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Masculinity at Work – a conversation with Nick Elston mental health advocate image

Masculinity at Work – a conversation with Nick Elston mental health advocate

Fit For My Age
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16 Plays18 days ago

How can a man be masculine at work, without being toxic?

Award-winning mental health advocate Nick Elston, and Michael Millward host of the Abeceder health and wellbeing podcast Fit For My Age attempt to define what being successfully masculine at work looks like.

Why is it that the men who are the first to offer help to others appear to be the ones who are least likely to ask for help when they need it themselves? That is part of the problem, to be perceived as masculine men must fulfil outdated expectations and be criticised when they do not fulfil more modern expectations.

During their attempt to answer this and many other questions Michael and Nick explore

  • Father son relationships and family expectations
  • Being an introvert who is seen as the strong silent type
  • The expectations of physicality
  • The lack of positive role models of masculinity

The conclusion that Michael and Nick reach may surprise you!

Find out more about Nick Elston and Michael Millward and Boys Impact, which Nick mentions at Abeceder.co.uk.

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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr.

Podcast Introduction

00:00:06
Speaker
Zencastr really does make making podcasts so easy. All the details are in the description. Hello and welcome to Fit for My Age, the health and well-being podcast from Abbasida.
00:00:20
Speaker
I am your host, Michael

Meet Nick Elston: Mental Health Advocate

00:00:22
Speaker
Millward. Today, I'm talking to Nick Elston, who is a mental health advocate. And we're going to be discussing masculinity at work.
00:00:32
Speaker
Nick is based in Bristol in the United Kingdom. If you plan to visit Bristol, do what I would do and make your travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club. because that is where you can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
00:00:49
Speaker
You'll find a link and a membership discount code in the description. Now that I've paid the rent, it is time to make this episode of Fit For My Age that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.

Podcast Philosophy: Encouraging Thought

00:01:03
Speaker
Very importantly, On Fit For My Age, we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Hello, Nick. Hey, Michael. And one of the choices that you've made is ah is in deciding to make your living by being a mental health

Nick's Mental Health Journey

00:01:20
Speaker
advocate. And what's been the story?
00:01:22
Speaker
I have mental illness. I have obsessive compulsive disorder. largely managed nowadays, but back in my childhood, I developed OCD. As I got older, it then have also morphed and changed into something called generalized anxiety disorder thrown in on top of that.
00:01:37
Speaker
ah Since that point, it was constantly fueled by high anxiety, high nervous energy, As a man, and certainly back in the day, very much an orphan man, I wasn't talking about how I was feeling. So for education, i just flew under the radar in that sense. A lot of young men do. as Then I went into my professional career. For over a decade, i was running at a really high state of burnout through masking how I felt, what was going on with me. And then in 2012, I had a breakdown. And it was at that point, I started to use speaking as a therapy person. I stood up in front of a very small business networking type audience and shared my experiences of mental illness, of mental health challenges. For context, I'm six foot four, I'm 25 stone, I ain't small. And people that look like me don't talk about mental illness, especially in 2012.
00:02:29
Speaker
So what I found was by me opening up, sharing the truth without the filter attached to it, that two things happened. Firstly, people started to share their stuff with me.
00:02:40
Speaker
And I realized straight away, I didn't want to be a coach or a counselor. I felt massively overwhelmed everybody else's stuff then. the The second thing was, I just felt really saddened. Why is it that when we need help, not exclusively, but especially as men, we don't reach out for help, but we are the first person to jump to the aid of somebody else?
00:02:57
Speaker
And that kind of question really kind of fueled my career to date. So as the rooms got bigger, the audiences got bigger, I started to forge a career as a professional speaker speaking in this space.
00:03:08
Speaker
What I found is lived experience is the perfect vehicle to drive engagement to the solutions, but it's not the solutions. I'm not a coach, I'm not a counsellor, I'm not a guru, nor do you want that in your life, trust me. Far too empathic, I just agree with everybody.
00:03:22
Speaker
But for me, the gap is that engagement

Workplace Well-being and Engagement

00:03:24
Speaker
piece. And that's kind of what brought me into your world, I guess, for people leaders, that they have all the initiatives, solutions and the employee assistance programmes, but they couldn't get engaged engagement from certain men, ah lot of men to be fair, but also a lot of people generally were struggling to engage in this stuff.
00:03:41
Speaker
And that's where my second cap started to pop on. I started to coach other people to tell their stories of their own experiences, things that we experience in life. Changing your narrative changes your experience. And then it took me into the prisons and schools. And fast forward to today, that's what I do. Essentially, I work with leaders and educators and help them to amplify their engagement in workplace well-being and mental health and all the great things we're talking

