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FC20 Solo 2 - Career Progressions and Advice
34 Plays5 years ago
After many requests to cover this topic, Matt leads listeners through the progression of his career sharing many of the lessons he's learned along the way.
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Transcript
Introduction to FC2O Solo Episode
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Fc2
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Welcome to another edition of FC2O. This is an FC2O solo. And so I'm going to be talking you through career progressions and advice based on my own journey. And yeah, just really trying to share whatever I can with you that hopefully will be helpful in your own journey. And it's based on requests from my own website and from people that have commented on various podcasts so far.
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I hope you enjoy the show. Here we go.
Choosing Career Advice as a Topic
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Hello and welcome to our second edition of FC2O Solo. So this is me giving you actually some career advice and progressions. Now this is something that we did a topics poll on the FC2O podcast tab on the website and that poll is still there so if you'd like to contribute your own thoughts as to what you'd like me to talk about in these solo podcasts then by all means go on there.
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you can tick one of the categories or you can suggest your own category but this is the one that so far has had the most votes so that's why we're covering career advice and progressions today.
Childhood and Early Career Aspirations
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So now I thought the best way to start this would be to actually go into a little bit of my background which led me into my career and so I'm going to start out as a as a kid I was well and I still am to some degree a footballer
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And around 10 years of age, I was doing pretty well. I played with my local team and I got selected to play for the regional team. And I ended up playing with a whole group of very talented young kids, several of which were already playing for professional teams. And we made it to the county cup final. We won that. And of course, there are lots of scouts there.
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from the professional teams and again several of the my teammates got selected for those professional academy teams and I wasn't amongst that group and so I think probably by the age of probably 12 I almost I wouldn't say I gave up but I recognized that perhaps I wasn't going to make it as a professional footballer which probably was realistic but looking back maybe I sort of ducked out a little bit early but
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But what it made me do is it made me focus on what else could I do that would allow me to still work with professional footballers and get into football.
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considering, you know, physiotherapy, this kind of thing. And I actually, I think around the age of 14, you have to go through a process at school, which used to be called JigCal.
Discovering Osteopathy
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And I can't remember what JigCal stands for. I know Cal was computer assisted learning. But it was a whole process where you'd enter all of your sort of aptitudes and interests and so on. And it would suggest
00:03:36
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categories of jobs that might be useful for you and I had things like PE teacher and physical training instructor and I had actuary of all things because I quite like maths but I also had osteopath came up and I think maybe even physiotherapists as well but so that was the first thing that sort of set me off on the path towards becoming an osteopath and moving into the check system and so on.
Impact of Personal Loss on Career Choice
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So now in between times I experienced unfortunately a bereavement. My mum died when I was 13 and you know what that did for me I think was to also give me a sense of compassion for people that were unwell and to want to help you know to want to help people to
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remain healthy, to realise their potential as a human being and to move into that kind of health field which fitted nicely with my other aspirations to be involved with football. And also I think the other thing that it did was it made me quite early on consider life and the meaning of life, death of course as well, spirituality and so on.
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And so this reminds me of a quote from James Hollins, which he says that spirituality, when he's talking about spirituality, he says that religion is for people who don't want to go to hell and spirituality is for people who have been there.
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And I'm not trying to say that I suffered terribly because my father did an amazing job and we ended up with a step-family which was fantastic and supportive. But of course it's still an extremely sad event to go through early in your life.
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And I think it opened me up to the idea of spirituality, so I was always interested in that. So that was kind of set the stage, if you like.
Choosing Osteopathy over Other Fields
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And then going into my GCSEs, which is the exams we take here in the UK when you're 16, I took the various subjects that I selected there, the options, with a view to going into osteopathy or physiotherapy or chiropractic.
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and you know I looked into all of those and I went for interviews at all of the different colleges, investigated where I wanted to go and for some reason osteopathy seemed to stand out to me as something that had a little bit more magic than physiotherapy and I think perhaps my young
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mind in my young mind and still today you know it's an exciting prospect there's something that's a little bit unknown about osteopathic approaches and some of this kind of more more subtle approaches to rehabilitation and and optimizing health and so ultimately I ended up selecting that as my pathway to go down.
Education and Influences in Osteopathy
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Now
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At the time in the UK there were three primary schools that were offering osteopathic education and the primary one was the British School of Osteopathy which is now called the University College of Osteopaths or Osteopathy but back then that was the biggest college and that was the one I wanted to go to because most people I spoke to said that's the key one go to that one but there were other people that said well there's the European school in Kent
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And then there was also another third one, which I hadn't really heard of, didn't know much about, which was called the British College of Naturopathy and Osteopathy. So I sort of diligently went along to each of those interviews and was really sort of quite impressed with all of them. But the last one I went to was BCNO, British College of Naturopathic and Osteopathic Medicine. I recall sitting in the interview and the principal at the time, a guy called Dr. Drysdale, Ian Drysdale,
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He was explaining to me, in fact he asked me, so what do you know about naturopathy? And I really hadn't done my homework. So I was sitting there and I said, I'm not really sure, is it a bit like homeopathy? And he said, no, it's not homeopathy. He said, what it is, is it's looking at nature's ability to heal the individual. And he said, what we tend to use in naturopathy is this idea of the naturopathic triad.
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Mention this, I believe, briefly in the Panjabi's Model podcast I did, but I may do a full FC2O solo on the Naturopathic Triad because it's a profound tool to understand what's going on with your health and how to optimize the health of yourself and your clients and so on.
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But he said, imagine someone has had a car accident and maybe they've got a bad whiplash or something like that. And he said, so certainly we can work mechanically. So this is one corner of the triad. It's the biomechanics of the triad, biomechanics of the human body. He said, and that's where osteopathy really comes into its own. We can work with the joints that are tight, with the muscles that are spasms. We can help to improve the fluid dynamics in the area so we can drain the area when there's
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excessive inflammatory fluids and so on so we can help with the whiplash in this hypothetical patient using osteopathy but he said but the thing is is that you actually need collagen for example to repair the damaged tissues and so we make collagen using vitamin c and so if we haven't got vitamin c in the diet then we need to know how to help patients by encouraging them to eat appropriate foods that contain vitamin c and so on
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and he said so that's just one example and there's many other potential nutritional examples so that that sits in the other corner or one of the other corners of the triads which is the biochemical side and so the biochemistry of the body is important as well and he said the last corner of the triad is the emotional or the psychological side
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And he said, you know, of course, if you've had a car crash, well, then it's an emotional trauma. It's, you know, normally there's fear involved. There could be anxiety. If it was your fault, there may be some guilt involved. You may have hurt someone or damaged your car, damaged someone else's car. You may also be feeling angry if someone else drove into you. So this is an emotional component. If that isn't acknowledged and worked with effectively, then the patient may not fully recover as well.
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And so just in that interview, I completely switched my idea of going to the BSO and ended up going to the BCNO in North London.
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As I went through the training of course you're exposed to different people and one of my inspirations, one of the people that I could see was a real mover and shaker in that field of not just osteopathy but naturopathy and the manual therapies in general was a guy called Leon Chato and he had many books out and many advice sheets and so on. So I learned a lot from him even though he'd never actually taught me at the college but he was quite a strong influence in my thinking in those early days.
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Now another person who I actually had on the podcast a couple of weeks back and in fact before I move on to him I'm just going to mention that in a few weeks time I'm going to be interviewing Sasha Chato who is Leon's daughter who's similar age to me and she has been instrumental in taking over the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies which we're going to talk about a little bit later.
Challenges and Insights in Osteopathic Training
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and she also is a very accomplished individual in her own right so we're going to be talking about both her experiences of growing up as Leon's daughter and and all of the kind of challenges that he went through as not just you know an author and a practitioner but also as a thought leader and someone who was really trying to
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to change the field and get this naturopathic message out to the general public and to practitioners alike. So that's something to look forward to. But another big inspiration for me was Phil Beach and Phil really tapped into something that I think was you know ready to be awakened in me. I'd always had an interest in evolution and Phil took evolution as you're here. If you want to listen to his podcast I believe it was
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podcast number 12 that we did. And Phil uses evolution and also embryology to really understand how the body has both been shaped through evolutionary pressures and then how it's been built through embryological development. So he really captured my imagination and became a deep inspiration for me during my training. So those things kind of teed me up
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and you'll see how they they tap into other aspects of the career progressions that I went through and how this is going to link into the advice that I can offer you as we go. So my training was between 1993 and 1996 sorry 1997 and
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In 1996 I went to a conference as one of the osteopathic conferences here in the UK and two things happened actually first of all I remember taking a pee break so I nipped the toilets and I walked into the toilets there were three more senior older osteopaths at the urinals and there they are and they're all hunched over, kyphotic
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And I looked at them and I just thought, wow, if that's what osteopathy does to you, you know, I'm not sure I want to be an osteopath. I thought, this is not, this is not great. And anyway, that was just a thought that occurred to me. And sort of further down the line, I ended up doing a course at El Lederman's place, which was called Training the Osteopathic Athlete. And this was applying my check
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understanding to the field of osteopathy and how osteopaths can protect their own bodies when they're working. But anyway, the other thing that occurred at this conference was that I was handed a free copy of this new journal that was coming out which was headed up. The editor was Leon Chato, it was his baby essentially, and it was the journal of body work and movement therapies.
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this journal you know I remember reading it and thinking this is so refreshing because right around that time I was doing a lot of research for my thesis I was heading into my last year at the college and so you have to write your thesis it's a 10 to 12,000 word piece of research and
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You know, so I've been delving into a lot of these research papers and they are dry, they're hard work. You know, to try and find the treasure within the papers requires quite a lot of persistence in some cases. And, you know, I found them challenging to read. Fun in some ways, but with the Journal of Body Work, what I found was almost every article in that journal, every paper had something almost immediately applicable. And so, you know, I love the way that Leona put it together,
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What he had done, and I think this is a really important learning point, was he had, having been in the career and in the field that he'd been in for so many years and travelling the world as he did, he had met with many, many different people and many, many different disciplines. And what he had done was he had gathered together some of the very creme de la creme presenters
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to contribute to this journal. And so he used a case study, it was a regular feature, he would put together a case study and I remember one of them was about a doctor strain and I forget, I think maybe in a hockey player or something like this.
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And what he would do is he'd describe the whole scenario of the injury and the way the patient presented. And then he'd ask an osteopath to assess it and to write their kind of example of how they would deal with that situation. A chiropractor, a physiotherapist, a massage therapist, and perhaps a traditional Chinese medicine therapist. And I remember reading through it and thinking, well,
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You know, the way the osteopath is addressing this is nothing like the way I would do it. It seems like he's missing the point here a bit, you know, and I would read it and think that's really interesting because I'm about to graduate as an osteopath, but, you know, this osteopath isn't practicing the way I would practice. And then, you know, I'd read what the chiropractor would say and I'd think, well, actually he's more aligned with how I'm thinking.
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And then maybe we get to the physical therapist or physiotherapist and it might be, you know, different again. And I'd be kind of looking at going, yeah, I'm not sure that doesn't feel right to me the way he's approaching it. And then I remember reading the massage therapist and just getting all kinds of new insights and, you know, just really learning so much from this massage therapist and coming away from it and thinking, my God, if I had to pick any one of those four or five people to teach me,
00:15:56
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In that instance, it would definitely be the massage therapist. And it really made me recognize that the training is really the start point and it's really the individual that is where the value is. And so, you know, you can have massage therapists, okay, so most of them don't have degrees. You can train as a massage therapist quite quickly in some instances in a few weekends. But this massage therapist, he was the sort of the real deal.
00:16:23
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And the reason that's important is what I'm going to come to a little bit later. But I think just to preface it, what that did for me is, as I was heading into that last year of my training, of course, you're increasingly being indoctrinated into the idea that osteopaths have something special about them. They're different to chiropractors. They're different to physiotherapists. They're better in some ways. That's what you're being told as an osteopathic student, or at least it's being insinuated.
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And, you know, one of the things with working professionally is that you get this kind of, what's the right word for it?
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like a positive user bias as it were, I think of the right term in a moment. But basically what it is is that you tend to see your clients, you see them getting better. And of course you tend to see the clients of the other practitioners around you that have failed to get the client better. So you start to see people coming in from the local chiropractor or from the physiotherapist and you get this impression that these guys aren't all that good because you keep seeing their failures.
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what you fail to acknowledge or is less clear to you, certainly unless you're doing some pretty heavy auditing processes, is that of course the people that came to see you once and never came back, the assumption is that it's because they got better.
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But the reality of course is that probably a high percentage of them aren't getting better and they're going off to see someone else. So you get this bias creeping in where you seem to think that all your clients are getting better and no one else's clients are getting better. So that's something I think to bear in mind going into practice if that's your direction that you're taking things.
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But anyway, so throughout the training I had my own challenges.
Academic vs. Practical Training Reflections
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I wouldn't say that I was strongly academic. I certainly found a lot of the exams and the detail in the exams very difficult to retain because it was very difficult to find the relevance for why you had to learn the 26 ossification centers in a given bone, including the primary and secondary ossification centers.
00:18:32
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as an example when it really doesn't apply at all to what you do as an osteopath. But what I came to realize is that actually that level of detail is only really there so that the courses can be accredited by the universities so that you end up with a degree at the end of it. So you learn all kinds of stuff. I would say that realistically what I learned on my osteopathic training
00:18:58
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I probably have retained about 10 to 20 percent of it because most of it is irrelevant to how you practice as an osteopath. So now that's not to say that it's not useful to cover it once but the reality for some of it at least is that it's just in there to pack out the course and get the academic points. So you know that's something that I think is worth bearing in mind. I'm going to come back to that later as we reach the conclusion of this this podcast.
