“We’ve been taught to believe life is only meaningful if we’re getting from here to there—doing a lot, becoming more important, accruing more stuff, feeling safer, and increasing our comfort. Even the good work of redeeming the world can become its own straight line, as we single-handedly try to move the world from Point A to Point B. We pretend life is what it’s not. We need to get real about how this whole thing works. We need to bend our lives back into the circle they already are.”

Here we are at the end of The Year of Listening, Loving, and Living. In this final episode, we do more than just sum up the content of this podcast so far; we add one final, invaluable insight to your journey of growth and transformation. And here it is: seeing life as a straight-line is a disease that will keep you ashamed and sick, and experiencing life and growth as a circle is essential to transformation and healing…

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post The Conclusion to the Loveable Podcast [Loveable 054] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Your true self folded in upon itself never ceases to be your truest you. Your soul is bigger and more beautiful and more mysterious than you can possible imagine. It has been folded in upon itself by people and by experience and by life. But it need not remain that way.”

One of the most common questions I receive as a therapist is, how will I know if I’m getting better? This is an important question to answer because the answer gives us direction, it gives us hope, and eventually it gives us something to celebrate. That’s the question we answer in Episode 53 of The Loveable Podcast…

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 52: Reflecting Upon the Unfolding of Your Truest Self [Loveable 053] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Fear about the future becomes bravery in the present becomes joy in hindsight. Joy is knowing you can be scared and still ride through life. Joy is being terrified and trusting you’ll survive it. Joy is believing in yourself enough to believe you are brave.”

Joy and happiness are not the same thing. In fact, they may be opposites, and the difference between them could make all the difference in your life. In Episode 52 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on how practicing your passions may not add up to happiness but will almost certainly add up to joy. Because happiness is about things going your way, whereas joy is about trusting you can handle life, no matter how things go…

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 51: How All This Passion, Pain, and Courage Add Up to Joy [Loveable 052] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Courage is ignoring the jeers and feeling the fears. Courage is returning to the edge of our comfort zone and choosing the place where our fear dwells, because we are worthy of another chance at life. Regardless of what the critics say.”

People who experience success aren’t better at being successful; they are better at failing. They don’t misinterpret failures as a sign that they should be doing something else. They don’t listen to the people who tell them their failures define them. They get back up and try again, believing their passion is truer than their setbacks. In other words, success doesn’t always feel great; more often than not, it feels like failure that didn’t stop us.

In Episode 51 of The Loveable Podcast, we will turn your definitions of success and courage upside down, and cultivate the courage to fail by listening to the right people.

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 50: The Courage to Fail [Loveable 051] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Life is a gift in terrifying disguise, and we are here to open it, until we find the still-quiet place in the center of it, where fear no longer decides.”

In Episode 50 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about fear. It is an important emotion. It causes us to buckle our seatbelts, run out of burning buildings, and grab our pepper spray when we hear footsteps behind us in a dark parking lot. But in the modern world, our fear has gone rogue. We now get afraid not just about life-threatening situations, but also about life-changing situations. We are afraid not just of dangers, but of opportunities. It’s time to quit letting fear make our decisions for us…

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 49: What to Do When Our Feelings Are Lying to Us [Loveable 050] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

The so-called good life is a hollow promise. It’s empty of the things we desire most, like passion, purpose, and peace. It bores us. Makes us restless. We crave something else. We ultimately crave a redemptive life.

In Episode 49 of The Loveable Podcast, we shift our focus slightly to something that will clarify not what our passion is, but the direction we want to go with it. That something is our pain. This week’s episode revolves around a hard but simple formula: passion + pain = purpose. In other words, when we practice our passion in the service of redeeming our pain, a sense of purpose is almost guaranteed…

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 48: The Good Life vs. the Redemptive Life [Loveable 049] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“We are healed when we reveal our mess to another and put our real self on the line. When we connect in our brokenness—not in spite of it—we discover what makes us messy is also what makes us beautiful. And we give everyone around us permission to be broken and beautiful, too…A world torn apart by invincibility can only be healed by vulnerability and weakness.” 

In Episode 48 of The Loveable Podcast, we are focused on the biggest barrier to practicing your passions. It is not lack of clarity about what they are. It is not lack of resources for pursuing them. It is something much more basic, much more common, and much more formidable. It is fear. This week we talk about vulnerability, courage, and what it means to be truly successful in the practicing of your passions…

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 47: What a Life of Vulnerability Really Looks Like [Loveable 048] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Life doesn’t have an easy setting. Remembering who you are isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor. It’s not a pass-fail assignment. The truth is much closer to this: life is like a sieve and everything we do runs through it. If we watch closely, we’ll notice passing through the sieve all those things that aren’t really us. And we’ll notice, captured in the sieve of life, the parts of us that are who we’ve always been.” 

We often confuse our passions and our skills, and this week we unconfuse them. A passion is “something we are extravagantly fond of doing.” That is very different from “something we are extra good at doing.” The former produces meaning in our lives, the latter just…produces. In Episode 47 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk in detail about the difference between passion and skill, how you might get more clarity in differentiating the two, and how that clarity can change your life.

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 46: You Aren’t Here to Be More Happy (You Are Here to Be More You) [Loveable 047] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert

In Episode 46 of The Loveable Podcast, we are focused on taking the space in your life created by last week’s exercise and doing something a little counterintuitive with it—we are going to build some monotony into it. In other words, we are going to focus on building structure around the practicing of your passions. By the end of this episode, you are going to be more motivated to make a habit of doing the things you love.

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 45: Why the Most Mundane Life Is Sometimes the Most Passionate Life [Loveable 046] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Sometimes, life gets too cramped to move in any new direction. Sometimes, the direction we need to go is backward. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to undo the best things we’ve done.”

In Episode 45 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on quitting some of the things we added to our lives before we gained clarity about who we really are. In this way, becoming a quitter can actually make space for the practicing of our passions. By the end of this episode, you will begin to see more clearly a path toward practicing your passions, because you will be planning to clear that path of debris.

Here are just a few of the takeaways from this week’s episode:

You can listen below or on iTunes!

The post Week 44: The Beauty of Becoming a Quitter [Loveable 045] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.