Vidya By Pia & Bart

When we think about the words "stability" or "grounding," it conjures up feelings of calmness, peace, relaxation, and overall well-being. It's akin to maintaining a solid foundation that keeps us safe from harm. Conversely, an excess of stability or grounding can lead to sluggishness, weight gain, and inflexibility. For us, the concept of grounding extends beyond the physical realm. It's about finding our inner core, a point of navigation, and using it as a base from which we can explore and grow, both personally and physically. Just as we ensure stability before doing a squat in the gym, we see the importance of grounding in life. It's like having a safe haven to return to after adventures or experiences, a place where we can do simple, stabilizing activities like tidying our homes or indulging in comfort foods. Grounding provides a sense of balance amidst life's changes, allowing us to venture out while always knowing where we can come back to.

In today’s conversation, we discuss leadership and its evolution in our programs. Over time, we've refined our approach, focusing on key leadership aspects. We explore the difference between leadership and management, emphasising how leadership goes beyond traditional roles. Our discussion highlights these essential elements in the leadership toolbox: Presence: Being fully engaged in the present moment, achieved through practices like mindfulness. Learning and Growth Mindset: Continuously seeking knowledge, embracing mistakes, and fostering personal growth. Self-awareness: Understanding one's personality and learning preferences, recognising learning obstacles, and appreciating diverse personalities. Culture and Values: Acknowledging personal values' role in shaping organisational culture and understanding the real impact - beyond written statements. Well-being: Prioritizing physical, mental, spiritual and emotional well-being, which leaders role model to their teams. Motivation: Inspiring and motivating team

In today’s conversation, we explore the concept of simplicity and how it differs in our perceptions. We share our personal associations with simplicity and discuss contrasting notions of simplicity and complexity in various aspects of life, such as travel, lifestyle, possessions, and relationships. As we delve deeper, we realize that simplicity can be considered internal and external. Internally, we aim to reduce worry and declutter our minds, while externally, we strive for fewer possessions and intentional decision-making. We appreciate the benefits of simplicity, including reduced stress, enhanced mindfulness, and improved sleep. However, we acknowledge that simplicity is subjective and can be pursued in different ways based on our individual values, preferences, and circumstances. Ultimately, we believe that embracing simplicity, whether in thought, possessions, or lifestyle, may bring a sense of ease, mindfulness, and reduced worry to our lives.

In today’s episode, we delve into the realm of personal growth, revisiting the topic we addressed in the episode of November 2022. We explore the reasons behind engaging in personal growth, highlighting the universal and individual benefits it brings. Reflecting on the influential people in our lives, we recognize the significance of journaling and reflection as essential tools for self-coaching and inner dialogue. We emphasize the importance of accountability and community support, whether through WhatsApp groups or habit trackers, in fostering personal growth. Deliberate reading becomes a valuable practice, allowing us to seek inspiration and insight from books that resonate with our present journey. Additionally, we encourage creating intentional experiences infused with fun, adventure, and curiosity, setting the stage for personal development. Our discussion presents practical steps to embark on this transformative journey, emphasizing self-awareness, intentionality, and the power of community support. As

Today’s discussion revolves around our recognition of the importance of connection and the need to reconnect with others, ourselves, and content. We acknowledge that in our fast-paced lives, we often underestimate the significance of meaningful connections. We believe in the value of intentional and authentic connections, where we show up authentically, actively listen, and seek to understand before being understood. We also discuss the impact of technology on our connections, acknowledging that while it offers convenience, it can lead to superficial interactions and a sense of loneliness. We advocate for taking the time to reconnect, emphasizing activities like sharing meals, going for walks, and having face-to-face meetings to deepen our connections. We encourage you to reflect on your personal and professional connection maps, identify gaps and take action to foster more meaningful connections. By prioritizing genuine connections, we believe we can enhance our personal and professional lives, experiencin

This episode is a direct response to a request of one of our clients. We suggest you listen to this episode in conjunction with episode 33, which was released the week before Christmas one year ago. We again discuss the Life Design process, but now dive deeper into the framework, the categories and the questions. Listen to episode 33 (Life Design - part 1) first, and make sure you have a notebook and a pen to hand (or a laptop with your favourite note taking app). A friend, partner or coach to do this together with and discuss your insights is optional. Enjoy!

