Hello, I'm Bonny Snowdon, ex corporate person and mother turned successful artist entrepreneur. It wasn't that long ago though that I lacked the confidence, vision, and support network to focus on growing my dream business. Fast forward past many life curve balls, waves of self-doubt, and so many lessons learned. And you'll see Ignite my thriving online coloured pencil artist community,
a community that changes members' lives for the better, and gives me freedom to live abundantly whilst doing what I love and spending quality time with my beloved family and dogs, all whilst creating my best artwork with coloured pencils and mentoring others to do the same. But this life wasn't always how it was for me. It used to only exist in my imagination.
I've created the, It's a Bonny Old Life podcast to help increase people's confidence, share mine and my community's experience, and hope through fascinating personal stories, champion the other amazing humans in my personal, professional, and membership community, and create another channel through which I can support others to realize their dreams. If you're a passionate coloured pencil artist or an aspiring one who's looking to create their best work and a joyful life you love, you're in the right place. Grab a cup and a custard cream, let's get cracking.
Sometimes meeting someone for the first time reveals an instant connection. My next guest, Jimmy Burroughes and I are part of a business by design next level. So we've got an awful lot in common. Our following conversation is the first time we actually met, and I love these initial conversations and I'm really,really glad that we went straight to the recording of this week's podcast.
Bonny, hi. Hi. Nice to meet You. I feel, I feel like I know you already, but Oh, I'm glad. I'm so sorry about that. I'm thinking, oh, I'm just log and I was like, oh, it's not my link. Oh, I think we got,
I think because I ended up, when Lucinda reached out, I think I said, oh, let's book a call in using my schedule, because I had one and then she booked it and that automatically attaches my zoom. But honestly, not a drama. Happy to jump on Zooms, cuz I know you wanna record it. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.
That was, That was a very funky, how did your camera just do that?
Oh God. Well, it's funky, but it's quite irritating. It's one of the new, the new Apple screens. Okay. And it has this wide lens thing, wide camera lens. So every time you move, your head follows around, which is fine, unless I've got one of the dogs in here and it starts moving about and then the camera starts moving around with it.
Love it. It's like, no, no. Track me. Not the puppies.
Yeah. No. Oh, it's mad. It's mad. Oh, it's really nice to meet you. Likewise. Yeah, no, I say I've, I saw you on the BBD sessions and I've been following you on Instagram and I have to say wow to your art.
Like I have, have I, I wasn't allowed to do GCSE art because I would bring the school average down, so they put me in like pottery class. So I have such respect for anybody who has that artistic creativity. And you seem to have turned it into an incredible business as well. An opportunity.
Yeah, Yeah, it is. It's, you know, I kind of sit here sometimes and I think this is crazy. This is totally and utterly mad. I mean, I, I loved, I did love art at school, and then when I was at school we were doing O levels, not GCSEs weren't a thing. This, it was O levels and, and art, I was always like,you know, guaranteed an O level because, because I was taking art. But then, and then I wanted to go on and, and I wanted to do art as a, as a career and I wanted to do a, a degree in it. And I did two years at a local college and honestly it just turned me off art altogether. And at the age of 16, 17, that was, it didn't, didn't do anymore until I was 46. Wow.
So you picked up a paintbrush 30 odd years later.
Yeah, Yeah. Pencil. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And, and did it just for sort of like mindful reasons and mental health and everything. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, hang on a second, this is, you know, I'm really enjoying this. And then it was like commission business started off as commission business. And then teaching has always been your, your leadership, aren't you?
Yeah. High performance cultures. So yeah, it's, it's helping leaders to build high performance culture rather than doing it for them.
Yeah. So I did, in my, in my old, my old me leadership and development, I did a lot of coaching, well, I taught overseas, so I taught a lot of the big telecoms companies. They wanted their teams to be coaches so that they could get better performance from their teams, basically. So that's what I used to do. So teaching was kind of something i, I love to do. I love to impart knowledge. So then that transition from me doing my commission work into then teaching that people how to draw with coloured pencils. And now it's like a...
Amazing.
You know, some people would say, I'm taking over the world, But I'm not. Well,
I mean, I'm impressed. So That's so cool.
It's lovely. It's lovely. It's really nice. And, and you have had, and this is why I wanted to reach out as well, cause I, I wanted to speak to people as well who had, had, we're, we're kind of buddies in Business by Design, the James Wedmore's Business by Design, which that man has. Oh, I'm so inspired by him.It's unbelievable.
He's, He's touched a nerve for me. I dunno if he got you. He's is like, it's like he's poking the inside of my soul in, in, in certain things in an, in a purely PG way, but you know what I mean, it's, yeah, I dunno. Here he's got a, a gift for getting, if you are somebody who's on the, on the journey to building a, you know, 6, 7, 8 figure business, he's got a knack for helping drop that piece of knowledge bomb when you just need it. Just that little thing you need. Yeah. It's, it's uncanny.
Oh gosh. Oh, we'll cover that. I'd, I'd love to know about that. I, I find him amazing. I, in fact, there's a, there's a whole, I, I think they all kind, they don't, they don't all work together, but they're all sort of, I guess rubbing shoulders with each other. There's Stu McLaren as well, which is who I sort of found when I was starting my business. And I think he,James and Stu, I think have done business together as well. And it's just, I, I just find it incredible listening to these sort of top minds who are really, really at the top of their game. And, and they, you know, you think that you've got it right don't you, you think, oh yeah, everything's fine. And then all of a sudden you think, oh, hang on a second.
Yeah. Not, not not doing that bit, that Bit, you know?
Yeah. And it's, it's just, yeah, it's, yeah, it's fantastic. But you've had some big changes.
I have indeed. Yeah. Put mentally, personally, professionally, yeah. All of the, all the things. I'm a very different person to who I was even five years ago and certainly, you know, 20 years ago. But yeah, I feel it's interesting, you know, one of the things I've been wrangling with for the last couple of years is mistakes and errors versus experiences and tools. And I've really reframed that. Oh my god, you know, that was a real disaster or that was a terrible thing to do versus do you know what, that was another experience that made me who I am. And that's another tool for the toolbox. And I now use it in our, in, in our ways of working program, which is the thing you can see down here, we talk about lessons learned and it's not about, well that was a mistake and that, you know, that's an error.It was like, well, that's an experience we can chalk up and it makes us better. And next time round we've got the tool in the toolbox to know about dealing with that one. So we're, we're better than we were before. And it's that whole, I think there's a, there's a Chinese proverb or a somebody proverb, a a Pinterest proverb that says when you start again, you're not starting from the beginning are starting from experience. And I kind of love that. And I think people like James have shown me that and many other coaches along the way that I've, I've worked with. But I I like that, you know, you don't, you, you have to go through big changes in life to get to where you are now.
Yeah, definitely. And that's not something that you used to live by?
