Mashup: Powerful Things High Performers Do to Increase Their Confidence

The way I look at confidence is I think the confidence that matters the most is the confidence in one's belief in our ability to figure things out. That's what I believe confidence to be. Do I believe in my ability to figure things out? Not do I know things? Because it's not always true. There's a lot of things I don't know. But do I believe in my ability to figure things out? Now there, I'm confident. Reveal uncertainty. This one is the opposite dynamic of how I used to think of confidence. Right? We think of confident people as people are just like, you know, it's like Wonder Woman, right? Is confident. We think of Superman, is confident who just knows everything, really what it turns out to be. High performers are a lot. Listen to this. High performers are a lot less Superman and a lot more Clark Kent. That's what it turned to be in all the research with millions of data points. In all of my conversations, high performers were much more likely to reveal things like, I don't know. Things like, I'm unsure. Things like, how do you think this should go? Things like, could you kind of help me with this? Like, high performers literally, explicitly share that they don't know how it's going, they don't know how it's supposed to go, that they need some help, that they need some mentorship, that they need some guidance. That's confidence. Confidence is not holding back the deck of cards of your weaknesses. Confidence is a comfort with vulnerability. And when people say vulnerability, they often don't know what they mean. When we're talking about vulnerability specifically related to confidence and high performance, like measurable outcomes, the thing that we can measure and see is that high performers in group meetings, in team meetings, in social situations more often share their insecurity. They more often say, I don't know how this is supposed to go, or they'll be the person at that fruit punch bowl who says, I don't really know anybody here. I don't really know how to start to meet some of these people. Could you introduce me to somebody? And that's how they handle the social networking, where they're awkward. Instead of just sitting back at the punch bowl, drowning their sorrows and feeling bad about themselves, they engage the person next to them and say, hey, you know what? I feel kind of awkward here. I don't know a lot of people. Could you introduce me? That's how high performers are handling these little situations in life. They're not the most confident person in the meeting who goes, I know everything here. They're the most confident going, you know what? I don't know this. Here's my question. What do you guys think? And that is how you lead confidently. You reveal that you don't know everything. Saying I don't know is power, not weakness. But you've been trying to do too many things on your own, and that's one reason you don't have the confidence you deserve at this stage of your life. Because, see, I didn't want to start with my definition of confidence for you because I want you to be thinking about it. But I'd like to share it now that we've talked about defining and measuring it. The way I look at confidence is I think the confidence that matters the most is the confidence in one's belief in our ability to figure things out. That's what I believe confidence to be. Do I believe in my ability to figure things out? Not do I know things? Because it's not always true. There's a lot of things I don't know. But do I believe in my ability to figure things out? Now there I'm confident. Not because I'm smart, because I'm good at asking, I'm good at saying, you know what? I don't know how to do this. What do you guys think? And I hope this is settling in for you, because sometimes your confidence is so low because you think your confidence is correlated with what you know versus what you're willing and able to go figure out by revealing that you don't know. Got it. Next big practice for you that will really help is small changes plus integration. This one comes from my wife, if you didn't know. My wife opened two exercise studios throughout her career. Very, very successful at it. Ultimately sold them. And today, literally this morning in the car, I said, okay, I'm going to teach this thing on confidence. Like, what would you teach, honey? She's led lots of big teams and had extraordinary quality of life. And I said, okay, well, tell me how. What would you say? She says, well, to gain confidence, people need to make small changes. Not always go for the biggest thing, but make small changes and see themselves making those changes and then integrate that into their identity. Integration, if you heard me talk about it, it's a big topic in high performance. It's one reason successful people often don't feel like successful people or successful people don't feel confident because they've never integrated the wins, the w I n s wins. They've had a lot of wins in their life, but they never stopped and said, wow, I really Appreciate that I got a little better today. I really appreciate that I put myself out there. I'm proud of myself for trying here. You know what? I am a little stronger because I did that thing. To acknowledge that you've gained some strength is everything to confidence, isn't it? Write it down to acknowledge that you gained some strength. Look, if you had two kids and you survived, you've gained some strength, you get a little more confidence in life. I mean, come on, what else do you have to be through if you've already made some money in your business? But it's always more, more, more, more, more, and you never stop to go, wow, I really came from nothing. I made some money here. And you never integrated the win in your identity. Your identity stays the same level over here, even though you've actually accomplished a lot over here. And I see that all the time. It's why I see people who are the same level of confidence in their 20s and 30s, and now they're 50 and 60 leading other people, but they're completely wracked with insecurity every night. They feel like crap. They don't know what they're doing. