Episodios

  • Do You Truly Accept and Understand Your Underlying Personality Traits?
    Jun 22 2018
    Many people wish they were different. They compare themselves with others and think that life would be better if only they had their traits, gifts, and confidence. They struggle to accept their nature, and in so doing fail to enjoy everything their uniqueness brings. “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” - Howard Thurman Think about it for a second. What the world needs is for you to conform to its own needs. It needs you to buy the stuff it says you need. It needs you to be predictable. What the world needs is for you to fit in and be like everyone else. In other words, it needs you to rely on the stuff it paints as important, and neglect the stuff that actually matters to you. Perhaps this is better described as what the world "wants". Because as Thurman says, what the world actually "needs" is people who have come alive. A world of people who have come alive is a world of love, creativity, and acceptance. It's a world where people live at peace with themselves, and in full acceptance of the aliveness of everyone else. Stop asking what the world wants from you. Forget trying to change in order to fit in better. Look at what brings you joy, and accept those parts of yourself. What brings you to a place of flow? Do those things and the wants, comparisons, envy, and unhealthy competitiveness will naturally drain away. In this episode of the podcast we look at these ideas in more depth. We examine the first of three disciplines that come from Stoic Philosophy, which is a great help to us as we think about how to thrive as introverts and sensitive types in the modern world. How can you accept who you are? We consider the Big 5 Personality Traits, and what they can teach us about how who we are is both fixed and flexible. By accepting what is fixed, we are able to develop our temperamental flexibility. I share why personality is like a bead on a rubber band. It's my hope that by the end of the episode you will see that you have more control over your personality than you might otherwise think.
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    34 m
  • Sustaining Your Creative Practice (with Steve Lawson)
    Sep 26 2025
    Is the audience more than a gaggle of consumers? What role do they play in the creative process of an artist? Should they, as Rick Rubin says, "come last"? Are they always right? Or is there a more nuanced and sustaining way to approach this question? In this episode of The Gentle Rebel, I explore this question with Steve Lawson. I bumped into Steve towards the end of the summer at Greenbelt Festival. We rapidly got deep in conversation about his recently completed PhD, A Study Towards a New Model for Subscriber Audience Involvement in Improvised Music. Steve’s approach to music-making and creative practice has always resonated with me. Over the past twenty-five years, he has carved out a living as a solo improvisational bass player, developing a thoughtful and sustainable model for art that resists the common assumptions that drive an obsession with numbers and scale. His thesis turns that lived experience into a lens for questioning many of the assumptions baked into how we think about creativity today. https://youtu.be/BB362bVySiI Notes from our conversation... The Audience Comes With What happens if we treat the audience as part of the story that shapes and sustains our practice? A way of looking at the influential relationship between artist and audience is to create spaces where the rationale (the philosophical approach) can be presented, and work can emerge as part of a conversation with the audience. For Steve, listening to how people (who respect your work) engage with it, whether “that reminds me of…” or “my Dad just died and all I can listen to is you,” becomes so much more meaningful than having a reviewer who doesn’t know what you are doing or why, and place it in a pile of other CDs. What matters is how people relate it to their lives, and what it means to them. Creating spaces for this dialogue became central: a mailing list, website forum, Twitter, and eventually a subscription model through Bandcamp. Non-Algorithmically Defined Community Spaces This meant integrating community with the economic rationale for making music. The audience emotionally sustains the music and financially supports its creation, along with the maintenance of the space where both artist and audience belong as equals. When the audience has already paid for the music before it is made, there is no need to rationalise it with hype or spectacle. Instead, it connects with people who already share the philosophical approach. This is a form of patronage, supporting the artist because of how they create, not only what they make. Scenius (Brian Eno) Genius is not an individual trait but the manifestation of the collective intelligence of a scene. Famous names are simply the visible tip of a larger iceberg, as with Russian painters in the early twentieth century. Reception Theory (Stuart Hall) Audiences actively interpret media texts by encoding and decoding. They may align with the intended meaning (dominant reading), reject it (oppositional reading), or negotiate it. Instrumental music does not encode meaning in a concrete way. Its sense of meaning emerges cumulatively, with artist and audience encoding together. Decoding and recoding become a collective process, shaped by new work and ongoing observations. The Space of the Talkaboutable (David Darke) Great works expand the “space of the talkaboutable,” an invitation to discuss ideas and broaden horizons. While Darke sees this as arriving around the work, Steve sees the space as built first (through mailing lists, forums, Twitter, Bandcamp), with the work then released into it. Meaning is collectively encoded, decoded, and recoded in this shared space. “The Audience Comes Last” The PhD began with the desire to make better music. What became clear was how much the audience contributes to the process, and what happens when that is denied. Rubin’s statement that the audience should be ignored overlooks the wisdom, care,
