Better Your Habits Today

When I talk about high performance habits, it's very different than other books about, you know, habit. Most books about habit are about just how do you form one so that it becomes unconscious and you don't have to think about it again? And I'm like, that's not the kind of habit that makes you succeed over the long term, ever. It's not unconscious competence that keeps somebody winning over and over and over. It's mastery. And mastery requires us to fully engage, and it requires us to be deliberate about our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions. Today we're going to talk about the myths and the mindsets that might be holding you back from having a different quality of life. And that goes for those of you who are on this right now who are already advanced, because what we found with high performers worldwide is sometimes the way they were thinking looked differently or was more advanced than the general public. In other areas, not so much. It was just that they made common sense, common practice. So we'd be talking about how do you understand which habits you should focus on in each of these different areas, and then how do you really apply it so it sticks and so that you rise to the next level a little easier? Because, look, maybe your last journey that got you to where you are today was really hard. You know, if you look at your past so far, it's been, you know, all over the place, and you've had a lot of crappy days, and maybe the relationships you've had so far weren't as vibrant and fulfilling as you wanted. Maybe your career or your goals seemed too far out of reach, or if you reached them, you had to do it by, you know, bluster and burnout. We want to get you back to a state of harmony or equilibrium in which you really feel like you're at your best. Like you are what we call high performing. You feel like not only are you more, you know, engaged in the moment and capable of performing well, but you also feel, like, satisfied and fulfilled as you're striving. We're gonna bust a lot of myths today, you know, about the hustle and the grind and, you know, being lonely at the top and all this other stuff that's become very great fodder for social media, but just doesn't have any truth in what we see from the research. I mean, there's a lot of podcasters or Instagramers or people who are posting ideas about how hard you have to work and kind of work yourself into the ground. The good news about high performers is that's not Their reality data worldwide confirms that high performers, they're happy, they're striving, satisfied, they're, they're, maybe they're not settling, but they're certainly not dissatisfied with where they're at. They still have an extremely positive range of emotions and positive relationships. Meaning they didn't burn themselves out, they didn't wreck their relationships. They didn't obsessively focus on something so much that it took away from their health or from their families. I mean, unbelievable data. We'll share with you here. That will be exciting for you and I promise we'll really engage you. For those who have supported the book, again, a big shout out. You'll get so many more tools, resources in the book. But my job today is to not just recite what this book is about to you. I'll make sure that I talk about these topics you've been asking about. And that's again, sort of abundance and confidence and looking through the lens of that. So I welcome everybody here. You've already supported me. So this is me just saying thank you and teaching based on what you've already been asking us about business and career, confidence, fulfillment, handling other relationships, chasing and pursuing your dream and staying after it and not apologizing when you have ambitions that might be higher than other people around you. And that's a big theme that you guys have been asking about too. And so with all that, I've got a curriculum in mind. First, I want to baseline everybody into a high performance conversation to get your mind into both the book and into your life, thinking about, how are you performing already? Like, how is it going in your relationships, in your health, in your career? Are you as far along as you wanted to be? Do you feel like that incredible sense of vibrancy and joy at what you're doing, even when it's hard, even if it's a struggle? Cause that happens too. But how do you stay on rhythm, getting stuff done and not alienate the humans around you when you're tired, exhausted or frustrated? We'll talk about all of that too. Now this might sound like, gosh, we got a lot to talk about. I'm like, we do. The good news is this book creates a framework in which it's possible for me to teach a concept and then talk to you about your career and your health and your wealth in that one area. And it's also a beauty of this experience we get to have here today. Make sure you take this time to really think about your life. This could be just an informational presentation for you, or it could be transformational. I always tell people, you know, when you're taking notes, either you're just writing down what you're hearing and you're excited about it, or you're writing your manifesto, you're writing your goals and your dreams and that next level stuff for you. And that's important. So look at it this way. This is a great time of the year to check in and see how you're feeling about the major areas of your life. To really score yourself, you know, scale of 1 to 10. One, you suck at that area right now. You know, if you're honest and 10, you, you're crushing it. You're great. What's number 11 for you? We'll talk about all of this here as well. I'm gonna go into some of the insights about the book so that we're all on the same page. Cause I know some of you haven't got it yet. So let me give you a high level overview of the main habits. And when I talk about each of the habits, then we'll jump down into other parts of your life. Okay, so this book is literally what the subtitle says, how extraordinary people become that way. And why is it different? And why is what we're talking about different here today? Because this is one of the first books ever written in the high performance realm that was really grounded in science, really grounded in analysis, really grounded, not just in, you know, the author's perspective. Because there's a lot in this book I learned I didn't know. And there's a lot of things that I've taught in the past that were, maybe they weren't wrong, but they weren't as important as some of the other things that we found in this book. And like I said earlier, some of the things in this book, common sense, but not common practice. But I got Data points, over 2 million data points from 190 countries. We did more diligence and discipline in finding what correlated to people's sense of their long term success than anyone's ever done before. And then it wasn't just data and surveys. It was me jumping into interviews with the people who scored the highest. And these are people who are already in the top 15%, maybe in their category where that's their career or their industry or their age range or their income level. Then I'd interview the top 15% of the top 15%. And I wasn't doing it for entertainment style. Like what you hear, like as an example in podcasts where they're like, tell me about your childhood and how'd you find this passion? And I mean those are good. But these were structured, academic sort of interviews. I did ethnographic research and we did the deep dive into these people's lives to understand what they were really doing. I was asking habits, as you'll see in this book, when you see the list of questions we gave them, it was pretty intense. These interviews were very practical and that's what makes this book, I really think special. It's incredibly well researched. And I don't just say that because hey, look at me. I used a research team. Like we went way deep on this stuff. And then I also interviewed the folks and then I've had the blessing now over the last 10 years of coaching some of the most extraordinary people in the world, all to bring these insights to everybody. So I hope that that grounds you in what we'll