Front Porch Book Club Podcast
Grab your book and iced tea and join the Front Porch Book Club, your no-commitment, casual, and eclectic podcast about books. We examine the relationship between characters, the worlds they live in, and what that means to us.
Latest Episode
117: Shift
A new year means a Front Porch Book Club book that will help us think about who we want to be in 2026 and give us some idea of how to become that person! This year, we chose SHIFT: MANAGING YOUR EMOTIONS -- SO THEY DON'T MANAGE YOU by Ethan Kross. The book was...
117: Shift
A new year means a Front Porch Book Club book that will help us think about who we want to be in 2026 and give us some idea of how to become that person! This year, we chose SHIFT: MANAGING YOUR EMOTIONS — SO THEY DON'T MANAGE YOU by Ethan Kross.
The book was published just last year in February of 2025, and it was an instant national bestseller. It was one of Oprah's daily best self-help books for personal growth in 2025. And it was a Publishers Weekly best book of the year. Ethan Kross is one of the world's leading experts on emotional regulation. He's an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan's top-ranked psychology department, and its Ross School of Business, and he's the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory there at the University of Michigan.
Kross begins the book by telling us that what emotions are and that we have the ability to regulate our emotions. We do not have to be just victims of emotions coming and going. You can lead your life feeling very in control of your emotions and regulating them. And that doesn't mean being a robot. It doesn't mean repressing feelings. It doesn't mean wallowing in feelings. And it doesn't even mean, and this was important to Nancy, that there are bad emotions and good emotions. Rather, he says, emotions are data for us to use and regulation is about experiencing them in the proportion that you want to experience them. Leading a happy life is understanding that there's room for grief and anger and sad. A happy life incorporates the range of human emotions, but it is about regulating them. It's about understanding what it is they are telling us. Kross even talks about the wisdom of emotions. Kross tells us we are not prisoners to our emotions that there are these levers or shifters, the book is called Shift. There are shifters that we have that can be very useful.
Throughout the book, Kross reviews internal and external shifters; these are the levers to shift our emotions. He advises us that different shifters work for different people at different times. The challenge for us is to learn what works for us and when. We are all unique individuals. Kross also talks about the important role of emotion in goal setting and achievement.
Both Linny and Nancy really enjoyed this book. Linny already was familiar with the shifters, given her education and experience as a counselor. But she definitely liked the illustrations and appreciated the science-based approach and all the citations. For Nancy, a lot of the concepts were new, but she also appreciated the science-based approach.
In this episode, Linny and Nancy also review their goals from last year's ATOMIC HABITS book. Spoiler: they both report really good results!
The episode ends with Linny and Nancy wrestling over the meaning of the word “peace,” and deciding that would be an excellent next book for Ethan Kross to write!
About Front Porch Book Club
I honestly was blown away by the deep dive Nancy and Linny did into SPARKS LIKE STARS and really appreciated the personal perspectives they brought.
Nadia Hashimi, Author
Every month the Front Porch Book Club features two episodes on our selected book. In the first episode Linda and Nancy introduce the book and discuss their thoughts. In the second episode, Linda and Nancy are joined by the author or an expert to delve deeper into the book. Our book selections are eclectic: fiction, autobiography, history, memoir, investigative journalism, and classics. They are books that give us insights into how we may be more intentional, creative, and loving.
Recent Episodes
87: Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the oldest book we've discussed on the front porch; it was published in 1958 just as the European colonization of Africa was being dismantled. The book's setting is the beginning of colonization in the 1880's in what is now...
86: Aneri Pattani
Picking up where Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain left off, journalist Aneri Pattani brings us up to date with the latest developments for Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. Aneri is KFF Health News' award-winning senior correspondent. For the past...
85: Empire of Pain
In this investigative non-fiction book, Patrick Radden Keefe reveals the role of the Sackler family in the prescription opioid epidemic that has decimated communities and families since the 1990s. Empire of Pain is an unflinching and horrifying account of how the...
84: Dr. Karen Roggenkamp
We wanted to learn more about mystery as a genre after reading Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club. Lucky for us, Dr. Karen Roggenkamp, professor of Literature and Languages at Texas A & M-Commerce, was available to stop by the Front Porch to talk about...
Meet The Hosts
Growing up, Nancy always had her nose in a book. She never remembers not loving to read books. Linda, on the other hand, hated libraries and spent her childhood trying to lure Nancy away from books into some other activity that she thought would be way more fun. That’s right – we’re sisters. Nancy was more of an introvert and Linda was more of an extrovert. But, somewhere along the way, Linda started loving books and Nancy started loving talking about books. Nancy is a recovering academic in Nebraska who writes and Linda is a licensed counselor in Pennsylvania.