Heroic with Brian Johnson | Activate Your Best. Every Day.

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Now displaying: August, 2020

#1: How to Celebrate your life more TODAY! (Hint: Acceptance + Gratitude + Winning for the WIN!) (#6) 0

Aug 9, 2020

This morning I worked on the “Celebrating” session for our Mastery Series (which is the foundation of our Optimize Coach program). After a 1-2-3 / 1+2+3! Breakfast of Champions (including savoring some SEAL mojo), we move on to a quick overview of how to get your celebration on—starting with acceptance then moving on to gratitude and finishing with you winning (or learning!) all day every day as you step into the Optimizing arena and give us all you’ve got while celebrating the whole process with deep, eudaimonic joy.

Hope you enjoy and hope you have an awesome day!

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#1: How do you start your day? Here’s how I start mine. (Note: Breakfast of Champions + Oura 1-2-3 +!!) (#5) 0

Aug 8, 2020

This morning I thought it would be fun to share how I start my day. Jocko Willink has his 4:00 AM Timex watch. Awesome. I’m thinking I’ll share my Oura data every day and how I quickly use that data to get a little better via a three-step process we teach our Optimizers and Optimize Coaches: 1. What’s working? 2. What needs work? 3. What will I do differently?

BOOM! Repeat. Aggregate and compound and let’s see what we’re capable of as we show up day in and day out for an extended period of time.

I also share my Breakfast of Champions and some more thoughts on the messy process of creativity! Now it’s time to hit the Trail and then take my kids to the zoo. LET’S DO THIS. TODAY.

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#1: Are you CELEBRATING your life? (It starts with Acceptance then Gratitude then…) (#4) 0

Aug 7, 2020

After filming Eating, Moving, Sleeping, Breathing, and Focusing over the last 5 days (YES!), I took a step back and did some messy creative work on Celebrating. Today I’m excited to share some thoughts on how I plan to approach that Mastery Series class along with some powerful wisdom from Abraham Maslow.

Hope you enjoy and here’s to Radical Acceptance, Profound Gratitude and Ceaseless Celebration!

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+1: #1220 Peak Performance You 0

Aug 7, 2020

In our last +1, we got an inspiring (Hoosiers-inspired) pep talk from Admiral McRaven right before engaging in our next most important mission.

I mentioned the fact that I had a chat with an Olympic swim coach shortly after reading that passage from McRaven. He and I chatted about that wisdom in the context of measuring the length of the pool, the number of inches the starting block is off the water. Etc. Etc.

We also talked about flipping the switch and striking an Amy Cuddy-inspired power pose—which can literally change our underlying physiology by increasing our testosterone and decreasing our cortisol while priming us to give the world all we’ve got.

Then I referenced a passage from Cuddy’s great book Presence in which she actually talks about an Olympic swim coach who used that very technique.

Here’s the passage: “In the first month after my TED talk posted, I heard from an Olympic swimming coach who explained how he’d been using a power posing-type strategy—with great success—for years: encouraging some of his swimmers, beginning on the morning of the race, to physically behave as if they’d won their events. Swimmers, as he pointed out, are notorious for their use of dominant body language in the moments before races, not only to signal their power to their competitors but also to loosen their muscles and pump themselves up. Sometimes they will literally pound their chests, like gorillas. But the approach this coach used—encouraging swimmers to adopt ‘alpha’ nonverbal postures from the minute they wake up on race days—was most helpful to swimmers who’d been thrown off by a poor performance or who were feeling a wave of insecurity and self-doubt.”

I love that.

Imagine a swimmer on the morning of her event acting as if she’d already won (and getting the benefit of all that extra power).

As Cuddy tells us: We need to fake it until we become it. Not to manipulate others and gain power over them but to slightly trick ourselves for the moment so we can gain personal power to express the best, boldest, most authentic version of ourselves.

Love it. Let’s do it. Pom poms. Rah rah. Etc.

And…

I say: Why limit it to the day of a swimming event?

How does the best, boldest, most authentic version of you think and breathe and walk and talk?

Let’s bring that wonderfully bold version of ourselves to our lives all day ever day.

Especially: TODAY!

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#1: Want to tap into your Soul Force SUPERPOWERS? Here’s how. (Hint: FOCUS!) (#3) 0

Aug 6, 2020

This morning I prepared for my film session on Focusing for our Mastery Series that is the core part of our 300-day Optimize Coach program. Here’s a super-quick look at some core ideas from that class. Hope you find it helpful!!! Here’s to having an awesome day, one FOCUSED (!) moment at a time!!