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, you should have so much more confidence. You should feel good about yourself and integrate some of these wins. So what small changes could you make in, let's say, the next 30 days that you could celebrate? Simple, small ones, like if you just did little things, like maybe, you know, you do five extra reps at the gym, or you stay for 10 extra minutes, or at work, you decide you're going to share one new idea a week. You don't have to change the world. You don't have to innovate the world. You don't have to take us to Mars. You just say, okay, it worked. I'm going to share one more idea every week at work, and I'm going to celebrate that every time I do it each week. By the end of the week or by the end of the month, I've shared four brand new ideas. Those are small. That's small. You can do that small. It's one thing. Little things. So think about your health. What small wins could you have in your health? Maybe next time you go to the grocery store, you just don't get the bag of chips. And that's a small win for the day because that prevents you from eating the whole bag of chips tonight or tomorrow. Nothing against chips, so don't attack me in the. But I think it's really important that you identify in Your health, as a parent, in your career, what are some small changes you can make? It doesn't have to be a big global brand change. It might be one more little thing that you do and then that one more little thing that's important for you to log it, recognize it, and integrate it so that you're getting stronger. If you don't acknowledge it, you can't get stronger. How are we going to set our emotional tone in this chaos? How are we going to find our strength, our center, and project goodness and compassion at a time when it is desperately needed? How are we going to hold the line in our businesses so that we don't overreact and going one direction when we ought to be in another? How do we manage all this? Today is my joy to talk with you about. Number one is the decision that I will always be the one to remain centered amid the chaos. And I have worked on myself, and I have taught myself that for pretty much, you know, 25 years. I've worked on that at a very steady pace. When everyone's freaking out, I take a bunch of deep breaths. I connect with my breath. I make sure that I'm keeping perspective. But ultimately, that decision to I will be centered amid this means for me that I will choose the emotional tone and my attitude as I am dealing with uncertainty or chaos. You know, I remember years ago, I was doing an event, and a person in the back of the room had a seizure, and literally they fell out of their chair and on the ground. They started having a full physical reaction to the seizure as well, where they were shaking. And it was terrifying for the people around them. And I was kind of at the beginning of my career, and I saw it happen. It was almost in slow motion. And could you imagine you're on your stage, I mean, put yourself there, you're in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and all of a sudden, somebody is falling over and having a full seizure in front of the whole audience. The whole audience literally starts looking back. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. People are standing up. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Total panic sets in the room. And I remember standing up there and I have this on video where at first my first reaction is, like, this. Kind of, like, shocked, just like everybody else, like, whoa. And then I kind of look over and instantaneously in my mind, I go, brendan, you have to be in charge here. I didn't want to be in charge. I had to be in charge. And my mind immediately said, two choices here. Join the panic or Stay stable and strong and present and connected with what's really happening. And so that decision, I'm going to say, centered amid this, made me immediately also decide I need to center the audience. So I asked the entire audience, I just announced, I said, everyone sit down. And everyone just kind of looks, I said, sit down. And everybody, they sit down. And I said, please sit down. Because your panic and your chaos right now is not serving the energy of this person who needs healing. Sit down, be quiet. Everyone. Please close your eyes so my team can address this situation. Please close your eyes and let's put some positive energy and prayer in the room for this person who needs our attention right now. They don't need negativity and fear in the room. Let's put some love and prayer. Let's do a little send some energy. So please close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and remember, you can choose to contribute good energy to the situation. And so I had everyone close and their eyes, take a few deep breaths and meditate or send prayer back to this person as my team was clearing that row and getting to this person so that when the paramedics would arrive, that person could be removed. Now here's the deal. I knew I had like 20 minutes at least before we could get a paramedic, probably at that spot in the seminar. And I thought, how am I going to buy 20 minutes? People are going to start freaking out. And I realized, no. If I set the emotional tenor in this room on purpose, and if I ask of others to find the best within themselves, if I ask of others to take a breath, if I ask of others to be responsible for the energy they are projecting into this space, if I ask of that, and if I demonstrate that we'll make it through this moment, and that might not seem like a big deal, but I really believe the energy in that room either was serving this man as he was having a seizure or was making it worse. You know, imagine here he is having this unbelievable, stressful, life threatening situation. And if all around him everybody is screaming in chaos, the body feels that, you know, the body and the mind feels the energy of what is around it. And so if that is true, let us all be responsible for the energy we are projecting right now. I've seen friends hop online and something's happening and what are they doing? They're contributing to the