Simple Ways to Have a Good Life with James Scott Henson

Having a morning routine is one of the simplest ways we can improve our lives. I really found that how I start the morning is how my day goes. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

We all feel this strange obligation to watch the news so that we can be informed and know what's going on. The problem is that watching the news often leads to anxiety and worry, and we may not even be as informed as we think we are in the process. This episode explores the idea of turning off the news and what that might do for us.

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This week’s simple way to have a good life is to say “thanks for sharing”. Our brains are amazing, but they are also weird as hell. We think negative things about ourselves, we get caught up in arguments and debates inside our own heads, and we get scared about future events that we made up. When we think about these things, we are giving them attention. When we argue with these things, we are giving them attention. Learning to thank them for sharing and moving on is almost magical in how well it works.

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This week’s simple way to have a good life is to remember that you are human.

This is the first episode in a series about getting back to basics. We have a super cool brain, and we like to use it. This often leads us to overcomplicate things and forget about some simple things that have a big impact on how we feel:

Eating

Sleeping

Drinking water

Moving our bodies

Going outside

Being social

Contributing

2018 was the start of a tough few years for me. I neglected these basic human necessities, and I paid a price for it. I talk about this and more in this episode.

This is the first episode in what I am hoping is a series of positive changes for the podcast and newsletter. I’m excited about this. It’s a complete re-brand and re-vamp of the newsletter and podcast, and I think it’s going to be better for everyone who reads and listens.

The podcast will be weekly from now on, going out every Monday morning. It will work with the newsletter to provide a deeper dive into whatever topic we are discussing that week.

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As we wrap up the series on self-sabotage we take a look at one of the worst ways we limit our own success: allowing toxic people to have a place in our lives.

It sucks, but there’s no way around the fact that some people will bring destruction and misery into our lives the same way someone with the flu will bring sickness. They may not mean to do it, but the results are the same.

Learning to recognize and draw boundaries with unhealthy, destructive people is essential to having a good life.

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We behave according to how we see ourselves, but we have a lot more control over this than we think we do.

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We are continuing our series on self-sabotage by looking at three common behaviors that hinder us: perfectionism, procrastination, and self-medication. We also talk about things you can do to break the cycle of these behaviors if you recognize them in your own life.

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I did a poll on Instagram asking people what they wanted the next series to cover, and I was surprised that self-sabotage won. In this episode, we talk about self-sabotage and how it can manifest in very subtle ways. I also talk about the very not subtle ways it has manifested for me over the course of my life and what kinds of things I've done to deal with it.

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“The brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile.”

Pierre Cabanis, 18th-century French physiologist.

It's a little scary to see just how much authority we give our mind once we take the time to recognize just how random the thoughts the mind churns out can be. We like to think that we are rational, logical beings who only make the best decisions, but a few minutes of observing the mind will disabuse us of this idea very quickly.

The mind isn’t bad, but it won’t stay in its lane. It’s super helpful in navigating reality, but it won’t stop there. It just has to start opinionating on things and predicting the future and reading other people’s minds, and this is where our trouble lies.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Marcus Aurelius

What does a realistic gratitude practice look like - one rooted in reality, acknowledging the difficulties of life, and not suppressing our emotions? We talk about this and more in this episode of the Simple Ways to Have a Good Life Podcast.

Two Quick Links:

We go through life feeling like we have to do a lot of things we don't want to do, but when we step back and look at things we realized that we are actually choosing to do a bunch of things we don't want to do. Sometimes this is necessary to have the life we want to have, but other times we are doing things without really questioning whether they are necessary or not.

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This is the first episode in the new series where we will be talking about the things that clients have most consistently told me were useful to them over the years.

The idea that we are not our thoughts is easily one of the most important things that we can recognize. We talk about that in this episode, along with three simple exercises we can use to help recognize this whenever we need to.

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As we wrap up season 3 I'm taking the last episode to answer a few of the questions I've gotten over the last few months:

Why don’t you tell more stories about your life?

What are your hobbies?

Favorite things?

What are you working on in yourself?

What motivates you?

We’ll get started on season 4 next week or the week after. Thanks for listening.

There’s power and freedom in minding your business. The world will bring you plenty of problems, it’s unnecessary to go out of your way to find more. There are plenty of things you are well-informed about, there’s no reason to have an opinion on the things that you don’t know much about.

So many of our human problems arise from our opinion of things we have no control over. Acknowledging this allows us to address everything with intentionality and purpose. By staying in our lane, we are able to put our time, energy, and awareness toward the things that matter most instead of unconsciously relinquishing control by chasing things that have nothing to do with us or are beyond our influence.

This is a sort of interlude episode while I fight my way through what has become a deep dive with lots of reading and listening to other podcasts to learn about the benefits of cold showers and the benefits of ditching social media. I'm excited about both of those topics so I wanted to put a little more work into them.

In this episode, I talk about one of the most important things I've learned working with people for the last 20 years: no one is perfect, no one should be on a pedestal, and it's not fair to ourselves or to them when we do that to people. The more that we can let everyone be fully human the happier we are, the deeper our relationships are, and the more honestly we can live our lives.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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This one is different. It is long, it is challenging, and, I think, it may reach some people who haven’t always felt a resonance with some of what I’ve offered.

Kurtis Vanderpool is a Life Coach who specializes in working with people who are struggling with their faith, and in helping them deconstruct their experience to retain the things that were good.

In this conversation, we talk about how people are fleeing organized faith, what this means, what we might lose as a result, and the difficulty institutions and their leaders are facing. Kurtis approaches all of this from the “outer edge” of the narrative and therefore offers a different perspective than what you may hear from me week-to-week.

You can find Kurtis at:

If you really pay attention to your experience you’ll notice that you tense up or constrict when something that you don’t like happens – a lot of our suffering comes from this. In this final part of the series on awareness, we look at moving beyond simple acceptance and into saying “yes” to the things life brings us, especially when they are beyond our control.

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In this episode of the podcast, we explore what it means to let go, how to actually do it, and the fact that it is a process rather a one-time thing. This can be especially difficult when it comes to other people in our lives. 

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