My Week: Secrets to filming, speaking to 10k people, and podcasting

Foreign. It's Brendon Burchard, and you're listening to episode number two of the new Brendon show. In this episode, we've got my pre game filming routines. You've all asked, how do you film your videos, Brendan? What do you do to prep for all of those? They've been viewed over 100 million times. You must have some kind of game plan or routine that keeps you in high performance. Yep, we'll cover that. We'll talk about speaking to 10,000 people in the Anaheim Convention center twice. Then we'll talk about how I just filmed some new promotional videos for one of my investment companies. And we'll end with a frequently asked question that just started coming in from our last episode, which is, dude, what's this janky photo booth kind of thing you set up to film your podcast? Tell me that story. All of that in this episode. Episode of the Brennan show, Part one, how I film videos and prepare for them. Now I stand here, Yes, I stand up during my podcast because I'm a speaker, right? I gotta move around and I think about my career in videos, and I almost. I'm so grateful as I think about it, but I almost have a tremendous amount of, I guess just joy in my heart thinking about it, you know, 100 million video views we passed this year, which is really a crazy accomplishment considering these videos are all just personal development. My YouTube channel, up until this year, before I started vlogging, has always just been me taking on a couple different concepts in life and talking about it. There's never been any, you know, cats in there or babies or really any that much humor. I'm not that funny of a guy, so I honestly, I just feel like we struck a chord with people. People who wanted to hear some good personal development without a bunch of crazy ads or without a bunch of cussing or without a bunch of ego and just sharing, hey, here's difficulty. Here's some ways to overcome it. Those videos took off. I never imagined that they would. But one of the most frequently asked questions I get is, how do you get ready for those types of things? If you've never seen my YouTube channel, please check it out and you'll notice something about my videos. They're all extemporaneous. That means basically, I just heard the question or just thought of the topic and. Or was just cued with the topic for my team. And I maybe sit for one, two, three minutes, and then I come up with one or two, three points in my head and I just start, and there I go and the whole video is extemporaneous, which is, I think, one of the reasons we ended up with 100 million video, because people know I'm just in the moment and I'm just teaching. I'm just talking and I'm going from my experience. And so I'll talk a little about how I come up with how to teach. But I think the more important thing, honestly, in filming videos is my pregame, which is my physical preparation to be able to deliver extemporaneous speaking well. And I know many of you all, you know, you have to communicate for your career, whether that's, you know, you present something for sales or you do your own videos or your own podcasts. Many of you are thought leaders in that way. But many of you also just have to give a presentation at work, or you have to make that important call, or you have to have that one conversation you've been waiting to have with somebody for years. I just say, before you have that conversation, make that presentation, pitch that thing. Get yourself in a physical place where your full body is open and ready to deliver. That's been the secret of most of my career, is that pregame, physical opening that I do. And so I'll give you a typical kind of rundown of my YouTube video day. Okay, so let's imagine I'm going to shoot six videos in a day, which is pretty common because we batch shoot. So if you've heard me talk about this before, I usually, you know, know I'm going to go into the studio and shoot six videos, and each of those videos I'll shoot on one day, but we'll release them over the next six weeks. One per week? Week. So in one day I can catch up for the next six weeks, which is why you shoot in batches like that. So it's a pretty vigorous day to shoot at least six in a day. Often it will turn into, you know, 8 to 12, depending on how well I do as I approach these topics and how well I can just, you know, flow well. I know that day is going to be pretty intense. You know, to be able to just go and go and go off the cuff takes way more energy than if you prepared. I know that sounds weird, but I've been preparing my whole life to do it, so I need to be physically prepared for it. So what I do is I wake up in the morning and I drink my 20 ounces of water. And on shooting days, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go out to my Garage or go downstairs and I'm going to do a full workout. That workout will usually be anywhere from 30 minutes to, to 45 minutes. And for me, on those shooting days, it's majority cardio and I push. So, for example, if I'm on the elliptical, I'll set that sucker. You know, the top level is like 20 and the top elevation level is 20. So, like, the intensity, like the resistance would be 20 and the elevation is 20. If that's the topic goes for about five minutes, I'll be at like 15 and 15, and then that last, let's say 10, 15 minutes, I'm gonna punch that sucker up to 20, 20, as hard and vigorous as I can. I'm trying to basically blow out my lungs. You know, I know that sounds crazy, but I found if you open up your lungs, I mean, really saturate your lungs with tremendous amounts of oxygen before you have to perform, you're just more likely to be able to deliver with vocal power. You don't run out of voice in terms of your vocal cords are, are fully, like, energized, if that makes sense. I know that's a silly description of your vocal cords that are energized, but I mean, you've just got so much breath coming in and out. You've got your breath game down. Most people lose their voice not because of how much they speak, but because of how they use their voice when they're speaking. And by opening up my lungs, opening up breath, by the time it comes down to shooting 6, 8, 812 videos in a day, I got the vocal power and the lung capacity to pull that sucker off. So that'll be the first part of the workout. And then from there, I'll do things that release as much testosterone and hormone as I can. In the gym, that typically means squats. I'll do air squats. I'll do box jumps, and sometimes I'll do skipping or lunges, because anything we can activate our hips and our glutes is going to activate the most amount of testosterone, at least for men. So I'll be doing that work. Go in the house. I have a shake. What do I have for a shake? I have my Vega protein shake. This is not sponsored. Many of you know I'm really good friends with Brendan Brazier, who is the original formulator and one of the founders of Vega, and some not sponsor ads. It's the product that I like to use for my personal morning shake, because I'll just take this. I do the 30 gram sport protein, so I'LL dump that in there. It can be chocolate, it can be vanilla. It doesn't matter to me. I just get that 30 grams of protein in there. And then I'll throw in two handfuls of spinach, two big handfuls of blueberries. I'll throw in half an avocado. I'll throw in just a little splash of coconut milk. I'll throw in. Sometimes, just depending on kind of what's in the house, I'll put in a bunch of ice in there. Sometimes I put in chia seed or almond butter just to kick in a little extra protein or a little extra flavor, depending on how I'm going. And I'll get that down. And then I will get over to the office. I get over the office and where I'm shooting, and I have a little back room where I have my shower set up. And so I go back there, I'll take a long shower. Kind of thinking about a few topics that I've seen that our students are asking me from our online courses or from our seminars or our Facebook