Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

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About the Host

Daniel Stih is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. Through engineering, environmental investigations, and interdisciplinary research, he explores how people define problems, interpret evidence, and make decisions under uncertainty. Learn more in Why I Think This Way.

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Show Notes

Brant Menswar
https://brantmenswar.com  

Designing Momentum: A Big Goal Blueprint for Transforming Everyday Moments into Massive Success 
On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394330006 

Black Sheep: Unleash the Extraordinary, Awe-Inspiring, Undiscovered You
On Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Black-Sheep-Extraordinary-Awe-Inspiring-Undiscovered/dp/1989603440 

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Transcript

My guest today is Brant Menswar.

Brant's a former rock star, turned thought leader and keynote speaker.

He's written two books.

The first of these is Black Sheep, Unleashed the Extraordinary, Awe-inspiring, Undiscovered You.

In it, Brant explains how to identify what your core non-negotiable values are, so you can live with intention and manifest what matters most to you.

Like a black sheep, it's about being authentic and knowing who you are.

His latest book on shelves this May is Designing Momentum, a big gold blueprint for transforming everyday moments into massive success.

It's designed to teach entrepreneurs, CEOs, and those looking for fulfillment the mindset strategies to use to harness everyday moments to transform your life.

Brant's also an award-winning musician and the front man and lead singer for the band Big Kettle Drum.

Welcome to my show, Brant.

Thanks, Daniel.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So let's start with your first book.

Sure.

This idea of values has been around a long time.

People in NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and other modalities throw it around a lot.

You actually wrote a book about it, The Black Sheep.

Tell people this concept, who haven't heard it before, why is it important to know what your values are, to identify your top values and know what they are?

It's impossible to live with deliberate intention if you don't know what they are.

And so that was the crux of me discovering what mine were and how to use them effectively every single day.

I have to be able to choose when and where these values appear to maximize their impact.

And so less than 1% of the population can definitively say what their top five values are.

Most people like me are still trying to process what is a value.

Can you give me your top five values to get an understanding what a value is?

Yeah, totally.

So mine, I actually have six.

Mine are creativity, hope, impact, empathy, family, and authenticity.

So every decision I make every single day is filtered through those six things, and they either honor those things or they don't.

And so when you know, when you have that sort of clarity, making decisions is not difficult.

And the idea of living with deliberate intention becomes very real, because now I am deliberately making decisions in alignment with these non-negotiable values.

And these values are where our purpose comes from.

Purpose is something we choose, but you can't choose it until you know what your non-negotiables are.

So you can't actually start with why, even though Simon Sinek wants us to.

So you got creativity.

What's your list again?

Creativity, hope, impact, empathy, family, and authenticity.

I noticed family is on there because whenever I've played this exercise with friends or people, women, clearly their children, their family, for most people, families, like what's most important to you?

But creativity, what comes to mind, Brant, is you're a keynote speaker.

You speak to corporations, associations, I assume, anyone that lets you on stage to speak and pay for it.

And you're also a songwriter, still.

I would have thought that when you say values, it would be literally my songwriting or my speaking is number one.

Number one is my speaking, number two, my songwriting.

So I can know at the end of the day, I've got too many things to do, what's important.

How do you manage if it's more generalized, creativity?

Anything could be creative.

Well, that's exactly how it should be, right?

So you're talking about the how and I'm talking about the what.

So what the value is, is connection, right?

So connection is the number one shared value among all people, by a 50% margin to the next closest shared value, right?

So the how I experience connection could be family.

That's why you hear that a lot.

Could be community, relationships, faith, anything that is how connection is experienced.

That's helpful because say I'm a lonely person and I decide connections are one of my top values.

It's important to me.

That's why I'm kind of suicidal and lonely and drinking a lot and whatnot, right?

So I make connection important.

Then like you are explaining, what I do is go to the coffee shop, is it invite someone for coffee, invite them to lunch, go to a meetup to go on a walk or play a sport.

Those are the little, what did you call them?

The hows.

That's the how, right?

So if we got what, why, and how, what is the value, why is the purpose, and how is the mission?

It's how you experience it, right?

How in Black Sheep, it's how you're feeding your sheep.

So if your five values are your Black Sheep, you've got to feed those sheep every single day.

They can't take a day off.

And so how I feed those sheep will change each and every day based on what I've got going on and what I have time for.

But the idea is that values don't change.

They don't.

By the time we're in our early 20s, our values are pretty well etched in stone.

And outside of a catastrophic event in your life, values rarely change.

Now, what does change is how we honor those values.

And so that how changes all the time and is what keeps us engaged and interested in life, right?

It's why anybody you know that's recently retired is busier now than when they were actually working because they're trying to figure out the how.

Because they had been doing the how the same way for decades, and all of a sudden now they have all this free time.

So the how is changing.

So with the values, wouldn't society share some of the common top values?

I guess if you don't like family, it won't be in your value.

I could see that, but some of these seem pretty basic.

They should be, everybody should share, would have the same common values.

So not everybody has the same common values.

We have over half a million data points that we've collected since Black Sheep came out in 2020.

We have an online assessment that anybody can go on and take the assessment for free and learn what their top five values are.

I can tell you what the five most shared values among all people are.

Number one is connection, right?

Number two is integrity.

Number three is authenticity.

Number four is growth.

And number five is creativity.

And that are the top five, those are the top five values shared among all people.

Now, as we go deeper into segments of gender and age range and industry, and all these sorts of things, those values will shift based on, someone in their 20s doesn't value the same thing as someone in their 60s.

Let's take integrity, for example.

I'm having to process that as what does it mean?

What does integrity mean?

Here's part of the process of discovering your values.

There is the definition of what integrity is, which for me, I would sum it up as walking the walk or walking the talk.

