Here’s a number worth sitting with: Americans spend $48 billion a year on dietary supplements. They spend $35 billion on gym memberships.

We’re dropping 37% more on pills than on pull-ups.

That stat comes to us from Dr. Jordan Metzl, author of Push: Unlock the Science of Fitness Motivation — and his point isn’t to shame anyo…

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Whether you join inside the Chase Club, the ChaseTracker app, or with nothing but a notebook …

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When we talked with her, philosopher Rebecca Goldstein put it simply: a successful “mattering project” is one that makes you feel like your life is meaningful in your own eyes.

Not impressive on Instagram. Not admirable by some external standard. Meaningful in your own eyes.

That distinction is doing a lot of work.

We live in …

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Every time we complain, we sign up for more stress.

That’s not a metaphor. Chronic stress is a physical condition - one that clogs arteries, suppresses immune function, and contributes to the diseases that kill most of us. And the strange thing is, we volunteer for it. Nobody makes us complain. We choose it, usually with…

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Fitness isn’t what matters.

It’s what makes everything else possible.

There is one shared human goal — to live a good, meaningful, fulfilled life. Deep relationships. Great experiences. Meaningful work. That’s it. Those are the things.

And there is exactly one thing that can take them from you: loss of health.

Not failure. Not poverty. Not heartbreak. Health. Because without it, you don’t have the freedom to pursue anything else. The person in late-stage cognitive decline doesn’t get to be present for their grandkids. The person too sick to move doesn’t get to have the great experiences.

Fitness is not the point. It is the infrastructure.

Inside Ben’s gym, they tell every new member that fitness is not of the utmost importance. It is of the utmost necessity. You don’t care about fitness because fitness matters. You care about it because you care about your life — and fitness is the precondition for living it fully.

This reframe changes why you show up to train.

Not to look good. Not to win. Not even to feel strong.

To be an asset. To the people you love, to the life you want, and to the world around you.

[ Dig deeper into this idea in our latest episode. ]

When you're being fully honest with yourself — what's the real reason you show up to train?

Download the Substack app and answer in the comments. 💬

In this episode, Ben, Cole, and Jamison unpack six foundational principles for anyone who wants to build fitness that serves them today, tomorrow, and forever. You’ll walk away with a clear framework for training with sustainable effort, building real-world …

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🎧 In This Episode

We explore six foundational training principles that define what it means to be a “forever athlete” — someone who trains not for performance peaks or aesthetics, but for lifelong capability and freedom.

You’ll learn why consistency compounds like an investment portfolio, how to measure training intensity without a lab or a heart rate monitor, and what it actually means to train in a way that lets you say yes to anything life asks of you.

Ben shares the Warren Buffett analogy that reframes how fitness really works over time, and Cole explains why the minimum effective dose — not the maximum tolerable dose — is the secret to long-term adaptation.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Consistency Beats Intensity

The most important training variable isn’t how hard you go — it’s how often you come back.

Ben draws on Morgan Housel’s comparison of Warren Buffett’s 22% annual returns over 60 years vs. a fund manager’s 62% returns over 20: Buffett wins by a mile, because compounding requires time.

Cole puts it simply: do just enough that you want to come back tomorrow. The minimum effective dose — not the maximum tolerable dose — drives the best long-term adaptation.

If you’re going significantly faster in your last round than your first, you didn’t start at the right effort.

2. Capability Over Appearance

Form follows function — not the other way around.

The training structure is built around real-world capability first: strength, conditioning, and mobility. Aesthetic results follow naturally when you do the right work consistently and support it with sleep, nutrition, and recovery.

Ben’s rule of thumb says it all: earn the right to do curls. Do the class, build the real engine — then the extras are genuinely extra.

A program built around capability will always deliver better-looking results than one built around appearance alone.

3. Strength for Longevity — Never Fail a Lift

The Chinese weightlifting methodology underpinning CompTrain’s strength programming is deceptively simple: triples at 85%, over and over.

You don’t need to test your one-rep max to get strong.

Regularly failing lifts is like regularly crashing your car during a driving lesson — it’s not a training method, it’s a mistake.

Cole confirms it from experience: every major injury he sustained came from lifting too heavy with bad form, ego overriding judgment. Living at 85% with perfect technique delivers nearly identical adaptation at a fraction of the injury risk.

4. Engine Before Ego — Pacing Is the Skill

You don’t need a VO2 max lab or a heart rate monitor to know if you trained at the right intensity. Ask one question: did every round look the same?

