STOP 2 THINK

Open to Everything, Attached to Nothing

This episode introduces a guiding principle that has genuinely stayed with me ever since Ray first said it, being open to everything and attached to nothing. It goes right to the heart of what Stop 2 Think actually means, and why real openness is so much harder to live out than it sounds.

We got into branding, of all things, using an exercise Ray ran with three hundred students where ninety eight percent owned an iPhone yet almost none of them could give an actual reason why. We also played with a simple perception exercise that reads as I am nowhere until you slow down enough to see it can also read as I am now here.

In this episode:

• What being open to everything and attached to nothing actually means, and does not mean
• The iPhone exercise, ninety eight percent ownership, almost no genuine justification
• I am nowhere and I am now here, the same letters read two completely different ways
• Diet and exercise trends across my whole career, all really just brands carrying meaning
• Your right is someone else's left, a line from my old coach I still use to this day

Pull quote: "Being open to everything attached to nothing is a decision to at least be open."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 28, recorded after we spoke together on stage for the first time, where we go deeper into identity, attachment, and authenticity.

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

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Living From the Inside Out

Recorded in Los Angeles, this episode leans on the work of trauma expert Gabor Maté to explain, with real precision, why authenticity and attachment get so easily confused with each other, and why untangling them is genuinely hard work.

I opened up about something small but revealing, a moment at the airport with my parents where I ate food I knew wasn't good for me, purely out of what I now recognise as separation anxiety rooted all the way back in childhood. Ray helped me see that authenticity has no competition, while attachment is built entirely from the five senses, starting from the moment we're born.

In this episode:

• The tension between the external world everyone sees and the internal one only I know
• Cold plunge exposure, and the real link between challenging the body and shifting the internal state
• Who you are only ever exists in the present moment, where you are is really just yesterday's residue
• The airport story, eating out of separation anxiety I hadn't recognised in myself before
• Why authenticity has no competition, while attachment is built entirely from the five senses

Pull quote: "Authenticity has no competition; authenticity has no compunction, it just is."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 27, where we explore a guiding principle that has stayed with me ever since, being open to everything and attached to nothing.

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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

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

Becoming By Overcoming

I recorded this one after a dramatic stretch of travel, from the wealth of Hong Kong and Macau to a Ugandan orphanage full of children who have already overcome more than most of us ever will. It introduces one of my favourite ideas from the whole series, the tree and its fruit.

Ray and I talked about how fruit is never really for the tree itself, only for others, and how the deepest growth in any life often happens completely unseen, in the roots, during the hardest seasons. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, Ray coined an acronym on the spot, RESL, that has stayed with me ever since.

In this episode:

• The metaphor of the tree, and why fruit is meant to be given away, not kept
• Meeting children at the orphanage who had already found the strength to leave unsafe situations
• Receive, exchange, and sow, the RESL cycle Ray built in real time as we talked
• Meeting Mandela, who runs the orphanage through a charity called God in Action
• Speaking honestly to anyone listening who has not received the same foundation of love I have

Pull quote: "You are giving love into the future, but you don't know explicitly where it's going."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 26, recorded in Los Angeles, where we explore the real difference between authenticity and attachment.

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

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

The Investment of Becoming

This episode explores what it actually means to invest in who I am becoming, not in some distant, imagined future, but through what I actually do today. It also reframes my own future self work in light of the hardest possible test, real, profound loss.

Ray asked me something genuinely difficult, how do you keep believing in the idea of a future self when the person you most wanted that future with is gone. I told him plainly that becoming that person means being them right now, in this moment, because there is no tomorrow, only what I am actually investing in today.

In this episode:

• Future casting, and why becoming that person happens now, not later
• The seeding paradox, nothing grows tomorrow unless you plant something today
• What actually sustains consistency, loving what you do, not just gritted discipline
• Seneca again, preparation, which we control, and opportunity, which we never fully do
• Why loving myself more since losing Hannah has never once diminished my love for her

Pull quote: "There is a convergence of two things: one you can control, and one you can't control. The one you can control is preparation."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 25, recorded after travelling from Hong Kong to a Ugandan orphanage, where we explore becoming through overcoming.

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

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

The Person Behind The Performance

Recorded jet lagged, the morning after ten unstructured days spent together in Indianapolis, this episode goes back into performance versus person, but with far more depth than the first time we touched on it.

I told Ray how much deeper my appreciation of who I am had become just from spending real, unhurried time together, and we talked properly about thought life as its own genuine layer of wellbeing, right alongside diet, sleep, and exercise, not separate from them.

In this episode:

• Three levels we operate on, physical, psychological, and metaphysical
• How what you think about before sleep actually affects the quality of that sleep
• Fight, flight, and freeze, and how freeze often hides behind constant busyness
• Wrestling, out loud, with the label the people's coach versus performance coach
• Why so many genuinely successful people say they feel empty once they get there

Pull quote: "We are more interested in you, the person. Then you, the performer."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 24, where we explore what it really means to invest in who you are becoming.

