Stay FOCUSED, Overcome FEAR, and Train Your Mind For SUCCESS | Brendon Burchard on Impact Theory

Your Life and Intention

Your life doesn’t end up an accident. Your life is a series of actions that you initiate, or donation, really thinking through and using the power of thought of what you want. What do you want to be like? What are the skills you want to deliver? What’s the service you want to offer to the world? All in, you have to be all in, and it’s the hardest thing to do because if it fails, then you can feel like a failure. I went all in with my identity. I said I am going to be a great writer and I am going to be one of the greatest online trainers there ever was. [Music]

Start The Day With Intention

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 too 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 to 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 going to serve, and whether or not I’m going to be excellent and extraordinary or not.” And the problem is most people never make that conscious decision. So, and so I was learning early on: make the conscious decision about who you want to be each day, stay congruent with that. And that was, you know, for me, a kid who’s just going through the motions all of a sudden going, “Oh, who do I want to be? What do I want my relationships to be like?” That was really important. And then I started setting personal challenges every month. At the beginning of each month, I did this whole thing where I holistically evaluate my life on the first of every month. And it’s like these 10 different categories of my life, you know, from emotional to relational to financial to, um, you know, career mission objectives, all these things. I go down that on the first month, just kind of a holistic viewpoint in my life. And then I set a personal challenge and a professional challenge. And I do that every month. Every Sunday, I revisit my progress. Every Sunday for 23 years. So it’s not like I’m just, you know, one day ended up in a happy life. It was like that a level of self-evaluation that most people avoid until their birthday or New Year’s. I do it every Sunday and every first of the month, and I don’t ever miss. And I think that has helped me kind of know what my thing is because I don’t think I’m…

Seeking Clarity and Self-awareness

Super special, it’s like what I help people do, and you know, this is chapter one of High Performance Habits, right? Seek clarity. The only reason I get to work with all these people you mentioned is because they’re at a new level in their life where they’re going, “What is it now for me?” And I help them kind of figure that out, like, “What is it now for you about how you want to define yourself, what types of relationships you want, and how deep you want to go? What is it that you want to develop as skill sets, and what is the specific service you want to provide?” And I just work them through that because I’ve been working through that myself.

The nice thing about self-awareness is the human brain has an incredible capacity for guilt, and most people unconsciously let that roll over them and kick their butt and make a horrible life. I love guilt. Guilt is a tool. Guilt is a weapon. Guilt does not have to be a bad thing. It’s not like I perpetuate, but I’m like, I love that I feel bad when I don’t do a good job. Most people hate that about themselves. I love that feeling. I’m like, “I didn’t do a good job there. Next time I will.” So, some people, guilt is discouragement, other people it’s a signal for learning. To me, guilt is a signal for learning. It is the body and the brain, the spirit knowing what is right, knowing what is wrong, knowing what’s great, knowing what’s mediocre, and it’s saying, “Hey, do a little better.” Now, if it’s translated into a negative impulse, then some people call it guilt, but I’m like, I’m totally cool with those. I, you know, I think it’s good that we feel bad when we do something that is below our standard or that’s not right because that impulse to go, “I want to do that better,” and that’s where people fail in life. “Oh well, my Instagram’s not like hers,” or, “You know, I’m not as famous as him.” You know, we have all these comparisons that cause us cortisol or anxiety that shut us down, and then we stop performing our best because we’re trying to follow somebody versus just go do our thing. So I identified that’s, “Oh, that’s where I’m at. Okay, what’s that causing? That’s causing that cortisol adrenal drip that I don’t want right now. So what do I need to do?” And the fastest ways to get yourself back is usually, you know, breath and movement. So we teach teachers program high performance.

