Doubt Diaries

Dr Ellen Langer has spent over forty years at Harvard reshaping how we think about thinking. She is the longest-serving professor of psychology there and was the first woman ever tenured in the department. Her research has shown we can quite literally think ourselves younger, healthier, and more aware. Her work has changed how I think about self-doubt more than almost anything else I have come acr...

Lindsey Jacobellis is the most decorated female snowboarder of all time - two Olympic golds, six world championships, thirty-one World Cup gold medals. She is also the woman who, aged twenty, on live television, made a split-second mistake at her first Olympics that the press has not let her forget for sixteen years. We talk about what it actually takes to rebuild after one public moment becomes y...

Chase Hughes spent twenty years training CIA operatives in persuasion and lie detection. He is now widely described as the world’s number one expert on body language and behaviour, hosts YouTube’s The Behaviour Panel, and Dr Phil wrote a chapter of his book about him. I was extremely nervous to interview him because he can look at your face and know what you are thinking. We talk about that. We al...

Astrid Tuminez is the first ever female President of Utah Valley University. She grew up in a slum in the Philippines and on her first day of school couldn’t spell her own name. By the end of the year she was top of the class. She would later go to Harvard, MIT, Wall Street and Microsoft before her current role. This is the closest thing I have heard to a real-life movie. We talk about magical thi...

Herminia Ibarra is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School and has held tenured positions at INSEAD and Harvard. She has been named one of the most influential business thinkers in the world, and her work on career change is required reading in the field. We talk about why so many midlife career pivots quietly fail, what her data shows actually moves the needle, and her most...

Dr Lisa Orbé-Austin earned her PhD in Counseling Psychology from Columbia and has spent her career researching imposter syndrome and how to dismantle it. She has been featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America and NBC News, and is the co-author of two bestselling books on the subject. I almost borderline-stalked her to get her on the show, and was not disappointed. We talk about the myths mo...

Wim Hof - known globally as The Iceman - holds twenty-six world records for what he can do in extreme cold. He has run a half marathon above the Arctic Circle barefoot. He has scaled Mount Everest in shorts. He arrived at the recording so full of energy that I almost forgot to press record. We talk about what he says about his own self-doubt (which most people will not expect), and the principle h...

Dr Caroline Leaf is a cognitive neuroscientist with three decades of research on the mind-brain connection. She is the author of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and other bestsellers, and has been featured in Vogue, Forbes and the BBC. We talk about why she thinks the dominant ‘chemical imbalance’ framing of mental health is bad science, and the five-step process she has developed to rewire patterns...

Amy Morin is a psychotherapist and the bestselling author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, which has sold over a million copies in more than forty languages. Her TEDx talk has been viewed twenty-three million times. We talk about what she has learned about who really has self-doubt versus who doesn’t, the article she wrote at her kitchen table that fifty million people read, and the p...

Amy Edmondson is Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School and is the originator of the concept of ‘psychological safety,’ which has now become a central tenet of modern management thinking. She has been named the world’s most influential business thinker by Thinkers50. I described her on the show as ‘the Beyoncé of behavioural science.’ We talk about her new book Right Kind of Wrong, the...

Lesley Paterson is a five-time World Champion professional triathlete and the Oscar-winning co-screenwriter of All Quiet on the Western Front. For sixteen years she used her triathlon prize money to renew the option on a 1928 anti-war novel nobody else would touch. The day before a race she desperately needed the prize money from, she broke her shoulder. She raced one-armed and won. We talk about...

Aisha Bowe’s high school guidance counsellor told her she wouldn’t amount to much, and maybe she could try cosmetology. She didn’t apply to college. Five years later she was interning at NASA, and a few years after that she founded a multi-million-dollar STEM education company. She is one of very few Black women to have travelled to space. We talk about the community-college recruiter who chased h...

