My Week - #1 on Amazon, Vocal Training, and Progressive Mastery

So I'm running all around my house screaming, I will not let this fail. I will not let this fail. And my wife is like, you won't let this fail? And I was like, I won't let this fail. She's like, you won't let this fail. I'm like, I won't let this fail. Hey, my friend. It's Brendon Burchard. And welcome to the Brendon show. In this week's episode, I'm gonna share with you all the hot news going on in my life, from an Amazon one bestseller to moving my house, to how I developed the skill and the efforts to get better at speaking so that I can maintain my voice for over 71 hours that we just recorded. And so much more to catch up on in this week's episode of the Brendan show, part one, number one on app Amazon, baby. Thank you. All right. This last week, I have so much to catch you up on from recording over 71 hours of my voice either on audio or on video. And I'll tell you how I didn't lose my voice in the second part of this week's episode. But first, I want to begin with this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My friends, if you didn't see what happened, all the fireworks this last week, I announced to my audience the sort of pre order campaign of my new book, high performance habits, how extraordinary people become that way. And when I announced it to you all, it went bananas, honestly, pretty unexpectedly. And it hit number one on Amazon for its hot new releases. Number one for movers and shakers and then number one in multiple categories. Number one in my category, which is what really matters to me, that success and self help categories. But also it hit number one in business and it was just out of, I mean, it just blew up. I mean, we're talking. It hit number five, I think. Yeah, number five across all books on Amazon. And that wasn't really the planned Amazon campaign. It was a pretty big surprise. So let me read about the book to you, tell you kind of how that campaign went from an insider perspective on my side and then I'll share with you how some sort of all this come together. If you haven't heard about the book, please make sure you check it out. Just go to Amazon, check out high performance habits with my name. You'll see it and I'll read you what it's about and then I'll tell you a little about it. Okay. Here's the sort of the official book description if you missed it. We all Want to be high performing in every area of our lives. But how? Which habits will help you achieve long term success and vibrant well being no matter your age, career, strengths or personality? After extensive original research and a decade as the world's highest paid performance coach. Hey, that's me. Brendon Burchard finally reveals the most effective habits for reaching long term success. It turns out that just six habits move the needle the most in helping you succeed. Adopt these six habits and you win. Neglect them and life is a never ending struggle. High Performance Habits how extraordinary people Become that Way In High Performance Habits Burchard proves that to become a high performer you must seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productive output, develop influence and demonstrate courage. These are the personal and social habits that are proven to help you excel. This book is about the art and science of how to practice these proven habits if you adopt any new habits to succeed faster. Choose the habits in this book because they are statistically more powerful than almost a hundred other performance variables we measured. Anyone can practice these habits and when they do, extraordinary things happen in their lives, relationships and careers. Whether you want to get more done, lead others better, develop skill faster or dramatically increase your sense of joy and confidence is in what you do. The six habits in this book will help you achieve it. Each of the six habits is illustrated by powerful vignettes, cutting edge science, thought provoking exercises and real world daily practices you can implement right now. High Performance Habits is a science backed heart centered plan to living a better quality of life. Best of all you can measure your progress. A link to a professional assessment is included in the book. So that's the overview of high performance habits. And the insider story is I spent the last three years conducting one of the world's largest research studies on high performers with data collected from over 190 countries of basically the most successful people on the planet. And we measured and asked about over 100 different performance enhancing variables, things that we already knew correlated with success, at least initial success. And then we did conducted in depth interviews, we did more assessments, we did 360 reviews of these people who were reporting to be high performers to verify if it was true. And it was an intense, oh my gosh, long three years. And I was kind of scared to announce that this was coming because I've been working on it so hard. I've been a little absent, as you know, from a lot of the world. I know it might not look like that because my social media we keep that going and everything but for me most of my efforts over the last three years. I stopped doing a lot of keynotes, I stopped being out on the road, I stopped doing collaborations with a lot of people in the industry. I stopped creating as much original content. We were recycling some of the old stuff, cutting up in different ways. My team was doing that so I could really focus on the book. And I had the blessings of literally dozens of researchers, coaches, some highly influential people and writers giving feedback along the whole process. It was full time, 24 7. I mean, never in my life have I worked on something so hard. And as I might have shared before, I wrote over 1,400 pages. We cut it down to 400 and now it is available on Amazon. Well, here's the kind of insider scoop of that. First and foremost, I hadn't planned to launch the Amazon campaign this last week. And this is a lesson for all those thought leaders out there, marketers out there, people who kind of want to do what I do, or social media influencers. And that was I had actually gone to launch a assessment that we had built that helped us prove a lot of what we did in the research. And that assessment was really the effort to promote an assessment and then with that assessment, then offer some mini courses that people could take depending on their score. And we're gonna do that first just to create a lot of value in the marketplace. That was the big idea. Like, we knew lots of people would opt in, get excited about the assessment, get their scores, see these other mini courses, they could sign up for those. And it was just part of a process of, you know, leading up to the big announcement and really pushing hard on Amazon. And we mentioned the book was available on Amazon, but that wasn't the crux of the campaign. And you know, as it started going, it didn't work initially the way I thought it was going to. And I was worried that it was just a failing campaign in the sense of I didn't, it wasn't hitting some of the goals that I had for it. And so I thought, well, I'm just going to the last minute. I said, well, you know, I'm just going to announce the Amazon thing and tell them about the pre orders and everything else. Let's just focus on that for now. The assessment