Best Of: How to Find Your Purpose

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.

So this week we're going to talk about an achievement map. So the Achievement map is very basic, but it's profound. It's one of those things. It's like we, common sense know we should have these things in our life, but they're not disciplined in our lives, so we're not advancing that much further. It's the same thing I would do with, like, when I'm working with Olympians is usually it's not just this idea of, oh, gosh, you know, Brendan, I'm, you know, I want to get better at this one sport I'm playing. They're already world class, but they know just a little slight tweak at something, but could make all the difference in the next game and get them literally that gold medal. And so we have to think about the same thing here. It might just be a few simple things that you're now going to do with constancy that will move you along to achieving your real aims in life. So we're gonna talk about what those real aims are, and I'm gonna break it down into these categories. The first category we're gonna be talking about is the idea of what's your purpose. I know people ask that all the time, but your purpose is so tied towards your identity, your. That we have to ask some questions about what do you think you're really here for? You don't have to know the exact answer. I always think it's funny who people think that you have to have one life statement or one mission statement for life, and you kind of realize, well, we actually have a lot of different things that you want to achieve in different parts of our lives, at different times in our lives. So we're going to work at a broad level first about what could be an aim for you, your purpose as an identity. Then we're going to talk about the people in your life. Because as much as you have goals of how you want to live your life, what your purpose is, we also want to focus on, well, you know, one of the most important achievements in your lives is improving the quality of the interactions you have with those around you. I think one of the greatest achievements you can ever have is being a great wife, a great husband, a great parent, a phenomenal friend, you know, a great caretaker, being somebody who. Who has achieved a quality of relationships with people that improves the overall quality of your life. Because we know from all the happiness studies, all the fulfillment studies, all the end of life studies, that the things that we ultimately evaluate in our lives really are relationships that we can feel great. But if our marriage is falling apart, it's not gonna be easy to maintain that feeling, right? And so we have to focus on the people in our lives. We also have to focus on our practices, our rituals, our habits. And we'll talk about that at a very defined level and give you the opportunity to improve those as well. Last piece of the map is your projects, your goals. Now I know some of you are just like, brendan, just tell me how to set some goals, man. But all these things sort of live in context to each other, all right? You can't remove any of these bars from our life without the foundation of our life falling apart, right? These are really important structural elements to our lives. We what do we feel is our purpose and our aim? How do we want to interact with people? What do we do on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis to maintain momentum? What are specific things we are trying to achieve and when all of these are going to be part of your achievement map? Let's talk about purpose. The first thing about purpose is let's just develop some kind of statement. Doesn't have to be the final statement about our life, but let's see what happens when, when we learn to do this in a very specific way. See, you hear this all the time. People say, what's the purpose of your life? And you're like, dude, it's Monday. I don't know what I'm doing this week yet. It's like people, I think they get very hyped up in the self development world about having an ultimate purpose statement. And I think it can change a little bit. But I think it's very important to have something written down that you repeat to yourself. And most purpose statements really tend to have different elements to them. Or one is, well, the purpose of your life is to be something, be what exactly, be what type of person. As an example, another part of our purpose statement also usually has to do with what's to do these things. It's to achieve these things. And another part of a purpose statement is often the explanation of why that's important. The so that statement. So you know, the purpose of my life is to, to be this, to do these things so that these things happen. It's very simple. Because our number one challenge right now in our world is we're so distracted and there's so many moving elements coming in and so many people vying for our time and our attention that we often lose sight of what's meaningful. Until we get sick, until somebody dies, until a major emergency comes up. And that's unfortunate. I tell people, you should be Reminding yourself about what's important on a very consistent basis. For me personally, I repeat my purpose statement multiple times throughout the day. Personally. I mean, if I'm backstage at one of my events, I'm shouting it out loud to get myself into a feeling of strength and just a confidence again about what's important to me. I'll repeat it sometimes