This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Dr. Miriam Meckel - award-winning journalist, professor of communication management at the University of St. Gallen, and founder of ada learning. We explore a burnout that became a life-altering depression, the vulnerability of turning her private writing into her bestselling book Letter to My Life, and why she believes embodied experience - not intelligence - is what separates us from machines.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Next week I am taking a short break, I will be back with episode #185 the week after.

Take care, Mark

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1. My Weekly Reflection

What if the point of your existence is simply to experience whatever it is you experience in any given moment?

At different points in this week’s conversation, Miriam suggests what AI can’t replicate:

“It’s the embodied experience that we share as human beings - but we don’t share it in the sense that I know how it feels for you to embrace a tree. I can imagine it might feel similar to what I feel when I do it, but I don’t know. I will never know. I will never be able to step into your consciousness and feel how Mark feels this.”

It brings to mind what my guest, Ralf Wetzel, said last week about his first therapy session. He was showing the outside world something different from the inside and at one point his therapist said to him:

“Ralf, don’t tell me the facts, tell me how you feel. Stop reporting.”

He was initially exasperated by this, as he thought he was already sharing everything. This was uncannily similar to my first therapy session when I used to live in London:

“How do you feel?”

I began to explain my thoughts.

“Sorry to interrupt, I asked how do you feel?”

I started again, telling her of my interpretation of an experience that prompted me to start therapy.

She interrupted again…

After the third time she interrupted me she said as plainly as she could, “How do you feel, are you happy, sad, angry?”

I didn’t know. I sat in silence for a moment, then simply said, “I am sad.”

Over the last decade I have continued to fine tune my capacity to simply share whatever it is my experience is with other people. I don’t mean some wild, undiscerning disclosure, irrespective of time, context, and place.

But at the very least a nod to it.

Like Miriam alludes to in the interview, I find that articulating an experience in the moment seems particularly important.

It builds a strange type of resilience in me. The act of sharing my specific human experience and being with it myself.

This quote from a past guest, Adam Mastroianni, has remained close to my thoughts since I interviewed him last year:

“It hollows people out, pretending that something is important that you don’t think is important, a lot of us have the capacity to do that for a long time, but it takes such a psychic toll.”

Right now I am bewildered with my financial situation in life, and when I don’t hide that from myself or others, it very quickly falls into the sense of it being another experience. Just another experience.

I feel so much of what we consider a problem is our reaction to the situation and not simply the circumstance itself.

In this week’s interview Miriam reflected on the decision to publish her writings from the period of a burnout and depression, against the advice of many people in her circle at the time.

She eventually came to the conclusion that sharing it was a public statement: “This is me and I am not capable of performing all the time, so you have to accept that or you will not see me or get all of me.”

There is a considerable relief I find in not maintaining the image so much and more concentrating on the experience. Not only does it leave us more connected with ourselves and who we are, it also creates an abundance of connection with people around us.

If my focus is more on cohering what is happening internally and externally, and acknowledging my experiences, it profoundly changes my sense of peace. I find it easy to feel like I am simply fulfilling my role in this world.

And my experience of this peace seems consistent irrespective of outcomes.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there a relationship in your life that could benefit from you sharing more of how you feel rather than merely stating the facts?

2. Is there something you are presently pretending in your life that is taking a psychic toll on you?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

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4. Full Episode - Resting in the Core of My Identity with Dr. Miriam Meckel - What is a Good Life? #184

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dr. Miriam Meckel below.

(Due to some technical difficulties on my side, the full video is not available this week, clips and shorts are still available.)

For Apple podcast click here.

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About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Ralf Wetzel - a leadership scholar who has taught at leading European business schools, and a clown and mask performer whose solo show Absolutely Reliable! has played the Edinburgh Fringe. We explore what it means to have a good relationship with fear, tracing Ralf's path from a childhood under surveillance in communist East Germany to the unexpected places he found relief - among them, a plastic clown nose.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Ralf was standing in front of a class of senior-level bankers - twenty-five of them, seven years into his role at the school. Half of them just got up and left. He had no idea what to do next.

He stopped the class, closed the door, took a clown nose out of his bag, put it on, and inhaled with his eyes closed. A couple of seconds fully alone. Then some clarity came.

He invited the class back in and asked what they thought was happening. They said what he was offering didn’t feel useful to them - the connection between them was broken.

So he asked: “Do you have experience of your own relationships with clients breaking down?”

Silence.

Then one man with grey hair, early fifties, said, “Yeah, those were the most horrible moments in my professional career.” They spent the rest of the session exploring that breakdown, and what it meant for their own work.

In a nutshell, this defines much of my perspective on life.

Imagine how excruciating it would have been to listen to Ralf in that class after the break if he had just ploughed ahead and told them why what they were doing was actually the right way, why it was applicable, and what they might not be getting.

Can you recall times where you have done your own version of that? Whether at work, with a loved one, or while a new relationship is forming.

A great superpower with regard to human connection is being able to acknowledge what is occurring right now. The significance of sharing a distant life story, even if personal, pales in comparison to the impact of being able to say, ‘This is what I think, feel, and see in this moment,’ and asking the other person: ‘What do you see?’

If there is barely a hint of defensiveness in what you notice and share, you would be amazed at what conversations unfold from there.

Even if what you have shared involves accountability for how you have messed up, it is highly unlikely the other person won’t be able to relate on some level. A couple of episodes back, Kadam Adam Starr referenced the significance of knowing yourself in knowing others. When you know your own experience of life so intimately, you know the same basic experience of so many others too.

When we realise this, it picks apart one of the great myths of our time: that in order to really connect with another human, you must develop yourself in several areas first.

Think about that - the thing humans have done naturally for millennia now apparently requires self-improvement first. I see it very differently. It is more about dropping the distortion and resisting the urge to make up stories to save face.

It is a strange trade we are making, hiding ourselves and then sacrificing the possibility of a real connection right now.

Get back to the point of where we are right now. Who you are in this very moment. It is always available to us. How could we possibly hope to connect with someone if not from there?

Everything else is just smokescreens and performance, and a watered-down version of what connection can be.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Was there a time where acknowledging everything as it was led to a greater connection between you and another?

2. Can you recall a moment where not acknowledging things as they were led to a connection deteriorating further?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

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4. Full Episode - When Fear Becomes My Partner with Ralf Wetzel - What is a Good Life? #183

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Ralf Wetzel below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Lior Steinberg - urban planner, co-founder of Humankind and author of The Car That Wanted to Be a Bike. We explore why so many cities remain trapped in car-centric design decades after urbanist Jane Jacobs first warned against it. It is a thought-provoking conversation on how often change feels impossible until it is here.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

It was 40°C for two days in a row here in Berlin the weekend before last. This conversation with Lior was recorded during the heatwave of that week.

Even by Irish standards, I have a strong aversion to the heat. People in my neighbourhood in Berlin, in winter, will often see me walk around in a T-shirt as temperatures approach freezing.

So, through those particular eyes, it is not very surprising that I felt I was pre-witnessing an end-of-days-type scenario.

My daughter and I went to my local ice-cream shop at one point, and even though we were under the shade of a parasol, my legs felt like they were being cooked from the heat of the concrete.

As we made our way home, I saw only a handful of pedestrians in the distance on what is usually a packed street, maybe mirages.

Indoors, our usually cool apartment didn’t dip under 30°C for that weekend. Lying around in my boxers and intermittently spraying my body with water became the norm.

Earlier that same week, when the temperatures were relatively more tolerable, in the mid-30s, I was cycling across the city. I was on the bike lane next to a busy road in the centre of Berlin. I could feel the beads of sweat roll down my back, the dryness in my mouth even though I was hydrated.

The heat pounding down from the sun, bouncing off the cars, up from the asphalt.

