Unlock LIFE CHANGING Habits with Brendon Burchard

The habits that everyone wants to talk about in the popular literature or books is like, you know, these small habits or atomic habits or automatic habits or unconscious habits. Those are valuable. Those are very important. But high performance requires deliberate habits. A deliberate habit means you kind of have to force yourself to do it. It's not easy. It's not automatic. It's not tiny. It's like going the extra mile thing. It's the tough work of life to go to another level. You want to be at the top. It's really friggin' hard. You have to accept that. And so what we did is we studied. We said, what is that difference maker? We spent $1 million on research. High performance means succeeding over the long term. In any industry or endeavor or whatever while still maintaining positive well-being and relationships? What high performers have answered is, how do you succeed over the long term without wrecking your health, your mindset, your positivity, and your relationships? We know lots of successful people, but they ruined all their relationships. We know successful people, they ruined their health. They're not high performers. They wouldn't qualify. What do they do? It's different practices. We call them high performance habits and constantly revisiting to become clear every day. What is my intention? That revisit of clarity is supremely important to them. Not setting a goal on January 1st and forgetting it. It's literally consistency in intention. Like every day you hear about high performers, they look at their goals. Every day you set your intention. When I work with Oprah, she taught me every meeting you have with Oprah, she starts with, what's our intention of this meeting? Every meeting, because that's seeking clarity. So high performers seek clarity more often.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because I need them, because I want to wake up every single day and get pushed by somebody who's doing a lot more than me, and in watching their videos, it inspires me to be bolder, to have more courage, and to go chase down the life of my dreams. And I hope it does the same for you. So today, let's get some incredible motivation from the one and only Brendon Burchard.

Enjoy. You must always begin your morning with going over your schedule and your goals. Never, never, never just show up to work without that plan. You need to have that plan. You need to, that morning, be very clear about what the day is, what's important, and why. And if you don't do that, yes, you can still hit high performance, yes, you can still be great, but you will not be as consistent as you could be. There's something magical, and you guys all know this, I spend 20 minutes every morning just looking at the day. Literally, it might just be, I might only have 5 things I have to do that day, but I'm gonna, I'll sit 20 minutes thinking about each of those 5 things. That amount of thought and intention that goes into it allows me to show up and do a lot of things you see me do. People always say, "Jesus, Brendon, you just show up and talk." I'm like, "Yeah, but I probably gave it a good 20 minutes this morning of thought." Some people say, "Oh my gosh, you know, you get so much done." It's like, "Yeah, because you know what? When I was thinking that morning about the full day, I also usually axed a lot, took out a lot. I know I have to get things done, so what'd I do?" I pushed away a bunch of things that I already had on schedule today from weeks, literally weeks or months ago. They're gone. So I can refocus today to make sure that I finish some of that. So your morning has to be planned. Challenge yourself out there, because when you challenge yourself, it puts you in that place of, I don't know how this is going to go. That's where you belong more often. That's going to bring life back. I don't know how this is going to go. That's where life is. If you always know how it's going to go, boredom lives there. If you always know how it's going to go, the peddling of the, you know, self-help gurus who say you need certainty, that's where they're at. That's not how life really works. Those who remain curious, open, those are the ones who succeed further. They're learners. If you're always grasping at some adolescent desire for certainty, You're in the wrong group. Because I don't know, I don't play at any levels in the highest levels of the world of anyone peddling certainty. What they're peddling is the reality. You need to be adaptive. You need to learn. Yes, trust yourself, but be curious. Challenge yourself. Be so curious about how it could be different. Do something new. And when you do that, I promise you, that's where life really is. Grasping to make it exactly as we want. Didn't we just fail at that the last 3 years? Didn't we just find out that doesn't work so good? When you try to, you know, edict how the world has to be and how your relationships have to be and how people have to act, it doesn't always turn out so good. We need to be more adaptive, more flexible, more open, more curious, not just in our own lives to ignite ourselves, but I think in our relationships too. Sometimes you forget in your relationship the persons that you love, you kind of forget. You don't pay attention to them anymore. You don't listen to what they want anymore. You don't know their goals anymore. You're not curious about them anymore. You know, I know my wife. I know my husband, he's always this way. And then you put them in your little certainty and expectation box, and all of a sudden they're not thriving in the relationship anymore because they can tell you're not genuinely interested anymore. So we've got to change. We've got to do things that are new. Everyone gets this wrong in personal development. They just haven't done the work. They tell you, you want meaning. That's how you know a beginner in personal development versus the pros. I know a lot of people who have meaning in their life. They have a great job, they got 2 great kids, they have an amazing spouse or partner, they're doing something. Some of you guys know, I actually started my first seminars for nonprofit leaders, if you didn't know. My first, like, real seminars were teaching nonprofits how to partner with entrepreneurs to raise more money, and entrepreneurs how to partner with nonprofits to spread a message or be part of a mission. Those are my first seminars, working with nonprofits. Do you know how many nonprofit leaders around this world still call me every single week? They're nonprofit leaders, and they're unhappy. They're saving lives in other countries, and they're unhappy. And when we get into it, like, what's going on there? There's a difference between meaning, having meaning, or generating meaning, and meaningful pursuits. If— let me tell you this, if you lost the pursuit in your life, that's the difference between the comfortable life and the charged life. The pursuit. The pursuit of something greater or harder. The challenge, the push. That part where you have to extend yourself beyond the comfort into the demand. It makes you feel alive. It makes you find flow and challenge and difficulty of contribution. If contribution is too easy for you, the meaning will never make you feel fulfilled. Say it again. If your contribution is too easy for you, the meaning that you could have there will never make you feel fulfilled. You always wonder, why am I not fulfilled? Because you're doing something that is too easy for you. The human psyche drives for competence and the development of that competence, as we will talk about in a moment. So I know amazing people, they don't feel fulfilled because they lost the hunt. That's what we call it in Montana. Other metaphors, someone help me out. The hunt, the pursuit. Right? You're not driving for something anymore. You're doing something, but you're not driving for something that matters to you. Live, love, matter. You got to drive something that matters to you. If it doesn't matter to you, it could be so meaningful and you could be doing something meaningful, but if you're not stretching, if there's no pursuit, we lost the edge. And as soon as we lost the edge, we're back in the comfortable life and we don't know why. And then we're bored. And then we're disconnected, and then we're in the cage, and then we're resentful, and then we're bitter, and then we think those bastards don't understand, and we're the animal in the back of the cage. This is so important. What's the pursuit? What's that contribution you're gonna go after? It might be a little outside your comfort zone. It might be a little bit much. And I know people get really hooked about the contribution word. Does that mean I need to change the world? I'm like, no, no. What's the contribution? Listen, there can be creative contribution. Making art is a contribution, right? Giving, serving. Yeah, you can write checks, you can volunteer, but volunteerism isn't the only way of contributing. Contributing sometimes is being an unbelievable mom. Contributing sometimes means getting involved locally again. Contributing sometimes means being a great leader at work where you stop just doing your work and you see the other people at work and you work together and you're pursuing something, the drive back. A lot of companies, when I work with them, I'm like, oh, you all lost your pursuit. You became an organizational stagnant company. There's no pursuit. There's no edge there anymore. We got to get that performance edge back in the culture. And all of a sudden people are like, woo, they're alive again.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business.

I'll see you there. You want to accelerate learning? Here it is: goals, deadlines, deliverables. I know that's so basic. That's personal development 101. Just most people have never applied it to learning. If I want to learn, and you know, some, some of you know I've done this in so many different areas of my life because you've been with me for a long time in my journey. But let's— I'll go back before most of you knew me. In, in high school, I want to learn French. Okay, you can just show up to French class once a week or 3 times a week and just consume. But unless it changes when you say, my goal is to learn conversational French because I'm going to Paris in, you know, in 4 months. So in that 4 months, I want to be able to introduce myself, ask where a restaurant is, ask where a bathroom is, get around town and visit these specific places and ask for clarification. And ask people if they speak English and ask where I should go. Now I gotta structure, don't I? To learn French is a philosophical— is, is the philosophy level. To learn French at this level is a science. This is the science of learning. You've got to get more clear about your learning goals. What do you want to learn specifically? By when? And what is the thing that you can do, the output or the deliverable, that shows that you learned it? Without these 3 things detailed, you are learning slow. And this is what most people do. You know, I'd like to learn about this thing. They buy 5 books on Amazon, one of which they read. They spend one random weekend downloading a TED Talk or, you know, getting sucked into YouTube. But there was no goal. There's no— this is the architecture of learning. Would you write that down? This is the architecture. This is the, this is the foundation. Without this, you are just browsing. Let me say that again. Without this, you are browsing. You are not learning. Real learning requires this first and foremost. Write this down. Without goals, deadlines, and deliverables, you are browsing. You are not learning. And that's why most people are struggling. They're only browsing. They're only browsing. They're only reacting. They live a life of browsing, reacting, browsing, reacting, browsing, reacting. Without that goal, without that strive, that thing to go for, we're just gonna meander forever. But we can't advance learning if we're meandering. Listen, you learn a lot by wandering. I'm a very— I love curiosity. I love walking around. But remember, I promised this was a session about advanced learning. This is not just about general conception and just like hoping to be inspired. Advanced learning requires a goal, a deadline, a deliverable. The first habit that we discovered of high performers worldwide, and high performers tend to be the top 15% of successful people in whatever field that is, And usually, you know, and that's the broad 190 countries. In the US, it's the top 3%. Hands down, the habit that really changed their trajectory was this habit called seek clarity. Notice it doesn't say get clarity. Yeah. High performers seek clarity. I'll give an example. Yeah, please. Like with, with Oprah. I've had the blessing of working with Oprah. If you have a meeting with Oprah, When she walks in that meeting, her first thing she asks is, what's our intention for this meeting? Mm-hmm. Now, lots of executives walk in meetings, they just start the meetings. She's seeking clarity of what is this about? And you take an underperformer in the work world or at your job, what they, they just bumble in and they're like, okay, let's just do it. High performers go, what is this about? Where does it fit in? What's the priority? They're asking themselves questions constantly. And not questions of self-doubt, questions of clarity. Like, who could I be? What's my best self look in this situation? You know, that's a question high performers ask. They want to know, how can I be of most service in this situation? A lot of people just go through the motions. High performers seek clarity. They ask the questions. And because they get clarity and seek clarity throughout the process, they get ahead faster. Because a lot of people just— and they're good, but a lot of people are just brunt force workers. They'll just go and do it and they'll just apply force and will and hope and fire and hours at something. But often they're running in the wrong direction. Yeah, absolutely. High performers, you know, it's like in directions. Some people will drive for 50 minutes, other people will pull aside in 5 and go, hey, where do I go? That's the high performer. And they're going to get there faster and succeed in life. That's seeking clarity. Have you ever struggled to be more disciplined? You know you got that paper due next week, but you don't do anything all week even though you know it's coming. Or you set up a brand new habit that you're so excited about that you know can improve your life, your relationships, or your work, but you don't stick to it. Or you started that workout routine, you got really pumped up, fired up into it, you lost a couple pounds, but then, you know, 3 weeks later it was gone, and what did you blame? Blamed your discipline. He's like, ah, I wish I was more disciplined and everything would be great. And the reality is it's true. You know, discipline is one of the most important things we can develop in our lives because without that ability to be sort of self-reliant and willful to get things done on a continual basis, we never get that great amount of momentum and progress towards what we really want. And I bet there's a lot of areas of your in your life that could really benefit from being more disciplined, whether you're eating healthier or working out more often or being more disciplined about doing your art on a consistent basis or contributing or even being more disciplined about just speaking up for yourself when you know that you should. I'm going to assume a little bit that because it's going to be a short video, I want to make sure that you have something in mind that you want to be more disciplined to. So think about a major dream or a major ambition that for some reason you like, gosh, I wish I really stuck with my sort of actions and routines more often. If you can have that in mind, then this is gonna really serve you. I have 4 ideas for you today. The first idea is to emotionally engage with that dream each morning of your life. See, a lot of people don't actually struggle with the discipline part in terms of the doing the thing. It's that they're not getting revved up to do the thing. In other words, we got a problem with motivation, not necessarily just discipline. We have a problem with that once in a while you hit it, you do it, you do the work, but a lot of times you fall off because you're not emotionally engaged in it. It's like if you want a lot of discipline, you need a high level of emotional connection and focus on that thing that you want to work towards. So every morning what I want you to do is just start a new visualization practice. When you wake up in the morning, close your eyes, think about the dream, the aspiration, the thing that you're really after in life, and just visualize it and really get yourself emotionally attached, emotionally engaged with it. Think about how great it will feel for you to have that thing or be that thing or contribute that thing to make that difference. Just think about it, allow it to well up in your heart a little bit, get excited about it, Remember the dream. That's why we get away from discipline, because we're so busy with the chaos of the world that we emotionally are no longer attached in a way that our brain says, hey man, focus on this. It's important to you. Remember? So if your heart is disengaged, it's difficult to stay disciplined. So every morning, make it a practice to actually just imagine the payoff, the benefit, the contribution, the art, the thing that you do and are doing and do contribute. If you can do that more often, you'll be more fired up and you'll stay back on track. You don't need to shame yourself in self-improvement. What you need to do is be aware and set up a better system. The concepts of self-improvement should inspire you, not shame you. And you're the only person who shames yourself. And the routine that you have of shaming yourself needs to end. If I just keep shaming myself that I haven't written a book in 5 years, what do I do? Is that— am I more likely to write a book or do I need to go, you know what, I need to acknowledge that I can't trust myself with that process cuz I'm not getting the outcome. Let me set up a better system. Let me set up some habits or some routines, some social situations or obligations that will turn me over, that will help me. How many of you have a purpose, a clear, like, purpose, a mission, an inspiration? You have a future vision, you're so excited about it, and you still don't do crap. See, our world's been conned into thinking, well, if you have a why, you'll do it. I'm like, oh no, trust me, the only people who do that are academics and motivational speakers who write books on it, who've never actually coached and worked with people over a series of years and been responsible for their results. That's why I love coaches, because coaches can't BS stuff because we actually work with people and we only get paid if we get results, not if we publish a book. I love knowing your why, but pretending that's the problem or the total solution is never the right answer. Lots of people have a very clear why and they don't do crap. They might have a why and a purpose and a vision, a dream, They don't have self-trust, or they don't trust their team, or they don't trust the people around them. And as soon as that trust is eroded, you can have a compelling dream, you can have vision board after vision board, battle board after battle board, but you don't move. The most important thing though is to hear what I'm sharing here and not shame yourself. Third big idea, which I love, is my 45-day quit rule. Now this is one of those things I think I mentioned in the email announcing this, you guys aren't gonna wanna do. There's two things on here I know you're not gonna wanna do. This one I forced myself to do. Here's what the 45-day quit rule is, and it's hard for me. I hate this one. I look at all my big project ideas. I don't know about you, but I have a journal with all my big ideas in it, or I have my vision board, or I have an Excel spreadsheet of all these different ideas and projects I wanna do. And I've got, like, you know, right, as an example right now, I know my next 6 books I'm going to write. I know 'em. I know my next 3 campaigns I'm gonna launch. I know 'em. But here's what I have to force myself to do, and I don't like it. I say, okay, if this is a major project that I want to do, even if it could lead to significant growth, if I'm not going to start it Listen to this. If I'm not going to start it in the next 45 days, it's off my plate until next year. I just get real. I go, okay. And I'm like, okay, well, if that's not gonna— if I'm not gonna start on this thing by the early fall, I'm not gonna do it. And I literally just take it from my journal, in my little bucket of things I want to do this year, and I put it out and I feel so mentally relieved. A lot of people have a lot of anxiety about the number of projects they have on their plate that they really want to do. And so what ends up happening is that anxiety leads to a lot of procrastination. That anxiety leads to a lot of poor prioritization because there's so much to do. They're like, oh my God, there's so much to do here, so I won't do any of it. Ever had that? Have you ever found yourself in front of Netflix going, oh my God, I have so much to do, but I just watched the 4th video in the 3rd season? Has that ever happened? You have so much to do, and that's the problem. You have so much to do that you haven't prioritized what you are going to do, so you don't do anything. So what I do, is this time of year, I look at all those things that are on my plate and I get honest. Which ones am I gonna start in the next 45 days? And if I'm not gonna start in the next 45 days, now it's not even on my mental concern. It's not even on my dashboard. No anxiety there. No, oh my God, I still gotta get that one in. Nope, it's gone. Number 1, adopt the role model mindset. Okay. When you adopt the role model mindset, that's the domino that knocks down every other strength you'll be required to call upon. What's that mindset? Role model mindset, bro. What does that mean? Role model mindset means I realize that as I'm going to endure difficulty in life, the kids are watching, my friends, my family, others are observing and being influenced by me. There is a contagion out there, but there's also an emotional contagion out there. Let me be that role model in showing people how to deal with things with perspective with being centered amid the storm, with the strength of intention to say, "You know what? I know this is going to be hard, so let me take care of myself and let me be kind to other people." When we determine ourselves to be a role model, we literally change our behavior. We say, "You know what?" Two things happen. One, I want to be a role model because 3 months from now, 6 months from now, from a year, when we look back, I want to be proud of my character and my behavior during this time. Please let me be proud of how I endured difficulty in my life. Please let me be proud of how I endured difficulty in my life. That requires intention for how you want to endure difficulty. And second, remembering relational, the reality that we're relational animals, that others are observing and seeing and experiencing what we are. And so let's do a good job for them. Let's show the kids how our values are demonstrated in times of uncertainty. Let's show our team how we deal with scary, fearful business environments. Let's show our friends how much we will be for them when the going gets tough. That's the role model mindset. It demands a lot of us and it's easy to say, well, it's so much easier just to go along and see how it turns out. And why don't we put our lives on pause? And, but if everybody did that, society wouldn't continue on. Remember to revisit your ambitions every single week or day. Okay, so let me say that again. You thought deeply about your life and envisioned a compelling future, and you revisited that future every single day. See, what I tell people all the time is, you know, there's this whole thing Brennan said, People say, "Well, Brendon, you know, I've lost my motivation." I go, "You didn't lose it. You forgot to revisit it." Two very different things. Most people, the reason they're not as motivated as they could be is they're not looking at what would motivate them, right? They're just going through the day in reaction mode. And what we do know from both positive psychology and optimism research, and well, what we found in our high performers, performance research is that people who are looking out towards the future, when they sit and they think about the future, it generates positive emotion, positive feeling. That optimism comes from anticipating the future and anticipating a good future, right? That's what I'm always telling people. The future holds good things for you, and you're stronger than you think. And if you believe those two things, it energizes you. And what happens at our event is I'm constantly getting people to realize that. To rethink their future, rethink how they'll be in the future, how they'll treat their family, how they'll manage their health, how they'll deal with other people, and how they'll envision even just simple things as their new mornings, their new morning routines. And it's so important that that's what is creating so much of the energy. Because remember, when we talk about energy in high performance, we call it capital E energy. That means it's not just physical vitality, right? Many people think of energy like, do I have enough energy to run around the block, right? That's physical fitness or physical vibrancy. But there's two other components of energy too, right? There's mental energy and emotional energy. And so when we think about the future in positive terms, that's amping up our mental energy. And we can see it too. If we suck you in an fMRI tube, a functional resonance tube that would allow us to see your brain activity, we could see without question that as soon as we get you thinking about your future, your brain and its activity changes. That different parts of your brain start lighting up. And we know from hormonal release too. You get a little dopamine drip going in the back, a little serotonin if you can see yourself having good things in the future, good relationships. Things change. That's my question for you. Have you been thinking deeply about your life? So write it down. Write this down. You thought deeply about your life. You envisioned a compelling future, and you revisited that compelling future consistently. This is such an important topic. If we're going to have goals and deadlines in our learning, we must never, ever, ever start from scratch or proceed randomly. Never start from scratch and proceed randomly, not at an advanced level. You're gonna spend so much dumb time wandering through the woods not knowing what you're supposed to do. So this is where this idea comes into play. You gotta model, block the learning, and practice. Model, block, learn, and practice. Model, block, learn, and practice. What does this mean? Well, model is pretty obvious. It means get a plan, get a roadmap, find somebody who's already done it, understand their strategies, right? You're trying to lose weight. Don't just go to the gym. Find a fitness program and follow that thing. You'll get way more results when you find a program, a roadmap, a way, a style, a method, and you follow that. Than you ever will randomly making it up. There's nothing you want to do in your life that someone has not already figured out and already laid the path for, already drew the roadmap. Buy the course, go to this seminar, watch their video, listen to their podcast. There's already a model. Never try to advance something without a model, right? Never try to advance something without a model. Next up, block learn. This means There's blocks of time in every single week of your life for that thing that you are trying to advance, learn. So it's like, oh my gosh, I, I gotta learn that French pretty quick. Well, you're not gonna learn on a weekend. We need to make it sure it's part of your life. Block learning. When are you going to learn, apply, or practice that thing? Like schedule it out and schedule your learning out like you schedule out your work. So many people, they'll— I look at their calendars and their calendars, all these meetings, and I look at all their meetings, I go, well, meetings are fairly reactive or prospective, right? You're either reaching out prospecting or you're reacting in, in interviews or doing status meetings, brainstorming meetings. But I'm like, but where are you learning the things that are gonna advance the company? Where are you learning the things that are gonna advance your health, your relationships, your marriage? If you're married, if I came into your life and I, I looked at your calendar and you want a better marriage and there's nothing in next week about where you block time to learn how to have a better marriage, I'm like, how do you think that's going to improve? Your random date night? No. Like, I remember in relationships when I was struggling because I never learned how to have a good relationship. So in my 20s, I would block time to literally read and listen to relationship programs. I would block time at some point to get therapy or get coaching. Like, I had like 3, 4, 5 years— let me say that again— 3, 4, 5 years of studying relationships every week. And if I hadn't done that, there's no way I believe I could have, you know, been blessed to attract or meet or connect with Denise. It came from that learning and it made me good in relationships with people. I wasn't naturally good that way. I had to demand it of myself. I had to block the time. Okay? And then practice. Whatever skillset you've, you're trying to develop, same thing. Is it in the calendar? Is it in the calendar? Where is the practice? Just like when you're trying to teach your kids to learn the violin, they gotta set up practice time. Okay, Mom. Okay, Dad. Where is your practice time? Where is it? Where's your practice time? You want to become wealthier?

