Best Of: Master Discipline, Connection and Resilience
19 Oct 2018 · 13 min
In this best‑of episode of the Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard delivers a high‑energy, live‑training style monologue that weaves together three core pillars of high performance: discipline, authentic connection, and resilience. He opens by describing how disciplined habits—daily writing, reading a book a week, regular gym sessions, and deliberate practice in speaking—have propelled his own growth in relationships, health, and career. He frames discipline as the "art and science of success," urging listeners to identify the areas of their lives where disciplined choices (e.g., eliminating distractions, committing to listening) are lacking. He then shifts to the importance of deep, vulnerable, and alive connections, arguing that successful people cultivate authentic relationships that allow genuine emotional sharing, humor, and play. Brendon stresses that connection is a skill that can be modeled and amplified by bringing one’s own spark, humor, and vulnerability into interactions. Finally, he shares a personal story of bankruptcy to illustrate resilience. He explains that resilience is a cultivated emotional style that lets a person bounce back from chaos, stay optimistic, and keep marching toward a clear vision. He advises listeners to quit early if a pursuit isn’t aligned with their true purpose, but to persist with grit when it is. Throughout, he promotes his High‑Performance Monthly program as a deeper, interactive venue for these teachings. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to share the episode on social media for a chance at gifts and community recognition.
Questions this episode answers
He says he is entering his 20th year of reading a book every week.
He states that he went bankrupt when he started.
Chapters
Foreign.
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 to 10 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 even 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 Brendan.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.
Discipline. Boy, when I wanted to become better in relationships with people, that took discipline. It took a lot of struggle, learning, practice and trying. When I wanted to become a writer, I had to discipline myself to sit down and just focus to create something. When I wanted to get in better health, discipline to get to the gym every other day without missing. When I wanted to become smarter at personal development, business and leadership. The discipline of reading a book a week. I'm entering my 20th year of reading a book every week, so it's a discipline to stay at it. The discipline of getting in front of a camera a bajillion times and challenging myself to become an extemporaneous speaker. I said, I'm going to be able to speak for hours if I want to based on the knowledge that I've learned, I've stored in my brain and a trust in my heart and my soul that I can communicate and deliver to people on demand, when necessary. If I'm going to inspire, I must be able to do it spontaneously when the situation demands. And I challenged myself. I had the discipline to go to communication seminars. I had the discipline to go to relationship workshops, to writing seminars. The discipline to create a learning journey for myself so I could master the very skills. So I share that with you because.
Some people don't like the word discipline.
And I would say it is the ultimate, ultimate art and science of success to be able to discipline our mind, our emotions, our bodies to achieve something. Think about an Olympic athlete, the amount of discipline in their training and the choices they have to say no to so they can stay on path to become world class. Think about the person at work, just like you. You say, oh, distractions are so hard today. Not really. Once you discipline yourself not to have distractions, you don't have them. I mean, do you really think. But the Fortune 100 CEOs are sitting there all day long browsing through YouTube and Facebook. No, they said, that's not part of my mission. And they removed it. And they had the discipline to keep it removed. We must do the same thing. What do we need more discipline in? In our lives? We must find those areas. Often they come back to the very same areas we've been talking about our careers. They come back to our self, our well being, our health. They come back to our relationships. It's so silly. But think about the discipline that you could have to be more present and loving in your relationships. Think about the discipline of listening. How's your discipline been there in your relationships? What level of listener have you been? Level zero. Not good. Level ten.
Extraordinary.
