' You can continually be choosing optimistic behavior even when you're not feeling optimistic.'

Michelle Gielan is a positive psychology researcher married to a happiness researcher - wouldn't you love to be at that dinner table?

In her latest book Resilient Optimism: The science of sustaining a positive mindset in tough times, she explores why optimism that lasts when reality hits is not based on an emotion, but on behaviour, and more particularly on the belief that our behaviour matters.

She also discovered that your behaviour matters way beyond your own mood and your own outcomes. Becoming a 'positive deviant' - actively expressing optimism, celebrating progress, spreading 'positive gossip' - can transform the outcomes of everyone around you.

We also talk about writing as sense-making, experimenting with 'power leads', and how to think of a book as a collection of beautifully connected two-minute stories.

A hopeful, practical conversation about agency, courage, writing, and resilience.

' Reps can help you improve your ability to speak, and you can be the person creating those reps.'

If you're seeking success as a speaker, what does that mean to you? Perfectly polished delivery, Big, flashy stages?

Alex Merry sees his job as helping founders unlock the true potential of their ideas, and as part of that he brings speakers at all stages of the journey into community in MicDrop. He has a more intentional, strategic approach to defining success as a speaker. In fact, turns out some of the most commercially powerful speaking opportunities happen in very ordinary rooms, with a relatively small number of exactly the right people.

We talk about the beautiful overlap between books and speaking, why the two work together so synergistically, and how being in community with the right people can supercharge success in both. We also talk about the importance of doing all of this in public, testing your ideas, learning to communicate the same message in a million different ways.

A practical and energising conversation about speaking, writing, business development, community, and why success might be different to - and so much achievable than - your assumptions.

'You can be both disappointed for yourself and delighted for other people at the same time.'

Book awards are great for visibility and credibility. But there's another side to them too.

Entering for an award means putting the product of months or years of private work into the public gaze to be judged. And however highly evolved you are, there's a good chance that fear, hope, self-doubt, and even a sulk can all be part of the process that follows.

In this episode, authors representing every dimension of the experience reflect honestly and helpfully on their experience and what they've learned.

Hear from:

• Sarah Robb on the difference between the award and the real reward
• Tom Pullen on awards as a way through the 'post-publication valley of death'
• Helen Beedham on the surprising questions that success raised about her identity as an author
• Susan Ni Chriodain on why there's nothing wrong with wanting something enough to be disappointed
• Martin Farrell on what awards revealed about his own need for recognition
• Virginia Cinquemani on managing expectations and breathing through the nerves
• Angela Rixon on the very real value of shortlisting
• Ian Pettigrew on the need to take care around the meaning we attach to an outcome
• Alice Sheldon on treating an award result as data rather than a verdict
• Trevor Merriden on why awards judges understand more than authors might realise about what's at stake.