PODCAST · health
Semi-Together
by Gillian Burgess and Melia Dicker
Semi-Together is a podcast by sisters Gillian Burgess and Melia Dicker about having some of your life together all of the time. It’s about working on where you want to get it together, while giving yourself credit for where you’ve got it together. As we learn to live with more calm, joy, and authenticity, we share takeaways from our research and experience that you can use, too. Topics: Perfectionism, self-compassion, personal development, anxiety, stress, coping skills, psychology, goals, authenticity, vulnerability, ADHD, optimism, happiness, humor, joy, evolving, self-care, gratitude
Episodes
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Ep. 90: How Do We Cope When It's All Just Too Much?
We’re back from a hiatus, during which a lot has happened on every level of our lives: individually, in our communities, and in the world. In this episode, we’re discussing a question that comes up all the time these days: How do we cope when it’s all just too much? We’ll share how we’ve been...
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Ep. 89: Creative Living with ADHD, with Ellen Langford
For ADHD Awareness Month, we talk with painter Ellen Langford about her ADHD journey and how it intertwines with her creative life. Ellen shares the gifts and challenges of neurodivergence as an artist and small business owner, and the strategies that help her thrive. Ellen Langford is a painter...
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Ep. 88: Zoning Your Time to Reflect Your Priorities
There’s rarely enough time in the day to do everything we want to. So how do we zone our time to reflect our priorities? We discuss strategies to sort out what we actually value, as well as experiments to build our schedules around these values. Resources: Big Rocks & Little Rocks priority…
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Ep. 87: What It's Like to Have a Bonus Family, with our brother, Jeff Hamilton
We're back after a bit of a hiatus! We talk with Jeff Hamilton, our older biological half-brother, collectively telling the story of how we met as adults and became a big bonus family. This is the first time the three of us have talked about what this life-changing experience was like for each of...
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Ep. 86: What Makes You Feel Alive?
We discuss the question: What makes you feel alive? It’s been on our minds during this mid-winter period, when we often get the blahs or the blues. We talk about what energizes, fuels us, or puts us in a flow state – and how we make time for it. We also share four strategies you can use to figure...
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Ep. 85: How Do We Navigate Difficult Anniversaries? with Tara Blumenthal
In this episode, we discuss how to acknowledge (vs "celebrate") emotionally complex anniversaries of life-altering challenges, like serious illness or loss. How do we process these events? What kinds of rituals help us through the peaks and valleys that accompany them? We talk with Tara…
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Ep. 84: Celebrating Wins and Setting Intentions for the New Year
Happy New Year! To celebrate last year's wins and set intentions for this year, we each share three "Got It Together"s from 2023 and three "Get It Together"s for 2024. That is, three areas where we've made meaningful strides, and three areas where we would most like to progress. Get It Together,...
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Ep. 83: Handling the Holidays with Limited Capacity
The holiday season is beginning ... and it's a lot! We talk about how we’re approaching the season when our bandwidth is limited and our plates are full: gauging capacity, setting intentions, and communicating boundaries.
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Ep. 82: Right-Sizing Our Thrills and Chills
It’s spooky season, and we’re talking about how to find our just-right amount of thrills and chills -- what feels fun or engaging for each of us (eustress), and what’s too much (distress). The amount of challenge that we desire in each arena of life can differ quite a bit, depending on our...
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Ep. 81: What Makes a Good Life?
Most of us aspire to live a good life. We may assume we know what that looks like, without asking what a good life looks like for us -- which may diverge quite a bit from cultural ideals. In this episode, we share research findings on the essential elements of general well-being and discuss how…
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Ep. 80: Finding Everyday Awe
There's a simple action you can take to lower anxiety and stress, calm your nervous system, and increase your feeling of connection with others and the world around you. It's free, straightforward, and takes only a couple of minutes to feel the benefits. That practice is finding everyday awe. In...
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Ep. 79: Giving Yourself Real Rest
What feels restful to you? Some of us are so accustomed to doing and striving that we’re not quite sure anymore. Still, our minds and bodies need real rest to function, especially when we’re under stress. Coming off a restful week together in Spain, we discuss how to identify what renews your...
