JCIP #338 - George Gabriel

In episode 338 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with George Gabriel.

George is the Director and Co-Founder of an organisation called ‘The Dad Shift’, which is made up of a group of men, dads and other parents campaigning for better paternity leave in the UK. 

Currently, in the UK, dads only receive a statutory two weeks off work when they become a father or for any future children they have. This is paid at less than half the minimum wage, with self-employed men receiving nothing.

The Dad Shift is calling for more paternity leave that is sustainable, affordable and equal. 

In this episode we first discuss George’s mental health journey, which centres around several major life events. The first was his marriage to his first wife, who he was in a relationship with for 13 years. 

After it ended acrimoniously, he ended up moving back into his childhood bedroom with his parents at 30 years old. At the time, he was running a humanitarian organisation supporting refugees called ‘Safe for Passage’ and he hit rock bottom.

The first steps of his recovery then came when his brother took him on a holiday to Brazil. However, things didn’t pan out that way and after signing up for a mountain hike in the middle of the night whilst intoxicated, he reached the summit and thought about taking his own life. 

Just as he was about to complete this attempt, his tour guide came over to him and offered him a Snickers bar, and it broke his suicidal thought cycle.

He came back to the UK, took more positive steps with his recovery, and suddenly things began to fall into place for him. 

He was approached by a recruiter for a tech company and got the job, he did EMDR therapy and ayahuasca, which we’ll discuss in the pod how they benefited him, and George slowly rebuilt his life. 

He entered a new relationship with his now-wife and became a father twice! In his words, he now lives a life he never imagined.

We discuss this entire mental health journey of crisis and recovery, fatherhood, the work he is doing with The Dad Shift and the impact it has had on changing the conversation.  

As always, #itsokaytovent

You can find out more about The Dad Shift here: https://dadshift.org.uk/.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Trigger Warning, this podcast contains discussions about suicide, which some listeners may find distressing or upsetting. So please listen with caution. Hi Venters, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checkin' In Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a natter and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. My special guest for this episode is George Gabriel. George is the director and co-founder of a campaigning organization called the Dad Shift, which is made up of a group of men, dads, and other parents campaigning for better paternity leave in the UK. Now, this is an issue I've wanted to cover on the podcast for a long time, and I was delighted to check in with George about it. Currently in the UK, dads only receive a statutory two weeks off work when they become a father or for any future children they have. This is paid at less than half the minimum wage, with self-employed men receiving nothing. The Dad Shift is calling for more paternity leave that is sustainable, affordable, and equal. Alongside his co-founder Alex, they launched the campaign in September 2024 and it has gathered momentum in the year and a half it has been going. The campaign went viral after they placed baby slings and dolls on statues of famous male historical figures across the city of Edinburgh and have lobbied in Parliament to get a group of over 90 MPs on board to support their campaign. This has also resulted in the Labour government launching a review of the current paternity leave policy as well, which is ongoing at time of recording. In this episode, we first discussed George's mental health journey, which centres around several major life events. The first was his marriage to his first wife, who he was in a relationship with for 13 years. After it ended acrimoniously, he ended up moving back into his childhood bedroom with his parents at 30 years old. At the time, he was running a humanitarian organization supporting refugees called Safe for Passage, and George hit rock bottom. During this time, he walked into a local bookshop and he asked the librarian for any books that would help him. The librarian recommended a man called Jordan Peterson and he looked into his message of personal responsibility and cleaning your room. The first steps of his recovery then came when his brother took him on a holiday to Brazil, and his brother suggested he extend his stay to reset his mental health more. However, things didn't pan out the way that he'd hoped, and after signing up for a mountain hike in the middle of the night whilst intoxicated, he reached the summit and thought about taking his own life. Just as he was about to complete his attempt, his guide came over to him and offered him a Snickers bar of all things, and it broke his suicidal thought cycle. He came back to the UK, took more positive steps with his recovery, and suddenly things began to fall into place for him. George was approached by a recruiter for a tech company, he got the job, he then did EMDR therapy and ayahuasca, which we'll discuss in the pod how they benefited him, and George then rebuilt his life from that point. He also entered a new relationship with his now wife and became a father twice. And in his words, he now lives a life he never imagined. We discussed his entire mental health journey of crisis and recovery, fatherhood, the work he is doing with the Dad Shift now, and the campaign, and the impact it has had on changing the conversation. So this is how my conversation with George Gabriel went. George, welcome to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you so much for letting me check in with you. I'm not going to date this podcast, but I'm just going to say we're both feeling very festive. I've been wanting to cover the issue of paternity leave for a very long time. So thank you for all the work you are doing with the dad shift. First of all, how are you, mate? Not too bad, man. Not too bad.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Christmas coming up real soon. And yeah, rocking and rolling. Looking forward to hosting the family.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

We're going to talk about so much more than just the dad shift, and there's a lot to cover. So are you ready to start the show and talk all about it? Let's do it. Let's start the pod by discussing your mental health journey first, as what we're going to discuss links directly into the work you do at Dad Shift today, mate. So I ask all my special guests on this topic this question first. Tip me back to early life, teenagers, and looking back, were there any early mental health experiences? If any, who's the George we meet here?

SPEAKER_01 5:06

I mean, he's a trying, testing type of George, if I'm honest. You know, I was like a very precocious kid, became a teenager, and was just like, yeah, very keen to prove myself, really, in whatever domain you can think of sports, my studies, my social life. And honestly, I must have been a pain in the ass for most of the people in my life. But Lord knows I'm lucky to have had some decent pals who stuck with me through there. My friend Max calls me his trying friend from early childhood. So anyway, I think I was, you know, honestly, just pretty insecure teenager trying to find my way. And yeah, in terms of early challenges with my mental health, I think just that insecurity, really, that sense that I had a lot to prove. And I don't know who I was even trying to prove it to back then, myself, other people, my family. But yeah, just basically quite an insecure young man is probably the honest truth of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

And before we get into the bulk of your mental health journey, mate, when did you become secure? When did that stop that constant chase to prove people wrong and maybe just prove yourself right continually?

