Good Life Project

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist (http://www.lorigottlieb.com/) and New York Times bestselling author who writes the weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column for The Atlantic.

She has written hundreds of articles related to psychology and culture, many of which have become viral sensations all over the world. A contributing editor for the Atlantic, she also writes for The New York Times Magazine, and appears as a frequent expert on relationships, parenting, and hot-button mental health topics in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Dr. Phil, CNN, and NPR.

Her latest book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, (https://amzn.to/2Tj5UMZ) and this week's conversation is a revealing look at the inner thoughts, struggles and revelations of a therapist who finds herself on the "needing help" side of the conversation, and all the unexpected things this shift in dynamics brings up.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

From the outside looking in, Leon Logothetis (https://leonlogothetis.com/about/) had everything. But, from the inside looking out, he was dying a little bit more every day, fiercely lonely and falling apart.

So, he made a radical decision that led to several trips traveling across America without cash, sustaining himself only on the kindness of others and giving back along the way.

This journey into the heart of kindness became a film and the basis of a book and then The Kindness Diaries (https://leonlogothetis.com/netflix/) series, which can now be seen on Netflix. And, Leon has a new book out called Go Be Kind, (https://amzn.to/2Oc5h6x) that is more of a daily journal of fun and easy ways to be kind.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

Abby Wambach’s (http://abbywambach.com/) name is synonymous with soccer. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup Champion, and the highest all-time goal scorer ever, she is an icon. But, that's not the whole story. Not by a long shot.

Her new book, Wolfpack, (https://amzn.to/2F6gxNx) and the movement and company she’s launched along with it, is a reclamation. It's a call to agency and community.

We explore this powerful journey, along with many of the deeper motivations, struggles, moments of awakening, defining stories and so much more in today’s powerful conversation.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

At the age of seven, Shobha Rao (https://shobharaowrites.com/about/) moved from India to the United States and found herself in a world of wonder and discovery that's never left her.

In fact, as we'd discover in today's conversation, she is so committed to presence and wonder, her cellphone has no internet, nor does she ever use her camera. And, when she teaches students, she invites them to have their heart's broken by leaving their phones at the door.

Obsessed with books, Rao eventually became a writer, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Her latest book, Girls Burn Brighter (https://amzn.to/2VFe0S1), is a heartbreaking and eye-opening exploration of friendship, sisterhood, patriarchy and the boxes society often seeks to put people in.

Rao is currently the 2018 Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School in New York City.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

Seane Corn (http://www.seanecorn.com/) is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher known for her impassioned activism, unique self-expression, and inspirational style of teaching.

Featured in magazines, TV, radio, and Oprah.com, Seane now utilizes her fierce commitment to action and her massive platform to bring awareness to global humanitarian issues. Since 2007, she has been training leaders of activism through her co-founded organization Off the Mat, Into the World®. Seane has spent time in the US, India, Cambodia, Haiti, and Africa working with communities in need- teaching yoga, providing support for child labor and educating people about HIV/AIDS prevention.

Her forthcoming book, Revolution of the Soul (https://amzn.to/2UA2LZP), will be published in September 2019. And, this week, we're diving deep into her personal journey, early-childhood trauma and struggle with OCD, awakening to her own sense of power and agency, discovering yoga and a global community of teachers, practitioners and heart-led activists and so much more.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Laura Peña (http://www.laurapena.com/about) discovered a love of design, animation, filmmaking, storytelling and technology that led her to New York City to study. Her fierce commitment to her craft created a fast name in the space, led her work with many of the top brands in the world, and eventually found her own creative design lab, JelloMonsters.

But, an experience back in the Dominican Republic set in motion a different quest that would lead her to put nearly every other part of her life on hiatus. She wanted to find a way to give voice to teenage girls. To share their stories, their hopes, dreams, fears, struggles and triumphs in a real and empowering way. She wanted them to choose what mattered, to be in charge of the way they would be seen and heard and accepted.

With that, the video docuseries, She Is The Universe (http://www.sheistheuniverse.org/) was born, along with a platform designed to amplify the voices girls from around the world. For the past year, Peña has been traveling the globe, on a mission to capture and share the stories of 111 teenage girls of all shapes, sizes, colors, languages, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. Her ultimate goal is to not only offer their unfiltered stories, the way they choose to tell it, but also create a place for them to see themselves in others and find a sense of community, mentorship and possibility.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

My guest today, James Victore, has been described as part Darth Vader, part Yoda, prolific storyteller, designer, provocateur, artist, activist and teacher. James Victore is the designer and creative thought leader whom people look to find clarity and purpose in their life and work.

