Doing What Works

You don’t have to live in the past, but why not mine it for its treasures? We’ll help you find them in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Business Professionals of America!Elizabeth Gilbert!Michael Bryant.

Darrell’s kept track of every penny he’s spent since he started college. If you want to keep better tabs on your own money you might have fun listening to this encore edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Your Money or Your Life might change the way you look at the money you spend.

Your relationships thrive in direction proportion to your willingness to address conflict. This edition of Doing What Works will help.Here are your show notes…“Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house.”Emotional intelligence is the discipline of sitting with a feeling long enough to understand it before you hand it to someone else.“The Comeback.”What is a relationship extinction event?Object permanence.“Most people who have post-traumatic stress disorder don't have it because they were hurt. They have it because they encountered someone who wanted to hurt them.”

There’s so much more to nurturing a friendship than trading updates. We have lots of great ideas in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Easy ways to nurture a long-distance friendship.Are you ready for kindergarten?Joshua Turek poetry!

If you want to get away from it all but take a lot of it with you, we’ll show you how in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Compression travel bags, no vacuum required!You like mayonnaise? Prove it.Dish soap, laundry soap, maybe even shampoo!

Expectations often lead to disappointment and unnecessary suffering. We’ll help you loosen their grip in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Warren Buffett says the key to a long marriage is low expectations.If you’ve got a T-shirt with blood stains all over it maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem right now.Dan Savage says any long-term relationship that’s successful is really a myth that two people create together.Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

Is it possible to know too much? Possibly! We’ll give you less to think about in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Inside the mind of a master procrastinator!Glass bottles have microplastics, too.The golden mean.The human brain isn’t designed to process all of the world’s breaking emergencies in real time.Jonathan Haidt on attention fracking.You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do.

What would make a mouse in the living area of the RV feel like the best Christmas morning? We’ll take you on quite a ride in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…You worry too much for someone who God has never failed.Nature is indifferent to us.Go back to sleep, Chuck. You’re just havin’ a nightmare -- of course, we are still in hell.Gasoline can start to go bad after only three months in a tank.

You don’t have to love New York or the Knicks or any sport to find so much joy in this edition of Doing What Works!Here are your show notes…City Slickers!The New York Knicks are the 2026 NBA Champions.A postcard depicting the Fairyland Cottages in Detroit Lakes appears in the opening credits of the 1983 movie National Lampoon's Vacation. The cabins were destroyed in 2008 by the Detroit Lakes Fire Department in a training exercise.Do testosterone levels rise when your team wins?Collective Effervescence!Hoosiers.Brat Summer!

If you struggle to find the perfect gift, this edition of Doing What Works is a present for you!Here are your show notes…If you keep anything long enough you can throw it away.Brooks Palmer suggests moving clutter to another room to see it for what it is, clutter). That applies to relationships, too.Why my husband and I won’t be exchanging gifts on Valentine’s Day.Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.

If you’re putting more into a relationship than you’re getting back, you might love this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.He’s Just Not That Into You.Do you respond to bids for connection?

When Katie was little she wanted to be a glassblower. Whatever happened to that dream? We can’t wait to give you an update in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…The Corning Museum of Glass.Blown Away was a reality show about glassblowing.Your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.Katie’s artwork is a wonderful way of, as Chris Shea puts it, escorting my words off the page.Michael Bryant is a career coach.The poet Taylor Mali suggests you not worry about people who shame you for a college major with, “What are you going to do with that?”Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.

Katie exudes joy, but even she was no match for the dog entrusted to her care for a week. We hope you enjoy the canine (and encore!) edition of Doing What Works!Here are your show notes…Watching Marley & Me for the first time, with friends, left a bad taste in Katie’s mouth.A Tamagotchi is as close as caring for a pet as she got when she was little.Peek-a-boo teaches a child that whoever just disappeared will come back.If you get the first three years right with a child you’re probably set.Dogs can smell fear!Notice I’m tensing up, decide that can’t be good, tense up even more.Much of what Maureen knows about dogs came from City Slickers.George Carlin likes people on a case-by-case basis.

