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It’s Day 84 of the last 100 Days of 2025!!!
Whoa.
Can you grab two more pounds in 2025? You know you can!
Can you still clean some of that stuff out of your pantry? You bet!
I will keep emailing some thoughts as we navigate the holiday season, but I don’t want to bug you either…. if I am bugging you, unsubscribe here:
I have been so reflective on the coming 2026 that the upcoming year reminds me of something…
It’s story time….
It was around 2014, and I was on a Hollywood stage, right there on Sunset Boulevard in all of its Hollywood history fame.
I was speaking on the stage with a big “TEDx” sign behind me.
I was giving an actual TEDx talk.
(It was on a consumer food safety issue, long before Eat Like a Bear was even a twinkle in my eye.)
TED talks are supposed to be the biggest 18 minutes of your life, and I was about two minutes into my talk.
It was going really well.
I had hooked the audience with a great story. They were laughing and cringing and carrying on.
I would link to all of the laughter of the audience EXCEPT…. the LIVE speech never made YouTube. The YouTube version was recorded later before an audience of about six people.
WHY?
At just about three minutes in, as the audience was all worked up and engaged, something crazy happened: The host ran up on stage and interrupted me. He said, “Sorry, something is wrong with your mic!!”
So the most important 18 minutes of my life is interrupted…
AND….
A guy is pulling the tech pack out of my pants, right there on stage.
I was about 45 and my pre-Bear chunky self.
The host was a 50 year-old yoga instructor from Hollywood.
He was handsome and charismatic.
AND…
He was in my pants in front of an audience of hundreds of people.
A good extemporaneous speaker is ready for anything, but I sure hadn’t prepared for this scenario.
I had the instant awareness that I was living in what would be either the very worst or the very best moment of my life. Which moment it was would be revealed in about the next half second.
I saw no other play….
He had not been in my pants for an entire second when I responded.
As he stood behind me, rooting through my pants with my shirt hiked up, I wiggled my hips slightly but visibly and I said just loud enough in an audible whisper, “Oooooo! Maurice, what ARE you doing back there???”
Maurice is from Hollywood. He had trained his entire life for that moment.
The banter ensued, back and forth as he fixed the mic.
The audience, which had been completely engaged with my opening story, lit up, laughing and hooting.
Then a 12-year-old jumped into the center aisle and shouted, “This is the best part!!!”
That child was the only young person in the audience, and he surely did look a whole lot like me, so it was not lost on the audience that this cheering child was my 12-year-old son Frederick, causing just a complete memorable moment at that event.
My mic got fixed and I continued on with the talk.
The talk went just as well as I would have imagined, despite a really big tech problem.
Think of all of the tech problems you’ve had and how they have probably really flustered you. That’s the more likely path and how would that have gone for me? I probably would have been standing there on stage, all humiliated and flustered, and unable to give my talk effectively. How terrible.
Instead, I’ve got a heck of a story.
The whole thing reminds me of E + R = O…
E + R = O
Years ago, Jack Canfield introduced me to this equation: E + R = O.
Event + Response = Outcome
Our outcomes are shaped by our responses to events.
The success of my TEDx talk was shaped by my response to having a potentially embarrassing tech problem on stage.
It makes me think of the upcoming year of 2026.
Our 2026? How will that go? In a world with a lot of difficulties and disruptions, it could go a whole lot of ways. We could be devastated by the circumstances or we can lean in and wiggle our hips…
2026 for me is about leaning in and building a bigger and deeper moat around all of the things that endanger my weight maintenance and my overall physical and mental health.
I hope it is the same for you too.
One of the big things I will be working on is building more of what I call “Good Day Strategies.” These are things we do on good days that help support our goals on bad days. I made a video years ago about the approach. I shot this video on a bad day. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78HNxQnlAJ4
ALL THROUGH 2026 I am going to be hammering away in my own life, building these structures, and I want us all to collaborate on it.
Most of the collaboration discussions will be in the Deep Den member area (because I am still not back to the main social media areas during my injury recovery). I hope we will end up with a lot of creative ideas, each of us building structures of support in our own unique ways.
The Deep Den has a membership fee, but I am going to give away 20 spots for 2026 to community members committed to this Good Days Strategy idea. If you’re interested, review the Good Day Strategies video and begin to reflect on what you might implement in 2026. Look for an email in two weeks (December 30) and be ready to respond to the prompt in the email.
That’s it!!!
2026 is what we make of it, so let’s get on it.
Go be awesome!!!
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