Master 3 Key Skills

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Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to the Brendan Show. This is a podcast about helping you reach high performance in your life, in every area of your life. It's about staying more motivated, more confident, more disciplined and on purpose. You know, the high performance experience is really about feeling more vibrant, more connected, more excellent, more fulfilled in your life. But it's also challenging you because you and I both know it's difficult to reach those levels of high performance without support, without ongoing commitment and dedication to your own personal development. So welcome to our HPX community. Thank you for joining us here on the Brendon Show. I'm super pumped for today's episode. Before we begin, I want to let you know that we have specials right now on our HPX nutrition line. If you didn't know it, I rolled out three specific products to help you with your performance.

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Master Key skills. Here's what I want you to do. Obsessively develop three skills. I want you to know what those skills are and obsessively develop that I'll tell you how in a moment, through what we call progressive mastery, I want you to obsessively develop three skills. I want you to know what they are right now. Like, decide today. Like, what are the three skills I am going to obsessively master this next 12 months? Like, what is it? Is that skill speaking? Is that skill patience? Is that skill video production, audio production, Podcasting? Is that skill sales? Is that skill phone work? I don't know what it is for you, but if you don't know the skills you're trying to obsessively develop, you're not in the game yet either. And you need somebody like me who maybe you don't even know to say you're not in the game yet. You're hurting yourself until you know the skills you're trying to develop and develop a curriculum for those skills. It's like, you know, when I had the blessing of training Oprah and her team, I mean, I taught a bunch of stuff over the hour or whatever it was. And then I remember the one thing that they, like, tweeted out afterwards was, like, if you leave your growth to randomness, you'll always be stuck in the land of mediocrity. And that came from a story about the necessity for us to build our own curriculum. What happens when you become successful is you stop building your own curriculum. Now your learning is on the job. Now your learning is that random seminar, but you're not architecting that skill development. It's kind of like when I was at Accenture. I remember when you started as an analyst, they had a skill path for you. You were going to take these courses. You know, when you made manager, you were going to take these courses. It was very structured, and it's structured in the big global corporate world. But for most people, that's not their reality. You know, small business owners, people who don't have great managers, there's no real skill development, and they're waiting for somebody else to give them the curriculum. If you keep waiting for somebody else to give you the curriculum to develop yourself, you're already losing. Your peers are going to glide right by you because they're being more proactive about their learning.

And this was a hard.

I had to learn this lesson. I saw people passing me by.

I'm like, we're in the same job.

How are they passing me by? And it turns out in the after hours, they had their plan. They were working their learning. They were on their personal and professional development level better than I was. And that's why I'm pushing you guys hard. Whether it's me or you find somebody else who gives you that curriculum or you build a curriculum. Here's the thing. World class for you. From now on, that's the bar. World class for you. Whether you get the best trainer in town. For you to help with your health, you get the best trainer online. Maybe you don't resonate with me. That's cool. Find somebody best in class. Learn from them. But you need to architect your own curriculum over a period of long term. I asked these high performers, how did you get so good? And they almost laugh. They're like, you have no idea the hours I put into that skill. No one sees the time. No one sees the discipline. No one sees the effort, because you're up and doing it before the day starts or after the day starts. The greatest performers in the world, in almost every area, they developed three skills. I thought it was going to be more. By the way, I thought, like, the most successful people, they must be, you know, they must have 100 things they're good at. When I asked them about that, I'm like, what did you obsessively develop, like, on purpose? They'd usually name one, two, or three things. That was the magic. That's the distinction you're getting here. Next up, you need to identify the three skills needed by every single person on your team, and then you need to create their plan. Now, I'm starting to do this with my team personally because I learned that I wasn't from one of my interviews. I was like, oh. Like, that's a skill my whole team needs to know. Copywriting. So I went and bought a copywriting course for a couple thousand bucks and gave it to my team. And I was like, get in on this. Because if you don't know the skills your team needs to develop, you think they're gonna do it randomly. Even if they're good people, they won't. What are the three skills for each of your team members? And most importantly, what are the three skills your highest performing team members need to get on? Because you know what? They're usually the most neglected. It's easy to let your high performers just do their thing because they're already good, right? So they're like. Often the people who are most neglected are the people who are already good because you try to fix the underperformers without realizing the biggest bang for the buck would be to develop the high performers. Got this?

Leaders.