Managing Energy and Setting Intentions

Academy, it’s like one of the crowd favorites. On day three, you have 2,000 people there, and about 40 percent of the audience is international. So, day three, their jet lag is just whooping them, right? And I always predict, I know exactly about, but one in the afternoon, day three, they start bonking. So, I do this breath scaling thing where I teach them to breathe in through their nose like they’re breathing in the ocean, and then breathe out, okay? And that’s kind of the top level. So, we just start breathing normal, and it gets more and more and more and more and more intense until you’re at the top. And just literally, I sustain that for like 60 seconds. And what it is, it’s like a hit, like oxygen, you know, like cocaine to the brain, but oxygen. And when it’s also light-headed or anything, no, because I’ve done it so much, right? I don’t push myself to get light-headed, I push myself to fully oxygenate the body. But what you do as soon as you do that, and the most important thing is for those who are going to try this at home, you scale up to it, then you scale down to find your regular breath again, and you need to not be standing there with your knees locked, and if you ever feel dizzy, sit down. So, but I do that and all this, you feel an incredible amount of energy in your body, your mind just goes super sharp. And the added benefit of that much oxygen intake lowers cortisol. That’s interesting, right? We know from meditative practices when we deep breathe, we tend to lower cortisol or lower that sense of anxiety, even if we don’t get the full mechanism of the hormone release. Then, all of a sudden, it’s like, “Ah, I’m in my zone, I’m ready to go.”

Then I do full body chi gong, it’s like a qigong, a cupping activity in qigong is basically like you are patting up one inch at a time on different parts of your body like this all over. So, your arms, your legs, your back. What that’s doing is opening the meridians in your body. And now, my body, my mind’s open, my body’s fully ready to serve. And now it’s like, let’s get it, I’m excited because now it’s just like I identified the source of the anxiety, got rid of it, took care of the mechanism of the body that was also making me feel like crap, and then it’s exciting.

I mean, people see me on this big stage and they think, “Oh,” or they see you and they think, “Oh, well, he must always be in the perfect state or the perfect energy and he’s always going to be great.” And that’s not true. You know, great athletes, great performers, an executive walk in an important meeting, you got to go deal with your kid who’s struggling with math. When we walk into those situations, we have to set intention for what we want to do in that situation, and we have to release tension. And so, the practices in High Performance Habits, that was the second big finding that we had, was high performers are generating the energy, and that means the mental, emotional, physical energy that they feel is necessary to serve with excellence in a certain situation. Like, they’re so conscious of it, and I know that’s common sense for people, but it’s not always common practice. Yeah, you know, it’s like a lot of people just wander into that situation, and I’m the guy says, you know what, get more intentional, release the tension you have, walk in as your highest self because that’s something you’ll never regret.

Goal Setting and Neurochemistry

What’s up, everybody? Tom Bilyeu here, and I have a question for you. At the start of this year, you likely set some goals for yourself, and I want to know how those are going. Most people give up on their goals and dreams by February, but I have some good news. If you’re not on target to succeed at the things that you want to achieve this year, it’s not too late. And trust me when I say you are not alone. Everyone gets stuck and loses momentum towards their goals at some point, myself included. If you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to take massive action, though, you can get back on track. The trick is not to think about being stuck as a problem with your motivation or to interpret your lack of results that you’re getting as a sign that you’re not smart enough. The trick is to recognize that the game that you’re playing is a game of neurochemistry. It’s about managing the way that you think about yourself and framing things in the right way. If you use your brain more effectively, repeat things that empower…

Taking Action and Generating Emotion

You can actually find ways to solve problems faster, create positive habits and behaviors that you know are going to help you reach your goal. I want you to take massive action right now. So, I’ve pulled a workshop from Impact Theory University called the six steps to getting unstuck, and I want you to watch it right now. It’s going to help you get back on track with your goals and make the rest of this year your most successful ever. To watch it, go to unstuck class.com and register for access. I’ll walk you through the same process that I use to get through obstacles and make fast progress towards my goals whenever something slows down. Alright guys, enjoy this and be legendary. Take care.

