Najwa Zebian is a Lebanese-Canadian activist, author, speaker, and educator who developed a passion for language at a young age, immersing herself in Arabic poetry and novels. As someone who found herself repeated displaced, leaving Lebanon for Canada when she was 16, not realizing it wasn’t just a trip, but rather a permanent change, would she’d find herself searching for a home—what Najwa describes as a place where the soul and heart feel at peace, a quest that continues into her adult life.Her passion for language, quest to understand her place in the world and compassion for those who’ve been displaced and disenfranchised led her to pursue a Ph.D. in education. But it was an experience teaching young refugees that rekindled her love of writing, after having left it behind because of an association with pain. She began to heal her sixteen-year-old self by writing to heal her students. Since self-publishing her first collection of poetry and prose in 2016, Najwa has become an inspiration to millions of people worldwide, and a trailblazing voice for women everywhere.Drawing on her own experiences of displacement, discrimination, and abuse, Najwa uses her words to encourage others to build a home within themselves; to live, love, and create fearlessly. Her new book, Welcome Home, invites us to explore how to create that feeling we so yearn for within ourselves first, before looking outside.You can find Najwa at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Humble the Poet about defining your own identity in a world where you don’t seem to fit the mold.My new book Sparked.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam J. Kurtz (whose artist’s identity is Adam JK, is a designer, artist, and speaker whose work is rooted in emotional honesty, humor and even a little bit of darkness, but always with the intention of connection, honoring the reality of any given moment, and being honest. He’s been making and sharing on the internet since age creating his first fan website at twelve years old, eventually went to school for graphic design and learned to express, in his words “slightly too much." Adam’s work embraces the world with a certain "backhanded optimism" and a dark sense of humor or what he describes as "positivity adjacent." And he speaks frankly about channeling human emotion into art, and generally just trying to be more okay with whatever we've got and wherever we are in life. This comes out, often, in the form of hand-lettered aphorisms and illustrations that you’ll find all over the internet and social platforms, as well as in books, merch, prints, stationary and brand-focused gifts under his ADAMJK® brand. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages and his offbeat, fun and irreverent creative work has been featured everywhere from NYLON and Adweek to Vice, The New Yorker, and more. In his newest book, You Are Here (For Now): A Guide to Finding Your Way, Adam steps more fully into his writer side, sharing longer-form stories, insights, and ideas. We dive into all of this, how his lens and work have been shaped by an othrodox religious upbringing, what led him down the path of zagging when everyone else was zigging, how his move from New York to Hawaii has changed him and so much more.You can find Adam at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Morgan Harper Nichols about art and life.My new book Sparked-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine being so drawn to a pursuit as a kid, it consumes most of your waking hours, rapidly becomes your identity, and is the thing you believe you’ll devote your life to, and then, in the blink of an eye, it’s taken away. That’s what happened to Maya Shankar, who fell in love with the violin as a small child, studied it with love and devotion, was being mentored by the legendary Itzhak Perlman, and was sure it would be her profession for life. Until, an injury took it all away in the blink of an eye. How that moment affected her, and how she’d eventually discover a new, equally fulfilling devotion years later - human behavior and cognitive science - is a big part of today’s conversation, along with a deep dive into how we change our minds.Maya is currently the Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google and is the Creator, Host, and Executive Producer of “A Slight Change of Plans”, a podcast with Pushkin Industries. Maya previously served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House's Behavioral Science Team — a team of scientists charged with improving public policy using research insights about human behavior. She has been profiled by the New Yorker and has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, Forbes, and on NPR's All Things Considered, Freakonomics, and Hidden Brain. You can find Maya at: Website | A Slight Change of Plans podcastIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Brené Brown about how we show up in our work and life. My new book Sparked-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joanne Molinaro was deep into her career as a full-time attorney when she started blogging as The Korean Vegan, a nod to both her heritage and her curiosity about reimagining the cuisine she grew up on. She soon after launched a TikTok account that exploded and, along with her other platforms, boasts over 3.5 million fans. She’s appeared on The Food Network and Al Jazeera English, been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and CNN, and has just released her debut cookbook + memoir, The Korean Vegan Cookbook.A Korean American woman, born in Chicago, Joanne’s parents were both born in what is now known as North Korea. Their harrowing journey to the states led them to settle in Chicago. From her earliest days, she was deeply aware of inequity and felt an empathic call to advocacy, along with the impulse to help guide people through a process of change. That led her into the law, which remained her central devotion, literally, until the day before we recorded this conversation. Her TikTok (@thekoreanvegan), was started largely as a coping mechanism for the isolation caused by the global pandemic. She began posting content related to politics and life as a lawyer during quarantine. However, after a single post of her making Korean braised potatoes for dinner (while her husband taught a piano