Hello and welcome to the Learning Chapter, a podcast for people who are doing okay on the surface but quietly unsure how to live well.

I'm your host, Sam McLean.

This episode is a collection of moments that stayed with me from my episodes during 2025.

I've really enjoyed this year of podcasting, and thank you so much to you, the listener, for coming along.

Whether this is your first time hearing my voice or Whether it's your 85th time, I think that's how many episodes are.

But yeah, I really appreciate you guys.

Obviously, without you, I'm just speaking to no one, so it kind of helps.

But yeah, hopefully you enjoy this.

Looking back at some of the episodes and some of the moments that I've been thinking about ever since I released the episodes, if any of these clips do resonate with you, then I'd highly recommend you go back and have a full listen to the episode, as the full context always matters.

Wherever this finds you.

Thank you for listening and let's get into it very, very quickly.

Before I get started, I just want to ask you one thing, and that is, if you haven't already, please could you subscribe or follow the show wherever you're listening or watching.

It really helps the show grow, and that's all I'm asking you for now.

Let's get into the episode.

Thank you for listening.

What does breaking a world record feel like?

So the only.

Having the world record means nothing to me.

I have no interest in currently saying, oh, I'm the world record holder.

Breaking the world record is crossing the finish lines, that it's the terrier catching the ball eventually.

And that's the bit I liked.

So that for me, and it's an unpopular opinion and there is nuances to it, and there is a halfway point and it's not black and white.

But, you know, there's a lot of, you know this famous saying on the Internet, it's not about the destination, it's all about the journey.

I. I'm on the other way around.

I'm very.

I'm less interested in the journey.

Enjoying the journey.

Right?

I'm less interested in enjoying the journey.

I'm far more interested in.

In catching the ball.

Now, it doesn't mean I won't enjoy the journey, and it doesn't mean I won't appreciate the journey while I'm doing it.

But that's not my.

My prime focus.

My prime focus is catching that ball.

So that's what the records have done.

So the positive feedback loop I get is exactly the same as a Terrier, he catches that ball, he feels great.

He brings it back to the owner, the owner throws it again.

And that's what I'm like.

And I love it.

I, I, I come back, I'm knackered, I'm exhausted, I go to sleep, and then I wait for that ball to be thrown.

And it's random.

Okay, that was gonna be my next question.

Like, how long does it stay, how long do you stay satisfied for after that ball's been caught, that finish line's being crossed.

Yeah, usually if I had to put a, if I just said to put a random figure on it, probably two years, you know, so after two years, I'm then like, right, okay, now I feel like I need to chase something again.

So, yeah, so it's.

And it doesn't always have to be because that's the other misconception people have is, oh, it's got to be bigger and better.

It's happened that way often that the next thing is bigger and better, but not always.

The next thing is just something that I think will be difficult for me to achieve.

I feel it has to have a 90% chance of failure linked to it to get really satisfied from it, you know.

So, for example, you know, I ran the length of Britain, 44 days, marathon a day.

44 days.

That I would say at a 90% chance of success.

I think it probably only had a 10% chance of failure for me at the time, at my fitness.

And to do it that slowly, you know, a marathon a day, which is not, not particularly difficult, had I decided to go for the British record, which is 10 days, Dan Lawson, that has a 90% chance of failure.

So that excites me way more, for example.

So that, that's sort of what I think about, you know.

So I'm doing Ironman Wales next year.

Like me finishing Iron Man Wales within the cutoff has 99.99 chance of success.

Like, there's very few scenarios.

Okay, it's probably not that high because you could quite easily crash out if someone crashes in front of you or drops a water bottle and you ride over him.

So, but really it's up at 99 chance of success.

So does that super excite me to just finish?

No, not at all.

And that's why I've never done a full Iron Man.

So this Ironman Wales next year, 2026, will be my first official Iron Man.

However, trying to do like a really good time, trying to be up there in my age group, that actually that now becomes a 90 chance of failure and that excites me a lot.

So what does that look like for me practically?

I don't know yet.

I'm.

I need to look at the times of people in my age group, which is very hard because also, well, luckily I'll be in the next age group.

I'll be 45 to 50, so I'll be, I'll be the youngster, I'll be one of the youngest in my, in that age group bracket.

So if I have a chance of doing well in my age group next year, is it.

So, yeah, I need to just see what those times are, you know, what is the swim time look like?

What's the bike time?

And then that, that excites me so, you know, is that as hard as doing 105 full iron distance triathlons in a row?

Nowhere near.

Nowhere near.

However, it still excites me, still gets that terrier going.

Different kind of challenge as well, isn't it?

And you speak about that 90 chance of failure.

So a lot of some of the events that you've done and people will see that you've got the world record but they won't see that you tried it at least one time before and it didn't go so well or something happened.

What is your relationship with failure like?

Because it can affect people quite a lot and often it stops people starting.

So the, my overall sort of the first feeling I get when I fail at something.

Firstly, I don't like to use the word failure.

I call it a hiccup because whatever, you know, oh well, it didn't work out, I'll try again.

But there is a feeling that I've disappointed other people.

So.

And that, that, that needs to be felt.

I think if I didn't feel that then I'm, I'm abusing the generosity of people who've helped me.

So that's friends, family, sponsorship who've, you know, helped me pay for it, crew members who've given up their time to, to help me crew me and, and coaches and physios and nutritionists if I, I'm very empathetic to letting them down.

And, and I think it's important to feel that.

I think it's important for me to feel a bit shit that I've let these people down who believed in me.

That then becomes fuel for the fire.

So that then sets in this new sort of.

It's not like, it's not that I didn't take it seriously enough, it's just that I obviously made some mistakes, which is why it didn't go well.

Now I'm very, very sort of aggressive in fixing those mistakes.

So I'm definitely a problem solver and I'm quite good at.

Over time, you get experience at it.

But I'm.

If I had a, if I had a skill, it would be.

I'm very good at micro analyzing my performance and why I did well or why I'm not doing well.

And then I'm very good at coming up with a solution to, to make that not happen again or to improve on that.

And I'm doing that on the fly.

I'm doing it constantly.

During Iron 105, I was doing it daily, probably every hour, where I'm micro analyzing everything, you know, And I have these 10.5 pillars of endurance.

I'm looking at all of them every single day, every hour.

And that is a.

It keeps me kind of my brain busy.

So when I'm in pain and misery, I'm like, well, I can't think about that.

I need to think about the 10.5 pillars and, and then work on those.

So whenever you do stumble across a problem or things didn't go the way you planned, that's the muscle you need to engage, the muscle in your brain that goes, right, that didn't work out.

Let's write it down.

Like, let's just write a list.

What went well, what didn't go well, how can I improve on that?

And it's all about these micro improvements.

What inspired that first moment where you said, I'm going to take my story and I'm going to share it and I'm going to start this podcast?

It was when my mother passed away.

Young grief is a weird thing.

Not to sound tongue in cheek about young grief, but it allows you to gamify immortality.

You see the implication of Death from a 3D lesson from a front row seat.

And I learned that life is too short.

And I could really see that ahead of me.

Life is too short to be nothing but yourself.

Life is not about selling a fake idea of yourself.

And when you lose someone so close to you, a mother figure, parental figure, you get that really firsthand.

So I was just encouraged to live life on my own terms.

I'm bewildered about how many people want to be proud of where they're going, but are ashamed of where they came from.

You can't be proud of where you're going if you're ashamed of where you came from.

And I just embraced that.

I embraced the working class, council estate mentality and features of my life.

I Realized there were features and not bugs.

And I really think about like the greatest origin stories in Marvel films or superhero films.

They all start with trauma and hardship.

Think of Spider Man.

The film doesn't start with him filing taxes and making millions.

It starts with him being bitten and being ostracized from the tribe, living with his Aunt May.

