Relationships 2.0 With Dr. Michelle Skeen

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Guest: Helene Segura author of The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer Apr 26, 2016

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This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Helene Segura author of The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer About the book: Slay Procrastination, Distraction, and Overwhelm! Who doesn’t want more time and energy for family, friends, and personal passions? Author Helene Segura coaches real people in the real world to operate more efficiently during the workday, so they can have a life outside it. Her engaging time management program caters to diverse learning styles, offering case studies that allow readers to self-diagnose and zero in on the strategies most appropriate for them. Anyone wanting to streamline workflow and improve productivity can employ her wonderfully doable techniques — for clearing task lists, handling reminder systems, scheduling a variety of priorities, and even managing emails and phone calls. Thanks to Segura’s astute attention to personality, The Inefficiency Assassin meets readers where they are struggling and details quick and easy-to-implement strategies to, as Segura promises, “kick chaos to the curb.” About the author: Do you want to wake up 10 years from now and lament, “I wish I’d lived a little more instead of work around the clock”? Helene Segura doesn’t want to either. That’s why she tells her time what to do – and teaches busy professionals how to do the same by slaying lost time. The author of two Amazon best-selling books, Helene has been the featured productivity expert in more than 100 media interviews. During her time management keynotes and workshops, she shares her mind-bending framework for decreasing interruptions, distractions and procrastination so that companies can spend more time generating revenue. On weekends, Helene can be found experimenting with recipes or sneaking adult beverages onto the lawn bowling court. To connect with Helene or for details about her third book, The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer (New World Library 2016), visit www.HeleneSegura.com.

Guest: Cara Bradley author of On The Verge: Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine Apr 21, 2016

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This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Cara Bradley author of On The Verge: Wake Up, Show Up and Shine About the book: In the final race of her college track career, Cara Bradley beat her personal best by a remarkable six seconds. Until then Bradley had been a so-so athlete hampered by pre-race jitters and self-doubt. But on this day Bradley was buoyed by a sense of calm confidence. She set about understanding how she could replicate this experience in every area of life. She has distilled what she found into four practices, four shift strategies, and a series of gut-check reminders for moving out of over-thinking and over-doing and into being fully awake and alive– clear, bright, confident. These techniques for settling busy mind, putting body and mind in sync, and cultivating awareness and strength are simple but require practice and attention, which Bradley coaches readers to apply daily. The reward is what she calls “high definition, high voltage living,” the ability to experience what Bradley did on the track not by accident, or in only a few memorable moments but on purpose, every day. About the author: Cara Bradley, a native New Yorker and former pro-skater for Team Rollerblade®, is a lifelong teacher, mental strength coach, and entrepreneur. She is passionate about feeling awake and alive and experiencing her life fully. As the founder of Verge Yoga, Cara has been in the trenches of personal transformation and mindfulness as a teacher to thousands including CEOs and professional athletes for over three decades. She is also the founder of Mindfulness Through Movement, a non-profit offering full year programs to schools in urban Philadelphia.

Guest: Emma Seppala author of The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success Apr 11, 2016