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Well, I don't know that it fully goes away. You know, there's something in me that's always kind of hungry and always is driven, and that's a part of myself I've kind of learned to love. But I think it's also a part of myself I've needed to kind of grow and kind of learn to hold a bit more maturity. You know, in stages I became more grounded, I would say. In my kind of twenties, I became grounded in work that I found meaningful and purposeful. I became grounded in a long-term committed relationship, even though it proved not to be the right one for me. And so, yeah, kind of bit by bit, I proved things that needed to be proved. I also kind of relaxed this sense that so much needed to be proved to begin with started to ease up as I just got a few more miles under the belt. And honestly, it's hard to know whether it's much about kind of what I did or or didn't do, and whether it's just a part of getting a bit older, yeah, and getting a few more miles under your belt, as it were. But yeah, I think gradually that kind of slowly faded away. And I, you know, still have a chunk of it, but I try and hold it in better balance these days.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Your first significant mental health difficulty came when you had your marriage to your first wife. Now, there's a lot of things we won't go into detail on this period here, but just tell me what you feel comfortable in saying about why you began to struggle and the impact it had on your mental health at the time.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

I made the mistake of getting engaged to my first long-term girlfriend. You know, we met when we were just 19, you know, it was very heady, exciting stuff. And I think in my 20s, you know, she ran into a period of really quite serious mental ill health. And I was still on this mission to prove myself. And part of that I think meant proving that I could make that relationship work. And so, yeah, I remember proposing in part because I'd convinced myself that there was just no way that she could recover unless she was certain that I was in her corner. And I look back now and you know, I feel some fondness for that younger George, you know, like you know, he was really trying, bless him, but he just didn't know. And he didn't know that you can't love someone better, you know, that people have to find their own ways, and that actually sometimes the more you pour into a bucket, the quicker the water pours out, you know, and actually you can be creating dynamics that really aren't helping the other person, even if that's what your intention was. And so, yeah, we were together, I think, 13 years, you know, seven or eight of them I would say were really pretty bad. And then, yeah, alongside that, I started doing, you know, we talk more about this in a bit, some very, very intense work in the last two, three, four years of that period. And I I felt like I was basically going from a fire at work to a fire at home. You know, things were just getting worse and worse on all fronts. And I guess I grew up with this understanding of, you know, what it meant to be a man was that you could take it. You know, you were meant to be able to take it, whether it was in your personal life, your professional, you were meant to be strong enough to just keep going. And I think for years and years and years I just kept going until one day I realized I didn't want to anymore. And I don't know whether it's that I couldn't or whether I didn't want to, I think it's that I don't want to. And I walked out of my marriage, walked out of my work, and yeah, really hit rock bottom in the next couple of months. And that was, yeah, kind of I would say the kind of big defining crisis of my 20s, 30s, and really my adult life.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Well, you mentioned that phrase rock bottom there, and let's talk about it a little bit more before we move on, because you're at the time a CEO of a humanitarian not-for-profit called Safe Passage, and as part of the work, you have to go to an infamous refugee camp called The Jungle, which is in Calais, in France. And the jungle has a huge amount of issues, kind of social, it in places it can be very dangerous for people to go to. And in that jungle, you were doing this work and you were trying to help people and support people and hopefully save lives in the process. And you said to yourself, I'd rather be here than at home. How did you feel in that moment, mate?

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Yeah, it was pretty crimp, honestly. I mean, safe passage was it was so intense. You know, I didn't even mean to start it. I just went to the jungle one time and I found all these kids who are trying to reach their family members in Britain. I thought, that seems odd. You know, if you're a 15-year-old lad in this muddy field in northern France, surrounded by people snuckers, surely you shouldn't be jumping on the back of a lorry to try and reach your sister in London. Like surely there must be a better way. And so, yeah, once the court cases had started kind of reuniting these refugee kids with their family members, but yeah, it was horrendous. On the one hand, yeah, the jungle, Lesbos in Greece, all over Europe, these places were awful. You know, raw human excrement, total desperation, lots of people trying to get to safety, many very traumatized. You know, sometimes there was a bit of hope there too, but there was really all the worst that you could find. They, you know, they called it a jungle for a reason. There were real dangers in there. And then, yeah, one day I was getting ready to leave the jungle and hop back. I was driving back, and then you drive on the Euro tunnel or whatever it's called, and I was getting into my car, and I was like, oh man, I really don't want to go home. And yeah, it was shocking. It was really shocking to realise that I would rather be in the jungle than in my home with my partner. And so on my way back, I rang my brother, who lives, you know, not that far away from where I was living at the time, and I said, Bro, do you think I could just stay with you for one night? And he was like, Yeah, of course, don't mention it. And um Yeah, while I was staying there, and I realised I couldn't go back the next night either. And I spent three nights staying with him before I realised that I had to leave the marriage and leave the work. I need to get some space from both work and from my relationship, and so yeah, I I walked up to my old flat and packed up all the things that I owned. It was pretty pitiful showing, honestly. I had like a laptop, I had PS2, I had two pairs of jeans and some t-shirts, and literally everything I owned, I fit into one suitcase. And the suitcase I don't forget, it was a bloody wedding present. The suitcase was a present I'd been given at the wedding by my parents, and I packed everything I owned into it and told my partner at the time that I was leaving, um, I didn't know how long for, but that I needed some space, and yeah, I walked out. My dad, bless his cotton socks, was waiting for me outside with the car and drove me back to my childhood home.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Like you said, you moved back in to your parents, you're 30 years old at this point, your finances are in a bit of a mess, your relationships with other people outside of your family are also in a very bad place because of the way that your marriage had gone. It's a great reset moment, as you called it off air. How did you go about taking those first steps to getting your life back on track, mate?

