What is a Good Life?

On the 141st episode of What is a Good Life?, I’m delighted to welcome Professor Megan Reitz. Megan is an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, and Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School. She is a leading thinker on leadership and dialogue, featured in the Thinkers50 ranking of global business thinkers, and the author of Dialogue in Organizations, Mind Time, and, most recently, Speak Out, Listen Up. Her work explores how we create the conditions for transformative dialogue at work, and her latest research examines how we can foster spaciousness — the capacity to innovate, reflect, and build relationships in workplaces addicted to busyness.

In this conversation, we explore the impact of space, silence, attention, and an outward focus on our relationships and our experience of life.

This episode serves as an invitation to pause, question the busyness we’ve become entangled in, and reconsider the status quo of how we relate.

For more of Megan's work:
Website: https://www.meganreitz.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganreitz/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@whatisagoodlife
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markcmccartney

00:00 How do I encounter the world?

04:00 Flow amongst people

07:00 How our gestures affect others

11:45 The labels, assumptions, and roles that create distance

17:13 The energy drain of societal expectations

23:00 Allowing, inquiry, and meta awareness

26:20 Creating the space we require

33:45 How do we see the world?

37:00 Navigating pauses and big questions

44:00 How strange it has become to pause

47:30 Our focus moving from ourselves

53:30 Experiencing periods without an agenda

What is What is a Good Life??

A project exploring the big questions around how we live, who we are and what actually matters. Over the past four years, I’ve sat with more than 300 people — artists, parents, executives, wanderers, therapists, and strangers and invited them into a simple but profound inquiry, "What is a good life for you?"
The conversations explore presence, paradox, uncertainty, and the moments that shape a life - love and loss, trust and fear, clarity and not knowing. It’s an invitations to slow down, to listen deeply, and to bring you into conversation with your own life. There are new episodes every Tuesday.

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What is What is a Good Life??