groups. You guys out on Twitter or Instagram. I'll think about a few questions in my head. Rattling around, just kind of freeform thinking as I'm taking a shower. End with a cold shower. In the last three minutes is just ice cold Portland, awesome water. And get dressed. I'll be ironing my shirt back there because I have the whole suite back there. Just get ready, I'll come out. And by the time I come out, Travis, who shoots my videos, he has already set up the whole thing. He's got the lights and everything's ready to go. So I'm basically ready. And then I go out there and right before I might go on a camera, I'll do some qigong. And qigong is basically, I'll use a few different moves from that, but primarily I'll bounce in place like. So if you're standing, you just kind of bend your knees and you bounce. Standing in place, eyes close, and I'll take 10 deep breaths to energize myself. If for any reason I feel stiff, I'll do some stretching, I'll sit down. And usually I'll have a topic in mind at that point. Or Travis will feed me one, or someone from the team will say, hey, Brendan, how do you deal with disappointment? Or we'll come up with a topic of how do you overcome fears? How do you find your confidence? Always personal development related. And in my mind, the first thing I think about is I can't just cover the Basics here. And I really think this has been maybe a secret part of my career that many people don't know is I'm always trying to think of what would be like, forget the basic advice, what might be one step up from that, like just a little bit more advanced. You know, even when people come into my world and let's say they enter their name and email, I usually try and start with maybe a little bit of a basic conversation just to get them, you know, head, you know, their, their heads nodding. But then I'm going to try and drop a video that really gives some more advanced tactics or strategies for reaching higher levels of motivation, high performance success. And so I'll think about it in that split second before I start talking extemporaneously on the topic. I'll think, remember, be a little advanced. I'm not trying to speak above anybody's heads. I'm not trying to, you know, answer the world's problems or I'm not trying to complete, you know, the answer in a way that, where I'm saying, wow, if I died, this would be the final ever voice from Brendon Burchard on this topic. Because I realize, you know, I'm always in perpetual conversation with you. I bet if you're listening to this right now, you've probably heard me before. Maybe you've read my books, maybe you listened to a podcast before. YouTube if you're new. Awesome. Welcome. What's up? But I genuinely think that over a period of time, my customers, my clients, my students, we're in a perpetual conversation. If I talk about disappointment today, it's gonna be different than I talked about it five years ago. And that's just because I'm in a different place. I know my students are in a different place. It's because I've learned more as a high performance coach in helping people deal with that. So I'm not worried about getting every word right, which is so important. You know, as I'm talking to you here right now, I don't have anything in front of me. I've got a sheet tacked, basically the foam thing in front of me. I'll tell you about that at the end here in part four. But I really just go. So I take that topic and I just start talking about it. I typically start with something that marketers know is one of the most important phrases of all time, which is, have you ever. Have you ever felt so disappointed that. Have you ever really felt fearful? Have you ever wanted to take a risk but you didn't Know if you should have you ever want to feel more confident? I don't always start with that, but quite often I do because it just puts them right in the place of, yeah, I've felt with that. I'm ready, let's go. And typically my YouTube videos are only, you know, 8 to 15 minutes long. So I just talk. And my strategy is always to have three to five points and I don't always know all three to five points as I start talking. Right. And that's, I think, what's made that show and what made that show so huge. The Charged Life, which was my first season of this podcast, we call it the Charged Life, that debuted number one on iTunes across all categories, stayed in the top 10 of self help for 100 plus weeks. And then we kind of throttled it down and then we started this new show now just called the Brendon Show. And I think it had that duration of success both in the podcast and on YouTube and Facebook and everywhere else other people have posted it. We can track a hundred million views. I honestly have no idea how many more than that has been out there that we don't know about. You know, when people like screenflow it or Camtasia and they put it on their own pages somewhere. I don't know how, how long it's been out there, y', all, but thank you for your support. But that's my process. I just kind of have in mind. I'm gonna answer, I'm gonna maybe give three to five tips and I just go until I'm done. Now, for those who think that's like some superhuman feat, I promise you it's not because I've been trying to develop my extemporaneous speaking skills for 20 years. 20 years. People say, how do you become such a good extemporaneous speaker? I say, number one, know your subject. That's everything you know. I've read a book a week in personal professional development for 21 years. I've only ever missed a two week period, and that was just this year. I've always, even when I had a brain injury in 2012, I still read constantly. And so I'm always consuming as much as I can of good stuff in personal professional development, reading as many books as I can to give me the most valuable thing that a thought leader can possibly have in his or her career. Perspective. People watch you and they listen to you and they pay you for your perspective. Many of you guys know I do a seminar, it's called Experts Academy. It's widely considered the world's number one marketing training for thought leaders. You look at the New York Times bestseller list over the last couple years. Most of those nonfiction or self help or business books. Most of those authors, well, I should say a large number of those authors are Experts Academy graduates. You look at the top YouTubers, lots of experts Academy graduates. You look at the top online marketers. Almost all of the top online marketers have been to Experts Academy or Spoken There's. And I shared that because that's the one thing that really resonates with my audience. When I tell that audience, look, I know you're trying to be a thought leader. The way to do that is to realize you get paid for perspective. People listen to you because they know you've maybe seen the world, dealt with this problem before, had a lot of other clients who are in the same position as them. So they're willing to listen and they're excited about it. And so my exemplian is speaking generally comes from just research, just reading and reading and reading and reading and reading. You know, my life is books. And I just, you know, I'm just so grateful that I heard very early on, in early part of my career, I think it was Brian Tracy, when I was 19 years old, I think was reading a Brian Tracy book. And he said, you know, leaders are readers and your life is changed only by the books you read and the people you meet. And I remember being really impacted by that. So I got into reading and now thousands and thousands of books. And just, I think that helps me give the perspective, being able to speak on it. The second way that I developed extemporating speaking skills was to basically, in early college, after my car accident, I had the accident when I was 19, I wanted to tell that story one day. I didn't know what that meant exactly, but I had been. After the accident, I started studying the greats in personal development because I wanted to change my life, not because I wanted to be like them. I just genuinely wanted to change my life. So I listened to everything I could get on audio tape. I read every book I could. I mean, I really dug deep into personal development. Then psychology, then sociology, then behavioral economics was. And then neuroscience. That was kind of my transition in reading. And. But when it was personal development, it was like, you know, Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie. It was Og Mandino. Earl Nightingale was the first audio programs I ever really listened to that changed my life. You know, Wayne Dyer, I think I mentioned. Yeah. Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Marianne Williamson, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield. I mean, I really just jumped right in and really enjoyed so much of that work and inspired me to want to be better man. And then I wanted to tell other people about it. So somewhere I got bit by realizing all these folks that I was studying, they spoke. They were like motivational speakers or keynote speakers. And so I said, well, I should. I should learn to do that. And I also realized after my accident that one of the greatest things I could do to further my life was to address my fears. And speaking publicly was a very terrifying thing at that moment in my life. So I said, I'm gonna be. I'm gonna learn how to do this. So if you've heard me talk about this before, what I did in college is, you remember, you have to do, like, class reports. Maybe you write a paper and you're supposed to stand in front of the class and read it out to them. And, you know, they give you this little podium, and most kids go up there and they've got their, you know, five, ten pages that they just read to the, you know, the class and then go sit down. What I tried to do was I tried to go up there, and honestly, first I did that same thing, and then over the period of a year or two, I started trying to strip it down. Instead of having five pages of something to read or notes, I tried to get down to three pages. Then I got it down to two pages. Then I got into one page, and on that page was just a bunch of bullets. And then it went from a bunch of bullets to a couple phrases, and then it got down to just five phrases on a page. Then it got down to, like, five words. Then it got down to three words, and then it got down to no notes. And that took from my sophomore year in college until my first year of grad school. So it wasn't like it was overnight. It was four years. Every opportunity I could get, stripping away the notes, stripping away, stripping away. And in four years, I could stand up and do, whether it was my master's thesis or it was speaking to, at that time, some student groups or to my team. I could talk for hours, no notes. And somehow it all kind of came together, even if it seemed really random to them. And so that was practice. You become extemporaneously powerful only by learning to practice, learning to find your flow, not worrying about where you're going, trusting. But also just experience, right? Knowing when to stop is an important thing. It's time for me to stop this part. But of course, when you're doing extemporaneous speaking. You think? I got one more idea. And here's my last idea on this. What makes me capable of extemporaneous speaking? Yep. Reading. Yep. Practice. And then I would say 3. Coaching. Many of you know I'm a high performance coach. That's what I identify myself as the most. I'm a certified high performance coach. We certify people, if you're ever interested in that. And what I developed in the coaching experience was the ability to just trust in conversation, you know, and so when I'm actually extemporaneous speaking, especially a lot of my YouTube videos, often you'll hear me say something like, now you may say Brendan, and then I'll state an objection that comes because as you're extemporaneous speaking, you should be imagining what the audience is thinking or might be replying to your points. Like what questions might they have? And then you address it. Where might they have an objection and how could you address it? So even as you're extemporaneous speaking and you're in your flow, be thinking about how they're receiving it and how you might reply to that and then preempt it by saying, now you might be thinking this and go, Oh, Part two. Sort of sucking in front of 10,000 people. So, you guys, I hope you're really enjoying this new format for the podcast. I have no idea if you like it unless you give me some shout out on the socials. But this is a new approach and I'm kind of trying to tell you what my week is like is these Brendon show episodes progress. And this week was another big one. I spoke to 20,000 people in the Anaheim Convention center in two sets, meaning the first set was 10,000 people. And I spoke to them for 45 minutes. And then I waited a couple hours, spoke to the second set of 10,000 different people for another 45 minutes. So 20,000 people total. 10,000 at a time. And I learned a lot at it, actually. You know, I've been speaking a long time. Many of you heard the first episode. I just come off of speaking to what, 20,000 people in the Superdome. And now I'm just two weeks later, literally two Fridays later, in front of another 20,000 Anaheim Convention Center. Welcome to the world of being a motivational speaker at this time in this level. And it was pretty intense. And it was intense because this particular group wanted me to do a mic check at like 6:30 in the morning. I'm not famous for being a morning person. I like my mornings. But I like what I call slow mornings. I like to wake up, do my sort of exercises and, you know, movements, have some shake, you know, ready my day, plan the day. I like easing into a day. I don't like waking up, getting dressed, hurrying down to a car or to meet somebody, you know, walking to through convention centers and worrying about just, you know, safety and people coming up and everything. And then like, get backstage and kind of get on stage and just a big. Just a big, fast speed through of the morning. That's not my thing. I like slow mornings. Well, I do the mic check, everything's fine, I go backstage. And backstage it's in the Anaheim Convention Center. There really isn't a backstage. They're just kind of some of these little rooms that are kind of set up back there that are kind of made of like Plexiglas, basically. And so it's really loud back there. I'm not on until 11am but they want me to stay back there. So it's, you know, I'm done with the, you know, rehearsal by 7:15, I think now I've got a little over two and a half hours before I take stage, which is cool because I end up getting to meet a lot of the people who are running the event, which I love. I really think a lot of people don't understand. They just see me on stage and they think, wow, Brendan must really love the stage. And I'm like, yeah, I totally love it. But honestly, one of my most favorite parts of being a public speaker is meeting the crew and the team putting on the event. Meaning I love being backstage. Backstage at events are magical. You see so much work, so much focus, so much excellence. You meet so many extraordinary people, especially if you're the speaker who's coming in, because a lot of the crew want to come up and say hello. The, you know, the founders, you want to sit down with them. If it's a company, you know, the event planners, the marketing people, it's usually you're meeting quite a few people backstage. I remember recently I was at an event in Dallas and I had a new videographer with me, and he had picked me up, met me in my room and we were filming. Some of this went down backstage at that particular event. And within five minutes of walking backstage, over 25 separate people came up to me and spoke to me. I mean, imagine it's like walking into like, you know, a nightclub and 25 people just suddenly come up and walk and talk to you, and everything's crazy. And it was just totally the poor