Episode 221: This week on Real Health Radio it is a solo show and it's a personal one - a life update from Chris. A reflection on 2020.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 221 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is seven-health.com/221.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. This week on the show, I’m back with a solo episode, and it’s actually another life update episode. This is my fifth time of doing one of these things, and the last one was back in June time. So I’ve actually managed to be a little more regular with it rather than once a year.
I try to keep the regular episodes fairly stripped back and just deal with the topic at hand or the guests at hand. I have obviously started to include on some of the shows recommendations of things to watch or things to read or listen to, but I put these at the end, so it’s very easy to just shut the podcast off if you don’t want to listen to them.
But on the personal front or on the life front, I don’t mention much in the intro to the shows. Not everyone wants to spend the start of every episode hearing what I’ve been up to or what’s going on with my life. It’s then these episodes that I like to include that stuff for the people who are interested and enjoy hearing about my life and what I’m up to do. For anyone who doesn’t care about this, they can simply skip this episode.
00:01:29
I know it’s incredibly cliché and trite for me to say this, but obviously 2020 has been a strange year. At the point of recording this, the UK has just come out of its second lockdown. The first lockdown was between the 23rd of March and the 4th of July, and then the second lockdown was a 4-week circuit breaker starting on the 4th of November until the 2nd of December.
This next little bit may be obvious for those living in the UK, but I wanted to mention it for anyone who doesn’t live here and doesn’t know what has been happening. I know when I talk to clients and they’re in the U.S. or in Germany or in Canada or wherever they are, I’m always intrigued about what restrictions they have at the moment or what they can and can’t do. I’ll just cover a little bit of that.
At the moment, England has now started a tier system. There’s a Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, and depending on the tier that you’re in will determine what restrictions apply. The vast majority of the UK is Tier 2 or Tier 3. I think there’s only like three places in the whole of the UK in Tier 1. Where I live is in Tier 2, and this means you’re not allowed to meet anyone indoors who’s not part of your household. Even with friends and family, you can’t meet them indoors.
You are allowed to meet people outdoors, but only a maximum of six people, and of course, you need to be socially distancing when you do that. You are allowed childcare, so we have been allowed our childminder or our nanny to help look after Ramsay, our son. This wasn’t allowed during the first lockdown, but it was allowed during the second one.
For parent and toddler groups, you can also meet both indoors and outdoors, so if we take Rams to a forest school or an indoor group, that is allowed – although luckily he missed going last week. He was in more of a wanting to stay home mode and said he didn’t want to go, and then it turns out that the person who runs the group has tested positive for COVID. So it was good that we missed that one and we’re not now having to spend two weeks in quarantine.
Gyms and indoor activities like rock climbing are open again, but they were closed for both the lockdowns. Pubs and restaurants are open, but you aren’t able to just drink alcohol or drinks. These have to be consumed while serving a full meal. They also have to close by 10 p.m. They can remain open longer than that, but they have to be for takeaways for food.
Masks are encouraged and recommended. When inside a building, so inside a supermarket or a post office or inside transport, like a train, they are mandatory. Basically inside you need to wear a mask, and this is for anyone who is 12 years of age or older. But outside you don’t have to be wearing a mask. Where I live in the countryside, you are so spaced out from everyone that if I’m walking outside, I’m not wearing a mask because I’m genuinely not seeing human beings – or if I am, I’m very far away from them. But I’ll be wearing a mask any time I’m indoors.
There is a very long list of do’s and don’ts and the different rules, but that gives you a general idea of things that are most directly affecting my life.
Obviously we are heading into the Christmas period, and under these rules, anyone in Tier 2 or Tier 3 would be unable to meet with family or friends during this time. So the government has created a 4-day period from the 23rd to the 27th of December where the rules are relaxed, so you are able to mix with family and friends indoors, but this is for a maximum of three households over this time. They talk about creating a ‘household bubble’ and that during that window, we’re allowed to mix more and then it goes back to the normal Tier system after that.
From a virus passing perspective, it’s likely that the relaxation will lead to more cases, but I think the government recognised that if they didn’t officially allow this, many people would flout the rules, so it was going to be more realistic and making it fair so that everyone gets a chance to see people and not just those that choose to break the rules. But it does feel slightly weird that it is happening after having a lockdown for four weeks, that straight after that we’re going into a period where everyone’s allowed to mix again.
