Kids don’t do what we say about attention. They do what they watch us do. I can preach presence all day, and what lands is whether I look up when they walk in the room or keep scrolling and mutter “mm-hmm” at a story I’m not hearing.

So this back-to-school season my focus check is pointed at me first. If I want a kid who can sit with one hard thing, I have to be a dad who can. If I want them believing their attention is worth guarding, they have to catch me guarding mine. The phone goes in the drawer at dinner. Not theirs. Mine, first. None of this is about being a perfect, phone-free monk in front of them. It’s about them watching me fight for my own attention like it’s worth fighting for.

Our kids are growing up with thieves far more sophisticated than anything we faced at their age. Thieves of their attention. The best defense I can give mine is letting them watch their dad choose them over the screen, on purpose, out loud. No lecture beats that. No app either.

I’m not clean at this, to be clear. I’ve fumbled the dinner rule more nights than I’d like, phone buzzing in my pocket like it owns me. Give yourself grace, put it back in the drawer, try again tomorrow. They’re watching the recovery too.

So who’s watching how you spend your attention, and what are they picking up from the way you spend it?

Which brings up something worth discovering. Find out what your attention actually looks like —> Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment (it’s only 24 questions)

In the SEAL Teams, getting help was practically a fireable idea. You did not raise your hand. You did not say the wheels were coming off, because the wheels coming off could mean losing the thing that gave you your whole identity. So you buried it, and a lot of good men buried it right up until it buried them. I came close enough to that to respect it.

Here’s what I believe now, after plenty of years doing it the hard way. Asking for professional help is the most self-respecting move on the board. It’s maintenance on the one machine you can’t trade in. You take the truck in for the noise before the engine drops. You get the weird mole looked at. Somehow the one system we’ll let run straight into the ground is the one between our ears.

So this is the Friday debrief. A few honest questions before the weekend.

What have I been white-knuckling that a professional handles for a living?

Whose number have I been meaning to call, and what story am I telling myself to avoid it?

If my best friend were carrying this, would I tell him to tough it out or to get help?

Then why do I hold myself to the crueler standard?

You don’t earn bonus points for bleeding privately. Book the appointment. It’s a rep like any other, and it might be the most important one on this whole list.

So what’s the call you’ve been avoiding, and what would it take to make it this week?

See you Monday. Peace.

Before you go, most people think they're sharp. The score usually says otherwise. Find out where you land. —> Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

There’s a gauge creeping toward the red. He’s checked it ten thousand times and it’s always been fine, so his brain shows him what it expects, safe, safe, safe, right up until it isn’t. She points to a sonar study where people were told to watch a screen for danger blips, and within 20 minutes most of them could no longer see the danger that was right in front of them. Their brains had decided nothing was changing.

Here’s the part that flips it. The person this happens to first is the 20-year veteran, the expert, the one whose brain got so good at the job it stopped looking. And her least favorite word in the English language is the one we hang on him afterward. Complacency.

Your brain predicts more than it sees

Janel’s whole argument is that the brain isn’t recording the world, it’s guessing at it. You see what your experience tells you to expect, then your senses fill in around the guess. That’s a feature. It’s how you drive home without thinking and how you stop burning energy on things you’ve already mastered. Your prefrontal cortex is a battery, she says, and it drains fast, so the brain shoves everything it can into habit loops and autopilot to save charge.

The catch is that autopilot can’t tell a good habit from a dangerous one, and it can’t see change. You put a sticky note on your mirror to remind yourself of something that matters, and for 3 days it works, and then your brain files it under “known” and you stop seeing it entirely. I’ve done this exact thing. Motivational notes on my bathroom mirror that may as well have been wallpaper by the end of the week. My brain wasn’t broken. It was doing its job.

That’s why “just pay more attention” has always been garbage advice. It asks a tired battery to override its own wiring through willpower. Janel spent a career watching that fail, sometimes fatally, before she went looking for what actually drives the behavior underneath.

The body runs the brain

So here’s her line that names the whole thing: you can’t focus your way out of a dysregulated nervous system.

She walks through polyvagal theory as a ladder. At the bottom you’re calm, clear, able to manage your own chemistry. A rung up, you’re in fight or flight, scanning for threat, cortisol climbing. At the top, you freeze, shut down, go quiet, and she says that’s where addiction and avoidance live. A trigger moves you up that ladder fast. She actually used me as the example, a hard phone call I once got from someone I served with can take me from the bottom rung to the middle before I’ve said a word. And once you’re up there, learning can’t happen and focus can’t happen, because the thinking part of your brain has handed the wheel to the survival part.

The move most of us try is to think our way back down. It doesn’t work. Janel is blunt that the body runs the brain more than the brain runs the body, and the vagus nerve is the lever. You settle the body first, then the mind comes back online. This is the same thing Will teaches in a breathwork room and the same thing I mean when I say you have to be well to lead well. You cannot out-discipline a nervous system that thinks it’s in danger. You have to bring it down first.

Stillness is where the work happens

Now the part the big burlies hate, her words. The guy who hears “stillness” and figures it’s warm-fuzzy-hug stuff and a fast way to fall behind.

Janel makes the opposite case on biology. When you stop feeding the brain new input, a network she calls your integration system finally switches on, the one that connects dots and hands you the insight you’ve been grinding for. Always-on doesn’t feed that network, it starves it. Your body even runs in roughly 90-minute focus-and-rest cycles whether you respect them or not, and Jeff Bezos famously refuses to make big decisions late in the day because he knows a depleted brain makes bad ones. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations between military campaigns, not because he had spare time, but because stillness was how he stayed himself under pressure.

