Quick note before our High Performance Challenge kicks off tomorrow.

As I mentioned in Thursday’s episode, we’re inviting you to do a 21-Day High Performance Challenge.

The short version: for 21 days, we’re going to practice the five characteristics that separate high performers from everyone else — not as traits you either have or don’t, but as a system you can actually work. One task per day. Built around five characteristics:

1. Ridiculous Work Ethic — working better hours, not more of them

2. Self-Management & Accountability — ownership of inputs before results show up

3. Strategic Prioritization — as disciplined about what not to do as what you do

4. Complete Ownership — no external blame, full agency

5. Initiative Beyond Expectations — raising the floor, not just the ceiling

The goal isn’t to grind harder for 21 days. It’s to close the gap between who you are and who you want to be at work — one day at a time.

How to join me:

Option 1 — Inside the ChaseTracker app (free with your Chase Club membership)

The full challenge is already built inside the app under “Challenges.” If you’re not set up yet, click here to get access without going through the subscription process. Run into any trouble, just reply to this email.

Option 2 — Print out the full 21 days

All 21 days of content are at the bottom of this post. No app required. Grab a notebook, your notes app, a sticky note — whatever works — and just show up each day with the day’s task.

Option 3 — The Simplified version

Don’t want to track all 21 prompts? No problem. Here’s the version that captures the heart of what this challenge is built to do: at the end of every night, before you put the phone down, ask yourself three questions:

1. What did you identify as the most important thing today?

2. Reflect on how it went. Did you ace it? Did you avoid it? Did you get distracted? Did you get frustrated? Try to understand why.

3. What’s the most important thing tomorrow — and what would it look like to do it at your highest level?

That’s it. Do that every night for 21 days, and I promise — you’ll get through most of what this challenge is built to do.

And remember: Join us on Friday for the Chase Club Chat Club.

Each Friday throughout the challenge, I’ll be dropping into the chat with something extra — a resource, a reflection, a conversation starter related to that week’s theme.

It’s the best place to share how things are going, ask questions, and connect with everyone else doing this alongside you.

If you don’t already have it, download the Substack app here — that’s where all the Chase Club Chat Club conversations happen.

Alright — the full 21 days are below. Save this email. Use it whenever you need it.

Let’s go.

🤙 Patrick

THE 21-DAY HIGH PERFORMANCE CHALLENGE

Most people don’t lack information about what it takes to perform at a high level. They lack a system for doing something with it. This challenge gives you one focused action per day — built around the five characteristics of high performers that we’ve studied and talked about for years on Chasing Excellence. No overwhelm. Just one thing. Done consistently.

The 5 Characteristics:

1. 💪 Ridiculous Work Ethic

2. 📋 Self-Management & Accountability

3. 🎯 Strategic Prioritization

4. 🙋 Complete Ownership

5. 🚀 Initiative Beyond Expectations

⚡ WEEK 1: AWARENESS

The goal this week isn’t to change everything — it’s to see clearly.

Day 1 — Work Ethic

Track every hour of your work today. At the end of the day, honestly assess: was each hour high-impact, or was it filler disguised as productivity?

Why this matters: High performers don’t work more hours — they work better hours. You can’t improve what you haven’t measured. This is your baseline.

Day 2 — Self-Management & Accountability

Write down three outcomes you’re fully responsible for this week. No external factors, no “waiting on someone else.” Just: I own this.

Why this matters: Accountability starts before results show up. It starts with ownership of the inputs. Most people only take credit for wins — high performers take ownership of everything.

Read more

Hope you’re having a nice Thursday. We’ve got a fantastic conversation for you this week, plus a new challenge I’d love for you to join me in doing.

🎧 Athena Perez on Fasting 40 Days to Face Emotional Eating

Athena Perez has lost over 200 pounds, went from a walker and two canes to opening her own CrossFit affiliate, and became a coach dedicated to the people who feel like they don’t belong in a gym — because she was one of them.

When emotional eating started creeping back in after a surprise surgery, she didn’t reach for a new plan. She fasted for 40 days. Not as a performance stunt — as a deliberate act of sitting with the thing that had controlled her for most of her life.

