Bookish Weapon Number Thirty-Nine

Brendon Burchard is a motivational speaker and ever-present online video encourager. He has written several books and one he wrote in 2012 had an impression on me. It is called, “The Charge.”

As with all of his books Brendon is passionate. I underlined the following right at the beginning of the book:

“The Charged Life, the truly lived life, is not routine existence in some quaint, picturesque village of safety and certainty. No, the life with living is out therein the wooded wilds of the unknown, on the craggy battlefields that test our wits and wills in the daily fights with our own demons.”

All The Lives

The author discusses other kinds of lives that may not be so “charged” such as the “caged life,” and the “comfortable life.”

The caged life is when you live in the past or in the expectations of others. You think you are stuck and can’t make the changes you need to make and have to be a certain way. You are asking “will I survive.” Brendon says unless life flips you upside down it is very hard to get out of this, but it can be done.

The comfortable life is “an everything is ok” kind of life. A ho-hum existence. It isn’t like a cage but more like a rut he says.

The Charged Life “calls to us after we have done what we were supposed to do, become who we thought we were supposed to be, lived as we thought we were supposed to live.”

The Motivation

Most motivational speakers use information from other motivational speakers. Tony Robbins borrows from Jim Rohn and others. Burchard borrows from Tony Robbins when he discusses human drives. He talks about how you control the meaning of everything or as Tony said it, “Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it.”

Burchard goes on to advise you to not spend your time on time wasters. In 2020 that would be on your phone. He mentioned TV and surfing the net. And then he says “For every bit of data that comes into your life, your brain attaches meaning and emotion to it.”

Competence

Burchard discusses the ten human drives. One of them is competence. It is important. When we are doing well and conquering our world we reinforce the feeling of competence. He calls this the “competence-confidence loop.” Then he says, “…the second our internal competence scale tips from self-assured to self-doubting is the moment we begin feeling defeat. We start questioning our ability, intelligence, strengths – or entire future.”

He says that if we can understand our world, perform in it and master it then we have competence. If not we don’t feel competent. If we know we can “figure it out” we are good. He says, “Personal agency is a term psychologists use to describe how confident you feel in your ability to control your actions and shape the outcomes in your life.” This is important.

There is so much more in this book but I thought the above was the best.