Radical Discernment Podcast

By: Katherine Golub
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  • Summary

  • Each week, host Katherine Golub offers practical tools to help social changemakers cultivate the capacity for impact and joy. If you ever feel exhausted, frustrated, disappointed, bewildered, overwhelmed, alone or stressed out in your efforts to make a difference in the world, this podcast is for you. Episodes are short to fit your full life and offer immediately-implementable takeaways.
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Episodes
  • The Neuroscience of Human Connection with Sarah Peyton

    The Neuroscience of Human Connection with Sarah Peyton
    Sep 30 2024
    Sarah Peyton is a neuroscience educator, Nonviolent Communication trainer, and, as a good friend of mine calls her, “brain whisperer.” Her live events, online courses, and bestselling books have transformed my coaching work and have helped my clients and me unstuck from many limiting personal and interpersonal patterns. We talk about the neuroscience of blame, guilt, shame, rage, and demonization, the difference between left-hemisphere and right-hemispheric thinking and why it matters for resolving conflict, and how to heal our brains and our relationships with empathy guesses. Sarah’s work has changed my life and my client’s lives, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Show Notes Episode Summary: Unlocking Empathy: Neuroscience of Human Connection with Sarah Peyton Sarah Peyton is a neuroscience educator, Nonviolent Communication trainer, and, as a good friend of mine calls her, “brain whisperer.” Her live events, online courses, and bestselling books have transformed my coaching work and have helped my clients and me unstuck from many limiting personal and interpersonal patterns. We talk about the neuroscience of blame, guilt, shame, rage, and demonization, the difference between left-hemisphere and right-hemispheric thinking and why it matters for resolving conflict, and how to heal our brains and our relationships with empathy guesses. Sarah’s work has changed my life and my client’s lives, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Key Topics Discussed: Transformational Power of Nonviolent Communication (NVC): Sarah shares her personal journey into NVC, including how it helped her overcome emotional barriers with her adopted son. She explains how empathy guesses—linking emotions and needs—can create powerful relational shifts and foster deeper understanding. Empathy in Conflict Resolution: Sarah elaborates on how empathy guesses differ from strategic communication. She highlights how focusing on feelings and needs can resolve conflict more effectively, especially in social justice and movement spaces. Relational vs. Instrumental Brain: We delve into the neurobiology of empathy, examining how the left hemisphere is task-oriented, while the right hemisphere supports relational thinking. Sarah explains how high-stakes situations push us into the instrumental brain, reducing our ability to empathize and connect deeply. Joyful Activism & Releasing Unconscious Contracts: Sarah introduces the concept of “unconscious contracts,” promises we make in childhood to "save the world" at any cost. She encourages joyful activism, where we work from a place of joy and passion rather than burnout and sacrifice, leading to more effective social change. Neurobiology of Demonization in Conflict: Sarah explains the neurobiology of demonization, where our brain's reward system fuels the tendency to other and blame people in conflict. By shifting focus to what we love—like justice and equity—we can channel rage into constructive, healing actions. Healing Trauma with Resonance: Sarah describes the process of healing trauma through resonant language and relational neuroscience. She explains how resonance allows the brain to process trauma and transform it into life experience, helping individuals move beyond their pain. Practical Self-Compassion Tools: For those feeling isolated or lacking support, Sarah offers a practice called “self-warmth,” encouraging listeners to start with one breath of self-compassion, building a foundation of emotional resilience through small moments of self-awareness. Recommended Resources: Books by Sarah Peyton: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain's Capacity for Healing Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-sabotage to Self-Care The Anti-Racist Heart (co-written with Roxy Manning) Other Resources on Nonviolent Communication (NVC):
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Welcome to Conflict Decoded!

