Renegade Breakthroughs with Robert Imbriale

Robert Imbriale
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Renegade Breakthroughs is the weekly wake-up call for entrepreneurs who refuse to wait for permission. Host Robert Imbriale — coach, founder, straight-shooter — turns hard-won lessons on mindset, trust, and decision-making into moves you can use in the next 24 hours. No fluff, no ‘someday,’ just breakthroughs.

  1. 8h ago ·  Video

    Stop Waiting for the Storm to Pass: Running a Business in Uncertain Times

    Stop Waiting for the Storm to Pass: Running a Business in Uncertain Times I asked a half dozen fellow business owners the same question this week: “So what are you doing about it?” Every one of them gave me the same answer. “I’m waiting for the storm to pass.” I understand the instinct. But I’ve lived through that answer once already, and it cost me years. So this week’s episode is about running a business in uncertain times, what the numbers actually say, and why the worst move you can make right now is to put your business in neutral. The Storm Is Here Six months ago you could still argue about whether the storm was coming. Not anymore. On September 11, diesel crossed $6.06 a gallon nationally, the highest it has ever been. California diesel was already at $7.98. And here in San Diego, I put a slide up on the show with a number in green that made the chat room gasp: $9.99 a gallon for diesel, $9.39 for premium gas. That happened in Los Angeles last week, and now it’s here. Not every station, but the edge of the market is at the ceiling. I mean that literally. A gas pump only has three digits. It can’t display $10.01. So I told my friend Bruce on his show earlier this week what I expect to happen next: stations will drop the posted price to something like $5.50 and quietly change the unit of sale to a half gallon. Sound crazy? When gas hit $3.99 in 2005, some states allowed exactly that. Pumps showed half-gallon pricing with mandatory signs telling customers to double the number. It’s been done before. Why is this happening? The story now is that Ukraine is bombing Russian refineries, taking supply off a global market where demand hasn’t budged. Prices aren’t local. They’re set on the futures markets, and when supply drops everywhere, the price rises everywhere. Canada is paying $1.92 a liter, which works out to about $8 a gallon. This is not a one-week news cycle. Why Prices Go Up Fast and Come Down Slow Here’s the part that matters for your business. Nothing in your house arrived without a truck or a boat, and those run on diesel. When diesel spikes, the cost of everything underneath it spikes too. Economists are already on record saying the damage will linger even if the fighting stopped tomorrow, and I believe them, because I watched it happen in 2007 and 2008. Gas spiked, UPS added a fuel surcharge to every package, and that surcharge never went away. Even when gas fell below where it had started, the surcharge stayed. We call it sticky pricing. A supply threat shows up and prices are higher the next morning. The threat disappears and it takes months for prices to settle. Layer the rest of the picture on top of that. The Consumer Price Index hit 3.3% in March, the highest since May of 2024, driven by energy, and that was before this latest spike. The Fed wants 2%. Instead of cutting, they just raised rates another quarter point, which means your variable-rate credit cards got more expensive this week. GDP growth for 2026 has been cut to roughly 1.8% from 2.1%, and that gap is trillions of dollars of commerce that isn’t going to happen. This is a slow bleed, not a headline. What the Small Business Numbers Say I pay close attention to the small business community because that’s who I’ve been training for thirty years. The NFIB data says 80% of small business owners report energy costs are having a significant impact on operations right now. When costs rise, an owner has exactly two moves. You can eat the increase and cut your own profit, which 58% are doing. Or you can raise prices, which 52% are doing. Plenty are doing both, because the numbers are moving too fast to absorb. Neither move is painless. You can eat costs for a little while to protect the business, but do it too long and there’s no money left to fix what breaks. Raise prices and you chase customers away. Think about your cable bill going up ten dollars. It’s only ten dollars, but it’s $120 a year, and it’s the same service you had last week. A lot of people cancel. The statistic that stopped me cold was this one: only 8% of small businesses have avoided cost increases entirely. That’s not a story about clever operators who dodged it. It means 92% of the businesses in this country are carrying higher costs today than they were a few months ago, and most of them are struggling to keep the doors open. I’ll be honest about my own numbers too. I’ve been working hard to bring people into my coaching programs, and it’s been crickets. In thirty years I’ve never had a stretch like it. There was always someone in my inbox with a question about marketing or selling online, and I could get most of them on the phone and into a program. Right now the people are frozen. They’re on the sidelines, and not just in this country. When my wife heard the 8% figure she said, “Don’t beat yourself up. This explains it.” She’s right. But explaining it and accepting it are two different things. Lower Gear, Not Neutral This is the lesson I paid for in 2008. Taxes went up, the health care mandates hit, and I watched clients in the seminar and promotion business shut down because they couldn’t carry the load. So I slowed down too. I decided I wasn’t going to do anything until things settled. And I lost momentum I had spent years building. My customers saw me go quiet and didn’t know what to do. When the economy came back around 2012, I was so far behind that catching up took years. The game had moved two stops ahead of me. So here’s my rule for running a business in uncertain times: take a couple of days to get your bearings. That’s normal. But when a couple of days becomes a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months, you’re in trouble. Slow down if you have to. Put it in a lower gear. Never put it in neutral. That applies to your plans as much as your business. The “someday syndrome” is one of the biggest things I see in the people I coach. This may not be the right time to build the new house, buy the new car, or start the renovation. It is exactly the right time to plan them. We’ve got twenty acres here and a building we want to put up for a studio and live events. We don’t know when. But we walk the property and talk about where it goes, and when things turn around, and they always do, we’ll be ready while everyone else is just starting to think. Take Care of the Person Running the Business Some of this is practical. Limit your exposure to the news. Check in for ten or fifteen minutes, and if nothing is breaking, get back to your life. Every headline is designed to grab your attention, and you don’t have to give it. Keep your routine. When COVID shut everything down, my advice to clients was to get up at the same time, have your coffee at the same time, and run your day the way you always did as much as you could. That’s how you keep the disruption from becoming trauma. And find a different way instead of stopping. We haven’t been eating out because lunch for two is over seventy dollars now. So we buy the salmon and the greens at the farmer’s market and make it at home. Cheaper, healthier, and we still get lunch. Some of it is emotional. I spoke with a woman this week who was very afraid, and when I listened for what she wasn’t saying, it was the unknown. I asked her: if you had extra water, some canned goods, a few things put away, would you still feel that fear? She said no, she’d feel prepared. That’s the whole answer. There is no downside to being prepared, and the upside is that it moves you from fear to strength. Anchor yourself in what you have right now, a roof, food in the fridge, people around you, and radiate out from there. And don’t do this alone. Talk to your peers. Tell them you think Robert might be full of it and let them argue with you. Get it out instead of bottling it up. If the people watching the show want a Zoom call to talk through what’s happening, I’ll build it and facilitate it. Choose Your Response We don’t get to choose what happens out there. We do get to choose how we respond. Fear isn’t something you can buy by the pound. It’s how you’re representing what’s going on inside your own head. I’ve chosen excitement, because I believe this is the required step to get us to the other side, and my picture of that other side is strong enough to focus on. Every generation gets its challenge. This one is ours. Stay in the game, stay in motion, and be ready when the weather turns. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  2. 6d ago ·  Video

    How to Cope with Traumatic News: 6 Ways to Recover

    Watch or Listen to this episode: How to Cope with Traumatic News: 6 Ways to Recover One year ago today, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking on a college campus in Utah. Tomorrow marks 25 years since September 11th. Two very different events, two very different eras — and the same thing happened inside millions of people who were nowhere near either one: the chest tightened, the sleep went, the focus disappeared, and for a lot of folks it never fully came back. This isn’t a post about who did it, why, or what the politics are. It’s about what happens inside you when the world shakes — and how to cope with traumatic news without pretending it didn’t happen. Why Bad News Hits You Even When You Weren’t There Here’s the part almost nobody tells you: the screen is the exposure. Your brain doesn’t distinguish between a threat happening to you and a threat happening on your phone. The amygdala — your brain’s built-in smoke detector — doesn’t ask “is this my city?” or “do I actually need to worry about this?” It just sees danger and pulls the alarm. Heart rate spikes, stress hormones flood your system, digestion shuts down, sleep gets disrupted, and your thinking narrows from “what are the possibilities?” to pure survival mode. The truth is, most of us were never actually in danger — not during COVID, not on 9/11, not during any national tragedy that played out on our screens. But our nervous system doesn’t know that. It reacts as if we were standing right there. And for a lot of people, that reaction has been quietly replaying every single anniversary for 25 years. The Four Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn When a traumatic headline lands, most people fall into one of four patterns: Fight looks like rage-posting — striking out at something because there’s nowhere else to put the anger.Flight looks like doomscrolling — searching for an exit that doesn’t exist, scrolling and scrolling while looking for relief that never comes.Freeze looks like staring at the screen until 2 a.m., replaying the same footage from every angle, unable to look away.Fawn — the one nobody talks about — looks like everyone suddenly agreeing with the official story just to avoid conflict, accepting an explanation without ever questioning it. Recognizing which pattern you default to is the first step to interrupting it. The Research: What Screen Time Does to Your Stress (Even From Far Away) This part surprised me. After the Boston Marathon bombing, researchers at UC Irvine surveyed nearly 5,000 adults and found that people who watched six or more hours of coverage a day were nine times more likely to report high acute stress than people who watched under an hour a day. Here’s the kicker: their stress levels were higher than the stress levels of people who were physically present at the bombing. Watching from a screen, repeatedly, did more damage than being there. The same research team tracked over 1,300 people for three years after 9/11 and found that those watching four-plus hours of coverage a day were showing up with doctor-diagnosed physical illnesses two and three years later. In the words of lead researcher Roxane Cohen Silver: “There is no psychological benefit to repeated exposure to graphic images of horror.” Watching it again isn’t staying informed — it’s reinjuring yourself on a loop. 6 Ways to Cope With Traumatic News Without Letting It Run Your Life You can’t avoid a major news event entirely — everyone around you is talking about it. But you can control your dose. Here’s what actually works. 1. Control the Dose Never watching isn’t realistic. Instead, set a limit: one check-in a day, one source, a timer if you need one. Fifteen minutes, then you’re done. Kill autoplay. And be deliberate about your algorithm — the more you click on traumatic content, the more of it you’ll be fed. Click on something else on purpose. 2. Name the Feeling Give the emotion a label — “I’m scared,” “I’m furious,” “I’m numb.” Putting a name on what you’re feeling takes power away from the alarm bell going off in your head. You don’t have to announce it to anyone. Just naming it to yourself is often enough to start turning the trauma switch off. 3. Move Your Body Emotion is influenced by motion. If you’re stuck in stress, sitting still doesn’t release it — it reinforces the pattern. Go for a walk. Go for a jog. Stress hormones are fuel for movement, and movement finishes the loop your body started. It’s no accident that Steve Jobs held his toughest negotiations as walking meetings, or that Reagan invited Gorbachev on a walk during high-stakes Cold War talks. Moving literally takes the pressure out of the room. 4. Get in a Room With Real Humans Isolation is the accelerant. Research on post-traumatic growth is blunt about this: the people who recover best are the ones who talked it through with someone who didn’t judge them. Call one person — not a post, not a thread, an actual voice. We have more ways to communicate than any generation in history, and we’re also the loneliest society to ever walk the planet. Close that gap. 5. Do One Useful Thing for Someone Else We consistently do more for others than we’re willing to do for ourselves. If you’re carrying stress, redirect it into contribution. Help someone with their groceries. Check in on a neighbor. It doesn’t have to be big — it just has to be outward. Watching someone else’s relief can release your own. 6. Zoom Out on Purpose Ask yourself: will this still carry the same weight in 25 years? Zooming out doesn’t minimize what happened — it puts today’s spike of stress inside a longer timeline, which makes it easier to carry. The Upside Nobody Talks About: Post-Traumatic Growth “Just get over it” doesn’t work. Trauma you ignore doesn’t disappear — it moves into your body. Heart issues, adrenal issues, liver and gallbladder problems: these are the places we store what we refuse to process. But there’s a flip side that psychologists have studied for over 30 years, called post-traumatic growth. A large share of people who go through something genuinely difficult report real, lasting gains in five specific areas: Personal strength — if you survived this, you can handle what’s next.Deeper relationships — fewer connections, perhaps, but far stronger ones.A greater appreciation for life — knowing it can change in an instant reframes how you spend today.New possibilities — opportunities that were always there but invisible until the old picture broke.Spiritual growth — bigger questions about meaning, purpose, and why you’re still here. The silver lining isn’t a personality trait some people are lucky enough to have. It’s a skill — and it comes down to what you do after the hit, not the hit itself. Real Stories of People Who Chose to Help Every vase in City Blossoms, a flower shop blocks from Ground Zero, was shattered on 9/11. The owner never closed. She kept making arrangements because, in her words, “everyone knew someone who died.” Her philosophy: you have to stay on your feet no matter what. At Bubby’s in Tribeca, chef Ron Silver watched the first tower fall, picked up his kid from school, then snuck past the barricades to make pancakes for first responders. He never considered closing — he never believed the city wasn’t coming back. Neither of them waited for permission or clarity. They looked at what they could still do, and they did it. The Bottom Line If a headline has ever knocked you flat — whether you run a business or not — the response is the same: control what you consume, name what you feel, move, connect, contribute, and zoom out. You don’t get over trauma. You get through it. And on the other side of getting through it is a version of you that’s stronger, more connected, and more awake to what actually matters. This post is based on Episode 12 of Renegade Breakthroughs. New episodes stream live every Thursday — find the full show at RobertImbriale.com/listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  3. Sep 4 ·  Video

