On this week’s show, Matt and Lisa meet Dan Bowsher to discuss Good Enough Chats, his podcast focused on men’s mental health through lived experience.
Dan founded Good Enough Chats following his own experience of burnout, anxiety and depression, which left him feeling profoundly isolated. His podcast deliberately features ordinary men — not celebrities or experts — sharing unedited, unscripted accounts of their mental health journeys, structured around the same five questions in every episode. Dan explains the thinking behind keeping the format lo-fi and the conversations raw: he wants guests to feel they’re having a conversation with a mate, not appearing on a podcast.
You can find Dan’s podcast at goodenoughchats.com.
Full transcript generated by Descript:
Matt: Hello, and welcome to episode 346 of WB 40. I’ve got no idea the timing intervals this show works on anymore, but this week it’s with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Dan Bowsher
Lisa: Welcome back listeners. Nice to see you again, Matt. Thank you. Um. I mean, I only saw you on Thursday, which was probably my busiest day this last week.
Um, but it feels like a, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the podcast, even though it’s only a couple of episodes ago. As you’ve alluded to in the intro, it’s a little bit wibbly wobbly time. Why me at the moment and what even is time? So, um, yeah, it’s been quite an interesting week or so. I think I’ve certainly noticed a shift in myself since the sun’s come back out again, and we’ve actually had some warmth.
I realized I’m probably a complicated houseplant because the sun was shining. I’m in a much best I feel. I don’t know, I just feel like everything’s lifted a bit this last week or two. I’ve been back rowing. I went back to, um, I went swimming in the Charlton Lido and it felt a little bit like I was weirdly on holiday it, rather than not being in a webinar that I’d signed up to just to watch.
And yeah, I had a. Really social day on Thursday. So I saw Matt and Susie, who’s a friend of the podcast at Paul Armstrong’s the new normal at disgusting the early breakfast session that started at eight in Old Street. Then went to work out of my friend Christine at c Rockstar’s office. Then I went to the Color Walk and actually while I was at the Color Walk, I bumped into someone from the rowing club and he was very confused to see me.
Couldn’t place him either. I also saw a friend, other friend of the podcast and my sometimes collaborator Simon Thompson, who said he might swing by a spitalfields market, but we happened to also bump into each other without having prearranged a time or a place. We just met at exactly the point that we’ve never met each other at before.
Then. So after the color walk, then came home, got my whiteboard out so that could take it along to the pub. Had my twice monthly, one of my twice monthly pub o’clock meetups in my local. And had a very long day and I did not leave the house on Friday. And then had a reasonably social weekend. And here we are.
How has your week been, Matt?
Matt: My week up until started to record this show, which, dear listener, it’s been an absolute disaster when all the technology goes wrong. My God, it goes wrong. Apart from that it’s been a a, a good week. We had a video sent through on Wednesday from China, from the people who are producing the book.
And it is finished. It is now being shipped. We’ve got four to six weeks before it arrives in the UK to be able to be sold for money. Uh, available@securityglenbooks.com. So that’s very exciting though to see the finished product because it is, uh. A book that defies normal expectations of what a book is.
We are pushing the boundaries of the book format. Uh, it’s not called the book though. What is it? No, it’s not called the book. It’s called Random, uh, how to Thrive In An Uncertain World by me and Nick, d dr. And, uh, it’s available from all good bookshops online that are called Security Blend Books. You can buy it other places, but we advise you to buy it from security blend books.com.
It’s gonna get more and more tiresome. You realize another four to six weeks of this before I can let go of the sail shtick. Uh, apart from that, uh, we’ve been, actually, I’ll tell you the other thing I’ve been doing, which has been fascinating is using the clawed to be able to do visualization of qualitative information.
I’ve got a client and there’s two parts to that client, but it’s public sector thing. So there’s a lot of the, the history of it’s in the public domain. I wanted a, a timeline to be able to help them understand what they might do next. ’cause I’m a, a big believer and if you don’t understand the history of, of where things have come from, it’s very difficult to predict a future that is in any way meaningful.