was doing really great, but it was almost going too fast and too many people were finding out about it outside of our market and the mini courses. It was going really great. But I thought, I'm going to flip this campaign to Amazon and I'll tell you guys more about that and why I chose to do that much, much, much later, maybe after the whole book campaign is over. But long story short, I kind of announced my list early that the Amazon book bonuses were available. So I said, hey, go order the book on Amazon, come back to this specific website and then we will give you a free $97 assessment. Free access to a 4 hour live training I'm doing on career and business habits that help you become more productive and wealthy. That's coming up. If you didn't know about it, make sure you sign up. Just go to brendon.com habits that's brendon.com habits that will give you these bonus offers I'm telling you about for ordering the book on Amazon. It's available nowhere else except that site, brendan.com habits. It will forward you to the book campaign I'm telling you about right now. And anyway, what happened is basically as soon as I told people about that, there was so much excitement throughout the book because you have to think, when I usually teach high performance, it's a thousand dollar seminar ticket. And now here's the last decade of my experience as a high performance coach. And this, you know, one of the world's largest research studies and all that data revealed in this book, you know, for whatever it is for a book, you know, 16, 20 bucks, you know, so I think my audience had all this understanding of the capabilities I built and because they see a lot of the celebrities I work with or advise or coach or interview and then all of a sudden I say, hey, I put all that knowledge in this book, High Performance Habits and, and what's unique about it is first it's very data driven but it's also very heart centered. It's going to be more of the most personal book I've ever released. And people will see how I kind of go, how I developed and how I developed some of the skill sets that helped me become a high performer in my space as well as how we've worked with a lot of other people to help them achieve that. But it's very, very, very tactical. My audience went crazy for it. So if you're listening and you participated in that, you know, I'm emotional talking about it because it just took off. I mean, our Amazon campaign, I was really going to push that next month. The book actually comes out September 19th, but these particular bonuses are available now. Oh yeah. Also the other bonus available for that is the deluxe edition of the audiobook. So I recorded the audiobook but we have some extra bonuses in there of some amazing interviews I did with some high performers but also some in depth training. It's a spectacular bonus and you get that when you buy one copy on Amazon. So as long as you go to my website and fill in your order number, so go to brendon.com habits it will take you to our secret little Amazon bonus page and you can follow the instructions there and get all these things I'm talking about. I hope that you will do that. And to all those who did, thank you so much. I mean, I don't know, I don't know if you're as amazed by what we achieved as I was because that wasn't the goal at that moment was to make a run on Amazon. And there we were in the number one in our categories and number one hot new release across all of Amazon, you know, for multiple days. Number five, all the best sellers on Amazon at the time. It was, it was just completely bananas considering the book doesn't come out for another month. So thank you for that support for everybody who participated. I always say we have one of the most ambitious, intelligent, collaborative and caring communities here with the Brendan show and all of my other students and programs and seminars. So you guys really showed up in force and I can't thank you enough. That was incredible. So thank you, thank you, thank you. If you didn't participate. Brendon.com habits part 271 hours so leading up to that announcement that my book was, you know, available for pre order, I had spent in, in seven days or so, 71 hours, hours recording my voice, whether it was direct to camera or recording that audiobook version I told you about. And that might not sound like a lot unless you're familiar with our industry and the skills required to pull it off. Because 71 hours of filming and recording in seven days is, that's a marathon and it is difficult and brutal. Let me give an example. If you just went to your shelf right now and you picked up any book and you read it out loud for say 30 pages, you would see at the end of that experience reading those 30 pages, your voice would probably be pretty hoarse. Especially if you were trying to emote and you were trying to be passionate and you were trying to share and you were up and down in melody and tone and rhythm that you have to maintain that kind of energy to read a book. Well, if you make it through 30 pages, imagine I read 400 pages and then did a deluxe version as well. Then filmed six different online courses related to the book. That's those mini courses I told you about that we did with the assessment, then filmed, you know, whatever it was, 17 plus videos for the marketing of high performance habits. That's coming up in these next two, three weeks that we'll be releasing those. I mean, 71 hours, that doesn't count. You know, all the time in between of talking with team or the audio engineers or the production team, or thinking through things, it doesn't count. All the other work I did those days, that's just literal hours recording. And a lot of you guys have asked me in the past to address this, so I will. How do you do that without losing your voice? You know, if reading 30 pages is gonna make you pretty hoarse, how do you maintain. How do I do four days on stage, 10, 12 hours managing energy of a room of literally 2,000, 10,000, 20,000 people in arenas? How do you maintain that type of fire in the belly, but keep your voice going as well? That's what I'd like to share with you. Now, I actually have a few tips for you on this one, because it's really difficult for people. So let me share how I prepared for that 71 hours. And maybe that will help you think of how you prepare for the studio or what you're gonna do specifically towards maintaining voice over the long term. You know, it's been hard to see so many of the influencers in the world, speakers. Some famous singers lose their voice, have to cancel concerts, shows, seminars, filming, because they never learned how to use their voice properly. And I mean, it can cost literally tens of millions of dollars for, you know, a major, you know, singer. As an example, when Adele loses her voice and has to cancel concerts, it leaves, you know, tens of thousands of people disappointed and sad. And of course, it's difficult for her too. And that happens all the time in this thought leader space as well. I mean, the truth is, I know a lot of speakers who after an hour on stage have lost their voice. I know some people who can't even, you know, some speakers or who kind of moonlight is singers. I have a lot of friends who do that. And they do a three hour concert and their voice is shot. Now, major singers, they might do three hours a night on tour, and many of them lose their voice too. And you're