Another episode where Bart has no idea in advance what we are talking about. This is becoming a bit of a habit for Pia! We start by addressing this question: What are the most interesting questions you get about our work? What is the elevator pitch of our work? Then we go into this issue: How to deal with people at work that are not as passionate and engaged about work as you are? A lot of what we are getting into here is about personal development, personal growth. So we continue the discussion about this and decide to call this episode “Personal Growth”. We discuss why personal growth is so important to us, the work with our clients, and the world. Then we continue discussing some of the most important ingredients of personal growth, such as personal values, curiosity, presence, experimenting and courage. Towards the end we decide there will need to be a part-2 or even a part-3 to this episode, as this is such a massive subject.

Interesting episode this, if we say so ourselves. We continue a (not recorded) conversation we had at AfrikaBurn three years ago, where we discussed stuckness and the question: How can stuckness become unstuck? Neither of us could remember the answer we had then, unfortunately. But we are having a go at it today. A part of the episode is taken up by Pia coaching Bart on changes in his life, which was very nice (thank you Pia). We (also) discuss: Fear of uncertainty, principle of impermanence, intentional experimenting, the foolishness of clinging, the distinction between moving towards and moving away from, the importance of seeking opportunities for change, the concept of life phases, the importance of solitude (internal time), and the related practices of meditation, reflection, journaling and reading and the believe that it’s ok, even desirable, to be uncomfortable and that we can learn from the negative emotions, when going through big changes. Apologies for the bad sound quality on Bart’s side.

We are still in the South of Spain (on the last morning before flying out), and we are tackling a topic which somehow has come up quite a lot this week: Ageing. (There are a lot of retired people in this part of Spain). We discuss the differences between chronological, mental and biological age. We talk about the benefits of hanging out with people that are half a generation older and half a generation younger than oneself. We discuss the concept of settling point: The point in one’s life when one stops learning, being curious and adventurous. We briefly discuss longevity, lifespan and healthspan. We argue that you are never too old to grow as a human being, whether mentally, emotionally or spiritually.

We are in the South of Spain, on our twice-per-year deep work days to prepare for the second half of the year client work. Quite appropriate then to discuss deep work. The why, what, how and so what of deep work. We discuss why it’s important to be deliberate about having rituals and routines around deep work, we define deep work as opposed to shallow work, we discuss how to do it: Plan for it (annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily), how to deal with distractions, the importance of specific time and space, chunking, intentions, agenda building and we give examples of what listeners can do as next steps after listening to this podcast episode.

We are in Stockholm, just after midsummer, when the light is always on. It has been a while since the last recording and we start by discussing what gets in the way of our podcasting: Health, bricks & mortar - very much level-1 stuff. Which then gets us into the topic of this episode: Fears. We remind ourselves of the three lower levels of the Barrett model and how we can use the model to provide a framework for fears. We make the distinction between rational and irrational fears. We discuss the role of the nervous system in fear. What happens when we allow fears to hold us back from our personal development? What is the connection between fear, authenticity, and purpose? How do the body, mind and emotions interact in fear? How can we learn from fear? How can we deal with fear, the thoughts behind the fears and the emotions, the physical sensations in the body? As usual, to illustrate this fascinating topic, we discuss lots of personal examples.

The birth of this episode is quite different. We created it and then put it to rest for a number of months. Then I recently listened to it again when I had one of those rare days of hardly any meetings and lots of time to reflect and create. I suppose I had the space to be open and to follow my curiosity. There was a reason we didn’t release the episode at the beginning of the year. You tell us what that reason might be. In the end, the topic Openness is too relevant and important not to engage in and not to have dialogues about. Especially now. If you are familiar with the Big Five personality theory, you also know that Openness is one of the five traits. It indicates how open-minded a person is. High level of openness to experience indicates you enjoy trying new things. You are imaginative, curious, and open-minded. Where do you sit on the scale of openness?

I (Bart) have never felt like I learned so much from recording an episode of our podcast than this one. Nature is something that is very close to Pia’s heart and she has a lot more opportunity to be in nature than most people that live in cities. For me it’s different, city parks are normally the closest I get to nature. In this dialogue, we touch on the importance of nature to us, human beings, for physical and mental health reasons, personal growth, and even leadership and organisational growth. There is a lot in this episode, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did recording it.

