The Safe Passage Podcast
Conversations on life transitions, midlife reinvention, and Third Culture identity.
Hosted by Nikki Muller and Dr. Doug Ota, clinical psychologist, educator and transitions expert. New episodes released bi-monthly. Built on psychology, scientific evidence and lived experience. The hosts explore their own struggles with transition, those of their guests and invite you to consider your own.
Why we made this.
Doc Doug and I had been having the same conversation for years, in different rooms. He, as a clinical psychologist and educator with people in his office, and myself, as a presenter watching companies move through change unaware of the life transitions they were putting their people through.
There’s a vast gap between what change management offers and what people actually live through. Therapy goes deep but rarely touches the professional angle. Coaching goes wide but rarely touches the psychological terrain. The middle is where most people are. That’s where this show lives.
Each episode is a real conversation. Always about the life transitions people are in the thick of but don’t yet have language for. Join us as we honestly examine our own struggles with transition, explore those of our guests, and invite you to consider your own.
Meet your hosts.
Nikki Muller
Presenter, keynote speaker, life-transitions authority. Twenty years on stage with leaders, organisations, and audiences in transition. A mixed-race third-culture-kid currently living her own most significant chapter change in Switzerland.
Dr. Doug Ota
Doug is a clinical psychologist and transitions expert with more than thirty years in the field. A graduate of Princeton, Leiden, and Erasmus, he spent fifteen years counselling at a high-turnover international school, watching firsthand what happens when mobility goes unsupported.
He’s the author of Safe Passage: How Mobility Affects People and What International Schools Should Do About It, the field’s go-to handbook, and founder of Safe Passage Across Networks (SPAN). Alongside a full private practice, he hosts SPAN’s monthly podcast The Nest and now co-hosts The Safe Passage Podcast with Nikki.
Learn more about Dr. Doug at www.dougota.com
A transition expert’s take on working with Nikki
Nikki’s not your everday conversationalist. You laugh with her just like you laugh with anybody who puts you at ease. You answer her questions just like you’d answer any seemingly straightforward question. But at a certain point—far earlier than you probably expected—you realize the conversation’s honing in on gold.
Nikki has a nose for ore.
Most prospectors left river valleys empty-handed and discouraged. A few struck lodes but lost fortunes trying to replicate luck. True bergmeisters were rare. Their eyes had been shaped by the land, enabling them to sense the rusty stain of a gossan, the milky quartz capping a pay streak, the way a river’s bend might catch the heavier metals.
As any talk with Nikki unfolds, you see her sensing folds in the conversation’s landscape. You watch her follow a pathfinder mineral, the pyrite capping ore. Most prospectors used the same picks, just like these days we all use the same mics. But it’s the way you wield a tool that distinguishes the doyen from the dabbler. More often than not, Nikki’s pick strikes a vein, enabling the mic to capture verbal gold.
In Bergmeister Nikki, you have a master infusing decades of experience in broadcast journalism with a soul carved deeply by life. Technique and intuition become alloyed in a single person, just as gold and copper would blend to the shakudo of the best of samurai swords.
And the best part? It’s just fun. Talking, searching, digging with Nikki is just pure fun. I hope you enjoy working with her as much as I do.
— Dr. Doug Ota
