The Kevin Miller Podcast

I’ve spent a lifetime doing. Achieving and building and creating and adding. And now I find that what I most want is peace. I’m 54 and I’m tired. Not physically tired. But emotionally. The past four years have been a time of deconstructing and dismantling and letting go of most everything I held dear. I have encountered the most difficult time of my life and along with it the most enlightening time. And I am experiencing peace like never before and finding it more fulfilling than any achievement. I will soon be sharing a construct that I have found to be truly revolutionary for my own peace and joy. But I’m concerned that when we look to offer happiness and peace and purpose to the world, we don’t realize that many, possibly a majority of people, don’t really want happiness, peace, and purpose. Or do we simply want to feel good in the moment? We want pleasure and riches and fame, even if we’re miserable at heart? There is some startling research that points to this and I want to talk with you about getting real with what you really want and quite possibly help reveal what is actually driving you and very likely at the root of your continued discontent. I’m going to cite a study that for me, belies a very important and I feel tragically dangerous revelation about our culture today. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have done a number of podcasts on calling, but as I don’t believe anyone has the definitive definition of what a calling is and what your’s might be, I am a fan of a continued discussion with various experts. I spent many years talking about calling and purpose as some holy grail discovery. Even as I did so many different things vocationally and personally, all the while feeling very fulfilled and inspired in my work. It wasn’t until I had kids in high school and became concerned about finding that big, one thing, that I started to understand calling not just as one role, but more as a position I can engage with in many, many areas. A few years ago I sat down with someone I learned to view as a sage regarding calling. My Dad, Dan Miller, famed author of 48 Days To The Work & Life Love. He helped so many people expand their understanding of themselves and what they had to offer. Which was offerings that transferred to many, many applications. He’d so often find someone who had been wildly successful in the corporate world or in business or even areas of life like athletics or politics, but whose role in those areas came to an end. And they had no idea how to transfer their skills to something else. And for that matter, were not clear on what their skills were. And how they related to what really called to their hearts. So in this conversation we discuss the myth of a narrow calling, and even address what a true “calling” is anyway. My father passed away, but his profound work lives on at 48days.com. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do we all have some creative ability in us? Yes. Can we learn and grow to be more creative? Yes. Should we all be living as “creatives?” I question this. But what creativity we have, whether it’s art, ideas, businesses, innovations, or solutions to problems, how can we best go from the idea or concept, to actually doing and delivering something? I don’t want to do something with every creative idea I have, but with the ones that matter, I’d be lying if I said I just made them all happen. I don’t always, and I haven’t always understood why. Which is why I have for you today, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle is a senior research scientist at Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence where she studies the process of making something both original and effective, which is how she defines creativity, and explains how turning those ideas into reality always starts with the choice to act, or what she calls the creativity choice. It is a choice that must be made again and again until one’s creative ideas take shape. She has a new book called just that, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action. In this conversation we discuss not only what it takes to get started with our creative ideas but the psychological and emotional tools needed to sustain the creative process. I really appreciate Zorana coming at this as a true scientist and not telling us it’s just easy. She claims the creative process is hard, and when it comes to the original idea and presenting something useful to humanity, I agree. I feel we do a disservice to people when we try to encompass things into a little formula we sell as “easy.” I find few things of value to be very easy. Simple maybe, but seldom easy.  So here we walk through the three parts of Zorana’s Creative Process and as you will hear, we discuss the  necessary ingredients, but ingredients you must assemble in a unique way for your unique self. You can find Zorana’s book, The Creativity Choice, anywhere, and connect with her at her website zorana-ivcevic-pringle.com Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In my experience almost everyone has a platform that provide the possibility and opportunity of influence. As a parent, as a spouse, if you work with other people, if you are involved in athletics or go to church, if you’re in school and more. Basically with anyone you are in consistent communication and/or proximity. Though to have influence you must have true relationships. And trust. And for that you need to be expressing your authentic self. This is the topic of the episode, and I bring back to you, Brianna Brown Keen. Brianna is an accomplished actress, appearing in more than 20 feature films and 30 television shows and most recently she had a featured role in season four of the Outer Banks series playing the character of Hollis Robinson. She defines her acting role as being “paid to pretend” and cites being in the business of rejection. What attracted me to Brianna was her use of her platform to go deeper with people. She wrote a book called Manifesting Your Mission where she helps guide people to pursue and achieve what they truly desire. Since this conversation, she’s also started a podcast of the same name where you will find one of her initial guests was, me. We talk about using your platform to really engage with people, being yourself, and everyone having art. I really appreciate her place in Hollywood where self-expression, rejection, and acclaim are in a very heightened and exaggerated forms and felt it helped me better conceptualize and better appreciate the challenges we all face. Find Brianna at www.briannabrownkeen.com and tune into her podcast, Manifesting Your Mission Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’m tempted to start by saying, “If you’ve ever gone through a significant transition…” but I’m not going to. I bet everyone listening has had something end that they didn’t choose, and chances are 99.9% that you didn’t come through unscathed. In this episode I’m going to share a message that has been a guiding light to me in recent, difficult times. Every week you tune in to hear me talk with an expert in Human Potential, usually with a new book that compiles their research. But I spend even more time reading and researching many experts who are no longer living. I’ve mentioned many times the idea of a “dead author” series. Today I’m going to do just that, share a message that has been profound to me and my life, from an expert who is no longer with us. William Bridges was an American author, speaker, and organizational consultant. He emphasized the importance of understanding transitions as a key for organizations to succeed in making changes. He says transition is the psychological process of adapting to change. But his last book was completely personal after the death of his wife and the book, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments was recommended to me by a recent guest after he found out about my own, current experience with transition. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Therapy gives much focus to our past, where modern day success coaching is focused primarily on the future. I advocated coaching and had no interest in the past. That is, until I realized I wanted to understand why I kept repeating the same patterns. Today I feel both are needed in order to better understand ourselves. In the field of positive psychology the idea is to look at your past, and while acknowledging the struggles and traumas, look at how they uniquely equip you to have strengths you would not have otherwise. And then, not just looking at what you want now. What else. But also, what is going right in your world this moment, not just what is going wrong or is missing. I’m revisiting the conversation I had with Niyc Pidgeon author, award winning positive psychologist, and high performance coach. I found Niyc to be an insightful and vivacious thought-leader who has had a profound impact on some big influencers, including Elon Musk. Niyc’s muse and the focus of her book, Now Is Your Chance, is what perspectives will enable us to continue instead of quit? How will we more healthfully in regards to our perceived commitments? I find Nycs perspective flying in the face of today’s negative media influences that are dragging much of the culture down and feel she gives us a breath of fresh air regarding how to find opportunities from our challenges. You can connect with Niyc at niycpidgeon.com Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome. I'm Kevin Miller and this is a podcast for your personal evolution.  In this episode  Will A Better World Really Benefit Us & If Not - What Actually Will I’ve struggled with technology and conveniences and efficiency for a long time. All our human advancements with tech and now AI and such are promoted as if they will finally make everything better and us, happier. But I have not experienced any technological advance that has added to my happiness, and actually, I feel it’s done the opposite. How many people have experienced an electricity outage and have stories of how great it was. We get out candles, play games, and talk like we haven’t in ages. On a more grand scale, are all our advances that arguably make life better, resulting in more happiness? Not according to our constantly declining health stats. So if all the “betterment” efforts aren’t making us happy, why? And what will? My guest is Soren Gordhamer. Soren is the founder and host of Wisdom 2.0, the premier conference exploring living with greater mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion in the modern age. Soren brings the leaders of technology, literally the giants who most impact the world as we know it, together with leaders in wisdom to explore how we can create a truly livable world with greater presence, purpose, and connection in this digital age that feels more and more like chaos just speeding up. Soren's work focuses on a central question: as technology becomes ever more integrated into our lives, will it support human thriving and connection—or drive distraction and isolation? He's culminated what he's learned about the influence of tech and now AI into a new book, The Essential: Discovering What Really Matters in an Age of Distraction. I sat down with Soren to get candid on my feeling that all our advancements are not and will not make us happier, and in fact, will continue to add to our declining mental health. Soren sights AI in health as expectant to do great things, such as find a cure for cancer. But I ask that even with that, a cure for cancer, will that actually make us happier? Listen in to hear his response. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The two primary ingredients we think of in regards to success is talent and hard work. We tend to believe greatness comes from having above average talent and putting in your 10,000 hours. Yet if we audit everyone who has achieved relative success, we find many, maybe even most, do not have either of these. So what did they do? They just figured out what works and modeled it. Ron Friedman is an award-winning psychologist and from his research in neuroscience, human physiology and behavioral economics he wrote a book on what he found in regards to this issue, called Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success. In this show I dig in and question Ron on how we can all use this reality to better embrace and accelerate our opportunities and success instead of thinking we have to be exceptionally talented or work the hardest. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We as humans tend to look at most everything with a linear perspective. Like every day and our lives are a straight trajectory that is either getting better or worse, depending on the day. We look at our desires as goals and work towards them sequentially, expecting to get closer every day on this so-called, straight line. My guest in this episode is a neuroscientist who believes this is an errant perspective and what our lives and pursuits really align with is experiments. Instead of sequential progress we are often starting over, again and again, till we get it right. I recall the TV series "Lessons in Chemistry," where the main character, Elizabeth Zott, perfected her lasagna recipe after making it 78 times. This wasn’t a linear goal, but an exercise in starting over 78 times, with more wisdom each time. For me this really helps with trying this and then trying that to see what works instead of pushing for one method and feeling like a failure if it doesn’t work. Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD, is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer whose work has been in peer-reviewed journals and WIRED, Forbes, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. Her new book is called, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World and it’s a guide to adopting and living a more experimental life, turning uncertainty into curiosity, and carving a path of self-discovery. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is not about working at your passions, or as my Dad, Dan Miller was famous for, finding the work you love. This is more about the tasks and activities you are engaging with in whatever work you are doing. Think about it like a football team. They are all playing football but they aren’t all playing the same position. So in the daily work you do, what position most excites you? What role are you most suited to fulfill? You could be working in a field that is a perfect fit for you, but you are in a role that is not. Conversely you could be working in a field you care nothing for, but in a role that is perfect for you. I’m bringing back a conversation I had with Jonathan Fields, host of the incredibly popular podcast, the Good Life Project. I’ve had Jonathan on my podcast multiple times and I just so appreciate his spirit and energy. He developed a test of sorts that will help you know what work role fits you best. Where you will be most inspired, or as he calls it, what sparks you? It’s free as well. Go to sparketype.com. As an example, my primary sparketype is Maker. I like to…make things. Build things. And while I build some physical things, most of my spark is in relation to building ideas. My second sparketype is Scientist, which is coming up with ways to make the idea happen. It then showcases what is not, my sparketype. This is not an excuse of what to do and what not to do, but to show you where you are best suited. For me, I continually strive to remain in the roles where I’m sparked, and delegate the other areas of my work to people who are sparked in them, and do a far greater and more efficient job. Again, you can take the test for free at sparketype.com and connect with Jonathan Fields at his podcast, the Good Life Project. Sign up for your $1/month trial period at shopify.com/kevin Go to shipstation.com and use code KEVIN to start your free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices