Best Of: Why People Act the Way They Do

Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the Brendon 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 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 while, 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 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 strategy 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.

What drives people and what drives the way that they think, think and the way that they behave now, if you're new to my world or you haven't read a bunch of my work or been to High Performance Academy, you know, now for 18 years, I've been obsessed about this question. Once I had my car accident and I discovered at the end of our lives, we're all going to ask, did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? I started changing my own life and trying to figure out, well, how do I, you know, how do I influence my daily behavior and my thoughts and my beliefs so that I can be happy with the answers at the end of my life? So I can say, yeah, I lived yes, I loved, yes, I made a difference. How can I do that? And it was such a struggle because even though I knew the questions, the goal, right, the goal is to live my life. So I'm happy with the answers. Evaluation I'll ask of myself at the end of my life. But sometimes I'd live a day and I'd be like, what happened to me today? Where did I go off the rocker? How come I didn't do what I wanted to do today? And I know some of you struggle with that too. It's like, you know what to do, but one day or two days or a week goes by and you didn't move towards it. What is controlling your behavior? So I spent 18 years in deep study of psychology, neuroscience, high performance studies, positive psychology, trying to understand what is it that we can know about ourselves. And what I came up with is an understanding that there are only a few moving sort of important things in the mind that drive us. And once I discovered these 10 things, everything shifted. Because now at least I'd understand that, oh, this is what's going on with me, or this is what's important to me. And I'm calling this a social intelligence booster. Because once you understand that only 10 things are governing all of our behavior, it's simple. Now to give you an understanding of how important these 10 are. I've passed these by over 100 very well respected psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, practitioners, life coaches, people who are very well recognized in the human development potential world and said, is there anything I'm missing here? And after over 100 people, and after literally millions of people reading these 10 now, I have not had one who said, brennan, you're missing one or, gosh, two of these are duplicitous, which means it's a powerful framework that you might want to learn and study over a period of. The first primary drive we have is the drive for control. And that is, we want to be in control of ourselves. Our environment, our thoughts, our body, our day, our work, our lives, right? Soon as you yank some control from somebody and they get scared, they get sort of stuck in uncertainty, overwhelm comes in stress, they freak out, right? You know, your life, if you've ever felt at a period of time when you were out of control or things were out of control, it messes with you psychologically, right? It's a terrible thing. Control is the footing of all of our psychology, Right? We desire to have that at a very deep level. It's a primary human drive. When we don't feel like we can control our day, we feel freaked out. When we don't feel like we can control where our next meal will come from, we feel scarce. All negative. Well, often most negative emotions come from at some level, a lack of feeling in control or certain or strong about our lives, right? Whatever level of influence we don't have in our life, it causes lots of emotional turmoil. And once you understand this about people, it's so much easier to see when they freak out, right? When someone gets really angry about something, really in that moment, at some level, they don't feel like they're in control. So they have to overexert themselves with power actions. So someone takes, you know, acts obnoxiously, or somebody becomes too domineering, it's because they don't feel like they have enough control in that situation. And they're often acting out in ways that aren't positive, but that's what they're doing. They're attempting to control. Control is also at the base of other types of things. A lot of food disorders, like eating disorders, come from a feeling of someone being out of control or overwhelmed. And that comfort of being able to control this one aspect of their life, to control one outcome of their life, becomes a disorder. And this happens all the time in lots of minute little ways. And we just have to ask ourselves to keep ourselves mentally healthy. Well, what part of my life do I feel like I don't have enough control? And what steps could I do to gain more influence there? I just don't ever. I. Don't you ever forget how critical that is to other people that look when they don't feel like they're in control, they often act irresponsibly to you. And once you understand that someone's irresponsible actions are to you, have often nothing to do with you at all. Maybe something to do with the relationship, but really it's just someone who's out feeling out of control in their own life. So they're seeking to exert it in another way over you or toward you. Then it's not such a mystery. You're not like, why is it going on? You're kind of like maybe there's something