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Steven Segal, "Mandela’s Leadership Legacy: Emotional and Existential Wisdom" (Routledge, 2026)
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Steven Siegel
welcome to the New
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Elena Sobrino
Books Network hello and welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host today, Elena Sobrino, and I'm an anthropologist. I work on environmental emotions and politics. I work on the Flint water crisis and today I'm really delighted to be speaking to my guest who is Steven Siegel and we're gonna talk about his new book which is Mandela's Leadership, Emotional and Existential Wisdom. And this has just come out this has just come out from Routledge this week that we are speaking in June 2026. We're recording this podcast. So congratulations on the book coming out and to give you a brief introduction, Steven Siegel was formerly an Associate professor of management at Macquarie University in Australia. He's currently in private practice as a psychologist and a leadership coach and he also runs professional development workshops for coaches and psychotherapists. So Stephen, welcome to the podcast.
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Steven Siegel
Thanks Elena, thanks very much for having me.
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Elena Sobrino
Thank you. I would love to know if we can begin by hearing about your background and your journey to writing this book. So can you please tell us a bit about yourself, your interests, what led you to write this book right now.
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Steven Siegel
Thank you. I guess there are a few events that are pivotal to writing this book. The first is I have a PhD in philosophy. I'm also a practicing psychologist. And for a number of years at Macquarie University, I was very much a leadership scholar and coach. And writing about coaching and leadership from a particular angle. And the angle is existential philosophy and psychology. And what has always stood out for me in the leadership studies is the absence of mood and emotion in kind of shaping the strategic leadership style of a leader. And so the existential perspective from which I come sees kind of emotions and emotions and moods as very central to leading especially, but not only in the time of transitions where kind of you don't have the old rules of the game to hold on to, but there are no new rules of the game yet. So you're kind of in this liminal, in between space. And what becomes very important is kind of the how you work across the space. What we know from psychotherapy and from existential philosophy is it's the way in which people handle uncertainty, anxiety and existential threats that are important for navigating the space of the between. And Nelson Mandela has kind of always struck me as a leader that was able to work with people in deep, deep experiences of uncertainty, enabling them to transition mindset and ways of being. And so it was this really, that kind of led me to this position of writing on him. I think he's an exceptional leader in being able to navigate existential threats. I think we live in a world today where we live in a world of existential threats today, but we don't really see leadership being able to work effectively with those existential threats. And so Mandela becomes an exemplar of how to work with those existential threats. Yeah.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah. Thank you. And yeah, I mean, it definitely it strikes me as a book that is kind of unique in the way, at least for me in the genre. It is, I guess, or I'd love to know how you thought about it. Felt like it was braiding together some of that philosophical perspective that you just mentioned and also kind of offers these sort of direct. The reader is sort of meant to engage with it. I think you actually write, you sort of see it as you're hoping it has an impact on the reader that is more than just maybe somebody kind of studying it and analyzing it in a conventional, the way you would do a textbook or another academic text. And I guess I'd love to know how you think about what genre this was. Were there other books that, you know, were kind of maybe models for you or was this kind of, I don't know, were there challenges in finding this way of writing and thinking? And I guess I'd also love to know, like, who do you see as the audience of the book? Like, who did you want to speak to and be affected by this?
