What is a Good Life? #63
What is a Good Life? #63
Being A Good Ancestor with Adah Parris
On the 63rd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Adah Parris. Adah is a futurist, artist, keynote speaker, and a visionary in the fields of technology, ecology, innovation, and art. She chairs Mental Health First Aid England and is a Fellow at The Royal Society of the Arts. She is recognised as a TED Talks Global Emerging Innovator and celebrated by Forbes Brazil as one of the top futurists in the world.
In this episode, Adah shares with us her journey to being herself, how curiosity and not following convention influence her life, the lessons she has learned about honesty and transparency in relationships, and meeting the human in each other before anything else. She notes the significance of seeing life as a series of experiments and shares what contributes to being both a good ancestor and being in kinship with the world around us.
If you find yourself stuck in life and are unsure of what to do next, or feel your present ways of relating to others are causing you difficulty, Adah’s perspectives will give you so much to contemplate across a wide breadth of themes and topics that may help you see the world a little differently.
The weekly clip from the podcast (5 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (73 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
📣 Announcement 📣
I am excited to share details of a leadership coaching program I am offering alongside Jindy Mann to build more human workplaces & teams - Click here to read all about
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
There was one point in this conversation when Adah referenced the term "radical honesty" regarding a significant shift in the quality of her relationships. For the first time, out of the many times I’ve heard that term, it dawned on me as very telling that the word "radical" is necessary before it.
The fact that the practice of repeatedly saying what you think, feel, and notice could require the word "radical" surely tells us a lot about how we are presently communicating.
When we think of the word "dishonesty," our minds often run to the idea of telling a blatant lie. But I think it is much more nuanced and subtle than that. However, we have it drummed into our heads from a young age that lying is bad, and therefore we seem to have a very resistant relationship with acknowledging dishonesty in our lives.
Even though we are quick to level such accusations at politicians, certain industries or companies, the press, etc., I find it much more interesting and helpful to examine my own interaction with it first. After all, the society in front of our eyes often just mirrors our collective behaviour.
While I have never read anything more than the odd article or seen a short video on radical honesty, I went on my own inquiry with honesty in my early thirties long before ever hearing of the term.
I’ve written before about taking a notepad with me wherever I went for a few weeks and noting down any time that I intentionally misled, lied, embellished, oversold my status or achievements, withheld truth, or attempted to cultivate an image in someone else’s head that wasn’t accurate. I was as much concerned with intention as the bare facts of the words from my mouth.
And I remember being stunned at how frequently I noted down little marks for various reasons. It could be really simple things like being late to a meeting with a friend as I watched something, blaming traffic, or telling curated stories that omitted facts to make me look more favourable, or someone asking me what was wrong and me protesting everything was fine - while being in a mood.
When I have shared this with people, sometimes they inquire, "Is that process not a little harsh on yourself or even self-flagellating?" Now of course, doing that for months on end or forever would be draining. It would be exhausting to track something all the time, irrespective of whether it is pleasant or not.
However, I believe it was one of the most insightful and liberating things I have done. Firstly, it brought me face to face with my dishonesty, which, though uncomfortable initially, provided me with a huge shift regarding my self-inquiry. I was now free to roam through the truth of my actions without the equivalent of “classified” or “protected” being labeled on a number of my behaviours, words, or actions.
I found it to be the opposite of self-flagellating, in that I could see how much more flawed or vulnerable I both am and was and to accept myself as that. If you don’t give yourself permission to look at certain parts of yourself by defending your behaviour to the nth degree, irrespective of losing your truth along the way, it’s very hard to say you accept yourself.
What’s more, when I could be more honest with myself, while I attempted to be impossibly virtuous at the start, perhaps annoyingly so, I realised we often tell lies or withhold the truth for much more human than malevolent reasons - we don’t want to feel discomfort or insecurity, we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, we feel some shame, etc.
However, I believe whatever the reason for our dishonesty, it’s important to be aware of it ourselves and not kid ourselves. Initially, when honesty became a bigger focus for me, I can definitely reflect on moments where I prioritised honesty over my humanity or care for others, so I am not saying this from the perspective of honesty being the virtue to pursue over all else, but if we can at least be aware of whenever we have not been honest, even if we only acknowledge it to ourselves, it can help us not get lost along the way.
And like Adah in this interview, I can testify that greater openness and honesty in relationships and with ourselves, can play a huge role in understanding what we want to do in this life, while cultivating the type of relationships we really need to take us there.
📣 My weekly conversation group is every Wednesday at 7pm (CET) on Zoom. It is centred around authentic communication & connection and is free of charge while I’m designing a course. Message me here to find out more and to be informed of weekly meetings and themes.
3. Full Episode - Being A Good Ancestor with Adah Parris - What is a Good Life? #63
Click here for Apple and Amazon
4. This week’s Questions
What relationship comes to mind first, in which you believe you would benefit most from being more honest and transparent?
What type of ancestor do you want to be? Is there a gap between where you are and what you want to be?
About Me
I am a Coach based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.