Good Life Project

Most of us think the biggest decision about a room is whether it's functional. Leidy Klotz thinks that's the wrong question, and the right one changes how a desk, a kitchen, or an entire return-to-office policy actually lands on the person living inside it.

Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design. His research has appeared in Nature and Science, and he's been interviewed everywhere from Hidden Brain to Freakonomics to The Atlantic. Before any of that, he spent 22 years as a professional soccer player and then built schools for a living, which is part of why his take on space is so physical and so lived-in.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• The three psychological needs that every space either feeds or starves, and why they trace straight back to hunter-gatherer survival
• Why Susan Cain's open-office backlash and today's return-to-office mandates are the same failure wearing different clothes
• The strange, well-documented phenomenon of "habituation," including the story of an architecture student who walked past a six-story landmark building for years without ever seeing it
• A simple practice called "space before screen," and why the top of a parking garage might be the cheapest awe you'll ever find
• What it means to build a space that keeps someone's memory alive, drawn from one of the most personal stories Leidy has ever told on a podcast

If you've ever felt something shift the moment you walked into a certain room and couldn't say why, this conversation gives you the language for it.

You can find Leidy at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Chris Guillebeau to talk about why the anxious feeling that you're running out of time might be less about your calendar and more about a story you've never questioned. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

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Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

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By the age of 7, most of us have absorbed the rules that run our financial lives…forever. And almost none of us checked to see if they were true. Not the numbers. The rules. The slogans we heard around the kitchen table about what money means, who deserves it, and what it says about us if we don't have enough of it.

Leisa Peterson spent three decades inside the financial services industry before a near-fatal event forced her to see how far she had drifted from her own life. Today she coaches people, most of them women, on the inherited stories that quietly run their financial decisions long after childhood ends, and how to rewrite them, along with their financial futures.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why twins raised in the exact same household can end up in completely different financial and emotional places as adults
• The specific questions to ask a financial advisor before you hire one, and the one answer that should make you walk away
• Why financial regret research shows the real damage isn't the bad decision, it's the silence around it
• How to start defining your own "enough" instead of borrowing someone else's number
• What Leisa's husband's diagnosis taught her about the assets that never show up on a bank statement

If you've ever felt behind, ashamed, or just quietly unsure whether you're getting this right, this conversation will change how you think about all of it.

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

Next week, we're sitting down with Leidy Klotz to talk about how the rooms you live in every day shape how much control, connection, and competence you feel, often without you ever noticing it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

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

Your body already knows you're stressed before your brain finishes the thought. That tightness in your chest before a hard conversation. The way your stomach drops before you walk into a room full of people. Logic doesn't reach it. Telling yourself you're fine doesn't touch it. What if you could send a direct signal to your nervous system that you're safe, and actually change the chemistry?

Jessica Ortner is a New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of The Tapping Solution, a movement that has brought EFT Tapping to millions worldwide, fueling hundreds of published studies, a massively downloaded app with tens of millions of sessions completed, and work that now extends to veterans, schools, and communities in crisis.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• What tapping is, where it came from, and how it works.
• Why positive thinking and reframing often fail, and what the nervous system actually needs to release stress
• The cortisol study that shows a serious reduction in stress hormones from a single session, and what that means for your daily life
• How tapping physically rewires the brain's response to food cravings, trauma, and intrusive thoughts, with fMRI data to back it
• Why your body can hold chronic pain in ways that have nothing to do with the original injury, and tapping might help
• How to use tapping covertly before a difficult conversation, a big presentation, or a social situation when anxiety tends to take over

You don't have to believe this works for it to work. You just have to try it.

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

Next week, next week we're sitting down with Leisa Peterson to talk about why the quiet question "am I actually behind with money?" never goes away, no matter how many articles you've read or podcasts you've listened to — and what it actually takes to resolve it at the level it lives. 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.

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

You have a plan for how to succeed in the second half of the year, how to “get back on track.” And a plan, it turns out, is the most sophisticated way to actually stand still while feeling like you're moving.

This is Part 2 of a special two-part midyear series on Good Life Project. In Part 1, Jonathan led a different kind of honest check-in, setting down the scorecard version of taking stock and actually looking at the one part of life that has been running quietly low. This episode is the moving part. It’s about taking action and building momentum, without waiting for a plan.

In this episode, you'll explore:

• Why plans fail, and why the reason is not the one you've been told. The flaw isn't you. It's how plans are built.
• The difference between a plan and a move, and why only one of them has ever actually changed a life.
• Seven elements that make a move more likely to survive a bad week, including Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions.
• The four traps that turn a move back into a plan, and how to recognize them before they happen.
• Why the middle of the year is one of the most powerful fresh start landmarks available, and almost nobody uses it.
• A five-step sequence you'll work through before this episode ends, leaving with a specific move already made, not planned.

