Episode 319 - When a role disappears or a career stops feeling right, most professionals reach for more control, more effort and more doom scrolling. In this conversation, Professor Stephen G Post explains why generosity, service and “pure unlimited love” are powerful tools for coping with job loss, protecting mental health and realigning your career with a deeper sense of calling.

Renata Bernarde (00:00)
When you lose a job or you feel stuck in a career that no longer fits, advice usually sounds very practical. You have to update your resume, you have to do more network, learn a new skill. All of that matters, but it doesn’t answer a deeper question that many of my listeners should be asking. How do I stay sane, hopeful and kind to myself and to others during this time of transition?

My guest today has spent more than four decades studying that deeper layer. Dr. Stephen G. Post is one of the world’s leading scholars on altruism, compassion, and the science of giving. the professor of preventative medicine and the director of the Center of Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at the Renaissance School of Medicine.

at Stony Brook University in New York. Before that, he was the professor of bioethics at Case Western University. If you know me, you know that this is where I want to do my further studies one day, fingers crossed. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the five-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics, a foundational reference in the field. Stephen is the founding president of the Institute for Research

of Unlimited Love, originally funded by Sir John Templeton to explore altruism, compassion and service through rigorous science. Alzheimer’s but you might be more familiar with his book, Why Good Things Happen to Good People.

In this book he pulled together a body of research showing that giving and kindness are not just nice to have qualities, they are linked to better health, longer life and greater happiness.

Stephen has a new book, it’s called Pure Unlimited Love, Science and the 7 Paths to Inner Peace, and it has a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and it takes this work even further. It lays out 7 practical paths for cultivating inner peace in the middle of conflict, uncertainty and fear and yes, job search too.

There’s a link to it in the show notes of this episode and I think it’s a wonderful Christmas present for you to give to a loved one or to give it to yourself. In this conversation, we talk about what pure unlimited love actually means in real life and why kindness and generosity helps us stay grounded during unemployment and career changes. How to keep your heart open without becoming a doormat.

and how to follow your callings even when the job market feels brutal. If you are in a season of job loss, reinvention, quiet frustration with your work, this episode is for you. My hope is that you walk away from it with the more spacious view of your own life and a few daily practices that help you find peace even when the future is uncertain. Let’s hear it from Stephen.

Renata Bernarde (03:41)
So first of all, Steven, can I just say thank you to you and your team for reaching out to the Job Hunting podcast. It’s such a great time of the year for you to be a guest on the podcast. This episode is coming out in December.

And it’s a good time to reflect, you know, it’s called the job hunting podcast. So many of my listeners don’t have jobs. Many of my listeners are not ⁓ employed or they are not happy at their jobs. So the first question that I have for you, I think is a very important one for them. Steven, you’re an expert in this. When you look at the world right now.

You know, I’m talking the world according to my listeners. We see layoffs. We see people being burnt out at work. We see people quietly, you know, resigning from their jobs, not loving what they do. Does that worry you?

Stephen G Post (04:44)
It is a perennial human challenge that seems particularly pointed these days. But the solution doesn’t change. The solution is that we need to find our callings in life and stick with them, not be diverted by…

a little more prestige or little more income, you need to stick with the things that feel true to you, that allow you to give and glow and not just fit in. I think that’s part of the problem is that our educational system educates people to fit in smoothly.

But in that process, they oftentimes repress their greatest talents, their greatest dreams. And as Eleanor Roosevelt said, the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. So the world needs dreamers. And I have been dreaming all of my life, and I’m not stopping now.

Renata Bernarde (06:11)
Steven, this 100 % resonate with what you’re saying. I’m a believer in that as well. When we’re about that big dream and a purposeful lifestyle, when we’re talking about love, you you talk about pure unlimited love. Is that however, a staging life that is

that one can pursue once one has dealt with the survival mode that they might be in if they lost their jobs.

Stephen G Post (06:51)
I don’t think so. I think that in fact from our studies, at least of adult Americans, we did a study in early 2010. And this was after the 2009 financial collapse. And what we found was that 41 % of American adults were volunteering.

which is a high percentage. How much were they volunteering?

Renata Bernarde (07:20)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen G Post (07:26)
on average about 100 hours a week. I’m sorry, a year. And if you break that down, it would be a couple of hours a week. And then we ask questions. This is in the book. We ask questions of them, which were more in the direction of positive psychology. So many of them who had lost their jobs said that they found great meaning in what they were doing.

Renata Bernarde (07:37)
Okay.

Stephen G Post (07:56)
that volunteering made them better able to cope with disappointments and setbacks. It improved their emotional health 77%. 68 % volunteering made me feel physically healthier. 92 % they felt an enriched purpose in life.