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Steven Siegel
Okay, great. So I guess starting with the last issue you raised, who is it written for? So my aim in writing the book was not to write for the text scholarship. This was intended for and is intended for is kind of people, leaders in practice, who are living in uncertainty and again, uncertainty where the rules of the game no longer apply. And how do you work in spaces of uncertainty? And I guess existential philosophy is really about working in uncertainty, especially kind of existential threats. And so I kind of see that coaches, therapists, philosophical practitioners, leaders, and practice based leadership scholars work in this kind of space of uncertainty. And of course there is a lot of literature on uncertainty and in leadership, but there's very little on existential forms of uncertainty in leadership. I just think you look at conflicts throughout the world today and you see nation states that feel threatened. They talk about being in existential threats, but do they really know what they mean by existential threats? Mean even climate change, you know, it's an existential threat because we cannot rely on our existing kind of values and technologies in order to deal with climate change. And even people in the United nations are saying, you know, that the kind of rules or the charter under which the United Nation was formed in the late 1940s are no longer fit for purpose in the kind of twenties or the two thousand and twenties. It's kind of there's a rethinking of the whole rules of the game that need to be played. So my writing in this book is addressed to that level of people, whatever field, in fact, what it may be in, who understands the deeper threats that we live in and wants to work with those threats. And it was kind of, I mean, I haven't seen any literature that brings existential philosophy and leadership in the case of Mandela, like this. Most of the studies of Mandela are written from a historical paradigm. I haven't yet seen any written from this kind of existential philosophy psychology paradigm. And I thought it'd be interesting to do that.
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Steven Siegel
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah, yeah. And I guess maybe I can ask you, you know, hear a bit about. Right. Obviously you see Mandela as a figure we can learn a lot from and kind of draw these sort of, you know, this wisdom about existential threat and our sort of, you know, movement through it. And I guess I'd love to know, maybe just broadly speaking, so what is it about Mandela? You know, why Mandela? You know, were there other people you thought about writing about? Or what is it about this figure that was so striking or meaningful to you for this kind of mode of thinking? And I also, kind of, relatedly, so why Mandela? But also I'm really curious how you approached writing about somebody. Cause I could see this being a very, you know, this is a figure who's sort of hugely symbolic in so many ways. And I could see it being maybe tempting or easy to sort of lionize and kind of, you know, you talk a bit about, I think you say something like, this is sort of about, you know, the human aspect of Mandela's leadership or, you know, presence. And I wonder how you navigated that. And was that a challenge to navigate at all? Like, how do you write about somebody without making it like this is a larger than life sort of, you know, super kind of. Yeah, charismatic more than human, you know, not relatable person. I'm just curious of that if that was at all on your mind, as you wrote, and how you chose to deal with that possibility.
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Steven Siegel
Look, I've always believed Mandela to be amazing, and I'll tell you why in a minute or two. And that amazement has never diminished. And I guess that if I have a critique of the book, it most probably is that I do kind of lionize him a bit, you know, I mean, again, the word to describe someone as amazing is already to be kind of seduced by them, you know. So let me tell you why and what it is about Mandela that I thought was amazing and still do think is amazing. And I think what I'll do is I'll center it around a particular speech that Mandela gave in 1993. So this speech, the context of the speech was the Mandela's African National Congress Party and the South African government of the day were in negotiations with each other for transformation to a kind of free and democratic South Africa. The negotiations were initiated by Mandela. In fact, they were initiated by him while he was in prison in 1985, which was still a long, long way from his release because he was released in 1990. So 1985, he wrote a letter to the minister of justice in the South African government of the time. And he said there are two issues to be put on the table for negotiations. The one is black majority rule in South Africa, and the other is taking care of the anxiety and uncertainty of white people, even though that uncertainty and anxiety is not necessarily justified. He said he understands where it comes from. So, I mean, that's already kind of quite a big understanding, you know, and it also, he's not coming in on a technical level. He's not saying, you know, this is just transactional politics. He's working here straight away with emotions. He's understanding the role of anxiety and black self expression. And so we see emotions kind of working here. And so what we can say is kind of underpinning his whole leadership root was this anxiety, fear, anger, black anger, white anxiety. And, you know, he knew how to speak to people, not only to people, but he knew how to speak to courtrooms. He knew how to speak politically to this distinction, anger and fear. And I think just adding to that, you know, in the Western world, there's a tendency to kind of negate emotions and see them as irrational, you know, rather than as seeing them as actually the glue which holds everything together, you know. And I think with Mandela, we start to see the glue that holds everything together. And nowhere was this more emphasized in the speech of 1993. So again, the speech was South Africa was intense negotiations. The government and the ANC were not seeing eye to eye. And then on a Saturday morning, the 10th of May in 1993, the second in command