00:19:29
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That said, despite the academic challenges, I found that practically I was very good. I seemed to pick up the techniques well and clinically when we moved into working with patients, I seemed to get good clinical successes. I was fortunate enough to be asked to represent the college. They did this thing where they take their best students and would get them to go and compare techniques and so on with other colleges.
00:19:53
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You know, I got some affirmation, let's say, that I was doing OK. And certainly in my last year, I kind of got the hang of the academic side and was, I guess, maturing enough that I could study effectively for the exams and had no issues there. But I wouldn't say that I was an academic, which some people that know me
00:20:13
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from later in my career would probably think that that you know I am an academic and that you know I have a capacity to remember lots of stuff but the reality is that I think we all can do that if we're interested in it but if you're not interested if it doesn't seem relevant like these multiple ossification centers I gave you as an example then you're just not going to retain it unless you have you know some kind of you know photographic memory which some people do seem to have anyway
00:20:42
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The last year of my training in 1996, I had to write this thesis.
Research and Thesis Work
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So naturally, being interested in football and wanting to work in football, I approached a guy called Terry Moore who was a well-known osteopath and naturopath at the time. Unfortunately, he died a few years back now.
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but he was very kind to me and he worked with Queens Park Rangers and I knew that and so I approached him he was a guest lecturer at the college and his suggestion was that I did my research on somatic referred pain in professional footballers because he and the physio at Queens Park Rangers
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were under the impression, certainly from their observations, that many players would present with apparent lower limb injuries but that actually a lot of these were due to dysfunctions or irritations or inflammation in the pelvis or low back. So I studied somatic referred pain which was fascinating and really teed me up for some of the later research that I've done since graduating.
00:21:43
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I guess also what it did was it enhanced my awareness of looking for factors outside of the symptomatic area, which is something that osteopaths are trained to do, but I think this helped me to hone and refine that process. So rather than looking at the painful joints, or not rather, but as well as looking at the painful joints, you also consider factors below and above. Now with somatic referred pain,
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just a little clinical tidbit and something that even if you're not clinical and you're just listening to this out of interest, what you'll find is that somatic referred pain which essentially means pain referred from a body tissue like a muscle, ligament, joint, tendon, connective tissue etc.
00:22:28
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That will tend to always refer from proximal to distal, so from, for example, from the hip down towards the knee, but not from distal to proximal, so not from knee up towards the hip. That's very unusual for that to happen. It also tends to refer from deep to superficial, so it's quite common you get a deep joint like a sacralact joint or maybe a disc injury or something like that, referring superficially towards the buttock or the leg.
00:22:53
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but you wouldn't normally get a buttock injury referring deep into the back. That's very unusual for it to go in that direction. Similarly, somatic referred pain does not cross the midline in general. So these are generalized rules. But like I say, that made me aware and interested in the idea that often pain
00:23:13
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presentations come from somewhere else and not always from the injured site or the apparently injured site. So, you know, other things that refer pain outside of the discs, ligaments, joints, etc. and muscles.
00:23:28
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are the organs so the viscera and also you know you can get referrals from other deep tissues like the periosteum for example which is the kind of covering of the bones and even from blood vessels and so on so so these are things that can refer pain elsewhere in the body and you may not you've
00:23:49
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You know classic example is that people will get shoulder or wrist pain when they're having heart issues You know so this is of course the heart isn't in the wrist, but you're feeling the pain there So that's an example of visceral or organ referred pain
00:24:03
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So, as I looked into this whole idea that the back or the pelvis might be causing low limb injuries in professional footballers, or low limb pain, let's say, then what I started to recognise, and again, I think I was
00:24:23
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perhaps lucky that this happened early in my career, was that joints are one of the things that osteopaths tend to focus on. In fact, some osteopaths are very joint focused and do very little soft tissue work, working with the muscles and so on.
00:24:39
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it struck me that joints themselves are passive and they can't really get tight without being held tight for a prolonged period of time. So then you say, well, what is it that holds them tight? And of course, the only thing that can hold a joint tight is a muscle. And so then you say, okay, well, so if the muscle's held tight, why is the muscle held tight? Well, the muscle is controlled by the nervous system.
00:25:03
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and so really all roads lead back to the nervous system and this was an important understanding and it tied in with a model that had just been made public I suppose around that mid 90s kind of time which is Punjabi's model of joint stability and of course that's what I did my last FC2O solo on so if you want to understand more about that then take a look at that one I figure which number it is I think it's number 11 or number 10. So
Professional Experiences in New Zealand
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In 1997 I finished the thesis, I qualified and I decided I was going to get out to New Zealand. It was an option for me to get out there so I could get in a little bit of travelling but also to work in an osteopathic clinic. So I did that and I landed in a really busy practice which was fantastic, gave me loads of experience and
00:25:53
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The thing that it also taught me was that, you know, when you're seeing between probably 14 and 18 patients a day, I realized there's no way that I want to do this for the rest of my life. It's hard work. And not just it's hard work, but it's painful. And I remember getting three, four months into it and my wrists were so tight from all the treatment I've been doing.
00:26:16
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that I was trying to treat my left wrist using my right hand but in doing so it was hurting my right wrist and so then I try switching over and same thing you know try and treat your own right wrist with your left hand and it hurts your left wrist because the wrists were so painful and the muscles are so tired and tight that I started treating my wrists with my own knees and ultimately getting some treatment from someone else but I realized that this is quite a heavy impact on the body and
Career Shift Due to Injury
00:26:46
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so
00:26:46
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Again, probably quite luckily, early on in my career I both experienced that but saw other osteopaths that had been in the game for 15, 20, 25 years and they too had osteoarthritis in their fingers, they had bad backs. I mentioned the guys I saw in urinals that had hyperkyphotic backs and I just thought, you know what, I do not want to be leaning over a treatment table the whole of my life.
00:27:10
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what I think I want to do is I want to mix that up. Of course I want to use all the skills I've got, but I want to mix it up with some writing, with some presenting, with some teaching, that kind of thing. And so that was a kind of early tap on the shoulder to say, you know, let's get some variety into your career. So that's what I did.
00:27:32
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Now, of course, whilst I was still in New Zealand, I was contractually bound and of course, you know, did my work there, which was, you know, Monday to Friday, nine to five, but about three or four months in.
00:27:45
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I managed to break my wrist, so I went out mountain biking and I managed to fracture my scaphoid into four pieces, which isn't ideal if you're an osteopath and you've got a lot of patience. And so what we did, so the guy I worked for was very innovative and he said, okay, you know, he gave me a week or two off and said, right, what we're gonna do is we're gonna line up patients that you can design rehab programs for and give them nutrition and lifestyle advice.
00:28:14
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and still to this day he takes some credit for sending me on that path and I think rightly so. I was using my naturopathic skills and my very basic rehabilitation knowledge at the time to help patients and to write programs for them with my, luckily it was my left wrist that I broke and I'm right handed so I could still write out programs and so on, draw little stick man diagrams.
Exploration of Primal Patterns
00:28:41
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But whilst I was there in New Zealand, there was a talk advertised by a guy who I'd never heard of called Paul Chek. And on his poster for his talk, he had pictures of people squatting and sitting long-legged. Oh, sorry, not sitting long-legged.
00:28:57
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he had pictures of people squatting and he had pictures of people lunging and so on and he called this the primal patterns and I thought well that's interesting because that sounds a lot like Phil Beech's concept of archetypal rest postures which of course we covered to some degree in our podcast with him but I was fascinated with Phil's work and I thought well you know what I'm going to go along and listen to this guy because it was a free talk anyway so I went to the local rugby club and listened to Paul speak and
00:29:24
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I thought well first of all you know this guy seems to know quite a lot and he was working with Chicago Bulls at the time so you think okay he's got some credibility but I was looking at his qualifications and he didn't really have any degrees or anything that I could really say ah yeah this guy is super qualified I can learn from him.
00:29:41
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But he did have a lot of knowledge, and I think looking back on it, part of the reason that I gave him the time of day, because of course you are very biased having gone through a degree. You tend to think that other people that don't have degrees aren't as serious about their work as you are. But because I've had that experience with the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies, and seeing this massage therapist in that journal just gives such great advice, I think I was much more open-minded and willing to listen to Paul Chek.
00:30:09
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So, you know, I did that. I didn't buy any of his merchandise or any of his courses. I just thought, yeah, you know, he's an intelligent guy, you know, got a unique take on things. And that was that. But I had always planned to go to New Zealand for just one
Advanced Studies and CPD
00:30:22
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year. And by the end of the year, I realized that New Zealand at that point in 1997 had very little in the way of CPD. So not a lot of continuing professional development. And there was no professional football there either.
00:30:37
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Really there was that there's my family my friends etc. And I decided yeah, I'm gonna come back at the end of this year and so I came back to the UK and Decided that I would enroll on a master's degree. So master's degrees you can do part-time so I did that and I was invited to Be on the faculty at the British College of Osteopathic Medicine. So that was very again nice and affirming that I could go back and teach and
00:31:04
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and so I began this master's degree and I guess that was taking about two days a week and I got to teach alongside Phil Beach which of course was a bit of an ambition of mine and you know I'm sure I picked up so much from him across the five years that I did that but that was that was fantastic and really got my mind thinking and starting to see how Phil created models of health, models of function and I think that helped
00:31:34
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me to develop my own capacity to do that as well. Now around that time because I've been perhaps a little bit starved of CPD in New Zealand I was on a bit of a CPD rampage and you know I was going off to course after course, weekend after weekend spending all of my spare money and I was still living at home so I didn't have many expenses so whatever I was earning I was pretty much plowing back into CPD and you know it got to a point where
00:32:01
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probably somewhere around 2001, one of my colleagues said to me, Matt, you're doing so much CPD that you could run a course on which courses to go on. And it was probably true. But the reason I say that is that I was getting a really good feel for what was available out there. And what I found was that in 2001,
00:32:26
Speaker
Paul Chet came back to the UK and I heard him speak for a second time I went when he made a point of going along and I have to say his education in that series of seminars that he did was head and shoulders above anything I'd seen in the previous two or three years so I was mightily impressed with what he had to offer but I've kind of skipped ahead of myself because you know I was talking about the master's degree and part of what I did for the master's again you have to do a thesis
00:32:55
Speaker
And this has to be between 15,000 and 20,000 words. And so it's fairly in-depth research. And I looked at recurrent, what was it called? Lumber Pelvic.
00:33:06
Speaker
associations with recurrent hamstring strain in professional footballers and so for that research I was essentially looking at the same idea that people could have lumbar pelvic dysfunction if you like or imbalances in their mechanics and this might be predictive of hamstring strain in professional footballers and sure enough I found that it was
00:33:28
Speaker
So that was a kind of area of interest and specialism that I developed. And I went on to present that research at the Football Association Medical Center to the team there, but also the Football Association Medical Society at Arsenal in 2000. And that was my first sort of public speaking event, which was a bit nerve wracking. It was done on an overhead projector. And what was nerve wracking about it was that
00:33:56
Speaker
what's his name, Gilmour was there, I'm trying to think what his first name is but Gilmour who is famous for Gilmour's groin, Jerry Gilmour, he presented first and I was up second so he was this famous guy working with a lot of the elite footballers at the time
00:34:13
Speaker
and in the audience was Gary Lewin who was the physiotherapist for Arsenal in England at the time so it was pretty nerve-wracking but I presented there and that went down really well and you know I hoped that my ambition of getting involved with professional football would come through but nothing really arose and so
00:34:32
Speaker
Moving on, between 2001-2005, I presented this research to the International Conference on Advances in Osteopathic Research. And that was fun. Again, got me up presenting in front of people. And part of what I found was that the more I stood up in front of people, the easier it became. And I actually managed to get the best young researcher award for that. But part of what
00:35:02
Speaker
I did, to try and get myself ready to speak in public, was I joined a group called BNI, which some of you may have heard of, it's Business Network International, and this is one of these kind of breakfast meetings that you go to. And I remember I was probably 23, 24, and I was the youngest person in this group by about 20 or 25 years maybe.
00:35:22
Speaker
And so there's all these sort of older established business people. And there's me, this young whippersnapper. And you have to stand up in front of people and give a little presentation as to what you do. And you have to each week stand up and talk about referrals that you can make or referrals that you're looking for, et cetera. And I did that really so that I could get more confident at speaking. And so that's something that I would recommend. So we're talking about career advice and progressions.
00:35:48
Speaker
I would recommend this really useful life skill to just put yourself in at the deep end and to
00:35:55
Speaker
just experience speaking in front of people.
Teaching and Specialization in TMJ
00:35:58
Speaker
And once you've done it, a few times you realize you can do it. I don't think it ever takes away from the nerves. I think you're always going to get some adrenaline, just like before you play a sport, a game of football or whatever, you know, you're always going to get some adrenaline. It's not because you can't do it, it's just because you're about to perform. And that's a normal physiological reaction. But so I did that. Now at these BNI meetings, I met a guy called Andre Hedger.
00:36:23
Speaker
And Andre was the local dentist, a couple of miles away from me. But he was much more than a dentist. It turns out that Andre is one of the leading TMJ specialists in the UK. And so Andre kind of took me under his wing and we cross referred a lot of patients back and forth. He also shared a lot of slides with me and imagery and trained me up a lot. He encouraged me to go on various TMJ courses, which I did. And ultimately that led to me
00:36:51
Speaker
not only being sort of well prepared to work with clients, but also to teach about the TMJ, which I now do in the check training, but also in...
00:37:03
Speaker
done many guest lectures at various osteopathic colleges and I even trained up by some of the osteopathic faculty at the colleges and ended up going into various professional football clubs to train them on TMJ function or dysfunction. So that was a very fortuitous meeting with Andre and he will be featuring as a guest in a couple of weeks time so listen out for that he's a really fascinating guy so that's someone who I'm sure you'll get a lot of great insights from.