videographer was completely out of his mind. He did a great job, but it was just like, whoa, what a. Welcome to my world. Because most people think you're backstage, you're meditating, you're Zen, you're getting in your zone. No, it is a complete and utter moment of chaos back there. It always is. It's why you need to learn to be able to get this fast into service mode, this fast into readiness to speak. Because a lot of times I'll be speaking to an event planner or a, you know, marketing officer or the person's putting on and literally I'll hear my name announced and they'll push me out and I'll be on stage. It can be like that. Now, that's not my preference. I'm just saying, look, after having done hundreds and hundreds or however many thousand plus presentations I've done, I can tell you for sure that what ends up happening is that there's always some kind of chaos backstage. And so just learn to get on your game. Well, two and a half hours, the Anaheim Convention center is filling with these 10,000 people. It's getting louder and louder and louder and louder and louder. People are talking and screaming and shouting and jumping. And you hear all the noise. And you can't help being a human, an animal. With that much noise, you. You feel it. The. The performance anxiety starts building up, the readiness, the excitement starts building up for two hours. The adrenaline just pumping and pumping and pumping, getting ready, getting excited. Meet this person, shake this person, sign this book. Shake this person, sign this. But talk, talk, talk, talk, talk backstage. Get mic'd up. Here we go. And I met extraordinary people backstage. I really loved it. This particular event was for an organization called Lularoe. And they are an extraordinary success story, maybe one of the most fascinating success stories of recent time. They went from zero to over a billion dollars in sales in four years. And I met their founders backstage, Mark and Deanne. Absolutely wonderful people, truly kind. The whole team, matter of fact, was like family. And many of them actually, literally were family members. And they were just all very kind to me. Everything was great. But by the time it was time to get on stage, two and a half hours back there talking with everybody. The adrenaline, the excitement, it had in some ways taken its toll on me. And I was conscious of it right before I went on stage. I felt it in my body. I'm like, wow, I've been back here a long time and I've been up cranking since basically 5am now it's 11. So not a big deal. But there's six hours there of readiness, which is not optimal. That's too much. And so I go out on stage, and I felt a little bit heavy from all that adrenaline, because it's pumping through you and not heavy like thoughtful heavy. Heavy, like physically, like as if there was already lactic acid buildup from all the excitement of being backstage. And so I go out on there, address the audience, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. There's something about speaking to 10,000 people that is so different than speaking to, you know, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000. Once you pass 5,000, the entire feeling is different because it's. The space has to be so huge to hold that many people. It literally is people as far as you can see, because usually the lights are pretty dimmed, so you can't see the end of the people because it goes into blackness by then. You just can't see that far. Literally, it's that many people. And of course, a lot of this group, I'm not sure how well they knew and were familiar with me. When I did the speech two weeks prior, it was, you know, a lot of that group knew and were familiar with me. This group, I'm not sure, but I have this process where I kind of just warm up the crowd a little bit. I could tell you about that in a future episode, maybe about how I approach these types of keynote episodes. So keep listening. Make sure you subscribe. But I tell the story because I was a little heavy, and I should have known that. And when I went out, it slowed my energy down a little bit in that first part. And here's how you learn as a pro speaker when you're not in a good place, your stories are too long. My first point, my story was a little too long, because what you're doing, the stories go a little longer because you're trying to find your space energetically, and you're trying to hit that mark and bring that energy up and hit that pop before moving on the second one. And if you're tired, what happens for speakers? And many of you guys know I teach this program called World's Greatest Speaker Training. It literally is that guaranteed. It's the best training for speakers in the world. And not just speakers like me, professional speakers and trainers. I mean, people come there who are CEOs of big companies, Fortune 500 companies, and they want to be a better speaker. Hedge fund guys, sales guys, people who are trying to communicate on video or podcasts. They come there just to learn all the different things to do. And in teaching that, of course, what did I have to do? I had to get perspective. I've done all the reading on the public speaking books, But I have also practiced it so long. And I've also coached people for so long and been coached in this area so long. I know what to look for. And I just, you know, you're observing yourself on stage. And I knew it. I was like, this point is going too long. My energy is too low. Cut this story, Brendon. Amp it up. Let's go. So my first story was a little bit long. And I knew I could feel it. I know the audience could feel it. And I just, like, snapped it closed. It moved on, got into a more emotional story and then really ramped it up into lots of lots of fun, lots of lots of courage, power, big end. And what I saw was this. About maybe a third of the audience kind of jumped to their feet for what we call a fast standing ovation. It was like, boom. But I kind of had to, you know, it was almost like I had to ask for everybody else to stand up, if you know what I mean. I kind of just be so humble. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And then everyone else saw everyone standing up, and then the whole audience. And there's something about a 10,000 person audience coming to their standing ovation. And partially because I end a speech like, boom. You don't know it's over. And people are like. And it always takes a second or two. Cause you're like, whoa, whoa. That's it. Oh, my gosh. And they stand up and clap, Right? So it was a little bit of a slow standing ovation, but got it. People were stoked. I went backstage. Everybody was stoked. Oh, my gosh. That was great. And it was a wonderful experience. The team was like, wow, that was crazy. But I knew. I knew it wasn't my best. And here's what I do. I walk backstage and I have a routine, Very simple routine. There's three things in this routine for me personally. Now, when I walk backstage, the truth is I might have to shake 20, 30 hands. Hello. How are you? Great. I loved it. Thank you very much. Here's my card. There's a lot of action backstage sometimes. And. But for me, I have a personal practice that composes of three things. Number one, I give gratitude. So when I find just even as I'm walking off the stage, turn, as soon as I turn my back to the audience to walk out backstage, I'm just saying thank you. Thank you. And I just feel I allow the gratitude to come in for the opportunity to even get to share my voice with one person, two persons, three persons. Because, hey, maybe this is your first time listening to me, and you don't know me yet, but believe me, this kid is not sitting here bragging, talking about speaking to 10,000 people, because this kid talking to you, this is how I began literally talking to one person, two people, three people. You know, even when I began this professionally, my first ever seminar that I held, there were 20 people there. So I don't take 10,000 people lightly. I don't take 500 people lightly. I