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Does keeping the peace leave you feeling anything but peaceful? People pleasing and conflict avoidance can settle tension around you while leaving frustration and resentment within you. In this episode of Winning… While Losing, Chris Hansen explores the cost of staying silent, the guilt of disappointing others, and how honest communication and healthy boundaries can help you pursue inner peace without giving up your self-respect. If making peace does not bring you peace, more needs to be done. Listen, follow, and share with someone who always puts everyone else's peace before their own.

How often do fear, anxiety, self-doubt, and limiting beliefs stop us from experiencing life before we even consider what's possible? In this episode of Winning… While Losing, Chris Hansen shares how a simple conversation with a friend challenged his perspective on personal limitations, fear, and missed opportunities. Discover how automatic negative thoughts can influence our decisions, why comfort doesn't always mean we're making the right choice, and how challenging our assumptions can open the door to new experiences, personal growth, and greater self-confidence. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle isn't what we're incapable of doing. It's what we've already convinced ourselves we can't do. Before you let fear or self-doubt make your next decision, ask yourself two questions: "But what if I did? What if I could?"

What if the flaws and imperfections you see in yourself aren't things that make you less valuable, but opportunities for personal growth? In this episode of Winning… While Losing, Chris Hansen challenges the negative way we often view our weaknesses, flaws, and imperfections. Drawing from his experience as a physical therapist and sports performance coach, Chris explores how changing our perspective can turn the things we see as wrong with ourselves into opportunities for self-improvement, growth, and building a better version of ourselves. Your imperfections don't have to define your worth or hold you back. Sometimes, the very things you see as wrong are the places where your greatest opportunities for growth begin.

When does accountability become punishment? In this episode of Winning… While Losing, Chris Hansen explores the difference between holding someone accountable and holding them hostage to their past mistakes. He discusses accountability, forgiveness, guilt, rebuilding trust, repairing relationships, and recognizing when real change and personal growth have occurred. Accountability should lead somewhere: acknowledge the mistake, repair what you can, make meaningful changes, and move forward. Whether you are holding someone else hostage, allowing someone to hold you hostage, or struggling to forgive yourself, this episode challenges you to honestly evaluate what still needs to be repaired—and what may finally need to be let go.

How do you make a difficult change when you are uncertain you can handle it—or whether the outcome will be worth the cost? In this episode of Winning… While Losing, Chris Hansen reflects on his decision to end his marriage and the fear, grief, and uncertainty surrounding it. The cost of leaving was immediate and obvious. The cost of staying was slower: losing self-respect, peace, happiness, and trust in himself. This episode explores the two beliefs often required for meaningful personal change: believing that change is possible and believing that the change will be worth it. Chris discusses why complete confidence is not required to begin, how small actions create evidence, and how rebuilding self-trust can turn uncertainty into forward movement. If you are facing divorce, relationship loss, an identity change, or another difficult life decision, this episode offers a grounded perspective on emotional resilience, personal growth, and finding enough belief to take the next step.

In this episode of the Winning… While Losing podcast, Chris Hansen explores how unprocessed pain can keep us trapped in repeated emotional and behavioral cycles. Through his experiences learning jiu-jitsu and navigating rejection after divorce, Chris explains how growth does not mean that pain disappears. Growth means becoming calmer inside difficult moments, thinking through the cloudiness, recognizing familiar patterns, and making intentional choices instead of allowing pain and fear to make those choices for us. This episode examines emotional healing, personal growth, self-trust, accountability, resilience, and what it means to choose yourself when someone else does not choose you. Chris also discusses the difference between escaping pain and processing it, how to rebuild confidence after loss or rejection, and how painful experiences can help us support others. Pain does not automatically create growth. Pain creates an opportunity for growth. We decide whether we use it. Winning… While Losing is about learning how to experience pain without losing ourselves—and using what we learn to build something better.

