The No Cry Zone

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

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What if you allowed yourself just one complaint a day? Which one would earn the spot?

Traffic. Prices. Other people. We can keep the complaint department busy all day. But are we solving problems, or just keeping disappointment warm?

In this two-part episode, Jim Best serves up a seven-day Complaint Diet: choose one complaint a day, name it precisely, and decide what to do about it. The others can wait. You might discover that tomorrow doesn’t want them either.

With humor, everyday examples, and connections to the Personal Momentum Engine, Jim explores useful complaints, grievances disguised as “just being realistic,” and the time, attention, and goodwill that repetitive complaining consumes.

Find out which complaints deserve action, which deserve retirement, and what you could do with the attention you recover.

Featuring “The Creek Palace Condos” by Brazen Candor.

The No Cry Zone, for a sharper take on life.
Visit http://upwardsbest.com for daily ideas to help you protect your momentum and Come Upwards with Us™.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

Momentum Is the Anti-Stuck

It’s the second annual Maximum Momentum Day, and Jim Best is asking a more precise question: What if feeling stuck is often a loss of momentum you can begin to rebuild?

In this special edition of The No Cry Zone, Jim walks through the Perpetual Momentum Engine: mindset, focus, effective action, supportive habits, and net positive living. He introduces the Action Flex, a practical way to identify your next useful move when you aren’t sure what to do. He also explains why recharging helps keep the engine turning.

Brazen Candor’s “Get Going” sets the pace. Then Jim invites you to choose one area of your life and take an effective action within twenty-four hours. Maximum Momentum Day comes once a year. Your ability to create momentum is available every day.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

What happens when you tell someone you’re excited about a new goal? Some people lean in. Others tell you to “be realistic” or “stay humble.” In this episode of The No Cry Zone, Jim Best explores social gravity: the pressure to stay at a level that feels familiar to the people around you.

In Part One, Jim separates being average from settling for mediocrity, and real humility from making yourself smaller. In Part Two, he offers practical ways to recognize the pull, listen to useful feedback, protect your relationships, and keep moving in your own direction.

Where have you been calling it humility when it’s really fear of standing out? You can stay kind, keep learning, and still create your own momentum.

The No Cry Zone — for a sharper take on life.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

What happens when your mood starts running the meeting—and canceling everything on the agenda?

Jim introduces the Moodshiner: a routine built during clearer moments to carry you through the cloudier ones. Discover why action can precede motivation, how moods become unreliable managers, and how a Minimum Useful Routine—body, environment, connection and progress—can keep one difficult morning from becoming a wasted day.

Listen to your mood. Consider its complaint. But definitely don’t hand it the keys.   
Added bonus:  listen to Brazen Candor’s newest drop - a fun one called The Outdoors Type.  Available only on this podcast! 

Your mood can come along. It doesn’t get to drive.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

Some hostage situations don’t have locked doors. They have expectations, old stories, other people’s potential, fear of being misunderstood, and comfort disguised as strategy.

In this episode of The No Cry Zone, Jim Best asks you to identify what may be quietly holding part of your life hostage - and then do something about it.

Session One: Name the Hostage explores the surprisingly ordinary things that can keep us stuck for years. Potential can become a polite kidnapper. Hope can keep us waiting for somebody else to change. An old wound can get a louder microphone than the entire present. And sometimes prudence is really just fear with a calendar.

Then in Session Two: Take the Keys, we move from recognition to effective action. Because once you discover the door is unlocked, continuing to sit in the cell is a choice.

Your assignment is simple:

I’m hostage to __________.
Today, I take the keys by __________.

Plus, Jim opens the episode with a question worth putting into circulation immediately: What are you excited about lately?

And speaking of excitement, Brazen Candor has just released its new 15-song album, Wait, What? Jim provides a completely biased, reasonably honest and generally harmless insider’s tour of the album, including Cottonwood, Wednesday, Earlier That Week, Anybody Seen the Landlord?, Sunset Suites, Can I Lose You Once More, Please?, Top of My Torture Line, and the monster rock-and-roll closer, Dap Me Back Up.

You’ll also hear What Is It About You? featured in this episode.

Personal growth doesn’t require a perfect explanation. It requires participation.

Name who’s holding you hostage. Take the keys. Get out.  Live. 

The No Cry Zone - for a more precise take on life.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

What Are You Really Afraid Will Happen?

People rarely say they’re afraid of failure.

Instead, they say, “I’m not ready.”

But what if “not ready” is sometimes just another way of describing fear?

In this episode of The NoCryZone, Jim Best takes a closer look at the words we use to keep ourselves from starting. Rather than simply telling yourself to be brave or “just do it,” Jim offers a more useful question:

If I were afraid of failure, how would I define it?

Write one sentence.

Then take the smallest possible test within the next 24 hours.

It doesn’t have to be a giant leap, a perfectly formed plan, or a decision about the rest of your life. It can be one small experiment that gives you something far more useful than another round of thinking: information.

Because the result of a small test is a snapshot, not a prophecy.

This week, we're getting precise about the words that keep us from moving forward—and what can happen when we stop treating our fears as predictions and start testing them against reality.

🎈 Featured song: “Mylar Balloons” by Brazen Candor.

Want the backstory on the song? Write to us at [email protected].

Aspire. 
Be Precise with the words that keep you from starting. 
Come Upwards with Us™

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

Criticism Is the Price of Visibility

How to Hear It, Use It, and Keep Going

The more you do, the more visible you become. And the more visible you become, the more opinions you attract.

