The Enlightened Overachiever

"I think intuition is really just calming your left brain down so that you can take in more information. What does that imply? It implies that the world around you is much more complex than you know. Much more, there's much more information to glean from the world out there than we allow.”

Stella Eisenstein is a healer and health practitioner who has touched many lives, drawing on formal training in acupuncture, physiology and bodywork alongside a highly developed embodied intuition. 

Like many of my guests, Stella is a recovering overachiever. She has travelled from a largely rational and materialist understanding of the world towards something more open-ended: a worldview in which intuition matters, not everything important is necessarily measurable, and change sometimes happens in ways that don't fit easily into the models most of us are trained in.

What I find particularly interesting about Stella is that she hasn't simply replaced one set of certainties with another. Her journey has been driven by a persistent attention to results and to what she calls the “data points” that didn't fit her existing worldview — combined with a willingness not to decide too quickly what they mean.

Stella is also married to the writer Charles Eisenstein, whose work similarly explores the territory between conventional rationality and less easily measurable ideas about interconnectedness and meaning.

It is perhaps no accident that Stella herself embodies the crossover between these two different paradigms, almost in her very being.

I feel personally that Stella's insights into physical healing and recovery - as insightful and helpful as they are in themselves - also point towards much bigger questions about how we use our time and our lives, and how we might think about the forward movement of our world at this time.

There is a lot of treasure in this one. A couple of fave moments:

“When you are engaging the tools of the left brain exclusively, in other words, getting, doing, fixing, action, and you're simply not recognizing that you are part of a system that has a whole another mode. That other mode doesn't go away just because you pretend it isn't there.” 

“We're going to always be a little bit in the not-knowing. That's very right brain. That's a very right brain way of just continuing to take in information, continuing to take in information, and not ever really falling into a sense of I know what this is. Because we don't.”

LINKS & FURTHER READING

Stella Eisenstein
https://www.resonantattention.com/

About Stella
https://www.resonantattention.com/about-us

Iain McGilchrist — work on the divided brain and different modes of attention
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/

“Attention Is Not a Resource But a Way of Being Alive to the World” — on instrumental vs exploratory attention
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/attention-is-not-a-resource-but-a-way-of-being-alive-to-the-world/

Charles Eisenstein
https://charleseisenstein.org/

Integrative Manual Therapy — Sharon Giammatteo
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/59446/integrative-manual-therapy-for-the-autonomic-nervous-system-and-related-disorder-by-sharon-giammatteo-thomas-giammatteo/

Ariane de Bonvoisin has lived many lives.

An international swimmer in her teens, she graduated from university at 19, worked in consulting firm BCG, went to Stanford Business School, entered venture capital, and by her late twenties had become a managing director at Time Warner’s $500 million digital media fund.

And then it all fell apart.

In this conversation, Ariane and I explore what happens when the external story of success no longer fits with deeper truths of who a person really is — and what that might mean not only for individuals, but for leadership, work and society as a whole.

Ariane is best known for her work on change, but our conversation goes into fresh territory: the body as a source of truth, the impossibility of living two separate lives and identities, and the moment when success becomes impossible if it's not 100% aligned.

We talk about her childhood across seven countries and three continents, the family instability that gave her drive, and the “chronic self-sufficiency” that helped her achieve but also eventually had to be unwound.

One of the most powerful moments comes when Ariane describes finding herself in a New York clinic, covered in eczema and on two medical drips, realising that she was “allergic” to her own life.

From there, we explore change not as a productivity strategy or self-improvement exercise, but as an identity shift you are never completely in control of — the moment when the life you live can no longer carry the person you are becoming.

We discuss:

• How many achievers have two bios: the external CV and the real, hidden one
• Why the body often knows the truth before the mind does
• Optimism and the danger of bypassing grief
• Privilege, control and access to transformation
• Feelings, spirit and intuition in leadership
• The fear of disappointing others
• Children, technology and the future of human aliveness
• Why the emotional body matters as much as the physical body
• The “S word” — and why spirituality is still so hard to talk about in serious adult life

Ariane’s current work focuses explicitly on bringing together the worlds of success and spirituality. Her podcast, The Spirit Collective, speaks with people known for public achievement about the spiritual path behind their lives.

This is a conversation about work, change, embodiment, intuition and the deeper life asking to be lived beneath whatever it is you are presenting.

Ariane de Bonvoisin — https://www.arianedebonvoisin.com
The Spirit Collective — https://spiritcollective.com
Spirit Mama — https://spiritmamabook.com

I know very little about philosophy but I like it when a random dad in a kids playground starts talking about Wittgenstein and the reality-shaping assumptions of language. 

Rich Watkins definitely passes the bar of being an over-achiever. He entered the world of business at 16, became the youngest innovation consultant at pioneering agency What If, travelled the world advising organisations, and eventually built his own practice around helping people work together better.

But more excitingly (for me), Rich has DIY-assembled a coherent philosophical outlook on life and work that, by comparison, makes my thinking feel fuzzy and unexamined.

In this conversation we explore what happened when the scaffolding of Rich's over-achieving began to fall away — and how he gradually moved from orientating himself around what the world rewards towards a more embodied sense of what he actually cares about.

Drawing on thinkers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Satir and Donna Haraway, Rich describes ideas not as maps telling us where to go, but as lenses or compasses that help us see our situations differently.

We talk about why so many of our models of leadership and teamwork are already out of date; why human beings live inside language rather than simply using it; and why the ability to notice our own defensiveness, assumptions and inherited ways of seeing may matter more than finding the “right” model.