00:06:27
I’ve been reflecting on the pandemic and what I’ve learnt this year or what it’s taught me this year or what I’ve experienced this year, and there are a couple of things that come to mind.
The first one, which may seem obvious, is just how much I miss seeing friends and family in real life. Zoom is wonderful, but it is definitely not the real thing. While this may seem obvious that I would miss people, it’s actually something I’ve noticed much more recently.
I remember when the first lockdown happened just feeling like I actually don’t see friends that often anyway, and that it wasn’t that much of a readjustment. I moved from London to the countryside 7-ish years ago, but really all my friends are still in London. I don’t have a job out here, which would mean that I would make friends out here by having a job – I have a job, but I’m not going into an office where I’m meeting people. I don’t have particular activities that I do out here where I’m coming in contact and being able to meet people. I play golf, but the times I play golf, I’m meeting up with friends from London to do that, or I’m playing on my own. I just don’t have a friends group out here. So it felt like, “Actually, I don’t see friends that often, so this isn’t going to be that different from usual.”
But actually, the reality turned out to be very different. I did realise how much I did use to see people. For example, my parents visit at least once a year from Australia. In fact, since Ramsay’s been born, my mum comes over multiple times a year, and we will hang out here or we’ll go away together. In the summertime I usually see friends a couple of times a month. We’d play golf or celebrate birthdays or I’d catch up in London. So it felt like I wasn’t seeing people that often, but in fact, once this changed it was obvious how much it was happening.
I mentioned that we’re now in Tier 2, and I was reading recently that it’s likely that this is going to be the case until Eastertime. So really, from now, except for Christmas, until Eastertime – basically six months – we can’t go to friends’ houses or hang out indoors. That news and that news article really upset me. And not because I don’t think that it’s the right thing to do, but more because I miss seeing people in real life.
I do think for me, I guess like many people, it’s the realisation of how much I value and miss seeing people and having human connection. As someone who is a card-carrying introvert and loves my own company, it can be an easy thing for me to forget until this is taken away and gone. It really has made me start to understand the problem of loneliness. I’ve looked at the research around loneliness, and I know the comparisons that are made with loneliness in terms of equivalent to smoking a packet of cigarettes a day or something along those lines. I know its implications from a health standpoint, so I knew the stats, but I just didn’t know it on a visceral level in the way that I do now.
And I’m saying this as someone who has a partner and has a child and doesn’t live alone and gets plenty of hugs and plenty of connections, so I know that I don’t even know the half of it. But I feel like I have a somewhat better understanding than before this all started.
00:10:12
This year’s also been a time for re-evaluating money and how I spend money. I’ll talk a bit more about this when I cover what’s going on with Seven Health as a business. The first half of the year was tougher financially than it’s been in a long time. My sister got married in Tasmania at the end of January, and we had a 5-week holiday leading up to this. We were in Thailand, and then we went to Australia. It was a rather expensive holiday, but with the intention that 2020 was going to be a good year and we’d make up for it once we returned. But things were then much slower.
We had a period of going through all our finances and cutting back on everything that wasn’t essential – going to the absolute bare necessities. We realised how much we’d spent money on takeaways or going out to restaurants or different subscription services or what I was paying for my CRM for sending out emails and just how much of all these things add up.
It was interesting; for a while, it made me think that once everything does open back up, people are going to be really reluctant to spend money. Once you’ve stopped going to the pub and paying four or five pounds for a beer and you’re using to just having something at home, will the cost feel so much more? It feels so much more stark because you’ve had this period of not spending that money.
This is really how I thought for the majority of the year, until recently. I think it now feels like it’s slightly going the other way in terms of my feelings. Things have been closed down for just so long that there is this feeling of “I want to be experiencing life again, and I do want to be going to the pub or going out to a club night or going to a concert or going on holiday.” The value of these things has started to increase again because it’s been missing for such a long time.
I saw a post recently saying something like “I’m never going to leave a club night early again. I’ll say there and help them cash up,” and it made me laugh. It’s also sort of true. I feel like when I’m back, able to have these kinds of experiences, I will appreciate them in a way that I haven’t for so long because it’s been taken away.
