Mashup: How to Develop Great Relationships With People Around You

Let's reignite your desire for deep, compelling, beautiful, awesome, fulfilling, intimate, zesty, fun relationships again. You can have them. And if you stopped yourself from believing that, it only means you disengage from the skill set. Have ambition for great relationships. I know that might sound common sense, but it's not common practice. That's why so many people who could achieve greatness do not. I want you to think about this. Your ambition for the quality of relationships in your life is the umbrella principle. It's the umbrella value ethic that is driving how your relationships are right now. I can't tell you how many people I've coached and worked with in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s who never, ever set a true, genuine ambition for great relationships. Relationships that were vibrant, relationships that were deep, that had depth to them. Relationships that made them feel engaged, happy, joyous, fulfilled. What most people do is they take the relationships that show up in front of them and go, I guess that's the way it is. I guess my parents are like that. Why have any ambition for anything better? They're never going to change. They get it. They start dating or they get married and they go, well, I guess it is what it is. I've been with her for five years, she's not going to change. And you get this idea that people don't change. And what you do is your ambition keeps falling and you allow your dream, your desire, your ambition for great relationships to continually get knocked down. Every time someone doesn't understand you, you let your ambition for vibrancy and intimacy and sexiness and fun and joy in your partner. Relationships fall down. Every time you get in a fight, it stacks on. Every time there's trouble, it stacks on. And you keep getting more and more frustrated with the person. Your frustration grows into closed down communication. And now there's this distance, there's this block. And what people do is they immediately stop keeping their ambition for great relationships alive. I had the blessing of horrible relationships. Anyone else? I mean, I had terrible relationships. Just awful, just the worst, terrible relationships. When I was a young man, right, just came up like, I had this terrible relationship. I grew up in a town where everybody beat me up. I grew up in a town where everyone. There's a lot of really, really, really awful adult behavior. Grew up in a place where, where there wasn't a lot of good communication. My first relationships with people I dated were just horrible judgment, just off, just like negativity and just huge demonstrations of anger. And it was just like, whoa. And the blessing was sometimes we Need a change. For me, it was, I got a knock in the head with my car accident and made me realize, actually, I don't like that. I want phenomenal relationships. I want phenomenal relationships with everybody around me. And so how many of you ever had that ambition before? And maybe you picked up a book like how to Win Friends and Influence People, or How to Talk so People Listen, or How to Argue and Win Every Time, or you picked up these books and you're like, oh, I need to learn how to share and communicate. Well, that was me. I was that dork my whole life. When I struggle with something, I go to books and I just start reading on things. And one of the blessings was I read about these people who had great relationships. And I never had that, but I kept my ambition. Here's the hardest thing to ask anyone to do in this particular year. Raise your ambition for your relationships. Especially now. Some of you have been shut in with your family for so long because of the pandemic that you're just like, we're trying to survive. And you're trying to blunt out the difficulty by just turning on the TV all the time or handing over devices all the time. And the ambition to have great relationships with the kids, with the spouse, with everybody else has kind of faded into, I'm just going to survive. But I'm here to warn you as your coach that I'm just going to survive in this relationship, just trying to get through the days with this family. That ambition is lower than your potential. That ambition is hurting your intentions. That low ambition not to have something great is cheating you from fulfilling the destiny you were probably meant to have, but would require great relationships. And as your coach, I'm here to say, be wary of the fact that you are so wary in your relationships. Be attentive to the fact, like, oh, wow, we are just trying to survive right now. Because that's a slippery slope, isn't it? How many know that? Like, when you just try to survive, imagine you run a business, right? You're a CEO, you're an entrepreneur, you're running your business. If you allow just surviving to last for months or years, that company never survives, right? Someone in that company must have ambition. For what? Growth? For better service, for better relationships with the customers. If you don't have that in the business, the business dies. That's the same thing in marriage and relationship. The same thing in child parenting. The same thing every time we don't keep an ambition to challenge ourselves to do better, we end up hurting the very thing. And so I'm here to say have ambition for great relationships again. And I know your first impulse can easily be, well, you don't understand my husband well, you don't understand these crazy kids. You don't understand this team. You understand my business. You know what? Don't be a you don't understand person because that stops you from learning. People say you don't understand, they cut off the very advice they need to hear because they want to self justify. Does it make sense that it's hard? Does it make sense? It's much more difficult with someone who doesn't listen. Does it make more sense when you have an obstinate husband, team or person in your business? Sure, those are roadblocks, those are difficulties, those are struggles. But just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible to improve. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible to improve. You can improve your relationships and I think you're going to find that and we're going to start it right now. Do you want to improve your relationships? Let's do a gut check. How much ambition have you had recently for great relationships? Have you woken up about it? Have you journaled about it? Have you thought about it? Is it in your goal sheet? If I paraded in your house? Show me the piece of paper that says improve this relationship. Show me the piece of paper that says create great relationships with everybody I meet. Show me the paper. Show me how often that piece of paper got journaled on. Show me how often you wrote that down and then we can have a conversation that I don't understand. Right? So let's start with have you had the ambition? And if not, let's reignite that today. Let's reignite your desire for deep, compelling, beautiful, awesome, fulfilling, intimate, zesty, fun relationships. Again, you can have them. And if you stopped yourself from believing that, it only means you disengage from the skill set. You just disengage from the development here. And that might sound like harsh or judgmental way for a coach to kick off with it, but I'm a high performance coach. I'm supposed to hold your feet to the fire a little bit and challenge you and say, this should be an area that you love working on. Raise your hands if you love communication. Yeah, you guys, I get it. This is a great and a fun and a fulfilling and a great place to focus. So please, let's up level our ambition together. My friends. Have you ever heard that advice to take risks but you felt Like, I don't want to take risks. No one likes risk, right? No one wants to say, when they wake up in the morning, I'm going to take tons of risks today. Usually, risk brings about fear. We're worried that if we take a risk, we'll fail, Other people will judge us, we'll look stupid, we'll feel uncertain or unsure of ourselves. And nobody likes those feelings or those outcomes. So as much as people say, take risks, it's easy for us to say, nah, I'm not into that. But we also know intellectually that we can't grow unless we take more risks. That your next level of success, that leap from this level to that level, there's going to be risk there. You know, it's from here to there, and there's that gap in between. You don't know as you take that leap, if you're going to do well, that's the risk. You might fall, you might fail, you might not do well. But if you're not making those leaps and taking those steps, you'll always be stuck where you were yesterday. And to grow, we've got to have a lot of courage to jump into those risks. So let me give you maybe a framework for how to think about taking risks. You know, I always think about three ways to think about taking risks so that I'm continually pushing and growing myself. So the first thing I think about when I look at my career or I look at my life, the first risk I want to take is I want to make whatever I'm doing harder. I know that sounds weird, but I'm like, how could I make my job more difficult? Because in the taking that risk to make it more difficult, I'll grow. I'll give you guys an example. Last weekend, I had the blessing to keynote a conference in New Orleans. Some of you all were there. It was at the Superdome in New Orleans, which holds like 100,000 people, but they kind of spliced it in half with a curtain. And they had 20, 30,000 people in the audience. This was for the Beachbody convention, and it was a blast. Now I could get up and talk to 20,000 people pretty regularly in my life. I'm doing it again next weekend. It's what I do as a motivational speaker. Right? I'm used to doing that. But I could just go on stage, do my thing, and get off, and that wouldn't be serving the audience as much. And so I asked myself, how can I make this presentation even harder on me so that I can grow? So I text two of my friends who happen to be in that organization. Tony Horton, many of you guys know he is kind of the founder of and trainer for P90X and Shalene Johnson, who does piyo. And I text them both. I said, what's your hardest exercise move that people usually can't get? Because both those people are gonna be at the conference. And this was a lot of their superfans. So I was like, let's go. So Tony told me, he's like, the donkey kick is the hardest one. The donkey kick is basically you do a handstand, you kick your legs out, you land back plank position, you run your leg through, like threading the needle in yoga, and then you return and you do a burpee. Okay? And Chalene said, well, the hardest one is like what she calls the piyo flip, which is like, imagine doing a bridge, right, but then going to kind of one arm. And, like, you're doing a bridge this way, and one arm goes that way. I mean, it's not easy. So I decided in front of 20,000 people to do those two moves back to back in a suit. So imagine doing a handstand in a suit, kicking your legs out, threading the needle, then flipping over, doing a full extended bridge. Not easy, but I did it because it would be hard. Does that make sense? Part of the reason I got better as a speaker is because I was pushing myself. Pushing myself. I mean, it's very comforting and easy to give a big speech and, you know, have a transcript or all these notes to read from. But I said, one day I'm going to be able to get up on stage and give a speech with no notes whatsoever. Now, that's hard. Hard. That's not comforting. It's not easy. But it's by putting challenges in front of ourselves that we grow. And that's part of taking risks. You know, I always say to people, look, if the only challenges you're dealing with in life right now are the ones that life dealt you, then you're not living a fully conscious life yet. And what I mean by that is you're living a life of reaction. If you're not moving and put. If you're not moving towards harder and more difficult goals, if you're not giving yourself challenges, if you're not taking risks consciously, then you're just reacting to the world. You're not growing. And so challenge yourself the next time you're going to go do something, your art, your career, put yourself out there, try something, make that sales call. How could you challenge yourself to make that process even harder so you get better. Obviously, you know, you need to do that in the gym too, right? I mean, part of growing a muscle is stretching it and making it harder, making it difficult, pushing it beyond its current