Seven's Playbook is the personal-development podcast from Sevenfold Studios, hosted by Joel. It sticks close to habits, goals and plans, and to what happens when they stall. Episodes open with the words 'we are live' and name the topic straight away. A running series is The Habit Loop, which Joel calls his own rendition of the ABCs of building healthy habits and describes as a journey through the year. The letters sit in the titles: '(B)uilding Better Plans', '(C)onsistently Take Action', '(D)eliberately Evaluate Progress', '(E)mbrace Adjustments' and '(E)mbrace Change'. 'Bouncing Back' works as a checkpoint; he calls it a habit recap. The ideas are modest and repeatable. On planning, he pushes the goal of getting one percent better and warns against being intimidated by the size of a goal. He pictures the first run on a treadmill as the moment past failures start to become irrelevant. On consistency, he measures progress in weeks rather than days, grading each week from A to F, with an A-plus next to impossible and anything less than an A still acceptable. A day that goes nowhere simply gets charged to the game. At the year's halfway mark in July, he argues that discipline rather than mood should drive action, and that showing up for a goal set months earlier is all it takes. He backs it with a difficult period at work when he did not know exactly what was going on. The episode on adjustments uses the example of someone who moved from South Africa, where he mostly drove, to somewhere with trains, walking everywhere and far pricier haircuts. The point is that the discomfort is real, and the sooner it is embraced the better life gets. The most candid material is about his own year. Starting consulting work and putting in extra hours left him drained, goals from the first six months slipped, and he missed a month of the podcast and fell behind on LinkedIn articles. His conclusion was that change has to be planned for, right down to the environment around it. In 'Bouncing Back' he turns that honesty outward, asking what goals have been put off and what the remaining two months of the year could still change. The delivery is conversational and loose, with self-corrections, slang and asides left in. Episodes close with a pointer to Instagram and LinkedIn and the sign-off 'keep doing the most with the most high'.