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If you can teach yourself in the good times to be grateful, to notice what's working, to what's good, you are architecting a neural pathway that becomes a consistent mindset, a habit of thought, a perspective that sticks. How do you sustain hope when things go wrong, when you're frustrated, when you fail, when people are rude, when awful things happen? How do you keep and sustain that hope? Well, I've been through a lot, just like many of you have. And I've been with a lot of people in their last days, hours and breaths here in this life. And I've learned a lot about hope through my own brain injuries, my own losses, my own huge failures, and even just those dark days, living in the gray of an empty mindset, a dispirited feeling. It's hard. I know it. So how do you keep it? Where does that light come from? How do you sustain it? Four simple ideas for you. Number one. I know it's going to sound so silly, but research shows it is true over and over and over and over and over again, and that is maintain a gratitude practice of journaling. Those who journal and capture the moments of life to be thankful for are able to sustain hope, keep resilience, keep momentum, and build confidence through the most difficult of times. People who journal have higher life satisfaction, deeper, more meaningful relationships, and feel more connected to their art. Why? Because it's the repetition of the reminders that forges new pathways in our brain or solidifies the one we already have. And if you can teach yourself in the good times to be grateful, to notice what's working, to what's good, you are architecting a neural pathway that becomes a consistent mindset, a habit of thought, a perspective that sticks. The little it might just be one little moment you appreciate it. Somebody helped you with something, someone said something nice. God granted you this little indication. You heard this quiet, beautiful whisper. You had this aha moment. The chocolate cake was good. I don't know. Whatever it is, capture that. Capturing gratitude builds the strength of capacity to deal with the hard times. You're more hopeful because you remember all those good things. When you forget all the good things, it's easier to become dispirited and believe there is no hope. But if time and time and time and time again, you have captured that evidence of goodness in your life in a gratitude journal, what happens is that is how you perceive things. Please do it. Please. Just make sure you do a journal entry every day and capture one thing that you're grateful for or you saw, or you appreciate it. I promise it will help you sustain hope later. Number two, how do you sustain hope? Have a great peer group. It is very true that those around us dramatically shape our mindset. And it's not, you know, self help, you know, psycho babble, that our brain is truly structured in a way with what we call these mirror neurons that allow us to mimic the things around us. It's why an infant will often mimic its mother's face. It's why when you see someone sad, you tend to feel sad. When you see someone yawn, you yawn. We tend to mimic each other because there's these mirror neurons that want us to mirror the tone, the pace, the energy of others. That is a real biological thing. And so the people who you around the most are shaping your hope for the future. Let me say that again. The people who you are around the most are shaping your hope for the future. And either that hope is weak or that hope is strong and is based on the positivity, the support, the encouragement and the goodness of those who are around you. And the good news is you get to choose those you surround yourself with. It's that old saying, maybe you couldn't choose every family member, but you got to choose your friends. And I always just say, hey, you get to choose the time allotted to individuals in your life. And if certain individuals are not giving you the energy that you need, well, sometimes they're in their own place, their own time. Maybe you don't have to leave them and never focus on them, but rather on the side to build that positivity, that community. Friends, family, team members, those you lead and work with. Your peer group should empower you. And as you are more empowered, you will have more hope. Number three, momentum. You want to feel more hopeful? Gain momentum. Take that small step today. Send off that email, write out that dm, call that person, finish that project, or at least start it. Momentum. When you got the wind at your back, because you've got some momentum, you're more hopeful, you feel more capable, more competent. You feel like the world is supporting you. And it's one little step at a time. Doesn't have to be big. One thing at a time. So few people actually do that. Dedicate themselves to personal development, invest in themselves, work on themselves. Desire to achieve that next level of success or joy or abundance or happiness, fulfillment. That's what we do here. Momentum. One small thing each day towards your best self, give you that hope. Number four, remember your strength. Remember those times when you thought you'd failed. You never get back up again. You sure did. You're here. You're still working on yourself. Your intention today, to build up, to get better, to learn something here in growth day says you're still in the game. You've learned some hard lessons. Appreciate that wisdom, honor the struggle that has been put before you. Remember that the challenge can shape the next level of character and capability for you. That's a beautiful thing. Remember your strength. Remember your strength. You've come through a lot more than you imagine you have. And every single time you learn that, as you kept stepping forward in momentum, you pulled yourself through. You'll do it again and again and again. Listen, as you climb up that mountain there, it's. It's sometimes left and right, four steps forward, five back, four up, six down, 10 up, three down. That's part of the process. It's hard to climb, hard to improve, hard to rise. But you've done it before. You'll do it again. Well, Ren, I don't have any strength. Well, the good news, if you're a person of faith, well, there's someone a whole lot stronger than you guiding you through. If you don't believe in God or the Creator, if you don't have a spiritual belief, well, then you know there's other people who are stronger than you, who are there for you. Mentors, people you can reach out to. You can raise your hand and ask for help. Neighbors, teachers, friends. You know someone who is stronger than you. Reach out to them. Ask for perspective. Ask for the shoulder to cry on. Ask for the time. Ask for the support. Let them know how you're feeling and where you're at. Don't be fearful of that. Because that simple ask is strength. That simple ask is momentum. That simple ask is connecting you to a better peer group. That simple ask makes you grateful. When someone says, I got you how to have hope, this was your guide. The future holds good things for you. You are stronger than you think, and every day is a great day to grow. Today's personal development topic for you is on the question of Brendan. What should I do if I lost my motivation? I received this recently in our community, and it's a perennial question I received since teaching motivation to high performance since 2007. I don't think I've ever done an event, taught a course, done a live cast without somebody saying, I. I feel like I lost my motivation or I lost my purpose or I lost that drive. Where did it go? And I always answer, well, you got old. I'm just teasing. Okay, hold on. Hold on. Five ideas if you lost motivation. Number one, get some real rest. These days, we all tend to run ourselves so stressed, so overwhelmed, and so overextended that what ends up happening is, of course, we face mental fatigue, emotional fatigue, and yes, physical or even spiritual fatigue. When you're going 24, 7 and you don't give yourself a break, then what ends up happening is you get wiped out. And yes, energy is correlated with motivation. Physical, emotional, and mental energy. All of them correlated with your sense of motivation. And too many people downplay this because, yeah, I'll get some rest eventually. And the issue is, not only do we need more recurrent pit stops on a daily basis to give our mind, bodies, eyes, a break from these screens and this to do list, but we need more weekends. Write it down. I need more weekends. You know, especially today as work life balance has gotten totally crazy, where lots of folks spend way more time working from home. And the blurring of that role that we play as contributors, leaders, or creators in our organizations or companies or businesses kind of gets blended. When you're in the house and you're dealing with the house tasks, the family, the kids, the issues, the dogs, the people coming over. And as that happens, it's easier to be working all the time. Even if you're staying at home, it's easier to have more things to do. Today you might be educating the kids, might be trying to deal with neighbors, might have extended family around, and suddenly there's just. You're always going and going and going. But the human body and brain needs significant breaks. We need breaks not just during the day again, but real breaks. I had a client one time who was just so spent, had worked with three other coaches, and one of the coaches he worked with finally reached out to me and said, brendan, I can't crack the code. I've been working with this guy for a good 10 weeks, and I just. I don't know what to do. Person's, you know, successful, and I think you might be a better coach for this person. And I, you know, usually when I get a referral like that, I don't want it because it means that something in that person's life, maybe they're not ready or, you know, because the coaches in my network are extraordinarily talented, and they know when they toss them over to me, that person's getting usually paid 10, 20, 30 times more. And so I just, like, I don't know, let me hop on the call. So I did a free session with this person and just had this conversation and what became clear within probably 30 minutes. I do this assessment where I run them through the high performance habits assessment. Anyway did it. And their energy score was so low, identified that as the primary thing and we talked about it. And now this person was doing all the things you see on Instagram. They were drinking all the water, having that green drink. You know, they had a, they were doing yoga. They, you know, believed in taking baths with the fancy salts. You know, they went for a walk every day. And you know, if you were casually observing what this person did, it seemed like fine. But also, this person hadn't had two weekends off in a row in about seven years. So it was pretty easy. When I do my calendar assessment, it's one of my easiest ways to discover what people's motivation really is. Not what they say it is, but what it really is, is by asking them to open up and share their calendar with me. And when I look at their calendar, if it's completely empty, I know that either they're a terrible scheduler or they are not judiciously and conscientiously building towards the future they want. Because if you're not blocking time and setting deadlines and managing it in a calendar somewhere, you're winging it and you're running way less efficient and effective than you could. It's not about working harder, it's about