The Life Shift | Conversations About Life Before and After

There are moments that don't give you any warning. You're living your life, things are working, and then something happens that makes you question every single thing you thought you knew. Including yourself.That's where Chris Magleby found himself in 2017. A small piece of a pot brownie triggered a full psychotic episode, one that landed him zip-tied in his front yard, fighting cops he didn't recognize, hearing sounds that weren't there. It was terrifying. And it was, in a strange and quiet way, the beginning of something.Chris spent the next two and a half years working through acute anxiety, a manic episode, and the slow, painful process of rebuilding a relationship with his own mind. What came out the other side was a man who understood the difference between controlling life and actually living it. Now he's channeling all of that into Mindless Labs, a mental health startup built for people who know what it feels like to be lost inside their own heads.What You'll Hear:How a childhood marked by his parents' divorce shaped his relationship with control and safetyThe night a psychotic episode cracked everything open, and what those terrifying hours felt like from the insideWhy the two and a half years after were, in some ways, harder than the episode itselfHow Chris found his way to mindfulness, meditation, and Eastern philosophy as tools for survivalThe difference between pushing through and actually feeling your way throughWhat it means to turn your hardest experience into something that might help someone else find the lightGuest Bio:Chris Magleby is the co-founder of Mindless Labs, a mental health startup with an apparel line that funds mental health resources and an app built around professional-led content for people navigating their own mental health journeys. He's been married for nearly 22 years, is a father, and brings to all of it a hard-earned understanding of what it means to fall apart and come back differently. You can find him and Mindless Labs at mindless.org or on Instagram at @mindlesslabs.Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/followSubscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/Mentioned in this episode:Pre-Order "still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything"This episode is brought to you by *still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything* by Matt Gilhooly. Matt is the creator and host of The Life Shift Podcast. Over four years and more than 240 episodes, he has sat with strangers and asked them about the moments that changed everything. *still HERE* is what he found. Over 100 true stories. Eight sections. One listener making sense of what it all means for the rest of us. The Kindle version is available for preorder right now. The physical book drops March 31st. Grab the ebook here: http://start.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/still-here-ebook Or search *still HERE* by Matt Gilhooly on Amazon.

Some of us spend years learning how to look okay when we are not. We get good at reading rooms, making ourselves small, keeping quiet. Not because we want to, but because it felt like the only way to stay safe. If that sounds familiar, this episode might feel like someone finally said the quiet part out loud.Eugene Z. Bertrand grew up navigating a home shaped by domestic violence. For most of his childhood and into early adulthood, survival meant masking. It meant saying he was fine when he was not. It meant watching and waiting and staying alert. And then, just days after graduating college, something happened that nearly took his life. And the most unsettling part was how calmly he described it afterward.In this conversation, Eugene talks about what it felt like to say it out loud for the first time, to sit with radical acceptance, to forgive not because the other person deserved it but because he did. He talks about EMDR therapy, about the friends who held space for him, about vulnerability as a superpower, and about the book he wrote, five to ten pages a day, just to keep moving forward.What You'll Hear:What it felt like to grow up in a home where uncertainty was the norm, and how that silence shaped who Eugene becameThe moment he almost lost his life, and why it took a friend's reaction to help him truly understand what had happenedHow radical acceptance and EMDR therapy helped him move through trauma without staying trapped in itWhat it actually felt like to choose forgiveness, including the morning after when he was not sure he had made the right callWhy Eugene believes vulnerability is your greatest superpower, and what happens when you finally stop hiding your storyHow writing a book became a form of healing, and what he hopes other survivors of domestic violence find when they read itGuest Bio:Eugene Z. Bertrand is a survivor, author, and social work student at Columbia University. He is the author of Resilience: Breaking the Chains, a fiction-based exploration of domestic violence and the long road toward healing. Eugene is a mentor, speaker, and passionate advocate for vulnerability as a form of strength and for creating spaces where survivors, especially men, feel safe enough to tell the truth.If Eugene's story moved you, send him a message at eugenezbertrand.com or pick up his book, Resilience: Breaking the Chains, on Amazon. And if you want more conversations like this one, subscribe to this newsletter and never miss an episode.Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/followSubscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/Mentioned in this episode:Pre-Order "still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything"This episode is brought to you by *still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything* by Matt Gilhooly. Matt is the creator and host of The Life Shift Podcast. Over four years and more than 240 episodes, he has sat with strangers and asked them about the moments that changed everything. *still HERE* is what he found. Over 100 true stories. Eight sections. One listener making sense of what it all means for the rest of us. The Kindle version is available for preorder right now. The physical book drops March 31st. Grab the ebook here: http://start.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/still-here-ebook Or search *still HERE* by Matt Gilhooly on Amazon.

