Passion Struck with John R. Miles

What if the way you eat has less to do with food than with how you feel about yourself? For registered dietitian and author Lee Cotton, the path to understanding nutrition began with her own struggles with food and body image. In this conversation, she

What if the story you've been telling yourself about who you are was never really yours? In 1979, a collection of interviews with college students disappeared into the archives. Decades later, Harvard developmental psychologist Alexis Redding helped unc

What if procrastination isn't a problem with your time, but a problem with what you believe you're capable of doing? You know what you want to change. You have ideas, ambitions, and goals. Yet somehow, you keep waiting for the right moment, the perfect

What if today's young people aren't as different from previous generations as we think? When Alexis Redding and her colleagues uncovered interviews with college students from the 1970s, they found familiar stories of loneliness, academic pressure, famil

What happens when the next achievement matters more than the one you just reached? Even after The Mattering Effect landed on the USA Today bestseller list, John caught himself immediately checking where it might rank on the NYT bestseller list. That ins

What happens when you spend years proving yourself, only to find that the people around you are making you question your worth? Heather Monahan knows that experience firsthand. After rising to the C-suite as a chief revenue officer, she was fired from t

Why do some teams bring out the best in people while others turn colleagues into competitors? The answer may lie in the way we structure power, status, and success. On this episode of Passion Struck, I sit down with Dr. Nir Halevy, a Stanford professor

What happens when you achieve the life you thought you wanted, only to realize you no longer feel connected to it? For John R. Miles, that question became impossible to ignore. After years of executive success, demanding workweeks, and responsibilities

What if the voice you use to motivate yourself is the very voice keeping you stuck? You push harder after a mistake. You judge yourself for falling short. You tell yourself that if you were more disciplined, more successful, or simply better, you would

What if the behaviors that made you successful are the same ones keeping you from feeling fulfilled? You learned to be dependable. You became the overachiever, the caretaker, the person who never asks for help. People praised your strength, relied on yo

What if the beliefs you hold about yourself, your future, and the world around you are shaping what happens next more than you realize? Shawn Achor, bestselling author and one of the leading voices in positive psychology, joins John R. Miles to explore

What if you can be successful, needed, productive, and admired, and still feel like you don't matter? That's the paradox at the heart of John R. Miles' new book, The Mattering Effect. In this special conversation, originally recorded for Mick Hunt's Mic

What if the biggest problem in your life isn't what's wrong with you—but what's happening to you?Burnout. Loneliness. Disconnection. Exhaustion. The feeling that you're constantly working, producing, improving, and performing, yet somehow becoming les

What if the way you’ve been taught to adapt is actually making you lose yourself?For weeks, The Adaptive Human has explored what it takes to navigate a world that keeps changing. Angela Duckworth showed us that our environments shape who we become. Ma

What if you're working harder and harder—but you're still moving in the wrong direction?Alec Litowitz learned this lesson during a mountain bike race in the Pyrenees, when hesitating before a blind downhill jump nearly sent him over the handlebars. Ye

What if the things we think are helping our children succeed are actually making it harder for them to become independent? Dr. Peter Gray has spent decades studying childhood, play, education, and human development. In his new book, Restoring Childhood,

Why What Matters Most Is Rarely the Loudest What if the things getting the most attention in your life aren't actually the things that matter most? We live in a world that rewards visibility. The viral headline. The impressive title. The dramatic turnar

What if the question you’re avoiding is the one you most need to answer? We often think courage means doing something difficult or frightening. But Scott Simon says the place people struggle most isn't physical courage—it’s having the courage to a

You're smart. You're informed. So why do you still make terrible decisions? We like to believe that intelligence and information protect us from bad decisions. They don't. Professor Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School and Fellow

What if the proof you're waiting for never comes? The apology. The promotion. The recognition. Someone finally admitting they were wrong about you. Someone finally telling you that you belong. What if you're waiting for proof that you don't actually nee