Neil Lawrence's Path: Shattering Labels and Embracing Mindfulness

Ever had a brush with death that forced you to reevaluate your life? Neil Lawrence certainly has, and he’s here to share his transformative journey with us. From surviving a near-fatal car accident to living with fibromyalgia, Neil has faced challenges that would break even the strongest among us. But rather than let these experiences define him, he’s used them to shape his worldview and inspire others.

Neil doesn’t just talk about adversity, he gives us a masterclass on mindfulness. As a transformational coach, he's learned the power of shedding societal labels and boxes. Be it disability, fibromyalgia, religion, the LGBTQ+ community, or neurodivergence, Neil guides us through his journey of self-discovery, highlighting the profound impact of ridding oneself of societal impositions. Get ready to be inspired by his insights and the far-reaching effects of discarding labels.

But that’s not all. Neil also introduces us to his unique method of managing fibromyalgia through neural rewiring techniques. He shares the role of mindfulness in maintaining his health and the influence of American Buddhist psychologists and teachers, Jack Hornfield and Tara Brack, on his life. Join us in this enlightening conversation as we explore the importance of trusting oneself, creating a responsibility system, and trading expectations for appreciation. Tune in for an episode that promises to change your perspective on mindfulness, personal growth, and overcoming adversity.

Support the show

Friends, our time together is coming to a close. Before we part ways, I sincerely thank you for joining me on this thought-provoking journey. I aim to provide perspectives and insights that spark self-reflection and positive change.

If any concepts we explored resonated with you, I kindly request that you share this episode with someone who may benefit from its message. And please, reach out anytime - I’m always eager to hear your biggest aspirations, pressing struggles, and lessons learned.

My door is open at my Denver office and digitally via my website. If you want to go deeper and transform confusion into clarity on your quest for purpose, visit http://www.bazporter.com and schedule a coaching session.

This is Baz Porter signing off with immense gratitude. Stay bold, stay faithful, and know that you always have an empathetic ear and wise mind in your corner. Until next time!

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Rise from the Ashes. I'm your host, baz Porter. If you've not seen this before, you've not shuned in. This is all about podcasts about you in your leadership, in your life and overcoming adversity, overcoming challenges to become the leader and the authority in your life. Rise from the Ashes is all about you and the people's popularity and overcoming into success. My guest today is a coach from the UK. His name is Neil Lawrence and he is a privilege and an honor to have him here today with me. I'm gonna let him introduce himself, as always, because nobody speaks best about themselves other than themselves. I have for those people who know extreme dyslexia and I hate reading. So, neil, over to you. Please tell the world who you are, what you do, where you're from.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Baz, that's such a. That's a really helpful link because, just as you were doing the introduction, I had equally a really dyslexic moment and I've just spilled a ton of orange juice all over my desk. So that's so. I will start by greeting you as a fellow neurodivergent. What's there about me? I'm a transformational coach. I work with leaders and execs, with bigger businesses and the smaller businesses too. I also work with young people. I started off my working life as a well-being teacher in UK secondary schools for 25 years, and in addition to that, I'm a songwriter and a fiction writer too. So those are my main things.

Speaker 2: 1:42

So what's your favorite song?

Speaker 1: 1:45

Oh God, I do know. I have no idea how to answer that question. Depends on the day. Can you do that? Have you actually got one that you go to?

Speaker 2: 1:57

I like Diestrates, I like some of the old ballads from the 80s yeah, the 80s and even into Eddie Cochran, some rock and roll. That's why we're up with listening to as a kid, going as an 80s child, going up through that, listening to the who, Dr Hook, all that era. I also was a DJ for seven years in Cyprus and, yeah, I was playing some of the biggest clubs in Europe, probably the World Castle Club. I was hosting karaoke on stages, which is still a pastime of mine. I like karaoke just a little bit maybe. But in answer to your question and thank you, I'm an old school guy but music really resonates with me. I find a lot of coaches also have that. To relax and go back into that little hobby yeah, what's your go-to then? If you were to go just to sit back and chill, turn?

Speaker 1: 3:00

the world off. What music? Why is it just generally?

Speaker 2: 3:03

Yeah, generally, or whatever you want to how you're going to go on with music. Do you want to see?

Speaker 1: 3:06

it. Yeah, music I go through phases of what genre I'm listening to, tend to go to sleep listening to music quite often, I think switching off, probably despite being a coach that spends a lot of time working with people about exactly that. My passion is reading and a lot of the time I'm read to I listen to Audible a lot, but it's impossible, as a writer, to listen or read a book without that little bit righty bit of you going oh, that's a good sentence, oh, I nick that. So technically, just how much I switch off? Yeah, I think my husband as well would say that I'm not the greatest at doing that. Probably DVDs, watching films and stuff is what I do at most. Having a horror fest at the moment just been watching all of Ty West's horror films in the last one from last year, pearl. That's been gruesomely satisfying.