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is Professor of Business Psychology at both University College London and Columbia University. He is the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders. His ideas have changed my mind about more things than almost any guest I have spoken to. We talk about why the entire confidence industry might have it backward, why imposter syndrome can sometimes be useful, an...

Julia Stewart’s story is one of the best I’ve ever heard. As she puts it: ‘You don’t borrow $2.7 billion for revenge, but…’ Julia is the former President of Applebee’s, the former CEO of IHOP, and when IHOP acquired Applebee’s she became CEO of Dine Brands Global, the largest sit-down restaurant group in the world. She is now the founder of wellness brand Alurx. Hers is a story of grit and the wil...

Ken Honda is known as Japan’s ‘Zen Millionaire.’ His books have sold almost nine million copies across more than two hundred titles. He still tells me he feels shy in interviews and that his tendency is to stay small. We talk about the difference between money IQ and money EQ, why he thinks the younger version of you can still be earning you a salary today, and the way our childhood encounters wit...

Ash Bhardwaj is a travel writer, journalist, broadcaster and author. We talk about why going somewhere new might make you braver back home, and what travelling alone does to your relationship with self-doubt. Originally released in 2024 when this podcast was called Tiger Therapy. Follow Doubt Diaries wherever you're listening for the archive and new episodes.

Kute Blackson is a transformational teacher, author and speaker. We talk about how our beliefs shape our reality - and what it takes to swap one belief for another. Originally released in 2024 when this podcast was called Tiger Therapy. Follow Doubt Diaries wherever you're listening for the archive and new episodes.

Cindy Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn and a former Chairman of advertising agency BBH in New York. She is a globally known TED speaker and one of the most genuinely fearless people I have ever interviewed. There is some colourful language in this conversation, in case you are listening with kids in earshot. We talk about why she thinks the bigger problem isn’t a lack of competent women in...

Paul Dupuis is the Japan Chairman and CEO of Randstad. He arrived in Osaka aged twenty-two with a red backpack, slept on a park bench his first night, and is, thirty-three years later, running one of Japan’s biggest staffing companies. He is the author of The e5 Movement. We talk about the karate sensei moment that taught him to focus on his stronger leg, what he watched a Japanese women’s footbal...

Shellye Archambeau decided in high school that she would become a CEO. Decades later she became one of Silicon Valley’s first ever Black female CEOs. She built her career on the simple principle that you improve your odds through preparation, education and connections. She is the author of Unapologetically Ambitious. We talk about being literally excluded from her Gifted & Talented programme a...

Joscelin Yeo is a Singaporean former Olympic swimmer. She swam in four consecutive Olympics, holds the record for the most gold medals ever won at the Southeast Asia Games, and is a former Member of Parliament. At the peak of her career she was secretly battling a mental health crisis. (Content warning: discusses self-harm.) We talk about what really happens to elite athletes when the world only w...

Kim Scott is the bestselling author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. She worked under Sheryl Sandberg at Google, coached executives at Dropbox and Twitter, and her book has been parodied on Silicon Valley. She also moved to Moscow in 1990 to run a diamond cutting factory and learned the most important lesson of her career over a bottle of vodka. We talk about the...

Nick Gray is an entrepreneur and the author of The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. We talk about networking, cringe, and what happens when you decide to do the awkward thing anyway. Originally released in 2024 when this podcast was called Tiger Therapy. Follow Doubt Diaries wherever you're listening for the archive and new episodes.

Nir Eyal is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestsellers Hooked and Indistractable, and more recently of New York Times bestseller Beyond Belief (which hadn’t yet been published when we recorded this conversation). He teaches at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He used to be clinically obese and a chronic procrastinator before he started studying the science of distraction. We talk abo...

I first noticed Elise Loehnen sitting next to Gwyneth Paltrow on The Goop Lab on Netflix. Since then she has had five New York Times bestsellers and built her own platform around how culture, history and conditioning shape how we see ourselves. We talk about why she thinks the seven deadly sins are functioning as a secret rulebook for women - and even though I was raised in a secular liberal house...