Your Burnout Isn’t From Hustle, It’s From Hiding

The longer you had the ownership mentality of your life, the more sense of worth I promise you have, the longer you were in reaction mode and you didn't have ownership. That is why you don't feel as strong as you deserve to feel. If you live your life in reaction mode, year after year after year after year after year, you don't feel like you're gaining competency in life. If you have sensed a real pattern of ownership for your chapters of life, maybe not every situation, not everything is your responsibility and not everything is your fault. But if over a period of time, take a look of a three year view, a five year view, a decade long view, maybe not the first day on the job, but the career, if you start looking at it and you can see that, listen please closely, that you took responsibility to develop yourself in those situations and to assert yourself in those situations, then you probably had a sense of ownership. So ownership is, I decide I'm the responsible party here to develop myself. And I decide in order to do that, I need to assert myself, I need to push an agenda, I need to have a point of view, I need to express myself, I need to set boundaries. I need to take ownership of the general experience that I'm having and the value that I'm putting out there. Now, if you never decided to do that, then you weren't conscious, you were reacting. And please listen, the longer you had the ownership mentality of your life, the more sense of worth I promise you have, the longer you were in reaction mode and you didn't have ownership. That is why you don't feel as strong as you deserve to feel. If you live your life in reaction mode, year after year after year after year after year, you don't feel like you're gaining competency in life. The more competent we become, the more confident we tend to grow. Now that doesn't mean that we always have worth, as we'll talk about later. But it is a big piece of it. It's a huge piece of it. So guess what? If I never assert myself in life, I never learn what I'm capable of. If I've never asserted myself into life, never put myself out there, never took ownership, had a point of view, set some boundaries, took some actions, built a life. If I never built it, well, then guess what? I don't value it as much. You know, people who actually build a home, they value it more than the market does. Often buyers, or I'm sorry, often sellers who are trying to sell their house after they built it, they're Stunned that they can't get the value that they think it's worth. And it probably is worth to them specifically because they crafted it. They cared about the floors and the floorboards and the wall color. They've obsessed about where the windows were or where the light was coming in or what the doors and the hardware looked like. They poured their heart and their soul into something. So of course they valued it so much more than if they just walked in and got a key. Does that make sense? Because why? Because they built it, they crafted it, they took ownership of it from beginning to completion. Ownership and value. Building and completing, learning to make the thing, designing the life. This is all under this category I'm calling ownership. This is the most important thing we can ever read. When people talk about taking back control of your life, they're talking about authorship, they're talking about ownership, they're talking about responsibility. And this is the thing we have to do. We have to please listen. Get you into the mental mode of, oh, I'm in this scene. I'm in a scene of life, and I am directing myself in that scene. I'm going to develop the character that I see here, and I'm going to make them take actions in this scene on the stage. And I'm going to be purposeful about that because that person, I want their character to develop like this. So I need to have them engage in the scene. Right? You're in the scenes of life. Are you directing yourself in those scenes? It's so important to know that over a period of scenes, you have done that. If you just stand in the back, if you just npc, if you're not engaging, if you're checked out, that is why you don't feel strong, because there's no character there. Right? We need you to have character. And character is conscientious choice. Character is conscientious choice. Here's what happens for a lot of people. And please listen. If you really dislike, if you're really down on yourself, please listen closely. What has happened in is you keep gauging your worth on circumstances, not the character in the circumstances. And this is where a lot of people never find their center, their real strength, their value in the world. If I continually focus on the circumstances of life, life will continue to feel unfair and I will feel unworthy and incapable of. Of handling everything because I'm always gonna have to react. But of course, in life, we can also enter a scene and instead of being reactionary in that scene, even if something happens, we can say, hey, the character entering the scene, the character is like this. They're gonna behave in this way because they have these personality attributes. They've made these decisions about themselves. They value themselves in a certain way. They have a sense of worth because of who they are or whose they are. And so they're going to enter the scene and they're going to behave very differently than somebody who's just a victim in the scene or reactive the scene or can't handle the scene. But notice we're not judging the scene anymore. Many of you, you think your life is your history of scenes and circumstances. And what we have to do to get you into your real strength, into your real powers, into the future you deserve is we got to get you back into character development. Just like as you built a house and you valued it more, it had more worth to you. When you built yourself into the character you are proud of, then you have more worth. Like, we can all say everyone's worth is the same in the world, but it's not true. Because your worth might feel different to you on a Tuesday than it might on a Friday. Because on a Tuesday, you went through the motions. You acted irresponsibly, you were overreactive, you were overly impatient. You let your impulses take over you. You got angry at somebody. You weren't a person of high character that day, but on that Friday, you know what? You woke up, you had goals, you were intentional. You worked your way through the day as the person you wanted to be. Even if the day kind of sucked, even if you faced obstacles, even if you fell on your face, you chose to get back up. So you were proud of your character that day. You built yourself up that day. Even if you were building yourself up against a difficult situation or building yourself up from a fall. See, when you are building yourself up, when you are building the house, when you are building the character, strength comes back into your life. A sense of worthiness because there's sturdiness, because there's intention, because there's character development. I know it sounds a little philosophical or metaphorical, but I can't tell you how important it is for you to realize you need to adjust your mindset from, oh, the scenes and the circumstances of my history drive my value and my worth today. No, it does not. Your sense of ownership is what is driving that psychological value. Hey, guys, it's Brandon.

