Life
Cultivate Resilience With These Simple Ingredients
Have you ever wondered where your resiliency comes from? Do you get a certain amount of it when you’re born, and when you run out, it’s game over? Or, is resiliency something that you can build and nurture?
You probably know people who get knocked down and get back up again and again with seemingly no effort. You might wonder: how do they do it? But then, maybe you cross paths with them later in life, and they don’t have any more “get up and go” left. What’s happened? Have they run out of resiliency? Can they get it back?
I recently spoke with Andrea Marcellus, life coach, fitness expert, and author of self-help book, “The Way In” to explore these questions and discover new ways to keep building that all-important resiliency muscle.
What is resilience?
We all face rejections, betrayals, or disappointments from a young age—whether in our family of origin, in our schools, or in our communities. And we all need ways to help us get back up again. This ability to rebound is resilience.
Resilience gives us buoyancy and elasticity to address stress, pain, or loss in our lives without snapping. Think of a rubber band, and how it snaps back into shape after it’s stretched. This stretchability is a quality of resilience. Except, what doesn’t work about the rubber band metaphor is that resilience does more than help us return to our original shape; Andrea defines resilience as “the capacity to expand.” Perhaps a better metaphor, then, is bread dough, that is stretched and kneaded by our experiences.
Mentorship through adversity
We all have a natural survival instinct, but our level of resiliency has more to do with how we’re raised and the amount of adversity we’ve had to face. In other words, our upbringing and our life experiences are an important key to how much resiliency we have than our DNA.
The key question, Andrea says, is did you learn to help yourself through positive mentorship following adversity?
In this case, one or more of these statements is probably true:
- You were given space and time to feel your emotions and express your disappointments.
- You were taught how to address and move through the emotions of the disappointment
- You learned to see life in a larger perspective, with all its peaks and valleys.
- You learned to reframe failures without resorting to defensive stances such as “They didn’t deserve me anyway” or downplaying them by saying, “I didn’t really care that much.”
If the answer is no, then perhaps one or more of these things is true:
- You were raised to “suck it up” or “push through”, getting into a habit of getting by on willpower.
- You heard that life is a battlefield filled with winners and losers, so you became adversarial, and all the language around your efforts was about “the fight.”
- You heard that the person who strikes first wins, so you learn to address problems with knee-jerk, reflexive words or actions.
- You grew up to believe that suffering in silence is a virtue, while talking about your struggles is complaining or whining.
No matter our upbringings, however, we can all strengthen our resilience muscle. Below are three ingredients Andrea recommends for creating an environment in which resilience can grow.
Strong purpose
What is your “why” in life? It is your birthright to live a life that excites and motivates you. But it’s easy to get stuck in malaise, get sidetracked by egoic ambitions, or lose the plot on what you really love and care about.
According to Andrea, you need to find “focus and purpose and a constant journey that’s above and beyond your occupation. Because when your mind is activated by purpose, it is forward-thinking and full of positive possibilities. It’s creative, it’s curious, and it’s non-judgmental.”
So, having a strong purpose in life is directly correlated to our ability to be resilient. Maybe we should update the phrase, “When you love what you do, you won’t work a day in your life” to “When you love what you do, you build resilience for life.”
Train your brain
Despite what you may think about our brains deteriorating as we get older, recent studies show that the opposite is true. Andrea says that our positive brain centers: the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex—can be trained, just as the body can, so that you have the ability to pull yourself out of any downward spiral.
Tara Swart, Neuroscientist, MD, Executive Advisor, Author of “The Source,” offers up these ideas to help support our brains in their ability to be more resilient:
“Start with the physical foundations: Rest your brain with 7-9 hours sleep per night. Hydrate your neurons with half a liter of water for every 30lb of body weight. Oxygenate your brain by walking 5000-10,000 steps per day and doing 150 minutes of aerobic exercise per week. Meditate for 20 minutes a day. Take the supplements that suit your needs. Eat as much oily fish, eggs, nuts and seeds, green leafy vegetables, avocado, olives, and coconut oil as you can. Drink four cups of green tea per week.”
