How To Balance Short and Long Term Goals

Hello my friends.

I'm Brendon Burchard, host of the Brendon show and founder of growthday.com and I'm honored to be your high performance coach today. I believe that every day we can be inspired. We can live with intention and purpose. We can bring the joy and honor the struggles of each day to push ourselves to grow, to serve, to be a role model, to lead extraordinary lives. I believe that every day is a great day to grow. That's why I started my company, growthday.com it's an online personal growth platform where you can get me and the world's best personal development teachers live coaching you every week, sharing our wisdom, keeping you motivated and accountable, encouraging you to find the aliveness and the connection and meaning of life that we're all after. If you're not a member yet, please go sign up@growthday.com and join our huge worldwide community of achievers. For less than a dollar a day you get the world's best teachers live every week. And look, you've probably known for a long time that you needed some expert guidance and inspired community and life changing tools. So please, your breakthrough awaits you@growthday.com now let's get to today's episode. My friends, please listen closely. Maybe you take some notes so you remember these insights of personal growth and share this episode with three of your friends because we all have to share more positive messages in the world today. So share this with three friends just like you who are committed to their personal growth. And also be sure to tag me or DM me on Instagram. Rendon Burchard, Join our million plus community there on Instagram so I can say hi. Thanks again for listening.

Now let's begin. How do you balance those short term needs to get things done with also setting yourself up for the long term? And you and I both know most people completely fail at this. And it's hard because every day you're trying to do so many things, but you know that you're sometimes costing your longer term future. The first thing that we tend to do in the short term, and many of you guys ask me this question.

Every single month, is we tend to.

Value and prioritize stability. And funny enough, it seems like something we would all want, right? We know from human behavior and human motivation studies that people want safety, they want belonging, they want sustenance, they want shelter. And all these things are things of like, oh, this is stability. I know what my day is going to be like. Or even if there's uncertainty There because I don't really believe in people who perpetuate certainty because there's no such thing as having total certainty in ourselves or others if we can remain humble and open to the world. And the more that we want certainty and want to grab it all the time, the more we tend to lose the pop and the vibrancy of life and the more we're disappointed all the time because nothing is ever perfect. But what we do want is stability. Big difference, right? Certainty. I need to know exactly what's going on. Stability. There's a lot going on here, but I feel safe and secure and stable. And so this is a good thing. And often people make choices in the short term for stability. They're like, oh, well, I guess I better get a job. You know, I better, you know, be nice to this person so they don't go crazy on me. You know, these are things that we do in our life. Taking a certain job, staying a certain job, treating people in a certain way so they don't leave us so that we have a sense of stability. So it's not a negative thing. And I don't want any of these necessarily to feel like I'm saying they're all negative, but what happens is they tend to turn negative if they're a consistent thinking pattern or consistent value ethic we have to have. And let me give you an example here and stability, and this is specifically related to you guys because you ask me about this every month. You say, well, Brendon, I'm thinking about quitting my job, but I haven't done it yet. Can you give me confidence or when would you do it or how would you recommend I, like, go into that transition? I hear that all the time for you guys in this community of like, how do I switch careers, when do I switch careers? You know, and the reason that we don't want to do it often is because we're seeking stability and it's scary, right? Quitting a job, leaving an environment, breaking up with the relationship. I mean, how many of you guys, how many of you have ever stayed in a relationship too dang long? You were in a relationship too long because you just wanted this or you wanted to please somebody who wanted this and so they wanted this or you wanted this. So in the short term you kept compromising, you kept settling for something that was less than you. You kept allowing behavior that was not right. Right. And that was just, you need to know that short term stability seeking things.

Tends to really hurt us.

