60 Mindful Minutes

What follows is a conversation about how we can use our hands and our imaginations to make stuff. But more importantly, why making stuff together—even if you don’t consider yourself an artist or even a creative person—becomes a means to cultivating more connection with our family, friends and community.

Spring is nearly upon us, which means for many of us, it’s time to go back outside. My guest today is Rebecca P. Cohen, someone who is incredibly passionate about inspiring families and individuals to spend more time outside. What’s ahead is a conversation about the enormous benefits to being intentional about spending time outdoors every day—with your kids and with yourself – and how to easily and almost effortlessly create a ‘15-minutes outside’ habit.

The idea of living with less—less stuff, less obligations, less debt and making less of a footprint environmentally—is really gaining momentum. When we have space—physical, emotional and spiritual—to nourish those relationships, our lives are simply better. What’s ahead is a conversation about how living with less makes for room more: more love, more space and more joy.

I first met Katie in my Friday yoga class. She’s a little hard to miss since she’s the only yogi in the class who brings her dog with her. I soon came to find out that she works as a volunteer raising companion dogs as well as therapy dogs. I was immediately fascinated, not just by her work with dogs, but I had a million questions about the relationship between dogs and humans, why dogs are so good at reregulating us and why so many people regard them as man’s best friend.

As the creator of The Dinner Party Project, Dana Marie Roquemore is on a mission to facilitate more and deeper connections between friends and strangers. Each week, seven guests are chosen at random and given instructions for where and when to attend. Dana uses guest chefs and guest caterers to create amazing food, but the real richness is in the connections that happen during these dinners. She has such a fabulous story and I can’t wait for you to hear it.

What happens when a community comes together to share its stories, triumphs, struggles and aspirations? PechaKucha, an international speaker series based on a 20×20 format (20 slides, 20 seconds each), exists to explore this question. Now held in over 1,000 cities around the world, the series gives a platform to each city’s residents—from creatives to professionals to regular folks with a story to tell—and the result is people connecting with people they would probably have never crossed paths.

Rick Bommelje has spent decades becoming a master listener and helping others do the same. Before you shrug off listening as a topic you already know about, I invite you to think again. In fact, I invite you to question why you may never have received any formal training in what is actually one of our most critical skills. Mostly, I invite you to listen to this conversation like it could hold the key to something that might dramatically upgrade your life.

Americans forfeit over 600 million days of vacation time EVERY year, and there are huge economic, cultural and psychological consequences to this. We’re not as creative and productive but we’re also not as happy AND we miss out on countless of moments we could have used to connect with our loved ones and ourselves. I loved this conversation and I can’t with to share it with you, but a word of warning: I have a feeling you’ll be booking your next vacation by the time this conversation is done.

Wherever you are in your life, chances are you’re going to find yourself working with teams at some point. And whether you’re trying to solve a challenge at work or plan your next vacation as a family, there’s a method to pulling out the gold, as this episode’s guest would say.

Our culture often teaches us to be uncomfortable with emotions, to avoid them, and to set them aside when making important decisions. But neuroscience would have us see them in a different way. In this episode, empathy researcher Karla McLaren invites us to see emotions as data, as fundamental aspects of our intelligence, and inescapable parts of our cognition.

Belonging and inclusion are both critical to our health and well-being. There’s real pain to be felt when we feel like we don’t fit in or were deliberating excluded. It’s not theoretical, it’s actually physiological, and science has proven this. During this episode, we discuss many great studies but we also bring it down to day-to-day life terms. The research is fascinating but so are the practical applications.

In this discussion with performance coach Angie Byrd we dig into why we don’t connect with ourselves and what we’re missing. And we also discuss how we can create self-connection practices and their immense benefits.   

International travel writer Rachelle Lucas invites travelers to break from the pack and get lost in a city. The best travel experiences are the ones they we never expected to happen, and they can only be found when we put down the map or the guidebook and just explore.

During this interview, we talked about how we can prime our emotional state, refine our inner awareness and create better attention skills that result in us having a great capacity to monitor our mind and body in real time.

Here’s something we don’t think about very much: how does a relationship occur for you and how do you occur for people who you are currently in a relationship with?