In this new episode of our Purpose Effect series, Jamison talks with Athena about transformation by subtraction, the danger of outsourcing your salvation to heroes, and what it means to finally stand on level ground.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop adding more — more discipline, more habits, more systems — and actually face the thing that’s been quietly running the show beneath all of it.

• You’ve put someone on a pedestal and let their perceived invincibility become a ceiling on your own potential — and you’re starting to wonder what you’re capable of when you stop looking up.

→ 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: BetterHelp · Momentous · MUDWTR · Decagon · LMNT · Function Health · Monarch · David Protein

🎧 High Performance Isn’t a Talent. Prove It in 21 Days

I go solo to kick off our next Chase Challenge — a 21-day program built around one central idea: high performance isn’t something you have, it’s something you practice.

This challenge is an invitation to close the gap between who you are and who you want to be at work, and to fight back against the kind of drift that keeps us from living a life with our hearts on fire.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’ve been waiting for the right moment, the right conditions, or the right version of yourself to start performing at your best — and you’re ready to build the system that makes it happen instead.

• You keep drifting through your days, finishing them without ever touching the thing that actually mattered — and part of you knows the cost of that drift is starting to add up.

Join us for the 21-day challenge:

→ Inside the Chase Club

→ Inside the ChaseTracker app

Thanks as always for being here.

If you’ve got a friend who’s been drifting — from their potential, their goals, or just their best self — this challenge was made for them. Please pass it along.

And if you haven’t already, we’d love it if you left us a review and a rating wherever you listen.

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

In this episode, Patrick introduces the 21-Day High Performance Challenge and walks through the five interdependent characteristics that, together, make up a practice for doing the right things at the highest level you’re capable of.

We…

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Most people focus a lot of energy on finding the right coach or mentor. The harder question is whether you’re showing up as someone worth mentoring.

The best students — in athletics, in business, in life — tend to share three qualities. Not talent. Not connections. Not even work ethic in the traditional sense. Three th…

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Most of us treat emotions like weather. Something that rolls in, takes over, and eventually passes — with us just waiting it out underneath.

Doug Earl Johnston, who spent a decade cataloging over 272 human emotions, offered a more useful frame when we talked with him: Emotions are gears.

Think about riding a bike through…

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There’s a version of fitness that’s about looking the part. And there’s a version that’s about being able to do something when it matters.

They’re not the same thing.

The distinction showed up in our conversation with the WWE’s Ivy Nile, who described her worst fear in competition: being so gassed that she can’t perform …

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Adding hard things is easier than removing comfortable ones.

We tend to think of growth as accumulation — more discipline, more reps, more intensity, more structure. And there’s real value in that. But there’s a subtler kind of work that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding.

Subtraction.

Removing the coping mechanism. Sitting with the emotion instead of routing around it. Letting yourself be uncomfortable without reaching for the thing that makes it okay.

It’s harder than any workout. There’s no metric for it. No one’s watching you do the reps. And the gains are rarely visible.

But the fastest way to find out what’s actually running your life isn’t to add something new. It’s to take something away — and notice what surfaces when it’s gone.

Athena Perez fasted for 40 days to find out. Not as a physical challenge, but as an experiment in facing what she’d been using food to avoid for most of her life. Around day 17, the noise finally went quiet. What remained was just her and the mechanisms she’d built to avoid feeling.

In the quiet that follows subtraction, as she told us, you find out what you were actually thinking about. What you’ve been managing. What you’ve been using your routines to avoid.

That’s the information you need. Not more structure layered on top of unexamined patterns.

Growth by subtraction isn’t a cleanse or a detox. It’s a diagnostic. It asks: What am I reaching for, and why? And then, instead of reaching, just sitting there. Seeing what’s underneath.

That’s uncomfortable in a way that adding doesn’t prepare you for.

Which is exactly why it works.