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This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Emma Seppälä PhD author of The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success About the book: A leading expert on health psychology, well-being, and resilience argues that happiness is the key to fast tracking our professional and personal success. Everyone wants to be happy and successful. And yet the pursuit of both has never been more elusive. As work and personal demands rise, we try to keep up by juggling everything better, moving faster, and doing more. While we might succeed in the short term, it comes at a cost to our well-being, relationships, and, paradoxically, our productivity. In The Happiness Track, Emma Seppala, the science director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, explains that our inability to achieve sustainable fulfillment is tied to common but outdated notions about success. We are taught that getting ahead means doing everything that’s thrown at us (and then some) with razor-sharp focus and iron discipline; that success depends on our drive and talents; and that achievement cannot happen without stress. The Happiness Track demolishes these counter-productive theories. Drawing on the latest findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience—research on happiness, resilience, willpower, compassion, positive stress, creativity, mindfulness—Seppala shows that finding happiness and fulfillment may, in fact, be the most productive thing we can do to thrive professionally. Filled with practical advice on how to apply these scientific findings to our daily lives, The Happiness Track is a life-changing guide to fast tracking our success and creating the anxiety-free life we want. About the author: EMMA SEPPÄLÄ is Science Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and a leading expert on health psychology, well-being, and resilience. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, ABC News, Forbes, the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report, the Huffington Post, INC, and Fast Company. She is founder of the popular online magazine Fulfillment Daily and a frequent contributor to Psychology Today, Harvard Business Review, and the Huffington Post. Her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Scientific American Mind, and Spirituality & Health. Seppälä consults for Fortune 500 leaders on building positive organizations. A sought-after speaker, she has addressed academic, corporate, and governmental institutions, including Google, the National Science Foundation, and the World Bank. Dedicated to applying the science of happiness to people’s lives, she taught happiness and service classes to hundreds of students, for which she was awarded Stanford University’s Lyons Award for service. Touched by the selfless dedication of veterans and the profound trauma so many bring back from war, she conducted groundbreaking research on mind-body practices for combat veterans. This research was highlighted in the documentary film Free the Mind. She holds an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Yale University, a master’s degree in East Asian languages and cultures from Columbia University, and a PhD in psychology from Stanford University. Originally from Paris, France, she is a native speaker of French, English, and German. She also speaks Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

Guest: Donald Altman author of Clearing Emotional Clutter: Mindfulness Practices for Letting Go of What's Blocking Your Fulfillment and Transformation Apr 04, 2016

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This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Donald Altman author of Clearing Emotional Clutter: Mindfulness Practices for Letting Go of What’s Blocking Your Fulfillment and Transformation About the book: A Fresh Start to a Healthy Emotional Life Is emotional clutter blocking success in your personal and professional life? You’ve likely heard about the psychological benefits of clearing out the clutter in your surroundings, but how do you handle your emotional clutter — the psychological version of the jam-packed closet or impenetrable garage? Shutting away and trying to hide old pains and traumas creates toxic patterns that can keep you from having the life of your dreams. Integrating mindfulness and cutting-edge neuroscience, international mindfulness expert Donald Altman teaches how to modify entrenched habits and patterns with only a few minutes of attention daily. Altman first helps you realize what your baggage consists of and how to transform or jettison it. He then shows how to avoid the daily danger of accumulating new emotional clutter. No matter how fraught your life or relationships may be, you can cleanse, heal, or accept the old wounds, mistakes, and disappointments. With Altman’s lifestyle tools, you’ll discover how to address your past, better deal with the present, and cultivate the best possible future. Start fresh with Clearing Emotional Clutter. About the author: Donald Altman, MA, LPC, is a psychotherapist, a former Buddhist monk, and the award-winning author of several books, including One-Minute Mindfulness, The Mindfulness Toolbox, and The Mindfulness Code. He conducts mindful living and mindful eating workshops and retreats and trains mental health therapists and businesspeople to use mindfulness as a tool for optimizing health and fulfillment. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Guest: Hugh G. Byrne, PhD author of The Here and Now Habit: How Mindfulness Can Help You Break Unhealthy Habits Once and for All Mar 31, 2016