00:37:30
Speaker
Now around this time as I mentioned Paul Chek came back to the UK and I went on all his seminars and as I said you know I was so impressed with what he was saying that I ended up signing up for his courses and went through the Chek training. Now the Chek training takes most people about four years to work through and it was no different for me. I started in 2001 and I finished in 2005 and during that sort of tenure
00:37:57
Speaker
I was still teaching at the BCNO.
00:38:02
Speaker
alongside Phil but in 2003 Phil Beach left the UK for New Zealand and he asked if I would like to take over teaching one of his courses actually at the BSO so the other School of Osteopathy and that was fantastic to have your own class and to prepare all your own materials and so I went and did that for a couple of years and really enjoyed that but one of the things that slightly concerned me when I was there was that
00:38:31
Speaker
By now, of course, I had taken a real interest not only in referred pain, but as part of my master's thesis, I had really delved into the whole area of core stability and motor control. And I had developed some of my own thinking around that and presented that in my thesis. And what I found was that when I went to the BSO, they actually had a PhD student that was actively trying to disprove the idea of core stability.
00:39:01
Speaker
And I found that quite surprising and I think some of that is related to the commercial nature of running these colleges and these courses, is that if you can prove that what you do is better or that what someone else does is wrong, then you're likely to attract more students in.
00:39:20
Speaker
And what I always felt was rather than trying to be exclusive like that, it was better to be inclusive and to look at the reams and reams of great research that had been done on motor control and to look at that through an osteopathic lens, which is what I've done throughout
Networking and Expert Collaboration
00:39:38
Speaker
my career. And I think you can get much more from it by doing that. And the evidence seems to bear that out as well. So anyway, that was a little thing that occurred there.
00:39:49
Speaker
Around that time I took courses with Diane Lee who's a leading physiotherapist and also is going to be a guest on FC2O in a few weeks time and also with Andre Vleaming who wrote the book or edited the book Movement Stability Low Back Pain and he set up the World Congress on low back pain so those guys are very highly decorated within our sort of field of musculoskeletal medicine and you know
00:40:14
Speaker
What was nice about that was that they were very interested in my research as well which I shared with them and they were very encouraging. So, you know, I would say that, again, that experience with the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies allowed me to be more open to explore other disciplines and to speak with other therapists in an open way.
00:40:34
Speaker
Also, around this time, 2003, I got in touch with Serge Grakovetski, who is the author of The Spinal Engine, and Serge is an incredible guy and incredible mind, some of the most insightful information about spinal function that has ever been published.
00:40:52
Speaker
and he really became a good friend of mine across two or three years around that spell and he was the first person I would say that I did a big presentation with so we set up an event at the Royal Geographical Society in London and we had 350 people I think turn up to this event
00:41:16
Speaker
and so I was really almost having a panic attack while I was waiting for Serge to finish his presentation and then I stood up and did my presentation but again it went down really well and you know so one piece of advice that I would offer is that if you can find people that are masters in their field and you can align yourself with them and spend time with them then that's going to really help to project
00:41:43
Speaker
or to amplify both your understanding but also your ability to move up through the ranks and get some awareness and get some profile and so on. So that was a fantastic boon for me to speak alongside Serge Grzegorzewski. And also you know as Timothy Carroll mentioned in his recent podcast he said you know if you want to be the best
00:42:03
Speaker
you need to hang out with the best. And so he was talking about hanging out with Deepak Chopra and with Anthony Robbins and people like that. So he did that in his field, which is all about the psychology and behavioral work. And I did that in my field by hanging out with, you know, Grakovetsky and Diane Lee to some degree, Andre Vleeming to some degree, Andre Heger as I mentioned, but also with Paul Chek and Phil Beach and so on. So I would really recommend that as
Publishing and Product Development
00:42:30
Speaker
I mean, I'd say it's a strategy. It wasn't a particularly conscious strategy. It was just that I wanted to understand more what made these people tick and to tap into their knowledge and their wisdom. And Leon Chato is another great example of that as well.
00:42:45
Speaker
So, with all this in mind, in 2004 I decided that I still hadn't made it into professional football, and it's been a long journey so far. And, you know, I didn't seem to be making any headway, so I published a paper on my hamstring strain research, which went into the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies. And, you know, with the hope that that might lead somewhere. But again, it didn't particularly seem to open any doors for me.
00:43:12
Speaker
In the interim, I developed a new product, which I call the Neutralizer, and that was a biofeedback device to help people to learn how to do certain exercises with optimal positioning. And yeah, there's a whole sort of webinar and product information on that on my site. So if you're interested in that, you can of course take a look. But that was an interesting experience because
00:43:40
Speaker
developing a product is quite easy in terms of getting the prototypes up and seeing if they work and so on, but then actually producing the product and getting it into stock and then getting it on your website and getting things like supportive DVDs or downloadable videos and all the rigmarole that goes with that. That was a whole different story and I'll explain a bit more about that a little bit later.
00:44:06
Speaker
you'll get a sense for how long it took me to get that up and running but still in 2004 I also was invited to go and do a guest lecture by now I was doing a fair few guest lectures around different universities and the London School of Osteopathy was up and coming at the time this was a fairly new college and I was invited by the principal to go in and do a couple of guest lectures on exercise rehabilitation
00:44:34
Speaker
And this was an interesting experience because I went into the class and was introduced and then left to my own devices. And one of the class put up their hands. And I recognized this guy because he had been on one of the check courses I've been on. And he said, Matt, I just wanted to let you know that the principal just came in and told us that we've got Matt Walden coming in today. He's going to be talking to you about exercise rehabilitation.
00:45:01
Speaker
my view on it is that any osteopath who needs to use exercise to help their patients recover does that because they're not a very good osteopath.
00:45:10
Speaker
So it wasn't the best introduction. Now, he hadn't said it in front of me. I don't know if that's better or worse. But the point being that this was an attitude that even some of the thought leaders in osteopathy had that kind of attitude, even as recently as 2004. And so it's another example of how these professions try to
00:45:32
Speaker
imply they have something magic about them and that they don't need to use the best evidence-based research. And indeed, my big concern with that is that it creates a dependence of the patient on the therapist and what I was already into and aware of because I've been practicing my Czech approach since 2001.
00:45:53
Speaker
I was already very aware that it was a far more ethically sound approach to give the patient the tools that they need to get themselves better. It's far more empowering than to make them dependent on you as the therapist. Now that's not to say that therapy and treatment and so on are
00:46:12
Speaker
you know, not valuable. They are very valuable and they can be very helpful with certain things you really can't do for yourself. But to give someone the tools not only to get themselves better but to prevent the injury from recurring down the line, that's what the check system is all about and to me that felt much more morally sound. So in 2005
Consulting for Chelsea FC
00:46:33
Speaker
I finally got to realize my dream and I got invited to go in and consult for Chelsea Football Club and it turned out that in the previous year or two they've moved their training ground to just a few miles up the road from me and one of the guys that had got in with them as their Strengthening conditioning coach.
00:46:51
Speaker
was a Czech practitioner and he knew that I was local so he started bringing players out that weren't rehabilitating well. He would bring them out to my clinic and eventually it got to a point where he said well you know why don't I just introduce you to the to the team doctor.
00:47:07
Speaker
So I went in and spoke with the team doctor and ended up going in and consulting with various players and so this really led to me having to hand in my resignation at the British School of Osteopathy because I had
00:47:23
Speaker
Essentially I didn't have enough time to teach at the BSO and to do my consulting for Chelsea. So I went into the club and what I found was that the players themselves were generally speaking very keen to see. They were very keen to find out what was going on, what your opinion was. They looked up to you and this was a little strange because having been a fan of football all my life and having seen all of these players on the TV, suddenly they're there in the room with you and they're looking up to you
00:47:52
Speaker
for your opinion because they're interested in how you can help them and so you've kind of become the star in that environment but the thing was was that the physios and the other team members were kind of looking over their shoulder say well why is this guy coming in you know just it felt it felt like the guys they couldn't help
00:48:16
Speaker
quite clearly were the ones I was being asked to come in to look at, because they were the ones that weren't getting better. If they were getting better through the standard physio approach, then fair enough. You don't need a consultant to come in, but when they're not getting better, you ask a consultant to come in. I went in and it made for a slightly uncomfortable environment, but what was even more interesting to me was that
00:48:39
Speaker
you know a set up like that and this is this is an important point in terms of advice if you're looking to get involved in professional sports and your approach is holistic then you're likely to have quite a challenging time going into a multidisciplinary set up like that and the reason I say that is that I work with several players you know one of whom
00:48:59
Speaker
clearly had a gluten intolerance, every time he ate gluten he would bloat, he had immune sensitization as a result, he was sneezing at the slightest hint of dust or pollen and his abdominal wall function was extremely low which for an international level footballer is not great particularly when you consider that first of all the lower abdominal wall which was particularly weak for him
00:49:26
Speaker
is synergistic with the hamstring group and so in other words they support each other in their function and if his lower abdominal wall isn't working so well then the hamstrings have to work harder and this guy was getting repetitive hamstring injuries so you know i explained all of this to him it made sense to him uh send a report into the team doctor explained it to him and i got a response to say matt nutrition is not your area i've got you in as an osteopath
00:49:52
Speaker
even though I was really practicing more as a Czech practitioner at that point. And so, you know, you can't be advising on nutrition, which you could say, OK, fair point. But then the doctor went on to say, and besides which, a gluten free diet is a miserable diet and it's a diet that no professional athlete can survive on. It's extremely rare for people to have gluten intolerance, less than one percent of the population. And so, you know, thanks for your advice, but we won't take it.
00:50:23
Speaker
And you're like, okay, that's interesting, because that was directly counter to all of my research and understanding, which I did explain back, but didn't work out so well. Then another example, I had a guy who kept spraining his left ankle, and this is a very senior first team player.
00:50:45
Speaker
kept spreading his left ankle, and it turned out when I assessed him using the check methodology of the totem pole, which some of you will be aware of, you look at higher reflexes. And interestingly enough, it links back into Andrei Hedger because this guy clearly had a TMJ issue on the left-hand side. And in addition to that, he had tight musculature in the upper neck, which is very common with a TMJ issue.
00:51:08
Speaker
And that was meaning he was holding his head out in a leftward tilt. Now, when you hold your head in a leftward tilt, your body has certain reflexes, which means that it needs to bring the eyes and the ears and the bite back onto the horizon. This is called the optic, otic, and occlusal plane reflexes. And so what he was doing is he was swinging his pelvis out under him, so his center of gravity was moving to the left, and that meant that he kept spraining his ankle.
00:51:32
Speaker
But, of course, the rehabilitation approach was to rub the ankle, to ultrasound the ankle, to stretch the ankle, to do proprioceptive work at the ankle, and no one was looking at the top end. So I explained this to the team doctor. Didn't seem to buy into it. That player eventually moved on, went to another club, and then on to Bayern Munich, and ultimately he had a very long and illustrious career, because Bayern Munich are super switched on with those kinds of things.
00:52:02
Speaker
So the reason I tell you the stories is not to sort of say
00:52:05
Speaker
that I was right or that they were wrong or whatever. But to say, if you're going into a multidisciplinary team, then the doctor was upset. I was looking at his teeth. He was upset that I was looking at his TMJ because that's the realm of the dentist, the team dentist. Another person, I was looking at his feet when he had a knee problem and saying, well, that's not what we want you to look at. You've come in to look at his knee. The diatrist deals with the feet.
00:52:35
Speaker
So these are the kinds of challenges that you'll meet, and of course the podiatrist wants to look at the feet and doesn't want some other person coming in and advising. So if I were to go back into a setup like that now, I would advise myself and I would advise any of you that if you're working holistically,
00:52:52
Speaker
you need to either toe the party line and do what you're told, which is one way to work. And some people are quite happy to do that. For other people, I would say if you want to be more true to your training and what you believe in, then you really need to upfront explain this is how you work.
00:53:11
Speaker
this is what i'm going to be offering you if that's what you're after as a club then fantastic and if you're not then perhaps i'm not the right person for you
Teaching Philosophy and Holistic Approaches
00:53:20
Speaker
uh... and so really in that way you probably want to be working as the right hand person uh... to the team doctor because generally the team doctor is the gatekeeper the person that decides where the player goes who they go to for uh... for treatment and for rehabilitation
00:53:40
Speaker
We're still in 2005 and at that point I was asked to keynote at the International Conference on Advances in Osteopathic Research. So that was again a nice accolade to do that. I would have been about 30 years old and I was working for Chelsea and keynoting at conferences. I was asked to write a chapter that year as well for Leon Chato's book called Naturopathic Physical Medicine which is available on my website.
00:54:05
Speaker
And so, you know, I really felt like I had made it and like I was doing really well. And the next thing that came along was that I decided, you know, now I've finished the Czech training. What I'd like to do is to train up as Czech faculty and to actually teach these courses, which was a fantastic
00:54:24
Speaker
fantastic learning experience and even still now I love teaching because that you always learn through teaching and you know one of the quotes this reminds me of is a quote from David White who's a great sort of inspiration of mine and David White says he's talking about poetry but I would say that this is actually true of presenting and it's true of teaching and it's true of working with patients as well and he says the art of poetry you could insert
00:54:54
Speaker
teaching or treating or whatever. The art of teaching is overhearing yourself saying things you didn't know you knew. And you might listen to that and just go, well, hang on a
Barefoot Running and Vibram Collaboration
00:55:06
Speaker
second. As a teacher, you're supposed to know everything. But that's just not practical. And I think any teacher that thinks that they know everything is not likely to be a good teacher. What I always try to convey when I'm teaching is that I'll share with you my experiences. I'll aim to keep us on track with the course.