That's what it is.

Integrity is doing what you say you're going to do.

Being able to develop trust and loyalty and all those sorts of things are all part of integrity.

But part of what we do when we help people discover their values is, you have to define what you mean by what you say.

Because to you, integrity might be something completely different.

It just sounds like it means a couple of different things too.

Do you tell the truth or do you lie?

It seems like a lot of people walking around aren't quite.

If that's the most common value, it seems like there's a lot of people not following their values.

Amen, brother.

That is exactly what we're seeing right now.

That's why this country is as divided as it is.

And then you go to church and you say, Hail Mary's for your sins because, hey, we're all human.

I'm just pointing out that.

Listen, church and politics are the two highest forms of hypocrisy, in my opinion.

So that's just the way it is.

OK, so I interrupted you.

What was your thought?

Where were you?

I was just, we were just talking about, there are commonly held shared values.

Those are the five that at least our research has produced over the last four years.

But they do exist in a hierarchy, right?

And so those five values are the top of the hierarchy of the five families of values.

So where connection is the highest value in that family, the other values beneath it that are sort of, that connection is the umbrella for, would be things like faith, relationships, community.

Anything that is experiencing connection falls beneath that.

Integrity would be loyalty, trust, truth, all of those things fall under integrity, right?

So you start to see how we have these cascading values.

And the reason that we, go ahead, okay.

Well, I was getting a little lost because it's getting a little, what's the word when it gets, it's conceptual, conceptual, abstract, a lot of jargon, not jargon, but I'm back to like, how do I apply this in my life?

How do I find out what my values are?

Why are they so important to know this?

How am I going to use them?

Well, there's a couple of ways to find them, right?

I mean, we've developed the online assessment to at least dip your toe into the pool.

So as much as values are, I would argue, the most important thing that exists in the world.

But hardly any of us have ever taken the time to define what ours actually are.

We have an idea of what we care about, but we treat things that are really important, like they're non-negotiable and they're not.

We treat things that are important.

Really important, like they're non-negotiable, but they're not non-negotiable.

Really important is not non-negotiable.

Okay.

What's the difference?

The difference is non-negotiable means no.

So if you asked me to do something and it violates that value, the answer is no, end of discussion.

If it's something that's really important to me, you could probably negotiate with me as to whether or not I will do or not do something.

Well, I noticed on there is there's no criminal activity on your values.

So, in fair game.

In what way?

Well, we know it's important to you, but it sounds like if it's not on that list, then it's not as important.

But that doesn't mean that it's still not a belief or a value to you.

It's just not in your top five.

Correct.

Yeah.

Now, the average person who takes the assessment lists at least 30 values that they consider really important.

And the challenge is that's where most of us stay, is in the, I've got 30 values that are really important to me.

But that's why you have anxiety, that's why you have depression, that's why you have all of these other things, because you haven't nailed down the five things that are non-negotiable.

And so you end up trying to honor 30 things that are really important to you, and you fail, because it's an impossible task.

So give me an example of, you have six, how come you're allowed to have six instead of five?

Because I'm a rock star, we do everything to excess.

You can't live 20 years living in excess and not have an extra value.

So give me a seventh one.

If you had a seventh one, what would your seventh one be?

That's a good question.

It would be sort of somewhere around, I could go in a couple of different directions for that.

They would all fall in one of those five families of values.

No, you can't cheat here, Brant.

The reason I'm asking you this is I'm trying to paint myself and listeners a picture of the seventh one.

Now, it's not part of my five.

And trying to get an example of a real scenario where some happens in life and I use these top five.

And then my seventh value is somehow coming into play.

I'm like, oh, can't do that.

Or that's not part of my five.

Yeah, for me, it would probably be something like accountability, right, would be my going down that range.

And so the question becomes the difference between it being in the seventh slot and the fifth slot.

Okay, let's talk about that because that's what you're asking.

If it's not in my five, what's the deal?

Yeah, what's the purpose of this exercise?

Right, so the difference is my five are non-negotiable, which means I'm going to do them no matter what.

You can't talk me out of it, right?

So if accountability for me is in the seventh slot, a perfect example would be I get up a little bit late and I don't give myself enough time to work out, so I don't go work out that day.

If it was in my top five, I'd work out, period.

It would be non-negotiable.

I'd find up time during the day and I would make up that work out.

If I overslept, I do it at lunch or I do it after work or I do it before bed, I would work out.

Now, I'm getting a bit confused again because it's because the way I always thought of values.

I would have thought working out would have been one of my non-negotiables to begin with, so it'd be easy peasy.

No, working out is an exercise of a value.

So health would be the value, working out would be how you're honoring health.

Yeah.

And it also threw me by not being accountable to myself, I guess.

Unless I had a workout partner, then I'm letting them down.

That's not accountable.

Well, that's why a lot of people have workout partners, because accountability is important, but it's not non-negotiable.

I see.

And if it's important, you need a workout partner to keep you accountable.

That's why you do that.

Okay.

So then give me an example of how your top five day-to-day do drive your life.

Some of the happens that is in your top five, you're like, this is my top five, this is what drives me.

So when you first define what they are, you've got to prove that they're real.

And you do that by sort of tracking your days and seeing which of these values appear organically or not, right?

That takes weeks, sometimes months, to determine whether something is real or not.

Once you know what's real, what we actually do is have people program these values into their calendar.

So you start writing when and where you want these values to appear.

So if you looked on my calendar and you saw today's podcast, while I'm talking to you, I am going to choose, you would see things for me, it's hope and impact, right?

So you would see Brant appearing with Daniel on his podcast.

And then next to that appointment, you'd see two words which say hope and impact.

So for me, I'm going to make sure that I speak hope and impact into this interview and it's not by accident.

