A Guide to Thriving

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

EP 3085 Are you living a life of quiet exhaustion, confusing relentless striving for genuine success, and feeling trapped in the reactive state of “survival mode”? This is an essential guide to navigating the invisible forces—from deeply ingrained beliefs to the profound influence of your external world—that keep you confined. If you are watching this prior to the book’s release in November, 2025,⁠ you can pre-order it here

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You ever have that feeling, you know, you’re doing everything you’re supposed to climbing the ladder, hitting all the milestones, but there’s this little nagging voice that says something’s missing that you’re not really living. You’re just surviving. Well, let’s get into it because that feeling is way more common than you think.

Even for the most successful people out there today, we’re going to dig into the big ideas from John Roseberg’s book, a guide to thriving, and see if we can map out a path from just getting by to actually living a life you won’t regret. Just let that sink in for a second. This right here, this is the number one regret of people at the end of their lives, written down by a palliative nurse named Bronnie Ware.

It’s not about money or promotions or a bigger house. Nope. It’s about not having the courage to live a life that was true to them.

That’s the stake in the ground. That’s what’s at stake for all of us. And it’s exactly why we need to understand the huge difference between just surviving and truly thriving.

So yeah, that leads us to the million dollar question. How do we actually do that? How do we live a life? We won’t look back on with regret. For the author, this question stopped being theoretical and became incredibly urgent after his best friend, Nathan was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I mean, watching his friend’s world just shrink into a daily fight for survival. It lit a fire under him to figure out how the rest of us can break through our own walls before it’s too late. And here’s the surprising part, that feeling of just getting by.

It’s not just for times of crisis. You can be at the absolute peak of your career with all the awards and the fancy titles, and still feel this deep inner disconnect, the author talks about feeling like he was just sprinting on a treadmill fueled by fear and ambition, completely unaware that there was another way to live. And that right there is the hidden cost of a life spent just surviving.

Okay. I want you to think about your own day right now. How much of it are you really present for a Harvard study dug into this and found a number that is, well, it’s pretty staggering.

It gets right to the heart of this collective disconnect. We’re all feeling the number is 47%. So what do you think that represents? That’s it.

Almost half of the time we’re awake, our minds are somewhere else completely. We’re either replaying stuff from the past or stressing about the future. The researchers basically said, this is the signature of an unhappy mind.

And this mental time travel is a giant red flag that we’re living in what the book calls survival mode. It’s a state that literally keeps us from showing up in our own lives, which brings us to the core framework of this whole idea. The book suggests that our entire experience of life is basically run by one of two operating systems.

You’re either in survival mode or you’re in thriving mode and figuring out which mode you’re in. Well, that’s the first step to taking back control. So let’s break down what these two actually feel like.

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Think of survival mode as your mind’s built in emergency alarm. And look, it’s amazing when you need it. Like if you’re actually face-to-face with a saber-tooth tiger, the problem is our brains kind of suck at telling the difference between a real tiger and say a passive aggressive email from our boss.

So this emergency system ends up becoming our default setting for just everyday stress. And it shrinks our whole world down into a long list of threats we just have to endure. This chart just lays it all out.

Doesn’t it? I mean, think about it. When you’re in survival mode, your body gets tight. Your breathing gets shallow.

You can probably feel it right now, just thinking about a stressful day, but in thriving mode, you feel relaxed. You feel grounded. It’s the difference between snapping back out of pure fear and taking a breath to respond with some creativity.

The goal here isn’t to get rid of survival mode. We need it. It’s to stop living there 24 seven.

Okay. So that’s the problem. How do we actually make the shift? How do we go from being constantly reactive to being intentional? This is where the book gives us a super simple, but really powerful tool called the AIR framework.

Think of it as a way to hit the pause button, create a little space, and then consciously choose a new way forward. AIR is an acronym. It stands for awareness, inquiry, and reframing.

The idea is that when you feel like you’re drowning in stress or just reacting to everything, you can use it to, well, come up for AIR. It’s a real practical process that gives you the power to go from being controlled by your circumstances to consciously choosing your response to them. So here’s how it works.

Step one is awareness. That’s it. Just notice what mode you’re in.

Are you feeling tense, reactive? Just see it. Don’t judge it. Step two is inquiry.

This is where you get curious. You ask yourself, Hmm, what’s the old story or belief that’s running the show right now? And then finally reframing. This is where you take your power back.

You actively choose a different perspective, a new belief that actually helps you and moves you back toward that thriving state. Now theory is one thing, but let’s talk about how this actually works in the real world. To really make this AIR framework click.

The book tells us a story about a woman named Emily and her journey really just perfectly shows what it looks like to go from surviving to thriving. So on the outside, Emily had it all figured out. She’s this brilliant executive.

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Everybody admires her, but on the inside, she was just running on fumes. She was totally trapped in survival mode by this deep gnawing fear that one day everyone would find out she wasn’t actually good enough. It didn’t matter what she accomplished.

It was never, ever enough to shut down that inner critic. And this was the story running her life. This was her core belief.

My value depends on my success. It was a story she learned as a kid when getting a 93 on a test was met with. So what happened to the other seven points, right? That belief that her worth was totally tied to her performance, kept her on that treadmill, constantly striving and constantly exhausted.

So this is where the AI framework starts to work its magic. In a coaching session, she gets asked this incredibly simple, but totally profound inquiry question. What would happen if you just stopped believing that? And that one question just cracked her whole world open.

It was an invitation to challenge a story that she had just accepted as fact her entire life. It created just enough space for a new story to begin. And this right here is the reframing part in action.

The change wasn’t some big dramatic moment. It happened in these small, consistent, little acts of rebellion against that old belief. Things like leaving work on time, delegating a task instead of just doing it herself, saying no.

Every single one of these little actions was like a tiny experiment gathering evidence for new belief that our worth was already there. It wasn’t something she had to earn over and over again. Emily’s story is so powerful because it shows us that rewriting that inner script, it’s possible for all of us.

It’s not about these huge life altering gestures. It’s about the small intentional choices we make every single day. So that brings the focus right back around to you and the first step that you can take on this path.

And if you take one thing away from this, let it be this. The goal is not to live in some perfect stress-free fantasy world of thriving all the time. Come on, life just doesn’t work that way.

The real power is in building the awareness to just recognize when you’ve slipped into survival mode and then having a tool like AIR to consciously and intentionally choose a different, more empowering path, this matters because this is your agency. It’s your ability to choose how you experience your own life. So as we wrap up, I’m just going to leave you with this question to think about, you know, just like Emily had her story about success and worth.

We all have these narratives that quietly shape our lives. So what is one story about yourself that you might be ready to start rewriting? Answering that, well, that might just be your first real step toward living a life with no regrets.

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