SUMMARY

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The Brendon Show. Please note that this episode, like all TBS episodes, features Brendon speaking extemporaneously–he is unscripted and unedited. Filmed in one take, The Brendon Show has become one of the most viewed unscripted, direct-to-camera self-help series in the history of Youtube. It has also been the #1 Podcast in all of iTunes and is regularly in the top podcasts in Self-Help and Health categories around the globe. Subscribe to the free motivational podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.)

Hey all, it’s Brendon, and I’m often asked to share with you some more of the training that we do that’s more emotional and getting into your life to help you release some of those challenges you have, so you can reach higher levels of motivation and High Performance.

So in this session I will play one of our High Performance Monthly training sessions. It’s where I go live every single month, and I talk about some of the difficult things in life and help people through them.

In this session, we talk about letting go so you can find more courage. If you’ve got some baggage in life, which we all do, then this is a great training on letting go and making space in your life for courage.

And when we’re trying to work through that, it’s important to let that stuff go so we can be free in the moment to make better choices for ourselves. This is a session that’s going to help you think through that and achieve that.

It’s part of our High Performance Monthly program, which you can join at Brendon.com/monthly.

Let’s just jump in and talk about the power of letting go so you can find more courage. Let go of the baggage.

You’re never going to touch the full rim of your potential if you’re weighed down by baggage from your elementary school years, your high school years, your college years, these last four years.

Listen, the last chapters of the book, you’ve gone through them, you’ve finished them, you’ve flipped the page, you got a new chapter here. You have to be willing to break from the past to have the future you so desperately desire. You have to have the courage to allow yourself to honor the past as it was; to forgive those who need to be forgiven; to forgive yourself; and to acknowledge that everything led you to this point now. Everything. Those crappy times. Those times when you’re depressed.

It also includes those times when you gave up on yourself, when someone else gave up on you, when you gave up on others, when you quit or failed, when you felt so small, you were embarrassed. Those times don’t live in this moment. And the more of those times that you cultivate in your mind, and you ruminate on, and you think, and you self-talk on, and you revisit in your mind, the more disempowering times from the past, hurtful times from the past, failures from the past, that you keep running in your head.

What that is doing is taking up the very free space necessary for the bold ideas to come in. It’s taking up the space for the very needed white space for creativity to come in, for the dreams to come in, for the best you to speak through from.

It’s hard for you to live an authentic, true, vulnerable and real life if you’re always speaking through your baggage.

Everyone’s got different baggage. Maybe your baggage is your divorce, or that last job. They are not relevant today. The only reason they’re relevant today is if you’re running the same old story.

You’re running the same old excuses. “Yeah, well I can’t do this because I suck at relationships.” No, you sucked at relationships ten years ago. “Well, I can’t do this because I failed.” Yeah, six months ago. Today’s a new day. You have to access this day. This day is fresh. This day is clean. This day was prepped for you by the universe, or spirit, God, luck, cosmos – whatever you want to call it. This day says to you when you wake up in the morning, the day whispers to you, “Do not fear me, for I have been brought here for you.” You don’t fear the day. That day has been brought here for you.

When you have real reverence, deep gratitude and appreciation for life for life, you don’t hold onto a lot of yesterdays.

You notice the changing Fall colors now. You notice the free space that you have now. When you notice the time, choices and opportunities available to you now, yesterday’s not such a big deal.

You don’t hold the baggage. And here’s how you know if you’re holding the baggage. You know in your heart there’s baggage there when you keep playing small. When you keep minimizing yourself to other people in your current situation, that’s because the self showing up is the self lugging the baggage. When you carry baggage, the result is that you feel bad about yourself, and you’re letting it weigh you down.

When you’re free-spirited in this moment, when you’re truly present,  and when you’re free from yesterday, that spirit shines through.

Listen, the same people who completely shut you down yesterday, when they go to shut you down today, you can respond to them by saying, “Hey, that’s not okay.”

Maybe the old you let them shut you down, because you had hurt feelings and old stories. You labeled yourself differently, and you let yourself be put in your place by somebody.

Today, the place you’ve been put on is a fresh ground of earth. Today, the place that you’ve been put in is this moment. And this moment doesn’t reek of yesterday. When the sun set yesterday, it set. When the sun rose this morning, it was fresh. There were new birds around your house, not old birds. They moved on too. You’ve got to get it in your mind at some point that this day, if you have real reverence for life, you don’t meet the day as you did in high school.

If you have reverence for life, you recognize that all those struggles brought you here. All those struggles were necessary to make a new you, a fresh you. You have to release some of those hurts, pains and old stories, because they’re old.

How can you possibly touch the rim of your potential of the future, how are you going to get the lift to be able to leap up there and grab it, when you’ve got 40 pounds of old stories of stupid stuff you did in high school? This may also include the way they treated you when you’re 10, or the way they talked to you when you were 30. You’re in a different place now. And you need to be in this place, light on your feet.

The world is in chaos. You need to be light on your feet, right? Have you ever taken dance classes before, when you’re heavy on your feet? It’s because your body moves in the old ways. The more you learn to be present in the moment, the more you get light on your feet.

And all of a sudden now, when your partner turns this way, boom, you can go that way, because you’re not thinking about the way you went 100 times ago, you’re there with that person dancing. Now it’s real, and it’s alive, and you’re creating something new and unique between you. You need to do that with the moment.

The chaos, abundance and opportunities of the world have never been intersecting the way that they are right now. You have to be light on your feet. And if you still hate yourself from something that happened a couple years ago, I have to tell you that I’m your High Performance coach. I am training you here, but I can’t be your therapist.

