What is a Good Life? #178
The Courage To Be Heard with Lucinda Millward
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I'm reflecting on a conversation with Lucinda Millward - founder of The Baskerville Project, whose work brings the body and nervous system into collective inquiry. We explore what it costs to speak our truth - and why so many of us have learned not to. From the paradox of using other people's words to say what we cannot otherwise say, to why courage literally means to reveal one's heart.
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
1. My Weekly Reflection
I open every interview with the same question and close with the same one. Everything in between is a completely organic conversation. It requires my complete attention to what is happening right now, otherwise I have nothing else to work with.
The interview would collapse, like taking a cake out of the oven before it has set.
The significance of this attention in conversation has been one of the biggest discoveries of my life.
“Keep talking I am listening” as someone checks their phone in front of me.
I have grown accustomed to stop talking and telling whoever I am with that I can wait. That they can’t possibly tend to both and do them well at the same time.
To have several moments in my day where I get to look into the eyes of a real and unguarded human as they look back into mine is life changing.
I have often put this lack of attention down to distraction and self-interest.
But Lucinda offered a perspective that adds another layer to it:
“If we are really going to listen to someone, really listen, then we consent to being altered by them. And that’s scary.”
It’s true.
If we spend time together in a totally present and unguarded way, I will be changed by you. You will be changed by me.
That is both a scary and exhilarating thought.
But it is happening anyway.
In the interview, Lucinda references an idea from Dave Snowden on identity. He suggests that identity is an emergent property defined by context, relationships, and the stories we share within a community.
Throughout this project of interviewing more than 300 people around this question, I don’t know where some of my thoughts and ideas begin or end. Sometimes I only realise months after that I have adopted a perspective or a way of living from another guest. I don’t sit down and intend to do so, it just happens.
We like to imagine ourselves as independent and self-determined. Yet we are constantly being shaped by one another.
There is a trade-off in how much we are willing to let go of control and how much we want to feel connection.
As Lucinda suggests, when we are in a moment where we can look deeply into the eyes of another, even in silence, then there is no armour or place to hide. For her, that is where she feels most alive and real.
These moments are much closer than we think, often just a moment of attention or a meaningful question away.
Like: “What is a good life for you?”
2. This Week’s Questions
Who do you feel most unguarded when speaking to?
In whose presence do you attempt to control the conversation the most?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - The Courage To Be Heard with Lucinda Millward - What is a Good Life? #178
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Lucinda Millward below.
For Apple podcast click here.
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.