Then I cycled for a few seconds through a pocket of trees. The air cooled, the temperature dropped noticeably, and I could breathe more easily.

And then, after a few more rotations of my pedals, I was once more back into the concrete oven.

“There is no air-con that does such a good job. There is no technology that will make our cities cooler than planting trees.” - Lior Steinberg

It brought back to mind a vision I semi-regularly have of a major European city. To any reasonable eye, this is it; our existence here is coming to its end.

There is a red burning around us, bodies on the ground, people thirsty with no water in sight, and there is a man in a suit, holding a white board and a message above his head, urging us not to lose hope, to remain calm:

GDP is at 5%

If that day does come, it will be tragic, and absurd, that perhaps we could have just planted more trees and not cut so many down.

In the interview, Lior points to us being trapped in a car-centric system that prioritises the needs of cars over what helps humans flourish. Without humans at the centre of those designs, we experience loneliness even while surrounded by millions of people.

More widely, we prioritise accumulation over what we actually need.

We need air to breathe, yet we still contribute to deforestation and pour plastic into our waters and poison plankton - all to maintain economic edges. Logic and rationality left the building a long time ago, even though we still dress our decisions up in that language.

However, despite the failures that Lior has faced in what he promotes, he retains some hope for us. The cigarette ban in many public spaces is one of them. There was a time this would have seemed unthinkable - when we could smoke on planes, when Hollywood stars and footballers were promoting cigarettes on TV - and yet one day, you couldn’t even smoke in a bar.

The other source of hope - and this one comes at a terrible cost:

“Crisis will make us change our habits. We will not be able to continue to do things the way we do.” - Lior Steinberg

Crisis carries its own potency for us personally too.

Throughout all these interviews, one particular moment stays close to my mind. It is of a prisoner in a rehab and recovery wing, telling his fellow inmates about hitting rock bottom, saying that he just doesn’t know why he is here in this world. Then a young man, with little interest in recovery, suggested to him that the very thing he was doing was his reason or purpose in life.

Change can come in unexpected moments.

Another interview moment comes to mind. A man who smoked from his late teens to his early forties quit last year, and it was easier than he expected. It came from a conversation with his two youngest children. They were talking about the environment, about things people do that harm themselves. And they asked a very simple question: if you’re talking about that, why do you still smoke?

He didn’t have an answer. Something then simply shifted.

I remember quitting booze for a time when a psychologist initially mentioned it to me as a helpful part of the process while I was in therapy. I couldn’t imagine not drinking on St. Stephen’s Day (the day after Christmas) with my oldest friends. I recall even saying that out loud to her: “What about Stephen’s Day?” Like it was a reasonable objection to something that was causing more suffering in my life.

While I might have the odd glass of wine every few months now, the thought of a rake of pints would make me wince.

We are a strange creature. I have no moral to any of this. Mainly just confusion.

However, before you continue to berate yourself for all your self-help work not taking you to a disciplined utopia, or your mental understandings not playing out into changed life patterns, two things:

1. We live in systems that are getting in the way of simple necessary responses.

2. You have no idea when change is coming.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What is the most obvious, simple, and accessible thing you could regularly do to benefit your life that you are not presently doing?

2. Is there a radical change to make in your life that seems almost unimaginable to you right now?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Cities That Make Us Happier with Lior Steinberg - What is a Good Life? #182

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Lior Steinberg below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Kadam Adam Starr - international teacher of meditation and Buddhism for over 20 years and the principal teacher at Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre. It is a conversation about self-knowledge, the attention economy, meeting difficult people with friendship rather than judgment, and the realisation that a good life may come down to how we choose to show up each day.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“When we get to know ourself, what we struggle with, our potential, we quite naturally understand where everyone else is at.” - Kadam Adam Starr

Throughout these interviews, I keep finding moments that strike me as a particularly healthy way of meeting the world. Adam’s is one of them, and it also pokes at one of my great fascinations: why has all the inner work we now have access to seemingly done so little to make us happier or more content?

I’ve had a number of experiences, on retreats, at gatherings, in forums, where people assume they’re collectively doing it differently to the culture they’re criticising, and yet to me it has felt like a different version of the same thing. So much of our inner-development seems rooted in the very thing we claim to be moving beyond - not only the wish to feel more content but the desire to be special, to be better than others. The game changes, but the desire underneath stays the same. Competition in a new outfit.

Adam’s perspective here is rather beautiful. If you sit with yourself long enough - really acknowledging both what you struggle with and the potential you carry - it becomes much easier to have compassion for yourself, and then for everyone else. When you stop looking away from what you actually are, you start to see how nuanced a being you are: full of competing desires and values, peace and busy-ness, love and judgement.

And once you’ve sat with that in yourself, you begin to meet other people who are simply in the same place. Timing may have put a different variation on it, but it’s largely the same struggle.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when someone confides a present struggle to me, I break into a spontaneous laugh - it’s all so familiar. As was the hope or expectation that we were going to escape the human experience in a given moment.

There’s a lovely link between what Adam is describing and several past guests in this series. Cormac Russell spoke about the thresholds of self-help - how useful it is up to a point, and how easily it tips into self-obsession if your attention doesn’t also expand outwards. Sit with yourself long enough and compassion becomes hard to withhold; the same is true of the attention we turn toward others.

Last week, Dr. Karen Jacob pointed to the importance of recognising anger in yourself, and then neither demonising it nor judging it so harshly in others. This week, Adam suggests that “a certain mental stability comes from being in touch with the reality of your own life.”

And it works both ways. In recognising our struggles, we often recognise the significant potential we hold for love and compassion too. That echoes something Bruce Anderson shared, his belief that our gift often emerges from our deepest wound:

“The indigenous idea is that you come into the world with your gifts and you encounter struggle. And it’s not until you encounter the struggle that the gift is cracked open and made available to you. So I have to see the person sleeping next to the dumpster as an incredibly gifted person because of the trauma that they have experienced in their life.”

Taken together, these perspectives tell me something I keep coming back to. Your practice, your streaks, your hours on a meditation cushion mean very little if your relationship with people doesn’t markedly shift. If it doesn’t markedly shift how you see other people.

Or, as Steven D’Souza put it: “I grow in my spirituality when I grow in my humanity.”

2. This Week’s Questions

1. How have your own struggles helped you to be more compassionate to others?

2. When has your inner work tipped into self-obsession rather than connecting you to others?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Finding Peace Within Myself with Kdam Adam Starr - What is a Good Life? #181

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kadam Adam Starr below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Karen L. Jacob, PhD - clinical psychologist, Program Director of the Gunderson Residence at McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. She shares how a father's dedication shaped her need for meaningful work, how four years of uncertainty after college turned out to be the most formative of her life, and how a chance encounter with a patient led her to specialising in borderline personality disorder.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Figuring out what you don’t want is part of the process.

This is a lesson that continues to arise from all these interviews, as Karen’s story so clearly demonstrates.

She recalled spending four years before graduate school trying several things that weren’t really a fit. She watched her friends begin climbing the corporate ladder while she pursued different paths and waited tables on weekends to pay the bills. For her, this was a period of considerable personal growth, which was also agonising at times. She felt lost.

We can often feel like we are stuck or lost by not knowing what we want, to the point that we end up discounting the significance of understanding what we don’t want.

We can also over-inflate the importance of thinking we know what we want in theory - you have to try it out. I recall interviewing a partner at a consultancy firm who was also a yoga instructor. He harboured hopes of transitioning into yoga full-time until he went through the process of organising a handful of retreats and realised what the life of someone living that profession entailed beyond the image he had of it.

None of this is wasted effort; it is all part of the process of refining what might be meaningful and realistic. It makes life more of an experiment rather than a matter of winning and failing.

Meaningful work rarely arrives the way you expect it to.