But I'm bewildered at how many people want the platform, the purpose, the power, but they're not willing to live with Aunt May.

Yeah.

And I realized that at that age that an unknown secret is that you either own your origin story or it owns you.

It puppeteers you.

And you can use it as your competitive advantage.

You can use it as your power.

And that's a choice.

And I made that choice at that age and it was because of that young grief experience.

That origin story makes you, doesn't it, ultimately?

So you, you wouldn't be who you are today, and no one listening would be who they are today without going through what they've gone through.

There's absolutely no way that you would understand.

Like you speak about the mortality of life and all of those things.

That's the only way you could have learned it.

Well, there's other ways, but ephemeral way.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's made you look at life a different way off the back of it.

So, yeah, I think that's important for people to sort of remember as well.

And with the rebrand you said about you wanted to sort of make it less about you and sort of take it out in that terms.

What sort of led to that?

In a world of AI technology and algorithms, people are starving for the real.

Most facets of our day to day lives are being automated and outsourced and reduced to rules and computation.

And I think the last bastion of humanity is our stories.

People think people shape stories, but it's actually the other way around.

Stories shape people.

And I wanted to share that as a message.

There's no such thing as disadvantage.

It's all disadvantage and disadvantage that I have is this podcast, this platform, this story.

And I felt, don't want to sound too altruistic, but I felt that I wanted to share that.

Over the last few years, I've been able to meet the most fascinating origin stories and the individual messages that I received from people that have found solace in either someone like a Jimmy Carr, all the way down to someone from Glasgow who they've never heard before.

And I realized that I wanted to ship that at scale and to ship that at scale and to purvey a message that your origin story is your sword and your shield.

I had to make it less about me and more about you.

And as a result, I've been able to attract the most amazing team I have, Samraj, Sam, Andres, and Howie, who all believe in that message, too, and they back it and they embody it.

The os, the origin story, is a sacred symbol to them.

Whenever we rock up and meet together on a Wednesday for our team meeting or we go to London for a shoot without even saying, we all rock up.

We're in os.

Yeah.

And that's because they're bought into the mission.

And.

And I want to do that for the listeners, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's.

I think it's a really nice way to look at it, and I think that's the value of podcasts, is the.

You're a fly on the wall in a conversation.

That's what I always enjoyed listening to, was unedited.

It's not necessarily an interview, per se, but it's a conversation, and you get to learn a bit more about the people behind what the message is, and you learn lovely little takeaways as well.

So, yeah, I think it's awesome.

And having listened to some of your stuff is.

Yeah, it's really cool, man.

Tell me a little bit about some of the stuff you do outside of the podcast, then.

So you've done a bit of standup comedy over recent years.

Tell me about that experience, because that's quite a unique thing.

I want to take that step backward.

Stories are not static.

I think a lot of people find status attached to their initial identity, whether it's the title on their cv, and they think, well, I'm an accountant now, and I'm going to be an accountant forever.

Yes, your CV is experience, but your origin story is essence.

And that, like Apple iOS, it's an iterative software update.

And I could have said, I'm an accountant, and that's all I am.

Or I could have said, I'm a podcaster, and that's all I am.

They say that cats have nine lives.

I think humans have more, and they have more when they do more things, when they change their identities, when they're not static.

You don't have to live a long life to live a long life.

You just need novel and intense experiences.

And again, through young grief, I learned that.

So I just started thrill seeking.

When I gamified mortality, I realized that I can create a bucket list of things I still have to do, things I still have to say, experiences that I still want to experience.

And I thought, why can't I start that tomorrow?

So I've almost tried every hobby under the sun.

I'm a jack of all trades and genuinely master fuck all.

And one of them was stand up comedy.

Yeah, I loved stand up comedy growing up because.

It.

Was the truest form of escapism.

As a young man, when times were really hard and the council estate box room and my mum and dad were shouting and it was alcohol fueled, we had no money.

Turning on the TV and watching a bit of humor was the way to take myself out of that room.

In stand up comedy clubs, we all recognize the world is shit out there and we can laugh about it and hear.

Yeah, and when I was watching standup comedy, I just had this itch to be on stage and do it.

And most comedians have either a huge sense of insecurity or unprocessed trauma or a bit of both and they weaponize it on stage.

And when my mom passed away, I developed my first five minute bit.

Most comedians start with five minutes and I was all around the end to end process of unfortunately watching my mum pass away from a heart attack on my, my hallway in my house.

And I'm smiling because I'm thinking of the jokes that I wrote about it.

Like it's, it's for a young man, it should be the most disastrous event.

But by putting on these comedic rose tinted glasses, I was able to process it in a less serious way.

And I'm not saying you shouldn't feel emotion.

Pain is real.

If I were to punch you in the face, Sam, it would hurt, right?

You would feel it.

It's instantaneous.

If you were to nip me in the arm, I would feel it.

That's not optional.

But suffering is optional.

Suffering is thoughts.

And I could grieve in the traditional way over my mother or why don't I write funny jokes about it?

Why don't I lambast and make myself the idiot in that situation and crack jokes about it?

So I kind of went into that experience doing that and it allowed me to process that and I got the itch.

It's truly a drug.

Telling your first joke is the greatest rush.

I can't explain.

I've never really taken drugs, but I can imagine it's greater than any drug.

We have to recognize the difference between a boundary and control.

A lot of the time we, we use boundaries as forms of control and just label them as boundaries so we can get away with it.

And so what we typically try to figure out is like, what do I want to change.

And what is it about that that I want to change?

And what do I think that will benefit?

And then how can I go about doing that?

And if there any of those answers is, well, if those other people have to change, then that's control and you gotta reset and you have to ask yourself what's within your control, what's within your influence, and what is neither.

And for the most part, the people around us are at our influence at best.

Even, like, control your kids.

Like, try, you try.

You can't.

And nor should we.

I don't think so.

But there's that part that really all that I have actual control over is me.

My thoughts, my feelings, my emotions, my behaviors.

And so anything within there will fall within a boundary.

So the example that I, that I tend to give is say, Sam, you and I end up in a conflict and you start yelling at me.

What people, especially on social media, will say is that the boundaries that you are not allowed to yell at me.

That is a boundary of mine.

And it's not.

That's telling you what to do.

That's not a boundary for me.

That's me trying to control your behavior.

My boundary would be, I do not tolerate being yelled at.

If you're going to continue yelling at me, I will be leaving.

Right?

It's.

You can do pretty much whatever based on whatever the law says and whatever happens with that, but I can't control what you do.

What I can say is that I refuse to be treated in this way.

That's not something I'm willing to engage in across the board, no matter who I'm speaking to.

And this is just something that I do not tolerate.

And boundaries are meant to keep people close to you.

We set boundaries so that I can keep people in my life and we can have this exchange.

It's a fence, it's not a wall.

You know, And a lot of the time we use them poorly because we would rather tell other people how to change instead of us holding ourselves accountable to seeing it through.

And then everything goes haywire because, yeah, I'm being controlled.

So for me, across the board, it's.

I do not tolerate being called out of my name.

I don't tolerate being screamed at.

And that's where even with my kids, that's what I tell them.

My younger son, he's somewhere within a sensory processing challenge that we're working through.

And he tends to play really rough, hit really hard, and move his body in ways that, like, he just doesn't realize how big he is and how much strength he has behind him.

And so what you'll hear me say, and I said a couple of times this morning and last night, I say, I do not sit near people who hurt me.

If you continue moving around like this, I'm going to move across the room.

I still love you.

I still like you.

I am just unwilling to be hurt.

And so it's really just setting that of, like, regardless of what the world does, what are you going to do about it?

And that's where our boundaries lie.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

I think again, yeah, we sort of resort to that.

Blaming other people or looking externally.

But again, it's all.