Burnout and Self-care Strategies

00:04:08
Speaker
about today. wow you've done an awful lot then with some turning a problem into a passion i suppose yeah got out of hand really became my career people don't believe me when i'm i'm still in front of like a lot of people that i'm an introvert but i truly am it doesn't stop our performance or our delivery or me enjoying the what i'm doing but it's about how we recharge and i think for me when it comes to things like burnout which i experienced for so long
00:04:37
Speaker
And I see this a lot in all the spaces, but certainly in people, people, businesses. So those HR leaders and training providers and stuff. Burnout is rife because we don't kind of put ourselves first. We're not great at being selfish in that sense. Very often we are introverted in terms of we recharge in our own company.
00:04:56
Speaker
but we constantly surround ourselves with people. We take on the burdens and the responsibility of everybody that comes to complain to us and comes to us for help. And then when we go home, home's not always an easy place. So think we need to be better at being

Masculinity and Self-awareness Challenges

00:05:10
Speaker
selfish.
00:05:10
Speaker
The image of the man as the provider, the person who's rock solid in any crisis, the superhero, and that's what you want to be. And We manage at work, manage processes. We don't lead people as such. So we're managing. And when you have an issue, you go to your manager to look for the answer. so all the pressure, you transfer the pressure onto someone else who's got their own responsibilities rather than dealing with it yourself. There's always someone that you can pass that on to. There's a generational element as well, because I remember as as a 47-year-old guy as I am now, back in the day when I was in employment and I needed help, I remember my dad saying to me, without any kind of lack of love or anything, all the great intentions, don't trust work with your personal stuff. Because generationally, people didn't trust ah HR, people didn't trust personnel.
00:06:03
Speaker
So for me, that kind of man up thing starts to kick in then. So when I needed help, I didn't reach out for help because I was conditioned to feel that, to have that kind of response. And I think that's amplified when it comes from male identity to a male.
00:06:18
Speaker
We don't want to drop that mask. And I think it's a really important thing to recognize very often. It's about how we've been conditioned by our environment. And again, without any bad intent at all.
00:06:29
Speaker
That's a great starting point if you're ever kind of questioning why you feel a certain thing or or reacting a certain way is why do you do what you do? So what you're saying is that the the jobs that people do, the families that they raise, one of the things that we need to ask ourselves as men is, do I really want to be in a relationship? Do I really want to be doing this type of work? Or am I doing it because it's what's expected of me?
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you a brief example. So growing up, I was quite successful in education. i didn't really try as hard as i had to or I could do because I was joining the family business, and a really successful engineering company. And that was always going to be my future.
00:07:15
Speaker
And within two years of me leaving school, the family business went bust, making friends redundant, splitting up the family, the effects of which can still ripple today, many, many years later. If you would have asked me what I wanted to do, maybe even 10 years ongoing from that point, I would have said, I want a factory here.
00:07:35
Speaker
Because I was on this medieval quest to correct the family name. Without even thinking about it once, I kind of picked up this medieval mission and didn't question it at all. And it was only when I did start to work on myself and come through my own challenges that,
00:07:49
Speaker
When actually thought, is this really what I want to do or is it actually what I've picked up along the way? And that's kind of when I started looking at this element of if you're not truly living a life on your terms, by default, you're going to be living it on somebody else's

Role Models and Success Perceptions

00:08:03
Speaker
terms. You just don't realize it right We can have all sorts of people tell us that we're they're impressed by what we do.
00:08:09
Speaker
But the one person that we really want to impress is our father. Interesting. I'm not quite sure what it is. We grew up in our father's shadow. Yeah. We all believe our fathers are very successful. Yeah. It's like the American dream. the next generation will be better off than we were. Yeah. It all depends upon how you measure better. That's that's a a really interesting point and not something i really thought about before.
00:08:32
Speaker
i don't think I ever felt that with my dad. My dad's been 100% kind of unreservedly supportive of me all the time. But I certainly have found that with role models, for example, my granddad, who was kind of like ex-Navy, very kind of, um I guess, that kind of typically masculine kind of alpha kind of thing, that that kind of stuff. That's kind of what I've always aspired to do. I've never really directly associated it with my career, but about how how I live and the values that I hold.
00:09:01
Speaker
And when I've fallen short of those values, things like guilt, which can drive a lot of challenges in the subject we're talking about today, They can play a huge part in how you go forward or if you do go forward feeding those

