Brendon Burchard || High Performance Habits

really excited to have Brendan Burchard on the podcast. Brendan is one of the most watched, quoted, and followed personal development trainers in the world and possibly in the history

of the world. Larry King named him one of the top motivation and marketing trainers in the world, and he is also a number one New yeark Times author in which his books include The Motivation Manifesto, The Chart, The Millionaire Messenger, Life School and Ticket, and most recently, High Performance Habits, which we'll be talking a lot about today. He's the star and executive producer of the number one self help show on YouTube, and his podcast The Charge

Life debut at number one on iTunes. Success magazine named Brendan is one of the top twenty five most influential leaders in personal growth and achievement, along with Oprah, doctor Oz, and Cheryl Sandberg. Brendan's so excited to chat with you today. Man, I'm thrilled to be here. I'm a huge fan of your work and your podcast, so thanks for having me. Likewise, thank you, and congratulations on being on the cover of

Success Magazine. I mean that's like the ideal thing to show your mom, right, Like, like, someday, someday I want to be in the cover of Success Magazine so I can really show my mom I made it. You know. The funny thing is when they sent me that cover. Yeah, literally, that's probably the first person outside of my wife that I texted it too. I said, Mom, check this out. And of course she you know, she's always been a huge champion and cheerleader for me anyway, and she's like,

that's great. How do you're so excited? But she would say that if you know, it doesn't matter what's happening, like, hey, mom doing a podcast today, that's great. Howey, I'm so excited. You know that's what mom's doing. Well. It sounds like kind of like your personality too, like when you're just imitating her, you sound like yourself. I don't know. I mean,

I don't know if you realize that. I actually read, of course, the Success article and they quoted your mom and I loved how they saw it her out And you know, she said, when you were a kid, you were this big, energetic ball of sunshine sort of thing. And you know that clearly comes through and a lot of the work you do. But that doesn't mean you haven't had a hard life. Now, when I've been reading some of your work, it's just so it says here you've been involved in car accidents, You've had to deal

with brain injuries, You've had lots of other failures. Could you talk to me about some of that, Brendan, Yeah, you know, the whole reason that I got into psychology in the first place was because I was dissatisfied with my own life. Yeah, and that all perpetuated my entire career. If that perpetuated, because when I was a nineteen year old kid, I had a breakup with the first woman I ever loved, and she was, you know, my sweetheart

and my everything. We were like that annoying high school couple, you know, like so deeply and passionately in love. We shared, like you know, a U haul to the college we signed up for it. I only went to that college because she went there. You know, all our friends were there. We lived in the same dorm, we signed up for the same classes. I mean, we were just locked at the hip. And then about halfway through that first year of college, she cheated on me, and I just fell apart.

You know, I like to say and tell people, it's like, you know, when all of your identity is tied up in a relationship and the relationship falls apart, so to you, That's what happened to me. So by the end of that first year of college, I became depressed and then suicidal, just a turn of events that fortunately gave me some reverence for life and some perspective. Right when I was in the deepest part of that depression and planning my suicide, not just thinking about it, I saw a full page

ad in a school newspaper. I was still, you know, reading a lot, and reading has always been the same grace of my life. And I was reading the school newspaper and there was a big ad, this big, beautiful ad, and it was an ad for a summertime job in the Dominican Republic. They needed students down there to be like two of guides, and long story short, I got

the job. I went down there with a friend and in our first couple of nights there was in a car accident, and I had these series of moments sort of lots of people in heaven in car accidents, and they know this slow motion thing happens, and if you're conscious anyway, and the slow motion thing happened, and it made me ask and think about my life. Now. I don't know if in the moments I was so you know, cognitive and thinking, oh wow, you know I'm facing that

in my life. Let me think through these main questions. But later, as I was healing, after I survived it, I realized the experience that I went through forced me in those moments later on to wonder if I'd really lived my life and I hadn't. You know, my question did I live? I hadn't been living. I've been thinking about taking my life. You know. Did I love? No?

My heart was so broken, and honestly, even in the relationship, I hadn't really been authentic in my love and caring because I was young and dumb, and did I matter? Was a question I asked, And you know, I didn't really have a lot of direction. I certainly didn't know about these things we talked about so casually today, like servant leadership and volunteering and making a difference. And so the questions that I faced at the end of my life, did I live, did I love? Did I matter? I

was deeply unsatisfied with the answers. So I, like a lot of people, I go well. After I recovered from the injuries and was back in college, I wanted to live a better quality of life. I started asking, well, how do you live a good quality of life? How do I change? And the irony is it began with me. I got a hold of Success magazine at some point talk about coming full's circle. I saw Tony Robbins on

an infomercial. I picked up a book from Brian Tracy and aug Mandino and Paul o'cuelo, and all of a sudden, I started just a deep dive in the world of success in psychology and personal development. It was my first time reading Carl Rogers and that totally changed my life. And then it was Alfred Adler, and it went on and on and on. I just went deep into those things, and I was trying to search out how do I change my life. There was never any intention of like,

I want to be a teacher on that someday. I just wanted to write my life. Then after I did, people said, hey, man, I remember last semester you were this depressed, sad kid, you know, and now you're happy. How did that happen? And I would just tell them the things I was discovering about, you know, beliefs, and about identifying my values and what's important to me and having a vision for my future and understanding the importance of optimism and all the basic things we always talk

about psychology and personal development. I tell them, and I tell my car accident story in a much longer, longer fashion than I just did. And then they'd say, that's inspiring. You should tell other people about it. And that kind of began my real deep dive into the work and then ultimately in teaching it. Yeah, and am I right that the first book proposal you put forward to the publishers was rejected? Yeah? I would love to say it was rejected the way you pronounced it kind of like

a singular event. Oh, I see, the book was life's golden ticket, and it was a story about a person going through second chances, because I wanted to talk about the psychology of change, but not be like, here's my story as Brendan Burchard. So my school and ticket has written a little bit like The Alchemist. It's a parable and it's a story of a man undergoing dramatic change. I'd never hearden any fiction before. I didn't know what I was doing, and so fifteen publishers turned the book down.

Later on, literally after a book party from a book I had called The Millionaire Messenger that hit number one on New York Times, my agent pulled me over and we were talking and he told me it actually had been turned down nineteen times, but he didn't have the heart to tell me about the four extra ones. Enough is enough, and then he's like, Okay, the kid gets it.

