Episodes

  • 38 Books, One Teenager, and a Trilogy About Clones

    38 Books, One Teenager, and a Trilogy About Clones
    Jul 1 2026
    I get a lot of guests on Lens of Hopefulness who found self-improvement later in life — as adults, sometimes as retired adults, like me. So, when I got to sit down with Shanti Hershenson, I was genuinely excited, because here’s someone who found her purpose before she could even legally drive.Shanti has written 38 books. She’s published 22 of them, with number 23 on the way by the time this episode is out. And she’s about to head off to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. I wanted to know how someone gets that much work done, that young, in a world absolutely stuffed with distractions — and what she’s learned along the way that the rest of us could use.Finding Purpose EarlyShanti told me she’s never really doubted that writing would be her life. This is what she wanted to do as a kid, and it’s what she wants to do now.“This is what I wanted to do when I was a kid, it’s what I want to do now, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.”She’s in good company. She pointed out that S.E. Hinton was sixteen when she published The Outsiders, and Christopher Paolini was fifteen when he wrote the first Eragon book. So, a young author with a clear sense of direction isn’t unheard of — but doing it in this generation, with this much noise competing for her attention, is its own kind of feat.The Discipline Behind the WordsI asked how she manages to write so much with a phone full of apps sitting right next to her — because I have that same phone, and I know how it goes. Her answer was refreshingly honest. She’s not immune to it.“One thing I do is that I have a goal, and I have to write a thousand words every single day. I have been doing this since I was in seventh grade. Not writing a thousand words is not an option.”She admitted she still catches herself two hundred words in, ready to scroll. Her fix is noticing the pattern and talking herself back: finish the writing first, then the scrolling will feel good, because it’s not standing between her and something she still owes herself.This connected for me to something I read years ago in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled — his idea that so much of what troubles us as a society comes down to wanting immediate gratification instead of delayed gratification. Shanti described her writing sessions almost like a meditation — noise-cancelling headphones on, everything else locked out, fully present with the work and the characters she’s built. That’s not so different from what I feel when I’m on-stage improvising or lost in a scene. You disappear into it.Family, Environment, and Finding Your FootingI asked where the discipline came from — school, family, something else. Shanti said part of it was simply natural, an obsession with writing and creating for as long as she can remember. But she also said her family has been supportive without that support directly explaining her output. What shapes her work more, she said, is the environment she lives in — real events, things she’s seen and felt, opinions she holds, all filtering into even her more fantastical stories.We talked a bit about how tough the teenage years can be for anyone trying to find their own independence. I shared that I didn’t really find mine until later, and that I drifted for a while into a crowd that experimented with drinking — something that, thankfully, never took hold in me. What did help, looking back at raising my own two sons, was giving kids as many outlets as they can handle. One of my boys found music and never stopped; the other found a camera in his hand young and became a professional videographer. Shanti’s experience, and the response she gets from other young people telling her they’re inspired to write too, felt like a good example of what happens when a kid finds that outlet early and it actually sticks.On Being a “Pantser” and the New BookHer twenty-third book, Wolfgang One, is the start of a planned trilogy. It imagines a society where everyone is cloned from an important historical figure and raised from birth to live up to that person’s legacy. The main character is a clone of Wolfgang Mozart, on the edge of adulthood, when a DNA test turns up something that sends him spiraling.As a fellow author, I wanted to know her process — plotter or pantser (A person who writes by the seat of their pants!), in the language we use in the Long Island Authors Group I sit on the board of. She’s mostly a pantser.“I do actually have a whiteboard in my room, but I haven’t touched it in like two years. I’m definitely — I’ve always been a little bit more of a pantser.”She’s not a pure one, though. She keeps bullet points and loose paragraphs of what needs to happen next, and by the halfway point of most books, she knows exactly where the rest of the story is going. It’s a process a lot of working authors will recognize — start loose, tighten as you go.AI, Authenticity, and What a Computer Can’t ...
