You Are Not Just Sympathizing - TRANSFORM Energy

The power plant doesn't have energy, it generates energy. I've been teaching that for like 15 years on stage, and one guy stands up one time, he goes, actually, you're wrong. At my event, there's 2,000 people in my event. He goes, well, you're actually wrong. I'm like, oh, how am I wrong? He says, well, a power plant doesn't generate energy. What it does is it takes energy from one source, upgrades it, so transforms the energy, then stores it and transmits it. So it's really transforming energy from one location to another. And I love that metaphor because I felt like that's my job. So much of my life is helping people reach another level of energy, because if you don't reach another level of energy, you can't serve at another level. If you don't reach another You can't feel better, be happier, be a better spouse. Everyone says, "I want that next level," but they don't understand energy is a requirement to get there. And when we measured energy in our studies, we were talking about really mental energy, emotional energy, and physical energy. It was a huge turning point in my life when I started realizing these things because that whole thing that we as entrepreneurs, we want to wait for maybe one day I'll feel energized, or maybe one day I'll feel joy, or maybe one day I can have fun after, you know, all the money's in the bank. You got the house or the cars or the money, and then people go, "Then I'm going to be really a fun person." It's like, no, if you're not a fun person when you're broke, You're not gonna be that much more fun when you're rich. I think that people have to learn to bring the joy. It's one of our little taglines on our shirts, right? Bring the joy. And that says you don't have joy, just like I don't think people have happiness. I don't think people have sadness either. I think that we are generating the emotions and the feelings that we experience in life. And as soon as we own that responsibility, life gets really fun.

Need motivation?

Watch the top 10 of Believe Nation, 'cause I love it.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself. You watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too. You have Michael Jordan-level talent at something. So get ready to seek clarity, decide to change, and raise necessity with Brendon Burchard and my take on his top 10 rules of success to give you the confidence, motivation, and belief that you need.

Enjoy.

Rule number 2: Know how to execute and scale creativity.

Is not strongly correlated with high performance. And if you told me that 7 years ago, I would have fought with you for like 2 or 3 hours. But then in one interview with one of the world's largest CTOs, chief technology officers, he said, Brendan, you know, they're a top 10 brand in the world. He said, we don't—

he said, my team—

he said, I'm not creative, my team's not creative, but we know how to execute and scale. And execution and scale is really important to long-term high performance. Creativity might get you in the game, but a lot of people are creative but can't work their way out of a bag. And I was like, I would argue that forever because I'm a creative, a writer and a coach. I would have never thought that.

Rule number 3: Have discipline.

If you're not doing block time, here's what your day might look like. You have all these different slots of time, right? And you're just going to plug in as you go through the day. You're going to plug in, oh, I'll work some there. And I'll work some there, and then I'll try to cram stuff up right at the end of the day. I'll try to cram that sucker in. Any crammers? Crammers? Crammers? Crammers? Okay, just checking.

No judgment.

No judgment. You're just not going as fast as you could. That's all. Crammers, they're— I love crammers. Yeah, just like, because they're easy to get to move faster, because you do have that diligence of when there's a deadline and it's on, you can go, which really serves you. But we gotta take you from a crammer to a preparer to a high performer, and the way that we do that is to look at this and go, listen, if you keep leaving all these time slots to randomness, what happens is they start to get filled with the big D, distraction. Some reason it seems like this hit home for some people.

I don't know why.

How many recognize what I'm talking about here? So now you add up— take this out, you might not be thinking too seriously about it, but let's say that's like a day. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 work hours. You didn't know I drew that on purpose. If you leave your time to randomness, you are stealing from your greatness. If you leave your time to randomness, you are stealing from your greatness bit by bit, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter, year by year, and decade by decade. And it's the little things like this where you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't get anything done. Done because you've got all these random approaches to your day.

Rule number 4: Make conscious decisions.

Your life doesn't end up an accident. Your life is a series of actions that you initiate or don't initiate, and that your thoughts are going to control that roadmap. And so how are you using your mind today to either make yourself feel great or not? I posted on Instagram this morning, I said, listen, your destiny is ultimately controlled to by a decision you already made this morning. Everyone watching this already made a decision this morning. This morning, they made it, a life-changing, huge decision this morning, and that is either I'm gonna get up, enter the world with no intention, go through the motions to hopefully get by or survive, or I am going to get clear in this morning about what I want, what I'm going after, who I'm going to be, how I'm gonna serve, and whether or not I'm gonna be be excellent and extraordinary or not. And the problem is most people never make that conscious decision. And so I was learning early on, make the conscious decision about who you wanna be each day, stay congruent with that. And that was, you know, for me, a kid who was just going through the motions, all of a sudden going, oh, who do I wanna be? What do I want my relationships to be like?