It's not going to work. And then Harper Collins called, and it was Harper one at the time they had published Pauloquelo, and it was Paulo o'quelo's editor who saw the magic in it, and he said, actually, I think this has got a chance. And they believe in this young, dumb author who knew had no idea what he was doing, and law school and ticket sort of came out and

began my career. Wow, it's amazing. You know. Something tells me, though, you have such resiliency that even if that one didn't work out, you'd still somehow find a way to this pathway, you'd find other other things to persevere. Man, I'd hope to think that, especially by that age. You know, I was twenty seven or eight by the time I wrote

Lafe School, maybe twenty eight. And the truth is I wouldn't have been if I hadn't read so much work in psychology in personal development, because those those things taught me that resilience wasn't Yeah, because I think, honestly, if I hadn't read you know, every personal development guy in the history said persevere. You know, that's like the oldest

conversation in all of self help is perseverance. And if I hadn't read it, I honestly I think I think before my car accident, I was a little bit of a quitter. And you know, I don't mean that as if I'm I don't understand any any like I feel bad about my identity. But you know, I remember reading Albert Bandura and all his work on self efficacy, and

that was a huge shift in me. I mean most of that stuff came out in the eighties, and you know, I was kind of coming into my own as a man after two thousand, but reading Bandura that was huge. The power of self efficacy and believing in our ability to make things happen, and our confidence in our ability to achieve things, and how we have to change our approach to achieving it but still belie we can do it, and a lot of expectancy theory and these things. I

got so wrapped up in it. I was like, yeah, man, that's what I want my life to be like, even though it wasn't like that. That's why I love psychology because it says, hey, maybe maybe you don't think like this yet, but maybe you can start these thoughts because you'll feel better or you'll be better. And that's what really drew me to the work and ultimately teaching it. That's wonderful, and it also speaks to the power of

these writings. You know, we write these books, we do this stuff, and we were like, man, are we going to have any impact? You kind of sold it on the other side. First, that yes, the stuff can have an impact. I mean it impacted you to have more efficacy to keep trying. So that's really interesting to me. Yeah, I told you I didn't come out, you know, being

a self help teacher, you know, right. I didn't start that until, you know, as a full time career, until I was like thirty two years old, which even that sounds young to me now, but you know it was because when I finished school in grad school, I finished grad school University Montana with a degree in organizational communication, I went to accenture and they just happened to be you know, I was telling these partners and these people at these fortune five Hnter companies about my car accident

and the meaning that I took from that as a gift, as a second chance, and how I decided to craft

my life differently after that. And they were the ones, you know, when I'm quoting to them, you know Earl Nightingale or you know Richard Carlson, or you know zig Ziggler, or I'm talking to them, you know about Alfred Ahler or Eric Frohm, They're like, you really like this stuff, You're really passionate about this, and your story could be inspiring like, go write a blog about it, you know, go do a video about it, go do a speech about it. And I had no I was like, how

do you do that? But so many people said that could inspire people that I got hooked on, and I believed them. I don't know that I'd be here if people hadn't cheered me on. And also, I mean, I feel like there was a great amount of post traumatic growth that happened for you. And that's as you know, of a field of positive psychology, there are a few people who are able to kind of turn these traumatic experiences into a great source of meaning and put it

into their creative work. So I feel like you keep channeling, Like you keep doing it over and over and over, and book after book, day after day, to YouTube video after YouTube video. I see you channeling all your energies. Actually, before I dive in, I want to talk about you, do I live? Did I love matter? Could you unpack for me what it means to you to live? Yeah? I get the others. I totally get the others, but the first one could be a little ambiguous. I'd love

for you to unpack it a little bit. Yeah, And I've been working on that for so long couting for myself, and I kind of came out with this little framework that helps me think through it. Which I know this sounds very academic to say. It's like, well I've got a framework about living, but yeah, but you know I love that shit. Yeah you're talking my language. Yeah, I think we all can. There's like three types of life, you know. I think there's the caged life, which is

where I had lived when I was depressed. You know, when you're trapped in your own negative thinking, you're trapped in your own circumstances, where you're own trapped in your own boundaries of belief or your own behaviors and they're not working. You know, it's like literally being in a cage. You feel like you're shaking the bars and you feel frustrated.

And we've all been there at different parts of our life and in different areas of our life, but we know what that means when we feel trapped or caged. And then I think a better quality of life, certainly is the comfortable life where you've got more options and more opportunity, more choice, and things are going good. You know, maybe you got the job or the car or the house, and things are going pretty good, and I was there. That's what it was like. When I had a corporate

job after grad school. I was like, this is good. I was comfortable. I had a paycheck for the you know, like a good one. You know. I was living an independent and free life. I mean, things were good and I was comfortable. But you know, sometimes with the comfortable life, there's this tell that happens where you're out with friends and everyone's like, hey, how's it going, and you're like, you know it, it's fine, and fine becomes this like four letter word. You know. It's like that you know

that there's something more aching inside. And to me, that's the charged life calling you and the charge life. It's just a higher level of enthusiasm, and it's a higher level of engagement, and it's ultimately a higher level of empowerment with you and other people. And so I think when I think of when you say did I live, the way I evaluate it is did I live my life fully and completely and honestly and vibrantly? And I measure that through my enthusiasm, Like today, am I enthusiastic

for this day and the opportunities I have? And I measure it through my engagement, like, am I really deeply not just passionate about what I'm doing? Am I a little obsessed? Because my philosophy in this book, a little bit from the study that we did on high performers worldwide, is they go a little beyond passion. And because you know, passion is actually pretty safe. You know, people want you to be passionate. Passion for pizza. Yeah, you know, live

with passion, be passionate, follow your passions. All that's good, that's safe. But when you're passionate, people cheer you on. When you're obsessed, they caution you. You know, they're like, hey, you know you're geting a little too much time for that here? Or why are you so weird? Or why do you care about that so much? And I thought high performers they allow obsession into their life. They don't fear it as much as other people do because they

figure out that healthy versus unhealthy obsession stuff. So for me, if I'm living life, really the engagement isn't just like I'm present in the moment. That's everything too, But I also want to be obsessed with what I'm working on. Am I obsessed with the mastery and the excellence? Of it where I feel like that engagement level isn't just passion that comes and goes, but it's like it's obsessions

like excitement, enthusiasm, and deep engagement. And I don't know if that answers it completely, but that's how I feel as I'm talking it out with you. Oh, sure does make a lot of sense. And you're bringing in some of those ideas about harmonious for subsessive passion, but you're saying they're not scared of the obsessive passion. That's really interesting. I really like that kind of framing. They kind of embrace and accept their totality of being in a way

that's right. Oh my gosh, you nailed it. Because one of the habits, and we'll talk about the research behind that, I know, but one of the habits we found of high performers worldwide was their ability to raise performance necessity. And that just means they mentally sort of psyche themselves up to be excellent what they were doing, because it's not a preference to do well here, it's a necessity. It's necessary that I do well here, and let me tell my brain why. And one of the components of

that bouncing up what you said. In the way that they raise necessity is they literally attach their identity with doing well in that activity. And just like obsession, they got the guts to do that. It's scary, Like you're not right before we started talking here praising you for your guts and saying, hey, I'm a writer and I had done that too. It's guts to say to attach identity to our craft, because what if it doesn't go well?