More on this idea from Athena in this week’s episode →

Download the Substack app and expand on your answer in the comments. 💬

🎧 In This Episode

We sit down with Athena Perez, affiliate owner, coach, and author of a two-part memoir about identity, worth, and what fitness spaces get dangerously wrong.

We explore how compounding habits shape who we become long before we notice, why a 40-day fast became Athena’s clearest window into emotional eating and genuine purpose, and why placing people on pedestals — in the gym or anywhere else — always costs you something.

You’ll walk away with a new framework for understanding the habits you can’t seem to shake, a different way to think about where transformation actually starts, and Athena’s hard-won insight that the ground was always level - even when it didn’t look that way.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Compounding Habits Work in Both Directions

The same mechanism that drives transformation can drive destruction. Athena’s path to 500 pounds happened through thousands of small decisions - each reinforcing the next, without a single moment of conscious choice.

She started using food as a coping mechanism at age seven, too young for executive reasoning. The habit compounded quietly for decades.

This is the under-discussed side of behavior change: we celebrate how good habits compound upward, but harmful ones compound just as reliably. The subconscious always finds the path of least resistance - and will use it, whether or not you’ve pointed it somewhere good.

2. Fear Is a Valid Starting Point

Athena didn’t walk into CrossFit because she was inspired. She walked in because her doctor said she’d lose the ability to walk if she didn’t act immediately. Fear got her through the door.

What’s striking is the permission she gives to that origin point: transformation doesn’t have to begin with a vision of who you want to become. Sometimes it begins with a visceral refusal of who you can’t afford to remain.

Her first year produced 187 pounds of weight loss, built on structured alarms and a completely controlled environment — zero reliance on motivation. Fear was the ignition. Design did the rest.

3. Growth by Subtraction

We are far more comfortable growing by addition than by subtraction. Adding a hard workout, a new habit, more intensity - these are socially acceptable and chemically rewarding. Removing something requires sitting with what’s underneath.

Athena’s 40-day fast was an experiment in facing emotional eating triggers directly. Around day 17-20, the food noise shut off entirely. What remained was just her and the mechanisms she’d built to avoid feeling.

Subtraction isn’t a cleanse. It’s a diagnostic. It reveals what you’ve been adding to avoid.

4. The Pedestal Problem

In fitness communities, we tend to elevate certain people to a kind of moral authority — as if elite physical performance confers immunity to human struggle. Athena witnessed this firsthand: she was in a room where someone she admired was visibly falling apart, and nobody moved.

Protecting the myth had become more important than helping the person.

What she walked away with wasn’t cynicism, but clarity: worth can’t live in another person. The moment you outsource your development to a hero, you become dependent on their continued heroism. They’re always just human. Which means the work was always yours.

5. Both Can Be True

Two contradictory things can simultaneously be true. You can be deeply hurt by something and also recognize the person who hurt you wasn’t being malicious. You can love a community and acknowledge its real failure points.

Athena spent years trying to separate harmful experiences in CrossFit from CrossFit itself — eventually landing on a truth that applies far beyond fitness: people are going to people. That doesn’t make the thing they represent wrong.

It just means grace has to be wider than we usually want it to be.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where have you allowed a coping mechanism to become a tiger?

Think about the habits or patterns you developed in response to stress or pain - particularly ones that formed before you were old enough to make deliberate choices. Are any still running on autopilot? What would it look like to see one clearly, perhaps for the first time?

2. Who have you placed on a pedestal — and what has that cost you?

Think about a mentor, leader, or figure in your community who you’ve elevated to a kind of moral authority. Has your confidence in your own direction ever been tied to their performance or approval? What would it feel like to relate to them eye-to-eye rather than looking up?

3. What would growth by subtraction look like in your life right now?

We often think about what we need to add to grow - more discipline, more habits, more effort. But what is one thing you’ve been carrying that is quietly working against you? A story, a habit, a coping mechanism. What would you learn about yourself if you removed it for just one week?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Remove one thing this week.

Instead of asking what new habit to add, ask what you’re using to avoid something harder. Pick one thing - food, scrolling, busyness, intensity - and remove it for seven days. Not as punishment. As a diagnostic.