And so, um, we did it and it’s amazing. Just put some. A little bit of structure in to, to say what it was I wanted, and it creates this interactive web timeline thing with clickable bits and all sorts. And the data, the, the thing that’s really interesting actually, the amount of wrong information that’s going into this sort of stuff.
Now is getting less and less and less, and the ability to then start to think about, well, how might I visualize this stuff in, in a way that would’ve taken weeks of work previously? Um, and it’s not, it’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s enabling, it’s back to the drum machine analogy, enabling me to do things that otherwise I’d just simply wouldn’t have done and nobody would’ve done.
So that’s been quite interesting as well. So, um, yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a productive, a productive week. Guest this week. Dan. Welcome to the show. How’s your week been?
Dan: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a great week in no small part because I got to go to a gig that I’ve been looking forward to for absolutely months and months with a mate who I haven’t seen for about a year.
And I’ve only seen this band with this mate every single time. Um, the band’s called Deus. They are a Belgian art rock slash alternative rock group, have been going since the mid nineties and the gig was at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and it was absolutely awesome. You go into these things fearing that they might be past it.
It turns out they can absolutely knock it outta the park. Still
Matt: WW worse than fearing that they might be past it. The worst stuff is no. Tonight we’re gonna just be playing new material.
Dan: Oh yeah. Yeah, we, well, we knew that wasn’t gonna happen because they were playing their first album versus their second album.
That’s, that’s the whole of this tour. So we knew that they weren’t gonna play any new stuff. So we were all right on that front. Um, but that, that was amazing. And then I guess the other thing, uh, of note was I started up this, uh, local marketing community, like this informal marketing meetup. And we get together every month.
And last Friday, it was the most recent, one of those great chats, lovely coffee. And uh, yeah, looking forward to the pub version of that next month now.
Matt: Excellent. That sounds also like a productive week. Well done everybody. Little round of applause. Um, uh, but we are going to talk this week about an initiative that you kicked off a while ago.
Now Dan called Good Enough Chats. So I think we should probably crack on
Lisa: , We are here to talk about your initiative talking about men’s mental health. Can you tell us a bit more about what it is and how you started it?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So, to all intents and purposes, its current form is a podcast. It may, well, hopefully, well, I would love it to evolve into more things beyond that, but it’s a podcast, but it’s a podcast that is entirely focused on lived experience, uh, men’s lived experience with mental health. And it doesn’t feature experts.
It’s all focused on. The story of guys who have come forward to share what they’ve been through so that somebody else can hear it and hopefully take some positive steps to help themselves because is, you’ll be well aware that the, the crisis in men’s mental health in particular at the moment is extreme.
And the way I’m looking at this is if by. Creating a platform for men to talk about what they’ve been through. It can encourage, like one guy per episode to go and speak to somebody and get help. Then it’s, it’s a, a pursuit that’s worth carrying out in terms of, I guess the origin stories of it. So back in 2017, um, I went through I guess.
I, I hesitate to probably my lowest point in my own mental health experience. Um, I was in a corporate environment at the time and I went through burnout, anxiety, depression, ended up being signed off work for three months. Um, and a big part of that was because I felt like it was just me that was going through it.
So there was a sense of isolation around it. I made a decision at one point to answer the question, how are you doing? Completely, honestly, to people regardless of whether or not they were ready for what I was gonna tell them. But in doing that, I immediately noticed that the, the whole dynamic of the conversation changed.
They’d say things like, oh, my other half’s going through something like that, or, I’ve been through something like that, and all of a sudden. You, you, you feel this, this sort of weight lifted off your shoulders because you realize it’s not just you, um, that’s going through it. So I, at that point in time, I sort of resolved that when I was ready to start doing it, I wanted to do something that was gonna help someone like me in that position to not necessarily feel or, or, or go as far down that particular rabbit hole.
I’d gone because they know that they’re not on their own. And, and it’s really that straightforward. The whole concept is someone comes on, we go through the same five questions in every episode. It’s all about their learned experience. There’s nothing they can say that’s wrong because it’s all, what’s happened to them.
It’s completely unedited. Because what, what, is there any such thing as the perfect answer in those circumstances? I don’t think so. And. The idea is to basically keep building this bank of these conversations so that each one of those episodes is there when someone needs to hear it. So it’s not a, I’m not expecting each episode to drive linear growth.