to Nelson Mandela is in the liberation struggle or the African National Congress. The second in command was assassinated. And I remember it vividly, was assassinated. And the shock that went through the country at that time was we were all expecting civil war in South Africa. My wife and I were on a. A holiday on one of the coastal cities in South Africa, and we were frightened as to how we were going to drive back to her home in Johannesburg. There was this very intense anxiety and from African people a very strong anger and a very strong grief at one of their big heroes had been assassinated. And so there's no doubt that the youth of South Africa, the African youth of South Africa wanted civil war. The hurt, the anger and the grief were just too much. And so for a few days, South Africa was in this radical state of uncertainty, an existential uncertainty, because, again, there were no institutions of state that could contain this threat. The leader of the white South African government knew that he could not appeal for calm in the nation. He didn't have the voice, he didn't have the credibility. And so he asked Mandela to do a national address to the people, recognizing again that no institutions of states could do it. Mandela was the only one that could do it. And so Mandela did make a speech on the day of the assassination, but it wasn't an effective speech. And it said by commentators that Mandela wasn't emotionally present in the speech that he was giving. It was like he was reading a speech off a screen rather than actually being there in the speech. And then two or three days later, he decided that he's going to do a national broadcast again, and he's not going to ask for permission to do it. He's going to authorize it with no formal authority. He had no formal authority to do this. So what was amazing about Mandela in the speech, he took a nation divided, one part feeling so much fear, the other anger and grief. He took a nation that was divided and unified, the nation behind the cause towards democratic South Africa. So again, we expected civil war. Civil war was in the air. And Mandela made the speech that
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Steven Siegel
was like a therapeutic speech that enabled people to get back behind his vision, or the vision for a united South Africa. So let me talk a little bit about the speech. And as I'm saying, it's a therapeutic speech that he made. And I do say that one of Mandela's kind of Attributes or characteristics of a leader is that he had a very strong therapeutic dimension to it. So let me try and make sense of that. So part of the speech was around acknowledging the anger and the grief of black people in South Africa. And so he sat there or stood there and said, this anger, this is an unacceptable act. It's an outrageous act. And it's evoked our anger. And we are in grief and we mourning for the loss of Chris Harney was his name. And so the first thing there he did was acknowledge the anger and the grieving. And then he provided a framework for people to transform their attitude towards the anger and the grief. Instead of kind of, you know, which would have been easy for a motivational speaker kind of leader, it would have been easy to rally the troops for a kind of national war. Mandela said, no, we've got to understand our anger and our grief. We can't give into it. Rather, we need to see it in a different way. And he said, and he followed that up by saying, our decisions that we make tonight are going to kind of affect the future towards which we go. So he said he's appealing particularly to the black youth of South Africa because he knows their anger is unbearable. And he kind of called on them to reformulate their attitude towards the anger, saying that, you know, it's in the national interest not to kind of react to not. And so he brought on board the black youth who were not so welcome to Mandela. They were quite angry with Mandela for going for peace in the first place. So he was able to bring them on board, and then he was also able to bring white and black people on board together. And he said something to the effect that this, this assassination was perpetrated by a white right wing leader against the black majority. And he said, but at the same time, we must remember that it was a white woman who kind of reported and allowed them to identify who the assassins were. So he was bringing white and black together at the same time by appealing to their different kind of roles. And what we also got to understand that he was not a leader that was detached and removed from the situation. He was grieving, he was angry, he was scared of a civil war. So it was in the midst of his own emotional disruptions that he was able to contain his own disruptions and speak to the people as we. And I know that sounds a bit crass, we the people. But he did it on a felt sense level. He did it with kind of the anger, the hatred, the anxiety and the threat of a civil war in South Africa. And so he was working like a therapist. He was working with the emotions for people to reformulate their relation to these emotions and to gain perspective out of these emotions. I think in my experience, I don't see that really happening much around leadership. I mean, I see leaders as being able to do motivational speaking, Whereas with Mandela, he was restrained. He didn't command, he didn't push, he didn't offer threats. You know, that if we don't do this, we're going to collapse. He was saying to the people tonight, you have a choice. The choice is either to succumb to the emotions and react or it's to overcome the emotions and to work towards the future that we have been working towards. And he said, these right wing people do want us to collapse into civil war now and actually we'd be giving them all they wanted if we went for civil war at the moment. And this speech is known as a turning point in the sense that although Mandela was not kind of the formal leader of government, he became the de facto leader of South Africa at that moment. And he was then able to use the effects of the speech for his political strategic advantage as a negotiator. He allowed negotiations to come very quickly to committing to a date for free and fair elections. So he was therapeutic and he was strategic at the same time. And I guess this is part of the fascination with Mandela.
