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Forging Resilience
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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
47 Phil Hilton: "I find that 90’s lad culture, really uncomfortable and obnoxious now".
Phil Hilton, was a magazine editor and writer, shares his journey from the 'lad mag' era of the 90s to his current endeavors in midlife fitness writing.
We reminisce about the influence of 90s lad culture and the lifestyle fantasies they spun, shaping perceptions of masculinity for a generation.
Together, we unpack how cultural shifts have redefined modern masculinity and the unique hurdles today's youth face in this algorithm-driven world.
Phil also opens up about the personal toll of professional setbacks, including the pressures of seeing a publication fail and the crucial journey of reclaiming one's confidence.
Managing work and personal life becomes an essential theme, with reflections on maintaining boundaries to preserve well-being.
This candid dialogue celebrates the authenticity of the human experience and the lessons gleaned from life’s peaks and valleys.
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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, I'm joined by Phil Hilton. Phil's got a background in magazine editing and intervention. He was one of the first editors of the Men's Health magazine in the UK back in the 90s. He now writes about midlife fitness body image for publications including the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph. So welcome to Forging Resilience, Phil.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. It's a real privilege and honour to be here. I'm very excited, genuinely.
Speaker 1:Nice one, mate. So, yeah, phil, our paths crossed a good couple of months ago when I had the privilege of working on a project called Halen, which was set up by Joe Bates. It's an incredible opportunity to. I got interviewed by you basically an article and I was really really nervous about talking about my background and also a certain story, which is what you were interested in, and I was really struck by the compassionate way that you handled my story and that you wrote it, given my impression of reporters and writers. And so, yeah, I was really grateful for the way that you encapsulated, I think, a bit of me through that story without losing the essence of it, and all three of us for that matter. So, yeah, very grateful for your writing ability and sensitivity there, phil. So thank you, mate. Thank you for being so open and sensitivity there, phil.
Speaker 2:so thank you, mate oh, thank, thank you for being so um, open and honest for that interview. It's a really interesting piece to do. Um, I'm fascinated by the movement of people who've experienced very stressful situations then turning towards mental health and helping others who have to deal with their own stressful situations, because there's a certain authority. I I think that comes certainly for us in civilian life from people who've dealt with extremely and almost unimaginably difficult scenarios who then can turn to us, who deal with things every day, and say, yeah, here's some help of how to deal with that. I think that's a brilliant, positive use of that experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cheers, mate. Yeah, long may it continue. But it's an interesting journey and I sometimes wonder with my own stuff. You sent me a couple of things to potentially base our conversation on today and one of them, which is a really interesting interview with a, with a guy I'm not going to mention actually, but um, back from from the 90s, and I just sometimes wonder, talking that matter of fact, about those such high stress environments, I wonder sometimes, does that like separate us from it? And because we think, when we're at our desks, nine to five, the normal daily stresses, oh I, if I feel bad like this, imagine what they feel. And it almost for me, sometimes it almost puts a bigger divide in and weighs even heavier on us. That's, that's something that I've considered with my story and the one that you wrote about as well. I'm not sure what your opinions are there, phil yeah, I think for the.
Speaker 2:I understand that the, the military protocols that are used in those situations, are there for a purpose, in that you cannot have everyone responding emotionally to every situation. I would, I would guess, and be able to function normally, but, um, it is odd to outsiders that, um, a kind of distancing languages use a lot of, there's a lot of acronyms, um, and there's a lot of very, veryplayed, deadpan descriptions of very extreme situations. And it's weird because for me, if I'm cycling into town and I have a little bump with a car or someone shouts at me and I shout back, that's an incident. I'm going to be talking about that for days man, that's going to be like the big thing.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be playing it up and it's going to be life-threatening by the time I've got to the weekend. It's a whole big deal, and to hear guys talk about, you know, firefights and explosions and what have you with that sort of you know, things got a little bit choppy today. It's very, very tight language that always kind of sits on top of the emotions, I guess, but you'll be the one to talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's different. People have different ways of coping with things. I think and yeah, if we refer back to the podcast that you sent me, there is a way that we speak in the military. And yeah, you're right, it probably is just to cut through sometimes the noise and be quite clear on things without too much emotions being in there. But there's also the marines have got their own sort of language and the army speak a slightly different way, and there's always banter about the. You know that the different ways of saying the same thing. A cup of tea can be a wet for the marines, it can be a brew for the army, and I don't know what the rf called it, but um, yeah, and the list goes on and on and on. But um, yeah, we're not here to talk about me today, mate, but no, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:It's all good, it's part of it really no, yeah, definitely mate, um, but I feel um give us a bit of a a rundown on of what's relevant for you and our listeners in terms of your, your career from from magazines and and leading to writing for the times and back in the 90s, I dropped fairly effortlessly into the lad mag boom, um, and I thought you know how it is when you're young.