    Welcome to Conflict Decoded!
    Sep 30 2024
    Hello and welcome to Conflict Decoded, where we explore the hidden dynamics that keep us stuck in conflict in our workplaces and communities and share practical guidance to help us break free. My name is Katherine Golub. I’m a coach, mediator, city councilor, activist, mother, and the founder of the Center for Callings & Courage. I live on the ancestral lands of the Pocumtuck people, recently known as Greenfield, Massachusetts. In this first episode, I want to share with you what called me to create this podcast and what you can expect from it. Show Notes Why I Decided to Create this Podcast About twelve years ago, I launched my professional coaching practice with the aim of helping social changemakers prevent burnout by taking better care of themselves. However, I quickly realized that my clients were coming to me already burned out and longing to get clear about what was next in their work lives. And so, career clarity coaching with changemakers became my focus. Although I used to believe that burnout came from working too much, doing this work now for over a decade, I’ve realized that even more people burn out due to conflict and challenging interpersonal dynamics. I also discovered that by helping my clients transform workplace conflict along with other patterns that gave rise to their burnout, about half of my clients end up falling back in love with their work and deciding to stay. While I’ve been able to help hundreds of clients realign their lives with what matters most to them and, in many cases, transform their workplace conflicts, it nevertheless hurts my heart to watch so many unaddressed conflicts, fractured relationships, and ineffective interpersonal dynamics bring committed people down and derail even the most promising efforts toward change. So, after over a decade of supporting my coaching clients to heal burnout, I’ve decided to focus my work on helping changemakers transform conflict in their workplaces and communities—the root cause of so much burnout—and learn to collaborate well, even in the face of great difference and complexity. I created this podcast to learn from some of the most brilliant minds I know on the forefront of conflict transformation and to share these conversations with you. This podcast is for you if you — Work hard to do your part to bring forth a better world, in your unique way and your corner of the world. Feel drained, disheartened, frustrated, baffled at why humans can’t just get along, uncertain about how to resolve things, and worried about what might happen if you don’t figure it out. Conflict or disagreement or just a lack of effective collaboration are thwarting your efforts toward change in your workplace or community. You want to understand what’s really going on with people, regain a sense of clarity and confidence, and develop skills and structures to help you collaborate well. Value love, liberation, learning, friendship, and wholeness and long for more of each of these in your life and in the world. Here’s what I know to be true— Conflict is a crucible—an alchemical space where different elements interact to create something new. Whether we like it or not, conflict will transform us. In situations with an abundance of difference, complexity, trauma, and strong opinions—which all of us who are working toward a better world face every day— conflict is inevitable. What’s not inevitable, is how we respond to conflict. Without the right skills or support, conflict can drain our energy, undermine our efforts, burn us out, and put an end to our most promising efforts toward change. With the right support, skills, structures, and strategies, conflict can be an opportunity to see things we haven’t seen before, strengthen our relationships, and create the changes we long for. What emerges from conflict can be horrendous, or it can be amazing. When we approach conflict as an opportunity to under...
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    8 mins
  • On Holding Conflicting Values & Realities

    On Holding Conflicting Values & Realities
    Feb 28 2024
    Have you ever heard a self-help teacher or friend say the words—Don’t should yourself…? As if should were a nasty word? If so, what do you think about this phrase? For a long time, I’d hear people admonishing themselves for saying the word should, and it would rub me the wrong way, but I didn’t quite know why. Then I discovered that the English word should comes from the same root as the Dutch and German word schuld, which means both guilt and debt. According to YourDailyGerman.com: “(For) some two thousand years, Schuld was simply about a sort of obligation that you had toward someone. Like…bringing the smith a boar because he fixed your ax or giving the chieftain a barrel of ale because he won the last drinking competition.” As a white person with multiple proximities to systemic power living on stolen land, I believe that I have a schuld— a debt rooted in unearned privilege, an obligation to pay reparations and to work to dismantle imperialism and white supremacy, the systems that give rise to my privilege. I believe there are some things I really should do. And yet, many people also use the word should to judge themselves into complying with dominant culture’s expectations, and this sense of obligation to the status quo does not serve most of us well. The inherent tension in the word should points to the deeper tension that most of us who care deeply about social justice and collective wellbeing grapple with— How do we simultaneously hold our obligations to the collective and our obligations to ourselves? If we show up for others and not for ourselves, we risk slipping into saviordom, which can perpetuate top-down dynamics, rob people on the margins of systemic power of their agency, and burn us out. On the other hand, if we only show up for ourselves but not for others, we abdicate our responsibility to the collective, and our complacency perpetuates injustice and collective dis-ease. And so, I believe we have a responsibility to learn to navigate the both-and, dancing between the polarity of self-care and collective-care over our days, weeks, and lifetimes. But because dominant culture does not train us to hold the both-and well and instead, teaches us to view the world as opposing binaries—good guys or bad guys, us or them, right or wrong—it can feel uncomfortable and challenging to hold the tension of conflicting values and realities. And so, most of us have a tendency to cling to one side of a polarity at the detriment of the whole. This either-or approach to life leads many people to all-or-nothing behavior—either working 24/7 or binging Netflix, either doing a daily self-care practice or none at all. And yet, the fact is that when we look closely, we can see that all of life expresses itself in polarities—apparent opposites that need each other to form a whole—night/day, birth/death, cold/hot, soft/hard, chaos/order, knowing/not knowing, yes/no, yin/yang, global/local, nature/nurture, receiving/giving, holding space for pain/holding space for joy, this is a nightmarish time / this is an extraordinary time. To bring forth the word that we long for, we must learn to perceive, honor, and skillfully navigate the polarities inherent in our work and in all of life. It is true that those of us who are committed to showing up on the front-lines of life and liberation are unlikely to find any perfect balance or to escape the tensions inherent in the conflicting realities we face. And yet, we humans do have the inherent potential to cultivate the capacity to hold the tensions in ways that make us proud. We can learn to show up for social change and take good care of ourselves, give and receive, say yes and say no, act and rest, be effective and have fun. Like all of creation, we are designed to honor the full expression of life living through us. For instance, one of my core values is solidarity, and this value often demands long hours of me. And yet,
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    11 mins
Career Success Management Economics Social Sciences
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