I'm being deliberate.

I'm going to do these things with deliberate intention because I'm choosing when and where these things appear in my life.

So I am programming these values to appear in my day to make sure that I honor all five of them, in my case, six, each and every day.

And that's how we take accountability is we're programming them.

We're not waiting for an opportune time for them to appear.

Oh, you know what?

I don't see money in any of those top five values.

How does money fit in?

Well, money is a how, right?

So what would be the value of money?

Is it security?

Why do you want money?

The value is the why.

Like your family.

If you need the money for your family, family is the value.

Sure.

So but what about your family?

Is it to provide security or safety or freedom?

You know, what is it about your family that makes you want money?

And so that's why you got to keep tracing this back and follow those breadcrumbs back to the root value of why.

Of why?

Why do you want money?

Because my family wants a new...

I'm just making stuff up technology wise.

My kid needs a new iPhone.

Okay.

Yeah.

So why do you want to give your kid a new iPhone?

Or let's say my family needs a bigger house.

We have a new baby on the way.

Yep.

And you know, it's a one bedroom apartment.

Yep.

So I'm going to need some more money for my family.

Yep.

What is giving your family a bigger house going to do for you?

It's going to allow the kids to have their own bedroom and to have so their mother doesn't.

Yeah.

So we have another bedroom right now.

We'll have one bedroom.

Yep.

So what is that going to provide you?

Provide some peace for the mother.

Ah, so peace becomes the value.

And everything you're doing is to honor that value.

You're buying the house to be able to give this to your kids, to have their own bedrooms so that there can be some peace for you, for them.

Less stress.

It's less stress.

Sure.

More comfortability.

Comfortability.

100%.

I agree with you.

And that's, and that's, but this is how this works, right?

Most people stop at money and it's not the money.

This is true.

They might say, I need a lot of money.

I'm like, for what?

Right.

But there are those people that aren't paying their bills.

They're struggling.

They bought a car they shouldn't have bought.

They're living in a place they really are squeezed for paying their rent or their mortgage.

Totally.

But then there are those people that just trying to make enough money to put food on the table too and that's the bottom line.

Totally.

Totally.

But money is the how they are honoring something.

They need the money for the what they're trying to answer to, right?

Yeah.

I need the money to pay my rent to this.

But then why do I want to do that?

That's the value.

You got to get to the why, right?

And so that's the challenge.

If one of your values was freedom and you got too big a house that you don't need this big a house, now you're having to work for money to pay that when freedom is one of your values, you're kind of in conflict here.

Now you got it.

That's exactly how it works.

Great.

Yeah.

So why do people likely it's it's this is not a 10 minute process to find out what your values are.

No, it takes it to listen.

This is what if I asked you right now to write down five, the first thing after you wrote them down, I'd tell you to put them in order from most important to least important.

Right.

So you've got now a list of one to five.

My number one's health, by the way.

Unless you're healthy, you know, money doesn't get to anything.

Nothing gets to anything.

If you can't walk, get out of bed.

You know, if you're fatigued, tired.

So health is number one to me.

Okay.

So I would say that whatever you put in position one, in position two of your top five, what we have discovered is those are more than 90 percent accurate.

Right.

So there's a really good chance that you are correct, that these most people.

Go ahead.

Tell me.

We can't take time to tell people how to do their values because they got to write them all down.

Is this how you figure out what's at your top?

Because what I did was say I had, I had money as one of my values, because I don't know any better.

Right.

I went down, I went down this 30 and I said, what's more important, my money or my health?

My health.

So I put that at top.

And then I said, what's more important?

Accountability or my health?

My health.

So that's how it stayed at the top.

I kept comparing it to everything else on this big list.

That's how our, that's exactly how our assessment works.

So the assessment will present you with about 80 commonly held personal core values.

And it's going to say, you have two and a half minutes to go through this list and select any value that resonates with you.

So people do that and they usually select at least 30.

And then what happens is it pits words against each other.

Is it this or that?

Is it this or that?

Almost March Madness style, right?

And so it's asking you, is it this word or that word that's more important?

And it helps you start to narrow down those 30 plus words that you said were really important down to somewhere around 10 or less.

And then it's going to say out of these, pick your top five.

And then once you have those five, the next step is to put those five in order from most important to least.

Well, that was backing up the harder part, getting it down to five.

Yes.

And the way I did that was to compare health to money.

If I could do six triathlons and write a book and be on TV, for being the, you know, Armstrong for that.

Or I could have zero dollars and be dumpster diving for my food and not have, you know, a house to live in and any clothes, be walking the streets, dead bro, panhandling.

Oh, the health, the health is the health.

If I could be super healthy but have no money, that wasn't so hard as I thought of if I'm super, super rich, have all the money in the world, I'm a billionaire, trillionaire, but I can't get out of bed.

Yeah.

I can't walk.

Yeah.

I'm basically a vegetable.

Clearly, health wins.

I do that kind of extreme comparison.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Listen, I've got several billionaire friends who are miserable.

And it's just so money is the how, right?

Money is just giving you the ability, hopefully, to explore what really matters to you so that you can start honoring those things because that's where fulfillment comes from.

That's where feeling like you're living a life of fulfillment happens.

And so money usually provides the freedom to be able to pursue those things.

So can you give me a similar example of your accountability?

Say I was stuck with your seven and I need to knock accountability off.

Family is important.

How do you do it?

Give me your process of throwing one off the list.

Of throwing one off the list?

Yeah, throw them off the list.

I'd go through a couple different scenarios to see if it's negotiable or not.

Is there anything that could happen that would make me negotiate that value?

So like accountability, I'm trying to lose some weight and somebody throws a little Debbie snack cake in my face.