So it’s been a really interesting year in terms of re-evaluation of money and of spending and the value of money and what’s important. It’s not that I’m wanting to be a miser and never spend any money, but more for the fact that spending things on the things that make a difference and the things that are really enjoyable and that you really appreciate as part of that spending.
But I do also think this is going to be a little way off. I think it’s going to be a while before life completely gets back to normal in the way it was before, where we’re able to just go out, there’s no masks, there’s hugging, there’s shaking of hands, there’s all of those things.
I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast recently where he was interviewing Nicholas Christakis, and Christakis was commenting that he didn’t think things would be back to normal until 2024. That still feels like quite a long way off, and I hope he’s wrong on that, but I can also see that even with the vaccine it takes a very long time to put all those things together, to get it out to everyone and all of that. So I think life in terms of being normal like we used to remember is not going to be just around the corner.
00:14:11
Next topic: Ramsay. Ramsay is now three, which feels mind-blowing. His speech and his comprehension is really incredible. I know they talk often about girls having stronger speech than boys, and that’s definitely not the case for him. He’s very good. He also has an insane memory, remembering things when he was really little that I wouldn’t think he would remember in terms of places we went to or things that happened on a particular day when he went to this place. It really is pretty incredible.
It’s also kind of a double-edged sword because it’s then easy to forget that he’s just three and his brain isn’t fully developed, and I’m thinking, “Why is he being so irrational in this moment?” And then I remember that he’s a three-year-old and this is what three-year-olds do.
I’ve commented before that he is a sensitive kid, a Highly Sensitive child. This is definitely still the case and is now more evident. When he hangs out with other children around his age, while he’s a massive talker when we’re around, when he’s in that environment he’s less talkative and he’s much more of an observer and on the edges. He just wants to do his own thing more and play on his own as opposed to really paying attention to the other kids or interacting as much. Obviously that changes a little bit more when it’s just one other person, but he’s still doing a lot more independent play as opposed to joining in.
His eating is slowly coming out of a more beige phase. I remember when he was really young and we were doing baby-led weaning, he would eat everything and anything. He would sit down and have quite large meals. Now it’s much more of a tendency for him to be eating one or two things at a mealtime. So he’ll eat all of the chicken or all of the potatoes, or just a bowlful of strawberries or a plain bowl of pasta or a bagel with jam or something like that, and then that’s it.
He typically eats little and often as opposed to wanting to sit down and have a full-on meal. Some of that could be just trouble sitting still for long and getting bored with eating, but I also think his tendency is much more as a grazer or someone who eats smaller meals more often than anything.
He’s going through a phase at the moment of really getting to understand feelings and how to deal with them, because there’s definitely more meltdowns or more challenging moments. He’s getting to understand “How are you feeling right now?” and what we do with that, and not necessarily always wanting to change the feeling, but just recognising what it is. We’ve got a book around feelings, so we can go to the book and it has “Are you feeling happy or sad or bored or embarrassed or lonely?” or whatever it may be. Then we can turn to the page that corresponds with that feeling, and there’s different things you can read about as part of that. So that’s something we’ve been doing with him.
He is currently – and when I say currently, it’s been going on for quite a while – obsessed with tractors and diggers and that kind of machinery. Our nanny’s dad or brother has a subscription to a tractor magazine, so I think they have a stack of them at their house. Ramsay’s constantly coming home with tractor magazines. So reading ad nauseam about tractors. He knows all of the different types of tractors and the different attachments that go on them, and he’s got all these toys. He’s constantly filling up tables with macaroni that he’s then digging and putting into trailers and all that. That is a big focus of how he spends his time.
He’s started watching screens. In the last one of these that I did, I said he still wasn’t watching screens and we were trying to prolong that as long as possible and wanting to get that to age three if we could. We pretty much did that. He would watch on our phone, he’d watch videos of us or him that we’d taken, or of his cousins that had been sent over, or he’d look at photos on the phone of all of us. But he wasn’t watching anything outside of that.
That has now changed. He always watches a tractor programme on TV. He watches nursery rhymes and that kind of thing. So there is more screen time than he was having before.
He has recently discovered Siri on the iPhone, so he’s asking Siri to do all manner of things – “Siri, set a timer,” “Siri, how many days is it till Christmas?”, “Siri, turn on the torch,” and using the iPhone with Siri’s assistance. Sometimes it’s just telling Siri what is going on in the room, and there’s a lot of “I don’t understand the question.” But that’s his new thing at the moment.
