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Ep. 48: Bullying, Body Image, Social Media and Stigma as a Teenager
139 Plays4 years ago
In this episode Helen Wills talks to social media guru Nickie O'Hara about her experiences of bullying as a teenager. Shockingly, Nickie was first picked on by a teacher, and the social stigma went from there.
Nickie is now also a running mentor, and told me about how being athletic as a teenager led to her having some body image issues, and how she dealt with them at the time.
We discuss how different parents handle bullying and friendship issues when their kids are teenagers, and the pros and cons of teens using social media.
It's a heartwarming and reassuring conversation about how friendships change over the years. If this is you now, Nickie says you will get through it.
Where to find Nickie
- @nickieohara on Twitter and Instagram
- Read her blog TYPECAST
- Listen to running podcast The First 10 Minutes Are The Worst
- Listen to her radio show Something for the Weekend on Ribble FM
We also talk about other accounts @pinkoddy and @stephstwogirls.
More teenage parenting tips from Helen Wills:
Helen wills is a teen mental health podcaster and blogger at Actually Mummy a resource for midlife parents of teens.
Thank you for listening! Subscribe to the Teenage Kicks podcast to hear new episodes. If you have a suggestion for the podcast please email teenagekickspodcast@gmail.com.
There are already stories from fabulous guests about difficult things that happened to them as teenagers - including losing a parent, becoming a young carer, and being hospitalised with mental health problems - and how they overcame things to move on with their lives.
You can find more from Helen Wills on parenting teenagers on Instagram and Twitter @iamhelenwills.
For information on your data privacy please visit Podcast.co.
Please note that Helen Wills is not a medical expert, and nothing in the podcast should be taken as medical advice. If you're worried about a teenager, please seek support from a medical professional.
Podcast produced by James Ede at Be Heard production.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Teenage Kicks podcast where we take the fear out of parenting or becoming a teenager. I'm Helen Wills and every week I talk to someone who's been through something difficult as a teenager but come out the other side in a good place and has insight to offer to others who might be going through similar.
Meet the Guest: Nikki O'Hara
00:00:37
Speaker
Today's episode, I'm talking to Nikki O'Hara. Nikki is the writer of award-winning parenting and lifestyle blog, I Am Tightcast, which is how we met in the early days of blogging. She's also the presenter of Saturday Lunchtime Lifestyle Show on Ribble FM, Something for the Weekend.
00:00:57
Speaker
and has her own running and motivation podcast, the first 10 minutes are the worst, which is such a great title because it's absolutely the truth every time I run. Nikki is a mentor for Couch to 5K and beyond, and I'm going to quiz her for tips later, having fallen very much back onto the couch recently myself.
Teenage Challenges: Body Image and Bullying
00:01:20
Speaker
Nikki is going to talk to us about her experiences as a teenager of
00:01:27
Speaker
body image issues and bullying as a result. Nicky, welcome to the podcast. It's so good to be chatting to you today. I'm over excited. Me too. And please, can you follow me around or at least do me a show I don't because I love that intro. I need something like that for my radio show.
00:01:50
Speaker
Nicky and I have not spent much time together, have we? But we've spent, it feels like a lifetime because we've been on Twitter chatting to each other. I think probably you were one of the very first people that I ever had a Twitter conversation with like 11 years ago. I was going to say it's probably about 11 years since I joined Twitter and it was just at the boom of mommy blogging.
00:02:13
Speaker
which is where our community is, where we met within the community. And yeah, I was just thinking when I knew I was going to be recording with you today, I just was thinking back about who was around at that time. And it's so wonderful to see there's still a lot of what I call the OGs, the
00:02:33
Speaker
the original gang or the original girls who are still blocking, still very successful, who have gone on to do absolutely amazingly great things, yourself included. It just shows that it wasn't a fad, it wasn't a phase. In many ways, the people who were writing back then and who are still writing now have changed the world.
00:02:56
Speaker
Oh, I love that outlook. You're right. It's true. And mummy-blogging, I remember everybody being a little bit, ooh, I can't call myself a mummy-blogger. It's a massive thing now, people make livings out of mummy-blogging. So it's not something to be sneered at, is it? No, I think we were ahead of our time a little bit. I think it's more accepted now with the influencer phase and the fact that, and I just think that's because social media is more accessible.
00:03:24
Speaker
and the fact that people are more willing to read things online or feel other people's opinions online and maybe have a discussion rather than arguments about it.
Impact of Social Media on Teens
00:03:37
Speaker
I can go into the other side of things, which is the very negative side of it, but I always try and find the positive out of it. And I really do think that we laid the baseline for all of that.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, oh, totally. And actually, I have this discussion with people all the time, because there's a tendency, and I know you'll get this too, for parents of slightly younger children, and by younger, I mean, younger than our children, you've got adults for children, I've got teenagers, to be really scared of social media and only see the negatives. And of course, you need to be wary because kids,
00:04:11
Speaker
do mess up. That's the point of being a child, isn't it? And a teenager, and they do need guidance online. But there's so it's my experience so far, touchwood has been that they're savvy about it anyway, most of them know what they're doing, they're taught very well at school, as well as by parents about what they should and shouldn't do. And I feel really strongly that social media is a force for good amongst teenagers, rather than a negative thing.
00:04:42
Speaker
What's your view, Nikki? I think the media have a lot to answer for in what they focus on. I also think that, I mean, I come from an area that is considered to be a deprived area of the UK, such like lower wages, lower learning abilities. I'm stereotyping there, but it is a fact.
00:05:03
Speaker
And we're talking about seven or eight years ago now. I tried to go into schools to assist with education on social media because there was a lot of parents in this area who had only ever accessed social media through a phone screen.
00:05:20
Speaker
and they were literally just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. They believed everything they read on Facebook. They'd not had complete access to the internet like we had with laptops and a wider range of peer knowledge, you know, where we could get advice and information from. And they were, it was very much a blinkered view, you know, a tunnel vision view of what social media was like and what was acceptable on social media. People sort of like going, I'm going to bed now on Facebook. And then they get up in the morning, I'm getting up now.
00:05:49
Speaker
Or they'd have an out-and-out argument on Facebook. And they were living their lives through a very narrow social media outlook, if you will. And I knew there was more to it than that. However, there was not the funding or the capacity within schools at that time to go in and educate children. My children, as she said, are adults now. So when they first started accessing social media or mobile phone texting, let's go back that far. Do you know what I mean?
00:06:18
Speaker
They had a very slow introduction to it in a very similar way to the way we did. But I do see my grandchildren now, two of them have mobile phones, and everything is done on the phones, everything is done on the screen. They're carrying the world around in their pockets, and I don't think they realize the power behind that at the moment.
00:06:39
Speaker
And then you get, like I said, I didn't really want to go down the negative route, but you do get the trolling and the, you know, the bullying online and things like that. But I think education is key. Definitely. And knowing how much power is behind just those few little taps on your screen and how important it is to
00:07:00
Speaker
you know, to sort of like, what you put out there is permanent. I've always tried to impress that on my children. It doesn't matter whether you delete it, somebody might screen cap it. It's always still hidden online somewhere, whether you can access that or not, it will still be there. So whatever you put out there, make sure you're going to stand behind that in your own voice and in your own, you know, as a person, because
00:07:24
Speaker
It will always come back to you and I want the positive stuff to come back to me. Yeah, actually that's a really good point and I've perhaps got a slightly rosier view of it than the average parent. I forget that I was an early adopter of social media so I do understand it and I've brought my kids up to be involved in it and understand it. I think because of that we were in an extremely privileged position. Yeah.
00:07:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, you're right. But I do want to go back to the positives of it. I'm sure you found this as well. I do want to say my kids are so well educated on the world compared to how I was at the same age. And I think that's a generational thing. And I do think that's largely to do with the internet and the fact that they've got access to news and opinions
Teen Awareness on Global Issues
00:08:10
Speaker
and views. They've got such well developed
00:08:13
Speaker
arguments to things and they're so passionate about, I know they're idealistic at that age but they're so passionate about what they want to see in the world and I would never have had that motivation at that age. I mean I've taught my children and I'm going to teach my grandchildren that don't believe the first thing you read or hear.
00:08:31
Speaker
There are many, many resources in which you can access. So go and have a read of a few and then make up your own mind about it. But you're right. In this instance, I don't think it is a generational thing. I think in the last 100, 120 years, our world has changed dramatically. I mean, if you think back to the beginning of the 19th century, there was no television, there was the odd car.
00:08:54
Speaker
you know, nobody had ever flown across the Atlantic. And in a very, very short space of time compared to the rest of eternity, I don't want to get too deep. We've had just in the 20th and the 21st century, we've had so many inventions that are meant to improve our lives, whether they have or not, I don't know. But this is, you know, even from, like you say,
00:09:16
Speaker
our generation where we were at school and to our children's and our grandchildren's generation, the access to information has changed so much that it literally is available to anybody anywhere now.
00:09:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Oh, we said before we started this that we would probably go off at tangents and see where it led. I never saw this one coming, but I'm so glad we've had this discussion. We'll stick it in the show notes that this is also a conversation about the benefits and negatives of social media for teenagers, because it's all very valid. But Nikki, talking about people's opinions and trolling and negativity that happens to teenagers.
Nikki's Bullying Experiences and School Life
00:09:57
Speaker
none of us are any stranger to it. We've always, we've all had growing up our own self-esteem issues, our own insecurities, our own peer pressure issues. And it sounds like from what you told me before we started to discuss recording this episode, you have more of it than a lot of kids, shall we say, with bullying.
00:10:21
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about life growing up and what school was like for you to begin with and then how the negativity began? I was born and brought up originally in a tiny little village just outside of between Preston and Blackpool.
00:10:39
Speaker
It was where my father had been brought up and all my family, my father's side of the family. And my mum lived, had lived in a seaside town just outside of Blackpool, St. Hans. And when I was younger, I always went to the same primary school because we moved to St. Hans before I started school. And I had a lovely primary, Catholic primary school, small classes, probably about 20, 25 in a class.
00:11:06
Speaker
In fact, I'm still in touch with some of the people that I went to primary school. One of them is a blogger. Yeah, I'm just thinking of Steph Curtis. Steph Curtis, yes, Steph Tugels. I put a picture up on my Instagram the other day of us at my seventh birthday party. So it's lovely that I'm still in touch with some people from that time.
00:11:26
Speaker
So that was great. Things changed when I went to high school, because obviously you get influx and influence from other people who you've never met before. There were already friendship groups formed, but there's also the opportunity to form new friendship groups. And it was always accepted that I had an unusual surname, my grandfather's German.
00:11:44
Speaker
And a quick overview of our family history is my grandfather was a prisoner of war in the Second World War. He was shut down and held at a prisoner of war camp just outside Preston where my grandmother worked. She had been, her husband had left her just before the war. He was called absconded, not absconded. Anyway, he'd done a disappearing act and left her as a single parent with two children, which was absolutely unheard of in the, you know, in the forties.
00:12:12
Speaker
When she taught my grandfather English with children's ABC books and comics in exactly the same way that we teach our children to speak. They fell in love. It was the war. They couldn't really do anything about it, but he came to look for her and he came back for her after he was allowed when he got transported back to Germany. He made the journey back to England and then my dad and my uncle were born. But yeah, it was
00:12:37
Speaker
And then they set up base in the village that I was born and brought up in. And it's a love story, but it means that I have a German surname. And it was unusual. It wasn't the usual Smith or Jones. I immediately stood out from the crowd and
00:12:55
Speaker
11 and 12 year olds can be quite you know nasty about little things like that especially when and this was another thing my dad had to come and help me fight a couple of my battles and I didn't really want it to happen but we had an elderly teacher
00:13:10
Speaker
who taught us craft design and technology. One of my favourite subjects, absolutely loved it. And he remembered the war and he absolutely took the mick out of me because of my surname. And that's more or less where it started and of course the kids latch on to that.
00:13:28
Speaker
That was a teacher. Yeah. And we're talking about the eighties. So it's not as if that teacher would then have been marched out and, you know, sort of like lost his job or anything like that. No, all sorts of things happened, didn't it? People would be horrified, but I remember very clearly our head teacher, who actually later in life was taken to task by authorities for various things, used to dish out the slipper, used to take a plimsole off basically and hit people with a plimsole.
00:13:58
Speaker
Well, I mean, it wasn't unusual for a board duster to be wanged across the beam. Somebody literally picked up by their collar and dragged out into the hallway. We had a cane at our school.
00:14:14
Speaker
And you think you talk about this now as though it's the, you know, it's the most natural thing in the world and it was accepted back then. I'm not saying it was the right or wrong thing. And maybe it was I don't I remember it was mainly lads. I don't want to be, you know, sort of like gender specific when it comes to this, but it was mainly lads that got sent for the cane. And I even now I can't remember any behavior that would have warranted to happen in today's world.
00:14:41
Speaker
No, same, exactly the same. I was talking to one of my guests. I can't remember who now in my ADHD series. Looking back to my primary school days, there were a couple of people who I look at now and think, that poor kid had a learning difficulty for whatever reason. But that kid spent most of his or her time sitting outside in the corridor.
00:15:07
Speaker
in the teacher's office, getting the cane or the plimsoll, or stood in the corner of the room facing the wall. Be singled out. It's barbaric. Yeah, being singled out. So you were singled out then, and by a teacher?
00:15:24
Speaker
So of course, like I say, children latch onto that type of behavior because they see it as it being okay because the teacher said it so the kids can say it. And I learnt to deal, I mean, it was my name. I learnt to deal with it. I learnt to ignore it. I had a good friendship group that helped me try to get through it. But it was always pretty difficult. I always knew that somebody wouldn't be able to pronounce my surname and I'd have to either explain how to pronounce it or I would always have to spell it out to somebody.
00:15:52
Speaker
And it became, you know, it was inbred into me because it just came past my natural life. But like I say, the kids, rather than anything being, you know, sort of like a racist, they would just literally pick on me because I had a German surname. There wouldn't be any other reason for it. So
00:16:14
Speaker
you know it was a difficult time so I tried to channel my energies into other stuff like athletics and things like that but then you know we were talking about body image issues and that's where those started because I was so athletic and my body developed differently so I had quite a boyish
00:16:33
Speaker
had quite a boyish body, so I was quite flat-chested. So that became a source of ridicule. Don't get me wrong, I did not get into fights or anything like that, and it wasn't every single day, but just those little chips.
