Episode 25 - Joanne Lockwood - 'The Making of Me'

Today, we're thrilled to have Joanne Lockwood with us on The Secret Resume podcast. Joanne is a trans advocate and DEI specialist whose journey is a compelling narrative of resilience, reinvention, and self-discovery.

From her early days in the RAF to becoming a trailblazer in promoting positive cultures within organisations, Joanne's journey is nothing short of inspiring. Listen in while she shares her incredible personal story including exploring her gender identity in her 50s, and the profound impact it has had on her life and those around her.

So grab your favourite drink, get comfy, and join us for a heartfelt conversation that promises to leave you inspired and enlightened. 

 

You can connect with Joanne here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jolockwood/

or here: https://seechangehappen.co.uk/

Joanne is also a podcast host and her podcast Inclusion Bites can be found here: https://seechangehappen.co.uk/inclusion-bites-listen

 

Joanne talks about finding her Ikigai - if you would like to know more about this, you can download the Liberare Consulting Ikigai worksheet here: https://liberare-consulting.ck.page/49e3d212e3

 

The transcript that shows on your screen is automatically generated, therefore we cannot guarantee it is 100% accurate.  You can access a copy of the full transcript here: https://shorturl.at/VWUAZ

 

The Secret Resume podcast is a Liberare Consulting production.  You can contact us at [e-mail] and can buy Melody's book 'The Inclusive Team: How to Build and Develop Inclusive High Performing Teams' or a set of our Team Conversation Cards here: https://shorturl.at/XspUX

Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on all of the items on our product page.

 

Or why not join our community to get access to exclusive benefits and be the first to hear updates and news https://liberare-consulting.ck.page/community

 

If you are interested in becoming a guest on our show, please fill in the form here: https://liberare-consulting.ck.page/podcast_guest

 

We are an Amazon affiliate and receive a very small commission if you buy books through our Amazon links.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Music.

(00:05):
Good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to the Secret Resume podcast hosted by me, Melody Moore.
In this podcast, we explore the people, places and experiences that have shaped
my guests, those which have influenced who they are as people and where they
are in their work life today.
You can listen in as we have a rich exploration of often unexamined and undiscussed,

(00:28):
but very important aspects of their lives, or as I like to call it, their secret resume.
So i'm very excited today to introduce my
guest joanne lockwood joanne your story i know is going to be fabulous for people
to hear so please can you just before we dive into everything about you can

(00:52):
you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do hi melody absolutely
wonderful Wonderful to be here.
So who am I? Joanne Lockwood. My pronouns are she and her.
I had this very deep voice, as you can tell, for Joanne.
So just to put that in context, I'm transgender in my very late 50s.
I'm so late in my 50s, I can almost see being 60 in a couple of months' time.

(01:16):
I'm an inclusion and belonging specialist, or the inclusive culture expert,
as some people may refer to me.
So I work with organizations throughout the UK, Europe, and further afield,
promoting promoting positive people experiences in organizations to create cultures
where people can thrive.
Married, been married for 37 years next month and two fantastic children in their 30s.

(01:40):
So yeah, life's good at the moment.
Fabulous. And you were telling me you'd just been to the gym this morning and
you're off to the cinema after we speak.
So it sounds like you're getting a very good balance between work and life as well. Yes, absolutely.
We'll talk about this in my journey a little bit in a minute,
but I think it's important not to have a work-life balance, but to have a life,

(02:04):
work balance where you're not living to work,
you're working for sufficiency to keep allowing you to live the life you want to live.
And I recognize that maybe I was gluttonous for much of my life acquiring and
trying to want bigger better faster whatever it may be newer,

(02:28):
and now I'm very much more content with sufficiency and what do I need,
it does create a couple of,
clenchy bum moments when you when the cash
flow is a bit tight because I haven't got buckets of cash in reserve but
I we have a good life we have a good life we're not
poor but yeah year sufficiency is my
it's my kind of motto of my late 50s i

(02:50):
love that sufficiency we'll come back to that so i'm gonna ask you to jump right
back to to the beginning to as you said 10 year old you and what was going on
for you at that time yeah i mean i was to all intensive purposes,
your average little boy really and.

(03:13):
My parents were school teachers my father had been in the navy
for 22 years i think and so
i was in i was around 10 years old so that was mid 70s you
know no internet it was punk it
was rockers it was kind of mods kind of
era it was way before the new romantics i
can't i can't remember who it was kind of those old school

(03:33):
music type stuff so i was living in a very vanilla very
kind of ordinary middle class well lower middle class family teaching and family
and i think i was about 10 11 years old i can't remember exactly how old i was
but my mum for some reason decided to buy me a book it was a lazy bird book
called how to make a transistor radio and it was so,

(03:57):
because my dad i think my dad was working away at the time so we my mum me and
my mum used to go out quite often together on exploration shopping trips and
things so she took me to this local electronic component shop i guess it was
radio spares rs or something like that.
Maplins or whatever the equivalent is today and so
we bought all these little components and what you do is you get this block

(04:17):
of wood and some brass screws and you you wind
the resistors around the screws screw them down then you put your transistors
in screw them down and you wind the copper coil around
this graphite rod and put that in there and yeah
you plug it all together and you you put your headphones in your ear and nothing works
you know it's absolutely nothing so that
was the crystal set we started with then we progressed and we

(04:40):
we built one with batteries in it and so
somehow somehow electronics became
my kind of hobby and that's how i kind of started it with this book when i was
10 or 11 and when i got to leaving school you know five or six years later somehow
somehow electronics became my my career choice you know i left school at 16.

(05:05):
I'd with hindsight i messed up my o levels a bit you know in those days i did some gces and some.
What's the other one you know what's the old school csc cscs yes i did i was
the last year to do those yeah and i i i underperformed you know i got two b's
and three c's uh massive physics as Bs.

(05:27):
And I got chemistry. No, no, I didn't get chemistry. I blew that.
Biology, woodwork, geography, Cs. I failed English language. I failed economics.
I failed French.
And these weren't just little failures. These were kind of Es and Fs and I had a very polarised.

(05:48):
Brain i was either all in or all out and yeah i was good at the technical stuff
and for some reason i say i joined the the royal air force to become a radar
radio communications technician as an apprentice and back in the 80s early 80s
went to ref swindleby for my basic training,
where's the little ref cosford swindleby is lincolnshire newark somewhere i

(06:13):
am there somewhere an area of cosford was just outside of wolverhampton on the
just off the m54 i remember we,
when they were building the m54 motorway off
of the i think it was the m6 we used
to run up and down it as as aircraft
technicians with telegraph poles on our
shoulders running up and down it using it

(06:35):
as our kind of fitness lane and yeah so
the motorway became our kind of field of torture in those
days still is when you get stuck in
traffic it is when we we were going to wales the other week and all we get no
shrews we were going and we drove down the m54 and i thought i can't remember
running around this is the bit we used to run down with our telegraph poles

(06:55):
and doing our star jumps and stuff on the motorway before i opened but yeah so yeah there i was.
16 years old joined the royal air force to become this technician and again
a bit like school i I was either all in or all out in this sort of thing.
And I think what it was is I just didn't really get it.