89 % agreed that volunteering improved my sense of well-being. 73 % said it lowered my stress levels. So that’s pretty good. They also said it helped them sleep better. They were happier. So I don’t think you ever get into a situation in life.

where love in the more profound sense that I speak of it, not the love of chocolate, although I was eating some chocolate this afternoon, not the love of designer jeans, but something much more fundamental. I like to say when the wellbeing and the security of another is as real to you as your own,

and sometimes more so, you love that person. And that can be expressed in many, many ways on the job or off the job, depending on what people around you need. So sometimes it can be expressed as care frontation. It’s a word in my book, which I…

have borrowed from ⁓ Scott Peck, a great psychiatrist and a friend of mine. ⁓

compassion.

helping others, creativity. There’s no end to the ways in which you can express love. And it’s these expressions of love that make life meaningful and that make people successful. So that really is always the case no matter whether you have…

secure employment, which I must say I do because I’m a tenured professor. Although you never know. ⁓ But I think that it’s always the case for me that ⁓ there are going to be low points every once in a while. This job, even though I love it, it does get boring. I even I say, thank God it’s Friday.

which is never a good sign. But you know, love is always the answer. And whether you’re employed or not employed, it’s the answer. And you can make tremendous strides with it. Sometimes losing a job is a good thing.

Renata Bernarde (10:53)
Yeah.

Steven, take me back to that moment in your life where you first became interested in compassion, in altruism. What happened in your life that pulled you in that direction?

Stephen G Post (11:32)
Well, I wasn’t being excoriated by some brutal beast. I had a fairly normal childhood, but I was lucky enough when I was in high school up in New Hampshire at a prep school to discover that what I really liked was not ice hockey, but rather

⁓ tutoring French Canadian kids from the poor neighborhoods. This is all south of Canada. And that made me very fulfilled. And I knew fairly early on that what I probably wanted to do with my life was to become a great scholar and a great teacher. And I stuck with that. Now there were some interruptions here and there.

and I had to be innovative. I had to persevere. And there are some origin stories in all of this. But yeah, I think you have to stick with your callings. Sometimes to find your callings, you have to experiment. We do a lot of volunteering here. In this medical school, we have probably at any point in time, 400 or 500 volunteers.

and they come in, these can be high school kids, these can be middle-aged people without a job, these can be older adults. They come in, they get a book, it’s about 200 pictures in this book, and it gives them a choice of what their activities might be. Maybe some of them want to ⁓ work in the gift shop. Maybe some of them want to work in preventive medicine or family medicine or…

population health in some way, shape or form. Maybe some of them want to garden. We have all kinds of options, but we let people have their choice when they volunteer. And then precisely what they do, some of them want to ⁓ do exactly what they were always doing because they feel more confident with that.

and others would prefer to be innovative and do something they’ve never done before. It’s important to gather these people together periodically, even at the end of every day if it’s possible, and let them debrief about what they found meaningful in the day. That really makes a difference. And what we know is that volunteering helps them live.

healthier, happier, and even longer lives. So the data on that is very clear. And I think for the younger people, it’s especially good because by volunteering and experimenting, which is what I did, they discover their talents and their gifts, and they realize that they have a quality.

Renata Bernarde (14:53)
Steven, most of our audience is older professionals, so experienced professionals. And they may see your path as being a lucky one because you found your calling very early on in life. And even with the ups and downs, you were able to pursue it consistently. ⁓ Many of my clients who are a small percentage, but still a significant

percentage of my audience struggle later in life with the situation of having pursued a profession that was not their calling.

Stephen G Post (15:35)
Right.

Renata Bernarde (15:38)
So do you have any advice to give professionals who have found their calling later in life or are even unsure if they have a calling at all?

Stephen G Post (15:50)
Well, first of all, as a point of faith, I think everybody has a calling and sometimes callings. ⁓ You know, as a teacher, if I say no to the curiosity and creativity of a student, I feel I should quit teaching, more or less, because that’s a bad sign.

You never say no without a yes. That’s a good management strategy. That’s how I operate centers and departments and divisions and so forth. I have lot of responsibilities and a lot of people who work with me. So you never want to say a no without a yes. And that’s just a general rule of life. Because when you say no, and that’s all you say,

It’s humiliating. Sometimes I go out on the streets in New York and I will tell a young person, do you know that you are a wonder of creation and a miracle of the universe? And they look at me like I’m very strange, which I suppose I am in certain respects. But I say that because I want to shake them up. People have been telling them for years.

that they have no gifts, no talents. And that is both humiliating, but also it strips them of their dignity. And so everybody, no matter what their stage in life, goes through these periods. ⁓ I’m sure you’re aware of Thomas Edison, who came up with the light bulb.