Topics include:

• Moving from external validation towards embodiment and desire
• Wittgenstein, language games and the “city” of language
• Ideas as lenses rather than maps
• Why old models of teams and leadership stop fitting reality
• Virginia Satir, defensiveness and how we relate
• Intensity, hyperfocus and learning to make space for softness
• Donna Haraway and “staying with the trouble”
• Optimism, uncertainty and doing the next right thing
• Dialogue as a practice for seeing more clearly

Explore further:

• Rich Watkins — website
• Rich on Wittgenstein and language
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Martin Heidegger — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Virginia Satir Global Network
• Donna Haraway — Staying with the Trouble
• David Bohm — On Dialogue

Oliver Burkeman has a brutal but liberating message - you will never do it all. Accept that and the real work can begin.

In this expansive chat, Oliver (journalist and author of Four Thousand Weeks, Meditations for Mortals, The Imperfectionist), joins me to explore the counterintuitive truth at the heart of modern life: that embracing limits is the gateway to living well.

We talk about insecure overachieving, parenting, Zen, email, death, and the strange liberation that comes from realising it’s all going to be a mess anyway. Oliver shares his own journey from perfectionism to “imperfectionism,” and we dig into what it really means to live a finite, meaningful, creative life in the age of infinite demands.

If you're a high-functioning procrastinator like me, battling endlessly with the hydra of your never ending self-expectations—you're going to like this.

We cover:

• The 4-hour workday principle
• Insecure overachievement: the emotional engine behind ambition
• Why facing our mortality clarifies things
• Zen, Stoicism, and the power of giving up
• How parenthood changes your relationship with time
• Email overwhelm, control-freakery, and the illusion of perfect systems
• Internal Family Systems (IFS), Focusing and the many parts within us
• What organizations and leaders can learn from “imperfectionism”
• Whether meaningful societal change can emerge from individual awakening
• Morning pages and the one practice Oliver always returns to

Why Listen:

If you ever feel crushed under the weight of your own dreams, stuck in a loop of planning without doing, or haunted by the feeling that you will die unfulfilled—this conversation will soothe you with a balm of friendly rationality and offer poetic license to just be and do the best you can.

This episode is apparently about teenagers, but it's also about the adult world we inhabit and create every day. We all started as a bored or engaged kids at school, and these learning identities live on in the careers and lives we build for ourselves as grown ups.  

Jenny Anderson is an award-winning journalist, former New York Times reporter, and co-author of The Disengaged Teen. Underpinned by impressive research, Jenny and her co-author flag an important and timely narrative about the crisis of disengagement in education — and why it says as much about adult life and modern work as it does about kids.

Across education, parenting and careers, our biggest problem is not performance but the erosion of self-directed meaning. What Jenny calls Explorer Mode — the capacity to know what matters to us and pursue it flexibly — is the missing developmental thread linking disengaged teens to disenchanted adults.

I invited this conversation to help me understand — as an adult — why my drive to achieve so often trumps my desires to explore, creative and simply do what I feel like (vs what I 'should' be doing). 

To to this end, Jenny introduces a powerful framework for understanding learning through four modes: the Passenger, the Resistor, the Achiever, and the Explorer. We unpack why achievement can coexist with anxiety and emptiness, how agency matters as much as effort, and why curiosity — not compliance — is the missing ingredient in most learning systems. The conversation moves beyond schools to some of the biggest themes of our time: presence vs productivity, neurodiversity, and the pressure many of us feel to optimise our own and our children’s lives. 

And we turn our sights on the adult world — where many high-performing professionals find themselves successful on paper, but disconnected from meaning, creativity or joy. What would it look like to live less in “achiever mode” and more as an explorer? And how early do we need to practice that skill?

This is a conversation about learning, agency and what it really means to thrive — for teenagers, parents, and grown-ups alike.

I recorded this conversation with Jenny about 9 months ago, but the wisdom of the explorer archetype won't be aging any time soon.

Topics we explore include:

• Why disengagement is often a rational response to environmental factors
• The hidden cost of achievement without feeling control
• Neurodiversity, misfit environments, and the myth of the “normal” learner
• What schools, workplaces, and societies reward — and what they erode
• How “explorer mode” might be the most important life skill in an AI-shaped future

About the guest
Jenny Anderson is an award-winning journalist and author whose work spans finance, education, parenting, and learning science. She previously reported for The New York Times and Quartz, and is the co-author of The Disengaged Teen, published in the UK and internationally in 2025.

https://www.thedisengagedteen.com

What does it mean to see the world clearly as it is? Why do simple narratives make it so hard for us to achieve that, and to live well together?

In this wide-ranging conversation with philosopher, author, and constellator Robert Rowland Smith we explore what it means to face reality without rushing to solutions, explanations or positions. Drawing on a life immersed in academia, business, systemic constellations, poetry, and spiritual traditions, Robert reflects on surrender, ambiguity and the fascinations that join his work together.

In this episode we talk about the limits of rationalism and science, the illusion of human progress and global productivity culture. Along the way, Robert shares some of his personal inspirations, his vision for “Hotel Philosophy,” and the self-doubt that continues to sit alongside his prolific public creativity.

Topics include

• Systemic constellations and surrender vs mastery
• Why narratives stop us seeing reality clearly
• Ambiguity as a mark of maturity
• The divine as immanent and transcendent
• Productivity culture and the limits of leadership programmes
• Art, philosophy, business, and following energy
• Neighbourliness as service without heroics
• Self-doubt, creativity, and continuing to show up

Show links

Robert's homepage - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com/

Philosophy Slam - www.philosophyslam.net

YouTube - robertrowlandsmith