00:55:24
Speaker
But if you want to share your experiences or you've got questions that you know, I can't answer, I'll do my best to answer them. If I can't answer them, I'll probably know where I can find the answer or know someone who can answer it for you so that you don't want to be bullshitting people when you're teaching or when you're presenting. But in being challenged or being asked questions that you don't know, often you reason things through and you realize actually you do know what
00:55:54
Speaker
the answer is to the question and so that's the art of overhearing yourself saying things you didn't know you knew. So in 2006 I began this teaching up or training up to teach on Czech faculty. I was out in New York City assisting one of the faculty there and
00:56:13
Speaker
into class walks a guy wearing a pair of toe shoes. And I'm looking at these toe shoes and thinking, well, that's interesting because I wrote to Adidas in 1999. Now, I didn't mention this. Obviously, during the time I was teaching with Phil Beach, we had become quite good friends and I spent time at his place and we'd gone out for various walks and runs around Hampstead and over the heath there.
00:56:36
Speaker
And he had a trail that was ideal for barefoot running. And he was just applying evolutionary concepts and saying, of course, our feet are designed to be barefoot from an evolutionary perspective. So here's a trail that I've sussed out, which is relatively safe, and we'll go out for a run. So we did that a few times. And so I had this kind of awareness of barefoot running and some of the benefits of it. And I'd done a lot of thinking around it. And so I'd written to Adidas back in 1999.
00:57:05
Speaker
The reason I wrote to them was because they had a shoe, which was a Taekwondo shoe, which is very slimline, very flat to the ground, very thin, and therefore proprioceptive. And I said to them, if they could make toes, individual toe pockets within the shoes, then what it would mean is that the toes could splay effectively, it would mean that they could adjust to the contours of the ground effectively, and the toes being hypersensitive, just like the fingertips are sensitive, the toe tips are sensitive.
00:57:33
Speaker
then that would provide better information back into the nervous system and allow the person to move more effectively, have a broader base of support, so they were more stable, et cetera, et cetera. I wrote all that to Adidas and they wrote back to say, you know, thank you very much for your idea. We'll hold it on file, but we're not going to go with it at the moment.
00:57:51
Speaker
Having done that, I kind of thought, OK, well, I'll just put that to bed and I'll leave it for now. And maybe they'll decide to go with it down the line. So seven years later, I'm teaching this course in New York. And this guy walks in wearing exactly what I described to Adidas, or Adidas, as the Americans say.
00:58:16
Speaker
I asked the guy where he got his shoes from and he said, well, you know, I know someone at Vibram and, um, but there's a shop a few blocks down called Tip Top Shoes and I'll take you there and we can get a pair after class. So we went and bought a pair. Um, I absolutely loved them. I thought this is exactly what I had in mind. And, um, and so, you know, I basically was in them from that point forwards and I haven't really taken five fingers off since, since that time. Um, but, um,
00:58:41
Speaker
The end result of that was that I got in touch with Vibram to say, look, I'm writing this chapter that I mentioned for Leon Chato in a medical textbook, it's on rehabilitation, it's natural medicine, and so I'm looking at evolutionary processes and of course barefoot running, barefoot walking is part of evolution.
00:59:00
Speaker
There's all kinds of benefits to it, and I listed a few of them, and I said, so if you'd like me to take some pictures of my models wearing your shoes, I'll be very happy to feature them in the chapter. So they agreed. We did that.
00:59:16
Speaker
Off the back of that, they were saying, well, hang on a second. So what benefits are you talking about? So I listed them out and they said, well, you know, have you got any research for this? And I said, well, yeah, I've got all the references, the medical paper or medical chapter. So I have to have the references. So I sent them the references. And bit by bit, it turned into a whole discussion where ultimately I offered to distribute the product to the UK.
00:59:36
Speaker
So, we did that, and interestingly enough, the first batch of shoes we had, we actually had them over for an evening that I put on in the same Royal Geographical Society where I had spoken previously with Serge Grzegorzewski. But this time, we had Diane Lee over, so I mentioned Diane already. We had Lynne McTaggart, the sort of investigative journalist.
01:00:00
Speaker
We had a chiropractor, an orthopedic surgeon, we had the same osteopath that I mentioned earlier, who said that exercise, osteopaths that use exercise do so because they're not good osteopaths. And we had Paul Chek. And what we did, we called this event, who owns low back pain. And who owns low back pain was supposed to be a little bit of a kind of
01:00:25
Speaker
antagonistic marketing title in as much as it will you know is it the osteopaths own low back pain or is it the chiropractors or the physios or is it the surgeons and so on and of course ultimately the goal was to get people to recognize that it's not really any of the professions that own it it's the individual that has the low back pain and you know there was some degree of success with with that
01:00:48
Speaker
I won't go into the stories around that just now, but what we did have at that event was we had our first batch of five fingers. And so we gave a few to the presenters before we started. So, you know, they're up on stage, trying them on our own with Diane Lee, wiggling her toes around on the desk.
01:01:04
Speaker
And ultimately, in the break, we sold out, I think there was 60 or 70 pairs of shoes, but we had 600 people along to the event. And we sold out in the break in 15 minutes. So that was amazing. And I think Vibram then thought, well, hang on a second. There is a market for this in the UK, and there's a medical market for it. OK, let's get Matt involved. So that was what led into me distributing the Vibram Five Fingers and setting up the company Primal Lifestyle.
01:01:31
Speaker
So Primal Lifestyle, of course, was really referring to this whole Primal movement, which actually in 2006 wasn't a movement yet. It only really kind of kicked off in 2009, 2010 maybe. But there are a few people talking about it. So Mark Sisson was one of them and he was my first guest on FC2.0. But Primal Lifestyle essentially was my best efforts at doing what Mark Sisson has done much more successfully.
01:01:56
Speaker
And it became really the vehicle of our distribution business, of the Vivian Five Fingers, which I did between 2007 and 2017. Now, I will talk a bit about that in terms of career advice and progressions, because it's interesting working with products versus working with people.
01:02:20
Speaker
I'm going to continue with the story and we'll come back to that as we go through the
Spiritual Growth and Personal Loss
01:02:23
Speaker
years. So we're still in 2006. Now, in late 2006, my father died and of course that was both a very sad time again, but also really opened me up to spirituality even further.
01:02:41
Speaker
experienced around that time. In fact, just a few weeks prior to my father dying, I experienced my first shamanic journey with Paul Czech. So by now, Paul had been practicing shamanic techniques for two or three years and working with him on himself and with clients. And so he was in the UK and asked me if I would go and do a shamanic ceremony with him. So I did that.
01:03:05
Speaker
And it was profound, not just because of what it was, but I think because of the situation of my father being terminally ill. But what I came to realize shortly after him dying was that it's much easier to lose a father when you realize you're surrounded by them. And this was a piece of advice I've given out now to many people, and I think
01:03:31
Speaker
you know what we don't recognize is that we are so interconnected and we are so supported and I remember my brother acting in a very fatherly way to me at times and some of my best friends doing the same and some of my colleagues doing the same and Leon Cheto doing the same and Paul Chek doing the same and you know so you start to recognize that you know there is the father archetype in
01:03:55
Speaker
all men and that that comes through when you need it and of course it doesn't take away from the sadness of losing your own father but we are very much interconnected and very supported we just have to be willing and able to accept that support and to ask when we need that support. So now moving on into 2007
Entrepreneurial Insights in Sports
01:04:21
Speaker
I started working with an elite sprinter in 2007, and this led to me training with her, or training her I should say, I wasn't actually doing the training myself, I was training her, and once a week I would travel up to North London and would go to Limpa Christie's training group, so Limpa Christie the Olympic
01:04:44
Speaker
champion sprinter and world record holder back in 1992 and so it was always fascinating to see him and to see his athletes of course some of the best athletes in the UK were training there and one of the things that struck me about that meeting was that you know
01:05:04
Speaker
The goal that I was working with was really struggling financially, and this is not uncommon for athletes that are just on the fringes of making it. They really can't work full time because they're training hard, but at the same time they can't get a grant because they're not quite at the performance level. Some of these, the very top guys that tend to make the Olympics or the World Championships,
01:05:26
Speaker
They will typically get lottery funding or grants to support them through their training. But the ones that are just on the fringes trying to make it in, they really struggle. And she was in this exact position. So I remember after one of the training sessions, her sitting down with Linford and explaining this term and saying she didn't think she could make as many training sessions as he wanted her to.
01:05:47
Speaker
and that she had to work, etc. And he just said to her, well, look, you've got to get innovative. He said, you know, when I was in the same position as you, he said, I found ways to make things work. And he gave various examples. And then he went on to his career and he was saying, you know,
01:06:03
Speaker
For a while, he said, I was sponsored by Puma. And so I used to wear the Puma leggings. And so I have the big Puma symbol down the legging. And then they said, you're not allowed to use branded merchandise anymore. You're not allowed to use the merchandise's name. So you're not allowed to use the brand name on the merchandise.
01:06:27
Speaker
He did, but he said, okay, well, let's get rid of the puma, as in the name, and just have the animal on there. Everyone will recognize it. So then they did that. And the next thing was that the International Athletics Federation said, no, you can't have any symbols. So you can't have Nike ticks and you can't have Adidas.
01:06:43
Speaker
logos and so on. And so what Linford said was, well, let's just change the logo slightly. Let's just tweak it so it's the other way around or it's slightly longer or whatever, because then it's not our logo, but everyone will recognize it as the logo. So they got away with that for a few meets. But then the International Athletics Federation said, no, you can't have any symbol or any likeness of the symbol on your clothing. So the next thing is Linford comes up with the idea of getting
01:07:10
Speaker
contact lenses that have the puma symbol on them and there was this amazing shot of Linford on the starting blocks and you can probably picture it you know him sort of facing down the 100 meter track and all the paparazzi at the far end and they're zooming down onto Linford he's looking direct down their lenses and he's got these puma contact lenses.
01:07:31
Speaker
And so, of course, it made all the papers and was this amazing image. No one had ever thought of doing that before, but that was Linford's idea. And, of course, the next thing is the International Athletics Federation fan any wearable logos, including contact lenses. So anything you could wear was out. You could not wear contact lenses or glasses or clothing or whatever.
01:07:53
Speaker
So the next thing Limford did was he got a puma tattooed on his back so that when he won his races, what he'd do is he would take his shirt off and he'd run round the track with his puma logo on his back. And again, that was his idea. So the point being that in order for him to continue to be paid
01:08:10
Speaker
top dollar by Puma, he himself came up with all these entrepreneurial ideas so that he could essentially become the world champion and become the Olympic champion and so on. So it was a really, for me, it was a really fascinating insight that for a lot of these people it's not just about their raw athletic ability, it's about their nous and their ability to turn a challenge into essentially an opportunity.
01:08:36
Speaker
and that's what Lympha did. So again, from a business and career advice perspective, I would say always bear in mind that any challenge can be transmuted or alchemically transformed into an opportunity.
Editorial Work and Writing Challenges
01:08:52
Speaker
So then we move on to 2009. In 2009, I got asked by Leon Chato to edit the rehabilitation section, which is a new section they're bringing out in the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapy. So that was a new kind of endeavor for me and meant that I had to publish two editorials per year, which has been a fantastic process. Now, when you write, one of the things that it does is it forces you to think about things. It forces you to research things.
01:09:18
Speaker
And when there's a deadline to write to, then it forces you to get it done. And so in terms of career advice, I would say, of course, blogging is great. And of course, commenting on Facebook is great. It's all helpful stuff. But if you were to actually write for a magazine, or for a journal, or for a newspaper, and it could even be a local newspaper, when there's a deadline to write to, that is fantastic.
01:09:43
Speaker
Okay, so that's been a huge support of my own professional development over the last 10 years since I started doing that.
01:09:52
Speaker
In 2010, by now the Five Fingers business was really growing and we'd done really well. We reached a point where we had gone through the standard story of having shoes delivered to your home and initially they're in the garage and then
Business Expansion and Financial Struggles
01:10:08
Speaker
you haven't got enough room in the garage so you end up sticking them in the loft and then you haven't got enough room there so you borrow someone else's garage and then you start renting a lock up. And bit by bit we got to a point where in 2010
01:10:20
Speaker
we knew that we were going to get a container load of shoes arrive. And you can't have a container delivered to a driveway or to a residential address. You've got to go to a commercial address. So we knew we needed a warehouse. So by 2010, we moved into this warehouse. We had offices within the warehouse. I had my clinic room in the warehouse and all my exercise equipment out the back in the warehouse. And of course, shoes filling just part of the warehouse, but with plenty of space for growth.
01:10:49
Speaker
This is another aspect of business advice I wanted to share with you in career advice is that if you do ever find yourself in a situation where you are working with products then the Or indeed, you know, it could just be you know clinical model and the growth of the clinic One of the challenges of growth is that it needs to be funded and in particular when you're dealing with products so for example if you sell
01:11:17
Speaker
you know a hundred thousand pounds worth of shoes.
01:11:20
Speaker
Well, the profit margins on those shoes as a distributor is relatively low because you're not marking them up for retail. So you're just selling them to retailers and so you get a lower margin. And what that means is that you've got, of course, your own costs of storage and transport and sending shoes out and so on, various delivery services, et cetera, marketing as well.
01:11:48
Speaker
Initially, we had very low overheads in terms of staffing because we had a lot of us just doing it voluntarily. There's a group of us that all were just chipping in. But nevertheless, if you sell, let's say, ยฃ100,000 worth of shoes, well, if your margin is only about
01:12:07
Speaker
20%, then what that means is that you've only got 120,000 pounds worth of cash. So you got brought in 100,000 pounds worth of shoes. You sell them, you get 120,000 pounds for that. And then you've got to not only fund the whole business and pay your taxes, et cetera, but you've got to buy shoes for the next year. Now, the problem we had was that because the growth was so strong, we needed 200,000 pounds worth of shoes for the next year.
01:12:34
Speaker
And we couldn't afford to buy them in. And so we needed investment. And so this was the whole rigmarole that went on for years of us trying to find investment. But it had happened immediately after the credit crunch scenario, which occurred, I believe, 2007, 2008. So 2009, 2010, we were trying to find investment.