Remember: Soul Force = T x (E x F x W.I.N.)^C

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#1: How’s your breathing? (It’s more important than you may think!) (#2) 0

Aug 5, 2020

This morning I prepared for my film session on Breathing for our Mastery Series that is the core part of our 300-day Optimize Coach program.

Here’s a super-quick look at some core ideas from that class. Hope you find it helpful!!! Here’s to having an awesome day, one Optimized breath at a time!!

Remember: 1. Nose. 2. Belly. 3. Exhale!!

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#1: Have trouble falling/staying asleep? Start here! (#1) 0

Aug 4, 2020

This morning I was preparing to film a Mastery Series session for our Optimize Coach certification program. We have 7 core fundies: Eating, Moving, Sleeping, Breathing, Focusing, Celebrating and Prospering. Today I was prepping for Sleep.

So… Here’s a video with a super-quick overview of the wisdom we’ll be sharing with an emphasis on one of the key practices we want to engage in if we want to Optimize our Sleep. I call it “Training Tranquility.” If you’re having trouble falling/staying asleep you may want to try this out!

Hope you enjoy!!! Here’s to some epic sleep.

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+1: #1215 The (Neuro) Trail 0

Aug 2, 2020

A couple +1s ago we spent some time pulling some weeds together as we created some new habits.

How?

By STARTING SMALL and MAKING IT EASY!

(Am I repeating myself AND yelling?! Lol. Yes and Yes.)

Today I want to spend a little more time on our new property. We’re going to talk about my new weed whacker and the little running Trail Emerson and I created.

First, a confession.

I’d never used a weed whacker before we arrived at our new place out here in the country. (Note: I did mow the lawn (and our elderly neighbor’s lawn) every weekend growing up but I never got promoted to the weed whacker.)

And…

Just so you know: I’ve spent more time at Home Depot over the last few weeks than I had in my entire life. (Hah.) It’s been awesome.

New Identity: Rancher Bri!

Yeehah!

So…

One of the first things I did after we arrived?

I created a little running Trail around the perimeter of our property. It’s a heavenly little loop that just so happens to be almost exactly a third of a mile. (Of course, I think in threes so running a mile was a good opportunity to think of The Big 3.)

Then Nama visited and suggested we create another part of the Trail at the other side of the property. I mapped it out and saw how it would perfectly connect with our existing loop. Then, after a nice day of Deep Work, I put on my Rancher Bri outfit and got to work.

And that’s when I started thinking about neuroplasticity.

Quick context: After going through my fair share of weed-whacker re-charges (and re-strings), I’m becoming a little more adept at this whole Trail-creation process.

What I learned is that it’s best to start with a simple little narrow strip that’s about a weed-whacker wide to kinda draw a basic directional line of where you want the Trail to go.

Once I get that, I go a little wider.

Then I go a little wider.

Then I’ll rake it out to see what I missed.

Then I go back over it and make it just the right width.

And, of course, I’m trimming some branches back that might be hanging in the way and all that jazz as I go.

Then…

Voila.

We have a v1 Trail.

Then, the more we go down that path, the more awesome it gets.

As it turns out, that’s actually a pretty good metaphor for how our brains wire (and rewire) themselves as we create new behaviors.

I think it was in The Brain That Changes Itself (an amazing book that, for some reason, I haven’t done a Note on yet) that I was introduced to another, similar metaphor.

Enter: Google search for “The Brain That Changes Itself sled metaphor.”

Yep.

In that great old-school book on neuroplasticity, Norman Doidge quotes Alvaro Pascual-Leone who tells us about the fact that when you go sledding on a freshly-snowed-on mountain, you tend to create a little groove that you tend to follow—both on the way up and the way down. By the end of the day after a bunch of trips up and down, you’re MUCH more likely to follow the grooved pattern.

(And, if you want to change those patterns, you're going to need to figure out how to block the old pathways and create some new ones!)

That’s what I was thinking about as I weed-whacked the extra .2 miles to our Trail—extending it to a nice .5 mile loop. (Those two laps for a mile make me think of having Strength for 2! Yes. I always think in Optimize-eze. lol)

So…

Today’s +1.

What Habit-Trails are you trying to create in your life?

Let’s have a basic MAP of where we’d like to go, be willing to start small (Tiny!) and lay the path for new behaviors as we widen those neural pathways with each pass through.

Weed whackers optional.

Oh!

Don’t forget.

When you’re whacking away (on your new habits) in tall grass in a sub-tropical climate, the bug bites and scratches are to be expected.

Yeehah!

Let’s do this.

Today.

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