chaos. They're posting snarky comments, there's sarcasm, blame, vitriol, anger. And I'm not here to say that we can't use our social mediums. To contribute to an argument or to make a case. But every word has a tone to it. And the tone that we are setting in reply to chaos either furthers the chaos or it levels it. And the more of us who choose to be even tempered, thoughtful, caring, compassionate, you know, the values that we would all hope to have as a global citizenry, the more that we will judiciously take action in a thoughtful way. That's the hope. And whether you believe that or not, I hope that you'll hear this first. Practice. Your family needs to see you centered, calm, strong and assured in chaos. Otherwise we are passing down panic to another generation. It's sad, in my view, that we have a world that is so connected, so potentially capable, so well informed, and yet we still have people who overreact. Now, I'm not saying that overreaction isn't something you would anticipate, but there's a difference between overaction, as in taking action to overprotect, like doing something useful to shore up things, versus an emotional overreaction of fear. You can deal with really difficult situations without the negative range of blame, vitriol, hate and anger. Now, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I'm just here today to touch base with you. You can set that emotional tenor. Let's all do a better job at that. Let me give you a couple examples of how I'm doing it right now. To stay centered amid chaos, you also have to stay a little distanced from chaos even as it is happening. I'll give you an example of how I'm doing it. And many of you guys know I have four major companies that I'm either, you know, the principal in or one of the principal investors in. And for me, like lots of different teams around the world, and obviously you've seen here, we have a global community. Well, for me, because I'm constantly being hit up on this phone by people from literally around the world. And people count on me to advise their companies. So what do I do? I don't engage the chaos all day. Instead, I work my plan. And many of you already know how I do that with my morning routines. My morning routine doesn't change, still stays steady. Wake up, center my mind, plan my day, open up my body. But I also do simple things. Right now, right now, listen, I'm not checking in my phone every 10 minutes because, right, guess what you want to do in chaos? Refresh. Refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. But every time you hit refresh, and every, every time you Scroll. Don't forget. It takes emotional and mental energy. And if. Refresh, refresh, refresh. Chaos. Bad news. Bad news. Bad news. Bad news, Bad news. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Just think about that for a minute. You're hitting the oh, my God button all day when you're refreshing in chaotic news times. And that is creating the panic and the stress inside that is freaking you out. So as an example of simple things that I do, I only check in on the news twice a day. I always say news at noon, right? I'm going to get through my morning. I'm going to make the magic happen. I'm going to move my projects forward in the mornings. If it's news that I need to know about, that affects me dramatically and locally, trust me, I'll hear about it. My friends or my wife or somebody will let me know via text. But I don't check in on the news because nothing's going to change for me in dealing with the news until around noon. And I know people say, well, what if this is canceled? Or that's cancer. You'll hear it from your family. You'll get the news. But I don't check into the major media. I don't check into social media multiple times a day. I don't check into. And I'm talking about what people are doing right now. They're hitting refresh by the minute, by the five minutes, by the time. How many of you are guilty about this? How many of you have been addicted to refreshing in the last 72 hours? Right? It's easy to do that when there's chaos, but that's also the most important time not to do that for your own psyche, right? That's the most important time to separate yourself from chaos versus what do you do. Reconnect to it every 30 seconds. Think about what that does. You cannot doesn't matter how conscious or intelligent or brilliant or meditative you are. If you check into oh my God, bad news 24 7, there is no human that. That does not start to shape your emotional reality. No human alive. The Dalai Lama couldn't do it without feeling that emotion if that's what he did 24 7. And right now, that's what we have people doing. And so I think what is necessary is to stay absolutely informed. But realize not a whole lot is going to shift in periods of time throughout the day. Now, I know it depends on what you do and how you respond in your career and where your family is and all these things. No question, no question. So here's what I suggest to you. To stay centered in the mid of the chaos. You choose how much you check in. You choose. And then at a conscious level, I'd say back it up a little bit. So however you're like, I gotta check 20 times this hour. But I'm like, okay, I appreciate that feeling and that concern. So let's just back. Could we check in just five times in the hour so you can actually get something done? So please don't think I'm saying don't be involved or don't be informed. I'm saying don't let the chaos eat you alive. Because listen to this statement. Chaos inside grows as checking in on the outside grows, right? The more everyone's freaking out and the more you listen to all of it, the more it infects you. Because there is also another contagion going on right now. And if you've studied neuroscience with me for a while or you've been with me in this community for a while, you know how much we talk about emotional contagion. Energy spreads. It's like, listen, we can act without losing our center. We can act without spreading fear. We can act without the anxiety. Like the stuff that I have to take on on a daily basis. If you saw it, you'd be like, oh, my gosh. But I choose not to address it with