LifeDoneDifferent.ly

Hi everyone. I hope you're doing okay given the circumstances. Welcome to our conversation with Charles Wookey. Charles is the CEO of A Blueprint for Better Business, a charity that helps organisations consider their social and environmental impact alongside their financial goals. This is how I know Charles. His organisation does some great work but how Charles' ended up with Blueprint is the interesting bit.

Boarding school from the age of six is a mixed blessing. It's certainly not what he wanted for his children put it that way. Philosophy and Physics at Oxford followed school and then into KPMG to become an Accountant and that's when he started to make up his own mind. The obvious path was to fit in and work his nuts off for the next ten to fifteen years and become a partner.  Two weeks after qualifying, at the moment his salary would have doubled, he left because he could see the future and it meant becoming someone he didn't want to become.

What followed has been a career of curiosity. A few years at the House of Commons before leaving to spend three months on a silent retreat in North Wales which alerted him to the fact he's got one crack at life. The dark bit was confronting himself and his conclusion that "there are things that are real and there are things that are illusory and I wanted to live in a way that makes sense of what's real. I do not want to have regrets."

Charles' comments remind me of Bronnie Ware's work. Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care. Her patients we those who had gone home to die. She was with them in their last three to twelve weeks of their life. Conversations in those final weeks were highly emotional. When asked about any regrets or what they would have done differently, common themes surfaced again and again. The most common regret was "I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

Charles has that courage. The confidence to know when it's time to move on. The confidence to overcome imposter syndrome. The confidence to step into the unknown.

After his retreat, Charles, worked for Institute of Fiscal Studies where he was the guy who knew nothing about economics and then having met a nun, he ended up in the God business, working for Cardinal Basil Hume. This role and his affection for Hume satisfied his curiosity for eleven years at which point he stepped into the unknown again. This time it was business. More specifically a Blueprint for Better Business which he's been leading since 2011.

In Spring 2022 Charles steps down as CEO to go on another, as yet undecided adventure. Don't be surprised if you see him on The Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury sometime soon 😉

https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
https://www.blueprintforbusiness.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Beuno%27s_Jesuit_Spirituality_Centre

Hello hello - welcome to Part 2 of our conversation with Junior Smart. If you haven't listened to Part 1 I suggest you do that first. Part One takes us to the point where Junior is just about to be sent to prison for what turned out to be a twelve-year sentence. This is Part 2 where Junior describes the shock of prison, the meanness and the compassion of both prison staff and inmates. He describes his journey from being scared to being respected, from someone who went with the flow to someone who swam against it . . . and ended up with an OBE as a result.

I've enjoyed every conversation we've had on this podcast but these two conversations with Junior have remained in my mind longer than any others and I think that's happened because I'm simply blown away by the speed at which Junior was able to use prison as his turning point. 

I've thought about his journey in so many different ways and every time I end up thinking about his ability to build bridges when others were building walls . . .  and that's what leaders do.

Junior is a leader. 

Enjoy . . Junior Smart OBE - Leader

Junior Smart is a youth leader, an ex-offender, an academic and a couple of months ago he added father to this list. 

If you don't believe people can change, listen to this. This is a story about the power of belonging. A need we all have to belong to a group. A lesson in how we often attach importance to the wrong things and end up in the wrong group, the wrong Club. It's a lesson in how, with an open mind and good people in your support team, you can change beyond your imagination. 

Juniors levels of self-awareness are stratospheric when compared to the frickin mess he describes himself as in his early twenties.

From giving away his personal power to taking it, from toxic masculinity to the Tedx stage . . . it's quite a journey . . . this is a story about leading yourself . . . this is Part 1 

Hi everyone. Hope you're all okay, coping, surviving, learning, growing - it's hard to know what to say these days - we're all experiencing the same thing and whilst the experience is so shared sometimes . . .  the more I talk to people the more I understand, at times, how very differently we're all experiencing it.

This conversation is a good example. It's a conversation with Matt & Lucia, husband and wife, both professional singers, parents to Persephone, neighbours of my friends Caramel & Roger and most recently the creative and operational geniuses behind mini music makers which are fun, energetic, educational music classes for pre-school kids.   

