Finding the Throughline with Kate Hanley
Finding the Throughline: Conversations about the Creative Process invites you into the minds of writers and other creatives as they open up about their process, their doubts, and what kinds of changes they’re thinking about making. The questions are mildly invasive, honestly, and the answers are unvarnished…and so refreshing!
Whether your creative work is writing, painting, making music, parenting, or simply living, Finding the Throughline can help you get—and stay—inspired. Invigorated, even.
For detailed show notes on each interview, visit katehanley.substack.com. And if you’d like to hear these interviews in one ad-free episode (as opposed to broken up into three shorter episodes with a few ads sprinkled in to keep the lights on), become a paid subscriber once you’re there.
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How to Make Decisions Quickly: Decide When You’...
One way to avoid overthinking or ignoring some of the things that you need to decide is to give yourself a deadline. In other words, some times you need to decide WHEN you’re going to decide. !
4 min
652
How to Stop Overthinking Everything EP: 554
Because you are listening to a podcast called How to be a Better Person, you give a shit, about a lot of things, including making good choices. And that desire, while beautiful, can also be a slippery slope into overthinking. I mean, we’ve all been...
14 min
653
Choose Love: Making Decisions from the Heart E...
One of the reasons why decisions can be so taxing is that we’re over-relying on our brains to make them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for making pro and con lists and doing research and mulling things over, but your brain isn’t the only game in...
7 min
654
How to Use Intuition in Decision-Making EP: 552
Most of us know the basics of decision-making--name the problem, list the options, weigh the pros and cons of each, and choose the best one. But sometimes, the straightforward, tried and true approach just doesn’t work. Especially now in the...
8 min
655
Being a Better Person Online: Get a Grip on You...
OK the pandemic did NOT help us have a healthy relationship to screens. Not that all screen time is bad, but... we could all pretty much use a check in on how much time we spend starting at a screen.
8 min
656
Are You Meaner Online Than in Real Life? EP: 550
There’s a scientific term for the phenomenon of acting differently online than you do in real life, it’s called the internet disinhibition effect. So if you get fired up and leave snarky comments or bad reviews, you're living out a scientific...
7 min
657
Are You Addicted to Your Phone? Maybe (Probably...
Smartphones are designed to be addictive. If you can't stop looking at yours, it makes sense. Does that mean there's nothing you can do? No. Dr. Jud Brewer, a New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, and thought...
16 min
658
Managing the Onslaught of Opportunities to Sho...
Anytime you are online (unless you’ve paid for a subscription service with no ads), SHOPPING IS EVERYWHERE!! It’s very, very hard to resist. Which is tough on our willpower, which is a finite resource that burns pretty quickly, our credit...
7 min
659
Being a Better Person Online: Keeping Relations...
All our connectivity makes a lot of things easier, but there are some things where you don’t really want to take the easy route: for example, fostering day to day closeness to people you love.
8 min
660
DAY FIVE of the First-Ever Give a Shit Challeng...
Well, you commit to something. Something that helps keep a very manageable amount of your energy directed toward making a difference. I'll also share how I came to be secretary of the PTO--and why I'm so glad I did, despite the meetings.
7 min
661
DAY FOUR of the First-Ever Give a Shit Challeng...
In what I think might end up being the shortest How to Be a Better Person podcast episode ever, your tiny assignment today is just ridiculously simple. But hearing why it matters so very much will help inspire you to do it.
5 min
662
DAY THREE of the First-Ever Give a Shit Challen...
You may not have 50,000 followers on Instagram or a million followers on tiktok, but you still have influence. Today’s piece of the challenge is to take the information you gathered on who is already doing the work on the thing you want to help...
6 min
663
DAY TWO of the First-Ever Give a Shit Challenge...
Here’s a crucial thing to keep in mind when it comes to making a difference on issues big and small, global and local: You don’t need to be the savior rushing in a white horse. In fact, you'd likely only make things worse. Instead, your task...
6 min
664
DAY ONE of the First Ever Give a Shit Challenge...
This week on the podcast I’m doing something a little bit different. Because I’ve gotten such a great response to my free I Give a Shit sticker (it's a nice antidote to the I give zero effs thing that’s been floating around) and because there...
8 min
665
Ask Yourself This Question to Figure Out What Y...
Your emotions aren’t here to torture you; they’re messengers, giving you information about what you value, need, and want. Here's one question to ask yourself to figure out what information your anger is trying to convey. (Then it won’t have to...
8 min
666
What’s Your Anger Story? EP: 540
Each of us has a set of beliefs about anger that we’ve been carrying around since we were little. By taking a little time to think about what those beliefs are, you can get a little more objectivity and perspective on this emotion that so often...
8 min
667
Breaking the Cycle of Anger, an Interview with ...
I wanted to reach out to someone who could help us think about anger in new ways and potentially interrupt any of our habitual patterns around it so that we’ve got some space to learn some new skills for dealing with it. The person I’m talking to...
23 min
668
Reasons Why You Might Feel Angry All the Time E...
There’s nothing wrong with anger management strategies, which are fine but, to use a healthcare analogy, learning how to manage anger is trying to mitigate symptoms, instead of treating the root cause. Let’s look at some of the many, many things...
10 min
669
Is Anger Good, or Bad? Both EP: 537
This week's episodes were inspired by a listener question about feeling angry all the time lately, and what to do about it. And since anger is definitely having a moment (all that cooped-up angst has to have somewhere to go), let's figure out what all...
7 min
670
How Do You Feel When You’re Having Fun? EP: 536
Even when you’re busy and don’t feel like you have a lot of time to do things just for the fun of it, you can increase your experience of fun by tuning in to how fun feels in your body.
6 min
671
Using Fun to Motivate You--It Is Possible EP: 535
Let’s face it: Adulting can be a real slog. The list of things to do and take care of can feel relentless. However, that does not mean that doing the things you need to do has to be boring, or tedious. You CAN use fun to goad yourself into doing...
6 min
672
Feeling Fried? Might Be Time for the Healing Po...
Today I’m interviewing Dr. Rachel Allyn, a relationship and sex therapist and the author of the new book, The Pleasure Is All Yours: Reclaim Your Body’s Bliss and Reignite Your Passion for Life. After all fun and pleasure go hand in hand, and if...
15 min
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So, What ARE You Doing for Fun? EP: 533
In order to invite more fun into your life, it helps to give some thought to what you consider to be fun, and what you’ve been doing for fun lately, and objectively assess whether you might need to prioritize fun a little more. I think of it as...
8 min
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Let’s Have Some Fun EP: 532
I get that fun can feel frivolous, and that it’s easy to think that we should wait until things calm down before we even consider doing something just for the fun of it. But fun is not just enjoyable, but also it’s vital to our wellbeing and even...
9 min
675
How to Make Multiple Meals Out of One Cooking S...
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who embrace leftovers, and those who turn their nose up at them. By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll be firmly in the embrace ‘em camp, if you’re not there already.
6 min