While many people are thinking about their New Year’s Resolutions, others are taking a different approach to the new year and setting an intention. To do that, choosing one word to focus on throughout the year is a helpful and effective practice, and this week’s guest is here to tell us how to do it and how it works. Matt Derrenbacher is a fifth-year rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati and has served as a chaplain candidate for the U.S. Air Force and a Jewish educator. He explains how using a single word can help us set an intention for the year and help us stay on track in the months to come. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why choosing one word to focus on throughout the coming year can help guide your actions.
• Why many people find it more effective than setting a resolution.
• How to decide what your word should be—and how to remind yourself of it regularly.

With her bestselling book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, psychotherapist, author and podcast host Lori Gottlieb taught us more about how therapy can change our lives. Now, she has created a guided journal based on the feedback she received to that book, which is designed to walk users through 52 weekly sessions that will transform their lives. This week, she talks about how to use it to create positive change in the coming year.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How regular guided journaling can help work through challenges.
• Why small incremental changes are the building blocks of big transformations.
• How to use journaling to help make the new year happier and more fulfilling.

The sounds of the season are all around us, but have you thought about why holiday music makes us happy? This week, Paula Felps sits down with sonic strategist Steve Keller to find out how holiday music is tied to nostalgia and what happens in our brains when we listen to it.  

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why even melancholy holiday music can make us feel happier.
• What role dopamine plays in the memories involving music.
• How to use holiday music to boost your mood throughout this busy season.

Grief and loss are something all of us experience throughout our lives, but they can be more difficult to manage during the holidays. This week’s guest, Julia A. Nicholson, shows how reframing that loss can help us navigate it better. As an executive leadership expert who has made it her mission to help others transform the way they view and manage grief, Julia drew upon the immense losses of her past to create a new framework that she shares in her forthcoming book, Move Forward Stronger.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How the holiday season may amplify feelings of loss — and how to manage those feelings.
• Why the traditional stages of grief often don’t apply.
• How to change our neural pathways to create a more positive approach to grief — while still honoring our loss.

Navigating difficult emotions are challenging for all of us, but that’s especially true for children. This week’s guest, Nadine Levitt, has turned even our most complicated emotions into a magical adventure. The author, educator, music artist, lawyer, and parent wanted to change the way children learn about their emotions, so she created Emotion Wonderland: a magical place where all our emotions coexist and we get to meet them, befriend them, and better understand them.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Nadine created the Emotion Wonderland — and why it was so important to her.
• The many different tools children can use to learn to express their feelings.
• How approaching our emotions differently can change the way we process our feelings.