anxiety. I choose to be in center of my emotional reality, the chooser, the captain of the ship. And I just want you to be that observer of how you've been dealing with this and choose to stay centered amid the chaos. I do things like keep your morning routine. It is so important right now. That is stability in an unstable world. Don't overly engage what is happening. Don't contribute to the negative energy in any way. Even if you want to trust me, when I do check in, I want to say, you idiots, oh, my gosh, what's happening over here? Don't be that person. It's not going to help your spirit or your soul. I promise you. Be the person who's centered amid the chaos. Resilience. If we've ever needed this conversation, it's probably right about now. People have really struggled to move through the dramatic changes we've all been experiencing. Not just in the last year, but if you look at just the craziness of the last five years or the last 10 years. We've had technical disruptions, economic disruptions, pandemics. We've had major political shifts around the world. Change is always accelerating. It's compounding each and every single year is the human body is being more connected to one another. It's an incredible challenge at the macro level to deal with all the changes that we face when sometimes it's scary, uncertain, discouraging, frustrating. When you witness hate, when you witness things that just don't vibe with your personal values or your socioeconomic beliefs or even your faith beliefs, all of that can really knock a person down. And resilience is that promise of the human spirit. The promise of the human spirit that it can rise through the most difficult times in life and recapture its sense of aliveness and connection and meaning and move forward with great faith and optimism. We know these things as we hear about resilience all the time. So today I'm hoping that I can provide a unique perspective on it from my vantage point. I think that a lot of resilience and our ability to do that is stymied or hampered or slowed down by the fact that we get hurt. We experience emotional pain, trauma, sadness, difficulty. And when we're in those days and nights where we feel that it's darkest, it's really hard to get up and go again. And it's not that most people lack mental strength or mental tenacity, which has become very popular in the last couple years of like, oh, well, they're just. They're not mentally strong or resilient. It's like, oh, well, let's not forget the difficulties that people face in life, because a big part of resilience is empathy. A big part of resilience is allowing ourselves to feel that, Allowing ourselves to feel those challenging days and those dark nights and those frustrating moments, allowing ourselves to be like, oh, yeah, it's all right if I'm not perfect. I'm struggling right now. You know, resilience always begins with acknowledgment of the difficulty, acknowledgement of the challenge, acknowledgment of the struggle of life, acknowledgement of the inevitable hardships. Because picking yourself back up or remaining strong and optimistic through difficult times, that's super hard if we don't, first and foremost, allow ourselves to sense it, feel it, recognize it. And the issue is when people do sense and feel and recognize it unconsciously or unconsciously, they often make a mistake. To become resilient, we have to remember. And you're going to write this down, you have to remember that hurt and pain are indicator lights, not the wheel. And let me draw out this metaphor for everybody today, and I'll go deeper on it because I've introduced this on social media. In the past. And people are like, whoa, that's a huge concept. And this idea is that when we're young or we're lacking awareness or we haven't done our personal development and we're just going through the motions of life, a lot of our unconscious behavior becomes steering ourselves and driving ourselves with, through or away from pain and hurt. We got hurt when we were a teenager, so we shut down. We got, you know, we felt pain of trauma. So we started doing everything to avoid that versus everything to live life. And so I use this metaphor as hurt and pain are indicator lights, not the wheel. And that means imagine you're driving your car, and as you're driving your car, you notice that some of the indicators aren't where you thought they would be. You don't drive the car forever based on one of those lights. You ever have a light go out in your car? Like, I had my car and I had this indicator light that the brake, the parking brake was on, but it wasn't. The light always said the parking brake is on. I mean, I had a 1988 Nissan Sentra. You know, it had, like, three different colors on it because I had wrecked it before. There's Bondo colors on. It was like orange and red. And this light was always on. Well, I didn't stop because that light was on. I knew that that light was important, but I could verify whether or not that thing had to stop my forward momentum or change my destination. And what most people do is when they got hurt or they feel pain, they start gripping the wheel of life in steering only to avoid pain. It's kind of like if you're driving down a road and you steer only to avoid the potholes, you will definitely run off that road. There will be a greater accident. Because what's more important in driving is that you have a vision of where you're going and that the wheel, you. The person at the wheel, you are directing this vehicle of life where you want it to go, not just where you are afraid it might go, and not just away from pain, but rather towards your ultimate vision. And sometimes we lack resilience in life. We are not even conscious of it, because all we're actually doing is never recovering from those indicator lights, and we're driving by the indicator lights. You know, another example I gave this morning, I think on social media, was about, you know, imagine you're a pilot of a plane, and you're flying that plane to New York. And you know what? The indicator lights, they show problems. Well, you work to Solve the problem of the indicator light. But just because it's windy or you're