Mindset Upgrade Part 1 The Mindset Lens Brendon Burchard

When I talk about mindset today, I'm going to talk about these recurring four A's, right? A to the fourth. I'm just going to give you a simple way to think about why mindset is so important in ways maybe you've never thought about.

The first one is all related to your aim in life. You ever heard that phrase, some people aim too small, they aim too low. That's a mindset thing. Your level of ambition and drive in life is directly tied to your mindset. So in a little bit I'm going to draw out what that even means so you can understand it. But listen, everyone's level of aim, how they envision the future, what their goals are is set on their mind on set on their mindset. Does that make sense? Your aim.

So if you're ever like, why don't I have any dreams anymore? It's not just because you're tired or because you had kids or because you got laid off or it was a bad week. It's not a circumstantial in the minute thing always. Even though, as we'll talk about, mindset is dynamic. What ends up happening is there is a mind set there that's not helping you re-up level up that aim after a setback, after fatigue, after problems. And I tell people all the time, if you're trying to gauge the health of your mindset right off the bat, you should look at your ambitions, your desires, your goals, your dreams, I don't care what you call it, your intentions, the things you want to manifest, whatever you call that forward future orientation, your forward future orientation that is ascendant. That's what I mean by your aim, right? I'm aiming higher. Does that make sense? So that height of your aim is correlated to your mindset. And what I found over and over is a lot of people who talk about this academically, they fail to incorporate this enough. They'll talk about goal achievement but not the size of the goals. And yet we know this from motivation and philosophy, you know, from hundreds of years old that your aim is really set upon your mind. And I want you to have that belief again. and we're going to talk about how to get it back. If you've been aiming too low, but you don't know why, this is one of the most important trainings of your lifetime.

The second reason we need to master our mindset is because our affect is tied to it. A effect. This is your feelings. Okay? This is how you feel. This is you. If you want to enlarge it, it's your state of being feeling or affect can be more targeted emotions and feelings day by day. But in general, your sense or your feeling, the affect that you have in life and that you give and you sense is tied to how you perceive things. Cuz mindset again is your lens. I'm literally going to draw out the lens so you can see what do you mean by a lens and what am I looking at? But there's a way that you perceive the world that makes you feel certain things. And if the way that you are perceiving the world, as an example, is pessimistic or threatening, guess how you're going to feel on a day-to-day basis. That lack of, you know, optimism or that lack of security is going to do what? It's going to lower your aim, as an example. It's not going to make you feel as good. And so as we move through here, a lot of your day-to-day feelings, emotions, the affect that you sense or even you bring to the world because it is dynamic itself is really affected by this.

And this gets very sensitive for people because they're saying, "Wait, you're saying my mindset controls all my emotions and feelings?" No, cuz bad things happen and there's injustices in the world and there's all the I'm like, "Uh-uh." stick through the training because our feelings and emotions over a period of time can be conditioned and a lot of people have been conditioned for a really terrible mindset and because they've been conditioned for a terrible mindset. Their emotions follow suit. They don't feel the positive range of emotions they deserve in life and they can't figure out why. And often I have to say it's because the conditioning that you're having daily is not helping you. We'll talk a lot about that today. You know, when you're scrolling through your social media every single day, what you're really doing is you are doing mental conditioning. And we know from the research that what we are doing as we're scrolling through social media every day is that we are training our mind for judgment, for comparison, and for division. That's probably not the best way to perceive every day of your life. And yet, if you swipe through thousands of times a day like the average person, now we're in trouble.

So, mental conditioning is always happening. Don't worry, I'm not making social media the total enemy here because maybe you follow positive people. Maybe you and I met through social media. So, thank you. But I know that you have to really be conscious of who you are following and what you are consuming. You already know about the old mindset saying, garbage in, garbage out. So that's really true also about your feelings and the mental and emotional energy of which you are consuming. Don't say consuming, say conditioning. You don't consume social media, you let social media condition you. Soon as you understand that mindset becomes a higher priority, right? there's and because for me I know that social media and we know from most of the research it leads to a lowlevel degraded sense of stress over a period of time and it's like I don't I don't want to condition my mind for that I mean I mean who has enough stress in their life you know I'm sure you already have enough do we need to condition it for more talk about conditioning for the opposite when we talk about stress today

Another reason that it is so vital to master your mindset but also uh gauge where your mindset is is based on your actual achievements. your actual achievements. We we know this especially from a lot of mindset work that's been done even with youth about improving their mindset as I said earlier improves their grades but we also know this in corporate America improving your mindset improves promotability improves workplace performance improves sense of wellness in the company and so we know and we can correlate your sense and your ongoing reality of progress. Are you achieving your aims? That's a sense of progress, right? I I had this aim. I moved towards it. I achieved some progress here. I feel better. It is all correlated. It all relates to another.

