6 Tips From Experts on How to Reach Your Full Potential in the New Year | Impact Theory

I hope you guys enjoy the episode brought to you by our sponsor Blinkist. Go to blinkist.com/impacttheory to get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership and a 7-day free trial. All right, enjoy the episode. Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with the show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. In celebration of the quickly approaching New Year, the end of 2020, which I know everybody has been waiting for, and here it is, my friends. We have put together a very special episode of Impact Theory. We all know what a challenging year 2020 has been, but even through the difficult times, it's possible to learn and grow. And these are some of the amazing guests who have helped us through this year. So, get ready to have your mind blown, my friends, with our first guest, the one and only Brendon Burchard. I want to talk to you about consciously designing your life. It's an idea that I see you live day in and day out. Everything in your world seems completely integrated. The people that you hang out with, the things that you do to have the energy, the things you focus on to make sure that you remain excited. Like it all feels like there's nothing that's sort of by accident in your life. So, what's the whole concept and how do you actually pull it off? You know, I think I talked about this last time a little bit about my car accident. So, when I was a 19-year-old kid, I had this car accident and prior to the car accident, I had been suicidal. And you know, coming out of breakup with the woman I loved, I I lost my identity in that, became suicidal, had the car accident and it was just powerful juxtaposition because here I am suicidal, want to take my life, and then I get an accident that says, "Oh, no, I I don't want to die." And it forced me to consider how I will evaluate my life at the end of my life. And that has always been the driving force for me is I realize at the end of my life, for me personally, I'm going to ask these questions to evaluate, was I happy with my life? And those for me are, did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? Which isn't For some people are watching like, so what? But I was 19. And it set in me. And so, if you think about it, you know, that was what, 23 years ago? If you wake up every day with a super clear intention and reverence for life, realizing how short it is, you absolutely get your act together. But how do you Like, how do you really turn that into a road map and start doing the right things? Because one, I think a lot of people could waste a moment like that, that eye-opening thing. A lot of people could do it for a while and then without without concrete things to do on a daily basis. Like, what I really want people to understand Yeah. in um all the research you've done in high performance and all that, it comes down to things that you can do. It comes down to things that you can teach. It comes down to things that people can um structure their life around. And And what I want to dive into today is that structure. Yeah. You know what's funny is like, I think you nailed it. People take an eye-opening experience and some don't do anything with it and some people grow from it. And I came back from that experience. I was in college. And prior to coming back, I was a depressed kid, the sad kid, kind of the the lonely kid, kind of the pull away from the world kid cuz I was hurt. I came back and I had this new intention to live. So, I wanted to meet people and talk to people and they're like, "Who are you?" And anytime you change your life, usually people are like, "What's wrong with you?" So, everyone's like, "What's wrong with you?" But I was like, "I'm going to change." Cuz I knew I didn't want misery anymore. I didn't want suffering. I didn't want sadness. I didn't want negative thinking. I didn't want poor quality of relationships. I didn't want to feel horrible. So, I began the quest of, well, how do I not feel horrible? So I started reading first I started with personal development, self-help, then jumped into spirituality, then jumped into psychology, then jumped into neuroscience, then jumped into sociology, then jumped into leadership, and spent every week for 23 years I read a book a week on one of those topics for 23 years. There's really two concepts that I think set you apart. You've got just how powerful negative thinking is and some of the stats around that which are pretty terrifying and some of the stories that you have on that which are I think will really shake people out. Yeah. Um and then of course there's neutral thinking. So I think that's sort of the next one two that we should walk through. Yeah, and and and then I think probably the third part of that would be sort of the impact of behavior. You know, of identifying behavior. But what I learned ultimately, my dad was the president of the National Association for Self-Esteem. Most people probably don't even know there is that. And he was one of the first authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul. So for anybody that's probably above 35 that they would know that. But the power of positive thinking never resonated with me. And when I was young and I was 18 years old and I dropped out of college and I was diagnosed with an initial diagnosis of cancer and it turned out to be shingles and a number of other things, I did start to understand quickly that well, I don't know if positive thinking works all the time and that the data is anecdotal, I do know that negative thinking does work. And it works negatively. And one of the things as I would start at Alabama and I'd start with the Jacksonville Jaguars and I'd start with the Miami Dolphins, I started to realize and even looking back to a young age that nobody wants to be told to be positive. The