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Elena Sobrino
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's really helpful to hear how that played out as an example of what is so different. And yeah, I think that's really something. We think of leadership. And you said this word like motivational speech. Motivational, emotional connecting or using that. And I guess I'm curious how so, I mean, how would people. I mean, the stakes were so high in what Mandela was navigating and speaking to. But I think as you said earlier, I mean, we also have some high stakes in our sort of politics and world today and the challenges of leading through that. So I guess I'm curious, so how does one kind of put together the pieces of what. What does it look like to maybe not do this motivational style, but how would you characterize this other way that Mandela seems to be so skillful at? And does that have to do with acknowledging emotion more or do you think the sort of issue with leadership has to do with kind of ignoring emotion or. I guess sometimes we think of times in history and politics where emotion has been kind of sort of intensified and used to kind of create more division and more animosity and what you just Described was really kind of the opposite. So it's a big question. But I mean, I wonder if you could break it down a little bit for us, who are just, as we wrap our heads around, well, what would does it mean to lead an acknowledgement of mood and emotion and sort of do that in a way that feels so productive and generative and kind of unifying?
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Steven Siegel
So I guess there are a number of things that come to mind around Mandela. I guess this was not the first time that Mandela worked with emotions in ways such that they produced transformation. It was kind of characteristic of his whole leadership approach. So even when he was sentenced to prison for 27 years, this was 1961 now, and, you know, he was on trial for high treason, and hard treason was punishable by the death sentence then. And he developed an attitude or an approach to the court in which he refused to defend himself in terms of the legal concepts or concepts of justice of the apartheid South Africa. Rather, he decided to put the South African state on trial in the courts. And of course, his kind of legal people said to him, are you crazy? You're going to get this death sentence for this? You've got to defend yourself or else you get the death sentence. And Mandela said his famous speech is, I'm prepared to die for democracy. So at the bottom of this, Mandela was embracing the fear of death. And I think that's something that in contemporary politics is kind of not always worked with, that fear of death. We've got to embrace the fear of death in order to enable dialogue. And so at the bottom, Mandela embraced the fear of death, and he questioned the assumptions of white South Africa. Courts of justice, you know, that this isn't. You're claiming to be democratic, and democracy means universal rights, and yet you're not. You're charging me in a prison whose terms don't represent me at all. I'm a nobody in the terms of this apartheid justice, you know. And the courts were flabbergasted, and they didn't know how to respond to Mandela. There was kind of a few moments of silence. And his public prostitute came to him after the trial and said to him, mandela, you've allowed me to see something that I've never seen before. And I'm ashamed of myself for kind of having treated you in the way that I have, you know, so Mandela was really a leader that was able to change the hearts and minds of people. And she was able to do this because he worked with his own emotions as well. So Mandela had been through a lot of. I'M just going to call it generally existential pain of kind of his homeland being disrupted, of coming to a strange, a kind of white city, Johannesburg, where he didn't know how things worked and he didn't have the education even to know how things worked. So he was overcoming the kind of uncertainty of the unfamiliar, which is a big part of existential threats where you don't have the familiar world anymore. And one way to think of that is going to, let's say, I think as an anthropologist, if you go on field trips to other countries and other cultures, you don't know how things work in that place. And that has a lot of uncertainty underpinning it. What is going on here? Who am I here? How do I do things here? Or these people are crazy, lock them down. You know, so, you know, one hand we deal with the threat by punishing the other. On the other hand, we have the curiosity of uncertainty. And Mandela had that curiosity of uncertainty. And he developed it all his life that he was able to work in very deep ways with uncertainty. So again, uncertainties and emotion. He worked with emotions in himself. He was able to be emotionally present and detached at the same time.