That was really important.

And then I started setting personal challenges every month.

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. Rule number 5, don't look for gratitude.

I'm a writer, I'm a coach, and I'm a trainer. My job is to share things that are relevant to the teaching point. So it's what am I trying to teach? Now I'll share case studies about my life or some research, uh, but it's pretty limited towards only what I'm teaching. And people sign up for me to teach a very specific thing. So they're not seeing the whole picture of my life. They're just learning that specific thing. So I think it also left a lot of people going, okay, he's super successful, but I don't know anything about him.

Right, right.

And that created—

It's hard to trust people you don't know anything about. Yes.

And, or you read the Motivation Manifesto, right? There is no Brendon in that book. The publisher famously turned down the book. We had a $2 million book deal. I turn in the book and the editor goes, what the hell is this? You, you wrote it like it's, you know, 1776.

You're not—

there's not one story of you in here. Your audience wants to know about you. I'm like, yeah, but that's not what I'm writing for. I'm writing for the art. And so they said, we can't publish and we can't— this book is unmarketable.

So you wrote a $2 million check back, wrote it back, which is painful because I already spent it. Um, but, uh, then you went and sold a million copies.

Yeah, then we went into 30 weeks, uh, 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list after they turned it down with no publisher.

Well, I guess you had like a—

yeah, we went to Hay House, they supported it and distributed it and did a great job on it. And I love them, and their community really got behind the book because they knew I wrote it for the art, not for the— I didn't sell out on the book. It was— this was my artistic— my art has never been like talking about Brendon. My art has been, I want to teach, but I want to teach in a way that really hits you in the heart. And gives you habits that you can implement in your life. But that also took me out of the picture a little bit because I didn't want to be the guru. I didn't want to be, you know, I'm from Montana, we're pretty private there. And one of our main sayings there is, you know, the time to have the map is before you enter the woods. So I just wanted to hand people the map. I didn't want to hand people like, look at me. Um, I also had a big influence from my high school journalism teacher And she said there's two kinds of people. One who walks into a room and goes, "Here I am." And the other person walks into a room and goes, "There you are." Rule number 6, raise necessity.

Necessity is kind of short for performance necessity, or what we call psychological necessity, which means there is a moment in which you are serving people or you're trying to achieve your goal or your dream in which now it is not a preference, It's a must, right? But to use better languaging, it becomes necessary for us to excel in this. Like, it's not a hope anymore, it's not I should do it. It becomes so necessary that it connects with our identity, that we feel it is necessary for me to deliver with excellence here because that is who I am. It's necessary for me to deliver with excellence here because Somebody needs me to do well. It's necessary for me to do well here because this topic, this thing I'm doing, I'm passionate about this, I care about this, I wanna master this. I'm obsessed with this.

And it's necessary for me to do well because of the time.

It's a deadline, or it's go time. And when all those come together, so that personal side of this is my identity and I'm obsessed about it, and that other side where it's like somebody needs me and there is a real deadline, right in the middle, that's performance necessity.

And we—

when we hit that, game changer.

Rule number 7: Change your interpretations.

In our lives, especially when we're being reactive, information comes in, right? We're at events, we're paying attention to how people treat us, we're studying something, we're trying to learn something, And we're just going about our regular day. Information is coming in— how people perceive us, the cause and effect of events. Things are just happening. Information comes into the brain. From that point, the information immediately goes into interpretation. And what this usually means is interpretation in the fast reactive thing is safe, unsafe, good, bad, like it, don't like it, recognize it, don't recognize it, been there, done that, unfamiliar, familiar, certain, uncertain, fear, safe. All these things start triggering. It's pretty unconscious and it's pretty fast. Our biases come into play. It's just that speed, spontaneous, reactive part of us. And that's not always bad. Sometimes it can be good, right? Sometimes it can be good. Interpretation could be, that event, that's good for me, or that event, that's bad for me. But usually it's like a snap judgment. Think about that. Most, most when we're talking about an unconscious level, it's like a snap judgment, automatic. Like you like her, don't like her, feel safe, don't feel safe.

It's very fast.