in their life that they don't feel like they have a handle on, so they're acting out. And that's a very powerful thing. If you know some about my early background, I was bus I've done literally hundreds of mediations and high level negotiations, including being in a room of a billion dollar negotiation. I've had an incredible blessing in my career to be in lots of incredible deals, both for my own seven figure brands, but also in other businesses that I consulted with and I can share with you. A lot of the times at the negotiation table, he or she who has the most feeling of comfort and control often wins that negotiation. Those who don't feel like they're in control obviously try to snatch up anything to make them feel satiated, feel a little better. And the person who feels in control can parcel out some things because they know it really matters to them and they're just feeding the person who's in the negotiation who has an insatiable desire for some scarcity and to have something that they feel like they can control. So give somebody something that they can control, but keep the bigger picture. And obviously and often I should say you have a better control of that negotiation. It's a powerful tool in social negotiation and dealings. Second, competence. When we don't feel like we understand or have the ability to master any topic or environment, we freak out. And it's really important to know that if you lead other people, this is one of the most critical areas of the ability to develop social intelligence is to understand how important it is for other people to have enough knowledge and information to make their own decisions and to get better at things. So if you're a leader and you look at your team and you have to ask questions like have I empowered them with enough information to do a good job? Because if they don't feel like they have the knowledge, skill, ability to do well at something, they won't even try. Or worse, they'll jump in and do stupid things and then feel so bad about themselves like they're incompetent that they don't want to try anymore or progress anymore. Our feeling that we have to be good at something or that we understand and believe in our mind that we have the knowledge, skill, abilities and Talents to succeed at something is one of the primary indicators of whether or not we will even try something. Often people can have a big goal, a big dream, and they really believe that they want it, but they won't take any action towards it. And so your question has to be to them, do you feel like you know enough to be able to start doing that, that you could gather some momentum and become more successful? Or do you feel like you don't know what you should be doing, like you don't have the knowledge or information, the steps to proceed? It's one of the most important things in all of your dealings and influence when you're leading other people is to check into how they feel and whether or not they feel like they have enough competency to succeed. If they don't, they will not act. That explains a lot, doesn't it? Think about your own life, some of the major ambitions you've had that you didn't begin because you didn't feel like you could do a good job there, so you just stopped. That's a very common thing in life. Third is our drive for congruence, which is we have to the primary drive of the human identity that we want to feel congruent. We have an image of ourselves and who we are, and if we act outside of that, we feel guilty or we feel shameful. But if we act within that, we feel strong and certain and in control of our character. Right. A lot of our conduct, if it doesn't line up with our character, we start to feel incongruent and we start to feel frazzled as an identity in a person. And we start to feel like we're living two different lives, or we start to feel like we're really frustrated with things. A lot of people who are very frustrated in their lives, you have to understand, maybe you didn't do anything. They just don't feel like they are themselves. And so we have to ask that question. It's like, I wonder, do you feel okay? Do you feel like yourself recently? Or I've noticed that you don't seem like yourself. Are you okay? And that's one of the most powerful questions that we can ask as caregivers, as people we love about, you know, I've noticed, you know, you're often like this, but today you're acting like that. Is there anything that I could do to help? And that's activating their internal sensation of congruence. You're right. Usually I'm a person like this, but I've been acting like this Let me explain why. When somebody is off congruence or off integrity, often in their lives, something is going on. Often what's going on is lack of control or competence and we need to understand those things. Obviously, as I'm going through here, if this is all new of a topic for you, I can share this just talking about openly all I have in front of me, I don't have any notes. This is a lifetime of work in psychology, a lifetime of work in coaching people one on one. So this is easy for me. But I will hope that you will listen to this over and over and over again like mastery to say this is what's going on for people.

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 brendanshow because when you do that, I can look you up and we can find you on Instagram and post that in the social media. And sometimes we do all expense paid trips to people we find, we just randomly select people, we send them gifts, autographed 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 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.

Sam.