How to Turn Stress Into Your Breakthrough with Jeff Krasno

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "How to Turn Stress Into Your Breakthrough with Jeff Krasno"

Podcast: Motivation with Brendon Burchard
Host: Brendon Burchard
Guest: Jeff Krasno (Founder of Commune, Author of Good Stress)
Date: April 16, 2025

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Overview

This special episode features a rare interview on Brendon Burchard’s podcast with Jeff Krasno, a prominent leader in the wellness movement and founder of Commune. The conversation centers around Jeff's new book, Good Stress, exploring how rethinking stress can catalyze growth, meaningful relationships, resilience, and fulfillment. Together, Brendon and Jeff unpack practical ways to leverage stress as an adaptive force—rather than a detriment—touching on biology, relationships, leadership, and personal narrative.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Redefining Stress: From Enemy to Ally

• Chronic stress in the modern world is damaging, but short-term or "good stress" is an evolutionary mechanism that drives adaptation and growth.
  • “Stress is really an adaptive mechanism in the human body. We have a negative association with stress because modern stress is chronic.” — Jeff [03:29]
• Classic gym analogy: Muscles grow after being stressed and repaired, not by avoiding effort.
• The right dose of stress (not overwhelming or chronic) is key—"the dose makes the poison."

2. Biological and Psychological Responses to Stress

• Small, acute stressors lead to physical and mental resilience.
• Examples from biology: Restricting calories (Paleolithic stress), exercise (muscle hypertrophy), breath-holding (building red blood cells).
• “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” — Jeff [04:34]
• Practicing "top-down regulation" (using conscious awareness to modulate involuntary stress responses) is crucial.

3. Practical Application: Building Stress Resilience

• Brendon shares how he intentionally challenges himself with minimal preparation for public speaking, building confidence over time.
  • “At the beginning, it was massive stress, no trust in self, total fear. But...I’m willing to endure this extraordinary distress and uncomfort. And I kept my eye on a bigger vision.” — Brendon [09:44]
• Skill: Harness discomfort to achieve breakthroughs and develop self-trust.

4. Stress in Relationships—The Power of Hard Conversations

• Avoiding stressful conversations limits growth; facing them is transformative.
• Jeff’s story: Transitioning from people-pleasing to developing a "psychological immune system" by engaging with critical feedback.
  • “In our effort to seek out comfort, we tend to avoid stressful conversations. But imagine what your heart really knows exists on the other side of those stressful conversations.” — Jeff [15:31]
• He scheduled 26 one-on-one Zoom calls with those who disagreed with his public writings—learning emotional regulation and connection.

5. Techniques for Stressful Interpersonal Dynamics

• Focus on seeking connection rather than agreement.
  • “A lot of it is about really seeking connection, not seeking agreement. Like finding places of convergence between your adversary or your partner’s life and your own.” — Jeff [22:19]
• Active listening: Listen to understand, not to respond.
• "Steel manning": Reiterate the strongest parts of someone else’s argument to create deeper understanding and respect.

6. Leadership, Overwhelm, and Centeredness

• Great leadership involves decentralizing decision-making and centralizing mission fluency—letting others shine.
  • “It’s a place that decentralizes decision-making but centralizes mission fluency. So you give people a lens through which to make decisions and then let go.” — Jeff [32:05]
• The importance of restoration and repair, not just relentless growth ("yin" as well as "yang").
• The healthiest systems are those in balance; bouncing back to “the middle” (homeostasis) is crucial.
  • “Our ability to always move back to the middle, to regulate, to find homeostasis—that could be physiological homeostasis...psychological balance, that is called centeredness.” — Jeff [33:01]
• The phrase “weeble wobble back to the center”—recovery isn't always graceful or quick, but it’s necessary [35:39].

7. Joy as an Antidote to Silent Stress

• Chronic stress can manifest as a lack of joy—it’s not always obvious.
  • “The absence of joy is a great indicator of a silent stress. You might not know that you’re under the extraordinary stress you are, but if you ask, ‘am I experiencing joy?’” — Brendon [38:22]
• Emphasis on enjoying the present moment (“hedonic treadmill” problem—always chasing the next goal).

8. Self-Talk and the Inner Narrative

• The mind sits at the top of experience: “Your entire experience of what it is like to be Brendon or Jeff is perceived through the prism of your mind.” — Jeff [45:22]
• Anxiety compounds when we anticipate future problems; train the mind like a muscle (e.g., meditation, focus practices).
• Recognize impermanence and agency in stressful moments.
  • “If all you are is change, then you can take some control over your behavior and your environment, such that you are moving along the spectrum towards wholeness.” — Jeff [52:20]
• Brendon’s self-talk trigger: use doorways as a prompt to recall intention (“I enter as a happy man ready to serve”) [43:11].

