Create the Person You Want To Be Brendon Burchard #555

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that people who are fully paralyzed are now using brain implants with off the shelf tablet computers in order to send text messages and surf the Internet, which is completely life changing because before that all you had was maybe a twitch of your eye or movement of your tongue the way Stephen Hawking did. This is game changing because what's going to happen in five years when we can get that same signal from the surface of your scalp without having to stick electrodes inside you, your brain, you could pretty easily scramble your eggs by sticking things into your head. We're probably not going to do that for many, many years, if ever. I don't think it's going to be necessary. But the fact that this is already happening is a precursor to the world that's coming where you don't have to hold your phone up to look at your face because it's already able to read your mind. This is going to accelerate things way more than we have today. And I'm excited to see it as long as I have a good firewall for my brain. Today's guest is not an expert in neural implants. And I know you thought I was going to go there, didn't you? He is a dear friend. It's the third time he's been on Bulletproof Radio and one of the top experts in the world on human performance. The other two times that Brendon Burchard was on the show, we talked about high performance, but he hadn't done what I might call his opus, if it wasn't motivation Manifesto, his new book, which is called High Performance Habits. Because Brendan and I think a lot about how do you kick ass at the things you do in life? And he went out and interviewed a lot of people, had a survey and really did a structured technique to figure out what do people who just do amazing things do every day to make themselves better. Now, you might know that we care about similar things because I did a similar thing in Game Changers based on Bulletproof Radio and, and we came up with some similar and also some different results. And I want you guys to learn from Brendan the same way I do. I learn a lot from Brendan about what you can do to perform really well. And I'm going to tell you right now that if you want to read a book that's going to absolutely change how you show up in the world, you should read High Performance Habits, which is Brendan's book. And because you're going to love that book. I also know you're going to love Game Changers. And yes, Brendan's in Game Changers. But here's the deal. You listen to this show because. Because you want to get something in every one of these interviews that's going to make you a little bit better of a human being, better at doing what matters most to you. And this is a man who can tell you more about that and who has helped majorly successful executives, celebrities, and professional athletes even show up better. So I'm going to pick his brain, you're going to get to listen in, and we're all going to walk away enriched and knowing how to kick more ass.

Love it.

Welcome to the show, my friend.

Thanks, man. You're saying we care about similar things, we write about similar things. I was like, yeah, but in Game Changers, you wrote about sex. If I'd put that in my book, I think I would have sold another 100,000 copies.

If we could get you some testosterone, you might start caring more about sex.

That's true. Maybe I'm just lacking there, but I think that is a good differentiator of what you do with biohacking. That really makes a difference. So, anyway, I love your book, and I'm pumped to be here.

There's a biochemical difference here. I think you're focused a little bit more on habits.

Yeah.

But you do cover some things that I don't and actually focus less on habits and Game Changers. There are some very important habits that boiled out of the research here. But you talk about a loop that is not in the body of work that I've done that I found really fascinating. I heard you talk about it at JJ Virgin's event. And JJ Virgin has also been a guest on the show.

Yes. She's awesome.

And share with people listening this loop that you've identified and how people who perform really well use it in their daily performance.