I mean, what does that say about us? If my book gets you know, declined from editors or it doesn't sell, or what if someone says, you know, I'm going to be world class, you know in this area or this topic, or I'm going to really put my passion behind this new small business and I am this person and it fails. That is a horrible thing on the identity. Just like when I said my identity was wrapped up in that

relationship with that girl I loved. Well, that's scary, except I found every high performer that it is structured interview with, which was over three hundred, they felt that. I mean, it was very clear that their identity was wrapped up in what they were high performing in and whether they were a high performing mom, or they were high performing CEO at a fortune fifty company, or they were both,

because that exists, you know. Even my favorite story is one of my favorite stories from the book is I was working with this gold medalist sprinter and we were at the blocks out on the track field and we were talking about his psychology right before the gun goes off to start the race, and he was talking about the importance of winning for him and I said, well, how do you know if you're going to win? And

he said, what do you mean? I said, well, like when you think of the competitors, all these folks in the lanes next to you, and you know this race is going to be won by you know, one hundredth of a second or a tenth of a second. Let's say, how do you know who's going to win? Who do you bet on? And he said, well, I do We bet on the person who is down the blox looks up towards the end of the finish line and says, I'm going to win this one today for my mom.

And I was like, oh, I was like, yes, you know, that's necessity I have to do. Necessity is my identity is attached to it. I'm okay, being obsessed with it. I'm doing it for a social d or a purpose or a mission or even yes, an obligation beyond me. And there's a deadline. And if we get those things together, those four little things identity, obsession, social duty and deadline all together in your mind with the right thought patterns, you will feel that is more necessary to perform with

excellence than usual. And you will that's really interesting. It's actually I'm going to try to play that tip next time I'm running on my Olympic track. Yeah, you know, it's like ask to yourself these questions like why is this important to who I am to do well? Why do I love this thing so much even when it's hard? Who needs me right now on my a game to perform well? Who needs me to do well at this? And why is it important that I do well at

this now? Simple questions like that, you know, aims are mental focus, Aims are ability to perform better, And is simple as those things are. It just turns out that high performers have that kind of mental pregame that allows them to perform better than the average person, even if the average person has a similar skill set, Because it's not always about expertise development. Sometimes it's about mental preparation. Sure, yeah,

this question, why do I love this? And it's tie into self esteem is really really important And you know, I really like this distinction between optimal self esteem and unstable self esteem, which is tends to be associated with some forms of narcissism. Yes, it's you know, oh my gosh, and I love that because you know, we've also in so much of great self esteem literature, we're cautioned against tying identity towards doing a good job. And that makes sense.

I mean, you know, for me, one of the big books of my early life in psychology and when maybe the first psychologist besides like Maslow or Rogers that I really fell in love with was Inthaniel Brandon and you know we just lost him, was that two years ago? Self Esteem? Yeah? Six Pillars Self Esteem was monster book

for me. And but even in that way, it does it does warn just you know, and most psychologists would say, just be careful of too much identity tied too, because then if the external thing that you want it doesn't turn out and you internally punish yourself, that's a good recipe for unhappiness, which they're true, but I'll tell you high performers are willing to take that risk a little bit, just like you were with your blog saying, hey, I'm

a writer, this is what I do. I'm sorry if you don't like it or I'm not going to respond as fast, but I'm going to pull myself away and put myself into scraft. Well, yeah, it sounds to me like what you're saying is, you know, contingent self esteem is not good, but choose your contingency carefully. So it's, you know, overall, like you don't really want to be contingent too much on external validation. You know, you want to have you want to be driven by intrinsic motivation.

But it sounds like in certain instances, you know, there can be very healthy contingencies. So you're just basically saying, choose your conitgency carefully. That's absolutely right, and don't fear when a part of you, you know, feels like doing that thing. It's like, you know, Oprah knew that what she was doing was right for her, and she speaks so eloquently about it, that she was doing who she is and what she felt called to do, and a lot of people back away from that higher sense of

calling and identity because you know, who am I? Or what will they say? Or how will I be judged? And I'll tell you it's a lot easier to back away from that than to embrace it. You know, I shared that not just from my own personal respective, but a lot of people in the stories of this book they struggled with that. You know, they really do and

I don't. I don't have the right answer, But the observation was pretty clear to me that they were willing to step over that line and say this is who I am, because they would often say when I interviewed them, you know, they would often say things like, I can't imagine myself doing anything else, right, this is who I am. And man, when someone says that to me, I just want to double high five I'm and hug them because whatever it took to step into that took some guts.

Oh yeah, it takes a lot of bravery to be yourself. Mm hmm, no, for sure. So let's talk about the study. Something that I am very pleased to see is that this was put to some rigorous testing. You had a whole team of researchers. I'm just going to call out some names, some first names, Alyssa, Mike, and Danny. Yeah,

those names Ringabella. Oh yeah, they were absolutely huge. And and I'll just clarify a little bit because you know, I think a lot of people when they see a book, they think of a you know, they think of a research or a study as a singular thing. Like, you know, a lot of people say, well, you did this study.

I'm like, well, we did studies, you know, because this book honestly is a culmination of the last ten years of me studying everything I could about the high performance that we worked with, both from the you know, the qualitative side of things as a high performance coach. I said, this is my career two more quantitative, based on taking surveys and based on sort of creating and validating you

now called the high Performance Indicator. At least three of this thing, which we validated other we validated this performance scale against other validated scales to assess our predictive utility. You know, fancy way for everybody you know who's listening, fan of all this stuff. We kind of geeked out on science of it. Oh yeah, my audience will love what you just said. Yeah right. It was like you know, three years ago, I didn't understand even what convergent validity meant.

