How to Live a Balanced Life

Listen, the chaos of the universe doesn't go away. It only gets more complex. There's only more responsibility, there's only more challenges ahead for all of us. It's about learning to deal with that stimulus and that reality in such a way that, you know, we can be a little more emotionally free during that journey, a little less stressed. Today's personal development topic, harmony. You know, so many people in their life are so caught by shame and guilt and frustration and stress because they don't feel like they have balance in their life. And this was a huge topic. Many of you know, I conducted the world's largest study of high performers worldwide from over 190 countries around the world. In depth analysis, trying to understand what is it that leads to long term success, where people actually maintain good relationships and maintain their health and their sanity. You know, because as you know, the climb up, the busyness, the overwhelm, the deep plans, the huge dreams can be so taxing upon us. Especially when you are the high performer in your life. You know, you might be the more successful or productive or influential or courageous member of your family. You might be the person on the team who's always in the lead. You might be the person who others look up to as the role model and always need you for something. Always trying to put something on your plate or get some mentorship or just kind of need your shoulder to cry on. It's a challenge to be the high performer. But we've shown by the research that you can have extraordinary abundance and success in your life from all the external measures, whether that is your perceived influence, your, your income, your bank account, your career achievements, or just your status in society, in your organization, in your church, in your community. But you can also have great, deep, rich internal worlds where you feel vibrant, you feel joyous, you feel grateful, you feel full, ready, alive. So how do you do that? Well, in that research study, a topic of life balance came up over and over and over and over again. But was interesting was it didn't come up for high performers as much as it did for underperformers. Now, what the heck is happening there? Why would underperformers be more frustrated by life balance than high performers? Isn't that strange? Well, we conducted the research to try and figure out what the heck was going on there and what it really was. One is a definition and a mindset difference between underperformers and high performers in life balance. The underperformers tend to focus on whether or not balance happened in the equilibrium or balance of hours Right. They were wondering, do I have a balance of hours in my life where higher performers are really trying to create alignment and harmony in their life? So high performers are more interested in, is there a balance of the activities I'm doing that align with my values and my priorities so it's less about, hey, I spend equal amounts of time with this person or that person, or equal amounts of time at work. There wasn't trying to balance hours. They were trying to ensure harmony. And so the nice thing about it was, with clear communication and deep clarity, they could really share with the people in their lives when they're going to have that two week sprint of crazy hours and then fall back into their family routine. Or they could communicate with others, hey, there's this project coming up, and it's going to be heightened expectations on me, and I'll probably be a little more stressed and I might need a little bit more time independently here. And they could ask for support. Part of courage is being vulnerable enough to ask for support when you really need it, to ask for understanding when you really need it. And so what we found is the high performers were trying to achieve harmony in a way that actually very much directly correlated with their clarity measures. So here's what I mean by that. So if you read the high performance habits, you'll see in the clarity section that high performers tend to have clarity in four areas. And I'll also talk about how that relates to harmony. So those four areas that they had clarity in were self, social skills, and service. So they had clarity of self. Who am I and who do I want to become? What is it that makes me unique? And what is it that makes me feel alive or connected? Second was social. What is it? What's my intention with other people? How do I want to treat other people? And how do I want to be treated? Third was skills. What are the critical skills I need to develop in order to become happier or higher performing or more productive in these areas? And fourth was service. What unique contributions do I enjoy? What brings meaning or fulfillment to me in terms of the activities at work or home or in my mission? And so they had clarity in those things. But let's come back to harmony. Well, you know, if you think about each of those as a circle, self social skills and service. When you feel like you are living in the alignment with the better part of you and you are challenging yourself in each area without compromising your sleep, without compromising your true integrity, then you know what happens. You feel a sense of harmony. And it took me A while to figure out that this is what they were talking about. So I had to really go back and decode these structured interviews we did. And so, for example, in their sense of self, they felt like they were in harmony when they were being congruent with their values or congruent with what they said, or aligned with the identity that they wanted to have versus the one they were prescribed by their parents or others. They felt like life was in harmony when that self could show up in the social realm and they could be seen, validated, liked, or a sense of belonging with other people who respected that side of them, that self. But also that they felt a harmony in their relationships with others, the social part also, when their skills happened to match the challenges at hand, meaning the problems they're trying to conquer and solve at work, you know, match their skills didn't mean they had world class skills, but it felt like, okay, I'm stretching myself. Mihaly Czentmihalyi talked about