9. Transforming Your Story: Post-Traumatic Growth

• Jeff shares insight from Gabor Maté: kids sacrifice authenticity for belonging—understanding this can help reframe our adult stories.
• “Transmute your greatest shortcoming into your greatest superpower”—Jeff’s journey from insecure, connection-seeking child to global community builder [56:02].
• The opportunity for everyone: honestly assess your story, then turn adversity into service and connection.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Stress is not only key to the struggle, it’s key to the breakthrough.” — Brendon [02:00]
• “The dose makes the poison here, but the right dosage can lead to self-betterment in a whole variety of ways.” — Jeff [06:51]
• “Pain hooks. Pain hooks. Pain hooks.” — Brendon, on modern media’s design to trigger us [13:43]
• “I ended up scheduling 26 separate 1-hour Zoom calls with people that didn’t agree with me...Very quickly I understood that I was really just creating a space for people to be seen and to be heard.” — Jeff [20:14]
• “A lot of stress is overcome when you become more assertive...The disengagement timeline increases stress in most people’s life.” — Brendon [29:00]
• “You can’t be joyful in the future. You can only be joyful right now. It’s the only opportunity for joy.” — Jeff [39:16]
• “To truly grok that and to feel that change is not only possible, but it is the only thing there is, is an incredibly powerful notion. It is empowering. It gives you agency.” — Jeff [52:28]
• “You transmuted your greatest shortcoming into your greatest superpower.” — Gabor Maté to Jeff, relayed by Jeff [56:41]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Redefining Stress, Biology & Good Stress: [03:29 - 08:13]
• Building Self-Trust Through Stress: [09:02 - 10:52]
• Ice Bath as Metaphor for Stress Practice: [10:52 - 13:14]
• Dealing with Modern Stress Triggers (Media, Negativity Bias): [13:14 - 14:18]
• Stress in Communication & Relationships: [15:31 - 23:21]
• Active Listening, Steel Manning in Disagreement: [23:21 - 29:00]
• Leadership, Centeredness, and Balance: [31:16 - 36:00]
• Joy and the Hedonic Treadmill: [38:22 - 43:11]
• Self-Talk, Narrative & Agency: [43:11 - 53:16]
• Transforming Your Story: [55:02 - 58:49]

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Conclusion

Brendon Burchard and Jeff Krasno deliver a masterclass in turning stress into growth—personally and relationally. Listeners are encouraged to embrace acute discomfort, develop emotional regulation, reframe personal narratives, and cultivate joy in the moment. The practical wisdom drawn from Good Stress moves beyond mere coping to the pursuit of resilience, connection, and meaningful fulfillment.

Essential takeaway: Stress, when properly understood and engaged, is not something to avoid—it’s the portal to your next breakthrough.

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Guest’s Book Recommendation:
Good Stress by Jeff Krasno

Further Resources:

• Subscribe to Commune’s newsletter
• Learn more at GrowthDay

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Transcript

[A]

In our effort to seek out comfort, we tend to avoid stressful conversations. We'll do anything to avoid them. Right. But what I'm really trying to ask people is imagine what your heart really knows exists on the other side of those stressful conversations, both societally but also just in your personal life. What stressful conversations are you avoiding with a really, really good friend that you care about or a partner or a parent, an elderly parent potentially, before you can't have that conversation anymore.

[B]

Hey, everybody, it's Brendon Burchard, founder of Growth Day. And this is a special episode and a rare, rare thing for you today. As you know, I never interview anybody for Growth Day or for motivation with Brendon Burchard anymore. And I think I've interviewed maybe five people in the last five years total. And so, you know, this is something special and something I really believe in. I am really blessed to be with my dear friend Jeff Krasno today, founder of Commune, one of the great leaders in health and wellness, a true pioneer in the entire category of wellness and has something very special that's going to push on you. As you know, I'm always teaching you that you have to learn to honor the struggles of life. And as a high performance coach, it's my job to, I really believe I'm paid to push. You hear me saying that all the time leaders are paid to push. We always have to take upon the challenge frame in our life. When we challenge ourselves, we grow. But most people don't like that process because it brings stress, it brings discomfort. And if I talk to you about stress right now in your life, a grand association is it makes you miserable. You're like, I don't like it, Brandon. I'm already stressed. Why do you want to talk with Jeff Krasnow about his brand new book called Good Stress? Because we're going to reorient your mind around this topic today and teach you that actually stress is not only key to the struggle, it's key to the breakthrough. And no one knows this in a more grounded way and a lived way than my main man, Jeff Krasno. I love you, brother.

[A]

Yes, sir. What an honor to be interviewed by you.

[B]

Yeah. I also gave you a quote. I'll start with this for your book. I think I've quoted five books in 10 years.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So this one, Jeff Krasno, is one of my favorite teachers and a truly wise guide for growth. Grounded wisdom and actionable strategies make this a must read for true well, being good stress, everybody. It's out it's available, it's awesome. And I wanna start with that with you, because I've seen you build big things, Wanderlust Commune. I've seen you lead the industry, and you're in a category of wellness where most people in wellness are like, man, I just got to get to peace. I got to zen it out. I got to calm it down. I got yoga flow through this thing. And you led those movements in so many ways. And so I'm curious about good stress, because you're actually asking people, maybe this is the time in your life to architect it and to build it into your life, into your routine, so you can grow. So was there a switch that happened for you, or you just have recognized this as a primary breakthrough mechanism?

[A]

Yeah. Well, I'll just start by saying stress is really an adaptive mechanism in the human body. We have a negative association with stress because modern stress is chronic. Right.

[B]

You can't get away from it. It hurts. It's misery.

[A]

Yeah. And when you have chronic stress in your life, you become psychologically dysregulated, physiologically dysregulated. A lot of people associate it with this kind of Chinese water torture of cortisol, where you always feel a sense of clutchedness.

[B]

Oh, I like that word, clutched.

[A]

You feel clutched.

[B]

Yeah, tension.

[A]

Tension. And it is that tension in the human body that actually anchors the ego, the ego identity. When you're at ease, true ease, and you're feeling connected like this, or in collective enterprise, or when you have a sense of flow state, right. You don't feel that sense of clutch, you actually lose sense of linear time. You have perfect awareness of your body in space and time, and you have that sense of real ease. Now, I'm not talking about kick back on the couch in a 72 regulated environment, watching Netflix, eating chubby hubby kind of ease.

[B]

It might be like heated yoga flow ease.

