Interview with Positive Psychologist & Self-actualisation Engineer: Dr Orin C. Davis

By Samantha Newport.

Dr Orin C. Davis is a fascinating and extremely knowledgeable professional in his field. From hypnosis, to positive psychology; from self-actualisation to making workplaces great places to work – we dive into it all here at theroompsy.com. In this exclusive interview, we drop right into the centre of Dr Davis’ mind, exploring his captivating viewpoints on where and how psychology exists as a discipline; unpacking the influences that inhibit family cohesion and perhaps enable crime; along with some useful insights for psych students in getting ahead - and what positive psychology has to say about all of it.

Let’s take a look…

Hello and welcome Dr Orin Davis! Let’s begin by dropping some of your socials so that our followers can find you. What are your social media handles, website name and anything that else that you would like to be found through?

So I run the Quality of Life Laboratory, so that’s www.qllab.org, folks can find me on Twitter and Medium at @DrOrinDavis. I do get around a little bit on various Podcasts and articles and so on, but those are mostly the two places I am on.

Brilliant, thank you. So, let’s get into it. I have done my research on you, and you have done and contributed a lot to the field of psychology and it is fascinating! But for those that don’t know you, can you give yourself a brief introduction about who you are and what you do?

I earned the first doctorate in Positive Psychology about 10 years ago and I do research on flow, creativity, mentoring, hypnosis, and the ideas that all fall under the rubric of self-actualisation; with the idea that this is basically looking at how we fulfil our potential and how we do and be our best. [This involves] looking at our best performances - that’s creativity -, our best experiences – that’s flow -, the state in which our best is most accessible - that’s hypnosis -, and the relationship that fosters our best - and that’s mentoring. From there I also apply this work to businesses. So as a business consultant, I am helping companies to do better hiring; looking specifically at their hiring strategies, their hiring mechanics, employee engagement, and diversity and inclusion.

What initially inspired you to dive into this line of work?

I guess I have always been interested in human potential. My parents told me that I was actually asking questions and exploring that even as a kid and it definitely came from my religious upbringing. I’m Orthodox Jewish and grew up religious and in a Jewish family. There’s a lot of lore about self-actualisation in Jewish culture. In fact, Maslow and many other positive psychologists were Jewish so it does have that very strong influence. But there is actually a famous story about a Rabbi named Zusya and a long story short, the Rabbi was very scared on his death bed about standing in judgement before The Creator and his student said “Rabbi, why are you so nervous? You were a great scholar! You did all these fantastic things!” and the Rabbi replied “Yes, but what I’m worried about is that The Creator is going to ask me: “Zusya, why weren’t you more like Zusya?” (i.e., “Why didn’t you fulfil your potential?”) ” and for me that was actually a very influential story; that the idea that we’re created or born with the potential to be all sorts of things […] The ultimate question for us at the end of our lives is “did we?”

When you began, what did your journey look like from first setting out as a student, to where you are now?

Well I definitely didn’t go the direct way! I was originally going to be a doctor or a physician and I was building up my background in the hard sciences. I loved chemistry - I still do! And I was really interested in organic chemistry, quantum mechanics, and was planning to major in that at Brandeis, but somehow the neuroscience department stole me and I ended up doing cognitive and computational neuroscience for my first degree. I then went on to take a neuroimaging research position at Massachusetts General Hospital, where one of my mentors convinced me – several of them had been working on me for quite a while! – but one of them finally put the final nail in the coffin and said “look, just go get your PhD and do behavioural research”. Around that time, I discovered Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on Flow and that looked very cool, so I applied to his lab for my Doctorate and was accepted and the rest as they say is history. I realised that a lot of my path was Micro to Macro. We as human beings at the micro level - the chemicals that are inside of us going all the way up to our brains, our neurons, our cognitive processes - and then moving on into business; our interpersonal relationships and our thought processes. As much as I’m an organisational psychologist, by training I’m very much a socio-cognitive psychologist; looking at how we think, the social interactions that effect how we think, and vice versa.