be talking about here. Because the search has always been which habits lead to dramatic improvement and proven long term success. And when we say proven long term success, we mean that these people could document it was an observable measure, whether that was by income or years of success or even if it was their own self ascribed levels of success over year then validated by a 360 performance assessment. I mean, we went to the wall in the overall research. And when I say the research, I want to be really clear. It's not like we did one survey one time, okay, we did some analysis so that we could create methodology reports and some validated assessments where we cared about construct validity and all the academic stuff. But then I've been researching and interviewing and conducting assessments with my audience for over a decade now. So it's really given us some great insights. And I want to share right off the bat with what we're talking about here today. When we talk about high performance, we mean something specifically, we mean succeeding beyond standard norms consistently over the long term. This means whatever the measure of success usually is. Let's say the measure of success is 100, okay? A high performer would be scoring higher than that hundred and they have been consistently scoring higher than that 100, whatever that 100 means long term. And our long term was we were looking at at least three to five years of sustained performance in a category. And then for many people we interviewed, I mean we're talking decades at the top of their game. So this was really fascinating research. And I just want to get into what it feels like for you though, because I don't want it to feel like oh Brandon's just going to talk about academic stuff the whole time. Here's what it feels like. And this is important for you to write these three things down. Okay? If you haven't written anything down yet, that's okay. Now begin. You need three things to feel like you're going to consistently be at your best so that you can perform. Okay? We did keyword analyses on all of our subjects and we asked them if you could describe how you feel when you are high performing in any given situation. For some people, that meant performing well on the field, other people doing well on a test because high performance is correlated with GPA and academic performance, too. And then maybe it's in their craft of what they're doing as an artist or a business person. But we need these three things. Number one, full engagement. And you've heard this huge conversation worldwide about mindfulness. All it's saying is, get here, get in this moment, put your body and your mind, woof, like right here, like, bam. Get present. And you've got to be able to do that consistently over the long term if you really want to succeed. And I know you already know that, but how many times, you know, have you found yourself just going through the motions? You know, you just kind of get up, you go over, you know, slam down that coffee or that morning shake, and then you're off to the day. But then you realize it might be three or four o' clock and you, and you, and you haven't felt yourself all day. You know what I mean? You haven't felt your heart, you haven't noticed your breath. You haven't really observed your own attitude and your own thoughts. You've been sort of oblivious to other people because you're typing along, they come in and express a need and. And you found yourself answering something, but they left the room and you don't even remember what you just talked about with them. You ever been there? So maybe you can score yourself. Let's be honest. If I parachuted into your life here and I followed you around the last 30 days and I said, how present are you? Being one, you were not present. You were checked out, going through the motions. And 10, man, you were just like, aware. I mean, you had like that Dalai Lama awareness thing going on. You were just like vibrant and in the moment, you were just like right there and people could feel it. Where were you in the last 30 days? And let me share my journey with you, too. You know, I would say for me, I was at like a level six. And that's not good. That's not good at all. You know, I would say in general, most of the time in my life, I feel like I'm a good eight or nine, like, solid. But I was a little of a six this last 30 days because I traveled so much. And that threw me out of my rhythms a little bit. We had extreme performance pressures to deliver on the book, to deliver on other promotions, to speak on these big stages, to deliver consulting and some curriculum and tools to other of our clients. I mean, it was odd. So I hope that as I talk through this with you today, there's not a sense of like, I figured everything out. You and me, we're going to work on these high performance habits our entire life. When I talk about high performance habits, it's very different than other books about, you know, habit. Most books about habit are about just how do you form one so that it becomes unconscious and you don't have to think about it again. And I'm like, that's not the kind of habit that makes you succeed over the long term, ever. It's not unconscious competence that keeps somebody winning over and over and over. It's mastery. And mastery requires us to fully engage, and it requires us to be deliberate about our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, how we're doing our work. And so these practices we're going to have to work at for life, and engagement is one of them. We all have our ups and downs of engagement throughout the day. Our goal is to get you to higher levels of those. And let me just give you a simple tool right off the bat. You need to set up some kind of trigger or triggers throughout the day that bring you back to presence in your work and in your relationships. I don't know what they are for you, but a trigger is when something happens, you teach yourself to do something else, right? It's like a cue happens. You trigger yourself. That's like the basics of, like, habit development. And what we're trying to get you to do is if A happens, then you do B. To make you more present, let me give you simple examples of mine. When I'm at home and let's say I'm working and family team, somebody comes into a room. One of my ways to get present with people is when I'm sitting down and somebody walks in and they want to talk. Like if somebody comes into my office as an example, at my house or here, one of the things I try to train myself to do is if somebody wants to talk, I stand up out of my chair and I Engage them. Because if I'm sitting down, I might be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't really see them. So soon as someone, hey, Brendan. I try to get up. Yes. And it's just a simple thing, right? Same thing with presence. For me on my phone. If you looked on my alarms, there's all these little labels that go off throughout the day. Same thing on my computer throughout the day, these little alarms are going off that are helping me kind of get back into the moment. You know, I, for myself personally, I meditate every day. Sometimes it's twice a day. In general, it's at least one meditation per day, 20 minutes. If you want to know how I do that to stay present and more engaged and fulfilled throughout the day. I have a video on YouTube you can check out called the Release Meditation Technique RMT. We've taught RMT to over 2 million people now have watched that video. I mean, I don't know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of downloads by now of the tools or the sheets for those and just Google Release Meditation Technique and my name and watch that. But it's a practice that's conditioning presence for me. And we found a lot of high performers do meditate. Here's the interesting thing though. We did not find that that one specific thing correlated with their long term performance more important than the other things that are in this book. Meaning maybe meditation was a part of them generating energy, which we'll talk about. But it wasn't the only thing that gave them the performance edge. Does that help? Because I think what's happened in personal