capabilities. That's how you grow muscle to same thing. That's how you grow in life. The second big thing I think about is how do I do what I'm doing and take a risk by being different, Right? So think about what I've shared so far. The first way to take a risk is to make your process harder so that you grow and stretch. The second way is to do something very different. I mean, maybe you're already good at something, but now you're going to completely switch up how you're doing it right now. Many of you know I have a podcast about to change that podcast from something that's been very successful. You know, we had top 10 for over 100 weeks in my category. We're completely changing that up. We don't need to do it. The old way worked fine. But part of taking risks is making yourself evolve, not being the latecomer to evolution, right? So think about how can you do something different? I'll give you an example. When we first started my YouTube channel back in, like, 2014, when we really started doing weekly YouTube videos, Travis had this great idea. He said, you know what? What if we did our videos in black and white? And back then, nobody was doing videos in black and white on a weekly basis as part of a show, certainly not in personal development. So we did it. It was completely different. It was a risk for us. I mean, would it work going from color to black and white? It. In the modern era, it did. And some of those videos took off. I mean, million views, 2 million views now, some of them entering the 3 millionth view. That. That happened because we decided to take a risk and be different. So how can you be different in your category, in your career, in your field of interest, whatever you're doing, how can you purposefully choose to evolve and do something different? Because that's a risk. And sure, not all risks are rewarded, but I'll tell you what's never rewarded. Stagnation. And then the last one. Part of taking a risk is being more personal, teaching yourself to share more, to be more vulnerable. It's hard. I get it. You know, I'm in front of a camera, in front of stage, all of my life. I shouldn't say my adult life. I mean, over the last 10 years of my life, it's been a very public journey for me, you see. I mean, this has been a journey for me of being in front of the public eye. But even me, for my next level, I'm going to have to share more about my personal life, be more thoughtful about that. And that takes a lot of vulnerability. It doesn't scare me. I just know I need to do it. And I'll give you an example, you know, when I first started my career in personal and professional development, you know, because if you ask me, Brendan, what do you do? I always say, well, I'm a writer first and I'm a trainer second. I've been blessed to train more people on the topic, motivation to high performance than anybody else in the world. Now, our videos have been viewed over 100 million times, over 10 million fans, across our Facebook pages. I've been blessed to reach a lot of people. But I can share with you. When I began my career, I thought I had to be Mr. Buttoned up, you know, so proper. And because I came from the consulting world, you know, if you ever had a real job in organizational America, and then you start doing this and it's hard not to be stiff, you know, and not share as much. But I remember the first time I ever shared with my audience back then. I shared with them about how when I started my career, I went broke, and I mean bankrupt broke, and I was in bankruptcy, and I was struggling to start my career, do my own seminars. I had no idea what I was doing. You know, people were making fun of me, but, you know, it was new and it was scary. And I'll never forget, though, that after I shared that, so many people would come up to me. And, like, I've struggled with that, too. I've been bankrupt or I came from poverty, and I worked hard and I made it, too. And people would share their stories with me, and it was really inspiring and taught me that, you know, people won't believe your successes if they don't believe the struggle. You got to share where you struggled more in life, and that feels like a risk. But, you know, you got to be honest. Does your family and your friends and the people you serve, do they know what you really think, what you really feel, what you really desire in life, what you're really going after, what you need? Because if they don't know that about you, that's not taking risks. Look, being quiet and avoiding difficult conversation is not taking risks, and it's not the path to growth. The path to growth for so many of us is. Is Another level of personal authenticity, another level of personal sharing. And if you don't do that, then you're not risking. You're just going through the motions. So I would say that today, when you're thinking about the next level of growth for yourself, think about risk. When you think about risk, think about it in these three ways. Okay? Number one, think about how can I make my process even more difficult? How can I take on a challenge that's hard for me, that would push me outside of my comfort zone? Number two, how can I do something different? I mean, even though I don't need to do something different, like really switch things up. And then number three, do something more personal. Share something more personal and watch how those risks start rewarding your life. Look, we can all go from, you know, an average person to an achiever, and we can all go from an achiever to a high performer. But it's going to take some new habits for you to get there. And I hope that this conversation about taking risks inspired you to think about just that. Hey, guys, it's Brandon. I'm jumping in here real quick. First, I want to make sure you've gone to progressmode.com to join the newsletter because I have a resource for you related to this episode and I have an upcoming meetup with my private group, Ultra. If you've ever liked to be in a private group with me where I help you get more progress towards your passion projects or to build your business or your brand in a bigger way, just go to progressmo.com, click on Private group to apply to. See you can get into Ultra. And we can take it to the next level by getting in person and meeting up virtually once a month online as well. Just go to progressmode.com this has been.