Redefining Masculinity

00:09:14
Speaker
things. What I thought we'd be doing is defining what masculinity is. But the way in which this conversation is going sort of tends to, there's obviously a dictionary definition of what masculinity is. Yeah. but in practice Living in a masculine way, yet there is no real definition of what that means, but there seems to be people's perceptions of what that means. Or maybe we assume that every man is masculine until we see something that isn't.
00:09:42
Speaker
The terminology plays a huge part here. If you say the word masculinity to anybody, the word toxic will pop in their head straight away. That's a very current post-pandemic type of combination of words. I think it's been it's been amplified by people that are visible and have the platforms to reach people that are, or say young men that are disaffected, they are struggling with a real lack of hope or the hope of something better.
00:10:08
Speaker
I do a lot of work with an amazing organization called Boys Impact in the education sector. And that's certainly a very relevant and and I guess more current thing. But terminology is everything.
00:10:19
Speaker
If you look at mental health, for example, the the term mental health in itself is always used in the negative. People will say to me, Nick, I have mental health. Yeah, absolutely you do. 100% of us do, whether it's good or bad, that's a whole different question. It's the same with masculinity is what you mean by that. There's a real danger of, if you look at that kind of man up kind of criticism, shall we say, and as much as I can understand the toxic element of saying to somebody, oh, man up, that kind of stuff, there is an element there, which for me is true. There has to be a level of accountability. There has to be a level of, or a decrease in entitlement when it comes to
00:10:56
Speaker
living life well by your standards, what that look like? So for me to be masculine now, how I would define that is being brave enough to ask questions about things that you don't understand.
00:11:08
Speaker
So as a 47 year old white straight guy, there is so much in this world I do not understand. And there's two main reactions to those things that you either blindly agree because that's what everybody else is telling you to do without knowing why you're agreeing.
00:11:22
Speaker
And for me, that's really damaging. Or you blindly disagree where all your old generational biases can run wild, equally damaging. The bit in the middle for me is the ability to ask better questions. That's being eroded by, certainly by cancel culture for sure, is is just a fear of saying the wrong thing.
00:11:41
Speaker
So if you look at something like pronouns and identity, so something that wasn't ever relevant in my world in the past two years, it became kind of visible on the parameters of what I do in my work. So therefore,
00:11:55
Speaker
There are two reactions to those things, either blindly agree or blindly disagree. But for me, I needed to know more. And and I just ask better questions from people that live the experience or have that specialism or just know about this lifestyle.
00:12:09
Speaker
I've spoken to two trans people, been very open about their experiences. And what you do is you educate yourself enough to form an opinion, which is valid for your opinion, but also enough to help signpost other people to help or inspiration or solutions when they need it. That's the really important thing that we risk losing is taking away the fear of asking questions from people. i speak to thousands of people, but people that are not like me, and I ask really deep, really probing,
00:12:41
Speaker
very personal questions sometimes, and I've not been punched in the face once. Because I educate myself and I'm curious. I'm not asking because I'm being provocative. ah provocative I'm not doing anything else other than forming an educated opinion.
00:12:54
Speaker
And for me, we cannot lose the right to do that as as men, but as people generally. What you're saying then is to be masculine is to be your own man. is to form your own opinions, drive your own behaviours, have values which you display in your behaviours and what you say. But being masculine means to be your own man, not to follow the herd. The masculine man would make up their own mind and make a decision and be their own man rather than simply following the crowd.

