25th Anniversary & New Direction

25 years ago today, I was in the car accident that inspired my journey to personal growth. And as I'm recording this audio, which is exclusive just here to this podcast, I thought I'd share some thoughts about the last 25 years. And I'm in an entirely reflective mood today because today is not just a magical and a blessed day to mark an anniversary that's important in my life, it's just a magical day as well. I woke up and I woke up to the lunar eclipse. So May 26, 2021, we have a special astrological magical thing happening, which I just love the lining up of those serendipities or signs, depending on how you consider it, today happens to be a super moon as well as lunar eclipse. Now, if you know what those means, it means, you know, in the cycle of astronomy that you have the supermoon, which is where the moon is a little closer to Earth's orbit. And according to NASA, it looks about 17% bigger than usual and about 30% brighter than where it, you know, is in its longest distance from the Earth. But we also have the lunar eclipse. So as the Earth is between the sun and the moon tonight, the sun will cast that shadow onto the moon and you'll see that beautiful copper golden colored magic that is the lunar eclipse. Some people call it the super blood moon, other people just call it a lunar eclipse. But whatever you believe, I just kind of love the blessing, the serendipity, the magic of those two things happening on my 25th anniversary. I can't even believe it. 25 years ago, when I was in this car accident, I was in the Dominican Republic, which is now a shorter stone's throw away from me, where I'm recording this right now in Puerto Rico, my new home. And I think about the magic of that time in my life and most people wouldn't call it magic. I was depressed, I was suicidal. I had come out of the most important relationship of my life that fell apart, that sent me into a spiral. And then the car accident knocked some sense into me, made me realize I wanted to live. I'm sure you've heard the story before. So today I thought I'd just instead share about the last 25 years and about the next 25 years. The biggest lessons I've learned in my life and in my career over these last 25 years and where I'm heading, because there's a big change coming and I'm excited about it. I'm really excited about the future. I'm excited about the blessings I'VE had and I'm excited about the opportunities to serve you all every day. I'm not a mystical guy. I don't know anything about astrology, but I happen to look it up today about the supermoon and the lunar eclipse and what it's supposed to mean. And I kind of liked what I read, not gonna lie. Let's see here. Pull this up for you guys. Here's what it says during this eclipse, lucky planet Jupiter and healing centaur Shirin. I have no idea what that means. Will be activated urging people to pay attention to their inner wounds. Now's the time to tell a new story about what came before. Instead of dwelling, move forward with a burst of inspiration. And since this luminary will activate the nodes of destiny, the choices and events made on this day may even seem fated, as if they were meant to be. Then it asks what the sign is for each zodiac sign. Hang in there with me guys, one minute. And it says that the mantra today for Pisces, which is what I am born on February 28, Pisces. It says the mantra would be I will use my gifts to help the world. If I think about the last 25 years of my life, it was a journey of personal development, self improvement, an attempt to gain greater self awareness and confidence and self mastery. Inspired by my depression and suicidal thoughts before the accident, I spent basically the last 25 years studying positive psychology. Well now what they call positive psychology back then more humanistic psychology, philosophy, personal development, self improvement, spirituality in depth. You guys know my story. Just spent so much time studying it, then ultimately researching it, then ultimately teaching on it, then training on it, then then becoming what they call an influencer. Today used to be called a thought leader. And here we are. Next 25 years is about sharing those gifts even more broadly, but not just under my own brand. And that's what I want to share with you today. Today marks a very, very big day and it was kind of accidental. It's not just the supermoon and lunar eclipse. It also happens to be the launch of the Growth Day app, a labor of love that was built entirely for you. Asking a simple question of how can I help self improvement become a greater way of life for people? How can I help self improvement and self help habits stick? How can I bring greater variety and diversity of voices to my audiences and way beyond my audiences. How can I create a worldwide community of people who, like me, dork? Out on personal development. And today is the launch of the Growth Day app, Version one MVP out on The Apple Store as well as the Android Store, as well as@growthday.com so we're on desktop today, Apple iOS and Android today. It's a big launch day. We're kind of not doing a huge launch for it, and I'll tell you why in a little bit. We're kind of a little bit stealth about it because we're putting out this first version and making sure it goes right. We're also transitioning over 10,000 people who were participating in the beta app to give us feedback and to use it and to learn from them. We're transitioning them into that. And that's our focus this week, is just getting all of our content, current users transitioned over well. And then throughout the summer, you'll be seeing me do promotions with major names in our personal development industry, influencers, celebrities and people, including students, just talking about the power of personal growth in our lives. And then in October, we'll do a huge, huge promotion that I think you'll be really excited about, where it's more of the. The fireworks you've been accustomed to seeing me do over 30 launches in the last, what is it, 17, 18 years of my career. So I thought I'd talk to you today about what I learned, marking all these amazing moments in my personal life, but also in my career. And I thought I'd start with a very unknown and not widely shared story. I very rarely have shared this before that I thought you guys would like as a framing to the lessons learned. And I think this is really cool. This is the stuff that when I had the blessing of teaching and talking to Oprah and her team, or Usher and his team, or a lot of the Fortune 50 CEOs and the unicorn billionaire leaders I get to work with, I often start not just with my personal stories or why we're there, but I start with this metaphor of circle one and circle two, and I kind of like this, this actually lining up. I'd plan to teach you guys this a little bit during this podcast today, but I didn't know it would line up with the super moon and lunar eclipse. So the circle metaphor today is pretty dominant. And in my life, the circle is always the important thing for me, the way I conceive of a lot of life. And so circle one and circle two, this is about stages or times in your life. Let's consider circle one is everything in your life up to this point, and circle two is going to be your next stage of life. Or in companies often teach. Circle one is the build and Secure stage. And circle two is the innovate and scale stage. And in our own lives, you know, a lot of us in circle one, the first stages of our life, we're really just trying to establish an understanding of ourselves, our social relationships, develop some skills, find our way in the world. And ultimately, you know, we're after a lot of security and belonging and sustenance. We're just getting started. And that survival and social mode is really dominant for us in circle one. And then at some