Karen didn’t seek out Borderline Personality Disorder as something to specialise in. In fact, it was considered to be a particularly challenging area to work in when she began her career, and she initially steered herself away from it. It was when working in a department that specialised in diabetes that she crossed paths again with a client with BPD, and it all began from there.

I once interviewed a therapist and best-selling author who tried to be a priest, a college professor, and a musician. This wasn’t a path he could ever have predicted. I recall a senior business executive telling me that she never saw a five-year plan come to fruition. This is not to say we shouldn’t plan, but rather that there is an element of discovery in life that is beyond our control - more like a conversation with life than a determination.

The way you show up matters too.

Even work that feels meaningful can become less so depending on how we engage with it. Conversely, work that isn’t a perfect fit can still teach us something.

Karen mentions how her own realisations about parenting and letting go of control affected her work. How once she was deeply invested in the outcome, and how learning to step back and let other people own the process was hugely impactful on her work and continued to make it meaningful in new ways.

I recently interviewed a meditation teacher who suggested to me that meaning for him was derived from how present he was when engaging with another human being and situation. Just like the conversation he was engaged in with me and the walk he was scheduled to go on afterwards with a friend.

Even situations we no longer wish to be in can reveal something about who we are, what matters to us, and where we might need to go next.

If you are currently in one of those moments you consider yourself to be stuck or lost, perhaps you are really in a moment of understanding more of yourself before the next move becomes clearer.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there a period in your life when you felt completely lost, only to later realise it was part of your process?

2. How important is it to you that your work feels meaningful?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Art of a Meaningful Life with Karen L. Jacob, PhD - What is a Good Life? #180

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Karen L. Jacob, PhD below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeld - Chairman of Umeå Kallbad and Head of Nature for People at Rewilding Sweden. He shares how his father's death became a turning point, how cold water swimming became a doorway back into his body, and how a small group of friends turned a Sunday morning dip into a movement.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“I didn’t even realise there were seasons before I left London.”

At one point in Dan’s life he was working in the restaurant industry and he would frequently work 80 and 90 hour weeks. When other restauranteurs would come to his establishment for lunch, he would scoff at the notion that someone needed a lunch break.

A pint of wine, two servings in one plastic cup, in a late night dive bar was his first drink after work and he was smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. So the almost daily cycle went.

And as the path predictably goes, he went on to move to the countryside in northern Sweden, ended up working with a rewilding group to help restore our relationship with the living world, and he also recently had a podium finish at the Ice Swimming World Cup.

It is very easy to hold up both of those images as night and day, as a dichotomy. But I don’t see it that way. Nor do I see it as linearly bad and now good. There will be ups and downs continually regardless of the stories we tell.

What I am more interested in, from interviewing 300+ people around this question, is how life flows in really unpredictable ways. Sometimes there are clear turning points, other times it drifts, sometimes our repeated intentions compound.

For Dan it was a moment at his Dad’s funeral, when his father’s best friend in a tender moment between them cupped his belly and lovingly and quietly said to “look out for that, son.” It reignited his love for the water and swimming. And took his life in directions he said he could never have imagined.

The interesting thing for me is not the finality of it, but how it will keep moving.

But how nice it is to sit by the roadside for a moment and consider you are somewhere you could not have dreamed of at one point. I do this frequently with myself and in conversation with friends. It feels important to acknowledge.

Last month I had an exhibition, from this project, on display at a forum in Athens. As I stood between the pieces and looked around at the walls they were hanging on, considering my experience in finance, I had a moment of “how did I get here?” Financial precarity and all.

I finished a book last month, once again from this project, that filled me with a deep contentment as I gazed out at my neighbourhood from my office desk. I have been trying to write some version of it for three years, a mixture of relief and feeling full. It has also provided me with several uneasy moments since of how exactly do I publish it.

I had another moment with my wife this week where our child was crying loudly and there were a few frosty exchanges and curtness between us as we tended to Ava. I was amazed by how quickly we found a way for our hearts to open between us after they appeared to close just moments before.

How am I a part of a healthy relationship of 10 years given I often felt like a guarded, insecure wreck in past relationships?

I think the temptation with our lives is to grade the transitions and changes as bad or good, as problem and solution, as stuck and complete.

Where we sacrifice so much of now with the promise of something different. The ends justify the means rather than attending to life as it is.

As Dan points to in the conversation, even his wellness practices became ways to quash certain feelings rather than let them linger.

We attempt to live through winter solely by wishing and dreaming of summer. The winter will shape us every bit as much the summer does if we let it.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there an aspect of your life that at one point you could only dream of, that you haven’t fully acknowledged?

2. Is there something you need to accept as part of your life even if it is simply difficult?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Trust, Water & Rewilding with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeldt - What is a Good Life? #179

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeld below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I'm reflecting on a conversation with Lucinda Millward - founder of The Baskerville Project, whose work brings the body and nervous system into collective inquiry. We explore what it costs to speak our truth - and why so many of us have learned not to. From the paradox of using other people's words to say what we cannot otherwise say, to why courage literally means to reveal one's heart.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

I open every interview with the same question and close with the same one. Everything in between is a completely organic conversation. It requires my complete attention to what is happening right now, otherwise I have nothing else to work with.

The interview would collapse, like taking a cake out of the oven before it has set.

The significance of this attention in conversation has been one of the biggest discoveries of my life.

“Keep talking I am listening” as someone checks their phone in front of me.

I have grown accustomed to stop talking and telling whoever I am with that I can wait. That they can’t possibly tend to both and do them well at the same time.

To have several moments in my day where I get to look into the eyes of a real and unguarded human as they look back into mine is life changing.

I have often put this lack of attention down to distraction and self-interest.

But Lucinda offered a perspective that adds another layer to it:

“If we are really going to listen to someone, really listen, then we consent to being altered by them. And that’s scary.”

It’s true.

If we spend time together in a totally present and unguarded way, I will be changed by you. You will be changed by me.

That is both a scary and exhilarating thought.

But it is happening anyway.

In the interview, Lucinda references an idea from Dave Snowden on identity. He suggests that identity is an emergent property defined by context, relationships, and the stories we share within a community.

Throughout this project of interviewing more than 300 people around this question, I don’t know where some of my thoughts and ideas begin or end. Sometimes I only realise months after that I have adopted a perspective or a way of living from another guest. I don’t sit down and intend to do so, it just happens.

We like to imagine ourselves as independent and self-determined. Yet we are constantly being shaped by one another.

There is a trade-off in how much we are willing to let go of control and how much we want to feel connection.

As Lucinda suggests, when we are in a moment where we can look deeply into the eyes of another, even in silence, then there is no armour or place to hide. For her, that is where she feels most alive and real.

These moments are much closer than we think, often just a moment of attention or a meaningful question away.

Like: “What is a good life for you?”

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Who do you feel most unguarded when speaking to?

2. In whose presence do you attempt to control the conversation the most?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Courage To Be Heard with Lucinda Millward - What is a Good Life? #178

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Lucinda Millward below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week I’m reflecting on my conversation with Sam Smith. Sam sees life as a big old experiment. He used to play professional rugby, before starting a few businesses. Last year he wrote his first book, The Door Was Never Locked. In this conversation, we explore identity and the stories we carry without questioning. If you are navigating any big life transitions right now, this conversation will be particularly helpful.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

When Sam came off the rugby field on a Sunday as a 13-year-old, it was the point of the week where his parents looked the happiest. The rest of those Sundays would take on a really light and fun quality.

He internalised this as: when he is good at sport, it makes his parents happy.

When he was coming out of rugby, whilst he knew they loved him, there was also a real fear of: but they’ve made so many sacrifices and this makes them happy.