So powerful when you've shared this on our morning show, and I just want to share it with everyone here. A lot of people are showing up here going, okay, like, it's been a hard 14 months and, you know, struggling with self doubt, struggling all the things. And some people have goals that they're trying to figure out with their career and all the other stuff. But then there's also a thing called feelings.

Goals.

Yes, feelings. Goals. Right. So many of you guys, this is gonna be new for a lot of people. This is newer for me in my own life, frankly. Right. Cause, you know, all my years of working as a Denny's waitress, trying to all the jobs, and then all the years of rejection with my business when I finally got, you know, when we finally getting momentum. I didn't feel the day. I just drove as hard as I could. And one of the things Brendan has shared so much about and I would love for you to share with everyone is, yeah, you can have goals in your fitness journey and in your career and all these things, but what about goals for your feelings, for how you feel and how you feel the day? Can you share?

Yes.

This is so powerful.

I remember the first time I said this to her, feel the day. And she's like, right. And we had this huge great talk about. Because what happens is sometimes you're taking care of the kids, you're going through your life, you're doing the projects, you have the to do lists, and you're just going, going, going. And you finished the day. You didn't even feel the day. There was no reverence for life. There's no love, there's no heart, there's no spirit, no flow, no connection, no creative pop. And it's not because it wasn't there. It was just. You just. You just like blew through the day. You bullied the hours, I call it.

And.