don't take a hundred people lightly because those are souls, those are people. They all have their own human journey, and I never take it for granted. So my heart floods with gratitude the second I walk off that stage and I allow it to happen. There's a lot of times I walk off stage, and even if I end very powerfully or in a higher level of courage or masculine energy, I walk. I'll turn and I'll walk, and oftentimes, by the time I get off stage, I'm in tears. You know, it's very emotional for me. It's real. I never thought I'd get to do this at this level. Then the second thing I do is I immediately score myself on a scale of one to ten. Brendan, how'd you do out there today? One, you sucked. Ten, it's the best full throttle thing that you got to deliver. You hit your points, you made that training solid. There's takeaways. They know it. They felt it. The energy was there. Where were you? And this one for me now, if you were having to be somebody who was in that audience, you might not agree with my rating, and that's okay. Everyone would rate me very differently. I mean, there's always people in that audience who, you know, even the ones who might stand up and get the standing ovation, they'd be like, you know, you know, he's an 8 or he's a 7, and I'll take whatever they take. It doesn't matter to me. But when I'm back there and I think about it one to ten, I thought, dang it, it was a six. And it was only a six because of the first half. And I knew it. I knew immediately. I said, why is it a six? It's like I went out heavy because I was heavy. I went too slow at the first start because it was heavy. I wasn't as. You know, if you Ever hung out with me. I'm a really playful guy, extremely animated. And if you've ever kind of heard my phrase, I want to bring the joy. Everything I'm going to do, I want to bring joy to it. So I'm very animated, very joyous. I'm, you know, I'm as happy as they come because I've chose that. And so I usually am very animated in the first couple minutes. I knew I wasn't 6 out of 10. Dang it. What do I need to do? I need to be make sure I get my pregame on. I need to do a lot more flexibility work before I go back on stage next time. I didn't do my full vocal routine that morning, so I got to do that again. And the blessing of this particular event was that I got to do it again. Just what was it? It was. It was 11, so it was 12, so it's four hours later. I was going to get to do the exact same speech for 10,000 people, which is that because the Anom Convention center, how they took up this particular event was they had to. They, you know, they had over 20,000 people at the event and they had to rotate them through so session one and then session two, different people. And so I was going to get another opportunity. Now, the truth is, you know, any novice watching or someone who hasn't had a lot of speaking training, the fact that one dude can get 10,000 people on their feet to give you a standing ovation, that blows people's minds. They'd be like, oh, my gosh, he must be a 10. But I'm just telling you my personal self rating. Part of my job in the Brennan show in this new season is just to share, like, how I think about things. I didn't think I ever. I just never really did that. I just told people, you know, here's some advice. But I rated myself at 6 out of 10, but I didn't get down on myself. I'm never disappointed. I just take every. I think when you have a learning mindset, disappointment quickly dissipates because everything is okay. You're just trying to learn to get better. So I had four hours. So I consumed a massive amount of calories, meaning, you know, it takes a lot of calories to run my mouth, so I gotta eat. When I get off stage and I move around. If you've ever seen me on stage, I mean, it's not like the YouTube videos. I mean, I stalk that stage. If I got 32ft, I use 32ft. So I went and ate a bunch of food and meditated, stretched out, then lay down for an hour and caught back up on my sleep, woke up, did a bunch of stretching, re ironed the shirt, went back down for session number two. And I went out on that stage hot. Because I was frustrated in a good way with that first session. I said, no way is it going to be happening. That first story. Bam. On point. Quick, tight, fast, fun, lots of energy. The place lit up. I didn't. I mean, by the second store, I could have got off stage. I mean, I could feel it. There was an energy in the room and it came from me realizing what the first one was. Now, the funniest thing is the structure of the speech the same. The slides the same. The stories, basically the same stories. I never really tell this, you know, I don't have a memorized canned speech, but, you know, there's a story. If I tell you my car accident story, it's my car accident story. It's never word for word because sometimes I see it or feel it or remember it in, you know, different scenes or different moments, or I might start the story in a different way. But if I'm going to tell the story, it's the story. So I. It wasn't, if you think about that structure, slide stories, all very similar, but was completely different, was I took that energy from a 6 up to a 10. And so I feel blessed to have had that experience. It's not that I would have went away, you know, sad. Oh, poor Brennan. He got his, you know, his first session was only, you know, standing ovation. It wasn't like that, man. It was like, I just know I can do better. And that's what I'm trying to suggest to you. If you really want to master anything, the second that you do it, be grateful that you have the opportunity to do it. Then score yourself and ask, why that score and what would it take to level up? If you've been to High Performance Academy, which I hope you will, some, you, you must make it a goal in your life. If you listen to me now, you must make it a goal in your life to get High Performance Academy. Okay, it is a 10 out of a 10 personal professional development seminar. It's four days and it is very advanced. And it is, at this point, the most respected personal professional development seminar probably in the world in terms of people really like it because we cover so many. It's so comprehensive in its curriculum. It's empirically based, not guru based. And it's not just you know, some dude up there, you know, cussing or screaming or challenging, and those things are fine, too. But there's not swearing. It's. Your family can come. You know, you can invite your grandma without being embarrassed. And it's something that corporate America can go to and nonprofit America can go to, and business owners who want to bring a team and know that there's a professional level of ethic that is being communicated. Even if I can be hard, even if I have to interrupt, even if I have to go to places that people are uncomfortable with, I do it in a very respectful manner because I think we need the world to revisit that. Maybe, you know, everybody now is just cussing and using cheap tricks to get attention and using cheap tricks to interrupt thought patterns, and that's all fine, but I really believe that we are in a time when that's a commodity now. I mean, everybody on Instagram is dropping F bombs all around. Fancy. Really? Well, you need to do that to, you know, get people's attention. Actually, no, you don't. 100 million people watch my videos, and I've never sworn in them. Like, get over it. You don't have to do that. What you have to do is add value to people, be intelligent in your approach, offer a perspective that helps them and give it to them in a way that they can remember it through metaphors and stories and frameworks. It's not necessary to go after the cheap trick. And so I think that that is a different approach. Why do I bring all that up? I bring that up because when I think about what has defined my career, it's been some of those things I just talked about. And that leads me to. You thought I forgot the third thing I do personally. When I got off stage, remember, I said I do three