The 4 Parts to Reinventing Your Life

Meaning does not always equal happiness. It always throws people off. They're like, I sprint it. I have all the reasons in the world to be happy. I have a meaningful life. I don't know why I'm not happier. I'm like, oh, well. Meaning and happier, they're different things, right? What can add onto meaning to make it more happy is aliveness and connection, but also pursuit. Right? We are human beings. We love to chase something we love. We love to build something, to be in progress, to be in motion. Doing something meaningful does bring us more happiness. I'm going to cover reinventing your life today from a slightly different perspective, from the perspective of more of what I do in my high performance coaching experience. And I hope it will help you. It will be a guided journey through a set of questions that I hope will help you figure out where you are in that scale of needing or wanting or desiring reinvention in the first place. Right? Because, of course, if we're talking about reinventing your life, our first question should be, why do you want to reinvent your life? Is there something pulling at your heart to do something different? Is there something that's whispering in your ear to shift a relationship or shift your focus? Is there something you just don't feel good about? Or is there something aspirational that you see and you just. I am clear. I want that. But I do believe that when we use the word reinvention, we should start with that. And you have heard other coaches and you will hear other coaches in growth day talk about that concept, right? About why would you want to reinvent your life? And can we find a way to enjoy the life we have now? But of course we can say that. And still sometimes we just go, I know I want to improve, so what should I do? Where should I focus? How do I think through this? I want to begin with the framework, though, that we're always talking about in growth day. This belief that typically, as humans, we all just want four things after we are past that survival and sustenance stage. You know, we want. It's a triangle if you've ever seen. We talk about it here a lot. That first thing we all want a greater sense of is aliveness. And I always come back to this, right? Reinvent your life for what? Well, could you reinvent your mindset, your habits, your peer group, your work efforts so you have a greater sense of aliveness? Aliveness is that sense of vibrancy, of being, of passion, of presence, in spirit, in the moment. We all want to feel that the good news is we can usually get aliveness to exactly what Jonathan Fields talks about, which is savoring the moment more. We can feel a greater aliveness when we up our health, get better, physical health to have more energy, we can feel better. What else do we reinvent towards? Well, we always talk about another corner of the triangle of being, about connection. Specifically, we want connection with ourselves and connection with other people. This usually is about the area of your life called relationships. We want to improve, deepen our relationships, increase intimacy and vulnerability, just feel more real and connected with other people. Sometimes that changes your communication approach with your partner or your spouse. Sometimes that changes your partner or your spouse. I'm just teasing you. I don't know what you need to reinvent, but it is a major area of concern, isn't it? Another major part of that triangle is meaningful pursuits. A sense of fulfillment or meaning in the act of progressing in our lives or creating in lives or leading in lives, or building in our lives that we want meaning and fulfillment. But specifically we want meaningful pursuits. Because some people have meaningful pursuit. They actually have a lot of meaning in their life, but they're not happy. Meaning does not always equal happiness. It always throws people off. They're like, I spread it. I have all the reasons in the world to be happy. I have a meaningful life. I don't know why I'm not happier. I'm like, oh, meaning and happier. They're different things, right? What can add onto meaning to make it more happy is aliveness and connection, but also pursuit, right? We are human beings. We love to chase something, we love to build something, to be in progress, to be in motion. Doing something meaningful does bring us more happiness. You can have happiness without everything being perfectly meaningful. I can eat a piece of chocolate with green tea and I am happy. There ain't nothing meaningful in it. It's just a moment, right? So you can have happiness separated from meaning clearly. But when we are pursuing something that matters to us and brings fulfillment, that makes a difference. And of course, in the middle of that triangle of aliveness, connection and meaningful pursuits is growth, the sense that we are growing. Now, I've taught you this growth day model many times, so I won't belabor the point. But I do want to always re aim us at those things. Because after 15 years of coaching people one on one in large groups, there is no question to me that after we have security and safety in some level, those are the things we're always striving for more of, more aliveness, more connection. More meaning and more growth. So with all that, where do we go? Well, again, I love to come back to why would we want to