Ben calls consistent pacing the universal secret of every serious cardiovascular athlete. If you faded, you crossed the threshold. If you held steady with just a little left at the end, you nailed it.

Cole adds the structural piece: the weekly training design undulates intensities deliberately so each day you recover from the previous one and still get in quality work.

5. Progress Is Cumulative — Think in Decades

Any two days of training have a 50/50 chance of feeling good or bad — just like the stock market. But decade over decade, the market goes up 100% of the time.

Fitness compounds the same way.

Ben’s law of thirds frames it well: a third of the time you’ll feel great, a third okay, a third rough. That’s the normal distribution. The goal isn’t to feel great every day — it’s to keep showing up so the compound interest builds.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where in your training are you choosing intensity over consistency — and what’s it costing you?

Think about the last time you crushed a workout so hard you were sore for three days or skipped the next session. Was that serving the long game? Where are you prioritizing the feeling of effort over the fact of adaptation?

2. Does your current training add to your life outside the gym — or take from it?

Cole shared that during his competitive years, he was too exhausted to play with his kids at the end of the day. Think about how you feel when someone needs something from you after training. Are you present and available, or tapped out?

3. How are you measuring progress — and is that measurement actually serving you?

Are you comparing yourself to others on a leaderboard, chasing a one-rep max, or tracking how you feel relative to yourself over months and years? What would change if you committed to logging everything — but stopped caring where you rank?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Train to come back tomorrow.

Before your next workout, decide in advance what “coming back tomorrow” looks like.

If the session destroys you, you failed — not the set, not the round, the session itself. Set your effort based on what you can sustain for the full workout, not what feels impressive in round one.

After the session, ask yourself: do I feel like I could do something meaningful today? Not the same workout — just something real, in the real world. If yes, you hit it right. If you’re on the couch unable to function, recalibrate.

The goal is never the single day. The goal is the decade.

Two new episodes and the start of two new series for you this week. This is something I’m really excited about — continuing to find ways to bring these conversations to you in a way that’s fresh and, hopefully, useful.

This week, we have the start of the Raise series, where I’m having parenting-focused conversations, and the 5x5, where Ben is answering your 5 Factors questions directly.

Here’s a quick look at what we got into, plus links to the full 5-3-1 Listener Guides if you want to go deeper.

🎧 Raise | Of the 272 Emotions, Most Parents Only Know 12 (w/ D. Earl Johnston)

Doug Earl Johnston — former corporate executive, world champion sailor, and author of Choosing Emotions — joins me to talk about what he calls the emotionary: a framework that treats emotions not as things that happen to us, but as choices we can consciously make. The conversation quickly becomes about what we’re modeling for our kids — and how the emotional vocabulary we give them now is the one they’ll reach for when life gets hard.

This episode’s for you if:

• You want to build a richer emotional vocabulary — for yourself and for the people you love — so that when the hard moments arrive, you have more than 12 emotions to work with.

• You’ve been so focused on what you tell your kids about emotions that you haven’t fully reckoned with what they’re learning by watching you — and you’re ready to look at that honestly.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

Supporting our sponsors is one of the best ways to support the show — thanks to these brands for helping us chase: Monarch · LMNT · Cheers Health · Function Health · BetterHelp · David Protein · Shopify · Momentous · OneSkin

🎧 5x5 | Reading for Recall Over Ego & Letting Flow Happen at Home

Ben goes solo for our new 5x5 format — five listener questions on the THINK factor, answered in five minutes each. This week’s questions cover growth mindset, the Fragmented → Focused → Flow framework, how Ben builds his frameworks, and what to do when your brain feels like a carnival cash machine (money flying everywhere, walking away with maybe $15).

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to bring the same loose, present energy to the areas that matter most — parenting, relationships, the things where the stakes feel highest — that you bring to the areas where you feel in flow.

• You keep finishing podcasts and books feeling like you learned something, but can’t articulate the main idea an hour later — because the dopamine hit of finishing has been quietly passing itself off as learning.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

Thanks as always for being here.

If one of these episodes resonates with you, please consider sharing it with a friend. And if you haven’t, we’d love it if you left us a review and a rating wherever you listen.

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

In this 5x5 episode, Ben takes five of your questions on the THINK factor, covering growth mindset, the Fragmented → Focused → Flow framework, and the distillation process behind every CE framework you’ve ever loved.

You’ll walk away with a clear process for building a growth mindset in others, a new approach to retaining what you read and listen to, and a reframe on why letting go is the highest-effort move you can make at home.