Then the next level And this is not always linear, of course, because your brain is not left brain, right brain kind of methodology. Your brain's more of a spider web of interconnectiveness. That is something we still don't understand, okay? You can study everything in neuroscience, and you might learn something about this lobe or that cortex region, but then only to find out that later on, a year later, like, well, actually, it seems like it's also communicating over here.

It's a spider web.

Unbelievable intelligence that's happening. That, and everything can be millisecond, hundreds of milliseconds of transitions between neural networks. It's unbelievably fast, unbelievably capable. So this is just for our understanding. It's not necessarily real-world linear like this. But what tends to happen is as information comes in, good, bad, we also then move it to a level of, well, what does this mean to me?

Identity.

What does this mean to me? What does this either mean to me, or what does this say about me?

How does this apply to me?

And if we're not conscious here, this can be really troublesome. Some of you discovered that yesterday, I bet, when you released a few things. Sometimes we have these events in our life that we take on, and we just assume it meant something about us. And we didn't realize, no, that's more of a statement about them than it is about us, right? Sometimes when you're hurt or someone was rude to you, it had nothing to do with you. Raise your hand if you follow. It had nothing to do with you, but if you're not careful, you could say, mean person, unsafe, means I'm bad child. Rude behavior, uncertain about this. I must not belong. Terrible situation, I feel bad, I can never be safe again. How many follow how this happens? This is why we have to be very, very, very observational of our own thoughts and feelings, because how these things get labeled can really change our lives forever. My friend Evan Carmichael's book—

listen, Humans are built to serve. Some people are built to serve the world. Others want to serve the 25 people closest to them. But in either case, humans are built to serve. So if you're not happy right now, it's because you're not serving enough. You got to pick up this book because it's so inspiring to remind you that we're all here to contribute, to make a difference, to make an impact. And this is your field guide for that.

Rule number 8: Seek clarity.

High performers seek clarity. More often than their peers. And what that means for them is every situation they go into, they're seeking clarity and setting intention. And it's not like once in a while, they're doing way more often. It's like, you know, I've been blessed to work with Oprah Winfrey. When she has a meeting, at the start of every meeting, she asks, what's our intention here? What's the intention of this meeting?

Not what's the agenda?

What do I do? What's the intention? That's every meeting. So she's seeking clarity at the beginning of every meeting. That's why she's so amazing, right? If you think about her whole career, she was always trying to have people seek clarity on who they were so they could be themselves. That's what high performers are doing. They just do it more often. They seek clarity before they shoot that video, before they have the podcast interview. Um, but specifically, we found 3 practices help you get better at seeking clarity. Uh, number 1, they are seeking clarity in what we call the future for. So you've probably heard that successful people are more future-minded.

It's true.

And specifically what they're looking at, if you talk to a high performer, they're more clear about who do I want to be in this upcoming situation? And by the way, it's not about who I am, it's about who do I want to be. They're more future-oriented. They're more intentional about who they want to be in social situations. So it's like, I want to have this type of interaction with Lewis today. That, that's intentional. They're more clear about what skills they need to develop to reach their next level of success.

Right.

Here's how you really know an underperformer. Open up their calendar and look for any evidence they have planned their own curriculum for greatness. If they don't have classes or courses, if they, if they're not actively skill building, there's no chance of high performance.

Rule number 9, decide to change.

People take an eye-opening experience and some don't do anything with it and some people grow from it and I came back from that experience, I was in college, and prior to going back I was the depressed kid, the sad kid, kind of the lonely kid, kind of the pull away from the world kid 'cause I was hurt. I came back and I had this new intention to live So I wanted to meet people and talk to people, and they're like, who are you? And anytime you change your life, usually people are like, what's wrong with you? So everyone's like, what's wrong with you? But I was like, I'm gonna change. 'Cause I knew I didn't want misery anymore, I didn't want suffering, I didn't want sadness, I didn't want negative thinking, I didn't want poor quality of relationships, I didn't wanna feel horrible. So I began the quest of, well, how do I not feel horrible? So I started reading, first I started with personal development, self-help, then jumped into spirituality, then jumped into psychology, then jumped into neuroscience, then jumped into sociology, and then jumped into leadership and spent every week for 23 years, I read a book a week on one of those topics for 23 years. I went to the seminars, I bought the audio courses, so I'm listening to Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale and Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar and Louise Hay and Marianne Williamson and Debbie Ford and Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Brian Tracy, and I went, down deep.

