I recently had the opportunity to attend four days of training with Brendon Burchard in Phoenix, Arizona for his High Performance Academy event. This event was all about how to hype yourself up, how to stay motivated, how to stay productive, and really keep your energy up when you work from home.

I know that this is something I have personally struggled with and the reason sometimes why we started our business a couple years ago, like when I wanted to leave my full time job in 2015 isn’t sometimes the same motivators and reasons why you are working now. If you too have ever struggled with your productivity, your motivation, your priorities, or just anything with keeping herself active and present in your business and stay tuned for the rest of today’s video because I’m going to be sharing my five biggest takeaways from HPA Live with you.

So let me go ahead and preface this video with the fact that I don’t think anything I’m sharing today is going to be groundbreaking. I didn’t have massive at this event the same way that I did at experts academy, which I’ll link below because I did a review of that run an event as well, but I did have massive realizations about mistakes I was making in my day and my schedule in my life and my heart in my mind. That I think will help you to sometimes it’s about coming back to the foundational things we know work that science is proven works and just actually doing them because we all know we should drink more water and we should eat better, and how many of us really do, I’m not raising my hand. All right, so with that being said, let me dive into my five biggest takeaways from High Performance Academy Live and the first one that I really want to share with you is about choosing priorities.

We are constantly a slave to text message requests, emails, slack notifications, all types of things coming into our space and saying, hey, instead of doing what you’re working on now, come pay attention over here. Come do this thing for me. Come help me with this. Your team needs you. We constantly have all these things kind of pulling at us. So does is super important, especially when you work from home and you have lots of clients and team members depending on you that you have real priorities. So Brennan gave us two hacks for making real priorities, a real option. The first tip was that you need to create your own scorecard. And he gave us an example of his where he asks questions like, was this task expected? Yeah. Could they have asked someone else for this? Do I own it? Is it my responsibility? Could someone do it better?

Does it need to be done? Now the questions like that that he ranked on a scale of one to 10 and if it below a certain score, he didn’t do it. He said, hey, back to you. This is on your plate. It’s not on my plate. Or if it really was on his plate than he put it into a schedule and chose it. But he didn’t let all the notifications, everyone else’s schedule, all the tasks in his inbox dictate what he was going to focus on. He was focusing on the core task that day and then he had this filter for the score card to use four priorities. One of the questions that I think is super important that we all have on our own score card is is there a better opportunity? I think we all are guilty of kind of sometimes overly saying yes to things and this was a question that really hit home for me.

Like if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to or what if this thing comes along that I might be planning? So make sure that that is definitely one that’s on your scorecard. Now the other tool he gave us for choosing real priorities was to put a filter on the opportunity or the event that you’ve been asked to speak at or do or help with whatever it may be. If you have something like that that falls onto your plate and you have this kind of real opportunity to think about, you might want to put some filters on it and Brendan’s example, he puts a filter on will it help make me healthier? Like, will it affect my health negatively or positively? How will it affect my family and my connections with those that I care about? And a, will it serve my mission?

Will it help me move kind of the business forward? If it didn’t meet all three of those criteria, he turned it down. If it didn’t help all three, enhance, he turn the opportunity down like an event to speak in front of like 600,000 people or something crazy because it didn’t meet his mission. Your three filters might be totally different, but maybe choose some things to feel like if this is the right opportunity for you to speak on this summit or at this live event or helpless something, put some filters on it of your own and see if you look at it in a different light. Is it really something you want to be doing or is it something that actually doesn’t serve you and you should go ahead and give a competent no to that request. All right, so I hope that was helpful in choosing your priorities for the rest of your week.

But let’s dive into takeaway number two, which was how to keep your motivation. This can be a big one for me. If I’m not working on something that’s serving like a big purpose or really gonna to move my business forward or me personally and really grow me, I have a really hard time staying motivated for the little tiny tasks. So Brendan gave us a motivation checklist of sorts to kind of see, do we need help sparking the motivation, do we need help sustaining it or do we need help turning it into a bonfire? And so if you need help with the sparking your motivation, you are probably missing one or both of these things. You’re missing a really big ambition and you’re missing the expectancy, the belief you have that it’ll happen. So if you have this big goal to speak on stage, but you don’t really believe you can speak on stage, you’re never going to get the sparks, you go after that dream because you don’t believe intrinsically that it can happen on the other.