There is a version of grief that nobody warns you about. It is not the loud kind. It is the quiet kind, the one that creeps in slowly until one day you are walking your dogs on a trail you love and you realize you no longer feel connected to the ground beneath your feet. That moment, as small and ordinary as it sounds, was the one that changed everything for Dianette Wells.Dianette has lived her life reaching toward something higher. She grew up in flat Southern California, looking at snow-capped mountains from her backyard and knowing, in the way some people just know, that she was meant for something beyond what she had been handed. That instinct led her to Mount Whitney, to Kilimanjaro, to all seven summits, and eventually to ultramarathons across the world. Movement was not just her passion. It was her language, her therapy, her way of sorting through whatever life threw at her.And then her son Johnny died. He was 23. He was a wingsuit pilot and a base jumper and the kind of person who had climbed the seven summits before he was legally allowed to do most of the things he loved. His death stripped the sparkle from the world for a long time. And Dianette had to find her way back, not to who she was before, but to someone who could hold the grief and still choose to live.What You'll HearHow a girls' trip up Mount Whitney cracked open a hunger for adventure that Dianette had never known she hadThe quiet devastation of losing her son, Johnny, and how grief made the world feel physically differentWhy she believes year two of loss is harder than year one, and what finally shook her out of just existingHer honest take on grief without a roadmap, and why there is no right way to do any of itHow movement, travel, and even a plant medicine journey became her path back to herselfWhat it means to honor someone you lost without feeling obligated to perform that grief for the worldGuest BioDianette Wells is an adventurer, author, and mother who has spent decades pursuing the kinds of experiences that most people only dream about. She has climbed the Seven Summits, run ultramarathons around the globe, and lived in Malibu before relocating to Park City, Utah, where altitude and single-track trails became both her home and her healing. After losing her son Johnny Strange at age 23, Dianette channeled her grief into continued movement, memory-making, and writing. Her book, Another Step Up the Mountain, is available at dnatwells.com and is now moving to a new publisher, Flint Hills Publishing. Johnny's story is documented in the film American Daredevil on Peacock and Born to Fly, Johnny Strange on Tubi.https://dianettewells.com/Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/followSubscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/Mentioned in this episode:Pre-Order "still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything"This episode is brought to you by *still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything* by Matt Gilhooly. Matt is the creator and host of The Life Shift Podcast. Over four years and more than 240 episodes, he has sat with strangers and asked them about the moments that changed everything. *still HERE* is what he found. Over 100 true stories. Eight sections. One listener making sense of what it all means for the rest of us. The Kindle version is available for preorder right now. The physical book drops March 31st. Grab the ebook here: http://start.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/still-here-ebook Or search *still HERE* by Matt Gilhooly on Amazon.