But truly, when people come to me and they go, you know, Brendan, I'm having trouble hitting this quarterly goal. Or Brendan, I can't break my personal record. Or Brendan, I'm struggling to write the book. Or I haven't earned what I want. or I've been trying to improve my marriage but I can't. Those are all outcomes, right? Those are all outcomes. Those are aims they have. Whether or not they actually can achieve the thing, they often think of am I good enough? And I often say that's not the question. The question is, have I conditioned my mindset and my habits to make it likely? See, you probably grew up in a frame where are you good enough? Are you worthy? Are you deserving? Are you a good girl? Are you a good boy? And those questions end up being things that condition our mindset to think about our worth versus asking, have I condition my mindset and my habits and the actual practice of my life to make that outcome likely? Now I I can control that. I I can do something about that. And that is called personal agency. Your sense of agency in life is so important. Can can you do the thing? Do you feel like you can assert yourself? In the old style of psychology or actually even before that in philosophy, this was called my will on the world, right? C can I impose my will? Can can I like make a difference? Can I affect life? Can I change things? Do I have some sense of control or capability to to to help? That is a sense of agency. Do you believe that you can take action and change outcomes in the world? And more importantly, do you actually do it? Because agency is not just a philosophy like I'm capable, I can. It's like prove it, right? Is there movement there? That's why achievements is a real thing. And a lot of people today, they don't want to talk about achievement because achievement got a bad rap. Just like ambition got a bad rap. Why? Because so often people don't have it. And so they're like, "I don't like it. I don't need it. That's stupid." Right? Because when we don't have the thing that we desire, we start hating on the thing when we see it in the real world. So if I don't have the level of achievements I want, guess what I hate in the world? People who are high achieving. It's kind of strange. When I don't have what I want and I see it in the world, I apply hate because I feel bad about myself. And this is why we start judging other people as you'll see with mindset. Remember, a lot of people have been conditioned over their lifetime through scrolling or through social interactions to judge others, to compare, and to divide. And I want you to understand how poisonous that is. If you're always instantly judging other people, you're setting yourself up for a lot of hurt in life. If you're always comparing yourself to other people, you're setting yourself up for a lot of hurt in life. If it's always me against them or there's only so much, I'm setting myself up for real hurt in life, not my opinion to you. Psychological outcomes. These are ill health in your mental world. And so we have to understand like, wow, I got to be careful about my mindset and how it's been conditioned by certain people or certain actions of my own life when I scroll or when I take in garbage because garbage comes out. Like I have to tell you, it's just like it's one of the most important things. And I tell people all the time, I know this will be a little bit silly, but I'm going to draw out some dynamics for you to understand how this works today. But just being like casual with you for a moment. It's like if you have a pet, you know, you need to take care of that pet every day. You need to you like you love on that pet, you care for that pet, you feed that pet, like you're nice to that pet. Like your mindset is one of your pets in life. Like it is a thing you need to take care of, right? I want you to put it in the comments in capital letters. I need to care for my mindset, right? I need to care for it. Like I'm very thoughtful. See, I want you to hear this. Your mindset is not you. Your mindset is a lens, right? Have you ever worn sunglasses before? And when you put on the sunglasses, if you don't take care of the sunglasses, all those scratches, all of that dirt affects how you see the world. That's really important as a metaphor I'm actually going to draw out for you here in a minute. Well, that's the same thing. You got to take care of your pets. you got to take care of his sunglasses. And if you can externalize your mindset that way, we're gonna have great progress today. Really great progress. Because the mindset, it is not you. Mindset is a lens as we're going to talk about. It's a way that we interpret things. And we're going to work through how you do that. And I'm going to give you 10 very, very simple shifts or lessons that will help you today perceive your own mindset differently. I know the double antandra there. Okay. Okay.

Number one, today we're going to talk about your mindset as a dynamic lens. Your first mindset shift is you need to understand it's a dynamic lens. You don't have a growth mindset. You don't have a fixed mindset. Those are concepts, but they're dynamic even. They're not real, right? You can adjust them. They're on a spectrum. You can shift them and shape them. They're not forever types of things. They can be developed and there's a bigger spectrum than just those things. Often people think it's just one thing. I'm like, it's not. It's there's a dynamic lens to which you perceive the world. So, let's let what are we perceiving? Let's draw out your lens. I want you to do this in your notes. I need you to have this forever. Okay. So, we're just going to we're going to like put you here and and this is you looking out through your lens. Okay. Hopefully, you know, it's happy, but it might be sad. I don't know. I don't know. But I can tell you it's going to be affected by three simple things and then I'm going to break down how those perceptions can really shift your life. So, stick with me. This is the biggest part of the training. And if I get you to understand this concept and these concepts from here, we will work right through how you interpret things, right through your negative thinking, right through your relationships. We'll work right through your skill development. We will write work right through your achievements. We'll work right through your stress and the bad days and your health. Like all through one simple picture. So draw it out. Do the work with me. Okay? Okay.