Like, I'm very much like you.

I'm obsessive. So I got obsessive into psychology. Carl Rogers, Alfred Adler, Roy Baumeister, Abraham Maslow, all of the positive psychology work that was developing at the time that was becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is be careful about your intentions.

From here, once we've kind of looked through that lens, and again, this can be unconscious and super speedy, But once we kind of— information comes in, good, bad, here's what it means to me. We tend to then from there set an intention, which means, so what do I want to do with this information? Intention. What's my next action from this? Or what am I going to do in the future because of this? And intentions can be very unhealthy too. Intentions can be, like we talked about yesterday, sometimes if this is wired wrong or this goes in a way that doesn't support us, sometimes that intention is, I'm gonna protect myself. I am never going to share who I am because that one person or those people hurt my feelings, or did that thing. And all of a sudden, our intentions become completely self-protective. I talked about yesterday how people button up, or they put on the face mask, or they build up the walls to the bad guys. And then who can't get in? The good guys. Like I said yesterday, sometimes in our own self-protection, we block out the very thing that we so desperately desire. Connection. But a lot of people's intention has been throughout their lives, because they weren't observing their thoughts, became completely tilted towards safety. So they think— there's a big difference between wanting to be safe and operating from fear.

Accountability means You know what? My credit card bills, those are mine. I'm accountable for handling those instead of avoiding them. I am personally responsible to deal with these. Even if I didn't cause all these problems, I am now the person who, if I'm going to clear the problems off my plate, I got to take some personal accountability for that. I am now the person who gets to choose my attitude today. I am now the person who expects myself to follow a higher standard and to follow through. Accountability, personal responsibility or personal accountability says, okay, I'm going to own this reality. I'm going to plan my way through it. I'm going to follow through. And I'm going to set up checks and balances to make sure I do that. Where that's setting goals and tracking and measuring the goals and my own behavior towards those goals. Or getting a coach, sharing socially in the Community, or talking with your friends and family and putting it out there. Now your butt's on the line and you got to do it. I think that's what's important. So often we say, you know, I have dreams, I'm not going to tell anybody. And often in personal development you hear people say, no, tell people. Because once you verbalized it, you can realize it. Once you verbalized it and it's socialized, now there's an expectation you follow through. Here's my question to you. Do you have enough expectations to follow through? Often when I work with CEOs as their executive coach, what ends up happening is They have that kind of— maybe they have investors and their investors expect them to stay on path. Maybe they need to hit their quarterly goals. But what ends up happening is sometimes they start feeling like their accountability is driven by others. And often high performers feel all these obligations. They are accountable, but they're accountable to obligations that other people have set. And if you want a real fast track to being demotivated, stop setting your own plan. Stop setting your own accountability. This is why for me, as I told you, I go into my plan section of Growth Day every day. I look at a lot of those plans. I'm like, oof, I'm behind on this. But I don't get discouraged. I just make a plan on how to handle it. Sometimes I look at it like, I don't like my score here with my friends. I went 3 months without really talking to my friends. I don't get down on myself. I make a plan. I don't fall prey to that victim part of myself that says, but all these other things are happening and oh my God. I just go, okay, got it. I don't like that. I'm the only one in charge of the ship. You're the only one in charge of those scores. And once you realize that, you're like, okay, I'm accountable. What's my plan? Because sometimes you've left your accountability to your boss. You left your accountability to your manager. You left your accountability to your spouse. You left your accountability to the kids. You left your accountability to somebody else and you didn't internally own it anymore. If you've ever been in my seminars before, I'll talk about this for a while and then I'll get the whole audience up. We'll play this music, we'll do the lights, and all of a sudden we'll have everyone start shouting, I own my dream. I own my dream. I own my dream. To help them realize again, they're the owner of their life. You own your dream. You own that impulse in your heart that says to get better. Once you're the CEO of your life, not just the follower, everything shifts for us. And that's accountability. If you don't feel this day, It's very likely tomorrow you're gonna be like, I don't feel purpose. And you forgot that feeling the moments of life, that's presence, is part of purpose. And to feel them even more, you bring an intention to it, right? To feel the day, you have to have the intention to feel the day, right? Intention precedes feeling. But most people don't know that. They have a feeling, then set an intention. I don't like this feeling, I'm going to change. But when you become more conscious, you say, oh, I'm going to enter this next situation intentional. It asks, what