development, especially today with hackers, they're like, do this one thing and that one thing will make all the difference forever. And I'm like, no, I know a lot of people who meditate who are jerks. I know a lot of people who meditate. They're very calm, but they couldn't be productive out of a paper bag. Okay? So it's never just one thing. What we found is there's a set of deliberate practices and habits that are all in the book that will help you get there. Okay? So trust that I'm not giving one silver bullet here. We're doing a comprehensive training and approach to this conversation. I need you to be more fully engaged in your work, more fully engaged in your relationships, more fully engaged in your health. Because you know what people do is they disengage. And when you disengage from your relationships, you're out of presence, you're out of that finding of fulfillment. Because A lot of people ask Brendan, how do I find fulfillment? And maybe they see something that I'm doing online or something someone else is doing in their world, and they say, oh, oh, they must be so much more fulfilled than me because they're doing X, Y and Z. And that's a big mistake. Don't make that. You know, I remember when I was, you know, coming up in the industry, I'd see some, you know, special, you know, some famous CEO and I'd see him, you know, traveling in luxury, or I would see somebody, you know, oh, they had a big team or look at their big fancy house, and my mindset would be wrong. And it would be thinking, oh, well, they must be so much more fulfilled than me because they have those things. But more things aren't going to make you more fully engaged and more things aren't going to make you more fulfilled. What will bring high performance but that sense of engagement and fulfillment in life is this. How are you engaging the moment? The situations, the persons around you and your craft, those things are what really are mattering. Like how are you engaging what you do have? I know people who say all the time at the top levels, you know, who aren't high performing, right, they might have financial success, but they're not high performing in their life. Does that make sense? Maybe they're, you know, achieving a lot, but they're burning themselves out and they wreck their relationships and I mean, who wants that life? But maybe they got some money and I hear the ones who are not performing well, but maybe they got lucky or maybe they did work really, really hard, but they blew up the rest of their life to do that. They'll often say things like, man, Brendan, I wish I could go back to a time when it was so much easier. I got all these things. A nicer house and higher thread count and fancier shampoo and whatever else they buy, I don't know. And they'll say, I got all these things, but I'm not happy. And their lack of fulfillment isn't going to be fulfilled by filling up their bank account a little bit more. It's just not where it's going to come from. Your next level of fulfillment and high performance is going to come from training yourself to more fully engage in the moment. Let me say it again. Your next level of fulfillment in life, Literally, life fulfillment satisfaction and high performance are both correlated. And we can measure Life Satisfaction Scale, High Performance Indicator Scale. Both those are strongly correlated with how you are deciding to engage in the moment where there's engagement and presence there really matters. If we can up those things, then the research in my interviews suggest that you'll be more fulfilled and you'll be higher performing. So score yourself. How are you really engaging the day? Are you conscious? Are you deliberate? Are you aware? Are you present? Or are you just going through the motions, man? And if you're just going through the motions, don't make the mistake I made when I was a young person, okay? I'm still young. Don't make the mistake I remember making in my 20s so often in that I would say, well, I'm not engaged because the work sucks, this job sucks. You know, I'm not engaged here because I don't like that co worker. And you cannot blame your level of engagement on anybody else. You control your level of engagement in life. You cannot blame anybody else. And soon as you do that, you're tearing yourself from your personal power and you're guaranteeing that you're not going to fill your dream because what you'll end up doing is you'll just, you know, it's almost like blade by blade of excuses and blame. You're knocking down, you know, your own potential. And so be very careful to ever blame engagement, other people or anything else. Right. Look, I'm here with you and I hope you feel my presence right here with you. It's been a crazy like 72 hours for us. Like we've been really going to serve you guys and make this possible. I mean, we've been going, I can't walk in the studio today and be a high performing two trainer. If I walk into you and I say, well, you know, I guess I'm just being awful today because I haven't really, you know, slept as much as usual or ate as much or worked out like, I can't do that. I can't blame my engagement on last night or the day before because in the moments that you are called to serve, you either choose that you are going to be deliberate and rise to that occasion or you're going to blame something. So rise, my friends. Measure your engagement second big thing. And I promise I won't go this long on all of them. Okay? The second big one though is joy. Joy, if you're not as wealthy as you wanted to be, you're probably not as joyful on the wealth journey as you should be. I was amazed by this. The level of happiness that high performers have. I mean, that's a big life outcome. And in the measures of psychology, whether or not people are happy and there's lots of scales that have been conducted and used over the years to determine that. And we leveraged a lot of that to make sure that we validated our overall construct here. It was amazing to see how happy high performers are worldwide now. You think, well, no doubt, Brendan, they're performing well, of course they'd be happy. Yeah. But one thing was really interesting. We think often the cart before the horse, we say, oh, well, you know, they became happy because they're high performing. But in my interviews, I often found that when somebody switched their attitude and became happy, in other words, generated happiness, then they started performing higher. It's like they're not happy just because they're wealthy. They got happy and started feeling wealthier in all areas of their lives. Right. The abundance came into their life. It's not like abundance came in, thank God, now I'm happy. It was reverse order. It was. They chose positive emotions over and over and over and over and over, meaning they chose their attitude, they chose to be an optimist, they chose to be happy. And by choosing happiness in their life, it became easier to perform even the mundane tasks that you and I wouldn't like. And maybe we complain about a little bit, meaning coming from that place of a deep sense of gratitude, happiness or joy, experiencing lots of joy. Not because necessarily something gave you joy, but you brought the joy that helps you get better. Like, if you're around me, it's pretty rare that I complain. I'll be very factual about, like, what I'm doing, like, how's it going? I'm like, it's bananas, crazy. But I won't complain about it because I feel joyful in the opportunity to serve. I think that if you have the opportunity to serve, you don't complain about the work required to do it. You know, it's like you honor that part, that struggle, that difficulty to serve. But more than just like begrudging it, bring the joy. Look, there is a reason why worldwide that people understand the concept of whistle while you work. As soon as you say it, people go, oh, I know what that means. And it's not just because of Walt Disney, though, did a pretty good job on that one, right? It's because we know we should be happy engaging our day and not waiting for some delivery day when we finally became happy. If that sounds too common sense for you, okay, if I jumped into your life in the last six months and I looked