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    53 mins
  • His Daughter Asked Him What Depression Was. Nine Years Later, He'd Defined 272 of Them.

    His Daughter Asked Him What Depression Was. Nine Years Later, He'd Defined 272 of Them.
    Jun 17 2026
    D. Earl Johnston came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about a book unlike anything else I’ve come across in years of doing these interviews. It’s a 376-page reference work that defines 272 separate emotions, not through clinical theory, but through more than 8,000 quotes and phrases from people who actually lived through them. The book is called Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart, and it took nine years to put together, drawing on more than 1,800 contributors across roughly 2,500 years of recorded human experience, from Confucius, Buddha, and Plato up through voices most of us would recognize today.Doug, as he goes by, didn’t come to this work through psychology. His career was spent as a finance executive in banking, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity in Los Angeles, and later as a professional researcher retained by national law firms to assess complicated business lawsuits. He’s also a world champion sailor. None of that is the typical background for someone who spends nine years cataloging the entire emotional range of being human, and that contrast turned out to be one of the more interesting threads in our conversation. Understanding feelings, he kept reminding me, isn’t the exclusive property of psychologists. It belongs to anyone who’s ever felt something and tried to put a name to it.A Question His Daughter Asked at the Dinner TableThe book’s origin starts with a game. When Doug’s daughter was in eighth grade, the two of them began having dinner together once a week, just the two of them, and he’d bring a list of 150 to 200 trivia questions covering everything from geography to politics. They called it College Bowl, and every correct answer earned her a two-dollar bill slid across the table. It became something she looked forward to, and a way for a father to stay close to a teenager’s world, which isn’t always easy.Two years later, in tenth grade, after she’d been out of school for a month recovering from an injury and surgery, she came to dinner and told Doug it was her turn to ask the questions. Her question was simple: what is depression?Doug told me, plainly, that he faked it. He gave her the economic definition, a slowdown in business activity accompanied by a decline in interest rates, because he didn’t want to deal with the emotional one. She wasn’t fooled, and told him that wasn’t the kind of depression she meant. Doug admitted to her that he didn’t know enough to answer honestly, and spent the next two weeks researching it.What helped him most wasn’t the clinical literature, although he found plenty of it. It was quotes from people who had lived through depression themselves. The first one came from Rollo May, one of the original self-help writers from the 1950s, before the term even existed, and a depression survivor himself.“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”— Rollo MayA few days later he found a quote from J.K. Rowling, who has spoken publicly about her own depression before she became one of the best-selling novelists in history.“Depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It’s the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever experienced.”— J.K. RowlingAnd then one from a freelance writer named Haley Cornell, who Doug suspects will be well known in her own right one day.“Depression lies. It tells you you’ve always felt this way and you always will, but you haven’t and you won’t.”— Haley CornellDoug texted the three quotes to his daughter, who was back at school. Three minutes later she wrote back: “I’m crying.” Alarmed, he asked why, since everyone in those quotes had survived what she was going through. Her answer: “That’s why I’m crying. Thank you, dad.”It’s a sweet father-daughter moment on its own, but Doug said it’s also when he realized something that shaped the entire book: clinical descriptions explain what an emotion looks like, while the words of someone who’s lived through it explain what it feels like. He was careful to add that this isn’t a knock on psychologists; he’s leaned on them himself and calls a good one “worth their weight in gold.” But there’s a gap that clinical language alone doesn’t close, and closing that gap is what eventually grew into 8,000 quotes across 272 emotions.From One Word to 272What started with depression expanded to anxiety, codependence, and eventually every emotional state Doug could document, including the lighter ones: excitement, enthusiasm, charisma, even an entry on zeal. By the time the manuscript was finished, it covered 272 distinct emotional states.In January, a friend suggested Doug submit the finished book to AI just to see what it would say. He was hesitant; the book was done, and he wasn’t looking to change anything. He sent it anyway. Within minutes, both Claude AI and ChatGPT came back with nearly the same response: this was the single most...