No, I would live by, I crashed and burned. That was a disaster. Let's try and start over. And now I'm like, whoa, that was fun. And I've got some experience now I've got a couple of battle scars to remind me what to do and what not to do next time round. And so I feel much more positive about everything in life than I ever felt before. I was very much a, you know, glass half empty person. Now I work a hard, in the abundant mindset and hard in being abundant. Not in a happy clappy, hippy dippy way, but in a, well there's always a way through, you know? And I've got, I am living proof that I can get through my worst days.
Wow. So what, what was it that made you, you sort of make that change?
Necessity. I think in many ways, I've had kind of what I would call three careers and each of 'em has been like a once a decade I decided just to completely change what I'm doing because why not, you know, you can. And so I was a mil, I was a, I was an army officer originally in the British Army. And as I was getting ex as I was moving through the ranks of being an officer, I discovered that I kind of done the fun jobs and I was due for the bad, for the more boring jobs in, well what I perceived to be more boring away from soldiers and in a headquarters doing paperwork and organizing and planning and things. And I realized pretty quickly that you could earn more on the outside doing that. And there wasn't a risk of being suddenly fired off to a war zone to, you know, backfill a, a job. So I decided to get outta the military and go and do the corporate thing. And that was a massive change, right? You're going from a, I'd been institutionalized since I was not in a mental hospital or anything, but institutionalized in a boarding school environment with army cadets and then university and then the military, which is basically like, you know, boarding school but with guns and cooler uniforms. And it was a case of now I'm stepping out into the big wide world, I have to go through this massive growing up activity cuz the army is very structured and very organized. And so I sort of stepped out at the age of 27 and had to learn how to adult and how to learn how to hold on a corporate job. And that, you know, not everybody was on the same side as you. And I was also transitioning from the UK to New Zealand at that point. So it was a whole kind of cultural shift, learning how to operate in a completely different world. And then when I was 37, I stepped outta the corporate world and decided to go traveling again. So I spent two years traveling Latin America and then building this coaching and consulting organization, which again is a massive shift away from being a corporate person with a job and a salary and vacation to becoming a self-employed consultant and then running a consulting business and being on the other side of the fence so you are now the person selling into an organization versus the person on the, you know, the looking at the RFPs and, and each of those and obviously then moving from New Zealand to Mexico at the same time. So two years in Latin America and have settled down in Mexico, which has been a massive cultural adjustment. Once again, moving from the UK to New Zealand was a cultural adjustment.
Moving from an English speaking predominantly sort of Christian Victorian values led culture to a a Latin Spanish speaking culture is, is was huge. So I've had to transition every couple of years to do that as well. And each of them is, you know, when you're going on these journeys you could, you could believe to yourself that I'm gonna crash and burn and this is terrible and it's all going horribly wrong. And believe me, I've had those down days. I've had those moments where I'm like, oh my god, what am I doing? Like it'd be much easier to go back to what I know. But I've always had this kind of underlying belief that I think the military instilled that in me that I can get through it, I can, I can do this, you know, just gotta take it one day at a time and it will get easier. And I'm still here so as I say, I'm the living proof of it. Yeah. I can get through every one of my worst days. So it's just that self-belief to keep going however small and it made me think back, actually just brought something else into my mind. Sorry, I have a tendency just to kind of talk, you brought something else into my mind that when you set yourself a goal, it's like standing on the pavement outside a skyscraper and the goal is the penthouse of the skyscraper. And it's very unlikely that you are gonna go from pavement to penthouse in, in one leap. Some people do, but for most of us we don't. And so all you've gotta do is try and climb one floor every day and there'll be days when you can just manage one step on the staircase and as long as you keep going up, when you look back after a week, a month, a year, you look down all those floors you've covered and you go, well here I am now versus where I was then. And that I think should inspire you and encourage you to keep going, and that's what kind of drives me. It's like, am I one step further ahead than I was yesterday? Then I've done well if I've fallen over and fallen down a few steps, well hey, I need to know what those steps look like next time I get to them and I can keep going and I know I can get through this, I will get there eventually. Just gotta keep plugging away.
Yeah. Got so what, what took you to New Zealand then? Was it just a case of you just wanted something completely different or That is quite a big,
It's about as far as you can go, isn't it from England? So the island in the middle of the Pacific. Well it's interesting. When I was in the military I had a wonderful opportunity to be posted to the Australian army on an exchange posting. And I was given the opportunity to go and essentially work with their training teams to share some of the lessons that we'd learned in Iraq doing the things that I did in Iraq. And so I had this opportunity to sort of jaunt around Australia for six or seven months and most of the time I was there they actually allowed me quite a lot of latitude and I had the opportunity to go between various different cities and various different bases sharing these skills.
And so when I left the military and I bought myself one of these round the world tickets that you end up with when you're in your twenties, the the travel consultant and I sat together and I said, oh no, I want to go to that, that those couple of islands that are just off the coast of Australia. Cuz I think when you live in the UK you think Australia and New Zealand are like kind of England and France.
Yeah.
That you don't realize are, you know, more like England and Moscow in terms of distance. So I ended up in New Zealand on the next leg of my world's trip and the intention of basically been sort of travel for a year and then come back to London and do the corporate thing in a consulting business in, in London. And when I got to New Zealand, I called the, the recruiter I was working with who was one of those ex-military into business recruiters. And unfortunately the job that I had lined up for me, which was a sort of transition management consultant job had disappeared as the GFC started to take off and all the recruitment was being frozen. So he asked me where I was, I said, I'm in Christchurch as I was at that point on my tiki tour around New Zealand and he said, well, I'll probably stay there if you can get a job cuz it's not looking good here. And at that point London was kind of imploding. And so I found myself a job in, in a consulting organization and decided I quite liked the beaches and the weather was pretty good and they spoke English so I could, I could cope. And over the next kind of, you know, 12 years built a life there, did the house and the dog and all those things that you do and, and eventually settled down. So it was, it was lovely.
Amazing. And then, and then from there you went onto another massive move.
Yeah, so I'd, I'd done, I, I, I guess one of the things, one of the themes that has always been part of my life is, is trying to achieve the best I could possibly can. And so when, when I set my mind to being in the corporate world, I was like, right, well I need to be the CEO of a business that's, that's the, that's the top right? It's the, that's the thing that we all should aim for, quite naively so I guess, and I thought, well, if I'm in charge, then I can make a difference, can make the biggest influence on the direction of an organization and the people. And I've always been very people-centric. So now how can I make the conditions amazing and the profit's amazing and the performance amazing? Well, if I'm the one in charge of it, I can control all of that. So I spent the next, you know, 10 plus years working my way up through organizations and got myself into a, a GM role. Which was a really great job, but unfortunately quite a dysfunctional organization. And unfortunately at the same time I was running an, I was doing an MBA and renovating houses and doing all sorts of other things and, and it just ended up with a consequence of me reaching a sort of point of burnout. I was doing too much, pushing too hard for too long a period. And that came with some un unhealthy habits and an unhealthy mindset and yeah, just kind of hit the, hit the wall in 2017 and decided to that I needed some sort of dramatic change in order to, to reach where I wanted to be in life. And I, I pretty quickly realized that actually even if you're the CEO of an organization, you're not necessarily in charge of the organization because there's boards and there's politics and there's all these other things that are going on.