(07:15):
I could read a map. I could follow the instructions. I could screw transistors
to a block of wood with a brass screw.
But when it comes to really understanding it, it just went straight over my
head. I could learn it wrote.
I could look at something and learn every single component of what it did.
But if you told me to design it or to think about why, I could repeat why,

(07:37):
but I couldn't think about the why.
How it worked and for one reason or another I was.
Me and the RAF, we party company. How did you find the structure and doing what you were told?
I had no problem with the forces mentality, the discipline. I was not a rebel

(07:58):
against authority and all that.
I was just a kind of, I think today
you'd probably say I had some kind of neurodiversity, all in, all out.
I would never say I am neurodiverse, but I certainly didn't.
I don't like doing things i don't like doing i feel like i'm very very polarizing
that but yeah we party company we were incompatible i i did some naughty things

(08:22):
nothing nothing terrible just not compatible and end up leaving after about
three and a half years now i'm really curious,
as to what naughty things you did well naughty things i was uh my cigarettes
were a bit too amsterdam flavor if that makes sense it does which is not it's
not not compatible with the forces.

(08:43):
Way before i was ever exploring my gender identity or
sexuality or anything like that it was way before i was in that sort of thinking
terms but yeah yeah it was yeah i i'm not proud of it but it was one of those
things that we a few parties went out and someone saw us and reported us and And next thing we know,

(09:04):
we're up in front of the station commander,
marched in without our hats on, saluting and getting sentenced to 21 days detention.
This is Colchester, it was the military detention centre in those days.
I think it maybe still is in Essex.
And yeah, I spent 21 days in there.
I got sentenced to 28, but 21 days with good behaviour and things.

(09:27):
And there I was, got back on leaf-sweeping duty for a couple of weeks until they sorted me out.
And they hoofed me out and said, bye, we don't want you anymore.
And there I was, back at home with my mum and dad, who weren't impressed, obviously, with me.
They thought they'd got rid of me forever. And there I was, bouncing back after three years.
But I bounced back a bit more independent, a bit more of a rebel,

(09:50):
less willing to be compliant with their discipline.
And I ended up moving out quite quickly after that and living in a bedsit in Portsmouth, actually.
I was sitting there paying £12 a week for a bedsit. It was a very big room. It was a bed.
It had a water heater for the whole building. It was in my bedroom.
So I never had to heat it. In fact, if anything, it was too hot sometimes.

(10:13):
And i lived there for about three or four years met my wife marie through a friend.
Probably around 1985 so i left
the raf in tail end of 84 got
a job working for plessies who are a defense contractor and actually the reason
i got the job there was because i had the rf background they thought i was an

(10:37):
asset and then they realized that i was actually trained on some of the equipment
that they were producing so yeah i they saw me as an asset in their post
-design laboratory because you know i knew electronics i knew
that i knew the radio the ptr 175 it was
and there was ptr 1751 yeah check
me out i can still remember that um that's very impressive and uh

(10:57):
yeah i know but yeah the same same happened
i just didn't get it again i was kind of like it was
just i was just going through the motions i blagged my way into it then
i found myself getting more interested in the
the test equipment so it was where were
we we were 1985 86 the ibm pc
had just come out places were using something called a deck digital equipment

(11:21):
company corporation a vax vms system for their cad and their engineering computers
that used to run chip simulations and they used to produce chips and and microelectronics
they I used to run simulations on this computer.
And I got quite friendly with the computer manager.
And he said, oh, do you want to come and work for me? So I jumped out of electronics

(11:44):
into computing in the mid-80s.
And my brain suddenly found something. It got and understood.
I was really good at it and really passionate about it. And I was,
being 20 at that time, hungry for knowledge. I flew.
Everybody else around me was in their 30s. they found out
like what's going on here they're all electronic engineers so it didn't

(12:06):
take much before it became my thing it turned
from a bit of a hobby what was the difference do you
think between it and electronics that one you
just suddenly you know found that that really worked for you what why do you
think that was i don't know i don't know a lot of it started you know my parents
bought me a dragon 32 computer or i say me me and my siblings my brothers we

(12:31):
had to share it in those days.
We used to plug it into the telly and we'd end up with books of basic code and
we'd type it all in or we'd...
And I guess somehow I was able to figure it out.
Yeah it just it was a language you know programming language it was a language i i was,
even though i didn't do very well in french and german at school i was always

(12:52):
had an aptitude for languages i just didn't apply it i just couldn't be bothered
but so computing whether it was,
basic programming language fortran c plus plus system programming a lot of system
programming i was yeah doing some deep stuff on the on the systems not just
applications so yeah i was more
infrastructure and more systems than

(13:15):
i was applications or products or
things like that so i was kind of one layer above
the hardware if you like so that's sort of that sort of side the operating
system side yeah i just i don't know i really really don't know why it ticked
but whatever it was it ticked and say pcs came along the first apple macintosh
computers were there and everyone just saw me as the uh yeah the the go-to expert

(13:39):
and and suddenly i'm i left the uh,
lessees and got a job with a it was a insurance company a life company called
nm schroeder financial management which was part of schroeder life then got
bought out by national mutual australia so i worked there for a few years about
four years progressing my way up and,
i actually became the chief architect reporting directly into the head of it

(14:03):
at that at that career and i was what 29 ish at that point so yeah it really got it i mean.
What is the chief architect now my guess would
be you designing the whole technical yeah
it was technical architect it was the the consultant the
ideas person around the infrastructure and architecture yeah unfortunately i'm

(14:26):
just looking at my timeline that i sent you that that that that job didn't end
well either actually because uh nm got bought out by friends provident and look
i'm giving all my confessions here all my naughty school.
And so friends problem for buying nm
out and what they were looking to do was outsource the it department from

(14:48):
the old nm the schroeder life site because they did friends probably didn't
want to absorb it they wanted to outsource us and cut us loose without taking
us on and they had two people bidding one was a company called hoskins i'm not
sure what they call themselves these days but they were called hoskins in those
days and there's digital equipment the company i'd uh.
Trained on the vaxes and the vms and some of the stuff i done when i was younger

(15:11):
and got to know that company quite well it just so happened by my boss who i
used to work for at plessy so it's now working for digital equipment and it
just so happened he was in their bids and outsourcing
department and he phoned me up one day and said look we're doing i'm doing the
bid to outsource your job i went oh is it defensive cup of coffee or me and

(15:34):
i went yeah yeah i'll have a cup of have a cup of coffee with him and we just
got chatting and we just talk about the merger and yeah how it'd be a good opportunity
to get me into digital equipment and yeah be really good,
and i just for some reason i i said oh i've got
a copy of the uh all of our budgets and
finances with everyone's salaries in it would that help and oh i've also got

(15:55):
a copy of the other people's bid was that any good could you use that and he
went i can't say no but i can't say yes so I ended up passing him a brown envelope
with all of this proprietary information if you like and for some reason I must
have shared this with a colleague.
I was doing this and my colleague was actually, was on the other side of the

(16:15):
fence. He was, he was more interested in the, the Hoskins bid.
It wasn't in a, in a overly competitive way, but for some reason he decided
that I was being jolly unfair.
It just wasn't cricket. And so he reported me to internal audit.
So next thing I know is I'm, I come back from Christmas holiday.