I take a nap when I can get one, and I still catch myself treating stillness as the thing I’ll get to after the real work. Janel would say the stillness is the real work. The pause is where the million-dollar idea and the location of your car keys both live. I know it’s true and I still resist it...

What to do about it

1. Downregulate before you concentrate. Before the task that needs your best brain, drop the threat signals first. One long, slow exhale, longer than the inhale, a few times. You’re not trying to focus yet. You’re clearing the runway so focus is possible.

2. Take the 5-minute window. Sit with nothing to fix. No phone, no input, no problem to solve. Let the integration network do the job it can only do when you stop feeding it. This feels like wasting time and it’s the opposite.

3. Name the activation. When you feel the buzz climb, say what it is. “I’m spun up. I’m anxious. I’m ticked off.” Naming it starts bringing it down, and you don’t have to fix it, just name it and let it settle. Reply and tell me the trigger that reliably sends you up the ladder, I read every one.

4. Run the “what’s changed” scan on the things you’ve gone blind to. Once a week, look at your marriage, your kid, your team, the way you’d look at that gauge, and ask what’s actually different now versus the story in your head. Then take our free Awareness Self-Assessment to see where your own baseline sits: focusnowtraining.com/focus-score. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 turns this into a full audit.

5. Reply with the sticky note that went invisible. The reminder, the goal, the person you stopped really seeing because they became routine. Tell me what your brain filed under “known” that deserves fresh eyes. I’m building a follow-up on it.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Janel Penaflor spent 3 decades investigating fatal failures across oil and gas, nuclear, aviation, and chemical plants, and was trained in medicine before she ever got into safety. She’s the founder of Safety Sense, the author of a stack of books on how the brain and nervous system actually drive behavior, and she’s neurodivergent herself, which is a lot of where this work started. Will and I both took this one, on focus, the polyvagal ladder, factory blindness, and why stillness is the most productive thing you’re not doing.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the paywall…

Awareness to Action has been open a couple of months now. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course. It’s a self-mastery course, and it starts exactly where Janel says it has to, with awareness of your own system before you try to run it harder. 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 resetting the system before you try to focus

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We still do that… but we do it with our bodies and minds!

For years I wore 5 hours of sleep like a medal. Bragged about it, quietly proud, running on coffee and grit and the story that rest was for people who wanted it less than I did. I had it exactly backwards.

Sleep is where the reps set. You train the muscle in the gym and it grows on the pillow. You learn the skill during the day and your brain files it overnight. Skip the sleep and you’re doing all the work without ever hitting save. For leaders it’s worse, because tired you makes tired calls and then hands them to a whole team that has to live inside them.

So now I treat sleep like the rep it is. A non-negotiable I schedule first and build the day around, instead of the thing I get to if there’s time left over. Screens out of the bedroom, a bedtime I hold more nights than not. It’s the least glamorous discipline I’ve got and it moves everything else on the list.

Fill the tank before you lead the team. You cannot pour steady, patient leadership out of a body running on 5 hours and a prayer. I’ve tried it. The people closest to me paid the tab.

Here’s the reframe that finally landed for me. Rest isn’t the reward you get after the work. Rest is part of the work, the half where it all consolidates. Treat it like the lazy option and you’ll keep grinding and keep wondering why you feel a step slow.

I still fight it. There’s always one more thing worth staying up for, and it’s almost never worth what it charges me the next morning. Give yourself grace, then go to bed.

So what changes this week if you treat sleep like your most important rep instead of the first thing you cut?

A few free tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

Get my book, DIAL In Your Leadership, FREE (just pay shipping)

Here’s why it works, in plain terms. When you’re spun up, your exhale goes short and your body sits in gas-pedal mode. Stretch the exhale out and pause at the bottom, and you tap the brake. The long, even out-breath tells the oldest part of your brain the coast is clear. You’re signaling your body down, in a language older than words.

You don’t need a firefight for this. A hard email. That hot second right before you say the thing you’ll regret at bedtime. Same 4-count. In through the nose for 4, hold for 4, out slow for 4, hold for 4. Run it twice and feel your shoulders come down off your ears.

The reason I love it for regular life is that it’s portable and invisible. You can box-breathe in a budget meeting and the person across the table just thinks you’re weighing your answer. Which, it turns out, you now are.

Respond instead of react. The count buys you the 2 or 3 seconds where the choice lives. I’ve talked myself out of a hundred dumb replies inside that little box.

I don’t always remember to use it. When I’m truly hot, the last thing I want to do is breathe slow, but… that’s exactly when it works best. Give yourself grace, then find the count.

So next time the gas pedal sticks, will you remember there’s a brake, and it’s already in your chest?

A few free tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

Get my book, DIAL In Your Leadership, FREE (just pay shipping)

We love the word multitasking. The brain flips between two things, fast, and on each switch, it costs us time. It never truly runs both at once. Psychologists have measured that tax for years, and it’s why you can tear around busy all morning and finish with nothing you’d point to. You spent the morning paying tolls and calling it work.

So Monday is the day I try to run one thing at a time on purpose. One thing, all the way through, before I pick up the next. Write with the browser closed. Have the conversation with the phone face down in the other room. It feels slower in the moment but it finishes far more, which took me an embarrassingly long time to believe.