at how much happiness you brought to the day, not took from it, you brought. I don't mean like, oh, Brendan, you could follow me around. My children brought me so much joy. I'm like, okay, that's one level, right? That's joy that the situations of the world can give you. But you know what, there's been a lot of turmoil in the world. And I know that hardship because I grew up with some very difficult times. And I have supported people in maybe any of the difficult, the most difficult times of their life, including death by doing hospice work. I've seen a lot. And having coached for a decade, you can imagine I talk about people's problems all day. I'm pretty familiar with people, how they handle them, and the person who can will themselves to choose happiness even amid that and bring it into the situations, you know. About three blocks from right behind your camera is a street here in Portland, Oregon. It's a tough place and they have a couple soup kitchens on the line there. And if you ever go volunteer in your local city, I hope you'll volunteer in your community and make that a big part of your life. But if you ever go volunteer, like let's say a soup kitchen, it's so obvious when you see a good volunteer, I mean, it's like it's this. It's not that they know where everything is. It's that they are happily doing the work that most people would see. Like, I mean, you're like, well man, the guy's sweeping the floor volunteering and you think, I'm glad I didn't get that task right. You could think that. But the guy be whistling and having a good time and just so happy to be helping out. The people who are happy to be helping out are bringing joy into the situations of life. That's making them feel more happy, more engaged. And yeah, they perform better. Because you know what sucks? When you're just doing the grind and it's 10pm at night and you hate the process. You know what I'm talking about. When it's 10 o' clock and you know you need to stay up till two in the morning and it's a grind. And you identify as just, I just gotta hustle and I just gotta grind right now. Guess what? That 10:00pm till that 2:00am, you know what that's gonna feel like? It's gonna hurt. That's what it's gonna feel like. I know I was there last night at 10pm going, I gotta go to at least 2am minimum. How am I gonna approach this next block of time? Am I going to be like, oh, I can't believe I do this again. And we're like, I'm going to grind it out. No. I'm like, okay, I'm going to bring some joy to this process. Because if I can put some positive motion on this. And guess what? 11 noon. 1, 2, let's rock. Okay. Yes, sir. 11 midnight. 1, 2, let's Rock. But I'm enjoying it. I'm having, like. If you actually saw me work, you're like, he must be on something. Why is he like that? And it's not caffeine, trust me. Ask my team. I have no caffeine in front of me right now. Sometimes I do, but nothing right now. Because I. You know, I'm very susceptible to that. Some of you guys are, too. You know, it's like, if my arm got cut off and you gave me an Advil, it'd grow back. You know, it's like, I'm very susceptible to things that I put in my body. Cause I'm pretty clean in general. So I'll tell you, it's like, it's not that that gets me through. And what gets me through is joy. Write it down. I really mean this. Write it down in your journal. What gets me through is joy. What gets me through is joy. That attitude didn't just change my life. I found it over and over and over again in the top 15% of the top 15%. They engaged the work, even when it wasn't sexy, because of the attitude they brought to it. And you know this. Again, I know it's common sense, but not common practice. But Viktor Frankl talked about it. The last of our human freedoms is the ability to choose one's own attitude. Next up, confidence. You got to start approaching your work with confidence. Same thing. Listen to this. You think, and this might be your big stumbling block. So please listen. You think. Just as soon as you get more success, just as soon as you get more accolades. Respect, support, money, experience, competence. A better community of people around you. Then you will now have earned the right and the blessing to be more confident. Is it true? People wait for something to give them happiness. They also wait for something to give them confidence. And that was a stunner. Confidence was so strongly intertwined in the conversations between the six habits that we'll go through. It stunned me. Even though I have a program called the Confidence Course, I still didn't know until we did this data to understand how important that is for people, but not to have it, to generate it. Your next level of performance at what you're doing does not only need to come from competence and Community, which usually that's where people take it from, right? I get better at what I'm doing. So the more experience I have, the more easy it is for me to do, the more confidence it is, right? That happens from experience. You might have the same thing in your genre or your career or your life. You've done it so many times, no problem, right? But there's an unconscious competence to that because you've done it so many times. But then there is a willed confidence that you're just saying, you know what? I'm going to do this confidently. Write it down, my friend. Just write down, literally write down the words, I'm going to do this confidently. Just choose that. See, most people, they start bumbling into something and then they want it to give them confidence. When I first started doing videos or books or training or on the big stages, I would have seen in that movie. We got, like. My development was a little slow over my first couple years. I don't think I performed that much better. And it was because I kept waiting for something like some kind of size of a stage or, I don't know, some. I don't know what I was waiting for to be more of a confident speaker. And then I was talking with a person who's very high performing and not even in my industry. But he was telling me about how he just decided to start owning his role in his business. He was the CEO of his business. He said one day, Brendan, I just. When I walked in the door, I don't know what it was for me, but I walked into the door, Brendan, and I knew I owned that space. You know, I was leasing it. He said, I didn't really own it because I owned this space I was in. And I realized, these are my employees, this is my space. And he said, I just stepped in full to the ownership role of who I was. And he goes, instantly, I became a better leader because I owned it Now. I was confident that that's who I was and what I did. Nothing happened for him. No bigger paycheck, no more team, not any smarter or maybe smarter by choosing a different disposition, right? I think a lot of intelligence is choosing the right disposition for how we need to serve. And he said, I just owned it. Well, I know it might be simple to think about, but ask about maybe, are you in a relationship right now? Maybe you're married or you have a significant other, or maybe it was just, if you think about a relationship you have with a family member, have you fully stepped into owning that role yet? Like with confidence. You know, I was working with a friend, right now he's having some challenge with his relationship with his wife. And I was over visiting with them and I saw even the way he brought things up and the conversations that we have, he was just so demasculated. You know, Is that a word? Sounds like one. Emasculated. Not demasculated. It sounds better when it's demasculated. Like it got taken away. They should change that word. Let's just change that word. So he was, he was very emasculated. He was a confident guy, but he wasn't being confident in his ability to love his wife. That makes sense. I've worked with Olympic level athletes and if they don't bring the confidence on the field, they're going to get smashed. And it wasn't like they needed 10 more training sessions. It's the mindset that we're walking into things. So I know I'm going a little bit long on these particular three things, but I do this at High Performance Academy, I do this in my training programs. Because