The School of Greatness
How To Reprogram Your Mind For Abundance & Wealth | Brendon Burchard
Mon, 12 May 2025
Leave an Amazon Rating or Review for my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!Wealth expert Brendon Burchard shatters conventional thinking about abundance in this transformative conversation. After hitting rock bottom in San Francisco — literally watching his girlfriend sleep under the weight of his unpaid bills — Brendon found his breakthrough moment fighting for someone beyond himself. He reveals how emotions happen to us while feelings are created through meaning, and why most wealthy people transcend survival thinking to build abundance. Through powerful personal stories, Brendon explains why alignment must precede achievement, why assertiveness trumps confidence, and how a particular mindset destroys potential. His journey from broke writer to coaching billionaires offers practical wisdom for anyone feeling stuck, proving that freedom comes not from needing less but from serving more.Brendon’s books:High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That WayThe Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal PowerThe Millionaire Messenger: Make a Difference and a Fortune Sharing Your AdviceIn this episode you will learn:How to break free from survival mindset into abundance by fighting for someone beyond yourselfWhy doubt isn't your problem, and how to use doubt as a signal to learn rather than quitThe Z.A.P.S. framework that explains how negative thinking sabotages successWhy preparation for what interests you reveals alignment with your true pathHow to develop assertiveness by believing you'll figure things out rather than needing certaintyWhy alignment precedes assignment, which leads to abundanceFor more information go to https://www.lewishowes.com/1770For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dean Graziosi – greatness.lnk.to/1766SCDave Ramsey – greatness.lnk.to/1758SC5 Mindset Shifts To Manifest Money – greatness.lnk.to/1748SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Chapter 1: Who are the speakers and what is the episode about?
My friend, welcome back to the School of Greatness. If this is your first time here, then welcome and I hope you stick around because we are always trying to level up each and every week with the greatest guests, the most inspiring stories, research, science, And really tools to help you improve the quality of your life.
We've been doing this for over 12 years, every single week for over 12 years. And today you're in for a treat. And if you've been here for a while, then you know what you're about to experience. Because we have my good friend, Brendan Richard in the house, who is a high performance coach of the high performance coaches. He's an author of many books. number one New York Times bestselling books.
And this is all about how to break free from a limited mindset and create true abundance in your life. So if you feel blocked, if you feel stuck somewhere, if you feel like you're doing good, but you're not expanding to where you want to be, this is all about how to break free from the survival mindset that keeps so many of us stuck.
Brandon shares part of his journey from being broke to becoming a world renowned success coach who works with billionaires and high achievers. And he shares it in a way that is so vulnerable and visceral that I've never heard it before that is extremely powerful. We did this live at my Make Money Easy book tour in San Francisco.
And that's where he was broke, struggling, trying to make it a few blocks away from where we recorded this live on the book tour. And it was powerful. He's going to be talking about how small daily victories of integrity can transform your self-worth more effectively than positive thinking alone. That and so much more. I cannot wait for you to dive into this episode.
If this is your first time here, please click the follow button over on Apple or Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. make sure to share it with a few friends because when you share helpful resources and positive, inspiring stories to others, you're making a difference on their life as well.
So copy and paste the link to this episode, put it on social media or text a few friends and say, hey, I was thinking about you and I think you might enjoy hearing this story. And without further ado, let's dive into this with my man, Brendan Bouchard. I'm curious, from your experience, I want to understand more about abundance and wealth.
From working with some of the biggest leaders in the world, from your experience, does wealth tend to come with more negative emotions or positive emotions for the people that you interact with?
I don't think wealth comes from emotions. I think emotions happen to us. And in the science of emotions, they're automatic, they're physical, they're impulsive, they're a reaction. Like an emotion comes up inside of you, right? And science shows they kind of dispel maybe in 90 seconds, maybe three minutes if they're really severe, but they kind of come in. You didn't know they were coming in.
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between emotions and feelings in relation to wealth?
