What is a Good Life? #122
When Our Messiness & Souls Meet with Felicity Reed
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This Week’s Podcast
On the 122nd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I’m delighted to welcome our guest, Felicity Reed. Felicity is a Psychotherapist and expert in leadership, who, alongside a private practice and consultancy, has worked as a clinical lead across the NHS, local authorities and the voluntary sector, working at the sharpest edges of trauma and health inequalities, supporting people facing life’s toughest circumstances to turn their pain into power.
She first came into therapy because of her own difficulties and ADHD, and uses this lived experience of messiness to bring humour, joy and humanity to the trickiest places of the human soul. She is the founder of Mic Drops: tiny pops of tools, techniques and training that highlight health inequalities, and demonstrate tiny but powerful actions each of us can take to undo inequity and improve social justice. She also shares tiny but powerful daily tips on Instagram to de-mystify therapy and make mental wellbeing easier.
In this wonderful conversation, we explore the themes of connection, soul, vulnerability, and embracing and sharing our messiness. We explore what type of relating is possible on the other side of this openness.
Ultimately, this episode points to a richness of life that can be experienced when we allow ourselves to be seen.
The weekly clip from the podcast (2.5 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (55 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
In this interview, Felicity shares a moment where she opened up to a friend about how she was really feeling within herself. She was at a low ebb, and how her friend responded seemed to shift something deep within her.
“It was the thought that when I thought I had nothing, there was somebody else in the universe for me.”
That idea—of being met when you feel most empty—immediately sparked a memory for me.
I had just met my now-wife in McLeod Ganj, in Northern India. We’d hung out with mutual friends the night before, and this was our first one-on-one conversation.
We were in a café, on the outdoor terrace. I can still see the morning sun barely peeking out above the foothills of the Himalayas behind her. Over our first coffee, she simply asked why I had taken a sabbatical to India.
The kind of question that usually cues up a tidy answer about your travels—Vipassana, meditation, ashrams, all of that. But for some reason, I received it on another level.
I told her that I had suffered quite a bit the year before. About therapy, and about how I’d spent much of my life running from a pain in me—that I’d become a bit of a mess in relationships. Insecure. Jealous. Pretending I was confident. Acting in ways that made me not like myself very much. And that I wanted the space to feel all of that more. To fall further apart, if necessary.
It’s strange; I don’t know why I said it. I could make up guesses.
Maybe I was tired of a persona I had created and was oversharing out of fear I might slip back into it.
Maybe it was because she was from Germany and I was from Ireland, and I didn’t expect to see her again. But given that was ten years ago and we were engaged five weeks later, maybe we were simply meant to meet in that moment. Who knows.
What I do know is that I’ll never forget how she looked at me after I spoke. It was a look of great compassion, an unwavering acceptance. She didn’t wade into the details of it all—she just said something simple like, “It’s nice to hear the truth for once.”
What a relief it was to hear her say that, it instantly moistened my eyes.
She, in turn, shared some of her story with me. I didn’t feel a shred of judgment toward her. I just felt the same acceptance I’d received from her.
There is something so individual at times about our paths of self-inquiry, spirituality, or self-improvement—whatever you want to call it—that I often see us getting caught up in ourselves. We try to do too much of it on our own.
We seem to forget we’re connected. That we can lean on each other. That we can help each other. That we can go much further together than alone.
It’s as if we all head off into our separate silos, working away on ourselves under cover of darkness, only emerging to show the bits we think we’ve improved. Maybe we share how deep our practices are, how disciplined we’ve been, how far we’ve gone. While not fully engaging with life.
And so much of it, to me, seems to miss a sense of wholeness. A wholeness I sense can only come from our connection to what’s around us—especially other people. Some parts of us are just out of reach. Some wounds need another’s presence. A touch. A word. A shared silence.
And yet how easily someone else can reach them—with a look, a phrase, an acceptance we ourselves can’t yet offer. Even just as evidence to counter the voice in our minds that tells us this thing, this part of us, is unlovable.
The more I go through life, the clearer it becomes: I don’t need to be perfect or pure before I let others see me. If I can be sincere about where I am right now, in that moment, then I have nothing to work on. I am here, as I am.
That sincerity, and the act of sharing it with another, does something for my sense of being and belonging that I can’t really describe. It feels alchemical.
In a culture that glorifies the lone hero’s journey, it’s worth saying plainly: the path to wholeness is through and with each other.
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3. Full Episode - When Our Messiness & Souls Meet with Felicity Reed - What is a Good Life? #122
4. This week’s Questions
Have you ever been afraid to share something personal, but when you finally did, it only brought you closer to someone?
Is there something you're currently hesitant to share or get off your chest?
About Me
I am a coach, podcast host, and writer, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 250 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 self-inquiry through one-on-one coaching, joining my 5-week What is a Good Life? group courses, or fostering greater trust, communication, and connection within your leadership teams, or simply reaching out, feel free to contact me via email or LinkedIn.