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Ep. 78: Spring Cleaning for Our Spaces and Minds
Spring cleaning has a number of mental health benefits. It gives you a sense of control over your environment that can help you manage stress and anxiety in your daily life. And making your space more open and tidy is both calming and energizing. We share 5 guiding questions, with examples from…
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Ep. 77: Small Steps to Break Through Overwhelm
As humans trying to keep up with the lightning-fast pace of the modern world, many of us often feel overwhelmed. It may be in a certain area of life -- like health, work, family, or current events -- and commonly, it’s all of the above all at once. In this episode, we share what overwhelm is and...
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Ep. 76: What's Your Love Language? with The Dudes
We bring in our husbands, Brian and Darren (a.k.a. The Dudes) to discuss our love languages and how they show up in our relationships. Gary Chapman published the book “The 5 Love Languages” over 30 years ago. Since then, the concept of “love languages” have become an enduring part of our pop...
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Ep. 75: Finding Meaning in Adversity
It feels important right now to figure out how to navigate the major stressors in our lives and move forward even when we’re struggling. Some of the people close to us are going through hard times right now, like infertility, serious illness, and loss of a loved one. It makes sense that as we get...
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Ep. 74: So This Is the New Year
We’ve always been amused by the holiday song that begins, “So this is Christmas,” because of its ambivalent vibe, like, “Welp, I guess this is happening.” But this opening line actually captures how we feel about the start of 2023.. In this episode, we talk about framing our intentions for the…
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Ep. 73: It's Your F'ing Holiday
The holidays can be A LOT, especially when we’ve been in survival mode -- as many of us have been since the pandemic started. This has been a challenging year for us: Gill has been managing her cancer diagnosis and treatment, while Melia has been building her coaching business and moving to New...
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Ep. 72: The Bittersweetness of Transitions
A lot of us are going through major transitions right now: moving to new locations, changing jobs or relationship status, having kids, or going through losses or health challenges. Many of us are shifting into a new phase in our lives or re-evaluating our priorities due to the pandemic. The...
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Ep. 71: How to Feel the Feels, and Why It Matters
Our upbringing, culture, and traumatic experiences can disconnect us from our emotions and intuition. Many of us get stuck in our minds and stop noticing the pain or discomfort in our bodies, so we miss signals that are crucial to our well-being. In this episode, we discuss why feeling your...
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Ep. 70: Dealing with Disappointment
Wellllll 🤬🤬🤬 Sometimes things don’t go as planned. You realize that a situation is out of your control, there’s nothing you can do about it, and it just plain sucks. This episode is unfortunately inspired by recent real-life events. We were supposed to meet in D.C. this month for some...
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Ep. 69: Get Out of Your Own Way by Knowing Your Enneagram Type, with Alicia Ross
If you’ve heard us refer to our Enneagram types in previous episodes (Melia is a 1, Gill is a 7) and wondered what the heck we were talking about, or if you are familiar with the Enneagram framework and want to learn more, this episode is for you! We talk to our dear friend Alicia Ross, a…
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Ep. 68: How to Set Internal Boundaries
When we think about setting boundaries, many of us focus on external boundaries: the limits we set with other people around our time, physical space, privacy, etc. But internal boundaries – those we need to protect our inner worlds from outside influences – are just as important, and often more...
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Ep. 67: Expanding the F**k It List
Heads up that this episode contains swearing. Let’s revisit The F**k It List! We recorded an episode on this topic back in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, when we were reevaluating our priorities and deciding how we want to spend our precious time and energy going forward. Making a F**k…
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Ep. 66: Poetry That Helps Us Feel It All
As National Poetry Month begins, we discuss the power of poetry to express emotion, read some of our favorite poems, and share what they mean to us. Become a patron of the podcast on Patreon (linked below) and read a couple of poems we’ve written that are close to our hearts. Gill gives a health...
