STOP 2 THINK

In this episode of Stop 2 Think, Dr Ray Sylvester and I explore the idea of celebration as a way of life.

We talk about the challenge Ray once gave me to find a way to celebrate in the middle of suffering, and how that eventually led to the creation of Hannah’s Story.

What became clear during this conversation was that the celebration had actually started much earlier. Through the videos, blogs, fundraising and the way Hannah and I shared our journey, we had been celebrating life all along.

We also explore the difference between gratitude and celebration, the idea that celebration is something we actively do, and how grief can become an expression of enduring love.

At the heart of the conversation is a simple Stop 2 Think question:

What in your life deserves to be seen, honoured or celebrated differently?

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Welcome to the STOP 2 THINK Podcast.

In this episode, Stories, States and Sentences Part Two: What Are You Saying to Yourself?, we continue our conversation with Dr Ray Sylvester about the powerful connection between the stories we believe, the states we live in, and the sentences we repeat to ourselves.

We explore how the stories we carry can shape our emotions, decisions, relationships and sense of possibility. Some of these stories may have been with us for years, quietly influencing the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

Together, we look at the impact of familiar sentences such as:

• “I’m not good enough.”
• “It’s too late.”
• “I should be further ahead.”
• “The best years are behind me.”

We consider where these beliefs come from, why they can be so difficult to change, and what happens when we pause long enough to notice the language we use internally.

Most importantly, this episode invites us to question whether the sentences we repeat are actually true—or whether they are simply stories we have believed for a long time.

Because when we become aware of the story, we create the possibility of changing it.

And perhaps it is time to write a new one.

In this episode, we explore:

• How our stories influence the states we live in
• The connection between thoughts, emotions and behaviour
• Why certain beliefs can stay with us for decades
• How repeated sentences shape our identity and choices
• The impact of self-critical and limiting language
• Why awareness is the first step towards change
• How to begin creating a more empowering story for yourself

Listen now and take a moment to consider:

What are you saying to yourself—and is it time to say something different?

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This is one of the most personal and revealing conversations Ray and I have recorded.

We talk about fear, grief, loss, health, getting older and something I’ve only recently begun to recognise about the way I’ve lived much of my life.

For years, I became very good at helping other people change their lives while often avoiding some of the things going on inside my own.

In this conversation, Ray challenges me to look at that and at the extraordinary difference between living your life from the outside in and from the inside out.

• The fear that can exist beneath busyness and achievement
• Why helping others can sometimes stop us looking at ourselves
• What grief has taught me about slowing down
• Learning to be kinder to yourself
• Why the hardest journey can be the journey within
• What can arise when we finally give ourselves permission to stop

Pull quote:“What I’m looking for isn’t out there. It’s in here.”

This conversation gave me a lot to think about. I hope it does the same for you.

Maybe the most important question is: what might you discover if you stopped long enough to really listen to yourself?

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Subscribe to The STOP 2 THINK Newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/stop-2-think-newsletter-7474223126868918272/

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Watch Hannah’s Story: https://petecohen.com/hannah

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How much of your life is being shaped by what’s happening around you, and how much is coming from within you?

In this episode, Dr Ray Sylvester and I continue our exploration of outside-in and inside-out living.

We talk about why we need both, the impact of the constant noise around us, and why STOP 2 THINK isn’t about withdrawing from the world. It’s about creating enough space to hear yourself within it.

We explore the difference between reacting and responding, the person and the performer, and the importance of creating what Ray calls intentional time.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether you live outside-in or inside-out.

Perhaps it’s simply:

Have you found your balance?

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www.linkedin.com/newsletters/stop-2-think-newsletter-7474223126868918272/

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Watch Hannah's Story: https://petecohen.com/hannah

Visit Pete's website: https://petecohen.com/

What Will You Pass On? Legacy, Hope and the Lives We Touch

What do we really leave behind?

This very special episode of the STOP 2 THINK Podcast was recorded in Uganda with my friend Mandela Salim Buluma.

Mandela and his team care for 101 vulnerable children, many of whom have experienced extraordinary challenges very early in their lives.

But this isn’t really a conversation about charity.

It’s a conversation about legacy, leadership, hope and what we choose to pass on.