    AI Took 100K Jobs. Here’s How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off.

    AI Took 100K Jobs. Here’s How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off. Two numbers came across my desk this week, and I can’t stop thinking about them together. Through June of this year, 101,743 American job cuts named AI as the reason. That’s the first half of the year alone, so figure it’s over 200,000 by the time the ball drops. Depressing, right? Now the second number: 531,423 new business applications were filed in June. In one month. That’s a record. So while the headlines are all about who’s getting cut, something much bigger is happening quietly underneath. People are deciding to start a business after being laid off instead of waiting for the next pink slip. And I think they’re right. Two Record Numbers in the Same Month Think about what those two figures are telling you when you put them side by side. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs in January. Oracle cut 21,000. Meta let 8,000 people go, Dell 11,000. Intuit cut 17% of its workforce. Block laid off nearly half the company. These aren’t struggling businesses. They’re some of the most profitable companies on earth, and they’ve figured out that AI does a lot of the work faster and cheaper. But the people walking out of those buildings aren’t stupid. A programmer who just got replaced by software knows that if he takes another programming job, it’s only a matter of time before that company catches on too. So a lot of them are skipping the job hunt entirely. They still have the skills. They still have the experience. They’re taking both and building something of their own. Half a million of them in a single month. Back in the 90s, when I was doing a lot of marketing work, there were only about 11 million businesses in the entire country. Add 500,000 a month to that base and you can see where this is heading. History is bending back on itself. We Were All Entrepreneurs Once Before the Industrial Revolution, every one of us was self-employed. You were the baker, the shoemaker, the blacksmith. That’s how people survived. Then the factories came along, and they needed employees, so they built a school system that taught people how to become employees. It never taught you how to work for yourself. It still doesn’t. Now AI is taking over the mundane, systematic work, and that is pushing people back toward running their own show. I left the corporate world in 1995 and never went back. I’m watching a whole generation arrive at the same decision, only they’re being shoved through the door instead of walking through it. Either way, they’re through. Which Jobs Are Going Away (and Why) Here’s the pattern I’d ask you to look for: anything that runs on a system is going to be replaced. Take what I call the systems coach. You bought a coaching program, opened the binder, and it told you the five questions to ask on every first call. Same five questions, every client. We don’t need you anymore. AI does that better. The coach we still need is the intuitive coach, the one who can tap in and feel what’s actually going on with the person across the table. Bookkeeping is a system. It won’t be long before your accounting software produces the monthly reports, the tax return, and a note telling you where you’re overspending. A lot of legal work is a system. Book editing is a system. I’ve been using Photoshop since it came out in the 80s, and I hardly open it anymore. I describe the graphic I want and get something better than I could have made myself. Remember “just learn to code”? Ten years ago that was the guaranteed path, with kids starting at $100,000 out of school. Now AI writes code better than most humans. I’ve done it myself: I needed a script for a website, asked for it, pasted it in, and it worked. What AI Can’t Replace So what’s left? Experience. Intuition. Judgment. AI has more information than you. You have more experience than AI. Those are not the same thing. When AI hands me a graphic, I can say the color is wrong, the balance is off, try again. Someone with no design background will call whatever comes out good enough. When AI writes a sales letter, I can tell whether it will sell, because I’ve written hundreds and watched what happened. Someone who has never written one will think it sounds fine, spend money on it, and find out the hard way. The tool is only as good as the person holding it. Your experience is the part nobody can download. The Mini Business: How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off The CEO of Perplexity used a phrase I liked: the mini business. Not a startup with a pitch deck and investors. A business that supports you and your family, built with tools that used to require a staff. You could be a researcher. Businesses pay for market research, and they don’t care how you gathered it as long as it’s accurate and packaged well. You could set up AI receptionists for local companies. I’m building one right now for a client: a knowledge base, a voice, and suddenly the phone gets answered 24 hours a day with no salary and no workers’ comp. You could write and publish ebooks. You could teach AI to the people who are still afraid of it, and that market is going to exist for a decade, because there are a lot of them. If you don’t know where to begin, here’s your first assignment. Open any AI model and type this: “I’m thinking about creating a mini business. I have no idea where to begin. I have skills and experience in these areas: [list them]. Can you make some suggestions about what I could do?” I guarantee it comes back with things you haven’t considered. My knowledge base is big, but it isn’t vast. AI is vast. Let it widen your field of view, then use your experience to pick. The Mistake I Made in 2008 I need to tell you about the years I lost, because I don’t want you to lose yours. When the economy turned in 2008, I watched my clients fall apart. More than half of my coaching clients walked away that year. Friends in the seminar business closed their doors. And I looked around and decided the smart move was to stop. Stop promoting, stop building, sit on the sidelines, and wait for things to improve. Things did not improve in 2009. Or 2010. Or 2011. It was 2012, maybe 2013, before the market really caught again. I lost four or five years I could have spent building, and when spring finally came, the people who had kept working were miles ahead of me. I grew up in Canada. I know what fourteen feet of snow looks like, and I know that when a storm dumps three feet on you overnight, it feels like the end of the world. It isn’t. Winter always ends. The question is whether you’re ready when it does. Some of the most successful businesses in history were started during the worst economic times, precisely because everyone else was waiting. Fear, Loneliness, and the Human Element Fear is going to be there. I’m not immune to it. What fear does to most people is shut them down. They pull back, stop spending, stop moving. You don’t have to be fearless to make progress. Some days the only thing you can manage is one email or a few notes. Fine. Some forward movement always beats none. The other trap is quieter. George Pu, who runs a company called Founder Reality, cut his team from 14 people to 5 using AI and hasn’t hired in two years. He called it the best financial decision he ever made and the worst emotional experience. We are not built to work alone. Loneliness kills productivity. That’s why coworking spaces are booming and why masterminds keep getting more popular. So build the human part on purpose: a weekly Zoom with a few people swapping what they learned in AI this week, or a monthly lunch at somebody’s house. It’s cheap, and it’s the difference between a business that lasts and one that quietly fades. Don’t Get Left Behind I open my AI apps in the morning and there’s an update. By four in the afternoon there’s another one. We’re still on the ground floor, and the worst possible move is to decide you don’t want to know about it. People said that about computers in the 90s, right up until they were standing at a gas pump that wanted a card and had no idea what to do. AI took work away from a lot of people. It took some of mine. But a record half million people just decided it also handed them the tools to build something new, and I’m betting on them. Stay strong, stay flexible, keep moving, and go build your future. Want a head start? Grab my free download of 100+ ready-to-use AI prompts at renegade.club/110 – they work in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok. And listen to the full episode, “AI Took 100K Jobs, Now It’s Time to Build YOUR Future,” at RobertImbriale.com/listen. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  4. Aug 28 ·  Video