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Well, I mean, one of the big things was I was so lucky to be caught when I fell. I had parents who were willing to take me back in. I had my brother who showed up for me, I had my best mate Max, who called me every single day for three months. Wow. So I had a lot of people in my corner, and I remember being in this pub with Max. I was just like in pieces. And you know, this song came on that played at my wedding that she played when I was walking down the aisle, and I just burst into tears and I was sobbing into my pint. And this lady in her 50s who works at the park comes over and she says, Are you alright? And I was like, Not really. She says, What's up? And I said, Well, I'm off on long-term sick and probably can't work anymore. And, you know, I think I'm getting divorced, and I've just started to realise there were some really, really serious problems in my relationship. And she gave me a big hug and she said, You know what, me too. It's gonna be okay. And she told me that she had just left, you know, a couple of weeks before she'd left her husband, who'd been beating her black and blue for the last two decades, and there she was working a bar job, having just finished a shift at Tesco, so that she could have two incomes for which to help her daughter through uning. So yeah, I think the first thing is like just I was very lucky to have so many people catch me. The second thing is, you know, those moments that help you find perspective on how lucky you still are, even when everything's going wrong, are a really big deal. And then I guess I'd say, you know, it wasn't like a single step, it wasn't something that just turned around. You know, those first several weeks at home in my childhood bedroom, God, I was so depressed. And I'd just get up and some days I'd just lounge around the house, other days I'd go for a walk around town or go to the gym. Yeah, I was like in this fog, you know. I felt like uh I'd been walking on top of thin ice and suddenly I'd just fallen through. But it looked like everyone else was still up on the ice, you know, they were all walking around and they didn't realise that like yes, there was some thing and someone down there. Yeah, it was in that like massive haze of depression, honestly, that yeah, I was just looking for any kind of answer really. And again, it was the connections in my life that kind of helped me through. You know, my brother basically came back and he said, Bro, like, I can't make this better for you, but I can take you somewhere less depressing. So he bought us two tickets and took me to Brazil. And I'll never forget we landed in Rio and we walked out to the Copper Cabana, and I'd been so depressed, and yet there I was with a caiperinha in my hand on like the best beach in the world. And it was just so shocking that I could still be happy. And so those moments of joy that you can find, even when you know you're in a really, really bad way, are also just kind of very important because they're a reason for hope, you know. They're like, oh, things can be different. And then, yeah, I think, you know, as as I shared offline, a couple of weeks go by, my brother really doing this amazing job supporting me, and then he heads home. You know, the second he went home, basically he said to me, There's no need to come back, you know, you're signed off work, why don't you stay out here a bit longer? Better than going back to your childhood bedroom again. I stayed out and he went off. And literally the day he left that night I went out, got absolutely wasted, and then joined this like group of tourists who signed up to hike up to the top of this mountain through the night. And the idea is you hike up a mountain in the night in order to catch the sunrise in the morning. Yeah, we're walking up and it's pitch dark, and I am just in pieces. I'm just like floods of tears, I'm like silently like wrapped with sobs. I don't want to make a noise because I don't want anyone to know. And we climb up for like four or five hours up to the top of this mountain, and we get up to the top, and you know, this group I'm with, mostly like gap year kids, right? Like 10 years younger than me, they're all taking selfies at the top and so happy to be there. And I'm just I'm still underwater, and I sit on the edge of this cliff, and I'm just looking down, thinking, you know, it's one of those things people always say when someone takes their life. They always say, Oh, how could he do that? You know, and it's normally a he, right? Because you know, I think it's what three out of four suicides in the UK are male, but anyway, they say, How could he do that to his friends and his family? And honestly, I I know the answer now. The answer is I was sat there on the cliff thinking about how much better everyone in my life would be if I just ended it. Yeah, you know, I sat there saying, you know, false selflessness, yeah, they could stop worrying about you, you know, the story can end, and they can say, Ah, he's a nice kid, tried hard, loved his wife, worked hard. So yeah, I really was like really on the edge of jumping off. And then the guide walks over to me and he just offers me a Snickers. He's like, Do you want a Snickers? And he really interrupted my train of thought, my doom loop. And I'd never eaten a Snickers, which sounds ridiculous. I was like 30 at the time, but I was like, All right, sure, I'll I'll try this Snickers. And I ate it, and you know, salty and sweet and delicious. And while I was eating it, I was like, you know, I have climbed all the way up this mountain, maybe I should just watch the sunrise and then kill myself after. And yeah, I sit and I watch the sunrise, it takes about 25-30 minutes. It's absolutely stunning. And at the end of that period, I'm like, well, you know, fuck, if there's still kindness in the world and if there's still beauty, then you know, maybe I should try and give this thing another shot. And so that was when I took the decision to try and like sort things out. But the actual reality of doing so that was months, that was years of work, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

I'll never know, and you'll probably never know if that guide spotted how upset you were or spotted that you were on the verge of doing something horrendous in that moment, mate. But if he's listened to this pod, he knows now. What would you say to me if he was listening to this pod? I've got a crazy story.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Five years later, my life is totally turned around. I'm in great work, I'm in good health, I've met someone new which I never expected. She proposed, who thought, who saw that coming? And I thought, well, shit, if it's to her, let's do this thing. Then we got pregnant, and you know, I was gonna be a dad, which is something I'd basically come to terms with was never gonna happen for me. Yeah, we went back to Brazil. I took her and we went on this road trip around Brazil and we went to the island. We went back to the same spot and I signed up for a night hike, and I climbed back up that mountain in the dark, and it was like very confronting, you know, walking in the pitch black again, and like, you know, it was like my body could just remember, remember the last time I'd been there, and I was amped and I was, you know, again quite tearful. But I got up to the top and the sun was shining, and I just sat there and started kind of meditating and saying my kind of thank yous, saying, you know, thank yous to my wife, thank you to myself, to my friends and family, to the world. And I opened my eyes, and there he was. The same tour guide was just there, and I was like, what the fuck? And I went up over to him and I said, you know, there's no way you'll remember this or remember me. But of course, you know, he's a tour guide, right? So, like, that's his job. He goes up there every day. So, of course he was there. Yeah, I went over to him and I was like, You won't remember this or me, but you know, four years ago, five years ago, I was here, and you know, I very nearly took my life, and it was actually you stopped me doing that. And the guy's uh he's Brazilian and um you know he speaks some English, but not amazing, and he's kind of looked at me a bit kind of confused, and I was like, you know what, it's okay, it's enough to have just seen him. And I gave him a big hug, and I went and sat down again and carried off my thank yous. And then, like 10 minutes later, I saw him kind of looking at me and I made eye contact, and then he kind of shuffled on over, and he was like, Did you say what I think you said? And I was like, Yeah, and he was like, Wow, and yeah, we had this massive hug, and like pretty soon, like he was crying, I was crying. All the people on the different groups had come up, like the story spread about what had happened, and everyone had this like insane moment on top of the mountain, and yeah, we're in touch. We like WhatsApp, he's total legend.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Oh guy, what a guy. Oh brigado, ohrigado. When you were in that moment, and like you said, you had this thought of if there's still kindness and beauty in the world, I can give life another go. A, did you surprise yourself looking back? And B, how have you put that mantra into practice today?

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Did I surprise myself? The life I've lived since then has been a massive and wonderful surprise. How have I lived that mantra? Kindness and beauty. Well, like in a lot of quite kind of practical ways, honestly. First, there's kindness, there's beauty, and there's the willingness to try, to actually like try and live well. And that was about taking responsibility for my life in a fuller, deeper way. It was about recognising my limits, you know, it wasn't about like this limitless sense of responsibility, no, it was partly about saying, Well, actually, there are problems I can't fix, and that trying to take responsibility for someone else's mental health, or to try and stop every single child refugee from dying. These are just not things in my power, and I had been holding myself to account for those things, you know, which is part of like the self punishment that had driven me to that crisis. So, yeah, I think there was a long road back where I tried to honour the kind of kindness and beauty that I found. There was, you know, lots of therapy, there was some pretty gnarly stuff called ENDR. Yes, done it myself. Horrendously tough stuff. Life changing though for me. Me too, man. Me too. Life-saving, obviously. And then, you know, obviously, lots of exercise, got into meditation, started sorting out my health, my financial health, my relational health. So yeah, I think you know, every step that you take is a way of kind of thanking the people and the circumstances that were there for you when you hit rock bottom.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

You mentioned the EMDR there, and it's obviously been life-saving and life-changing for you. It was life-saving and life-changing for me. I've done two rounds of it. And you also did the ayahuasca. Now, ayahuasca is a natural psychoactive brew traditionally prepared by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon Basin from the Banisteriopsis capy vine, and it's a plant which also contains dimeltryptamine or DMT. So, what tools did you learn from the EMDR? And what kind of experience was the ayahuasca?

