Mashup: How to Keep Track of Your Personal Growth

Self awareness is gained by self evaluation. If you want to be better aware of who you are, where you can grow, how you can uniquely give or serve, we need to evaluate yourself. Hello my friends. I'm Brendon Burchard, host of the Brendon show and founder of growthday.com and I'm honored to be your high performance coach today. I believe that every day we can be inspired. We can live with intention and purpose. We can bring the joy and honor the struggles of each day to push ourselves to grow, to serve, to be a role model, to lead extraordinary lives. I believe that every day is a great day to grow. Your breakthrough awaits you@growthday.com now let's get to today's episode. My friends. Share this with three friends just like you who are committed to their personal growth. And also be sure to tag me or DM me on Instagram Rendon Burchard so I can say hi. Thanks again for listening. Now, let's begin. You know when most people evaluate themselves? When they have a performance review coming up at work, when they've really screwed something up and they're guilty and they're thinking of all the other stupid things they've done that hurt them. When they hit a birthday, when they hit New Year's, when someone holds up a mirror in front of them and says, hey, you're being a jerk and they have to really re evaluate. Most people are not proactively assessing their performance. And so when it comes time to do that, they're disappointed. And so if this is not a basic habit for you, I need you to start scoring yourself at the end of the day. Now, people really don't like this one, and I'm just gonna be upfront about that. You probably won't want to do this, and a lot of people don't. But if there's something inside of you that is restless for that next level, we're gonna have to start measuring. If you don't measure it, you can't improve it. And the same way that most people, you know, if you ever try to lose weight or gain, you notice apparently this is weightlifting talk. But if you've ever tried to, like, get stronger, you gotta write it down. Like, how many reps did you do? How did you, you know, what routines did you do today? How much weight did you use? Like, if you do that in the gym, well, you gotta do that in the playground of life. 2. But most don't. And they're really struggling. I can't tell you. It's just like painful to watch. I'll show up and I'll like, tell me about your life. And first, they don't even know where to start because they've never measured themselves. And then second, in the dialogue with me as a high performance coach, I find them disappointed, upset, struggling, unsure of themselves. And a lot of that could have been handled if on a more consistent basis they were self aware and personally accountable to their own behavior and growth. Isn't it true? Don't you know somebody you wish? Oh my gosh, I wish that person would like stop at the end of the day and say, am I being a good person? Isn't there someone you're so frustrated with right now in life who you just love to sit them down and say, hey, you need to be more self aware. You aren't paying attention to who you're being and it's hurting everybody around you. Jerk. We all have that person. We wish they were more self aware. But how do you get self awareness? You just go to a meditative retreat once a year. You luck out into being a self aware person. Self awareness is gained by self evaluation. If you want to greet better aware of who you are, where you can grow, how you can uniquely give or serve, we need to evaluate yourself. Does this make sense? So what are your habits right now for evaluating yourself? What do they look like? How are you measuring yourself and your progress in life? What are those? If you got some man virtual high five, I could be there with you. Celebrate that. That's awesome, right? That's incredible because most people don't do that. So I hope that you are doing that. But it's a struggle for a lot of people too. So here's a simple way that you can end your day scoring yourself along the lines of, again, what we're talking about here, productivity specifically, you might have other ways you might score your personal values, you might score your energy, you might score how much influence you had with other people. I'm going to give you some related to what we talked about, productivity. So we can get some quick wins and gains for you as we jump into more in depth training. Here's what those are. I would like ask yourself at the end of the day these specific statements and then rate yourself low. One means you suck. Okay. Five means you're awesome, you're doing a good job. Okay, so let's walk through these. Number one, I worked on things that mattered most today. I know that's basic, so I'll go fast here. Number two, I progressed a major dream or goal Today, meaning did you progress today? Number three, I avoided distractions. Well, today. Number four, I set intentions before each major activity. Today. That's a huge one. Number five, I fully engaged and enjoyed my efforts today because high performers strive satisfied. They're engaged. And in that engagement, they find joy and they find fulfillment, satisfaction, confidence. It's by engaging. So how did you do today? Did you enjoy your efforts or not? Now remember, low 11. 11. High five. Five. Five. Where are you? Here. So every day I sit myself down and I started scoring myself. This is probably about seven years ago. And remember seven years ago I was still then a certified high performance coach. Seven years ago I was like my career was just taking off. And what we want to believe is that people just kind of bumble into progress. People bumble into momentum. I'm telling you, high performers are more strategic and they're more self evaluative. Now, many of them, this was a unconscious competence for them. They really didn't know that their self talk was so oriented towards self evaluation until I did some coaching and interviewing with them to, to discern that. But it turns out high performers, they're measuring stuff. Now, I just want to make it easier for you. So here's a simple tool. Just write those things down, then score yourself. Now, when you score yourself at the end of the day, add your score up. So let's say your three's all the way down. That'd be 3, 6, 9, 12, 15. Montana kid doing math and who's right? Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So let's say you're 15. So you add your score up. That'd be 15. Then multiply it by four. 15 times four is 60. That will give you a score of 100%. Okay. Whatever your score is, keep seeking clarity each day and you'll get better and better and better. Try to improve this each day. Look, there's gonna be days you're a two, other days you're a five. But the goal is to ask yourself this. Like, I want you to do something. And if this sounds too basic, here's what I want you to do. And add to your routine that maybe you already have. Maybe you end your day with journaling. Congratulations. Not enough. Okay, instead, what I want you to do is create your own scoring mechanism for the end of the day. Whether it's taking a page out of my playbook here or you're scoring yourself. Right. If I ask you, how'd you do today? And you go, good, that's one level of self evaluation. But if I say how did you do today? And I give you a specific context. How did you do today in keeping to your own agenda that you might say good or pretty well. But if I say, how did you do today in keeping to your own agenda? On a scale of 1 to 10, 1. You sucked and got pulled into everybody else's agenda. You got totally distracted. You didn't get anything done. You wanted to. 10. You were superbly excellent today. You stayed on point. It's a different quality, isn't it, when you got to rate yourself and you're like, I was a six. And then my next question to you, well, why were you a 6 versus, say, a 10? Then you can go, oh, well, because I made these decisions or I allowed that, or this person did this. Okay, great. Okay, well, what would it take to go from a 6 to a 10? Well, I would had to have done this or next time I would do this. Soon as you score yourself, you have an anchor or a benchmark from which to move yourself and a different level of self evaluation. So what could you. I know I'm talking long about this. There's one reason I'm trying to get you in your own unconscious mind right now to be generating a lot of ways you could score yourself. Because for me, there's 50 different things I score myself on at the end of the day. 50. Now, here's the thing. I don't let my low numbers bum me out. Because the truth is, you know what? Measuring myself across 50 things every day, it's not like I'm a robot, you know, it's not like I'm perfect in every one of those areas. But here's what happens. Let me tell you this. This is a huge insight. So please write this down. If you're not scoring yourself consistently, that's why you feel so out of balance. If you're not scoring yourself consistently, that's why you feel yourself so out of balance. It's why, you know, one day you realize you've been working so hard, but you neglected the kids. Why did you neglect the kids? Because you're a bad person or a bad parent? No, it's because you didn't have the quality of your experience with them on a radar, on a dashboard, on a sheet at the end of each day or maybe each week. And so what happens is, you know, life takes hold of us, that we get caught in the stream of life and we're just kind of getting carried along. And then one day we wake up and we realize, wait, I'm like seven. I'M like seven. I've gone down seven different river channels that I didn't anticipate. Right. And so the only way to keep us there is to evaluate. And I think if you can do that, things significantly shift. So I hope that you'll figure out what is your end of day scoring. I'm sure while I've been talking, you've been thinking of other things. You could score your energy, you could score how you treated your wife or your kids or your team. You could score how much you stayed focused. You could score how well you actually made sales, or how well you dealt with clients, or how well you built your business. I don't know what it is for you, but if you don't know what it is for you, and if you aren't scoring, I know the next level. It's right there for you. It's right there. So put this in play. How do you create remarkable and long lasting friendships? And I'm talking about the kind of friendships that you love, the friendships that bring you alive, that bring you that connection, that help life feel more even meaningful, that help you progress and feel supported, help you be seen, help you feel a true connection with not just others, but with humanity. Because the people around you are awesome. And when the people around you are awesome, you know, you feel better about life. But we also went through this crazy last 18 months where so many people were isolated, where we had so much turmoil, so much conflict, so much just uncertainty and fear in the world, where I really believe friendships really elevated. And you could see whether or not you had great friends throughout this pandemic or you didn't. You were able to see whether or not you got the support that you needed, whether or not you were able to maintain your sense of vibrancy in some of those times of aloneness, whether or not you had people who cheered you on when you decided to make a transition, start something new, or the kids left the house, or you got sick or something was going on that was difficult in your life. We look to our friends and I think that this is a very undervalued conversation in mental health. So much about the mental health conversation is appropriately about self awareness, is. It's about, you know, mindfulness, it's about taking care of our stressors. And a lot of it is that solo work that we all have to do for self mastery. But I can tell you that the great universities of the world, the psychology department is right near the sociology department because they go together. We are social beings. And when you lose that Social connection with the world, which usually starts through lack of disciplined habits with your friends, then suddenly life loses its color. And I think this is so important. You're going to hear me talk about friendship today in a way you probably haven't heard before. Very much from what we would call a high performance psychology perspective. And I think you're going to love this. So if you've been struggling with friendships in your lifetime, not either having enough friends or not having the quality of friends that you've always wanted, this is a serious conversation today. I can't imagine a time, at least in my life so far, where friendships were so incredibly important. I get to share some of the things that really have worked, not just in my life and my friendships, but in studying this work deeply over the years in recognizing how many people are entrepreneurs, high achievers, people who are trying to make great impact in the world. You're here today and sometimes that journey can feel very lonely or when you get to the top, it can feel lonely, they say. And I'm like, I kind of believe what my friend Brian Tracy and mentor said to me one time. He said, if it's lonely at the top, you did it wrong. I thought, woo, that's good, that's good. Because maybe sometimes we value today progress. We value today getting things done. We value that top mountain of achievement. And then we look around and go, oh, nobody really knows me. I don't feel a connection to others. Yeah, I got the thing, the house, the car, the bank account, the accolades, the Instagram page. And all of a sudden, though, something's missing. And friendship is one of the greatest vehicles to the real psychology of well being that we talk about here at Growth Day. I'm going to share with you a secret today, just a simple phrase. You're going to go, oh my gosh, that's why my friendships aren't going right. So you're going to love this session. I say that triangle, right, of well being that we talk about Growth Day aliveness is one of the things we all want after you had everything else, right? Another thing we want is connection. We're not after casual friendships here today. We're at like, how do I create authentic, deep, trusting, vulnerable, fun, real relationships? Because how many of you have ever had friendships that turned out to be