(16:35):
I think it was the, I know exactly when it was actually. Our daughter was born
on, my daughter's birthday is 11th of January.
And it was her birthday party with all those little two-year-old school friends around. So it's 1994.
It must have been the 12th of January, the day after. Her birthday must have
been the Sunday. This was the Monday.
So my wife's there with all these little kids and the mums, and everyone having

(16:56):
a little two-year-old birthday party celebration.
And I come home in the afternoon and go, she goes, what are you doing home?
I think I've just been fired.
So, well, technically I wasn't fired. i
i attended my immediate resignation
which was immediately accepted so i managed to
escape i escaped without being fired by falling

(17:18):
on my sword very quickly and yeah so
there i was out on the street again feeling
very disappointed with myself okay i need
to get my act in order here but fortunately the person i used to this this person
at digital equipment who is my old boss who would i wouldn't say he instigated
it he catalyzed this problem i said so i i feel some responsibility to this

(17:43):
situation i know some recruitment agents and some contract agencies,
i'll do my best to try and find someone to get you a job pretty quickly and
the next thing i know i've got a job working for an it reseller in in burgess
hill i think it was called they were called micro business systems wow let's
go back a bit and they placed me into coots bank as one of their subcontractors.

(18:06):
So there I was, about a week after I'd been fired, keeping my lips very tightly shut.
I'm now working for Coots Bank at their development centre in Slough,
travelling 60 miles each way every day.
But I'm on contractor wages, so suddenly I've been bumbling along at,
I don't know, 20,000 a year, and suddenly I'm on 40,000.
I'm cashing in £350 a day. You fell upwards there, didn't you?

(18:32):
I fell upwards big time, yeah. Yeah, we just had our first child,
but Marie wasn't working.
So we were kind of broke as a family. And suddenly I've got cash.
Yeah, we're kind of loaded. And I worked at Coutts for four years doing their IT development.
And then I got onto their global deployment. I was working around the world with them.

(18:52):
Some glamorous locations, LA, San Diego, Beverly Hills, New York, Miami.
Vienna, Cannes, Nice.
Yeah, I ended up in Athens as well, Hong Kong, Singapore.
So I was on their global deployment team, and I spent a week in the Bahamas,
a week in Cayman Islands.

(19:12):
We were jet skiing off the beach. It was, you know, on banking expenses and
having an absolute roaring time.
But I'll be really honest, though, we were working really hard.
This was kind of a 12-hour days and then six-hour party and then whatever's left to sleep.
And it was like we were literally coming in at three in the morning,
crashing out waking up going back into work doing the same thing day in day

(19:35):
out for weeks and it was like yeah you can't do it in your 30s couldn't do it
now but yeah absolute blast and and your wife marie at this time was at home
one he was at home i had two children this stage.
Yes we had two children we just bought up a big four bedroom detached house
because you know we were we were cash rich we had lots of money coming in just

(19:57):
bought myself a bmw 325i car Oh, she had an Audi, something.
So, yeah, we were kind of in our young, in our 30s, yeah, loaded at this point
here. So, yeah, things were good. Things were really good, yeah.
And you mentioned in, like you said, what you sent to me before,
that you were involved in the round table. Is that around that time as well?

(20:18):
Yeah, it was, yeah. So, back at the age of 26, so it was before,
so whilst I was still working at the life company, before I went to Coots, I joined.
In in fact a colleague of mine introduced me to someone i was working with at that company,
and we joined at age 26 and i remember turning up to this first meeting in awe
of it it was at the waterside club in port solon near portsmouth and it was

(20:41):
a yeah i walk in there and it's all the.
Local bank managers the solicitors barristers estate agents all of the kind
of the movers and shakers in the portsmouth area and i walk in there and think blimey look all these,
gods gods of commerce if you like gods of the society and for those of you who
haven't heard the round table it's a it's a men's club it was founded in 1927

(21:04):
to be a club for young men to,
network socialize and give back to the community so i joined yeah i joined the
round table at the age of 26 ish became a bit trickier to say committee but
i was flying around the world but I'd always come back here,
there and everywhere and go to our second and fourth Thursday meetings and go

(21:25):
to our dinners and conferences and things.
And, yeah, it was a massive part of my life.
I became the chair or the president of my local club back in 1999,
2000. What did you like about it?
It was doing stuff. It was giving back to society.
There were a really supportive group of people. you know we if you're having

(21:48):
good times and bad times you have people around you it was,
And also business networking. I got some business through it as an IT person.
But also, when I had this industrial espionage encounter when I was at the life
company, one of my friends in Roundtable is a solicitor.
And I was able to phone him up in tears and say, look, this is what's going on.

(22:12):
This is what's happened. and sort of prostrate myself down the
phone to him and he said and he was the one that said to me just resign
just go for it write my letter say you'll leave now and often
that works you'll just get out without a black mark on your book so but yeah
the person we bought and sold a few houses over the years a solicitor is always

(22:33):
a roundtabler i've got my best friends architects people like this so yeah it
just became it gave me that set or us as a family actually because it wasn't just
me and my wife our children all were involved with
the the families of other people but it kind of made
you feel connected and empowered knowing
that you've got a solicitor knowing you've got this you've got that you got

(22:56):
so suddenly these people who you would maybe be scared or apprehensive or have
no relationship with were suddenly your friends and so you knew you were you
were going into battle if you had to knowing you had a whole defensive army around you.
You know you felt incredibly i felt incredibly sort
of empowered to do things because and that's

(23:18):
what led me to start a business actually in uh i left
coot so yeah it was just before the year 2000 i remember getting a memo from
the head of it kevin something his name was kevin something he wrote me he wrote
everyone this letter saying your bonus is on the line if we have any year 2000
y2k issues then your bonus is on the line blah blah blah and i just read it and thought

(23:40):
i don't need that shit i don't need someone talking to me and writing me this
letter you know i've spent so many years as a contractor i was permanent at
this point i thought i don't want to be an employee and be treated like your
porn like your thing so i just and about that time i.
A good friend of mine, a chap called Ian Cox, who was my accountant when I was
a contractor, said to me, and they used to call me Manners in those days,

(24:04):
and the reason I got that nickname was because I didn't have any manners.
So they could manage for something and he
said look i want to my accountancy practice is
my accountancy practice is growing
and i want someone to come help with my it but
i also think we can get together and run

(24:26):
a night build an it company in portsmouth i went okay so there
i am i'm checking checking my global head
of system development there was a system support i
think it was in coots i'm checking that career out the
window and jumping myself
back onto the street and saying like okay here i am nothing again yeah actually
yeah no business no nothing apart from him as my client one and another roundtable

(24:52):
friend i had who ran a printing company booked me to go and install a new server
and get him up and running so i had i had probably.
That was probably two and a half grand worth of business and i
had my accountant was guaranteeing me like three or four hundred pound
a month so there i was may 20
no may 1998 there i
was two gigs and my accountant said i've got people i can introduce you to we'll

(25:17):
we'll get something just just just trust me we'll make it happen and it kind
of did it kind of did we had some good times we we we drank a lot we went to
the chinese restaurant a lot and i did a lot of business and And yeah,
that culminated in, somehow, luckily,
I got involved with a cable TV company on the Isle of Wight.
They were called White Cable, I think, at the time. I'm not sure what they're

(25:40):
called now. I installed a lot of their...
Head end which is where they put all the equipment all of
their equipment in for their their network their infrastructure
their cable modems you know the internet connection over
your cable i was interfacing between the people
who produce the wall gardens you know the epgs the
electronic program guys the bit you interact with on this guy tv the

(26:02):
bit that moves up and down and you've got all your channels and you've got your
bonus content i was interfacing with all these people put all this together
i was winging it big time i really was bringing it big time but you know so
were they they were quite happy that this it person who understood ip yeah internet protocol,
tcp ip i i kind of got all that stuff and pcs

(26:24):
and servers and linux and some some some
workstations all this i kind of got it all and we've
just put all this stuff together and we're just i don't know i probably did
a couple hundred thousand maybe two or three hundred thousand over the course
of a few months and then that project came to an end and things got a bit tight
for a while And then one of the people who was on this white cable phoned me

(26:45):
up and said, do you want to fancy doing it again in Scotland?
Me and a few friends, we've got some seed funding. We're going to put a cable
TV company up in Scotland.
I went, okay, you want me to come do all the IT stuff again?
Yeah, it's the same thing.
We've got the same billing platform, same people producing the wall garden,
same people doing the content, same people doing the cable modems.
So you mean the old crew are back? He said, yeah, basically.