🎧 Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Weakness Is the Starting Point, Not a Destination

Ben opens by cataloging his own limitations without flinching: an autoimmune condition he manages through healthy living, a caffeine dependence he’s fighting cold turkey, and physical constraints in strength and mobility that require daily attention. The point isn’t confession — it’s modeling. A growth mindset begins with honest self-assessment. You can’t improve what you won’t name.

Ben’s approach to each weakness follows the same pattern: identify it, understand what’s driving it, and build a daily practice around it.

2. Growth Mindset Starts With Language, Not Belief

Carol Dweck’s research is often oversimplified to “believe you can improve.” But Ben zeroes in on the practical mechanism: language. The famous study — students told “you’re so smart” vs. “you must have worked really hard” — produced radically different outcomes. Smart-labeled kids chose easier tasks to protect their identity; effort-labeled kids chose harder ones.

The coaches, parents, and leaders who most effectively shift mindsets aren’t the ones giving speeches about growth — they’re the ones consistently rewarding process over results, effort over outcome, becoming over being. Drip by drip, the language of the coach becomes the internal monologue of the athlete.

3. Flow Follows Focus — But Focus Requires Non-Judgment

The Fragmented → Focused → Flow framework explains why we often perform best in the areas where we care least. Emma’s insight — that she’s in flow at work but anxious at home — maps perfectly to Ben’s own HRV data: his lowest-stress moments were coaching classes, his highest-stress was putting his (then) toddlers to bed.

Flow doesn’t emerge from trying harder; it emerges from a singular, non-judgmental point of focus. The surfer doesn’t force the ocean — she reads the waves and responds. Letting go isn’t less effort; it’s redirected effort.

4. The Distillation Process Behind Every Framework

Ben’s frameworks don’t come from journaling or brainstorming sessions — they come from noticing friction. When something feels complex or off, he drives toward the simplest true version of it, then tests it publicly: on the podcast, in classes, in conversations. Each round of feedback sharpens it further.

The Five Factors emerged from the same process — adding things until they’re essential, then removing anything that doesn’t break the puzzle. Cold therapy? Nice, not necessary. Sleep? Remove it and the whole thing collapses. The principle: keep, combine, kill.

What remains is the framework.

5. Active Learning is Hunting for the Nugget

The difference between listeners who retain and those who don’t isn’t intelligence — it’s intention. Ben listens to find the next nugget, not to be entertained. When he finds it, he pauses, tries to say it back in his own words, listens again, and often goes through the entire book or episode a second (and third) time.

Underlining is reading twice. Writing it down is reading three times. Listening with intent to own the idea — not just absorb it — creates the neural encoding that makes recall possible. The 15-second back button is, in his words, his favorite feature of any audio player.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where are you consuming information for entertainment rather than learning — and what would change if you approached it differently?

Think about the last podcast, book, or article you finished. Could you articulate its core idea to someone else right now, in your own words? If not, you may have been in entertainment mode. What would it look like to switch — to listen or read hunting for the single next nugget instead of passively absorbing?

2. Where in your life are you squeezing the bar of soap — trying so hard that the thing you want most keeps slipping away?

This could be in parenting, performance, relationships, or creative work. Where are the stakes so high that the effort to control outcomes is actually creating the tension that prevents flow? What would it mean to read the waves instead of trying to command the ocean?

3. Think about a belief you have about yourself that may have been handed to you — not chosen. Where did it come from, and does it still serve you?

Ben grew up with a fixed mindset about academics — believing he wasn’t good at school. It was inherited, not evaluated. Where might you be carrying a similar story? And if you looked at it through a growth lens — not “I’m not good at X” but “I haven’t become good at X yet” — what would change?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Hunt for one nugget.

The next time you read a book, listen to a podcast, or watch a video, set a single intention: find the one thing that changes how you see or do something.

When you find it — pause. Try to say it back in your own words without looking at it. Then write it down as if you’re going to teach it to someone else tomorrow.

That’s it. One nugget, fully owned, is worth ten hours of passive listening. Most of us are walking away from every learning experience with $15 when we could be walking away with everything we came for. The process starts with one clear intention before you press play.

You’ll walk away with a clear process for building a growth mindset in others, a new approach to retaining what you…

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When people lose their gym community, they usually say the same thing: I miss my people.

But dig a little deeper and it turns out they’re not missing one thing. They’re missing five.

