Back2Different

So.  Buckle your seatbelts.  Jennifer Fiedler is blunt, subtle, quick, measured, a wonderful soup of contradictions and a bright light for candor and truth. We merrily dash along while playing play ping-pong. We explore the movie business (a hefty chunk of her life), family (dys)function, lessons (un)learned, all of these with no reticence or shields up. We agree that we've all had trauma, jo...

Noemi and I travel well together. Liable to laughter, a couple of people who love to listen and reflect rather than talk at. We have a ball - she lives in Cyprus, via a life spent growing exponentially as she left and returned to Hungary. She loves language (ditto here), especially Scandinavian languages (and culture). From good girl to ring-in-nose force for growth and change, she's become a...

Two very different and almost identical travelers, David Abel and I.  We both explore and breathe curiosity. David is demonstrably ambitious, I more demonstrably gestalt. His childhood Dickensian, mine bourgeois, yet each gave birth to a hunger for experience and a reasonably ambiguous approach to normal. Signposts in our conversation turned us toward learning we couldn't hold back our own ti...

As Lauri Smith and I traveled together for about an hour, I watched in my mind's eye a slide show of my childhood. We both were fine playing alone, we loved acting out stories and episodes. Both introverts. Both shy. Both actors and performers. Both empathetic, sometimes awkwardly so.  She told me about how she lost my way doing the good girl thing and how heavy the armor in front of my heart...

Laurie Gardner and I share the dearth of a concept: career . We could be politely described as peripatetic, by others taken with sarcasm as short attention-spanned.  Laurie has tended bar around the world, including competing and doing well in mixology competitions. He has been cabin crew for an airline, and even worked in the construction industry for starters. We cover money, 'too much trut...

Eyra and Mathieu collided with me in a conversation at The Friendship Bench. I have misplaced the topic, but not the experience. So I asked them to talk and listen for a bit and off we went - the quantum past, limiting beliefs, what sparks us, the soul is safe, eliminate the word 'better,' bags of sand, 'when (s)he's there, it's different'.  And that was for starters....

Smoothly, professionally, I approach with "I really enjoyed your presentation on AI." Luckily, it's true, and Michelle gets that, so we had a great introduction, which led to lunch, a ping-pongy conversation, a friendship and this podcast. Wait until you hear about her foot and the subway door, her solo Odyssey in Asia, her lumpy bumpy road to her here and now. Michelle clarifies an...

"Doesn't work up to expectations" was inscribed repeatedly on my report card. Heather 's too. She's danced professionally, I coincidentally, and we both love it. We talk about raising thinkers, loving what is whether we like it or not, discovering and working the shift that makes us feel better, and moments of humanity. A community of two, old friends rediscovered, two peo...

"You may have to wait to talk, but you never have to wait to listen."  Every back2different podcast starts with a 5-10 minute story - the guest's answer to "How did you get here?" That's all we need to move forward together. Just notice and connect. Jenlyn UNBN and I travel together for an hour and explore grieving, "the gray zone," our core selves, circumst...

We had a wonderful journey together, Sarah and I, as we shared her blossoming, awakening, I guess, as an adult. As she says, "I found my voice at 40."  A classically trained singer, she was invited to sing in a surf band her husband had started and suggested "I can't do rock and roll." Guess what happened next, right?  Give us a listen, please, and find out why she was adv...

I was never diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. Of course, the label didn't exist until 1980, so I simply received more than one report card that said, 'Seems to have difficulties following direction." As a lifelong teacher, I often clashed with the administration, who struck me as hidebound and beset by a "let's not make waves" perspective. My biases. Amy G...

I have always suspected that lots of planets lined up identically for Victor 's and my births. We don't finish each other's sentences, but we do finish each other's paragraphs. Contemplatives, dogma, dynamism, solipsism, belief systems, impressions and projections, impersonation, human spirit progression (with a long gestation and difficult birth) gave us some things to talk ab...

