Meet the Mancunian - Christmas Special - 5 things my podcast taught me

Christmas Bonus 2022: 5 things my podcast taught me

Intro

For this Christmas special, I wanted to share five things that my podcast Meet the Mancunian taught me.

Lesson #one about the Mancunian spirit. My first guest, Diana Bowden, introduced me to the Mancunian spirit in her own words.

Diana Bowden: What I love about Manchester and being a Mancunian is just our spirit. And we're fierce, you know, and we will stand up. And going back to Peterloo, and, you know, the way that the Suffragette movement was, was very strong in Manchester. There's loads of times when Manchester stood up for itself.

Lesson #two, play to your strengths. If you can't run a marathon, write poetry to fundraise. My guest, Anthony Parker, a school teacher, and a poet, talks about fundraising for different homelessness charities here.

Anthony Parker: I post a lot of my poems on Twitter and obviously hearing about issues such as homelessness and the food bank crisis in the country. I'm not the most sporty person. So other people do like things like marathons and half marathons, and I just thought, oh, why don't I see if I ask for requests for poems based on all manner of themes, just to see if people would sponsor me for doing that. And it went from there and I posted something on Twitter about it. And I got quite a lot of likes and responses from it.

So I started doing poems by request initially to raise money for Mustard Tree, which is a homelessness charity within Manchester. And later on, to do the same for FareShare as well.

Lesson #three. Together we do more. Risha Lancaster, Coffee4Craig talks about being part of the Homelessness Network and how that helps them serve the community better.

Risha Lancaster: We started talking to other charities of the grassroots organizations and formed Coalition of Relief, which was a load of us who got together and we decided that we wanted to start working with the council, start working with the police, and from there it kind of progressed. The Homelessness Partnership was formed. All the charities started working together with the council and we started to, chat to the council and say that we needed something in the evenings to offer to people. And somewhere where we could start sort of collating information about people who were on the streets, start working with the council and start working with all the all the charities.

Lesson #4: Be quirky, be unashamedly you, and find your own angle. Timeline therapy from Katy Branagan, forest therapy from Natalie Rossiter and forest bathing from Gaynor Mullin.

Katy Branagan: Timeline therapy was devised in the mid-eighties, and it's a combination of techniques used in hypnotherapy and techniques used in neurolinguistic programming, coaching now, which is commonly known as NLP. And NLP - a lot of it is about how you speak to yourself, how the words that you use, So those two things were sort of combined to give you timeline therapy, which helps eliminate negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt by going back to the root cause of when you first really felt angry or sad, or whatever the emotion is that you're dealing with.

And it can also help with any self-limiting beliefs, and limiting decisions. So many people, women in particular are notoriously bad for going, well, I'm not worth it. Why should I do that? Oh, I don't believe in myself, so why should anybody else believe in me? And I was, I was one of those people that I really didn't like myself. I didn't believe in myself. I didn't think it was worth anything. Because of timeline therapy, I now know I am worth something and I do believe in myself. And that's where I want to help women, help them get to places.

Natalie Rossiter: So the forest therapy came about from sort of through the mindfulness and then doing some mindful walking, kind of learning about walking meditation. It came through that and then taking clients for sessions outside when some people found that they couldn't kind of open up in a small space and that kind of thing. And so I started to feel again through my own experience, oh, there's something in this nature connection. And then, so I just started looking it up and sort of reading and researching around it.

I discovered that it's a whole thing and it has this name and, you know, forest bathing is something that's been really well researched. So it came from Japan, as a formal practice. I mean, it's, it's global. It's something inherent in all human beings. So there's a, something called the biophilia principle, which EO Wilson proposed. And it just, we know it, it just means it's a human being's innate tendency to want to connect with all living things, you know? So when a child bends down to look at a flower or collects a leaf or a conquer or something like that's biophilia, you know, that we just, we want to connect with other living things, animals as well as and so it is across the world.

Everyone sort of does forest bathing. I always say that at the start of my forest bathing sessions.

Lesson #5: Life takes a squiggly path. We've got a postman who turned community worker, got a receptionist who turned CEO, and a security guard who became an artist.

John Swallow: I didn't like working as a postman, basically, and I got very bored. I found it very boring. It was the same thing every day over and over again. But I had a friend who worked for the Woodcraft Folk, which is like the alternative scouts and brownies, if you like. They were very outdoors-based, very political, and very environmentally focused. The Woodcraft Folk, and she worked for them and she was taking a group of older teenagers to Edinburgh for a week camp, and she asked me to drive the minibus.

And I didn't have any time off work to give, so I took a week sick and drove this minibus with my friend and all these young people, 20 and camped out with them for a week, and it was the most fun I have ever, ever had. I think I was about 20 at the time, and it was just a breath of fresh air in terms of a completely different field of work.

So after enjoying that so much, one of my friends at the post office, I identified that there was a part-time youth and community workers course in Rochdale where I lived.

Yvonne Hope: It was good for me because I knew nothing. I was going into a sector I knew nothing about, and I was literally like a sponge. I wanted to learn everything. I was probably really annoying to work with because I was always asking questions and people were always thinking, goodness, how could she not know that? And then I was saying, well, I can tell you all about warehousing and I can tell you all about e-commerce, but I don’t know anything about helping people.

So it was amazing. Very quickly. The lady I went to work for, who's now our head of fundraising said, you're not really a receptionist, are you? And she said, well, you be the office manager.

Outro

I hope you've enjoyed listening to the Meet the Mancunian podcast. It's now in season four. There are lots of inspiring guests who featured on the podcast, and I hope the lessons they share, the challenges they've overcome and the passion they display really helps you and motivates you to follow your own dreams.

If the podcast has been of any help at all, please do reach out. I'd love to hear from you. You can do so on the Meet the Mancunian website, www.meetthemancunian.co.uk. You can do so on my social media. You can leave me a voice message, leave me a review. I'll be very grateful for any feedback at all.

If you're celebrating Christmas, I'd like to wish you and your loved ones a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. If you're celebrating Hanukah, I'd like to wish you a happy Hanukah, and if you're just celebrating the holidays, happy holidays to you. Should you not be celebrating at all, here's to new beginnings, and I hope 2023 brings you a great new start in life.

Thank you so much for listening. Bye-bye.