00:16:49
Speaker
those little knocks, whether it be once a month or once every couple of months, just take it out of you. And you're not that person anymore. Once somebody said something, it will always stay with you. And even now I can remember some of the stuff, you know, it was like I say, I mean, I don't even think if I went back to those people now, I don't think they would realize that what they said one day in, you know, in December 1985, I stayed with me.
00:17:18
Speaker
all these years later. I could still name the people that did it. It's so odd, the stuff we forget and then the tiny little things that were just throw away comments that stick with you forever. I always still think of myself as having a big bottom.
00:17:37
Speaker
And I know that I don't technically, but I think that because my best friend was skinnier than me. I was two years older than her, so I was further developed than her. And she once said, and I can picture it now, we're at the back of our house. We had a garage at the bottom of the garden, stood outside the garage, and she said, God, haven't you got a big bum?
00:17:58
Speaker
And I was wearing a new pair of cords. Cords were all the rage. I was wearing a new pair of pale pink cords and I never wore them again and my mum couldn't understand why and I wouldn't tell her, but I'm 54 now. And I remember that now and I was probably 12 at the time. I was just going to say how old were you then because 12 is a massively impressionable age anyway, isn't it?
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah, isn't it nonsense? But people probably don't mean it. Were there any, were there people who did mean it? Were there people who were being mean?
00:18:30
Speaker
Probably a couple. I mean, there was one girl who always needed to be the center of attention. And she was consistent in the way in which she spoke to me, the tone of her voice, the things she found that she knew would be cutting and knew would be upset. Weirdly, this is a massive memory in my head.
00:18:54
Speaker
I got a new pair of shoes for my, it was either my 13th or 14th birthday. And I wanted to wear them for school. My mum was like, you're not wearing them for school. First of all, they're not uniform. Second of all, you might scuff them up, you know, whatever. And they were a casual pair of shoes and they were bright red. And I wanted to show them off. This sounds ridiculous, but can we remember, please? This was mid 80s. Oh yeah, I had bright green. Yeah. So I went.
00:19:23
Speaker
She relented because it was my birthday and I went to school in these shoes and I was ridiculed from the second I got on the school bus to the second I got off the school bus in the evening by this one girl who sang, is it David Bowie's? Put on your red shoes and danced the blues. She sang that at me all day because she decided she didn't like those shoes and I shouldn't have been going to school in them so nobody else was allowed to like them.
00:19:50
Speaker
God right and did your mum say because this is what my mum would have said and my and I now want to say to my kids I have to check myself although I do still spit it out occasionally did she say she was probably just jealous?
00:20:07
Speaker
Do you know what? I never told my mum. No, you don't. I didn't want my mum to say, I told you so. Or I didn't even want the sympathy from my mum, because it was my decision at the end of the day. Even back then, that's how stubborn I was. If I'd done something, I felt that I had to accept the repercussions, which is why I always struggled with people who bullied anybody.
00:20:33
Speaker
you know, not even necessarily just me.
Personal Responsibility and Resilience
00:20:36
Speaker
And like I said, I still to this day don't think I was bullied as much as other people were or I could have been. It was like I said, it was usually the same couple of people and it was more when I went to high school. I can't remember anybody being nasty to me when I was at primary school because of my name. I mean, you had fall ins out with your friends and everything, didn't you? But
00:20:58
Speaker
So yeah, I'm a big believer in my actions, you know, have consequences, and I need to be able to deal with those consequences, but I learnt it at a very early age.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough, isn't it? But I actually do think, and this is why I wanted to have this conversation with you, because I do think this will resonate with a lot of girls who listen. Well, boys as well, boys have body image issues as well. But I think it's really quite common because you're so hypercritical of yourself as a teenager and you desperately want to fit in.
00:21:31
Speaker
I mean we all quite like being different and our own characters eventually but at that time you need, I believe it's an evolutionary thing, it's a survival instinct, you just want to fit into the crowd because that's safety.
00:21:48
Speaker
Well, sorry to interrupt you. The thing I struggled with was the fact that it was something I couldn't change. It wasn't my hair that I could cut or I could grow. It wasn't an item of clothing that I could discard or I could be more on trend with. It was my name.
00:22:06
Speaker
And it was something that at 13, 14 years old, I couldn't change, even if it had wanted to. And that's why, you know, I got into all the stuff which took me away from that feeling and took me away from that crowd, if you will. But it caused all the problems, like I said, with the body image side of it. And you mean the athletics and the sport. Yeah. Yeah. So what impact do you think this had on you over those years in terms of body image?
00:22:36
Speaker
From the athletics or from the bullying? Well, I guess the bullet whichever I'm thinking of the bullying because for me that's always the thing These are all personal aren't they and I was a little bit bullied not for body image Although I had my own issues there. I was bullied for being a SWAT because I got I got good grades And it was margin, you know, it was very low level. It was very tame. I just wasn't popular because I was clever and
00:23:05
Speaker
I feel I can almost physically feel how that made me feel even now the shame and embarrassment and awkwardness of not fitting in. That's why I keep going on about it. Did you feel that or did it affect you in a different way?
00:23:20
Speaker
It did affect me because I always felt that the people who were bullying me had this larger group of friends. And if one of those friends would seem to befriend me or be associated with me in any way, that person would come and drag them back.
00:23:39
Speaker
So I was never allowed to be part of that friendship group unless I was invited in. And that was really difficult because all these people, although I hadn't been to school with them initially at primary school, we all lived within a few miles radius of each other. So there was a school bus that came to pick us up. So the people that this little core group of bullying people, if you will, if you want to call them, their school bus
00:24:04
Speaker
was the furthest point away from school and I was picked up halfway along the route. So they were always on the bus first. So they were always on the back seat. They were always, you can't sit there. We don't want you near us. So I just, you know, from that point, just stepping on the bus in the morning, I had to be aware of my surroundings and who I was going to upset. And there was two buses that came along. If I saw somebody on the bus,
00:24:29
Speaker
that I knew I was going to have this negative interaction with, I'd wait for the second bus to come along. Now I can talk about it and back then I don't think I realised how it was affecting me.
00:24:44
Speaker
It's only now that, you know, when you think back and you have your own children and your own grandchildren and you can see little things and something will trigger a memory and you go, I wonder how I dealt with that when I was, oh, I remember how I dealt with that when I was a kid. You know what I mean? And it's, it's, it's just seeing a new generation and you remembering being that age, because I know we're all old, but we still definitely remember being those ages. You know what I mean? Very poignantly. Yeah. Yes.
00:25:12
Speaker
So yeah, it was, like I say, it was just little things. And I'll say it again, all those little knocks, those little chips. I mean, none of us are perfect. We all need that, you know, occasionally we need somebody to tell us something to bring us down a peg or two, but it's those little dents and those little scuffs. Yes, they make us the person we are now, but it's hard work battling through that. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:36
Speaker
I try to remember that as a parent because, let's face it, it doesn't matter who you are. You could be the most popular girl in school. You still are going to feel those self-esteem issues. In fact, that's, I think, sometimes the reason why you become the bully and what I was alluding to with the potential jealousy over the red shoes. Like my mum would never let me get away with where it goes. It's not fair. And I do try
00:26:04
Speaker
to say to my kids when they come home with somebody said or did something or other, if I know that person,
00:26:13
Speaker
It's easier because I'm able to try and help them understand where it came from. But if I don't know them, I'll always say, well, look, do you remember when someone said this to you and we agreed? It was probably because she was feeling insecure herself and felt the need to big herself up, felt the need to reestablish a position as top dog or whatever, because she's feeling insecure about something. It's probably that kind of thing. I try to put it into context, but I do feel like, and this is how it was dealt with by my mum,
00:26:41
Speaker
I do feel like a lot of parents just don't, they either don't get it or they just take it so personally that the reaction is either angry and negative about that child as well.
00:26:56
Speaker
that friend who's been mean or dismissive. My mum was dismissive. My mum was very, oh, don't worry. It's, you know, they're probably just jealous. It's the fight or flight method, you know, mechanism in this, isn't it? You either fight back or you leave it.
00:27:14
Speaker
It was the brush off though that I always got from my mum. I never felt like it mattered. And it's interesting because in recent years or in years since, she's described incidents that I don't even remember that pained her. She quite often tells this story. I was never very good at tennis, but my two best friends were. So I joined the same tennis club and tried to play with them. And my mum tells this story that we were walking
00:27:43
Speaker
walking home from the tennis club and she was walking with another mum behind us all and I was walking on my own and my two friends were walking way up ahead and she said I just thought those little bitches and I'm like why could you not have said that to me at the time? I would have felt less alone maybe. Yeah yeah but again that's just like you know the protection that mums tries to give as well isn't it? Yeah yeah
00:28:08
Speaker
It's so, so hard, but I do think it's important to take all of that seriously. Well, we've read the parenting manuals these days, haven't we? It was a different era. We've rewritten them, basically. Rewritten them, yeah. They'll get rewritten again for the next generation.
00:28:29
Speaker
Often, Nicky, with body image issues, I have people talking to me about how it affected what they did physically, whether they over-exercised or over-ate or under-ate. Did you have any complications like that? I didn't. Do you know what? I was so lucky in the fact that because then I turned to athletics and I was... I don't want to get big-headed when I say this, but I was a champion sprinter for my area.
