How to Become Who You WANT to Be

Most people don't make advanced changes in their life because they lost connection to their self. Time for yourself is not the same as time listening to yourself. We're in this culture of such rampant addiction to consumption that we don't have any time to think. When you honor yourself now, you make bold moves. When you honor yourself, you come from a different place of strength. For everybody, there's a consequence to your inaction. But the thing that's so strange about life only almost always the consequence to inaction is blind. Most people don't make significant change in their lives because they've lost a connection to their self. Most people don't make advanced changes in their life because they lost connection to their self. They don't sense themselves anymore. They've prioritized everybody else and everything else for so long, they don't know who they are. This happens. You see this in research over and over. In a divorce, a person wanders out of divorce, and for like, two or three years, they're like, who am I? That one significant change in relationship makes you say, who am I? And they realize they haven't heard their own thoughts and feelings and desires and dreams. I can't help you change unless you start hearing your own thoughts and feelings, desires and dreams again. So what's the advanced stuff? You need everyday moments to connect to your own thoughts, feelings, desires, and dreams. What is that? Well, every single thing we're talking about can become a habit. Connection to self can become a habit. That can be your time to pray, to meditate, to do your ice bath and think about life. You can do. No. Or whatever you have to think about. Like, you have to find the time. If we're gonna shift your life, there needs to be time in your life to connect with yourself. That might be your warm bath. That might be your daily walk. That might be your workout. Alone or with headphones. Like, when do you. And please let me be specific. Time for yourself is not the same as time listening to yourself. Do you understand that Something got lost with the pandemic in that you got to take time for yourself. So people put on podcasts and get on ellipticals for 30 minutes and think they had time for themselves. No, no, no. You weren't even thinking. You were consuming. Consuming is not the same as listening to yourself. Who follows? Well, Brendan, you don't understand. I meditate. I'm like, what form of meditation? Most forms of meditation are trying to release a thought pattern. Most forms of meditation are doing a mantra so that the monkey mind isn't Going, so what type of time are you spending listening to yourself? This is why, of course, every psychologist in the world and every coach that I know has any worth their salt. Not only do they journal, they recommend journal as one of their first interventions. When you journal and you actually think about your thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, how you're dealing with life, everything shifts. You can't know yourself and become a better version of yourself if you're currently not listening to yourself. Let me say it again. You cannot know yourself and become a better version of yourself if you're not currently listening to yourself. So to ask my clients to go, show me where you're listening to yourself, you might write this down. Show me where you're listening to yourself. Like, where. When does it happen? For some people, it's like New Year's drunk. I'm not judging. I'm just saying it's a very common thing. Some people, they take a walk on their birthday and they think about it for five minutes, but they really think about the future versus themselves. What is your real, true, authentic, loving self saying to you about what you really think and need and feel? Because here's the thing. It's hard to get change in your life if you're so out of touch with yourself that one hit. It's hard to get change in your life if you're so out of touch with yourself. But we are in a modern era where every second we have that we're not in touch with ourselves, we're just. We're feeding ourselves. We're in that swipe mode. And when you're in swipe mode, you're not thinking. You're reacting, but you're not thinking. And real human behavior change takes thinking more time alone. I just saw a great session with Hugh Urban where he was describing to a friend how he. He spent 13 minutes talking about all the wealthy and extraordinary people he met. And he was like, I'm so shocked how much time they take to just think. And he's just like. He's blown away by it. And he realized. He's like, I don't think. I've just sat and thought for like three years to just sit and actually think about yourself and your life and how things are going without consuming, no consumption, just thinking in quiet. There's a reason Einstein was Einstein. He sat in silence thinking about hard things and changed the entire understanding of the universe. Does that compete with you? He sat and just thought about complex things and changed the entire understanding of. Of the universe. And you want to become more wealthy but you literally won't even sit and think. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. We're in this culture of such rampant addiction to consumption that we don't have any time to think. So as I shared earlier, the great changes of life are strategic. They're purposeful. But most people aren't enacting a strategy. They're just reacting today. And so I want you to take some time to think. Like when you hang out with the best CEOs and entrepreneurs, they're thinking. I mean, it's crazy. I've been with Elon Musk. He's just thinking all the time, and he's thinking very complex things. And anyone can judge him for lots of different reasons that they might believe. But one thing that's amazing is this guy has thought up some of the most incredible inventions of our existence as a human species. It's amazing, but you have to spend like people understand how much time that is. So, okay, give me something tactical, Brendan. Show me it in your day, in your schedule, on your calendar. Where's that block of thinking time to connect with yourself, to connect with yourself. If you got anything, you might not like anything I said today or anything Ed did, but if you will make sure that you have time every day to think and connect with yourself, what it will do is it will put you back in touch with yourself. And when you're back in touch with yourself, you start to honor yourself. When you honor yourself now, you make bold moves. When you honor yourself now, you make authentic, courageous action. When you honor yourself now you know how to love like a man or love like a woman or love like a partner. When you honor yourself, you come from a different place of strength for everybody. Your service goes up, your wealth goes up, and everyone's like, what's going on? You're honoring yourself by listening to yourself. Somebody said, we're so fragmented. You're playing so many different roles, right? It's like your head is like this all day. Whoever felt like this, if we're gonna change, we also need connection beyond yourself. So what's your habit? To connect beyond yourself. Now, this can be connection with others. This can be connection with your creator. This can be connection with nature. But we gotta get you out of you now. Every day, we gotta get you into you, and every day, we gotta get you out of you, right? And so this connection beyond self for Ed, as you all know, he's down on his knees praying for me. Being a Montana kid. It's outside. If I'm in nature, I'm with God. I just. I'm an outside kind of guy. It's just something different for me. That's where that connection happens. That's a big important part for me. My conversations with God are outside. I gotta walk and be in nature. I'm a guy from the rivers gotta happen. So getting connection beyond yourself, where does that happen? Because see, what are these two things gonna give you? Well, we know from research called high performance habits that the first habit is to seek clarity. How do you get clarity? You gotta connect and listen to yourself again. And you gotta connect beyond you. If we could get advanced change in your life, do you know what every single performance psychologist, every single mindset coach, and every therapist would agree in the world? Clarity. If we can increase your clarity for who you want to become and how you want to live and how you're going to live into that, we shift your life forever. Clarity is your answer. The issue that I'm trying to demonstrate here is you need to know where you're going to get that clarity from. Hey, guys, it's Brandon.

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Just go to progressmode.com where's clarity coming from? Oh, Clarity is coming from my character idealization. Who do I want to become? Then it's time to connect with self and time to connect beyond self. That helps develop the role clarity of who we want to be. This stuff is so important. Now we get to some of the basics and simple fundamentals. Okay, we want to change somebody. I prefaced earlier. We're just going to challenge them. Stubborn or not. We got to introduce challenge into your life. Second, we got to pull in something called Consequence Review. Do you know why a lot of people never change? They never think about the consequences of their inaction and their action. See, it turns out higher performers are very adept to thinking about consequences. They're not paranoid. They're not paranoid. Though Jim Collins would argue otherwise. In one of his later books, he wrote Good to Great, and he would argue that, no, it's very important that some of the greatest leaders in the world, they're slightly paranoid. And what was trying to elaborate was they're kind of seeing out, and they know they got to hedge against these bets. They gotta. They gotta make sure they don't lose. They gotta see that what we're doing now is adding up into a direction, and if we don't shift now, that direction's gonna crash. Some people never change their behavior because they're so in the moment, they're so out of touch with themselves that they can't even see the consequence of who they're becoming. Who's ever had a child like this? You kind of had to say, oh, my God, if you don't change your behavior, you're gonna go to jail. A lot of people told me that when I was growing up. I remember one time, I don't know what happened to us goofy kids, but somebody taught us. I don't know, somebody in my high school taught us that you could go into a parking lot at night and you could get one of those shopping carts, and you could put it in front of the car and then put your friend in the shopping cart and go fast. Yeah, this became a thing. I have no idea why. And then you could also climb on top of all the buildings. It was like a goal to climb on every top big building in our high school town. I have no idea