    What to Do When Your Business Idea Fails: 3 Smart Moves

    Watch or Listen to this episode now: What to Do When Your Business Idea Fails: 3 Smart Moves This week Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face – the platform people call “the GitHub of AI” – for a reported $12.9 billion. It is the kind of number that makes an entire company look like it was destined for greatness from day one. It wasn’t. Hugging Face started life as a chatbot app for teenagers. It stalled out around 100,000 users and stopped growing. By most measures, that was a flop. The founders had built the thing they cared about, and the thing they cared about had quietly run out of road. So they did the one thing almost nobody does. They looked sideways. One of the co-founders had put an open-source machine learning tool up on GitHub — an afterthought, a side project, not the business. It started getting attention. They noticed, and they rebuilt the entire company around the thing that was working instead of the thing they had planned. That is the real story behind almost every overnight success, and it is exactly **what to do when your business idea fails**. On Episode 10 of Renegade Breakthroughs, I sat down with Bruce “Poppy” Feldman Jr. — creator of the Unleashing Excellence System — to break down the gap between a flop and a win, and why most people never make it across. The Three Things People Actually Do When an Idea Flops Watch enough entrepreneurs long enough and you see the same three responses every time. **They quit.** The idea hits its first real obstacle and that’s the end of it. Not the second obstacle, not the tenth — the first. This is where the overwhelming majority land. **They hide.** They’ll try again, but quietly, privately, telling nobody. They’re not done with the idea. They’re done being seen failing at it. The humiliation is the thing they’re actually avoiding. **They keep going.** A small group refines, retools, tweaks, and keeps moving until something works. Not because they’re smarter or braver, but because they’ve built a different relationship with the word “failure.” Most people reading this already know which one they are. The useful question isn’t which category you fall into — it’s how to become the third one on purpose. Stop Making the Flop About You Here’s the single biggest shift, and it’s the one Bruce hammered hardest. A flopped idea is *information about the idea*. It is not a ruling on your worth. We collapse those two things constantly. The launch didn’t sell, so I’m not smart enough. The offer didn’t land, so I’m a fraud. Once failure becomes part of your identity, you shrink back, you avoid, you procrastinate, and eventually you quit — not because the idea was bad, but because trying again now costs you something psychologically that you can’t afford. Bruce puts it plainly: he doesn’t use the word failure at all. There’s a finality baked into it. His framing is that he either wins, or he figures out how something isn’t supposed to work. Same event, completely different consequence for the person it happened to. The same trap shows up in how people value themselves financially. If your identity is welded to your bank balance, then a low balance means *you* are low. Break that connection and you’ll actually perform better, because you’re no longer defending your self-worth every time you take a risk. If I tell you your idea is terrible, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you. But if you hear it as a verdict on you, you’ll never move again. Define What Winning Actually Means First A huge share of what people call failure is really a badly set expectation. Every January, someone decides they’re going to get healthy. That’s it — that’s the goal. “Get healthy.” At the end of the month, they’ve lost seven pounds instead of the ten they vaguely had in mind, and they log it as a failure and stop. Seven pounds is not a failure. Seven pounds is better than zero and dramatically better than gaining ten. But without a granular definition of winning, there’s no way to tell progress from defeat — so everything short of the fantasy gets filed as a loss. Get specific about what winning looks like before you start. Then get specific about the smallest unit of progress that still counts. Build Reps, Not Breakthroughs Bruce’s answer to the paralysis is reps — the smallest possible action that moves you toward the thing you want. You don’t join a gym on January 2nd and bench 300 pounds. You move a small weight, then a slightly bigger one. The reps build confidence, and the confidence funds the next rep. That compounding is the whole mechanism. His practical framework is the **3×3**: three tiny reps in three areas of your life — health, business, relationships, whatever yours are — every single day. Non-negotiables. Write them out in advance. Do them. Repeat tomorrow. That’s the consistency chain. What counts as a rep? A two-minute walk. One paragraph. Ten minutes with your phone face-down and your full attention on your spouse. That’s it. That’s the whole rep. And there’s a hidden benefit to setting the bar that low. If you commit to writing one paragraph, you’ll often write ten pages — because the resistance was never about the work, it was about the size of the thing you were staring at. Lower the entry cost and you’ll routinely blow past it. I run a version of this myself. Every day my task list has things on it I know I can finish, alongside the bigger items I’m chipping at. Finishing the day having accomplished something visible is not a vanity exercise. It’s momentum, and momentum is the fuel you’ll need on the days that go badly. The Reset Day Rule You are going to miss. Life happens, you’ll skip a rep, you’ll take a day off you didn’t plan. Bruce’s rule handles it: **it’s okay to miss once. Never miss twice.** Missing once is an event. Missing twice starts a story — *I always do this, I could never keep this up, I’m the kind of person who quits* — and that story is far more expensive than the missed rep. So you reset. You already know what the rep is. Go do it at the next opportunity and skip the self-flagellation entirely. How to Tell “Keep Pushing” from “Beating a Dead Horse” This is the hardest question in the whole conversation, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a motivational one. The signal I trust most is force versus flow. When you’re forcing it — white-knuckling, stressed, reaching for a bigger hammer to drive a square peg into a round hole — that’s usually information. When things start moving easily and doors open without you kicking them, you’re pointed the right way. But notice the third option, the one Hugging Face took: it’s often not that the idea was flawed. Sometimes the square hole is half an inch to the left. The pivot isn’t abandonment, it’s aim. What makes this possible is shortening the distance between doing and reflecting. A ship a fraction of a degree off course is fine at first and catastrophically wrong a thousand miles later. Review daily on the small things, weekly on the big ones, and correct early while the corrections are still cheap. You Cannot Do This Alone The biggest lesson of my last thirty years is that nobody gets there by themselves. When you’re inside your own idea, you can’t see it. You need people who will look at the failed launch and ask what happened, break down the numbers, find the actual broken step — instead of confirming that you’re a failure. That’s what a good mastermind does, and it’s why people who have one move faster. Choose those people carefully. Friends and family are often the worst possible sounding board, and usually out of love — they don’t want to see you hurt, so they’ll talk you out of the risk. Others will discourage you because your success would hold up a mirror to their own inaction. Be deliberate about who gets to weigh in. One modern addition: AI makes a surprisingly good brainstorming partner. When I’ve built a page I think is finished, I’ll hand it to an AI and ask how to make it better. It doesn’t tell me I’m a failure. It gives me options. That’s the exact function a mastermind serves, available at 2am. The Takeaway Failure is only final if you quit. Everything else is data. Separate the result from your identity. Define what winning means before you start. Shrink the work down to reps small enough that you’ll actually do them. Never miss twice. Review often enough to correct early. And put people around you who will help you look sideways at the thing that’s quietly working. As Bruce says: no matter how you feel today, get up, get dressed, show up, be strong, and keep going. Nvidia just paid $12.9 billion for a company that started as a failed teenage chatbot app. Your flop might be information, not a verdict. **Get Bruce’s free framework:** Bruce has released *The Forge* — the third pillar of his Unleashing Excellence System, where identity and beliefs get tested — as a free ebook, including the full 3×3 framework and the reset day rule. No upsell, no strings. Grab it at https://forge.brucepoppy.com Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  5. Aug 21 ·  Video