fake? You thought you had a good friendship and that thing turned out to be not so good or poisonous or, you know, somebody, like, they weren't loyal to you as a friend or they lied to you or something went wrong. You thought, how could that happen in that relationship. And I always tell, like, friendships are a science of relationship. It's about how you create relationship with others. And I'm going to give you again, a phrase that will really help you with this today. And then if it's true that we want aliveness and connection, this triangle, another thing that we want is meaning. Well, meaning isn't achieved just by living your purpose each day in your own head. Meaning is achieved through a social relationship network. My sense of meaning is, do I feel connected to the world? And the world isn't an abstract thing. It's not like I feel connected to the oak tree. It's like, no, I mean, did I feel. Did you make your difference in the world? That's going to be served and answered through your social impact, your relationships with others. And I have to tell you, I've been coaching people for 20 years of my life now. And a lot of people have one friend. You know, in the United States, unfortunately, the number of people with three good friends has declined over the decades. You're like, three good friends. Oh, we got to talk about that. Because some people stumble into friendships or hope for friendships, just like some people hope to have a loving relationship, just like some people hope to have a good job, just like some people hope that, you know, they get healthier. And then there's strivers who take life a little bit by the reins and say, no, no, no, let me architect that, Let me build that. And I'll give you my own examples today of where I sucked at friendships and I had to learn how do you do them and how do you create them? And once you know how to create and craft them, life really opens up for you, and it becomes not just more alive and connected, but more meaningful. Like, a sense of meaning happens when we have a tapestry of social relationships that are real and impactful. And then, of course, in the middle of that triangle, you always see me draw out growth. Your friends should be lifting you up, not pushing you down. Your friends should be inspiring you to get better. Your friends should have your back, but also be willing to challenge your face. You know what I'm saying? Like, your friends are and should be one of your primary growth drivers in life. Most people choose ambitious goals to be their growth driver. Oh, I'm going to do something that's hard, or I'm going to try to achieve this amazing thing. I'm going to try to become a millionaire or make this difference or build this company or, you know, have this type of family. And it's this external climb, this thing they're trying to achieve, and too many people forget. It's like, actually, one of the best drivers of growth isn't your job, isn't your goals, it's your friendship circle. And when your friendship circles make you a more alive, deeper, caring, thoughtful, authentic person in the world, I'm telling you what, guess what? At work, you're better. At home you're better, your art gets better, your sense of life lifts. Let me share with you what I really believe to be the two central problems of friendship. Okay, the two central problems of friendship. The first one is a failure of each of our own. I'm just taking this on myself as well. It's like we fail in life to realize most of our friendships were assigned not aligned. Most of our friendships were assigned not aligned. What I mean by that is many of our friendships happen because group assignment, right? Think about it. Some of your best friends, where did you meet them? School, Your neighborhood, some other affiliation, Maybe at work, maybe in a group that you joined. So it was like, oh, we showed up somewhere, or we were assigned somewhere and there was that girl who sat next to me in class, we became friends. Or, oh, I worked with this person at work. We were co workers, we became friends. And these are kind of like assigned. And I know that sounds really weird to say, so bear with me a little bit. I don't mean that the manager, like, you're going to be friends here. What I mean is because of your group, your affiliation, or where you were, you kind of met people there. And by default, by you being a good person or communicating or doing stuff with them, you kind of became friends versus. That's like an assigned friend. It's like, oh, because we were here, we became friends versus an aligned friend, which is, oh, I'm an adult now. What are the types of friends that I want to create that align with my passion, my dreams, my lifestyle, my values, my beliefs, the things that I want of life, and let me go get them, not let them fall into my lap, which brings up the second designation. And this is hard to say to people. And if you're in a place where you feel lonely in your life or you feel like you don't have great friendships, I promise this will be so helpful for you today to even know how your own brain thinks. And many of us. And I was this way probably all the way throughout high school, even I never. And this is the second problem of friendships. I never made the deliberate choice to have remarkable friendships. I kind of ended up with Friends. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Who's like ended up with friends if you kind of just ended up with like this person? It was kind of my friend. One of my buddies goes, he goes, I don't want no rando friends. And it was like random. Now I love random. I love the universe, I love God, I love coincidence. Listen, I read the Celestine Prophecy. People are glowing out there for me. I believe in that coincidence stuff. But I can also share with you, like if you just allow randomness in your life all the time, you'll always feel a sense of mediocrity too. We have to stretch. We have to choose our life. And to choose our life we have to be deliberate and go, what kind of life do I want? I would like you to learn to architect your ideal friendships. And can you get all of them? And will all your friendships be perfect? I'm not that guy. I'm not here to promise everything's going to be sweet and perfect and peaches in life. I am here to suggest though that if you haven't deliberately chosen the types of friendships that you want, that's a problem. Especially if you're an adult. Right? And that's the thing is we're just, we're not encouraged to do that. Think about how much time people were feeding your ears with the idea you had to be really thoughtful about the career you choose. How many of you ever had more people tell you more times about be so thoughtful about the school you choose, the career you choose, but no one ever said as much. Be very thoughtful about the friends and the friendships that you build. And that's why we have a lot of high achieving people who are lonely their whole life. Think about your career. What are you going to be one day? Very rarely. What's the type of social network you're going to build around you? What's the type of friendships you're going to architect? What are you going to be proud of in terms of your friends in the