Yeah. We call it the confidence competence loop. It's like if you're lacking confidence, then you don't feel like learning, so you don't get competent. And if you're not competent, then you don't feel like you're able to actually go do anything. And so there's this weird thing that happens. If you develop a little more competence, so you learn a little bit more, you're a little more confident. If you're a little more confident, you trial a bit more. If you try a little bit more, by trial and error, you learn more. So the more competent you get, the more Confident you get. And so it just goes like this, where all some people, like, learn. Part of the reason I'm passionate about bulletproof radio is like, you're teaching people how to improve their lives. You're giving them new things, new ideas, new tools, and if they put them into play, they get a little more confident. And when you're a little more confident, you try more things. When you try more things, you learn more things and you're on your path to mastery. I think what happens for a lot of people, though, is naturally we all have a lot of self doubt and we have a lot of fear. And so when our confidence is low, we tend to not learn as much. And when we don't learn as much, we start pulling back because we don't think we're capable. That's where people go, I'm not enough. I'm not smart enough. I don't really get it. And so they don't try anymore. And if you're not trying, you're never going to reach high levels of performance. You can't get mastery without this trial and error process. So one of the things we learned from high performers was like, they kind of mastered that. Their confidence is genuine because it came from competence. And their competence was also sort of accelerated because they had confidence going in. Like, if I enter any situation, I'm like, I'm gonna learn this, I'm gonna figure this out. Like, I believe in my ability to figure things out. When people say, brendan, what's confidence? I go, confidence is really your belief in your ability to figure things out. And if I believe in my ability to figure things out, I'm gonna try way more things and I'll advance faster.

Isn't it kind of a chicken and egg thing, though? I mean, you're coaching some people at exceptional levels of performance. But you also have hundreds of thousands of people who've been through your training courses online, they've been to your events. I mean, I've been to your events, and you've got people from all walks of life, these kind of extreme performers. Are they still dealing with that confidence problem?

Yes. Yes. Because here's when I meet them on their best day, when they're walking down the street and they got all the money in the bank and they're rich and famous, successful. Are they lacking confidence? Not per se. They still believe in their ability to figure things out. But when I get brought in to train Oprah and her team, these are incredibly confident, competent people. Or when I get trained, like Usher hires me to come out, fly across the country and work with him. Why? Because the one thing that high performers almost always have is this moment in their life when they're in transition. They're starting something new, they're trying something new. And when you go to do something new or something big or something game changing, you call it, that brings up a lot of nerves. That brings up the old stuff. That brings up the concern, are these strategies we've ran over here, are they gonna work over here? Take any person in the world, but put them in a moment of transition or chaos, the self doubt increases. And we live in a world where there's chaos and transition all the time now. And so my seminars, I'll ask the audience, I'll say, listen, let me test to see whether or not I know my audience. If you would say, in the last six months, you're kind of in a state of transition in your life. Maybe you're changing jobs or the kids are leaving the house, or you're going from paleo to keto. You know, like, if you feel like in the last six months you're in a moment of transition, would you please stand up? My entire audience stands up. People who are in personal development, and I mean like, really in it. Like in self improvement game, they can recognize they're always transitioning because they're transitioning between habits, between mindsets. They achieve goal one, they climb mountain one, but they're on to mountain number two. I call it circle one in circle two, right in circle one, we have confidence, we have competence. We got it figured out. We know the strategies, the habits, we know what made us successful. But soon you go to circle two, wide open field of possibility. Something you don't know. You're just like everyone else who walks into school your first day of high school going, how's this gonna go? Even if you're already successful, it doesn't mean that you don't have confidence. It's that you're not as confident. And the weird thing with high performers is if they feel not as confident, that affects their performance. Now, to the general public, it looks like they have an 8 out of 10 level of confidence. Right. They're like, amazing. But if I have eight out of 10 confidence, everyone says, Brandon, God, he's amazing, has eight out of 10 confidence. What? Unbelievable. But if I got to have nine and I'm at eight, that brings up stuff.

And that's a 50% change of that little two that you have left. It's a big shift.

Yeah. And so I think what people under Appreciate in our field in personal development, high performance coaching in anyone who's trying to help develop people is they think that because a person has confidence in one context, of course they're going to have confidence over here equally and it's not true. Switch somebody out of context. I mean take a person who's really confident, they're happy, they get divorced, same person the next week, completely rocked your world. Same job, same every. But they're rocked because their contexts change. And my job and my career is often helping people manage that transition better. Like what habits matter now, what mindset matters now, not what strategies worked in circle one. What strategy are going to work in circle two. And so high performance habits was a lot of trying to understand like what habits made the greatest difference for people as they were attempting to do what you call like achieve big things, not just what makes you happy. We measured how do we know if a person achieves long term success? And one of the easiest indicators is how do they handle transitions?