SPEAKER_01 22:53

I mean, they were both very different ways of getting into my subconscious. To start with, I did a bunch of meditation, did a bunch of talking therapy, and both were really helpful, you know. The talking therapy for about two months I went to therapy and I just refused to talk. A guy kept asking me how I felt, and the answer was terrible. I certainly didn't want to talk about it. But I slowly learned to like identify these feelings in myself through meditation to find them in my body to begin to express them a bit better. Because I think for years I just like suffocated my whole emotional life, but I still had this sense that like there was just a bunch of stuff buried that I couldn't get at, you know, and it all started for me with this board game called Katan. Have you ever played it? I haven't, I haven't no. So it's it's like super nerdy. You is you're trying to build an empire and you like trade different resources.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Oh, it's like risk, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yeah, a bit like risk, sort of trading. And I'm playing with my wife and two friends, and one of the friends has never played before, and I'm taking ruthless advantage of her. I'm trying to trade a week for three sheep. And my wife really takes ill at the way I'm exploiting this news beginner and starts yelling at me, like, you can't do that, don't do that. And I just absolutely flipped. I went completely silent, totally cold, played the rest of the game in silence. It was awkward as hell. And at the end, I took my wife to one side. I said, you know, can I just have a word with you, please? And took her to a different room. And I said, Don't ever speak to me like that again. If you ever speak to me like that again, we're over. And she blew up. She's like, What the fuck are you talking about? I went crazy and we had a huge fight. But I was trying to understand, like, how had I flipped out so bad over this like board gate? And I was speaking to his therapist about it, and he was like, It sounds like you've got some like something triggered, like really intense. When there's this thing called EMDR that you can travel to try and find it. And and yeah, for those of listeners who haven't tried it, like basically, I think of it like the world shittest gym. Like, you basically go there to like work out the awful, awful shit that's happened to you because it's basically a when you experience something that's too traumatic to be processed normally, your mind and body just like lock it away in this vault. And basically, EMDR is this like method for like breaking into that vault in a safe way and taking it out and healing it. Yeah, I mean, it felt very violent to me if I'm honest. I felt because it was just so intense. I had to sleep like basically for a whole 24 hours after every session. It was nuts. But I recovered all these memories that I'd lost and found out exactly why someone yelling at me in that way had driven me to totally berserk. Basically, the trigger for that was yeah, partly the argument and partly my partner she proposed to me, and and I kind of said yes, but I thought if I was ever going to make a wedding vow again, who was I to do that? I felt so much shame at having broken a vow once before. I needed to know that I could make a vow in good faith. I deserved to be able to do that again. And so, yeah, it was really important to me to try and find ways to look into my subconscious because if I was carrying around a whole bunch of shit that I couldn't control, didn't understand, I didn't feel like I could make a vow in good faith. So, yeah, that was the driver both for the EMDR and then for the ayahuasca. And you know, they were very different, but both kind of very powerful ways of exploring what you're carrying. So, yeah, the ayahuasca was nuts. I was in this kind of shed in Essex, and there were about 50 of us and amazing facilitators who are very wise, decent people. And anyway, you drink this kind of green goo, and it the first time drinking, it tastes honestly takes an absolute vile. And yeah, I kind of sat there, and you know, it's famous because people vomit a lot on it, and so what you hear is you just hear around the circle, they come around with these little buckets that they give out to you, and mine had a little cap's face on it, and everyone, you know, you slowly but surely you sit there and you just hear people starting to hurl, and you're like, Oh, that's gross. And yeah, after a while, it's kind of time for the second dose. So people are playing music, and I I didn't have a very intense experience at first, and then our second dose, yeah. I kind of felt like I've been hit by a truck, and I started walking back to my seat, and I sat down, and suddenly, yeah, my vision just went completely dark, you know. It was like being in a lightless sky, my eyes were wide open, but I could not see anything, and then I just started feeling this intense cold on my arms, and I was like, Oh my god, this is terrible. Hold on for beer life, George. And then I started to feel really sick, and then I started to heave and heave and heave, and as I was vomiting, it sounds mad, but like I felt like this like black liquid was just pouring out of me that was like pure sadness and grief. And as I was vomiting, there's a novel called The Plague by an existentialist writer called Albert Camus. It's an amazing book for anyone who's interested. It's set in Algeria in like 1900s or something. A plague breaks out in this town, and loads of people die. And a few kind of protagonists get together to try and do what they can to help people, so they quarantine the sick, they burn the bodies of the dead, and they try and develop this serum to protect people and treat them. And the first person they give the serum to is this five-year-old boy, and there's this very famous scene where all the protagonists give it to this really sick little boy who's on this gurney in a hospital, and they all stand around for about like 12 hours watching as this boy slowly dies. And while I was hurling my guts out, what came to mind was these five trolleys in front of me, five kind of hospital beds, and on the beds were five teenage boys. And I realized that they were the boys that had died while we were trying to help them in safe passage, they had been crushed under the back of lorries. I knew their names. There was like Massoud, there was Muhammad, there was Rahim Mullah. These were like young lads who I had met and who we'd been trying to help, and basically had decided one day they couldn't wait, and they tried to make it overclock on their own and they died. And I was just stood in front of them in my mind's eye saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. All the while, you know, hurling my guts out. And after what feels like an eternity, as I start to kind of empty, I realize that it's irrelevant that I'm sorry. You know, these boys are dead and gone. It's irrelevant. And with realizing it was irrelevant came a second realization, which was like, oh actually, the reason why it can be irrelevant is because their deaths weren't my fault. And I think I had spent years feeling like our failure to protect all of the kids made me responsible for the ones who had died, and really, I didn't create that situation. I tried my damnedest to protect as many kids as I could, and you know, I had some success. And so, yeah, at the end of that experience, I felt like totally drained and wrecked and miserable. Like I was like up there with the worst nights of my life, and you know, basically, just as I stopped vomiting, the guy next to me just erupts, and I was like, oh man, I need to get away from this. I like crawled across the room, and yeah, spent the next like three, four hours still like absolutely out of it, but feeling just totally drained, and then yeah, went to sleep at the end of the ceremony, and uh I woke up the next day feeling weirdly light, and then you go again, and so you do it a second night, and the second night was this amazing, joyful adventure where I basically learned a lot about what it means to be alive, what it means to celebrate life, and back to your question about kindness and beauty, you know, those were themes that really returned to me, and so yeah, it was a very powerful experience. Actually, I came home from it, yeah. Me and my wife conceived our daughter the day I got home.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Pretty nuts. If your younger self was listening to this podcast, would he have believed all of these steps and parts of your progress and recovery that's happened? You sound fucking mental, mate.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

He sounds absolutely mental. What on earth are you talking about?

SPEAKER_00 31:15

But you know, he's got to walk his own path, doesn't he? You said to me off air, I now live a life I could have never imagined. So, what is your relationship like with gratitude as a result now?

