Brendon Burchard on Finding Fulfillment in Life - GrowthDay

tags:: #source/video GrowthDay Purpose on/fulfillment on/meaning
author:: Brendon Burchard

Intro

I think this is one of the biggest struggles we've dealt with in humanity.

Today: framework that will inspire you and trigger you to journal.

Today's session will be invaluable to enjoying the ride.

Check-in

Where have you been in terms of feeling a sense of deep meaning / fulfillment,
this year, in life?

3/10.

Why can this change so much?

It's the meaning we attribute to things.

Events happen, emotions are triggered, feelings are cultivated.

Our long-term feelings and sense of life is a function of will and
conscientiousness. We get to cultivate feelings in the long term.

If you don't

This has an impact on your energy, your enthusiasm. It'll bleed out into your
relationships. They can't bring it out of you, you have to bring it.

A sense of meaning is cultivated.

Framework

Today: everything you really want in life.

It's human psychology. It's historic, it's universal. This is what we all want.

Connection is relationships. With yourself and with others.

Meaningful pursuits is so critical, most of our time today.

It's a triangle, you can't leave out any. You can live a meaningful life but not
feel fulfilled because you're not alive or because you can't share it.

Probably, most of what you'll find today to work on will be your mindset and habits.

Meaningful Pursuits

Destiny Mindset

This is why people are often blocked from feeling meaning even though they're doing something meaningful. That's because they don't have a destiny mindset.

A destiny mindset means that you see your life as consequential. That you
believe you matter because you're fulfilling a destiny. That you believe you're
leaving a legacy, you sense there's a future space for you where you get to have a meaningful life.

So many people haven't decided yet that we matter. You matter. Yes that
annoying person on the internet's life matters. We lack an overarching life
philosophy.

Brendon believes his life has a consequence. He feels like everything he does
has a ripple effect. It's not a grand scale, it can be just about one talk with
one person who then feels better.

The future holds many amazing things for us, and we all get to make a mark on it.

What we often do in the morning is start scrolling through everyone else's
agenda and life. Then you end up inside someone's to-do list, we end up being
myopic.

Want to feel more meaning in life? Start your day with your life philosophy.
If you never pay attention to the bigger picture, there's no way to find meaning
in life.

Brendon approaches even handling emails as “this is a part of my flywheel effect.”

Want to feel more meaning in life? Expand your vision. Think about life more.
Read philosophy, big people's lives. Don't fall into the myopic trap.

Brendon: “I didn't know my meaning for 20 years but I knew it was there.”

Know something beautiful will happen in your life.

Each day's meaning and our sense of fulfillment are things we must learn to define better

People have hammered negative meaning to so many things, they're carrying all this weight, so how can they lift their heads and look forward? Usually they
were not taught to take control of their thoughts and meaning.

You put the meaning on things.

As an adult you have to decide at some point: this is the demarcation
point—from now on I'm going to pay attention to the meaning I attribute to
things. To make more grace and gratitude and forgiveness.

98% of the world don't read self-development or spirituality. So they're never
taught about how we interpret the events in our life into our identity and
meaning and how we live the rest of our life. Then we live on autopilot, but the
manufacturer sets the speed—and for most people the manufacturer is other
people.

You're not sensing the full depth and breadth of the meaning in your life
because you haven't done the practices enough.

You know which people have deep meaning in life? People who cherish their life.

Journaling has been proven over and over and over again to be the most important
single tool in therapy and in long-term effects of how you feel about life.

Start to define the moments in your life more actively, consistently. For
example, right in bed, what's the meaning I can put on things that happened
today? That gave energy and took away energy?

Presence :ATTACH:

If you want to feel more meaning in life you have to practice more presence.

This has been stolen from us my smartphones. Pepole can't hold attention for 3 minutes because they've trained themselves over and over to scrolling.

The more days that blur by, the less meaning you'll feel in life.

Demand presence of yourself.

“When I have a dinner with my wife, I say this in the minute and afterwards: I'm
so grateful for this moment. I will cherish this in the future. I'm so happy
that we're here now together.”