Okay.

Where's your practice time to work on your finances? Where's your practice time to, um, renegotiate that credit card bill? Where's your practice time to hit the gym? Where's your practice time to learn your new skill? Where's your practice time to do the homework? We have to have that in our own life. And when you don't have that, I know when I say this, you can get down on yourself. Oh gosh, why haven't I been doing this? This is not an opportunity to beat yourself up for the past. This is an opportunity to learn and go, wow, let me set up this infrastructure in my life. Because learning, when it's set up as an infrastructure, that's how Olympians go from, you know, good to one day a champion at their local level. To one day world level, to one day Olympic level. How? They set up the infrastructure around them to keep learning, to keep leveling up. If you really want to accelerate it, you've got to make the practice every day, or at least every week. I always tell people, if you're trying to learn something, every day. When I was trying to learn online marketing, every day I was studying a course, every day I was watching a video. I mean, like every day for, I would say, 3 years, I was taking some online marketing course for 3 years every day. I want you to— every day. In that 3 years, I went from broke, literally on the verge of bankruptcy, to earning— at the end of that 3rd year, I'd made over $4 million. Broke. Never did online marketing, never set up a webpage, never shot a video, never sent an email. Didn't know how to do any of that. 3 years every day studying online marketing. 3 years every day. But also what I was doing, I was part of a community. I hired a mentor by basically taking their course and signing up for their coaching program, and I just stayed in it. And every day I studied. Every day. And I think many of you, you could have gotten, you know, similar or better results in a shorter amount of time. It took me 3 years every day till I finally was like, I think I really get this. 3 years every day before I had like that. Yeah, I think I really get this. All right. I didn't struggle with the esteem part. I always said I can figure this out, but I know about my— it, it takes me a little longer to learn. Than the average person. And I don't get discouraged. I just go, okay, I, I understand that about myself. But if I want to advance it, you can't dabble. You must immerse yourself. You must get committed. You must invest in yourself. You must dive in and make it part of your life. I did that in every area from finances to health to relationships to running a business. All of those things I learn. That's why you all know every single day I read for at least an hour. I tend to have about 2.5 hours of block time a day for learning. And that learning might be a call to ask and interview somebody. That learning might be reading something. That learning might be something, and this is outside my normal job, right? This is just calling, asking, interviewing, researching, reading, just absolutely every day to this day, including Saturdays and Sundays. Learning is a part of my life. And I don't say that makes me fancy. It just, I just know I need that much. That's my style. Maybe some of you can do it once a week because you're smart and it's easier for you to go like, hey, Brent, I, you know, I do, I know people who can learn 4 or 5 times faster than me just natively. It's just a personal individual intelligence they have. They can really absorb, their memory's better than mine. You know, I've had 2 brain injuries. My memory sucks. So I gotta, I gotta hear it a couple times for me to really break through. Everyone's got their different things. So this is again, not a braggadocious session. It's like, it took me 3 years every day. What's your advice for people to figure out their purpose and their mission? I really believe that there's 2 ways to explore this topic. First, your purpose is something you should already know is going to shift in definition throughout your life. Yeah. A lot of people think I need to have one purpose. I'm like, you're gonna have multiple purposes throughout your life. Just let's start with that. If, if we can accept that, then life isn't so awful where you wander around all the time. How come I don't have my one thing? I'm like, you're gonna have a lot of things. At one stage it might be your career, another stage it might be your family, another stage it might be your health, another stage it might be your marriage or your relationship, another stage it might be something else of service. And so just know that it's going to shift. And so if you're in a moment of transition or you don't know what it is, that's okay. Now the research is pretty clear about how people claim to have found it. Usually you're interested in something, right? There was a curiosity, you wanted to explore it. The exploration became a real interest where you started following it, looking at it. You, you were just kind of very interested in it. So you studied it, you watched it, you observed it, you followed it. That led into a little bit more of a deeper interest called a passion. You're like, wow, I'm passionate about this. I love this thing. I want to do something with this thing. That passion then bled into a sense of mission where you wanted to manifest that thing, build that thing, do that thing, or serve in that way. And then you recognized how that thing that you were doing or passionate about had an impact on other people. Mm-hmm. And now you felt like you were contributing. And now that sense of contribution and that sense of interest and passion, now people call, oh, that's a purpose for me. It's almost always that way. But a lot of people, they were like, well, Brendon, I don't even know what I'm interested in. I go, oh, great. Then if you don't know what you're interested in, then your job is to truly explore the world. Your job is to read widely, to follow a lot of people, to study a lot, to travel around your town, to meet lots of mentors, to adventure out into the world more broadly. And something, I promise you, will catch your interest. If you stay a student of life and an adventurer of life. If you stay in student mode, you'll observe a lot. And once you observe a lot, you'll find an interest. And that interest will grow into a passion, into a mission, into a contribution, into a purpose. Mm-hmm. So if you're in that place where you just don't even know what your interest is, that's great. Explore. You'll be fine. You'll find it. The first thing that every single person wants, and you wanna draw this triangle out on your notes, I wanna see you taking notes. If you don't know these things, you can't sell and you can't build, you can't be happy, you can't find joy. The first thing that we all want is called aliveness. Aliveness. Think about why relationships die—no aliveness there. Think about why you went and worked out this morning—a greater sense of vibrancy and energy. Think about what they teach you when you're unhappy to become more present Aware, flow. In my work, we just call it full engagement. To be fully engaged in the moment again. To get back into our body, into this moment, into this second. That's aliveness. Everybody wants it. And the craziest thing is how easy it is. This is what you sell. Does everyone understand that? Raise your hand. If you haven't understood that people are buying energy because they're burned out and they're exhausted, you haven't got quite in the flow yet. Everybody wants more aliveness. You can call it whatever you want: vibrancy, presence, flow, even joy. You've heard the word passion. All of those positive emotional reins are about being engaged in the moment in a positive emotion to feel more fully alive. What's your advice for people to start monetizing that interest, that passion, that mission? Yeah, well, it just depends on what they wanna do, you know? So whatever that purpose or that passion is, you know, for sometimes monetizing means get a job in that industry. True. Sometimes that means literally go be an assistant. It's for someone already doing that. It means sometimes, you know, uh, become you know, volunteer in that space. Hmm. Other times it means, no, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur and I'm going to monetize that knowledge or passion. I wanna share it with the world and I wanna work with them, whether that's coaching them, training them, teaching them, building a community for them, creating curriculum for a course or something else. I, I want to create something that adds value to other people and I'm gonna charge money for it. And that of course is the whole creator economy or knowledge economy or influencer economy now where most of us, we say, what am I passionate about? How do I think it can help people? And now I gotta package it into some product or service they can buy. Mm-hmm. And that's just the world of entrepreneurialism. I know lots of people call it, you know, thought leader industry or creator economy, but it, it's, It's being an entrepreneur. It's saying, I have something that I know can add value, and so let me build it, let me sell it, and let me build a lifestyle and a business from that. And I just encourage people, if you feel that impulse, you already know, do it. You already know. Entrepreneurs already know. You're passionate about it. You're geeking about it. Oh, I wanna share this. I wanna make money from this. I wanna do this each day. You already know your job. Is to follow through. Long-term wealth requires ever-increasing competency. What you know now won't get you there. You're going to have to get new knowledge, skill, ability, and talent to go to the next level. Even if you luck into a ton of money, you're going to have to get more competent on what to do with the money, right? Dealing with finances is a skill that you can learn. Well, same thing in every other area of your life. What I tell people all the time, I go, show me where you make money. They go, what? Show me where you make money. What, what do you do to make money? And they go, oh, well, you know, I have this job, or I have this type of business. I said, okay, what's the skill there that you have that you think is driving your pay? What's the primary? If you had to narrow it down to 1, 2, or 3 skills that's driving your primary pay. And if you enjoy that skill, go deeper, gain more mastery, take classes, watch videos for free on YouTube. Investing in your skill development, and, and investment means time, energy, money, effort, right? Time, energy, money, effort. We gotta go, okay, I, I, I've gotta, I, I gotta put something in here. What's worthwhile investing in? I'm like, yourself and your skill sets. You know, I went to a bunch of seminars on how to enhance my public speaking. I invested in hiring coaches in that regard. I invested in taking classes and tutorials on how to operate all this gear by myself. I invested in, um, online courses to learn how to do online courses. Like, these are skills that you can develop. And as you learn to develop more skills, it's easier to exceed expectations and add new value, right? I think skill development is way underrated, way under— what we have now is we have a browsing-based culture versus a mastery-driven culture. When you switch from, I'm a browser, right? I'm gonna use this phone all day like this. 1, and I'm going to input a million random things that mean nothing to me whatsoever. 2, I'm going to use this thing to deeply study something that will give, develop my skill, my capabilities, so I can build better, serve better, lead better, change, add value. When this becomes a tool of study versus just selfies or distraction, now you're on the right path to wealth. Now you're on the right path to wealth. This is so important. I would say one of the fundamental problems in our culture right now worldwide is that most people invest their time in consumerism, shopping, or in entertainment, just absorbing, taking it in, and very few in active development of skill. And skill can be communication, Conflict management, negotiation, leadership, influence, like soft skills or hard skills, like coding, like building something, like designing, like creating something, like actually executing a process or behavior, like athleticism, like something where you're just developing that over and over. The mastery mindset is a path to wealth. The mastery mindset is a path to wealth. When we invest in our skill development over a period of time, we're more capable of adding new value, exceeding expectations, going to the next level. And as we go to the next level in those areas, we tend to get paid more. That's important. What's the primary drivers of how you get paid today? What are the major skills? How can you develop them, get way better at them? Way better at them. I had to learn that in every area, from online marketing to email marketing to influencing to teaching to running the gear to running the company to how to deal with employees to how to build up the finances of a company. Like, I don't know how to do any of that coming out of a broke mining town, but what I said is I want to be able to serve at the highest levels. So what skills do I need to learn? When I was an author and I was broke, I said, what skills do I need to learn? Okay, well, one skill for me is writing a book. So I'm going to study how to write well. So I studied and studied and studied how to write well. Great. That's one skill though, isn't it? And I'd look at these other authors. I said, well, how are they so rich? How are they wealthy? Well, it turned out a lot of them were on the road speaking, and as they spoke more, people bought more books. And I was like, well, that's a virtuous loop. Okay, so if I can learn to become a teacher and a speaker, then people buy more books. And, well, I want to be a writer who sustains my life as a writer. That was my goal. Okay, I guess I could add that skill. Which would support the finances over here. It was an adjacent skill that served the main goal for me. Okay, well, I hate speaking. I don't like it. But I was like, well, why don't I like it? Well, because I don't know how to do it. I'm uncomfortable doing it. Well, I was uncomfortable riding a bike. I didn't know how to do that. Well, let me try. Let me put some training wheels on. Let me learn to speak. So I started speaking. And teaching myself. Time, energy, investment of my heart and my soul to speak. And I was literally speaking to myself in a room, walking around, wearing out my carpet, just teaching myself to talk out loud about topics for long periods of time. You know, it's like, okay, figure out how to do that. Then I was like, okay, I need to get in some practice. I need to get in front of some audiences. So I'd start doing it in classes. I'd volunteer to give my report out. Or when it was time to give the report out, I'd put some flourish on it, man. And I just thought, okay, I'm gonna keep getting better. I'm gonna keep trying to get in front of more and more audiences and bigger and bigger. I'll speak free, I don't care. I just need to run the reps to gain the skill so I can become good at it. Because I saw speaking as an adjacent way to serve people beyond just my writing. So that was an entire skill that I built up from scratch with no natural talent or ability. In fact, more fear. And so it was like, okay, but that's gonna serve over here. Let me see if I can do it and let me see if I enjoy it. And of course, once I got over the fears and I saw the impact beyond me with people, I was like, wow, that really made a difference in a person's life who might not read my book. Wow, this is just another vehicle for me to make my difference. I thought it had to be about book writing. I was like, oh, but I can make a difference this way too, huh? And I can enjoy this too, huh? And if I hadn't done that, we wouldn't even be here right now. If I hadn't learned to run a camera by myself, because I'm in a room by myself. I don't know if you can tell, like, this is— I'm literally— this is a real room. I'm, I'm here by myself running all this gear. Like, it's just me. And so I had to figure out, like, how do I do that? How do I do the lighting? Right before we began, literally with the team, we were adjusting the camera and they're watching on Zoom. I'm like, how about here? How that— what do you think about that? Like, trying to figure out all these little things without knocking everything down. And if I hadn't learned that, we wouldn't be here. So I would also say I wouldn't have reached the scale in my own career. As you scale you scale up the likelihood you will build wealth. You have to own the vision decision. You have to be open to it. You have to be adaptable with it. But you've got to be the most committed person on the team, in the organization, in the culture, in the family. You've got to be the person who holds that thing together, who's entrusted with that. I always say leaders are really entrusted with service. They're entrusted with the vision, and as they're entrusted with that mission, they're also relied upon to make the hard decisions. What's some of the hardest decisions you ever made in your life? Like, the hardest decisions you ever made in your life. It can be in any area— your relationships, your finances, your career. What's some of the hardest decisions you've ever made? If you think about those hard decisions that you made, those hard decisions ultimately were made because you had a different vision at that moment. You didn't like where things were. You wanted to go in a different direction. And you bought into a vision of how things need to be different. Whether that was from depletion, you were just exhausted, tired, didn't like it, whether it was from a place of just like, oh, I recognize all the problems here, or I I know there's a better solution, or it was highly aspirational for your future. You bought into a different vision and you made a decision from that vision. Well, I share that with you because part of the principle here of vision decision is to be aware, oh, your whole team is making hard decisions based on the vision. You're going to have to make hard decisions. Based on the vision. So, here's a tough question. What the heck is the vision? What is it that you are after? What is it that you collectively want to move towards, want to achieve? And it doesn't have to be some pie-in-the-sky, forever, 100-year-out vision. It might be a 3-month-out vision. It might be a 6-month-out vision. But if you're not crystal clear about that decision with your— that vision with yourself, what will happen is as people support what they create, as you open those ears, as you have those other conversations, you'll be unmoored to the beliefs, the values, and the direction that you want to go. You'll lose yourself in the noise. This is the number one thing I see great leaders do to fail? They lost themselves in the noise. So much noise from the stakeholders, so much noise from the shareholders, so much noise in social media, the bad article written about them, the people trying to cancel culture them. They lose their foundation of their vision of themselves and their future, and they start becoming a ghost, fully adaptable and flexible into everything else everybody else wants. And now what they really are is a vessel carrying everybody else and everything else without that command level internally of, "Oh, I am in charge of this." If you read The Motivation Manifesto, you get the ethos of this, right? 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 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. The 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? The very first question that I might ask when someone tells me they want to quit something is I'm going to ask this question: Is this decision you're about to make strategy or discouragement? Meaning, are you thinking about quitting the thing because strategically you've thought through it and it's the right next bold move for you, your family, your career, your future? Or do you just feel discouraged? Right? Is it a logical thing, like you've sequentially thought this decision out, or do you just feel bad right now? Are you just discouraged because you've tried for a while and it's not turning out? Are you discouraged because you got some negative feedback? Are you discouraged because you got some rejected? Are you discouraged because you're disempowered in that relationship or that job or that career? And A place of discouragement is not the same as empowerment, and we have to be aware of that. But what I want to know at the very beginning of the conversation is just, where are we? Have you been thinking through this? This is the strategic right move for you and your family, your life, your career? Or are we just kind of in a fed-up place, a hurt place, a discouraged place? Because Some people, they don't need to quit the thing. They need to learn to manage their emotions. That's a very different thing because many people, they're in the right thing, but they're lacking that emotional connection or emotional intelligence to deal with the realities of it. I'll give you an example. I don't know if— who's ever had a hard job before? Like, it was hard and you were failing and you sucked. Or maybe you started your own business And the first year, I mean, it was terrible. You felt like a failure the whole time. People are like, why are you doing that? Spending your time there? The neighbors making fun of you, talking behind your back, and you're like trying to get it going and you're putting so much into it and it's not happening. It's discouraging. And you go, I better— I'll quit this opportunity. I'm just going to quit this effort. I'm going to quit my dream. Well, the reality is there, maybe the dream was strategically the right decision. The opportunity was strategically a good bet. But what happened was you got emotionally hooked, and your feelings of how you're dealing with that difficulty made you make a decision to throw out the thing when really, if it was the right thing, you needed to learn to manage your emotions better. In every relationship, there's going to be a, a time when it feels bad. In every new startup, Every new entrepreneurial idea, every company, there'll be times when it just feels bad. That's, that's life. The strategic mind has to say, okay, even though this feels bad, if I'm in the right place, can I learn to honor the struggle? Can I learn to turn that discouragement into curiosity or even interest? Can I learn to take that disempowering feeling and find a way to bring joy into this thing that right now kind of sucks, you know. I remember, and this, this applies at the most simplistic levels in our lives, it really does, how discouragement allows us to quit things. I'll give an example. Have any of you ever applied for a mortgage? Anyone ever gone through? How about any entrepreneurs? Have you? If you've been an entrepreneur and applied— if you're an entrepreneur and you've applied for a mortgage, that is a particular kind of hell. You know, that is a— they don't believe in you. They don't trust your income. You might earn more than your neighbor. They don't believe you. Like, it's like, it's a particular— it's an awful process. I've been through it