This episode is for anyone who has spent the first half of this year meaning to do something and hasn't yet. Not because you lacked motivation, but because you were waiting for the right conditions that were never going to arrive. They don't have to. You just have to make one move.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Next week, I'm sitting down with an old friend, Jessica Ortner, to explore something that most people have never tried, that looks a little ridiculous at first, and that turns out to have a surprisingly serious body of research behind it. It's called tapping. We're not going to sell it, and we're not going to dismiss it. We're going to give it a genuinely honest look: what the science does and doesn't support, who it's actually for, and then Jessica is going to guide me through a real session, live, on the episode that you can follow along with in real time. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss 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.

You can hit every goal you set in January and still be running on empty in the parts of your life the list never thought to measure. That's not a failure story. That's a design flaw in the instrument most of us reach for at the midpoint of the year.

Jonathan Fields has spent 14 years exploring what it takes to build a life that genuinely feels like yours. In this solo episode, he gets personal about a stretch that looked, by every external measure, like one of the best runs he'd had in years. A major work transition, real momentum in business, and every morning from 7:30 to 9, writing the first draft of his first novel. A genuinely good season. And one that was quietly drawing down on something no scorecard ever caught.

What you'll explore in this conversation:

• Why grading yourself against January goals in July is the least useful thing you can do at the midpoint of the year, and what to reach for instead
• The three Good Life Buckets framework (Vitality, Connection, Contribution) as a practical audit tool, not an abstract idea
• Two ways a bucket drains that most driven, successful people never see coming: the leak and the missing refill
• Why the most dangerous bucket is often not the one that aches, but the one filling and draining at the same time
• Three reckoning questions that surface something more honest than any goal list you've ever written
• Why so many of us would rather stay tired and certain than rested and unsure, and what it actually costs us

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 arrives in a few days with the specific actions to take for your mid-year wake-up call.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Next week, we're coming back for Part 2 of this series with Jonathan to talk about what to actually do once you've named the bucket, and why you don't need a plan for the second half of your year. You need a move. One small, real, repeatable move. And we're going to figure it out together in real time before that episode is over. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss 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.

Between 10 and 15 percent of mothers and 1 in 4 fathers are currently estranged from a child. If those numbers feel shocking, the harder truth might be this: most of the moves parents instinctively make once estrangement begins are the exact moves that keep the door shut.

Dr. Joshua Coleman has spent more than four decades as a practicing psychologist and is a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His own daughter once cut off contact with him. That experience, and everything he has learned since, shaped his work helping families find their way back to each other. He is one of the most trusted voices in the country on family estrangement and reconciliation.

In this conversation, you will explore:

• Why estrangement rates are at historically high levels and what massive cultural shifts are driving them
• The five defensive moves parents make that almost always make things worse, including why fighting for fairness is the most damaging trap of all
• What a genuinely healing apology actually sounds like, and why most apologies miss the mark entirely
• Why radical acceptance and hope are not opposites, and how to hold both at the same time
• How the principles of repair transfer to sibling estrangements and to grandparents cut off from grandchildren

If someone you love has pulled away and you cannot figure out why, or if you are the one who has needed distance and are wondering what repair could look like, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Joshua at: Website | Instagram | Family Troubles Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am going solo, actually for the entire week, for a two-part midyear summer series about really taking a fresh look at where we are right now. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss 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.

Here is something most people never see coming: the hardest part of caring for an aging parent is not the logistics. It is the grief. The grief for who your parent used to be, for the life you thought you would be living by now, and for the version of yourself that is quietly disappearing inside a role you never planned to fill. Couple that with being there for kids, even adult kids, and it can feel like a lot.

Candace Dellacona is a New York City estate attorney known as "a family's lawyer," advising families, athletes, and entertainers on estate planning, asset protection, and the full arc of what it takes to navigate a family through its most vulnerable seasons. Not just the logistics, but also the many, more nuanced shifts in identity, relationships, and responsibilities. She is also a member of the sandwich generation herself, which is what led her to launch The Sandwich Generation Survival Guide podcast. She brings both the legal expertise and the lived experience to this conversation.

What you will explore in this conversation:

• Why the sandwich generation is far broader than you think, and why it applies to you even if your parents are healthy right now, or your kids are grown
• The four shifts that happen inside you during a caregiving season, identity, ownership, grief, and loneliness, and why we almost never talk about them
• Why the conversations about aging, death, and documents are almost always saved for the worst possible moment, and how to have them earlier in a way that actually feels like love
• The three-person team that can change everything, and what each one actually does
• The unexpected beauty that enters the equation in a caregiving season, the reconciliation, the closeness, the chance to usher someone you love through

If you have a parent who is still healthy and you have never had a real conversation about what happens if that changes, this one is for you.

You can find Candace at: Website | The Sandwich Generation Survival Guide Podcast | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am sitting down with Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who has spent years studying something that is reshaping American families in ways most of us have not fully reckoned with: family estrangement. Why it is rising, what is actually driving it, and what to do if you are on either side of it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you do not miss 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.

