Forging Resilience
Join us as we explore experiences and stories to help gain fresh insights into the art of resilience and the true meaning of success.
Whether you're seeking to overcome personal challenges, enhance your leadership skills, or simply navigate life's twists and turns, "Forging Resilience" offers a unique and inspiring perspective for you to apply in your own life.
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Forging Resilience
45 Graham House: Going upstream to impact society for real change.
Graham House shares his insightful journey from a troubled childhood to a dedicated advocate in youth leadership and personal development, underscoring the power of vulnerability and resilience.
This episode explores themes of trauma, the importance of genuine connection, and the urgent need for educational reformation to foster emotional intelligence.
• Discussion of Graham's childhood and formative experiences
• Exploration of the impact of trauma on personal identity
• Insights from military experiences and challenges faced
• The role of collaboration in systemic change for youth
• Advocating for emotional intelligence in education
• Connecting kindness with resilience building
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Welcome to Forging Resilience, exploring for a different perspective on strength and leadership. Join me as we discuss experiences and stories with guests to help gain fresh insights around challenge, success and leadership. Today, on Forging Resilience, we're joined by Graham House. Graham's a former RAF officer who now works in youth leadership, personal development and social advocacy officer who now works in youth leadership, personal development and social advocacy. He's involved in social initiatives to look into and understand the needs of young people, especially those coming from challenging environments.
Speaker 2:Graham welcome to Forging Resilience mate. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1:Likewise, thank you, likewise, thank you. Um, I usually hand it straight back over to the guests to give us a little run down of a bit about themselves, a bit what they do and and where they are now in their life. So yeah, go for it, graham, over to you uh, that's helpful.
Speaker 2:I'm going to dive into some vulnerabilities as well with you. Let's go. If you go back a bit, aaron, what attracted me to your work was what appeared to be your own exploration of yourself and exploring your own vulnerabilities and contributing to others who are in similar positions but might not know it. That that was interesting to me and it comes back to a while ago. If you go back to Graham when he was nine, I've had to do a lot of work in the last couple of years to bring that individual back into my hole, if that sense. I've had to do a lot of work because I unintentionally, unknowingly, isolated him way back there in a tough, dark space and unknown to me. That was confusing and complicating a lot of my actions and behaviours over a long period of time without me really understanding that. So I recognised that I just didn't know how to resolve that or address that. So I recognized that I just didn't know how to resolve that or address that. So I turned really to your profession and that took a while to find top-drawer people. So whilst I've been preparing for this as well, thinking well, where will we go I've gone back as part of that journey, the sort of work I've done. I had to do an awful lot of work on myself, uh, for good reason, um, and I found this old school report.
Speaker 2:So my background I traveled all over the world with mum and dad. I was the youngest of four, so I grew up in, uh, in what to me was a normal world, but I guess, by reference, was quite an unusual world to to many uh young people. So I grew up with inconsistency, change, new ways of having to learn and adapt and apply, so that socialisation requirement became quite necessary for me in order to work out. Where am I now? And as a young person I don't think I really understood that and I'm not even sure. Now I'm a little and I'm not even sure. Now I'm a little older, I'm not even sure my parents understood that either. We just went with. Fun was pretty much mum and dad's mission. But I grew up with a lot of adults, so mum and dad had everything was really a party to them. They were great, fun characters, great role models, and I was surrounded by a lot of wise, interesting, colorful people and that was my whole reference growing up.
Speaker 2:So it's not surprising that I get this school report as a 10-year-old that is really powerful to the work you're doing, I think. And it says I'll just read you the short paragraph and it says Graham has established himself in class to be a character, be accepted Was I seeking that? And to be liked by his peers Was I seeking that? However, he needs to be much more aware of his relationships with adults, where he has a tendency to be overly familiar. I hadn't seen that for like 30, 40 years and that explains a lot of my character when I was young, because something happened to me when I was a little over nine years old Now I guess today you could call, we'd label it a sexual assault, but it wasn't like that at the time.
Speaker 2:To me it was just bizarre and I was too young to really understand what was going on. But whilst that didn't hurt, I felt at the time in terms of a violation, you might be more sensitive to it these days. What hurt most was just to the point where I was confused and needed to speak to mum and dad. Dad had a very serious heart attack and the dad that I knew for the first nine, 10 years of my life, who was great, fun, sadly because of a brain injury as a result of the heart attack, became a disturbed, troubled, angry, depressed individual. And my mother and you'll appreciate this as a parent, my mother then became very fearful of him, maybe not surviving with young children me especially. And I grew up then from the age of 10 as don't upset your father I grew up in that environment, so that's pretty much why I kind of became disruptive at school, became unconventional at school, didn't really fit into anything, didn't really want to be at school, didn't see the point of school. I was very much a creative ideas, fun, play guy School.