multiple times in my life, and every time I'm like, after the 5th call or the millionth request of a document that's stupid, I, I get discouraged, I get angry, I get fed up with it. I go, I'm out. Well, it's right for me to keep trying to get that mortgage for us to get the house. That's a strategic right decision. We chose the city, we chose the house, but I get discouraged in the process and I'm like, screw this, and I want to quit. And Denise, my wife, she's always like, it's just paperwork, we'll get through it, let me help you with it, or let's do this. And, and she'll save the day because for me Paperwork is a lot of pain. So you see how that's so small as an example, such a small, simple thing. You quit things that are just paperwork things to get you towards your dreams. Think about that. Think about how many times you've just thought, I don't want to fill out this loan application. I don't want to have to reach out to them. What you do is you get discouraged, frustrated, or fed up with the process, and that emotional thing has you quit the thing that is required to get the strategic good outcome. And as soon as you realize that, like, whoa, I'm just giving up, I'm giving up on the right thing because I feel the wrong way, you really got to get your head around this one. Like this is a major decision, right, in your life. You wanna be thoughtful and strategic and intentional about it, not impulsive or acting from discouragement. Now I know therapists on the line who's Brennan, oh my God, you're such a terrible coach. Don't you realize that people, you know, should listen to that discouragement? I'm like, oh yeah, absolutely. I just don't want you to live there or make all your decisions from that place. You can listen to discouragement, you can feel fed up. Notice I'm not taking away the emotion. I'm— in fact, I just— the whole goal is here. Where are we coming from? When people first propose quitting a marriage, a relationship, a job, an opportunity, their first proposal of, ah, this is stupid, I'm gonna quit, is impulsive and not strategic. And I, again, as a coach, when they first throw it at me, I want to know where they're at. If you're really not doing at creativity and creating, you need deadlines. Because you're allowing yourself to procrastinate. You're telling yourself a story that I'll get to it, it'll turn out great, I'll land on it, you know, I'll wait for inspiration. If you talk to journalists or daily vloggers or daily or weekly bloggers, they don't have time to wait to create. They don't even have time to suffer the feeling of inadequacy that comes when you feel like you're not creating well, so you have all this time to stew. I'm not creating well, this isn't good, and you keep working to perfect it and perfect it and perfect it and you hate yourself. They don't have time for that. And what I mean is they don't have time. There's just no time for them to go, oh, I feel bad about myself, I'm not creating, because it's due. When it's due, you don't get to suffer the creativity. You ever have that paper due in high school in high school or college and it was due and it was 12 pages, 20 pages, you hadn't even started it until 6 o'clock, you sit down at 6 o'clock, you work to make that deadline, when you get there you don't have time to go, oh, it wasn't creative enough, I'm just not creative. It's like, you get it done, you turn it in. So if you want to get rid of the suffering, set the deadline. Let me say it again, if you want to get rid of the suffering, set the deadline. Deadline. It will change the game for you. You'll be so happy that you did that, I promise you. What we found in one of our surveys was that high performers set deadlines more consistently, and frankly, what it seems like, for every project, more so than underperformers. Underperformers just say someday. High performers know the day. Procrastination basically means that you are not doing what you know you need to do when you know you need to do it. It's putting things off because in the short term, it's easier, it's more comfortable, it's more certain, it's more pleasurable to be distracted or to indulge yourself doing something else than it is to sit down and do the actual work to create the outputs that matter when they are needed. And I know that every single one of us procrastinates. Me too, so it's okay. The issue is, can you set yourself up so you do less of it? I believe you can. Now, I believe there's tactical things you can do to procrastinate less. Those are the things I'm going to focus on the most here today. But I also believe there are very important emotional things you can do to procrastinate less. You know, most procrastination is either tied to worry the emotion of worry, like, "I'm worried that if I do it, it won't turn out well," or, "I'm worried it's going to be too hard and I can't handle it," or, "I'm worried I don't know what I'm really going to do and I'm going to mess things up, fail, or cause ruin in my life." So a big part, if you ever feel like you're procrastinating, sit down with a journal and say, "What am I worried about?" And really just journal, just write it out. What am I worried about? Well, I'm worried if I do this, because what happens is unconsciously, we're not aware, you know, we're just, we're not aware of our worries. So we keep thinking it's the task's fault. Well, the task is not passionate. Well, it's not, you know, we say, well, maybe it's not my real passion. Maybe it's not my real purpose. And we start blaming ourselves and we start having like these, you know, these esoteric kind of conversations with ourselves about life's meaning. Instead, what's happening is unconsciously we're a little worried about something. And if we can bring that worry into our awareness, then we can examine it, observe it, and start building the case that that's not something we should be worried about or something that is something we can truly handle. Do you feel like this week you were rapidly moving towards the completion of a major project in your life? I mean, do you feel like you made major strides? I think every Friday is a good day to wake up and say, did I make major strides this week or was I kind of all over the place? And major strides mean there is a direction towards your efforts. You're not just randomly doing everything because the email told you about it. You have a clear sight to where you're trying to go. You got some clear projects lined up. Even if— look, even if they're only lined up for the next 30 days, that's okay. It's— you don't have to be able to see 5, 10, 15, 20 years out to be able to organize the next 30 days. Does that make sense? I'll be an example. I don't know where I'll be exactly in 10 years. I know I'll still be doing this, for me, I'll be writing and I'll be teaching. But I don't know how that might be. I might be doing it by, you know, in 10 years from now, I'd be, you know, 100% hologram. I mean, in 10 years from now, I might be on your kitchen table right now in front of you. Creepy, I know. But, you know, we don't know what's going to happen in 10 years. But I hope you know what's going to happen in the next 30 days. Do you know what's going to happen in the next 30 days? Do you know what you're going to make happen in the next 30 days? I found that that's how high performers think. They are clear on the major projects and initiatives in their life, and they have taken all the tasks that are required to make those projects and initiatives happen, and they've organized them into buckets of projects or initiatives. A huge piece of high performance in all the coaching I do— and I've been blessed to coach billionaires, so please don't anyone say, well, this doesn't apply to me, I already I already know it. Because the worst thing you can ever do in your personal development is go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I already know. It's not do you already know, it's do you implement with unbelievable amounts of focus, discipline, and consistency? I don't care if you know the topic. You might already know block time. Yeah, Brendon, I've heard you teach block time. That's fine, that's why I'm here live with you coaching you every single month to ask questions. Good, I'm glad you know block time. Did you do it last week effectively? Is it clearly scheduled this upcoming week? If I zoom out on your calendar, can I see these blocks of time clearly leading to the completion of an initiative or a project? If not, my friend, this is a million-dollar moment for you. This is the moment where you go, whoa, I need to get more strategic and disciplined in defining my projects, breaking them down and making sure they land on my calendar. Because if they don't, you're only going to do what the world gives you. And if you only do what the world gives you, you'll always be a reactive person. And if you are always a reactive person, you'll never be capable of adding the value that you know you can add in the world. Do you have a plan? Is it written down? Is it on a wall? Is it executable? Is it a plan that serves your business growth goals but also your lifestyle, your life goals? If you think about the next 6 months of your business, again, which is your Super Bowl in our industry, like, what's your plan? What's your plan this month, next month, the month after that, the month after that? Get together a plan. If you don't have a plan yet, you're still like, I don't know what I'm gonna offer, or I'll figure out my new offer next month. You're cheating yourself and you're gonna fall into a lower sentiment. You're gonna experience less progress. Don't keep thinking, oh, I just need to keep learning. I need to keep learning. No, put a plan in place. Make a decision. What's the offers? When are we gonna launch them? What's the evergreen? What's gonna be running? Like, one or two serious decisions today about your plan changes everything. The benefit that many of you have, as my friend does, is they have money. You know, they have sufficient money to survive, sufficient money to have abundance or give something to kids. And what I found over and over and over in this space specifically, people with money more often than anyone else fails to make a plan because they don't have to. And this is a, you know, a transition. They're transitioning from one thing into another. They're in a moment of transition. And so they're like, you know what, I'm comfortable, I'm safe, I actually don't have to do anything. You know, I'll just keep learning, I'll keep engaging, I like the learning. But at some point, they never make the plan, and that cheats them from the progress, that cheats them from the impact, and then their sentiment goes down. Even if they're in the right group, or they got the good business, or they do know how to help people, they just never made a plan and executed it. And people like you, in a group like this, there is a high achievement mindset that needs to know that you are executing against a plan. This is what happens when people retire. They had a plan in their career. They had work plans and teams, and then they retire and they forget to make a plan. And a month goes by, they're all right, maybe even a year, maybe even 2 years of decompression. But at some point they kind of could start not just going stir crazy, they lose self-esteem, their mental health goes down. Humans are goal-driven humans. People. We, we have to have a goal, a plan, and be moving towards it to sense, to sense that we are activating our potential. Our sense of our potential is often tied to having a plan. Later in the research, we found out that the top 5% of the wealthiest, most successful, and happy people in the world are 40% more likely to work out 3 times a week than the other 95% of people, quote unquote, below them. Think about that. The top 5% of the most successful people in the world, not in my opinion, but in the largest academic study of high performance that's ever been done, the top 5% are 40% more likely to work out 3 3 times per week than everybody else. Same true for those who recover from all sorts of challenges physically and mentally. You already know this, I'm preaching to the choir, but that's when I got it. Got my workout back in shape, got my mind back in shape by sharing some of the things I'll share with you today. And all of a sudden, the aliveness started coming back. But the most important thing was I didn't make excuses about how crappy I felt. If you're just having a tough day, go for a walk. This is so basic. I know it sounds like, you know, kitchen table wisdom, but it actually is a tremendous amount of creativity research with the highest arts, the highest level achievements of all artists, musicians, artists, musicians, contributors, vloggers, across every realm possible, the highest achievers tend to go for a walk when they're stumped. And they do it proactively. Let me give you an example. Probably one person who I consider maybe the most successfully creative person in the world is Paulo Coelho. Paulo Coelho wrote The Alchemist, which many of you guys know. It's the 6th most read book in the history of the world. In the world now, The Alchemist, the 6th most read book in the history of the world. What does Paulo do? Follow him on Instagram. Every day he goes for a walk. Every day. He has his daily walk, you know, every single day. Every day I walk outside a minimum of 20 minutes. Every day. The only times I ever miss that rule is if I'm at my live events because I'm basically walking and putting on miles and miles and miles, but walk outside. Yes, every day. Treadmill does not count. I don't care if it's raining, I don't care if it's snowing, go outside and walk. If you want to be a more creative person, you need to be out in the sun's rays, in the earth, walking, moving, light. You need to have real air on you. You need to get outside, especially when you're stuck here. If If you're stuck, immediately, the sense, the moment you feel like you're stuck, get up, leave, go for a walk. Don't even have a goal for the walk. Goal is, I'm not creating well, stand, walk. I promise you, it will change your life. Give me a shout out, all the people, you already know this, we got a lot of high performers here, how many of you go for a daily walk, or when you suck, you get up and go for a walk, because you know it will break your thinking pattern, and it will generate ideas. I'm curious to see how many walkers we have in our community, and I bet it's a ton. High performers walk. They literally do, and we know it from our surveys that they do it. I've had so many fears in my life. I haven't overcome all of them, and then I started learning some simple ways to use my mind, some simple ways to deal with the fear, to turn into it instead of Avoiding it. I know you already know that, but sometimes we need the reminder. I had terrifying fears of heights, of public speaking, of starting my own career as a writer and a coach and a teacher. Terrifying fear of being on video and stages, and now I've made that my career for a decade. But I was scared, and I didn't handle it well every time. But you know what? When you're scared and you don't handle it one time, that one time that you didn't do it right, that's supposed to be the teaching point, the training point, the readiness point. That's where you go, wait, I didn't deal with this well. What did I learn? Let me do it better next time. But the problem is most of the world said, I didn't do it right, that's terrible, that's embarrassing, I'm out, sucker. Instead of saying, let me do it right next time, they said, I'm out. And there's probably been moments in your life where you did that too. I'm out, I quit. And other times you couldn't quit because the job, the career, your back was against the wall. Someone was counting on you. You had that dream, you weren't going to let it go. And even though it was hard, instead of saying I'm out, You said, I guess I'm all in. And those moments changed your life, didn't they? Those moments were everything. I want you to be here for those moments for you today. Even through my own stories, I want you to find those moments that are for you. Those moments where you go, oh, that's why I was here. Not just to hear from this guy, but to go, let me look at my life and think of where do I need to reinvent and when do I need to engage, where can I engage the difficult things? The scary things, those things that make us vulnerable or threatened or defensive or antagonistic, to turn back in and engage those hard things again. I know it's pop psychology, except it really does work. You know, it really does work when we honor the struggle and the difficulty and we challenge ourselves through it. That changes everything. Just not always easy. I want to learn to be confident. I want to learn how to communicate well, and I want to learn to have great relationships. So I studied those things really intensely, and I just tried them. I tried them, and I just— I literally, I was so good about making little goal sheets and trying it. And that was the year I also began my monthly goals. So on the first of every month, to this day, I write a personal goal and a professional goal that is outside of all the things, projects I'm trying to achieve. The personal goal is something like, be more patient this month. And every day I look out on the way out, I put on the door, I'd walk out and be patient. No matter what my other goals or objectives were, that was like the defining personal theme. So I created monthly challenge themes for 23 years. You know, patience have come up a lot of times. It's like joy has come up a lot of times. Yes. You know, staying centered has come up a lot of times. It's not like I have ever achieved— I've— no one achieves personal development. Agreed. Or purpose. It is like an intention and a dedication. And so that's where it started. And by studying all that, it gave me the edge. I really believe when you are a student of life, especially in psychology and philosophy, you get the edge because when people are having problems, you can see perspective around it. And once you have perspective, you got superpowers. Mm-hmm. Because most people are trapped in their problems. And if you have perspective of how people have solved or managed these things in the past, you have superpowers to people. They can't believe, like, how did you know to say that or that? I'm like, oh, I read that in a personal development book 10 years ago. Uh, and that made the big difference for me. Wow. It made a big difference. So it's, it's just reading. I mean, I read a book a week. For 23 years. I love that. Never missed. That's not true. 4 times in my life I missed. Most— 2 of them were in the hospital. So that's it. Oh, wow. I'm a reader. And then I try to apply it. Yeah. Try to apply it. And then the ultimate challenge is I made my career about it. That forced me to develop skill. When I was a consultant first, then became a coach, then decided to become a researcher and a writer in this field. I had to prove my chops. There was no just talk about it. It wasn't posting on, you know, Instagram because I didn't have that. It was, can I sit in a room with an executive and change? Yes. Can I get the change? Can I sit with a high-profile athlete who's in trouble with their behavior? Can I get the change? Can I sit down with the person who wants to start a business and give them that confidence they need? Like, whatever it was, it was real-time challenges for so long that fortunately that experience helped me optimize your health and wellness. Because if we're all out there fighting, you know, whether it's this particular pandemic or it's future things, we all got to optimize our health and wellness, which I know you and I deeply, deeply, deeply care about with our people. Because there, there's no separation between physiology and performance. There's no separation between mind, body. It's all, it's all the health of the sante. And so, if you want to have bon santé, which means positive spirit, it's going to come from health. And I think most people don't realize the major components of that all have to really activate together. Right now, you got to be on your A-game in those things. When we did the study for High Performance Habits, at the time, and still is to my knowledge, the world's largest academic study of high performers. So, we evaluated people in 190 countries around the world. Over 2 million data points, we had an epic, epic, epic team from University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Department, UC Santa Barbara's Positive Psychology Department. We had a lot of smart people on this thing. One of those habits was the ability for high performers to generate energy. They have energy to generate energy, and it's a lot easier to generate energy when you've been building it up and storing it up. I always tell people, you know, the power plant doesn't have energy, it generates energy. A power plant takes energy from one source. Wow. Transforms it into another, stores it and transmits it. And so right now we've all got to take energy from this low-level, low-grade source, negativity, fear, upset, outrage, terror, We gotta take that low-grade energy and we've gotta be able in our mind to be able to transform that and transmit something different. This is a big one for everybody. You took 10 deep, this is what people do at HPA. We took 10 deep breaths and body awakening movements every 50 to 60 minutes. So those silly exercises if you're into HPA where you stand up and you bounce in place. So we have people— we'll have them stand and we'll have them bounce in place and close their eyes and take 10 deep breaths. Like that. Bouncing 10 times. And I tell the audience, it's not a deep breath unless I can hear you breathing. That is how we're getting that kind of energy. Now this is the physical vitality part of it, right? We're energizing our body, bouncing up in place, right? Just moving around that lymph a little bit, activating our blood flow a little bit from having sat down so much, taking in those 10 deep breaths, giving our brain a hit of oxygen. And people like, whoo! Like, they don't know it because it's so subtle that first, like, 2 or 3 times we do it. But then what happens is then we're on day 2 or 3, and that momentum of of feeding our brain oxygen for 2 or 3 days at elevated levels than most people are used to, moving around more consistently than most people are used to, that changes the game. Look, one of the world's largest studies was just done on productivity. And it's a productivity app that basically tracks people's productivity throughout the day. And I can't remember what it's called. I'll find it. But what they did is they found out that the most productive people in the world tended to take a break at 52 minutes. So they worked throughout the— every day they were working, they'd work for 52 minutes, they'd take a break anywhere between 5 and 17 minutes, come back, 52 minutes intense, break, 52 minutes intense. Now the app is just proving what I've been teaching for over 10 years of my life. I've been teaching this 52-minute 50-minute break idea. Because why? Because I found it in my own life, I found it in my clients' life, we found it from qualitative studies, and now we've quantified it as well. That that 50-minute mark is a magical time in which your body says, "Dude, I need a break." Your brain says, "Dude, I need a break." And every one of us wants to push through those times, right? Or we think, "I feel fine, I'll keep going." But you need to rest. You need to recharge. And so these 50-minute breaks are built into the curriculum. Now it's not always exactly 50 minutes, but in general, about every, between every 50 and 75 minutes, I have the audience changing up what they're doing, either physically and taking these deep breaths and movements, or socializing something, standing, talking, doing something like that. But there's a high level of movement and breath that's gonna happen between 50 and 75 minutes across my 4-day seminar. And so what does this mean to you if you don't go to seminars? It means, and I've taught this for so long, I hope you do this, when my butt hits my chair, my timer starts on my phone, and at 50 minutes, I'm standing up and I'm bouncing and I'm doing 10 deep breaths. Do you know the number one reason people quit jobs? The number one reason? It's usually because one person. Most people quit jobs not because of compensation, not because of ability to grow in that role. Most people quit jobs worldwide reported by some of the largest consulting companies in the world because of number one, lack of appreciation. And when they say, well, who doesn't appreciate you? They usually say my first line manager. So their immediate supervisor, okay? Number 2, what else reason? 