A coach he was working with invited him to go and speak to his parents about that. In response, his mum said, “My goodness, Sam, the reason we were so happy on a Sunday when you walked off the pitch was that it was the first point in the week that you looked the happiest.”

It left a real impression on Sam.

“It was this incredible moment for me to see that how wildly wrong we can interpret a look or a word or anything. They were happy because I was happy, and that had always been the case. Yet I’d carried a very different story for a long time.”

There are two things that this story stirred in me.

Firstly, throughout these 300+ interviews, many people have noted the significance of when their attention moves beyond their own personal inquiry and personal sensations to the outside world, nature, and other people’s experiences.

I recall one woman who was stuck in a heavy conversation right up until the point she viewed the Grand Canyon for the first time - her whole breath left her body and she just broke into tears. The relief of her smallness in the context of this larger existence was freeing.

There is something about an outward gaze with our attention that moves us away from both being the centre of the world and feeling the weight of the world.

It allows us to feel more compassion for ourselves and others. Much of what we experience as someone doing something to us is often just the unavoidable mess of being human. Nobody can fully escape this mess.

Secondly, it just made me think of the importance of getting to know your parents intimately. Sam joked that we forget sometimes that they had a life and a story before we existed.

It’s easy to view our parents primarily through the impact they had on us, rather than as people shaped by their own histories, fears, and limitations.

Or that they, like us, can make bad decisions and are prone to anxiety, struggle, and stress at times.

Much like the woman who, standing before the Grand Canyon, momentarily lost her position as the centre of the universe, I find it liberating to widen the scope of my story and become curious about my parents’ lives.

What was their childhood like, how were they as teens, how was the transition into parenthood? What were the highs and lows of their lives? When were they happiest? When were they most afraid? What are they most proud of and what do they regret?

There can be plenty of reasons why questions like these aren’t discussed when we are younger. But as an adult, I must say it is quite relieving and connecting to hear much more context.

I worry sometimes that much of our self-inquiry is fixated on ourselves almost in isolation from the people and world around us. That while our understanding of ourselves becomes much more nuanced and hopefully compassionate to our own humanity, that we don’t extend that to others.

There is something very sad and isolating about all this inquiry if we don’t look out with the same quality of attention.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What story are you presently telling yourself that might not be true?

2. What reminds you that you are not the main character in the world’s unfolding drama?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Complicated Locks, Simple Keys with Sam Smith - What is a Good Life? #177

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Sam Smith below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week I’m reflecting on my conversation with Doug Skoke - Founder & CEO of LFG NOW!, a boutique executive search firm. What begins as a question about why dogs are so emotionally regulating opens into something much wider - grief, crisis, therapy, love, acceptance, and what it actually means to lift others up. It is a real gem of a conversation.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

One of my favourite places to be is between my sleeping dog and sleeping toddler on a midday nap.

Watching diaphragms rise and fall. Inhales. Exhales.

Occasional movements of limbs and light snores from my dog. It is easy to get intoxicated.

On two separate occasions, after both their arrivals, my wife halted me in my tracks. I was waxing lyrical about them being in my life, specifically them.

A few months after we collected Alma from a shelter, I mentioned that I was so glad that the sequence of events unfolded as they did, so that we ended up with her.

To which my wife responded, “Do you think had we picked any other dog, you would not have ended up loving that dog too?”

Fair enough.

A few months after Ava was born, a similar exchange occurred. I told my wife I was so glad we’d waited - that otherwise we wouldn’t have had Ava. She asked, “And do you think, if it had been another child, you wouldn’t have felt the same?”

Once again, fair enough.

When I shared this with Doug in this week’s interview, it brought up some memories for him around adopting his sons.

With his first son, he wondered during the adoption period about his capacity to love, a fairly common question for parents going through the process.

“Will I love, can I actually find that in me? To love this newborn that’s being delivered in a different, albeit beautiful way. But, yes, it’s the same answer. I mean, it’s an unequivocal, “of course, you idiot.” And your heart just expands.”

He experienced a similar pattern of thought the second time round and the result was just the same.

“The heart just expands. Love is a beautiful thing. Love is, unconditional love is, a really a big emotion.”

Jennifer Garvey Berger, in last week’s episode, talked about this idea of rising up to love rather than falling into it. That the lens of possibility we hold with love is too narrow.

For most of my life I felt love only existed with immediate family, partners, children, and perhaps a handful of long-term friendships (which was only expressed with several drinks).

Now love feels far less personal than that, less rooted in story or continuity. Yes, with certain relationships it is easier to access or notice, but it more broadly feels like love simply exists.

Almost akin to presence, we can experience it in a moment, a gesture, a look, without a building up to or working on.

Realising this makes this world feel like a very different place.

And if you pay attention, you notice the presence of certain portals that make this realisation easier to make.

For Doug it is a golden doodle called Harley, and for me a Romanian street dog called Alma.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Can you think of a moment where you were surprised by your capacity to love?

2. With whom or in what setting do you most easily feel love? Where does it feel most out of reach?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - What Is It About Dogs? with Doug Skoke - What is a Good Life? #176

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Doug Skoke below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m sharing my conversation with Jennifer Garvey Berger - author, global leadership coach, and founder of Cultivating Leadership. It's a conversation that explores values in a way that rarely contains such nuance, acknowledgement of shadow, and lived experience. Values is a topic that is usually reduced to platitudes. This conversation doesn’t do that. This week’s reflection is a little different, as it is not from the podcast but a lecture I gave last week.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

I am sitting on a small stage with a microphone stand in front of me, a bright light beaming into my eyes.

A packed room is creating a wall of sound as strangers and friends connect over the question I have just asked them to contemplate.

“Can you recall a recent or significant moment of fulfilment?”

It is part of a lecture and participatory talk I have been invited to give in a bar, of all places, to around eighty people.

I ask people to shout out short answers from the crowd:

“Dancing”

“Hugging my godson”

“A walk in the woods”

“Being on a mountain”

“Walking the dog”

“Feeling part of a tribe”

“Tomatoes…perfect tomatoes”

The simplicity of responses to this question never ceases to make me feel so human. The same is true later when I ask the big enchilada of “What is a Good Life?”

I am enjoying myself so much that when my loud calls to invite them back from their one-on-one conversations are either not heard or ignored, I briefly break into an Irish song to get their attention again.

“Óró, sé do bheatha ‘bhaile” — said in a loop a couple of times.

Loosely meaning “Welcome home.”

We sit for almost an hour together after it was due to end, with people asking very reflective questions. Not the monologues masquerading as questions that some settings seem to naturally attract.

Amidst it all, one lady asks, “Is this a question that only the privileged get to contemplate?”

It’s a great question.

I sit with it for a moment in dead silence.

I briefly muse that I know many privileged people, who by their own accounts, don’t experience what they consider a good life. I also recount experiences of joy and generosity that I and the people I interviewed encountered in much less affluent settings.

It reminded me later of a moment a man shared with me in an interview. He had just flown to Dhaka in a fancy plane and was staying in a nice hotel. He was there meeting a relief worker his organisation supported financially. She had been at the frontline of several global humanitarian disasters. She was wearing well-worn sandals in an office with no window, where there was space for one, and a fan that was doing little to keep the sweltering heat at bay. She looked at him and his travelling party and said with genuine pity, not a hint of judgement:

“All of you people in the West need so much to be happy.”

So I suggested that the experience of a good life doesn’t seem to be so neatly contained by our ideas of privilege.

Earlier in the talk I had mentioned the horrific killing of 150 schoolgirls in Iran in passing in response to another question.

She said she was Iranian, and that for four months she had had no contact with her parents. And when she spoke to them a few weeks ago, she was amazed to find that her parents were dancing and enjoying a dinner in that moment within the horror of it all.