So I become a little bit disillusioned with, with that path. And so had been looking at the idea of consulting and I had a little side gig consulting org consulting business going on where I was able to kind of almost step into organizations or support leaders to make change within their organizations. But I didn't have to be part of that politics and I didn't have to be part of the, the noise that leaders have to deal with. I was able just to influence and help and support. And so when I left my GM role, when I left the relationship I was in and, and sold everything I had and moved back to live with mom and dad for a couple of months, it was this great space opportunity to think, well what next? And the what next as it turned out was what has become in Jimmy Burroughes' leadership and, and the ways of working program, but the what next initially started off as well, I could just, I just wanna go and spend some time thinking about what caused this for me, how did I get myself into this situation? How can I learn from that experiences and tools, and how can I share that with other people?
Yeah. And so as I was traveling through Latin America, I was fortunate enough to be approached by some organizations to help them with leadership programs and facilitating workshops, which is essentially what I do is I facilitate conversations and facilitate workshops. And that turned into a much the same as, you know, my passion turned into a business. So I, I, here I am, you know, based in Mexico and, and even the Mexico thing was kind of a, a big change, but a, an opportunity stumbled into, I was working with a, an organization in California and basing myself between the uk I, I'd traveled Latin America for two years, I moved back to the UK to set up in, in Europe somewhere. I was basing myself in New Yorker and the organization I was supporting were in California. So there was a big time difference. And they said, well, would you consider moving over this side of the world to be a bit closer in terms of time zone, so you're not working till three in the morning? And so I thought, where am I gonna go live? Like I need to get an apartment or something, I'll go and live in Medellin in Colombia. And then I spoke to a few friends and they said, well, you've got friends in, in Oww in Mexico, why don't you just get a condo there and, and you can always rent it if you don't need it.
And so I bought the condo and then two weeks later the project finished, but I entered this condo in Mexico, so I decided to make the best of it and, and ended up living at the beach, which has been glorious.
Oh goodness. Gosh, that's, I mean, I mean, I'm thinking, you know, kind of stepping back a little bit when you sort of ev the, the burnout happened and it was almost like right, everything's gotta go. And I've, was it almost like starting from fresh, having to move back in with your parents is, I mean it's amazing. I I it's absolutely amazing that family will do that. Family is a huge, huge part of, we was going through some values, I was doing a coaching session a couple of weeks ago and we were going through my values again to kind of re-establish stuff. And family is my number one value followed by faith. Not, not in a religious sense, but faith that everything will be okay. Every, everything will work out. But family is number one. And, and it's only when, when things get really tough. I've had some crappy stuff happen in my life and family is the one thing that just rallies around for me. I know not everybody is as lucky as that, but it sounds like you have, you know, quite a, a strong family to be able to, you know, know that you can go back and be with them to then go right, breathing space, let's start again.
I think you're so right. Certainly in in my life, I, I left home at 10 years old and went off to boarding school and I, I saw my parents every, you know, six or eight weeks and then I joined the army and I was off gallivanting around the world and then traveling around the world. And then I decided to move to New Zealand, which was about as far away as you can get.
But I had, I realized in my thirties and forties that my, my folks, my parents were my biggest cheerleaders and my almost my rock. And so I always knew they were there, but I didn't necessarily connect with them as well as, as I could have done. And, you know, you can talk about, you know, being a, a remiss son or you know, a a a person who hasn't taken the biggest opportunity to use the time that's available with their parents. And so one of the things I focused on in the last few years was really reconnecting with my parents. Being closer helps. You know, being seven hours versus 13 hours is, is a significant benefit for connecting and talking more frequently. But making that conscious effort to, to tap into that, that strength and the love of a parent that the parent has for their child, and to know that that's a stable place for me to, to check in and be o be vulnerable and be hurting. And that doesn't matter who I am or what I'm doing, they're still gonna love me. You know, and then that's the, that was a joyful moment to actually rediscover, I think I'd forgotten it, but rediscover that, like my mom is, you know, she likes every Facebook post I do. She likes everything I do. She reads all my blogs and sends me little corrections on WhatsApp. She's like my number one cheerleader and my dad the same, you know, he's quietly super proud of everything I do. And realizing that was huge in terms of giving me that strength, faith, I call it abundance, you know, the belief that everything is gonna be okay and that I can, I can manifest great stuff into my life, but knowing, because no matter the, like if everything goes wrong, my parents still love me and I could still go home.
Mm.
And that was huge.
Yeah.
In terms of letting go of some mental baggage that I picked up in my twenties and thirties that weren't serving me to be able to go home at 37 and go,Hey, I need a, I need my room back, but I haven't lived in until I was 10. And for them to go, of course, you know, move in. And it was only for a few weeks, but it was huge. And that, that was massive and that kind of set me on in this path of, so what do I wanna do with my life now? Like I've, I've tried this and it didn't work, but I've learned from it. I've tried this and it really didn't work and I've learned from it. So what's next? And I think now finally, because I'm more comfortable with myself, I'm more aware of who I am and I'm more authentic in myself that this one's working and it's in, this is, you know, what's five, six years into doing my own thing. And it's, I've never, never been happier. I've never been, I've never been more successful. I've never been happier. And I'm having a bigger influence than I ever dreamed possible. Which is awesome.
It it isn't, it, it is really amazing, isn't it? How you can almost live, you know, the, the majority of your life and not necessarily know who you are and what you were put here to do. Yeah. You know, absolutely. Just going off and doing this and that and the other, and oh, I'm, you know, this is who I, and then all of a sudden just sitting there going, this, actually, this is who I am, this is why I was put here, and this is how I can actually make the best outta my life by, you know, doing, doing X, Y, Z. And it, it, it's, I find it fascinating that, you know, if I hadn't, if I, well, I dunno how it would've happened, but if I hadn't have asked for a, a colouring book and pencils for my Christmas present for my daughter, where would I be now? Because I had no inkling to do art at all. I, I was a, I was a, you know, a, a business coach. That's what I was doing. You know, I, I wanted to kind of go out and do, do more of that. I wanted to do a lot of sort of like business development and art was just not on the radar at all. It was obviously, I like to think it was obviously meant to be, but you know, I could have gone down all sorts of different routes. This was the route that I chose. I took a massive leap of faith and I'm guessing you've taken huge leaps of faith as well and just going, do you know what, that's simply so just see what happens. And for me, I think the, the, the common denominator or the, the sort of like, the, the magic in that is the actually starting to understand who we are to be, like you said, comfortable in your own skin.
