The Pivotal Question You MUST Ask About Your Life

Self esteem is an active concept that can be boosted. Who you are is not fixed. You have control levers in your mind to shift your self esteem at this stage of your life. Don't fool yourself at this stage. What do you want to get better at? Some of you measure yourself so unbelievably unfairly that your measurement of yourself is based on impossible unfair goals. I'm going to jump to a little bit of the conclusion that I've learned now. I've coached people full time in my life and career for 17 years. Full time. At least 3 individual clients every single week. 3 million plus clients have taken my online courses on personal development. Over a billion video views and quote card views out there. 104 day life transformational events. And I can tell you the simplest and the most straightforward thing is whether or not you answer what I call the thunderous question. The thunderous question. Now don't worry, I have a lot of things to teach you because some of you won't like that. I'm going to start with this one and that's okay because I had the marching band today. I can just jump right in. I can tell how you feel about yourself as an adult. Now we have a lot to cover where your life, your experience, your childhood that might all lead to exactly how you're feeling right now. There's no question about that. But once we get into an active adulthood, when we start taking responsibility for who we are, how we feel, how we show up and we'll talk about all these concepts today the thunderous question is so elegant. I can tell how someone genuinely feels about their life on an ongoing basis as an adult with what I call the thunderous question. Am I getting better at life? Am I getting better at life? This has a lot to do with how you feel about yourself. If you hated yourself last Monday, yes, we can go back to your childhood when you were five years old. No question. We could dig that up. We could also dig up years, 15 years, 20 and every time somebody treated you really poorly. We can absolutely do that. And that's very valuable. Valuable if you've ever been at any part of what we do at Growth Day we always teach the incredible value of working with a therapist or working with a licensed professional or working with a coach or with somebody who has expertise in anything you're struggling with. And if you struggle with your self concept or self identity, if you hate yourself, if you've been through trauma year after year after year, please make sure you get a therapist. Can I get an amen on a weekday, ladies and gentlemen, it's like that's important and an operational level. Every day when you're active in your adulthood, you want to know, am I getting better? Because who's ever been really down, you've been in a bad place, maybe you've been in a hospital with a terrible medical situation. And you know what? Life felt terrible and you felt terrible about yourself, and then one day you woke up and just felt a little better. And that little better was a life changing better. Anyone ever had that? Like you're injured and then you're a little better. That little better feels like 10 times better. But overall, I think over a period of time, whether or not you feel like you're getting better at life, listen, when you're starting out parenting, it sucks. If you get a little better at it, you feel better about yourself. When you start speaking on stages, you're completely terrified, likely to throw up or poop yourself backstage and never tell anybody. You go to the bathroom 17 times just to check if you have to pee. Do I have to pee? I don't know. I'm in the bathroom. Do you have to? I don't know, I just, I think I should, right? I gotta be up there for a little while. You, you just have all these little things that you start doing and the question is, over a period of time, are you getting better? Because if you feel like you're getting better, stronger, faster, more capable, more caring, more kind, more connected with the people you love, more healthy, I can guarantee your self concept goes up. Academic literature validates over and over so much. What people just need is a little bit of progress in the betterment of what they're doing, it doesn't have to be crazy big. But if in general they feel to use another language, if they feel like they're growing, things shift. One area of self esteem is called self efficacy. And Albert Bandura really drove this home through academic literature for decades. The idea that self efficacy is that shift where we feel like we are capable to handle the challenges of life, and more importantly, we're capable to do a given task. I have confidence if I know I can do that thing or I believe in my ability to do the thing. So whether I've done it before or I believe I can do the thing is called self efficacy. And if I believe I can do that thing, I feel better about myself, I feel better about the task, I feel better about my ability to complete the task. We all know that. But there's a shift there. When we start