01:12:52
Speaker
and we just couldn't get it for love nor money uh... now another aspect of that is that the product was not our own and this is another thing that i would advise if you are going to go into business and sell someone else's products bear in mind it's going to be extremely difficult for you to get investment on that product if it's your own products and especially if you have intellectual property uh... or you know other rights such as you know patents or design rights etc then you're much more likely to get investment but uh...
01:13:21
Speaker
we just could not get investment and so we couldn't grow nearly as much as we wanted to and so that was the biggest challenge in the first four or five years of our business was actually being able to grow and you know the banks weren't even lending money as well so i remember actually we needed about three hundred thousand pounds that year so we could bring in the stock and this was this was for pre-ordered stock so this was firm orders that we knew people had had placed with us and we had something like ninety thousand pounds in the bank
01:13:51
Speaker
So we went to the bank and said, look, can you lend us the money, the other $210,000? And we went through this whole procedure, which took days and days. And eventually, they came back and said, well, we'll match whatever you can put in. And we were saying, well, we've only got $90,000, so that takes us to $180,000.
01:14:08
Speaker
We've got 300,000 pounds worth of pre-orders. So it was just a very, very challenging time because of the growth. So that's something which I think from a business perspective you've got to bear in mind is that growth itself costs money. So anyway, another thing that happened that year was that another company were introduced to us. And this company were about seven times our size. They'd been established for about 20 years, and they had their own sales force, et cetera.
01:14:36
Speaker
And so we were introduced to them on the idea that they were going to come in and support us. And they were outdoor specialists, so they had lots of accounts with outdoor stores and sports stores as well. But we were given the sports side of the market, and they were given the outdoor side of the market. And they were going to support us to bring in the shoes.
01:15:01
Speaker
And what we found was that very, very quickly we noticed that our retailers, including our sports retailers, were being approached by this new company to say that, look, we're now in the game. Primal Lifestyle My Business was going to be out of the game soon. And so everyone should be placing their orders with them and they would supply the shoes. And so, you know, initially we got a call from one of our retailers to say, oh, we've heard that you're not working with
01:15:29
Speaker
the interim anymore or that you're going to be packing in and we said no that's not the case at all, we're working with the sports market.
01:15:36
Speaker
But this was a running store. So we called up this new company and said, well, look, hang on a second. This is one of our stores. It's clearly sports. It's a running store. And one of your sales reps has gone in and told them that you also can supply them. And they said, oh, no, no, this is a mistake. They've got it wrong. We'll reprimand them, et cetera.
01:16:00
Speaker
and then we got a report from another part of the country from another store and then from a third retailer of ours and you know bit by bit we realized that they were essentially muscling in there going to try and take over the business and this really leads on to another point which i found that being in that kind of business the whole concept of karma and you know what goes around comes around seems to operate at
01:16:24
Speaker
an amplified rate and so you know it didn't take long for not only our retailers to recognize that this other distributor were playing a dirty game but it's you know it's like this the whole industry so it's not even though it seems like it's a big industry and it is to some degree sports shoes it's a huge I think it's 90 billion dollar industry
01:16:45
Speaker
90 billion dollars per year of shoes are sold worldwide. But very quickly this company essentially got this terrible reputation and the upshot of it was in the end that we got given the sole distribution rights for the UK because they were just disingenuous.
01:17:06
Speaker
There was another story, which I'm going to tell you a bit later, which happened again with a different company, but like I say, it seems like there's this kind of microcosm with the macrocosm, and the karma comes back and bites you in the bum if you're being disingenuous. That was a very interesting, but also a very stressful time.
01:17:26
Speaker
But it did teach us the lesson that we never were disingenuous, at least to my knowledge, not knowingly. These guys were clearly, very knowingly, trying to undermine us, quite literally.
Reflections on Academic Biases
01:17:45
Speaker
Moving on from that scenario, the other thing that happened that year was I went out to the World Congress on low back pain. And I presented at the World Congress on low back pain in Los Angeles. And I was there with Paul Chek. And we actually tell the story on the podcast I did with Paul Chek. I think it's the second one. So I won't go into too much detail here, but it was another kind of interesting story from the perspective that
01:18:10
Speaker
he was asked to keynote at this conference and you know some sort of academic type you know that was involved with the board that decides who speaks essentially said well you know Paul Jack you know he might have a good reputation and he might seem to know his stuff but he's got no qualifications so if he's going to present he's got to present alongside a PhD or a professor or something
01:18:38
Speaker
And that whole story was that ultimately Paul ended up not presenting, even though he was on the board, he was invited onto the panel that organized, and his name's still on, the proceedings of that World Congress. And of course, again, this is with all these leaders I've mentioned already, people like Diane Lee and Leon Chato.
01:18:59
Speaker
Andrei Vlaming, you know, Grzekowski wasn't there at that one, but, you know, all the top names in this line of work.
Clinical Practice vs. Business Roles
01:19:08
Speaker
And it's amazing how people can be quite narrow-minded and stuck, that they didn't have that experience that I had or certainly weren't acting on it that I have with the general body work in recognizing that it's really nothing to do with the qualifications and everything to do with the individual.
01:19:25
Speaker
So anyway, in 2011, I was, by now I was doing a lot of teaching for the Czech Institute, and I used to go out to Denmark probably three or four times a year, sometimes five times a year. And the guy that organized those courses in Denmark is a friend of mine called Alan, and he also was the distributor for the Vibram Five Fingers.
01:19:46
Speaker
Now, so we used to have good chats while we were out there and we were good friends, had a lot of common interests. We still are good friends actually. I just happened to turn up one time and he was in quite a bad way with his back and it turned out when I assessed him, I offered to assess him and it turned out one or two of his ribs weren't moving very well at all.
01:20:10
Speaker
I did my normal osteopathic style treatments, a bit of massage, a bit of mobilization, some manipulation and it was one of those occasions where the next day he woke up and he was feeling so much better and it was just one of those times where it doesn't happen every time but it was like a miracle cure.
01:20:30
Speaker
The interesting thing about it was that I was right at a point where I was thinking, well, you know, we're now four years in, five years into our tenure as deep and five-fingered distributors. And perhaps this is too big an opportunity for me to not put all my eggs in that basket. And I was thinking, do I give up osteopathy? Do I give up check work? Do I give up my clinical work, et cetera? Do I stop writing?
01:20:56
Speaker
I was thinking maybe I just need to do that for a year or two just to really secure this.
01:21:04
Speaker
Of course, the fact that I was able to give this guy a treatment and for him to respond so well just made me realize. And I think also the other aspect is, you know, he wasn't a paying patient. He was just a friend and I just gave him the treatment because I could. I helped him because I could. And it made me realize that's such a gift. It's such an amazing thing to be able to help people. And I realized that there was no way I was ever going to give up my clinical work. And that actually added value to the fact that I was
01:21:34
Speaker
Although I was the head honcho, as it were, of the distribution company for this Vibram Five Fingers product, I had credibility because I was a clinician and I wasn't a shoe salesman.
01:21:48
Speaker
So later that year, this is the next story about karma. We were at a conference, it was called FitPro, which is the biggest kind of get-together for all fitness professionals in the UK. And there was another shoe company there that had a very similar product to ours. And they were telling everyone that even Five Fingers are the worst shoe on the market.
01:22:13
Speaker
They disrupt your gait patterns. They had some kind of story about how having something between your toes meant that your foot couldn't function properly. And they had one little piece of research which was quite amusing. It was done on about 16 people. And it had been published, but essentially suggesting that maybe if you've got toe socks on, you don't have as good balance as if you've got normal socks on. So they, of course, extrapolated that data and said, so you should be wearing our shoes and not the VVV5 fingers.
01:22:42
Speaker
First of all, it was a very small study, but what was quite funny about it is that first of all, the research was done on a group of people wearing socks versus toe socks versus barefoot, and they were looking to see how these conditions affected balance.
01:22:58
Speaker
And what they found in that very small study was that when the guys wore the toe socks, they had worse balance than when they were barefoot or when they were in normal socks. So, of course, this is a little bit surprising to us as even five fingers distributors and having used them for training and, you know, experience, the kind of lived experience of how it improves your balance and your proprioception and so on to have your toes move independently.
01:23:25
Speaker
but if they'd done their homework properly this same person had done a second study which had actually allowed people to adapt to wearing toe socks because of course you know what you have to recognize is that most people don't wear toe socks so if you go into a condition that you have never experienced before then it is going to feel a bit foreign to you for a little while and it may affect proprioception for the first few hours that you're wearing them but when they
01:23:51
Speaker
I redid the experiment and got people to wear toe socks for a couple of weeks and then did the experiment. What they found was that people in the toe socks actually had better balance than people in normal socks. So anyway, they've been going on about this and that same year later in that year I got invited to speak at a conference in Scotland.
01:24:09
Speaker
which was called the Scottish Barefoot Conference. And it was really, really good actually. There was probably about 70 or 80 people there. And one of the guys from this other shoe company was there. And so I brought this up. And it didn't go down too well, as you can imagine. But the point is that
01:24:28
Speaker
If you tell porky pies or try and manipulate the data a little bit just to suit your commercial needs, which of course happens all the time, then it does come around to bite you quite hard in the backside. And again, just another example of how, yeah, of course we have to speak our truth and of course we have to look for evidence for what we do, but we also have to
01:24:50
Speaker
be diligent in looking deeper. And, you know, I'm not immune to that. I'm going to tell you a story a bit later where I've got things a bit messed up at times. But the important thing is to be able to adapt to that and to have humility. And humility actually, you know, literally comes from the word humus. So it's literally that you feel like you want to melt into the earth. Yeah. That you are
01:25:17
Speaker
What's the phrase? That you are returned to the soil of your being, to the ground of your being, like you want the earth to swallow you up because you've got something completely wrong. You're humiliated.
01:25:31
Speaker
The next thing, moving into 2012, now we had, in 2012, we ran our own conference, which is called the Barefoot Connections Conference at the Natural History Museum, and we had Paul Chek there, we had Barefoot Ted there, who, of course, I've done a podcast with, and he's, that's a great podcast, actually, so you'll enjoy listening to him if you haven't heard that one. And he's the star of the Born to Run book, if you're not aware of who he is.
01:25:57
Speaker
He ran all kinds of races barefoot and at a very good level and then five in five fingers and sandals and so on. But anyway, you can listen to the story on the podcast. But we also had Louis Liebenberg, who I'm hoping to have on as a guest on FC2O in a few weeks time. Yeah, this company turned up to that event because we invited them because it was about trying to connect the barefoot community and
01:26:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, it didn't go down too well. The guy who presented for them was good, gave a nice presentation. But unfortunately, because Paul Chek knew some of the backgrounds I shared with him, he absolutely laid into this presenter in the question time and they left fairly swiftly after that, which was, again, just a bit of an example of karma when you stood up in front of 150 people and you're being humiliated again.
01:26:56
Speaker
But it was a great event and got lots of positive feedback. Obviously fantastic to be at the Natural History Museum and we picked it because the whole barefoot story is so congruent with evolution and of course just a wonderful venue to go to. And that's actually available. If you're interested in seeing that we actually have the videos of that on our Vimeo channel which I'll provide details to in the show notes.
01:27:20
Speaker
So, business challenges that year, we had major business challenges. The stock that we had ordered that year arrived late. And it was our biggest year so far. We had taken on a team of sales agents. We had quite an expensive PR company working for us in London.
01:27:38
Speaker
We had six or seven people in the office and all kinds of consultants coming in. And so we had very big overheads, about 50,000 pounds a month. And the shoes that were due to arrive in January arrived in April. And of course, the shoes that were due in February also arrived in April. And the March delivery arrived in April. And the biggest challenge there was that we were never cash rich as a company because we were in growth. So we didn't have plenty of spare cash in the background.
01:28:08
Speaker
And so we had forecast that we could afford to bring in the shoes in January. We had all these presales, so we knew those shoes were going out. We'd get the money in from those shoes and that would allow us to buy the stock for February. And then the stock for February would arrive and that would allow us to buy the stock for March and so on. But when it all arrives in April, not only do you have no cash flow,
01:28:31
Speaker
but you've just had three months with no stock coming in and the ยฃ50,000 per month overheads so you're ยฃ150,000 down.
01:28:39
Speaker
And then, of course, the retailers don't want to take it because they ordered it for January. So it was an absolute nightmare. And we looked like we were going to go bankrupt or go into insolvency. But we managed to negotiate with Ibram that they would give us a credit line, which they did kindly.
Collaboration with Wasp's Rugby Club
01:28:57
Speaker
But obviously, they recognized where the fault lay.
01:29:03
Speaker
We got through 2012. Now, you know, I'm going to come back to that story in a moment, but we also had a very interesting meeting in 2012 because we were invited to Wasp's Rugby Club. And Wasp's Rugby Club, as most of you know, but if you don't, they're one of the kind of premiership teams here in the UK for Rugby Union.
01:29:23
Speaker
and one of the best teams in the Premiership and their strength and conditioning coach loved the shoes, a couple of their senior players, James Haskell was one of them, loved the shoes and they wanted us to take some in for the first team to use to train them. So we went in, did that, explained all the ins and outs, the pros and cons, how to transition, etc.
01:29:43
Speaker
And then we were invited to go and have lunch with them in their canteen afterwards. And what was interesting was we went into the canteen and they said, look, you know, just go up, help yourself. It's all gluten free. It's all paleo. You know, just have whatever you want. And I thought, well, isn't that interesting? You know, because we're in 2012, so just seven years previously I've been at Chelsea Football Club and the team built there and said, you know, no elite athlete can survive on a gluten free diet, as you'll remember me saying.
01:30:11
Speaker
is it's a miserable diet. And there they are. They're all sitting around having this wonderful lunch with this amazing chef that cooked all this great gluten-free food.