    Rejection-Proof Networking: The Life Hack Mitch Axelrod Used to Turn $16K Into $100K

    Watch or Listen to this episode here: Rejection-Proof Networking: The Life Hack Mitch Axelrod Used to Turn $16K Into $100K Every entrepreneur hits the wall Mitch Axelrod hit in 1983: he’d burned through every local audience willing to have him speak, income had stalled at $16,000 a year, and the next move meant asking strangers for something — the exact moment most of us freeze. On the latest episode of Renegade Breakthroughs, host Robert Imbriale sat down with longtime friend and returning guest Mitch Axelrod — creator of The NEW Game™ and author of the #1 bestseller The NEW Game of Selling — to unpack the system Axelrod built to eliminate that freeze entirely. He calls it rejection-proof networking, and it’s the centerpiece of an episode built for anyone ready to hack their own life. Who Is Mitch Axelrod? Since 1978, Mitch Axelrod has delivered more than 3,500 talks, workshops, and keynotes, and trained roughly a million people on the skills packed into The NEW Game of Selling. Imbriale introduced him on the show as “the small hinge that moves big doors” — a nod to Axelrod’s decades spent teaching insurance companies, speakers, authors, and coaches how to license their intellectual property instead of trading hours for dollars. The two go back to a December 2019 event called, fittingly, Hack Your Life — the same title this episode borrows, and the same night everyone in the room was busy predicting a great 2020. Three months later, everything changed. From Brain Surgery to Acceptance: A Masterclass in Resilience In March 2020, days after that optimistic event, Axelrod suffered a stroke brought on by a brain tumor. Two brain surgeries and nine weeks of rehab followed — learning to walk and talk again, isolated in a locked-down nursing home where no visitors were allowed. It’s the kind of story that could derail an episode about “life hacks.” Instead, Axelrod turned it into the clearest lesson of the conversation. He described the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and how most people get stuck somewhere in the middle. Axelrod skipped straight to the last one. “It’s not how far you fall that counts,” he told Imbriale. “It’s how far, or how high, you bounce that counts.” Once you’re in acceptance without guilt or shame, he explained, you can finally ask the only useful question: what can I do about it, and who can help me? That question is where rejection-proof networking comes in. What Is Rejection-Proof Networking? Rejection-proof networking is the model Axelrod built after hitting that 1983 income wall. Rather than pitching prospects, he decided to invite people who had “more money than me” to lunch — 15 of them, cold — and test a new way of asking for help that didn’t put anyone in a yes-or-no corner. The structure is four simple lines: Here’s what I do. Here’s why I do it. Here’s who I’m looking for. Who do you know? Where should I go? Notice what’s missing: no ask to buy, hire, or sign anything. “None of that even comes up in the conversation,” Axelrod said. “It’s just casual conversation. And you’re kind of asking for support without actually asking for it.” Because there’s nothing to say yes or no to, there’s nothing to be rejected from — which is the entire point. The Track Record Axelrod didn’t just theorize the model; he ran it twice, with numbers to show for it: 1983–1985: Starting from $16,000 in annual income, he used the four-line script over lunches with strangers. Within a year he doubled his income to $33,000. The year after, it tripled to $100,000. Eight years later, entering consulting and speaking, he took five more people to lunch. One was an insurance VP who put him on a $2,500-a-month retainer on the spot — later expanded to $8,500 a month after a single introduction opened the door to a network of growing companies. Why It Works Most networking fails, Axelrod argued, because it’s personal — you’re selling yourself, not a product, so a “no” feels like rejection instead of a business outcome. Rejection-proof networking sidesteps that entirely by removing the ask. You’re not requesting a transaction; you’re requesting information — “who do you know, where should I go” — a question almost no one refuses to at least consider, because helping feels good and costs the other person nothing. The Decision Gap: Controlling How You React The conversation’s second major hack ties directly into why rejection-proof networking works on the listener’s side, too. Axelrod described what he calls the decision gap — the space between a stimulus (something someone says or does) and your response to it. His point: if you keep giving people a stimulus that reminds them of a bad past experience, they won’t respond to you in the present — they’ll react from the past. He illustrated it with a story about a financial-planning client who zoned out mid-conversation, replaying a story about a bad investment from years earlier. “You’re in the past,” Axelrod told him. “I’m in the present. We’re in two different time zones.” His fix: name it. Ask directly whether the person can be present, or whether they need to get the past experience out first before a real conversation can happen. “That changed the context of every conversation I’ve ever had since then,” he said. The same logic applies in reverse — if your own communication style keeps drawing resistance, the fix isn’t repeating yourself louder. It’s changing your stimulus, because the definition of insanity is expecting a different outcome from the same input. Imperfect Action Beats Perfect Inaction The episode’s other recurring theme showed up on Axelrod’s coffee mug: imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time. Both he and Imbriale returned to the idea that most decisions are made without enough information, not with an abundance of it — and that waiting for certainty just means staying stuck in fight-flight-freeze. You rarely know you made the right call until after you’ve made it and adjusted. It’s the same instinct that shaped the rejection-proof networking model in the first place: Axelrod didn’t wait until the approach was perfect. He took 15 strangers to lunch and iterated from there. More From Mitch Axelrod Beyond rejection-proof networking, Axelrod pointed listeners toward three resources he’s built over the years: The NEW Game of Selling — his #1 bestselling book on selling yourself authentically, with bonus links inside for networking, referrals, and trust-building. Soul Role Goal — a free framework for aligning your goals with what you’re actually good at and enjoy, so ambition stops fighting itself. The IP Money Club — a weekly meeting for speakers, authors, coaches, consultants, and healers who want to get paid to create their books, courses, and content instead of creating it first and then trying to sell it. Watch or Listen to the Full Episode Robert Imbriale and Mitch Axelrod cover a lot more ground than fits in one post — including a candid look at decision-making, why we’re never taught it in school, and how to tell the difference between living in the past, the present, and the future. Watch on YouTube: Hack Your Life with Mitch Axelrod and Robert Imbriale Watch on Rumble: Hacking Your Life with Special Guest Mitch Axelrod Apple Podcasts: Renegade Breakthroughs with Robert Imbriale Spotify: Renegade Breakthroughs iHeartRadio: Renegade Breakthroughs Amazon Music: Renegade Breakthroughs Pandora: Renegade Breakthroughs TuneIn: Renegade Breakthroughs Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  6. Aug 14 ·  Video

    How to Handle Economic Uncertainty as a Business Owner (Without Losing Your Mind)

    How to Handle Economic Uncertainty as a Business Owner (Without Losing Your Mind) Watch or Listen to this Episode Now! If you’ve felt like the ground keeps shifting under your business this year, you’re not imagining it. In the latest episode of Renegade Breakthroughs, “The Next 90 Days: Bend, Don’t Break,” host Robert Imbriale tackles the question every entrepreneur is quietly asking: how do you keep moving forward when the economic signals refuse to make sense? If you’re wrestling with economic uncertainty as a business owner right now, this episode is 25 minutes you’ll want to carve out time for. The Jobs Report That Started It All Imbriale opens with a number that stopped him mid-scroll on Friday: the Fed reported a loss of 23,000 jobs, right when the narrative was supposedly “the economy is getting better.” He doesn’t panic over it — instead he offers a theory worth hearing in full (it involves the shift away from off-the-books labor) and makes a point that lands harder than the statistic itself: mixed news is more stressful than bad news, because your nervous system doesn’t know which signal to trust. Add gas prices bouncing back over $6 a gallon, new tariffs hitting small overseas purchases, and a war whose outcome nobody can predict, and you get exactly the kind of background stress Imbriale says has been quietly reshaping all of us since 2020 — whether we’ve noticed it or not. Why “Bend, Don’t Break” Isn’t Just a Catchy Title This is where the episode earns its name. Imbriale shares a personal, slightly uncomfortable story from 2008: when the recession hit and Obamacare landed a tax blow on small businesses, his instinct was to sit on the sidelines and wait it out. He lost years waiting for a recovery that didn’t meaningfully arrive until 2012–2013. His warning for anyone facing economic uncertainty as a business owner today is blunt — don’t repeat that mistake. Stay in the game, but stay flexible, because “we’re walking on quicksand in some respects.” He walks through concrete, usable tactics for staying grounded instead of frozen: Label the ambiguity. Vague dread is worse than a named problem — call it “a rough economy” and it becomes something you can actually respond to. Ration your news intake. Ten to fifteen minutes, ask “will this affect me today?”, and if not, walk away. Doom-scrolling, he argues, is “very soap opera” and almost engineered to keep you confused. Actively calm your nervous system. A walk, music, or — his personal go-to for years — calling a friend and talking about anything except the stressor. Rebuild face-to-face connection. He’s blunt about how isolated we’ve become post-pandemic (his Costco cart-collision story alone is worth the watch), and makes the case that reconnecting with strangers — the cashier, the neighbor, the mechanic — is quietly one of the most powerful tools against uncertainty. The AI Curveball: Watermarked Text and Weekly Whiplash Midway through, Imbriale pivots to something most listeners won’t have heard yet: Anthropic (the company behind Claude) is reportedly embedding invisible characters into AI-generated text so platforms can detect AI authorship — a response to mounting EU-style regulatory pressure. He’s candid that he doesn’t think it’ll hold up long-term (workaround tools are inevitable), but the bigger point is the pace: apps updating twice in a single day, AI now used to improve AI itself. For any business owner trying to plan the next quarter, this is one more variable moving faster than the news cycle can process. The Discernment Shift: Homeschooling, Farmers Markets, and Home Healthcare Perhaps the most thought-provoking stretch of the episode is Imbriale’s read on where all this uncertainty is quietly pushing people: toward self-reliance. He connects the dots between the explosion in homeschooling, the crowded Saturday farmers markets replacing processed grocery staples, and what he predicts is the next frontier — home healthcare replacing the hospital system entirely for non-emergency issues. He even shares a striking anecdote from Dr. John Gray (Men Are From Mars) about stage-four cancer patients reaching remission through trauma-release work rather than chemotherapy — tying back to his core argument that economic uncertainty as a business owner is just one layer of a much bigger societal reset happening right now. Why You Should Watch the Full Episode This summary barely scratches the surface — the full episode includes his AI-prompting framework (with a free 100+ prompt download), his hypothesis on the September–December “busy season” for entrepreneurs, and a preview of next week’s guest, Mitch Axelrod. If you’re navigating economic uncertainty as a business owner and need both a strategic reset and a reason to feel optimistic about the next 90 days, watch “The Next 90 Days: Bend, Don’t Break” on Rumble — it’s also available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Pandora under Renegade Breakthroughs. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Learn more about Robert here. Check out out Resources Page

