Dame Heather Rabbatts trained as a barrister – but that barely gets her CV started. She’s also been a BBC Governor, the youngest-ever Chief Executive of Merton and Lambeth Councils, Head of Education at Channel 4, a Director of the Bank of England, a Board Member of the UK Film Council, and deputy chair of Millwall FC – and that’s just to name a few.

I wanted to ask her about getting ahead in big organisations and businesses – and she gave her take on that before speaking about retaining humility as you rise the ranks – as was so masterfully personified by Nelson Mandella, who she met while working in Lambeth.

***

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

Email: [email protected]

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast. Much obliged.

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"Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel and perform our best".

As many of you know, the topic of flow and its deeper implications are subjects I have spoken about on many occasions in this podcast – and in today’s episode we dive into what is a fascinating area. Steven Kotler is a New York Times best-selling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective.

Steven has spent decades exploring flow and working out ways for people – from elite athletes and Navy seals through to your everyday man and woman – to hack their way into 'the zone'. As well as being about flow and how to get in to it, this episode is also about peak ageing and performance, and is full of actionable insights, tips and hacks.

In this episode we discuss:

• How the feats of extreme athletes in the 90s informed Steven's decades of work on Flow
• How Flow is a trillion dollar industry - we pay to watch it and love to experience it
• Flow underpins peak performance - and peak ageing
• Why accessing Flow is so crucial as we age (think inflammation & stress and Flow's direct anti-ageing properties)
• How Flow can increase the speed of learning by as much as 500%
• Flow & releasing the 5 Potent Reward chemicals
• Steven's Peak Performance ageing experiment
• The Four Stage Cycle of getting into Flow
• Deliberate Practice v Deliberate Play
• Understanding Allostatic Load - the cumulative burden of stress & life events
• How to do a Flow Walk
• Friction that gets in the way of Flow
• Understanding Flow Triggers

The Flow Research Collective: https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/

Steven's website & book Gnar Country 'Growing Old, Staying Rad': https://www.stevenkotler.com/book-pages/gnar-country

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast.

Thank you.

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What the experience of flow - particularly in sport - may reveal about the nature of reality. One theme that has arisen time and again while recording this podcast is the experience of flow, and numerous athletes in particular have spoken about the experience of "me" not being there in such moments. But what is that "me" that seems to disappear? That’s a big question and here to help address it is Rupert Spira, a philosopher interested in the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness - and non-duality.

This is a rerelease of the episode Rupert and I recorded in 2021 - the full 2 hour episode can be found here:

https://www.simonmundie.com/blog/rupert-spira-a-philosophy-of-sport-and-reality

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." - Max Planck, the Nobel prize winning Physicist and 'father of quantum theory'

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-mundie-89379114/

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

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Understanding the cost of fear and how to face and replace it - with the former England football psychologist, who was credited with helping transform the team at the 2018 World Cup. Pippa explains the difference between 'in the moment fear', and 'not good enough fear', and it's the latter that is the focus of this conversation and which is lurking behind many of our self-defeating behaviours.

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-mundie-89379114/

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

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

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The ability to hack our health could be right inside us. That’s the view of Wim Hof - aka the iceman.

Among other things, he has run marathons barefoot beyond the polar circle as well as climbing through the "death zone" of Mt. Everest in only his shorts. He puts his achievements down to the Wim Hof Method – which has three components, cold exposure, breathing techniques and meditation.

Wim speaks about the importance of tapping into your inner pharmacy – and putting ourselves into stressful situations consciously – by using cold, water for example – to make us more robust and resilient. Continually seeking comfort is gradually killing us – he says, so go to the stress, before the stress comes to you.

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

Email: [email protected]

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast. Much obliged.

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Would you like a proven pattern to tackle your most ambitious and challenging plans? Whatever it is you would like to do – whether it is starting a business, running a marathon or transforming a school – this episode is for you.

My guest in Sir Michael Barber, whose career has straddled the world of elite sport and government. Since joining the government in 1997, he has advised 7 of the last 8 Prime Ministers – the exception being Liz Truss. In the world of sport, Michael has advised Team Sky, the elite cycling team, and he is a member of the Football Association's Technical Advisory Board, which helps the FA prepare England’s teams, both men and women, for major tournaments.

Michael has written a book called Accomplishment, and we discuss some of the key themes in this episode, so that you can immediately start applying them in your own life. 

In this episode we discuss:

-         The value of setting an irrationally big goal underpinned by values

-         A powerful thought experiment used by Tony Blair to understand what is truly possible

-         How to develop focus in an age of distraction & why it is crucial

-         The key elements to building a plan

-         Planning mustn’t stop action. How do you know when you have done enough?

