3 BADASS Mindset Shifts You Can Apply TODAY | 8

In this episode, I break down 3 powerful mindset shifts you can apply today to stop waiting and start owning your recovery:

1. Create your own motivation
   Stop relying on external wins, compliments, or “feeling ready.” Learn how to build unbreakable internal drive—even on days when everything feels heavy.
2. Learn from setbacks instead of being defined by them
   Every failure, rejection, and painful moment is data—not a verdict on your worth. Flip the script: turn losses into lessons that make you sharper, stronger, and more resilient.
3. Develop unspoken badass confidence
   The quiet, unshakable kind that doesn’t need validation, flexing, or loud announcements. It shows up in how you carry yourself, set boundaries, and walk away from what no longer serves you.

These aren’t fluffy affirmations—they’re battle-tested shifts I’ve used myself and taught dozens of men to escape the post-breakup fog, stop people-pleasing, and rebuild a life they’re actually proud of.

No theory. No waiting months for therapy breakthroughs.
Just practical, do-them-today mindset upgrades that move the needle fast.

Your next chapter doesn’t start when you “feel better.”
It starts when you decide to think differently.

Let’s build that badass version of you!

#MensMentalHealth #BreakupRecovery #DivorceRecovery #MindsetShift #PostBreakupGrowth #MasculineConfidence #SelfMotivation #PersonalDevelopment #PodcastForMen #ComebackSeason

Hosted by Chris Ryan - Professional Life Coach | B.A. Psychology

Breakup and divorce recovery coaching for men

For coaching inquiries and general questions, email: coachchrisryan@gmail.com

*The BCP is 100% self-funded and does not run ads.

Keywords: breakup recovery for men, divorce recovery for men, rebuilding identity after breakup, masculine qualities after divorce, feeling incomplete after breakup, reclaiming masculinity post-breakup, life after divorce for men, men's self-improvement after breakup, healing from heartbreak men, post-breakup identity crisis men, divorced men recovery, broken up men healing, men's mental health after relationship ends.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What does it take to become a badass? Well, first thing we have to do is learn how to think like one. If you're tired of being average, if you're done feeling empty and unmotivated, if you want a life that's full of accomplishment and confidence, you've clicked on the right episode. Welcome back to the Badass Comeback Podcast, boys. This one is all about building the foundation for your future. Whatever path you choose, we're going to talk three mindset shifts that will take you there. No special tools required. All that is required is your attention. So let's crack on with it. First badass mindset shift. Failure means giving up. In order to be successful in anything, you have to be okay with setbacks. When you're working towards success, be it a sports game, starting a business, or even bouncing back from a breakup or divorce, in the most badass way possible, of course, it's easy to stay on track when good things are happening. You get a bunch of small wins and it hits you with that good dopamine, which helps you stay positive and motivated. But what happens when you run into a setback? What happens when something goes wrong, or your plan backfires? The thing that most people do is allow it to affect them in a negative way. They get down on themselves, they beat themselves up, or they may deflect and place blame on other things to avoid the ego punch of taking full responsibility. Then they lose motivation. They may even start to doubt themselves and their confidence will dip. But success in anything requires your confidence. Doesn't matter if it's a math test, a work project, or a workout. Your success in turn can be compromised by stacked setbacks that as a result suppress your confidence more and more if you allow it to have that effect. But setbacks are inevitable when you're chasing success. So how can we keep our confidence up if we run into a setback? The key here is to call them what they are. Setbacks. If you miss a shot in the game, that's a setback, because you can still win the game. If you quote, fail a math test, that's a setback in your overall grade for the class. You can still pass the class. If you're in the aftermath of a divorce or a breakup and you have a day where you sit on the couch instead of doing something productive, that's still just a setback. You can still pull out of that post-breakup slump. The problem is when you slap yourself with the failure label, it embeds itself into your identity. Slap that label on yourself enough times and you'll eventually run out of confidence and give up. Realize that setbacks will slow you down. Yes, it is a bad feeling. But boys, nothing in your life is a failure unless you give up. The best lawyers I know passed the bar on their third or fourth attempt. The best athletes we know missed thousands of shots and lost hundreds of games. The most successful entrepreneurs out there made countless mistakes and lost millions on bad deals. But here's the thing: do we call these athletes professionals and entrepreneurs failures? No, we call them the GOATs. Why? They stayed in the game. They kept grinding, and most importantly, they learned from their setbacks, whether it was their fault or not. They understand that yes, those setbacks sucked, but they separated their ego punch from the goal that they are working towards. They developed the skill of bouncing back from setbacks, and yes, anyone with a halfway functioning brain can develop that skill. Setbacks suck, but they do an incredible thing. They reveal where our shortfalls are. Fail a math test, now you know what types of equations you know and which ones you need to study more. If you lose a sports game due to a bad defensive strategy, now you know your offense is good and you can now focus on new and improved defensive strategies. You wouldn't know what to fix if you didn't try. So how can we apply that to us? Simply put, regardless if this breakup or divorce was your fault or not, this is only a setback. Yeah, it's probably a big setback, but understand that while you lost something that was important to you, now you have a bunch of newly available space to fill. And you have a choice. Either you give up and fill it with instant pleasure and superficial things which will plunge you into a deeper hole, or fill it with new challenges that will rebuild you into a man you are proud of. And I know that you know what those challenges are. The rewards for challenging yourself compound over time and they are waiting for you.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