I remember commenting, I think at the end of year show in 2018, where I go through my favourite books and documentaries and stuff, that I had listened to Alfie Kohn’s book, Unconditional Parenting, and that it was one of my favourites for the year. It’s actually something I’ve recently revisited again because it’s so good. It’s just so helpful as a reminder of different things – the premise being that you want kids to feel unconditionally loved. This doesn’t mean that you say ‘yes’ unconditionally to every request. Pretty much every parent would say that they love their child unconditionally, but the premise of the book is, how do you make it so that the child would answer the question in that way, or when they’re an adult they’d answer the question that way, that “Yes, I feel unconditionally loved as a child.”
It focuses on many different areas – understanding how to foster intrinsic motivation, how to work with the child as opposed to doing to the child. It’s letting them know that you love them for who they are, not because of good grades or winning a trophy or because they’re quiet or obedient or anything along those lines. It talks about the problems with both punishment and also rewards and also with praise, and that praise isn’t this thing that’s positive. It can also have problems associated with it.
I have it on Audible, and I love Alfie Kohn’s narrating and his enthusiasm for the topic as well as the fact that it’s really well researched and clearly evidence based. It’s not just in terms of “How do I get a child to be compliant?”, but rather, “How do I parent in a way that is likely to create a happy, resilient, and moral human being?” So I really like the book. I highly recommend it if you haven’t checked it out before.
It’s really the ideas and the ethos of Unconditional Parenting that I regularly come back to, and especially come back to now when things have been more challenging in terms of his emotions or more challenging because our nanny has been off for long stretches and it’s just Ali and I. Or if Ali’s been unwell, then it’s just him and I.
Also, in a similar vein, the idea that so much of a child’s personality and interests are innate, and that rather than starting with some blank canvas that you then parent the child into a way that is desirable or you think is important, he’s already his own being. He has his own likes and dislikes and strengths and interests, and it’s about supporting these things. If he turns out to be someone who’s really interested in STEM, then we’ll do more STEM. If he’s someone who’s interested in art and drama and music, then we’ll do more of that. It’s not that he’s some extension of me or my ego; he’s his own self, and it’s finding out his way of being and the things he likes and how we encourage or support more of that.
00:23:45
Another area I’ve thought a lot about is when I was growing up, kids on average had much more freedom. I remember being seven or eight and being off on my bike, on my own or with my brother, just riding around he neighbourhood. We’d ride up to a park that was maybe a kilometre away from my house, maybe more than that. We’d sometimes walk up there, we’d take a football, we’d ride to some shops that were probably a kilometre and a half, two kilometres away. That was completely normal.
I remember getting a bodyboard when I was pretty young, and then a normal foam surfboard when I was probably seven or eight or nine or something like that, and then a fibreglass surfboard when I was 10. By having that, it meant that going to the beach, I wasn’t allowed to be in the flags; I had to be to the side of it. Rather than just being on the shoreline, I was way out the back.
I know now that my mum was sitting on the beach, nervously watching, but she never let on with any of this. I thought that that was completely normal and it was fine for me to go and do that. There were definitely times where I was out of my depth and I was being pummelled by wave after wave, but I would always be fine and make it back in.
From age nine or ten, I’d ride my bike to school. Not all the time, but some of the time. It was probably about three kilometres away, and it was mostly quite suburban streets, but it did involve crossing some fairly main roads. These are just a couple of examples, but there are many others. All of these are situations that were (A) normal, and no one thought twice about any of these things, but (B) were pretty crucial for helping me to feel confident and capable and all of these things that I didn’t really recognise at the time but which have helped in terms of self-esteem and all of those components.
I’ve just really thought about how important that is and how much I want to foster that with Rams as well. I’ve listened to a number of podcasts and read articles with people like Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skenazy on this topic. Skenazy rose to prominence after writing an article about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway on his own and going from a store to the subway and a bus and then catching that all the way home. She’d let him do that at age nine, and that caused quite a sensation.