It's all internal.

I think everyone listening's got a lot of internal reflection to do after this.

Oh, yeah, it's gross.

A lot of the like.

And here's the where I think, because doing this work feels really good after we tend to put a toxic positivity spin on it that, like, this is supposed to feel good.

It does not.

A lot of the.

Doing this work feels really atrocious.

And I try.

I run away from it often.

And it's not that it's supposed to be easy.

It's just supposed to get me closer to where I'm trying to go.

It's building a muscle.

I don't want to go to the gym and lift weights, which is why I kind of don't.

But, like, that's that part that if I want to, if that's important to me, I have to go through.

I have to do the reps, I have to do this work.

And this stuff is really important to me.

And so.

So even though there's days that I miss leg day or I'm gonna do these types of things, I'm still going to know that ultimately I have to put in the work.

I have to go through that pain in order to get the result that I'm looking for.

So I don't want anyone to think that doing this work will be easy by any means.

It's not at all.

Yeah.

Disclaimer.

Yes.

When it comes to conflict, then.

So obviously conflicts can happen between sort of parent and child.

It can happen between couples.

Any.

Anyone.

Really.

One of the common responses that people might have as well in that moment is to just apologize whether they think they've done right or wrong, but just to sort of diffuse that situation, I'm just going to apologize until they sort of move on.

And I suppose it's a sort of passive style, but maybe slightly different.

What difficulties can that Cause going forward, that's your go to response?

Yeah, it's such a good question.

It causes a lot.

And I know that in certain ways, like if someone I'm not gonna see again.

Right.

Like if I cut someone off in traffic, I'm gonna go out of my way to say sorry.

Even if they are the ones who are merging in my blind spot, whatever, I'll still be the one to acknowledge it because that doesn't take anything away from me.

Right.

And people are unpredictable.

Everyone is the main character in their own life and I'm just an obstacle in their way.

So.

So for a lot of ways, that's me just like, sorry.

Okay.

And when it comes to people we actually care about, I, I will quite literally never suggest apologizing just to keep the peace, because what that's doing is taking full accountability.

You're eating up all of the, all of the blame here.

And if you don't believe that that should be on you, you're now conditioning them to expect that of you.

So if you apologize this time just to keep the peace and then another situation comes up that rhymes with that one, and this time you're like, nah, nah, I'm not in trouble, then the last one's gonna be opened up and the last one's gonna be opened up and you're basically setting the precedent that you are the one to blame.

And if we don't fully understand what the other person's complaint is and.

Or if we just don't really care to hear it and we just wanna move through it.

Do that.

Just know that when you do that, you are choosing short term comfort for long term dysfunction.

Yeah.

And while there's room, it's not really helpful.

Yeah, for sure.

I can see where that causes problems.

Probably more for the future rather than in the immediate.

But in that immediate.

Obviously the other option or the other.

Not the other option, but the other potential is obviously that conflict to escalate into something maybe ugly and definitely not useful.

How can we avoid that escalation and sort of find that middle ground between just giving in and conflict?

Yeah.

And I do want to make a point too about just apologizing to keep the peace isn't necessarily only about the other person.

Like you know what you're doing and you're apologizing for something that you don't believe that you should carry.

Which then means that you'll stop trusting yourself and your own perception of things and you will make yourself small so other people can feel big.

And that's of course like you suffer more than anyone when that comes through.

I know that it can feel like that's just what I have to do.

It's like that's all they're wanting from me is to say sorry.

And I mean, I see that and it makes sense.

What I think works against us though is that if we aren't coming up with an actual remedy and acting in prevention of something, then, yeah, words are just words.

And I teach my children often that words are not just passive statements, they're promises towards change.

And so unless we're actively saying, yes, I am sorry, and this is what I'm sorry for, and here's what I'm going to do about it differently in the future, or attempt to do differently in the future, it's not really going to mean anything.

Your words are gonna fall on deaf ears.

Some people just wanna hear other people say sorry.

And unfortunately that's their stuff.

Like that is their work to do.

And you are just, you know, you're just along for the ride, unfortunately.

But more than anything, I think it's fair to incorporate.

And I, I'm a big and person.

My clients know this.

My sister just pointed it out the other day.

She's like, you say yes and a lot.

And it's because I believe in multiple truths that, hey, husband and I got into a conflict.

And when I'm taking accountability, I will say, hey, at this point in there, I can see how I came through very passive aggressively.

I was rude, whatever that is.

I'm really sorry for that.

And here is where I was harmed by you.

And usually what we hear is like, I'm sorry, but what about you?

Well, I'm sorry, but what about when you did la da da da da and we miss the point.

It's like we have to like land one plane before we can take off in another.

And so if we can recognize that in any given argument, there are at least dozens of ways that each one of us could take accountability.

And so that's what we try to do is really dissect it into like, hey, my approach to this was really poor.

What I was trying to talk about is still valid for me and really important for me.

And the way that I approach this was really not cute and I really am sorry for that.

What would work for you better next time, do you think?

Like, I took extra time, I thought I was being assertive and it came through as aggressive.

And so like, how, how do you, how would you prefer that I bring these things up to you?

And if the answer Is like, just don't bring it up.

Then that's its own problem.

And that's something that we can deal with later.

But a lot of it is like, okay, out of all of these things, out of this entire 20 minute argument we both errored so many times over, I took every piece of bait that you gave.

I chomped it right up happily.

And I didn't keep my eye on like what, what the prize really is, which is peace.

So this is a project called man Man Talk 2014.

That's more than 10 years ago now, which is frightening.

But I did that with someone called Michael Walton.

The two of us set up this project which was basically a year long intervention trying to cause.

80% of Samaritans volunteers are women, just as 80% of counselors are women, 80% of psychologists.

There seems to be an 80% rule when it comes to talking or listening kind of helping approaches.

So we thought we would do an exposure of all the volunteers, including the men as well, of course, to what men's lives were like.

And at the beginning of the project, we measured how long the phone calls lasted.

So we had a sample of about a thousand phone calls and we found a certain percentage were under five minutes.

Many more phone calls with men were under five minutes than with women.

So men were more likely to have a short phone call and just hang up sort of thing.

So then we spent a year just exposing all the volunteers to men's lives.

Not directly by lecturing, but we got in a blues guitarist and he came and played some blues music for all the volunteers.

And we said, what are those lyrics about?

What are men doing there?

You know, most blues music, if you listen to it, is about men suffering.

You know, my woman left me and all this misery.

We think men don't express their feelings.

It's there every day in our art.

So we did that.

We played blues music.

We got the Royal Shakespeare Company came in and all the women agreed to play the men's parts and tell us what that felt like.

And they said, gosh, they were doing Julius Caesar.

Of course, being the London Samaritans, we had some really nice people who were like the Royal Shakespeare Company who were prepared to help.

So that was a lovely thing.

But they came in and said, yeah, these Roman politicians, the pressure on them.

They felt they had people's lives, they were responsible for all these lives.

And they felt suicidal about getting it wrong.

You know, they suddenly realized that even these powerful men, they wouldn't have an easy life.

They really had a Massive struggle with who's gonna kill them.

You know, they didn't feel safe.

They were under threat.

They were trying to protect their people.

So we all had a kind of debate about what that play, what the gender meant in Roman times.

And we did various other things.

A cellist came along and played some music and then said, what did that feel like as a male cellist playing that?

So we tried to just open up the minds of the female, mainly volunteers, and the men as well, to what it was like to be a man.

And then after a year of doing that, we measured the phone calls again, and suddenly all these calls that were less than five minutes, there were very much less calls.

The men were speaking for longer and there were much fewer.

We halved the number of calls that were less than five minutes for men.

So even without telling the women or the men volunteers how to listen by just changing their minds, exposing them, what had changed?

