Larry King interviews #1 Bestselling Author Brendon Burchard

Brendan Richard is the New York Times best selling author of the Charge and the Millionaire Messenger. He's one of the top motivation and marketing trainers in the world and is an amazing guy. How did you're a kid from Montana, you had a near death experience. How did you get into this?

Right, well, it was the near death experience.

What happened?

You know, I was 19 year old kid, pretty distraught with life and directionless, you know, like no other 19 year old kids. Right. I'd just gone through a breakup with the first woman I ever loved and I needed to get out of there, so I took a job in another country. And one night I was rounding a corner, going 85 miles an hour in a car and ended up flipping off the road. And in that experience, you know, kind of crashing into death's doorway, you discover you're going to think about life in different ways. And I discovered what we call LIFE's last three questions that you wonder, the first question you wonder is, did I live, you know, if this is the end, did I live my life like fully vibrant?

Did you find the hospital?

Yeah, I thought of the hospital actually as we went into the turn and the car started to turn off the road.

Other people in the car?

Yeah, my friend was driving and I remember bracing and when you brace it's this feeling throughout your body like if this is the end, you want to know did I live it? Was I alive and vibrant? And then the car starts flipping and you start seeing images or I started seeing images of people who I loved and who I cared for. And you think, who's going to miss me and who will I miss? And it brings up the second question of did I love and did I love openly and honestly or completely? Did I hold back because I got hurt one time? Which was my story at that point. Car crashes, I get knocked out. I come to Kevin, who is driving, is screaming, get out of car, get out of car. I don't know if it's on fire, what's going on. And there's this moment I'm able to pull myself through the windshield of the car and I stand up on the crumpled hood of this car and I look down at my bloodied body and this fear is shooting down, realizing life can end. I just remember thinking, did I even matter? You know, did I make a difference? Did I change somebody's world? Maybe didn't change the whole world, but I changed something. And I didn't like the answers to any of those questions. You know, did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? No. It was just lost, unconnected 19 year old kid. But then I, after months of recovery and kind of figuring out what my life was about, I thought, how empowering is that to know what questions we might ask at the end? So I just wanted to tell people. So I started telling people. I said, you know what if you lived your life in a way that you were happy with those answers when you ask them at the end? And then everyone said, well, you got to write books on that and you become a speaker on that. And I didn't like any of that stuff, but I just wanted to tell people. I thought that would be a very empowering thing for people to know. So I started telling people. And then it just grew into this big thing where all around the world they call us and they say, come those three questions. And I said, okay. And then it started this journey of me wondering, well, what's it take for people to change?

No background in public speaking or.

I was terrified of it. Terrified.

That's the biggest fear people have.

Yeah. And I had it.

How'd you get over it?

Practice. Actually. You know what I think the real thing was the mindset change of realizing it wasn't about me, but it was in service to this mission that I felt like I'd been given what I call sort of life's golden ticket. I remember standing on that hood of that car and this blood coming off of me. And there was a moment I looked up and there was this big beautiful moon that night. And I remember feeling like the big guy upstairs reached down and said, you know, here you go, kid, you're still alive, you can still love, you can still matter. But now, you know, the clock is ticking.

In your book, you talk about the charged life.

Yeah.

Define. What does that mean?

Well, after I discovered one of the questions is, did I live? I started realizing, if I'm going to change my life, I want to know that I live my life fully. And how do you do that? So I started doing a lot of research into what makes people happy and what makes them engaged. The charge life is just, it's more consciously designed. It's you and I deciding how are we going to show up today? How engaged and energized are we going to be? And it has three qualities, specifically. One is energy. You know, someone who's more fully charged and joyous in their life, you can feel them. There's a sense of energy about it. You always had that. You know, people say that to you all the time. And then engagement when we're engaged. With our passions, our relationships, with this moment, we feel better. And then enthusiasm. That people who are really fully charged in life, they look forward to tomorrow in different ways. They're more optimistic about it, but they're more generally physically excited about it. They're like, I look forward to it. It keeps them getting up every morning.

How do you deal with bad moments, though?

Yeah, it's perspective. You know, you and I is like, everyone has bad. Everyone has bad moments, you know, and when you have them, it's not avoiding them or hating them, or being mad at the bad moments and realizing, yeah, this isn't quite right yet. So what would be? And it's an understanding that any circumstance we're in right now that, you know, the gift we've been given is this power of choice.

Are you in the Tony Robbins, Harvey McKay? Yeah, you can do it.

Mode set work very much for me. I mean, they're both dear friends, both mentors, as you know. And what I'm about is choice. I'm about, you know, any given moment, we get to choose how we're going to feel or how we're going to react to things. Not that we can't have a bunch of bad series of moments, but at some point, we all have to ask this question. Who do I want to live with tomorrow? Tomorrow? Do I want to live with the guy or the gal who didn't fight for their dreams, who didn't direct their own destiny, who didn't decide how they're going to feel in life and march towards that? Or do I want to live with the person who said, you know what? I'm going to charge up my life. I'm going to live a better quality of life. So we take more action.

We.

We feel better about ourselves, and we engage the world differently.

You do personal coaching, right?

Yeah.

How does that work, people? What happens? Someone calls you, how does it work?

