Some people have been trying. Maybe you’ve been trying something for so long, but it’s just not there yet.
What are the ideas, strategies or elements you need to put into your life to get to the next level?
I’ve studied this for 17 years and it always seems to come back to one of five things.
The first thing it often comes back to is consciousness – becoming more aware of who you are and what you really want in your life.
Some people call it clarity, but I don’t like clarity as much as I like the word consciousness because it’s hard to be clear about things in your life if you’re not present and aware to them. So, if you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to get ahead, what is it specifically that you want to get ahead to? And, is it what you really want?
A lot of people just say…
I want to get ahead, and I say what does that mean? They say, “Brendon, I want to make some more money.” And I say, “Great, make money at what?” Then they say, “Well, I have this job so I’m going to try to get ahead here at this job.” And I say, “Yes, but is the job what you really want to be doing in the first place?”
Because sometimes, the busy work that you have in your life isn’t your life’s work.
It isn’t your real passion, your real drive or your real desire where your work feels like a hobby, it feels like you get lost into it because it’s so great and so fun.
So many people out there are lying to themselves saying, I couldn’t make money at doing X thing. They have some big dream, but they say I couldn’t make money doing that. I say what are you talking about, I know yoga instructors making six figures a year. I know piano teachers making seven figures per year. You can’t go online and not find someone crushing it in any given topic area of life today. The business opportunity is there, it’s just will - you show up in a disciplined and intelligent way, which we’ll talk about.
So it’s becoming conscious of what you really deeply truly desire to do. Because, if you get ahead at things you don’t care about, maybe you’re climbing the ladder or you’re succeeding at something, but it’s not your real thing. It will eat at you. It will eat you from the inside out and deaden the soul, because maybe you have some financial and material success at that thing and maybe you even have some accolades. Maybe these people appreciate you for it and maybe you’re even paying people’s mortgages and paying employees at it, but if it’s not really your thing than you’re in trouble, because you’ll never feel internally like you’re getting ahead, because you won’t integrate those successes to yourself because you don’t find them meaningful.
So, getting ahead begins with becoming conscious to what it is you truly desire. What would you love to do? You can build a business model around anything today. That is the great gift of the online world and what we’ve seen over-and-over worldwide, people in any given area crushing it.
What do you want to do? That’s where we begin.
What do you truly consciously desire to do? Not, what are you doing because you fell into it - that’s not consciousness.
Consciousness means consciously designing your life, deciding who you are, deciding where you’re going to go and what you really want to accomplish.
The second thing we have to have to get ahead is competence.
We have to have knowledge, skill and ability in any given area.
It’s not just one day you wake up with talent it’s that if you’re really going to get ahead you have to study your craft. You have to deeply study it.
I decided 18 years ago now, that I wanted to inspire and motivate people, and I wanted to coach people one-on-one on motivation and high performance. I wanted to write books on the topics. So, 18 years ago I started reading a book a week on psychology, leadership, communication, marketing, anything I could get into my hands about human behavior and high performance.
I was studying everything I could on psychology every week. Now people are like, “Wait, you’ve read a book a week for 17 years?!” I don’t brag about it. I’m not like whoa yeah, look at me. That was for my passion. I knew if I really wanted to succeed at something I had to study it and study it deeply. I couldn’t spend all this time doing a lot of other things I had to study my craft.
The great artists of our past history… that’s what they did. They did one thing. They had a true level of depth of study in that area. Maybe they dabbled in some other areas too, but they became famous because they studied one area.
What’s your area? What’s the thing you need to study on, develop a deep level of competence in, to know how to do it and how that world works?
We have a saying in Montana, “The time to have the map is before you enter the woods.”
A lot of people have a dream and they run out into the woods and just start trying stuff. They take this path and this path and this path, and because they didn’t study best practices one day they wake up and they’re lost. They’re confused about who they are and where they are, and they’re in this dark forest of the unknown with no plan to get out. They had no idea they just jumped into something, they didn’t study before taking that leap.
I always say study, pay attention, learn from the best and model the most intelligent, smart, successful people you can in any given area that you want to succeed in, in your life before you get into it.
Then develop competency by doing it over and over and over again. Don’t do it once in a while here and there, do it over and over, because that’s how you get competence.
That leads us to the third thing, commitment.
