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Because you just know at some point in your life you have to get wildly honest if you are doing the things that really matter. It's the hardest thing you have to say is the things that I'm creating and doing do I feel like it matters? Adds value, is done with excellence. The hardest and scariest thing in all of self improvement is self evaluation. To truly look at ourselves and say, how am I doing? Am I putting enough in this amazing. It is okay to admit that you have not done enough. Hey, my friend. It's Brendon Burchard, host of progress mode, and I hope you enjoyed this season one of progress mode. And in some ways, I've asked enough questions and I pushed you hard enough to really get you to swipe your brain into progress mode to really move in the direction that you want in life at the speed and the pace and the personal power that brings you alive again. Just because you deserve that. You deserve that feeling of progress, that sense of joy, aliveness, satisfaction, fulfillment that comes from being on the right path in your life. And I just want to thank you for being on the journey with me. I've shared some of the critical turning points and crises and challenges and big decisions I had to make in my own career as a writer and a coach and a trainer. But also along the way, I tried to prompt you and push you towards your passion projects, allow you to do things that might feel more like innovative or artistic or crazy, reminding you that you don't have to worry so much about what other people think and that you can boldly and courageously do things that matter most to you. The next stage in all of progress mode always starts with asking, what's the next level for me at this stage of my life? I want you to think about that. What's the next level for you at this stage of your life? Because that's going to give you an indication of what that path should be. That's going to give you an indication of where the progress will come from. Remember, progress has a vector that means a direction. It has a rate that speed and velocity but also has valiance valence is like how positive or negative I feel about the direction, pace that I'm going in. But most importantly, most people don't think about this. But progress also has magnitude, right? There's a, like, relative distance you traveled, point A to point b. But someone can go from point A to point B and be at the same level. A magnitude of change would be like a blip or like a shift. What I call a step change in your life, how do you get there? That's really the topic of high performance. How do you perform at the next level? Like, how do you prepare your mind, your habits, your whole worldview to go to the next stages of difficulty, challenge, growth, success, wealth, health in your life. A lot of people progress, but you want that step change. We need a magnitude of change in your life. Not every year, not every quarter. But I can tell you when you look back upon your life, you'll remember those times you made some bold moves. Those times when you said, wow, I went for it. Those step changes of just difference, that really made the difference. And so today I want to talk about high performance and some of the stories and challenges I had in my own life, on my career, and maybe it will resonate with you and prompt you in a few ideas. In previous episodes, I talked about my journey through my books and writing and coaching and teaching. And at this stage of that last episode you listened to was that wild story of the Motivation Manifesto, how my publisher turned it down and basically said, hey, you need to give us millions of dollars if you don't rewrite it in the way that we want you to. In other words, if you don't comply with us, we're not going to publish and distribute your book. That was the last episode. After that experience of my life and the Motivation Manifesto doing six months on New York Times bestseller list, my events and seminars are filling up. It feels like an incredible time in life, but also is massively challenging to deal with the fact that I did not have the right size team to chase after my passions to make my biggest difference. I know a lot of entrepreneurs listen to the progress mode and maybe you've been at place in your life where before you thought, I better get support, I better get help. What a lot of people don't know is really that first decade of my career, that was me making every webpage, sending every email. That was me like putting all the live launches and the campaigns together. I had like a super scrappy, tiny team. I had like a videographer, I had customer service. I had someone helping with ads and email sequence. So I had like a pretty small team considering how, you know, far we reached into the world and what we were earning. But have you ever been in that place where you could admit you needed more help, you needed another team member? You need to change the structure of what you were doing. You needed to make sure you were focused on the things that whatever your output was, that it was really efficient and effective and it Moved the needle because you were so busy. I know if you're listening to progress mode, you're probably that person who is very busy. You have a lot of goals and you have a lot of dreams and ambitions and you want to do something significant. So your time really matters. And most people don't take that serious at all. One of the reasons people don't get progress in their life is simply and honestly time management. Right? They're losing an hour, two, three or four hours to scrolling entertainment and consumption each day without realizing how much of that is eating their life. I always tell people, you know, if you lose an hour every morning to scrolling to social media, and I'm talking about like just consumption, maybe you're a creator or you're putting content out there and you need to use social media to build your business. That's one thing, using social media to build your brand, your business, but there's another one, just consuming and like starting the day, randomness, scrolling. If you lose that hour a day, anywhere during the day to just dumb stuff that hour during a day, across seven days, obviously that's seven hours. Well, when you think about it, seven hours, that's like a full workday, right? Most people only work seven to eight hours a day. So if you lose one hour a day across the week, that's seven hours gone. That's a whole workday gone every week. Well, there's four weeks in a month. That means at the end of a month, you basically lost four full work days. Well, I mean, think about it for a