The Catherine Plano Podcast

About The Catherine Plano Podcast

Your ultimate resource for expanding your mind and accessing more of your brain, while experiencing unparalleled ‘aha’ moments with guaranteed radical shifts to your learning and growth. Catherine’s goal is to help you become the very best version of yourself - to live an extraordinary life by reaching your fullest potential, with self-coaching strategies to boost your confidence, make better decisions, create new habits, kickstart your motivation, get extraordinary results and build lasting change for a meaningful life that you will absolutely love! Get inspired and energised with your weekly dose of new ideas and insights.

Publisher

Catherine Plano

Category

education · education · health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Feb 2016

Latest episode

3 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

2 of 539 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   3 Nov 2026

   EP 488: The Overthinker Is Not a Flaw, It’s a Bodyguard

   Have you ever had an argument in the shower, and won it? Have you written a message, deleted it, rewritten it, and then sent “no worries at all”? Can you replay something you said years ago, word for word, and still wince? Do you say “I just need to think about it”, mean it every single time, and somehow never finish the thinking? Is there a sentence you have been carrying for years that the person it was meant for has never once heard? If more than two of those landed, this one is about you. In this Moment of Awe, we explore the AstroPsychology of the inner voice: why the third house is not about how well you talk, what Lev Vygotsky, Paul Trapnell, Jennifer Campbell, Dana Crowley Jack and Matthew Lieberman can tell us about the conversation that never stops, and three ways to say the sentence you have been rehearsing. The Third House Has Two Doors The third house belongs to Gemini, and it is ruled by Mercury, the messenger. On the surface, it describes communication: talking, writing, learning, the everyday exchanges with the people closest to us. But the third house has two doors. One faces out towards the conversations you have with other people. The other faces in, towards the conversation you have with yourself all day, every day. In the 1930s, Lev Vygotsky noticed that small children talk out loud to themselves while they play, and he argued that this private speech does not disappear as we grow up. It goes underground and becomes the voice in your head. Which means your inner voice did not begin as yours. It began as a conversation with other people. So the question of the third house is not “are you a good communicator?” It is: whose voice is doing most of the talking in there? I once drafted an email to a colleague eleven times over three evenings. I prepared for every possible reply. I finally sent it close to midnight, and she replied the next morning with four words: “Of course, thank you.” I had spent three evenings preparing for a war that was only ever happening in my own head. The Overthinker Is a Bodyguard The archetype that lives in this house is the overthinker, the analyst. Its purpose is to use analysis to avoid deep emotional engagement. Its secondary gain is control: if I can understand it, I can manage it, and if I can predict every reaction, nobody can surprise me. What it protects you from is the fear of emotional vulnerability, and the fear of being caught not knowing. The overthinker is not a flaw in your thinking. It is a bodyguard. The trouble is that it cannot tell the difference between the conversations that might hurt you and the ones that might free you. So it stops all of them. Exploring or Being Chased In 1999, Paul Trapnell and Jennifer Campbell pulled apart two kinds of self-focus that look identical from the outside. Rumination is driven by threat. Reflection is driven by curiosity. Same subject, completely different motives. Rumination travelled with anxiety and distress, and reflection with openness to experience. Much of this work is correlational, so it does not settle every question about which came first. But here is the useful part: the overthinker always believes it is reflecting, and most of the time it is ruminating. You can tell the difference by the feeling, not the content. Reflection feels like exploration. Rumination feels like being chased. The Voice You Silence Goes Inward In 1991, Dana Crowley Jack described a pattern she called silencing the self: holding back thoughts, feelings and needs to keep a relationship safe. It creates a divided self, an outer self who keeps the peace and an inner self who is anything but peaceful. The sentence you do not say does not vanish. It moves into the third house and keeps talking, only now you are the one person who hears it. And here is the part I find genuinely beautiful. In 2007, a team at UCLA led by Matthew Lieberman found that simply naming a feeling reduced activity in the amygdala. Not solving it, not analysing it. Just nami

2. 

   27 Oct 2026

   EP 487: 50 Years on the Spiritual Path: I Created My Own Misery with Asha Nayaswami

   Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ Asha Nayaswami lost interest in Stanford after about two weeks. From then on, she made A’s when she went to class and F’s when she didn’t, and within a year she had flunked out, which was just fine with her. The people there were extremely intelligent, but she did not feel they were wise. Why do we live? Why do we suffer? What is the secret of real happiness? Then a fraternity on the Stanford campus invited Swami Kriyananda to speak. When he walked into the room, it was the first time she had ever seen anyone who had what she wanted, and she never looked back. Asha has dedicated her life to Kriya Yoga meditation, devotion to God and service to others, with 45 years of very close association with Kriyananda, a direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi. The misery we create After more than 50 years on the spiritual path, what does Asha know that her younger self could not have understood? The degree to which she created her own misery, and therefore the degree to which she can create her own happiness. You can rarely control circumstances, she says, but you can always at least influence your response. In her view, karma is an unlearned lesson about who we are, what causes suffering and what brings happiness. Like a worm moving away from a needle and towards food, we always go where we think happiness is. The trouble is that we think easy and pleasurable is good, whereas courageous and expansive is what really brings us to happiness. You are allowed to feel what you feel Asha calls it a great misunderstanding on the spiritual path that you are not supposed to have these feelings. Grief, anger, fear and jealousy are, in her view, unfinished karma, and you do not get out of them just by hating them. For many years, she says, her personality was a preemptive strike, built to stay ahead of all that unresolved energy until it caught up with her. These days she will often say to herself, yes, I feel this way because I’m just not that good, and then try to minimise the damage. Soul can rejoice, she says, while ego just cries itself to sleep every night. There is no shortcut You can’t game the system, Asha says. There is no shortcut, nobody you can bribe, no trick, and the same attitude can be forward for one person and backward for another. Just before she was 20, terrified of conflict, she spent a summer in New York learning to yell at strangers, telling the groceryman he was stealing from her and fighting for the taxi cab. When she noticed she was beginning to enjoy it, she stopped. From then on she was no longer being nice because she was afraid, but because she had mastery over her own energy. Make your ego your friend Asha would rather befriend the ego than fight it. Ego, as she defines it, is the infinite self identified with limitation, and it is meant to serve the higher self, not be the dictator. Her formula is to do a little better than your worst. Too tired to wash the dishes? Just stack them before bed. Want to write a horrible email? Write it, but don’t send it. Over time, she says, the ego starts to help: honey, remember what happened the last time you blew up like this? When prayers are not answered If a child prays for chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner and doesn’t get it, Asha asks, has God really failed him? Once, praying for a situation to change while other people were really suffering, she heard an inner voice ask, do you think this is happening outside the will of God? Her prayer changed: whatever you’re trying to teach them, help them to learn it. You can complain all you want, she says, but in the end you have to say, thy will, not mine. Asha left us with three shiny golden nuggets. First, always do a little better than your worst. Second, consider very deeply your place in relation to a greater reality, whether that is God, a gu

