The Practice Ground | A Self-Improvement Podcast with Ken Li and Kari Watterson

What might become possible in your life if you could learn to respond differently to the things that have been holding you back? Maybe you've been putting something off, second-guessing yourself, avoiding a difficult conversation, or struggling to change a behavior you've repeated for years. You can see where you are. You can imagine where you'd like to be. But no matter how much you want things to be different, you keep finding yourself on the same side of a gap you can't seem to cross. And ...

What if you could coach yourself through almost any problem? In this solo episode of The Practice Ground, Ken introduces one of the most influential tools in his own life and coaching practice: The Self Coaching Model, created by Brooke Castillo. Known simply as “The Model,” it breaks our experience into five parts: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, and Results — CTFAR. The idea is deceptively simple. Something happens. We have thoughts about what happened. Those thoughts generate f...

What if making progress isn't about doing more, but removing the one thing that's slowing everything else down? Our instinct may be to add something: more effort, another strategy, more information, another book or podcast, more preparation. But in Essentialism, Greg McKeown offers another possibility: What could you remove? In Chapter 16, “Subtract: Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles,” McKeown uses the story of a hiking group to illustrate the power of identifying a system's biggest cons...

What if the lessons we learn from our habits could teach us something bigger about how to live? Near the end of Atomic Habits, James Clear shares 18 “Little Lessons from the Four Laws” — short observations about desire, emotion, motivation, action, and human behavior that extend well beyond building or breaking habits. In this episode of The Practice Ground, Ken and Kari each choose three lessons that caught their attention — not necessarily because they have them figured out, but because the...

What if self-doubt isn't always something we need to overcome? Impostor syndrome is usually framed as a confidence problem: something to conquer so we can finally believe in ourselves and move forward. But what if some amount of doubt can actually make us better learners, encourage us to prepare more thoughtfully, and remind us to ask for help when we don't know what we don't know? In this episode of The Practice Ground, Ken and Kari explore a different way of thinking about impostor syndrome...