like, it's only three hours considering I just did 71 hours. And by the way, I am not bragging. I'm gonna tell you how I learned to do that, because I didn't used to be able to do that at all. Matter of fact, one of the reasons I'm telling you, this is because I lost my voice once and it nearly destroyed my career. I remember I was doing one of my very first seminars and gosh, I probably had, I would say it was not one of my first seminars, one of my first multi day seminars. It was one of my first four day seminars that we charged over $3,000 a ticket. So we got about maybe 200 people in there. And you know, it's important that I do really well. You know, 200 people paying three grand started my career well. I get to the end of the first day and my voice is shot. And if you ever see me on stage, I mean it's different than I'm talking to you now because it's more intimate experience. And even on video is very different. Like this is one level because it's more intimate video. I'm a little bit more charged up on stage. It's like the most annoying version of myself. You know, it's just like I'm having so much fun up. There's a different level of passion for me because I can, I can stalk and move around. I mean, right here I'm stuck in this little dark, weird little booth with you. And on stage it's just a whole different level of energy because I'm just alive up there and I feel the energy from you all. It's just different. And I love it. But I share that experience because that first day I lost my voice and I went in total panic mode because remember, if I can't deliver the next days, 2, 3, 4, these 200 people can all ask for their money back. You know, if I don't finish the seminar, I didn't finish the services. So I'm like, oh my gosh. So I text a bunch of friends, you know, other people who were in the speaking industry and three or four of them mentioned this guy Roger Love. One of them, I think it was John Gray who wrote Mineral from Mars, winner from Venus. He texts me back, gives me Roger's cell phone number. I hit up Roger and he says, hey, yeah, let's spend 10, 15 minutes or whatever it was. And I go out in the parking lot behind this hotel. My voice is gone. I'm terrified. Roger gets me on the phone and he just starts asking me these questions, asking to hear how I breathe, asking me to say certain phrases and then does this vocal sort of almost you would think it's like a vocal warmup, but it was really a vocal repair sequence that he used. And literally in five minutes of doing this with him, he Fixed my voice. And when I say fix my voice, I mean it was like it was better than it was when I started on day one. So I lost it and he got it back full power. It was un frigging believable. Now Roger, and again, it's just Roger Love. And you guys can see him or meet him or learn from him at our event together. Now I started with his client as a client and then he transformed me so much we started doing a seminar together called worlds greatest speaker training. You can check out the dates on my website. Just go to brendon.com b r e n d o n so brendon.com and click on the events tab and you'll see something for world's greatest speaker trainer. World's greatest speaker training there and you can sign up. And Roger is one of my co trainers along with Bo Eason who's one of the world's number one story and movement coaches for speakers. Back then I was just a client. And Roger Love, if you're not familiar with him, he literally is the undisputed world's number one vocal coach. He coaches like Selena Gomez, who many of you know is the most followed people. Most followed person on Instagram and social media. Madonna, John Mayer, gosh, Adam Levine. So many people. He was also famous for helping Reese Witherspoon and Jeff Bridges learn how to sing for their academy award winning performances in their movies. I mean, he is just absolutely unbelievable. So he taught me not to just repair my voice, but he taught me some secret things that I could do to improve my voice before speaking. And I'll share some of those with you here. But I'll also tell you how I got prepared for that 71 hours because here's the most important thing and I'll come back to Roger and what I learned. The most important thing to be able to perform vocally and especially in teaching is not just your voice, it is your physical body and preparing it. So what I do because remember especially 71 hours, that's a marathon. I mean that's literally recorded workday. That's just when I'm filming, okay. When my voice is being recorded. And. And so I have to prepare my body like I would for a marathon because what I need access to is my full lung capacity. My cardiovascular system must be so good to go into that. And the truth is, it wasn't. I had a very, very difficult summer in terms of travel and work and a lot of pain and injury, frankly. Many of you know I had a accident in 2011 where I flipped a four wheeler and that's what caused my brain injury. And I opened up the story of that with my book the Charge. So if you ever read my book the Charge, that story about my brain injury, that was 2011. And one of the consequences from that, you know, I snapped my wrist clean, messed up a bunch of ribs, my hip, my shoulders, and long story short, I mean, broken everywhere, blood. It was just, it was so gross. But mostly it was the brain injury and that's what I usually tell the story about. But one kind of sucky circumstance from that is I have a rib that continually falls out, you know, and so I got to go to a chiropractor and get that thing kind of popped back in. And it's often quite painful. And that had happened maybe three weeks leading into me recording the 71 hours. So it was just difficult and I was not prepared, but I knew it was coming up. So what I do every time it's coming up is I really switch how I work out. Many of you guys know I recommend two by twos. A two by two means two days of activity each week where you do 20 minutes of HIIT training, high intensity training, and really go for it, you know. And usually I recommend using weights or doing plyometrics during that, really strength based 20, maybe 30 or 40 minutes of activity. Then the other two of the two by two is two days of cardiovascular work where you do something that's longer. Maybe a 45 minutes to 60 minute cardio routine, whether that's taking a group class, it's cycling, running, rowing, treadmilling, whatever you're going to do. Okay, that's a two by two to strength based 20 to 30 minutes, two cardio, 45 to 60 minutes. And that I think gives people a good diversity of workout. And on the other days that you don't do those things, you walk for 45 minutes. So that's my usual routine. That's what we recommend at High Performance Academy. I hope you'll join us there someday. And for me, what I use, I completely change that up and I go leading into something like that where I have to be on for a long time. I go completely into cardio and that's all I focus on. So I really ramp that up for a week, two, sometimes three, leading into a long bout of recording so that I have full lung capacity. Everything in terms of your performance, how you feel, and guess what your voice counts on breath. The power of your breath conveys your words. The power of your breath determines how you feel. And the power of your breath and how you use it specifically not only changes your tone or your melody or your