Word for the Week

I recently met SGM Jesus "Chuy" Almonte at a leadership conference in Fayetteville, NC. He was asked to sit on a panel of military leaders advising chaplains on how to more effectively care for Soldiers and Families. As I listened to Chuy, two things became immediately clear to me. First, this guy is serious about good leadership, and second, this guy loves his family. As a senior Green Beret, I w...

C asey signed up to fight his nation's wars the year after 9/11. After 17 years of service—12 of them in Special Operations—and after going on 42 different training trips and combat deployments literally all around the globe, he has gained some perspective on being a husband and father. He's quick to declare up front how failure has played a big role in shaping his understanding of what it means t...

In the journey toward becoming a man, every boy needs to hear that his father loves and affirms him. But sometimes it's not easy for fathers to know what to do or say to express that love and affirmation, especially if fathers didn't grow up receiving it themselves. John Brantley has a vision to equip fathers to do this effectively. He started BAM (or Becoming A Man) Adventures with the mission to...

Chaplain (COL) Keith Croom was 15 years old when he knew God called him to vocational ministry. While preparing to become an Army Chaplain, he met his future wife, Kelly. Three weeks later he told her he loved her. After twenty five years of marriage, they continue to come alongside, and help serve the spiritual needs of Army Families. Currently, Keith serves as the senior chaplain in the United S...

There are lots of misconceptions about how our bodies interact with alcohol. For example, does alcohol help you sleep better? Lauren answers this question and explains how alcohol impacts our sleep, hormones, performance, and how our bodies metabolize it. 

Practicing compassionate awareness is essential for us to have healthy, and meaningful relationships with ourselves and with those around us. Dr. Blank addresses this spiritual process through a mental performance perspective.

As a Performance Dietician Lauren Thomas studies how nutrition impacts performance based metrics and equips tactical-level athletes to understand how to properly fuel their performance. Last week Lauren shared with us 6 ways overeating negatively impacts our bodies. Today, she shares with us how the use of mindfulness combats the tendency to overeat.

Culture and marketing media pressure us to turn Christmas into an object we consume, rather than a sacred season we celebrate; and we often feel the effects of that pressure in our stress levels and in the anxiety we feel during the holiday season. In this episode Dr. Mary Rose Blank shares four essential pillars in self-care as a way to withstand those holiday stressors. I hope you enjoy.

Lauren Thomas is a Performance Dietician, and has three sets of letters behind her name (M.S. in Nutrition Education, R.D. Registered Dietician, CSSD-Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics)…in other words, she's basically an expert! She studies how nutrition impacts performance based metrics and equips tactical-level athletes understand how to properly fuel their performance. Today, Lauren share...

When someone brings you good news, how do you respond? We all have a typical response style we use in our communication with others. Today Mary Rose talks with us about four primary styles: (1) Passive constructive responding, (2) passive destructive, (3) active destructive, and (4) active constructive responding.    Then she leads us through a deeper understanding of how the active constructive r...

Al and Jeff are back with their new sports show format. Today they tackle their top five: NFL rundown, college football, the Wilder/Fury fight, Urban Meyer and domestic abuse in the NFL. 

Gratitude is a physiological antidote to stress. It change the chemistry of our brain and rewires our neuropathways. Mary Rose shows us how to incorporate gratitude into a routine that helps us optimize our performance in life.

Dr. Mary Rose Blank continues to explain the Negativity Bias she introduced in episode #40. She explains the neuroscience underneath the Negativity Bias works and introduces ways to overcome it in our lives in order to optimize our performance. 

What does neuroscience teach us about our natural inclination toward negativity? In this episode Mary Rose tells us how the Negativity Bias works and introduces us to ways to overcome it in our lives in order to optimize our performance. 

  John Dickson, in his book, Humilitas, makes the case that practicing humility is just common sense. Regardless of how capable or qualified you might be in one area doesn't mean you necessarily know a great deal about everything else.

I love sports, but I don't always have time to follow the headlines. That's why I love listening to the Sports Guys—Al and Jeff. Each week they decide on 5 of the biggest American Sports headlines and provide a brief summary of what's going on. You can always listen to them in the second half of the Word for the Week Show, after our interview segment (17:35).    Mary Rose, a professional mental pe...

In episode #35 mental performance coach, Mary Rose, taught us about how habits are formed. In our last episode she talked about goal setting. Today, she's going to teach us about motivation. You're going to love what Mary Rose has for us in this episode (4:20).   She's followed by The Sports Guys, Al and Jeff. They give us the latest college and pro football rundown. You don't want to miss them la...

Here's part 1 from our series on humility, followed by mental performance coach, Mary Rose (minute 3:35). Last week she explained how habits are formed. This week she tells us about the science behind motivation. Then Al & Jeff talk about Drew Brees and share their opinions on NFL rookie QBs today. Of course, they line up this weekend's biggest NFL and college games (minute 23:30).

The next series of podcasts… It's been a while since my last Word for the Week Podcast. I've started a new format featuring input from some really neat people I've gotten to know. I'll start each podcast with a devotional "word for the week," and then follow it up with different segments each week. This week, I introduce the topic of humility—a powerful virtue that is often misunderstood. I'm foll...

In our final podcast, Pete and Brian talk about our own challenges with engaging with other religions. How can we remain passionately Christian while still humbly interacting with those of other faiths?  We talk about some of the lessons we learned interacting with other religions and some of the challenges that we still face.

Islam is at the forefront of inter-religious thought in America for the last two decades.  We bring a lot of baggage to this conversation and it makes it very difficult to understand the religion from the point of view of practitioners. This is again a 101 level discussion between Pete and Brian about the basics of Islam.  We once again try to see the problem that Islam is attempting to solve and...

In the United States we are inundated with subtle references to Buddhism.  Whether it is a bumper sticker that says, "My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma," or Hollywood stars talking about their Zen practices, we hear bits of Buddhist practice often taken out of context.  This podcast is a conversation about Buddhism in a beginning discussion aimed at understanding the religion of over 500 million adhere...

For Westerners there may be no more confusing religion than Hinduism. With its plethora of gods, lack of orthodoxy, and strange practices, Hinduism is an enigma.   This is another discussion about the basics of this religion claiming over a billion adherents in the world (primarily in India).  Find out what Hindus believe about the problem in the world and how their faith aims to resolve it. To ju...

Pete and Brian talk on how we understand religion. In this podcast you will hear some definitions of religion and some ways to analyze them. At the center is the framework presented by Stephen Prothero in God Is Not One.  At its core, we start to understand religions by finding out what they see is the fundamental problem with the world and how their religion proposes to solve this problem. From t...

Have you ever wondered what it is that enables some people to endure extreme adversity, and then be able bounce back from it?  World-renowned author, speaker, and professor, Dr. Glenn Schiraldi, calls that special ingredient "resilience." The recent movie  Unbroken  about WWII veteran and Japanese prison camp survivor Louis Zamperini gives us a glimpse of what that resilience looks like. Dr. Schir...