So you're going to have a lens. This lens is dynamic, right? It's always being shaped. But what are we seeing is the question. When we think about mindset, what are we perceiving? What what what is the thing we are seeing through this lens. I'm going to draw this out with you. Please draw it out with me on your sheets and then we're going to work through it. The first thing that we are perceiving is our self. Okay? How do I perceive myself? My mindset is my set of beliefs and attitudes and assumptions. about myself right that's one lens that we have right I am seeing who I am and it is developing for me a belief about who I am I am perceiving the world and how I move within it but I'm perceiving myself like I am knowing who I am and it is setting up for me an attitude about myself and the world it is setting up a set of assumptions about who I am and how I operate what I prefer and how I progress in the world. So, it's a lens. It's dynamic. It's day by day, right? Isn't it true? A couple weeks ago, you felt pretty good about yourself, but then you found like maybe two days later you felt really low about yourself. Why? Because mindset and our perception about oursel is a dynamic lens. One day you look in the mirror, you feel pretty good about yourself. You're having a good day. The next day, I'm fat. I'm ugly. What's wrong with me? I'm old. Look at the wrinkles. You're terrible to yourself. Why? It's dynamic. That is why doing daily personal development, daily mental conditioning is so important because it's very easy for your mindset to go off the rails. Your mindset is malleable. It means it can change. There are a lot of forces that can change it. I'm going to share those with you today. But you got the concept, right? It's like, oh, wait. The like my perception of myself can change. And we believe like or we've been told that mindset is more like structured than that like it will last longer than we think. It actually takes a lot of caretaking. It takes a lot of caretaking. The good news is when you make a fundamental mindset shift as you learn today like one fundamental mindset shift can actually improve people's performance, grades in school, promotability, work quality. We can see those improvements and they last like a fundamental mindset shift from your first set of fixed mindsets as an example to a growth mindset that can last three years in the research. Like it it's fundamental. It can last but it needs a lot of caretaking like that pet if you want to be actually happy if you actually want to feel good. If you actually want to progress through life because remember my job is not to teach you baseline. I'll let the, you know, the the the fundamental concepts or that generalization, I'll leave that to philosophy or to academic psychology. My job is to interfere in your life as a coach. And my job in these interventions is actually to get you to measurable higher performance. That's my job. I need to get you to longer term success and improve your well-being and your relationships while we get there. Right? That's the work of high performance before. Okay, now let's back all the way up. Why is this so important? Your view of yourself is very dynamic. This is why the work of personal development, why the work of reading, why the work of journaling, why the work of self- introspection, meditation, therapy, coaching, the stuff of know thyself. You don't know thyself forever, right? It's not like one day you have an epiphany and you know yourself forever. Know thyself is an active teaching and you have to continually think about how you perceive yourself but more importantly not reflect on it not ruminate it condition it how should I view myself if I want to move through my world toward my aims successfully how should I to conceive of myself and think of myself we're going to get to this here in a little while I'm kind of previewing a few things to come because I'm actually going to break down all these areas We're going to start with again the idea. Here's you. You have a lens through which you view the world. You view yourself in such a way it sets up your beliefs of self, your attitude of self, your perception of self, and your belief in your capabilities in the world. Okay? You do the same thing though for your social relationships. Your mindset affects the beliefs, the assumptions, the perceptions, and your sense of relatability with other people. And you have to really think about that. It's like, oh, okay, my mindset is making my marriage happy or not. My mindset is raising good kids or not. My mindset is helping me develop a team or not. And this is so important because think about how easy it is today that this dynamic lens has gotten super scratched by judgment, comparison, and division. Just think about how profound that is that so many of us view the other the other political party, the other preference, the other style, the other personality, the other inogs. We view these other things as enemies. And if you view this, if you view yourself positively and you view other people negatively, is that going to have a certain result in your life? Of course it will. So, we're going to talk about how you're viewing these things and we're going to really break it down to gauge where you are, not only just in terms of like mindset conceptually, but your actual mental health and outcomes in life. It's very important to pay attention to this. You have a dynamic lens and you have to shape this dynamic lens on your social reality. As an example, a lot of people when they perceive their spouse, they're perceiving a person 15 years ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. They haven't dynamically updated their perception, their belief, their assumptions, their connection with the person who's here now, your spouse, your partner, your kids, they change. And as they change, have you changed perception with them? or have you held them to one thought, one pattern, one expectation that doesn't even exist anymore, that's not fair anymore. And this is why I keep using I'm going to keep coming back to this word dynamic. A dynamic adaptive mindset is so vital for real world consequences. Okay.