Does long term success make you happy?

Yes, if it's called high performance.

Okay, what does that mean?

High performance. The way we measure high performance. And we did the world's largest academic study still ever done today. Over 2 million data points. 300 in depth structured scientific interviews. 190 countries in the academic surveys. The structured surveys, major effort. Three years of my life, which was hard because I'm a kid from Butte, Montana and I was like, the academics were killing. I just like, can we finish this project please? It was brutal and I learned so much and I learned a lot of things that changed my life because I thought I was the high performance guys. I've been training on this for 13 years now. I thought I knew a lot. And then you do the data, you do the research and you go, oh, there's a lot that I didn't know. But one thing we found that I really love about high performers, you cannot. Sorry. One thing I love about. One thing I love that we learned about high performers. You can't become a high performer and achieve long term success unless you also maintain positive well being and relationships. So most people think to achieve long term success, I'm gonna have to compromise on my marriage, on my family time, I'm gonna have to compromise on my health. And they really think that this, it has to be that way. They're like, I'm gonna have to throw out my work life balance completely. I'm gonna have to destroy my life to climb this ladder. And we found out that's not true. You can't maintain success over the long term if your body's wrecked, if everyone around you hates you, like, it just, it literally is impossible. Could it happen for one out of a million people? Maybe. But they're miserable, which is like, who wants that?

I mean, Gary Vee's been on Bulletproof radio and I mean, he's famous for saying, you know, eat whatever ramen or something for 18 months and then eat caviar for the rest of your life sort of thing. And there's sort of this lean in Sheryl Sandberg, you got to just like kill it and that you focus on that. But it seems like they're talking about doing it for a brief period of time.

Yeah.

Is that what the people you talk to is how they got started? Or did they somehow manage to achieve this balance where even as they were getting started, they had support from their community, they had the relationships in their lives.

They evolved into that. I think a lot of people, like circle one or level one is hustle, eat ramen, grind, hate your life, turn off everybody else, get rid of everybody in your life and then you achieve, maybe you achieve something, but then you're lonely at the top.

Yeah, you're unhappy.

Like Brian Trace always says, like, if you're lonely at the top, you did it wrong.

Right?