He was fairly young when he was humiliated. He was thrown out of his school in Milan, Ohio, which is where he was from and was born on a farm. His teachers threw him out of school because they didn’t think that he had a mind that was good for anything.

So I went home to his farm and his mother, who was the heroine of this story, she told him that he could tinker in the barn and that maybe one day he could be a light to the world. And of course he was. I visited that farm because I lived in Cleveland for many years and it was just a little bit outside of the city. And…

It’s a beautiful story. No matter what age you are, whether you’re in midlife or whatever, you can find beautiful things to do. I’ve known many people who saw their professional careers come to a close, but it worked out fairly well for them. In Canada, in Calgary, Canada, we had a program where

older employees, let’s just say in their late 50s, would for the last five years on the job be allowed to take a day off a week and volunteer for something that they found particularly meaningful. And our studies on that indicated

that it freed them of any kind of depression and suicidality, because that does happen. By giving them an opportunity to discover sources of meaning beyond the structure of their corporation or whatever their workplace may be, and to let them gradually find that value in activities that are beyond what they had normally been involved in.

Renata Bernarde (19:36)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen G Post (19:57)
they had very fulfilling transitions and oftentimes went on to do wonderful things. I think part of the problem is that people make the mistake of thinking that if their career runs into a wall, that their goal is to find almost the same kind of career except in a little different venue.

I don’t think that’s very productive. I think the best thing to do is to really do something creative and new. I know that if I lost my job, I’ve been teaching in medical schools for 40 some odd years. But if I lost my job, I’d probably go back to Mesopotamia, Ohio, that is, to Hopewell. Hopewell.cc.

people who want to Google it. It’s a 350 acre farm that was owned by the Amish once upon a time until it was purchased by a very wealthy woman who converted it into a therapeutic farm community for people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

I won’t go into the details, but it’s the most successful and innovative program in the world. And there are now almost a hundred that are modeled identically after it. And what you do at Hopewell is you’ve got pro-social activities. You’re bailing the hay, you’re combing the horses, you’re going out and getting the eggs out of the chicken coop. You’re

You’re doing wonderful things every day. You’re also meeting together in small groups and discussing positive psychological themes like gratitude, happiness, kindness, and so forth. The essence is a positive psychology. And you’re not on the internet.

You’re not doing AI. It’s a wonderful psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has developed the idea and shown it to be a big problem with youth of AI psychosis. There’s 17 American adolescents with no history of mental illness, and they’re now dead because the AI doesn’t really

teach them that they’re lovable. It’s a machine. So it has its limitations. And it can ask them, it can query them. So what’s bothering you? ⁓ I lost my job or I can’t get started or whatever it might be. But instead of guiding them toward a productive path, it actually guides them into a sort of negative vortex.

of depression and ⁓ self-destruction. So I think part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten how to relate to one another. Our social skills are not what they should be, ⁓ at least in many cases. And I think this is a real problem. We don’t really have much community, ⁓ at least in America these days.

Renata Bernarde (23:14)
Mm.

Stephen G Post (23:38)
I don’t know how Melbourne is, Melbourne’s a pretty nice place. But you know, we have these problems of finding meaningful community. And I think that that comes first. I don’t think people should be looking for a job per se. I think they should be looking to use their talents.

Renata Bernarde (23:42)
you

Stephen G Post (24:06)
in the service of an identifiable constituency and the job will come. If it doesn’t come, they will create it.

Renata Bernarde (24:13)
Mm.

That’s a great way to explain the sort of coaching that I do. Thank you, Stephen. I may have to add that quote to my website. Look, I’ve been researching you and I saw your book, Pure Unlimited Love, and in the book, you propose these seven paths to reach pure unlimited love.

Stephen G Post (24:42)
and inner peace.

Renata Bernarde (24:44)
Yes. What does it mean to have pure and limited love and inner peace?

Stephen G Post (24:51)
Well, first of all, you could ask what is love? And I already tried to give you a simple definition of what basically we’re talking about here. When the security and well-being of another is as meaningful or real to you as your own, sometimes more so, you love that person. Now, there’s no Greek, there’s no Latin.

Renata Bernarde (24:55)
Yes, please.

Mm-hmm.

Stephen G Post (25:20)
There are no wonderful ancient Eastern languages involved in that. It’s commonsensical. You could be in downtown Melbourne and be talking with an old friend in a coffee shop who’s had some hard times. You could be listening to them. That would be an expression of love. ⁓ Maybe they’ve lost a loved one, so you could express compassion.