positive thinking is probably the number one reason this industry has not grown in my 44 years of living. Positive thinking in many cases repulses people. You're telling me to be positive and I'm going through a divorce. You're telling me to be positive and I threw three interceptions. You're telling me to be positive and I got to deal with this president. You're telling me to be positive and I got this current situation. You're telling me to be positive and I got this health situation. So then what's the alternative? Well, the alternative has always been negative. So, when we would get to the University of Alabama, you have a this finite window of time. How long could you influence Um everything comes down to influence, would you agree? Yeah. Whether you're it's your family, your kids, whatever the circumstances or the situations. So, the NCAA gives you 22 hours to influence your players over a week. And so, when you look at the human performance, you look at nutrition, you look at strength and conditioning, you look at fatigue signs, you look at all these different things. Coach Saban believed that there had to be some emphasis on psychological education. And so, how are we going to do that and how is it going to be efficient? Well, most people think of sports psychology as treating somebody who has a problem. Nick Saban didn't look at it that way. He looked at how do we make our best players better? How do we take great players and make them greater? And then how do we have an educational platform for all 120 players? And a college football team is a business. It's 120 employees and you lose 35% of the is employees every year and it's an EBITDA driven business where when you succeed, you get more sponsorship and as you get more sponsorship, you make more money and as you make more money, the school makes more money and everybody benefits and it all happens from winning. But if your best players leave every year in that 35% and they take their great behaviors and their great habits and their great mindset with them, then you're in trouble. So, you have to develop programmatics. You have to develop a system. I mean, you look at Quest and what you guys did that ultimately when you were going to sell it or you're going to evolve that there had to be if we're going to create the ultimate metabolic type of food or we're going to limit like the recipe has to be the same so you're not the only one that can cook it. So ultimately psychologically we had to come up with a plan for everybody. I think that learning how to meditate and regulate your breath is important but to me I think that's AP chemistry and we need an eighth grade version where we just know okay that there's a a table of elements and we need the basics and and so that's what we did when we started to study what we learned was that negative thinking was the most powerful element that our players were combating. That negative thinking was weaponized weaponizing them against them. So how's negativity carried? Well, is it your internal thoughts? Well, if you're dealing with trying to change internal thoughts then you got to go to affirmations and you got to go to imagery, you got to go to visualize very difficult skills. What we started to look at the externalization. Well, if somebody says something out loud it's 10 times more powerful than if they think it. And then as we started to study the data particularly data that was just reinforced by Christine Porath from Georgetown and Harvard that negativity is a multiple of four to seven times more powerful than positivity. So think about that. If I say something out loud it's 10x. If it's negative it's four to seven times more powerful. So when I say negative things out loud it's 40 to 70 times more likely that that will happen or cause a result that won't be good for me than if I just didn't say anything. My whole like thesis in life is to get people to understand your brain is creating a virtual world for you. You have mistaken this virtual world for the real world and once you understand we're talking about Umwelt's here homie. We're talking about you take the world in in a certain way which is why the article by Nagel on what it's like to be a bat is so fascinating. It's asking you to step outside your own Umwelt and into something else's and say, how fundamentally different would this whole experience be? But what I really want people to understand cuz this this is a huge breakthrough for me when I went from having a totally fixed mindset and I just thought life is hopeless and I can't go where I want to go cuz I'm only so intelligent and I'm just not that bright. And so I'm stuck here and I spent a lot of time there and then began to realize, wait a second, I started reading about the brain. I was like, "Whoa, like the brain is cobbling [ __ ] together." Yeah. It's keeping me from bumping into too much stuff and for that I am grateful. But ultimately like there's a lot of lies being told to me by this evolutionary machine and once I could begin to think through them and go, "Oh, whoa, like it's it's interpreting this, it's interpreting that. What is it interpreting that's creating an emotion for me that isn't helpful?" I think people also experience a lot of relief from this idea that they are responsible for all of that processing too. And so this gets into when I when I talk about these examples in my book, I'm I'm specifically talking about two illusions that I think inform our view of consciousness, which is why I spend a lot of time on them. Um and one is this illusion of conscious will. Um and one is the illusion of being a self and I think that that's one place that that relates to a lot of the work that you do. Um because this false sense of a self is actually where a lot of human suffering comes from. And part of it is is what I was just getting at, which is that we have this idea that, you know, even