Best Of: Improve Your Relationships

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 on 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 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. 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 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.

You are going to love this session and I know that because this is something that many of you actually asked along the way for me to cover. And usually I don't cover this really anywhere else in my work. So I think you're going to really enjoy this one. People have been asking Brennan, tell us more about success in your perspective and your research in the most important area of our life, our relationships. And now I know some of you may be in an intimate relationship. Maybe you're married, you're with a significant other or a partner, you know, in that loving, intimate kind of way. And some of you will apply this to your relationships even at work. Probably not the first one, definitely not the first one. But maybe relationships with friends and kids. But I'm going to use almost this whole time and examples about your intimate relationship. This is going to be a fun session because I think the number one thing we must do in our relationships is bring back the joy and the fun into them. We all get trapped into our routines. And because we're in our routines or we're in our mindset, we're in our day, we go through the motions and I think what ends up happening is really unfortunate. Our energy, our fun, our teasing, our flirtation, it's not there in our relationships. It was there when you went on your first couple dates and then it disappeared. You got to bring that back. And a lot of this is about bringing that back. You'll get that back if you'll do these things. As you've learned, everything is about intention and then it's about the implementation doing it. This first one, I'm going to start really hot and heavy with you because a lot of people aren't doing this anymore and it's killing their intimate relationships. And you might not be comfortable with this. And that is exactly why I'm starting there. You need to flirt more often if you're married. What I want you to do today and tomorrow and the next seven days, I want to give you a seven day flirtation challenge. I want you to look at and process your relationship in your marriage like you did in that first two, three weeks when you are texting that person or you're calling that person, you are sending flowers, you take them to the nice restaurant and not bitching about the price like you were doing fun things together. But there's also chemistry. And what people forget all the time is the chemistry.

It didn't go away.

People think chemistry goes away. Well, just like some people think they have energy. You don't have energy. You don't have chemistry. You generate energy. You generate chemistry like the power plant doesn't have energy, it generates it. You must also transform, generate, store, deliver energy, chemistry back into your relationship by intentional will. I want you to bring the fun back in. I want you to think, how could I flirt today? Literally. Here's what I like to do. A couple simple things on your phone. Set an alarm to go off. Twice every day for the next seven days, that alarm is going to go off and it's going to say, send a flirtatious message to spouse. I don't care if you are angry at your spouse right now. I don't care if you're mad at them. I don't really care what the context of the relationship is. I know that sounds insensitive, but I want you to challenge yourself, to rise above it anyway. And if you really care about this person and you want to reestablish chemistry, life, love, joy, heart, intimacy with them, twice a day, alarm goes off, send flirtatious text. I think to have a great, successful relationship, you need to become a master at reframing things, especially how you interpret things. It's really easy to just to blame, to get caught in negative cycles in relationships and not give the benefit of the doubt to our partners anymore. You know, it's easy to walk in and see the house is all destroyed and say, oh, what a slob. But maybe you can walk in and say, gosh, I wonder what was going on. He had to be such a hurry that he would leave it like this. Gosh, I hope he's okay. You know, it's giving people the benefit of the doubt to say, you know, let's not just automatically frame things as the negative, but to reframe them in an understanding, empathetic way. When we give the people the benefit of the doubt, you know, if someone is dropping a bunch of balls and they're just a hot mess in your life, not to just say, oh, they're an idiot, but to say, you know, maybe they're really. Maybe they're really struggling right now. I need to pay attention to that.

My first impulse is to blame them.

Or get mad at them, but maybe I need to reframe that and ask a different kind of question and to reframe the situation from how I'm feeling about it to the broader frame. Remember that wedding picture you got? The broader frame is the relationship is the context of love that we have bound our hearts with another human being. And to reframe into that higher spiritual precept that. That higher perspective into the relationship that kind of gets out of our hurts and our Insecurities and our childish ways and says, how can I look at this in a way that would benefit this relationship, not just make me feel better because I'm selfish, not just make that person wrong because maybe they are wrong, but rather reframe everything in the context of the relationship. I think that's the magic. Many of you know, I really cut my sort of teeth in the, in the relationship world as a professional mediator. I was doing mediations with literally court appointed divorces. So two people would come in, they're in a divorce situation, and I had to mediate that. This was very difficult work. And I was doing this by the time I was 22. You know, it was a lot for a young person to take on and it was challenging. But I learned a lot about people and I learned about the number one way that I could have a breakthrough in a conflict in a relationship was to help each party's to reframe their perspective about what was going on there. To reframe a story, they had to reframe a slight that they felt like they had against them and instead reframe it to a higher context of not just you and me, but us and what are we all about here. I think you could do that. And so maybe there's a few issues or old stories in your relationship that you could reframe. Maybe next time you're upset, you can take a step out of that personal frame and into the relationship frame and say, what would serve this relationship better right now? I know that's hard for people because we are now in a culture that is so unbelievably selfish.

And how can we expect to have.