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This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Hugh Byrne PhD author of The Here and Now Habit: How Mindfulness Can Help You Break Unhealthy Habits Once and For All About the book: Bad habits can take a hefty toll on your health and happiness. In The Here-and-Now Habit, mindfulness expert Hugh Byrne provides powerful practices based in mindfulness and neuroscience to help you rewire your brain and finally break the habits that are holding you back from a meaningful life. Have you found yourself doing something and thinking, Why do I keep doing this? We all have an unhealthy habit—or two, or three. Yours may be as simple as wasting time on the Internet, constantly checking your e-mail, or spending too much time in front of the TV. Or, it may be more serious, like habitual drinking, emotional overeating, constant self-criticism, or chronic worrying. Whatever your harmful habit is—you have the power to break it. The Here-and-Now-Habit provides proven-effective techniques to help you stop existing on autopilot and start living in the here and now. You’ll learn how to cultivate mindfulness to calm and focus your mind, be aware of thoughts without identifying with them or believing they are true, deal with difficult emotions, and clarify your own intentions regarding unhealthy habits by asking yourself, What do I want? How important is it to me to make this change? By learning to pay attention to your thoughts and actions in the moment, you’ll discover how to let go of old patterns and create healthier habits and ways of living that will make you feel good about yourself. And when you feel good about you, you can do just about anything. About the author: Hugh G. Byrne, PhD, is a guiding teacher with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW), and cofounder of the Mindfulness Training Institute of Washington. He has worked extensively in the fields of human rights and social justice, and is committed to advocating the benefits of mindfulness and other contemplative practices to help relieve the suffering of the world. He teaches classes, retreats, and workshops in the United States and internationally. Byrne resides in Silver Spring, MD.

Guest: Matt McKay PhD author of Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe Mar 24, 2016

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This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Matt McKay PhD author of Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe. About the book: If you have lost someone you deeply love, or have become strongly aware of your mortality, it’s hard to avoid wondering about life after death, the existence of God, notions of heaven and hell, and why we are here in the first place. The murder of Matthew McKay’s son, Jordan, sent him on a journey in search of ways to communicate with his son despite fears and uncertainty. Here he recounts his efforts — including past-life and between-lives hypnotic regressions, a technique called induced after-death communication, channeled writing, and more. McKay, a psychologist and researcher, ultimately learned how to reach his son. In this book he provides extraordinary revelations — direct from Jordan — about the soul’s life after death, how karma works, why we incarnate, why there is so much pain in the world, the single force that connects us, and our future as souls. Unlike many books about after-death communication, near-death experiences, and past-life memories, this is a book for those who do not believe yet yearn to know what happens after death. In addition to being riveting reading, Seeking Jordan is a unique heart-, soul-, and mind-stirring reflection on the issues each of us will ultimately face. About the author: Matthew McKay is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. He cofounded Haight Ashbury Psychological Services in San Francisco in 1979 and served as its clinical director for twenty-five years. Currently he serves as the director of the Berkeley Cognitive Behavior Therapy Clinic. Books he has coauthored on professional and self-help psychology have sold more than 3 million copies.

Guest: Bruce Weinstein PhD author of Is It Still Cheating If I Don't Get Caught Mar 17, 2016

Show notes

About the book: My teacher gave me an A… by mistake. What do I do? Teens face tough choices like this one every day. Help’s arrived! Whether it’s about the use of the internet (downloading music? copying homework papers?) or sports (steroids?), friendship, family, school, or affairs of the heart, kids often find themselves asking: What’s the right thing to do? With five simple and clear ethical principles as a foundation, and plenty of out-of-real-life dilemmas as examples, Dr. Bruce Weinstein offers answers and an approach to things that teens will find useful, reliable, and commonsensical. About the author: Dr. Bruce Weinstein, The Ethics Guy, believes that the key to success in business is having not just emotional intelligence, but ethical intelligence, too. He shows how to improve your ethics IQ and leadership skills, which will strengthen the relationships you have with colleagues, clients, family, friends, and folks in the community.He is a contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Management Blog. His latest book, “Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Untangling Your Toughest Problems at Work and Beyond,” was a Silver Winner from ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. An in-demand speaker, Dr. Weinstein’s clients have included the National Football League, Northrop Grumman, the Investment Management Consultants Association, the National Business Aviation Association, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the colleges of business of Eastern Michigan University and the University of North Dakota, and over three hundred other leading groups. You have seen Dr. Weinstein on a wide range of CNN programs, NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor and Fox and Friends, Fox Business Network’s Cavuto, MSNBC Live, and CNBC’s Fast Money. His work was recently featured in the Sunday New York Times, and his ethics quiz will appear in the October issue of American Airlines’ in-flight magazine serving Latin America, Spain and Portugal. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College, a PhD in philosophy and bioethics from Georgetown University, and a National Fellowship in Leadership Development from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. He lives in New York with his wife, Kristen Bancroft.