We hadn't changed the callers because they didn't know we'd been doing this.

What we'd changed is the way we were listening.

So what that proves is if you change the way you listen to men, they will talk better.

It's nothing to do with the men.

You listen better to men and they will talk.

So it's not about, come on, guys, open up.

The message should be, come on, society, let's listen to men better.

Yeah.

And that's the thing at the minute, is men need to talk more.

Men should be talking, let's help men talk.

But we're not actually giving them the space or opening our minds to, as a society, potentially to how we make that happen and how we start to listen to men better.

So by just like, like you did there, getting people to understand the experience more, not lecturing about, okay, when they say this, you might say this in return, that's not going to change it, but just a deeper understanding and the effect that that had.

That's really, really interesting.

Yeah.

So I did A.

In 2007, I did a national advisory group for the Health secretary.

At the time, it was Patricia Hewitt in the labor government.

But I got managed to get the role of a sort of temporary advisor to her on mental health.

And we came up with five great needs for mental health, which is the other big message I would have today, is that mental health isn't a series of mental conditions.

Mental health is the human condition which has five really big psychological needs.

So it's to be loved, to be heard, to belong, to make a difference and to have some meaning or purpose.

Now, if you treat everyone in terms of how can I meet that person's needs in those respects, rather than what condition have they got, how can I treat it?

Mental health services would be a whole load better.

So when it comes to men, if you think about how can I help this guy feel cared about, how can I help him feel heard, how can I help him feel he belongs?

How can I help him make a difference, how can I help him have a purpose?

If you meet any of those needs, his mental health will improve.

Now talking is only one way of meeting those needs.

Yeah, you might help him feel you belong by putting him in a football team.

You might help him feel heard by not talking to him.

Cause he doesn't like talking.

Do you see what I mean?

You might help him feel cared about by, I don't know, lending him 10 quid if he's hungry.

Do you know what I mean?

It's not about treating mental conditions, it's about meeting the needs of the human condition.

Once I got that idea in mental health and it went down well with the health secretary, that idea.

But sadly, like all health secretaries, they don't last very long and those kind of ideas didn't go into the policy department.

But I still use those a lot in my work and it applies to men and women.

So if you want to make a man or a woman feel heard, you don't have to do the same things on average, you know.

So the key thing about men is it's not about them talking more.

Because if they talk, talking only helps.

Depending on who's listening, what attitude they're listening with, what are the consequences of them listening.

So if you're a male victim of domestic violence and you ring up a standard kind of female oriented domestic violence charity, the way you will be listened to will not help you, it might harm you.

The point is that listening can be unhelpful.

If you go to a doctor with mental health problems and they're not very good at mental health, that might make you feel worse.

If you go to a mental health hospital and no one's got any time for you, cause the staff are all burned out and you are a rejected kid, you've got mental health problems, you go into a hospital and the staff haven't got time for you either and you were rejected in your family, it reinforces the sense of rejection.

And even if someone is listening to you, they might listen to you and then tell you what to do, just give you some really bad advice.

So listening isn't talking and listening Aren't the panacea.

It's really connecting with people that matters.

The only thing that really makes a difference.

And this is true with teachers as well.

We go into school.

Well, who are the teachers we all remember who changed our lives?

Yeah, the ones that connected with us.

Yeah.

Not the ones that just lectured us.

Can you explain to those people what rope flow is and the benefits that it can offer people?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'll preface it with the lens of how I understand the body and why the rope is such a perfect way to do it.

So throughout most of what we know about the physical body, it was based on sections that remove something called fascia.

And fascia we could think of as, like, skin underneath our skin that integrates our entire body together.

Right.

So it's like a sleeve of tissue that is integrated in the nervous system.

It has so many responsibilities that we don't even fully understand yet because it's really within, like, the last hundred years that it's been kind of uncovered and.

And discovered.

Right.

And.

And kind of elaborated on.

And so what we used to understand the spine as with respect to movement based on that old kind of idea of how the body's organized is that it's kind of this stable, stationary middleman for the legs to the arms or from the arms to the legs.

It's kind of this passive structure to one degree or another, which, through my yoga training and how they perceive the spine, you know, obviously didn't really make sense to me because it's a totally different idea with the spine and yoga and Hindu new philosophy.

So when I.

When I learned this new idea through understanding fascia on more of a physical side, there's another offshoot of.

Of that kind of general idea called spinal engine theory.

And spinal engine theory is basically the complete polar dichotomy of how we understand human locomotion based on what is, you know, previously thought of, which is legs do everything.

Spine is the middleman.

Arms are kind of like the.

The last expression of it.

Where spinal engine theory presents this idea that your spine is not just this passive structure, but it's actually the source of all human movement.

And if we can wield the movement of our spine and if we can tension all of the soft tissue that connects to it, which then connects to the rest of the body, we can then move much more efficiently, get out of pain, and we could become far more athletic.

Because all of these athletic movements that, whether we're from antiquity, through dance or hunting or whatever it might have been, things that we just naturally did as humans, right.

It all makes sense within this lens of spinal engine theory.

And so I bit down on that and the rope is the perfect way to explain it and rope flow in particular.

So with rope flow, you use a softer, you know, weighted rope is very weighted in comparison to like speed rope.

So we're talking about about a pound.

If you're a muscle bound dude, you're going to need a heavier rope to get that feedback that we're looking for at the spine and at the core, right?

Because you're just too strong for a £1 rope.

But for the average person, even for, you know, the, the person who's training and are pretty strong, if you're not like a bodybuilder or power lifter, you know, a standard rope would just fine.

And rather than jumping through the rope, which is a type of syncopation where I'm bringing the rope down with my body, but I'm jumping up to avoid it hitting me, right?

So it's this kind of like rhythmic, offbeat, disconnected thing that I'm doing with the rope, which don't get me wrong, jump roping is phenomenal.

Nothing bad about jump roping.

It's plyometric, it's cardio, it's awesome, gets you light on your feet.

But what rope flow teaches you, rather than jumping through the rope in that syncopated manner, it synchronizes your movement by you rotate the rope around your body.

So rather than going through it, you're now having the rope hit on left and right sides of your body.

On the physical side of things, what that starts to teach you is weight shifting, right?

Understanding this idea that in locomotion, in throwing in any athletic endeavor, what we're doing is we're wielding gravity through our body and then transmitting that through space to then perform the task.

And all of that requires some form of a weight shift.

If I'm going to throw a ball as hard as I can, I have to shift my weight.

If I want to throw a punch as hard as I can, I have to shift my weight.

If I want to run as fast as I can, I have to shift my weight.

And classic conventional training does not account for that, right?

So on the physical side of things, you have this low barrier for entry.

Grandma could do it, professional athlete could do it.

Rope.

And it teaches the athlete what they already know, and it teaches the grandma how to unleash that dormant athlete for whatever is to her level of capabilities, right?

But in terms of movement, like you can get an old person walking Pain free just by having them understand that you need to rotate when you walk.

Right.

And so on the physical side of the rope flow practice, every single rep requires rotation.

That rotation and the expression of the rope at the hands, ideally over time, gets sensitized to how you're engaging your core, which is then utilizing the spinal engine to manipulate the rope.

Right.

So it's in the beginning, it's very handy and it's very shouldery.

But then people start realizing like, oh, I have all this core musculature that I could manipulate this rope with.

And then all of a sudden, man, I, I kid you not, the stories that people have.

I'll share one just briefly.

A friend of mine was scheduled for a spinal surgery in May, and it was February of that year.

He found the rope two months later, canceled his surgery four months later.

After that, ran his first marathon.

Wow.

He was about to be on the surgery table.

And just because he, he started learning how to again, wield your body weight under the constant force of gravity in an efficient way.

That was the thing that was causing the back pain, right?