I wanna build the resource that people can tap into as when they need to.
Matt: I’m interested to how you have found people, found men to talk because there is, for all the fact that mental health is a lot more discussed these days. You know, we, if we think in the generations before my grandfather’s generation, there seem to have been. Collective posttraumatic stress from the war.
Their father’s had post-traumatic stress in the war before. My father’s generation, I mean, my dad’s a psychologist, but bless him, he’d never really talk about emotions. Certainly not his own. Uh, very occasionally he does, but it’s very rare. We’re at a point where I think that for. People born in the seventies, eighties, even into the nineties, there’s a little bit more acceptance, but there’s still an awful lot of pressure put on men to fulfill a set of stereotypes that most of us aren’t, and even more of us would really struggle to be able to meet at any point.
And one of those is for God sake, don’t talk about your feelings, man. So how, how have you managed to lu people into this? ’cause it’s, for all of them, positive talk, there is these days it’s still somewhat, you know, norm busting
Dan: the, I guess the way it, it’s starting to build my mentor, right? So when I started I would put a blanket invitation out there on social media, which obviously wouldn’t travel very far.
In the hope that it would land in front of one person that would say, I’ll do it. Because I, I knew it was, I knew it was a good idea, but obviously it is contingent upon people coming forward and being willing to talk. And if they don’t come forward, I can’t record any episode. Right. And the way I got around that in the first instance was I recorded sparsely and I released them very sparingly as well because there just wasn’t a bank of them.
I think it was after I got through the second series, the guests that had been on started to recommend to their friends that they should come on. And what initially, if you look at the first sort of six episodes, I would say that five of the six first episodes where people either I knew already or lived quite close to me, and by the time I’ve got to the third episode, I’m interviewing people who are in.
New Zealand people who are, um, the US people who are in Sweden, like one of, I, I don’t know if the episode will happen but somebody who I’ve been introduced to through somebody who was a guest is a Zambian diplomat, a former Zambian diplomat. They, they might be coming on it next. So I think once you show enough people that it is a thing.
It seems to start building a bit of momentum, a bit of a life of its own. I, I don’t wanna give you the impression this is traveling to like tens of thousands of people each time. It’s not, it’s, it’s traveling a very short distance into a few, few people, but it is resonating deeply when it reaches the kind of people that it’s intended for
Matt: and.
And social proof, I guess, is part of that, isn’t it? That if there are people already doing it, then it becomes more acceptable for others to do it.
Dan: Yeah, absolutely.
Lisa: What was it that prompted you to finally do the episode yourself and be the person that’s interviewed? Because it took a little while for you to get to that point.
Dan: Yeah. So part of my journey. Is I, I discovered through my burnout and through therapy, I discovered that I’m a clinical perfectionist who also has low self-esteem. So that would effectively caused me to become inert. I would overthink things. I wouldn’t start doing things because I’d be thinking, well, I won’t be brilliant at it.
So what’s the point in even starting, um. Part of my, I guess my recovery journey is I can now say I’m a recovering clinical perfectionist. Who can get to a point where he has enough conversations with himself and with people around him to go, actually just do it. It’ll be fine. I also, I didn’t want.
Any of the episodes to feel like they were about me because they’re not, I’m, I’m creating a platform. It’s the person that’s coming on that’s telling their story. That’s what the episode is about. So it took me quite a long time to feel just okay with the idea of me being the focus of an episode. Even though ironically I don’t have any concerns about sharing my story and my experiences, I just didn’t want the show that I developed to be about me.
And eventually I, I had enough of the guys who’d come on to an e to do their own episode who said, when are you gonna do yours? I thought, yeah, yeah. Okay. I, I sort of owe it to you guys. Now you’ve done it. Now I owe you, I owe you this. And I just, I pulled on my big boy pants and went for it.
Lisa: How have you felt since that?
Did you have any, has it sparked being on it? Has it sparked any conversations or feelings since then? What impact has it had on you since doing the episode?
Dan: The funny thing is that I’ve been very open about my experiences. I’ve told close friends and family. Sort of the detail and the depths of, of how I was feeling and what I’d gone through, but the amount of them that heard the episode and then came to me and said, oh, I didn’t realize any of that. I didn’t realize that’s what had actually happened.