Back in March, both Matt's & Lucia's incomes dried up overnight. This is the story of what the business world calls a pivot but it's so much more than that.

It's really a lesson in both fighting and rolling with the punches. 

Matt and Lucia are very different. Matt was born with huge talent, Lucia worked hard to develop hers. Matt, the teenager, rebelled. Lucia didn't need to. Lucia's parents encouraged her to follow her dreams. Matt's parents less so. Matt is lazy, Lucia wants to be.  These differences, together with a shared vision are probably why they're such a good team.

Matt has achieved more in music than most people even dream of but he doesn't like to say he's a professional musician . . . because he's been this since he was 9 years of age. He really wants to do something different but money and more have been barriers.

He says "I feel guilty that I've found music so easy . . . I could always just do it . . . but I didn't make the decision to be a singer . . . it just happened"

Lucia seems unafraid to change her story. She spent her childhood dreaming of becoming a professional opera singer and as soon as the box was ticked, moved on to become a music educator.
 
Matt's teenage motto of "there must be more to life than this" is still there. He seems to have nailed curiosity but hasn't quite yet converted it into the life done differently he's looking for . . . . . but a huge nudge from Covid and an old story or two swapped for new ones, continued support from Lucia . . . and they'll be in a Costa Rican jungle dressed as Shady the Racoon.

The lesson I've learned from Matt and Lucia is that to get where you want to go you have to decide when it's time to fight and when it's time to roll with the punches. It seems to me you have to fight when you have a plan and energy . . . . and you need to roll with the punches and see what happens when you don't.

It works for Covid too. Embrace the chaos rather than fight it. When change happens you can hang on to what was if you want . . . . but you're better off saying to yourself. It's changed I've got to change.

When am I going to be able to go back to the way it was before? is not a healthy response . . . because there's no knowing when or if that will ever happen.

Enjoy Matt & Lucia Long - I'm actually an opera singer

https://minimusicmakers.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=mini%20music%20makers
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMArwTF8UQ8amxrP8NAkdRw
http://matthew-long.co.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw

Hi All - welcome to our conversation with Ben Ivey. Ben is a coach to Entrepreneurs but what makes Ben interesting is that he's interested in the Entrepreneur as a person, the whole person not just as a business person. He's as happy talking about love as he is margins. He wants you to live the best life you can, one where regrets are minimised and magic moments are maximised. 

Ben's awareness of business was there from an early age.  Both his Grandad and Dad were property entrepreneurs and this feeling that he needed to take personal responsibility or control of his life seemed to be a reaction to his parent's separation.   

He was good at numbers and so business or banking seemed a natural option but he realised early on that he didn't want to go down the corporate consultancy route and so, like many of us do, he followed a friend - in Ben's case on to the start-up bus where he started his own entrepreneurial journey in the form of One Pink Elephant which took him to China and then Los Angeles.

Ben was telling himself the 'Let's make loads of money' story and then at 21, Ben lost his 53-year-old father to suicide. Ben had spoken to his father the previous day and it was a shock like no other. Ben had always seen his father as a man full of fun, charm and character and seems to have been the moment Ben realised that what you see is nothing like the full story.

Ben describes his feeling of being utterly lost, having no idea how to deal with it himself and so he spent time being there for other people. Then he spoke to counsellors, then he started to understand the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and then acceptance) 

During this Ben went to China. He'd always wanted to go there because he'd studied Mandarin at school and what Ben noticed was that China and the Chinese culture is sooo different. Not better or worse just very very different - the way things are done is different at a fundamental level - it's China's differentness that inspires (check out Episode 5 with Oliver Dall for another example of how China inspires).

Ben has a mindset that if someone else can do something, he can do it too. Ben seems to follow through on most of what he says he's going to do because he perseveres. A good example of this is Ben's Ted Talk in Mandarin.
 
He talks about a fulfilled life being one with gratitude, purpose and meaning. He talks about happiness as love.

