How to Master Motivation in 2025 | The Science of Focus, Habits and Growth
A framework for sustained motivation built on physical health, purpose-driven relationships, and identity work. Use a three-word self-definition, daily mindfulness triggers like a 10-breath reset, and regular self-evaluation across mental, emotional, and physical energy to align your life with your vision.
Chapters
To sustain motivation, you have to do two things you probably already know. First, you have to focus. A lot of people have that initial desire, but they don't look at their goals every single day. They don't revisit. How did I do this week? How did I do in my health, in my relationships, in my career? How did I do with my finances? How did I do with any other goals that I set up? You have to have that daily discipline to look and focus on what you're doing and that weekly review. You also have to have the ability to avoid distractions. One of the reasons people love my book, The Motivation Manifesto, is this teaches you how to set boundaries, how to say no, how to push away distraction to own your life again. But here's the deal. When you're focusing on something and you're really dialing in, it also brings your full presence into something. So you perform at higher levels. The second thing you need outside of focus is sane motivation is everyday effort. It's the reason you have to set up habits. It's the reason you have to have a daily routine, a morning routine. It's the reason you have to make sure you have a checklist of to-dos each day. I know that sounds so basic, but here's the funny thing. A lot of people think they'll have motivation one day, then they'll put the effort out. It's like motivation first, they think, then effort comes. Comes, the motivation inspires the effort, right? It's actually the opposite in the science of motivation. It's with daily effort that motivation comes. I like to tell people this: with momentum comes more motivation. Don't wait for the motivation to go out and take action. Actually, take action first, because just a little bit of progress, a few quick wins, drops dopamine into the brain. We start feeling good and rewarded for our behavior, and suddenly we find ourselves more motivated. Set 3 goals each day. Knock off each of those 3 goals. If you just did that each and every single day, you'd start feeling more personal power, and you start getting ahead. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because in my first business, I quit on my business partner. I was making $300 a month and I didn't have the motivation to keep going. And the thing that got me through was studying the stories of entrepreneurs who've had massive success. And I hope that in sharing these stories with you, you find a motivation to keep going. And if I'm being honest, I still need the stories for myself today too. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Brendon Burchard, and get some of his incredible motivation. Enjoy. Social accountability. Having other people around you who are healthy is as important as quote-unquote biological luck. It's true. The people around you really do shape your expectations and how you show up in the world. And in this category, more than anything else, if the people around you tend to be healthy, whether that is emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, physically healthy, your odds go way up, especially the odds of conscientious discipline and design. Your ability to surround yourself with people who are in a good place is one of the great gifts of our life. We are social animals. A lot of what we do in life is mimetic. Meaning we kind of copy what we see of others. We set expectations on ourselves of what we see of others. A lot of our behaviors, our habits, our mental models are really a fact of sociology. And when you understand that the people you surround yourself with, you talk with, you look at, you work out with, you're around, you're healthier. I am a greatly healthier person in my life because of my wife. And for most men out there, or those who are partners in couples where one other partner is healthier than the other, that's one of the greatest gifts of all time. You know, I'm a way healthier person. I don't think I knew what kale was until I met Denise. What's kale? What you talking about? Like, I had, I had no idea. No idea. Broccoli? What? What? Why? Wait, that's— how come it's dark like that? I mean, it Is there no cheese on it? I had no idea. So that was important for me to learn a lot about. And all of my friends in the health and wellness category, like being around them all the time and seeing their posts and their Instagrams, or being at conferences and studying their work, or going to conferences that are about health, surrounding myself in an ecosystem has made me healthier. It really has. If you look at where I grew up to where I am now, I mean, it's totally different peer set. And that was by design. You might not get to choose your biology or all your family, but you get to choose your peers and your friends and the inspirations who you follow or learn from, especially in this category of health. Once you have that energetic vision, I promise you'll surround yourself with better people. Social accountability. Work out with friends. Get a trainer. They expect you to show up, so you show up. Social accountability. Surround yourself with people who expect you to do well, who expect you to take care of yourself, who are empathetic when you're struggling because they themselves are empathetic people who struggle too. Right? Having vulnerable, honest, open, truthful, transparent humans around us who enable us and allow us to be vulnerable, to share our hurts, our pains, our shames, our sadness, increases our mental health. If the people around you tend to be healthy, whether that is emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, physically healthy, your odds go way up, especially the odds of conscientious discipline and design. Your ability To surround yourself with people who are in a good place is one of the great gifts of our life. We are social animals. A lot of what we do in life is mimetic, meaning we kind of copy what we see of others. We set expectations on ourselves of what we see of others. A lot of our behaviors, our habits, our mental models are really a fact of sociology. And when you understand that the people you surround yourself with, you talk with, you look at, you work out with, you're around, you're healthier. I am a greatly healthier person in my life because of my wife. And for most men out there, or those who are partners in couples where one other partner is healthier than the other, that's one of the greatest gifts of all time. You know, I'm a way healthier person. I don't think I knew what kale was until I met Denise. What's kale? What you talking about? Like, I had no idea. No idea. Broccoli? What? Why? Wait, that's broccoli. How come it's dark like that? I mean, there no cheese on it? I had no idea. So that was important for me to learn a lot about. And all of my friends in the health and wellness category, like being around them all the time and seeing their posts and their Instagrams or being at conferences and studying their work, or going to conferences that are about health, surrounding myself in an ecosystem has made me healthier. It really has. If you look at where I grew up to where I am now, I mean, it's totally different peer set, and that was by design. You might not get to choose your biology or all your family, but you get to choose your peers and your friends and the inspirations who you follow or learn from especially in this category of health. Once you have that energetic vision, I promise you'll surround yourself with better people. When we don't have a vision for next week, next month, next year, life can start to feel like we're just in, you know, kind of in the swamp and that we're just going through the motions and, "Oh my God, I'm working so hard, Brendon," or, "Oh my God, Brendon, I have all these reasons to be happy. I already have the great kids. I have a house. I can afford the car payments. I mean, I have all these reasons to be happy, but I don't know, something's missing. I don't feel purpose either. It's usually a disconnect or lack of clarity about your future. And I don't mean 10 years out or 50 years out. I mean, sometimes next month and next year, really just sometimes it's just a couple month horizon. And lacking clarity and connection with just the next couple of months, or in some cases, if you're a longer-term strategic kind of guy, the next year or two. I can feel that. If I feel a disconnect for my next year or two, I tend to lose a connection with purpose, a connection with motivation. I feel like the intentions or the productivity of the day are kind of Like, for what? You know, it's easy to go, I'm working so hard, but for what? And that for what, I know, equals vision. What is the vision of your next couple months or next couple years? No one will give you that. It's time to sit down and think about that. It's why you all know I keep a battle board over here on the wall. My battle board is like, it's basically like an arts and crafts version of a yearly schedule. It's like a big piece of butcher paper with 12 boxes drawn on it, and the 12 boxes each represents 1 month of the year. I create themes across the boxes. I write the major projects and deadlines up on the boxes, and I write a bunch of my values up there. All I do is every day, I just kind of stare at it. I'm a person who is really good. Any persons here, you're really good at just living in the moment? I know a lot of people aren't good at that, but I'm really good at just being here in the moment. I've had to teach myself to do that. I'm not as good of making sure I'm connected to my vision or to a longer-term plan. I'm like, I'm like in the moment, I'm a happy-go-lucky kid. But if I lose connection to the vision to the future, the happiness goes down. I also see that the luck tends to go down when you're disconnected from a vision. So what do I do? I force myself every day when I come into this office, I'm like in a home studio here. When I walk in, I stare at that for like, and I force myself to just stare at it and think for 5 minutes. I have a little notepad next to me, and I look at where everything is lining up over the next year, sometimes the next 2 years, and I just look at it. I mean, if you walked in, I mean, it's really not an attractive thing. I'm kind of like this. I'm just standing there kind of dumb looking, just looking at it, like, hoping something comes into the brain that day, walking through each month, even if I saw it yesterday. I'm still going. I'm just forcing myself to look out. You know why people tend to be motivated January 1st? Because they're looking out again. So routine, or we could call it a habit, or what I like to call in our high-performance research, we talk about the phrase of a deliberate practice or a deliberate habit. I personally deeply believe that people who want to be healthy, who think their habits are going to carry them over the line, don't know how work— how life actually works, right? We've all fallen in love with these simple gimmicky habits that we're supposed to do and the way of thinking about habits. That's not how it works when you grow. Growth requires deliberate habits, not automated habits that just happen. They're so easy and all that. No, deliberate habits. Okay. I'm going to do this today. I'm going to implement this thing. I'm going to choose to do that as a routine, as a practice, as a deliberate habit that I have to like conscientiously decide to go to even if it's hard. Routines, you know, those might be eating well, working out well, sleeping well, finding out what works for you, which we'll talk about in a moment. But here's the deal. If you don't know your routines, if you don't have patterns, practices, or plans for your health, how are you supposed to ever feel your best or even feel better? You got to have a plan in place. One of my favorite things to do is when I work with a client and some of you know, when I work with like one-on-one with a client, it's a big deal. I rarely do that anymore. You're talking about like 7, figure levels of work. Very rare that I'll do that with. But one of my favorite things to do with an actual paying client is ask them to take a picture for me of their list of health habits. And you know what they usually say? Oh gosh, Brendon, I don't have one. I go, nowhere written down in your house is a list of your health habits or your health goals? It's not written down. Well, no. Did you ever journal about it? Well, yeah, I guess one time, you know, on New Year's 4 years ago. They don't even— it's not even written. There's no plan. They'll tell you, I'll ask what you're— well, you know, I like this routine or, you know, I like kale. You know, they'll tell you something. You know, I had to drop a kale joke up in here. They'll be like, they'll have an idea. They'll have a list of things that they'll pontificate on that works for them once in a while. It's nowhere written down. You know, I love my friends when for the first time they go to run a marathon and often they'll get a coach or they'll start reading books on it or, you know, they'll look something up on the internet and realize, oh, to run a marathon, there's a plan. And listen, if you just go in and try to run a marathon yourself, I guess a small percentage of the planet could figure it out. And actually pull it off. The rest of us humans, we follow a plan. That plan is starting small, getting a little bit better, focusing on these things, running a little bit longer and a little bit longer and a little bit better. And then all of a sudden you ran a marathon. It's an incremental approach. But guess what? There's a plan. No plan, no gains. No plan, no change. No goals, no growth. And so if you want health to be something important in your life, where's the list? Where's the plan? Even as simple, we need the routine, we need the plan, we need the goals. Write it down. Do it today. Put it in your journal. In growth day, go make a plan. In growth day, I'm going to start doing these things. Put it in there. Set reminders in growth day. Literally, you can pop up, you can write your reminders in growth day. Drink water, have it pop up a couple of times a day as a notification. You know, eat healthy tonight, have it pop up as a reminder. You set up reminders in GrowthDay if you didn't know, which are a hugely popular thing for people's health. So go set up reminders. Just go to the plan section of your GrowthDay app after this broadcast today and set up your plan. You have to find what feels good for you. What feels good for me, as an example, a calm, Slow morning. I'm, I'm pretty dumb in the morning. I'm slow to rouse in the morning. I like to, you know, kind of shuffle around the house, you know, get a tea or coffee, and it'll sit down with the, with my book, a little piece of paper, or my journal, and just, I like a slow morning. A slow morning is great for my mental health. That's for me, right? My wife is the opposite. She's incredible. By like, by like 10 AM, she has done more than most humans in a decade. I don't know how she does it. Shout out to Niece. Like, like one of the most amazing, like she can, she wakes up and a list of things download into her brain and she just starts going at them. It's unbelievable. Talk about a morning person. Me, my mom, the opposite. My dad, he, boy, he was ready to get up and go to work 'cause he was in the military all his life. Biologically, we all have different rhythms, don't we? Right? Some of those are conditioned and we create. Some of that's how we are. I think I conditioned my slow morning because I like it. What feels good to me is a slow morning. How simple is that? How controllable is that? Even if there's chaos and there's a lot going on, I can find my moments, which we'll talk about. I can find my moments to recalibrate and reset, even if it's hectic and crazy 'cause there's people around the house or something's going on. Still, I gotta make sure that that morning finds those moments of calm and peace and intention for myself. Otherwise, it can really frazzle out a lot of the day. If you wrote down your 3 top priorities for the day, do those first. Before you do your social media, before you reply to everyone's DMs, inbox, you know, voice message, texts, it's like, listen, I have so many people who they spend all day just checking their email to reply to everybody else. Now that's fine if that's your job, if that's customer service, do that, that's your job. But if you're an entrepreneur, as an example, or you have a whole list of other priorities and you're just checking into other people's agendas all day to meet all their obligations, and you keep missing your key priorities day after day after day after day, your brain doesn't feel like you're capable anymore. Even though you might be smart, you're competent, but your brain doesn't believe you're capable. You've got to develop the pattern of taking the action. The pattern of taking the action. Better yet, the pattern of taking the action to complete the key priorities. So all I want you to do as a daily simple habit, every morning, we do it in the High Performance Planner, I write down my key priorities for the day, do those first. Get those out of the way. Make that happen. Maybe that's your morning. Maybe for me, I didn't feel capable in my career for a long time because I was replying to everybody. And then I did a simple thing. I said, you know what? No phone calls till 1:00 PM in the afternoon my time. That leaves the morning to do the most important work. Because I do the most important work almost every morning of my life, I feel incredibly capable. Give me a task list, give me— that log is happening in the brain. Good job today, good job today, good job today, good job today. That consistency, that congruence developed the capability. Now I feel capable and I am capable. Because I executed. Because I executed so many times, I developed a skill. Y'all follow? This is so important. If you don't have self-acceptance, clearly you don't have authentic self-confidence. If you don't have self-acceptance, clearly you won't have an authentic sense of happiness because you don't even like yourself. So what do we do about this when I'm coaching others? Well, first, After I've tried to understand where that's coming from, that solution-driven part of coaching is about realizing there's things we all do to gain greater self-acceptance. Your self wants to realize itself, right? We all want to reach a fuller, higher standard of our potential, right? We all want that. We— I've never met a person in my life who didn't want to realize a higher level of potential for themselves or their family or their teams or their work. And I know some of you are like, no, no, no, you don't know my kid. He's 42 and he's still on the couch. I don't have a judgment for that. What I have to say about that is this, that person does too. It's built in the human spirit. We all want to grow. We all want to be happy. Sometimes we get discouraged from that enough that we lie to ourselves and say we don't want it, or worse, we don't deserve it. Many people don't have self-acceptance because they don't believe they deserve it. They think that they did something wrong. They had other people judge them. They had that experience when they've had so much negativity around them, they started to believe that story. And so what I share with you about self-acceptance, it's one of the reasons I'm a very big proponent of coaching or of therapy. A lot of self-acceptance is actually socially gained. You know, there's a reason that the psychology department tends to be in the same building as the sociology department, because they go hand in hand. We are social animals. A lot of your acceptance of yourself actually has nothing to do with self-acceptance, Your acceptance of yourself came from how people treated you before. It was socially gained and constrained. You started to believe that you were at a certain level based on how other people around you treated you. Isn't it true? And one way to gain greater self-acceptance is to take that, that self part and say, oh, I'm going to do the work on me right now. I'm going to take some time. To work on myself again, and I am going to lessen the noise of the negative people around me and get around positive people who amplify the noise of positivity. It doesn't mean get around yes persons. It means get around yes-spirited persons, people who are supportive and encouraging of you. You probably have one positive friend. Talk to them more often. Hang out with them more often. Lean on them more. I think that's critical because the easiest way to develop often the self is in our social environment. Getting other more positive, healthy people around us tends to lift all boats. The other thing to think about with the acceptance part is to learn to be in the moment in such a way that you can forgive the things that you did in the past. You want to feel potential? You want to feel purpose? It comes from acts of service, acts of compassion, kindness, generosity with the people around you. Are you providing great service as a husband, a wife, a role model, a team leader? Service as in servant leadership, service as in generosity, Service as in doing a good job with heart and soul. That's what we mean by service. My short answer is, I hope that a lot of what you do in life feels like you're doing it from a generous, soulful place. A generous, soulful place. If you're a mom and you are generous and soulful with your kids, good job. If you're a leader of a big company and a mom, and you're doing it from a generous and a soulful place, Good job. If you're a volunteer and you do it from a generous and soulful place, good job. If you're trying to lead a team and you've had the guts to ask, how do I do this well? You've probably read about servant leadership and Robert Greenleaf's work in servant leadership. You go, oh, okay, the servant kind of leads from the back. The servant is the guide by the side, not the person pushing with the stick. The servant has heart and soul because they have compassion and empathy for others. And boy, do I think we need to develop this because we've gone from a service mindset at one part of last century to a selfie narcissistic culture that has forgot others and literally passes people struggling by on the road like they're pieces of trash. And that's where we, that's where we're at as a society. And it's going to be the volunteers and the leaders and the servant leaders who are going to change this world. And I hope that's you. And I give you a round of applause if you are that person who's generous and showing up for people