Guest: James R. Doty, MD author of Into The Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart Feb 25, 2016

Show notes

This week on Relationships 2.0 my special guest is James R. Doty, MD author of Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. About the book: Extraordinary things happen when we harness the power of both the brain and the heart. Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart. Doty would go on to put Ruth’s practices to work with extraordinary results—power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth’s most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results—until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts. About the author: James R. Doty, M.D., is a professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), where he researches the neuroscience of compassion and altruism. He is also a philanthropist funding health clinics throughout the world and has endowed scholarships and chairs at multiple universities. He serves on the board of a number of nonprofits, including the Charter for Compassion International and the Dalai Lama Foundation.

Kira Asatryan author of Stop Being Lonely: Three Simple Steps to Developing Close Friendships and Deep Relationships Feb 18, 2016

Show notes

This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Kira Asatryan author of Stop Being Lonely: Three Simple Steps to Developing Close Friendships and Deep Relationships About the book: Loneliness isn’t something that happens only when we are physically alone. It can also happen when we are with people. Online friends, followers, or “likers” don’t necessarily add up to much when you crave fulfilling interaction, and satisfying, long-term relationships are not a mystery to be left up to chance (or technology). The good news is that, according to relationship coach Kira Asatryan, loneliness has a reliable antidote: the feeling of closeness. We can and should cultivate closeness in our relationships using the steps outlined in this book: knowing, caring, and mastering closeness. Whether with romantic partners, friends, family members, or business colleagues, these techniques will help you establish true closeness with others. The simple and straightforward actions Asatryan presents in this wonderfully practical book will guide you toward better relationships and less loneliness in all social contexts. About the author: Kira Asatryan is a couples coach and a team coach who trains Silicon Valley startups to work cohesively. She is also a popular blogger on Psychology Today and other sites. Prior to becoming a full-time relationship coach and writer, she ran marketing campaigns across major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Google Search. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

Guest: Linda Carroll author of Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love Feb 11, 2016

Show notes

This week on Relationships 2.0 my guest is Linda Carroll author of Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love. Whether you are in a new relationship or you’ve been partnered for years, you will benefit from Linda’s relationship expertise. About the book: In Love Cycles, veteran couples therapist Linda Carroll presents a groundbreaking model of the five natural stages of romantic relationships — the Merge, Doubt and Denial, Disillusionment, Decision, and Wholehearted Love — and a guide for navigating through them toward lasting love. Love Cycles helps readers understand where they are in the cycle of their relationship and provides a clear strategy for how to stay happy and committed, even in difficult times. About the author: Linda Carroll, MS, has worked as a couple’s therapist for more than 30 years. In addition to being a licensed psychotherapist, she is certified in Transpersonal Psychology and Imago Therapy, the highly successful form of couple’s therapy developed by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt. She is also a master teacher in the Pairs Psychoeducation Process, a nationally-recognized relationship education program for couples. Linda has studied many modalities of psychological and spiritual work, including Voice Dialogue with Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone, Holotropic Breathwork with Dr. Stan Grof, the Four-Fold With Angeles Arrien, the Diamond Heart Work of A.H. Almaas, and training with The Couples Institute of Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson. She is also certified in the Hot Monogamy program, which helps couples create or re-create a passionate connection between them. Linda works with a limited number of couples regularly in a new style of “concierge therapy,” in which she travels to their home or office for 2-6 days per year for private, all-day sessions, offering ongoing Skype and phone sessions in between. She teaches workshops and delivers keynote addresses throughout the United States and is a frequent speaker at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. Find her on the web at lindaacarroll.com or lovecycles.org.

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