Today I talked to Clint Pulver about his new book I Love It Here: How Great Leaders Create Organizations Their People Never Want to Leave (Page Two, 2021). If you’ve ever completed an annual employee survey by filling-in-the-bubbles, this episode is for you. Clint Pulver’s approach to knowing what employees are thinking (and feeling) has been to pose as if he’s a job seeker at that company or organization so he can catch the “vibe” in an anonymous, candid conversation with his would-be colleague...
Mar 31, 2022•32 min•Ep. 99
In the hills north of Rome about a month ago I met a woman, a writer, so blown away by her Dottoressa, her psychoanalyst, that she announced to the surprise of all around her (surprised I want to add that she was in analysis in the first place) that she was writing a book about her treatment. I thought of H.D. I thought of Alison Bechdel. Then I thought of Emma Lieber. The Writing Cure (Bloomsbury, 2020), Lieber’s first book, is a hybrid text—equal parts the work of an analysand, a new clinician...
Mar 31, 2022•59 min•Ep. 190
We all want positive, healthy, and genuine relationships whether it's with family, friends, peers, coworkers, or romantic partners. And yet, time and time again, we all seem to get stuck in how we see and relate to certain people, which can limit or even sabotage our relationships. These autopilot reactions are called cognitive biases, and they happen when our brans try to simplify information by making assumptions. Seeing beyond these "blindspots" is essential to building the connections we tru...
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 163
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: The science that explains our busy minds What mindfulness is The difference between mindfulness and meditation How changing our habits is a small-step by small-step process A discussion of the book Bettter Daily Mindfulness Habits: Simple Changes with Lifelong Impact Today’s book is : Better Daily Mindfulness Habits: Simple Changes with Lifelong Impact Mindfulness by Kristen Manieri. Mindfulness is a powerful tool for staying calm,...
Mar 31, 2022•48 min•Ep. 91
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental h...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 165
In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more i...
Mar 29, 2022•40 min•Ep. 6
Improve your mental health and well-being through guided journaling It's impossible to avoid stress entirely in the hustle and bustle of modern life--but practicing mindfulness can help you maintain a positive mindset and respond to daily challenges in healthy ways. Elizabeth Cronin's Mindfulness Journal for Mental Health Prompts and Practices to Improve Your Well-Being (Rockridge Press, 2022) is filled with prompts and practices that support your mental health, encouraging you to deepen your se...
Mar 29, 2022•47 min•Ep. 38
Today I talked to Lindsey Pollak about her book Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work (HarperCollins, 2021). How can envy be a positive catalyst for changing your career? Why is curiosity so vital? (Hint: it’s been said that “Learning is the new pension.”) These are among the topics, and emotions, covered in this episode that runs the gamut from getting hired to managing both your boss and your personal brand. Along the way, this episode delves into what kinds of...
Mar 24, 2022•33 min•Ep. 98
Today I talked to Mike Robbins about his new book We're All in This Together: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging (Hay House, 2020). COVID-19 has spurred two major issues for companies in general, and often their HR departments in particular: remote/hybrid work, and retention given the Great Resignation as workers leave companies to find workplaces that better align with their values and dreams. This week’s guest, Tim Robbins, is intimately familiar with both of tho...
Mar 17, 2022•33 min•Ep. 97
Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon fa...
Mar 16, 2022•57 min•Ep. 135
Today I talked to Gautham Pallapa about his new book Leading with Empathy: Understanding the Needs of Today's Workforce (John Wiley and Sons, 2021). The World Health Organization’s director-general has called Covid-19 more traumatic than World War Two. Add in other issues like racism, sexism, and inequality and there’s never been a more important moment for leaders to step up and be more empathetic. What are the limiting beliefs that may hinder their ability to be so? As my guest observes, too o...
Mar 10, 2022•35 min•Ep. 96
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How a devotion to efficiency can become unhealthy Why leisure time (a.k.a. doing nothing) is essential How to reclaim our time and humanity · A discussion of the book Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving Today’s book is: Do Nothing , by Celeste Headlee, which examines how in searching for ways to “hack” our bodies and minds for peak performance, people are working more instead of less, living h...
Mar 10, 2022•50 min•Ep. 88
What makes a living body conscious? What is consciousness and are there different types of it? These questions have been studied by Professor Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Much of her early work was on epigenetic inheritance which poses questions such as whether learned behaviour can be passed on from one generation to the next and that has led her to think about whether it’s possible to take an evolutionary approa...
Mar 08, 2022•45 min•Ep. 3
Much is known about the physical strain that athletes’ bodies are subjected to, but until recently, the role of psychological factors in risk and rehabilitation has been poorly understood. In The Mental Impact of Sports Injury (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Carly McKay bridges the gap between academic research and practical settings in an informative, yet easy to follow guide to the psychology of sports injury. Addressing risk, rehabilitation, and prevention, it outlines key considerations for researche...
Mar 07, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 159
The untimely losses of her brother, her father, and her husband, make this author uniquely qualified to help support you through your loss and grief. She understands that each loss will change one’s life in different ways as she writes about the fears and questions that swirled in her head following each of the deaths in her immediate family. In Chapter nine she focuses on the first loss in the family, when her older brother was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967. Her father died of a heart att...