You don’t have to fast for 40 days. But Athena’s experience points to something real: we are far more practiced at addition than subtraction. We add hard things because they feel like progress. But sometimes the thing standing between you and the next version of yourself isn’t something you need to do - it’s something you need to stop doing.

Seven days of subtraction will tell you more about your current patterns than most years of addition. That’s the rep. Fewer inputs, more signal.

In this episode, Jamison sits down with Athena Perez: affiliate owner, coach, and author of a two-part memoir about identity, worth, and what fitness spaces get dangerously wrong.

We explore how compounding habits sha…

Read more

Hope your week is coming to an end smoothly. Got a couple of new episodes for you to check out this weekend, if you haven’t already dipped in.

🎧 7 Habits of People Who Make Other People Better (w/ Jon Gordon)

Jon Gordon — author of 33 books, including The Energy Bus, The Hard Hat, and The Power of Positive Habits — joins us to talk about what actually separates the people who raise everyone around them from the people who quietly drain the room.

The conversation moves fast: from the positive-interaction ratio that predicts whether your relationships thrive, to the idea of a caring trademark — the specific, consistent way you show people they matter.

This episode’s for you if:

• You want to become the kind of person others feel better for knowing — and you’re ready to understand the specific habits that make that possible, not just the intention.

• You’ve been showing up for the people in your life, but quietly wondering whether the math is working in your favor — whether what you’re giving and what you’re taking is actually in balance.

→ 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: BetterHelp · LMNT · Function Health · Monarch · David Protein · MUDWTR · Shopify · Decagon

🎧 The External-to-Internal Method for Raising Healthy Kids

Every parent who cares about health eventually hits this wall: your kids don’t want to do what you know is good for them — and the harder you push, the harder they pull away.

Ben and I tackle Chase Club member Brendan’s question about getting his 16-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter moving consistently, despite a split household.

Ben draws on his own kids, his years coaching elite athletes, and the CompTrain youth program to map out what actually works — and why the answer usually isn’t what you’d expect.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop fighting the resistance and start building the conditions — the right structure, the right coach, the right habit loop — that make fitness feel inevitable for your kids.

• You’ve been trying to lead by example and wondering why it isn’t landing yet — and you’re ready to reckon honestly with whether you’re playing the right role.

→ Read the full 5-3-1 Listener Guide

Thanks, as always, for being here and for being on the chase.

If you haven’t, we’d love it if you left us a review and a rating wherever you listen.

Until next week.

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🎧 In This Episode

We tackle one of the most honest Chase Club questions we’ve ever received: how do you get your kids to care about fitness when they’d rather be on their screens?

Brendan is a committed CrossFitter navigating a 16-year-old son, a 13-year-old daughter, and a split household — and asking whether to lead by example or take a firmer approach.

You’ll learn why modeling healthy habits today isn’t for the teenager in front of you — it’s for the adult they’ll become. We explore the difference between leading by example and being the coach, why structured environments beat parent-led training almost every time, and how external rewards can bridge the gap to internal motivation.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. You’re Modeling for the 26-Year-Old, Not the 16-Year-Old

When we model healthy habits, we expect to see the return in our kids today. That’s not how it works. The prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until the mid-20s — your teenager literally cannot compute the long-term payoff of fitness the way you can.

Of course they choose screens. That’s neuroscience, not laziness. Your job isn’t to change their behavior today. It’s to lay a blueprint that loads quietly in the background — one they’ll access when they’re 26 and deciding what their own mornings look like.

2. Don’t Be the Coach — Get a Coach

There’s a reason we don’t fully teach our own kids to drive. When parent and child enter a coaching relationship, both bring the full weight of their history together. The smallest friction becomes a battle.

Ben tried to train his kids alongside him — it was a fight every time. When he enrolled them in a structured youth program with peers present, the dynamic shifted entirely. What changed wasn’t the workout. It was the environment.

3. External Rewards Bridge to Internal Motivation

Screens win the habit loop every time — reliable cue, effortless action, instant reward. Fitness can’t compete with that in the short term. So instead of fighting the loop, use it.