(27:07):
We just need to come to Scotland for a year or so and we'll just make it happen.
So yeah, that was even more of a feeding frenzy.
I turned over 3.8 million in eight months.
We were supplying all of their PCs, all of their high-end servers,
all their switches, all their data.

(27:29):
Everything, if it wasn't bolted down, we supplied it and shipped it in and set it up.
And I had a team of six people up there working all hours, but obviously partying hard in the evenings.
But we're putting this stuff in and i remember we had
this deal with hp hewlett-packard where we
were putting these leading high-end corporate enterprise
switches in for their for their internet for their ethernet background and i

(27:54):
remember we we went on a training course in grenoble in france paid by hp because
we were such an influential customer at the time we were these things like 150
grand each these switches size of a big suitcase you put them in this rack,
and I remember we were buying five or six of these and the guy that worked for
me at the time who did my purchasing just phoned up our HP account manager and said,

(28:17):
Is there anything you can do on the price? And they went, I'll go and we'll
give you another 40% off.
And 40% was like 100K of extra discount, 100K.
Obviously, we didn't pass that on to the customer. We just absorbed that.
We just took that raw profit for him saying, is that the best you can do?
And we became HP's best customer in a quarter for selling the warranty packs.

(28:42):
When you buy a PC, you can buy a warranty upgrade on it. it we we
we became hp's record selling company
selling these care packs on hp equipment in
one quarter we were i don't know i don't know how many maybe they
didn't sell that many we must have sold a couple hundred but yeah
it was we were just printing money at that stage it was the back of the the

(29:03):
yuppie days so why here there's some really interesting themes i think so far
there's something there's kind of an undercurrent of rebellion quietly going
on there in terms of some of the things that you've done.
There's also some quite hard partying by the sounds of things. Yeah.
And this may be sort of slightly boom and bust, you know, sort of more up and

(29:25):
down income-wise as well.
That doesn't continue though, does it? So you had some more tricky times maybe
when you went into your 40s?
Yeah, so that IT company was doing the cable TV stuff in Scotland.
The cable TV company went bust. by 9-11.
Someone flew some airplanes into a building in America and that destabilized

(29:49):
the whole US economy or their investments.
So a lot of the investments this KWTV company had were US-based and they basically
pulled out. That meant that I...
Effective into administration where they'd go into administration and i had
about 100 and something k in in debt they owed me in the i was offering credit

(30:12):
to about 100 and something k,
and the worst about it was i'd already i'd already bought the equipment
i already paid all the staff that i had on contract there
so it wasn't like this was profit i mean okay
i'd taken out the profit before so i'd
and spent it obviously but now i was sat with
100k plus fat that that just kind of and
they just went sorry no can do we can give you a

(30:34):
pound a penny in the pound if you're lucky maybe in a
year's time so i went back home went back to the it company which i i still
had running in the background it's a 20 or 30 odd staff running that and but
when you suddenly take away the 60 70 100 000 pound a month income that's coming
in from the cable tv company company.

(30:56):
The underlying business wasn't viable, really. I was financing the growth of
the other business and realized we didn't shut it down quick enough.
And that business went bust.
I tried starting up another business, another IT company, and it was never quite
the same. That bumbled along for a couple of years.
And I ended up closing that down and merging, actually, as it happened,
with the person I used to work for at Plessys, the person who who got me into IT in the first place.

(31:22):
I merged with him and his son, and so we ran an IT company from around 2005,
so I'd have been best path, well, 40-ish, give or take.
So we started that, and I ran that with them for about 15 years, 12 to 15 years. But...
And yeah, we had some good times. We were turning over 1.2 million at the end.

(31:44):
We had 12 staff, no, probably back to 20 staff by then, a couple of business
partners, but it wasn't the same.
It was, I don't know, it wasn't the same. It wasn't my business.
It was kind of our business. And I never felt like I had ownership of it.
And once we got on all right, I just didn't really enjoy it.

(32:06):
I could just tell it wasn't me.
I was getting really, really bored with IT. you know it's
i mean i i love the projects i love
the i love the wing in it i love to just jumping in
and seeing what happens but this was becoming my pc
doesn't work my backups failed my servers crashed and i'll
be sitting in computer rooms at two o'clock in the morning trying to reload tapes

(32:26):
and systems and i thought i don't need this i
don't need this anymore i've had enough of it it was just it was
just becoming a young person's job and i just thought i want
to i want to be strategic i want to
be out there i want to be going in and doing stuff and i
just worked with in my sat once you know the satellite satellite company
they got me on contract to turn up

(32:46):
into their office in london and i turned up and
had an issue and i just went in and did a few things on their screens and within
15 minutes they got what you're incredible i remember charging a thousand pound
a day and it was actually 15 minutes work and it was kind of if i can do this
I want to get back to that seat of the pants stuff again. It's much more fun.

(33:07):
Anyway, so yeah, I got to the end of my 40s. And all my life,
and I mean all my life, I can remember is I've always had this nag in the back
of my head about my gender identity.
Six seven years old i remember being a uh being a cub scout you know cute little
cub scout with a green pulley on little little flat cap and my badges on my

(33:28):
arm you know like you do i remember going to church parade because i used to
go once a month first sunday of the month church parade
i remember sitting in in the in the aisle and in front of the guides and in
front of the guides with the brownies and i just always felt that i was in the
wrong lane i was in the wrong queue I was in the wrong aisle.
I should have been at the front there. And that feeling, that disconnect with

(33:50):
my sense of self was always in my head, always in my head, through my teens,
through my, when I was in the RAF, when I first got married.
And, of course, when you're busy, when you're doing stuff, your mind is engaged in that.
But I always found that when I went to neutral or took the pressure off,

(34:12):
off my brain would always go back to it and it was i think what happened i got
to my 40s where the children left home we're becoming empty nesters we live
in this big four-bedroom house,
nice cars big garden but we were living different lives my wife and i were in
different rooms i was in my office she was in the kitchen i was we were in the lounge for brief times.

(34:34):
It's not we weren't getting on we just weren't doing stuff together we just
drifted apart and And I think what happened was we went through a trial separation in the,
actually coincided with the London Olympics.
I remember it was the opening ceremony that night there.
We had an Olympic breakup. It was that enormous.
And that lasted all the way through to the end of the Paralympics.