I don’t think this question is a privilege; more that we live in systems that want us to ignore it - that want us to go on miserably ignoring what actually matters to us and what really moves us.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Can you recall a recent or significant moment of strong fulfilment?

2. What values of yours and your life have the greatest gap between them?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Closing the Gap Between Values & Life with Jennifer Garvey Berger - What is a Good Life? #175

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Jennifer Garvey Berger below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I'm reflecting on my conversation with Laura Beckingham — a modern mystic for turbulent times. It's a conversation that remains as grounded in the bread and butter of life as it ascends into the spiritual. Family Constellations, ancestral wisdom, the right size in relationships, grief and death, and the energy of birth. It will leave you with plenty to sit with.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

I have noticed this a few times while out walking my dog and my daughter is on her push bike.

In one moment, I feel totally content, at ease with Ava cruising along the street, while I throw Alma a treat for her to raise up on her hind legs and pluck it from the sky.

And then in a matter of seconds, I can be disturbed by the slightest thing, Alma taking too long for my liking when inspecting the pee of another dog.

For a while I discounted the peace and contentment I experienced as somehow disproven by the existence of impatience and some gruffness with my dog a moment later.

Even suspicious of the spaciousness I could experience again moments later.

However, more and more, I am not seeking to tie them together in a story.

If you want to say you had a shit day, what do you do with the moment your belly ached from laughter with a friend. Does that get lost or banished in the headline of shit day?

Last week, I was in Athens at a forum that one of my best mates was also attending. At one point we took a break from the crowds and busyness of the forum and found a bar and a table on a somewhat quiet street.

As it goes with this friend, jovial nonsense is interspersed with real depth.

And so we talked about fatherhood for a time and the respective aches we could feel the more we were having to let go of toddlers meeting the world. Ideas around protecting and preparing them swirled. Letting go again too.

Listening to us reflect on the moments we don't quite meet the mark as parents, a thought occurred.

In recent years, more generally, our ideas of parenting have got hung up on whether love given to someone is conditional or unconditional. To me it has always struck me as an intense judgement of however a parent may have raised a child.

I sense it more these days, even before I became a father, as something that really impedes us seeing things more clearly.

A moment where conditional love was present doesn’t somehow cancel out or erase the series of moments where it clearly felt unconditional.

At one point in the interview, Laura shared something about a good friend of her’s passing that really spoke to an element of what I am pointing at:

“She’s more alive than ever, interestingly to me, now that she’s passed over than she was certainly in her last few weeks. When we can stop separating these things or setting them up as opposition or as binary or paradoxes and start realising that they’re actually all just parallel threads.”

She later went on to say:

“Everything settles when we acknowledge what is, I think.”

Paying less attention to the story and more to the moments.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Where are you paying more attention to the story and less to living the moments?

2. What brings you into contact with the living pulse of life?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Being In The Pulse Of Life with Laura Beckingham - What is a Good Life? #174

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Laura Beckingham below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Dave Snowden - Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co., creator of the Cynefin Framework, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of complexity science, organisational design, and human decision-making. It is a beautiful mixture of thought provoking ideas and powerful lived experiences.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

He knew the various paths among the Sacred Valley in Peru better than I did, and he always found a way to get us back home. So, it made sense that I simply followed him.

However, this time, my four-legged companion got us into a spot of bother.

We entered the next rural town, and a pack of dogs closely observed our arrival. Alianqu was the alpha dog of where we resided, so this was the first time I had seen him display a sense of anything other than bravado. Which worried me.

Four dogs predictably charged us.

I had only recently overcome a huge fear of dogs, but I knew better than to run. As he fought two off, the other two were snapping at my feet until, thankfully, a local farmer began to shout in their direction and threw some pebbles to startle them.

All four dogs proceeded to chase after Alianqu, so I ran after them until I found him on one side of a river with the chasing pack on the other side, barking their territorial threats.

I crossed the river and joined Alianqu on the other side, realising I had no idea where we were, and going back to the road we had just come from wasn’t an option.

Over the next couple of hours, I followed him through thorny bushes and broken shale paths that disintegrated beneath my feet, sending me sliding down parts of the mountain.

We entered fields where Alianqu teased cows and bulls, as I tried to make it out without them charging at me too. Eventually, we reached a part of a path that I had walked maybe a few hundred times before.

A relieved sigh. A deep relaxation in my body.

It was a part of the path back to my place from the local rural town. It often made me groan a little due to how often I had walked it, coupled with the sharp incline and the altitude of 3,000 metres.

The weather there was always changeable; bright blue skies could quickly turn into thunderstorms.

Of course, it was sunny now, and the path looked golden to me.

I sat, deeply satisfied outside my bungalow, sweating and picking out whatever thorns I had accumulated and inspecting the scratches on my body.

This experience came to mind when Dave shared that instead of having a big party for his 65th birthday, he disappeared into Tasmania to go into the Cradle Mountains.

He hadn’t realised how difficult it was, with its massive boulders, and there was only one way back. He knew he could get up, but wasn’t looking forward to getting back. Really wondering “what I am going to do?”

On the way back, he encountered a woman and two children who were in need of help and he noticed his mountain rescue training from when he was young kicked into autopilot.

“You need to put yourself in the positions which aren’t too dangerous, but are enough just to get you that little bit on the edge.”

I do get the sense that in maximising comfort in our lives, we are missing out on aliveness.

As Dave points out in the interview, not everyone will feel called to an edge, in whatever form that takes. Maybe even to have that conversation you are fearing or hesitant about.

But some capacity withers in us if we keep resisting the call.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there an edge you feel called to that you are resisting?

2. Is there an edge you need to step back from that you have stayed at for too long?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Place Of Multiple Belongings with Dave Snowden - What is a Good Life? #173

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dave Snowden below.

For Apple click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Dr Myriam Hadnes - behavioural economist, facilitator, and host of the Unprofessionalism podcast. It is a beautiful exchange around communication, courage, and what it means to feel truly accepted.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

There is a really telling moment in this interview.

Myriam is at a radical honesty workshop with her partner, and it is now her turn to share what she finds annoying about her. When she gets it all out, she is surprised by how well her partner takes it. Her partner even considers some of what Myriam is saying to be understandable.

I don’t think we have any idea as to how resilient we are and how relieving it is to be met with someone else’s truth.

Even if it can be jarring to hear at first, how it generally tends to soothe my nervous system after my initial reaction relaxes. Our truths don’t need to align or agree, they simply need to be true and to be heard.

The absence of this honesty continually keeps us at arm’s length.

I once interviewed a filmmaker, Nic Askew, who said this about attention:

“If you’re going to give someone your attention, why wouldn’t you just give them your full and undivided attention. How would you hope to ever know someone if you didn’t give that?”

Much later in the interview with Myriam, she touched on a beautiful moment where she felt totally accepted and seen for who she is. A moment of unconditional love from another as she was judging herself.

How could we ever expect to be accepted by another if we keep so much hidden?

And it is a continual process as we are always becoming.

It won’t always be smooth but it feels very worth it to me. Life will continually offer us these moments to tend to whether it is on a retreat or in the everyday.

A few years back, my wife and I were walking to the park with our dog and we were getting a bit pissy with each other.

We’d had an argument where I felt she hasn’t taken any accountability and she observes that my reaction to that is too much. She tells me what I call a lack of accountability is simply how her brain works differently to mine.

True.

She then folds me over with a one-liner:

“With all you write and the work you do with yourself and others, you talk about people being themselves and acceptance. I am just being me.”

I have nothing to say for a moment as we have come to a halt. What she said is undeniably true. That she’s been consistent on this front since we met, it is part of who she is.

I then tell her that when I respond with anything other than roses and butterflies, I don’t feel like I am being accepted for who I am.

She smiled and nodded and she took my hand as we walked on.

