The Easiest Way to Destroy Your Own Peace

Do you know what the easiest way to get overwhelmed? See one problem and then multiply it. You know what a lot of people? They get one bad email, oh my whole inbox must be terrible. And all of a sudden they avoid answering their emails. They multiplied the problem. That's where your overwhelm is coming from. You are taking it personally and you're amplifying the number. That's the overwhelm. I don't even like to use with any of my clients the word overwhelm. I use the word overload. You are overloading yourself with too many tasks. Why? Well, because I need to be this kind of executive. Oh, that's identity. executive who replies to everything 24/7 and has my hand in every single project. I'm not a CEO who delegates. I am not this. So, I'm going to take on all these things that overload me and I'm going to go complain about being overwhelmed. Once you recognize, wow, a lot of the overwhelm in life is identity. What does it mean about me if I don't handle this well? And then I go into the ego insecurity loop. Well, it means I'm not good enough. It means I'm incompetent. It means I'll be abandoned. It means I'll look like a loser. It means they won't love me. It means I'll suffer forever. It means I I I followed by a negative statement. I will suffer. I will fail. I'll be abandoned. I'll be unloved. I'll be incompetent. Do you follow? Overwhelm is almost always about the I, not about the to-do list. It's how you perceive yourself or will perceive yourself in situations of stress or demand. And now you're overwhelmed. What if I can't handle this is the central message that you say to yourself in overwhelm, isn't it? Instead of like, I'm going to handle this the best I can with enthusiasm and excellence and great care. That's a different frequency than going, I can't handle it. That's overwhelm. I am going to handle this with great excellence, enthusiasm, and care. That's a different level of identification, isn't it? I'm in command. I have agency. I can move through it, right? I will handle it positively. These things actually matter, the way that we speak to ourselves. It was like, how do you not get overwhelmed, Brendan, with all the things you have going on? I'm like, well, because I'm not a person who overloads myself with fear of failure. If I start stacking on those negative thoughts about bad outcomes, about everything is relevant right now. If everything is everywhere all at once and it means I'm a failure, yeah, guess what? I'm going to be flooded. But listen, when you feel flooded, it's because you're unfocused. That make sense? When you feel flooded, you are unfocused. You're taking, oh my god, everything's everything everything everything. everything everything. But notice, it's not just there's everything. It's everything everything everything. About me. What does it mean about me? And so, instead of focusing on me and everything happening at once, I move up that ladder of meaning into your real source of power, which is intention. So, we had information, we had interpretation, we had identification, and now we have intention. Oh, is my intention right now to feel freaked out, flooded, emotional, angry, shut down? No. Would you ever say that? Think about this. Would anyone ever say, it's my intention? No, it accidentally happens. Why does it accidentally happen? The meaning, the ladder. Why does stress and overwhelm happen? Information coming in and out, interpretation, identification. That's the only where it's coming from. What's familiar here? What's unfamiliar? What's good? What's thwarting me? What's supporting me? Okay, what am I saying about myself right now? What am I sensing about self? Small ego Brendan, what is he doing right now? But then, if I get trapped in all those things or it's immediate tsunami, the most important thing I can do is ask. Whenever I feel stressed, whenever I feel overwhelmed, I ask myself a very simple question. What's my next right action of integrity? Instead of zooming on the focus of the stress, of the difficulty, what's my intention? Okay, I I can see this screaming