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Well, I have a nightly gratitude practice. I started it basically the day I walked out of my first marriage. You know, I when I close my eyes, I do three things I'm grateful for. I find that very, very helpful. When I'm in a good place these days, it's almost always quite deeply anchored in gratitude. You know, I've got an amazing wife, I've got two gorgeous kids, I live in a lovely home, I've got decent work, I've got an amazing set of family and friends. I just go on these adventures that I just never thought would be possible. This time last year, me and my wife and our daughters before our summer's born, we set off and went and spent a month in Cape Town. I never thought I'd go to like South Africa, done a month living on the Cape and like height table mountain. Like I'm just like a kid from Bath. If I was ever going to be able to afford a house, I thought it'd be a small one in Bristol, putting my ex-wife in my miserable marriage. I feel like just really, really, really grinding it to just try and keep things going. And now I'm so lucky. So yeah, I'm pretty deeply anchored in that, I think, most days, and that is a wonderful joy. And it's just also a big surprise. It's so surprising to find yourself living a life that you wouldn't have expected.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

And as a final question before we move on, mate, what has this mental health journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 32:48

A big part of what I needed to learn was about my limits. I think I was just so arrogant. I thought I was limitless. And there's a real power in pretending that that's true. You know, if you pretend that you know everything is just a question of taking enough responsibility and then you can fix it, there's a real power in there. But it's also it's not true. Yeah, you should take responsibility for what's yours. And yeah, sometimes take responsibility for what's not and try and fix that too. But have a realistic sense of yourself as a person, see yourself clearly and honestly, face what needs to be faced. So yeah, I I try and have I don't know whether I always succeed or like, you know, a more humble, honest outlook on kind of who I am, what I'm for, what I can achieve. And I think that definitely makes me happier in the long term. I think it makes me a better husband, a better dad, better friend and family member. So I think that's my big takeaway, my big thing to reckon with was my limits.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

We've talked about your incredible mental health journey, mate. Let's now talk about the brilliant work you are doing with the Dad Shift and the reason I came across you. So, first of all, tell me how you and your co-founder came up with the idea for the campaign, why your experience of father had shaped it, and obviously the very obvious inspiration behind it. As a day job, I work in big tech and in social media.

SPEAKER_01 34:18

I think um working as I do there, I became kind of concerned earlier than most about the rise of some of the toxic figures online, folks like Andrew Tate. And I think when I was at Rock Bottom, you know, I've been recommending like a YouTube series from Jordan Peterson. I'd like connected with some of these kind of influencers and I kind of found some value in what they were offering, but that like there was this very strong focus, you know, as I as we've been discussing on got to take responsibility, you've got to clean your room. And you know, first time I heard Peterson shouting that my room was a mess and it needed cleaning, so so was my life. But I think you know, as I've shared in the mental health segment, you know, I think actually a lot of my journey was coming to recognise the end of my responsibility. You know, my problem wasn't taking responsibility, I took too much, it didn't ever kind of really click with me. And then when I saw it mutating and warping into this thing that while pretending to encourage men to kind of take responsibility, was also somehow starting to blame women for our struggles. You know, I basically became really concerned about that. And I worried that a generation of men, you know, my age and younger, were falling out of love with gender equality when all my experience was actually that like basically equality is good for all of us. And so yeah, I started looking to try and find issues that would prove that what's good for men can be good for women and what's good for women can be good for men too. And I was trying to figure out what these issues were when me and my wife had our first child. Yeah, it was just so obvious, you know. Because I work in a tech company, I got given four months' paternity leave, and it was amazing. It was great for me, right? Like I got all this time to figure out who I wanted to be a dad, to like settle into this whole new rhythm of life, to figure out, you know, just basic things. I'd never held a baby really before I had one. I never changed a nappy, never burked a kid or fed one. I was rubbish at it. It's not a lot of funding rubbish of things that are really important. And so, but I actually had the time to figure that out and get to enjoy my relationship with my daughter. Got to support my wife as she was recovering from a C-section. It was obviously amazing for me, but it was also really good for them. And all of my mates get just two weeks. The UK has the worst paternity leave in Europe, it's two weeks on less than half the minimum wage. So only a tiny amount of time, next to no money. Most blokes don't even take it. Like most working class men, 90% of the paternity leave that's claimed in Britain today is claimed by the top half of earners. So even that two weeks, it's only basically like well-off families who can afford to take it because, of course, it's a cost of living crisis and it's bloody hard out there. So yeah, I had this amazing time out, and all of my friends were getting two weeks or nothing because they couldn't afford to take the time, and it was just outrageous. So yeah, I posted about it on LinkedIn and said I wanted to do something about this, and a friend connected me with Alex, my co-founder, who was also kind of looking to do something about it. And we said, well, you know, let's meet up and have a chat. And we talked it through and decided to have a go. So, yeah, about 18 months ago, he and I slipped out at about like 5 a.m. with this amazing woman called Mel, who runs the local sling library, and she brought a kind of massive suitcase full of slings that you wrap babies in and dolls, and we just went and whacked dolls and slings on statues all around London and had a team doing it up in Edinburgh because you got all these statues of kind of famous male figures, but they're always remembered for what they did in public life, right? They're a politician or an actor or a footballer, they're never remembered for their roles as dads. So yeah, we whacked these slings and these dolls on them, and I took along a journalist who I knew from my old safe passage days. I just had no idea how big it was gonna go. I was back at my day job the next day, and my colleague pinged me, and he was like, mate, you're in my local paper. I said, Fuck off, Jackton. What are you talking about? Because Jackton's based a bank of law. Um, but he got his local paper out, held it up, and there we were on the third page. I just couldn't believe it. So yeah, it went absolute pop from the start. And yeah, we've been campaigning for the last year and a half to try and get British dads and non-birth and parents at least six weeks off and 90% of pay so they can afford to take it so that yeah, they can support their partners, bond with their babies, and figure out who they're gonna be as fathers. And yeah, the campaigns are up and rolling. The government has launched a review of parental leave, which is gonna run until the end of next year, so we've got our kind of definite political opportunity that we're pushing towards, and we've got to get out there and do the work and make sure that we get the outcome we want.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Amazing, mate. You're doing incredible work. I spoke with Tanika Davson, previous podcast guest, good friend of mine, about the issues around maternity pay, right? And there's loads of issues within that too. But on paternity pay itself and paternity leave, I should say, because of this issue, like you said, whereby there is this huge imbalance between paternity leave and maternity leave, one could argue that this imbalance reinforces a norm or belief that the woman is the priority caregiver in a relationship and is therefore valued more than the father. How would you respond to that and how do we change it? Yeah, I think that kind of was true, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:25