Speaker 2:It was a fact, a unique moment in publishing history. Um, the sales um were absolutely huge. The ad budgets were huge, um, success was a given. The question was how successful was each magazine going to be? This was the golden age of FHM, men's Health and all those.
Speaker 2:And I was an editor pretty young, actually in my 30s. My first editorship was Men's Health. It had just been launched and there was quite a sense of running to catch up with yourself. So I I was, I was a boss, um by probably 32, of a team of people with their own ambitions and problems. And, and, um, I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't very well trained. The imposter syndrome, in fact, it wasn't imposter syndrome, I genuinely didn't know what I was doing, I guess not. But I can look back at those magazines I've gotten lying around and they're not very well constructed. They were a success because of the formula and the times they were in, and I did that for quite a while.
Speaker 2:And then I was a founding director. We launched our own company. We did this free magazine, shortlist and Stylist. This was bringing us right up now to 2005, 2007, around there, and they were a big success. So that was, like the majority of my, the last about 12 years men's magazine shortlist, women's magazine stylists they've given out the tubes and that was fantastic.
Speaker 2:Success is forming your own companies quite a big deal. I wasn't leading it, but I was in the founding directors and you you were certainly aware of when things were could have been going better and when they were going well and you had all those stresses and then and then I switched. I left to become, to really become a writer. Actually it was something you always wanted to do. So, if you're in my neck of the woods, I'd gone up the promotional ladder and become sort of what I refer to as management scum and what I really that.
Speaker 2:The image I had in my head that I was in love with was the romantic image of the writer who's a creative, you know, looks off into the middle distance waiting for the next line to come to him, and now that's pretty much the life I actually lead. So I have a perfectly nice home which I'm sitting in now, but usually I go to cafes and desks in central London and I sit and I write pieces for the Times, the Telegraph etc. And I'm living my dream. As long as enough pieces come in, you get freelance panic days three days in a row, I think I'm going to be on the streets. I'm going to be on the streets, but on the whole it chugs along nicely and it feels great to be the person doing the thing rather than the person telling someone else to do the thing, because the fun is the thing doing. Being a manager I got a lot out of it, but it puts you in some really strange human situations with people. I'm sure you've experienced this yourself, but it's odd. Management's odd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So going back then to the lab mag boom, what was the sort of formula that that hadn't been tried, that or had, or what was the new formula that you found that really worked, that helped, helped launch some of those magazines into success?
Speaker 2:yeah, it was. It was. What we did was, um, the breakthrough, to be fair, was really um, james brown at loaded magazine, and I didn't work there, but the the initial gist of all the magazines was to appeal to luxury goods advertisers. That was my initial teaching. So it's kind of like gq world where, um, it was all about selling people a watch for um 30 grand, which meant that you couldn't really address the way normal blokes lived. So you could never say we had a load of beers and we went for a kebab, because your Swiss watch advertiser would go up that guy's not going to buy any of my watches. So you had to pretend you had to create this largely fictional character, and then what James Brown had the idea was appealing to regular guys, which we then took on.
Speaker 2:I was FHM initially and so the formula was all about kind of, I think, painting a sort of hyper-masculine ideal. So this is where, going back to that first boom, that obsession with people with military backgrounds or people who've been in crime, people had led extreme and what appeared to be hyper-masculine lives, was very interesting to us, alongside a lot of sexual imagery of women and loads of jokes. And the other thing was we took our jokes extremely seriously. If you'd seen us in the office at that time, you would see a crowd of like six people around the screen trying to think of a funny caption, and we put a funny caption on every single picture in a thick monthly magazine. That's a lot of standing around thinking of jokes. Um, it's weirdly, when you take jokes seriously it's quite a brain ache, um. So there's lots of funny people around, very competitive kind of tense, um, and I went up the ladder there so I became you know, I said I became an editor quite quickly, but that always tweaking that formula so that guys could simply, by buying the magazine, get that sense of being the kind of man they wanted to be.
Speaker 2:So men's health you're kind of ripped. And the lads mags you're very sexually active. Looking back, it's extremely dated. That 90s lad culture I find really uncomfortable and obnoxious now and I'm sure it had all sorts of awful effects both for men's mental health and for the women out there as well. But it was the air we breathed at the time. I'm not letting myself off. It was the air we breathed at the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting, mate, because obviously I was a young lad in the 90s as well and I bought many a copy of FHM and Men's Health. It's probably where I stumbled across the Royal Marines adverts first of all, mate, which would, if I think back to it now in Men's Health. But I guess there's nothing wrong with any of those lifestyles or any of those things. I guess there's nothing wrong with any of those lifestyles or any of those things.