getting a lot of turbulence, it doesn't mean that when you're going to New York and get this turbulence, you go, oh my gosh, this is just terrible. I better go where the turbulence isn't. And you end up in Philadelphia. No, you're going, you're going to New York. And that having vision for life, having a direction in mind, and being at firm control of the wheel is a important precept to everything we're going to talk about today in resilience and mindset. Meaning if pain has a hold at wheel, you're not going to be where you want to be in life. Consciousness, intention, awareness, mindfulness, spirit, soul, future, purpose, mission, whatever you call it, that's got to be at the wheel. When you got hurt and you were 15, that didn't need to dictate your next decade. You didn't need to drive your next decade of your life because the hurt. You got divorced at 40. You don't need to be at 50 having just been reacting that indicator light for a whole decade. What you got to go is, oh, okay, this thing happened, it hurt. I had to check in on myself, I had to make sure that I was okay. I had to take care of that problem or take care of myself. But that's not going to direct my map, that's not going to direct where I go. That's not going to make me steal, it's not going to steal my ability to steer my life. And a realization of resilience comes when often we realize, whoa, I did pick myself up, but I went in the wrong direction. See, a lot of people actually have tremendous resilience and they never get credit for it. But it was the choices they made next that showed they didn't have ultimate resilience. Because you know what we learn in high performance habits, and I know you all know this, that first habit of highest performing people in the world, which remember they are also the highest in well being and positive relationships, was clarity. They had clarity about who they were, where they wanted to go. They had clarity about who they were and where they wanted to go. Think about that for a minute. They had clarity about who they were and where they wanted to go. It's pretty powerful idea, right? That if I get hurt or I feel pain or I feel sadness and I shut myself down, but I'm able to pick up and go through the week still, yeah, I pick myself up. But if I didn't ask, wait okay, that wasn't what I expected. That did hurt. But what's it about now? Where do I want to go now? What is my vision without that? I'm here to tell you it's extremely hard, extremely hard to be truly resilient. There's a difference between picking yourself up and getting back at the day and being resilient enough to course correct for what's true to you, to where you want to go. So to be resilient, we have to know in the future, you know what? Next time I get discouraged, someone judges me, I get hurt, I'm sad. Next time I experience that, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to remember that's an indicator light to check in with myself. That's an indicator light to check in, see what's meaningful, see what matters to me and where I'm going to go. Now, what's the next right action of integrity for me now? What does my future hold for, for me now not to now grip the wheel and stay or live in the pain or the hurt, or direct ourselves only from the pain and the hurt. Because when we. What resilience is, is the ability no longer to direct ourselves from the discouragement, the hurt or the pain. Now, I know this is kind of like an advanced idea in personal development here. And, and some people will always say, well, yeah, easy for you to say. You didn't have this person break your heart or you didn't have that happen at your job, or you didn't have this happen in your business. I'm like, well, I probably did or work with somebody who did. And if I didn't, the good news is 7 billion people on the planet, somebody did. If you keep thinking your hurt and pain is only yours, it only happens to you, then you feel even more isolated and more or less likely to enter the world again faithfully and confidently. And so don't be one of those people like, you don't understand my hurt and pain because that's a slippery slope into isolationism. That's a slippery slope into withdrawing from the world of. It's a slippery slope of closing off your heart when you think other people can't understand. Maybe the immediate people around you who hurt you, they don't understand. But the world at large, they get it, They've been through it. They saw their parent go through it, they saw somebody experience it. And when we can recognize the common human story, that's always struggle or progress, we can go, oh, other people struggle too, but they can progress too. And so can you. 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 to going 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, 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 going to 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 going to have to start measuring. If you don't measure it, you can't improve it. And the same way that most people, 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 too. 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, their own behavior and growth. I mean, 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 be 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 have yourself ask yourself at the end of the day these specific statements and then rate yourself. Low one means you suck. 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 day 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 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 was 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. 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 you go is, well, why? You were. 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 six to. To attend? Well, I would had to have done this, or next time I would do this. As 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 along 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 or 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 kind of 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, you know, 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.