The physical practice. The accountability of showing up somewhere at a specific time. The shared values - people who care about the same thing…

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The advice sounds controversial, maybe even selfish: Prioritize your spouse over your kids.

We’re taught the opposite. Kids come first. Always. You’d run into traffic for them. You’d sacrifice anything. Your marriage becomes a team effort to serve them.

But here’s what happens when you make your kids the center of every…

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Most people think you need to lift heavy weights to get strong.

But when we talked with him, Scott Hogan offered a different approach: slow down. Way down. Five-second negatives. Five-second eccentrics. Don’t jerk the weight around. Move with control and intention. And watch what happens to your joints.

The reason thi…

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We explore D. Earl Johnston’s groundbreaking book Choosing Emotions — now the single most comprehensive reference on human emotions in the English language — and what it means to parent as someone who chooses their responses instead of defaulting to them.

You’ll learn why the average adult operates with a vocabulary of just 8-12 emotions when hundreds exist, how to break default emotional patterns using the Awareness → Belief → Repetition framework, and why the vocabulary we give our kids now is the vocabulary they’ll reach for when life gets hard.

Doug also shares the story of how three Post-it notes with quotes from survivors changed his daughter’s relationship with depression — and ultimately sparked a decade of research.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Emotions Are Choices, Not Reactions

The near-unanimous scientific consensus says that, at our best, we choose our emotions. Doug calls them the “gears of life” — tools we shift deliberately, like a cyclist downshifting on a hill.

The distinction matters enormously for parents: we’re not just modeling how to handle emotions, we’re modeling whether they can be handled at all.

Winston Churchill captured it in eight words during the London Blitz: “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” That framing shifts everything. You’re not expected to stop feeling afraid — you’re expected to decide what comes next.

2. The Emotional Vocabulary Gap

The average American believes there are 8-28 emotions. Doug has documented 272 — and suspects the real number is closer to 400. This gap has real consequences. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on “emotional granularity” shows that precision of language directly predicts our ability to resolve what’s troubling us.

When a kid mislabels fear as “stress,” they solve for the wrong thing. When addiction gets mislabeled as anxiety, recovery slows.

As linguist Noam Chomsky put it: “Words are the grooves through which our thoughts are conveyed.” The vocabulary we give our kids is the vocabulary they’ll reach for when life gets hard.

3. Awareness → Belief → Repetition

Breaking a default emotional pattern requires three things in order.

Awareness first — the habit of catching what you’re feeling before you act on it. `Doug’s practical tool: say it out loud. “I’m getting mad.” The moment you name it, you’re watching the emotion instead of being inside it.

Belief second — Doug read Carl Jung’s line about ego and literally cried, because a belief he’d carried for decades shifted in a moment. Nothing else produces that kind of change.

Repetition third — wires the new default in. Your kids are watching every rep of this sequence, whether you intend it or not.

4. The 90-Second Rule

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s research found that the physical experience of an emotion lasts roughly 90 seconds in the body. After that, it dissipates — unless the cognitive brain kicks in and connects it to every previous time you felt that way.

The guy who cut you off triggered a 90-second chemical event. What keeps it alive is the story you keep retelling.

For parents, this reframe is immediately useful: you have 90 seconds.

If you can pause and name what you’re feeling instead of acting on it, the wave passes on its own. The pattern interrupt — that pause — is the practice.

5. Name It to Tame It

UCLA professor Dan Siegel’s five-word principle sits at the heart of this conversation: name it to tame it.

When we give children specific words for what they’re feeling, two things happen: the emotion becomes workable instead of overwhelming, and we signal that emotions can be named, examined, and moved through.

Doug’s book exists precisely for this — a page full of quotes from people who’ve experienced an emotion, survived it, and found language for it. If Winston Churchill or J.K. Rowling felt that way, it becomes easier to face. That’s the gift — not protection from hard feelings, but orientation inside them.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where are you currently reacting instead of choosing — and what would it look like to catch it one beat earlier?

Think about a recurring emotional pattern in your life — with your kids, your partner, or your work. Is the reaction something you consciously chose, or something running on autopilot for years? What would change if you named it out loud before you acted on it?

2. What emotional vocabulary are your kids absorbing from watching you — not from what you say, but from what you do?

Not what you teach explicitly, but what they observe. When you’re frustrated, what do they see? When you’re anxious or afraid, do you name it or perform it? What’s the gap between what you say about emotions and what you actually model?

3. Think of a time you struggled to find the right words for what you were feeling. How did that affect your ability to move through it?