problem is here. What is my intention for this day? week? What is my intention for my purpose? It's realigning back to intention. This is putting you back into awareness and agency. It is I want you to call it if you write down a anything today, it's forward eyes, not crazy eyes. CRAZY EYES, AH! NO, OKAY, I CAN SEE IT. I'm forward. It's faith in a forward motion. It's looking purposely. It's what is my intention now? It's full I can sense it and feel the tsunami hit me. People will say, you can choose to sense it or not. I'm like, probably hits you. If it's an emotion, it's automatic, impulsive, physical, unconscious. Just bam, hits you. Okay, it's hit me. Now what? Do I dive deep into that negative feeling or instead of ruminating, summoning, feeling, diving deep into it, I return myself to the white space of the next choice. I put myself back at the wheel. It's like, okay, I was at the wheel of a big ship. And you know, it's like those old pirate ships, you know, that big wheel they had with like the handles on it, okay? And all of a sudden like a wave hit the ship. ship, right? And the wheel got ripped out of my hands. It spins, right? The we all lurch this way. What do I do in that moment? Do I go, gosh, that was a big wave. Let me walk over to the side over here. Let me look down and look at Yeah, boys, there's lots of waves down there. No, what do I do? I grab the wheel. And I go, what was our course? We had a course. Where are the stars? What are we aiming at? Let me find my way back to course. Not let me go stare at more waves. If you leave the wheel to go stare at the problem and all the other problems, guess what? The ship is going to keep flipping and pushing and turning and you're going to be off your feet. If I'm feeling stressed or overwhelmed, I'm like, I'm looking at the waves. I like yeah, the wheel got ripped from me, but right now I'm feeling stressed overwhelm cuz I went on, wow, there's look at this whole ocean of waves over here. There was a problem there, here. That one's probably going to knock me down. These things are probably get You got boys, we're all going to drown. And then I start telling myself this big story, right? I'm ruminating, reflecting, catastrophizing, observing all the other similar problems. There's a wave, there's 50 other waves. Do you know what the easiest way to get overwhelmed? See one problem and then multiply it. So easy, right? I got one bad email today. You know what a lot of people? They get one bad email, oh my whole inbox must be terrible. And all of a sudden they avoid answering their emails cuz one bad one came in. They multiplied the problem. They expect every email to be bad, so they stop replying to them. You see how simple it is? It's like you multiply a problem, you look for similar problems, right? It's like you go into one kid's room, the room is a mess. You can't believe it. You're angry. You're just so angry at these kids. The room is a mess. So, what do you do? You go in the other kid's room to see if they're a mess, too. Why would you do that? That's causing you more stress and overwhelm. Why do you have to go looking for more problems, babe? Write it down. Why do I have to keep going looking for more problems? Why do you keep Because it steals you away from the wheel. It tears you off course. You can get hit by the wave without going looking for waves. Cuz remember, emotion is just a wave. Most of the science shows and proves, literally, in neuroscience and in biological measures, most emotions and even intense emotions, they hit you like a wave. They come in and they're out. On in general, anywhere between 90 seconds and maybe 3 and 1/2 to 4 minutes generously, depending on the research study and the locale of that study around the world, meaning where it's happening. If I go looking for more anger, what do I feel? More anger. If the problem hits me with the one kid and I go looking for the other kids, if this thing happens and I keep looking for it everywhere else trying to pattern match and I ruminate on all the matching problematic patterns everywhere, everything all at once. How can I be shocked that I'm overwhelmed? Hey, my friend, sun is going down behind me and I just want to thank you for watching my YouTube channel. You know, so many of my subscribers are always asking me, Brendan, how do I go to another level of my life and stay consistent in my personal development and

really get progress? You know, we all want to be more motivated, more productive, more confident. We want to be a better leaders. better at our craft. But how do you do that on a consistent basis? Well, that's why I built GrowthDay. It's an app that you can use that builds your personal growth streak that every day you come in and you do a series of actions and you listen to some inspirational training and life strategies that advances your life. It's very hard to stay consistent in your life. I know sometimes you watch a YouTube video, you read a book here, you listen to a podcast there, but you're not developing your habits, you're not scoring yourself, you're not finding real progress and insight that kind of wows you and opens up to I say the awe and the real agency that you have in life. So, please go to GrowthDay in the App Store. Just go to the App Store, go to GrowthDay to growthday. com and get GrowthDay. I promise you with your 7-day free trial, you'll go through GrowthDay and in 7 days you're going to be like totally like feeling fired up, but also you'll find a new momentum cuz every day as you do your growth streak, you start to really discover what you're made of. And we access different parts of your brain. You're listening something inspirational, you're doing a checklist or doing a journal prompt that blows your mind, you're scoring your habits and reflecting on your day in ways you've never done before. We're basically taking all of personal development and putting it into a streak that you'll get like totally addicted to. You'll be addicted to that progress, that growth, that joy and energy that you deserve to feel every day. Go to growthday. com or go to the App Store and just download the GrowthDay app, start your 7-day free trial, and let's level you up. Every day is a great day to grow, but you have to stay consistent to get real progress and to really change your life. Go to growthday. com or go to the App Store and get the GrowthDay app right now. You are problem matching. You are problem multiplying. That's where your overwhelm is coming from. You are taking it personally and you're amplifying the number. That's the overwhelm. What if I can recognize all the problems? I don't take it personally, but instead of looking for the third, fourth, fifth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th layer of these problems, I instead go yeah, there's a lot of waves out there. Um where was I headed? Where shall I point my attention now? I can accept that the wave hit me, but let me go ahead and grab this wheel and try to chart myself back on course. That's maturity. That's awareness. That is your awakening point. That's what we call agency. It's like again, I can accept it. I can see it. I felt the wave. I'm not angry at the wave hit me. I'm on an ocean. Why am I angry a wave hit me? Well, in life is there suffering? negativity? Why am I so shocked and upset that the wave hit me? I should go of course that happened. Of course this Of course there's waves. Great. Now, where do I want to go? That's the power of intention. It's the best metaphor I can ever give you. Wave hits the ship, but where was the ship going? Who do you want to be with your teammates on the ship? How do you want to be with the kids on the ship? What was the course that you were charting? Remember, Matt, you're going towards the islands. Don't go stare at the corner into the waves. That's where the overwhelm is. That's where the storm looks so scary and uncontrollable. You know? Soon as you can like orient yourself again. You know, there there's a reason even in modern ships that the captain is up front, right? And the captain is in there with his team and the windows kind of go around like 180. There's a reason that right behind them there isn't a 360° screen showing them the entire ocean, you know, and it's chaos. It's like, oh, you know what? We're going to go right here. I got my controls right here. What do I want this control to say? Where to go? And all I got to do I got to start working the dials. I don't need the storm to end. Oh. That's your breakthrough. You don't want the storm to be there. The overwhelm is already there. I don't need to have things perfect. I don't need the calm to be there.