And there was no moment of a pit stop to give prayer or meditation or gratitude or a second to go, like, how am I feeling? Am I experiencing the energy that I wanna experience in life? And that's again, regenerate that. But feeling the day I found the most successful people in the world. I remember we drew this out. I went to Jamie's house almost two years ago, I think now.

Yeah.

And we were talking about successful people. And they're drawing this little triangle. And we're what everybody wants after they've gotten everything. After you hit your goals, you made the money, you feel like your family needs. What you want is you want to feel the day more. You want greater depth in your relationships, like deeper relationships, deeper commitment, deeper meaning. Right. We all want those things. And then we also want to know that we're leaving some kind of legacy or contribution, what I call meaningful pursuits. And I think feeling the day should be in your top one or two priorities every day. The whole mindfulness movement is really architected to. I want to feel the day. I want to feel presence. Right. I want to feel the energy, I want to feel the spirit, I want a self awareness or consciousness. It's a different feeling of the day versus just like powering through or caffeinating through it all and just blunting it out. We want you to have those sensations of beauty and honor and respect and depth every day. We want you to feel joy and Reverence every day. She knows. I probably say reverence every morning show because I'm so happy. Who feels so happy to be alive? I'm so happy to be alive. I'm so happy to be with this woman. I'm so happy with this team and with you all guys. It's amazing. It's a gift.

Yeah. You know, I love that so much. And even Ed Mylett was sharing a little bit about that idea of setting goals also for feeling the day and then also, what are feelings we want in our life. And I think you just named a big one too, which is presence. I think that it's been so easy, especially last 14 months, to disconnect and just try to numb out and try to surf Instagram or watch the news or all the things right? And so many people are saying that's really taken a toll on them that they feel their own light dimming when they do that. And I started the morning off by talking about how that light is still inside of you. That light in every single one of us. A lot of people nodding. It's still inside of you right now. And I think part of igniting it is learning to feel the day. Right? So what are just a few just simple tips people can do who are like, Brendan, how do I feel the day?

I feel nothing. Part of it is recognize your overall emotional feeling. Every day is usually a 72 hour after effect of how you moved, breathed, slept and ate in the last 72 hours. It really is a cumulative effect, especially of the last 72 hours have a lot to do with your emotional world. So that's why having good habits on a consistent basis, you might listen. If you want to have a cheat day, that's okay. But that's why they call it a cheat day. You eat bad for one day, but then number two and number three, if you get back on the train, you start feeling good again, Right? So it's okay to have one day off, but I think the most important thing for feeling the day is you need to have pit stops throughout the day. You need to have moments that you purposely take every day throughout the day to reconnect with spirit, soul, energy. Or even just to breathe. Mom. Like, just to take a beat. Close your eyes. Like, ideally, I'll stand. Like, I do this every hour. Okay, I'll stand up. Sorry for the camera, guys. I'll stand every hour. I stand up. You've been asking me to demonstrate.

Yes, demonstrate.

I will stand up. I will close my eyes. Because a lot of your fatigue is visual. Fatigue. And that visual fatigue is causing a lot of neurological fatigue. So closing your eyes, especially since we're all these devices, close your eyes. I stand, I bounce in place, I swing my arms, I take 10 deep breaths like this, 10 deep breaths like that every hour. And it re energizes my body and my brain, and it's a little pit stop. And now my mental focus is back. When I open my eyes, I go, what's my intention for this next hour? And that little pit stop makes me go longer. Just like a race car, it can go around the whole race, but it doesn't. It takes the pit stops to tune it up so it can go longer and faster and win the race. You need little more pit stops to tune your mind up, amp up your emotions, reconnect with the heart or the spirit or the soul. And if you are just grinding all day, that is not. There's no pit stops. That's the equation for burnout.