and giving your best to your kids and to your team and your fellow members. Very few people do that. And that you do that, I honor you and I thank you for that. It's much, much needed. It's more needed now than any time I've ever seen. This moment that we're experiencing in life, the reason a lot of people are feeling so lacking in purpose is because there's so much negativity in the environment. There's so much narcissism in the environment. We're, you know, completely bombarded and scrolling by all these acts of selfie culture and narcissism, and so few demonstrations of beauty, of humanity, of genuine moments where someone takes a beat out of their day to help somebody or to be with somebody. And when you're willing to do that, part of purpose is sensing a mission larger than yourself. I don't think there's a more easy access to a greater sense of purposeful being than being more intentional in the relationships we have. But that often happens because one of two things. Either one, we suddenly realize that the purpose of life is manifested through our relationships. The purpose of life is manifested through our relationships. You've heard all the Growth Day teachers talk about the research about how it's your relationships that actually leads to the highest levels of not only positive wellbeing, not only life satisfaction, but longevity. The biggest study of the longest living people on the planet happens to be completely showing that the, the highest correlation to life length and positive life length, meaning you lived a good life and you lived a long life, came from people who had 1 or 2 deep, meaningful relationships. And they found purpose in that. They found purpose in their children, or they found purpose with their wife or their spouse or their partner or their family. There was purpose there. And sometimes purpose in the social realm can really fill us up in the self realm. So for those of you who are struggling with yourself, know that maybe deepen some of those relationships around you. Reminder to all of you, if you're struggling in any relationships in your life, that is, as a Growth Day Pro member, when you click the Learn section and you watch past events under the Live Events section, you'll be able to see an entire month's training that you can sort by on relationships. And I think that's a really important call-out here. We've got, and like, I taught relationships for 2 hours there. Jenna Kutcher did, um, Koya Webb did, Anthony Trucks did. All of— all 8 of our teachers or so taught an hour on how they have learned about relationships from research or their coaching or teaching practice and what they do in their own life to develop those relationships. You know what feels good for me? Planning. Planning. If you looked at my, my growth day, my plan, it's full. It's filled out with plans and deadlines and reminders. If If you look at next to my computer, there's all these checklists written down. Like I, and by the way, I don't naturally do that. I actually don't like planning. I love the mental and emotional effect of planning. Anyone follow that one? Yeah, you guys see, right? That's the difference maker for me. I don't like the act of sitting down and doing it. It's not like I find tons of joy in organizing my life. I just don't. I love the mental clarity, the peace, the progress that comes from making plans. Write down your goals, write down your deadlines, identify your projects, know who you need to reach out to, know who you're waiting on, know what your priorities are of the day. If you need any advice on this in Growth Day, remember you can go to the learn section, you can smash the watch past events, and you can watch an entire month of training on productivity. You can go to your courses and watch an entire training on the habit of productivity from the world's number one, you know, I'm sorry, the world's, you know, largest research study on high-performance habits. That High-Performance Habit Builder course that you have unlocked in the course section of your app. Just go to the learn section, go to courses, and you can see High Performance Habit Builder. There's a whole section just on productivity. And that productivity isn't done just to get ahead and to succeed. It's because you feel better when you organize your life better. When you lead life and live life with more intention, when you have a little bit more clarity, You feel better. Strip away someone's clarity, their intention, their connection with what they need to do today, and misery sets in over time. We just know it. With no connection to our intention and our future, we feel less motivated and good today. That's why the plan is so important for me. Would you go to, you know, one of your random neighbor's house, would you go there and, you know, pull up in a big— with a big dump truck of garbage and shovels and just go start shoveling in and breaking their windows and vandalizing their house? Of course, Evan says, well, no, I wouldn't. Unless you hate your neighbor. But most people, what are you talking about, Brendan? Would I vandalize my neighbor's house and throw garbage in? Of course I wouldn't. And yet we vandalize the very temple that we have been given. We throw garbage in the very temple that we have been given. And what I found through years of studying psychology, but also actually doing the academic research and also doing the field testing with all our millions of high-performance clients over the years, is as one's self-respect and self-worth go up, their health habits improve. In fact, often when their health habits improve, their self-respect goes up. I really believe it is a perpetual evergreen loop. Someone with greater self-respect and self-love, of course they want to care for their temple because they care for their life. They care for their energetic force. They see themselves as stewards of the temple or stewards of the energy or the spark inside. They care for their energy levels because they care for themselves. And I've been there. So if you think I'm preaching here, for those who don't know my story, when I was 19 years old, I had suicidal ideation and planning. I'd had a huge breakup in my life. I did not have the emotional tools needed to deal with that situation in my life. And so I fell into a deep pattern of self-hatred and stopped taking care of myself entirely. I mean, entirely. Not eating, not showering, not, you know, doing anything. And so I understand that path. I've been down that path. I've coached through that path. And I have to share with you that we have to be attentive. To the deep correlation between how we care about ourselves and think of ourselves and our self-worth and our health practices. It's really vital. It's very important. If you're not taking care of yourself, there's an emotional reason and an identity reason, something about yourself that you are blocked by, upset about, angry about, sometimes disgusted about, or there's that self-hatred. And so I'm telling you here, I'm telling— I'm here to tell you that is one reason, especially in the world of mental health, I'm always like, see a therapist. If your health practices have sucked for two decades, if your health practices have sucked for a decade, don't blame it on your sweet tooth. Go see a therapist. Get some emotional support to understand what's the underlying thing happening here that I'm not taking care of myself. So I begin our health conversation by recommending therapy. If you have not been practicing health habits well, especially over a period of time, there's sometimes trauma there. There's sometimes negative self-talk there. There's sometimes patterns that are hard to break without a professional assisting you. And so I'm always that person who's like, hey, I'm going to tell you to optimize. I'm going to challenge you. I'm also going to say, if you really struggle with this for a long time, get some help, babe. Sometimes you need that. And so please hear that respectfully from me because I care about your health. There is an evolutionary and a biological reason that you feel the way that you do, right? There is. It's very important to understand in both, I really believe, mental health and physical health, it is that kind of 50/50 kind of thing. And when we blend it together, by the way, but there's no question that some people biologically feel more fatigued or more depressed or more anxious. We have to understand that you and me are not the same biologically in how our energy might be. And I hope that that always introduces empathy and compassion, that there's a big luck card that we get. I have friends literally who are born without limbs. I have friends who are born with conditions in which their brain functions in very unhealthy ways. I have friends who've died so early of cancer. I have friends who, um, have struggled with mental health. I have friends who've committed suicide. I have friends and family who struggle constantly with all sorts of biological health issues that is quote unquote not their fault. And it's important to realize that some of you, you feel terrible biologically even though you're drinking all your water, you're eating all your greens, you do move and you do exercise. And so I'm here to say there is no preaching. We all have to take the cards we've been dealt and figure out how to care for ourselves, how to optimize the best that we can, how to improve, even if it's a little bit incremental by incremental. But it starts with a biological understanding of where we are at. And this is why, again, as a person who's not a medical professional, I'm like, listen, if you don't understand closely how you feel and why you feel the way that you do, please, please, please, if you've never done it, go get a full workup of every friggin health test you can. As an adult, as somebody who's accountable for your health, go get the blood tests, go see the nutritionists or the dietitians. Go work out with a trainer. Go literally do all the genetic testing that you can do to understand what's up with you. I always tell the story of a friend of mine who was one of my partners in one of my businesses, one of my best friends in the world, who discovered at the age of 40 that, you know, every morning he always had the sniffles and his nose was running and he's clearing his throat and everything and found at the age of 40 that he was allergic to eggs at the age of 40. Didn't know, spent 40 years having these reactions that made him fatigued and blowing his nose and everything because he was allergic to eggs. And I think that's a sad thing about our society is that we're not taught or trained or honestly empowered or equipped or served with some simple health support when we're young that says, hey, look, seems like you're allergic to this thing, don't eat it. I mean, how is that not part of our educational process, right? Or, or, or, or, or, or healthcare system that of course we would all find out very early on and be tested multiple stages of our life, including every new decade. What are we allergic to? What preconditions might we have? What's our genetic— what's our genetic makeup leading us towards? So this is where I say health is luck, right? Health might be luck, but it's your job to be aware. Your job. No one else's. No one's going to come and save you here. You've got to do the testing and see the medical professionals, professionals and dietitians and people who can help you optimize and care for your body. I believe that has to be something we demand of ourselves. It's not served to us, at least not in the society I live in. So we have to take accountability for that. So health is luck, dot, dot, dot. Just challenge yourself. Just challenge yourself. Challenge yourself at the gym next time. Challenge yourself when you're on the road next time to go a little bit further. Challenge yourself to get a little faster. Challenge yourself to be a little more mobile or flexible. Challenge yourself to stay a little longer in that yoga pose. Challenge yourself to reset your mindset after you get angry or hurt or down. If you're not challenging yourself, who is? I know people say, but Brendon, isn't perfectionism such a problematic thing in mental health? I'm like, totally, totally. But it is a super thin slice. The reality is perfectionism isn't the problem. The problem is people think they should be perfect. But perfecting ourselves, growing into our full potential, expecting a lot of ourselves, that can be done in healthy ways, especially when you consider all the things we've talked about today. It's okay to challenge yourself again. Last time you might have challenged yourself, maybe you got down on yourself. This time, as you challenge yourself, allow the grace. Do it with social accountability. Have an energetic vision. Recalibrate, find what feels good for you and stick to that. You can figure out a way to feel better. You can figure out a way to get healthier. It's going to be on your own path, in your own way. No one can tell you all the right ways to do that. You'll probably need support. You'll probably take months and months and months and years and years and years to figure it out. And often you'll fall off the wagon. You'll do a terrible thing. You'll make a bad choice, but you'll recalibrate and you'll keep getting better because you and I both know that every day is a great day to grow. I want to thank you all for this incredible session today on health. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you'll share with family and friends if it supported you. Just go tell people what we're doing here at Growth Day. Like, holy, they're having an entire month of conversations about health, about mental health, emotional, physical health right here in Growth Day. We'll be live every single week with you guys, as always, on our Wednesday Wisdoms. So tune back in, watch the replays, make a commitment, journal today about your energy vision. Please do that. Please stay, please stay on path. Please take care of yourself. Please be kind to yourself. Please practice self-respect and self-love. You deserve a vibrant and energetic life. Do your work. To move towards that, to align with that, to honor that impulse. And know that you don't have to do it alone. We're all doing it together. We're all figuring out together. We're all on this journey together. That's why we always say every day is a great day to grow together. You're going to fall off the wagon. You're going to have a suck day. You're going to be unmotivated. You're going to eat that pizza. You're going to do something that you know you shouldn't do because your current mood or the choice of passion or joy or spontaneity or the thing that you like is there. And the most important thing in health isn't just knowing what to do or having that plan. It's recalibrating when you fall off. You know, in the mental health space and the personal coaching space, we both use the same term for this. It's called resilience. It's okay. Challenge. Problem. Something didn't go the way I'd planned. Can I find my strength again? Find my focus again and keep progressing? Today we're just going to call that health recalibrations. Recalibrations. Okay, so what? You didn't work out yesterday and you planned to do it today. Okay, you ate the terrible food. Make the better choice for the next 4 meals. It's what people do is instead they made a bad choice. They did something bad. Self-hatred increased. And so they stop. They stop trying. You know, you're down on yourself when you stop trying. You know, you're down on yourself when you don't recalibrate after a fail. You know, you're down on yourself when something doesn't go right. You fail, you feel bad about yourself, and you stop. The idea that we talk about here in Growth Day all the time, it's just making self-improvement a way of life. Tomorrow, improve, get better, try again. Okay, you, you had a huge outburst. Guess what? I have a huge outburst. Do I keep outbursting for hours and hours and hours? No. Huge outburst. Whoa, that was off. Let me go recalibrate over here. Let me go on a walk. Let me bounce in place, take 10 deep breaths. Let me lay on the floor, do a release meditation. Let me stand back up, write out my intentions, and go. I don't get down on myself or angry about myself. What I do is go, well, that's not what I wanted. That wasn't my intention. That wasn't good. Okay, recalibrate. So I reset my body, I reset my mind, I reset my intentions, and I go, you got it. That's recalibrating. You don't stop and beat yourself up. You go, okay, let me recalibrate. Reset, right? That is so important. The reset, or what I'm calling a recalibration, is everything. And here's what happens. The longer between incident and recalibration, the worse your health, right? People say, well, I missed 3 weeks of working out, screw it, guess it doesn't matter. No recalibration. So now those 3 weeks turn into 6, turn into 9, turn to years. But if instead of getting down on yourself or stopping, you said, Okay, I missed it for 3 weeks in a row. Let me reset. What do I really want here? How can I do better? Let me try again. It's just keep going. I know that's so simplistic, but we have to keep progressing. If we stop, not only do we stop the forward momentum, we increase— I should say we decrease our self-esteem, our self-respect goes down because we know we should be doing something for ourselves, but we don't. And so this is really important to understand and hear. Recalibrate, recalibrate, and make it fast. Like, resiliency doesn't take 5 years. You know what? Recalibrations can happen in moments. You maybe had a bad morning, but you're here, you're working on yourself. You're here on Growth Day saying, you know what? I just sometimes the instruction, the positivity, the perspective even or just the reminders, it's helpful. Every time I listen to a Growth Day teacher, I feel better. Not because everything changed in an instant, because it just, it resets me to, right, okay, good mindset, good habits, I can do that, here I go. So it's just a recalibration. It's a recalibration. I can't tell you how many bad days I have, or bad hours I should say, emotionally that I have, that I choose by the end of the day to recalibrate. Okay, I had a terrible morning. Whew. Let me go for a walk. Let me get a bunch of water. Let me get some food in my stomach so I'm not hangry. Let me come back, do a 10-minute release meditation, some 7 or 8 vinyasa flows on the floor, get back up, look at my goals on the wall, write out my intentions, make my action plan, and get 2 things done. End of day, I feel better. You follow? I'm not perfect and neither are you, but we are perfecting ourselves. We are in motion of progress when we recalibrate more quickly. So have it in mind. Okay, bad morning, recalibrate. Bad hour, recalibrate. Bad conflict, recalibrate. Missed the workout, recalibrate. Ate the bad thing, recalibrate. I hope that serves you. Have you ever had the pain point where you perceive yourself different than everybody else around you? You know, you think you're this great, amazing person and other people around you are being mean. Or maybe sometimes you're like down on yourself, but everyone's like, no, you're awesome, I love you, what's wrong? I love you. If you ever had that, it's like there's this challenge sometimes between our self-perception and how other people perceive us. So the So the first thing you have to do is make sure every single day that you have a very clear intention for who you wanna be. I know you've been watching my YouTube hopefully for a long time and you hear me talk about this. You can't keep bumbling into each day and just reacting all day. You have to have an intention for like, what kind of person do I wanna show up to the world as? Like, how do I want to be perceived? And be really clear about that. Don't just like wander into social situations all throughout high school, all throughout college, all throughout your professional life, showing up as you do normally, instead go, how do I really want to be in this situation? How do I wanna feel in this situation? How do I wanna treat people in this situation? How do I want other people to perceive me? Not in some kind of method of conformity, but rather like, what's the real me? If you can't articulate the real you, please don't ask other people to figure it out. If you're not clear about your own values, how you want the world to see you, and what you want to accomplish, please don't ask the world to know who you are and what you're about. So it begins with that intention, that clarity of self first. You got to do the homework, you got to do the personal development, you got to read the books, you got to geek out on figuring out your values, your drives, how you want to show up to people, what you're your goals are, because if you don't know it, I promise you we're never going to figure it out. And I think a lot of people are really miserable in their life because they're like, no one understands me, but they don't understand themselves, or they don't understand themselves and communicate who they are. So it all begins with intention, all begins with clarity. You got to start by defining yourself, and every day look at it. I mean, like literally every day, like what are the words that should define how you're going to be today? I have people write that down every single day. Like, I want to be a person who is— and write it out. I want to treat other people like this. Because if every day you show up as that person and you treat people like this, then integrity starts happening in your life. You have that congruence of being who you really want to be, and more people see you on a consistent basis being like you versus scattershot, just reacting or conforming or trying to fit in. Now, when you know they know you and you show up as you more often, they go, "I get you." So the second big thing you can do is learn by discussion. This is the hardest thing to do, and what this means is ask other people how they perceive you. I mean, it's the hardest thing, but let's say you got a job and you have a great meeting and you feel good about the meeting. Lots of people walk out and just go celebrate and they'll go, "I guess I did a great job." Instead, ask other people, Hey, how did that meeting go for you? How do you think I did? Was there anything else I could do better? How do you think of the way I talked to this person? Is there anything that you feel like I missed? And just start asking other people to share their perceptions of you and your performance. It is the gutsiest, scariest thing in the world for people to do, 'cause most people don't want feedback. But if you never solicit feedback, if you're not consistent in asking for it, Then people just don't say it. And then one day they're like, well, I think you're like this. And you're like, how could you say that? We've been in a relationship for 10 years. And they're like, I guess you never asked. So you gotta ask. Ask consistently and constantly in almost everything you do. Be like, how was that? Did I come across as this? I was trying to go for that. Did it work? I mean, even as we're shooting this video, you know, today I've shot a couple of these and I asked my team, I'm like, do you think that was, Was it like too slow? Was it too fast? Did I get my points across? 