[A]

And a lot of that real true ease that we're looking for is the product of. Of leaning into a little bit of discomfort. So we evolved in relationship to our environment over hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens, over millions of years, as hominids before that. In relation to a good deal of what I sometimes called Paleolithic stress. We had a little bit of calorie scarcity in our life from time to time, especially in the winter. Right, Right. So it would be completely normal to get your loincloth would be a little tight in the fall or late summer. It store a little bit of warehoused energy in the form of fat, because winter's fallow was right around the corner. And that scarcity, that stress, that good stress not only kept you lean, but now science is revealing that it also activated all of these longevity pathways. It built new mitochondria, your energy power plan. It cleaned up dysfunctional proteins in this process called autophagy. There's a lot of scientific geekiness about it, but the kind of the headline there is, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And we know that in some very, very obvious ways. Those of us who like to go to the gym, right, we overload, let's say a biceps muscle. And what happens? We rip some of those microfibers in that muscle, we stress it to the point where it just rips a little bit, and then the body springs miraculously into action. This is what I mean. We are engineered with an adaptive response to stress. In this particular case, the body then summons these structural proteins. They're called myosin and actin. And you give that enough rest and you eat enough protein and leucine, et cetera, and what happens a couple days later? You get up, you look in front of the mirror and you're like, boom. Brendan Stacked. Everyone says that about me. Everyone says that about me. So that's called muscle hypertrophy. That is a really, really good example of how the right dosage of stress, right, the dose makes the poison here, but the right dosage can lead to self betterment in a whole variety of ways. Now, we can study that physically with the body. I just gave one example. We can also, like, for example, hold our breath. We won't do that on a podcast because that's a little boring for people. But if we did, the body builds up excess carbon dioxide. Well, that's called hypercapnia. So when you have excess carbon dioxide because you're holding your breath for a while, what does your body do? Well, it has again, a miraculous engineering for an adaptive response to that stress. And it makes more red blood cells. Red blood cells then take the available oxygen that you have to your cells to your mitochondria to make energy. This is why athletes often train at high altitudes, where there's a low partial pressure of oxygen at high altitudes. So a lot of Olympic facilities are at these places.

[B]

I love that met because I work with a lot of Olympians. And this effort to strain themselves more so they can perform better later is very rare. It's a very rare thing. In my world of public speaking. I taught myself to go from long script where I'd read the speech to a Few paragraphs to a few bullet points to literally five words on a page. I can do three hours on stage with three bullet points and three words. I don't need to do that. I'm creating, like, it's hard. I'm creating my public speaking career. So it's harder for me. So I stay more active, I stay more engaged, and I grow more because I'm doing more hard sets, hard reps.

[A]

Well, you know why you do that? Because you trust yourself. You have a deep implicit trust of yourself because you've done the hard work. You've built the foundational knowledge such that Brendan can step on that stage with five words and then access the spiritual well, because the technical well is so ingrained. And that comes from making a lot of mistakes, being unafraid to make the mistakes, and doing the hard work. It's very much.

[B]

I would share a less optimistic view. I would share that what you said is true now.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

At the beginning, it was massive stress, no trust in self, total fear. But the vision was, that's okay because that's what I want to become over here. So I'm willing to endure this extraordinary distress and uncomfort. And I didn't trust myself. I didn't have any capability or competency to trust myself. I didn't have any reps to trust myself. And I was a kid from Montana. I was like, what I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to be on a stage with Wayne Dyer one day or Jeff Krasno. I didn't have it. It was that I did not bemoan the fact that stress and discomfort was going to be an immediate and real and awful part of the process. And I kept my eye on a bigger vision that allowed me to go through that. Just like if you're climbing Kilimanjaro, you're like, this sucks. I can't breathe. I'm freezing. I. I'm terrified. But I really want to get there. And I think that that was it for me. I don't know if that applies to most people, because I think what I appreciate from the book was you're allowing that to be true for people who don't trust themselves yet or don't have all of that ingrained yet. It's like, stress is real and it's okay.

[A]

Well, you jumped into the ice bath of public speaking. Some people jump into the ice bath of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Some people jump into the ice bath of actually having really hard, stressful conversations. I love that metaphor. And if you actually unpack, what's happening when you're literally jumping into an ice bath, right. You get into 40 degree water, let's say, right? You gasp, you have a deep breath and then you have an involuntary bottom up response, Right. So your heart rate and your respiratory rate start to increase. You feel that epinephrine coursing through your veins, it's coming up through your carotid arteries. You're like, I'm gonna have a panic attack. And then wait, there's a space available to me right now to put conscious top down pressure on top of that involuntary bottom up response. I can do that through conscious breath work potentially. I can do that through maybe just stoic practices or, or leveraging just my neo mammalian prefrontal cortex to know that no, I'm gonna be fine in this 40 degree ice bath. I'm just gonna be fine. And doing that over and over again provides you with that capacity to emotionally regulate, to basically put top down pressure on top of involuntary bottom up response such that when Brendan steps on that stage, he's got that skill. So this is really interesting where physiological good stressors, like literally getting into the ice bath can punctuate the rest of your life. It spills over into public speaking, stressful conversations, managing your children because you have.

[B]

Skilled the top down regulation.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And most people, because they're in a reactive mode of just dealing with the bottom up stress and they're trapped in that, that they don't develop that practice or that capability into the future. So when they look at future goals, they're really scary. Or when they look at future hardship, it's really scary because they haven't yet run the reps of oh, you can top down this. I like that metaphor. The top down pressure. I like that a lot.

[A]

Yeah. And this is so unbelievably useful in today's attention economy, for example, because our media economy is literally designed, it's engineered to trigger you to leverage your human negativity bias to make you outraged and fearful.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And you're just sitting there getting deluged all day with 24 hour news and social media sensations.

[B]

Pain hooks, pain hooks. Pain hooks.