So, what else do we view? Well, obviously we view the world outside of self and social. There's circumstances. There's how the universe works. There's nature. There's situations. There's opportunities and threats and challenges that we perceive the world in. Not just our immediate social environment, but the world overall, right? The world, where it's at, where it's going, how do we feel about it. This is all related to our mindset. Okay? Okay. So, when someone says mindset, you're going to think, "Oh, it's a dynamic lens of how I interpret, see, perceive, and feel and move through the world related to myself, social, and the world." Okay, that's the biggest picture I can paint for everybody. And now we can get into the to the work of let's bust these things down. What is it? What are the common elements that we are actually looking for, perceiving, and sensing like in here where all this relates? So, let's draw this out and I'm going to teach you a simple little framework if you're ever trying to like tune up your mindset. Here's what you're actually looking for. Here's what you're interpreting and sensing within these things. And it's going to explain a lot about again your aim, your affect, your achievements, and your agency. Okay? I'm going to use a new framework. It's just going I'm going to put a little bit of naming conventions to these. So, I'm going to call I see three. Okay. So, we're going to move through three I's. Please write this down in your notes. And three C's. And this is going to kind of explain as we move through these. This little picture we're about to draw is going to explain how you feel. It's going to explain where you've been going. It's going to explain so much about your psychology that you probably never had someone break down before. So, I really want you to do the work with me today and stick with me. I know some of you I'm like not going fast enough. Other people are always like, "Could you go could you go back?" I just I want you to listen and study this so closely. This might be something you share with family members later or you teach your kids. It's just a way that as you think through it can really improve your life. So, IC3, what does it stand for? Okay.

When we are looking out, our mindset is always active. It's dynamic, right? It's moving through. And as we look through this, I call IC3. The first thing that we don't even know that we look for in each of these areas and we gauge our happiness, our energy, our actions is intent is actual intent. So for example, if I think other people's intent towards me is negative, how does that shape my feeling that day? Let me let me give you an example. You have a big meeting coming up. You got to go in the boardroom. There's going to be six people there. They're all in position above you, right? They're your managers. They're your bosses. They're the VPs. They're the seat suite that, right? They might be above you in your job. Just imagine that. And if before I go into that meeting, I think they all think that I'm an idiot, how do you think that's going to make me feel as I walk through the doors of the boardroom? That's mindset, right? We gauge intent. So when I am making assumptions about others, one of the assumptions or beliefs I'm casting or thinking is like what do they want? And that shapes my mindset about them. And now it shapes my level ambition for that meeting. See how it all flows through. I'll keep coming back to those things. Remember everything here is going to shape your aim, your affect, your emotions or feelings. It's going to affect your achievements and it's going to sense your your your sense of agency in the world. So see you think think about this one. People when they think about the world, does the world have positive intent for you or negative? If the world is for you, you move through the world differently. If the world is against you, you're in defense or threat all the time. Where is that coming from? Your mental conditioning, your beliefs, your assumptions, your thought patterns, and how you think the world really works. And all of a sudden, it changes your entire position. See, your mindset changes your position. Your mindset sets you in a certain position. Does that make sense? Your mindset sets you in a certain position. Approach, avoid, fight, flee, flow, feel, right? Your mindset is shaping that. And a huge piece of it is based on intent. Same thing with yourself. If you know that you are a mean, snide, jerky, hateful person, how do you feel about yourself? Obviously, you perceive yourself low and that's actual research into self-esteem. Our mindset has positive or negative consequences on our actual self-esteem. How we perceive and feel about our self. Same thing with our friends. Same things with the greater opportunities of the world. So, what's the intent? See, uh, and this is not I don't want you to think about this just as like some psychology or coach guy talking about. I love Einstein's entire perspective about the world. Einstein said, "The most important decision that you have is whether or not you live in a friendly universe." Let that sink for a minute. The most important choice or decision or frame you could ever have is do you live in a friendly universe? Is the universe for you or against you? Is the world and circumstance and situations for you? When you're going to that meeting, is that meeting for you? Is that an opportunity for you or is that a threat that's going to crush you? That make sense? When you walk into the ring to battle, is that an opportunity for you to demonstrate and showcase and experience and flow through your skills and your training, or are you going to be embarrassed by this person? Do you see how that shapes how a fighter would enter the ring? That's daily. That's daily. When I literally work with professional athletes and CEOs, we have to gauge what do they think the intent their intent? What's your intent? What's other people's intent? What's the world's intent? And I know as I'm going to draw this out here for you, the the dominant frame here is is it positive or negative? Just as you're thinking about IC3 today, it's positive or it's negative. Right? I either positively perceive these things which gives me optimism if I believe the intent that I have that others have for me that the world universe divine God has for me is positive if I believe the intent of these are in harmony and positive guess what I'm optimistic I take more agency what happens the 4 A I talked to you about all go up my aim goes up my AF goes up, my achievements goes up, my agency goes up, and it's measurable. So, think about your life. It's like, wait, but if I think other people are out to get me, the world sucks and it's unfair all the time systematically for everybody everywhere of my, you know, of my nation, of my race, of my style, of my preference, of my Inog, of my astrology, uh, if I think that, you know what, I I just I keep screwing things up, you know, I always self-sabotage, then I'm going to be pessimistic about the world. And as I'm pessimistic about the world, negative, what happens? I get in negative loops. I get in negative thinking. I get in negative behaviors. And all of a sudden my aim goes down. My affect goes down. My achievements goes down. And my sense of agency in the world goes down. Is this so basic? But if it's so basic, how often have you personally and mentally conditioned yourself to even ask the question, what's my intention here? What do I think their intention is here? What do I think God's intention is or the universe's intention? How often do you think about that? How often you think about that is another way of saying, are you mentally conditioning yourself for positive outcomes? That's all. So many people never think about it. So they just take how they feel, but they don't realize how their feel is an outcome of their mindset. Okay, I hope this is helping you. We're just moving through. Okay, that's the big one. That intent piece is so huge for people. I can't even tell you.

