Shop the 'Great Day' collection here.

Every day is not a great day. Some days are objectively hard — a diagnosis, a loss, a stretch where everything feels uphill. But every day is a great day to compete.

In this episode, Jake breaks down what he calls gratitude with calluses on it — the Competitor's version of gratitude that says "I have today, and I'm going to act like it matters" — and walks through the T.O.D.A.Y. framework from Beat Yesterday plus three moves to stop punting to tomorrow and start stacking the day you're actually in.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

The last home football game of Jake's senior year ended with a concussion, a season on the line, and Jake watching his backup light it up from the sidelines — quietly hoping the guy would play well enough to win, but not so well that he'd keep the job.

That instinct doesn't disappear at 40. It just gets better funded and better disguised. In this episode, Jake breaks down what he calls sideways competition — why competing against your teammates quietly caps your ceiling — and the five specific behaviors of the teammate everyone actually wants, ending with the one question you should ask yourself before every Monday: would you want to work next to you?

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

Most confidence advice is quietly built on comparison — be the best in the room, outperform them, outshine them. It sounds like ambition. It's actually a trap. In this episode, Jake exposes why comparison-based confidence has an expiration date, what decades of research on self-efficacy actually says builds lasting confidence, and the five moves to build it from the inside out — starting with the promises you keep when nobody's watching.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

Speaker, dancer, coach, and author Cara Moeller Poppitt breaks down what she calls the "backwards confidence model," and why waiting to feel confident before you act is the exact wrong order, why the messy middle of any transition is where the actual growth lives, and how a conversation with a friend facing pancreatic cancer became the moment she stopped waiting and wrote her book Big Freaking Change.

If you've been sitting on a decision, a role, a project, or a version of yourself waiting for the confidence to arrive first — this is your permission slip to start now.

Connect with Cara & Grab Her Book:

• Read Cara's Big Freaking Change book here.
• Visit her website, Caramoellerpoppitt.com
• Follow Cara on Instagram @caramoellerpoppitt

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

Early in my career I was afraid to make outbound calls. Not nervous — afraid. I'd sit with the phone and find something else that needed doing first, and I told myself it was about respecting people's time.

It wasn't. I'd attached a no to who I was instead of to what I'd done. If they passed, that wasn't a data point about a pitch I could improve. That was a verdict.

I've got a name for that now. A Borrowed Scoreboard — any measure of your worth that somebody else gets to keep. You didn't build it, you can't see it, and you don't get to decide what it says. Mine was a stranger's answer to a cold call.

This episode is about what that protection actually costs, and why it never shows up in a report anybody else reads.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

I shot the same number the last three times I played golf, and I was annoyed about it. Then I looked at what my golf year actually consists of: twenty minutes of warm-up swings and eighteen holes. No target. No lesson. No range session I didn't play immediately after.

Then I did the uncomfortable math on the rest of my week — the meetings I run, the talks I give, the conversations I keep having — and found the same pattern. Hundreds of reps. Zero practice.

This episode is about the difference, and about why frustration is the wrong response to a system that was never built to produce improvement.

In this episode

• Why warming up isn't practicing, and why almost nobody notices the difference
• The reps you already have that aren't making you better
• Why "try harder" isn't the mechanism

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

There's a 2003 study of European organ donor forms that explains exactly why I couldn't feel it happening — and why "I'll get back to it" is the least reliable plan you own.

This one is about Comfort Drift: the version of complacency that doesn't feel like decline, because it feels like peace you finally earned.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

There are two ways to avoid ever being known by the people around you. One of them gets corrected — people stop taking your calls and eventually you find out. The other one gets you thanked for years.

This episode is about the second one, and about why asking someone for something is the least selfish move you've got.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

Nick Saban could tell whether a pass was complete without watching the ball — he only had to watch his quarterback's face. So he filmed it, played it back, and it changed Mac Jones's career. Jake on the lowlight reel your team is already running on you, what the research on emotional contagion says about how far a leader's bad day travels, and the one question to ask two people this week.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

The market. The timing. The two people who left. Jake spent most of 2017 reciting a list of reasons that were all factually true — and nobody ever asked him the follow-up question. This episode covers why blame is a confidence report written in someone else's handwriting, what Bandura's work on mastery experience says about where confidence actually comes from, and the two reps that build it.

Next Steps to Continue Competing:

1. 📈 Make Your Next Event Impactful Beyond Just One Day: Learn how I can help your leaders & organization compete every day ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.

2. 👉 Let's connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

3.👕 Save 15% off motivating apparel with code: PODCAST ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠.