SUMMARY

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

 

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.)

How do you develop more clarity? This is important for everything we know in high-performance and everything we know about confidence. Here’s what happens:

Human beings are a goal-directed species. If we don’t have clarity on what we want, if we don’t have clarity on who we are, if we don’t have clarity on what our intentions are in social relationships, it’s unnerving to us.

Who’s ever felt lost in life?

Well, if you ever felt lost in life, you know that feeling. It’s often coming from a lack of clarity. You just don’t know who you are, what you’re about, what you want anymore, and it’s unsettling when you lack clarity. It’s really unsettling. You’re like, “Ah, I don’t know what I’m about anymore” and this is where midlife crises come in. This is where the difficulties when you get laid off come in, cause you don’t know what you’re supposed to do that month anymore. Or when you retire from the thing and now, you don’t know what to do with yourself. Or the kids leave the house and your role just changed from parent to, you know, freedom. Something shifted in you and you don’t know what to do with this new world anymore.

Well guess what’s happening in the world right now? At a macro level, the world is in such shifting times that it can feel very uncertain for us. And that lack of clarity of how things are going to turn out can really be unnerving.

A lot of your insecurities come from a lack of clarity. When we study the most productive people in the world, what we call high performers, their first practice is to seek clarity. They’re always asking, “What, what’s important to me here? What’s the best next right action of integrity? What do I really want? What would feel fulfilling here?”

They’re asking more questions, so they’re getting more clarity. Now what’s important about clarity and high performance is clarity is something that is like knowledge or a goal or an aim, but it’s loosely held. What I mean by that is like, “that’s important to me, but I can be flexible and adaptive as well.” It’s not this idea that you have total 100% complete certainty and you’re totally certain all the time. That is an adolescent dream. There is no absolute certainty in anything in life. Right? And so we have to go, “Oh, okay. I can have clear direction or I can be strongly committed to this thing, but lots of people who are absolutely certain about something shift months later.”

On a scale of one to 10 in the last 60 days, how clear have you been about what you wanted in life? How clear have you been about how you wanted to show up each day?

How clear have you been about what you wanted and how you wanted to show up? Did you start the day with some clarity about how you wanted to live that day, show up that day, treat other people that day, serve that day? And it’s so simple. I hear it literally tens of thousands of times a month from people who use a High Performance Planner worldwide. They’re just like, “Oh my God, I started doing this. I did it for 10 days in a row. I’ve never felt so good.”

What happens is they go, “Oh, I’ve really been starting the morning asking myself the tough questions of the day, which prepares me for the day.” Clarity. So let’s think about where sometimes you feel insecure. You know, you’re out in the world. You’re going to go to that party or that networking function, and you feel insecure about yourself. Why? Because in your mind, the insecurity in that moment, in that situation of the networking situation or the party, is coming from, “I don’t know who I am here. I don’t know these people and who I’m supposed to be with them. I don’t know where to go or where to stand or who to talk to” and so it’s just unnerving. The insecurity is “I don’t know what to do in this situation.” Now that type of confidence or lack thereof is something that psychologists call self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is about “I don’t know what to do in this situation.” That’s where the insecurity comes from. The positive self-efficacy means “I believe that I know what to do in this situation. I can handle this. Even if I don’t know how yet, I believe I can handle this. I have the competence to take this on as an example.” That’s positive. But a lot of things in life, you don’t know how to deal with. You don’t have self-efficacy ’cause you don’t know how to handle it yet. This is a new party. You don’t know anybody in it. It’s a new networking event. You’ve never met any of these people. How do you get more confidence in that?

Well, one simple thing you can do is start with clarity. Like, “I’m going to go talk to people. What’s something I love to share about myself with every new person I meet? What’s one question I could ask every new person I meet?” Let me lock that in. Just those two things have been found to dramatically increase people’s sense of confidence in social situations.

“I know what I’m going to share about myself. I have clarity on it. I know what I’m going to ask them. I have clarity on it.” Just those two simple things. We’re not even talking about your childhood dilemmas yet. We’re just talking about what to do in a situation. Having a little more clarity in that situation can really help. And I know I’m being a little bit teasing and facetious here, but I’m trying to make it entertaining too and I promise, we’ll get to some of the heavy stuff too, but I think it’s really important.