'Cause if you don't ask that, you don't know. And a lot of the external feedback that comes from others can give you the real direction for how to be better. I know it's scary, I know it's like, well, people might say negative things, but if you realize all you're trying to do is learn, not judge, everything goes fine. If all you're trying to do is say, hey, just give me the honest feedback and don't worry about saying it exactly right, I won't get mad. You gotta actually have those conversations with people. Allow them to share the feedback and don't take it personally. Take it as a learning point that either applies and is true for you or not. Like, I get a lot of feedback and like, I don't agree with that. That's not true. I don't think that's true for me. I'll try to do better next time to make sure that that doesn't happen. But I don't ever hold it against other people. Now, is it true that some people are gonna be mean to you? Is it true some people are gonna call you names? Is it true some people are gonna be hard on you? Yeah, that's part of life. So don't be surprised by it anymore. You're too old now to be surprised by other people being a jerk to you. You should know that it's gonna happen. You should know people are gonna give you negative feedback, and what you have to do is start learning to take feedback from people who know how to deliver it. If someone gives terrible feedback and they're a terrible jerk and they're always that way, man, don't take that personally. Just know that's their style, that's their thing, that's their life. That's their, you know, axe to grind, not yours. We're always trying to improve our lives, but life is hard. Things mess you up, people judge you, finances are hard, and you're always trying to be your best, but sometimes that ain't easy. And so I think developing habits of mind, body, spirit, productivity, service, love, can really change your life. And I'll start this morning with a super funny story about just a life-changing habit of mine. You can see I'm in a new space this morning. I'm literally in a shared office right now. And if I, well, I'll give you a play-by-play of like the last 41 minutes. 41 minutes ago, the power in my studio went out. I'm typing an email to— I think it's about 41 minutes. Yeah, about 41 minutes if I'm doing the right math, right? And I figure out about that time that, oh wait, no, it's the power to the whole house and my studio. My studio is in like our guest house. And, you know, I've got the broadcast camera you guys have all seen over the years and, you know, it looks nice set up and everything. Just, I'm typing an email to all the Create accounts in, um, Growth Day about another promotion, and, and also everything goes out. Now I know I got this live with you guys at the top of the hour, and I was like, okay, didn't expect that. Take a few deep breaths out, swear 5 times. Stand up and I go outside looking for what's happening. And like, is there someone out there? They've turned off the power. What's going on across the street? What's— because there's construction. And I'm looking around, I'm trying to— what's happening? Can't figure it out. Go into the house, and like I said, that whole house power seems out. Go to, uh, ask Denise, my wife, hey, do you know anything? Is someone doing anything with the house? There's no power. I'm live in like an hour. She's like, no, I, I, I don't know. And she'd just been getting out of the shower. She's like, I don't know. So I go blazing outside, I go look across the street, there's construction going on. I pick up the phone, call the project manager over there, and I go, did you guys just shut off the power? Is something going on? And we're doing this landscaping project, so I bolt over there, ask the guys, did you guys— are you digging? Are you digging anything? Have you hit power? No. And run back into the house, uh, and Denise is like, hey, I just got a notice from PG&E, power's out. But it doesn't say anything about it, just says notice. We, you know, it's kind of those texts that says, hey, your power might be out. We figured it out. So I go, okay, uh, I think, okay, well, um, what am I gonna do? I'm live at the top of the hour. So I said, okay, well, it'll probably come back on. You know, yeah, yeah. Who's had that Zoom moment where your power went out and you just thought it'll come back on? Anyone else? You're just like, just faith, you're thinking about it. Okay, power's gonna come back on. I said, okay, but what if it doesn't? So I start packing up a spare laptop because my other laptop is connected to all the gear, right? Just in case it comes on, I've got that fancy camera and everything. I'm like, I'll hold out. And I run back inside. I said, okay, I'm going to drive into town and get that shared office space that we know about. Hit up my assistant, say, can you book a space for me? I'm going to be going in. And then the project manager from across the street, Says, "Hey, it's not us. Got a note from PG&E." He sends me this audio that says, "There will be no power till 1 o'clock," which I'm on Pacific time, so that's 2.5, that's 3 hours away, but I got to be live with you at the top of the hour. Okay. I listened to the thing. The audio says, "No power till 1 o'clock." The next text comes in from the project manager, "Hey, I'm coming, I'm trying to come over, uh, to see if it's anything about your property, because he also worked on our property. I can't get in the gate. We have a gate at the beginning of a property that's powered. And so all of a sudden I realize I can't get in my car and drive down to the shared space because I can't get my car out of our property. The gate don't open. I'm like, oh my God. And this is where that first habit comes in. I take a deep breath anytime there's a huge interruption. When you meet a master negotiator, a master coach, a master therapist, a master role model who really understands how to do communication well in conflict, What they're doing is they're reflecting, restating, and rephrasing things that the other person are bringing to them. They're reflecting, rephrasing, or restating what other people said in order to demonstrate understanding. Someone says, I'm so pissed at you. It's as easy as saying, "I hear that you're pissed." If someone says, "I'm so hurt that you did that," it's saying, "I know that you're hurt." If someone says, you know, "I'm so angry," "I hear that you're angry." It's just reflecting back the feelings that they are stating to you. And I mean, literally use the explicit one, even if you don't agree with it, right? If they say, "You're being condescending to me." "I hear that you feel I'm being condescending." Right? It's as simple as just reflecting the words right back. You don't have to validate. You don't even have to agree. It's just hearing it. It's restating it back to them. It's reflecting it. It says, I'm listening to you. I heard the words that you chose to use. Right? And it's reflecting back the feelings. If they don't— a lot of people don't know how to access feelings. You know, research shows most people only have access to like 3 to 4 words to describe their feelings: happy, mad, sad, and confused. Happy, mad, sad, and confused. Most people don't know how to say any other words than that. They have no emotional training, right? I never did. I had like happy and mad. That's all I grew up with. I was like, happy, mad. That was it. There was no nuance of all the other feelings that we could have. So most people, they might not know how to communicate it. And so if you're sensing it, one way to reflect it is, I'm sensing that you're upset. Is that right? And it's saying, I sense it, and asking to help you gauge the feeling. Or it's just saying— I say to coaching clients all the time, especially now in this virtual world, I say it on Zoom. And as many of you guys know, my coaching clients paid $1 million a year to work with me. So I'll look at them right on Zoom and say, you know what, can we take a beat? I'm listening, but I can't quite gauge here through this virtual world What it is you're feeling, could you describe that to me? I know that sounds so, you know, junior varsity, but I literally say that to CEOs. I say that to Olympians. I say that to my friends, my partners, my spouse. I say it all the time. Hey, can we take a beat here? I'm not sure I'm picking up what it is you're feeling. Can you, can you describe what you're feeling right now? I can't tell. I say that all the time, and now it just opened up the platform for them to express feelings. And that's really important for a lot of people, especially if you're dealing with somebody who doesn't say what they feel, or it's hard to read it on their face. To say, hey, can we take a beat a minute? I can't tell what you're feeling right now. That really can open up the door to better conversation. I am a person who builds positive relationships. Imagine you've gotta go have that difficult situ— conversation at work with that underperforming employee. There they are in the glass conference room cube, and you know you have to go in there and deliver some truthful feedback that they're underperforming. If your mindset is, this person sucks, I hate them, how are you going to treat them? If your intention is, I need to get this person to change, I'm going to fire them, how are you going to treat them? But if the intention is, I'm a person who builds positive relationships, okay, stepping into this conversation from that truth, I want to be a role model. I want to build positive, lasting conversations and relationships with other people. Okay, let me start with that. It is entering a conversation with the intention to build the relationship. Let me say that again. It's entering the conversation with the clear intention to build the relationship. At home, that sounds like, honey, I love you. I'm always trying to figure out ways that we can make the relationship better. I have some ideas and I'd love if we could have a conversation. At work, it's as simple as, you know what, your relationships with your coworkers here really matter, and we're trying to build something really special together, and I know you're part of that, so we need to have a conversation. It's just baselining everybody and reminding everybody that we're here to build a relationship. See, when you're angry, what is your usual intention? I'm here to end this relationship. F this person. They're out. And now from that frame, from that intention, how do you treat people? My intention is to fire this underperforming jerk. Okay, you're going to have a very different conversation. Intention is the very thing that will change you for the rest of your life. I know many of you heard me talk about my experiences with Oprah Winfrey and the blessing of doing some courses with her and her network and really learning a lot from her. And one thing I just, I was always amazed by, when she starts any meeting, she always asks, what's our intention for this meeting? Your environment shapes you because you're soaking in it. And so make sure the relationships you have are high quality. Now this is, everyone's like, but Brandon, you don't understand my spouse. Oh, he's a doozy. I know. It's like, listen, if you're around people who aren't like this, the job isn't to get rid of them and throw them away. The job is to go build that group somewhere else, to find that, to find that, to build it. If you didn't get it right, you didn't just luckily fall into a group. I didn't have that. I grew up in a town that had been economically depressed for a century. I grew up in a town that there, it was so survival mindset, but also very aggressive and competitive. There, there wasn't a whole lot of talk about these things. And I had to go find and build it. I had to start going to personal development seminars. I had to engage with higher achievers. I had to look for people who had fulfillment in their lives, no matter what they were doing. And I had to seek them out. And I made that a choice. I made that a decision. I said, I'm going to create an awesome group of people to be around in my life. I don't know how, but I'm going to do networking. I'm going to do volunteering. I'm going to ask to be around people and I'm going to get mentors. And I'm going to make sure that I surround myself with people who care about life, who want to live meaningful and fulfilling lives, who want to lead. Who want to make a difference. And I can't think of a single person at all in my entire life today, that decision was 25 years ago for me. I can't think of a single person who I have a consistent or recurring communication with in my entire life who isn't like that now. Every person, to a person, to a T. Every person I interact with has some sense of that, or they don't get in my world. It doesn't mean I'm unfair or discount people. It just means I'm not going to let that stuff into my head. And I don't say that I'm perfect. I say it took me 20 years. Like I said, that's going to be a goal. I'm going to get there. And I want you to have that goal. Like the people around you should be so fulfilled and so happy and grateful for their lives. And you got to find that. You got to lead that. You got to cultivate that. You got to talk about that. I think fulfillment should be a topic that people talk about every single month of their life. If you're in relationship with someone, ask your spouse, your partner, "Hey, do you feel fulfilled?" And just hold that space. If they don't feel fulfilled, Ask why. Get to know them. Understand what they're really looking for. Encourage them to go in the direction that will bring them that fulfillment. Encourage them, you know, at the end of a bad day, when you hear them say sentence after sentence of negative self-talk or meaning after meaning that's catastrophic, terrible, negative, awful, be that encourager. Be that person who helps them maybe think about or become more aware of that self-talk or those labels or that meaning. You can do it without judgment, but you can also be committed to building the circle of influence that you deserve in your life at this stage of your life. You have to be conscientious about it. You got to get at it because when those people around you are living a life of impact and meaning and fulfillment, it lifts you up. I have down days, and then I talk to somebody in my circle and it's like, whoa, it just kind of resets my brain a little bit. And I go, oh, I've been speaking negative, or I've been thinking small, or oh wait, and all right, okay, yeah, I am lucky, I am blessed, oh my gosh, let's go, Brendon. And I get back on because sometimes you will drown in your own discouragement, and it is your circle of influence, the people around around you, the people in your network who can help draw you out of that faster. And that is something to be grateful for. Practice emotional regulation. Practice emotional regulation. And we're gonna talk about what that means, because here's what happens. You have two choices in a conflict situation. You have emotional regulation or you have emotional contagion. You'd better make that choice consciously. Emotional regulation or emotional contagion. So what is emotional contagion? Emotional contagion is that part of us that we are hardwired to do, which is mimic or act out, respond to someone else's emotions. It's how when you walk up to a group of 3 people who are sad, you start to feel sad. It's how an 8-month-year-old baby, Mel Abraham, will— when you smile at the 8-month-year-old and they smile back, they can't help it. What's happening there? It's in your brain, in your prefrontal cortex, these things called your mirror neurons that make you— or in your cortex, it helps you want to mimic other people. And match their emotions. It's why when someone yawns, you yawn. It's why when someone gets super angry, you feel your blood go up. It's automatic, it's impulsive, and it is hardwired until we run a new program over it so many times that that gets dampened. Maybe it doesn't go away, but it gets dampened. Right? Emotional regulation, however, is a conscious choice to sense and feel the emotions coming up and to regulate them appropriately for my intentions or the situation. It means you take the reins of your emotions and your feelings and your behaviors. It means you're personally responsible for it. And that's hard. Because if you heard me teach on this before, there's a big difference between emotions and feelings. I talked about it in the Daily Fire, that your emotions psychologically— so when we talk about emotions in my field of practice, whether it is in— actually doesn't matter what field of practice, if it's in psychology, if it's in coaching work, emotions are automatic physical impulsive and very difficult to dictate their extremity. Very— it's just like emotions tend to happen. Feelings, however, think about feelings are kind of like the wake of an emotion, but you get to apply meaning to it. Feelings, you have much more control over. It's a lingering effect of an emotion. Emotion, in most, at least most neuroscience and most studies of physiology of emotion, an emotion is actually pretty quick to come up and go, right? Emotion can come in maybe 60 seconds, 90 seconds, sometimes 2, 3 minutes in the extreme, but the emotion itself tends to pass. And now the brain is starting to label it, attach meaning to it, decide what does this mean, what does this mean for me, is this safe, is this bad? A lot of mental processing has actually taken over and now it's creating a lasting feeling. I like the phrase take turns. It means you take a turn. Many of you are so silent in what you really think, feel, need, expect, deserve, want, Many of you never speak up for yourself. Many of you get bulldozed every single conversation, and you keep blaming them for bulldozing versus speaking up. Many people do not participate in conflict. They just listen. They get mad, passive-aggressive. They quit. They stonewall. They refuse to set boundaries. They refuse to ideate. And they just get more and more disconnected, disengaged, stop participating. And if you've ever been in a situation like that with someone else, it drives you mad. It's just like, I can't believe they're stonewalling me. I can't believe they're not participating. And it gets very, very upsetting for me. That's a big one for me. When someone— like, I know that triggers me when they won't participate in a respectful process. I gotta breathe. I gotta move. I gotta self-talk, baby. Emotional regulation. Because that one will get me going. But I see it all the time. And so take turns means you take your turn and you set up the space that they're going to make theirs. You ask the questions to draw them out. You give them the platform to speak. You express what you need to express. You take a beat and you don't wait. Listen, this is so important if you want to be a great communicator. After you've expressed what you needed to express, Please don't expect them to comply, accept, validate, or say yes to what you just said. Think about it this way. You just got to take your turn. Now they get to take their turn. Then you get to move towards resolution. But what you just said was not the resolution. What you just said was your piece. You took your turn. Now they get to take their turn. In taking their turn, their turn is not set up that they have to agree or comply. They just get their turn. And when they get their turn, you listen. When they get their turn, you reflect. That's the key. Most people, when you take your turn, you expect compliance. And that's where the whole thing falls apart in conflict, that they have to do it your way all the time, immediately. Oh man, that sucks. I know you've been there before, but the reality is most people think they've been there before, but don't realize they've put others there before too. And we have to take ownership of that. Again, this is not Brandon Burchard being perfect to you. I've done this a million times accidentally. I mean, I don't know how many conversations I've had where I feel like I've made a great argument and they should just go, "Yes." And then they don't. And I'm like, "How can you not agree with that?" And then I argue with them and it devolves from there instead of builds from there because I didn't make sure they took their turn. Now that I have vented or I've expressed, now they get an equal part to share back. And when they share back, even if they didn't agree with me yet, and I just want them to say yes, I've got to go, okay, Brandon, fine. Feelings, interests, needs, expectations. Listen for those, reflect those back. Because if they feel heard right now, then we can move to resolution. So key, taking turns. Please do me a favor. Make sure you take your turn. Our job in our relationships is to create real, authentic, caring interactions. Real, authentic, caring. Write it down. Real, authentic, caring. Real means that we are being who we really are in that relationship, right? We are being real with that person. We're speaking our real thoughts, feelings, dreams, desires, needs. We understand and hear their real thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, and dreams. We validate it. We appreciate it. We are acknowledging it. That's being real with one another, right? We're meeting each other as two people who are separate. We're coming together, creating a real connection based on actual honesty and trust that comes from sharing one another's real thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, needs. That's real. Authentic. Authentic means, oh, this relationship is unique to us. So often we're taught in the modern world authenticity is about us, because we all think of authenticity now as like social media. Am I showing up real in my social media? But in real life, in, in family dynamics or sociology, authenticity is about the relationship. It's, it's, I am authentic with myself In relationship with my sister, we have an authentic relationship. And my relationship with my mom is different. We have an authentic relationship. An authentic relationship with my mother means different things than authentic relationship with my sister, as an example, right? Each person— you have a team, you have a team. If you treat each person on the team exactly the same because you're always authentic, that's not an authentic relationship. An authentic relationship