STOP 2 THINK

Welcome to the STOP 2 THINK Podcast. In this episode, Stories, States and Sentences Part Two: What Are You Saying to Yourself? , we continue our conversation with Dr Ray Sylvester about the powerful connection between the stories we believe, the states we live in, and the sentences we repeat to ourselves. We explore how the stories we carry can shape our emotions, decisions, relationships and sens...

This is one of the most personal and revealing conversations Ray and I have recorded. We talk about fear, grief, loss, health, getting older and something I’ve only recently begun to recognise about the way I’ve lived much of my life. For years, I became very good at helping other people change their lives while often avoiding some of the things going on inside my own. In this conversation, Ray ch...

How much of your life is being shaped by what’s happening around you, and how much is coming from within you? In this episode, Dr Ray Sylvester and I continue our exploration of outside-in and inside-out living . We talk about why we need both, the impact of the constant noise around us, and why STOP 2 THINK isn’t about withdrawing from the world. It’s about creating enough space to hear yourself...

What Will You Pass On? Legacy, Hope and the Lives We Touch What do we really leave behind? This very special episode of the STOP 2 THINK Podcast was recorded in Uganda with my friend Mandela Salim Buluma. Mandela and his team care for 101 vulnerable children, many of whom have experienced extraordinary challenges very early in their lives. But this isn’t really a conversation about charity. It’s a...

When Scott Edwards Jimena reached out to me, I had no idea just how much this conversation would stay with me. Like Hannah, Scott is living with glioblastoma. But this isn’t really a conversation about cancer. It’s a conversation about what happens when life forces us to STOP. Scott shares, for the first time publicly, the childhood trauma he carried in silence for more than thirty years and how c...

Celebrate the Journey As the first series comes to a close, Ray asked me a question I had never quite asked myself before. Not how do I celebrate Hannah, but how do I celebrate the whole journey, including who I used to be. We recorded this one walking an old railway path in South Buckinghamshire, looking back across thirty one episodes and ten months of raw, unscripted conversation. It started wi...

Stand Up For Your Authenticity Recorded on the same Indianapolis visit as the last episode, this one brings the whole attachment versus authenticity thread to its fullest conclusion. It closes with a piece of advice from my late coach Raphael that has genuinely become one of the most important lines in this entire journey. I went deeper into my own school days than I ever had before, tracing a lif...

Who Are You, Really? Recorded after Ray and I spoke together at a global health and fitness conference, this is one of the most personally exposing episodes in the whole series. I admit, openly, to something I had been doing quietly for a long time. I told Ray about eating an entire Toblerone on a plane, and connected it, in real time, to Hannah's own one indulgence, smoking, the single thing...

The Journey Continues, Identity, Attachment and Authenticity Recorded on my last day in Indianapolis, right after Ray and I spoke together on stage for the very first time, this episode goes deeper into identity, attachment, and authenticity than we ever had before. We watched the Bob Marley film One Love together that morning, and it gave us a way into something I have said for years without ever...

Open to Everything, Attached to Nothing This episode introduces a guiding principle that has genuinely stayed with me ever since Ray first said it, being open to everything and attached to nothing. It goes right to the heart of what Stop 2 Think actually means, and why real openness is so much harder to live out than it sounds. We got into branding, of all things, using an exercise Ray ran with th...

Living From the Inside Out Recorded in Los Angeles, this episode leans on the work of trauma expert Gabor Maté to explain, with real precision, why authenticity and attachment get so easily confused with each other, and why untangling them is genuinely hard work. I opened up about something small but revealing, a moment at the airport with my parents where I ate food I knew wasn't good for me,...

Becoming By Overcoming I recorded this one after a dramatic stretch of travel, from the wealth of Hong Kong and Macau to a Ugandan orphanage full of children who have already overcome more than most of us ever will. It introduces one of my favourite ideas from the whole series, the tree and its fruit. Ray and I talked about how fruit is never really for the tree itself, only for others, and how th...