Now, this one you're not going to like unless you're super smart, which I'm not. So, just stick with me. Intelligence. You know this is a continual strange controversy in the world. But how you perceive intelligence, how much intelligence you have, how much intelligence other people have is the universe or nature or God. Is there an intelligent design as an example? Really shapes your mindset in the world. We you know this from you know childhood studies from you know the 40s and 50s. If a kid thinks they're smart or is acknowledged for intelligence, they perform better. The way that we hold somebody's intelligence can really dynamically shape how they perceive their self, right? And many people, they h have only ever perceived their intelligence on, for example, one plane, like did I do good on my scores, my SATs? So, they have an academic intelligence or a memorization intelligence or a test intelligence. But often intelligence is so much more well-rounded or holistic than we think about, right? Because there's musical intelligence, there's biological intelligence, there's physical movement like dance intelligence, like there's intelligence of how I move my body like dance or or workout or um you know, balance, speed, stamina. Those are like a certain kind of intelligence, aren't they? So there's a physical type of intelligence. There's like an IQ type of intelligence. It's like some test that they made, which by the way is very important. A lot of people don't understand like IQ is a correlate to tons of positive life outcomes, right? But a lot of the IQ tests are really at a genetic level not that malleable, right? You might be able to move it up a little bit. However, all the other forms of intelligence and there's a lot. There's social intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, academic intelligence, you get the idea. As we think through multiple ways in which we are intelligent and we move through the world, well, that's important again to our positive or negative aim, affect, achievements, and agency. So, let me give you an example. Intelligence. How intelligent do you view yourself? Are you smart? Are you capable? Which domain are you intelligent in? If I think I am good at something and I can measure that I'm good at it and I believe that I'm capable at it or I have competency enough in it, that really shapes that really shapes how I engage with the thing. If I feel like I'm dumb in an area, I'm more likely to be silent. I'm more likely to be embarrassed. I'm less likely to literally raise my hand and ask a question. Do you know a lot of people go throughout their life scared to ask the critical questions they need to ask to have progress because they think they're dumb in some way? Does that make sense? So intelligence is a big important one. Like I also tell leaders all the time, do you think your people are smart? Are you looking for intelligence? Are you hiring for intelligence? How do you perceive intelligence? Which intelligence are most important in this role you're hiring for? If you think your people lack intelligence, then guess what? You don't delegate as much. You don't move as much. You don't progress as much. And guess what? You have bitterness towards the very people you hired because you never considered the question. And so, of course, it shapes our social experience, too. Hey, guess what happens when parents think their kids are dumb? They treat them differently. They have all sorts of anxiousness. And the problem is again people perceive it through one simple like oh like they're just smart or not smart. You need to broaden that perspective into multiple intelligences. That's for another day here in growth day. All right. Same thing with the world. I think this is one of the most important ones. I believe there's a divine intelligence. I'm a person of faith and so I believe that good things are being planned out and designed out for me because that gives me a lot of optimism in the world and so I believe good things are in the future. I believe God divines good things for us, wants good things for us, made us for good reasons and because I believe that and I feel that I move through the world differently. Right? We know that if we're nihilistic in some way or we don't have a sense that, you know, there's some kind of intelligence, whether it's consciousness, uh, when we believe everything is just total chaos, we tend to be more pessimistic. And by the way, I have no judgment about whether or not you have faith or you believe in a god or or what type of god you believe in. That's not my I I'm somebody of faith. I'm somebody who was raised in like a Christian/bddhist dowist tradition. So, I feel like I have a really good sense of how I feel about it and that's what's important. How do you feel about it? How do you perceive the greater world, universe or divinity does shape your overall feelings in life? And that's really important to know. Okay, so let's move on.