Anything else when we're teaching everyone to take selfies all day? You know, when it's all about public demonstration of who we are, what we like, how we feel in the online sort of social media world that we've forgotten to take a broader view about our human interactions and relationships and responsibilities. And you don't need me to preach to you about this, I get it. But I think we could all do a benefit to our relationship if we would reframe everything in terms of us again and how it could benefit us again. And I know that can be a hard battle if your relationship is struggling right now. But I promise you won't win the battle without being an expert. Reframing. It's a good thing to do. If you've never read books on sort of conflict mediation, I encourage you to go read some of that work. You know, just go to the Bookstore or go to college, university bookstore and say, do you have any books on, like, conflict or mediation, you know, family therapy, you know, whatever you got to study to get in the world of looking. There's lots of ways to look at each situation. And most of us have such a narrow frame about how we feel that we often block out other perspectives. And now we get boxed in how we view things and we think our truth is the truth, and it's not. There's other people in the game in a relationship, so that's a must. In relationships to start asking for things again. Here's what happens in relationships. Well, she knows what I want. And then I'll sit him down. I'll say, could you tell me what you think he wants? And she won't know. Or she'll verbalize it in a completely different way than he does. Or you'll get people who they're just bitter and resigned from each other. So they won't ask for what they need. They won't ask for the favor. They won't ask for the empathy. They won't ask for the forgiveness. They won't ask for the support and following their dream. They won't ask for sex. They won't ask for caring. They won't ask for understanding. They won't ask for some help handling the kids because they say, he doesn't help. She doesn't understand me. And they take these positions. And so because they don't believe others understand them or will support them, they just entirely stop asking, how is that ever going to move them through? Matter of fact, I really believe if you want more in life, you must learn to request more of life. You know, ask and you shall receive is biblical. I mean, it is important. It's essential that we learn to verbalize it. And most people, especially when they've been through a couple bad relationships in a row or they're in one, that's really just tough, you know. And by the way, I don't speak just casually about that. I don't mean to do that because.

I know you might be going through a hard time.

I've just been through it a lot. I've seen it. And you may think I understand you or you may think I don't, but have you ever mediated over 200 conflicts and personal relationships? I did that professionally. It doesn't take a whole lot of couples and working with a lot of high performers to realize relationships get wrecked. And they get wrecked pretty easily and people give up pretty fast. And so I think a lot of people aren't receiving what they want in life because they don't ask for it, even at such a level. I tell people this on stage all the time. I say maybe the world isn't giving you what you want because based on all of your distractions and your silence and your avoidance, it's simply unclear what you are asking for. You know, in relationships, you think people know, you know. One of the number one things that I've been blessed to work with, very high level government officials and some of the best speech writers in the world, matter of fact. And one of the things a speechwriter will often tell me is, Brendan, you have to ask things from a populace or an audience way more than you think, because they forgot about it. They got back into their world. Your spouse got back into their world. They forgot what you asked for yesterday. It's got to come up again. It can't be badgering or belligerent or negative or upset that they didn't deliver it as immediately as McDonald's would deliver you a hamburger. Look, sometimes people need a lot of reminders. Not because they're stupid or because they're irresponsible, but because, you know, today the world throws a lot at us and we're all juggling a million things. It's pretty easy to drop a ball and forget something. And even if they care about you sometimes that because, hey, let's be honest. Is there someone who you owe something to or maybe you should be more present and attentive to? And maybe someone asked you for something this last week or two and you kind of forgot to give it to them, whether it was to send them an email or to take some time to listen or to give them some support in a certain way. I bet you have. We all have. No one's perfect. So if that's happening for you, it's probably happening for them. And maybe it's time to start asking again on a more consistent basis. You know, I think if you haven't said to your partner, your spouse, your lover, your husband in the last several days, honey, is there anything you need, anything I can do for you? If you haven't said that, let me tell you what you forgot. This one. You really got away, and I really mean that in the last couple days, this should be something you ask. If not every day. Every couple days, honey, you need anything today, honey, Anything I can do to make your day better, honey, anything I can do. It doesn't make you a servant. It makes you a spiritually connected person to the person who you dedicated your life to. Now, I know I'm preaching a little bit here because many of you might have the most extraordinary relationships. But I'm hoping too you'll remind yourselves of some things maybe you could do in your own life. But maybe you could pass these on to a friend at lunch who's telling you they're having a tough time and say, hey, you know, maybe honey, you need to ask a few things more of the people around you because that would be a positive thing. So I know sometimes I'm speaking to these things, they might apply. You might be the most flirtatious person on the planet. You didn't need to be reminded of this, but maybe you could remind your partner of this. Maybe you could remind someone going through a difficult time of this. Part of the development isn't just what you will apply, but maybe you taking a leadership role and inspiring other people as well. And so I think of that hat that you're wearing. Maybe if you already ask your spouse or your partner or your lover a lot, maybe you could encourage them to ask more of you. Or you can encourage someone who's having a tough time in a relationship to ask more. I think that would serve 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 posting 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.com 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.