Simple Ways to Have a Good Life with James Scott Henson

It is strange to me that this generated some pushback when I posted about it on Instagram a few months back. We only know what we know, and if we surround ourselves with people that are familiar, it's impossible for us to know more than we already know.

Thick bubbles used to be the privilege of the wealthy, but the Internet has allowed us all to cultivate echo chambers that feed our own ideas back to us in the guise of likes and comments, making us think we are more right than we really are. This also creates a world where people who are different than us are faceless enemies, making our lives more fearful and anxiety-ridden than they need to be.

In this episode of Simple Ways To Have A Good Life we talk about thinning our bubble by being open to knowing and understanding the stories of people who live differently than us, come from different places, then believe things we might not believe.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl

It is sad that we are not taught this, but there is a difference between the things that arise in our internal experience without being invited and our response to those things. If someone wrongs us, we will feel anger, this is normal. Our power lies in what we do with that anger, and what kind of hold we allow it to have on us going forward.

This episode of Simple Ways to Have a Good Life is all about recognizing that space between stimulus and response, and using it to make our lives better.

We live in a world that offers us thousands of distractions in the guise of opportunities. If we aren’t careful we end up doing a large number of things really poorly, and we aren’t happy with the results. We try to be everywhere and end up being nowhere.

This episode of The Simple Ways to Haves a Good Life podcast is all about priorities and how we spend our time. Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - check out my website or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

We tend to overprioritize our internal experience. Our thoughts and our emotions can take a good day and turn it bad and they often claim knowledge of things they do not have knowledge of. As we look at these simple ways to have a good life, learning to meditate is one of the most important things we can do because it helps us change our relationship to all the things going on inside of us and it helps us learn that a great deal of it doesn't mean anything at all, much less mean as much as we think it does.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

Our ego cares more about us being alive than it does about us being happy, so it operates with an inherent negativity bias. This makes sense, and it's a good thing in many situations, but it can also run amok and make our lives really difficult. In this episode of The Simple Ways to Have a Good Life Podcast we take a look at this negativity bias and its effects on our lives, and we talk about a simple practice that can help minimize its impact on how we live day-to-day.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

Change can be scary, and it usually requires some work. Because of this, we often choose to feel justified in what we are already doing so that we don't have to pursue the process of change. The problem with this is that it keeps us locked into the things we're already doing whether they're working or not, and this prevents us from finding freedom in life. This is all complicated by the fact that there are armies of well-meaning people who will tell us that we are fine just the way we are. We talk about all of this and more in this episode of The Simple Ways to Have a Good Life Podcast.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

The things we “know” are often the source of so much of our trouble. We think we know things about how the world works, about how other people are, and about ourselves, and we allow these things to become unwritten rules that dictate and limit our lives.

In this episode of The Simple Ways to Have a Good Life podcast we take a look at the things we supposedly know, talk about how to deconstruct them, and explore the concept of friendly curiosity as a way of living in a world full of possibilities instead of a world limited by what we think we know.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

When it comes to simple ways to have a good life, the ideas that we shed are every bit as important as anything we can learn.

One of the first things we have to shed is our identification with our suffering.

We live in a world that encourages us to suffer, to identify with our suffering, and even to validate or justify ourselves through our suffering. This will always tie us to that suffering because we think it's part of “us”, and how can we ever escape from something that is “us”?

In this episode, we talk about the difference between pain and suffering, how the ideas we accept about ourselves impact us, and what it means to accept our pain without turning it into suffering.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

This is the first in what is going to be a long series about the simplest ways to have a good life. I've worked with people for close to 20 years now, and I thought it might be useful to take everything I've learned over those years and turn it into a series of episodes for the podcast.

It's become clear to me over the past two decades that a majority of the things that are best for us are more about shedding what we think we know than about learning something new, so we’ll start the series by talking about the issue of identity.

All the things that we think are “us” and help us define ourselves simultaneously lock us into patterns of behavior and thought that make it very hard to change. This episode is all about that.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.

This episode is all about nonattachment: what that means, what it means for the people in our lives, and how this looks when we approach it in an unhealthy way.

I've studied nonattachment for close to a decade now, but even with that, it took me a while to get this podcast out because it's such an important topic. In my early life I embraced a toxic perspective on nonattachment due to my emotional immaturity and how deeply I was suffering. This was messy.

Since then, I've explored the idea of healthy nonattachment and I think it's one of the more important things we can cultivate so long as we do it from the right mindset in the right perspective.

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Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram. I also have a free resource library with a bunch of cool things you can have with no obligation. Check it out here.