There is something your brain is spinning right now, that you may never have been given a name for or a way out of. The thought you keep replaying. The conversation you keep recasting. The reel that loads up again and again without resolution, making you feel worse each time and no closer to clarity. That is rumination. And according to the neuroscience, it is the single greatest pre-diagnostic factor for depression and anxiety we have identified, and we are all doing it more than we ever have.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science writer whose work sits at the intersection of neurobiology, emotion, and mental health. Her new book, Mind Drama, is the most rigorous and humane investigation of rumination yet written: what it is, why your brain does it, what it is actually trying to tell you, and how to use a specific neurobiologically grounded framework to loosen its grip.

In this conversation, you will explore:

• Why rumination is a survival response gone rogue, and why knowing that changes how you relate to your own spinning thoughts
• What a brain scan of Donna's own ruminating mind revealed, and what those red swirls in the default mode network actually mean for your daily life
• Why midlife may be the season when old ruminative patterns return with the most force, and what that signal is asking you to hear
• The research showing that women ruminate at significantly higher rates than men, why this is, and what the neuroscience says about the acting-in pattern and its link to depression
• The MIST framework: a four-step neurobiological practice for naming the mental movies, emotions, and somatic sensations underneath your rumination so the brain can actually let go
• Why rumination is never random, always circling the question of whether you matter to the people who matter most to you

If you have ever told yourself to stop thinking about something and found you could not, this conversation is for you.

You can find Donna at: Healing Together Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we are sitting down with Candace Dellacona, a trust and estates attorney who is also personally in this season, to talk about the caregiving years, and what it costs you when you are pulled in every direction at once, not just logistically but in terms of who you are and who you thought you would be by now. If you are caring for an aging parent, a younger dependent, or both at the same time, this one was made for you. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts, so you do not 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.

Most of us believe more options equals better outcomes. Research says no. In much of life, the opposite is true, and the gap between what we believe and what the data shows is one of the more quietly consequential misconceptions shaping how we live right now.

David Epstein is the author of Range and the new book Inside the Box, both New York Times bestsellers. He spent years studying human performance and creativity, and this conversation picks up where Range left off. If Range was about why broad exploration matters early in life, Inside the Box is about what you actually do once you have all that range. The answer turns out to be counterintuitive: you box yourself in.

In this conversation, you'll discover:

• Why people with more options to watch are consistently more bored than people with fewer, and what that reveals about how your brain actually works 
• The difference between satisficing and maximizing, and why maximizers make worse decisions, feel more regret, and are less happy with their lives despite spending more time and energy on every choice 
• How Keith Jarrett recorded the best-selling solo jazz piano album of all time on a broken, out-of-tune instrument he almost refused to play, and what that says about where creative breakthroughs actually come from 
• The paired constraints process used by Monet, Dr. Seuss, and Isabel Allende, and how you can use the same structure to unstick your own creative projects 
• Why our attention switches tasks every 45 seconds on average now, down from every three minutes 25 years ago, and what it's actually costing us in terms of stress, creativity, and the simple experience of loving our work

This is a conversation for anyone who has ever felt scattered across too many possibilities, half-committed to too many things, and quietly wondered if the constraint they've been avoiding might be exactly the thing they need.

You can find David at: Website | Instagram | Range Widely Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Donna Jackson Nakazawa to talk about why rumination feels so productive even when it's actively working against you, and what the neuroscience actually says about how to loosen its grip. She has a framework for this that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since we recorded. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss 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.

There is a feeling many people in midlife carry that does not have a name, a clear cause, or anyone to blame. 

It shows up when you have been the dependable one long enough that dependable starts to feel like a cage. Or when you have handled everything capably and walked away feeling hollowed rather than proud. Or when you have given more than you have received for so long that the imbalance stopped feeling like generosity and started feeling like the terms of your life.

In this solo episode, Jonathan Fields examines what he calls diffuse resentment, a specific, accumulated form of feeling that is distinct from the anger or grievance most people recognize as resentment. It does not have an address. It does not require a villain. And because it feels illegitimate, because the voice in your head says you made these choices, you have so much to be grateful for, it tends to go unexamined, parked, managed, and silently expensive.

In this solo episode, Jonathan draws on his own experience, research from psychologists Jennifer Lerner, Laura Carstensen, James Pennebaker, and Nick Epley, and thousands of conversations over 14 years of doing this work, to offer a way of looking at this feeling directly.

In this episode, you will explore:

• The five territories where diffuse resentment most reliably lives, the calcified role, the invisible labor ledger, the deferred self, relational drift, and the unlived path
• Why midlife is specifically when this feeling tends to become unavoidable, and why it often intensifies precisely when things are going well
• What the research on emotional suppression actually shows about the cost of carrying unexamined feelings
• Two movements (not steps) for beginning to look at this honestly, and why the first must come before the second is possible
• What becomes available on the other side: accuracy, energy, and a different quality of closeness in the relationships that matter most

If you have been explaining away a feeling you cannot quite name, this episode is for you.

Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with David Epstein to talk about something that runs against just about everything the self-help world has told you about freedom and options: why the constraints, limits, and boundaries you have been trying to escape are often the very conditions that make creativity, focus, and satisfaction actually possible. It is a genuinely counterintuitive conversation, and it is the kind that stays with you. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss 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.