reinvent? Well, we want to achieve those things more. Okay, Brendan, let's get more specific. Help me think through this better. This is where I'm going to introduce some Growth Day tools, and then I'm going to teach you 10 questions on reinvention that I ask myself every single year. And then usually on birthdays as well. And so I'll cover that with you as well. Okay, so first I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to hop into the Growth Day app because I think this might help you. If you feel like you've heard the session or these sessions, you're like, where am I? What should I focus on? I'm in the Growth Day app right now. Can you raise your hand if you can see my screen? Because I can never tell. Okay, thank you, Sarah, and thank you, Audrey. I appreciate that. Okay, so I'm in the Growth Day app right now. I'm going to go to this. There's a section here called the Monthly Whole Life Score. The Monthly Whole Life Score. Now, if you filled out in the last month, it's not going to let you do it along with us here today because we built it to go every month. But I haven't done mine this month for this session specifically. So when I go into beginning, what I like about this is this is going to ask me to look at all these different areas of my life, and it's going to give me questions or statements to see whether or not I agree with them. And it's going to help me narrow and find an area of my life that maybe needs some focus. Because when people say, where do I start? I usually say, do the Monthly Whole Life Score and see what it tells you. Start there. Improve that area. Because often that's the area that needs the most. Reinvention of your mindset and your habits. Because, listen, everyone could talk about reinvention as a philosophy, but you know how it shows up in your life, how you think mindset, and what you do on a recurring basis. Habits. I always tell people you want to change your life. It starts with three simple things. Mindset, habits, and goals. That's why we built Growth Day the way we did. Mindset. You fill out your journal, your morning mindset prompts, as an example, habits. That's why you ask you to fill out the life scores on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, because it helps you track your habits. And then Goals, which is our plan section in the app. So those things, that's operationally how we actually change our lives. Right? Mindset, habits and goals. Maybe not in that order, but you get the idea. So, okay, where should I focus, Brendan? Well, I'm going to go in the monthly whole life score with you, and I'll do it with you right now. Okay. So I'm in the app. I'm on the desktop version. It's easier to show you it here. So the first question is about health. The statements here are, I regularly take care of myself so I can feel my best. I want my overall physical and emotional health to be primed and optimized to make me feel energetic and strong. Each day I strive to eat well, sleep well, and work out so that I have the physical vibrancy and stamina to enjoy life and deal with its challenges and opportunities. So these are the statements. And then if I agree with that, then I'm a 10. If I don't agree with that, I'm low, I'd be a one. And somewhere on that spectrum of low to high is where I'm living today or in this month. And I would fill this out right. So I'm just going to buzz through a couple different examples. That's health. The next thing is about my mental and emotional states. I keep a positive outlook and attitude. I'm cultivating a sense of joy and peace in my life so I can experience positive emotions in relations. I take care of myself by being mindful to the energy, focus and emotions I really want to experience and generate in my life. Now, why am I going through this at this level? Because I want to help you realize something. In this monthly whole life assessment, it's not just asking you whether or not you agree with these statements. It turns out the statements are actually the answers as well. The statements are actually the answers as well. Meaning these statements, based on research, are the things that create a good mental and emotional health for yourself. So sometimes just going through the assessment, you go like, right, I'm not doing that right. I got to do a better job at that. So, for example, I could realize today, you know, I think about my last, you know, three days, I can realize this statement, I take care of myself by being mindful to the energy, focus and emotions that I want to experience and generate in life. I'm like, that's why the last three days weren't awesome, because I was in reaction mode. I wasn't being mindful as much as I needed to do, and I wasn't generating the emotions I want to experience in life. I was hoping to have the emotions I want versus generating the emotions I want. Got it. Puts me right back in the driver's seat, so I'll go through more quickly. I don't want to belabor the point of walking you through all of these, but then we're going to ask about your partner or your loving relationships. We're going to ask about your family. We're going to ask about your friends. We're going to ask about your mission. We're going to ask about the experiences in life you're creating. We'll ask about the spirit you feel, how your finances are going, what you're learning, and what it's going to do. It's going to