The trap is that switching feels productive. 12 tabs open and a podcast going in one ear, and you feel like a machine. Then the day ends and the one thing that mattered is still sitting there untouched. Attention is stolen, not lost, and the sneakiest thief is the one that convinces you the theft is efficiency.

I’m not great at this. I’ve got a browser open right now with more tabs than I’ll admit to in writing. But single-tasking is the closest thing to a superpower I’ve found, precisely because so few people will slow down enough to do it.

So what’s the one thing today that deserves your whole brain instead of the leftover slices?

Tomorrow, a way to settle the system when it won’t settle.

A few free tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

Get my book, DIAL In Your Leadership, FREE (just pay shipping)

Here’s a man who did one of the calmest, most competent things a human has ever done under pressure, and the move he made this summer might be the harder one. He said, in public, at 75, I have something I can’t fix and I’m not going to hide it.

Most of us do the opposite with whatever we’re hauling around. We hide the diagnosis, the debt, the marriage that’s wobbling, the quiet fear that we’re falling behind. We white-knuckle it alone and call that strength. I spent a career in a world where showing the crack felt like a fireable offense, and I carried a few things about 10 years longer than I should have because of it. Silence felt safer. Silence was just slower.

That’s the whole cost of self-sufficiency, and it’s why this lane exists. The thing you won’t say out loud runs your life from the basement. Naming it won’t cure it. Saying it just means you’re not the only one holding it anymore, and that changes what it weighs.

So this is the Friday debrief. Five quiet minutes, and tell yourself the truth.

What am I not saying out loud right now?

Who’s earned the right to hear it?

What am I afraid happens if I say it?

What would change if one person knew by Sunday night?

One safe person is enough. You don’t need a stage like Sully’s. Say the true thing to somebody who loves you, and let them carry a corner of it.

So what’s the sentence you’ve been holding, and who are you going to say it to?

Wishing Sully and his family every good thing.

A few free tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

Get my book, DIAL In Your Leadership, FREE (just pay shipping)

He was driving home from that appointment in Florida, and he turned on a talk show. The moment he turned it on, Dr. Mark Gordon was on the air talking about a Navy SEAL named Nathan who’d gotten 50% better in 60 days on Gordon’s protocol.

Tim called the next day. Twelve weeks in, he was 90% better. At 14 weeks, no symptoms at all. Gordon won’t say cured. He says remission. And Tim has held that remission since November 2023.

Will took this one solo, I wasn’t in the room, and I’ve listened to it twice now. Because Nathan on that radio, the SEAL who got better, that’s my tribe. And the thing Gordon is actually selling isn’t a miracle. It’s a reframe that a lot of us needed 20 years ago.

What if it was never a character flaw

Here’s Gordon’s core claim, and it’s the part worth your attention whether you ever touch a peptide or not.

When your brain takes trauma, a blast wave, a car wreck, a decade of collisions on a field, or the slow grind of chronic stress, the cells knock into each other and set off inflammation. Gordon walks through the machinery: microglia dump cytokines, the brain’s chemistry goes acidic, and that inflamed environment shuts down the brain’s ability to make its own hormones and neurotransmitters. You lose the dopamine, the serotonin, the testosterone your brain makes on site. And what shows up when those go missing is depression, insomnia, fatigue, a startle response that won’t settle, and a temper with a hair trigger.

Read that list again as a man who spent 20 years around blast and never once considered that the ringing in my head and the darkness that followed Operation Red Wings might have been partly physical. I put all of it in the character column. My weakness. My failure to just get right. Gordon’s saying a chunk of that was a brain that got hit and never got treated, running on a chemistry set somebody had knocked off the table.

That’s the whole reframe. An injured brain behaves like an injured knee. You don’t call a torn ACL a personality defect. You clear the swelling, you rehab it, you rebuild. Gordon treats the brain the same way, drop the inflammation first, put the missing hormones back, then use peptides like SEMAX, which nudges the brain to regrow nerve tissue, to help it come back online. For the guys who’ve been white-knuckling something they thought was a flaw in them, that reframe alone is worth the hour.

Peptides aren’t the magic, and cheap ones can hurt you

Now the part where I pump the brakes, because this is the corner of health where the hype is loudest.

Gordon says it before Will even asks: peptides are not the cure-all. They’re a tool on top of a foundation, and the foundation is the boring stuff. Sleep. Food. Movement. He named alcohol as the number one thing quietly wrecking the exact hormones he’s trying to restore. If the base is garbage, the fancy stuff on top does very little.

And I’m not a doctor, so hear this as me relaying his own words, not prescribing anything. Some of the claims in this episode are enormous, MS in remission, dementia turning around, treatment-resistant depression lifting. Gordon is a credentialed MD who’s been at this 25 years and self-funds treatment for veterans, and even he refuses the word “cured” and stays at “remission.” Take the reframe seriously and take the specific protocols to an actual physician who runs your labs.

The one flat warning worth repeating out loud: cheap peptides can put you in the hospital. Gordon has had 3 people land in the ER with anaphylaxis from impure product ordered off the internet from overseas. His line was blunt. “Cheap isn’t safe.” More isn’t better either, he says your body just shuts the receptors down and you get less. If any of this is on your radar, the buy-cheap-off-Instagram move is the one that actually hurts people.

The part that had nothing to do with peptides

Gordon went into medicine because his father, an Army man, died of bone cancer. Before he passed, he told his son one thing that Gordon repeats like a compass: put your feet in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their side before you make it about yourself.

