Live Ready Founder and Personal Security Trainer Sam Rosenberg Releases Maslow’s Missing Rung Model

Rosenberg explains why successful business owners and executives still seek out personal security training.

WEXFORD, PA, UNITED STATES, October 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Live Ready, the personal security training firm founded by former U.S. Marine Corps officer Sam Rosenberg, has released Maslow’s Missing Rung, a model Rosenberg uses to explain why business owners who have succeeded in nearly every area of life still doubt they could protect themselves in a crisis.

Rosenberg, a personal security trainer whose former protection clients include Warren Buffett and Tom Cruise, presented the model during a recent appearance on the Million Dollar Flip Flops podcast with host Rodric Lenhart. According to Live Ready, the firm has trained tens of thousands of people and hundreds of organizations, from family businesses to Fortune 100 companies.

The model draws on the hierarchy of needs that psychologist Abraham Maslow published in 1943, which ranks human needs from food and shelter up through safety, belonging and esteem to self-actualization. Rosenberg says many of the most successful people he has worked with appear to have met nearly every level. In his experience, they live in safe neighborhoods, have strong relationships and have built successful businesses, yet they still seek out training.

Rosenberg spent years in close protection, the industry term for bodyguard work. He says most of his protection clients, many of them surrounded by security teams, still asked to learn how to protect themselves, often because they worried that everything they had built could be taken from them. In Rosenberg’s view, Maslow’s Missing Rung describes that gap: a safety need that wealth and outside protection do not fully meet.

“When you don’t have those skill sets, it’s like a missing rung on the ladder,” Rosenberg said during his appearance on the Million Dollar Flip Flops podcast. “You filled all the other pieces of the puzzle in, but there’s a lack of confidence internally that I can handle myself in a true crisis.”

Rosenberg believes the missing rung matters most for leaders. Under the Maslow’s Missing Rung model, he argues, a leader who has never prepared to handle a true emergency carries that uncertainty into every other crisis. “If you think about leadership in its most primal sense, what leadership is, is the ability to manage crisis,” he said.

According to Rosenberg, a leader who can manage fear, avoid freezing or panicking and keep making decisions under pressure becomes the person a team turns to. He said that next to a threat to someone’s family, business problems such as lawsuits seem small by comparison. Live Ready’s executive programs cover personal, family, home and travel security, and the firm also provides workplace safety training for organizations.

The model also helps explain why many adults, particularly men, are enrolling in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other hands-on training, Rosenberg said. In his view, the soft skills of reading people and situations matter more than physical technique. He noted that many problems begin when someone misreads a person, misreads a situation or mismanages it.

Rosenberg recommends a set sequence for closing Maslow’s Missing Rung. Students start with his book, move to online training that reinforces it and then pursue hands-on instruction with his team or another qualified instructor, a progression he says helps them separate effective training from programs that create false confidence.

Rosenberg served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer before entering close protection in 1996, and in 2003 he shifted to teaching individuals and organizations the same skills used to protect public figures. He is the author of three books, including Live Ready: A Guide to Protecting Yourself in an Uncertain World and The Traveler’s Guide to Personal Security, and holds a patent on the Response Pen.

More information about Maslow’s Missing Rung and Live Ready personal security training is available at www.liveready.co.

About Live Ready

Live Ready is a personal security training firm founded by Sam Rosenberg that provides preparedness, protective intelligence and threat assessment services for individuals, families and organizations. Through online courses, private instruction, executive retreats and corporate workshops, the firm teaches business owners, executives and parents how to recognize danger, avoid it and make sound decisions under pressure. Live Ready works with clients across North America, from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies.
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Sam Rosenberg
Live Ready
samr@livereadysolutions.com
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Written By: EIN Presswire