This has been so powerful when you've shared this on our morning show, and I just want to share it with everyone here. A lot of people are showing up here going, okay, like, it's been a hard 14 months and struggling with self doubt, struggling all the things. And some people have goals that they're trying to figure out with their career and all the other stuff. But then there's also a thing called feelings. Goals, feelings, goals. Right. So many of you guys. This is gonna be new for a lot of people. This is newer for me in my own life, frankly. Right. Cause, you know, all my years of working as a Denny's waitress, trying to all the jobs, and then all the years of rejection with my business, when I finally got. When we were finally getting momentum, I. I didn't feel the day. I just drove as hard as I could. And one of the things Brendan has shared so much about and I would love for you to share with everyone live right now is, yeah, you can have goals in your fitness journey and in your career and all these things, but what about goals for your feelings, for how you feel and how you feel the day? Can you share?

Yes.

This is so powerful.

I remember the first time I said this to her, feel the day. And she's like, right. And we just. We had this huge great talk about. Because what happens is sometimes you're taking care of the kids, you're going through your life, you're doing the projects, you have the to do lists, and you're just going, going, going. And you finished the day. You didn't even feel the day. There was no reverence for life. There's no love, there's no heart, there's no spirit, no flow, no connection, no creative pop. And it's not because it wasn't there. It was just. You just. You just, like, blew through the day. You bullied the hours, I call it. And there was no moment of a pit stop to give prayer or meditation or gratitude or a second to go, like, how am I feeling? Am I experiencing the energy that I want to experience in life? And that's. Again, we generate that. But feeling the day I found the most successful people in the world. I remember we drew this out. I went to Jamie's house almost two years ago, I think now, and we were talking about successful people, and they're drawing this little triangle and what everybody wants after they've gotten everything. After you hit your goals, you made the money, you feel like your family needs. What you want is you want to feel the day more. You Want greater depth in your relationships, like deeper relationships, deeper commitment, deeper meaning. Right. We all want those things. And then we also want to know that we're leaving some kind of legacy or contribution, what I call meaningful pursuits. And I think feeling the day should be in your top one or two priorities every day. The whole mindfulness movement is really architect to do. I want to feel the day. I want to feel presence. Right. I want to feel the energy, I want to feel the spirit. I want a self awareness or consciousness. It's a different feeling of the day versus just like powering through or caffeinating through it all and just blunting it out. We want you to have those sensations of beauty and honor and respect and depth every day. We want you to feel joy and reverence every day. She knows. I probably say reverence every morning show because I'm so happy. Who feels so happy to be alive? I'm so happy to be alive. I'm so happy to be with this woman. I'm so happy with this team and with you all guys. It's amazing. It's a gift.

Yeah. You know, I love that so much. And even Ed Mylett was sharing a little bit about that idea of, you know, setting goals also for feeling the day and then also like, what are feelings we want in our life? And I think you just named a big one too, which is presence. I think that it's been so easy, especially last 14 months to like disconnect and just try to numb out and try to surf Instagram or watch the news or all the things, right. And so many people are saying that's really taken a toll on them, that they feel their own light dimming when they do that. And you know, I started the morning off by talking about how that light is still inside of you. That light in every single one of us, right. A lot of people nodding. It's still inside of you right now. And I think part of igniting it is learning to feel the day. Right. So what are just a few just simple tips people can do who are like, Brendan, how do I feel the day?

I feel nothing. Part of it. To recognize your, your overall emotional feeling every day is usually a 72 hour after effect of how you moved, breathed, slept and ate in the last 72 hours. It really is like, it's a cumulative effect, especially of the last last 72 hours have a lot to do with your emotional world. So that's why having good habits on a consistent basis like you might, you might listen if you want to have a cheat day that's okay. But that's why they call it a cheat day. You eat bad for one day, but then look, number two and number three, if you get back on the train, you start feeling good again, right? So it's okay to have one day off. But I think the most important thing for feeling of the day is you need to have pit stops throughout the day. You need to have moments that you purposely take every day throughout the day to reconnect with spirit, soul, energy, or even just to breathe, Mom. Like, just to take a beat. Close your eyes. Like, ideally, I'll stand. I do this every hour. Okay, I'll stand up. Sorry for the camera, guys. I'll stand. Every hour, I stand up. You've been asking me to demonstrate it.

Yes, demonstrate.

I will stand up. I will close my eyes. Because a lot of your fatigue is visual fatigue, and that visual fatigue is causing a lot of neurological fatigue. So closing your eyes, especially since we're all these devices. Close your eyes. I stand, I bounce in place, I swing my arms, I take 10 deep breaths like this. 10 deep breaths like that every hour. And it re energizes my body and my brain, and it's a little pit stop. And now my mental focus is back. When I open my eyes, I go, what's my intention for this next hour? And that little pit stop makes me go longer. Just like a race car, it can go around the whole race, but it doesn't. It takes the pit stops to tune it up so it can go longer and faster and win the race. You need little more pit stops to tune your mind up, amp up your emotions, reconnect with the heart or the spirit or the soul. And if you are just grinding all day, that is not. There's no pit stops. That's the equation for burnout.