2012 Business Struggles
01:30:20
Speaker
And of course, around that time, Andy Murray came out as being gluten-free, and Djokovic came out as being gluten-free, and so on and so forth. So there are lots of elite athletes that were essentially taking on this new diet, and not just gluten-free, but paleo as well. So the whole idea of needing
01:30:35
Speaker
X amount of carbs to be able to get by with being seriously thrown into question as well. Anyway, so moving into 2013. Now, 2013, well, I should say actually right near the end of 2012.
01:30:48
Speaker
We were really struggling with the business. We lost almost all of our high street retailers, certainly all the big ones, because of the late deliveries. So no one was buying in the autumn winter stock. And we got to a week before Christmas, and we realized that this was it. We could not buy in the shoes. We could not pay the staff. We were going to have to close down. And the only way to survive it was we were going to have to lay off most of the staff. So in the week before Christmas, I had to call up.
01:31:18
Speaker
How many was it? We had 19 people on our books and we ended up with four of us left in the office. So 15 people I had to lay off in the week before Christmas. And those phone calls were tough. You know, some of the people were very compassionate and sympathetic and understood our plight. Others were aggressive and angry about it, understandably.
01:31:43
Speaker
It's never good at any time of year but in the week leading into Christmas that's definitely not good. I just remember I was in tears making these phone calls sometimes because of people's compassion and sometimes because I get off a call from someone saying they couldn't afford to buy their kids Christmas presents anymore.
01:32:02
Speaker
So that was tough and it hit me and my business partner, Mike, pretty hard. But we kind of survived and scraped through.
Marathon Preparation and Injuries
01:32:11
Speaker
But we had booked onto the London Marathon for April 2013. And of course we started our training like you're supposed to, somewhere around November, December time.
01:32:21
Speaker
But with this whole business collapse happening, I just, of course, didn't have the energy or any focus on doing any training. And it kind of got to early February. And we realized we kind of survived this and got through it. And it looked like we were going to be able to make business work for the next year.
01:32:41
Speaker
And we suddenly thought, shit, we've only got like 10 weeks or something until the marathon. And so we got into our training, but with probably a degree of what we used to call adrenal fatigue, but probably is HPA axis dysfunction is a more accurate term. But the stress of it had knocked me sideways a bit.
01:33:01
Speaker
did as much training as I could within reason and we just agreed look we'll get around the course we're fit enough but you know we're just obviously not going to get a great time so so we went on with the training got to marathon date
01:33:17
Speaker
And in fact, a week before the marathon, I went out on my last training run, just a fairly short one, maybe 8 or 9k. And I decided to do a trail run because I didn't want to run the road so much. I've been doing a lot of road running. And I thought it would just be better for me to get off-road. So I did that. And so I just did this trail that I hadn't taken before. And I'm running along this trail. And it's alongside a hill. So I'm kind of running.
01:33:42
Speaker
on the side of a hill and this trail went on and it went on and it went on. So you can imagine one foot's really pronating and the other one's really supinating and I'm running on and on and on and then I got a pain in my, around my fibular head and it started to ache a little bit and then it got really sharp.
01:34:02
Speaker
And then I started to get visions of, oh, this is an old football injury I had. And I had a football injury maybe 10 years previously, which I struggled to shake for a few months. But it was right around that fibular head. And anyway, I thought, I'm going to have to stop and walk for a bit. So I walked. And anyway, I managed to make it back home with a bit of run-walk kind of combo. It didn't feel too bad, but it was a little bit concerning a week before the marathon. Anyway, didn't really think anything more of it, because I didn't do any more training. And it didn't bother me at all after that.
01:34:32
Speaker
marathon day comes around and we got up to London obviously fantastic carnival kind of atmosphere and off we set and we decided we were going to try to do it in about four or four and a half hours we thought we could probably manage that we thought under four hours was a bit of a push considering the lack of training we'd done so off we set with that group and we were right on track and you know we got to about 12 miles in it's just around the point you go over Tower Bridge
01:34:59
Speaker
And just as I was running up onto Tower Bridge, suddenly I got this pain back again. And it was fairly quickly, within a few hundred meters, it was quite severe. And I said to Mike, my business partner and brother actually, I said,
01:35:17
Speaker
I'm going to have to walk for a bit because my leg's killing me." And he said, no, that's fine. That's fine, mate. Let's just walk for a bit. So he walked for a bit and it eased off. I said, okay, let's try running. So ran for a few hundred meters and then it got to a point. I said, look, I'm going to have to stop again. So he walked for a bit. I said, look, I think probably if we can just find the next medical station, then let's go in there, get it taped up and it'll be fine.
01:35:40
Speaker
And so sure enough, we found this medical station, went in there, oh no, sorry, we're all out of tape. Oh, OK. So I can give you painkillers. And I was like, no, I don't think I'll do that. I don't think that's a particularly good idea. So I said I was going to the next medical station. And so off we went. And same thing, run for a little bit, walk for a little bit, run for a little bit, walk. And it got to a point where I just couldn't run anymore. I was not only
01:36:06
Speaker
in pain walking, running, but I was in pain walking and I started to limp. Anyway, I got to about mile 19 and we found this medical station which seemed pretty decent setup. I went in, still they had no tape. They'd run out and the guy basically said, look, we'll get the physio to come and look at you. So he came over, had a look, gave it some massage, said, look, it's just the annular ligament around your fibular head.
01:36:29
Speaker
You can carry on running, it's not going to do any damage. You're nearly there now so just go ahead and give it a go. So off we went and it was basically the same thing. I got a few hundred meters and I had to walk again.
01:36:44
Speaker
So ultimately, we got to somewhere around the 23, 24 mile mark and my brother Mike said, I'm going to have to run, my legs are stiffening up. He said, do you mind if I meet you at the finish line? I said, no, no, no, it's fine that you walk with me. By that stage, what would it have been? We'd have done about 10 miles walking.
01:37:04
Speaker
And, you know, it struck me afterwards. I had a really sore shoulder afterwards, and it was because I'd been hitching my shoulder for about 13 miles. And if you think, if someone said to you, you know, when you've got a sore leg, I want you to go and walk 13 miles, then that would be quite a thing to do. And you realize how long a mile is. You know, in a car it seems quite a short distance, but when you're walking it, it's quite a long old way. And when you're limping it, it's even further. But anyways, he ran off.
01:37:33
Speaker
And I got quite emotional, I was kind of walking along and I felt like I wanted to cry and I was just watching the people run past me. And a lot of the people I saw go past me, people I had passed earlier in the run. And you know, a lot of them were elderly and some of them were disabled and some of them were obese and I was watching them run past me.
01:37:54
Speaker
And I was just thinking, you know what? I really judged all of these people. As I ran past them, I was looking at them going, oh, yeah, he's a bit unfit. She's a bit fat. He's got a funny limp. They're really old. And I kind of knew I was going to beat them. But actually, the reality was that on that day, they beat me.
01:38:14
Speaker
And it was a real humbling, again, you could say, humiliating experience. But it made me realize that, of course, I would never have said any of that to them openly. But in my mind, I was judging them. You kind of look certainly as a lesson, I would say, or a bit of advice. When there's something that occurs like that, I always look for the lesson in it and see what I can learn.
01:38:38
Speaker
And I think that was it. You don't realize that you're doing this, but I was judging all these people as I was running past them. And only when they ran past me later did I realize why I was feeling so emotional. Aside from the fact that, of course, I'm wearing my five fingers and I'm there to try and represent the five fingers and show that you can run marathons in these things. And there's me hobbling along, which is not a good advert for the five
Vibram Business Closure
01:39:01
Speaker
fingers.
01:39:01
Speaker
Anyway, also in 2013, I managed to launch my neutralizer video. That gives you a little bit of an idea. It took me 10 years to go from developing it right the way through to actually getting the final videos out. That was a real lesson in persistence.
01:39:21
Speaker
And you could say focus as well. I mean, I got hugely distracted, obviously, by the Veeam Five Fingers business. That really took all my attention. And if that hadn't happened, I'm sure I would have gotten them done sooner. But I had recorded those videos. This was the fourth time I tried to record them and had succeeded in recording them. And I just had all kinds of things happen to me.
01:39:44
Speaker
from computers breaking to files getting corrupted to the sound board getting broken and it taking out the motherboard in the computer I stored the files on. It was just like a series, a catalog of errors. And I just thought, you know, where is the lesson here? What am I supposed to learn from this other than the fact, maybe I'm not supposed to put this out yet, you know, or maybe I'm not supposed to put it out at all.
01:40:06
Speaker
But in 2013, we finally got it done. And so the neutralizer is obviously available on the website. And it's a great little device. But yeah, it took a long old time to get to a place where I felt I could reasonably sell it.
01:40:20
Speaker
Now, in 2014, there was the Czech conference. So Gavin Jennings, CEO of the Czech Institute, decided he was going to put on a Czech conference in the UK and asked me to present a couple of different talks. And the main one I did, I presented a kind of new realization, which was that I had been aware that we could always find simplicity in the complexity of things. And actually, the neutralizer and the neutral spine concept
01:40:49
Speaker
is a great example of that, is simplicity. There's all kinds of complexity around keeping a neutral spine, and there's things like when you're in neutral, your core stabilizer musculature activates better. When you're in neutral, your pelvis and low back are held in a better position, so the length-tension relationships around the muscles are more optimized. There's all kinds of technical complexity you could go into as to why a neutral spine might be a useful awareness to have.
01:41:19
Speaker
But the simplicity is that if you do any exercise in neutral, then essentially what you're doing is you're optimizing core function and you're improving muscle balance around your primary joints. So I've had this realization of this idea that there's simplicity in the complexity. And then it really dawned on me that that is what Paul Czech is a genius at. He manages to find simplicity amongst
01:41:45
Speaker
enormous complexity. And again, we talk about this in the podcast I did with him. But it's the theme really for this whole podcast is the idea that you can find order from the chaos. And so examples of that in the check system are the primal pattern system that Paul developed.
01:42:01
Speaker
He also developed the six foundation health principles. He developed the concept of the four doctors. He developed the concept of the one, two, three, four, which again, if you want to learn more about that, then listen to the podcast with him. He developed the concept of the totem pole of survival reflexes. And all of these models are examples of simplicity found in the complexity.
01:42:24
Speaker
So what I realized was that Paul had identified simplicity on the other side of complexity. So he worked his way through all of this complexity in holistic health and at the other end he came up with simple working models that are highly effective and really useful for everyone from healthcare professionals to fitness professionals to the general public to utilize.
01:42:49
Speaker
Interestingly enough, also at that conference, Edward Heskey, the England footballer, was there. He had been working with a Czech professional, one of my colleagues, called Warren Williams. He was there in the audience, and he was listening to the talk. I kind of did a similar thing to what I'm doing here, just walking through my career, presenting some of the key points. I had mentioned my experiences at Chelsea.
01:43:12
Speaker
He came up to me in the break with Warren, and he said, oh, Matt, I really enjoyed your talk. Thanks for delivering it. And I said, oh, no, that's really, really, really appreciate it. Thanks. It's good to meet you.
01:43:23
Speaker
And he said, you know that bit when you're talking about Chelsea? And what happened with the team doctor? I said, yeah. He said, I knew exactly what you're going to say. He said, it's like that throughout the whole of professional football. Now, that was 2014. Things may have changed. So let's just put in that get out of jail clause. But it was interesting and affirming to have his experience, especially as such a senior and accomplished player.
01:43:52
Speaker
Anyway, so moving at 2015 to 2017, this was really heading towards the tail end of the business with Vibram Five Fingers. The business has shrunk bit by bit. Each year it looked like we might go back into growth, so it wasn't shrinking dramatically. But we were just struggling to repay the loan that we had taken, or the credit line we'd taken with Vibram. We'd got it down from 300,000 pounds that we owed them down to 230,000.
01:44:21
Speaker
And so when you consider this is sort of four or five years later, that's not a lot of money to pay off in that period of time. And so anyway, there were three things that happened all towards the end of 2016, one of which was Brexit. And when Brexit happened,
01:44:42
Speaker
what happened was the pound collapsed against the dollar and unfortunately we owed our 230,000 pounds in dollars and so what that meant was that because the pound collapsed the 230,000 pounds jumped straight back up to 300,000 so that was just
01:44:59
Speaker
highly demoralizing and didn't look good on the books. But also because of what had happened in 2012 and us losing all of our high street retailers, what had happened was the online business had really picked up and had kind of taken some of the weight as it were.
01:45:16
Speaker
And Amazon were our biggest customer. So back in 2012, I think they did about 12,000 pounds worth of business with us. And our business turned over about 1.2 million. So you can see they were pretty small fish at that point. But by 2017, 2016 rather, they had essentially they were worth 27% of our business. And Vibram decided that they were going to take all Amazon accounts in-house and work with them directly.
01:45:45
Speaker
Now, you can understand that, obviously, from Vibram's perspective, and it's in their contracts that they can do that. They, of course, hold all the cards in the contracts because they can. And some of the other distributors really didn't care whether they took Amazon or not because they didn't work with Amazon. So they weren't losing anything. But for us, Amazon had become a big fish because we needed to work with them because of what had happened in 2012.
01:46:12
Speaker
So to lose 27% of your business and for your debt to jump back up to where it was four or five years previously. And then the third thing was that there was a distributor sniffing around who was well capitalized and ready to potentially take over distribution. And those three things combined led to our demise as a company.
01:46:33
Speaker
Vibram basically called their credit line in, said, we need you to repay it. They knew we couldn't repay it.
Lessons in Life and Business
01:46:39
Speaker
And so what we had to do was to file for insolvency in early 2017. So it was sad. And I still have pangs of sadness about it because it was 10 years of my life. And I truly believed in the product. I still wear the product now. And yeah, it was a shame.
