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Preparing for the Unexpected – a conversation with Suke Ridler founder of MyLifeJars.com
10 Plays2 days ago
When something unexpected happens, it is amazingly useful to have the key information in one place.
As Suke Ridler lay in hospital listening to a doctor saying that they could not do anymore to help her, her first thoughts were not about herself. Suke was worried about the mess that she would be leaving behind for her family to sort out.
Administering modern life is complex. Just like Suke very few people have everything organised in one place. This realisation led Suke to create MyLifeJars.com.
My Life Jars can be the place where you store your multi media life story, with all the information your family will need to act on your behalf if you are not able to act for yourself.
In this episode of the Abecederwork life balance podcast Rest And Recreation Suke explains to host Michael Millward the My Life Jars story, and how she planned that it would work and how people are using the platform in practice.
You can find more information about Suke Ridler and Michael at ABECEDER.co.uk
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Transcript
Zencastr's Role in Podcast Production
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production process from recording to distribution so easy.
Introduction to Rest and Recreation Podcast
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Rest and Recreation, the work-life balance podcast from Apocida, where we don't tell you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
00:00:32
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward. the managing director Abucida.
Suk Riddler's Journey and MyLifeJars
00:00:37
Speaker
to Today, Sooke Riddler, the founder of MyLifeJars is going to help me appreciate how creating your life story can help you understand your presence and make better plans for the future.
00:00:53
Speaker
Sooke is based in Derbyshire in the United Kingdom, but you'll be able to tell from her accent that Sooke also has strong ties to Australia. I have often visited Derbyshire and I have seen a little bit of Australia.
00:01:07
Speaker
When I travel to either, I will make use of my membership of the Ultimate Travel Club to make all my travel arrangements. This is because as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club, I have access to trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
00:01:26
Speaker
Use the link in the description to join the Ultimate Travel Club because that link has an automatic discount and just like me, you will be able to travel at trade prices.
Promotions and Call to Action
00:01:37
Speaker
Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of Rest and Recreation. An episode that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:50
Speaker
And hopefully also good enough to share with your family, friends and work colleagues as well. Now, hello Suk. Hello there. How are we today?
Origin of MyLifeJars
00:02:00
Speaker
We're well, thank you. And looking forward to discussing why it's so important to start our life stories, not someday, but today. Brilliant. Before we do that, can you share a little bit of your history and your career to date?
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I was born in the UK. I studied acoustics, noise and vibration and was a consulting engineer for many years, both here in the UK and in Europe and eventually over in Australia.
00:02:31
Speaker
Then i when I had children, I realized that it was really difficult to travel so much. So I retrained as a teacher um at Cambridge, actually, and I got my PGCE, but I didn't go into teaching straight away. I did carry on with acoustics.
00:02:51
Speaker
ah Then I did a bit of teaching in physics and ag, when I had the opportunity with my then husband to start a vineyard and micro winery in New South Wales in Australia.
00:03:07
Speaker
I did that for several years before finding that I'd lost who I was and and the passion had gone out of me. It was very much my former husband's passion.
00:03:20
Speaker
I had a life changing event where I nearly died And it's kind of set the scene for my future because as I was lying on the table being told there really wasn't much hope for me i had septicemia i realized i'd left everything in a mess i hadn't written my life story and worse still i hadn't left messages for my children at key milestones in their life so that was a very poignant moment luckily hi um recovered and i'm here to tell the tale you are thankfully it sounds um
00:04:03
Speaker
really knocks you six a little bit as it must have done for you but to be told that somebody in a white coat is is there with you saying you've got septic sema there isn't much that we can do for you is like wow that really would just like make you stop and really think about life Absolutely. it it really is. it was a very pivotal point in my life.
00:04:28
Speaker
And yeah, it was it was I they couldn't do anything. My blood pressure and pulse was so low. low They couldn't take the infected colon away. So they just had to pump me full of antibiotics.
00:04:41
Speaker
I'm very lucky to be here. And thankfully you are. That was the catalyst. It was. The life jars. It was. Right.
Features and Benefits of MyLifeJars
00:04:49
Speaker
Great. So what's been the journey so far with this new business? What's been the highs and lows?
