment is free? You know what I mean? It's like, how many days do we forget to do that? That's so powerful. I love that. I love that.

So to me, that's funny that the discipline is to have the intention. Right. Every day, when you have the intention or every moment or every experience, when you have the intention, it turns out better. Like this morning we talked about, Jamie and I, before we started, we talked about, like, what's the show about today? What's our theme for the week? Our theme for this week is focus and discipline. Our theme for the week, the month in growth day is confidence. And if you're not a growth day member yet, please sign up@growthday.com because last week I taught two hours on confidence. Jonathan Fields from the good Life project taught, you know, over an hour and a half on confidence. And so did Dave Hollis and they took questions and did coaching. And upcoming we've got Mel Robbins, Jenna Kutcher, Jamie. Oh, my gosh, David Bach is this week. I mean, it's going to be epic, guys. So go to growthday.com because you can get live coaching twice A week with us and you get the replays for less than a dollar. A friggin day for the year. I mean, it's unbelievable. So go to growthday.com it's my favorite thing. And my favorite thing.

Yeah, it's amazing what you're doing.

My favorite thing.

Glow atonmo Prince ea. I'm trying to. There's so many incredible people in there. So super excited.

Coming up. He's just fire.

I can listen to him all day long.

I know his voice.

I know it's. It's insane, right?

Oh, okay. We're overtime. I love you guys. Listen, I want to remind you, every day you can choose a new attitude, you can improve, you can take that step, you can show up for your schedule.

Just show up.

Remember to do the things we talked about today. But remember, you're stronger than you think. Future holds good things for you and every day is a good day to grow.

The number one issue with being productive isn't that people usually don't know what to do with the day. It's that they look at it with dread and they accept that feeling and they stop.

They.

I don't wanna. So they stop. Even though, even though if they looked past the immediate dreadful activity and looked into the future about the benefits it would give them, if they could reconnect with that, they could push through. It's that when we get in the short term, just automatic feelings, automatic emotions that come up, those things when they're not monitored consciously and sometimes they're not overridden by a higher calling, a higher ambition, a higher ambition to serve a higher mission. Then what ends up happening is we go, ah, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll skip this one. And you know, I'll get the workout in tomorrow and then workout comes tomorrow, I'll get it in next Friday and then it doesn't come in next Friday and then I'll get the work in. The work doesn't happen. And we keep telling ourselves these stories. I'll do it when I feel like it. But I hope if one thing you've learned here is the power plant doesn't have energy, it generates. You need to generate the energy in which you need to excel and serve in this world. That's what I had to do last night. I had to generate the energy that I need to excel and serve on the stage. I had to make sure that today I felt my best. This is my marathon that I get to do eight times a year. This is what I train for.

This is what keeps Me sharp.

We all have to have those things in our business or our brands or the things that we're being productive towards that push us, that challenge us. If you don't have three or four of those each year that are your form of business or productivity marathons, build them back in. Build in challenging expressions for yourself each year, build them in. We all need our own marathon each year. Whether that's a true running marathon or for me, this is it for me. And I got eight of these a year that I build in that make me sharp. I don't need to do them. The better use of my time would just be doing more videos on the Internets, more social media. But this, this pushes me. This demands excellence from me. When we talk about productivity today, I'm gonna say, what is the things that are scheduled for you that demand you be great? Cause if you don't have any of those, you'll never be great. You'll just do what's comfortable and easy. You gotta have those milestone moments throughout the year in your business. Sometimes that means, okay, that's three weeks. I'm gonna write my book in that three weeks. And you're just gonna gear up for it and you're gonna crush it. Sometimes that means that's when you're gonna launch your thing. Okay, we're gonna gear up and launch that thing. Sometimes that means that's when you do your executive retreat. You pull away all the executives, you meet with them, and that week is just like fire week for you. That's not. I don't mean fire. I mean fire, you know, but you gotta have those scheduled. Otherwise you just go into homeostasis. You just kind of go through the days and go through the motions and. And nothing is compelling you to reach and stretch and push. And if you don't have that, I'm telling you, it is hard to live a fully charged life. So you got to approach productivity now in a completely different way. First rule, don't think of productivity as something that you're doing just in a block of time. Think of your life as being a productively fulfilling life. That productivity is not a time management thing. It's a purpose thing. I don't think of time management. When I think of productivity, I think of purpose. I think of who do I want to be, what do I want to contribute, what will be fulfilling for me? Because if you don't have something bigger than just blocks of time, which are important, but there's not something that we together are going towards where it's this Set of dreams where there's personal meaning and there is social contribution, we won't go. And you might write that down. You need both things as a mindset for productivity. Personal meaning, meaning you care about it, you like it, it's intrinsically valuable to you. You feel like me doing this is important because I like it, I enjoy it, it's important. That's personal meaning. The other aspect of productivity is social contribution. I have to see what I'm doing is going to matter to somebody. It's going to make a difference. And if we don't look at productivity that way, we'll just be like, ugh.