It's hard to imagine listening to Ben's story that his father's suicide wasn't the single biggest moment to date but like many other people we've spoken to on this podcast, Ben has reacted to this rock-bottom moment and created a turning point. Somehow, he's managed to, eventually create something positive out of the chaos.

Ben has worked in suicide prevention and has overcome what he describes as his biggest challenge and that's his 'When I have this' addiction. He says "I believed I had to be successful myself before I could help people - if that's the way one thinks you'll never be qualified because there's always something more to be achieved - if that's the attitude you will never get there because there's so much to learn you'll never be qualified"

Like me, Ben is inspired by Bronnie Ware's 'Five Regrets of the Dying'. What is it that really matters in life?

He talks about the benefits of noticing what's actually happening and the need to balance a 'gratitude for what you have' with 'the wonder of what could be'.

We talk about Goals as Direction - he says "don't become too attached to the result you're looking for because the result you have in mind is there to provide you direction and rarely something to be achieved".

He's spot on. If any of you have achieved those goals you set out to achieve you'll know that the moment of achievement is there only briefly - before you know it gone, replaced by another mountain to climb.

The bit I personally found most enlightening was Ben's take on relationships. He talks about the six expressions of love being; food, gifts, positive words, acts of service, physical touch and quality time. This insight that we all value different things is gold-dust and as awkward as it may feel, regularly asking the questions.

What can I do this week to make you feel loved? & When did you feel most loved?

This something I'm going to try.

At one point Ben says "Doing something different enables me to notice what's happening. It slows life down so I can enjoy it".

Enjoy Ben Ivey - when did you feel most loved?

https://www.ben-ivey.com/
https://www.tonyrobbins.com/stories/unleash-the-power/discover-your-peak-state/
https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
https://www.kylebenson.net/make-a-relationship-last/
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80102204?source=35

This episode is a conversation with Tom Libelt, salesman, musician and DJ, coffee shop owner, publisher and most recently digital nomad.

Thank you to Tom for a thoroughly enjoyable conversation. As you've probably noticed, our title for Tom is 'The Reluctant Adventurer'.

For Tom, adventure is a reaction to boredom, not the primary motivation.

It seems clear that Tom's parents and his wealth of experiences as a child played a role in shaping him. I loved hearing about the VCR and blueberry hustles. I loved the way he dealt so nonchalantly with the move from Poland to the US, gunshots in his hallway, rarely seeing his parents and customer service punch-ups at school. I get it, it was simply the way things were.

For me, the inspiring bit is when he starts to get dissatisfied with his trajectory when he starts to make his own path. I wish I'd been smart enough to hack the school software system and pass my exams in two months rather than the usual four years - it would have saved me and my teachers a lot of pain!

I see Tom's unwillingness to go with the flow as taking personal responsibility for his own life. Tom's realisation that he was trying to live other peoples stories and not his own seems to be such an important one. There are so many of us who simply go with the flow and end up being a part of someone else's else story, always feeling something's not quite right.

It's interesting to hear about Tom's unwillingness to be a part of the crowd, to be unique or as he describes 'finding the third door'. I'm in no doubt it's what's delivered entrepreneurial success and I think the way he compares himself today with himself yesterday is infinitely better than comparing yourself to someone else.

As Oscar Wilde says "Be yourself, everyone else is taken."

Tom's life now seems quite different from his life a few years ago. It sounds like he's starting to reap the dividends of all that investment in learning, in failure, in different jobs, in meeting different people from different cultures and different industries. It sounds like he's taken the best of what he learned and experienced and transformed it into a series of healthy habits and routines that, with discipline, deliver the consistent results he's looking for.

In our terms, his early years were spent voraciously exploring the unknown, albeit reluctantly! Now, he seems to have found more of a balance between the known and the unknown.

I can see Tom will always be curious to some extent or another but it's so interesting to hear him describe the way he stops himself from getting distracted. For people like Tom who feel comfortable in the unknown, this is a big challenge. New ideas can often feel so much more interesting than maintenance.

It all seems to come together in his bus metaphor. Serial entrepreneurs get on a bus and stay on for a few stops before switching to the bus where people look richer and happier. This process continues when you're a hustler, you never stay on any bus for very long, you never stick at anything, you never go deep into anything.

