Kelly McGonigal

speaker

787 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Kelly McGonigal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The School of Greatness · The Real Reason Stress Is Hurting You | Kelly McGonigal · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

I'm somebody who found meditation initially as a tool for dealing with physical pain and anxiety.

Eventually, I came to study the benefits of a particular form of meditation that develops compassion and empathy and kindness.

That's been the primary focus of my own research.

I feel like meditation is an interesting thing because unlike, say, getting a pet and volunteering, I'm not sure that it's for everyone.

I'm not the kind of evangelist.

I think meditation, it meets a lot of people at a moment and provides something really valuable.

The thing that I love about meditation when it's the right fit is we know that there's something about the quality of attention

and intention that you can develop through contemplative practices that changes how you experience difficult moments in life when you really need qualities like courage or acceptance or hope.

So I'm not somebody who thinks like you meditate to relax.

I think you meditate so that in moments when everything is falling apart, suddenly you have the mental ability to hold on to hope or focus on what matters.

Absolutely.

And then maybe it's the pessimist in me, but this is, I always encourage people to imagine how things can go wrong because then when it happens, you can actually say to yourself, honestly, this is what we trained for.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's so funny.

So I actually teach a public speaking and communication class to graduate students at Stanford.

And we do this whole exercise where I have them imagine their absolute most dreaded worst case scenarios.

We figure out what you could do and we do it collectively because I know it's going to happen to somebody.

And what I want people to have is not just the memory of like, okay, I trained for this.

I thought about it.

But also in that moment to feel like the support of our whole group and community behind them saying, you've got this, like we've got your back.

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