is that relationship with them is real. And unique to them. It's authentic with that person. That's what we're talking about here. Um, we've got to be able to have, on top of this realness or this authenticity, this sense of that there's a depth or an intimacy in that relationship. Depth would be like, oh, I know things about this person. Intimacy could mean the same thing, but it means there's a depth there that can be physical as well. But I think depth or intimacy in sharing with one another is really important. I think most people don't have fulfilling relationships because they don't have deep relationships. They're always talking about surface things. They're talking about what's on TV. They're talking about the weather. They're talking about what's in the media. They're talking about comparison to other people, but they never talk about the meaning of life. I would say you barely know a person until you've talked about the meaning of life with someone. Because what do you really know if you're not connected or understanding what their sense of purpose is or where they draw fulfillment or meaning from? So this whole conversation we're having today, if you had conversations like this with your family, think about how deeper those relationships would be. I know some of you are laughing right now because you can imagine never having this conversation with your family. I totally understand. But I think it's important that we say, okay, if I want to have great relationships, they've got to be real. They've got to be trusting. They've got to be intimate. They've got to be deeper. And the more— I would say this, I was talking with Denise actually about this topic this morning. And she was like, when she thinks about meaning and fulfillment, her first go-to is relationships. First go-to. Because, you know, if the people around you don't ever sense fulfillment, if the people around you don't imbue moments with meaning, then now you're left to do all the hard work. And if you haven't done personal development work before, what ends up happening is you kind of just take what's given to you. And I think it's important that we realize the people we surround ourselves with should be people who understand life's meaning, who are seeking it out. People who want to feel fulfilled, do good things, be role models, because those people lift us up. Those people reconnect. Has anyone had an interaction with somebody in the last year or two who reminded you about the blessings or the importance of life? Make sure by the end of this year you have wowed your relationships. Wowing your relationships means Today, you sit down, you identify the most important relationships in your life, and you ask the question, how can I wow that person this year? And it doesn't mean you have to do anything extravagant and buy them big gifts or take them on big trips, though you might have one or two people you want to do that with. It just means usually here's what wows people. Appreciation, a written card, some encouraging audio texts, a nice email, more frequent phone calls. It's simple. It's simple. Wow the most important people in your life by the end of this year. Now, I know you might already have a good track record. Maybe you had a great summer with somebody. Carry it on. See it through. Finish this year strong in your relationships. Remember, long-term healthy relationships are a secret to longevity and life satisfaction. So who's somebody that you could reach out to with some appreciation, some love, some encouragement? I put this as part of my morning routine. Some of you guys know is I send 5 encouraging audio texts every single morning to the persons in my personal life, usually, Sometimes in my professional life, my peer network or my team. Usually for me, it's my personal network of friends and family who, who've encouraged me throughout the years. And I want to be that source for them. And so who could you wow by the end of this year? Maybe you had a tough year like lots of couples did with your partner, your spouse. And you've kind of been struggling a little bit. And right now it's been all about the blame and the negativity. And maybe you guys aren't even going to make it. But could you still do something to wow that person? I think that when we remember that we signed up for the relationships we're in in our life, by and large, that, you know, okay, I signed up for this. I'm going to end this well, or I am going to wow this person, or I'm going to take it as an obligation, a responsibility to make their life better, right? It's, it's my job, I feel, in my marriage to make our life better, to constantly surprise my wife, to constantly give and be generous into that relationship, even when it's busy, even when it's hard, with little things. And I can't say I'm great at it, but it's always on my intention radar. It's every day I'm thoughtful about it. Every day I try to do something and it doesn't take much. I mean, the joy my wife gets when I pick up or clean up is amazing. You know? So we all have different ways and most people don't need you to do some big extravagant thing. It's the things that they need. It's, you know, their love language. It's their priority. Their preference, even if you don't like it. You know, even if that's not the meal you want to eat, make them that meal that day. Maybe, maybe you've had a hard time and you know you could hold it against them. Maybe today you let it go and you approach them with open arms and open spirit to try to repair. Accountability means, you know what, my credit card bills, those are mine. I'm accountable for handling those instead of avoiding them. I am personally responsible to deal with these. Even if I didn't cause all these problems, I am now the person who, if I'm going to clear the problems off my plate, I got to take some personal accountability for that. I am now the person who gets to choose my attitude today. I am now the person who expects myself to follow a higher standard and to follow through. Accountability, personal responsibility, or personal accountability says, Okay, I'm going to own this reality. I'm going to plan my way through it. I'm going to follow through. And I'm going to set up checks and balances to make sure I do that. Whether that's setting goals and tracking and measuring the goals and my own behavior towards those goals, or getting a coach, sharing socially in the community, or talking with your friends and family and putting it out there. Now your butt's on the line and you got to do it. I think that's what's important. So often we say, you know, I have dreams, I'm not going to tell anybody. And often in personal development you hear people say, no, tell people, because once you verbalized it, you can realize it. Once you verbalized it and it's socialized, Now there's an expectation you follow through. Here's my question to you. Do you have enough expectations to follow through? Often when I work with CEOs as their executive coach, what ends up happening is they have that kind of, maybe they have investors and their investors expect them to stay on path. Maybe they need to hit their quarterly goals. But what ends up happening is sometimes they start feeling like their accountability is driven by others. And often high performers feel all these obligations. They are accountable, but they're accountable to obligations that other people have set. And if you want a real fast track to being demotivated, Stop setting your own plan. Stop setting your own accountability. This is why for me, as I told you, I go in my plan section of Growth Day every day. I look at a lot of those plans, I'm like, "Oof, I'm behind on this." But I don't get discouraged. I just make a plan on how to handle it. Sometimes I look at it, I'm like, "I don't like my score here with my friends." I went 3 months without really talking to my friends. I don't get down on myself. I make a plan. I don't fall prey to that victim part of myself that says, but all these other things are happening and oh my God, I just go, okay, got it. I don't like that. I'm the only one in charge of the ship. You're the only one in charge of those scores. And once you realize that, you're like, okay, I'm accountable. What's my plan? Because sometimes you've left your accountability to your boss. You left your accountability to your manager. You left your accountability to your spouse. You left your accountability to the kids. You left your accountability to somebody else and you didn't internally own it anymore. If you've ever been in my seminars before, I'll talk about this for a while and then I'll get the whole audience up. We'll play this music, we'll do the lights, and all of a sudden we'll have everyone start shouting, "I own my dream. I own my dream. I own my dream," to help them realize again, They're the owner of their life. You own your dream. You own that impulse in your heart that says to get better. Once you are the CEO of your life, not just the follower, everything shifts for us. And that's accountability. If you are struggling with the sense of purpose today, you are lacking a routine or a practice to look at your tomorrows. Raise your hand if you got that one. If you are struggling with purpose today, you're simply lacking a routine or practice to look at your tomorrows. I tell everybody, you want to be a better leader, you want to be a better parent, you want your day, your health together, you want to build a bigger business, you want to earn more money, you got to look at your tomorrows way more consistently. Not on January 1st or December 31st, But daily, that's why I force myself to look at a year calendar every day, because I'm not good at that. And I know that about myself. And sometimes when you're not good about something, you need to create a habit or routine that you will stick to and find some joy in. So usually before I get to that wall, that battle board, I got a cup of green tea in my hand because I love it. I got a journal next to me because I love that. I love green tea and I love journaling. I'm not so good at the vision part, but I've created the routine. Just like on email, I've created a routine there that helps me go through a process that I know I need to do, but I'm not as good at. You all follow? So this is what I'm suggesting to you. If you're lacking vision, we need to practice to look at your future more often. So critical. It's why when you do that morning mindset prompt, In Growth Day, one of the questions asks, what's a project I should keep in mind that I'll be doing in the future that I might not be able to do today, but I just need to keep it on the dashboard of my mind? And people always ask, well, when I do this thing, it's kind of the same thing every day. I wrote down I'm going to write a book one day, and I got to write it again and again. I'm like, yes, you have to again and again and again think about your future, even if you're not doing anything for it Today, you know, even if you're not taking the action, say you have to think about it. You know, right now I'm thinking I'm working on some major media projects. I'm not doing them yet, but I'm thinking about them. I take a moment to think about that project, just trying to get in the unconscious, kind of scrolling around back then, to connect me to the future. Because when you feel connected to the future, especially when it's something that you are choosing to go do, to go build, to go manifest, you will feel more purposeful. If you don't feel this day, it's very likely tomorrow you're gonna be like, I don't feel purpose. And you forgot that feeling the moments of life, that's presence, is part of purpose. And to feel them even more, you bring an intention to it, right? To feel the day, you have to have the intention to feel the day, right? Intention precedes feeling. But most people don't know that. They have a feeling, then set an intention. I don't like this feeling, I'm going to change. But when you become more conscious, you say, oh, I'm going to enter this next situation intentional. It asks, what is it that I would love to experience or make happen in this next moment? Oh, I'm going to go play with the kids, or I'm going to go teach my kids math. Okay. I'm going to teach my kids math. Let me not just show up, plop the book down, look at them and go, what are we doing? But instead say to yourself, okay, I'm about to go teach my kid math. How would I like to do that as a parent? How would I like to show up? What would I like that learning experience to feel like between us? Father and son, mother and daughter. What would— what do I want that to feel like? Even if they don't learn well today, what do I want the end of our learning session to feel like for them? What association do I want them to create with learning math today? Now notice that took me, I think I clocked it right, just under 30 seconds to ask those questions of myself. Intentional living doesn't take that much longer. It's like a beat before going into the situation. You know, let me take a second here to enter the situation more intentionally. That is the process of bringing purpose to a situation. Right now I'm using and replacing the word intention with purpose for a specific reason, because people get all lost in airy fairy land when they talk about purpose. But ultimately purpose looks a lot like Daily intention. And the more daily intention you have, research shows, the more you say you have a purposeful life. Notice it doesn't say you earn more, built more, did more. It says the more daily intention you have, the more you sense your life is purposeful. I recommend everyone get a coach at some point because You need someone to have that sounding board who asks you next time where you're at in your development or in your progress, or where you're stunted, or whether you're crushing it, and helps you tease out those lessons so that you stay motivated and clear about the next steps. And that's why I think it's so powerful. Often the biggest shifts in our life happen when we're accountable. Sometimes it happens when you work with a coach, or some of you, you become a coach. I've never been more accountable for my life or had so many other people become so accountable for their life when they became a coach. Because once you're a coach, you're accountable to help someone grow, and you— that instantly raises up your awareness. Just like many of you, when you get a teenager and you start talking to your teenager about health or mindset and you realize you're a little off, it makes you more accountable because soon as you teach it, you're even more accountable to live up to it. Remember that congruence thing? It's a beautiful thing. The best I ever became in my life is once I became a coach, because once I was a coach, it was like, oh, level up your identity, Brendon. You got to follow through on these things. You have to be congruent on them too. You can't go out on the stage all the time tired like, come on, everybody. It's like I had to learn to take care of my health that I could literally manage a 38-foot, you know, stage with thousands of people and for multiple days. It was like running a marathon every single day. I had to be accountable to that audience because I was teaching it. And it was like, oh, soon as you put yourself in a role of a leader, a coach, a mentor, a role model, a caregiver, soon as you're in that space, you gain positional accountability. You realize, oh, I better walk this talk because if I don't walk this talk, not only will they notice, I will start to dislike myself. I share that. I really shared that one of the big gates that happened for me after my car accident. It wasn't just the car accident made me want to live, love, and matter. It was after the car accident, I had to sit with the reality that I had built a life I didn't intend to. I had set in motion that relationship. That wasn't the right relationship. I chose the wrong person despite some red flags. I allowed abusive language to happen in a relationship. I allowed, um, I'd say resentment to carry on. I had done some things and I had experienced some things. That I didn't like, and I could accept them. They did. But now I was accountable for building that next relationship that had to be better. I had to make that next relationship better. It was on me. I was the captain of the ship, the director of the destiny. I was the director behind the movie set watching that character evolve. I was choosing the next act. That's accountability. That's a great thing to have in life. If you think about the, maybe the 3 biggest times of your life that you changed, like those big, what they often call in psychology, those inflection points or those critical incidences. What were the 3 times when just major shift happened in your life? I promise there was a major gate to awareness opened up for you. Either it was an insight, an aha, maybe you're like Eckhart Tolle, you're just laying in bed and all of a sudden, you know, awareness and presence enters your life, a new level of consciousness lands on you. Wonderful. Maybe you had to go through something. It was a divorce, a business ending, you got fired, somebody said no, you got in a health challenge. An accident happened. For me, as you know, an accident happened. I got in a car wreck and it was the ultimate perspective check. At that point in my life, I thought I wanted to die. At that point in my life, I had been suicidal and depressed. At that point in my life, I didn't see that my life could ever be abundant or happy or loving. I, I didn't get it. And then that car accident, bam! And that was like a knock on the head, literally, that opened up my eyes and made me realize, oh, I don't want to die, I want to live, I just don't know how. And that was my awareness. It was, I, I want to live, I don't know how. But I've got this second chance, and I understand I want to live. I understand I want to love. I understand I want to matter, but I don't know how. And that began a lifelong journey in personal development, and then psychology, and then philosophy, and then neuroscience, and then high-performance studies to try and just understand how do people change? Well, maybe as you're listening to— what were those 3 big things for you? Maybe it was a health thing. Something happened with your family. Maybe you— that was when you went off to school or when you had the birth of your first child or something happened and it shifted you into another level of awareness that said, "I want to improve. I want to get better. I want to be healthier. I want to be happier." And if you haven't had that yet, then let me knock on the door a little bit and say, "Hey, this is a great time to gain some greater self-awareness." Without greater self-awareness, we aren't resilient. We aren't authentically confident, we aren't vibrant, we aren't healthy, we aren't able to deal with all of the chaos without conforming to everybody else. The moment we lack self-awareness is when the impulse to conform to everybody else enters. The moment we lack self-awareness, we don't know how to ask for what we need in an argument with our partner or spouse. The moment we lack self-awareness, we make a bad decision that we knew wasn't right for us. It's always the first thing— awareness. Some of the best celebrations you'll ever have is if you just sit with something for a minute, take it in. I was with a friend recently who bought a new house, and, uh, they had this great back porch, and they were showing me the new house, and we're walking around the house, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do— they're talking about all the remodels and stuff they were gonna do. We're going to do this and we're going to do this and this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen. We went back to the back porch and they were just kind of showing around and they were, listen, we're going to do this in the yard. I said, come over here. He said, what are you doing? I said, come here. And I had him sit down on the steps of the back porch. I said, look at all this. I bet this was a dream of yours once to have a house like this. Oh yeah, it was. Tell me about that. And he shared about his journey of the house he grew up in, which most of you and I would call a shack. And he told the story of how he had, you know, paid for himself, the first member of his family to go to school, first member of his family to get like a big job. First member of his family to give back to his community, first member of his family to have a house like that. And he was in that moment of just sharing everything he's gonna do. And I just made him sit down and integrate it, take it in. And so I said, literally, hey, let's just sit here for a minute. Just, just, just take this in. This is a big win for you in your life. You should celebrate this. Just, just take it in. And if you ever hung out with me, you know, I do this a lot. I'm gonna make you stop all the moments. We're just going to take it in. If we have a big breakthrough together, we're going to sit together, we're going to take it in. If we're, you know, if I'm out with my friends or my family, it's like we're going to take that moment, we're going to find a moment, just take it in. You got to integrate it, take it in, allow yourself to feel. Otherwise you'll never feel fulfilled. I would be a person who my natural tendency would like, give me all the potato chips, give me Give me all the pizza. Give me all the bad food 24/7. But the effect of it doesn't align with my energetic vision, and I know when I do those things and I feel terrible the next day, it's so out of alignment for what I want energetically in my life, my self-respect goes down. I get down. And I'm less productive, happy. Does that make sense? Very key to understand. Very key to understand. That's for me. Again, I'm sharing my things. Another thing I know feels good for me, because people always ask, I'm like, massive amounts of water and electrolytes every day. Like, I really believe most people are so dehydrated they have no idea that most headaches, as an example, are tied to dehydration. Most people have no idea that their physical stiffness and inflammation happens because they're not having enough water go through their body. A lot of people are so dehydrated, and they're shocked when you just like, drink some more water. Like, really? And they start doing that, like, this changed my life! Oh my God! And now they have fancy little bottles all around the house, and they carry them along with them, you know. Um, I think it's important that most people realize how critical hydration is to their lives. So I have to learn that. I also know that what feels good to me is a body that's not inflamed by terrible diet or things that I drink or consume that increases inflammation. As inflammation goes up, fatigue goes up. As inflammation goes