If you really want to get ahead it’s going to take another level of commitment.
I always say to people who say to me, “I want to get ahead Brendon,” and I say, “Okay if you’re at this level of commitment, to get ahead means you’re going to have to go to this level of commitment. If you want to earn 10X more, you’ll have to go to 10X more commitment in that area.
You have to decide, what is it specifically that I’m willing to give up and move out of the way now, to focus on this thing and make it a success, to truly work harder and smarter in this area.
Today, do you know what commitment means? Getting rid of distractions.
Stop believing that we can all multi-task and do 50-70 different things, because that’s not true. The most successful people in the world aren’t doing 50 or 100 different things, they have very defined area or specialty that they focus on and say this is my thing.
So, getting rid of all the distractions, meaning if you’re reading celebrity gossip magazines, you aren’t committed to your craft or art unless you are a celebrity gossip photographer, writer, designer, or fashion person.
Most likely, those are not contributing to either your life nor your bottom line. And if you’re really going to develop competence, real skill, real talent in an area, then you have to stop doing so many other things.
That’s why you don’t have a lot of really famous NBA stars who are also really famous quarterbacks and also really famous tennis players. No, they are great at one thing. Olympians tend to be Olympic athletes in one area. Why? Because it takes that much commitment in one area to become great.
That’s how you get ahead, commitment.
I think, once you get a little more consciousness and we all grow in our congruence and ability to be more committed, from there it’s getting coaching.
Because you can do the best you can do all day long, but if you aren’t getting feedback from your friends, your customers, your family members, and people you are trying to serve, then there’s no way you’re going to go to another level.
We all have a level of competence ceiling, if you will, where we hit a top level in which we can take ourselves only so far and then we need someone from the outside to look at it and say, “Look, hey kid, you need to adjust this. Try doing that. Oh, have you thought of this? When you’re doing this it’s only where this level needs to be at this level.”
If you get somebody…. and, everyone says Brendon, “I don’t have any coaches.” Really? How many have you asked?
People always tell me, I don’t have any coaches. I’m like great, how many did you ask? Are we failing in the asking or are we failing in the never approaching? Where is it?
Most people don’t have coaches in their life because they never sought them out.
They say I wish I had that [a coach], but they never actually sat down with someone and said, “Hey, I’m starting something here and you seem to have competence in this area, can we make an arrangement? Can I hire you as a coach? Can I pay you as a coach? Could we do something together?”
I started getting coaching informally, from dozens of people in my industry just by asking. Now today, I coach so many people I can’t even count them all so it’s crazy.
I think that’s what we have to start figuring out, who’s going to coach you?
If you don’t have a list of 10-12 people who you think could mentor, advise or coach you, then you’re grasping at hope and fate that maybe someday a coach will land on you.
I think you have to go out, just like for every other area of success and work a little harder and be more focused in that area to have success there. It’s the same with coaching. You have to get a coach.
Congruence. To get ahead we have to be congruent with the best within ourselves. We have to find that magic, that part about us that’s energized, engaged and enthusiastic. We call it the charge… having an internal charge, an excitement for it and being congruent with who we know we truly can be.
If you are currently at one level of success in life, you’re probably being congruent with how your mind has been fashioning what you’re capable of. Your mind has told you, “I’m capable of only this,” so you’ve settled at that level, or you’ve allowed that level, or it’s gotten easy to be distracted from improving because you’re being congruent with what you think you really are.
Sometimes the easiest way to shift someone and actually help them get ahead is to say, “Look, we have to change the way you think about yourself.”
You have to give yourself more credit. You have to give yourself a bigger vision. Don’t limit your vision for yourself, based on what you accomplished yesterday.You can dream and you can grow into your best person.
You can grow into new competencies, new skills and new talents.
You can break through tomorrow.
So have that vision for yourself. Set a new congruence in your mind and say, you know what…
I can become world-class at what I do.
I can become great at what I want to achieve.
I can become a magnificent person who is loving, engaged and joyous in life.
Set your mind to it, really set your mind to it, and once you have that set in your mind your body and unconscious behaviors will start moving towards that. It will desire to be congruent with your very thoughts about yourself.
If we can do those things, just decide to be more conscious, decide to get more competence in an area, decide to be more committed or go get a coach and be congruent with the best within you, then you can live the charged life.
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