What is a Good Life?

On the 82nd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Parneet Pal, MBBS, MS. Parneet is a Harvard- and Columbia-trained physician-educator who teaches skills and communicates ideas that advance personal, workplace, and planetary health. She is the founder of Systematically Well Advisory Inc., where she applies her expertise to enhance health and performance and their impact on business leadership. Her goal is to make you fall in love with your biology so that it works for you, your work, and the planet. She works with business teams and global organisations to address workplace stress, burnout, loneliness, and sustainability.

Parneet speaks at global conferences such as Web Summit and TED Countdown and guest lectures at several universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. She has been a TEDMED scholar, a Harvard Business Review contributor, and has been featured on the cover of Mindful magazine.

In this enlightening conversation, Parneet shares her explorations around what true health is, moving away from siloed approaches to well-being to consider social, economic, ecological, and environmental factors. She shares remarkable insights from what our biology suggests a good life is, as well as major realisations she has made in her own life in relation to nature, community, mindfulness, and compassion. 

This whole conversation is full of life-affirming messages around the wonder, design, and miracle of life. Parneet is an absolute fountain of knowledge and embodied compassion, and this episode will fill you with gratitude to simply exist in this world and for the very life we live.

Subscribe for weekly episodes, every Tuesday, and check out my YouTube channel (link below) for clips and shorts.

For further content and information check out the following:

Parneet's Website: https://www.parneetpal.com/
Parneet's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parneetpal/
IG: @pal.parneet   
X: @parneet_pal  

- For the podcast's YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@whatisagoodlife/videos
- My newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
- My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/

Contact me at mark@whatisagood.life if you'd like to further explore your own lines of self-inquiry or create experiences that lead to more connecting and genuine conversations amongst groups of people.

00:01 Introduction
03:17 Exploring what true health actually means
05:37 What makes the cells in my body sing
09:57 The connection between health and sustainability 
16:47 The impact of meaning and connection on our health
24:02 Recognising the body as part of nature
29:28 Stepping away from clinical practice 
34:07 The importance of embodying compassion
40:57 Appreciating the significance of community
49:12 Breathing in the world and the miracle of life
54:07 What is a good life for Parneet?

What is What is a Good Life??

Over the last three years I've interviewed over 200 people around the question of "what is a good life?". I am not trying to find or prescribe universal answers to this question, instead to prompt your own inquiry into what constitutes a good life for you. While I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the masks that we wear.