Speaker 2: 4:01

What do you think of Stephen King?

Speaker 1: 4:03

Stephen King is. I absolutely love Stephen King. The other thing is being a neurodivergent I tend to read about. I quite like reading a lot of things at the same time. I'm not following one, so at the moment I'm reading about five Stephen King books in the mix. Just started Holly, which is the new one. I'm really enjoying that. But yeah, he's a great writer and I think the Shining. I don't love the film, the.

Speaker 2: 4:26

I've been to Stanley Hotel, but it was really.

Speaker 1: 4:28

Have you actually?

Speaker 2: 4:28

been. It's an hour after Road from where I live.

Speaker 1: 4:31

Oh my God, that's amazing, but the book is one of the most written kind of documentations of somebody's journey with alcoholism that I've ever read, and I wish it was known. For that reason, rather than some of the other things, I really value what he has to say, particularly around things like the world of addiction.

Speaker 2: 4:54

I agree, and that's a valid point. When you were going through your journey to be a coach, was there any adversity that you've actually overcome, that you really had to dig deep within yourself to go? I need to do this because yeah, that's a great question, Buzz.

Speaker 1: 5:15

I've said this a lot of times before, but I think it bears retent. There's a couple of key moments for me before becoming a coach. One is yeah, me and my partner he was driving on the A4 corridor which, as many people in the UK will know, it is not the safest stretch of road motorway in the whole of the UK, and there was a weather warning system out. I don't know how we survived the crash that we did completely unscathed, but we came out into this blistering rain and I thought, okay, I'm not supposed to be here and I'm still here. What does that mean? So that was one key moment. And the other one is I think there's a couple of things that played into me looking at the world differently. I'm disabled, I live with fibromyalgia and this was at the point as well where there was quite a lot of pressure from the sport. There was a lot of pressure from the school that I was in and education in general. That was making me feel very disenchanted with what it stood for and also the way I was being treated. I ended up leaving in inverted commas and literally felt like I had nothing, literally, and I think the interesting thing about leaving a toxic career or kind of something that's really doing you harm is my discovery was you can't leave it until you're well enough to leave it. At the point you're actually at your lowest, you're too ill to be able to leave, so I'd recovered just enough to do it, and then there was a little. I had a few key realizations then. One of the maybe one of the most crucial ones is that working in education and being bullied systematically by managers and higher ups meant that I'd develop PTSD, so that last year and a half I was having, incredibly, what I now know are very almost by the textbook. The Body Keeps the School. I'd recommend that to anyone.

Speaker 2: 7:23

PTSD episodes.

Speaker 1: 7:25

So I started my. I'd looked at coaching before and I thought maybe it would be a good fit because it would in the wellbeing work I was doing in schools. I was doing a lot of one-to-one work and some of it was quite intensive. I was working in schools that were in really deprived and difficult areas those were the terminology that the government and the schools were using but with young people that really have been through a lot of adversity at a very young age, I'm already, quite some of them, quite traumatized by it. Sorry, dyslexic moment, because I've now just lost this race of where I was. What was I going with that?

Speaker 2: 8:06

You were going from the adversity from leaving your employment and school into a coach and some of the challenges that you were facing.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Oh, yeah, yeah. So it was never, ever the young people that were the problem. I'm not sure. Yeah, they run me round and run me ragged sometimes, but it was the system and it's and it was the way that education's been set up and, specifically, it was the kind of people that were being drawn to it to run these muck schools, as I like to call them. I literally came out of there with nothing and I went. I asked about the coaching course and I looked for a course that would work for me, and I found this course, run by an organization called Catalyst14. And what really sang to me was they also had a mindfulness component to it. I am deeply a mindfulness practitioner. I do not mean the tick box. That's great. So I'll sit down, have a cup of tea and talk about how wonderful mindfulness is. Just get doing it. I'm really believing in it. So when I spoke to the founder, there was a guy called D'Monfort and signed up to the course, and I always remember the first day I walked in there feeling like I had absolutely nothing, and so I was complete shell, and I often say that to him. I'm still in contact with him. I'm in contact with people who are on the course there and a supervision group that I'm with as well, and I couldn't have started from a lower point, I think. I could have done, because it could have been the year and a half before, when the PTSD was so rampant and my fibromyalgia was symptoms were overwhelming that I could barely walk, talk, do anything. But certainly it's an interesting position to start from for a new career.

Speaker 2: 9:49

Is that a trick, Cary?