up, weight goes up. As inflammation goes up, life expectancy goes down. Like, you want to find one or two main culprits of dis-ease in our health physically? Inflammation. A high inflammation diet kills you sooner. So we have to figure out, like, okay, we have to study, like, what are the things that inflame my body? That's partially knowing what you might be allergic to, right? Your food allergies as an example. But also just the basics of understanding certain certain things that you eat or consume tends to elevate your level of inflammation. And if you don't know what those are, see a dietitian, a nutritionist, go read some books, watch some videos on YouTube about anti-inflammation diets, and you'll see it completely changes your life. Did for me. Part of purpose is sensing a mission larger than yourself. Most people confuse that with a large achievement But what it was meant to be back in the day in these conversations was it meant you can see beyond yourself. I can see the suffering of others and want to be of service to them. I can see the suffering of others and want to be of service to them, where that means your angry child, or that means the neighbor who's struggling, or your friend who just lost her husband. It means I can see beyond myself, my immediate selfish, impulsive needs, and I can be with someone. I can sit with someone. I can listen to somebody. I can empathize with somebody. Too often we think of service as like donation. You know, did I donate to this cause? And by the way, please donate to whatever cause that you get behind. But there's different ways to provide service outside of just money. And the biggest part of humanity is learning to sit with people and be with them in their times of need, to let them know you see them and you hear them and you're curious about their story and you want good for them in their lives. Not your way, not imposing your values, not pushing the answer, but literally just honoring them as a human being, our social realm is incredibly purposeful. Most importantly is this, and you all know this as strivers here in Growth Day, but I think this is so critical. You've got to be around purposeful people. You got to be around purposeful people. If you feel like the people around you aren't as purposeful as they should, send them to growthday.com. You know, it's like maybe they need a little training. A lot of people need training on this topic, just like my friend I told you about, the woman I was coaching, who she'd never been trained to ask the question what would make her feel fulfilled. Most people never been trained on purpose either, but getting around Striving, giving, generous, kind, compassionate, high-performing people will completely make you feel different about life. I think about my friendships and the people in my life. They got a lot of purpose. And it doesn't mean they have this end game. It means they're living purposeful lives with great intention and appreciation and presence. So they're awesome to be around. Do you have 5 people who are awesome to be around in your life? Like awesome and purposeful? If not, time to meet them. When people have clarity about their future and clarity about their purpose, it tends to come in different categories here. Okay. Let me give you some of those categories. First is yourself. I know that sounds like no duh, Brendon, but this is yourself in terms of your identity. This is yourself in terms of who you are becoming. And this is yourself in terms of your self-worth. Okay, I'll cover those 3 elements here in a second. Self in regards to your identity. Who am I? Self in terms of who you are becoming. Who do I believe I am meant to become, or do I desire to become? And self in terms of self-worth. Am I worthy? These questions make you either feel connected as a purposeful being, or they make you feel terrible. And so let's explore them. Your identity. I always ask this in my seminars. If you've never done this work with me, it's from one of my other books called The Charge. And the charge being like the amp, like the battery pack, like, you know, the subtitle was Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive. The book is called The Charge. And one of the things I started asking people to do in High Performance Work was to share with me, to generate and share with me, what are the 3 words that would define the best of who you are today? Like if you had to describe yourself, like let's say you went on speed dating and you sat down across from someone and the question was, okay, share the 3 best parts of you And with using one word, describe that now. It's kind of like that, right? It's like, what's the three— like, if I had to describe the best of who I am in three words, what would my three words be? What are your three words? Like, what are your three words that that is the best of who you are? Or if you struggle with that, the three words that would describe the best of who you want to be. I want to make sure that you have your 3 words. And I want your 3 words on a board, or I want the 3 words on your mirror, or I want the 3 words next to your computer. And every day you look at those 3 words and say, today I'm going to be this. At midday, am I being this? At the end of the day, was I that? We need to develop a purposeful sense of being and remind ourselves of it. Personal growth and purpose is something to be cultivated on a very regular basis. Otherwise, you lose touch with it. Just like most people say, "I lost my motivation." I go, "You didn't lose your motivation. You lost the practice of paying attention to the things that matter to you and using your mind to rev you up for those things." That's all. You started going through the motions, and so you lost the motivation. You can still do the same thing, but instead of just going through it unconsciously, bring conscious intention. By bringing purposeful being to a thing, it changes. Well, as you learn to make being a purposeful being happen on a more regular basis, I promise you can shift. And that's the hopeful message for today. I know sometimes you watch something like this You're not in a good mood. You don't feel good. There's been a travesty. Something's going on in the world you don't like, and your day is just kind of like all over the place. But that's why we're here. It's got to do— it's like constantly doing the work. I would love for you to all type this in either your journal or the chat or the comments right now. I love constantly doing the work. Actually write it down. I love constantly doing work. You have to teach yourself. I love constantly doing the work. I get in an argument with my wife, I'm like, "Ooh, I love constantly doing the work." Like, you have to keep generating the ambition and the engagement and enjoyment of doing the personal development work. I walk out of a conflict or an argument with somebody and I have to go recenter myself. I'm like, "Okay, Brendon, chance to learn, buddy." What do you got to learn? How can next time be better? How do I really want to show up? How can I repair this? How can we improve the situation next time? How could I approach it differently? What can I watch for next time to make it better? Let me try. You got this next time, Brennan. Be graceful for today. You got this next time. A little more intention. Okay, here we go. Just over and over and over, giving yourself the grace to learn, to enter the next situation more intentionally. That's the stuff of purpose. Time to go out and volunteer. My very favorite way to change someone's life is to turn them into a volunteer. I don't care what they volunteer for, but go volunteer. It will change everything because who does volunteering? Purposeful humans, you know. So it's my favorite way to improve your social life. If you're not around purposeful people, volunteer. You'll meet more purposeful people, more intentional people, more present people, more appreciative people. But also, if you are struggling in any of your relationships, please watch the relationship trainings or courses in Growth Day, because they've found that just one negative one hurtful relationship in your life can dramatically decrease your sense of purpose in life, your overall sense of purpose by one person. And we know that to be true in your career, right? You have one bad boss, they can ruin the whole company for you. Well, that's true in our personal lives too. One negative hurtful person consistently in your life tends to decrease your sense of purpose in life by 3 points out of 10. So meaning, let's say on a scale of 0 to 10, you feel life is purposeful and you're really connected to it. 10, you feel totally purposeful, totally connected. 0, you have none. Let's say you're at level 7. Having one negative or hurtful person recurring in your life takes that 7 down to a 4. That's why that saying, don't suffer fools, is a good one. If you got somebody who's negative or hurtful, it's time to do the relationship work to either improve that situation with that person, help them get assistance or help or coaching, or exit that situation. If you can't do any of those, then you got to find a tribe or a community over here that you build up that meets those needs. And I think that's important because sometimes people say, well, Brendon, my mother is— she's terrible and I hate having her around. I'm like, okay, well, you can't necessarily replace your mama. Maybe you can limit time there, but sometimes people can't. They're caregiving, as an example. I'm like, okay, Well, then outside that house, we've got to develop the relationships that provide you with that sense where it's lacking there in that particular relationship. And so I think that's really, really important. One time, um, I was, uh, about to kind of go pitch an idea to somebody who I really admired. And right before I went in the meeting, my phone went off and I, I had set an alarm in my phone. This is before Growth Day. I used to just set alarms on my phone. Now I just use Growth Day for reminders, but I said it and it went off. And one of my words at the time was bold. And the truth was, I don't think I was that bold, but I was trying to become more bold. And I know it was in me and I know it was the best of me, but it took a lot of courage to summon boldness, like take a big action or ask for a big thing. It happened right this thing. The reminder went off right before I went in this meeting. In the meeting, people started talking about this big new idea. Usually, I would just sit there and listen and take notes. I heard them and I heard the enthusiasm and I loved what they were talking about. I literally put my hand on the table and it made a thump. I said, "Hey, y'all." I'd love to quarterback that. What do you think? That's all I said. I'd love to quarterback that. What do you think? Everybody kind of looked around the table. One person said, you'd like to do that? I said, I would. They said, go for it. And I got like a dream project. If I hadn't got that reminder to be bold right before the meeting, I don't think I would've ever done that. And that became a very critical, changing moment in my life for, in terms of my career. And so I shared that with you because there's a sense of purpose that comes into our life when we are being who we know we should be at our best levels. But just like you need a fulfillment habit, you need a reminder habit about Yourself. Because who gets down on yourself sometimes? Sometimes the words you say about yourself are terrible, and you're on repeat on terrible words. I want you to have positive words, and I want you to repeat about those. It might take some time. I didn't even believe my 3 words for the first year I did this activity. But then I had the blessing one time of sitting down with Oprah on her porch in Maui. And it was like, I just taught her and her team about change management. And we were doing this big program together about your next bold move. And I had taught about these 3 words. And so I asked Oprah's 3 words, and I'll keep that private to her. But what was amazing is when she said them, I heard them, I'm like, Yep, yep, and yep. They were all totally true descriptions of who she was because she lived in integrity with that intention of who she wanted to be. It was just like so obvious. And so the beauty there is, as you develop yourself, as you choose your 3 words, as an example, you choose your identity and you live into those words on a more consistent basis, you'll be more in touch with your natural and best being. I'm consistently asking, like, what, what's the feeling I want to have here? If you ever see me teach, it's often I always say, bring the joy. So I have joy triggers that I've set up in my mind that makes me more intentional about things. So for example, I have a doorframe trigger. Whenever I walk through a door, I say, bring the joy. So when I walk through that door right there, it's like, bring the joy into this room. It's just, it's just a mental trigger that I've set up for myself every morning. In the shower, I ask myself 3 questions, and not that I shower every morning, but the ones I do, I— the first question I say, what can I be excited about today? So it forces me to be clear about what's going to draw joy, enthusiasm from me. Number 2, I say, what might trip me up today? Because usually I know what's going on in the day. I'm like, what, what might mess me up? What might— where I might not perform well? What might bother me? And number 3, I say, what can I do to surprise somebody today? Hmm. To give a gift of appreciation or acknowledgement today. And so I think through that in the morning. So I think that helps me begin my day pretty clear. Um, then when I sit down before I do work, I literally look at my calendar of the day. I did this this morning and I look at whatever's going on in the day and I think about it for 20 minutes. It's one of my 20-minute routines in the morning. I literally think about my calendar. For 20 minutes a day. People think that's crazy. But what I'm thinking through when I'm looking at the calendar, I'm like, okay, I'm going to have that call. What do I want to happen on that call? You know, what's my intention for that call? What's my goal for that call? What's the feeling for that call? How do I want to end that call? You know, I'm going to have that time with Lewis. Like, how do I want to be there? And how can I make sure I enjoy it? Because it's a big deal. You know, I love your show. I want to do a good job. I want to share something good for the people, even though I have no idea what you're going to ask. Right, right. And I just want to be present for that and make sure I'm really there, even though maybe I have a head cold today. You know, it's like just thinking through it. I think that helps me. 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, you know, Jonathan Fields talks about, which is savoring the moment more. We can feel greater aliveness when we up our health. right? Get better physical health to have more energy. We can feel that. What else do we reinvent towards? Well, we always talk about another corner of the, 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, right? 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 y'all. 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, right? 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 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 happy are They're different things, right? What can add on to 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, right? You can have happiness without everything being perfectly meaningful, right? I can eat a piece of chocolate with green tea, and I'm 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, you know, 15 years of coaching people one-on-one and in large groups, there's 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. What you find meaningful and fulfilling tends to come from things that you are doing, meaningful pursuits that you find intrinsically and deeply interesting or passionate or even obsessive in that you're like, I just love this thing so much. And the more that you love something, the more that you tend to find it to be fulfilling. And so we've got to allow ourselves to pursue our interests and our passions to the place of love. That when you have love in your life, you are more in connection with what will make you feel fulfilled. And it will be in more connection of what you will later on ascribe as a meaningful life. Never met a person In all my years of researching personal development, reading all the great biographies, being with psychologists and sociologists and psychiatrists, and being with people in hospice at the end of their life, never met a single person to talk about, think about, write about, research, or experience a meaningful life absent of love. Not a single, never done. I haven't read a spiritual text. That love wasn't the center of what humankind's meaning is. I've never read any research that has found a happy person who didn't have deep, meaningful, connected, and loving relationships. I've never met someone who attained, you know, the remarkable status of a billionaire or a multimillionaire or the CEO, the most successful person or expert in their field who didn't love what they were doing. Maybe they didn't love it every day. And that's a mistake that every day is supposed to be perfect and joyous and abundant and oh my gosh, perfect. Nope. There's lots of days that aren't, but they're on what I would call a loving path. They're on a loving path. They love what they're doing. They might not even know what the career is, but every time they do that one thing, they feel a connection to it that's different than other things. There's more interest, more passion, more depth, more excitement, more something there. And we haven't been taught to pursue those things. Especially when we're young, we're taught to pursue avenues that lead to a specific result that society said is good. You know, we'll do this job because it leads to that salary instead of asking, what, what do you like doing? What are you interested in? What draws your passion? What do you love actually spending your time on? Integration. What does that mean? I always talk about this with so many friends, so many friends. Who have had so many wins, right, successes, and they don't feel like a success yet. So good things have happened to themselves, but they haven't integrated that they are good, right? It's that person who never feels satisfied, who always feels a lack, who never feels high self-worth. Why? Because even though the good things are happening, even though they've made things happen, they've never never put their hand on their heart and integrated the good things into their identity. So everything else just bounces off. That if we want meaning and fulfillment to happen in our lives, when meaningful things happen, we have to integrate them into our life. We have to say, "Ah, that was meaningful." And you almost have to pull it right into your body, in your mind, in your heart. You have to say, Oh, I felt that. You know, it's like I was recently at a wedding, and, uh, it was funny to see how different people participate and see and experience weddings. To me, it's just like I'm taking so much of it in, and I'm— I wouldn't say because I'm an empath in any way, it's just because I go, you know what, this is one— this is one time, one day this gets to happen for them. Let me enjoy this with them. Let me bring some joy to this with them. And let's make this day meaningful. People know to do that. Make this day meaningful. Make this day meaningful on a wedding day or on Christmas or on your birthdays. And then the rest of the day, the rest of the days of the year just blur on by. Well, I think that first you have to choose to make it meaningful. That's what we do at weddings, right? But then you also have to stop and feel it and integrate it. I had a great mentor of mine, um, when she found out I was getting married, She said, "Brendan, here's what I want you to do. On your wedding day, after the ceremony, I want to make sure that you pull aside your bride Denise 3 different times and make a meaningful moment with her and really integrate it into your memory and into your heart." It's the best piece of advice I got ever about my wedding day. It was like, right, make a moment, feel it, and really integrate. Take a moment to pause and, and take in life. Your newborn is finally starting to walk. Those are the moments where you take that in and you just pull it in. You integrate that into your life as a meaningful moment. But a lot of people don't take that same idea when they have successes in life. Good things happen. And so even though they have all the reasons in the world to be fulfilled, they don't feel full, fulfilled, because they've never stacked or integrated all those good wins. They haven't taken a moment to think about them and to feel them and to be grateful for them. You want to feel more meaning and fulfillment in your life? Think about life more. Read some philosophy. Read some great biographies of people who did great things. Expand your vision. Soon as you expand your vision, there's a different sense of, I would say, emotion and motion in life. Expand that vision again. Open up that ambition again. Now, most people don't do that because, "Well, you don't understand, Brendon. I got disappointed. I failed. They don't believe in me." I'm like, "And?" If you let every disappointment or failure or discourager out there pull at your life philosophy and where you're going in the future, if you forget that you are destined for greatness by God, or you are destined for goodness by a higher power, or if you don't believe in any of that, if you forgot the connection to your own future in which you want abundance and joy and amazing things for your family, Well, then we got pulled into the mud, didn't we? Today I get to share some ideas with you on health that I've learned in my own personal journey, but also as a high-performance coach for 16 years. You know, one of the fundamental most important things that we all want in our life is a sense of vitality, and that vitality is what we want We want to feel mentally engaged, alert, focused, enthusiastic. We want to feel energetically, like physically energized, right? Physically, we want to feel a sense of that health. And it's one of really the only 4 things that we all deeply desire. We talk a lot about it here in Growth Day, that you can give anybody anything, but what we all really truly want aliveness. That's what I mean by vibrancy. Connection with others and with ourselves. Meaningful pursuits, things that we're doing that we enjoy or see as important or contributing. And growth, like growing as persons. So all of that is really important, but that sense of aliveness, I always put that at the top of that little diagram diagram because it's so important to us. When we don't have a sense of aliveness, even if we have amazing relationships, when we are fatigued and wiped out, we can have the greatest marriage or partner or spouse or intimate relationship, but the zest isn't there. We can have a great job. We can have incredible opportunities to serve. We can love our passions and our hobbies But if we're wiped out, it doesn't feel as good. I know you all know this. And that is why it's so important that we focus on our health. Now, I want to do full disclaimers with you. I am not a doctor. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a neuroscientist. I am not a health advisor, coach, or medical professional in any capacity. I'm a high-performance coach. This means I work with people primarily on their mindset and their habits and their relationships. The first big gate of personal development that I believe everybody goes through in their own journey to maturity, happiness, fulfillment, aliveness, connection with others, ultimate life satisfaction, that first gate of awareness is— I'm sorry, the first gate of personal change is awareness. Is awareness. Now, I know some of you already know this, but think about this. In any given moment, we can be aware of our feelings, of our environment, of how our emotions are affecting our minds, of our decision-making, of our surroundings, of God, of universe, of connection to this very moment. In any given moment, awareness can ebb and flow, can't it? And sometimes in your life, I know some of you feel this way, you're going so fast, there's so much on your plate, you're so busy at home and at work, everything's going 90 miles an hour, and it's like, it feels like you're so torn from happiness or torn from the moment that you don't feel connected. And that is when awareness is sort of out the door. And that's why in the last decade, the topic of mindfulness you know, went from sort of a subtle art to like a societal need. And as all of the research has been showing in the mindfulness research of how that can make us feel more grateful, happy, appreciative, loving, connected, and kind and resilient, it's become more and more clear that people get this. But you don't go through the gates of awareness all the time by choice. Sometimes it's pushed upon you. I know many of you have had that story, just like I have in the past, where you weren't ready for change. You might have been resistant to change. Does anyone have any family members, team members, people in your life who are resistant to change? It's just like you're around people, you're like, why won't my husband change? Or why won't my child want to be better? Or why won't my kid do better in high school? Or why? It's like we all know somebody who just doesn't ever shift into that. And what you need to know, I'm going to make you sort of a casual coach today or an influencer or a leader today. We'll use all that under the term of influence today. If you want to influence others, you have to understand they're not going to start taking action to change until they've gone through the gate of awareness. And sometimes that gate of awareness, you can inspire it, you can role model it, and sometimes life just has to happen for them. We all know people like that. It's not a judgment. Sometimes you can't be responsible for everybody else in their lives. You gotta let life be their educator. Please remember, anytime you have a frustration or a conflict or an argument with another person, please remember you are dealing with a trauma survivor. Please remember, you are living with a trauma survivor. Please remember, you are working with trauma survivors. You yourself have survived traumas and struggles, unfortunate incidents, brutalities, difficulties, awful situations in your life. You survived them. You're still here. You're, you're still working through, you're still showing up, you're still working on yourself. If you can put the humanity in the other person and realize they have also struggled and more importantly survived traumas, this will allow you to now be more compassionate, empathetic, patient, and understanding. Because raise your hand if you think sometimes you're in a conflict with your spouse, your partner, or someone at work, and they might be acting out from old triggers and traumas. Raise your hand. Right? You think you're fighting about the vacuum cleaner. They're fighting about something that happened in the 5th grade to them. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. The person you're dealing with in that moment We always teach like freshmen in college about conflict. You're not actually there in the moment with that person. One of you is probably in high school or in elementary school. You're in a situation or a moment in your past that's being triggered to bring up all these emotions and you're acting out from the emotion. That's usually unconscious for most people. Isn't it true? The more therapy work, the more coaching, the more perspective, the more self-improvement, the more healing you do, the more you're aware of those things coming up. And they will come up, as we'll talk about in my next point. But if it's true that something's come up for you and it's uncontrollable or it's upsetting, it's happening for the other person too. I had a great, um, uh, interaction with the person at work one time. That I learned a lot. I was very much— I know this is really hard for understand, but I was productivity Brendan. I was like, man, I was getting stuff done. It's hard to keep up with me. I am like, I'm very— I'm like, I schedule it, I show up, I deliver it. I schedule it, I show up, I deliver it. And I do it with a positive mindset and I'm going to make it happen. That was really, really strong in who I was in my 20s. I remember having this conversation and, well, there's no better way to say it. I was kind of a condescending jerk to somebody at work. I just was not nice to this person at work. Early 20s, probably, just starting my career in consulting. A partner at the company saw the interaction. And she pulled me aside and she asked a question that changed my life. She said, Brendan, if you knew that person was dying, how would you have handled that situation? And I was like, Whoa. I mean, it was like, I immediately, like, I literally went to tears immediately. The second she saw it, she said that, immediately went to tears. It was like, whoa. Now let me ask you that. Think about the last argument or conflict you had. What if that person was sick? What if that person was hurt? What if that person was dying? Trust me, I know. I know how the pessimists and the people who don't like personal development would receive this conversation right now. "Oh, Brendon, here he goes." You know, I get it. Trust me, you're not the first persons I've trained on this topic. "Oh yeah, sure, Brendon. Now I'm supposed to every time I think about having an argument, think about they're going to die. Sure, it's practical." Maybe it's not practical, but maybe it's spiritual. And I say that because there's not a single person you're talking to who isn't dying. Not a one. You won't meet a person your entire life who isn't dying. That's what we call in our work mortality motivation. When we can see humans as mortal, when we can realize it's a short stint for all of us on this planet, everything can shift a little bit. You have to learn to practice presence. Practice presence. Being here fully in the moment, alive, vibrant, or at least attentive. Snapping your brain out of that reactive, like, "Go with the flow" mode to being here. That oldest advice in all of personal development about presence and awareness, about being with the flow, about being in the moment, every spiritual tradition has taught it as being central to human happiness and connection. This has been stolen from us. Because of this. I really believe— I'm stunned when I hang out with people that they can't be present for 3 minutes without wanting to scroll through something. I mean, they can't be— I mean, even 4 or 5 minutes, they can't do it anymore because they have trained themselves with millions of swipes to be not present. And I believe that meaning and fulfillment they become too fleeting when we haven't learned to be really present. And I think that's important, learning to be really fully present and pulling that from ourselves. There's plenty of times, I mean, if you saw my schedule, you're like, how do you get present? I'm like, I've trained myself. Otherwise, I can just be pulled in the next thing. There's always a million things going on around me, and I have to learn to just zoom right in and be here with you. You have to teach yourself to do that too, because the more days that blur by, the less sense of meaning or fulfillment you have. You can be busy, but the days don't blur by, right? I'm incredibly busy. I'm actually— this last 2 years, I can't believe how busy we got. But during that time, present, forcing myself each day to get present so I can recognize and appreciate those little moments. So I can create the connection with other people so that I can sense that spiritual aliveness of being here now versus hoping one day to arrive to something. And that practice of cultivating presence of, I would say, and I know people don't like when I use this phrase, but demanding presence. I demand of myself to be present. I, because I know when I'm not, I'm like, Brendon, Get present. Okay, so I might bounce in place, take 10 deep breaths just to reset my brain and my body. And that 10 deep— maybe you do it right now with me. Just stand up wherever you're at, bounce in place a little bit, take 10 deep breaths, recenter yourself to the moment, and keep going. And that way you can observe life. Many people They'll work their whole career, then they'll retire, and then they'll retire, and they'll finally be like, oh wow, look at the color of the trees. This is amazing. Wow, life looks pretty good. And they didn't even see it for 5, 6 years. They missed all of it, even though they were amidst all of it. They just missed it. You have to teach yourself to be with it, to be here. Meaning and fulfillment is so much, as much as we can define it and have a destiny mindset, We can feel it. I do it for like, if I have a great dinner with Denise, things go great, we just have a nice conversation, I'll walk away and I'll be putting things away and just literally think in my mind, what a blessing. God, I made it. Thank you so much for this blessing to be here with my wife. What a great day. What an amazing moment we just had. You know what? Years later, I'm going to cherish that dinner. Simple as that. It's what we say to ourselves in the minute and after the minute that really defines how we feel over the long term. Isn't it true? I mean, the little moments, if you can celebrate them, be there for them, give thanks for them. I believe the more you give thanks for the moments in your life, the more meaning you find. The more you give thanks for the moments in your life, the more you feel fulfilled. Even if you feel years away, even if the next big thing is out there, it's okay. Right now you're feeling it. That's what presence is. It's about feeling the day more. You hear me teach this now for what, 20 years? It's like you have to learn to feel life. If we don't feel it, then what's it about? And you're not just going to suddenly one day feel it, you know, because you drank a bunch of coffee. Maybe you are, but you're going to imagine me on caffeine. One day you're just going to You're going to teach yourself to feel the day and feel the moments more. You're going to observe more. You're going to breathe more. You're going to have more intention. And as you learn to feel the day, when someone says, "Hey, do you feel fulfilled about your life?" You're like, "I do," because you are filling life with presence. When you fill life with presence, you feel fulfilled. It takes an active participation on your point. You're not just going to show up one day and feel fulfilled. You have to fill the day with those senses of gratitude and meaning and really, I would say, connection. If you don't do that, I promise the days just blur by. And the more they blur by, the more you just stack on everybody else's reactions, needs, desires, drives, distractions, their meaning. And one day you show up and you're just, you're really just a bag of everyone else's intentions and needs and drives and labels and meanings. And in that place, you're not autonomous. In that place, you don't get to experience that individual sense of meaning and fulfillment we've talked about from the very beginning, 'cause you didn't take the time to define it consistently enough. When building a team, what are the strategies for influencing them to work towards a common vision? Number one, if you are just establishing the team, remember, people support what they create, so get their ideation involved in that. But two, make sure that team, on a weekly or monthly basis, is revisiting that vision and talking about, have them facilitate a process where they talk about how their contributions or what they created serve that vision, serve that mission. So that can be as simple as, hey, share with me what you did this last month, but make sure you talk about how does that help, like in our company, our mission is to change lives. So it's like, okay, how did what you do translate into changing lives? Talk about that. And just get people talking about it way more often, man. That's a big piece about it, is that most people are doing status updates but they're not talking about how their work directly touches the vision. And if you can get them seeing that and having that conversation more often, they'll naturally start supporting it because people support what they talk about a lot. So you wanna get them talking about it. I would also say that you've gotta have some kind of measurement system in place, whether it's quarterly goals, weekly or monthly rhythms, whatever it is, where they're maintaining some type of momentum, right? Everyone loses touch of the vision when there's not momentum in the company, when there's not momentum in their role. You could have the greatest heartfelt, caring, awesome situation in terms of a vision or a mission in the world, but if no one senses they're moving towards it, they love it, there's nothing you can do to get them to love it more. So you as a leader have to make sure people are moving towards it and they're getting recognized and appreciated for it. Otherwise, I mean, it could be, you know, a mission of saving babies and they'll get bored with the vision. All of personal development, the good part about it, is about the difficult decisions. I really believe that. It's about the difficult decisions and it's about the disciplined habits that keep us growing and extending and reaching new levels of our potential. That's why I love it. That's why I love personal development. That's why I love it so much. It doesn't matter how much I'm working, how tired I am, where I've been in the world, how much travel, how much work. It doesn't matter what's going on with my family, my life, my finances, or whatever. I love personal development because it commands so much from you. It says, oh, you want to grow? "Look at where you are, young man. Look at where you are, young lady. Decide, is that the vision you have for your life? No? Then make the hard decisions. Practice those discipline habits to go where you want to go." I love that stuff. Today is a good day to evaluate the vision you have for your life, overlay that to how your life really is, and then make the difficult decisions to start more disciplined moving towards that vision that you want. It's the stuff of accountability that lies within this principle. So when I talk about the vision decision, it's you own it, you're responsible for it, you've got to communicate it, and you got to be real about whether that vision is mapping to today. And if it's not, you got to initiate the decisions or the discussions with others to make What do you find meaning in? Is there something you love you could give a few more hours to? Is there someone you love you could give a few more hours to? Is there an interest or hobby, a passion that you just love doing? And maybe, you know what, it doesn't add up to the bank account. It doesn't get you on the COVID of the magazines, but it makes life worthwhile. You feel better. You feel a greater sense of fulfillment from life because you're living life doing things and being a person that you love. I think ultimately all meaning and fulfillment, all roads somehow lead back to this topic of love. Might not have all the answers on that one. That might be something for you to journal about today. How does love connect to your sense of meaning and fulfillment in life? That might mean you live with love, meaning you are loving-hearted towards other people. It might mean how you treat other people. It might be the things that you do. It might be your life philosophy. However you define it, I promise you, my friends, love— that's the answer somewhere. Take care of yourself, you know. Do your meditation, your exercise, get a good diet, start sleeping better. Start learning to sleep better. Start taking care of yourself better physically, and I promise mentally and spiritually, you'll flower. That when you feel good physically, I'm telling you, way more likely, way more likely to feel grateful for life, way more likely to sense meaning and flow and fulfillment of the day. So get your energy up, 'cause you know what? When you're wiped out, It's really easy to be pulled into discouragement. When you're wiped out and someone says something negative to you, it's so easy to believe them because you don't even have the mental power for critical thinking to talk yourself out of that negative stuff they just threw at you. And you just, you accept what they say, the emotions hit, you just don't even have the energy to mentally fight back anymore. You got to take care of your health first and foremost. When I talk about aliveness, it always comes from a place of physical vibrancy and health. You've got to take care of yourself. And that usually is, for mental and physical, meditation, exercise, good diet, great sleep. You start with those things, everything starts to shift. Everything starts to shift. And I say this all the time because if you are fatigued all the time, you will be less likely to feel fulfilled because you're empty. When you're physically empty all the time, how are you going to feel fulfilled? Got it? You got to fill your gas tank once in a while. Take a break. Do more resets throughout the day. Breathe again. You know, you want to feel fulfilled? Sit and breathe and feel grateful for 10 minutes. Simple, you know, we just got to breathe again. Do you know who feel incredible meaning in their lives? People who cherish their life. Cherish it. Truly cherish their life. And if you feel like I'm speaking philosophically to you, I'm not. I've had both the blessing and the very real difficulties of being with a lot of people at the end of their life. And many of you know, I've volunteered in hospice. I've been with my own father as he passed away, um, in our home. And I can share with you that it's not until too late that many people finally start cherishing their life, really owning and appreciating different parts of their life. And if you can remember to do that, I think something magical happens. That's why I ask everybody, go into your Growth Day journal every day and capture any meaningful moment, capture any sense of gratitude, capture any event you didn't like, and spin that meaning into such a way where you acknowledge what's real, but you're back in control of your emotions, feelings, and your next actions. It's like by the more often that we capture moments that we can cherish or moments that we can learn, the more life becomes more meaningful. But absent of that self-reflection, it's just a busy blur. That's why journaling has proven over and over and over in psychology, including mental health practices and yes, therapy, to dramatically shift people's thoughts and feelings and life satisfaction over the long term. Your life matters. My life matters. Those people you hate out on the internet, their life matters. That what happens is we get so myopic into our own world of, okay, is the little thing I'm doing today, does that matter? Does my, you know, this one thing I did, does that make me feel fulfilled and complete as a person? And we lack an overall life philosophy. An overall life philosophy that we have defined our lives and the context of humanity as meaningful. I know this might be too academic for some people, and that's why I use the word or the phrase, a destiny mindset. If you have lost that feeling that says, I have an opportunity to make a difference while I am here, you've lost that connection with what I'm calling a destiny mindset. A destiny mindset. And I know some people will take a destiny mindset that's like, "Oh, you know, I got to see myself on a cover of a magazine." I'm like, "I know lots of people on covers of magazines who don't feel a sense of meaning or fulfillment in their life." It's not an external thing. It's an internal or intrinsic thing that I just feel called. I feel that my life is leading to something important. I feel honored or privileged or grateful that I can make a difference in the future. And that make a difference in the future thing is an overall life philosophy that is connected to destiny. And I hope you start thinking about that because you know what? Sometimes you wake up in the friggin' morning and you pull this thing out, don't you? You pull out your phone in the morning, And what do you do? You start scrolling through everybody else's stuff, everybody else's agenda, everybody else's life, and you get trapped into the myopic looking at that comment and getting sad or upset about it. You get trapped in the small things of life, the tasks, the emails, the responses, and all of a sudden you've been pulled into this tiny little myopic to-do list part of your life, and you forgot the being part of your life. You want to feel more meaning in your life? Start your day with that destiny mindset. Can you show me somewhere, something that you look at every day that opens up your mind and reminds you to get out of that little myopic brain that we all have that's just focused right here? Because if you never look to the bigger vision of life, it's hard to ever feel a deep sense of meaning or fulfillment. If the only challenges you're facing in life right now are the ones that life threw at you, that's why you're unhappy. You're only in reacting mode. You're not in growing mode. Let me say it again. You're in reacting mode, not growing mode. You're going through the motions. And even if you're congruent, you're being a good person, you're showing up, trying each day to be yourself, be your best. But if you still feel unfulfilled, if you still feel like you haven't broken through, that's a good higher calling to honor that is saying to you, challenge yourself, young man. Challenge yourself, young woman. Challenge yourself, my friend. It is time to rise to the next level. The world, the universe, God, your soul, your spirit is demanding more of you. Rise to the next level. That is a beautiful impulse we must hear. And if we don't hear it, it's because we've drowned it with negative thinking and the wrong intentions. So we must now challenge ourselves. 