4 Breakthroughs: Seminar Survival, New Podcast, New Vlog, and Willpower

Foreign. Hey everybody, it's Brandon Burchard. And welcome to 4breakthroughs. In this new series called four Breakthroughs I'll be sharing with you every single week. What are four breakthroughs that I've had in my own personal life, in my career as a certified high performance coach or a high performance trainer, in my work, as a writer, in my efforts in social media, in my own journey every single week to become my best self, to find greater clarity, to deepen motivation, to practice those high performance habits that I know will lead to a life of excellence, enjoyment, progress, fulfillment and hopefully along the way, in hearing my own journey, you get to find some new ways to access those very same things for yourself that you gain more clarity, more motivation, more ability to be high performing in everything in every area of your life. That is my goal for this new series. This series is certainly by popular request. I mean, I can't tell you how many years people have been saying, hey, you know, open up the kimono, share more about yourself, more about you, Brendan. And as you know and you've probably heard through my podcast journey on the Brendon Show, I just have never really been that interested in myself. Frankly, as much as I like to write and train and teach, I do that usually from more science backed principles or heart centered principles and spirituality versus just like, hey, here's what my week was like or what I had for breakfast. But I know this is popular. So in this new series, just look for that title in this podcast for breakthroughs and that will be my personal journey that I'll be sharing more and more with you versus excerpts from my seminars or excerpts from my live training events or my live casts. These four breakthroughs will be original. They will be me sharing it and it will be every single dang week. And with that I've got a couple big announcements because you might actually be listening to this on the High Performance Habits podcast or on the Brendon Show. And so if you're listening on the Brendon show, hey, big news. I've dropped a new podcast in the business category called High Performance Habits and it includes the entire audiobook of my book High Performance Habits for free as season one. I just dropped that literally as I'm releasing this podcast episode on the Brennan Show. So good for you. And hey, if you're listening on High Performance Habits to this four Breakthroughs episode, welcome to High Performance Habits. In High Performance Habits, I'll be doing I'll release this four Breakthroughs here as well as on the Brendon show but what's unique about High Performance Habits is I will also be reading to you some excerpts from research that we've done in high performance outside of my book and bringing to you some of the latest voices in positive psychology, high performance studies, and the broader context of psychology, sociology, neuroscience to help you understand more about human behavior specifically oriented to living the best quality of life possible for you. That's been a big request as well, so that's coming in the High Performance Habits podcast. Either way, I hope you will actually subscribe to both podcasts because they will be independent and unique. The Brendon show much more personal, but also sort of the best of my training across all of my different platforms. Whether it's live cast, seminars, everything, it's kind of like the best of Brennan's teachings is always going to be on the Brennan show as well as a weekly four Breakthrough series where high Performance habits will be more oriented towards career, business and bringing in other voices outside of my own to take on the difficult and complex topics of becoming our best. And now to four breakthroughs. In this episode I'm going to cover a seminar Survival guide. How do I survive one of the most difficult trainings in the world today? I'll talk about the new vlog that I'm releasing and why I'm moving towards a vlog format and what I've learned in trying to become excellent at that. I'll talk about that new podcast and some of the distinctions there. And I'll talk about a popular request, willpower versus Conditioning and the Importance of Knowing the Difference. Part 1 a seminar survival Training Guide so some of you know, the most difficult thing that I do in my career is definitely pull off some of the highest rated seminars in the world, including one of the most difficult ones that I do, certified High Performance Coaching training. This is a five day certification event and widely considered one of the hardest training events in the industry to actually pull off. Because it's a single trainer event, meaning it's just me five days going full on out. It's one of my smaller events, anywhere between 200 and 300 people. But the expectations are quite high. It's $10,000 a ticket. It's a five day certification training. So it's a profess certification. So the expectations are quite high. It starts people's careers and it is all built towards helping these folks become qualified to be able to coach other people, whether life coaching or business coaching or athletic coaching at the highest levels in the world. So you can imagine the expectations are extraordinary. But I Don't want to spend time just telling you about the event. I'd like to tell you about the pre training, the training on site and the conditioning and training afterwards. The to actually be able to physically pull this off year after year after year, multiple times, it's incredibly difficult and something I'm asked about all the time of like Brennan, how do you prepare to be high performing at your events? And this will be relevant to you if you've ever been in a place where you just got to be on for a period of time, maybe you're going on a tour or maybe you're going to have a crazy two weeks coming up, or maybe no, it's just crunch time. And how do you prepare yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually to be able to deliver it at your best. I'll begin with the preparation. Now to tell you about why the preparation is done the way it is. You have to sort of begin with the end in mind. So let me paint a picture for you of what each day of my seminar kind of looks like and entails and that will help explain why I get ready the way that I do. Okay, so imagine you're about to teach and now I know you might not like public speaking or you might not be a trainer yourself, but just let me kind of paint the picture of how this goes for me. Imagine waking up at 6am in the morning and by about 9am you've got to be on stage and it could be a couple hundred people or a couple thousand people and you've got to go from 9am till 1pm and it's just you. There's no MC, there's no other speakers, there's no other trainers. And Your job from 9am till one is to both educate and teach people, but also to entertain them so that they stay in their seats and stay engaged and empower them. And your goal is that they're in that room pretty much that entire time. You don't do any official breaks, like we're taking a 20 minute break. There's no other speakers and you don't want people out in the hallways networking or having conversations because then they miss the training and they miss the value. So you try to creep everything in the room. Then you have a lunch break from 1 to 3 o' clock in which you usually meet with team, have some lunch, maybe get a little meditation in, maybe a little stretch out, then you're back on stage by 3, 3, 15 depending on the day. And you're gonna go till 7pm now or maybe sometimes 8 or 9, just depending on what the curriculum is. And then you meet with team and then get some dinner and then maybe stretch out and go to bed and repeat that for five days. During that time each day you're putting just on stage about 10 miles because the stage itself is 30 to 39ft wide. And you're back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between the stage and out into the audience. And of course you're walking around backstage as well. There's no chairs on stage so you're not sitting down. There's no podium. You're back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You cover about 10 miles a day on your feet. I'm in a suit, so I'm wearing dress shoes. And during that time you tend to burn about 6,000 calories. So it's a very serious physical thing. But not just the physical thing of 10 miles, 6,000 calories. It's on and off the stage. When you come out on the stage, you're clapping and jumping and get everyone going, hyping up the crowd, putting out an unbelievable amount of emotional, spiritual, full on presence of energy out into the audience to keep them captivated, to keep them there. And oh yeah, you have to remember everything they're teaching. And I'm sure you've given a speech before for an hour, but this is from 9 to 10, 10 to 11, 11 to 12, 12 to 1. That's four hours of content that you have to be prepared to deliver. Now