Tom's trick has been to notice the dissatisfaction, explore alternative paths, pick the one that works for him and repeat until he feels that twinge of dissatisfaction again.

As Tom and Jocko Willink say "Routines free you."

To some people, it might sound like Tom's wrestling with, on one hand, the value of routines versus the value of adventure but it isn't like that.

Routines and adventure work together as interdependent pairs like inhaling and exhaling. There's no point in mastering inhaling without giving equal attention to exhaling. The way we think about these things is balance.   

With balance in mind, I hope Tom works out how to feel a contentment from what he's already achieved and balance it with the desire to move forward.

I'm sure his small group of family and friends will help him along the way.

Thanks again Tom for all the insights.

Cheers

Ray & Neil

https://smartbrandmarketing.com/ 
https://smartbrandmarketing.com/tom-libelt/
https://www.tonyrobbins.com/
https://jockopodcast.com/

• The benefits of being forced to do something we said we'd never do  
• Responding to change
• The difference between hearing a story and experiencing it
• The need for human connection
• The importance of humour
• Finding ups within the downs
• Can you build real relationships via technology?
• How we can all experience the same event so very differently 
• When fear and excitement become the same thing
• COVID-19 as a magic wand for the environment
• The possibility of Universal Basic Income (UBI) 
• The importance of taking aim 

She tried mainstream fashion but didn't fit in. Clare doesn't fit in - in so many ways! Clare's a rebel. She suggests that rebellion became a part of her when she moved schools and studied the same syllabus and sat the same exams two years on the trot. Clare, because she was bright got very bored and that bred rebellion. 

I'm sure that year shaped Clare but I have very little doubt that Clare was born to rebel. Her childhood was characterised by instability and change. She learned to cope with the unknown. As an adult with her own mind, she is still unafraid of the unknown. She is unafraid of the consequences of her actions because she's experienced the likely consequences before . . . and survived. Being arrested doesn't faze someone whos spent time in the notorious Top Shop Hilton. 

Clare's childhood doesn't seem good enough to me. I think she deserved better. She's worked hard to understand what happened but what occurs to me is that this not good enough childhood might just be the very thing that's given her the ability to shock, to wake us up, to help us notice. 

In her work with XR, the job is to wake us up to what's happening to the planet.

It seems to me the risk is too great for no action. Hindsight won't be an option. And why not work together to clean things up?  

Why not shout about it if that's what you do so well?

Enjoy Clare Farrell - Rebellion

We talked to Clare about:

• Claire's estranged relationship with her much older Dad
• Having the wrong accent
• The moment she lost trust in her family
• Watching her mum get ill and die 
• Going into a state of numbness when her Mum died
• Having to grow up quickly
• How she justified her thoughts of self-harm 
• Becoming a surrogate Mum to her little brother
• Living in Middlesborough next door to armed robbers, heroin dealers and heroin addicts 
• Being surrounded by people who'd also suffered childhood trauma because they understood each other
• Finding out your boyfriend's gay
• Arriving in London in a state of serious trauma
• Mistaking openness for weakness
• Bailing on the commercial fashion world
• The benefits of desperation if it leads to asking for help (rock-bottom)  
• Becoming a much better version of herself thanks to a very special therapist
• Learning to become more compassionate to herself
• The culture of the fashion industry
• The plethora of gross bosses
• Being told 'sustainable' wasn't something that would work in fashion
• 'Sustainable Fashion' by its very nature being an oxymoron 
• The destructive nature of Capitalism
• Her Dad's advice to do something she enjoyed
• The protest/art project she organised in a Top Shop store
• Getting banged up in the Top Shop jail
• Buy Nothing Day
• Space Hijackers
• Disrupting the daily life of people
• Shaking people awake
• How Clare's rebelliousness developed 
• How age has mellowed the rebel
• Extinction Rebellion
• Teaching fashion  
• Money
• Risks
• Forgiveness
• Some people walk on by, some people take personal responsibility
• Heading toward environmental catastrophe
• When comfortable becomes uncomfortable
• The impossibleness of maintaining the status quo 
• Clare's relationship with 'hope'
• The challenges of activism
• How our planet is the thing that can bring us together