I had to conceptionally understood, but I certainly had never

executed it. And so doing that work and then trying to do the factor analysis and the component analysis and blah blah blah to make sure that what we were seeing in this book wasn't just from my perspective of coaching, wasn't just you know, my opinion, because I've been training on high performance also for a decade, and it wasn't just from my own literature views, which you know, I've been doing for basically twenty years reading everything I can

in this topic. Was Hey, I want to be able to create a scale or what now call the HIGHERFORMANCEY indicator. I want to be able to create something that if I go into an organization like we just recently did. We went to a large organization and we said, give us your top leaders and give us your average performers, and I wanted them to take this scale. Inevitably, the top leaders who have objective measures of success, their score should be higher in these areas that we are saying

correlate with long term performance, specifically long term success. And those who are an average, well, their members should reflect that. And in area after area that we have tested this with, that comes to be true that these six habits do correlate with long term success. And you know, we've gone through multiple versions of it, just like any good science, and we keep meeting it up and we'll do it

better and better and better. And when the book publishers were publishing our latest methodology report on the entire thing as well, and I could not have done that if it was not for Danny Southwick jumping in especially him to help me make sure I was thinking through it right. You know, I have a master's degree, but I'm by no way a psychology PhD. Or a psychologist or a

psychiatrist or a neurologist or anything with an ist. At the end of ALYSSA MARASAAC, Mike Shannon Thompson jumped in there and I had, you know, I've been blessed to train over four hundred psychologists in a high performance who attended a performance academy and I beat this up against them, and I said, hey, am I doing sorry? Am I thinking about right? Would you take the assessment? What other

things should we run it against? And really long story short, we came down to after measuring over one hundred different performance variables throughout my last decade, came down to about eleven to fifteen. That seemed to be pretty strongly correlated with long term success. Then we beat it up even more by asking, well, are these habits malleable? Are they trainable?

Are they observable? Are they conscious? Are they things that high performers would say they are aware that they are doing and try to do better at I think what makes this book unique is I wasn't going after, you know, the same things a lot of habit writers have done in the past. They're trying to tell you how to set up a habit so it's easy and unconscious and you never have to think about it again, you know, like tying your shoes, But high performers don't. That's not

what they're after, you know. They want to know what are the deliberate habits that I can do consciously and consistently to keep getting better, because otherwise it's an unconscious competence and that's not going to take it to the top.

So that's what this book is. It's a six deliberate habits that we have both codified, figured out how to measure objectively bounced against you know, other things to get the predictive utility value, and then proven out in the field with GPA, with sales revenue numbers, with rank in position and hierarchy, and in multiple external measures of success just to see, you know, to test our stuff. And

so these six kind of made the great. Yeah, I'd add some outcomes here that I see you measure that I care more about, like happiness and interpersonal relationship quality of interpersonal relationships. You also predicted those two things. Yeah, I mean, high performance is a incredibly high predictor and correll it of happiness, of well being measured as multiple different types of scales of well being, as purpose in life,

as wiliness, as achievements, driving diligence, industriousness. I mean we were able to balance against a lot of other things. But for me, I'm similar to you mine where it's super highly strongly correlated with happiness, positive relationships, and what's

important to me influence. Because my number one struggle in and forced me to kind of want to write this book honestly, was there's so much done in psychology, but sometimes you just want, you know, psychology to walk across the hall to sociology a little bit, you know, yeah, like you know, my thoughts on grit or deliberate practice is usually to say both of both. By the way, I'm a huge fan of both Angela and Andrew's huge, huge, and I know, you know, them really personal for me.

Sometimes I say yes, but long term success without you know, you can say passionate perseverance, but if you don't have people skills in there. I know a lot of very passionate persevering people because they're not good with people, skill that they never broke through. I know a lot of people who deliberately practice and do you know a version of it, let's say, and yet because they're bad with people, they piss off the coach and now they can't climb

up on the team. They piss off the investors. Now the investors won't you know, who funded them in the first round won't fund them the second round. It's like, our influence and our social circle is so much more important than you know, grid or deliberate practice or even high performance alone. So I wanted to create a concept that measured that as well. And my theory was, or my hypothesis was, Hey, I bet this is really important,

so let's include it in there. And I think, especially in the corporate market, they're really going to like a book like this because it's it's saying how important leadership really is. You know, Tom Brady can't be Tom Brady without leading that team. I don't care how good he throws that ball. I don't care what his grid is. If he doesn't lead that team, well he ain't Tom Brady. And so I think we nailed that, and that to me rose up out of the study. I didn't even

know how important that one would be. So in terms of outcomes, it's correlation with influence, happiness, life, satisfaction, all those those getting really fired up you can tell yeah, I can, you know, let's push talk. I'm sorry. And health. That's the last thing, like, oh yeah, health outcomes, which is huge. You know, high performers are somewhere of forty percent more likely to work out three to five times for a week than you know, the average person. That's

pretty extraordinary forty percent. You know, it's the health outcomes, positive health outcomes being associated with this too. I think that's important because I think the world's really struggling that at least here in North America. Oh yeah, mental and physical health for sure. Can we talk about each of the five and I'll read like one item from each of it because I imagine you wouldn't want me to read the whole scale, right, that's proprietary information, Is that right? Oh? No? Yeah? Yeah,

one item sounds great, and we can talk about each habit. Great. So let's start with clarity. I know what I want. I'm clear about my goals and passions. Tell me why that's important. It's important because we found that high performers one of the first practices each chapter is a habit, and then we break it down into three practices that we saw led to the development or the improvement of

that habit. And one of their habits is to envision what we call the future for and that is high performers tend to enter situations thinking through these four things themselves, like who do I want to be in the situation? Their social context, as in, how do I want to interact with people here, the skills or the strengths that they want to demonstrate in that situation or develop, and the service or the contributions they want to make there.

So we call it self social skills and service, and critical to that is the one you just read about is they're continually seeking clarity on who they are and what's important to them. And that's why they're able to adjust course or even stay resilient because they know what's important to them, which sounds so seemingly obvious, except that we're often told that we're supposed to get clarity, but high performers happen to be seekers. They seek clarity there.

I mean, they're not the ones who evaluate their performance on New Year's Eve only you know, they're not New Year's goal set. They're very consistently and seeking is this right for me? Should I be doing this? Do I really care about this? Is this something that's going to you know, lead to you know, fulfillment for myself? So you know, I know what I want. I'm clear about my goals and passions. But it's you know, I know what will make me successful. I know how to achieve

what's important to me. I have clarity about what I really want to accomplish in my life, or in this context, it's really sitting and ruminating about that. Am I clear about what's important to hear? And coming back to Oprah again. And the only reason I keep mentioned to her is because you know, I'm blessed to work with her, and we have a course coming out soon. It's my second Oprah dot com course, and so it's on my mind. Every time you do a meeting with Oprah. She has

this thing. She says, what's the intention for this meeting? And she asked at the beginning of every meeting. She always wants to know what's the intention of this meeting? And that is a great example of seeking clear before they enter situations. High performers are asking that type of question. They're trying to get more clarity as they are about to begin something. Yeah, So that habit seems to I. I was wondering where you bring in the purpose or the mattering part, and I see that as part of

habit one. Yeah, that how do I matter in this situation? The third practices define what's meaningful, because you know, I like to say not everything that's achievable is important. Yeah. No, for sure, brother, for sure. There's a story in there

in that. Probably one of the most successful people I ever coached myself personally, you know, as a woman in fortune five hundred and had ten thousand employees under her direct report, and we were talking about something and she kind of gave me that language in her own dialogue. She was realizing that she'd climbed a lot of mountains, but many of them are the wrong mountains. And so I tell people all the time, it's not always achievement.