It blew me away. I mean, it was all incredibly positively received, and that seems to be. The, the sort of the rule from this, for every guest that’s been on, they’ve had some amazing feedback, so like really powerful feedback from friends and family that have heard them talking about this stuff. But it, it, I guess if anything, it heightened my awareness to the fact that you really do have to keep repeating these things and it, it might feel uncomfortable for me to say it again and again and again because, you know, to my earlier point, it’s not about me, it’s about the other people’s story.
But you really do need to keep reminding people. You need to sort of champion the idea of talking about these things yourself and your own experience and be willing to do that if you wanted to get any cut through. And for it to have it resonate with people. It also wasn’t such a big deal, you know, after I’d done it, it was nowhere near as big a deal as I’ve made it up to be.
But that’s part of the clinical perfectionism journey.
Matt: I wonder as well, um. In all of this there, if we think about how we, we regard health and and healthcare, we have a tendency, I don’t think this is a unique to Britain thing, to think about health and healthcare being something that you consult when you are ill and that there are some people who take an active role in their physical health to prevent.
Illness and, and ill health. I can see you’ve got a number of running numbers in the, uh, the backdrop behind you. So it sounds, or it looks like you are one of those people who does work to be able to keep themselves kind of physically fit as a way to avoid being unwell. But the idea of you work until you break and then you get fixed.
Which comes from physical health, I think has also become a fairly large part of ideas around mental health. And I think what my, my experience in the last few years where I’ve had at least three midlife crises now, and they’ve been at varying levels of severity. None of them super, super terribly bad, but at points where I felt incredibly low about stuff and what I’ve come to realize is that that’s too, well, it’s not too late at that point, but that, that’s, that’s like only going to the doctor when you’re on crutches and actually being able to do work to be able to maintain good mental health is similar to doing work to be able to maintain good physical health.
But the whole thing is still so stigmatized and, and even the language. We talk about a, a therapy and therapist, not a term that would be more associated with good health. That still for me sounds like language that is about fixing bad stuff. And I dunno how, how it’s, if it’s even possible to break through some of those misconceptions because I think it’s much deeper than mental health.
But there is definitely, for me, a thing about being able to frame this as the maintenance of good health, not just fixing bad.
Dan: There’s, um, someone I’ve been speaking to is a guy called Ben Akers, who’s the founder of Talk Club. I, if you’re familiar with Talk Club charity, it’s, they do some amazing work talking clubs for, for men.
And he. Uses the term mental fitness, and I think that is you, you naturally say mental health, but actually what you mean is mental fitness. Mental health is, to your point, it’s when you’ve got a problem. Mental fitness is the preventative measures that you take. And again, you, if you’ve been through some of these challenges and you’ve had that chance to talk to a therapist.
And to reflect and to learn about why those things happened. That’s when you become aware of the things that keep you on an even keel. And that’s when you start to take those proactive steps, you know? So, so I, it’s only through going through the experience that I and many other people realize that it’s not about running further or faster, it’s just running.
That’s good for me. Right. If I am reading a book before I go to bed every night, that’s a sign that I’m in a good shape good frame of mind. If I wake up in the morning and I feel energized, that’s an indicator that I’ve had decent sleep. So what have I done the night before to make sure that I have good sleep as opposed to staying up late on the phone, maybe having two glasses of wine that I didn’t need to have.
All of those kind of things by becoming aware of. What the, the habits are, I guess, that you can form the small habits that you can form that will contribute to your mental fitness. It shifts the whole conversation and, and my, I guess my working theory with the show is I’m not an expert and I’m not offering advice, and the guys that are coming on to tell their stories are sharing their experiences.
They are not offering their advice. Right. But my theory is if you think of this as a funnel and at the bottom of the funnel, you’ve got a guy called Jeff who’s worked out exactly what the support he needs, and he’s actively engaging with that in the funnel. You’ve got charities, professionals, gps, medication, all of these options.
