Charles Wookey - Reinvent Yourself

Explicit content warning

01/28/21 • 96 min

Hi everyone. I hope you're doing okay given the circumstances. Welcome to our conversation with Charles Wookey. Charles is the CEO of A Blueprint for Better Business, a charity that helps organisations consider their social and environmental impact alongside their financial goals. This is how I know Charles. His organisation does some great work but how Charles' ended up with Blueprint is the interesting bit.

Boarding school from the age of six is a mixed blessing. It's certainly not what he wanted for his children put it that way. Philosophy and Physics at Oxford followed school and then into KPMG to become an Accountant and that's when he started to make up his own mind. The obvious path was to fit in and work his nuts off for the next ten to fifteen years and become a partner. Two weeks after qualifying, at the moment his salary would have doubled, he left because he could see the future and it meant becoming someone he didn't want to become.

What followed has been a career of curiosity. A few years at the House of Commons before leaving to spend three months on a silent retreat in North Wales which alerted him to the fact he's got one crack at life. The dark bit was confronting himself and his conclusion that "there are things that are real and there are things that are illusory and I wanted to live in a way that makes sense of what's real. I do not want to have regrets."

Charles' comments remind me of Bronnie Ware's work. Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care. Her patients we those who had gone home to die. She was with them in their last three to twelve weeks of their life. Conversations in those final weeks were highly emotional. When asked about any regrets or what they would have done differently, common themes surfaced again and again. The most common regret was "I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

Charles has that courage. The confidence to know when it's time to move on. The confidence to overcome imposter syndrome. The confidence to step into the unknown.

After his retreat, Charles, worked for Institute of Fiscal Studies where he was the guy who knew nothing about economics and then having met a nun, he ended up in the God business, working for Cardinal Basil Hume. This role and his affection for Hume satisfied his curiosity for eleven years at which point he stepped into the unknown again. This time it was business. More specifically a Blueprint for Better Business which he's been leading since 2011.

In Spring 2022 Charles steps down as CEO to go on another, as yet undecided adventure. Don't be surprised if you see him on The Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury sometime soon 😉

https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
https://www.blueprintforbusiness.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Beuno%27s_Jesuit_Spirituality_Centre

Charles has that courage. The confidence to know when it's time to move on. The confidence to overcome imposter syndrome. The confidence to step into the unknown.

In Spring 2022 Charles steps down as CEO to go on another, as yet undecided adventure. Don't be surprised if you see him on The Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury sometime soon 😉

https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
https://www.blueprintforbusiness.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Beuno%27s_Jesuit_Spirituality_Centre

Previous Episode

Junior Smart OBE - Leader - Part 2

Hello hello - welcome to Part 2 of our conversation with Junior Smart. If you haven't listened to Part 1 I suggest you do that first. Part One takes us to the point where Junior is just about to be sent to prison for what turned out to be a twelve-year sentence. This is Part 2 where Junior describes the shock of prison, the meanness and the compassion of both prison staff and inmates. He describes his journey from being scared to being respected, from someone who went with the flow to someone who swam against it . . . and ended up with an OBE as a result.

I've enjoyed every conversation we've had on this podcast but these two conversations with Junior have remained in my mind longer than any others and I think that's happened because I'm simply blown away by the speed at which Junior was able to use prison as his turning point.

I've thought about his journey in so many different ways and every time I end up thinking about his ability to build bridges when others were building walls . . . and that's what leaders do.

Junior is a leader.

Enjoy . . Junior Smart OBE - Leader

Next Episode

Emile Bennett - Letting Go

Hi all - welcome to our conversation with Emile Bennett, Emile is a 37-year-old knife-maker and bladesmith but it’s taken him a while to feel comfortable with those descriptions. Previously his world was software, apps, websites and to begin with studio engineering. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Chamonix in the French Alps.

Emile has spent most of his working life with the distinct feeling that he wasn’t doing what he was meant to do. This is Emile’s very frank story of his struggles with anxiety and his search for meaning.

Emile’s willingness and determination to paint the real authentic picture of his life is what I appreciated most about our conversation. He does anything but suggest he has life nailed, but it is the hero’s journey, albeit he’s not returned home yet - he’s had that rock-bottom moment which arrived a few years ago after a sleepless night and a 90-minute hill climb with friends. His conclusion, at the top of that hill was that he had to change what he was doing, and he had to do it that day, because, to use Emile’s words

“If I don’t commit to something else now, regardless of whether it’s going to make me any money or not, I’m going to end up in a mental institute, I’m going to have a breakdown.”

It was the culmination of 10 years of “Melancholy March”, Emile’s annual existential crisis of meaning. He describes the feeling as:

“You know you need to do something different, but it’s so incredibly hard to do when all you know is the thing that you’ve always done”

He was trying really hard to find the thing he loved but he didn’t know what he loved. All he knew was what he was doing made him unhappy and anxious and wasn’t making the most of his life.

He talks about great ideas revealing themselves, that they don’t appear when you actively seek them.

“When you’re sitting there stressed out, upset, telling yourself you’ve got to do something else. That thing isn’t going to come because you’re pushing too hard for it.

I’m mildly obsessed with Alan Watts at the moment and Emile’s experience sounds very much like his ‘backwards law’ - whatever it is you want; money, love, security, happiness or something else - it’s the idea that the more you want something, the more effort you make trying to acquire it, the more you’re amplifying the feeling that you lack it in the first place and

How many people have you heard say “As soon as I’d stopped looking for a partner . . . it happened”

The flipside of this also seems to work. Stop fighting the negative experience and it becomes a positive experience. It’s a longer conversation for another day but this it seems, is what Emile was talking about when he says living in a simpler place with less stuff means it’s harder to escape your daemons, you don’t have the toys, bars, restaurants, clubs, cinemas and other distractions that do the job of numbing the negative feelings - anxiety, pain, suffering, whatever you call them.

It seems that Emile subconsciously put himself in a position where he could no longer avoid his daemons, his shadow, his negativity, the suffering. I’d suggest that ‘no longer avoiding’ was the turning point on top of the hill, when he decided to take action, when he embraced his shadow and this is what flipped his anxiety from negative to positive because he’d now come to terms with himself and as a result could now move towards something, rather than away from something.

This positive anxiety is anticipation or excitement. It’s the nervousness we all feel when we take on a challenge. The impact is very different from the negativity of fear but it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference, particularly in the early stages. Emile did notice the difference and has created a bit of momentum.

He’s not there yet but he will get there.

Emile’s message is “Can’t find what you’re looking for? Let go and give it space to reveal itself.

Enjoy, Emile Bennett - Letting Go

https://www.lubelknives.com/

https://www.getpennies.com/

https://www.mindjournals.com/