Yeah. Well, so many people feeling burnt out, right? People that aren't leaving their home because of the pandemic, but just so burnt out and so overwhelmed. And one thing you shared that I wanna make sure everyone caught is the idea of visual fatigue. Because that was a huge aha moment that I had with you on the morning show just in the past few weeks. I thought you guys. We implemented this at IT Cosmetics. We grew to over a thousand employees, and we would start ending meetings, like five minutes before the hour instead of just back to back to back meetings. Right? Because the idea that you can get up and just walk around and move your body, but one of the things you brought up is I learned I was doing them wrong because I was like, walking and moving, but still engaged. I would take meetings in the hallway, walking, or I would check my email on that five minute break. Right. And can you just quickly share the idea that when you do take a pit stop, when you do take that five minutes. Right. And this is hard for a lot of people, but the idea is when you take that five minutes, the other 55. Right. Or you take the 10 minutes, the other 50 are so much more alive. Yes, they're so much more alive. And so people that say, oh, I can't afford to do that, no, no, no, you're so much more alive than those other 50. But I was doing it wrong because I wasn't actually resting my mind. And you talk about the power of visual fatigue. If you take a break and you're scrolling Instagram or emails, that's not a break.

That's exhaustion. Right. Scrolling is just exhausting your brain even more and more and more and more. It's engaging it, but it's exhausting it more and more and more. And so it's like this. You cannot possibly hope that burnout will end if you don't more consistently recharge. But we grew up on a century old model that, oh, we'll get to recharge when we retire. We'll get to recharge, you know, two weeks out of the year when we have vacation. It's why people are miserable, because the burnout is real, because they don't recharge. One day I'll recharge. The spa day. Or you know, a year from. No, no, no. The world's largest study of productivity that's ever been done found out the most productive people in the world who also reported high levels of happiness. They took a break on average every 52 minutes. Largest study ever done. Every 52 minutes. They took a break. Did they need a break? No, they're recharging. If you're crashing at 2 and 3 o' clock in the afternoon every day, it's time to take a hint. You need to recharge at like 10:30, 11:30 or 1:30 to prevent the crash. That happens two or three. The crashes happen because the recharges are not happening. And so the burnout will always be there. And I always say, make sure you don't blame the burnout on anybody. Please don't blame your burnout on your kids. That's not fair to them. Don't blame your burnout on the team. Blame the burnout on either ambition that is unmet with planning or just not taking care of and Prioritizing your self care or your well being take care of you. So you have the energy to serve at your highest levels. I think that is something we call alignment. Capability is you can do it, you can do it every time. It is like a strength if you will. It is something that is you are highly capable at that thing. You are at another level of skill that it shows up every single time. But here's the truth. Capability. Capability is as much as a mindset as a competence. Let me give you an example. A lot of extremely smart people who can handle the problem don't handle the problem because they don't feel capable. It's like, yeah, I know it, but I don't do it. It's like a lot of people who achieve a lot of great things. They actually how many of you know someone who's very competent, has great skills but lacks the capability to execute? See, capability is something you know. Capability is self trust to take the action. It's not just do I know how to take the action, it's I'm an action taker, I'm going to show up, I'm capable to handle this, I will do this. I trust in myself to handle this. To execute, to execute again and again and again and again and again. That's capability. And I really want you to develop that in your heart and in your soul by checking off the simplest of things each day. If you have a list of three to do lists, if you wrote down your three top priorities for the day, do those first. Before you do your social media, before you reply to everyone's DMs inbox, voice message texts, it's like listen, I have so many people who they spend all day just checking their email to reply to everybody else. Now that's fine if that's your job, that's customer service, do that, that's your job. But if you're an entrepreneur as an example, or you have a whole list of other priorities and you're just checking into other people's agendas all day to meet all their obligations and you keep missing your key priorities day after day after day after day, your brain doesn't feel like you're capable anymore. Even though you might be smart, you're competent, but your brain doesn't believe you're capable. You know what I mean? It's so important to understand this. I know if you're a parent, you understand this difference. Lots of kids can learn things and have things and have skills and abilities, but if they don't put them and apply Them, they don't sense that feeling of capability. And now your smart child, your child full of strength, talent and ability, doesn't run on the field, doesn't take the action, doesn't finish the test, doesn't go for it. They don't feel capable. Why don't they feel capable? They don't have a pattern of