though we understand that we're brain processing, you know, at bottom, somehow we have we have a very strong intuition that there is a me that is separate from the brain processing. And um there can be a lot of um guilt and regret and and things like this that come about because of kind of a false way of viewing um what in fact we are and what our conscious experience is. So that the notion of this this self that somehow can override whatever the brain is doing or um you know, make make decisions somehow. I mean, it's funny. It's an incoherent idea, but we all have it very strongly and we kind of assume it's there. Um it's related to the notion of conscious will. And I like to distinguish AKA free will or Well, I was just going to say I like to distinguish conscious will from free will. Um only because free will um by my definition is a much more complex thing and I I we could actually talk for a long time and I could explain why I think there's not much freedom in free will. Um but that free will is is something that in some sense I can agree that the the brain has. It's it's a complex processing system. It's responding to all kinds of stimuli and ideas and can can change and mutate and and and make decisions as a processing device for lack of a better word. Conscious will is the idea that consciousness is the thing that is that is the will. That consciousness is the will. So we have again, it's related to to these questions that I that I ask in the beginning of my book. Um is consciousness doing something? And we feel that consciousness is behind our willed actions. When in fact there's a lot of neuroscience to suggest that it's it's actually the reverse that it's that it's at the end. That all of this processing happens, a decision gets made and then we're kind of the last to know. Um I have a chapter in my book called The Long for the Ride. Um which can also be distressing to to people when they first hear it. get freaked out. I I get it too actually, but in ultimately I actually think it's very freeing and it doesn't mean you can't So So the brain is not in any way a closed system. Um just because our conscious experience is of what the brain is doing, um doesn't mean at all that the brain is not influenced by ideas. Um and you know, it it it and even in physical terms as you said, you can you can have a brain tumor that will dramatically alter what your conscious experience is. Um but more importantly, um for for this type of discussion, you know, if I yelled and said, "Oh, that that beam is about to fall on you." That's an idea that just gets communicated through language that suddenly changes your brain. So, your brain is as a physical system, but my words, my ideas get in and it completely changes the structure of your brain so much that you're going to jump up. Right? Like I could get you to jump up just by transferring that information. The thing that I think is is a true illusion is that consciousness comes first. And consciousness is is again wrapped up in this idea of a self. So, that there's this self that's kind of floating free from the material world somehow. Um and is initiating everything that happens. And I think that is a is is a false view. And so, where I would love to hear your thoughts is how much of the parameters of the project do you give someone? Like if you say, "I know this can be done in a week. I know it can be done on this budget." And you say that, "Hey, get this done." And they're like, "It can't be done." Then, of course, to convince them what I do is I give them the path. And I say, "Well, if you did this, it would work. Do we agree?" And then when they agree, they can go do it, but by then I've now taken all of that ownership away from them. And they're just executing on exactly my plan. And so, I know I'm not getting what you're talking about. So, it's like, "Fuck, do I really just back off and go I know it's not impossible, but it's impossible if I don't want to ruin this relationship." Mhm. How do you handle situations like that? I ask Now, when I ask questions, this is a this is a tool, but it's also legitimate questions. So, when I say, "Hey Tom, here's a project I want you to get done. Can you take a look at it and tell me how you want to get it done?" And you come back to me, you know, 3 days later and you say, "Hey boss, I was looking at this thing and it's just not possible." And I don't say, "Well, actually it is possible cuz I've already thought it through. Here's how Here's how you need to do it." Instead I go, "Well, what's what What do you think our our real challenges are?" And then you say, "Well, you know, we can't get the supplies in time." And then you say, "Well, and also we don't have enough manning." And I say, "Okay, well, how What's taking the supplies so long to get here?" And you say, "Well, you know, they're coming across the country on a truck." And so it's going to take, you know, a week and a half for them to get here. And we don't have enough people cuz it's going to take 190 man-hours in this amount of time. And And I only have three guys. So, it's impossible." And I go, "Is there any other way to ship stuff across the country?" And you say, "Well, I mean, I guess we could we could fly, but it's going to be more expensive." Oh, "Okay. Well, how much more expensive?" You see what I'm saying? And so eventually eventually you're going to come to the solution. You're going to come to the solution. And And I'm going to be happy that you come to solution or there's a chance that you actually say, "Hey Jocko, it's it's not possible and here's why." And you tell me something I didn't I didn't foresee cuz I'm at a higher level, I'm elevated, I'm working on I'm overseeing 14 different projects. You just got one. When you dig in and you pull the thread, you realize it can't be done. I go, "Oh, okay. Well, I that makes sense. Okay." Yeah, I I love