Psychology to Live By

This roundtable discussion of the podcast Music Creativity & Mental Health with Harrison Storm focused on three or four main themes. The first was intuition: how do we know when to trust our intuition? This led to a discusion of what intuition is, when it is needed, and it's relation to expertise. In artistic enterprises intuition is needed to naviagate ambiguity and often results in authentic expression. The second theme was how Harrison used the Covid period to grow personally and artistically, especially by having time to reflect and to explore somatic therapy and the PEM training method to enhance his performances. We also discussed a sense of accomplishment amidst the challenge of not workig a 9-5 job with clear measures of achievements and milestones. Finally, we explored Harrison's growth musically and how he embodies 'appreciative humility.'

This podcast with Garrett Wood, entitled 'Healing the Problem Under the Problem', explores Garrett's work helping high-masking professionals break free from burnout, chronic stress, and the imposter syndrome, building sustainable success without sacrificing health, happiness, or relationships.Garrett is a National Board-Certified Health & Wellness Coach, Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, and Executive Function Specialist. We started with Garrett’s background and what led to his passion for working with burnout and high performers. As is often the case, a tragic suicide of a very high performing colleague was the catalyst for the wonderful work he does. We explored the relationship between high performance and burnout; how one can recognise burnout in oneself, especially as it manifests in the mind, the emotions and the body. We then discussed the shortcoming of traditional approaches and finally explored Garrett’s approach that starts with body regulation, then relating with compassion to one’s painful feelings and thoughts that are masked by apparent thriving and resilience, and only then using reason to restructure more adaptive, healthy understandings of self.

This roundtable discussing the Garrett Wood podcast began with a discussion of the difficulties for managers having to performance-manage people who may have mental health issues or who may be neurodivergent. We discussed the two duties that any manager has to balance: the duty of care and the duty to manage performance. Other topics included: the power of emotional reasoning to bias thought outside direct awareness and how preconscious feeling states inplicitly structure concious thought; how medications designed to numb emotionscan be a problem as it is important to learn what imporant things those emotions are conveying to us; we also discussed how this can lead to feeling disembodied as we compress and numb our feeling states; the tight relationship between identity and burnout andhwo they relate to staus and self-esteem; how tendncies to burnout are reinforced by workpkace reward systems.

This is a wonderful conversation about music, mental health and creativity with Harrison Storm, indie-folk singer and songwriter, in which we touched on many topics including; Harrison’s background and trajectory to a musical career; songwriting and singing as self-discovery and emotional catharsis; the centrality of intuition for both wellbeing and creativity and being in tune and true to self; Harrison’s maturing as an artist and taking a broader, less attached outlook; mindfulness and somatic therapy as methods to sustain creative output; using the PEM acting method to cultivate his performance skills and elevate his experience of performance; the wonderful feeling of calm connectedness and authentic communication in performance and how performing in this way feels like ‘a better version of myself’; the distinction between entertainers and artists; the dilemma of a contemplative artistic life and feeling guilty about not achieving enough each day. It was a delightful and insightful conversation, and I hope you really take a lot from it.

This roundtable on the third personality podast, Building Character, traversed quite complex and nuanced terrain: the scientific basis for morality beyond the effects of culture and politics; the difficulties of navigating moral disagreement; the problem of in-groups and out-groups; the imperative to grow one's moral thinking; how good character bestows high status and respect, but that status can also be accrued via pseudo-esteem for bad moral characters; the problem of lies and lying becomeing normalised, even respected; the important insight that evolution is not about flourishing or moral good, but about passing on genes; and that moral wisdom is an emegent possibility of our success as a species.