Speaker 2:When I came back to the UK sort of 11 onwards, 12 onwards it was a bit serious for me. The academic expectation. I never really grasped that and all I wanted to do in a very simple way was I just wanted to be an astronaut. That's really all I wanted to do. So, yeah, as you'll appreciate, I failed all my exams age 16, hung around for a bit trying to understand what was that about. I've kind of been labeled now and pushed down relative to my peers. That wasn't very comfortable for a young person to to sort of understand. Uh, and then I was really lucky and this comes back to a lot of the work I'd like to do with you in future.
Speaker 2:I met a man, um, I became a typist age 16 17. I left school, left home really early on my own, lived on my own, found my own digs, found my own job as a typist and my chief exec my boss, really lovely guy who's now called Lord Crisp, works in the House of Lords. Now, when he asked me what I really wanted to do and I said, well, you know, I want to be an astronaut, he didn't laugh and I'd already been self-conscious that if you follow what you want to do, that's by expectation. Way up here people are just going to dismiss you or laugh at you and and you won't be doing that then your potential will be influenced by the others. And he taught me age 17 that don't ever do that in life. Don't ever take away the decision of others when it's actually your decision to follow your own belief and your own heart. Don't ever do away the decision of others when it's actually your decision to follow your own belief and your own heart. Don't ever do that. And I'm really grateful that I got that education age 17, which is the best education by far in my life so far, and I wish young people would be able to access that that truism too, because it breaks all your ceilings, it breaks all your doubts, it breaks all your fears.
Speaker 2:And really what he was telling me, aaron, was you keep going until someone else says you can't, because they're just as likely to say yes, but you've, you've made yourself believe they're going to say no, so you're not even going to go down that highway. So that's in in a brief summary. Uh, you could call it trauma. I wouldn't really over dwell on that. It was an experience. The sadness and the loss was not being able to express or explain that relationship with my father, especially my father and my mum. They never knew what happened, so I just set myself instead of being angry or bitter or upset. Right then, I'm just going to use that experience to the very best of my ability for as long as I possibly can. I'll keep going as far, far and high as I can until someone eventually says that's it and that'll probably be on my deathbed, I guess.
Speaker 1:So there's a a long canter through, so a lot of stuff there yeah, definitely, and I appreciate you sharing that mate, and I recognize that to be vulnerable isn't always easy, so thank you for the courage that you've shown there to to speak about that mate. Um, in terms of of that experience, was that just bottled away until, like you said once you, once you left the military and started to I don't like the word work on yourself, but to peel back the layers and discover who you were? Or did that come earlier?
Speaker 2:So I joined the military. I do all right in the military. I really enjoy myself in the military. I was very, very lucky. In fact my whole life has been blessed with a lot of luck and great support.
Speaker 2:I end up in a command role of a military unit and, as is now in the public domain, I got involved in an allegation of a rape case of a young, 13 year old cadet that I was expected to brush away for understandable reputational and organizational need. I get that. But the reason why I challenged it it's not really as altruistic as it might sound, actually, where I, you know, some people think I did a courageous thing. No, I was mostly focused on the 13 year old who was going to be silenced, if I allowed for that, and that effectively was my nine-year-old self, and I didn't. I didn't want that to to flow through.