Haidt wrote a long piece for The Atlantic called ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’. Haidt and Skenazy wrote a piece together that appeared on Reason.com called ‘The Fragile Generation’. (I’ll link to all of these things in the show notes.) And then Haidt and Skenazy, along with a couple of others, have created an organisation called Let Grow. It’s about allowing kids to step up and parents to step back and trying to create the childhoods that a lot of us had back in the ’80s where we were allowed to do things.
So we are trying to do this in a number of ways. Obviously, at this stage Ramsay is only three, so we’re limited in how much we can do, but there is still a lot that we can do. One of the things I’m conscious of is not saying ‘be careful’ and having that be a regular thing, of saying ‘be careful, be careful’. It’s this throwaway line that can be easy to say when a child is running off or climbing something or riding a bike or riding a scooter. It’s not that I won’t say it at all, but if I’m going to say ‘be careful’, there is then something specific that I’m saying ‘be careful’ about and spelling it out.
So he’s climbing on the table and there’s a sharp knife on the table; I will either move the knife or I’ll say, “There is a knife on this end of the table. If you’re going to climb, can you climb on the other end of the table?” But I don’t want to be constantly tossing out the phrase of ‘be careful’.
We have a wall outside in our garden, just outside our kitchen door, that he loves climbing onto. It’s about 50 centimetres or a foot wide at the top, so once he’s up there, he’s able to walk along it. It’s not too tiny. But then it’s next to a wall that has a hedge on it, and in summertime the hedge gets quite thick. Rams loves to get up there with scissors or secateurs and to cut it himself. Or he’ll just go round the garden cutting different things with them.
I’m happy for him to do this unsupervised. He’ll come into the house and say, “Hey, I want to do some cutting with the scissors,” and he’ll then climb up onto the counter, get the scissors down, climb back down, and then we’ll go outside and do some cutting I’ve explained that the scissors are sharp, and he knows that they’re sharp because he can see they cut things, but I’m happy for him to use them and to trust him.
There are times when he starts running with them or I see that he jumps down while holding them. If I see this, I’ll explain that that’s dangerous and why not to do that, but it doesn’t make me say, “Hey, you’re not allowed to use those things anymore.” It just means we want to explain to him why it is dangerous to use it in that manner, but he can go on cutting the things he wants to cut and do what he was already doing.
He has started to do rock climbing. I think in the June or July time – this was after the first lockdown – we discovered a rock climbing centre that had opened up about 10 minutes’ drive from our house. It had opened at the beginning of the year, but we just hadn’t discovered it yet. The proximity, obviously, being so close, was great. But what was most important was there was no age restriction with it. Since Ramsay was able to stand, he’s been a climber. He’s been climbing on everything. We’d wanted to find a rock climbing place that we could go to, but everywhere we could find, there was a minimum age limit. He had to be four or five, so it just wouldn’t work. But this place, there is no age limit as long as we are taking responsibility for him.
So he started rock climbing at age two and a half, two and three quarters. The centre is all bouldering. For anyone who doesn’t know what that means, it’s where you’re climbing without ropes, but underneath all of the climbing areas are these big mats underneath that you fall down onto. You can still go pretty high; you can be five or six metres, nearly 20 feet off the ground. Ramsay just absolutely loves it.
There are many times where he starts to scare himself a little bit, and you can see that he’s pushing himself outside of his comfort zone and he may look down and he’s super high up, way higher than I can reach him, and he has to then figure out how to climb back down. But this is really confidence-giving. Every time we go, he can do a little more and he feels more confident.
I will say that because of the Highly Sensitive side of him, there is a lot of pausing and checking. He will only go for challenging moves when he knows he’s fairly close to the ground, and I do feel safe where he’s checking all of the different handholds and working out how much he can grip onto it. Maybe with a different child who is very reckless, there would be more of a fear with it, but with his disposition, I feel very confident with him doing these things.
And he absolutely adores it. He is a phenomenal little climber. It is really mesmerising to watch him. He just has this feel or intuition with it. I can see people in the centre watching him and coming up and asking how old he is, because he’s small, but he’s able to pull himself up a wall.
I remember seeing a clip of Tiger Woods when he was two on the Bob Hope Show, and he is just a natural. He can swing a golf club and putt. I have no aspirations that Rams is going to be the Tiger Woods of climbing, but just more mentioning it because it is so natural. There is nothing I’ve done or that we’ve done. It’s just within him. You put him in that environment and he just knows what to do.
