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.

This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Nicholas Janni, author of Leader as Healer and co-author of Leading in Chaos. We explore why rest has become a radical act, the difference between wellness and transformation, and what happens when we stop trying to get somewhere.

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. Again, she asked, ‘And do you think, if it had been another child, you wouldn’t have felt the same?’

Once again, fair enough.

These experiences came floating back to me when I was in conversation with Nicholas.

“The fundamental break we all experienced, most probably very early in life, was a break from the flow of love. In a way, the whole journey is a return to love. For that to occur, we have to face all the ways our heart got wounded. But as we do that, there is this field we enter together which feels like the one heart.” - Nicholas Janni

I interviewed Nicholas and last week’s guest, Dr Scilla Elworthy, on the same day.

It felt like a retreat. Simply brought about from sitting in my living room and having two open hearted conversations.

I went for a walk with my dog after the second interview and floated around the neighbourhood for thirty minutes. Smiling and greeting anyone I crossed paths with.

“And I come to experience more and more deeply, what it means to rest in the unified field, which is a field of real love” - Nicholas Janni

This morning my wife and I were about to get into a row, a few early snaps taken and shots fired. It was only thanks to her saying she wanted silence and me having to take the dog for a walk that stopped me unloading and saying things I regretted.

After stewing for the first few minutes of the walk, when we came together again it was rather easy to say, “I fiercely disagree with you and I fiercely love you.”

As missiles are fired and the number of conflicts exceeds my fingers and toes, it may seem delusional to speak of love.

I see it more as the very point of it.

To realise it expands far beyond our designated objects of love.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What makes it hardest to feel love right now?

2. When did you last return to love after losing connection to it?

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 - The End Of All Seeking with Nicholas Janni - What is a Good Life? #164

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Nicholas Janni 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 conversation with the wonderful Dr Scilla Elworthy, a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, founder of Oxford Research Group and Peace Direct, and one of the world's most respected voices in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. She is the creator of The Mighty Heart programme and we explore how listening to the heart transforms the way we live, lead, and relate to one another. This conversation is for people who sense there's a deeper way to live but haven't yet learned to trust it.

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 had an aunt who passed away a few years back, and I was very close to her.

On this particular crisp January afternoon, we were walking up Harcourt Street in Dublin on the way to a nice restaurant. My aunt wasn’t flashy in any way, but she liked a meal out and was dressed accordingly.

As she and I were chatting away, we approached a man who was clearly sleeping rough. I remember half shaking my head as she gave him a five euro note, thinking, “Always notes, never coins.”

The man seemed relatively pleased with what he saw coming.

When my aunt placed the note in his well-worn hand, she cupped both of her hands around his and simply said, “It’s been a very cold winter, hasn’t it?”

He instantly welled up. I did too.

She sat down on the cold step beside him for a few moments in her Sunday best, and he told us briefly about how harsh the winter had been for him.

………………

I missed the train. The subway line I took to the Hauptbahnhof was delayed because someone had fallen on the track ahead.

I felt a heaviness when I heard that announcement. Then a jarring dissonance from the procedural way it was announced.

I rerouted at the next station, only to miss the train by a couple of minutes.

At the information desk, I explained what had happened—that someone had fallen on the line, that I’d just missed my train—and asked if I could transfer my ticket or would need to buy a new one.

I ended up buying another ticket.

A hundred euros felt trivial against the loss of a life.

What really struck me most was how the news of someone falling on the track didn’t stir even a flicker of pause or acknowledgment.

If anything, there was an impatience for me to finish my story to inform me that the U-Bahn is operated by a different authority, and they weren’t responsible.

………………

A guest on my podcast said something I keep returning to. Tom Morgan experienced what he called a psychotic break. While wandering Manhattan in a mystical state, he noticed something rather profound:

“Every time I said something I didn’t actually believe, my heart hurt — physically, my heart actually hurt. And I realised I had this connection where if I was saying stuff just with my head, the heart would call it out. And I was like, well, shit, how often am I feeling that in real life? And I’m suppressing that feeling.”

………………

I am not practicing any religion but a few years back I was making frequent visits to the Catholic Church around the corner from me in Berlin.

I was lighting candles for my aunty, who had a terminal condition. Before she became bedridden, her weekly ritual had been to light a candle for me and many others. I’d light it, take a photo and send it onto her.

The church was open from 12pm to 1pm each day and there usually wasn’t anyone else there. Given the church sat amongst residential blocks of apartments, it was surprisingly vast inside.

After lighting a candle for her one day, I saw that no one else was around and sat down in one of the pews and meditated.

At some point during the meditation, I felt a beam of light burst from my heart and rise up to the dome of the church—an experience I’ve never had before or since.

I clearly saw it as a golden beam — though I’m not sure how I could know that with my eyes closed.

It felt so visceral that, when I returned home and told my wife about it, I found myself shaking a little, laughing, and crying all at once. I remember saying to my wife: “What if much of this spiritual stuff I say I believe is actually true?”

………………

This week’s guest, Dr Scilla Elworthy, put words to something I’ve felt for some time is the cornerstone of a good life:

“The heart doesn’t lie. It’s probably the only one of our faculties that really doesn’t lie. Our imagination, our vision, our sense of other people’s feelings can often be fallible and inaccurate. The heart is truth. Every time I had a very big question in my life and taken the time to meditate and put my real attention on my heart. It tells me the most wonderful truth. And it’s not necessarily a painful truth. It may be slightly difficult to absorb, but it’s never unkind. The heart cannot be unkind.”