I want you to imagine looking at yourself in the mirror three months from now. Are you looking at a failure who gave up on turning himself into a badass motherfucker?

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Or are you looking at a guy who is trudging through the mud feeling better with each passing day? The only thing standing in your way is you. Let your setbacks be your greatest teacher and reveal to you what you should focus on next. All right, the second badass mindset shift. Pain is necessary for growth. No pain, no gain is 100% true. When we're kids, we make mistakes. When we're learning to walk or ride a bike, we fall down and sometimes get hurt. When we exercise, we put our bodies through physical stress on purpose. That is painful. When we're being trained on a new job, we make rookie mistakes. But if you notice, that pain teaches us a great lesson. We eventually triumphed and learned to walk with balance and then run. We eventually conquered our bicycle and learned to ride it like a boss. Increased cardiostamina and bigger muscles after exercising, and now our boss wants to give us a raise or a promotion. It's a pendulum swing. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. On one side is pain and suffering, the other is triumph. The more pain we choose for ourselves, the greater we triumph. If we avoid pain, we will not triumph. But for many of you listening right now, you did not choose the pain of this breakup. So how is it possible to triumph when you just got your heart smashed?

SPEAKER_00 6:54

I want you to think about this. Equal and opposite reaction. What's the secret?

SPEAKER_01 7:01

First of all, you're in a great spot to learn from your past relationship. If you fucked up, you can learn how to be better next time. If she fucked up, you can learn how to avoid that type of behavior in the future and implement new and improved standards and boundaries for yourself. If you can learn both of those things, boys, the caliber of women you will meet will be smarter, hotter, and love and appreciate you for exactly who you are. Secondly, filling your new free time with challenges to make yourself into a better man will initiate that pendulum swing. And this will be twice as beneficial to you if you are in the shits of a really bad breakup. If you are challenging yourself anyway, despite how you feel, two things will start happening. One, your brain will use the pain you're feeling right now and turn it into jet fuel. Two, take whatever you imagine seeing yourself as in the mirror in three months and fucking double it. Guys, I've been through numerous breakups. Some that even left me with PTSD. When I got up and started marching towards my new goals, whether it was as simple as cleaning and reorganizing the house, a new gym routine, going out to socialize, not only did the pain start to melt, I used it as extra motivation. And as a result, my life has become 10 times better than when I was making the choice to just sit on the couch and be a victim. I guarantee if I was still sitting on that couch after getting my heart smashed over and over, there would be no badass comeback podcast. Do not let this pain keep you couch slots. Do not allow this pain to give yourself solitary confinement. This may be the lowest point in your life, but all that means is you're going to bounce back equally as hard. Start with your small goals and challenges first and then set some bigger ones. When you do this, trust that you will be turning that pain into gain, and that gain is way better than you'd ever expect. Apply it consistently. Trudge through the fucking mud, and you will emerge a man you are proud to be. Third badass mindset shift. Motivation is momentum initiated by one thing. You. The badass doesn't wait for motivation to arrive. Yeah, you can listen to motivational speeches, and sometimes you just randomly get that little burst of energy to go and start X, Y, or Z thing. But as great as those speeches and little bursts of energy are, they are not sustainable. The reason is that that is top-down motivation. This whole point, number three, is about building ground up motivation. How do we do this? Well, how do you get an airplane off the ground? Does it just magically teleport to cruising altitude? Waiting for motivation to arrive is like