Leadership Through Emotional Understanding

00:13:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:26
Speaker
And when it comes to things like leadership and masculinity and work, still most of the the sectors that we both operate in and are the last bastions of traditional business in that sense. They're still very much kind of male dominated, especially at a senior level.
00:13:42
Speaker
It's understanding where we come from when we hold these opinions or these beliefs or the way that we act. As a 47-year-old guy, back in the day, my early 20s, when I was being trained in a corporate environment, I was trained to lead through instruction.
00:13:57
Speaker
You tell people what to do. And they do it. And I'll do it. And if they don't do it, you shout. i mean, I kid you not, that was the training that I had. It was to lead through instruction.
00:14:10
Speaker
ah By the way, Michael, it never worked then and never worked now. But now more than ever, it's about your ability to lead through influence. It's your ability to change your perspective, which a lot of men, certainly of my generation and back, have challenges with, but also your ability to have compassionately led conversations.
00:14:29
Speaker
And for me, emotional leadership is one of the most powerful things that we can develop. The ability to ask better questions and to change our perspectives and understand that in a room of 200 people, you can have 200 different and experiences of life, of business, of education, that your experience is not going to be the same as anybody else's. What is emotional leadership? I guess there's two two things. Emotional leadership is your own emotional regulation.
00:14:54
Speaker
So that's kind of how we react to situations, how we prepare ourselves for situations. So there's very much an inward conversation, which absolutely for me took professional help. I took things like counseling and therapy and and and other things, including medication along the way as well due to my OCD, of course.
00:15:12
Speaker
So emotional regulation, emotional leadership is how you lead internally for emotional leadership, but also it's about how you go forward. So again, it's about your ability to lead through influence, to bring people with you. And to me, one of the foundations of that is being prepared to be vulnerable.
00:15:27
Speaker
and Certainly in professional environments and absolutely with men, we're not great at that piece either yet. I think it's getting better, but I think people also get it wrong. I have built a career sharing my experiences, but I do it in a way which relates to people's own experiences. So I kind of always imagine it like you're telling a story in a third person kind of narrative.
00:15:49
Speaker
Very often people make the mistake of telling their own experiences or sharing or even oversharing what's going on with them, but they're doing it in a very kind of like open therapy kind of way.
00:16:00
Speaker
So for me, emotional leadership is your ability to tell stories to people that relate to your own experiences. with the aim of bringing it down to a human to human conversation. I did ah a couple of articles around kind of having conversations with people leaders to employees around furlough or redundancy. We have a scripted kind of method of dealing with these kind of things for legality purposes, of course. So actually, when you're having that conversation around redundancy or furlough, and you're speaking to somebody, they will react very often very angrily or very over emotionally because they're seeing you as an implement of the company.
00:16:36
Speaker
By changing one thing in that process, and that that that ability is to say to somebody, do you know what? I don't want to be having this conversation, but here we are. Or this has happened to me before and I get it. So it's sharing a little bit of your humanity to make it a human conversation because then other person is disarmed, I guess.
00:16:55
Speaker
In the early days of my HR career, working in a factory where the day before Christmas, I had to tell all the temporaries that I had recruited for Christmas that they were not going to be required after Christmas. Wow.
00:17:09
Speaker
I stood on a chair in the canteen. And so I stood up and sort of made this comment and added in the words, I hate doing this. And the voice from the background said, so why are you doing it? And I would never include that comment again, but I would include the comment, you know, this is in the past has happened to me.
00:17:30
Speaker
Exactly. I know how it is that you're likely to be feeling at the moment. And although there's nothing I can do to change the situation, I do want you to know that it will get better. that's And that's a perfect example of what i'm talking about.
00:17:43
Speaker
By you yeah showing more vulnerability as a man to somebody else in a tough situation, you are disarming, diffusing the situation.
00:17:54
Speaker
And as a disclaimer, all of my content has been checked by an employment look lawyer. So I know this is valid. I know this is stuff that you can actually use with people. But because I hate to do this, sounds like the start of a Dear John letter.
00:18:06
Speaker
But actually, the way that you expanded on that and the way that you injected your own experiences and feelings, you see, People don't really remember what you say to people. It's about how you make people feel. And very often, our reaction to things that are superficial is to react with complete ignorance, with complete anger depending on the situation it's kind of like seeing a hearing a scripted sales call we don't we don't buy it it doesn't mean anything to us or a scripted speaker it doesn't feel genuine so it's taking that approach into our day-to-day lives and I think especially when it comes to to men and to to be masculine in that sense emotional leadership is a cornerstone of that and but and practicing being vulnerable in a really safe way of course
00:18:50
Speaker
think I