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What truth is your heart telling you that you are yet to listen to?

2. Have you ever noticed a pain in your heart from decisions or actions you have taken?

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 - Listening To The Mighty Heart with Dr Scilla Elworthy - What is a Good Life? #163

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dr Scilla Elworthy 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 am reflecting on a conversation with Jasper Walshe, coach, facilitator and founder of TRIPS Tank™ and The Arena. A conversation that explores one of the most relatable traps in modern life — building our identity around performance, achievement and having the answers. This episode is for anyone who's hit the goals and found themselves asking — is this it?

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

Jasper and I have more than a few parallels when it comes to optimisation.

I used to journal daily to really try to find out who I am. I used to meditate daily to become more aware. I revelled in the suffering that therapy helped me explore, buoyed by notions of really “doing the work” and a thought, “give me more suffering, that is how I will earn joy.”

I yearned to find out final answers to BIG questions. I can’t be the only one who intermittently found themselves pleading during journalling sessions, sometimes in a repeating loop:

“Please Universe tell me my purpose.”

I was armed with new models and vocabulary, but my judgements felt as pointed as ever.

I recall walking along a stream one day, in the picturesque mountainous setting of the Sacred Valley, Peru, and my mind was consumed with how full of shit the western hippies in the town were (they mostly were, to be fair) and how I had only managed to do five of my spiritual and health processes out of seven that day.

I felt an exasperation by the stream, “is this really my state of my mind and being, after all this effort?”

Missing one practice one morning would apparently be the reason why I was feeling anxious.

Perfectionism and optimisation were still running the show.

Jasper said something that cut to the core of my experience too: “I was always willing to be open and vulnerable when it’s on my terms.”

The daily practices can be wonderful tools if they allow us to notice more. When they become obsessions in and of themselves it becomes a cycle of separation and frustration.

I am not sure when something shifted.

My life feels slower now, less rushed. This project has helped. The act of having deeply connecting conversations each week around what really matters to another human. They both fill me up and continually point to something important.

Rarely if ever do people speak of meditation streaks, perfection, or even what they achieved or accumulated. They speak of moments.

When I started these interviews they were initially private. I often asked people to recall a recent moment of fulfilment. It’s the question that caused the most hesitation.

Then a smile would break across their face. Almost embarrassed by how simple the answer felt.

A sunset. A conversation. A hug. A shared sadness. A bike ride.

I realised the hesitation wasn’t confusion. It was the search for something impressive.

There’s a difference between our idea of a good life and how a good life actually feels.

I suspect many of us walk right past it every day while chasing the idea. The moments are here. We just forgot to notice them.

“How can I live in wonder?” — Jasper Walshe

This happened 18 months ago but some rendition or version of it has become a bit of ritual in my house each week.

I woke up early, as I naturally tend to do. I went to the living room to write something that was begging to be written—the kind of thing you fear might vanish if you go back to sleep and try to recall it later.

Two hours later, I hear my 8-month-old making her sweetest cooing sounds. I feel my heart soften instantly on feeling their vibration.

I clap down my laptop and make my way to the bedroom. There she is, smiling and beaming. She’s standing up, leaning on her mother’s body for support—a beacon of light on this grey, dull Berlin morning.

My tired wife wears a contented grin, looking at our baby and then me. My dog meanwhile is curled up at the feet of my wife, and her tail is whirling around like a helicopter with excitement of seeing me.

I kiss my wife on the lips. I kiss my baby girl on the cheek. Place my head next to my dog’s and scratch behind her ear.

I stand up and glance at them all once more.

I tell my wife, “My heart is so fucking full it could burst.”

I say that irrespective of what our lives become, what finances we need to figure out, or the areas we may need to develop individually and collectively, none of it would bring a greater feeling than this.

My heart was already full.

It took just five minutes to notice and acknowledge it.

There was nowhere to go, nothing to improve. It was simply here already.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. How have your attempts to optimise your life helped and hindered you?

2. How can you live in wonder? What comes to mind first for this question?

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 actually move the business.

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - What Comes After Optimising with Jasper Walshe - What is a Good Life? #162

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Jasper Walshe below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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 am reflecting on a conversation with Rasmus Hougaard, chairman and founder of Potential Project and author. A conversation that moves from childhood questions about happiness, to monasteries in Nepal, to finding purpose through tragedy. This conversation sits with both the challenge of being human and the incredible capacity we have for loving kindness.

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

On Sunday afternoon, my toddler handed me an inflated balloon and asked me to untie it.

I’d never tried to untie a balloon before, so instinctively I told her you don’t untie balloons and blow them back up.

I heard myself say that and something felt off.

So I started to pinch and pull at the knot, a bit frustrating at first, and then to my genuine wonder it came apart. By the third one I had a technique down and it was rather easy. I was smiling at my certainty five minutes earlier.

I asked her to take one to her mum and ask her the same question. I just wanted to witness my wife’s response, and it was the exact same as my initial response.

What are you telling yourself about your life right now that can’t be untied?

This made me think of something Rasmus points to: research consistently shows that after meeting basic needs, accumulating more wealth and possessions doesn’t reliably increase our happiness - and often makes us less satisfied. Yet what do we primarily focus our energy on?

A recurring motif in my life is speaking to some very wealthy people who talk wistfully of simpler times - when they had less money but more presence.