After becoming paralyzed and living life in wheelchair, everyday places stopped being simple locations and became decisions. Stairs, curbs, restaurant layouts, parking lots, door widths, and table heights are no longer background details- they are constant calculations.  In this deeply personal episode, host Chris Hansen shares two true stories that changed how he understands friendship, belonging, and love:  A friend who quietly built a wheelchair ramp just so Chris could visit his home Another friend who literally tore a doorway down to the studs to make sure Chris could access a bathroom These weren't just acts of kindness.  They removed uncertainty.  Chris discusses how many people don't exclude others intentionally, but how hesitation, silence, and inconvenience can still create distance. He also shares a difficult realization: he has lost important relationships not because of limitations, but because he failed to give people reassurance.  The lesson becomes clear:  People don't just need access.  They need to know they matter.  If you've ever wondered where you stand with someone... If you've ever felt left out... If you've struggled to say what you feel... This episode is for you.  Winning... While Losing is a podcast about personal growth, relationships, resilience, and finding meaning after loss. It is not about avoiding hardship - it is about discovering what actually matters because of it.

In this Episode of Winning... While Losing, Chris Hansen breaks down the hidden danger that comes with success: comfort. Success feels good - validating, rewarding, and safe - but it can quietly become the limitation that keeps you from becoming who you're truly capable of being. Chris explores how success can trap your identity, stall your momentum, and create fear around moving toward the unknown. Chris reframes success as a signal - not a finish line - and challenges you to step settling for the comfort of a single win. Your greatest successes aren't behind you; they're waiting for the version of you who refuses to stop growing.

In thie episode of Winning... While Losing, host Chris Hansen, shares a powerful story from the gym that turns facing a simple deadlift into a life lesson about belief, discipline, and self-growth.  We all face moments when doubt feels heavier than the weight in front of us. But what if, instead of accepting "I can't," you challenged yourself to prove it? Chris dives intertwines fear, failure, and self-belief - exploring how proving you can't often becomes the path to realizing that you actually can.  Whether you're an athlete, leader, or anyone pushing through life's resistance, this episode will challenge your mindset and reignite your confidence to show up, commit, and lift beyond your limits.

We all imagine a fairy tale ending - in love, in sports, in our careers, and in life. The joy after pain. The calm after chaos. Happiness after the hard. But, what happens when the fairy tale doesn't show up the way we expected?  This episode of Winning... While Losing brings to light how waiting for someone or something to come into our lives to create the fairy tale often only keeps us losing in life, while playing an active role in our own story is what puts us on the path to winning.

Hafe you ever felt like you're living as more than one version of yourself? In this episdoe, Chris Hansen uses the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to explore, self-perception, and the emotional tension that comes from being seen - and misseen - in different ways. Just like one pattern inside a kaleidoscope can create many different reflections, we each show up in four version: who we truly are, who we think we are, who others believe we are, and who we think others think we are.  When these reflections don't align, we experience self-doubt, insecurity, and emotional exhaustion - the mental tug-of-war that keeps us stuck. But real peace doesn't come from chaning ourselves to match every reflection. It comes from grounding ourselves in our true identity and allowing the other versions to align around it.

The inability of Chris Hansen to do what he did before in the gym after seven months of recovering from a surgery made him feel weak. In this Winning... While Losing episode, Chris reflects on what made him feel weak and why blaming external forces keeps you powerless and how accepting weakness is an invitation to follow a path to ownership, strength, and growth.

In this powerful episode of Winning... While Losing, Chris Hansen shares a raw reflection on how life's lower moments can become the foundation or your greatest strength. Comparing the feeling of being choked out in jiu-jitsu to facing paralysis, betrayal, and personal loss, Chris explores how confronting your worset experiences can teach resilience, self-awareness, and confidence.  He breaks down how adversity strips you down to your core, forcing growth through confronting fear, discomfort, and vulnerability - and how learning to "appreciate the worst" is what truly makes you unstoppable.  If you've ever felt overwhelmed, discouraged, or trapped by life's challenges, this episode is your reminder that strength is forged in struggle.

Pain is a universal and personal experience that we will all experience. Even though it is such a common thing, most people don't understand it. Even those that study pain still have so much to learn. In this episode I provide an brief explanation of pain. Understanding pain can have a significant effect on how we perceive and experience pain.

A short while after being paralyzed, I made my way back into the gym. Since I wasnt' able to use my legs, I gravitated to the bench press. There was a lot of uncertainty with my ability, but I set a goal or 275 lbs and pushed forward. Where I ended up at 405 lbs is much further than what I thought I could do and in the process of achieving more, I learned a lot along the way.