[A]

And then, but then the question you have to ask yourself is that, do I have that capacity to find that space to not be triggered, to put that top down pressure onto all of the influences that are trying to trigger that bottom up response. And again, this is where exposure to the right amount of stress yields and confers an amazing benefit because you build that emotional regulatory capability. It's just so important.

[B]

My favorite part about the book.

[A]

And.

[B]

It'S also scary to say to an author, but my favorite part of the book is where you bring in the concept of good stress being vital to our relationships. And that idea of engage the hard conversation, have the hard conversations, because you need to develop that social strength, that social acuity, that social communication skill, which is hard to tell someone because earlier you said, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. When you are in chronic stress or you feeling stress, you don't feel like challenging yourself. So if I'm a person listening to this, I'm like, okay, yeah, I get what you're saying. Good biological examples. But my life is really stressful, Jeff. I'm kind of stuck in the stress. Why would I challenge myself? Like, why would I push and how would I do that? And I think the easiest access point in the book to me was, well, in your relationships, learning to have a harder conversation is really kind of stressful, but that gives you a skill that goes other places. Can you talk about that, how you perceive stress in relationship or in conversation with other humans as actually a growth driver? Because I thought that was really cool.

[A]

Totally. I mean, again, you can think about this as jumping into the ice bath of stressful conversations. And again, in our effort to seek out comfort, we tend to avoid stressful conversations. We'll do anything to avoid them. Right. But what I'm really trying to ask people is imagine what your heart really knows exists on the other side of those stressful conversations, both societally but also just in your personal life. What stressful conversations are you avoiding with a really, really good friend that you care about or a partner or a parent, an elderly parent, potentially, before you can't have that conversation anymore. So for me, you know, I was a people pleaser all my life until I was about 49. And of course, I still, you know, it's still a process. It's a work in progress, but I had an experience or a series of experiences that built what I call my psychological immune system. So I started writing this newsletter, which I love. Yes, I was right at the beginning.

[B]

I was replying back to you. During COVID he started writing these newsletters for Commune, which I hope you all subscribe to.

[A]

But.

[B]

And I know many of that, that, that, that, that. A lot of that momentum you had led to the book. But you're such a phenomenal writer. That's why I want people to read this book. So sorry to interrupt, but yeah, yeah, I know you're doing that as an outlet psychologically too.

[A]

Yeah. Well, this was really with your counsel. And Jake, my very capable partners, was really encouraging me to write this weekly missive because it was a really crazy time. It was a time of great fear and uncertainty. I think Jake was like, you need to send buoys out so people can navigate the choppy seas of COVID So I was like, okay. And then three or four weeks in, I got myself over a little bit of a literary barrel because I had to produce 1500-2000 words every week. And 2020, though, gave me a lot of compost, a lot of fodder to write about. So I was taking on very incendiary issues at that juncture. Covid, the national reckoning around social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder, The rise of QAnon, the election, all of these different issues. And, you know, over 2,000 words, I was bound to find a turn of phrase that would, you know, piss people off here or there. And I attached my personal email to those, and I would be in receipt every Monday of, you know, hundreds of emails, many of which were encouraging, but probably a hundred a week that were brimming with opprobrium and recrimination over something that I had said. And at first, I was very, very defensive when people were insulting me. And I would stay up all night and I would brood over clever rejoinders. Oh, man. And of course, I was holding that ember and I was the one getting burned. I was insomniatic. I was spending too much time in a place of anger or retribution. And then over time, I built what I call my psychological immune system, which is very similar to how you build your physiological immune system, which is low grade exposure to insult with your physiology. That's like pathogens, like bacteria and viruses, and you're exposed to them a little bit, and then your body spins up these wonderful proteins called antibodies, and then we become immune to that pathogen when we encounter it in real life.

[B]

Expose yourself to toxic people more.

[A]

Well, you know, this is definitely not to ever excuse, like odious abuse or neglect or racism, et cetera. But exposing yourself to some degree of insult or challenge or obstacle or difference of opinion actually can build your psychological immune system.

[B]

The people who I know know themselves the best can handle debate. The best.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And debate doesn't threaten them anymore. Debate makes them explore, makes them curious, makes them strong. And it's almost like the less mature we are, the more that that debate or that feedback, you know, makes us kind of sick to the stomach later on. It Makes us instead of sick to the stomach, almost like centered on principle, like, oh, how might my top down reply to this?

[A]

Totally. So the moral of that story was I ended up scheduling 26 separate 1 hour Zoom calls with people that didn't agree with me. Wow. Yeah, I love that. So I had 26 hour long, quote unquote, stressful conversations. And because I had also honed my ice bath protocol, I had sort of built some of that psychological emotional resilience to stress. And then I had also built up my psychological immune system so I wasn't as triggered by a difference of opinion or people insulting me. And then I would enter these conversations in a very, well in kind of polyvagal theory, sort of ventrally vagally activated state, but essentially like a calm, serene place where I was just creating a safe and trustworthy container for me to have these conversations with these people that didn't agree with me. And, you know, it was so interesting, Brendan. These conversations took on such a concilian similar pattern. You know, we weren't as fluent with zoom at that point, you know, so we would just be jabbing at buttons for a few minutes and even just that was humanizing. But then there we'd be face to face, and they would see me very emotionally regulated, very much kind of in a space or an energy of coherence and attunement, and they would just launch into their entire life story and I wouldn't say a word for 45, 50 minutes. And most of the time, we actually never got around to talking about the original issue that had put us at loggerheads. They were telling me about their sick dogs or their alcoholic parents or their broken relationships or their health journeys, et cetera. And very quickly I understood that I was really just creating a space for people to be seen and to be heard. And that that was a service, especially in that moment. And I got better at these stressful conversations. I learned actual protocols and techniques for having them. And I write about that in the book. I love it. You know, a lot of it is about really seeking connection, not seeking agreement. Like finding places of convergence between your adversary or your partner's life and your own.