It feels like a task.

But if we can assign some meaning and social contribution to our tasks, everything can change. But ultimately, those things have to come together in something to be productive for.

Like, I'm always.

I'm like, what am I productive for? Took me a long time to figure that out for myself. Based on what I do, what am I productive for? Well, at the personal meaning, I'm productive because I want that vibrancy of being a creative human being. I want to be productive because I want to feel like I'm creating and expressing myself. That's the personal meaning for me. I also want to be a productive person because the social contribution, I want to feel that energy and that creativity. But I also want to feel like, you know, what my life mattered? Did I live?

Did I love?

Did I matter? Did I create some outputs? Did I create something or do something that helped somebody or move the needle or made a difference or a contribution?

People ask me, brendan, how do I reprogram my mind?

And I'm like, that's kind of creepy.

Are you a cyborg? Why did somebody one time, like, ninjutsu your brain and hypnotize you into thinking something hor. Like, why do you need to reprogram anything? Most adults don't need to reprogram something. They just need to program it for the first time. You know, it's like there was never actually any programming that happened anywhere. There were just all these patterns of incidences and these circumstances that have all coalesced into sort of these automatic thoughts and behaviors that they aren't necessarily being responsible for. They're just. They come up automatically and they happen to them. It's not like someone said, I want you to think this, I want you to think this.

I want you.

No one ever sat you down. And probably just like, maybe it happened. But for most people, that never happened. What they're really saying is brendon I.

Need to get a hold of my.

Mind, man, because sometimes I just got these constant negative recurring thoughts that come up. I can't get rid of them. Or sometimes I get obsessed about this one bad thing that happened to me. Or sometimes I, you know, I just can't even control my attention, dude. So what they're really struggling to do is to master their mind in a more sort of capable way. So let's talk about how your thoughts are generated. Now some of this you might already know if you've read my book the Charge or you've seen some of my other work. In High Performance Academy we talk a lot about how do you master your psychology. I'm going to give you one simple framework to think through and then some tips and tools and strategies you can immediately implement put into your life to better manage your mind. The first thing, if you're having negative recurring thoughts and feelings that are coming up, those are really, they're just, they're easy. And here's what I mean by that. You know, we kind of have two systems of thought. Psychologists like to say now we have the System 1 theories in which the System 1 is your automatic, just unconscious, immediate thoughts and impulses that come up from, from your body that usually your brain is just saying, hey dude, we've thought through this before or hey dude, we're trying to protect you. So it's running at a very baseline, easy, energetic level. Your brain loves to optimize itself. It doesn't like to have to do.

A whole lot of thinking.

