Best Of: Practices of Achievement

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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 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, 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.

First step, if it's not in the calendar, it is a dead dream. What do I mean by that? You must have whatever your goals are, whatever you're seeking in your life, it has to be in a calendar. It has to be actually scheduled down, otherwise you won't do it. The way that the mind works is it is so attracted to new and distraction, matter of fact, we can measure it. If you don't know anything about me, I'm a nut about neuroscience. I've been blessed to interview some of the smartest people on the planet in that realm and also study it now for seven years intensely. And we know that when there's something new that comes in, we get this little dopamine drip, a little fire off in our brain that says, hey, you know, I like this. We are very attracted to new things, to novel things, and frankly, to distracting things. So if it's not in the calendar, we're not going to remember to do it. It must exist in the calendar. We have to have it there. If it's not there, we won't achieve anything. It must be in the calendar. What needs to be in the calendar? Well, you need completion deadlines, right? If your goal is to write a book, Okay, I want to open up your calendar and you got to show me. When is that book done? Is it Thursday of next week, Thursday of next month? Is it Monday five months from now? It must be. Go put in the calendar right now. Whatever you dream of, put it in now. You want to quit your job, put it in the calendar now. You want to find your ideal spouse or lover, put it in there. It's okay if you don't get it, but we need to know that we have to put that intention. See, strivers, they kind of thrust their intention into the world and they land it into the calendar of the future. And then they start marching towards that baby intentionally. And that's what we have to have you do do, right? So what's the deadline for whatever you are after if it's not in the calendar? It is not going to happen. You need to have it there, must be there, no holds barred. I don't let any of the clients I work with not show me a fully developed calendar, including these things. You need learning dates. If the completion date is five months out, I also need in the calendar, by what date will I have learned what that will help me get there, right? If my goal is to be in a certain shape at that amount of time, like I want to run a marathon by five months from now, then I say, okay, by this date, I must learn. I must learn exactly what I need to Start eating for these next five months. By this date, I must learn what's the best gear for me. I need to go and meet with somebody to find out what's the best shoes I should wear. By this state, I'm going to learn how to physically train to make that happen. By this state, I am going to learn how to mentally master how other people mastered their mind. To finish that, we set learning dates in the calendar as much as we do completion dates. And because people don't do that, they don't complete anything. Because they get there and they say, well, shoot, I don't know how to do it. So they quit. We need to learn the how. So schedule it. Say, by this date, I will learn how to do this thing. And that way we really actually start having a learning journey map that gets us to a destination versus just hoping we have a destination. It's kind of like, I mean, it's almost impossible to drive a car without having milestones along the way to tell us if we're going in the right direction or not right. And learning goals help us say boom. It helps us advance and have a goal before the goal. Does that make sense? Learn something, develop competency. As you develop competency on purpose, then you will achieve your ultimate goal faster. It's very vital, very vital. That one distinction could change your life forever. Because most people I work with, even a players, they don't have their learning goals set up. And because they don't have those set up, they never achieve the ultimate goal. Second idea, you must reclaim your morning. And you've heard me talk about this in all of my work before. I've been perpetuating this even before our high performance studies really started coming out that revealed the power of this. It's absolutely vital that you take back your morning. What does that mean? It means, you know what, when you wake up, I want you to have a practice. Your first actions of the day should be wake up, get out of bed. There should be a glass of water there. Drink it. I have 20 ounces of water next to my bed. Boom. 20 ounces of water. Awesome. Then I set an intention for the day, for who I want to be, how I want to interact with other people. Got it? Awesome. Then I do some stretching or working out, depending on the morning, if I'm going to work out in the morning or not. No matter what. I stretch every morning to open up my body. I do some qigong to stretch and open my body. Literally 15 minutes of activity. Simple stuff, very simple. You might just go For a walk, just to open up your mind and your body before you do anything else. Those must be your first actions, not checking your inbox. Never check your email inbox in the first hour of your morning period. I don't care who you are, how important you think you are. I've done this with billionaires and trust me, they're a little busier than you and I. I've done this with people who have schedules that would terrify you. I've done this with people who have teams that demand their responses and need them. And I still strip it away. I say you can't check your email in the first hour. The first hour is a sacred time for you to set up the rest of the day for success. In that hour or so, we need to make sure that you've got that you've hydrated, that you move to open up your body, that you set some intentions. Maybe you read something inspirational, maybe you write something inspirational, maybe you eat a good healthy meal, maybe you get the kids off to school. But you are present in your morning experience and you're thinking about the day in a proactive way versus doing what most people do. 68% of people had said, now wake up, roll over, grab their phone and check their inbox or their messages. And doing that does one thing, it immediately checks you out of your life and into the demands and the agendas of other people. You've probably heard me say it in a lot of my work before. The inbox is nothing but an organizing system of other people's agendas. We must