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A month online as well. Just go to progress mode.com your sense of how did I show up in life? What was my character? What was my character like? Do I like that character or not? And I can tell you, you can do all the therapy and all the therapeutic work and you can go to wellness retreats and do yoga all day long. But if you don't like the character that is showing up consistently in your life, and specifically you're not building that conscientiously, then I can tell you you'll never feel that true sense of knowing and strength and vitality that you deserve. If the wrong character keeps showing up in good scenes, still no value or worth. If the wrong character shows up in bad scenes, still not much worth. You want to know that you are building this, that you are working this, that you're proud of yourself. See worth. I wish we could say it's always stable, but remember, sometimes you feel like crap on a Monday. That's normal. I hate this idea that we're all supposed to feel 100% worthy all the time. Because you know what? I'm okay if I don't feel worthy for my wife's affection at the end of the day. If I was a jerk to her earlier in the day. Because sometimes holding to a standard creates a stability that creates a sense of value or worth. That's real life. Now I know that's not going to rub a lot of people, right? Because what you want me to do is say no, no, no. Worthiness is 100% guaranteed for everybody all the time. And maybe that's true if you have a divine or spiritual connection, you just think that we're all worthy of everything. Maybe that's true today. I'm talking about your sense of knowing yours. Remember, own your worth and you just like I we can be honest that we don't always feel that. Isn't it true? There's times in your life you don't feel it. And if you're honest, you can even say, you know, I didn't deserve it. I really didn't Deserve it. I don't feel the value of myself today. That's okay. Can I be upset with myself? Can I devalue myself? Can I say, you know what? You didn't earn it today, Brendan. Can I do that and still show up tomorrow with intention and develop my character and not shame myself into stopping? Of course. Can we all acknowledge our wrongs and still march on tomorrow? I think that's fine. I know it. That doesn't sound good. Because in a. In a TikTok world, we just want everybody to feel perfect and complete all the time. It just doesn't work that way. Someone has to be real. Sometimes it's okay to say, you know what? I work with clients all the time, Brendan. I don't feel worthy, and I can't figure out why. I'm like, okay, let's look at the last couple months and the major scenes and challenges of your life. Who showed up? Were you intentional? Were you acting with integrity? Were you proud of yourself? Now, of course, we all have moments where we mess up, where we destroy the house, where we, you know, we would just want to blow it all up. We've made a mistake. We. We. We feel incredible embarrassment or shame. But remember, those were scenes that. That was happening. The character in the next scene, you get to redefine. You're the director. And so if that happens, that's normal. That's called emotion. Emotional waves can take over you. Emotions tend to be things that are automatic. They're impulsive, they're physical. They just happen. Emotion just sweeps in. But feelings and an ongoing sense of worth, that's going to become a conscientious thing from today on. Today on, we're going to lead our sense, our sense of worth in build mode, in character development mode, meaning we're going to forge ourselves so that we feel that sense of pride, of competence, of confidence and internal or spiritual value that we want to grow into. And it's okay for some of you, like, that's aspirational. I bet there's times in your life where even though you knew you had all the reasons in the world to be proud of yourself and you had a sense of belief that you just didn't feel worthy. You know, I don't know how many, you know, personal, valid books you know you've read or how many spirituality books you've read, but isn't it true that you can do all that work and still not feel worthy? You know, I was a kid who at one time in my life, when I was a teenager, contemplated taking My life. I had become suicidal after the breakup of the first girl I ever loved. And so I know what it feels like to have no sense of worth is like zero. In fact, less than zero. And if you've ever been there, you're just like. When that sense of I don't have any worth is matched with, it doesn't matter, right? I have no earth. Nothing matters. Those are the darkest places we go. And I know many of you, like me, our mindset, have been stationed there at certain times of our life because, again, our attention was given to the circumstance. Not character development, not ownership. See, in those times, what we ended up doing, we kind of release those two things, don't we? In our misery or our pity, we release those. The reality that we're in charge of the story, that we're in charge of the character development, that we're supposed to say, okay, kid, you got your heart broke. You're laying in filth in your bed. You haven't got out of bed in several weeks. You haven't been eating. You're really struggling. Okay? As a director, I'm gonna call it scene. All right, now I gotta say, what do I want for this character next? Do I want this kid to get out of that bed? Yes or no? Yeah, I want this kid to get out of bed. What else do I want for this kid? You know, I want this kid to start going back to class, to start talking to his friends. Okay, what else do I want for this kid to do next? In the next scene, right? When he wakes up tomorrow morning in the next scene, what should this kid do? You know what? This kid should immediately write a little note of forgiveness to himself and to this person. Do that tomorrow morning, okay? What else would the kid do? If that kid was going to be the character who becomes the hero in the story, becomes happier, long term, finds love again. What should that kid do? This is called being the. Not only the observer of life, but the director asking, what would the ideal me or the story arc that I want for this character, what would he do? Is going to lay there another week? Is that what he should do? See, we have to externalize sometimes and command ourselves. And if we've done that before, that's called ownership. That's called responsibility. That's called conscientious direction of our life. If we don't, then what happens? We're just the kid feeling and sensing the misery in bed. Sometimes we have to then what? Break out of our circumstances, out of the circumstance, into character development mode again. And the more you do that, and the more you follow through on that, the more strength comes into you. You're like, whoa. I can actually determine the next causes and consequences in this person's life, in my life. And as I have that authorship or that direction in my life, I'm calling it ownership for everybody. Over a period of time, I promise, everything shifts.