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

    The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope
    Jun 3 2026
    I was not sure what to expect from my recent Lens of Hopefulness interview with Lolo—psychotherapist, paranormal explorer, and host of the REALMS Podcast but was happy to cover ground that I had honestly been wanting to explore for a long time: the space where clinical psychology and the unexplained overlap, where grief and ghost voices coexist, and where a practicing therapist can sit with questions that have no clean answers.REALMS is Lolo’s YouTube channel. It stands for Real Experiences, Answers, Lore, Myth and Sanctuary. I had watched his YouTube channel and liked what I saw. As I told him on air, it was the kind of show where you cannot bring yourself to turn it off. The approach is open, unhurried, and—something I rarely see in the paranormal space—genuinely humble.From Existential Anxiety to Podcast HostLolo did not arrive at the paranormal through fascination alone. He describes a history of existential anxiety that pushed him to ask the hard questions about life, death, and meaning. Several close brushes with death sharpened the urgency. His background in therapy—he is a licensed psychotherapist who works with trauma, anxiety, and grief, currently through Teladoc—gave him a clinical lens. But clinical tools, he found, have limits.“Things have to be proven, it has to be very black and white,” he said, describing the constraints of evidence-based practice, “but that’s also not real life. There’s so much that we can’t explain and we don’t fully understand.”That recognition—that the clinical model has a ceiling—drove him to create a community rather than a stage. REALMS is less a ghost-hunting show and more a conversation space where people with unusual experiences can share without being laughed out of the room. No slick host, no click-bait production values. Just people telling their stories, his co-host included, in a space where grief, wonder, and uncertainty are all allowed in at once.The Big Conclusion: The Answer Is Too Big for UsI asked Lolo what his most profound discovery has been after years of investigating, interviewing, and questioning. His answer was not what I expected. After all of it, he has arrived at a kind of acceptance of not-knowing.“Whatever the answer is, it’s too big for us to understand,” he said. “It’s just so out of our perception that we just can’t even try to understand.”He followed that with something even more practical: truth, he observed, is a little bit relative. And if a belief system makes a person feel better and helps them function, you have to ask yourself how much it matters whether it is objectively provable—as long as the person is not losing themselves in it. Balance, he said, is everything. He understands why people go all-in on certain systems; the exhaustion of seeking direction makes it tempting. But he holds back from that himself, always taking baby steps and staying skeptical enough to keep perspective.Personal Experiences That Are Hard to DismissThis is where the conversation got personal—on both sides of the microphone.Lolo described being present at a Catholic exorcism ritual—a full church closed down for a three-to-four-hour event, presided over by a priest, for a single individual. He witnessed the person behaving in ways he still cannot fully account for, while also noting, with his therapist’s eye, how much the cultural and media landscape (particularly the enormous impact of The Exorcist) could influence a person’s presentation. He does not dismiss what he saw. He does not fully explain it either. That tension is exactly where he lives.I brought my own experience to the table as well. I shared that when my father passed away, during a period of deep grief, I had what felt like a channeling experience. I asked him to give me a piece of information I could not have known—my grandmother’s maiden name—and I received the name Ingrassia. When I checked with my mother, she confirmed it. I also shared that during a particularly intense period of spiritual engagement, I found I could touch someone in pain and the pain would stop—and that the experience frightened me enough that I stepped back from it entirely. And there was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Long Island that a family had opened for viewings by appointment, once a year, after seeing the image of their late son in the painting. My family went. I saw my father’s face in that picture.These are not things I trot out in casual conversation. But with Lolo, there was no performance required, in either direction. He listened as a therapist does—with interest and without the need to nail it down.Science, Scripture, and the Surprising OverlapOne moment in this conversation that surprised me was when Lolo pointed out that the Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic astrophysicist—and that its core concept, a sudden explosive emergence of light from nothing, aligns rather neatly with the opening of Genesis: “In...
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • From the Red Sox to Brain Cancer: Michael Bugary on Addiction, Personal Responsibility, and the Disease of Me

    From the Red Sox to Brain Cancer: Michael Bugary on Addiction, Personal Responsibility, and the Disease of Me
    May 27 2026
    I read Michael Bougari’s book The Disease of Me before we sat down to record this episode, and that was the right call. By the time we got on, I felt like I already knew who he was — not because the book is a polished, carefully packaged personal brand, but because it reads exactly like the person who wrote it: honest, unguarded, and sometimes uncomfortable in the best possible way.The book opens with a section called “Why You Shouldn’t Read This Book,” which Michael basically uses as a disclaimer. Right there, before chapter one, he writes:I am not a psychologist, nor do I have any fancy initials after my name. I do have a bachelor’s degree that took more than six years to finish. I’m not a self-help guru. For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to help myself, and I have failed miserably at it.That sets the tone for everything that follows. No toxic positivity. No memes. No pretending that the answers are easy if you just follow the right steps. What Michael offers instead is his story — the unvarnished version. And the story is a lot.The Triple Count of AdversityMichael describes his book as being organized around what he calls “the triple count of adversity”: sports, addiction, and cancer. He argues that just about everyone is touched by at least one of these three — either directly or through someone they love. Michael went through all three, and he went through the extremes of each.He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox and had everything physically to make it in professional baseball. What he didn’t have, by his own account, was the mental piece. He describes being driven almost entirely by insecurity and a desperate need for external validation — chasing something he could never quite name.Baseball was my first addiction. Drugs and alcohol are a symptom of my disease. They make me worse. Addiction is not my disease. It’s me.His career ended before it really began. He was hurt in his first spring training and never got the chance to find out how far his physical gifts might have taken him. What followed was years of substance use, self-destruction, and gradually burning through the patience of just about everyone around him.The Brain TumorThe cancer part of the story is the one that stops you cold. Michael was diagnosed with a medulloblastoma, described in the book as an extremely rare tumor of the central nervous system. The MRI scan is on the book cover and it’s a striking photo.Here is where Michael’s brand of radical honesty gets particularly hard to argue with. He spent years blaming God for the brain tumor. Until he stopped. His words:I was the one that chose to go out and buy human growth hormone and other anabolic steroids from a shady source and misuse them without medical supervision. That most likely gave me my brain tumor. I caused my brain tumor, not God.He came up in the steroid era of baseball — McGuire, Bonds, Sosa were his heroes at age twelve. He thought he could do both: be the talented player and the party guy. That thinking caught up with him in a way he didn’t see coming. But getting there, and surviving it, became the basis for everything that came after.He lost his hair. He lost feeling in his toes. He didn’t know if he’d walk normally again. Ten years later, he says he’s stronger physically than when he played baseball. His dog Lingo — a military base dog that found its way into Michael’s life through his mother — was born the same month Michael’s tumor was removed. That coincidence isn’t lost on either of them.He was what saved me. He came to me in my darkest moment.The Disease of MeThe title of the book is the key to understanding Michael’s whole framework. He distinguishes between addiction as a disease (which he understands scientifically and doesn’t dismiss for others) and his own experience, where he sees himself as the problem — not the substances.His logic is straightforward: if he views his substance use as a disease, it gives him an easy out. “Oh, I have a disease, I can’t help myself.” Instead, he holds himself accountable in a more direct way — he calls himself the disease. The drugs and alcohol just made it worse.What changed everything was personal responsibility. Once he was willing to stop blaming the Red Sox for his arm injury, stop blaming God for his tumor, and start looking at his own choices honestly, something shifted:All the bad things that happened to me in my life were my fault, right? They’re just products of the choices that I’ve made. Once I started to take that personal responsibility, I began to look at things in a different way.He’s careful to say he didn’t get better quickly or cleanly. His description of the process: “I just clawed my way out of it. I dragged myself.” There was no single breakthrough moment, no sudden switch that flipped. It was accumulative, gritty, and ongoing.What Actually HelpedThroughout the book (and the conversation), Michael ...