Speaker 1: 9:51

And what I found was that there's a couple of things that happened. The first one was and I hadn't counted on this that learning to be a coach I'd already got psychotherapy qualification before that. I never wanted to be a therapist or a council, although I believe in both and I've had some really great experiences of being in therapy but just I've always wanted it to help work with the one to one work that I did. But but actually the coaching process from the moment I saw the first model started to heal me. By coaching my, I was coaching myself at the same time as learning how to coach other people, and that was incredibly powerful. I even remember being told about the moment I saw goals and progress as two words that are deeply important to the coaching process. I flipped out because of my experiences in education, where goals or goals and progress is what you hang yourself or your hand kids with, or that they're there to benefit a very small minority of those schools who are either economically advantaged or neuro, neurologically whatever, but not the kind of experiences I'd had. I had to reframe the idea that goals and progress could really make a big difference and that was a simple but actually that was a complete revelation to me that you could non judgmentally frame what you're doing in order to make progress. I think, that point on. I was on on the way up, as it were.

Speaker 2: 11:26

Yeah but you turn, you change the challenge into an opportunity and you embraced it to not only elevate your own life and you had healing from that. How did my would buy you some things afterwards about fibromyalgia, because my mother has it and it's a devastating thing is it is it will wreck your life apart.

Speaker 1: 11:46

It's true.

Speaker 2: 11:48

Yeah, and people, some people maybe listen to this guy and what the hell's fibromyalgia? Would you please explain to the viewers what that actually is and how the some of the impacts that it has on your life?

Speaker 1: 11:59

Of course, but then actually I'm saying your regular life for sure. That's not necessarily true for everyone, and also it's certainly not true for me now, so I can also talk a little bit about that. Nobody knows quite what it is and why. I think it's connected to trauma. It's connected to living life at a pace that our bodies and our minds and our emotions can't cope with. And what it? I have to say I think it's just about the most creative condition I've ever heard. So it can mimic arthritis. It can mimic yeah, it induces chronic fatigue syndrome. At its worst it can stop me from walking, talking, thinking. Every single nerve point in my body flares up. I forget, and I think, not unsurprisingly, it skews the brain towards depression. That's not because of the pain. It actually chemically does something to the brain to make that happen, and there's all kinds of things which you don't realize. I don't know. You get more cold. You get more cold. So you just your immune system is not as robust as it could be. I have PTSD to that and it's surefire with it.

Speaker 2: 13:12

I've done. We'll just say some research and leave it like that. And may I offer you some advice and the viewers some advice out of my experience and doing some research on this particular subject. Absolutely for sure, buzz, I'm always really interested yeah one of the things that came out of what I was researching is two things actually Blueberries, plenty of blueberries, because they are antioxidant and they D. They take a lot of the bad metals away that are in our brain, in neurological circuits away from the brain naturally. Yeah, the other one is epsom salts. Soak your body at least twice a week, if not three times a week, for at least half an hour in a hot epsom salt bath. Yep, and there are the two main things that I will share with people without going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But it really changes your life because the detoxifying qualities and blueberries and also other berries strawberries, blueberries mainly cranberries are very good as well. Granberry juice is good for kidneys and D D congestion and all the rest of it. So the more you research the natural products in this and it's not a physical, it's a neurological thing so by clearing out the brain and the neuro pathways and neurodiversity and all that sort of things, you're also feeding the brain good stuff.

Speaker 1: 14:51

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Sorry, no, please carry on. I'm most of the time I think, about 70% recovered these days. It would be ethically for me to have made the kind of statements I made about fibromyalgia before and just leaving it that I'm. Morally, I would never do that if there wasn't a dip, and also I'm lucky enough to work with some of the people I coach have chronic conditions as well. So the combination for me I absolutely is about finding natural products that really help. There's of this things that are much more obvious, I guess, than what you're saying as well, like turmeric stuff that's natural anti-inflammatories. So there's numbers of mushroom complex thing that I use. So this is about three or four supplementary supplements that I use. I am taking medication for it. I managed to get that down significantly and I do worry just how many people in the US and the UK are probably zombified by what? The strength of a painkiller that they're given. I've got a personal trainer who also she's 52, is amazing. She also is living with fibromyalgia, so she's she's found a regime and she's actually got me from not being able to even turn my head to lunging, stretching, using weights. So that that's been a major thing. And I think also a lot of the narratives that we tell ourselves around chronic health need rethinking and can be rethought. And, amazingly, on top of all of that, there's a course I went on. It doesn't work, for anyone it doesn't work for everyone and it was a three, three half days and it's partly neural rewiring, it's partly mindful nurses, partly reconfiguring stuff and kind of making new narratives. It's a whole range of different things but within two, within two weeks, I was doing things that I hadn't been doing for years and you often see that on their website and you read it and you obviously go that's a con and it doesn't. It doesn't work for everyone, but actually it's a really powerful technique and I use that and my everyday management is around. All the things I've already mentioned I'm careful about. I'm quite okay with the things I can do. I'm not going to even say this I'm happy with the things I can't do. I'm happy with the things I can do and it's okay Most of the time. It really is okay and I have a full life. As far as I'm concerned, People say to me oh, you never go on holiday. I was like it's not even in my brain to go on holiday. Because why I can't right now? Because, unless I want to be quite ill, and that's fine, If I hope that changes. So I'd frame it like that and also just really making sure that I'm responding to where my body is, without setting the making, the narrative happen, if you like.

Speaker 2: 17:48

Unlike what you said about the mindfulness and your experience with building up the mindset of positivity, is there anything in your life that you now do ritualistically in the morning is like a ritual meditation, being mindful about space? That sets you up for success, not just in that day, but it brings that level of certainty towards you as a person, and would you share some of the things that may inspire somebody else?

Speaker 1: 18:16

Yeah, absolutely, and these are things that I also use a lot within my own coaching as well to give for other people. So there's a couple of things on that. First of all, the course that I went on, a technique that you use every single day. You can use I do use. There's, I have think, 34 PTSD exercises. I keep on my phone and I don't wait until the moment has come where I really need it or I'm beyond the moment. I practice some of those every single day and say the mantras so that I know that I'm newly rewiring my brain and helping to move in a different direction, without some being careful about the words I used to describe even what I've gone through is. That also sets it up, without beating myself up about it. In terms of mindfulness, there are two American Buddhist psychologists and Buddhist teachers who absolutely changed my life forever. They're both very human. They're both very committed politically, globally, what's going on in the world. They're also very funny. One of them is called Jack Hornfield with a K and the other one's called Tara Brack. Tara Brack that particularly is written about three or four books that I regularly use with clients of mine, and I'd say I probably do rotate around, I'll do the meditation that I need for that particular day. If I'm feeling quite vulnerable and I notice that I'm picking on myself more, that's clearly a day where a matter of meditations needed. Going through loving kindness meditation is kind of where I'm at. If I notice my body's really rigid after a lot of work or if I have had a PTSD episode, going in for a body scan might be a good idea and I just am listening to other people's meditations to. Final thing on top of that is PMR, and I can't remember in the Istanbul. Progressive Thank you Muscle relaxation there's also. That's also a technique for kind of tightening them, releasing the muscles. That really helps the body to relax. I've got again on the same app as I've got all these Jack Hornfield and Tara Brack and all these other wonderful teachers. They've got a number of meditation style progressive muscle relaxation recordings. So I lean into those every day as well and I find that doing that combination of all those things sets me up. And then exercise I'm aspirational about. Don't always get to it, depending on what workload, especially the writing as well. There's a lot of quite a sense and true life in lots of ways.

Speaker 2: 20:54

Many of our listeners have four or five people that aspire or inspire them. Is there anybody in your life that has been a true inspiration, living or past, that you've not copied but modeled, and it's empowered your mission to serve other people?

Speaker 1: 21:19

Really good question and I think it's. I think it's thinkers and it's writers. So I'd say Tara Brack and Jack Hornfield, absolutely. There are two writers who have more of a profound effect on how I write and also how I want to be, than any others. One of them isn't alive, unfortunately Shirley Jackson, the Haunting of Hill House. And if anybody's read that they will know it is not a shocker minute series like the adaptation, which was great but but actually is about the struggle of a woman who's caught up in a society where she has no voice and chooses to stay with go. Oh, no, spoiler alert, let's just say the decision she makes at the end shows how really awful her life must have been before, which says which is a really bold statement to have made about the place of women in suburban society at that point. And Brian Evanson, who is labelled as a horror writer he's the only person who's managed to make me pass out 14 times while reading one of his books. It's one of my favourite books. I can't very wary what I read. It's and it's and it's called Last Days. If anybody's interested, if you, if you pass out, don't blame me, but he really writes about alienation and people's capacity for for just dark and weird thought so well, and he also is very funny and he grew up as a Mormon and he's caused a lot of controversy as a result of what he's written, certainly from that sex, oh. So really that bravery encouraged as well really speaks to me. So that's for a throwbilly holiday and there's a Okay, yeah, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 23:16

You mentioned their conspiracies. Is there anything in your life that you've walked away from, that you didn't really disagree with and what you were able or willing to share here, that has or would help people have an understanding? For, for instance, the education system hasn't changed in 400 years and the regime is set up in a certain way to benefit a certain class of people instead of the people who actually need to benefit. Could? You share a bit of your experience with that, if you're willing to do so.

Speaker 1: 23:52

Yeah, I'd say yeah, and actually when you were talking about that, I was thinking I belong to so many so-called current world tribes organizations, more like if. So if I'm writing an application form and it gets to the, do you belong to a group that don't have a voice? I'm ticking about seven boxes by that point.

Speaker 2: 24:11

One of them.

Speaker 1: 24:11

I can't even talk about at the moment because the world is so unstable I for the first time in my life, I find out. I'm not going to say it, but let's just say I walked away from nearly every single one of those groups that I belong to because they always hated somebody else or they wanted to believe they were better than other groups, and I can't bear that.

