Beginning My Harvard Graduate School Journey

Hello there. Welcome back. I have an exciting update. I've decided to go back to school. I know, can you believe it? It's kind of a surprise to me too, but I found this incredible opportunity at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to get a master's degree in education specializing in learning design, innovation, and technology. One of the reasons I did this is because one of the co-chairs is Karen Brennan. She earned her PhD at MIT, where she was part of the team that built Scratch, a free programming language and online community where, according to the website, quote, you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations, end quote. If you and your children haven't used Scratch yet, you will definitely encounter it at some point. It is the go-to educational tool to teach coding to beginners. And it's really fun to use also. So one of the many other reasons I'm here is that Harvard Graduate School of Education, known cozily as HGSE, has partnered with Sesame Street since the 1960s to bring research-backed academic and socio-emotional curriculum into all of their famous shows. And of course, Cambridge feels really comfortable for me because I've been coming up here to Harvard for about 10 years now. I trained at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine, and more recently I visited my son who was at Harvard College and happily attended so many lectures and all the cultural, uh, opportunities that they have to offer here. I wanna acknowledge who started this whole journey for me, a physician named Morty. He helped me through a very tough time in my life when I lost my mom. And at that time, he was one of the first people to ask me, what are you curious about? I told him I didn't know, but that I always love to learn new things. And at that point, he told me to go to the Harvard website and check out the plethora of courses they have for absolutely anything you could imagine. So I did what he told me to do, and I've never turned back. And here I am living in Cambridge and absorbing everything I can. In this 1-year master's program where I'm gonna share everything I learned with you and also take what I learned and roll it into the curriculum that I teach to reach even more kids and parents. And if you're not a parent or a kid, what I talk about is something that you can use to parent your own brain, to give you agency over your mental and physical health so that you can perform at your best and live your best life. So stick with me cuz we're gonna together learn how to overachieve without the overwhelm and maybe even increase our level of happiness. So this podcast is where we discuss the science behind resilience and actionable steps you can take to make stress and time work for you and not against you. I'm really excited for a fresh lineup of guests coming up in the fall. So thank you for being here with me. And if you're new to the podcast, I'm all about preventing the common chronic diseases that —people suffer through these days that I used to diagnose on a daily basis. But if you are here, you know that most of our mental and physical diseases can be controlled or even prevented with lifestyle choices that we make every single day, actually every single moment. The great news is that wellness and peak performance go hand in hand. So my goal is to give you evidence-backed takeaways you can apply to real life so that you can stress less and boost your performance and wellness down to the cellular level. So please subscribe, share, and leave a great review and rating if you feel like you're benefiting from this podcast. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe for upcoming interviews with experts in neuroscience, meditation, education, psychology, and medicine. So I'll see you in the next episode where I discuss how small moments like the one that I had with Morty can transform someone's whole entire life trajectory. There's a lot of research nowadays showing that single session interventions can change your brain to shift into a more positive mindset. So join me next time where I discuss Jessica Schleider's book, Little Treatments, Big Effects: How to Build Meaningful Moments That Can Transform Your Mental Health. I'm a big fan of her work, and I think you will be too. I'll see you in the next episode. If you have any questions, you can directly contact me through the Spotify podcast site. You can also go to mindbodyspace.com and sign up for the newsletter. Thank you again for all your support and for being here with me. I'm so happy to be going on this exciting journey with you. I'll see you in the next episode.