When I look at the speed and distracted hunger of our culture, I see a considerable lack of presence.

It is something I am always tinkering with in my life if I feel this presence drift.

Over the last month I’ve made one day over the weekend a day without any screens. It’s amazing how spaciousness emerges without the possibility of checking something regularly. I usually don’t carry a phone, but even the possibility of some world waiting on my laptop creates a low-level anxiety. I only really notice its existence with the contrast of its absence.

Without that in my day, time moves more slowly.

We can never dedicate enough time to our online world. It’s like that Eric Hoffer quote: “You can never get enough of what you don’t need.” It unconsciously fills all the space around and during activities, even sacred time on the toilet seat.

We attempt to give our children, our partners, everyone ‘everything’ - yet often without giving our presence and attention first. Akin to buying a plant a fancy pot when you haven’t watered it enough.

When we’re more present, different kinds of connection become possible.

This story from Rasmus tells me something of what we are missing:

“I was giving a meditation retreat in Southern France. And suddenly this guy comes walking in these like big rubber boots, he’s a monk, he looked scruffy and he comes straight to me and he looks me in the eye and he takes my hand and I tell you I’ve never felt a hand like that.

And the experience of his look in my eyes, his presence, his hand, was so unbelievably overwhelming that I was in tears. And I had never heard of the guy, never seen the guy before.

And I’m sharing it because Dalai Lama and others, we all have all kinds of projections on these people that stirs up all kinds of stuff in ourselves.

But here was Bodhisattva Charles, who is a completely unknown old monk, who walks up to me, takes my hand, looks into my eyes and asks how I’m doing. And it completely opened my heart.”

If I could wish one thing for us to experience, it would be a moment of unconditional love. I suspect it would radically alter the perpetual chasing that runs our lives. Not in some perfect sense of constantly giving and receiving it. But moments where you were present enough to notice the experience of it. It would pierce through so many of the stories we tell about what is important.

For me it is not uncommon to experience it when speaking to or meeting with someone for the first time. I recall a Zoom call last year with a middle-aged man from the States who I had never spoken to before, it was simply there. Something in our eyes gave it away.

It can even be in the moment of eye contact with a stranger we pass on the street.

I believe we have conditioned ourselves out of experiencing it. We have created a concept of it with clearly defined rules and boundaries rather than something we feel.

And we have told ourselves that to believe love has something to offer to meet a cynical and untrusting world is a naive thing.

I wonder if it’s as naive as we think it is. I wonder if it’s yet another thing we instinctively say we cannot do.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What do you frequently say can’t be done that you haven’t actually tested?

2. Can you describe a moment of unconditional love that you experienced?

Work With Me

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

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Potential For Compassion with Rasmus Hougaard - What is a Good Life? #161

Listen to the full conversation with Rasmus Hougaard below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

This week I am reflecting on a beautiful conversation with psychologist, founder, and writer João Sevilhano. Together we explore coherence as something that goes beyond rigid moral ideals or plastic authenticity and is more a lived, imperfect practice. This episode is for anyone feeling the pull between who they are, how they live, and what the world is asking of them right now.

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 toughest task I ever had was just to be coherent. While having - and this is not to be rigid or not to change your mind - coincidence between your values, your ideas, your feelings and your actions. Especially when no one’s looking.”

The word authenticity and its adaptations gnaw at me. Whether that is using it as an excuse to say whatever you want without consideration for the other. Or the idea that there is a singular fixed authentic self that must be projected at all times. I have this image in my head of someone who is chatty defiantly defending their right to speak loudly in a library.

I much prefer the idea of an inner and outer coherence. This does not mean a wild disclosure of everything, more that whatever is displayed outside does not betray what is occurring inside and vice versa.

João suggests it is coupled with curiosity and flexibility, and warns against rigidity:

“It’s easy for some people to think about coherence as just to stick to your principles and that’s it. And that’s fairly easy. And that’s the path to arrogance or narcissism or dictatorship if you want.”

It is a psychic energy that you feel when it is present, more than another virtue to uphold.

A couple of years back, I cancelled on relatively short notice for a coffee I had arranged with a friend. I was just feeling some deeper discomfort and didn’t feel I had the energy to do much more than have an evening to myself.

I felt bad about not saying it earlier so I texted my friend to say a work call had unexpectedly emerged and could we postpone. No problem was the response I got.

A few hours later, after a long walk with my dog, and all seemed to have settled in my world again. It settled enough for me to notice the gnawing feeling of having bullshitted my friend. It didn’t come with a moralising or scathing criticism, if anything an energetic discomfort coupled with a curiosity.

I sent a message stating the fact of the matter and the text offered an instant relief.

It taught me how instantaneously we can feel coherent and incoherent, and it is not based on a virtuosity or a lifelong build up to a moment but a simple acknowledging of what is. My experiences continue to tell me that life is instantly redemptive if we strip away the interference from whatever we have just done to get in its way.

There will continue to be consequences to our actions, people can decide whatever you did is not ok and keep us at a distance or leave our lives, but this sense of coherence to me feels beyond the reach of others to affect.

When you get to witness the pain of incoherence and the ease (internally) of coherence, it tells me something significant is being missed in terms of our relationship with ourselves. Many of the accepted forms of manipulation and relating in the world today are costing us much more significantly than we think, regardless of whatever justifications we make.