being efficient and effective with clear goals, deadlines, projects outlined in your calendar so you know what the heck you're doing. Anyway, that was the situation with this person. And I could see they hadn't had. I went back probably three, four, five, six, seven, eight months and they were just booked wall to wall. And so we had a conversation person. I basically forced them to take off three weekends in a row, which for them was like this monumental ask. They had never done it before and you would have thought by the end of that month I had delivered a new human being to the earth. I mean, this person was completely different. And I think today people fool themselves and think that they have a weekend when the truth is they spent two to four hours a day on their phone. You know, the average American is an hour a day on Facebook alone, another hour a day on other social media and apps that are non work related. That's two hours just blowing off time every day. And I know some people think that's their idea of vacation or mental break, but it's not. As you've heard me talk about often in growth day, scrolling through social media is actually incredibly taxing on your mind and your body. It causes extreme amounts of comparison fatigue and extreme amounts of judgment fatigue. So we had to change some basic habits. Person got their energy back. They had the most extraordinary year in their business than they ever had before. And was effusive with me and others about, oh my gosh, you know, Brendan changed my life. And I was like, okay, the dude some weekends. Second big idea is sometimes when you lose motivation, it's just your brain telling you you gotta get your house in order. It's saying, you know what, there's so much chaos around my home. But when I say house and order, I also mean that metaphorically in that you just gotta get yourself a little organized. There's so much uncertainty and so much chaos in the world. A little bit sometimes. You know what, pull out that high performance planner in paper and use that. Or log into growth day and go to the plan section and use that. Or open up your Google calendar and schedule something and use that. Just getting yourself organized. Research has found that just by literally clearing your desk, writing down five or six simple things to do by the end of the day and doing that repeat over and over and over can increase productivity and effectiveness. Well, I'd argue it also increases motivation. Third, get closer to impact. You know, often people actually do really great work, meaningful work, important work, highly engaging work. But when they lose motivation, it's because they got away from the impact that their work had on the end user, either the customer or the team, or the organization they're serving, or their family. And they just got so far away, you know, it felt like they were doing a lot of work and throwing it out into black abyss of space. And they never saw it land. They never saw the final outputs of their work. It's kind of like if you work on assembly line and your job is just to fashion a wheel to a car and you just do that all day long and you never actually get to see the car outside the warehouse, or the car better yet, on the lot, or better yet, the car on the lot being driven home by a new family. If you never get to experience the end point of your efforts, the totality of the conclusion event, where there is impact of your process, your work, then you lose that sense of meaning and fulfillment to it. And while you're doing a process in high efficiency and what others in the old world would call high performance, I don't, I don't think there is any high performance without meaning and fulfillment. And the research tends to prove that. The reality is if you don't see that impact, feel that impact or sense that impact. Usually it's not because it's not there. You're just not looking for it or connecting with it. It's why people I always share, tell executives, make sure you do some serious customer service. Even as an executive, be close to the work, be close to the front lines. Listen to what's happening out there, see what is happening. If you're not doing that, you're not seeing the impact, and eventually you'll just feel like you're shuffling things around. Fourth, sometimes we lose motivation when we lack big basic momentum towards our life goals. You know, it's like all of a sudden you're, you're, you're used to crushing at work, but suddenly you're not so much anymore. You might not just feel like there's progress in your personal life. You know, it's not the work that needs to be changed. Sometimes you just got your personal life. You had some goals for your health or you had some goals for something you were going to learn or for a hobby or something you were trying to master. And you just don't feel like overall you're progressing in your personal life. Those are life goals that aren't necessarily tied to KPIs and OKRs. You know, it's that you just have some, you know, lifestyle goals. You kind of wanted to one day live in that one neighborhood or get that one car or get your health in a certain way or have a relationship like this. And when you're not moving towards those things and you just feel like you're being effective somewhere else but not towards those things as well, motivation goes away. See, our whole psyche needs to have a forward lean, a sense of advancement and achievement, a sense of progress to really feel engaged. It's a holistic thing. And that's why even here in Growth Day, every month we ask you to do a whole life assessment. That monthly assessment looks at all area of your life, from your finances to your friends to things that you're learning or your sense of adventure or your health. I think