Podcast
That Got Me Thinking
Hosted by That Got Me Thinking · EN
with Ellie Newman
10episodes
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How to Thrive in an Uncertain, Rapidly Changing World
Oct 20, 202101:02:59Tap to summarize“Our anxiety is no longer a background noise.” says, Dr. Madeline Levine, New York Times bestselling author of The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well. Her new book, Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World, walks us through the behavior and mindset shifts needed to thrive in the new normal of modern life. So, what’s so different about today? First of all, we are emerging from a global pandemic. On top of that, there have been dramatic sociological changes in the last 50 years – the very definition of success has morphed! Being part of the middle class: owning a home, having a steady job and raising a family, used to be the measure of success. Since that time, we’ve had a large scale bifurcation of wealth. And most importantly, as a nation, we’ve experienced a major loss of community. Post WWII, there emerged strong communities with tight bonds and shared experiences that provided security, place, and connection. This unity helped people get through even the worst of circumstances. From Victory gardens to a longstanding working class attitude that we are all in it together – everybody pulls their weight and we are going to get through and we are going to help each other get through it together. It’s been evident over the last decade that this assuring attitude has all but disappeared, and that’s stressful! Today, we are under a constant pressure to succeed, to be successful. And the new definition of success- money, materialism, fame – solely external markers, causes a lot of stress and unremitting anxiety. In response, we must learn to master our anxiety, to reduce stress and live more fulfilling and meaningful lives. This will require changing our misperception about the definition of success and the paths to reaching it. Change the narrative. Think critically about the things that are making you anxious. Do a deep dive and ask yourself what’s true. Evaluate your fears and take small steps toward conquering them. Spend an hour a day of down time to consolidate your experiences, relax in self-reflection, and get some sleep! https://madelinelevine.com/ The post How to Thrive in an Uncertain, Rapidly Changing World appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →Changing the Autism Conversation
Sep 19, 202100:54:53Tap to summarizeAutistic journalist and author Eric Garcia believes autism has been a criminally misunderstood concept, hidden in the shadows of mainstream culture and previously relegated as an outlier even within the world of disabilities. Historically misunderstood and surrounded by myths – first believed to be a form of schizophrenia, then a personal failing; autism was theorized to have been caused by an unloving mother or a detrimental vaccine. Garcia’s “aha” moment came when he realized with so much misinformation filtering down, bad policy were sure to follow. As an autistic journalist in Washington D.C., Eric Garcia understands the relationship between misinformation and bad policy and the development of politics, systems and institutions downstream. He knows that the support systems that emerge: treatments, accommodations, or economic waivers, are a direct result of culture and of what we think of autism. From what Eric was hearing in the national conversation regarding autism, we were getting so much of it wrong. The public knowledge was filled with myths and misunderstandings. Eric knew that faulty public knowledge would lead to creating bad policies, so he hit the road. He set out to see what it was like to be autistic in America and how the myths about autism were failing autistic people as a whole. Then, he wrote a book, We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. When we change the conversation, we change the culture, and that leads to policies that meet the needs of those in need. We’re Not Broken The post Changing the Autism Conversation appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →How to Parent Better and Live a Happier Life
Aug 23, 202101:08:16Tap to summarizeThe Uncomfortable Facts: “No amount of achievement, money or prestige is worth the price of lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.” Incidents of mental and emotional problems are pretty much off the charts. We are in the midst of an epidemic of anxiety and depression. We are experiencing a dramatic increase in suicides. Children and adolescents are wildly stressed and wildly under rested. When stress hits, the mind goes out the door, no matter how smart or well prepared one is. When working under pressure, or a loss of sense of control, our brains don’t work well. Negative language is extremely hurtful in the moment and has detrimental longterm consequences. Attempts to motivate through fear, guilt and anger backfire. Bribing kids to meet your goals doesn’t work – Incentive to support them meeting their goals does. Striving for perfectionism holds kids back. If your message doesn’t land the first or second time, it’s not going to land the 20th. Dismissive Positivity is destructive and disrespectful, as is the Righting Reflex. Wealthy kids are often under excessive pressure to excel and lack closeness with their parents. Therefore, they are at higher risk for anxiety and mood disorders, chemical use and abuse, self injury and certain kinds of delinquent behaviors. Getting highly anxious or depressed in childhood changes the development in the brain; if we stop this happening we avoid mental illness presentation later in life. The most important outcome of childhood and adolescence is sculpting a healthy brain, not where one goes to college. “We want kids to be as successful as they can possibly be, but we want them to be able to enjoy their success.” The science shows it’s safe to relax and not drive your kids. It’s not your job to make your kids turn out as something or in a certain way. You can’t force them to do something they truly don’t want to do. Toughing it out for future rewards is a dangerous approach. Soothing builds resilience. Your job isn’t to motivate your kids at all. “The truth is there are many ways to be happy and successful in this world…A successful life is a life you want to have.” What You Can do for Yourselves and Your Children to have More Successful Lives and a Happier Home: Speak with your children versus to them. Sit next to them. Make eye contact. Create shared rituals and interests (or show interest in their interests.) Create one on one time every week! Work with them, not on them. Ditch the carrots and the sticks. Replace judgement with empathy. Show empathy and validate your kids’ feelings and experiences, even when you don’t agree. Help your children foster their own sense of internal motivation. The end goal is for them to want to do well in alignment with their values and interests. Reframe –Instead of a take it or leave it approach, ask them, “What do you think about this?” If they are upset, reflect back to them that the situation sounds challenging and ask what you can do to help. Focus on developing agency. Autonomy and a sense of control are the factors that bolster self motivation. Autonomy, relatedness and competency support solid mental health. Show your children you love them more than anything and express confidence that you think they can figure out what to do in their own lives. The most important element of parenting is developing a close relationship. If you want them to be respectful treat them respectfully. Shift from manager to consultant. Love them too much to fight about the way something is done. Support your children to develop Stress Tolerance. Teach them to calm themselves down with your help. “Tired, stressed, discouraged, angry kids misbehave. So what’s making them tired, stressed, discouraged, or angry? Start there and the rest is much easier than you might think. Be the Sun! “Remember that kids have a brain in their heads and want their lives to work.” William Stixrud, PhD and Ned Johnson are the National Bestselling authors of The Self-Driven Child and their follow on communication guide: What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. Bill is a thriving neuropsychologist, founder of the Stixrud Group, and Ned is the test prep guru who founded PrepMatters. These two have sixty years combined experience talking with kids about their passions, challenges and frustrations. After countless hours talking with kids and figuring out how to connect with them, they’ve determined that having someone in a child’s life who listens, doesn’t judge and doesn’t tell them what to do is the most critical element for success. What Do You Say? The post How to Parent Better and Live a Happier Life appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →Bittersweet Grief
Jul 27, 202100:58:51Tap to summarizeIt’s astounding the myriad of ways we are willing to be anything other than who we authentically are. Because we believe our genuine self is not ok, not enough, we reorganize our being and how we show up. Anything to not risk abandonment or engulfment- to be accepted, to stay safe, to be loved, to survive. These convoluted ways we shield our hearts, move off our centers, and away from our genuine beings, are at once impressive and heart wrenching. With an intentional shift to courage and steadfast inquiry, we can begin to recognize and identify what’s “not me,” so we can come back to know “me” and reclaim the miraculous majesty of our lives. Kelly Minor PhD. is a personal transformation therapist. Her approach draws from the foundations of ACT therapy and wisdom traditions as a way of bridging conceptual knowledge toward embodied understanding. She provides space and time, a context, for consciousness to integrate. With a framework to distinguish the difference between a thought generated by the ego to protect us, from a genuine experience, we can stay in the authentic moment without allowing the well meaning ego to hijack our integrity. We have a choice to make when we arrive in a moment of dynamic tension. With the internal narrative asking, “Will I be loved? Will I be safe?” we can learn to rest in a relaxed state without forcing or striving toward an acceptable response rising from a habitual pattern of non-authentic action and reaction. We can choose to trust ourself as our own authority. Instead of running from, we can do a u-turn, stay with self, shifting our questions to, “What is the nature of this? What am I afraid of?” When we choose to do a radical turnaround, engaging in gentle and intimate curiosity, we go more deeply into the moment rather than resisting it and spinning off ourselves. When we allow and entertain the action of genuine relating to self and others we live a more authentic, expansive, joyful, and fulfilling life. As we lean in, instead of deserting our essence by spinning off into habitual, protective patterns of protection and control, we meet the magical being we were about to abandon and our heart breaks open. It breaks for all the time lost, all the times we fled thinking we weren’t enough. And as we determine to stay, we experience a beautiful, transformative moment of bursting enlightenment and a wave of bitter sweet grief. Kelly Minor The post Bittersweet Grief appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →Anxiety, Panic, Stress? You Are Not Alone.