Like if someone walks and they don't have this weight shift, every single step is a rep and you're accumulating hundreds of thousands, millions of them throughout your life.

And if those are off balance, at some point it's going to go to a weak link.

That's going to be your hip, it's going to be your knee, it's going to be your ankle, it's going to be your back, it's going to be your shoulder, it's going to be your neck, because everything is over your feet.

Right.

And so the physical side alone has helped people get so wildly out of pain that it's like, why wouldn't you do it if you're in pain?

And, and how would people would that be?

Is it a rep based thing?

Is it a time based thing?

Is it something people should start to ease in easily?

Yeah, so, so it's called rope flow for a reason.

It's, it's based on four primary patterns and then thousands of variations of those patterns.

And the way that the patterns work together can be synchronized and sequenced in a way where you can move through every single pattern without ever losing that loop.

Because every single one is based on these figure 8 patterns with the hands generally, but then figure 8 patterns with the shoulders, figure 8 patterns with the hips.

There's overhand variations, there's underhand variations, there's ways that you can position yourself where overhand in that pattern is to your right and underhand is to your left.

So you learn how to change directions, you learn how to balance your body.

You're getting this beautiful reciprocal movement throughout everything, left and right sides that without even knowing it, you're balancing your body back from the first rep that you do.

So in terms of like integrating it into your training, if you're brand new to it, you got to give it 7 to 10 minutes to sink into the brain side of things.

And you have to just know what's, you're going to suck.

In the beginning, we all look the same.

Like the real flow community has blossomed to this monstrous community worldwide where, you know, it's like, it's huge.

It's huge in places like Thailand and, and the Philippines and all these little pockets of the world where a lot of times they don't have that like bodybuilder ego culture in their physical culture.

So it's, it's like easier for them to realize the value in it.

But nonetheless, when it comes to integrating it, like you, you just have to commit to doing it every day because it's a pattern based tool.

And so you have to revisit it and, and you'll notice it's like riding a bike where if you do one pattern and you finally kind of get it, you put that thing down, you pick it up, the next day, it's like you're 50 times better and then you're a hundred times better.

And it just is this exponential growth to what is also an unending level of skill in the practice and new nuances and variations you could develop over time.

So there's no limit to it.

You just have to do the bare minimum, which is just spend time with it daily.

And then what you'll find and what most people have found is that the physical benefits and then again the psychological brain based benefits are so profound, even if they're subtle in the beginning, that you just yourself like just want to do this thing because it just feels so good.

And the next thing you know, it's been an hour and you're like, how did that time just fly by?

And it just kind of integrates itself over time if you just commit to just doing it.

Remember this phrase, you cannot outthink your physiology.

Okay, so all the talking therapies in the world, all the positive mindset, inspirational stuff, that it should be good isn't going to affect some, isn't going to positively affect something with low testosterone, clinically low testosterone isn't going to positively impact somebody with a DYSREGULATED thyroid, you cannot out think your physiology.

So if you think about the relationship between physiology and psychology, it's bi directional, isn't it?

But again, physiology is fundamentally how your body functions and we're a big bag of chemicals, okay?

If those chemicals don't have the foundation, you, you will not get better.

And again, when we think about mental health, then we're thinking about what's the cure?

There's no cure because we've all got mental health, okay?

And it's, again it's, it's seeing the positive as opposed to the negative.

And I think the problem is, is we've got lots of virtue signaling on the Internet and people being labeled as being depressed and people being labeled as being anxious.

And like depression and anxiety is a symptom of something.

You know, whether that's dysregulated physiology, whether that's your current life, whether that's past experiences, we need to be again having a real proper rethink about how we look at mental health issues.

Because we've all got mental health problems, you know, if, if we want to see them as problems.

Now you do have pathologies, obviously, but the vast majority of people with depression and anxiety need to take a step back and understand that again, at your.

Core you are an animal.

Again, consciousness disappointingly adds a weird complexity to what should be the human experience.

Ultimately it's down to you, what you do with that.

And again, as you know, I'm a massive fan of Cole Yom and Nietzsche and Alan Watts and really Bill Hicks who was a comedian.

And again, it's just regaining that perspective once you've got that solid base of how your body functions.

And it starts with hormones.

Yeah, yeah, definitely remembering that it's bi directional.

A lot of the time we look at, like you said, mental health and we think how are we going to treat the mind?

But really how can we treat the body to then impact the mind as well?

And you spoke about labels and the idea that we say I am depressed or I am anxious, there you go, that puts a finality on it.

You can't get out of that.

Whereas if you say I'm feeling depression at the moment or I'm feeling anxiety, it doesn't become you.

And I think there's a big difference.

And it just goes back to that reframing of what we spoke to before as well.

I mean, social media is utter poison.

And I put a comment on one of these mental health sites and some guy goes, well actually, no, you know, it's empowering and then I work in mental health and it's like, oh, my God, couldn't give two shits what you're saying, because I do have quite a deep understanding of this.

But.

But I understand that an argument on the Internet is never going to result in a positive outcome.

So I kind of.

I did reply because again, my ego got involved.

But I mean, if you label somebody, it's like, great, I'm depressed.

So it's like, good.

It's empowering, empowered.

I'm depressed, so there's no reason to.

Get out of that.

So, you know, again, you know, we should always be striving to be better, a better version of ourselves.

But if you have that reassurance, I'm depressed, it's fine.

That's why I feel like this.

So, yeah, there's no reason for me to get out of it.

And again, work, work, work, work, work, work.

Yeah, it's an excuse to stay where you are, I suppose, in that.

In that moment.

I mean, it's perverse, isn't it?

You see so many kids, teenagers, being diagnosed with anxiety and depression and fundamentally is due to social media.

But again, you know, When I was 18, I was an idiot, so I was doing all sorts and perhaps I was questioning life and questioning my place and I was thinking, well, how do I.

How do I.

What I want to do?

I didn't go, oh, thank God, I'm depressed.

I don't.

So, you know, God, you've got 60 years of your life.

Is.

Is that how you want to be remembered?

Is that.

Is that your legacy?

Oh, and little Johnny was depressed and he was depressed for the rest of his life.

Well, no, I wanna.

I wanna.

I want to be, you know, the best version of myself.

It sounds terrible, cliched and it's like.

But cringy saying it, but get on with it.

Yeah, yeah.

It shouldn't be cliche or cringy to say that.

That should be.

They say that's just what we should be striving for.

Surely it's taking that level of personal responsibility and accountability.

And I think those sorts of diagnoses that are applied to something inappropriately, again, it absorbs them of that responsibility and accountability.

And, you know, fundamentally your journey is down to you, nobody else.

If you stay that way, people get bored because nobody wants to be around somebody like that.

So ultimately, you've got to.

How do I get myself out of it?

I think it was like 200 beats per minute.

Yeah.

Maybe even a bit more.

And it started out as a kind of Flutter in my chest.

And like it was very immediate to me when I could feel it obviously in my chest just going very fast.

And it wasn't, I don't think it was like.

I wouldn't describe it as painful, I'd describe it as really uncomfortable and you know, I could.

When your heart's beating that fast, the blood is obviously like pumping.

You can feel it in your neck, you can feel it everywhere.

And yeah, I got very used to that sensation of being like, oh, okay, here we go again.

And over the years we developed a number of different techniques to try and deal with that, involving things like handstands, like cartwheels.

It's all about kind of rejigging the system to get back to a normal rate of beating.

Yeah, I suppose like 200 bpm is the very top end of like physical exertion for most people.

Like your max heart rate might even be less than that for a lot of people listening.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's.

You might expect to feel that 200 bpm if you were in an all out sprint or running up a mountain or whatever it would be.

But obviously to just be doing nothing physical and then to suddenly feel that feeling.

Yeah.

Is a completely different thing, isn't it?

