The Solo Collective

We're launching season 2 of The Solo Collective on Thursday 29th July Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s said that loneliness can increase your risk of death by 26% and poor social connections are as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Being a solo or an at-home worker increases your chances of being lonely, something our host Rebecca Seal dealt with and a feeling that led to the creation of The Solo Collective. Chartered Psychologist and Author of How to Build a Healthy Brain, Kimberley Wilson joins us for the series finale. We explore how we can stop it in its tracks by learning about loneliness and celebrate the working revolution as a united front instead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will be the least awkward conversation you’ll hear about money. Historically, we tend to tie our self-worth to how much we’re earning. In this week’s episode, we’re delving into money, status and self-worth discussing how this tension impacts our friendships and our jobs. Elizabeth Uviebinené is an author, The Reset: Ideas to Change How We Work and Live and writer for The Financial Times. She explains why we need to reframe how we think about not just the practicalities of money but also how our brains interact with those readies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adrienne Herbert, author of The Power Hour and a motivational speaker, shares her journey of resilience, emphasizing the importance of recovery in overcoming adversity. She discusses how personal struggles, including her husband’s stroke, shaped her understanding of resilience. Adrienne highlights the necessity of structured downtime, likening it to interval training, and advocates for self-reflection and balance in managing solo work. Listeners are encouraged to embrace personal growth through life's seasons with kindness and patience.

WARNING: This episode will make you hungry. Studies show that taking a lunch break allows your mind to rest, recharge and refocus, which can directly improve your productivity for the rest of the day. Working from home has many benefits but one of the best ones has to be the opportunity to serve up something delicious to eat rather than a bland sandwich grabbed on the go. Signe Johansen is a big advocate of a solo lunch and is the author of Solo: The Joy of Cooking for One. The book is all about becoming more selfish in the kitchen and is full of recipes for happy solo cooking; celebrating the art of cooking for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Working from home can be difficult. Working from home with housemates, a partner or children is super difficult. Jennifer Petriglieri knows all about this. She’s an associate professor at INSEAD and author of Couples That Work: How Dual-Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work. She’s also spent over a decade researching how people’s close relationships shape who they become professionally, and personally. Now, more than ever, it’s so important to adjust to a healthier way of working. Hopefully, that way we can keep those important relationships around us healthy too.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Could your home working space be making you less focused? Oliver Heath thinks it might well be. The interior designer and sustainable architect explains how the buildings we inhabit and work in have an enormous impact on our lives. Now more than ever. Multiple studies have shown that nature can play a valuable role with the benefits of plants and greenery adding personalisation and improving air quality to our lives. But it’s more than just adding a pot plant to the desk. We find out how textures, colours and even the smells we surround ourselves with can have a profound effect on how we work.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’ve been getting the idea of productivity all wrong.In this episode, we unpack the ingrained ideas of efficiency, its history, psychology, philosophy, and more to discover how we got so obsessed with hustling and how that obsession fuelled by the likes of the Beyonces and Elon Musks of the world, often hurt our creative output. Rebecca is joined by Rahaf Harfoush, (Author of Hustle and Float) she challenges our view of productivity and our belief systems surrounding how to achieve fulfilment and happiness in our lives. BTW it’s not about working a billion hours a week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Henry Holland’s witty Fashion Groupie t-shirts were the things to be seen in when he launched his iconic brand back in the late aughts. But the pandemic has devastated many industries and House of Holland was one of those to go under in March last year. In conversation with Rebecca, the London designer looks back on the dissolution of his company but shares his gratitude for everything he’s learned as a solo entrepreneur and the resolve it’s given him - from building an empire from the ground up to surrounding yourself with the right people to propel you into a positive future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When was the last time you had a nap? Alex Soojung-Kim Pang advocates an afternoon one and believes that overworking can actually hinder productivity. With so many of us working from home, that chance to rest is now available more than ever so why not take that break away from your desk starting today? It can help reset the brain in a way that is far more beneficial than we might think, allowing us to explore more ideas creatively and help with problem-solving. In this episode, Pang shares how we can empower these new practices into our day-to-day as solo workers and reap the benefits.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.