pitch, your rhythm, it is also responsible for the health of your vocal cords. This is what Roger ultimately gave me the greatest gift of. You know, I used to breathe in a way that really hurt my voice. And it wasn't. I thought it was the volume, how loud I was. It's not. People don't. You don't lose your voice because of volume. Usually it's because you don't know how to achieve volume. You aren't breathing right, and you're screaming. And I can go way high and fill an entire room. I do this as a demonstration at World's Greatest Speaker Training at all my other events, too. I literally. There'll be thousands of people. I'll turn the mic off, and the people in the back can still hear me because I've learned how to project through the power of breath. Well, one secret that Roger taught me was that when I'm speaking, to make sure, you know, obviously, first I take a deep breath in, and then as I'm breathing out, every word is riding on top of that steady stream of air coming out of my belly as I'm breathing. And once all that air is gone, that's the period, and I take a breath in, and then the next sentence comes out all on one steady stream of air. And he does this activity where you kind of put your hand up to your mouth and you just talk. And most people, if your hand is up to your mouth and you might even try this, if your hand is up to your mouth and you're talking, what you're probably feeling is like a machine gun of air hitting your fingertips. So if your fingers are in front of your. Just, let's say, an inch outside of an inch away from your lips. If you're talking, odds are what's happening is there is a feeling like that. It's like, as you're talking, just like it's like a machine gun of air hitting your fingers. That's not what it feels like. If you put your fingers in front of my mouth. If you put your fingers in front of my mouth, all the words are coming out on one steady stream of air. You would feel a force of air coming out and hitting your fingers. It's not a machine gun. It's a steady stream of air. And I had to learn how to breathe like that. Matter of fact, World's Greatest Speaker Training. Roger pulls people up onto stage and listens to them. He'll say, like, who hates their voice? Or who keeps losing their voice, or who doesn't feel like they sound like they should, or who doesn't know how to achieve volume and strength and power and passion. And he'll pull them up on stage, and it is the most remarkable before and after you'll ever see. He'll have them say something, and then he'll literally change how they hold their, you know, their mouth open, how they use their larynx. And it's unbelievable. It truly is unbelievable. He also taught me how to drop my larynx. And what I mean by that is, your larynx is basically the hollow organ tissues that hold your vocal cords. And you might think of it as sort of like your vocal box, if you can think of that. Like, you're often called your voice box. And it's kind of, you know, you fill your Adam's apple. It's kind of about that right in there. And he'll show me how to speak by lowering my Adam's apple, which is really lowering my larynx. And I can get more air going out of that, and it doesn't constrain my larynx or my vocal cords as much. When you lose your voice, what's happening? Hold up your two fingers, your first two fingers, your pointer finger, and your middle finger. Put them together, and now rub them together. That's kind of what's happening with your vocal cords. Okay. And when you strain your vocal cords by not using them right, you push them together tighter where you squeeze your words out, those get tighter, and so there's more friction. And as there's more friction, they get inflamed. And then as they get flamed, they hurt and you sound worse. And so the job is, how do you kind of keep a steady stream of air going between the two of them? And how do you not strain them in such a way that you're squeezing them right? So if I squeeze like this, I'm pushing like this. A lot of people talk like this. And it's like they're pushing and they're doing it, and they're, oh, my God. And it sounds like this, well, that's killing your vocal cords. So he taught me how to do that. Why is that important? This is all to say, it kind of gives me my pregame. So before I go to do those hours, one of the things I do is I'll do a vocal warm up where I'm dropping my larynx, I'm breathing out powerfully, and I'm doing Not a vocal scale, but vocal sounds that are unique to me, that help me open up my voice and get ready to serve and maintain that. So, meaning you gotta do a vocal warmup. That vocal warmup for me, on a day where I'm gonna be recording 10 hours, I don't mean being in the studio. I might be in the studio 14 hours, the actual time that I create. I might do a 40 minute morning workout and then, I'm sorry, a 40 minute vocal warmup. And that'll be huge. So I'll get up in the morning, cardio activity, then I'll go to the radio studio or the booth where I'll be recording. Then I'll do my, you know, my vocal warm ups and get ready. And that might take, you know, literally 30 or 40 minutes of vocal warmups. And then I'm going. Now people say, well, how do you maintain? Well, I'll only record maybe, you know, two, three hours. And then after three hours, I'll go take a break and I'll walk around the building or I'll lay down and meditate, but I won't speak maybe for 20 or 30 minutes at all. Then I'll be drinking a bunch of water and I'll be stretching and opening up my body. A huge part of fatigue isn't your vocal cords, it's your body. So open up my body. I'll be moving around. I'll do some vinyasa flow yoga, I'll do some calisthenics, I'll do some qigong, get my body back in a good place. That might take about 10 minutes back into the booth. Here we go for another 1, 2, 3 hours. During that 1, 2, 3 hours, what I also do is I alternate between sitting down and standing up. I might sit for 40 minutes, stand up for an hour or 90 minutes, sit 40, stand for 90, sit 40, stand for 90,. And then giving myself those breaks every two, three hours where I go completely silent, open up my body, get myself ready again, and then go. And that just went on for seven, eight, nine days. In seven days, I did the 71 hours and I never, unfortunately measured the eighth and ninth day. I'm curious. I think I probably went well over 90 hours. So it was about 10 hours a day straight for nine days. I mean, talk about a level of exhaustion that most people have never experienced. If you don't maintain it. Well, it was very, very difficult for me because during that entire time I was moving part three, the great move of 2017. So as all of that is going on, the Big Amazon launch promotion, things are running up. I'm filming well over 80, 90 hours. During that same time I happen to be moving. I don't mean moving my body, I mean moving my house. And in fact, I wasn't just moving my house, my primary residence, I was also moving my office. So if you've seen a video from me from 2008 to up to, let's say four months ago, that, what is that nine year period of time? I was filming all of those videos in my studio. And many of you know, I often called it just expert studio. It's where I shot 15 online courses. It's where I shot literally thousands of videos. It's where we shot the hundred YouTube videos that you see up on YouTube, except for the last four months of them and all of those have been