Howard Behar was the president of Starbucks North America and Starbucks International. He helped grow a coffee shop into a global icon, wrote the books on servant leadership, and mentored a whole generation of executives on how to lead with the heart.

And around his 80th birthday, it caught up with him. The birthday party itself turned into pain, real physical pain he felt sitting in his chest. He’d had the same counselor for years, so he called her and said something’s up. She listened for a minute and told him: you sound like you have depression. He did not want to hear it. He did not want to admit he was sick.

It got worse from there. He stopped wanting to be alive. He told his wife he had to go to the hospital, and from that hospital he flew himself across the country to a treatment center in California and moved into a house with five strangers.

The man who wrote the book on leading with heart, at 80 years old, had to be taught how to keep his own beating. “Nobody necessarily escapes,” he told Will. It comes for the titan, the mentor, the guy who looks like he has all of it figured out.

Will sat down with Howard for this one, I wasn’t in the room. I listened to the whole thing as a guy who’s been a lot closer to that edge than I let anyone see for a lot of years.

It’s a sickness, and it lives in the body

Howard’s first teaching is the one most men need and most resist. Depression is a sickness. As much as it’s mental, it’s physical, and he learned that by feeling it, a genuine pain in his chest that came and went. The work started the second he stopped pretending. “Once I dealt with it physically and mentally, then I could deal with it.” Before that, he couldn’t, because he wouldn’t call it what it was.

That resistance is the whole trap. It gets filed next to weakness, so a man buries it, and a buried thing never gets treated.

I know that trap from the floor of it. After Operation Red Wings in 2005, after we lost 19 men, the survivor’s guilt turned into serious anxiety and depression. I self-medicated with alcohol and prescription medication. I got to a very dark spot, dark enough that I considered suicide. What turned it was a counselor pointing me toward mindfulness and meditation, which I credit with quite literally saving my life. And here’s my version of Howard’s confession: for years I could describe my emotions in perfect detail and feel almost none of them. I intellectualized the whole thing. Being able to explain the sickness is not the same as admitting you have it, and I hid behind the explanation for a long time.

The door was only halfway

Here’s the part of Howard’s story I’d want every man to hear. He did a full month in treatment, felt good, decided he was ready, and went to leave. And right at the door, everything came back. He calls it falling off the wagon. He couldn’t go home. So he stayed, went through the entire process a second time, another month, all of it again.

Will put an image on it that stuck. You get your hand on the doorknob, you’re sure you’re done, and the whole weight drops back onto you. Howard was so certain he’d made it, and he hadn’t.

The way through was work he had to choose every day. He walked every morning. Group therapy first thing, then individual sessions all day long. And the actual move, the one he keeps naming, was leaning into the pain instead of running from it. “I knew that I couldn’t get out without embracing it.” The pain in his chest would rise while he sat in it, and then it would pass. That’s the opposite of what every instinct tells you to do, and it’s the only thing that worked. Healing didn’t run in a straight line for him, and it won’t for you, so a slip after you thought you were fixed is just part of the shape of it...

The medicine was other people

Now the part that matters most to me. When Will asked what protects him now, Howard didn’t lead with the meds, though he’s honest that a psychiatrist and the right medications made a real difference. He led with people. Staying in treatment twice a week. Going to parties. Dinner with friends. Cribbage with his neighbor. Grandkids in the house. Being back inside a regular life.

And he was clear about other people. People want to help. They’re afraid to ask, but they want to know, and when Howard tells them the truth about the depression and the suicidal thoughts, they lean in. What he needed from them was smaller and harder than advice. “Don’t judge me, just be my friend.” He also said the thing that undoes most of us: “you have to learn to accept it.” The help is there. Taking it is the skill.

That matters more for men than we admit. Men die by suicide several times more often than women, and it almost always starts the same quiet way Howard’s did, pulling inside, not wanting to go anywhere, not wanting to see anyone, until the isolation has its own gravity. I’ve watched strong men vanish into that silence one skipped phone call at a time. Howard’s whole message is that the exit is a person. It’s telling one true thing to one safe human, and letting them stay...

What to do about it

1. Say one true sentence to one person. Howard’s first move was calling his counselor and saying “something’s up.” You don’t need the right words. “I’m not okay” is a complete sentence, and it’s where the sickness starts losing.

2. Use the two-week rule. Will’s line from the episode: symptoms that run longer than 2 weeks, persistent sadness, no interest in what you used to love, sleep and appetite changes, pulling away from people, a flat sense of hopelessness, are a signal to get help, not to wait out. If that’s the last two weeks of your life, this is your cue.

3. Do the unglamorous daily things, and get a real baseline. Howard walked every morning and kept showing up. Sleep, movement, sunlight, people, in whatever small dose you can manage today. Start by seeing where you actually stand with our free Awareness Self-Assessment, about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 turns it into an early-warning system.

4. Be the friend who asks. Howard said people were afraid to ask him but desperate to know, and what he wanted most was “don’t judge me, just be my friend.” Pick one man who’s gone quiet and call him, out loud, on the phone. Reply and tell me who you’re reaching out to, I read every one.

5. If you’re the one in the dark, reach out right now. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. Tell your doctor the truth. Reaching out is the strong move, the same one Howard made at 80 and I made after Red Wings. And if you want a human on the other end, reply with the one thing you’ve been carrying alone. I read every single one.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Howard Behar is the former president of Starbucks North America and Starbucks International, one of the most respected voices in servant leadership, and the author of It’s Not About the Coffee. He’s a returning guest and a friend of the show, and he came back this time to talk openly about the depression that put him in a treatment facility earlier this year, so the rest of us can spot the signs sooner, in ourselves and in the people we love. This is a heavier one than usual, and an important one.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the paywall…

Awareness to Action is our 12-week self-mastery course and community, built to help you turn this kind of knowing into a daily practice, alongside real men doing the same work. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course. On the fence? Reply with the word A2A and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s for you.

Until next time,

Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider

Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

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That’s the rep nobody posts about. The dull Tuesday you show up for anyway, when it feels like nothing is happening. Consistency turns out to be far less about willpower than about size. Make the rep small enough and a bad day can’t take it from you.

Willpower is a liar with good intentions. It swears it’ll be there tomorrow, then taps out the second the day gets hard. Systems over willpower. Shrink the rep until the exhausted, over-it version of you can still clear the bar without a pep talk.