While we may think we are defending ourselves, in reality we are creating a more fragile version of ourselves. A version that is afraid to see life and ourselves clearly. One that loathes and refuses to accept our humanity. The more we maintain these stances the more threatening life becomes.

The importance of this goes well beyond our inner sense of coherence.

The peace I get from sitting with people like João, and many others I know and have interviewed where I sense that coherence is strong, it feels like a remedy or antidote to much of the bullshit and bewilderment we can experience from what the world around us serves up.

It feels like it helps us regulate ourselves, to soothe our nervous systems. A break from the second guessing, figuring out, and wondering about what I am hearing.

A retreat.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Can you describe what it feels like to experience coherence?

2. Is the world presently asking something of you that is interfering with your coherence?

Work With Me

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

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Art Of Living With Coherence with João Sevilhano - What is a Good Life? #160

Listen to the full conversation with João Sevilhano below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

This week’s conversation with Cindy Forde asks: How do we live in harmony with each other and the natural world?

Cindy is an acclaimed author of Bright New World, founder of Planetari pioneering Earth-led education, and Associate Fellow at University of Cambridge Homerton College. We explore the role of spiritual practice in sustaining changemakers, the paradox of living in systems misaligned with our values, and why “cosmic time” might offer a more realistic perspective on transformation than human urgency.

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

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Late on Saturday evening, my friend and I were discussing the present plight of the world. Where do you start? Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, Minnesota. For him given his background, UK politics was also to the fore.

We had just watched the end of a football match after putting our kids to bed. Life seemed a mixture of the beautiful, sad, absurd, and bewildering.

We have recently started a tradition, when his wife is occasionally away, my daughter and I will spend the day and night at his place, with his son who is just a few months older.

The following morning we were in the kitchen, my friend is making us breakfast – quite a cook in fairness – and the two kids are on my lap as I am reading a story, slowly moving back and forth on a rocking chair.

I can’t help but point out to my friend, while all we discussed last night remains, this is also my present experience. A great friend of mine cooking breakfast for us, and two beautiful kids sat on my lap as I read them a story.

It would be a great shame as well as lamenting the world if I wasn’t here for this too.

In my various conversations with my friend that weekend, I referenced this week’s interview with Cindy several times. She embodied many aspects of wisdom that are needed and lacking in our culture.

Themes of coherence, spiritual practice, calling out what needs to be, and also an unwillingness to see hate as the final resting stop, were deeply inspiring to me, and continued to percolate. More than anything it was an appreciation that she was speaking from her lived experience of dedicating her life to ushering in and creating new systems.

At one point she mentions, “The only thing that you can really change is yourself. So when you work on yourself, the different energy that you put out around you to your partner, to your child, to the people that you work with does change and it does change things. But it’s probably the hardest thing to do.”

There is something really compelling to me in my own life about exuding the energy that others may be affected by. It allows this life to be an expression from my being. This is a continual practice of responsibility and coherence rather than a reason to stand back, disconnect, and continuously self-reflect.

Later on that same Sunday, my daughter and I went to a local pizza place that has just opened. We were the only ones there initially so the manager had time. He came around the counter to explain the opening offer they had.

You could tell he was clearly an open human being with his demeanour, but I had also seen him around the neighbourhood and he has brought a smile to my face many times – as he just belts out whatever he is listening to on his headphones as he walks down the streets.

We introduced ourselves and he told me where he was from and I told him I was from Ireland.

We went to sit at a table on a raised platform and I then heard The Pogues play as he professed to me his love for Irish music from across the restaurant. As someone living in Germany with a daughter who is bilingual but naturally is speaking more german, it just felt like a beautiful moment.

Tapping her wellies along to the beat, it felt like it stirred something meaningful for me.

When he played Sinead O’Connor and my daughter got up and danced and demanded I did too, it all felt a bit special. Van Morrison followed.

When we left we shared a nice moment with the manager.

He didn’t set out to create a special moment for me, he just did as an extension of who he is, not a grandiose intention of help.

In the face of all that is happening in the world it makes me want to double down on staying open to all the beauty that persists in my life. Not as a means of avoiding or denying what is here, but as fuel to face it even more.

Even within the micro experience of my life, there is real financial uncertainty I need to tend to and yet that is simply a part of my whole life. My whole experience of it.

The more people I interview around this question (300+), the more I see the significance of inner and outer coherence in experiencing a good life.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy, that the world will magically reward you for it, or that you won’t make mistakes. However, there is a deeper peace in our lives if we can cultivate this. It goes far beyond ideas of authentic expression and speaks to an alignment that, once experienced, feels jarring to exist outside of.

Not because anyone else knows, but from your own felt experience of life.

It is not that it makes me impervious to the external world, but it does help me meet both its challenges and joys. The present financial constraints with laughter of my daughter dancing.

The horrific news of war and geopolitical chaos with an appreciation for the warmth of someone thoughtfully playing some tunes for me in a restaurant.

Nothing gets cancelled out or nullifies the other.

It would be a great shame for me to stop noticing it all.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What is it about living in our present system that makes you feel least connected to yourself?

2. What helps you stay connected to our humanity?

Work With Me

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

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Cultivating Interconnected Harmony with Cindy Forde - What is a Good Life? #159

Listen to the full conversation with Cindy Forde below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

A project that isn’t about fixing you — it’s about noticing and inhabiting life more fully.