00:28:55
Speaker
and I did some long jump as well. I didn't even have a regulated diet. My mum was an at-home parent right throughout my childhood because she had an illness that prevented her from working.
00:29:11
Speaker
So, I was lucky that my meals were made for me. They were good, healthy, home cooked meals. We were in a very privileged situation because of that. My dad went out to work and I was in, at the time, a stable household. My parents were in a stable relationship. My dad had a fairly good job and me and my sister were brought up in a very happy and very loving household.
00:29:35
Speaker
The food side of things, I wasn't affected at all. And especially with training to be an athlete, I didn't find myself for having to go, right, I need to have such as, you know, like now, if you were an athlete, you'd have a food plan and things like that. So even if I did, I don't remember any of it. So I was either shielded from it or my mum was already doing the right stuff with that kind of thing.
00:30:03
Speaker
So with any eating disorders, no, I was fine because I was literally eating and then I was running it off and then I was eating and then I was running it off. So I was naturally thin. And like I say, with the way in which I trained, because I did a little bit of gymnastics at one point as well, I just had a very boyish figure again. And that was another thing that people, like I mentioned earlier, another thing people could pick up, you know, pick on before.
00:30:26
Speaker
because I wasn't developing in a very feminine way and things like that. And I had short hair as well. But the thing is, the way I battled that in my own head was the fact that, well, if I had big boobs and they were bouncing all over the place, I won't be able to run 100 meters in 12 seconds.
00:30:47
Speaker
which is what I wanted to do. That's where I was always trying to better myself. At least I'm streamlined. That was the only way that I got a positive side of things from that is because I know that my body was the shape it was because it was helping me be better at something that I loved.
00:31:09
Speaker
That's so good. You sound like you had your head screwed on even at such a young age. The thing is though, I had a really good trainer who was very positive in what he said to me. He was a positive force in my life.
00:31:27
Speaker
when the switchover came from being a teenager with no direction to focusing on something that possibly would have got me quite a way down.
Athletic Pursuits and Setbacks
00:31:39
Speaker
I was actually heading towards the Olympics at one point. That was where my goal was. Amazing. For the 1992 Olympics is what my aim was. I'll come to that in a minute because that path didn't quite go the way it was supposed to go.
00:31:54
Speaker
So I had this goal and that's what helped me blank out all the rest. And like I say, he was a very positive force. He actually lived in the same village where I was living at the time as well. So when we didn't go down to the track, he would meet me on the playing fields
00:32:11
Speaker
with another girl who was doing some training as well. And we'd have additional training sessions there. So I didn't even have to go and hang out with anybody if I didn't want to, I could just go and say, you know, Brian, can we have another training session and we off we go. You know, so my focus changed.
00:32:27
Speaker
It's important to have something, isn't it? And actually what you described there is a life skill, I think, that you just learned quite young. Not to say that the bullying is a good thing and it got you there, but that, as you say, we get knocks and we learn from them and we become ourselves because of them. And that is a life skill because all through life, all of us are prone to comparing ourselves to other people who have different things than us. And the skill is in seeing the positives in what we've got.
00:32:55
Speaker
Mm, definitely. Absolutely. Tell us how that, how did that plan out then? What did happen over your later teens? So I was 16 years old. I had just left school. I was still training as an athlete. I was running for Lancashire at the time and I had been selected to go forward for England selection. And it was all, it was very much a process.
00:33:23
Speaker
And it was the last couple of weeks of August. I can't remember the exact date, but I was due to start college in the second week of September. And I had a Saturday job at a supermarket in the next town along. And I'd been doing some extra hours because it was the holidays and a little bit of extra money and what have you. But I was actually on my Saturday shift. And I'll never forget coming out of the supermarket, across the square, and there were some telephone boxes. And we were very mad. We didn't have mobiles back then.
00:33:53
Speaker
It was 1988 and I went into a telephone box. I rang my friends and I said, I'm just getting on the bus now. Now the bus only took 10 minutes. So I'm just getting on the bus now. It's 20 to six. I literally got to go home, take my uniform off. I will meet you to go to Kirk, which was another town in the opposite direction at six o'clock. Be at mine for six o'clock. I'll see you in 20 minutes. Put the phone down. I can remember opening the phone box.
00:34:22
Speaker
And I can't remember a thing after that. And apparently what happened was, where the phone boxes were, we're next to a bus stop. And I had to go across the bus stop, across the road to my own bus stop. But I'd walked out between two buses and I'd looked one way, looked the other. And as I was looking the other, I walked across the road, but a car had come from behind the bus out of a back alley and obviously accelerating and taking me over his bonnet.
