Good Life Project || Inspiration | Motivation | Happiness | Meaning | Success

Today's guest, Vanessa Van Edwards , is a behavioral investigator and founder of human behavior research lab, the Science of People.She's also known as a human lie-detector, master of influence and someone who has spent her adult life decoding human interaction, influence, social and power dynamics, charisma, likability and more.As a geeky, modern-day Dale Carnegie, Vanessa Van Edwards' innovative work has been featured on NPR, Business Week and CNN. And, her book, CAPTIVATE: The Science of Succeeding with People, is a literal roadmap to decode and, to a certain extent, influence human interaction.We wanted to learn all about these things, the ideas, the ethics and application. But even more, we wanted to know what unfolded in Van Edward's life that led her to become so obsessed with the study of what makes us tick. Because, it turns out, Vanessa wasn't always the social savant in the room. In fact, in her earlier life, she pretty much ran from interaction.So, what happened? The answer, and the

Comes a time you’ve gotta get out of your head and just act. Maybe you want to change careers, start a company, learn to paint, start a relationship, write a book or mount any other potentially transformational endeavor. Think about it, ponder for a bit, suss out the basics, but then stop talking about it, […]The post Don’t Just Ship It appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Suicide or psychedelics?Those were the options this week's guest, Ayelet Waldman, found herself facing.A married mother of four and novelist living in Berkeley, Waldman struggled with bipolar, anxiety and depression her entire life. According to her, mental illness ran wide and deep in her family. Over the years, she'd found a pharmaceutical regime that made life tolerable, until peri-menopause destroyed her ability to time her medication and things spiraled rapidly out of control.Waldman found herself increasingly mired in suicidal ideation. Nothing seemed to be working any more. Then, she heard about decades old research on psychedelics and a non-trippy therapeutic approach called microdosing.Through a series of events, Ayelet found herself in possession of a vial of pure LSD and, seeing few others options, decided to try following a 30-day psychedelic microdosing protocol shared in James Fadiman's The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.Those 30-day changed everything. Within hours, the gray numbness be

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re living in uncertain times. And, that can have a pretty life-stifling effect on us. It can impact everything from state-of-mind to our physical health and even our creative and mental abilities. Question is, if you can’t change the immediate circumstance at work or in life, is there something […]The post Certainty Anchors: Finding Calm in a Stormy World appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Michelle Gielan, national CBS News anchor turned positive psychology researcher, is the Founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research.She is partnered with Arianna Huffington to study how transformative stories fuel success and is an Executive Producer of “The Happiness Advantage” Special on PBS and a featured professor in Oprah’s Happiness course.Michelle is also the best-selling author of Broadcasting Happiness.In today's episode, we dive into her journey from "coder kid" to TV anchor to positive-psychology researcher and change-maker. We explore the deeper psychology behind media, rational optimism, how the stories we hear, see and tell affect us and how we relate to each other both at work and in life. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There’s this mythology. Go all in. Don’t dabble. Don’t play. Don’t make it a hobby, make it your “one thing.” From the very beginning. Even if you have no idea if you’ll like it, how it’ll make you feel and whether it can ever really be what you’ve told yourself and the world you’re going […]The post The Experimental Life appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Born in Ghana, West Africa,Kute Blackson was the child of a Japanese mother and a Ghanaian father who was a legendary faith leader with some 300 churches across Ghana and a massive following in the U.K.By his early teens, Kute was being groomed to rise up in his father’s church, but that would all change when Blackson rejected the path his father laid out for him and chose his own instead.Estranged from both his father and his community, and feeling called to blaze his own path, Kute headed to the United States where he’d struggle on nearly every level and finally come to a place where his true hero’s journey would begin.That process of stripping away, hitting rock-bottom and eventually mounting his own search led Kute to rediscover his path to freedom, and rebuild his life and living, becoming a respected voice in spirituality and consciousness on his own terms, in his own way. His story and philosophy are detailed in his recent book, You. Are. The. One.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy

We are taught, from a young age, to exist in the middle. Everything in moderation. Don’t be a tall poppy, nor a shrinking violet. Good enough is good enough. The middle way, middle-class, mid-tier. That’s where we want to be. Not so big that we get cut down, and not so small that we can’t […]The post The Unfortunate Middle appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You know that little button on Facebook you click to "like" something? Well, as one of the early employees at Facebook, today's guest, Leah Pearlman, came up with that idea.Actually, its original incarnation was the "awesome button," but what's more interesting is why she created it. And, what was going on in her life that led her to want it, both for herself and the millions of others flooding the platform.Turns out, Leah was leading a double life. Publicly, she was a fiercely smart, driven technologist as the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. But, privately, she battled near-debilitating perfectionism that led to a decade of bulimia. On any given day, she'd move between helping to build a revolutionary company, and purging in the women's room.Until, one day, tragic news about her father, and the way she caught herself dealing with it, led everything to fall apart. She was forced to bring her dark side into the light and find a way through. And, from that emerged something she never saw coming.Having been a

