The Hidden Cost of Never Taking a Break

If you've never tried to take multiple breaks throughout the day, it will change everything. When you burn out, when the car blows up now, that recovery time is three months, six months. A major mental health problem. You feel like you lost your purpose. No. You're fatigued. You are aligning throughout your life to meaningful pursuits, and your purpose will reveal itself. And if you can keep recalibrating to these things, there's an ascendant path for you. If you've never tried to take multiple breaks throughout the day, it will change everything because you're realigning throughout the day. It's the same reason I always teach my audiences in high performance, that the high performance sports car doesn't need the brake. When it's racing around a track 200 miles an hour, it's still taking pit stops in championship races. It doesn't need to. Why does it do it? To refresh, to reset. It only takes a second. That thing's outgoing. You're like, wow. They do it because if you reset and refresh, you can go longer, faster. But some of you, you're burning out. You burnt out the tires seven laps ago. You still haven't pulled over to refresh. You burnt out two children ago, and you never gave your spouse a spa visit. You burnt out on that last launch, but you made the money. So you're like, let's double down, babe. Let's keep going. And you kept going. All in. All in, all in, all in. Which is great, but it's been five years of all in. And everyone's like, can we get a break here? And you don't understand. When you burn out, when the car blows up now that recovery time is three months, six months. A major mental health problem. You feel like you lost your purpose. No, you're fatigued. You're fatigued, but you blow it all up because you didn't reset and refresh. And as you just learned, your performance is actually worse because you're not aligned. When you align your physical body, but you align your mind, not only will you get more miles at more speed, you'll get better performance. So this is really important. When you're talking with somebody, stand up straight. When you're on zoom, sit up in full. Not just because you're trying to pose power, which is not only a recent research study that went way too viral, that was also disproven and could not replicate. It's not an issue of how you project to somebody. It's literally an issue to activate your energetic reserves. It's not about power. It's not about that. It's if you can align, we can change your life. Remember, achievement isn't the problem. Most of you already have personal power. You have control, you have capabilities. But you keep sabotaging because you're living sometimes a life that looks like that image, and we just need you to stand in full again. Like most of you, you're so stressed, and you're living in distress because you're not releasing. I'm releasing all day, every hour. That, to me, is releasing tension. The whole reason I do that, I'm releasing tension in my body. I'm releasing the thoughts in my mind, and I'm putting the thoughts in there. I'm letting the thoughts go, and I'm putting the thoughts that I want in your life. Now, when you have new tools, when you forgive, when you let go of the past, you're lighter, your shoulders aren't so hunched over in the old stories that you're carrying along. And now you're not trying to get back to what's comfortable, what's interesting that's happening is even if the pit is happening, instead of aiming for here, we're just going to aim up here, and then we're going to go like this, and there might be a fall, but you know what we're going to do? We're just gonna aim up a little higher. See, resiliency can get me back. I don't want you to get back. I want you to ascend. It's a different mindset, isn't it? He said, it's a big shift. It's a different mindset. It's like, oh, I need to actually take that old personal development advice and actually aim higher. People say, but that, Brendan, you're setting unfair expectations. You should just help them get back to there. I'm like, oh, I want to help them get back to there. But my vision for you might be beyond your vision for you. That's why I'm usually hired as a coach. You can't sometimes see past your current circumstances, but never limit your vision for your future based on your past or present circumstance. You follow? If you need a great metaphor for this, read Nelson Mandela's autobiography. He's literally in prison. He was literally about to be the world leader, and then he was imprisoned, and then he has to sit there and wait and watch his country fall apart. But while he's in that prison cell, his vision was not in that prison cell. If you haven't read A Long Walk to Freedom, read that book. And you Go, oh, my gosh. I can be in the worst circumstances and still see. What most people do is they're in bad circumstances and they don't even look when you're in bad circumstances, you can still see, you can still feel it. You can still touch it and vibe with it. And that's actually the stuff of faith and hope. The stuff of our own discouragement is staring down at the ground, breaking our own alignment with the best of who we are. Another metaphor you might use is we break alignment with our core values because we feel bad. And then we get into a bad game of justification. Well, I was a jerk last night, honey. But you know what? It's because you do this and this and this, and you blame your spouse for your behavior, you're out of alignment. It doesn't matter what they did. They don't have to pull you out of alignment. You get to control your thoughts, feelings, actions and word and it's getting you back into that alignment. So people ask me, though, well, what. What am I aligning to? I don't know. What. What's my star up here, Brendan? I'm like, no, no, no. The star is making sure along the way as you keep every single time, you're leveling up that vision that you're living in alignment with the best of who you are and what your aspirations are. What are we living in alignment to Aliveness. See, you're not trying to achieve the book. You're not trying to get the billion dollars. Well, maybe you are. I don't know. It's. It's not the next gift, the next card, the next materialism, the next level of the thing that you think you're after. What you really want is the sense of aliveness you will feel when you