If your ambition is just to go live on Facebook and it’s not to speak on stage, it’s not a real big ambition. You might also have trouble finding the spark because you’re working for such a tiny coal. So make sure that your ambition is a big, that you are dreaming big, that what you are going after is big and then believe that it is really possible for you. And that will help you reclaim your motivational spark. So once you got the spark of motivation, you need to turn it into a flame. You need to kind of make sure that the s you know Kohl’s or being stoked and that you keep that fire burning. And so the two ways that that if you’re, if you’re good at sparking it, but you kind of lose your motivation midway through, then you’re missing one of these two things.

You’re either missing attention or you’re missing effort. I feel like this is one that gets me a lot where you know you kind of are putting in like a little bit effort, but if you’re honest, you’re a little bit half passing it because we’re high productive people so we can get away without giving 100% but you really need to bring 100% of your effort to it and your presence to it. So make some benchmarks for yourself. Bring that attention to it. Also where you know what your task groups are that are going to move that big goal forward or that you are sending up little benchmarks that you know you need to hit to make sure you’re on track. Make sure you’re bringing that effort and attention and then it’s time to turn your motivation into a raging bonfire. And there’s two things that you might be missing if you’ve kind of got a little bit of a flame going, but you haven’t turned it into a raging bonfire.

One of these two things might be missing. It could either be a consequence of your attitude. You’re not kind of keeping a positive attitude, you’re not staying upbeat, you’re getting defeated really easily. Or it could be a factor of your environment. So it could be that you don’t have the right people around you. It could be that you’re coming to other people who’s low standards instead of other people’s high standards. It could be that you don’t necessarily have the tools you need, but something in your environment could be putting the flames out. So next time you’re struggling in the morning to get motivated, kind of run through this checklist and see if any of these are missing for you. If you need the spark, if you need to build a stronger flight or you need to turn it into a raging bonfire, run yourself through the checklist of those six things and I guarantee you will be able to snap right back on track.

So my third takeaway from High Performance Academy Live was really twofold and it kind of circled around identity, both identity anchors and future identity. You might’ve heard of people talk kind of in the law of attraction world about identity and maybe even in some behavioral psychology if you studied any of that. Where it talks about who we believe we are is how we act when it comes to our future identity. It can sometimes stop us from acting. This is kind of where self sabotage and can come in. If we don’t see a very clear future identity for what were our life is going to be like when you reached the school or if we think that future identity is going to like if we’re super successful, it’s going to make us a bad mom or a bad wife or we’re going to have to be a greedy, rich person.

If we’re successful, if that future identity is negatively associated, it’s going to immediately stop in your tracks. I know a lot of people who have fear of being successful, they kind of fall into this trap of their future identity. Feeling like a gross, icky person. Well, you need to believe that no matter what level of success you achieve, you know you’ll who you are and that you’ll be a good person. So this is where the twofold part comes in. So if you’re finding yourself kind of stuck because your future identity is going to be either icky or you don’t like, it’s possible to be that kind of future version of yourself. You need stronger identity, angers. Identity anchors are really central to us behaving in a way that’s congruent with who we think we are, who we want to be or who we are. So you need some identity anchors in one or more of these categories to help you propel that future identity and get you moving.

Again, you might need some grit anchors or some passion anchors, some productivity anchors, some focus anchors. There was about nine possible anchors that you could have. But take a minute and take stock and say are the goals and the beliefs and the actions I take really lining up with who I want to be now and will those continue to serve me so that I don’t become that icky version of my future identity where I’m a bad mom or greedy rich person. I know that one’s a little bit complicated, so if you do have any questions and future identity kind of rings true with you, maybe check out Anthony trucks work. He was one of the guest speakers that kind of touched on this point or just Google identity anchors and do a little bit of research out on the web. So my fourth takeaway from High Performance Academy Live was really about physiology, meaning our bodies and how we feel in it.

Sometimes we’re not motivated because we just binge Netflix all day and drank the whole bottle of wine and we don’t feel like working. We just don’t feel good in our bodies. But there’s actually so much that we have control over when it comes to that. So Brendan actually gave us lots of little challenges throughout the live event itself where we stood up every 15 minutes we did things and weirdly tacked on ourselves and we did all these kinds of really cool exercises that actually made a big difference in how we felt in our bodies. So from that, I want to give you some of the tips that again aren’t groundbreaking, but I want you to give them a try and see how you feel. The first is that you really do need more breaks than you think. A lot of us batch content or we do back to back calls with clients, but we really need to take a break at least for like 10 minutes, every 50 minutes.