That you think that you're after more achievement, but and we all really do believe that in some ways. But a lot of people are good at checklists and to do lists, and they got the great planners, and they really are good at knocking off the task and the activities on a workplan. But for many people, achievement is not the problem. Alignment is. Yeah, And that brings to me lots of ideas of authenticity. So I think that

one I would put authenticity as part of that. It sounds good, and I may in fact do that when I write for your site. Yeah, you know, we asked too. You know. Part of that is we give a lot of questions and here to ask to kind of aim yourself in. One of the sking clarity questions is how can I make this effort personally meaningful to me? And I think that's important. I recently had a team member who in one of my companies who we let go.

And in the sort of the debrief process of letting this person go, we had this conversation and they, you know, they said, well, I just, you know, I was doing a lot of things and sometimes it just wasn't meaningful. And I'm like, we're changing people's lives. Oh my god. You know. But it's like that person like, look, I do email too, you know, I do so yeah too. I've got to do a lot of menial tasks, but I make them meaningful to me by seeking clarity on

what that meaning could be. And that's why I'm able to stay in the game longer than a lot of people would quit by getting bored. Yeah that's great. Okay, So let's move on to habit too, which is energy. So one item would be like, I feel highly energized every day. Now, I imagine you don't treat these six as completely independent of each other, right, but as kind of feeding off each other, right, Like the more quality you have, the more energy you have for the task, right,

or the more energy you're right. So these kinds, would you agree they feed off each other? They do? And in our very first methodology report, we found that it was cool that each of these habits correlated strongly with long term success, but they each actually correlated with in one another too. They were distinct enough, you know, to

pass the test of distinction and differentiation. But yeah, the more clarity you have, the odds are, the more energy you have because you won't be wiped out doing things you hate, you know. And that combined all six also added up to a total higher score in high performance, which is kind of how we started drilling down on

which ones mattered most. But yeah, generating energy is everything because I think, especially today, this is going to be a popular habit in chapter because a lot of people they feel like the energy that they're experiencing your life is just energy they have or do not have, you know, similar to people who might think, well, I'm happy or I'm not happy, and as if you know, there's no will component there, you know, or no ability to raise

those numbers or those feelings or those sensations consciously. And our energy that we are experiencing mentally, emotionally and physically is under a great degree of our command. And when we discover how much that is now we really want to optimize our health now we want to bring more intention and joy to experiences. Now we want to learn. And this is my favorite phrase from that chapter is release tension, set intension, and that is you dig on this.

I think a lot of people are going to cover this. When I studied how high performers, why is it they didn't burn out? It was weird. They're more successful, but they perceive that they have less stress than their peers. And I thought, was it just because they, you know, are more confident in handling stress they've done it before, or they seem like maybe their peers were running around crazy. I'm like, why is it that they report less stress?

And others like, what was it? And so when I started to get in the structured interviews and in conversations, it wasn't that they were using less energy throughout the day, and it wasn't that they had less tasks that demanded all of them or could be stressful. It was they had this practice of renewal in their transitions. They had what we now call master They mastered transitions. So I'll give you a great example. It's very tactical. You and

I do it every day. Probably you know there's a transition moment between answering emails and opening up keynote to make a presentation. What most people do is they're bleeding energy mental focus, energy, if you will, and also physical energy in their kind of sort of tractoring through their transitions without releasing the mental focus from one to enter

the next one. And what I found, for example, a high performer, instead of just you know, doing email immediately opening the presentation, work on the presentation, they would finish email and they would do something casual that they didn't know they were doing at the time. They'd get up, they'd walk around the office, say hi to some people, get some water, maybe stretch a little bit, ah, sit back down and start the next activity. And they had

all these little renewal practices between activities. Not like they took a walk at lunch, but with a lot of them did stuff like that. It was between the activities of the day where they refreshed themselves mentally, emotional or

physically before entering the next activity. It's the person before walking into the meeting or their fifth meeting, I should say, they go to the bathroom, you know, spash a little water on their face, do a couple jumping jacks, then walk into the next one, or it's the person who they pull up to their house from a long day of work and before going in to say hi to their honey, they just close their eyes and release tension with maybe a you know, a sixty second or five

minute meditation, then go in intentionally on what kind of mom or dad they want to be. I like that. Yeah, I don't know how to describe it other than they mastered these transitions, and they're like little transitions and not these big ones at the beginning or the end of

the day necessarily. They're like throughout the day. They're doing these little renewal peros that all culminate to their ability to recharge throughout the day, not just that one time in a meditation or at the very end, you know, or during that one time at lunch. It's lots of little renewals that keep them recharged. And we talked about a lot of those in the book, and that was for me. I learned a lot in that and just observing I was like, wow, I got to start doing

a better job at that. So now between the major activities I go and my routine is I'll go and drink glass of water, all bounce in place and take ten deep breaths while bouncing in place, not like jumping, but just like sort of chea gong bounce, like a Tai cheek bounce, just loosening the shoulders, letting my body bounce up and down, breathing ten times in and out, and then I'll go down the next activity and I've entered way more present, way more focused, and I feel

like my performance went up too. So this, you know, makes me think of Andre Eriksson's work showing that the highest performers in his sample didn't necessarily have the more quantity about it, but they're more efficient and they also rested the most as well. So this seems to dovetail nicely with that kind of finding. It does. Yeah, so like that, so there's an efficiency here. The efficiency of your time seems to be somehow related to this energy managing.

It's like managing your energy, your ability to manage your energy, not necessarily as a treat like I either have a lot of energy or not, because you find extroverts have on average more energy than introverts, and I would hate for this these habits to be all about extroverts. Y, that's right, So that's what we're happy with and the habits didn't correlate with a traditional perspective, I should say,

in personality. And there's a study in here that we cided as well, for you know, some nine hundred CEOs. There wasn't a huge difference in extroverts versus introverts in terms of their performance over the long term. I know there's a lot of debate about that, certainly in academic circles.