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Ep. 65: How to Show Up for People in Tough Times
Heads up that we talk about some serious personal health issues in this episode with a good bit of emotion and swearing. If any of this is too much for you right now, feel free to skip this episode, read the summary in the forthcoming show notes or come back to it later. In this episode, we…
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Ep. 64: Building Joy & Meaning Into Every Day
We imagine that we’re not the only ones going through intense ups and downs right now, with the ongoing pandemic and winter weather. We’ve really been feeling the need to have things to look forward to, as well as everyday highlights we can count on, so in this episode we talk about Building Joy…
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Ep. 63: Relationship Insights from These Pandemic Times, with The Dudes
It’s been a wild ride during pandemic times, with many opportunities (welcome or not!) for us to practice the strategies we talk about on this podcast. Managing relationships in a new way -- with coworkers or friends, your family of origin or chosen family -- has been important but often...
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Ep. 62: Start the New Year with a Vision
Happy New Year! We recorded this episode on the last day of 2021 (together in person, yay!!). Our topic is Start the New Year with a Vision – which is especially timely as we’re ringing in 2022, but you can do this any time you want to reflect on and reset your goals and intentions. In this...
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Ep 61: Make a Holiday List, and Shorten It Twice
As the busyness of the holiday season ramps up, we're feeling the need to simplify our tasks. We’ll talk about how we’re doing with the holiday hustle, then share tips for shrinking your list down to the things that really matter to you. By letting the rest go, you’ll feel calmer and have more...
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Ep. 60: Happiness in the Here and Now: Our BFF Katie, a Therapist, Shares Her Secrets
Today’s episode is a little different. We often mention our dear friend Katie, who has transformed herself over the years from a melancholy teenager into a contented adult. After healing past traumas and learning to practice radical acceptance through years of therapy, she became a therapist...
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Ep. 59: Perfectionism: How We’ve Evolved and Where We’re Still Growing
Perfectionism is a recurring theme of Semi-Together – and the root of many of the things we struggle with, as we learn to show up authentically and treat ourselves with compassion. We went back and listened to Episode 25: Perfectionism & Self-Compassion, which we released almost exactly two years...
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Ep. 58: Dealing with What Scares You
Buckle up: it’s Halloween season, and we’re talking about fear! Fear is a primitive emotion that evolved to protect us from real threats, but it can also hold us back from taking risks that would likely benefit us. We discuss: How fear affects our brains and bodies – keeping us safe from…
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Ep. 57: ADHD and Creativity, Parenting, and Identity, with Ginger Williams Cook
October is ADHD Awareness Month.Even if ADHD is not a part of your life, as far as you know, we hope you listen – because it’s likely that you know someone or are someone with undiagnosed ADHD whose life could change with treatment. And if you don’t have ADHD but struggle with some of the…
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Ep. 56: Making Time for Play
Our topic in this episode is a fun one: making time for more play! We know how important play is for kids. But when we grow up, we somehow start thinking about play as optional or frivolous or childish. Spoiler alert: it’s none of those things and is actually fundamental to our health and well...
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Ep. 55: Re-Entering Our Cocoons
We are so happy to be back with a new season after our summer break. We missed you, and the opportunity to talk things through with each other. Our last minisode at the end of May was called Emerging from Our Cocoons. Welp! How innocent we were. Now we’re halfway back in our cocoons, trying to...
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Minisode: Emerging from Our Cocoons
As we re-enter the world and find our new normal, we want to be intentional about what we’re putting back into our lives and what we’re leaving behind. We revisit our minisode from April 2020, “What Do We Carry Forward?” to see what still resonates. Melia geeks out over the process of...
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Minisode: Close Calls as Wake-Up Calls
We both share how we’re feeling after speaking so honestly about our mental health journeys in Ep. 54: Let’s Talk About Mental health. We get emotional as we each recount a terrifying close call that made us grateful to be alive, a wake-up call to remember in tough times. Melia sets the record...
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Ep. 54: Let's Talk About Mental Health
We talk about mental health – ours, yours, and everyone’s – and why it’s so critical to normalize talking about it. We share our own personal experiences, terms to use and avoid, strategies to care for your mental health, and tips for supporting others. Note: We get into some serious topics...
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Ep. 53: How We've Evolved During the Pandemic
As we reach the anniversary of pandemic quarantine, we talk about the ways we have evolved during the past year -- not necessarily in ways that we expected or asked for, but have experienced nonetheless. This is NOT a list of achievements; it's about recognizing the fundamental ways we’ve grown...
