What Is A Good Life? #151
Seeing What We’ve Been Missing with Olaf Lewitz
On the 151st episode of What is a Good Life?, I welcome Olaf Lewitz. Olaf is the Trust Artist, a leadership thinker and coach who’s endlessly curious about our similarities and differences, and how context shapes the quality of attention we give each other. He’s learning how to change systems so that they support life rather than extract or exploit it, sourcing wisdom and insight from unexpected places. He does this through his TrustTemenos Academy and his work with Dark Matter Labs.
In this conversation, we explore the question “What am I missing?” as a way into anger, boundaries, and the stories we tell ourselves – and how much of our “drama” is created by our interpretations rather than reality.
Olaf shares how an unshakeable sense of worth and hope help him live with paradox: enjoying a good life while staying awake to harm, responsibility, and the future of our children – and what that invites us to examine in our own lives.
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
These moments always get me.
After more than 300 interviews, it remains equally fresh — a moistening in my eyes continually guaranteed.
A moment when the guest shares how another human told them they were OK as they were.
As simple as that.
In this week’s conversation with Olaf, he described moving to an all-boys school, where birthday parties suddenly became boys-only by default. He’d always felt more at ease playing with girls, and his father simply encouraged him to keep inviting the friends he genuinely wanted there.
He said this continued reinforcement — that you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing, that it is OK to be different, and that you are enough as you are — has left him with a sense that there is a core within that cannot be touched or harmed by others.
Even in hard times, he comes into contact with this part of himself, and hope seems to remain.
I have shared moments before in this newsletter that really brought me into contact with this too. One was the realisation that I was still me after I felt my external and internal worlds were falling apart.
Shortly afterwards, I met my German wife in India — after our first coffee together, when I told her exactly where I was in my life — and was met with a look of pure acceptance.
It still moves and supports me to this day — all the more so because it taught me that I was enough then, even in some distress, and I am most certainly enough now.
A friend recently asked me if I could distill one thing that I hoped people would take from this project. Without much forethought, or even blinking, I said, “That people would realise that they are enough.”
Olaf mentions in this interview that the core question he is asking himself as he moves through life is, “What am I missing?”
He and I both had moments in our lives where we told ourselves narratives that weren’t true or missed a considerable truth, and so this ongoing curiosity remains.
Not as in “What am I lacking?” but “What am I not seeing?” — in you, in me, in us.
I see, at the core of our culture, that we are fundamentally missing a connection with this sense of enoughness.
It has become so normal to believe it must be strived for or achieved.
Nonsense.
You are enough simply because you exist right now, and all the ways we try to earn it will look so trivial as we look back on our lives and realise what we denied ourselves and others access to.
It need not be some over-the-top verbal declaration or emotional inquiry.
It can simply be a look at the right moment — a close paying attention, and the other person feeling it.
It can be us all taking a collective exhale and letting go of our attempts to mould ourselves to an idea of who we ought to 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.
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Full Episode - Seeing What We’ve Been Missing with Olaf Lewitz - What is a Good Life? #151
4. This Week’s Questions
Is there someone you need to let know that they are enough, exactly as they are right now?
Have you ever experienced a moment of undeniable self-worth, even when your life felt like it was falling apart?
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.