One breath before you open the laptop counts. A single honest line in a notebook counts. The goal is simple. Show up for the rep, good day or boring one, and especially the boring ones, because those are the days that quietly build the person you’ll need when it finally matters.

I still bail sometimes. Skipped two mornings last week telling myself I was slammed, which really meant I didn’t feel like it. Got back to the cushion the next day. That’s the whole practice, honestly, the getting back.

So what’s a rep you could shrink small enough today that even your worst day couldn’t knock you off it?

Friday, we close the week out honest.

Want a quick read on where your consistency has your attention and steadiness right now? The free Focus Score grades you across 8 areas in under 5 minutes.

Take your Focus Score: https://focusnowtraining.com/focus-score

So I did the smallest reset I know. I looked up. Lifted my eyes off the phone, sat back, and let them slowly wander around the actual room. The window. A tree outside doing absolutely nothing. There’s a name for what that does, the orienting response, and your nervous system reads it as a plain all-clear. Nothing in here is trying to eat you. You can stand down.

That’s the trap with a screen. It pulls your eyes into a tunnel a few inches wide, and your body treats that narrow, locked-in stare the way it would treat stalking something or bracing for a hit. Do hours of it and you wonder why you feel wired and worn out at the same time.

The reset is to widen the lens on purpose. Look up, look far, let your eyes land on something 20 feet away and rest there for a few slow breaths. Respond instead of react, starting with where you aim your eyes.

I need this one more than most. My default when I’m stressed is to look closer, grip the phone tighter, and dig further into the exact thing spinning me up. Looking up feels almost too simple to count. It counts.

So the next time you catch yourself braced over a screen, can you lift your eyes and give your nervous system one honest look at the room you’re actually safe in?

Wednesday, we get back to the reps.

Curious how wired your baseline has gotten? Our free Focus Score is a quick, private read on where your attention and steadiness stand right now.

Take your Focus Score: https://focusnowtraining.com/focus-score

Howard is the former president of Starbucks North America and the founding president of Starbucks International, a longtime advocate of servant leadership, and the author of It’s Not About the Coffee and The Magic Cup. He returns to Men Talking Mindfulness for one of the most candid conversations we’ve had: what depression actually felt like in his body, why acknowledging it was the hardest and most important step, what treatment really looked like (including the setback when he thought he was ready to go home), and what keeps him well now. His message is direct and hopeful. 

Depression is a sickness, not a weakness, nobody is beyond its reach, and people around you genuinely want to help if you let them. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
1.  Why depression is a physical illness as much as a mental one — and what it felt like in his chest
2.  Why acknowledging it was the hardest step, and what changed the moment he did
3.  What treatment actually looked like, including the setback that taught him he wasn’t done yet
4.  The two-week marker: when ongoing symptoms are a signal to reach out rather than wait it out
5.  What keeps him well now — ongoing counseling, real routine, and letting people in

More about Howard Behar:
1.  Website: http://howardbehar.com/
2.  Books: It’s Not About the Coffee and The Magic Cup — available on Amazon
3.  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/howard-behar-24ba274/
4.  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Hpbehar
5.  If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)

Take our Awareness to Action COURSE (A2A)
12 modules structured curriculum on attention, presence, practices & performance — plus an inspiring community built in for connection.
https://focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course

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I’ve done this my whole life. Ran teams where I’d redo a guy’s work at 11pm instead of coaching him through it, because asking felt like admitting I couldn’t hold it all myself. I once led an organization of around 2,500 people and still caught myself trying to personally carry things a smarter man would have handed off before lunch. For what it’s worth, the stretch where I led 3 guys underwater was easier. Fewer people to keep up the act for.

That’s the quiet cost of self-sufficiency. Somewhere back there a lot of us learned that needing help disqualifies us, so we white-knuckle everything and call the exhaustion a virtue. It reads as strength right up until it walls you off from every person who would gladly grab the other end.

So this is the Friday debrief, two honest questions.

What am I carrying alone this week purely because asking for help felt like losing?

Who has offered me a hand and gotten a reflexive “no,” when the truth is I could use it?

Letting someone in is the stronger rep, and the harder one. You were never built to be a one-man everything. The people around you aren’t standing there waiting for you to prove you don’t need them. Most of them are just waiting to be asked.

So who could you let help you this weekend, if you were willing to be caught needing it?

Next week the schedule shifts a little. Mondays now bring that week’s new podcast episode, and I’ll see you Tuesday for the reset.

One more thing. Next Friday, September 25, Will and I will be in Charlotte for Warrior Defined, a full day built around men’s mental health. If you’re anywhere near the Queen City, come find us and take in the rest of the lineup: https://warriordefined.com

And if you want a quiet, private read on where you stand right now, our free Focus Score takes about 5 minutes and hands you your number.

Take your Focus Score: https://focusnowtraining.com/focus-score

In the SEAL Teams and across most of the military, we didn’t call it ibuprofen. We called it vitamin M, for Motrin. Sore knee, screaming back, headache that won’t quit? Take some vitamin M and drive on. And these weren’t the little 200-milligram tablets from the drugstore. They were 800-milligram horse pills, and plenty of us threw back two at a time, for years.

I ate them like candy for most of my adult life. Nobody forced them on me. I asked for the horse pills and doubled up when they felt weak, so a piece of this bill is mine to pay. When Dr. Mark Gordon told us what those pills may have been doing the whole time, I got quiet.

Here’s his claim. Ibuprofen and its chemical cousins can build a wall around your testicles, so they stop hearing the signal your brain sends telling them to make testosterone. The pituitary keeps shouting the order, louder and louder, and the factory downstairs never gets the message.

Then Mark pointed at the thing that got him to email me in the first place. The same institution that handed us vitamin M by the fistful now has a directive to screen every man over 30 and offer him testosterone. And in his view, that fix is aimed at the wrong target completely.

Fair warning before we go further. I’m not a doctor. Everything here is Mark’s clinical read and my own experience as one of his patients, so take it to your own physician before you change a single thing.

Testosterone just sounds sexy

Mark’s first move is to widen the frame. Your endocrine system is a whole orchestra playing at once. We fixate on testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and growth hormone, and Mark points out there are 20-plus other hormones doing just as much work, quietly, because they don’t sell. “Testosterone sounds sexy,” he said. “It sounds real sexy, man.” The others don’t, so nobody markets them and nobody thinks about them.