not all that content is just you teaching. Sometimes it's you interacting with the audience, sometimes it's having you have the and share some things with them. You know, I have my audience do stand breaks we call them where they stand up. They share, they're often called share breaks, where they stand and share something. I give them three questions to consider and to share with their small group. They work in a small group and then I get them back their attention and we keep going on. This goes on at this particular event for five days. So with all that said, that's like the end in mind. Now it's like, okay, how the heck do you prepare for that? And that has been a journey of mine for now, 12 full years trying to dial in this preparation and work for this. And here's what I found. In general, I think most of you, unless you're totally new to some of my work before, I'm very, very, very keen on high performance physiology, understanding how my body works, understanding how to prepare myself. And so in general, my regular routine, which I Get asked about all the time is I practice two by twos. A two by two is you work out four times a week. Twice a week I do 60 minute cardio exercises and twice a week I do 20 to 30aminute. Much higher intensity, much more weight bearing routines. Now that's my all year round. So all year round I'm doing two by twos, generally four days a week. Pretty intense for one hour or pretty intense for 20 or 60 or 20 or 30 minutes weight bearing. Now people say, what do you do the rest of the week? Well, those other three days I either have one off day or two walk days. And so I tend to walk outside for 30 to 45 minutes pretty briskly every single day. It helps get my energy going, keeps me fired up, keeps my lungs full and keeps me going. That's my all year. Now 60 days before this event, I start doing pretty heavy weightlifting for about 30 days. Really focused on just building strength, really high, intense, very, very heavy weights for me for about 30 days. In that time I really increase my protein intake. I'm probably taking about 30 extra grams of protein per day. I use Vega protein drink for that. If you're wondering what I use Vegas protein for that, I just throw it in with some avocado, blueberry, spinach, chia seeds, water and some coconut milk. That's it. And so I'm taking that extra every single day. That's for 30 days. And then the 30 days prior to the event, I completely shift though now I build some strength. Now I might do some maintenance, but almost entirely I switch to cardio work. Longer cardio work. You know, anywhere between 45 minutes to two hours where I'm doing, you know, I might do elliptical treadmill, rower and bike the entire, you know, just switch between those for one to two hours. And going pretty good at it. You know, sprints slow down, sprints slow down, sprints slow down. Because that's kind of what it's like being on stage. When I go out on stage, the energy that I have to hold that audience at, we're all jumping and clapping. I'll maintain that for anywhere between one to five minutes. So it's an incredible intensity outburst of energy. And that might happen at any given event, say four to five times where I'm really the entire each day, four to five times each day where I'm literally just getting the crowd jumping, excited and clapping. I know it sounds weird, but trust me, it's not. And so I've got that short burst, intense energy. I gotta be able to manage. And then though, I gotta keep going because it's not like I get off stage and I'm done. Now I gotta teach for the next 90 minutes before I might have them do a stand share break. And so for me, I don't have a break for another hour or two, sometimes at all. And then of course I go backstage and I'm doing the calls with the production team, with Mel, who's backstage with me. If you ever met Mel at my events. He and I are kind of doing musical cues, doing curriculum handouts, we're planning the events. So it's very intense the entire time. That's why I switched to cardio, because my whole focus get as much endurance as possible. I also, in that 30 days prior, spent a tremendous amount of time on flexibility and mobility. I mean, I'm rolling out with a foam roller, you know, I've got those lacrosse balls I'm standing on, moving around. I've got the tennis balls in the back, you know, I'm doing lots of pulley work to stretch and elongate muscles. If you can't, if you say that I'm just doing everything I can to really increase flexibility, mobility. I'm doing yoga every day. And this is just one event a year that I'm prepping for. I do that same event twice a year. And then I have seven other seminars. So. But this is the hard one. This is the one where I'm that diligent. I have a 60 day plan leading up to it because it's five days of just me. It's really truly difficult. Okay, so that's the preparation is basically do heavy strength training, then cardio over a two month period. So when I get there, I'm just physically primed to be able to crush it. During that same time, I also tend to schedule a lot more of my coaching calls with my highest end clients. For me, that's a quarter million dollars a year and above. I schedule more coaching calls with them right before that event. So I have a lot of great examples to share of difficult, intense coaching sessions. And while I keep confidentiality, I'm able to share situations of how I coach someone through overwhelm, or how I coach somebody to find greater confidence, or how I coach somebody to be a better leader, or how I coach somebody to do a turnaround in the company, or how I coach somebody to master any areas that we talk about in high performance, work, clarity, energy, courage, influence, productivity, et cetera. And so now I got my mind primed into this area because I Tend to do personal coaching only just a couple times a year with clients. I might meet with clients, say three, four times per year. So I try to bulk load them right in front of that event. So I'm really fresh mentally. And then everything else comes down to managing what I do at the seminar. And frankly, I screwed that one up. This event was difficult. I'll share with you this. Last month's certified high performance coaching event was the hardest one on me in history because we were at a new hotel and we had some change in team roles and frankly a lot of what I need to pull off an event just wasn't present or there on time. And because we were in a new hotel, we didn't know exactly how the ballroom worked. And that's important because the ballroom, every hotel, the ballroom's temperature control is very different. And if you're going to teach for five days, the temperature is everything, everything. Because imagine again, I'm up on stage burning through 6,000 calories, walking 10 miles plus in a suit. Temperature is very important. This particular hotel had horrible temperature control settings that the team was not prepared for. And by day three, the heat in the room had sapped me of so much energy that it really made me thankful that I prepared so hard for it. Because there's just certain conditions that have to be met for you to be able to do five days. Because remember, like a singer might get up on stage and do a three hour concert and they're wiped out, but they gotta go do it again the next day. Well, three hours to me is like I do that before, you know, lunch every day. So. And then I do it for five days. It's really intense. But think about how like, you know, in the NFL, the average play time for any given play is like three to say, six seconds. It's very short bursts of energy. And the game only lasts a couple hours. And in this case, I mean this is hour after after after hour. Now I'm not comparing those things and saying they're the same amount of energy or output or stamina. It just says that. Look, NFL players prepare like crazy for their games. Great singers or performers prepare like crazy before their tours. So you have to imagine I do the same thing now when I'm at the event. Some basic conditions that have to be there for me that help me be at my best whenever I get off stage. I go back there and I've got a blender set up there and I've got protein shake back there and I've got avocado I've got blueberry, I've got spinach, I've got chia seeds or whatever. It's basically the same shake that I've conditioned my body to consume in those 60 days prior to the event. And that's really important because a lot of people make the mistake of they're going to try some new supplement at your events. That is not the right time. It's just like some people who, you know, they've never spoken before. The first time they go to speak, someone says, well, you know, drink a bunch of Diet Coke before you get on stage. And they don't usually drink Diet Coke. And then they drink Diet Coke and they feel like they're farting and belching the whole time they're giving their speech. Like, you don't change your consumption or your nutrition patterns before high