This week, I've been reflecting on my conversation with Alan Wilson — Director of People & Operations and qualified coach with 17+ years in senior leadership. Alan shares his journey from chasing achievement for validation to discovering self-love, exploring the question that's followed him since childhood: where do I belong, and how do I best use my gifts? This is a gorgeously human 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, liking, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“If I look at my own journey, to be completely honest, the belief I had was I am not enough. And that core belief is at the root of these questions that I’ve often been asking myself. The need for the validation, seeking my identity outside of myself, seeking love and attention—not within but without.”

How many of us can relate to this?

Alan went on to share a quote from Ram Dass, “Scratch down deep enough into every being and you will find some sense of unworthiness.”

I wonder how true that is? Or how culture-specific it is?

Have you noticed how fast life presently feels? Instant messages, social media, emails, and now AI giving rapid responses to problems that may have taken you weeks to tease out (not suggesting the soul or its meaning is maintained).

Political landscapes significantly shifting by the day, after day, after day…

Under 30 and under 40 lists.

What are you going to have achieved before you retire?

Tick, tock, tick, tock…

I have made some unconventional choices in recent years, that sometimes make me feel somewhat outside of time. But invariably I’ll get sucked in at different points.

I know at times I just need a break.

I haven’t really carried my phone around with me for a couple of years now, but my laptop can really do a number on me. On Sunday, it was just the dog and I at home, so I decided to go for a walk for four hours.

I met a friend for a couple of those hours and at the end of our loops around this large park, we sat down together on a bench for around 15 minutes.

After chatting for much of the entire walk, a silence emerged.

It was freezing but there was a bright pristine blue sky and we were in direct sunlight.

As I sat there, I noticed the bare trees and when you look at them for long enough how beautiful the patterns of their offshoots and branches were.

I could really see the older man on the bench next to us with his eyes closed, fully taking in the sun. The micro moments between couples or friends.

A flock of birds dancing in the sky, going from side to side, giving me a taste of freedom.

I said to my friend how easy it is to see the beauty in something if you take the time to notice it.

I had such a clear sense that this was real life for me right now, in this very moment, and without any plans for the day or any technology around, how stunningly enough it all just felt. How accessible it was.

On this same walk, my friend shared something that’s stayed with me. On New Year’s Eve she gave some change to a guy outside a supermarket—someone she often stops to chat with. After she told him a few things she was trying to figure out this year, he told her in a really heartfelt way that he really hoped all her biggest wishes come true this year.

She was briefly struck by how genuine it felt and where it was coming from relative to her position in life.

In this week’s interview, Alan questions much of what we have been told makes a good life, and our ideas around purpose and achievement.

“We live in a society which has a bias for action and that in itself is not a bad thing. But when it’s not underpinned by a level of awareness, then what you get is a lot of very frustrated, unhappy, burnt out people... the outside world can never truly fulfil us.”

For him, where he has found some peace is in the awareness of the day-to-day. The simple interactions that our speed and big ideas run “roughshod” over for the sake of appreciating what truly matters.

The interactions and moments that give you a felt sense of this life rather than a concept to chase or resist.

It is remarkable just how enough it can all feel when we find some space.

(If this need for space resonates, this event I am a part of in Cambridge in March may be of interest)

2. This Week’s Questions

1. How dependent is your sense of self-love on external achievement?

2. What allows you to let your armour down?

Work With Me

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

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Finding Self-Love Beyond Achievement with Alan Wilson - What is a Good Life? #158

Listen to the full conversation with Alan Wilson below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

A project that isn’t about fixing you — it’s about noticing and inhabiting life more fully.

This week, I’ve been reflecting on my conversation with Matt Zeigler — Managing Director at Sunpointe Investments, co-owner of Excess Returns, and creator of Cultish Creative, where he makes complex ideas accessible. Matt shares his journey from disconnection to rediscovering connection.

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

In other updates, I’m hosting a What Is a Good Life? retreat in Ireland in May for business leaders and owners with limited places. Click here to learn more and stay updated.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

I was sitting on my friend’s couch in his apartment in London. Willing the words to come out, yet they wouldn’t. I was having a series of panic attacks that left me feeling a great deal of shame, and I hadn’t told any friends yet.

We were two fairly typical, striving, ego-driven lads in our early thirties—competitive with each other, but with enough shared moments where our souls were clear to see. So I told him I wanted to share something, and he sat there for a moment, wondering what was going on.

When the words finally spilled out and I wondered what his reaction would be, he first breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t told him I had a terminal illness, given the drawn-out build-up to it. He asked if there was anything he could do, told me of his respect for me, and gave me a hug. What a relief.

It’s remarkable how different it feels today. Now, as new experiences and challenges arise, there is a relative ease to it—so different from those initial forays into what felt like another world.

While my friend and I now live in different countries and contact may be sporadic, whenever he has had any major upheaval in life, I know I am always one of the first calls he makes.

There is something beautiful about that.

It makes me think of an image I saw this week of a tree’s roots intertwining—something fused or forged at a deeper level that doesn’t need constant tending.

This week’s interview reminded me of this experience. Matt maps the territory of disconnection across three domains: family, work, and community. He’s spent his life fighting disconnection in each—running from his hometown, feeling trapped in certain jobs, operating without real friendships.

He shared a rather poignant realisation from his mid-thirties, when seeing a therapist. He was sitting in the therapist’s office and she asked, “Who else are you talking to about this?”

“I’m talking to you about this.”

And she said, “Matt, this isn’t how this works. You need to talk, open up, and share with other people.”