Emotions kind of happen. Feelings are different. Feelings are the meanings you give to emotions and stories. And so you get an ongoing feelings. And I think wealth is a lot attached to ongoing feelings. It's like my ongoing feeling about myself, not just the emotion I had, Because scarcity isn't an emotion. Scarcity is a feeling that you create. I feel scarce.
I feel scarce because, you know, when I was a kid and then you have the story like you share. And a lot of people had stories like you and I had, too. You know, I grew up broke. You know, my parents raising four of us had no money, working full time. My dad was retired military. Shout out to all the Marines and service people in the Marine Theater tonight.
My mom, immigrant to the country, they barely made it. Between the two of them, I have no idea. They were always fighting and struggling. It was difficult for them too. The challenge that I grew up with, and maybe you did too, is I grew up with a survival mindset. If you can just get enough, Like, you know, just get enough, just enough to pay the bills, just enough to pay rent.
If I could just get enough. So what you're always trying to do is fill a void, not build abundance. If you're only ever trying to pay the bills, you're always filling a void, not building abundance. It takes a while to figure that out. And a lot of wealthy people I work with, they kind of figure that out. At some point they're like,
I wanted to go beyond survival because I wanted to do something different. And what that different is is different for everybody. I wanted to give, I wanted to serve like you. It was give, it was service, it was build. Other people, it was like, you know what? I didn't want to be like them. I wanted to change.
I want to be that different person, that one person in the generation that turned it around. But at some point along the way, they understood their feelings about money.
When then were you able to break free from that survival mindset around money into thriving financially and creating more abundance? Guys, it happened like three miles from here.
Three miles from here. I went broke in the mission district. Okay. So this is a true story. I had a good job and I quit it because I want to become a writer like Lewis. I want to write a book. I wrote about the same age too. And I wrote that book. I quickly put it out and I did what most writers do. I went really broke.
You're already not doing great where I was living at the time, but then I went really broke. And there was probably two or three years I was faking being a writer. I was looking in San Francisco, all the famous places the writers went, all the cafes in this town, the big name writers, and I would go there and I'd order a croissant.
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Chapter 3: How did Brendon Burchard overcome his survival mindset and financial struggles?
You should have seen how he looked at me. People continue to laugh at you.
How do you not fall back into survival or self-doubt or insecurity or self-judgment?
Just stop pretending those are going to go away. Doubt's not the problem. Stopping is. A lot of people have doubt, but they keep going. If doubt becomes a signal to stop, you'll always fail. If doubt is a signal to learn and to try again, now you're in the scientific method and you win. So doubt should be a signal to learn and to try something new.
But even doubt's not the problem, catastrophizing is a problem. What does that mean? Catastrophizing. is where a lot of learned helplessness comes from. It's where you worry about ruin in your life, which is one of the great fears we have as humans. If I do this, I'll be ruined. I'll be ruined. Everything will go away and they'll reject me and I won't be able to handle it.
So I'll be inadequate too. And so here's what, write this down. If you ever want to understand your negative thinking, write this acronym I'm going to give you down. ZAPS. Z-A-P-S. You guys will be having success, and then you'll zap yourself. And when you zap yourself, you'll stop. Zap, Z-A-P-S. The Z stands for zoom in. Problem happens, you zoom in on it. Difficulty, you zoom in on it.
You failed, you zoom in on it. They made fun of you, you zoom in on it. Then the A is you attach self. You attach identity to the problem. You attach identity to the ruin. The failure. Yes, I am the failure. Now it's not just a bad thing happened. I'm impacted by it. I am. You zoom in on what's wrong. You got to stop that. You got to zoom in on what's possible. You got to zoom in on blessings.
You got to zoom in on grace. You got to open up that perspective. You got to open up that aperture. So you zoom in on what's wrong. You attach personality or identity to the problem. Then P is... then you punish yourself. Oh, man. I used to do that all the time. Yeah, you punish yourself. You shut yourself down. You speak terribly to yourself. Procrastination is punishment. Drugs, alcohol.