performance events. You prepare yourself right. Everything should fall into a rhythm there. So it's the same types of proteins and recovery accelerators and electrolytes that I'm used to consuming so it doesn't throw off my stomach. Because I'm sure you've spoken before. It's the worst thing ever to have like stomach full upset when you're out on stage for 8, 9, 10, 12 hours a day. Okay. So that's really important to me is to have just that basic nutrition backstage. I'll also have some coconut water back there for some extra hydration and electrolytes. I will also have back there sometimes some fruits or nuts that I'll consume throughout my break times. If, for example, I have the group standing up and sharing things, you know, there'll be groups of five. I'll have them share five minutes each. That's 25 minutes that I might have to go backstage and recover before I have to get them back. So during that time I'll consume those types of Shakespeare or protein bars. For the most part, I use vega products because I'm more of a plant based diet kind of guy. And they're very clean and they burn clean, which is really important to me. Also backstage, I'll have all my curriculum printed out. I'll have all my offers if I'm selling anything at the event printed out. I'll have lists of my team names so I can acknowledge them. I'll have just simple things like lacrosse balls. I can take my shoes off and roll my feet out. I'll have an extra ironing board, an iron back so that if I mess up a shirt on stage or I spill something on myself backstage, I have another shirt back there. Another iron back there. I know this is way over detailed, but I'm trying to just tell you guys everything this year. That is the goal of these four breakthroughs is to share what I struggle through and what I actually do in my own performance. I hope that you like it and that you share this podcast. And do me a favor too, if you're listening on itunes, make sure you go on Apple podcasts and give me a review of this new series because I'm going to learn from you guys what you like. What else do I have backstage and upstairs? I usually tend to stay in or near the hotel and I'll have very similar things in my hotel rooms to prepare me to be my best from all the food nutrition I need, but also have a foam roller there. I'll have lacrosse balls and tennis balls I can stretch out on. I'll have the rubber band types of weights that I can move and stretch and use mobility training on. And most importantly, as many of you guys know, probably the most controversial thing I do is I do ice baths every night at my events. And I've spoken about this before, but I know we got a lot of new listeners here with this new format and I'll just kind of walk through how I do those. First and foremost, every time I talk about ice baths, I always say, consult your doctor. If you've got heart issues or other medical issues, just don't do an ice bath without some consultation of your healthcare provider, your doctor or a professional. And I'll just tell you what I do and tell you that journey and why I chose to do ice baths. The number one sort of fatigue issue that people have on stage after multiple days of events is inflammation. All that standing and walking, your feet are inflamed, your calves are inflamed, your legs, your hips, your whole, your back. Like, there's just no, you can't stand and move around that much of time with that much energy output, burning 6,000 calories, moving 10 miles a day plus without causing serious inflammation in the body. And so what I do is at nighttime, after I've gone up to the room, I finished my event, I'll go upstairs, I'll stretch out for 15, 20 minutes, just doing some mobilities, rollouts, stretches, flexibility, yoga. I'll get some food, I'll meet with the team, have a conversation, I'll sort of putter around the room, prepare my suit and my shirt for the next day, day, just kind of clean up and just get my mind in a good place. I might meditate for 10, 15 minutes. And then I'll start running the water. I'll run cold water in the tub till about halfway up, and I'll put in about six to eight cups of Epsom salt into the bathtub till it's about halfway. And then once it's about halfway, I'll start pouring in the ice and. And I'll do the equivalent of about 10 big bags of ice, minimum at my events. So let's say I'll put in, like, three bags of ice, get the tub most of the way filled back up. I'll get in the tub, and, you know, for the first 30 seconds, it's horrible. You know, I'm freezing and shaking and shuddering. I'm. Oh, my God. And. But you just breathe through it. And I don't hyperventilate. There's misconceptions about that. I'm just. I'm deep breathing on a steady, consistent rhythm throughout that first intensity because it's intense. And your body, of course, naturally goes into its shock and it starts shaking. And I get through the first round of shakes. I keep breathing through that, and within about, you know, two, three minutes, I'm through those rounds of Shakespeare physical shaking. Then I'll put in the rest of the ice. And now it's a lot. You know, it's seven bags of ice or so. So. So that when I'm in that tub, I mean, there's, you know, a layer or two of ice on top of me that doesn't go away because the Epsom salt keeps that temperature even, you know, more steady, and is also providing my body with magnesium, et cetera, for recovery. And a popular misconception is I'm just up to my legs. I'm full body immersion up to my chin. So it's pretty intense, and I wouldn't recommend it for people. It took me about six months to move up to that level. I mean, first I just took a cold water bath, and then I added one bag of ice, and then it was two, and then it was three, and then it was extra. And now if you. I'll release a vlog soon. I'm sort of showing. They're delivering the ice in huge garbage buckets for me that are like 55 gallons to give an idea. Like, it's. It's a lot of ice that I've worked my way up to, and people go, why? Well, because once I get out of there first, I'm. I mean, I'm frozen, and I'm in there between 8 minutes and 12 minutes more often. I would say 12, but usually it's in the 8 and 12 minute range. About, usually about 12 minutes is what I set my timer for. I listen to podcasts while I'm doing that ice bath and during that time I'm just trying to breathe steady through the discomfort, frankly. But why would I do it? Because when I get done, I empty out as much of the water as I can in the tub, I dry off and then I get back in and I take basically what's a cold water shower. But that cold water in the shower feels warm because it's way warmer than that freezing water I was just in. And then I towel off again, I go out and I start kind of moving around. I bounce in place, I tend take 10 deep breaths. I just start moving around and waking up my body a little bit. I don't do the hot shower afterwards. I know a lot of people do that and I think that's great for me. I found I just want to be frozen for a little bit and I'll just move, move my body back into a better core temperature over, you know, just a couple minutes of movements and warming up my body temperature and stretching and then I'm pretty much. I might look at my curriculum for the next day and then I'm in bed. And what I have found is that I wake up the morning after having taken a nice bath. I feel so amazing. One, I sleep entirely through the night. That never used to happen in my events. I'd wake up throughout the night, think of something, I'd do this and this. But what happens in that ice bath is part of it, is your body thinks you're dying, so it sucks all up the blood into your core organs to keep you alive. And it releases all these endorphins and hormones and testosterone to keep you alive, which happen to become repair mechanisms. And so it kind of repairs my body overnight. All those hormones released during the ice bath, the inflammation is gone. And so I wake up and I feel like I'm in my 20s. My body feels fantastic, completely mobile, free, alive. My mind is completely cleared, like a blank slate because all those hormones releases and it makes me sleep all the way throughout the night too, so that my body can repair even more. So that's why I do the ice bath isn't because I enjoy it. It's because the next morning I could be on day five. My body feels like it's day one or two because the inflammation isn't there. The fatigue and the sort of soreness you feel in your body after A lot of activity is usually related to inflammation, right? So that's my practice. I don't recommend it for everybody, but by doing all these things, managing my nutrition really well, especially with supplementing with additional protein and fats at the events, really helps. People ask if I do caffeine at my events because I'm kind of an energized guy. The answer is 90% of the time, no, 10% of the time. I do have some form of an energy drink back there in case of emergency and I very rarely access it and if I do, I might have like half