Am I going to say no to that 10 out of 10 times?

Probably not.

Probably not, which means it's not a non-negotiable, right?

Because if it was, I'd be like, get that out of here.

Not interesting.

Oh, I see.

You're not trading this list to change your life.

You're trying to figure out who you are.

That's what values are, brother.

That's all that this is.

This is about stripping away what the world has polluted you with for however long you've been alive to get to the root of who you actually are.

Oh, so it's not about changing who you are, trying to be better than you are.

How can you change who you are when you don't know who you are?

I see.

Well, it makes it easier in one context because you don't have to think so much.

You just watch your behavior to figure out.

But what if you're one of those people that really don't realize you don't have good values?

There's no such thing as values that aren't good.

All values are good.

Yeah.

Now, you might be exhibiting behavior that violates a value.

It's the behavior that's bad.

It's not the value that's bad.

Can you give me an example?

I'm thinking like a criminal, someone that's really gone down the not ideal path, but everyone's a good person.

All babies are born good.

Is that what you're speaking of?

Yeah.

I mean, I believe that we're all born that way and we learn behavior.

And so if you've spent your life in a scenario of learned behavior that isn't good, that isn't moralistic, that isn't what we would consider healthy, then that behavior ends up taking over.

And the reason that that behavior continues for a lot of us is because we don't take the time to discover the values that can hold us accountable.

Except Brant, this won't work because if I'm that person and I do like we're speaking of, how do I live my life day to day?

It would come up my values probably to don't want to get up early out of bed.

No, do I want to steal?

Do I want to tell the truth?

No, I don't want to.

My values might come up kind of not so rosy on my list of values.

Right?

I don't understand that.

I don't understand the question.

So the values come up, the values have nothing to do with being good or bad.

Well, remember you were saying, you were teaching me how you can't, you're not trying to change, it's who you are.

And we're using accountability.

It was a great example because you're like, if it comes up, someone give me a chocolate chip cookie and I'm accountable on my diet, yeah, I'll take it.

So accountability is not big.

What if being honest wasn't really big on my list?

Because do I tell the truth every day?

Would I fib on my taxes or this?

No, you know what?

Being integrity is not really that big on my list.

Right?

I'm not understanding what you're asking.

So yeah, I mean, if I guess I don't understand where you're going with the question.

So to figure out your values, you said what we do is we don't try to aspire to be something.

Correct.

Those are aspirational values.

We tell it how it is.

To which I could build a list of values based on my current behavior.

No, you can't.

It's not behavior.

You can't.

Don't confuse behavior with values because behavior is meant to change.

Values are not.

Values do not change.

Behavior changes all the time.

So they are not the same thing and they are not related.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm still processing that because I thought to understand our values more, we looked at how we live day to day.

To understand our values more, we have to look at which of these values appear organically in our lives all the time, over and over and over again.

These are the things that will tell you whether or not what you think is true is actually true.

They're not because you spoke them into existence.

They're because they're there organically.

Okay.

Say I'm a realtor and I'm trying to sell a house.

Yep.

And I will do anything to close that house, even though I know the family buying it can't afford it, that in six months, the deal they got on there to pay their monthly mortgage is going to flip.

It's going to be balloon payment.

They're going to be out of their house.

What is my value, though?

I sell real estate.

Now, the value is the how, brother.

The value is not you selling real estate.

That's what you do for work.

Pretend I am the realtor.

You're my coach.

Okay.

I need to know what your values are.

My value is to sell, sell, sell.

No, no, that's not a value.

That's a how.

That's a behavior.

That is not a value.

Then it's to make money.

That's not a value.

But I love what I do.

I get to show houses.

I get to drive all over the night.

Why do you want to do those things?

I love to win.

Okay.

Why do you love to win?

It makes me feel important, successful, freedom.

I have financial freedom.

I own my own business, my own real estate company.

Yep.

So the idea of this is, I can't give you an answer to that until you tell me exactly what the five values of that realtor would be.

And then I'd be able to look and go, is doing this, is selling this house to someone who can't afford it, going to violate one of these five values that you say are yours?

In fact, I needed to be the top salesperson in the book so I can put on the billboard that I sell the most homes in.

Then it's not, then it's not a non-negotiable.

It's not a non-negotiable.

It's not a non-negotiable value.

If you're going to violate a value because you need money or you need to do this for your family or you need to do that, but by doing it, it violates one of your other values, then that other thing is not a value.

It's not one of your non-negotiables.

It's not in your top five.

Because if it were, the answer would be, I don't care, I'm not doing that.

Well, I mean, I do know a lot of realtors, very few actually, who will do the right thing if the house has a big easement, a big, what do they call it, when there's a lien on it or something like that.

And some of the stuff falls out, will be discovered anyhow.

But I know some have a good heart.

A used cars person, how to take a used cars person, a car salesperson, for example.

You're asking me questions about what happens when we theoretically violate a value.

That's what you're asking.

You're actually asking how we come up with our values and live by them day by day.

I'm actually going backwards to my own head, Brant, trying to figure out how I got on this track.

I got a little bit...

I was incorrect in my thinking when originally I thought the values are what I think I aspire to be, the person I think I am.

And you're right.

So back to know the values are based on your day to day.

The values are based on the things that matter most to you that you will not be negotiated with on.

That is what the value is.

All right.

I know you have stuff online that walks you through this and...

Yeah, you have to take the assessments.

The easiest way to do this.

Take the assessment and the assessment is going to get you started onto this path.

It will give you what you think your five values actually are.

Now, whether or not that's the truth, that's going to take some time to prove one way or the other.

So we have a tracking workbook.

It's a two-week workbook that you track your values every single day, right?

Where do they appear, when do they appear, who do they appear with?

And you start to learn what's real and what's not.