He’s built the rest of his life on it. He self-funds care for veterans and first responders, gifts them their consults, routes the money back into treating people who can’t pay. When I hear a story like Nathan’s or Tim’s, I don’t hear a supplement pitch. I hear a guy who found a way to serve and pointed everything at it. Different lab coat, same instinct I recognize in the mirror...

What to do about it

1. If you have a hit history, stop filing it under “character.” Blast exposure, contact sports, a bad wreck, years of chronic stress. If the symptoms match, the honest next move is a real workup with a doctor who looks upstream at inflammation and hormones, not just baseline labs. It might be an injury, and injuries get treated.

2. Fix the foundation before you shop for the fancy stuff. Gordon’s own order of operations: sleep, food, movement, and cutting the alcohol he named as the top saboteur. This costs nothing and it’s the part that makes everything else work.

3. Take our free Awareness Self-Assessment. Before you chase a protocol, get an honest read on your own baseline, your stress, your sleep, where your head actually is. About 5 minutes: https://focusnowtraining.com/focus-score Paid subscribers, Resource 1 turns this into a full upstream-workup checklist.

4. Reply with the vet or the fighter you’re going to send this to. You know a guy who came home different and calls it a personal failing. Hit reply with his first name, or just tell me the story. I’m gathering these, and I want to build a follow-up on brain injury and the men we keep losing to it.

5. If you’re in the dark place right now, you can call or text 988. Veterans and service members, press 1. Reframe or not, if the bottom is close, that’s the number, and reaching for it is the strong move.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Dr. Mark Gordon is an MD who has spent 25 years on the science of brain trauma and recovery. He’s the medical director of the Warrior Angel Foundation, treating TBI in veterans, advises the Clinical Peptide Society, has shared his work 6 times on the Joe Rogan Experience, and wrote the new book Peptides for Health. Will sat down with him solo for this one, on peptides, hormones, neuroinflammation, and why so much of what we call a broken man is a brain that never got treated.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the three paid resources

Awareness to Action has been open a couple of months now. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course. It’s built for the foundation work, the sleep, the stress, the attention, that every expert in this space says has to come first. 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 treating the brain like the injury it is

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The part I sit with is the Tuesday in February that never made a highlight reel. The 5am trainer ride in the dark, legs screaming, no crowd, no camera, a guy doing the rep because he said he would. A Tour is won in the thousands of joyless base-training days months and years (decades even) before anyone’s watching. July is just when the bill comes due in your favor.

Mental fitness is the same animal, and it’s why I keep hammering this lane. The steady leader, the parent who doesn’t come apart when the week does, none of that shows up on the day you need it if you haven’t been quietly banking it for months. You don’t rise to the moment. You sink to your training.

So the move, same as ever, make the rep too small to skip. Keep it stupid small. 3 breaths before you open the laptop. One honest page in a notebook before bed. Reps a tired, unmotivated person can still pull off. Systems over willpower, because willpower took the day off and the small rep doesn’t care how you feel.

And here’s the part the highlight reel hides. Pogacar has cracked before. Blown up on a climb, watched a rival ride away, had the bad day in front of the entire world. The reps are what get you back on the bike faster after a day like that. One rep so small you can’t fall off of it, and on the days you do fall off, one small rep back on.

So what’s the unglamorous February rep you could put in today that future-you gets to collect on later?

A few free tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

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There’s real science here, and it’s been around a while. Craig Anderson at Iowa State has spent decades on what he calls the heat-aggression effect, and the American Psychological Association lays it out plainly: as temperatures climb, so do irritability, hostility, and impulsive reactions. Hotter days, shorter fuses, and they can measure it. Your body reads overheated as under threat, and a threatened animal snaps.

So the reset for a brutal August Tuesday starts below the neck, before it ever reaches your mouth. When you feel the edge coming up, run a quick body check first. Am I hot. Am I hungry. Am I tired. Am I running on fumes. Half the time what feels like a righteous reaction is a dysregulated body looking for somewhere to dump itself. You can use that. Spot the overheated animal and you buy a beat to choose before you act.

Then cool the actual machine. Cold water on the wrists and the back of your neck. A real glass of water instead of the third coffee. You’d be surprised how often the whole “problem” quiets down once your core drops a couple degrees.

Respond instead of react. The gap between what happens and what you do lives in the body first, and in August the body needs more help holding that gap open.

I still blow it sometimes, ask the slow driver. But saying “I’m just hot” to myself before I open my mouth has saved me more dumb moments than any clever mindset trick ever has.

So what’s been setting you off this week that might have more to do with your body than the actual offense?

A few FREE tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment

Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

Get my book, DIAL In Your Leadership, FREE (just pay shipping)

If a feed is corrosive enough to a 12-year-old’s focus that a government steps in, what do we figure it’s doing to ours? There’s no law coming to protect my attention. I’m a grown man. The only regulator I’ve got is me, and … he’s not great at it!

The apps aren’t built gentler for adults. Same infinite scroll, same engineers whose entire job is keeping you tapping.

So Monday is the day I regulate the one attention I’m in charge of. One thing named before I open anything. Phone across the room for the first block of real work. I still use the feed, I just refuse to let it be the first voice in my head.

I lose this plenty. Caught myself in a scroll hole before coffee this very morning, which is an embarrassing thing to admit in a piece about attention. Give yourself grace, then get back to the one thing.

So if you had to protect your own attention the way France is trying to protect a kid’s, what’s the first rule you’d write for yourself?

Wanna know how you’re doing with your awareness and focus?