A third A and I think this is really important is when we think about um intent with I'm sorry the third I intent intelligence and this is important interaction is the interaction I have with other people positive negative. The more positive interactions you have with other people, guess what? Your mindset is better with other people, your sense of what self-determination theory would talk about like relatedness improves. And if we improve your sense of relatedness, we can literally see that you do better work. We can literally see that you're happier. We can literally know that you move through the world differently, right? And so if your interaction with other people and you perceive it, your mindset is I'm good with other people. I like other people. If that interaction is there, oh, let me tell you something, everything changes. Everything changes. Like for example, I used to have a mindset that said, again, mindset is beliefs and assumptions and perceptions and how we move through the world. My mindset about like networking events was super negative, right? I was like, I'm not really good with other people. Networking events in the world that the world imposes on me these networking events, they're stupid. Why should I have to go there and talk with people to punch bowl? It's so dumb. And so my mindset about a fundamental thing in life, talking with other people, networking with other people, like was so bad that I didn't want to do it. And it limited my ability to meet new people who could open new doors, who I could learn from, who I could get feedback from. So if you're not out with other people in a positive way, there was a mindset thing. Who said it for you? Who conditioned it for you? Did you do it consciously asking what should my mindset be? How should I take care of my mindset or condition my mindset to achieve the outcomes I want? Well, my outcomes were well, I'd read a lot of books on personal development in business and they all said the same thing. Your net worth is tied to your net worth. Your level of skill and capability in life is tied to your mentors. I was like, well, if I want high skill in life and I want high earning in life, I'm going to have to deal with like those people. So, I've got to train my mind to put myself on the field, don't I? I had to train myself to think my interaction with other people, it's going to be awesome. We're going to have fun. There's going to be value there. I'm going to learn something from people. It's going to be fun. There's going to be value. I'm going to learn. And so I had to start doing things as you learn in this training where I had to start conditioning my mindset. Start conditioning my mindset to make me want to go to networking events to make me perform well at networking events to make me enjoy life talking with other humans. For those of you who've seen me on big stages, you know, I've had the blessing of of of what um keynoting every major arena in North America. You know, I've been on a stage pretty much like a major stage every month of my life for 20 years. Like I I'm out there a lot speaking. At the very beginning, I saw it as a threat. I saw being out in front of people as a threat. I saw being out in the world as a threat. And because it was scary, I avoided it. And I had to reshape or shift my mindset because remember mindset is not you. Mindset is a lens or a pet. You are caretaking of that. Right? So if you're like well my mindset's so terrible about public speaking. It's like that's not fixed. That's not there. A mindset's dynamic. It it it's based on these things that we were talking about. Okay. If you're following closely now, you're starting to see, wait, how you feel about dealing with other people, how you feel about being in front of other people, that's the interaction I'm talking about here. What is your like when I move through the world, I move through the world. I had to train my mind from the conditioning I had and the experiences the act not just conditioning someone told me, the actual experiences in my life set me up to move through the world very defensively. so defensively. I was like learning to be, you know, I was learning martial arts as like a very young man. I was, you know, watching the world very defensively because I grew up in a place where your neighbors, your teachers, the principal, they all hit you or smacked you with a board. Like not kidding. So I grew up in a very defensive position. But I had to ask a question. Is the mindset, assumptions, beliefs, habits, the way that I move through the world, is that mindset going to help me achieve the aims I have in life? To be happy with other people, to have progress in life, to get to do what I want to do in this world, not just what other people told me or gave me reward or punishment for, but the way I want the future to be. Let me look at that mindset and ask that question. Is it helpful or not? And I viewed interactions as threats. I viewed interactions as something that might hurt me or diminish me. And I had to go, how's that going to turn out? How will that mindset that the world and other people are going to hurt me or diminish me all the time and make me feel negative, where is that going to lead me? And I knew the research is clear. It's going to lead you into the basement of emotion of life. It's going to take you into a negative pessimistic territory that's going to lead to less results, less wealth, less relationship, less love. Man, I had to get real about that. Same thing. You have a mindset with other people. Many of you guys know my origin story in a personal development was somebody I loved cheated on me and it made me see all interaction as a negative thing. Remember the positive and negative dominant frame is a simple way to think about this. All right. So now we're gauging now now you're seeing where just just think about these three eyes for a minute. Maybe it's a basic understanding that you already have. But now when you start applying it to these and you start doing a little bit of genuine journaling or self-reflection on these, now you're starting to see where your mindset is a worldview, isn't it? It's not just like how do I feel? It's like wow this is this explains a lot of my life how I perceive these specific things and each one is different how you your your level of u how you perceive your intent your intelligence your interactions this is all shaping up into a pretty big worldview but we're like halfway through we haven't even started like I'm still on lesson one you have a dynamic lens okay but like I said this is the most important framework it will help me speed through the others so I hope that serves you okay now we're going to move into the I see three. So 1 2 3 I's intent, intelligence, interaction. Now we're going to go into the C's.

