Our Favorite Advice Shows for Modern Times
Where do you turn to for advice? You have a problem, something niggling, something is keeping you up at night and you’re not finding the solution in a Youtube video or your Instagram feed?
We've been discovering some great voices and content in Podcast listens, some that offer actionable things to do when we’re stuck, others just a reassuring voice and something new to think about. Here are some of our recent go-tos, the ones we turn to when we need a fresh perspective, some empathy and just a little bit of support.
Like a daily vitamin, a tiny bite of a podcast that gives advice from a different person to start each day. Roaming across the quirky — shower belly creations — to the inspirational with words that stick – “you are not a throwaway girl”, the episodes are definitely not the usual subjects, the self-help platitudes that we’ve come to grow tired of. Hosted by curiosity seeker Zak Rosen, The Best Advice Show illustrates just the degree to which we can make our worlds make sense to us and find ways to be ok within them.
“You can think of the show as a reminder that there are weird, delightful and effective ways to survive and thrive in this world.” — Zak Rosen
The winner of the BBC’S World Service Competition was inspired by host (and Nigerian development worker) Namulanta Kombo’s letters to her daughter Koko. In these episodes, she invites her friends to do the same for their daughters, and then extends that ask into the world. These are moving, powerful, funny testimonies of mothers saying what they need to their daughters when they can. The first episode has someone who lost her mother to breast cancer writing to her two daughters throughout their childhood and even as she goes through the same diagnosis that took her mother.
What would you write to your own daughter? What experiences would you capture, what memories would you share, what life lessons would you make known? Pair with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele.
Looking for a new morning routine? Have a listen to this podcast by host and productivity expert Laura Vanderkam. Each episode covers small bites of advice on such things as finding your moonshot (ambitious life-changing goals), realizing that most things can be changed (and how you can identify what doesn’t need to be permanent) and how to share the good that other people are doing (and how that can help you too). We find these less than 10-minute listens a more soothing and inspirational way to start the day than scrolling the news or checking social media. Try and habit stack with brushing your teeth, making that morning coffee, or walking/driving back from the school run.
“Time is elastic. It stretches to accommodate what we need or want to do with it.” — Laura Vanderkam
Life Kit, from NPR, covers a huge range of subjects but dives deep into each with actionable advice from different experts. Whether health or parenting, finance or professional lives, these short episodes (around 20 minutes) offer takeaways framed within expertise.
Recent standouts include how to get into tarot (and how it’s more about reflection than seeing the future) with Michelle Tea, how to deal with and understand Seasonal Affective Disorder and how to talk to your Latinx parents about mental health. But we recommend scrolling the feed for the areas in your life that you need some wisdom on.
OK, this is technically not an advice show but these tender conversations with anonymous callers often reveal something we hadn’t thought about on a subject. The premise of ‘1 phone call. 1 hour. No names. No holds barred’, and the lead of host comedian Chris Gethard, means talks go in ways often unexpected, and sometimes uncomfortable, but we found ourselves drawn into these episodes.
These are some recent episodes: Engaged, but in Love with Someone Else, on what do you do when you’ve met someone new but your about to marry the father of your baby, I’m a Sugar Baby on how a PhD engineering student is financing her studies through sugar daddy work and Crisis Hotline Worker, on what it’s really like talking to people who are suffering and how to experience all of humanity without damaging yourself. But host Chris Gethard has polled his community and here are their favourites from the over 160 episodes.
One inspirational woman talks through their six pieces of good advice, and one piece of bad advice. Like Huma Abedin talking about having a Both/And perspective, and writer Lizzie Damilola Blackburn on seeking progression not perfection.
These weekly podcasts show us how we all have something we struggle with and strive for, and we may have very different ways of navigating our lives as we do. These conversations also reveal the real stories behind some public figures - musicians, writers, artists, actors - who we think we know but only really do on one level. Always intimate, thoughtful and revealing.
Which Podcasts are you listening to for some good advice? Let us know and we’ll try and include these in our next round-up.