Authenticity vs. Image in Leadership

00:18:51
Speaker
get what you mean. The eight idea that the traditional approach to masculinity and masculinity at work is that you tell people what to do. if they don't do it, you shout at them. And it's what you say goes.
00:19:05
Speaker
What you're saying though now is because the world has changed, we have to look at things in a different way. We need to be more someone that people can relate to, yeah can perhaps aspire to be like.
00:19:19
Speaker
And we need to demonstrate to people that we understand their situation doesn't devalue our situation. yeah We don't have to be them, but we have to demonstrate our understanding of the lives that they live. and the impact that our decisions will have upon them, which means we need to spend perhaps more time understanding them as individuals than simply, you're here to do a job, and look at them as to, you're here to do a job, which is going to help me do my job, so how do I make it easier for you to do your job? And the emotional leadership is more giving than simply just telling. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for me, it's recognizing that instead of seeing yourself as, for example, the boss or whatever your terminology is within your organization, is actually you are an influencer, to use a modern term, you are a thought leader. And actually, your ability is to bring people with you.
00:20:14
Speaker
And we know that it doesn't work to have that dictatorial role anymore, for sure. We all understand culture is everything. It's what people look for when they apply for jobs, and apply for roles. But we set the tone.
00:20:25
Speaker
We just need to understand that very often it's not about what we say to people or what we do. It's about kind of what roles we we model. We cannot have that masculine, unapproachable role if that's not really you and the other way around. Because I do see that. I see a lot of people that aren't truly masculine trying to kind of like masculine up just to show that they have any sway or any power. And it's a really strange thing to see.
00:20:53
Speaker
I am hugely vulnerable. I share, and maybe too much the other way sometimes, I guess, because that feels like open therapy sometimes when I take to the stage. But the biggest kind of selling point that I have is actually that I'm telling a vulnerable story. I am giving people honesty and the truth and people engage with honesty and the truth. People do not engage with instruction.
00:21:17
Speaker
And I think if we can start to flex our muscles when it comes to that, I guess, start to flex our vulnerability muscles, things will change very quickly for us in a very positive way. Yeah, it's a bit like the difference between image and substance is that the image is a brand, it is superficial. yeah But when you've got the substance, the story behind the person, why they are the way that they are, you can buy into them in more detail. Yeah. This may be a bit sort of like left field type of question, but imagine for a moment that you you are working in any type of work environment and you realize that you have a manager who is displaying all of the things which mean that their management style is perhaps rooted in the 1960s or the

Navigating Outdated Management Styles

00:22:04
Speaker
70s. They are bark instructions at you.
00:22:07
Speaker
there any advice for that person into how they could explain that? to their manager, the impact that that behavior is having on them as somebody who needs to be managed and led, and what they might do in order to like ease the manager down a different route.
00:22:24
Speaker
Great question. My gut feeling is telling me that if you're working in that kind of environment, maybe a different company is going to be the right option for you. That is one of the answers, but very often, you know, there are people who work in a place because it is the place that is closest to where they live. And to go to somewhere else is ah like means upheaval and they're limited in their choices of where they can work. yeah That manifests itself in the way in which then employers manage those people because they know that as well.
00:22:49
Speaker
Absolutely, I agree. with My general feeling around this is that, and you see this with kind of parents or grandparents of a certain age, whether it be around, again, sexuality, culture, race, is very often they're very fixed mindsets. It could be very difficult to change those mindsets. So I would say try to find somebody that you have a trusted relationship with in the organization that you have rapport with and you can speak openly. and share your experiences to see if they have had a similar experience. The second thing would be to make sure that are they the end of the line in terms of line management or is there somebody above and beyond that?
00:23:25
Speaker
It's trying to find a workaround to that. my Hand on heart, I think very often people with fixed mindsets of, Certain generations, certainly ah men, will really struggle to adapt or take that as anything else other than criticism. I wish it wasn't that way, but that's my general feeling, if I'm being honest, this Michael. Yeah, criticism, you need to have a solution as well as the criticism. Yeah.
00:23:48
Speaker
I think if you change criticism into feedback and talk about the impact on you, you talk about what you observed rather than what you felt. Yeah, absolutely. then you're going to, know, this is what was said.
00:24:02
Speaker
This is the impact that it had. this if it had been said in a different way, you'd have been feeling more positive about it. You just need to keep everything in perspective as well, though, but it's a long, slow process. I've always said that if people are going through things like ah divorce, where it's a really highly emotive subject, that if you stick to the process of divorce, you can move through the process quite quickly. But as you quite rightly say, in that conversation with somebody more senior than you, where you're calling them out on their behaviors and their actions, it can be a very emotional process very, very quickly. So sticking to a, I like call it a cold process. So actually purposely taking away the emotion from the situation, to have that kind of fact-based conversation. I think that's the most you can do directly with that person in that situation. But you know I'm willing to listen to kind of your ins insight on that as well, because again, this is not something I've really considered before.
00:24:59
Speaker
Having been in that situation several times, I think a lot of people have, sometimes you don't realize you've been in the situation yeah until you've left it. Interesting, yeah.
00:25:09
Speaker
you're You're in the situation that's just normal life, and you go somewhere else and you realize, wow this is so much better. And you only realize the problems that you had in an old situation when you've moved on to somewhere new. Going back over time and reliving my career, With my greater age and experience, there are times I would have would have actually said, that's not a way that I want to be spoken to.
00:25:34
Speaker
Though you can tell me what to do, that's fine because that you are the manager, you are that's your job, that's your responsibility. But you don't need to do it in a way which feels as if you're aiming to belittle me. Absolutely.
00:25:45
Speaker
It does require a lot of guts, but it's not about creating an argument. It's not something that needs to be done in public. It's something that can be done. Let's go and have a chat about that. What you just outlined there, that lobster in the pot kind of feeling, isn't it? That you you just you never feel the temperature rising until it's too late.
00:26:06
Speaker
No, you don't. Too many of us go through life accept accepting yeah something just because it is what it is without realizing that things can be different because we've never experienced them.