There’s this odd thing that happens the moment after we ask for help. While we’re asking, we stand in a place of surrender. We hit a point, often deeply uncomfortable, where we’re riddled with uncertainty and we step into a place of vulnerability and say, “please, I don’t know where to go from here. Can […]The post Naked and Silent: Asking Is Not Receiving [encore] appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A pioneer in functional and integrative medicine, Dr. Frank Lipman is the founder and director of the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City and the author of many New York Times-bestselling books, including 10 Reasons You Feel Old and Get Fat, The New Health Rules. and Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Start Living Again.Born into an activist family in then apartheid South Africa, he was taught to always question norms and authority. This ethos followed him into his initial training as a doctor in South Africa. In his early work in a Soweto hospital, he was exposed to non-traditional healers who were able to accomplish what a more traditional approach to medicine struggled with.He then emigrated to the United States in 1984, where he worked in the South Bronx, becoming Chief Medical Resident at Lincoln Hospital at the height of the crack epidemic. There, again, Lipman, began to see the limitations of traditional medicine in treating addiction, and embraced complim

What happens when you take a social risk? Simple truth, we’re all wired for a certain level of human interaction. Some of us cannot get enough of other people. We’ll walk up to anyone, introduce ourselves, enter conversations and engage with just about anyone, even total strangers. It’s a bit like each new human is […]The post Social Risks: When is it Worth It to Say Hello? appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When Tiffany Dufu left for summer camp as a teen, both parents dropped her off. Only one picked her up.She’d soon discover her parents had split while she’d been gone. Not long after, her mom’s boyfriend moved in and began to behave in ways Dufu, a self-described preacher’s daughter, had never been exposed to. When this stranger in her home became violent she left to live with her father and began to rebuild her life.But it wasn’t until years later, when returning from maternity leave to assume her role as Chief Leadership Officer of Levo, that she found herself in crisis-mode, and began to ask deeper questions.While Dufu had spent years as a strong advocate for women in leadership positions at the highest levels of industry and government, she’d never examined the far more personal roles she and her husband had “defaulted” to in everyday life. She’d never realized how it was stifling her life and stopping her from truly stepping into her potential.Things had to change. How she navigated this c

There’s this beautiful verse in Khalil Gibran’s book, The Prophet that speaks to the interplay between reason and passion. It reminds us that these two qualities, so often treated as opposing forces and even warring world-views, are actually essential and hopelessly co-mingled elements of a live well-lived. They each make the other possible. Gibran writes: For […]The post Reason and Passion appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today’s guest, Dr. Aviva Romm, has been referred to as “the face of natural medicine in the 21st century by Prevention Magazine.”She’s a Yale-trained, board-certified physician with a specialty in women’s health and obstetrics; a midwife and herbalist, and a founding member of the Yale Integrative Medicine Program’s Advisory Board.Dr. Romm practices medicine in New York City and is a nationally sought speaker, author, and consultant. She is also one of the nation’s leaders in botanical medicine and is the author of 7 books on natural medicine.In this week’s episode, we begin with her service-mission to Haiti after the earthquake, then find our way back to explore the key ideas from her groundbreaking new book, The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution. Aviva describes a pervasive yet often undiagnosed condition—Survival Overdrive Syndrome (SOS)—which leads to the feeling of being in perpetual survival mode, overcome by everything from fatigue, overwhelm and brain-fog to pain, disease and even de

You’ve heard the phrase, “don’t throw good money after bad?” It basically means, once you realize the thing you’ve invested in is not what you though it would be AND likely never will be, don’t keep putting new money into it just because of what you’ve already invested. Take your losses or your “sunk costs” (the […]The post Don’t Throw Good Money (or Love) After Bad. appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tim Ferriss is a man on a mission, driven to deconstruct mastery and excellence, then share what he’s learned.It began with his own relentless experimentation and documentation, which yielded #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef.In more recent years, though, this yearning has led him to sit down with hundreds of elite-performers, from a vast array of domains, on a quest to reveal what made them them. What were the experiences, moments, stories, awakenings and methods that shaped them? What are the replicable elements, the unique traits and the ideas that are transferable to others.These conversations are shared weekly on Tim’s award-winning podcast, The Tim Ferris Show. And, the essential ideas have now been “condensed” into a remarkable 700+ page tome entitled Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. All of this made us curious about a particul

“I’m good.” It’s a lie we often tell ourselves. Why? To avoid the fear and uncertainty that comes from owning the fact that things aren’t quite what we’d hoped. That we’re terrified of of leaving the comfort of a “passable,” yet mediocre existence in the name of embracing the pursuit of our own personal legend. […]The post Are You Happy, Or Afraid? appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today’s guest, Dave Evans, is a lecturer at the famed Stanford d.School a theological scholar and management consultant. He is also a man on a mission to explore what it means to spend time designing your life.As an early team-member at Apple, he led product marketing for the mouse and introduced laser printing to the masses.He then joined gaming behemoth, Electronic Arts, as employee #2, before leaving to help start-up teams, corporate executives, non-profit leaders, and countless young adults build amazing ventures.Along the way, he realized they were all asking the same question. “What should I do with my life?” Helping people get traction on that question finally took develop a groundbreaking course that applies design thinking to life, where he introduced the concept designing your life to students at Berkeley and then Stanford.His latest book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life, walks you through the entire, step-by-step process.Subscribe to email u

In today’s GLP Riff, we’re sharing two powerful questions from one of our super-awesome podcast listeners. Turns out, we’ve received similar questions many times over the years, so we figured this’d be a great time to share a bit of a longer answer, along with a few stories and ideas. It’s all around the realization […]The post I’m Aware, and it’s Bumming Me Out. Now What? appeared first on Good LifeProject. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.