[B]

My very favorite principle of the book right there is like, oh, you know, this is not about agreement. This is connection. Doing that and offering that space to people can. That's stress. But if you can learn to be there and make it more about the idea of the connection and whether or not that happens, then you don't have to feel like you have to prove yourself Right. And now you actually gained a skill, and I thought that shined in your writing.

[A]

Yes. Thank you. Yeah. You know, there's other principles involved with real active listening and listening to understand and not listening to respond. Like, so often in our conversations, we're actually formulating rejoinders or rebuttals in our head while the other person that we're conversing with is still talking. They haven't even finished their thought. And we will probably do that in this conversation. And that's fine. It's like instinctual. Cause we're excited to be in connection. But when you're having a stressful conversation, the best approach is really just to completely listen for the sole purpose of understanding someone else. Let them finish, allow for a pause, then form your rejoinder, and then explain yourself.

[B]

So hard for people, because biologically, one of the things that sets us aside from other species is we're anticipatory animals. We're also the most visionary. And because we have the k Pax universi, the ability to. We can conceive of the universe, and that's what distincts us from other animal species, is we can actually. The dog in the other room might not quite understand the argument happening in the other human realm in the kitchen, but we can conceive of things happening on other planets, and we can explain them. Our explanations make us a unique species. The ability to explain and anticipate. But in relationships and in stressful situations, that can also be murderous. Because in a difficult situation, we also anticipate ruin in a conversation. We anticipate the debate before it even happened. And we're just not locked into presence. And it's what you described to do. I love how you describe it. It's really hard for people to listen. Take it in, hold the space, keep the container of connection good. And then when it's your turn to move in. But it's so funny. All previous cultures have learned this too. It's like the talking stick world. You have to learn to understand how important it is for people to be heard. And I think when you're able to do that, it gives you a super strength in stress, which is patience.

[A]

Talking stick is a great analogy. I also learned it in Japan. In Japan, when you have a conversation with someone, there's always a pause at the end of what you say before they actually rejoin. And that pause can be disconcerting for a Westerner. And you feel the need to fill that void. I used to go to Japan. I used to fall into this trap a lot where I would say something, there'd be a pause, I'd feel really uncomfortable. Then it'd fill the space, and then it'd be another pause, and I keep filling spaces. But really what it is is like it's a sign of respect. It's that they're helping. What they're indicating to you is that they've fully heard you, fully heard you. Then they're synthesizing it, then they're forming their response. And that's very key when you're involved in a stressful conversation. And then when you do respond, instead of rebutting, try this technique. It's called steel manning. Right. So it's the opposite of straw manning. So straw manning is generally just using an insult or distorting someone's argument because it's very easy to knock down a straw man. Very hard to knock down a steel man. Right. So steel manning is, instead of rebutting someone's argument, you actually reiterate back to them the best elements of their argument.

[B]

You strengthen their argument or reflect it back totally.

[A]

And it's an incredible personal development technique because you have to put your own opinions aside for a second and actually recognize the best aspects of someone else's opinion by. But get this. It also fortifies your own position because you do actually have to. You actually have to take in and assess the best parts of an opposing position.

[B]

Yeah, it's actually.

[A]

It's fortifying.

[B]

We say that in high performance. I can't debate you unless I appreciate you. So if I fully appreciate your position now, I can fully debate it or work through it together. I love that.

[A]

Yeah. So this was an incredible personal development experience, having these stressful conversations. And then the question I asked myself at the end of this period that was in August and September of 2020, is like, if I can have these thorny conversations with people that I don't even know, can I not have them with the people that are most dear to me? You know? And I started to lean into those. And instead of avoiding those hard conversations with, like, a parent, for example, I found a compassionate way to process and metabolize some, like, very kind of long enduring trauma around kind of relation, really my relationships with my parents. And that was all through being able to equip myself with emotional regulatory techniques and these protocols for having hard conversations. And I'll tell you, Brandon, the world that our hearts imagine is possible is really on the other side of having them.

[B]

I think a lot of stress can be overcome by more. And this is going to sound so strange to People. But as a high performance person, I think a lot of stress is overcome when you become more assertive. And people don't like that word because they often mistake it with aggressive. But to assert oneself into a situation means now there's agency in it. And we're in the mix, we're in the arena. We have optionality, we have behavior change. We can do something with it, we're engaged with it versus sitting out and waiting for it to change. And so many people wait for things for change so long. It's actually in the waiting for change for so long where the stress accumulates and builds. Like when you're running a business or you know you're doing too many projects, or you haven't set the boundary with this person for so long, it is in the endurance of the disengagement.

[A]

That's totally.

[B]

The disengagement timeline increases stress in most people's life. I say, often when I meet people, I say, how long you been stressed about this? They go, brother, I've been stressed about this for 10 years. I go, you've been stressed about this for 10 years. Tell me all of your strategies and your actions to overcome it. And they say, I've tried everything. I say, show me the list. Well, if you tried everything, there must be an Excel spreadsheet somewhere with mutually exclusive rows showing all your strategies. But no, what they actually did is they endured the frustration, the hardship, the pain, and the misery for too long. So I'm curious, what do you say? A lot of entrepreneurs listen to this, or a lot of leaders listen to this. And I know in your life, another area outside of the parents or the hard relationships, you've run big enterprise, you've run big teams. I know you have overwhelmed yourself at times, just like we all have. You take on too many projects, too much work. You're overwhelmed and stressed. In our work life or our career or our mission, how do we deal with the overwhelm and the stress that is sometimes our own setup of taking on too much, or our own setup of neglect, or our own setup of not jumping in too early. How do you deal with overwhelming stress as a leader or as somebody building something? Because I know you've taken on. I mean, you've achieved remarkable things.