The problem with clarity is it’s a double-edged sword. You might have a lot of clarity and beliefs about why you’re not a good person. A lot of people, their clarity is “I’m awful. I’m worthless. I’m no good.” And they’ve stacked up all these experiences to strengthen that belief and their clarity is, “I’m a jerk. I’m no good. I’m used goods. I’m bad. No one loves me. No one ever will. I don’t deserve success. I won’t have success.” They’ve locked in. They have certainty and clarity around a negative identity and outcome for themselves. In other words, they view themselves and their future, negatively, pessimistically, or harshly. And so, they’ve got clarity, but they got the wrong kind of clarity.

See, confidence requires positive clarity, not negative, self-defeating clarity.

I know some people, they sure know who they are and they hate themselves. They are certain about it. You’re like, “Oh that’s not the clarity we’re looking for here.” Right? So clarity is a double-edged sword. If you believe the wrong thing about yourself, that’s going to hurt you too. So what’s the opposite of that? “I’m going to start viewing myself positively.” How can we do that? “Well, you know what, maybe each day for the next 10 days, I’m going to write down a strength that I have. Every day, I’m going to start by writing down something good about myself, literally the next 10 days.” And if you think this is just fluff out there, this is positive psychology.

Write down 10 positive things about yourself every day for the next 10 days and watch what happens for you.

It starts shifting your perception of yourself. If we can shift your perception of yourself—because your clarity of self was established by other people, unless you’ve done personal development work. Most people unconsciously gobbled up everybody else’s opinion about themselves and they’re not actually an authentic being because they haven’t done the self-reflection and the personal development. So what they are is a collection of everybody else’s opinions and desires. They’re not a free, autonomous self-chosen human yet.

By the way, I was that too. So if you ever think I’m judging anybody or speaking negatively of the world, you have to understand, I still do the work. I still came from that. So I’m just sharing that’s what happens, right? When we’re young and dumb, we wander around and we just—if your mom tells you you’re a terrible person, you believe it. If your teacher says you’re never going to make it, you believe it.

If you feel terrible about yourself, I would love for you to journey within and ask whose opinion shaped that feeling?

Write this down, whose opinion shaped that feeling? Whose opinion is fueling this feeling? If you feel so bad about yourself, who told you to feel that way? Who gave you those labels? Who issued those judgments? And why did you so readily take them? Because you know what, whatever you accepted in high school is completely irrelevant today, unless in your mind you want to ruminate and recreate high school. Every day is a new day. Every day is a blank page. Every day, you can start reshaping yourself.

Every day, you can start reshaping your identity, re-crafting your dreams, changing up your mindset, and learning new things. Every day is a great day to grow.

You will be so tired of me saying that, but this is important because if your clarity leads you to feeling bad about it, if you are so confident that you’re a jerk, or you’re so confident that you’re incapable, this is not the kind of confidence we want. We want positive competence, life-affirming confidence, self-affirming confidence. The kind that says “I know my worth. I believe in my ability to figure things out. I believe in my future.” And you deserve that and so do your kids, so do your loved ones, so does your team, but guess what? For those of you who are struggling with your team and your team feels disorganized or disengaged, guess what? They might just be lacking some of this clarity. How can your team confidently execute if they lack the clarity, if they don’t know what is going on right now, if they don’t know what’s coming up right now? It’s not easy when you have lots of people or teams or people you serve. I have that same challenge in my business with my team. I wish I could talk to all my people an hour or five a day. It’s not going to happen, right? So you have to do things when you’re around to make people clear about what to work on, what to focus on, who’s working on that and this. It’s super hard, but with more clarity comes more confidence.

With more clarity comes more confidence.

So I’d love you to do something simple for yourself. Where in your life do you not feel that you have clarity yet? Because sometimes that might be as simple as, you know, “I want to launch this new book, but I don’t know how to write a book.” Or it might be, “I want to make more money on the internet, but I don’t know how to do the internets.” It might be, “I want a raise, but I don’t know how to ask for one.” It might be, “I’d sure like to achieve this pivot, but I don’t know which direction to go in.”

That’s just clarity. And so what you need to do is spend time, both learning, but most importantly, here’s the important piece, please listen to me. You must always make sure that you switch gears from learning to deciding quickly. A lot of people, they have clarity on too much. They’re overwhelmed with all the things they could do. Anyone overwhelmed out there?

A lot of overwhelm comes from over consumption and too little decision.

We got to move.

Clarity is strengthened with real decisions. We have to strengthen our clarity with decisions.

Many people have clarity of knowledge, but they haven’t decided anything yet. Clarity, when it’s locked in as a decision, as a pattern, as a discipline, as a commitment, that feels good. That’s the kind of clarity that we’re talking about here today. The kind of clarity that is decisive and consistent, that’s what builds the confidence, the decisiveness, and consistent clarity.