kick you an overall score, meaning I just got a 69% out of 100%. I go, you know, that's kind of like a C. It's not an A plus. It's not a B plus. It's kind of like a C, 69%. And then what I can do is I can see here what my scores were all in one dashboard. Okay, I can see all my scores here. And then based on my scores, it's given me a video to watch, saying, hey, just watch this video. Sometimes it'll recommend one video based on your behavior, other times more. But it's like, dude, your job is to watch this video because you can see up here, my lowest score was in my partner in love. Don't worry about me. I was just going through clicking, gosh, I shouldn't have done that. My wife will be worried. And so I got a 40% in my relationship score. Watch this. The secret of successful couples. That's how targeted growth day is. Okay, so as you're going through, it's also kind of giving you the answer and then giving you a prompt. So I would say, if you're going to reinvent, look at do the whole life score and just say, which area are you struggling with the most? Or which three areas are you struggling with the most? And could you improve those by adjusting your mindset, your habits, and your goals? Whenever I'm facing a major problem in my life, I don't blame the problem. I go, how can I weaponize my mindset, my habits, and my goals to overcome this? Let me get clear on my goals. Develop what we call in high performance work clarity. Develop real clarity here about myself, my social relationships, my skill sets, or the service I want to provide here. Got clarity. Good job. Okay, how do I every day stoke the mindset that is necessary to show up and do well here. What habits would I have to create, to learn or to deal with this? So I always want to give you that. It is like imagine, you know, you have a quiver of arrows in the back here. Anytime you want to change something in your life, mindset, habits, goals, that's it. That's your weaponry in fashioning a better life. Because all of your life happens through those things, right? Your relationship with someone you love is actually happening through the mindset you bring into it. It's happening through the relationship habits that you have together, and it's happening through the goals that are shared together. It's always happening. Even your communication. Listen, 70% of your communication is not so intentional. It's a pattern. It's a pattern, which means it's a habit. Most of your communication patterns, that's a habit. You have a way of communicating. It's a habit, right? You have a habit of how you deal with conflict in your life. You have a habit of how you express vulnerability in your life. You have a habit of how you listen to other people in your life. And you either have explicit and conscious goals or you have unconscious implicit goals that you're just acting and reacting from. So more conscious goals, more conscious habits, more conscious cultivation of a mindset can change your life. This is why we say in growth day we want to make self improvement a way of life. Because how many of you feel like you got to work on your mindset every day? I've been teaching personal development for 20 years. 20 years. I still have to do the morning mindset in the high performance planner or in growth days journal section. So if you didn't see that before, I'll show you that too. For those who are new, I highly recommend you just go to your journal section here and you'll see I'm on a journal page. And if you didn't know, under journal there's this prompt, there's a box and it says morning mindset. And when you click on asks you to finish these prompts, one thing I could get excited about and you can type it. If one word could describe the person I want to be today, then it would be this. Someone who needs me on my A game. A situation that might stress me up and how I'll deal with it. Someone I could surprise, an action I could take, Something I could do outside my comfort zone. If I was a coach, the way I'd advise myself today is this. The projects I need to take on. Even if I'm not addressing them today. Blah, blah. You see, I just do this every day, and it keeps me focused. I still need a morning mindset prompt after 20 years in personal development. Yeah, because, dude, life is hard. Life is change. Life is chaos. Life is struggle. I'm not perfect every day. If you saw me in the 20 minutes before this show today, you'd be like, what's going on? I'm on the phone with the celebrity. I'm running around here without a shirt on. I'm trying to get the new studio set up right. Literally, this is three minutes before we went live today. I'm trying to get the sound thing up in here. I threw this big sound wall I have in front of this window I have over there because it's blaring. I mean, it was just like. But luckily, I knew that this morning when I did my morning mindset, I said, what tripped me up Today? I'm going to be really squeezed for time going into the live cast. So breathe. So I wrote that this morning. I was like, okay, so I'm doing all that. I'm just breathing d. Rhythmic breathing as I'm going through setting everything up, just getting myself in a good place because I wanted to share with you some ideas that I've recently followed that helped me reinvent different parts of my life. You all see this new backdrop. This is real. This is not a green screen. This