On your website, you talk about how your consulting focuses on making workplaces great places to work. Off the top of your head, what are your top 3 suggestions for businesses in order to achieve this?

The most important one - and this is, I think, one of the keys to management - is to let your employees be your employees. You hire them for a reason, step back and let them do their job. The overwhelming majority of complaints I hear about work and about time at work, is “Why doesn’t my boss or my company just step back and let me do my job?”

The second one is just recognising that employees are human beings; they’ve got lives, they’ve got other things that happen – let them manage it. Most people really do want to get their work done […] human beings have a phenomenally good work ethic most of the time. There are not that many lazy people in the world, there [are] bad apples that give the rest of us a bad name, but the overwhelming majority of people actually want to work, so trust that. So [if] people need to take a day here, time there - you know those sorts of things - just let them manage their lives and understand that work is part of their lives.

The third thing is to understand that people want to grow too. People want to work, but people also want to grow. A workplace should be a vehicle for self-actualization - and it really can be! Many of us really do experience self-actualisation though our work, whether that is because our work is actually an integral part of who we are and its calling - but for some people it’s actually just that which funds our calling; So we work by day or by night and we make money, but then we turn that money into the opportunity to pay for the development or the other opportunities to create things that we actually want to create. So recognising that we want to work and grow – work places should be offering people the opportunity to work and actually grow. [To] develop, train, become and express themselves creatively – and I say “creatively” writ large – but to express themselves creatively through their work.

On your website, you also talk about your research into hypnosis. There is a common assumption - thanks to an abundance of cartoons and some pretty terrible live stage acts – that hypnosis is all about getting someone into a comical or quite disturbing trance so to make them engage in all kinds of crazy acts. But what does hypnosis really mean and does it really work?

It absolutely really works! That’s a certainty! We’ve been spending a lot of time proving that and demonstrating that. But I would argue that the main point of hypnosis is to help people focus and really use their abilities and their attention to direct it towards things that they find valuable. So I’ll give you an example: if you want to learn a new behaviour, or if you want to develop a new habit - if you do it mindlessly, that is really hard to do. Whereas if you focus on it carefully and you really think about it, you can learn a new way of doing things where you can develop a new habit much more quickly. What hypnosis does is it basically helps you to focus and then it guides you through your own mind, through the experiences that you’ve got, through your interests and desires and it helps you actually focus them into doing something differently or into exploring a part of yourself or a part of your life - but really, really zooming in on it and casting a spotlight. Attention most of the time bounces around a lot. The point of hypnosis is to focus the attention and then help direct it very much like a spotlight onto whatever you’re looking for and to fulfil the goals that you have. Many people are not very good at this and they don’t have a lot of practice with it. So really what hypnotists do, is they are the guides; they know how to help people do this, they spend years practicing and training to help people develop this focus in short order and then show them how to guide the focus. So basically they’re helping people enter that hypnotic experience and then navigate through it in effective ways.

I’ll let you know a little something about stage shows. What people forget about is that most people who step up a stage show are consenting to do whatever is going to happen up there. So as comical or as weird as that is, you have to remember that the folks that go up there are generally consenting to it and if they’re not consenting to it, the stage hypnotist knows how to identify those people. It’s an important part of the craft to identify who’s not really consenting, who doesn’t really want to play along and so who shouldn’t be up there. People forget that during those stage shows, people actually get sent down. The stage hypnotist invites a whole load of people up, checks them all out, sends a few folks down…What they don’t realise is that the folks who got sent down are the ones that don’t want to play along; and the hypnotist through all those theatrics and those quote-unquote “tests” are identifying those who don’t want to play along and who should be sent down.