In this episode of the NoCryZone, Jim Best takes on one of the unavoidable costs of living an active, ambitious, expressive life: criticism.

The episode begins with the backstory behind “Never Be” by Brazen Candor—a song inspired by an online critic who confidently declared, “You will never be successful!” Rather than becoming angry or defensive, Jim did something more useful with the comment: he turned it into a song.

And that leads directly to the larger question:

How do you keep criticism from determining what you’re willing to attempt?

Jim explores why criticism often increases as we become more visible, successful, assertive, independent, or simply more ourselves. Some criticism is accurate and valuable. Some reflects legitimate differences in perspective. Some comes from people uncomfortable with our changing roles. And some is simply uninformed, malicious, or irrelevant.

The challenge is learning to tell the difference.

This episode offers a practical framework for doing exactly that:

Is it true? Is it useful? Is there something I should do about it?

Jim also shares his own history of being highly sensitive to criticism—and why learning that “feedback is the breakfast of champions” helped change his perspective.

The objective isn’t to become criticism-proof. It’s to become criticism-discerning.

Take the lesson. Leave the insult.
Take the information. Leave the hostility.
Adjust when appropriate. Then keep going.

Because criticism is information.

It is not a verdict.

And nobody else gets editorial control over your life.

Welcome to the NoCryZone, where we take a sharper view on living.

Questions or comments? Reach us at mailto:[email protected].

And make sure you grab yourself another fantastic week. There are plenty still available.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

This week, the The No Cry Zone comes to you from somewhere between a soggy Scotland and the Faroe Islands — with an Irish pub, a little whisky research, an outbreak of singing, a new Brazen Candor song, and the usual questionable paraphrasing along the way. 

But beneath the travelogue and humor is a serious question: What actually makes us unhappy?

Not tragedy. Not grief. Not clinical depression. We’re talking about the ordinary dissatisfaction, irritation, resentment, disappointment, and discontent that can quietly make life less enjoyable than it needs to be.

Jim identifies five major sources of everyday personal unhappiness:

The Expectation Gap — when reality doesn’t match the script we had already written.

 Perceived Powerlessness — when “I can’t control everything” quietly becomes “There’s nothing I can do.”

Comparison — when somebody else’s good fortune somehow becomes evidence that our own life is insufficient.

Time Displacement — when our bodies are in the present but our minds are stuck regretting yesterday or worrying about tomorrow.

Self-Incongruence — when how we’re living no longer matches who we are—or who we want to become.

Then, rather than merely cataloging what’s wrong, the second half turns toward personal agency: closing the Expectation Gap, reclaiming your sphere of influence, turning comparison into useful information, returning to the present, and bringing your actions back into alignment with the person you want to become.

Because pain is sometimes delivered by life. But a surprising amount of everyday unhappiness comes from what we do with what life delivers.

Along the way: Ireland, the Faroes, prepaid alcohol, Scotch-versus-Irish-whisky research, The Happiest Habit, Secret Agency, legitimate Self-Sovereignty, a Dad Joke alert, and an inexplicable request to return your 3D glasses upon leaving.

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You probably have plenty of habits already.
 Some useful.
 Some questionable.
 Some you can't even remember deciding to have.

That's the problem.

The Happiest Habit is about replacing some of those automatic patterns with small, intentional choices that can make your everyday life more satisfying, meaningful, and —yes— happier.

You don't need to reinvent yourself.
 You don't need a complicated system.
 You just need to start paying attention to the choices you're making every day.

Small choices. Repeated often. A life that starts looking a lot more like the one you actually want.

👉 GET THE EBOOK — THE HAPPIEST HABIT : FOR A LIVE WELL-LIVED

Because your habits are helping build your life. You might as well have a say in what they're building.

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Be happy if you want to. Permission granted. All systems go.

Aspire.
Be Flexible.
Come Upwards with Us™.

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.

What do you genuinely like about being you?

Not what earns applause. Not what looks impressive to other people. Not what you’ve been told you should value about yourself. What makes you quietly think, “I’m glad that’s part of who I am”?

In this inaugural session of The No Cry Zone — for a sharper take on living, Jim Best comes to you from Cornwall, England, with a challenge to one of our culture’s more peculiar habits: confusing healthy pride with arrogance.

There is an enormous difference between believing you’re better than other people and simply being glad you’re you.

This episode explores why your personality doesn’t need to become a lifelong renovation project, why idiosyncrasies aren’t necessarily defects, and why other people should never have veto power over your opinion of yourself. Jim distinguishes accomplishment-based pride from something deeper—the self-respect that comes from recognizing the qualities, character, resilience, humor, curiosity, loyalty, courage, and peculiarities that make you distinctly you.

The challenge is simple but surprisingly powerful:

What makes you proud to be you?

Get reacquainted with yourself. Keep growing. Keep improving. But don’t become so preoccupied with who you could become that you fail to appreciate the person you’ve already become.

Plus, this session features “Tiger in My Tank” by Brazen Candor, along with an update on Sunday Songday at UpwardsBest.

And this is only half the argument.

Next session: Embrace who you are — but don’t become satisfied with all you could be.

The No Cry Zone
For a sharper take on living.

Aspire.
Be inquisitive.
Come Upwards with Us™

Follow Jim Best at UpwardsBest to listen, learn, explore, and stay connected to daily insights for positive change that’s both doable and durable.

Explore MomentumGPS, designed to support your personal growth goals.

The NoCryZone is an UpwardsBest endeavor, produced by BestStoryAlive, LLC.

All rights proactively reserved.