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Elena Sobrino
What do you mean by that? What was the detachment part?
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Steven Siegel
So let's say going back to the speech, he was angry, he was hurt, he was grieving very deeply. And he was also shocked and surprised because it was totally unexpected. So there were these whole emotions going on in him at the same time. He could see the bigger picture and he could see that if he had kind of given permission to react, that it would have led to self destruction as well. So he was caught in the anger, but he was able to see beyond the anger at the same time, and he was able to take the nation beyond the anger. Let me say it in another kind of way. So I'm a psychologist. I see clients, but when I see clients, I'm not in the mood of a divorce or I'm not grieving. So I'm already positioned a kind of step back. My existence is not at stake, the client's existence. They are mourning, they are grieving, they are hurt. I'm not in those states. So I have a fairly neutral. I don't like that word, but I have a neutral, more or less neutral perspective from which I can see the client. Mandela wasn't in that neutral state of mind. He was emotional full. But he knew how to work with that emotional full in order to go beyond the immediacy. In fact, he used the emotion. He was so present to the emotions that he was able to use them to enable people to see the bigger picture. And so we have a very emotional, full way of leading, very tuned in. I mean, this is. Chris Harney was assassinated on a Saturday morning. By Wednesday night, Mandela had, with his colleagues developed a speech that hit the nail on the head, so to speak, in very quick time and under very real conditions, you know, not, for example. I mean, so many organizational decision makers make their decisions kind of removed from the actual field of action. You know, whereas in Mandela, he was in the field of action and, and making judgments and decisions in the field of action. And, and that in, in the, in the literature it is called practical wisdom or emotional wisdom. Emotional wisdom is the ability to do the right thing in the right way at the right time, with the right degree of mood. And none of that is easy. And yet he was able to bring those all together. The right level of anger, the right level of gravitas, the right level of not pushing the people. Again. He said, we are making a decision tonight and I'm not telling you what to do, but how we respond to not at the speech is going to be decisive for what emerges from here. And so he was giving autonomy to the people. He wasn't, as many leaders do. Take away the autonomy of the people. Those are sort of things. Yeah.
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Elena Sobrino
So good, so good, so good.
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Elena Sobrino
So it sounds like kind of embracing uncertainty is a really big part of this whole, you know, way forward. If you're thinking about, you know, something truly transformative and kind of embracing the opportunity for that in the uncertainty, which, as you say, is quite difficult. It sounds quite difficult, but certainly was effective. You know, we can kind of see how that played out, which is really useful to look at. I maybe want to take a bit of a step back or I wanted to ask you a little. So for people who aren't as familiar with existential philosophy or, you know, this kind of literature, you draw a lot on Heidegger. And there's other figures, too. But I guess I'd love to know how you sort of engage Heidegger and some of his concepts in this book. And, you know, how did you sort of settle on Heidegger as a figure here to kind of help you through these all these questions we've been talking about?