The patterns continue in some ways but the tensions never quite feel the same.

I had a conversation last week in which someone shared with me the etymology of courage. It was not about some brave and heroic deeds, but revealing and sharing what feels true to our hearts.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What feels true to your heart that you would be better off for sharing it?

2. In any situation it may apply to, what would you do if you weren’t afraid?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - What If It Were Easy? with Dr Myriam Hadnes - What is a Good Life? #172

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dr Myriam Hadnes below.

Click here for Apple.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a glorious conversation with Robert J. Anderson - creator of the Leadership Circle Profile and author of Mastering Leadership and Scaling Leadership. He talks beautifully about doubt and fear alongside grace and synchronicity, and what it takes to keep saying yes when you can’t see where it’s going.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Robert is working in the family agribusiness, managing production in a feed manufacturing plant. He is frustrated and he knows this isn’t it - what he is meant to do with his life - but he doesn’t know what it is.

His frustration grows as he is unloading a railroad car in the middle of the night because the plant is down. After climbing into the railroad car and sweeping out the last of the ingredients, he is exhausted and lies down.

“Out of my mouth, completely unrehearsed, came:

I’m not becoming who I am.

It was declarative. I wasn’t reflecting on anything. It just came out. And I knew I’d crossed some threshold. I’d spoken a truth I couldn’t go back on.”

This is one of many moments in this interview that moved me. Robert’s path of continually taking notice of moments like this is inspiring.

It reminded me of what the author of Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore said in another interview:

“Every once in a while you get a deep urge to move in a certain direction. And I think it’s important to follow that urge.”

Having interviewed over 300 people on this question, and asked them to reflect on their lives, I’ve found these moments often come in far more ordinary settings than in the deliberate incubations of retreats and courses.

……………..

I was out walking my dog on a Sunday afternoon when I ran into a friend. We don’t do drive-by greetings, so we stopped and talked.

He proceeded to tell me about a chair he was restoring that he found on the street. In Berlin, people often leave out things they no longer want or need. Rarely is it just trash they are throwing away carelessly. In this case, it was a Bauhaus chair that still functioned but needed restoration.

My friend is a details guy, so he began to tell me about his process of carefully stripping off the paint. Apparently, several coats of paint, sloppily painted over different colours, had been the chair’s fate.

He mentioned that if he had used the quickest way of stripping paint, the quality and essence of the wood would have suffered.

He then had this self-conscious moment where he blinked upon realising how long he’d been talking for and apologised if he was boring me.

I told him I am all in on this process, “Please continue, it’s music to my ears.”

He invited me into his office where he was restoring it and told me how the process had worked over several days and how over time the wood could breathe again.

He then showed me how he had dismantled each mechanism of this chair and taken the time to clean them all individually. A point I particularly relished was a steel part of the chair that resides underneath the seat, which nobody would ever see unless they were lying under the chair.

He diligently cleaned both sides of the steel, even though one side would never see sunlight.

He talked about how, when this chair was being customised and more widely produced, it would have taken a number of specialists to be in conversation with each other to figure out how this chair would be built to its highest potential.

He seemed to revel in this thought back in time and the connection he had with these people from the past.

I asked how much the chair, fully restored, would cost if he were to find a similar one online. “Probably three or four hundred euros,” he responded. Nowhere near the amount his time would cost, but that wasn’t the point.

He had found a profound meaning and connection through this chair, to its parts, to the past, through the dedication of his craft in restoring it.

In going through the process and pointing to different parts of the chair, he looked up at me and said, “I realised that I need to change my job, this work is, in some ways, the antithesis of my job.”

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Have you ever heard yourself spontaneously speak out a truth that you couldn’t ignore?

2. What must your life be about?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - What Must My Life Be About with Robert J. Anderson - What is a Good Life? #171

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Robert J. Anderson below.

For Apple click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a beautiful conversation with Ally Kingston - creative strategist, trained death doula, and one of Forbes' 43 People Changing Advertising for the Climate - about what it means to come home to yourself, your community, and the living world.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

During lockdown, Ally had bought some seeds and began to grow some plants. After seeing two tomatoes grow, she was thrilled, experiencing a clear sense that this is something we are supposed to be doing.

The courtyard next to her flat had become somewhat of a pigeon sanctuary during Covid, and so she instinctively left them out for the pigeons as a gift.

After checking each morning, on the third day they were gone. And she found herself bursting into tears.

“I’d had this first glimpse after 30 years of life, of being in some very very humble reciprocal relationship with the world. Just like a cycle had happened.”

……………………….

“Western civilisation is three days deep”

When Ally participates in a four-day wilderness vigil she cites this sentiment from the mythologist Martin Shaw. That after three days you’ve run out of civilisation, that you’re just scrabbling around and quite feral.

And that the initial boredom from being unplugged from everything was much more to contend with than not eating for four days. How long a day can feel when you watch the sun go all the way over your head. However, beyond that initial boredom is something else.

“It’s such a relief sometimes to return yourself to the loop, to be back in the entanglement that you’re meant to be in. And in fact you always were in, you just pretended you weren’t, or you believed the story that you weren’t.”

……………………….

Hearing this made me think of an experience.

I am lying on a bed which comprises a sheet of wood and a thin cushion as a mattress. The room is cold at night, there is no heating.

I am in a deep state of discomfort that has nothing to do with my surroundings.

I am into my second night of my first 10-day silent retreat, it is amongst some farmland, a short drive from the city of Lucknow, India.

My mind is excruciating to be with.

It runs through a loop of recently getting ripped off when booking a trip here, to me staying in India for another few months with no plan, and having no idea what I will do on the other side of this trip.

I indulged in distractions, both healthy and unhealthy, before this trip, now there is no escaping myself.

It briefly fantasises about fleeing the Vipassana on night two, aware that all my valuables - passport, wallet, and phone - are locked in a box at reception. My mind drifts towards jumping the fence and roaming the surrounding countryside for eternity with some white bed sheets wrapped around me.

I find peace and distraction, briefly, with the thought of roaming the countryside for a time and being well known as a wandering, foreign, madman who occasionally wails out loud.

Before I loop back into the turmoil.

I am lying there silently. Or so I think, until the seventy-year-old Indian man I am sharing this room with hovers over me in the middle of the night.

He gestures towards me with a blanket, assuming I am cold.

We can’t speak so I just nod and smile at his moonlight eyes, as if that is what is causing the chattering of my teeth.

And with it, the tension comes to an end.

And I fall asleep.

……………………….

Like me, Ally is researching what it means to live a good life. Her particular interest is in our faculty for imagination. And she has been noticing something that is concerning her:

“What I’ve noticed over the last few years is that that vision, the scale and the colour of that vision seems to be shrinking. People used to say bigger things. And then a few years later it was suddenly as if the good life was an absence of decline rather than anything bigger and dreamier.”

And then:

“There is something in our system at the moment which is causing anxiety, unprocessed trauma, grief, all kinds of stuff are getting stuck in us and it is shrinking our capacity to dream. Just at the moment where we really need to hold on to that deep vision.”

Can a good life exist, can we participate in this life, without access to our own imagination?

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What in your life do you need to let go of to find your way back to healthier relationships - be it with yourself, another, the world around you?

2. How would you describe your relationship with boredom?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Recovering Right Relationship with Ally Kingston - What is a Good Life? #170

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Ally Kingston below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a beautiful conversation with Sam Lee, Mercury prize-nominated singer, composer, arranger, folksong interpreter. We explore the nature of wonder, the role of ritual and rite of passages, as well as being dangerously surrounded by a dozen shepherd's dogs in the Carpathian mountains. This conversation and Sam's stories are for anyone seeking more aliveness in this life.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Sam is standing in a circle of ten people, shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by a dozen shepherd’s dogs.