It's a weird, weird business, but I love it. Because what people do is they call and they usually high performers because my emphasis in high performance coaching, so working with people who are usually at the top level of their career, but at some point they got comfortable and they know that even in their comfort, that they can be better. And they want to touch that rim of higher levels of potential performance. So they say, okay, kid, I need two things. And they usually, you know, I'm a young guy, but the two things I can bring to people's lives is first and foremost, clarity. Because just sometimes that's the number one thing we need. We're frustrated or we're restless in our life but we don't know why and we don't know where we want to go. I don't believe in goal based coaching, which is just like, what do you want to accomplish tomorrow? I'm more interested in who do you want to become. And let's get you to the highest levels of your performance on a day to day basis, not just marching towards one goal or another. And that's our emphasis.

You know that every great athlete I've spoken to continues to have coaching.

Yeah.

Personal coaching, self coaching. You never have it totally made. Right.

Because that's the second part of what we do. The first part is clarity. The second part is challenge. Every high performer, you know, they know if they're going to get better, they've got to challenge themselves to break through a knowledge or a skill or ability. And sometimes you just need somebody who pushes you. Even as good as you are, you just need someone to say, you could show up differently.

Why do people have to be drawn to this? You need you. Why do I need you?

I don't think anyone needs anybody or needs anything. I mean, we can all just choose to bliss out and be happy right now, close our eyes, go into people's life.

You have a choice. That's the eastern philosophy. You choose what your life is like.

Very much so. So we could all bliss out. The challenge is it doesn't last that we need someone sometimes just to keep us at a peak level for a longer amount of time. And the top performers in the world, they know that they can't do it on their own because we all get to where we're at in our life on our own. But at some point when we want to go to another level, we know sometimes we need a coach.

How about people who are skeptical about people who do what you do and do it successfully, who say what you are basically is marketing.

Right.

You're not. It's not. It's selling. You're selling a kind of false hope. You feel good. Yeah. You walk out of the building feeling good and then the energy goes away.

Yeah. I've never been the hype guy. You know, I'm not even really the success guy. I'm more of the struggle guy, of I honor your struggle. And I don't think struggle is something to move away from. I think that your next great breakthrough is going to come from you struggling and working hard for it. And so that whole hype y feeling of just getting people energized, I mean, we can all get everyone Clapping. But my job has been, let's show them the science and the strategies for performing at better levels over the long term. That's much more of an, I think, an intelligent approach than just getting people clapping.

Is it hard work?

It's really hard work because you're dealing with people's dreams. You know, when I mean, I've worked with people who, they have some outcome or dream in mind and they're feeling better, but they don't feel like they're moving towards it fast enough. The progress, sometimes if it isn't there, they don't feel, you know, they don't feel like it's working. And most times in life where success is happening, there's a point where people feel like it's not working. If they can struggle through that and keep marching on, they usually find their few other things.

You talk a lot about the science behind happiness and success. What does science have to do with this?

I think we've come a long way. You know, the old world of self help or personal development was just kind of hypey talk about people's attitude and feeling good. But now we have neuroscience and positive psychology and we can measure your. Literally how your brain activates during different moments of your life. So what we discovered is there are certain activities that make you feel fully charged, that there's a different amount of dopamine release or vasopressin or oxytocin in your brain stem. We can actually measure your blood flow and your oxygenation in your brain. And by measuring all of that, we've been able to figure out what makes people really happy, what makes people more fully engaged. And if we know that, then we can coach their life towards that.

Even when dealing with bad events, even with dealing.

No one doesn't like a car crash. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting. Traveled around the world speaking about all this, and people come up to me after all the time and say, you know, Brenda, I went through a car accident and nothing changed in my life, and my car wreck was worse than yours. And I will say, you know, that's what comes down to the ultimate thing in all of motivation or personal development or human potential. It's meaning. It's what meaning are you ascribing to things in your life? Are they positive meanings, negative meanings? Are sometimes you taking a hint from the universe to make an adjustment in your life. And so for me, that car accident, it felt meaningful and it said, you know what, kid? This is your time to turn around.

So you use the negative to be Be a positive. Yeah.

It took a different meaning. And that meaning is, I mean, it's led to all the successes.

Brendan Burchard, who, very successful guy, is going to do a series on Aura later this year. Tell us about it.

Real excited. We're calling it the Charged Life.

I love that.

It's just about meeting fascinating and influential folks in our community and in our culture and asking them simple questions of what made you feel successful? How did you have your breakthrough when you were struggling, when you felt like you were knocked down, you couldn't survive anymore? What strategies or beliefs or habits made you pull through? Because everybody watching has their own dream and everybody has this desire to do something more with themselves and, and reach their highest levels. Well, how do some of the world's most successful people do that?

I'm going to answer some of those questions from you. Right, right. And you're going to talk to people, all walks of life who are successful. All walks of life, athletics, drama, the fields of science, anything.

Right. Anyone who has a unique perspective that we believe can give some strategies or tools to our audience so they can go to the next level.

And we're going to call it the Charge Life.

Right.

Thanks, Brendan. Great. I'm ready to be your foil.

It's honored to be here.

Brendan Burchard, the New York Times best selling author of the Charge and the Millionaire messenger. And you'll be seeing him on Aura with the Charge Life.