And when that short term value ethic I need stability plays out month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. One day you wake up and you look back at the last five years and you're like, oh my God, I've been stuck in something I didn't want to be in, but I didn't have the guts to leave. And what I tell people is, you know, it's not always a lack of courage that prevented you from going though. We can talk about that. It's often that you just overvalued stability. Does that make sense? I mean we're in a world right now where everyone says, you know, if you don't do something well, you're a chicken, you're crap, you're, you know, what's wrong with you? You have no courage. And I'm like, it's stop just going to people's character like that, right? It's like, well this must be wrong. They're just weak willed humans. They lack courage. And it's like, calm down guy, get off the caffeine and let's just have a conversation. Because what happens is most bad decisions you've made isn't because you lack good qualities. It's because you overvalued something for too long and often you overvalued something good for too long. Meaning often people don't leave a relationship or a bad career because it's not. They're lacking good qualities, they're overvaluing stability. It's a short term thing they're trying to get, but it became a long term strategy. Does this make sense? So they valued stability so long, it overcame other values that would have helped them have more freedom. And see, it's almost like the opposite. And that's what I want to point out today. If we keep seeking stability over and over and over and over and over again, eventually we end up in stuff that we don't ask to grow or get better. We won't rock the boat, we won't leave things because we need to feel so stable. And then that comes often at the cost of our long term value that we need to be seeking, which is fulfillment.

Right.

It's almost like there is a polarity here. I don't want to say it's like one and another. It's more like a pendulum. And what's happening sometimes for people is they're so far instability, they're not asking what would really fulfill me and what would really bring me alive, what would make me feel connected and happy. So think about it. If you're in a place where you're always seeking stability, and you're making compromises for that because you don't want to rock the boat, don't want to upset people, don't want to take risk. Omg. Then you never ask the bigger question, the longer term stuff. Well, what would make me feel fulfilled? See, sometimes we need to move away from stability for moments and move towards fulfillment. And this is how I would get to this question. You always ask me about jobs and relationships in this community. And when I think about, like, okay, how do you leave a job? I'll tell you exactly what I did when many of you guys know my story is becoming a writer. When I was at Accenture, which was a consulting company I worked for for six, seven years, it was very stable, which is funny. What it meant was it was stable because I got a paycheck all the time, but it was not stable for my mind. It was almost like I valued the wrong thing. I valued that stable paycheck. But for my mind, it was not a healthy job. I was in, you know, 16 cities, you know, every single quarter. I was all over the place. It was, you know, working every single day for six years straight till midnight two in the morning, always being on call 24, seven, seven days a week for six years straight, while traveling Monday through Thursday through different cities into different organizations where there was no, like, clear mission or clear boss or clear real goals except for, like, little projects. But there was no values to what I felt like I was doing. But sure, why did I make it there six years when the whole time I wanted to be a writer? What would bring me heart and joy would be the fulfillment of writing and coaching. Why did I take that long to leave? Because I overvalued this and I undervalued that. So I kept protecting this and not acting towards that, protecting this and failing to act towards that. And so one day I had to get real with it. And I said, okay, I got to make the switch a little bit here. And what I decided to do is I said, I wonder if I can put myself out there as a speaker, as coach, as a writer. And I wonder if I could figure out a way that I would know that that would probably make that career. Now we just call it the influencer career. Used to be just thought leader or expert career. But I was like, I wonder if I could earn 20, 25% as a writer or speaker on the side over here and if I could get that, just kind of do it on the side. Well, then if I. Then that would be just Enough to meet my need for stability, but really serve my senses of fulfillment. And I could step away from this thing that I think adds stability. Because if I'm spending full time over here in this career, but I know.

I can see I can earn like.

Even 20%, 30% over here, I'd be willing to leave that jump over here because if I gave my full time efforts, full time efforts over here, it would build up. And that was my assumption and my way of thinking. And I'm not making, you know, making that my recommendation to anybody here because 20% was arbitrary. You might want 40% or 50%. You might have family you might need. You might have higher, you know, obligations, debts, challenges, more responsibilities than I did when I made that decision in my, you know, late 20s. But I think that's really important to hear. Often we get stuck in valuing a good thing, stability at the cost of the long term. This is the most important thing today. We're going to go way deep in a lot of other things. But I'm here to tell you, almost always your sense of need to feel safe, secure, things are going good, things are predictable. I mean, it's why people won't leave. Even horrible situations, abusive relationships, terrible, unfulfilling jobs, they don't walk away because they're like, well, at least I know this, right? That old thing, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. So they stay with the devil they know. And the sad thing is they assume everything's a devil. And they don't realize that sometimes after that transition, we can find new areas of opportunity. After that transition, when we go into new things, more positive relationships can open up. More opportunities to lead, more opportunities to serve, more opportunities to love and feel. Is there anything you have been putting up with too long? Is there anything you've been putting up with too long? Bad job, bad relationship, even for yourself, Bad habits, just because you know what they are. I have friends in the past who quit smoking and even for them, there was the stability to that. You know, at least I could take a break every hour and breathe deeply. I mean, I'm breathing in poison, but at least I get to go breathe a little bit. Because most people hold their breath all day and now they get to do 20 minutes of meditation, deep breathing, they're just breathing in poison. But at some point they realize, wow, that's like a crutch. What is it about that that's giving me a sense of stability and I'm not trying to judge anyone who has Any addictions at all here. I'm just trying to say in our human psychology, stability is a big driver that often keeps us put. But again, as I said earlier, not all these things are bad either, right? The first time you got a job that you had no idea what it was was because you were trying to seek stability for your family or to pay your credit card bills. So that's not a bad thing. It's just when these things become the dominant frame, the dominant thinking pattern. So if you ever coach with me.