So we can find all these areas to develop more discipline in our Lives and thus advance our lives even more quickly. And so that's the challenge, to know where we're off the mark in our discipline. I love working with high performers because I always say, when was a time when everything in your life was just flowing and you felt like you had your discipline in order, you were just crushing it. You had a practice that was working for you and things were advancing. And they can always remember those times. I hope for you, these are those times. If not, get back on your game. Life is waiting for you. Connection, Successful people, their connection with other people, as much as their awareness to other people, their connection with them is deep, it's vulnerable, it's authentic, and it's alive. Let me say that again. Their connection with other people, it's deeper. They're not surface level people, you know, on a sitcom somewhere. They actually have real relationships with people. Those relationships are authentic and genuine. There's a vulnerability there where they can share their true frustrations. They can share the things that they're happy about, the things that they're worried about. There's true emotional sharing going on in those connections. In business and in their personal relationships, there's just a deeper quality of connection they have with other people that kind of makes them stand out. I mean, it's why they become so successful. They're that good with people. And what does good mean? It means their connection is deep, it's authentic, it's vulnerable, and it's alive. When they're in relationships, you know, successful people, they laugh a lot. It's hard to remember that because we think, oh, they must be so stoic and amazing because, you know, there was three decades, particularly here in the Western cultures, where success was being buttoned up and very serious and highly regarded. And now that's just complete BS because what it did is it stripped people of their identity, of fun, of the reality in the moment. We can joke, we can tease, we can play. How alive have your relationships been? Measure yourself on that. Not just are you aware of other people, how alive is the actual connection? Is there a spark, a chemistry there with other people? And if it's not there, don't blame them. You have to say, what am I bringing to the situation? Am I bringing my full spark, my full charge? You know, the power plant doesn't have energy. It generates energy. If I want aliveness, authenticity or vulnerability in my relationships, the only way to get it is, is to demonstrate it more, to role model it more, to lead it more. And people will come along and they'll start to Connect with you in a different way. I can tell you I've been on the call. I mean, it doesn't matter. I could be on the phone with any of our clients, our customers, our friends, major Fortune 500 executives. And no matter what is going to happen, I'm going to surprise them on that call. I'm going to say something loud, I'm going to tease or I'm going to laugh. I'm going to lead the emotional quality of that call because that's what I want to experience in my own life. Don't you? So let's put that connection back with us on our shoulders. If your spouse is not sparking you up right now, that chemistry is faded, you bring it back. Don't hope, you start doing the work. And hey, if ultimately it doesn't work, at least you know you went all in. You were 100% vulnerable. You gave on out, you played, you teased, you had a good time, you gave everything you got. If it didn't work out, at least you can say that. Because having great connection with people comes back to us being discipline aware and having the vision for it. All of these things work together to shape a successful experience in life. Resilience. If we have an emotional style to deal with chaos in a way that we will be resilient and keep going, if we have an emotional style that allows us to bounce back when everything sucks and keeps going, that's what makes us successful. I know that personally. You know when I started doing this, writing books and being a trainer, because if you ask me, who is Brendon Burchard? He's a writer, he's a trainer. That's what I do. I'm honored to do that in the areas of motivation and personal growth as well as business and marketing. And for me, I can share with you. When I started, I went bankrupt and it terrified me. When I went bankrupt, I had a choice. Keep pursuing this path and be resilient. Survive this turmoil or quit now. If it wasn't my real vision, quitting would have been the right answer. If it wasn't my real vision. I tell people all the time, if this is not your vision, if you don't see this as part of your real contribution, if it doesn't make you fully alive and express and it's your real goals, bail, quit sooner than later. But if you know it's right for you, then resilience is everything. The ability to be resilient toward your dreams, to keep marching on when the struggle, the strife, the trial, the turmoil the chaos, the frustration, the hurt, the anger, the disappointment, the shame, the regret, the embarrassment. When all that is there and you keep marching on, you know you'll be a successful person. It's the ability to be optimistic enough to know. This too shall pass. This time shall change. I will find a way. I will honor my truth and keep pursuing my dreams. Thick and thin, storm or night, I will maintain my march. That is something that is built and ingrained into a successful person. Not because they were lucky with it, not because they grew up with it, because they developed it. It's the style they developed by doing it.
Once.
They did it again. They did it again. They did it again. The more bold and courageous you are, the more bold and courageous you'll be in the future, the more confident you are today. The more confident you'll be in the future. The more you overcome yesterday's struggles today, the more you'll be able to overcome the bigger struggles tomorrow. Never forget these things. Keep marching, my friend. Your time for accelerating is here.
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 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 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 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.