Creator Profile Avatar for John R. Miles
John R. Miles
Creator Profile Avatar for John R. Miles

John R. Miles

@john_r_miles • 691K total followers
John R. Miles is a best-selling author, a combat veteran, and the visionary behind the globally acclaimed Passion Struck® podcast, which has inspired millions to live with purpose and intention. A former U.S. Navy officer and Fortune 50 executive, John now dedicates his life to helping people of all ages discover their inherent worth and live more meaningful lives. His award-winning book, Passion Struck, and his thought leadership in intentional behavior change have earned him international recognition. You Matter, Luma is John’s first children’s book, born from his own childhood experiences with emotional adversity and a lifelong belief in the power of mattering. Through heartfelt storytelling, John empowers young readers to embrace who they are and know that they truly matter. He lives in Tampa, Florida, where he continues writing, podcasting, and speaking to audiences around the world.
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Most people do not disappear suddenly. They slowly learn to trade authenticity for usefulness. Over time, many begin organizing their lives around performance, productivity, and survival while quietly losing the feeling that who they are matters beyond what they provide. That is the hidden cost of modern life: visibility without genuine connection. When people stop feeling seen, valued, and needed, something inside them contracts. But when people experience real acknowledgment, emotional safety, and human significance, they expand again. That is the heart of The Mattering Effect. Pre-order now: [www.matteringeffect.com] #TheMatteringEffect #JohnRMiles #Mattering #Belonging #HumanConnection #MentalHealth #EmotionalHealth #PurposeDrivenLife #IntentionalLiving #PassionStruck
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1 mth
I recently had the opportunity to appear on BLOOM Tampa Bay’s daily health and lifestyle show on WFLA News Channel 8, hosted by the wonderful Amber Freeman. BLOOM focuses on the topics that shape how we live—health, wellness, relationships, mental well-being, and the everyday choices that help us grow into healthier and more fulfilled lives. It was the perfect setting to talk about the message behind You Matter, Luma. At its heart, this book is about a simple truth many people forget: every person matters. When children understand their value and the ripple effect of kindness, they begin to see how their actions can change the world around them. I’m grateful to Amber and the BLOOM team for creating a space where conversations about well-being, purpose, and emotional health can reach families across the community. These conversations matter—especially for the next generation. Thank you for helping us spread the message that **you matter… and the kindness you share matters too.**
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4 mths
BIG NEWS! Passion Struck just won the Gold Stevie Award for Best Business Book at the 2025 American Business Awards!⁣ ⁣ This isn’t just a win for the book—it’s a win for everyone committed to living with purpose, igniting their potential, and making what truly matters, matter most.⁣ ⁣ Thank you to every reader, supporter, and believer in this mission. This is only the beginning. 🔥 ⁣ #PassionStruck #StevieAwards #BestBusinessBook #PurposeDriven #Leadership #PersonalGrowth
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1 yr