When I went on the business by design, the, the, the live that he did a couple of weeks ago, and, you know, he'd got, I didn't, I, I can't remember putting my hand up and saying, yes, I'll be on it. I might have done, but I can't remember. Memory is terrible. I dunno, I dunno. But anyway, and then he was like, oh, you know, we, we want you to come and be an expert on building social audiences. And I'm like, oh, brilliant. You know? Great. And I then get taken into the back sort of room on Zoom and I'm sitting there like this, I've got a couple of dogs in the studio with me and there's a, there's a zoom window of the production room and the screens everywhere. I dunno whether you, I dunno whether there's screens everywhere. There's a person in the headphones, there's somebody. And I sat there and I went, oh my God. And it was about, it was about sort of half past 10 in the evening. I'm thinking, oh God, this looks really posh. I'm not, I'm not. And that is when my, my, you know, those sort of limiting beliefs come in and it's like, oh, I'm not sure I'm, I'm not sure I should be here. Which is bizarre because,
Which is imposter syndrome, right?
Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I I, yeah, I, I I'm not a big believer in imposter syndrome. I think it's just a human trait, isn't it? I think it's a, I think it's human.
Well, 86% of people have it and 14% of people will lie about not having it. It's human, human and it, and it can, it can take any form, right? But it, yeah, it could be that I'm, I shouldn't be here.Yeah. It's imposter syndrome.
Yeah. Yeah. I tend to, I tend to, I try not to put a label on stuff. I get this an awful lot with my, with my artists when I'm teaching people to draw and everything, I get an awful lot of people saying, oh, I have got imposter imposter syndrome. You know, I don't, and I try and encourage them not to put a label on what it is that they feel they have. Because once you put a label on yourself, you kind of then become it. So I, I try and sort of guide them and say, well let's, let's kind of put a softer label on that you can actually, you know, be, be sort of comfortable with and happy with, but it you, but yeah, exactly. That's how I sat there and I looked at this stuff and I thought, I, I'm, I'm not sure I should be here. And then the two guys that came on with me, and they were look very professional. And then one of his back, his back, the, the woman who was doing the production sort of sent me a private message. Bonny, can you sit up? Can you sit up and just be the same height in the window as the other two guys? And I was like, I said, I'm not sure I can, cuz my chair doesn't go up anymore. And this, you know, anyway, so that was that.
And then, and then one of the guys had a presentation and I'm Sitting, oh yeah, yeah. Oh My God, he's got a presentation. There's me having done no nothing. I got some figures written down. Cause I know James like, likes, figures, figures terrify me. And then I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna, I'm just going to just be me. And I'm just gonna say, look, you know, my limiting belief was that I didn't think that my face fitted social media, but actually I've grown my social media, I've grown my business just by being me
Being authentic.
Exactly. And going back to that, I think that's when the success starts to come when you are just, you know what, I'm me and I'm really happy with me and if you don't like me, that's fine. That's, That's, you want somebody else Exactly. That, You know, but, and I think that is when we start to really be able to do our best work. You know.
I I I'm so in alignment with that and with your permission, I'll share my thinking in that space because it's something I've been working on. So Yeah, you, you know, now I talk about being the corporate guy and, and you were the, you were the corporate girl. And now I, I would go to work every day dressed in a suit that was my suit of armour and was my body armour that, you know, if I used the military analogy and I had my corporate face that I put on, I was like the hard hitting gm, high driver ethic, high delivery ethic, you know, hard ass. And I, I believe, I genuinely believe that we all have, and depending on how, how woo you want to get, we'll get the Wedmore woo going on. How woo you wanna be. No, I believe we have a magic or a light, or let's just call it an energy inside us. And we all know that the universe is just made up of energy. And when you put this body armour on, when you put your corporate mask on, and so many people go to work doing this, right, they put their makeup on cuz they have to look a certain way or they, they put their face on because they have to act a certain way or they put their armour on because they have to be protected from a, a certain thing. And all that does is it just stifles that energy from flowing freely. It's like putting a block or a dam in energy and en energy needs to flow really freely to be able to be effective. And so for you to show your magic or your light, or to, for you to show your best energy, which we call authenticity in the corporate world, well you call it authenticity in, in the human world as well. If you are, if you are damning that energy from flowing freely, you are limiting your own potential. And so you can't, you can't receive energy if you're not letting energy flow out naturally. So you can't get the benefit of the wealth, the success, the happiness, the abundance, the, the joy because you're not making space for it because you're blocking it with all these things that you're putting on yourself to get to dam it up.
And, and I, I think about it in terms of like, in terms of light. You know, if you had a light bulb inside you and you put the suit of armour on and you put a face on, where does the light go? It can't get out. So you can't absorb sunlight because you are also blocking yourself. And energy is the same. So that, to hear that you were, you know, that journey, that transition, you had to feeling like an imposter. But when you was like, well, bugger it, I'm just here to be me and I've been invited because I'm me. I, I love that because the reason that I reached out to you was because I saw you on that and I was like, I love this lady. Like she's super authentic, she's super down to earth. And you said, you know, I've got my funny little hat and I teach people to draw. So I looked you up on Instagram and I was like, this lady's so cool. Like this is great.
She has got a funny little hat. Oh gosh,
I Remembered and I was like, funny, I need to find this.
Yeah, Yeah. It's, well it's cause I've got my lights behind me see, and the lights shine in my eyes and then if I don't have visor on, I can't see all of the values on my thing. And people are like, we'll put the lights behind you. And I'm like, well, yeah, but then the dogs knock them over and they'll get shadow. So, you know, anyway, it works. I really love what you've just sort of, I explained, you know, about the light and the energy. I've never seen it or I've never heard it like that before. Obviously I'm, I'm very much what you put out, you get back very much about that energy, you know, vibration, all of that kind of thing. But I really, really resonate with what you've said about almost like putting a, it's almost like putting a shield around yourself, isn't it?
It is, It's a suit of armour. It's like a medieval metal suit of armour that most people wear Yeah. All the time. And they're just stifling their capability. And when we talk to leaders, you know, we, I do, the ways of working program is about building high culture. And if you go to most organizations and you say, what's a high-performing culture? They're like achieving KPIs, making profit, shareholder returns, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, actually no, A high-performing culture is about teams that are, that trust each other that are connected. There's an energetic flow, they connect and they, and they feel safe around each other and they've got some sort of clarity and vision of where they're going. And as long as you produce those three things, you create, the, the outcome is profits and shareholder returns and, and a, you know, roi. But high-performing cultures are built with people. So what we need to do is unshackle the people from these big suits of armour they're all wearing. And most people protect themselves in the workplace because they're worried about what people think of them. So cool, let's, let's just connect to a human level first and then we'll talk about the, the tough stuff. Yeah. But when you do that, you, all you're doing is just opening up an energetic flow and you, you don't, I don't share it like that when I'm in an organization, when I'm in a, you know, a left brained rational thinking organization, we talk about performance and potential and, you know, the, the, the, the, the stronger words. But that's all we're basically doing going Well, hey, let's just get you trusting each other and feeling safe with each other and connecting to each other as humans. And all the magic will come as a result.