things personally. Number one, gratitude. Number two, score myself, scale of one to ten. How could I do better? And at High Performance Academy, we teach the psychological trigger of leveling up. How do I level up? Like right now, what level of presence and energy am I experiencing? If I'm at a five, I go, come on, level up, man. Take it to seven. Get there. And I challenge myself and I use movements and I use mental representations to help me level up my energy. We teach that at High Performance Academy, which is. Was why I gave you the aside. I hope you'll go. Just go to hpa.brendan.com that's hpa.brendon.com the HPA stands for High Performance Academy. So h p a dot brendon B-R-E n d o n dot com hba.brendan.com to see about some upcoming seminars. So what's that third thing? The third thing is a simple question. And here it is. Is what I am doing sticking to my values and delivering with world class excellence. In other words, that speech I just gave that stick to my values. Was I honest? Did I follow my dream up there? Did I push myself? Did I care? Was it important to me to demonstrate what? Did I demonstrate what's really important to me up there? Did I use that opportunity, the best of my ability to serve? Was it world class? Was there a real level of excellence up there? Or did I just do the cheap trick or say the thing to make them laugh? Because I can. And I think it's that personal standard check at the end that you know, because the second one is really a performance check. The third one is a personal values and standards check. And if I get that right, that really helps. Now, it's not to say that's all I do, because backstage then, you know, I do that internally. But if you've ever been backstage with me, I ask everybody, how is that? And the first, the first question is, how is that second question anything else I can do to improve? I'll ask 20 people backstage at these events that question. Anything else I could do anything else, anything else could relate with the audience any part that you felt was too slow? Any part. And I just ask questions and I just receive and I never get upset. Some people are like, yeah, it was great. Other people are like, dude, that was the best speech I've ever seen. Because remember, perspective, everybody's seen something different. So that's how I kind of approach that opportunity. And I really loved it. Last part about that experience, I'll share. And this has happened a couple times. I get off the stage and it's funny, you know, usually when I get off the stage, I usually have an opportunity to talk with the founders or the people who put on the event even more because now they've seen me, now they know what I do. And I had a wonderful conversation with Mark, who is one of the founders of Lularoe, with his wife Deanne. And it was just a great conversation. So, Mark, if you're listening, first, thanks. And second, it just reminded me that, you know, we all, no matter what you see, when you hear someone you know is doing a billion dollars in sales, it's easy to forget that that's just, we're all just people, you know, Mark's story, he was a concrete Contractor. He was doing concrete, you know, five, six years ago. Now he's doing a billion dollars in sales in their company. And to hear that a person sticks to their values as much as they can and you know, a lot of tough things come with rising up. And even though I advise a lot of startup founders, I mean the big ones, many of you know, I've coached a lot of big name folks and I shared that. Not with like, haha, look at me. I share that with like, man. What I have learned in that process is their lives are tough. We'd love to think everyone has it easy, but you know, coming up and through this stuff, you know, you're not the first person who can couldn't get a small business loan. You know, you're not the first person whose first career didn't work. You're not the first person who maybe sometimes look at your prospects or your bank account or your opportunities and go, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do here. You're not the first person who ever wondered if you were doing the right thing for your family. And I just remind you that because it's easy even to hear a dude like me talk about these things. I'm just trying to. Here's the thing, I can't dumb this down. This is what my life is like. You know, I know somebody said from my last podcast on, on the Internet, you know, oh, here's Brennan is, you know, talking about his big fancy speeches. I'm like, no man, I'm talking about my week. That's my life now. I can't help that my settings got bigger, but you know, maybe the settings got bigger, but I'm the same. I would, I can't. You know what, I can't say I'm the same person. That wouldn't be fair because as my settings got bigger, those settings, you know, demanded that I got better, that I became a better person to be able to handle all that. And so yeah, sometimes I am confident, like, you know, and I'm. Sometimes I am. Sounds casual. Here I was speaking to 10,000 people. I'm not doing about bragging. I'm like, that's my life now. And I hope that part of the Brendon show is where can you, where else can you go in the podcast land and listen to this type of conversation? I don't know, maybe it's out there. But I think most podcasts for me that, and I enjoy them too, are they're interview based. And I wanted someone who was at a high level. Instead of saying, well let me just be the interviewer of high level. I won't say like hey, I get to do that stuff. So let me just tell you the week by week of this. So if it sounds like I'm like, haha, look at this. No, this was a big summer. You know, I spoke to over, I don't even know what it was. 50,000 people live already this summer. It's been a big summer. And again, I don't say that to say look at me. I'm like, this is life and I'm struggling to deal with it too. It's a challenge. Like I said, I don't always nail it. I was a 6 out of 10 man. So I'm hoping that sharing how I evaluate and how I learn and how I pivot and how I try to get better and develop these routines and these processes so I advance. Maybe you can do them or maybe they'll spark something and an idea in your head and you'll get better, better at it too. Whether you're talking to 10,000 people or one person or a hundred people, we all have the world is our stage. Part three Promotion day I spent right after the speech, let's see, we hopped a car and I ended up going down to a company that I invested in called Kajabi K A J A B I. If you've ever entered your name and email on any of my pages or received an email or bought something from me, you know, bought a book, bought a course, sign up for a, a seminar, signed up for private coaching or mastermind with me. The system that I use for all that is primarily Kajabi K A J A B I. It's an aboriginal word that meant to fly. And so Kenny and Travis who started Kajabi, I've been friends with them since 2008. I think I got on their first platform in 2008 or nine and I mean within that first year I generated my first seven figures in this business and man, it was a haul even back then and all the way up until honestly this last year to do what I do. If you're in the thought leader space, you know this, it's hard system wise. I mean you've got, you know, a system for email, a system for video hosting, a system for customer service, a system for sales, often a system to tag this thing over in that other system and, and it's just like system friggin nightmare. You're usually paying literally tens of thousands of dollars a year for lots of different systems every Single month getting rebuild. It's complicated if you want to hit scale. And I just had so much frustrations over the years, but I had this relationship with Kenny that I would just text him like, hey man, can you make Kajabi do this? And hey, do you think I could ever do this? And of course, he and Travis had big ambitions for Kajabi too. And. And they've been building out the system