Best Of: Create Your Ideal Lifestyle
4 Jun 2019 · 3 min
In this best‑of episode of The Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard delivers a comprehensive, high‑energy training on designing an "ideal lifestyle" and becoming the person you know you can be. He begins by framing the difference between conventional achievement (awards, status, power) and a lifestyle built around daily joy, meaning, and personal growth. He then outlines a practical framework of recurring practices—daily, weekly, monthly, yearly—that span health, relationships, renewal, and finances, offering concrete examples from his own routine (meditation, nutrition, walking, outreach, creative work). Burchard introduces a five‑category goal taxonomy (create, acquire, experience, learn, maintain) to help listeners clarify what they truly want, and he demonstrates how to translate vague intentions into specific, measurable goals with deadlines and behavior‑trigger cues. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of consistent high‑performance habits, new commitments, and the role of his High Performance Monthly program for deeper, interactive training. The episode ends with a call to share the episode on social media and an invitation to join his monthly subscription for ongoing coaching.
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Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the Brendan show. These best of episodes feature training that I have done live, sometimes online, online to tens of thousands of people or live on stage where I was speaking on some stages across the world. Or these might be some of my monthly training programs and highlights of those that I do every single month with our monthly students. So I know you're going to really enjoy these because these are a little bit more of a deep dive look at some of my training as a personal and professional development trainer. You know, I focus so much on helping you find that deeper level of motivation and start practicing some of those high performance habits. Well, you hear me talk about many of those concepts in these special episodes here. These are my best of trainings only and exclusively right here on the Brendon show. So I hope you enjoyed them. Please note that as you hear me speak in many of these, you'll hear me reference something because sometimes I'll have been training live or on video or on stage or through a broadcast. So you might not be able to see something I'm suggesting or motioning to or maybe even drawing out on a flip chart or motioning towards on a presentation, but you'll get the gist of it. So make sure you bust out your journal. Just take some good notes here because this is really valuable insights on the mindset or the strategies that you need to adopt in order to improve your life. And if you want to go and get more content like this, but much more deeper and have more of an interactive relationship with me in this type of training, make sure you join our high performance monthly training program. That's our monthly subscription program where I go live with you and our high performance students every single month and I train on a new topic or a new piece of research that we've created from the high performance institute and I train on that and then I do Q and A and actual live coaching, interactive coaching with people every single month. That's called high performance monthly and you can Access it at brendon.com monthly that's brendon.com monthly B-R-E-N-O-N.com forward/monthly to get deeper dive training similar to this. So if you like this, you would love that training program. But without further ado, let's jump in right now to one of the Brendon show's best of trainings.
How can you create your ideal lifestyle and become the person that you know you are capable of becoming. And I think that's the major difference here. You know, a lot of people talk about achievement and accomplishment, but it's about awards and accolades and power and status. And as I've said before, those things are fine. But what we're after here is how can we create a lifestyle that you just love? You know, a lifestyle that is in pursuit of things that you truly find meaningful. The things that bring you joy each day, but also to. To challenge yourself, to be the person bringing the joy to each situation of your life, to becoming the person that you know that you are capable of becoming. Because the best thing you could ever achieve in your life is that striving each day to be your highest self. Because not a lot of people around the world would raise their hand and say, hey, I want to focus a couple weeks on improving my life. Most people can't even focus on improving their life for a day. And what it says is, you're, in my mind, a person to be admired. Because not a lot of people will strive for excellence and growth in their life. And they certainly won't commit to it at the level that you have. Because this is about having a life that you truly feel, that you truly sense, and that you truly love each and every single day. Above and beyond just the achievement stuff, long term achievement is ultimately going to come from a balance of new philosophies in your life. You know, new principles, new psychological mindsets, but also some new practices, some things you can specifically do to get ahead faster. We all have different practices in our life. We should have daily things that we do every single day. We should have things we do every week. We should have things that we do every month. We should, things we have do every single year. And we should think about the different things that we could do in those areas in terms of our health, our relationships, our mental, physical, spiritual renewal, as well as our financial or sort of material aspects of our lives. So these are just practices. So let me give you an idea. Every day that you wake up, I encourage you. And last week I said, you know what? First practice. Just when you wake up, be thankful, drink some water, do some stretching, breathe deeply, and wake up. Right? A