You have likely seen moments of peak performance—perhaps an athlete plays a perfect game or

a business that has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. Perhaps you have experienced something similar – playing a musical piece perfectly, making a faultless shot, or perhaps acing a final. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary or even unsatisfying days.

Now, imagine your best day at work - you exceed the goals set for you, your interactions with coworkers are productive and bristle-free, the new system you implemented has boosted productivity company-wide, and you leave the office feeling on top of the world rather than crushed under the weight of it.

What if your best day could be every day?

This is something that Dr. Daniel Goleman knows a lot about. Along with Dr. Cary Cherniss, they have written Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day, which discusses how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day, or said another way, to consistently work at our “optimal” level.

Daniel Goleman is a renowned psychologist, author, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ was on The New York Times Best Seller list for a year-and-a-half, was a bestseller in numerous countries, is in print worldwide in 40 languages, and has sold over six million copies.

A frequent speaker on campuses and to businesses, he has worked with organizations around the globe, examining the way social and emotional competencies impact the bottom-line. Daniel is ranked as one of the 10 most influential business thinkers by the Wall Street Journal, and his articles in the Harvard Business Review are among the most frequently requested reprints.

We covered topics of ways for a person to attain better self-awareness, organizational citizenship and becoming a “good organizational citizen” along with ways to become one. And research has found that, emotional intelligence can improve productivity and engagement, career advancement, job satisfaction, and better health.

As I noted at the beginning, Daniel and his work have served as an inspiration and role model for me in my career as a psychologist, and I am deeply indebted. He shares his gifts with the world at large via living with purpose and fulfillment in order to live our lives in full.

Have you ever found yourself in the presence of someone you love dearly and had nothing to say? The silence, not indicative of your care for the other, nor of your desire to connect with them, and yet there were no words you could grasp to articulate the depth or quality of your connection to them.

Or, have you found yourself in the same looped pattern of conversation with someone you love? Feeling as though you were treading the same path repeatedly, and it was simply exhausting? Or, even worse, it was deteriorating your connection.

We all crave connection. But sometimes we need help getting there.

Topaz Adizes offers a guide to having the conversations that can lead to that connection in his latest book, 12 Questions for Love: A Guide to Intimate Conversations and Deeper Relationships. After a decade of exploring human emotions and intimacy through more than 1200 conversations in his Emmy Award-winning experience design studio, The Skin Deep, Topaz has been studying and watching humans of all types, and in all kinds of relationships, simply talk. And it’s resonating, having over 1.2 million followers on TikTok and 900,000 on YouTube.

Topaz is a writer, director, and experience design architect. He is an Edmund Hillary Fellow and Sundance/Skoll Stories of Change Fellow. His works have been selected to Cannes, Sundance, IDFA, and SXSW; featured in New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times; and have garnered an Emmy for New Approaches to Documentary, along with Two World Press photo awards for Immersive Storytelling and Interactive Documentary.

He is currently the Founder and Executive Director of The Skin Deep. Topaz studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Oxford University. He speaks four languages, and currently lives in Mexico with his wife and two children.

In this episode, Topaz shares what he has learned from witnessing over 1200 conversations and the lessons from his own first-hand experiences.

Topaz’s creativity, like his humanity, seems boundless. His work on relationship developments is a useful approach to helping us all have deeper and more intimate relationships that helps each us live our lives in full.

Over 20 million copies of one of the most famous memoirs of all-time, “Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson” written by Mitch Albom, have been sold since its 1997 publication, and to this day it remains on many a college’s required reading list.

Twenty-eight years after Morrie Schwartz passed away, his son Rob Schwartz, has edited his father’s last work, and posthumously published what has become a bestselling new book, “The Wisdom of Morrie: Living and Aging Creatively and Joyfully.”

Rob is a journalist and entrepreneur, having founded a number of companies, both in Japan and the US, and held executive positions in others. He’s produced numerous film and music projects with international teams. His areas of expertise include the entertainment industries in Asia, the US, and Europe. His projects often have a special emphasis on music, film, online business development, and developing musical artists’ careers, as well as working for Billboard in Asia.

