Your 1-minute phone call to yourself 10 years ago. What would you say? Rob explores why this is a useful way to distil important life lessons you can use to help shape a better future.

Rob shares a more personal episode, talking about the experiences of his grandparents who were forced out of their Polish estate, sent to the Gulags, and then relocated to New Zealand. But the key insight is that while externals can be stripped from you, what’s on the inside cannot be taken away. That, and the reality that none of us have the control in life we think we do.

This episode comes out at Christmas/New Year. A time when everyone rushes around everywhere trying to handle and deal with all the things they believe they need to. Usually, those same people end up exhausted. Today, Rob discusses this modern dilemma and suggests a practical way of reducing our pace and stress, and increasing our calm and sense of control.

Developing your communication skills is one of the best ways to gain more influence, develop better relationships, and create presence and impact. However, most people think they’re pretty good at communicating. But in my experience of 10 years in radio and 25 years of corporate coaching, I think there’s one skill most of us need to improve on: listening.

Forward modelling is an approach used mostly by engineers, computer programmers or data scientists to think out beforehand how something should progress so that any discrepancy can be quickly noticed and acted on. It’s about achieving the desired outcomes. So, what if we used something similar in our personal development?

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about what you should do, think or say. But should you pay that much heed to what they say? How can you do so without being rude? Let’s talk about considering what others say without necessarily agreeing to it.

There is great wisdom in more fully accepting that, in our everyday lives, very little is within our actual control. Letting go of the illusion of control allows us to accept what is, and live in harmony with it with less anxiety and more freedom.

Our content-saturated world has some advantages, but also significant disadvantages that may be hurting us. Let’s explore what we really need for human flourishing.

It’s interesting how our children can sometimes turn out quite differently to how we thought they would when they were young. What’s that about? How do we fully accept that?

There are various forms of authority. This one is quieter, and ultimately more powerful. Being silent when you could speak up, but there are good reasons not to.

We can gain more authority of ourselves and our actions if we learn this powerful idea; that the thing is seperate from the thought of it, and we can make better choices accordingly.

The Stoics were good people. They loved virtue and growing wise in practical ways. We look at what this means for us in our daily lives today.