00:34:50
Speaker
Apparently, like I said, I have to say apparently, because I heard all this in bits over the next two or three months, somebody had seen the accident. It was quite a busy town square, but somebody who'd seen the accident went to dance school with me.
00:35:05
Speaker
And she knew my phone. I don't even know how the heck she remembered the phone number, but she knew the phone number. So somebody had phoned the police. She phoned my parents to tell them what was going on. Instead of just in Nicola, getting knocked over in in Litham Square. And then when they put the phone down, that's when the police rang them. And I don't there's somebody must have given them my details. Somebody from school had seen the accident.
00:35:30
Speaker
And obviously I got whipped away in an ambulance, taken up to the local hospital, and I'd literally got away. And apparently I'd gone onto the car bonnet, I'd smashed the windscreen with my head, rolled back down the car bonnet and then skidded across the floor. And I'd taken all the skin off my knees and my legs, off my elbows, off my head, obviously got knocked out.
00:35:54
Speaker
But I was told by the doctors that the only reason I didn't break a single bone is because I'd been running and my body was conditioned. So weird. Anyway, I was off my feet for six weeks just to heal properly. And obviously because there was, you know, slight muscular damage. I had torn ligaments, but I've not broken any bones or anything like that. The only thing that was disappointing for me was the fact that that happened on the Saturday, on the Sunday I should have been at the England trials.
00:36:24
Speaker
Anyway, it wasn't to be. So it just never happened. It never happened. So I went back to a little bit of training after six weeks, just, you know, gentle walking and doing some exercises and things. Went back to running after six months. But by this time I discovered boys and smoking and drinking because I got six months off from training. You know, I was like, all my friends would be going, Oh, look at what you've been missing out. So.
00:36:52
Speaker
that was um yes i didn't go back to training properly and when i did go back to training i found that i was having pains in my knees so my training given me some exercises um to just like try and compensate for that and he said well look we'll just take it easy we'll take it you know take it as it goes and
00:37:12
Speaker
We just like did some on and off trail. I never went back to the track. I never got back to the track. So that was, I was 16 then. And then 18 months later, I met my now husband. Why? And the story unfolds. The story unfolds. And obviously, I met him, we had a baby and then we had two more babies. And then, you know, 30 years later, here we are. Yeah. So like I say, I,
00:37:40
Speaker
And I said it at the beginning, everything happens for a reason. I don't know what the reason was, but I wasn't destined to be an Olympic sprinter, let's put it that way. Nicky, I think you have clearly always had a really straightforward, helpful outlook on life because that is such a mature response.
00:38:06
Speaker
to something that could have absolutely devastated you and sent you down entirely the wrong track. Can I be totally honest that it did devastate me at the time, which is why I probably ended up getting drunk on a park at 16 years old with a cheap bottle of peach concord.
00:38:23
Speaker
I said she was down my spine now just thinking about it. But having said that, I did, a friend of mine was just like, didn't take me under her wing as such. But I went out and I did stuff that normal 16 year old teenage girls were doing. And it opened up a little bit of a new world to me and I'm like, this is what I've been missing. And because we'd then left school,
00:38:48
Speaker
People's attitudes changed as well. And I think, you know, once you break away from those friendship groups where maybe you were influenced, like you say, by somebody who had the biggest mouth or, you know, didn't care what they were saying or maybe had struggles in their own life and that's how they compensated for it. Once they had been taken away from that situation, those people had a different look at you as well.
00:39:09
Speaker
or me. And I had different relationships with those people who I'd been to school with. I went to college, I met new people, but then I left college and I went to work.
New Beginnings Post-Accident
00:39:22
Speaker
I only stayed at college for two months. It wasn't for me. And I got a job in the November. And this was all the crossover period between the accident in August, me starting college, and then me starting a job in November. And one of the girls, she's not mad at me saying this, so she listens then, Karen. One of the girls who was working at the place where I got a job, we were both there as trainees. So we got sent to college a couple of days. It was like a glorified YTS scheme. Yeah.
00:39:50
Speaker
we were subsidised. So we got the YTS wage, but we were subsidised with it as well. So we got a little bit more of a wage, which was fantastic. And Karen was one of the girls who I'd never gelled with at school. She was one of the girls who was in that group. She never actually was nasty to me, but she was within that group of people who I never really interacted with. And apparently, she told me this years after we started working with each other,
00:40:16
Speaker
She'd seen me turn up for the interview and gone, oh my God, I hope she doesn't get the job. Really can't be doing me working with her. And we became best mates for two years. Isn't it weird? And it's just have it. It's just being away from those school. School has a lot to answer for. I don't mean school in itself, but the set up and the situation that everybody, the melting pot that you're all thrown into. I've got exactly the same thing, not as close a friendship, but I'm in contact with all of those kids
00:40:46
Speaker
who were popular, who I thought didn't like me, now on Facebook. And I talked to them and they're lovely. There's one of them in particular. I'd said something about how I'd felt like I never fitted in at school on my social media. And she'd messaged me and said, God, I'm so sorry you felt like that because we all thought you were amazing. We just thought you were out of our league because she was smart. And I wanted to be like that.