future? What do you want your friends to achieve? What do you want your friends to experience in life? Not just what they give you, but what are you going to give out too? What kind of friendship do you want to create and experience? How do you want your friends to actually interact with one another? Have you ever thought about that? We spend so much time. If you're a parent and you have two kids, you're so worried about how they interact, right? I know people who've never even thought, how do I want my friends to interact? I mean they might think, you know what, we shouldn't put them in a room at a party because they have this history of that background. But very few people are like, I'm going to actually teach my friends how to be friends with one another. Now, I know some of you might be like, this guy sounds like a control freak. I'm like, I am, but I'm a happy one. You know what I'm saying? I think this is such an important area to architect. Most friends have never talked about how to be friends. They just go, you want to go to lunch? They go to lunch. They talk about the weather, the waiter, the food, what's going on. They leave. And there's no architecting. There's no. I think of, like, social systems are things that can be shaped. You all think, like at work, right? How much we talk about at work, building a culture. More books and more people have spent time on this conversation of building culture at work and never the culture of a friendship. Isn't that weird? I don't know where along the line we lost the conversation and the desire to choose to build awesome friendships. And a culture of friendship, meaning not just friends. Most people think of, I want a friend, right? When you're in high school, you just want a friend, right? You're just like, at least I was. Can I get one? You know, it's like you worry about having friendships when you grow up. And usually that means you think. And we're all trained this way. Especially in Western cultures. We're taught to have a friend and we think in a very individualistic mode. I and this person are in relationship, and then you have another friend. I and this person are in relationship, and maybe you go out and you try to get them together and we have a party. But even at the party, it's individual nodes. Me, that friend, and this friend. And I don't get trained as I'm getting older to think as a systems social architect. Oh, wow. Look at all these nodes, if you will, these friends. If I like each of these people and have relationship with each people, why don't in some way I weave them together and create a tapestry of friendship where I'm actually connecting the dots and creating a culture of friendship. See, we don't think like that, do we? I was a very kind of solitary child. I was kind of in my own little world. I don't know about you all, but I was definitely, you know, much. I would be like an introverted kind of child. I kind of kept to myself. I like to play with my Toys, kind of by myself. In elementary school, from what I can remember, I was kind of solo. Brendan. I didn't see social systems right? I was in a class with kids and a teacher, and I had a relationship with the teacher and. And I had a relationship with this person or that person or not. But I couldn't see the class. I couldn't say, oh, you know, like, this group is kind of like this. Instead, it was just like, she likes me or she doesn't. Teachers like that. I didn't see the system. Today, I'd like you to try to see the system a little bit. See the system of the friendships you've built in your life. See the system at play, at work. See the system of your culture or your nonprofit or your company. When you can start seeing a bigger picture and get out of your head a little bit. Now, something happens. There's connection, there's community. See, everyone says, I want community. I'm like, well, you can't be an individualistic person in the community forever. You have to elevate to seeing the system. If you never be a community member or an effective one or a helpful one, and if you can't get out of your head, well, I'm saying that not as judgment to you. That was me. So there's. There's no judgment here. If you don't have friends, I'm like, I'm telling you my story, too. I was a solo person. I was in my own head. I couldn't see the class. I couldn't see the system. And so I felt apart. And because I felt apart, and I couldn't see what was happening, and I didn't know how to engage. I was lonely. And then when I finally made a connection with a friend, that friend became my life. Later on, that perpetuated into, you know, some of you guys know my story of my first breakup with the. My high school sweetheart. I was destroyed because that was my one person, right? That was my one node in the world. And then when that relationship fell apart, I fell apart and became depressed and suicidal. And so how we relate with one or multiple people can completely shape our mental health. I know you already know that. And so I had to learn, like, wow, one. I don't want to ever be dependent on one friend. I want to build a support system. You ever heard that language before? No one says, go build a supporter. I want you to listen to the language of successful people. When successful people are speaking, they never tell you, go build a supporter. They say, go build what? A support system. A support network. Oh, I got to get out of single node thinking. A node is one individual unit. And I got to get into the system. I got to stop thinking, does Sally at the class next, does she like me? And if she likes me, my whole life is good or bad or ruined. And I got to go. Mm. There's a class here. There's an energy, a vibe, a spirit. There's rules and norms. There's a culture here that is happening. How do I want to participate in this? And how do I want this culture to happen, too, in ways that I can affect what do they want? And we all have to start thinking about that more in a society in which we're supposedly connected, but we've actually become individual nodes in the network. Hey, it's Brandon jumping back in here again. Are you looking to go to the next level in your life right now? The next level of joy, abundance, success? Then you already know that you need to journal about your lessons learned in your life. You got to track your moods and your habits. You have to learn from the best personal development coaches and teachers in the world. And you got to stay inspired and accountable so that you can be more focused, disciplined, joyous, and keep growing. That's what the Growth Day app is going to help you to do, my friend. It's the world's first all in one personal development app. It has all of the tools you need, all the coaching and the community that you need to level up, to progress every week, to track your breakthroughs, and to keep growing in every area of your life consistently over the long term. So go start your transformation right now@growthday.com or just download the Growth Day app on your phone right now. Every day. You can keep improving every day. We are here for you. And every day is truly a great day to grow together. So let's make self improvement a way of life. Let's make that self improvement stick. Go to growthday.com