'Cause one conflict with one person. There's some bastard in the office they can't deal with. Like one person. But often, I just worked with this person, works at Google, had this great conversation, and he said, "Brandon, I'm thinking about leaving Google." And I'm like, "Wow, leaving Google?" I said, "You're not gonna get paid higher somewhere else. What's the reason you're leaving?" And he said, "Well, there's this one person." And I said, "Okay, let's break this down." I said, "Tell me about this one person." And they were having lots of difficulties, and it's been literally years, 2, 3 years, they just can't stand this person. But I said, "Let's take your career and bust it down to 10 moving parts." So we drew out a bunch of boxes on a page, and I said, "Write down what you think about your career here. Fill in these boxes for me." If you're ever coaching somebody, make it visual. Like, make them draw stuff. Like, if you ever work with me, I'm gonna make you draw something pretty quick, or I'm gonna draw something for you pretty quick. Make it visual. So I would draw out 10 little boxes, and I said, fill in, when you think about your career, the totality of your career, what's the big moving pieces? What do you like? What do you not like? And he wrote in each of these boxes what he liked. And when he thought about his career, one of those boxes was inevitably filled with somebody they did not like. I said, okay, so 10 boxes, and the person was pretty happy with all 9 boxes, but this one box, one bad person at work, he was going to quit a career. And so I had to have the difficult conversation, which is saying, you're avoiding this one box. You're going to pull the plug on the whole thing because one box is bad. That to me is the lack of, I would say, intention and resilience, but also just skill in dealing with life, right? If you're gonna quit on your spouse 'cause one fight when you had 10, one bad year when you had 10 good years, I don't know how I feel about that. You know, I wanna tell you as a coach, maybe is it something worth examining? Is it something to think about? Now, I don't know what happened in that year. Maybe it was really an awful year, but let's just consider it. Same thing for businesses. I know people when they first start in this business, my business as an example, when they start being a thought leader, right? They're so passionate and they're so stoked for like 10 months, you know, awesome 10 months, and then they just have one month filled with complete doubt. I don't know if this is working. Or they have one month, they do their first launch, no money, doesn't play out. But they were so passionate and creating and learning for 10 months. They have one bad month, they pull, well, this isn't for me, and they pull the plug. And I just go, I think what might be happening there is you're avoiding the challenging emotions of life. You're letting that one box globalize into everything else. And so I'd like you to think about that next time you want to quit on something. Just going, am I letting one box ruin the whole puzzle? Am I letting one person steal away my joy everywhere else? Because I see that all the time. You know, someone who just kind of stops engaging at work because one or two bad people when there's 10 other great people there. They globalize one person to mean the career, globalize one person to mean Google, globalize one fight to mean marriage. And that globalization immediately destroys their ability to engage fruitfully. There is no team in the world that has 100% perfect time management. And as a leader, what happens is you believe you've hired higher performers, everyone's managing their time, And what you don't realize that organizational theory shows across, like, I think all of research effort, let's just go there, that there's a lot of slack in the system, meaning that most people who say, yeah, I'm slammed, I'm 40 hours all week, they're not because they tend to focus on things that might not matter. Your job is to push harder. About time optimization and the needle movers. So, catch me. I'm not saying burn out your team. I'm saying most teams are incredibly inefficient. And as leaders, we often don't think about making them more efficient, but maybe once a quarter, twice a year, we have the conversation. If you're a leader of a team, you actually have to have this time management conversation all the time, right? All the time. Like literally monthly, it has to be a conversation where you ask people, "Is there any bandwidth? If someone on this team has bandwidth, would you raise your hand? Would you let me know? Would you tell me?" Because often what happens with teams too is people get too much bandwidth and they got an extra 4 or 5 hours a week they're not doing anything. And at some point, because of that, they become more and more disengaged. And as a team, less and less high-performing. So, it's got to be someone on the team. Sometimes that's the manager, right? Or the supervisor who's just checking in. How are you doing? What were your goals this month? Did you fulfill them? Did you have any extra time? How's it going? This type of question is so important. Okay? It's about you giving yourself permission to push harder about time optimization with your team. Very hard to have that conversation for many people because They're like, well, I don't know, is that rude? I'm like, no, that's responsible. If they're on your team and they're wasting your time, if you're an entrepreneur, that's your money, right? If they're wasting time, they become less engaged, less fulfilled. They feel like they're not contributing as much. So now they're just like kind of there, but not really all in. So you have to find that balance, which is hard sometimes. Again, you have to hire that driver of the agenda who helps you do that, right? You can't be all things, all things to all people. That's really important to know. Like, I'm someone who's probably terrible at that piece, so I have to have the other leads on the team to do that more than me. Like, I just can't. I'm doing too many roles. So again, if you're the visionary, you're the creator, you're the entrepreneur, this is where you get support in team to manage those schedules, to manage those details, and to keep pushing the thing forward versus waiting on you. One of the higher performers in the world, Jeff Bezos, who started a little company called Amazon— tiny— he talks about this idea that he and executive team makes decisions when they have about 60% of the information. So I'm 10% above Jeff Bezos. Yeah, I should Yeah. I should drink that. Well, you think about that for a minute. Yeah. Like, wait a minute. A person and a team that could get all the information in the world, they, what they do is they're moving forward even when they don't have everything. And what perfectionists do, what they don't realize is there's a difference between perfection. Remember, perfection is to perfect, in motion, iterative, moving. It's active. What they also can't admit sometimes is The real struggle is they're indecisive. Most perfectionists, they actually know the next moves. And I'm like, go, SWAT team, make it happen. Release it, drop it, do it, go. And I'm cheering them on. I'm like, go. Like, for everyone listening, you need to know high performers are decisive, not because they are like, I know everything and I've got clarity. I know. They know if they don't drop it, if they don't release it, if they don't do it, they can't iterate it and make it better. They can't learn, just as you said. And worse, they can't be of service. Because when you're in silence in your life and you're in silence because of fear in your life, not silence like the way you and I talk about in a positive way, being still and silent inside, that's a positive thing. But when you are in silence in a way in which you are suffering because of fear, you are not going to be able to serve. You have to be in motion to serve. You have to release things to perfect it. You've got to be decisive. High performers— what is high performance? It actually academically means something in our study. It means people who achieve long-term success while also still maintaining well-being, which is usually based on happiness and fulfillment and health and positive relationships. Because there's this myth I can't achieve high performance without burning myself out without the grind, without wiping myself out 24/7, outworking everybody else and all these other things. And hey, for some people that's true. However, high performance, it's based on long-term success measures in any given field. And you can't have long-term given success if you wipe out your health or your positive relationships. And so, on the health aspect of things, one thing that people do is they think, We're saying just work out 24/7, do all these things. The world's largest study on productivity that's ever been done, one of my favorite studies that's ever been done, found that high performers, the people who achieve the most, produce the most, and feel the most fulfilled, they take breaks every 52 minutes. Wow. So every 52 minutes, they break from whatever they're doing. So, in my life, that kind of shows up at— when my butt hits the chair, I literally set my iPhone for 50 minutes. 50 minutes starts. When it goes off, I stand up if I'm sitting down. I might bounce in place and close my eyes because visual fatigue is very, very, very, very intense for people on screens. So, bounce in place, close my eyes, take 10 deep breaths, get some water, might hit the ground and do a few push-ups and vinyasa flows. Come back up, set my intention, and go. Because those pit stops throughout the day, listen, y'all, pit stops throughout the day is how the race car wins the race. The high-performance machine actually doesn't need the pit stop. It takes the pit stop so it can go faster longer. The high-performance machine doesn't need the pit stop. It actually takes the pit stop so it can go faster and longer. So you have to have breaks on the hour. So people always confuse, well, Brendon must be saying go, go, go, go, go. Actually, I'm saying go, pit stop, go, pit stop, go, pit stop. And that way, when I hit 6, 7, 8, 9 o'clock at night and people are with me, they're like, holy, how are you still going? I'm like, 'cause I've been recharging every hour while you've been burning the candle every hour at both ends. It's that recharge that really helped performers go longer at what they do. So, I really practice that. The most impressive people I know, it's like, you don't know about this Jamie Kern Lima, let me tell you what, she's incredibly assertive. She will come up with an idea, she's asked me to do things or asked me to be part, no one's ever asked me before. And I'm like, ooh, sometimes I go, that was pretty direct. And then my high-performance brain kicks in, I'm like, that's awesome. Oh my God, Jamie, that's awesome. Shoot, no one's ever asked me that before, ever, my entire life. You know what she asked at this event? You know what she asked at the event? She's like, can I have 4 hours on stage? Do you know how many people I've had on this stage in 15 years? Remember, some of you, you're new to my world. I've done this 8 times a year for 15 years. Tony Robbins has been on my stage. Wayne Dyer has been on my stage. Marianne Williamson has been on my stage. The late, great Debbie Ford was on my stage. Larry King has been on my stage. Harvey McKay has been on my stage. Brian Tracy has been on my stage. Jack Canfield has been on my stage. Everybody. 7, 8, 9 billionaires have been on my stages. I've been doing this a long time. No one ever asked me that before. Ever. How badass is that? At first I thought, what? What are you talking about? You know, because if you've done something you're comfortable, every new request seems crazy. But you know what? Those crazy requests change the world. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about that. Now, we had already had an agenda, so that wasn't going to work for this particular one, but she still got an hour more than she was gonna get because she asked, 'cause she asserted herself. She goes, I want more time on stage, I'm gonna ask for that. Does that make her crazy or bad or awful? No, it makes her successful. Where are you asserting yourself? Where are you asking the big questions? Where are you asking for the favors? Where are you pushing? That's what I want you to do. That's your next level and you don't even know it. This is part of the things I do with all my groups. Many of you guys know this. I even teach this sometimes in Growth Day that I want to make sure you finish every single Friday, part of your Friday finishers, you make a bold request. You don't finish a Friday without an email going out or a voice message going out with a bold request. Find that person on LinkedIn, email them, DM them, message them. You think, oh no, no, no, I need to wait. I have a million followers. I need to wait until I have 100,000 downloads. I need to wait until we hit 5 million. I need to wait until we hit 50 employees. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Now. Make the bold requests now because later is perennial. Make those bolder requests sooner, faster. Get in it. Successful people are assertive people. Right now, when they're ready, they go over and over. I want you to be a little crazy once in a while and allow yourself to do this. Hey, here's my question. Where are you lacking this? Is it your career? And sometimes, I'm not lacking that. I go, okay, do you have any employees? Yeah. Any difficult employees? Yeah. Any employees you should have let go of 5 months ago, 6 months ago? Yeah. Okay, you're lacking that. Hey, you have a good dream? Any big ideas? Yeah. How long you had that idea? 3, 4, 4 or 5 months? Yeah. Have you done anything about it? Make any bold requests? Pushed it? Made it happen? Bought the thing? Invested? Gone? Yes? No? No? You're lacking that. How does one begin to change? Yeah. What is the catalyst for that? How does one, in your opinion, begin to change? Well, you know, in the old— the old books of personal development always answer that by, it's either inspiration or desperation. You know, which we know. I'm a little more, I guess, framework-driven than that. Yeah. I think that at some point All change. It's inspired by ambition, which is funny because people today think ambition is this bad thing. Yeah, but ambition, whether you call it desire or drive or you feel like you must, or in psychology we call it psychological necessity. Like, I feel like it's necessary. Like, it's necessary now. There's, there's no choice. There's no going back. There was a threshold. There's something. Not everyone needs a car accident because you know how many people I've told that story to Millions of people in person, live on stadiums and arenas, or 500 million people on video views now. I've shared it to a lot of people. Say, I was in a car accident too. My car accident was even more dramatic than yours because they lost a limb or they were disabled. But I didn't change. Yes. I didn't change, Brendon. Why? And ultimately comes back to psychological necessity. And we can think about it a couple of different layers. One layer. Is that you are the way that you are because of what we all call the comfort zone, right? There's, there's comfort in who we are, how we be, how we behave, I should say, you know, our natural strengths, talents, abilities, just who you are already. That's just your comfort zone. That's how you are. But what happens for other people, there's a layer above that and they shift because now there's a demand zone. Circumstances demand you change. Yeah. Your dreams demand that you change. Something external demands that you change, or you place the demand on your own shoulders because you want a different kind of life. Most people are scared to demand anything from themselves. Yeah. And most people, when a demand hits them, it feels like an obligation and they fight it. They resist it. I don't want that. You know, you're at work. Don't give me more stuff to do. How dare my manager ask me more? You know, they fight. As soon as demand approaches them, it's a threat. So true. Other people teach themselves because they're into growth. A demand approaches them. That's, that's challenge. That's character development. Let me see if I can rise to that. So they— the approach to demand and how we view that as a threat or as a challenge is a fundamental mindset or choice of attitude. And then above that, there's another layer, which is why don't people change? And which you— oh my gosh, every episode you do, I feel like there's masterclass on that. And that's the, what we call the esteem zone. Okay. Esteem zone. A lot of people have, you know, comforts and abilities. They could be remarkable. They have natural talents. Other people have lots of demands on top of them. They still don't change. Why? Esteem. Yeah. How they view themselves, value themselves, express themselves, relate themselves to the world. They, even though they have so much opportunity or so many natural talents, because how many gifted people do we know? Who never potentialize that gift. So many. Because their esteem, their value of themselves, their view of themselves, their belief in their ability to figure things out is so low that it doesn't matter. You could give them the greatest challenges, resources, tools, support, but no one ever cared for them and they never taught themselves to care for themselves. There you go. So how can they change? You can proceed in fear or in faith. You are a person and you are coming from one of the two. You are entering every situation from one of the two. Every situation. I'm going to enter this situation in a place of faith and I'm going to trust that it's going to work out just as it needs to. Or I'm terrified. I don't know how it's going to go. And people don't understand how binary that conversation is in your brain. And I'm just somebody, I'm so proud that a long time ago I said, you know what, fear is so much to me. You know what fear is outside of physical threat? Physical threat is real. Okay, physical threat is real. But outside of physical fear, threat of safety, right? Outside of physical threat, Most fear is just poor management of the mind. Write it down. Most fear is just poor management of the mind. I am not utilizing this brain to see this in a positive, confident, faithful light. And as soon as I can use this brain to see this, and write this down, in a positive, confident, faithful light. I do that to myself anytime I feel worry or fear, and trust me, I feel it. Emotions are automatic. They're from the body often. They're impulsive, unregulated. They happen immediately. They're in, and often they're out. Most research shows an emotion rises and it's gone and dissipated within within 2 minutes, but you feel it. So I feel it, and I don't choose to hang on to it and grab it and hug it and claim it and say, that's me. And some of you did that with fear. You got scared a few times in your life, and you grabbed it, and you held on to it too long, and you integrated it, and now it's you. And you say, I'm just afraid all the time. The number one people skill has always been patience. It will always be patience. Because in every argument you got in with somebody, I bet this was the problem. I bet every conflict you ever had your entire life with another person, somewhere along the line, this got the better of you. Maybe you should have held your tongue, right? If you just listened, if you let them say 3 more sentences, then you spoke, you would have understood what they really meant, right? If you just waited to understand the situation before you try to go and do something. Right? If you're trying to develop somebody and you're constantly telling them all the answers without answering the questions, if you expect somebody to get something faster than is humanly possible, it's just that people are so impatient and it hurts them all the time. I mean, look, this guy could have said, I mean, he said, "Hey, you know what? I also ordered some ceviche," which, by the way, the funny thing is my wife had to explain to me what ceviche was. I didn't know what that, you know, usually It just shows up when I eat some of it. I didn't know it was a thing. But I was like, what? He's so mad. What's this ceviche thing? She's laughing at me. Anyway, if he could have just said, you know what? I ordered some ceviche too. I'm going to start picking away at this. Could you put that order in for me and I'll just wait for it? I'd love to. Maybe you can get it for me. He could have been cool. He could have been patient with the attendant. One of the reasons I love this place, because the way the attendant responded to this guy. First, he was initially surprised. And then he was so like, "Oh," and he let the guy kind of fume about it. And he said, "You know what I'm gonna do right now? I'm gonna go check on it. Maybe it's there, maybe I missed it. It could have been there, I didn't pick it up. But let me go make sure I check. If not, I'll get the order in and we'll get it to you as soon as we can." And he was super cool. And he walked out and he stayed in his zen in the spa even though the other dude lost it. I think this is something that might remind you, where are you being impatient right now? Where? Identify that place and check yourself, my friend. Many people just don't succeed more because they never even found out where they're at. You know, it's like if you have a map and you don't know where you're at on the map, there's no way you can go to the destination. So where should you start? Tracking and measuring your habits over a period of time. Now, for a long time, I just used the High Performance Planner. And that helped