Latest posts

Some of the hardest battles I’ve fought have been the ones no one else could see. The quiet moments in front of the mirror, the stories I’ve told myself about my body, the belief that if I could just change something—lose the weight, look stronger, stay disciplined enough—then maybe I’d finally feel more at peace. But this conversation with Whitney Otto challenged me in a way I didn’t expect. Instead of asking what needs fixing, she invited me to ask what my discomfort might be trying to tell me. That landed deeply. Because when I look back, so much of my self-criticism was never really about my body. It was about fear, pressure, old wounds, and the need to feel like I belonged. What I’m learning now is that healing starts when I stop treating myself like a problem to solve and start meeting myself with curiosity and compassion. And that changes far more than the reflection staring back at me. #JohnRMiles #WhitneyOtto #PassionStruck #BodyImageHealing #SelfCompassion #EmotionalHealin
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4 days
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to confuse adaptation with identity. There were seasons in my life where becoming more disciplined, more reliable, more productive felt like growth, and in many ways it was. Those parts of me helped me build a career, carry responsibility, and navigate some incredibly demanding chapters. But looking back, I can also see how some of those same adaptations slowly became the lens through which I understood myself. What started as a way of meeting life became the way I lived it. And somewhere in that process, I stopped asking whether the person I was becoming was actually me, or simply the version of me that life required. I think that’s one of the hardest realizations in adulthood: you can build a life that works and still feel strangely absent from it. You can be needed, respected, and successful, while carrying this quiet sense that some essential part of you has gone unvisited for years. That’s the kind of disconnection I’ve been exp
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5 days
Most leaders think appreciation is obvious. They assume their people know they’re valued because they feel it internally. But that’s the trap. People don’t experience what we feel. They experience what we make visible. That’s why generic praise rarely lands. “Good job” may acknowledge effort, but it doesn’t explain what was seen, what mattered, or why it mattered. And without that specificity, recognition often feels interchangeable. What Adrian Gostick said in this conversation stayed with me: the difference between vague appreciation and meaningful recognition is the difference between being noticed and being understood. When someone says, “Thank you for staying late last night. You took ownership when the team needed it most,” something shifts. Not because the words are complicated, but because they create evidence. Evidence that your contribution registered. Evidence that what you gave mattered. And that changes how people carry their work. The real leadership challenge isn’
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1 wk
There comes a point in life when you begin to realize that some of the qualities you’ve relied on most heavily were never really chosen; they were built. Built in moments when you needed to protect yourself, prove yourself, or make sense of a world that felt uncertain. What’s humbling is recognizing that those strategies may have been necessary once, but they were never meant to become the architecture of your future. The version of me that learned how to survive taught me endurance, discipline, and how to keep moving forward, but it also taught me how to stay guarded, how to confuse achievement with worth, and how to believe that being needed was the same as being valued. Growth has been learning that survival and self-leadership are not the same thing. One keeps you safe; the other asks you to be present, honest, and open enough to build a life that is shaped less by fear and more by intention. #PassionStruck #HealingJourney #SelfAwareness #EmotionalGrowth #PersonalDevelopment #joh
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1 wk
A lot of us think change has to look dramatic. Quit the job. Move cities. Blow up your whole life and start over. But most of the time, that’s not how it begins. It starts smaller than that. Way smaller. A class you almost didn’t sign up for. A hobby you stopped making time for. An hour where you do something that has nothing to do with being productive, impressive, or useful to anyone else. That’s what Spencer West talks about here, and it hit me because so many of us have built lives around performance so early that we don’t even know what play feels like anymore. Somewhere along the way, we started measuring our worth by how efficient we are, how busy we are, how much we can carry. And then one day someone asks, “What do you actually like to do?” and the answer feels harder than it should. That’s usually the signal. Not that something is broken, but that some part of you has been waiting a long time to be heard again. Sometimes the next step isn’t a leap. Sometimes it’s just
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1 wk
Some of the heaviest things I’ve carried in my life weren’t visible to anyone else. The need to achieve. The instinct to stay guarded. The pressure to always be the one holding it together. For a long time, I thought those things were proof of strength. I thought they were simply part of who I was. But over time, I began to understand something deeper: a lot of what we call personality is often just protection. That’s why putting the backpack down is very different from throwing it away. Healing isn’t about pretending your past didn’t shape you. It’s about recognizing that the strategies you built to survive were necessary once, but they may not be necessary now. The goal isn’t to erase them. It’s to understand them well enough that you can decide when to carry them and when to let them rest. There’s compassion in that distinction. Because the backpack tells the story of how you made it through. But it doesn’t have to determine how you move forward. Sometimes growth begins with
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2 wks
Something Adam Lane Smith said in this conversation stayed with me because it cuts right to the heart of how so many of us move through relationships. When you carry this deep belief that you’re hard to love, you start making decisions around preserving connection at all costs. You keep the peace, soften your truth, and shape yourself around what feels safest, and over time, that can look so much like love that you stop seeing the difference. What Adam articulated so well is that a lot of this starts in the nervous system. If your body has learned that closeness is unstable or conditional, then your decisions will naturally orbit around avoiding loss. The work isn’t just changing your thoughts; it’s learning how to calm your body enough to make decisions from your values instead of your fear. That shift is where self-respect begins, and I’ve found that the stronger that self-respect becomes, the less your life is organized around who might leave and the more around who you’re becomin
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2 wks
For a long time, I believed that achievement was the clearest path to significance. If I worked hard enough, built enough, or proved enough, maybe I would finally feel secure in my place. But over time, I’ve come to see that beneath so many of our pursuits lies a quieter and far more human question: Do I matter? It shapes more of our lives than we realize. The work we chase. The relationships we hold onto. The rooms we fight to stay inside. And maybe the deepest truth is this: achievement can tell us how we’re doing, but it can never fully answer whether we belong. That answer has always lived somewhere deeper, in the places where we are seen, known, and valued for who we are, not just for what we produce. #Purpose #IntentionalLiving #EmotionalHealth #PassionStruck #JohnRMiles #Mattering
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2 wks
One of the hardest things to recognize in life is that we often confuse what feels familiar with what is actually healthy. In this conversation with Kati Morton, we explored how many of the relationship patterns we repeat in adulthood are shaped long before we are conscious of them. As children, we build an internal blueprint for love, trust, and connection based on what we experience at home. Those early experiences become our reference point, and over time they can quietly shape the people we choose and the dynamics we tolerate. What struck me most in this part of the conversation was Kati’s honesty about realizing she kept choosing partners who mirrored the same emotional inconsistency she experienced growing up with her father. Not because that was what she wanted, but because it was what her nervous system understood. That insight stays with me because it explains so much about human behavior. We often think our repeated choices are random or that they reveal something broken i
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3 wks
What stayed with me most from this conversation with Marcus Buckingham is how simple and how confronting his insight is: when people describe the best teams, leaders, and companies they’ve experienced, they don’t say they were efficient or satisfying. They say they loved them. That completely changes how we think about leadership because it shifts the question from “How do I get better performance?” to “What kind of experience am I creating for the people around me?” Marcus makes the case that love isn’t soft. It’s one of the strongest drivers of loyalty, trust, resilience, and growth. And if that’s true, then designing better human experiences may be the most important work any leader can do. This conversation genuinely changed how I think about business. #Leadership #MarcusBuckingham #PassionStruck #HumanFlourishing #CompanyCulture #BusinessGrowth #DesignLoveIn
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3 wks
What if the reason so many people feel lost has nothing to do with motivation, success, or purpose? What if they've simply lost the narrative of their lives? In this powerful conversation, Greg McKeown explains that many of us are navigating life like sailors in the middle of the ocean, disconnected from the story that once gave us direction, meaning, and a sense of who we are. Yet the insight that struck me most was even deeper. For generations, we've been taught to understand ourselves by looking inward. We analyze our thoughts, examine our feelings, and search for answers within. While self-reflection matters, Greg argues that the human mind was never designed to exist in isolation. We discover who we are through connection. We understand ourselves through understanding others. We find meaning through relationships, and we regain our bearings when we are truly seen, heard, and understood. If you've ever felt disconnected from yourself, this conversation may help explain why. T
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4 wks
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