People actually don’t realise that stage hypnotists are extremely adroit at figuring that out and actually the main skill of stage hypnosis is identifying subtly who is going to play along who is not. The ones who are playing along really are getting hypnotised. I’ve seen some pretty good stage hypnotists out there – and some pretty lousy ones – but I’ve got to admit the difference between a good stage hypnotist and a bad stage hypnotist, mostly, has to do with the quality of their comedy and the quality of their suggestions and things that they’re having people do. Some of them are doing more ridiculous things, and some of them have actually done some really clever stunts and do things that are really interesting and amusing - and that’s actually good comedy plus the skill of identifying who wants to play along and who doesn’t, without the audience really realising that that’s happening.

What are the main things a hypnotist would look for in someone to assess whether they’re susceptible to it or not?

Funnily enough, I go to universities and sometimes do this as a talk or as a demonstration to actually show how a lot of that stuff works […] it’s actually a lot of fun. […] Roughly 90% of the population is susceptible to hypnosis but an important detail is that only the willing are going to experience it. Just because you are susceptible to it, doesn’t mean that you are going to experience it and it doesn’t mean that those who are going to hypnotise you are going to be successful. As a matter of fact if you’re not up for this, it is just not going to be successful and that’s just a standard part of the protocol. Almost any trained hypnotist is very well aware of that and most of us have no interest in working with somebody who doesn’t want to be hypnotised - most stage hypnotists don’t want to do that either because, again, it’s not fun, it’s not interesting and why in the world would you want to do that?

So, you presented a TED Talk in 2014 about self-help. This talk really blew me away and was deeply interesting. It is no secret that in today’s society, young people in particular are gravitating more towards valuing happiness, self-worth, personal enrichment, travelling and making memories over buying material objects and seeking status. In other words, millennials want purpose over paychecks. How can the principles of self-actualisation engineering help people unchain themselves from society’s grey hamster wheel and walk into the life that they really want?

I’m not sure that people really are pushing purpose over paychecks. I think they’re pushing growth, at times, but especially after the crash of ’08 I think people are perusing paychecks also. Because they want that financial security and especially with student debt being what it is, they do want that financial security. When you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy [of needs] you think of financial security as being one of those baselines: just knowing where your next paycheck is going to come from, knowing where your next meal is going to come from, knowing how you’re going to pay your rent, knowing that you’re going to be able to retire. So I do think that is very much intertwined with purpose, so I’m not sure that purpose and paychecks are so incompatible because for some people their purpose is to get a good paycheck, because that pays for the things they want in life. Along those lines, I would say that for many people, the goal is to live a good life and so people should be thinking mindfully about why they do what they do.

Do you think that there is a bit of perhaps an unfair stigma against millennials [that they are decadent and don’t really care about getting ahead]?

I don’t think at all that, that’s what most millennials are like. I have been a college professor for about 10 years now and – you know don’t get me wrong I have met my share of millennials who are like that. What I actually found more than anything else - it’s a class difference! People in the higher echelon, people in the upper classes, they do that a lot more often. Whereas people from middle class, people from lower classes of socio-economic status, they are driven. As much as they are looking for experiences, they’re not really looking for decadence and you know many of the millennials I’ve spoken to, especially the older millennials, […] those who have done those sorts of things, they’re really looking back on that and going “what was I thinking? Why was that important? That didn’t actually mean anything” and it’s like they lived that whole “took a pill in Ibiza thing” and the funny thing is [those things] weren’t so memorable and that wasn’t so great and yet they think about certain other things they have done that are extremely meaningful to them and it didn’t cost them a penny - or it cost very little.

Research says that everyone has a genetic baseline of happiness which we return to after events of distress or euphoria. Therefore, it can be one thing to desire wellbeing and quite another to obtain it. Following along a similar vein, from your research, do you think that there is a particular personality – or a unique genetic propensity – that means certain individuals are better able to achieve self-actualisation than others?

