Life
How to Critique Without Damaging Their Confidence
When you are the leader, there will come times where you have to critique the performance of those whom you are leading. Their work is not meeting the standards that have been set and you must confront them. How do you critique but not detract from the confidence of the person you are critiquing? How do you correct his work but have him continue to come to work with a positive attitude?
You may consider thinking about the following five thoughts listed below.
1. Action vs. Person
In their outstanding book, The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson emphasized that you critique the action, not the person. A number of coaches in the athletic arena don’t believe this. They think you criticise both the action and the person. By addressing both you get the attention of the person and he will be motivated to do better.
I played for a coach who believed the person had to be addressed harshly to get the player to improve his performance. I found that to keep my confidence, I literally tuned him out when he was ripping me. The problem, however, was when he was teaching some very important concepts for improvement, I still had him tuned out.
I then played for a coach in college, Gordie Gillespie, who surely corrected poor performance. When he yelled you knew it! However, in the four years I played for him, I never heard him attack the personhood of one of our players. It was always the action.
I think there can be one exception to this philosophy. When you have corrected the action of the person whom you are leading a number of times but he refuses to change, you may have to address the person.
We had an athlete on one of our basketball teams at the University of St. Francis who would go to the end of the bench when we took him out of a game. We wanted all of our players to come to the bench and sit by an assistant coach and talk about the game. He paid no attention to our mandate and continued to not sit by a coach.
The third or fourth time he did this, I told one of our assistant coaches to escort him across the court to the locker room during a time-out. I instructed our coach to inform him that I would ask him one question at half time – does he want to be part of our team or not.
I was glad his decision was to stay with us because he was a very good player! I hated to embarrass him but he had no right to embarrass our team. He never went to the end of the bench after that incident.
2. Sandwich Theory
The sandwich theory can be a way of getting your critique across to a person without detracting from his confidence or his positive attitude. You sandwich the critique between two positive comments.
I could say something like this to one of our basketball players. “You know you are an excellent player, so why would you make the difficult or fancy pass instead of the easier pass to keep our offense moving? Now get back to the court and show everyone why you are an All-Conference player.”
He hopefully got the point that the fancy pass is often intercepted and we don’t want it in our offensive game. Were he to continue to make the difficult pass, he would be sitting next to us on the bench! In sport, the bench is the great equalizer.
3. Mean What You Say
There is a maxim that states, “Mean what you say and say what you mean.” You don’t want to beat around the bush when you have to deliver criticism; you want to be specific. You want to be straight forward in approaching the problem.
I only participated in one intervention and that was definitely a time to mean what you say. We had to confront a person on alcoholism. We had our team present along with a psychologist who taught us how to conduct the intervention.
We actually integrated the sandwich theory into the intervention because we began the session with three of the team members telling the person how much they sincerely cared for him. Then we addressed how serious his problem was and that we could no longer tolerate his being with us if he would not go to rehab.
We had a car waiting for him right outside the building and a hospital ready to admit him. We also had a facility that would take him in after the detox at the hospital. We finally meant what we were saying by telling him if he did not immediately go to the hospital, he would no longer be with us. He agreed to go. It was critical that we were all on the same page in saying what we meant and meaning what we said.
4. Private
Amy Guettler wrote, “During any critique, do it in person and privately to avoid embarrassing him in front of his coworkers.” I do agree with this with the one exceptional example given above. Embarrassing the person you are critiquing is always the very last resort.
A major league manager once spent three hours with a group of us talking baseball. I had great respect for him because he never criticised his players in the newspaper or broadcast venues. He did tell us, however, there was a time when he was disappointed with his middle infielders.
He called them in privately and simply told them, “There still is a Triple A League!” He didn’t have to say they could be demoted there. They got the point. Joe Nameth, the outstanding NFL quarterback, was actually criticised publicly but he still respected his parents. He said until he was thirteen he thought his name was “Shut up!”
5. Feedback
Geoffrey James wrote, “Threat criticism as a form of feedback.” Ultimately, the purpose of criticism is for the person you are critiquing to improve his performance. To get improvement from your critique, you may want to consider how Geoffrey James continued, “Listen, acknowledge, and learn. You may think you know what’s going on and why something happened, but you might easily be wrong.”
This can happen in the educational world. We once had a girl at the high school level who was bright but simply did not want to study. When we listened to her, we found out she was in a foster home and in that home she had seen some horrendous things happen to the younger people there. Given what she was experiencing, studying was the last thing on her mind.
There may be merit in what Ian Maclaren wrote, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”
If your goal is to have criticism lead to improvement and to have the person being critiqued, retain his confidence and positive attitude, you may want to consider these five points prior to the confrontation.
- Critique the action, not the person.
- Determine if the Sandwich Theory is applicable.
- Say what you mean, mean what you say.
- Critique in private.
- The goal is feedback, confidence, and improvement.
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.
Life
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