Yeah. Well, so many people feeling burnt out, right? People that aren't leaving their home because of the pandemic, but just so burnt out and so overwhelmed. And one thing you shared that I wanna make sure everyone caught is the idea of visual fatigue. Because that was a huge aha moment that I had with you on the morning show just in the past few weeks. I thought you guys. We implemented this at IT Cosmetics. We grew to over a thousand employees, and we would start ending meetings like five minutes before the hour instead of just back to back to back meetings. Right? Because the idea that you can get up and just walk around and move your body, but one of the things you brought up is I learned I was doing them wrong because I was like walking and moving, but still engaged. I would take meetings in the hallway walking, or I would check my email on that five minute break.

Right.

And can you just quickly share the idea that when you do take a pit stop, when you do take that five minutes. Right. And this is hard for a lot of people, but the idea is when you take that five minutes, the other 55. Right. Or you take the 10 minutes, the other 50 are so much more alive. Yes, they're so much more alive. So people that say, oh, I can't afford to do that. No, no, no, you're so much more alive than those other 50. But I was doing it wrong because I wasn't actually resting my mind. And you talk about the power of visual fatigue. If you take a break and you're scrolling Instagram or emails, that's not a break.

That's exhaustion. Right. Scrolling is just exhausting your brain even more and more and more and more. It's engaging it, but it's exhausting it more and more and more. And so it's like this. You cannot possibly hope that burnout will end if you don't more consistently recharge. But we grew up on a century old model that oh, we'll get to recharge when we retire. We'll get to recharge, you know, two weeks out of the year when we have vacation. It's why people are miserable, because the burnout is real, because they don't recharge. One day I'll recharge the spa day or you know, a year from. No, no, no, no. The world's largest study of productivity that's ever been done found out the most productive people in the world who also reported high, high levels of happiness. They took a break on average every 52 minutes. Largest study ever done. Every 52 minutes they took a break. Did they need a break? No, they're recharging. If you're crashing at 2 and 3 o' clock in the afternoon every day, it's time to take a hint. You need to recharge at like 10:30, 11:30 or 1:30 to prevent the crash. That happens two or three. The crashes happen because the recharges are not happening and so the burnout will always be there. And I always say make sure you don't blame the burnout on anybody. Please don't blame your burnout on your kids, that's not fair to them. Don't blame your burnout on the team. Blame the burnout on either ambition that is unmet with planning or just not taking care of and prioritizing your self care or your well being. Take care of you so you have the energy to serve at your highest levels. I think that is something we call alignment. Anytime I talk about bad habits with people, they already know what theirs are. Maybe your bad habit is you overspend or you overeat or you're impatient with people or you're late for something or you always let this thing down or that thing fall apart or whatever was going on. We all got bad habits. And the good news is you don't have to feel bad about them anymore. Because today we're going to explain why they happen and we're explaining where they happen and we're going to explain one simple thing to overcome those bad habits. So we got a lot to cover here. My attempt today is I'm going to boil them all down into Four categories. So I'd love you just to start by brainstorming any bad habits you have, and let's see if we can pinpoint where they are and why they're happening. A bad habit, by definition, is something that's negative. And enduring a habit, right? You keep doing it, and it's almost like automatically, like you're not even thinking about it. That's a habit. You've done it so many times. It just. It's automatic. It's a response. It's easy. You just fall right into that thing. So we've got to interrupt that bad habit, put something more positive and something more enduring in its place. Because I'm sure by now you know how habits are formed, right? Something happens, we react to it with a routine, and we feel like we're paid off by it. There's a payoff, there's a benefit. And after a period of time, we just do something over and over and over and over again, and it becomes easy or natural. That is a habit. But here's my discovery about bad habits. There's really four types or four categories of bad habits. And once we learn to recognize them, awareness is always that first step. So the first step is, let's recognize where our bad habits are and where they're coming from. I bet if you look at all your list of bad habits that they all fall into these four categories. The first bad habit is bad habits just caused by our desire to protect ourselves, right? A desire to protect ourselves. You know, I don't want to take on that. That