Maybe they’re bogged down in their creativity and so you could help them with that. You’ve got to look at every situation every day, whether you’re in workplaces or at home or just out on the street. And you’ve always got to be asking yourself, how can I manifest love as this particular person needs it? So that’s important.

Renata Bernarde (26:15)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen G Post (26:18)
Forgiveness, you I run into physicians who sometimes are responsible because they all make medical mistakes for the death of a patient. And what I like to say to them quietly and with compassion, ⁓ “Those who make no mistakes make nothing”. That’s a quote from Martin Luther King. And it’s a good rule of love and of life.

And so you’re always trying to expand the canvas. There are these difficult moments. It’s like a, for those of you who are aware of him, Jackson Pollock, the painter, he would put a block full of yucky paint on the floor and it didn’t look like anything attractive. But by the time he covered it up with beautiful colored lines, it was museum worthy.

So you always want to expand the canvas. And if you lose a job, if you are looking for ⁓ something meaningful in life, it’s always there. You just have to expand the canvas. And I’ve had those experiences a few times. I’ve had to change jobs.

Renata Bernarde (27:32)
Yeah.

But.

Stephen G Post (27:37)
Occasionally, I’ve always tried to be conservative and make sure that I had a new job lined up. Before I quit my old job, I quit a job in Cleveland where I was very happy, but the economy wasn’t working too well for me and I wasn’t getting the kind of support and freedom that I needed. So I left.

particular medical school in Cleveland and I came here to Stony Brook and I’ve been here for 17 years. It wasn’t easy at the start. I thought maybe it was a mistake but as it turns out there are good people everywhere and I’ve been able to flourish here at Stony Brook which is about an hour outside of New York on the north shore of Long Island.

Renata Bernarde (28:26)
Yeah.

Stephen G Post (28:28)
So I’m one who really believes that you have to just be ⁓ enterprising, creative, and loving, and free. And if you get an opportunity in life to break out of a job that honestly you didn’t care much for anyway, although maybe you did,

Renata Bernarde (28:40)
Mmm.

Stephen G Post (28:55)
That’s not a bad thing. It can work to your advantage. We had a guy here, he’s now passed away, named Jim Simons. And you might know his name because he was the first quantitative investor in the world. He was a graduate of MIT in Princeton. And he was here.

only because he lost a job after he got done with his doctorate. He got a job with the CIA in Boston, code busting. And they caught him protesting the Vietnam War out on Commonwealth Avenue and they fired him on the spot. And as a result, they were looking for a math department chairman here at Stony Brook.

It was a new university at the time. Now it’s a leading university, but at the time it was just a mud hole. And they offered the job to four previous people and they’d all turned it down. And he came here and he said, well, you know, I’ve been fired and ⁓ I need a job. So he took the job and in 10 years it was the number two rated math department in the country.

number four in the world. He himself won all the major medals in mathematics. He hired five or six brilliant people. And then he lost his job. But he always said about getting fired in Boston, you know, everybody should get fired once. And they should. I was fired once upon a time in high school from a job in a shipyard.

because I sanded down the transom of a big, beautiful boat, of a power boat that had all kinds of gold inlay and people had been working on it for weeks and weeks. But the boss said, take that down. And I took it down to the wood and I was fired on the spot. But it was great for me because I realized that I could find other things to do and be resourced. And I found a job tutoring.

Renata Bernarde (31:09)
Mm.

Stephen G Post (31:13)
which was a wonderful thing. So I don’t have any problem. I think it’s okay to lose a job once, maybe twice is a lot, three times, four times. That’s maybe over the top. But everybody should get fired once. I really believe that.

Renata Bernarde (31:30)
Steven, ⁓ I’ve been thinking about what you’re saying and thinking about the amount of volunteering I did this year. It’s probably the most volunteer I’ve ever done this year has been really heavy on the pro bono and volunteering work that I have done because there has been so many big layoffs ⁓ that ⁓ were done ⁓

one after the other with organizations that were ⁓ not really proper clients. They would never be clients of mine. So for example, ⁓ United Nations and WHO, I think there were about 14,000 ⁓ people that had to leave because of lack of funding all of a sudden, very suddenly. ⁓ mean, people saw it coming, I suppose, but

they didn’t expect it to get this bad. ⁓ So these are people that work and live in Africa, in the Middle East, in countries where I usually don’t have clients and they can’t afford me and I volunteered to help UNHCR and UNNWHO with support for the people that were leaving.

It takes a toll on me. love it. I do it gladly. You you don’t have to ask me twice. I will always sign up for this sort of opportunities to share my expertise and, and I do it freely. I don’t mind. But is there a limit where I need to be careful so that I can protect my own wellbeing? Cause I have sometimes felt depleted during this year and I am wondering here if it’s

if I’ve done too much.