[A]

Yeah, I really evolved in many ways as a leader and a CEO of commune, certainly from my wanderlust days. And a lot of that has been a product of. Candidly, a lot of that has been a product of my deep dive into Eastern religions and Eastern thought. There's a lot about leadership in Daoism. The great leader, the best leader in the Dao is one that actually creates a situation where everyone else thinks that they've done it all by themselves.

[B]

Correct?

[A]

Right. The leader almost disappears. He rules like the ocean, the lowest body of water, but the most powerful one, and lets all the rivers and tributaries empty into him or her. And so this is a place of greater humility. It's a place that decentralizes decision making but centralizes mission fluency. So you give people a lens through which to make decisions and then let go. Right. It's also really about. And maybe you will start an app to balance out Growth Day. It's called Repair day, but it's restoration day.

[B]

Restoration day, rejuvenation, recalibration.

[A]

Because like, listen, I'm totally into personal growth, but there's a place in our, in our society where we've sanctified and celebrated growth so much that it's often at the expense of repair and restoration. And so I started to run a company that was just as focused on repair and restoration and sustainability and yin energy as it was on growth and top line expansion and bright masculine energy. And to find that balance, you know, if I could reduce health and well being into one single word, it would be this balance. More specifically, our ability to always move back to the middle, to regulate, to find homeostasis that could be physiological homeostasis. The body is riddled with those mechanisms. When we are the most healthy, we're always balanced. PH balance, blood sugar balance, lipid panel balance, balance between excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters, hormonal balance, et cetera. When we're psychologically balanced, that is called centeredness, we're in the middle. Yes, we might follow something out, we might get triggered for a second, but then we weble wobble back to the middle. And that's a skill. And you can apply this to almost every system in economics. What is the healthiest system? The one that has the biggest middle class, where the distribution of wealth looks like a bell curve. It's always in the middle. In ecology, it's biodiversity balance between all these interdependent, mutually interdependent spec. In politics, it's a strong middle, generally characterized by our ability to find common ground and compromise and pass legislation or whatever. So this is a very, very central concept to leadership in an organization is that how can you create a strong middle in your organization where you can take risks, you can push the edges of your discomfort, but Then bounce back to the middle and find some degree of, of homeostasis and safety. And it's funny. And then somewhat ironic is that your ability to find the middle and to bounce back is enhanced often by pushing the edges of your discomfort and that hones your ability to come back to the middle. And this is why I'm so into eustress or good stress or finding the edge of adversity and then being able to come back to the middle. So beautiful.

[B]

I love everything you just said because finding that centeredness and I actually like the phrase you use to weeble wobble back to the center is powerful because it's not always graceful, it's not always fast.

[A]

I'm dating myself a little bit with the weave of the.

[B]

No, I love it. I was laughing, I was like, in my own mind, I was like, that's such a great phrase. I'm going to remember that for forever. Because I think people also get impatient with themselves. They're out at the edge, they're burning hard, they're burning out, they are go, go, go. They are in that grit, grind, push, heroic efforts of the hundred hour work week, braggadocious stuff. And they genuinely believe they can sustain that. And the funny thing is youth sometimes allows you to sustain that mission, service, revenue, growth, there's a lot of these external things, a lot of extrinsic reward allows us to sustain that. And then the worst happens. Either we burn out or we get the thing and we're not fulfilled. And there was no centeredness along the way. And we go, man, I just had a stress filled journey to get this thing that actually didn't bring me as much fulfillment as I thought. And I meet people and we have a lot of examples. In Growth Day we had Ed Mylett on stage at one of our Growth Day LA events. He had a birthday and he stood on stage. Actually he'd had a birthday and some heart problems which he was sharing with the audience and has shared openly on his podcast. And he was telling the audience about this amazing journey he's had, generating hundreds of millions of dollars, reaching all these people, having top books and podcasts and all these amazing people in his world. And then he just caught himself in a moment of presence and he looked at the audience and he said, you know, but the thing is, if I died right now after having these heart problems, I have to tell you, I'd have a lot of regret. He said, I would have the regret because I look back at all that and I didn't have any fun. I Didn't know how to have fun. I didn't enjoy it. I wasn't to bring the joy guy like Brendan. And he shared that. And I thought it was so amazing because I think a lot of people do work extremely hard. But I also believe the absence of joy is a great indicator of a silent stress. You might not know that you're under the extraordinary stress you are. But if you ask, am I experiencing joy? Because I think that's a balance. I think that's a counterpoint. It's not the only radius there, but I think it is a radiant point that a lot of people, they don't know they're under chronic stress, they're under chronic achievement, but the alignment isn't there. They're under getting things done, but they just somewhere along the way, that positive emotional frame that I think is part of centeredness, there's a joy or a peace, but particularly, I believe there's an enjoyment to it that a lot of people don't have. How do you balance those things? When you think of hard work? Joy, harmony, peace. Obviously there's no perfect balance because people say balance. There's no such thing. I can't have balance, but there is a harmony and there is a balance of good things. And I know one thing I've always related with you is you have the dark and the light. You have the ability to have a lot of joy and peace and gratitude, but you're also a hard charger. So can you talk about that balance specifically?