Doug’s central argument is that if you can’t name it, you can’t tame it. Reflect on a moment — a setback, a relationship tension, a loss — where the feeling stayed stuck because you didn’t have language for it. What word, if you’d had it then, might have helped you move through it sooner?

🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY

The vocabulary we give our kids is the vocabulary they’ll reach for when life gets hard.

Doug Johnston didn’t set out to write the most comprehensive reference on human emotions in the English language. He set out to help his daughter, who couldn’t find words for what she was feeling. Three Post-it notes with quotes from survivors changed something in her — not because the quotes solved anything, but because they proved the feeling had a name, and that others had been there and come out the other side.

That’s the through-line of everything in this conversation. Emotional vocabulary isn’t just self-help language. It’s the primary tool we have for moving through difficulty. When we can name what we’re feeling precisely — depression, not sadness; fear, not stress — we can address what’s actually there. When we can’t, we solve for the wrong thing.

The Awareness → Belief → Repetition framework Doug describes maps directly onto our own model of Awareness → Intention → Action. You can’t choose an emotion you haven’t noticed. You can’t notice something you don’t have a word for. This is where the work starts — not in a crisis moment, but in the quiet daily habit of naming what’s actually happening inside you.

And here’s what makes this a parenting conversation specifically: your kids aren’t waiting for a teachable moment. The conversation is already happening. They’re watching how you handle frustration, fear, grief, and joy. The emotional vocabulary you model — and the size of it — is what they’re inheriting.

Name it. Tame it. Then teach them to do the same.

In this first episode of our new Raise series, we explore Doug Earl Johnston’s groundbreaking book Choosing Emotions — now the single most comprehensive reference on human emotions in the English language — and what it mean…

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Most of us spend our lives chasing pleasure. And most of us wonder why it never quite fills us up.

Arthur Brooks makes a distinction that’s worth sitting with.

Pleasure, he says, is not the same as enjoyment — and it’s definitely not the same as satisfaction.

Pleasure is immediate, often solitary, and typically leaves you worse off when it’s over. The mindless scroll. The extra drink. The path of least resistance at the end of a long day. It feels good for a moment. Then it’s gone, and you feel vaguely emptier than before.

Enjoyment is different. It requires other people. It creates memories worth keeping. It’s the version of “good” that compounds.

But satisfaction is different still. Satisfaction — the deep, lasting kind — only comes after you’ve done something hard. You can’t manufacture it. You can’t shortcut it. It lives exclusively on the other side of effort.

The problem is that pleasure is louder. It’s more available. It’s easier to choose. And so most people spend their whole lives optimizing for the thing that depletes them while the thing that would actually fulfill them sits just on the other side of a little discomfort.

You know the feeling we’re talking about. The end of a hard workout. A project you finally finished. A conversation you’d been putting off. That quiet, settled sense that you did something real today.

That’s what we’re actually after.

We just keep forgetting it when the easier option is everywhere, always.

What's something you keep reaching for at the end of a hard day — and what does it actually give you?

Sound off below. 💬

Two new conversations dropped this week. Here’s a look at what we got into, plus links to the full 5-3-1 Listener Guides if you want to go deeper.

🎧 Be Selfless So You Can Become Fearless (w/ Jim Murphy)

Jim Murphy — author of Inner Excellence and The Best Possible Life — joins us to explore a counterintuitive truth: fearlessness isn’t built by conquering fear. It’s built by releasing self-centeredness.

You’ll learn why the ego runs on three internal adversaries, what it actually looks like to become unembarrassable, and why comfort might be the thing quietly holding you back.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop building your confidence on outcomes you can’t control — and start anchoring your identity in who you’re becoming instead of what you’ve achieved.

• You keep getting hijacked by defensiveness, comparison, or the need for approval — and you’re starting to realize the fear isn’t the problem. It’s what the fear is protecting.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

🎧 The One Thing You’re Actually Hiring a Coach For

Using a Chase Club member’s question about whether to take six days off training, we unpack what it really means to be coachable — why the most valuable thing any coach offers isn’t a program or accountability, but a view of yourself you can’t get on your own.

This episode’s for you if:

• You want to get better at receiving perspective with curiosity instead of defensiveness — whether from a coach, a partner, or anyone who sees something you can’t.

• You’ve been holding so tightly to your routine, your identity, or your way of doing things that the thing you love has quietly shifted from supporting your life to trapping you in it.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

Thanks as always for being here.