Speaker 2:So that was the catalyst really for doing what I've done ever since then, quite aggressively, quite determinedly, because it gave me a chance to recover that experience when I was nine and pull that back in here, because I knew there was a gap of some sort. I just didn't know what, that I didn't really have the understanding of each other. I had definitely compartmentalized it. I'd locked it away and that taught me a lot about trauma and how to deal with it, which is absolutely not lock it away and compartmentalize it. You've got to find a way to reach into that. So that's why your profession, people like Professor Mack, those kind of characters I think they're really critical as you go through your life journey. I just wish we could find a way where we could introduce that awareness and understanding of yourself at an earlier stage in someone's lifetime. That's really the focus of mine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that. My strongest drivers is to be able to have a certain level of conversation with with the people I love, but especially my kids about certain things, especially challenging things for us, whether that's something that I'm going through that they can understand and talk about it honestly, or something that's gone on for them at school or with a friend honestly, exactly like you say, to give them 5% of the awareness that I have been blessed enough to have received as a 40-something-year-old man. And I don't wish I had all these things before. I wouldn't change things from my past. But if I could help create two more courageous, compassionate little people with that sort of level of self-awareness, I wonder yeah, the ripple effect of those sorts of people. So I get it, I completely get it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's really, aaron, what? Since, because of those events in the military for the last sort of 10 years I challenged. But because I grew up with adults, as that headmistress recognized, I was comfortable with adults. I've always been comfortable with very senior rank. I've never considered myself to be beneath that, equally, neither am I above that, but I reckon I can handle myself in any situation, whether it's the porter at the airport or the chief exec in the office. I can treat and respect and challenge accordingly relative to what. What is a better world look like? And where do we all fit in?
Speaker 2:So I had no problem with taking on the defense board with some of these cultural leadership challenges at all, because I was, I felt I was representing the nine-year-olds, the 13-year-olds, the young people, the vulnerable, the young soldiers, the young sailors, et cetera, who are actually somewhat powerless. They're relying on the chain of command to represent them true to their needs, not your own needs. It taught me an awful lot actually, about not so much who I am, but who do I want to be, because it wasn't that person. So I took a huge leap of faith with, you know, a career that could have been quite predictable. Now I'm just going to turn right and jump. And that uncertainty led me to some wonderful people in the shall I say, I call it mental fitness space, and a couple of those characters then gave me a really deep dive into me with, by invitation, come and swim around in Graham, check every cupboard, dust it out, clean it up, tidy it up and let me see the light as to what is really going on. And that led me to do an awful lot of work, good work, to sort of circle that square, and I've got an awful lot of learning from that. And because I learned so much, it was right. Now I've got that knowledge, I'm kind of obliged to apply that. I'm going to deliver on that. Otherwise it's almost a little selfish then if you don't then use that skill set. So I've met some incredible people that I wouldn't actually have met, uh, if my decisions had been different in the last 10 years.
Speaker 2:It was very deliberate on my part, part, sometimes arguably quite reckless because it was completely off plan um, but an awful lot of good and depth has come from it, an awful lot of value, and that's why I'm really interested in how do you inculcate vulnerability in a more positive way, in a more meaningful way for younger people, so it becomes more normalized as opposed to fearful, and you put a great post out on linkedin the other day about fear. That was really interesting. That that is. That's right. Where I am is how do you help people overcome fear, uh, and and deliver more to? What are you about? What do you want to be? Yeah, it's fascinating, aaron. Yeah, your work's really really important thank you.
Speaker 1:And and likewise, mate, there's so much in here, graham, in terms of then challenging the system or in terms of going back a bit. This case that was, for whatever reason, trying to be swept away, how did you find that energy to keep going? I mean, I know you touched on you doing it for the nine-year-old that you were and you didn't want that 13-year-old that you were and you didn't want that 13 year old to be silenced as well. But in terms of meeting because I I guess it wasn't one or two characters where there is resistance, there would have been I'm making assumptions here quite a lot of resistance, quite a lot of noise, and it probably wasn't as easy as left or right. It would have been a, I imagine, a very complicated soul searching time, even though that you knew which way you wanted to go or the right thing to do was yeah, I kind of.
Speaker 2:I, you know we've had experiences on the operational front. That teaches you an awful lot about uh purpose and what's what's important rather than what you thought might be important. I briefly talk you through my thinking process, if you like. This, I think, is important for a parent as well as a child as to influences in your lifetime and therefore, the value of parenting and education. I'm in my office 2011. I get a call in the evening. I'm usually in the office in the evening. I'm usually out with the call in the evening. I'm usually in the office in the evening. I'm usually out with the troops.
Speaker 2:On the day. Someone phones me. She claims to be the lady of a young cadet who'd been on my base for camp. None of my staff were around, so you can get direct access to me. So all my defenses, by design, have gone. It's just uh. And she said you know this has happened.
Speaker 2:And uh, she talked me through and my thinking, aaron, was, if you, if you can visualize a sort of baseball or rounders first base, second base, fourth base, um, I get to first base, listening to her and uh, mentally, whilst I'm listening, I'm thinking, thinking, no, this didn't happen. It just didn't happen at all. I'm quite defensive and deflective whilst trying to listen, but I keep going and I get to second base, and second base was more like, well, if it did happen like the way you say, it didn't happen quite the way you're saying it, so it was not quite like that. So I've now tried to again protect and deflect without accept. That was base two. I got to base three, which, shamefully, was this is awful to to share, but I got to base three, which was okay.