Because I promise you, out of the, you know, we've done this with tens of thousands, probably 50,000 people at this point who have taken the assessment.

Not one of them have ever started with the five values that they came up with in the assessment.

Not one of them has landed on the same five values after they go through the five week program of proving what you think is real is real.

It's never been what it starts with, ever.

So give me an example I was using you, and we talked about the common ones.

Can you give me an example of a real person, a real client or someone who really did this, and how they use their values to drive their life to make decisions?

Every decision that is presented to them, they filter through those values and ask themselves, is this decision going to honor this value or violate this value?

That's how you use it.

Okay, so, can you give me, can you give me an example?

Just give me a question.

Oh, for you then?

For a decision.

Yeah, what's a decision you want me to make?

I'll give you one.

Okay.

Should I appear on Daniel's podcast or not?

Okay, there's the question.

My filter of creativity, hope, impact, empathy, family and authenticity, I would have to say, okay, I'm going to be on Daniel's podcast.

Is it going to give me an opportunity to be creative?

Probably.

Probably because we're going to have this conversation.

I know he's a musician as well, a songwriter.

I know that we share this creativity, so I know this is probably going to come out in what we talk about.

Am I going to have an opportunity to have impact?

Well, I'm definitely going to have an opportunity to impact you, but because of your listeners to this podcast, yeah, I'm probably going to be able to amplify that impact by the people who listen to your podcast.

So yeah, so I'm two for two, right?

I'm going to honor those two things.

Now I'm going to say empathy.

Okay.

Well, chances are Daniel's going through something right now that I don't even know about that I might be able to encourage him in one way, shape, or form, or at least feel for him of whatever's happening, and maybe by having this conversation with me and having empathy as to what's happening in his life, I may be able to help him in some way, shape, or form.

I'm three for three.

Family, which is basically connection, right?

So family is in the same value as connection.

So what would happen though if your family needed you and you had to cancel the podcast, which I totally understand.

Totally.

Then I would cancel it.

I would cancel that because in the hierarchy of my five, family is first.

Okay.

I thought it was creativity was first.

Family.

I was just, I was listing.

Oh, you were listing.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

I would expect family is the topic.

Yeah.

Sure.

So if that's number one, then even though I'm missing, I'm not violating the others, but I'm missing an opportunity to honor those others.

But if that's the case, then I would simply go, hey man, I'm going to need to reschedule.

My wife has to go to the doctor, she's sick, whatever that looks like, my kids aren't feeling well, whatever that is, then yeah.

But the decision I am making is whether or not I'm going to be able to honor these values that I'm telling you are most important to me.

What it doesn't consider is the outcome.

I am not considering the outcome.

You shouldn't because you don't know how things are going to play out.

I could have gone, yeah, perfect.

I was going to cancel on you rescheduled, but I didn't want to do that to you.

You never know.

But so I could see like people probably already do this and don't know it.

And then they come to these difficult decisions in life.

And by having these on paper, they just, it's what they're already doing.

They just, there's some decisions people can't make that are difficult.

And if they had it on paper, it's easier because we do it all the time.

The family is an example.

Oh, I can choose my family instead.

It's a higher value.

And you do that without knowing that you're actually considering your values.

Yeah, what I would say is that most people are winging it, right?

And do you know where that term comes from?

Where winging it comes from?

Don't recall.

So it comes from in the early 1900s, right at the turn of the century, but during the gold rush and everything, people had had more money and time than they knew what to do with.

And so they, the especially on the on the west coast over in California, they started to build play houses so that people could spend their money and be entertained and use some of this free time that they have.

Well, they built more play houses than they had actors.

And so what ended up happening is someone would get sick, someone would get hurt, and at the last second, they'd have to try to find someone to fill in for the actor.

And so that person would show up the night of the show, they'd be handed a script, they would stand in the wings of the theater, and they would frantically try to memorize their lines before they stepped on stage to do the scene.

That became known as winging it, right?

And so I would argue that most people in this day and age have adopted that as the way they live their life.

They have no idea what the lines are to their life story.

So they are frantically trying to memorize something in a moment's notice before they have to step on stage and perform in whatever that is in life, instead of figuring out what this is so that you don't have to do that.

So something that was created for an emergency has been adopted as how we choose to live our lives.

And that's the biggest challenge that we have.

It's why we have so much arguing in politics and religion is because we are frantically trying to form an opinion on something that we haven't taken the time to really figure out what our non-negotiables are.

Because if we were talking about values, we'd find that we share more.

Well, so, Brant, actually, pull me out of the rabbit hole when you want to.

But since you mentioned, oh, what came to my mind is religion.

It's politics, religion.

I think part of the issue is with the values, with the religion.

If I was to literally put the value as I'm Roman Catholic, is that valid or is the deeper values is what would Jesus do?

What are Jesus' values?

Okay, so again, you're confusing the value.

The value has nothing to do with being Roman Catholic.

The value is faith.

Okay, so the value would be my faith.

The how I honor that faith for me might be by being Catholic.

For somebody else, it might be being Presbyterian.

For somebody else, it might mean being Buddhist.

For somebody else, it might mean being Muslim.

So we all value faith.

But what I mean is it comes down to like war.

We're going to go to war with Sam.

I'm just making this up on the fly.

But plenty of other places in the world besides the United States for war and conflict.

Let's take the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

But not real deep, just as an analogy.

They have forgotten, say one of your values is peace.

How does it, it seems like there's a conflict now.

My core value is peace, but one of my core values is my faith.

How do I resolve that?

One of the, if you are at odds that much, right?

They will, values can be at odds for sure, right?

But if they stay at odds, then one of those, I would argue, is not a non-negotiable.