[A]

Yeah. Well, you can't be joyful in the future. You can only be joyful right now. It's the only opportunity for joy. And like you said, a lot of people are chasing some glittering object on the horizon only to get it and cut the ribbon off the package, open it up, and then refocus their eyes on the next glittering object on the horizon. That's called the hedonic treadmill. It's where a lot of people spend their life. And part of Eastern teachings is this concept of upeka, or in Sanskrit that's known as transliterated as equanimity. A lot of people kind of consider equanimity this very kind of limp, kind of passive, conciliatory approach to life, but could not be more confused on that point. It's actually bringing your full, passionate, joyful self to this moment right here, right now, with very, very little attachment to result. Let's be joyful and hear now. And I find that the greater energy that you bring to the present moment, that passion that you bring to the present moment without an attachment to that glittering object on the horizon that actually yields greater abundance in the end. But you actually, the experience of what it is like to be you, moment to moment, feels like the true ease that people are actually seeking in their life, that true sense of flow. And so this is, you know, again, like wisdom is taking your own advice, of course, you know, I actually have to stare in the mirror and, you know, try to live in alignment with these principles. I'm far from the perfect version of myself, but I find that that is the key. One of the biggest keys to life is loving what you already have. Love that, spend a moment there. It's actually a stoic teaching, and you can actually practice it within the context of a negative visual. You can actually visualize something that you cherish and love and imagine losing it, and then feeling the sorrow, the whole inside of yourself, not having that relationship or that family heirloom or whatever it happens to be, and then come back to the realization that you do have that thing. And that can elicit a tremendous amount of joy and gratitude for what you already have. You know, you are truly. And I certainly don't want to discount people's experiences of pain and suffering. We have them. But most of the time, if you're listening to this, you are living someone else's dream life, you know, and just to sit in that for a moment, and when you do, what you find is that you become Mini Brendan, really, you know, you become that energy that you bring into the room where you just light everything up and then people, you know, you're in. Because that feeling is one of. Is such a gift to people that you become unwittingly in receipt of. Of that equivalent kind of energy. And this creates what I call upward spirals in life. We so often associate health with downward spirals. Upward spirals are just as available.

[B]

I love that I've learned this practice. You have to trigger that mindset or trigger that practice. You have to, as you said, you have to look in the mirror and tell yourself to follow through on these principles. And one of mine that got shared widely early in my career was when I walk through a door, I use the doors, the door frame as a trigger, mentally. So even when I walked in this door over here, which is right off camera over here, I entered and I said, I'm entering this room as a happy man ready to serve. And every, literally every room, every ballroom, before I go on stage, it's my thing. I'm already happy. I enter as a happy man ready to serve. And I think we all have to remind ourselves that. That we can tell ourselves to be happy. We can tell ourselves to come back to centeredness. We can tell ourselves that stress is okay. We can tell ourselves these things. And as quaint as it sounds, the concept, the power of self talk in that emotional regulation, I believe, is only usurped perhaps by breath, like doing the breath work to regulate a little bit so I can get my biology under control. But then it's about self talk, which is a concept of meaning, a concept of intention, a concept of reminder of first principles. It's that importance. How does the inner world. Because I. I think of you as a philosopher king in the wellness space. And I mean that genuinely. What do you say to yourself, the self talk, when you're stressed? Because you often lead with biology, because that's who you are. And you led the yoga movement across pretty much the world with wanderlust and all the work you and Skylar did. So what's the self talk that happens when you are in the crisis of stress?

[A]

I mean, candidly, I find very little separation between biology and physiology and psychology and emotions. Just even building my own physiological strength has spilled into my psychology in the form of confidence, particularly in athletic performance and things like that. But mindset sits almost, really, you can say it sits atop all of these other components of life because your entire experience of what it is like to be Brendan or Jeff is perceived through the prism of your mind. That's it. I've never worried myself out of anxiety or out of a problem. You know what I mean?

[B]

Right. Applying more to it might not be the answer.

[A]

No, I mean, in fact, many of us build anxiety on top of other anxieties. Like, oh, man, the last time I went to the dentist, this happened. And I've got an appointment in two weeks. It hasn't even happened yet. You've layered an anxiety on top of a feeling of potential anxiety. I mean, this is where suffering is often just a phantom of our own projection. And so we have to train our minds in the same way we train our biceps, period. And certainly that can be in the realm of meditation. You know, my particular practice, I have a couple, but one specific one is really a single pointedness of mind practice where I have a singular gaze point, or that gaze point can be a physical object. It can also be my breath. Sometimes it's a mantra that I sing off key in the sauna, but it is a place to which I can return. Okay. And thoughts and feelings and sensations that might Otherwise, knock me off my stride. Those just become phenomena that arise in consciousness moment to moment and subside in consciousness moment to moment. They just appear from under the crust of consciousness. Like, I didn't put them there. They just came up. And when you're in that space, when you're in that single pointedness of mind space, you can follow them for a moment, watch them disappear, and then come back to that single point of focus. And through that training, you become somewhat impervious to the more stressful vicissitudes of life. You know, where you can have an immediate reaction to something within your environment, but then you have that capacity to recognize the fact that that thing is just going to simply come and it's going to go, and you are the blackboard, if you will, upon which all of that is etched. You sit behind that, and that is an incredibly peaceful and serene place to be. But this state of being that you're cultivating takes training. It takes an examination of your own mind. And it takes a lot of courage around a lot of personal inventory, because so many of us become the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. And so we're living in a story, right? You're like, oh, Jeff is just that fat, chubby kid that'll do anything to be liked, and his fate is written in the stars of his genetics. And he really just mostly cares what the external world thinks about him. And he bases all of his self worth in that. Okay, that's the frame. That's it. That was 4.9 decades.

[B]

Was it really?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

That was the self talk as well.

[A]

That's the self talk.

[B]

I mean, I would say those are more dominant frames, but the self talk flowed through those frames, Right?

[A]

The self talk was the little utterances that laddered up into those high principles about myself.