Speaker 2:If this did happen, what's the impact on me? Because I'm supposed to be in command of this slot. Right, that's not good and that was really. You know, all this took like two seconds to get through, and what got me from third base, which was the weakness in me, what got me to fourth base, was what would my mum and dad expect me to do here? And the fourth base my mum and dad being really influential to me was, well, you're going to do what the lady's asking you to do, which is find out what happened, which is perfectly reasonable, and you're going to take that to your chain of command and you're going to, quite rightly, follow the evidence through a proper investigation and see where that takes us. That's what our values are all about. It didn't happen that way for the reasons that you all understand. It just gets squashed. But I was pretty determined at that point with you know what this is actually.
Speaker 2:All I've seen operationally and systemically and institutionally, this is part of the challenge. Just like Justin Welby yesterday, you get a choice in life. You either act on what you believe to be correct and you take a hit for it, or you act true to a different faith and you take a hit for it, maybe later. Either way, you're going to get hit, and that's what responsibility is all about. And you don't have to be a commanding officer, be tested there. You can be a parent trying to get through the day every day with those sorts of challenges. You could be a teacher, you could be a cleaner, you could be anyone. So that really gave me a deeper conviction to go upstream, um work with the education systems, to how do we better inform young people.
Speaker 2:When I was nine or ten, uh, true to what lord chris told me, where you don't need to validate yourself to anyone, as it says in this report. You know, why do I need to be popular? Why do I need to be liked by my peers. Why do I need to be accepted? What's that about? You know that that can uncomplicated. That can really complicate you later in life if you don't really know who you are. So a lot of this was about identity. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Because I'm really pleased when I was tested by the mother that I didn't duck it. I was really pleased I didn't do that. The reasons for it might be, you know, not quite pure, but nonetheless, yeah, I got a lot of head. I hit a lot of headwind, as you can imagine from there, but that's fine, I understand yeah, out of curiosity, graham.
Speaker 1:Where did, where did that go?
Speaker 2:very sadly and this is fascinating because I was a commanding officer I had the legal duty of care for everyone on the base. I had a legal remit to protect me. I didn't have the rank to fight off the chain of command. It was quite directional. I didn't have that rank, but I had a legal duty of care that they didn't have. So I played my legal card.
Speaker 2:Someone very clever baked that into the chain of command set up. I applied that which allowed me to take the investigation out of the military into the civil space to try and secure independence and sadly, the RAF instructor that had committed the crime went to prison because of that. That had committed the crime went to prison because of that. So, fascinatingly, that individual without labelling the individual, their own upbringing, their own journey in life, had been really fraught with trauma as well. It was just a mess, and that led me to be concerned about vetting. Who do we check? How do we check, especially when we've got a volunteer element? How do we maintain the standard? It really made me write a senior command with. You need to know what the ground truth is, not be triggered or driven by your bias or your institutional interest. You need to be driven by. What are the troops telling you? Which really the best support I had, aaron, all my chain of command pretty much ran away.
Speaker 2:I understand that. A lot of my friends who I thought were friends ran away, I understand that. But there was one particular four star who got it, did an awful lot behind the scenes and very admirable character, true to a faith, I guess, true to our values. So there are characters out there. I just wish there were more of them. And that led me to do a lot of the work upstream with how do we help leaders become more authentic, a little more courageous, a little more moral in their decisions, more people-focused, more caring-focused, more loving? And if we could do that, what would be the impact on a more resilient society as a result of that? And when you create a more resilient society, what can the world then do, rather than be driven by fit, as I was when I was nine and a half?
Speaker 1:I was just about to say the same thing, and it goes back to a point that you made that I would gently challenge as well. It's that for me, it's all about fear. It comes back to fear what will they think of me, what will I do? The self-doubt that, the potential for yeah, being seen as weak or vulnerable. And so for me, it's not about necessarily overcoming fear, and, in my own personal journey, it's about learning to be with the fear rather than either reject it or distract it, and I just need to let it be um yeah someone really clever.