that's really important to do every single month. It's the monthly whole life assessment in the Growth Day app. It's under life scores if you haven't seen it before. Finally lost motivation. Level up your peer group. Level up your peer group. Now, you all know I'm a high performance coach. And for me, I've had, you know, literally hundreds of people come in to get certified as a certified high performance coach through our institute. And what's incredible is how many coaches come in and they just say, you know what, I just need to level up with the caliber of people. I was a good coach, but I lost my motivation. And it wasn't their clients, it was, they didn't have a pure group of people who were accelerating, who were that next level up in mastery, who were continually improving themselves. So they joined us and became a certified high performance coach. By the way, if you're ever interested in that, just go to growthday.comchpc that's growthday.comchpc that stands for Certified High Performance Coaching CHPC. And so when you, when they, these coaches who by the way, they're life coaches, they're business coaches, they're executive coaches, these are folks who know about motivation, but they lost theirs. And they come into our community going oh my gosh, I see you all at such a higher level. And, and not just because usually CHPCs earn more, but because the vibe, the community that we seek to create and the caliber of people that we work with because we really work on our certification, it's just another level. And I shared that as an example. That makes a difference in my career too. Because if I'm not working with CHPCs, if I don't know that community's out there, I would have lost some motivation too. There's something about in your career or your life having a peer group. I know parents who are stay at home, but they've got other parents in their neighborhood who they look up to and admire their parenting style and it helps them level up and it helps them become more motivated to become a great parent. The people that we hang around with dramatically shape our feelings and our emotions and our long term ambitions. They cheer us on to accept and seek larger and higher standards or they let us fall below the standard in which we want to live. Your peer group really matters. That's why I always share with you all. Please get active in our community. You know, just go in our community and share. What habits do you have in your life that keep you productive, happy, sane? You know, growing up, what's your morning routine? What's your wellness routine? What makes you happy? Post those things in the community. Share and learn from another. When you get around to people who are sharing about the ways that they seek self improvement, something changes. You know, for, I mean two years ago today I was with I think 2,500 people in San Diego at one of our personal development seminars. And you know, people walk in on that first day and I do four day events and they walk in and they're kind of like, what's this about? Is this conference? Is this a concert? I heard Brennan jumps and claps and gets us all going. What's this all about? And there's always questions. But by day four, people are leaving there transformed, more motivated, more inspired than they've ever been before. And it's not because of me on stage, is because they meet so many other people who are also like them, ambitious for a better life, excited to try new things, open to new ways of learning, open to shaping their mindset and their habits in such a way that supports their goals and their dreams and their highest selves. Getting around people, man, it can change your life. But I just really support you in and sort of cheer you on and urge you to find a peer group, three, four, five people who you keep in, connect with you, create a little group with you, talk with on a consistent basis about personal development, your goals, your dreams, your best habits, what makes you happy. As you share more and more and more of that with a tighter and tighter group of people, I promise the motivation can start to come back in. Now, of course, I didn't cover everything this session. Those are just five common things I often look for or listen to. Obviously there are issues sometimes of mental health, physical health, things going on in our family. There are short term acute pains in our life that can really take us away from feeling motivated or driven. I always urge people, if you have before work with a certified high performance performance coach, if you want one, hit reply to any of our emails and say you want to work with one. Or if you are really struggling with this for a long period of time, make sure you seek out therapy, professional, licensed therapist or counselor who might be able to support you as well. I'm somebody who really believes that motivation, it can come and go. It's our job to stoke it, to light those fires. By aiming our ambition, by reminding ourselves of our goals, by getting around great people, by taking care of our physical and our emotional health. These things can all fortunately be levered up. They can all be leveled up. And I really believe if you remember that, then you always remember with me that each day we can choose to focus on things that make us feel a little more motivated. Even if some days that means we just got to get in the work, get some momentum, put in the effort. Because as I always say, a lot of motivation comes after momentum. And the first part of getting momentum is usually not that much fun. It just looks like showing up and doing the work and then suddenly the momentum catches the engagement increases the progress fires and you start to feel something of the will and the spirit coming back alive. Sa.