point, that's not enough. For whatever reason, it's just not enough. Even if it's great, even if we have good relationships, good job, safe income, plenty of food, you know, we can stroll to the nice shops and enjoy some leisure on the weekends. At some point, it's just not enough. And that's not because you're not enough. It's not because something's wrong with us. It's. It's because we're always seeking something greater. We're always trying to. There's a sense of us. I call it the pull of potential. There's something that is pulling us, and that's the innate human spirit. You know, you're gonna have a lot of circle ones and circle twos in your life right now. You might be just in that transition. Everything's okay or everything's not okay. But you're ready for a new circle, a new stage life. And I can share with you the same thing I share with our growth day community all of the time. And that is what we all want, no matter what you think you want. I can guarantee, after studying human behavior change for 25 years after now, having had the blessing of spending 15 years at the top of my industry and game and teaching and accolades from the industry, 15 years of deep research, 15 years of teaching millions of people around the world. 15 years of collecting an unbelievable data set from people all around the world, from 190 countries. Here's what I know. No matter what, in our lives, we all want four things. We all want a greater sense of aliveness. That aliveness is enthusiasm. That's joy. That's optimism. But it's just. It's vibrancy, too. It's health. It's energy. Mental, emotional, or physical energy. That sense of pop and aliveness. We want that. We want that. Sometimes we have to reignite that with our health habits. Sometimes we have to reignite that with, you know, mindfulness. Sometimes we have to reignite that by connecting something greater or creator or something. Something. But aliveness, spiritual aliveness, mental aliveness that's what you want for circle two. I know it for sure. We also want connection. Greater connection with ourselves and others, Deeper relationships, more meaningful moments throughout the day with ourselves and other people. Connection to, you know, ourselves, earth, spirit, God, universe, whatever it is. A greater sense of connection. We all want better and more fulfilling, meaningful pursuits. Not necessarily outcomes. A lot of circle one was chasing outcomes. A lot of circle two is finding the magic and the joy and the mindfulness and the journey and the pursuit itself. Meaningful pursuits. We all want more of that. And then ultimately we want to grow more. We want to know that we're progressing in our humanity, we're progressing in our relationships, we're progressing in our bank accounts, we're progressing in our projects, we're progressing that we feel growth, that we're moving beyond boredom, we're moving beyond the status quo, we're moving beyond who we are now to achieve our ultimate potential and destiny. These things I know for sure. No matter what you're after in your life, what you really want and what will bring you back to life and what will give you great happiness and what will serve as the levers for developing yourself, aliveness, connection, meaningful pursuits and growth. Well, if I drew those out, I draw it as a triangle. Alternative aliveness on one, connection on one side, meaningful precision on the other and growth in the middle. And that's why we're launching Growth Day today. It's like a huge understanding that to do all of that you need better tools, you need coaching, you need community. And that's really the promise of the Growth Day app. It's all your personal development tools, coaching and community in one place. And it's the next stage of my career. And I'll walk you through what I think about that. It's absolutely the best thing I've ever done and I feel like it's just the beginning of these next 25 years. And so the Growth Day app is a. It's all your. It's everything you need for personal development in one place. We know from research and personal development that there's really six activators to growth. One which we all know is people who journal on a regular basis report less stress and anxiety, more happiness, greater career outcomes, more ability to experience life satisfaction and higher self awareness over time. Those things matter. So we created your digital journal that has prompts for you that are research backed to help you grow. We also know that to grow you have to assess where you're at, your life assessments or the quizzes you take. You take those because you're wondering like where am I and what do I specifically need to work on? So we just developed the best tool for that ever for daily, weekly and monthly scoring of the major areas and habits of your life that we know matter in research to long term success and well being. And you can take them and they give you recommendations like if you're low on this score, watch this, listen to that journal on this. Then we also know the biggest thing is we've got to be able to plan our goals, write our goals, track our goals, set up notification for our goals, goal setting, goal planning and goal attainment. I mean that's a huge part of everything that we study in behavioral sciences to understand how people can go after what they want. But we need consistency there, we need to look at it. You can't just set your goals on New Year's. It's like, no, it has to be an active process. Part of Growth Day is I'm trying to make self improvement a way of life. So it's the first and only all in one personal development tool that has all of your tools for personal development like these things we're talking about, but plus your coaching, which we'll get to. Because the next thing we all need is coaching and mentoring. We need to listen to people who not only make us feel understood and validated and have some empathy and encouragement for us, but who can give that direction and that accountability and that motivational boost and that better life strategy as we struggle or as we seek to grow. And so we have our coaching in the app as an option as well. And not from me, from I am in there, but from the world's most influential personal development coaches and teachers. And then we also have in there, which I'm excited about your online challenges. I'm sure you've taken ton of challenges from me who kind of pioneered that whole thing in personal development online anyway, to the most incredible personal development teachers and influencers in the world who are there live for you every week. And then we also know that on top of the challenges that we can set for ourselves and take the coaches we can get the planning for our goals, the journaling we can do. Ultimately, community is so huge and I've always struggled with that part of how do I activate the community. And I realized that we needed better software to activate community, especially after what we learned in the pandemic and we've got a good first version at it and where it's going to go and is so incredibly interactive and so incredibly inspiring for the rest of this year that we're building out that people will be wowed by. Because you know what? We launched the Growth Day app today and it's Circle one first step, built it, got it out. People are going to love it. You know, our feedback from our users is incredible, but it's just getting warmed up. So let's back go back to you, me, Circle one, Circle two. I'll share quickly about my own life and then I'd love to hear what you think about it by sharing the Brendon show on Instagram and just making sure you tag me so I can see what you think or DM me. Here's what I think. For me, Circle one was a lot of that story of figuring out myself, but also learning great life lessons. If you've heard me teach before, the four greatest life lessons