is it that I would love to experience or make happen in this next moment? Oh, I'm going to go play with the kids. Or I'm going to go teach my kids math. Okay. I'm going to teach my kids math. Let me not just show up, plop the book down, look at me, go, what are we doing? But instead say to yourself, okay, I'm about to go teach my kid math. How would I like to do that as a parent? How would I like to show up? What would I like that learning experience to feel like between us? Father and son, mother and daughter. What would— what do I want that to feel like? Even if they don't learn well today, what do I want the end of our learning session to feel like for them? What association do I want them to create with learning math today? Now notice that took me, I think I clocked it right, just under 30 seconds to ask those questions of myself. Intentional living doesn't take that much longer. It's like a beat before going into the situation. You know, let me take a second here. To enter the situation more intentionally. That is the process of bringing purpose to a situation. Right now, I'm using and replacing the word intention with purpose for a specific reason, because people get all lost in airy fairy land when they talk about purpose. But ultimately, purpose looks a lot like daily intention. And the more daily intention you have, Research shows the more you say you have a purposeful life— notice it doesn't say you earn more, built more, did more. It says the more daily intention you have, the more you sense your life is purposeful. When we don't have a vision for next week, next month, next year, life can start to feel like we're just in, you know, kind of in the swamp and that we're just going through the motions. And, oh my God, I'm working so hard, Brendon. Or, oh my God, Brendon, I have all these reasons to be happy. I already have the great kids. I have a house. I can afford the car payments. I mean, I have all these reasons to be happy, but I don't know, something's missing. I don't feel purpose either. It's usually a disconnect or lack of clarity about your future. And I don't mean 10 years out or 50 years out. I mean, sometimes next month and next year, really just sometimes it's just a couple-month horizon and lacking clarity and connection with just the next couple months. Or in some cases, if you're a longer-term strategic kind of guy, the next year or two. I can feel that. If I feel a disconnect for my next year or two, I tend to lose a connection with purpose, a connection with motivation. I feel like the intentions or the productivity of the day are kind of like, for what? It's easy to go, I'm working so hard, but for what? And that for what I know equals vision. What is the vision of your next couple months or next couple years? No one will give you that. It's time to sit down and think about that. It's why you all know I keep a battle board over here on the wall. And my battle board is like, it's basically like an arts and crafts version of a yearly schedule. It's like a big piece of butcher paper with 12 boxes drawn on it. And the 12 boxes each represents one month of the year. And I create themes across the boxes. I write the major projects and deadlines up on the boxes. And I write a bunch of my values up there. And all I do is every day, I just kind of stare at it. I'm a person who is really good. Any persons here, you're really good at just living in the moment. I know a lot of people aren't good at that, but I'm really good at just being here in the moment. I've had to teach myself to do that. I'm not as good of making sure I'm connected to my vision or to a longer-term plan. I'm like, I'm like in the moment, I'm a happy-go-lucky kid. But if I lose connection to the vision, to the future, the happiness goes down. I also see that the luck tends to go down when you're disconnected from a vision. So, what do I do? I force myself every day when I come into this office, I'm like in a home studio here. When I walk in, I stare at that for like, and I force myself to just stare at it and think for 5 minutes. I have a little notepad next to me. And I look at where everything is lining up over the next year, sometimes the next 2 years. And I just look at it. I mean, if you walked in, I mean, it's really not an attractive thing. I'm kind of like this. I'm just standing there kind of dumb looking, just looking at it, like hoping something comes into the brain that day. Walking through each month, even if I saw it yesterday, I'm still going. I'm just forcing myself to look out. You know why people tend to be motivated January 1st because they're looking out again and they hadn't done it for a while. If the people around you tend to be healthy, whether that is emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, physically healthy, your odds go way up, especially the odds of conscientious discipline and design. Your ability to surround yourself with people who are in a good place is one of the great gifts of our life. We are social animals. A lot of what we do in life life is mimetic, meaning we kind of copy what we see of others. We set expectations on ourselves of what we see of others. A lot of our behaviors, our habits, our mental models are really a fact of sociology. And when you understand that the people you surround yourself with, you talk with, you look at, you work out with, you're around, you're healthier. I am a greatly healthier person in my life because of my wife. And for most men out there, or those who are partners in couples where one other partner is healthier than the other. That's one of the greatest gifts of all time. You know, I'm a way healthier person. I don't think I knew what kale was until I met Denise. I had no idea.

Broccoli?

What?