as my mantra as I am meditating it just to kind of gauge like, what's important to me again, why am I doing this? It's just a nice anchor to have a strong thing to grab onto amidst all the chaos. For me, the purpose of my life is to be fully alive and vibrant. For me, I sense of. For me, I just feel like we're alive. And that gift, that subtle hint from the divine, the universe, God, luck, whatever you call it, for me, it's a spiritual belief. I'm like, I feel like we've been gifted with a life and so here we are alive. So what's the hint? What's the purpose? Well, be fully alive. So I focus a lot of my intention each day to feel that sense of aliveness, to generate that sense of aliveness in my life. It's vital to me. It's first and foremost I want to feel alive. I want to feel vibrant. Vibrant to me means almost just shining forth, right? To almost just something I can see something shining, a vibrance and energy. It's palpable between people and I want to generate that. I'm focusing on it right now as I'm doing my video. I'm focusing on when I'm on the stage. I'm focusing on when I'm on a phone call. I'm focusing on it with friends. It's important to me to feel alive. And when I don't, I feel miserable. So I generate that. So for me, my first and foremost part of my purpose statement is to be fully alive and vibrant. And I share that with you. Because as simple as a statement can be, it can also be the standard that is set in your life. For me, aliveness is a standard. It is a purpose, it is a mission. It is a thing that happens every single day, not some days. I feel alive and vibrant every single day because it's part of me. It's important to me because I've repeated it so many times to myself that my brain is now unconsciously latched onto it and says, hey, dude, you should feel amazing right now. Get yourself together. You're lucky. Look how blessed you are. You can dictate the quality of your Relationships, the quality of your mind, your attentions right now. Get it together, Brendon. And you know what I'm thankful for? The guilt that my brain gives me sometimes when I'm not living into my purpose. This part of me that says the doing part, well, I say, you know, the purpose of my life is to be fully alive and vibrant and the do part is to adore and appreciate my loved ones. It's very important on my list that I want my family and specifically my lady to feel unbelievably cared for. I want them to feel appreciated because I feel like if you're an adoring and appreciative people of the loved ones around you, you will have an incredible quality relationship with them. And I know you know that in business as well, most of the reasons that people quit a job is because their first line manager is somebody who they don't sense appreciates them or their contributions. Most people quit jobs not because of pay but because of appreciation. The same thing happens in marriages. People don't feel appreciated and because they don't feel appreciated, the quality of their relationship falls down. So I decided to make it part of my purpose to let people around me know that I adore them. I flirt with everybody around me in such a way that they know that I care for them deeply. And I'm always thanking people. I'm giving gifts of gratitude. I'm saying things, I'm making sure I notice when they do something. If I'm in my own personal life and I come home and something is clean or something is done or something is left there, I'm appreciative about it. I verbalize it and make it explicit. And that keeps me personally on purpose. The second part of doing many of these, by the way, I want to reference these don't have to be single lines. Like I said before, none of this has to be a single page or a single sentence. I think all that's nonsense. I think we can keep it as short as we, you know, as short as we desire. But for some of you, you're going to have. The purpose of my life is to be many things, right? You're going to have commas of words. You know, mine's short, it's pithy, fully alive and vibrant. But I could also be my highest self. I could also say be present, be joyous, be purposeful. You have to choose your words. But you might have multiple of them in that same light. I have many things that I want to do. One is adore and appreciate my loved ones. Another one is I want to strengthen and share my gifts. Because I feel like we've all been given certain innate talents and gifts, but most of us aren't strengthening them. I mean, I think anybody you know, if you found an art that you're really good at, or a topic that you're really good at, or a way of contributing that you're really good at, you could choose to just kind of ho hum or you could choose to strengthen that gift. Now some of us have acquired gifts and skill sets as well. Like one of my gifts is the ability to communicate. Now the truth is it wasn't a gift, I didn't have it. It was something that I wanted to have. It was like a Christmas present I wanted to have and I had to attract it into my life. I wanted to make a difference in the world. And I thought if I'm going to make a difference in the world, I'm going to have to become a good communicator. And I wasn't a good communicator at all. I mean, I'm doing this whole video with you in a single take. Most of my videos you ever see, including all my YouTube videos, are generally one take, one take. It's because I had to teach myself to be able to do this, to be able to flow. And now it is