I hope so. Okay, next up, practice progressive mastery. Practice progressive mastery. I'M going to tell you what that means. It's probably the most important concept in all of expertise development. You've probably heard of, like, deliberate practice. This is other level, and I'm going to walk you through it's truly other level. Deliberate practice is world class and scientifically proven. I hope you guys have studied Anders Ericsson's work genius on deliberate practice. This is now the next level of what you do. It's called progressive mastery. And you're gonna take some notes on this because I'm gonna break it all out for you. I want you to think about. First, write in your journal a skill you like to learn. Actually write three skills you'd like to learn. Now write down these steps. Number one, determine a skill that you want to master. That's everything. Obviously, we're going to start there. Then set specific stretch goals on the path developing that skill. Specific stretch goals on the path. Development skill. Let me give you a skill so we have a metaphor of working through this. Number one, determine a skill that you want to master. Let's imagine the skill that I want to master is swimming as a skill, right? I want to become proficient in swimming, but you can't just say swimming. You need a specific skill within that. So I'm going to say I want to develop my ability at the.

I'm going to make this up and propagate it.

Wrong. But like the 200 meter freestyle. Okay, I don't know if that's a thing, but. Is it a thing? Sounds like a thing. The 200 meter, I don't even know how long 200 meters is. You might drown. I don't know how long that is. So. But let's say you're going to master the 200 meter freestyle, okay? If you're going to do that, if that's the skill specifically you want to master. Setting specific stretch goals. Specific stretch goals. That means specific stretch goals. Like, okay, how long you swim that lap, the time in which it takes to flip around and go the other way. The time in which it takes you to get into the water, the time in which it takes you how many strokes you can get per breath or per whatever other measurement that you set up. Like, you need to know those numbers. What are your stretch goals and what's the improvement of it over a period of time. Otherwise, you're novice. Okay. Number three, attach high levels of emotion and meaning to your journey and your results. How it means before you do that activity every time, get yourself emotionally connected about. Why is this important to your identity? Why do you love this? How is it serving a social obligation or duty or purpose? And why do you need to do it?

Excellent.

Right now. Okay. Every time, right before you get in the pool, you tell yourself about why this is so important for you to do. I don't know what yours is, but you need to psychologically ramp yourself up.

Hey, it's Brendan. I'm bopping in here real fast for you to urge you to go to hpxwellness.com and check out our products to help you get more of that mental focus and energy. You need to stay at your best, to deliver with excellence, to feel like vibrant again. Because I know we all struggle with mental fatigue and mental focus. We all sometimes get tired and. And sometimes we're worried about our overall health. And so I created three specific products to help you with that. Go to hpxwellness.com check out our nutrition line, and let's get you to high performance, baby. HPX wellness.com.

Number four, Identify the factors critical to success and develop your strengths in those areas and fix your weaknesses in those areas with equal fervor. Meaning what are the needle movers? Avoid most of everything else because you know what everyone's gonna tell you. Do 50 things. I want you to identify what's the five things. Stop thinking there's gonna be 50 things to success. Strip it down. What's the five fundamentals? Right? So for swimming, it's your entry time. Maybe it's your stroke per breath, maybe it's this kickoff. I don't know what it is for you, but focus on those things that really matter. Not everything else that people will tell you matters.

Right?