2020, this year, 2022, this year, this is a year for you of challenging yourself and not getting discouraged. See, I can have a terrible day and at the end of the day I can go, okay, 2 years ago, here's how I would have dealt with that terrible day. Today, how can I improve how I deal with this terrible day? It doesn't mean you don't have terrible days anymore, does it? It doesn't mean you're not tired. It doesn't mean you don't get stressed. It doesn't mean you don't get frustrated. What it means is you have the intention to ask, oh, how can I improve how I'm dealing with this? How can I— like, what— have you ever been in a relationship where you and your partner, your spouse, have the same fight over and over and over and over and over and over again? It's literally the same fight over and over and over and over again. No, it's literally the same fight over and over. You ever had that? That— what's lacking is somebody there is lacking the accountability and the consistent action to say, how can I improve this? How can I do it? What's happened is it's turned into a blame game, right? This person's responsible, not me. No accountability, no action. I don't have to improve it, you improve it. You broke it, you cheated, you're the bad one, you're the one bringing this up. And all of a sudden, you, you, you, blame, blame, blame, no accountability. I don't have to change, no action. If both couples get into that, That's where couples therapy has to happen because they're both in the blame game. They've both taken the accountability off. They believe the lie that relationships have to be 50/50 equal. No, relationships actually mean 100/100. You're 100%, you're responsible for yourself. I'm 100% responsible for myself. And it takes 100% to keep improving this thing and making it better year over year. I think that's what people forget. It's not like huge dramatic shifts always need to happen. What has to happen for most people to change? Awareness, acceptance, and accountability. And then just small, consistent actions to improve, right? It's like, it can be— that can be so tactical and tangible. I think of like, you know, my career as a coach. I, I just try to get better every session. It doesn't mean I'm always actually better every session. It's my intention. I'm gonna get better Every session with this client will get better. Sometimes it feels like it was just 2 steps back. Luckily, it's 3 steps forward at some point. And so I don't pretend that every day is a bright, shiny, happy place. I just pretend that every day it's possible to improve, to improve my reaction, to improve my energy, to improve how I treat this person, to improve how I stay congruent. It is that constant desire, that constant intention to have purposeful living. And no one has purposeful intention or purposeful living and decides, "You know, I don't want to improve today." You can accept yourself and still want to improve today. The Dalai Lama can be fully accepting of himself, but he can also want to improve his meditative practice. We all have that impulse to grow, improve, develop mastery, to remind yourself of how capable you are because how far you've come, the childhood you came out of, the trauma and difficulties and challenges have been thrown in your life, and you're still here, still working on yourself. Let's go, growth day. You're still striving. Good for you. It's possible. It's okay to desire something great in our lives. It's absolutely okay. So please let that ambition back in as you think about reinvention. You can be centered, you can be happy, and you can still, in that place of being centered and happy, build a great future. In fact, my argument would be you can't do it any other way. Until you actually open up a new realm of appreciation and consciousness right here in this moment, in your real daily life, You're not going to build the greatest future you could have. Instead, you're going to act out of fear or lack or insecurity, and you're going to build another future that doesn't have boundaries, that isn't healthy, that isn't something that you want. But when you start from a place of being centered and conscious and happy with what we have, feeling blessed, you open up another realm of brainstorming and a higher vibration of ambition. That allows you to see a future in which you are serving with excellence, caring for others, living a deeply meaningful life. It all starts with allowing ambition in, saying to ourselves, I'm worthy, I am capable, and it is possible for me. If you believe that, then I know you can reinvent your life in whatever way is appropriate, meaningful, and exciting for you. Most people don't recognize what they have until they've left it or it's been taken away. Then they come back or they want it back and they go, "Oh my gosh, I love this thing. This thing is so valuable. This is so important. This is so meaningful in my life." And I always tell people, "Don't be that guy. Be the person who sees it now." One of the ways to see it now is to make sure you're doing new enough things and then practicing self-awareness so that you can have that little compare and contrast and you recognize the value of what you have around you. Most people have so much more to be grateful for than they actually are because they don't even see it. It's right in front of them. But until they leave that context and they come back, then they go, "Oh, right." It's kind of like when you were growing up, you thought you're your parents, your family, everything was just crazy and not awful. And then you went to another person's house that was more crazy and awful. And you came back home, you thought, "Whew, I'm so happy I'm home." You know, that happens metaphorically in a lot of parts of our lives, right? You thought your job was terrible and then you took a new job and it was way worse. And you thought, "Oh my God, what have I done?" Right? The grass is always greener. But the good news is when we go through that open gate and we walk back and forth because we're trying new things throughout our lives, we can see that the grass is green over here too and over there, and we can start sensing more meaning and fulfillment in every area of our lives. Be open. Be open. Like, what's going to attract something new into our lives is when we have created the white space around us that a new energy could enter. Right? Most people, they say that they are open. You know, well, Brendan, I'm open, I'm a liberal. Or, Brendan, I'm open, I'm a this. Or, I'm open, I'm that. No, no, that's not what I mean. What I mean by openness is that if you think about it like spatially, right, like this room, what makes this room open is the absence of structure. Does that make sense? So in your own life, sometimes all that structure that you're trying to build to perfect things, to organize things, to discipline things, to keep everything great, that structure can also blind you or prevent and block out more coming in. So sometimes you need to be okay that your routine doesn't have to be perfect, that your habits don't have to be exact, that what you think needs to happen when you go into that next networking experience doesn't need to happen, that dinner out with the girls doesn't have to go a specific way, that you— especially in social situations, you structure less. Lower your expectation, lower your anticipation, and instead go in with a full openness and trust to that universe, a full openness and trust, a faith that something amazing could come in that you that you might not have any control about. If you need help on this, go watch that old movie, what was it called, Serendipity with John Cusack and I can't remember the lady's name in that movie. But it was all about, like, she was in this, she's gonna trust that things are gonna come back around and it's a beautiful thing. So you have to trust that in your social situations that things will come into you. Be open to that possibility of things working out. Here's a simple way to do that. I call it the doorframe tag. Any time I walk into a new door in a social situation that matters to me, right, I'm walking in to go meet somebody new, to go to a networking event, to go out with my friends into a bar, when I walk through a doorframe, I tag, I trigger my mind to say this, what's this gonna be like? There's an enthusiasm. What's this gonna be like? Not like, I know what I want, and I, like, no. What's this gonna be like? People who are like, what's this gonna be like, have higher curiosity. Thus, they have higher openness and faith and trust that something is gonna, something cool is gonna happen. That's gonna draw people into you. Like that anticipation that something good around here is gonna happen, that's gonna draw people to you, okay? So that openness, that trust, that faith, whatever you wanna call it. The second thing we have to do is to learn to listen longer. And I know you're probably like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Brendon, listen, I know I gotta listen." No, I know, but people always say, you know, "Be a better listener." I say, "Well, the essence of being a better listener is to listen longer." See, respect is really just a demonstration of listening a little longer. And I think what we have to do is train ourselves to be more patient with people, to listen to them without trying to solve their issue, without trying to input our own story without trying to figure out the root cause of what's going on for them. I know this as a man, right? When I listen to somebody, especially a female, and she's upset about something or she's venting about something or she's complaining about something or she's just speaking about something that she's very frustrated with and it comes at me, it's easy. I get up, I'm like, I just want to solve it. I want to stop the noise, you know? But that is not a way for me to deepen my relationships. What we have to do is allow people to vent at us a little longer without losing our patience. Matter of fact, some of my best friends in the world, I tell them the 20-minute listening challenge. When they get home, when their spouse comes up to them and starts sharing about the day and wants to talk about a bunch of things, I tell them, just weather that storm for 20 minutes. Just listen for 20 minutes. Try not to solve anything. Try to reflect back what they're saying, or just even be quiet and let them just go. And you know what the funniest thing is? After about 20 minutes, almost everybody runs out of gas. Now you say, "No, no, no, no, my partner can talk for hours and hours and hours." That might be true, but usually when they first connect with you, when they first see you, when they haven't seen you, they just— there's a 20 minutes of And at the end of 20 minutes, they kind of run out a little bit and they're like, "Oh yeah, so how are you?" And that's when you say, "Oh, you know what? It was a really crazy day. Hey, would you mind if I just go get settled?" Just give them the 20 minutes. Just if you, when you pull up to your house, if you have to, you know, just sit in the car, center yourself, then go inside the house and let them get you for 20 minutes. Just give them 20 minutes. Give them 20. You can give them 20 minutes. You love them. Give them 20 minutes, then get yourself settled. But if I think we can learn to allow people more time to talk, we start to find greater connections with people. Often we just cut them off. Often we interrupt them, we tell them what to do, and the worst thing we often do is we say, "Hey, you shouldn't feel that way, and here's why." Or, "Hey, why are you feeling that way?" And we try to do some root cause analysis when really we you could just allow them to express themselves and they'll find their own way. So listen longer. I think for those of you who are really struggling to like meet high-quality people from your perspective, um, I can't recommend enough that you get involved with some local organizations that are nonprofit-based and that you start attending more fundraisers. More acts of service. And I know some of you go, I don't, I don't have anything. I don't have money to contribute maybe, or I don't have, you know, I don't know what I want to do. I'm like, I don't care. Go to a bunch of them and you'll learn what you like. And I will also say this. I know I've been saying this for years. I beat a dead drum a little bit here, but when you go to a fundraiser or you go to a volunteer event, do you know who goes to those? Like, you go to a black tie event, like a fundraiser as an example. Do you know who goes there? The most successful, high-achieving, positive, wealthy, influential people in that particular community. People who have something to give, and in their spirit, in their heart, says, I, I play this role in this community where I'm going to make a difference here. Awesome. I mean, some of my best friends I've met Throughout the years, I met either doing the work of contribution or literally on a nonprofit board or at a fundraiser, because that striving community who wants to make a difference, I can't, I can't share with them. But here's the thing, whether you go do that or you don't, the people who are closest to you, if you want to make a difference with them, if you want to deepen that relationship, find a way to make a difference together. Go do something cool that contributes. Go volunteer. I think if you really want the closest friendships imaginable, you go volunteer once a month or once a quarter. You just, you don't wait for it, you schedule it. I want you to be the friend that schedules the contribution. Be that friend. Don't hope that person comes into your life. You're that scheduler. You're that person who sets that up. You're the person that gets them together because at some point they'll take it over. In all of my greatest friendship circles, I tend to be the person who initiates it and we do something and then someone says, "I'll do it next time." I'm like, "Great." Just do that. Acts of contribution. Just try. And what I mean by try is try with other people again. I watch people talk at lunch, they're not really trying to be engaged. They're not really there. They just— and it's great that they're comfortable with themselves, but they've kind of— they're going through the motions. And very few things ever happen amazing when people are— two people are just going through the motions. Because our default going through the motions, unless it's imbued by like challenge or presence or vibrancy, usually our default is homeostasis of just like, "Yeah." And that is not very attractive, okay? That is not something that gets people's attention. What gets people's attention is when you put in effort to listen to them, to be with them, to be present with them, to change the energy between the two of you, for you to spark something. Stop waiting for good energy to come into your life and start generating great energy, and you'll feel They'll feel the difference. Try with your energy again, right? Really pay attention to people. Be present with them. They'll feel that you're trying and they'll appreciate it. I'm not saying faking, right? So if it's not authentic and real, don't do it. But you must try more often to show up as your best self in the conversations and to try and pull out the best of others. I think the most sexy thing in a person ever is someone who's trying to pull out the best energy from you, right? Whether they're trying to pull out the flirtation of you or pull out the joy of you or the gratitude of you or that positive range of emotions from you, that's pretty sexy. So try to bring out the best of others. I do not expect other people to think or feel or experience life like me. It just isn't there. I don't think my team members should think like me or are like me. I don't think that my spouse is anything like me. She has her own universe of emotions and feelings. They're very different than mine. Trust me, way different. I think my family, my friends, it's like there's no, for me, demand that they think like me. It doesn't mean I don't get frustrated that we don't have a good relationship or I don't like their communication or I don't like something they said or feel neglected or hurt. We all have those things. The question is, over a period of time, do you have depth and closeness in that relationship? I promise there's a ton of things Denise, my spouse, she would say that she doesn't like about how I think or how I experience the world. And I would say the same about her. But the question isn't, do we like everything that we say? The question is, is there depth and closeness and intimacy in our relationship? And that only happens if enough times you realize the person is different than you. Different preferences, different hopes, different needs. Like, I'm, I'm probably needier than my wife is in terms of, like, emotional stuff. I just— the way I am. And you might be different than your spouse, your friend, your dad, your mom, someone who raised you. And if you're trying to cram the world with this expectation that they gotta be, think, and behave exactly like you, that is where there is a ripping of that relationship. You gotta let other people have their own life. And the more you try to control their life, the more misery you have. A lot of mental health is letting other people live their life. Not trying to control everything. You know what mental illness is? When you feel like you must control everything. There's a part of reinventing your life that really says, I'm worth it. I'm worth having a better future. A part of reinvention that says, I'm capable. No matter what I've been through, I am capable. I am stronger than I think. I know I can build and architect the future I desire. And there's a part of reinvention that says it is possible. It's possible to change. It's possible to manifest your dreams. It's possible to improve every area of your life, even just small little tweaks. It's possible to have what you desire, to be who you know you can become, to manifest a future where you are happier and healthier. And wealthier and in more love with yourself and your life. It is possible. I'm worthy. I'm capable. It's possible. You must begin there if there's any hope for reinventing or changing our lives. Because if you don't feel worthy, well, that's on you to change. No one's going to give you a permission card that says, finally, hey babe, you're ready. You're worthy of change now. No, it is an internal reinvention of your mindset of how you perceive yourself. And that perception of self, what that comes down to being is, I'm going to honor myself and honor the gifts I've been given and honor this breath and use the short time on this planet to enjoy it and to build and enjoy the life that I truly desire. I'm worthy of that. No one has to give me a permission card. I have to open up my brain and go, you know what? Dang, I'm a good person. I went through a lot in my life. I've struggled. I've fought. I'm here and I still showed up today. I'm worthy. I recognize at some point my attitude and energy in the world was my choice. And I thought, if I'm going to bring— if I get to choose over the long term and in the moment, I want to experience joy. I want to be happy and free and loving and light, and I'm going to bring that into each day. I really believe it. If you want one thing from today, if you could take one thing as a major intention this year, I would ask for you to choose to bring the joy every day. It doesn't mean I have to fake it till I make it. It doesn't mean that I don't have dark, dark, difficult days and moments of my life. It just means on par, over the average, across the days, most often you're gonna get joy from this kid. That's a choice. I was not born that way. You have to challenge yourself to go to the next level, whatever that is for you, right? Whatever that is for you. What is that? Please write it down. What is the next level of challenge for you this year? In your business, if you have a business, what's the challenges you're going to take on? Right? Whether you call that goals, priorities, initiatives, OKRs, you know, key performance indicators, whatever you call it, those are deliberate challenges. You are setting a stepladder of ever-increasing challenges, not because you're glutton for punishment, because in your heart, you know there's potential. I think it's really important to stay in your job in a relationship? And I don't mean by your employment, right? You can quit your job, but don't quit the relationship. But what's your job in a relationship? It's to love. And it's so easy to forget that because we get mad at somebody and they didn't run the task or empty the garbage or take out the dishes. Wait, I think I got that backwards. But they forgot something and we get mad at them and we forget our job there is to love. And if you're really going to choose love over choosing your past, or you're going to choose love over fear or hurt or pain, or choose love over being, you know, right, then you're gonna start to find something switches in that relationship and it's a good thing. See, most people aren't choosing love, they're choosing fear. Most people aren't choosing love, they're choosing hurt. And because of that, over and over and over again, that simple choice in the relationship, they're not approaching the relationship with the intention of love, right? If you can approach your relationship with the intention of love to say, look, I'm just gonna keep bringing joy and love and acceptance and compassion and empathy and vibrancy and sensuality to this relationship, and you're always doing that more often than you're bringing the negative stuff, that relationship will suddenly start to turn positive. It will get easier as you change your intentions to be more geared towards love. That's your job. Stay in your job. Is your job in the relationship, to love this person, to make their day, to surprise them, to care for them. Stop asking so much what you're getting from the relationship and how they've done you all wrong and start asking, what have you been doing right? What have you been doing to add value, love, energy, vibrancy, sensuality to their