Check out our self assessment!

Honestly… that’s friggin amazing! Here’s a person whose entire living is being on, being liked, performing “thriving” for millions, and she hit a wall and had the guts to say out loud, I’m not okay, I need to step back. I spent decades around some of the hardest men on the planet, and I’ve watched most of us do the exact opposite. We’ll quietly come apart before we’ll admit the wall is even there.

Self-sufficiency is a hell of a drug (h/t Dave Chappelle as Rick James). It looks like strength but eventually you find yourself running on fumes.

She’s young enough to be my kid, and she pulled off in public what a lot of us still can’t manage in private. Tapping out before you break, on purpose, so you can come back whole.

So this is the Friday debrief. Grab 5 quiet minutes and be honest.

Where am I performing “fine” this week while the tank sits empty?

What’s the true sentence I’ve been swallowing, and who could I say it to?

What would I tell a friend this tired to put down?

And why won’t I take that advice myself?

Stepping back before you shatter is the strongest move on the board. Log off if you need to. The people who love you would rather have you back whole than watch you grind yourself into the floor.

So what do you need to step back from this weekend?

A few free tools if you want them:

Take our FREE Awareness Self Assessment Get our FREE Focus App (Mobile only)

The guy on the bridge had already turned it into a game. He’d been stalking his estranged wife, the mother of his kid, and when the police staked out her house he spotted the officers inside, drove to a grocery store, came back, and set a cold-cut platter and a bottle of wine on her back porch. Then he called 911 from a pay phone. “Tell the guys in the house I left them a little snack.”

That’s who Derek Gaunt was standing across from on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, in the winter, for 7 hours. Concrete construction barges sat in the water below. If the man jumped, it was over.

Derek got him off the railing and walking back toward Virginia with one skill set. No force, no bigger threat. He made the man feel understood, over and over, until the guy chose to move. A less-lethal round from another team put him over the side anyway, and he survived on 6 feet of water over 5 feet of silt. “Success or failure? He lived, so I guess it’s a success.”

This same man, 20 years on hostage negotiation teams, will tell you flat out he fails at this with his own family. “I failed miserably. And I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a human being. And I’m more emotionally tied to the people in my house than I am to anybody else.”

Everybody’s a threat until they’re not

Derek’s whole thing is tactical empathy, and I know how that lands. Tactical sounds cool. Empathy sounds soft. Put them together and a lot of guys tune out. Stay with it, because the idea underneath is hard as nails.

Tactical empathy is the deliberate work of seeing and naming the other person’s world before you say a thing about your own. Derek’s claim is that almost nobody gets this anywhere, not at work, not at home, and the second you provide it, you stop being a threat. And you are a threat, by default. Any time you walk in with “I want” or “I need” running in your head, the person across from you feels it and puts up the wall. Doesn’t matter if your intentions are clean. The wall goes up anyway.

So instead of yelling “it’s better over here” from across the street, you cross over, stand shoulder to shoulder, and look at the block the way they see it. His line for it: “Never be so sure about what you want that you wouldn’t take something better if it came along.”

Then he did it to me, live, on the recording. I told him my mornings feel like a hostage situation with a 5-year-old and a pair of socks. He asked, “How bad of a position am I going to put you in if I ask you to put your socks and shoes on so we could leave right now?” And I sat there and actually felt myself want to put my shoes on. No “because I said so.” No knife hands. Just a question I couldn’t feel trapped by. He calls the other thing the BISS voice, because-I-said-so, and yeah, I’ve lived in that voice more mornings than I’d like to admit.

This is the same gap I talk about all the time, the space between what happens and how you respond. Derek puts it in negotiator terms: you’re going to get triggered, but there’s room between the trigger and your reaction to decide who you’ll be in it. Curiosity fills that room. When someone comes at you sideways, ask where the hell it’s coming from before you fire back.

Your tone is doing 93% of the talking

Derek dropped a number in the intro that stuck with me. Tone does something like 13 times the work of your actual words. When I asked him to back it up, he pointed to Albert Mehrabian’s old 7-38-55 work from the 1970s, 7% content, 38% delivery, 55% syntax. The exact multiplier gets tossed around and he admitted that, but the direction is not really in dispute. How you say it swamps what you say.

And it’s literal. Come at someone hot and their amygdala lights up like a lion walked in, and the thinking part of the brain goes offline. Derek says he can watch a person get measurably dumber in real time on his tone alone, then come back online the second he softens it. Shawn Achor’s work puts a brain about 31% more effective in a positive state. So if you’re the loud one in the room, you’re making everyone around you worse at the exact moment you need them sharp.

His fix is almost annoyingly simple. Control your state. Not the conversation, your state, and the conversation follows. This is the leadership version of something I say to the men I coach constantly: you have to be well to lead well. You cannot regulate a room you can’t regulate yourself in.

Then he roasted me for it. Said in an hour of talking he’d seen my teeth twice, that I’ve got the mug for the aggressive tone whether I mean it or not, while Will’s out here grinning like the natural accommodator he is. My kids could’ve told him that. I sat with it. He’s not wrong.

The apology I got chewed out for

Here’s the one I’m still chewing on. Back in 2002, right after 9/11, I was going through training, and I gave a shorter teammate a tip on an obstacle that worked great for a tall guy and got him nowhere. He came back and told me it didn’t work. I said, “man, I’m really sorry.” An instructor heard it, pulled me aside, and lit me up. “Do not ever apologize to your men. That undermines your authority.”