and getting it better and better and better and better. And now I just tell people all the time, look, this is the all in one marketing system that you need if you're trying to sell knowledge content and products and services online. Especially if you're in the thought leader space. Like if you're using anything else, I just would say you should really, you know, go to their website and check it out and get the, you know, either the free trial or I'll tell you a way you can do basically exactly what I do with the system. And it just, it's grown so much. And so I had a, you know, I tried to get down to my investment companies once a quarter, and this one, I just haven't been down there for a while because I was working on high performance habits. But as we're working on high performance habits, we're talking about all the new. Because that book is about to launch. And so I've been talking with them about all the new things Kajabi does and how I'm going to use that to launch high performance habits. So we said, hey, when I come down there, we'll brainstorm. And while I'm there, let me shoot a couple promotional videos for you guys. You've been so awesome. So I went down there and imagine this trip. It's like on a plane, talk to, you know, 10,000 people. 10,000 people. Have a couple meetings, go to bed, get up, get in a car, go over, walk in the building, you know, have an hour conversation or prep. And then I did three or four promotional videos that you'll be seeing soon for me, I'm sure, for Kajabi. And I'll just tell you guys sort of preemptively if you'd like to get the new offer for Kajabi from me. And that is where you get all my page templates. So if you go to like Brendan.com, you get that, you get a template that looks just like brendan.com. if you want my best performing opt in pages, my best performing value pages, my best performing checkout pages, we're going to offer that for the first time As a bundle as part of Kajabi. Sign up when you sign up for Kajabi for the full year. So it'll be at. I don't think it's up yet but type it in. Brendan.com B R E N--O-N.com forward/system Brendan.com forward/system and by the, I'll make sure by the time this is up either the link is active or it'll give you a waiting list. But it's going to give you literally for whatever it is. I think the price for the whole year is like a thousand bucks and it's got a 30 day money back, you know, guarantee. But you're getting some other awesome bonus. I'm not even tell you here but I shot all the videos and they were all in one take. And the reason I tell you that entire story isn't to sell Kajabi because trust me, we do that somewhere else. But and full disclaimer again, I'm an investor, so even telling the story I want you to know that. So if you go to brendan.com system, whatever's there, I'll be compensated if you buy it in some way because I'm an investor. Okay? So full disclosure, I tell you the story because I got all the guys standing around and I'm knocking out promotional video after promotional video, usually in one take and people are like how? And so I remind you, if you want to get better at this, read, see what everybody else is doing, learn, get perspective, then get some coaching, do some practice. Because I shared this particular part because it's very different than what I shared earlier. Look, the conversation of LuLaRoe's 20,000 people or the 20,000 people earlier, those were just presentations, these were sales and it's very different. And I bet you feel that way like you might be cool talking with your friends but selling your friends is a lot harder, right? It's a different skill, it's a different way of selling. We teach at World's Great speaker training. It's a very, it's a very different approach and you have to have a different mindset to it. I tell all that because I really had to learn that process and I'll probably cover that in the future podcast. If you guys ask, I'm not going to know. But this is the way I'm, this is the only way I know how to get feedback from you all is like, hey, if you want me to teach sales or business or marketing or social media stuff as well as part of the Brendon show versus just personal development, which has been the emphasis from season one, the Charge Life. Let me know and I'll do that in some of these sessions like this too. I'll teach you sales frameworks or I'll teach you, you know, marketing hooks or I'll teach social media stuff. Wasn't planning on doing that in these episodes, but after the Kajabi experience, I'm like, people wonder how I can just show up and do three or four sales videos. Extemporaneous. It's a different amount of perspective, practice and preparation, but it was part of this week and that's what this Brennan show is. I'm just trying to tell you, hey, here's what my week was. So I apologize if this is sounding like a little bit of a diary, but hopefully I'm teaching along the way. Part four this Goofy Podcast Booth so in episode one of this new season of the Brendon Show, I talked about like how you all would laugh at me if you saw this podcast booth I've set up for myself. And I thought I'd answer the question because I got a lot of that from people asking and direct messaging me. So here's what I'd like to tell you about it. First, with this episode, please put your comments on the socials out there, tag the Brendon show, ask me questions because that's how I'm going to learn and make these even better. And also how I'll take on topics that you'd like to learn about my life or things that you're struggling with. That's how I'll do it. Just tag hashtag the Brendon show. The Brendon Show B R E N D O N Show the Brendon Show. Okay, but this was one of the things that people were dming me on Instagram, on Twitter, and some very well known podcasters were like, dude, what'd you set up? So let me just tell you what I have set up and also tell you the philosophy behind it. I'm speaking right now into about maybe a $200 podcast mic that plugs in with USB directly to my Mac computer that's sitting basically right behind me. And this podcast microphone is called a Rode Podcaster. R O D E A Rode Podcaster. R O D E A Rode Podcaster. It literally plugs right into the USB of my computer. And actually no, that's not true. It actually plugs into a stupid dongle that has to plug into the new frigging MacBook Pro. Cause Apple decided to be so Fancy and. And completely tick off all of their customers by making us buy an extra $150 plus of dongles to plug in everything else that works today that used to plug in the old one. Now they got rid of all those ports that still people use. They were too far ahead of the curve. They tried to force the market. They made a big mistake and got a lot of returns on this MacBook Pro, which is too unfortunate. But, hey, they got billions of dollars, so who am I? And anyway, I've got this rode podcaster plugged into my MacBook Pro. It's running on GarageBand right now. Then I got a little mic stand. It's sitting on top of this wood block that used to be, I think, like an end table covered with towel. Okay. On the table is a towel, and then the block is sitting on top of that with a towel of that. Then around me, I've got these 1, 2, 3, let's call them panels that are 2ft wide by 3ft tall. Okay, 2ft wide by 3ft tall. And they're covered in. Basically, it feels like a velvet material that it's just stapled around the wooden frame. So it's a wooden frame with. That's 2ft by 3ft, 3ft tall, 2ft wide. Then the velvet is stapled all around it. And what I do is I have three of those. And I just went to the hardware store. Okay, sorry, wife went to the hardware store and got me door hinges. And I put hinges between them. And so the one directly in front of me is flat. Meaning. I'm sorry, it's. How do you describe this? It's parallel to me. And then the two other ones that are on hinges are at 45 degrees. So remember, like, in science projects in school, you'd have, you know, this. This cardboard thing that was, like, flat in