viewed now over a hundred million times. There's no cats in my videos. I mean there's nothing that particularly funny and I'm not that particularly entertaining. These are actually self help, personal development, straight training videos. It's here's a problem you're faced with, here's how to deal with it. You guys know the story. Anyway, I was moving that office. So imagine moving your home, your office and recording 80 or 90 hours and running a book launch pre order campaign and launching a brand new assessment with six mini courses all at the same time. How is that frigging possible? I would say two things. Number one, team. This is a big shout out to my team, to my entire team. I think of my team in terms of two distinct types of contributors. I've got my customer service team who's been with me since, you know, forever, especially led up by Denise McIntyre. If we think about my customer service team, this has been everything it's been. The company has basically been me plus customer service team and that's been it, you know, since 2008. And what I mean by that in terms of business marketing aspect of it. And the only marketing support I've had or I had from 2008 to 2016 was Travis, my videographer. It was basically me and Travis, we'd shoot a bunch of stuff, he'd edit it, he'd get up onto YouTube or onto Vimeo or onto Wistia or into Kajabi, wherever we were using it. And then I'd embed it into the blog or into the course or into the thing and then I do all the marketing and I'll talk about that later where literally every piece of marketing you saw for me from 2008 to 2016 I created that. Emails, images, brochures, handouts, sales letters, checkout processes, everything. Literally, personally, I did that and I'll tell you why in the next part. Well, along the way you can create all the marketing in the world, but if you don't have a customer service team that handles all the customer service emails and everything else like that, I mean, it's difficult to lead and serve and scale in this industry. So my team was there for that. Also the privilege of having since 2016amarketing team come on board. And that is, you know, I've got, what is it, five people now who support me in all my marketing. Now they're helping build some of the pages, do some of the sequences, do some of the emails, create some of the images, do some of the social, do some of that. I say some because I'm still deeply involved in all of that and. But it's been such a huge part and such a huge assistant, especially in this time of need of trying to pull all that together, plus moving. And by the way, no, I didn't plan that. You can't really plan the real estate market. I couldn't plan when something was going to sell. It just all happened together at the same time, house and studio. But the second reason this was all possible is because of my wife. And man, when you pick up your copy of High Performance Habits, how Extraordinary People Become that way, you'll open it up and the first thing you'll see in there is a dedication. And the dedications to my wife, she, as I say in there, she's the most extraordinary person I know. Her support of me, I know many of you know that now. It's a famous story. It's funny, it's this famous story. It's just our life. I mean she's the one who supported me when I went broke and I had to move in her apartment and I was writing on that little desk next to her bed and you know, she was the one who just believed in me and bought my groceries and supported me as my girlfriend then. And wasn't till years later that we quote unquote, made it. And it's something very special. I proposed to her right before we quote unquote, made it. And she's been everything in my life, the best gift of my life, everything. And she was a one woman SWAT team moving us out of a house and office at the same time, literally. And we're talking about like when I say the same time, I mean in a 72 hour period, getting everything boxed up with some Movers, support from both locations, getting it into two new locations, and, you know, planning to send a bunch of furniture and stuff to my mom. I mean, it was totally bananas, but she did it with just total grace and support and cheering me on because she knew all this coming together at the same time was not awesome for me either. It just was. It was on. And I can't tell you, you know, I talk a lot about the most important decisions in your life, and there is no more important decision, no more strategic thinking, no more sort of blessed part of our lives and taking the time to find the right partner. I hope that you have done that or you are seeking that or you're seeking to improve your relationship. I don't know where you're at with your lover, your spouse, your husband, your wife, your significant other, but please just choose a good one. Because when the stuff hits the fan and you got somebody who stays centered, who deeply cares about you, who supports you, who helps things happen, and does it in a thoughtful and kind and loving way, you're lucky. And I'm lucky. I got a great woman. It was emotional for us. I mean, you've moved out of houses before and, you know, we were living in our dream house, and we've chosen to kind of move into another place that we also attribute to our dream house. It just has a better view and. But it was a big move. But honestly, the most emotional one for us was moving out of the studio where I shot all those videos. We went up there and it was our last time in there. Everything was moved out and cleaned. All the windows were up. If you've ever seen the video views, looking out to the beautiful Portland, Oregon skyline where I shoot all those videos. And it was a tough one. It just kind of hit us. We were up there and saying goodbye to the space. And that place made my career. And I mean, that space meant so much to us. When I bought that space, I didn't really have the money to buy it. You know, I wasn't too far out of the time in my life when I was broke and bankrupt and I had to buy that place in cash, which was really scary. It was a big decision for my wife and I because we also had just bought our new home at that moment when we first moved here in cash as well. So it was putting a lot out. It was risk. It was scary. But I was saying, in my mind, I'm going all in on this, creating videos, and I'm going to find a beautiful place to shoot. And at that time, they'd just kind of come out with day flow lighting, where the lighting bulbs that you shoot videos with could be the same spectrum as the outside, which means you could shoot in front of windows. And if I'm kind of known for anything in the marketing world, I was certainly one of the very first to do lots of video in front of a window, naturally well lit. And it was a very challenging. We got calls from show producers, major TV producers, being like, how are you lighting that? Because if you've ever gone into a dark studio before, like a television studio, radio studio, the reason there's no windows there is because the studio lights used to be of a different spectrum than real daylight. And so what would happen if you mix the two? You'd get this. The person's face would look like blue or green or some weird off color because the studio lights are a different spectrum. Now they've made it. Some lights you can buy that are the same spectrum, which allowed me very early on to really climb in this industry. People were