me do it every single day. Now I use the Growth Day app because the high-performance habits are in there. But these are habits like measuring every day whether or not I felt like I had clarity and I stayed focused, whether or not I had good energy habits, whether or not I, uh, was productive that day, whether or not I tried to be a role model or was influential that day, whether or not I did something outside my comfort zone. And sought to be or live a bolder, courageous life. Helps me measure my diet, exercise, or diet, movement, sleep, and mood as well. Those are what we do in Growth Day. It's in the app, it's technologically enabled, it's awesome, it's convenient. If you don't have that, then what I want you to do is just write it out on a card. How are you going to measure your habits every day? And what habits specifically? This is really critical. Please listen to this. Achieving long-term success, it's really clear that the science shows, is not related to your personality trait, your astrological chart. Sorry, I'm, I'm not dismissing that. I'm just saying the science over a period of time, it's not related to even your current income. It's not related to where you grew up. It's not related to your age. Long-term high performance, which is tied to external success, internal wellbeing, and positive relationships. Those three measures specifically we studied in 190 countries around the world with the High Performance Institute, University of, uh, Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Department, and researchers from UC Santa Barbara. If you want long-term success, well-being, and positive relationships, what matters more than any other thing in the entire world is your habits, not your personality. So for those who are like, I can't succeed because I'm an introvert— sorry, lots of extremely successful introverts. I can't do it because I'm an Enneagram 7, 4, 3, 2, 1— I'm like, sorry, does not matter for long-term success. They're not correlated. They're cool to learn. Those are what are like StrengthsFinder, cool to learn. Those are tools for self-awareness. They are not correlated with long-term actual performance. Difference between self-awareness and performance, right? Some people are very self-aware but can't work themselves out of a brown paperback. You know what I'm saying? It's like there's a difference of knowing thyself and performing over long term in such a way you maintain positive life satisfaction and relationships. Because you and I both know somebody who works really hard and they're successful, but they wrecked all their relationships and their health. That's not high performance. High performance is long-term success, well-being, and positive relationships. And please know, Growth Day members, if you're in the starter level, or in the pro level, you have a full 6-hour training, a $300 course called High Performance Habit Builder from me in the, in your app that you can watch for free if you're a starter or pro member, meaning you signed up for one of our annual memberships. That $300 course is available to all Growth Day members in any annual capacity. And That training will teach you the power of this research and help you think through a lot of the habits that really matter. What I'd love for you to think about is like, okay, I need to chart this out. Bust up your journal and like, what are the 10 habits you're going to measure yourself on every day from now to the end of the year? And a habit is something that you are doing on a consistent basis, not just an idea, not just a hope, not a goal or an ambition, a routine that you are doing. And either it's an automatic one, it's easy, or it's a deliberate one, it's hard. And I really encourage you, have your list. I'm just asking you, measure yourself every day. And here's the thing, I know you're like, but Brendon, I get discouraged when I do that. Great. Read High Performance Habits and read The High Five Habit. And so when you don't feel like you're on your A-game, you can still encourage yourself in the morning with a little bit of a high five, some good self-talk, and some basic practices throughout the day. You can get back on track, I promise you. And many of us— and I was this way probably all the way throughout high school even— I never— and this is the second problem of friendships— I never made the deliberate choice to have remarkable friendships. I kind of ended up with friends. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Who's like ended up with friends? If you kind of just ended up with like this person, it was kind of, um, my friend, one of my buddies goes, he goes, I don't want no rando friends. And it was like random. Now I love random. I love the universe. I love God. I love coincidence. Listen, I read the Celestine Prophecy. People are glowing out there for me. I believe in that coincidence stuff. But I can also share with you, like, if you just allow randomness in your life all the time, you'll always feel a sense of mediocrity too. We have to stretch. We have to choose our life. And to choose our life, we have to be deliberate and go, what kind of life do I want? I would like you to learn to architect your ideal friendships. And can you get all of them? And will all your friendships be perfect? I'm not that guy. I'm not here to promise everything's gonna be sweet and perfect and peaches in life. I am here to suggest, though, that if you haven't deliberately chosen the types of friendships that you want, that's a problem, especially if you're an adult, right? And that's what the thing is, we're just— we're not encouraged to do that. Think about how much time people were feeding your ears with the idea you had to be really thoughtful about the career you choose. How many of you ever had more people tell you more times about, be so thoughtful about the school you choose, the career you choose, but no one ever said as much, be very thoughtful about the friends and the friendships that you build. And that's why we have a lot of high-achieving people who are lonely their whole life. Think about your career. What are you going to be one day? Very rarely, what's the type of social network you're going to build around you? What's the type of friendships you're going to architect? What are you going to be proud of in terms of your friends in the future? What do you want your friends to achieve? What do you want your friends to experience in life? Not just what they give you, but what are you going to give out too? What kind of friendship do you want to create and experience? How do you want your friends to actually interact with one another? Have you ever thought about that? We spend so much time— if you're a parent and you have two kids, you're so worried about how they interact, right? I know people who've never even thought, how do I want my friends to interact. I mean, they might think, you know what, we shouldn't put them in a room at a party because they have this history, that background. But very few people are like, I'm gonna actually teach my friends how to be friends with one another. Now I know some of you might go, this guy sounds like a control freak. I'm like, I am, but I'm a happy one, you know what I'm saying? I think this is such an important area to architect. Most friends have never talked about how to be friends. They just go, "You want to go to lunch?" They go to lunch. They talk about the weather, the waiter, the food, what's going on. They leave. And there's no architecting. There's no— I think of like social systems are things that can be shaped. You all think like at work, right? How much we talk about at work. Building a culture. More books and more people have spent time on this conversation of building culture at work and never the culture of a friendship. Isn't that weird? Everybody copes differently. There's no right or wrong way to experience loss. There is, however, a healthy way to re-engage life. We know from 50 years of psychological study, and you all know it inherently and innately, that there's ways that we cope that are healthy, and there's ways that don't make us feel good. There's things that we do that can lead to less ability to continue on with life in a happy way. One of the most important and powerful frames I can give you for loss and grief above all else and above everything else is conscious anticipation. Conscious anticipation. Consciousness or awareness in life is so important if we're going to cope well. And what we usually mean when we speak about that, especially with loss and grief, is having the ability to anticipate that it will happen. Okay? That it will happen. That if you haven't faced your own mortality and your own death yet, I deeply invite you to do that at some point. Face your mortality, your own personal mortality. Most people have never had a conversation about death in their own mind with themselves, let alone contemplating that maybe they would lose a parent one day. Or a sibling one day, or a job one day. In other words, in a spiritual practice, we would talk about this as a concept of awareness to impermanence. You've heard that phrase before, awareness to impermanence, that nothing is permanent, that in a lot of spiritual principles, you might think of, well, what is permanent maybe is if if it's God or if it's universe or it's the Tao or the way, that there might be something spirit that is permanent, but in the human experience, in our natural world, things are impermanent. Can you face that? Can you face that? Can you anticipate that? Subtract, simplify, systemize. I'm sure you've heard this type of concept before. It's going through your calendar and removing things to become more time efficient and enjoy your life. You need to remove some things like subtracting. For me, as an example, I got rid of networking events and that weren't learning events. You know, things are just like, hey, let's all gather and network around cocktails. I was like, that's done. I ended that in my 20s. I was like, that was taking so much of my time in my 20s. And it was cool because, yeah, I'd meet some people, but it wasn't moving me forward towards my goals. I love meeting people, but then I found out the best place to network is actually at personal development type conferences or business type conferences, places where it's like intentional-based learning. Learning because I want to get around learners because learners are achievers. And so, it's like, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get rid of all those random meetups that just make me tired and drain me from energy. I'm going to get in learning environments where I'm amplified. So, I subtracted those types. What are you subtracting? Some of you are subtracting drama. I love it. Netflix. I love it. Social media. I love it. Some of you are subtracting. This is so good, by the way. I love a lot. Excessive office trainings or meetings. This is super good. What else? More social plans. Yep. Good. I think that's so important. You know, putting limits on lots of different structures. You got to know what you need to subtract. It's really important. The other thing is to simplify. There aren't that many things you need to be doing. You feel like there are, but probably only 3 or 5 of them actually move the needle. And as soon as you identify those, in High Performance Habits, it's called prolific quality output. And so, we're always looking like, what is the things that we need to do? And there's probably only a couple of them that actually move the needle the most. Pay attention to those. Simplify, simplify, simplify. I always tell people too, you want better time management, simplify all the things you want of life. You know, like this setup is so simple for me to run. There's a light here, a camera there. My laptop is here. You can actually see, there it is. Okay. And a microphone. That's it. I used to have all this fancy rigging and lighting stuff. Nope. Now it's one box right there. Good to go, right? My podcast station right over there, one mic on it, simplified everything off the desk, right? Over here where I work, simplified everything off the desk. Just simplify your life. I promise you'll be happy about it. And then systemize. Systemize means what do you do on a consistent basis that either a tool online can do or a person can do. And it's about systemizing, like writing down the rules, writing down the process, handing that off, delegating that, or automating that with your system changes everything. Just like maybe you're doing marketing and you go, oh, instead of me doing all this outbound all the time, I'm going to automate that process. When they come in, the actions are triggered with the emails and the messages afterwards. That prevents you from having to do all the outbound yourself all the time, right? It's like you have to go, what's, what's the goal? Well, the goal is to get more clients. Okay, my goal is to get more clients, but I don't have the time to talk to everybody. Huh? How can I systemize that? Build an online funnel or some other type of attraction campaign that allows me not to have to be doing all that all the time. And most of my life is just run on systems. It just happens. It just runs. It's just a routine and rhythm. And that happened when I was broke. That happened when I got more successful. You just get better and better at it. In relationships with ourselves and others, repair and recalibration is a weekly growth loop. It is a weekly effort. You don't have 10 years of a crappy marriage and sit down with a relationship counselor and hope to solve it in an hour. You don't have years of trauma and go to a therapist and think it's gonna be solved in 2 sessions. You don't struggle with productivity and vision and drive and work with a coach and hope they fix it in, you know, 4-week sessions. It's an ongoing recalibration, repair, trust, requires that consistency. It just does in every relationship. It's why I'm always sharing with you, like, in your relationships, you have to sit down on a Sunday or a weekend somewhere and talk about what you just experienced as a week and talk about what's coming up in this week, where you'll need help, what you really think, feel, desire, and need, and have that talking out every week. Because the more that you don't, The more this division starts happening and you didn't even know it. And one day you wake up next to a stranger, you go, I don't even know what you think, feel, need, or desire. Well, they didn't change in a dime. They changed over time, but there's no discussion. So it's a shock to you. It's a shock to them. Brendan, how do I deal with self-hate? Whoa. What a great question, right? Because be honest, how many of you have ever just, you know, you're discouraged because somewhere inside there's something about yourself you don't like, or maybe even you resent or you despise or angry about? Anyone ever been there before? You know, and it just kind of gets in the way of your creativity because maybe you've done something or someone said something and you internalize it into such a self-criticism that, that self-criticism became recurrent, and that self-criticism got into a loop in such a way you don't like yourself. Or maybe something failed. You tried to do something, you looked silly, or you got shamed by it. Someone said something mean, and because you're in that space, you can't create in flow. Your spontaneity is no good anymore. Your excitement to do anything is no good anymore, and maybe it never really was fully because something that happened to you before. And I think that that is something to always, um, be working on. You know, I know the opposite people will say is, you know, self-love. It's hard to go from self-hate to self-love in a Zoom call. So I encourage you who struggle with this, get some assistance, get a therapist, get a coach. But often what has to happen in that bridge between self-hate and self-love is a big session of forgiveness, a big session of resetting expectations, and a big session of realigning to get yourself into integrity. Where your words and your actions and your momentum matches the person you want to be. So we'll talk about some of that today, because I think that's the bridge. When you need to go from self-hate to self-love, we've got to get in a place of forgiveness, resetting some expectations, and realigning to some integrity. And until we do that, I think it's hard to be in that state of personal freedom where you really can give and serve at your best. And I don't say that in a preachy way. I think that's a hard journey, and we've all been there. Sometimes it's, you know, big things, and sometimes it's little things. You have to forgive others. I really believe that when there is self-hate, that we have to start somewhere with forgiveness. It doesn't mean we approve it. It just means we're deciding to let go of its emotional talons in us. We're not going to carry it anymore. That however we felt made sense. That was the feeling. I'm not taking that away. What I'm saying is now, today, as conscious adults who want to move in a new direction, let's make that decision not to carry that around and hate ourselves. Because if we hate ourselves, we cannot fully express ourselves. If we cannot fully express ourselves, there's no way we will find a larger and larger audience. We can't scale it. The audience will feel that we're still trapped there. And just as you don't trust yourself because of self-hate, they'll pick up on something. It's hard to trust you. Your job is to find your emotional freedom. When you find emotional freedom, your audience grows. They trust you more. They want to watch you. They want to be with you. And I'll tell you what, if somebody did something to you, it sounds so crazy to say forgive them, but part of maturity will be doing that. It doesn't mean you need to call them and forgive them. It means you need to recognize that they're human and they made a tragic and a terrible mistake, and they were tragically and terribly conditioned or trained or hurt along the way that they would hurt someone else, because hurt people hurt people. And there's probably a chain there somewhere that you might not be aware of that goes back that caused their actions, or mental trauma or disorder that caused their actions. And it doesn't mean to make it right. It just means that today forgiveness means you're going to forgive that connection between you and that person so you can be free today. You don't have to forgive even the action. You don't have to forgive their intentions because maybe they were bad. But the thing, the string that's holding your story and their story today, cut that with forgiveness. That string that is holding your story and their story, that past, you got to cut that string and find your own emotional freedom by forgiving the situation. Even alignment is everything. If you read High Performance Habits, that story in there of that incredibly successful woman realizing that achievement wasn't her problem, alignment was. Most of you, you're amazing to be doing personal development. I already— you're an amazing person. You're probably already good at checklists and goals. You're probably already— you probably already get stuff done. You're probably the person in your community, excuse me, or your family who you happen to be the person who's a little more motivated, or, you know, you try a little harder, or you want better for your life than other people. Other people might think that personal development is silly, or that your emphasis on, you know, getting things done is like, why do you have to be such a perfectionist? And why do you have to try so hard? You probably get this from other people around you. If you're in this community, I'm guessing. So you're amazing. Your next level isn't just being more productive, it's being effective at the right things that support the dream. That's what I mean by alignment. You can already get a lot done. The issue is removing the things that are not bringing value or progress towards the dream experience. It's about really analyzing my time, energy, resources, money, efforts, sanity. And are— am I applying those things in alignment with the dream, or am I aligning to lots of other actions and other people's obligations? It's such a breakthrough. It's like if you— I mean, and this is so easy. I'm, I'm not trying to be doing a session here with so philosophical with you. If I came into your house and we just look at your calendar for the next 6 months, it's either going to show there's alignment towards something you're trying to experience and create, give, manifest in your life, Or it's blank, or it's filled with a bunch of blocks of time for things that don't bring you joy or creativity or fulfillment or connection or growth. And I don't mean just your 9-to-5s, I mean just life, right? We are either planning to live and build the dream life, or we're just going through emotions. That's the stuff of alignment. Reveal uncertainty. This one is the opposite dynamic of how I used to think of confidence, right? We think of confident people as people are just like, "Bum, bum, bum." You know, it's like Wonder Woman, right, is confident. We think of Superman is confident, who just knows everything. Really what it turns out to be, high performers are a lot— listen to this— high performers are a lot less super Superman and a lot more Clark Kent. That's what it turned to be. In all the research with millions of data points, in all of my conversations, high performers were much more likely to reveal things like, I don't know, things like, I'm unsure, things like, how do you think this should go, things like, could you kind of help me with this? High performers literally explicitly share that they don't know how it's going, they don't know how it's supposed to go, that they need some help, that they need some mentorship, that they need some guidance. That's confidence. Confidence is not holding back the deck of cards of your weaknesses. Confidence is a comfort with vulnerability. And when people say vulnerability, they often don't know what they mean. When we're talking about vulnerability specifically related to confidence and high performance, like measurable outcomes, the thing that we can measure and see is that high performers in group meetings, in team meetings, in social situations more often share their insecurity. They more often say, "I don't know how this is supposed to go." Or, you know, they'll be the person, you know, at that fruit punch bowl who says, "You know, I don't really know anybody here." I don't really know how to start to meet some of these people. Could you introduce me to somebody? And that's how they handle the social networking where they're awkward. They, instead of just sitting back at the punch bowl drowning their sorrows and feeling bad about themselves, they engage the person next to them and say, hey, you know what? I feel kind of awkward here. I don't know a lot of people. Could you introduce me? That's how high performers are handling these little situations in life. They're not the most confident person in the meeting who goes, I know everything here. They're the most confident going, you know what, I don't know this. Here's my question, what do you guys think? And that is how you lead confidently. You reveal that you don't