Will named the deeper habit underneath it. Modern medicine loves to pick one thing, name it the enemy, and attack it, while the actual system it’s plugged into has a hundred moving parts. Hormones are the case study. The brain makes its own class of them, the neurosteroids, and they steady your mood, your sleep, your thinking. Wall off the signal and you don’t just lose the number on a lab sheet, you lose the machinery that holds a man level.

The wall is where the ibuprofen comes in. Mark says the literature going back to 2020 shows the NSAIDs blocking the brain’s message to the pituitary, which is the gland that tells the testicles to fire. He talks about a selenium cycle as one way to help walk that back, and there’s more where that came from. I’m not going to list doses here, because this is exactly the stuff you sort out with a doctor and not with a newsletter.

Screen everyone, ask nobody why

Now the directive Mark came on to sound the alarm about. As he describes it, the Defense Department wants annual testosterone screening for service members 30 and older, with testosterone replacement offered to anyone who comes back low. Active duty and reserve.

His problem with it is one question the whole plan skips. Why is the testosterone low in the first place? Nobody’s asking. And Mark’s numbers make the fix look reckless. A healthy young man makes something like 4 to 10 milligrams of testosterone a day, call it 28 to 70 a week. He’s watching men get handed 200 milligrams in a single weekly shot. Push a body that far past what it makes on its own and it does what bodies do with a flood, it shuts down its own production, which can cost a man his fertility and can thicken his blood enough to risk a clot.

So Mark works the other direction. He reads the pattern between testosterone and luteinizing hormone, then reaches for something like clomiphene, pulsed rather than daily, to wake a man’s own system back up instead of replacing it. He treats the inflammation and the brain chemistry and the head injury underneath the number.

This one isn’t abstract for me. I’m a vet who ate vitamin M for years, and I’m on Mark’s protocol now, so I’ve watched the difference between chasing a number and fixing what’s under it from the inside.

The injury you can’t see on a blood test

Here’s the part that matters most to me. Mark’s whole life’s work is the link between brain trauma and hormones, most of it done with veterans and operators whose bodies paid for the job. Blast exposure, the scuds and mortars and IEDs and years of heavy gunfire, can damage the pituitary directly. And when that happens, a man’s blood testosterone can read perfectly normal while the hormone production in his brain is devastated. An injection into the arm never reaches that. You’d never even go looking if all you did was chase the one number the directive tells you to chase.

The stories are the argument. Mark described a major out of Fort Hood on 8 different medications, who sat at a screening of the documentary Quiet Explosions and asked, on the edge of tears, how come nobody told me this existed. They brought him into the program and walked him off most of the meds. Another man called two weeks into treatment and said, “I’m 100 percent now.” A retired Navy lieutenant who’d run the nuclear plant on a carrier lost vision in one eye and function in a hand and a leg before anyone connected it to his brain.

Mark’s picture for all of it is a gas tank. A shot in the arm is like tapping the fuel gauge to make the needle jump. He’d rather put fuel back in the tank. His whole aim is to leave a man his own ability to make his hormones, which is the exact thing a lifelong shot of testosterone takes away. I keep wondering how many guys are walking around right now, medicated for a number, while the real injury sits upstream where nobody’s looking...

What to do about it

1. Look hard at your vitamin M habit. If you’re taking ibuprofen or another NSAID most days, bring Mark’s concern to your doctor. Don’t start or stop anything on your own. Just put the question on the table and let a professional weigh it.

2. When a number comes back low, ask why. A low testosterone reading is the start of the conversation. Ask your doctor what’s upstream of it, ask what your luteinizing hormone is doing, and ask what a prescription would suppress before you fill it.

3. Get the whole picture before the quick fix. Sleep, inflammation, the medications you take, your head-injury history, all of it feeds that number. Start by baselining how you’re actually functioning day to day with our free Awareness Self-Assessment, about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 is the full list of questions to walk into your appointment with.

4. If you’ve eaten blasts, say so out loud. Breaching, heavy weapons, IEDs, years on the range. Mark’s whole case is that repeated blast exposure can wreck the brain’s hormone production even when your blood work looks clean, and no injection reaches it. Put your exposure history in front of your doctor. And reply and tell me your own vitamin-M-era story, I read every one.

5. Talk to your own doctor before you touch any of this. I’ll say it a second time because it earns the repeat: this edition is Mark’s clinical view and my experience as his patient, and it’s a reason to walk into your doctor’s office with better questions, full stop. Reply with the one question you’re going to bring to your next appointment, and I’ll build a follow-up from what comes back.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Dr. Mark Gordon is one of the pioneers connecting hormones and the brain. He’s spent decades on the link between traumatic brain injury, hormones, and mental health, most of that work done with veterans and operators, and he’s featured in the documentary Quiet Explosions. He runs Millennium Health Centers and this is his third time on the show, which puts him in a very small club. Will and I brought him back for the quiet war of male hormones, the new push to screen and medicate, and why he thinks it’s aimed at the wrong thing.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the paid stuff!

Awareness to Action is our 12-week self-mastery course and community, built to move you from knowing this stuff to running it in your actual week. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course. Real modules, real practices, real men doing the work alongside you. On the fence? Reply with the word A2A and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s for you.

Until next time,

Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider

Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

If this landed for you, share it with someone who needs it. Subscribe if you want it in your inbox every Thursday.Three resources for reading your own machine before someone medicates it

A note before you start. None of this is medical advice, and none of it is a protocol to run on yourself. It’s a way to think, and a set of questions to bring to a real doctor. Mark is the physician here. I’m a guy who learned this by living it.

And now the paid stuff:

Read more

That’s the rep nobody posts about. The dull Tuesday you show up for anyway, when it feels like nothing is happening. Consistency turns out to be far less about willpower than about size. Make the rep small enough and a bad day can’t take it from you.

Willpower is a liar with good intentions. It swears it’ll be there tomorrow, then taps out the second the day gets hard. Systems over willpower. Shrink the rep until the exhausted, over-it version of you can still clear the bar without a pep talk.

One breath before you open the laptop counts. A single honest line in a notebook counts. The goal is simple. Show up for the rep, good day or boring one, and especially the boring ones, because those are the days that quietly build the person you’ll need when it finally matters.

