The Charged Life

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SUMMARY:

I’ve spent my entire career helping high performers set up better strategies and habits to keep them energized, engaged and achieving their best. And the biggest secret I’ve learned in almost 20 years in this field is what I call “trigger moments.” 

In essence, trigger moments are cues that remind you to activate your intentions or habits.

It’s one thing to have the intention to be more kind, patient and loving with people; it’s quite another to set a reminder on your phone that triggers you into being that kind of person. It’s one thing to want to eat healthier but another to setup a mental trigger that says, “Every time I drop off my kids at school, I immediately go to the gym or drive to the grocery store and buy fresh produce.” A trigger is a “when this thing happens, then I do or think that.”

For example, if you want to become more present and calm throughout the day, set up three phone alarms to go off throughout the day with a label that says, “Close your eyes, take ten deep breaths in, and remind yourself to be calm.” These reminders will trigger you to enact the new behavior. 

One of my favorite triggers to set up are “doorframe triggers.” Here’s how it works: When you walk into a room you have a psychological trigger go off in your mind that you’ve associated with that doorframe. So, for example, when you walk into the office in the morning, have three words go through your mind about how you want to interact with other people. Set up this same kind of trigger for when you walk into meetings, conference rooms, and even when you walk into your house.

Whatever you want to achieve in your life - better health, more energy, more clarity - set a trigger. 

If you set up more triggers reminding yourself to stick to your habits and intentions, everything in your life will change. You will feel more energized, engaged and on track and you will experience what we call The Charged Life.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, guys! It’s Brendon.

In this video, I’m going to talk about the power of habits and the number one thing you must do if you’re ever going to maintain your habits.

Now, I know you all have

• big goals,
  
• big dreams,
  
• and big aspirations just like I do.
  

You’ve got ambitions to become an amazing person, to build your career, to create, to contribute, to give, to be an awesome human being. But all of that is impossible without great habit setup.

If you don’t have routine and structure set up in a way that will keep you on track, then you’ll fall off.

And having new goals without new habits is kind of like having a new car without wheels. The habits are the wheels. They’re the things that make you able to achieve the goals.

So,you’ve got to have good habits.

But the challenge for most people isn’t that knowledge.

You know you need to have good habits. It’s you can’t keep the habit going.

Have you ever started at the New Year you’re going to get healthier, and you start that habit of working out on a more regular basis and then it goes away?

Or you say, “I’m going to be more kind, more patient, and more awesome to my partner, my lover,” and you start being nice for two or three days, and then on the fourth day, you’re a jerk.

You think, “What happened? I said I was going to be nicer.”

It’s that you didn’t set up the most important thing you needed to maintain a habit.

I’ve spent my entire career helping high performers basically set up better habits in their lives, better routines, better strategies that they could run on a continual basis

• to keep them energized,
  
• to keep them in a good space,
  
• to keep them engaged,
  
• to keep them enthusiastic.
  

If we can’t have the right habits in our daily life, we’ll never reach high performance.

And that’s my job as a high performance coach: to get you to your top level.

So, what’s the biggest secret I’ve learned in almost 20 years in this field? It’s so simple, but most people don’t have it.

It’s called trigger moments. You have to set up trigger moments to activate your habits.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you want to become a better person. You want to become more kind, more patient, more loving with people.

Now, you can just set that intention or write that down in your journal or set up on a vision board that you look at once in a while, but in day-to-day life, it’s not enough.

You need things to trigger you, to remind you to be that particular kind of person.

It’s almost like if you could have a little angel speaking in your ear all day long to tell you what to do and how to be, you would obviously become better. Well, that makes sense.

Let’s use that idea by setting up alarms on our phones that trigger us to do the very things we need to do.

This is going to be so basic, you’re going to laugh and then I’ll also tell you how I’ve literally taught this to Fortune 50 CEOs and they said it was the one thing that changed their life the most dramatically.

Let’s start with this. Let’s have a goal in mind. Let’s say you want to become more present and calm throughout the day.

• You could write that down in a journal: “I’m going to be more present and calm.”
  
• You could meditate in the morning saying, “Today I’m going to be more present and calm.”
  
• You could start out with good intentions,
  

but those fall apart without a trigger moment set up throughout the day to remind you of that.

So, what if you did this? What if you just set up on your phone three alarms during the day with a label that said, “Close your eyes, take ten deep breaths in, and remind yourself to be calm”?

Let’s say you’re going through your day and it’s crazy. It’s 10:00 AM, and all of a sudden, BING! Your phone goes off. You look down and it says, “Close your eyes and take ten deep breaths.”