minute. There's 52 weeks in a year, and every week you're losing a workday. That means you lost 52 potential workdays. That's a month and a half that you lost. But here's the truth. Most people, they're not losing 52 work days a year, they're losing a hundred. Because most people aren't losing one hour a day. They're losing two hours a day to just blatant distraction, blatant consumerism or entertainment that does not move their life forward. Now, don't worry, I'm not the person saying, don't watch Netflix. I'm not the person who's not who's sitting here saying, don't have entertainment. I'm here to say be conscious. Because if you lose two hours to distraction a day, that ends up being a hundred plus work days lost a year. Whoa. Now you can really shift someone's attention into your Time matters so much, so much. And so you gotta make sure you're effective at doing what you're doing, which is a challenging demand of progress mode. And I felt that at that stage in my career, I realized I was not high performing. I was losing a lot of time. I was not scheduled. I was not effective enough because I was doing everything. I needed somebody to come in and help me do the things that didn't move the needle as much as I uniquely could. You need to know what do you uniquely do that actually moves things towards progress and almost everything else. You either have to delete and not do, delay, wait to do or delegate to give somebody else to do. Does that make sense? You either delete it, you delay it, or you delegate it, or frankly, you do it. And I realized I was quickly becoming overwhelmed and going to risk burnout if I kept going at the speed and the pace I was on. See, I had these next stage ambitions at that stage of my life. I was already a New York Times bestseller. Like, things were going good in my writing career. That was my goal. I could write as much as I wanted. My goal was to be a coach and a teacher as a coach. Now, that was those years. I started charging a million dollars a year to work with me one on one. I was charging $50,000 to be in our private groups, up to $100,000 to be in our private groups. My keynotes were going 100, 150, $200,000. And I'd made this crazy dream of I wanted to keynote and speak at every major arena in North America. And I set that goal. That goal took 10 years to achieve, by the way. So it was not easy. These were next stage concerns, of course, but I actually had the honesty to go. I have next level ambitions, but I don't have next level performance. Like, I could admit that I didn't have the competency, I didn't have the habits to be able to go to the next level. I was doing good. But I think a big part about progress mode, it invites a little humility into our life to go. If you want real humility, progress, especially when we talk about progress of orders of magnitude, right? Like I said, step changes in the results you're getting in life or going to a new level, you have to go. I need new levels to be able to pull myself up to those levels. And I knew I didn't have the habits. I just knew it. I was like, people are organized better than me. People have better teams than me. People know how to manage their day and big projects better than me. I had to be honest. I Didn't have the organizational capacity. And I mean that. Like, I was not organized, but I also didn't have an organizational team that could help me go to the next level. And I had to. If I can be honest with you, I probably knew that for about two years before I said, I gotta really start hiring and I gotta do deeper research. How do I perform at the next level? And for those who know my career, that was the genesis concerns that became this book. High Performance Habits. How extraordinary people became that way. Is the subhead High Performance Habits? I just wondered. I'm like, okay, I know there are people who perform at higher levels than me all around the world. How the hell do they do that? Like, do they have a different mindset? Do they have different strengths? They have a different economic background? Did they have. Did they have, like, what was their magic? And so I did, you know, three, four years of deep dive training and research on that topic. I read everything academically about performance psychology or goal attainment. I interviewed over 300 extraordinary high performers around the world. Not for a podcast for, like, academic research. I partnered with researchers at University of Pennsylvania's Positive psychology department, UC Santa Barbara Psychology department. I was trying to really figure out, like, what really makes the difference for your next level. And let me pause there. What do you think is going to make the real difference for you to break through to a new level of results, not just incremental improvement. I know you're consistent. I know you're disciplined, but I'm talking about, like, step change. So if you earn, you know, 50,000, a hundred thousand, 150,000, what's it going to take to go to 500,000 or a million? If you're at a million, what's it take to go to 5? To 10? If you're at 10, what's it take to go to 50 and 100? That's what I mean by step changes. I. I'm just using that as convenient metaphors. And so what's it gonna take for you? Could you take a moment to think about it? What does it really require? And as I did that research, it was a little bit counterintuitive and a little bit counter to what was popular in the media and the research back then. Back then, it was basically like, oh, if you want to, you know, be extraordinary, what you do, either A, you need to, you know, have decades of focus on something to get extreme competence, which of course helps and is true, or B, we were in the strengths movement back then. It was like there were all these strengths Evaluations, strengths, assessments and strengths. And everyone's like, oh, if you have strengths, that's the thing, just focus on your strengths more and you will break through to new levels. It's just that that wasn't always true. In fact, people who focus obsessively on their strengths don't have that much greater performance over a period of time than other people. Because sometimes we have to be honest about where we lack and we have to, you know, fix the leak in the boat. We have to handle our weaknesses. We have to develop competencies that make us a better general player, not just a highly specific one. Because sometimes generalists are able to break through as long as they also have skillset. So what did I discover in all of that research? I found out your personality doesn't matter that much. That was a shock, right? Well, I'm an introvert Brennan, or I'm an extrovert Brennan. I