But what you don’t have before you get into that funnel right at the top is just the idea that a bloke saying I could do with a chat. Is just normal. And that’s, that’s the space that I think if we can influence that positively by a percentage point or two, then the amount of people that don’t need to go into that funnel in the first place because they’ve normalized just talking openly about what they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing.
That’s a huge net gain. I mean, obviously the guys that are coming onto the show. They, they come from all kinds of different backgrounds. Their experiences are, are wildly different. And for some people who are suffering with bipolar disorder, that that conversation is gonna help, but it’s not gonna stop ’em from needing more support necessarily.
Or guys who are dealing with issues around neurodiversity or childhood trauma, you know that that’s. That requires professional help and intervention, but I think we need to spend much more time and effort just normalizing that idea that a guy can sit down in front of his mate over a cup of coffee or talk to a colleague and just say, I don’t need you to fix anything, but could you just listen to me for a couple of minutes because there’s a thing that’s on my mind, and that’s it.
That’s all you’re asking them to do. But as men, we do love to rush and to intervene before the people have had a chance to actually articulate what’s in their head.
Lisa: You’ve also just reminded me of almost the opposite thing, where I remember years ago going to the pub with a bunch of male friends who I went to school with but hadn’t seen since primary school, basically.
And what I was amazed about as someone who. Does talk about things and is used to chatting about life, the universe and everything to people and trying to encourage that around me. People were sitting there in silence, just drinking their pints. They wasn’t even like, they weren’t even talking about the football or any of the conversations that they got onto.
Eventually everyone just sat there quietly staring at their drinks, just kind of on one. One hand, it was really nice that people felt like they could just sit quietly and be with each other. And on the other hand, it did feel like there were like things that needed to be said, and no one really felt that comfortable saying it.
I. I think that I love what you’re doing with this and actually starting those conversations. And I know that there’s lots of things that, like you mentioned, some of these organizations, um, I’ve got friends who have been involved with, like, there’s a, is there a proper blokes club as well in London where men meet up and go for a walk together and chat about their feelings as they go for a walk or just walk together And eventually they might talk, but it’s a case of meeting up, going for a walk.
And I just think it’s brilliant to be, do to, to be actually helping facilitate this because it’s really needed.
Dan: It is. And I think to, to, I think the point you just made there, it’s almost the, the onus is on, is honest us to create the space for somebody to talk if they want to, and, uh. Those walking, um, groups, I’ve, I’ve seen a couple of those.
They’re great, but you don’t know how far you’re gonna need to walk with somebody before they’re willing to open up. And actually, sometimes people might turn up and say absolutely nothing for three or four weeks on the trot. And then the fifth week is the one where they go, I feel like I can talk now.
I feel like I’m, I can get this off my chest. So it’s, it’s, um. There’s, there’s patience that needs to be involved in this as well when it actually comes to somebody being ready and willing to open up about this stuff. Obviously, when I’m recording this slightly different ball game, the person’s already decided that it’s, they’re ready to come and talk, but some of them have, some of them are people who have publicly talked about this.
It’s their experiences on a stage. Some people have literally never spoken to anybody publicly about it before and they, they’ve come forward to decide to do that on the podcast and that’s a, an enormous privilege, but also feels like quite a lot of responsibility to make sure that they are, they feel psychologically secure and they’re okay once they’ve had the conversation as well.
’cause that matters just as much.
Matt: Do. Do you find that the men you’ve spoken to have the vocabulary to describe their emotions? ’cause one of the things that I’ve learned a lot in the last 20, 24 months is how difficult I found it to be able to actually articulate feelings. Also understand things like it’s possible to hold almost diametrically opposed feeling simultaneously.
It is perfectly possible to feel happiness and sadness at the same time, and having always been a little bit conflict because I’d never really ever investigated any of this stuff before.
Dan: I think the guys, the guys that have come forward.
They’re self-selecting. So there there’s a readiness and an innate sort of readiness for themselves to come forward and talk about it. So there have been some people who’ve come on who have been through therapy a bit, some who’ve done extensive therapy, and some guys who haven’t done it at all. But they’re all, they’re all finding their voice around this, and they, the guests often say that the experience is cathartic for them.