know everything. Saying I don't know is power, not weakness. But you've been trying to do too many things on your own. And that's one reason you don't have the confidence you deserve at this stage of your life. Because see, I didn't want to start with my definition of confidence for you, 'cause I want you to be thinking about it, but I'd like to share it now that we've talked about defining and measuring it. The way I look at confidence is I think the confidence that matters the most is the confidence in one's belief in our ability to figure things out. That's what I believe confidence to be. Do I believe in my ability to figure things out? Not do I know things, because it's not always true. There's a lot of things I don't know. But do I believe in my ability to figure things out? Now there I'm confident, not because I'm smart, because I'm good at asking. I'm good at saying, you know what, I don't know how to do this. What do you guys think? And I hope this is settling in for you because Sometimes your confidence is so low because you think your confidence is correlated with what you know versus what you're willing and able to go figure out by revealing that you don't know. Got it? You gotta invest in your peer network. This means invest time, energy, effort around Getting around other people who are successful, happy, joyous, good, positive, generous, giving, skillful. This is really, really undervalued today because we've become such a lonely and separated culture. This not only brings you back to life when you are around other people who have high energy, want to give, want to serve, want to contribute, want to develop mastery, want to develop the people around them, life feels insane. So good, so positive. When you are around a bunch of people pulling you down, that's going to affect your mindset. That's going to affect how hard you try on things. That's going to affect your wealth. You got to invest in a peer network, time, energy, money, effort. When I was beginning, that meant I joined a bunch of free groups. I joined Kiwanis, I joined Rotary, I joined, I joined everything. Yeah, any free group, I'm there, man. Then some of these groups, they charge money. Okay, I gotta pay money to be in part of these groups. Save some money, join the group. And that helped elevate my career. Other ones were just networking, just free. I'd go to conferences, I'd meet 10 people. I'd keep in obsessive contact with them every month. Okay, hey, we left the conference last month. How are you doing? What's working? What's not working? What do you need help with? And I'd keep in touch with everybody who was on this educational spiral up. Later on, when I had more disposable income that I could use, I would invest in masterminds, small group coaching sessions. I'd go to conferences or retreats to get around people who were doing what I was doing or did something bigger. Than I would do. So I would start networking with people who are at other levels of finances, other levels of joy, other levels of sport, other levels of anything, so that I could keep upleveling my mastery. And some of you have never done the work on a consistent basis, year over year, to keep upleveling your network. And I want you to hear this. Year over year. Not when you make it, not when you become a millionaire, not when, you know, all the bills are paid. No, no. Every year of your life, uplevel your network. More positive, purposeful, generous, thoughtful people. Every year of your life. Every year. Sometimes in one part of our life, we invested, we moved into a new home that was just in a better community. And that better community was something that we felt like, okay, the folks who live here, they, they're, they're experiencing life differently. Okay. Now, of course, did I meet happy people and unhappy people? Absolutely. But we knew that was a higher quality of community than where we had been or where we'd come from. So we just kept upleveling. But also for me, I'd go to every year, I go to new conferences, meet new people. Who's adding new value? Who's doing a new thing? Who's being generous? Who can I get around that energizes me? A lot of my motivation is also driven by seeing other people do amazing things. I'm like, wow, I didn't even know to aspire for that. I didn't even know we could do that. We, we've gone on a couple trips with other families where the way that they holiday, I was like, I never even thought about that. Never even entered my mind. Okay, I guess people do that. Okay, amazing. That stuff like, like taking a helicopter somewhere. I'm like, taking a helicopter somewhere? I would have never thought— I wasn't sitting around in my, you know, with my little vision board over here going, someday I'm going to take a helicopter. I was like, no, it's like, wow, you took a helicopter? That's amazing. I never even thought about that. So sometimes getting around other people Other people too, their contributions, their giving, how they've gotten involved in the nonprofit world, how they generously give their money, how they serve their employees. Like, being around generous, positive, purposeful, giving people will change your life. It is an investment strategy. You've all heard it, and you knew I was going to say it. Your network is your net worth. Your net worth is your network. As you get around people who are strivers, climbing up, giving, serving, ambitious, thoughtful, generous, it levels you up. It levels you up, not only in your finances, in your feeling of life, in your sense of motivation or drive, in your example of productivity, in your examples of courage. In your examples of mastery, in your examples of servant leadership. Every year, it's your job to uplevel your network. And I'm telling you, when you do, the finances take care of themselves over a period of time. And if you think I'm being facetious, I'm not. One of the biggest breakthroughs in my life was I invested to go to a conference, and at that conference, I heard that a bunch of people who were really successful there they were going to the bar. Now, at this stage of my life, I didn't drink, and I heard that they're going to the bar. I was like, okay. So I was like, I'm gonna invest in myself tonight. I'm gonna go network. I went there, I started chatting with these people, and eventually, you know, just became friends with these people. And when I went to do one of my first big promotions, one of them supported me and promoted me, and it really helped change the game for me. And that was doing something that I normally wouldn't do. It was like, I could barely afford that conference. I would not usually go to a bar, but here I was networking and meeting these people. I should say that I would not usually go to a bar at like a conference, like with my friends. I'd go to a bar in college and stuff, but this was very different. Like, oh, in a professional setting or at a conference, I wouldn't usually go to the bar. Go to the bar and literally one connection there, one person, one new abundant-minded mentor, one new mastermind, one new group, group that can open up these huge doors for you. It's just a game changer. So I want you to think about that. Have you appropriately invested in your peer network? Both the free stuff, you doing the networking, and then as get up small group coaching or masterminds or conferences or educational experiences or adventures where you're going to meet people who are outstandingly successful, giving, generous, and happy. Go do that. Find that peer group. I would love for you to do that. When we enter conflicts, it's so often we get so myopic, we take things personally and we just want to win. So we want to just crush and trounce the other person and debate them and make them look dumb because our ego wants to be right. And we forget we got to wake up with that person tomorrow morning. Maybe that's your spouse. We got to go to work with that person again tomorrow because it's Tuesday. We got to, you know, see that person again in our neighborhood. We got to— that person who we're about to have a conflict with, they're probably going to be there again. And once we can realize, oh, I'm entering a conflict, this is about to get heated up, we're about to have some debate here, or you're already in it, if you can adopt the shared future mindset that, oh, we're gonna share a future together, I'm gonna have to see her again, I'm gonna have to work with this person again, I'm gonna have to deal with this probably again and again through multiple more projects in the future, everything can shift. You'll approach the conversation differently, more strategically, more thoughtfully when you keep the future in mind. Usually what happens in the moment of conflict, we just throw out the baby with the bathwater or whatever that phrase is. I don't even know. I still don't know. Why would you say that? You understand what I'm saying? What happens is you just You just toss out the whole relationship because you're mad and the ego goes into self-identity, disconnects from the other person and from the future and just gets in fight and flight mode. From that place, we've already lost. So deciding and determining we're going to have a shared future mindset is important. And importantly, if we're talking about relationship, or partner or spousal, you know, conflict, somebody who you really love. If the two of you have in mind, you know, a compelling future together, right? You have shared interests, shared goals, shared adventures coming up. If you can always ground your relationships in the reality that you're building something together, If that pre-exists, then moving into a conflict, you're more likely to resolve it more quickly and amicably, right? Research shows even just having a couple have a conversation about something they're interested in doing or something good coming up in their future before having them talk out a difficulty makes that difficulty or that conversation of conflict so much more smooth, so much more short, so much less accusatory. It changes everything. Grounding ourselves in the future, I think, is important. Starting off the bat with relationships thinking, I'll work with this person again, I'll see this person, I'll care about this person again. It can change everything. It can really shift everything. Strive and serve free from outcome. Those of you who read any Eastern philosophies or spiritual work, you know, whether it's the Bhagavad Gita, whether it's, you know, Buddhism, whether it is more ancient ways of thinking, was the idea was show up, work hard, help other people, but free yourself from the expectation of the outcome. This is hard because a lot of people have mattered, but they didn't get the outcome they thought, so they didn't integrate that they mattered. Does it make sense? They're like, I thought if I did that for other people, I'd become famous. And so they don't feel like they mattered because what they're focusing on is, did I become famous? Did not? No. Then I don't matter. Versus focusing on, I showed up and helped people. Meaning, if you're emphasizing the perfect outcome versus engaging in the process, you will rarely feel like you matter. Your focus is on this thing that you can't control or contribute to. And if there's no connection to the— that outcome in your mind, you go, well, I guess I didn't matter. I guess I did all that. I did all that. I didn't matter. I was talking with a mom recently. She has a, a daughter who just turned 22 years old. And for the first 21 years of her daughter's life, her daughter liked her. And then her daughter turned 22. She doesn't know why, but all of a sudden at 22, this daughter no longer likes mom. And she feels like she doesn't matter. All of a sudden I said, well, did you feel like you mattered 5 years ago? She goes, yeah. I said, why? Well, my daughter liked me. I said, so your sense of whether or not you matter in life depends on whether or not in this moment today someone likes you and approves of you. You see how ridiculous that thinking is? So the process of being an amazing mom for 21 years goes out the door. I don't matter because now my daughter don't like me. I did all that for nothing, focusing on an outcome. And most outcomes are immediate. We forget that outcomes are entirely changeable over a period of time. We lose perspective. We zero in on what's wrong today, and we feel wrong versus recognizing this woman made incredible choices throughout her life to care for this daughter. She's, she's got enough meaning and mattering points to last 5 lifetimes for parents who are disengaged and don't care. This woman gave so much, but she never gave herself the gift of feeling like she matters. When people don't get more momentum, or they set a habit or a goal and they say, I'm going to achieve that, but they don't, I believe one of the main reasons why is this first fail. People fail to see beyond now. They fail. They see their current circumstances right now. They go, oh my God, I got bills to pay. Oh my God, I got in that fight last night. Oh my God, I haven't done work for 3 months, so why would I do it now? They get stuck because all all their vision is stuck now. And I know this from even high performers, very successful people who I've been able to be blessed to work with, whether I'm working with an Olympian, literally a billionaire, or having the opportunity to network, associate, coach, connect with some of the most extraordinary people in the world. One of the things that I always have to do in the conversations with them is move their mindset and their conversation pattern from today to the future. Because what's the opposite? If you are stuck in today and you don't believe today can change, that you're going to be right here all the time, that this is just the way you are, that this is just what your income's always going to be the same, you're never going to make any more money, you're never going to impact more people, you're never going to get out of that argument pattern, and you're just focused on that, that quickly leads to Upset, hurt, turmoil, negative emotion, and ultimately to depression. And because, you know, what's one way to help somebody move out of those bad emotions? You start moving them towards their future again. Give them something to look to that inspires them, that challenges them, that makes them want to be something more. And this is what I tell people all the time. I say, you want more momentum in your life? Start expecting something from yourself again. Beyond what is today, right? Because maybe you're already good. You're like, Brent, I'm watching this, I got my thing down, homie. Maybe that's where you're at. But sometimes your next level is expect even more of yourself, that have that truly, that hunger inside, that higher standard that says, you know what, I want my life to be so significantly better. And then when you say that, don't get depressed or upset because what people say, I want my life have to be so better, but it's so bad. Look at all these things. And all they do is they're focused on today. See, they're failing to see beyond now. I want the big dream, but it sucks now. And then they spend hours thinking about how it sucks now, and they're like, I wonder why I can't get motivated. Because if you spend hours thinking about how it sucks now, you will generate the negative emotional reality that will keep you stuck in that now. It is our job to look beyond the now, right? Yes, be fully engaged. Yes, be fully present. But if you want momentum, you need to raise your ambitions. And when you raise your ambitions, you stay stuck right there. You see that person, feel that person, be that person. You're there, not here. Delegate 7 days in advance. Delegate 7 days in advance. He told me, and this was really interesting, and this is a coach who has taken teams to world champion levels. This was amazing. He said, "Brendan, most people delegate day of." And I was like, "Oh my God, that's what I do." You know, I get to that day, and because I'm so focused as an individual contributor in my career, I'll have my week planned out pretty good and pretty solid. And then on the day when I'm doing a task, I'll go, oh right, I need some help with this, and I'll delegate day of. And he said what he does is he sits down like on a Monday morning and he looks out his week and he immediately thinks of what are all the questions I'm going to have and what could all the things I could hand and delegate right now. And he delegates 7 days in advance. And I was like, that's pretty sharp. I mean, that is a weaponized high performer right there. Delegate 7, not day of, 7 days in advance. So you need someone to go get you lunch on a Thursday, on Monday, or on Thursday before, say, hey, next Thursday I need you to go get me lunch at 2 o'clock. I know that's so basic, right? But it's almost the same thing as like, oh, you're working on getting your OVO up and you're going to have to make a logo. Oh, okay, 7 days in advance, put it on to someone else and say, hey, need a logo in 7 days. Like, we don't think about that. What happens is now we get to the webpage and go, oh crap, it says upload logo. I don't have a logo. I better delegate that now. And what it does is it slows you down. So delegating in advance speeds up the schedule. And if you think this is no duh, Let me ask you a question. Did you sit down at the beginning of this week and say, what are all the things I need to delegate? Because you know what? I didn't. So that's why I said I suck at this one. And this is a big high-performance habit for me this year. I really want to get better at it. When I say you can achieve most of your ambitions in the next decade, I genuinely mean that. It might not be at scale for some of the things that people want to achieve, you know, "I'd like to sell my company for $400 million, Brendon." Well, I don't know if that's going to happen in the next decade, but I know you can achieve financial freedom in the next decade if that is your focus, if that is something that you want, if that is what you build and architect toward. If you are a person who says, "Well, Brendon, I would love to be known in this area. I would love to achieve that thing. I would love to open up my new store. I would love to move across the country or across the world. I would love to travel the globe. Look, you don't have to have crazy means to do any of those things. You know, most people think, "Well, one day I'll live in a nicer neighborhood." That could be literally in 3 months from now. And people don't believe that, and so they think it's going to take 5, 6, 7 decades. When the truth is, it's all about scale of ambition and how much we really want. That's why instead of saying decade of achievement or decade of all your perfect dreams, I'm like, let's make it the decade of mastery. Because if you achieve mastery in your craft, you achieve mastery in your relationships, you achieve self-mastery over your emotions, your physical body, your mental and spiritual realms, then guess what? Everything that shows up is either joyful and fulfilling or not. And so I'm here to tell you, you can have more in this next decade than you imagine right now. And I'm not here to be your hype guy, I'm here to explain literally the psychological underpinnings of what makes that true. You can have way more in the next decade. You can experience more in the next decade. You can feel more in the next decade than you're probably imagining now, 'cause sometimes at this time time of year, you're just crash landing into the end of the year. You know, you're trying to get all your projects done, you're trying to get gifts bought for everybody in the holidays, you're trying to wrap up all those little tasks that you still have outstanding. And right now it's just stressful and it's a hurry and you're trying to get everything done. If you're here today, it's all about how do we design a decade of mastery? Because it is through self-mastery that we gain the things we truly want. It's through self-mastery that we become more disciplined. It's through self-mastery that we create and cultivate the emotions and experiences we want of life. It's through self-mastery that we're able to be more patient, kind, loving, and thoughtful with people. It's through self-mastery that we're able to discern what we really want. It's through self-mastery that we're able to say no and set some boundaries. It's through self-mastery that we're able to get ourselves in good health. It's through self-mastery that we're able to get here in this moment when it's time to serve and feel good, find that positive aspect, and lead well. All of it requires us to master ourselves, and I really believe it is through the vehicle of self-mastery that you are going to achieve whatever your big ambitions and goals and dreams are. What else do people fail at? They fail to do the research. I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight. I can feel losing weight. I can see myself thinner. It'd be great. But then they go, gosh, I wonder what would be a healthy diet. I wonder what would be the best workout routine. And what do they do? They go watch one YouTube video and they go, oh, well, I guess, I guess I can't do that. I'm like, no, no, no. You want to be a high performer, you do your homework. And you do your homework daily. Every day. Every day you're trying to learn, trying new things, testing things out, measuring things with that scientific, scientific approach, that every day you're doing your homework. What worked today? What didn't work today? Do you know how many people I know don't ask that question at the end of the day? You know what, more people at the end of the day go, what do we watch on Netflix, than ask what worked today, what didn't work today. I mean, sometimes you just got to get— high performance is about the fundamentals, discipline, common sense applied over and over and over and over again. So at the end of the day, go, what worked today? That's research. It's a scientific mind. It's saying, hmm, where am I? Where do I want to go? What's working? What's not working? And noticing what's working and amplifying that. But you got to start with doing the homework for your dreams. You know, when I began, I had to— I went to seminars and bought courses and read books on how to write books. I went to speaking classes on how to speak. I read everything I could about people in my industry or great leaders in history who I could learn from, from their communication patterns. I started reading a book a week when I was 19 years old, which is like a big dream of mine. And I'm now at, what, 20-plus years later, I'm in my 40s, and I've read a book a week, and I've only missed 3 weeks. I get 1 week, if I'm honest, there's been 4 weeks. Now, but I don't count that week because there was, uh, you know— well, it's none of your business. I just didn't count that week. But anyway, I've been reading a lot of books because I'm always doing homework. I think it's important. All research or all homework, it's got to be diligent and consistent. You don't do it once and then forget about it. Just like you don't go to grad school and you, you know, you watch— you know, you go to 4 classes in the first week and then you don't come back again. You got to stay in class, man. Stay in class. It