Neal Allen is a spiritual coach and a speaker whose chief concern is removing obstacles of the ego. Neal has written a book called Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, the subject of most of our conversation here today. This is Neal’s second time on the School for Good Living podcast after our first conversation about his book called Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You.

In this interview on the School for Good Living Podcast, Neal joins me to talk about our inner critic. Sometimes Neal refers to it as a parasite. You might call it your conscience or your superego. But Neal distinguishes that it is not you. It's a part of you. He talks about how it forms, what its purpose is, and how we can live healthier, happier lives when we learn to manage our inner critic and make space for our authentic self. We also talk about how we can live with less anxiety, have more fulfilling relationships, and be more content more often. In this conversation, Neal also shares what he learned from a six-month experiment he conducted in his own life where he said yes to every opportunity, invitation, and request that was made to him and what he learned from it.

“It’s not necessary to seek for love, only to find and remove the obstacles we’ve built against it.”

– Neal Allen

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

·       Neal’s belief and practice that people are naturally respectful

·       Saying yes to everything for 6 months and its lasting impact on Neal

·       Defining and overcoming “the parasite”, “the gremlin”, and the superego

·       Turning Win, Lose, or Draw into Yes, No, or Maybe

Resources Mentioned:

·       Shapesoftruth.com

·       goodliving.com

Connect With The Guest:

·       Neal Allen

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

Colin Campbell is an author who knows a lot about grief. When Colin and his family were hit by a drunk and high driver that killed his two children, his life was sent into a whirlwind of grief, pain, and isolation. This grief led him to write “Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose” to help us understand what it takes to accompany people in their grieving process. His personal experiences has helped him to navigate the human tendencies that we all face when we experience loss or in our efforts to accompany others through their pain and grief.

In this Interview on the School for Good Living Podcast, Colin joins me to talk about confronting pain to help us have good living. In this interview, we discuss the profound losses that we face in life and some techniques we can use more quickly and fully get to places of peace, joy, and love. We also discuss some of the hardest parts of helping others who are grieving and finding the words to help them through it. Colin believes that we can all find common ground in the ways that we grieve despite the individual ways that we all find to avoid it. Ultimately, this conversation with Colin can help us to navigate being with others who are grieving and how to open ourselves to others when we are the ones in that position.

“A lot of the trouble in the world comes from avoiding pain.” – Colin Campbell

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• Understanding profound loss

Resources Mentioned:

• Colincampbellauthor.com

Connect With The Guest:

• colincampbellauthor.com/contact/

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

Doug Evans has been a prominent figure in the natural food industry for over three decades, dedicating his life to promoting healthy eating habits and sustainable agriculture practices. As a devoted advocate of sprouting, he has inspired countless individuals to embrace a plant-based diet and lead a healthier lifestyle. Evans’ latest book, The Sprout Book: Tap into the Power of the Planet’s Most Nutritious Food, is a culmination of his lifelong passion for sprouts, and provides readers with a comprehensive guide to growing and consuming these tiny but mighty superfoods. In this book, he shares his knowledge and experience on the benefits of sprouts and how they can help us lead healthier, happier lives.

In this special episode on the School for Good Living Podcast, Doug joins me in the studio in person today. In this interview, we talk about all kinds of things related to sprouting. Why to do it, how to do it, and even some insight into his favorite recipes. We also dive into what Doug’s health journey has been like and why he has made the health decisions he’s made. If you’re looking to improve the quality of your life, if you’re looking to feel better, if you’re looking to have more energy, or if you’re looking to have the capacity to give more of the gifts that are perhaps latent within you, join us in this conversation to find some help ways that sprouts can help you find good living.

“Not everyone can be a farmer, not everyone could be a gardener, not everyone has a green thumb, But everyone can be a sprouter.”

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• The health risks involved in the 21-century American diet

Resources Mentioned:

• The Sprout Book

Connect With The Guest:

• Doug Evans on Instagram

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

What is life about? What is something about which you have changed your mind in recent years? What have you started or stopped doing to live or age well?