get out of the inbox. There is life outside the inbox. But if you we go into the inbox and we reply in that first hour, we are ruined. We are going into a reactive state during the day. Never check, just period. Decide today, not in the first hour. If you got to set the timer on your phone or on your watch, then do it. Give yourself back that first hour. Get yourself in a healthy place. Before you open up your inbox, before you even do any work, I want you to think about the projects that you're working on that are important to you in your life and what you'd have to do to advance towards them. I want you to think about the people that you need to reach out to or you're waiting on a decision from. And I want you to reach out to them before you do anything else in your inbox and your priorities. What are the things that must happen this day? Third, you must have a comrade or a coach. You need somebody in your life that you can check into. And I think that you need to realize that personal development and all achievement acceleration in your life, it's not an act of your genius. It's a result of social phenomenon that the people that we are around affect us so dramatically. So dramatically. It is necessary for you to have a friend, an accountability partner or a coach that you pay or work with that's going to help you take you to the next level. It's necessary, right? If you just got to come to our forum or jump into our Facebook group every single day to look for some inspiration, support, do it. But you have to realize you need a peer network of people who are striving with you. But you need a specific person. Who's it going to be? Is your mom and you going to talk about the process of you achieving your dream? Is it your spouse? Is it your best friend? Is it somebody you know who's mentoring you? You got to have somebody and you need somebody who is an accept no excuse, mentor or friend. Do you have somebody who kind of kicks your butt? I mean somebody who's like, who won't let you be a victim, who will challenge you every step of the way if you don't? Your job is to get that. Now some people say, well Brendan, you understand I don't have people like that. You're lucky. No, no, no. I didn't have them either. I wouldn't found them. People say, well Brendan, the people in my life are negative. Should I dump them? I'm like, well, I think you should focus less of your time, energy and effort towards them and you should start maybe thinking about developing new relationships and new connections. We don't have to dump the look, we have family. Everyone's got family or friends that you know, maybe aren't the most positive. But we don't have to cut all ties. What we have to do is develop the community or the people or the individual relationship of someone who will champion us on without a comrade. Like if you're going to start working out, you need a workout partner. If you're going to change your company and the direction of your company forever, you better have a teammate with there with you on that journey. Another champion. If you're the CEO, you better have your COO and your CFO and your CMO on your team comrades in this game to change this business forever. If you don't have somebody who's your right hand person, your go to person who can support you and cheer you on, your goal must be to get that Even as you're moving towards that goal, you must pick up people who are championing you on and checking in and keeping you accountable. Next idea. You have to quit what's wrong to get ahead faster, but don't quit what's difficult if it's right. What do I mean by that? Too many people are staying with what's wrong for too long. That's why they're not achieving faster. So you got to do that. You have to quit a lot of projects too, before you start them. We'll give you the opportunity to evaluate, we'll teach you what to do. But there's lots of things you should just not start. You should look at the project and say, am I going to commit to that full force and make that happen? No, I'm out. Only do the things that you are absolutely passionate about making really happen in your life. Otherwise, don't begin it. Too many people wander into too many projects and it's that wandering around into too many projects that makes them feel overwhelmed and lost. So what projects could you cut now if you're not really committed to it, cut it. Get it out of your life, minimize, simplify, because too many people, they think. You know Arianna Huffington, who many of you know, from finding the Huffington Post to her best selling books, to being one of the greatest mentors for many of our great female achievers in the world today. She's a dear friend and I've worked with her quite a bit. And I'll tell you, she has this great thing. She says sometimes the easiest way to complete a project is to quit it. And I love that. Right? And so like, what projects do you have that just stop them, they're done. You got to cut it off. You're not going to do it, you're not going to complete it, you're not going to commit to it. Just quit. Focus on the ones that you will make happen. You will go faster. Second, leave friendships that are poisonous. Just leave them. If you have any friendships that are really poisonous, you need to quit those relationships. Look, you had a good time with them. Maybe they were high school buddies or college buddies, but now you've changed and they've changed and all they are doing is dragging you down. Tell them, hey, look, you're so poisonous around me. I love you, but unless you change, I gotta change. And you just have to be straight with people. It's absolutely necessary to quit those levels of relationships that are poisonous. Same thing with walking away from toxic environments. Look, the fastest way to achieve more is to quit. More. And I know that sounds so crazy, but we're all doing so many things that don't make a difference. They don't look if they don't move the needle, we need to stop them. And we also need to be so self aware that if we walk into a toxic environment, we meet somebody and we're outsourcing to them and we actually meet them and we're like their lifestyle, their energy, their vibe isn't my own. We need to bail immediately. We cannot afford. If we're going to achieve a remarkable difference in the world and change our lives, we must not allow ourselves in toxic environments. We must exit them. You go to a party and you have a bad intuition about that party. You kind of look at it, just there's something about it, it feels, you know, toxic or not good. Walk out of that party immediately. Don't say, gee, I hope it gets better. Get out. If you have