Then again it happens at 2:00 PM and again it happens at 6:00 PM and again it happens at 8:00 PM.

What’s going to happen? You always look at your phone, don’t you?

It’s going to go throughout the day.

The funniest thing is I’ve had so many people do this worldwide – we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people I’ve taught to do this – and they tell me all the time, “That changed everything.”

You’ll think once you set it up that the next day you’ll forget about it. No. That alarm will go off. You forgot you set the dang alarm. There it goes off in your face and you think, “Oh right, I’m trying to be calmer and more present. Close my eyes, take ten deep breaths, reground myself, here we go.”

You can’t do it once a day.

You have to have moments throughout the day that trigger you to enact the new behavior.

I know this makes sense to you, but it’s a challenge for a lot of people because they never set those things up.

What if you did it with an alarm?

For example, for me on the opposite spectrum, I don’t want to just be calmer and more present. I want more energy throughout the day.

So, here’s what I do. One of my big trigger moments is every time my butt hits a chair. I don’t care if I’m on a plane. Where we’re shooting here, I wrote a lot of my books here. I wrote The Motivation Manifesto here, I wrote The Charge here.

If I’m going to write, my butt hits the chair, I grab my phone, I open the timer, and I set 50 minutes.

At 50 minutes, the timer starts buzzing. I look at that and say, “That’s my trigger to get energy.”

• So I stand up,
  
• I go get some water,
  
• I do some stretches and exercise just really briefly, or I’ll go for a walk, whatever it is. I’ll do something that usually takes just two to five minutes.
  
• Then I’ll sit back down, set that 50-minute alarm and I’ll work.
  

What that does is every 50 minutes it triggers me to change how I’m physically moving.

It changes my attention. So that throughout the day, I’m continually refreshed. So I never have that 2:00, 3:00, or 4:00 o’clock time where I feel, “Ugh!”

Why? Because I’ve triggered my day. My energy is maintained throughout the day

Let’s say you want to be healthier in your life. Let’s set up some trigger moments for you in this way. Let’s say every time you drop off the kids, on the way back to the house, you stop at the grocery store and get some fresh produce. It’s just a trigger. It’s like I did one thing: drop kids off. Now tied to that, triggered from that action, is go to health food store.

One of the easiest ways to help people maintain a better exercise program is this. Set a trigger.

• You wake up in the morning and your first action is to drink water
  
• Get dressed and put your shoes on and put your exercise shoes on.
  
• You go downstairs or you go to the gym and that’s the trigger.
  

You woke up and you do these actions. Nothing interrupts those actions. That’s the action.

You have to have those set up.

One of my other favorite trigger moments to set up is doorframe triggers. What do I mean by that?

When you walk into a new room to have a psychological trigger go off in your mind that you’ve associated with that doorframe.

Let me give you an example.

If I’ve been working all day and I am going to walk into my house and see my lady, I have it so when I walk through the doors of my house three words repeat off immediately in my mind because I’ve done it so many times consciously. I went to the door, I said the three words, I said the three words, I said the three words and I did this so many times that now when I walk through a door my mind automatically triggers those three words and I remember to be those three words.

• What words would you love to have describe you as a person that you would be happy if that was how people described you?
  
• What would those words be?
  

Have those and set them up in your life.

I teach executives to do this as well.

I have them have a doorframe trigger when they walk into their office in the morning.

As soon as they walk through that doorframe – boom – their three words about how they want to be perceived as a leader are automatically triggered in their mind.

I have them set up another doorframe trigger every time they walk into a meeting, into the conference room. When they walk through the doors of the conference room, they have another three words that trigger off for them. It just reminds them how to be.

These aren’t big, crazy things. A lot of people think they have to completely change their life.

What would change your life completely is setting up more trigger moments and associations that

• when you see something, you do this;
  
• that when this action is taken, then that happens;
  
• that when you have the opportunity to set up alarms on your phone, you set them up so that you’re interrupted in your everyday life to remind yourself to stick to the habits, to stick to the intention.
  

If you do that enough on a continual basis, you’ll find yourself in so many ways completely rejuvenated, and I promise you’ll stick to your habits even more.

And once you do that, everything changes.

I hope that serves you as you’re thinking about your next set of habits. I challenge you to sit and think, “What are the trigger moments I could set up during the day to keep me on track?”

Share some of them here beneath this video. I would love to hear about your own trigger moments. I can’t wait to hear some of your stories and your successes. I promise you, if you set up these trigger moments in your life, you will start to feel much more energized, engaged, on track and you’ll experience what we call The Charged Life.

Like this? Please share it with your friends so that your loved ones can create better habits and stick to them starting now. - Brendon