a gift and, and I keep strengthening it and I keep sharing it with people. It's something that I've worked so hard on though. And so if you've got a skill set, a knowledge, a competency, a talent and it came natural to you or the desire to have it came natural to you, I say strengthen that, you know, really develop that, share that with the world because that's something that's unique to your identity and it probably makes you feel really connected. If you're an artist and there's some element of artistry, whether it's doing photography or painting or hobby or crafts, and you just, it's a gift, you're good at it. I say share that. I know friends who, they're amazingly gifted musicians and they're miserable because they never developed their gift. They were good, they were strong at it, but, but they stopped doing it. And it was something that was just, it was innate to them and they really did enjoy it and they just stopped because they got a job or they had the kids or life got in the way. I just want to encourage you. If there's something that you're good at or drive that you have amplify that, you know, the World needs us to amplify our gifts, to share our gifts even more. I really believe that. So that's one of my focuses. I'm always strengthening. If you know anything about me, I am on this path of mastery. I am trying to get better and better and better. I hope I've gotten better on video throughout my career. I hope I'm getting better on stage throughout my career. I hope I'm getting better on one on one coaching, one on one consulting, organizational work that I do. I want to get better and better. I'm going to strengthen this gift that I feel like I've been given, which is to try and inspire people the desire and the will that I have to inspire people. I feel like that's a gift. I feel very lucky about that. So I'm going to honor that by strengthening and sharing it. And then for me personally, my. So that my why is that I might inspire other people to live more fully, love more openly, and to make their difference every single day. Because that's the gift that I was given when I discovered that the questions we'll ask at the end of our lives and I'll share that with you here in a moment. So this is sort of my purpose statement. I say it like I said several times throughout the day, and usually I really focus on it when I'm about to do something where I'm in service, where I'm about to, you know, serve an audience on that, and that helps me stay the course. You know, in those last few days of your life, what are the questions you're going to ask yourself to evaluate whether or not you lived a good life? I really want you think about that. Because as simple as that, I think it's one of the most profound gifts you could ever give anybody in terms of a distinction for their life is at the end of your life, you're going to ask some questions to evaluate whether or not you're happy with it. What are the questions you will ask once you know those questions? You live your life in a way in which you strive to be happy with the answers. So as an example, in my own personal life, I ask these questions. Did I live today fully and joyously by being my true and highest self? So I ask that every day. It keeps me on my purpose. I asked myself this question, did I love others today and live through my heart by showing respect, appreciation and adoration? You can hear the alignment with my purpose statement, can't you? And the third one I ask all the time is, did I invest my time today in meaningful activities that. That made a real difference. What are the questions that are gonna guide your journey? What are the questions that you're gonna use as a daily habit to evaluate your progress in life? Now, I know again, this is really big picture stuff, and some of you are like, dude, just tell me how to set a goal. But this is the main goal. You know, living your life in a way that you'll be happy with the answers at the end. That's everything. Some subtle adjustments in your life could profoundly shift the quality of your life if this became important. Let's talk about the people in your life. Your family, your loved ones, the people that you serve and honor each day. How have your interactions been with them? See, most people don't have any intentions for their interactions. They just literally show up. I mean, I'm in some amazing. And I've polled and interviewed people around the world. I've been with audiences from, you know, almost every country in the world now. And it's. I'm amazed how many people wander into a relationship or a situation with zero intention in advance. They just kind of go in and they're just like, what's going on here? And some people will fool themselves in saying, well, you know, I'm being spiritual and present with the moment, but not really. They might be being present, but there's more power than just being present. It's learning to be present and purposeful, to have an intention, right? If you have no intention for your spouse, you're just going to be in reactive mode all the time. You'll be present with your anger, your frustration, your hurt, your challenge that you have with them, but you won't have the ability to overcome the present moment with purpose. So we have to have an intention with those that we love. And basically you need to have different intentions for different quality for the different people in your life, right? You've got different folks in your life, different