TED Talks Daily
(#8) Elise’s Top Ten: Change your story, change your life | Lori Gottlieb
20 Sep 2025
Stories help you make sense of your life — but when these narratives are incomplete or misleading, they can keep you stuck instead of providing clarity. In an actionable talk, psychotherapist and advice columnist Lori Gottlieb shows how to break free from the stories you've been telling yourself by becoming your own editor and rewriting your narrative from a different point of view.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
Hey everyone, you're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. After all these years of listening and now hosting this show, the number one question I still get is, Elise, what are the talks that have stood out to you? What are your favorite talks?
And of course, I have more than 10 favorites, but we had to start somewhere. So we made a playlist and dropped 10 of my favorite TED Talks on the feed for our first ever podcast playlist.
This next one is from psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb, and it's had a profound impact on my life and my thinking because it's taught me how most of life's problems just boil down to wanting one of two things, freedom or change. But it's really important that we take into account something else. Lori Gottlieb gets into it.
So I'm going to start by telling you about an email that I saw in my inbox recently. Now, I have a pretty unusual inbox, because I'm a therapist, and I write an advice column called Dear Therapist. So you can imagine, right, what's in there? I mean, I've read thousands of very personal letters from strangers all over the world.
And these letters range from heartbreak and loss, to spats with parents or siblings. I keep them in a folder on my laptop, and I've named it The Problems of Living. So I get this email, I get lots of emails just like this, and I want to bring you into my world for a second and read you one of these letters. And here's how it goes.
Dear therapist, I've been married for 10 years, and things were good until a couple of years ago. That's when my husband stopped wanting to have sex as much, and now we barely have sex at all. I'm sure you guys were not expecting this. Well, last night I discovered that for the past few months, he's been secretly having long, late-night phone calls with a woman at his office.
I Googled her, and she's gorgeous. I can't believe this is happening. My father had an affair with a coworker when I was young, and it broke our family apart. Needless to say, I'm devastated. If I stay in this marriage, I'll never be able to trust my husband again, but I don't want to put our kids through a divorce, a stepmom situation, et cetera. What should I do?"
Well, what do you think she should do? If you got this letter, you might be thinking about how painful infidelity is, or maybe about how especially painful it is here because of her experience growing up with her father.
And like me, you'd probably have some empathy for this woman, and you might even have some, how should I put this nicely, let's just call them not-so-positive feelings for her husband. Now, those are the kinds of things that go through my mind, too, when I'm reading these letters in my inbox.
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