Chatting to a Friend

In 2009, Nikki Scott BEM was 28 with two children under 5 when she got the knock on the door that every military wife dreads.

Her 26 year old husband, Lee, had been killed in Afghanistan and she was suddenly a widow, with no home of her own and a piece of her heart ripped out.

Over the next few months, she barely survived, watching her 5 year old son shrink into a shadow of his former self until, on an enforced family holiday, she saw him smile and laugh with his cousins and she realised she had to do something to ensure he stayed that way.

In this incredible episode, Nikki tells us how she used her grief, and her desire to see her kids grow up strong and loved, to set up Scotty’s Little Soldiers. The charity was founded to assist and support children of British service personnel in the event of them losing a parent.

She is passionate about children and young people feeling remembered and seen despite their very particular kind of loss. We discuss all the aspects of the charity’s incredible aims as well as her own personal journey to happiness.

Nikki’s story is tear jerking, vulnerable and so inspiring. How a young widow who had only ever worked in bars and nurseries set up a nationwide charity and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to charity in the 2021 New Years Honours List, is well worth a listen.

To learn more about Scotty’s, see how to donate or buy their cool merchandise, go to www.scottyslittlesoldiers.co.uk

You can follow on social media on:

Instagram:       @scottyslittlesoldiers

Twitter:           @corporalscottyL

LinkedIn:         Scotty’s Little Soldiers

Do you know or are you someone who struggles to get started on a task, gets easily distracted, is always excited by the “next exciting thing”, who is constantly late, losing things, who finds it difficult to keep their emotions controlled, does not seem to have a very flexible approach to life or does not seem to really understand themselves or how they are functioning?

It could be that they are struggling with their Executive Functions. These functions are what allow us to execute our lives, get stuff done, keep track of our things and function as efficiently as possible. They are located in the “new” part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, and they are vital for a calm and fulfilled life.

Victoria Bagnall is a pioneer in the field of executive function skills development and passionately believes that applying the latest developments in neuroscience is the key to unlocking the potential of the human brain. She regards poor executive functions as the bottleneck to productivity and is committed to working with people of all ages to help them overcome their executive function challenges in order to flourish.

Victoria is the Co-Founder of Connections in Mind, an organisation of highly motivated team of experts committed to supporting executive function development in both children, adolescents, education providers and adults.

In this fascinating and vitally important chat we discuss her story from dyslexic, “out of place” child to reading Geography at Cambridge while still managing some fairly troublesome challenges with her executive functions.

A small discussion on how to write an essay is followed by the question of the moment: “What are executive functions?” and why do people not know more about them. It appears no one has a perfect EF profile but for between 20 and 40% of the population are “neurodiverse” and find tasks that “neurotypical” people find easy, very hard.

This tendency to not be able to do what is seen as basic functions in life can lead to great feelings of shame as parents, teachers, bosses label these people “lazy”, “over emotional” and “stupid”. Yet, these issues are not character traits or personality flaws, they are skills like any other – learning to walk, riding a bike, driving a car… you can learn to improve them and make them work for you.

But you need to look after yourself. You need to eat well, sleep well, do the things that make you feel good so that the better you feel, the more able to are to engage that part of the brain and fight off the “old” prehistoric, instinctual brain that puts you into fight, flight or freeze mode on a daily basis.

We discuss the classroom, life at home and the workforce and how all these places could be so much less difficult if only we all understood what this all meant.

Victoria is passionate about all of this and it shines throughout her interview how much she wants people to know about this and to talk about it more. You will hear a lot more from me in this episode than in many of the others because this is something that has affected me all my life (without me knowing) and now affects my 10 year old daughter.

Victoria’s company is Connections in Mind and her website is www.connectionsinmind.com

You can get hold of her on Facebook on @connectionsinmind 

On Instagram on @connectionsinmind

Victoria is on LinkedIn as Victoria Bagnall

The survey she refers to with 10,000 people taking the EF test is here su.vc/executivefunction

To find the books she was talking about “Smart but Scattered” please look here https://www.smartbutscatteredkids.com/books/

Adele Diamond’s (leading EF researcher) brilliant article on nourishing the human spirit and Executive Functions here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210770/

And finally, Russell Barkley’s findings on the links between ADHD and EF/self regulation are here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210770/

Shasta Nelson is a leading expert on Friendship. She’s been quoted in magazines and newspapers, online and print, including New York Times, The Washington Post, and Readers Digest, and has been interviewed live on over dozens of TV shows, including the TODAY Show and Steve Harvey Show. Plus, if you haven’t yet seen her popular TEDx talk then you’ll want to watch that later!