right now. This is going to be a conversation about overall life happiness, not just like in the moment, you know, happiness. Because in the moment of happiness, I mean, we can all kind of get that bottle of wine, bag of chips. Maybe it's just me, but I think finding pleasure or joy or in the moment happiness, we can get there. We'll talk about that a little bit, but I wanna talk about the big picture. How do we know what will give you enduring happiness? Happiness that you'll self report throughout your lifespan that, yeah, I have a happy life. It's different than sometimes just in the moment Happiness, it has to last longer. And so what psychologists have done is basically broken it up and said, you know, people who are happy over the long term, they tend to look at their lives in very specific ways, and here's how they tend to do it. They tend to break up their life. They look at their past, they're happy with their past, they're happy with their present, and they're happy with where they're going. So they kind of break it up into time zones, right? Past, present, and future. And here's what we found in each of those areas. If you look at your past in this specific way, you'll be more happy. If you look at your present in the specific way, you'll be happier. And if you look at your future in this specific way, you'll be happier over the long term. So let's start with your past. Okay? Most people who are unhappy over the quality of their life over the long term, it's because something in the past, they're really hung up on it. They consistently battle it, blame it, are angry about it, are bitter against it. And those who are happy, they don't have that negative emotional range about their entire past. It's not to say that there might not be some things in the past that you can't be unhappy about or some things that happened that you were upset about because you know what happened to all of us. But those who make it out and have a joyful life, here's what they tend to do when they look to the past. The first thing they tend to do is, is accepted. They're like, the past is the past. It did pass, and here we are today. They don't make everything okay. They don't try to validate it. They don't try to say, well, that was supposed to happen. They just go, I got it. The past happened. I have to accept what happened because I can't change it now. I can change how I perceive it, but things happened. I'm going to accept that the past happened for some type of reason, or if anything, maybe I don't ascribe a higher reason to it. But I'm going to say, in general, I'm good with the past. It happened. Today's a new day. And they accept the reality that that time period, that situation, that person, that thing that they didn't like, it's not here anymore. So they can't keep living there. They have to accept that today is today. All of that is gone. Today they can choose a different life. As we'll talk about. So they accept the past. But here's the thing, they go beyond just acceptance. And this is really important because I think people forget this all the time. It's not just about, like accepting the past. Okay, that's fine. No, happy people, they generate memories of fondness on a continual basis. They relive the past. Not the negative things, but the positive memories. They think about it, honey, you remember that one vacation we took? And they talk about it today, hey, do you remember when you were a kid and that funny thing happened? And they relive the positive. They have. Happy people have a sense of nostalgia about the positive things of the past, and they remember that. And their connection to that is more than towards the negative thing. And so here's a question to see if you're happy with your family, with your friends, those around you, Are you often reliving positive memories? They tell positive, nostalgic stories about the past without apology. They're not living there. They're not trying to go back and relive the glory days. They're just honoring and appreciating that those days even happened for them. They have a deep sense of fondness and yes, gratitude to the beautiful moments and memories and people and experiences they got to have. And so I know that might sound almost too easy to say because, you know, maybe in the past you went through some traumatic stuff, some very difficult moments happened, but by and large, if you can finally get to a point where today you go, okay, I don't have to be cool with everything that happened, but I accept the past. I'm cool. It's over. I am cool today. And I like these little moments. And I'm going to choose to focus and remember those and bring them up to people, talk about those things. Then I'll feel better about the past. And if you feel better about the past, you have a more solid foundation and a much easier time finding happiness Today. Today. If you want to feel happy today, there's two things we know without question will get you to higher levels of happiness. Number one, connection. Connection, that is you deciding to connect to the moment. That means being present and connecting to other people. You know, they've done a lot of those end of life studies to see what makes people happy. And you see over and over and over again it's the quality of their relationships. And so if you want to be happy today, put more emotional connection into your relationships. And I say that not philosophically, I mean, like, have that intention. Like, I'm going to put good energy into this relationship. Today, I'm going to put good energy into my kid today. Even if they were a jerk yesterday, I accept it. Kind of cute. Today, I. I'm going to just put good energy, good vibes into this relationship today. Because if I do that, I'll feel better. If you're doing work and you don't even like the work, but at least you'll engage with it. You'll connect to the work. Like, you'll force yourself to be there, be present, be in it. You'll feel happier. The second thing today that you can do so easy is increase your appreciation. Almost in every psychological study ever done, those who had more gratitude reported greater happiness. The way that you get gratitude is you appreciate things. So let's just jump right to that. Start appreciating things better. Appreciate your house today, you know, appreciate that maybe you got a car. Appreciate that you had somebody in the house with you today who loved you. Or appreciate the fact that you have opportunities that all around the world, people would just beg for that billions of people don't have the opportunities that you do. I know we're all in a big rush. I'm guilty sometimes, too, of going through things as fast as I can, because I got one thing, I got to go on another thing, another thing. But you know what I found? I'm most unhappy in life when that's what I'm doing. I'm just going on one thing, to the next thing, to next thing, to next thing, and the next thing, and not feeling what I'm doing, not really connecting it and not appreciating it. I'm writing a book, and there's days when I'm miserable about the book. And those days I'm miserable about the book are those days that I forget to connect with the material. And worse, I forget to appreciate the fact that I have the