8 Nov 2018 · 20 min
In this episode of The Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard delivers a motivational training session on the power of letting go of past emotional baggage to unlock higher motivation and high‑performance living. He explains why lingering stories, failures, and traumas occupy mental “white space” needed for creativity and bold ideas, and he outlines concrete practices for releasing that weight: daily awareness of lingering baggage, a weekly Sunday review ritual that decouples behavior from identity, self‑forgiveness, and, when needed, professional therapy. Burchard stresses that courage comes from honoring the past, forgiving oneself and others, and choosing to be present and “light on your feet” in a chaotic world. He also promotes his book High Performance Habits as a deeper resource and invites listeners to join his monthly live high‑performance program.
Chapters
We've got this opportunity to make a space in which we debrief the weak and unhitch the trailer of weight and let it fall back down the hill. And so you got to be attentive and aware of, like, do I got any weight on me from the last couple weeks or months or years? And can I just start releasing some of that tension? It's a difficult thing to do and it will change your life. Hey, my friends, it's brendon burchard. And welcome to another episode of the brendon show. Hey, all, it's Brendan. And I'm often asked to share with you some more of the training that we do that's more like emotional and kind of getting into your life a little bit to help you release some of those challenges you have so you can reach higher levels of motivation and high performance. So in this session, what I'm gonna do for you is play for you one of our high performance monthly training sessions. It's where I go live every single month and I talk about some of the difficult things in life and help people work through them. In this session, we talk about letting go so you can find more, More courage. And I feel like if you've got some baggage in life, which we all do, by the way. I do. We all do. And when we're trying to work through that, it's important to let that stuff go so we can be free in the moment to make better choices for ourselves. This is a session that's going to help you think through that and achieve that. This is like literally a little segment of a two or three hour training on these types of topics. So if you ever want to join me, every single month live, that's my high performance monthly program. You can go to brendan.com monthly. But let's just jump in and talk about the power of letting go so you can find more courage. Let go of the baggage. You're never going to touch the full rim of your potential if you're weighted down by baggage from your elementary school years, your high school years, your college years, these last four years. Listen, the last chapters of the book, you gone through them, you finished them, you flipped the page, you got a new chapter here. And you have to be willing to break from the past to have the future you so desperately desire. You have to have the courage to allow yourself to honor the past as it was, to forgive those who need to be forgiven, to forgive yourself and to acknowledge that everything led you to this point now. Everything. Those crappy times, those times when you're depressed, those times when you gave up on yourself, those times when someone else gave up on you, those times that you gave up on others, the times that you quit, the times that you failed, the times that you felt so small you were embarrassed. Those times don't live in this moment. And the more of those times that you cultivate in your mind and you ruminate on and you think and you self talk on and you revisit in your mind, the more disempowering times from the past, hurtful times from the past, failures from the past that you keep running in your head. What that is doing is that is taking up the very free space necessary for the bold ideas to come in. It's taking up the space for the very needed white space for creativity to come in, for the dreams to come in, for the best you to speak through from like it's hard for you to live an authentic and true and vulnerable and real life if you're always speaking through your baggage. If you're always thinking through your baggage. And you guys know what I'm talking like everyone's got different baggage. Maybe your baggage is your divorce or that last job. They are not relevant today. And the only reason they're relevant today is if either you allow them to be relevant from those situations or those persons revisiting you or you're running the same old story. You're running the same old excuses. Yeah, I can't do this because I suck at relationships. No, you sucked at relationships 10 years ago. Well, I can't do this because you know, I failed. Yeah, six months ago. Today's a new day, homie. Like, you gotta access this day, dude. This day is fresh. This day is clean. This day woke up, showered, ready, prepped for you by the universe or spirit or God or luck or cosmos, whatever you want to call it. This day says to you when you wake up in the morning, the day whispers to you, do not fear me, for I have been brought here for you. You don't fear the day. That day has been brought here for you. And when you have real reverence for life, when you have a deep gratitude and appreciation, like a deep gratitude and appreciation for life, you don't hold on to a lot of yesterdays. You notice the changing fall colors. Now. You notice the free space that you have now. You notice the time and the choices and the opportunities available to you. Now, yesterday's not such a big deal. You don't hold the baggage. And here's how you know if you're holding Baggage, you know in your heart there's baggage there. When you keep playing small, when you keep minimizing yourself to other people in your current situation. That's because the self showing up is a self lugging the baggage, feeling bad about themselves, letting it weigh down. When you're free and spirited in this moment, when you're truly