I met Gina Mazza during an online conversation about creativity. Took us a bit of back-and-forth to get to recording, and then a few delays to mix and load. With every minute. She's had a variegated career - something we share. We speak on God and the church, meaning and work, and the evidence for a major evolutionary shift in human kind's consciousness. Join us as we agree that  we&apos...

Via my wonderful friend Craig James arrived Maggie Jackson . So here's a tiny sample of our journey together: The unease of uncertainty is actually a gift. Ambivalent CEOs are actually better performers. It's fear of uncertainty that sets you back, not uncertainty itself. Try on the Unknown. What does it mean to be human now that we are married to these technologies? That's just for...

Carey Corr has a marvelous story. He is a film-maker and carries a boundless sense of curiosity and adventure. He's fearless and we share the excitement of new ideas alongside a deep suspicion of knowing as a way to live - it's embracing how little we know that gives us energy. Education, Laurel & Hardy, W. C. Fields, science fiction B movies, no holds barred as we realize that, each...

I met Clarabelle Miray Fields on a forum about creativity and knew I'd need to listen more to what she had to explore. She was self-publishing when she was four, binding her own books using her mother's hole-punch and yarn. She writes speculative fiction, both prose and poetry, and we take a stroll through the land of creativity. She's thoughtful, wide-ranging and candid. And she fi...

We gathered each other through a mutual friend, Colin Smith . Glenn Behenna worked in the steel industry, as a member of the constabulary (a cop), went back to school, and now he is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Fellow at University of Wales Trinity St. David. He didn't hit his academic stride early, though as he says, "It must have been in there somewhere."  We explore culture, soci...

Music, toxic HR culture, confounded with structure, 'I cycled through the pandemic,' moral hazard and money to be made, exam strategies and rock songs, and then our conversation took off. How can you not like listening in on a conversation with Peter Cook , who wrote Sex, Leadership and Rock N 'RolI: Leadership Lessons from the Academy of Rock ? We're each (and both) proponents...

We can be successful in business, outwardly merry, envied and admired. At the same time, we may be carrying a corrosive load of trauma, unhealed emotional and spiritual bruises that can lead to broken relationships, thoughts of suicide, and addictions both behavioral and chemical. Spend some time with Michael Padurano and me as we explore the pain that leads to showering in the dark , and the rede...

No stone left unturned in this one. Tamsin Astor is fearless, peripatetic (as in she's been all over the place geographically and educationally), and embracing. I would love to get together with all the back2different community, walk together for a while, then just sit and listen. I am very blessed to be part of this wondrous crowd, and Tamsin is no exception. Tamsin and I run through the Iri...

Jim Burke  appeared through my connection with Craig James , and each connection enriches the other. I finally got some time with Jim and off we went, looking carefully into kinds of questions , since the questions we ask, not the answers we find, shape our reality. We batted around living through "Have you thought about this?" We agreed that we both don't know nothin' and just...

I hate scratching my head with "I wonder what s/he meant by that?" First of all, I'm an inept fill-in-the-unspoken-part practitioner. Hence my pleasure at getting together with Phil Williams . He wears no barriers and carries no shields. We travel through Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, time in the burn unit, his family and their home, music, and 'the great perhaps,' among other...

So Ileana and I explore trees, quiet, burls, pushing less and being more, Cra-Cra, chickens, naps, a sky with no airplanes, and "the moment you start laughing at yourself, that's when you're free." Ileana grew up in Venezuela, worked 24 years with Exxon Mobile, then skipped out (like a happy child) to found Colibri Business Development. She helps local and international busines...

Brooke left behind her home country - Turkey -  and her successful career at IBM to find a new home - San Diego - and to start her own consulting businesses: purposeful.business is a site for the organizational side of work, yourbestlifeinc.com is for individuals. She made her giant step as she realized that who she was, the singular and only Ozlem, was vanishing. Her humanity and identity were fa...

Craig James is my trust talker. We never plan nothin'. One of us brings a thought, an idea, an event, a confusion, and then we start bouncing around like the lights from a mirror ball. It's fun, comfortable, and fearless.  Without intent, without control, no matter how far we go, the conversation brings us back to where we started. It's not linear and it's not mysterious, it&ap...