These are some of the questions that I have asked many of my guests this year and their responses have been both insightful and entertaining. Join me for this final episode of 2022 as we look back at many of the guests I have interviewed and their take on many things including getting creative work done and living a good life.

This year on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• 168. Suzanne McConnell – Pity the Reader: On Writing With Style

Resources Mentioned:

• http://goodliving.com

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

Ryland Engelhart is a philanthropist. He’s a lover of people and of life. Ryland co-founded Kiss the Ground in his living room with a friend ten years ago. It’s a nonprofit organization that he leads today as executive director. Ryland is also the producer of The Kiss the Ground documentary and the co-creator of the documentary film “May I Be Frank?” He’s also co-owner and formerly served as Mission Fulfillment Officer of the nationally recognized plant-based restaurants Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre, located in Southern California.

In this interview, Ryland joins me to discuss sacred commerce, using business as a force for good, the possibility of restoration and regeneration, and gaining a sense of optimism toward the future of the Earth and humanity. We also discuss one of Ryland’s strategies to deal with challenging moments and to avoid closing down or shrinking from difficulties. We talk about finding our thing, whatever it may be, and creating ways to express what we value. We also talk about building and solidifying habits related to creativity and writing, and a lot about Ryland’s sustainability efforts.

“Regeneration is playing a role in reversing or balancing the climate.”

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• Gaining a sense of optimism towards the future of the Earth and of humanity

Resources Mentioned:

• Kisstheground.com

Connect With The Guest:

• Ryland Engelhart

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

Diane Dreher is the writer of The Tao of Inner Peace as well as other nonfiction books, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She is an award-winning positive psychology researcher and her work blends wisdom from the past with contemporary psychology and neuroscience. Her work combines knowledge of the western world with traditions of the eastern world including many insights from the Tao Te Ching. Her work helps teach people to live with the pains of life without also suffering.

In this interview, Diane joins me to discuss how to better understand and cultivate your unique strengths, how to understand and cultivate a relationship to your intuition, and the power of stillness. We also discuss the four stages of discovering your purpose or calling, recognizing, and resolving false dilemmas, and finding paths through “either / or” situations that seem unwinnable. Another interesting thing we talk about is the wisdom of bamboo, what we can learn from it about strength, flexibility, and resilience; How we can use our differences to help us work together to find solutions.

“There are times when to be strong is to be flexible.”

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• Being aware of and using our strengths
• Combining eastern and western philosophy
• The false dilemma and Seeing through “either / or” situations
• The wisdom of bamboo, learning to be flexible
• Allowing our differences to help us work together to find solutions

Resources Mentioned:

• Dianedreher.com
• Viacharacter.org

Connect With The Guest:

• DianeDreher.com/contact

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

David Bradford is the author of Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues. He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for over 50 years and helped to cultivate a course affectionately known as “touchy-feely” where he has coached and consulted with hundreds of people to help them cultivate excellent relationships.

Join us in this interview on the School for Good Living Podcast as David and I discuss how we can better deal with conflict, the three realities in any situation and how to leverage them to strengthen relationships, and how to differentiate between thoughts and feelings. We also discuss how we can give better feedback and productively address pain points in relationships.

“Emotions are important because they give meaning to facts.”

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• The “Touchy-feely” course David helped develop at the Stanford Graduate School of Business
• The keys to exceptional relationships
• The tennis court model and the three realities in any interaction
• Feedback as information rather than a requirement for change
• Breaking away from feedback sandwiches to create more actionable feedback
• How to correctly identify feelings and cognitions
• Breaking through fear by understanding their limitations
• Feeling pinched rather than hurt

Resources Mentioned:

• ConnectAndRelate.com
• goodliving.com

Connect With The Guest:

• David Bradford

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

David Kadavy is the author of multiple books, including Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity when Creativity Matters and The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating and Start Creating, and a book called Design for Hackers. David has spoken at South by Southwest, TEDx and his writings have been featured in The Observer, The Huffington Post, Ink Magazine, Quartz, McSweeney’s, Upworthy, Lifehacker, and many other places. In addition to his writing and publications, he is also the creator and host of the Love Your Work podcast.

