Best Of: Personal Responsibility (How to Fully Own Your Life)
1 Oct 2018 · 6 min
In this best‑of episode of The Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard delivers a live‑style training on the habit of personal responsibility, which he frames as the foundational habit for high performance and lasting success. He begins by explaining the format of the best‑of series and promotes his High Performance Monthly program. He then defines personal responsibility as taking total ownership of one’s life, regardless of external circumstances, and stresses that excellence and consistency turn this ownership into a positive habit. Brendon breaks the habit into four concrete domains: (1) Aim – setting clear daily intentions, goals, and a long‑term vision; (2) Attention – deliberately directing focus and protecting it from distraction; (3) Attitude – cultivating a constructive mindset and avoiding habitual bitterness; and (4) Actions – aligning daily behaviors with one’s values in relationships, work, and personal life. He challenges listeners to self‑audit each domain, noting that scientific research links conscientiousness (the result of personal responsibility) to longer, happier lives. The session ends with a call to deepen the practice through his subscription‑based high‑performance training.
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Hey, my friends, it's Brendan 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 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, 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 enjoy 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, on a flip chart or motioning toward 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 forward/monthly. That's brendon.com forward/commonly B R E N D 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.
We're going to walk through success habits today and what I want you to do as we go through them is challenge yourself. How well are you executing that particular habit in your life? Right again, excellence and consistency. Are you doing it with excellence and you're doing it consistently? That's what's going to make it a positive habit in your life. I'm telling you, these fundamentals will shift your life. And I have to build it all up like this before I reveal the first one, because you go, of course. But people don't do it, and that's why they struggle. So, so let's jump into it. What's the first habit of becoming a successful person? It's very straightforward, and I think it's universal to all personal development. And I'm going to test you on this one. And that is, it's your level of personal responsibility, the habit of fully owning your life in particular categories, which we'll talk about here in a moment. It's taking total responsibility for what's happening in your life, even if you didn't cause it, even if someone else. You're not blaming other people. You're not making excuses. You're saying, okay, right now I'm creating these things in my life. And if we can learn to take command of these things in our life again at a level of excellence and consistency as a habit, then our life changes. So here's what we have to be personally responsible for in our life, and I'm going to quiz you on these. The first one is our aim, right? Our goals, our ambition, our vision, if you will. We just call it our aim. Have you been really waking up with an intention, with an aim, a goal for the day? Have you been truly responsible for the direction of your life where you've been the last couple years? Has the last three years been a striving for you to attain something, to become something, to contribute something? Or has it become a hot mess of running down this distraction, going in this area, going in that area? Has it been all over the place with no intention? Well, that's the habit of personal responsibility. We just have to own the fact that wherever you've landed today is you either aimed to be there or you didn't aim to be there. And either way, you got to own that. That's personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is also not only owning just our aim, it's owning our attention, your focus. You have to own where your attention and your focus is going. If you find yourself too distracted, if your habit is a habit of distraction, you're ruined. And you and I both know that we have to own that responsibility of boy I've got to be diligent about protecting where my attention is going. Otherwise life will go off the rails. I'll never achieve that aim. Third thing we have to have personal responsibility for as a habit, our attitude. You know, our attitude. Are you showing up a grumpy bear too often? Whose fault is that? Are you owning that saying, you know what? It's my issue. I am generating a bad attitude. Or does it happen once in a while? If it happens once in a while, that's cool. It happens for all of us once in a while.
But if it's on a consistent basis.
You'Re generating the habit of becoming an angry, frustrated, bitter person. Well, you got to own that. If your life is just flooded in bitterness, whose fault is that? This is the habit of personal responsibility, saying, I created this reality. I might not have created every element of it, but I'm creating how I interpret it and how I respond to it in this moment. That's maximum personal responsibility. We got to do that. And I know you already know that. So let me challenge you on this. Out of like the most important people in your life, who has the best attitude? I want you to ask out of everybody you're surrounded by at your job, who has the best attitude? If it's not you, let's own that and let's start developing better attitude for ourselves. Last piece. If we can focus on our aim, our attention, and we can focus on that attitude, then obviously we have to take personal responsibility for all of our actions, what behaviors we are doing, and the overall actions as a theme in our life. Are the behaviors that I'm exuding as a father, being sufficient, supportive, loving of my children? Are my overall actions at work, leading the business to grow? Are my overall actions in my relationship deepening that relationship and bringing it more joy? Or are my overall actions making things go worse? Are my overall reactions not contributing? And what actions should I change and change immediately because I own them and I'm being aware of them? So much of personal responsibility is being awareness of these things, having an awareness, a consciousness, a conscientiousness to our aim, our attitude, our attention, and our actions. And what we know from all science is that conscientious people live longer, literally, they are happy, happier, literally. And these are things we can measure as a science. So this might sound like a simple one, but it is the grand unifying habit. The habit of taking personal responsibility for one's life is everything. And I know every single trainer in the success category, the personal development category, says this. So if this is repetition for you, so thank goodness that you've heard this before. We have to own these types of things in our life. They're fundamental. It's common sense. Now it's going to be common practice. If you're already in this place and you're like, dude, I got it. I'm good there. Okay. How could you go to the next level of clarity about your aim? I mean, clarity about what you really want in your relationships, the ones you have now or the ones you could create in your work, in your own well being? What's that next level of attitude development for you? What's that next level of narrowing in your attention to what matters? What's that next level of honing in your actions to be more supportive and congruent of your values and who you are as a person all over the world, as I work with people. The next level for you, what's that next level of habit I could develop to own my full experience? What's that next level of owning and controlling and being conscientious and supportive of my aim, my attitude, my attention, my actions, that's going to take you to the next level.
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.com monthly. 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 at brandon.com forward/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.