I still bail sometimes. Skipped two mornings last week telling myself I was slammed, which really meant I didn’t feel like it. Got back to the cushion the next day. That’s the whole practice, honestly, the getting back.

So what’s a rep you could shrink small enough today that even your worst day couldn’t knock you off it?

Friday, we close the week out honest.

Before you go, one heads-up. This Friday, September 25, Will and I are going to be in Charlotte for Warrior Defined, a full day on men’s mental health. Come find us and take in the rest of it: https://warriordefined.com

Want a quick read on where your consistency has your attention and steadiness right now? The free Focus Score grades you across 8 areas in under 5 minutes.

Take your Focus Score: https://focusnowtraining.com/focus-score

So I reached for the simplest reset I know. I named it. Out loud, kind of stupid sounding, alone in the kitchen: “I’m anxious about the quarter.” That was it. UCLA researchers have a name for why that helps, affect labeling. Put a feeling into actual words and the emotional alarm center of your brain, the amygdala, measurably settles. Naming the thing turns the volume knob to the left.

We burn a lot of energy trying to make hard feelings disappear. We push them down and power through. The reset runs the other way, and it’s smaller than that. You turn toward the feeling just long enough to give it a name. Angry. Overwhelmed. Grieving. Scared. The naming is what takes the air out of it.

That’s the whole gap between reacting and responding. A name, dropped into the space between what you feel and what you do next. You can’t set down a thing you won’t admit you’re holding.

I forget this constantly. Spent most of yesterday snippy and blaming my calendar before I stopped and admitted I was just plain worried. Named it, and the edge came off inside a minute.

So what’s the feeling you’ve been hauling around unnamed today, and what happens if you actually say it out loud?

Wednesday, we get back to the reps.

Quick heads-up before you go. This Friday, September 25, Will and I will be in Charlotte for Warrior Defined, a full day on men’s mental health. If you’re close, come say hey and catch the rest of the lineup: https://warriordefined.com

Curious where your stress and focus sit right now? The free Focus Score gives you a quick, private read in under 5 minutes.

Take your Focus Score: https://focusnowtraining.com/focus-score

Dr. Mark Gordon returns to Men Talking Mindfulness for his third appearance to unpack the quiet war on male hormones. He’s a pioneer of hormone-and-brain medicine, Medical Director of the Warrior Angel Foundation, and featured in the documentary Quiet Explosions. This episode centers on a live policy moment: a Pentagon directive associated with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would screen service members over 30 for low testosterone and offer TRT, with the goal of a more capable, resilient force. Dr. Gordon shares the good news underneath the headline — the goal is right, and the biology is fixable — while making a clinical case that simply injecting testosterone is the wrong target, because it shuts down the body’s own ability to produce it. Jon and Will dig into what actually drives low T, why everyday ibuprofen may be quietly part of the problem, and the root-cause path that restores a man’s own hormone engine.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
1.  Why the average man today carries far lower testosterone than his grandfather did — and what’s driving the decline
2.  The Pentagon’s proposed directive (tied to Secretary Hegseth) to screen service members over 30 for low T and offer TRT — and Dr. Gordon’s clinical case for a smarter target
3.  How everyday NSAIDs like ibuprofen (“vitamin M”) can quietly interrupt the brain’s signal to make testosterone — and how to work around it
4.  Why blast and TBI exposure can leave blood testosterone looking “normal” while brain hormone production is devastated — and why an injection can’t reach that
5.  The root-cause approach that restores your own production — pulsed clomiphene, calming inflammation and cortisol — instead of shutting your system down

More about Dr. Mark Gordon:
1.  Educational site: https://www.tbihelpnow.org
2.  Store (10% first-time discount, funds veteran treatment): https://www.millenniumhealthstore.com
3.  Neurosteroid hormone paper — available on his website and Instagram
4.  Documentary: Quiet Explosions: Healing the Brain — featuring Dr. Gordon and the Warrior Angel Foundation
5.  Book: Peptides for Health — available via millenniumhealthstore.com

• (00:00) - Cold open

• (01:18) - Welcome to Men Talking Mindfulness

• (01:27) - The 60-second version: why testosterone is falling

• (02:11) - Meet Dr. Mark Gordon

• (03:26) - One-breath grounding practice

• (04:04) - Hormones 101: what the endocrine system does

• (06:14) - What disrupts your hormones

• (10:15) - 'Vitamin M': the military's ibuprofen habit

• (10:58) - How ibuprofen shuts down the testosterone signal

• (12:02) - Selenium and Brazil nuts: reversing the damage

• (16:13) - The Pentagon's TRT directive - and Mark's objection

• (17:10) - What ten years of veteran data shows

• (19:43) - What an 'optimal' testosterone level really is

• (21:39) - Fertility, Clomid and dosing mistakes

• (24:32) - Case file: Quiet Explosions

• (27:38) - Hormones and psychedelic-assisted therapy

• (30:53) - The brain's own pharmacy

• (36:10) - Breaking the NSAID wall

• (38:22) - Brain injury, LH and reading the labs

• (42:34) - Inflammation, pain and peroxynitrite

• (44:20) - What a listener can do without a military-grade panel

• (47:31) - Reversing MS: Tim's story

• (50:50) - First steps for a new patient - and what it costs

• (53:59) - Closing thoughts and where to find Dr. Gordon

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There’s a number on this worth knowing. The Survey Center on American Life found the share of men with no close friends at all climbed from 3% in 1990 to 15% by 2021. Five times as many of us, alone. Back in 1990 most men said they had 6 or more close friends. By 2021 that had been cut roughly in half.

That’s self-sufficiency’s longest bill, and it comes due slow. We pour everything into work and providing and being the guy everyone else leans on, and we let the friendships starve because keeping them up felt optional. Then one hard night lands, and the strongest guy in the room finds out he has nobody to dial.

So this is the Friday debrief, and this one is about your bench.

Who is my 2am call, the person I could phone in the actual middle of the night with no explanation and no shame?

And the harder one: am I that person for anybody, and when did I last make it easy for someone to reach me?

Friendships run on reps too, the boring maintenance kind. A text that just says “you around.” A call with no agenda. You keep a friendship the same way you keep anything that matters, by showing up for it before you need it.

So who are you reaching out to this weekend, no reason required?

And if a name came to you while you read this, don’t sit on it. Text him today.