Speaker 2:I introduced you to james reeves really lovely, beautiful soul, lovely character he's he made. Gave me an analogy because I'm a bit dumb on these things. He said just just treat fear as a bouncer. You're trying to get into some club and fear is there on the door and he's checking you out and and if you're intimidated by that, especially the way they treat you, you're probably going to walk out. Just acknowledge, be be courteous and just walk on. You walk with it as opposed to be defeated by it. So yeah, I agree with everything you said. I've learned so much from that. I wish I knew years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, likewise, and for me, yeah, it was explained to me brilliantly. I love analogies as well, and it was like imagine, it's like tea leaves in a cup of tea. Sometimes there'll be a few floating around. If I'm trying to get the spoon in to hook out the individual tea leaves, I am bringing the rest of them up to the surface. If I accept that every now and then there's going to be a bit of a tea leaf or a bit of fear, the rest will just float to the bottom and I can have that cup of tea yeah, letting it be which goes on to the point of teaching people what fear is and how do we allow it or work with it rather than see it as a weakness?
Speaker 2:I do think that's a lot of the charitable work that I set up then was I took it as you. Would you take an interest in leadership? What is it about the humankind that uh is faking it? Uh, once you get into a position of leadership or senior management or an executive role, um, when you're tested, why are we seeing institutional weakness at this level and the impact on society? Why are we seeing that? And that really made me look at especially the military as an example, because I was very familiar with that.
Speaker 2:What is it about men, especially our insecurities, that we mask, that we hide behind with a loaded badge and gold and cloth? What is that about? What is the problem with being more comfortable to say I just don't know the answer to this problem? What is wrong with that? Because that will secure a relationship of trust with your team. I'm not expecting you to know all the answers. I'm kind of expecting to come with you on a journey somewhere with a bit of vision. I'm needing you to inspire me, but I don't need you to bluff it or mislead me.
Speaker 2:That's going to break me that will break the institution and really that's what that example, that uh, you know that 20, 2012, 2020 period of my life it taught me an awful lot about insecurity of uh leaders as a broad generalization. And how can you go upstream and try and um sort of invest in that better in our educational system so that these vulnerabilities become normalized as a young teenager? How can you do that? Which is why I largely look to your profession especially. I've just found, unfortunately, there are there aren't enough errands in the world. You know, there's an awful lot of coaches and whatever psychologists and psychiatry there's not a lot of that, but um, uh, I wouldn't say that there's an inconsistency, perhaps in the in the standard of it.
Speaker 1:So I'm grateful to have met you and likewise mate, thanks we don't use video, but you would see me blushing, but I do do sit with that. As uncomfortable as it is, my work is learning to acknowledge that, so thank you. So give us an idea, then. What are some of the things that you have been doing to go upstream, to help people, graham?
Speaker 2:So it became a bit. This obviously became very political. So it became a bit. This obviously became very political. I didn't have a clue what I was doing.
Speaker 2:For example, when I set up a charity to represent military personnel, I thought it was always a weird situation that military personnel have got no independent voice. They've only got the chain of command. There's no independent representation. Everyone else has got a union or a federation or some body. We didn't have one, so I'm going to set one up as independent as we can. I think it's appropriate that serving personnel, their families and veterans have an independent body to represent them that they can go to in parallel to the chain of command. I think that also helps the chain of command. So I tried to set that up with some really impressive characters in the military Colonel Philip Ingram, Colonel Diane Allen. Some great work they've done.
Speaker 2:We set a lot of. We got some great support within Parliament. I had an idea of because I'd worked in whitehall for a while. I had an idea of how parliament works as a system and how to get things through that system. So a lot of this was about relationships build relationships with people in power, build trust, connect with them, collect that power to empower the people. You want to be heard. So that led to an awful lot of legislative change through using parliament to move this momentum forward. That led to an awful lot of legislative change through using Parliament to move this momentum forward. That's still in progress. That's great. It's a long burn, as you can imagine, but that's important.
Speaker 2:And then, aside from that, a parallel charity was to look at the education system in Parliament in Scotland using a bit of kind of weaponized the devolution argument here in the UK. As you'll know, post-devolution Scotland largely wants to be an independent body, independent nation, true to its own identity, and I get that. So, okay, we'll help the Scottish Parliament look really good by making these sorts of adjustments in the education syllabus where their interest might be anything that makes England parliamentarians look really bad. So you kind of weaponize that dynamic but for a virtuous outcome. That's been interesting to see how that can play through.