And I think it, it’s a, I guess what we end up with is a snapshot of how that person’s feeling at that particular moment in time. And I’ve been inviting all of the guys who recorded, like a year or so ago to go back and listen. To what they said, because I think that’s a really important sort of benchmark for them to realize how far they’ve come in the, in the subsequent year.
But I, I, I think one of the other reasons why it’s important I don’t edit it is precisely because if you can’t find the right words and you do stumble across your answers to, to the questions, I want people to know that that’s okay as well. There is no perfect answer to this. You know, it’s, it’s how you feel and it’s how you are explaining it.
And the fact that people are coming forward to do that on a public platform is so valuable to people in ways that we may never know. So, so yeah, it, it varies wildly, but they’re, they’re all, they’re all trying, and I think that’s the thing that is most important.
Matt: And we talked a bit before we started recording about some of the the principles in which you’re looking to be able to build this and the sorts of, and it sounds like you’ve got like a little tiny veto list of, of potentially not guests.
Tell us a bit about that.
Dan: Yeah, so, hmm. And I just wanna stress that nothing, nothing that I’m saying here is denigrating any other effort that people are putting into trying to encourage men to talk about their mental health. But I realized when, whenever I see a famous person, a celebrity, talking about their experiences of mental health, I’m immediately putting a barrier up and it’s.
It’s judgy. I know, but I’m thinking in part, but you’ve got the resources to do stuff that most people do not have to help themselves. That’s not to say that, you know, money is gonna fix absolutely everything, but if you are, if you are a wealthy public figure, there are resources that you can call on that Dave at the desk next door and not call on.
So I took a decision very early on that. I was gonna focus exclusively on regular relatable guys. And actually I’ve been thinking a lot more about that recently and I’m wondering if the way that I might try to leverage some celebrity exposure is by telling people that they can’t come on it. But I’d really love them to tell their audiences that they should listen to it.
Um, because that’s more sort of true to form. It’s about. So I said earlier about the kind of unedited conversation. It’s very deliberate. It’s lo-fi as well. So just as I’m talking to you today, I don’t have an external mic. I don’t have a 4K camera. This is my laptop mic, my laptop camera, because I want the person on the other end to feel like they’re on the level with me.
Like, it’s not like I don’t want ’em to feel like they’re suddenly on a podcast. Because that’s gonna intimidate some people and make the conversation feel more awkward. Right. I have an intro chat with them before we book the recording, but I tell them in that intro chat that I don’t want to know anything about their story until we hit record.
And the reason I do that is because
I want. The reaction to be as close to how somebody that they know might react if they’d had a couple of pints in the pub and they just said, there’s something I wanna talk to you about. So it’s a natural reaction. I have found out that guests are gay by doing this. I have found out that guests have suffered from child loss.
I’ve found out that guests were literally. On a bridge about to throw themselves in front of a train as a result of that. So what you are getting when you hear that is the raw story from them and a completely natural reaction to it. Because again, I don’t know how I would react if a mate told me that they were going through something like that, but I think it’s important that people hear that there isn’t a perfect response.
To those as well as a perfect way to describe them. So it can be, it can be raw, be really raw, uh, and surprising. But it’s my belief that that makes the final conversation more useful to the kind of person that needs to hear it.
Matt: It feels almost, I can exercise almost in like social anthropology rather than a podcast.
It the, that,
Lisa: that’s what a sociologist would say now.
Matt: Well, no, an anthropologist would say that. A sociologist would say it is a sociology. It’s, but I, I, I mean that in a a really positive way. It’s not about having a format and I mean the limited to extent to which we pretend to be some sort of media thing with a format and, you know.
Whatever. But you’re not doing that. What you’re doing is you’re trying to be able to find a structure in which to collect voices. And that I think is very powerful actually.
Dan: Yeah.
Matt: And it happens to be that you’re then publishing them rather than analyzing them in private and writing a thesis about it.
But
Dan: yeah, and I’m, I’m very, I’m very careful around how I describe the process to. The guests and the audiences were recording it because I’m not a therapist. Some, some of the guests come off the conversation saying that there was a therapeutic benefit to it, but that’s, that’s like the power of talking, right?
