This roundtable discussion of the podcast 'Personality and Developing Character Part 1' was very lively and filled with insights from the participants:. Topics discussed included: the surprising virtue of being average on personality dimensions; the understanding of a wider range of people when you are centrally located on the traits; some fantastic examples of the egocentric basa!; a live personality assesmmet of one of the participants; the importance of reciprocal altruism in business deals; how an understanding of the Big 5 can really help us better navigate relationships and not take things quite so personally; how understanding the Big 5 breeds tolerance and empathy. All in all a fantastic discussion!

This is the first in a podcast series on personality and the building of character. I’ve called it ‘Being the Best You Can Be’ because, in my opinion, this is the best way to fulfill our most important of desires: to maximise wellbeing for ourselves and for those around us.
An important way to maximise wellbeing is to understand one’s own personality and to have the skills to recalibrate it to function more wisely in everyday life. This is what I mean by the development of character.
1. This first podcast will address the questions: ‘What is personality?’ and ‘Why does it matter?’
2. Podcast 2 will suggest practical strategies for adaptive change. This naturally raises the highly debated and important question of whether you can change personality, including how we can recalibrate our natural preferences when needed.
3. Podcast three will then apply all this to the development of character and a practical moral outlook.
In the first podcast describe the general features of personality:
• that it is a preference system and thus motivates us emotionally
• that this deep motivational system is largely unconscious, that is before we reflect on it consciously, we are already predisposed to situations in predictable ways
• that personality it is crucial to understand as it influences everything we do and knowledge of that is of utmost importance in living a happy and successful life
• that personality is largely genetic and for most people doesn’t change much across the lifespan, so accepting, working with it, it is absolutely necessary
• that each dimension of personality is distributed on bell curves and the further we are apart from each other on each dimension, the harder it is to understand that person
• that this is a part of the egocentric bias, whereby we project our worldview onto others and become upset when they are not like us… but they of course do the same towards us!
• that re-calibration is the answer when we find ourselves in environments that don’t naturally suit us.
I then give brief summaries of the Big 5 : Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability. Finally, we explore a number of combinations of these 5 traits, indicating how they help us ‘cut through’ and understand people and their behaviour more clearly.

This is a roundtable discussion with my friends from Nettwerk Music. Our subject was the Music, Creativity & Mental Health podcast with Robot Koch. It was a deeply insightful and wide-ranging discussion that appropriately matched the often deep and fascinating discussion I had with Robert. Topics discussed included: Why do people decide to be artists even though they know it is likely to be difficult, insecure, stressful and so on; Becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, learning to trust it, even value it, as a key for creativity; Fluid versus Crystallized intelligence and how that informs intuition; Quietening down and placing the brain in a more contemplative state to encourage intuition; Social Media and the shifting music industry landscape, especially the ‘compare and despair mindset that can result; Sensitivity and listening to the quiet inner voice of intuition, and tuning the internal antenna; The importance of navigating difficult experiences for one’s creative and personal development.

This roundtable discuses the third podcast in the Staying Composed series and is titled ‘Cultivating Equanimity Within Everyday Life’. Topics discussed included: how so many small things can build equanimity; how we should cultivate a certain skepticism or epistemological humility in the face of misinformation and disinformation; how we need to transcend particular disputes looking for the larger picture; how we need to strike a balance in attending to, and turning away from, media reporting; why we ought to be grateful for our existence; how eudemonic happiness is central to equanimity in modern times and the importance of having a ‘why’ for what we do’; how authentic relationships are central to general equanimity and the primacy of action in the face of a divided world.

The first 2 podcasts in the Staying Composed in Troubling Times series focused on more direct psychological strategies for equanimity, but the focus in this third podcast is on less direct, but nonetheless very practical strategies that lead to inner calm and composure. I broke these into four, overlapping categories: 1 Maintaining physical health & resilience; 2. Intentional information and media consumption; 3. The active pursuit of purpose and of awe and; Prosocial action, compassion, gratitude and civility. Although there is much to worry about in the world, it is fortunate that there are so many ways to practically nurture equanimity and this series, hopefully, gives people a few extra practices they can add to their wellbeing toolkit!

Today in this Music & Mental Health Podcast I’m talking with artist, composer and record producer Robert Koch, who is much better known by his stage name, Foam and Sand. Originally from Germany, At the age of 13 he was inspired by MTV videos and embarked on his musical career. Now residing in Los Angeles, Robert has a stellar background in composing and producing his own work as well as for other major artists. Our topics are creativity and music and their relation to mental health, with a focus on what challenges our wellbeing and our creativity and what Robert has found that nurtures his creativity as well as he physical and mental wellbeing. I found this conversation very uplifting, and topics touched on included: the toll that touring took on him physically and psychologically; his decision to follow his passion, trust his intuition & stop touring; artistic sensitivity as a ‘super-power’; the relationship between intuition and a sense of coherence; meditation and accessing intuition; egolessness and the problems of the ego; healthy perfectionism and intrinsic motivation; being comfortable with the unknown; and other topics.

This roundtable on cultivating equanimity psychologically, with my esteemed friends from Nettwerk Music, explored many implications of the podcast: that you can always exert some control over your response to the world; that playing the victim keeps us stuck and is a psychological trap that extends our suffering; that the Fundamental Attribution Error feeds into polarisation and hatred; that mindfulness is at the core of slowing down and magnifying mental contents so they can be recognised and changed; that we must start with self before we try to change others and the world, and thereby we can better infleunce others; and that choosing our repsonse is circumscribed by the very real constraints on our access to high qulaity information and knowledge, and by the pressures to 'choose a side' and not take more nuanced and middle-gound positions. As always with my colleagues from Nettwerk, thsi was a wonderful conversation!

Many of us are finding contemporary life unsettling. This second podcast in the series focuses on psychological pathways to equanimity. We cover a lot of gground: the Serenity Prayer and the freedom that potentially lies in the space betwen stimulus and response; the power to choose as exemplified by Viktor Frankl; The role of courage and of Mindfulness in equanimity; the Buddhist notion of the Sacred Pause and how this can be applied using the 2 Conditions Test and finally, how all of these strategies are 'defusion' techinques as we defuse our identity from our automatic thoughts and feelings.