I thought it was garbage advice then. Derek thinks it’s antiquated, and he wrote a whole book about why, Ego, Authority, Failure. His take: the apology is powerful precisely because almost nobody does it, for the exact reason that instructor gave me. People think it makes them small. It does the opposite. It tells your people you don’t have all the answers and you’re still in the chair, which means they can be in the chair someday too. The thing that actually torches your authority is the leader who blows it and says “my guys just didn’t execute.” Derek said when he hears that, he wants to kick the guy down a flight of stairs. Same.

Ego, he says, is just identity wearing armor. Threaten it and the body reacts like physical danger, so people dig in to prove they were right instead of getting it right. I’ve felt that pull. Every leader has. The whole game is catching the armor as it goes up and choosing to set it down first...

What to do about it

1. Turn one yes-question into a no-question today. Yes feels like a trap, so people resist it. Try “would you be against” or “how bad a spot would it put you in if.” Use it on your kid, your teammate, your spouse. Notice how much less they fight you when they can say no.

2. Label before you argue. Next low-stakes conversation, name what the other person seems to feel before you add anything. Derek’s version at the coffee counter: “Sounds like you’ve been getting kicked in the nuts all day.” Watch how much they open up when someone finally names it.

3. Control your state before you open your mouth. You can’t run tactical empathy on anyone if your own nervous system is redlined. Start by knowing your baseline. Our free Awareness Self-Assessment takes about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 turns this into a full tone-and-state audit.

4. Send the apology you’ve been sitting on. No “but” after it. Just the apology. Then hit reply and tell me what happened, or tell me about the apology you’re still avoiding and why. I read every one, and I’m building a future edition on this.

5. Reply with the hostage negotiation you face every day. The kid and the shoes. The boss who slams the table. The conversation you keep dodging. Tell me who’s across the bridge from you, and I’ll pull the best ones into a follow-up.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Derek Gaunt spent 29 years in law enforcement, 20 of them on hostage negotiation teams in the DC metro area. He’s an instructor and coach at the Black Swan Group, the negotiation firm behind Never Split the Difference, and the author of Ego, Authority, Failure, a book on leadership that Will and I both think should be required reading for anyone who runs a team. His newest, Fight Less, Win More, is out now. We covered tactical empathy, tone, ego, and why the world-class negotiator still loses the morning battle over socks.

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Three resources for disarming the people you can’t just order around

Resource 1: The tactical empathy starter kit

You will never talk a man off a bridge. You will absolutely have to move a stubborn

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Most of us listen to reply. It’s normal. It’s also the reason so many conversations with the people who matter most go sideways. And it’s fixable: research shows people who listen to understand have measurably happier (and more effective!) relationships than people who listen to respond.

Will and I are hosting a free live webinar to train exactly that. It’s called Being in the Conversation, the third session in our Awareness to Action live training series, and it’s about improving communication in your most important personal and professional relationships.

In 45 minutes together, you’ll get:

• why good, well-meaning people slip from listening into reacting (your brain is doing this to you)

• the H.E.A.R. method, a four-step practice for staying present when a conversation gets hard

• a live practice you can reuse in your very next tough conversation

• five under-a-minute reps to wire it into your week

August 5 at noon ET. It’s free but registration is required.

Save my seat!

Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.

See you there.

Jon

P.S. If someone came to mind while you read this, the one you keep having the same hard conversation with, forward them this email. Bring them along!

For years I treated exercise like a long-game deposit. Do it for 30 years, get a better old age. Probably true. But it undersells the thing. Researchers at University College London, led by Mikaela Bloomberg, tracked older adults and found that a bout of moderate-to-vigorous movement was linked to better memory and focus the very next day. The next day. You train today and your brain cuts you a check tomorrow morning. I’ve personally felt it that same day!

Mental fitness is a daily transaction. You do the rep, you get the sharper brain, roughly same-day service. Skip a few and the fog rolls back in.

So the move today is to make the rep too small to argue with. A 20-minute walk with your heart rate up. 10 pushups before the shower. Systems over willpower. One rep so small you can’t fall off of it, and you collect the same-day payout anyway.

Give yourself grace on the misses, then get the next one in. The reps are how a leader keeps a clear head for the people counting on one, and you can’t fake a clear head.

So what’s the smallest movement rep you could get in today, for the brain you need this afternoon?

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RAND surveyed young people 12 to 21, and 19.2% of them said they go to AI chatbots, ChatGPT and the like, when they’re feeling sad, angry, nervous, or stressed. That’s about 8.2 million kids. A year before it was 13.1%. So it’s climbing fast, and I don’t think that’s because the kids are broken. I think it’s because when the wave hits, the fastest thing in the room is the phone, and the phone always answers.

And I’ve gotta say, I’d rather them turn to that than many of the other options and at least they’re feeling the feelings and not just numbing out.

BUT… THEY (we) still need to do work from there… because an AI chatbot can hand you words but it cannot take the breath for you. Regulating your nervous system is a physical event. Your body settles when you exhale long and slow, when the animal part of you finally gets the signal that the threat has passed. No paragraph does that for you. You do that.

And look, I’m not anti-AI, I use the stuff every single day (I’m literally using it right now to clean this up - clean it up… not write it for me!). But there’s a difference between asking a tool to help you think and asking it to do your feeling for you so you don’t have to. When I’m keyed up and I grab the phone, I’m usually skipping the one rep that works: the pause. The gap between what happened and what I do next.