Her previous books include Friendships Don’t Just Happen! which is a guide for making new friends as an adult, and Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness which teaches us how to make our relationships more meaningful. But it’s her newest book that we’re talk about today as she takes her expertise about friendship into the workplace in The Business of Friendship: Making the Most of Our Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time.

In this conversation we talk about loneliness and how it should never be a source of shame, how to gauge it and tell if that is what you are feeling. We touch on mens’ friendships and how the pandemic may actually be helping them to engage on a closer level.

One of the most important aspects for me was the discussion around how to take responsibility for your own part in your friendships and how to deepen them and improve them using Shasta’s Frientimacy triangle of positivity, consistency and vulnerability.

Lastly, we talk about how to maintain and even grow work friendships even though you may not even be able to be at work just now.

If you have friends, would like to deepen your friendships or understand where you are on the unfulfilled/loneliness scale and what to do about it, then this is a must-listen conversation.

You can find Shasta on:

www.shastanelson.com

IG - @shastamnelson

You can also check out Tipsy Tea on www.tipsytea.co.uk and use the discount code CTAF to get a free measure glass!

After a 25-year relationship, Rosie Aiello, engineered an international escape from the Middle East to save her young adult daughter and herself from domestic violence.

Stunned by PTSD and nearly mentally destroyed, she reinvented herself since arriving back in the United States, started her own business, and became a speaker, best-selling co-author and an international awarding-winning entrepreneur.

And found the “kind” love of her life.

With her Freedom Fulfillment Foundation system, Rosie helps women worldwide reclaim their voice, value, confidence, and courage so that they can create the joyful and productive life that they deserve, in both their personal life, and in work.

She is on a global movement to inspire 100 million + women and their children to release the shackles of abuse so that they can reclaim their lives, to believe that they deserve to be treated with kindness—because this is the foundation for their empowerment.

She is on a mission to create kinder intimate relationships, kinder families, kinder communities and therefore, a kinder world. It’s a win-win-win. To help with that mission she created National Love is Kind Day, observed on July 27th to celebrate that real love is kind.

It’s not cruel, it’s caring. It’s not terrorizing, it’s tender, it’s not threatening, it’s safe.

Rosie and her daughter Sunny will be sharing their powerful story of escape, healing and freedom in their joint upcoming memoir entitled: 11 Hours to Freedom.

In this conversation we get to hear the story of her marriage, the realisation that this was not how love is supposed to be and the subsequent escape to the United States from Lebanon.

We cover “how did you not know?” and “why did you stay so long?”. We delve into what is a narcissist and how do they fool so many people, including those closest to them?

Rosie shares how therapy, self-care and setting boundaries have helped both her and her daughter to realise how much they deserve kind and compassionate love. And how they are striving to help millions of women and children to find their freedom and their voices.

Some of this content may be triggering. It is a really important conversation to have and I hope it will help anyone in the situation and anyone trying to help a friend or a family member in a similar situation.

You can find Rosie on www.theloveiskindnetwork.com

On Twitter - @loveiskindtweet

On Instagram - @rosieaiello_loveiskind

On LinkedIn – Rosie Aiello, MBA

Podcast – Vulnerable to Valuable https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vulnerable-to-valuable/id1528869606

Rosie is a frequent guest on live stages, podcasts and radio shows, including appearances on the BBC .

She holds certifications in Neurolinguistics Programming (NLP), Life Coaching, Executive Coaching, and Timeline Dynamics, Intercultural Communications as well as holding an MBA in finance.

Getting the new year off to a flying start (pun fully intended) with the RAF’s 2nd ever female fast jet pilot, Mandy Hickson. Think Top Gun with British accents and you’re right on the money!

Mandy’s book, “An Officer, Not a Gentleman”, is a cracking read, charting her flying career from Air Training Corps as a teenager, via the years of intense training to 3 tours in Iraq and the latter years “flying a desk”.