I would agree, and that my, whenever I had that conversation in particular, I'm like, stop the conflict.

Then I'm like the father when my kids are fighting.

I don't care whose fault it is.

People are like, well, you should care whose fault.

I'm like, no, I want peace, period.

I don't care.

What I would say is this, if we break this down into what, why, and how, right?

What do we care about?

Why do we care about it?

And how do we honor it?

Right?

Those are the three things.

I would argue, hardly any of us have an argument over the what.

We don't argue over the value.

We argue over the how.

How are we going to honor it?

How are we going to get to peace?

That's right.

And in politics, it's, I value education as an example, but how are we going to honor that?

For Republicans, they think one thing.

For Democrats, they think something else.

For independents, they think something else.

We all value the education.

Well, see, actually, that's not a helpful example because I, as an engineer, breaking it down to the simplest of simplest, education is, what does that mean?

I really, it's, give me what you really want out of the education.

Right.

So is it learning?

Is it knowledge?

Is it, again, the value would be something like, I value learning, I value knowledge, I value whatever that is.

I'd need to read.

But even then, why?

Because I need to communicate and I need to understand.

That's what we're really getting to.

I need to be able to communicate and I need to be able to understand you.

If I didn't need to go to school and learn how to read and get educated, and someday with AI and a chip in my head, I might not need to, I wouldn't need to education.

I would just have a chip implanted at birth and I'd be able to communicate with you.

And why we need education?

That's why I get hung up with this, determining the values and such as what is the real, why am I really going with this?

Why is it useful?

Why do I need it?

So again, if we looked at education being knowledge, right?

So the reason we want to be educated is so we possess the knowledge that we can use to help us get a job, to help us learn how to do surgery on somebody, to help us argue a case in court, whatever that is.

So if knowledge is the value, the argument comes not in the fact that we care about knowledge.

The argument would become what knowledge do we care about?

But let's go back to the peace example.

Okay.

Or not.

I just think we left that one hanging, not really resolving it in terms of these are in conflict.

I have peace and I have faith.

Right.

If your faith is telling you to kill somebody else, then you do not have peace as a value, period.

End of discussion.

It is not one of your values, because you wouldn't do that.

You can't have peace by doing that.

Well, thank you.

I think everyone, a lot of people would argue with you on that, but I agree.

Thank you.

It would be wrong.

Yeah.

Well, don't come up with a way to logical it out.

And maybe I can do it for them.

You take peace off your values if you believe God and your faith is that strong, and basically peace is not a value.

If you believe that the only way for your faith to be realized is through violence of some sort, then you cannot value peace if you are in favor of violence.

I don't see how those two things can reconcile themselves.

And it's okay.

You just got to admit it to yourself.

That's the truth.

My faith is more important than peace.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's the truth.

Now back to, if you want to finish.

Yeah.

Where you were with education.

So my point is this, is that I think we can all agree that we value knowledge, right?

We want our kids to learn something that is going to help them in their future, right?

Like we can all agree, and it doesn't matter what side of the fence you're on, we can all agree on that.

Where the argument comes is not in that, it's in the, well, they don't need to learn this, they need to learn that, right?

It's in the specifics of knowledge, that I define knowledge differently than you do.

I don't, you know, this is, we just moved from Florida, right?

So Florida had the whole sort of woke movement where they're trying to take away history.

I wondered about that because on your musician page, it came up a lot of stuff in Florida in respect because a lot of Tom Petty came out of Florida.

But I know you live in Nashville now.

I live in Atlanta.

That's where I live now.

Oh, okay.

And so the idea though was that the argument in Florida has become what is woke, quote unquote, woke and not right.

I just learned that term this year and I'm kind of like, I don't get because it's so contradictory.

We do what it's mean.

Anyhow, go ahead, Brant.

It's ridiculous.

It's just ridiculous.

It's ridiculous on every front.

I'm a woke.

What does it mean?

You can't erase history.

What's happened has already happened.

And denying it doesn't mean that it's not real.

What are you speaking of exactly?

I'm naive in that.

Oh, God.

I mean, in Florida, it was everything from Black history to anything in the LGBTQ movement.

You know, anything that wasn't what I would say mainstream white America.

How is it related to being a woke now?

Well, if you care about those other sorts of things, then you're woke.

You're woke.

You're not standing to our roots.

You're worried about what the world is trying to convince you of right now.

And it's just, listen, it's a ridiculous argument.

So, woke would mean like I care about the Black people.

I care about the LGBTs.

I'm still working on this because I care about everybody.

It would be like the Black Lives Matter movement, the Pride movement, the trans movement, anything like that at all that isn't what I would consider hardcore, you know, say, right-wing Christian.

That took us down the rabbit hole.

Yeah.

Away from the values, I think, unless your value is low.

The point of this whole thing was, if we could keep the focus on the value, we could come to agreement a lot better if we were not focused on how we're going to honor that value.

So the value would be, I care about people.

I care about, in this case, it would be, I care about learning.

I want my kid to learn, right?

And so, no one's arguing that.

It comes down to, well, how are they going to learn?

What is it that we're going to teach them?

We're not arguing the learning.

We all want our kids to learn, but some people say, well, I only want my kids to learn X, and other people say, I want my kids to learn Y.

And so, that's where the argument comes in.

It's not in the valley.

You're speaking of in history, in terms of history.

It's like I want to learn science or I want to learn math or physics or history or economics?

Or I want them to, yeah, I want them to learn what's actually happened in history, or I want them to learn some bastardized version of what I'm willing to agree to.

And how does that go into values again?

It goes into values that if we could keep the focus on learning, and let's talk about that, right, let's talk about that, we can find common ground in the other things.

But when we take the eye off the ball of learning and we start focus, hyper focusing on these little minute things along the way, we get stuck there and learning gets lost in the argument that, well, I don't want them to learn this, I want them to learn that.