1. What we’re really talking about here is contemplation, really thinking through and using the power of thought. What you want, what do you want to be like, what are the skills you want to deliver, what’s the service you want to offer to the world.
2. The consistency of action to not only create that in your own body, in your own mind, but create that, start creating that result in the world. That’s really important.
3. Courage, because it takes courage to put yourself out there and try to get a little better. Like it was even just laying in bed visualizing myself doing something on stage that was way outside my boundaries of like comfort, like walk across the stage really fast, like walk down the audience and give high fives, and you know, say something strong, or you know, admit something, or share something vulnerable. Like that’s courage, that’s scary. But the other thing is, I think that you and I have always had, which sometimes is undervalued, is we also had community, we had other people, right? You had Lisa, you know, I had Denise. We had people in our industry or our peer set who we looked up to or who we could learn from, or we could be like, “This sucks, this is hard.” And for me, coming back to your emotional element, that has been everything for me, community, having people in my life who I can, you know, when I’m on the road for X amount of time, or I’m dealing with a super hard client, or we’re rolling out a leadership program to a Fortune 50 company, or you know, I’m doing my first major deal with Oprah Winfrey Network and I don’t know what to do, I’m so incredibly fast of asking people what to do. I’m also incredibly fast in sharing how I feel about it, being like, “Oh, you know, I feel really awkward about this, I’m unsure, you know, I’m having a lot of self-doubt. How would you deal with it?” Like, I’m somebody who expresses his emotions all the time. My frigging tagline is “Bring the joy,” like everybody knows that. Why? Because I want to make sure people know, “You’re, we’re going to create this energy because emotion is not something you have, it is something you generate.” Emotion can be an impulse, but feelings are our interpretations of those impulses over a period of time. I think those who learn to endure hardship, struggle, challenge, difficulty…

Embracing Emotions and Fulfillment

Pain, grief, vulnerability, failure, regret — that’s one side of that coin. But you also know, on the other side, learn to allow joy, fulfillment, satisfaction. You have to first allow it because what most people do is if on the other side of the coin it’s super etched in, what happens is even when that impulse comes up like, “This is good,” “Oh no, I’m not supposed to like this.” So, you have a lot of people who are extremely talented at the top levels who they do endure the pain, and they really like the pain and they will allow that all the day long, they’ll allow that now because they’ll tell their brain, “This is what’s expected.” But they also don’t let themselves feel good when feeling good is there. This is a real big problem. I mean, if you study psychosis, a lot of people who really struggle with addictions, eating disorders are super common who even when they feel that sense of self-love or self-acceptance, “I’m not supposed to feel that.” No, you really, there is an element to personal development where you have to allow the good feelings and not push them away because it’s like, “I don’t deserve to feel that because a huge part of the world is telling themselves I don’t yet deserve to feel happy even though happiness comes up. I shouldn’t feel that yet, I’m going to keep striving. It’s not until I get the next two million then I’ll let myself feel happy even though they had that good Monday.” And so you have a lot of people who are striving in difficulty who also have not taught themselves the emotional side of what is called the most important movement in the history of the world in psychology called positive psychology kicked off by Marty Seligman, a good friend of mine. Without that work of saying, “No, no, we also have to allow ourselves and teach ourselves to flourish, feel satisfaction, feel joy.” So, I’m 100 with you and I’m like the rule is that’s one side of the coin and the other rule is make sure you teach yourself to generate the positive emotions because what happens is if you don’t teach yourself to generate the positive emotions as well then what ends up happening is you burn out or you become a cliche of the person who had it all and never felt fulfilled. And you know our mutual friend Tony Robbins says that’s ultimate failure — to succeed, succeed, to succeed but never feel like a success, never feel like you’ve had it. Like, I’m vitally aware that, you know, I could get on a plane and not survive, I’m vitally aware that tomorrow might not be here for me. I don’t want to grit and hustle it out and never feel the joys of life, that satisfaction, that pleasure of, you know what, gosh, good for you. You’re trying hard, Brendan. Today sucked, you failed today, Brendan, but you’re doing a good job, kid. Stay in the game. Feel some satisfaction that you tried, feel some fulfillment of that, you know? Because what I learned from high performers, this is not just Brendan’s personal opinion, I’ve done this for 16 years at the highest levels and I see it over and over. It’s usually when I get the call, it’s like, “Well, I just sold my company for hundreds of millions and I’m miserable.” And I ask when someone says, “I can’t figure out, Brendan, you know, everyone says I should be happy, I’m not, I don’t know what’s going on,” and they’re edgy as hell about like, “I have, I mean, jeez, look at the house, look at the girl, look at the cars, look at the thing I got it all, I’m freaking out, man, I don’t know why.” I did it all and I said, “Well, did you ever teach yourself to be happy along the way?” And they never did that work.