looking at our life more like we do in self improvement, like we do in growth day, holistically. And we create routines in our life to ask the thunderous question, am I getting better? This requires the most simple and elegant thing in all human consciousness. Do you have a list? Are you tracking it? Can you even tell if you improve? One reason. Adults who are 40 years old still have the same sense of self, same sense of value or worth or, or perceived value or love when they feel it at age 40 and it's exactly the same as it was at 20. Isn't it true they had life experiences? I mean there's 20 years, but they still feel exactly the same. They had 20 years of wins, of surviving, of trying. And they still feel like the 20 year old self, not the 40 year old self. They value themselves at 40 normal more than they did at 20 and worse. Some people value themselves less as they age, even though they've been through all that stuff. Everyone raise your right hand, say I've been through enough, I've been through enough. If you don't care about yourself now, what else do you need to go through? If you don't like yourself now, what else do you have to survive, for Pete's sake? It drives me wild, people. I hate myself. Why? Tell me about your life. You hear about your life and you're like, that's pretty amazing. You survived a lot of challenges and crises. Maybe you had kids, maybe you fell in love, maybe you did like a job once. Sounds like it's going kind of good. I don't know Brian. I don't like myself. If you don't like yourself, can I ask you a question? Have you been measuring yourself and what have your measures been and would you give those measures to a 20 year old who's not you? Because sometimes that question, am I bettering myself? Is hard because that means you have to measure yourself. And then some of you measure yourself so unbelievably unfairly with the most obscene expectations that your measurement of yourself is based on impossible or ridiculous or unfair goals. And so you went from maybe 20 feeling good to 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 feeling worse because you didn't measure anything along the way and go, huh, I am getting a little better. As we talk about in ultra all the time, you didn't integrate your wins, you had wins. You didn't integrate the win, the success, the progress into your self concept. Your self concept stopped at a trauma, your self concept stopped at a bad day, your self concept stopped at a certain income level, your Self concept stopped at a business level. Your self concept stopped at a divorce. And you had all these wins, successes, wins, successes, survived. Things would go, but none of them went. It never got in there. Never got in there. Ladies and gentlemen, let's put it in. Let's put a little bit in. Let's put some goodness in there. Everyone say it with me. I'm here, I'm ready. I go in strength. Yeah, you gotta start putting that in. You don't feel stronger because you ain't putting nothing in there. You haven't noticed the progress. You haven't taken in the joy. You didn't measure it. This is why in growth, they were like, measure your habits every week. Great. Give yourself a score every week. Great. Watch. See how you can improve. And then people say, but, Brendan, what if they have a bad week? I'm like, welcome to life. Well, Brendan, you're just selling hope. I like hope. You're telling anyone they can succeed. Yeah, sounds about right. It's hard to attack me when. I'm just saying you got potential, babe. It's hard to attack me when I've seen people like you day after day, year after year, for two decades of my adult life. Watch them transform and shift and become more. Just because you've had limited exposure to your own potential, don't pretend that's market reality. And people don't shift and change and activate their free will. Ladies and gentlemen, if you only knew what was in here, but you think you need new to be in here. If you only knew what was in here, but you think you need a new thing. Well, I need a new level of income. I need a new team. I need a new car. I need a new relationship. I need. It's like you didn't even count the last 20 years. If you were subtly aware of what you have been through. Subtly. If you were subtly tuned in with how much you have achieved, if you were subtly tuned in with how much God gave you, if you were subtly tuned in with the actual opportunities of a global marketplace, you would wake up in full, we wouldn't have to fill the tank. The tank and the cup would be overflowing. Can I get an amen on a Wednesday? Ladies and gentlemen? Completely different. Completely different. Now. I know, I know. Don't worry. For all my friends, you gotta understand, doing what I do as a high performance coach, all the academics love my stuff. We got psychologists and sociologists and human behavior experts. They watch every word I say and they're like, you're mixing things up. I'm like, hey, life's a salad. Let's throw in some spinach here, a little bit of kale there. It's all okay. We're