(34:57):
It was literally, it was the opening ceremony through to the closing ceremony of the Paralympics.
And as part of that,
We kind of managed to re-baseline who we were and said, actually,
we both want to be together. We both want to be together forever.
That's our motto, be together forever.
We both want back what we had when we met 30-odd years ago.

(35:19):
And it got to that point where we started talking about it. We both realized
we went to the same thing.
But at that time, I also shared about my gender identity and my gender confusion
and what's been going on in my life. and we laughed and joked about a few things
that my wife kept finding a dress.
She found a dress in the spare wardrobe and then I came home one night and found

(35:40):
this dress on the back of the spare bedroom door thinking, oh my God, she's found my dress.
What am I going to do now? She's found my dress. Panic, panic, panic.
I thought, okay, I'll just pop the dress back in the spare wardrobe again and
then carried on and then the next couple of days it reappeared.
I thought, oh God, she's got it. I'll put it back.
She hasn't mentioned anything. I'll just put it back, see what happens. and

(36:01):
this carried on for I don't know on and off for a week or so it
would appear I put it back it would appear I put it back she kept saying
to me do you keep putting that dress away and I
said yeah I didn't know what it was she said it's
funny she said I don't remember buying this dress she said
I'll put it at the back of the door so I'm going to try it on but I
don't remember buying it I went oh really and a

(36:22):
few days later she said I tried it on just for fear I'm not
sure why I would have bought it i said oh okay fine whatever
and we were joking about this this event and
she went wow i'd never known i said i know i
was absolutely terrified being discovered so this
was before 2012 then the dress yeah this was this would have been five three

(36:44):
or four years earlier probably three or four years earlier so yeah 2008 2009
issue and you're you know one thing that It struck me about the professions
that you'd chosen or fallen into in some cases.
They're quite blokey, masculine kind of professions.
Do you think that was a conscious, unconscious choice? How did that feel?

(37:06):
Or is it irrelevant, do you think?
No, I don't think it's – I wasn't doing it to mask or anything like that.
And I fell in – it kind of resonated with me.
I look back on it now, and I had a great life, and I had a great time.
I wasn't making conscious choices to try to fight myself.

(37:29):
It was just I was getting swept up in the momentum of opportunity.
And one of the sayings I often say to people is no great adventure starts with a no.
And so i people always say to me if we ask you you're going to say yes yes of
course and i also say if i've got two choices let's do the first one because
then we can do the second one as well but if you say no if you say no to the

(37:52):
first one and you like the second one you've missed the opportunity to do the
first one so i always say do the first one then you can always do both.
So i i was very much more i'm happy to exist in chaos i suppose getting kicked
out the ref of getting fired from an insurance company being thrown out the
house by my dad at the age of after i got out the raft living this bed sit i

(38:14):
kind of i was kind of happy living in chaos,
i'm also fairly resilient adaptable and able to sort of i don't know build relationships
with people be likable if you like so not not not not not an ass or a dick or
anything like that so So,
it means that I quite easily get in with people. So, yeah.

(38:36):
No, but there was no conscious decision to macho myself up or anything.
It was just opportunity moments.
But don't forget, I was born up in the 60s and 70s. There was no internet,
no TV, transgender, transsexual, gender identity.
It just wasn't a thing. It was in my head.
And it just stayed in my head. It was just something in the background.

(38:58):
It was something that… But I suppose what happened in my 40s,
Facebook came along in 2007.
Okay, it became popular in 2008, 2009, sort of thing.
And I suddenly realized that there was other people out there who had a very
similar narrative, very similar story.
All having masked and hid this for all their life.

(39:20):
And they were bankers, they were professionals, they were high in people in
society. in fact one of my RAF classmates came out as trans about six months
before I did I remember I remember sending her a Facebook message saying oh
you bitch you beat me to it.
I've got photographs of me and her in photographs in the RAF of us both there

(39:42):
together going you'd never guess from those 14 young men that two of us would
be trans and at least one would be gay or by that lot so yeah it was,
yeah no it wasn't a conscious hiding or masking it was just there it was always there.
And i inside out too the film just come out and i remember when i saw inside out the first one,

(40:05):
and the sort of the metaphor the analogy i use is that i was being driven by
the little red angry man character all my life you know it would be it was driving me in the same way that
in inside out the red man angry man drives the young child for a while and then
what happened was like when i started to open myself up to this guess what happened
joy took over and suddenly i've I've got feminine energy. I've got joy in my life.

(40:30):
And I've almost got the angry man strapped and sellotaped and gaffotaped to a chair.
And joy is now driving my head. And I can't explain it.
All I know now is that instead of having two voices, a conversation in my head,
an argument, a confusion, double thinking things, I've now got silence.

(40:51):
I've now got clarity. I've now got one voice, one purpose, one thing.
And and i've just got so much more clarity than i ever used to have and it is
i can't explain it i can't explain whether it was a complete change of career
so selling my it company in.
2017 to my business partners chucking all

(41:12):
that in starting this new career as an
inclusion belonging trans awareness is what i do now i went busted i went bust
properly i didn't end up doing an IVA in 2018 we we got a bit carried away with
tax planning in the business and HMRC wanted I don't know three or four hundred
thousand pounds off of us as a business because we'd,

(41:34):
we'd been doing everything that Alistair Darling the then chancellor made retrospectively
illegal we were doing all this you know you heard Rangers Football Club and
Jimmy Carr and all these people doing all these dodgy tax planning deals and
yep that was us we We were doing that as well.
So, yeah, HMRC wanted 300,000, I think, after the company. They wanted some

(41:55):
of that from me personally.
Then due to incompetence on my part, I can't blame anybody else,
when I sold the shares in the business, it wasn't done tax efficiently.
So instead of expecting, I think, a 10 grand capital gains tax,
they wanted to tax me something like 70,000 pounds.
So I had this share of this APN, Advanced Payment Notice for the HMRC,

(42:17):
for the business my share is yeah 100 or 1070 grand for this tax bill for the share sale,
plus yeah i've been i've been fast and loose cars credit you know all this kind
of stuff like you do you end up this bankroll in this massive great big bit
of debt you carry around all your net your life as an adult these days so i
had all this going on so eventually i did an iva in 2018 for,

(42:38):
quarter of a million pounds actually in the end it turned out so when it was
free myself i know No, I don't know what I... Involuntary... So involuntary...
I don't know what's it stand for involuntary arrangement
i can't remember the ice answer it's
only a voluntary arrangement basically you do a deal with
your creditors to avoid going bankrupt so

(43:00):
you make them an offer you make them an offer so i was
offering them in the same way the cable tv company made me an offer
of a penny in the pound i made my credit stuff
of something like 8p in a pound or 10p in the pound for the the 250 000 i owed
in total across hmrc and all the other creditors on my loans and cars and stuff
so yeah i just i woke up on the i think it was about the 18th of july or something

(43:25):
like that i was 250 000 pound better off.
Effectively because yeah so whether it was the freedom and that that wasn't
easy because we had we ended up having to sell our flat we had a beautiful flat
apartment if you like on on the waterfront of port solar at the marina beautiful
views so we had to sell that so i had I had to put 50 grand into the deal to buy my way out of the IVA.