Going All In and Performance Necessity

You have to be all in, and it’s the hardest thing to do because if it fails, then you can feel like a failure. I think of this idea of performance necessity. Two stories kind of come to mind. One is I was working with an Olympic gold medalist sprinter, and we’re in the tunnel and we’re going out and he’s talking about the competition, and we get out to the blocks, and I said, “Uh, he was really worried about the competition.” I said, “Well, how do you even gauge like who’s going to win, you know? In his particular race, people are winning but by, you know, 1/100th of a second, tenths of a second, I mean, these are really close sprints.” And I said, “Well, how do you know, I said, who would you even bet on?” And he says, “You know, I would bet on the guy who gets down at the blocks, gets himself settled, looks at the finish

line, then says, ‘I gotta do this for my mom.'” I was like, “Oh, that’s good.” His performance necessity in that is it’s necessary for him to win that race for his mom. I think of when I started my career and I really decided to go all in with writing and online training. This is like 2006, I’d gone broke, completely bankrupt and failed, I left my corporate job, I had…

Personal Struggle and Motivation

His cushy kind of corporate job as a consultant, good job, left it to write, and I didn’t know how to make it as a writer. I want to do seminars, workshops, didn’t know how to do that, so I was pretty much a hot mess, ran out of money. I got nothing to my name, nothing kind of no positive prospects, no one’s calling me except the guys who want the money. And, one night, I’m riding, and the apartment was so small. On the bed, I had my bills, my vision boards, all my research, all my journals, like the bed was basically the desk, the extended desk. And my lady comes in, Denise, and she walks past me, but she sees I’m trying to write. She doesn’t want to disturb me. She goes, she crawls under the covers of the bed. And I’m just typing, kind of casually typing away. And I look over and I see my woman sleeping under my bills. And it was just like, you know, because none of us want to see our, you know, our family suffer because we are not performing, sure. And I was just like, I gotta figure this out. And I’m telling you, I wrote more that night than any night in my entire life. Next day, I wrote more than ever that bird’s life scolding ticket which became a bestseller. And in, you know, 18 months later, because I was like, I’m going to figure out this online thing, I’m going through marketing, I’m going to figure out how to teach, I’m going to how to train and get paid for it, because I’ve never really been paid for those things. I said I’m going to figure out this industry, and I’m going to make it. 18 months later, after her crawling under the bills, I made 4.6 million dollars. Jesus online total transformation, people like, how did you do it? I’m like, she gave me, she was my necessity. I was not going to let my woman be in that situation. And she believed in me, she supported me, she married me, and, you know, but that was, she was my drive. And the second part was, I went all in with my identity. I said, I am going to be a great writer, and I am going to be one of the greatest online trainers there ever was. You know, as you said in the intro, now we’ve graduated over two million people have taken our online courses video series. Now I don’t think it would have happened if I hadn’t had the guts and maybe the no other choice to say this is who I’m going to be.