[B]

So how do you. I understand the single point in this and a lot of what we talked about? I'll come back to that question of what do you say to yourself? What's your self talk in the moment of criticality? Obviously, you can let the thoughts that are come and go and ebb and flow. I would love to hear what do you say yourself? What do you actually say to yourself? Your self talk in the moment of crisis, of stress or overwhelm hits you, fear hits you, but also that grand narrative change. What did you tell yourself when you recognize, wow, my story is that chubby kid trying to get acceptance. So obviously there's some narrative work happening here in the moment of criticality. But then in a broader perspective, I'd Love to.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I think when you're living in that story, it actually impacts your ability to operate optimally under stress. If you just think like, oh, no, I'm really not good enough. I don't belong there, really. And again, this was sort of a product of this convergence between my interest and inquiry into Eastern thought and also human physiology. But basically, if I was going to put a Buddhist lens on it, I would say, yeah, well, sitting under the bodhi tree some 2,500 years ago, the Buddha had this awakening that everything in the universe was impermanent. So everything was subject to construction and destruction. So clinging onto anything or craving anything is futile because it's all just ephemeral. It's all just going to go away. And that includes Brendan and Jeff, okay? And he had that revelation without the luxury of an electron microscope or anything like that. But if you look at a study then of human physiology, you know, Brendan, you wake up in the morning and flex your pecs in front of the mirror. You're like, there's Brendan. You know, you have a sense that you are some fixed, stable thing, because that's underwritten by their physical and psychological continuity day to day. But if I was to open the hood on Brendan and I look inside, I'd be, there's seven octillion atoms in this organism having 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second. Right? Brendan is not the same guy who started this interview, period. So these two physiologically, physiologically, also psychologically, to some degree, you are impermanent, changing moment to moment in relationship to your environment, period. And to truly grok that and to feel that change is not only possible, but it is the only thing there is, is an incredibly powerful notion. It is empowering. It gives you agency. Because if all you are is change, then you can take some control over your behavior and your environment, such that you are moving along the spectrum towards wholeness. That is the process of healing, to move towards wholeness or move towards disconnection and disease, the process of ailing. And when you seize that agency over this idea of impermanence, boy, you can really find some unbelievable momentum in your life.

[B]

I want everybody to rewind that because that's his answer. The question of. In that critical moment of feeling stressed and overwhelm, you are somehow reminding yourself of impermanence, but also agency. And however that self talk or that narrative comes out, it's like, if you can touch that concept, this thing that stressed me out might not be here forever and I can do something. Those two things are powerful. It might not be here forever and I can do something. I think that's powerful. How did you shift the last question of this? What sounds like a very stressful story? And I think a lot of people have a stressful story about self. This thing happened to me, this drama, trauma, difficulty, challenge, this unfair event, these things, but also the good stuff. But their overall life narrative sometimes doesn't feel that empowering as a story. It feels more stressful. I've been forgotten. I haven't gotten the accolades I deserve. I haven't earned what I should have. There's a chip on the shoulder as we talked about earlier. There's something going on there. Yours was a little bit as you shared. Chubby kid trying to get acceptance, 4.9 decades. What was the shift to go, oh, no, I can become more, I can become different. Because growth there, our tagline, has often become more. And not because you're insufficient or less than or not enough. It's just human potential. So how did you go from that story, which is, to me, a stressful one, to a new story? What was the self talk?

[A]

It was a stressful story full of fear of failure and fear of judgment. And it really. Well, there's a guy named Gabor Mate, if you may be familiar with him. He really helped me in this regard because a. He helped me have more compassion for that chubby little kid who was just really willing to do anything to sacrifice any authentic aspect of himself for the sake of connection. And he's like, jeff, that's just human condition. And particularly children will always sacrifice authenticity for belonging. But then he said, what did you do in your life? What did you do? I'm like, what do you mean? Well, what did you do? What have you spent most of your time doing? I was like, oh, well, you know, I built a business called Velour. You know, we were doing big musical shows and putting bands out on tour. He's like, oh, you were bringing people together in large concert halls and on festivals. I was like, yeah, yeah, that's what I was doing. What did you do next? I was like, oh, well, I started this thing called wanderlust. It's like, oh, what was that? Well, I was bringing large groups of people together around shared values and shared practices in festivals and in gatherings. He's like, oh, so you were creating a container for connection? You're creating community? I was like, yeah, I guess I was. What are you doing now? It's like, well, I started to smile and laugh. I was like, well, now I run a company called commune. And he's like, you know what you've done? I said, what? He's like, you transmuted your greatest shortcoming into your greatest superpower. He's like, because you understand me viscerally how important it is to belong, you've taken that forward and that is the thread of your entire life. And you've created all of this unbelievable opportunity and container for connection both for yourself and for all the people around you. You know, that's your story. And I was like, wow. And I think this is the great opportunity in post traumatic growth, right, is to be honest and do your psychosocial bio intake form, right? Be honest about your story and then transmute that story into something glorious and miraculous. And it's a spiritual U turn that people need. But that is available. It is available.

[B]

Well, I know you've inspired a lot of people with that and I want to recognize you for that journey and sharing it so openly. I also will hope that people reflect on this conversation we had and realize that this book and this concept of good stress is probably a bigger philosophical and spiritual development point than they imagined. They probably came in and thought, well, tell me about when I'm stressed with the kids or tell me when I'm stressed about work. But what we're sharing here is there's a bigger story, there's bigger dominant frames, there's bigger agency, there's more impermanence, there's more ability to shift these things than you probably imagined through taking care of yourself, through having good relationships, for coming back to center, to having the hard conversations and to doing the hard work. I know they're going to find that inspiration in this book, Good Stress. So, Jeff Krasno, my brother, appreciate you today. Thank you for this conversation.

[A]

Thanks, man. Love you.