Katie and I started working together when she was only two weeks old. No kidding! This edition of Doing What Works is one example of how to have it all -- or most of it -- all at once.Here are your show notes…What Color Is Your Parachute?Staying the Course: A Runner’s Toughest Race.You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

Katie had a stress bender recently. I’m still reeling from a version of RV life I didn’t see coming and wouldn’t have signed up for. If we can find the upsides, which we describe in this edition of Doing What Works, you’re sure to be inspired.Here are your show notes…Maureen’s proudest moment as a parent.A reframe doesn’t have to be true to be helpful.The Serenity Prayer.In times of change, cling to and take comfort in what hasn’t.

Wondering what to look for in your first job? This edition of Doing What Works might leave you drooling.Here are your show notes…If you don’t want it on Page Six, don’t do it.Farm to Fork.

Darrell pursued a career in medicine while I was studying to be an engineer. Each of us found our way into radio, and this edition of Doing What Works is reassurance it’s okay to change course.Here are your show notes…“A Friend of Mine Is Going Blind.”John Mulhern runs Doing What Works on KSCB in Liberal, Kansas.Guardians of the Galaxy is the first exposure some people have had to cassette tapes.Joel Pollak is writing the biography of Scott Adams.AI is useful but it doesn’t have a soul.Dick Bolles said you should always be able to choose between at least two alternatives.“I got nowhere else to go!”Farm to Fork.

On Katie’s second-longest bike ride, which happened to be on the hottest day in a dozen years, she tried an experiment. No music in her headphones, no texting during breaks. So we had that much more to talk about in this encore edition of Doing What Works!Here are are your show notes…Another first for Katie on this trip? Energy gels!

How do you bring out the best in other people so everybody can accomplish what they need to in the best way they can? That’s the role of an effective leader, as Katie explains in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Suzy Welch suggests you hire people who can execute.“Winning Wimbledon,” Chris Evert once said, “lasts about an hour.”What is servant leadership?Happiness is health plus freedom.

Life might be more enjoyable if you look at problems like puzzles. Darrell fills in for Katie again to help make that case in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Reframe Your Brain!Reasoning from first principles.Making an apple pie from scratch.Laughter born of a shared memory.

Deliberation often means diminishing returns. This edition of Doing What Works challenges you to be honest about your nature, assess the stakes of a decision, and get on with life.Here are your show notes…When the odds of a win are effectively zero.The almonds we love.What do you make all day? Decisions!“What if you told yourself that no matter what happened after you chose A or B, you wouldn’t be mad at yourself?”We romanticize the road less traveled.

If one person’s trash is another’s treasure you’re cheating people when you throw things away. Darrell fills in for Katie to make that case in this edition of Doing What Works.Here are your show notes…Planned obsolescence.Farm to Fork.Are you a finisher or an opener?“How bad for the environment can throwing away one plastic bottle be?” thirty million people wonder.“The aftermath of the 98th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre showed a messy scene with littered bottles, cartons, wrappers, and debris in the upper rows.”Don’t mess around with a cigarette in the car!

Does assembling a piece of furniture fill you with dread? You aren’t alone, and you might need help. You can start with this edition of Doing What Works!Here are your show notes…The right to repair.Callings.Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

You don’t know what’s going to make you happy until you try it. The job or the relationship that looks good on paper may not feel so great at, say, ten o’clock on a Tuesday. That’s one reason to say yes to more things, so you can get a better feel for more things. Saying yes is a habit and a mindset. If you practice saying yes to smaller things with low stakes, you might find yourself more willing to take bigger risks. That’s what we hope to inspire in this edition of Doing What Works. Here are your show notes…Irresistible author Adam Alter [http://adamalterauthor.com/] was one of Katie’s professors at NYU Stern and “say yes” was his advice.“I wish I might go back and do the little things you asked me to” is from a poem by Alice E. Chase [https://www.scrapbook.com/poems/doc/860.html] entitled “To My Grown-Up Son.”Saying “yes” (and “yes, and”) is a rule of improv [https://medium.com/the-improv-blog/the-first-rule-of-improv-is-yes-and-30e5954240d6].“If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.” That’s from Dilbert creator Scott Adams [https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays].“Marriage is a big bet. It’s the only bet of its kind, one in which you say, ‘This feels right; I think I’ll change everything.’” That’s from Jerry Seinfeld [https://www.today.com/popculture/seinfeld-turns-25-read-jerrys-best-real-life-lines-1D79884423].