Reflecting on What Matters After a Terminal Cancer Diagnosis

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How does someone who's been told he will die much sooner than expected find contentment in the time he has left? As a former therapist, cofounder of the Deeper Coaching Institute, and business book author, Mark Goulston has spent his entire career trying to help others manage their emotions, improve their communication, and find the right balance between the personal and the professional. Faced with his own cancer diagnosis, he's been reflecting on lessons learned in his own life, things he and clients wish they'd done differently, and how to both prepare for a "good" death and leave a meaningful legacy. He shares his newfound perspective and his advice for early, mid- and late-career leaders.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you've ever wanted to learn from the head of sales at OpenAI or the Chief
0:06.0	Revenue Officers at Asana and Atlassian, check out the Science of Scaling from
0:11.2	the HubSpot podcast network. Each week you'll hear from folks who've scaled the
0:15.6	most successful sales teams in tech. Get the Science of Scaling wherever you
0:20.6	listen to podcasts.
0:36.6	Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.
0:43.6	From mid-life on, or maybe earlier for some people, we all tend to start
0:52.7	reflecting on the choices that we've made in our personal lives and careers and
0:57.0	the legacies that we think we're gonna leave behind. I know the pandemic sparked
1:01.4	this kind of thinking or rethinking for a lot of us. Other big moments like the
1:05.5	birth of a child, the loss of a job, becoming an empty nester, or retirement can
1:10.5	do the same. But our guest today has been thinking deeply about these issues for
1:14.4	another sadder reason. Mark Wolston, psychiatrist, leadership coach, best-selling
1:19.6	author, and friend of HBR reached out a few weeks ago with some terrible news.
1:23.8	He has been diagnosed with cancer that might be terminal. A life-long
1:28.9	educator, he started to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about all
1:32.4	the advice he still wants to impart. He says he's gained a newfound clarity about
1:37.0	what matters and what doesn't, and he wants to share what he's learning from
1:40.5	this experience with us. Mark is co-founder of the Deeper Coaching Institute and
1:44.9	author of a number of books. Mark, I really appreciate you volunteering to come
1:48.8	on the show to talk about this. Well, thank you for having me.
2:00.3	First, I am so sorry. How are you and your family doing? They're very quiet
	...

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