The power of vulnerability
Brené Brown. On shame, worthiness, and why the willingness to be seen without armour turns out to be the thing that makes connection possible. Useful for anyone who has decided that needing people is a weakness.
Home/Videos
Guided practices & talks worth your time.
Six follow-along sessions written for this site — they run on the page itself, need no sound, and work on a phone in a parked car. Below them, a small, carefully chosen library of talks I recommend to patients often enough to have put them somewhere permanent.
Part one
Guided practices you can follow right here.
Press begin and read along at the pace the page sets. No headphones, no buffering, nothing to download. If you would rather have the whole script at once, every practice has a “read the script” button.
The guided practices need JavaScript to run their timers. Every script is also written out in full on the printable forms page, so nothing here is lost without it.
Part two
The talks I keep recommending.
Eight talks, all freely available from TED. I have chosen them because patients come back and tell me they changed how they thought about something — not because they are famous.
How to make stress your friend
Kelly McGonigal. How your beliefs about stress change what stress does to your body. I recommend this to people who have started to feel anxious about being anxious.
Why we all need to practise emotional first aid
Guy Winch. We treat a cut finger and ignore rejection, loneliness and failure. A clear, funny argument for tending psychological injuries with the same seriousness — and a good first talk for a sceptic.
A simple way to break a bad habit
Judson Brewer. The trigger–behaviour–reward loop, and why curiosity dismantles it more effectively than willpower. Pairs directly with the urge surfing practice above.
Depression, the secret we share
Andrew Solomon. The best description of depression from the inside that I know of. Often more useful for the family of a depressed person than for the person themselves.
We don’t “move on” from grief
Nora McInerny. Funny, unsentimental, and exactly right about the pressure to be finished with mourning. If someone has told you it has been long enough, watch this.
The gift and power of emotional courage
Susan David. On emotional agility, and the cost of the “be positive” culture that tells people their difficult feelings are a failure of attitude.
There’s more to life than being happy
Emily Esfahani Smith. Four pillars of meaning — belonging, purpose, transcendence, storytelling. A good talk for anyone whose life looks fine on paper and does not feel that way.
Videos are hosted by TED and embedded here; TED’s own terms and privacy policy apply while a video is playing. If an embed does not load on your network, every card has a direct link.
A note on watching versus doing
Insight is pleasant. Practice is what changes things.
A good talk can rearrange how you see a problem in eighteen minutes, and that is genuinely valuable. It is also, on its own, not enough — which is why the practices come first on this page.