Becoming an Ideal Manager

00:26:19
Speaker
And if we sort think about, okay, what would my ideal manager be like? You know, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who are recruiting their first people and very often they are talking about, I do not want to be the manager that I had. big question is, so what type of manager do you want to be?
00:26:36
Speaker
a You know, how are you going to make this the place that everybody wants to come and work? And how are you going to make sure that everyone, regardless of who they are, what type of personality they have, why they come to work, that they're going to say, this guy understands me. This guy wants me to be successful.
00:26:52
Speaker
yeah yeah And it goes back to what you were saying earlier about how a manager needs to understand all the people that they are managing, all the people that they are leading and create something, a version of the masculinity that is accessible to the person that they're wanting to talk

Curiosity as a Key Trait in Masculinity

00:27:09
Speaker
to.
00:27:09
Speaker
Yeah. And also being able to share share an opinion or ask a stupid question. I mean, I get asked to host kind of sessions on things like menopause. I am not the obvious candidate for a menopause webinar. and So I bring on an amazing specialist who specializes in menopause, menopause coaching.
00:27:28
Speaker
But my position in that as a man in that environment, a topic I know nothing about or didn't until I started working with her, really just to ask the stupid questions that we're afraid of asking.
00:27:40
Speaker
Because the main reaction to things we don't understand, said we we either get defensive and angry and everything else, we just dismiss it, or we make very bad jokes about things. That's the other thing.
00:27:50
Speaker
Or we ask better questions. And again, that's that bit. So it's masculinity and to be a man right here, right now is to actually say in any given situation, be prepared to ask stupid questions as well. If it's something you don't understand, ask the questions. And that involves people that work for you or with you or around you. Yes. Be a man who asks questions is the best way forward.
00:28:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Be curious. Brilliant. You know, Nick, thank you very much. This wasn't exactly what I had planned, but I found it very interesting. I do appreciate your time today. Thank you very much.
00:28:22
Speaker
Likewise, Michael. Thank you so much. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abasida. And in this episode of Fit for My Age, I've been having a conversation with Nick Elstam.
00:28:34
Speaker
At Fit for My Age, our aim is proactive positive ageing. Knowing the risks early is an important part of maintaining good health, and that is why we recommend the annual health test from York Test. York Tests provide an assessment of 39 different health markers.
00:28:50
Speaker
The annual health test is conducted by an experienced phlebotomist who will complete a full blood draw at your home or workplace. Hospital standard tests are carried out in a yeah UKAS accredited and CQC compliant laboratory.
00:29:04
Speaker
You can access your easy to understand results and guidance to help you make effective lifestyle changes anytime via your secure personal wellness hub. There is a link and a discount code in the description, which all in all means that that description is well worth reading.
00:29:22
Speaker
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Fit for My Age as much as Nick and I have enjoyed making it. Please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abysseed is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:29:44
Speaker
Until the next episode of Fit for My Age, thank you for listening and goodbye.