Yeah, definitely.

And it was just, it was quite unpredictable as to when that was gonna happen because you'd think it would be when I'm doing sports or when I'm doing, you know, like something that's quite physically exerting, but actually it could just come on at any time.

You know, sometimes I was in the classroom or just lying around and it would happen.

So it's quite difficult to, to manage because you just never really know when it's going to strike.

Yeah.

So what age was it that that started and how long was it that you sort of lived with it for in that period of your life?

Because it was through a lot of your childhood years.

Yeah.

So I think that holiday I was about 4 or 5 and at the time, even because we were in a foreign hospital, there was lots of doctors not speaking much English.

We were trying our best and I think everyone was a bit confused.

I don't think we got the diagnosis then until we got back to England.

I went into the care of the Royal Brompton Hospital, which is a great hospital and great charity that is associated with that hospital as well.

And I was under their care for probably about 10 years in total, going for regular checkups throughout the year.

Actually, like, do look back on those with quite fond memories.

The hospital was really great There was a great pediatric center with lots of fun games and things.

Me and my dad used to go, oh, dad.

And it used to be not a day out because it's never fun going to the hospital.

But, you know, we'd make it as fun as we could.

We'd play the four in a row.

We'd get some muffins from the Sainsbury's on our way home.

And it was, yeah, making.

Making the most of.

Of it.

But, yeah, really great care, I think, through that time.

But it was a lot to deal with as a child.

And I think probably at the start, I kind of didn't really know that it wasn't.

That it was.

Wasn't normal.

Yeah.

I was just like.

Oh, like five.

You don't know much.

Yeah.

Everyone must be doing this.

Everyone must be going for their checkups every few months.

Yeah.

And, like, taking medication as well to try and manage it.

And was on kind of various different types of medication over the years, which all had different side effects.

And as I grew, trying to make sure that the dosages were right, those type of things, which I think is probably more complex with, like, childhood kind of things.

How often were the episodes, do you remember?

Was it completely random?

I think it was completely random.

I'd probably say every.

Every few months or so.

But then sometimes you'd go for months and months without one.

But, yeah, it was really quite hard to predict when they were gonna be.

And some were worse than others.

Like, some we could manage ourselves through the handstands and the whatever.

But I did have a lot of instances as well where we'd have to call the ambulance.

I'd have to be rushed to hospital from school and have to kind of, you know, go to an emergency and have some injections, which that actually feeling was probably one which I dreaded because they used to.

I don't even know what it was, but they used to inject this drug that essentially kind of.

Well, it felt like it was like pausing your heart and then restarting it.

So there was like.

As soon as it went in, there was this moment where we were just like, whoa.

So you're going from, like, you know, a million beats per minute.

Yeah, a million beats per minute.

To then nothing, to then reset.

And it's like, whoa.

It's quite a lot to take in.

Looking at your career.

There's one day of your service that is very unique to you, and hopefully no one else sort of has to go through that.

Are you able to tell the listener about that day?

Yes, it Was, it was a mundane, it was a duty weekend for me.

I was one of six officers on duty that weekend.

And we basically, we start our duty weekend at 8 o' clock on a Friday morning and that doesn't end till 8 o' clock Monday morning.

So it's sort of three 24 hour periods.

And I was phoned about certain incident and it was just for information purposes only because sometimes we get called, you'll know this, assist other agencies which is often a medical related call or a medical emergency and we know how busy the ambulance are.

And so as a result a lot of fire crews are, you know, advanced trauma trained and casualty care skills and things like that.

So we, we attend a lot of incidents like that to assist and I'm, as an officer, I'm often informed about them.

I don't have to attend necessarily.

Sometimes I have to make a decision as to whether our resources should be getting used and things like that.

So.

But I tend to person on a personal level, I tend to go always attend because I know that 99.9 of those turn out to be fatals.

They're normally some sort of medical emergency.

So I go for two reasons.

One is I can provide an extra pair of hands if nothing else.

And you know, even the other night I was doing CPR on someone because I wasn't needed specifically as an officer.

They just needed people doing stuff.

It was all hands on deck.

So I, I go for those reasons to be an extra pair of hands if they need help.

And also because for the, for the welfare element, I want to be there to provide an element of welfare after the incident.

Yeah.

So, you know, I've been known to take a couple of trucks back to a station after an incident and just say, look, let's go back and have a, a coffee and a chat and let's decompress before I put them back on the run.

Because you know, I've seen the look on people's faces before and people are pretending they're fine and you know, what they've just seen and done and experienced and we shouldn't be looking to normalize that because that's when we start getting problems.

So I think that that element or that little period of decompression is important and so I like to be there for that.

And also I am a, a trim practitioner for our service.

So I, I do the welfare bit as part of a team of us.

So I, I always go for those reasons.

And it was, it was that reason that I chose to go to that incident.

That day it, yeah, it was a medical emergency in the next town.

We were sending crews to it and I elected to attend as, but that was no different to any other time.

I would always choose to attend.

Yeah.

And then en route, I was given some further information whereby some ID had been found, which has suggested it could be a relative of mine.

I was still going regardless.

You know, I've had this argument with many people since that disagree with that choice.

I'll have that argument with them all day.

I, you know, I challenge anyone to make a different decision in that moment.

I was on autopilot.

You know, I, I didn't become more emotive or drive erratically.

I, I, you know, you go into the zone, you're a trained operator and that's, you know, that's what we do.

We go, we drop into the comfort zone of what we've been trained to do and that's something that we, we fall back on in those moments.

That's why we don't, we don't get flustered because we're trained in a crisis.

So I maintained a mindset whereby I was starting to prepare myself, that I might be seeing someone that I knew or cared about.

Yeah.

And when I arrived, I saw CPR being delivered to a lady that I recognized and that lady was my mother.

And, and ultimately she, she passed away.

So, yeah, obviously a very difficult incident for me to be involved with.

But, you know, some time has passed now and I look back and I'm, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to be there because if that was going to happen, I'd rather that I was there to be with my mum.

I got to thank the crews that tried to help and not many people get that opportunity.

I got to thank the air ambulance doctor, you know, all of these things that often you don't get to see any of these people that help you.

So I shook the hand of the fire crew and I thanked them for trying to help my mum.

And I was also, because I was there, I, I was in a position where I could call my brothers as well.

So both of my brothers turned up and my dad and we could sit with my mum.

And then I was left me and my dad with her while we waited for the coroner to come and collect her.

So, yeah, it was deeply distressing, but I'm thankful I, it was me that was there.

So you mentioned in there about how you wanted to give back to people and how you realized that you enjoy helping people.

Why is it that that's important to.

You.

To be, to answer the question super honestly is I. I don't feel like I have very much self worth unless I'm helping somebody.

A lot of my identity is wrapped up in being there for other people.

I think that stems from maybe not 100% knowing outside of that who I am.

Because of so much of my identity is about leading or supporting or creating.

And like I said earlier, in terms of.

I spent so much of my twenties doing my work as my identity, I almost fallen into that black hole space of going, well, what else is there to me?

Yeah, it comes from a place of like, deficit, which is a.

It's an interesting thing to occupy because we're always taught to be like, don't be a people pleaser, don't say yes to everything.

And you can't do it.

You can't do that.

If you're empty, what have you got to give?

And that.

And so much of that is true.

That's absolutely true.

But when it's who you are is the blueprint of who you are, it's like, well, I can't just stop doing that to replenish because part of the replenishment comes from that.

It's, it's, it's really hard.

And I know I very much dodged speaking to people about that for a long time.

And I've sort of always just been like, oh, well, I can use my art to deal with those things.

I appreciate your honesty.

Yeah.

If you, if, yeah, that's.

You can go there.

Is it, Is it something.

You talk about it and you say that you, you can acknowledge it.