Yeah, yeah. No, it, it's wonderful. And it's, and it's funny, I, I wonder how many of those people would actually be more successful and feel more themselves if I know when I worked in, I remember when I worked in, in corporate and we had to, well they, they stopped with the women have to wear skirts. I can't remember when they stopped with that. But you had to wear a, a jacket you had to wear, men had to wear a tie, you know, everybody had to wear suits and everything. You had to look like really, really presentable. And I mean, to be honest, we were all on like a, a massive great big floor. I mean, there were about four or five floors and you'd literally, it's the size of a football field, you know, all of these people and you know, yeah, it's corporate, isn't it? You all dress in a certain way and you're all, every day I have my makeup on. I, you know, I spent hours doing makeup, hair, all of that kind of thing. And now I kinda roll out bed, you know, kinda dogs up and it, and it's just, I, I feel so much more myself without, you know, making this sort of effort to make me somebody I'm not.
Yeah, I Agree.
And the other thing as well is that for, for my, for me, from my point of view, I mean, people think of artists as being a bit quirky and whatever. And you could, I mean, I could walk around and whatever and anybody would sort of go, oh, she's an artist. But, you know, I, I want people to be able to think, I, I can do that. I, I really resonate with that. I love what she's doing. I could really do that. And I look at an awful lot of, well, anybody on Instagram, not necessarily on TikTok. Cause I think TikTok has become far more real and, and raw and everything because that's sort of what, you know, but on, on Instagram you get an awful lot of people who are, you know, you'll get artists painting from the back and they'll, they'll hardly be wearing anything or you know, they'll be wearing some, and you think, and, and I have to be very careful not to go, oh, you know, look at them flaunting their bodies off. Well actually there's nothing wrong with that because that's them and that's what they wanna do, their style that they wanna, and they've got, they've got a lovely slim body. And you know, I haven't, and I wouldn't ever do that, but I would do something different.
But I also see a lot of people who I go, oh my goodness, that how wonderful is that? I could never do that because I don't look like them. And so many people are like that, you know? Oh yes. But I could never do what you do because look, look at what you do. You know? And that's, that's one of the reasons again, why I, I guess I've built up, you know, a, a good following. I mean, other people have got far more than I have, but I've built up a good following. I've got a good membership. I've got sort of two and a half thousand in my membership, which is amazing. In fact, I've got 3000 across two.
Wow. Amazing.
Both my memberships, which is brilliant. And I honestly believe that is because when people see me and they see my drawing, they go, oh, I, I'm like that I I could be like that. That's, that's me. I've got, you know, I'm a single mum or you know, I'm a bit chubby or I don't wear makeup. And she looks a little bit like me having a bit of a laugh, actually. I think I could do this and that, I think is what I want to stand for is that, you know, not a not a scruffy middle-aged woman, but somebody who can just be normal, you know? And people look at me and go, yeah, I can absolutely connect with her. And, and, and I think it's,
It's showing the way, isn't it? It's, yeah. What I, what I heard you saying and what I, what I was sparking in my mind while you were talking was there's a lot of people who wish they could be more authentic, who wish they could be an artist who wish they could be a consultant who travels the world and lives by the beach in Mexico, and they wish they could do those things, but they're shackled by needing to protect themselves against the scary things in the world. And they don't know how to get there. And what I think you have done beautifully is you say, well let's move from wish to being, and this is how you can do it, because I'm showing you how you can do it. And you can let go of the corporate rat race and the trappings of business suits and the armor that you put on. And when you be you, you will be the person you wish you could Be. Yeah. And, and we kind of do the same thing with leaders. We, we say the same thing we're saying, so you wish you could have a high performing team. Well let's, let's just show you a few conversations you can have with your team to be a high performing team, to be a high performing culture. And it's not about, and it's just letting go of some of the things that are blocking you, that you are using as safety barriers or armor, but that you don't need. So let's show you a way that you don't need them. So you let go of them. So the magic happens and, and you've done the same thing. Let's show you that you wanna be an artist. Cool. Let's show you how to be an artist. I, I think it's wonderful.
It is. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. Oh, I want to talk about your surfing as well.
My surfing.
No, your surf. When you, you know, with your, you know, with the, with where you spend time at the beach and all of that kind of stuff. Do you, do you, is that something that you do an awful lot of? Or do you find that you are? So I, I work from home and I, and I love what I do. I could literally sit in front of my laptop all day working. I still love it. And, and I have to make myself go and do other stuff. Cause I really do love running a business and I love doing my drawing and everything. What are you like in that sort of like work-life balance? Because, because mine is sort of like a, mine's a a life balances because I see my work as being, you know, part of, part of your life, but yeah, yeah, exactly. And I, and I absolutely love it, but I know that there are, I need to kind of just let go of it and go and do something else. Do you find that a struggle or are you, I mean, I'm guessing you live in a really wonderful part of the world anyway, that it must be much easier for you.
Which, you know what it's, You know, there's the, there's the, there's the PC answer and then there's the real answer, right? So the real answer is, I probably work too hard, but it's because I genuinely love what I do. Like I genuinely love running workshop for teams and seeing those, I I don't call myself a facilitator. I call myself an electrician. I, I crawl around inside your brain running new wires and turning light bulbs on. And when you can see the light, magic happens. And so, and I love doing it, like, it's so great, it's so energizing to be in a room of people virtually, or my actual preference is to be in a room with people connecting at a human level with people in, like, feeling the energy move around that it's not work. It's, it's literally fun. But I am also very conscious that I am an introvert. And so it's training to do it for, you know, nine hours of facilitation is, is tiring. And so I have to have a mechanism for pulling back. And one of the things when we were doing our, our burnout research, which we talk about in the book that's, we'll talk about that later anyway, is, is that you need downtime to recharge to, and it's like, if you're giving all your introverts, give all their energy away, it's like having five gold coins in the morning and every person you meet, you give 'em a gold coin and you've got no gold coins at the end of the day till you recharge. Extroverts go around collecting gold coins from people and then they lose them overnight.
So I know that by the end of the day, I am tired. And so I have to have those opportunities. So I've, I've discovered two things that, or three things that really work for me. And they're all based on the principles of downtime. So we know that downtime should be using the opposite hemisphere of your brain to the one you use in your workplace. It should be ideally creative, not consumptive. So creative is making or cre or building or kind of improving something. Whereas consumptive would be drinking tv. One of those things, and don't get me wrong, I love to watch good Netflix series, but the, the things I love to do, I love to run. So I, I run three, four times a week, which is where I kind of set myself up for the day. But that's my like re-energizing. And then my, my downtime things are cooking because cooking is creative. I love to just throw things in a pan and mix 'em up and see what happens. And I learned to cook with Ainley Harriet on Ready Steady Cook back in the nineties. That was how I learned to cook. It's like, Hey, bring a burger shopping and see what you can make.And that was my kinda really my birth to cooking. So I love to cook still and I love to entertain and I love to have people over, but it's not because I want the conversations just cause I like putting some cool things on a table.