life? What have you been doing to love them? Ask the question, how can you deliver more love to your partner and to the world, and you might start to experience what we call the charged life. Don't forget to celebrate and integrate the wins. Don't forget to celebrate and integrate the wins. What should I do with my life? Well, align with those things that make you feel alive, deepen your relationships, chase meaningful pursuits, and grow. And don't forget along the way to celebrate and to integrate the wins. Now, these are two different things, by the way. Lots of people celebrate, but they don't integrate the win. I want you to do both. Celebrate means, hey, you had a good day? Great. Go for a walk. Tell your spouse about it. Celebrate. Call a friend. Celebrate. Celebration for the human species is about social sharing. Yes, you can crack open that champagne by yourself and celebrate, But when you share the win with somebody else, whole different level of impact in your heart and your soul. That's celebrating. Share it with other people. Small wins. I put up my website today. I got that promotion. I said I was going to complete that project. I completed it. It's okay to celebrate and talk about your wins. We still live in a society where we're supposed to be all coy about our wins and our achievements. I'm like, why? By the way, I'm not one of those people, I don't show you my jet and my cars and my houses. And I'm not that person of like, look at me celebration. But if we hang out, we talk, I'm like, oh my gosh, I finished my book last night. Oh, you know, I really wanted to donate to this thing. I got to do it. I celebrate the things that I'm doing that are meaningful pursuits. That's important. But integrating the wins is something separate. Integrating the wins means you sit with the win, you meditate on it, and you acknowledge yourself, you acknowledge your efforts, you acknowledge the outcome, and you cheer yourself on to keep going. You integrate into your psyche, into your identity, a person who is capable, a person who manifested something, a success. You speak to yourself in such a way that you acknowledge your effort, you acknowledge the impact, and you say, keep going. What it does is it builds a character that knows it's capable. And so many of us, you've achieved a ton of things, but you've never given yourself any credit for any of it. So you're still with a self-esteem of a teenager when you should be a capable, confident 45-year-old woman. I know you're not all 45-year-old women, apologize, but you get the idea. Some of you are still sharing your insecurities as high school students, even though you have a job, you have a house, you've made your house payment, you're doing good work in the world, and you're still lacking all self-esteem. Why? You were never taught and you never learned to integrate the win. Integrating the win can be as simple as at the end of the day to sit down and journal on the good things that happen. Acknowledge that you worked hard for it. Cheer yourself on as someone who's capable and tell yourself to keep going. Do that simple. You can celebrate yourself just for being alive and surviving this far. The habit is generate energy. Mm. Okay. Not necessarily have energy. Create energy. Create energy. And what they do, the way we measure that was kind of academic. Mental energy, which is tied to your focus and your stamina and your ability to manage complex tasks without too much mental stress. Number 2 is emotional energy, which is just the quality of positive emotions. And number 3 is physical energy. High performers are 40% more likely to work out 5 times per week than the rest of their peers. So that means the top 15% most high-performing people in the world tend to work out 5 days per week. And that workout could be defined as, you know, 45-minute brisk walk or, you know, HIIT intensity or whatever it is. But 40% more likely, that's a huge finding. And what we found is high performers just have better well-being and happiness and physical conditioning than everybody else. One stunning finding was, uh, CEOs senior executives and business owners, they report expending as much energy as athletes who are competitive now. I can imagine. Yeah, yeah. I kind of— I was surprised by that. I would have thought, you know, athletes would be 10% more. I mean, the emotional and mental energy they have to— the decision-making, the conversations, the big deals, the stakiness. Yeah, it's a lot of energy. It's a lot. And that's why, I mean, if you really want to achieve your dreams you have to care for your body, your mind. That's why all these things, you know, finally resonating in the marketplace because the science of meditation or taking a break or, you know, managing your own energy, sleep is everything. And I think all of that is really important. And we say generate energy because there's this myth that, you know, some people have happiness or they have, it's like, no, you generate it. You don't have happiness, you generate it. You create it. What would be some of your things that you've come up with to be able to get that self-eval— or self-assessment? It happens every night, and it happens at the end of each week, and it happens at the end of each month. Okay. So every night, and I codified this into the High Performance Planner eventually, some of my perspective, but we also did the research of the world's highest performing people. Sure, 'cause you have a book that's all focused on all the high performance research and everything. Yeah, it's called High Performance Habits. It's the biggest biggest study that's ever been done on high performers worldwide, and I learned a lot about how they speak to themselves and what they ask themselves and how they evaluate. And so it was very clear that at the end of each day they do it, sometimes it's unconscious, sometimes it's very deliberate and written out, but they're essentially asking, okay, this day, what was great about it? This day, where did I not do as well? This day, what did I learn about somebody else? What did I learn about myself? What did I learn about my team? What did I learn about my business? They're connecting with what they learned that day, and that's a real big part about it. They're asking, you know, how could I have handled this little thing better, and they're asking, like, did I enjoy it? Was I fully here? Was I alive? Was I present with it? Whatever it is, in some ways they're asking those types of questions. In the High Performance Lineup I also put, here's the 6 major habits we found from research matter the most, and you score yourself on them. So I score myself. Then at the end of the week, I— So you're doing that on a daily basis? I do that on the daily. Then every Sunday I do my weekly review on Sundays. And I look back to the week and I ask very similar questions about the week. But at the end of, on every Sunday, I look at the 10 major areas of my life. 10 major areas of our life are things like mind, body, mission, family, friends, adventure, finances, These types of things. So I look at 10, and everyone should have their measure, their blocks of things that they look at every week. And then I score myself on a score of 1 to 10. So maybe that week, my friends, you know what, I didn't see anybody, I'm a 3. I'm a good friend, but I really wasn't, I didn't do it, I'm a 3 out of 10. But maybe my mission, I crushed it that week, I'm a 9. And so if you score yourself every week, Right. You will get better. It doesn't mean it won't be sometimes disheartening, discouraging, or, you know, frustrating. Sure. But being aware is half the game. But most people don't schedule awareness. Every morning you got to get up, you got to pick up that spear of purpose, you got to cast as far as you can see it today. Throw that— cast that spear of purpose as far as you can today. As far as you can. And then your day is to go march towards that spear with so much commitment, so much discipline, so much resilience, that then you get that spear, you get to throw it out as far as you can again. That is having the vision, and that is having the discipline to go get it. The interesting thing is you have to take that outside of your head. You probably have a clearer vision for what's important to you than your wife does, than your partner does, than your friends do, than your family does. And so a huge part of the vision principle is you've got to communicate it more. You got, you got to help everybody see what that vision ends up being, where they participated or they didn't depending on your timing. And now it's like, oh, this is the thing we're rallying around. This is the spear. I'm going to throw it. We're going to go together. Okay, great. Let's go. And that command of the vision is what I mean by the vision decision. It doesn't mean other people didn't participate in it, but you own it. You own it. A big part about it is your life's decisions Whether you are conscious or unconscious, throughout your life, your life's decisions were leading to a vision. And today is a good opportunity to say, is this the vision? Is this what I wanted? Or did I not know what I wanted? Did I just go along the ride with everybody else and do what everyone else told me my whole life? Or Did I architect this? Was I thoughtful about what the decision was, what I was after? Today's a good day to look at the vision you have for your life and ask, does it match what your reality is today? To learn to role model positivity and good values, right? It's super hard to attack me online at this point because for a decade and over 300 episodes of a podcast and over 200 episodes of my YouTube videos and 6 bestselling books and literally being on stage in front of millions of people and graduating millions of people from our online courses, just the effort of all that, the messaging is so clear, right? I'm the guy that tells you to be more intentional. I'm the guy that tells you to be a role model. I'm the guy that tells you be active excellent at what you do so you can be of greater service to the world, and the more I talk about living fully and loving openly and making more of a difference, of stepping into that role model mindset, of honoring the struggles of life, and being authentically you, the message ends up standing for itself. You know, they could attack you in a video, or they might not like my shirt in this video, or might think it's stupid I took a picture of, you know, the cat, or, you know, They don't, they judge me or my clothes or my wife or something they see, but the totality of what you have done, no one gets to take away from that. They just don't. Even if they attack it, because here's what happens. Remember, as you build that big tribe, you've imbued good values in the marketplace. Your tribe starts fighting for you. Your tribe starts canceling the haters. Your tribe starts fighting back for you, explaining for you. Your tribe starts getting your back because they're like, "Wait, why are you judging this guy? He's put out a decade of free content. Why are you judging this person? They've done all of these good works." And your community, your tribe, ends up getting your back when you have imbued that tribe with good values and honestly demonstrated but also commanded, demanded, begged, pleaded, cajoled for people to be to be positive forces in the world. You know, at base of all of my messaging has always been that did I matter message. That message about servant leadership. The message about get so good at what you do so you can be of greater service to the world. Like, how do the haters come at me when my message is about contribution? That's what you wanna think about, is that as you role model positivity, contribution, good values in the world, your tribe tribe stands up for you, but you also stand up for yourself more because you know true down deep in your heart you're doing good work. Like, no one can make me question my work. I'm going to do this. I tell my team all the time, I'm going to do this till I'm 100 years old. Like, I'm always going to be that guy putting out personal development and psychology work. I love that field. It's what I care deeply about, and it's what I've stood for for a decade. And no one gets to take that away from me. No one gets take it away from you. So please don't let a hater ever slow you down. I hope that supports you, and I hope you always believe in your message. You have a voice, you have great art and contributions to give the world. Do not slow down. When's the last time you tried to make the person you're talking with feel like the only person in the world? You know, we do that when we're dating. We, you know, we're out on a new date with somebody, man, we just They just wanna shine with all that attention. But over a period of time, it's like, honey, get me a beer, or, you know, people just stop paying attention. They don't even see the people they're talking with. They never look in the eye and actually connect anymore. They don't try to make that person unique and amazing, and so what happens? The person's, the vibe between the two people is lost. So, have you been doing a good job in that department? Making the person in front of you the only person in the world. You want to have a better relationship with your kids or your spouse or your team or the new people you meet at networking functions. I mean, it doesn't matter. When you meet a person, if you just shine your full attention on them, they're gonna be like, that person has such good energy, I don't even know why. It's because you're giving them attention. People have to have that balance of those recharge and recovery moments, right? And those moments of being in the game. And so much of what people don't realize is you're always in the game. Everything you're doing now is preceding that next thought. Everything you were doing 4 hours ago, and what you put in your body 4 hours ago, preceded the energy you feel now. And I tell people, you don't realize you're always a little bit in training. You're always setting yourself up for success or failure. And it doesn't mean you have to be like, on all the time. It just means be deliberate and thoughtful about your habits and what you're doing throughout the day so that you can quickly call forth your genius, that you can quickly and easily flow into the things with your most exceptional side, that you can be intentional and thoughtful and kind with other people because you are in touch with your full humanity. Because what most people are doing is they're so disconnected from their body, so disconnected from their Sure, because they're just going. And they're running, they don't realize it, but it shows up in their life. They're running in an avoidant strategy in their life, right? And avoid— because avoidance feels amazing. Avoidance is a great short-term strategy, sure, to guarantee comfort and safety. Wow. And avoidance is also a great long-term strategy to guarantee suffering. Right, so avoidance now feels good. Avoidance later will wreck your life. Sure. If you keep avoiding life, and what most people are doing is they're avoiding their absolute best. They're avoiding it because the absolute best requires them to put it out there a little bit more, right? The absolute best requires them to like use their brain harder, their physical body harder. Schedule. There is no discipline without a schedule. It's so easy if your calendar doesn't have anything in it the next 6 weeks, don't be mad at yourself for lacking discipline. No one shows up on a day and go, "It's discipline day," and has nothing to do. Discipline requires a schedule. So fill out your schedule, work the schedule. Fill out the schedule, work the schedule. Fill out the schedule, work— as you fill out your schedule and you work the schedule, you get more self-trust. With that self-trust comes confidence. From that confidence comes more competence. We gain more mastery and we're in the game more. We feel good about ourselves. The progress mind loves it, eats it up. It's like, hey, we're doing it. We said we were gonna do it, we did it. We moved towards our outcome today with a schedule. What an idea, right? I've got ideas how to make my team more high-performing, but some of these ideas involve organizational changes that would require buy-in from my managers and peers. What can I do to persuade others in a culture where change is often resisted? Resisted and slow. You know what, change is almost always resisted and it's always slow. The most important thing you can do, Jeff, is to realize a simple phrase. I teach it in everything I do. It might have been in the video. The most 5 powerful words in all of leadership is people support what they create. If you want buy-in from people, you have to facilitate a process where they came up with the answers. If you want buy-in from people, you have to facilitate the discussions and the meetings and the decision-making process in which people put their ideas into that hat, because then when it's their idea, they support it. When they had no input towards the idea, they always fight it. If they got to contribute one little piece of it, even if they don't want to do it. And I've had conversations with team members at one of our companies before, it's like, listen, I know you don't like the idea and you're not even sure of the general direction, but I want to make sure you've got at least a piece of it. So what's one thing you could contribute or give to make this more successful? What's one area you could play in what we're going to do that you might like? And just get them, I mean, get their foot in the door of doing doing something or contributing something or agreeing to something because when people have skin in the game, which is their ideas, or they can see their future towards it, when they have that kind of skin in the game, they get excited about it and they support it. The worst thing you can do is go roll out something to everybody that changes everything without having had them participate. Right, participation gets buy-in. Got it? Participation gets the buy-in. The strongest relationships are built on encouragement, right? We know this from the social sciences. I know many of you guys heard me recommend, you know, for the last decade the work by John Gottman and his wife in research and relationships. I love that work. And one of the critical things that came out of that was such a simple distinction that that happy couples tend to praise each other 5 times more than they complain or negate. And whether that ratio is true in all relationships across all cultures is probably not super validated. But what I do believe is the simple way to break that down is encourage your partner a lot, a lot. Encourage them, cheer them on. You know they got a big day, do something. Look, I got this on this laptop over here from Denise. I don't— can I see that? You guys probably can't see this too. No, I'm not going to show up. It's just— it's a Post-it note that she gave me like 6 months ago. I still have it on my computer. It says, I love you. I appreciate you. I know you are doing big things. I love you. I appreciate you. I know you are doing things. It was just a Post-it note. She put on my computer in a really particularly difficult week that I was having. And we're both pretty good about leaving little notes around for each other, especially when we're traveling or we'll be apart or something like that. But also throughout the day, like, she puts something over there that she likes. She does. I'm like, I love that. Good job. That's amazing. And we don't say that flippantly. Like, we were like, that's, that's great. That's amazing. Like, we cheer each other on a lot. And I think that's huge. The ability to encourage one another is so vital, so vital. People with good mojo, they have more joy and enthusiasm for what's coming up and for what they're experiencing. So in this present moment, they're taking it in more with a great level of appreciation and gratitude. And because they're doing that, they're kind of playing with the moment right now. There's joy. It's kind of like they're that person who's opening that gift at Christmas. You know, they don't, they don't even know what's in it. Could be a small gift, a big gift, but they're like, they're excited. You can see there's enthusiasm for unwrapping this gift. Well, they bring that same joy and that same enthusiasm to unwrapping this experience that we're gonna have together, for unwrapping this moment. For even if they're just at the restaurant waiting for the meal, they're excited for the meal to come. There's an amazing mojo or around them because there's enthusiasm. You know, they're breathing life into the moment. They're, they're feeling a sense of excitement for what's about to come next. So they're so fun to hang out with because it always feels like something's about, something's about to happen because you can just sense that energy from them that they're excited and appreciative of the moment. How do you ensure that a new team member is quickly integrated into the high-performing team? Andrea, two things. Number one, you make sure you understand where that new team member is going to play, and you assign a lead in your company to mentor that person. You make sure, first and foremost, if it's your team, you sit them down, you talk through some of the things that I've covered so far already about what is it that we do here, what are we trying to create here, that you make sure that that person is really clear about kind of like what they're going to be doing on a weekly or monthly or quarterly rhythm. Like, a rhythm is everything, which we'll talk about. And that they have somebody who's kind of their peer or their guide or their lead over their first 60 to 90 days at the company. It's huge, huge, huge, especially if they're not starting with a group. I tend to like to hire in groups, and I highly, highly recommend that. If you're gonna hire another 5 people, don't Don't hire one in September, one in October, one in November. Be like, okay, I guess if that means hiring people earlier, you hire them earlier. A little later, a little later. But if you can hire in groups, then you create culture. If you're always hiring one-offs, it's harder to do that. So first, hire in groups. If you can't hire in group, hire that lead. Make sure that they are very clear on their rhythm, and that will help. Andrea sold that to assist you with how to think through that process. Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. For some incredible John Assaraf motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. What's the number one reason we procrastinate? Is it because we want to? Have you ever heard of the law of secondary gain? So think about this for just a minute. When you procrastinate,
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