if we're not, you and me on the same page here about this, it's. It's going to be hard to make you another level of success for yourself. Right? Because you can't feel like you're gonna be self made unless you finally say, I'm gonna own this moment. I'm gonna bring some joy here and I'm gonna do this confident. Maybe it's time for you to be more confident in the relationships and the roles that you play in your life, to really own them. If you're gonna be a good wife, own that and be a great wife. Like know that as part of my identity, feel that, you know, if you're going to be a great leader with your team, own that. Walk in the office tomorrow more confident than you have in six months for no other reason, I promise. People go, whoa, what's up with you? And that feeling that you have like that emotion, these things, presence with your team, joy with your team, confidence with your team, Social contagion, baby, it'll spread, but you gotta bring it. You can't wait for your team to give it to you. You can't wait for Skills to give it to you. You can't wait for support to give it to you. If we can get you pulling these three feelings into your life, we're gonna put you on the same deck as high performers. Because as I walked around and had the conversations, they had these things, some of them, but most of them brought it, they generated it. They chose it. They owned it. Hey guys, it's Brandon. I'm jumping in here real quick. First, I want to make sure you've gone to progressmode.com to join the newsletter because I have a resource for you related to this episode and I have an upcoming meetup with my private group, Ultra. If you've ever liked to be in a private group with me where I help you get more progress towards your passion projects or to build your business or your brand in a bigger way, just go to progressmo.com, click on Private Group to apply to. See you can get into Ultra and we can take it to the next level by getting in person and meeting up virtually once a month online as well. Just go to progressmode.com how do we know what I'm saying is true? And then we'll jump into the actual habits and how it applies to wealth, your relationships, and the sense of fulfillment and confidence you do have. Before the book came out, these were the numbers where we're at now. Now we're infinitely farther now because the research and the support of many of you taking many of our assessments or tools or doing whatever, but over a quarter million assessments now have gone out. We've partnered with organizations that have over 300,000 employees who, who gave us access to the performance reviews of their top 15%. I've graduated over 1.6 million students from our own programs studied what worked for them, what they watch, what questions they have, have been doing, the training, the before and after of our events, all this stuff. But most importantly, we did those global surveys, those structured one on one interviews, those academic literature reviews, those validated assessments. We did all this research and, and here's what we found. There's over 100 different performance variables that you can try or do. Okay, now I want you to think about this just for a moment because you have a lot of your own answers and today I hope you grasp some of those. So let me ask you this. What makes a difference in your performance? Let me ask again. What makes a difference in your performance? Think about your work for a moment. Maybe you're an entrepreneur or maybe you work for somebody, but when you're crushing it one week, but you suck the week before, why whatever answer you come up with probably fits into what we have measured here, what we call performance variables. These are things that they change or you could do to get a different result, right? That's what we call performance variables in the research. Okay, so what is it for you I would love for you to just take a moment right now with your journal and write it down. Like if you have a crappy week and then you crush it, what is the difference? Take a moment. Take a moment. Actually write down your journal. Okay, so what's the difference? Why is it sometimes you suck and other times you crush it? Well, we found there's over a hundred of those different things. But then here's what we did. We as part of the, the research. And this is mostly the first initial phase that I went through personally. I said, well, is this something that they're doing on purpose? That means is it deliberate? Can I see that they're doing it? Can I change the way that they do it? Is what they are doing something? We can train other people and is it effective whether it's the secretary or the CEO? Okay, this is kind of how you go through the research. And what we did, it boiled down to just six habits, 100 different performance variables. Now, truth be told, I think I came down to about 31 habits that I really believed made the difference that fit into these categories. And why are these categories important? Because we can train you on them. You can get better on them. It's not just like your personality and you're naturally good and perfect. It's not about natural tendencies. It's about what do you deliberately do to keep calm. Climbing, baby. Because a lot of people have unbelievable strengths and skills that we're talking about, but they don't deliver. So they came down to these six habits. And let me tell you what they weren't though they are important, they weren't the very common things you heard right? A lot of personal development. And the different between my work and other people's is I've always been the next level guy. I'm the advanced guy. Okay, Lots of people will tell you, just keep going. Work hard, man, Be passionate, focus on your strengths. Practice a lot, be grateful, stick to it. But if you read the book, the first chapter, we kind of blow through that because we go, there's a lot of people who are very grateful and hardworking, but they're not high performing, they're not making it. There's a lot of people, you know what, they do practice and they keep losing. There's a lot of people who are passionate and are persistent. They don't got on people skills though, so they're not high performing. There's a lot of good people following the good basic advice. And I'll tell you, I tell you my story. In my book, I did all these things. And you know what? They worked. I got initial success. This is great for initial success, but it's not going to take you over the next mountain. It might get you in the game, might not keep you in the game. And so what we found is high performance is not strongly correlated with how old you are. So don't make that excuse that when I'm 100 years old, I'm still watching training from people. Because if you get one insight, look, if all you got was tomorrow, you said, you know what? Today I'm gonna focus on being engaged. I'm gonna be joyous and I'm gonna be confident. You will build yourself better. You will be better on the road to greater levels of wealth and abundance and fulfillment in your life from those three things. So if you're just here, celebration, you're already doing great. But high performance, look, men and women, equal performers problem is not always equal pay. And that sucks. And we all know there's a gender gap in pay, especially in the Fortune 1000. And so I'm here to be a champion for everybody who's ever been that. Look, performance is also not tied to nationality. It's not tied to your iq. It's not tied to extroversion or introversion. And that's not just my research. This is literature review, right? Not just strengths. So you don't have like a perfect mix of strengths that makes you perfect. It's not tied to creativity. So if you think like, well, I just, I'm not creative like other people. It's not that. It's not empathy either. Empathy's important. But lots of people are very empathetic but don't get anything done, you know, it's not tied to your years of experience. There's lots of people who've been doing it for something for 20 years and they're lazy on their bones. So. And is not tied to compensation, meaning how much you get paid. There's lots of people getting paid 30 grand who are out hustling people making 