-         What to do when things go wrong

-         How to build relationships & the art of negotiation

-         Managing an ‘implementation dip’

-         Recognising that ‘success’ isn’t all its cracked up to be

Sir Michael Barber's website: https://sirmichaelbarber.co.uk/

Michael's book Accomplishment: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314538/accomplishment-by-barber-michael/9780141991276

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast.

Thank you.

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

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Are you someone who has a tracker to keep tabs on things like your sleep and calorie count?

We are increasingly obsessed with data and tracking – and we are also increasingly out of touch with the signals of our body.

Christie Aschwanden is an award winning journalist, Nordic skier and the author of the fascinating book - Good To Go: What the athlete in us can learn from the strange science of recovery.

She emphasises the importance of getting in touch with our bodies and learning to directly heed the signals it gives us, and to be with our bodies and minds - without distraction. It’s the key to recovery, relaxation – and vital for a life well lived.

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

Email: [email protected]

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast. Much obliged.

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Psychological flexibility is often described as the ‘super skill’ of resilience, wellbeing and mental health. It is your ability to ‘make contact with experience in the present moment fully and without defence’. Research has found that it is associated with higher quality of life and wellbeing. As regular listeners will often hear me say, we are not our thoughts – we are aware of our thoughts. This is a profound insight that can have a huge impact on your experience of life, and is the cornerstone of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy - and psychological flexibility.

This week I am truly delighted to be joined by Steven Hayes, the founder of ACT. ACT is is all about developing Psychological Flexibility, and is one of the most profoundly helpful psychological interventions in the world. While so many other approaches focus on changing the content of your thinking, for example from negative to positive, this is all about changing how you relate to your thoughts and feelings.

In this episode we discuss:

• How we lose touch with our innate belonging and develop the 'conceptualised self'
• Recognising the ‘I hear, nowness of awareness’ and its profound importance
• Steven's panic attacks – which led him to develop ACT (and my experience with insomnia which ACT had a profound help with)
• Recognising the importance of not turning from the content of experience
• Flow state and our true nature
• Learning how to put the mind ‘ on a leash’
• Walking through an exercise in self-compassion
• Psychological flexibility – just how important it is
• Developing it with the six steps of ACT
• Mental Defusiuon techniques – 'Mental breaks to stop mental breaks'
• Living your values and how to uncover them

Steven Hayes website, including his 'ACT toolkit': https://stevenchayes.com/

Steven's TED TALK on Psychological Flexibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79_gmO5ppg

Steven's TED TALK 2 on 'mental breaks': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSHpBRLJrQ

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast.

Thank you.

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

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Olympic 2020 Tokyo 1500 metres silver medalist Laura Muir is one of the finest middle-distance runners Britain has ever seen.

But there’s more – she is a trained vet too. Muir graduated from the University of Glasgow’s prestigious vet school in 2018 all while competing at the top level – winning her first senior outdoor gold medal at the European Championships that summer.

How did she juggle both things? And what are the key lessons to take from her experiences about not overthinking things, and recognising that sometimes anticipation can be worse than reality?

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

Email: [email protected]

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast. Much obliged.

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As research into the potential healing powers of psychedelics gains pace, I am thrilled to be joined by Michael Pollan, the author and journalist described as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In his book How to change your mind, Michael researches how psychedelics including psylocibin mushrooms are being used to help people suffering from various mental health conditions – including depression, anxiety, PTSD and addiction.

Psychedelic research is clearly a growing and interesting area, and may have the potential to help a lot of people who are suffering. That said, psychedelics are not to be taken lightly. They are extremely powerful substances that must be treated with respect. That’s why the work that is taking place in various universities and medical institutions around the world – to explore how people can explore psychedelic therapy safely – is so important.

In this episode:

– What are drugs? How what we consider to be drugs is continually shifting – and the role of coffee and caffeine in capitalism

– How his view of psychedelics shifted once he started looking into their potential for therapeutic use

– So-called 'ego death' and how it can help people living with cancer reduce fear of dying

– What is the ego, its address in the brain and the value in transcending the self – including its relationship to flow in sport

– The hard problem of consciousness & different views of reality

– How psychedelics can shake up beliefs and relationship with self, other and the world

– The evolving legal situation in the United States

– Current work on psychedelics taking place & what the future may hold

Michael Pollan's website: https://michaelpollan.com/

US Berkeley Centre for the Science of Psychedelics: https://psychedelics.berkeley.edu/

My BBC news report on Ayahuasca: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41333172

CAUTION: This conversation contains themes of an adult nature

**

MyTwitter: https://twitter.com/simonmundie

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonmundie/

And for the 'Mundie on Monday' newsletter - featuring three of the best Life Lessons from four years and 200 of these conversations - head to simonmundie.com (where you can also drop me an email)

Please do share this episode - it makes a big difference in helping people find this podcast. Thank you.

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

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