shocked. I mean, I think a lot of those initial first views we got was people just going, how is this dude doing this? You know? And so shout out to Travis Shields for helping me figure that out back then, buddy. And we were together for, you know, those eight years that were just awesome. Nine years, I guess, working together. And it was magic. And then there's my wife and I standing in the studio now. It's empty, all the gear is out. And just looking at the skyline and beautiful summer and thinking about all the, you know, millions of people's lives we've touched all the. I mean, 15 courses, you know, that's just the ones we released. Remember, a lot of those courses we updated, we shot, you know, reshot every two, three years. So, I mean, you're talking thousands and thousands and thousands. I'm told that I've created more online instruction than any other instructor in the world. That's why the Oprah Winfrey Network labeled me one of the most successful online trainers in history. Part of it was just being prolific, frankly. There's nobody in our industry that's created more hours of online training that's actually been consumed than I have. At least that's what they told us when they went out and tried to figure that out. And there I was standing. Now we're, you know, in there. So I took a bunch of pictures and we sent that to all our friends and family, kind of letting them know we're saying goodbye to the old studio, and then stood at the doorway where there's this. These switches that we hit and it lowers all of the window shades. And I'll put that up on my Instagram for you guys so you can check it out. This space, empty. If you ever wondered what the whole space looks like, it's a little deceiving with an iPhone, but you'll get the idea. And you know, those curtains came down and we. I was filming it and we just lost it. You know, a home, a place you work. I hope that you have reverence for the spaces that you serve in. I always do. I deeply connect with the space that I'm serving in. And I always been that way. I've been the guy who always. Every house I've left and I moved a lot in my life. I'm crying like a baby. I'm sure you've had that too, but I honestly share that. Just to say, even those blinds coming down, I was just standing there with my woman, her. And I started it when the place was empty. And through all these years, no matter what, we filled it with all the new gear, all the new cameras, all the new lighting, all the new people in and out of the team. And at the end, it was just there, her and I standing, holding hands and just in tears of gratitude and joy. That night we went to bed in our new home for the first time. And I'm sorry, it was maybe the second night in our new home and we were number one on Amazon because of you guys. So it was an unbelievably emotionally connected and charged moment. It was just like, wow, we're saying goodbye to that part. And this effort that I've just put out, the three years on this research study for high performance habits, you know, going to bed. And it was number one in hot new releases. Like I said, movers and shakers, self help success business. It was number five when we went to bed. It was number five overall on Amazon. And I knew I could stay up late and hit my list and ask people to buy it. But again, it wasn't even the moment of Amazon campaign. I know we could have driven it to number one on Amazon, but I'm not after the accolades. I'm after following the strategy of marketing that we already laid out. And the Amazon campaign's supposed to come in September. So it was just you guys supported it so much, so you guys ran it all up. And I just want to let you know that as a writer, I appreciate that so much because I went to bed that night thinking about the three years I just gave my life and my heart and my soul to. And all of the challenges that put on my team and family and even my wife. And then going to bed with her in our new dream home after closing one chapter and starting this new one, to know that it was appreciated and rewarded by you guys. I don't know how to explain that. Right, but you appreciate it. And I love you. Part 4 Developing skill, progressive Mastery. So how does all of this happen? You hear all these crazy things that I'm doing, you know, you know, whatever, 80, 90 hours of recording, building all these webpages, all these tools, getting, you know, making all this happen. Like, how does it happen? Well, I've already told you, you know, wonderful team, wonderful wife. But I will say that one of the most important things is, for me, having learned the power of progressive mastery, it was a huge, huge thing in my life. And maybe the only way I know how to explain progressive mastery is to kind of walk you through some decisions in my life that I hope you've made too. And that is, ultimately, we all must master the skills which are essential to our future success. We must master the skills that are essential to our future success. And too many people fail fail to do that, and too many people fail to anticipate what those skills will be or grow into them or master them. And if I made any great decision in my career, period, that has helped me reach hundreds of millions of people, it was that simple thing. I said, I'm going to master the skills that are necessary to win in my industry. Even though they were not strengths, even though many of them. I was like, I don't really want to do this. I'd rather outsource it. Even though I had no natural inclination to do those things, I decided they were important and progressive mastery helped me do it. If you're not familiar with progressive mastery, do yourself a favor, go to Amazon and pre order my book, High Performance Habits. There's an entire chapter or part of the chapter on productivity. How do you actually achieve more in productivity? Most people don't really. They're trying to figure out, like a day planner. I'm like, no, no, no. One way you achieve more is you become a weapon in the skill sets that are necessary for you to contribute and win. For me, as an example, speaking was something I was not natural at or any good at. And I had to learn to do that video. Heck, no. I was awful at that. I'm learning this skill of podcasting. Please tell me how it's going by leaving a comment because I have no Idea. I hope you guys are liking this. I don't know. Sometimes I'm standing in this booth just talking to the air, and I'm like, I. I hope this is resonating with people because this is a new format for us here at the Brendan Show. I don't know if this is going good. I honestly don't. And in some ways, I stand here sometimes in the dark and I'm like, a little insecure about it because I want to know that my work resonates and impacts you. So if it does, please take a screenshot of you watching or listening to the Brennan show and put it up on Instagram. Just take a screenshot of. If you're listening to this on your phone, take a screenshot, put it up, say, hey, Brennan, I'm enjoying these things. I don't know if you guys like this, but I'm gonna keep doing it, and I'm gonna try to get better and better and better for you. Cause I know I kind of suck at it right now, but the decision was to develop skillsets in the things that were necessary. And most people don't wanna do that. They would rather so much outsource it. And I don't know how to give better examples than, for example, the