(43:50):
And we had to move into rented. And we're still in rented now.
So, yeah, we haven't gone back to where we are.
And was that pre or post you transitioning?
It's almost like simultaneously. So when I sold the business in 2017,
I often say that the 1st of March 2017 was the day I kind of transitioned because

(44:10):
I left my old career and my old self.
On that dotted line if you like i sold it as as the
old fella and stepped off
as me and but that that took
that yeah this kind of thing doesn't happen overnight it
took me probably six months or so to get

(44:31):
used to myself really because you know you're test
driving something it's not until you get out of the showroom and into
the world that you try and figure out you know how the gears
work and things so it took me a while i went through
bouts of depression moments i couldn't get
out of bed i was in tears all the time i couldn't focus couldn't do
anything and whilst i had the money from

(44:52):
the share sale sitting in my bank coming in every month so
i wasn't desperate for cash at the time but i
yeah i was pretty much functionless able to
function for about six months until i
had a kind of epiphany about i've just got to
get on with this i can't just sit licking my wounds feeling sorry for myself i've
got to i've just got to get on with life and

(45:13):
so that was 2017 so i remember sitting
i was at a training course actually on in january
2018 is when i found out about the tax issue that was again a pretty traumatic
time having to sell our our dream home with my wife and just that kind of self-imposed
stigma and shame really and feeling a failure you know that was kind of you

(45:34):
know i got burnt a few times but this was kind of.
Wrecking everybody's uh perception so yeah that was a tricky time and at this
in parallel with this we're also doing a channel 4 documentary which is you
know if we didn't have enough going on so in 2016 this is before i told my work
colleagues before i told my our children.

(45:55):
Obviously my wife knew at this point we both decided to take part in channel
4 documentary about which followed mine or our gender transition and that of
seven seven or eight other other
couples or other people and that was
a three-year project in total so from 2016 to
2019 so they were coming out filming us filming

(46:16):
me filming my wife interviewing us around
yeah they stick a camera in your face say how.
Are you feeling how's life what's going on what are you doing they'd follow
us to the supermarket they follow us to the theater they follow us
go and buying buying stuff and going
in for way days and having dinner with our friends like the camera
crew would show up but it did up yeah it

(46:37):
did annoy a few of our friends occasionally so joe's here with the camera crew
again and sort of kind of annoyed them a bit because they
never truly a fly on the wall that they do
disrupt things they did cause a bit of a problem but i would
look back at it as a good thing because they uh they became.
Our marriage guidance through that period you know you've got
this independent person with a camera on their shoulder emma

(47:01):
her name was and she became became a real deep personal friend
and someone i could talk to and confide in because she knew
our story she'd been there almost at the beginning of this this phase
she was there before i sold the business she was
there when i was selling the business when i had a mental health breakdown when
i was seeing the doctor and being referred
to gender identity clinics so she was there the camera

(47:21):
in my face asked me the questions but also she was
listening and so and the same was with my wife she was
listening to my wife asking my wife's question so it became
very cathartic to have that that person in
our lives who was there more than just a
counselor she was our friend and she was but independent she
was she was completely independent of us but able to be our good friend and

(47:44):
yeah she really helped but yeah and uh it was a it was a hectic time yeah quite
a lot of anxiety and pressure being filmed speaking from the heart you know i've told you.
In those days, the difference is speaking from the scar, speaking from the wound.
I was speaking from the wound. It was open. It was raw.

(48:06):
There was blood pouring out in those days. I hadn't really got my,
you know, in quotes, shit together at that point. I was sort of trying to figure stuff out.
It's much easier now. I look back. It's history.
I'm healed. Life is good again.
So, yeah, it was a tricky time. And, yeah, being past, you know,
National President of Round Table, I didn't tell you that, but I became National

(48:27):
President in 2008, 2009.
Of a man's club you know black tie dinners traveling the country traveling over
the world actually standing in front of drunk men in black tie drinking port
and wine and doing stupid stuff,
and then they looked at me a bit funny so so you're saying as a national president
around you're now and now saying you're a woman i mean yeah it does it's crazy

(48:50):
about you know what But obviously it's a man's club,
so then you're not able to be a member, presumably.
But I'd already left due to the age rule because it's a club for young men. So the age cap is 45.
And there is an ex-roundtable club called 41 Club or Ex-Table.

(49:11):
But strangely enough, their rules say the only requirement in their rules is
you must have been in roundtable. So technically, it doesn't say you had to be a man.
It just says you had to be in roundtable. So I was in roundtable as a man.
I was now in 41 club and i still am actually as a woman which kind of like it
rubs a few people out the wrong way i'm sure but most people kind of just look
at me shrug their shoulders and go
i don't get it and i just smile back and say i don't get it either so

(49:34):
don't worry about it we're fine we're cool and they're kind of yeah
it's kind of okay and yeah i went i
went to their conference this year actually they invited me to
talk to their national conference on agm in Bournemouth
and I gave a talk about basically EDI and
how they could think
about EDI in terms of their membership and developing their club and

(49:55):
I also did a presentation to ladies circle which is the sister
club a round table and presented
to their AGM around basically a trans 101 talking about gender identity because
they as a club had been targeted by two sides one side saying you you should
be more inclusive of trans people and another side saying you must never be

(50:16):
more inclusive of trans people. They end up caught in the middle between these two factions.
And I ended up just giving a very pragmatic one-on-one, not,
not, not an instruction on what they should do or should or shouldn't do.
Just these are the, this is who I am. This is what makes me happy.
This is what makes me sad.
And if you, if you want to find out more, let's talk. And it was kind of that

(50:37):
kind of, that approach is how I normally take it is you have the choice,
how you want to make me feel.
If you want to make me feel unhappy, that's your choice. I can't stop you.
But if we can work on a way by everyone feels happy, that's the objective here.
So yeah, times healed a lot of those things. At the beginning,
it was quite raw because also I had a camera crew, remember, at that time.

(50:57):
So I was going to these round table events for the camera crew,
which that caused probably more problems than my gender transition,
to be honest, having a camera in their faces when they paid to be at a dinner.
But yeah, it's been an entertaining nearly 10 years.
Nearly 10 years, yeah. I noticed you said our

(51:17):
transition when you were talking about rather than your
transition you were talking about you and your wife that
transitional period well it's it's quite a selfish thing you know and the definition
of selfish you do it for your own self for your own reasons for you but it did
dawn on me very early on that i was trying to be do this do a selfish thing

(51:41):
in the least selfish way possible
I also recognize that in order to be have
respect of the family I had I had to
be worthy of respect in order to be loved I had to be lovable you
know you know to all these things it most of this started with
me it was how I showed up and how I presented
and how I I lived my life and how I interface

(52:02):
with others so I it was very much about personal responsibility but
what I also realized was i'd known this story
has been in my head for at that time 30 or
40 years i've just woken up and this this is this is and giving it to people
for the first time and expect them to just get over it and get used to it so
for me transitioning was like spinning on a sixpence for everybody else it was

(52:25):
like this massive great big arc and you know you think about dropping a pebble into a pond.
The ripples in the middle are the most the most violent if you like so the people
who are the the closest to me, had the biggest trauma from that.
Our daughter, our son, my mum had to get used to it, Marie's parents had to
get used to it, my close friends, people who had known me 30 or 40 years, they had the journey.

(52:48):
I was just pivoting. I was just going, hey, it's me, figure it out.
So I always say the transition is less about me and more about other people,
how society, you know, we talk about the social model of disability,
disability how it's just how it's the society that disables or removes access to people,
it's society that has to accept me because i'm just

(53:09):
me and society has to blip that blip in the time space-time continuum ripples
out everybody else is going to so yeah it most definitely was our transition
marie had to get used to me she had to she had to come out as someone who was
There's a woman married to a man who's now a woman married to a woman.