a can. I used to use a product that I don't even think they make anymore called FRS Energy Drink. I liked it because it was basically some B vitamins, some quercetin and some flavoring and that was fine. It was very low calorie, low sugar. I enjoyed that. These days I really haven't found a replacement for it other than I take Vega Recovery Accelerator, which does have some MACA in it and a little ginseng which gives me the boost of energy. I also have my own supplement mixes backstage that I'll tell you guys about in the future podcast that really supports my energy. And those are some basic things that are, you know, related to nootropics, you know, brain enhancement type supplements that are very basic to facilitate, you know, basic brain functioning, oxygen flow, memory. So I'll take things like, you know, basic stuff like ginkgo, ginseng. I'll take things like maca. I'll take things like phosphetylserine, acetyl L, carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, vinpocetine, Huperzine A. All of these things that are in basic. Like if you're wondering, just go to Amen clinics, check out Dr. Daniel Amen's brain and Memory Power Boost. And it's stuff like that that I'm basically taking back there. It's not giving me necessarily competitive edge in life. There's no caffeine in any of it. It just makes sure my mind is operating at its best, which many of you know, is really important for me because of my brain injury. Then people ask about what do I eat? I tend to eat at the events, a barely, I would say more Paleo diet than I do at home, where I'm having chicken tacos at lunch, where it's basically like chicken or beef, really well sourced. I'll have no cheese on it, but I'll have like a lot of guacamole or avocado on it. I'll have you know, tons of spinach on it. I'll use a corn tortilla, not flour tortilla, some beans. And, you know, I'll have a side of blueberries inside of spinach that I'm consuming along with it. And it's a lot. I'll eat a lot of food. I mean, if you think about, like, put your two hands together, you know, and that's size of a taco, I might eat like five of those because I'm trying to manage the fact that I'm burning 6,000 calories. So it's a lot more food than I really like to eat. But I'm burning through it pretty darn quick, walking the way I do on stage, because by no means am I just standing on the stage. So if you've never been my events, and you've never really been to a seminar where the person is up and moving around and you've just seen talking heads or, you know, people who aren't in particularly great shape moving around on stage, it's a very. It's more concert style. Sometimes some of what I'm doing, it's a lot of movement. So I got to fuel for that. And dinner won't be much different. You know, it's usually, again, it's very boring and bland. It's lots of chicken, lots of spinach, lots of blueberry, lots of avocado that I'm constantly consuming, lots of beans. Okay with that. Then there's the after recovery. And that after recovery is, you know, I'll take three days off. I don't speak during those three days. Not a peep, not a whisper, nothing even. I'm with my home, with my wife. I'm just texting her. She'll talk to me, you know, and then I'll just text her back. And for three days, I don't do anything. And that is repairing my vocal cords because I want to have a cream, you know, I don't want to have to deal with difficulties with my vocal cords. I had that early in my career because I didn't know how to speak. I didn't know how to use my volume. I didn't know anything about taking care of myself or my voice. And those things are important. It's why I don't consume a lot of sugar at any of my events, being very careful not to make my body go acidic because that hurts your vocal cords. I don't scream without using the proper amount of airflow and volume. Speaking from my diaphragm, that's really important. During Those three days after my events, I minimize the amount of work that I do. The first day off of my event I don't do anything. The second day I might do one to two hours of work. The third day I'm mostly back at it, but I really, really, really just meter it all down. Barely do any work. On the second or third day after my event I'll do a massage and just do like a 90 minute deep tissue massage. I might do that two days in a row just to knock out all of any soreness I have in my legs or lower back from all the standing. And that's basically my seminar survival guide. The rest of it isn't about me. It's about making sure I've trained up my team to do an excellent job managing that audience, delivering that audience's experience and expectations, just taking care of people. And that's a whole other topic for a whole other time. But I've got a world class team I'm very, very proud of who work really hard to pull off excellent events. Especially we do eight events a year. This example I've been sharing with you is just our Certified High Performance coaching event. That's the hardest one for me to survive. The rest of them feel look, a three or four day event feels way easy after a five day event, trust me. So here's what I would recommend. If you're interested in ever attending and becoming a Certified High Performance Coach, just go to brendon.com chpc brendon.com CHPC that stands for Certified High Performance Coaching. And on that website you can apply to be one of those few hundred people I certify each year. And that allows you to be out there in the marketplace as a Certified High Performance Coach to build your own brand, your own business, provide new services to your team, lead your team, take your family, friends or those that you work and serve with through full disclaimer. Obviously as you can hear all that preparation just for that it is one of the highest, I would say the highest fee certifications in the world because it's truly an elite level of coaching that we go through. It's very science backed and it's super awesome. But I'd love to see you there one day and you'll witness me surviving. But you'll also have to take care of yourself there because five days of learning is also not easy. And with that I also want to give a shout out to all of my attendees who if it weren't for their openness, curiosity, love of learning, enjoyment of each other and sharing the events would not be as magical. It is. So if you've ever been to any of my events, big shout out. Love you all. Appreciate you. If you're not interested in becoming a coach, but you'd like to attend a high performance training with me, just go to hpa.brendon.com that's hpa.brendon b r e n d o n.com and it will redirect you to our upcoming High Performance Academy seminar where Those ones are four days and it's 2,000 people for four days and those are awesome and super fun. Very similar recovery and efforts there. I just don't have to prepare for those 60 days out because those are less days and I do more of those per year, so I'm more conditioned for those. You gotta Part two the New Vlog as you're listening to this, I hope that you're finding some insights about the way I weirdly live my life. And if you're enjoying it, I got some hot news for you. This year, after so much trial and error and so many popular requests, I'm going to be doing a vlog that is posted on my YouTube where it will be me more sort of out and about in the world with some behind the scenes footage. I have experimented with it in the past with paying clients and a little bit on social media, but haven't really gone full in on the YouTube vlog style. But I'll be doing one every single week, all year for you all. Now I've gotten lots of questions about why, so I'll share why I'm going about that strategy and just sort of the approach to how I'll be doing it. And I'll walk you through some equipment and some other things I'm doing to make sure that I'm conditioned for high performance to do a good job there. Because just like my seminars, I'm always asking how do I do a great job? How do I set up all the conditions in the environment to allow me to be at my best and to enjoy this process and to deliver with excellence. And I think shooting a vlog is no difference. So before I jumped into doing vlogging, I've been blessed to have over the last 10 years some of the major YouTube stars have been clients or students or fans of mine, and I've been able to sort of get an inside look into how vlogging has affected their privacy, into what equipment they use, into their creative process, into what they enjoy about it. And I really had to do A lot of sort of digging there to figure out what I would enjoy about it. And I'll share with you, I guess, first why I haven't done a vlog. And then I'll share with you why I am. I didn't do it in the past, frankly, because I just didn't think I would enjoy it. I'm not good at schedules, even though I'm the high performance guy and I'm really great about scheduling the things I deeply enjoy. And I'm good at scheduling work and everything else. When you're starting to do