Good Life Project

Ever have something clearly wrong, and yet no expert can tell you what’s causing it? Or, worse, they DO tell you, but they’re wrong?

Nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. Not a minor mix-up, but a missed, delayed, or wrong diagnosis that shapes how long you suffer, what treatment you receive, and whether anyone believes something is actually wrong with you. For people in midlife, when the body starts sending new signals and the stakes of getting it right feel higher, that statistic carries a particular weight.

Alexandra Sifferlin is a science and health journalist and the author of The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis. She spent years inside hospital systems, talking with leading diagnosticians, tracing families who waited decades for answers, and mapping the structural gaps that let real suffering fall through. Her book is dedicated to her sister, who spent years being told her severe hip pain was a pillow-placement problem, until imaging revealed torn cartilage that required surgery.

In this conversation, you will explore:
Why receiving a diagnosis is more than a medical event, and how a diagnosis gives you permission to be ill (in the best of ways)
How physicians actually build a diagnosis in real time, and what gets lost when appointments shrink to seven minutes
The case of the Proctor family, five siblings from rural Kentucky who spent decades with a mysterious, painful condition before becoming the first diagnosed case of the NIH's Undiagnosed Diseases Program
Why the best diagnosticians in the country share one habit that has nothing to do with medical genius
How AI note-taking in the exam room is making some appointments more human, not less
What to do when you've seen four practitioners and nobody can tell you what's wrong

If you've ever walked out of a doctor's office with more questions than you arrived with, this conversation is for it.

You can find Alexandra at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing a really meaningful conversation with Tom Rath, whose books have shaped how millions of people think about their work and lives. His new book makes a direct challenge to the whole "find your passion, follow your purpose" framework, and argues that the source of real fulfillment isn't looking deeper inside yourself. It's what you contribute to other people every day. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
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There is a conversation most of us are carrying right now. Not one we lack words for. We have plenty of those. One we keep finding reasons not to have. Not because we don't know what we'd say, but because we have become very skilled at building the case for staying quiet a little longer.

Jonathan Fields has spent a lot of time in that particular waiting room. This solo episode starts with a story he describes as embarrassing in the specific way only true stories about your own behavior can be embarrassing: a decade-long friendship, a thing said in passing that he never addressed, and the slow drift that followed because he never said it. It's a story many people in midlife will recognize without needing the details changed.

What you'll explore in this episode:
Why intelligent, emotionally capable people are often the most skilled architects of avoidance, and what that architecture actually looks like from the inside
The difference between protecting a relationship and protecting yourself from discomfort, and how easy it is to mistake one for the other
Four distinct types of difficult conversations and why knowing which one you're actually having changes everything about how to begin
Why the perfect moment to have the conversation you've been postponing doesn't exist, and what to do instead
How to open a hard conversation without scripting it, performing it, or trying to win it
A question to carry with you, not answer immediately, that may be the most honest thing in this entire episode

For anyone in midlife who has been living carefully around something true that needs to be said, this one is for you.

Episode Transcript

Next week, we are sitting down with journalist Alexandra Sifferlin to talk about why millions of Americans are living with conditions that doctors simply cannot name, and what that does to a person when the system meant to help you keeps coming up empty. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you do not miss any upcoming episodes.

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it.

Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, a leading resilience researcher, and one of the world's most trusted voices on loss and grief. Her TED talk on resilience has been viewed more than nine million times. She is also a mother who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident in 2014, and who has spent the decade since weaving her scientific training and her lived experience into tools that actually work. Her new book is How Will I Ever Get Through This?

In this conversation, we go to the places most conversations about grief are afraid to go.

What you will explore:
Why grief is not an emotion but a full-body experience that explains the exhaustion, brain fog, and 3 am waking you may have been blaming on other things
What "living losses" are, the griefs that come without a funeral, and why they may be driving far more of our suffering than we recognize
The difference between acceptance and coming to terms with, and why one word changes everything about how you move through loss
What the research actually shows about post-traumatic growth, including the statistic that will surprise you about how common it actually is
Why resilience is not about bouncing back, and what Dr. Hone means when she says you do not bounce back from anything that matters
The one question she asks herself in the hardest moments, and why it is a more useful starting point than any technique

If you have ever minimized something you were going through because it did not feel like it counted as real loss, this conversation is for you.

You can find Lucy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am going solo to talk about something that I think a lot of us are quietly carrying, the conversations we know we need to have with the people who matter most to us, and why we keep finding reasons not to have them. The research turns out to be really clear on this: we consistently overestimate how bad it will be and underestimate how much it costs us to stay silent. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Somewhere in the last few years, a lot of us started asking a version of the same question: who am I now, and what am I actually here to do? The answers don't come from a quiz or a vision board. But they just might come from the one word that has been running your life all along, whether you knew it or not.

Erin Weed is a speaker coach, keynote speaker, and the creator of the Dig, a purpose-excavation method she has used with over a thousand leaders, founders, and changemakers across every stage of life and reinvention. Her new book, Just One Word: The Surprisingly Simple Method to Discover Your Purpose and Unleash Your Power, is the culmination of that work. She also spent over a decade as head speaker coach for TEDxBoulder, helping people find the one true thing they need to say and the courage to say it.

In this conversation, you get to watch the Dig happen in real time, because Jonathan sits down in the chair and lets Erin guide him through the full process.

What you will explore:
What the Dig is and why close to 100% of people who think they know their word are actually wrong
How your life story, all of it, from childhood to present day, contains a 10-word operating system that explains exactly how you tick
Why your deepest violations, the things that make you genuinely angry, point directly toward your core word
The difference between the word you think defines you and the one that actually does
How knowing your word changes the way you make decisions, support the people you love, and build the things that matter most to you
What Jonathan's word turned out to be, and the moment in the conversation where it landed

If you have ever felt like you were circling your purpose without quite landing on it, this conversation is for you.

You can find Erin at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Dr. Lucy Hone to talk about something most of us are carrying without ever calling it what it is: the grief that comes without a funeral, the losses that do not count as real loss in our culture but may be driving more of our suffering than we know. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The voice telling you that you're not enough, that something is about to go wrong, that you should have done it differently, it sounds like you. That's exactly what makes it so hard to catch and so hard to stop.

Emiliya Zhivotovskaya has spent decades inside the science and practice of mental wellbeing, training thousands of coaches worldwide through her Certification in Applied Positive Psychology program.

Her own path into this work began with a personal reckoning. An eating disorder that started in adolescence, years of thoughts she couldn't separate from herself, and the moment someone first told her she didn't have to be a passive recipient of what her mind was doing to her.

In this conversation, we go deep into the phenomenon most of us call overthinking and find out it's not one thing. It's five distinct types of chatter, each with its own voice, its own purpose, and its own specific antidote.

What you'll explore:
The five types of mind chatter: worry, motivation, mindset, judgment, and regret. And how to tell which one is running you at any given moment
Why high-level worriers actually problem-solve less effectively, and what to do with anxiety that won't respond to "just let it go"
The "I can't... yet" reframe that shifts a fixed mindset in a single word, and why it works where positive affirmations don't
How to take your brain to court, the evidence-based tool for the thoughts that insist you're not enough
Why your chatter isn't trying to destroy you, and what it's actually asking for

If you've ever found yourself exhausted not by what's happening, but by what your mind keeps doing with it, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Emiliya at: Website | Instagram | Mind Over Chatter Course | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Erin Weed, talking about her book Just One Word, and the surprisingly simple method she's used to help over a thousand people unlock their purpose and finally feel clear on who they are and where they're headed. If you've ever felt like you're searching for that through-line in your life, this conversation is for you.

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.