And this one is today. Will and I are in Charlotte right now for Warrior Defined, a full day on men’s mental health. If you’re anywhere close, come find us and take in the rest of the lineup: https://warriordefined.com

If you want a private starting point for your own head right now, our free Focus Score is a quick, quiet check on where your attention and steadiness stand.

Get your Focus Score.

Ed Hinman spent his thirties in Los Angeles working all the time and had no real friends. His buddies from the Marine Corps were scattered across the country. One day he got tired of it and decided he needed people.

So he did something no action movie would ever show a barbarian doing. He called his wife’s friends’ husbands and boyfriends, guys he barely knew, and said some version of: I hear you like to read. Come over to my house. Bring a book you love.

They came. That was 13 years ago. They still meet every quarter, and the group has grown to 25 men who now gather around a fire in his backyard.

The guy who titled his book The Barbarian in You started his shield wall with what amounts to a book-club invite to near-strangers. And it worked for a reason he didn’t expect. He wasn’t the only one starving for it. Half those men were just as hungry for it as he was, and nobody else had picked up the phone.

Nobody drops you into a platoon anymore

Ed’s whole book runs on three pillars. Vigor, wonder, and fellowship. Physical effort and the state change it brings. Awe, imagination, the sense that you’re small inside something old and large. And real connection, the kind that used to come free.

In the military, fellowship was automatic. They dropped you into a platoon and those were your brothers, no effort required. Same with a team, or a fraternity, or the job that hands you a built-in crew. Then you age out of all of it. You’re married, you’ve got kids, you’ve got a living to earn, and the machinery that used to hand you friends is just gone. Nobody replaces it for you.

So it takes work, but not the kind most people think. They think it’s a bigger lift than it is. Ed’s line is that it’s like the gym. The dread is all in the parking lot. “Just showing up’s ninety percent of it,” he said, and once you’re actually there, moving, with people, the resistance you built it up to be evaporates.

I’ll own my own version of the problem, because I’m bad at this. I have a ton of acquaintances and a small handful of actual friends, and almost everyone I connect with, it’s because they’re coming on the podcast or we’re working on something together. There’s an agenda baked in. Then this week a guy I’d never met, 50 years old, turning 50 on Saturday and training to run a sub-5-minute mile, messaged me because we’d both posted about a physical challenge. Turns out he lives in my small town. We went for a run at sunrise, two dudes, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. Vigor from the effort, wonder from the light coming up over the front range, fellowship from the company. All three in one hour, and I drove home realizing how long it had been. I still haven’t cracked how to make more of that happen.

Trust thyself, and other terrifying advice

Ed’s favorite barbarian is Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is funny until you read him. The line Ed lives on is from Self-Reliance: “trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Listen to the pull inside you, the primal inclination, the thing you were drawn to before anybody told you what to want.

The problem is that trusting it is frightening. Emerson called going your own way “the terrible freedom.” Ed felt it literally. He tells a story of being on the fence line at Guantanamo Bay, on patrol with his Marines, driving the paved road, miserable, and feeling a pull to veer off onto a dirt road instead. He took it. Within minutes he knew: I’m getting out of the military. He’d stopped feeling any agency in the life that had been laid out for him, and he had to go build his own.

Ed is careful here, and it matters. He’s not preaching that you torch your life and chase bliss. “There’s fucking honor,” he says, in a man working a job he doesn’t love to feed three kids. The pull doesn’t have to become your whole career. It just has to live somewhere in your week.

He has a clean test for telling a real calling from an ego chase. Would you still do it if no one ever knew? “You would do it if you couldn’t tell a soul,” he said. The higher rank, the shinier car, the win you can post about, run it through that filter and a lot of it falls away as stuff you’re doing for the scoreboard.

I’ll be honest about my own scoreboard. One of the reasons I got married young was that it was next on the list. Navy, then college, then a job, then a wife, then kids. Nobody ever sat me down and told me to. It was just what I believed society wanted from me, sitting right below the surface where I didn’t have to look at it. Ed found his pull at 15, when a kid moved to town and got him into weight training. He’d felt mediocre his whole childhood, bad at sports, bad at school, low self-esteem, and the iron was the first thing that gave him momentum he could measure. He walked into a gym, saw guys built like “pagan gods,” and wanted in. That one pull built his confidence, got him recruited, got him to the Naval Academy. He knew it was his because nobody had to make him do it.

A wall built out of men

Ed has a chapter called Shield Wall, about a battle in the 8th century where Charles Martel’s men locked shields and stopped an invasion cold. He loves the image because a shield wall is a wall built out of people. And his point is brutal and true: “when life starts firing arrows, you’re gonna need your friends there. But if you haven’t helped them and been there for them, they’re not gonna reciprocate.”

You build the wall before the arrows fly, or it isn’t there when they do. Ed went through something hard recently and called on friends he’d shown up for before, and they carried some of the weight. He also described a night at the bottom of a dark stretch, lying in bed staring at the ceiling fan, when he felt what he could only call an energy of love come into his chest, and the gift of it was that he could surrender to it. He was an atheist most of his life. Now he goes to a quiet weekday Mass, “me and all the other lost sheep,” to sit and exhale.

There’s a Simon Sinek bit about finding out a close friend had been struggling and never called. Sinek’s response was fury: how dare you deprive me of the chance to be there for you. When you reach out, you hand someone who loves you the exact thing they’ve been waiting to give.

The way I picture a dark stretch is a ridgeline in the clouds. You can’t tell how high you are, because the fog’s all around you. It clears a little, you look down, and you think, well, I’m not at the bottom, I’m fine right here. Then it clears above you, and there’s higher ground you could reach, except the only way up runs down through some dark valleys first, and that’s more work than staying put. Fear freezes some men there. Apathy holds more of them. I’m good where I’m at is the most comfortable lie there is...

What to do about it

1. Send the least barbarian invite you can think of. Pick one thing you actually love, a book, a fire, a Saturday run, a poker table, and invite 3 guys you’d like to know better. Ask them to bring one thing. That’s the whole move. Ed’s 25-man brotherhood started with a text to near-strangers, and the effort was almost nothing next to what it’s become.

2. Stack all three in one hour this week. Vigor, wonder, and fellowship in a single block. A hard effort, outdoors if you can manage it, with one other person and nothing to sell each other. My sunrise run did all three by accident. Do yours on purpose.