a vlog, it requires a little bit more forethought into when your production and creative time is going to happen. And what I mean by that is it's, I guess, sort of opposite of how I tend to do something. So for example, I might say, okay, during these two hours today, I'm going to write. Well, during that time I might be shuffling around and be thinking and sitting down. The creative time is pretty loose and free flowing where when you're vlogging, you're more sort of outcome based. You're like, okay, I'm going to go here, I got to film it here. I got to put one camera over down there. I got to make sure I capture this angle. I got to do all these things just a little bit more involved. So I thought, I also thought that I might not enjoy it in terms of vlogging out and about. You know, when I'm out in public, I tend to be pretty under the radar. You know, 10 million fans across Facebook and 200 million video views. Now I get recognized when I'm out and about without, if I don't put a hat on, I'm not everywhere. Trust me. Don't worry. This is not a fame situation here. It's a matter of just. I get recognized a lot and it, it's, it's not awkward for me. I appreciate it and I enjoy it. But I also have to be careful with it because it can consume a lot of my time because I love to meet my fans, I love to meet my students. And it can be something where, gosh, I went out for a workout at the gym and it becomes a three hour, you know, conversation with somebody about their life experiences. And I was worried with vlogging, you know, walking down the street with a video camera, I'm. That's almost the opposite of what I've done my entire life. I've always tried to minimize attention to myself when I'm out and about because I know, I know you Guys know about this, about me, but primarily I consider myself a writer and a trainer. And in those capacities there have their settings. But when I'm not doing a seminar or on stage, I like to be under the radar. When I'm writing, I like to be out in the woods, you know, away from the world. And so vlogging is very, very public display sometimes of your movements out and about. And even if it's not that, because a lot of my YouTube friends who are pretty incredible stars in their own right, with their, you know, subscriber bases being, you know, well above the million subscribers, you know, a lot of them just shoot from their house, from their office setup. And so I've learned a lot from them. And if you go check out my vlog, it's released the same day as this podcast on YouTube, you'll see it. It's my most recent video, at least the drop of this particular podcast. I give you a full behind the scenes tour of my home office as well as where I shoot my videos. But I mentioned that to you here because you'll be able to see the exact podcast booth setup that I have in my home. And you'll see the equipment and the link to the equipment. You'll see the, you know, the sound walls. You'll see the LED lights I use. You'll see the simple little shelf system that I have to organize myself. So if you're interested in that, if you're ever gonna do some podcasting, this is a way to do it very simply to the basics. I have a shelf built so it holds up my microphone at the exact height. I don't have a chair in here. I've got on all sides of me sound walls that absorb the bounce of the sound that we'd usually get because, you know, there's some sort of fancy stone beneath me, but I have a carpet on it. There's. The walls are just typical drywall walls, but at the end of a hallway. This would not be a place I could do a podcast if I didn't have these sound walls set up. And I'm recording on a microphone that I got like six, seven years ago that does well if you control the environment of the bounce. And so I bring all that up because I'm sort of simplified the setup for myself to just be able to come in, knock out podcasts and vlogs. You'll see the video equipment I use for vlogging, the Sony RX100 camera that I like because it had a flip screen on it, the fancier camera, the simple lights to the fancy lights. And you'll also get to see the difference between what's it look like when I'm vlogging with a regular sort of vlog camera to what's it look like with the fully produced setup that I do for my live casts. And I think I just want to give you that sort of heads up that's out there so that you can check it out because a lot of people wonder about that behind the scenes stuff. It's a 20 minute video of showing you pretty much my entire setup for my career and all the gear, if you'd enjoy that. Now to the point of why I'm doing the vlog. I think one of the most essential things you can ask in your career is always how can I create an even deeper connection with my customers and my audience? How can I continually evolve my own creativity to push myself outside my comfort zones? Because real creativity requires ever increasing levels of vulnerability. Real creativity requires ever increasing levels of risk. And so for me, vlogging in this particular style, it is a risk. I'm not somebody who has, you know, tried to be a social media star and I know lots of people want to do that and that's their thing. It kind of ended up that way. I've always, you know, my job and my career is more dealing with higher end customers in what's often considered a high tier fees where you know, I'm selling thousand dollar plus online courses and seminar tickets. You know, I've got Mastermind members and you know, 30,000, 60,000 quarter million dollar levels. Companies pay $75,000 for a 45 minute keynote from me. So for the, you know, the last decade or so, a lot of what I wanted to put out there was just me sitting and teaching and that was it. And I've gotten as I got a little more informal along the way. Sometimes it did affect the sales and I could see that. And you know, I got, I'd get bucketed in with, you know, a bunch of folks who maybe didn't have the areas of expertise or the background or frankly the passion for the research I did. And I didn't like that. So I'd be very careful and very wary. And Most of my YouTube stuff and most of those views that have been of me have been pretty straight lace, pretty straightforward. Like here's a topic, let me teach four things on it. And I apologize if you're hearing this again because I've spoken about this on the Brendan show several times throughout the last year about Getting more access and a little more informal, having a little bit more on, more fun so people can see, you know, the non teaching side of my life. And that's what the vlog is going to be. And the way I look at it, I'm like, oh, this is basically the non teaching side. It's not that I won't teach some things and share some things about my life and say, well, here's how you could do this too. But most of it's just like, hey, here's what I'm doing, here's what's going on. And amazingly, people care about that. And I get asked it all the time. So I thought, okay, calm down, Brendan, just do this. And so for me, it's a challenge because I have to schedule it differently. It's also challenging. Just one more thing, right? I'm already busy doing lots of more things. When you add a vlog on it, that's just one more thing. It's one more thing to shoot, it's one more thing to edit, it's one more thing to sound design, it's one more thing to post, it's one more thing to promote. And I think it's really important. As much as we can ask, how can I extend my creativity and my connection with my customers, we must also base that and ask, how can I do it and enjoy my lifestyle? Meaning I've been very judicious about adding more things onto my plate over the years. Even if I thought this could be amazing, this could add tons of more value, this could be amazing. I just didn't add it on because for my lifestyle. I thought, gosh, that's one more thing on my schedule when I'm already really busy. It's why I've turned down now in the course of my career, 24 television shows I've turned down 24 where they asked me to come on and be, you know, a life coach or guest expert or motivational speaker or something. I just turn them down all the time because a television show consumes a remarkable amount of your time. Like you, I Love, you know, Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz and Ellen, but you couldn't give, you couldn't pay me enough to do those schedules. And I admire them for their discipline and their work ethic and the way they approach things. I just don't like having that conscious, that consistent and crazy of a schedule where I'm also being, you know, pushed and pulled by 100 different producers 247 a day. I like my creativity to be a little bit more open and more flowing. And I frankly, I like to travel a lot. I like to have a lot of free time to allow me to create and most importantly, discern how to teach. Because the difference with traditional vlogging has always been. And what I do is the vlogging is more entertainment driven, and my work has always been more educational driven. And