If one of these episodes resonates with you, please consider sharing it with a friend — and if you haven’t, we’d love it if you left us a review and a rating wherever you listen.

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club (Ad-Free) · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

We explore what it actually means to be coachable — and why the most valuable thing any coach can offer you isn’t a program, a plan, or accountability.

Using a Chase Club member’s question about whether to take six days off training on a coach’s advice, we unpack the two foundations of any great coaching relationship, why your own perspective is always more limited than you think, and what the science actually says about what happens to your fitness when you rest.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. You’re Hiring Their Perspective

When you hire a coach, you’re not really paying for a program or a plan. You’re paying for a view of yourself you can’t get on your own.

No matter how self-aware you are, your perspective is shaped entirely by your experience, your history, and your biases. A good coach has seen dozens — sometimes hundreds — of people just like you. They connect dots you can’t see. That’s the whole point.

2. Coaching Is Built on Two Things: Trust and Experimentation

Every coaching relationship comes down to this: I trust you, so I’ll try it. Both halves matter. If you don’t trust the coach, no experiment is worth running. But if you do trust them — and then refuse to follow their advice — you’re not actually being coached.

Christina hired a coach who has a track record of success with other clients. That’s enough to earn a seven-day experiment. The low-risk nature of the experiment makes the trust equation even easier.

3. The Physiology Is on Your Side

Here’s the good news for anyone afraid to take time off from training: the science says you almost certainly won’t lose a thing. Research shows negligible loss in strength or aerobic capacity from a one-week deload — and in many cases, the opposite happens. Your nervous system, connective tissue, and hormones get a chance to restore.

Work on aerobic capacity from Dr. Jack Daniels (no, not the drink) found that muscle tissue maintains roughly 90% of peak performance for up to 70 days. Seven days is not a risk. Seven days is a rounding error.

4. Good Coaches See the Whole Human

A great coach isn’t obsessed with whether your back squat goes up or down by 5 lbs this week. They’re watching the bigger picture — your mood, your sleep, your energy, your relationship with training itself.

When a coach prescribes rest, they may be seeing something you can’t: that your identity has become too wrapped up in the workout. That training is no longer supporting your life — it’s trapping you. That’s a more important thing to address than any performance metric.

5. Curiosity Over Judgment

When we get advice that challenges what we’re already doing, the instinct is immediate judgment: That’s wrong. That can’t be right. But judgment closes the door before you ever see what’s on the other side.

Curiosity opens it. Instead of this won’t work, try I wonder what she’s seeing that I’m not. That shift — from defending your current approach to genuinely exploring a new one — is what makes coaching (and growth) actually possible.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. When you seek outside perspective, are you looking for confirmation or challenge?

Think about the coaches, mentors, or advisors in your life. When they push back on what you’re already doing, what’s your first reaction? Do you tend to dismiss advice that disrupts your current approach — and what might that be costing you?

2. Is there an area of your life where training (or work, or any habit) has stopped supporting you and started trapping you?

Consider the difference between loving the process of something versus loving the identity of being someone who does it. Where might you be attached to the idea of the thing more than the thing itself?

3. What would you try if you genuinely trusted the outcome was going to be fine either way?

Sometimes resistance to change is just fear dressed up as logic. If you knew the experiment was low-risk — that you could always return to what you were doing — what would you be willing to try?

🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY

Perspective is the only thing worth hiring a coach for.

We tell ourselves we hire coaches for accountability, for programming, for expertise. And those things matter. But underneath all of it is something more fundamental: we hire coaches because our own view of ourselves is always incomplete.

We’re too close to the work, too deep in our own history, too surrounded by our own blind spots. A good coach — in fitness, in business, in life — earns their value not by confirming what we already believe, but by showing us what we’ve been unable to see.

The willingness to actually receive that perspective, to sit with discomfort and approach it with curiosity rather than judgment, is what separates people who grow from people who stay stuck. You can hire the best coach in the world and learn nothing if you’re not ready to be coached.

We dig into a listener’s real dilemma — her coach told her to take six days off from training — and explore why the hardest part of being coached isn’t the programming, it’s the trust. Discover why a great coach’s perspective is the single most valuable thing you’re …

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Your kid lies to you. Again.

And the moment you find out, two things happen at once — you’re hurt, and you’re angry. The hurt is about the relationship. The angry is about the rule they broke. Most of us handle them as one problem. That’s where things go sideways.

This idea comes from Ray Dalio’s book Principles. Whe…

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