can't do this or I can do that based on my personality. As an example, obviously your level of openness, your level of conscientiousness, your level of extroversion or introversion, your level of neuroticism, all these things in personality psych, they make a difference. They're all important. But there's something that actually is more correlated to long term success and performance. When we ask, how does someone achieve long term success and maintain positive health? How does someone achieve long term success and maintain positive relationships? I didn't ask those questions because I was super smart. I asked those questions because I was struggling. Have you ever really struggled to keep friendships as you were working hard to stay as close to your spouse, as you got more busy to keep that connection with your kids as you took on the next level of work? Have you ever noticed that as you work harder, you compromise your health, you gain weight, you don't sleep as much, you start choosing bad foods? Here I am out on the road and I have to be so finely tuned in my mind and my body to get up on stage and to speak extemporaneously for eight or nine hours a day for four or five days straight. So that's hard. Most singers, you know, they might lose their voice. Singing for three hours, I got to speak eight or nine for four days straight. And that's after promoting and filling and selling tickets and doing all the marketing myself. I had to be so finely tuned because you also know, if you've listened to previous episodes, I was coming through brain injury. And so I kind of, I really had to take care of myself. But I could See that it was hard for me to stay as connected and present with my friends, family, even my wife. It was very hard for me to maintain the health and energy required. And I just knew there had to be a better way. It wasn't my personality. My personality was like, you know, I want to be successful. Did I have passion and drive? Yeah, well, you have passion and drive too, but how come sometimes you're not breaking through? And it came back down to something so simple. And I know you know this, but the highest correlation to being able to achieve your dreams and have high performance over the long term, where you have great health and good relationships, it's just your habits. You have your internal practices and you have external practices. These high performance habits were what I was researching. And I was researching it at a time I desperately needed it because I was failing at that organizational part. Let me give you two examples. One, I was consistently double booking myself. I was consistently having like crash landing into deadlines. Always crash landing deadlines. Never, like having enough time management where it felt like it was being achieved. I had a sense of urgency, I had a sense of focus, but I just was not organizing enough. I was not prioritizing daily at the levels I needed to prioritizing weekly and quarterly and yearly. And year two and year three, it just wasn't happening. That was my personal planning in my team. I needed to hire about 20 people to go to the next level. That was really scary. Like there's like when you have a business and you have to hire one or two or three people, that's one level. But when you all of a sudden realize you need like 20 or 30 and they got to be weapons, they got to be like a players, well, you got to talk to a couple hundred to find those 20, which takes a ton of time. And so I made a great mistake of hiring a hiring agency that helped me, you know, Islam in those 20 people. And so now I'm trying to manage 20 extra people by myself. Not doing a good job at that. Definitely chose some people who were just, you know, inexperienced or immature. Definitely did not manage them well because I'm crashlining in my projects. How do I manage them and their projects? And I know you hear this and you recognize the complexity that it takes to go to your next level. That's why I want to be strategic. In this last episode of season number one, I want you to be strategic in setting up high performance habits into your life so you can go to the next level. We'll end season one on the conversation of high performance in your life. And this conversation is so critical. Number one, we gotta get great clarity right now at this stage of your life. We gotta get clarity in four separate buckets that really matter. Clarity for number one, who do you want to be? Who do you want to be at the next level? The next stage? I'm not talking about who do you want to be? Like, tomorrow, because you have a sense of being, presence, vibrancy, authenticity. I want you to think of, like, okay, in, like, five years, who do you want to be? Who do you want to become in five years? And in order to get there, what habits do you need to install now? Habits of learning, habits of research, habits of interviewing people asking questions, A new skill set. Like, what. What specifically would you have to get strategic about right now to be able to move up to there? That's the first question. Second question. Who do you want to be with other people? This is a question about how do you want to show up with other people? Like, if you stepped away from yourself for a second, I know that's kind of silly, but if you could step away and observe yourself and how you interact with other people, is that sufficient for where you want to go to the next level of leadership, success, happiness in your life? Right. I had to realize it's like, oh, well, I kind of get awkward with people because I just. I haven't really learned how to deal with being known. I didn't know how to deal with people wanting a selfie. I was awkward about people telling me my books changed their life. I was awkward. I'm kind of a bookish person already. You. You can see I'm not doing interviews on this podcast. I'm talking to you directly because I'm more like this. And so I was struggling to. How do I socially be with people when they know who I am or they need something from me? I didn't know how to do that, and I had to get strategic. I had to be honest. I'm like, I don't know how to do that. And if I want impact in the future, I need to start asking some people. I'm like, hey, how do you deal with if somebody knows you and how do you. I didn't know how to evaluate people. Did they have good intentions for me? I realized in one of areas of my life, I was like. Because A, I'm a people pleaser, and B, I'm altruistic and I love people so much. I also. I didn't know how to evaluate people. Like, I think of my wife she has great radar to tell if someone's trying to, you know, get something from me or be