That’s, that’s not a me thing. But I, I, I think you are right in that I, I passionately believe that having a, creating a platform like this is really important. It needs to exist in the world because I haven’t personally come across something similar that isn’t about celebrities or that isn’t hosted by a psychologist, for example.
And I think that there is a, a huge amount of
latent value. To the people that need to hear it in lived experiences that I would love to see more being done to harness the power of I know there’s, there’s loads of research groups that are looking into men’s mental health moment that the lived experience advocates are becoming more visible. And I think that’s really important.
But I also think it’s, and again, this is not to denigrate battle. Know if, if you’re in a corporate environment and they say, oh, we’ve got a guest speaker in. And the guest speaker comes in and they tell you some incredibly stirring story about, you know, they’re rowing across an Atlantic on a, in a two-man crew, or how they’ve overcome adversity.
And it’s, it’s, it’s powerful ’cause it’s a great story, but it’s, it’s at the extremes, right? And the vast majority of challenges that. People face with their mental health, especially men, because they aren’t talking about it as much as they need to. It happens in that gray area in the middle, and, and this could be stuff that’s just sort of bubbling away just under the surface for years and years and years, until it gets to a point where it’s suddenly escalates that person because it’s, they’ve not talked about it and they’ve not sought to help themselves.
Lisa: So you said you are not an expert, um, but there is something in having had this conversation so many times with people and learning as you go and, and you’ve, you’ve kept to, it sounds like you’ve kept to the same sort of format as you’ve gone through it, but. Things that I’ve heard you say tonight. I think, um, you know, there’s no right answer, uh, or no right way to answer questions and there’s no right way to respond.
Have you got any other tips for people who might be trying to have this conversation or want to have the con, want their friend to have the conversation with them? Any ways to kind of get it going or to Yeah. Any tips really,
Dan: I think the. The most useful thing that you can do for your friends, your brother, uncle, dad, son,
is be patient and let them know that you are there. Show them that it’s okay even if they’re not ready. The other part of the patience piece I’ve, I’ve sort of alluded to earlier, but it is
as men, we do tend to rush in with a solution when actually what we need to do is just shut up for a bit longer because they probably haven’t finished speaking yet. That’s hard because there’s a, there’s a part of that which is about being uncomfortable with the silence as well. Um, sometimes that doesn’t work particularly well for the person that might want to talk as much as the person that might want to, to be talked to.
But I would say that the most important thing is yeah, exercising patience and resisting that urge to just jump in and try and fix it because. I’m sorry. You can’t, that’s not how it works. Um, but actually just showing that you are there, checking in with your mates. I, I’ve made, that’s, that’s a big thing that I’ve done actually since I started recording this.
I’ve noticed that I have started just randomly drop notes to mates just to see how they’re doing. No other agenda other than letting them know. That there’s, that somebody somewhere has thought about them. ’cause you just don’t know how that’s gonna land with someone either. Um, and that’s almost become not like a structured habit, but it has become quite habitual for me to do that.
So yeah, be patient. Don’t try to feel the silence. And if you’re thinking about your mate, your dad, your son, your uncle. Just drop on the message. Just say how you doing? That simple,
Matt: Thank you Dan. Powerful ideas. Where can people find out more?
Dan: They can go to good enough chats.com. They can look for the pods. It’s on Spotify, apple Podcast. It’s on YouTube. Good enough chats, or one word. Search for that. Um, and they can find me on LinkedIn as well because I’m pretty active there. And actually a surprising number of the people who have.
Come forward to be. Guests on the show have come through LinkedIn connections as well. So I dunno if we can drop a, a link to my profile.
Matt: Yeah, they’ll all be on the show notes. So if you want to find out more, you can find them there. Uh, this is the bit where we talk about the week ahead. Uh, so have you got anything particularly, uh, enlightening or exciting in the week ahead?
Now?
Dan: I’ve, I’ve got. Something that’s way too exciting happening this weekend. But if I don’t sound excited, it’s because I’m not ready for it. I’m running the Sheffield half marathon on Sunday, and uh, the plan was starting from December. I was going to be upping my training and I was gonna be fit as a fiddle.
