9 lifestyle and career podcasts to help you be your best self in 2019

Get ready to treat your earbuds to some inspirational soundbites

Universal Pictures (Bridesmaids/Apatow Productions)

Podcasts have surged in popularity in recent years and there are now thousands to choose from, all bidding for a place on your morning commute.

As we move into the new year, self-improvement continues to be the topic-du-jour, with many of us looking for ways to boost morale amid the doom and gloom of January.

Funnily enough, there’s a podcast for that. In fact, there are plenty, so we’ve rounded up a few of our favourite lifestyle-focused ones to help you kickstart 2019 with a skip in your step and a fire in your belly.

From celebrities opening up about their mental health on Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place to Baroness Karren Brady’s latest interview series with successful female leaders, get ready to treat your earbuds to some inspirational soundbites.

Happy Place

As an esteemed broadcaster, it should come as no surprise that Fearne Cotton makes an excellent podcast host.

Happy Place sees the former BBC Radio 1 presenter conduct honest and heartfelt interviews with a range of celebrities centred on the theme of what happiness means to them. High-profile names like Stephen Fry, Natalie Dormer and Zoe Sugg make up Cotton’s eclectic lineup, with each episode offering a unique insight into the lives and minds of some of the country’s most fascinating people, with heaps of valuable life lessons between them.

Speaking to The Independent, Cotton explains how she hopes the podcast will help people feel less alone.

“I love having authentic conversations with people where their stories and answers help to unite us all,” she says. “Stories that highlight humility, strength and vulnerability that may help other, myself included, to feel inspired or understood.

“People are so interesting, especially those who are willing to peel back the layers they present to the world. Making this podcast brings me pure joy.”

With addiction, bereavement and mental illness all up for discussion, Happy Place is not always an easy listen, but it’s certainly an inspiring one.

Listen here.

Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

She’s one of the best sex and relationships therapists in the business, and you can soak up some of Esther Perel’s expertise firsthand by listening in to her sessions with anonymous couples on Where Should We Begin?.

These raw, and often emotional, episodes cover a range of topics from overcoming infidelity to tackling sex droughts in marriage.

Whether you’re single or in a long-term relationship, there’s plenty be to learned from Perel’s advice.

Listen here.

How to Fail with Elizabeth Day

We can learn a lot from our successes, but they’re nowhere near as formative as our failures, says author and journalist Elizabeth Day, whose chart-topping podcast demonstrates just how important it is to get things wrong.

How to Fail with Elizabeth Day sees people from all walks of life confess their greatest failures and talk about what they learned from them, with recent guests including Lily Allen, David Baddiel and Alastair Campbell.

Day tells The Independent that she was inspired to launch the podcast after experiencing a failure of her own.

“I first came up with the idea for the podcast when I was dealing with a break-up. I was having a lot of conversations with my closest female friends about heartache and I gradually came to realise that all of us had experienced similar failures but that we all felt we’d ended up growing stronger as a result of them.

“So I started looking at how we categorise failure and began thinking how great it would be if, in this age of curated perfection and filtered Instagram feeds, we could open up to more honest, public conversations about when things went wrong and what we had learned from those episodes in our life.”

Listen here.

Nobody Panic

Struggling to prioritise? Unsure how to “do” online dating? Want to learn how to “nap like a boss”? Then be sure to check out Nobody Panic, formerly known as The Debrief Podcast, which acts as an all-inclusive life guide for aspiring adults.

Comedian duo Stevie Martin and Tessa Coates make for entertaining hosts as they attempt to tackle some of life’s biggest questions, from how to be happy to how to be a witch – yes, really.

It’s an upbeat and light-hearted listen.

Listen here.

Ctrl Alt Delete

From Lena Dunham and Hari Nef to Nimko Ali and Greta Gerwig, if you want to learn about success in the digital world and hear some of your favourite tastemakers speak about creativity, social media and feminism, then this is the podcast for you.

Emma Gannon is an insightful interviewer and each episode of Ctrl Alt Delete is as fascinating as the last.

In addition to a roster of high-profile guests, Gannon also speaks to lesser-known people making waves in their various fields, including Alex Loizou, founder of independent fashion site Trouva, and Sharmadean Reid, who founded WAH Nails.

Listen here.

Safe For Work

Most of us spend more time in the office than we do in our own homes, so it’s important to cultivate a positive workplace so that you actually look forward to coming in each day.

This is what Safe For Work aims to help you with. Each week, hosts Liz Dolan, former head of marketing at Nike, and Rico Gagliano, contributor to The Wall Street Journal, offer career advice on every issue you could think of with the help of guests who are experts in the fields they're discussing.

From how to eat healthy at your desk to handling office gossips, this is an essential listen for anyone who started the new year feeling uneasy about returning to work, which, let’s face it, is probably quite a few of us.

Listen here.

If I Can Do It with Bryony Gordon

The bestselling author and mental health campaigner has launched a new mini podcast series aiming to show how the route to success is rarely smooth-sailing. Gordon’s first guest was Spice Girl Mel B, who opened up about her experience with domestic violence.

It marks the journalist’s second podcast following Mad Girl, on which she interviewed people in the public eye about their mental health.

Gordon explains how If I Can Do It is about empowering listeners and inspiring them to achieve their goals, which is something she knows about firsthand having run the London Marathon twice despite not having been able to run for a bus two years ago.

“I wanted to create a podcast that encouraged listeners to do the thing they thought they couldn’t,” she writes in The Daily Telegraph.

Listen here.

Get What You Want

New for 2019, Get What You Want is a podcast about being a woman in business, hosted by Baroness Karren Brady.

So far, the Apprentice advisor, who is also West Ham’s vice-chairman, has interviewed Jo Malone and Elizabeth Truss, chief secretary to the treasury.

The latest episode features an inspiring conversation with British financier Dame Helena Morrissey, who is head of personal investing at Legal and General Investment Management. She speaks to Brady about balancing family life – she has nine children – with her flourishing career.

Listen here.

We Are Offline

Social media is both a blessing and a curse, but it’s all too easy to focus on the latter in today’s selfie-obsessed culture. We Are Offline aims to help those who find themselves losing hours to Instagram, by opening up the conversation around digital dependency.

It’s hosted by social media editors Alyss Bowen and Lotte Williams, who felt inspired to create the podcast after learning about the detrimental effects that apps like Twitter and Facebook can have on our mental health.

Bowen tells The Independent that she hopes it will teach listeners how to have a healthier relationship with social media without being didactic.

“We’re not here to preach or judge anyone for their social media habits, we just hope our listeners can relate to what we have to say and want to join in on the conversation.”

Listen here.