Community
Life is too hard to go it alone. We need others who we can trust to share our journeys with, and who can help us process, reframe, learn, and grow from each experience.
A few tips:
- Make sure that you’re surrounded by people who won’t try to minimize or always expect you to see “the bright side,” and who support you in the ways you need to be supported.
- Create a circle of allyship in which no one feels pressured to put a happy face following a disappointment or hardship but are instead held in support while they process and regain their footing.
- Consider modeling yourself after someone who is resilient. Pay attention to how they navigate their lives and disappointments. Note that they are not driven by pride, arrogance, boastfulness, or bluster. Instead, they carry an unbreakable sense of personal authority and inner resourcefulness.
Creating a supportive community can become pseudo-resilience for when you need to take a moment before you can tap into your own, or, as is often said, the “strength of others give us strength.”
Conclusion
No one escapes this life without experiencing setbacks and hardships. It’s healthy to feel your feelings and communicate these with others in the aftermath of a loss or failure. We all need to occasionally take a time-out to get our balance and find that focus again. Having a strong purpose, training your brain, and building a community of supportive people are three of the things you can do to make sure that you rebound in a healthy way.
Entrepreneurs
The Brutal Truth About Entrepreneurship with ADHD (And Why Most Advice Is Making It Worse)
You’re not lazy. You’re not undisciplined… and you’re definitely not broken.
You’re an entrepreneur with ADHD, and right now you’re probably sitting on 19 unfinished projects, 47 open tabs, and a brain that feels like it’s running on 12 different radio stations at once.
You’ve read the books. You’ve tried the planners, the Pomodoro timers, the accountability groups. You’ve even hired coaches who promised to “fix” your focus. Yet here you are — brilliant ideas, massive potential, and a business that still feels like it’s one step away from collapsing under the weight of your own mind.
Here’s what almost nobody in the entrepreneurial space will admit:
The real struggle isn’t your ADHD. It’s that you’ve been trying to run a neurodivergent brain inside a neurotypical business model — and then beating yourself up when it doesn’t work.
Most advice for entrepreneurs was written by people whose brains work differently. They preach consistency, routines, long-term planning, and steady execution like those things are universal truths. For the ADHD entrepreneur, those “truths” feel like trying to swim upstream in cement. You can force it for a while (and you have), but eventually your brain rebels, the burnout hits, and you’re left feeling like a failure who just needs to “try harder.”
That cycle is quietly destroying more talented founders than cash flow problems or bad hires ever could.
The deeper layer most people never reach is this: your ADHD isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a different operating system entirely. And when you stop trying to install Windows on a Mac and start building everything around macOS, the game changes completely.
The Hidden Addiction That Keeps ADHD Entrepreneurs Stuck
You already know the surface symptoms — time blindness, rejection sensitivity, starting strong and fading fast, shiny object syndrome.
But the real trap is more insidious.
It’s the addiction to chaos and novelty.
Your brain is wired for dopamine. New ideas, big visions, last-minute sprints, high-stakes pressure — these things light you up like nothing else. The boring, repetitive, systems-building work that actually scales a business? It feels like torture.
So unconsciously, you keep your business in a state of controlled chaos. You say yes to too many things. You chase the next exciting opportunity. You avoid building the boring infrastructure because “I work better under pressure anyway.”
And every time the pressure gets too high, you crash, swear you’ll get organized next quarter, and repeat the cycle.
Meanwhile, the neurotypical advice keeps telling you to “just build better habits.” As if your brain is a poorly trained dog that needs more discipline instead of a high-performance race car that needs the right fuel and track.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s neurology.
And until you stop treating your wiring as something to overcome and start treating it as your greatest strategic advantage, you’ll stay stuck in the same exhausting loop.
The Identity Shift That Changes Everything
The entrepreneurs with ADHD who finally break through don’t “fix” their brains.
They redesign their entire business to work with their brains.