  7. Aug 7 ·  Video

    The Courage to Think for Yourself

    Watch or Listen to this powerful episode now! The Courage to Think for Yourself: What the Fauci Contempt Vote Really Teaches Us Today, a Senate committee voted 8-7, along party lines, to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. Last week, he sat in front of that same committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times rather than answer questions about the pandemic response. Whatever side of that vote you land on, I’m not here to litigate guilt or innocence — that’s for the Senate, and if it gets there, a jury. I’m here to talk about something bigger: why so many of us stopped being surprised when “the science” turns out to have a footnote nobody told us about. Held in Contempt Fauci’s team says the whole hearing was a setup, designed to trap him into a perjury charge. Committee chair Rand Paul argues that Fauci’s 2025 pardon from President Biden means he can’t legitimately plead the Fifth in the first place, and he’s pushing for a referral to the Justice Department. The matter now heads to the full Senate floor, where it has to clear a filibuster before the DOJ ever decides whether to prosecute. Nothing here is settled. But the moment is still worth sitting with, because it’s not the first time. And if we don’t learn the actual lesson underneath it, it won’t be the last. The Pattern Here’s the thing that gets lost in the noise of any single hearing: this isn’t one bad moment. It’s a pattern, and the honest version of it — the version that survives fact-checking — includes the other side’s explanation every time. Take the six-foot rule. For two years, “stand six feet apart” was treated as settled science, enforced with tape marks on gym floors and closed playgrounds. In June 2024 testimony, Fauci told Congress it “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on data. He later clarified he meant there was no randomized trial comparing six feet to three or ten — the CDC says it leaned on 1955 droplet research instead. Even taking the more generous read, a rule the public was told was precise science turned out to be an educated guess. Or masks. In March 2020, Fauci and the Surgeon General told Americans there was no reason to walk around in one. Weeks later, the guidance flipped to universal masking, and for a lot of people, staying masked became close to a moral test. Fauci later said the early guidance was shaped partly by a real shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers, not purely by the science changing. That’s a legitimate defense. It also means the public wasn’t told the real reason for the guidance at the time it mattered most. Or the vaccines. In 2021, the CDC director said vaccinated people “do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Fauci called them “dead ends” for transmission. President Biden said vaccinated people “do not spread the disease to anyone else.” Within months, breakthrough transmission during the Delta wave showed that wasn’t true. Or gain-of-function funding. In May 2021, Fauci told the Senate flatly that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH’s own former acting director later told Congress the agency had, in fact, funded gain-of-function-type research there. Notice what all four have in common. Not one was presented as a best guess. Every one was delivered with total certainty — trust the science — right up until it wasn’t true anymore. Building the Courage to Think for Yourself So what do you actually do with that? Not “trust no one.” That’s not courage, that’s just a different kind of laziness dressed up as skepticism. Real courage is the willingness to ask anyway. You can respect expertise and still ask what the evidence is and what happens if the expert is wrong. And here’s a filter worth adopting: certainty is a red flag, not a green light. Real science hedges, because it’s supposed to. When someone in authority sounds one hundred percent sure about something that’s still evolving in real time, that’s worth a second look, not less scrutiny. Ask who pays a price if they’re wrong, too. The officials who deliver bad guidance rarely lose their job over it. You do — in time, money, or trust in the people you thought had your back. That asymmetry is exactly why you can’t outsource the thinking. This isn’t about being contrarian for its own sake. It’s “verify before you comply,” especially when compliance is going to cost you something real. Why Blind Trust Costs You in Business, Too Here’s the flip side, for the builders and leaders reading this. Every industry has its own Fauci moment — the marketing guru who swore by a tactic that quietly stopped working two years ago, the “best practice” everyone copied because everyone else was already doing it. Confidence was never a track record. Build your own filter before you need it. Don’t wait for a crisis to start asking where the data behind a recommendation actually comes from — make it a habit on an ordinary Tuesday. Run small tests instead of taking a big trust fall. You don’t have to bet the business on someone else’s certainty; pilot it, check it against your own numbers, scale what actually works for you. And own your own calls, mistakes included. The flip side of not blindly trusting authority is that you don’t get to blame it when your own bet doesn’t pay off either. Courage cuts both ways. They Don’t Need Your Courage to Be Right They don’t need your courage to be right. They need your compliance to be easy. Don’t confuse the two. Today’s vote is one data point in a much longer pattern. The lesson was never “trust nothing.” It’s “verify before you comply” — and build that muscle now, before the next crisis makes it expensive not to. Listen to the full episode, “The Courage to Think for Yourself” — and tell me in the comments: what’s one thing you were told with total confidence, by an official, an expert, or a guru, that you later found out wasn’t true? Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