(53:29):
People will question her sexuality. How does she describe me?
Am I her wife, her partner, her husband?
So all of those things that change a language that I enforced,
or I didn't enforce it on her, I created a scenario where she felt forced to have to change.
Or not or walk away and that was one of the conversations we had you know we had a,

(53:53):
saga back in 2018 i had
a hairway fitted part of the tv documentary and if
you if you ever find it on gogglebox or on the other channels you can see where
i had this hairway fitted and it because it it completely changed my my persona
visible identity it it meant that i couldn't just take the wig off at night

(54:13):
you know i go to bed wake up in the morning wander around make breakfast.
Watch telly without a wig on now i
was joe 100 at the time i was there was
no there was no way people could gatekeep me and tell me how
i had to show up it was like it's stuck on it
doesn't come off and that so we call
that we call that period of hair gate you know like you know that
was our kind of hair gate and we almost broke up let's

(54:36):
say we almost broke up i never thought we would but we were
going through some really tricky times lots of conversations and i
probably probably owe it to the fact that we'd we'd been through this in 2012
with our olympic breakup that we kind
of knew how to shout and argue but we
also knew how to show how to hug and cry and and look into each other's souls
and we were able to keep connected with our shared objective was be together

(55:00):
forever and all we had to try and do was try and figure out which bits were
tricky which bits weren't tricky which bits were were doable which bits weren't
and and how we i had to adjust my
pace and speed because you know if you
rush too quickly you leave people behind if you
leave people behind they become disconnected or detached and so
it's very much a case of trying to two steps forward one back two steps forward

(55:23):
one back and you know salami slicing taking very small slices to make to move
forward and recognizing sometimes that yeah we had to support and take time
and i think that helped that people get used to it and again i focused on the.
Be likable, be lovable, be worthy of respect. And people will respect me. They will love me.

(55:45):
They will want to spend time with me. But if I'm a dick, then they would treat
me like a dick sort of thing.
So that was kind of how I kind of framed it.
I had the power to show up in a way that people would like me and love me.
And that's why I took personal responsibility for that.
So I had to share my burden, my in on maintaining the relationships.

(56:08):
Relationships and yeah it was a again another challenging time in our lives
but yeah we got through it we got through it we've done the IVA we're in the
middle of that we're doing the Chenifield documentary in the middle of that
we're changing my career going through depression.
Coming out telling everybody else of course the trouble the Chenifield documentary is,
we were avoiding telling the kids we're avoiding telling my

(56:31):
mum for a while but the only thing hang on a minute they're
going to be broadcasting this in a few months time we can't can't keep it
a secret so why are these cameras hanging around all the
time so once i had the hair weave and all that
sort of stuff it became we had to kind of again
that created tension when marie had to sort of tell her parents
and i'm fair play to

(56:51):
my father-in-law my mother-in-law rest in peace my
mother-in-law passed away last year but i my mum my
mum is one of my biggest advocates and she's you know i think
when we talk about setting this this session up today
you know influential people in my life my mum you know she took a few months
to get used to it she she had a few tears she couldn't she was a bit confused

(57:11):
and one of the challenges actually is you know you go to all these websites
download material to to help you know the parent of a trans child to cope with this,
and i can guarantee you none of the documents are for 75 year old woman with
a with a 50 year old child it's all it's all pictures of young people and stuff
so i printed all this stuff out gave of all the PDFs.

(57:34):
And bless her she read it all she's really got she must have read it cover to
cover several times because after a few months she became a massive advocate
and she was fine you can still tell behind the eyes she was a bit confused but
superficially she was absolutely fine and I remember she was in hospital about.
18 months ago she had a bit of an anxiety stress attack she was

(57:55):
in hospital for a few days and i was going to visit her and i was thinking when i
go into the ward what am i going to say if if someone comes up
to me says who are you you know that's was the
question you can't go and visit your this person unless you're
a relative religious so and so as i imagined i
was going to get gate keeped and said or who are you how yeah and i
thought what do i say i'm a i'm a child am i like this am

(58:17):
i i just couldn't find the adjective to describe
myself because i'd never i'd never ever had that conversation
and i walked into the ward and my
mum saw me at the other end she says oh my daughter's
here you have to see me and i almost burst into
tears at that moment i sat down the side of my mum's bed held
her hand said you called me your daughter he said well yeah you are i see you

(58:38):
as my daughter i tell my friends you're my daughter and i just i was just tears
rolling down my cheeks in fact if you can see me now i've got tears developing
in my eyes and welling up now because it was just an incredible thing that we'd
never spoken about it and for her to say that.
And we go out shopping today you know these days we
went around whiteley outlet village a little while ago and

(59:00):
uh where she wants she's having this sort
of uh going through this phase at 85 where she wants to go and buy nice
dresses and stuff so we went to sea salt we're going into next and
going into fat face and she's trying all these dresses on and i'm giving her
the dresses and we're trying stuff on it's like absolutely superb and we were
just having a coffee we bought matching hats it was like absolutely yeah really
fun so yeah i've reconnected with my mom in a way i'd never would have imagined

(59:23):
so yeah it's really really everybody else has been amazing but,
for your mom yeah to do that it is so powerful and one of the things i said
when i told her i was thinking about i was talking to other people about this and i said,
if you can't tell your mom the truth you're lying to the world sort of thing
i really had this belief that if i couldn't tell my mum i wasn't being honest

(59:47):
with everybody else you know so mum.
I didn't really want my mum to take the brunt of that. But I felt I had to be,
in order to be honest and open and truthful with the world, I had to tell my mum.
If I kept it secret from my mum, I was still lying to somebody.
And that's part of the empowerment I found from this is, I went from a life

(01:00:08):
where I probably had secrets, hiding stuff about my gender, about other things,
finances and everything else.
I now live in a world where I'm a completely transparent, open book.
You know if you if you try and blackmail me i just
go go on what is that
what is there you could blackmail me about i mean there is nothing and it's

(01:00:29):
like for the first time so maybe you know talk about
this is one person in my head one story one
voice when everything i don't have anything in
my head i'm i'm ashamed of i don't have anything in my head
that i have to hide i have my head i i can't talk about
and i feel much more empowered to speak my truth but also be accountable for
that truth you know i don't speak truth without the accountability knowing how

(01:00:53):
it impacts somebody else tell me about what's next for you what's going forward as you said you are,
at the end of your 50s birthday in january january yes yeah 16 january yeah
yeah i i don't i don't i don't have a game plan.

(01:01:17):
I tried to have a game plan. Then COVID came along, and I realized that game
plans are kind of overrated.
I always say to people who try to sell me business coaching,
I said, I'd be your worst coachee ever because I don't have a business plan.
I don't have this. But I say that.
I know what I'm trying to achieve. I've got big long-term goals.