this in his concept of flow, that when our skills are adequate enough for the challenges at hand, but there is a stretch goal there, it's a little hard. That's actually activating us, not discouraging us. And when we feel in harmony with, you know, our unique calling or a mission or something that we want to do. These things were all important to be in alignment with our sense of self, how we want our relationships to go socially, the skills versus challenges we face in life and the service that we want to provide or sense as a meaningful pursuit when we're aligned with those hours are less important. It's more of over time. Am I living my truth? Am I in harmony with who I want to be and how my relationships should be? Am I aligned each week doing things or the activities and projects of my life aligned to the service that I enjoy giving? The service that I think makes a difference, whether it changes people's lives or supports them, or is interesting or creative or passionate endeavor, that type of harmony is what we're after more than having a perfect balance of hours throughout the day. Because there's a lot of gurus or experts or supposed influencers out there who make a living in the motivational or confidence game. And what they end up saying is, oh, wow, wow, wow, you know, life balance is bs. Well, it's important for you to discover what do they mean specifically by balance? Because here's what I've also found about high performers. They feel balanced, they feel a sense of centeredness. And they feel a sense of centeredness because if you imagine these four circles sort of rotating around them, or them standing on these four circles, or there's a Venn diagram of these four circles in some way or another. Their sense of harmony with who they are, how they want their relationships to go, what skills are required to grow, and how they want to serve. Well, there's just a nice harmony between those things. That is what we're after in personal development. If again, coming back to high performance habits, forgive me, but this topic today warrants it. It's that famous chapter now that I think every Fortune 1000 CEO now mentions is the story of the senior executive that the woman in there who realized that in her life, achievement wasn't the problem. She could get stuff done, she could check things off, she could move projects ahead. Her real problem was alignment, doing the right things, focusing her time on the right things, finding a harmony between how she wanted life to be and how it really was and how she wanted to serve. And always, always, always trying to find a greater alignment with the things I just spoke about.

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My favorite words is the entire English language. No kidding. Release. Now, most of you probably know by now that I created the Release Meditation technique. And it's just a very simple technique of meditating with a mantra and a goal. But that meditation came from an overall lifestyle choice. When I was in my late 20s, I was burning out hard. I had been through sort of the corporate grist machine of, you know, taking these young kids in their 20s, work them 18 hours a day for five, six years, as much as you can till they burn out and leave. And I was just realizing that so much of my life was stress and drama and hurry, hurry, hurry. And I was carrying a lot of pain and hurt and anger from, you know, my childhood. And I just really got it in my head that I need to let go a lot of that old drama. I need to learn how to release the stress. I needed to learn how to be with other people without having just like intensity and expectation and tension in my shoulders and a clenched jaw, if you know what I'm saying, people. I had to learn how to release. And that was sort of the genesis of what became the release meditation technique, which again I'll reference here really briefly, is just being able to close your eyes, repeat the word release, have the intention to release the tension in your body and release the thoughts running across your head. And even as though of course you'll always have thoughts running across your mind, you learn to release them. You don't hang on to them and go down the wormhole of worry or thought about every little thing that flashes across your mind. And you just take a nice few moments to do that. Release meditation technique. I do it every day for 20 minutes. Some people do it twice a day. Some people do it for five minutes here or there throughout the day. They do it every time they're in an Uber or Lyft. You know, they do it when they're standing in line or just right before they start their work. I want to talk about four other ways that I think of this concept of release. First, I think it's just absolutely vital that if you're a productive, creative, high achieving person, that you have an hourly release practice. You heard me talk about the world's largest study on productivity that had been done when I wrote High Performance Habits. And that study found that the highest performers in the world and the most productive people in the world tended to take a break at every 50 to 52 minutes. Now this is across worldwide data sets. And so every 50 minutes I just learned, okay, if I'm sitting, I get up, I stand, I bounce in place, I stretch out a little bit. If I'm working, even if I'm on a roll, I still get up and I leave. I walk around the house, I go outside for a quick five minute breather, I go over to the pull up bar, do a few pull ups, stretch out. I do something to break my mental focus and energy so that I have a pit stop and every hour to just recharge, which allows me to then be more productive longer throughout the day and thus, of course, longer throughout the week. That moment of recharging on the hour makes you be more effective, focused, present, peaceful, less stressed throughout the day. If you keep building up the pressure all day, all day, all day, all day, all day with focus and Energy and effort and you never break it. You don't take that pit stop. You're on lap 72 without a pit stop. That's why you burn out your tires, man. You need that hourly release practice. So please find what that is for you. Second, big idea is to release your expectations of hurry on others. What I mean by that