And then my final, my, my, my beach activity is, is actually scuba diving. Yeah. So I'm a, I've been a scuba diving instructor for about five years. I don't teach, but I love to be in the water. And one of the things I realized very early in scuba diving is it's not about the diving. Like it's cool to go and see fish and sharks and turtles, don't get me wrong, it's the most amazing gift that anybody can have. And I, I hope that there are fish and turtles and sharks to see for the rest of our lives. But it's about the breath work, and the peace, and being isolated. So some people get really claustrophobic when they're diving because you are isolated underwater. You can only communicate by hand signals and you've gotta control your buoyancy by breathing steadily and slowly. And if you breathe too quick, you use your air up, you have to, the dive is finished. So the joy in diving for me is the solitude and the peace, but it's also the opportunity just to slow down and observe the world. And you'd be amazed, I mean, I could talk about scuba diving for hours, but you'd be amazed in scuba diving how many people go in the water and they swo around as fast as they can trying to find fish. And actually, one of the things I discovered when I was becoming more experienced diver is if you just drop into the ocean and you sit in front of a, a wall or a reef or a, a piece of sand and you just sit there for a couple of minutes, the world starts to come to you. And magical things start to happen because the little fish that were hiding start to poke their heads out and the little worms that were withdrawn or start to come up and start wiggling again. And the ray that was hiding in the sand, desperately holding its breath. So you didn't see it starts to move. And, and I think that's actually a great metaphor for, for being a leader, for being a human being, is that sometimes we we're fighting to attack the world and get through it. And when in reality if we just stopped and waited and let things happen around us, better things happen then we could possibly force. And it's again, it's going back to that energetic flow, right? You just let let the universe happen around you and better things happen.
Yeah. Oh wow. That I love that. I, and I'm, I'm a big visualizer, so I can see you sitting on the bottom thing. I mean, you know, I have films running through my head when, when, when people talk to me. That sounds wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
It's, it's a gift. And I, I was lucky enough to learn when I was a kid, so I learned when I was about 10 years old in Malta. And then I really got into it in the last six years, went through kind of all of the, the qualifications you can do. And there's my great hope this year to, to dive to a hundred meters. So the normal kind of recreational depth of diving is about 30, 30, 32 meters. And I'd love to go down to a hundred meters a for the challenge, but b, because then you're going somewhere that other people don't go. And you get to see the world in a different way to what most people see.
So I have a, a really good friend called Josiah Macken who works out of a, a school in util in Honduras, who is a, I look up to him and we kinda look up to each other, we're both kind of looking up to each other in our own fields, but he's a gifted diving, diving instructor. And so hopefully I'm gonna get there this year and spend some time with him and get myself down to a hundred meters. And again, it's just be able to sit in the bottom of the ocean and go, well, what's down here to see that I haven't seen before.
Amazing. Oh, that sounds fantastic. You see, I get that, I get that from my drawing. If I don't, and, and I'm also an introvert, I don't think they call me an an extroverted introvert. I'm, I'm really, I dunno whether you were on wrong. Are you in the next level? The James Wedmore? Yeah. Were you on the onboarding call?
Yes.
When he was like, right, we're gonna put you in the rooms and you're gonna talk to somebody as if you'd never to
Pretend you've known them for ages.
Yeah. S and I was putting this, both these rooms got in there, there's these two people looking terrified. And I just was like, hello? Just like, who is this crazy woman?
But you know, I'm, I, I am, I love being on my own. I just, I just, I, you know, I love it. I got my three children who, who live here there. My youngest is 18, they all still live at home. And I, you know, as long as I've got my dogs around me, I love having my dogs around me. They're with, they're not with me, they're with my youngest son at the minute. Cause they're quite, they get quite noisy. But for me, my time is either my drawing or I've refound my love of swimming.
Oh wow. Okay.
So, so I've, I joined again, you know, this massive limiting belief. I shouldn't be a member of that. I joined a spa, beautiful spa, quite a little spa country's bar, about 25 minutes from where I am. And I'm, I try to go swimming, you know, during the week. And they have a, an outdoor natural pool that's fed by a by a pond. It's a bit slimy around the edges, but that's where I like to go. Cause it is, there's no, honestly, because there's no chlorine or anything like that in it, it's, you know, and, and it's cold and it's lovely and you just get in and you, it is literally, your whole body just goes numb and you can't, anything that you're worrying about, just you can't even, you don't have the
Not focus on that.
To be able to worry about it. But I'm not a worrier anyway. And it, and I, and it's something that I, I kind of ponder at times because anxiety is a horrible feeling to have. And I have had anxiety before and, and I, you know, I've had panic attacks and everything and it, and it's a really debilitating feeling. It's horrible. And there was one point where I just, it was almost like I said to my body, I don't want to feel like this, so I'm not actually going to worry about what's going to happen in the future. I can make goals, I can make plans, but if there's something that I can't actually do anything about, then I'm just going to take a deep breath and I'm going to put it to one side and I'm not going to worry about it. And that has kind of been my strategy for being able to, to kind of deal with anything that, that sort of comes up. If I can't do anything about it, I won't. And, and that, that has been quite a lot of hard work, internal work.
It is self-work, isn't it?
I've done, yeah. Yeah. And I'm guessing, you know, did, have you been through, cause obviously the coaching and everything, have you been through a lot of sort of internal stuff as well? A lot of coaching stuff to find where you...
Yeah, Yeah. Oh my God. in fact, I, I'll share a, I'll share a conversation that I had earlier this week with, with a, a client who, he's an artist. He's freaking out about the AI world right now. And, you know, oh, my career is over. And, and we, we do this activity, we do this exercise, which is, is three points in time. So we are in, if you imagine a straight line with three circles on it, you've got the past, the present, and the future. And we are in the present, right? So if we're worrying about all the things that have happened, we call that rumination like the cow, chewing the curd. We keep going over and over and over and over it. And it doesn't service. It just consumes energy and mental fortitude. And that's taking us away from being present and creating the most enjoyable existence we've got right now. Cause we're worrying about all the things that happened. And we go back to the start of our conversation, it's experiences and tools, right? So use that. It happened, cool, it's done. Experiences and tools. How can that help me live better at life now?
So let's be present and then we start worrying about the future, right? Because we, we worry about everything all the time. So lemme start worrying about the future. And so, in his mind, he's got this narrative of what the future might look like. And I said to, and he's a, he's a, a sci-fi fan and a, and a and a, a movie fan. So I said to him, this is co imagine that what you are seeing is one possible universe in the multiverse, one future that you've predicted, this is what's gonna happen, and you are super anxious about this, what's gonna happen? But there's a bazillion other universes with options that you also don't know what's gonna happen. So you are expending all this mental energy, worrying about this disruption of my career, when actually who knows that legislation isn't gonna be passed, that AI will be outlawed. Or who knows, that people might want hand drawn stuff or human created stuff, which is like the Rolls-Royce version compared to the AI Toyota version of art. So there's, this isn't gonna disrupt, it's just gonna change, but you're spending all this mental energy in anxiety about a possible future that may or may not happen.