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Kerri Mangis: Why the Mud Is the Point

    Kerri Mangis: Why the Mud Is the Point
    May 20 2026
    Kerri Mangis is a TEDx speaker, author, and spiritual guide who has spent more than 20 years as a seeker. She came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about her book Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness, her forthcoming book The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis (August 25, 2026), and a philosophy of transformation rooted in alchemy, Jungian psychology, and hard-earned personal experience.Self-Help Got It WrongKerri opened by taking aim at the self-help industry’s most persistent failures — toxic positivity and the “fake it till you make it” approach to emotional life. She didn’t just critique it from a distance. She admitted she bought into it herself.The alternative she offers is not another system of positive thinking. It’s embodiment — the idea that all of it, the anger, the shame, the fear, belongs to you and deserves acknowledgment.“I am my soul, I am my ego, I am my anger, I am my shame and my fear, and all of that — if we acknowledge it and we learn to live with it — it doesn’t have power over us. It allows us to be in power.”She extended that point to emotions specifically: “Our emotions aren’t out to sabotage us. They’re there to get our attention.” Even anger, which she named as her most difficult emotion, she treats as a messenger. She gives anger a pronoun — he — and said he “has a lot to teach me and is usually trying to get my attention to something that I’m not paying attention to.”The Three StagesKerri’s next book, The Essential Ingredient, organizes her philosophy into a three-stage model of transformation: breakdown, reflection, and rebirth.Breakdown is the stage where you question everything — the social contracts, the childhood conditioning, the beliefs handed down from parents and grandparents. Reflection is where you sit with those beliefs and ask whether they’ve helped you or hurt you, whether they once protected your heart but are now sheltering it. And rebirth is returning to the world transformed, carrying fewer of the old ways of thinking.“Your greatest rebirths always came at the end of something that was hard.”The model didn’t come from a textbook. It came from alchemy.Alchemy in the KitchenDuring the pandemic, Kerri went to her local New Age bookstore and cleaned out their alchemy section. Then she went hands-on, practicing a related discipline called spagyrics — working with herbs to make tinctures using the same philosophical principles as alchemy. She was up at 4 a.m. mixing herbs, and she found in that physical process the same breakdown-pause-transformation arc she’d been observing in her own life.From there she discovered that Carl Jung had drawn heavily from alchemical principles in his own work. Jung posed a question Kerri found essential: what happens if we allow people to break down, instead of constantly picking them back up right away?She also shared three mantras she encountered across her yoga and spiritual studies — what’s here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere; as above, so below; and as within, so without — and traced them all back to alchemy’s central principle: all is one. “It’s one river,” she said, “lots of tributaries, lots of different directions, but it’s all the same truth.”The Soul Has a NameIn 2014, Kerri attended a women’s retreat. One of the closing exercises was to write vows to your soul and read them aloud to the group. The retreat leader also suggested giving the soul a name.Kerri chose Serene Voyager. “I liked the word serene because I like the idea of being serene on the inside,” she said. “And yet Voyager — my soul wants to travel, my soul wants to explore, doesn’t want to sit still.” She shortened it to Seri, which rhymed with Kerri, and kept the piece of paper with her vows on it.She still uses that relationship as a counterweight to ego. When the metrics of publishing and podcasting start to wear on her — the subscriber counts, the views — it’s Seri that pushes back: “Yeah, but did you have fun?”Heroes vs. EldersKerri’s TEDx talk, delivered last August, made the case that menopause is a rite of passage, not a medical inconvenience to be minimized. In the West, women are conditioned to hide it. Her argument was that this transition from the adult years — defined by work, family, and obligation — into a wiser stage of life should be honored, not suppressed.That argument connects to a broader framework she writes about: the difference between heroes and elders. A hero is someone we look to out there, to save us. An elder is a community guide that everyone seeks counsel from, but who still holds people responsible for themselves.“In the hero model, we outsource our power. In the elder model, we embody it.”Grief Became SteadfastnessKerri lost both of her parents in the fall and early winter of last year, one after another. She described them as soulmates — one not willing to be here without the ...