3. Run the ego test on your next big want. Take the thing you’re chasing right now and ask Ed’s question: would you still want it if you couldn’t tell a soul? If the answer is no, you’re chasing it for the scoreboard. Not sure which of your wants are yours? Start with our free Awareness Self-Assessment: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 walks the whole audit.

4. Build your shield wall before the arrows. Reach out to one person this week when you need nothing from them, so the wall is standing when you do. On Friday, September 25th, Will and I are running Warrior Define in Charlotte, a full day of men doing exactly this in the same room. Come if you can. Either way, reply and tell me the one guy you’re going to reach out to this week with no agenda. I read every one.

5. Name your dirt road. Ed felt the pull to veer off the paved road and knew inside a minute he was done with the military. What’s the pull your gut keeps sending up that you keep overriding? Reply with it, and I’ll build a follow-up on what it actually costs us to keep ignoring that signal.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Ed Hinman is a US Naval Academy graduate who served 8 years in the Marine Corps and earned a master’s degree in history. He’s spent his career at Gavin de Becker and Associates protecting public figures, writes the Barbarian in You blog at barbarianu.com, and has had his work run in Task and Purpose, Business Insider, and the Washington Post. His new book is The Barbarian in You. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and, at last count, five cats. Will and I both took this one, on vigor, wonder, fellowship, and the courage to walk off the paved road.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the paywall:

Awareness to Action has been open a few months now, and as of this week there’s a new monthly membership tier, so the door’s cheaper than it’s ever been. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course. It’s built to move you from knowing this stuff to actually running it in your week, with real practices and real men. On the fence? Reply with the word A2A and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s for you.

Until next time,

Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider

Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

If this landed for you, share it with someone who needs it. Subscribe if you want it in your inbox every Thursday.

And now… the paywall… Three resources for taking back vigor, wonder, and fellowship

Read more

Nobody claps for a good pack job. You only ever hear about the one that failed. That’s the deal with the reps that matter most. They’re boring, they’re invisible, and the whole point is that they hold on the one day everything is on the line.

Mental fitness runs on the same table. The calm you’ll want in the hard conversation, and the steadiness your team reads off your face before you even open your mouth, both of those got packed weeks earlier, in reps no one saw. You don’t rise to the moment. You open to the level of the pack you folded back when it was boring.

So keep the rep small enough to survive a bad day. Not the version that needs motivation and a free hour. The one a tired, unmotivated you still runs on autopilot. 5 minutes of quiet before the house wakes. One honest line in a notebook. “Fold it” the same way every morning, whether you feel it or not, and it’s “packed” and ready long before you ever reach for it.

Systems over willpower, because willpower is the guy who shows up once the jump is already fun. A small enough system shows up at 2am.

I got lazy with mine twice last week. Told myself I was too slammed, which really meant I didn’t feel like “folding anything” that day. Caught it, got back to the table.

So what’s the rep you could pack today, the small boring one, that future-you gets to trust with something that matters?

Friday, we close the week out honest.

Want to know how solid your pack is right now? Our free Focus Score is a quick read on where your attention and steadiness actually stand, before the day you need them.

Take your Focus Score

Note before today’s reset: we’ve officially linked this Substack to the Men Talking Mindfulness podcast, so Mondays are changing. Starting this week, in place of the Monday Focus Check, you’ll get that week’s episode announcement dropped right here every Monday. That Monday note is a quick heads-up on the new episode. The deep dive is still Thursday. Your Thursday Three Things is where we go in depth, and it’s where a paid section will live, with the more powerful resources for anyone who wants to take it further. Tuesday Reset, Wednesday Reps, and Friday Debrief all stay right where they are, free as always. Alright, onto today.

Saw an ad this morning for a $200 device that promises to regulate my nervous system. Scrolled past 3 more posts on the same thing before my coffee finished brewing. Nervous system regulation has turned into one of the big wellness trends of 2026, gadgets and 12-step morning routines and a whole aisle of supplements, and part of me is glad the world finally cares about this stuff. The other part watched a guy try to sell me my own vagus nerve.

The part they leave out of the ad is that the reset that moves your nervous system is free, and it takes about one breath.

When something spikes you, an email, a tone of voice, a kid melting down in aisle 7, your body floods before your thinking brain gets a vote. That’s the gap between what happens and how you respond, and it’s a lot narrower than we’d like to believe. A long, slow exhale is the fastest way I know to widen it. Breathe in normal, then make the exhale longer than the inhale. That long out-breath is the signal that tells your body the threat is handled and it’s safe to come down off the gas.

That’s the whole game. Respond instead of react. One long exhale before you answer, before you say the thing you’ll spend all night regretting. You don’t need something strapped to your wrist to run it. You needed it back in traffic this morning, and you’ll need it again by 2pm.

I skipped my own exhale yesterday and snapped at someone who didn’t deserve the version of me they got. No $200 device would have caught that. A single breath would have.

So what’s the moment today most likely to spike you, and can you put one long breath in the gap before you react to it?

Wednesday, we get back to the reps.

Curious how steady your nervous system actually is under load? Our free Focus Score gives you a quick read on where your attention and steadiness stand right now, no wearable required.

Take your Focus Score

Ed Hinman is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, an eight-year Marine Corps veteran, and an executive protection specialist at Gavin de Becker & Associates — who left a paved path to chase what he loved, earned a master’s in history, and turned his writing into a career. His book, The Barbarian in You, is built on three pillars every man can reclaim: vigor (physical effort and aliveness), wonder (awe, imagination, meaning), and fellowship (real male connection). In this episode, Ed joins Jon and Will to make a genuinely hopeful case: living well doesn’t take a blown-up life or heroic willpower — it takes intention, a willingness to be the fool, and the courage to trust your own heart. Just showing up, he reminds us, is ninety percent of it.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
1.  The three pillars of a life that flourishes — vigor, wonder, and fellowship — and how to build more of each
2.  How to make real friendships as a grown man (Ed started a book club that’s thrived for 13 years)
3.  How to tell a genuine calling from ego — and the simple litmus test that reveals it
4.  Why filling your own cup lets you give from the overflow, not the reservoir
5.  How to move through dark seasons — reach for your people, and remember you don’t have to go alone

More about Ed Hinman:
1.  Website and Book - https://www.barbarianinyou.com/
2. Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ed_hinman/
3. Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@edwardhinmanbarbarian 

Check out our Awareness-to-action Self Mastery COURSE & COMMUNITY:

12 modules on attention, presence & performance. Work at your own pace plus a community built for Inspiration and connection.