Stephen G Post (33:24)
Well, you don’t want to let yourself feel depleted. Remember, definition of love, the well-being and security of another becomes as meaningful or as real to you as your own. There’s still a you. And here, working in a big medical center, I’ve known some great professionals who’ve devoted their lives

to the care of patients for many, many years, and they begin to start running on empty. They lose the meaning. And that’s a very serious problem. And so you can say on the one hand, well, be mindful, meditate, ⁓ balance your life. But sometimes the system itself, to be frank, puts so much pressure on them.

that it’s not that they’re burned out, they’re suffering kind of moral injury because they can’t practice with the sort of care and compassion that they want to practice with. So I would say that…

There are limits. No human being is unlimited. And we have to be stewards of our energy and our creativity and utilize our energies to the extent that it’s possible for us to be thriving. Now there are times when sacrifice is inevitable and that can be challenging and it doesn’t mean that that’s a bad thing.

but you don’t want to overdo it. So I believe in balance and try to pursue that. I write a lot about volunteering. I’ve written whole books about it. And I don’t like to think that that gets in the hands of somebody who was already serving others as a nurse or a social worker or a physician ⁓ because

They’re doing that anyway on a professional day-to-day basis. But I mainly think about volunteering for folks who don’t have that level of meaning in their lives. For, you know, the noble bus driver or the taxi cab driver or the guy who cleans up the park. They need opportunities, pro-social opportunities to… ⁓

do things that are very meaningful for them because they don’t have that opportunity in day-to-day life.

Renata Bernarde (36:10)
Mm.

Stephen G Post (36:11)
So I think you have to look at who the person is. it’s not how much you do. That’s important. Our studies show that it’s really not a matter of volunteering hours and hours. It’s really that two to three hours a week that seems to create a kind of shift effect.

And by the way, for young kids, for teenagers, it’s probably an hour or two. For older adults, it’s probably three or four hours. So there are differences in the prescription. ⁓ And that’s important to note. Now, as you realize from the first chapter of my book, it’s kind giving, kind volunteering. May you give and glow. So it’s not as though…

It’s just an external action. That can get very dreary. It’s not as though it’s the worst and imposed upon you. That can be very dreary. Service-based learning is required in some of the schools. And about a third of people take to it like a duck to water. And about a third of people need a lot of mentoring. And eventually, they catch on. hear the music.

Renata Bernarde (37:09)
Mm.

Stephen G Post (37:30)
And there’s about a third of people who just don’t quite get it, maybe until they have a midlife crisis.

Renata Bernarde (37:37)
Yeah.

Stephen G Post (37:38)
And so there are differences ⁓ in all of this. I generally ⁓ don’t want anybody to overdo volunteering and how it’s managed.

Renata Bernarde (37:42)
you

Stephen G Post (37:54)
Excuse me, he’s very important.

Renata Bernarde (37:56)
Yeah. I love the statements in your book, May You Give and Glow. The other one that I really liked was May You Heal in Kindness. I think this is such a good one for me as a coach to use with my clients because when you are laid off, when you lose your job, when you get fired, something happens, or you don’t like your boss and you’re very upset at work, you go through a grieving process.

You know, and we talk a lot about the seven stages of grief and, you know, how they’re not linear. But I love the may you heal in kindness, where there’s this, I mean, I would love for you to maybe explain it better than I am here, but I think one of the stages of grief that can happen if you’re laid off is you get really angry. So what would you say about that?

Stephen G Post (38:49)
Well, number one, I’m not a stage theorist. I knew Kubler-Ross, the University of Chicago, and frankly, we thought she was pretty crazy. The stages of death and dying. People are too different to go through the same stages. So I just don’t believe, anytime I hear a stage theory, I’m skeptical. Maybe in certain instances,

Renata Bernarde (38:53)
Mmm.

Stephen G Post (39:18)
⁓ There can be acceptable stage theorists, but I don’t think it’s something to put in the bank. ⁓ To heal with kindness is something that we can all do. It’s not just for healthcare people or pastors or counselors. Healing with kindness is for everybody without exception. So how we

use our voices, the tone of our voices, ⁓ our ability to respond to adversity and not react to it. ⁓ But that takes spiritual discipline. So you cannot get away from spirituality. I get up, as you know, from reading the book. I get up in the morning about five o’clock. I was up at five o’clock this morning.