transactional with me. But I didn't know that. I had to ask people, how do you measure up people? How do you tell if they want good things for you or if they just need something from you? I knew. I didn't know that. So when I'm saying getting clarity about things, I'm genuinely being strategic with you and being honest about my journey. I didn't know how to do that part of social interaction. I didn't know how to deal with manipulators and transactional people. Because where I grew up, you know, like, people are nice in general. You know, the business I have, people are generally nice. It's not that I don't deal with cutthroat people and haven't been, you know, deal making and negotiating. It was just that in general, I didn't have to evaluate it that much. But then as you go to next levels of influence in your life, when you get promoted, more people who now work for you need something from you. Right. Do you know how to deal with that? Have you read books on leadership about that? I hadn't. I didn't have the clarity in that area. So I had to step away and go, okay, if I'm watching the future Brendan interact with people, how does he have to interact with people? How does he want to a be with them? For me, it was like, I want to be very present with people. I want to be very loving with people. I want to be very enthusiastic with people. But also, how does he discern who his friends should be? Like, who should your friends be at the next level of your joy, happiness, health, progress in your life? That's a hard question. Most people don't do that. And most people, what they do is they just bring everybody with them. But you've seen all those stories of people who have great wealth or fame or something great happens in life and they bring everybody with them. And those people end up, like, leeching, taking advantage. You've heard those stories. It's like, oh, okay, who rode with you this far might not be the people who are going to ride with you at your next level. So could you describe your next level of friends? Can you describe your next level of team? I need you thinking about that now as we switch into progress mode. Not when you get there and realize you're dealing with a train wreck. You have to anticipate. See, the thing that sets us apart as a human species is our superpowers. Of anticipating abstract things that are coming in the future. Oh, I have to think about that next level of technology, leadership, friends, business, time management. If you don't already think about those things in the future. I'm here to say you just haven't been on progress mode yet. What you've been in is reaction mode, survival mode, or just passive mode. You're coasting, you aren't consciously designing. It took me a long while to realize that. And honestly, I'm going to tell you, it was very hard for me to learn to say that to people because I also realized at that stage of my career, as I started working with, at that stage, my first, you know, teams like sports teams, Olympians, NFL teams, fighters, golfers, like super celebrity sports people started working with billionaires at that stage, started working with way more CEOs. Do you know what I realized about myself as I stepped away from myself and I watched how I would coach, I realized I was almost too soft with them. I didn't know how to push. I didn't know how to be assertive. I didn't know how to challenge them without feeling like I was either being rude or misplaced. I had to start going, oh, for Brandon. For me to go to the next level as a coach, I need to learn how to challenge people appropriately. They already feel like I connect with them. I can already help them find their answers. Right. Because a big part of coaching in my career, what we do as high performance coaches, so much of what we do is helping people generate options for where they should go. It's not telling them the answer. That's more of like consulting. And it's not like looking in the past for the root of the cause, like therapeutic. It's more of like, okay, you have this goal. Let's generate a bunch of options for how you might get there and let's be resilient together as you're moving towards it. Well, what I found out was if I stepped outside of myself, I knew the step change I was going to have to achieve was how do you challenge somebody into higher levels of leadership? Or how do you challenge somebody to look at a belief they have that's just not serving them? Not just talk to her, but like real challenge. I had to learn how to put edge into my relationships. Does that make sense? I spent my whole life learning how to connect with people. Now I need to learn how to challenge them and put edge into it. I spent my whole life trying to take the edge off because I also grew up in a very angry, impatient and volatile corporate culture. So I had to go like, okay, while people were nice, man, if you step on the wrong side of them, you could get hit in the face. I grew up in a very challenging, difficult and physical environment in that way. So it's like, oh, I was always trying to take the edge off, de escalate, de stress. But for my next level of leadership, I actually need to put a sense of urgency on people. I need to put edge on them. Does this make sense? What I'm trying to do is, like, you have to imagine that. So you have to step out and go, who do I want to be in five years? How do I want to interact with people? What will those interactions look like and feel like at that next level of success for me? And you have to start training yourself now. Reading books, taking courses, getting a coach, going to seminars. You are proactively developing yourself. That's how you know you're in progress mode. I am proactively developing myself for a future that I anticipate and I desire. I have faith in the future being good and I'm going to prepare myself to be awesome in it. Your level of preparation tells me if you are in progress mode or not. Hey, guys, it's Brandon. I'm jumping in here real quick. First, I want to make sure you've gone to progressmode.com to join the newsletter because I have a resource for you related to this episode and I have an upcoming meetup with my private group, Ultra. If you've ever liked to be in a private group with me where I help you get more progress towards your passion projects or to build your business or your brand in a bigger way, just go to progressmo.com click on private group to apply to. See you can get into Ultra and we can take it to the next level by getting in person and meeting up virtually once a month online as well, just go to progressmode.com that was a big breakthrough for me. I was like, I don't know. I had to think