Process of Skill Acquisition and Self-Identification

To be, and I’m going to build into that, and it’s necessary for me to become that person. So let’s go, and what does that process of skill acquisition look like? Yeah, uh, it first and foremost starts with identifying. I wouldn’t even start with the skill; I would start with the self, you know. In the chapter on seeking clarity, we say it’s like what we found for high performers: they’ve identified these four things. They’re more intentional in these four areas. Number one is high performers are consistently seeking clarity: who do I want to be? And I know a lot of people do that when they turn 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70, and people do that at New Year’s. But high performers are doing that like in every situation. Like before I walked down the stairs, I was like, who do I want to be in this interview right now with my friend Tom? Like, I want to do a good job for him, you know. I made that performance necessity on myself. Like, I want to do a good job. So I was like, well, I want to be present, I want to be enthusiastic, I want to be bold, like I want to be those things. High performers are constantly seeking clarity about how they want to interact with other people. And I think a big development growth point for people is determining how do I really want to treat people when they don’t agree with me or when they’re hating on me or when they’re discounting me or they’re being mean to me or we’re in a fight because I think some of those are the greatest growth areas of our life. And then high performers are very clear about the critical skills they must develop in order to succeed in their space. You know, they identify, believe success is possible. Usually, we found they usually know three to five current skills they’re working on. So another example for me was video. I was very awkward and uncomfortable in front of video. I know the feeling, right? Yeah, right. But you said, okay, if I’m gonna make an impact, I’d better figure that out. Yep, I’d better figure that out. And so you go.

Passion, Growth, and Contribution

To work, you put in the miles, you try because learning is the ultimate lever to leveling up, right? You actually have a math equation, if I may, which I think is where you’re headed, but I loved this equation so much: passion plus growth plus contribution equals personal satisfaction, yeah, yeah. It’s like those all coming together, a lot of people have never experienced, and it’s hard for you and I’d say that’s personal development, guys, but it’s true. There’s a lot of people who’ve never had those three completely line up, so they’re not satisfied even with their job or their career or their life because the passion isn’t there, even if the passions are, they don’t feel like they’re growing. But everybody I talk to, do you remember that first personal development book you read? Do you remember that first time you wrote tons of notes about what you wanted your life to be about? Do you remember that first time you watched a movie inspired you to go change? There was fire there because that learning, it opened up your mind to a new level of existence for you, and as soon as you saw it, you were like, oh, ambition hits your heart. And now, if you can match it with contribution and you can see how that passion or that fire or that learning or that growth all aligns to some type of impact, now you’re getting me fired up because now I can see the outcome of all the work. A lot of people don’t do the work because they don’t believe the outcome, that’s interesting, you know? And psychologists talk about the power of expectancy, um, when we talk about motivation, there’s only two things that spark motivation, one is ambition, and that is, I want more of or I want a greater depth of, right? I want a greater depth of connection with my lady, that’s ambition. Or I want a better meditative practice, that’s ambition. Alright, I want to be better at my job, that’s ambition. So it starts with ambition, but ambition if it’s not coupled with what they call expectancy in psychology, you’re screwed. Expectancy says, I believe that I can figure that out, I believe that I can achieve that, I believe that that is possible for me, because if we don’t believe it’s possible for me, you can show them all the results from a thousand people, right? How many people say, I want to get in great shape, you know, I’m Tom, I’m new ketosis, I’m doing the ketosis thing, man, and they hop on your Instagram and they see the cuts, they see the changes, they see the transformations, but they don’t believe it’s possible for them, so they don’t try. Expectancy is their problem, you gotta bust through the beliefs to get them to understand that it is possible for them, not for other people, for them. And if you can open that gate for somebody, and often that’s only achieved through learning, then you get somebody who starts really moving ahead forward. Most people are half-hearted, half-interested, half-engaged in their actual dream and actual ambition because they either fear it or they feel insecure or incapable. And teaching people, I literally just had this conversation with one of the most successful people in literally the like the world in the top .01 category of revenue, has not fully expressed and owned their ambition. Instead, people apologize for their ambition, hide their ambition. You have to learn to own your ambition, speak of the ambition, chase the ambition, drive the ambition, and lead the ambition. It is a full, both allowance back to the world, allowance of the ambition, and an active generation of that ambition. The further you are from your ambitions, the more miserable you are, and most people don’t even look at their goals every day, so no wonder we have a world that says I’m disconnected, it’s like no, wake up, like I asked people, did you look at your goals today? That’s the simplest, that’s literally personal development 101 is h