There's very little debate about that, by the way, in high performance circles in terms of like corporate practitioners, because you know, anyone's who's done a lot of work has seen lots of introverts crush it and lots of extra rits crushing, you know. And it's really about the mindset and the routines and the habits that are happening to

support that person. And I think that's what you said is a really important distinction because the reason I said when we label to have it to generate energy is because they are consciously doing that. It doesn't say, you know, have energy by trade or birth. You know, it says there are these activities that they are doing that just they're doing it more consciously and consistently in other people,

and that's giving them the edge absolutely. So let's talk about the next one, because I know that you have a life too, so you don't want to spend the rest of the day. Oh man, you know I dark out about this with you. Brother, I could say, you keep me on time because I'll go on and on. So I will. So the next one is, let's say about necessity. That's an interesting phrasing. That's kind of a

unique phrasing. Right when I look at these items, they seem to have a lot to do with grits and working hard and having the motivation, the ability to self generate motivation in a way. But tell me why you called it necessity. It's very interesting. The first time I ever had a real touch of real sort of academic

approach to organizational communication. A lot of the work we were doing there was more ethnographic, and I was very interested to see how do high performers actually talk about it and what are the things that they say that gives them the edge? And a lot of them if you go in and you ask a bunch of high performers like hey, why are you so good at what you do? They almost laugh and a lot of them say things like I don't have any other choice. Man. It's like, it's not like what we want it to be.

For a nice you know, for a great ted talk like purpose and meaning and amazing. A lot of some that's there, no question, But a lot of times it's just like I have to get myself primed to do a good job here, or the competitors are to eat my lunch, or that new young hire is going to outpace me, or you know, my family is going to be left struggling. And for them it wasn't just like at first we wanted to call that's like, is this this is like emotional commitment, right, and so we want

to call it emotional commitment. But looking through the transcripts and in the different ways we had to figure out how to do the first measurement of the first HPI, it was like, no, this is it is They feel it's necessary for them to do well. And it's not always just the internal standards of my identity or my beliefs or my purpose. It's sometimes those external ones, the social obligation or deadline. Like I don't know about you, but dude, a deadline makes it necessary for me to

get that book done. As soon as you give me a deadline, my output per hour kicks up. That's so interesting. So there's individual differences in that. Do you think there's some people where a deadline really crushes their spirit? I think it ends up being down to in the book, we call it real deadlines versus false deadline. You know what's that difference? That's interesting? Yeah, Well, and I were kind of joking about this in the beginning, like we

get a lot of requests and we're blessed to have that. Yeah, but I get a lot of requests, Brandon, I need this by Thursday, by Friday d D. And I have this reply that I said almost anybody who sends me request because they are usually asking me for it by a certain time, and I say, hey, thanks for this.

Could you write me an email back and explain when is the absolute drop dead date and time you need that, in which if you don't get it by that date, the world explodes or career crumbles, my reputation is ruined forever and a series of negative consequences upon which there is no hopeful return. Ac curbs. Please let me know that date, because every day before that is called a preference, and honestly, before you wrote me, I got hundreds of preferences in front of you. So the only way I

can possibly sort Yeah, that's good is by knowing the men. Right, you're good, You're a good brand. I'll send you the email, Brendan, you're good. That's influence. That's an influence ability. I would put that under that habit. That's very good. That's very good. Yeah, I changed my contact forte to just due to the

high volume the commitments I receive. I'm not just I'm just simply not taking on any more commitments till next year because I need in order to help people maximally, I need to focus on what I'm currently doing, as opposed to spread myself too thin. That's what I wrote. But I feel like I guess they're just different approaches

to this. You know, it's easy to get overwhelmed, and that's a that's an incredibly gracious way to respond, Brendan, incredibly gracious, well, because you know it ends this way and it basically ends with you know, can you please let me know that drop dad date and why it specifically occurs. Then for you, what if you honestly like read the request and you just don't want to do it though, Like I'm saying, like, what's your rejection for that?

You can't do everything in life? No? Yeah, very similar to what you would. What you just described that you wrote is that I'm very focused on this particular project right now. If it's not an emergency or a real deadline, please you know, take this action or you know, defer it. But I have that type of thing as well. Our no is very gracious, and I talk about this in the book in the productivity habit is that the ability to say no first after you've achieved a certain level

of success is important. And to convince yourself about why you would say yes, I like that becomes now the game. You know that makes no sense? Yeah, yes gets you in the game, and then no keeps you at the top levels of the game. So when you're you know, when you're in your twenties, you say yes to everything because you're just trying to get influence and experience, find

out what your thing is, you know, help people. And then then at some point, if you're responsible for the powers that you have developed, however you define that, then you have to now start prioritizing and the way to do that is to immediately start with no and then justify to yourself why that should be prioritized up for you to even take it on. My friend Brian Holiday actually wrote a really good article about why he says no to everything, very similar to what you just said.

I really like that. It's one of those things, though, when you say that too much, that people think you're kind of a jerk, because, especially people who don't know what it's like to receive a million requests, you can come across as kind of thinking you're better than others, when that's not what it's about at all. You know. No, here's the good news. I've got the you know, sort of scientific answer for that a little bit, and that is so our next habit and the fourthabit is to

increase productivity. And here's how high performers did it. You can't possibly write an action based, sort of business oriented book without having stupid acronyms. But well, my colleague Martin Sellingman is the master at that end. All right, it's true. So this one or just you know, some alliteration or some type of you know, this one is just like here's what we found. The fancy phrases you will get

the idea and why high performance became that way. The first thing they did is they identified that what we call their PFI, their primary field of interest, and that was a big thing. And they all talked about the day when you discover the primary field of interest, it's real for you versus the busy work, right because there's a difference between busy work and your life's work. And when people hone in on what the real primary field

of interest is for them, things really shift. But then they went to another level deeper and they identified their PQO, which is the sort of abbreviation for prolific quality output, and they identified in that primary field of interest in which they wanted to be recognized, received rewarded, or dedicate their life to because they're calling. They identified the primary and the quality outputs they would have to create in

which they would have to be prolific. And when they made the shift, and this is an obvious and very clear shift that a very high performer I talked with when I talked about because I ask questions like, tell me about a time when you shifted into the highest gear of performance in your life. What changed then? So many of them, you know, when they finally dug down

and we really got to the question. We essdenced the question they would discover, Oh why realized that my craft was this and I was really going to aim that, Just do that or you know, it's a story in the world of a steam job is coming back to an Apple when it's floundering and saying, hey, you guys

have too many product lines here. We're only going to do these things primary field of interests, and we're be prolific in creating this type of output the highest level of quality in this way, and be more prolific in creating more than anybody else ever. And it's like high iPod iPhone, and it's just over and over and over.