that and you have two elements that I'll say maybe are a dichotomy, but I'll be interested to hear what you think, which is your your you always soft shoot it a little bit to talk about it is kind of manipulation and then truth and you have chapters on both in the book. Where do you come down on how just sort of transparent you are versus knowing I have an outcome that I need to get to. I'm realistic about human psychology. If I just come in and [ __ ] give you the answer, it doesn't work. You feel robbed of your agency and your ownership and so I have to get you there slowly, but I'm also trying not to make it obvious that I'm leading you there. I'm legitimately asking these questions. I'm not I'm not doing this okay, well we're going to get you there and that's what's going to happen. I already know the outcome. No, I think I know the outcome, but I'm not sure of it. You know how many times I'm sure of what the outcome's going to be? Not very often. So, that the the truth is I I am I'm being totally transparent. I'm asking legitimate questions. I think I know the answers. I think they're going to lead to the right place and so it's okay to let that run its course. Now you talked about manipulation. Manipulation obviously has a bad connotation. Leadership has a good connotation. What's the difference between the two? Because guess what? If I'm manipulating you, I'm trying to get you to do something. If I'm leading you, I'm trying to get you to do something and many of the tools are very similar. So, what's the difference between me leading you and me manipulating you? It's very easy for me to answer that question. If I'm manipulating you, I'm trying to get you to do something that's going to benefit me. If I'm leading, I'm trying to get you to do something that's going to benefit you, it's going to benefit the team and it's going to benefit the mission. The the whole notion of Dharma to me hit home really hard in that story in the book and you talk about one of the people in particular who was changing like the photographs out for people so that they had something new to see and somebody asked her like, is that part of your job? And what was her response? I thought this this summed up Dharma for me in a really visceral way. Yeah, it was it's not part of my job. It's how I see my job, right? It's how I perceive what I do and the term is job crafting. Where you have assigned meaning to the task, you've assigned meaning to the experience that you're now fueling that work rather than letting the job description be your only definition of it. Yeah, when she was stepping into that and saying like, okay, I knowing who I am and knowing how I feel and what it means to me to take care of this person and to look at a small detail like that and to imbue this thing which somebody else might think of as, you know, sort of a gross job or whatever, but to bring the beauty that I want to bring to it, um it it's me recognizing she didn't use the word Dharma, but it's me recognizing my purpose, it's me like not asking what's the definition of the job, but instead how do I bring my truest purpose, the unique way that I would do this job and bring that to this situation. Now, this is where your book got really interesting for me is this interesting interplay between there's a uh a sense of your essence, who you are and then there is bringing that into the things that you do. And so you could take something you talk about like cleaning the um the monastery like in the tiny tiny little ways, but how what you would do is you would think about cleaning this, I imagine myself cleaning my my own heart. And so now it becomes not actually polishing a monastery, it becomes like this spiritual pursuit of recognizing one that even as you get to the end of cleaning it's dirty again and so it it's this continual thing. But that was that that being able to begin to tease those things out. That some things will seem really boring and dull, but you can imbue them with meaning. And then there's this thing inside of you that when you align to the things that you like and that you enjoy is like the the sort of raw response is there, but you can also create a response. Yeah. And how do you help people like bring those together? You talked a little bit about it with job crafting, but how do you get people out of a woe-is-me mentality into, you know, finding ways to to make their life beautiful? I really believe that you have to seek the love and the beauty that you want in what you have now. Because that way you're training yourself to extract meaning right now, which means in the short term if you can, like those hospital workers were doing, if you can fill that role with meaning and your true passion and what's coming from you, then that's going to lead you to discovering the power of it. And I saw that in my own life when I came back from being a monk and I worked in the corporate world, I was teaching meditation and mindfulness and the things that I talked today in the corporate world. And I remember in 2014, I was invited by one of our executives to teach mindfulness to a thousand of my peers at Twickenham Rugby Stadium. And I was speaking in between the CEO and Will Greenwood, who won the Rugby World Cup with England. And and I'm sitting in the audience as a complete nobody and completely around people who are my same age. We all make the same money. No one knows who I am. And there I'm sitting there going, "How am I going to share mindfulness?" But after doing that experience, I realized that even though my job was digital strategy and social media innovation and I was a consultant, I was bringing my passion to the workplace, which actually gave me confidence that I could do this outside of the workplace. And that's how the two ideas connect, that when you find how you can apply it to your small world, you then get the confidence and the courage