This Is Why You Feel Out of Control

The easiest way to change your life is change how you talk to yourself. The easiest way to change how you talk to yourself is to start directing yourself. A lot of people have an inner monologue. Things are happening in the brain, right? They're, they're hearing thoughts, they're, they're thinking of things. And most of those are stimulus and response type of things. Have you been creative thinking in life or just responsive thinking? Just like, oh, look, it's a sunny day. Oh, I wonder what my mom's doing. Oh, I wonder how this is going today. I wonder. You kind of wonder. Things come up like the conscious is just rolling through lots of things that may be tied to precedent or prediction. Your brain tends to operate from those things also simultaneously. At a superficial level, we tend to think that we're all big, deep thinkers, but in general, most people actually don't think that deeply. We all think we're so deep as humans, but your brain actually doesn't work that way. People kind of have a flash of insider thought, like the first thing that comes to mind. You've heard that before, the first thing that comes to mind? Well, in the research, very few people, after the first thing comes to mind, very few people go deeper. Very few people go to the second thing, the third thing, the fourth thing, the fifth thing, right? Very few people, you know this, most people, it's just their first preference comes out, the first thought comes out their mouth. Do you have anybody in your life that you wish would pause their mouth and think one level deeper before opening their mouth? Has that ever been you? Been me before? When I'm on stage, you know, in front of 30,000 people, I gotta be like two or three sentences out in my mind or I might slip up and say something that's so easy for me to say as an example. And so you have to learn to be a little bit more intentional with your communication in life. Makes sense, right? Well, most people just kind of first order thinking, the first shot that comes out, which is usually driven by some very simple things. In life, the first thing that comes to your mind is usually not based on your childhood. It's usually based on your current mood. Your mood is shaping everything. Your mood is set by the really the last 72 hours, last week of sleep, diet, nutrition, movement, priming, experiences that you just had. Your brain really operates off a recency pattern. And so it's like that pattern recognition of what's been going on, what's happening now. And that's all cumulative, of course, but really, first thoughts happen a Lot of mood. And you know this because you've been hangry before, True or not. Have you ever been hangry and said something inappropriate that tells you you're not that deep? Is that so bad? It's so mean to say to people, our brains are wired to be quick thinking, but our brains are also energized. So your mood is really driving a lot. And then when we get into the structure of how we actually think, it is based a lot on precedent, what has happened before. And it's based on prediction. What do we think will happen next? Not just based on what happened before, but also based on intention, based on imagination, based on our ability to future forecast things that don't even exist. That's one thing that makes us unique as a human being is we can future forecast conceptually things that don't even exist, that are beyond our human needs. We can forward think into building a skyscraper, even though that has nothing to do with our human needs. Does that make sense? We can like do that. Generative thinking, your creative generative thinking is one of the unique gifts that you have of life. Creative, unique, innovative in the moment. Spontaneous conceptualization. That is adaptive, that is abstract. It's unbelievable. Here's my question. Have you been using that extreme human power to direct yourself, to direct your thoughts of what to think? Have you been creative thinking in life or just responsive thinking? That is the difference. And what happens for a lot of people is they've never moved into a directive. And a directive is like a command. Like today is theme is about command. So when we think about a directive, I want to know what are you telling yourself? What are the commands you're giving yourself consistently? Self directives, do you have any? To command and control yourself each day. It is the central work of all of personal development is to start being consciously aware of of our thoughts. That's like kindergarten. Our next level of personal development is moving from awareness into intention. Okay, this is happening. That's cool. Lots of dumb stuff come up. Like literally 20 seconds ago I was thinking about pizza. Is that relevant and needed now? Should I zoom in on that thought? No, it should be intentional. Where am I going with my thoughts for? For my friends here today. What's the energy I want to bring here today? These are directives. Does it make sense? And I tell people all the time, don't worry about all the thoughts that just come up. They come up. Be aware, Notice them. Ask if they're helpful, useful. But more importantly, recalibrate to your aspiration and move towards that. When you're in a conflict with somebody you love. Lots of thoughts and feelings will come up. Not all of them need to be asserted towards the person. Your question is how there's a different directive you're giving yourself there than just speak out all the negative things that come to my thoughts right now. You have an aspiration to improve the relationship and you move the conversation there. Okay, if you get all these metaphors, then here's my question for you today. What are the directives you give yourself every day to be in more control of your life? What are you saying to yourself every single day? I'm going to give you a couple of my examples so you can make your list. My goal for you today as we come out of this training today is I would love for you today as we go through these, at the end, I want you to make yourself what I'm just going to call today your directive card. I know this sounds simplistic, but