get the thing you pursued. Right. Oh, I want the fast car. Why do you want the fast car? Because when I drive that fast car, I feel alive. Oh, it's a feeling of aliveness that you want. If you don't generate aliveness, you'll never have it. So you have to generate aliveness. It's an aspiration. It's not something you're going to have one day. You're going to generate it more and so you'll live it more. Same thing. The other human drive is connection. Connection, that is the relationships that we have in our life. It's connection with self, but more when I speak to. It's connection with relationship. It's connection with you. It's connection with your family. It's connection with those you serve. It's making sure you're connecting with the audience. A lot of people talk at you, but they're not with you. And you're kind of like, did you just need a wall to talk to? Are you. Is there. Are you recognizing there's a thing, a relationship that's happening here? A give, a take, a vibe? A lot of people don't understand that they grew up in narcissistic lens, so they just want to tell you about themselves and they're. They don't understand how to connect with you. Right. It takes a long time to do that too, because it's a vulnerability. That's why a lot of people fear connection. They sense it's an energetic pull from them because you're the more generous person in your relationship. And so because of your output has been so much over a period of time and people sometimes don't appreciate it, you start pulling back. The problem is you pull back with everybody, not just that person. And so you limited yourself for their limited appreciation. Some of you have been limiting yourself in all of your relationships because one person limited you or sucked you dry, took your heart, took your soul, took your spirit, took your money. And then you removed the generation of connection. And now you hope it happens. You hope connection happens, but you're not generating it. If you don't generate the connection, why are you so shocked? It's not amazing. I work with couples all the time. They're like, brendan, we lost affection. I go, you didn't lose it. You stopped focusing on it. You didn't lose it. You're both not generating it. So now we have to make a decision. Is she worth generating the energy for? Is he worth generating the energy for? Is your marriage worth generating the energy for? If it's not, don't complain. You don't have connection because you don't have it. You. That puts you right back in command of your life. The mental conditioning you have to adopt today is you are directing the character in the scene. Maybe you don't get to choose all the scene or the people comes into. Maybe that's universe, God, spirit, luck, nuance, randomness, chance. But in that scene, you get to call it. You get to go, how do I want to conduct myself? And I'm here to say, be the generator in the scene. Be the person with agency in the scene, have intention. Be that person who you choose to be. When you become generative in self versus reactive. That's all that stuff you've learned about the distance between stimulus and response. Your whole life, you're generating choice between stimulus and response. Then after response, you're generating choice with intention and initiative. This is what we're trying to do. I want you to generate whatever it is connection. I want you to generate that often you've heard me talk about. Sorry, this has gone off a little off the rails. Meaningful pursuits bring you to life. You're aligning back to the story. You're aligning as you go through life to things that help you feel and generate aliveness. You are aligning to things throughout life that help you feel and generate connection. You are aligning throughout your life to meaningful pursuits. And your purpose will reveal itself. You won't know it. It's in the alignment to the human aspirations of aliveness, connection and meaningful pursuits that the path actually reveals itself. You won't know all the purpose. It's like. It's like Ethan telling me the other night. It's like. It's like Steve Jobs is sharing. You don't know it until you look back. Then you can connect the dots. It's kind of like that is that you are in alignment. So what do we align it to? Listen, you'll have tons of projects. You have lots of projects. You have lots of dreams. You have lots of goals. You have lots of initiatives. But if even along the way, you're always recalibrating. What's the word? You're recalibrating. To those that amplify aliveness, connection and meaningful pursuits. I promise it looks ascendant over time. It won't look like this. You won't plateau. You're going to keep recalibrating and aiming high. Recalibrating, aiming high. Recalibrating, aiming high. Meaningful pursuits, those pursuits that bring you alive. It feels like a contribution and a chase and a hunt that you want to be on. We're just going to keep realigning. We know this in psychology as post traumatic growth. You can go through trauma and drama and difficulty and hurt and hardship and you can grow through it. It doesn't mean you wanted it to happen. It just means over the long term, you don't distress because of it. You grow because of it. You don't live in the pit because of it. You grow through it. You grow out of it. You grow, mature and become even with all the crap that they did to you, the things they said to you, hey, you grow through it. And I knew that at 19, I said, hey, no matter what they say, no matter how much I fail, no matter what I try, I will grow through. I'm going to choose growth. I'm going to choose growth, and I'm going to generate it on purpose, over and over. If I'm going to start speaking, I'm going to generate that. I'm going to get better and better and better and better. And that was the choice that made the difference. So what are we talking about so far? We're talking about you not getting in the pit because of fatigue or aimlessness, discouragement or ego. And we're talking about an ascendant path for you now. An ascendant path that might not have a defined purpose that you can tell now, but what you need to do is start making choices that generate a little more aliveness, generate a little more connection, generate a little bit more meaning, generate a little more growth. And if you can keep recalibrating to these things, there's an ascendant path for you.