01:46:57
Speaker
Also, of course, I lost my place of work, so I had to start working from home, which has its ups and downs, more ups and downs, I'd say. But the dog comes in and treats the patient sometimes, which for some of them is an up, and for others, not so much an up. But anyway, in that same year, 2017, it was now 20 years after I graduated as an osteopath.
01:47:21
Speaker
And so we had a 20-year reunion. And it was lovely to see some of the guys and to just catch up on what everyone had been doing. And one of my friends there sort of took me aside at one point and said, Matt, of all of us, because there were 65 of us in our year,
01:47:39
Speaker
I think only 45 of us graduated. But anyway, of that cohort, he said, you know, you're the one that's really walked the road less traveled. And he was saying it as a compliment. And I kind of needed to hear it at that point because
01:47:55
Speaker
I was pretty low in some ways. I wouldn't say I was ever depressed because I had my clinical work and I had many other positive things going on in my life. But I guess if I put all my eggs in one basket, which is another potential bit of advice and lesson, then I would have been in a real difficult position. But anyway, so that was nice to hear.
01:48:19
Speaker
But towards the end of 2017, I was invited to speak at a kind of event for personal trainers that was to be held in January 2018. And so someone asked me, the organizer asked me, could you just put together a brief bit of blurb about what you're going to talk about and how you're going to deliver it.
01:48:37
Speaker
So, using my experience as a shoe salesman, I put together a post on Facebook, which essentially was saying I was going to be teaching these personal trainers about spinal pathology, spinal injuries, and how to look out for them in their clients, because the last thing you want to be doing is loading up a client who's got an unstable spine or a spine with, you know, hidden injuries such as disc injuries or fractures, this kind of thing, which are quite common.
01:49:05
Speaker
And so I put something like, do your clients have hidden spinal pathologies lurking ready to be exposed? I think that was the exact phrase I used. And, you know, send it to this guy. He posted it up on social media. And the next thing I know is I'm getting all kinds of friends from around the country and elsewhere saying, Matt, you know, you're trending on Twitter. And I'm like, what do you mean?
01:49:32
Speaker
And it turned out I was being lambasted by the pain neuroscience guys for essentially engendering kind of a catastrophization or creating what some people call dims, which means danger in me. So in other words, getting people to think that they were in danger when they really weren't. And some of these guys were people that I knew, some of them were people I taught.
01:49:54
Speaker
And they were just laying into me and tagging in all kinds of highbrow people. And there's all this discussion going on. And I was thinking, oh my god, what's going on here? And so discussion ensued. And in some ways, quite rightly, they picked me up on it. Because what I was using was I was using the standard sales approach, which is that you want to talk to people's pain. How can we avoid pain?
01:50:20
Speaker
And then how can we improve pleasure? And so I'd use that kind of avoid pain, improve pleasure.
01:50:27
Speaker
way of marketing my course or my presentation. And they were saying, if you speak like this, then you are getting people to believe that they're broken. And I said, well, no, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that the research shows that many people are walking around with disc bulges. And if you then go and pick up a real heavy load with poor form, then the likelihood then is that that disc bulge is not going to get better. It's more likely to get worse.
01:50:54
Speaker
And anyway, so all these kind of slightly combative conversations went back and forth. But it was a real rude awakening into the world of pain neuroscience and a really welcome one as well. And so I'm glad it happened in many ways. But again, it was pretty stressful. The key thing that I would say is that you
01:51:14
Speaker
you really need to be able to stick to your guns to some degree and to speak your truth. But that if you do do that, then you've got to be ready to adapt as well. And I feel, and I hope that I've managed to do that. So in 2018, something by way of a response to that, I wrote a paper with Paul Chek for the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies called The Ghost in the Machine is muscular skeletal medicine lacking salt.
01:51:43
Speaker
And really what we were doing was we were looking not just at the physical side, but as the name suggests, we were looking at the emotional side, the spiritual side, the unconscious aspects of human function and how they can influence the nervous system and influence behavior and ultimately end up creating pain.
01:52:09
Speaker
That paper was very, very popular. We got lots of terrific feedback from it. But we also got a bit of a backlash as well. And some of it was critiquing us for painting a kind of narrow view of evidence-based medicine. And that was in some ways a fair comment, again, because we were really critiquing people that focus almost entirely on research papers.
01:52:37
Speaker
and don't also incorporate their own experience, their clinical experience and clinical judgment, but also the patient's values. And so in evidence-based medicine, they describe it as a three-legged stool where you've got the evidence side from the literature. You've got the experience of the clinician or the trainer.
01:52:56
Speaker
And then you've got the values of the client. And so we were really condemning a little bit some of the evidence that's out there, which was kind of saying that you don't need to worry about disc injuries and you don't need to worry about posture and all this kind of stuff. There's some pretty big flaws with that, which I mentioned actually some of them in my introductory preview to FC2.0. But anyway.
01:53:19
Speaker
Off the back of that, really, what I took a big interest in was central sensitivity. And central sensitivity is the notion that the nervous system, so the central nervous system, can become sensitized by multiple inputs into it, such as, you know, you might have a slightly sore knee, you might have a bit of a neckache, you might have some irritable bowel syndrome, and the combination of those three can be enough to sensitize the nervous system.
01:53:47
Speaker
and to mean that pain persists longer than it should do or indeed that you feel pain when really there's no damage there.
01:53:56
Speaker
What it turns out is that when you dig down into it, it seems that what drives central sensitivity is essentially allostatic load or physiological load or physiological stress, you could say. And so it fits really beautifully with what the check system has talked about for many years in terms of physiological load is the phrase that we tend to use in the check system. But how do we assess people's physiological loads?
01:54:21
Speaker
thereby give them the right program for them. So we don't want to make their exercise program part of the problem. We want to make it part of the solution. So we don't want to keep loading them more if they need to be unloaded. And so recently I did a podcast with Phil Austin on central sensitivity and on visceral pain and various other
01:54:37
Speaker
factors associated with persistent pain. So if that's your kind of bag, then by all means listen into that. But really what central sensitivity is all about is about the idea you can't just take a biomechanical approach. You really got to be looking at the psychology, at the emotions, at the nutrition, at the lifestyle and at the mechanics and the exercise and so on and the sleep, et cetera. And that way you end up with a much more effective system of both helping people out of pain
01:55:07
Speaker
but also allowing people to realise their potential.
01:55:11
Speaker
So moving into 2019, of course, I launched the FC2O podcast, and that's what you're listening to right now. And that's been really fantastic. I really enjoyed it. It's been wonderfully uplifting to chat with all these people and to really tap into the expertise of all these very accomplished individuals. And I'm looking forward to doing more of that in the future. But what I would say is a lesson is that
01:55:39
Speaker
you know right throughout my career I've had to speculate to accumulate and some people would prefer not to do so much speculation as I've done and I totally understand that you know I've launched all these products and one thing I haven't mentioned is I've done a whole bunch of different conferences and workshops and so on webinar series etc etc and I wouldn't say that any one of them has made me a lot of money but
01:56:04
Speaker
It's not just about money, it's about energy and giving you a sense of purpose. It's about the insights that you get from doing it, the lessons that you learn, which obviously is hopefully what I'm sharing with you here today. And it reminds me of a quote that David White states, and he says, that every courageous life is lived out in the grits and dirt of existence.
01:56:31
Speaker
I'm not saying that my life is a courageous life, but it is, as my colleague said, perhaps a road less traveled kind of life that I've taken so far. And the point of the quote is that we project onto others the whole time. So we look at people in the limelight, whether that be within our profession, in our community.
01:56:54
Speaker
or on TV, you know, and we project on to these people that have got some kind of glorious, courageous life, or glossy life, maybe even. But the courageous life is one that is lived out in the grit and dirt of existence, and every one of those people you see
01:57:11
Speaker
in the glossy magazines has their cross to bear and I think that's a really important thing to recognize because in the social media age all we get is the gloss and the superficial kind of Facebook type existence and that can lead to us feeling like we're less than or like we're not as worthy and I think there's an overall sense of a lack of self-esteem or self-worth in society at this time because
01:57:38
Speaker
we are so exposed to the glossy parts of other people's lives and we don't see the grit and the dirt that they're going through. So that leads us on to the biopsychosocial view of medicine and of life in general.
01:57:53
Speaker
Fortunately enough for me, I've kind of fallen into using a biopsychosocial approach through doing the check training and through doing the naturopathic training. But it's really a profound way to look at people and situations. And you might add to the biopsychosocial approach that you would have spiritual tagged onto the end there as well. So a biopsychosocial spiritual approach. And the reason I say that is it sounds contentious.
01:58:21
Speaker
But the reality is that most people have a spiritual leaning, particularly when they're under stress, when they're existentially challenged. So if they were given a diagnosis that they may not live for very long, most people find spirituality at that point if they haven't already.
01:58:41
Speaker
And every culture has a spiritual belief system or spiritual practice. And indeed, many of the different things that we do on a day-to-day basis are forms of spiritual practice from eating to singing to dancing to playing sports. If you listen to Rupert Sheldrake's recent book, just trying to remember what it's called, but I think it's called Science and Spiritual Practice, something like that.
Biopsychosocial Approach and Life Philosophy
01:59:04
Speaker
He very much elucidates on this and points out that we are all using various everyday activities for spiritual practice. So it's actually his books called Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. His previous book was Science and Spiritual Practice.
01:59:24
Speaker
So the interesting thing about this is that if you have a spiritual practice, then what that tends to go hand in hand with is identifying a purpose, a purpose to life. And the research I did on central sensitization and central sensitivity is that
01:59:45
Speaker
If you do not have purpose, then it increases the stress on the system. And so there's this research study which tracks a whole bunch of people. I think it was a couple hundred, maybe several hundred people. I have to get the figures for it. But they track them across 10 years. And they assess them at the beginning to see who had purpose and who did not, who felt they had life purpose.
02:00:08
Speaker
And then they also took a bunch of different physiological measures to look at the amount of physiological stress on them. And they reassessed at the end of 10 years and those with purpose had a statistically significant lower level of physiological stress or allostatic load on them at the 10 year mark. So purpose itself is very important for us for our optimal health.
02:00:32
Speaker
So one of the challenges in a scientific, materialistic culture, which is exactly what we're inhabiting at the moment, is that
02:00:41
Speaker
Matter or materials do not have inherent purpose. And so the scientific materialist view of the world is that life is purposeless and that it's all happened by chance. Evolution is a chance, almost a mistake, you could say. It's just an accident that we happen to be here. So it really makes life devoid of purpose.
02:01:08
Speaker
And so this reminds me of a quote from Gandhi who, when he first set foot in London, he was asked by a reporter. I think it was London. It might have been in New York. But it was in one of the major Western metropolises. And the reporter said to him, Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization? And he stopped for a moment. And he looked at the reporter and he said, I think it would be a great idea.
02:01:37
Speaker
And I think that really encapsulates one of the big issues that we're facing at the moment and something that we can actively engage in to move beyond that level of scientific materialism. And if you want to see what that looks like, the last podcast I did with Monica Gagliano,
02:01:57
Speaker
I've actually, in the show notes there, I've actually got Ken Wilber's different levels of consciousness, and you'll see that scientific materialism isn't at the top of the levels of consciousness. So we've got a way to go before that, and we explain it a little bit in the podcast. So, you know, another quote from Krishnamurti, which really resonates here as well, is that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
02:02:25
Speaker
Now, if we're taking a biopsychosocial approach or a biopsychosocial spiritual approach,
02:02:32
Speaker
If you're adjusting yourself to our society, which as we know is the sickest society we've ever had, we've got higher levels of obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, et cetera, than we've ever had, and higher levels of persistent pain than we've ever had. So something that we're doing, and this is all in spite of having the best medical systems and the highest number of manual therapists and personal trainers and gyms and all of this stuff,
02:03:01
Speaker
we're still the sickest we've ever been. And so a biopsychosocial approach would say, well, hang on a second. If the society is sick, then we do not want to adjust ourselves to be more well-adjusted to the society. So you take the example back of, only because we've mentioned it already, gluten-free foods. Well, gluten-free food now is very easy to come by.
02:03:27
Speaker
But it's only because there's been a minority of people that have insisted on it and woken up early to it and said, right, I don't do well on gluten. I need to make sure there's no gluten in this. And so just as always happens in a commercial environment, if there's demand, then a supply starts to arise. And so if we take Krishna Murti's quote, it's no measure of health.
02:03:52
Speaker
In our society, it's healthy and normal to eat bread. It's healthy and normal to have beer after work, particularly on the weekend. It's healthy and normal to have takeaway foods. I say healthy. It's normal. But the point that Krishnamurti is making is that it's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. So if you adjust the society, all of those things are things that you do. And if you don't do well on those foods, and of course, some people do fine on those foods. I'm not anti-gluten or anything.
02:04:21
Speaker
then you're going to end up with an issue and this is what happened with the footballer at Chelsea. He wasn't well adjusted to the food and yet he was trying to adjust to society and to the culture that he was in at the club and ultimately it made him sick. So what advice can I offer you? Well I would say that one of the important things
02:04:41
Speaker
in your career and in your life in general is to have some variety. Don't be a one-trick pony. Variety is, as we all know, the spice of life, but it also gives you other options. Now, of course you can spread yourself too thin, but if I didn't have that variety when the Vibram Five Fingers business went down, I think it would have been more calamitous for me than it turned out in the end.