and decisions I ever had emanated originally from the car accident, but were part of my entire last 25 years of experience, teaching and intention. And the first one was have reverence for life, enjoy this life, earn this blessing. I really learned that from my car accident. You know, when we skidded off that road going 85 miles an hour and you could feel the sense of loss of control of the car. I was in the passenger seat. There was that burst of fear and that question in my mind of if this is it, did I live? And it wasn't cognitive. It was full on emotional, physical fear and terror of losing life. And there I was, that suicidal, depressed kid. I would been planning to take my life, not live it. I got it, I'll tell you. Then the car, that slow motion thing happens, the car flips over several times. I see these images of people I love and I think will miss me. And they'll miss me. Perhaps I'll miss them. I just have this deep connection of those moments and those beautiful scenes I see of my life. I get knocked out, car rolls over. When I wake up, Kevin, who was driving the car, my friend from college, we were lost in the Dominican Republic. He's screaming, get out of the car. I pull myself through the windshield of the car. I stand up on the hood of the car and big moon that night too, big moon that night. And I can see all the blood on my body and it terrifies me. And I thought I was going to pass out. And I look down at the blood and going off the hood of the car and I saw a reflection in it and it made me look up to that big beautiful moon. And that was my. That was it. There was a connection There with God and spirit. I felt like I knew I would be okay. I knew I was lucky to be alive. I felt like God had handed me what I call life's golden ticket, second chance at life. And opening to what I would now call circle two. And realizing the preciousness of life in that moment taught me that at the end of my life, I'd ask questions. And at the end of your life, you're going to ask questions, too. So I've always said, having real reverence or blessing or purpose in life is at least anticipating. How will you evaluate your life at the end? What questions will you ask yourself to determine whether or not you are happy, satisfied, fulfilled, appreciative of life? What will be the questions you ask at the end of your life? And for me, those questions were, did I live and did I love and did I matter? And I hadn't, not really. So it made me want to. I know it at the end of my life. And I faced it three times now, just recently this year, some of you heard me share the story of. I was in a plane that almost went down. That was terrifying. Moments of reflection. And I've been through, you know, brain injuries and broken bodies and a lot of, you know, life experience now. What am I, 44 years old today? 44 years old this year, yeah. And what's come through every single time in those moments where I'm evaluating life, that matters Every single time. I've been with people in hospice, when I sat with my father as he passed away, when I have had the deeper moments of reflection in life, it always comes true. Something so simple. Life is precious. Enjoy it. Please. Make good choices for yourself. Please. But don't just go through the motions. If life is beautiful and blessed, then earn it. Earn it by drinking it in. Earn it by noticing it. Earn it by being mindful of the moments. Earn it by appreciating each day, each person, each interaction. Earn it by feeling. Feeling the day. To feel the day is that sense of aliveness I was telling you about earlier that we all want to feel. We all want to sense, to feel it. We earn this life by recognizing it, noticing it, being aware of it, appreciating it, feeling the blessing. And I'm not preaching. That's been baked into my bones and spirit and heart for 25 years. I've never shook in it. It was, if I say life's golden ticket, it was given to me. It was a gift. And I want to earn that gift by reminding myself every day to have reverence for Life, to honor life, to notice it, to respect it. The second thing I learned was, as you all know, you got to bring the joy. One way of earning life is to bring joy to it. Not just take from it, not just hope that happiness or joy lands on us. To bring it, to bring it, to bring it. To bring joy to others, to bring joy to the moment. To recognize that our energy is a result of choices and conditioning and we can make new choices and we can condition ourselves. I would say, and the biggest lesson I learned certainly in the last 25 years of personal development is only two things change your life. One, something new comes into your life and it shifts you. Car accident came in my, that shifted me. A new person comes into your life. You fall in love, it shifts you. A new opportunity or a crisis comes in, it shifts you, it changes you. So two things change your life. Either that new thing, person, situation, opportunity, crisis comes in and it shifts you and it forever changes the course of your life. Or two, something new comes from within. And I've had the blessing of being with the Dalai Lama, the world's spiritual leaders. I have had the blessing of coaching and teaching some of the most remarkable people in the world. And what I see over and over and over is a choice to generate the energy they want to experience and share in the world. Their mind, their emotions, there's an energy to that and they're choosing what they want that to be. They're being responsible for their energy that they thrust upon others. And they're being self reliant and self controlling about controlling their own mind and their own emotions to experience the life that they want. It doesn't mean they don't have unhappiness. It doesn't mean they don't have emotions. It doesn't mean there's not things that throw them off. It just means that they're more likely to say, okay, I'm sensing this. It's coming from without, it's coming from within. I'm going to summon a different energy, I'm going to summon a different set of questions. I'm going to summon a different state, mood, movement. I'm going to summon the energy I want to experience in the world. And what is that energy that unites all of the most impressive people I've met In my short 25 years since that car accident. Joy baby. Joy baby. Their willingness to bring joy to others, their desire to experience joy in life. The whole mindfulness movement is masqueraded for a socially acceptable self awareness. But the truth is behind Mindfulness lives, joy and love. And a lot of people have love in their life, but there's no joy in that love. It's two different things. Real love, there's a joy foundation, bring the joy. Third thing I've learned in circle one was honor the struggle. And guys, we're only in circle one of my sharing. I can't wait to share circle two here. But in my life, boy, honor the struggle. You know, everyone can look at the accolades or the achievements or the bank accounts or the perceived, you know, status in an industry or life and I feel like I'm just getting warmed up. But it wasn't easy. I mean, it was not easy. If you don't know my career in circle one, boy, it was, you know, go to, you know, go to college, have three jobs to put myself through because I had to make the money and pay for college myself. Go to grad school, working three full time jobs the entire time. Got a great job out of school because I wrote a book in college called the Student Leadership Guide and it took off. So I got a leadership consulting job at Accenture, which is a big global company. Moved from Montana, small town Montana, to big city San Francisco, California. Had no idea. I just couldn't afford it. Very challenging time trying to learn the consulting world, working, you know, not joking, on usually 16 hours, but more often 18 hours a day. Just straight, just straight