He reflects, “I know it’s dumb but that was a lightning bolt to me.”

That he can’t just pay somebody else to be his friend – the one he shares things with; he actually has to cultivate this in real relationships.

He was at a point where he felt the people in his life were more acquaintances than friends, but he took a chance with three people the following week. He opened up a little, tested the waters. To his relief, in each moment he was told that they too, to some extent, were experiencing their own version of something similar.

Matt and I have both experienced something rather profound with relationships in our thirties. They began to take on a satisfying level of depth that, for a long time, we were scared to engage in.

There is an almost disbelieving joy with which he talks about the level of community and connection in his life, which is hugely resonant with me. It is like realising the magnificence of a sunset when you rarely look at one—yet this is more freely accessible than that.

Neither of us could have imagined we’d arrive here, or thought this was possible.

The path to both our new experiences was shaped by our willingness to be open and say it how it is. It is powerful for the person who shares, but the permission it gives the other is equally impactful. It seemingly gives that person permission to share with you forever.

To me, it feels like people really want to let something out—that we can hardly hold the performance together for much longer. I feel it more and more in conversations: a wobble in someone’s voice, a sadness in their eyes, a longing to be held.

What is clear in both Matt’s story and mine is that connection is something we do naturally. Our experiences may cause us to turn away for a time. But we don’t need to be trained to respond to someone’s inner life. To develop or grow, we just need the space and the invitation.

This innate capacity to connect at depth is already there.

Just waiting for you.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. When have you felt most connected to others in life?

2. When did you feel least connected to other people in your life?

Work With Me

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

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Building Real Connection in Everyday Life with Matt Zeigler - What is a Good Life? #157

Listen to the full conversation with Matt Zeigler below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

A project that isn’t about fixing you — it’s about noticing and living life more fully.

This week, the newsletter has a new order: reflections first, then a couple of questions, a short clip from the conversation, and finally the full episode if you want to dive deeper.

I’ve been reflecting on my conversation with Alejandra Guzmán González, a Nicaraguan educator, lifelong learner, and mother of two. Alejandra’s journey is about learning to trust her own voice. There is much to take from it.

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

After doing 300+ of these interviews, there is always a moment that gets me emotionally.

Alejandra was navigating a difficult family situation with legal implications. Big decisions needed to be made. She was still in that ocean of “I don’t know what to do” — the lawyers would tell her, her dad would guide her, she’d follow what they said.

But there was one day when she called her father and said, “I don’t want to do that. I really want to do this.”

He started screaming. He was very upset. That was his way — he’d scream for a second or two, then explain why her choice wasn’t advisable.

“Okay,” she thought, “I’m listening to him, but I’m not going to change my mind. I’ll stick to this because I feel I have to do this.”

She was so scared. He was her idol, her protector.

They stayed quiet for a moment on the phone.

“And then he calmed down, with the softest voice that he would easily have too, because he is very sweet also. He told me, ‘You know what, love? Do whatever you want to do and I’ll be there for you.’”

She was almost 40 years old, with two children, legal issues, working to support her family — and still being the child internally who feared her parents because they were the top voices in her head instead of her own voice.

The world is very loud right now.

Opinions and content proliferate ad nauseam. Alejandra describes her journey to trusting her own voice as a period of cocooning — retreating, creating boundaries, cultivating silence.

It reminded me of when I took a sabbatical to Peru, and when people asked me why I was going, they seemed a bit confused by my response: “to hear whatever is going to come next.”

I felt a bit crazy or self-conscious for saying it, but it was true.

With more time and space, Alejandra made a profound realisation.

“What lowered my anxiety about getting the right answers or finding the right guidance,” she said, “was understanding two things. First, that I have the right to listen to myself. And second, that if I make a mistake by following my voice, I can learn from it — and that’s okay.

My intention is never to hurt anybody with the decisions I make. I know that about myself. I can trust that. If something does go wrong, I’ll pay attention and show up.”

There comes a point in all our seeking and figuring out that I’ve seen so many times in these interviews — accompanied almost with a laugh and an exhale: “Ha! I am trying so hard, yet this doesn’t make it easy.”

A psychotherapist friend of mine suggested to me shortly after my child was born: whatever any experts say, whatever it says in the books, nobody spends as much time with — or knows — your child better than you.

Surely we can extend that notion to ourselves.

Nobody knows what it feels like in your mind and body right now. You could shadow me for a year and hear all my thoughts, and you still wouldn’t know.

The particular mix of tension, pain, fears, joys, the excitement of it all.

Also, nobody really knows how it is going to play out in the long run.

I always laugh at the thought of a receipt I received from a travel agent in Delhi, who used my own ignorance against me and ripped me off. I was furious when I noticed.

Only to find that same receipt a year later, when rummaging through old notepads, and realising he set me on a course to meet my wife. That receipt is ten years old this week.

Life seems to be continually inviting me into a conversation. To notice. To listen. To fully inhabit this existence.

I’ve begun to realise it doesn’t want an answer.

My response is enough.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there a moment when you have felt most content listening to your own voice?

2. Is there a moment when you listened to your own voice that you now regret?

Work With Me

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

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Learning To Trust My Own Voice with Alejandra Guzmán González - What is a Good Life? #156

Listen to the full conversation with Alejandra Guzmán González below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

Subscribe now

On the 155th episode of What Is a Good Life?, I’m joined by Julian Kirchherr. Julian combines a career as a Partner at McKinsey & Company with his role as an Associate Professor at Roskilde University. At McKinsey, he co-leads the firm’s public sector work in Europe, focusing on people and organisational performance, while his academic research centres on the circular economy. He ranks among the most highly cited circular economy scholars worldwide. He earned his PhD from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and is the author of The Lean PhD: Radically Improve the Efficiency, Quality and Impact of Your Research.