The Investment of Becoming This episode explores what it actually means to invest in who I am becoming, not in some distant, imagined future, but through what I actually do today. It also reframes my own future self work in light of the hardest possible test, real, profound loss. Ray asked me something genuinely difficult, how do you keep believing in the idea of a future self when the person you...

The Person Behind The Performance Recorded jet lagged, the morning after ten unstructured days spent together in Indianapolis, this episode goes back into performance versus person, but with far more depth than the first time we touched on it. I told Ray how much deeper my appreciation of who I am had become just from spending real, unhurried time together, and we talked properly about thought lif...

Significance Without Dominance Recorded on my last evening in Indianapolis on that visit, this episode introduces one of the sharpest tools in the whole series, the difference between something being significant in your life and something being allowed to dominate it entirely. Ray and I got into the Serenity Prayer, and why willpower driven diets so often fail while genuine identity shift tends to...

Who You Are Is Bigger Than Where You Are Recorded on another walk with Ray, this episode pushes further into Viktor Frankl's ideas and sharpens the distinction between circumstance and identity even more than before. We talked about why where you are always includes time, meaning even something you have already overcome still carries the shape of what you escaped, while who you are carries no...

When Life Changes Everything This is a solo episode, no Ray this time, just me talking directly to you, recorded while I was genuinely waiting, phone in hand, for a very special delivery to arrive. It is one of the most emotionally raw conversations in the whole series. I talk honestly about the sheer amount of travel I had taken on recently, and address, directly, the suggestion from someone that...

The Journey Beyond Circumstance I recorded this one walking with Ray the day before Thanksgiving, deliberately, as a kind of prequel to a much harder conversation that follows it. I wanted to give you the context first, before you hear something far more raw. We talked about branding as identity, and about Steve Jobs's Stanford speech, connecting the dots, love and loss, and facing death. I al...

Where You Are Is Not Who You Are This episode states the idea that everything else in this series ultimately returns to, as directly as we have ever said it. Ray and I use real, well known lives to prove the point, because I think it lands harder when you can see it actually lived out by someone else first. We talked about Nelson Mandela, twenty seven years in a cell and still choosing not to be d...

Waiting for the Sunrise This is one of the rawest episodes in the whole series. I was genuinely uncertain, in every direction, professionally and personally, and I told Ray plainly that I know who I am more clearly than ever, but had absolutely no idea yet what to do with that knowledge. We talked about the seven people I consider my great guides in life, and Ray gently pushed me to look honestly...

Discovering Your Way This episode is a direct pushback against the idea that there is one right path to real change. Ray and I made it clear, neither of us wants to prescribe anything to anyone, because the only change that ever actually lasts is the change someone finds for themselves. We talked about how much digital information has changed our ability to focus, the difference between the hedoni...

Here's Episode 15, in my voice, with the corrected footer. Episode 15: Designing Your Backstage This episode takes the front stage and backstage idea from the last conversation and turns it into something practical, the actual physical spaces and objects that quietly shape how we feel about ourselves. Ray and I walked through Erving Goffman's three elements of any performance, setting, app...

The Person Behind The Performance This episode introduces one of the most important ideas in the whole series, the difference between front stage, the version of me the world sees, and backstage, who I actually am when nobody is watching. Ray and I got into Erving Goffman's idea that we are all performers on some level, and I opened up about my own childhood, my dyslexia diagnosis, and a lifet...

Back to Calm This one is different from the rest. Instead of a conversation with Ray, it is a full guided meditation, my gift to you, turning the one percent of your day idea from the last episode into something you can actually do, right now, rather than just think about. It runs about fourteen minutes and twenty four seconds, exactly one percent of your day, and it is designed to help calm your...

Here's Episode 12, in my voice, with the corrected footer. Episode 12: Hurry Sickness, Why We Struggle to Stop This episode names, directly, the thing that makes stopping so hard for almost everyone, hurry sickness, a genuine clinical term describing constant, compulsive urgency. It also introduces the one percent of your day idea, fourteen minutes and twenty four seconds, for the very first t...