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What Do You Owe Yourself in Terms of Effort, Expectations, and Integrity? We spend much of our lives thinking about what we owe other people. We owe our employer an honest day’s work. We owe our family our love and attention. We owe our friends loyalty. We owe society respect and responsibility. Those obligations matter. But here’s a question that deserves equal attention: What do you owe yourself? Not in…

New Term: Your Comfort Platform™ I travel a lot.You want to know why?Because I really enjoy it. I enjoy reading about places. I enjoy documentaries. I enjoy hearing other people describe where they’ve been. But for me - and perhaps for you as well - nothing compares to being there in person. I travel with my wife as often as we can.  Sometimes with family. And sometimes I travel by…

When Reluctance Compromises Your Comfort Zone  We recently celebrated our Second Annual UnReluctant Day, and what a rewarding experience it was. We were delighted by the number of people who participated - and even more encouraged by what happened afterward. The success stories continue to arrive. People have written to tell us they finally:    Asked for a raise.    Pursued a promotion.    Requested greater responsibility.    Applied for a job they had been…

BEST Proof of Living:  Ask for More Many of us spend our lives accepting whatever is offered. We hesitate to ask for more because we don’t want to appear demanding, entitled, or ungrateful. But asking isn’t demanding.It’s intentional. Ask for more encouragement.Ask for more feedback.Ask for more clarity.Ask for more responsibility.Ask for more coaching.Ask for more patience.Ask for more opportunity. Ask for more time.Ask for more support.Ask for more affection.Ask…

Welcome to Sunday Songday. Sundays are a good time to slow down, reflect, and maybe discover something new. This week, we're inviting you to spend a few minutes with a Brazen Candor original. Today's featured song is "Cottonwood,"a song that began on a hot Arizona afternoon and grew naturally from there. Hit play, enjoy the journey, and then let us know what stood out to you. If the music or lyrics speak…

Effective Action Produces Progress I’ve seen too many people stall out simply because they could not persuade themselves to take action.   Thinking matters.Planning matters.Learning matters. All three are worthwhile. They prepare us. They sharpen our judgment. They reduce mistakes and increase confidence. But none of them, by themselves, change our circumstances. Progress begins when preparation becomes participation. Many people confuse being busy with being productive. They fill calendars, attend…

When to Ask for Help There’s no universal threshold for when adversity requires outside help, but there are reliable signals worth taking seriously, and there’s a common set of reasons people ignore them. Signals it’s time to ask for help: Function has genuinely degraded - sleep, eating, work, relationships are noticeably affected over an extended period, not just a rough day or two.  When adversity starts affecting the systems that…

Misdiagnosing Adversity Can Make It Worse The connection between adversity and stress is obvious and undeniable.  Unfortunately, adversity is often mishandled not because people lack resilience, but because they’ve misdiagnosed what they’re actually dealing with. Getting the diagnosis wrong sends effort in the wrong direction entirely. Mistaking a symptom for the cause. Someone struggling at work might diagnose the problem as “I’m bad at this job,” when the real issue…

Once you’ve precisely and correctly identified an issue, an event, or a problem as adversity, the instinct is often to look for a single decisive response - fight it, fix it, push through it.  In practice, dealing with adversity well is less about one heroic move and more about a sequence of smaller, deliberate ones. Grab some perspective and stabilize first. Before solving anything, address what’s acutely threatened: sleep, safety,…

Using Mental Precision to Disarm Adversity  Not everything hard is adversity. This distinction matters more than it seems, because how we categorize a difficulty shapes how much power we give it. A late train is an inconvenience. A disagreement with a coworker is friction. These are the textures of ordinary life, and treating them as adversity inflates their weight and drains energy better spent elsewhere.  Adversity, properly defined, is something…