He’s leading a group of people on a wilderness tracking trip in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania and they have encountered its most dangerous animal.

So the group stands tightly together as these huge dogs snap and snarl, kept at bay with really heavy walking sticks.

Some are laughing, others are literally wetting themselves. They hold this formation for around forty minutes until the dogs eventually leave.

Reflecting on the experience, Sam said:

“This isn’t really a threshold experience. This is more of a thrashing experience than a threshold. It becomes one. Many people said they’ve never had an experience where they feared for their real life.”

Afterwards the group reflected on the experience, they sang together too, metabolising the moment.

Throughout this project, I have been fascinated with thresholds - moments in people’s lives that carried significant meaning and yielded change.

Like Sam, and one of my favourite writers, John O’Donohue, I feel we live in a world that often rushes by them. What they require is more our attention and willingness to stay with a moment.

We attempt to create thresholds on demand. It will happen when I go on that retreat. This will be the therapy session where it all breaks open.

I remember the year I saw a therapist in London. When something arose, I’d make a note of it and attempt to hold onto it for the following Wednesday.

And then sitting in that chair telling the therapist of something that occurred five days ago, the whole experience was bereft of energy or even significance.

The next year, just after I had met my wife in India, we were in her home town of Hamburg. I experienced a pang of jealousy that plagued how I felt in relationships before.

As we left a restaurant and were making our way to her apartment, I noticed the usual signs, I was getting cold and distant. When we got back to her apartment I told her what had bothered me and how it wasn’t her problem, it was mine.

I said I needed to be alone and lay on the wooden floor in a room in her apartment. And I wept. I spent several hours there. Something died in me that day and I stayed with it as it did. Just over ten years together now, I am glad I did.

I recall interviewing David Dunn who found himself on the drug and alcohol recovery wing of a prison. Feeling at a significant low in his life, he felt he needed to do something differently. Having had experience in recovery before he volunteered to be a mentor to others in their recovery.

And as he sat there one morning explaining that rock bottom feeling to a group of lads, he said out loud to the prisoners, “I just don’t know my purpose on this planet anymore.”

And then one young guy in the group, who David noted had little interest in recovery, said, “But this is it, Dave. This is what you’re good at, this is what you should be doing.”

David told me how he took the time to sit with that when he went back to his cell. He emphasised a couple of times that it stayed with him, and went on to shape what he created upon his release.

Another experience comes to mind of Diane Button, who while going through chemo, she was bald, had acne, and her tummy was bloated. She felt awful.

In the middle of the night she found herself standing in front of the bathroom mirror and all she could see was her glowing beauty. And she just stared at herself.

After a lifetime of picking on herself and finding the flaws in her appearance, all she could see was her beauty.

When asking people what is a good life, nobody will say peeing your pants while surrounded by huge dogs, being on a drug and alcohol recovery wing in prison, undergoing chemo, or weeping on a floor.

And yet there those moments sit.

A good life is everything in it.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Can you recall a considerable threshold you passed through in life that involved little intention or design on your part?

2. Is there a threshold you are keeping at bay?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Wonder, Wildness And Song with Sam Lee - What is a Good Life? #169

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Sam Lee below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Joel Monk, Co-Founder of Coaches Rising and podcast host, where we explore the journey from spiritual bypassing to embodiment and what it actually means to feel safe, okay, and enough. It’s for anyone on a path of dropping deeper into their own humanity and body.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

In our chasing of exalted states, sensational lifestyles, I sense we are missing the good life that is already here.

In this week’s conversation with Joel Monk, he shared his path from experiencing a sense of dread, even after years of meditating, to feeling a much deeper and consistent sense of well-being.

It arose after a dark night of the soul experience that led him down the path of embodiment and cultivating greater sensitivity and intimacy with life.

He listed off words like safe, ok, enough, and at home in his body, to paint his present picture.

When I heard him say these words it gave me a flutter of emotion, as I recognised their significance in my own life. I laughed that when people start their own journey with meditation or personal-development, these words would hardly be inspiring.

We want to be enlightened, conscious, confident, in some sort of loud and impactful way. But I sense Joel and I are becoming more aware of how full this life already is.

Yesterday was the dreariest day you could imagine in Berlin.

As I walked with my daughter and dog in the morning, puddles were forming on the street.

I had posted over a week ago about an experiment of sitting silently for an hour in an amphitheatre in my local park. A lot of people had suggested they were interested but I created neither an event nor a reminder.

If they’d come they’d come I thought.

Given the rain and the visible puffs warm exhales were making in cold air, I assumed nobody would come.

I made my sign anyhow, “Silent Sitting 12-1pm” with a marker on cardboard, put on a raincoat, and off I went.

I picked a spot in the middle of the amphitheatre and thought this is a beginning for this project. Not surprisingly, I was alone. The park was also sparse with passerby.

And for the first ten minutes I just sat there on my own in the spitting rain and noticed my own thoughts and the park around me.

Some inspiration for an exhibition I am creating for an event in Athens came to mind. Some reflections on my life and family. I sat contentedly, rather pleased I had showed up.

Then a man arrived on his bike and parked it next to mine. I had not met him before, but it was clear that he was here to participate. We exchanged a warm smile and nod and then he sat down a few metres to my left.

Two men in an empty cold and grey amphitheatre sitting on cold stones.

No words were exchanged but I instantly felt a warmth between us. It shifted my experience to something now shared.

Over the next thirty minutes I just sat there and noticed. Some works with machinery were taking place near by that ebbed and flowed. Bird song could be heard too whenever it stopped.

Birds dancing in small groups from tree to tree caused awe. Really looking at the small number of passerby in detail did too.

Occasionally sharing smiles with my silent partner.

Until two friends arrived with around fifteen minutes to go. We smiled and they quietly took their place a few metres to the right of me.

I offered them some of the cardboard I was sitting on. I was momentarily thankful to my wife for suggesting the cardboard as I felt the temperature drop with a layer of it now gone.

I sat smiling, looking out, contemplating the absurdity of this idea as the four of us sat there. I felt totally at home while glancing through the increasing drizzle.

When the hour was over I had a warm hug with this man I never met and my two friends. We chatted briefly and went our separate ways as the rain picked up.

How full and enough it all felt.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What does it mean to you to be fully alive?

2. What are you discounting that is fundamental to your own good life that is already here?

Work With Me

Good Life Coaching — a space of presence for individuals navigating questions of direction, meaning, and what needs attention now.

Senior Leadership Facilitation - Helping your team have the conversations that connect and move the business.

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - What It Means to Feel Fully Alive with Joel Monk - What is a Good Life? #168

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Joel Monk below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Bruce Anderson, Executive Director of the Core Gift Institute. We speak about the three kinds of glue that hold relationships, communities, and the world together: gifts, welcoming, and ritual. It is a conversation that reminds us of what we’ve forgotten about being human.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“The Western world has reduced significant rituals to insignificant gestures.” - Malidoma Somé

Bruce mentioned Malidoma Somé, from the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, as someone who greatly influenced him. Having spent time with him, Malidoma shared a misconception about his work in the West.

People assumed the village elders sent him to the Western world each year to share teachings about global crises: water, war, and what wasn’t yet commonly called global warming. But Malidoma corrected that assumption. The council sent him because they believed:

“The Western world had reduced significant rituals to insignificant gestures.”

This line really stopped me in my tracks in the interview.

Bruce then quipped: “I realised how true that was. You know, that there’s funerals during lunch hours now in cities so people can come. I mean, I’m making light of that but these four kinds of rituals are all tied to belonging, this multicultural idea that there are four paths for you to belong.”

The four paths are rituals through which we connect to spirit, self, nature, and other humans.

Upon hearing this, a memory came to mind.