Speaker 2: 24:37

I love that, because that's what mindfulness is all. A lot of mindfulness is about having that inner voice and having that resumption that everybody is equal and they deserve an equal, a true equal opportunity, not a narrative equal opportunity, and I think you've just touched on that subject. There is just a prime example of how organizations or systems are set up and then how they can mimic a narrative to benefit a certain class of people, and I know that's wrong, we all know it is, but it still goes on in the world. Yeah, how did you separate yourself from that and metaphorically break or separate and break away from it in the coaching world? And how does that show up in your life where you can actually see it happening? How would you advise someone to go through it and for the benefit of mindfulness Through a mindfulness lens.

Speaker 1: 25:43

I think I need to. This might be a bit of a long answer. I think I need to. Actually, you're right, I need to go through my journey first.

Speaker 2: 25:49

Yeah, please do.

Speaker 1: 25:51

Yeah. So the early journey would have been having to reject my religious community because of their bigotry and their hatred, despite the fact that they were persecuted group themselves or had been. Then I discovered I was discovered I was gay. That was a weird way of putting it.

Speaker 2: 26:12

Well, that's what's going on. I'm state of epiphany.

Speaker 1: 26:16

To be fair, I went to see Back to the Future and more or less is what happened to me as I was watching Michael J Fox on the screen, paul Mack in the avenue in Medi-15 year old boy cry on the bus on the way back home to his house. But that was the second group because, like you, I grew up in the 80s. Nothing you want to be is gay in the 80s, so you're scum of the earth at that point. Genetics yeah, and then. But then equally, I saw that there were a radical section of the gay community that were slagging off the religion that I came from and at the same time, as a religion. I was slagging off who gay people were, which also happened a while ago. So it's like, okay, so what do I do now? Move on again. Next label that I acquire is education, becoming a teacher, and, as you say, somehow I managed to make enough difference and loved working with people who, again, it's all about being outside of the system. I think for me that I could wasn't about giving advice or modeling, because I don't believe in all that and role modeling. It was about helping them find their voice even then, even though within that system, apparently I was better than them, I had more power than them, however you want to revoltingly put it. So that kept me there, but then in the end, that was unsustainable after 25 years, but by then the damage was done by that point. I then also belonged to the disabled community through Fibromyalgia and the neurodivergent community after a late blooming. What's the word? Not diagnosis, what's the word With this calculator? Anyway, I did the test where the word is and, as you can hear, can't find my words sometimes.

Speaker 2: 28:15

We put it in a box, basically.

Speaker 1: 28:18

Yeah, but that was actually, and all those things and all these things have value, by the way, they all have, but they helped me frame, they helped me understand. I think I thought I was stupid until I got that understanding that my brain, I was discolcuted. So at this point I'm running out of. There's a point where I just thought and this is no disrespect to people who have written any single one of those communities or others, because people do need to have voices and I spent my whole life coaching for that, but for me, I couldn't see pass that. I couldn't see me in all those labels. So by the time I started my coaching course and I'd found mindfulness, I've been on this journey that gets more radical every year, where I want to deal with more and more of the stories that either I've had told to me so many times that I've got them, or that I'm telling myself and doing away with as many labels as possible, including good or bad. So I don't want to describe the condition that I have as being either of those things, or PTSD, or my religion, or being gay. I just want to be. I think that's what mindfulness has taught me and from that, that is how I coach and that is the way that I hopefully help people to be able to make real decisions from their true selves and everyone's into all the right words at the moment, which makes it a lot harder to use language, because everyone's using the language that we need to be using and a lot of it is being corrupted and I miss you, so I'm trying to. I find myself having my language or being stolen, yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:13

One of the things I love about what you just said is boxes. Everybody wants to be identified with something to make them feel a certain way. Doesn't know what the way is.

Speaker 1: 30:30

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:32

What? The question I'd like you to try and answer is what if we started as a society, as individuals at first, and as a society started to remove the restrictions of boxes and labels on humanity? What do you think would be the outcome? Or what would you think would be the domino effect, the ripple effect for that? So if you start to remove PTSD, for instance, or neurodiversity, or gaze, or transgender, whatever you identify as in this day and world, because it's all basically politicalized and used as weapons, everything for various reasons, and we know this. It's very evident. Yeah, but what would you think would happen if you start to remove these boxes and these labels for people?

Speaker 1: 31:22

It's a really good question. I'm going to be annoying and fudged and then you can press me further.

Speaker 2: 31:26

I love it.

