BONUS: Are You In The Right Place? — The Full Audio Guide

You found this place somehow.

A video. An article. A podcast you weren’t expecting. A colleague who changed in a way you couldn’t explain, and you asked them what happened.

However you got here, something brought you. And that something is worth paying attention to.

Let’s be honest about a few things.

You don’t have friends.

Not real ones.

You have contacts. People you know from work, from the gym, from church, from wherever life has put you. You talk to them. You chat about sport, about work, about the economy, about the boss who makes everything harder than it needs to be. Safe subjects. Horizontal conversation. Nobody goes below the waterline.

And if you do go below; if someone catches you in a bad moment and you say something real… it turns into a pity party. Competing for who has it worse. Which isn’t connection. It’s just a different kind of performance.

You may have a group. A small group, a cell group, a men’s group, a yoga retreat, a running club. And for a while it works. In the group there are unspoken rules, people mostly follow them, and something that feels like safety develops.

Until the dynamic shifts. New people arrive. The anchor moves away. Someone dies. The rules change. And you are back to where you started, except now you’ve been reminded of what connection felt like and the absence is sharper.

Some people have a spouse they talk to openly. Not everyone. And seasons change even there.

Most people, if they are honest, have no one.

The dog does a good job. The dog doesn’t talk back.

And if you’ve found yourself talking to an AI at 11pm: not for productivity, not for work, but because it was there, it listened, it asked the right questions, and it didn’t judge you. You are not alone in that either. It is happening everywhere. In silence. Because the alternative was no one.

This is not weakness. This is the human condition in the marketplace in 2026, after decades of optimising for output and ignoring the person producing it.

You are performing a life you’re not sure you chose.

The title. The salary. The track record. The respect of the room.

All of it real. All of it earned.

And underneath it, something that the performance has never quite quieted. A low-grade awareness that the life you’ve built, the one that looks correct from the outside, doesn’t quite fit the person inside it.

You haven’t said this out loud. Not fully. Maybe not at all.

But you’ve thought it. Probably on a Sunday evening. Probably when the calendar is full and the results are fine and you still can’t explain why you feel the way you feel.

You were promised something that hasn’t arrived.

Work hard. Stay faithful. The reward comes in time.

You believed that. You built your life around it.

You’re still waiting. Or the reward arrived and felt strangely empty; which is almost worse, because at least when you were waiting you had the hope.

You’ve tried the obvious things.

A coach. A course. A retreat. A new system. A better morning routine.

Some helped. Briefly.

Then the slow slide back. Same patterns. Same drag. Same end-of-week feeling that you’ve been busy without being any more settled.

Because you weren’t a productivity problem. You were a formation problem. And no productivity solution touches that.

You have a faith history. It’s complicated.

Maybe a community that failed you. A leader who disappointed you. A theology that felt hollow after years of faithful application.

Maybe it is the Christianity you’ve watched in public: the political, the performative, the certain, the unkind. You want no part of it. That’s not unreasonable. That’s paying attention.

But underneath the complicated history, something is still there.

Not hunger for church. Hunger for something real. For the thing the church was supposed to point toward but kept getting in the way of.

If any of that landed somewhere specific:

You’re not lost. You’re not broken. You’re not behind. You’re at the threshold.

The Insiders Challenge is a six-month formation journey for marketplace leaders who’ve hit the wall and are ready to find out what’s on the other side.

Not a course. Not a coaching programme in better clothing. A daily practice, a structured journey, and a fellow traveller who has been a little further down the road.

From Day 1, you have a Handler. This is someone who reads your journal, responds within a day, and walks the road with you. Not in front of you. Alongside. For many people, it will be the first relationship in years, possibly ever, where someone is paying attention to their interior life with no agenda other than their formation.

The only promise is that it’s hard. There are no shortcuts. There is no formula.

There is a daily question, asked every morning before the day gets its hands on you:

What’s better today?

Six months from now, you will be able to answer it. In ways that surprise you. A different person producing better results.

And if you complete the journey, you may find yourself becoming, for someone else, the person you needed yourself.

That is not a small thing.

I’m John Michael. Fellow traveller. A little further down the road.

I built this because I needed it and it didn’t exist. I know what it is to be functionally alone in a full life. I know what it costs to finally let someone see you. And I know what the other side looks like.

You are heard. You are accepted. You are loved.

Jesus said so. I’m just the one with skin on.

Are you ready? → whatsbetter.today/challenge

If none of this landed, that’s fine. Come back when the ache gets louder. It usually does.

What’s Better Today? John Michael

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wbtworkshop.substack.com