The more we're thankful in the moment the more meaning we'll have.

Feel the day more.

Fill life with presence. The you feel ful-filled.

Integration

I believe meaning and fulfillment come especially from the acts of
self-reflection, putting meaning into it yourself, and integration. That's
the cure to never feeling satisfied or as if you have enough worth. Integrate
the good things into your identity.

With successes and good things that happen, take a moment and feel it. Fill
yourself up.

Every decision you made that turned out well, every happy thing that happened
the past year—take some time to sit with it. “Even after a broadcast like
this I'll sit for five minutes and reflect on it. Allow feelings of gratitude to
overwhelm my body and mind, just for a few minutes.”

Some of the best celebrations you'll have in life are when you just sit with
some things.

![img](/Users/marcel/Nextcloud/org/roam/_20211201_200450CleanShot 2021-12-01 at [email protected])

What's cool about personal development is it's a download. You'll get insights
that are not even related to what you're learning, just because you're showing up.

Trust in a bigger destiny that all of this is adding up to something.

Connection

Relationship with yourself

Many people's fulfillment is hindered because their self-talk is negative. They
say things to themselves that they would never tell other people.

The way you speak to yourself daily is what leads to your sense of fulfillment
in the rest of your life. If you hate yourself, you'll never find the meaning of
life.

“If you're someone who's mean to themselves, please please please find
professional help.”

Exercise: where does your conscious self-talk happen? Bedtime, journaling, while
making my coffee, sitting in the sofa in the evening. What's the specific
pattern of what I say to myself? Hard question. Most often repeating or
“predicting” talking with others.

Without consistent self-talk there's no consistent character. When we aren't
congruent with how we think we should be we're not fulfilled—that comes from
our self-talk pattern. This can be as simple as having some morning affirmations
for yourself. That's you programming yourself.

Talk to yourself. Cheer yourself on. You kind of have to boss yourself around
a little to keep yourself out of the gutter.

It's hard to feel fulfilled if you don't feel good on how you're showing up.

Relationship with others

If everything is life but your spouse is miserable, it suddenly doesn't feel as
good.

Our job in our relationships is to create real, authentic, caring interactions.

The people we surround ourselves with must be people who are looking for the
meaning of life. Who remind you of meaning and beauty in life.

The people around you shape your meaning. If you're around people who aren't
that way, it's your job to build a group of people next to that.

Brendon: every single person in my life that I converse with regularly has some
sense of this.

Fulfillment should be a topic people talk about every single month.

If you tried, gave them books, and they're not doing it, maybe life has to be
their teacher. (Brendon, in my 20s I was an idiot!) So go to more other people
in your life and spend time with them.

Sometimes you'll drown in your own self-discouragement, and it's your network
that will pull you out of it again.

You barely know someone until you talk with them about the meaning of life.

Aliveness

You need aliveness in all of the points we've seen above.

Health / Energy

Take care of yourself. Do your meditation, exercise, diet, learn to sleep
better. And I promise, mentally and physically you'll flower! Way more likely to
feel grateful in life, to feel meaning and flow in life. When you're wiped out
it's really easy to go into discouragement.

Sense of adventure and exploration

We're a curious cat over here. This is why mental health had its worst year in
50 years of recorded history about this.

The last 2 years will have caused so much harm to people that if they don't take
charge right now of how they talk to themselves, we're going to have a hard 10
years ahaid.

You know how many good relationships die because people don't cultivate
aliveness, novelty and exploration in them?

Doing meaningful things will often feel boring. You have to bring new things.
This has to come from you internally.

Most people have so much more to be grateful for than they actually see, but
they don't see it until they get away from their life and back.

Passion

We want the passion from doing things we deeply feel interested in or passionate
about or even obsessed with. We've got to allow ourselves to pursue our passions
to the point of love.

Love is at the center of what humankind's meaning is.

Hey, what do you like doing? It doesn't mean you've go to quit your job, it
maybe just means you need to give yourself 2 more hours to do something with it.

What does “love” mean to you? (It can difer throughout life.)

How does love connect to your sense of meaning and fulfillment in life?