What time is it now? It’s about midnight East Coast time. That’s why I go on a couple of times. Forgive me. ⁓ But, you know, I get up early every morning and I meditate. I’m mindful. And I do that for half an hour. And then I envision in some detail the people I know I’m going to encounter over the course of the day. And I ask myself,

what expression of love do they need from me? And so I mentioned care frontation before. That means that there are some people who have sort of gotten off line and they’ve forgotten really who and whose they are. And so I want to be the one who can remind them in a very caring way to kind of keep on track. That’s what Aristotle.

Renata Bernarde (41:11)
Hmm.

Stephen G Post (41:13)
said defines the highest level of friendship. It’s not who you party with or who you hang out with, but it’s who you can help maintain their inner core. So care frontation. Sometimes it’s loyalty. Sometimes you’ll run into sign. can know that somebody’s lost a spouse, run off in some irresponsible way.

Renata Bernarde (41:17)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Stephen G Post (41:44)
And so I want to be assuring them that they’ll get loyalty from me and from the people in my programs because I teach loyalty and I teach compassion. I want everybody to be compassionate. I don’t want any of this rough stuff or this callousness. So that’s leadership.

And for a lot of people, when they find they have a boss who doesn’t care about these things well, ⁓ maybe there’s not too much you can do about that. But if you ever have an opportunity yourself for leadership, don’t imitate those bad role models. Do the opposite.

Renata Bernarde (42:33)
Steven, you’re a scholar and you wake up at 5 a.m. Do you think… I’m very particular about a daily schedule because if I’m working with ⁓ professionals that are unemployed, they usually fall off the wagon by not having a schedule. You know, don’t have to go to work, then you start ⁓ becoming, you know, more more undisciplined with your life. And that can affect…

the outcome of your job search. So I’m very strict with what I call an optimized job search schedule. I, you know, my clients love it. So I, I’m very proud of having developed it, but I’m interested in your views about the waking up at 5 a.m. time, because I know that there’s some controversies there. Is this something that suits you or is this research that you’re applying to yourself?

Stephen G Post (43:27)
Well, it has a long history. ⁓ The ancient rabbis always said that the early morning was the time to meditate and envision your day because when you get up out of bed, you’re not really conscious of time or even place. You could be in Melbourne, but you could be in Sydney or Brisbane too. You have to kind of orient yourself. It’s also a time when

human nature at its worst has not yet expressed itself. So I like the early mornings, so do the Hindus and people from most of the great traditions. Doesn’t mean that during the course of the day you can’t refresh yourself, but I’m a believer in the early morning as a time of purity and for the ⁓ ancient rabbis,

And for anyone who reads the Upanishads, ⁓ it’s the early morning when you can get closer to the Supreme Being, to that ultimate energy and reality, ⁓ because you feel beyond time and place. And that’s the same as the Supreme Being, as at least it’s described. And so that’s important to me. Now, does that fit for everybody?

⁓ I’m not sure. can’t testify to that. But it works for me. And I’ve been doing it since I was 15. Just a long time. I won’t tell you quite how long.

Renata Bernarde (44:56)
Mm.

A

very long time. ⁓ And the other thing I wanted to ask you, which is in your book as well, is this relationship that we can have with nature, right? This is something else that I think is really important for job seekers because usually what happens these days, if you lose your job, the first thing you do is you sit in front of a computer and you doom scroll ⁓ job.

marketplaces like LinkedIn or Indeed, and you get addicted to those platforms. And when you look outside, it’s already dark. And I think nature is such an important part of that optimization of your daily routine. How do you think we can best do this when we’re so anxious about finding a job quickly?

Stephen G Post (45:41)
Yeah.

Well, there can be financial pressures, but in general terms, you want to cherish nature. So that’s the sixth way. May you cherish the gift of nature. And you want to do that while you’re working, while you’re employed. I ride a ferry across Long Island Sound, which is part of the ocean.

to Bridgeport, Connecticut at least every couple of weeks. And I don’t get off the boat, I just stay on. It cost me 20 American dollars. I don’t know what that is Australian now. But I go back and forth because I love the waves, I like to see the seagulls. I just like the feel of the water. And I can see the coastline and all the beautiful fall leaves.

which are not quite off the trees yet. So I really believe that we are necessarily creatures of nature. And I don’t know how Melbourne is doing these days, but we have a little town nearby called Port Jefferson from which the ferry goes over to Bridgeport. It’s only 20 bucks. It’s really nothing.

But I go there and there’s a meditational center and you’ve got wind chimes making beautiful sounds. You’ve got water flowing through a bamboo ⁓ tube and into a little pond.

Maybe you have a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi. You’ve got lots of beautiful plants. And you know, that’s so important in life, even in assisted living centers and nursing homes for older adults. You have whole wings of those structures that are devoted to nature. And everybody realizes from very significant studies at Harvard and elsewhere.

that you wanna have what we now call here the Eden alternative, have some nice friendly labradors floating around and let people be looking after those laboratories. Let somebody be ⁓ watching the, know, watering the plants.