going through, just, you know, is this what life is about? Kind of things in some ways. Really loved the experience and it taught me how to teach, build frameworks, do consulting, talk with senior leaders. Awesome experience with major companies, JCPenney, eBay, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Levi's, Walgreens. I mean, it really helped me. And then wanting to write my book, life's golden ticket, my first big book, if you will. And leaving Accenture to write that book, failing, couldn't get a deal. Trying to do seminar, failing. Not really understanding. This was so early. You know, people Forget how early 2006 was in the digital marketing world. And that was like, I mean, and when I say early, that was literally its first year or two. Certainly in personal development and in quote unquote life coaching and quote unquote online marketing or digital marketing. It was for personal development. I mean, there was some of that stuff out there for get rich quick stuff, but. Or how to build a business or how to do those things, but not for personal development. It was way early. And so I had to figure out how. And it was a struggle. But you know what? I loved it. I went broke trying to write my first book. Loved it. You know, I struggled in the first years of my career. Loved it. I've had brain injuries, major accidents, huge difficulties in business. All along. Those last. What is that? That was 15 years ago. In that 15 years, struggled feels like a lot. Loved it. Because struggle and joy are not separate things to me. And that's been a secret superpower. I honor the struggles of life because those struggles are the openings to learning. And I know the more entrances I go into learning, the more my potential expands. So struggle to me was never a negative thing. It wasn't something to stop. It was like, oh, of course, of course. Luckily, I'd studied enough Buddhism in college to realize life has a huge component of suffering. But that doesn't mean you can't have joy and love and peace through it. And so for me, honor the struggle means, you know what? Maybe the struggle is here to make us better. Maybe this struggle is needed to expand us beyond our comfort zones, to teach us, to help us learn. Maybe the struggle isn't something to be so feared. That was game changing for me. I don't know about you. And so throughout the struggle, figuring out everything I had to figure out to build the career I have today, but also frankly, the entire what the things that we figured out from 2006 to now is the influencer industry today. I mean, think about that like it literally is that because back then there was no iPhone yet. You know, Facebook, YouTube, those were nascent certainly in terms of having a career on them. Email marketing was literally just becoming thing. You know, think about these last 15 years in personal development. Specifically everything that you see social media influencers doing today, we had to figure out along the way too. And some of it I was late. Most of it we pioneered, you know, first seven figure, you know, multimillion dollar online personal development course hours, first million dollar monthly subscription teaching people personal development online hours, first live online training event to do a million dollars hours, first million dollar live launch in personal development hours, first million dollar personal development ever green funnel hours. I mean, it was a journey of figuring those things out. And none of those were things I'm bragging about because if you saw them in real time, you'd see me stressed out of my mind dealing with anxiety and worry and concern and am I going to get it right? But always, always, always, every day, every day, coming back to your anchor, questions about life, coming back to your anchor intentions about life, every day saying, okay, did I live today? Yeah, I sure tried. Did I love today? I tried to Pour my heart into this. Did I matter? Today I am doing this work to make a difference for others. So yeah, it could be a hot mess of a day. But if I tried to live, love and matter, I feel good. If I tried to bring some joy today, I feel good. Those things were important to me. Circle one was figuring out a lot of what we all now use. You know, you're seeing a lot of major promotions and online challenges that are based off the seven day live launch and the previous launches that we did, you know, from 2010 to 2015, where we really brought that social media online launch challenge where the whole community was involved in something where, you know, there was that tight challenge promotion with that, you know, 72 hour deadline, what we call seven day live launch. All of that, figuring it out, figuring out how to hire a team, figuring out how to start multiple businesses. I had the blessing of at the same time trying to, as we were trying to build it ourselves, I started teaching it. So in 2009, I started teaching experts and thought leaders. Many of you guys along the journey now teaching social media, thought leaders, online marketers, digital marketers, and now Fortune 50 huge companies how to do modern marketing. And so we started teaching that and that became ultimately, you know, partnership seminar, Experts Academy, Total Product blueprint and you know, Marketing Monthly, which has been running as, you know, a live teaching since, think about this, 2010. I've taught live online and been paid to teach live online since 2010. Most people are just discovering it in the pandemic, you know, so I'm aging myself a little bit here. But in 25 years in circle one, we had to learn a lot. And all along the way onto the struggle, the beautiful part of that was helping the industry do what I was doing by teaching it. But also being part of the journey with Kajabi. Some of you have seen the, the incredible outcomes and journey of Kajabi over the years. You know, Kajabi was the platform that I built my career on for all my email and memberships and you know, online courses, live trainings throughout the years, all my evergreen funnels, all those challenges, we're talking about that part of my career, that marketing part of my career was really built on Kajabi. As Kajabi got more capabilities and more features and more scale and you know, Kenny, oh, my brother over there, it was like, I always feel kind of bad. I felt like all I did for his first, you know, six years was just, can it do this, can it do this, can do this? Hey, I tried this it broke. Hey, can it do this? Can do this? But also him helping me build pages and code things, you know, custom for some of our celebrity clients and some of the things I wanted to do. It was amazing. And ultimately becoming an investor in the company, the first outside investor in the company, and developing a lifelong friendship and respect for Kenny and the whole team, frankly, just an unbelievable journey that I got to have. My journey in what I quote now is called the influencer or knowledge industry, I got to have my journey, but then I got to teach other people to do it. I always taught people to do it on kajabi. And as many of you guys know, this year Kajabi was valued at over $2 billion. Wow. What a journey. And I think of the best thing that I love about watching Kenny do that was just how steady he was. He didn't try to be flashy, didn't try to be the guy. He just showed up every day and did the work. Honor the struggle. Know that the journey matters. Know that you're building great things when you show up and try and work every day and have good intentions. Honor the struggles that come when they get in your way. Listen, that self doubt, that's not a reason to stop. That self doubt, that's a signal to learn and to try again. That self doubt is a signal to test, to try to see how it turns out, to see if your worries are actually factual or not. That