What is a Good Life? #154
The Art of Making Meaning with Katie Elliott
I love doing this work — after interviewing over 300 people so far, every conversation still teaches me something new. I hope it reveals something for you too, sparking curiosity, presence, or an insight along the way. Supporting my work means I can spend more time noticing, exploring, and sharing with you.
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.
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Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Full Episode - The Art of Making Meaning with Katie Elliott - What is a Good Life? #154
4. This Week’s Questions
Where in your life could you create a space for shared meaning making to emerge?
How might you allow yourself to make a fuller contact with another person today?
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.