Extinction Rebellion
Reverand Billy
Space Hijackers
Vigilante-hippie-six-wheeled-riot-tank
David Wallce-Wells

We met up a few weeks later and Katey told me more. More about: 

• The wasted years of her life and how she started to doubt people were good
• Noticing she was angry with herself and everyone around her
• The point at which she decided not to be angry
• How she became braver, how she started to change
• How the simple act of liking an instagram post became the first step of her journey 
• The importance of her friends who act as her support team
• The moment when she realised she was strong 
• Her brother's suggestion to make a list of the things she wanted to do
• The difference between confidence and self-esteem
• How getting out of her comfort zone gives her confidence
• How liberating it can be to take your clothes off in public
• What happens when you bring what you want and what you need together

La Bordello Boheme Burlesque
The Walrus Pub Brighton

We have a big old natter about:

• Growing up in Swansea
• The problem of doing what you want on your wedding day - when others want you to go with the flow (one week after this conversation Damian was getting married Vegas) 
• Moving to New York
• The problem of describing what he does; Musician v Builder of Businesses
• The creativity of building businesses 
• When he gets bored it's time to move on
• Being a five-star failer
• Good drummers = good videographers
• Playing Wembley Arena & Hyde Park 
• Meeting your heroes
• Being paid to do what you love
• Failing all his GCSE's
• Joining a band
• Signing a record deal and the anticipation of becoming a rock star
• The 9 months of anticipation being followed by being dropped by the record label  
• Getting a job in the local shampoo factory
• Realising that he didn't want to get used to a very boring job
• Why everyone should do a very boring job
• Reacting to rock-bottom
• Being more scared of staying at the shampoo factory than he was scared of the unknown
• Understanding that failure isn't fatal
• Finding his 'lane' which is working very hard to overcome any lack of talent 
• Competing with himself not others 
• Why he doesn't want to look back on his life and wish he'd done something different
• Why life is like a computer game 
• Money is like oxygen - you don't really care about it until it's gone
• One holiday in his 20's
• What are holidays?
• Having a Dad with no ambition whatsoever and reacting to that
• Taking personal responsibility 
• Contentment v Ambition
• His very supportive mum
• Having a Stepdad who introduced fun and was a big influence on his life
• Sliding doors moments
• The importance of the mentors in his life, particularly Bruce Dickinson
• When 'Why Not?' is the answer
• The amazing Princes Trust 
• Going to Rock School
• The different lenses through which we look at life and why alternative lenses are essential for growth
• The importance of doubting that your stories are the only important stories 
• When snow forced Damian to move from Rock School student to Rock School teacher
• When Damian became the Rock School's Sales & Marketing Manager 
• Following/stalking his mentor Bruce and how they set up their own music college (BIMM)  
• Damian's focus on giving students the best music education possible
• How in the first 3 years students were involved in 24 Top 40 hits (including the Kooks)
• The importance of remembering students names (and at the height taking 3 weeks to remember 1,000 students names)
• How the scale of BIMM became a problem
• Leaving BIMM 
• How becoming a millionaire was overshadowed by a sense of failure
• Losing confidence
• The 'what next?' moment  
• Feeling like Jason Orange
• Going back to the comfort of his bass guitar
• Learning to sing and having too much work
• Starting to manage bands and having to employ people to help out
• How learning is a confidence builder
• His Mum's words 'do it while you can'
• Unwittingly becoming the social media guy
• The irony of being asked to write a book when the last book he'd read was Fantastic Mr Fox
• Writing 'Fuck Plan B' which became 'The rulebreakers guide to social media' 
• Understanding that both success and failure are fleeting and just part of the game 
• The importance of doubting the stories you tell yourself when the story is that you can't do something
• The importance of creating meaningful experiences or 'legacy' 
• Damian's next adventure and why it feels like he's burning the ships 

BIMM
Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
https://www.youtube.com/user/Damiankeyes