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    55 mins
  • You're Not Broken — You're Protected

    You're Not Broken — You're Protected
    May 6 2026
    She Called It the Process of Unbecoming — And It Changed How I See EverythingLacey Kelly is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and author of three books — The Process of Unbecoming: A Different Relationship to Being Human, Already Human: Why the Culture of Self-Improvement Is Making Us Feel Broken, and God Is a Dirty Word: A Cultural Reckoning with the God We Left Behind. All three are available on Amazon.I went into this conversation a little uncertain. I told Lacey — and my listeners — exactly that: “I was tentative... what am I going to say today? I’m not sure if I’m ready for this.” By the time we wrapped, my shoulders had literally dropped. A weight I’d been carrying for a long time quietly lifted.The Premise That Changes EverythingThe process of unbecoming is not another self-help system. It’s a response to what Lacey kept seeing in her therapy practice — people arriving with the underlying belief that something was fundamentally wrong with them and then finding that all the effort they put into fixing themselves only reinforced that belief.“The core that I see in this is the premise that people go into self-help or therapy with is that it makes sense, it’s this way, but there’s something wrong with them, they’re not good enough, or that they’re somehow broken,” she said. “And until we address that premise the work itself can become rather fruitless because it tends to set up a pattern of effort that often reinforces that premise they came in with.”The starting point — the base of her entire framework — is this: wholeness is not something you earn. It is inherent to every human being. You were born with it. No experience takes it away. You will die with it.“When we operate from that place,” she said, “everything starts to change on its own.”Six Principles That Reframe the Whole PictureLacey built the process of unbecoming around six core principles. She was careful to call them philosophical, grounded in what she considers fundamental truths about human beings. Here’s what we covered:1. Wholeness is inherentWorth and dignity are not conditions to be earned. They are built into every human being. “When we believe that we are whole and complete as we are,” Lacey explained, “and within that wholeness holds our worth and our dignity as human beings, it holds the vulnerability that reaches and can feel and connect with other people.”2. Identity is adaptive.Human beings are exceptional at adapting to their environment. The problem is that during childhood, identity is forming at the same time we are adapting. The patterns and behaviors we developed to get our needs met — in whatever environment we were raised in, functional or not — later get labeled as personality flaws or pathology. “Adaptation isn’t necessarily who we are,” Lacey said. “It’s just what we needed to do in that environment.”She also pushed back against putting too much weight on the family unit alone. Biologically, she pointed out, we are designed to be raised in groups of 25 to 150 people. Today, we’re lucky to have two parents in the house. That mismatch puts enormous pressure on parents — and on children.I grew up in the 1960s with relatives up and down the block. I told Lacey about my cousin who took me under his wing when I was a heavy, uncoordinated kid who couldn’t pay attention in school. He put me to work alongside him, bought me lunch, took pictures of me holding a tool in front of a car. That relationship built something in me. I think back and wonder: without that kind of community support, where would I have ended up?3. Capacity is inherent.This principle challenges the common therapy-world idea that capacity — the ability to tolerate and meet experience — is something you build or develop through work. Lacey disagrees. “Capacity is always within us,” she said. The issue is not that it doesn’t exist. The issue is access. When we don’t have enough co-regulation — the steadying presence of other nervous systems around us — we lose the ability to reach our own capacity. The goal in her work is not to develop something new. It is to reconnect with what is already there.4. Protection precedes pathology.This gave me a long pause. The behaviors and patterns we most hate about ourselves — the walls we put up, the ways we push people away, the cycles we feel trapped in — are not evidence of brokenness. They are protection. “We are born vulnerable,” Lacey explained, “and humans have the instinct to protect what’s vulnerable.” When that vulnerability felt threatened, protection came online. What we often call personality problems or disorders are adaptive protections that got locked in.“When we relate to them as protective rather than something wrong with us, the intervention changes, and the protection tends to soften through the relationship that we build with it.”5. Change happens through ...