00:41:15
Speaker
Isn't it a shame that teenagers can't articulate that at the time? Isn't it?
00:41:22
Speaker
The wheels would be much happier and a much better place. Yeah, any teenagers listening really need to try and bear that kind of thing in mind. All the people you think hate you don't hate you. Oh, Nikki, thank you so much for telling us that story. I had no idea about that accident or that you were on track to be an Olympic star potentially, but I do know that you have a brilliant life now and
00:41:45
Speaker
I'd love your outlook on things. Do you want to just tell people where they can find you a little bit about your running because you still run and I'm always inspired. In fact, you need to inspire me to get back off that flipping sofa. Well, I'm trying to inspire myself at the moment, which is why I've gone back to the beginning again. So I've run three half marathons now. Amazing. I was trying to work out how many people I've mentored over the course of the years.
00:42:14
Speaker
And I would say there was one group, I took 45 people out for a whole nine week session at one point. So if we say 30 people, four times a year, that's 120 people a year. And I was doing it on and off for five years. Yeah. Well, I'm more than that actually, Nicky, because you'd often post and talk running tips on your Instagram account where I follow you.
00:42:41
Speaker
So you and Joy, I saw the other day talking about running. Joy's a big runner on Instagram as well. Yeah. Nick, just give us those details, your Instagram account for anybody that is seriously interested in all the running tips.
00:42:58
Speaker
Well, let me caveat that with I'm a big depreciate, I depreciate myself quite a lot. And I think that if I tell people where I'm failing and where I want to improve and how I'm improving, that's probably the biggest cheerleader they can get. Exactly. Oh, that's what I need.
00:43:15
Speaker
I don't believe that you see all these influencer runners, and they are amazing, absolutely outstanding, but I can never achieve what they're doing. Because you're a normal runner, but that's what I want to see. That's what lots of people want to see. So, well, I just like, you know, like I said, I like to see people to see the real, you know, like the real landscape, if you will. So, my Instagram is Nickyohara. It's Nicky with an N-I-C-K-I-E, Ohara. All my socials are Nickyohara. Okay.
00:43:44
Speaker
Very easy to find. Yes, I will link all of those in the show notes. Thank you, thank you. And, you know, occasionally I talk a little bit about running on my blog, which is iamtypecast.com. You mentioned the podcast, the first 10 minutes of the rest. We haven't actually done anything on that for a while, just simply because we were finding it difficult to talk about running during Covid times, because we talk about how we felt during races, how we were doing with our training.
00:44:09
Speaker
You know, the nitty gritty behind getting race ready, personal feelings and things. And plus, I do it with a couple of co-hosts. And when you're not talking face to face, it's very difficult when you have a theme and it's two people talking about the same thing week in, week out.
00:44:26
Speaker
and you can't meet face to face. It can be quite difficult to find the thing, especially if it's a physical activity that you've got to go out and do and then that's taken away from you slightly.
00:44:42
Speaker
By all means, what I can do is I can send out, if you want to include it in the show notes, I'll send you the links to all the podcasts. I'll link to it anyway, because there'll be stuff historically that people might be interested in listening to. There's about 12 episodes out there that were really interesting.
00:44:58
Speaker
And your radio show, so how do people tune in if they want to hear more of you?
Nikki's Current Endeavors at Ribble FM
00:45:04
Speaker
Okay, so it's Ribble FM, which is a local community radio station where everybody who is a presenter is a volunteer. I have the Saturday lunchtime slot, 11 to 1. However, you can hear it via the Ribble FM.com website, or you can just ask your smart speaker to play Ribble FM.
00:45:24
Speaker
Lovely talking to you, Nikki. Thanks so much. Thank you for the offer of interview. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Ellen.
00:45:39
Speaker
If you've enjoyed the Teenage Kicks podcast, I would love it if you consider subscribing or giving me a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps other people to find these important conversations about teenage life. And if you know someone else who might get inspiration from this episode, please do share it with them.
00:46:01
Speaker
There are lots more episodes, so have a browse and see if anything else strikes a chord for your family. And if you have feedback or a suggestion for a future episode, please do email me on Teenage Kicks Podcast at gmail.com. I love to hear from my listeners, and I'm always looking for more stories to tell. There are more parenting teens tips on my blog, Actually Mummy, and you'll also find me talking about the teenage years on Instagram at I am Helen Wills.
00:46:31
Speaker
I'll put all the links in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. Come back next week when I'll be chatting to another brilliant guest about the highs and lows of Raising Team.