way you probably know me is through online marketing. And I sucked at marketing. I mean, I didn't know anything. I didn't have any education in marketing or any background in marketing when I began trying it and doing it. And then I sought out mentors and sought out courses, went to seminars, got coaches, you know, built it, but I didn't know I sucked at it. And I remember even thinking about it. It wasn't even something I want to do. I'm like, I'm not a marketer. I'm a writer. I only became a marketer because it was supporting the writing. It was not something I planned on being. And now Success magazine has said that I'm the world's highest paid marketing trainer. And that's primarily because of what I teach at Experts Academy and the monster success of that. If you're not familiar with Experts Academy, wow. It's the world's number one marketing training for thought leaders. And I say world's number one. I mean, there's just not even a question that has been around since 2009. And it was the only program that taught how to do all of it. From writing, speaking seminars, online training, coaching, and masterminds, and social media. It taught all of that since 2009. Most of the major bestsellers in nonfiction, bestselling authors, a huge swath of them are Experts Academy alumni and graduates. A huge swath of the major YouTubers are graduates of Experts Academy. It's just it achieved that pinnacle not because I'm so smart. It's because I went out and developed progressive mastery in each of those areas. In terms of marketing, I became a master marketer for books. That's why I've helped so many big names launch their books. And I became a master marketer for my speaking career, for filling my seminars, for signing up coaching for masterminds. I don't say that because I was good at it, I sucked at it, but I developed it through progressive mastery. So if you're trying to develop any skill, learn a language, or develop, you know, the ability to market online, you have to approach it with progressive mastery. So please check out high performance habits. It will change your life forever. Follow those steps for progressive mastery. It's how I did it. And for for. I'll give you an example of why I chose to do that. Back in 2000, I realized that if I was going to have power in the future for my career, and this is before I even started my career as I know it now, I knew I had to have the ability to put up web pages. I knew the Internet was changing everything and I knew if I could manage my web pages, then I would have the ability to manage my career. If I could do good web pages, my career would be done well. And so I taught myself coding. Now back in 2000, this was like when you're learning like HTML, like just straight old fashioned coding, nothing too fancy. I'd learned to basically put two rows on a page, put two columns and fill it up with text. It was not fancy at all. My first web pages sucked. But from then all the way up until 2015 or 16, I built every single one of the web pages and marketing funnels I ever used. It wasn't until 2015, I think even or 14, that I had some support with Brendan.com had a friend of mine, Jason, help build that page. That was but every other marketing page, every other thing, I built it until templates came along. That came along. Now many of you know I use just this platform called Kajabi K A J A B. I go to brendan.com kajabi I'm sure there's an offer or something there, usually full disclaimer. I'm an investor but I share that story because I used to just hard code everything and I still build most of my funnels. In terms of the strategy and thinking through it all. And now I've got some support in that area of putting it and tying it all together. But I share the story because people are just, they must. For so long people thought you must have this huge team. I'm like, mana. I never had any marketing support and we hit 4 or 5 million on Facebook, tens of millions of dollars every single year in online revenue. And I was the only guy doing the marketing again outside of Travis, shooting my videos and my customer service team, fulfilling that and doing our events as well. But the marketing, that was me and I had to learn that and just bothers me so much that so many thought leaders like, well, I'm gonna, I'll hire an agency to do it for me. I'll hire this to do that. Because I'm the talent, I'm too special to do all that. I'm like. Or I don't want to get in the weeds and do all that. I just want to. I'm like, you know what? You better friggin figure out exactly what the skill sets are for you that you need to master for you to be not only prolific in your area, but ensure your long term future success. My entire team could walk away. And I know how to do my business. It doesn't mean that I'm saying you'll never outsource or delegate. That's not what this is about. But you know what? It's hard to. If you outsource and delegate. It sure is hard to manage them if you've never done it. I mean, I always tell people, before you delegate or outsource anything, get dangerous at it, you know, start doing it, understand all the moving pieces, understand the process, understand the depth of work that goes into it, the thinking that goes into it, know how it plugs into other things. And then once you, if you really just don't enjoy it, then go ahead and outsource it. But a lot of the things that made my career I didn't enjoy. I didn't enjoy speaking, but I knew that that was a skill in which would be essential for me to serve my mission, which I thought was just to help improve people's lives or help them achieve their goals faster. I wanted to help people live, love and matter. And I knew one way to communicate was to speak it. I was a sucky writer. I still, Everyone's a sucky writer. You'll always be a sucky writer. I'm a sucky writer. Everyone's a sucky writer. And I knew, though I Had to be better. And that's why some of you have thought, well, Brennan, you're kind of schizophrenic in your books. I've got six books out. They're all completely different. Life's golden ticket is a parable. So it's fiction. The charge is kind of based on a lot of what I was learning in neuroscience. The motivation manifesto sounds like it was written in the 1700s because it's based on revolutionist rhetoric. The student leadership guide has a completely different voice to it. High performance habits sounds different than anything else I've ever written before because it came from a major research project. And there's a way you have to communicate the learnings and the data and the research from that. So every book of mine has been different and that has been part of my journey. Leveraging progressive mastery. Developing a diversity even in a single skill starts to make you a master, right? It's not like a judo master can only do one move. It's they've gained a diversity of skill sets within that skill of judo itself. And there's different skills they develop on the ground or when they're on their feet with an opponent in front of them, behind them with a certain size opponent versus another, there's a million little skill sets that fill out the breadth of your mastery in that one skill set. And you just have to have a judicious way of going about that that works. And that's part of the progressive mastery process. So I hope you'll do that. The takeaway here is master the skills that are essential to your long term