new project. And so I have this bad habit of procrastinating because I'm protecting myself. I feel like if I do it, I'm going to lose face, I'm going to fail. Something negative will happen. So I've created this little payoff called procrastination. That procrastination, it is protecting me from falling on my face, from looking dumb, right? There's always a payoff to every bad habit, and one of them is that payoff of protection. I don't have to put myself out there. That's the payoff. I don't have to get hurt. That's the payoff. So we create all these habits of whether it's a habit of perfectionism, where we never actually release anything to the world, so we don't have to be judged. Because being judged, we don't want that. So we protect ourselves. So we think, how can I protect myself? And these bad habits ensue. I want to protect myself. Bad habit. Don't put anything out there. Bad habit, not complete the work and release it. Because they might judge me. But there's a specific thing that's happening here. We're looking to protect ourselves. So are there any habits in your life that you've developed that's a bad habit to protect yourself? Let me give you an example. One bad habit a lot of people have is. Is they don't speak up for themselves. It's just automatic. They have an idea in a meeting, they don't say anything. Someone says something wrong or abusive or mean or negative, they don't say anything because it's easier. That habit of not speaking up for ourselves feels like it's protecting us. But we call it a bad habit because over time, it steals away the joy and charge of life. The second big one that we have, big habit is to pacify our negative feelings. To pacify right categories of pacification. To pacify ourselves. You know, when we feel stress, overwhelm, or even uncertainty of what to do. I know I'm supposed to be doing something, but I don't know what. So I'm going to pacify myself. Just like if a child is screaming, you give it that pacifier so that it soothes them. Well, so we soothe ourselves with food, we soothe ourselves with social media. We soothe ourselves with distractions. We soothe ourselves with, you know, meaningless conversations or relationships. We are pacifying ourselves because inside we're screaming to do something, but we lack the courage. Or inside we're screaming to change, but we don't really know what to do. So in the meantime, until we either figure out what to do or develop the strength of what to do, we pacify ourselves with all these bad habits. Well, I don't know what to do, or I feel uncertain, so I'm going to eat. I don't know what to do, or I feel uncertain. So let me, you know, I'll just check in. I'm going to look at the newspapers here. I'm going to look at my phone. Or we feel uncertain or insecure, and so we pacify ourselves by seeking validation from other people. Could you tell me how great I am? And we develop all these bad habits of doing things that compromise ourselves just so we can get some validation from some people because we feel insecure. It's important to recognize those bad habits that are really just pacifying a deeper need that says, don't do something, try something, go. It's so important. The third big category of bad habits comes under placating. Placating. That means we have A bad habit of pleasing other people so that we can cause them less stress, less overwhelm, or get less emotional reaction from them. Like a lot of people, they're like they would call themselves, they say, you know, Brendan, I'm kind of a doormat. I said, what do you mean you're a doormat? Well, you know, I just, I don't want to cause a ruckus. And I just let people run over me all the time. You know, people are always stepping all over me. And it's because they have a bad habit of not fighting for what they really want, not communicating clearly their expectations, not setting standards. Instead, they don't want to upset their husband, so they don't say anything. It's not about protection, it's about placating him. Sometimes it's about placating the people around you to make them feel good, even though it's coming at the cost of your life. That's often a big bad habit, isn't it? That's why we get overwhelmed in the first place, is because we're doing everything for everybody else to make everybody else feel happy and charmed and good at the cost of our own sanity, our own well being, our own health. And the last big category, over and over and over of bad habits is proving ourselves bad habits. If you're always arguing, arguing, you just. Someone says something and you just scream at them, you get anger because you have to prove yourself. It's your ego saying, hey, hey, validate me. Hey, pay attention. Someone cuts you off on the road, you flip them off, you floor, you cut in front of them, you go, ha, ha ha, look at me, jerk. You ought to prove that you're important. You want to prove that you should be taken seriously. You want to prove that you're somebody who doesn't deserve to be cut off. And you fight and you fight and you fight. And so if you can at least begin to identify some of these, maybe just me talking with you here, maybe that helped you identify some habits, and you're like, oh, I'm doing that. So