What I need to is to be back at the dials and steadying myself back to course. Does that make sense? This is very hard because we live in a culture right now that has told you for now literally a decade of just awful science and truly like really awful societal expectation that you're supposed to get calm then carry on. Everything is supposed to be perfect and then we can be happy. The day has to be sunny and then everything is back to normal. And I'm like, but that's not always life. Right? I'll give you an example. Uh and I'm trying to be extreme in some of these examples, but I hopefully this helps. It's like when I'm working with a boxer as an example, which is funny cuz I can't box at all. Just so a lot of the work I do is the mindset stuff, so don't think I'm fancy. It's like uh when I'm working with a boxer, this happened just a couple months ago. This person um I'm going to share it without giving a name. I'll just share this. Uh this person's on a losing streak. And what's happening is in the middle of the fight, they want the fight to be going perfectly. They want like the pain to stop. They want to win several rounds. And it is their need and expectation for that that explains why they keep losing. Often I have to tell people I'm like, oh, you you're in the fight. You're in the storm. The You don't wait until the storm is over to go where do I want to go? You need to start navigating this fight towards where you want the fight to go. Don't be obsessed and angry that the last one didn't go the way you want. I have to do the same thing with golfers all the time, which is silly. Right? Golfers get so mad about the last shot that they keep messing up the next shots. You're so upset and attached to the previous motion that you messed up the next motion. I go, oh, you're still in it. You're The storm is still happening everywhere around you. The goal isn't to act once the storm is over. The goal is to get up in that captain's chair and go, I need to start moving this thing to where we want to go. I need to start taking command and charting this course despite that rogue wave, despite the storm. This is called agency in psychology. And if we lack agency, it's almost always because we get sucked into the storm and I want you to watch what's happening. You lose intention for one reason, the backwards ladder. I'm failing here. This is terrible and awful and I can't get my feet beneath me. I've never seen this before. Oh, they're all going to think I'm terrible and listen what they're saying about me. And then your self-talk goes into worse information, too. I suck. I'm terrible. I'm a bad fighter. It goes backwards. And so why is it so powerful? Cuz when I share about this intention, I'm telling you your freedom you know, starts with identification, not getting so attached, but then also aligning back to your course. Align When I have a bad call, a bad meeting, and I want you to like know, like it's hard for people to imagine this cuz they you know, they see me teaching like this. It's hard to imagine like I have bad calls and bad meetings all the time. Every week of my life since I started teaching personal development, which is now almost 30 years ago, uh some negative thing happens in my life even though I'm a personal development guy. Even though I've read all these books. It's like it's not like the waves don't hit me. It's that I keep aligning back to purpose. Can you just write that down for yourself? Align back to purpose. That's what intention is. intention is, okay, I'm not just going to survive the storm and then I'll start again. I'm going to start navigating now. If you're in a bad relationship, if your marriage is falling apart, you start navigating now. You don't wait until it gets to couples therapy. You don't wait until the divorce. You navigate now. You don't wait until all things calm down and they're perfect in your marriage anymore. You start navigating now. You start asking the questions. You start having the conversation about what's the intention of our relationship? What do we want for each other? How do we get back on course? You course correct soon. If you don't and you go and you stand at the corner and you're up front on the you're up on

the you're at starboard side with all your friends talking about all the crappy things in your marriage, complaining at the dinner table, complaining at the lunch table, calling everybody and gossiping about everything that's going on with your spouse, your kids, your family over and over, you're right back down to the bottom and you're creating a toxic situation. And the wheel is just spinning over there and you're shocked that the family's spinning out of control, your relationship is spinning out of control. You're standing staring at the waves, taking it personally, telling the world how unfair it is. This is the difference between being the captain of your fate or the victim on the sidelines. —