How come it's dark like that? There's no cheese on it? So that was important for me to learn a lot about. All of my friends in the health and wellness category, like being around them all the time and seeing their posts and their Instagrams, or being at conferences and studying their work, or going to conferences that are about health, surrounding myself in ecosystem has made me healthier. It really has. If you look at where I grew up to where I am now, I mean, it's totally different peer set. And that was by design. You might not get to choose your biology or all your family, but you get to choose your peers and your friends and the inspirations who you follow or learn from, especially in this category of health. Once you have that energetic vision, I promise you'll surround yourself with better people. The first big gate of personal development that I believe everybody goes through in their own journey to maturity, happiness, fulfillment, aliveness, connection with others, ultimate life satisfaction. That first gate of awareness is— I'm sorry, the first gate of personal change is awareness. Is awareness. Now, I know some of you already know this, but think about this. In any given moment, we can be aware of our feelings, of our environment, of how our emotions are affecting our minds, of our decision-making, of our surroundings, of God, of universe, of connection to this very moment. In any given moment, awareness can ebb and flow, can't it? And sometimes in your life— I know some of you feel this way— You're going so fast, there's so much on your plate, you're so busy at home and at work, everything's going 90 miles an hour, and it feels like you're so torn from happiness or torn from the moment that you don't feel connected. And that is when awareness is sort of out the door. And that's why in the last decade, the topic of mindfulness went from sort of a subtle art to like a societal need. And as all of the research has been showing in the mindfulness research of how that can make us feel more grateful, happy, appreciative, loving, connected, and kind and resilient, it's become more and more clear that people get this. But you don't go through the gates of awareness all the time by choice. Sometimes it's pushed upon you. I know many of you have had that story just like I have in the past where you weren't ready for change. You might have been resistant to change. Does anyone have any family members, team members, people in your life who are resistant to change? It's just like you're around people like, "Why won't my husband change?" Or, "Why won't my child want to be better?" Or, "Why won't my kid do better in high school?" Or why— it's like we all know somebody who just doesn't ever shift into that. And what you need to know I'm going to make you sort of a casual coach today or an influencer or a leader today. We'll use all that under the term of influence today. If you want to influence others, you have to understand they're not going to start taking action to change until they've gone through the gate of awareness. And sometimes that gate of awareness, you can inspire it, you can role model it, and sometimes life just has to happen for them. We all know people like that. It's not a judgment. Sometimes you can't be responsible for everybody else in their lives. You got to let life be their educator. If you think about the, maybe the 3 biggest times of your life that you changed, like those big, what they often call in psychology, those inflection points or those critical incidences. What were the 3 times when just major shift happened in your life? I promise there was a major gate to awareness opened up for you. Either it was an insight, an aha, maybe you're like Eckhart Tolle, you're just laying in bed and all of a sudden, woo-ah, awareness and presence enters your life. A new level of consciousness lands on you. Wonderful. Maybe you had to go through something. It was a divorce, a business ending, you got fired, somebody said no, you got in a health challenge, an accident happened. For me, as you know, an accident happened. I got in a car wreck and it was the ultimate perspective check. At that point in my life, I thought I wanted to die. At that point in my life, I had been suicidal and depressed. At that point in my life, I didn't see that my life could ever be abundant or happy or loving. I, I didn't get it. And then that car accident, bam! And that was like a knock on the head, literally, that opened up my eyes and made me realize, oh, I don't want to die, I want to live, I just don't know how. And that was my awareness. It was, I, I want to live, I don't know how. But I've got this second chance. And I understand I want to live. I understand I want to love. I understand I want to matter, but I don't know how. And that began a lifelong journey in personal development and then psychology and then philosophy and then neuroscience and then high-performance studies to try and just understand how do people change? Well, maybe as you're listening to, what were those 3 big things for you? Maybe it was a health thing. Something happened with your family. Maybe that was when you went off to school or when you had the birth of your first child or something happened and it shifted you into another level of awareness that said, "I want to improve. I want to get better. I want to be healthier. I want to be happier." And if you haven't had that yet, then let me knock on the door a little bit and say, "Hey, this is a great time to gain some greater self-awareness." Without greater self-awareness, we aren't resilient. We aren't authentically confident, we