Communication of Ambitions and Personal Development

The simplest, that’s literally personal development 101, is to have goals, look at them. Most people do not do that. I want you to just not go, I want you to deeply visualize, feel, sense, and talk about your ambitions, way more, like way more. Like, I love that about you, you’re like, I’m going to build a frigging Disney, and everybody around you knows it. You know how rare that is? It’s one reason I love you. People who are scared to communicate about their ambitions are cheating themselves in the world from supporting them. I coached an Olympian, I love this, it’s in hype from what’s happened, I wrote really briefly about it, but she had won several world records and world championships but never a medal, and this was a big goal for her. And then she did, and I was working with her, and then afterwards we have this conversation. I said, what made the difference? She says, you know what, one day, it wasn’t training, it wasn’t nutrition, it wasn’t diet, it wasn’t everything we talked about. She was one day, I just started shouting from the rooftops that I wanted to win a gold medal. I started telling everybody around me, and she had this great, she’s when you shout from the rooftop what you want, two things happen: one, the village idiots come out and judge you, all the village idiots, she says, but also the village leaders come out and go see this, let’s set this person up. She said all of a sudden the right coaches, the right dietitians, the right former gold medalist, the right teammates started came out, and all of a sudden she had a community who were galvanizing behind this vision and ambition she had that she’d never achieved even though nothing changed in her physical body, it was like she communicated the ambition, the tribe arrived, the goal was achieved, complete game-changer. So, allowing the ambition, shouting from the rooftop, that’s the mindset, that is a behavior change that takes real personal power, real courage, real vulnerability, whatever you want to call it, but most people don’t do it, that’s number one. Number two, you have to have daily intention and habit tracking. You can’t leave your personal development to randomness, and what most people do, they leave their personal growth to randomness, and so they’re always in a land of mediocrity. You have to have that morning routine and that evening routine of evaluating where you are and where you want to go, and asking the hard questions of what is it about me that’s not moving forward, what is it about me that I need to accept, love, care for, take care of, do a better job with? How do I treat other people so I can get ahead faster? What do I need to focus on? If you don’t do that on a daily basis, you’re going through the motions, and even if you’re successful, imagine how much more successful you would be if you were way more intentional and you actually tracked your habits. This is why we developed the High-Performance Planner because I wanted it, I was like, I know how easy it is to go through a day, you hustle all day, and you crash at the end of the day, I know the hundred-hour work weeks, I know how that feels, I know what that’s about. But if you’re doing all that and you’re not aware, that leads to a nightmare, that leads to you taking the wrong path and you’re hustling down the wrong path, you lean the ladder against the wrong building, you do the wrong thing. The awareness on the daily is something people need to build into a routine and physicalize, like write, not a note on your phone, journal, workbook, planner, something that you actually connect pen to paper, you think through. And if we can get you ambition clarified, ambition speak, the ambition, own the ambition, and you’re actually intentional in tracking each day, you win this game, very well said. Yeah, where can people find out more about you? Listen to The Brendan Show, my podcast, The Brendan Show, because we’ve basically taken some of the best I have of all my online courses, I got 28 online personal development and professional development courses, we take little clips of those best courses, we take clips of my live cast that people pay for that they don’t get to see, we put that on The Brendan Show, I’m really proud of that podcast right now because the best of stuff is in there. And then just on Instagram, on the Gram, man, just sharing my things. But my favorite place for people to meet me is in your local bookstore, go look for the B section in the bookstore and pick up all six of the books, they really are extraordinary, the deeper you dive into his world, the more you’re gonna get out of it. He is one of the rare people that the more I get to know him, the more I like him, the more I’m affected by him. So I hope that you will avail yourself of all the amazing stuff that he makes available. All right, if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe, and until next time, my friends, be legendary, take care.