Like the color of your Speedo. Stop worrying about that, because that's what people do. They worry about the dumbest stuff that has no impact on performance. Number five, develop visualizations that clearly imagine what success and failure looks like. Visualization practices are so neglected. If I'm going to visualize swimming, I'm not just going to visualize, okay, I jumped in the water, swim. I'm going to visualize what it feels like under the water. I'm going to visualize what it feels like when I run out of air, when I run out of energy, when I don't feel like I can win, when I don't feel like making that last kick turn, when I don't feel like going for it in those last 10 meters, like, I'm going to visualize all of that. If you're visualizing running a marathon, you don't just visualize running across the Finish line, which is what most people do in their visualization practice. You need to visualize what happens when your legs are falling apart at mile 16 and you're just like, no way can I go any further than this. What do you say to yourself? How do you overcome that? How do you be resilient? How do you make it through the struggle? You need to visualize the struggle and your survival past the struggle. Points with as much detail, precision, hope, optimism, joy as you do the win. Number six, schedule challenging practice developed by experts or through very careful thought and learning. Obviously the most, the easiest way to advance is to get an expert to teach you. So if I want to become proficient at that 200 meter freestyle, I'm going to hire a coach who's known specifically for that. Right. I'm not going to hire somebody who's just a swim coach. I'm going to go, who is excellent at this particular race. Otherwise you're going to generalist. You want specialists. So for those who are like, I want a specialist in psychology, that's me. You want a specialist in physiology, that's me. You want a specialist in productivity, persuasion, challenging practices. Number seven, when's the last time you had weekly feedback that rocked your world? See, common sense, not common practice. People go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Feedback, yeah. Tell me who's giving you world class feedback? Show me. What are you paying them? Where are they? People say this all the time. Yeah, yeah, I know, Brendan. I should get feedback. Yeah. When do you get it? Once a quarter. Who's giving it? Who's pushing you? Because if you don't really have that, you have not structured up your own skill development. Number eight, socialize your learning. This is the big difference between me and like deliberate practice. Socialize your learning and efforts by practicing or competing with others. Competency is not done in a lone room by yourself. You need to set up situations where you are literally competing with other people and you're influencing them as we'll talk about. So that you see, how do I socially compare? Because if you're not socially comparing yourself, you're not really going to develop that skill. The kid just beating away at the piano doesn't really know how good they are until the piano recital. You just don't know. You're in your own vacuum. So you need to put yourself out there and see how you're doing. Number nine, keep setting higher level goals that keep you improving. That means keep going and going and going in your measurement and your goals and then this is the most important thing this is really what differentiates all my work and skill development. You got to teach others what you're learning. You got to teach. There's this myth and really poor studies of, well, there's the individual high performer, and we just studied their competency development and we forget so, so much of why they're good. Why is that quarterback world class? Is it just because they threw that ball a million times? No, it's not just routine. Why? Is it because they had the best coach? Not just the coach. The best quarterback is often the best quarterback because they're the ones leading the team and teaching others to become more excellent. They usually have someone they're mentoring that second string quarterback. Why is it that the world's most accomplished people tend to be mentoring other people? Is because when you teach, you learn the finer distinctions of your own skill set. I had the blessing when I was at the University of Montana, and so I went for my undergraduate, my graduate degree and I got to teach public speaking. And it was a skill I was working on so hard at the time. And I mean, it was just. It was huge to me. I really wanted to learn to do extemporaneous speaking. So if you guys have been with me here, as I've been teaching this, I don't have any. There's no notes sitting around anymore. I got that. The rest is me teaching from experience and having the ability to do that in extemporaneous speaking.

Well, I sucked at it.

But by teaching public speaking and watching students implement what I was teaching or struggle with this or have their breakthroughs, it taught me more distinctions. You learn just as much by teaching as you learn by applying often. So that's a huge part of progressive mastery. All right.

Hey, it's Brendan. I hope you enjoyed that episode, and I hope it helped you reach another level of high performance in your life. Whether it's just a shift in your mindset or shift in your habits or a shift in your intention for the day. I really honor you for listening to the Brennan show, and I'm deeply thankful. So could you do me a favor? Could you just go onto itunes or Apple Podcasts and rate and review this episode or any of our episodes. And also, while you're there to help.

Me, just download the last five episodes.

Too, onto your phone, because, you know, Apple really cares about the downloads and the rating and reviews, and I've never really asked for that in six years of podcasting. And finally my friends convinced me to ask you to do that for me. I've never asked anything with my podcast community ever. But I really, really appreciate if you could do that. Also, if you would like some more in depth training, please don't forget that every single month I go live for two hours and teach new and original personal development research new frameworks to my entire virtual community in our HPX coaching program. And you can just go to hpxcoaching.com that's hpxcoaching.com to learn all about the different options there. But listen, I'm live two hours every single month with literally thousands of high achievers from around the world who tune in to get these new frameworks for reaching high performance in their life. Sometimes we talk about relationships, sometimes we talk about breaking bad habits. Sometimes we talk about achieving another level of confidence or discipline or goal attainment. But we are there every single month and I'd love for you to join us. Just go to hpxcoaching.com to see all of your options and really join us. Dedicate yourself to personal mastery. Dedicate yourself to this journey. Not just once in a while with an episode here or there or a book there, but literally a program that could change your life. It's called HPX Coaching and you can go to hpxcoaching.com until next time, my friends, please remember every single day you can choose to be average or ordinary or just kind of go through the motions. Or you can be more intentional, more disciplined, more excellence driven what you do because you know you need to serve those you love and those that you lead. You can choose to be extraordinary. So my friends, go out there today and be extraordinary.