You know, whether it's you know, some sports people identifying that specific sport and the wins that they need to climb the national rankings on or the worldwide rankings on, or it's you know, a musician whoever it is, those two things. When those align, you figure out that primary field of interest, and then you figure out the prolific quality output. And then you identify and this is the hardest part that we're really talking about, You identify the

rest as distractions towards your ability to do PQ. Oh, so it sounds like a lot of like deep focus, deep focus added with deep courage and the ability to say no to things that are great. So I see lots of things that are boundary setting, the importance of boundary setting, importance, prioritization, time management, all that stuff is kind of folded under productivity. Is that right? Yeah? And you know what I think the distinction is is that

you and I say things like that. You know too, especially when you know, speaking around the world, people their eyes can glaze over when you say boundary setting or time management or increasing productivity. But then you bring it back to that sense of self satisfaction and meaning that comes from having a sense of personal power and focusing your life on things that matter to you and the guts to do that, the guts to say no to the things that don't matter to you is the defining

hallmark of high performers. But I also say, just you know, the good life. I mean, there's so many things that you and I get requests to that would be so amazing to go and do. By the way, I recognize it's difficult to make a distinction of saying yes and no between good and two bad things is easy. It's when you have a lot of good opportunities that it gets harder. And I don't pretend to be the guru on that. I would recommend everybody reading Rushworth Kidter's work.

He's pretty much the pre eminent ethics trainer worldwide. Most of the fortune one hundred Good or Bad took his ethics training and he wrote a book called How Good People Make Tough Decisions. And all listeners should listen. If you're going to read hyper Worm's Happen, that's awesome, compliment it with that book because it will help you make those right choices for you and the others that you lead and serve. That's great. Thank you for that recommendation.

We'll try to put that in the show notes. Oh cool. In the instance of time management, we talked about influence already, we touched upon that. One of the items is I'm good at persuading people to do things. I'll be honestly, I'm a little critical of this one because these kind of items are actually very correlated with grandiose narcissism. These things could rate out of the MPI as well. I have strong leadership skills. People describe me as highly influential.

But the other two, how do you distinguish this from, you know, manipulative exploitation. Sure, well, first, the one you're counting on is our most recent methodology report for the that's right, Yeah, for the academic version versus the one that informed a lot of the book. Oh okay, that's good information. Actually cool. Yeah, yeah, this one was to the one you're reading, is the methodology report to kind of run this against other validity other scales have been validated.

So your point that one does have that theme and style of that work before it, because we wanted to assess where that's true or not. The actual HPI, which is, you know, five times longer than when you're reading there, the professional assessment version is much more. There's a lot more under the influence related to empathy. Oh that's good, that's very good. Yeah, I'll send you the full one. It's pleasy. Do please do the ability to for example, one you don't see in there because it was, again,

this was a validity report. The actual assessment has, for example, the ability to garner trust, to create camaraderie less oriented towards those ones. Unfortunately, just the traditionally most of the items. In order to sort of assess the predictabilidity of this, we had to bounce it against things that had been correlated with success specifically, and that one I agree with you. You You know, I'm good at persuading people to go

do things. I haven't met a high performer who wasn't good at persuasion, but they weren't also using it just to you know, right right, that really has a very instrumental feel to it, right. It's not consistent with your love thing. So that's why that's why Hyperworn's have it. Number five is called develop influence, and the three practices that we found that develop it is. Number one teach people how to think, and that is you have to consistently say what do you think about this? Or hey, guys,

let's think about it this way. When you want to influence people, you're helping shape their thoughts and you're also asking for it. How would you think about it? How would we go about it? Number two is they challenge people to grow, and so influencers I like that one. Yeah. They challenge people's character, they challenge people's connections or relationships, they challenge people's contributions, and it's in challenging that they

gain influence. You know, Challenging can be like persuading. It can sound very instrumental, you know, but it's the way that you use it. And you know, precision can be a positive tool or a negative tool, and a frankly socan leadership, and so can productivity. Right, all these things. I mean, honestly, grit can be a terrible thing as well, you know. Oh yeah, no, it's true, No, it's very true. Actually, I modify what I said. A lot of these items.

It's not necessarily grandiose narson, but the assertiveness aspect of extraversion. You would find lots of these kinds of items, you know, like I'm really good at persuading people and having them do what I want, and I'm very effective at telling stories and et cetera, et cetera. So you see a very strong link between extremely high levels of assertiveness and grandiose narcissism, which I find really interesting. Oh dude, And you know what the coolest thing is, man, You're good.

Assertiveness did not strongly correlate with high performance overall scores you're talking about with a larger test battery or with this one, because with this one I mean the idea it has to These items are straight out of the assertiveness rule book. That's right, these ones in your scale, yeah, any one? Yeah. The ones that I'm taught talking about is when we asked the survey to high performers, Okay,

good like empathy, ability to garner trust, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I'll give you the actual item is the actual item was I am more assertive than my peers. High performers didn't strongly. They don't feel like they're more assertive than the average person, even if and for me, I think persuasion or leadership, and even the ability to describe myself as highly influential as an example, I think in real

life language. And I think this is where obviously methodology comes to play in academics and science is where the meaning is important. Like you know, our next, our last, habits demonstrate courage. It was so hard to find a lot of strong agreement on what courage was in the academic science. You know, it's difficult. There's not a lot of people who agree on exactly what courage really means if we're going to measure it. I feel the same

way in the popular culture. If you say asservativeness to somebody. A psychologist thinks of that in very different way than a fortune and fifty executive. How's a fortune and fifty? How do they think of it? They would associate even more with what I would lead towards demonstrating courage, in the sense of, oh, I stand up for myself, I speak up for myself. I am willing to push my ideas even when other people are pushing back. I think

that's all a psychologists because sectualized as well. But we're talking about the extreme high ends. You get dominance that can easily turn into dominance if it's too high. A good point, absolutely, so maybe you know, for some of these things, maybe there's a golden mean. I think so.

I think that's a good point. My sense about the matter is that language really matters in self assessments, and I think people would you know, if I'm filling out something, and then this is just always going to be a part of self assessment when individuals filling it out for themselves. You know, when they say, if I read I'm good at persuading people to do things, you know, I might yeah,

if I read I'm more assertive than others. I mean I don't want to be like you know, I don't want to Yeah, you know what I mean is yeah, so it's it's how they might be identifying in that particular item. My reference with the assertiveness so cool partics was just figuring out the right words. Sounds good. I don't want to harp on that. Well, man, this is actually I love this stuff. Let's go to the last one.