aren't vibrant, we aren't healthy, we aren't able to deal with all of the chaos without conforming to everybody else. The moment we lack self-awareness is when the impulse to conform to everybody else enters. The moment we lack self-awareness, we don't know how to ask for what we need in an argument with our partner or spouse. The moment we lack self-awareness, we make a bad decision that we knew wasn't right for us. It's always the first thing, awareness. I recommend everyone get a coach at some point because you need someone to have that sounding board who asks you next time where you're at in your development or in your progress or why you're stunted or whether you're crushing it and helps you tease out those lessons so that you stay motivated and clear about the next steps. That's why I think it's so powerful. Often the biggest shifts in our life happen when we're accountable. Sometimes it happens when you work with a coach, or some of you, you become a coach. I've never been more accountable for my life or had so many other people become so accountable for their life when they became a coach. Because once you're a coach, you're accountable to help someone grow, and that instantly raises up your awareness. Just like many of you, When you get a teenager and you start talking to your teenager about health or mindset and you realize you're a little off, it makes you more accountable because as soon as you teach it, you're even more accountable to live up to it. Remember that congruence thing? It's a beautiful thing. The best I ever became in my life is once I became a Coach. Because once I was a Coach, it was like, oh, level up your identity, Brendon. You got to follow through on these things. You have to be congruent on them too. Whoo! You can't go out on the stage all the time tired like, come on, everybody. It's like I had to learn to take care of my health that I could literally manage a 38-foot stage with thousands of people and for multiple days. It was like running a marathon every single day. I had to be accountable to that audience because I was teaching it. And it was like, oh, soon as you put yourself in a role of a leader, a coach, a mentor, a role model, a caregiver, soon as you're in that space, you gain positional accountability. You realize, oh, I better walk this talk because if I don't walk this talk, not only will they notice, I will start to dislike myself. I share that. I rarely share that one of the big gates that happened for me after my car accident. It wasn't just the car accident that made me want to live, love, and matter. It was after the car accident, I had to sit with the reality that I had built a life I didn't intend to. I had set in motion that relationship that wasn't the right relationship. I chose the wrong person despite some red flags. I allowed abusive language to happen in a relationship. I allowed, um, I'd say resentment to carry on. I had done some things and I had experienced some things that I didn't like, and I could accept them. They did. But now I was accountable for building that next relationship that had to be better. I, I had to make that next relationship better. It was on me. I was the captain of the ship, the director of the destiny. I was the director behind the movie set watching that character evolve. I was choosing the next act. That's accountability. That's a great thing to have in life. Today, I get to share some ideas with you on health that I've learned in my own personal journey but also as a high-performance coach for 16 years. You know, one of the fundamental most important things that we all want in our life is a sense of vitality. And that vitality is we want to feel, you know, mentally engaged, alert, focused, enthusiastic. We want to feel energetically like physically energized, right? Physically, we want to feel a sense of that health. And it's one of really the only 4 things that we all deeply desire. We talk a lot about it here in Growth Day, that you can give anybody anything, but what we all really truly want is aliveness. That's what I mean by vibrancy. Connection with others and with ourselves. Meaningful pursuits, things that we're doing that we enjoy or see as important or contributing. And growth, like growing as persons. So all of that is really important, but that sense of aliveness, I always put that at the top of that little diagram because it's so important to us. When we don't have a sense of aliveness, even if we have amazing relationships, when we are fatigued and wiped out, we can have the greatest marriage or partner or spouse or intimate relationship, but the zest isn't there. We can have a great job. We can have incredible opportunities to serve. We can love our passions and our hobbies, but if we're wiped out, it doesn't feel as good. I know you all know this, and that is why it's so important that we focus on our health. Now, I want to do full disclaimers with you. I am not a doctor. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a neuroscientist. I am I'm not a health advisor, coach, or medical professional in any capacity. I'm a high-performance coach. This means I work with people primarily on their mindset and their habits and their relationships. Please remember, anytime you have a frustration or a conflict or an argument with another person, please remember you are dealing with a trauma survivor. Please remember, you are living with a trauma survivor. Please remember, you are working with trauma survivors. You yourself have survived traumas and struggles, unfortunate incidents, brutalities, difficulties, awful situations in your life.