So the secret to both of those is just being present and going, well, those things could happen, but what I've got to do right now is enjoy today and be the person I wanna be today. So tomorrow is better. And if I keep being the best version of me today, by being present, by being here, by being aware, by being authentic, by letting the energy flow more freely, then the future I want will naturally emerge. And because I know that I am living proof of my worst days that I can survive anything, that even if I get there and the future that maybe I'd predicted happens, I'm all, I'm still gonna be happy. And I'm only one day away from that happening. And so I've enlive and enjoyed all of those days up until that point, as opposed to worrying through all those days. And I learned all of these lessons while I was on the road. Yeah. And I learned a lot of them underwater, because much like swimming, you're too cold to think about anything else. With diving, the only thing you really focus on is your buoyancy and breathing. And so all of the other noise in the world, all those things I wish I'd done well, I've gotta think about staying level in the water, all those things that I'm worrying about happening. Well, right now I've gotta pay attention to my air and I'm waiting for some fish or some sharks or some turtles or some cool things to happen. But I'm just gonna be here right now. And if you can be here right now, and this is, you know, we, we talk, we do it in, in our, in our facilitated workshops, we're just saying just feel the pressure of the seat on your bum underneath, like underneath your bum. Just feel that that's being present. What does that feel like? What type of feeling is that? Can you feel the blood pumping through your legs? Can you feel your heartbeat and your body? And when you start to feel now, then all those other things just kind of dispelled and all of that stuff. I've got to through lots and lots and lots of self-work and listening to podcasts and reading and programs. But essentially it's just going, well stop worrying about stop ruminating, stop being anxious. Just be present live for now.
Exactly. Exactly. You know, and that, and, and it is, and it's not a switch you can just switch off. I, I completely understand that. You know, there's so many people who are anxious and who do worry and everything, and just, I understand just by saying, well, just stop worrying. It's not overly helpful.
It Doesn't, it's a muscle, right? You've gotta build that muscle of stopping, worrying going, Hey, I'm, I'm anxious right now and I'm anxious about this, but I'm gonna pay attention to now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And it's, and it just, it makes for such a, a lovely life.
Yes. And we all slip, right? We all start to worry about, am I gonna get the next piece of work or is that gonna go right And oh my God, what if I, you know, get sick in my future? Or we all have these, you know, catastrophizing thoughts, but it's going, Hey, but they're one of millions of possible futures
And and that's it, isn't it? You know, because it is very easy for me to say, oh, we just had, you know, a really successful launch, which has been fantastic, helping all of these new people or, and then it's very, very easy just to go, well, it's not gonna happen again. Yeah. You know, because, well, you know, I've got, I've got all of the people and then you think, how can I possibly have got all of the people who want to learn to do this? Cuz there are billions of people out there, you know, and it is just you, you go through, I've been going through the, the, the, the post launch
Debrief.
God blows my mind. Honestly. I just figures, whenever I see a a figure, my mind just goes all weird. Yeah. We've been going through that today and I've been listening to, I hadn't come across it before. He's got a video where he goes through the whole of the debrief with, with this lovely lady she called Stella or something. And then there's another in-depth deep dive thing. And that has been fantastic for me because he's gone through everything step-by-step. And I've like, right, okay, I think I understand this now. I think I understand that I still don't know what my earnings per lead is. I have no, I'm gonna have to put it in the Facebook group. I'm gonna have to go, do you know what? I'm putting my hands up. I don't, I dunno how to do it.
I think with, with James's stuff, there's, when there's always something that you need when you need it.
Yes.
And even if you listen to the same, same podcast 10 times, you'll hear something different each time. And I think that's the mark of, of where saying, he, he always seems to serve up something when I need it. And I literally woke up this morning and I had a, a conversation with, with one of his team a couple of days ago. Cause I was feeling like, oh my God, I'm bit overwhelmed. I'm doing too much. And I literally woke up to an email this morning saying, less is more, you know, and here's the things I used to be doing and here's the things I now focus on and this is how it's grown my business. I'm like, oh my God, okay, is this like psychic waiting to happen? Or also, I dunno what's going on. It's brilliant, but there's, there's always that support when you need it. Right. Which is great.
Yeah, Yeah. Definitely. I could, I could chat to you for all night, which is, you know, so, so you know, what's, what's lovely is we, we haven't met, we haven't spoken before. You know, I reached out and I said, you know, I'd, I'd love to speak to somebody who's had big life changes and everything. And, and I, I do genuinely feel a real connection and, you know, I, the the rapport and everything. And I, and it's been really, really nice speaking to you.
I didn't even realize we'd started to be honest. I thought we were doing kind of the preamble and I was like, oh, you know, just chat away.
No, this is, this is it. I don't do, when when you get to know me, you, I don't do preparation. I do organic.
I think the organicness of it though is, is, is wonderful. And yes, I, I dunno if I've mentioned to you, I'm, I'm hoping to do my own podcast in q2. Once the book is done, then yes, the next focus is podcast. So we're in the midst of recording all those episodes at the moment.
Oh, Brilliant. Just before we go, before we go, tell me about the, tell me about this book.
Oh, so the book is, it's just a short book. It's about a hundred pages long called Beat Burnout, how to Build a High Performance Culture. And what we did was, over the course of a couple of years, we worked with about 30 organizations globally. And we did essentially a research project with all of those leaders and all of those teams. And we identified five factors that tend to be the, the trigger of burnout. So if you, you know, if you've got these, if you've got these things, you don't burn out. If you haven't got these things, you burn out.
And so what we did was we read a book around that research using some case studies from personal experiences and from the, the client experiences where we talked about each of those different contexts, each of those different factors. And then we gave some practical things that you can do that are gonna shift the dial in the positive direction so you know how to have this conversation or do this thing very, very practical. And the whole, the whole premise of our entire business is people go, oh my God, that's super obvious. I can do that. And you go, cool, so go do it. So we try and make everything very, very practical and down to Earth, so the book is essentially a, a synopsis of two years work around the concept of high performance teams, but from, if we imagine performance as like an elastic band, most businesses are pulling as mentioned towards profit. Profit and all those things. We're saying, well, let's detentions the negative stuff so we can move the band further across without, without breaking it. And so that's what the book is about. It's gonna be just a practical guide that will, we'll pop it on Amazon, we'll be putting it onto a, an opt-in page that people can, that people can download it and read it. And we'll be sharing it with as many people as possible just to give them an introduction essentially into the, the wow community and how we do what we do. So there, I'm really excited. We're in third round about it at the moment and ah, it's a lot of work, but I'm, I'm so excited to get it out. My biggest thing is I needed to stop updating it with the new stuff because I'm constantly creating.