So those are just a couple of examples of things we are doing with the Let Grow philosophy in mind. Obviously there are limits at this age because he’s only three, but it is something that we’re going to continue to do more and more, and as he gets older we’ll continue to expand on this.
00:33:35
The next thing to mention: I got married! We were meant to be getting married in the beginning of May, in France in the beginning of this year. That obviously had to be called off because of the pandemic. We then pushed the wedding back to April 2021, and that has also been cancelled and pushed back to July 2022. Hopefully the world is in a good place then, and it will feel very overdue to have a proper party.
But with getting married in France in a different country, we had to get married in the UK first to do the official part of the wedding. We had pushed that part of it back to September when we had to change it in the May time, and when it was rolling around and we were still able to do it, we decided to just do it anyway. So we had a very 2020 wedding with Ali, Ramsay, and myself, and then three friends who were all wearing masks. We went out for a meal afterwards, and it was all very low-key and enjoyable.
But yeah, I’m now married. It does still feel weird on the podcast to say ‘my wife’, probably partly because of listening to Adam Buxton’s podcast. If you are a listener to Adam Buxton’s podcast, you’ll know that whenever he says ‘my wife’, he says it in this weird robot voice, so I subconsciously feel like I’m going to slip into that every time I say it.
So we got married in September time, so if you’ve been hearing me say ‘my wife’ instead of ‘my partner’ on the podcast for a while, that is why. There has been that change.
00:35:46
The next thing is Seven Health and what’s been going on on that front and changes at Seven Health. As I mentioned earlier on, it was more challenging at the start or first half of the year.
At the end of 2019, I had taken on two new practitioners. I had started working with a company that was helping with Instagram. I had Drew who was working here, and she was helping to do the marketing and the running of everything around here. We had really, in the second half of 2019, ramped everything up with the intention of then having more people working here and more revenue coming in and all of that.
Ali had also quit her job at the end of 2019 and finished up working at the beginning of 2020, in February time. The goal with that was twofold. One, to be able to spend more time with Ramsay before he goes off to school and being able to be more of a mum. We aren’t having any more kids, so she really wanted to value that time. But also, just for her own health. I’ve talked more on that in previous updates around her rheumatoid arthritis and the stress of going into a job in London and all the travel as part of that because we live out in the countryside. Just wanted to be able to focus more on her health, and being in a position that we are, we’re lucky that we could do that.
So everything was pointing towards 2020 being a much bigger year for Seven Health, and kind of needing it to be that way because of the expenses. But then the first half of the year, because of the pandemic and for other reasons as well, was just a lot slower. There were much more outgoings that needed to be paid, and it was definitely much more of a challenging time.
I had the vision at the end of last year, and part of the reason why I was doing that was trying to create Seven Health as something bigger than just me and growing it into a larger company. But with the experience I had this year, and also just the reflection on realising where my strengths lie and how I like spending my time, I kind of changed my mind on this.
Seven Health is now back to just being me in terms of the practitioner front. Drew is also no longer here, and Ali is now working for Seven Health. So it is very much a family business. We’ve just had much more of a recognising of what we want to be spending our time on, what is important both in terms of the business and in terms of what we’re good at and what we enjoy. We really pulled back on Instagram. I went in quite hard on Instagram from about September / October last year, and over that time had a number of different social media managers or companies helping out as part of that.
It just got to a point where I realised it wasn’t working the way that I wanted it to be, and knowing that to make Instagram work successfully, you need to be spending a lot of time on it – you need to be interacting rather than just posting – my heart just does not lie in Instagram or in social media. I love writing blog posts, I love doing the podcast, and I just can’t do everything.
So we are still posting on Instagram and on Facebook, but it is much more reduced. It’s much more of a distribution channel rather than creating content that is specifically for the channel. Creating Instagram-only content is just not happening.
It also made me realise how much failure is part of running a business. Failure is not always the appropriate term, because there are things you do that work for a while or you enjoy them for a while and then at some point you change and you no longer want to be doing those things. Over the years, I’ve done supper clubs, I’ve had different online programmes, I tried developing an app, I did speaking engagements in offices and at conferences – I’ve done lots and lots of things, and I’ve learnt a lot from these experiences. All of those are things that I’m not doing anymore. They could be seen as failures, but I’m actually okay with that. A lot of business things don’t necessarily go the way that you hope or anticipate, but actually, things do work out.