He has appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, PBS NewsHour, NBC10 Boston, and in WebMD, Psychology Today, Reader’s Digest, and People magazine. Rob is currently one of the producers of Onetopia, a benefit music festival.

I asked Rob what it was like growing-up in the in the Schwartz household along with his work and background, and what took him to Asia and his work there as a founder, journalist, and in production.

The book’s been described as a profound, poetic, and poignant masterpiece of living and aging joyfully and creatively, but he first starts off examining ageism and explaining how poisonous it is and how wrong it is. In his reflections he confronts the false notion that people are somehow made less by the aging process, and his coining the term “age casting,” as an aspect of ageism and diminishing a person’s value solely based on their age.

We wrapped-up our conversation with him sharing a bit about his efforts in producing a global benefit festival dedicated to mental health and has a playlist on Spotify. He’s also working on the development of Holocaust survivors’ story as a documentary as well.

Rob’s perspectives, work and life serve as an inspiration to us all to live our lives in full.

When you think of modern technologies that aren’t gadgets and gizmos, you probably think of the Web, and with it, the Internet.

If so, you aren’t really thinking of modern technologies.

We are entering a new age. We’ve moved from the “Read-only Web,” which had little functionality for interacting with content, to the “Read-Write Web,” which offered seemingly endless collaborative opportunities, from sharing things with friends and family to shopping at your favorite brands. But the profusion of cyberattacks, data hacks, and online profiling have left many of us to view digital life as a Faustian bargain in need of a major rethink.

It brings with it a new lexicon and vocabulary for concepts and tools like blockchains, the metaverse, NFTs, DAOs, decentralized finance, and self-sovereign identity. In this episode, Alex Tapscott will serve as our guide and interpreter of this brave new world.

Alex is the author of the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail Bestseller Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier. He is also an entrepreneur and seasoned capital markets professional focused on the impact of emerging technologies, such as Web3, AI, VR/AR, the Metaverse, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, on business, government, and society.

Alex is masterful in communicating via both the written and spoken word as to complex topics that are critically important to our future and living fuller lives. As he wrote “In the Read-Write-Own Web of Web3, we are not merely spectators; we are authors of our digital destiny, reclaiming control over our identities and assets.” This episode is not to be missed if you want to better understand what the future holds and how it will impact us all and society.

We all have an Everest.

Even if you are not an alpinist or mountaineer, we are all on individual journeys, facing ascents and descents as we strive toward our personal and professional peaks. Whether yours is to achieve a big, audacious goal, or to find a way to coexist better with your mother-in-law, how you navigate the journey is up to you. You can choose to stop, to turn around, or to keep going. And you can choose to find meaning in the challenges along the way and embrace the joy in the journey.

And what if you could transform challenges into triumphs?

Well, Jenn Drummond has a lot to say about how to do that through resilience, determination, and mindset. Jenn is a Guinness World Record holder for being the first woman to climb all of the 7 Second Summits, and she’s also a successful business owner, international speaker, author, host of the Seek Your Summit podcast, and the mother of 7 remarkable children.

She also helps others create thriving businesses and lasting legacies of their own through her speaking and writing; in fact we’ll do a deep dive into her new book, BreakProof: 7 Strategies to Build Resilience and Achieve Your Life Goals.

Listen and embark on a journey of personal growth and learn actionable strategies and exercises to build resilience and handle life's challenges. We discuss the importance of goal setting, continuous self-improvement and personal growth, along with ways to troubleshoot seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

I think Jenn’s life and adventures can serve as a blueprint for becoming breakproof. Jenn has a wonderful set of amazing accomplishments in all aspects of life that are models of empowerment and inspiration on how to live a life in full.

How do you get the job, or position, or career, where the work that you do matters - and not just to your employer - but to you? Few experiences in life are as awful as the feeling of being trapped in the wrong career. But how do you find a job that truly resonates with you? And once you’ve found it, how do you develop the confidence to take the necessary steps to arrive at the career of your dreams? Or how do you recover from a career setback and seize new opportunities? Or, what if you are returning after a time away from being in the workforce? How do you deal with the uncertainty behind a career change and what gives you the confidence to hit a reset-switch on your professional life?