daily practice for you might be, if you take each of these for your health. A daily practice is you're only going to have three meals during the day. Not lots of snacks, lots of crazy little potato chips here and there, but you're just gonna have three meals a day. Three square meals a day on one plate. One plate, not one plate. With four bowls of stuff, not two plates, not three plates, one plate of food. And most of that food is going to be greens. I just taught this at High Performance Academy. It's very focused towards. We give at High Performance Academy, we give you a specific health plan that you'll get when you go to the program. But for you, I feel like, okay, are you doing something every day that maintains your health physically in terms of the nourishment? Maybe you take supplementation each day? I don't know what it is that you do, but you should have something. What about your relationship? Is there something you do every single day? Do you text and flirt with your sweetie? Do you acknowledge and praise your child? Do you go in and ask your team what they need? Something that you do every day? What about renewal? Could you take a step back each day and meditate for 20 minutes once or twice a day? Could you make sure you just, you know, you turn off the radio, you turn off all the sound. You just close your eyes for a minute and get centered and find your space. Maybe renewal for you means you catch up on a nap. Maybe renewal each day means you're going to get seven to eight hours of sleep. No matter what you do. I don't know what is for you. What about financial? Maybe each day you check into like, okay, how much am I spending? Am I spending money? That makes sense or is it stupid? I know all these things might sound so basic, but I want you to develop practices, routines. And so here's what, I'll give you a couple examples that I might run in my own life. Like every single day, no matter what, I'm going to meditate every single day, no matter what, I'm going to eat healthily every single day, you know, no matter what, I'm going to walk outside, usually on average between 30 and 45 minutes without a phone. Just go wander, go walk to a park, be outside a little bit. Most people are not outside enough anymore in the modern area. Every single day, you know, no matter what, I'm going to send emails to the people who I need to reach out to that day. No matter what I'm going to send out, I'm like, I'm waiting on a decision for this person or I need something from this person. I'm going to send those out every single day. I'm going to do some kind of art. For me, art is writing. I'm going to write every single day. It doesn't mean I'm going to write for hours every day, but I'm going to get that done every single day. As I do these types of things, it creates real force and impact in my life. But most people, their everyday is, well, I wake up, I check my inbox, I drive to work, I work, I come home, I feed the kids and I go to bed, but there's not enough in there. They're missing their health, they're missing their relationship, they're not taking care of themselves, they're not advancing themselves toward their financial lifestyle that they desire. And so they're in trouble. Now, some people have daily rituals, but they don't have weekly rituals. Now. See, every Wednesday. I'm sorry, every Sunday of my life, I sit down and I journal about the week and I just, you know, what was I happy with? What do I feel grateful for? What am I still working on? Simple questions. Very simple questions. If you have my book, the Motivation Manifesto, when you read Reclaim youm Life Agenda, that chapter, the Declaration Number Two, you'll see some of the questions I ask myself each day. Declaration 2 of the motivation Manifesto. Monthly what could you do every single month? Could every single month you take off at least three days, totally off the grid. I mean off the grid. Could you do it once a week? You know, every year, could you go on vacation, you know, every 90 days? So like in my life, I make sure every 90 days I get off the grid. My wife and I, we go away and we escape somewhere. We might do a staycation, we might leave town, but we'll go away, just her and I, nobody else. And we'll just go away and we'll turn off the phones and the laptop and we'll just be together and reconnect. And it's part of our practice each year. Right, but you might have other ones. Maybe the first of each month you do a full analysis on your financial reality and say, how am I doing in my business or my career or my life or in my savings? Maybe every Wednesday you go and you shop at the specific health store. I don't know what it is for you and I don't want to give you too many answers. This isn't high flute and ideas here. This is life practices. And when you do them, everything shifts. Everything shifts. Because most of our challenges in our lives come from lack of discipline and to implementing the things that we know we should be doing. And if you set up a routine that does not move, that is a must. That happens every day or every week or every year or every month, everything starts to shift. Next projects and goals, Right? We all have to think about now. Okay, what do I specifically want outside of who I'm becoming, my purpose, outside of the interactions, relationships I have with other people, and outside of how I'm going to run my life every single day, every single week, every single month and each year? Okay, very important, and I hope you'll really stick to that. There should be routines you have set up in each of those, and you stick to them. And by doing that, that's how you become excellent. You see, we condition ourselves for sport performance, or we condition ourselves for performance at work by setting up meetings or setting up projects and agendas. But very few people do it in their own personal life. And so I hope you'll really take that practice session very seriously, because you'll get more miles out of that than anything else we talk about. By getting a new routine or set of habits every single