self doubt is a great part of your humanity that says you want to do better. It's okay to doubt yourself. That's what keeps people from being, you know, egoic crazy monsters. To wonder if we're capable, to wonder if we can do it. That makes us extend ourselves and makes us learn and. And keeps us humble. It's okay to have self doubt. It's not a reason to stop. It's a signal to keep going through the struggle. Having reverence for life, bringing the joy, honoring the struggle. Fourth big piece for me in circle one was the role model mindset. I've talked about this a lot. Obviously, if you've heard my teachings over the years, you know these lessons, but you'll love how they're directing and going in circle two of my life. But the role model mindset is the part of us that says, you know what, Let me do good in the world. Let me live my life authentically and congruently. Let me serve as an example of what's possible. Let me act in this next situation the way I would hope that my role model did or would the Role model mindset is an understanding and awareness that people are watching and listening and observing your behavior. And they can either draw a warning from you or inspiration from you. And what I've learned about strivers, achievers, people who give great things, they want to be a positive difference. They want to be a positive image, role model example for other people. So they live their lives in a different style of congruence by asking themselves, how would their best selves show up? Because their impact and energy matters on other people. And so I don't have the role model mindset because I have an ego that wants to be an idol to people. I have a role model mindset because I have reverence for life. And I recognize that there were role models placed on my path. And maybe part of earning my life is to be that for others at some point on their path, not for everybody. I'm not trying to be an idol or a guru or a perfect person because the struggle is real. It's, can I demand of myself more than how I might usually show up? Lackadaisical, going through the motions, not caring about it. Because you know what the opposite of the role model mindset, the selfish mindset, the role model mindset demands more. The role model mindset says, hey, show your potential, extend yourself, be your best, be generous. The selfish mindset doesn't care about that. Big part of my journey these last couple years was looking at this huge impact that we've been able to have and having all these people come to me from all walks of life. I mean, literally, world leaders, billionaires, who I coach, I mean, just an absolutely amazing experience. People saying, hey, Brandon, what can I do? What can I do for you? And my answer has always been double down on your goodness. Whatever you do good in the world, do more of that. The world needs more role models and positive influences. Do that. Whatever way that is for you, whether it's just the way you show up for your family or your community or your church, whether it's how you lead and serve, whether it's how you do your job, as simple or as complex as that job might be, it's the way you show up. We need more role models. And most people say that's true, but they won't develop the mindset that that needs to be them. It's time to be the role model. It's part of the pull of Circle Two says, extend beyond yourself, beyond your comforts, beyond your security, to make that impact, to make a difference for other people. That's part of giving back. To life. Earning this life is contributing to this life. Not just enjoying and taking from it, but earning it. People say, well, Brendan, people shouldn't have to earn life. It's blessing. God just gives it, Everyone has it. What a beautiful thing. I think that's true. I don't think we have to earn anything. You are enough. You're great as you are. We could all tell ourselves that. But the reality is many of us know, no, you know what, who we are in our seven, you know, in our teenage years is insufficient for reaching our full potential. And that's not meaning you should feel bad about yourself. That's the recognition of immaturity. That's the recognition of room to grow, baby. And I think the people who grow the best have the role model mindset. If I can share a fifth thing I've learned, it's that it's all about relationships. It's all about relationships. In your last moments in life, it's really about who you're surrounded by and the relationship, the depth, the closeness, the intimacy, the care, the love that you had with those people. It's about reflecting on your career, your life, your kids, your community, and asking, was I a role model? Asking, was I vulnerable? Asking, did I make real relationships or just fly through surface level? I think that's important. It's all about relationships. It's a truth that I miss you guys. You know, I used to do part of our career was, you know, doing live seminars, and we did eight live in person seminars a year for, you know, a decade. It's crazy. And these were multi day, you know, four or five day events. And the relationship I got to have with you in person, I miss that. I know it'll come back. But I also enjoyed the relationship I've developed with our growth day community because it's been different. I get to see you live every week if you're a Growth day member. And that's been the connection that kept me going throughout the pandemic was the relationship with you all. But I also always knew that the relationships that matter the most, that's your family, that's your best friends, and they deserve time with you. And in circle one, it's so much self striving to achieve and extend and to move from that interdependence of youth to the independence of our teenage 20s and 30s. And then something happens in your upper 30s, your 40s, your 50s, you come back to a grounding a little bit of like, oh, wait, right. Great friendships. Oh, yeah, right. Some family members. I haven't talked to. Oh, right. New relationships that really matter at work in my industry, in my life. I think one of the best things I did in my 25 years since my car accident was cultivate great relationships, take care of my relationships, treat people with respect, as my dad taught me. Because I learned so much observing my dad and how he treated people. Dad worked at the dmv, that's the Department of Motor Vehicles. That's where you go get your driver's license. And I saw people treat him horribly. They came in with a bad attitude, but many left with a smile because he was a jolly guy. And even if he was serious, because he was a Marine and if you couldn't drive that car and his life was in threat, his face showed it. But dad. Dad taught me the most important things in circle one for me, from his perspective as my role model. Dad taught me you have to be yourself, you got to be honest, you got to do your best, you got to treat people with respect, take care of your family. You got to be a good citizen, you got to follow your dreams. And so much of that was not just a self thing, it was about others, isn't it? It's about being yourself so you can respect yourself, but have respect from other people too, because no one respects a copy. It's about being honest. That's a social thing, but it's also a self thing, about doing your best. Not just for yourself, for others. It's about treating other people with respect because then you'll respect yourself and you'll have the care and love and respect of others. It's about taking care of family, which is all about relationships, about being a good citizen, which is all about your relationship in your community. It's about following your dreams, not just so you can have the stuff that you want, but you can make a difference. My dad knew both sides of those coins. The service side of life. He certainly knew that. 20 years in the Marine