What is a Good Life? #124
To Make a Difference for Another with Glenn Behenna
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This Week’s Podcast
On the 124th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I’m delighted to welcome our guest, Glenn Behenna. Glenn is a recently retired Senior Lecturer at Carmarthen Business School and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He held a varied range of roles throughout his career, including steelworker, police officer, consultant, and facilitator, alongside more than 20 years of experience lecturing and managing university programmes. He was also an invited speaker at the House of Lords on topics related to education. Glenn’s path has been driven by a deep interest in people and how we communicate.
In this conversation, Glenn shares his insights on the power of making a meaningful difference in the lives of others. We delve into the value of listening, paying attention, and fostering relationships within learning environments. Our discussion highlights how curiosity can drive personal growth and deepen our understanding of both ourselves and others.
We also reflect on the need to create space for our feelings and intuition, as well as the necessity of preserving our humanity in an increasingly automated world.
The weekly clip from the podcast (2 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (59 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
The more of these conversations that I am a part of, the more poignant our plight of attempting to be or feel enough becomes apparent to me.
It's like we have created an obstacle or assault course that dangles the carrot of enough-ness at the end of it, but in truth, it doesn’t deliver.
All the while, all we may simply have to do is drop the act.
Share a little more of our lives with one another.
Share a little more of our present moment feelings and experiences.
In our attempts to conjure up or present this highly efficient and competent being, we leave our enough-ness in the hands of outcomes and the perceptions of others.
We set ourselves up for inevitable failure, as moments of failure are inevitable on all of our paths in life. Whereas, oddly, failure or mistakes are not seemingly allowed on this externally driven path to enough-ness.
Nor are your frailties as a human.
It’s quite weird when you step back from it all—observe the landscape of our difficulties with accepting ourselves and the actions we take in an attempt to achieve our way towards this acceptance.
It is so obviously destined for more suffering and feeling less than enough, yet we keep pursuing paths that have mainly yielded disconnection and fragmentation rather than wholeness or any semblance of peace.
In a recent interview, and in a beautiful, rambling, philosophical walk I took with a past guest in a park yesterday, both people mentioned how painful it is to fail at something when you haven’t been yourself in the first place.
That this is almost the seed of true regret in life—the pain of failing without having truly been ourselves. And conversely, the peace that can still accompany loss when we’ve remained true to ourselves and expressed our felt values.
I’ve known and felt this experience in my bones too.
There is something very simple but important that Glenn shares in the clip above.
The simplicity of simply sharing more of your story, your experiences.
The more we do this, the less we have to act. The more others respond in kind. The more we can get a felt experience of another’s human life. The more resonance we can experience.
And the absurd reality of this wild life—and all its ups and downs, its shames and its glories, its suffering and its joys—becomes apparent.
That the reasons you are giving yourself for not being enough are, quite simply, what it means to be human in most cases.
Surely, given what we are, being human has to be enough. Being you has to be enough already. What else can we really be?
To sign up to the What is a Good Life? Course
3. Full Episode - To Make a Difference for Another with Glenn Behenna - What is a Good Life? #124
4. This week’s Questions
Who in your life do you sense truly believes in you?
Is there a situation in your life where you could open up more in order to encourage someone else to do the same?
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.