if all we did is help you generate some more understanding or awareness or categorization of your bad habits, we're starting on the right foot. I've found over and over in my life a lot of people don't know what their bad habits are, and yet they're unhappy. So if you're trying to figure out why you're unhappy, start with what routines are you continually doing that are negative and stick around because in there is a way to get Some more happiness back. It's right there. And all we have to do is make sure first we're aware of them, and then once we're aware of them, we decide we're going to break them. We're going to find a payoff that's above those payoffs. And it's a very simple thing to do. I'm going to ask you to do one thing, and it's so easy. Whatever your bad habit is, all I want you to do is rehearse overcoming that bad habit. Rehearse it, because see, what we think is that one day we're just going to break our bad habits and it's going to be instantaneous and easy. The thing is, we have to practice overcoming a bad habit to be able to do it in real life. So here's what I mean. What I'd love you to do if your bad habit is you just pacify yourself with food when you're uncomfortable or unsure. What I'd love you to do is not do what everyone else says. Get rid of all that food. Because all that food. And you know, if there's food around you, you're just going to be fat, right? It's like, well, it's not the food. It's why you're turning to the food. So let's not trying to solve the problem. Leave the food, and let's practice not going to the food. Let's instead rehearse. Okay, how do I deal with this emotion instead of going to the food? What's another way I can have the payoff of dealing with the emotion without that thing? That's the bad habit, the food, as an example. Now, what I want you to do is don't wait until next time you're angry or. Or hurt or upset to go to the food. Instead, stand there looking at the food, say, okay, when was the last time I was really angry, upset, emotional, unsure, insecure, and I went to that bag of potato chips? When was that? Okay, let me remember that. What was that like? Now let me rehearse. Not going to the food. What else could I do? What routine or behavior could I do instead of going to the food? Okay, you know what I'm do? I'm going to open up my journal right next to that dang bag of chips. I'm going to open up that journal. I'm going to look at the chips. I'm going to open the journal, not the chips. Open journal, not chips. Open journal, not chips. Open journal, not chips. And I'm going to write down why am I upset? If my highest self was in this situation right now, what would he or she do? Let me ask you that question again. If my highest self was in this situation right now, what would he or she do? And I want you to literally write that out. So what happens with habits is there's a cue. Something negative happens. Our response or our routine is also negative, but it feels like it's paying us off. And then we feel horrible for ourselves. So that middle thing, here's what you do. The cue still happens. The cues, my friends, are always going to happen. They're always. If stress or drama from another person drives you in a bad habit, I'm going to tell you, there's always going to be stress and drama from other people. If feeling insecure or unsure always drives that bad habit, guess what? There's always going to be times in your life you're going to feel insecure and unsure. The cues, my friend, are not going to change. They're always going to be there. So your job is, instead of running that routine of that bad habit, is identify what you're trying to do. Am I trying to protect myself right now? Am I trying to pacify myself? Am I trying to placate her? Am I trying to prove myself? And instead, just ask this simple question. What would my highest self do in the situation? You're not going to win every time. You're just not. Sometimes you're going to have the intention to do the new positive thing, but you do the old negative thing. And I'm here to tell you that's okay. That's life. Our job is not to win every battle. Our job is to win the war. It's to win more battles against those bad behaviors by putting in new things. And you know what's funny? As soon as you put in those new things, guess what? They give you a payoff. When you act as your highest self would in that situation versus going to your protectionist self or your pacifying self or your placating self, or that part of you that just feels like you got to prove yourself, you go to a higher realm, Your brain gets the payoff. Your brain says, good job, Good job, good job, good job. And the more good habits you run, the more your brain says, good job, man. Good job, man. And now you have more strength. You have more certainty in yourself. You don't have to lean like a crutch on those bad behaviors to give you some sort of weak payoff. Instead, your brain goes, hey, you know what? Last time we fought this and we won. That felt pretty good. And you start to get momentum, establishing new good positive habits simply because you said bad cue. What good would my highest self do? You try that a few times and you start getting momentum to changing your life.