Like a lot of people who are in that space and they wouldn't even be able to acknowledge it.

So you can see it.

Is it something that you're trying to change in yourself?

Trying, definitely.

Which only seems to be a quite recent thing.

Last sort of 18 months, I've navigated quite a lot of different things, lots of change.

And I think I've had a couple of years where I've really, really hit burnout mode.

There was a year a few years ago where I sort of counted the amount of work I'd made.

And I think it was in the course of like, one academic year, I'd made nearly 30 works, half of which were all over 15, 20, 25 minutes long, which is a huge amount of output.

And trying to do that, run your company, support other people, have some form of a life, a relationship, navigate the complexities of just being a person.

And just that level of creative output isn't.

I don't think it's normal, and I don't particularly think it's healthy, because you're trying to do.

You're trying then to make every single work look and feel different, trying to have 30, 25, 30 new and original ideas.

And I haven't really stepped down from that gear of creating.

I've kind of actually just put the foot down and tried to sustain it.

And I think that especially in the last sort of 10 months, 12 months, with a couple of injuries and change, I've really realized I'm like, actually, I'm not sustainable if I keep doing this.

So I am actively trying to.

Trying to change.

But also, I'm also at the point where I'm questioning how much capacity do I have to change?

Because if I really wanted to change, I would take it.

I'd take myself more seriously.

But being the person I am, it's like, oh, I could just make a joke about it, bury it, and crack on.

So then, yeah, I think there's a sustainability that I can manage, but there's also a sustainability that I shouldn't be managing.

And trying to do those two things is tricky.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

It's something I've been thinking out about quite a lot, actually, in terms of identity and how we identify ourselves.

So I think a lot of the times we make what we do into our personal identity, whether that's work or political beliefs or anything like that.

And I think the importance is to identify yourself for something, but not to make it your personal identity.

So if I look at myself, I'm Sam.

I work as a firefighter, I host a podcast, I run, I go to the gym.

These are all things that I can identify with.

I can identify myself as a firefighter, but if I make that my personal identity, and I am Sam, and I am a firefighter.

That is me, and that's all I talk about.

Or whichever one of those things I want to sort of identify as if I lose that thing out of my own choice or out of a choice out of my hands, will, like, cripple me because.

And again, to go back to another conversation I had on this podcast, I learned this from Lee Eldridge, and he spoke about pillars.

So if you picture your life being held up by a number of pillars, it might be your family life, your work life, your hobbies, et cetera, and all these pillars.

As you put more time into one, that pillar gets wider and the other pillars will get narrower because of it, because you've only got a finite amount of time.

And if you Lose that wide pillar and you look at what's actually holding you up over here.

It's loads of really skinny ones.

So just to.

It's like a visualization on the reminder that balancing what we do in our lives as well is such an important thing.

Let me know where, if you ever get that right, how you done it.

Yes.

And that's the thing.

I don't think there is a way to get it right.

No, I don't think there is.

Like, I mean, I've spent my entire career being the biggest hypocrite, because everything that I do, I tell everyone else not to do.

I say to my, shit, don't be like me.

I'm not.

I'm not the role model for that.

There are plenty of people that show that better.

It's definitely.

Yeah, I'm definitely at the point where I, like, I know.

I know who I am, but if it's just one thing, what am I?

It's.

It's a.

It's a. Yeah, it's a.

It's an interesting sort of mental bit of gymnastics to play with.

I just want to look at your time at Wimbledon.

So you spent the longest amount of time there as a Coach.

Was it 18 years you were there for?

I think.

I think 18 and a half, yeah.

Yeah.

So you.

You sort of coached through the youth setup, ended up coaching the first team for a time.

What was it like leaving the club after that long, being there?

Tough.

Yeah.

Especially the way it ended.

Yeah.

I've had two, you know, in.

In my career.

Football.

What then through to when I worked out of football, having my own business with my wife.

I'd say emotionally, that was the toughest time because I love the club so badly.

So, yeah, emotion, that was tough.

If burn, which we go on to mentally, was the toughest.

But, yeah, because I'd been there so long, I'd like to believe.

Well, I had real success there.

You know, the Academy, we were the Most Prolific Cat 3.

We'd gone from nothing to Most Prolific Cat 3 Academy in the country.

And then I stepped in as interim manager on the back of them.

They'd lost 11 games.

I think their goal difference was something like -24, 25 in 11 games.

So they were in a bad place.

And I had such a connection with most of the fans.

They didn't actually want me to step in.

Not in a bad way.

They just went, look, it's the worst squad we've ever had.

They're going down.

Just let them go down.

Cause otherwise you're Gonna get the sack, then we won't have you in the academy.

And I was kind of, I don't know, I just thought, no, I've got to try and keep us up.

Yeah, yeah, risk taker again.

I thought, well, no, I don't want us to just go down, you know.

So I went in interim and things changed.

You know, I think we lost five of the last 21 after 11 straight defeats.

Our goal difference in those 21 was a plus at the time.

It's been beaten now this season.

But at that point, well, saying that over a long spell, I don't know.

But over those 21 games, it was the most points per game.

And yeah, we were, you know, we won 5, 1, 4 0.

We beat in Ipswich like 3 0.

And things went unbelievably well.

And so.

And I'd never felt so confident in my life.

It felt like everything I was doing was going right, change this team.

I had no transfer window because I took over at the end of January.

So it was exactly the same players and yeah, it was a great feeling.

And I felt really comfortable being the first team head coach because I hadn't really thought about doing it.

And then the second year there was changes made that financially the club were in trouble.

And then they said so they took money off the budget.

If I'm honest, my agent wanted me to leave.

He said, your stock's high now, you need to go, I can get you a triple the budget.

And I was like, no, this is my club.

And so you make those decisions to stay.

And then I think 10 games in, we're sitting just outside the playoffs.

We got lowest budget in the league.

Youngest squad in the country.

There was things that happened that were out of my control in terms of the squad depth.

But yeah, 10 gate was sitting outside the playoffs and they'd just done a feature on me in the EFL show.

And again my agents come to me right now, you really have to go like you stuck.

I could probably get you a job in the championship right now.

You know, the football that you're playing.

But again, it was my club.

And he said, like, you know, they let you down at some point I'm going, well, that's not going to happen.

You know, this isn't going.

And unfortunately there was a real, there was a turn.

We ended up.

We were almost a victim of our own success.

We sold a player that had never been sold.

That had a dramatic effect.

At the same time we had about four or five injuries and then the results took a dip.

And the wins become draws, draws become losses, and we couldn't buy a win.

And it was mentally tough.

But I still maintain if anyone was gonna get em out of it at that time, it was me.

Cause they made the change and nothing changed.

If anything, it got worse.

So I knew I still had the players.

But yeah, I remember packing up my desk after 18 and a half years and walking out the building thinking, I'm not coming back here.

That was, yeah, beyond tough.

Yeah.

Yeah, beyond tough.

And.

Yeah.

So I was really fortunate that Chelsea come knocking quite quickly.

So, you know, I've been in that respect.

Unfortunately, I've gone from a club I fell in love with to the club that I loved as a kid.

Yeah.

So that was a real blessing.

But yeah, no walking.

I've never felt like I felt that day walking out that door, you know, and it was, it was.

It was incredibly tough.

Yeah.

You say there was times in there.

So like when you first took the role that people were telling you not to because you're part of this club from the ground up, essentially, your agents telling you, maybe this is the time to move on.

Do you ever look back at those times with any regret for not doing those things?

Or do you.

Are you happy with how it played out?

No.

Because who knows?

Yeah, I could have moved on and who knows, things could be great.

Bigger budget, you know, because I proved when I went with Chelsea, I took them from near relegation to title channels and most debuts they'd ever had.