Drugs, alcohol, abuse. Whatever. Neglect. All of these things you punish yourself, you neglect. And you don't just punish yourself with the bad, you neglect yourself from the good.
You rob yourself of blessings. Yeah. Because you don't believe you're deserving of those things.
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Chapter 4: What role does fighting for someone beyond yourself play in creating abundance?
Success will always be way more about your behaviors than your thoughts. Because a lot of the thoughts I have suck during the day, but I still get what is necessary done. Daily prioritized action versus daily good feeling is often the thing we don't crack till later. Now, we do have to have thought. By the way, I'm going to come back and reverse this. But if you achieve the results.
Yeah, you have to have good thoughts. And you don't. We think. Yeah, yeah. If you achieve it, but you still don't accept yourself, are you going to feel good? Yeah. Let me share this.
Instead of thinking, let's use a different word. Alignment. The goal is to get in alignment with your higher energies and your higher form of being. The goal is to be in alignment with who you are and what you're really meant to do, the path you are uniquely supposed to be on. And when you take the steps, and it is steps, a lot of those steps, you're going to have doubts.
Your thoughts are actually going to suck. They just are. They're really going to suck. And you're going to be unsure for a long time. But when you're unsure for a long time, you need to be aligning.
And if you will make the game about aligning ever more closely to your higher state of being, ever more closely to your higher state of consciousness, ever so closely to your true nature, ever so closely to the proper path that is unique and primary and important for you, every nudge and alignment, it's going to improve the thoughts because you're going to have a sense of integrity and character now.
And it is in aligning to the actions and the path that is unique and true to your human nature and your real powers that the thoughts start getting better. They start clearing. It's actions of integrity that start making the mind come into alignment with greater strength. And so I tell people all the time, achievement isn't your problem.
Lots of people can do things and thinking isn't necessarily a problem because a lot of people overthink and they got plenty of thoughts and they're very positive. I mean, I know a lot of people in our industry, they're the most positive thinkers of all time. They are law of attraction gurus. And I'm like, do something. Just do. But do the thing that is in alignment.
Listen, if you get in alignment, you are granted a bigger assignment. And when you get greater alignment, greater assignment is given to you. And then greater abundance is the result. You don't start with abundance. No, you start with alignment. And abundance is an outcome. And once that switches in your head, then it's like, wait, I can do that.
Because I don't know if we want to go over here, but you know, I in college had a girl who broke up with me. I've shared on your podcast before, but it sent me into suicidal ideation and I became depressed. And sometimes you can't think yourself out of depression. you have to have small daily victories of integrity. And it helps decrease that feeling. It doesn't fix it. It doesn't resolve it.
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Chapter 5: How can doubt and negative thinking sabotage success, and what is the Z.A.P.S. framework?
I said I was gonna go to the gym and I went to the gym. I said I was gonna call my mom, I called my mom. I said I was gonna write the first page and I wrote the first page. And it's these small acts of integrity that improves our thoughts more than wishing our thoughts were different thoughts and could be better thoughts and could be replaced with thoughts. And so I think alignment
in, now I'm going to come back and reverse myself, in alignment in our thoughts and our behaviors. But sometimes shifting behavior can be a little easier to start cleaning up the thoughts. Yeah. It's being our word to ourself over and over again.
Yeah. Yeah. That sense of integrity. Doing what I say I'm going to do for myself every day. Yeah. And that will help to create more belief because you're now in alignment with what you say and do. It's matching. Yeah. And I think you're in alignment.
Like I said, there's alignment you have to get to because you have an assignment. And you can't see the assignment. Lewis, I've known him a long time. A decade ago, if we were talking, you wouldn't see this as the assignment yet, right? He had to go through things and discover things and keep, Lewis has become more of his best self.
And I've watched it and I really honor it because I just so you know, I'm not geeking on. I just told him this in the green room today. It's been awesome to watch as a friend. Thanks brother. What you have become. Appreciate it. Thank you. He aligned himself. And I want to let you show, I know he shares on the podcast, but sometimes it's different when someone says it.