day, week, month, and year, everything will shift. Okay, let's move now into specificity. Your specific projects or goals you want to achieve. The good news is most goals fall into five categories. Very few people realize this, so they spend their time going, gosh, I don't know why. I'm just. I'm not more driven. Because they have no specific focal point to achieve specific things that these five things will give you. Okay, so let's walk through those five different categories of projects or goals you might have in your life. The first category is we all have goals of things we want to create, right? Things we actually want to physically produce or create in our life. Mine might be, I want to create a book. Other people might be, they want to create a new business. They want to create a product for Kickstarter. They want to. They want to create a new service for their business. They want to create a designation as number one in their category. Right? We all have something we want to create, and usually it's something physical or a product or a service that we feel like, you know, that's a goal. I want to create that thing. And so we should decide, well, what are the things in our lives we want to create? In the next step, I'll help you kind of narrow that down to deadlines and specific structure, systems, tools, or support you might need for it. But for now, just, I'd love you just to use this an opportunity again to check back into your life and just brainstorm, like, what are the things I really want to create in my life? Don't worry about organizing them into. This has to be done by next Monday yet. I don't even want you to think about Next week. I just think about, like, what would bring great fulfillment and joy and advancement in your life if you created them. For some people, it's like, I'm going to create an app. I'm going to create a website. I'm going to create a store. I'm going to create something. What is it that you want to create? Because those things that you have that impulse to create, I think you should follow them. You know, if you've read or read my other book called the Charge, you learned that one of the forward human drives, one of the things that drive us the most in life, is creative expression. And that usually comes through not just what we wear each day, but really what we physicalize, what we create. And if you want to create something, then do it. Create a new business. Go. Create a new product. Go a new service. Go. A new PowerPoint. Go. A new app. Go a new website. Second category is things you want to acquire, right? Acquire. When someone says, brendan, I have a goal. I want to buy a yacht. Well, that's an acquisition, isn't it? Somebody say, well, Brendan, I really want to have a better car. I want a new house. I need a new washer and dryer. Those are goals. Those are material things that you want to acquire in your life. You have to have some money to acquire them usually, but not always. Some things you want to acquire, you could barter or borrow or beg for. I don't know what it is for you, but there's some things you want to acquire. What are the things you want to have in your life that would bring you joy? Right? For me, I wanted a riders villa. I wanted a vacation home up in the mountains, away from the city, away from everything where I could go and escape to. That was a huge goal for me. Like a place that I found magical that I could go right in the woods. You know, I'm from Montana. I had to be in the woods, right? So we all got our different things. I wanted to acquire that. Well, the one I wanted was really expensive. So it had to become a goal for me to go get that thing, right? So it's okay for you to have material things that you want, too. Maybe you want to acquire status, right? Maybe you want to acquire notoriety in your area. As much as people want to bemoan those things and say, oh, that's just ego or whatever, it's part of everybody's life and it's not something we should look negative upon. If someone's idea of success is they need to accomplish these things, look, they'll find out when they accomplish them whether or not they mattered. I'm hoping you're after things that you will find meaningful and are real. But there's nothing wrong with want to acquire wealth in life either. Matter of fact, I wish more people wanted to acquire wealth in their lives because once you acquire that wealth, you can improve the quality of life for you and your family. You're able to give back more to society both by more having time off. Freedom. Financial freedom gives you time, freedom. Now you can go volunteer more. You, you can write bigger checks to causes that you care for. There's nothing wrong with wanting to achieve influence, status, money, power, wealth in life. Those just can't be our primary ends because those things should serve something our purpose of improving our lifestyle and becoming the best people that we can be. Next experience. We all want to experience something. People say, well, Brendan, you know, I just want to be able to go to. I want to be able to go to a Caribbean island for a month out of every single year and just do nothing. That's an experience. Other people say, you know, I want to take, I got four kids, I want to take them all to Disneyland. I want to stay in the Good lodge. You know, that's cool. That's an experience you want to create for them. I want to have an incredible loving, vibrant, sexy, sensual relationship with my wife. That is an experience you're trying to create right now. There's a lot of things you have to do to create that experience, as many gentlemen will know. But I mean, you know, you have to work at these things. But they're just goals. What are the experiences you want to have in your life? Right. Maybe an experience is you just, you know, maybe a goal for you is you just do not want to talk to anybody between 8am and noon. Because that's when you're going to create your art or focus on your business or do something that's very specific to accomplishing something. Maybe an experience that you