So it's like, okay, line in the sand. That's what we wrote to get that out. Exactly. That's second book and the third book. And I've written so many books and not finished, finished them. So this is the first one we're gonna definitely get out.
Brilliant, brilliant. I'm just in the process of putting my proposal together for my, I've got three chapters written I'm working with a brilliant coach on, it's something that I've wanted to do for a while and then never got round to, and now I'm kind of doing that and then trying to do other stuff and I'm finally, I'm, I am being pulled from Pillar to post. So something's gonna have to give, but the, the, the proposal is ready to go to agents. So that's the next step is finding an agent and then going to agent to go and find a publisher. So whether it's this year or next year or whatever, I don't know, but, but it is exciting doing something like that and you know, seeing your words start to come together. You know, you sit there and think, oh you know, I can't write a book. And then suddenly somebody shows you a process of how to do it, you know, and then it's Like, oh,
It's the same as you becoming an artist. Right? It's like here's the process of how to become an artist. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And I'd never thought of myself as a writer. I don't consider myself a writer. I consider myself a speaker. Yeah. And I paint pictures in people's minds with the words I use, but it turns out that I've got a few things to say and so I've popped them down in, in words and I've luckily, I've got some amazing editors sitting behind me who are picking up all my grammar mistakes and I don't I've apparently, I'm a very indiscriminate use of the comma and then, and, and, and have long sentences.
So that, I think that is a thing that we used to do because I'm exactly the same. She's like this, this, this sentence here is actually three sentences, four full. I'm like, but that's how you used to write. That's how we were taught to write. You'd wrote a descriptive paragraph and it was Ed, you know, and you had commas and, and you didn't. Now it's short.
Yeah, Yeah. Short size needs to be, I think it's that bite sized. Yeah. Almost the sort almost when you do the Instagram post and the LinkedIn post and that's like a line space. Line space. Yeah. So I'm lucky that I have a really good team supporting me to get that done. But it's, I'm very excited about getting it out there and I'm very excited to be able to send it to a leader who perhaps isn't aware of our community and aware of the things that we're doing and the changes we're making in organizations. Yeah. And saying, well hey look, this will take you a night to read. And it's not designed to be read from end to end. It's designed to be kind of dip in to get the thing you need when you need it. But you could get through this in a night or two, two nights and it'll give you a bit of an insight into how we think without me selling at you. Cuz that's, I don't wanna sell.
No.
I love James's analogy of the energy party or like, Hey, we do some cool things with amazing people and we help you have some conversations that probably need to happen in your team. If you're interested in that, let's have a conversation.
Yeah.
You know, if you wanna make a difference, if you want life to be more fun and more enjoyable and your team to do cooler things, let's have a conversation.
Yeah.
But to do that you need to know a little bit about the way we think and how we, how we speak and how we talk. So this, the, the book is designed to get people there in a nice way. And the podcast will be the same thing. It'll be yeah. Organic conversations with people who I think are fascinating who've done some cool things in business that leaders might be interested in hearing about.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean the podcast thing again that was never really sort of, it's coming up to, it'll be a year that I've been running this in March and it has been, it's been brilliant and I've had one a week. Dunno, I've managed to do it, but it is, it's a really nice thing to have.
Yeah. And it's, to me it's about connection again. Right? Yeah. It's about just connecting people with ideas, turning light bulbs on.
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's funny cuz I don't listen to any radio. I used to be an avid Radio two and radio four listener. I didn't listen to any radio at all. Now I purely listen to podcasts.
Really? How fascinating. Yeah. I should try that. I do, I listen to a few when I'm running or when I'm walking, but I'm, I'm definitely getting more and more into it and I thought, well, bugger it. I've got a, I was once told by a a, a manager years ago I should be a radio presenter and I poo-pooed the idea because I was a corporate CEO want to be, and now I'm about to be basically a radio presenter. So she was a fortune teller, I didn't realize.
Oh, brilliant. Oh, it's amazing. Do you know? Yeah. I it is been so, so nice talking to you and it's really nice to actually put a, a face to the name as well. You know, we're both doing the, the next level with, with James, which is, I'm really excited about it. I'm booked onto my first coaching call tomorrow, which I'm excited about. Got my question ready?
And are you going to Phoenix? No.
Okay. No. So if you wanna, I'll give you a big hug when you get there cause We'll both introverts and a room of people are very terrifying.
No, it's a, it's a bit tricky. It's a bit tricky at the moment cause of family. I've got dogs, my mom's not very well at the minute and it's all a little bit, you know, sort of up in the air. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, no, she's, she's doing well. She's recovering really well. So took looking after my dad, I took him swimming yesterday. Oh my God. I said to him, cause he doesn't, he's not very mobile and I said to him, I said, just, just come in your bath, in your bathrobe and your trunks and we'll just go and we can just walk in you, you know, and then you, because getting dressed and all of that. Well you didn't come in his bathrobe.
He came in my mum's oodie, which is here to floor bright blue, love it with a, with white furry. And I was like, come on man.
You do. You dad. That's fine.
He Was brilliant, honestly. He's ab he's absolutely brilliant. He's absolutely brilliant. So yeah, so it's all, you know, all kind of a, a little bit up in the air at the minute with, with sort of, you know, helping out looking after 'em stuff. But I can understand. But no, it's the live stuff I'm, I'm hoping to be, you know, in, in the, in the, the virtual stuff. Amazing. So Yeah. Yeah.
But Thank you for, thank you for the invitation and for Oh gosh, so an unexpected opportunity and didn't go anywhere. I thought we were gonna go and it's been super enjoyable just to kind of just be, to be Jimmy for a bit.
Well that's, but that's the thing you see with, with me. I just like to, I quite like to talk to somebody who we don't necessarily, or we haven't necessarily chatted to before, because I think you get to hear really quite interesting things. You know, I've done this before where I've had a, a conversation with someone beforehand and then we've done the, and we've missed out all of the interesting stuff that we talked about in the first one. So yeah. Sorry for taking you off guard.
Not at all. No, I was, I was expecting you to say, okay, we're gonna start now. And Right, we've finished. So that's, that's awesome. And there's, I'll, I'll leave you with the, you just sparked it. We spark off each other quite well. I like that. The, the, that's something that I learned years ago. I was sitting in a, a room with New Zealand government politicians and I sat next to the Governor General of New Zealand and he said, you know, it doesn't matter who you're at dinner with, you've, your job is to find something interesting about them cuz everybody has something interesting to share. And it stuck with me. So it doesn't matter who's on your podcast or who's on your room with you or who you're talking to, they've always got a fascinating story to share. And so I, I'm genuinely grateful for this opportunity just to talk a little bit about my story. So really appreciate it.
Oh no, it's been really, really lovely to chat to you and and hopefully we'll do it again.
Would love to, would love to, love to.
Brilliant. Thanks Jimmy. Have a lovely rest of your evening. You have a great day.
Take care. See you later. Bye Bye.
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