is real. I'm a new place here. I'll drop the thing here. You can see my new backdrop that coming out. Okay. I'm in California now, Northern California. That's my. That's my backdrop. I know it's a little blown out today because I got to make sure you guys can see my face, but so I had a big move. You know, I would. I haven't even shared on social media in any significant way yet that Denise and I moved from Puerto Rico back to Northern California. If you didn't know, Denise and I met in San Francisco 18 years ago. Eighteen years ago, we met in San Francisco, and we lived there together. She was there. I think she had lived there maybe 11 years. I was a Montana kid. I moved down there. I got a fancy corporate job. Then I quit the job and quickly went bankrupt trying to become a writer and a coach, an online teacher. And we met, fell in love, and we got married in California and then moved to Portland. Oregon had an amazing decade there of building an incredible team. And I launched, like, six books and three podcasts and had a couple hundred million video views. And then we moved to Puerto Rico. Because my dream was to live in the Caribbean. At some point in my life I was like, I'm going to be in the Caribbean some point. Cause I had. For those of you who know my story, when I was a 19 year old kid, I had a car accident in the Dominican Republic. So I thought. But when I was down there, I fell in love with the culture and the environment of the Caribbean, traveling to different islands. So I decided, okay, I'm going to move there one day. So we moved there. We had an amazing three years that was kind of strange because half of it we were under the pandemic. So we weren't exploring and doing as much as we thought we would do. But we achieved a lot of our goals that we had down there and had an extraordinary time, met amazing people, but also brought a lot of clarity in life during that time to realize the importance of family. And my wife's family is in California and her parents are in their upper 70s. And the pandemic brought pretty good clarity. We want to be close to our aging parents. That became real and very clear to us. We knew at some point the next stage for us was back to California. We just didn't know when. And through the clarity of the pandemic and the success of a bunch of things we had going on in business was like, yeah, let's do it. It was a major move. And I love what Mel Robbins shared in her session on Reinventing youg Life of if you're only looking at a six month period, you're kind of in emergency and just handling things. And she invited you to look at a 60 month period, like a five year journey. Well, even when we moved to the Caribbean, we thought we'll be here maybe three, five years and then we'll go back to California. Maybe we'll be there for X amount of time. When we moved to Portland, it's like one of those things having a longer vision is helpful so that you're in a constant state of becoming and that is your reinvention. See, I want to just call this month becoming, but it's less sexy than reinvention at this time of year for people. But at the end of the day, reinvention, we are always becoming the next best version of ourselves. We are always trying to level up our feeling of aliveness and connection and meaningful pursuits and growth. And for us in our life that involved a move. For us that involved a diligent shift in mindset, in our habits, in our relationships and our goals. But it was a long conversations over a series of years. It wasn't an impulsive thing. And I think that what people do when they wreck everything, when they hit a midlife crisis and they reinvent everything is because it's an impulsive reaction to something they don't like. I don't like this part of my life. Break it all, move it all, change it all. And it's impulsive. And by the way, I don't have judgment to that. But impulsive is not actually a value laden word. It means something specific. It means short term, immediate, get it done reactionary, which sometimes can be very useful for people. But most often in becoming our best versions of ourselves, we need to have a little more vision. I hope you enjoyed this session. I hope you're enjoying this series on reinventing your life. I want to congratulate you for making personal development a priority. I always say it, but so few people in this world will actually do the work. You were here. You took notes. I hope you had some insights that helped you. If you did, please share them in the comments. Anything I shared today that you thought was helpful, please let us know about it. DM me. Follow me on Instagram. Say hi that you are on Growth Day today. I appreciate each and every one of you. We are building something unique here. Where do you see this level of conversation about life that you just experienced literally this day in Growth Day. So if Growth Day is helping you, please just go send someone to growthday.com, tell them you use Growth Day or you like Growth Day. Help us build this mission of helping others make self improvement a way of life. I'm honored to get to do this work with you. I'm honored that today we all came together and we got to grow as we learned about this important topic. Thank you to our other teachers. Thank you to each of you. I appreciate all of you. Every day is a great day to grow and we did it together. Thanks everybody.