Speaker 2:I'd say, like all these things, aaron, it's I think it is Martin Luther King. You know the arc of the moral universe. It eventually bends towards justice. It's just probably beyond your lifetime. So that really comes down to what's your incentive.
Speaker 2:If I thought my purpose here was to create a wealth of material mass and enjoy fast cars and a fast lifestyle. I'd have lived a lifetime due to that. I made a fundamental shift from that once I realized I'd been, you know, sort of deceiving myself as to who I really am relative to who could I be? And that's the work that I look to other professionals to help me with, that. So, yeah, that's, that's really what I've done is, wow, the last 10 years, 12 years has been, you know, like jumping off a swing. What on earth was that about? Um, but I'm I'm delighted I went for that.
Speaker 2:I'm just now interested in how can you encourage other people to be more comfortable and confident in their inner belief system, identify their purpose?
Speaker 2:I know I met some great guys that you all know, from the special boat services, for example, who do a lot of. They gave me so much gen about you know your moral compass, your true north work that out and they were really rigorous in their questioning approach. You know, quite, quite aggressive. But I needed that, I sought that. So I was just surprised wow, I've had all this education investment in me. I haven't actually had anything that was really useful. That's really useful and it came to me almost by chance, so by coincidence, said yeah, I'm very much focused on and the organization we're soon to set up, with a team that's working with me at the moment, is really focused on this sort of upstream challenge. How do you go upstream and affect positive change for a stronger society, rather than play downstream, where you're actually part of the symptom? How do you do that? There is a way to do that and we're just working through that problem, if that helps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it will and it does. Can you give us an idea, then, of something that that you guys are working on, that is, a and, the, the, the, the repercussions of that 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line?
Speaker 2:to make it okay, sure, um there's a wonderful uh individual, a lady called dr alice loving. She's based in surrey, uh, you could label her as a social worker for a profession. She does an awful lot of work I'd say it's the last intervention point on family cohesion and she helps young parents understand their young infant in the way that they communicate. So there's a relationship that she plugs that gap where there's often an absence of understanding. And if she's effective in that, as she is, as she can prove, as the system can prove, you retain the family unit as one because it's stronger with that understanding and that knowledge and that educational uplift. If you don't do that, you watch family units break down, young children, worst case, go into care. There's a cost to society on that. There's a cost to society on that. There's a cost to the parents of that. Families break down, relationships break down. All of that is incredibly destructive, not just to the individuals but to the employment sector, to the social sector, to the health sector, probably to the judicial sector. It has a lifetime impact and that comes at huge cost financially to society as a whole. So we look to work with people like her because she loves doing that work and she's really good at doing that work. But what she doesn't love doing is trying to get funding for it. That's not what she's great at. So if we can find a way to commercially fund that profession, a way to commercially fund that profession to do that high impact for society, that adds huge value to society. But it also adds huge value to the commercial sector. It gives them a strong narrative that they're actually. You know their corporate social responsibilities and environmental and social governance obligations. They're not just saying it, they're doing it. And that's actually what I expected of the military. If those are our core values, you live and breathe them. You don't just put them on the shelf when it's convenient and apply them. It's every part of your fibre and you need to inculcate that across the whole spectrum, not just in the ranks but across society as a whole. So Alice Loving is a really good example of a pilot study for one of a turn. If you invest in Alice and she does that full-time, the impact she's having for society long term is is measurable in a really simplistic way.
Speaker 2:But you can't do Alice's work on your own. If you just focus on social sector improvement. That's not going to work. You're going to have to take a whole systems approach. You're going to have to work with people in education. You're going to have to work with people in health. You're going to have to work with the same policymakers in the judicial space. You've got to bring all those partners into play for a common objective military yourself sort of you know intelligence here is j2, and yet j3 the operational space is here and j5 they all live in the silo bit. You know you want to cross cut that quickly and pull them all in. Uh, and there's resistance to that. So that's really what our organization is going to try and do. Is that when the system is that, if that makes sense yeah, yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1:Whilst whilst it strikes me as it is is really interesting, really beneficial and rewarding work, graham, it, it also there must be a reality of, of an uphill battle sometimes, and I'm curious to know your purpose, or what is it that you hold true to you, even when rejection, failure, mishaps, doubts come, come along, as they inevitably will have done and have done. What's it you hold close to to? To get you back up, to keep taking the next?