He aligned himself by getting counseling and therapy and help and going to seminars and listening to the people he interviews. He actually is present and he listens to them. And because he realigned himself in the universe, God assigned him Martha.
Yeah.
Thank God. And now he has the abundance of love. You see that happen? He aligned, then he was assigned.
And now he has the abundance of love. And it's so interesting. Thanks for the acknowledgement I receive. So interesting because we never know Like the moment before I met Martha, I didn't know four years ago I'd be where I'm at today. Isn't that crazy? It was like literally one moment and everything changed. And I didn't know in that moment when I met her, this is what was going to happen.
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Chapter 6: Why is assertiveness more important than confidence for wealthy people?
Coach it up.
On that coaching, this is important. And he said it. He didn't need and he didn't try to control. And he didn't try to get. It's weird because I mean, we're at this money conversation tonight, but think about how often we need, we try to control and we try to get, and that's, that's our mode of operation that we've learned with money and relationships.
And it's why we have this terrible route of poor performance in those, in our culture. Because if it's need all the time, I mean, you can't be fulfilled. It's like the oldest metaphor I used to teach college kids back in the day. It's like, oh, if you have a relationship of two incomplete and broken people, they can't really ever quite connect.
And that's why each person has to really work on their wholeness, because then you lock in. But if you're needy, you're always trying to grab somebody's parts. You're trying to grab. And then at some point, that doesn't feel good, so they pull away. The harder you grab at them to fill your incompleteness, the more they want to pull that part back of themselves. So neediness is never working.
Control never works, which we all know, but we still try to do it on people. And then you're trying to get, and you're like, hey, actually, I'm not trying to get any from you, Marta. It's like, oh, okay. That's a powerful reframe. And so I think what you shared is so powerful because it's about relationships and money. But alignment, I want to really hammer that home.
It's like achievement is not your problem. Alignment is. So many people are busy. They have busy work, but it's not their life's work. And until they move in more of the direction of the path of what is truly aligned, why is it that every spiritual text and everything we know from ancient traditions, why is it always this? Why is there always a centering?
Because it's ancient, we know it as human beings, right? When we're out of alignment, That's where our ego grows. And we're in pain. We're in separation. We're in pain. So it's just about ever so more for you. And I don't know what the answer is. And Lewis doesn't know what the answer is. But you have a path. And you have a way of being. And you have a nature.
You got to have those daily acts of courage to scoot yourself towards that because then you have that self-respect at the end of the day and go, I scoot myself a little bit. A few more days of doing those actions that are good for you in alignment with you, it's just a game changer.
As weird as it sounds, most of the wealthy people I work with, which I never imagined I would, I imagine all my clients are wealthier than I am, all of them, so why do they need me?
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Chapter 7: How does alignment precede assignment and abundance according to Brendon?
That is, if you've been granted life, the purpose is life. Another word is aliveness. What everybody wants is more aliveness. What they're usually chasing in the next thing is more aliveness. The bigger risk, the bigger deal, the bigger adventure, the bigger novelty, the bigger complexity, the bigger bank, the bigger, it's like the chase makes them feel alive. And so the chase is important.
So we just got to make sure they're chasing the right thing. We are goal-driven species. We have this drive to achieve and build and create and expand. So you have to honor that. And I want you to feel that. We call it meaningful pursuits. We want you to have a meaningful pursuit that brings you alive. And sometimes it takes a while to figure that out. And the block is they're busy.
in the wrong chase. They're in the wrong hunt. They're literally playing a game that isn't even what matters to them. They just got taught that, or the kids who went to that college they went to that was fancy did that, or those guys on Wall Street who do that, or this guy I'm neighbors with who has this thing. And now they're playing games that are stupid that don't bring meaning or aliveness.
And if you don't have meaning and aliveness, The worst thing is you start making even worse choices because now you resent other people. So now you've got to compete with them to beat them in games that don't matter. Does anyone hear what I'm talking about?