100, right? So as you know those to be truths, I also say this. No excuses, None. So you can't say, well, Brendan, I can't high perform in my life because of this situation. I am being held back in this way at this particular place. And I'm like, you know what? Maybe right now, but I bet you're going to be alive a long time. Maybe it's time to make a decision to get yourself into a better environment where you can succeed. But ask yourself and be accountable. Always own it. Go, am I bringing my best into this environment despite these suckers? Because I'll tell you, I've had jobs before where I looked around, some co workers, I was like, man. And they would make me feel bad for having higher ambition to do better. And that's a challenge. You know, you might come from a family or a community or cultural background where it's not okay to, you know, really put yourself out there, where it's not okay to celebrate your successes, where it's not okay to become wealthy, where it's not okay to have the ambition that you have. And I'm just here to say this, do not let anybody or any circumstances around you ever limit your ambition. Ever. Don't let that happen. Because look at the greats. A lot of them came from nothing and they didn't have support and they didn't have, you know, a silver spoon in their mouth. And they still made it. They still made it. How? High performing habits. That's what got them there. That's what takes them to the next level. So don't think it's like if you weren't, you know, imbued with a perfectly creative mind or you don't find yourself as likable as other people or you feel like you take your Myers Briggs and there's some. Look, Myers Briggs is not correlated with long term high performance. It's just not. Personality isn't even in deep psychological studies. And you do lots of work in psychology and I know we got a lot of psychologists here, so give a shout out, test the book, run it through me and ask that. And you know, you know that even in the big five personality traits measured in academic sciences for psychology, and those typically are like whether or not your levels of openness, let's say your levels of conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, that kind of thing, Those big five, the only one that really has a good correlation over the long term is conscientiousness. But here's the, and here's the deal. Even that one isn't that particularly impressive in its strong correlations in lots of different domains, meaning across people's domains. It's very important. By the way, and by the way, anybody could say something is correlated with something, right? I challenge my own research because you know what we also found? Strongly correlated with success. I don't know, people who took showers, people who eat food. Wow. I mean, look, we can. People who wear shoes succeed. I mean, we could make all. I mean, there's no doubt that you can bend the science towards whatever. And a lot of psychologists do that, unfortunately. We did a pretty good discipline here in the research. But I will share with you, I don't think I have all the answers either. What we found is the research suggests these things and there are strong correlations. But what we definitely found is you cannot blame where you are from. You cannot do that because we had people who had no money and they're crushing it. And I bet there's people right now. You were the first one in your family. How many of you were the first ones in your family to really succeed? I mean, really do it? You didn't have a lot of things. Maybe you had, you know, a very challenging upbringing, just like your siblings, but you crushed through for some reason. Why? It's not because you were better than or your personality was perfect than somebody else. It was, I bet, the high performing habits that we'll talk about. So why am I saying this? I want you to write this one down. No excuses. Write at the top of your journal my old excuses and write down everything you've been allowing yourself to think or feel or do to hold you back. The old excuses, right? Well, I'm not happy because my spouse, I mean, your spouse, I know, can significantly shape your happiness. But you got to own your own happiness, right? Look at all the things in the world that can make us unhappy right now. I mean, look at all of them and look at how easily and almost in some ways. And forgive the language because I don't like this language. But I think it's important to be abrupt with this particular one. Look how pathetic some members of our society are being right now in blaming everything else and being pathetically pulled into the negative karma and the negative energy. Right? I do. I think of that. And if you don't like that word, I'm taking it from even a perspective. Do you remember Winnie the Pooh? You remember Winnie the Pooh? He had those two little friends. He had. One of them was like Piglet, the pink one. And he had the other one. What was it? What was it? It was a donkey, right? Remember Eeyore? You remember Eeyore? Was that a little pathetic little dude? He was a pathetic little dude. I don't know if you don't like that language, but he was a pathetic little donkey, okay? And some people, they are being pathetic like that because they say it's the news. It's got me so down and like the news. You're an adult and you're letting the news get you down. It's the people at work. The people at work. And you're over the age of 18 and you're blaming them for your attitude. I just say, look, conscious adults, it's on us to be self aware and to own our own feelings and emotions. At some point, we can't keep being. Did I get the name right? It's Eeyore. Right? The pathetic donkey. Yes. Okay, I said it. Okay. If you need a little. If you like to use a metaphor like that, by the way, make sure you go read a book called the Dao of Poo Tao. The Tao. Tao. The Tao of Poo Pooh. But it's written by Benjamin Hoff, and it's a book about Eastern philosophy, Taoism brought into and told through the story of Winnie the Pooh and how Winnie the Pooh doesn't get ruffled and why he doesn't get ruffled, but why everyone else around him does. And it's a beautiful book and it's a beautiful metaphor for this reality that maybe we shouldn't be blaming everything. You know, I think we have entered an area where it's so easy to blame that. Oh, you know what, Brendan? My generation, we're being looked at this way and that way. No, you're not. Okay. Anytime someone says a whole generation is anything, they're operating from a place of ignorance and judgment that just should not be done. So apologies for any out there who try to teach generational training. I'm cool with where you're trying to come from. There, inevitably, if you're responsible, you can admit you're inaccurate. No one can speak for a generation. No one can say, well, the millennials are like this, and the greatest generation was like that. Because inevitably, it's inaccurate. There's too much variability in both performance, too much variability in both personality, too much variability in income, too much variability in lifespan, too much variability in lifestyle to ever competently say, one generation is like this. If you hear someone doing that, I usually say, you might listen, you might pick up a tidbit of a generic statement. Just beware of being judgmental, because right now we're in a place. And why am I bringing this up? Because I promise to talk to you guys about business and career as well. And right now, in a lot of businesses right now, multiple generations are being discriminated against in how they're treated. That, you know, millennials might be being talked down to, and those who are at the upper level, who have years and years and some gray hairs, they might be being talked down to as well, it's like, look, we all need to give a little bit more respect and patience and credit to the people that we work with and we serve with. They have long days, they got families, they got other competing priorities. They might not have as much equal skill and training. Everybody's different. So don't make a general statement. And I think it's really important too because we see that with nationality, we see that with