Not at all. I don’t even buy the Set Pont Theory or the high genetic influence towards your happiness. I would say that, that is much more nurture than nature. I would never deny the role of genetics in this, but I think that it is very much over-hyped. I also don’t think we have much of an idea of how genetics works yet, especially the epigenetic factors. There’s a lot of mystery in that and we still are noodling around in the dark. Same with neuroscience, we really don’t know much. I say this as someone who has worked in the field for many years, we really don’t know much and we are making increasingly better guesses, same with genetics, and my friends who work in genetics tell me something similar that we don’t know much but we’re getting there. But when it comes to our happiness, I think a lot of that is [more-so influenced by] culture, upbringing, and experiences - and most importantly along those lines because culture, upbringing and experiences also give us different definitions of happiness! So in certain countries there is a conception of happiness that may be very foreign - and I use that word intentionally - to people in other countries. It’s not always so obvious what it means to be happy or what is important, or what’s valuable, or what people should be striving for and that is going to vary by culture.

Self-actualisation is often thought of as a religious goal – and research largely shows that religion and spirituality have a positive correlation to psychological well-being. However, there has been a great deal of confusion and debate over their operational definitions. Moreover, words like “good and evil”, “judgment”, “right and wrong”, are argued as not having a place in psychology - that everything is subjective and simply built upon from previous research. How does religion fit in with the principles of self-actualisation? Does religion have its place within psychology?

So I’m actually going to say yes for one simple reason and that is The Sacredness of Life. The value of life and actually living life, I would argue, that without religion – and I’m talking about religion writ large, any religion, it really doesn’t matter which one you pick on this – but all religions hold life as something sacred and that sacredness of life is ineffable. When you start thinking about morality and other sorts of ethics, they all stem from this sacredness of life and I think that when you don’t have religion, life isn’t sacred - life is just something that people may elevate by choice. But if you’re playing from a rational perspective to start with that “all life isn’t sacred”, when you look at life rationally [as not being sacred] it becomes the sort of thing where you might just do the calculus of “is it better for hundreds to die, so that thousands can live?” – and things along those lines. You look at that calculus very differently when you’re looking strictly from an atheist perspective versus […] a religious one. When you’re realising that all of those lives are sacred and to take any life is a very serious thing - and I can hear the atheists pushing back and saying that they value life; of course they do! - but there is a difference between thinking of life as something consecrated and sacred, and thinking of it as something that is valuable. Because without a Deity that has established life and has created life, you don’t think of it as sacred. You just may choose to elevate it as a highest ideal, but that would become a choice that every individual makes and is not an obligation posed by a Godly creator, or spiritual creator of some kind(s). So the concepts of good, evil, morality, and ethics - they all derive from the sacredness of life and so for those of us who are trying to understand the psychology of human beings, if we don’t consider the fact that most human beings have some kind of religion in some way, you’re not really going to understand people.

There is a lot of negativity in the media today and in society more broadly – such as climate change, geo-political issues, corruption in government, as well as an abundance of religious and racial conflicts. According to research, worldwide discord such as this can – and has – significantly impacted people’s mental health and made us all far more discerning, paranoid, anxious, and pessimistic. How do you feel as individuals and as a collective, we can resist this negative priming and conditioning, so to inspire and reinforce positive change and improve attitudes?