- [43:36]
Steven Siegel
So based on Hardigger, I have developed a framework which kind of structured the whole book. And it does a lot of structuring of my work in general. And I call the framework Convention Disruption and Transformation. And convention refers to the kind of everyday ways of doing things in our conventional ways of life. We do things without reflecting on the assumptions behind those conventions. We just do things. So we eat in a particular way, or we walk, or we drive in particular ways. We greet people in particular ways. So we can't operate without conventions. Conventions guard us in our everyday ways of life. But conventions can become Obstacles, especially when we confront something unfamiliar and strange. When we confront something unfamiliar and strange, our conventions become disrupted. So let me give you an example. The first time I went to Vietnam, which must have been about now, 15 years ago or so, we were very excited. We landed in Ho Chi Minh City, and we got out of the hotel as quickly as we could, and we started walking just to kind of absorb the excitement of the newness of the place. And then we wanted to cross the street. And so we looked for a traffic light to cross the street. And in Ho Chi Minh City, there are no traffic lights. But we didn't know that. So we went around looking for a traffic light. And eventually we realized, well, there's no traffic light for crossing the street. And that already was jarring for us. How can there be no traffic lights? Of course, you need traffic lights to cross the street. And, you know, in our home in Sydney, we never thought about traffic lights. Traffic lights were in the background of our mind. They were guiding us without us knowing we were being guarded by them. And so, you know, we came to question crossing the street. How do you cross the street? And so we started observing people crossing the street, and. And they were kind of bobbing and weaving between the traffic. You know, there was no. No set distinction between traffic and pedestrians. They were continually weaving at each other. And we. We freaked out when we saw that, with, no, I can't do that. That's crazy. You know, that's. That's going to. Well, it's crazy. But nevertheless, that kind of anxiety subsided a little bit, and we became curious about this way of crossing the street. And we started tentatively, kind of stepping out into the street and beginning to bog and weave. And one of the things that stood out for us then was there was a kind of eye contact the cars and the pedestrians were making with each other as we were crossing the street. We were kind of looking at the drivers, and they were looking at us. And when to take the gap, when not to take the gap. And so we kind of learned that there was even a form of relationship and happening in the traffic there, which certainly doesn't happen in Sydney. You know, there is no relation. You kind of st. You at a traffic light, you stop. You don't really look at the pedestrians crossing the street. And so it started opening up Vietnamese ways of life for us, if you like, you know, and that was the transformation. So the transformation is we could do things in new ways and we could understand things in new ways. So a convention is kind of. We want to cross at the traffic light, we don't even know it's a convention until it gets disrupted. When it gets disrupted, it kind of throws us into an existential uncertainty, which is an uncertainty of the things being unfamiliar. You know, the things are unfamiliar here. Their ways of doing things are unfamiliar. And so we started to embrace the unfamiliar, the mood of disruption, if you like. And as we embraced the mood of disruption, we stepped into the traffic, we took a bit of a leap into the unknown. And as we did that, we started developing an understanding of the practice and more generally of the culture, which is a transformative kind of experience. So that's the model that on the back of Heidegger that I've developed, and that's the model that underpins the framework of leadership for Mandela. Many of the chapters of the book are about the way he navigated different disruptions in order to open new possibilities, both for himself and other people. So even the trial that we spoke about earlier, the court case, that was a disruption of the conventions of apartheid kind of justice. And as I said, you know, some people came up to him afterwards and said, you know, you've enabled me to see things that I never saw before. And that was an essential part of his leadership style. He enabled people not by force, not by kind of mandating it, but by dialogue, by dialogue, enabling people to see very differently. And I think that was a therapeutic style of dialogue because it worked very strongly with people's emotions, not just with their intellect.
- [50:47]
Elena Sobrino
Yeah, yeah. That's a wonderful example to sort of break down. So that's cdt. That's one of the frameworks you do kind of introduce in the book, which is convention, disruption, transformation. Would you want to. Just to add a little bit to that? There's another kind of acronym that is another framework you introduce, and that's hermeneutic existential phenomenology. So this hep. Do you want to just maybe briefly say a bit about what that is getting at and how that works as well?
