Melissa Hughes - Neuroscience, my guilty pleasure

No stone left unturned in this one. Tamsin Astor is fearless, peripatetic (as in she's been all over the place geographically and educationally), and embracing. I would love to get together with all the back2different community, walk together for a while, then just sit and listen. I am very blessed to be part of this wondrous crowd, and Tamsin is no exception.
Tamsin and I run through the Irish goodbye, the dance of the universe, being a good faker, feeling too much, change as life, and all within the organizing principle of A Pillar of Pleasure.
Put your top down and have fun.

Jim Burke appeared through my connection with Craig James, and each connection enriches the other. I finally got some time with Jim and off we went, looking carefully into kinds of questions, since the questions we ask, not the answers we find, shape our reality. We batted around living through "Have you thought about this?"
We agreed that we both don't know nothin' and just had a grand time traveling through our stories together, both having reached a wonderful step in our road and reaching this conclusion: Be careful not to should all over yourself. Join us for some fun, please.

I hate scratching my head with "I wonder what s/he meant by that?"
First of all, I'm an inept fill-in-the-unspoken-part practitioner.
Hence my pleasure at getting together with Phil Williams. He wears no barriers and carries no shields. We travel through Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, time in the burn unit, his family and their home, music, and 'the great perhaps,' among other things. 
We both dreamed of being engineers, the choo-choo kind, but for very different reasons. Nothing is out of bounds, including his argument why we might consider the advantage if we can sit in the dining car with total strangers.

So Ileana and I explore trees, quiet, burls, pushing less and being more, Cra-Cra, chickens, naps, a sky with no airplanes, and "the moment you start laughing at yourself, that's when you're free."

Ileana grew up in Venezuela, worked 24 years with Exxon Mobile, then skipped out (like a happy child) to found Colibri Business Development. She helps local and international businesses, especially those in the energy market, with their growth and development.

Once she went out on her own, she realized this is your hummingbird.

She's transparent, excited, and a joy.

Brooke left behind her home country - Turkey -  and her successful career at IBM to find a new home - San Diego - and to start her own consulting businesses:

purposeful.business is a site for the organizational side of work, yourbestlifeinc.com is for individuals.

She made her giant step as she realized that who she was, the singular and only Ozlem, was vanishing. Her humanity and identity were falling away as a requisite for success in the world of corporate homogeneity. She's fun, smart, shining with the energy that builds when we focus on becoming ourselves, not ego but survival.

We talk about loyalty, millennials, values, success, and why change toward humanity at work is "common sense but not commonplace,"  for starters.

Join us, please, for our questions and conversation about why Everybody is Waiting for Friday.

Craig James is my trust talker. We never plan nothin'. One of us brings a thought, an idea, an event, a confusion, and then we start bouncing around like the lights from a mirror ball. It's fun, comfortable, and fearless. 

Without intent, without control, no matter how far we go, the conversation brings us back to where we started. It's not linear and it's not mysterious, it's just true. Give us a listen as we both realize I'm going wonderment. Buckle up!

What a combo of insight and humility is Melissa.  I know, that sounds like the first line of a sonnet - she and I tend toward the childlike and the fun. In our time with microphones, we explore -

The Rat Tickler
What's my Cat Hair?
Math tests and egg timers
"I don't just hire people who are smarter than me, I listen to them."
Glial cells - the day shift and the night shift
Cortisol overproduction and brain cell erosion - 

and then we get down to some serious stuff. Please join us as we hike within that three-pound wrinkly mass between your ears.

In any conversation that includes Roger and Colin, I wait comfortably in silence for their contributions. What I get for a small investment of patience is wisdom, empathy, and self-effacing humor.

When I asked Roger to contribute to Gender Crap, he hedged a bit. It turns out what he saw (or heard, I suppose) in the title was very different from my intent, which led to a wonderful conversation followed by his remarkable contribution.

Please join us as Roger reads, and the three of us explore, the complexity and insight of "The Rise of the Feminine."

BTW, Gender Crap will publish May 30th, 2023 and the ebook is available right now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4QB1XMQ. The price is $2.95, free with Kindle Unlimited. Any proceeds go the Doctors Without Borders.

Byron Edgington and Mariah Edgington pay complement to each other very well indeed. They don't complete each others' sentences - a practice I find quickly tiring - but they never fail to leave the other space to help populate the insight of whatever we're trying to understand. They are both and separately devoted to opening up possibilities, and they are part of a growing critical mass of those who are candid, humane, and do not suffer BS gladly. We explore the 60s, legacy, service and more as they help me understand that in some ways, the year in Vietnam was the safe part.

Vura's voices are a joy.
His speaking voice, his perspective, and his poetry, each rings straight and true. We both love writing and it brings us such pleasure that we spend a good part of this episode laughing. Vura serves on the Hertfordshire County Council in the UK and has a background in project management, as well as giving his time and energy to youth and recovery work. For two people of different generation, location, and race, we find a foundation of brotherhood, and isn't that what's it's all about? Take a listen as we talk and as Vura reads a marvelous poem, Tranquil in the Hill , during our exploration of Poetry, the Sound of our Story.
Vura is also a featured contributor ("The Agenda") to the upcoming book. Gender Crap, to be released May 15, 2023.