I’m launching a new podcast next week and I’m excited to share it with you!

At the end of 2019, I wrote about the elderly in our society, whom we sadly treat as invisible and voiceless.

Here’s the other side of this: I have been given a voice, and yet, too often I’ve failed to raise it to speak up for what I deeply believe:

·      I believe we all have the capacity to learn and grow.
·      I believe authenticity is an essential foundation for growth.
·      I believe we are meant to be connected – to help one another along the way.

I intend to keep raising my voice. In the past, I’ve done this primarily through writing – books, blogs, newsletters, articles and essays. Although I’ll continue to write, I’ve found an additional medium that I believe lends itself especially well to a community wishing to foster authentic growth and learning: podcasts.

According to a recent Forbes article, if 2018 was the year of video, 2019 will be the year of audio. Over 73 million Americans listen to podcasts each month, and over half of them spend somewhere between one to five hours each week listening to podcasts.

The reasons most people point to for the rapid rise in podcast popularity are convenience and ease of multi-tasking. Podcasts are also easy to access. They are readily available to any of us, downloadable from iTunes, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. What’s more, podcasts are free and that they can be listened to on computers, smartphones and smartspeakers.

These are all good reasons for listening to podcasts. But I believe there’s an even more important reason for us to increasingly engage with each other on the podcast medium.

The words I speak to you are more intimate, personal and real than words I write on a page or on a computer screen.

Although my intention never has been to fool my readers, I believe that writing as a medium of communication is particularly susceptible to inauthenticity and deceitfulness. We’ve all heard the advice: E-mail is one of the worst means of communication when trying to resolve a relationship issue. Not only is there a good chance that the recipient reads your message in a different way than you intended it. Written words, themselves, too often hide what we really mean to say – sometimes even from ourselves.

UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian developed a model that has become one of the most widely referenced statistics in communications:

·      7% of a message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken.
·      38% of a message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said).
·      55% of a message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the facial expression.

No wonder the feelings and attitudes we attempt to communicate via written words so often go astray.

In fact, fairly recent neurological evidence shows that effective communication physically reverberates in the brain of the listener, echoing the feelings and attitudes of the speaker by inducing and shaping specific neurological responses. A remarkable study led by Princeton University’s Greg Stephens determined through MRI brain scans that in both the speaker and the listener, similar regions of the brain fired when engaged in verbal communication. Our brain cells actually synchronize during successful oral communication!

As the study reports:
“The findings shown here indicate that during successful communication, speakers’ and listeners’ brains exhibit joint, temporally coupled response patterns. Such neural coupling substantially diminishes in the absence of communication. Moreover, more extensive speaker-listener neural couplings result in more successful communication.”

Stephens further argues that the more meaningful the conversation, the more deeply the listeners’ minds meld in rapport with the speaker.

I’m all in!
What an exciting way for us to connect in 2020 on our journey toward ever more authentic conversations.

My new podcast series, titled Becoming Who You Truly Are, will launch on January 13, 2020. There will be ten weekly episodes in this first season. The show will reveal inspirational stories of people who’ve faced horrific adversities head-on, and in the process have uncovered who they truly are and what’s possible in their lives.

For example, I’ll bring you the thinking of New York Times best-selling author Larry Dossey, M.D., who proposes that we’re all part of an infinite, collective dimension of consciousness he calls the One Mind. Rita Berglund will inspire you as she shares important lessons that her journey through her son’s illness and death taught her about suffering, trust, self-care and courage. Those are only two of the ten. I’m committed to exploring with you the unvarnished and authentic truth about these ten remarkable people so that we may all grow as a result.

Click here to subscribe to the podcast.

Let’s deeply meld our minds and raise our voices together in 2020!