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Ep. 52: How Nostalgia Helps Us Cope with Stress
Nostalgia is powerful – and it turns out, experiencing it regularly can boost our mental health, especially during difficult times. In this episode, we share: Our own experiences with leaning into nostalgia this past year (hello, ‘90s jams, TV show revivals, and fave childhood books!) Research...
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Ep. 51: Top 10 Takeaways from Our First 50 Episodes
We look back on the concepts, tips, and takeaways from our first 50 episodes, choosing 10 that have changed us the most and inspired the most listener response: Concept: Get It Together/ Got It Together (a segment in nearly every episode) Minisode: Practice the Pause Episode 13: Stop Shoulding...
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Ep. 50: The F**k It List
Join us in a fun and liberating exercise: The F**k It List. Think of it as the anti-Bucket List. Instead of “Things to do before you die,” it’s “Things to stop doing so you can fully live.” It’s a list of things that don’t bring you closer to the life you want, and therefore bring you farther…
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Ep. 49: What Are Your Silent Shoulds?
Back in Ep. 13, Stop Shoulding, we discussed why “should” is a word rooted in expectation, obligation, and criticism. Since then, we’ve mostly eliminated it from our vocabulary, which has felt liberating and has significantly boosted our happiness. Even so, there are still plenty of silent…
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Ep. 48: Are You a Scanner or a Diver?
Do you ever feel anxious about not knowing what your calling is, because you’re interested in so many things? Well, you may be a Scanner, and the good news is that you don’t have to limit yourself to just one thing. When Melia talked in In Ep. 47 about identifying her core purpose, Gill shared…
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Ep. 47: Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021!
Happy New Year! It’s FINALLY 2021. Melia and Gill talk about what they’re taking forward with them from last year, and what they’re happy to leave behind. They check in on how their 2020 goals ended up going in spite of it all, share how they’re paring down their goals for the new year, and offer…
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Ep. 46: All Vibes Welcome for the Holidays
It’s going to be a different kind of holiday season this year, and it’s important to acknowledge and accept the range of emotions we’re feeling. "Good vibes only" isn't realistic or helpful. We are human, and living through very challenging times. Even in normal years, the holidays can be tough…
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Ep. 45: Building Atomic Habits, with Brown Girls Read
Melia and Gill interview Daman Tiwana and Khyati Thakur, hosts of the excellent podcast Brown Girls Read. They chat about books, cocktails, and cultural differences – plus the habit-changing strategies that have helped them the most after reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Daman and...
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Ep. 44: Pressing the Reset Button
We’ve all been through a lot in 2020, and the weeks leading up to the presidential election were especially stressful and emotional. It’s time to press the reset button to renew our energy and hope. Melia and Gill recorded this episode two days after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were announced as...
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Ep. 43: Thriving with ADHD, with Dr. Michelle Frank
October is ADHD Awareness Month, and Melia has some surprising news to share: she was recently diagnosed with ADHD, at age 40. 😲 ADHD is often missed in girls and women – and a big misconception is that it’s limited to physically hyperactive boys. In this episode: Melia talks about her…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Semi-Together is a podcast by sisters Gillian Burgess and Melia Dicker about having some of your life together all of the time. It’s about working on where you want to get it together, while giving yourself credit for where you’ve got it together. As we learn to live with more calm, joy, and authenticity, we share takeaways from our research and experience that you can use, too. Topics: Perfectionism, self-compassion, personal development, anxiety, stress, coping skills, psychology, goals, authenticity, vulnerability, ADHD, optimism, happiness, humor, joy, evolving, self-care, gratitude
HOSTED BY
Gillian Burgess and Melia Dicker
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Semi-Together have?
Semi-Together currently has 102 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Semi-Together about?
Semi-Together is a podcast by sisters Gillian Burgess and Melia Dicker about having some of your life together all of the time. It’s about working on where you want to get it together, while giving yourself credit for where you’ve got it together. As we learn to live with more calm, joy, and...
How often does Semi-Together release new episodes?
Semi-Together publishes regularly with 102 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Semi-Together?
You can listen to Semi-Together on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Semi-Together?
Semi-Together is created and hosted by Gillian Burgess and Melia Dicker.
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