You survived them.

You're still here. You're, you're still working through. You're still showing up. You're still working on yourself. If you can put the humanity in the other person and realize they have also struggled and more importantly survived traumas, this will allow you to now be more compassionate, empathetic, patient, and understanding. Because raise your hand if you think sometimes you're in a conflict with your spouse, your partner, or someone at work, and they might be acting out from old triggers and traumas.

Raise your hand.

Right? You think you're fighting about the vacuum cleaner. They're fighting about something that happened in the 5th grade to them. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. The person you're dealing with in that moment We always teach like freshmen in college about conflict. You're not actually there in the moment with that person. One of you is probably in high school or in elementary school. You're in a situation or a moment in your past that's being triggered to bring up all these emotions and you're acting out from the emotion. That's usually unconscious for most people. Isn't it true? The more therapy work, the more coaching, the more perspective, the more self-improvement, more healing you do, the more you're aware of those things coming up. And they will come up, as we'll talk about in my next point. But if it's true that something's come up for you and it's uncontrollable or it's upsetting, it's happening for the other person too. I had a great, um, uh, interaction with the person at work one time. That I learned a lot. I was very much— I know this is really hard for understand, but I was productivity, Brendon. I was like, man, I was getting stuff done. It's hard to keep up with me. I am like, I'm very— I'm like, I schedule it, I show up, I deliver it. I schedule it, I show up, I deliver it. And I do it with a positive mindset and I'm going to make it happen. That was really, really strong in who I was in my 20s. I remember having this conversation and, well, there's no better way to say it. I was kind of a condescending jerk to somebody at work. I just was not nice to this person at work. Early 20s, probably, just starting my career in consulting. A partner at the company saw the interaction, And she pulled me aside. And she asked a question that changed my life. She said, Brendan, if you knew that person was dying, how would you have handled that situation? And I was like, Whoa. I mean, it was like I immediately, like, I literally went to tears immediately the second she saw it. She said that, immediately went to tears. It was like, whoa. Now let me ask you that. Think about the last argument or conflict you had. What if that person was sick? What if that person was hurt? What if that person was dying? Trust me, I know. I know how the pessimists and the people who don't like personal development would receive this conversation right now. "Oh, Brendon, here he goes." You know, I get it. Trust me, you're not the first person I've trained on this topic. "Oh yeah, sure, Brendon. Now I'm supposed to every time I think about having an argument, think of that they're going to die. Sure, it's practical." Maybe it's not practical, but maybe it's spiritual. And I say that because there's not a single person you're talking to who isn't dying. Not a one. You won't meet a person your entire life who isn't dying. That's what we call in our work mortality motivation. When we can see humans as mortal, when we can realize it's a short stint for all of us on this planet, everything can shift a little bit. If you are struggling with the sense of purpose today, you are lacking a routine or a practice to look at your tomorrows. Raise your hand if you got that one. If you are struggling with purpose today, you're simply lacking a routine or practice to look at your tomorrows. I tell everybody, you want to be a better leader, you want to be a better parent, you want your day, your health together, you want to build a bigger business, you want to earn more money, you got to look at your tomorrows way more consistently. Not on January 1st or December 31st, but daily. That's why I force myself to look at a year calendar every day, because I'm not good at that. And I know that about myself. And sometimes when you're not good about something, you need to create a habit or routine that you will stick to and find some joy in. So usually before I get to that wall, that battle board, I got a cup of green tea in my hand because I love it. I got a journal next to me because I love that. I love green tea. And I love journaling. I'm not so good at the vision part, but I've created the routine. Just like on email, I've created a routine there that helps me go through a process that I know I need to do, but I'm not as good at.

You all follow?

So this is what I'm suggesting to you. If you're lacking vision, we need to practice to look at your future more often. So critical. It's why when you do that morning mindset prompt, In Growth Day, one of the questions asks, what's a project I should keep in mind that I'll be doing in the future that I might not be able to do today, but I just need to keep it on the dashboard of my mind? And people always ask, well, when I do this thing, it's kind of the same thing every day. I got to, you know, I wrote down I'm going to write a book one day and I got to write it again and again. I'm like, yes, you have to again and again and again, think about your future, even if you're not doing anything for today, you know, even if you're not taking the action. Say you have to think about it. You know, right now I'm thinking I'm working on some major media projects. I'm not doing them yet, but I'm thinking about them. I take a moment to think about that project, just trying to get in the unconscious, kind of scrolling around back then, to connect me to the future. Because when you feel connected to the future, especially when it's something that you are choosing to go do, to go build, to go manifest, you will feel more purposeful.

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you want even more Brendon Burchard, check out the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Double down on your goodness. You want to have an exceptional and incredible 2020? You want to find purpose this year? Double down on your goodness. Adopt the role model mindset and say, how can I be a role model?