Determine the Feeling You're After

Hey, my friend, it's Brendon Burchard. And welcome to a special episode of the Brendan Show. In this episode, I'm going to play for you a section of the audiobook of my book, High Performance Habits. How Extraordinary People Become that way. And I'm gonna play for you a practice that will ultimately help you become a higher performer in anything that you're doing, whether it's related to your health or your career or other positive life outcomes. This is the practice that will really serve you. And I'm gonna be releasing a series of these so that you can get a taste of the book. But also whether you have the book or you don't have the book, you can put these practices into your life to develop the habits that matter the most. That's ultimately what my book is about. Has become so well known for high performance habits is the result and the findings of the world's largest study of high performers ever done over 190 countries reporting in over 2 million data points an unbelievable amount of research over a three year period with me and academic research teams to find the strongest correlations we could of which habits led to long term success. And they were also healthy, they were also happy, they also had positive relationships. And that's the magic of it.

All right?

High performance isn't just about getting ahead for achievement's sake. It's ultimately about a distinction of a new way to strive so that you do reach the next level of success. But this time you do it more sane, healthier, more happier and you enjoy the process. You can succeed long term. That is what this book is about. It tells you exactly which habits make the most difference. And we break it down, each habit into three different practices. Now, this audio excerpt today for you is one of those practices. And please just listen, follow the prompts, put this either mindset or philosophy or tactic into your life and you'll see a total change. So I'll be releasing a series of these for you in upcoming weeks and months right here on the Brendon show. And tell you what, if you like this, you're welcome to go get the audiobook on Audible or anywhere else where you download your audiobooks and you know, it's whatever it is, 1216 bucks for that. Or if you want the deluxe audiobook version which comes with additional training, additional interviews and an online course along with it. If you want that, you can, you can actually get it for free when you order a hard copy book from us@Brendon.com habits. So just listen to the practice. If it resonates with you, put it into play. If not, no worries. Keep listening to the Brendan Show. You'll find something that's useful, but if it really resonates, go to brendon.com habits and get your copy of the book from that site so that we can give you the free deluxe audio edition of the audiobook. I think you're really going to enjoy this and as always I want to thank you all for supporting my message. I deeply believe that as each of us develops deeper motivation and starts practicing these high performance habits, not only can.

We change our life, not only can.

We reach longer term success and be less stressed and crazy and enjoy the process this time, but we can change the world. The right habits changes your world ultimately changes other people's world. Without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt of high performance how extraordinary people become that way.