02:05:05
Speaker
More practically, I'd say if you can write papers, if you can write articles, write blogs, chapters, books, whatever, then it gives you a kind of medium through which you can express yourself, and that's very healthy. But also, it allows you to put your truth out there. And by putting your truth out there, as I did on that Facebook post,
02:05:27
Speaker
you get corrected. So your truth, you can never be 100% accurate with your own truth. You can only speak your own truth. And other people's truths will come back in and correct you. And so I think that's really helpful. If you can work with people that have deadlines, then what I've always thought is that if I didn't write for the Journal of Body Work, I'd be a lot lazier than I am. I can sometimes read 20 papers in the morning when I'm writing a
02:05:52
Speaker
You know a paper for the general body work and movement therapies because I have to do it I've got a deadline I've got to get through these papers and each paper leads on to another paper you need to read You know you go through them and by the end of it you become quite specialized in that topic area So I would say that's a really good strategy for anyone that wants to develop themselves and to keep themselves honest as it were and
02:06:12
Speaker
Speaking does exactly the same thing as this teaching. It gets you out there, it gets you, again, speaking your truth, and that allows you to learn more from others. It allows you to formulate ideas and to essentially align your ideas in formation, as it were, and then you can put them out to your audience.
02:06:39
Speaker
Another aspect is potentially providing products. If you are someone who already provides products, we've talked about that a little bit. But I think many people listening, they are in the service industry. So they are healthcare professionals or fitness professionals. And so our service is our product. And I think it's useful to remember, it struck me on many occasions that, of course, in Christian ideology, one of the phrases that you'll hear is that patience is a virtue.
02:07:09
Speaker
And you could say that patience is a virtue and I'm being patient and hopefully at some point through this career of jumping all around the place trying different things, speculation, then something will return back and you end up with what feels like a fair exchange of energy. But like I say, it's not all about the money, it's about also all of the other nutrition you get from these experiences.
02:07:38
Speaker
But the other thing on that phrase, patience is a virtue, is that it's often struck me that patience are a virtue.
02:07:45
Speaker
So if you just switch the CE of patients for a TS and you say are a virtue, then I think that's a really important thing to remember. It's very easy when you're running a business to think patients or clients, they start to become numbers on a spreadsheet because to run a business, you need a spreadsheet. You need to be looking at the figures, can I afford to pay the rent this month? Can I afford to pay my staff? Can I afford to advertise? Can I afford the mortgage? So on and so forth.
02:08:13
Speaker
So it becomes logistical, it becomes objective and so you start to objectify your patients or your clients but just to hold that thought that they are a virtue and they aren't objects but they are subjects, they are humans, that's the object but they are also beings and that's the subject and you are there to be with them and to support them.
02:08:33
Speaker
And so I guess this leads me into the concept of different models of healthcare. Now, for a while, really since getting involved in the Czech approach, what I've come to recognize is that our model of healthcare in the West is
02:08:53
Speaker
to my mind, woefully inadequate. I wrote a paper called But We're Infinitely More Complex Than The Car in 2015, and I also did a webinar on that topic as well, which you can see on the Vimeo page that I have. It's a bit of an unusual title, and the reason that it's a bit unusual is that
02:09:15
Speaker
obviously entering into discussions with various colleagues over the years, they will commonly say to me, well, Matt, how come you worked with people for four days in a row? I could never do that. I wouldn't know what to do. The patients wouldn't want to come for four days. They wouldn't pay for me for four days. It's a ridiculous model. How can you think that that's the right way to go about things?
02:09:38
Speaker
So I would often say to them, well, how long do you spend with your patients? And they would say, well, 30 minutes is the standard answer for an osteopath. And I would say, well, if you went to a garage and said to them, look, I need my car serviced. And they said to you, OK, well, that would be 30 minutes and it would be 40 pounds.
02:10:00
Speaker
What would you say? Would you take your car there? Almost certainly you wouldn't. And the reason that you wouldn't is because your car is, you know it's a complex system of systems. And there's no way you can check over everything and make sure it's safe to drive and functional and nothing's going to fall apart in 30 minutes. And certainly not for 40 pounds either. If someone said that, it might sound good, but you would instantly know that is not a good idea. But we're infinitely more complex than the car.
02:10:29
Speaker
And so how can we have the audacity to think that in 30 minutes we could actually help someone or something as complex as a human being? And so that's why I do spend the time to work with clients for two, three, four days at a time. And of course, it's not for everyone. It's quite a high-end way of working, and people have to be serious about their health. But this is another example of
02:10:54
Speaker
most of society would not do that they would not come and see someone for four days because they're living in a scientific materialist society so they value matter and material possessions more than they do themselves and that's why they will spend hundreds if not thousands of pounds to get their car serviced and they'll be without their car for a minimum of a day possibly two sometimes a week but they accept it because they know they value their car
02:11:21
Speaker
yet they don't value their bodies nearly as much. And so that's just a reflection of the society and the level of consciousness that we're at. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for higher levels of consciousness and to make changes in society. So another bit of advice I'd offer is that if you're anything like me, and hopefully you're not because no one would want to be like me, as Elon Musk famously said, then
02:11:50
Speaker
It's easy to get inspired. And I'm very easily inspired by people that have, you know, good ideas and great insights and are well read and they speak well and deliver information well. I can get easily inspired. I get inspired by my own thoughts, by my own ideas, my own creations. And I think most people are the same. I think when you find something you're passionate about, then inspiration comes easily. But what I would say is that life is a balance between inspiration and expiration.
02:12:17
Speaker
And so the inspiration is the impetus. It's the drive to do something. But the exploration is the actual execution. And it's funny that when something expires, it dies. It's done. So it's the execution. And so if you're looking at that from a
02:12:34
Speaker
project perspective. It's very important that when you're inspired to do something that you don't just start and get halfway through and leave it.
Final Thoughts and Life Advice
02:12:41
Speaker
I've been a classic person for doing that a lot. That said, I've also got a lot done and so I have had the exploration as well, but I would say on balance that I have had a kind of mental asthma.
02:12:53
Speaker
Where, at the mental level at least, I can breathe in, I can inspire, I get inspired, but I struggle to breathe out again. And so, you know, we need to have inspiration and expression balance because that is respiration, right? We know that inspiration and expression is respiration.
02:13:09
Speaker
which literally means the re-breathing of life or the re-spiriting of life and respiration is of course what is required for life. So we need to get that balance right not just in physiological terms but also in sort of mental, emotional, spiritual terms as well.
02:13:31
Speaker
So one further thing that I would recommend is I think it's really useful for you to develop your own living philosophy, which is essentially a form of spirituality. And one definition of spirituality, which is Paul Cech's definition, or one of his definitions that he uses, is that spirituality is taking responsibility for your actions moment to moment.
02:13:59
Speaker
And in that way, I would say that absolutely, you know, responsibility, taking responsibility.
02:14:06
Speaker
is literally having the ability to respond. And I mentioned this in the podcast with Sherry Tenpenny, the second one where we're talking about vaccinations. And so I'm saying that if you don't vaccinate your children, then you need to take responsibility for that, which means you literally need to be able to respond if there's an issue, if it looks like they're coming down with a serious condition.
02:14:30
Speaker
If you choose to vaccinate your children, exactly the same. Some children do react to vaccinations. We know that. So you need to have the ability to respond. You don't just go blindly into these things. You need to read around it and take responsibility.
02:14:45
Speaker
One of my favorite definitions that I really feel fits with my life philosophy is that to live a spiritual life, or let's say, if there's purpose in us being here, which is what spirituality really relates to, then surely that purpose has to be for us to realize our potential. And so that's what I've always wanted to do with my clients, is it's not about getting them out of pain. I mean, that's obviously a great goal.
02:15:15
Speaker
I really want to help them to realize their potential. What I want to do while I'm here is to realize my potential. My advice to you is to find what it is in your life that will allow you to realize your potential. That means not sitting on the fence because that's the potential. You have to go one direction or the other.
02:15:35
Speaker
And when you go one direction or the other, then what happens is you get redirected. Either you're on the right track and it leads down the right path and you do really well and you feel fulfilled, or you get redirected. And you can see I've had several redirections on my path. But in general, my path has been heading to the same destination, which is to help people to realize their potential.
02:15:59
Speaker
So, you know, I've mentioned what goes around comes around. That's another little bit of advice. I don't think anyone really needs that advice because we all know that we have an innate sense that that's the case. But I wouldn't ever play games in that way. I think that is opening yourself to all kinds of stress and distress and challenges. So that's a fairly obvious one. And then really to speak your truth.
02:16:26
Speaker
So you know as I've alluded to several times when you speak your truth as Jordan Peterson says so the word or the logos is the truth then that means that you put your ideas out there and they will be
02:16:41
Speaker
adapted and adjusted by others that are listening to you. And in that way, of course, linking back into evolution, then the whole thing about evolution is to have flexibility and adaptability. It's your ability to adapt to your environment, which allows you to survive it. Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try and change the environment. So like with the gluten example earlier, you could say, well, there's just gluten available, so I need to try and adapt to that environment. Well, no.
02:17:10
Speaker
We've got other options. We could stop eating gluten and we could ask people, is there gluten in this? And we could ask, do you sell gluten-free bread? Do you sell gluten-free this, gluten-free that? And as you do that, you start to see people's behaviors changing. And certainly that's what I've witnessed over the last 20 years. Of course, you've got to do what is right for you.
02:17:30
Speaker
What I mean by that is that of course I've taken one path and you're taking another path and everyone's got their own path, but so long as it feels like you're doing what is right for you, then you can't really go wrong.
02:17:47
Speaker
It might sound a bit obvious, but I'm going to use a couple of quotes to illustrate. Now, one quote is a series of quotes, really, from a poster that my father left me. And so before my dad died, he
02:18:05
Speaker
left an envelope for my brother and my sister and myself and it was one of those envelopes that you dread opening because you know it's there in his deed box but you know that when you do open that it will be because he's died and he told us there's some envelopes in there for you. So sure enough that happened as you know and opened it up and there's this
02:18:29
Speaker
scroll the paper which is called Desiderata and some of you will be familiar with this and I've just grabbed a few bits of the kind of wisdom that are written down in Desiderata and so the first one is speak your truth quietly and clearly and listen to others even dull and ignorant they too have their story
02:18:50
Speaker
And so, you know, we've spoken about that several times already. But even the dull and ignorant, in this case, you might say, well, the dull and ignorant might be, you know, ignorant might be your students, right? You know, of course, they're not dull, but the point being that,
02:19:06
Speaker
You might perceive them, you might be inclined to perceive them as dull because you're the teacher, but they too have their story and that way we learn better, we get a more rounded view of things and you can help to re-steer them if they're off track. So we have to listen to each other, but we have to speak our truth quietly and clearly. The next bit of advice. Keep interested in your own career, however humble. It is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
02:19:32
Speaker
not just strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. And what I say about that is that, of course, purpose, and of course, many of us tie our life's purpose into our careers. It may be humble, but it is a real possession and it is something if you're working in service to others, whether that be, you know, making sure someone's bank account doesn't go awry, cleaning the toilets, sweeping the streets,
02:20:01
Speaker
treating a patient, helping someone lose weight, giving them lifestyle advice, whatever it is, then no matter how humble, it's a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. The next part, nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. I think I'd done that to some degree, certainly with the Vibram collapse, with the
02:20:27
Speaker
my bereavement with my father probably wasn't so prepared for the bereavement with my mother but
02:20:33
Speaker
It is important for us to develop a sense of spirit and purpose for us to move through these challenging life events. And as David White says, we all have to say goodbye. That's just a truth. We all have to say goodbye, whether it's us saying goodbye to others or them saying goodbye to us. So we have to nurture that strength of spirit to shield ourselves in sudden misfortune.
02:21:00
Speaker
But Desiderati goes on to say, but do not distress yourself with imaginings. You're a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. And whether or not it's clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. And so I think that points to a number of things, but in particular, the notion that we need to
02:21:26
Speaker
hitch our wagon to a star. We need to have a direction and a purpose. But when we get setbacks, no doubt things are happening for a reason and we can use them as lessons. We can use pain as a teacher and that allows us to steer our lives more effectively down new, more fruitful paths.
02:21:46
Speaker
So my advice would be surf the wave of life. Sometimes you're high, sometimes you're low on the wave. Sometimes that wave comes crashing down all around you. But you get back to the surface, you paddle back out, you're going to have to duck through a few big ways to get back out, and you're going to have to work hard, but you get back out and you catch the next wave.
02:22:07
Speaker
And I think that's really a very useful metaphor for life. There's a lot of work involved. There's some amazing, joyful experiences. There's some crashes. There's some bumps and bruises. But it's just a case of getting back on that surfboard and paddling back out again.
02:22:26
Speaker
So to conclude I'm going to use a sentence from David White and this we actually used for the last sentence of working with the Ghost in the Machine paper that we wrote in response to some of the critiques from that original Facebook post and some of the
02:22:48
Speaker
the, let's say, more mechanical ways that people look at life, this more scientific, materialistic way. And it's a beautiful quote and essentially it says that the soul would rather fail at its own life than to succeed at someone else's. The soul would rather fail at its own life than to succeed at someone else's. And so
02:23:14
Speaker
With that in mind, I think that gives you enough advice and information, tells you enough about my career for now. And I will look forward to seeing you on future editions of FC2O. Thanks for listening.
02:23:31
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening to another show. I hope you got something useful out of that. And if you did, of course, please feel free to share it. If you have other thoughts about what you'd like covered in these FC2O solos, or indeed in any of the FC2Os, if you've got guests in mind, people that you know that would be great to interview, please drop me a line.
02:23:48
Speaker
Coming up we have Lawrence Smith who is an Alexander teacher. He's worked with a lot of elite sports teams and athletes and ballet troops and so on so I'm excited to speak with him and find out more about how he's applied the Alexander technique.
02:24:04
Speaker
in his work and then I also have Leah Keith who is the author of the excellent book The Vegetarian Myth so I'm really excited about that one that's going to be particularly pertinent given the recent release of the film The Game Changers which is promoting a vegan lifestyle so this will provide an alternative perspective and I think you'll find her absolutely fascinating she's very holistic in the way she works
02:24:30
Speaker
So thank you for joining me again and look forward to seeing you on the next show.