an intuition that something is going to be toxic for you, that leave. Because too many people wander years in bad environments, bad situations, bad relationships, and they needed to get out earlier, but they didn't decide their life was worth it. They didn't decide to move the needle towards those things that will propel them forward. So they hung out with mediocre or toxic for too long and it sucked the vibrancy of life away. Your job is to bring the joy and you can bring the joy to lots of different toxic environments. But I'd rather have you bring the joy towards a joyous environment. It will amplify you faster. Right? You can bring all the light in the world into a dark place. But the challenge is at some point it's always going to be a dark place. So you need to for yourself, choose to aim yourself towards more of what is positive support of you. I know this is so basic and as much as this is a practice, it really is a practice. It is a philosophy too. I mean, you should see, you know, how many rooms I walk into, I scan it, I vibe it out for a little bit. I'm real with it. And I go, not for me. And I go because I got things to do, I got people to change, I got people to support, I got important projects. And I won't waste my time in areas that are toxic environments or conversations. I never allow criticism and bitching and moaning around me when if I walk up to four or five people and they're just like, oh gosh, the weather, oh gosh, did you see what she did? Oh gosh, I'm gone, I'm like hey guys, good seeing you. Bam, I'm gone. I don't have time for that. I want to move the needle of the world and I know you do too. Last, this is important. Be obsessive. Yes. Obsessive about three things. First and foremost, your level of energy and attitude. Be obsessive about it. If you're have a practice in your life that's really going to move your life forward. It's going to be a greater self awareness and check in and accountability for your energy, your attitude. That's the most important thing. That's the most important practice to take care of your energy and attitude to achieve more. I know that's so basic. It's common sense but not always common practice. Your level of energy, how is it? Is it zero? You're dead. 10. You're vibrant and present and I want you to challenge yourself to use your mind and condition your body in a way that you can show up in a place where you're just, you're energized, you're good, you're present and your attitude is positive because you will impact that situation in ways that are beyond your own expectations. You will start moving the energy of the world around you and the energy of the world around you will sense this positive, powerful, conscientious, conscious person and it will reward you. But you have to do it on a consistent basis and you know your life will change when you decide that is a real intention for you. Second, commit to your habits and your routines if you're obsessed about something. My habits, my morning habit doesn't change. I got a habit when I'm at home. I got a habit when I'm on the road and I do not bust those habits. Those are law for me. Right? I've got routines that I do to shoot these videos. If I don't do them, I don't do a good video. I've got routines that I run in my mind, things that I do when I meet people and if I do those over and over and over again, if I'm committed to them, my life changes. If not, I get distracted. So commit to your habits and routines. If you're like, I don't have any habits or routines, Brendon. Good. So what new habits or routines could you develop and stick to that would change the quality of your life for the better? You need to know that and you need to start thinking about that again. I'll give you some more as we go throughout the course. Finally, be obsessive about distraction removal. Get rid of it. Be obsessive about. About distraction removal. I mean, get rid of it. Be obsessive about distraction removal. I mean, get rid of it. No, this isn't an editing problem. This is me hammering one of the most important points of all Achievement achievers. Remove all the blocks, they remove all the stuff, the distractions. And they're very focused towards making their difference, towards actualizing their self, increasing their life experience and their connection with the things around them. They're so conscious. And it's not easy, believe me, because the more successful you become, the more demands land on your shoulders. However, you can manage that weight if you get good at deciding which demands, of deciding what are the distractions. I want you to watch less television, consume less news, get rid of the trashy magazines, stop spending so much time on Twitter or Facebook or online perusing, right? If you use Twitter, use it strategically. If you use Facebook, use it. Use it to connect, use it to contribute and create. But that's it. Stop perusing, right? All this perusing online is stealing people's momentum towards their real ambitions. So stop the distractions immediately. To the nth degree, I am obsessive about getting rid of the distractions. And that's why in a period of, you know, six years, every year, I've built a new million dollar brand six years in a row. And people go, that's amazing, but they're not listening to what I'm saying. I only built one every year. I was obsessive. That's all I did that year. I minimized all the distractions around it and I focused on making this one thing a vital success. Everything else pushed out of the way. I didn't engage in a million things. How do I write a book? I get rid of all the distractions and I write the book. So it's necessary for you to do the same. Even if you lead a large company, your ultimate goal in a large company is minimize distractions. One of the first things I do with Fortune 500 CEOs is get them out of about half of their meetings. I go, these meetings are sucking up your ability to create, guide and lead. Get rid of them. They're distractions. They're not needle movers. If it's not moving the needle towards your growth, your contribution, your impact, you need to look at it and go, mmm, I need to get rid of it. If it's not a joyous thing for you, if it's not moving towards you, you need to start asking, how can I minimize this? How could I not have to Deal with this as much. Could I delegate it? Could I drop it? Could I decide to focus on it later? It's managing with an obsessive mind distraction removal that will make you excel faster.

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 brendanshow 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@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.