I think that the main difference and the main issue here is how do we define our in-groups and out-groups? […] There is a fundamental human nature to create in-groups and out-groups; the folks that we want to spend our resources on and the folks that we don’t. Who is our in-group and who is not? And what do we do about people who are not in our in-group, is one of the things that matters the most. A lot of that could be live and let live and I think that one of the most important things is that people outside of our in-group aren’t worth the effort of hate. But more than that, when we do find [hate] happening, a lot of it is - do we stand up? Do we do something about it? or don’t we? And I think for many of us, people are afraid to stand up and combat these things and yet it’s the group that matters. So for instance, imagine that you are riding on the tube and you start to see somebody addressing another person inappropriately for whatever reason; they’re starting to say ethnic slurs, things along those lines. When one person steps up to do bystander intervention, that’s a good thing but when one person does it that can be a scary thing. But what happens when a couple different people make eye contact? And decide “we’re going to do something here”. That is hard to get going, but if people started actually coming up with the idea and people actually started getting the word out that we should be finding ways to signal one another, that “we are going to get up and we as a group are going to do something”. It really does change the game when it’s one person intervening between two people, [versus] five people intervening between two people – and that collective action can really feel good. That can actually add a lot of positivity - and just knowing that you were part of that [and] that you stopped it really makes a difference. And funnily enough when you were there, when you observed it, and when you didn’t do anything, that actually takes a toll on us also. Realising that we could have done something but chose not to because we were afraid or because we didn’t know what to do - we actually do feel bad about that. So we really could start to get the word out to teach each other how to get involved, how to intervene, how to be active participants in making this world better.

Gun crime in the States is frequently being identified as a current issue in the news, whilst over here in the UK, knife crime seems to be running rampant. The main age-group at risk in the UK appears to be those aged between 10-17 years old. Therefore, some argue that schools should be better equipped to teach and reinforce positive values in their students, whilst they are still relatively young and impressionable. As someone who is incredibly versed in learning, promoting and applying positive habits and behaviours so to encourage personal development, what advice would you give to schools to help save our kids from falling through the cracks?

Actually it’s not advice I’d give the schools, its advice I’d give the parents and the governments – stop making the schools substitute for parenting and community! That’s not fair! That’s not fair to teachers - look at how little they get paid! [People] want them to be educators, parents, babysitters, clergy - so what I would say is don’t put this on the schools! That would be the number 1 thing I would say. That’s totally unfair, it’s ridiculous and I mean just imagine this, you’re a teacher with 30 students in a room – “ok I’ve got to make sure that I know what’s going on with each and every student” – this is crazy. Also the idea that parents need to be talking to their children. There’s a saying, “it takes a village to raise a child” - well where are the villages now? People don’t know their neighbours. People aren’t building communities. People aren’t getting things together and getting together. Many of the things that happen [e.g. knife crime/gun crime], there were warning signs that people missed and we’re relying on teachers to do this all. I mean look, if [people are] going to rely on teachers to do this all, teachers should be making a six figure salary. We can make that demand on teachers when we’re giving them £100,000 per annum. I think unless we are paying teachers that kind of rate, this isn’t about teachers, this isn’t about schools, and this isn’t about administrators and stop looking at schools for the solution. Instead, we should be focusing on building communities, we should be focusing on making sure that parents have the work-life balance so that they can come home and have dinner with their kids. You were asking me earlier [in the interview] about the workplace, well the workplace can play a major role in this. Just look at how many parents are staying late at work and are not having dinner with their kids every night and just go ahead and ask those parents, you know “what would you rather do? Would you rather be staying at work late at night, or would you rather have dinner with your kids?”

How much do you think social media and smart phones have played a role in that division?

Not much honestly because it’s really just filling the void. When the void is: you don’t have community, you don’t have relationships, you don’t have parents and family and neighbours and groups getting involved - you create a void of people not getting enough interaction. People aren’t getting enough stimulus and so social media just happens to be there and is a nice cheap babysitter, for lack of a better term. I think that if we focus more on building communities and building neighbourhoods, building better relationships between parents and children - and that’s something that workplaces should get involved with. Let people go home. Let people build families and so people can have their lives. [Allowing this] will create more productive employees, but will also result in fewer incidences of teen violence [and] fewer school shootings because people are actually given the time to build relationships and [aren’t] just robots and workaholics and required to be ‘on’ 24/7. Let your employees go home for the night - and whatever time they go home, they don’t have to answer emails until they come into the office the next day. I think just making a policy like that would actually have major impact on reducing teen violence because now you’ve got parents who can be more involved with their families - and they want to be!