just sitting in the cockpit waiting for it to take off. Yeah, you had a sudden burst of energy to climb up into it and thinking, yeah, I'm gonna start this. Let's do it. So you strap yourself in, start the engines, and then you realize you actually have to put in some real work to get it off the ground. And then you start to doubt yourself. You think, damn, those guys on YouTube are cruising, and I want that same feeling, but I'm not getting it. I'm still stuck here on the ground. How am I gonna get this huge chunk of metal to feel weightless and travel at incredible speeds? Gentlemen, there is no hack to properly motivating yourself. But there is good news. Self-motivation requires only one thing that everybody has the ability to do. And it's the same thing that all those motivational guys did in the very beginning of their journey. Momentum. An airplane experiences the most amount of stress during takeoff. The engines are working extremely hard, the airframe is experiencing flex and stress, and the wings are struggling to catch the wind properly. At first, this ties into the lesson that the first 10% of anything is always the hardest. The same amount of effort and stress applies to you. When you commit to a new gym routine, you will be the most sore during the first two weeks. If you decide to start a business, you're initially going to be putting in hundreds of hours with no pay, sometimes even going into debt for it. If you decide to bounce back from a breakup in the most badass way possible, you will struggle for the first few weeks. There will be times when you won't want to put in the effort. The answer, however, is to trust the plane. Yeah, taking off is scary. It's extremely difficult. But if you keep the throttles pinned for long enough, you will feel that giant behemoth start to lift. If you don't, and you pull back a little bit or you decide to abort the takeoff altogether, you're gonna crash and burn, and you're gonna have to start all over. And of course, anybody who's experienced any sort of level of success has had to start that over. There's no shame in that. Even the motivational guys, if you learn about any of them, they all crashed and burned many times. Setback after setback after setback. A lot of them were also raised in horrible circumstances and had to defeat that little victim voice in their head. And you never knew about them when they were at their lowest point. You only see them now that they're cruising 80,000 feet at Mach 3. But their message is all the same. They eventually told themselves, you know what? Fuck this. I will get this plane off the ground. I will pull myself out of this hole and I will do whatever the fuck it takes to get me above the clouds. And they all did the same thing. They initiated that momentum on their own. So just copy that. Pin the fucking throttles and trust yourself. At first, those engines are going to be roaring and you're only going to be inching forward. Then you hit one mile per hour, then two, then five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred. And before you know it, that plane is begging you to pull back on the stick and get the nose off the ground. Then what seems like three seconds later, the back wheels lift off, and oh shit, look at you now. You're going 200.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

And from there, you guessed it. The sky is the limit. The only thing holding you back is yourself.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Grab whatever challenges in front of you by the balls. Give it 100% of your trust in yourself, and you will take off. When you can master the takeoff, everything in your life gets easier. You won't have the energy to be sad about setbacks. You won't have time for people who weigh you down. You'll be blasting past all the storms, haters, what-ifs, doubts, the little victim voice in your head. And at that point, all you're concerned about is how incredible you're feeling. Master the takeoff, and your motivation will be cruising right along with you before you know it.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

And when you do, do me a favor, boys, motivate others to take that first step. All right, here's a bonus. Number four, badass confidence is unspoken.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