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

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

Significance Without Dominance

Recorded on my last evening in Indianapolis on that visit, this episode introduces one of the sharpest tools in the whole series, the difference between something being significant in your life and something being allowed to dominate it entirely.

Ray and I got into the Serenity Prayer, and why willpower driven diets so often fail while genuine identity shift tends to last. I also opened up about something harder, my own instinctive reaction to Black Lives Matter, and what it actually took for me to stop and look at things properly with a fresh pair of eyes.

In this episode:

• The real difference between something being significant and something dominating your life
• The Serenity Prayer, taken further than its usual reading
• Why willpower driven diets fail, and identity based lifestyle change tends to last
• Ray's own experience as a Black British man, and the honest limits of empathy
• My own instinctive reaction to Black Lives Matter, and what it took to actually reconsider it

Pull quote: "Making a decision to say that something is significant and treasure that without making a decision to say it will dominate."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 23, recorded the jet lagged morning after ten days together, where we go back into the difference between performance and the person underneath it.

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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

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

Who You Are Is Bigger Than Where You Are

Recorded on another walk with Ray, this episode pushes further into Viktor Frankl's ideas and sharpens the distinction between circumstance and identity even more than before.

We talked about why where you are always includes time, meaning even something you have already overcome still carries the shape of what you escaped, while who you are carries no such attachment at all. I also opened up about the letters that came in after my parents died, describing them both as people who always had time for others.

In this episode:

• Why where you are always includes time, and who you are does not
• Carol Dweck's fixed versus flexible mindset, and which one I was actually showing
• The letters that came in after my parents died, and what they revealed about who they really were
• Where research itself came from, interpretation, long before it became obsessed with numbers
• Triggers, and why how we respond to them is always a genuine choice

Pull quote: "Where you are is always contingent on context, and context is always time as well."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 22, recorded on my last evening in Indianapolis, where we explore the difference between something being significant in your life and something dominating it entirely.

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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

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

When Life Changes Everything

This is a solo episode, no Ray this time, just me talking directly to you, recorded while I was genuinely waiting, phone in hand, for a very special delivery to arrive. It is one of the most emotionally raw conversations in the whole series.

I talk honestly about the sheer amount of travel I had taken on recently, and address, directly, the suggestion from someone that it might be avoidance. I also tell the full story of Hannah becoming a quilter after her diagnosis, and the quilt she started but never got to finish herself.

In this episode:

• Addressing head on the suggestion that all my recent travel might be a way of avoiding my grief
• Meaning as something you give your own life, not something you simply find waiting for you
• How Hannah reinvented herself as the bespoke quilter after her diagnosis
• The Michael Jordan shirt quilt she started, and the friends who finished it after she died
• A stranger I met in a hotel who had also lost his wife, and the instant kinship we shared

Pull quote: "I think we're love."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 21, where we go even deeper into Viktor Frankl and what it really means to be bigger than where you are.

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

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

The Journey Beyond Circumstance

I recorded this one walking with Ray the day before Thanksgiving, deliberately, as a kind of prequel to a much harder conversation that follows it. I wanted to give you the context first, before you hear something far more raw.

We talked about branding as identity, and about Steve Jobs's Stanford speech, connecting the dots, love and loss, and facing death. I also admitted something that felt strange to say out loud at the time, that despite everything, I felt more content and more alive than I had in years.

In this episode:

• Branding as identity, and why so much of the world confuses where you are with who you are
• Steve Jobs's Stanford speech, connecting the dots, love and loss, and facing death
• Admitting, out loud, that I felt content and alive in the middle of active grief
• Real connection built across distance and different beliefs, without ever needing agreement
• How you treat someone in a position of lesser visible status, like a waiter, and what it actually reveals

Pull quote: "You are connecting the dots in terms of meaning. What does it mean to you because you are still here?"

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 20, one of the most personal episodes in the whole series, recorded while I was genuinely waiting for a very special delivery to arrive.

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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

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

Where You Are Is Not Who You Are

This episode states the idea that everything else in this series ultimately returns to, as directly as we have ever said it. Ray and I use real, well known lives to prove the point, because I think it lands harder when you can see it actually lived out by someone else first.

We talked about Nelson Mandela, twenty seven years in a cell and still choosing not to be defined by it, about Arnold Schwarzenegger realising, right at the end, that none of it was ever really about him alone, and about my friend MJ, who lives with a permanent disability and taught me something important about the limits of comparison.

In this episode:

• Nelson Mandela's twenty seven years in prison as the clearest possible example
• Arnold Schwarzenegger's documentary, and his realisation that it was always we, never just him
• My friend MJ, and what her story taught me about circumstance versus identity
• Simon Sinek's Golden Circle, and the difference between a label and a real why
• Dolores Jordan's vision for her son Michael, long before anyone else could see it

Pull quote: "Your circumstances never define you; they're a moment in time."

Come and join me and Ray for Episode 19, a walking prequel recorded the day before Thanksgiving, setting the stage for one of the most personal conversations in this whole series.

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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/