The Secret to Happiness
19 Nov 2017 · 10 min
In this episode of the Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard shares the central metaphor that shapes his view of happiness: a power plant does not possess energy, it generates it by transforming and transmitting it. He extends this idea to personal life, arguing that we do not have happiness or joy; we consume external energy and must deliberately transform it into the feelings we want to experience and share. Burchard recounts his early experience as a peer‑mediator and the lessons he learned from his mentor Bill Wilmot about staying "Zen" and self‑willing one’s emotional state. He describes his own journey from a short‑fused, anger‑prone youth to a conscious creator of joy, using behavioral‑science tools such as cue‑trigger‑reward loops. A key practice he highlights is the "doorway trigger" – a verbal cue he repeats each time he enters a room to set the intention of entering as a happy, service‑oriented person. He stresses the importance of teaching families and teams to talk about what makes them happy, using simple rituals like Friday‑night happiness check‑ins. Throughout, he emphasizes intentionality, reminders, and habit formation as essential for sustaining happiness. The episode concludes with a brief promotion of his book High Performance Habits which compiles two decades of research on habits that drive extraordinary success.
Chapters
Foreign. Hey, everybody, it's Brendon Burchard. And welcome back to another episode of the Brendon show. You can do happiness. Yesterday, I didn't share with you my favorite metaphor of my entire life. It's still the most important driving metaphor my lifetime, in every area of my life. This is the most important metaphor that I've learned and I've sort of owned in my lifetime, and that is this. The power plant does not have energy. It generates energy. To be more accurate, one of my students actually taught me this. Brendan actually generate is maybe not the exact term. I said, okay, tell me about that. He said, well, what a power plant actually does is it takes energy from one source, then it transforms that energy into another kind of energy. Then it transmits that energy, which is what you call generating the energy. That process of transformation to transmitting, I just call it generating energy. But that's what it's doing. So in the same way we don't have happiness, we don't have joy, we don't even have energy. We are taking energy or just consuming it and letting it land on us. And we are transferring or transforming that energy into what we want to experience and transmit in the world. And that's why I said yesterday, we have to be responsible for the energy we bring into our families. Because guess what they do, especially when they're young, they don't know this metaphor. So what do they do? They just take the energy that hits them. They don't yet have the tools to. To transform that energy and be who they want to be. They just take the energy. So when you get around people who are either unconscious or children, and sometimes it's the same, You really have to manage your energy, right? How many of you have ever been in a negative mood and it completely set off somebody in a way you did not anticipate, right? You know why that person did not have the tools to deal with your energy. How many of you ever been that person? Someone's energy completely set you off, right? We've all been there. But the thing is, you gotta learn how to deal with that. When I was in college, I got certified as a peer counselor and I focused specifically on peer mediation was my license. So I had peer mediation training. And it was the best thing I could ever get because it taught me that when you get around two people, they're gonna fight a lot. And I had to mediate those conflicts. And we'll talk about some of that technique on Sunday for you. So you do better in dealing with your conflicts. But I'd have two people and I was an official permeator. So I was a court referred. So they would refer. I remember I'm at this time 20 years old, court referred. So I would get a couple that was married and going through divorce mediation. I'm a 20 year old kid. This is over 20 years ago. Look how young I must have looked, right? Oh my God. And they would come and they would scream at each other. They would just be like freaking out on each other. And I got a deal with this. And I remember, I mean, my first two or three sessions I went to my advisor who was one of the great communication and conflict trainers in history. Bill Wilmot was my mentor and he wrote one of the most important books I ever read in that topic. I think it was called Artful Mediation. And he said, Brendan, you gotta learn to just be Zen. When other people are fighting around you, their energy is not your energy. Their energy is not your energy. You have to. He told me this phrase, I never heard it ever before. He said, you have to self will how you want to feel. You have to self will how you want to feel. And that was such a profound effect on a 20 year old kid. Because at that point in my life, I still was a child, I was still consuming the energy of the world. And it could tip me off in one way or another because I especially, I grew up around a lot of anger. So just short fuses, bam. Short fuse, bam, you're smacked. Short fuse, bam, you're in a fight. Very short fuses. So that was what I had consumed and what I was trained to. So I would get angry fast, very fast. All throughout high school and all throughout college, because I had martial arts training, I was in fights, constantly in fights. My friends and I, we would go out and sure enough, one of them would start a fight and then they'd come and grab me to end it. You know, all throughout school, I mean, just tons and tons of fights me and I'm proud. I have not been in a fight since I was 21 years old. And the last fight I was in was just to end a fight that was happening that I could be of service in. That was it. That was it. But I had fought a lot in my lifetime, right? I didn't want to do that anymore. And part of my journey was learning to deal with my own anger issues, my own energy. That wasn't right. And I knew it wasn't right. So you have to be very conscious of your energy and self will it. That's why I started teaching myself, I got to learn to bring the. And I would say it over and over and over to myself. I'm like, look, if I'm gonna bring energy into a space, it's going to be joy or it's going to be love. And for me it's the same thing. So I wanted for me to make sure that no matter what I did, that was the energy I was gonna bring into space. So I started training myself on that with my phone triggers. I started training myself on that by just deciding, okay, every time I walk through a door, what's the feeling I wanna bring into here? One of my doorway triggers. When I walk through a door, I say to myself, I am entering this room as a happy man ready to serve. I am entering this room as a happy man ready to serve. I've said that to myself tens of thousands of times every door I walk through. So I'm setting up a trigger cue for me to remind myself to be happy. Cause if we don't remind ourself to happy to be happy, we won't self will ourselves more often to be happy. Now some people say, well, this is just an affirmation, stupid. I'm happy, I'm happy. Actually it's not. It's something that we know from habitual training in behavioral sciences. Cue, trigger, reward. Cue, trigger, reward over and over and over again. Ultimately, you set up that practice, it becomes a higher level of practice and mental discipline. So let's return to this conversation about happiness. If you have not had that role of happiness, get therapeutic support. But also at the same time start practices that will make you happier. And you have to teach your family to start practices to be your happier. It can be as simple as a Friday night dinner where you say to the kids, what made you happy this week? You need to start giving the vocabulary of happy to your families. You have to start giving the vocabulary of happy to your teams. If your teams are never talking about what makes them happy, what kind of workplace is that to be in? If you're not having conversations and dialogues if other people. I say it to people all the time. Are you happy? How's it going? Are you happy? How's it going? I ask it all the time, are you happy? How's it going? Because by asking the question, I'm cueing it just like the doorway trigger. I enter this room as a happy man ready to serve. And when I say I enter this room as a happy man ready to serve, it makes me more intentional. Makes me more what? And these little triggers that you set up in your life, it makes you more intentional. Like those little reminders, they mean so much to us, we forget to do them. But your happiness is important. Your happiness is very important. Just like your self identity is important. Just like how you want to treat people, all of that is incredibly important. We just forget to set up those triggers. How many of you could do a better job setting up your life for some happiness at this stage of your life? Yeah. Turn the person on the left, right, shake them, say you deserve to be happy. To do it, you just have to be a little more intentional. And sometimes to be intentional, you just need a reminder. How many just had their alarm go off to say, that's me. Turn the person left, right, shake them, say be more intentional. 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.