Start with the Mark Groves Podcast, available on Spotify and YouTube. It is the most direct way to hear his teaching voice: conversational, grounded in real examples, and free of jargon. Pick any recent episode that touches a topic you're already wrestling with, whether relationships, attention, or leadership, and listen to it start to finish. Because the podcast hosts guest conversations as well as his own thinking, you'll hear how he asks questions, not only what he concludes. If you prefer video, the YouTube channel carries the same material.
Humaning on Substack. This is where he publishes long-form essays on relationships, technology, presence, and what he calls staying human. The tone is more reflective and, for some readers, more intimate than the podcast. It's a good second step if the podcast made you want to slow down and sit with an idea.
Liberated Love. This is the book he co-authored, a book-length treatment of relationships and authentic partnership. It's more structured than the podcast or essays. It assumes you care about the relationship topic specifically, so read it when that's true for you rather than as a general introduction.
markgroves.com. Use the website as a hub. It's where you'll find his full body of work, the frameworks he applies to leadership, attention, and presence, and the official word on events, coaching, and phone-free gatherings. It's also the way into Create the Love, the organization he founded.
Expect directness. Mark spent fourteen years in pharmaceutical sales studying how people actually change behavior, and it shows. He leans on mechanism and choice rather than inspiration. He draws on psychology and neuroscience, then ties it to a specific example from his own life or a client's. Humor and plainspokenness run through it.
You'll also notice that he asks more than he tells. Questions like "What would you do if you chose yourself?" or "Who are you becoming to stay in this thing?" put you in the position of the agent, not the audience. His own story is part of the material: he ended an engagement at 27 because the life he was living wasn't his, and he later noticed himself becoming "automated" as his following passed a million people. Expect that kind of candor about cost.
His work is bracing rather than soothing. He is not there to comfort you into staying small.
Treating him as a meditation teacher. The tags around his work include mindfulness and meditation, but his grounding is secular: psychology, neuroscience, and the study of behavior. His intellectual anchor is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. If you want meditation technique or a lineage teacher, this isn't that, even though his emphasis on presence touches similar terrain.
Expecting affirmation. People sometimes arrive hoping to have their current choices validated. He's more likely to ask what you're settling for and why.
Hearing "choose yourself" as "be selfish." His thesis is that choosing anyone or anything should never mean abandoning yourself. The point is honesty, not self-indulgence.
Treating it as pure information. The work doesn't land if you collect ideas without applying them to your own relationships and decisions.
Expecting a complete curriculum. The recorded and written material is an archive of a teaching that happens largely live and in conversation. It isn't a self-serve course.
It tends to hit hardest when you're at a crossroads in a relationship and suspect you've been shrinking to keep it. It also lands for leaders and professionals who feel they're performing success rather than living it, and for anyone who has noticed their phone running their attention. His own turning points, leaving an engagement at 27 and catching himself posting from performance rather than feeling, mirror these moments, which is why people in them often feel recognized. It's not designed for acute crisis; it isn't therapy, though it can support work you're doing with a therapist.
Day 1. Listen to one Mark Groves Podcast episode on Spotify or YouTube, with your phone put away. Afterward, write down one question he raised that stung a little.
Day 2. Read one essay on Humaning. Note where you recognize yourself.
Day 3. Listen to a second podcast episode, this time a guest conversation. Notice how he asks questions.
Day 4. Pause on new material. Write a short answer to your question from Day 1: what are you choosing, and what are you sacrificing for it?
Day 5. Spend an hour with your phone out of reach during a real conversation or meal. This is the practice his work keeps returning to: attention as an act of love.
Day 6. Read a second Humaning essay, or start Liberated Love if relationships are your reason for being here.
Day 7. Visit markgroves.com and see what's on offer, whether more episodes, essays, or a gathering. Then review your notes and decide on one concrete change to make in a relationship or in how you lead. The test of this work is whether you do something differently, not whether you finished the reading.