We used to have this vision of like the man as the breadwinner, the woman as the homemaker, and our social policy really kind of reflects that view. So, yeah, in the UK, dads get two weeks on less than half the minimum wage, mums get six weeks paid at whatever they're earning, and then they get up to a year on this very low statutory rate. So, yeah, historically, like we've had a very, very gendered division of care labour in families, and that's been reflected in the policy we've got. The reality is though that basically the last two decades things have changed completely. Right? Find me a family where the maths stack up with only one earner. You know, basically, we are in an economy where you need to have dual earning households, and that is where you know very large numbers of women have entered the workforce. Some of them are finding that like extremely fulfilling and kicking a bunch of ass, and that progress is to be celebrated. Likewise, men have been falling in love with spending time with their kids. You know, this is the most active generation of dads there has ever been. When we poll dads, 90% of them say they want to be a more active part of their kids' life than generations before. And that's every social group, that's every geography, that's every class. You know, when you poll older men, by far and away the thing people my dad's generation regret, men regret in their 70s, natives saying spend enough time with their families. You know, people who are back at work the very next day. And I think what we're learning is that imbalances in care in those early weeks and months then get locked in for the long term. So I'll give you my example, right? Like I said, I was shit at looking after my daughter when she first arrived. And this was before I'd finished the MDR and she was like screaming in my face, and it was like really challenging stuff for me. And it was so easy just to step back and say, you know what, she's still breastfeeding, maybe she wants her mum. You know, that thought just like slides into the back of your head. And it was only because I had a decent amount of time off that I could have a word with myself and say, no, come on, mate, ask some questions, make some mistakes, figure it out. You can learn this. And I did. And I became a really capable caregiver for my daughter, and with that kind of capability comes confidence, comes enjoyment, and I just started having the best time. And it's not say I've given up or wanting to do stuff in the world, but I love spending time with my kids. It's amazing. You know, the idea that one would have a family and then spent one's whole life working to provide for them is really just quite sad, right? Because you want to provide them like a roof over their head and a decent meal on the table for sure. But you also want to provide them with your presence. That's the thing they'll remember the most. That's the thing they will miss if you don't. So, yeah, I think basically what we're arguing in the dad shift is not that like that old-fashioned vision of protect and provide is wrong. No, we think it's right. We want to protect and provide. We just want to hold a higher bar for what that means. We want to provide our kids with our presence as well as our paychecks. We want to protect them, not just by putting in the stairgate and getting the right car seat, but by role modeling what it means to be like a healthy, decent man in their life. And so, yeah, that's why we think it's so important that social policy changes and catches up with where society's actually been at for like 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

Like you said, you've been lobbying parliament, you've now got a group of over 90 MPs across political parties on board to support your vision and support the campaign. As well, like you've said, the current UK Labour government is ordering a review of the current paternity leave allocation. So, long term then, what's the goal beyond getting that paternity leave slightly extended? What's the vision? When would you think that the dad shift is redundant now and I can sail off into the sunset? If there ever is one.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

You know, on paternity leave, we're the worst in Europe. The European average is eight weeks at 100% of pay. I really hope within the next two years, British dads are getting at least six weeks and can afford to take them. So that would be a massive step forward. And if we win that, yeah, I'll I'll feel really proud and I'll feel this sense that, you know what, maybe for a spell I've done my bit. But also, you know, I think there's some really big challenges going on. You know, the stuff we've been talking about, it's it's very true that like particularly there are some specific struggles facing boys and men today that I think we just have to do better on. We have to improve, both for the sake of those boys and men themselves, but also for the sake of society as a whole, right? All the women who love them, the girls who call them dad. And I feel really like quite called to that work over the summer. I was pushing my son along in the pram, and I got this test on the phone, and it was from a number I didn't recognise, and it just said, Hi, it's like so-and-so. I'm really sorry to say that Josh took his own life last Tuesday. And I was like, Who's Josh? And then I looked up the name and I realized it was my childhood best mate's sister. She got married, so she had a new surname, and I didn't recognise it. And she was telling me that my best mate from childhood had taken his own life. And you know, we'd not seen each other in about 10 years, you know, we lost touch growing up, but we were inseparable as kids until we were like 12, 13, and loved him dearly. Yeah, I went to his funeral a couple of weeks later back in Bath. And I was stood outside the wreck. The wake was at the wreck, and I was stood in the car park. There's this bar, Legends Bar, I mean it was packed, because he was very well loved, the family's very well loved. So I just stood in the car park because I needed some air and I was like, just again, a bit of space, trying to get my head together. And the car pulled up carrying his family and outstepped his dad and his mum and his sister, and I just clocked his mum and she saw her clock me. And she just says, Oh my god, your little face, you haven't changed. Because obviously she just remembers me as a child, you know, like I remember her son. And we burst into tears and started having this hug. And then she just said to me, he didn't say anything that nobody knew. It's this thing about being a man. And yeah, I feel really haunted by those words, you know, having come close to killing myself, now trying to raise a son, I'm trying to raise a daughter, it's gonna be in the world with plenty of men around her. Like I feel very deeply that the world is getting harder for everyone in a number of ways, and it's getting harder for men specifically in SAR. Male earnings in the UK have flatlined since the 1970s, even though costs are rocketing up. You know, the average male lives four and a half years fewer than the average female. Partly that's suicide, partly that's we're not good at going to the doctor, partly that's a whole bunch of health conditions that could be better treated.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

Dangerous jobs we take as well. Dangerous jobs we take compared to women.

SPEAKER_01 46:21

You know, in coal mining communities or former coal field communities, there's something like 60 jobs for every hundred adult working people. And blokes used to make a lot of meaning going down the pit, and that was like hard, sodding work, but dignified and proud. Now the only job that's going is in a warehouse in Amazon. And like it is really, really hard. And particularly if you're a bloke and you're carrying around this identity where what you've been told is that to be a good man means to be strong enough to take it, means to protect and provide no matter what. It is getting harder and harder to do that. And so, yeah, I feel very passionate about trying to both tackle some of those issues and about changing the script on what it means to be a man in Britain today. You know, I'm I'm all for strength, but I think we need to change the script so that we're talking about a strength that is strong enough to face that we can't always do it on our own. You know, the strength of a team is not just one individual player. So it's weird to think that the strength of my character is just me. No, it was my brother who was in my corner, it was my mate Max who was in my corner that meant I could get through what I got through. So yeah, I basically am really passionate about tackling some of these issues, about changing the script on what it means to be a man. And I think if we do that, then I don't think we need to go around blaming women for their struggles. I think we can recast this as a battle that everyone's in to live a decent, dignified, happy life, and that we're better off trying to do that together than we are apart. So yeah, on the one hand, paternity leave, I want to suddenly win it. This could be one or two years. But this longer term stuff, yeah, you know, I want to keep it in proportion. That's one of the lessons I learned. You know, it's not all for me to fix, nor could I, nor should I try. But I want to play my part, I want to find great other people to do that with. And in Alex, I've got this amazing partner. So, you know, for as long as he and I are having fun and kicking ass and I can manage it alongside my day job, let's go.

SPEAKER_00 48:16

Very well said, mate. Let's dive a bit deeper before we reflect because you've mentioned loads of issues there. There's also the issue of boys being behind in education compared to girls for decades now. That's not just university admissions, it's secondary schools, and then you've got the sub-issues of not enough male secondary school teachers and definitely not enough male primary school teachers, whole different separate podcasts. But you referenced a study off air to me that you wanted to talk about, which is an Australian study, and it was called 10 to Men, and it followed a large sample size of Australian men from childhood to adulthood and basically tracked their life outcomes. So, what did you learn from that study when you read it? It's a really interesting piece of work.

SPEAKER_01 48:55

So, yeah, they looked at, I think it's 16,000 boys, or it might be 10,000 boys over 16 years, or 16,000 boys over 10 years, I think get it right. One or the other. And one of their findings that really blew my mind was you know, there's a lot of conversation at the moment, and rightly so, about violence against women and girls. 800,000 women in Britain are assaulted every year. So there's like a very serious problem of violence against women and girls, and in it, you know, understandably, men are often portrayed as the problem. A lot of that violence is kind of male violence.