watch how it changes your life. So we're going to come out with a directive card based on some of the things we're going to write down here today. Okay, so how do you command yourself? I want you to write these down, even if they're not going to be the things you say to yourself. I want to tell you the things I say to myself all the time. I'm consistently in good times, in bad times, in the morning, in the afternoon, on date night, in a zoom, talking to my teams like things I say to myself to command myself. If you don't have phrases about that, how can you possibly think that you're living purposefully if you've never consciously written down the phrases you should say to yourself? How can you argue you're living purposefully? Is that powerful? Right? That's the power of old school. Personal development was about affirmations, wasn't it? Why do you say an affirmation? To direct your mind. So how are you directing your mind? That's a directive. Okay, let me give you an examples because I know this can get a little esoteric. Let me share with you like some of my dominant ones. Directive. I say to myself all the time, feel the day. Life is alive. I want to feel it. Life is a blessing. I want to feel it. I'm somebody because I'm so in my head. Anyone else in your head? All the time. I'm an in your head guy, you know, I'm just like, I don't know, professorial. Even though I'm not academically a professor. I just, I just, I just think A lot. And so I'm in my head, I can go. I'm somebody who can go through four days and not feel enough. You know, I'm saying now when things are bad, I can feel the stress and get angry. Right? A simple stressful incident can be inconvenient or frustrating or anxiety inducing or make me angry. But that was a tiny part of the day. That was a sense. That was an incident. You had an entire day. Did you feel it? I know people who literally, they'll go through the motions with their kids. They'll go through the motions at work, they'll go through the motions, you know, with others, they're just kind of showing up and going through, but they never feel anything. They've lost that sense. And I'm not judging it. I'm here to tell you this is one of my directives because it's like, hey, Brendan, dummy, feel stuff. You know, the good stuff. So I want more feeling in my life. Many people, the outcome of feeling the day, that's called presence. The outcome of feeling the day, that's called awakening. Hey, my friend, sun is going down behind me and I just want to thank you for watching my YouTube channel. You know, so many of my subscribers are always asking me, brendon, how do I go to another level of my life and stay consistent in my personal development and really get progress? You know, we all want to be more motivated, more productive, more confident. We want to be better leaders. We want to be better at our craft. But how do you do that on a consistent basis? Well, that's why I built Growth Day. It's an app that you can use that builds your personal growth streak, that every day you come in and you do a series of actions and you listen to some inspirational training and life strategies that advances your life. It's very hard to stay consistent in your life. I know sometimes you watch a YouTube video, you read a book here, you listen to a podcast there, but you're not developing your habits. You're not scoring yourself. You're not finding real progress and insight that kind of wows you and opens up to, I say, the awe and the real agency that you have in life. So please go to growth Day in the App Store, go to the App Store, go to Growth day, or go to growthday.com and get growth day. I promise you with your seven day free trial, you'll go through Growth Day. And in seven days you'll be like, totally, totally, like feeling fired up. But also you'll find a new momentum because every Day. As you do your growth streak, you start to really discover what you're made of. And we access different parts of your brain. You're listing something inspirational. You're doing a checklist or doing a journal prompt that blows your mind. You're scoring your habits and reflecting on your day in ways you've never done before. We're basically taking all of personal development and putting it into a streak that you'll get like totally addicted to. You'll be addicted to that progress, that growth, that joy and energy that you deserve to feel every day. Go to growthday.com or go to the App Store and just download the Growth Day app. Start, start your 7 day free trial and let's level you up. Every day is a great day to grow, but you have to stay consistent to get real progress and to really change your Life. Go to growthday.com or go to the App Store and get the Growth Day app right now. I've worked with people now full time as a profession for 20 years. Every day. I mean, it's like seven days a week that I've been serving my audiences for 20 years. And what I found over and over and over, a lot of people, they just want to feel the day. They need to feel the feet on the ground again. They need to sense themselves, their body, their mind, their spirit again. They've lost the sense of feeling because they've numb themselves out because something happened. Remember, adversity led to fatigue or indifference or both. So my directive is feel the day, man. Like, when I come in here, I'm like, listen, I don't know when you're watching this, I want you to hear this. This right here is my 17th annual New Year's broadcast. I've done this for 17 years for millions of people. 