This episode is quite different to what you are used to: Rather than in our normal mega-professional studio environment (just kidding), we find ourselves recording this in a beach restaurant, with lots of background noises. We discuss quality of life. Why is it important? What does it mean to us? For us, health and freedom is important, spontaneity, not too much stress, being able to decide who we spend time with, spending time on what we want to spend time on, choosing experiences we enjoy, really to make our passion our work, and making our home what we want it to be. We discuss the opportunities the pandemic potentially may have given us to enhance our quality of life, potentially without taking away anything else. We discuss that some enhancements may cost some money, and other opportunities to increase our quality of life doesn't have to cost anything. So, quality of life is also related to our relationship with money, and in particular our relationship to spending money. Quality of life is its own

Our Christmas present to you, a podcast episode on Life Design. This is a process we use with some of our clients and we discuss in general terms how we go about this ourselves and with others, and the benefits of having a structured approach to reflecting on our lives and setting intentions. A naturally appropriate time to do this is around the end of the year and the start of the new year. What are the highs and lows of 2021, in different categories of our lives, and what could be some intentions, actions or routines we may set for these categories for 2022. We can also do this for a longer period, say 5 years, or shorter periods such as quarters of the year, months or even weeks. We give some tips on how to go about this in the coming few weeks. Enjoy!

It feels a little like we are back in March-2020, when we advised our clients to “hope for the best, prepare for the worst”. Except we didn’t know what we meant by “the worst”. Certainly not that we would, almost two years later, be back at what feels like another chapter in the ongoing story of this global pandemic. Today we discuss resilience. How can we train ourselves, our bodies and minds, to be more physically, mentally and emotionally resilient? This, we argue, is a super power that is very useful in a world full of covid-induced setbacks and disappointments.

In this early morning recording of this episode, we talk about sleep. We start from the technology, the biohacking / tracking tools we use, Whoop (Pia) and Oura (Bart), and how we use these tools in optimising sleep. We discuss some of the basics of sleep for example the four main aspects of sleep: Quality, quantity, continuity and regularity and the main stages of sleep: Deep, REM and light sleep. We continue discussing other matters such as the value (and potential risks) of daytime napping, the value of each of the main sleep stages on body and mind repair, and the importance of knowing your chronotype: Are you a lark, a night owl or somewhere in the middle? Do you need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning? Then you are probably not a lark! We talk about the stages of life and how this impacts sleep, for example the sleep of teenagers, parents of very young children and older people. All sleep deprivation in our lives, throughout our lives, has an effect on our health, in particular later in life. H

It has been a while since the last episode, not sure what happened to the time! In this episode, we discuss organisational culture. A good episode to listen to before you listen to this episode is Episode 3, of May 2019, in which we talked about personal values. We define culture as those values and behaviours that are important to a team, group, company or country. What is important to us who work and/or live here? Culture happens anyway, whether you are aware of it or not. We talk about the importance of leadership, and the relation between leadership and culture, and the importance of walking the talk. We also touch on the importance of the company founder(s) in culture, especially when they are still around in executive roles, and for senior leaders to explicitly work with culture. Next is the importance of culture in international expansion, and how for example a European country’s corporate culture might meet US corporate culture and how to get the best out of both. We discuss the importance of auth

Following on from our last episode on coaching, we are discussing a closely related topic, motivation, with one of our clients, Max Barclay. We discuss the importance of motivation in managing and leading people, and what’s important in motivating people. We talk about: Knowing the people you motivate because it’s personal and situational, generational differences, the limited role of reward in motivation, the connection between personal values and motivation, how to use feedback in motivating people, and the importance of motivation in happiness at work. We touch on our favourite book on the subject, Drive by Daniel Pink, and the three drivers of motivation: Autonomy (leave them to it, don’t micromanage), mastery (allow people to get really good at what they are good at already) and purpose (support them to find some meaning bigger than themselves).

It’s the early morning on Good (Long) Friday and we are talking about coaching. What do we talk about when we talk about coaching? Of course, it’s our profession. It’s also a communication or leadership style. And it’s a methodology, a series of behaviours. It’s a personal value, and it’s a way of being in the world. We discuss some of the most essential coaching behaviours: It’s about showing curiosity and openness, being present in the here and now, having empathy with the person you are coaching (which means real interest in the whole person, not just the subject matter), and we discuss some tools such as using silence. We leave listeners with some ideas on what to experiment with the next time they are in a coaching conversation.