Speaker 1: 31:30

I don't think so. I agree with you. I think we have been in the UK, particularly Brexit. It was the final masterstroke, but it's incredibly liberating to know who you are and it's incredibly liberating to know why my brain works like it does. But that doesn't mean that the only people that I should be able to talk to are people who have the same brain pattern as me. Having the same brain pattern as me does not make you a replica of me. It makes you another person. And if I then stop myself from talking to others in the way that social media does, all the time and all our life online gets oiled down to this binary system of opposition really adolescent opposition, where there's no room for negotiation or really doing the thinking and communicating in the middle. That's when it gets dangerous. So what we have at the moment is countries full of people who have been given some liberation from their own oppression which is also caused by the system Bonding together, quite rightly, feeling angry about injustice that's happened to them and then pointing out the rest of the world. The problem is you can't stay angry forever. What you need to be able to do is to recognize the value of another person in front of you, and the worst thing or the cleverest thing about the system that's currently playing out is, just like everything else, to do with the way that we've been taught about hierarchy, because everything's about hierarchy you mentioned it before about class, so everything is about who's better than who. That's what we become a box. Is my box more important than your box? Do I have a box on my box? And instead of us joining together, we're being ripped further apart, which is exactly what we're supposed to be doing, because then, as long as we're all fighting and beating the crap out of each other, the people that really want to be milk in the system and making sure that they're protected with enormous amounts of money Continue to levels of poverty in the UK. I don't even need to begin talking about that.

Speaker 2: 33:53

What's happening with chess?

Speaker 1: 33:54

I don't even need to be talking about that and people keep taking it and it's just stultifying that's the right word, or just just to me that the success of the system to blind people to what's being robbed right in front of them continues at such a level?

Speaker 2: 34:22

People don't recognise what's in plain sight.

Speaker 1: 34:24

sometimes and that is a global issue. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 34:31

And it's not just, it's anywhere. I can describe it, so you would probably receive it is look over here, not over here.

Speaker 1: 34:41

That's right. You look over there because we're busy taking everything out while you're doing. That. That's exactly right. And I used to get angry about this before COVID. It used to make me angry, and when COVID happened, and then all the stuff around, we didn't see this come in. Just read the fucking newspaper, because for the last 10 years we've had three scares of a pandemic already. What did you think was going to happen?

Speaker 2: 35:09

The warning signs were always there.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Exactly. That's not conspiracy theories, it's just bloody fact, right? That then caused me to think from a mind. I dug into mindfulness. Actually, I thought what causes people to have something right in front of them and not be able to see it? Fear, fear and the way that we get trained Programming. Yeah, I'm avoiding using that word, but you are right, it is the right one.

Speaker 2: 35:41

Is there any other way to?

Speaker 1: 35:46

No, you're right, that's about my own assumption. I'm not using that word.

Speaker 2: 35:50

But you can use that as a positive in your own life. It depends how that was received. So you can take that and go. Actually, that's correct and this is how it's going to shock in my life. I'm going to receive it. This is how I'm going to pass it, pay it forward in my world, in my spirit. So programming can be taken any way you like it's the recipient of it and then paying it forward at a higher level, at a higher consciousness, to give it as a benefit to the next generation. That's what changes lives.

Speaker 1: 36:27

That makes a lot of sense and I think and what happened for me was this I really dug into compassion medication, Compassion meditation.

Speaker 2: 36:38

It is medication.

Speaker 1: 36:39

It's something that works better than medication and I was surprised at the point where what I refer to as bog roll gate in the UK. So when that very strange period of people violently frantically ripping toilet paper off shelves I found, rather than getting angry, I just realized that getting angry was hiding what I really felt it was an easier option and what I really felt was in pain and sadness for who we are. But, it's very interesting that you said that that changed. that changed everything. Obviously, I can't be Mr Carmen collected every day, but that's why we're talking before about scheduling, weren't we? That's why, when people ghost dropped, I get overloaded with it too, and there's times where I just could just could send very unhelpful text to whoever it is, but generally a lot of the time I'm like I know, and that's why we've got to start looking at what's across the other side. It's not about reaching over to your designated enemy necessarily. It's just about recognizing. And it's happening in workplaces all over the place as well. I'm sure you've seen the same. This kind of side mentality is strangling everyone. It's certainly not helping productivity and helping business rebuild in the wake of the pandemic. We have to work together.

Speaker 2: 38:15

One of the things and I agree, one of the things that I noticed was the whole gestation period of the building up to what's happening now. If you look back five years ago and what was being presented to us in many different ways and it didn't perform a bit or cross, not just in the UK or the US, but across the world it was showing up then. These were the warning signs and they were going back 20, 30 years ago. If you look closely at things, however, mindfulness and meditation I meditate twice a day at least once at lunchtime, once in the morning and if I, if I give it a bit of time at night, I spend it with my wife up to 15, 20 minutes there. But it actually changed my life for two reasons, and if you are listening to this and you've never heard me before or heard about meditation or what it actually is, meditation is simply this spending in a moment with yourself and being present with who you are, at your core. Now, that has many different forms. There are different styles of it and each each are powerful in their own way. However, the moment you find what works for you and you play witness to all these events instead of being in the event, step back as an elevated awareness, not egoically not on above anybody, but just as a witness watching a game, because that's all it is a game. But if you do that, and you do it enough, that mindfulness within you, the moment of presence, will reveal so much. And it's not about that size winning that skies football game. It doesn't matter about the score, it matters about the game and the enjoyment of it. If you look at your life in the enjoyment of playing witness to that game, removing all emotion other than love and mindfulness in that, observing it, because love has many different forms what's your life change? Have you experienced that in removing playing witness, in these roles we've identified with People say, I'm a man, I'm a woman, I'm transgender, I buy whatever it is today that you identify as, why not just identify as a god damn human being, as a creature of love and respect? That's what would change your life. Have you ever witnessed something in your life that made you grow incredibly as a leader in your own view and concepts and improve your coaching?

