Good Life Project

Here is something most of us have never been told: falling in love was never supposed to be easy, and the fact that it hasn't been isn't a character flaw. It's a design problem. Your biology may be working against you. Your cultural programming works against you. But, more than anything, the list you've been carrying around of what you want in a partner is almost certainly pointing you in the wrong direction.

Bela Gandhi is a dating coach and the founder of Smart Dating Academy, where she has helped thousands of people find lasting relationships. She was a longtime dating expert on Good Morning America and the Steve Harvey Show and built her methodology after realizing that love, like anything else worth doing, benefits from a system.

What you'll explore in this conversation:
Why 74% of third marriages end in divorce, and what that tells us about how most people approach finding a partner
The "elevator people" exercise that reveals what you actually need in a relationship, and why it almost never matches your dream list
How biology, attachment patterns, and cultural messaging conspire to make us fall for the wrong people, again and again
What highly accomplished, independent women often get wrong in the dating world, and what to do about it instead
Why attraction can grow rather than just appear, and how pacing changes everything

If you've been wondering whether love is still possible for you at this stage of life, Bela's answer is clear. She's seen too many people find it at 50, 60, and beyond to believe otherwise.

You can find Bela at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with seven-time New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler to talk about something most of us have felt but never quite had words for: the particular loneliness that arrives in the middle of a full life, when the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once, and the rituals that helped people move through moments like these for thousands of years have largely disappeared. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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Most of us reach our 40s and discover something unsettling: the ambitions we've been chasing weren't entirely ours. They came from parents, from culture, from the two or three careers we happened to see up close. Tom Rath calls this looking through a pinhole, and he thinks it explains more midlife restlessness than most of us are willing to admit.

Tom is one of the most widely-read researchers on how careers shape health and wellbeing. His books, including the instant number one New York Times bestseller How Full Is Your Bucket? and StrengthsFinder 2.0, have sold more than 10 million copies. His latest book is What's the Point?: Turning Purpose into Your Daily Superpower.

In this conversation, you'll explore:
Why only 50 jobs represent half the entire labor market, and what that means for the choices you made at 18
The difference between a ladder and a garden as frameworks for a life and why one of them is making you miserable
What headstones actually say (and never say) about what we thought mattered
The legacy question that most people answer wrong and what Tom's grandfather's final hours taught him about the purest form of giving
Why purpose is less about finding your calling and more about something entirely different

There's a particular kind of grief that comes from realizing your striving belonged to someone else. This conversation is for anyone in midlife who's starting to ask whether the ladder they've been climbing was theirs to begin with.

You can find Tom at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Bela Gandhi to talk about why midlife is actually the moment most people become more ready for a real relationship — and what's quietly getting in the way. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ever have something clearly wrong, and yet no expert can tell you what’s causing it? Or, worse, they DO tell you, but they’re wrong?

Nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. Not a minor mix-up, but a missed, delayed, or wrong diagnosis that shapes how long you suffer, what treatment you receive, and whether anyone believes something is actually wrong with you. For people in midlife, when the body starts sending new signals and the stakes of getting it right feel higher, that statistic carries a particular weight.

Alexandra Sifferlin is a science and health journalist and the author of The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis. She spent years inside hospital systems, talking with leading diagnosticians, tracing families who waited decades for answers, and mapping the structural gaps that let real suffering fall through. Her book is dedicated to her sister, who spent years being told her severe hip pain was a pillow-placement problem, until imaging revealed torn cartilage that required surgery.

In this conversation, you will explore:
Why receiving a diagnosis is more than a medical event, and how a diagnosis gives you permission to be ill (in the best of ways)
How physicians actually build a diagnosis in real time, and what gets lost when appointments shrink to seven minutes
The case of the Proctor family, five siblings from rural Kentucky who spent decades with a mysterious, painful condition before becoming the first diagnosed case of the NIH's Undiagnosed Diseases Program
Why the best diagnosticians in the country share one habit that has nothing to do with medical genius
How AI note-taking in the exam room is making some appointments more human, not less
What to do when you've seen four practitioners and nobody can tell you what's wrong

If you've ever walked out of a doctor's office with more questions than you arrived with, this conversation is for it.

You can find Alexandra at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing a really meaningful conversation with Tom Rath, whose books have shaped how millions of people think about their work and lives. His new book makes a direct challenge to the whole "find your passion, follow your purpose" framework, and argues that the source of real fulfillment isn't looking deeper inside yourself. It's what you contribute to other people every day. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a conversation most of us are carrying right now. Not one we lack words for. We have plenty of those. One we keep finding reasons not to have. Not because we don't know what we'd say, but because we have become very skilled at building the case for staying quiet a little longer.

Jonathan Fields has spent a lot of time in that particular waiting room. This solo episode starts with a story he describes as embarrassing in the specific way only true stories about your own behavior can be embarrassing: a decade-long friendship, a thing said in passing that he never addressed, and the slow drift that followed because he never said it. It's a story many people in midlife will recognize without needing the details changed.

What you'll explore in this episode:
Why intelligent, emotionally capable people are often the most skilled architects of avoidance, and what that architecture actually looks like from the inside
The difference between protecting a relationship and protecting yourself from discomfort, and how easy it is to mistake one for the other
Four distinct types of difficult conversations and why knowing which one you're actually having changes everything about how to begin
Why the perfect moment to have the conversation you've been postponing doesn't exist, and what to do instead
How to open a hard conversation without scripting it, performing it, or trying to win it
A question to carry with you, not answer immediately, that may be the most honest thing in this entire episode

For anyone in midlife who has been living carefully around something true that needs to be said, this one is for you.

Episode Transcript

Next week, we are sitting down with journalist Alexandra Sifferlin to talk about why millions of Americans are living with conditions that doctors simply cannot name, and what that does to a person when the system meant to help you keeps coming up empty. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you do not miss any upcoming episodes.

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it.

Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, a leading resilience researcher, and one of the world's most trusted voices on loss and grief. Her TED talk on resilience has been viewed more than nine million times. She is also a mother who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident in 2014, and who has spent the decade since weaving her scientific training and her lived experience into tools that actually work. Her new book is How Will I Ever Get Through This?

In this conversation, we go to the places most conversations about grief are afraid to go.

What you will explore:
Why grief is not an emotion but a full-body experience that explains the exhaustion, brain fog, and 3 am waking you may have been blaming on other things
What "living losses" are, the griefs that come without a funeral, and why they may be driving far more of our suffering than we recognize
The difference between acceptance and coming to terms with, and why one word changes everything about how you move through loss
What the research actually shows about post-traumatic growth, including the statistic that will surprise you about how common it actually is
Why resilience is not about bouncing back, and what Dr. Hone means when she says you do not bounce back from anything that matters
The one question she asks herself in the hardest moments, and why it is a more useful starting point than any technique

If you have ever minimized something you were going through because it did not feel like it counted as real loss, this conversation is for you.

You can find Lucy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am going solo to talk about something that I think a lot of us are quietly carrying, the conversations we know we need to have with the people who matter most to us, and why we keep finding reasons not to have them. The research turns out to be really clear on this: we consistently overestimate how bad it will be and underestimate how much it costs us to stay silent. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:
Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.