where people come from and ethnicity, that there's a lot of discrimination and ignorance still today. And you know, I'm blessed to travel around a lot and I'm blessed to have literally at our events we have people coming from 40 countries around the world, every age, race, possible background. And it always inspires me that so many people are striving to be their best, no matter where they come from. So I would just say to you, if you want to go to another level in your career, make sure that you are meeting the people at work and giving a great amount of respect to others and appreciation to others, no matter what you think of them. Because you cannot count out that 70 year old white dude and you can't count out that 23 year old fresh face who still hasn't learned to iron a shirt. Okay? You can't do it, you're gonna be wrong. I mean, I'm blessed to coach and work with some of maybe the most extraordinary people on the planet. I got a client, we tell his story in the book from Silicon Valley. I mean, he's moving the needle of the world and you know, young guy and everybody discounted this person at some point. They were wrong. So don't discount based on these. I know this might be like, yeah, yeah, I get it, Brendan, but your next level of performance is going to come from the way in which you engage the people around you. And if you are judging them quickly, you're in trouble. That's all I'm here to say. Because you probably can't guess their performance. Next up, I want to address one big elephant in the room and that is about strengths. There is a very big issue that we have been bought and sold about the strengths. And I say this with respect because strengths are a good thing. Like, I love to do things I'm strong at, it's great. But I also know that my strengths are not sufficient for me to go to a new level too. They're part of the equation, but they're not all the equation. Because here's what we found. High performers do not report working on their strengths any more than other people do let me say it again. We all again, that cart before the horse thing, we think, oh, they're working only on their strengths, and that's where they're high performing. That is not true. There are plenty of people who are working a little outside of their confidence or comfort or competency zone, and they're high performing. Okay, you don't have to have this perfect mix because you know what? I know a lot of people took the strengths finder and they scored really high and they feel good about themselves and they can't do crap. Okay, I know you do too, right? If you're in an organization that they rolled out the strengths finder, you saw it, probably didn't do what they or what you were promised. And so I think it's a feel good attitude and it's better than just bemoaning our weaknesses, but our strengths are insufficient. And here's the thing, it doesn't matter anyway. And I know that sounds flippant, but high performers, they're not like, what am I strong at? What am I perfect at? Let me just do that. We wanna do that. That's very Instagram worldy. High performers are saying, who am I and what am I? They're not saying as much, who am I and what am I good at? Though. They know those answers. Listen, please listen to me. Self awareness is high. Who am I and what I'm good at? They score high on that. But the question of operation for the day isn't usually in the morning. Like, who am I? What am I good at? And I'm only gonna do what I'm good at today, baby. They're asking a different kind of question. Boy, that's gonna be a meme somewhere. I shouldn't have done that. Movement. They're gonna say, what is required to be of service here? And how can I grow into that and lead others to deliver exceptional service? Let me say that again. What's required to be of service here? Right? What is required? Video communication was not my strength. I was terrible at it. I knew it was required to be of service in my industry, so I developed the skill. Same with public speaking. Terrified. Look, I don't have any notes in front of me right now. I'm not reading a script. This is. I'm looking at the same thing you are. And I've been doing this whole thing extemporaneous. I did not have any skill for that. Where I came from, men didn't really communicate more than like six sentences in a row unless all those sentences were like, one Word starting with the F. And each had a period. So I didn't grow up with an incredible, articulate group of people around me, okay? And I'm not judging that because I wasn't either. So it's not about, like, I was naturally skilled at this. It was. Listen, I identified the primary skills that were important to my career, and I went and mastered them, regardless if I had any affinity or strengths in that area. Let me say it again. I identified the skills that were necessary in my industry, and I went and mastered them regardless if I was good or. Or regardless if I liked it. Believe me, the first time I sat down to code a webpage, I was, like, hating it. I was like this. I don't even think like this. I looked at the webpages like, everybody. I'm like, I don't know how to do this. I don't even know what this button does. And I was constantly terrified I was going to crash something. I was like, I'm not a technology thinker. My brain was not like that. And that was my excuse. My brain was not like that. Because I also came up during another myth time. We're in myth time right now that all you need is your strengths. There was another myth time, and that myth time was left brain versus right brain. And it was just because neuroscience was pretty old. But very definitively, you do not have a modus operandi of left brain versus right brain thinking. If you still think that, I would love to encourage you to check out the neuroscience of the last two or three years. Your brain is not just left, right hemisphere and left right thinking. That's not how it. The brain is like an intricate spider web of everything connected. And there are things that we think that were only, you know, zeroed in on the left hemisphere that also come to the right. The history of where that comes from is because the visual cortex and how we use our hands was very much tied towards left and right hemisphere stuff. Same thing with the visual cortex. But the issue here is that I used to say, well, I'm just not right brain thinker. I used to say that I'm just not a right brainer. I literally said that I'm just not a right brainer. Because back then it was popular to say right brain versus left brain. Now we know that's a completely absurd connotation. It's a convenient metaphor. It's just not accurate. And so I encourage you to check out some recent site in the last couple years that has come out that just completely debunked that Entire idea. What we do need to know is, okay, do we know how to tell stories? That's a skill we can develop no matter how your brain is built. Okay. Can you be more thoughtful about your work? Sure. And some people say, well, Brendan, you don't understand. Some people are just built to be more creative. Creative is an innate strength. Well, sure, we could argue that almost anything is an innate strength if you're good at it. Everyone could say, well, you're just born that way. People say to me, brendan, you were just born writing books. Right? I'm like, what? You know, and just like, some things I am good at, like, naturally good at, like, racquetball. Naturally. I don't know why I'm good at racquetball. I'm better at racquetball walk on a court than I should be based on how much I do it. But I also get my butt handed to me. Is that a phrase? Butt handed to me? Yeah. Okay. It sounds a little odd when you actually say it out loud. So I get my butt handed to me on the racquetball court by people who've just done it more than I have. Right. And so it's not about natural talent and the talent myths. And it's important to say that. So I would love for you to write this sentence down if you haven't already. What is required to be of service here and how can I grow into that or lead others to deliver service? What if you walked into your business every day and you asked that question? What happened if you walked into work