so I've never seen myself as that Hollywood style or that social media style. I've always seen myself more as the trainer. I'm the researcher. I'm the guy that discerns what works and knows how to train people to competency level in that area, not just make people laugh. And so I thought, can I even do the vlog? I mean, that style, I don't even think I'm that entertaining. So it is a big creative leap for me. It does add something new to the schedule. But I felt like finally, you know what, it makes sense to deepen this connection with the audience and my consumers. And enough of my students, frankly, rallied around and bugged me about it that I did my first one. People enjoyed it just enough, I thought, okay, and I put on the schedule. I mean, my first vlog was done literally months and months and months, and at this point, probably over a year ago. But I didn't put it on the schedule to do it on a repeating basis until it fit within my lifestyle, my schedule, which just happens to be this year. And so why do I share all that with you? Because your performance at whatever you do in your life is going to require creativity, and it's going to require you to keep upping the ante if you want to be a professional. But I also urge you not to up the ante or do things just for the sake of creativity or deepening your relationship or even your service to the world at the cost of your own lifestyle. Figure out where it's going to fit in. Drop a few things that are important or that are no longer needed. That's going to be required. So I think it's. I don't know exactly how, if I'm explaining this well, but I'm like, if you're going to decide to do something new, be judicious about when you decide to do that. And for me, it literally took a full year after I decided to do it to start implementing it on a regular basis. So I say that to all those who you feel guilty or you feel bad that you haven't done something just yet. You might have just been unconsciously saying, you know what? This doesn't really fit into my lifestyle yet. Yes, I'm passionate. Yes, it'll be fun. Yes, it'll be creative. Yes, it'll help people. But my plate's already full. So sometimes the next move is to spring clean, to remove a few old things so you can add a few new things, and to constantly push yourself to ask those questions. What's the next creative level of service to the world for me, and when could I fit that on the schedule to deliver it with consistency? Part three, the new podcast, High Performance Habits. So you can see this is a big time of change for me. I'm getting pretty excited about it, and there's a lot of new things that we're rolling out all at the same time, including the new podcast, High Performance Habits. It is a new business category podcast that I'm launching, and season number one, I am releasing for free the entire audiobook of High Performance Habits. Now, I want to talk to you about why I decided to do that crazy thing, because, trust me, the whole publishing world is like, what? You know, they're freaking out because it happens to be a time when High Performance Habits is still selling like crazy and people are paying for and downloading the audiobook. So they're like, why would you ever give away the entire audiobook, you know, which can cost between $18 and $36, depending on the format you consume it in? Why would you give it away? And I thought, well, two reasons. One, I think in your career, you should always know what is the best deal that you could get. Let me give you sort of a breakdown of what I mean by that. Let's say, you know, you're working in corporate America and you want to become a vice president of your division before you ask for the promotion of the raise, wouldn't it make sense for you to know all of the best deals that you could get, both outside the company where you could be compensated and inside the company how you could be compensated. What other factors might be involved in not just salary, but the overall compensation package? Well, when I started taking that kind of thinking into my career for book publishing, you know, I've been publishing books for the better part of my adult life. My first book came out at 21 years old. So for me, you know, after 20 years of this, I have started discerning what's the best deal for me as an author. And one of those best deals for me as an author obviously includes the rights to the audiobook. And traditionally, with a traditional book, when a major publisher buys that book from you, gives you an advance for it to publish it. They'll wrap up the audiobook rights with the book rights. And with high performance habits. I said, you know what? Audio is just. It's becoming more and more of a big thing. I don't want to ever have to ask permission to do anything with this. I'm going to keep the audiobook rights. That one decision really started the domino effect leading to high performance habits, the launch of the new podcast. And what I mean is I first said, well, this is cool. When I first launched the book, I said, hey, buy the hardcover book. I'll give you the audiobook for free. And people go to my website and I found different tools that they could play and stream it from my website but still keep it private. And at some point, enough of them were in there and we'd given away literally tens of thousands of books and sold hundreds of thousands now. And I thought, well, a lot of these people want another way to access the audiobook where it's downloading on their phone. I thought about creating an app and I thought, what a pain in the butt that is. I wanted to get them to it faster. So I put up a private link to the podcast and would give it out only to people who bought a special promotion from us. And then somebody downloaded that and ultimately ripped it off and put it out on the Internet. And he was on a torrent site somewhere. And I saw that it had been downloaded like a couple hundred thousand times, literally. And I thought, you know what? It's out there. People are finding it anyway. I'm not doing anything in my career for money anymore. I haven't done that for a really long time. If you guys are aware of my choices here, you'll notice this podcast. There's no sponsor to this. There's no ads. There's no ads on my blog. There's no ads on my YouTube. I turn off all ad functions across everything that I do to deliver for you just value. And I do that because when I'm learning, I hate when it interrupts with ads. I don't want to hear people pitching me underwear. I don't want to hear people pitching me their new mattress. I don't want to hear people doing that. I don't have a problem with any of that. It's just not my style. I don't like consuming it in educational forms. I know it's different in entertainment, but I consider what I do more education than just straight up entertainment. So I thought, I don't want that stuff. So I just decided, since it's already out there and I don't need the money for it to be, you know, continually downloaded and paid for. I thought it's already out there, it's already the situation. Why don't I just put it out there? So that was the first thought. The second part behind the thinking process was listening to customers who were asking me to do a new style of podcast where they said, you know what, we'd like you to share more of the research that you had behind high performance habits and we want you to share more business and career and marketing advice which the Brendon show is very straight up, good old fashioned personal development motivation. And so the best of training from a lot of what I do. But I usually it's not about business and it usually isn't about other people's voices, just my voices. And I want to be able to bring in more of that, you know, here's what a senior researcher at, you know, University of Pennsylvania has found and share some insights about more of the academic sciences and more about the business practices that we're learning really make the difference in people's lives, teams lives and company's lives. And that's what kind of fell into place. So many customers asking that, me wanting to release that, I thought I'll just release a brand new podcast called High Performance Habits. Season one will be the whole audiobook, give it away to the world for free to get everyone stoked and everybody subscribed. And then I'll just keep adding more value and more value around individual, team and organizational performance and it'll be a different kind of podcast that's I think really will stand out because a lot of people will say that, you know, they're, you know, talking about world class performance or high performance or deconstructing this or teaching that and their work is very self experimental or their work is taking one interview and applying it to a broader base of assumptions. And what I like to do is say, well what's the research actually say? And what do we actually know from work that involves interventions? Not just what did I do in my diet to change things? No, like