I was back home in Ireland last year, and during a conversation with my mother, she mentioned that when driving back to Galway, where she grew up, she likes to leave the motorway several exits early because she enjoys the feeling of driving through familiar places.

I said the last time I went, I got off the motorway early to be stuck in the traffic in a town called Loughrea, reminiscing about all the times we drove through it on the way to my granny’s home.

From there, I took some country roads where the summer breaks I spent every year came to life - whether it was a pub where I’d play pool and eat cheese and onion crisps and a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, a GAA club where I watched games or attended summer camps, or all the fields we’d venture into on our own.

In a culture that is hell-bent on speed, convenience, and innovation, I continually get the dreaded sense of: to what end? What becomes of this collapsed experience and time we save.

This morning as I write this from my office desk, that looks out onto a crossroads in my neighbourhood, I see a man walking his two dogs. It is just past six in the morning and the footpaths are almost empty.

He is around my age and looks relatively fit and strong. He holds onto his two dogs with one hand and he holds his phone in the other hand. His eyes are fixated on the phone.

His dogs go about vibrantly sniffing what is available to them and the three move slowly through the neighbourhood. Almost like a slow procession.

Whenever I am walking close by him, I aways hear the distant and undulating sounds of videos being scrolled as the noise of the nearby traffic rises and falls.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What rituals create your own sense of a good life?

2. Where do you sense you have collapsed a ritual into an empty gesture?

Work With Me

Good Life Coaching — a space of presence for individuals navigating questions of direction, meaning, and what needs attention now.

Senior Leadership Facilitation - Helping your team have the conversations that connect and move the business.

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Gifts, Rituals, & The Path To Belonging with Bruce Anderson - What is a Good Life? #167

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Bruce Anderson below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Kaylyn Lehmann, Co-founder and Executive Coach at Simplified Coach and a specialist in neuroscience leadership and character strengths. If you are in the middle of uncertainty that you are struggling to navigate - this conversation will offer much to consider and support.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Over the last decade, Kaylyn realised what had been missing from her own good life.

She had always been driven and clear on what mattered – family, physical and mental health, purposeful work. But there was a period where, in trying to do all of this diligently, she found herself overwhelmed.

Around that time, she came across something in a magazine. It suggested that if we tried to do everything the experts recommend in a single day, and actually timed it all out – we’d need 28 hours.

This led to something shifting for her. It brought her back to how much she loves play. Whether it’s games, learning to ski later in life, canyoning, or white water rafting.

“All of those things that just dip back into who you were when you were eight years old on your bike, pedalling across town thinking you could go as far as you needed to go.”

The other thing she began to notice was how much awe she wants in a good life.

“Awe fills you up, right? And it grounds you at the same time. I don’t know if there’s a life after this life. I don’t have answers to any of those big questions, but I also don’t care in those moments of awe.”

That might be watching a sunrise or sunset, or noticing the presence of wild animals where she lives in Park City, Utah.

“Awe makes me feel whole.”

And she’s convinced it’s not rare.

Wandering through a city, looking at what we humans have built, noticing the faces of the people around you.

“You can find awe anywhere if you just stop and really look around.”

……………………….

Hearing this put me back into a moment last year with my daughter.

We are sitting in a noisy and busy playground. Sand sprays up from running children’s feet. Screams, shouts, and laughter from excited games.

A butterfly lands on some steps beside my daughter and lets us get really close – until we touch its wings, and off it fluttered.

I then stick out my arm, almost like a falcon handler, and make a clicking sound with my tongue against the roof of my mouth. After doing a few loops around the playground, the butterfly lands on my hand.

I have no idea why I do this.

It just sits there for a few moments, unbothered. The only thing that moves it is my daughter’s insistence to transfer it to her outstretched hand.

Off it flies once more, returns to my hand, and again just sits there, unhurried. We repeat this dance four times.

I am part giddy, part calm.

To my surprise, when I look around, other kids and parents are watching. Many now hold out their arms and hands as if this was just something we all do with butterflies.

At some point, the butterfly loses interest and flies off for good, and we move onto the swing.

It’s never happened since.

My daughter keeps it alive by assuming this just happens with every butterfly we have met since.

“Click, click” and her hand outstretches.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. When is the last time you felt a sense of awe?

2. What in your week would you consider play?

Work With Me

Good Life Coaching — a space of presence for individuals navigating questions of direction, meaning, and what needs attention now.

Senior Leadership Facilitation - Helping your team have the conversations that connect and move the business.

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Living Your Own Version Of Success with Kaylyn Lehmann - What is a Good Life? #166

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kaylyn Lehmann below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Bogumil Baranowski, investment advisor, author, host of Talking Billions podcast, and a profound thinker on the intersection of wealth and human experience. We go deeper on why money is one of the most emotionally charged forces and why being truly present might be the most undervalued skill of our time.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here — and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Bogumil was getting his wisdom teeth removed. He had never gone under before or had any surgery, so this was a whole new experience. And the dentist knew exactly what he was going through.

The dental office was busy and overbooked and the dentist sat down with him and said, “I’m going to be here with you for the whole thing. I’m here.”

This really stayed with Bogumil.

“They gave me a bill, I paid. But that sentence, that hand holding moment, it’s not captured anywhere, but that was the biggest value he provided to me.”

………………..

A girl, around six years old, is standing at the top of the escalator and is beginning to cry. Her father, just a few metres away, is drifting away.

He has some bags and a buggy with a baby in his hands. He briefly motions to walk back up the escalator and then realises that may not be the best idea.

He tries to assure his daughter to step on as she pleads for his hand.

A stranger, patiently waiting for this to unfold, looks to the father, almost asking for permission, then offers the girl his hand.

She gladly accepts. There is something so satisfying about how easily she takes his hand.

The momentarily dramatic scene is reduced to nothing remarkable.

………………..

It’s around the time of COVID and Bogumil is busy. He’s very active on the investment side.

But he tries to reserve as much time as possible to take calls from clients.

“And they appreciated that. They told me they just wanted to hear my voice. And I have those moments that are stuck in my head. Another human just needed me to be present.”

………………..

I have just wrapped up an investor meeting and presentation in Arizona and I am about to order a taxi.

An elderly man in the meeting, a sizeable investor in the company I work for, has offered me a ride to the airport. It is ninety minutes away. I talk to him almost every day and I would like some peace.

The company doesn’t have daily news and yet he will call me regardless looking for updates.

I suggest it is too far, he insists.

We walk across the parking lot on this bright sunny day, I peel my tie and jacket off after a long day of meetings. We get into a convertible sports car and off we set.

At one point my wife is mentioned, which then leads to him asking where we met, which leads to a sabbatical in India, which leads to a whole other conversation.

I tell it to him straight with some of the headlines of my struggles, going to India and seeing a therapist.

Within fifteen minutes of setting off he is sharing his own life story. The loves and the loss of it. The regrets. The pain of it.

There is a moment of silence in the conversation. I look around at the mountains. The clear blue sky. I notice my hair ruffling in the wind.

I almost laugh at the setting, the fancy sports car, the suits, the depth of the conversation. That I never realised he was lonely.

After a day of meetings, I can’t tell you how grateful I am to him for the experience of feeling this alive in a conversation.

“I realise that money is a very intimate topic and it’s almost just a gateway. An excuse to have a much bigger conversation.” - Bogumil Baranowski

2. This Week’s Questions

1. How would you describe your relationship with both giving and receiving?

2. Is there a repeating conversation in your life that is masking the conversation that really wants to happen?

Work With Me

Good Life Coaching — a space of presence for individuals navigating questions of direction, meaning, and what needs attention now.

Senior Leadership Facilitation - Helping your team have the conversations that connect and move the business.

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Money Is Never Just Money with Bogumil Baranowski - What is a Good Life? #165

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Bogumil Baranowski below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.