blessing to get to work on a book. I forget to appreciate how far I've come as a writer. I forget to appreciate the time that my team has set up to protect my ability to write. I forget to appreciate that God has given me a voice and I get to share that. And so I share with you that the most important thing you can do today, like, stop thinking that stuff will give you happiness. Stop thinking that you'll achieve something today that will give you happiness. The only thing that's going to give you happiness today, connection and appreciation. So connect to the moment. Connect to other people by putting positive energy. Remember, bring the joy. And then appreciate the little things, all the little goofy things throughout the Day, appreciate the opportunities that you have, you'll start to feel much happier. I promise you. Those are easy, quick wins in the moment, and then what we know for people who have the highest ranking of happiness, they look to the future in a unique way. And there's two elements there that they're usually looking towards. One, they're enthusiastic about something in the future. They're not optimistic. Optimistic would mean, you know, I believe stuff in general from today will turn out well. I believe that tomorrow is going to be good. Happy people are enthusiastic about something specific tomorrow or in the future. Very specific. They're enthusiastic about getting to do that project or complete that project. They're enthusiastic about that wedding coming up. They're enthusiastic about. About that thing gonna come out. There's something they look for. It's very specific. It's not a general optimism, though, that also has been shown very, very high in correlation to happiness, one of the highest rankings. Being optimistic, thinking things will turn out well. But really happy people, when they talk about the future, there's something specific they're excited about. So I ask you, what could you be excited about for tomorrow? What's hanging out there that you haven't allowed yourself to believe in and get stirred up about? Cause, you know, we're so scared of being disappointed that we destroy our happiness. We say, I don't want to get enthusiastic because it might not go well. And so we cage ourselves into an unsatisfying life. If you want to be happy again, you have to open yourself again to the idea that things can be great. You got to open yourself again to that hope, that optimism, that you gotta open up yourself again to the possibility, yeah, you might be disappointed. But here's the thing I always tell people. What would you rather experience a life in which you don't do anything and you never look forward to anything because you're scared of disappointment, which, by the way, means you are continually living in disappointment. Or you say, you know what? I look forward that. I think that could happen. I'm going to go for it. You do take action, but at least if you do get disappointed, the whole time you are taking action, you are developing competency, knowledge, skill, ability, talent, mastery. So even if you got disappointed, you know what the disappointment came as? It came at the very end as a sudden surprise. I'd rather have disappointment come at the very end as a sudden surprise than every single day of fear and disappointment and living in that terror that I'm going to be disappointed and doing nothing with myself. Don't know about you, but that's how I feel. So first, enthusiasm for a situation, something specific, it's so important. And then that next part about looking to the future is they have a sense of positive legacy they have made up in their mind. And that's all they've done. They've made it up. Because you and I, we can't read the future. We have no idea. But they've made up in their mind this story about their life having meaning and specifically a legacy they see looking into the future, they can see the legacy of their children, they can see the legacy of their business. They can see the legacy of the love that they created. They can see something. They can see that they are going to leave some type of mark or some type of relationship or some type of situation where the world is better because they tried, because they showed up. And maybe you don't know what your legacy is, but you know what you're never going to suddenly realize. It's not just going to happen. You have to make it up. So if you're not happy today, start making up stories about what you can be excited about tomorrow and about what mark you might leave. The difference you might leave even if you don't know exactly what it is. You don't have to have precision about these things. But in general, when you cast your eyes into the future, you go, mm, that's gonna be good. These next five are just tactical things every leader has gotta remember to do in order to allow that, you know, that forum for people to support what they create. For having those vision decisions, for making sure there's alignment and autonomy, for making sure that you're embodying it and showing it to people. And ultimate making sure you're managing the energy and the resilience of the groups. So here we go. Practice number one is you must establish the rhythm of the teams. You've got to establish the rhythm. And what that means is let's say you're running an organization. The rhythm of the organization results in two ways. I want you to think about it. There's an internal rhythm, the way that you meet, the way that you set goals. The rhythm of planning your quarter or your OKRs, your KPIs. It's all the internal rhythm of the things that you do to function and run the business, right? Then there's the external rhythm. That is your release rhythm, that is your launch rhythm, that's your marketing rhythm. That's the public facing publicity rhythm. It's what the world sees of you. Now those two rhythms are Sometimes different. They're different organizationally, they're different in families. They're different in how you might run a new team versus an established team. But it's so important that you as a leader take that on the helm of like, oh, what does that need to look like? And you won't know, unfortunately, until you practice principle number one, People support what they create. I'll give you an example. In my company right now, we've added a whole bunch of new people and we're still trying to figure out, okay, what's this new rhythm going to look like? And so the new team has to come in and see the rhythm we're doing now. And then we've got to adjust and pivot to the new team to establish the norms. You all know this from storm and forming and norming in team research experience. Well, our job is to figure out, okay, what should that rhythm be across the company, like your all hands meetings and processes to what each team or each organizational unit does or how you're going to improve. Families have to do this too. So you're a parent, okay, what's your family rhythm? What do you do Monday through Sundays? What are your rituals? What are those time slots that you're going to repeat? You might have a rhythm that you have with your partner or spouse. You go out to date nights on Fridays. Right. Or you might have a rhythm that you have with this child versus that child