the back. And then the two other parts of the cardboard came out 45 degrees. That's basically what I've set up. And then I've set up another one of that. That same thing right behind me. So I'm in this little, like, cocoon of these panels covered in some kind of velvety texture. I can't remember what the heck this stuff is called. And it's pretty janky, actually. This podcast was 200 bucks. GarageBand is free on your MacBook Pro. Each of these panels probably cost, like, 30 bucks. And the hinges were probably, like, a buck a pop. That's it. Now, why would I tell you that? I tell you that because I think people imagine that to do whatever you hear someone doing, whatever your perspective about their brand or whatever. We all get fooled into thinking things are overly complicated. One of the messages that the deanne shared with me, who has now done over a billion dollars in sales, she said, I said, what's the number one challenge some of your folks face? She says, they over complicate everything. And I remember really resonating with that because I've been teaching marketing. Been teaching marketing since about 2007. So I get two. A decade. Dang. Whoa. Moment of realization in the look cocoon getting old. Okay, so about 10 years I've been teaching marketing, and I would say the last six, seven years at the highest level, doing real work, not just talking about it and handing off to a team, me doing the work. And I share all that because as I've taught marketing to so many audiences too, they overcomplicate it. This whole setup cost me, what, you know, under 300 bucks. I know the Mac Pro costs more than that, and so catch me on that one. Could have been cheaper for sure, but I have a laptop. I need it for the rest of work. And I just share all this because I want to start this podcast. And what my impulse would be would be very impulsive to what many of you guys might sense, which is, oh, well, I better, you know, I better register and, you know, I better schedule a radio studio and go in and, you know, I better pay them, you know, a couple hundred bucks to use that, you know, fancy studio or, you know, I better go buy that podcast Mike that I see those big guys using. That's, you know, $700 or $2,000. And. And we fool ourselves into overcomplicating everything. It's about time to remember to one, strip it down and two, get in the game. Remember, you don't need to be a perfectionist. And if you were an honest perfectionist, at least you realize the root of the word is to perfect. And you cannot perfect unless you begin. It's by releasing something and seeing how it does that you're even able to perfect it and improve it. So get it out there. And I know it's like even at my level of experience now, you know, and I still think I'm a young dude, you know, I'm only in my 40s. And I've had the blessing, though, since 2007, of really pushing and doing this full time. And I've worked with so many amazing people. And in that process, I have to tell you, I've seen and I felt so many times like I wasn't enough. And I felt like, well, I don't have that fancy office, I don't have that fancy team, and you know, maybe I'll wait one day to do this. And I even let some of my clients sometimes intimidate me because, you know, they're such high level achievers. I'm like, oof. Well, they can do this because they've got this or that, but I always have to catch myself. And that's not true. They got going. They began with what they had and they got better and maybe they got fancier over time, but they just got scrappy, they stayed in the game. And I would love for you to think about what's some major dreams you have and get scrappy again and get in the game. And here's what I mean. You know, Tony Horton, who I talked about in my last podcast, he was, he introduced me at the Superdome to that talk, that big audience, and he was one of my big heroes because I did P90X in right after college or in college or after college, can't remember. And so just a huge, huge, huge impact on my life. And so he and I ended up doing an online course together. His course is called Living Large with Tony Horton. And I think it's on growth.com if the course is still up. Anyway, he was out at my house and one time he said, you know, I've been thinking about doing this art project. And he started telling me about it and he said, you know, as he was describing it to me, I kept listening, listening, listening, and then he kind of said, well, you know, I don't know when I'll ever get to that. And I said, Saturday sounds like a good day. He goes, what? I said, what are you doing this Saturday? He goes, well, I don't know. I said, well, start. And he kind of looked at me and he just laughed because he's like, sometimes we need to be just friggin told that. Start, get in there, be scrappy. Look, if you start your podcast with 200 bucks, right, rock on, man, go. Because I also tell my team all this time, strip it down to the most essential elements. The needle movers. Get rid of everything else. Everything else. Just the needle movers. What's the needle mover in podcasting? And you hearing me right now, what's it take? It takes a mic and it takes this basically little booth to keep out the crazy noises around here, and it takes that computer, but that's it. I could say I need to design this room out. And I Do have ambitions to ultimately make this fancier and fancier. Don't need to. You hear my voice. People are liking it. When we debuted the new episode of that first Brennan show, it kicked the podcast back into the territory of the top 10 again. It was pretty awesome. And I share that with you because, well, I hope the obvious takeaway, get in there again, get scrappy. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can begin now. No matter how small you start, start something that matters. Remember, there's a magical stirring in your heart that's saying, go do something. And that magical stirring is a hint. It is a lesson. It is something to be heard and to be honored. It is something you need to listen to. And it's not saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's the little scared part of you. Don't live as a mouse. Live as a lion. Remember that you have within you the full capabilities to. To do what you really want to do, even if right now you don't have the competency and capability. But over a period of time, if you believe in your ability to figure things out and you try and you learn and you get mentorship and you learn and you try and you learn, you'll get better and better and better. And on that path of mastery is the only place that we really grow, the only place that we start perfecting our art and getting better at it. The only place where we remember the true strength that we have within us is in motion. You want motivation, get momentum. You want to grow, get momentum. You want to go now to that next level. Get muddy, get dirty, get going. And as you do that, over a period of time, you lift and you lift and you lift. And one day you're standing still at the top of your career, and you have no problem standing in a janky little podcast booth starting something new. Because you love your people, you love your art, you love your mission. And I'm Brendon Burchard. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the B R E N D O N Show. If you're ready to take your life to a whole new level, make sure you grab my book, High Performance Habits. How Extraordinary People Become that way. It's available on Amazon right now, and when you order your copy, you're really supporting my channel and the message. And you're also getting a book that will reveal to you 20 years of my research into what is it that helps people go to a new level of success in their life? What does it really take? What habits are proven to help you reach long term success in your career, your health, your personal life, your relationships. It's called High Performance Habits. How Extraordinary People Become that Way. It's available on Amazon right now. It.