Your Priority Centered Life

Stress makes every ADHD symptom louder. So what can you actually do about it in the moment, when you don't have 30 minutes to meditate (and couldn't sit still for it anyway)? In Episode 113, I talk with Pen King, an ADHD coach who was diagnosed at five or six years old, back in the 1990s, and spent 17 years on stimulant medication. Pen shares what helped, what didn't, and why he came to see emotio...

What if the goal was never balance in the first place? In Episode 112, I sit down with Young Han, a business builder who spent two decades at places like Starbucks, Apple, and Philz Coffee before a hard turn at 40 sent him looking for a different kind of life. Today he builds and invests in his own portfolio of businesses, coaches founders, and hosts The Girl Dad Show. Young makes the case that sp...

Think you can’t meditate because your mind won’t stop chattering? Former Marine and meditation teacher Mark Blacknell has a refreshingly simple answer: stare at the wall. In this episode of Your Priority Centered Life, Dr. Alise Murray talks with Mark, founder of Stare at the Wall, about how a stripped-down meditation practice can rebuild focus, help with emotional regulation, and make it easier t...

There's a moment in this conversation where guest Marlon Buchanan says something that Dr. Alise has believed for years: no matter how good your memory is, it was never built to hold everything modern life asks of it. You need systems. Marlon is a technologist, bestselling author, and IT leader with a computer science degree from MIT and advanced degrees in business and software engineering. He's t...

There's a piece of productivity advice Dr. Alise hears often: always finish your top priority tasks before you go to bed. In a steady, normal stretch of life, maybe that works. But in the middle of a transition, she thinks that advice can actually hurt you. This final episode in the Transitions series looks at the thread running underneath every kind of transition covered so far: sleep. Dr. Alise...

There's a popular saying that the Chinese word for crisis combines the characters for danger and opportunity. It turns out that's not quite accurate. The real translation is closer to danger and a crucial turning point, and Dr. Alise thinks that version is actually more useful, especially when you're in the middle of one. This episode looks at the transitions we don't see coming: an unexpected dia...

When Dr. Alise's oldest went to college, a parent orientation speaker said something that landed hard: for some parents in that room, this was going to feel like being forced into retirement from a job they loved. Except it's not retirement. It's not an ending. It's a change in responsibilities. Episode two of the Transitions series looks at family change, from the smaller shift of a new grade and...

Fall doesn't have to land like a thud. But for a lot of us, it does, because we treat September like a light switch instead of a dimmer. This episode kicks off a new series called Transitions, four episodes on the shifts that throw people off, even the good and expected ones. We're starting with the one that sneaks up on almost everyone every year: the jump from summer's slower pace into fall's fu...

Why do I feel busy all day but never move forward on anything? Why can I never get through my to-do list? How do I stop feeling too overwhelmed to even start? In this episode, Dr. Alise answers three of the questions she hears most consistently, from listeners, clients, and people she meets who ask "this might be a weird question, but." They're not weird questions. They're the ones without obvious...

Prior 10 Is Open! Prior 10 is officially open for fall enrollment! This eight-week group coaching program is designed to help you identify what matters most, plan your days with intention, protect your energy, and create a life that feels more manageable and aligned. Doors are open through September 4. Ready to join us? Enroll in Prior 10 here: https://www.dr-alise.com/groupcoaching Want to get a...

Burnout usually gets treated like a crisis. Amy Loken, founder of The Amy Factor, sees it differently. Burnout is the visible result. The real crisis, she says, is self-negotiation, the slow accumulation of small concessions we make to ourselves while we're busy showing up for everyone else. In this Friday Flip conversation, Dr. Alise talks with Amy about the distinction between self-care and sel...

There's a belief that's been running beneath the surface of every episode this week: if I do less, I become less. It's the thought behind "if I slow down I'll fall behind," "if I say no I'll let someone down," and "if I stop being the person who does everything, who am I?" It was installed by a system that has rewarded doing more since you were in school, and it's why limits feel like the opposite...