Two rounds of illness, a foot injury, and appalling weather have somewhat screwed me over on this one. So I, uh, yeah, I’m going, I’m going to Sheffield with no small amount of trepidation. However, because of good enough chats, I now know a load of people in the Sheffield area. So actually I’m gonna go and meet a load of people for the first time in real life who have been on the show.
Who I’ve never met in person. And I’ve built the whole weekend around making sure that I can catch up with as many of those people as possible. So even if Sunday hurts like hell Friday, Saturday, and Monday are going to have a nice counterbalance to that.
Matt: Amazing. Lisa, how about you? What’s your weak head looking like?
Lisa: Well, I’m partly jealous of you going up to Sheffield, but not of the run. Um, if you can make it go to the Rutland arms, it’s a glorious pub in Sheffield. It’s got a great selection of beers, decent grab as well. Um, and just a really nice vibe. And also, um, the Hot Hideout is a lovely little indie beer place run by someone called Jules who.
One of my favorite days in lockdown. If you could have any. I had a genuinely fun Saturday because she organized an online birthday party for her pub, and we did a yoga class in the morning. Then we had a, a virtual tour, like with their phones taking us around St. Miles. The desert Brewery got to actually see inside the hoppers and things.
Then we did a beer tasting and she’d sent us out packs of beers, including one from that brewery. Then we had Pete Brown talking about the marketing of Beer, and he’d written a book about it and he did a book talk. And then we had a pub quiz and it was just like a glorious, like I was sitting at home, but.
And she did the Indie Street feast, I think it’s called, that I went to a couple of weeks ago when I was up in Darbyshire. We made it over to Sheffield. So I love Sheffield. Do enjoy it. I’m not going to Sheffield this week. I, I am doing a talk at my, another local school, which I’ve not been to yet about my wibbly wobbly career.
Still trying to wrap up some work bits. Um, and yeah, I got my dad’s birthday this weekend, so I need to think about how to bring something for that. ’cause our oven’s not working. Um, yeah, that’s my week really. How about you, Matt?
Matt: I, uh, will be going to the queue. Half marathon on, uh, uh, Q Run Fest. I will be handling bags.
That’s what I do at, uh, running events. So I handle bags. I’m very good at it. Uh, it’s much easier than that. Running malarkey. I might get a blister too, but we’ll see. Uh, so that’ll be SAS and Sunday on the week ahead. Well, the main things are I’ve got a very last minute. Booking to do a talk about randomness on Tuesday night, tomorrow night as as we record now which can be five minutes long.
I might be able to stretch to 10, but five minutes. That’s an interesting discipline, creating a five minute talk. So I’m quite looking forward to that. I’ve created special dice, which should be fun. We’ll see how that goes. And on Thursday, we have a co-working day for. The government client that I’m working with at the moment.
And so I’ll get to see lots of people in person, but I’ve also taken the opportunity to create a short workshop about influence, which would be interesting ’cause this taps into stuff that I haven’t done for years, but, um, used to. To the Teach and Coach around. So, I think I’ve got eight or nine people signed up for it and, uh, getting people along for that and getting them talking about how they might think about their influence and how they might apply influence in different work situations.
So that’d be good fun. Apart from that, it’s getting ready for Easter. Kids broke up on Friday. So madness lies. ’cause after Easter comes GCSEs and I cannot wait. He says lying. Um, so that’d be good. Anyway that’s a run of three shows in a row, which is quite remarkable ’cause we used to do that every week, all year.
And I dunno how I kept up that mate that. Workload, quite frankly. We’ll be away for a few weeks now because we’ve got Easter coming up, so the show will be back at some point in April. I know already that lined up. I have a professor of economics whose specialism is luck. I wonder why I’m talking to a professor of economics.
His specialism is luck. What could possibly have drawn me to him? Well, we had to wait and see. Thank you, Dan, for joining us. It’s been a wonderfully enlightening conversation this evening.
Dan: Thank you for having me
Matt: and Lisa as ever, a delight to co-host with you.
Lisa: Likewise.
Matt: And, uh, we will be back at wherever a point it is that we can be bothered to do another one of the things that we call the WB 40 Podcast.
Until then, bye-bye.
Dan: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet@wbfortypodcast.com and on all good podcasting platforms.