Ben paid Bode a quarter every time he touched the soccer ball during games. Within three games, Bode was chasing it — because the external reward (money) gave him enough reps to discover the internal one (playing well). The reward doesn’t need to be permanent. It just needs to last long enough for internal motivation to take over.

4. Find the Passion, Then Nurture It Through the Resistance

Passions aren’t found in lightning-strike moments. They’re cultivated through reps — and they die when we let kids quit too early.

The operating standard isn’t a lifetime commitment. It’s: you can quit — just not today. Not letting every hard day be the last one gives kids the chance to discover what they genuinely love. The experience of getting through the hard part is the only path to that discovery. We rob them of it if we always let them leave.

5. Meet Them Where They Are

Fitness doesn’t have to look like your version of fitness. Brendan’s son loved cross-country. That’s fitness. Trail running, kayaking, basketball, skateboarding — all of it counts.

The goal isn’t to get kids into the gym with you. It’s to keep them moving, build a positive relationship with their body, and give them a foundation that carries into adulthood. Forcing them into your container often destroys the container entirely. The long game is finding the version of movement they’ll actually show up for — and trusting the rest will follow.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where are you currently trying to be the coach when your kid actually needs a coach?

Think about the fitness-adjacent habits you’re trying to instill — training, nutrition, sleep, even studying. Is the dynamic working? Are you bringing your whole history with your child into that space? What would it look like to hand that ball to a structured program or external authority, and let yourself just be the parent again?

2. What does your child already enjoy that involves movement, even loosely?

Before deciding what program to sign them up for, ask what they’re already drawn to. Running with friends. Dancing. Hiking. Skateboarding. Any of these can be the entry point. What would it look like to lean into their version of movement instead of redirecting it toward your preferred form of fitness — and to show genuine curiosity about what they enjoy?

3. What external reward could create enough reps for the internal reward to take over?

Think about your specific child — what do they actually care about? Screen time, money, a particular experience, a social outing? The goal isn’t bribery. It’s using a reliable reward to get enough reps in that the activity becomes its own reward. What’s the minimum viable incentive that could bridge the gap until internal motivation takes over?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Build the minimum viable loop.

Pick one movement. Not a program, not a workout — one thing your kid can do in under 10 minutes. Three sets of five pull-ups. A walk around the block. Ten minutes of shooting hoops. Something so small that arguing against it feels unreasonable.

Then make it a gate: the reward they want (screens, usually) doesn’t unlock until the dose is done. Not as punishment — as structure. The framing matters: we move first, then we screen. Keep it short enough that resistance is hard to justify, and consistent enough that it becomes background noise within two weeks.

The minimum viable dose isn’t about fitness. It’s about installing a habit loop. Cue, action, reward. Once the loop is running, you can expand the action inside it. But the loop has to come first. Start smaller than makes sense — and watch what happens when the loop takes over.

In this episode, we tackle Chase Club member Brendan’s question about getting his 16-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter to move consistently, despite shared custody.

We dig into why…

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At 22, hitting the road at midnight and driving two or three hours isn’t a huge deal. You can just sort of … do it.

But at 42? That kind of road trip is nearly impossible, and not because anything dramatic happened. It’s more subtle than that — and that’s what makes it dangerous.

What you could get away with in your 20s, yo…

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We think of habits as something we build through repetition. Do the thing enough times, and it becomes automatic. That’s true — but it misses something important about how habits actually stick.

The real goal isn’t repetition. It’s the elimination of choice.

When we talked with him about this, the writer Jay Heinrichs …

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Everybody’s always talking about muscle mass.

Sarcopenia — the gradual loss of muscle as we age — gets lots of attention in longevity conversations. And it deserves it. Adults lose 3-8% of muscle mass per decade after 30. That’s real, it’s measurable, and it compounds.

But there’s a number that almost nobody talks ab…

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Jon Gordon and his mother walked to the store while she was quietly fighting for her life — just to make him a sandwich for his drive home.

It turned out to be the last real conversation they had.