  8. Jul 31 ·  Video

    The Trust Recession

    Watch or Listen to this Episode Now The Trust Recession: They Lied, You Knew, Now What? Yesterday, the man who spent years telling an entire nation to “trust the science” sat down in front of the United States Senate — and refused to answer a single question. After more than 250 appearances before Congress, Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth. And whatever you think of the man, that moment is the perfect snapshot of something I’ve been watching build for years: we are living through the trust recession. When the Experts Went Silent Let me say plainly what a lot of people are thinking. When someone spends years demanding your trust, your compliance, telling you he is the science — and then, the moment he’s finally asked to account for it under oath, he goes quiet — that tells you something. That tells you a lot. Is pleading the Fifth a right? Absolutely. Every American has it, and we should be grateful we do. But this wasn’t a private citizen caught off guard. This was the most powerful public health official of our lifetime, sitting on a thousand pages of his own private pandemic diaries that Senator Rand Paul just put on the table — with a contempt of Congress vote coming next week. A man who had all the answers for the rest of us suddenly had none for himself. And here’s the thing: this was never really about one man in a suit. It’s about what he represents. For years we were told to sit down, be quiet, and trust the experts, the institutions, the people in charge — because they knew better than we did. Millions of us had honest questions, and we were treated like we were crazy for asking them. What the Trust Recession Really Is Look around now. This is what I call the trust recession, and it’s bigger than any single hearing. Ask yourself honestly: who do you actually believe anymore? The government? The media? The experts who were so certain, right up until they were wrong? Trust in our institutions has been sliding for years, and this Fauci hearing is a symptom, not the cause. That trust didn’t simply evaporate. It was spent — burned by people who treated your faith in them as something they were owed rather than something they had to earn. A society runs on trust the way an engine runs on oil. When you run low, the machine still moves for a while — but you can hear it grinding. You can feel it grinding. That grinding is the sound of the trust recession, and it changes how every one of us has to operate, whether you’re running a household or running a company. How to Think for Yourself in a Low-Trust World So what do you do about it? Here’s the good news: the answer isn’t to believe no one. Pure cynicism is just as lazy as blind faith. The answer is to build your own filter. When you hear a claim, run it through three quick questions. Who is telling me this? What do they get if I believe it? And have they been right before? Follow the incentive and check the track record, and most of the noise sorts itself out. Then watch out for the tribe trap. The most comfortable information is always the stuff that flatters what you already believe — but comfort is not the same thing as accuracy. Skepticism isn’t cynicism. Cynicism believes nothing and does no work. Skepticism rolls up its sleeves and finds out. In the middle of the trust recession, that willingness to do the work is a superpower. And protect your peace while you’re at it. You can stay informed without being enraged twenty-four hours a day. Curate your inputs on purpose. Why Trust Is Now Your Most Valuable Business Asset Now here’s the flip side, and this one is for the builders and the leaders in the audience. In a world where people believe no one, the person they do believe wins everything. That makes trust the rarest and most valuable asset you can offer. Transparency is the strategy. The Fauci diaries are the lesson in miniature — what leaders hide tends to surface. So say the hard thing first, before someone else says it for you. Consistency compounds: trust is built in drips and lost in buckets, so do what you said you’d do, every single time, especially when it’s inconvenient. And when you get it wrong, own it fast. The brands and founders who admit mistakes out-earn the ones who spin them. There’s an AI angle here too. In an age where anyone can fake content, being verifiably, consistently you is a moat. Authenticity has quietly become a competitive advantage. Good Times, Bad Vibes: Trust Your Own Eyes The trust recession doesn’t stop at politics. It’s in your wallet, too. Read this week’s headlines and the economy is booming: jobless claims at their lowest level since 1969, solid GDP, the Fed looking around and deciding everything is fine. By every official number, we’re living in good times. So why does nobody feel it? Because I talk to real people every day, and I don’t hear “booming.” I hear business owners holding their breath and families doing the math at the grocery store and coming up short. When the official story and your own two eyes disagree, trust your eyes. You live in your bank account; they live in a spreadsheet — and a cheerful average can hide an awful lot of pain underneath it. You are not crazy, and you are not wrong. And the moment you understand that, something powerful happens: you stop waiting for permission. Now What? Move While Everyone Else Freezes Here’s the trap, and it’s the whole trap. Most people are frozen right now, waiting for a headline to tell them it’s finally safe to move. That headline is never coming. By the time it feels safe, the opportunity is already gone — scooped up by the people who moved while everyone else waited. For everyone at home, that means making solid decisions from your own reality — your job, your income, your bills — instead of the national mood. For the entrepreneurs, it means the field is wide open precisely because your competition is paralyzed. When others pull back on marketing, hiring, and building, attention and talent get cheap. Make small, reversible bets. Keep moving. And be the calm one — because in the fog, people follow whoever isn’t panicking. They Lied. You Knew. Here’s What to Do. The trust recession is real. They earned it, and we’re all living in it. But you and I are going to do the opposite. We’re going to be the people who tell the truth, who own our word, who earn trust back one honest day at a time — and who keep moving while everyone else stands frozen, waiting for permission that isn’t coming. Stay in your power. Trust your own eyes. And let’s get to work. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

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About

Renegade Breakthroughs is the weekly wake-up call for entrepreneurs who refuse to wait for permission. Host Robert Imbriale — coach, founder, straight-shooter — turns hard-won lessons on mindset, trust, and decision-making into moves you can use in the next 24 hours. No fluff, no ‘someday,’ just breakthroughs.

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