In this highly entertaining chat, we cover much of that plus men’s mental health, crying as a healthy outlet for the “stress bucket” (or just at a weepy movie!), being shot at by a surface to air missile while flying in Iraq, how she built a career post-RAF teaching people about human factors - communications, decision-making, risk and threat analysis, leadership, team work – and how when it comes right down to it, having friends who know and love you make for the best times and the best memories.

Mandy was so easy to talk to - we found some shared life experiences - and I’m pretty sure two tall, blonde, gobby women could quite happily have put the world to rights over a glass of wine or six, but we had to make do with a very enjoyable hour-long internet chat.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

You can follow Mandy on Instagram @mandyhicksonspeaker and get hold of her, and her brilliantly titled book, through www.hicksonltd.com

In my most personal episode yet, I chat to my two best friends from university. In October 2020, despite the utter nonsense the world was going through, the three of us celebrated (in different countries, sadly) 30 years of friendship.

In this episode, we go back to how and when we met, first impressions and a quick whizz through the highlights of our time at St Andrews.

We then move on to how we ended up doing what we do, how lack of solid plans seem to have led us to pretty good lives. We discuss having kids, the choices we make for them, mummy guilt and the constant worry!

Next up is the old perimenopause and the impact it has had on us and whether COVID has exacerbated it due to lack of social interaction.

How do we make ourselves happy, riding out midlife crises and best of all, friendship.

After we’ve finished, I have included a bit after the outro about a very funny incident involving the very talented band, the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra (pronounced Scoobie Doo), and some stalking…

I hope you enjoy. It was fun to do so I hope it’s fun to listen to.

The happiest of Happy New Years to you and yours. As they say in Scotland. “Lang may yer lum reek.”

Jacki Hill-Murphy has spent the last 10 years researching female explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries and recreating their expeditions.

She does so as faithfully as possible, at the same time of year with similar forms of transport where possible.

This episode is a little different to the others, because as well as the incredible adventures and journeys Jacki goes on, part of the fascination for me was in the stories of these women. In an era where they had almost no rights of their own; were expected to marry; wear dresses and corsets, they decided to take on arduous, dangerous journeys with very little experience.

In this chat, we discuss how she got into this fascinating field, what she has learned about these women and their discoveries. We also discuss what she thinks they can teach the 21st century woman about adventure.

A lot of the chat, however, is good old rip-roaring adventures of the Victorian era, where a few intrepid women struck out on their own for myriad reasons and recorded their journeys, their near-death experiences and the cultures they discovered.

Towards the end, I discover how Jacki is also helping adults who were brought up in care to discover the great outdoors to aid their mental health – www.undertheskyevents.org - and how she supports a women’s charity in Bristol that helps victims of domestic abuse. www.womankindbristol.org.uk

Jacki has written three books on the subject of female explorers, two are available on her website, www.jackihill-murphy.co.uk, and the third will be published in February 2021.

You can follow Jacki on Twitter on @jackihillmurphy

Laura Penhaul is two-time Guiness World Record holding ocean rower, physiotherapist and performance manager for high performing athletes.

She was the team leader of the Coxless Crew, setting two World Records in January 2016 as they rowed unsupported across the Pacific for 9,000km from California to Cairns. It took 4 years to prepare for the challenge and 9 months to complete it.

Laura has supported athletes through Vancouver, London and Rio Paralympic Games and previously was Lead Physiotherapist for the Paralympic Programme of British Athletics, and the British Ski Team.

She is now the Founder of Adaptive Performance, and in 2017 provided Performance Management support to Mark Beaumont as he circumnavigated the World in less than 80 Days by bike.

She is now co-hosting a podcast with Mark and they have written a book together, both called Endurance, giving an insight into the teams behind successful athletes and giving everyday sportspeople the chance to learn to access the support that they may not otherwise know about.

In this chat we cover why she chose to take on one of the world’s toughest ocean challenges, how useful it is to understand your own body literacy and how self-awareness is key to good teamwork and leadership. And what she learned from nine months at sea in a 8m boat.

We touch briefly on the huge and exciting topic of the sports science specifically in women’s bodies, training and sport. How to manage good mental and physical wellbeing, spotting the signs of stress, overwhelm and breakdowns, hopefully before you hit rock bottom, but crucially after you have been there to stop it happening again.

Then we discuss how she managed herself and her own wellbeing while supporting Mark Beaumont on his astonishing achievement of cycling round the world in less than 80 days.