SPEAKER_00 49:25

Men are also counted as a victim of violence against women and girls, mate, which is a weird anomaly which some of my friends in this space are trying to counter. But yeah, that's also something to consider. And of course, you know, men are also victims of violence, etc.

SPEAKER_01 49:37

Men are also victims of violence from women. But I think, you know, basically, men are generally physiologically larger and stronger. We are historically the dominant social group, and so there is a significant volume of violence that always has been directed from men to women, and it's a real problem, and if we can stop it, we should. But in thinking about how we stop it, yeah, the narrative has often been that, yeah, this focus on that, yeah, men are the problem. But what this study shows that is fascinating is that, yeah, of these boys that the study tracks, one in three will go on to commit what's called intimate partner violence. That is some form of physical or emotional violence towards their partner. And what it finds, yeah, there's lots of stuff that predicts which boys will do that. Yeah, is their substance misuse, is their alcohol abuse, are they mentally unwell? But the biggest factor from boyhood that predicts whether a boy will grow into a man who abuses his partner is whether he reports a high level of paternal affection. Affection from his dad or a father-like figure. Now that is massive. Because historically, we've always said boys learn how to relate to women through their relationships with their ma, right? That's the received wisdom. But what this study shows is that actually boys are learning how to relate to women through the relationships they have with adult men in their life. Because they mirror it and their dad is good, dad, they'll check it. 100%. And if their dad's a rotter, you know, that's where they'll learn the same patterns of behaviour. And I think um to have that proven out in such a massive, robust study is a huge step. Because it's a step that shows that, yeah, men are part of the problem, but they can also be a really big part of the solution here. And so for us, it's a really powerful argument around paternity leave, right? If like healthy relationships between fathers and sons is part of what keeps everyone safe, both the boys and the girls, we need to make sure that social policy enables those relationships to fall. And if we send dads back to work after two weeks or even less, you know, at the very first hurdle, we're failing. So yeah, I think it's a really important study. I think they're like a complex set of issues, but it's a really valuable proof point to kind of an intuition a bunch of us have had for quite a long time.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

No, very well said. And yeah, the uh the family court system is also a big part of that, but that's also a separate podcast. I want to reflect now on this part of your journey, mate. So, first of all, what's been your proudest achievement on this journey with Dad Shift so far?

SPEAKER_01 52:03

I mean, it was pretty cool. We called this thing this the world's first ever dad strike. We asked dads to down tools for a couple of hours, just sort of the week before last year's Father's Day. And yeah, like a thousand dads did it in London and around the country, and we had two, three hundred of them in London setting up a picket line outside the Department of Business and Trade. And like, it was the week after my mate Josh's funeral, and to be there in public with like hundreds of dads for their kids. It was the biggest group of dads with kids I'd ever been a part of, I'd ever seen. And it was so moving to be there just after Josh had taken his own life and to be there and feel like you know this was really us being part of the solution. I wrote about it, but that morning I did Good Morning Britain. I was being interviewed by Richard Madley. He was pushing me on what are the arguments for paternity leave, and I said, Well, they're good for mums, good for dads, good for babies. And he was really pushing me, trying to get me to say, This is about dads. Yeah, we should do this because it's good for dads. Because then he could spin it of like, oh, well, why should dads be prioritised over mums? Why should dads be prioritised over kids? And he was really pushing me, and I refused to take the bait, like stuck to my lines, which were that no, paternity is good for mums, good for dads, good for babies. And then it was only later that day at the strike, surrounded by all these beautiful families, I'd felt something stick in my throat at Good Morning Britain, and I've been carrying it with me all day, and I didn't know like what was it that I should have said, what was it that I couldn't get out? And it was only when I was stood at the microphone in front of all those dads that I realised what it was, which was yes, paternity leave is good for mums, yes, it's good for babies. But even if it was just good for dads, we should still bloody do it. And it's okay as men and dads to say that we need some help at the most important and challenging moments of our lives without qualifiers 100%. Yeah, honestly, it was a bit of an epiphany, and realizing that actually the real reason why I'm doing this whole dad shift stuff, yeah, it's because I care about other families and other men, and you know, I want them to have opportunities to enjoy this wonderful part of life. But it's also this is literally me trying to be the man I need to be in order to be a decent role model to my son, and it was hugely meaningful. Two weeks later, the government launched their review of parental leave, and I was with the Secretary of State for Business in the museum just down the road from my house. They got like a museum of childhood. Yeah, they picked it because they asked us where we should launch this thing, and and I said, that museum, because it's a hundred yards from my house, we're throwing it in my place. It's the hottest day of the year, and my poor kids, I've got a two and a half-year-old, and I've got at that point a kind of 10-week-old baby, and we've gone, and it's absolutely baking. But Secretary of State launches this review using language that he could have lifted straight from the Dad Shift's campaign press release, and in the Times they wrote it up as uh you know, paternity leave, an opportunity to tackle kind of misogynistic influencers, and there's this big picture, and the picture is like me and my daughter on one side, the Secretary of State in the middle, Alex on the other side, who's actually holding my sir. So, like in the shot, both my kids, if I wanted clearer proof that we were pushing the government further and faster, yeah, I couldn't have asked for it. So I was really proud of that. Yeah, really moved by the opportunity to learn and grow with all these other dads.

SPEAKER_00 55:28

And as a final question, before we move on to our mental health chat, what has this journey also so far taught you about yourself as well, mate?

SPEAKER_01 55:37

I still struggle with a lot of the same stuff, you know. I still get so caught up in it, I get so excited, and that excitement can quite quickly turn to like stress and anxiety, and then I'll become someone who's not that fun to be around. You know, I can forget the joy of what I'm doing, I can lose sight of a lot of those insights about limits and like accepting my limits. So yeah, it basically continually reminds me that I have to just keep relearning these lessons that life is giving me. But hopefully I learn them a little quicker and with a little less brutality than in times past.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

Our final topic of conversation, George, and it's one I try and have with all of my special guests if we have time. It is a general nutter and quick fire chat about our mental health. So, firstly, how is your mental health, mate?

SPEAKER_01 56:28

All right. I think I've had like a little bit of a dip this last term, and I've been trying to figure out why that is and what it means, but I'm coming through the other side of it. I love New Year's, I always love it as a time of year, like obviously it's Christmas, get to rest, get to be with family, but also this thing of like setting new intentions and like taking a bit of stock. So, yeah, that New Year's energy is definitely starting to kick in, and I'm feeling pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 56:50

What age were you when you became self-aware of your mental health and you realised that the feelings you were having weren't physical and they were actually in your mind?

SPEAKER_01 56:58

30, 31. But I'd say um honestly, I think they are also in my body, like my meditation. I can literally find the anxiety, can find the anger. So yeah, I think it's both mind and body.