So here’s the reset. Next time the heat climbs, before you type it into anything, give your own body the first 60 seconds. One long exhale, feet flat on the floor, feeling it. Then go ask the robot, if you still want to. Most nights I’ve already handled it by then.

Respond instead of react. The tools are fast. Your nervous system got here first, and it still does the part that matters most.

Now… ironically… here’s access to our Free Awareness Self Assessment… it can tell you where you may need to do some more work … and then our Focus App can give you some of the tools to use! Check them both out below.

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January 2009, US Airways 1549, both engines gone to a flock of birds at 2,818 feet over Manhattan. Captain “Sully” Sullenberger puts it in the Hudson and all 155 people walk away.

In the movie there’s this scene where they run the whole thing through the simulators, and the sim pilots make it back to a runway every time, which makes Sully look like he blew it. Until he points out what they left out. Those sim pilots knew the birds were coming. A real human needs a second (or 35!) just to catch up to the fact that the world changed. Build 35 seconds of that into the sim and neither plane makes it back.

In those seconds Sully didn’t get to decide where to point his attention. It went where 42 years of flying had trained it to go. Straight to the one thing that mattered and right past all the hundreds of things that didn’t… land the airplane.

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We treat focus like something we’ll summon when it counts. Really it just drops to wherever we’ve trained it to live, and for a lot of us lately that’s the phone and the feed.

So Monday’s the day I try to aim mine on purpose before the inputs aim it for me. One thing on a card. Phone in the other room for the first block. Nothing fancy about it. I’m just training my attention to fall toward what matters, so that on the ugly days it goes there on its own instead of straight to the noise.

You decide where your focus goes now, in the boring Monday version, over and over, long before any hard moment thinks to ask for it.

So where has your attention been trained to fall when the pressure hits, and is that where you’d have chosen to send it?

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While I do think about the folks on the flight deck when I read something like that, I also try to think about the house they left. Somebody back home has been solo since, what, last fall. The 2am fevers, the water heater that dies the worst possible week, all of it handled alone. No medal for that one. They just do it.

I know this one from the inside. I met my wife on a deployment. 2013, she was running the medical side, I was the ops officer… we were two people who were world-class at stuffing it down and functioning. In that world asking for help gets read as a liability, so you don’t. You carry the weight, then a little more of it, and one day you look up and you’ve decided all on your own that needing anybody is a crack in you.

And of course… this goes way past the military. The single parent. The founder floating payroll off a personal card and not telling a soul. Whoever’s white-knuckling some season right now because they think they’re supposed to.

The strongest people I know are the worst at asking for help. Costs them the most, too. The weight is quiet. It just wears on you, slow, until you’re worn down and lonelier than you’d ever say out loud.

So. Friday debrief. Five quiet minutes, and be honest.

What am I carrying solo right now that was never a one-person job?

Who keeps offering, and I keep waving them off?

What would it cost me to just say yes?

And one thing I could hand off before Monday. What is it.

Deployed, holding down the home front, starting up that company… you weren’t built to run it alone. Set some of it down. Let somebody in.

What are you asking for help with this week?

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One food. That’s the claim. One food that covers the multivitamin, the fish oil, the pre-workout, the greens powder, all of it. NASA has called it a complete food for space. The United Nations called it one of the great answers to human nutrition. There are, she says, 100,000 studies.

My honest first reaction to a stack of claims that big is to reach for the door.

Then you find out who’s making it. Dr. Catharine Arnston walked away from a 25-year corporate career, went back to school in her 50s, and built a company around algae because her baby sister got breast cancer and the oncologist said “eat alkaline” and never explained why. “Love will propel you to do a lot of things,” she told us. She’s turning 70 in 2 months. Got her PhD last year. Walks 2 miles a day in a weighted vest. Takes no medication.

So I did the thing I do now when something sounds too big to be true. About halfway through the episode I went quiet and started typing on my phone off to the side...

Energy is optionality

Here’s the line of Catharine’s I keep coming back to. She said cellular energy is like money. When you have more of it, you can do more things, and you have more choices. When you’re running low, your options shrink whether you notice it or not.

The engine for all of it is the mitochondria. Will has a clean way of putting it: the power plant inside every cell. Catharine’s claim is that most of what we file under “getting older” is those power plants getting damaged and dying off faster than we replace them. She points to an antioxidant your body makes called SOD, superoxide dismutase, that mops up the wreckage inside the mitochondria. Your body produces plenty of it until about 30, then less after 40, then less after 50. Layer on processed food, bad sleep, too much stress, and the plants take on damage they can’t keep up with.

Her bigger point landed harder than the biochemistry did. We treat the downhill after 40 as a fixed thing, she said, “because that’s all we’re seeing right now.” That’s the part worth sitting with. Not that decline is impossible, but that most of us have only ever watched the default version and assumed it was the only version.

I’m almost 49. I think about fuel more than I used to, and I’ve got an analogy I reach for with the guys I coach: your body is a jet engine, not an Audi, and it matters what you put in the tank. Sleep, food, how you handle stress, whether you move. You have to be well to lead well. You can’t stay steady under pressure, you can’t respond instead of react, when the tank’s empty and the lights in the power plant are flickering. Attention is your KPI, sure. But attention runs on cellular energy. Everything does.

I’m not a doctor, by the way

Let me be straight about the other half of my brain during this conversation.