And so you have two choices here. Are you going to grind it out and hustle out. In a way you compromise your health, your well being and your overall life to have some external measure of success that you bought this thing, did this thing, or achieve that thing. Or are you going to really appreciate life and feel life and have a sense of fulfillment as you strive? I always tell people, I'm like, you can totally strive. Satisfied, right? You know what I tell people most of the time when they're high performers or want to be one? I say, look, achievement isn't really your problem. Hard work is not your problem. Effort isn't your problem. Achievement's not the problem. Alignment is the problem. Most people's lives aren't aligned like their efforts, what they say, what they do. They're lacking a sense of congruence in self and in all the projects that they're doing. It's so unaligned, it doesn't know. I always tell people, like, hey, if the universe isn't giving you what you want, perhaps it's just because based on all your distractions, it's simply unclear what you're asking for. Dude. It's like, if you're doing everything, the universe is like, I don't get what you want. And so you're out of alignment. A lot of those folks who you mentioned will say, just focus on this one thing. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. But I also, you know, I'm the kid who had a car accident when he was 19, and I didn't like my life before I had the accident and got the gift at 19 of what I call mortality motivation. And I feel like if you have reverence for life, if you really appreciate life, you are not a hustler, you're not a grinder, you're not a, you know, get rid of everybody else in your life. You're like, I actually want to have a high quality of life in every little area that I can, because tomorrow's not guaranteed. Neither is next week or next month. You know, I lost my dad when I was 32. Dad was 69. He got acute myeloid leukemia and went in the hospital one day, happened to be Mother's Day, and his back hurt. And when he went in and got tested, they said, that's weird, your spleen is enlarged. Ran a bunch of tests, found out he had AML leukemia. And they gave him seven days. Wow. The week before he's golfing, the week before he's playing bowling. He's, you know, been a great father. And it's like, what if you get that seven day diagnosis? Are you going to be like, you know, I'm glad I spent 10 years gritting it out. And I, what do you have show for a bank account? Because that's not going to show up at your deathbed. Because when my pops, you know, he was a Marine, so he made it 59 days, they gave him seven. But you can't tell a Marine when he's gonna die. You know what I mean? That's the last person you can tell when you're gonna die. So he made it 59 days, not seven. And at 59 days, we were there. He was. He had a sense of peace going into the last moments and days of his life. That, like, made it better for us too, because we're wrecked that we're losing this man who was such a great father. But it's like he was good with it. Now, if he had done nothing but grind for 10 years at the cost of his relationships, he'd have no one at that bedside. And I think that what people have to do if you want to become high performing, and this is not my opinion, this is the ironclad, no questions asked data points from the world's most successful people. This is the best study that's ever been done on high performers worldwide with the most data points. There is no question that they were able in their achievement of long term success. They achieved positive relationships and positive well being. It doesn't mean were there times they compromised. It doesn't mean one time they got sick, or one time they did, they wrecked a marriage, or one time they did this. But over the arc of what they were able to do, the reason they outperformed everybody else is because more often than not they had a positive support network that they personally created, they intentionally created. They didn't luck out with the community, they built the community they didn't like. They out sort of stamina, if that's a word. They had more stamina than other people because they took care of themselves. High performers are 46% more likely to work out five days a week than underperformers. If it was 12%, that'd be earth shattering. It's 46% more likely. Now some of those people that workout is 45 minute walk, other people it's like 20 minute hit session or whatever. But the point is they're more actively and intentionally taking care of their personal health and their relationships. And that's what gives them a sense of fulfillment too. Because high performers are statistically happier than underperformers.

That was an interesting thing that I found in Game Changers as well. The people who hit that level and stayed there and usually to get on bulletproof radio, you've done something for a while in order to become the best in your field. They're generally happy. They've somehow learned how to do that. And it's that happiness that gives them the power to keep performing well. Because miserable with people, you can make a lot of money or something, but you're gonna hate your life and you probably won't perform very well. So there are rich unhappy people who probably don't make the bar.

That's right.

What do you do when you meet a rich unhappy person like that? What do you tell them first?

It's usually checking the alignment of their life, but it's also listen everything. The first habit is seek clarity. And it's our job to always be seeking clarity and asking, who am I? Who do I want to be? What skills do I need to develop? What contributions do I want to make that align with my creativity and align with my fulfillment? And it's just a lack of clarity. A lot of people achieve the wrong thing. A lot of people climb the wrong mountain. They lean the ladder against the wrong building. Like they're high achieving, but they're high achieving towards something that really doesn't fulfill them. And so when I meet somebody who's a jerk or super wealthy and has no friends or doesn't have time for friends, it's because they've never appreciated friends. It's because they've never set an intention to say, you know, I wanna be happy in my relationships. And so we make little goals. Sometimes it's like, you know what I need you to do? I need you to go hang out with friends twice a month. Dude, you're freaking yourself out and you're freaking your family out because you stopped being human. Humans need a social dynamic and that's fun and spontaneous and real and authentic. And I meet a lot of these super successful people who have nothing but yes men around them who have nothing but, like, you know, agencies supporting them, doing this and that. And they lack dudes, they lack friendships, they lack the gals to go out to lunch with. And it's like, let's get you enjoying life a little bit. It doesn't have to be. I don't need to change you. A lot of people go, I better change their career when I get brought in. Usually in a conflict situation. Well, you know, they need a major change in their life. Yeah, A lot of people need real friendships. A lot of people need to get to the gym once in a while.