I'm like, hey, I'm going to figure.

Out your top five dominant frames about how you view the world and, and what you're moving towards. And what few people move towards is that sense of fulfillment. So a more positive question for you today is what could be more fulfilling for you? Like what would be more fulfilling in your career? What would be more fulfilling in your relationships? And it doesn't mean I'm asking you to leave something per se. It means sometimes to get people towards more long term happiness. Because if you really think about what we're trying to get towards here is we're just trying over here to get to a big sense of long term happiness, satisfaction, joy. And we need to act more towards that. Sometimes that's just a behavioral change, right? A lot of people don't need to leave their job. They need to show up at their job and give their all and actually collaborate and create again. Get away from fear, engage. That's hard for people, right? They're there for the stability, but they forget you can have stability, but if you don't show up and act in a congruent way that makes you feel fulfilled, right? Then you're toast. So sometimes it's behavioral change. Some of you don't need to leave your marriage to find fulfillment. You need to change how you do marriage, right? You need to change how you engage in the relationship. So this is not about Brendon saying quit everything, everything sucks, get out of there. This is about Brendon saying maybe you need to change your thinking pattern. Maybe you need to change a few actions to move you towards more fulfillment. And maybe it'll take time for me to get to a point in my career where I felt fulfilled. Took years, right? I was doing things over the short term that we're getting stability, but not always something that I really enjoyed. Personal growth is not something that ever tires. Let me tell you that.