Speaker 2:there's a great um. What I really enjoyed about um flying and I is a really humbling when you introduced me as a former RAF officer, because a lot of my former RAF officers who were also pilots would always introduce themselves as ex-pilots in the Air Force, whereas I always held a view mate, you're an officer first, you're a pilot second. And before the officer bit, you got a name. Your identity to me is Graham. I just happened to be an RAF officer and I just happened to be an RAF pilot. That's all happened to be. I'm flipping Graham and I'm still working out who Graham is.
Speaker 2:But if you focus your identity on a pilot, you're going to unravel at some point because no one's really interested. And in answer to that question, what I was very comfortable early on and my exams taught me that I'm comfortable with rejection. I'm comfortable with failure because I see it as an invitation to learn from that and apply, re-evaluate and go again. I've been lucky enough to give them the chance. I didn't meet the standard. Okay, what do I need to do in order to improve it and try and get to that standard? If I think that's still the direction of travel I need to go in? There's a great poem and the flying world taught me a lot about spirituality, because you get this sort of sense of majesty, as you appreciate, with wow. This world is just flipping, amazing, it's just enormous and I'm in it. Wow, what am I going to?
Speaker 2:do I just practice landing on clouds Gives you a sort of this is like is God? Like, wow, this is, there, is a magic power here. Very intoxicating, just don't let it go to your head. But it got me interested in literature. Intoxicating, just don't let it go to your head, but it got me interested in literature. And there's a great poem called the Guest House that really tells you, encourages you to. When people come in and criticize you, embrace it. When people come in and tell you and steal all your sort of values and all your sort of character and all your and they, they discredit you, embrace it.
Speaker 2:It's, it's an approach of life and once this is why you're, you will understand this more than most with your background. If you can discipline your mind to an outcome that that's going to happen and it's going to be just fine, then the fear falls away, as opposed to being intimidated by it or being upset by it or reacting to it badly. When it happens, it's inevitable, it's going to happen. If you want to be around in this life and contribute to a better purpose, then you're going to get hit. That's the nature of it and you've got to find a way to. You know a rainy, what I would call. There's another quote that I use a lot a sunny disposition is no match for a rainy day. You always look for the positive, that don't delude yourself in a sort of bizarre colorful way that it's all right, let's think lucky. You've got to actually examine that. What does that look like? So in the business that we're setting up because I know I'm pretty useless on my own and I'm still working out who I am I've always surrounded myself with people who are better than me, really capable people, because they've got more chance of delivering what I'm thinking about or talking about. They know better than I do how to do that and they'll adjust accordingly.
Speaker 2:So I love sport, but I never really play to win. I play to be better. So my experience, especially tennis and stuff like that I like tennis. I don't really enjoy winning because that's not pushing me. I really enjoy trying my best and being better for it, and that probably means I'm going to lose the match but I'll be better next time. And that probably means I'm going to lose the match but I'll be better next time, and that kind of. It's like scaffolding. I suppose it kind of lifts me up a bit in terms of where can I really go? So I guess that comes back to that school report. You know, I'm really confident that I had an overly familiar relationship with my teachers and the adults, because I'm naturally going to look with who knows more than me. That doesn't mean you're right, necessarily. It just means you've got more experience. I'm going to absorb all of that and then think about it and then apply it and keep going. So I guess that loosely defines my sort of perfectly imperfectness for one of the two. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Still working it out Brilliant brilliant, aren't we always?
Speaker 1:something I've been working through for the last couple of months with my mentor. Who am I and at points, so stuck on that, so stuck and the the other day, in conversation I said something and she started waving her arms around all over the place because I didn't. I used a description of myself that wasn't labels, it was feelings. Yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 2:Yes, Interesting the field. Just to add on that, Aaron, this guy I did some work with, with James Reeves he, he, really we worked it out as well. It was a an invitation of him to deep dive in me and work out my feelings Not what I thought, but it was very painful. There were a lot of tears because we were going into areas that I'd never explored before and he had a lovely gentle approach to that. It wasn't judgmental or critical, it was enlightening and once you see it, but that was my objective with who am I, who am I really and who do I want to be? Because it's not quite. It wasn't quite complete, it wasn't. I knew it, I just didn't know how and I didn't have the map. So I was looking for people constantly who's got the map here, who's got the map of that? And that's pretty much my driver to the education system was.
