Episodes
How to move from Crisis to contentment: by the psychologist who studies midlife men
What if the restlessness, the irritability, and the quiet sense that something needs to change aren’t signs you’re falling apart—but signals worth listening to?
Dr Marny Lishman is a health and community psychologist, author of Crisis to Contentment, and one of Australia’s most sought-after voices on midlife wellbeing. She’s spent decades working with men who’ve walked into her clinic carrying the weight of burnout, disconnection, and a nagging sense of ‘is this it?’—and she’s helped them find a way through.
Rites of passage for men, midlife transition, and the quiet work of becoming
Most men arrive at 45 or 50 with the boxes ticked — career, family, mortgage — and still feel a quiet unease they can’t quite name.
Dan Foster, CEO of the Centre for Men and Families Australia, has spent over two decades sitting with men in exactly that place. Drawing on the work of Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr, Dan guides men through what Rohr calls the second half of life: a descent from striving and achieving into something far more meaningful.
The Fitness Trap: Why Being Fit Doesn't Mean You'll Age Well
Most men in their 50s know they should be looking after themselves. They train, they eat reasonably well, they track their steps. And most of them are blind to the thing that will actually limit how well they age. Not disease. Not fitness. Their weak link.
Professor Scott Fulton has spent years studying what actually predicts functional health span for men — the ability to do what you want to do, for as long as possible, with independence intact. His conclusion challenges almost everything the fitness industry tells you. Being fit is not the same as being functionally resilient. And most men find out the difference far too late.
Keen but Clueless: What Men Really Need to Know About Their Partner's Menopause
Most men whose partners are going through menopause describe the same experience: keen and caring, but clueless and helpless. Thea O’Connor has spent years interviewing men about exactly this — and delivers the only workshops in Australia specifically designed to help men understand what’s happening and what to do about it.
In this episode she covers the basics most men have never been given, why a man’s attitude can influence how severe his partner’s symptoms are, and what Orca whales have to do with any of it.
The Most Important Relationship You're Ignoring: Kerri Sackville on Learning to Be Alone
Most men who find themselves single in midlife do the same thing. They start dating too soon, from a position of loneliness rather than strength, and they have no idea that’s what they’re doing.
Kerri Sackville knows this because she spent eight and a half years on the midlife dating scene after a 17-year marriage ended, wrote a book about what she found, and then wrote another book about the thing that turned out to matter more than any of it: learning to be alone.
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