Some of us had a bad week in the last couple months. There’s a difference between a bad couple days versus a bad couple chapters, right?

Maybe you had a couple chapters where you’ve been down, depressed, sad, where you minimized yourself, shot yourself down, sabotaged yourself, told yourself sad stories, and literally limited yourself because of the way you perceived yourself from the past. If those old chapters have been there, then from today, do yourself a favor and seek professional therapy.

Seek somebody to do that work with you. There’s lots of tactics, strategies and productivity tips that I’m sharing all the time. There’s lots of new triggers and ideas I’m sharing all the time. But if you’re trying to hit gas, and you keep hitting the brake at the same time due to trauma, super old stories, and old baggage, then you just need somebody to help you process that.

It doesn’t make you weak seeking help; rather, it makes you courageous seeking help. It doesn’t make you small seeking help; rather, it makes you expansive seeking help. It might be your way out.

A lot of people think that there’s a stigma to therapy still, worldwide. So I just want to let you know, it’s okay for you to seek professional, medical, or therapeutic guidance. You shouldn’t still be trapped in your old stories (not at this stage).

We’ve all been through too much to be thinking about what we did in high school, or elementary school, or that trauma that we had four or five years ago. Sometimes you need assistance for that. I had a major trauma a couple years ago when I had a brain injury. I didn’t have the brain injury and then say, “I’m good, I’ll get on with my own self.” I said to myself, “I had a significant trauma there. I got hurt. I’m gonna go get some help.”

And if I hadn’t received that help, we wouldn’t be here together today. So it’s okay to ask for help and to know when you need it. If you don’t need the help, what you need is a reminder. And that’s why you’re here today. You have to have a process every single week where you let go of the screw ups of the week.

Most people just carry the screw ups and they hate themselves, and they start defining themselves through that lens.

The mistake you made weeks ago, you labeled as part of your identity versus a behavioral mistake. Behaviors change every day. Your behaviors today are different than they were yesterday. Behaviors are a very adaptive and reactionary type of thing. You’ll get some behaviors wrong, some behaviors right. But what most people do is they have the wrong behavior, and they pull it into their identity.

They grab their mess ups, and they make it their mindset. The mess up was a behavioral problem. It isn’t an identity problem. And so they take the mess up, the problem, and they make it the personhood. That’s what we call making mountains out of molehills.

So what if you got the project in late? Does that mean you’re a complete failure? No, it means you got the project in late. Next time, plan better. We take the little things and we blow it up into who we are. Who you are is not all the mess ups. It’s part of your learning journey. But it’s not you.

There’s a difference here. And sometimes baggage is recognizing that was an awkward, weird, uncomfortable, harmful situation, but that’s not me. That was a situation. It was a behavior. It was something that happened, an occasion.

Then we can say to ourselves, “Okay, if that’s true, then who am I really? Who do I want to be? Who am I now, at this stage of my life, without those old stories?”

You’ve have to give yourself that distinction. But here’s the thing. I told you, you need a reminder. It needs to be a rhythm for you. It’s part of my Sunday rhythm. I do my Sunday review. And when I do my Sunday review, I say, “Okay, where could I have shown up better this last week? Where could I have behaved better this last week? What could I have done better this last week?”

I just reflect on the previous week, and I identify the things that didn’t go the way I wanted them to. I then ask myself, “Okay, what could I have done better?” And then I do the most simple and basic thing that you could do on a Sunday. I forgive myself, and I let it go.

Isn’t that why some people go to church, to absolve themselves, to admit their sins, and to release it? Maybe you’re a churchgoer, maybe you’re a spiritual person, maybe you believe in God or you don’t, but either way, wouldn’t it be a practical thing to do on Sunday, to say to yourself, “Okay, let me review where my week went good and bad, and let me de-couple my emotions from that so I can enter Monday with freedom. Because when I am in a space of freedom, I make much better decisions than when I am in the space of lack, self-hatred, or carrying all this stuff, unprocessed.”

You have to process it. Most people have the snap judgment of, “Ah, I screwed up.”

I don’t have enough hands to count the number of mistakes I’ve made in the last few months. Imagine if every time I screwed up, I activated negative self-talk (like referring to myself as a ‘dummy’, etc). Now, imagine if I didn’t de-hook and decouple from that mistake and that self-talk.

That’s what most people’s realities are. Due to the fact that that’s always running unconsciously, because they’re not deliberate about processing, they’re not living a courageous life now. Every time they think a courageous thought, that overwhelming chorus of noise swamps and smashes that courage. That whisper of a dream that is bold is beaten to death by the horrid self-talk.

That noise of negative self-talk needs to be synthesized and edited down on a simple Sunday.

You sit there on your Sunday, and you say to yourself, “Alright. I had a lot of noise this last week. A lot of things didn’t go the way I hoped. How could I have met those situations as my highest self? Or more courageous self? What could I have done? Good job for having the intention to be better. Good for you for learning, good for you to setting higher intentions. Good job being on purpose, trying to improve your life. You’ve got to have a new way to look at that. Now just let it go. Take that emotion and let that emotion float away for a little bit. Don’t let that emotion from that mess up mess up my Monday. It’s Sunday. I gotta let that go. I forgive myself in that situation. ‘Cause I’ve learned. I forgive the other people in the situation. Because even if they didn’t learn, I learned and they gave me a lesson. I let go of that situation because that situation is not in this moment.”

We’ve got this opportunity to make space every week in which we debrief the week, and decouple ourselves, unhitch the trailer of weight and let it fall back down the hill. You have to be attentive and aware of whether or not you have any weight you’re carrying from the last couple weeks, months or years. Can you start releasing some of that tension? It’s a difficult thing to do. And it will change your life.