Speaker 2:I do believe there's a better map than what society has currently created for younger people. I think there is a better one than the one we currently have. It's not for me to say this is it, but it is for me to work with people who can craft a better one. So this is definitely collaborative, it's definitely cooperatively and it requires similar people that I've been lucky to meet in their own experiences of life, who just try their best, like you do, to contribute to a slightly better day tomorrow. There's nothing more powerful than that. Really, there's nothing special about it, there's nothing unique about it. They just think, you know, there's a bit more I can give rather than just take. I guess that's it. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I get that. It's an understand, because there's an understanding or an allowance and acceptance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll give you one more example, if it's okay, because I set up an organization a while ago, a few months ago. There were some problems in it. Intuitively, I knew there was a problem in the structure, I just couldn't quite work it out relationship issues especially. I just thought I'm going to use this connected world that we're in and put out a really bizarre 30 second video saying I'm looking for some clever people to help me out with a problem.
Speaker 2:so, as wacky as that and some really impressive people just came to me to help me through, help me through it and it as soon as they told me because I had the emotional baggage that they didn't have. They just they took me there. There's a problem right there. And one particular guy, alistair Wickens incredible human being in terms of social housing and the work he's done there to alleviate homelessness, by being clever rather than procedural, by being human rather than systems, by being sensible rather than blunt. Just a lovely character and very intelligent in the way he applies it, but a bit like that Rodyard Kipling poem, if not overly so, in a way that just makes him look like he's just too clever and unrelatable to anyone else Like yourself. Very relatable, very relevant, very recognisable. Well, you can do a lot with people like that. So, yeah, that's one of our areas of interest.
Speaker 2:Obviously is homelessness, not just in the military community but society as a whole. Suicide, all these things that destruct or destroy or disrupt someone's potential. They kind of get my interest. You know, what can we collectively do better to help an individual get to their true sense of purpose and belief? What can we do better? Or just forget it, stay on the hill in Scotland and just live my own life and run away. Could do that. It's just not in my nature to do that. You know, that was evident to me when my teacher told me that you know that's not compliant, doesn't listen to instruction and is often daydreaming yep, absolutely love it, mate, love it, graham.
Speaker 1:As we start to wrap. Is that wrap up? Is there anything that you feel compelled to share, what you'd like to to put across before, before we start to wrap up? Is there anything that you feel compelled to share or you'd like to put across before we start to finish?
Speaker 2:up mate. Yeah, thank you for that. I think this issue with the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church in the world, has disturbed him a bit. I'll tell you why it disturbed me. He had a podcast similar to yourself a few years ago with six really clever people, one of which was the chief of defence staff who at that time we were like that on issues of ethics and morality Not that I'm the authority, he probably is by appointment but I felt there was something wobbly. So it's fascinating he's resigned.
Speaker 2:It's easy in the modern day to judge and blame and criticize and hurt. It's very easy to do that. I'm much more gentle in my approach to forgiveness and understanding and caring. In my approach to forgiveness and understanding and caring, and I think all I'd summarize for anyone really who might be listening or work that you're doing today with other people and yourself I understand a lot more about what being kind means, including on yourself and not being kind as an instruction, because people will probably resist that. This comes straight back to something you said earlier about feelings. Try and connect with your inner fat inner self and your inner feelings and go with them. You know, go, journey with them, explore them and be comfortable with the vulnerability that they will declare to you, be vulnerable with that, which all comes back to the work that you're doing, which which is highly relevant, highly relatable and really important. So, yeah, keep going, thank you for doing it.
Speaker 1:No worries, mate. Thank you for the tip of the hat there, Graham. Graham, where can people find you if they're interested in reaching out or connecting with you, mate?
Speaker 2:I'm on LinkedIn. On that social platform, Most of the work we do is leadership I lose that word very loosely leadership focused. We're trying to influence sort of senior decision makers, so people can easily find me on that. Very soon we'll be on a company website that's about a setup, but that will all come through the LinkedIn project. So you'll also see me on the public domain on some of the work I did in the military. If you just type in Graham house, RAF, that will send you off into the connected world and you'll see some of the stuff that I've done. And if anyone disagrees with it, I'm really welcome with that conversation as well. It doesn't mean what I did was right or wrong. I just had a point of view, and I had. What I did was right or wrong. I just had a point of view. I was in a position where I could do something about it, so I did right or wrong.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Graham, listen. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your courage, thank you for your vulnerability, thanks for the work, the valuable work that you're doing upstream for so many people. Mate, it's a great pleasure to have you on our show and get to listen to you today. So thank you for being you you've got the fight.
Speaker 2:Love to the chickens, take care brilliant.