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If the only challenges that you are facing currently in your life are challenges that the world threw at you, then you have not yet consciously chosen to live your life. You haven't consciously architected your own challenges. But what I've learned is that some people, they design challenge into their life so they have more success than everybody else. The great emphasis of high performance, the great emphasis of psychological flow, the great impetus upon each of us if we actually want to grow, it's called challenge challenge. When a person is faced with challenge, their brain lights up, man. If the only challenges that you are facing currently in your life are challenges that the world threw at you, then you have not yet consciously chosen to live your life. You haven't consciously architected your own challenges. But what I've learned is that some people, they design challenge into their life so they have more success than everybody else. They don't run from challenge, they don't complain when it hits them. As they're dealing with challenge, they're actually, they're creating their own challenges, they're creating their own five day challenges, 10 day challenges, 20 day challenges. They're creating their own challenge to get stronger in their gym, they're creating their own challenges to hit that next KPI okr or goal. @ work, they're the ones in their peer group or at work, they're the ones who's setting higher standards, higher aims, bigger dreams, bigger goals. They're setting up their own challenge to stretch themselves into an aspirational character. While most people are sitting in comfort and complaining about difficulty, they take on difficulty and their brain loves it. They take on problems and their brain lights up with all its problem solving apparatus and goes, let's go. They trained that. That is not something. That's just a personality. It's actually a set of preferences that they were conscious of that they kept dialing in towards challenge. Now, of course, people go, I don't like the challenge I'm facing right now, Brendan. I know, but that's why we're saying change is a character test. Sometimes you hear, today, we just got to honor the truth that life is hard. We got to deal with the fact that there's suffering, there's pain, there's frustration. I'm not the happy go lucky guy who pretends that sometimes just reacting to the difficulties of life, that feels all we got, that feels like everything that we have in us. Sometimes we're in a season where it's like, Brennan, I am giving everything I have. How could you talk about pulling myself up to a next Level. I'm drowning at this level, bro. I get that, believe me. Every day I get hundreds of messages about this. People really do struggle with change and the difficulties of life. And there's times when we can really charge into higher order change. Higher order change, higher order challenges that we create, that we want, that we manifest. And there's days and weeks or months or seasons where we're just fighting to keep up either way, honor that fight. Either way, be engaged in it. Either way, really be there. Because if we don't, then we're really going to struggle. So I'm going to jump into three choices that we're going to face. Then we're going to talk about some preferences and the way that you've been conditioned to think about change. And maybe I can shift it, but I want to start with a very simple reflection here. Three things are going to make you come alive again in your life. Novelty, challenge, connections. And those three things, when you think about how can I inject those into my life? How can I inject some variety or a new approach or renewing of the mind, body, spirit or effort? That's novelty. How can I challenge myself? Where can I input a challenge or the challenge I'm facing? Can I honor them but actually engage them? And connections, how can I refresh my relationships in some way, change them or shift them in a way that supports me? Where that's getting in a new environment with better people who are more positive, optimistic, confident, joyful, appreciative, striving. Or it's changing how you approach your conversation with your spouse or your kids. Like these three things can really shift how you feel overall about your life. And we can see it in your brain. Novelty, challenge, connection. I'll keep coming back to those as themes today. And my hope is by workshopping this, you're going to learn a lot about your life, your brain, your preferences. But also I want to give you that edge. We're going to start and we're talking about the three choices that we all have in dealing with change. The first one is the most popular one, and that's called avoidance. Most people avoid change. They don't want anything to do with it at all. Right? This is the dominant style for most people who aren't into personal development. And I mean that honestly. Most people avoid change. They avoid change in every way. They won't change their lifestyle, they won't change their opinion, they won't change their argument, they won't change their stance, their position, how they feel about things, who they vote for they just avoid change because confirmation bias makes them feel good. Like, well, I chose this, this is my path. And they won't change. When you input new arguments, new details, new ideas, they avoid change. They're not just avoiding it. Like, they're actively resisting it. They actively resist almost all change. Any suggestion about doing something new they're offended by, they get defensive by, they get upset by. That's the dominant truth for most people because they're in a reactive mode in which they don't like change because they didn't introduce it, they're not familiar with it, they don't understand it. It brings up uncertainty or anxiety or lack of capability or the truth that they might be wrong. So they avoid the conversation, they avoid the engagement, they avoid doing the work. But