In this episode on the School for Good Living Podcast, David joins me to discuss creativity, productivity, and living a meaningful life. We discuss creating something David calls a curiosity management system and how he uses “crumb time” to learn and to create more than you otherwise might. We explore how David escaped being born in the wrong place, a suburban area in Nebraska, surrounded by people who didn’t understand him and with whom he didn’t really connect, and how he managed to create a fulfilling life of creativity and contribution and create a life in Columbia where he lives now. We also discussed the struggle that many artists and creators have of figuring out what their unique message is, exactly what their voice is, who their audience is, and how David has approached these things. Join us to explore these ideas of writing as a process of teaching ourselves and learning what we need to know and the fact that writing is often not a linear process and how to use that fact to your advantage.

“That’s kind of the secret of anything, being okay at being bad at it.”

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• Looking past money, knowledge, and experiences to find meaning
• Using “crumb time” as a curiosity management system
• David’s “beige period” and how he found his way out of it
• How to finally just get started
• What happens if the human race goes extinct – and is it really a bad thing?

Resources Mentioned:

• kadavy.net
• Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters
• 100wordhabit.com

Connect With The Guest:

• David Kadavy

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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

The Coaches Commonplace Book is a candid extention to the School for Good Living Podcast. My co-host and fellow member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches group, Dean Miles, joins me to dive deeper into what it means to be a coach, find fulfillment, and ultimately to live good lives. This series includes several fun thinking activities where we explore quotations and news articles. 

Join me this week as Dean and I discuss our recent information diet and what it takes to be a coach. In this discussion, we talk a lot about where we find out motivation, our purpose, and ultimately how we seek for good living.

“On the other side of any emotion felt fully is peace.” – John Wineland

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• Brilliant and Dean’s information diet
• Training versus fight training; what it takes to really be great
• Masculine and feminine energy
• The wisdom of the pages
  • Dean’s article: Six Signs You’re Lying to Yourself: How to Recognize When Your Confidence is Covering up Your Self-Deception – Dr. Evan Parks
  • Building a Personal Brand – Success Magazine
• Finding and following your purpose

Resources Mentioned:

• From the Core: A New Masculine Paradigm for Leading with Love, Living Your Truth, and Healing the World
• Pickmybrain.world

Connect With The Guests:

• Bridgepointcsg.com
• Goodliving.com

Subscribe and sign up for more!

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!

Sam Carpenter is the author of Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. Sam is an author, an entrepreneur, and has extensive experience in a variety of fields, including engineering, journalism, publishing, surveying, forestry, construction management, telecommunications, and a myriad of other blue- and white-collar enterprises and jobs. Sam has owned and operated Centratel, the leading telephone answering service in the United States, for nearly 40 years.

In this Interview on the School for Good Living Podcast, Sam joins me to discuss how we can find good living through the good results of managing our systems. We all deal with systems and processes and Sam is someone who helps us learn to deal with recurring systems and processes to make our lives easier, free ourselves up, reduce our stress levels, earn more money, and have more free time.

“Unhappy people’s lives are out of control because they spend their days coping with the random bad results of their unmanaged systems.”

This week on the School for Good Living Podcast:

• Which way should the toilet paper roll face?
• How we can avoid ‘fire fighting’ against our tasks and challenges
• Finding the organic processes in a business and making them mechanical
• The documents required to guide a business’s goals and principles
• Sam’s systems for writing books that make a difference

Resources Mentioned:

• Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less
• Workthesystem.com

Connect With The Guest:

• Sam Carpenter

Subscribe and sign up for more!

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the School For Good Living Podcast, I hope you found it as insightful as I did! If you enjoyed this episode, then be sure to head over to goodliving.com and sign up for our email list to receive special reminders and exclusive content sent right to your inbox. Explore our website to learn more about the many services I offer, like my Transformation Coaching Program, Coach Training Program, and my catalog of quotations to help you live a good life!