present, free from yesterday, like when you're present right here, that authenticity, that spirit shines through. And listen, the same people who completely shut you down yesterday, when they go to shut you down today, you go, hey, that's not okay. Maybe the old you let them shut you down. The new you today, you. The old you let them shut you down because you had hurts and feelings and old stories and you labeled yourself differently and you let yourself be put in your place by somebody. Today, the place you've been put on is a fresh ground of earth. Today, the place that you've been put in is this moment. And this moment doesn't reek of yesterday. When the sun set yesterday, it set. When the sun rose this morning, it was fresh. There were new birds around your house, not old birds. They moved on too. You got to kind of get it in your mind at some point that this day, if you have real reverence for life, you don't meet the day as you did in high school. Because if you have reverence for life, you recognize that all those struggles brought you here, that all those struggles were necessary to make a new you, a fresh you that you gotta release. Some of those hurts, man, and those pains, girl, and those stories, my friends, because they're old. And how can you possibly just touch the rim of your potential of the future? How are you going to get lift to be able to leap up there and grab it when you got £40 of old stories of stupid stuff you did in high school, or the way they treated you when you were 10, or the way they talked to you when you were 30. Like, you're in a different place now. And you need to be in this place, light on your feet. Because how many of you think, like, the truth is right now you need to be able to adapt? I mean, the world's in chaos. You need to be light on your feet, right? Like, if you've ever taken dance classes before, when you're heavy on your feet, it's. Cause your body moves in the old ways. The more you learn to be present in the moment, the more you get light on your feet. And all of a sudden, now, when your partner turns this way, boom, you can go that because you're not thinking about the way you went 100 times ago. You're there with that person dancing. And now it's real, it's alive, and you're creating something new and unique between you. You need to do that with the moment, like now. The chaos of the world and the abundance of the world and the opportunities of the world have never been intersecting the way that they are right now. And you gotta be light on your feet. And if you still hate yourself from something that happened a couple years ago, I have to urge you and tell you and reveal to you. I'm your high performance coach. I am training you here. I can't be your therapist. And so what I tell people right off the bat, if you really want to live a courageous life, but you notice you keep shutting yourself down because of stuff that happened in previous chapters of your life. Not just like, you're down, hey, look, we all had, some of us all had a bad week in the last couple months. Like, there's a difference between like a bad couple days versus a couple chapters, right? And if you had a couple chapters where you've been down, depressed, sad, a couple chapters where you minimize yourself, a couple chapters where you shot yourself down, sabotaged yourself, told yourself so stories, and like, literally limited yourself because the way you perceived yourself from the past, if those old chapters have been there multiple previous chapters, than from today, do yourself a favor and seek professional therapy. Seek somebody to do that work with you. There's lots of tactics and strategies and productivity, things that I'm sharing all the time. Lots of new triggers and ideas I'm sharing all the time. But it's like if you're trying to hit gas and you keep hitting the brake at the same time, because for reasons of trauma or super old stories or old baggage, you just need somebody to help you process that. It doesn't make you weak. Seeking help, it makes you courageous. Seeking help, it doesn't make you small. Seeking help, it makes you expansive. Seeking help. And it might be your way out. So I just think that I don't know how you guys feel, but I really feel like a lot of people think that there's like a stigma to therapy still worldwide. And I know I have an international audience. You heard how everybody's from all around the place, so. So I just wanna let you know, like, it's okay for you to seek professional medical or therapeutic guidance because you shouldn't be still trapped in your old stories. Not at this stage. You're too damn old. Like, isn't it true, we've all been through too much to be thinking about what we did in high school or elementary school or that trauma that we had four or five years ago. And sometimes you need assistance for that. Like many of you guys know, I had a major trauma a couple years ago when I had a brain injury. I didn't have the brain injury. And then be like, I'm good, I'll get on my with my own damn self. I was like, man, I have significant trauma there. I got hurt. I'm going to go get some help. And if I hadn't got that help, we wouldn't be here together today. So I just think it's okay to ask for help and to know that if you need it, If you don't need the help, what you need is a reminder. And that's why you're here today. And that is simply, you have to have a process every single week where you let go of the screw ups of the week. See, what most people do is they just carry the screw ups. Hate myself, failure, screw up, label, screw up, label, screw up, label, screw up, label. And all the mess ups of their life, they start defining as themselves. And the mistake you made weeks ago, you labeled it as part of your identity versus a behavioral mistake. Behaviors change every day. Your behaviors today are different than they were yesterday. Like, behaviors are very adaptive and reactionary type of thing. You'll get some behaviors wrong, some behaviors right. But what most people do is they get the wrong behavior and they pull that wrong behavior and