Also, having that quieter time with fewer clients at the start of the year, it really made me re-evaluate how I spend time and what I want to spend time on, and wanting to get that better work-life balance and not just be constantly working. Yes, it’s great that Ali is now able to be looking after Ramsay more and that we have a nanny that can help out for three days a week. So in some senses, if I wanted to be working all the time, I could. But I just genuinely don’t. I want to find that balance between those things.
More recently, that has meant that the podcast has been becoming something that is once every two weeks. For the last little while, there’s been one new episode and then a rebroadcast episode and then a new episode. I think that’s the way it’s going to be for a while. There’s going to be a new episode every two weeks in terms of getting that balance right.
00:42:30
The next thing is Ali. I don’t have a huge amount to say on this. I know in other update podcasts that I’ve done, I’ve devoted more time to her just because her health hadn’t been so great and had provided more challenges, so it was more relevant. But the good news is that health-wise, she’s the best that she’s been since we’ve had Ramsay.
Things aren’t perfect; there’s still ups and downs. There are still times when she’s having flares as part of the rheumatoid arthritis. But on the whole, things are much, much improved. A big part of that, I do think, is because she’s not having to go into London and do that job and everything that that entailed as part of the travel, etc. So I’m very grateful that having less stress, at least less stress in one realm, has been really helpful for that.
00:43:35
In terms of me, I’ve finally managed to develop a fairly reliable meditation practice. This has always been something I’ve suggested with clients, or at least something I’ve suggested with clients for the last five or six years, but never really managed to put into practice myself.
It was probably about the May time that I started it, and I got up to about 70 days. It probably took me about 80 or 90 days to get there, and then I had a couple of months with doing nothing again, and now I’m back to around about 30-odd days. I’m probably doing it four or five days a week, typically not on the weekend. There’s probably some day during the week that it gets missed, but most of the time it’s happening.
More importantly, it’s starting to bleed out into real life. I notice my thoughts and my emotions as they rise up and I’m getting better at being an observer or being objective rather than being instantly swept up in it. Obviously, I’m human and it doesn’t always work, but I am really starting to see the benefits of meditation, and that’s probably part of the reinforcing thing that is getting me to keep up the practice.
I’ve actually been wanting to write a long blog post on this as well. I’ve got a post that’s about half done, so it will see the light of day at some point, just going into more detail on this in terms of the benefits that I’ve noticed and how I’ve managed to have it be a practice after such a long time when it didn’t work.
I’ve noticed this year – and this is probably connected with the meditation – I’m doing a little better in the wintertime. I’ve noticed the last handful of years that I probably am affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, in a more mild way than maybe some people, but it did definitely affect me. I would definitely have more low points during the wintertime. At least at this point, it is seemingly better, and I do think the meditation is at least part of why that is occurring. So that’s been good.
I had a fairly eye-opening experience recently, and this connects to some of my comments earlier on about realising the importance of people and seeing friends and family. Ali and Ramsay went up to Scotland together a couple of months ago while I stayed at home, and I was super excited. I hadn’t had time on my own like this since Ramsay was born, or even before Ramsay was born. It’d probably been like four years since I’d had any real extended time on my own.
As I said, I’m an introvert. I love my own company. I had loads of movies and documentaries and shows that I wanted to watch, and I wanted to just be able to do nothing, to chill, to watch, to eat, to sleep and repeat. Whenever I would have times of stress or things feeling overwhelming, I had this fantasy of just being able to have long stretches of time on my own. So I was in this situation where I was finally getting this to happen.
By the time that Rams and Ali left, I was actually pretty knackered. I’d had a couple of months of fairly heavy work time and was feeling rather wiped. I said I wanted to get that work-life balance, and I definitely had time where that was not occurring, so I was pretty wiped. It just felt like ‘This is the perfect time for them to be going away.” I was still obviously needing to work, but I was going to pull back on some things and have a whole weekend of doing absolutely nothing. I was imagining that I would feel really vitalised from it.
It didn’t do what I expected it to do. I did get to do what I intended in terms of watching shows and listening to lots of podcasts and barely leaving the house, barely talking to anyone, so it went to plan on that front. But how I felt and how I responded to it, it was not what I expected.