sort of types of people in your life. And I tell people, you know, you should have intentions for all the different types of people in your life. If you could just set up in your mind, you know, like three words that you run through your mind every time you interact with this type of person, then you'd be more effective with them and you'd be more intentional, and ultimately that quality of the relationship would rise. So here's the types of people that we have in our lives. We've got those that we love, right? That's your spouse or your partner. Maybe you've got children, maybe you got you know, brothers, sisters, siblings, moms, dads, grandparents. Maybe you got some friends. Well, I say for each types of those folks, you know, we should have some intention for them. And how do we develop intention? I like to tell people, just develop three words that you would run through your mind every single time that you see this person, period. So when I see the whites of the eyes of my wife, every single time I walk in the house, three words go through my mind. And those three words now frame my behaviors with her. Does that make sense? They guide it. Those three words become my standard with her. And because now I didn't just see her and I look at her, I'm like, oh, does she look happy today? How's this going to go tonight? Instead of doing that, I see her and my mind takes over. It fires off a trigger of these three words. Why does it do that? Because I've done it. Every time I see her, I set the intention. Every time I see her, three words pop up. Those three words are going to guide that next set of behaviors with me and her. And that's why my relationship is at the level I want it to be. And she wants it to be. Because those three words are important to us, and because those three words are important to us, the quality of our relationship is astounding. Does that make sense? So I want you to develop the same thing in your relationships. Maybe you have different sets of words with your spouse and your partner, your intimate lover, than you got with your kids, right? Maybe you have a different set of words with your kids. And now every time you see the whites of your eyes, your kid, the first time you walk into the house, you see your kid bop, these three words go through.

Vroom.

Now, you guide your behavior based on those three words. That's intentionality. Without a descriptive vocabulary, without words to describe how you want that relationship to be, you are not living in intention. And it's important that you start doing that. It will start giving you a different feel and control over the quality of your relationships in a positive way. Not that you're controlling them, because these words are powerful. For some words, they're values. For some words, they're principles. For some words, they're ethics. For some words, I don't know what the words are for you, but that's why you're going to do the work and figure them out today. Okay? Very, very simple. So I want you to set one up. You might want. You might have a different one with your parents, right? Imagine next time you walk into Thanksgiving and it's not going to suck because you're going to show in there, and you're going to come in with some intention. You're going to guide Thanksgiving based on how you want the interaction to go with you, with your family. Do those interactions always go that way? No. But if your intention is to steer them that way, it's going to be a lot more close than if you had no intention and you just showed up. The next area is you have people that you lead, right? And when I use the word lead here, I'm talking about the team that you lead. If you are in a position of authority or a position of power with people, let's say at work, you're a manager, and there's associates under you, or you're a partner or vice president, and there's other people, other layers beneath you organizationally, as a hierarchy. I just want you to think, if you're in a position of leadership, what is your intention for. For the people who you are leading that you're gonna run through? Same thing every time I walk into my workplace, I see someone I'm working with, bam. Something goes through my mind. And I've set this up. Literally, if you think this is too simple or you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, Brendan, I get it. Did you know about 35 of the Fortune 500 do this every single time they walk into a meeting? Cause I've trained them to do it. And by training your mind to focus on this way, they walk into their meeting, and they have three guiding words that. That are gonna dictate that entire interaction they're about to have with their team. And because they're intentional, they start achieving more. See, the way to achieve nothing is to have no intention. With no intention, nothing is moved. Nothing can be shaped. Nothing can be worked towards. Once we have the intention, we can seek to make that come into fruition. We can manifest that very feeling, that sense, that word. So I'm encouraging you here to really get thoughtful about this, because many of these things become lifelong. I will always say those three words to my wife. And maybe in my own mind, I'll change the words once in a while, but for most part, they're kind of similar. And this is part of your achievement map is having guideposts, right? These guideposts in these big areas of purpose and people that you can return to over and over and over