Mar 04, 2022•52 min•Ep. 37
Kile M. Ortigo's Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide to Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration (Synergetic Press, 2021) addresses major issues that arise from the psychospiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics. It describes a core structure that psychedelic journeys exhibit, and share, with classic mythologies; religious traditions; and spiritual practices. Its method is to integrate findings from cognitive-behavioral therapy, Jungian depth psychology, existential philosophy, compa...
Mar 03, 2022•38 min•Ep. 44
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How rejection is normal and even inevitable Skills to help you learn from and move through rejections toward your goals Why you need to develop your capacity for patience How asking people about their own rejections can help normalize yours A discussion of the book Win or Learn Today’s book is : Win or Learn: The Naked Truth About Turning Every Rejection into Your Ultimate Success , by rejection expert and New York Times bestsellin...
Mar 03, 2022•52 min•Ep. 95
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental h...
Mar 03, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 159
If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing—often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes—to reflect the interests of the groups you belong to. In The Power of Us (Little Brown, Spark, 2021), psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how to harness its dynamic nat...
Mar 03, 2022•58 min•Ep. 159
Today I talked to Daniel H. Pink about his new book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (Riverhead Books, 2022). After the emotion of love, regret is the second most common emotion people report feeling. Regret is therefore our single most common negative emotion, and yet an emotion that we can benefit from. In this episode, the celebrated author Daniel H. Pink explains that what we regret also serves as a compass pointing us toward what we value most and want to get right...
Mar 03, 2022•31 min•Ep. 95
The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Change Your World (Henry Holt, 2022) is a journey through the cutting-edge science of how our mindset shapes every facet of our lives, revealing how your brain holds the keys to unlocking a better you. What you believe can make it so. You’ve heard of the placebo effect and how sugar pills can accelerate healing. But did you know that sham heart surgeries often work just as well as placing real stents? Or that people who think they’re particularly pron...
Mar 02, 2022•52 min•Ep. 158
The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn't enough time. We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and "life hacks" to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxiou...
Mar 02, 2022•57 min•Ep. 157
Many people, at some stage of their life, worry about sleep: are they getting enough of it? Or even, too much? Derk-Jan Dijk is Professor of Sleep and Physiology at University of Surrey. His current research interests include the contribution of sleep to brain function in healthy ageing and dementia; the role of circadian rhythms in sleep regulation; negative effects of sleep loss; understanding age and sex related differences in sleep physiology and developing tests to monitor sleep. In this po...
Mar 01, 2022•44 min•Ep. 8
According to a broad consensus among philosophers across the ages, anger is regrettable, counterproductive, and bad. It is something to be overcome or suppressed, something that involves an immoral drive for revenge or a naïve commitment to cosmic justice. Anger is said to involve a corruption of the person – it “eats away” at them, or plunges them into madness. Maybe anger has been under-appreciated. Perhaps we have failed to make the right distinctions between different varieties of anger – th...
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 276
Screen time. Daycare. Praise. Sleep training. Spanking and time-outs. Helicopter versus "old school" parenting. There are a lot of questions facing parents of young children but consistent and reliable science-based answers can be hard to find. Parenting Made Complicated: What Science Really Knows about the Greatest Debates of Early Childhood (Oxford UP, 2021), written by child psychiatrist Dr. David Rettew, tackles many of the biggest controversies facing new parents today and examines the scie...
Feb 25, 2022•34 min•Ep. 156
This book cuts new ground by applying a human rights lens of analysis to domestic mental health laws. It makes a timely contribution into the discourse regarding mental health, supported decision-making and disability rights in the post CRPD era. In A New Era for Mental Health Law and Policy: Supported Decision-Making and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Research Fellow Dr Piers Gooding challenges law makers to bring domestic laws in...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 151
The rich inner world of a human being is far more complex than either/or. You can love and hate, want to go and want to stay, feel both joy and sadness. In On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life (Guilford, 2021), psychologist William Miller--one of the world's leading experts on the science of change--offers a fresh perspective on ambivalence and its transformative potential in this revealing book. Rather than trying to overcome indecision by force of will, Dr. Miller explores what ...
Feb 23, 2022•44 min•Ep. 155
Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) delves into an under-researched and little understood but extremely pertinent issue in law; the prevalence of neurodisability within criminal justice systems. Considering the challenges faced by both juveniles and adults with neuorodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system, a host of interdisciplinary international scholars examine the issue from multip...
Feb 23, 2022•55 min•Ep. 150
Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: the very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds. Here are gripping accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake. A college student cannot remember if she has eaten breakfast. By dinner, she is strapped to a hospital bed, convinced she is battling zombies. A man planning to propose marriage instead becomes violently enraged, gripped by body spasms so severe t...
Feb 18, 2022•53 min•Ep. 15
Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2022) examines the role of film in shaping social psychology’s landmark postwar experiments. Dr. Kathryn Millard shares that we are told that most of us will inflict electric shocks on a fellow citizen when ordered to do so. Act as a brutal prison guard when we put on a uniform. Walk on by when we see a stranger in need. But there is more to the story. Documentaries that investigators claimed as eviden...
Feb 17, 2022•58 min•Ep. 212