Jul 19, 202101:00:58Tap to summarizeWe are all feeling it to some degree, and it doesn’t feel good. Yet, our attempts to resist it, struggle against it, and fight it with all our might, only serve to make our experience worse. As the saying goes, “What we resist persists.” It’s true, our emotions are a natural response to our environments – internal and external; and, yes, they will eventually pass. But at times, our excruciating discomfort feels eternal. In addition, heaped on top of our painful feelings of anxiety is a big dose of guilt and shame for not being able to fix it. Society and our quick fix mentality pressure us to “heal” in a prescribed manner and amount of time – those guaranteed three easy steps to success. And if you can’t, not only have you failed, you are a failure for not having tried hard enough to feel perfectly perfect. Abbe Greenberg and Maggie Sarachek, the authors of, The Anxiety Sisters’ Survival Guide: How You Can Become More Hopeful, Connected, and Happy, understand this un-winnable struggle; they spent a good part of two decades buying into this quick fix maxim and relentlessly searching for the “solution” to their anxiety. Then, they accepted the reality of our emotional responses – they can’t be fixed! They can be adjusted, rewired, and ridden out with more ease, but not fixed. The Sisters realized, “We need a paradigm change because this pursuit of stopping anxiety isn’t working. And this is where we are going astray. Once we figured that part out our lives changed really profoundly and relatively quickly.” From this shift in approach, they then devised a “Secret Sauce” that we can all adopt to learn to shift the habitual responses from fighting your feelings to riding them out, just like surfing a wave. So instead of fighting our experience, we can learn to recognize it and name it. “What we name we can tame… When we know what to call it, we can sit up and tell it to sit down.” And thus achieve a return to agency. ‘When we are in that reaction mode, that fight, flight or freeze reaction, we can’t access our frontal lobe – we are in a restrictive mode with limited options for response. We have put up walls and taken out our arsenal for protection – it’s not a creative, collaborative space for problem solving. It fosters positional thinking, and separateness. Instead of this habitual reaction, we can learn to (and practice) interrupting our automatic response and instead: we accept, breathe, calm, and soothe ourself, in all the ways we now know to handle this challenging situation of our uncomfortable emotions and very real physical experience, with all its varied responses. ‘ Knowing that this emotional and physical experience is anxiety and we are not alone is the biggest gift The Anxiety Sisters give us. To normalize and destigmatize our experience and be able to talk about the truth of what’s going on. The comfort we get from knowing that this is anxiety and that other people feel that, have that too, is immense. To know we are not alone and understand what we are feeling, and that it’s anxiety and there is support. There is nothing more valuable than being seen, heard and understood, gaining a connection and a validation that it will be ok. The Anxiety Sisters’ Survival Guide The post Anxiety, Panic, Stress? You Are Not Alone. appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →Making a Black Hole Visible
Jul 5, 202100:56:34Tap to summarize“If the speed of light were infinite, all the information in space would reach me instantaneously, even if we were separated by an infinitely great distance. The knowable Universe would have no limits and would be infinitely large. Everything would be connected with everything else simultaneously. But because the speed of light is finite, there is no knowable infinity in space or time and therefore never an absolute precision. The finite nature of the speed of light thus grants us a particular freedom – only the here and now counts.” And in this here and now, award-winning astrophysicist, Heino Falcke, inspired, organized, and led, a brilliant team of astronomers and other incredible experts, around the world, to take the first ever image of a black hole. Lightness in the Dark: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us, is the wondrous account of this decades long journey to achieve the once assumed impossible feat of taking a photo of a black hole. Lightness in the Dark The post Making a Black Hole Visible appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →The Universe is Talking. Are You Listening?