It just likes to say, what do we already know? How can we apply it to this situation? So if you had fears in the past and a similar situation is here, your body just generates those fears and says, hey man, run away again. If you had challenges in the past and you want to protect yourself, your brain just says, hey, protect yourself right now. We're worried about this, but sometimes those are not helpful thoughts. They're automatic, but they're not actually helpful. It's just your brain saying this is the easiest route we know. And part of becoming a more mature, conscious, enlightened person is to better take control of our system too, which is our sort of consciousness dashboard on our mind or our ability to more directly work, control, generate and create our own thoughts and behaviors in the moment. Not relying too much on just the things that come up for us. Now of course, we're always going to most of our lives is very system one driven, very unconscious, automatic. We're just going through the motions. But the people who Achieve the peak amounts of success. The highest performers in the world have said, you know what? I need to discipline my mind to support me. Even when it comes up with an automatic immediate thoughts, I want those to be positive and buoyant and confident and strong. Something that leads me to healthy decisions for my life, not just things that protect me. And so I think that we have to learn how to do that. One of the simple ways to do that is this framework to understand how thoughts develop into strong and automatic thoughts in our lives. I call the framework R WID which stands for relative weight of importance and duration. People often who have negative recurring thoughts and feelings in their life, the reason those keep coming up all the time is because they, at some point in their life or continually are giving those thoughts, the negative ones, more attention than necessarily any other thoughts. In other words, the relative weight that they give those thoughts is quite high, and they give a lot of importance to them. So those thoughts are very important to me right now. And they're durational. They last over a period of time. They keep thinking about those thoughts, thinking about those thoughts, think about those thoughts, and it's all that repetition that seals it in the back of their head. And now their head says, oh, this is an easy thing. I know this one. And it pulls it forward. So that simple repetition, because they made it important and they thought about it a lot, it keeps coming up for them over and over and over again. So there's two negative. There's a good negative thing about that and a positive thing. The negative is if you keep obsessing about negative things, your mind will be automatically conditioned to bring it up more and more and more often without your control, just automatically. The positive aspect is we can use that same sense skill set and that same rule to apply positive thoughts into our own life. We can give positive thinking, positive questions, positive approaches to life, a lot of importance in our life and a lot of focus and focus on them and give a lot of duration to them over a period of time, and they get sealed in the brain as well. And now the brain says, well, that's easy. Automatically thinks about it. So for me personally, I've done this so much in my life that I just have. I automatically think about the best possible outcomes in almost everything I do. I used to think about the negative outcomes. I thought, that's not supporting me. So how did I do that? Well, leveraging RWID it helped. And let me break it down for you a little bit about how you could do this. Because the first thing you have to do in order to improve your mind is take total control of your attention and notice where are your thoughts right now? At a very continual basis, you have to think, where are my thoughts right now? Are they supporting me? Or are they automatically coming up negative and self protective in ways that are not advancing my life? Just to be aware, to be conscious of what's going on in your body, in your sense of feeling and emotion and the sense of the thoughts you're actually having, just start paying attention. You know, for a lot of people because they've never done this before and it's hard to remind them to do it. It's like simple, here's what I want you to do. Just start paying attention to your thoughts. Anytime you're in line, anytime you're in line. From now on, if you're in line at Starbucks, just say, I'm in line at Starbucks. Brendan said, think about my thoughts. What are my thoughts saying right now? Just checking in. You're in line in traffic waiting for the next car. Just sit and think, what are my thoughts right now? And just notice what you've been thinking about. The more we notice what we've been thinking about, the more we can interrupt what we've been thinking about. See, if we just allow that feeling to keep coming up and you don't pay attention to it, our life can be very frazzled and very highly anxious. But once we say what's my mind on right now? And we redirect it, that is where personal power comes from. First awareness, right? And understanding and the consciousness to what's going on. But then the ability now to be self directed, to choose what we want to focus on. So first we're attentive to it and then redirect it. If it's negative, it's not supporting you. Redirect it.

How do you redirect it?

First and foremost you just say what.

Would be the opposite of this negative thing?

Then you think about the positive thing and you focus on that and you repeat it to yourself. For many people that might include closing their eyes, just visualizing a more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, thinking about more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, focusing on with their eyes closed, close. And that visualization of a more positive outcome, of how things could turn out well or how the situation could be better, or even just what are the next steps I should take? Visualizing that and assigning a high amount of importance and duration to it, Meaning making that thing important to us by making it. How do you make something important. You give it a sensation. You feel that thing, you sense it. You sense what your next step would be. You sense how it would feel if the outcome would be better, how it would feel emotionally, psychologically, spiritually for that thing to be up. Allow it to have a lot of emotion to it, pay attention to it, your eyes closed, you see that thing, you feel it, you sense a different step. You know what you're gonna do. You pay attention to it and you keep focusing on that. Just over a period of minutes. Keep focusing and keep focusing, focusing. When your mind automatically wants to go back to the easy, which might be negative, you go, no, no, no, no, I don't want to. I don't want. I'm not into easy right now. I'm into conditioning my mind. Focus, focus, focus, focus. Give attention duration and sensation to it. Attention, duration, sensation. Attention duration, sensation. Visualization. Visualization, Visualization. It's repetition of that positive alternative to a negative impulse that comes up that gives us personal power. Let me say it again. It's that attention to that positive alternative over attention to repeating that negative impulse or thought that gives us personal power. It's not that we're going to someday wake up in the perfect world in which we don't have negative thoughts. There's plenty of times I struggle too. I come up with this.

I'm thinking about a new dream, a new goal.