00:04:56
Speaker
Well, it took me a little while to realise that I really had to step away from my former life and do my life jars. My life jars was an easy way to really capture everything that matters in our lives. Because when I did recover, I looked around to solve the issue that I faced when I was lying at death's door and I realised there really wasn't anything, there wasn't anything to help me to deal with all this information, you know, we have bits in our head, head we have stuff scattered around in piles of paper, sticky notes that have lost their stick We have boxes here, boxes there. We have digital stuff, you know, ins files and folders, on drives we forget about, on old devices with file names we can't remember. And it's all a lot of and a lot lot of mess. And it's really, you know, trying to...
00:05:58
Speaker
reign all of that stuff in and then also capture our story and put that all in one place so we have both the practical and the sentimental stuff together because a lot of us do rely on those social media to capture what's happening in our lives and of course it's so easy for accounts to be hacked and deleted and we lose all that emotional side of us our life is quite frequently you remind me of when i uh i started abecida which is uh back in 2004 one of the things i joked about with someone one day was like oh yes of course i'll i'm going to write a book about it and they said to me that one of the important things to remember was not about the the practical side of things but the emotional side of things yes you had a meeting with this person
00:06:55
Speaker
but remember how you felt during and after that meeting because that's what that's what your story is it's how you felt about something rather than just what you did absolutely i always say nostalgia isn't remembering it's about how moments made you feel it's about making sense of your life and and understanding yourself better It's surprisingly comforting and emotional in a good way.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yes. Yes, I've just discovered set of coins from 1977, which was Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. And of course, I was at school at the time. So just looking at something like that reminds you of all the things that were happening and at school. and But how does My Life Jars work?
00:07:48
Speaker
Well My Life Jars is a secure vault where you can put everything and so that you and your family members and your wider circle of friends can actually find things quickly about you, both from the practical and side, but also your life story. So it curates your life story, but not only in text, because text really doesn't capture who we are.
00:08:20
Speaker
um The written word is only possibly about 7%. It doesn't convey our body language, or it doesn't It conveys what's in our voice and our facial expressions.
00:08:37
Speaker
So My Life Jars is about capturing life story in its completeness. So both text, both voice, both video as well as images.
The Power of Life Stories
00:08:50
Speaker
So it's the complete person's life story. A story that hopefully makes people, when they read it, go, wow. Wow. Yes. All the things that you didn't really know, I suppose, about someone can be in one place.
00:09:05
Speaker
That's right, rather than scattered. So we we really encourage people to start their life story as soon as possible um because we just don't know what's around the next corner.
00:09:19
Speaker
And so many people just... leave it to the end of a life and and and never get round to doing it yeah so it's really about starting that life story sooner rather than later and then you can add to it as you go through life which is which is really a good way to go yes I've got in my mind here that like yeah I have photograph albums with photographs in them and I have diarists with words in them and occasionally there's a little bit of video as well
00:09:51
Speaker
but they're on different shelves in different cupboards and I'm thinking a little bit like a historian or historical detective you need the all of the pieces of information together in the same place so you can cross-reference what I've written in a diary with a photograph that was at the same sort of time so you can actually see what almost was going on for me at that particular point in time to then understand me but you don't need to be a historian to
00:10:29
Speaker
be in that sort of situation it's i'm getting the feeling that know if i started this when i was 18 by the time i was 36 i would be able to look back and be able to understand perhaps a little bit more about who i am today because of the experiences that i've recorded 18 years previously Absolutely. I think it's really important that looking, reflecting back on our life is really good because our life isn't just good. It's it's full of different shades of grey. Yes.
00:11:02
Speaker
We can have ah really quite trying experiences as we go through life and capturing those memories, in both all sorts of formats is really important because it really gives us chance to work out our relationships with those experiences. it's actually quite cathartic and sometimes it's quite healing to actually look at those experiences and how they impact your present day life and how they might be addressed so that they
00:11:40
Speaker
impact your future life in a positive way yes i am sort of thinking about when you say positive way i'm also thinking it's quite an empowering experience to know look at where you were look at where you are now and almost have one of those wow moments of thinking like you know none the person ate 18 would not believe The person at 36 was possible.
00:12:10
Speaker
But look at me now. i agree totally. It's really important. The memories we have really do define who we are. and sorry Our experiences and memories really define who we are and who we want to become.
00:12:28
Speaker
It's such a powerful thing to do to start writing our life story right now. yes yeah with my uh hr hat on i'm also thinking that if you understand more about your past you can understand more about your present yes but you can be prepared for the future and that absolutely i think with my as i say with my hr professionals hat on is a great career development tool yes
00:13:00
Speaker
To be able to look at yourself as an individual, where you have gone to, work out what you enjoyed from your past, and then aim to make a conscious decision to include more of that in your future is going to written enhance life in general.