action taking. You've got to develop the pattern of taking the action, the pattern of taking the action. Better yet, the pattern of taking the action to complete the key priorities. So all I want you to do as a daily simple habit, every morning with, we do it in the high performance planner. I write down my key priorities for the day. Do those first, get those out of the way, make that happen. Maybe that's your morning. Maybe for me, I didn't feel capable of my career for a long time because I was replying to everybody. And then I did a simple thing. I said, you know what? No phone calls till 1pm in the afternoon, my time. That leaves the morning to do the most important work. Because I do the most important work almost every morning of my life. I feel incredibly capable. Give me a task list. Give me that log is happening in the brain. Good job today. Good job today. Good job today. Good job. That consistency, that congruence developed the capability. Now I feel capable and I am capable because I executed. Because I executed so many times, I developed a skill. You all follow. This is so important, okay? This is so important, this capability piece. And the best part is when you get some capability. If you'll do what we talked about earlier, self reflection, you'll start to go, look what I did there. If you do what I've always taught, which is you have to integrate the wins. Integrate the wins. When you do something, take a moment and go, I did that, you know, yesterday. Here's how simple this is yesterday. After months of thinking, strategizing and planning, I created this presentation and I sent the email and it took me about two hours to pull this off. But I just, I decided, you know what, this has been on my like big dream list for a while. I'm going to make this pitch. It's a pitch. And so I said, okay, I'm going to get it done. And I finally sent it. And I'll tell you what, I walked out in the other room. Denise was like, what's up with you? I was just feeling so good. I said, I'm going to have a nice glass of wine with dinner tonight to celebrate. I did this. It was sending an email, but I was selling Somebody like, I'll have a glass of wine every time I send an email. Yes, sure. Thank you. But here's the thing. You got to celebrate the days that you are capable when you do something good. Go. Good job. Pat yourself on the back a little bit. You have to integrate the win into your identity. If you took all of your strengths and all your good days and all the wonderful things you have done in your life and you really sat with them for a minute, you let them come in, you let them mentally stack where you just thought of that time. You finished that big project, you launched that thing, you got the negotiation, you won the award. You handled that tough situation at the park with the kids well. You didn't get brought into their drama. You just took some time for yourself, and you let that integrate into the identity of who you were. You would feel an internal goodness. And see, when you integrate the good of what you're doing in life, you feel good. And I don't mean that like with hyperbole. I mean you sense goodness again, when I sense that I'm good. Because one, in my opinion, I'm lucky to be here. My clarity says, if you are alive, have reverence for life. You're a child of God. What a gift. You are so lucky. You're blessed to be here. So for me, I feel capable as a person. I feel I've been given gifts and strengths. Yeah, I had to develop a lot of them just like you did. But because I trust that I was given those gifts or those strengths or this life, I feel capable. I feel like. You ever heard that thing, you can do all things through Christ, which strengthens you. You ever heard about that? It's like, oh, yeah, I'm capable because I got someone watching over me. My dad's up there, my creator's up there. Grandma's up there. I feel good. I feel good. I feel capable. Because you know what? I've done some good things, okay? You let that come in. You let that goodness come in. Some of you haven't let your goodness shine for a while. Your vibrancy, your joy, that sense of soul or spirit or flow or femininity or masculinity, that part of you that's like this because why hasn't it gone out like that? Because you haven't brought it in and stored it up. See, all you've done is deplete yourself for other people without those moments of self reflection about the goodness that you're doing for other people, about the goodness you're doing in the world about the virtues and the values you stand for. You haven't let that stuff come in and sit in, like, sit like form into the cement of the foundation of your character. And so you wonder why it doesn't emanate. Why doesn't the goodness come out? Because you haven't sat with the goodness that's already within. Why doesn't the goodness spread out? Because you haven't sat with the goodness that's already there. If you knew half of how good of a human you are, the choices that you've made, to be on something like this, to raise your hand for personal development, to want to learn from other people, I celebrate that. I raise my hand to learn. When I go to a seminar or I buy a course, I pat myself. I'm like, good job. You're learning, kid. You're not done yet. And I feel good about myself as a learner. I think learners tend to be more confident than people who think they know everything, you know, because people who think they know everything are terrified their worldview might break. Learners like, I'll adapt. I'll figure it out, right? That adaptation mentality, that learning mentality gives me confidence. I believe in my ability to figure things out.