I'm going to go interview some, you know, major celebrity or we got a big time celebrity client. And I get a little nervous and I can start thinking about all these negative things that could happen to if I screw up. My mind immediately interrupts that. Now because my mind goes relative weight of importance and duration. Brendon, you can either give this thought more time and energy and focus or you can just stop it and force your brain, creatively force it to direct it to a different possible alternative. Force it. Literally go, oh, I'm sensing this negative thing over here is coming up for me. I'm sensing it.

Stop.

Okay, get to work, brain. What positive thing could I create? And focus on and close your eyes and think about it and focus on it and focus on it and focus on it and build it out. Make it elaborate in your own mind so you can visualize and see it and feel it and focus on it. Focus on it, focus on it. Literally later on in the evening, focus on it again, focus on it again. You start building in that capacity. Now, if this all sounds way too philosophical and you're like, dude, how do I land this? How do I Make it happen. Here's a very simple thing you can do to reprogram your mind. Create a sheet of two simple things. Very simple things. I want you to write five questions down that you're going to ask yourself three or four times a day. Five questions that are positive for yourself that you. Every day you're going to wake up in the morning, you're going to read these questions to yourself. You're going to answer them, you're going to read them, you're going to answer.

Them every morning, then at lunch, read.

The questions, answer them at night, read the questions, answer them. These can be questions like, what could I feel incredibly grateful for right now? How could I surprise or flirt with somebody right now? How could I have fun right now? Positive things like that, right? How could I demonstrate love or excellence right now? Ask these questions in the morning, ask them in the afternoon, ask them at night. By asking these positive questions over and over, I mean, you just do this for 30 days, you're going to recognize a total shift in your life. Just simple questions. But you're giving them weight by focusing on them three times during the day. You're having duration by focusing on it three times during a day, over 30 days, your mind starts to reshift its gears to give automatic ease to answering those questions and living in that mindset versus an undirected unconscious mindset. Second thing on that sheet are those things you can do. Five questions first. Second thing I want you to do is come up with three words that describe your ideal self. Just three words, you know, Mine are, for example, present, excited, and bold. So I'm going to focus on those questions three times a day as well. What I do is I put them on my iPhone and they come up as an alarm three different times during the day. Just my phone buzzes and those words are there. I'm like, oh, right, I'm that guy. I got to focus on being that guy versus whatever. I might be in a bad mood. I'm like, ah, you know, completely detached. And then I look, I'm like, dude, no, I'm an excited person.

Break that thought.

Get back into this. Got it. This is who I am. That sounds so simple.

But guess what?

People won't do the discipline. They are so frustrated with their mind because they haven't done the conscious discipline to reprogram it. That's the last thought here. Yes, we all have unconscious thoughts, every single person of us. If you don't have a mental disorder, and then, guess what, you. You have extreme power in your Life to overtake it. And even those who have mental disorders, psychologists and therapists work with them to recondition their mind by allowing them a different way of attaching meaning to the past incidences. But even if they attach a different meaning to the past, the whole focus is bring them into today and teach them to use their mind to direct itself into positive orientations to make healthier decisions, to enact healthier behaviors. If you can just focus on getting more attentive to what you're feeling and then do these thought exercises. What questions? Who do I want to be? And you do that over and over again, everything changes. Last thought. Our unconscious and our mind is incredibly programmed not just by thought, which is what I've been talking about. Relative weight of importance and duration. Focusing our attention on what questions would ask ourselves. What positive alternatives can we create for ourselves? What labels can we create for ourselves to support us? But our mind also is incredibly conditioned by action behavior. You've heard the term, like, fake it till you make it. I don't love that. I'd rather just say, you know what?

Just be authentic over and over and.

Over and over again.

Right? If you take action on a consistent basis, it teaches your mind that do that. So do things that are positive for yourself. Take bolder actions. Teach yourself. I'm just gonna be confident, you know, Just for no other reason, I want you to really think about this. The more that you take action, the more your brain gets automatically conditioned to understand. That's what we do. Hey, man, that's just what we do. We just react to bad situations like this because that's how we've done it. You can actually condition your mind without doing any thought other than just behaving in a more positive manner. And suddenly you find yourself thinking more positively. I know it sounds duplicitous, but word is duplicitous. I think it's word sounds good.

Good word. It's like a $10 word right there.

You know, that's a big word for Montanan. But I really want you to think about that. Your actions condition your mind as much as your recurring thoughts condition.