It says on your LinkedIn page that you have conducted research on the cognitive and personality factors that enable people to be creative and productive. What does this mean, what are the factors, and how can the average person put these principles into action, so to enhance their lives and move closer towards achieving their goals?

This work has been ongoing for about a decade now - trying to figure out what enables people to be maximally creative. So, I’ve been looking at a number of personality dialectics - this is actually building out on Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s theories on creativity and on the creative personality, and I’ve been trying to expand those theories and trying to measure what he’s got going there. It is actually quite a challenge. But one of the main points is that there seems to be a relationship between our maturity and our ability to be creative - and building on Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s work here, and I agree with him, that the more mature and complex we get, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to make it better, make a better contribution to humankind and to actually create things that are more novel and more useful - which I use Teresa Amabile’s definition of creativity to be novel, be useful and be appropriate – that the more we develop our complexity, the better we’re going to be at creating these sorts of things. So Dr. Csikszentmihalyi and I looked at 10 different personality dialectics; it’s not clear how relevant all of them are to creativity, we’re still exploring how that goes. I’m still trying to find samples. It’s actually very hard to do […] it’s actually a challenge to get a sample, so that’s something I have been working on. But one of the things that I have been noticing more than anything else is that people who really take the time to get to know themselves and are taking an active role in their personal development often are the ones that are building the right sort of skills, experience, knowledge, breadth and depth to be more creative people. I guess the number one piece of advice I can give for these sorts of things […] [is] just building on this Socratic notion: “know thyself”. […] That piece of advice […] is central to most religions, most philosophies, over and over and over again – it really comes back to “know yourself… well!”

Moving on now to 5 Wild Card questions. To begin, we have a good vs bad opinion question…SO…What are your salty vs sweet points or opinions about your profession, or the culture of psychology more broadly?

I think what I love about psychology is that it is becoming more and more of a science and we really are trying to analyse what works, what doesn’t and to take it very seriously to really subject human nature to the rigorous of science. Where I’m getting a little salty about this however is two things: number 1 that there’s an over-emphasis on just producing results that look sexy, even when they may not have a lot of validity. I have been finding a lot of papers - in good journals! - are just total fertilizer and are not respectable papers. They’re often getting into just silly, cute little quirky things that really don’t move the needle on our understanding of humankind.

Similarly, there has been an overemphasis on sensationalism and that’s [been] propagated by media and so you find a lot of people appropriating the work of psych-scientists and building names on this. I think of scientists whose work has been grossly appropriated and stolen by people who bill themselves as subject matter experts that really don’t know jack, couldn’t invent it, and never did; and I’m thinking of certain writers for instance – my examples aren’t to embarrass bad people but actually to give a great example of somebody who does this well is Malcolm Gladwell. The thing I like about Malcolm Gladwell is that he does not bill himself as subject matter expert, he bills himself as a writer and a storyteller. He is translating the work of psychologists, he is constantly crediting the people whose work he translates and he is making it very clear that he is a translator, he is a story-teller, he is not a scientist and he’s not a subject matter expert – he can read the technical stuff and translate it. He makes a lot of mistakes but the difference is he knows that and he is open about that and he is very honest about that. I can think about a lot of other people that are similar to Malcolm Gladwell who are not nearly as intellectually honest and who are just appropriating the work of psychologists and are taking a lot of people’s money for making gross errors. And I have sat in some of those talks where they’ll [cite] a paper and since I’m an academic, I’ll download the paper right there, look at the paper [and realise] that’s not what the paper says! They just charged these people tens of thousands of dollars to stand up there and pretend they’re a subject matter expert when they’re not a scientist! They don’t really understand the research and they’ve made that mistake and they’re giving people incorrect information – I mean blatantly incorrect information and they’re taking people’s money to do it when they don’t even have a degree in psychology! Not even a first degree in psychology – you’re a writer! You’re a journalist! […] And we allow it. And we pay for it. It’s funny, for example - those bad actors - they’re making it because we’re willing to pay them and we’re not willing to investigate and demand that the people who present to us have expertise.