They stop trying to become the consistent, routine-loving founder the gurus talk about. Instead, they become the architect of a system that leverages their natural strengths — hyperfocus, pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, relentless drive under pressure — while outsourcing or automating everything that drains them.
This is the layer most ADHD entrepreneurs never reach because it requires something terrifying: accepting that you are never going to be “normal” at entrepreneurship… and that’s exactly why you can win bigger than most.
Your ability to see connections others miss. Your tolerance for uncertainty. Your capacity to go all-in when something lights you up. These aren’t liabilities. They’re unfair advantages in a world that rewards speed, creativity, and bold moves.
The shift is simple but brutal:
Stop trying to manage your ADHD. Start designing your business around it.
How to Actually Build a Business That Works With Your Brain
- Stop fighting your energy cycles — weaponize them. Most ADHD entrepreneurs try to force 8-hour focused days. That’s insane. Instead, track when your brain actually works best (for many it’s 10pm-2am or random 4-hour hyperfocus bursts). Build your schedule around those windows. Protect them like gold. Do the deep, high-leverage work then. Use the low-energy periods for admin, calls, or recovery.
- Build “chaos containers,” not rigid systems. Traditional project management tools feel like cages. Create loose but effective structures that give your brain freedom. Use tools like Notion with massive flexibility, or body-doubling (working alongside someone virtually), or even hiring a “chaos wrangler” — an assistant who thrives on turning your scattered ideas into executable plans.
- Turn your rejection sensitivity into rocket fuel. That intense fear of letting people down or looking stupid? Channel it into creating ridiculously high standards for your customer experience or product quality. Use it as fuel instead of letting it paralyze you.
- Outsource the parts that make you want to die. The execution, follow-through, and maintenance phases are where most ADHD entrepreneurs lose. Hire or partner with people who love the details. Your job is vision, strategy, and big swings. Let someone else own the spreadsheets.
- Create external pressure on your own terms. Deadlines and public commitments work wonders for the ADHD brain. Use them strategically — announce launches, create beta groups, or work with coaches who understand neurodivergence instead of fighting it.
The entrepreneurs with ADHD who are quietly crushing it right now aren’t the ones who finally became “disciplined.” They’re the ones who stopped apologizing for how their brain works and started building empires that are specifically engineered for it.
They have teams that handle the boring stuff. They have systems that flex with their energy instead of fighting it. They’ve turned their “flaws” into the exact reasons their businesses stand out.
Your ADHD brain is not the enemy. The enemy was trying to play the game by rules that were never designed for you.
The moment you accept that and start designing everything… your calendar, your team, your offers, your processes — around how you actually operate, the struggle doesn’t disappear… but it becomes manageable, even exhilarating.
You were never meant to fit the mold. You were meant to break it and build something better.
The world doesn’t need another cookie-cutter entrepreneur. It needs the chaotic, brilliant, all-in, slightly unhinged visionaries who can only operate at full power when the game is built for them.
That’s you.
Stop trying to fix yourself. Start building the business that was always meant to be run by a mind like yours.
Your next breakthrough isn’t going to come from working harder or being more consistent. It’s going to come from finally giving yourself permission to work differently.
And when you do that? Watch what happens.
The same brain that once felt like a curse becomes the exact reason your business becomes unstoppable.
You’ve got this. Not despite the ADHD. Because of it.
If you want to learn more from me or send me a personal message I’ll respond to you on Instagram at https://instagram.com/iamjoelbrown speak soon!
Health & Fitness
The Health Planning Habits That Support Long-Term Success
Most people think about health planning only when something forces them to.
A medical bill arrives unexpectedly. An insurance issue appears during treatment. A diagnosis changes how future care needs are viewed. Suddenly health planning becomes urgent instead of preventative.
The problem is that long-term health stability is usually shaped by smaller habits built quietly over time, not just by major decisions during emergencies.
That includes physical health habits, of course, but it also includes how people approach insurance coverage, preventative care, financial preparation, and long-term healthcare planning before problems become immediate.