Speaker 1: 41:18

maybe that's a really good question, but again I'm thinking about so these frames or these experiences that I have that make up me, these different parts. I think for me I need the words, I need the journey that's given me and the wisdom of how to be as present within my life as possible, and also because they're sometimes quite handy for starting a conversation, particularly around being a changemaker, to have an activist, sometimes those words are really helpful.

Speaker 2: 41:53

So I'm not using the phrase.

Speaker 1: 41:54

My truth is me say it. I want them to email me or to send me a DM on. Send me a DM, it's fine, I'll care. But beyond that, I think all of this experience come together to make me realise that we do. When we're interacting with other people, we do need to be aware that they could come from a certain experience or want to be experienced a certain way, but actually the mindfulness tells me that if I don't make an assumption about who's in front of me right then and I don't preload the conversation with my expectations of how they're going to finish the sentence or when this conversation is going, if I actually have the bravery and the courage to just be there, then I will truly hear them. And as a leader one of the biggest things I've discovered and as a coach coaching leaders and coaching aspirant direct as the CEOs, I think the biggest thing is that actually we tend to do things the wrong way round. Having five billion things on a to-do list doesn't make it happen. Actually being present enough to know and giving yourself reflection time enough to know what are your priorities for right now and having brave conversations with people within the workplace and within the companies you have, and not holding a hierarchical system, but holding a responsibility system that doesn't make one person better than another, just means they all have different functions. That's a way forward to help and to have people invested in the organization they work for, that have autonomy, that also have support and to make it possible to make mistakes From there. I could go on for another 25 years or so. Performance management particularly. I'm a 360, I do quite a lot of 360 audit coaching and it's always really fascinating. I think at heart, it's that I love that.

Speaker 2: 44:16

How would you advise somebody to go from where they are now if they're in that loop of perceived failure? And then this box of oh my god, this is happening to me and one of my inspirations who is everybody knows it doesn't know me. Tony Robbins, I was privileged to be a plant and partner and being an experience. You said something earlier if you trade your expectation for appreciation, so you remove the expectation and you appreciate what is, you don't have the stress, you don't have anything to a goalpost to meet. Okay, that happened, great. So if you were in that framework of, or someone was listening to this now, and you were to advise them of a frame they've put themselves in of failure, what advice would you give them specifically to level up to that next level and have the courage to step forward?

Speaker 1: 45:24

I think there's three or four things around that. The first is, obviously you're talking about people who perceive themselves as failures. Again, that's a global job that's been done effectively. I think most people feel like they're not crap at what they do. So, again, I like Tony Robbins' kind of statement there. But I think I push it. I'm thinking mindfully again, I push it one stage further. There's still a narrative there with that and there's still a labeling around, not a labeling, but there's still a describing of something. And actually what all of this stops us from doing all of these things, especially the plethora of the self-help industry, is so choked up, without people, unfortunately, like Tony Robbins, who are saying or bullies a lot of them as well and incredibly shallow. If you had everybody who had that kind of depth that Tony Robbins would be in a much better shape, wouldn't we? But actually, what if you're already enough? And that is the scariest thought for most people what if they don't need to buy a billion books? What if they don't need to be in coaching for 10 years, although I'll be quite happy for that so I can feed my feed people, feed myself but what if they have most of what they need already and actually they've not learned how to listen to it. So that'll be the first thing I'd say. It's not about the thing in mindfulness, about just being and taking away all narratives and just being so that you're not even a human asset. It gets really trippy and a bit deep and difficult if you go down to that level. And there's a wonderful Jack Cornfield book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, which kind of describes having gone through the process of becoming a Buddhist monk, which sounds like one of the most difficult things anybody could ever do. And then that's the US and go oh shit, I've got to wash my clothes now. So there is yeah, I'm thinking that as well. Is that?

Speaker 2: 47:27

there's all of that, but I've lost my train of thought again there is four things, and the first one was a bit coming out from a Buddhist monk about an M2, observing it was just being asked.