this also happens technologically throughout time as well. It's not just a human action. It's true that many people, they just avoid the realities of technology. They avoid things that are inanimate. Like, they just literally won't even. Like, they'll never update something in their house. They'll never update their technology, their systems, their tools. They'll just never do it. They're just like, I like this. I'm staying with this. So I'm only gonna play this record player that I had when I was a kid. I will never get a CD and MP3 or stream it. It only has to be this way. And by the way, I have no judgment to that. Unless they're avoiding things out of fear or they're avoiding things that could progress their life, their business, their contributions. I'll give it a relevant example right now. Everyone's talking about in the world is about AI, artificial intelligence, our path to AGI, asi, and like, the incredible synchronicity of AI taking over the world. And everyone's so scared of it. I was with the business group maybe two weeks ago, and it was unbelievable how many people haven't even explored the idea of AI. They haven't used any AI tools in their career where they're paid to be productive and to advance. They haven't used it in their business or as an entrepreneur. They haven't looked it up, they haven't tried it. I mean, AI has been a dominant modality, you know, in use of hundreds of millions of people for multiple years now. And they're just resistant. I don't like AI. It's like. It's weird. Do you know what it is? Do you know what you can do with it? Do you know how you can help people with it? Have you explored how it can improve your life or how it can improve your business? But there's just a resistance. I don't like that. It means I have lack of familiarity of how it would apply to me. And that's what change is for most people. I'm not familiar with how that would apply to me. And I have these other preferences that paralyze me and push this away. Because most of those preferences for you are unconscious. And your unconscious preferences that prevent you from making important changes in your life can turn up in all sorts of ways. And I'll give you that example. If you have not used AI in your career to advance your career, I'm just here to tell you you're not trying. And you are paid to push. You are paid to push into the future. If you are employed or you make money, you are paid to push into the future. You are paid to be productive. And any way that you can enhance that and do a better job, your job is to go, how can I do a better job? Right? I ask that every day, how do I do a better job? Our job is to do a better job if we're employed, if we're paid, how do I keep doing a better job? What other tools, resources can I have? And the unwillingness to explore those can really trap you. And it can trap you in a time in which is previous to the current time, meaning you live in the past. But here's the issue. Avoidance feels really good. Avoidance feels extremely good. Avoiding a bad argument, avoiding a conflict, avoiding shifting something or changing something you already really like. Avoidance can feel really good. And I've said this for 20 years. Avoidance is a great short term strategy, but is also a guaranteed long term strategy for suffering. The longer you avoid getting that health checkup, the more you'll probably suffer when it hits. The longer you avoid having that conflict with your spouse, the bigger the bitterness grows. The longer you avoid using new tools. The more you see people pass you, the longer you avoid taking care of your health, the harder it is to fix it. They don't understand how the brain works as we've talked about, or worse, they're just so unconscious about their preferences that are keeping them stuck. But my belief at an emotional and spiritual level, outside of just kind of the dorky science stuff I've been talking about, is that you have an unbelievable potential in you. Like a magnificent potential in you. And sometimes what you are avoiding is that extraordinary power. Because you know that power. It's like Marianne Williamson taught us, right? Our greatest fears are not that we are inadequate. Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond our own imagination. Like the responsibility that comes with that much power in our potential. It's kind of like it freaks people out. Because when you know that you are capable of so much more, but also you're not that yet, you could really judge yourself, right? There could be a lot of self hate there. Well, you know, I know I'm capable of this, but I'm not doing it. And you can get pretty mean to yourself. So today I hope we can overcome that. I really want you to do that because you'll feel differently about yourself. Because see, we have three choices. We can go through life and we can just act your avoidance or we can take the challenges and the change and the difficulties in life and we can handle it. We can just choose to handle it. Be like, I don't know how, but I'm going to figure this out. And the more that we go, I don't know how, but I'm going to figure this change out. I'm going to succeed through this. I'm going to win anyway. I'm going to push through this. The more that we do that, I promise, the more self respect comes into your life. And I've always seen those with great self respect are more adaptive. I work with a lot of CEOs. I was with a high, high level group of CEOs recently and I was talking with them and I said, how many of you be honest, you don't even look at the monthly reports. You just kind of like a little bit discouraged. People are sending them. You're in the meetings, but you're just not engaging there and driving there at the level you know you need to as a CEO, raise your hand. These guys raise their hand. These ladies raise their hands. They're like, whoa. So that's all of us. So I hope you hear as I'm going through here, I'm going to push you, but I'm also not going to