(01:01:38):
I do procrastinate. I do mess around, but I like shiny things, and I like to zip in.
I like stage speaking. I like going to big conferences, standing on stage.
I like traveling a bit, not too much, a bit.
I love the human connection. I love standing in front of an audience,
either as a workshop or 100 people in a room.
I love it when they come up to me afterwards and give me a hug and say,

(01:02:00):
oh, wow, Joe, that was really inspiring.
So that's what feeds my beast, if you like, the change in others,
how I can move people with my words, my voice, inspire people or give them a
different perspective.
But i quite the my my
techie background won't leave

(01:02:20):
me so covid was because i
had a hobby photography videography were hobbies
obviously computing mix that together suddenly i can support myself my online
online speaking delivering i'm big into ai automation spending a lot of time
I'm now creating content for myself, multi-purposing stuff.

(01:02:44):
So I'm actually enjoying some of the production side for my own content,
but not doing it for anybody else, just doing it for me. But I also share...
What I do, I'm quite good at collaborating, showing other people what I do.
Yeah, look at this shiny toy. Oh, you gave me so much great advice when we initially spoke.

(01:03:04):
I wrote loads of notes. I've gone and trained a chap GPT to sound more like me now.
That was because of you. So, yeah, you definitely made something that was confusing me very accessible.
Yeah, but I'm kind of determined.
Every so often I think, oh, I could earn a living on this. I could become an AI speaker.

(01:03:25):
I could become an automation speaker. I could become a content-creating speaker.
And I thought, do I want to? No.
I ended up doing this with electronics, a hobby turned into a career.
Then I ended up doing computing, a hobby turned into a career.
I just want to talk to people about what ignites my passion, the icky guy.

(01:03:46):
What do people want? What does the world need?
What are you good at? what can you make money out whatever the other one is i want
to live in that in that center box of the icky
guy and what brings me joy and i
think if i'm not careful i'll end up turning a
hobby into a career again and i'll lose my joy because
they're playing with ai and that sort of thing i enjoy it

(01:04:08):
it's a it's a distraction it's something that i
i can really get into but do i really want to do it for somebody else full time
not really yeah not really just because you can doesn't mean that you should
exactly that's another one of my sayings yeah just because you can doesn't mean
they should i think that that is so true yeah and it's it's about finding joy and being sustainable,

(01:04:30):
what about you know keep doing this i'm just conscious of time i don't want
to keep you too long but what advice would you give to your younger self.
People often ask me this. I'm a great believer that you are who you are because of who you were.
I wouldn't be sat here today with two fantastic children who I love to be.

(01:04:50):
It's a mum who loves me, a wife, and everybody around me, and sitting here having
a conversation with you, if it wasn't for everything I've got wrong,
everything I've got right, all of those twists and turns, every decision I've
made, we're here today having a conversation.
So I wouldn't want to change anything. But what I would say is,

(01:05:11):
without distorting the space-time continuum, is just when it's dark and it's
hard to see a way through, it'll figure itself out.
When you think you can't, you will, and you can.
And please don't ever smoke again.
Very nice advice. If you had to, I don't drink anymore.

(01:05:34):
My wife and I both gave up alcohol 950 days ago,
I think it is, give or take i drank far too much for
far too long and it was
part of part of my own personal culture and
i looked back on it and thought i don't want on my gravestone to to someone
to write joanne bit of a piss head but great laugh you know i don't want to

(01:05:54):
be remembered as being that person who was always drunk our children have got
so many stories of me being drunk here here, there, and everywhere on parties.
My friends, we've got so many stories, and it's always about me being drunk and being silly.
And I think I look back, I don't want that to be my legacy.
So I think if I could erase that part of my life, being a drunk and smoking,

(01:06:22):
without changing the space-time continuum and everything else,
that would probably be it. But I suppose mostly I'd just say.
You're okay. You're going to be 60 soon. Don't worry about it.
You had some good times. You had some bad times. But your life's been good, I think.
What about books? Any books you would recommend to the listeners?

(01:06:42):
I'm not really a book reader. I tend to use Audible if I'm listening to things.
I've got a whole shelf to my left over here, which you can't see because we're on audio only.
But I've got a whole load of books. I buy more so I can hold them up and say
to people this is a great book.
I buy books that friends write and yeah I support them but I am going to be

(01:07:06):
writing a book and actually two books and I'm trying my work the working title
is a 99 ways not to be a dick.
I should definitely call it that. Yeah I
might change it to 99 ways not to be a jerk or
something that is it's going to be easier to search and decide
to get blocked and the other one I'm i'm going to
write something called podcast poetry volume one so what

(01:07:29):
i've done is i've got 130 episodes of my podcast
recorded and i feed it through ai and it generates
a poem for each one so i'm going to publish podcast poetry as generated by ai
volume one because that gives me plenty of scope for volume two three four it's
gone forever yes yeah so those are my two books yeah i want i want to do something

(01:07:49):
i want to leave a mark i'd be known for something yes Yes.
And what about a title for your story? Has one come to mind as we've been talking?
Yeah, we talked about this, I think, when we were planning this session a couple of weeks ago.
And the TV documentary was called The Making of Me, which, I don't know, it's kind of opportune.

(01:08:13):
It's still the case that, you know, the story of my life. And I think we're
all making ourselves until the microwave goes ting and we're done and they put us in the ground.
So, yeah, I think the making of me is still relevant to our, my story.
Because my wife was a co-contributor to the making of me. So it is like the making of us.

(01:08:36):
So, yeah, I'm happy with that as a working title until something better comes along.
And you told me that you have a theme tune for
your life yeah in my in my younger
days i was kind of a a reluctant heavy
metalist so my friends we were my toast friends they were big into some of the

(01:08:56):
real heavy stuff we used to end up going to concerts and sort of stranglers
a few times sort of deep purple the clash strength status quo acdc those sort
of bands in the 70s and 80s,
but I was always reluctant I was always probably more contemporary
I got into the new romantic stuff but I didn't
have the character strength of

(01:09:19):
character to stand up and say this is this is what I enjoy and I was probably
too overly influenced by the the rockers but when I when I gender transitioned
about 10 years ago I kind of adopted Taylor Swift 22 as my kind of anthem them
at the time because it really,
even now, when I, if it comes on, I, I sing along to it and that's how I felt

(01:09:41):
that, that, that second puberty, that second opportunity to,
to live that life carefree again, but then, then I realized that.
I was married, two children, responsibilities, and I couldn't be 22 again.
And I realized that I didn't want to be 22 again. I'd been through that phase, and I had to grow up.

(01:10:06):
And I then remodeled myself on the Sainsbury's shopper, the average shopper
in Sainsbury's, not the one that wears tracky bottoms and crocs,
but this kind of ordinary and plain and just a middle-aged woman in her 50s.
It's kind of where I wanted to go back to.
Find my own comfort because i was trying to chase this idea idealized version of femininity,

(01:10:29):
stereotyped femininity i realized that everybody i knew was running
the other way every woman i knew was running away from this i said hang on a
minute why am i chasing this so i realized i wanted to find my own version my
own my own me which is why my current anthem if you like is It's Paloma Faith's
Make Your Own Kind of Music.

(01:10:50):
And again, that really sings to me that I'm here making my own kind of music
and love me or hate me, it's my tune and I'm going to sing it.
And the lyrics to that really, really deep down sum up where I am today,
that joy from just making my own kind of music. Perfect.
Joe, thank you so much for this has been so fascinating.

(01:11:14):
I've written even more notes than last time that
we spoke but thank you so much for your time today I've really really enjoyed
talking to you and thank you I haven't told the story in that way that deep
for many many years I know it's been really really interesting to analyze myself
and share that with you so thank you so much brilliant thank you.

(01:11:38):
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