of skills I had to develop. I said, okay, you know, in the last episode, I shared with you how the motivation manifesto. I had the blessing of being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for her magazine. And here was the thing. When I did that experience, I learned I don't have that skill set of knowing how to be interviewed. Like, I didn't know. I was like, not good, in my opinion. I was like, I don't know how to do that. I'm usually the writer, so I'm by myself or I'M the teacher on stage, out to tons of people, a one on one long format where they're asking about me. I'm the coach. I'm usually asking about them. I didn't know how to talk about myself. And that's why, for those who've been listening to these episodes, you're probably like, I've never heard Brennan really talk about himself this much. This is wild because usually I just teach you frameworks. I tell you maybe my car accident story, I tell you maybe a story about Denise and I struggling financially and that's it. And then I'm just teaching. Well, now I've done a whole series with you here in season one, sharing some behind the scenes stories. I didn't know how to talk about myself. I didn't know how to be interviewed. I was like, oh, I need to learn to do storytelling and I need to learn how to be interviewed. Those are skill sets, right? I was doing seminars and events where it was maybe 100, 800, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 people, but I want to start booking arenas of 10,000, 20,000 and 30,000. Oh, I need to learn to work the stage differently. That's a skill, right? I literally need to move on stage in a different way for that projection of that number of people. I'm just giving you examples of what I had to learn to do, right? I had to have a new skill set to be interviewed. I had to have a new skill set to speak to that many people. And so what is your passion? What is your business? What is your future that you desire? Start imagining, who do you have to become? How do you have to learn to treat and interact with people, what skill set you want to develop? And the fourth thing we need clarity on. So one is self. Who do you want to become? Second is social. Third is what skill you need to develop. And fourth is what level of value or service service would you have to provide to, like, leapfrog to the next level? What level of service would you need to provide to leapfrog to the next level in your life, your career, for example? A lot of people go, you know, hey, Brandon, I just want a promotion at work. I've been here for five years. I'm like, oh, duration is not what gets you a promotion. Value is what's the next level of value it would offer at work to earn that promotion. That's a different thought process, right? And so a lot of people just hope that, you know, their consistent action will compound into the step change. That's very rare. That's very rare. Usually it is compounding, but if you want the step change, you have to anticipate and go, okay, what would be the next level value? For example, if you have a client and you're charging your client, you know, 300 bucks an hour, but you want to be charging a thousand dollars an hour, it's still one hour. But what are you going to do differently in that hour to go from $300 to a thousand? That's what I mean. That's anticipating the level of service for the step change in result. All of this I had to learn. I wanted to go, well, I want to go from, you know, I want to go from like one business to doing, you know, eight figures. I want to have like multiple businesses doing that. I advise all these companies and, and, and people. But I, I don't want to just charge them by the hour or by the project or by the workshop. I want to actually have equity in these companies. I actually want them to see me not just as a hired gun speaking, I want them to consider me the CEO coach or I want them to hire me as an advisor into their company and get stock. I'm giving time and energy and traveling there anyway. How do I get stock in these companies? What's the next level of value I'd have to do to go from a speaker to an advisor? Does that make sense? That's not where I was. That's where I wanted to go. So I had to start reading all these books on investing and finances and on leadership and business strategy so that I could do that while I did those things in my own business. I had to learn to do that for other people. Does that make sense? So this was like new service I had to offer to people. I thought, well, you know, if I want to be able to serve millions more people, what extra value would I have to have in their life? And let me give you like very tactically so I'm telling you about this journey. High performance habits. The first habit by the way of the six high performance habits is seek clarity. And you have to have clarity again as I shared on yourself your social interactions, the skill you want to develop and the service you want prior to the world. Right. Okay. So as I was thinking, well, what's my next level of service to the world? Well, what happened was, and the reality is I was teaching workshops so you would come to a four day event with me and I would just teach and train and give everything I got. But then you would leave and you wouldn't necessarily have full frameworks or you wouldn't necessarily know what to do every day. And so even as I was writing High Performance Habits, I was on the side at the same time creating the High Performance Planner, now one of the most successful planners in the world for high achievers. Because I was like, okay, they have to. My next level of service is I need to be in their day every day. For those of you who don't have the High Performance Planner or didn't read High Performance Habits, that's okay. I just want to share with my favorite thing about it is the Daily Habit Scorecard. I think we have to score ourselves when we're in progress mode. How do you know if you're in progress mode? If you don't score yourself in some way, you need to create a rubric for measuring yourself and scoring yourself over a period of time. Sometimes that's just towards your goals and, but not just towards your goals. I'd love for you to measure habits. And what we found out in High Performance Habits, if you've read it, is that there are six primary habits that matter the most to long term success. There's our internal habits and external habits. And there's a little scorecard in the High Performance Planner where I just started scoring myself each day on a score of 1 to 5. There's the internal habits that make the big difference. That's clarity, energy and necessity. Clarity. We've talked