In this conversation, we explore curiosity, autonomy, and the value of diverse experiences. Julian also discusses caring too much about external demands, and how this can undermine autonomy, meaning, and impact.

This episode will resonate with anyone carving out their own path and explores what it can take to make your own impact.

The weekly clip from the podcast (1 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (52 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.

1. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

2. My Weekly Reflection

I can recall a moment when I knew I had to leave.

The share price of the company had recently doubled.

The chief geologist and the CEO were talking about a potential new discovery on a project.

Both of them seemingly brimming with excitement.

I liked them both, generally felt at ease in their company, and yet here I felt like a third wheel.

I felt happy for them, and my pocket, and also, to some extent, realised I didn’t care.

People often talk of imposter syndrome as something connected to self-worth. I felt it in that moment because I was somewhat pretending to care.

I was around two people who seemingly loved what they were doing, and I didn’t.

It makes me think of what Adam Mastroianni said in episode #149: “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.”

But this wasn’t a moment where I was concerned with authenticity; it was really around my sense of potential. And what may be draining it.

In episode #134, Mike Moss referenced potential as this stored-up energy within us, not something outside of us.

I love this sense that it exists within us already, not another thing to develop or acquire.

At times in my life, I’ve felt it as something scratching away underneath the surface of my skin, just asking to be released. Maybe you have felt that too?

While I was away on holidays over Christmas, I was struck almost by a sadness at what our present system does with our potential. There must be something in between doing something totally for the sake of money and striving to be the best and optimised version of yourself.

Some more space for this life being more a felt expression of you.

In this week’s episode, Julian talks of the joy in pursuing what he wanted to do so freely in his PhD. He also speaks of how his additional role as an associate professor gives him energy for his primary role, as he gets to explore ideas he is totally curious about.

There is something really freeing or liberating in simply doing what you want with your time.

Like a relaxation or release that sweeps over my body.

As we touch on many times in this week’s interview, the combination of the words autonomy and curiosity feels like a beautiful bridge between where we are now and where we might need to go.

We seem to have this idea that if a teacher, parent, or boss isn’t sitting on us, we would just be lazy or up to no good.

I am forever left with the face of my daughter at the playground one day, grasping for a grip on a platform that she was trying to ascend.

A confronting frown shot in my direction as I momentarily had the audacity to see if she wanted a hand.

So I stepped back, and off she went.

I have interviewed several people who talk of an almost never-ending sense of energy for their work when it has stemmed from their own curiosity and autonomy.

For people whose careers were both working out and for those who were still navigating confusion. For both those working for themselves or for others.

It has little to do with status or outcome.

It appears to me that we are totally misusing one of the great human powers.

Terminal illness has once again visited my wider constellation this Christmas, which inevitably evokes conversations full of both confusion about how this life works and clarity about what is important.

Reflections on people’s own lives that reach an effortless depth or substance.

I wonder how many of us will reach the end and feel the weight of the stored-up energy that remains.

What if our potential is less about striving and more a willingness to get out of its way?

To do what is required to make your own impact, whatever that may be.

Work With Me

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

A short conversation is the simplest way to see whether the work fits your situation.

3. Full Episode - Making Your Impact Count with Julian Kirchherr - What is a Good Life? #155

4. This Week’s Questions

1. Where are you holding back from having the impact you want to have?

2. What would you pursue if you cared less about what others expected?

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

Subscribe now

On the 154th episode of What Is a Good Life?, I’m joined by Katie Elliott. Katie is a facilitator, writer, and programme designer working across community and organisational settings. With a background in jazz and a long-standing fascination with human change and habits, she creates tools, conversations, and projects that explore how people make sense of themselves and one another. Her work includes Amiko® Cards, the Adventures in Behaviour Change podcast, a series of children’s books, and an album of original piano music.

In this conversation, we explore curiosity, bewilderment, and the value of staying with experience rather than rushing to explain or resolve it. We talk about patterns, presence, and how meaning slowly reveals itself in relationships and in life — showing how deeper listening and meaningful conversation can genuinely shift how you see yourself and others.

The weekly clip from the podcast (3 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (56 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.

1. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

2. My Weekly Reflection

“But in the midst of something that I thought would be horrible, I found something I wasn’t expecting. That was also true when I sat at my mum’s bedside as she was dying and it was also true on the days where it looked like my life was perfect and I was unbelievably broken on the inside. That’s the kind of bewilderment, like, “This doesn’t add up and I don’t understand.””

There is a moment at the end of this podcast episode that was incredibly profound.

Katie reeled off a series of moments in her life where everything unnecessary finally stops.

The performance of anything just halts.

And somehow there is a quality of peace to be experienced, as well as whatever else the situation is stirring in us.

And then the contrast of that with moments in our lives when the performance is in full swing, and regardless of how it appears to others, it just hurts.

That sounds achingly familiar to some moments in my life.

I have come to know Katie a lot more closely in the last year, and there is an experience I continually note during and after our conversations.

I feel like I am experiencing a breeze. I can’t help but notice it.

I am very fortunate with the number of relationships in my life that I can now say something similar about.