These are the questions, areas and issues in which Octavia Goredema thrives, as she works to help others navigate their own personal career success.

Octavia is the host of the Audible Original series, How to Change Careers with Octavia Goredema and the author of PREP, PUSH, PIVOT: Essential Career Strategies for Underrepresented Women, published by Wiley.

Octavia founded Twenty Ten Agency, a career coaching practice, where she has coached leaders at Google, American Airlines, Tinder, General Motors, Nike, and Dow Jones, to name but just a few. Her insights have been featured in leading media outlets including Fortune, CNN, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Black Enterprise, among others. During the pandemic she co-hosted “HBR Now,” the Harvard Business Review’s weekly show on leadership, and this year she contributed a chapter to the Harvard Business Review’s new book, Navigating the Toxic Workplace.

I see her work as a gift shared with her readers, her listeners, and her clients. Her wisdom, her transparency in the sharing of her experiences, and what she does, all demonstrate how she lives her life in full, and in the service of others.

At the intersection of architecture is art, creativity, design, engineering, sociology, psychology, and inspiration, not to mention survival, sustainability, and comfort. It’s been said that architecture is the art we live in. We’re all impacted by the communities in which we live, the spaces in which we work, along with the places we visit and experience throughout our lives.

So what is it that makes for good architectural design? How does a space become iconic? How does an architect go from project, to design, to engineering, to completion? Well, Lance Cayko knows a lot about the answers to those questions, and more.

Lance is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the architecture firm, F9 Productions, with Alex Gore. His career in architecture, engineering, and construction spans over two decades and includes numerous design awards including the international Architizer A+ Award for Architecture + Living Small. Their firm earned the #1 spot as BizWest's Mercury 100 Fastest-Growing Private Firms.

As an architect, Lance discussed the various benefits as also being the builder and developer on a project, both from a business success aspect but also in dealing with the various practical considerations of project management at scale. We also discussed the types of projects and clients that he finds most fulfilling to work with.

Lance’s perspective on the intersection of design and entrepreneurship yields examples and lessons for architects as well as any other founder or entrepreneur, regardless of field, and how it has influenced his approach to business and achieving an amazing growth rate of 386%(!). He believes that a strong design strategy plays a powerful role in contributing to the success of a business.

Lance is a great role model for living a life in full, not just a founder and architect, but also how to be antifragile in a field with more than its fair share of challenges via mindful leadership and creativity. I think you will enjoy this episode with such an authentic and innovative individual.

To succeed in a fast-changing world, individuals and companies know they must create a culture of growth, where experimentation and feedback are encouraged, and learning is integrated into the everyday. Yet we often get stuck in a well-worn pattern of habits that don’t move us forward. Why?

How do you get better at something? You do a lot of it. The 10,000 hour rule. Practice makes perfect, right? Maybe not. What if our focus only on performing doesn’t lead to the hoped for improvements, and instead our performance suffers?

Well, there is a strange phenomenon that runs counter to what most of us would think is a key ingredient to improving our performance--that is--if we spend all our time performing, we actually hinder our performance. Worse yet, this applies to us as individuals, to our teams, and in our organizations, and it’s called The Performance Paradox.

Eduardo Briceño knows a lot about this phenomenon and he has written a new book on how to recognize it, and what to do about it. The book is aptly titled The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action, and is published by Random House.

We discuss how to
• avoid falling into the chronic performance trap that stagnates growth
• identify when and how to unlock the power of mistakes
• integrate learning into daily habits in ways that stick
• lead teams that constantly improve and outperform their targets
• grow your skill level and output simultaneously and for the long term

Discover how to balance learning and performing to bolster personal and team success with this revolutionary guide from a world renowned expert on growth mindset. 

Eduardo Briceno's life is a testament to the profound impact that a growth mindset can have on personal and professional success. His relentless pursuit of knowledge and his mission to help others unlock their full potential continue to inspire individuals and organizations on their journeys toward excellence.