is, you know, you send an email and you don't get it back in 10 seconds, you get all angry. You know, you text your friends and you don't hear back from them for a day or two, you get all upset. You have this immediate desire or need that everyone must absolutely reply or placate or respond to you as fast as human possible. You ask the kids to do something, they do it in four seconds. You freak out. We've got to change that practice. Release that expectation. I am a happy person because I remember studying very, very long ago a spirituality teacher who shared that she had very little expectations of others and that's why she was so happy. It kind of blew my mind, I thought, huh? If I don't need or demand or have to have all these things from others and they don't have to do exactly as I designed the earth, then guess what, my friend, I don't get as angry and that tension is released. When I can release expectations about others and the speed in which they comply or do what I need or conform or do what I've asked or live their life the way that I would expect, then you know what? Less drama, less tension, happier life. Third big idea, Release the ego. Release the ego. It goes a little bit with that previous point here that, you know, I really believe if we have to have everyone do what our ego desires, then we're just going to be in trouble. But I think a lot of people in releasing ego, what that sometimes means is don't take things so personally. You know, don't get so hurt or upset or angry every time someone poses a thought that contradicts your biases or your belief. Don't get so hurt or angry every time somebody says anything online that's negative towards you. Don't get so upset if you don't achieve the perfect thing or have that bent towards perfectionism because your ego is all tied up into things. Let the ego move on and adopt the learning mindset. Step into your humble spirit. Don't feel like you have to quash and dominate other people and suddenly life feels better. Last idea. Release the need for fake hurry and fake deadlines. You know, a lot of our stress actually comes from Self imposed deadlines. Well, I have to get to the store today. I have to, I have to, you know, I have to finish this project today by 5pm or the world's gonna fall apart. No, you can go to the store tomorrow. No, you can do it on Friday. Nope, it's not being casual about deadlines. People say, Brendan, if you've released all these, you know, this stress and hurry that you're talking about, how do you meet your deadlines? Well, I meet them joyously, not with a clenched jaw. Does that make sense? I can still productively create and generate and move towards reasonable deadlines in my life without burning myself out. My journey has always been a rather joyful journey in terms of the deadlines I've set for myself once I became an entrepreneur. But when I was even a corporate employee with a company that had literally 80,000 employees and I was just a cog in the wheel, I was good at setting boundaries and expectations with my managers, my team, about what seemed reasonable, about how long I could work, about the deadlines I could hit with joy and full engagement and real excellence. Because I found that when you hurry, not only are you stressed and you have a lot of tension in your body, but you tend to do things with less quality. That hurry, that highly anxious mindset that you have, often, that's ego. It's ego that's spilling in, that you have to be right, that you have to get it done on your deadline, that everyone has to comply with you. And that hurry, hurry, hurry is something that, you know, what costs you in the long term, costs your relationships, costs your joy of work. You receive all these prompts that expand your own self awareness, that deepen your own commitment to figuring things out and building the lifestyle and the experience of life that you truly want to have, that you learn to feel the day and construct the day and design your life in a way that you're satisfied with, that you can have content from that you can experience engagement and joy and passion and fulfillment and purpose on a continual basis. But I'm telling you, people on a real path of purpose and joy, they're not wandering around with their arms, you know, crossed and their mouth and jaw clenched and their shoulders hunched up and that their stomach just like clenched all the time with stress and worry. That's not the path. You can have the world's weight on your shoulders like the Dalai Lama does, and still somehow manage to have a smile and an ease. I think that's the real importance of emotional intelligence, of self, mastery of self, actualization of a deep meditative or spiritual practice is that, listen, the chaos of the universe doesn't go away. It only gets more complex. There's only more responsibility, there's only more challenges ahead for all of us. It's about learning to deal with that stimulus and that reality in such a way that, you know, we can be a little more emotionally free during that journey, A little less stressed that we've learned to release the thoughts and the tension in our body that cause us drama, especially the self imposed kind. Listen, striver, you deserve to have an extraordinary quality of life. And the good news is you set most of those parameters up in your head, in your mindset, and in your choices of attitude and how you spend your time and energy and focus and how you actually experience the world. This is a worldwide positive community of people who really care about personal development, who know that if we improve individually, we can collectively improve society. Who know that every day that we choose to be our best, we inspire somebody else to keep going, to be encouraged to find their own path and their own dreams, to believe in themselves, to see you as a role model, that's an amazing thing. I just feel like spreading the message that there's this new thing, this new movement, this new moment that if we all look within, if we all learn to release all that stress and that anxiety and that ego and those expectations and all that hurry at this moment in the world, well, if we do that, then we change the world and we really discover the real truth and the real meaning that every day is a great day to grow.