The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

Dr. David Bell has been fascinated with religion his entire life, and has come down on the side of being a "post-religious believer." He believes in the beauty of religion, but not in what he calls the supernatural. He challenges his students -- and his fellow faculty members -- to prove to him empirically that we have a soul. He loves taking his students on a journey of pulling out their intensel...

Everything changed this week. The response to the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus upended all of our lives. Workplaces shut down. Schools closed. Airlines cut their flight schedules. Major league sports suspended their seasons. Hospitals began preparing for a predicted surge of patients. And on Friday, President Trump declared a national emergency. "Social distancing" is the new catch...

Kaysie Strickland went through a major bottoming out. Over the course of a year and a half, she and her husband both lost their jobs unexpectedly, they got pregnant, and her parents were bottoming out from a long battle with alcoholism, just to name a few of the stressors. She was left reeling emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Somehow, through the course of career and personal setbacks, sh...

On this week's episode, we have a wide-ranging conversation with Matt McClanahan.  Acute, chronic, or auto-immune pain, Matt McClanahan has seen a great deal over the past decade and a half. What do you do when medicines don't work, and diagnoses are tricky to figure out? What's the difference between pain and tissue damage? And even if it's not tissue damage, while pain is in the brain, it doesn'...

On this week's episode, we have a wide-ranging conversation with Patricia McLelland.  Patricia is a physician, but does more than merely meet bodily symptoms. She coaches and guides her patients to understand the whole person, beginning with what is going on within. She's been on a mission to help women for years, but over the years she's learned how to communicate processes and how to begin where...

On this week's episode, we have a conversation with Hilarie Robison about the importance of listening well, and how that plays into good storytelling.  Hilary tells us about what she does with her work in helping people find their family stories, as well as digitizing it and making it a part one's legacy. She also talks about the why and the how it's done. What does it mean to publish a life story...

On this week's episode, we have a wide-ranging conversation with Lakweshia Ewing.  From her ten steps toward self-improvement to building a community for everyone to re-structuring our thinking to building the right kind of product to what her faith means to her, Lakweshia Ewing has a lot to offer. An eternal optimist, she gives us her authentic self, and her powerful thoughts and insights into th...

On this week's episode, we turn the tables on Big Self Founder, Shelley Prevost, and ask her the questions. We aim at what brought us here to the Big Self table. It's a story that emerged over years, and after the result of a heart-rending, teeth-gnashing failure. Shelley gets vulnerable about how she felt during the low point, and then what she did to steadily rebuild and become an invested stude...

On this week's episode, we have a fascinating conversation with CEO and founder Startup Champs, a fast-growing agency helping new ventures (both individual founders and corporate clients) with risk assessments, design thinking, market research services, and growth strategies before identifying and securing strategic investment partners.  We hit on everything from how the startup scene needs a well...