Jun 21, 202100:58:12Tap to summarizeWhat if this podcast was your sign? What if you could simply choose a different story and everything in your life that wasn’t making you feel happy simply fell away? What if struggling wasn’t actually the path to reaping rewards and it turned out not to be very noble or really necessary at all? What if you chose to tell a story where you were the master of your Universe and you could gear all of your thoughts and feelings in a way that would create positive transformations in all areas of your lives? In this new story, what if the path to fulfillment, meaning and joy – the best life possible – was simply to accept love and honor yourself where you are and to ask yourself what you need in each and every moment and then listen to the answer? Ulla Suokko, in her practical guide to shifting your story, Signs of the Universe, invites you to play with the Universe and follow your signs to truth, peace, and freedom. You are already and always on your path. You can’t be anywhere else. So settle in and enjoy this miraculous ride. Learn to know yourself and find out what makes you feel better. Become acquainted with what you enjoy, what makes your heart sing and what energizes you. Live from a place of nurturing and love. Trade in all the seeking for a life of glorious finding. Ulla’s inspiring TEDx talk, “Do You See the Signs of the Universe?” has been viewed almost two million times! https://wisewomanenergetics.com/ The post The Universe is Talking. Are You Listening? appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →This is London Calling
May 12, 202100:49:32Tap to summarizeV2 rockets dropping out of the sky. Mourners, a vicar, upper crust Wimbourne types, working men with black armbands on their jackets, a greek daughter and ancient father walk down a London street. Lissa Evans’ third novel, of her loose trilogy, V for Victory takes place in the last stages of a long and grueling war that felt like it would never end, especially for Londoners. And Evans’ novel got me thinking about secrets and intimacy and one’s ability to understand the experiences and perspectives of others when our own experience is so different and we are observing from the outside. V for Victory got me thinking about warfare, internal and external and what it’s like to emerge from the bombings. https://lissaevans.com/ The post This is London Calling appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →Acceptance, Compassion and Commitment
Apr 29, 202100:55:56Tap to summarize“Increasing your psychological flexibility is not a one-and-done issue. Like creating healthy patterns of eating, sleeping, and exercising, it’s a one-day-at-a-time issue, and there is no better way to groove a daily habit of improvement than to keep a daily journal while you learn.” – says, Steven C. Hayes, PhD. originator of ACT Dr. Diana Hill and Dr. Debbie Sorensen, cohosts of the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast and coauthors of ACT Daily Journal, lead you on the 8 week journey to get unstuck and live fully with Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. “Humans yearn for connection and belonging and our conceptualized self-stories prevent us from learning, experiencing intimacy and seeing our part in a greater whole.” – Dr. Diana Hill. With the daily journal as your guide, you will practice opening up, and the more you open up, the more freedom you will experience. And who doesn’t want more freedom? We can choose to get aligned with our values and live a life that reflects what is most meaningful to us. and this is our path to courage and fulfillment. Blog: https://drdianahill.com/blog/ Book: https://drdianahill.com/book/ The post Acceptance, Compassion and Commitment appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →Your Time to Thrive is Now
Apr 22, 202100:43:46Tap to summarizeYour Time to Thrive: End Burnout, Increase Well-Being, and Unlock Your Full Potential with the New Science of Microsteps. Marina Khidekel and the editors of Thrive Global want you to thrive. “Discover the revolutionary behavior change system built on microsteps – tiny actionable changes that are too small to fail.” Khidekel writes, “With minimal time and effort, you can seamlessly integrate Microsteps into your days. And over time, the results can add up to a very big deal indeed.” Ask yourself if you are ready to live the life you want rather than settle for the lifestyle you’ve created through unintentional habits. You can create meaningful sustainable change and unlock your greatest potential by adopting these small, science based, actions that will improve your physical health, mental resilience and strengthen your relationships and productivity. We all know we should get a good night’s sleep, eat well, get some exercise in our day, hydrate, and get off our phones, but knowing something and actually taking action to make a change can have a huge canyon of dissonance lying between the two intentions. Microsteps help you bridge the gap, simply, easily and quickly. Life can be better with just a few micro shifts in behavior. Arianna Huffington, founder of Thrive Global, says, “Use this book to thrive in the new normal, one Microstep at a time.” It’s a new normal, but with the help of Marina Khidekel and the editors of Thrive Global, We’ve Got This! Your Time to Thrive The post Your Time to Thrive is Now appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.
Transcribe →