about energy as in like generating energy to have the mental energy and focus to achieve things, but also the physical energy. And the third internal one is necessity. That means you raise the level of necessity to do things. You give yourself your own sense of urgency and importance to do something right, because you don't have to do anything. It's the necessity is, oh, it is necessary for me to be excellent. It is necessary for me to learn. It is necessary for me to grow. It is necessary for me to progress. It is necessary for me to be in pursuit of things that matter to me. Necessity is something you intellectually like rev up for yourself. Like most people don't have to do something. You have to like summon that desire, that demand, that drive. You have to will your motivation. In other words, you might not always just quote, unquote feel motivation. You have to reflect on your why as an example which will make you feel like, oh, it's necessary for me to do this because it's important. That's the internal things you can score yourself on. The external things are productivity, influence and courage. Are you being productive towards the things that matter the Most. And this is important if you read high Performance habits of the book, the concept, and this is important, the concept of prolific quality output is what you are doing and outputting the things that matter the most for the impact you want. Or are you just doing processes that never see the light of day and don't touch the customer as an example? The question is, is what you are doing each week, is there an output that matters? That's the stuff of productivity. The stuff of influence is did you influence other people in positive ways to support their goals and yours? But we measure it specifically in high performance. So make sure you read the book. The chapter on that is so powerful in the book. And the last habit is courage. To demonstrate courage, did you speak up for yourself? Did you go for it despite the risk or the scariness of it all? Did you speak up for other people when they were threatened or not heard? This is the stuff of courage. So the High Performance planner just has like a little grid and it explains each of those. And you just measure yourself or on that every day. And I want to tell you something, I had to do that every day to get better in those people think, well, you wrote the book on it. You must have been great at this. I'm like, oh no, the book was a research project. I had to research what do the world's highest performers do? What are their habits? And I found myself wanting in a few of those areas. As I talk about in the book, I was like, oh, this was a surprise to me. I thought it was this, but it turned out to be that. And I'd never scored myself in these ways on a consistent basis. I was a person who showed up each day and tried my best. That is not the same as being in progress mode. Showing up to try your best, you know, that's like living a good life. But to be in progress mode, you also have to measure yourself a little bit to know if you're in progress. And in no other area of your life could you measure yourself that would matter the most than your daily habits. So create your own scorecard or use the High Performance Planner or whatever you need to do. I want to make sure, like measure yourself self evaluate. Don't be scared of that. Some days your scores suck. That's okay. Get up, do better tomorrow. I think your habits really matter. And if you're ever confused on where to focus, read high performance habits. You know, I think that High Performance planner is going to be the daily thing in people's lives. Sufficient enough that I'm good You know, I feel good about it. It's out in the world, and it's changing people's lives. And then a few years later, Covid happens. World shuts down. People are super struggling with their mindset. I'm noticing a flood of requests of people going, okay, I have the book, or I've done YouTube, or I've. You know, it's like, what do we need to do? We had to stop our events during COVID and people are longtime, you know, customers and clients who aren't able to get together and network and learn and workshop anymore. Everyone's looking for a breakthrough. I bet you had that. When Covid hit, did you stop progress mode? It's a big tell in our lives. When crises hit or major challenges hit, do we stop progress mode and wait for better conditions? That was a big, like, aha to me, because I saw a lot of people, even my own industry, because if they couldn't speak or do their regular business, they just sat and waited for it to end. And I was like, I can't sit and wait. I don't know how long this is gonna take. And I kept thinking, like, okay, I don't know what to do during this crisis. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And so instead of wondering, what am I supposed to do? Like, it's just gonna hit my head, I go, what's the next level of value I could provide to my customers, my clients? And some of you know, that was the beginning of Growth Day. Growth Day is my app where I do daily mental conditioning. Why did I do that? Well, it's like, I noticed during COVID people were falling apart. They went into coast mode, they went into wait mode, they went into someday mode. I'm like, you can still make progress even when the world does not cooperate. There's some way you can read a book. You can get healthy, you can skill up, you can take a training. You can. Even if you can't be out in the world, you can still do something to advance yourself. And I was like, what's happening? People were getting so negative, and people were feeling lonely or cut off, or they were just angry about the situation, or they were scared or they're dealing with grief. And it felt like, for me, it was compounding day after day after day after day when Covid happened. And as it marched on and people were passing away and people were scared and the world was shut down. And what I saw was people were losing their minds. And maybe you experienced that at some point. It was Scary. And people were freaking out. And I said, people need, like, they need daily mental conditioning. I need to be in their voice. Not like once a week or once in a while on social media or my training or my courses or my events. It's like every day. And I need to make sure they listen to it every day to condition them for strength through this time. And so I thought, how? So I ended up building the Growth Day app, where I do a daily mental conditioning and training audio. So you have a daily mindset coach, basically. And then I started adding these other features. And all of a sudden, listen, all of a