So I'm trying to stay focused on values.

My attention is being pulled away, but I think this is relevant.

Disinformation, misinformation, it could be about truth.

Truth could be a value.

Truth is a value, yeah.

So if one of your values is truth and one of them is knowledge, this is an relevant example then, because your value is truth, it'd probably be my top value above knowledge.

I'd want true knowledge.

Would this help me, Brant, is what I'm doing here is processing?

So theoretically, absolutely.

The challenge would be truth.

What's truth?

You can't live in this country in the last few years and not question what the truth means, because it depends on what you have convinced yourself of.

Right?

Is it absolute truth?

Is the sun the sun?

Or is the sun a piece of cheese that just floats in the air?

If I've convinced myself that it's a piece of cheese, then that's my truth.

So truth is a slippery subject.

I mean, that's why we've got CNN and Fox and MSNBC, and we've got all these news shows, because they all have a different version of the truth.

But in the end, we are all searching for the truth.

And that's what I mean by my value.

The truth is, whether I've been played or not, my value is really the truth.

And I've been played.

I might believe the lie that I've been told.

Lie is a strong word.

We say my new belief based on this misinformation, but I'm really still seeking the truth.

Yep.

Agreed.

Yes.

The truth is still the value, and we get lost in the details.

So back to this choice about knowledge, I think this is an important thing we're on here, because I'm open-minded, and I choose my friends based on who they are, not what color they are, not whether they're sexual preferences.

But to this knowledge thing, can you give me an example of where someone might choose a different path in knowledge and not be aware that they're violating their truth, seeking the truth is actual a higher value.

So for me, when it comes to things like, I put learning and knowledge in the same bucket, right?

But how I would differ those two values, even though they're similar to each other.

Learning is about the act of learning.

I like being, I like going to classes.

I like being in school.

I like the act of learning, right?

It keeps me engaged.

Knowledge is about possessing the knowledge.

So it's not the act of learning.

It's having the knowledge is what's most important to me.

Is it the journey or is it the destination, right?

So someone who has learning is somebody who really loves the journey and somebody who has knowledge is really about the destination.

I care more that I possess the knowledge than how I learned the knowledge.

Does that make sense?

Hmm, it will.

So what I'm saying is that if I was looking at those values, that's what I'm looking at for somebody, because there's a lot of people who come between learning and knowledge as two values and they don't know which one is right for them or not, right?

So for that person who is going, well, it's either knowledge or learning, but it's one of those two things is one of my non-negotiables.

My thing to them is, is it about the journey or is it about the destination?

Well, an example I can pay my head, I'm trying to think of putting myself in the shoes.

If say I'm a professor at this college, knowledge is very important to me.

It's part of my job.

It's who I am.

Yeah.

What if somebody offered me the truth?

I'm just making this up.

Sure.

Somebody from the government showed up and said, I will show you a UFO.

It's real.

In this conflicts with everything that I've accumulated my knowledge for.

I guess if the truth was higher in my value list, I would choose that over all this knowledge I've created, which might be based on history that's not all, you know, not everything.

What I would tell you is this.

Truth, truth is a very volatile value because truth is subjective.

I should say this.

Truth has become subjective.

We're back to the misinformation, disinformation, beliefs on you watch too much TV.

That's the tough part of using truth as a value, right?

So yes, you want the truth, but truth has become subjective.

And that makes it really hard for two people on opposite sides of the fence.

Oh, I know what you're speaking of.

I know.

Absolutely talking about.

I'm by the way, one of the people I question everything.

Some of my friends get really frustrated.

Can't we agree on anything?

Why is that so important?

We absolutely, positively have to agree.

I'm not challenging your beliefs or I don't have a problem with your beliefs.

But basically the moving target you speak of, people, they feel the need to agree on this is true.

Evolution, yes or no, God, yes or no.

I'm like, why does it have to be so absolute?

Because it's going to change next year.

Just like they'll say coffee is good for you, red wines, a little bit of red wines good for you every day, good for the heart.

It'll change next week.

Right.

Ideally, truth should be absolute.

Okay.

So I think I beat the truth out of this enough.

Let's talk about your new book, Designing Momentum.

Yeah.

Tell me about it.

So, you know, the first book was rooted in, in me discovering what mattered most to me while my son battled for his life with cancer.

Right.

And so Theo was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer when he was 12 years old, I'm sorry, 14 years old in 2012.

And, you know, he battled for nine years.

And during that battle, I had not defined what my non-negotiables were.

And so my, my decision making was questionable because I was swayed by the emotions of the moment a lot.

And so it made me have to discover what my non-negotiables are so that if I ever found myself in this position again, I would know what mattered most and I wouldn't be swayed one way or another.

I could stand on my truth.

Let's say that.

And then COVID comes.

Theo catches COVID in 2021 in January and he passes away in February from, from COVID after cancer beat him up for, for nine years.

And I, you know, find myself detaching from the world, right?

I just, I don't want to, I don't want anything.

I don't want to talk to people.

I don't want to be around anybody.

I don't want to live my life the way that I'm living it without him in it.

And after about 18 months or so, one of my inner circle buddies calls me up and he's like, look, I know you've been through something horrible.

I'm sorry, but I want you to know something.

What I believe in my life is this, is that when you die, you really die twice.

The first is when you leave this earth, but the second is when your name is spoken for the last time.

So what I want to know is what are you doing to make sure Theo's second life outlives his first?

Because the wallowing in the detachment is not going to get it done.

So you need to re-engage.

You need to talk about him.

You need to bring his message forth.

You need to share him with the world so that they don't forget who he was.

And you're not doing that.

And so what I realized in that moment was that he was right.