What would be your number one top piece of advice for students who are looking to pursue a career in psychology?

The pattern I find most often when people come to pick my brain about this is [I’ll] say “why are you doing this? Do you know yourself? Do you know why you’re doing this?” and sometimes what I find is that people want to learn about psychology because there’s something about themselves that they want to understand and that they want to help people with. But what I point out is, if you’re looking to help people, you’re probably going in the wrong direction – and I say this with full sincerity – if you want to help people, go work in a soup kitchen and I mean it. It’s an incredible experience, you will do a lot of good and you will help a lot of people. Go volunteer, go visit the sick, go visit the elderly… If you want to help people, you will do a lot of good that way. But if you want a career in a helping profession, you really [have] got to think about why you are doing that, because just the fact of helping people is NOT a reason to go into psychology. Do it for very, very specific reasons - do it for specific reasons that you can articulate and that you can explain - but also if you are finding that you want to discover certain things because there’s things about yourself that you don’t understand, what I would say is, go find coaching or counselling if you can afford to do that. I would say that is a privilege, it’s a great opportunity, it’s a great exploration, with people who you can talk with and explore with. And that doesn’t necessarily need to be your profession.

What is something you know now, that you wished you knew when you first started out in your career?

The weirdest thing for me is that the market crashed while I was in graduate school. So that was something that was rather shocking to me. I’d always known the value of connections, and yet, I would say that I didn’t know that value well enough. You know they always say “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. I found over and over again that the main opportunities come from connections. One of the things that I watch as an active alum of my university - I actually go and meet students - and one of the things that I found over and over again is they’re not taught how to build a relationship with people that would be very happy to open doors for them. As an alum, I’m happy to open doors for my fellow alumni and yet I find that they don’t know how to take advantage of that offer. They don’t know how to do it and part of that is because they don’t value relationships and because we’ve created this void. [We’re] not building community, not building neighbourhoods, we’re not building families the way that we used to - people aren’t used to the idea of building a longstanding close relationship with someone. It’s harder to build, it’s harder to maintain, and people don’t have the experience doing that. One of the things that I wish I knew back when I was starting university is that I would have put more focus into building those and making sure that I was developing not just what I knew in uni but who I knew.

You have spoken at many public events over the years. What advice would you give to those who struggle with public speaking?

Recognise that you are bringing something valuable and that people are here to hear you. Remember that when you’re getting up there - you’re getting up there because people want to hear you and because you have something valuable to contribute. If you think about it, if your friend asked you for advice would you give it? Sure! If a colleague asked you for what you have to say, would you give it? Sure! Well, what’s the difference between one person asking for that and wanting that and a whole audience wanting that? Of course they want to hear what you’ve got – something that’s valuable. Focus on that. Get up there and give them something valuable because you know they want it and because you can uniquely give that. And don’t worry [about] whether you’re going to give that - it is a function of who you are. There’s nothing that you can lose when you get up on stage, you always have something to contribute and that’s why you’re up there in the first place. So be gracious, be generous, and think of your public speaking as offering a gift to people. You love to give gifts – we all love to give gifts! So get up there and give the gift.

To close out, are there any new exciting upcoming projects/releases/events coming up that you want people to look out for?

I’m going to be showing up on a couple of podcasts coming up so stay tuned to Twitter for the links. [There’s going to be] some new blog posts and journal articles coming out and hopefully some new talks are coming this year - so again, stay tuned to Twitter because that’s where they’re all going to get featured. And stay tuned to the blog because there are going to be some new posts coming up with some new ideas coming out that I have been working on and hopefully some new projects coming out too later this year! [Also] invitations to speak are always welcomed, I love talking to folks and I love talking to audiences. That would be great to be doing more of those - and again they will be featured on Twitter!