For the first day or two it was nice and novel, but it kind of went downhill after that. I felt like I was slipping into depression. I’m not saying that flippantly; it literally felt like this. On Day 4 or 5, when I spoke to Ali, I mentioned it. I was like, “This feels really quite dark.” I think the weekend of doing nothing and seeing no one, which I thought would be revitalising, felt quite sad and lonely.
I was actually really happy for the experience. I’m glad I got to have that extended time on my own because if it had only been for a day or two, I wouldn’t have realised this. I wouldn’t have reached that point and I still would’ve had that fantasy in my mind like, “Oh gosh, it would be so amazing to have this extended time where I’m not seeing or talking to anyone.” But now that I’ve had that experience, I realise I just need that in small quantities. I can have a couple of hours or half a day or a day or something like that, and that will scratch that itch.
If I hadn’t had this extended period, I don’t think I would’ve made that realisation. While I am an introvert, I really do crave connection and people; I just want it in the right way and I want it in the right amount. So I was very grateful for that not-so-pleasant experience.
00:50:02
The only holiday that we’ve been on this year – obviously I mentioned we went to Australia at the start of the year for my sister’s wedding, but after returning from that in the very end of January or the start of February, whenever it was, we haven’t gone on holiday at all for the rest of the year except for one short excursion to Dorset. It’s about two hours away from where we live, a two-hour drive. We went camping for a couple of nights and discovered the most beautiful beaches down in Dorset.
I’ve been spoiled; I grew up in Sydney and spent my life at the beach. Australia has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, so every time I go to the beach in the UK, or at least up until that point, I’m pretty disappointed. Most of the time it’s pebbles – which I’m not a fan of; I prefer a sandy beach. Also, a lot of the seaside towns and beach locations in the UK feel a little bit like time has forgotten them and can feel a little bleak. So I never really enjoyed them that much, and then found this beautiful stretch of beaches in Dorset, where it was sandy beach, where it felt nice and vibrant, and had this experience that I didn’t expect to have in the UK.
It made me realise just how much I do miss the beach and I miss the sea. I came away with this plan of “I want to move here. I want to be somewhere where I can be having this much more on my doorstep and be close to this.” I still think I would want to be living in the countryside, but you can be in the countryside and be only a 15- or 20-minute drive or whatever it is to the beach, and that is very practical and doable in the way that living two hours away is not so.
So I’m thinking of that as a potential two, three, five year plan of moving somewhere that is going to have that much closer.
00:52:30
The final thing to say is that Christmas is coming up, and for Christmas this year I’m going to head up to Scotland. This is something I’ve never done before. Ali is originally from Scotland, and we’ve been together for a decade, or at least a decade’s worth of Christmases – could be longer. But over that time, we’ve made it to Australia five times. My folks came over here for one of those Christmases, so we had Christmas with them. Then there was the time we’ve had it with friends. We’ve never made it up to Scotland before. So I’m really looking forward to that.
After a year of not being able to see many people and see friends and family, the thought of just doing Christmas with the three of us wasn’t particularly appealing. We were really wanting to have it with people, and so made the decision to go up to Scotland. It’ll be great. I know Ramsay is really excited to hang out with his cousins and play with them. It’s in the Scottish Highlands, beautiful scenery – although with only a handful of hours of sunlight, I’m not sure how much we’ll actually get to see. But I’m good with staying indoors and drinking wine. That would suit me as well.
I think that’s kind of it. I was chatting with a friend recently; she works in catering, in events, and has recently moved from London out to Ibiza because her events company had disappeared, somewhat because of the pandemic. She was just commenting that if at this point of the year you run your own business and your head is above water, then you should be grateful that things are going well. That was definitely a reminder, and it is a thing that I have kept in mind, especially for this second half of the year. Things are going well, and it has been a crazy year and we’re still here and still surviving and still in a good position.
So that is it for this update. I hope you have a nice holiday period, whatever you’re up to. I know it’s going to be very different this year from others, but yeah. I hope you enjoyed hearing what I’ve been up to. It always feels slightly weird just talking all about this stuff, but apparently people are interested, so I’m happy to do it.
I will be back next week with a rebroadcast episode, but in two weeks with another guest interview. Until then, take care and I will see you soon.
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