Corps, three years getting shot up in Vietnam. He knew the service and dedication and loyalty side of building relationships. Spending 20 years working for the state of Montana, 30 plus years with Mom. He was a relationship guy. If you met my mom, you come to my seminars. Mom is the epitome of bring the joy. And mom is the epitome of love. Mom is the epitome of connecting people and taking joy in her relationships. More than anything else, relationships are what matter. I learned that from my parents. I lucked out there. I know not everyone has two good parents or let alone one good parent or caregiver I lucked out for sure. Hands down. What's the greatest blessings of your life? Brendan? Number one. It was the blessing of my parents and my family. Amazing siblings, didn't always get along, fought a lot, didn't understand each other most of our lives. But amazing humans, amazing humans had some terrible ones, too along the way. People who, you know, were awful to me, people who stole from me, people who lied to me in that life, honor the struggle, have reverence for life, and recognize most people, they're doing the best they can. My dad would say that all the time. Most people are doing the best they can. You don't know their story, you don't know their journey. You don't know their life lessons. You don't know their values outside of that situation you experienced with them. Something to always remember in relationships is give people a little bit of credit and room and patience and compassion and love. That's what I Learned in circle one. That's what I learned to do in circle one. That's what I learned to think about in circle one. That was my circle one. What was the first stage of your life? That's 25 years since my car accident, but I've been alive 43 or 4. 44, I guess it is. And I think about the next 25 years. And obviously I'm in a reflective mood this morning because I got up way early. I wanted to make sure I filmed this dang thing on this day. I wanted to record today to really capture how I felt. And I'm reflective because I got up way early to try and see that lunar eclipse. And so think about circle two. You know, circle two is usually more expansive than circle one, isn't it? That next stage of your life, it's more expansive. It's different. The truth is about circle one for me was it was so much about self mastery, so much about developing the relationships, developing career, being an entrepreneur. It was skill building, honestly, it was skill building and finding my place in the world, achieving, quote, unquote, success at the levels that I had hoped for. And honestly, way beyond, way beyond. I never imagined I would reach millions of people, make millions. I never imagined. None of that was. I never imagined I'd be part of a unicorn story. Like, it wasn't. None of that was. My hope was to be able to write when I wanted to write and make $40,000 a year. So I'm not one of those guys who had the big dreams of the big fancy cars or jets. That was never part of. If you ever saw My vision boards or walls in school or college. It was more of destinations I wanted to go to. And none of them were called the Four Seasons. I didn't know those were things. Let me tell you what. So coming from, you know, living pretty much right at that, you know, what would be considered today the poverty line, but not knowing it because my parents were so abundant and figured out and were resourceful and made us feel loved, I don't think I knew where we're at financially. But having achieved, if you will, what I thought you're supposed to and everything else. What's Circle two? Well, you already know the answer, don't you? If after you get everything you want, all you still want is aliveness, connection, meaningful pursuits and growth. Got it. Circle two for me is extending beyond my own learning and skills and platform. Much of circle one, in the last 25 years of my life was learning things, teaching things, and I was doing that under my own brand, under Brendan. And Circle two is about growth Day, about how do I make if the greatest gifts I've been given in my life are all these lessons, which, if you listen to this podcast again, it's basically like a personal development seminar. It's just. I can't help it. Here I am reflective, just talking to myself in a room, and I still have to talk about those things. It's just. It's just me. I'm. I'm literally boring. I love personal development. I love self improvement. I've studied it, I've worked through it. I know all the modern teachers, all the old teachers. I'm a barely a ripple effect, you know, the entire movements of philosophy, sociology, psychology and political science. I'm really just. I'm just a ripple effect of all those things I've learned. But I love personal development. I love human behavior change. It's literally all I've done for 15 years. Every day. Not someday. It's important you know this. Every day of my life for 25 years, I've done personal development. And every day of my life for the last 15 years, I've done it and taught it every day. Yep. Sundays too. I create two to four new pieces of content every day for 15 years without missing. So all those quotes you saw on Facebook or Instagram from me know, viewed now over 7 billion times, apparently. Yeah, those. All those quotes, that's what I wrote in those mornings. That's. I consider myself a writer or a coach. Those quotes you saw from me, those were things I said in my teaching or training. All the podcasts you've heard on the Brennan show that's pulling from my work, that's all content and so it's all I've done. And now the truth is I've had to face, well, that's been my body of work. But I want to go beyond my brand, beyond my body of work and I want to introduce the world to self improvement and self improvement teachers in a different way. I want to really help make self improvement a way of life. And I knew I needed software for that. You know, I can go live, I can do the things we do through our platforms. Yet if it's not on your phone, you're not getting push notifications and sms, you're not engaging with it. It's a book on the shelf. And I wanted to help. Like if you're gonna take an online course, I wanted a platform where you could take your notes and they were time coded and you could take lots of online courses and they would all your notes from all those things would all roll up into one place and you could click the times and go back and watch those things. I wanted to make sure that you could journal and that you didn't fear facing the blank page, but rather if you knew what you wanted to write today, great. If you didn't, you press a prompt and that prompt asks you a question or starts a sentence that you complete. And I want to make sure those prompts were research backed. So as many of you know, we've invested millions of dollars in research to make sure I wasn't just some talking head on the Internet. But rather I'm coming from a great foundation of psychology and sociology. And so for me, I wanted to make self improvement stick and I knew we needed software. So Circle two in my career is going beyond the Brendon brand and even the Brendon show. You'll be seeing the launch of Growth Day to Day on the app stores desktop. You'll be seeing the launch of the a new Growth day channel on YouTube. You'll be seeing on June 1st the launch of our Instagram for Growth Day. You'll be seeing on June 1st a new podcast from Growth Day featuring not just myself, but all the other teachers, trainers, influencers, people who I believe just move the needle in personal development, sharing their own life lessons with you. You'll be seeing me build this company to hopefully that unicorn level. It's just all I'm going to be doing and it's a great transition for me into what I believe is Circle two, which is always expansiveness, serving more