James is widely known for his timely wisdom and impassioned views about design and its place in the world. At the helm of his independently run design studio, James is always working to make work that is sexy, strong and memorable, that takes a strong position and often toes the line between sacred and the profane.

And, the world has taken notice. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (and he shares a pretty funny story about that in our conversation), is in the permanent collections of the Louvre and the Library of Congress and his client list includes industry-leaders like Adobe, Starbucks, Aveda and many foundations on a mission to create change in the world. James taught at the School of Visual Arts in NYC for over 20 years. His new book, “Feck Perfuction“ (https://amzn.to/2EksGze) is sort of his manifesto on living a creative, full-contact and alive life.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

Growing up outside Newark, NJ, the daughter of a first-generation mom from the Dominican Republic and a dad who grew up going back and forth between Harlem and the Deep South, Judge Victoria Pratt (https://judgevictoriapratt.com/) found herself in the role of translator, advocate and champion at a very young age. That deep desire to serve at the sweet-spot between justice and humanity never left her.

Rising up through government and educational institutions, she eventually became a judge, but not your ordinary judge. For her, it was all about serving the broader humanity and needs of both those who appeared in her courtroom, as well as those who were affected in the community. Judge Pratt gained acclaim as a champion for criminal justice reform in her Newark courtroom, worked with jurisdictions across the US, and as far as Dubai, Ukraine, Mexico and England. Her TED Talk, How Judges Can Show Respect, went viral.

Now a leading voice in criminal justice reform through her consulting firm Pratt Lucien Consultants, Judge Pratt speaks to corporate and organizational leaders about restoring respect to their processes. At the heart of it all is a call-to-action to elevate the humanity and dignity of all people and focus more on restoration and rehabilitation than punishment.

In today's conversation, we explore Judge Pratt's early childhood, the experiences and moments that shaped her, as well as the powerful moments and exercises that transformed her courtroom into a place not only of justice but of reclamation and an awakening to potential and responsibility.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

photo credit: Tinnetta Bell

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

Scott Barry Kaufman (http://scottbarrykaufman.com/) has a Ph.D. from Yale, and an M. Phil from Cambridge and now teaches at Barnard. Not bad for a kid who was labeled as lesser-than, put into special-education and told he didn't have the intelligence to achieve anything significant.

It took a single moment in 9th-grade, where a teacher took note of his innate curiosity and abilities and prompted him to reclaim control over his education and life, for everything to change.

Now an acclaimed psychologist, researcher and professor, Scott embraces a humanistic, integrative approach that takes into account a wide range of human variation– from learning disabilities to intellectual and creative giftedness to introversion to narcissism to twice exceptionality– to help all kinds of minds live a creative, fulfilling, and meaningful life.

Scott writes the weekly Beautiful Minds column for Scientific American, hosts The Psychology Podcast (https://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/), and his books (https://scottbarrykaufman.com/books/) include Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind and, as editor, Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties and The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence.

And, lately, he’s been taking a seriously deep dive into self-actualization and transcendence, getting rare access to Maslow published and private writing that fueled his own research on the key elements what it takes to step more fully into the experience of life.

We explore all of this in today’s wide-ranging conversation.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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

Aleksandra Scepanovic was born into a nation soon to be at war.

Growing up in then Yugoslavia, she found herself entering adulthood in the middle of the Bosnian war. While she lived in the relative safety of Belgrade (at least in the early part of the war), she left to head into the heat of the war zone, on a quest to discover not just the highly-filtered stories being reported by a state-controlled media, but the truth on-the-ground.

Scepanovic joined local media efforts, became a reporter, then editor and analyst, where she spent years documenting and sharing what happened as her country divided itself, became decimated from violence, leaving so many lives destroyed and entire areas riddled with broken “Swiss cheese-like” buildings. The experience left her not only longing for truth, justice and peace, but also with a belief in architecture as a symbol of perseverance and the human need to rebuild and move on.

Aleksandra eventually made her way to New York, where she discovered a love of design and pursued a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. That program awakened her inner eye for detail, and also invigorated her passion for architecture and interiors. Blending the experience of seeing a brutal war destroy so many homes with her renewed passion to help people find and create beautiful homes, she co-founded Ideal Properties Group (https://ipg.nyc/), which has now grown into a leading residential real estate firm in New York's Brooklyn neighborhoods.

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Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.

If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.

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