SPEAKER_00 57:11

And was it a eureka moment or a gradual process? Gradual process, but with some big moments along the way. And can you remember the first conversation you ever had with someone about your mental health? So if you can, who was it with? What did you say, and how do you look back on it? Did it feel like the big moment and weight had been lifted, or on the other hand, something quite easy, natural, and normal to do? I remember the first time I asked for help.

SPEAKER_01 57:35

I'd run out of money, like properly run out of money. And I rang my dad and I asked him if he could lend me some. And um he said how much, and I told him, and he said he'd send me three times as much, and it wasn't a loan, it was a gift. And oh, I was still very touched by him doing that and the way he did it. That was um my son 26. That was like the first time I remember really asking for help. And then in my mental health, I think it's been something that's just kind of naturally come into the conversation. I think we've had like a pretty big shift socially, haven't we, over the last couple of decades. And it's gradually seeped in.

SPEAKER_00 58:14

Did you have a chat with your dad kind of years later after that? Did he know in that moment how big it was for you?

SPEAKER_01 58:19

I've told him, and actually he's uh he's Greek, and yeah, and so you know, I love Greece and I've got citizen shift and it's wicked. But he's in his 70s now and uh he loves walking. And next summer I'm taking him to Mount Olympus, which is the tallest mountain in Greece. He's very into Greek mythology, and I grew up here in a battle of the Greek gods, and we're gonna go meet them, and I'm super excited about it. We're gonna go climb it, and you know, it's gonna be an opportunity for me to tell him a lot of these things again, and hopefully he'll he'll kind of really hear them and carry them all the time next day himself.

SPEAKER_00 58:51

I just read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, which is all about Turkey and Greece, and yeah, beautiful book. So, yeah, I mean, have a look at it. It might be one for him, might not be. It was an amazing book. What things in life do you find that trigger your mental health, mate? So it could be things people say to you, it could be a sound, a sensation, a smell, or have you not figured all of them out yet?

SPEAKER_01 59:10

I think through MDR and and I've dug up most of my triggers. So yeah, the the really raw ones I think are mostly out. You know, I still feel triggered when I feel judged, but normally I know that when I'm feeling judged is because I'm busy judging myself. And so that trigger is normally telling me that something's going on in me rather than you know someone else is doing this thing into me. So yeah, that's probably one that I continue to struggle with a bit. And what about positive triggers then, too? I mean, there's nothing better for that than kids. Like just hearing my daughter squeal, daddy. Like, or my little boy just like rolling around with him, like he's like a little beach ball, and I just swing him over my shoulder, I chuck him up in the air, and I just hear him laughing like a maniac. Honestly, just he thinks the whole world is absolutely hysterical, and he gets super cross, and that really reminds me of me as well. But like hearing his laugh, hearing her voice, hearing little footsteps on the corridors or the landing.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:10

It's lush. It's absolutely lush. Conversely, then, or in addition to, should I say, what positive tools and methods do you use to improve your mental health on a daily basis and help you feel better? Which ones have worked and maybe which ones that you've tried but haven't? Well, I do quite a lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:25

Sometimes I think it's like a full-time job, just try and be well in the world. I meditate probably three or four times a week for about 25 minutes. There's a I see a kind of Buddhist guy who I meet with once a month who's helping me develop my practice, so that's massive. I try and exercise once, twice a week if I can manage it. Don't always, but try and do that. I've got this gratitude practice I do before bed. Got a little mantra that I've developed, I also say before bed. So yeah, there's like a bunch of like quite practical day-to-day things that I do. Yeah, and then if I run into trouble, I have additional tools, right? Like if I'm in a difficult period or something's really challenging me, I know I can go back to therapy, you know, to obviously talk to my friends and family about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:05

You mentioned a book earlier in the podcast. So, what has been your favourite book or the best mental health Bible you've read for your mental health? Now, it can be self-help or mental health related, doesn't have to be, it can be fiction. And if you can't think of a book, album, TV show, any piece of popular culture.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:21

Uh Victor Frankel wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. That's a Bible. And then obviously Dreams by um Fleetwood Mare. Oh, amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

That's like one of the best choices we've had.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:36

And for anyone who's in like a difficult period, like that line is so true. You'll know when you're better and you will get better. You know, when the rain washes, you clean your nose.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

You mentioned Buddhism earlier. So, what is the best mantra in life that sums up your mental health and why?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

Well the mantra I tell myself, I say, you know, probably once or twice a day, and I'm woken up for the 17th time in the night by one of my kids. I say, Today I will die. I will greet death with a smile, with joy in one hand, with peace the other. Having put my back to history's arc, hoping to see it bend, having given love and received it in return. And it might sound quite grand, but I think yeah, the three pillars, or kind of four pillars of it. The first is acceptance, right? Like you are going to die, and in some ways you die every minute, you die every day. And there's something wonderfully free, and there's something also very real and important in that. From there, the piece around peace and joy, yeah, those are two things I've really worked to try and find. And I think of my daughter when I think of peace, and I think of joy when when I think about my son. You know, this stuff around putting my back to history's arc, that's about you know trying to make a mark in whatever way I can, and then obviously it ends with love because that's also where it starts, and it's the most important thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:05

That's incredible, mate. Just taking a moment to myself there, just to process that. I've got two questions left. The first one is what do you love about yourself? I like my body.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:19

I'm in a good relationship, my body. Like I take decent care of it, it takes decent care of me.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:27

Yeah, I trust it. Give me two other character traits as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:32

I think you know, I can have a laugh at myself. That's so important. There's a great quote from I think it's GK Chesterton who says, uh, the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. But I also, you know, I find my own idiots super amusing. So I think that goes quite a long way. And then what's another quality? I'm very strategic. Like I know if you tell me we're trying to get from A to B, and what we've got is a piece of string, seven ducks, and a lamp, I'll tell you what we do to get from A to B using seven pieces of string, a duck and a lamp, or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:07

And as a final question, you can answer it any way you want. What more do you think we have to do to ensure men from all backgrounds, all walks of life feel comfortable and safe in opening up about their mental health issues or just their general mental health if most importantly they want to do it?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

I think the single biggest thing is to update what we mean when we say being a man is about being strong. We have to update it. We have to be clear that strong doesn't mean strong enough to do it all on your own all the time. You know, you have to be strong enough to face the fact that you can't always do it on your own. Strong enough to face the fact that you're stronger with others, among others, than you are on your own. So yeah, I think we need to flip what strength means so that it includes openness rather than shut it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

George, it has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the Just Checkin' In podcast. Well, that's all we've got time for in this episode of the Just Checking In pod. I want to say a big thank you to George for being my special guest and for letting me check in with him. I'll put some links to where you can find out more about all the amazing work the Dad Shift does. Support them and follow them on social media in the show notes. As always, thank you to all the vendors who've tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, please give it a share on social media by tagging us at VentHelpUK. Tell your friends, family, or work colleagues about us. If you're feeling generous, please do write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support us further, go to patreon.com slash ventshelpuk or make a one-off donation to our PayPal. All of those links are also on our link tree. That's linktr.ee slash venthelpuk. We hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember, guys, it is always okay to vet.