all gonna survive. For today's topic, I think it's important to understand it's time that we're okay and actively asking, am I getting better? It's okay. If you're in addiction recovery, it's okay to ask, am I getting better. If you're playing a sport, it's okay to ask, am I getting better. If you're a husband and you've been a jerk to your wife, it's okay to ask at night, can I get better at this? If you're struggling as a leader to communicate and you keep saying, well, it's just not my style, it's okay to ask, can you get better? Because people are counting on you and the world cannot keep defaulting to people's resolutions not to change. If we keep doing that, oh, we gotta change. Nothing can change. We gotta go backwards. We're not gonna shift into the potential, am I getting better at life? It's a thunderous question because I see, to me it's one of those elegant questions in coaching you can't run from, are you getting better? Because you know. So I wouldn't be a proper personal development person if I didn't start the day with, what do you want to get better at? What do you personally, at this stage of your life? Don't fool yourself at this stage, not your 20 or 30 or 40 year old self, you now here today, what do you want to get better at? We're going to talk about this later. What do you want to get better at? And don't fear that question. Be proud of that question. I love that. I want to get better at being patient. Me personally, I'm not giving you a metaphor. You know, being patient has been on my personal and professional goals for, I think over 20 years. Every month I set personal professional goals. You should too. That's why we're here on the first day of every month, so we can think, what do we want to get better at? Together? Is this cool? What do you want to get better at? And if that list scares you or you don't have a list, we got a problem. Because if you don't have a list right there, I promise you life will start feeling mundane and you will start feeling like you're sliding into nothingness over a period of time. Human beings are goal directed animals. We are, we're built that way. Even sociologically, we are Driven to connect and to improve relationships over time in every measure of the human experience, from evolutionary psychology to archaeology to economics, we understand how much we want to connect and we want to get better. Don't fear it. Measure it. Don't fear it. Measure it. When it's on that paper, when it's on that board, when you look at it in growth day, you're like, okay, great. Something to show up for, something to grow into. Because if we take out your impulse to grow, you know, what's left is misery. It won't feel like it at first. At first it feels like a nice vacation. At first you're like, hey, this is pretty nice. I got nothing to do. But every friend I've ever met who retires or has their big day or does whatever, and they don't continue growing, it catches. One day, they're on the ninth fairway, on the third daiquiri, and they look around, they're like, what the hell am I doing? So at some point, we all need this list to get better at. And I promise, if you face it, not fear it, I have so much to improve in my life. So much. I can be such a better husband, I can be such a better speaker, I can be such a better leader, I can be such a better person who's healthier. I can be such a better caregiver, and I can be better to myself. Raise your hand if you get this one because that's better too. Getting better at life is learning to treat yourself better. It's learning to treat others better that's better at life. Because if you still treat your spouse the same as you did in year five and you're in 15, you got a hurt situation coming on. If you don't grow in the relationship, the relationship decays. We all know that. So this stuff is important. The betterment of who we are and how we treat people. I think our society is lax on now. Everyone's fine. We should love everybody. I'm like, absolutely, everyone can be fine. But in personal development and in high performance work, if I work with an athlete and they're just fine. Fine. F, I, N, E. That's a four letter word, ladies and gentlemen. Could you imagine? Have you ever sit down with a friend? How you doing? She's like, I'm fine. And like, ooh, this is gonna be. Let's just. We'll take the whole bottle. This is gonna be a whole long lunch situation. If she's just fine, you know the trouble is coming. You know, you're about to hear the stuff? Cause we're not built to be fine. We're not. There's something more. There's a higher consciousness to tap in. A better flow, a better sense of life and energy. I know you all know that I'm preaching to choir sometimes, but who's already found a little bit of a list of something you can better in your life? Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, Turn the person left, right, shake them and say, you can get better. Oh, we got new people. No, no. Turn to the person left or right, Grab their shoulders, shake them, say you can get.