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    1 h y 24 m
  • Hypervigilance and High Sensitivity (The HSP Owner’s Guide)
    Sep 20 2025
    In this week’s episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we look at the relationship between sensory processing sensitivity and hypervigilance. As we finish our journey through the first HSP Owner’s Guide, we turn our attention to hypervigilance. that feeling of being permanently “switched on,” unable to stop scanning for danger, even when we’re safe. For highly sensitive people, vigilance is a natural part of sensory processing sensitivity. It helps us read the room, pick up subtle cues, and stay attuned to what is happening beneath the surface. But when vigilance tips into hypervigilance, it can leave us in a state of chronic over-arousal, disconnection, and exhaustion. In the episode, we explore why hypervigilance is such a common experience for HSPs, how it shows up in everyday life, and ways we might support our nervous systems in returning to a sense of safety and connection. I examine hypervigilance within a social and cultural context for HSPs, rather than from a clinical or individual psychological perspective. https://youtu.be/RCvrgSJH73I Vigilance vs. Hypervigilance Vigilance is an intrinsic feature of sensory intelligence. It anchors us in the awareness to notice and predict useful information to help us survive and thrive together. Hypervigilance is what happens when vigilance overspills, and we get stuck in a state of alertness with limited capability to move our nervous system into a state of connection. This can have roots in early life (especially for HSPs who are more impacted by their formative environments). But it can also develop over time because of the pressures and rhythms of the modern world, with constant notifications, cultural glorification of busyness, and a never-ending expectation to perform and prove our worth. Possible Signs of Hypervigilance Hypervigilance is not always dramatic. Often it shows up quietly and gradually, for example you might notice: Feeling flat or detached, as if life is happening behind glass Difficulty taking action, even on small plans Unusual tearfulness Brain fog and trouble focusing Ruminating thoughts on repeat Disrupted sleep cycles Anxiety or panic attacks seemingly “out of nowhere” Harsh self-criticism or low self-esteem If these feel familiar, they may be signs that your nervous system has been in “stay safe” mode for a long time. Why Hypervigilance Happens Hypervigilance is the nervous system’s over-lean into the message, “stay safe by staying alert.” This is obviously appropriate in certain contexts, but when we carry this story everywhere, it takes its toll and can be a difficult pattern to get out of. Some common contributing factors include: Early Environments: Growing up in conflict or unpredictability can train the nervous system to always be on guard, especially in volatile environments where safety could be torn away at a moment's notice. Past Experiences: The nervous system may overlearn from painful experiences, remaining alert to avoid “ever letting that happen again.” Cultural Pressures: Hustle culture, social media outrage cycles, and global crises all create a background hum of threat. Worldview and Meaning-Making: Certain belief systems (political, religious, ideological) can divide the world into “us vs. them,” keeping us in a state of perpetual alertness to nefarious outside actors. Physiological Factors: Poor sleep, hormone shifts, or nutritional deficiencies can lower our threshold for perceiving danger. These are rarely isolated and often overlap in ways that reinforce one another. Meeting Hypervigilance with Creative Gentleness A helpful (though, not easy) way to meet everyday hypervigilance is to slow things down. Not necessarily by stopping altogether, but by letting engagement become gentler and more deliberate. Rather than rushing to solve, fix, or control, we can allow space to notice small sensory glimmers,
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    32 m
  • As a Man Thinketh (A History of Self-Help)
    Sep 6 2025
    I had not heard of James Allen before I started exploring this history of self-help. I saw references to his book, “As a Man Thinketh”, which was frequently cited as an influential text around the power of thought on manifesting circumstances. With our “It’s the thought that counts” theme in The Haven this month, my curiosity took me into a James Allen rabbit hole. I read three of his books: From Poverty to Power (his first), The Divine Companion (his last), and As a Man Thinketh (his most famous). I wanted to try getting a sense of where he was coming from in his philosophical worldview. He published around twenty books, all written within an eleven-year period, before he died in 1912 at just 47 years old. I do wonder how his ideas would have evolved if he had lived longer. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I share my response to As a Man Thinketh. I reflect on Allen’s ideas and their implications for the way we think about ourselves, one another, and the nature of reality. https://youtu.be/tVtG-Ahrkgw Why Am I Doing This Project? You may be wondering why I'm exploring self-help...Good question. I'm not completely sure. But I think it's because I’ve felt an intuitive nudge to explore this world and its function in culture. I don't know where it will take me (I have no overriding purpose or vision with it - sorry James!), or what I will find, but I have a sense that there are interesting things to discover by examining, not just the content that is common in the self-help genre, but the role the field plays in how we understand and judge ourselves, others, and the horizons of possibility for the world. As I find in this book, there are some interesting insights and invitations to explore. But it also carries the potential to be understood, embodied, and applied in dangerous and harmful ways, especially when Allen’s metaphors are mistaken for literal truths. This is where his philosophy, which initially sounds positive and empowering, becomes reductive and destructive when we examine its logical implications. It demonstrates rhetorical tricks that are echoed in modern-day personal development literature, such as metaphorical literalism. This is where poetic imagery and aphorisms are employed to support and prove otherwise baseless philosophies. How James Allen Described As a Man Thinketh As a Man Thinketh is intentionally short. Allen described it as a pocket book with teaching that all can easily grasp and follow. He said it shows how, in their own thought-world, each human holds the key to every condition, good or bad, that enters into our life. By working patiently and intelligently upon our thoughts, we may remake our life and transform our circumstances. The question I keep coming back to throughout this exploration is, does he mean this as a description or a prescription? And what difference does this make to our reading, interpretation, and application of these ideas? As a Man Thinketh - Notes Thought and Character “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." A person is the product of thought alone. The mantra “change your thoughts, change your life” is still repeated as if it were a scientific law rather than a metaphor. The Effect of Thought on Circumstances “Every man is where he is by the law of his being. The thoughts which he has built into his character have brought him there, and in the arrangement of his life there is no element of chance.” Prosperity and poverty, joy and suffering, always mirror the state of an individual’s mind. The Effect of Thought on Health and Body "The body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed." Thought is the source of health and sickness. Thought and Purpose “He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.” To avoid suffering,
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Overstimulation and High Sensitivity (The HSP Owner’s Guide)
    Aug 22 2025
    This post elaborates on the ‘overstimulation’ section of The HSP Owner’s Guide. In this week's episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we look at the relationship between sensory processing sensitivity and overstimulation. Overstimulation is a term we often hear when people talk about high sensitivity. It's the second word in the DOES acronym after Deep Processing and before Emotional Responsiveness or Empathy, and Sensing Subtleties as a description of core characteristics of the trait. But what do we actually mean by overstimulated? What does it look like? And is there anything we can do about it other than avoiding stimulating environments and situations? At the get-go, I want to answer that question with a resounding yes. We don’t have to write ourselves out of the situations, environments, and experiences that really matter to us. We have the capacity to build sustainable approaches to this stuff. https://youtu.be/qy8XxQe7_iU Responsiveness and Stimulation Because highly sensitive people are all different, it’s important to remember that sensitivity isn’t who we are. It’s more like the rails our nervous system runs on. It is often described as a spectrum of sensory responsiveness. Those on the high end take in a huge amount of sensory data and process it deeply. Those on the low end take in less, and most people are somewhere in the middle. As a species, we have evolved and benefit from individuals existing along this continuum. Environmental Sensitivity researchers describe this variation through the concept of differential susceptibility. Some individuals are more profoundly influenced by their environment, for better or worse. It’s not about weakness or fragility. It’s about responsiveness and depth of processing. Studies show that highly sensitive individuals flourish in supportive settings but face greater challenges in chaotic ones. I like to visualise this difference using microphones. A sensitive condenser mic is uniquely effective in quiet, controlled spaces. It picks up every subtle detail. But in a loud environment, it can get overwhelmed by noise. A dynamic mic has a narrower field of responsiveness and can work in almost any environment because it picks up less background noise. Both are useful, but for different purposes. This helps us remember that high sensitivity isn’t a flaw or superpower, it’s just a variation in human temperament, useful in some contexts and less so in others. What Overstimulation Looks Like Overstimulation can look different from individual to individual. It is caused by an overload of the nervous system with environmental, emotional, social, or cognitive information. It's not always evident to others when a highly sensitive person is overstimulated. Despite appearing calm or composed, HSPs may be grappling with intense physical discomfort or emotional distress due to nervous system overload. Rising levels of stress hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol exacerbate this heightened sensitivity, leading to strong reactions to excitement, tension, temperature changes, or sensory stimuli in the environment. What looks like calmness in a person might be a kind of shutting down. This happens to me when I've had too much stimulation - I can look really chilled out, but in actual fact I'm unable to function properly. You might experience: Physical symptoms of overstimulation Lightheadedness or dizziness Internal tremors (feeling shaky inside without visible shaking) Heart palpitations or irregular heartbeat sensations Nausea or digestive discomfort Temperature sensitivity Cognitive effects of overstimulation Difficulty concentrating or focusing on tasks Short-term memory lapses Mental fog or feeling disconnected from surroundings Racing thoughts Emotional responses Irritability disproportionate to the situation Sudden emotional surges, such as tears or outbursts of frustration
