Simplify

What if the thing standing between you and a better day at work isn't a new habit—but just knowing which play to run?Amy Morin is the psychotherapist behind the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do series, which has sold over a million copies and sparked one of the most-watched TEDx talks of all time. Her new book, The Mental Strength Playbook, takes a different tack. Where her earlier work was preventative, this one is urgent care. Fifty plays you can run in the moment you need them: before the presentation, during the spiral, in the middle of a task that feels completely pointless.Caitlin and Amy get into why positive thinking can actually leave you less prepared, what happens in your brain when you step away from a problem and the answer shows up in the shower, and a surprisingly simple vagus nerve trick that can drop your anxiety in thirty seconds. You'll also hear how Amy arrived at this work through personal loss that reshaped everything she thought she knew about helping people.Mental strength isn't about pushing through pain at all costs. It's about having enough clarity on your own values to know which battles are yours—and enough flexibility to let the rest go.ResourcesAmy's new book: The Mental Strength Playbook by Amy MorinAmy's rec: How to Not Know—launching May 2025 Caitlin's rec: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis Ben's rec: Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir EyalAlso mentioned: Amy's podcast Mentally Stronger, the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do series (6 books), Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver BurkemanLet us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected] episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, Molly Rose Hart, and mixed & mastered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens in the gap between updating your LinkedIn title and actually knowing how to do the job? Caitlin sits down with Deborah Caulet—leadership coach, former VP of People at Blinkist, and someone who's spent 15 years helping leaders figure out what they're doing (and why they feel like they aren't doing it right!). Deb works with first-time managers and founders at growing startups, coaching them through the messy, humbling transition from high-performing individual contributor to someone whose job is to make other people shine. It's an identity shift, she says—and your sense of self has to catch up. They get into the classic traps: the leader who becomes their own bottleneck because delegating feels slower than just doing it, the difficult conversation that gets avoided for weeks because the anticipation is worse than the thing itself, and the imposter syndrome that 85% of professionals have felt at some point. Deb shares her CLEAR framework for navigating hard feedback conversations, and there's a thread about what it actually means to be kind versus nice at work — and why the difference matters more than you'd think. There's also a moment about AI's role in leadership that takes a surprising turn. The conversation lands on a deceptively simple piece of advice for anyone staring down a new role and feeling the weight of everything they don't yet know. It's the kind of thing you'll want to remember on a Monday morning.Resources Deb's Rec: Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock  Ben's Rec: Radical Candor by Kim Scott  Caitlin's Rec: A.Q.: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That's Always Changing by Liz Tran Deborah Caulet's 7-Day Difficult Conversation Challenge (free) Deborah Caulet's 12-Week Leadership Bootcamp.  Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected] This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.