in order to create that connection with them. Everything has to be thought of in terms of a rhythm or a ritual or a patterned calendar slot in order for everyone to feel like, oh, we're moving in unison here. When leaders don't establish or work to establish with their teams or their culture or their families, what the rhythm is going to be. Everything feels random all the time. Everything feels like we're fighting fires, fighting, fighting. It always feels like we're fighting fighters, we're in emergency mode and we're going to burn out. And so I see this all the time and it's the hardest part because you as a leader often don't know what the rhythm needs to be yet. It has to happen in motion, which is why it's so important to be a good listener. So many leaders come into new companies and when they come into new companies, you know, I recently, I think it was last, it was two quarters ago, helped a CEO transition into a company where they had 12,000 employees. And I got brought in by the board because he was in trouble. And so I got brought in his 360 evaluations from the whole team. He'd only been there like six months. Everyone hated the guy. And I couldn't like, it took a while to figure out. Very likable, emotionally intelligent, fun, smart business person. And I'm like, what, what is going on? And what I found out was when he came into the company, he just, he said, well, this is, this has to be our rhythm. Here's our quarterly goals, this is our yearly goals. This is how we meet. And just imposed a rhythm on an existing team. They weren't ready for that. And so it was like a revolt. And for them, they got used to doing something. This whole thing changed everything. It was too fast. And if you're an organizational leader, you know that that's super hard. It always happens. Every company goes through it. Transitions in leadership are always difficult, always challenging. But your job is to be aware of that. And your job, if you're, if you're the person who has that vision, decision, you have to work really hard to establish that normal rhythm, normal meeting cadence, normal way about trying to achieve a goal, normal way of managing a project, normal way of meeting a quarterly stretch. You have to establish that. And you're probably going to need help with it. This is a great distinction between where leadership and management diverge. Leaders work with managers to establish that people support what they create to establish that rhythm. And often the leader doesn't actually manage the rhythm. They help set it up, they agree to it. They go. And then there's project managers, there's mid level managers, there's other people who are going to make sure that that rhythm happens. Right? Same thing might happen in your family. You might say, okay, we're all going to do this, but you might not be the person who always makes that thing happen. You might be like, you might have some support, you might have an assistant. You might assign the rhythm of the kids to the older kid, right? That you, that there's an assignment happening there. But you need to be aware of it and ensure that rhythm is happening with great energy. The second big idea is that in that rhythm, your job as a leader is to consistently repeat what is the vision? What are our beliefs? What should we focus on and not focus on? It's a repetition. What's the vision? What do we believe here? What are we working on? What are we not working on? What's the vision here? What do we do together here? What do we believe? What do we work on? What do we not? I often teach my own teams. I call this fighting for focus. It's like the leader's job is to say the same thing so many times, it finally sinks in. And you hope when you're leading teams that they get it. It takes years to get it. You can say the same thing. And I've had the blessing of working with US presidents, two of them now. And one of the common things that they always share, and you can read this in their books too, from presidential candidates and presidents, literally 200 years back, they all say the same thing. They're so surprised by how often that they have to say the same thing. They can't believe that they have to go from this organization, that organization, this team, that they have to say the same thing over and over. They have to repeat it. Here's our values, here's our vision, here's what we're after, here's what we're focused on. It has to be so repetitive. You have to build that. People need to hear things. How many times before they get it? Not seven. Dozens. Right? They have to hear it seven times to understand it or to repeat it or to memorize it, to operationalize it over the long term. Now you're talking about hundreds of times. That's the difference between understanding and memorization and operationalizing. That's why too many leaders get in trouble. They think I already said it. It's like you did. You said it, they understood it, but they didn't operationalize it. So high levels of repetition are the most important things. What are we about here? What do we believe? What are we going to do and not do? So hard. So hard. So hard. Very important that you have that on top of mind. Third thing. Third major practice for great leadership. I try to teach my own internal teams this, that you have to ensure mindful striving as a leader. What that means is you've got to know when to hit the gas and when to slow it down. You've got to know when to take on the project and when. Not all. Not in terms of how to achieve it, because management can do that, but how to achieve it with harmony and sanity and avoiding burnout. And everyone struggles with this. Because you know what, if you're a leader, you probably have a bunch of high performers, you have great talent, right? And if you're really a high achieving leader, you've got amazing talent all around you. And everyone wants to go and go 99, 99 miles an hour all the time. But every race you've ever seen on a track, the cars have pit stops. The car's got to take the pit stop. In order to function at a high level, over and over. So you got to build in the pit stops, you got to build in the celebrations. You got to say, not now, this one thing. I know you want to do that, but let's do this. And that always takes a lot of discussion and conversation, but you hold the heart of the organization. You have to know when you're pushing too hard and you have to know when you have to just ask for patience. You have to know when it's letting off the gas a little bit. You have to know when, like, okay, we're going to take a little bit less, you know, in this revenue or this quarter than we usually would. But you know what? Our people are stretched right now. And that's the hardest part. That's really ensuring that there's a harmony and an ongoing joy and the ability to have high performance. The reason most people don't like organizational leaders is because the organizational leaders burn them out. They don't listen and they don't practice everything we talked about in the principles in the earlier session of this training. And so knowing that you hold the heart and the energy and the resilience of the company reminds you, like, how do we ensure that we mindfully strive to. Mindfully