So doing things that are pro-social and naturalistic, that’s very, important for people at any point in their lives. And so you should never stop that. It doesn’t matter whether you’re searching for a job or you have a job or you never had a job or you may never get a job. You need to be cherishing nature. There are books now being written called

nature deficit disorder. I go to the psychiatric emergency unit here about every several weeks just to see how bad things can get. And I have to tell you that it’s horrendous. And most of these people, especially the younger ones, are just so hooked up on the internet all the time that they’ve lost any kind of balance or proportion in life.

Renata Bernarde (49:02)
Wow.

Stephen G Post (49:29)
So right here, I keep handy, I’ll show this to your audience, ⁓ a nice book with some Australian writers called Ecopsychology. That’s important. I have to get out to nature and I’ve always been that way. I remember with my kids who are now grown up, we would be driving from Cleveland to New York

And I would be getting so excited about the cow or the horse along the side of the road. And my kids would look at me like I was nuts because they don’t have that necessarily. And it’s a very sad state of affairs. So I think we need to take nature very seriously because spirituality may you know the one mind.

May you cherish nature. ⁓ These things are very closely connected. And I’d like to see more of that connection ⁓ manifest in people’s lives. I went to school at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Steve Jobs slept on my floor. A young Steve Jobs. And he loved nature.

He would disappear from Friday to Monday to the apple orchards north of Portland, Oregon.

And then he would, and there were no machines to pick apples back then. It was hand picking. Then he would come back to campus with a wonderful bag full of apples and a pocket full of money. And we all love the guy. And we read the autobiography of a yogi on my floor. And when he died, everybody who got to the funeral got a paperback copy of that great classic book.

So, and the cover of his iPhone was the cover of that book.

So he understood from the get-go that nature and spirituality are interconnected. He never let his daughter go near one of those white plastic devices that he later developed until she was college age because he didn’t want to ruin her life.

So, you know, when I see the way people are growing up now with these devices everywhere, I don’t think it’s a good thing. I feel very badly about artificial intelligence. I actually know the guy who got the Nobel Prize for developing AI when he was with Google, and he quit Google.

And now he’s a professor, a general professor at the University of Toronto. His name is Hanson, great guy. And the reason he quit Google is because he could see no way that we mere human beings could ever really thrive and flourish in a world dominated by technology.

And so that’s part of the problem is that if people don’t get freed up from that and really interact socially and meaningfully and really interact, I mean, in their embodiment. ⁓

I’m not sure it matters if they have a job or not.

Renata Bernarde (53:33)
Yeah. Steven, this is such a wonderful conversation for my audience. ⁓ The fact that it’s also December, I think it means a lot to finish the year with these messages and these reminders of love, of nature, of purpose, of empathy and compassion. It’s such a good time. ⁓ Is there anything that you would like to speak directly to my listener? You know, is there anything that we maybe didn’t

discussed today that you want to finish off with.

Stephen G Post (54:07)
Well, you know, ⁓ what is happiness?

there’s a terrible guy whose name will not be mentioned. He’s a Harvard professor. And he wrote a book called stumbling on happiness. And he thinks that happiness purely in hedonic terms. It’s all a matter of hedonic pleasure.

But really the father of happiness studies, Marty Seligman, was a long time friend of mine. He says, yeah, the hedonic side of happiness is a small part of it. You do want, let’s acknowledge this, you do want a plate of food on the table from time to time. Hopefully not too much, you don’t need to be obese.

You want a roof over your head, and maybe you have some other desires that are important for you, for your family. But that’s a small part of happiness. The larger part of happiness is what my professor at the University of Chicago, Mikhail Chik sent me high, called flow. And that became a huge international success.

his book and his movement.

Renata Bernarde (55:32)
I love that

book. I’m looking at the book because I’m talking to you. It’s right here.

Stephen G Post (55:35)
Yeah, yeah.

And so when you’re really, really engaged with what you’re doing, and that’s what everybody wants to have, that’s more important than anything else in terms of your work life, if you will. You know, you’re not just fitting in, but you’re really doing something that makes you better at being who you are. And when you’re in the flow state, whether you’re a writer or a teacher,

Renata Bernarde (55:38)
Mm.

Stephen G Post (56:06)
or whatever you might be, a musician, ⁓ cleaning the parks, driving a bus, you can find what makes you flow. And when you’re in the flow state, you lose sense of time and place. It’s very mystical, actually. That’s why Chick sent me high, taught in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, as well as in the psychology department.

because he was very interested in Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and such things. And so I think it’s very important to be able to get into the time of flow on a daily basis. And ideally, if you can flow at work, then you blur the line between work and play. And blurring that line is the secret to a long-term success.