00:13:16
Speaker
But if you did that within the context of the work that you do, not just the job, but the actual work that you do, you're going to end up with a a more satisfying experience of work. and potentially a more successful one because you're having more fun, you're happier doing the work that you do because you understand the reasons why you do that work.
00:13:38
Speaker
I totally, totally agree. I also think it's not just only about ourself, it's about understanding the people around you because when you look back and think about the moments you spend with family members and colleagues and friends, then understanding more about their lives as well and how you relate to them really does help define you right now and into the future. So when we talk about our life story, it's not only about our life, it's about our family and our our friends and our colleagues, all those people that are connected to us that make us who we are.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yes.
Generational Impact of Life Stories
00:14:26
Speaker
Who is using MyLifeJazz? It's ah a range of people. So a lot of people come to My Life Jars sort of it around the age of 50 plus and so when they are confronting some issues parental issues that they they're needing to organize parents lives and they're finding things are scattered they start to reflect and realize all their life is a little bit scattered and if someone had to step into their shoes they wouldn't be able to find things that they need to help manage their life and now we're finding that in the life story side of
00:15:17
Speaker
of My Life Jars that we're having millennials thinking much more about their lives and starting to understand that that the importance of their experiences are going to shape their future as we've sort of already discussed so it started off really looking more at people in their 50s and their 60s but it really has branched out in fact we've just completed a life story retreat and we had people there from their mid-30s right up to their late 80s and it was a truly amazing experience of the generations really understanding how story was important in their lives.
00:16:09
Speaker
You're going to have to tell me a little bit more about that when you say stories. and There's more to that than simply a list of facts, but tell me more about why you say importance of stories in people's lives.
00:16:21
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it connects them to their past. So what we found on the Life Story Retreat that the younger generation were absolutely amazed to hear some of the stories from the older generations of what they had experienced, not just from looking at documentaries, but actually being in the same room and being able to discuss those experiences with people. It was really enlightening. And then the older generations found that it was really interesting to see see the younger generations actually get quite nostalgic about their childhood and the things, of course, that they remember that they had...
00:17:08
Speaker
had been involved with with their children. so it it it was really quite emotional when people brought up memories and one memory came up with another memory and it was just like a ah chain of memories throughout the generations. It was truly quite inspiring as the presenter of the Life Story Retreat to to hear and see what this experience had generated in in the people that had come along.
00:17:42
Speaker
Yes. People experiencing the same events, but seeing them from their perspective, which is completely different from the other person's perspective.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, that came through time and time again. Yeah, absolutely incredible, really.
Building and Sharing Digital Legacies
00:18:00
Speaker
Yeah, so are you people able to do that same sort of sharing on the platform at the moment?
00:18:07
Speaker
They are. You can write your life story ah through capturing memories, so you don't have to think of a big life story, you know, where do I start, how do I do this? We approach it very simply, we break it down into five life stages, and we have...
00:18:27
Speaker
um a summary memory and four key memories in each area of your life so you can go in and capture a very um comprehensive life story ah with 24 memories throughout your life. Now then you can add to those memories and the platform orders them all to make your complete life story.
00:18:56
Speaker
What it does is it has the, for each memory you can add just 10 files and we always say it's good to add seven or eight images and maybe a couple of videos or a voice note and that might be a video that a little capture of the video that you have or it might be a capture of a video of narrating that memory so when all the memories are stitched together you get a combination of an audio and a book
00:19:33
Speaker
and a a video kind of like ah a little bit of a documentary on your life, which is really quite amazing. And the other thing that the platform does is that you can read that life story as it's evolving and then when we eventually go up onto our cloud, we've exited Earth, we can our guardians can transition that life story into our legacy, which is amazing that it's there in digital format for future generations to come and see and listen and understand our authentic self.
00:20:17
Speaker
Are people looked at using this in a very personal way? It's like it's my story. Or have you got people who are using it as a planning for it a larger project around really telling their life story in terms of they did these various different events and they're trying to create a bu book, let's say an autobiography.