striving means not burning out, but mindfulness also means being attentive to the awesome things that are happening. Because so many people, you know what, you know when burnout sucks, when there's no appreciation, when there's no celebration. A lot of people will push themselves super hard as long as they're appreciated and there's some celebration and we're making the impact. If you take away the impact, you take away the appreciation. Now it just feels like the grind. No one wants that. Being mindful in real life, like our personal development, mindfulness means we establish a peace and a, and a harmony and a gratitude and consciousness to the moment we're present and enjoying the journey and you ensuring that the enjoy that the journey is being enjoyed by the team. That's mindful striving. We're going for big things together, but we're being mindful, mindful to one another, mindful to our opportunities, mindful to our customers, mindful and grateful for the opportunities at hand. Fourth big idea is as you are trying to evaluate how you're doing, because evaluating the progress of you, the collaborators, the vision is so central to what you constantly have to do. Remember, you're kind of have that leadership vision on you, trying to see, where are we out of alignment, where are we not Doing well. I always tell especially new leaders or new managers of position, but also parents all the time. It's like it's more important for you to evaluate habits than outcomes. New leaders tend to obsess about the outcome, the KPI, the okr. They bemoan, they brutalize everybody on the final results, what's on the spreadsheet, what's in the metrics, what's in the panels of data, and it's all about that. And unfortunately they forget those things aren't real. Those things are outcomes. You don't need to like. Those outcomes happened. Why did they happen? Because there were habits at play. My job isn't to evaluate the quality of this thing. My job is to evaluate the quality of this thing. So one reason as an example, high performance habits kind of took over the world because it taught a lot of people. It's like, oh, measuring people's personalities or strengths or a lot of these other assessment tools out there actually don't correlate with long term success, wellbeing or positive relationships. What does the high performance habits. Because our habits create our outcomes over the long term, our habits create our real relationships, create peace of mind, or not create the ultimate results. So you're evaluating the habits of the team more than the outcome. And when you do that, now you're speaking their language, but versus speaking the language of the spreadsheet leader. And no one wants to work for the spreadsheet leader. They want to work with the person who has the heart and soul, who can talk about behavior and behavior change and patterns. And what patterns do you need to recognize? The habits of your team, the habits of your consumers, the habits of your kids, the habits of your spouse, the habits of your community, of your church. Like it's all about what are our collective habits? Because if we improve those, the panels, the outcomes, the KPIs and the OKRs get better. But if you start with those and you get obsessed about those and you're trying to manage and lead people to those, they get frustrated, bored, detached. It's not inspiring. What's inspiring is how do we summon the best of who we are together? That's inspiring. That's motivating, that's leadership. Last big idea here today with you all is it's simple practice. And I tease this out from the conversation about mindful striving because I think it's so important. And that is you have to teach the teams, teach the people who are leading, teach the people who you're impacting. You have to teach everybody the importance of recognizing our oneness and sharing love along the journey. That is, we are in this together. And I appreciate you and I want to celebrate you. I want to make you the hero. I want to elevate other people. The sharing of love on the journey is so important that people forget about. It's the heart and the soul of leadership. It's like very few people understand that leadership is just a format, a function of loving other people. Because you'll never last as a leader unless you genuinely like people. If you don't love other people, if you don't love elevating them, if you don't love listening to them, if you don't love celebrating their wins, if you don't love working hard together to make something happen, you'll never last. Please don't elevate yourself to a leadership position if you dislike people. We don't need more jerk leaders. What we need is people who are operating from their heart and who love to celebrate other people and why they love to celebrate other people because they recognize the oneness. They recognize the humanity. I'm like you, you're like me. We can, even though we might see things differently, be from different places, have completely different socioeconomic realities. Here we are together. We've decided to pursue this vision together. We have that vision. We've made the decision. We're all in. We're going to do it together. And as we do it together, if I can ensure that you love the process, that you feel cared for, that you feel celebrated when you win, that we are winning together. That's sharing the love, man. That's sharing the love. Your customers. When you make your customers feel loved, cherished, served, you make them the heroes. That's where word of mouth comes from. That's where the community builds. We have to realize it's like it's about sharing the love. It's just about sharing the love. And you got to find your way of doing that in your rhythm and how you talk about others with their habits, in how you mindfully strive together and how you practice all the principles that we talked about today. This is leadership. It's loving what we are doing together. It's caring for one another. They're not your followers. They're your collaborators, your co creators. That's why I love leadership. Okay, my friend. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Brennan Show. Tell some people about this episode. It's on each of us to spread positive positivity and empowerment during these times of chaos and negativity, right? So I'M asking you to be the dealer of hope and personal growth and education in your tribe. So take a screenshot right now and share the screenshot and this link to this episode with three of your friends today. Post it on social media. Use the hashtag growthday. That's growthday because that's the name of my company and we're always giving away prizes to our community. If you'd like to help me personally, then please rate and review the podcasts on Apple Podcasts. Give us some stars. Cheer us on. Leave a review. Because believe it or not, that stuff actually really does help and I read all of them. So my last thought for today Please remember you are stronger than you think and the future holds good things for you. Tomorrow can be an inspired today. Every new morning is a second chance. Every day is a great day to grow. We're thankful to have you here in the Growth Day community, so be sure to go deeper with us@growthday.com SA.