tomorrow and you said, what's required to be of service here today? And how can I grow into the person who can do that service better or develop my team to develop that better? Instead of going into work and going, what's going to happen today? I better check my inbox. What are they going to do? And I know I'm being a little bit facetious here, but I hope you get the idea. High performers aren't focused just on what they're good at. They're focused on what is required. Nobody is naturally good at the top levels. They got there, they disciplined themselves, they worked harder than everybody else. Even if they had some luck of genetic to be bigger, stronger, faster, or have some other mental capability. There's lots of people with high IQ who don't do anything. There's lots of really tall, strong, powerful people who don't play in the stereotypical NBA. I mean, there's just. It's about the hard work to be there and the high Performance we'll talk about. Okay, so here's what we found that. Oops. We found that high performance habits ultimately fall into two camps. There's the personal habits, and there's the social habits. And they interact. Okay, they interact. And as I go through each of them, I'll be talking about your wealth, following your dream, and taking on some of those promises about which dreams to chase, et cetera, that I talked about at the top of the hour. But here's the thing. I didn't go looking for this. It wasn't until I was almost done writing the first section of the book that I kind of realized, oh, these conveniently kind of fit into this framework. But I didn't start the research be like, oh, I wonder what they personally do and how they interact with people. That wasn't the very beginning of the research. It just turned out that way. And here's what we found in the personal habits. There's three of them. Number one, seek clarity. And this is so basic, and it will fundamentally change your life when you start doing it better. High performers more consistently seek clarity about who they are, how they want to interact with people, and what feeling and meaning they will draw from their work than other people. My favorite example is most people bumble into the next meeting. And that's why they're no good at work. They just keep bumbling into the next situation, bumbling in and bumbling in. Because when you're good, you can kind of just bumble around, right? You can just pop over here, show up over there, do good over here. But high performers are more deliberate. Right before they go in the meeting, they sit and they see Claire. They go, okay, meeting's coming up. Who do I want to be in that meeting? How do I want to treat people in that meeting? What's the feeling I want to generate in that meeting? What's the meaning I want to draw from being here in that meeting? And that might sound overly constructed, and in some ways it is. But almost always when I did the interviews, I found out that they were asking questions more often than other people in those categories of who they are, how they treat people, the feeling they want to create and the meaning they want to draw from it. That's the things I found over and over and over in the book. And specifically that high performers. This was a big finding that also a lot of literature review finds this in success, and that is high performers are future oriented. They are more consistent than other people considering their future. Because a lot of people, they go through the whole year, and they don't think about their future until New Year's Eve or when their birthday hits. You know, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, then they start really getting high. Performers have a very consistent thought process about the future, about who they're going to be in the future, where they're going to be, how they're going to treat people, what they're going to achieve, what's going to be fulfilling to them, and they're asking of themselves more often. I think it's one of the reasons we found that they tend to be more dedicated, their personal growth than other people is because they're really interested in that. I think that's very hopeful that what if you just create a simple. Like maybe create an index card. If you got the book in this chapter, there's something called the Clarity chart. And if you did not know it, you can go get it and download it. You know, I'll just give it to you guys right here. Go to highperformancehabits.com tools. You can download the Clarity chart. So you can print it out and actually fill it out. You can do it in the book, too. But if you guys want to do that, highperformancehabits.com tools and you'll see the Clarity chart there. Download it. Check it out. There's a bunch of other tools. Yeah, there's a bunch of other performance prompts on that page. Like all the questions that I ask you in this book for the performance prompts, you can download them at that website, too. It's free for you guys, right? And those tools and that approach to asking those questions will really help you over the long term to get more focused. Okay. The second big thing I know some gone generating energy. Huge. Okay. To generate energy is so important. Your next level of wealth comes from your next level of energy. And some people might not like when I say that, but we figured out how to codify and actually measure energy. And we define that as mental, emotional and physical energy or vibrancy. And. And guess what, my friends. Yeah. Your energy scores are correlated with your income. Your energy scores are deeply connected to your productivity levels, which I know you know already. So my question for you is, do you want to crush it, get more energy? You want to crush it, Generate more energy. And it's really important. But the first thing to do when you're installing these habits, and this is important for everybody, the most critical thing in performance improvement for you is going to learn to start measuring yourself on a consistent basis in the categories you want to succeed in. Let me give you an example. Lots of dudes go, brendan, I want to be a better husband. And then I'll talk to him. Three months later, I'm like, how's it going being a better husband? Ah, you know, I try here and there. And she didn't listen. I'm like, what? Look, being a better husband is not about trying here and there and only doing it if she responds. Well, if you want to be better with your partner or your lover, you can't just say, I want to do it, and walk into each week hopeful for it. What you need to do is set up a set of cues, triggers, and evaluative practices where you score yourself. And when you score yourself, just do this one to ten strategy one, you're sucking ten, you're amazing, okay? And then when you score yourself and you should do it at least twice a week in whatever area you're really trying to improve, score yourself twice a week. I remember when I was trying to be more productive as a person, I said, you know what? I'm not as productive as I know I could be. And I kept thinking, well, I'll do this hack or I'll download this thing, whatever. And I never got more productive. You know how I got more productive? I put it on my sheet for Wednesday and for Sunday to score myself on productivity. That week one, I sucked 10. Super productive. And here's what the nice thing about that is. When you score yourself and you do this over a period of time, you start to see, ooh, I'm scoring low right here. And when you score yourself, let's say you give yourself a five, and, you know, you should be an eight, Then you get that benefit. Asking a question which seeks clarity, saying, how could I be more productive right now? How could I go from a 5 to a 10? Like, what would I have to do? Same thing with being a better husband. Okay? This week, how am I doing as a husband? I'm a four. Want to be a ten. What would it take to go from a four to a ten? You know what? Let me bring home some flowers. You know what? Let me listen a little bit better. You know what? Let me straighten up a little bit here. You know what? Let me stop screaming at the kids, because that freaks everybody. You got to figure out your thing, man. But it only happens from scoring.