I really enjoyed putting this week's episode together. Frank Diamond is a former missionary priest who spent more than a decade in Africa, during which time he contracted malaria nine times. He has returned to Ireland in recent years and his personal mission to empower other people has led him to a new role with Emergenetics, a company which aims to help individuals and teams achieve high performance through a deeper understanding of the role of nature and nurture in our own unique individual make-up.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about Frank's memories of growing up in County Derry in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, his calling to the priesthood, his time in Africa, his very personal experiences of malaria and the current chapter of his life as father of two young daughters, who, he says, have taught him anew the meaning of humility and hope and unconditional love. 

We chat about spirituality in the context of a move away from organised religion around the world, the meaning of ego, the three L’s of love and empowering leadership in the context of his new career. 

I felt really grateful for spending this hour with Frank Diamond, and I really hope you enjoy this conversation. 

As always, if you do enjoy it, I would be very very grateful if you could help me spread the word about the Life Well Lived podcast. The mission of this podcast is to play a small part in helping to heal unhappiness in the world, and I try to do that by talking to inspiring people each week about navigating the challenges of life, being our best selves in the world and overall, living a life well lived. So if that sounds like something you’d like to get into your ears on a regular basis, subscribe by searching for the Life Well Lived Podcast with Shane Breslin in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you like this episode with Frank Diamond, take a screenshot on your phone or your computer and share it out on your favourite social network, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn (or - even better - all of the above!)

This week’s guest first properly came to my attention and to the attention of many people around Ireland almost a year ago.

Chris Kerr is a goalkeeper with the Antrim Gaelic football team. 

(A quick word for any non-Irish or non-sporty listeners. We mention some acronyms in this interview. The GAA is the Gaelic Athletic Association, the governing body for the native games of Gaelic football and hurling in Ireland, and the GPA is the Gaelic Players Association, a representative body for the country’s top players, of which Chris is a member.) 

A year ago Chris Kerr wrote an honest, revealing and heartfelt piece about his own experiences with depression and anxiety following the illness and death of his father five years previously. 

That depression and anxiety brought him to the brink, when out for a night with friends from his football club he contemplated the river Lagan and the end of his own life. 

In this conversation we talk about his lowest point and how we has come back from there, why he decided to write about his experiences and how Belfast in Northern Ireland is the place where young men are most at risk. 

He also chats about the stigma of mental health, the positives of social media and how he’s reminded of his father every time he takes to the field at his St Gall’s club in West Belfast.

TIME STAMPS:

3:00-9:00: Chris’s lowest point, when he stared at the Lagan river with thoughts of suicide

9:00-12:00: Why he decided to write about his experiences 

12:00-20:00: Depression, anxiety - illness and medication 

20:00-24:00: The mental health stigma 

24:00-28:00: Coping mechanisms 

28:00-32:30: Self-talk 

32:30-37:00: Belfast and the most at-risk young men in Europe 

37:00-40:00: The workplace and mental health

40:00-42:00: The positives of social media 

42:00-47:00: The contribution of the GAA and the GPA 

47:00-54:00 : Memories of his father (and why he remembers him every time he takes to the field at his home ground at St Gall's)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Life Well Lived Podcast with me, Shane Breslin. Over the first three weeks of this podcast, the guests have been a sports-based mental health activist (Jessica Robson), an educator with a rebel stance on what education should be and do (Finbarr Bradley) and a disabled extreme endurance athlete and disability advocate (Sinead Kane). 

This week’s is something different again. It’s about religion, but I think it’s about a lot more than just religion, and I really hope you enjoy it. 

I first heard of Sister Mary Scholastica exactly a year ago, when I was idly watching a BBC TV documentary series called Sea Cities, which brought viewers around the coast of the United Kingdom meeting interesting characters in coastal towns. 

This small woman with the big persona and an unmistakable Irish accent, who was making light of her obvious advancing years to go about her daily business in the city and port of Sunderland leapt out from the screen.

I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Great North Run in September last, and arranged to make the short hop to Sunderland to spend a couple of hours at the Stella Maris Centre, a tiny building away out on its own deep, in the port of Sunderland. Seeing it as part of her vocation to help seafarers, Sister Mary established the Stella Maris Centre in recent years. 

Stella Maris is Latin for “star of the sea”, and her little building is a drop-in centre and a beacon of warmth for the seafarers from all over the world who arrive in the port of Sunderland every few days, many of them accustomed to pretty extreme working conditions.

While I was there our conversation was momentarily interrupted by a visit from four Ukrainian shipmen, who seemed to have little English but Sister Mary was able to communicate enough to arrange transport for them into the city centre, with instructions of how to get their mobile sim card to allow them to contact home during their stay in Sunderland. (The manager of the Three Mobile store in the city was in that documentary series saying that Sister Mary was one of his best customers, as she regularly purchases a stack of SIM cards to hand out to travelling ship workers.) 

It was a privilege for me to see this generosity up close. I was brought up Catholic but I guess I would now be described as lapsed. I no longer go to Mass. I guess the exposure of so many Church scandals in recent years just eroded any confidence I had in the hierarchy. But still I’ve always recognised spirituality and warmth and generosity, and that those qualities can be present no matter what faith or belief system is at play. 

I loved talking to Sister Mary Scholastica about her childhood in the Ireland of the 1940s and ‘50s, of her work in Sunderland over the past 60 years. We also spoke about the scandals that have engulfed various strands of the Catholic Church, and she offered a passionate defence of her fellow nuns in the Sisters of Mercy and other religious orders, and the contribution they have made to Ireland. I hope you enjoy listening to Sister Mary Scholastica. 

If you’re already subscribed to the Life Well Lived podcast, thank you so much. If you’re not, search for Life Well Lived Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you could leave the show a review in iTunes or Google Podcasts, I would be so grateful.

Wherever you are in the world, whether you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or Midwinter or Yule, the turning of the year has always been a special time.

It’s a time for reflection on the past and contemplation about the future. In the past I was always very preoccupied with the idea of What’s Next.

There are lots of reasons we spend time in the What’s Next.

I’m not asking you not to ask What’s Next. 

Because What’s Next is human nature. Instead, I just encourage you to ask a second question too.

This is Episode 3 of the Life Well Lived podcast with me, Shane Breslin.

This show is all about conversations about navigating the challenges of life, being our best selves in the world and ultimately how to be happy, which I firmly believe is the whole point of life, and living a life well lived. 

My guest this week has found her way past incredible challenges in life, including discovering her congenital eyesight problems at the age of just four, which means she sees only certain colours and brightness. 

Her disability might mean Sinead Kane is legally blind but she was not going to let that hold her back from a fulfilled life. In this episode we talk about her phenomenal and still young life, in which she qualified as a solicitor, achieved a PhD from the Anti-Bullying Centre at Dublin City University and taken up extreme distance running, including the World Marathon Challenge in 2017 when she ran in -30 degrees in Antarctica and +39 in Dubai as part of a seven-marathon challenge on seven continents in seven days, all with her guide runner John O’Regan alongside. Sinead also talks about the gift of self-acceptance, looking out for real role models in life and the power of personal leadership.

I really hope you enjoy this episode of the Life Well Lived Podcast. 

If you do, please please please spread the word. Take a screenshot and post it on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or tell your friends the old school way next time you meet them!