Of course, you talked a little about courage. To me, a lot of these items have to do the resiliency, the ability to fall back, to get back from setbacks. This one is assertiveness, though I speak of for myself, even when it's hard. That's assertiveness. That's pure assertiveness. Yes, that's interesting. I anticipate the new situation. Oh sorry, I don't know. I don't want to read the metloud. This

is proprietary. Yeah, so that's cool. So tell me a little bit more about courage and would you link that a little bit to post traumatic growth as well? You know, I haven't studied that link. I would guess it'd be true. I mean, my God would say yes, I haven't studied enough about post traumatic growth to know all of the

levers there. I guess would be yeah, but I think what we found here that was really important was the ability to respond quickly made the difference for high performers that you know, it's easy to avoid for something for so long that performance declines. And we found this with people, for example, who ran organizations who know they would talk about a period of years they knew there was a problem, but they kept waiting, you know, well, when we get

some new hires, we'll fix that. Or we found entrepreneurs, Yeah, I knew the process didn't work, but you know, I thought the customers weren't that bothered by it, and they waited too long to face a challenge or an emergency, and that really hurt their performance. And yet we also found that there was that part of that assertiveness that says, hey,

despite that, I'm going to face it. What we did find a lot of agreement in the academical literature about courage is that they were to take action, usually for a moral or what they senses a higher reason, in the face of fear, uncertainty, judgment, rejection, threat Taking that action despite those things is what qualified his courage in both the eye of the beholder and those who viewed them.

And we found that debate be true. And one of the other elements that was so powerful about their ability to demonstrate courage was that they spoke up not just for themselves, but they also spoke up for other people. When they saw a wrong or when someone smashed down someone's ideas, that they would say, well, hold on, that

was a good contribution. That's scary. I mean, we always everyone's listening has had had that point in their life when they were in a meeting and they wanted to speak up for somebody, but they didn't and they regretted it, you know. Yeah, and we know the hyprowormers would on average more likely to step into that and say something. I like that one a lot. So look, Brendan, I want to thank you for really making contact with the research community and really caring about getting the science right

and validating the ideas. You're a very rare, rare breed in your field, and I mean that I think we could scientific prove that's true. Like I'm not just like that's not just my opinion. Like you look at the one hundreds of thousands of books on the self development bookshelf in the bookstore, and I want to roll my eyes at a lot of them because they're just armchair theorizing. So thank you for really taking that care. I think that I'm not sure if even your audience as fully

aware of that fact. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, you know, it was helpful to have the audience because, you know, when I started been teaching High Performance Academy four D, a seminar on some of this stuff, what seven, no, gosh, nine years ago, something like that, and it was great because maybe it was my second one, and it was a little armchair theorizing from what I'd been through or how I'd coached people, but I didn't have, you know, the literature view or any empirical work behind it yet.

And a person came out to me to say, you said this on stage, Brendan, how do you know it to be true? And I wasn't even satisfied with my own answer. That's a good question. Yeah, I thought, you know what, I'd better dig into this even more and hopefully one day, you know, if I read and study enough, I can learn how to do these types of things and find the right partners and friends to contribute it and write and also acknowledge you know, everything I said here.

You know what one part that I do think makes me unique is you know a lot of people who want to be the grou and have the one hundred percent certainty. I mean, I opened this book, you know, after talking about sort of the method we went about it with probably what I don't know, seven eight paragraphs of saying, hey, we've also tested to see if this

isn't true. And I'm sure we're at the tip of the iceberg because there's so much we don't know about high performers yet, because I feel like this is relatively an emerging field still, at least in the way we think about it in my genre. So I feel like

we're learning so much. And so I'm also hoping that a lot of the academic or even the more professional community, these who are the practitioners in that performance specifically contribute ideas, blogs, articles to us, because one of my goals of my performance institute is to learn. I mean, that's one reason you and I got to connect, because I'm going to

learn so much from you. And I don't think any science has ever done, you know, And I think it's always just learning the finer ways of replicating or breaking it down or expressing it to find out what's more and more true or likely. But I think we're all going to be a student in this game for a long time. Well, I think that what you just did suggest you should add one more habit of humility. What's wrong with you? Know? You see a lot in the High Performance to me, and it's just so much about

overconfidence and crushing it. And with what you just said was a great example of humility, and I just hope that you incorporate that somewhat in your models of high performance. Matter of fact, it's in the what we call the High Performance Traps. It's in the last one of the last chapters of the book. We talk about the three things that ruin that's right over the long term, and number one, the number one thing was superiority. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I like that. Yeah. And then then

I go on a whole tirade in there about humility. Right, I questioned myself, I'm like, if I take on superiority, does it make me sound superior? Here's a trick as a writer to make sure I wasn't doing that. So I do you mean if you're like say that, you're like the most at humility is that you're saying or

just saying people who are superior are wrong. You know, it's like, well, you know, but it was one of the huge, huge lessons because I really believe that when we interviewed performers and asking when they had a period of we asked them, say three to five years, she were on a roll and suddenly that role or the hot hand ended like what led to that that was in your direct control and was part of either of

your psychology or relationships. And the three traps that we talk about are beware superiority, beware dissatisfaction, and beware neglect. And that second one is so important to dissatisfaction because to your point, so much of the overconfidence or hustle and grind stuff is you know, you're supposed to you know, in the old phrase of you know, grin and bear it. And just we found the strivers and or high performers they're not striving dissatisfy that they actually do have a

level of satisfaction consistently throughout the journey. And it is that satisfaction that enables them to access things like you know, presence or gratitude or flow or being in the zone. And it's not just grin and bear horrible, you know, work yourself to the grind nonsense. You know, it's actually high performers. The reason they're high performing is because they're enjoying the process and they're honoring the struggles that come up versus fighting them. And it's that enjoyment of the

process that I was in access to higher performance. So important, so such an important point because you know, we find our own research that perfectionism is like one of the strongest correlates of grandiose narcissism, which is, you know, what you would call superiority. So they're linked, they're very much linked. Like those with a superiority complex are really really hard and perfectionistic on others as well as themselves, and they don't know that if they kind of relax those external

standards a bit, they would actually get better performance. So I'm really glad that you include that as a trap. Well, thank you so much for being so gracious with your time, and I wish you all the well with your book and with this model. Thank you, my friend. I loved it so much just chalking with you, and I normally learn so much from you and continue to listening to the podcasts. So thanks for having me on. Thank you, Thank you so much for listening to The Psychology Podcast

with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.