Determine the feeling you're after. Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Howard Thurman the second practice that will help you heighten and sustain clarity in your life is to ask yourself frequently what is the primary feeling I want to bring to this situation and what is the primary feeling I want to get from this situation? Most people are terrible at this. Underperformers especially are neglectful of the kinds of feelings they are experiencing or want to experience in life. They bumble into situations and allow those situations to define how they feel. This explains why they have low self awareness and weak self control. High performers demonstrate a tremendous degree of emotional intelligence and what I call willful feeling. In performance situations. They can accurately describe their emotions, but more importantly, they can also calibrate the meaning they draw from those emotions and determine the feelings they want to endure. Let me give you an example. I worked with an Olympic sprinter who was at the top of his game that year, but in prior years his performance was often erratic. Sometimes he won a competition, other times he didn't even make the qualifying cut. When I got the call to work with him, he had a year long winning streak. In our first session together I asked if you had to describe why you're winning now in just three words, what would they be? He said, feeling, feeling, feeling. When I asked him to explain, he said, I got very clear about the feelings I needed in my mind and my body before I walked out onto the field. While I readied myself at the starting blocks, what I sensed in the middle of the sprint and what I wanted to feel after I crossed the line and even all the way back into the tunnel. I asked if that meant he got control of his emotions and didn't experience performance anxiety anymore. He laughed, no. When I'm at the starting box, my body still senses the energy and emotion of it all. My body is naturally aware of what's at stake, and there's an emotion of some fear that that's there no matter what. But I don't feel anxious. I define the feeling. I tell myself what I'm sensing is a feeling of readiness, excitement. I've heard so many high performers describe this practice in some form or another. They can sense their emotional state in any given moment, but they often choose to override it by defining what they want to feel. Lets pause to differentiate between emotions and feelings While researchers differ in their definitions of what an emotion is, many agree that emotions are different from feelings. Emotions are generally instinctive, a triggering event which can be an external situation or simply our brain anticipating something generates an emotional response like fear, amusement, sadness, anger, relief, or love. Often the emotional response happens without much of our conscious will. We just suddenly feel the emotion because our brain interpreted something happening and attached a meaning and emotion to it, guided mostly from how we sense the situation from the past. This doesn't mean that we are conscious of all our emotions or that we can't also generate an emotion consciously. For example, seeing your baby smile at you may stir joy in your heart, but you could also elicit the emotion of joy that simply by purposefully thinking about the same incident later on without the actual stimulus. Still, the vast majority of the emotions we feel in life are automatic and physical. The word feeling here is used to refer to a mental portrayal of an emotion. This is not a precise statement, but it's helpful for our purposes here. Think of an emotion as mostly a reaction and feeling is an interpretation. Like the sprinter, the emotion of fear came up, but you don't have to choose to feel frightened and run away. You can experience the sudden emotion of fear, but in the very next moment choose to feel centered. Whenever you calm yourself down, you are choosing a different feeling than the emotion that may have come up for you. Before entering any performance situation, high performers contemplate the how they want to feel regardless of what emotions might come up, and they envision how they want to feel, leaving the situation regardless of what emotions might come up. Then they exert self control to achieve those intentions. Here's another example that shows this dynamic at play. If I'm in a meeting and people suddenly start arguing With a negative tone, I'll probably experience immediate emotions like feel, fear, anger, or sadness. The response is pretty predictable. My heart will start pounding, my hands will get sweaty, my breathing will get shallow. Those emotions can soon evoke feelings of dread or anxiety. Knowing this, I can choose to feel differently in the meeting. Even if those emotions come up instinctively, I can tell myself that the emotions are just telling me to pay attention, or to speak up for myself, or to feel empathetic toward others. Instead of allowing the emotion to evoke the feeling of dread, I can just let it be. Take a few deep breaths and choose to feel alert yet calm. I can keep breathing deeply, speak in an even tone, sit comfortably in my chair, think positively about the people in the room, choose to be a calm force amid the storm. All these choices generate a feeling that's different from what came up earlier. My automatic emotions don't have to be in charge. My feelings are my own. Over time, if I choose to create the feelings I want from my emotions, my brain will likely habituate to the new feelings. Fear suddenly doesn't feel so bad anymore because my brain has learned that I'll deal with it well. My old references for how I feel after the emotion has changed, and that can change the actual automatic emotion's power. The emotion of fear still might get triggered. But now the feeling I sense from it is what I've created in the past. Emotions come and go. They're mostly immediate, instinctive and physical. But feelings last, and they're often a result of rumination, which you have control over. Anger can be the emotion that comes up, but bitterness, a lasting feeling, doesn't have to be your lifelong sentence. This might sound as if I'm just parsing words. And again, I acknowledge that my descriptions are imprecise. No description of any function of mind or body can be precise because there is always variance. And no thought or emotion is an island. Our senses and intentions interact and overlap across a vast neural network. But I share this here because it's so thoroughly obvious that high performers are generating the feelings they want more often than taking the emotions that land on them. When high performing athletes say they are trying to get in the zone, what they mean is that they're trying to use their conscious attention to narrow their focus and feel in the zone. Being in the zone is not an emotion. That just happens. Athletes will themselves there by minimizing distractions and immersing themselves in what they are doing. For high level athletes and high performers from all walks of life, flow is a feeling they choose it is summoned, not a lucky emotion that conveniently happens to show up just in time for kickoff. It's when we stop being conscious of our feelings that we get in trouble. Then the negativity of the world can start stirring negative emotions which if we don't control the meaning of, can evoke long term negative feelings, which in turn set the stage for a horrible life. But if we seek to experience life and all its emotions and yet choose to feel centered, happy, strong and loving right through the ups and downs, then we've accomplished something powerful. We've wielded the power of willful feeling and suddenly life feels the way we want it to. That's what Kate had been forgetting. She was too lost in a sea of unpredictable emotions. She wasn't choosing to feel any one way over another. She wasn't aware of how she was treating the emotions and experiences. And so she just became reactive. She wasn't just going through the motions, she was going through the emotions. So she wasn't really feeling life the way she wanted to anymore. All I had to do was get her to choose how she wanted to feel in each situation she entered. And that intention activity alone brought more vibrancy and color back into her life. In your everyday life, start asking what do I want to feel today? How could I define the meaning of the day so that I feel what I want to? Next time you go on a date with someone, think about the feelings you want to create. Before you sit down with your child to work on math, ask what do I want to feel when I'm helping my kid? What feelings do I want them to have about me? About homework? About their life? This kind of clarity and intention will change how you experience life. Performance Prompts Number one the emotions I've been experiencing a lot of lately. Number two the areas of life where I'm not having the feelings I want to. Number three the feelings I want to experience more of in life include. Number four the next time I feel a negative emotion come up, the first thing I'm going to say to myself is.

Okay my friend, I hope you enjoyed that audio excerpt of my book High Performance Habits How Extraordinary People Become that Way Again. If you really enjoyed that and you like the deluxe audiobook version for free, go to brendon.com habits get the book through that site and we'll go ahead and give you the deluxe audiobook version of the entire book for free at no cost. As my thanks for ordering through our website. I want to thank you as well for supporting my message. You Know, we've really started this worldwide performance conversation. We've got dozens of companies and major organizations who have bought the book in bulk, who are sharing it with their teams and employers, employees who are sending their people through our assessments, who are getting all the tools that we, we built around this book. We're changing the conversation about performance in major organizations and small businesses around the world. And if you'd like to support that, just pick up a copy of the book, get some amazing results, tell us your story and we'll try to get out there the best way that we can. It's an honor to serve each and every one of you. I began this journey to decoding what it really takes to become a high performer. Now, gosh, 20 years go in my life. So having it all come together in these set of practices in high performance habits has been quite the journey. You know, the last 10 years of my life being a high performance coach and then this last three years of academic research to prove it all out, at least to find what the data suggests and leads us to in terms of the strongest correlations. I know you're going to love this book. So for those who already got it, thank you. Keep sharing the message because if you'll post on social media highperformancehabits of you listening to this episode or reading the book every single day and week, we are still out there giving away all expense paid trips, giving away swag t shirts, cups holders, free online courses. It's my students, we're celebrating you. So just go post on social media, tell us what you thought of this episode and just again, use hashtag high performance habits and thebrendon show so that we know you listen to us on the brendon show and we'll go ahead and try to find you and give you some free gifts. We can't do it for everybody but we're out there consistently doing it. And I mean, I've already given away, I don't know, 50 to $100,000 worth of stuff just this month already. So it's been pretty active and I thank you all, all of our students who've made this the best stellar all of our students who supported the message, all of our students who've committed to their continued education, their personal growth. I'm honored to be on that path with you. So thank you again for supporting the brendon show. Thank you for supporting high performance habits. I look forward to seeing you out on the road someday. Until then, remember, you can change your habits and change your life if you're going to practice any new habits, practice the ones in high performance habits. And as always, go out there every single day of your life. Live fully, love openly, and make your difference today.

Sam.