Some of what Catharine says checks out. That thing I was typing on my phone? I was asking whether algae and nitric oxide actually work together, because we had Dr. Nathan Bryan on a couple months back on exactly that. The answer came back clean: spirulina is high in the raw material your body uses to make nitric oxide, and its antioxidants help protect what you’ve already got. I read it out loud. She confirmed it. Good moment.

And then there are the absolutes. “You will never have a hangover. Ever.” “Normalizes blood pressure in a few days.” When a claim leaves no room for the exception, that’s the exact spot where my skepticism wakes up. Catharine clearly knows her stuff, and she’s sincere as they come. She’s also the founder of the company that sells the tablets, and the format rewards certainty. So I do 3 things with any health pitch, hers included. Does she explain the mechanism in plain language, or hide behind jargon. Does she promise an absolute. And who profits if I believe it.

She passes the first one easily. The plain-language teaching is strong. The absolutes are where I pump the brakes.

And yet. I’ve taken the stuff. Both Will and I have. I keep a bottle around. So much for my hard-nosed skepticism. Reply and tell me the health thing you fell for, the supplement or the protocol you swore by that turned out to be nothing. I’m collecting them, no judgment, because I’ve got my own.

Where it started was a sick sister

Strip away the tablets and the studies and here’s what’s underneath the whole thing. A woman’s little sister got cancer, and she couldn’t not do something about it. So she torched a career she’d spent 25 years building and pointed the rest of her life at the problem. Underneath all of it, that’s a love story that happens to involve algae.

I know that move from the inside. Mine started in a much darker room. After Operation Red Wings and the survivor’s guilt that followed, I was self-medicating and in a very bad place, and a counselor pointed me toward mindfulness and meditation. I credit those practices with quite literally saving my life. So now it feels like a duty to pay it forward. I don’t harp on it. I just know the shape of what Catharine did, because I did a version of it too.

Pain has a way of pointing at the work you’re supposed to do. Hers pointed at nutrition nobody was translating for regular people. Mine pointed at a bunch of men who’d rather eat glass than say they’re struggling. Different rooms. Same door out...

What to do about it

1. Take our free Awareness Self-Assessment before you buy a single thing. Most of us reach for a supplement before we’ve actually measured where we’re running low, on energy, on sleep, on our relationship with stress. Get the baseline first. It takes about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 1 turns this into a full inputs audit.

2. Run the free levers before the paid ones. Before any powder, tablet, or stack, the cheapest energy on earth is sleep, morning sunlight, protein, and a walk. Pick the one you’ve been ignoring and give it 2 weeks. If you still want to add algae or anything else on top of a solid base, fine. Foundation first.

3. Pressure-test every health claim with 3 questions. Does the person explain how it works in plain language? Do they promise an absolute with no exceptions? And who makes money if you believe them? Run it on Catharine, run it on me, run it on the last guy who sold you a protocol. Reply with a claim you’re not sure about and I’ll give you my honest read.

4. Name the age your energy changed, and what you did about it. Hit reply with the number and the move. 41 and started lifting. 47 and finally fixed my sleep. I want to build a future edition around what actually worked for real men in this community, straight from you.

5. Do one thing today, not just plan it. Knowing you’re running down changes nothing. Drink the water, take the walk, close the laptop 30 minutes earlier tonight. One rep so small you can’t fall off of it. Then do it again tomorrow.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Dr. Catharine Arnston is the founder of EnergyBits and has spent 16 years on a mission to get two algae, spirulina and chlorella, into the hands of regular people. She’s got an MBA in international business and walked away from a 25-year corporate career after her sister’s breast-cancer diagnosis sent her down the nutrition rabbit hole. She went back for a health-coaching certificate, taught plant-based nutrition in hospitals and corporations, and earned her PhD last year. Her book, Love Your Health to Bits with Algae, comes out in January. At nearly 70, on no medication, she’s her own best case study.

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Spoiler alert, by the way, in case you haven’t caught Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey yet. I finally sat with yesterday. Read it in junior high and never felt a word of it. This time it got me.

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There’s a moment near the end that took me apart. Odysseus is finally home, disguised as a beat-up old veteran, talking to his wife, and he admits the thing we almost never say out loud. Part of him didn’t want to come back. I felt that one in my whole body, sitting there in the dark.

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He built the Trojan horse. Turned a 10-year stalemate into a single night of slaughter. It won the war and made him a legend and broke something no trip home could fix. So he wandered. 10 more years of monsters and shipwrecks, but underneath all of it a man who didn’t know how to be a husband and father again after what he’d carried.

I know that guy. I’ve been some version of that guy. And odds are, in your own way, so have you.

Maybe it wasn’t a war. Maybe it was the job that hollowed you out, or the stretch of caregiving that ran you dry. Carry a heavy enough season and you know the walk from the trench back to the kitchen table.

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We treat coming home like a finish line. Odysseus needed 10 years and a war goddess to walk back into his own house, and even that happened a thousand small returns at a time. Whatever got you through the hard stretch is the same thing that puts distance between you and the people you love. Softening back down happens one rep at a time. You run it today, you fall off it tomorrow, you run it again.

That’s why mental fitness matters, and why I keep the rep small. Set the armor down at the door for one dinner. Be present for the 4 minutes it takes to hear about someone’s day. Systems over willpower, because willpower is long gone by the time you walk in. Give yourself grace on the nights the distance wins, then run the rep again tomorrow.

If you made it back in body and you’re still finding your way home in spirit, you’re in the middle of the hardest work there is, and you don’t do it alone.

So what’s the one small rep that walks you back toward the people you love today?

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