1.  www.focusnowtraining.com/a2a-Course

JOIN US IN PERSON — Future Events and Retreats.

1.  Live in-person event: Warrior Defined.
We will be in Charlotte, NC, September 25, 2026 more info HERE: 

Or mentalkingmindfulness.com

GET MORE FROM MTM:

Text MTM to 33777 — free weekly newsletter

1.  Subscribe: mentalkingmindfulness.com

2.  FNT: focusnowtraining.com

BRING FNT TO YOUR TEAM:

1.  focusnowtraining.com/contact

Produced by Robert Lopez | https://www.cratesaudio.com/

25 Years ago today. Some of you reading this weren't alive. My children weren't alive. I was essentially a child myself ... only 24 years old.

I took my son to visit NYC last year and we visited the 9/11 Memorial. He was 6. Before we went, I showed him this picture and explained what we were going to see.

He stared at the picture for a few minutes. I thought my words fell flat. That he was wanting to be somewhere else doing something else.

Then he looked up at me with huge crocodile tears welling up in his eyes and said, "Can I cry?" We both cried together. Simultaneously, for the same reasons and for different ones.

Whether we were alive for this or not, it is always something we should remember. And yes, it's ok to cry.

Never forget. God bless the all the souls we lost that day and the souls of those we lost in the wars that this started.

The conversation happened on Zoom. Not because it was convenient. Because the man who murdered Alexander Love’s father asked for it that way.

His name is Herbert. He’s serving life in Pennsylvania, and life there means life. When the counselors set up the restorative justice dialogue, Herbert requested it be over video, and the reason he gave was that if they were in the same room, he was afraid Alexander would come across the table and try to strangle him.

So a son and the man who killed his father met, face to face on a screen, more than 20 years after the murder. Alexander’s first question was what his friends call him. The answer was Razor, a name earned the hard way across four and a half years in solitary.

And by the end of it, the two of them were friends. Will took this one solo, I wasn’t on the call, and I’ve listened twice trying to understand how a person gets there.

The doorway nobody wants to walk through

Alexander opened the episode with the thing he wishes every man knew. Pain is a doorway into profound possibilities, and the door only opens when you turn toward it.

That runs against everything we’re trained to do. The script most of us got is that when something hurts, you kill it as fast as you can and then get back to being happy, as if happiness lived on the far side of not feeling. Alexander’s whole life is a rebuttal. The pain itself transforms when you turn to face it. And here’s the line that reorganized how I heard the rest: the degree to which you can be with the pain inside you is the degree to which you can be with pain in anyone else. Your own avoidance is the ceiling on your compassion.

Hero and villain is a story for movies

Here’s what Alexander refuses to do, and it’s the hardest part of the whole hour. He will not flatten Herbert into a villain.

The backstory makes that possible. Herbert was 19. A man he trusted, the one who ordered the killing, lied to him and told him Alexander’s father was part of “the game,” a player in a world where death was on the table. Herbert had a code, he wouldn’t hurt innocent people, and that lie is the only reason he crossed the line he crossed. He didn’t learn he’d been lied to until his conversation with Alexander, more than two decades later. It was the one moment in the dialogue he got visibly worked up. Sit with that. He’s serving life, and he found out he was deceived into it from the son of the man he killed.

Alexander went further into Herbert’s world than any movie goes. First dead body around age 5. First killing witnessed before he was 9. There was a children’s name in the neighborhood for a shooting, for the display of blood on the ground. They called it Rainbow Bright. A kid’s name, because it happened often enough to need one.

None of that undoes the murder. Alexander holds both hands open at once: Herbert killed my father, and Herbert is a deeply good, sincere man. He says the friction of holding two truths that don’t fit, if you have the courage to stay in it, is catalytic. It grows you. And under all of it is a belief I share and can’t prove: that if you look deeply enough into anyone, there’s an unbroken part that is fundamentally good.

The guardians at the door

So why is turning toward pain so hard? Alexander’s answer, drawn from parts work, is that we’re all protected by guardians, and they mean well.

He splits them into two kinds. The yang guardians run on control. The inner critic. Keeping it all together. Grin and bear it. Show no weakness. The yin guardians run on collapse. Scrolling you can’t stop, the third drink, the porn, the show you binge to go numb. Both are parts of you doing their best to keep you from feeling something they decided you couldn’t survive. The problem is the bill. Numb yourself to the pain and you numb yourself to aliveness in the same stroke, because it’s one dial, not two. Wall off the grief and you wall off the joy, the connection, the whole thing.

The way out isn’t hating the guardian. Alexander’s move is to get curious about what it’s actually protecting, then relate to it from a steadier place underneath, what he calls the ground of being, the part of you that isn’t your thoughts or your sensations or your story. That’s also the case he makes for meditation, and it lands for me. Leaning into your pain from that grounded place is a completely different act than leaning in from another part that’s already drowning. You can’t build the house on sand. And the thing I keep coming back to, the reframe he and I would both plant a flag on: a good man is not the one who feels no pain. A good man is the one with the courage to turn toward his own...

What to do about it

1. Turn toward, locate, embrace. Next time something hurts, don’t stay in the story spinning in your head. Drop into your body and find where the feeling actually lives, chest, gut, throat, below the neck. Then bring it curiosity or warmth, the way you’d get close to a sleeping puppy, and let that gentle attention touch the edge of the pain. That contact is where the doorway opens.

2. Meet your guardians. Name your go-to protection. The controlling one (inner critic, keeping it all together) or the numbing one (the scroll, the drink, the screen). Then ask it what it’s trying to keep you from feeling. You’re not trying to kill it. You’re trying to understand what it’s been guarding.

3. Change the observer, not just the actions. If you keep landing in the same reality, the same fights, the same stuckness, don’t just swap the behavior. Look at how you’re making meaning underneath it. Start with our free Awareness Self-Assessment to see the pattern you keep recreating: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 walks the whole thing.

4. Ask for help, and pick the right people. Alexander is blunt that healthy men don’t do this alone. Find one person or one group that can see what you can’t, and make sure it’s a group that grows people, not one that just reinforces everyone staying stuck. Reply and tell me the pain you’ve been powering through instead of turning toward. I read every one.