they pull it into identity mess up. They grab the mess up and they make it their mindset. You know, the mess up was a behavioral problem. It is an identity problem. And so they take the mess up the problem, and they make it the personhood. And that's what we call making mountains out of molehills. Like, so what, you got the project in late? Does that mean you're a complete failure? No, it means you got the project in late, dude. Next time plan better. Jesus. Right? It's like we take the little things and we blow it up into who we are. Who you are is not all the mess ups. It's part of your learning journey, but it's not you. And so you got to know, like, there's a difference here. And sometimes baggage is recognizing, oh, that was an awkward, weird, uncomfortable, harmful situation. But that's not me. That was a situation. It was a behavior. It was something that happened, an occasion. And then we can go, okay, if that's true, then who am I really? Who do I want to be. Who am I now at this age of my life without those old stories? And you got to give yourself that distinction. Yeah, it's like the mess up isn't the mindset. Right? It's so simple. But here's the thing. I told you, you need a reminder. It needs to be a rhythm for. It's part of my Sunday rhythm. Some of you guys know I do my Sunday review, and when I do my Sunday review, I literally go, okay, where could I have shown up better this last week? Where could I behaved better this last week? What could I have done better this last week? And I just reflect on previous week and identify the things that didn't go the way I wanted to. And I ask, okay, what could I have done? And then I do the most simple and basic thing that you could do on a Sunday. I forgive myself and I let it go. You know, isn't that why some people go to church? To absolve themselves and to admit their sins and to release it? And maybe you're a churchgoer, maybe you're a spiritual person, maybe you believe in God or you don't, but either way, wouldn't it be a practical thing to do on Sunday to go, okay, let me review where my week went, good and bad, and let me decouple my emotions from that so I can enter Monday with freedom. Because when I am in a space of freedom, I make much better decisions than when I am in the space of lack, when I am in the space of self hatred, when I am in the space of carrying all this stuff unprocessed. I mean, have we learned anything from personal development other than, hey, you got to process the stuff that went, that happened in your life and understand how you identify with that and what you're going to do next. You got to process it, man. And most people, because they're not processing their immediate snap judgments of self, oh, I screwed up. Imagine if we could just loop back your last couple months and every single week just think about every. Think about how much you screwed up the last couple months. I don't know about you, but mine's like a, like, my hands would have to, like, I can't. I don't have enough hands, like, to count the number of screw ups in the last couple months. I can't. It's like, it's so infinite. Number of screw ups. But imagine if every time I screw up, I'm like, ugh, you're a screw up. Ugh, you're dumb, Brendan. Ugh. And my self Talk in that moment was snap judgment, which most people it is snap judging self talk, dummy. Ugh. I know this. Stupid. Brendan. Ugh. Imagine if we take a loop of that for the last six months, uninterrupted, unpaused, unedited, and we took out all the situations of life, we removed all context, and it just sounded like, screw up. You suck, you suck, you suck. Why'd you do that? Oh, my God. Dummy, dummy, dummy. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. And we didn't de hook that. We didn't decouple that. That's what most people's realities are. And because that's always running unconsciously, because they're not deliberate about processing, they're not living a courageous life now, because every time they think a courageous thought, that overwhelming chorus of noise filters and swamps and smashes that. That whisper of a dream that is bold is beaten to death by the rap base of the horrid talk that we have with each other. It's like in the back, right? And so that noise needs to be synthesized and edited down on a simple Sunday. You just sit there on your Sunday and you go, all right, man. Had a lot of noise this last week. A lot of things didn't go the way it did. But you know what? Let me think about them. How could I have met those situations as my highest self or more courageous self? What could I have done? Okay, good. Good, Brendon. You're learning. Good job, Brendan. You're learning. Oh, yeah. You could have been better then. Yeah. Good for you, having the intention to be better. Good for you to learn, Brendon. Good for you to set higher intentions, Brendon. Good job. Being on purpose. Good job, Brendon. Trying to improve your life. Okay, good job. You really. You got a new way to look at that, Brendan. Good job. Now just let it go, man. Just take that emotion and let that emotion float away for a little bit. Don't let that emotion from that mess up, mess up my Monday. It's Sunday. I gotta let that go. I forgive myself in that situation because I've learned. I forgive the other people in the situation because even if they didn't learn, I. I learned and they gave me a lesson. I let go of that situation because that situation is not in this moment as I'm sitting here with my green tea and my journal, reflecting on last week in this moment. I got a journal. I got a green tea. It's just me and the green tea. So you see, we've got this opportunity to make a space every week in which we debrief the week and decouple ourselves, unhitch the trailer of weight and let it fall back down the hill, you know what I mean? And so you got to be attentive and aware of like, do I got any weight on me from the last couple weeks or months or years? And can I just start releasing some of that tension? It's a difficult thing to do and it will change your life. 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.