want to have is you want to experience freedom from cigarettes, freedom from addiction or emotional or physical pain. That's an experience. Right? So again, you can think broadly, but that's the category we'll be talking about the next one, Things we want to learn. Some people have a goal. They want to learn French, they want to learn Spanish, they want to learn Chinese, they want to learn German, they want to learn Portuguese. Right. Whatever it is that they want to learn. Maybe they want to learn a new skill set to play the piano, play the drums. They want to learn a New skill set. Drive a specific kind of car, Drive, fly a plane, right? They want to learn how to speed read. They want to learn how to contribute in a specific way. They want to learn the next levels of competency they would have to develop to get promoted. Right. So what skills or knowledge or talents would you like to pick up? I had one friend, his big goal. He's like, I'm going to learn seven songs that I can play at every Christmas on the piano for my family. I said, you play the piano? He goes, no, that was just his goal. So you have to have your learning goals, and then finally you have to have your maintenance goals or your improved goals. These are so simple. But a lot of people forget that these are goals too. Maybe, you know, maintaining a clean house is a goal for you. It's real for you. You want to have that, that's fine. Maybe for you, you know, you want to renovate the garage. See, renovating the garage isn't under any of these other ones. Unless you're going to go buy a new garage. That could be under acquirer, I guess. But maybe you just want to improve your garage. You know, you want to create a better. You want to create a better environment in your garage for yourself, that's fine, too. Just simple things you want to maintain or improve. Maybe you want to improve your, your stamina so you're going to work out more often, right? Maybe you want to improve the quality of the mental clarity that you have in your life. Maybe you want to improve and have less stress in your life. All of these things could live in any one of these, right? Create a life that's free of stress. Acquire something in your life. You know, some headset that helps you achieve less stress. Some magical way. Maybe you're going to meditate a couple times. You're going to learn how to chill out a little bit more. You're going to improve your life so that you remove some of the stresses where. Look, some goals can live in multiple ones of these things. So I'm showing you, these are broad categories. Sometimes goals blend over them. But giving people a framework, I found, always helps them aim a little bit more. And as I've taught this, I found most people never even knew to think about these categories. They've only been taught what personal development has been taught since literally the 1800s. Think about how you like to improve your life, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, mentally, and in terms of relationships. And those are broad, nice categories, too. There's no right way to develop what your goals are. My only encouragement is to think big for yourself again and to really get committed to them. To think big, to have some dumb goals again, to, you know, dream driven, uplifting goals. You know, goals you can put some method or behavior behind, which we'll talk about in a moment. I mean, just really think big for yourself again. And I hope that you'll do that. You know, if you did achieve a goal and you all came together to celebrate it, how would you know you achieved it? What would success look like for you? It's very important. So, for example, as simple as that example is, you know, I'm going to have a better garage. Great. Describe in one statement, what does a better garage look like to you? My garage now is finally what? Describe it. You can't just tell yourself, better garage, it's not going to work. You won't do it. I mean, how many of you have. That is a goal of yours. Clean up the garage. Everyone. They hate their garage. But it's been, I mean, how long have you hated your garage? I hated my garage for 15 years. Well, how come you haven't changed it? Because it never became a real goal. They never really had a statement behind it. They never had steps to achieve it with real deadlines. Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to clear out these cabinets here. We're going to get rid of this table and bench here. We're going to clear the bikes out over here, hang them up over here. We're going to have all these steps that we're going to do and we're going to do it by next Saturday or three Saturdays from here. Or we'll do the cabinets this Saturday. Then we'll do the bikes next Saturday and then the following Saturday from there, we'll clear off this oil and this mess all. I mean, we just. People don't do that. And so it's. Why. It's just something they kind of like to do, but it never gets achieved. There's a difference between an intention and achievement. And it comes from having a statement about what you really want, having the steps and deadlines. And then what's the support? What do I need help with here? Oh, I want some cabinets. I'm going to have to hire and bring in a cabinet maker. I don't know anything about cabinets. Okay, that's on a to do list. When am I going to get that person in here? Now it becomes a deadline. Make sense. And then next, simple behavior triggers. You know, setting up a method or behavior trigger for Everything that you do in terms of a goal will help you do it faster. What do I mean by that? Well, what if every single time you walk through the door of your garage, you pick something up and you put it away? You just trained yourself to do that. I walk in garage, I put something away. It's a behavior trigger for that goal, right? It's so simple, but it's some behavior trigger. Means you do one thing, your mind is reminded to do the next action. It's one of the most important things in all of memory development, is creating that association. So an example like