to take it out and make something real of it. Whereas I think a lot of us are waiting for that break to get into doing it in reality, but we actually haven't even tested it or experimented on it in in a small space where we can develop our our own confidence and courage around it. So, you've talked about the little voice that people have, the need to create quiet space to hear that. Combine that with the notion of the culture sort of chipping away at people, and whether it's based on, you know, race and oppression, or whether it's just the school system teaching you to be a good cog in the machine, or whatever other things people have to fight against, how can people that are listening to this now, especially if they're an adult that's got all those labels put on them, that's had their creativity squished, what process do they do to hear the voice? What sort of communion can they do to create that imagination that's going to allow them to get out of that and move towards something new? That's the reason why you designed this program, you and your team, for them to do that. That they have to expose themselves to something that will give them a different vision of themselves. And in addition to that, they have to put themselves in a community of what I call OQP, only quality people. A gentleman who dramatically transformed my life, I was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Miami, Florida. And I went in his class looking for another friend, and and he said, "Go to the board and work this problem out for me." I said, "Sir, I can't do that." He said, "Why not?" I said, "I'm not one of your students." He said, "Do it anyhow." And and the other kids started laughing saying, "He's Leslie. He's DT." And he said, "What's DT?" He's His brother is smart, but he's the dumb twin. And and I said, "I am, sir." And he came from behind his desk and he pointed at me said, "Don't you ever say that again. Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality." And he taught me three things. He said, "If you want to become successful in life, young man." He said, "Number one, you got to change your mindset." He said, "You don't get in life what you want, you get in life what you are. Number two, practice OQP. Only quality people. You earn within two to $3,000 of your closest friends." I found that out. I left all my broke friends. I said, "Y'all got to go." Cuz I used to be so broke I passed a bank and tripped the alarm. And the third thing he said, "Develop your communication skills because once you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are." He said, "Those are three major things that you want to work on that will liberate you from living in Liberty City, living in poverty in Overtown. It will help to escape out of where you are right now because I see you watching me and I know you want more. I can see the hunger in your eyes. That's why my book is about to come out called You Got to Be Hungry." I love that notion. I love that title. So, how do people get hungry? You get hungry by finding something that's you. I believe that all of us are born unique, but most of us die copies. You got to find out what is it that turns you on, what resonates with you. One of the things that I realized and what allowed me to become successful as a speaker, the speaking industry has been hijacked by people who speak to sell. And it's it's okay to do that and make money. I speak to change lives because somebody spoke and changed my life. So, this is my passion. This is my drive. This is something that I feel in my heart. And and so, the key to that hunger-driven life is a heart-centered life. I didn't do what I'm doing for years because of my programming, because of the culture in which I was raised in. I would see other people with with degrees and PhDs and and MBAs and credentials I don't have and I convinced myself I couldn't do it. But Mr. Washington, on that day, we became friends and and he taught me that only someone's opinion of you does does not have to determine your reality. He said that you have to work on yourself and you have to have an unstoppable attitude and no excuse is acceptable and you've got to to make it a a priority, a non-negotiable in your life and hold a a constant vision of what it is you want to achieve, see it accomplish and go all out, find a way to win. All right, guys. I hope that you got as much value out of that episode as I did. Sitting across from those people and getting their nuggets of wisdom is something I'm so grateful for and that I'm always trying to put to use in my life. Remember, it does not matter what you look at, it matters what you see. So, 2020 was whatever 2020 was. Now, 2020 is for you to make of it what you will. The control is in your hands. It is time to do something awesome with this year. Take the things you learned in this episode and put it to use. And I'll be right there with you guys. All right, until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Everyone, there's no way to build an empowering mindset or get ahead in business without constantly learning and accessing new information. And today, I want to share with you guys my secret weapon in the battle to learn new things and get ahead, Blinkist. Blinkist is for anyone who cares about learning, but doesn't have a lot of time. Blinkist takes the key ideas and insights from over 4,000 non-fiction bestsellers in more than 27 categories and gathers them together in 15-minute text and audio explainers that help you understand more about the core ideas. Use the Blinks to get into a topic quickly, find new topics to grow from, or figure out which books you want to spend more time reading and listening to more deeply. Also, they've teamed up with popular podcast creators to Blink those for you, too, so you can get to the heart of a podcast episode fast. 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