Coming soon
Build Your Comeback.
The full framework, in twelve chapters, told through the story of someone who needed every page of it.
The premise
Walk into any bookstore and the self-help shelf will tell you the same story a hundred different ways: change your thinking, and your life will follow. Visualize. Affirm. Believe in yourself, and then begin.
I tried that version for years while my life got steadily worse, so I wrote this book in the opposite order, because the opposite order is what actually worked. You begin first. Badly, small, and unconvinced. The belief shows up later, built out of the evidence your actions create. I made my bed every morning in early sobriety not because I believed it mattered, but because someone told me to and I was out of better ideas. Hundreds of beds later, I understood: I hadn’t been building a habit. I’d been building a witness. Every morning, proof that I do what I say I’ll do. Action precedes belief. That’s the spine of the book, and of everything else I’ve built since.
The architecture
The anatomy of stuck
The book is organized around the actual machinery of stuck. The three locks are the root causes: limiting beliefs, the old stories about what’s possible for you; failure, or rather the verdict you turned it into; and shame, the belief that you don’t deserve the thing in the first place. Researchers have been mapping that last one for decades. June Tangney’s work at George Mason drew the line that matters: guilt says “I did something bad” and tends to push people to repair, while shame says “I am something bad” and pushes people to hide.[1] Hiding is where comebacks go to die, which is why the book spends real time getting shame out of the dark.
The four disguises are how the locks dress up for work: perfectionism, overthinking, procrastination, and self-sabotage. They look like personality traits. They’re not. They’re protective patterns with predictable mechanics, and the book takes each one apart with the tools I use in my own life and in my coaching, including the two exercises I’m most proud of: The Reverse Engineer, for taking apart a sabotage after it happens, and The Pre-Game, for disarming the next one before it does.
And underneath all of it, the engine: small actions, taken consistently, that rebuild self-trust whether or not you believe in them yet. Researchers at Duke estimated that roughly 40 percent of what you do every day isn’t decided at all; it’s habit, running automatically.[2] The book’s bet is simple: if nearly half your life runs on autopilot, the highest-leverage move available to you is changing what the autopilot does.
Who it’s for
It’s for the capable, exhausted people. The ones who’ve already read the books and done the planners and know all the concepts, and are still circling the same goal they were circling three years ago. You don’t need to be in recovery to use it. Recovery is just where I learned it, under conditions I don’t recommend.
Get it first.
The book isn’t finished, and I’d rather get it right than get it fast. The list gets the release date before anyone else, the first excerpt when it’s ready, and first access to whatever I do at launch.