why we crawled on all those buildings. But it became a thing for fun. Maybe. I don't know. I didn't ever think I was Spider man, but it was like somebody, a security guard, pulled me over and I unrolled my window. I said, yes, sir. And he says, didn't say anything. You know, you're gonna get yourself killed or kill somebody, right? And just the way he looked at me, that's all he had to say. I had never thought that I was just having fun. You know, you're gonna kill yourself or get somebody killed, right? And he said it so sternly and so seriously, it hit me. And I was like, what am I doing this for? Cause sometimes you're just not thinking about that consequence. But when you feel the consequence, you shift. If you're a bad parent and you can see that consequence 10 years out and 20 years out, you're like, ooh, I don't want to be like that. You shift when you see. And this is the most important one I want to share this with you and make sure you wrote it down. The consequence of your inaction, you shift. Most people think their inaction doesn't have a consequence. But you heard Ed Milette give a different speech today, didn't he? There's consequence to inaction. There's consequence because life is so short and it's so precious. And you have to realize the things you don't do are also adding to a type of life, the things that you don't do. It's almost like there's a, you know, a quantum parallelism happening. Okay, again, fancy words, but it's like there's two things happening. There's like, okay, who you are becoming, but also who you could have become. If you stay acting the exact same way, you're going to become something. But there's always a parallel track of if you had taken more action or the person who would have been of more courageous action, what would they have shifted into? Because there's a consequence to your inaction. But the thing that's so strange about life, almost always the consequence to inaction is blind. You can't see it. You can't see the person now who you could have become if you had acted differently for the last 10 years. So you don't have to actually deal with the consequence, right? You just, you think the consequence of who you are today is what you did the last 10 years, but it's also what you didn't do. And that person who you didn't do, that inaction is blind to you. You can't see it. It's kind of a mind blowing reality of that inaction. You can say, well, yeah, but Brenda, I didn't work out, so I have to deal with that today. I'm like, yeah, that's one form of it. But the other form is you just can't see. You don't know who you could have become. That's the problem with consequences, is often you don't see them. You're so unaware of them. Or it seems like they live on a different quantum field that you're not even ever gonna access. And that's why you have to have times of review. When do you review the consequences of your life? Now when you say consequences, it doesn't sound fun. So in growth day, we call them life scores. And we just have you track your habits and your mindset every day, every week and every month in growth day. So if you haven't used the life score section in your app, start using it and you'll start to see some of Those consequences with your scores. So you can score, you can make it fun, but at the end of the day, if you're not reviewing it, it's just gone. It's blind. You'll never experience it. And that's why I want to end with. For this framework, one more thing across the bottom, and it's courageous action.

Courage.

Courage is that virtue that makes all other virtues possible. You've heard that quote before. Courage is the virtue that makes all other good virtues possible. If you want advanced human behavior change, it's going to be from knowing who you want to become, connecting to yourself more often so you can understand yourself connecting beyond yourself, challenging yourself, understand the consequences of your behavior, and having way more courageous action. Way more. And here's the thing. I would just rather, for most people, and here's kind of interesting. If I tell you, take courageous action, and you're like, yeah, I'll do that. I'll be like, wait. But before you do that, can we stop the inaction part? There's things that you want and you desire, but you're inactive. You're not going for it. You're not assertive towards it. I want you to assert yourself way more consistently towards the things that you want. That doesn't always require courage. Sometimes it's just doing the thing. It's just showing up, just showing up. I want you to stop the inaction, get in motion towards the things that you want on a consistent basis. And then. And then after we review the consequences of that, then I'm gonna say, okay, bold moves. Courageous action. Let's go. Let's get in it. Let's do the hard things now. Let's go to that other level. Courageous action. What would be a courageous move this week? And start stacking those weeks, stacking those weeks. One courageous action week after week after week, 52 courageous actions throughout the year. That's a whole lot more than most people. And that gives you an unfair advantage. It gives you an unfair advantage. This should be a year of courage for this community. For each of you who know this personal development stuff, who are unblocking, who are ready to do the work, a year of courage. Everyone say, I'm here. I'm ready. I go in. Courage. That's what we want to build today. That's what we want to build today.