people, serving Them better because I have no problem saying that. There's no question in all of the data in eLearning or EdTech, however you want to phrase it today, that people, you know, buy courses and they don't watch them, or people download podcasts, they don't listen to them or people purchase books and they don't read them listen, I would bet in my mind I just genuinely believe most people in their life are super casual and do drive by interests. They're like, oh, that's curious. And they download it, never look at it again. Very few people do the work. That's why we have such vampit and rampant and worldwide unhappiness. Where there's no depth, there's no happiness. Where there's no depth, there's no self mastery. Where there's no depth, there's no real relationships. Where there's no depth, there's no real fulfillment and meaning. We got to go deep. And sometimes I believe we need tools to help us go deeper. We need coaching for different perspectives to go deeper and we need a better community. I mean if anything, people learned in the pandemic and these last years of the political victory all around the world was that being surrounded by a positive community, it doesn't need to be a completely like minded community. It needs to be a positive, empathetic, encouraging community. And when you have that in spades, you expand. And I've been blessed to have that. The biggest names in my personal industry of personal development or self improvement, I consider mentors. I am blessed to mentor. I have, you know, learned so much from and, and I follow them. Some of them listen to me and we created great friendships together and I want to bring their messages to a broader audience. And that's what you're seeing in Growth Day where we have different coaches going live twice a week live personal development coaching at the highest levels every week that would cost with our coaches that because they're all famous influencers by now and New York Times best selling authors, et cetera, you'd have to pay 3,000 bucks a month to access one of these people, let alone a dozen now who will be on a Growth Day platform this year. So I wanted to bring their voices to you and I just felt like if I expanded the conversation that would change. So what's the future of Growth Day? Well, today it begins, it's on the App store. Go to growthday.com to get signed up for desktop and so that it works across desktop and your mobile phone. And listen, it's not 3,000 bucks a month. It's literally the tools just for the journal, the goal planning, your life scores, life assessments, the notifications, the ability to take challenges, different parts of your life as we roll out more and more challenges, all that free trial and try for 14 days and then it's just $37.99 a year for the tools. Now, if you knew the many millions I put in this project, you'd be like, what? It's 37 bucks a year. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to democratize personal development at the highest levels. And then if you want the live coaching experience with these coaches, obviously that's more, but it's still less than a dollar a day through the year. That's crazy. So for 299 bucks, you get access to the world's best personal development coaches, teachers and trainers who I've hand selected because of their humanity, because of their ability to teach, because of their ability to take questions from you in different parts of your life and offer some good perspective and strategies. That's Growth Day. We built an amazing community platform already that we're just getting warmed up. The challenges are just getting warmed up. Everything we're doing in Growth Day, I feel like it's just getting warmed up. But I'm awfully proud of version one because we put 10,000 people through and you can go to growthday.com and you can see what they've said about Growth Day, the difference that it made in their lives and the uniqueness of this. It literally is the first ever all in one personal development platform that has your tools, has your coaching and has your community. It's never been done before, not even close. Other people, other apps that are out there, they might do one or two of these tools, but not all of them. And they don't integrate them and they don't make them easy to use and they don't have the live coaching of this caliber. That's what's magical about it. You can go take online courses because we have them in Growth Day as well. You can upgrade for 20 or 30 plus online personal growth and wellness courses if you want to upgrade. And those are unbelievably powerful. I hand chose those two from some of the biggest names in the industry. And we'll be adding more and more, kind of like the Netflix of personal development, if you've heard me talk about our coaching or courses programs before. And so that's all in the app as well. And so we're trying to cover all the bases of personal development. To create your one stop shop. This is just where you do personal growth and bringing that to the world and scaling that company and reaching more people and bringing in more voices will be part of it. And when I say scaling, I mean that literally. It's like you, you're going to see version one today and it's going to be like, you know, in a decade it'll be like the version one of Amazon or version one of Kajabi or the version one of Facebook. It's like whatever the start is and not where it goes. And you know, people ask me about where I'm going the next 25 years, I'm going to focus on building Growth Day. And what it's going to look like is a platform and an app that the whole world has access to and uses. Now, of course the English speaking world has access right now, of course, but we've got to take it into other countries. We've got to onboard and bring on coaches from around the world. So we've already got many of them who've been my students before, who are now the most influential personal growth and wellness teachers around the world. Most of them at the major levels in every country are friends of mine or students of mine. And so we'll tap into that community as we expand in the coming years. We'll expand into more integrations, more ability for the app to do machine learning and AI to make sure your recommendations are on point with what you're trying to develop in your life. In other words, the app will just get smarter and more global. And as we do that, that's just heads down. And for me, on a personal side, my next 25 years is more art, more travel, more relationships. Those have been the things that I loved so much of my first 25 years. But you know, if I look at the last 15 years of my career in this industry, I think I should have wrote another two or three books. But I was really in the weeds of doing all the work of the operations and marketing the business. I mean, if you consumed any. Mark, if you consumed or saw anything from me from 2001, which was the launch of the Student Leadership Guide to my full career that began in 2006, all the way until 2000, 2011, no, 2014, I did all the marketing myself, a hundred percent of it. If you saw a podcast, I probably uploaded that. If, if you saw something on Facebook or Instagram, that was me. Some of those didn't exist during that time. Obviously it was YouTube, that was me getting that up. If you Read an email. I wrote that email. Every single thing you saw for, you know, basically the first decade of my career, I did that. And I'm not saying that because I'm so fancy. I'm saying it because I didn't, didn't. I was, I think I'm just, I wanted to master it because I loved that stuff. I geek out on it. But I also did too much work in terms of operations and marketing. And so a big part of Growth Day is just hiring and scaling up team all around the world, you know, contractors, full time, you know, interns. That whole nine yards is going