So for the last 10 minutes of your hour, you should be up moving. You should be doing something physical, you should be stretching. It should be just like moving to walk, to get a new cup of coffee, but to do something where you literally move every 15 minutes has other big tip was that you need to make sure you’re eating those meals. Sure. I’m not the only one who’s been guilty of working through lunch, whether that was at my old mind to five or here in my entrepreneurship life where someone wants to schedule a call at 12 so it’s open and I don’t have a lunch written in there. So we take the call, but how important it is to be eating well, nutrient dense meal, drinking, lots of water, these things are actually really important to help productivity have you can be. He shared what he called a ladder of vibrancy and all these things are on there along with workouts and meditation and sleep.

But really for me, moving my body every 15 minutes has really been a game changer where I don’t notice that at 3:00 PM all of a sudden just white, just exhausted because all I’ve done today is sit at my desk, walk to get a cup of coffee ever so often and then come back. Really moving and being conscious of doing some activities like jumping or dancing or singing or doing things every kind of 15 minutes have really already made a big impact on my productivity and my energy levels. And my enthusiasm for what I’m working on that day. So definitely give these things a try. I know they’re not groundbreaking to drink more water or eat better or move your body more, but you aren’t doing them and you’re feeling bad as a result. So start doing them and feel better. So while the four other takeaways are all things that you can do on your own, one of the biggest takeaways and something that was talked about the entire event was the importance of a community.

Whether that’s a paid community, a free community, a casual community, your team as a community. Just how much we need the support of others, both as humans from a scientific perspective that actually if we aren’t surrounded with other humans, we die as babies, right? Like we don’t have human contact, we can actually die, which is crazy to think about. Um, and that we’re so isolated, right? So we’re literally like starving ourselves of the human connection we require to flourish and be high performers. And also that if you aren’t surrounding yourself with the super supportive people or people who are also dreaming big, that you’re really doing yourself a disfavor and you’re going to kind of play down the things that you want to achieve. I know personally for me, this is a big takeaway from 2018 into 2019 I know so many entrepreneurs are like, oh, what would you do first if you had to start all over again?

And they’re like, oh, I’d list builder. I do this with my website. I honestly would build a community and find a support community much faster. I joined tons of programs and yeah, there’s Facebook groups. The Facebook groups are full of bad advice even if it’s free. What has really helped me to keep motivated and dreaming bigger and playing bigger is finding a supportive group of, in my case, female entrepreneurs that I can hang out with online that I mastermind with, that we meet biweekly that we’re accountable to has been a game changer. So if you don’t have a peer group, a mastermind group, or even some casual friends where you get together and you actually talked about your goals. So I’m not just saying like you get to, you don’t go to a mommy and me breakfast and we talk about being moms, but a place where you can talk about your goals, your ambitions, your dreams, these big kind of things and have real strategies and tactics that support it.

Masterminds are great for something like that and you don’t have to join a paid one. You could definitely put together one yourself, but it’s so important to, to your high performance because you really need other people that are constantly striving around you. So that’ll help kind of, you know, light your fire. We talked about it in the motivation checklists. You need a good environment. So community is so important to your high performance. I highly, highly recommend that if you are a female entrepreneurial, you check out some working otherwise put together your own, reach out to people, join a meetup group, do something that gets you in constant contact with other people who are growing and striving. So Brendan literally kicked off this event saying that common knowledge is not always common practice. And I think nothing I shared with you was super groundbreaking. Okay? What you’re honestly, if you’re honestly grading yourself, you’re not doing it.

I know that I definitely wasn’t. So I highly recommend it just for the next 30 days. Take the commitment, take the action, challenge yourself to actually do the Dang thing. So again, make sure that number one, you run everything through a priorities checklist or filters so that you are actually working on things that are getting you towards your goals and not just being a yes person to kind of help others, but you’re making sure the things you say yes to actually help you. If your motivation starts to fail, go through that motivation checklist and see what parts you might be missing so you can get your spark going again or fan the flames or build that raging bonfire. Align up your future goals and future identity with identity anchors that are going to support the actions that you’re taking. Drink more water, take care of your body, work on how you feel in it, and to find a community and supportive group of people to help encourage you on your high performance journey.

So those are my five big takeaways for you. I hope they’re helpful. I really recommend giving them a try. Trying something different. If this is kind of something you’ve struggled with or there’s going to be another High Performance Academy Live sometime this fall, maybe check that out. It really was an epic four day experience and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is kind of struggling with productivity or motivation or just kind of purpose. All those things are factors of high performance.

Your Turn

Leave a comment below if you have any other questions about what I learned at the event, and if you’re interested in going.