I have to confess, if I may, that every once in a while, even I say to myself, thank God it’s Friday. But that’s a bad sign. I don’t do that much. I’ve done it a few times, especially in the last couple of years. Maybe it means I’m destined for something more next step. But I… ⁓

Renata Bernarde (57:17)
Mm.

you

Stephen G Post (57:32)
I’ve, as far as I can recount, I’ve always had a joy in coming to work. Now I’ve had a certain amount of autonomy because I have had to move jobs from Case Western Medical School, which I loved very much, but I didn’t see the opportunities for leadership to develop the kind of programs that I have now.

I mean, I have now the number seven ranked program in American medical education. And it’s a center for medical humanities, compassionate care and bioethics. It’s all about compassionate care and teaching empathy to these young, wonderful students. And I couldn’t do that where I was. So I had to move on and it was painful to move on. And it took me a couple of years to get over it.

I think I had separation anxiety. It took me three years to get used to the guy who pumps gas in the village of Stony Brook because he had this incredibly Eastern European accent and I just couldn’t believe what I was listening to. I knew I wasn’t in Cleveland anymore. So, you know, there is separation anxiety and people are going to feel that.

Renata Bernarde (58:32)
Yeah.

Stephen G Post (58:58)
And there’s nothing like having to move jobs and oftentimes move locations and even cities and counties and whatever. That’s part of it. But you also have to be resilient and have post-traumatic growth. There’s a lot of trauma in losing a job or quitting a job.

I didn’t so much lose the job in Cleveland at Case Western, but I quit the job because I knew I could never do what I was really called to do. And so I came here, I ran into a university president who wanted someone in the world to come to Stony Brook and teach kindness and compassion and empathy.

⁓ And we’ve had great programs, great success. We’ve won national awards in this area. So the movement was tough, tough as nails. But I always had my eyes on something. And so the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. When you lose a job, that’s exactly what you need to be thinking.

Renata Bernarde (1:00:13)
Hmm.

Stephen G Post (1:00:19)
And then of course, the third level of happiness for Marty Seligman is more over the course of a lifetime. You get to a point where you kind of look back, I’m doing a little bit of that now, and you feel that what you did was meaningful, that it was pretty good on the whole, that you contributed to the wellbeing of identifiable constituencies, family and others, and that’s important.

So I think ⁓ we have to really reflect on what happiness is and don’t give in to some of these really foolish pseudo scholars, social scientists for the most part, who think they know what happiness is, but they don’t.

Renata Bernarde (1:01:08)
Yeah. Steven, thank you so much. I think we got into a flow here and we could have gone on forever, but, you know, it was great to speak to you and there’s so much. I want my audience to be like a sponge observing absorbing everything that you you said today and that that carries them on to 2026 with, you know, more more of a purposeful, intentional.

Stephen G Post (1:01:14)
Okay.

Renata Bernarde (1:01:38)
plan for their careers. So thank you so much for speaking to us today. I really appreciate you being here today with us.

Stephen G Post (1:01:45)
Well, it’s pleasure. And this book, Pure Unlimited Love with a forward by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, it can do some good. It’s very practical. That’s actually the last forward that he will have written because he’s now 90 to 91 and he’s not doing that for anybody anymore. But fortunately, he came around and he was willing to do this for me. It’s a beautiful forward. So I’m glad of that.

Renata Bernarde (1:01:54)
What a trip. That’s amazing.

Yes. That’s amazing, Stephen.

Awesome, beautiful.

We’re going to have a link to it in the episode show notes, a link to your website and to the book. So anybody listening, they can go and purchase the book. That will be a wonderful Christmas present. Okay.

Stephen G Post (1:02:27)
Okay, now I have a final joke.

What do you do if you are agnostic, you have insomnia, and you have dyslexia?

Renata Bernarde (1:02:43)
have no idea.

Stephen G Post (1:02:45)
Okay, the answer

is you’re up all night like I am tonight.

Renata Bernarde (1:02:49)
Yeah.

Stephen G Post (1:02:52)
wondering about the existence of dog.

Renata Bernarde (1:02:58)
Okay.

Stephen G Post (1:03:01)
It’s God’s father. So you’re up all night wondering about the existence of dog. It’s a great, if you get it, not everybody gets it.

Renata Bernarde (1:03:03)
Okay.

Okay, it is.

All right, Stephen, thank you so much.

Stephen G Post (1:03:15)
Okay, I believe in Murth.

I’ll see you. Take care.