The first one is your sense of control. Your sense of control. This is huge in psychology, right? Your sense of control here and your need for control here is a very strong determinant of your mindset and the way you move through the world. This is so important, right? I I don't even know how to emphasize emphasize this one enough. You've seen a lot of research in this. I'm sure you've heard of like the locust of control. Like do you have an internal sense of control of life like I can shape things like I have high agency or do I have an external sense of control I'm at victim to the world the world just happens to me and I want you to think about if you could just take a minute and think about your last six months of life in your last six months of life where was the control for your daily life experience when You sense the world is controlling you. When you feel like genuinely compelled to people please, do everything for everybody else, that the world has imposed unfair, strict limits on you, that's not called a happy life. When you feel like your spouse or your parents or your peers or your boss are unfairly controlling you in such a way it's actually diminishing your own self-control, your self-regulation, your feeling about self or your life or your day. That feels terrible. That's how big this one is. And our job, our job is to move up your sense of personal agency in life. That's a way of saying what is your perspective or your assumptions about how much control you have. Now I want you to understand this is definitely a spectrum here because if you want too much control and everything's not perfect towards the way you want to control it and you think you can control your kids 24/7, you can control your spouse 24/7, you can control your boss 24/7, you can control your customers 24/7, you can control the code 24/7, life is going to hurt because if you think it can control everything, we're in trouble. This is why one of the principal orientations of literally all of personal development landed in the 12step program to say, "Please grant me the serenity to know what I can control and not and the wisdom to know the difference." I I know I didn't exactly right, but you get the idea. It's like wisdom is knowing what I can actually control and what actually matters. Okay, that's important. But see, a lot of people don't realize your mindset has been shaped by this tremendously. This is why it's very, very important to be attentive to how you consume social media related to things like politics or the economy or, you know, government relations because what ends up happening is you don't have a lot of control there. Yes, you can vote, but if every day you're consuming things and going, "Oh, this is stupid. They're bad. They're bad. They're bad. They're bad. They're bad. They're not doing it right. They're not doing it right. They're not doing it right. The more you sit there and you go, "They're not doing it right. They're doing it bad. I have no control. They're not controlling it right." You are setting yourself up for an extremely negative, corrosive, and divisive mindset. Because soon as I say all the time, they're not controlling it right. Well, that's because they don't care. That's because they're dumb and they're messing up my life. So I'm building these for a specific reason in this order. That's why I put it IC3. You're gauging intent, intelligence, interaction, but this one is such a big shift. I want you to understand how it's like you might even star. Your perception here often drives everything else. And so because that's your immediate sense of power, isn't it? Your sense of power is often based here. And it's really important to understand I want a lot of people I go let's shift your sense of power from here and let's start up here. Let's shift your power into your intention. Not do you control everything in life but let's set clear intentions and have positive intentions for the world. Let's put my power starting there. A lot of people they base their power based on can they control it. But see sometimes what you need to have is a positive purpose or intent and you need to be moving into the world with that positive purpose and intent and sometimes the outcomes will just happen. I'll give you an example. I can't control whether I finish the chapter as a writer. Right? I've written nine books only released six of them. um all of them fortunately bestsellers. Uh and I can tell you that even today as I go to sit to write I can't control am I going to finish the chapter. I can have the intention and the clear spirit to sit down and to open the world and to write. I can control if I show up but I can't control the outcome. Does that make sense? I might be able to

Control do I show up, but I need to make sure I control do I show up with positive intention. That's so important. Do I show up? Have I prepared? Have I been doing research? Have I been studying? Trying to improve my intelligence in that particular area? Am I going to make my interaction with my writing good today? Or I'm going to hate the process. And I know this is so basic for some people, but I'm just here to tell you control is a major thing. And your sense of control over self is so important. Your sense of control over others is so important. Right? The more I can allow myself not to want to control everybody else. I can allow them to be themselves, move through the world in their way, not try to control every decision. I tend to be happier. But more importantly, I tend to have grace. And for me at a spiritual level, granting grace is the opposite of trying to control. And grace is not just like, um, you know, they're doing something wrong, I'm going to forgive them. Grace is also knowing I don't control them. Like, there's another intention happening for this person. I'm not even in the picture. There's, for me, there's a divine universe. There's God happening with them and I'm not even in the picture. And that's a level of grace. I'm like, grace is going to handle this one. So I can stand back a little bit and not try to control it so much. And that's given me a tremendous amount of relief throughout the world. When you stop trying to control everybody and everything, it's great. But if I can make sure I have that clarity and control of my intent, now things move differently. Now you're seeing the interaction here, right?