this. Imagine if you have a simple goal. It's so simple, you never want to forget your keys ever again. You never want to walk out your house without your keys ever again. Here's what you do. You sit down and you visualize this scenario. When you walk through the door of your house, that's the behavior trigger. Walk through the door. Imagine yourself, there's a cliff, and all of a sudden your keys fall down them. Right at the edge of your door, there's a cliff, your keys fall down them. And you run this in your mind a million times. Just run it over and over and over time. Now get to the frame. Actually go to the frame of your front door. See the frame of your front door. You walk to the frame of your front door, you see the front door, and all of a sudden just look down. Imagine your keys dropping down into that cliff, down into the darkness. Now, you trained yourself. Every single time you walk through that, you hit that door, your trigger goes off. And you feel. And you sense these keys dropping. You're like, I don't have my keys. I lost my keys. And he reminds you to turn back in the house and get the keys. Now, I know that's so simple, but that's the power of behavior trigger. Another behavior trigger you might have is simple. This. If you're trying to get your health back, you know what? You drop the girls off to school. And as soon as you drop them off, you turn around and on your way back home, you stop at that health store and you buy some fresh good greens, fruits and vegetables that you're going to consume. And you make sure that you never walk out of that door with processed food. Not on that day, not when you drop the kids off, if you got to buy processed food. Other times, okay, you have to, that's fine, but not on that day. So you set up little triggers. Kids off, health store. Makes sense, right? Very, very, very simple things. I do simple things like that. I Get off a plane. I have a behavior trigger because health is important to me as a goal. So when I get off a plane, boom. I have a behavior trigger of things that I go and do to open up my body, to get my energy meridians back into space and then to consume a supplement that helps me get back into my mind and get my body going, get my rhythm going, get my antioxidants going. Very simple stuff. It's just a behavior trigger. It's important to me because one of my experience goals is I want to experience a vibrant, energized life. So I set up all these triggers, these things I do in the morning, these things I do before and after workout, all this stuff. You'll hear me talk about a lot about that at High Performance Academy that I've done for myself, but also for literally, Fortune 50 CEOs, for billionaires, for Olympians. So again, if this seems too simple for you, it's not about is it complex? It's about, are you doing it constant enough, with enough force, with enough degree of excellence to make it happen, to make the change stick? You cannot argue that you would not get ahead faster if you had a higher degree of specific intention in each of these areas of your life and you did them. That's why those behavior triggers are so important. If you just did that, if we just got you more clear about your purpose, the interactions you want to have with people, your daily, weekly, monthly, yearly rituals, and the goals that you have specific for creating or acquiring, experiencing, learning or giving. If we do that, then we're going to do a good job. Remember, only two things are going to change your life. Either something new comes into your life. New idea, a new strategy, a new framework, as we've taught here before, and that shifts you, but ultimately it's got to be something new comes from within. A new commitment to taking your life to the next level. A new commitment for a higher level of energy and joy and vibrancy in your life. A new commitment for a different quality of relationship. A new commitment for different practices and behaviors in your life. A new commitment for the goals and the projects you're trying to achieve. And when we do, that achievement will happen. Live fully, love openly, and make your difference today. All right, my friend.
I hope that you enjoyed that best of episode. Was that inspiring? Were you fired up? Did you love it? If you did, make sure you do me a favor. Go out on social media somewhere and share that episode. Just go out, post it somewhere, post yourself, listening to it. Make sure you hashtag thebrendon show because when you do that, I can look you up and we can find you on Instagram and post that on social media. And sometimes we do all expense paid trips to people we find. We just randomly select people, we send them gifts, autograph books, swag, T shirts, all expense paid trips to some of my seminars. So make sure you let us know, share what you thought about this episode out there on the social media worlds and then we can find you and celebrate you. And also I would love to invite you to join us in our high performance monthly program. So just go to Brendan, that's Brendan.com monthly. That's where we do deeper dive trainings like you just heard. But we do that every single month and there's some live Q and A there and I do some giveaways and we give students in that monthly program tickets to my seminars and some extra special training on leadership. So make sure you check it out@brendon.com monthly. I appreciate you being part of this community of so many people dedicated to finding that deeper drive of motivation and practicing high performance habits so that they can become extraordinary in their careers. In your personal life, in your health, you can live an extraordinary quality of life. And sometimes you just need a little bit more training and a little bit more nudge, a little bit more energy, a little bit more drive and consistency. And I'm hoping that being part of this community with the Brendon show, I'm providing that to you in some way. So thank you, my friend, for listening. I look forward to seeing you or listening with you on the next episode of the B r e n D o n show.