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Next big idea is in the short term, we often overvalue our individual needs and our individual preferences, right? And so meaning we say, well, I want this, so I'm going to do it. But you know, doing that really hurts your spouse or your partner, right? It's all about me. And you forget that you're also a leader and what you do other people see. And so I think this is one of the easier ones. Individual versus team or community. I'll just use two words there. Team or community. So individual versus team or community. I think this is one of the great dilemmas in life. A guy named Rushworth Kidder wrote a book I hope you've all read called How Good People Make Tough Decisions. How Good People Make Tough Decisions. And one of the areas he talked about there was individual versus relationship decisions, right? You want to live in Portland, Oregon, but your spouse wants to live in Puerto Rico. You got to have what's the right choice there. That's a hard decision. That's a dilemma sometimes, right? That's what we all face. We all face that. I would really like this. But your spouse wants that, or your kids want that, or the team wants that, and that's a hard dilemma. And what we have to do is recognize, in terms of high performance, those who more greatly value their will, their desire, their needs, their wants, their short term pleasures, at the cost of building community, team and relationships that allow them to go faster tend to be people who can't either make or sustain high performance. What this means, and let me ask you very directly and simply is are you building the team and the relationships you need to go faster? Don't take this conceptually. I mean, right now, if I parachuted into your life in this last five days, can I sit down and could I have listened to some conversations you had where you were actively building team and relationships that allow you to go faster? Is that happening? Is it active right now? Or are you one of those individual slog? No, Brent, I got it. I'm a workhorse. I got grit. I can power through. I got it, man. You don't understand, Brendan. I'm one of those hard worker Instagram guys. I'm in the grind. I'm like, okay, good job, buddy. And I value the grind just like anybody else. But if all you do is keep working towards individual contributions, you'll never go faster or scale. It's super hard, right, to build the relationships that you need to go faster. But I want you to do this as, as you are doing your individual contributions, you need to be building that relationship network, that support network that helps you go faster, right? Seth Godin wrote a lot about this in a book called Linchpin. And when you are somebody who are the linchpin of your community, not only can you make a greater difference in the world, your individual goals get met faster because you know somebody who can do that. And how do you do that? Well, it's a simple thing. How can you bring people together who either work for you or don't work for you, or are in your community or industry more often and have them share what their goals, their needs, their desires are, and then you try to facilitate that, support that, help that, but also share your own. I'll give you an example in multiple ways of how this turns out in your own life. I mean, when's the last time you got the family and the kids around the table and you said, what are you all really trying to do, not just how was your day? Try changing language once in a while. From how was your day to what would make you more happy? Different question, right? How was your day, Sally? It was good. My teacher was nice. What would make you more happy? If I could spend more time doing art projects. Whoa, okay. That's a different learning, isn't it? When you find what will make more people happy over the long term versus just what they did today, you know more about them and you might be able to contribute something there. But it also gives you the platform to also share what would make you more happy and what you need to get there. And if you ever hung out with me for like a week, you'd be so annoyed about how much it's big vision, how much its goals, how much we need to do this, how much we gotta hire here, move here, do that, make this thing happen, move this thing around. You like, oh my God, you'd be overwhelmed. But by speaking in that language, people mobilize around me. People are like, how does it get so much done and build these teams and move all these things around? It's like I'm always moving towards the future. I'm always trying to do what I do, this work. But even as I'm doing this with Worthy, before I came in today, I did two calls with potential team leaders to move everything forward, right? So it's like even on days where the whole day this is all I'm doing, I started the day with still having those relationships. Moving forward, I want you to be on the phone and in the email. Moving relationships forward or piecing relationships together, they're going to help you in 1, 2, 3 years. Now some of you are just like, are you just talking about networking, Brennan? I'm like, yes, if that's what you got to boil this down to, network better be the linchpin in your community. Build team constantly. For all my friends right here who are influencers or individual contributors in your own companies, I'm like, as soon as you can get somebody scaled up, trained so they can take over, the majority of the things that you can do that are systemizable, explainable, predictable, process driven, like break down what you're doing, get somebody at least, especially if you're working by yourself, get somebody who can take some of those procedural, administrative, process driven types of things, get that stuff off your plate and over to them so that you can more focus on either A, your art or B, revenue producing things or C, A and B, right? Like that level of support you Need. I'm telling you, here's what people do. Well, I don't want to hire people because I'm faster. I like working alone and I can do it faster than they can. Yes, right now. But guess what? In four years, it's still just you working to the late hours a night. It's still just you wondering when things will break through. It's still just you. Oh, I hope one day I can take a vacation. It's still just you. So for all my solopreneurs out there, I hope you'll listen real close. You got to build team. You just have to. It's not fun, it's not easy. It doesn't always make you feel stable. But in long term, it lets you do more of what you want to do and it gives you more of this right. It gives you more freedom and fulfillment even though in the short term it's like unknowns. It's hard, it's difficult, it's frustrating. Listen, we all think that overwhelm goes away just because we meditate. That's the whole world today. It's like, oh, you're overwhelmed. Just meditate. I'm like, yeah, meditate and get support. Don't think one of them is going to free you. You've got to have the support network.

Okay, my friend, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Brendon Show. Tell some people about this episode. It's on each of us to spread positivity and empowerment during these times of chaos and negativity.

Right?

So I'm asking you to be the dealer of hope and personal growth and education in your tribe. So take a screenshot right now and share the screenshot and this link to this episode with three of your friends today. Post it on social media. Use the hashtag growthday. That's Growthday, because that's the name of my company and we're always giving away prizes to our community. If you'd like to help me personally, then please rate and review the podcasts on Apple Podcasts. Give us some stars, cheer us on, Leave a review. Because believe it or not, that stuff.

Actually really does help.

And I read all of them. So my last thought for today, please remember you are stronger than you think and the future holds good things for you. Tomorrow can be an inspired day. Every new morning is a second chance. Every day is a great day to grow. We're thankful to have you here in the growth day community. So be sure to go deeper with us@growthday.com.

Sam.