judge you that much because it's easier to avoid. That's human nature. I did it. There are lots of areas of my life, until I really understood what we're teaching you today, that I was just like, I don't want to deal with that. But then once I got into handle it mode, like I really got into this, like I really like really got into handling it. You know what, that stuff of personal responsibility will change your life forever. That stuff that says I'm going to lean into this problem right now, you're not going to delay Anymore. Delay tactics are not your primary routine anymore. Because that thing you're procrastinating on, handle it. Handle it this week. Not a month, not three months. Handle it. Doesn't mean you need to solve it forever. It means you're in motion to handling it. You're getting your hands back in. You're getting dirty again. You're getting ready again. You're in the work again. You got to be in the work again. You got to handle it. It doesn't mean it's always perfect. If you got to have that difficult relationship, start the conversation to improve that relationship. If you're in bad health, start the new habits to improve that situation. It doesn't mean you're going to be, you know, thin, perfect, mobile, strong, flexible in a day or a week or one month or three months. It means you're in motion. You're in motion of handling the thing that's the most important thing. How fast can you get in motion to handle life's problems? How fast can you get in motion to handle life's problems? That's just part of that being good in reactive mode. Because I think this is worth emphasizing. You can create it. You can create that change. You can create that difference. You can create that new start. You can create that dream. You can create that future. You can create that new dream home. You can create that new job that you love. You can create that new career that brings you alive. You can create a new habit in the relationship that makes you feel connected again. You can create a new workout that pushes you. You can create a new campaign that gets better results. You can create something that is different. You can do that. This is your ultimate human advantage, your ability to create a future that you envision, and that is beyond your impulses, that is beyond your immediate nature, that is beyond how others have done things. You can shift and change and create something so different, so unique, so magnificent, so extraordinary and so particular and right for you that you look back and you're like, I walked my life path, right? It's Sinatra's. I lived life my way. That you lived your life your way, but not in reaction, not failing to handle it, but you created a whole story of your life that is in the future that might not have been in the first chapters. Your first chapters are not where your potential goes. Your first chapters and the problems that lived there do not need to live in every future chapter. We've gotten into a culture that is so obsessed with our past that very few people ruminate, think, dream, literally look into the future and live with vision anymore because we're taught to really like ruminate on it and blame everything and oh, I am this way because of these past situations and events. It's like, no, most animals are. That's true. You aren't that. You have a spirit. You have a mind that is capable of soaring much beyond impulse. That is the creative spark that is in your birthright. It is in your brain, that is in your spirit. Like you are from an act of creation, whatever you call that, where that's a big bang or that's God or that's the universe, or there's just some panpsychism happening to all of us. Pretty rad. We're riding these waves of consciousness that we don't know what it is. Awesome, whatever you want to call it. Something created you. And you can just say, well, just my mom and my dad. I'm like, well, they had moms and dads. And that went way back. There's some long term thing that has led to you having an extraordinary human capability to create. And if you haven't been looking far out into the future, you have been hypnotized by a culture that has become armchair therapists who want to explain things based on your parents or old dramas and traumas that haven't been relevant or in your life in years. But you ruminate on them. You label yourself and you stay there. How much time is staying there? Feeling there, blaming there, versus time, Attention, energy towards the aspirational future of who you can become. That's a simple approach to change. I think it is a dramatic approach. I always tell people there's two things that can change your life. Either something new comes into your life. New understanding, new framework, new teaching, new mentor, new lover, new opportunity. Or something new comes from within. And that thing that comes from within, often it is not something that was already there. It's a new spark of life. It's a new idea within. It is something. It is a strength that you have not yet accessed because you piled up a bunch of other stuff on it, because you blamed other people, because you labeled yourself something wrong. And one day it just. You break it. It's a breakthrough. You break that. And the real power, that real source, that real potential we talked about, that scares most people, that comes from within and it will freak everybody out. And that's why you don't change as much as you can, because you're scared of freaking everybody out. If I do what I want to do or what I'm capable of, I'm going to scare the kids, I'm going to scare my neighbor, I'm going to scare my boss. I'm going to scare my spouse. And you're so worried about being perceived as trying something new that you're like, I don't want to be embarrassed because I'm trying something new. It might not work. Well, most things don't work. But you know what? It's like a startup. It's like investing. It's like, hey, you can invest in a thousand things. It only takes one to really crack, and you win.