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • What Your Therapist Is Really Thinking | 50 Years as a Patient Meets 50 Years as a Psychiatrist

    What Your Therapist Is Really Thinking | 50 Years as a Patient Meets 50 Years as a Psychiatrist
    Apr 22 2026
    I’ve been in psychotherapy, on and off, since I was 16 years old. That’s 51 years as a patient. My guest on this episode, Dr. David I. Joseph, has been on the other side of that equation for just as long — 50 years as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His book chronicling his journey in the mental health profession, Listening for a Lifetime: The Artful Science of Psychotherapy, is available on Amazon, including Kindle Unlimited.When I read it, I recognized my entire mental health life on those pages.Know Who You’re Talking ToBefore we got into the book, I asked Dr. Joseph for a primer — one that I wish I’d had 50 years ago. What exactly is the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a psychotherapist?His answer: “A psychiatrist is someone who’s gone to medical school and then done specialty training in the field of psychiatry,” which means training in both the brain and the mind, including the ability to prescribe medication. Psychologists focus on how the mind functions. Their training centers on providing psychotherapy, not pharmacology. And not all psychiatrists are equally equipped to do deep psychotherapy work — some are, some aren’t.That explanation paralleled my experience. In my time in the system, I found that psychiatrists often moved quickly to the prescription pad. Dr. Joseph, to his credit, agreed — and contextualized it. He was trained in the late 1960s and early 70s, when psychiatrists still received serious education in psychotherapy. Today, many don’t. And the economics make it worse. As he put it, a 15-minute appointment and a prescription generate more income than a 50-minute conversation. Knowing that matters when you’re choosing who to see.A Book Built on AphorismsListening for a Lifetime grew out of Dr. Joseph’s decades of teaching and clinical practice. His students and colleagues kept telling him he had a gift for distilling complex psychological truths into short, memorable phrases. After the third person said he ought to write a book, he did.He spent about a year and a half collecting these aphorisms — phrases he had developed over the course of his career that condensed the essential experience of both therapist and patient. “I decided that I would organize the book around these aphorisms because I wanted to make it understandable, readable, substantive. I didn’t want to dumb it down.”The cover of the book, by the way, is a photo of his actual office. His story is that real.Being a Patient Is Hard WorkDr. Joseph said it plainly: “Being a patient is hard work.”He’s right. And the hardest part is opening up about the things you’d rather leave buried. I told him I’ve been in situations where I refused to go there — where something was too painful to bring to the surface and I just covered it over instead.His response was not what I expected. He doesn’t coax anyone. “I never coax anyone to do anything,” he said. And he reframed the whole thing for me. It’s not that talking about certain subjects is painful. “It’s risky to talk about certain subjects because you’re going to make yourself vulnerable.” That distinction matters. Risk is something you can evaluate. Pain feels like something that’s just happening to you.What a Bad Therapist Looks LikeI’ve had a lot of therapists over the years. Some great, some not. I gave Dr. Joseph two real examples.The first: after my brother passed away suddenly in January 2024 — he was 66, they found him in his chair — I found a telehealth therapist through my insurance. I told her my brother had just died. She had me fill out a questionnaire. Session after session, we went through the questionnaire. She never once said she was sorry. When I mentioned my brother again — the details, the shock of it — she moved on to page two. I had to drop her.Dr. Joseph’s reaction was unambiguous. “I would say that this is a lousy psychotherapist. I would no more give a patient a questionnaire before I’d met them and talked with them a long time. I never have given a patient a questionnaire and never would.”The second example: a psychiatrist who started avoiding me — not returning calls, not available for appointments. When I finally got in to see her, she told me, to my face, that I had been “so draining.” I later found she was going through something herself — possibly a divorce however her approach had already hit my psyche hard. My first thought was that I was actually that bad — that I had broken my own psychiatrist. Dr. Joseph’s take: she couldn’t make herself available in the way I needed, and the professional thing would have been to say so and refer me to a colleague. The failure wasn’t mine.Where the Problems StartI brought up my own tonsillectomy — I was four years old. My parents turned and walked away. Someone put a mask over my face. I remember smelling and tasting the anesthesia, and then it went black. I’ve always believed that...