The commitments other people hand you at least have a source you can point to, a boss who needs one more thing, a friend who needs a favor. But some of the fullest parts of your calendar have no external source at all. Nobody asked you to plan the day trip, sign up for three parks and rec classes, or turn a good lesson plan into a 2 AM sensory experience lab. In this episode, Dr. Alise turns the l...

At work, there's at least a job description, some theoretical line between your role and everyone else's. At home, with the people you love most, there's no document. No scope of work. So you fill in the blank yourself, and that role gets very, very full. In this episode, Dr. Alise looks at the limits we struggle hardest to set: the ones with our own families. She unpacks why rest without a purpos...

You didn't choose your relationship with work. You inherited it, starting in a classroom where more effort reliably meant a better outcome. That formula felt true because it was true, at least back then. But you carried it into adulthood, into a workplace that rewards the same behaviors with something much more expensive: scope creep, constant availability, and a shrinking window of time for the w...

You spend roughly 90,000 hours of your life working. If you're in your mid-40s, you likely still have 45,000 of them left. Career and talent strategist Stephen Shortt joins the show to talk about what to do when you keep feeling like it may be time to make a change. Stephen is the creator of CareerFit, a multi-book author, and a career and talent strategist who spent years running a family busines...

If you've spent your whole life being told that being late means you don't care, this episode is a direct rebuttal to that. In the final episode of the Tame It series, Dr. Alise tackles the kind of clutter that lives in time itself: time blindness, a very real neurological difference in how some brains track the passage of time, and drift, the phenomenon of available time filling up and slipping a...

You've probably heard of the Golden Rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated. R. Karl Hebenstreit, an executive coach and organizational psychologist with over 30 years of experience, explains why that's actually the wrong rule, and what to use instead. Karl has worked with organizations including AT&T, Merck, Genentech, and Kaiser Permanente, and he's the author of Explicit Expectati...

Tame It Series, Part 5: Task Clutter You've probably heard the advice: do a brain dump. Write everything down and you'll feel better. And the theory is solid, but so many of us fill one page, keep going, and end up more overwhelmed than when we started. The brain dump isn't the problem. The missing step is what you do after. In this episode, Dr. Alise introduces the 5 D's framework for declut...

You may have told yourself that you're not able to produce consistent results, but you're probably just bored, or the task isn't producing a result you care about. Marketing mentor Polly Pollock, diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, joins the show to talk about building a business (or a work life) that actually fits how your brain functions. Polly hosts Neuropreneur Rising and mentors neurodivergent e...

Tame It Series, Part 4: Email Clutter The average person checks email every six minutes. That's not a focused work habit, that's standing in a river all day trying to grab what matters before it floats past. This week on Tame It, Dr. Alise walks through a six-step approach to email clutter that starts with the thing most people skip: getting out of the river entirely. That means consolidating acco...

Tame It Series, Part 3: Paper and Digital File Clutter Here's something Dr. Alise wants you to hear before this episode even really gets going: you probably don't need to scan every piece of paper, build a tiered digital filing system, or spend hours on any of this. Paper clutter isn't a filing problem. It's a decision problem, and once you see it that way, the whole thing gets a lot more manageab...

Last week you found your hot spots. This week, you fix them. In Part 2 of the Tame It series, Dr. Alise walks through the six root causes of recurring clutter from Episode 91 and gives you a specific, low-effort fix for each one. No elaborate systems, no lidded containers you'll stop using by Thursday. Just practical adjustments designed for real life and real energy levels. Then we get into the p...

If you've ever cleaned off a counter only to find it buried again two weeks later, this episode is for you. We're kicking off a brand new series called Tame It , and we're starting where most people feel it first: home clutter. Not with a cleaning checklist or an organizing overhaul, but with the question nobody asks: why does it keep coming back? In this episode, Dr. Alise walks you through a sim...

Is what you're calling ambition actually avoidance? Executive coach Kenyada Meadows spent over 25 years in Wall Street risk and compliance before he started asking that question about himself. In this episode, he brings that same clarity to burnout, boundaries, and the cost of being everyone's go-to person. Kenyada is the author of The New Alpha and The Passenger Seat , founder of Executive Parent...