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.)

If those moments of stress and anxiety happen and you’re not doing something to self-soothe, whether it’s like go take a bath, go for a walk, go to the gym, take a breath, lay on the floor, you know, go make your wellness shake, like whatever you’ve got to do, self-soothing is actually the ultimate competitive advantage.

When you’re at work and two people are in a meeting and they’re frustrated, one person loses their stuff because they haven’t trained themselves, and the other person can stay Cool Hand Luke and steady, the peaceful warrior, I’ll put my money on the peaceful warrior every day of the week.

Denise and I were talking this morning, on our morning walk, and she was talking about the power of self-soothing and it really resonated with me. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I think I’m good at that.” How many days do I feel super frustrated or angry or hurt or slow? I can’t count them as days, but those moments are there. And I got to calm myself down. So again, coming back to the release meditation technique or coming back to tapping or self-soothing, if you guys were with me the other day, I taught the simple thing of you breathe in, you breathe out. You breathe in. You breathe out. And all you’re doing is you’re putting pressure on the back of your head, near your cerebellum. You’re pulling with pressure down over the neck and onto the chest. And I will just close my eyes and I’ll take a breath in, and breathe out. And I’ll do that 10, 20, 30, 50 times. I’ll bounce in place 10, 20, 30, 50 times. I’ll open up my body, I’ll tap, I’ll do a lot of things because guess what?

I know the sooner I end that anxiety and that frustration the more productive, healthy, and forward thinking I am.

I don’t want to be stuck there so I have to self-soothe.

Remember if you aren’t doing self-soothing on an active basis, you are not even close to your real emotional powers.

What most people do is they just go through the world reacting, go through the world feeling what their biases feel, going through the world upset, angry, on an emotional rollercoaster 24/7 as if they don’t have complete and utter ability to change that and to feel better over the long term. It’s not easy, but if you’re above the age of 20 years old, if you’re above the age of 18 years old, I hope you spent a lot of time trying to learn to master your emotions, a lot of time trying to self-soothe when you get angry or upset or frustrated. If you’re dealing with stress the same way today as you did three years ago, welcome to GrowthDay, God bless you, thank you for being here.

There is no excuse for people not getting better at stress every year of their life. But we just feel like, “Oh, stress just happens to me.” Well, yeah, emotions do, that is the definition of emotion, it is a physical and immediate impulsive response. But an emotion is not a feeling, a feeling is an ongoing series of emotions that we hold on to that becomes now, as we hold on that feeling and those thoughts, that becomes a mood. That mood becomes a habitual pattern which establishes our overall affect, our attitude and ultimately our personality.

And so if those moments of stress and anxiety happen and you’re not doing something to self-soothe whether it’s like go take a bath, go for a walk, go to the gym, take a breath, lay on the floor, go make your wellness shake, whatever you got to do, self-soothing is actually the ultimate competitive advantage.

When you’re at work and two people are in a meeting and they’re frustrated, one person loses their stuff ’cause they haven’t trained themselves, and the other person can stay cool hand Luke and steady, the peaceful warrior, I’ll put my money on a peaceful warrior every day of the week, right? When you see great executives, great leaders, their ability to be even keeled even when it’s hard is so impressive.

If you haven’t read the autobiographies, the speeches and the writings of a Nelson Mandela or a Martin Luther King Jr. I plead for you to read those things. Even volatile people like great leaders like Winston Churchill, as an example, who would find a way to calm down. Yes, sometimes I know, alcohol was there, but also the ability to change mindset, to look at it in a different angle or perspective. Their ability to shift their mind from stress and anxiety into flow or into peaceful action inspired me, inspired me so much. I thought, “Okay, I have to learn how to do that.” Okay, if I want to be resilient, I have to learn to calm myself down. If I want to be stronger as a leader, I have to calm myself down. If I want to be loving to others, they need to feel my approach to them as peaceful and loving, not an edge of expectation where they have to do exactly what I say.