The families who navigate healthcare stress most effectively are often not the ones avoiding every issue entirely. More often, they’re the ones who built systems early enough to make difficult situations feel more manageable later.
Consistency Matters More Than Perfection
A lot of health advice still revolves around extreme change.
Perfect diets. Aggressive routines. Complete lifestyle overhauls.
In reality, most long-term health success comes from consistency people can realistically maintain for years instead of months. Small preventative habits tend to matter more than dramatic short-term efforts that collapse under pressure.
That principle applies financially too.
People often spend more time researching investment strategies than understanding their healthcare coverage or preparing for future medical costs. But healthcare instability can disrupt long-term financial plans surprisingly quickly when households are unprepared for how expensive even routine care can become over time.
The practical side of health planning is becoming harder to separate from overall financial planning now than it used to be.
Preventative Planning Reduces More Stress Than People Realize
One overlooked benefit of health planning is emotional stability.
People who understand their coverage, maintain preventative care routines, and think ahead about healthcare decisions often describe feeling less overwhelmed when unexpected situations happen. The goal is not eliminating uncertainty entirely. That’s unrealistic.
The goal is reducing how chaotic healthcare decisions feel under pressure.
That’s one reason broader conversations tied to healthcare and health insurance have expanded significantly over the last several years. Rising costs, changing coverage structures, and increasing healthcare complexity have made long-term planning more important for average households than many people expected.
Healthcare is no longer something most families can comfortably approach reactively forever.
People Underestimate How Quickly Healthcare Costs Compound
One reason health planning habits matter so much is that healthcare costs rarely arrive in one dramatic moment alone.
More often, they build gradually:
- recurring prescriptions
- specialist visits
- ongoing treatment plans
- insurance deductible increases
- long-term care considerations
- unexpected procedures layered on top of existing expenses
Families often absorb these costs incrementally until they realize how much financial pressure accumulated over time.
That gradual buildup is part of what makes proactive planning valuable. People who think ahead about coverage structures, emergency savings, provider networks, and preventative care tend to adapt more smoothly when healthcare needs eventually increase later in life.
The difficult part is that many households delay these conversations because they feel healthy right now.
Healthcare Decisions Have Become More Complicated
Another challenge is that healthcare systems themselves continue evolving quickly.
Insurance structures change. Telehealth expands. Employer-sponsored benefits shift. Prescription pricing fluctuates. Patients now carry more responsibility for understanding deductibles, provider networks, and out-of-pocket exposure than previous generations often did.
That complexity creates decision fatigue.
Even relatively organized households sometimes feel uncertain about whether they’re making good healthcare choices because the systems themselves are difficult to navigate confidently. A lot of current health insurance trends discussions reflect this larger issue, healthcare planning is becoming less about isolated medical events and more about long-term sustainability across entire households.
People want predictability, but healthcare systems increasingly feel harder to predict.
The Most Effective Health Habits Usually Feel Boring
One thing people rarely admit is that good long-term planning habits are often not particularly exciting.
Scheduling preventative appointments. Reviewing insurance annually. Building emergency savings slowly. Staying physically active consistently. Maintaining realistic routines instead of dramatic cycles of burnout and reset.
None of those habits feel dramatic at the moment.
But over long periods, they create stability that becomes incredibly valuable once life gets complicated. The people who navigate healthcare stress most effectively are often the ones who built ordinary systems early instead of waiting for perfect motivation later.
That applies financially and physically at the same time.
Why Long-Term Success Depends on Adaptability
Health planning is ultimately difficult because people’s lives keep changing.
Careers shift. Families grow. Aging parents require support. Medical needs evolve. Financial priorities change over decades in ways nobody predicts perfectly in advance.
That’s why the strongest long-term health planning habits are usually flexible rather than rigid.
The goal is not building a flawless plan that never changes. It’s creating enough structure, awareness, and preparation that future adjustments become manageable instead of overwhelming.
Most people cannot control every future health outcome. They can, however, build habits that make uncertainty easier to navigate when it eventually arrives.
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