The badass has no need to brag about his wins. He has no need to tear others down to feel superior. His confidence instead emanates through how he carries himself and what he does. Think of Chuck Norris. When have you ever heard him say things like, Yeah, I'm the greatest martial artist in the entire world and everyone else sucks? Yeah, probably never. We all know he's the GOAT just by watching him kick everyone's ass. But do you have to become the world's greatest whatever to earn the title a badass? Of course not. All you have to do is commit to the next step, then the next one, and so on and so forth. And over time, your confidence will fortify. Yes, even if it is something as simple as cleaning and reorganizing your house, it's a 1% at a time thing. So just commit to 1% today. Tomorrow, one more percent, etc. Here's the uncomfortable secret. It has to be something greater than yourself. It has to require you going above and beyond, and it has to be difficult. No one, absolutely no one, becomes a badass by just going through the motions and allowing life to dictate what they can and can't do. You become a badass by chasing your goals. You become a badass by challenging yourself, learning from your setbacks, and pushing through obstacles and bad days. Think of education. You go through the motions of school where the lessons are all planned out for you. You learn only what your professors want you to learn, and they hold your hand when you make a mistake. And when you graduate, you just have a good baseline knowledge of whatever it is. Then you go into the workforce. Now you need to apply those skills in the real world with a bunch of other variables that you can't control. Now you're on your own. You will make rookie mistakes. Sometimes you'll have to deal with shit coworkers and shit bosses. But eventually you become so skilled that you can do it with your eyes closed. You don't have to work for a Fortune 500 company to be a badass in your industry. If you're a barista at some hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, you can make a badass cappuccino and have regular customers who only want you to make their coffee. If you work construction, you can be a badass craftsman if you want. Or your superintendent shows up randomly, sees your work, and goes, Who in the hell is responsible for building this? That is way beyond what I was expecting. One of the best parts of building your badass confidence is that it doesn't even have to be in your professional field. You can be a badass in your hobbies. Hell, even with the fun things you love to do. In high school, I worked as a lifeguard during the summers. On swim breaks, my coworkers and I would have competitions to see who could do the most badass tricks off the diving board. After work, I would go to my friends' houses. Some of them have muscle cars. We would restore them, modify them, detail them, and then drive them to car shows. We were usually the only 16-year-olds there, and we always impressed a bunch of the older guys. So, boys, it doesn't matter what you do. You know what it takes to become the best you can be at it. You know what that next step is. When you start stacking those wins, your confidence will start fortifying, and people will not only see it through the results you produce, they will be able to feel it when they're around you. This is all about cultivating positive energy and it's infectious. And I guarantee that high-quality women will also start to notice. The only person you need to prove your worth to is yourself. The only person you need to convince you're a badass is yourself. Go above and beyond. Do it with pride and let your results speak for themselves. The right people will notice, and the wrong people won't want anything to do with you. Zooming out here, guys, all four of these points tie together. If you learn from your setbacks, play into the pain you're feeling to motivate yourself by creating momentum, you will develop some pretty badass confidence. And that confidence is stronger than steel. I want to bring in some important points made by Dr. Andrew Huberman. I know a lot of you guys know who he is, but for those who don't, this guy studies neuroscience like a madman and has done countless experiments on the complexities of the human brain. This is what he says as far as learning from mistakes, pushing through pain, and succeeding. And these aren't any direct quotes, I'm just going to summarize some of what he said real quick. He says that experiencing pain and setbacks aren't something we should avoid. It's actually a powerful biological signal that drives positive brain changes. When we are in pain from a mistake we made or something bad happening, our brains hit us with epinephrine, which is adrenaline, and noreprinephrine, which is focus and alertness. With this also comes frustration or some sort of emotional discomfort, and our brains make a special note to make us more aware of that mistake happening in the future. When you push yourself out of your comfort zone and start to improve, whatever it is, you will start to see results that you are indeed improving. This releases dopamine. Dopamine helps to rewire your brain, which in turn means that you learn that new method or thing faster. So what this means is that making the decision to improve after shitty things happen to you will make you better faster. Pain is necessary for rapid change. Because think about it. If we never encounter setbacks, that means we're not trying.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

If we don't try, there's no reason to change. Wrapping up here, boys, notice how there's one word I repeated a lot in this episode.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Trust. Trust your pain to be your greatest teacher. Trust your brain to help you start feeling better and gathering momentum. Trust the plane to get you off the ground. Trust your process to take you to success in anything you decide to do. And above all else, your badass confidence is rooted in the trust you have in yourself.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

I'm gonna leave you guys with a quote from Andrew Huberman.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Quote The ones that do exceedingly well are the ones that embrace the feeling of frustration and making errors. These are the few that do exceedingly well in whatever pursuits they happen to be involved in.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

See you guys next week. Thank you for joining me in another badass episode, brother.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

If you want to accelerate into this new chapter in your life and get a boost into your badass journey, sign up for a free 45-minute consultation for post breakup or divorce coaching. All the info is in the episode description. Also, please remember to like and comment. And if you know anyone who could use this info in their badass journey, please share this episode with them. None of this will be possible without you guys, so thank you again, and I will see you in the next episode.