It’s a varied conversation and I feel like we only brushed the surface of so many exciting topics. Since recording this podcast I was delighted to learn that Laura got engaged – massive congrats to her and her fiancé Matt.

You can follow her on IG on @laurapenhaul

The website for her business Adaptive Performance is www.adaptive-performance.com

Laura and Mark Beaumont’s book is called “Endurance – How to Cycle Further” and is available at https://shop.globalcyclingnetwork.com/endurance-how-to-cycle-further-book

Laura and Mark’s podcast, also called Endurance, is released every Thursday anywhere you normally get your podcasts!

Géraldine Fasnacht is a Swiss snowboarder and wingsuit pilot.

She is a three-time winner of the Verbier Extreme in her home resort of Verbier, in south west Switzerland. She competed in the Freeride World Tour for 8 years.

In 2014, she was the first person to wingsuit off the Matterhorn, the iconic Swiss mountain. And she has other wingsuit firsts; flying off peaks in Antarctica, Baffin Island and Iran to name but a few.

In this interview, she teaches me that it is not all about the adrenaline seeking rush of popular belief. Rather about freedom, peace and communing with nature as she finds the perfect lines either in the powder on her snowboard or down the sides of mountains in her wingsuit.

We discuss her early career and the choice to give up a good, sensible job to take a chance on becoming a professional athlete and how that dream did not happen overnight. It took hard work, dedication and perseverance.

We discuss the passion she shares with her husband for wingsuit flying and how since they became parents nearly a year ago, they have not given it up but have changed how they approach it.

In common with many of my high-achieving guests, nature and being outside are a great force for good and a way to reconnect to what is really important. And she talks about how she equates what she does to the trust and communication needed in the workplace and in life.

You can follow Géraldine on Instagram on @geraldinefasnacht and on her website www.geraldinefasnacht.com

Géraldine is an ambassador for Verbier www.verbier.ch, one of the world’s finest ski resorts, something of which she is enormously proud.

A “sliding doors moment” is how Karen Darke MBE describes the climbing fall that paralysed her from the chest down, aged 21. I wanted to know if she thinks she would have achieved everything she has achieved if she had just decided to climb back down that day when it started to get hard.

Instead, she fell off a sea cliff and into a completely different life, one she says she feels fortunate to have lived.

It’s almost impossible to put into words how impressive the comeback from that accident was. From intensive care to going back to finish her Geology PhD in Aberdeen, to completing the London Marathon in a matter of years, quickly followed by handbiking across the Himalayas.

She is a two-time World Champion paratriathlete, has kayaked 1200 miles from Vancouver to Alaska, is a silver medal paracyclist in London 2012 and a gold medal winner in Rio 2016. All being well, she will be competing in Tokyo in 2021 just as she turns 50.

She has sit skied across 600km in Greenland, handcycled the length of the Japanese archipelago and climbed El Capitan by pulling herself up the rope – 4000 pull ups, in case you’re interested!

We discuss in length her belief that “what if?” should be replaced with “what if I don’t take this opportunity?”, our shared belief that you can have an adventure wherever you are if you have the right attitude and beliefs.

She shares her journey to visit a spirit surgeon in Brazil, where she witnessed things her scientific mind found almost impossible to comprehend and with that the expansion of her mind into how we are capable of so much more than we think we are.

She now runs transformational coaching, works with social enterprises and inspires people to inspire each other, something she truly believes we can all do.

Her latest adventure, Quest 79, has taken her into a whole new realm of expeditions on the 7 continents.

The aim to encourage people to find their own personal challenges and rise to meet them. She is also raising funds for The Spinal Injuries Association and the project will culminate with a trip to Antarctica in Jan 2022 – the 7th and final continent.

Her unwavering belief that everyone can find their “inner gold” is motivating and, dare I say it, inspiring – it’s not a word she likes to be used in conjunction with her, but it’s nigh on impossible not to mention it in the same sentence as her name.

I could go on, the list of adventures and achievements is almost endless, but you’ll need to listen and then devour her books; If You Fall, Boundless and Quest 79 to find out more about her physical, mental and emotional journeys.

They are all available on her website www.karendarke.com as is the opportunity to contact her about being on the incredible transformational adventures she is putting together, as mentioned in the ingerview, and to donate https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/karen-darke

You can follow Karen on IG on @handbikedarke and on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/karenquest79