But I didn't have the motivation to change everything all at once.

I only had enough energy to focus on the moment I was in.

And so that's where I started.

And so starting in really the last half of 2021 into 2022, I started to focus and live my life moment to moment.

And can I generate enough momentum in a single moment to catapult myself forward towards my goals?

And what I found was that sort of survivor mentality of survival mode that we have all found ourselves in at one moment or another, where you're only focused on the moment in front of you because everything else is too overwhelming.

I was able to flip that and use that moment to moment idea to start building momentum.

And here we are now, you know, four years, almost four years, in two weeks, it'll be four years of Theo passing.

I finally have built that momentum back in my life to be at the top of my game again.

And this new book of Designing Momentum was how I did it.

Now, how do we use the power of a single moment to propel ourselves forward?

Nice.

Yeah.

What worked for you?

What I've discovered is it really works for everybody.

This comes back to, you know, Eckhart Tolle and the power of now, right?

Are you in the present moment or are you living in a future that hasn't been created yet?

Or are you dwelling on a past that you can't escape?

And so it's about owning the present moment and using it to propel yourself forward.

And the book gives you, how do you change your mindset?

To do that, it puts forth what I call the bump framework.

How do you bump yourself forward in a moment is by creating belonging, understanding, meaning and purpose.

If you can do those four things, you can actually create enough momentum in that moment to push yourself forward.

And so it teaches you how to do that in what I call moment momentum.

That's what the entire book is about.

And notice the catchy acronyms.

There's the bump framework and then there's the W-I-T-W-A-W.

Witwa.

Witwa.

Witwa mindset.

What is the Witwa mindset?

The Witwa mindset is what if there was a way?

If you approach the challenges that you're facing by asking what if there was a way, what you're doing is tricking your brain's desire for uncertainty or at least to be able to make something certain, right?

So when our brains face uncertainty, it wants to just take that uncertainty and be certain about something as quickly as possible.

What it doesn't care about is whether you're right or wrong.

It just wants to be certain.

And so WitWa allows you to hack that part of your brain to be able to say, when you say, what if there was a way, you are immediately looking at a positive outcome, right?

So whatever the challenge is, you're asking, what if there was a way to overcome this challenge, to get past this particular obstacle?

And your brain starts looking for solutions to overcome, right?

As opposed to, well, this is going to tank us.

Well, we're never going to be able to handle this.

We're never going to be able to do it, because the minute you say that, your brain is just trying to confirm it.

That's all it's doing.

So what if there was a way, is a way for you to hack that part of your brain to look for the positive potential outcome.

It's looking for possibilities.

It's not looking for negative probabilities.

What comes to mind is if I say, I'm at a bump, there's a roadblock.

And if I think, what if there was a way, it's taking me into the future, a different picture already around the bump.

Not like how do we get over the bump?

It's already, I'm already thought of, I've already kind of assumed I'm around the bump.

Yeah.

Agreed completely.

And what that does is it just puts your brain into a mode of trying to find solutions.

How did I get here?

Like I'm working backwards.

I'm already here around the bump.

How did I get here?

That's right.

And it's trying to avoid, when you're looking for solutions, it's avoiding you confirming the negative potential of whatever that looks like.

Right?

So if you sat there and went, well, great, now I'm going to be late.

Well, great, I'm never going to get around this bump.

I'm never going to, your brain immediately is trying to confirm what you just said is true.

It's going to kill you, take it.

Yeah, it's just going to make you feel really bad.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Is there anything else?

Is there anything we haven't talked about?

No, man, not at all.

I think this is great.

Listen, it's values work is swimming in the deep end of the pool.

Right?

And sometimes you're treading water.

Sometimes you're swimming strong, and sometimes you feel like someone's trying to drown you, right?

And that's all part of doing the work to determine what's real and what isn't real.

So having spirited discussion, having the courage to question for yourself what's real and what's not.

What do you really care about?

Can you get honest with yourself?

Is this something that you care about, or is it something that somebody told you to care about?

Those are the tough questions of growing up and being an adult.

And understanding that you have to live your truth, and your truth is not my truth.

But if you don't take the time to discover it, you're living somebody else's truth, and that's not doing anybody any favors, right?

And so this is why we do this work.

It's why we have these discussions as difficult or confusing as they sometimes can get.

The truth is, if we don't have these discussions, we never get to who we were meant to be.

And that's the goal.

So, your website is, it'll be in the show notes, brantmenswar.com.

Are there any other links?

Or is that the site to go in terms of getting?

You can get to all the other.

You can get to my book sites, you can get to the assessment, you can get to my socials, all from that.

That's probably the easiest way to go.

The assessments for the values and your new books.

I'll put the book links into Amazon separately, but it was the assessment was circling back to because I really got us in the swamp with the...

It's good.

Listen, these are...

Here's the real challenge, Daniel.

Most people don't take the effort that you just did to get into the weeds.

They don't.

They just blindly accept something or they don't want to get themselves in a position where they might feel uncomfortable.

Life is uncomfortable.

Get over it, right?

Yeah.

So, the fact that you're willing to do that is the best possible sign.

Also, in terms of drawing boundaries, which is another issue, I don't know about everyone else, but sometimes my boundaries, I can just go, I have my values.

Top five, not in this.

Sorry.

Not my fault.

I went to Brant's website, did the...

Done.

Yeah, it's not...

Blame it on me.

I'm happy to take the blame any day.

But if you can convince me that what you want to do is in one of my top values, then I'm on board with you.

Add a zero to the ask, and then maybe you can convince me to challenge one of my values, right?

Thanks so much for taking the time to be on my show, Brant.

Really appreciate it.

You bet, brother.

Thanks for the invite.

Have a great day.

You too.