00:20:39
Speaker
Have you got people who are using it from that from that sort of perspective as well? Well, each memory has a setting. We call it the secret keeper setting where you can actually decide who sees that memory. So it can be public so that anyone in or outside My Life Jars can read that memory. And that's really important in terms of leaving a legacy.
00:21:03
Speaker
Then you have a tribe setting and that's for the people, your family and friends that you've invited to My Life Jars that you want to share your story with and then you have the option to share it with just one or two tribesters. So for instance there might be a memory that you want to share with just your children or your parents and then there is a situation where you might want to use
00:21:35
Speaker
your story, your capture of your story or capturing some an event in your life as more of a cathartic healing experience and you just want to journal for yourself and you have the option of setting that to only me, so only you can view that particular memory, which is amazing because then when others read your story, everybody gets a slightly different version of your story depending on the settings that you've chosen for each memory.
00:22:08
Speaker
It sounds like you you've put a huge amount of work into working out how this will all work. Well, there's another setting, as I say, you can use the time lock to decide when a memory is is read or looked at. It can be either in life or legacy or life and legacy. So you do ah have the option to share a memory with somebody after you've exited earth and gone to your cloud.
00:22:40
Speaker
So it it's got a lot of ah possibilities for sharing which makes it really incredibly powerful and it means that you can capture your story without worrying everyone's going to read it and you can decide With each memory, who's going to read it and when they're going to read it.
00:23:02
Speaker
um And that gives you the ability to actually really capture your story. Yeah, and it can and control over your story as well.
00:23:13
Speaker
Absolutely, yes. So what sort of feedback have you had from users about how they've been using it? They really enjoyed the multi-generational dimension. so others So many have actually started to get their grandparents involved, their parents reaching out to their wider friends and actually the younger generation. So their their kids have been really interested to understand who their parents are, um the parts of their story that, you know, the the children haven't actually really understood. And when I mean children, I mean adult children. So My Life Jars is not for um children under the age of 16 because and all the information is encrypted and we...
Future Preparedness with MyLifeJars
00:24:12
Speaker
um we It's really important from a child's safety point of view that we don't we don't have a problem with complying with the Online Safety Act. Yes, so you've ex excluded children.
00:24:28
Speaker
Parents can actually create a life profile attached to their MyLifeGIS account for children and they can actually add memories for the children and then pass over that life profile to the child when they turn the age of 16 which is kind of nice so all those memories that you that children create as they're growing up um can be captured by the parent and separated from theirs but the children themselves can't write them until they turn to the eight past all right so that gives the parent on their 16th birthday for the child the opportunity to say look at all of these embarrassing pictures
00:25:10
Speaker
Absolutely embarrassing pictures and tales, although, yeah it yes, they can. And all those, um you know, Mother's Day cards that they've created, Mother's and Father's Day is created, and all those little bits of things that they bring home from school, and you can't quite store everything, but you can actually capture them, take a photo or a little video of something else. and pop it into their My Life Jars so it's all always saved for the future. And of course, when things get lost or broken, you have you have something recorded. Great stuff.
00:25:48
Speaker
The future looks rosy for My Life Jars then. It does indeed. We are very excited by the amount of people coming on board and enjoying both capturing their life story and also getting ready for the future with understanding their wishes and their plans to make it easier for their families. So they if something happens to them like a serious accident or a life-threatening yeah illness, that they have the information to step in and help help them, rather than being left with a bit of a puzzle and not knowing where everything is.
00:26:34
Speaker
Great. Thank you very much, Suk. It has been really interesting to take a bit of a look at my life jars. But for today, thank you very much for helping me make such an interesting episode of Rest and Recreation. Thank you.
00:26:51
Speaker
Thank you, Michael. I hope your ah listeners enjoy thinking about their life story and and indeed move from that maybe one day to today in terms of starting.
00:27:05
Speaker
mean I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abbasida. In this episode of Rest and Recreation, I have been having a conversation with Suk Riddler, the founder of MyLifeJars.
00:27:18
Speaker
You can find out more information about both of us by using the links in the description. An important part of planning your future is preparing for how you will cope with any ill health.
00:27:30
Speaker
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00:28:03
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00:28:21
Speaker
There is, as you would expect, a link and a discount code in the description. I'm sure you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of Rest and Recreation as much as Suk and I have enjoyed making it.
00:28:33
Speaker
So 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. And also share the link with your friends, family and work colleagues as well.
00:28:47
Speaker
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of Rest and Recreation, thank you for listening and goodbye.