what actually works when your job, which my job is is to be a high performance coach. My job is actually not to just talk about what other people do or interview them. It's to actually go into people's lives and change it. And that's a very different conversation, a very different methodology than just interviewing people. So I thought it could add a unique value to that space. Now as I say that, please don't be like, oh, are you talking about this podcast or that podcast? Or burning. Because listen, I also listen to. And I love those types of things. I love anybody talking about, you know, high performance or living our best life in the health categories, in the business categories. I'm a fan of all podcasters. I want to make that super clear. What I'm trying to suggest is I thought I have a different angle that's not being voiced from somebody who actually is in charge of intervening in people's lives and changing it. It's very different than someone who interviews and very different than somebody who tries to break down what other people did instead. It's like. But it's a different approach and it's a different level of insight and methodology to actually intervene in someone's life, discern what actually needs to change. Learning how to establish behavioral change, set up new habits and make them stick. Changing people's lives is very different than talking about how they do something right. And that's what I want High performance habits to be. Now, I have no idea if I'm going to be able to do that. I have no idea meaning if I'm gonna be able to translate what I do as a high performance coach and trainer into a podcast format. But that's what I'm gonna try to do. Bust down like, here was the situation, and maintain confidentiality, but describe the situation, talk about the intervention that happened and the results that happened from that, and hopefully you can apply that to your own life. That's the goal of the new podcast, High Performance Habits. So I hope you'll find it and subscribe. It's on whatever platforms you listen to, podcasts, we have it out there. It'll be on itunes, obviously, and Spotify and all the other ones. So I hope that you'll download it and listen for it and watch for it from me and make sure to be part of them because they will be unique, they will be different. Even though this opening one is going to be very similar. This Four Breakthroughs every week, all release on both platforms. The Brennan show and High Performance Habits. Not always, but in general, I'll try to make sure that that is my weekly. You'll know when you read or when you listen to Four Breakthroughs, you'll say, okay, that's Brendan busting down what's going on in his career, what he's learned, what he's trying to do and why he's doing those things. So I hope you've noticed in this podcast, I'm going on and on about my thinking process so that maybe it serves you in some way. The new podcast I form as habits available anywhere. Please subscribe to that. As a addition to that, I've started a new weekly newsletter called Four Breakthroughs that you can subscribe to on my website, Brendan.com and the Four Breakthroughs newsletter is a little different than the podcast. The Four Breakthroughs podcast is me sharing what I've learned. But the Four Breakthroughs newsletter is every single week I'm going to give four things that you can do to improve your life or your career or your relationships or your health. And I'll also add in, you know, some bullet points of here's what I'm learning, here's what I've learned, here's a little product I like, here's what I use for this equipment, or here's what I'm listening to or consuming. So you even get a more full view of what it's like to be a high performance coach trying to change people's lives. And I hope that will support you as well so that it's very tactical and tangible. But it comes out every single week. It's a weekly newsletter that has four bullet points on it. That's why I call it four Breakthroughs and it's oriented towards you. So these new formats of the new vlog, of the new podcast I hope are really going to catch some fire and serve you in a different way than maybe you've been able to access. For my long time customers, my seminar attendees, some of this stuff, you've heard me do this stuff before, but I want to bring it out to the market where more people have access to it than behind a thousand dollar paywall. So my hope is that by sharing some more of these insights, especially some of the research, that more of the audience learns the differentiation of what I do versus a traditional podcaster who earns most of their revenue interviewing or doing podcasts or getting sponsors versus what I do. No ads, no sponsors, just deliver the value. Because my business is very structure different and I'll keep sharing about how I approach those things and why I do that throughout the period of These series on 4 Breakthroughs. Part four Willpower versus Conditioning. It's a myth that you can just use your mind and willpower at any given time to say no, to deliver your best, to be on your A game, to avoid temptation, to stay focused, willpower itself. There's a lot of training, a lot of education behind it. If you're a researcher, you like the academics, make sure you read Roy Baummeister's work and his evolving approach to what willpower is psychologically. But here's what I tell people. Don't rely too much on willpower. Willpower is something you can develop, and it is malleable. You get better at it. Just like developing your bicep. It can get bigger. Well, your willpower gets bigger. My willpower is something I've been working on for years, and I'm really proud of it. It is not a finite resource. And if someone tells you it's a finite resource and be cautious of that approach, especially with what we know about psychology today, like people's modern approaches to it. Willpower is just like confidence. It can be developed, it can be strengthened, it can be honed. It can be something that improves your life year over year over year, as you develop it even more. And so that's why I like to think about it. I'd say when you think about willpower, think of it like confidence. It's something you can develop. But I also say set up every dang condition possible to help you perform at your best. Everything. Set it up. Set the environment up so that you're going to win. Let the conditions or your conditioning allow you to perform at your best, so that you don't have to gut it out, so that you don't have to summon up everything on demand and be a genius on demand. Or perform at your best on demand. Or say no and avoid temptation. It's just the simplest thing to do is let your social environment, your home environment, or your office environment set you up for success. It's like when you watch that vlog I told you about. Just go to my YouTube channel and check out my first vlog in years, my most recent video. You'll see it. You'll see me walk through my home office and this podcast booth. It's not that fancy. In fact, it will be deceivingly simple, because I've stripped away every single distraction so that I can do what I do. Why? Because I don't have the willpower to fight a lot of distraction. And I know that about myself even as I try to hone it, even as I try to, you know, fight off the leanings I have towards, you know, ADD and adhd. And yes, I've been diagnosed. I realize that if I'm going to deliver with real value and excellence, I need a minimal amount of distraction. So you might be surprised. My home office setup, it's like, in a little gosh, that room is probably 8ft by 12ft, and that's My home office, it's pretty small, and all you're going to see is a desk with a laptop and a screen on it, a keyboard, a mouse, and, you know, maybe a book or something, a journal. Everything else is off that table. Now, it doesn't mean I'm always that clean as that vlog, because sometimes there's, you know, a holy terror of just a mess. Like, it looks like a tornado on that desk sometimes. But when it's time to really work, like, today was a big work day, what did I do? I made sure the night before I cleaned off that desk and there was nothing on it. So that when I showed up to work, the right things were already pulled up on my computer. There was a note on my computer of exactly the task list I had to accomplish by what time? And I could just sit down or, well, I stand up and just get at it. Minimal distractions, just go right at it. When you see the podcast set up on the vlog, you almost be, like, disappointed. You'd be like, that's it. I'm like, that's it. And it actually took a long time to figure this out, like, where I was going to do my home podcasting. And finally I found this little corner at the end of one of the hallways in a back room we don't use too much. And I blocked it off with these sound walls. And it's just. I mean, literally, it's only four feet across. Like, I can't even extend my arms fully left and right in here. And it's just I'm