Best Of: The Special Powers Myth

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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 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 gonna 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.

The special powers myth. You know, we all want to believe that some people were just born with special powers, that there's these special people with special powers who were just more naturally inclined to be awesome and to live awesome lives. And we think because they were born that way that they innately have some kind of innate genius or innate talent or innate strengths that allow them to succeed beyond other people. But unless you haven't read anything in psychology over the last decade, here's the surprise that's not true. I know we want to believe it. And every human is born with unique abilities and talents and beliefs and different levels of IQs. We all have different biological and genetical basis of things like our intelligence or our happiness. We all come out of the oven a little bit different, in other words. And that difference, that uniqueness, is a beautiful thing. However, this huge myth that some special people have these special strengths and special powers that allow them to succeed is overblown and needs to be minimized in the personal development world as much as it has been in psychology. Right. If you go and read anything recently in the positive psychology movement as an example, you'll read works like Carol Dweck's book called Mindset, all about how your mindset, which is very malleable, meaning you can change it, right? Thoughts change your life. You've heard that before. That's more important often on the path to success than personality, than iq, than even sometimes the number of hours you put into something, that it's how you look at something and that you can train yourself on. You know, a lot of people's bad attitude, they weren't born with a bad attitude. They continue to develop that. Now, is it true that some people are born with disadvantages? Mental disabilities, mental illnesses, there's no question. And does that affect performance? Absolutely. But for the vast majority of people who make excuses about their success levels, they're usually saying, well, I'm just not like that. You know, I don't have the special powers they have. Or they say, you know, I took that strengths finder Brendon, and I don't have the unique mix of strengths it probably takes to do this type of job. Or they take a Myers Briggs and they say, well, I guess I shouldn't choose this topic for my college education, even though I'm passionate about it. And that's the wrong use of those tools. First, nothing about the major tools in existence today is about performance. It's more about personality and kind of figuring out some themes that you have. So, for example, if you take the disc profile, the Colby, the Myers Briggs, the strengthsfinders as examples, none of those are correlated with long term performance in any given domain or across domains. The literature and the research on those is so low that you should not take stock. Can you learn something about yourself? Absolutely. Can it generate some interesting discussions? Sure. Anytime you stare at yourself for a little while or take a survey, you can learn something about yourself. You know, do you prefer blue over red? Ooh, there's insights there. But those things are no more effective in guessing your future than horoscopes are. So don't take a lot of stock in those things. Instead, ask what's it going to take for you to serve in the situations you enter in? What's it going to take for you to achieve the goal? I tell people all the time, stop worrying about your strengths. The first question is not what are my strengths? And how do I apply them? No, the first question is what do you want of life? Now go develop into that. Whether that's developing and amplifying your strengths. Sure. Or fixing your weaknesses. Sure. But the first question isn't, let me start from my strengths. Because starting from your strengths is living in your comfort zones. There are other factors that have been proven by qualitative quantitative research and certainly by my career, if anything, that show that vast amounts of research. There are other factors that are more important than our innate talents and abilities, if those things even exist. You know, I'm sure if you've read books like Grit by Angela Duckworth or Peek by Anders Ericsson, you've seen an extraordinary amount of research that says we can change our thoughts. And by leveraging our mindset, our passion, our perseverance, and putting in dedicated mastery practice levels, well then, gosh, we can finally start to achieve things beyond what our IQ or personality might say as an example. So my research has validated that too high performance is not correlated. Let me say that again. High performance is not correlated with personality, with iq, with years of experience. It is not correlated with gender. It is not correlated with ethnicity. It is not correlated with nationality. It is not correlated with your compensation. It is not correlated based on whether or not you are even satisfied with your work. Because look, there are a lot of people who are satisfied with their work and they're not high achieving. They're just sitting there going on each day thinking about how can I take a three hour lunch, right? There are people who, you know this whole myth that the more you get paid, the higher you perform. Not necessarily true. So what does move the needle? Well, for the last decade I've studied that in depth. And if you haven't Heard about it. I've got a book called High Performance Habits. But we share a lot of this new data and a lot of this new insight that says, look, the factors that really matter to your performance, they're not the things that we used to think about and they're certainly not how you were born. High performers are not born, they are made by habits. And these six specific habits are what allow them to get ahead, even beyond nature or nurture. It's self determination, baby. It's choosing how do I want to show up, how much do I want to give. So if you've ever said I'm just not like that, or I'm not capable, or I wasn't born to do that dream, be careful. Because any label that you've been given by the strengths finder or Myers Briggs or by yourself or the people around you can be dangerous. Your potential is not fixed. Your brain is not fixed. Your thoughts are not fixed. Your personality isn't even fixed. Over large scale meta analysis, we see personality changes in youth, it changes in midlife, and it's still changing towards the end of our lives. Nothing is fixed, nor are your situations, circumstances or anything in life. You can change, my friend. You can get ahead. And it's what you're doing today that matters more than where you came from, what you've been through, or what some test or some person told you. So here's what to focus on. These are the factors that matter more than innate talent or innate genius or innate special abilities. These are the things that matter. In high performance research, we know without question clarity. And seeking to develop clarity or generating clarity is one of the most important high performance habits. Look, give me two people. One person with extremely high level of iq. Well, let's just say, let's match it. Two people of equal iq. Who's going to win? The person who has more clarity about who they are, what they need to do, what the goals are, what the timelines are, what's necessary to win, who has more mindfulness in the moment, awareness.

These people.

Clarity. This person's going to win over the person if they're lacking in this, even if they have the same iq. Matter of fact, if you take somebody who has a higher level of intelligence, ability, years of experience, et cetera, who has everything set up for them in life. But if they don't have clarity, they're just spinning their wheels. They're distracted, they're confused, they're lacking purpose or intention. All the things that we know move the needle in personal development and in Psychology. It's very, very important to develop greater levels of clarity in your life. So ask yourself the questions of life on a continual basis. Like on a Sunday night, sit down and say, okay, what do I really want now in my life? What are the major steps I'd have to take to get them? Who do I want to be in my life as a person, but also as who I want to be as I interact with other people? What is it going to take for me to develop and become the person who gets to have the next level of success? Not I'm not like that, but what would it take for you to grow into that? Right? It's not about starting from your strengths, it's about starting from a place of service. What must I be? Who must I become? How must I arise to serve even better? That's the stuff of real personal development. I know you know that. We know that energy is critical to performance, right? You could have all the special powers in the world, but if Kryptonite is wiped, you're out. You're not performing Superman. When you are tired, when you are less energized, when you are struggling, I'm telling you, you're not as good, you don't perform as well, you don't make as good as decisions or as swift of decisions. When you're lacking that mental and physical vibrancy, all of your performance levels go down. Your cognitive scores go down, your VO2 max goes down. That's what happens when you're breathing and running, right? All these things that we can measure both physically and mentally, every capability that you possibly have goes down when your energy is low. That's why in our programs like High Performance Academy, we're always stressing your physiology. You got to get right, not just managing your moment to moment state, but managing the long term stuff that matters. Nutrition, exercise, the ability to sleep well, the mental preparations of meditation, the things that get your brain and body optimized to power up and learning. That energy isn't something that lands on you, but you generate it. I know you've heard me say that so many times. We also know that a specific kind of energy happens when high performance starts happening. And that energy is really an emotional energy and that's that quality of joy and it's that quality of alertness and is that quality of confidence. When you have those three things, that energy is high. And it looks like you have special powers, but the reality is you're just choosing to create it.

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. You know, just go out, post it somewhere, post yourself, listening to it. Make sure you hashtag the Brendan 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 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.