So much so that there is often some degree of bewilderment when I encounter experiences where that is simply not the case.

The performance has become so normal that we can’t really settle in each other’s company.

We don’t have a simple grounding moment of connection, where I fully see you in this moment and you me.

As Katie suggests it can be something rather simple like asking people to reflect on something from their present experience and environment.

Maybe even taking the question of “how are you?” to be a literal one.

When we do this more frequently, the world becomes a surprisingly different place.

“Ich mag deine Ausstrahlung.”

I said those words in the third sentence of the first conversation I had with a man in my neighbourhood.

It roughly translates to “I like your vibe” or energy, maybe even aura.

For context, I was in my local café, and he was queuing up.

We had already said hello, as we have probably done a dozen times before. My daughter was gazing at him and he made some reference to his dreadlocks, and after we formally introduced ourselves, I said the above words.

He smiled and went to order his coffee.

I don’t remember being very self-conscious as to how he may have taken it. If he thought I was a bit weird.

After his coffee was ready, he asked if he could join me and my daughter, and we had a gorgeous conversation about life, sensing aliveness, what is presently occurring in our lives, and speculated where they may be headed.

For him, it was six months in Buenos Aires to test the waters there before a longer-term decision.

There was very little fat or fluff in the conversation or feeling each other out.

We even shared past observations of each other and what we had admired or noted in the other’s perceived disposition to life from times we’d seen each other around the neighbourhood.

What a gift of an experience this exchange is, I thought as it was unfolding. What a fucking gift. Really.

How freely this connection is potentially available.

Life continues to show me how much we can experience belonging if we really make contact with the moment and each other.

And just how remarkably enough that feels.

Work With Me

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

A short conversation is the simplest way to see whether the work fits your situation.

3. Full Episode - The Art of Making Meaning with Katie Elliott - What is a Good Life? #154

4. This Week’s Questions

1. Where in your life could you create a space for shared meaning making to emerge?

2. How might you allow yourself to make a fuller contact with another person today?

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.

Ethan is a PhD researcher integrating performance-training with 4E cognitive science. He is also Artistic Director of 5ToMidnight and Platform Manager for The Lectern, where he has co-designed select practices with John Vervaeke.

Together, we explore nihilism, play, embodiment, identity, and the question that now orients Ethan’s life: When does being itself become service?

This episode invites listeners to loosen self-fixation, recover participation, and rediscover what becomes possible when we allow life—and each other—to change us.

The weekly clip from the podcast (2 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (62 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.

1. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

2. My Weekly Reflection

I was feeling some stress yesterday.

Some beautiful moments too.

When I take my 2-year-old daughter to bed, I usually walk her on my shoulder.

These moments are often times for me to really feel and inhabit the moment.

Listen to the sounds my bare feet make on the wooden floors. Notice where there is any tension or strain in my body. Feel where her head nuzzles in against my neck and shoulder.

The cadence of my breath becomes quite noticeable. Hers too, deeper as she begins to drift.

I often do this because the moment simply invites it and I really want to be with it. It helps soothe her too.

Last night, while there was some stress in my body, I noticed she started to sing or hum the chorus to a song she often hears me play, Spirit Bird by Xavier Rudd.

It has this repeated primal chant in the chorus.

I picked up what I thought was the cue to start quietly making the same calls of the chorus.

Even after a few minutes of it, my voice didn’t feel as grounded as it usually might.

And it dawned on me.

Was she trying to soothe me this night?

There have also been a few moments recently with my wife where she has asked for a hug in times she felt in need of some support.

In the moments we hug, while initially thinking I am some sort of pillar, when I get really present, when I become aware of where my finger tips are in contact with her back, it is hard to make definitive sense of who is helping who.

While there is definitely some uncertainty in my life that I am navigating now, I have noticed in recent years an almost abnormal tolerance of that, all while feeling I am truly living a good life.

I’ve become all too aware of just how foundational the somewhat effortless presence I experience with my wife and daughter is for that capacity to handle uncertainty.

It allowed me to pause from my work yesterday evening upon sensing a rising surge of stress, and actually sit with it. Slowly closing my laptop and taking a moment to feel it.

It doesn’t make it pleasant, but there is an intimacy with it that often brings me peace.

In my conversation this week with Ethan, he spoke about a period in his life where self-work took over — where life became a series of exercises, each moment another opportunity to work on himself.

He noticed he was becoming less available to the people right in front of him.

Ethan credited his friends and the people he surrounded himself with for grabbing him by the shoulders and returning his attention to the significance of the relational space between us all.

Which left him with a very simple but profoundly important idea of a good life:
“A life lived in good company. Becoming together.”

In a very loud world, there is something so understated about presence when we consider all the ideas of things we value in others or the things we aspire to.

What we may look for in a partner, friends, a team, or community. This quality is rarely the answer you expect to hear or that is foregrounded.

Through all of these 300+ conversations I have been a part of, and the too many to recount moments of my life, presence is the fundamental basis of it all.

And more than any practice, it is people who keep on inviting me back to it.

Work With Me

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

A short conversation is the simplest way to see whether the work fits your situation.

3. Full Episode - When Being Becomes Service with Ethan Hsieh - What is a Good Life? #153

4. This Week’s Questions

1. Has your “self-work” ever reached a point where life feels like a continued exercise rather than something lived?

2. With whom does an awareness of presence come most easily to you?

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, 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.

If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.