is the— one of my most quoted phrases now from High Performance Habits is that if you leave your growth to randomness, you'll always be stuck in the land of mediocrity. Doing your research means designing your curriculum. A lot of people fail to get any momentum because they learn just enough and they just do that. But they never kept learning, so they never drew a bigger circle. If you keep learning and doing the research, you draw the bigger circle. This is all about ego. What happens is we start losing at something, we feel bad about it, we don't want other people to see it or know it, so we just double down. I'm going to prove I'm right. But in the area of wealth, just like in the area of science, Testing is important. Knowing what is working is important. Getting rid of the experiments that are not working is part of the scientific process. Who, who understands what I'm saying? Well, the same thing with wealth. I think the wealth— I think wealth generation is a very scientific process. You don't always get it right, but at least one core piece about it is having a hypothesis, making sure you're trying different experiments, seeing what's working. But what's important in wealth is not to lose it. What's important in wealth is when you've worked so hard to generate it, not to blow it on stupid stuff, or if you have a losing strategy, not to keep pouring into it. I have friends and family and people who— they'll try something for 5, 10, 15, 20 years. It's not working, but they're embarrassed to be seen quitting it to start something new because it would prove that they're wrong. And people don't like to be proved that they're wrong, especially insecure people, especially people who have their ego wrapped up into something, especially people who don't want to learn. Especially people who are easily embarrassed when things don't turn out right because they've been taught, or they believe, that by being wrong, they're bad, and they cannot see themselves as bad. So they get defensive. When they get defensive, they get stubborn. When they get stubborn, they double down. Anyone know someone like this? Be honest. Yeah, this is a big one. This ruins families. This ruins finances. This ruins your future. And you have to know when you're just being stubborn, when your actions are causing losses over and over and you keep repeating them. This is often where gambling or addiction comes into play. And when this comes into play, sometimes you need to know that you have to raise your hand and ask for professional help. Sometimes you need to tell a family or friend that they might need professional help. Some of you have had to do interventions with family, take away credit cards, tell them, you know, give them, you know, take away access to bank accounts. I know when I talk to a global community, that stuff has happened. Here. And I'm here to say, um, without any judgment, I understand how hard that is. Like I said, I had people very close to my life who followed this strategy, and sometimes they could control it and sometimes they could not. So I don't make light of this. When you take on topics like this, this is tough stuff. However, I need you to know today Have you been doubling down on a losing strategy, something that is just not working, and you keep pouring money into it? Now, there is investment in skill development, as we'll talk about later. There is investment in your life. And if you feel like, hey, you're gaining mastery, you're getting better, and that increases the odds dramatically of that thing turning around and you making it go, Okay, I understand it. I did that myself, right? Uh, I'll give you an example of me. I was somebody who invested a lot of time, energy, and effort in learning the new skills that would become my future career. And in my first year or two, it didn't look good. And I had to have this honest sit-down with myself, with a journal, with that green tea, and go, is this going to work? Is it going to work because I'm going to develop the skill, I'm going to apply myself, I'm going to stay consistent, I'm going to get around good people, I'm going to keep trying? Is this going to work because I've seen it work for other people? Is this going to work because there's evidence that there's progress here? Is this going to work because I'm— there's evidence of gaining skill here? Or is this a total dead end? and I need to be honest with myself. Now, here's the issue. Notice I didn't make that about self-esteem, because when I was starting, my self-esteem would have said, you know, should I double down on this? Well, I'm not very good at this. I'm not smart. I'm not capable. I've never done this before. My self-esteem would have said stop. But instead, I look for evidence. Have other people do this? Is there progress? Am I gaining skill and mastery? Is there a clear path? Are there people around me who are doing this? And it's obvious they're— they've figured out a strategy that is very clear. There's no hocus pocus, there's no lack of transparency. Like, these are what the things they're doing. Do I have a clear plan? That wasn't about me, it was about is there some evidence? Is there a plan? Can I execute? Okay, I kept going. I kept going. And I'm glad in that moment that I did double down. Now, however, I didn't double down irresponsibly. Even though it wasn't going well, even though I felt like so many days were failure, there was evidence of a path. There was evidence of a peer group doing this. There was evidence of progress there. There is evidence eventually of, okay, this is working. Hey, look, people are opting in, people are buying the book, people are, you know, signing me up. Okay, I can see this thing scaling. Got it. All right, let me keep investing there. But also along the way, I can tell you, as someone running a business, there's been so many losing marketing campaigns. Losing ideas, losing business along the way that I just had to go, not working, kill it. Just, it's just not right. Look at the evidence. It's not progressing. It's not getting the numbers. It's not scaling. It's just not working. Let's change our strategy. Let's leave it. Because when I tell people always, you can always find lots of other strategies that also get you to where you want to go. And can bring you joy and connection and fulfillment. There's anything you want to do in your life, there's 100 strategies. Anything. There's nothing you— like, think about parenting. Hundreds of strategies, right, to find your way authentically and to connect with your child. There's hundreds of ways to develop skill. There's hundreds of businesses. There's— I mean, literally, they're like, there's an infinite number of strategies in some ways to do something. Your job is to find those ones that speak to you, to try them, to have a plan, to see something else someone else has tried to done, model them, find your own way within it. But listen, if it's not working, you have to choose when to quit it. You have to choose. And the most important thing when it comes to wealth is to not double down on things that are not working. Because something else could, right? Same thing in investing, right? This can be as tactical as, hey, you invested in this stock, you're watching the stock, and you keep pouring into it every month for 6, 7 months, and you're watching it, you're pouring into it 6, 7 months, it's not doing anything. Well, remember there's other strategy. Well, you look at, well, all these other stocks, they happen to be growing, they're doing fine. Maybe I need to evaluate if this one is where I should keep pouring into, or should I diversify? Right? That's the basis of a lot of what people talk about in wealth management is understanding, oh wait, I put all my eggs in this basket. It's not turned out well. Let me make sure I'm more diversified so I don't lose. Y'all following what we're talking about here? Please don't double down on where you're losing. Know when you're being stubborn, know when ego ego is there. Know when you're embarrassed to quit and say, you know what, instead of being embarrassed to quit something, let me be okay with the fact that quitting or stopping this thing that is hurting me or my family or my finances— stopping that might actually be the thing that brings me the next level of abundance. You want to learn better? Mentor others. Teach others. Coach others, influence or inspire others. There is no question about this in all of the expertise gaining literature that those who teach the thing that they are learning as they're going rapidly accelerate their performance. Why? Because they're forced to, right? Like when, when you are learning something and you simultaneously have to explain it to another person, it reconfigures it in your brain. It makes your brain understand the concept and then communicate and express it. It simplifies it. It's almost like a filter of learning. And so if you're learning French simultaneously, as you're learning French, teach somebody French, right? Like, here's what I learned in French today. Why don't you learn along with me? As you learn it and you express it or teach it, coach it, or mentor it, your capabilities and your competency goes like levels way beyond. If you— I always tell, I always— I'm just really great example actually, um, that billionaire, um, I was sharing with you, we're working with their kids, um, two of them, um, pretty young, had not learned how to swim yet, and they had them in separate schedules of swim practice. I said, no, no, no, We gotta get those kids at the same swim practice. And one was slightly ahead of the others. I'm saying, we gotta have the other kid coaching this kid on what they're learning in their practice. We accelerated them so far. So they like, even their swim coach was blown away. Like, Brendon, have you worked with a lot of Olympians in, in swimming? I said, no, not, that's usually not my space there. I, I've worked with them on mindset stuff. But he's like, but you've never taught them how to swim or taught— you never did, you know, lap trials and stuff like that? I said, not— no, but I knew if you put the kids in there and they have to learn together and explain it to each other, they'll learn faster. Blown away. Pair people up, have one person learning, one person teaching, and vice versa, and the learning goes faster. The most important boundaries you're ever going to set in your life are with yourself and what is acceptable with who you are, which is acceptable in how you conduct yourself. A boundary between the good self and the not so good self. A boundary between the higher level of who you are versus the lower impulses. A boundary in your own sense of what is right and wrong and what you allow yourself. In other words, we're going to go into the conversation of standards that we allow in ourselves and in our lives. And I think when you think about a boundary, not just something between you and another person, but in your own mindset about what is allowed or not allowed I think this could be a game-changing conversation today. And I'm gonna jump right into it because I don't wanna like speak conceptually for you here. So let me talk about some important boundaries in your life. I'll talk about 3 huge internal boundaries. Then we'll talk about the standards that we allow in our life that may be really hurting us or accelerating us. First one, I think you guys are gonna love this. So you can grab a screen grab. I wish I was prettier with my fancy camera, but here we go. I think you're gonna like this one. The boundary of the fake self versus the real self. Take that screen grab. You got to get this. See, this boundary and what you allow here and how you conduct yourself here, it matters, doesn't it? When I talk about setting boundaries, very few people ever think about this one. Because when we talk about setting boundaries, we often feel victim to something. We feel like, oh well, someone's encroaching on my boundaries. We'll talk about that. But this is the one that causes the real damage. When we blur the lines between who we authentically really are and how we are showing up to please or placate others, to minimize ourselves. That's the boundary. How much do you cross this boundary? You want to talk about the quality of your life? How much do you cross this boundary right here? Think about this. How much, how often do you cross this boundary? That can be the game changer in your life today. Be present. Try to be present. I really believe, as Denise does, it's like when couples have learned mindfulness, when both of them have learned how to be self-aware in the moment, to be nonjudgmental in the moment, to be able to come openly into the moment, and be there with the other person in full presence, not stuck 5 years ago, present, everything changes. I would say what our partners, our spouses, our relationships, our families want from us isn't more presents, like material presents, like Christmas gifts. It's presence. They want more sense that we are grounded right here with them, attentive to them, accepting of them, in the moment with them, not trapped in old stories, not angry about the stress or freaking out about the worries of next week or next month's bills, but rather at dinner with them, in the moment with them, on the walk with them, living in the present with them. And this one, I would guess Denise probably brought up because it's so important in times of conflict to be present with them and to be— I would say, like, if I had to think about, like, my presence with Denise when we're struggling or when we're in an argument, I would say if I could give my— like, knowing what she needs in that moment more than what I'm kind of built or I was conditioned to as I grew up. Is that presence with tenderness, that presence with tenderness. I think that's what lacks in a conflict or a fight. It's like one person's so worked up and the tenderness isn't there. And I raise my hand, I got to work on that. That is one of those things. I grew up in a— I don't know about some of you, I grew up in a super fast twitch, like very speed up to argue, very vocal. I didn't grow up around any passive aggressiveness or quiet silence and conflict and judgment. It was all verbal and very physical. I grew up in a place where there was a lot of physicality, a lot from the neighbors, the friends, the teachers. I mean, I grew up in a place where the principal could swat you with a wooden paddle. Literally, you got in trouble, you got beat by a wooden paddle by the principal. I grew up so like crazy like that. And so, my mind until I was probably about 25 was conditioned for that. And I recognized in a relationship when I was 25 how quickly I got angered and wanted to storm out or scream or holler or my ego would trap up, but I was also just angry. I was an angry young man. I worked a decade really hard in personal development. To let go of my anger that came from just how I grew up. I had to let go of that and let go of that. Not be perfect, just get a little better every day at it. But that means I was also conditioned that way and I have to go, "Whew, okay, that's a weakness of mine. And where does that come out?" Usually for me, that will come out in an argument, right? If we're just not seeing something, I just feel it. I feel it literally come up. I feel the emotion of it. It just can be triggered. And what do I have to do? I've got to try to be present. That's why I love her language this morning. I was like, "Oh, that's so good." I underlined "try" like 7 times. Just try. Put the effort back into being present with your partner or spouse, even in conflict, but also in the beautiful times. Put your dang phone down. Be at dinner with them. All right, when you're intimate together, don't be staring off the wall thinking about something else. It's like, try to be passionate, intimate again. Like, bring your awareness, your physical body, your mindset to the moment with the other person. I tell people all the time, I go, imagine you just found out your beloved partner or spouse is going to be gone in 3 days. You— they got it. Terrible diagnosis. I promise you would be so tender with them and so present. Well, none of us know when those days are going to come. None of us know we're going to lose the person. And as I've been with people towards the end, couples, all they want is to hold each other and to be tender with each other. And so being present is about living in this time zone being with them right now in the here and now, not the past, not the future, here, but it's being attentive, tender, thoughtful, and energetically co-creating together. Because some people say presence is, you know, it sounds like presence is just tenderness and boring. I'm like, no, presence is pop and vibe and like the thrill of it all too, right? That when you went on those first couple of dates with that person, you were locked in, you were interested in trying to learn about them, you cared about what your clothes looked like, you know, you tried to smile, you tried to show some physical reaction to what they were doing. There was interest there, there was intrigue there, and you're both there, right? You're attentive. And if that relationship lasted, let's bring some of that back, that energy and the magic from that time you fell really in love, when you went crazy for each other. What was there? What was their intention? What was there? Mindfulness to one another? What was there? Acceptance. And also not just accepting them, but pulling them in with your presence. Like you were drawn in, right? You were drawn together, they say. What was that? That's that energy. That's that presence. That's bringing us together. We must rekindle that over and over and over in a relationship. It begins with both of us finding presence. If you want more wealth, you have to learn to exceed expectations and add new value. Notice it doesn't say add value, add new value. Okay, so first part, at your job or in your career, you need to exceed expectations. And we live in a culture right now which really, I know, is for many of you who are older, it's really hard to understand That many people say, I'm just gonna do what I paid— I'm paid for, only gonna do what I'm paid for, won't do anything more. And that's a very big cultural thing, especially in the United States right now. It's like, I only do what I'm paid for. Who, who are you? What right do you have, boss or society, to ask me to do more than you're paying me for? And I'm like, ooh, that's poor thinking. That's bad thinking. That's going to get you in trouble because you know what that's going to mean? It just means you're always going to get paid for what you do and only for what you do. So if you're happy with your pay, do that forever. You don't deserve any more unless you go beyond the expectations or the dollar value of what you're doing. That's so hard for people to get. And people, I don't like that. I'm like, I don't, I don't know. That's adding value, doing your best, stretching yourself. Now, the criticism, which I think is appropriate, comes down to being when that turns into burnout culture in companies where the company's paying you a certain amount or they're paying you less than, you know, another person would get paid because they lack diversity or they're paying genders different things and you're getting paid. That's a whole different conversation politically than what we're having here. We're talking about you and what you control. And you're either going to be a person who builds wealth because you believe, I'm going to exceed expectations here so I can be rewarded with promotions, or I'm just going to stay here. I'm going to do the same thing like a robot all the time, and I'm only going to do what they're paying me for. And I say this both having been an employee and an employer of hundreds of people. I really believe this gets a lot of people in trouble because they want career growth, they want promotion, but they're not willing to do anything beyond their level of pay. And I grew up in a culture where I saw my dad and my mom go way beyond what their job description was, way beyond what they were getting paid. Why? Because when they were at work, they were going to be their best whether they got paid or not. That's what they taught me. Hey, you be your best, you do your best, you do great work. Doesn't matter what you're getting paid, you're there. And if you agreed to be there, you signed the contract, you raised your hand, you took the job, you agreed to be there. Do not diminish yourself because of the pay. Can I get an amen on a weekday here? Do not diminish yourself because of pay. I will say it a million times. Do not diminish yourself because of pay, because you will lock yourself into a low level of not only income, you will lock yourself into a low level of living because you're diminishing yourself because you're not getting the exact external reward you desire. That's going to ruin you in life. Because think about how that plays out in real life in other areas. Think about your relationships. Think about a marriage as an example. If you're only going to do what you are paid in return by the other person, think about how poisonous that is. I'm only going to do— I'm only going to love them equal to exactly how they love me. That relationship is gonna die. Well, the same thing in careers. Careers die all the time because people go, nope, I'm only gonna do what I'm paid for. I, you know, some of you guys know I had a blessing of working with, um, Paula Abdul when she was on American Idol, and she had this saying that I just loved. When she was working with the kids, she would often tell them, hey, There's no traffic beyond the extra mile. Go the extra mile, there's no traffic there, less competition, and go faster. Go the extra mile, you got freedom out there. You're not clogged up with everybody else. And I love that. It was about exceeding expectations. And if you want your company— for me, I know maybe you're entrepreneurs or business owners or managers— if you are in a place where you want your company to perform better in the marketplace, especially in a capitalistic marketplace? Well, you have to exceed expectation. You can't just give them like the thing that they're buying, cuz then you're just a commodity. What they want is something extra. They wanna be surprised by what you delivered. That's exceeding expectation. When they're surprised by what you deliver, you have raving fans, repeat customers. Higher average order values, greater lifetime value. They stay longer, so less churn in every business metric possible. When your customer satisfaction— they say that you've exceeded their expectations, your company succeeds. In fact, there's literally entire books and areas of study about this that have found year over year, culture after culture, all around the globe in every different industry. If a company only meets expectations, they fail. You have to exceed expectations. It is a mindset of the most extraordinary, the most extraordinary people I've ever met. They're like, how do we make this better? Right? The biggest business titans you ever study, whether you like them or not, they looked at the thing, said, this thing sucks. I'm gonna make it better. Right? Steve Jobs with the iPhone going, phones suck. I'm going