We are building a world of quitters. The resilience needed to help us reach our full potential is lacking. Individuals have become so discouraged that they just give up when it’s time to work through situations that are difficult or uncomfortable. We’re failing at accomplishing our goals by taking the easy way out.

There is a massive lack of personal accountability in the world today. The constant beatdown from negativity of social and mainstream media, civil unrest, pandemic living and more tends to filter into our personal lives, allowing anxiety, stress, and depression to run rampant. When we carry feelings of low self-worth and esteem, it creates a lack of consistency and inability to follow through. However, personal accountability is the key to crushing your goals.

A sense of urgency is what propels an idea into an achievement. It is what inspires people to be
productive and to create. It is what motivates highly successful people who are focused on being their best selves, having the drive needed to believe in themselves and see their goals all the way through. Time is our most valuable commodity. Knowing this, we should do everything in our power to not waste it by adopting a sense of urgency.

Rollercoasters: I love them. Stepping off the new Jurassic World VelociCoaster recently, I felt strong, invigorated, as if I’d “conquered” something bigger than me, and eager to go again. Boarding an emotional roller coaster is an entirely different thing. We’re not necessarily wired, willing or braced for psychological whiplash. Stepping away from an emotional rollercoaster, we typically feel confused, undermined, destabilized, beaten up, and eager to mentally and/or physically quit. Great leaders are strong in Emotional Leadership. People follow them because they want to, not because they feel trapped. What kind of ride are you engineering?

When I talk about balance in life, I’m referring to an ongoing investment in strength and readiness across a broad enough base to keep me stable, grounded and positive through all the ups and downs of life. I build this stability by a reasonably equal distribution of focus and attention within all areas of what I refer to as the Pentagon of Peak Performance, one of which is Mental Leadership. The demands of leadership can be relentless. Great leaders are highly effective in part because they constantly flex their mental muscles in pursuit of knowledge, wisdom and intellectual growth.

Of all that transpired to save my life during and after that enemy ambush in 2007, only two had been within my control. One of them, according to the medical teams who put me back together, was my rock-solid physical fitness, which had prepared my body for its best chance at survival and healing through the extreme compound trauma. If Physical Leadership hasn’t already been a consistent focus for you, I recommend you make it your primary goal starting today. Start here …

Host Lewis Howes and I broke down some hot topics for business and life, including how small gains lead to big success, breaking the victim mentality, overcoming devastating circumstances and more on his top-ranked podcast, The School of Greatness. Listen now …

When asked about my involvement in Task Force Pineapple, a citizen-liaison network which successfully evacuated more than 800 Americans and Afghan allies during a one-week period between the fall of the Afghan government and military and the “official” exit of U.S. troops, I tell them this …

The sooner we each face it, the better: Much of life on Earth is beyond your control or mine. Only by embracing that fact can we fully realize the value in developing one of our greatest individual super-powers: self-control. Self-control is the key to effective self-leadership, and excellence in self-leadership is the key to overcoming the adversity, savoring the fruits, and even leading others in life. And it requires strength, balance and discipline …

How many times have you asked yourself, “What are you waiting for?” Often, the answer to that involves “perfect timing.” And that may sound rational in theory, but while you hang around waiting for a threat or unpleasantry to blow over, what other destructive forces may be undermining your mission? In the real world, the “perfect time” to take action is always the same …

One lucid hour in my hospital bed, I awoke to a somber yet critical reality: If I didn’t define my future and my plan, somebody else would. I understood my new mission: Get off X. Once you’ve identified your own path off X, plan your course of action and communicate it clearly to your support team.

If you’ve ever endured a life ambush, you understand the common effects: The mental-emotional tidal wave can present very real physical, biochemical and cognitive effects as the mind and body react by default mechanisms to the perpetual stress. If you’re in the midst or on the verge of this, hold on. You may not know any other way, but there is one. This article focuses on the REACT action step “A.”

If you feel overwhelmed, paralyzed or crushed by adversity, and you believe that you are trapped by your circumstances, you’re in what I call a life ambush. In any crisis, being well prepared to handle adversity will be the key to overcoming it.

As leaders in business, we must be able to assess a crisis and develop a plan to move safely through or away from that point of adversity as quickly as possible. The first step is to recognize your reality.

People are increasingly striving to cultivate resilience, balance and leadership in their personal and professional lives. They need to adapt quickly as leaders — especially through change and adversity. How do we best prepare ourselves to recognize and avoid what pitfalls we can and quickly and properly manage those we can’t?

A key component to building an increasingly relentless Overcome mindset — one of getting off the X, of pushing forward, overcoming perceived obstacles and moving the needle toward our short- and long-term goals — is the strength, balance and readiness that we create in what I call the Pentagon of Peak Performance. The Pentagon of Peak Performance pertains

Silence can be sweet. But suffering in silence is fertile ground for chaotic collisions of the mind and heart that crush the ambitions of good people every day. If you’re in crisis, you have more control than you realize. Here are five reasons and tips for not suffering in silence and overcoming adversity with the help of others.

Part I: Creating a Mission Statement the Pointman Way Generally speaking I’m not one for allowing our emotions to drive decisions or relying on uninformed plans. Their random, influenced nature leaves too much to chance and too much potential for unnecessary vulnerability and ultimate defeat. I’m all about research, situational awareness, strength and risk-mitigation balanced

Every single day we wake up, we are met with new challenges. Things we may never have seen before. New life ambushes, or just scenarios that don’t fit into our plans. More traffic than we expected. Someone runs a stop sign, and now we have to deal with at best a fender-bender. Or worse. Like

It’s a constant theme with us, overcoming life’s ambushes. Sometimes though, overcoming isn’t enough. We have to conquer them too. This is why we call the podcast, Overcome+Conquer. I bring this up because a big part of overcoming and conquering the things life throws at us is learning how to not let the darkness become

Things go great sometimes. A lot of the time. But also, things go wrong. We will fail at times. What we do what that happens is what makes up our character. Are we going to blame our circumstances, or perspective roadblocks, or are we going to own our part in what happened? It’s easy to