Mandela shares how his father inspired the work he does today, and how losing him created an even greater responsibility to continue what he had started.

We talk about the importance of giving children more than food, shelter and education. Mandela’s vision is to help them develop practical skills, confidence, independence and the belief that they can become valuable members and leaders within their communities.

We also explore something much bigger.

What happens to the things people give us after they’re gone?

Can someone’s values, love and influence continue through the lives of other people?

And can our most difficult experiences eventually become something that helps somebody else?

During our conversation, Mandela said something to me about my late wife Hannah that genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

I’m not going to tell you what he said here.

I’d rather you experience that moment for yourself.

• The extraordinary story of how Mandela and I first met
• How his father’s legacy inspired his work with vulnerable children
• Why creating independence is more powerful than creating dependency
• Giving young people skills, responsibility and a voice
• Why asking for help is a strength
• What suffering can teach us about leadership and life
• The importance of hope when circumstances are difficult
• The vision for creating a sustainable future for 101 children in Uganda
• And a deeply personal moment that I will never forget

This conversation reminded me that perhaps legacy isn’t something we start thinking about towards the end of our lives.

We’re creating it now.

In our conversations.

In our choices.

In the way we treat people.

In what we teach.

In what we give.

And in what we choose to do with the things life has given us.

So as you listen, STOP 2 THINK:

What are you passing on?

And perhaps more importantly…

What would you like to pass on?

If you like to find out more about Mandela, the work he does then check the links below. If you would like to donate or set up a fundraising event then contact him directly thorough the website.

https://www.godinactionuganda.com/

Follow him on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/godinactionuganda/

If you like to donate then please visit here.

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=N8QJFV8NTGETJ

When Scott Edwards Jimena reached out to me, I had no idea just how much this conversation would stay with me.

Like Hannah, Scott is living with glioblastoma. But this isn’t really a conversation about cancer. It’s a conversation about what happens when life forces us to STOP.

Scott shares, for the first time publicly, the childhood trauma he carried in silence for more than thirty years and how confronting it completely changed the way he sees himself and the world around him.

We talk about identity, vulnerability, fatherhood, purpose, spirituality, healing and why so many of us spend our lives wearing masks.

What struck me most wasn’t Scott’s diagnosis—it was the peace he has found despite it.

His story is a reminder that sometimes the greatest transformation begins when we stop resisting life, stop running from ourselves, and have the courage to discover who we really are.

I genuinely believe this is one of the most honest and courageous conversations I’ve ever recorded, and I hope it encourages you to stop, reflect and perhaps see your own life a little differently.

I hope you enjoy it.

Follow Scott on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/scott_edwards_jimena/

Celebrate the Journey

As the first series comes to a close, Ray asked me a question I had never quite asked myself before. Not how do I celebrate Hannah, but how do I celebrate the whole journey, including who I used to be.

We recorded this one walking an old railway path in South Buckinghamshire, looking back across thirty one episodes and ten months of raw, unscripted conversation. It started with a walk round Ray's Indianapolis neighbourhood just days after Hannah's funeral, and it has brought me all the way to a recent, unguarded conversation on Davina McCall's podcast. This is the episode where the whole series comes full circle, and where celebration finally turned inward, toward me.

In this episode:

• What I finally understood, ten months on, about celebrating in your suffering
• The moment on Davina McCall's Begin Again that changed how I share my own story
• Why an overactive nervous system can run for years before you even notice it is happening
• Purging, and how I use sauna, journaling and meditation to deliberately release the old me
• The harder question Ray finally asked me, how do you celebrate the old Pete, not just Hannah
• 
  

Pull quote: "This transition from old Pete to new Pete deserves celebration. Celebrating the old Pete, because without the old Pete, this narrative wouldn't exist. So nothing is wasted."

That is the first series of Stop 2 Think, complete. If you have walked the whole way with me and Ray, thank you. Go back to Episode 1 and hear where it all began, or reach out and tell me what has stayed with you.