There is someone in your life whose story you have not asked about yet. Maybe you keep meaning to. Maybe you figure there is time. This episode is a quiet reminder that time is the one thing none of us actually have on hold.Cristian grew up in Paraguay, surrounded by family lunches that stretched into the afternoon, stories layered on top of stories, and a kind of closeness that most of us only read about. He carried all of that with him, through Stanford, through Google, through the blank whiteboard moment of figuring out what he was actually supposed to build. And then, a few weeks before a trip home to finally sit down with his grandmother and record her story, she had a stroke. The conversation he had been saving for later became one he would never have.What came out of that loss was not just a product. It was a reckoning. Cristian built Autograph, an AI-driven platform that interviews people about their lives, so that the stories we keep meaning to capture do not quietly disappear. This episode is about grief, yes. But it is also about what happens when you stop waiting and decide to become the author of your own life.What You'll Hear:Why the stories we never say out loud are the ones we lose foreverHow growing up in Paraguay shaped the way Cristian thinks about family, identity, and belongingThe moment his grandmother's stroke became the catalyst for everythingWhat it actually feels like to become the main character of your own storyHow grief and technology can hold hands without losing the human partWhy your story matters, even if you have never once believed that it doesGuest Bio: Cristian Cibils Bernardes is the founder of Autograph, a platform that uses AI to help people record, preserve, and share their life stories with the people who matter most. He grew up in Paraguay, studied symbolic systems at Stanford, and worked at Google before stepping back to figure out what he was actually building toward. The answer, it turned out, had been waiting in his own family all along. Learn more at autograph.ai.---Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/followSubscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/Mentioned in this episode:Pre-Order "still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything"This episode is brought to you by *still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything* by Matt Gilhooly. Matt is the creator and host of The Life Shift Podcast. Over four years and more than 240 episodes, he has sat with strangers and asked them about the moments that changed everything. *still HERE* is what he found. Over 100 true stories. Eight sections. One listener making sense of what it all means for the rest of us. The Kindle version is available for preorder right now. The physical book drops March 31st. Grab the ebook here: http://start.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/still-here-ebook Or search *still HERE* by Matt Gilhooly on Amazon.

If you have ever loved someone so deeply that the thought of losing them rearranged everything, this conversation is for you. It is for the moments when you try to stay steady while the ground is already shifting beneath you. It is for the quiet questions that surface when life no longer follows the plan you thought you were living.Kathleen Quinn shares a story shaped by devotion, sudden illness, and the long unfolding of grief. She speaks about caring for her husband through a devastating diagnosis, about choosing presence over denial, and about the many small decisions that come with loving someone at the end of their life. This is not a story about moving on. It is a story about staying open. About learning how grief and joy can exist side by side. About discovering that the life you are living now may still hold meaning, tenderness, and purpose.This episode is a gentle reminder that there is no correct way to grieve. Only your way. And that honoring what was lost does not mean closing yourself off from what still remains.What You’ll HearLoving someone through a terminal diagnosis without turning them into a patientThe quiet weight of anticipatory grief and how it shows up unexpectedlyChoosing presence in moments that feel unbearableLetting go of rules about how grief is supposed to lookStaying open to life after loss without rushing yourselfHow grief reshaped her relationship with worth, joy, and purposeGuest BioKathleen Quinn is a mindset coach and former philanthropy leader at Stanford. After more than three decades working closely with high-achieving and high-net-worth individuals, she now helps people explore the deeper questions of worthiness, wealth, and fulfillment. Drawing from her professional experience and personal journey through loss, Kathleen guides clients through meaningful transitions rooted in self-trust, clarity, and impact.Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/followSupport the show for ad-free and early-release episodes: www.patreon.com/thelifeshiftpodcastSubscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/Mentioned in this episode:Pre-Order "still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything"This episode is brought to you by *still HERE: True Stories of the Moments That Changed Everything* by Matt Gilhooly. Matt is the creator and host of The Life Shift Podcast. Over four years and more than 240 episodes, he has sat with strangers and asked them about the moments that changed everything. *still HERE* is what he found. Over 100 true stories. Eight sections. One listener making sense of what it all means for the rest of us. The Kindle version is available for preorder right now. The physical book drops March 31st. Grab the ebook here: http://start.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/still-here-ebook Or search *still HERE* by Matt Gilhooly on Amazon.