to, we're just going to develop that out because, you know, ultimately we're going to have to have hundreds of people to serve billions. And so building and building and building across all of our brands and our companies, you know, we're already at a stage of having, you know, 100 plus team members across our brands and companies. And I say brands and companies because we have, you know, companies that do our coaching, we have companies that do our live production, our events, companies that do our product and our swag. We have companies that, you know, are specific to our, our content or our promotions, to our services of, of certainly what I provide to the world. So it's, it's, it's a more of a complex organization than what most people see at the Brendon Show. So the nice thing about the Growth day, as you'll see from growthday.com is it's, it's not quote unquote, Brendan focused. It's no, we're building the next great app, we're building the next great company. We're following the path of so many of the mentors and the clients that I have of, you know, trying to scale something global and significant that's beyond, you know, my own personal brand. And that has been the journey of Growth Day since its real inception here. And I'm excited about it. The thing I need to do in the next 25 years is make sure I do more art. When I look back at those last 15 years, if I hadn't had to do all of the work myself in terms of the marketing, I had just more team earlier and my team in marketing today is awesome. We have a social media team now. We have a funnel team, we have an ad team, we have all of this. But if you look back five, six years ago, you're like, geez, Brendan, get some team, dude. But scaling up, that will allow me to write some more books. I should have wrote another two or three Books, no regrets, but I've had two or three books in my mind and working at, but not taken the time or been able to take the time to complete those projects. And I think that's a big part of it. There's other art that I do that's just been private for me that I'll put out to the world probably through NFTs this next year. And that's a big part of it. Another big part of it is mentoring. I invest in a lot of companies and mentor the founders, and I love that experience. And another part is just travel. Denise and I want to travel. I mean, a big part of the next 25 years, just more time with my sunshine. I started the episode about talking about the moon, but I got to end by talking about my sunshine. You know, Denise has been the, you know, if I said the greatest blessing of my life was, you know, having good parents and, you know, certainly transitional points of my life were the car accident, running my businesses, meeting Denise, though incomparable to what I've learned about life and love and myself and other people by having the blessing of having a loving, patient, joyous sunshine. People asked me the other day on a clubhouse, brendan, what's a secret to your sunshine? Success and happiness in life that most people, you know, wouldn't immediately jump to because, you know, that's framed. Because everyone knows. Well, people jump to, you know, money, wealth, career status, fame, etc. And I just went right to, you know, the secret is picking a good life partner. Do a good job at that. Pick the right person. And I definitely lucked out on that. I was blessed that she also picked me. And Denise is, you know, just to give you an idea of who she is, this morning when we woke up, she turned to me in bed and said, I'm happy you're alive. It's crazy to think that 25 years ago, I almost wasn't. And the three times since then I've faced my death or laid in a hospital bed thinking I was going to die, that I'm still alive. And I'm so happy I get to enjoy life with her. I'm so happy that I get to enjoy life, knowing today I'm just having a conversation with my friends, that my voice gets to be heard, that hopefully in some way. This is probably the most chill episode in the history of the Brennan show. Cause I got up so dang early for this eclipse and to get this app out to you guys. It's been an incredibly, incredibly challenging year of building this app, leading all to this day, and with all the teams and all the support and all of the 10,000 plus people who helped us beat us up and test it out, it's been an incredible, incredible journey. But the best part about it has been being able to share with my wife and go through the ups and downs and the struggles we've had. Really, I mean, we've had struggles just like any other couple. We're not perfect. I'm not perfect. And I try to be a better man for her. And what I know is that picking the life partner, get that right. Your companies, your brands, your styles, those will come and go. But if you can have a partner along the way, a love along the way, that makes a huge difference. And I know not everyone has that, so I know how blessed I am with that. And even if you're not looking for that or if you already have that, cherish others. Cherish those who are close to you. Cherish that. 25 years ago. Wow. Today, I'd like to end with a simple thing and that is an awareness that we'll all face our end. And I say live, I say love, I say matter, have intention every day because it makes such a huge difference. And finally, thank you. Thank you for being on this journey with me. Some of you have been reading and watching and listening and engaging with me for, you know, 15 plus years. Some of you just getting to know me and I love you already that I get to do this work every day. I enjoy it, I feel and I know everyone in our industry at the top levels and I feel the luck of having been the happiest guy on my journey. And I've been blessed to be so happy along the journey because all these lessons I shared with you and I hope they helped you. And I wanted to let you know every day I still get up and I want to earn it for you. I want to do a good job for you. Thank you to all those who have given us feedback, who've been at our events, who participated in the beta app, who've given me direction throughout my life. It's you guys, our listeners, our clients, our friends, our students, whatever you want to call the people who engage in our work that has made me a better leader, a better caregiver, a better lover, a better teacher, a better human, a better son, a better person. It's the lessons I've learned from you in coaching you, teaching you, observing, listening, all the input that I've gotten over this time. It's what's making the work good. It's what makes the day good. It's what makes growth day good. It's what makes. It's what makes me feel like I'm still just getting started because I'm always learning from you guys. Thank you for being part of the journey. Thank you for listening to a meandering 44 year old talk about the first circle of his life. Thank you for being part of circle two. There's a lot coming that I didn't share today that you will be seeing throughout the year because I mean, gosh, you can't take all the magic out of the excitement and the optimism of the future for everybody. But I hope that you'll be along the journey. If you enjoyed this episode or you know somebody who's ever listened to some of my stuff, maybe share this with them. No. No jumping, no flash. Just a conversation about life. And as you enter your circle too, your next stage, I hope you'd be part of that story. On Growth Day, let's all make self improvement a way of of life. I would love to learn with you. I would love to be part of that journey. Go to growthday.com we're just getting warmed up. Thank you everybody for this one. To my entire team who put Growth Day together, to my family who supported me over the years, to my sunshine who've loved me, to everyone who've been the gift on this journey, I appreciate you, I love you and I'll see you soon.