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Follow me on Instagram here: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/petecohen_/⁠

Subscribe to The STOP 2 THINK Newsletter on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/stop-2-think-newsletter-7474223126868918272/⁠

Follow Ray on LinkedIn here: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/drraysylvester/⁠

Watch Hannah's Story: ⁠https://petecohen.com/hannah⁠

Visit Pete's website petecohen.com

Stand Up For Your Authenticity

Recorded on the same Indianapolis visit as the last episode, this one brings the whole attachment versus authenticity thread to its fullest conclusion. It closes with a piece of advice from my late coach Raphael that has genuinely become one of the most important lines in this entire journey.

I went deeper into my own school days than I ever had before, tracing a lifetime of feeling not enough all the way back to being singled out at five years old, and assessed again at ten. Ray helped me see that even a real, hard won achievement, like beating a future Olympian in judo, can be undone in a moment by someone else's disbelief, if you let it.

In this episode:

• Attachment as something necessary for survival, authenticity as a later, deliberate choice
• My own school trauma, traced back to being singled out at five and assessed again at ten
• The runner I met in a shop, and why plateaus are a necessary, unglamorous stage of growth
• My judo story revisited, beating a future Olympian and still doubting myself afterwards
• Raphael's instruction, cross out the if in life, so that only legacy, le, remains

Pull quote: "You can't outlearn your potential. Your potential is always a scope of expansion of self that you can't breach."

That brings this stretch of Stop 2 Think to a close. If any of this has resonated with you, go back to Episode 1 and walk the whole journey with us, or reach out and let us know what stayed with you.

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Follow me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/petecohen_/

Subscribe to The STOP 2 THINK Newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/stop-2-think-newsletter-7474223126868918272/

Follow Ray on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drraysylvester/

Watch Hannah's Story: https://petecohen.com/hannah

Visit Pete's website: https://petecohen.com/

Who Are You, Really?

Recorded after Ray and I spoke together at a global health and fitness conference, this is one of the most personally exposing episodes in the whole series. I admit, openly, to something I had been doing quietly for a long time.

I told Ray about eating an entire Toblerone on a plane, and connected it, in real time, to Hannah's own one indulgence, smoking, the single thing she ever did purely for herself in a life spent giving to everyone else. We also worked through a genuinely useful exercise, two columns on a page, where am I and who am I, that I had actually done on the flight over.

In this episode:

• Why fame and possessions never actually fulfil people from the inside, however much they accumulate
• Admitting, openly, to eating an entire family sized Toblerone on a plane
• Connecting my own comfort eating to Hannah's one private indulgence, smoking
• The where am I, who am I exercise, done honestly on the flight to Los Angeles
• David Goggins, and what it actually looks like to reject comfort entirely

Pull quote: "The easiest thing we can be is ourselves, and the hardest thing is to be something we're not. However, the world teaches us the opposite."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 30, the final episode of this stretch, where we ask what it really means to stand up for your own authenticity.

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Watch Hannah's Story: https://petecohen.com/hannah

Visit Pete's website: https://petecohen.com/

The Journey Continues, Identity, Attachment and Authenticity

Recorded on my last day in Indianapolis, right after Ray and I spoke together on stage for the very first time, this episode goes deeper into identity, attachment, and authenticity than we ever had before.

We watched the Bob Marley film One Love together that morning, and it gave us a way into something I have said for years without ever quite knowing what to do with it, you can't unpickle a pickle. Ray took that phrase somewhere genuinely useful, pulling the pickled onion apart layer by layer, and I got triggered live, by nothing more than a cancelled flight, and we used it as a real example right there in the moment.

In this episode:

• Watching Bob Marley's One Love, and his own genuine ambiguity around identity
• You can't unpickle a pickle, and Ray's extension of it, pulling the pickled onion apart
• Getting triggered live by a cancelled British Airways flight, and what it actually revealed
• Viktor Frankl again, and the real freedom that lives in the space between stimulus and response
• Marley's idea of I and I, and what it means to remove hierarchy from how we relate to people

Pull quote: "What you can't do is unpickle the pickledness, but you can pull the onions and get the layers back, to see the essence of who you really are."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 29, where I open up honestly about my own struggle with comfort eating and what it actually means to ask, who are you, really.

Follow us here.

Follow me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/petecohen_/

Subscribe to The STOP 2 THINK Newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/stop-2-think-newsletter-7474223126868918272/

Follow Ray on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drraysylvester/

Watch Hannah's Story: https://petecohen.com/hannah

Visit Pete's website: https://petecohen.com/