facing a white wall in front of me. This is sound wall that kind of absorbs the sound and doesn't let it bounce around this room. And there's a microphone, a rode podcast or microphone on a stand that's perfectly heightened for me. I'm standing up right now, and there's nothing else in here. My laptop is down below connected to this USB podcast microphone, and nothing else. I mean, literally, there's nothing else in here. And creating the conditions that are sparse for me to be able to creative, that works for me. I don't know what works for you, but it's your job to discern what works for you. How should your home office be set up? What's the absolute best way for you to do something? And taking this idea into other parts of your life is really helpful. I do the same thing with my health. Like, when you come into my house, there's just not any junk food because I would eat it. So just like, I set up my Health for optimal sort of performance by keeping out things. I do that in my home office as well and at my other office. Minimizing distractions is important to me. And just like I set up my health practices and my recovery practices at my seminars that I told you about in part one, I do that at work. I mean, think about all that things I told you about at the seminar. All those things are set up so when I walk off stage, the blender is right there, the protein shake is right there, the food is right there. When I go to my room, there's the yoga mat, there's the, you know, the foam roller, there's the rubber bands. I don't remember what you call those things. You know, the ice is already delivered, the food is already there. I don't have to think through any of that. And it is a myth that the more decisions you make, the less willpower you have. That is ultimately a major myth. And unfortunately, a lot of people perpetuate that without A, having ever trained people on willpower, or B, having trained themselves to discover how many. I make hundreds and thousands of major and micro decisions every single day, the willpower doesn't go away. That there's a myth of that, yes, when you're fatigued and you're tired, you might not make as good quality of decisions, but the number of decisions you're making isn't necessarily something that ruins performance. And that's a big myth. It's like, well, if you know, you have to choose which shirt to wear each day, you're hurting your mental performance the rest of the day. That actually is very, very, very poor science. Just so you know, if you're not up to speed on the recent research on willpower in the field of psychology, you might want to read up if you're a person perpetuating that myth or you've heard that, it's just not true. It's easy to believe, but it's also easy to believe and apply to people who haven't done work to condition themselves. Right. It's just like it's easy to say, well, gosh, weightlifting is really hard and people don't usually stick to it. That's true when people just begin, but that's not true for professional weightlifters. Why? Because they condition themselves differently. They have a different set of belief. They approach the training and the excellence in a different way than a novice would. So always beware when you're reading or listening or paying attention to academic science or anything related to behavioral social sciences. Just make sure you're aware of what audience set they're using. A lot of what we discover in social sciences. You know, a lot of unfortunately unfortunate truths are many studies are using participants who aren't at a competency level, who aren't at a training level, who aren't trying to become excellent at it. They're just taking any random Joe because they assume, well, everyone's random Joe. So let's just do it with and Joes. Worse. They tend to do a lot of studies on undergraduate students. And with no offense, having been an undergraduate student. An undergraduate student does not think, operate, behave or influence like a person with a real job in the real world. Or let's say even if they have that, then someone who is 40 or 50, or let's say somebody who's out of school and has 10,000 employees under them. My question has always been what do real high performers do? And how do a players respond to things? How do people who are already successful reach that next level? How do people who are already a little more successful than the average bear, how do they use their mindset, their habits or unique tools or approaches to achieve something extraordinary? And I will say, having studied that particular group for so long, I have seen that willpower does not diminish for them in terms of the number of decisions they make. Because the truth is they make way more decisions than their peers. And they make good decisions. Even they can make a hundred decisions. And the hundredth one is still a good decision unless they have compromised their environment or their health in a way that they're fatigued. Because look, no one makes good decisions when they're completely wiped out, burnt out, or drained. But what I found is high performers don't let themselves get there that often because they control the conditions in the environment that they're in so that those conditions prop up their performance and those conditions allow them to. To recover, to recharge, to. Whether that's meditate, nap, sleep, rehydrate, refuel, work out. They have set it up so that their willpower runs at its best. Because they're running at their best. But why? Because they're not hoping to just wing it. If you're hoping to just wing it and let willpower or genius or talent take over. Good luck. Because the people I work with, let's say, you know, I'm blessed to work with some pretty extraordinary people. One guy's in the NBA right now and, and very famous dude, really spectacular what he does, he's not at his level just because of talent, because everybody in the NBA has talent. But not everybody has the same mindset, work ethic, habits, coaches, mentors, disciplines and conditions set up for them to succeed. So your job is to start asking, how can I set up every little moving part in these parts of my life that are important to me so that it's easier for me to be more successful Now I just share that because I get asked about willpower all the time, but also because I'm hoping that this particular four breakthrough session, this episode, demonstrate that for you. I'm trying to set up the vlog and the podcast so that it's easy for me to keep delivering this for you. I try to set up my seminars so it's easy for me to show up and deliver with excellence and be at my highest energy because this, this matters to me. I'm in this weird white room right now. Not because I thought I'd ever do that. It wasn't like I was in college. I thought one day I'll stand in this weird little four foot booth and talk to people who I can't see. That wasn't what I thought of, but this became something that allowed me to reach millions and millions and millions of people. And so I love it. And I want to thank you for listening because I know this is a long episode and a little bit rambling, but I think you're going to have to put up with a little bit more rambling, Brendon, as I learn how to do this. So forgive me if I'm not awesome at podcasting yet in this style or this format, but I hope that by taking you on a weekly journey of what I'm trying to do in these four breakthrough series that you'll learn something about me and maybe establish something or learn something about yourself and if anything, I hope adopt a few new mindsets or thinking patterns that will support you on your own journey to high performance. It's been an honor to be here with you during this episode. Do me one simple favor. Make sure you go over to my YouTube channel, subscribe so that you can see my latest vlogs now being dropped every week. Please make sure you subscribe to both the Brendon show and High Performance Habits, those two podcasts, because they'll be unique and different. One's in self help, one's in the business category so you can find those anywhere. Go to brendon.com podcast if you need any links to that, make sure you're on my four Breakthroughs newsletter. Just go to Brendan Brendan B R E N d o n brendon.com you'll see a little box there says sign up for the new newsletter for Breakthroughs. If you're already on my newsletter or you get emails from me, don't worry, you'll automatically get those. That's going out to what? You got over 2 million subscribers there, so we'd love to have you join that huge worldwide community of people who are intent on finding more clarity, who are intent on deepening their motivation, and who are intent on serving at the highest levels of excellence in whatever they do. If that's you, you're a high performer and it's an honor to speak with you this week. Until the next four Breakthroughs podcasts go out there every single day. As always, live fully, my friend. Love openly, and go make a difference for somebody who you love today. Sa.