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How To Win Friends And Influence People With A Podcast

This article is more than 4 years old.

Have you worked for a narcissist or had a client that is a narcissist? I have, it’s the pits.

Narcissists are people in love with themselves, or to put it another way, have a tremendous interest in themselves and not others. Unless it is preying on others.

Please consider someone who was an anti-narcissist. The world owes a debt to Dale Carnegie, author of the classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Making the world a better place through better conversations was a theme of How to Win Friends and Influence People, a self-help book published in 1936. Over 30 million copies have been sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. One of my mentors taught me to read a page a day.

Making the world a better place through podcasts is a theme of Kristin Sunanta Walker’s work.

What do you do if you've been the prey of someone with all the signs of narcissistic personality disorder? In Walker’s case, you start a podcast about mental health and turn it into the first podcast network in the world solely dedicated to mental health.

I caught up with Walker by telephone to discuss her podcast strategy and those pesky narcissists in your life.

An important aspect of Walker’s post traumatic growth is having one of the largest podcast networks covering the topic of narcissism but also 50+ podcasts that touch upon everything from digital media addiction to suicide to depression to sexual abuse.

Everyone from Michael Rezendes, formerly of the Boston Globe Spotlight team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Catholic Church and sexual abuse, to Kristen Bell, to one of the Bill Cosby survivors, to Erin Brokovich, to Dr. Gabor Mate, to Larry King have been guests sharing their stories with the network’s global audience.

Talk about life giving you lemons and making lemonade.

“As anyone who has experienced the soul crushing gaslighting, revisionist history, projection, Stockholm Syndrome, and psychological torture at the hands of a high spectrum narcissist will tell you: your mental health can easily become mental illness,” says Walker.

A way for Walker to understand what was happening was to interview every expert in the field of psychology and neuroscience, including a world famous pro-social psychopath, on the topic of narcissistic personality disorder.

While her show which has been on the air for over seven years covers many mental health topics, the most downloaded are always about psychological abuse. As many guests have stated: psychological torture.

“What does this have to do with post traumatic growth?” says Walker. Learning to recognize the red flags of an emotional abuser whether it is a relative, a neighbor, a colleague, a CEO or your partner and how to extricate yourself from these relationships, can become one of the most pivotal experiences for personal growth.”

As stated by many in the psychological profession, malignant narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths don’t litter the counseling rooms. For every extreme narcissist that does enter therapy, the road is often lifelong behavior modification. Why? They don’t believe they have a problem. Everyone else does.

“Of those, there are thousands more who will never seek treatment and tens of thousands of victims of their behavior,” says Walker. “The victims can and do grow, evolve, and arm themselves with incredible tools to navigate our ever increasingly narcissistic society. Thanks social media.”

And then there are devastating negative effects of social media, and with that in mind, the network just launched a mental health speakers bureau and a Benefit, LLC, Digital Tech Initiative, to tackle digital media addiction and its impact on our mental health, with a multi-discipline list of founders/speakers who are geneticists, psychologists, psychiatrists, comedians, and more.