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    42 m
  • Exploring the History of Self-Help and the Rise of a Global Industry
    Aug 15 2025
    I’m starting a project exploring the history of self-help; where the ideas came from, how they’ve changed over time, and what they mean for us today. This episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast is my chance to set some intentions, explain why I feel drawn to do this, and share how you can get involved if you want to join me for the ride. I’m not starting this project with the end in mind. Sorry, Stephen Covey, but I’m rebelling against the second habit of highly effective people. I honestly don’t know how this will look or where it will take me. I’m just intrigued to dig into the backstory of personal development and positive thinking, and explore how it became an industry worth an estimated around $40 billion in 2024, projected to more than double by 2033. Self-help shapes how millions of us think about ourselves, our relationships, our struggles, and our potential. I want to look at where it came from, how it works, and what it’s doing to us now. https://youtu.be/GMowyoc4TeA This isn’t about belittling self-help I want to approach this with a curious and critical open mind, not a cynical one. I’ve personally gained insight, tools, and practices from authors in the personal development space. So, I have experienced the value of resources and authors under the broad self-help umbrella. But I do have some questions. One in particular that has long been on my mind...with the ideas in self-help are as widely adopted as they are, why haven’t they “worked” in the big-picture sense? Why now feels like a good moment to examine the rise of self-help We’re living in a strange mix of economic precarity, post-pandemic disorientation, the maturing of influencer culture, and now AI churning out self-help style advice at industrial speed. If self-help reflects and responds to the anxieties of its time, then this moment feels like a perfect point to ask whether it might be contributing to those same anxieties it claims to ease. The quote that caught my attention About 12 years ago, I read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. One idea in it has stuck with me ever since: “Perhaps you don’t need telling that self-help books… rarely much help. This is why some self-help publishers refer to the ‘eighteen-month rule’, which states that the person most likely to purchase any given self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months, purchased a self-help book—one that evidently didn’t solve all their problems.” I was a big reader of personal development books at the time, especially those that spoke to building online businesses around creativity. They gave me a sense of forward momentum and excitement about future possibilities, but I could also feel myself on a treadmill. Old dissatisfaction was replaced with new. That quote made me wonder if the self-help industry insists on not solving our problems. Which makes sense when you think about it...why would a market secure its own demise? It needs to keep inventing new problems to solve. Otherwise it collapses. The 18-month rule and endless repackaging Some people enjoy the sense of growth that comes from reading a new book, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But from my experience, a lot of them say the same thing in different clothing. Different anecdotes. Different metaphors. Same structure. So why do we keep reading? And why does the market keep producing more? The Mel Robbins example Earlier this year, I looked into whether Mel Robbins had plagiarised a poem by Cassie Phillips and made up the story that inspired her book The Let Them Theory. I bought and read the book as part of my research. It’s not my usual reading choice, and I hadn’t read a new personal development book in years. Two things struck me: The writing felt more like marketing copy than the work of a writer. The ideas weren’t new; just repackaged versions of stoicism,
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    20 m
  • Toxic Positivity is a Permanent State of Temporary Discomfort
    Aug 2 2025
    The internet is full of memes about positive thinking. I saw this quote a few days ago:"The only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude." At first glance, it contains some truth. Of course, the way we think about things can influence our relationship with them. But taken too far, this kind of thinking turns into something insidious and destructive. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we explore the darker side of positive thinking. https://youtu.be/E0JCsl_u_7M?si=XAHxf4c2LB578QIr I remember hearing someone suggest replacing 'have to' with 'get to' as a way to live with more gratitude for things we take for granted. Again, that can definitely be a useful reframe at times. But the associated claim that words impact thoughts and thoughts are the only thing that create our reality can quickly become an imprisoning and judgemental superstition. Toxic positivity encourages emotional suppression and shame, where anything other than optimism is considered weakness or failure. You've Only Got Yourself To Blame If we follow the logic that our thoughts dictate our reality to its extreme, we land in a society shaped by what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the achievement imperative. In this world, external rules are replaced by internal commands. We no longer respond to "you should" or "you must." Instead, we internalise the injunction to perpetually "live our passion," "find our purpose," and "optimise our potential." Han quotes Tony Robbins, who promotes this mindset by saying,"When you set a goal, you’ve committed to CANI (Constant, Never-Ending Improvement)! You’ve acknowledged the need that all human beings have for constant, never-ending improvement. There is a power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life." This leads to a permanent state of temporary discomfort. There is always something to optimise, improve, and change. Never rest. Never be satisfied. The Problem With Pathological Positivity Toxic positivity - we might describe it as pathological positivity (though I've seen a book of that name painting it as a desirable state of being, so that's a bit odd)- thrives on the belief that we should reframe negative thoughts. But there is a big difference between resistance and repression. A good comparison comes from Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor, founder of logotherapy and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. He wrote:"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way". Choosing Your Response vs Blaming Your Attitude Unlike self-help slogans, Frankl’s words do not offer easy comfort. He was not promoting positive thinking. He was describing something he observed in those who were stripped of their humanity and subjected to unimaginable suffering. For Frankl, attitude was not a shortcut to happiness or material prosperity, but a form of resistance and an expression of power over an oppressor. It was a way to maintain dignity in the face of dehumanisation. His message was not about pretending things are okay, but about facing reality with courage and integrity. This contrasts with James Allen’s 1903 As a Man Thinketh, often credited with laying the foundation for mindset-focused personal development and the Law of Attraction. Allen writes:"All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.""Suffering is always the effect of wrong thought." These statements are not just simplistic. They can be dangerous. They suggest that all suffering is self-inflicted, that illness, grief,
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    28 m
  • The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Still Has a Lot to Teach Us (a chat with Bo Miller)
    Apr 1 2018
    You may well be familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It's one of the most recognised and used personality tests in the world. It is based on the psychological theory of Carl Jung along with Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. In this week's podcast I chat with Bo Miller, who is an author, blogger, podcaster, introvert, and certified Myers-Briggs practitioner. He helps people identify and maximise their unique gifts through his website, iSpeakPeople. It's a site for INFJs (a Myers-Briggs personality type). However, Bo publishes great stuff for introverts of all colours. You can download his free ebook, The INFJ Personality Guide, which is a fantastically in depth look at life as an INFJ. Criticisms of The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator I loved talking to Bo about the MBTI, and its use in our lives. Over the years of working with introverts and sensitive types I have come across various critics of the test. It was lovely to talk with Bo though, who recognises that while it is not perfect, it carries a huge amount of value. It helps us better understand ourselves, others, and maximise our own impact on the world. Escaping Tribalism and Reductionistic Language Conversations about introversion can be deterministic; a pre-determined set of characteristics and values. Introverts have no control over what they are capable of...and what they are incapable of. We are good at building walls around ourselves, using labels to justify the behaviours and attitudes we want to get away with. But this is not helpful, necessary, or healthy. What I love about Bo Miller's approach to this topic is that he sees the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a tool we can use to free ourselves. It's not a tool to label and thus restrict our self-understanding, but one to help us better understand who we are and how we can create conditions in our lives for the best way of being. It's important for all of us to embrace this approach. To enjoy the validation of recognising ourselves in a certain personality profile, whether that's as an INFJ. But then to use it as a way to understand ourselves within the context of the richly spiced variety of humanity, of which we are but one small speck. In the interview you will learn: Why the MBTI is still relevant today What it helps us understand about ourselves and other people Why Bo wanted to be a licensed practitioner Bo's favourite kind of resources to create (as a podcaster, writer, YouTube creator etc) What advice Bo would impart to his younger self if he could How Bo balances family, work and business life, without burning out Over to You What did you enjoy about this interview? Has it changed anything in your understanding of yourself as an introvert? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Support the Podcast and get bonus extras:
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    48 m