5. Reconsider your villain. Name the person you’ve cast as all bad, the ex, the parent, the boss, the guy who wronged you. You don’t have to excuse a thing they did. Just ask what you’d see if you looked deeper. Reply with who came to mind, and I’ll build a follow-up on what it costs us to keep people flat.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Alexander Love is an acupuncturist and developmental coach who serves as a senior facilitator and director of curriculum at the Newfield Network. He created the Alumina process, a parts-work method weaving shadow work, Eastern wisdom, and polarity work, and he’s finishing his first book, The Evolutionary Gestures Trilogy, built around his father’s murder in 1998 and the restorative justice dialogue he’s had with the man convicted of it. Will sat down with him solo for this one, on pain, forgiveness, and the courage to turn toward what hurts.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the paywall

Awareness to Action has been open a couple of months now, and the group of students in it is real. Text A2A to 33777 or go to https://awareness2action.com. It’s built to take you from knowing this stuff to actually turning toward it, with real practices and real people. On the fence? Reply with the word A2A and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s for you.

Until next time,

Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider

Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

If this landed for you, share it with someone who needs it. Subscribe if you want it in your inbox every Thursday.

Now… for the paid stuff… Three resources for turning toward the pain you’ve been outrunning

Read more

The American College of Sports Medicine dropped its 2026 fitness trends survey this week, the big annual read on what the whole industry is chasing. Wearable tech took the top spot again. Rings, watches, straps, the entire dashboard living on your wrist. Mental health climbed into the top 6, which is real progress. But no device on that list has figured out how to measure the rep that changes how you lead.

You can't see a breath before you answer the email that tightened your jaw. No ring closes for the hard sentence you said out loud instead of swallowing it. The page you scratched in a notebook syncs to nothing, and the pause you took before you snapped left no data behind. All of it invisible. Which is why it's the first thing to go.

That's the whole game with mental fitness. It runs on reps nobody claps for. Systems over willpower, because willpower only clocks in when it feels like it, and your watch will happily hand you a badge for the easy stuff while the rep that counts goes unlogged. So keep it small enough that a tired, unmotivated version of you still runs it. 6 minutes of quiet before the house wakes. One honest page in a notebook. Run it in private, on the days it's boring, and it's standing there when the lights finally come on.

I blew mine off twice this week and let the watch tell me I was crushing it anyway. Closed every ring, missed the rep that mattered. Caught it, and started again this morning in the dark, where nothing was keeping score.

So what's the rep no device will ever give you credit for, the one you could run today anyway?

Also! Those invisible reps, the breath before you react and the pause that keeps you steady, are the whole spine of our Awareness to Action course. And the Labor Day special on it closes tonight.

$360 off full enrollment, a full 30% off, gone at 11:59pm ET tonight, Wednesday, September 9.

Enroll in Awareness to Action

That jolt is real for all of us. You spent the long weekend in a slower gear. That was the whole point. Then Tuesday lands and the world expects you back at full speed with no on-ramp. Your nervous system was never built for instant. Floored from zero to full throttle, it hands you whiplash.

So today’s reset is an on-ramp, built on purpose, before you merge. Before you open a single thing, take 4 quiet minutes. Feet on the floor, a few long breaths out, and name the two things that matter most today. Just two. Then open the inbox already knowing what you’re hunting for, before 200 strangers set your agenda in the first 10 minutes of the week.

Respond instead of react. The re-entry will yank you if you let it, and a short on-ramp is how you merge into the week as the driver instead of the cargo.

I fell for it myself this morning. Dove straight into the flood and answered emails for 40 minutes before I’d decided a single priority. Caught it, shut the laptop, took my own 4 minutes, started the day over.

Build the on-ramp, then merge on purpose.

So before you floor it into this short week, what are the two things that deserve you most today?

If this morning showed you how fast you get yanked out of the driver’s seat, that gap between what hits you and how you respond is exactly what our Awareness to Action course trains you to hold.

With all this in mind… we’re running a Labor Day special on our Awareness to Action community, 3 days only: $360 off full enrollment, a full 30% off, through 11:59pm ET this Wednesday, September 9.

Enroll in Awareness to Action

Things do not settle down. I spent a long stretch of my life waiting for them to, and all that waiting bought me was a shorter fuse and a family that got whatever was left over.

Awareness to Action is what Will and I built for the person stuck inside that sentence. Twelve modules that build on each other, a workbook, guided audio, weekly live calls where you can actually ask us something, and a community of people doing the same work so you are not white-knuckling it alone. It is a skill set. Like any skill set, it responds to reps.

Through 11:59pm Eastern this Wednesday, September 9, full enrollment is 30 percent off. That is $840 instead of $1,200. You keep $360.

Use code LABOR30 at awareness2action.com, or click the button and it applies itself.

If it turns out not to be for you, email us with REFUND in the subject line inside 30 days and we send your money back. No questions, no awkward conversation.

What is the thing you keep putting off until things settle down? Hit reply and tell me... I read every one of these.

Jon

Here’s the trap with a holiday. The calendar hands you the day, but only your attention can take it. No one steals a day off from you. You leak it, 5 quick checks at a time, until it’s gone and you somehow feel more drained than a workday.

So this Focus Check is aimed at the day itself. Before the burgers and the pool, I’m naming where my attention goes today: to the people in front of me, and not the inbox that will be exactly as full tomorrow. Phone in a drawer for real stretches. One rule I stole from a friend: if it can wait until Tuesday, it doesn’t get today.

Attention is stolen, not lost, and the holiday version of the theft is the sneakiest one, because it dresses up as just staying on top of things. What it costs is a quiet Monday you’ll never get back, with these particular kids at these particular ages.

You’ll clock plenty of workdays this year. You get a small handful of these. Hand this one your real attention and it gives back something no productive Tuesday ever will.

I’m not naturally good at this. My gut reaction to any open hour is to fill it with something “useful.” Give yourself grace, put the phone down, and go be where your feet are.

So today, what deserves your full attention that a screen has been quietly skimming off the top, and can you give it the whole day off with you?

Tomorrow we’re back in the regular rhythm, starting with the week’s first reset.

Not sure where your attention goes once you think you’ve clocked out? The free Focus Score maps it across 8 areas in under 5 minutes and gives you your number.

Get your Focus Score