sudden, I'm building a software company, an app company. Now, if you went back 10 years in my career and you said, brendan, you're going to start a software company one day, I'd be like, no, I'm 100% not. I'm a writer, I'm a coach, and I'm a teacher. I'm not a software CEO. I don't hire engineers. That's not what I do. But sometimes in your life, the next stage of progress is that next stage of service. And I had to go, okay, well, I'm not that I'm not a software CEO, but this customer seems to feel like they need a new learning platform. They need more like, conditioning, training. They need to capture their goals in one place. They need to interact with other people who are on personal development because we're not at our events. I had to really reimagine my own career and how I provided value. That's how Growth Day began. I was literally walking with my wife, and we were talking about what it seemed like people needed. And I realized during COVID one of the reasons people didn't feel good, not about whether they were sick or not. What I realized was when the world shut down, some people shut down internally, too. And when the world shut down, something very unique happened. Because if you weren't out there anymore, you didn't have as many days of interacting with people or learning or trying as some other people did. And sometimes what happened was you didn't have as many days of growth. And so I was talking with Denise and I just said, you know what? People are sad right now because they're just not having so many days of growth. Their mental health is falling apart because they're not out there. They're not having as many days of growth. What people need more of to be happier is more days of growth. They need more growth days. As soon as I Growth Day was born, every day is a great Day to grow. If you engage your learning each day, that will change. I never really thought about my career as providing, like, daily something. I was more of the, hey, we're gonna shift your life this way. We're gonna develop this new skillset for you. We're gonna install these big habits. We're get these next big bold moves. But I was like, no, people actually just need daily conditioning. And I know you already do that. You listen to podcasts, you do training. Some preaching of the choir a little bit here. That was the next level of value and service that I had to learn to build. I didn't know how to learn to build an app or a software company. Just like at the beginning of my career, I didn't know how to build a website or an email sequence or a live broadcast or an online course. You have to say, I don't know how to say it to you. You have to evolve with your service. You have to develop new skills and new ways of becoming and leading and serving as you try to stay on the path of progress. For you and for me, doing that with Growth Day has been one of the great blessings in my life. So all my Growth Day members out there, thank you for getting the app, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. It's become something I never anticipated. So much bigger than I ever imagined. So fulfilling and so incredible. So the whole Growth Day community, Growth Day team, thank you guys so much. So now let's jump out of my story. And in your story, what is it that you think would add a new level of service or value? When you think about your passion project, when you think about your work, when you think about your career, when you think about your business, if you really want to go in progress mode in your life, you have to think about that more. You need more clarity there. You have to anticipate that. Okay, I really want you to think about what takes you there. You know, in a lot of my groups that I do, I have this program called Ultra. And so it's like, if you want to maintain progress in your life, like, join us in Ultra one day. It's like an event. And so people come to the event. And so much of the event is teaching frameworks. So they have the mental edge, but also like, what's next level service? And I share that because you literally have to sit down and workshop it. You know, join us in Ultra one day. Just go to progressmode.com, you can learn about it or literally sit down after this episode and go next level Value next level service. What does that look like this year, next year and the next year? And what you do is you start leveling yourself up consciously, conscientiously, right? You're not like hoping for excellence, you're actually planning those next step changes in value to the world, in how you want to interact with the world, who you want to become. And that shifts everything into high gear. And this time though, as you shift into high gear, you're also going to make sure you protect your health and you protect your relationships. I want you to evaluate yourself real quick with me. Are you compromising your health on the pursuit of some ambition? Are you not having as much fun with your friends or your family, your spouse, your relationships as you pursue the ambition? I want you to hear that high performance kind of looks like a little triangle there where you have the external achievements, right? You're moving towards things, you're getting your goals done, achieving and moving towards your priorities. You're on the right direction, but you are also, also improving relationships and improving your health. You're caretaking your relationships and your health as you strive for the impossible. What most people do when they strive for the impossible, they make their relationships impossible. They make taking care of themselves impossible by not managing their time. That's why I created the High Performance Planner. I was like, we got to get people managing their time better. They're giving away so much time to distraction and instead of calling the family, they bring so much time to distraction instead of working out for 20 minutes. And so if you are going to stay in progress mode, which is my message to you as we finish season one, if you're going to stay in progress mode, you need your high performance habits. You need to make sure that you take care of yourself and your relationships as you progress to those next levels. So what does that look like for you? What would make your relationships that much better? What would make your health that much better? And focus on those as you seek to achieve the important outcomes, I want you to be very careful of listening to people who just say, screw your feelings. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind towards outcome. Those people are right that you will move ahead, but they are also forgetting that you'll be lonely and out of shape. And what's the point of success if you're lonely and out of shape? If you're lonely and you have no energy, the reason you want success is so that you have more time, more freedom, more joy, more contribution. You can make a greater difference. You can be present with your family and your friends, have good times have great adventures. You want success so that you can maybe have a little less stress and more positive energy that you can take care of yourself better, make better choices for yourself, feel life better. Don't forget that in the pursuit. I know so much of what we've talked about in progress mode is big goals and next level thinking and really believing in yourself. As people doubt you. Believing in yourself is you doubt you. I just want to make sure you also take care of you. Sometimes the biggest shift into progress mode is, is realizing it's not just about the task or about the achievement, but rather it's gaining a greater alignment in our life with our relationships, our energy and the direction we are going. It's not just about achievement, it's about alignment. That's actually the opening story of high performance habits. And literally tens of thousands of people around the world like that. One story of teaching me from not just about achievement, but alignment. Being in alignment with who I am becoming on the journey, being in alignment towards what matters the most and coming alive because of that. Because if you are misaligned as you achieve great things over a period of time, that part where you are misaligned, you will not only go in the wrong direction, but you will compromise your integrity. You will do something irresponsible, you will tell lies, you will find yourself so off path, even if you get the award. You know, I've spent especially this last five years working with some of the most outstanding performers in the world. Whether musicians, Olympians, CEOs, I mean, people at the top, top, top of the game. And many of them have this story of where they got the accolade. They got the award, but they no longer like themself. They got the dollars, they got the bank account, but they no longer knew who they were. They didn't even recognize themselves. That is the challenge. As you stay in progress mode, it's not just about achievement, it's about alignment. You staying in alignment with the best of who you are. You staying in alignment with who you desire to be and how you want to live your life. And I promise you, relationships and your health are a big part of that. Don't compromise there for the quick check, don't compromise there for that pride of ego of slugging it out every day in the trenches because you don't need sleep and you don't need a break. I promise it's true. We all need to work hard to have progress and great success in our life. But you can work hard and find harmony. And that is the ultimate shift when you can work hard towards meaningful pursuits, you can feel enlivened by it, passionate about it, enthusiastic about it, and even on the days you don't want to do it and it sucks. And you worked really hard, but you found an overall harmony in your life because you didn't compromise your relationships. You didn't compromise your health over a period of time. It doesn't mean you don't have a week where you work super hard, or a year or a quarter. It means that you are aware of the bigger picture. Your life is a bigger picture unfolding. There's a bigger story unfolding for you. You want this future that you're going to land in. You want to be healthy. You want to be connected with other people. You want to be competent and capable. This is what happens when you have Progress mode switched on in the right way. That's why we call it progress. The right direction, the right speed, the right magnitude of change, the right valence of emotion, positive emotion along the way. Not just grit, grind, hustle, burnout. Because you already played that game. At this next stage of progress mode, you're going to learn to play the game. You're going to learn how to be in the world. You're going to learn how to achieve great things. You're going to have faith in the forward position of life. You know, you're in a before picture right now and there will be an after picture. In the after picture, we want you healthier, more in love, more capable, more happy. You deserve to do that. You deserve to feel that. You just got to stay in progress mode, baby. Listen, if you've enjoyed season one of Progress mode, just do me a simple favor. Share it with somebody. Somebody you know who wants to be in Progress mode and they want to be healthier this time. Somebody you know who wants to be in progress mode and you know that they want to have better relationships. You know that they want to achieve great things, but also live an extraordinary life. As they achieve those things, they want to become something. Just share Progress Mode. That would help me so much. Share it on social media. Go to progressmode.com, get on the newsletter so I can send you all the resources associated with these last six epic episodes. Please cheer me on out on social media by sharing Progress Mode. Please join the newsletter so you get the resources and you can hear about our upcoming events where I would love to work with you and have you in the room and keep you in progress mode. You deserve great things in your life. You are stronger than you think as I sign off on season one of Progress Mode, I want to take a moment to thank you, thank my family, thank my team, thank my friends, thank all my clients around the world who have supported me through so many of the stories I shared with you here in Progress Mode, season one, it's been an epic, epic journey. And in season two, we're going to talk about going to a whole other level. How did I start unicorn companies? How did I build, you know, relationships around the world to do what I've been able to do? More importantly, what happens when you crash and burn? What happens when you're in a room and everybody else is way smarter? What happens when you stay up all night and you still don't have the answer? And that goes on night after night after night, day after day after day. I'll be sharing some of that in season number two, because guess what? Progress mode doesn't stop. You don't hit some top level and you're done. You're not done. You're becoming more. You're not done. You've got passionate pursuits, you've got. You got desires, you got dreams, you have contributions. So remember, when you wake up tomorrow morning, the sun comes up, you put your feet on the ground, you get ready, you switch your brain into progress Mode, baby.