So I'd never had that opportunity to work with bigger budgets.

So you don't know.

But no regrets at all.

Because I know who I am as a person.

I know what's important to me.

And I can honestly say this, that if I'd gone at that point and went to a club with bigger budget and had success, I still would have felt that I was letting the Wimbledon fans down.

And those 18 years of relationships I built.

And don't get me wrong, when results turned and we couldn't win, you get fans who don't want to look at the narrative of what has happened and they come for you and they're having a go at you.

And it can be hurtful, but I don't care about that, is I love the club.

There's people there that I've got so much respect for and for me as a person to.

And this is the first time I ever really spoke about this, you know, so when I left and there were certain things or when I got sacked, there were things, obviously you're not Happy.

But I would never air anything in public because again, at the time people were trying certain things.

The club had to raise money, which we did.

That was a thing.

They'd never sold a non academy player until I was manager ever.

So they'd never made any money from sales, they'd only ever sold academy players.

And in the period I was there and just after, because of players I brought in, they did like nearly 4 million pound, which for a club of their size was massive.

So.

But no, I don't, weirdly, I don't regret it because I was true to myself, true to what I believe in.

Yeah.

And you know, success and money doesn't ever override how you are as a person and what you believe in.

And then when we had to go see the surgeon in the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, it was me mum, me dad, the Derby physio and myself, we were all sitting in an office and to this day it's like I remember it word for word, like my parents can still remember the name of the doctor.

And he walked into the room, he sat down at his desk and then he picked up a model heart and he said, mark, your heart is three times the size of what it should be for someone of your age and if you don't get an operation done this year, you're gonna die.

And it was at that point it didn't seem real, like nothing felt real to me, like it was almost kind of like a, you can't be speaking to me.

So me being the naive 16 year old asked, can I still play football?

And he said to me, look, Mark, you'll probably be lucky to play down the park with your friends than getting back to a professional standard.

Professional standard, he said, takes a lot of physical, physical fitness and with this operation there's not a guarantee that you'll ever get back playing again.

You might never play again.

And that was the news that like broke me as a 16 year old to think I'll never get to do it again.

And that's what I could never really understand because I made me debut.

It meant so much, it cemented this is, this is the job I want.

And to then get told that I'll never get to do it again.

Like the operation never registered to me, that, look, I need it done or I will die.

So we went through the different procedures that can be done, which was there was one where they can swap the valves around with the lung valve and the heart valve so it's still your same tissue, but in five to ten years you'll need another one.

There was a prosthetic pig skin valve which meant there's no guarantee that it will take to your body and your body will accept it.

It could last you a year to a maximum of five years.

But he said there's no guarantee in between that.

He said it could go after 18 months because we got told there was a girl gymnast who had that operation similar to me the previous year and her valve lasted her 14 months and she had to go in and have another one.

So there was not a guarantee on that or else the tord option was having a metallic valve.

And the metallic valve meant I'd never get to play football again.

I'd be on blood thinners for the rest of my life.

But it was a guarantee that everything would be okay.

So I asked the option of going, well, which one will give me a slight chance at trying to be a footballer?

And we spoke about the prosthetic pigskin valve and without hesitation that was the one I went for because it was the only thing that gave me that chance of going, you might play again.

And that was for myself.

Doctors again told me I'd probably never play again.

And again my parents were supportive, like they never questioned me and go mark, are you sure about this?

It was always, well look, this is the way we're going and this is what we're doing.

And I remember I went in for the operation, it took six and a half hours long and that would have been probably September, October time 2009.

And I had the operation, it was a success.

But at that time I remember three of my teammates came up to visit me in the hospital and it was when they left, I remember I sat there in the room and I cried to me mam.

And I was like, why did this have to happen to me?

Why is this me?

Like everything was going so well.

It's always me that ends up in all these horrible situations.

And I remember I bought into tears and I was only 16 asking these questions and I was like, I don't want, I don't want this anymore.

And you just break into like you just kind of have those breaking points.

And when I had the operation, Darby sent me home for three months until the January but again Derby and noise of Clough to like as a club gave me a chance at a career and gave me a chance at life.

And Nigel Clough offered me a new three and a half year deal after open heart surgery to give me the opportunity to try and get back fit who if it wasn't for him, I probably would have never had a career because clubs handle it differently for whatever reason.

And I was just lucky to have these people and that club at the time to look after me.

And I went back to Dublin and again, you have Noise of Clough on the phone, which is why I always say he's a massive part of what my career was and even me life, that he was on the phone to me family, making sure they're okay.

He's on the phone to me making sure I'm walking each day and doing what I need to be doing and if I'm okay and if everything's.

If my family need anything and that you just don't get with a lot of people.

And it made me want to get back and play for Derby that little bit more, and it made me want to get back and play for noise and that little bit more.

So I had that fire in my stomach.

So by the time January came, I flew back to Derby.

And over that time we started walking in the snow.

And then we started, like light jogging.

And we're keeping.

We're keeping our eye on my heart rate through a watch on a heart rate belt.

And again, it was all new for.

For Darby physios.

And the fitness goes like, how do you rehab a heart?

Like, they just looked at it and thought, well, we have to just do it in.

In a way of how do you get somebody fit who's not fit?

So you do light jogs and then you'll walk, your heart rate will come up a little bit and you walk again.

And we just done that for week after week after week.

And that process was long and I had little doubts in my mind, but not a lot of this might never happen because in the distance or across the field from me is all me ex teammate, all me teammates playing and training like everything's okay.

And I'm thinking, my fitness isn't that.

And again, I'm comparing myself to them thinking, I want to be back there training and I can't.

And this might never happen.

But again, I just had so many people around me saying, mark, we go again, Mark, everything will be fine.

And when you get back playing.

And I always remember it was always the saying of, but when you're back there, it'll be all worth it.

And when you're back, there was never a doubt of anybody saying, mark, this might not actually happen.

And it was only when we went back to the hospital a couple of months after January, I had to do a fitness test.

So their fitness test for the general public is walk on a treadmill and just walk.

Torn her up a little bit, walk again.

And they kept trace of my heart rate.

They kept traces of everything.

They said, mark, like, whatever you're doing, keep doing it.

Because he said, you are like streets ahead of where you should be.

Which then gave me the confidence of going, oh, actually, I am doing really well.

Rather than comparing what I'm doing to the teammates, I actually looked at and thought, I'm actually doing really well here.

Like, I'm going in the right direction.

And again, we just carried on with the same process.

And fortunately enough, I got myself back playing by April time for Derbys under 18s, and my fourth game was against Manchester United in the Academy.

My dad got to watch on the TV back at home on mutv and we got to see that everything was worthwhile.

And my dad was more nervous than I was because he wanted to see, is Mark going to be the same player?

Is he?

Is.

Is everything going to be okay?

And I always remember him telling me that he seen me win me forced header and throw myself in front of the force ball.

And he thought to himself, yeah, Mark's okay.

And he could sit back and relax.

Nothing's changed.

And that for me, when I got to do that and the ball hit me in the chest and I just felt, yeah, I'm back.

And with that last clip comes the end of the episode and also the end of 2025.

Like I said at the start, it's been a really wonderful year.

And looking back, I can see the improvements I've made, the changes I've made, the growth that's happened, and none of that is possible without people listening, giving me feedback.

So if you are a regular listener, I'd love to hear from you.

You can reach me on Instagram @lonelychapter podcast.

But, yeah, all I would ask again at the end of this episode is that you follow or subscribe to the show if you haven't already.

Again, it really helps the show grow.

It feeds the algorithms and all that stuff that's too technical for me to understand.

But otherwise, as 2025 comes to a close, I wish you well, and I wish you all a happy new year.

And let's see what 2026 has in store for us.

Thank you for listening.

Stay curious and I will see you in 20.

20.