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • What a TV Reporter Turned Media Coach Taught Me About Showing Up on Camera

    What a TV Reporter Turned Media Coach Taught Me About Showing Up on Camera
    Apr 15 2026
    Most people think communication is just talking. Susan Siravo proved otherwise.Susan is a former television reporter and anchor who spent roughly a decade in local news as a general assignment reporter — covering crime stories, water main breaks, political hearings, whatever the day brought. She later became a public information officer for a water and flood protection agency in California, transitioned into corporate communications and social media for a regional bank, and eventually built a media and communication coaching practice. She joined me on Lens of Hopefulness to break down what it really means to communicate effectively on camera — and along the way, I made some discoveries about myselfJournalism Taught Her More Than She ExpectedSusan traced her path back to where it started: a genuine love of storytelling.“I was always attracted to the field of news and journalism. Since I was a kid, I loved watching the news and the idea of storytelling.”That love turned into a career, but the most enlightening part came when she crossed to the other side of the camera. After years of interviewing people as a reporter, she became a spokesperson for a public agency — and discovered something humbling.“One of the hardest parts of it was being the person who speaks to the media. I thought that would be so easy because I had been in the media for so long interviewing people and I know what makes a good interview and all that. But then when the camera was on me and then I was supposed to be articulate and succinct — that was very hard. And so now when I work with clients, I know what they’re going through.”That experience is why her coaching connects. She’s not teaching from theory. She learned it the hard way herself.The Pandemic Changed EverythingWhen COVID hit and the world moved to Zoom, Susan saw a problem most people didn’t even have language for yet. Professionals who were competent, knowledgeable, and credible in person suddenly looked and sounded uncertain on screen. Teachers were trying to reach kindergarteners through a webcam for the first time. Executives were running town halls from kitchen tables.“So many people had no idea how to communicate well on Zoom with a webcam in front of them. It started out with me helping people with the look and feel of how they presented themselves. And then the next part was to be able to help them understand how to speak to the camera effectively.”The challenge she identified goes deeper than just logistics. When you’re speaking to a live audience, you get feedback — nods, laughter, visible engagement. On camera, none of that is available to you.“It’s so different when you are speaking to a camera. You’re just looking at the lens. There’s nobody laughing, there’s nobody smiling at you, there’s nobody nodding — but yet you have to give the same performance as if you are seeing all of this in front of a live audience.”That gap between what feels natural and what the camera requires is exactly what she trains people to close.Camera Presence Became a Business SkillI shared a story about a financial consultant my wife and I interviewed on Zoom during the pandemic. He was highly recommended. He never looked at the camera — he was positioned in the corner of the screen, looking up at something off-screen — and despite his credentials, we didn’t hire him. We couldn’t get past what we were seeing.Susan wasn’t surprised.“If you’re selling some sort of service and you have potential clients, they’re looking for reasons not to hire you. So you want to remove all of those. And if you can show up on camera, you’re looking at the camera, you look professional, your background looks organized, you look like you know what you’re talking about — at least that’s a good start.”She also made a point I hadn’t fully thought through: the camera has to be at eye level. Not on a desk looking up at you, not tilted down. Eye level — so the person watching feels like they’re in a conversation, not looking up at a ceiling or down at a head.And the background matters. Not because it has to be perfect, but because every element sends a signal. “It’s just a matter of making sure that it’s the right message that you want to share and that you’re deliberate about it.”The Four-Week and Eight-Week ProgramsSusan’s coaching isn’t structured as a one-day seminar. She offers four-week and eight-week programs — one hour per week with assignments in between. Clients record videos on their phones, upload them, and she reviews and gives feedback.“I have found that working with people over the course of four weeks or eight weeks, that’s when they make the most progress because they have an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned week to week to week.”The intensive one-day model doesn’t stick. I know this from personal experience with self-improvement seminars — you walk out energized, and two days ...
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    57 mins