success. Do not get lazy and think you should just outsource those things because so many thought leaders, you know, I'm blessed to see people come and go and come and go in this industry. And the ones who stuck around are the ones who mastered the skills, the ones who just wanted to outsource and delegate and have agencies do everything. I don't even. You don't even see them anymore. And part of the reason is it's because they never had to earn it. They just didn't. And if you don't earn it, if you don't struggle for it, if you don't strive for it, if you don't get your hands dirty all over it, learning how to do it and move it and shake it and get excited about it, then you're just, you're going to struggle and then you're going to lose that fulfillment that comes from growing into a higher level of skill. And that's why I tell everyone what skills. If I show up at your house and I open up your frigging calendar and we look at your calendar, whether we flip through your day journal or you open up your calendar on your Mac, or maybe you have a PC, I have no idea if you have a PC, but if you do, I'm sorry. And so you open up your Mac, we look at your calendar. If I can't see in there blocks of time dedicated to learning, then you are leaving your personal development to randomness. And those who leave their personal development to randomness always walk in the land of mediocrity. It's those who get strategic about their skill development that become the masters, that become the thought leaders. And I don't pretend it's easy because I sucked at speaking. Many of you would say, I still do. I sucked at writing. Ditto. I mean, I was not a good trainer. I didn't know adult learning theory. I didn't know curriculum building. I didn't know how to get the effect. I mean, I didn't know how to speak. I didn't know how to not lose my voice. I didn't know how to do 80 hours. None of that was things that I knew how to do. But I started developing a process to develop and get better in those. And you need to have that same intention. I'm going to master some critical skills here. And if you master those, not only will you gain greater competence, you'll gain greater confidence. And as you gain those two things, you will contribute better trust in that. So if your contribution matters to you, then your competence must too. And if your competence matters to you, you'll architect your learning journey. You'll get serious, you'll get strategic about getting better and developing those skills. And then one day, you look around and you've passed everybody. You know, it's like when I worked with Paula Abdul. I remember she always was saying, there's no traffic after the extra mile. You know, most people just won't work through all of that skill development. And so if you do it, then at some point, you look around one day and you're out front or you're on top, or you're in the top 15%. And everyone's like, wow, you're so lucky. And they have no idea that you sucked at these things, you know, that you were terrible at these things. And so I hope that inspires you to get even better at what you do and what you care about and how you want to serve. Because progressive mastery can change your life. So make sure. You get high performance habits. Okay, my friends, I hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Brendon show. A couple different shout outs and ways to end this thing. Number one, I would love to see you out on the road at one of my seminars one day. But I also am just about to announce a book tour and I thought I'd announce it to you guys first. Go to brendan.com tour I'm going all over the country, six different cities and literally you basically buy two books and you're in and you can come and see me teach for two or three hours depending on the location, all over the country. We'd love to have you there. Brendan.com that's b r e n d o n.com tour brendon.com tour t o u r brendon.com tour join me out there. I'd love to sign some books for you, shake your hand. Thank you for being in my audience. The only way to do that is brendon.com tour I would also like because I mentioned in this episode something about, you know, skill and something about voice, you know, telling you about developing, you know, the development of your voice. But I also like to talk about the importance of that and succeeding at it. So I'm going to read you something that just happened literally on a break here in the podcast. I got this crappy direct message from somebody on Instagram saying, you know, you're only in it for this reason and you suck and all these awful things and, you know, you're not taking care of people. You're just asking for money because a person was offended that I was asking people to buy the book on Amazon. I mean, just, there's always these people out there. And so if you develop your skill and you do develop your voice, that can be a scary thing because you think, well, maybe people won't like me. It's worth it even if they don't. So I'm gonna end this episode with a couple things. First, come see me if you like what we're doing. Go to brendan.com tour I'd love to shake your hand, get you a book. But also, let me just end this because you're gonna get some haters when you get good. You're gonna get some people who don't appreciate you when you get good. And I just wanna tell you how to deal with that. And that will be my little closing for today. And I'll read you. It's a post I did on Instagram. So I hope you'll follow me on Instagram. Brendan Burchard and this is what I replied to this person. And then I wrote a little bit about it. I said, if you don't like how I serve, then your mission is to go do it bigger and better. Otherwise you're just making noise and not helping either. And that's not who you want to be. The world needs more servants and people acting positively than haters who are unaware of what others do to serve. And then I wrote beneath that post on Instagram how I just responded to a hater. When you are trying to serve others with your voice, there will always be people who question you and assume you are doing things for the wrong reason, or accuse you of being out just for the money, or think you're full of bs. So what? Do you quit or do you believe in what you're doing? Not everybody has to understand you or know all the good things you do or even like you. Haters live in hate and the only comrade of hate is ignorance. This means that those who hate on you simply are ignorant of who you are and what you do. I don't take their accusations or criticism personally. Instead, I challenge them to do better. I would take great joy in seeing them or anyone else serve as long or through so much training for free across as many platforms as I've done and so many of my peers and students have done. I don't need them as in those haters to understand my business, or how many scholarships or free books I've given out around the world, or how long and hard I've fought for my audience and my dreams. I know these things and you don't need them to understand you either. Just keep doing your work. Just keep doing your work. Believe the right people will be attracted to your positive message. The rest, we hope, will serve in their own way someday. So just keep doing your work. Haters gonna hate and servants gonna serve and the light always wins. I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode of the B R E N D O N Show Sat.