17 years, it could be boring, right? I've done 400 classes, I've written six books. You know, I basically teach something every single day. I reply to 300 emails a day. Like, it could be so easy for me to be like, I'm bored with that. I've done that. People always say, well, how do you keep coming up with new content? I have intentional points I'm going to go to, but it's pretty spontaneous. That's how I've stayed feeling in my career. Does that make sense? If I had to read everything, that would have gotten boring. The challenge of doing all this the way that we do it is it keeps me fresh. So that directive of feel the day makes me feel alive. Does it make sense? I want you to Understand? It's like I'm feeling this with you. I want you to sense that from me. Feeling the day. I want people to go, you know, Brennan, he's feeling life. The guy's alive. He feels it. He feels it. How do you know that, that people even care about you if you can't sense that they feel you feeling them. Like there's that sense back and forth, isn't there? So for me, that sense of feel of life, man, that's wisdom, that's spirituality. That's the awakened state. But that's not natural for me. So every day I literally, Brendan, feel the day. And I want you to hear what I just did. Just like we teach sports athletes, we speak to ourselves sometimes in third person as command. Brendan, feel the day, bro. Brendon, calm down. Brendan, feel the blessing. Brendan, take a walk. Like, I speak to myself, to command myself. Remember yesterday, I'm the orchestrator, I'm the director. Like, remember? So much of spirituality is learning to become the observer of self. Observing yourself, observing your thoughts, taking that back position to observe what's happening. But you can't stop at observer. Remember, level one in personal growth is awareness. Level two is intention and initiative. And so I have to go, oh, I see Brendan acting this way. Hey, man, you can do better. Don't forget the blessing of life. Connect with God a little bit here, take a beat. I tell myself that all the time. Brendan, take a beat. That's a self directive, isn't it? Does that help? So take a beat. I say this to myself all the time. Now, if you've been following along, you're developing commands for yourself. I want you to come up with five that you're going to command yourself about yourself and you're going to put them on a card this year and you're going to carry that card in your wallet in your purse. You're going to put it on the mirror. You can put it next to things. These are phrases that are uniquely yours. I'm giving you mine as illustrations. I know it feels like I'm teaching a little bit. I'm trying to. But I also want you to have it as an illustration to understand the power of this. You all know I also teach this. I mean, we have hats and hoodies and all this other stuff that says bring the joy. It's a reminder that life is about the joy. But I got to bring it, not wait for it. I got to bring that very specific word joy. I try to bring joy in my household. I try to bring joy on my Team. I try to bring joy in here. Like this morning, Ricardo and I, we're running around like crazy like this, but we're like laughing and making jokes and trying to have fun and talking about how hard this friggin is, right? It's like, it's like you have to make it. You have to like make joy. It's hard, I know, but you have to make it. So I tell myself, make it, kid. I also teach myself, I think one of the most important things that I've ever done personally and that is to tell myself to honor the struggle. Everyone here who's learned with me for several years knows you, you know how important that phrase has been in my life. You know, to honor the struggle, to recognize that struggle is a part of life. I think struggle is something that we all sense. I think suffering tends to be optional outside of grief and outside of medical conditions. That a lot of our own suffering is just all the worries we have up here that don't never even manifest. You know, there's so many studies that says like over 85% of the negative thoughts we have in our head never even come close to happening. Most of the things we're inventing in our head are worries of what if that never happen and never manifest and they tend to be catastrophic or trapped in learned helplessness. But I can tell you when I go, this struggle is here for a reason. I don't know the reason and maybe the reason doesn't even matter, but the obstacle is here and it's my job to handle that. And I use honor as a two sided coin. One, I honor the struggle. I go, okay, this obstacle is real. I see it, I recognize it, I honor that it's here. But there's also an honor of me being personally responsible. Like I sense a sense of pride, ownership and honor when I deal with it, right? When I go into the fray and deal with it, there's a reason that our great military talks about duty, honor, service, country as an example, Honor. It's like honor is like showing up when it's hard, dealing with difficulty, taking on challenges and being willing to be courageous. You develop honor from that. You honor people who are great in your life. As another metaphor, it's like to me, I never bemoan the struggle. It's very rare that you hear me bitch and moan about something. Very rare. I will call out difficulties, I will describe problems. But it's very rare that anyone in my life, probably outside of my wife, who gets probably more of me complaining about something or hearing more of that. Maybe your spouse or your coach or therapist might have more access to those types of things. But in general, I'll describe something and I'll be like, here's what I'm doing about it. Here's how I'm working through it. Here's the decisions I'm trying to make. It might sound like I'm complaining, but I'm calling it out. I'm like, this is a thing. I don't like this thing, but I'm going to handle it. I'm going to honor the fact that it's here. I'm not going to avoid it. That makes sense. So that's another thing that I do personally. Another one for me that I put on my card this last year that helped. I just wrote this one down. Activate. I know. Growth Day members, you heard this? Activate. I know. Ultra members, you heard this. Activate. I know that so many of you heard me say this on daily fires in Growth Day. Activate. It's like, I, like, bro, turn on. Like, activate. Like, you just, like, turn on. Like you got lost in going through. You might be feeling it. You might be on the struggle. But it's like, I got to Activate. Each day. Activate toward those aspirations we talked about yesterday. It's like, I really got to make sure I do that. I think today it's very easy to be reactive. I got to activate towards something that's important. So I've been saying that to myself a lot.