lesson in the background) went viral, Joanne shifted her attention to producing 60-second recipe videos while telling stories about her life, family, and the state of the world. She discovered an entirely new channel for advocacy and artistry in this most unusual place, one that both allows millions of people to see themselves in the stories, cultures, and yes, food, of others, and also serves as a powerful mechanism to advocate for inclusivity and change.You can find Joanne at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with MILCK about creativity, music, carving your own path and representation.My new book Sparked-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1992, after years of teaching workshops on creative unblocking, Julia Cameron self-published The Artist's Way, which became a global phenomenon that sold millions of copies, was translated into 40 languages, and anchors companion workshops that have brought creativity into the mainstream conversation. Along the way, Julia has authored more than 40 books, plays and screenplays, written for Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and The New York Times, and collaborated with legends of television and movies, including Martin Scorsese, who would, for a time, become her partner in life as well. A few years back, I had a great opportunity to sit down with Julia in her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a beautifully honest and open, deep-dive conversation that ranged from her upbringing to her entrée into the writing life, her years-long struggle with addiction and awakening from it, her time in Hollywood, swept up in the world of movies, and her fierce commitment to her craft and to helping others find their creative voices and let them out. So excited to share this Best Of conversation with you.You can find Julia at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Chase Jarvis about the creative calling.My new book Sparked.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At the age of 24, living in Ibiza, Matt Haig stepped to the ledge of a cliff with the intention of launching himself to his end. But something pulled him back. That experience led him and his girlfriend, who’d eventually become his wife, back to his childhood home where Matt would begin the process of picking up the pieces of his life. A writer, he kept that season of profound darkness, revelation, and recovery within his family, while he deepened into a career as a novelist and children’s book author. But years later, a simple blog post that he never thought anyone would see effectively outed that experience, leading to a book a year later called Reasons to Stay Alive that became a massive bestseller and also expanded Matt’s notoriety into the world of personal growth. He’s since blended fiction and nonfiction, penning more novels, something exploring big existential questions, but in honest and accessible ways. His book, The Midnight Library, just hit 2 million copies sold, and Matt’s latest book, The Comfort Book is Haig’s life raft: it’s a collection of notes, lists, and stories written over a span of several years that originally served as gentle reminders to his future self that things are not always as dark as they may seem. You can find Matt at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Kate DiCamillo about writing, creativity, telling the truth, but always leaving readers with hope.My new book is available!Order Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive today!-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I first met Kristoffer Carer nearly a decade ago when he raised his hand to participate in the inaugural Good Life Project immersion. It was a yearlong deep dive into work and life that we ran for about 5 years. Kristoffer or KC as most people call him, was running fast. I wasn’t sure if he was running toward something as much as he was running from it. In the end, like most of us, it was probably both. A married dad of three living in Ohio and working at a Chicago ad-tech startup after exiting life as a touring musician, he stumbled upon a book that would change the direction of his life. Our lives intersected just as that existential reimagining was shifting into high gear. There was this moment during our first weekend together, 15 strangers who’d become fast family in an industrial space in downtown Manhattan. I caught him out of the corner of my eye, sitting cross-legged against a 100-year-old wall of leaded windows, the light pouring in behind him. Hands laying open over his knees as he sat in meditation. It was a moment of powerful foreshadowing. In the ensuing years, KC would become an initiate of Yogananda’s Self Realization Fellowship, a Kriyaban yogi meditating hours a day. He’d find himself exiting his career to carve his own path, bridging the worlds of spirituality and business as an executive coach, founder of This Epic Life consultancy, and someone who remains fiercely devoted to bringing all parts of himself - the deeply spiritual yogi, the bouncing-off-the-walls kid and musician, the wise mentor, husband, and dad - to everything he does. In his words, full life integration. And along the way, he developed his own philosophy he calls the four permissions, which also happens to be the focus of KC’s new book, Permission to Glow: A Spiritual Guide to Epic Leadership.You can find KC at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Daniel Goleman about meditation, which it turns out, changes you, on the level of DNA.My new book is available!Order Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive today!