It's like this is why alignment and finding the feeling, what brings you alive a little bit, what has meaning to you, that's where the wealth is. What brings you alive, what brings you meaning, that's where the wealth is.
What's the test or the assessment that people can take right now that can figure out if they're in alignment with a meaningful pursuit or if they're playing a dumb game? Their career and their purpose and their relationship, whatever it might be.
Yeah, it's going to sound so lame. If you find yourself preparing for it, thinking about it, researching it before you go do it, you're on the right track. I'm from Montana, where I grew up hunting, and I don't hunt anymore, and I know I'm in California, so hunting is officially banned by the government here. But my dad grew up on a true ranch, Uh, have y'all seen Yellowstone?
Like my dad grew up, but it was not fancy like that. He grew up in a place where he had to go four and a half miles to a one bedroom schoolhouse. So he grew up hunting because that's how they provided food for real. And so I grew up a little bit like that too, because we were broke and it was a big deal to go hunting.
But, uh, I use the metaphor just a little bit because people who, who, if they're on the right hunt, they get up at like 5 a.m. Hmm. They start putting things together. They're checking the gear. They're checking the equipment. I got a buddy. He doesn't hunt, but he's like a kite boarder. You all know what kite boarding is? Yeah, yeah. Okay, it's really hard. He's a kite boarder.
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Chapter 8: What personal story does Brendon share about love, relationships, and alignment?
so first if they judge it realize they don't know you i think second is to realize that your job is to align the humans around you to be as good and caring and thoughtful and compassionate and growth mindset and oriented as you are It doesn't mean everyone will. It just means sometimes you have to decrease the amount of time with them.
I got all this hate early in my career because I started teaching that there's three kinds of friends. and three kinds of people in your life. There's old friends, your high school people and other people, different parts of your life. You never talk to them again. They were just like, they were that chapter in your life. You don't see them again and you're fine with it.
And sometimes they reach out to you and they're like, they're trying to come into your new chapter, but they're like, that was that chapter. And sometimes you need to be okay that that was that chapter. So you have to say, you're an old friend now. It's less time, less experience, you know? And then you have your maintenance friends. the people you see just enough to maintain the friendship.
You text them just enough, you reach out just enough, just enough, it's maintenance. It doesn't mean they can't be good friends. And then you have growth friends. You expand the itinerary of things you do together. You want to spend more time and see each other and you're trying new things and growth friends are the best. Your job is to get as many of those as you can.
It doesn't mean these other ones don't exist. It just means you have to kind of align it. And if you have somebody who is extremely, the worst people to have in your life are people who are discouraging towards you. Not that they're mean to you. There's lots of mean people. But even mean people who are critical or funny, like I have a lot of friends who are like super British.
And I mean, that's like, they cut you down. They're so smart with the cynicism. Like, and I'm not a cynical person, so I'm just getting killed by these guys. But it's out of love. It's out of love, I guess. And I'm an easy person to make fun of me. Look at me. But they're so cynical and funny. And I wish I could be like that. I can't come back with a quick quip at them. So they just demolish me.
But they're encouraging of my dreams. And so if someone is discouraging you of you growing... And whatever that way is, they're controlling you, speaking down to you, shutting you down. Your job is to decrease your time towards them in whatever way it can. Sometimes that means a separation relationship. Sometimes it means a divorce. That's extreme. Other times it's like, you know what?
I'm not going to go to have brunch with this person every other Sunday. She's bumming me out. And you just got to find out like if someone's bumming you out, You need to be assertive in that situation and let them know, hey, you're kind of bumming me out. Actually, I need some encouragement and I want us to be good friends.
But if you keep bumming me out and speaking to me this way, I don't know that we can be friends. And most people go, I didn't even know I was doing it. I'm sorry. Or if they double down and then they're a real jerk when you assert the conversation, you were just given the gift of the evidence you've been waiting for. Yeah. Wow. And we're all so scared to like
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