He didn’t know it then. Neither did she. She just knew what she did when she loved someone: she fed them. That was her way. What Jon calls her “caring trademark” — the specific, consistent thing she did that made you feel like you mattered to her.

When we talked with him about it, Jon told us that a caring trademark isn’t a grand gesture. It’s not the thing you do on holidays or when you’re at your best. It’s the thing you do reliably, without being asked, because it’s genuinely how you show up for people.

For Jon, it’s encouragement. Reach out, and he’ll encourage you. Every time. Not because it’s strategic — because it’s his thing. For someone else, it’s listening. Or showing up to help when you need it.

The most memorable people in your life aren’t memorable because of what they accomplished. They’re memorable because of the specific, reliable way they made you feel seen.

You have a caring trademark. The question is whether you’re using it on purpose.

More on this idea in our latest episode →

Think about the most consistent way you show the people closest to you that you care. Is it something you do on purpose — or only when it occurs to you?

Download the Substack app and answer in the comments. 💬

🎧 In This Episode

We explore seven habits of people who make everyone around them better with Jon Gordon, author of 33 books, including The Energy Bus, The Hard Hat, and The Power of Positive Habits.

You’ll learn why the ratio of your positive-to-negative interactions may be the single biggest predictor of whether your relationships thrive or fall apart, how to shout praise and whisper criticism without eroding standards, and what it actually means to give freely and make the pie bigger.

Jon also shares the concept of a caring trademark — the specific, consistent way you show people they matter — and tells the story of his late mother’s final act of service that still shapes how he thinks about love.

Listen Now

• Chase Club (Ad Free)

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. The Positive Interaction Ratio

Research shows that teams with at least 3 positive interactions for every negative one outperform those that don’t. In marriages, that number climbs to 5-to-1. But here’s the counterintuitive twist: when the ratio reaches 13-to-1, things actually fall apart — because no one is willing to address real problems anymore.

The lesson is that connection — built through genuine positive interactions — is the foundation of every high-functioning relationship. A high five, an encouraging word, a difficult conversation that ends in resolution: all of these count.

The goal is a ratio that keeps people connected, not one that keeps things comfortable.

2. Shout Praise, Whisper Criticism

Chuck Daly, coach of the original Olympic Dream Team, built his culture around recognizing people publicly and correcting them privately — calling people up rather than calling them out. But Jon adds essential nuance: there’s a difference between personal criticism (always private) and in-the-moment coaching (sometimes public).

When someone misses a play in practice, correcting it in front of the team is a teaching moment for everyone. The key question is always: is this going to uplift this person, or deflate them? Is this a coachable moment for the group, or a private conversation? Demand. Don’t demean.

3. Be a Conduit, Not a Container

In electronics, resistors hold their electrons — their power is fixed and finite. Conductors give and receive freely, and their power comes from the current that flows through them. Jon uses this as the central metaphor for how energy moves through relationships and through life.

Giving without keeping score keeps the current moving. But receiving matters just as much. When you deflect compliments, refuse help, or insist you don’t need support, you cut the circuit — and rob the giver of the gift of feeling useful.

The people who live the biggest lives let the most move through them.

4. Make the Pie Bigger

When Jon partnered with Damon West on The Coffee Bean, he offered him half the royalties before writing a word — not because he had to, but because he believed making the pie bigger would lead to something better for both. It did.

The abundance mindset isn’t naive — it’s the deepest kind of strategic thinking. Not calculating in the sense of keeping score, but understanding that the world expands or contracts based on how you show up. When you look for win-win, you grow alongside the people you make better.

Win the person. The prize tends to take care of itself.

5. Your Caring Trademark

A caring trademark is the specific, consistent way you show people they matter. Not what you think you should do — the thing you genuinely do, reliably, without being asked, because it’s how you’re wired to show up.

Jon’s is encouragement. His late mother’s was simpler: she walked to the store while quietly fighting for her life to make him a sandwich for the drive home. That was the last real conversation they had.

The most memorable people in our lives aren’t remembered for what they accomplished. They’re remembered for the specific, reliable way they made us feel seen.

🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What is your current positive-to-negative interaction ratio — and what’s one relationship where the math is working against you?

Think about the person at work, at home, or in your social circle with whom you feel the most friction. If you honestly tallied the tone of your recent interactions with them, would you be above or below 3-to-1? What would it look like to intentionally shift that ratio this week — not with fake positivity, but with one genuine deposit you haven’t been making?

2. When did you last win an argument at the cost of the relationship — and what would winning the person have looked like instead?

Jon is direct about this: the person who always has to be right is often alone. Think of a recent disagreement where you pushed harder than you needed to. What were you actually trying to protect? And what would it have felt like to let go of the point and hold onto the person instead?

3. What is your caring trademark — and how intentionally are you using it?

Think about the people who have made the deepest impression on your life. What was their specific, consistent way of showing you they cared? Now flip it: what is your equivalent? Is it something you do deliberately, or only occasionally by accident? What would it mean to make it a habit — to show up with your caring trademark as reliably as you show up to anything else that matters to you?

🎯 1 PRACTICE

Change your ratio by one.

You don’t need to overhaul every relationship. Pick one — the one where the ratio is farthest from where you want it — and commit to one new deposit a day for the next week. Not a grand gesture. A text that says you were thinking of them. Noticing something they did well and saying so out loud. Asking a real question and actually listening to the answer.

The research is clear: the teams that high-five more win more — not because high-fives are magic, but because high-fives are the visible evidence of a connection that was already there. You can’t manufacture the connection with the gesture. But you can start building it today, with the simplest version you can actually sustain.

One deposit. One relationship. Seven days. Watch what happens.

In this episode, we sit down with Jon Gordon, author of 33 books and 18 bestsellers, to explore seven habits that transform ordinary people into the kind of person others genuinely want to be around.

We explore how the …

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Here’s a look at what we got into this week, plus links to the full Listener Guides if you want to go deeper!

🎧 Train Heavy, Fast, Far, & Free: How to Stay Formidable for Life

Ben, Cole, and Jamison are back for another episode in our Forever Fit series.

Together, they break down the Heavy, Fast, Far, Free framework — a complete approach to training that covers strength, power, endurance, and mobility in a single week.

The conversation gets at why most of us are training in only one or two dimensions — and how that compounds into real limiters over decades.

This episode’s for you if:

• You want to build a training week that’s genuinely complete — not just the things you’re already good at — because being formidable at 60, 70, and beyond is the actual goal.

• You’ve been optimizing hard in one or two dimensions while quietly skipping the others, telling yourself you’ll get to them eventually — and you know “eventually” keeps getting pushed.

→ 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 · BetterHelp · Function Health · David Protein · Momentous

🎧 Why You Need to Reverse Engineer Your Triggers

I go solo to close out the 21-Day Trigger Challenge. It’s less of a recap and more of an honest report of what the work actually revealed.

I cover the tug-of-war between what we want and what’s real, the difference between surface triggers (daily annoyances that are actually low-stakes practice reps) and serious triggers (the ones rooted in something much deeper and much harder to see), and the idea — from philosopher Alain de Botton — that our triggers are a secret guide to our own private histories.

This episode’s for you if:

• You’re ready to stop treating your triggers as random inconveniences and start asking the harder question — where are they actually coming from — because you know that’s where the real work is.

• You did the challenge (or skipped it) and moved on, but you haven’t stopped to ask what your most consistent triggers have in common — and what that pattern might be quietly telling you about yourself.

How to get access to the next Challenge, starting June 11th:

→ Join us inside the Chase Club

→ Start using the ChaseTracker app

Thanks as always for being here.

If you haven’t, we’d love it if you left us a review and a rating wherever you listen. That helps new folks know the show is worth their time and attention!

🤙🏼 Patrick

Chase Club | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

In this close-out episode, Patrick reflects on the 21-day trigger challenge with two reframes that change everything: the tug of war between wants and reality, and the difference between surface triggers (your mental dojo) and the serious ones rooted in your own history.

Learn why the f…

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