again. They give you a sense of grounding in the world amidst all the chaos, right? The other group that you have is, you know, you have some people that you support the people who might be above you. So if you're a manager and there's vice presidents and people who are above you, what's your intention for working with them? What do you want your interactions with them to be like? Because it might be different. Right. Maybe your interactions with those who are quote, unquote, beneath you in an organization are different than your intentions you have for those who are above you. Right. They just might be different. I don't know if it is for you or not. Maybe it could be the same. It's not my job to give you your answers. I'm trying to illustrate it with what I do with myself and my clients. But you might have a different way that you interact with those who are above you in the hierarchy in order for you to move up or to get your promotion or to add as much value as possible in your workspace. Another group that you're working with are those that you serve, the direct line customers that you serve. I have an intention for you. If you in this course, when you're in my audience, I have an intention for my audience. When I'm working one on one with a client, I have an intention for that client. I never going to a relationship or a moment of service, including when I'm doing things like service to the broader world. Right. Service to. Let's say if I go and I volunteer at a soup kitchen, I got an intention for every person who I hand a bowl to. And by having that, I'm creating an emotional quality of my life that I enjoy. And I think I'm giving off a sense of my character. See, your character is only felt and sensed through your conduct. Right. It's not just the intentions. It's the initiative that follows up with it. Right. We are the sum of our actions, not just our intentions. You can have all the intentions in the world, but if you don't demonstrate these things, then what are we talking about? We're talking about making you feel good for yourself intellectually. We want you to make it a real principle of your initiative each day. I hope that makes sense. Last one. The people that you meet. You know, if you think this isn't. If this is too basic again, I want to remind you the power of it when you put it in your play into your life. I just had Arianna Huffington at one of our events. She's a dear friend. She found the Huffington Post and has been a major media mogul, but also a major force in politics and in women's leadership. She's inspired women all around the world and literally mentored so many tens of thousands of women. And she was one of my events and she came back and I told her this intention idea. And one of the things I told her, I said, one of my favorite practices in life is every time I meet a new acquaintance, whether it's a networking opportunity or something, I have three words that fire off in my mind. The second I shake somebody's hand who I've not met, these three words fire off. And now it's going to set for a frame for me for this interaction. And she loved that. And matter of fact, one of the things I told her that I do with my overall, like, there might be some people you have in your life that you just want reminders. If all this sounds like too much work to figure it out for each of these different groups of people. If you don't want to figure out three words, three words, three words, three Words, three words, which would be, you know, 12 plus words. Maybe what you do is you just roll it up and you just have three words that are going to guide your intention with all people. Anyone you meet that you see the whites of someone's eyes, you shake somebody's hands, and that becomes a trigger in your mind. You're going to fire off these three words. So I taught Ariana to put that in her phone to say, okay, you know, these three words are important for me in my interactions with other people. And it's going to pop up on my phone several times throughout the day like an alarm. Now, I do that. At High Performance Academy, we really make you do it because you're here. There's no accountability. I can't see you if you do it or not, because we're doing this through video. But at my events, I literally make people do it while they're in the seats. And everyone checks to make sure they did it. Because if you're walking through the day and all of a sudden, beep, you know, your purpose statement shows up as an alarm two or three times throughout the day. Or your phone vibrates and suddenly there's three words of intention of how to be with a relationship you're in at the moment that severely, severely alters the course of your behavior. Because most of us are distracted and unintentional. We're unconscious throughout the day. And that little interrupt, we all carry our phone. Now your phone buzzes and it reminds you, and you're like, ooh. And suddenly you realize, I got adjust here. You know, most people's phones are stealing away their life in terms of the distraction. I'm using it as a tool to keep me on focus, to keep me on purpose. I, I hope you'll do the same thing. 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 the Brendon show because when you do that, I can look you up and we can find you on instagram and post that on the 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 brendon.com monthly. That's brendon.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. Sam.