Speaker 1: 47:40

We need to know what, and when I say this, sometimes people go oh, so you don't think you need to plan, you don't need to have, you need to have business plans. No, I'm not saying that at all. We need to do these things lightly. I just literally put a tick to my business plan for 2024 with my wonderful supervisor in the Guides. Who's the guy who trained me that I mentioned before? Yeah, for next year, I've got a marketing strategy that I've been ruminating on for next year, for LinkedIn as well. It's not that those things don't happen, it's just that I exist beyond them. And if you don't leave space for stuff, you never learn to trust yourself. And what we've got at the moment is a world full of people that do not trust themselves, presumably because they've been told not to, and that's much better ways of system and systems to use that will stop them. If you actually just trust yourself, then you're going to fail. That's the message. The answer to that is it's completely not true. If you trust yourself, you know what? I ended up doing an impromptu coaching session with a 15-year-old yesterday who absolutely felt that they couldn't succeed in their exams. They were talking about every test they do. They did really well, and then every successive test they've been doing since then has got worse and worse. Why Turns out that she had been preparing more and more. I flipped it back and I said but did you have it right the first time, when you weren't thinking about it? And it's that. It's not that we don't need to grow, we need to grow. We don't need to improve. We need to stop saying self-improve, we don't need to self-improve, we need to keep growing. We don't need to keep growing. It's also okay just to sit down and do bugger all for a bit too, because that's what evolution is. We keep pushing everything. Things don't happen. So if we trust the world and we prepare enough and we have the intention in our minds, then stuff happens. But the scary part of that is we're saying you can't micromanage it better. You actually have to face uncertainty. Again, we're back to Buddhism. Again. The two things about Buddhism that are absolutely the tenets are life is uncertain and we're gonna die, and everything about the way that we live our lives pushes against those two things. Right, don't recognize mortality. And again, I don't mean that in a really morbid way, and we've come from COVID and a pandemic in the midst of a pandemic, and we're still trying to make our lives certain. Our energies will be much better spent practicing waking up every day, facing that fear with compassion, to accept the facts that life is uncertain. And we talk about practicing meditation, don't we? Because it's never complete. It doesn't need to be, thank God, something in the world, we don't need to take a box for right. But and that means that constantly living with uncertainty and mortality needs renegotiating all the time but that's okay, that's what the practice is for and that's why it's hard. But it's a damn sight better to do all of that so that we can see ourselves and trust our stomach, intelligence, our gut, our somatic experience, whatever version of that you want to call it then constantly be trying every single new system possible to turn ourselves into something other than what we really are.

Speaker 2: 51:18

Shiny object syndrome, isn't it? Yeah, it's the next best thing, it's the new thing. I had a conversation today with somebody about a marketing system. I won't go into which one it was for, because I'll get slammed for it. Yeah, no, but I said my analogy for that was I'm happy with what I'm using. I know it works. I'm playing a long game, not a short game, and I do not feed it into that new shiny object. Syndrome is everybody else is talking about it. We'll let them talk because it's a new thing with the same old cogs and wheels, just jazzed up in a different way.

Speaker 1: 52:01

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 52:02

And to your point when Neil, which was great, don't get focused too much on the seriousness of life. Live a little love a little and have fun doing it. Yeah, and despite all the adversity you've been through, you're still sat in front of me now. You're in a very value relationship who I presume that you both respect each other, but, most importantly, you enjoy what you do and that shows so much within this interview, so much within your life.

Speaker 1: 52:37

Thank you. That playfulness bit is really important. We're talking about deeper stuff, so it's so clear. But being irreverent, making comments that are pure out and have the lesson, are a big part of who I am as well. A lot of the stuff I write fiction-wise is quite serious, but there's also quite a lot of comedy in there too. I absolutely believe again, that if we're gonna be creative and we're gonna, I'm thinking about leadership as well that if you're gonna become a leader that's gonna make real change or become who you're really meant to be, you've gotta have curiosity and playfulness there, because those two things are where the energy and the passion and the life force lies. So I absolutely agree with that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 53:23

I'm gonna leave it there before we get into even deeper conversation. I'd love to carry that on, maybe another time, if you have.

Speaker 1: 53:30

Of course, honestly, baz, I'd be more than happy to continue talking about any of this. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you here and it's felt really co-creative, and that matters to me.

Speaker 2: 53:42

Yeah, and the pleasure is mine. Thank you very much for your time and energy into this. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for listening. Please share this message and share Neil's message. If you wish to contact him, if you wish to play a part in his life and also get some coaching from him the details for that will be in the description and in the blog Please reach out to him, give him your feedback for myself. Thank you very much, neil. Do you have any parting words before we say I'll pay farewell, not goodbye, but always farewell.

Speaker 1: 54:13

Yeah, maybe happy, maybe healthy or maybe free from worry. That's it, thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 54:23

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm your host, brad Porter. This is Neil Lawrence from myself. Have a wonderful day. Remember, live with purpose and inspire with legacy. Be blessed.