Good Life Project

There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it.

Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, a leading resilience researcher, and one of the world's most trusted voices on loss and grief. Her TED talk on resilience has been viewed more than nine million times. She is also a mother who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident in 2014, and who has spent the decade since weaving her scientific training and her lived experience into tools that actually work. Her new book is How Will I Ever Get Through This?

In this conversation, we go to the places most conversations about grief are afraid to go.

What you will explore:
Why grief is not an emotion but a full-body experience that explains the exhaustion, brain fog, and 3 am waking you may have been blaming on other things
What "living losses" are, the griefs that come without a funeral, and why they may be driving far more of our suffering than we recognize
The difference between acceptance and coming to terms with, and why one word changes everything about how you move through loss
What the research actually shows about post-traumatic growth, including the statistic that will surprise you about how common it actually is
Why resilience is not about bouncing back, and what Dr. Hone means when she says you do not bounce back from anything that matters
The one question she asks herself in the hardest moments, and why it is a more useful starting point than any technique

If you have ever minimized something you were going through because it did not feel like it counted as real loss, this conversation is for you.

You can find Lucy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am going solo to talk about something that I think a lot of us are quietly carrying, the conversations we know we need to have with the people who matter most to us, and why we keep finding reasons not to have them. The research turns out to be really clear on this: we consistently overestimate how bad it will be and underestimate how much it costs us to stay silent. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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Somewhere in the last few years, a lot of us started asking a version of the same question: who am I now, and what am I actually here to do? The answers don't come from a quiz or a vision board. But they just might come from the one word that has been running your life all along, whether you knew it or not.

Erin Weed is a speaker coach, keynote speaker, and the creator of the Dig, a purpose-excavation method she has used with over a thousand leaders, founders, and changemakers across every stage of life and reinvention. Her new book, Just One Word: The Surprisingly Simple Method to Discover Your Purpose and Unleash Your Power, is the culmination of that work. She also spent over a decade as head speaker coach for TEDxBoulder, helping people find the one true thing they need to say and the courage to say it.

In this conversation, you get to watch the Dig happen in real time, because Jonathan sits down in the chair and lets Erin guide him through the full process.

What you will explore:
What the Dig is and why close to 100% of people who think they know their word are actually wrong
How your life story, all of it, from childhood to present day, contains a 10-word operating system that explains exactly how you tick
Why your deepest violations, the things that make you genuinely angry, point directly toward your core word
The difference between the word you think defines you and the one that actually does
How knowing your word changes the way you make decisions, support the people you love, and build the things that matter most to you
What Jonathan's word turned out to be, and the moment in the conversation where it landed

If you have ever felt like you were circling your purpose without quite landing on it, this conversation is for you.

You can find Erin at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Dr. Lucy Hone to talk about something most of us are carrying without ever calling it what it is: the grief that comes without a funeral, the losses that do not count as real loss in our culture but may be driving more of our suffering than we know. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The voice telling you that you're not enough, that something is about to go wrong, that you should have done it differently, it sounds like you. That's exactly what makes it so hard to catch and so hard to stop.

Emiliya Zhivotovskaya has spent decades inside the science and practice of mental wellbeing, training thousands of coaches worldwide through her Certification in Applied Positive Psychology program.

Her own path into this work began with a personal reckoning. An eating disorder that started in adolescence, years of thoughts she couldn't separate from herself, and the moment someone first told her she didn't have to be a passive recipient of what her mind was doing to her.

In this conversation, we go deep into the phenomenon most of us call overthinking and find out it's not one thing. It's five distinct types of chatter, each with its own voice, its own purpose, and its own specific antidote.

What you'll explore:
The five types of mind chatter: worry, motivation, mindset, judgment, and regret. And how to tell which one is running you at any given moment
Why high-level worriers actually problem-solve less effectively, and what to do with anxiety that won't respond to "just let it go"
The "I can't... yet" reframe that shifts a fixed mindset in a single word, and why it works where positive affirmations don't
How to take your brain to court, the evidence-based tool for the thoughts that insist you're not enough
Why your chatter isn't trying to destroy you, and what it's actually asking for

If you've ever found yourself exhausted not by what's happening, but by what your mind keeps doing with it, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Emiliya at: Website | Instagram | Mind Over Chatter Course | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Erin Weed, talking about her book Just One Word, and the surprisingly simple method she's used to help over a thousand people unlock their purpose and finally feel clear on who they are and where they're headed. If you've ever felt like you're searching for that through-line in your life, this conversation is for you.

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if procrastination has been working exactly as intended?

Not as a character flaw, not as laziness, but as a solution you invented for a problem you were more afraid of than the thing you kept putting off. That reframe changes everything about how you approach it.

Jon Acuff has spent decades thinking about why people with real ability, real ideas, and real desire still find ways to delay the work that matters most. His newest book, Procrastination Proof, is the result of working with hundreds of thousands of people on this exact struggle. He brings both the humor of someone who has personally been inside the loop and the precision of someone who has studied the patterns long enough to see what's actually underneath them.

In this conversation we get into:
Why procrastination is a solution, just not the best one, and what that distinction means for how you actually change it
The four permissions most of us never gave ourselves: to dream, to plan, to do, and to review
How desire creates discipline, not the other way around, and why willpower is the wrong tool entirely
The broken soundtracks that sound like reasons but are really just fear in disguise
What "the opposite of procrastination" actually looks like, and why it has nothing to do with productivity

If there's something you've been wanting to do for months or years, and you keep finding new reasons why this isn't quite the right time, this conversation is worth your hour.

You can find Jon at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Emiliya Zhivotovskaya to talk about what's actually happening when you can't stop the spin cycle in your head, and more importantly, what to do about it.

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The anxiety you carry, the way you go silent in conflict, the relentless drive that never quite feels like enough, these didn't start with you.

They started much earlier, in relationships and environments your body learned to survive before you had words for any of it. And according to Dr. Nicole LePera, until you understand what your nervous system actually encoded in those years, you'll keep bumping into the same walls, the same patterns, the same exhaustion.

Dr. Nicole LePera is a clinical psychologist trained at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research, a New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of the global SelfHealers community. Her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, brings together neuroscience, attachment research, and epigenetics to explain not just why we are the way we are, but how real change actually happens in the body, not just the mind.

In this conversation, you'll explore:
Why your childhood adaptations were brilliant at the time, and how they became the patterns holding you back now
What the inner child actually is (the science, not the cliche), and why insight alone isn't enough to change it
The neuroscience of emotional flooding: what's happening in your body when you can't just calm down, no matter how much you want to
Why midlife is often the moment these old patterns finally surface, and why that's not regression, it's readiness
The epigenetics of stress: how your ancestors' survival adaptations may be running your nervous system today
Where to actually begin if you want to do this work without needing to excavate everything that happened to you as a child

If you've spent years doing the work and still find yourself reacting in ways that don't feel like you, this conversation will help you understand why, and what to do next.

You can find Nicole at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Jon Acuff about why procrastination is not actually your problem and the surprising permission shift that happens when you finally finish what matters most. Follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.