- [51:26]
Steven Siegel
So I guess what that's about is that Mandela was the kind of leader who didn't need to force his word upon other people. He allowed the meaning of his words to emerge. So he didn't force. You can't force people to change mindsets. You know, you've got to create the space for them to come and change their mind, their own mindsets, if that makes sense. So in. In therapy, for example, you know, you work with allowing the client to see things for themselves. You don't tell clients how to see things. Because they can't. You, you allow and enable them to, to see things. And that was part of Mandela's style. And that's what the HEP is all about, is providing a framework to allow people to see things in different ways. So one of the ways in which it worked for me, and this goes to a story close to the beginning of the book. I was a WAT academic in South Africa in a white education department. And we had some African academics working with us and they totally adapted to our way of life. So I'm thinking in the book it's one colleague in particular, he knew how to play the game of Western bureaucracy, politics and so on. And he also knew how to play the game of his own culture. So, you know, in, in the kind of bureaucratic Western university, he was independent, he had agency, he spoke with his own voice. When he went home to kind of the, the rural lands, he, he knew his place in the community and he could take his seat with deference to authority and be fully present there as well. So he had navigated this whole change of way of doing things from kind of the rural area to the urban area. And that's the word hermeneutic. Hermeneutic is about making meaning out of different circumstances. So he was able to make meaning of a new place while still retaining his old meanings as well. And one weekend or week, he took a few of us white academics out to his rural home. And we were totally confused. We didn't know what was happening. And he would laugh at us, at our bewilderment, but not in a, you know, taking it out on us kind of way, in a very helpful way. And then he slowly but surely, as he saw we were bewildered, he started providing an understanding for us in that bewilderment. And he took us through our own bewilderment to able to see things in new ways. And hermeneutics is meaning making of new ways of seeing things. Phenomenology is the art of allowing their meaning to emerge rather than pushing meaning onto people. And the existential is that disruptive moment when we were bewildered in, let's say, going to his rural homeland. And when he first came to Johannesburg, he was also bewildered. And that's an existential moment because you can either embrace the bewilderment or you can turn it down. And I mean in that way, the turning it down is the more dominant one because people drink a lot of alcohol turns a lot of drugs, kind of all kinds of self sabotaging behaviors because of the pain of this existential kind of uncertainty of being caught in the between.
- [56:05]
Elena Sobrino
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. That brought a lot of clarity. Well, we've taken a lot of your time and this has been so interesting, and I'm wondering if you have projects going on right now. I mean, as we said at the beginning, this book has just come out. But I wonder what you're thinking of next and are there other books or other projects on your horizon that you're working on?
- [56:33]
Steven Siegel
I'm almost complete another book this book is looking at. It's called Philosophical Reflections for Psychologists, Psychotherapists and Mental Health Workers. And it's a kind of reading of philosophy, of the history of philosophy in terms of these frameworks of convention, disruption, transformation, and hep as well. So it's looking at kind of disruption in Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Descartes, and many of the philosophers subsequently. And what value does this have for therapy, for coaching, for leading? And I'm almost on the verge of handing it in. So it's also big relief off my shoulders now.
- [57:30]
Elena Sobrino
I see, I see. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it really is building from what you have sort of laid out in this book as well. So that sounds really interesting and it sounds very practical. And I think this has been such an interesting conversation and the book gives such an interesting, maybe a different, unexpected perspective of someone like Mandela and of politics and democracy, and it kind of invites us to think about it in a different way. And also the themes are so close to home. I think we can all kind of relate to these existential questions and patterns of disruption and uncertainty and the way we turn away from or turn towards emotion. So I appreciate you talking about this today and I really enjoyed our conversation. So thanks so much.
- [58:30]
Steven Siegel
Thank you. And I also enjoyed it very much. Thank you very much.
- [58:34]
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- [59:15]
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