In this episode of Walk Through Open Doors, James Henson discusses the significance of recognizing and assessing opportunities in life. He emphasizes the importance of pragmatism as a mindset for making effective decisions and avoiding the pitfalls of unrealistic expectations. James continues to talk about the five criteria for evaluating opportuni…

In this episode, James introduces the concept of 'Walk Through Open Doors' and explains how it has transformed his life. He shares his background as a social worker, therapist, and now a coach, and describes how a media company helped him define his unique approach and how he recognized the importance of recognizing opportunities in every situation…

It's been a minute. After a year and a half I wanted to tell you where I've been and talk about where I'm going. There were some difficult times, but I'm excited about what's coming. Thanks for listening.

Okay, time to wrap up the series on being the main character by talking about three ways we can chip away at the idea of our own importance: 1. Learn to meditate 2. Invest in other people 3. Understand that you will die I know that a lot of this might seem disempowering or morbid, but there is freedom in recognizing that nothing revolves around you…

This is an audio version of an old video that I created specifically for an issue of my newsletter. It’s about 4 things we can always be grateful for: 1) There is something instead of nothing. 2) This something is stable. 3) We have a consciousness with which to experience this stable something. 4) We have a say in how this consciousness relates to…

If we pay attention, we can see that life is constantly giving us feedback about our behavior. We cannot hear this feedback if we are too busy being the main character, and this will bring us constant trouble.

Simple ways to tell if you are the main character. Quick spoiler: you're not.

I used to think I was the main character. Now I know I’m not. There’s freedom in ordinariness.

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. I’m doing a class called Surviving Social Media for ClassRT on Tuesday, June 28th at 7pm CST. You can check it out here. _______________________ This episode is meant to be …

People ask me often enough what kinds of things I'm working on personally and what kinds of things I struggle with that I figured I'd just do an episode about it. The first two things I'm working on were pretty easy for me to identify: I'm always working on being more gentle and on being more social. I'm not really good at either of these things, b…

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. _______________…

Here's a more accurate title: “Care less about all the things that you don't have control over or that you aren’t really interested in so that you can put your time and energy into the things you can control and the things you do care about.”⁠ It's a little clunky. Everybody expects us to care about what they care about. They expect their passions …

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 atte…

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 Mo…

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 …

We behave according to how we see ourselves, but we have a lot more control over this than we think we do. _______________________ If you enjoyed this episode, you may enjoy the Simple Ways to Have a Good Life newsletter. It goes out every other Monday morning and is full of things intended to help you live your best life, all for free. Sign up her…

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. _______________________ If you enjoyed this episode, you may enjoy the Simple Ways …

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 …

“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 deci…

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 This is the first in a four-part series on our thoughts and how they impact our lives. In this episode of the podcast, we explore how our thoughts…

We have three degrees of control in life: none, conditional, and total. Knowing which is which and focusing our time and energy accordingly is everything. _______________________If you enjoyed this episode, you may enjoy the Simple Ways to Have a Good Life newsletter. It goes out every Friday morning and is full of things intended to help you live …

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: Your Anxiety Toolbox class My friend Meredith Hooke _______________________ If you enjoyed …

We experience a lot of different energies in the body. The mind takes these sensations and tells us a story about them, creating our emotions. When we learn how to recognize and deconstruct this process, our life gets better.

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 a…

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…

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. I…

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 thing…

This is another simple one. I'll talk about the things that concern me with the primary role our phones play in our lives, and I tell you about a few things that have helped me change my relationship with my phone for the better. Thank you for taking the time to listen, take care.

This one is fairly self-explanatory. Taking a break or permanent vacation from social media can improve your life. There are a bunch of studies that document the harmful effects of social media, especially on young people, not to mention the time suck and fragmentation of awareness that comes with the territory. I don't think you have to be militan…

This episode is pretty simple. I mentioned that I think taking cold showers has been really good for me, a lot of people asked me questions, so I did a bunch of research and I talk about it on here. I wanted to keep it short and concise, so it's not exhaustive but it should get you started.

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…

This episode was inspired by one of the questions I got most frequently over on Instagram: “What should I look for in a counselor?” This isn't an exhaustive exploration of this question, but we touch on things like the relationship, scope of practice, and professionalism in the counseling field and I think it will at least point people in the right…

This episode is in response to a valid criticism someone recently shared with me: this podcast claims to be about simple ways to have a good life, but I spend a lot of time talking about things like awareness and the ego. Not everyone knows how to take those concepts and turn them into actual change. I realized the person who told me this was right…

It is strange to me that this generated some pushback when I posted about it on Instagram a few months back. We only know what we know, and if we surround ourselves with people that are familiar, it's impossible for us to know more than we already know. Thick bubbles used to be the privilege of the wealthy, but the Internet has allowed us all to cu…

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl It is sad that we are not taught this, but there is a difference between the things that arise in our internal experience without being invited and our response to those things. If someo…

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 w…

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 relationsh…

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 an…

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 …

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 …

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 sufferi…

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 major…

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 toxi…

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…

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…

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. _______________________ Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or …

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. The need for approval is a tough one. We …

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. The practice of simple awareness is power…

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. This is a cool one. My friend Yash lives …

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. This is probably the most requested video…