3. 

   20 Oct 2026

   EP 486: Author of The Secret of Letting Go: You Cannot Satisfy a Fear with Guy Finley

   Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ At seven or eight years old, Guy Finley was riding in the Hollywood Christmas parade, where his father was the honorary marshal, sitting on the lap of one of the biggest stars of the day. He remembers thinking, what’s wrong here? Everybody was so fearful, so angry and so anxious. Born into a show business family, he grew up with a contradiction he could not reconcile. That question, what is this pain, set him on a path he has walked for almost 70 years, and he says he is still just beginning. Today Guy is the Founding Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit centre for spiritual discovery, and the acclaimed author of The Secret of Letting Go and more than 50 other books and audio programmes, translated into 30 languages. Not the problem, but the mirror Letting go, Guy says, is an inside story. We tend to look out at the world as the party responsible for the pain we are in, and he believes it is just not true. You cannot separate the experience of life from the nature having that experience. When he has a problem with another person, that person isn’t the problem. They are here to show him where parts of him are still clinging to certain ideas and demands. He calls them secret agents of God. And the work, he says, is done by seeing into our consciousness, not by fighting with it. You cannot satisfy a fear So why do we chase validation? Guy believes that affirming qualities we do not have only leaves us living in fear of proving we are what we imagine ourselves to be. He remembers being 12 at his father’s business meetings, in a suit and tie, his left shoulder hurting so badly he wanted to cry. Even that child, already conditioned to want approval, was afraid he would not get it. You cannot satisfy a fear, Guy says. You can dope it up or distract yourself from it, but until you understand the nature of fear itself, you will live in it. In his words, people bother us for only one reason: what we want from them. The circle of self Guy describes it as dominoes. Desire gives rise to image, image to identity, identity to attachment, attachment is dependency, and dependency is fear. He calls it the circle of self, and he is clear that a conditioned nature cannot free itself from its own conditioning. What can help is a light that reveals where we are conditioned. Escaping desire, he says, is lunacy. We are here to transcend the nature that believes it can complete itself through its desire. Relationship is revelation Why are we drawn to anyone at all? Guy believes we discover ourselves through relationship. At first everything is oh yeah. Then oh yeah turns into oh no, and we meet the part of us that wants to blame the other person for not loving us the way they said they would. There is no bad revelation, he says. He is just as clear that trying to change the world is, in his words, egotism of the worst kind. You don’t change a rose. Guy has been with his wife for 46 years, and says he has never once raised his voice to her. The dragon never had any teeth From around 18 to 25, Guy lived a celibate life, almost in a cave, only to find he still got angry. Awakening, he came to see, isn’t some sudden aha. It is the gradual recognition that who and what you are cannot be defined by any experience the mind wants to create. He tells the story of a knight who puts down his sword and shield and leaps into the dragon’s mouth, only to find it never had any teeth. It was all gums. For Guy, that is what an awakening is: the collapse of a false identity that produces false shadows in order to be the slayer of them. Guy left us with three shiny golden nuggets, gathered into one practice he calls Stop, Drop, Endure. Stop: the moment you feel a fear or an anxiety, come to a stop, as present as you can in your body. Drop: catch the thoughts that rush in to explain why you feel the way you do, and b

Inside a recent episode

EP 457: A Chiropractor Told Her “Your Body Wants to Be Stuck.” It Changed Everything with Inna Segal

Published 17 Mar 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] You know, you're glowing, usually your skin's glowing, usually means your heart is good, like you're in a really good place, right? Is your heart in it? We know that the heart is connected to our purpose. The digestive system is all about taking experiences and being able to assimilate them or not. When we kind of assimilate our experiences, I didn't care what diet you're on because I've explored majority of diets there are, you know, from anything, from vegan, vegetarian, meat, macrobiotic, whatever you want to, you know, kind of look at, keto, doesn't matter how clean your diet is, if you cannot digest your experiences, you're going to have digestive issues. […]

Who has been a guest on The Catherine Plano Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Ryan Zofay
• Athena Laz
• Nicolas Canon
• James McCrae
• Dr Margaret Rutherford

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

301,095

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.8 / 5

19 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 72 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

73

Social presence

0

YouTube

86

Engagement

93

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