-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mel Robbins is one of the leading voices in personal development and transformation and an international bestselling author. Her work includes the global phenomenon The 5 Second Rule, four #1 bestselling audiobooks, the #1 podcast on Audible, as well as signature online courses that have changed the lives of more than half a million students worldwide and now her groundbreaking new book, The High 5 Habit. As one of the most widely booked and followed public speakers in the world, Mel coaches more than 60 million people online every month and videos featuring her work have more than a billion views online, including her TEDx talk, which is one of the most popular of all time.But, I also know Mel in a different way. She’s a dear friend of mine, with a fierce intellect, a giant heart and desire to make a genuine difference in people’s lives, starting with her own. She shares, very publicly, her own inner dance with anxiety, compulsion, negativity, and judgment, in a real, relatable, non-sugar-coated way. Mel has found herself at the center of storms that left her thinking “I can’t take another thing” more than once. In fact, the last few years landed her in just such a tornado of calamity. Yet, somehow, in those moments, she seems to gain access to ideas that become tools that turn everything around. And the moment she feels their impact in her own life, she’s off on a quest to understand how and why they work, then share them with the world. This is what she did with The 5 Second Rule and, now, The High 5 Habit, which became her second global phenomenon before the book was even released. We dive into The High 5 Habit, but also explore her take on relationships, parenting, mindset, vulnerability, transparency and beyond.You can find Mel at: The High 5 Challenge | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Brené Brown about vulnerability and bravery.My new book is available!Order Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive today!-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So question for you: When was the last time you did something where it was so immersive, so enjoyable it so captivated, the essence of who you are that you completely lost track of time? You just vanished into the experience, the activity, the moment, the conversation, the relationship, like the world around you ceased to exist. The only thing that you became aware of, if you were even aware of that, was you and the thing that you were doing, or the person or the group of people that you were engaging with or all of those things, but everything outside of that, it just vanished away. And you felt like in that one moment in time, whether it lasted a minute, whether it lasted an hour, whether it lasted a day or a week or a month for whatever window that happened, it was like, the world was, as it should be, your world was, as it should be, you are doing the thing that you were here to do with people.What if the way you work could give you that feeling? Sounds bizarre, right? It sounds like it's some sort of, you know, like utopian far-off dream. But what if that was a lie?What if there was a way to do the thing that you do and have it feel that way? Not just losing yourself in flow, but also you feel like a sense of purpose. Like you're working towards something that actually matters to you, a sense of meaning, like who you are and what you're doing is meaningful. That is what my new book's Sparked is all about. And along the way beyond the massive dataset we've gathered, that shows that you can experience this, have been story, after story, after story, after story use cases, applications, individuals showing up and sharing how they have integrated these ideas into their work and life. And today I'm going to share two of those stories with you. Amazing, powerful, moving, insightful stories, about two people who have done incredible things and continue to do incredible things and have explored how this thing called the Sparketype integrates into the way they do it. So excited to share this conversation with you.If you LOVED this episode:I have a single ask: Join me on this journey. Pick up a copy of SPARKED wherever you buy books. We’ll drop links to various booksellers. Dive into it, discover your own personal Sparketype. Then begin to bring it to the world. Because right now, we need people who’ve come alive, more than ever. Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books-a-Million | iTunes | Audible Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode will be unlike any conversation we’ve ever aired on Good Life Project. For the first time on the podcast, I’m on the other side of the mic. And, to be honest, the thought of it kind of terrifies me. Even now, with it’s recorded and I know how it went and what’s on tape, it still kind of terrifies me. I’m pretty comfortable asking the questions, and even answering questions on other people’s shows. This, however, is different. Today, I asked my dear friend, big-hearted human, renowned keynote speaker, community builder, “personal power alchemist,”* bestselling author, and all-around truth-teller, Cyndie Spiegel, to sit in the interviewer’s seat and not let me off the hook. That’s exactly what she did, in the kindest, but also realest way possible. I trusted her to push me into places I never go, topics I never speak about. This was a conversation that made me squirm, in the best of ways.Why would I do this? Because, by the time you’re listening to this, my new book SPARKED, will be out, or literally hours away. It’s a book about being seen, reclaiming agency and control, reimagining the way we work, and the way our work makes us feel. This book, it’s been a wild adventure that is so close to my heart in ways and on levels nothing else I’ve written has approached. Penned in the throes of the pandemic, living semi-nomadically for most of it, the journey to get here has been equally hard, beautiful, heartbreaking, heart-opening, eye-opening, and transformative. I wanted to sit down with someone who knows me well enough, who I trust enough, to take me to all those places of discomfort and vulnerability that I rarely talk about on the air. Sure, we touch into the big ideas and key awakening and insights in the book, but this conversation is about so much more. The creative process, the role of vulnerability, love, devotion, revelation, and grace.I’m both freaked out, and incredibly excited to share it with you. I’m Jonathan Fields, turning the mic over to Cyndie Spiegel, and this is Good Life Project.If you LOVED this episode:I have a single ask: Join me on this journey. Pick up a copy of SPARKED wherever you buy books. We’ll drop links to various booksellers. Dive into it, discover your own personal Sparketype. Then begin to bring it to the world. Because right now, we need people who’ve come alive, more than ever. Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books-a-Million | iTunes | AudibleCheck out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.