DON'T LET THE OLD MAN IN
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DLTOMI is a podcast brought to you by Pod O’Sullivan, where he has real and candid conversations with experts, celebrities and ordinary men about navigating midlife. The ups, the downs, the surprises, the opportunities, the secrets and how to do it on your terms, gracefully or even disgracefully!
Pod will explore ways to take charge of your health, to divorce well, to reinvigorate your sex life, to find ways to lift your spirit, to join new communities, to make sure you have enough money for retirement, to laugh, to cry if needed, to change perspectives, and most importantly, to ensure your second act is even better than the first.
Pod O’Sullivan has been fascinated with transitions and personal reinventions for most of his life. His career has seen him in the medical industry, in sales and marketing, consulting industries, being self-employed, being an entrepreneur who successfully sold businesses, being an educator at Sydney Business School, an author, an Executive Coach to 100’s of CEO’s all over Asia, a podcaster, the owner of a failed tech start up and now the co-founder of The Wisdom Vault and host of this podcast.
Migrating from Ireland and England to Australia taught him many lessons. Divorcing with two young kids threw a few more his way. Remarrying and creating the ‘Brady Bunch’ with Carole, his two children and three new daughters, topped off many great life lessons. Pod knows the harsh reality of life’s ups and downs and firmly believes that mid-life, whilst tough on many levels, lonely on other levels and downright confusing on even others, can also include the best stages in life. He is here to explore and find those!
Latest Episodes
Don’t Let The Old Man In now has its own website – Click here for all the latest Episodes and Resources.
The energy game: how a burnt-out psychologist rebuilt her vitality one small experiment at a time
Dr Amantha Imber has spent two decades telling other people how to work better. In 2024, none of it saved her from burnout. The organisational psychologist behind Inventium and the podcast, How I Work, found herself fantasising about a week in hospital, not because she was sick, just so nobody could reach her.
In this conversation with Pod, Amantha talks honestly about what it took to step back into the CEO chair she’d once handed over, why “just pushing through” quietly stops working long before you notice, and the small, specific habits that got her energy back, from a two-minute splash of cold water to a phrase she calls “yes, but.
Eat more, not less: the dietitian rewriting the rules on weight loss for midlife men
At thirty-two, Dr Jessica Turton ended up on the cover of a national magazine with a message most people had never heard: eat more, not less.
In this conversation, she explains why the “eat less, move more” advice most of us grew up with fails so often, what insulin resistance is quietly doing to men in midlife, and how eating more of the right foods, not less of everything, can turn it around.
How to design your second career at midlife
What does a genuine midlife career change look like when it comes not from crisis, but from a clear-eyed decision to stop trading time for the wrong outcomes? In this episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In, host Pod O’Sullivan sits down with two executive coaches — Allan Tillack and Andy Sheats — who each walked away from the top of significant corporate careers to design lives built around purpose, adventure, and the kind of leadership that actually lights them up.
Their stories speak directly to the men in our audience navigating their own career reinvention at 50, wrestling with questions of identity, executive coaching, and what midlife reinvention really costs — and delivers.
How to move from Crisis to contentment: by the psychologist who studies midlife men
What if the restlessness, the irritability, and the quiet sense that something needs to change aren’t signs you’re falling apart—but signals worth listening to?
Dr Marny Lishman is a health and community psychologist, author of Crisis to Contentment, and one of Australia’s most sought-after voices on midlife wellbeing. She’s spent decades working with men who’ve walked into her clinic carrying the weight of burnout, disconnection, and a nagging sense of ‘is this it?’—and she’s helped them find a way through.
Rites of passage for men, midlife transition, and the quiet work of becoming
Most men arrive at 45 or 50 with the boxes ticked — career, family, mortgage — and still feel a quiet unease they can’t quite name.
Dan Foster, CEO of the Centre for Men and Families Australia, has spent over two decades sitting with men in exactly that place. Drawing on the work of Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr, Dan guides men through what Rohr calls the second half of life: a descent from striving and achieving into something far more meaningful.
The Fitness Trap: Why Being Fit Doesn't Mean You'll Age Well
Most men in their 50s know they should be looking after themselves. They train, they eat reasonably well, they track their steps. And most of them are blind to the thing that will actually limit how well they age. Not disease. Not fitness. Their weak link.
Professor Scott Fulton has spent years studying what actually predicts functional health span for men — the ability to do what you want to do, for as long as possible, with independence intact. His conclusion challenges almost everything the fitness industry tells you. Being fit is not the same as being functionally resilient. And most men find out the difference far too late.
Keen but Clueless: What Men Really Need to Know About Their Partner's Menopause
Most men whose partners are going through menopause describe the same experience: keen and caring, but clueless and helpless. Thea O’Connor has spent years interviewing men about exactly this — and delivers the only workshops in Australia specifically designed to help men understand what’s happening and what to do about it.
In this episode she covers the basics most men have never been given, why a man’s attitude scientifically affects how severe his partner’s symptoms are, and what Orca whales have to do with any of it.
The Most Important Relationship You're Ignoring: Kerri Sackville on Learning to Be Alone
Most men who find themselves single in midlife do the same thing. They start dating too soon, from a position of loneliness rather than strength, and they have no idea that’s what they’re doing.
Kerri Sackville knows this because she spent eight and a half years on the midlife dating scene after a 17-year marriage ended, wrote a book about what she found, and then wrote another book about the thing that turned out to matter more than any of it: learning to be alone.
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