to exceed all the customer's expectations with what this phone can do. Now, whether you like the guy or not, it's like, wait, that led to one of the biggest companies in the history of the world. And you can go right down the list of all the big companies in the world and go, you know what? They innovated. They didn't just do the thing. They exceeded expectations and they added something new. So if you have a job, how can you add something new onto your plate? Take on a new responsibility. That shows the people around you that you're adding value, that, that takes care of the customer, that, you know, helps the company grow. Your job isn't to do just the minimal at work. If you just do the minimal at work, you will get paid the minimal. Like, the good news— logic works there, doesn't it? So your job is to go Okay, what— here's the work, here's the job. How can I add new value? In all of our research, in all of our coaching, in all of our training across literally millions of people from 190 different countries, like, those who don't add new value, not only do they not succeed over the long term in every measurable way, they're less happy because their life grew stale. And how many of you would equate staleness with living and experiencing a richness of life? Got it? Add new value. How are we going to set our emotional tone in this chaos? How are we going to find our strength, our center, and project goodness and compassion at a time when it is desperately needed? How are we going to hold the line in our businesses so that we don't overreact and go in one direction when we ought to be in another? How do we manage all this? Today is my joy to talk with you about. Number 1 is the decision that I will always be the one to remain centered amid the chaos. And I have worked on myself, and I have taught myself that for pretty much, you know, 25 years I've worked on that at a very steady pace. When everyone's freaking out, I take a bunch of deep breaths, I connect with my breath, I make sure that I'm keeping perspective. But ultimately, that decision to— I will be centered amid this— means for me that I will choose the emotional tone and my attitude as I am dealing with uncertainty or chaos. You know, I remember years ago I was doing an event and a person in the back of the room had a seizure and literally they fell out of their chair and on the ground they started having a full physical reaction to the seizure as well where they were shaking and it was terrifying for for the people around them. And I was kind of at the beginning of my career, and I saw it happen. It was almost in slow motion. And could you imagine you're on your stage? I mean, put yourself there. You're in front of, you know, hundreds or thousands of people, and all of a sudden somebody is, you know, falling over and having a full seizure in front of the whole audience. The whole audience literally starts looking back, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. People are standing up, oh my God, oh my God. Total panic sets in the room. And I remember standing up there, and, uh, I have this on video where at first my first reaction is like this, kind of like shocked, just like everybody else, like, whoa. And then I kind of look over and instantaneously in my mind I go, Brendan, you have to be in charge here. I didn't want to be in charge. I had to be in charge. And my mind immediately said, two choices here: join the panic or stay stable and strong and present and connected with what's really happening. And so that decision, I'm going to stay centered amid this, made me immediately also decide I need to center the audience. So I asked the entire audience, I just announced, I said, everyone sit down. And everyone just kind of looked, I said, sit down. And everybody, they sit down. And I said, please sit down because your panic and your chaos right now is not serving the energy of this person who needs healing. Sit down, be quiet. Everyone please close your eyes so my team can address this situation. Please close your eyes. And let's put some positive energy and prayer in the room for this person who needs our attention right now. They don't need negativity and fear in the room. Let's put some love and prayer. Let's do a little— let's send some energy. So please close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and remember, you can choose to contribute good energy to the situation. And so I had everyone close their eyes, take a few deep breaths, and meditate or send prayer back to this person as my team was clearing that row and getting to this person so that when the paramedics would arrive, that person could remove— be removed. Now here's the deal. I knew I had like 20 minutes at least before we could get a paramedic, probably at that spot in the seminar. And I thought, how am I going to buy 20 minutes? How am I— I mean, people are going to start freaking out. And I realize, no. If I set the emotional tenor in this room on purpose, and if I ask of others to find the best within themselves, if I ask of others to take a breath, if I ask of others to be responsible for the energy they are projecting into this space, if I ask of that, And if I demonstrate that, we'll make it through this moment. And that might not seem like a big deal, but I really believe the energy in that room either was serving this man as he was having a seizure or was making it worse. You know, imagine here he is having this unbelievable, stressful, life-threatening situation, and if all around him everybody is screaming in chaos, the The body feels that, you know. The body and the mind feels the energy of what is around it. And so if that is true, let us all be responsible for the energy we are projecting right now. I've seen friends hop online and something's happening, and what are they doing? They're contributing to the chaos. They're, they're, they're, they're posting snarky comments. There's sarcasm, blame, vitriol, anger. And I'm not here to say that we can't use our social mediums to contribute to an argument or to make a case, but every word has a tone to it. And the tone that we are setting in reply to chaos either furthers the chaos or it levels it. And the more of us who choose to be even-tempered, thoughtful, caring, compassionate, you know, the values that we would all hope to have as a global citizenry, the more that we will judiciously take action in a thoughtful way. That's the hope. And whether you believe that or not, I hope that you'll hear this first practice. Your family needs to see you centered, calm, strong, and assured in chaos. Otherwise, we are passing down panic to another generation. A lot of people's negative emotions comes from they're just so high-strung and they've never integrated the success that they have. You know, they keep beating on themselves over and over and over again, and they're not giving themselves any credit. And so if you feel like a lot of negativity, you probably also lack a practice of integrating the wins, of taking a moment and taking a beat to celebrate what you have done. Because if you don't celebrate, how are you supposed to feel positive? And so many people don't have a practice of that. They only celebrate, you know, at huge milestone achievements. But each day is You can journal about what you did well that day and how you handled stress or struggle well that day. And you can give yourself that credit. And as you give yourself more credit, it's like building a bank account of positive emotions, right? I give myself a lot of credit. Like, after I finish this one, I'll go, I did an entire live webcast with a nostril full of powder. Unbelievable, Chard. Yeah. You know, you have the stupid little things that you have to celebrate like that when you made it through something that was difficult or hard. You got to celebrate those things. You make it through more difficulty and stresses and struggles throughout the day than you give yourselves credit for. You didn't freak out with your kid today. Give yourself credit for that instead of feeling like a bad mom all the time. You didn't snap at that coworker who was driving you crazy today. So your relationship would be good. Good. Give yourself some credit for that. Good job, you were patient. Well done. These things, as we give ourselves more credit, we feel better for ourselves. As we feel better for ourselves and our esteem goes up for ourselves, the negative emotions don't knock us off track as much. How many of you have ever been in a conversation, in a conflict, and you were just trying to be thoughtful and try to be calm and the person you're dealing with was not respectful? All right, yeah, I'm sure a lot of hands raised here in the Zoom, at least as we're doing this. It's very, very frustrating. And as soon as we lose respect in the conversation process, you know, all is fair game in war. And so it's a very challenging thing. We have to go into conflict situations, but adopt this philosophy overall. I'm going to treat people with kindness and respect. Even if they don't treat you that way. You know, for those who don't know my background a little bit, this is a topic I really love because, you know, if you don't know, my master's degree was in communication studies and I focused mostly on leadership communication. And in that process, so I got to do a lot of mediation and including peer mediation. So I was mediating, you know, students in college having conflicts. I was mediating, you know, professors and professors, professors and students, administrators and professors, local community members and administrators. Like, my job was literally two people come in a room, they are in conflict, they cannot resolve it, they've already tried, they do not like each other, and here they are. I even did some court-referred mediation, which in like a divorce case, they'd bring in the couple and I'd have to work with them. And mind you, I'm in my early 20s, you know, and it was such a great training ground. I mean, for 2 years, I just got to see how terribly disrespectful people can be toward each other, even when they both want to solve it. And a big part of mediation was teaching people in advance of a conversation that this process we were going to keep respectful, that the expectation was that this is going to be a respectful conversation because otherwise we couldn't solve it. And they already usually knew that. I've done a lot of coaching, as you know, over the last 15 years. I'm a certified high-performance coach. And over these 15 years doing it full-time every single week, a lot of times I'm dealing with conflict situations and couples or conflict situations between co-founders. And soon as it devolves into disrespect, it is 10 times harder to pull it back. It is so much more difficult. And so you'll hear me talk about how you can maintain that respectful stance with your partner or the person you're having conflict with, but also know that The expectation has to be had in advance of the conversation. Sometimes you react in the heat of the moment without stepping back and setting the frame for the conversation. As simple as if you feel hooked or triggered, saying, you know, could we talk about this in like 30 minutes in a much more calm way? I just need to go reset. And coming back with the expectation and the conversation. Let's try this again. I want to be more respectful with you. I know that we love and care for each other, or I know that we need to work together, or I know that it hasn't been easy. So let's try this again. Let's try to do this with kindness and care for another, and we can solve this together. I know we can. A simple reset into the frame of respect can change the outcome as well. You must choose the life of excellence. You must choose to reach for that high-performance experience, not go through the average experience in life. You deserve more than a humdrum, boring, distracted, unfocused, unmotivated life. To get more of that that vibrancy, that pop, that connection, that fulfillment, you gotta refuse mediocrity. I know when I walk in the office someday, listen guys, when I walk in the office someday, I don't feel like it. So I do everything we've talked about here and everything with the High Performance Planner or my morning routines or everything we're covering in coaching month to month to month to month. Everything that you are learning as you stay with us, as you progress right here because I won't let you off. Every month I'm gonna challenge you. Every month I'm gonna remind you of that discipline. Every month I'm gonna cheer you on. You have so much extraordinary power and capability in your body. Don't ever forget that. Your mind, your heart, your soul, it is geared and bred and built for service, for something extraordinary. You got something to give in this world, something to create in this world. So on the down days, on the discouraging days, you don't lose the day. 'Cause you refuse to be mediocre. You say, no, I have the mindset, I have the identity. It is my role to be the person who shows up with excellence. You are a high performer. You know there's another level of experience for you. You've gotta learn to feel the goodness of life. I know this sounds super esoteric. Don't worry, I'll get more tactical for some of you who are like, come on, dude. But so many people don't feel like they matter because they've never felt life. Who knows what I'm talking about? They don't feel like they matter. They've never felt life. They've never felt the energy of this moment. There's no connection to the presence. It's what I've been teaching for so long now. You have to condition yourself to feel the day. You have to condition yourself to feel the day. This means you have to notice moments and appreciate it, have gratitude for it, recognize beauty, recognize something happening around you that draws awe, aspiration, inspiration. It means feeling the goodness of life, also having perspective to realize how much better your life is than some of the other alternatives. It means, for example, recognizing the struggles of other people and being thankful that you are gifted something different, and knowing that in the magic of this very moment you have new choices. And if you're looking for what's there— there's no goodness in life, Brendan, it's all arbitrary and chaotic. And I'm like, but isn't it true you have choice at this moment? You can choose your next thought. You can choose to pick up the thing on your desk. You can choose to call somebody after this session. You got a lot of choices. If there's any great goodness in life, it's the fact that you got a lot of choice. It's the fact in this moment you can make a change, but it's the fact that you can also aim your awareness and aim your focus to take something in that's beautiful and good. Because when you sense your goodness and you sense the world is good, others are good, life is good, this moment is imbued with goodness, then all of a sudden you feel different. And when you feel that around you and you feel that from within, you start to say, this really matters, this means something. If you don't recognize the beautiful gift of life, it's hard to ever recognize that you are a gift and that you matter. People always say, I don't know where to start. You know what? My marriage is a disaster. I don't know where to start. Brendan, my health is a disaster. I don't know where to start. My career sucks. I don't know where to start. And so what they do is they say, well, I don't know where to start. Seems overwhelming. I'll just stay here. Even if here is misery. See, people's fear of the unknown and their inadequacy in being able to learn or handle something makes them stay where they're at, even when where they are at is terrible. You know, many of you know I've worked with people who are in domestic abuse situations, and it's easier to stay there sometimes even though there is misery and harm and danger there because they don't know what to do. They don't know what they would do without that other person. They don't know what they do out there in the world. And so they feel stuck. And that first step, which would seem so obvious— get out of this situation that's harming you— they can't make that leap because they don't believe in themselves. You see how these all tie together? Even though they have the direction— get out of house and be safe— disbelief is killing that progress. Yeah, but I'm unworthy. I guess I deserve this. I can't handle life out there. I don't know how to do it. I don't know where to start. I wouldn't know how to get a job. I wouldn't know what to do next. And when people don't progress because they don't know what to do, We definitely need inspiration. We need volunteers. We need support. We need, you know, free content. We need a kind neighbor. We need better programs that help them realize you can take that first step. You can take that first step. And please realize that knowing the first step You already got it. Everyone else, I don't know what to do. I'm like, what's one thing you could do? What's the first obvious thing you could do? And that's all they have to do. You don't have to know every step. You just need to know the next right action of integrity and health for yourself. Do that, right? People don't begin a diet program because they go, oh my God, a program. I'm like, what's the first thing you could do? I guess I could throw out the chips. Throw out the chips. You know, I don't mean to be too heavy today. The simplest, elegant, first right action of integrity and help for yourself. Do that. Do that. You know, people like, well, I can't start working out until I get my full gym equipment in the gym. I'm like, there's a sidewalk out front. Do you have shoes? You have shoes? Go walk, go run. Go jog. Simple. Get in motion. Why do you think more people aren't happy, and what could one do to just begin the journey of loving, living, and mattering more and being happier? Oh, I love that. Um, I think let's begin with most people don't know what happiness is or where they get it. You know, I, I, I taught this at your event. This is, it's a simple framework. It's like draw out a triangle. Who, for those who are listening, draw out a little triangle. And on each of the points, I'll tell you what happiness is. Like, the human desire and striving is we want a sense of aliveness. So you need to do more things that make you alive, make you a vibrant, authentic, expressive, uh, make you sense. An example of that would be— give me one. For some people, it's adventure. Go mountain biking. Okay. It's like, wow, that just brought me back to life, you know. Some people, it's hanging out with great friends. Some people, it's doing their passion. Some people, it's, uh, you know, just Just honestly feeling and sensing the moment and meditating. Another thing that everyone wants is connection. Most people today lack the depth of happiness because they— I love what you said earlier. The difference between you and maybe Tony is that you really believe in the environment and most people lack a connection with other people. They're surface-level relationships. You can't be really happy long-term with surface-level relationships. So you got to find out how do I connect more deeply? And it can be simple things like you talked about, you know, with the kids, maybe less than texting, call them, have that moment of connection. It's nothing crazy, but that's what you're striving for. You want happiness with your kids. You're going to call them, you're going to connect with them. So think about connection, relationships, a level of depth. Then we want meaningful pursuits. When I, when I go after that, I just, I love that pursuit. And notice it doesn't say meaning. A lot of people just say meaning. I said, no, it's meaningful pursuits because a lot of people we know who are really successful, they've already had a meaningful life. They're miserable because they're not pursuing anything anymore. Gosh, Brendan, that's so true. You got that. You got to have that pursuit, man. You got to find a pursuit that has meaning to you. It brings you back to life. That's happiness. And then the middle of the triangle is the capital G— growth. If you don't have aliveness, you don't have connection, you don't have meaningful pursuits, and you don't have growth, you're miserable. We can bank on it. We can guarantee it. The research will reveal it every single time. But if we can get you a little bit more alive, a little bit more connected, a little bit more meaningful pursuits, and a little more growth. Those, like, little bit in each of those, it's like a thunderous shift in your life. You're just like, whoa, little bits in those. But there's an access point. Why aren't most people happy? Let's say they do all those things, still not happy, and they're just not here. Presence is the gateway to happiness. If I can't get you present, to feel it, to sense it, can't change. What most people want in real life, what they really want, all the people I work with, maybe the people you work with, what they really want, they'll never say it and almost of them never know it. What almost every human being wants is they want to feel the day more. They got all these activities they're blazing through. Get the kids to school, get this off to there, get that done, answer that email, get this project done. And even if they're moving towards things they find meaningful and they're awesome, But if they don't feel it, if they're literally not present, they're not mindful enough to sense it, to appreciate, to feel grateful, to feel the joy, to feel the ups, to feel the downs, to feel the miseries, to feel the wins. If you aren't feeling the day, you're just blazing through as an automaton. You're just blazing through the days, you know, on autopilot. You're just like overwhelmed, stressed, going through it, but you don't feel. The day, I can't get you to be happy. So the gateway to all of happiness is always presence. Learn to be more present in the moment. Feel the moment, even the bad ones. You got to feel the day more so that when you get on your knees at night to pray, you felt the day. Dear God, thank you. I felt this day. I felt those lessons you gave me. I felt those gifts you gave me. I felt— thank you for that connection. See, when you talk to God, if you don't feel there's, there's not a relationship there. God wants you to feel. It's a unique thing he gave us, not just the emotional reaction of an animal, but the ability to deeply appreciate feeling. Very human. So we've got to tap people back in the present to deeply appreciate the moments, the feelings, the events of life again. And I think that's why I'm so happy. It's like I feel so much. Most people are so scared of that. I love it. It makes me feel alive, right? How do you sense more aliveness? You got to feel the day, feel the moment.

Because you made it this far in this 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 it's 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 Simon Sinek motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

A philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Karse defined these two types of games: finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and an agreed-upon objective. Football, baseball— there's always a beginning, middle, and an end.