Okay. Next is capability. Capability. Often people get confused on this. And they're like, "What's the difference between intelligence, capability?" Capability, I want you to think of more of like a a broader competency and efficacy. What does that mean? It means, can you do the thing? Can the thing be done efficiently, effectively? Can it be done? Can it be seen through? Are you capable? Like, do you have the knowledge, skill, and ability to see it through? Do you have the knowledge, skill, and ability to see it through? Uh, for the dorks out there, that means competency plus efficacy, right? Knowledge, skill, ability, talent, right? A lot of people are competent, but they don't do the thing. Efficacy. Get it done. All right. We want competency and effectiveness. Another way to say it. We want you to know the thing, learn the thing, understand the thing, and do the thing. And if you believe you are capable, we know from basic stuff on self-advocacy, you move through the world differently. You engage challenges differently. You try harder. It's like a whole different move. And I think a lot of people when they think about themselves, they don't understand how capable they actually are or could grow into. See, I viewed my capability low when I was a young man. Later on, as I realized how bad that was, meaning negative for me in my outcomes. What are my outcomes? My aim. That's my ambitions, my drives, my affect, how I feel, my achievements, what I actually do and how I progress through the world, and my agency. Do I take action? Those things were low because I viewed myself as incapable, inadequate. But once I realized I was like, oh, this can be shaped. Your capability in almost any area of life can be completely shaped. For example, I couldn't do public speaking. You guys don't know this right now, but I literally have four words on a piece of paper right here. So, everything I've done today is ext. There's no teleprompter. There's no one's in the room with me. I'm in a room by myself with four words on a piece of paper. Like, I had to develop the capability to extemporaneously speak. I had to develop the capability to write books. I had to develop the capability to set up the internet, uh, for what we do. Not I didn't build the internet. I had to set up my websites, my marketing pages, my code. I had to learn how to do. I had to set up this camera today. I didn't know how to set up a cameras. I didn't know what this lens was. I had to. That's those are capabilities. I believe I can develop capability. This is one of the most important aspects of all mindset. This is where you get the conversation often of a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, right? Do I believe I can learn to improve? That really sits with a sense of capability. And I think this is a nice way to think about more than just a growth or a fixed mindset. It's like each of these are can be moved. That's why I'm this is a dynamic lens. Some days I don't feel capable even though I actually am. What's going on there? We're going to get that in a moment.

All right. So your capability. Are other people capable? Not just are they intelligent. Are they capable? I believe a lot of people are intelligent, but do I believe they're capable at the thing I needed them to do? Probably not. So, I'm going to delegate it over here. Same thing with the world. Is the world capable of setting you up? Is your government capable of setting you up? Is God capable of setting you up for success? If you think everybody else around you is a a a blundering buffoon, incapable of helping you or asserting themselves or achieving anything great, then we're in trouble. I know a lot of people right now, they think humanity is incapable of overcoming our challenges. And I'm like, what more evidence do you need? Look at what we've done. But a lot of people's mindset is, oh, we're all stupid. We're just, you know, we're all chimpanzees who have no intelligence whatsoever and we just keep screwing things up. And I'm like, how does that make you want to move through the world? It does have an effect, doesn't it?

Okay, last big piece. And this is important. And this changeability, I like to use this word. Psychologists like to use the word malleability. Uh, another way of saying adaptability, dynamic, malleable is just changeability. Can you change you? If you believe you can change you and you can learn and you can grow and you can get better. That's what they mean by a growth mindset in the sense of self, but also with other people. Can your kids get better? Can your spouse get better? Can your students get better? Can your audience get better? I know I work with a lot of coaches who fail in the first three years because the truth is they actually don't have the belief and the assumption that the people they're coaching can really level up their life. They're just trying to get them to improve a limiting belief versus transformation. And I'll tell you what, if you're working with a coach who only wants to repair a few limiting beliefs versus a coach who believes you can transform, these are completely different human beings to work with. Isn't it? See the your mindset in that specific instant of how you perceive people's changeability. I know how much people can transform their lives because I've actually measured it as a career. I know it's more dramatic than you think. And because I know that when I'm with people, I have so much hope for them, so much faith for them, so much intent for them because I know how much they can change. I know how much the world can change. So when it sucks on a Monday, I know next Monday can be completely different. There's so much chaos and change in the world. It's like great. You know what? This down period, this down economy, this difficult time. You know what? There might be another season of sewing coming up right now. It's just like it's difficult. It's a bad time. It's a bad season. I can see the world getting better. You see the mindset shift again. Now you have a big picture of what we worked through just to get the foundation so I can move fast through everything else in this next hour together. The not the dominant number one mindset shift you must have in your life is that your mindset is a lens, right? And this lens right here, this lens is something that you must condition and care for. Just like a pet, just like your sunglasses. This lens that you have is shaping how you perceive yourself, the social environment and relationships you are and the greater world. How so? Well, you are judging these things and perceiving these things based on intent, intelligence, interaction, control, capability, and changeability. How? So, it's positive or it's negative. Now you have the total math for understanding your mindset. These are the factors involved in the math that gets an outcome called your mindset. Is it helpful?