Speaker 1:What struck me is that, yeah, if you're looking at hyper-masculinity or anything for that matter, if we're only taking the smallest slither of the whole pie or the whole picture, that's when I think not necessarily misleading, but it might be for somebody that's not got the clarity or the whole perspective of the situation. So if we look at crime or oh no, that's not my background, let's not got the clarity or the whole perspective of the situation. So we look if we look at crime or oh no, that's not my background. Let's talk about the military. If we look at the military, yeah, it's sometimes some people get to do some really cool things, but the other side of that is there's a lot of waiting around and sometimes those cool things are really quite dangerous and and and the scars, and the, the trauma or the well the memories go on, you know.
Speaker 2:So it's yeah, that's just an observation from yeah, yeah we didn't deal with that and and really mental health all around didn't exist. Then it just wasn't discussion. Um, there was stress. We talked about stress, but about stress. But what we were interested in is people abseiling down the side of buildings or dropping out of helicopters and deeds of derring-do.
Speaker 2:Real life is much like an action movie with Bruce Willis or Arnie as it possibly could, and we would edit the stories in that way and probably at that time, even if someone had turned and said, oh and then I've had three years of psychological treatment to get me through the scars of that issue, we probably wouldn't have concluded that bit, because it wasn't the cool bit. I think. Also it was a construction like a character in a movie that we created through the magazines. We didn't lead that life. I was already in a relationship with the same my wife was with. Now I've never taken drugs.
Speaker 2:I've always looked after myself physically like a drink, but I avoided dangerous situations. I always have. I look after my ongoing existence very carefully. I don't do anything that might involve me suddenly dying, and so it was kind of a we were doing something, we were selling something that we weren't living, had no intention of living. Certainly I was as a bit of entertainment. What we didn't realize is it would become so huge, so popular at its peak. After my time FHM was selling a million copies a month. A million copies a month in Britain alone. It was insane, and so that influence both on women, who were all suddenly judged by how great they looked in or out of a bikini, and for men was how close they could get to this masculine ideal. It was problematic.
Speaker 1:But I guess that's a replica of all. We see the same sort of thing with social media now, anyway, in certain websites not websites, but social media platforms. There you go in terms of the Bugatti is the lifestyle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's different, though, in that you don't see those things unless you kind of find them. So the internet is very different to print, in that you it gives you what you search for or it gives you, it feeds you. The algorithm feeds you more of what you've looked at in the past, whereas a magazine sits on the shelf in those days those shelves were well visited and you turn the page and that's the surprise. Nothing as much is going to surprise you. I don't know what your your feed is like on your social, but it just gives me endlessly why. I mean, you know it's um, punk bands from the 70s and classic boxing, mike tyson or whatever. You know the rubbish I look at, um, whereas in magazines it has a much bigger cultural influence. I think sitting there on the shelf next to good housekeeping, that's a whole other game. As far as your influence on the world around you goes, so was this formula.
Speaker 1:Did that come from europe or or from america or anywhere else, phil, or did it spread from the uk? Or did you know much about that?
Speaker 2:in terms of no, we we pioneered that and then we exported it to the, to um, to the states. Actually, um, and it was very much around a kind of british lad culture that we're interested. In the 90s there was a lot of the swagger. If you look at um, the guys from oasis, for example, seem like really nice people now, but when they first um hit the big time it was all swagger and um, threats of violence and and um, and they were projecting that kind of manly um strutting that a lot of guys and I think in real life you're, you're um reading that you're 21 years old, you're in a rubbish job, um, you're probably still living at your mum's. It's very appealing to someone to project that at you. And we we stumbled across that formula because that's what people were buying. You're always having a laugh, you don't care about anything, you're really brave and you've got a really sexy girlfriend. You probably have none of those things, but you know it feels good to read about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in terms of the magazines, or lads' magazines, today, is there much difference?
Speaker 2:in them. Oh, it's all kind of gone. Now there aren't really. Yeah, it's a huge cultural moment and then it ended. So most of the magazines men's health still exists, because it had kind of, and gq does, but all the real lad lad magazines that, um, that I worked on they're not around anymore and that culture has disappeared. Um, what people do say is that people with younger kids than mine is that online misogyny and online porn is playing a whole other role in in their lives. Um, but as far as that kind of mainstream culture goes it, it doesn't exist in any way and would seem really weird and absurd now if it did crop up again.
Speaker 1:I think yeah yeah, it was my, my living in, living in spain and going back home I go straight to the mountain bike magazines to see what they're like. Rather than you know, I bypass the what. Maybe it's not because it's that, it's because it's not there, the fhm sort of yeah, those passion magazines have survived, actually in various forms.
Speaker 2:they they don't go anywhere and people love looking at the larger pictures, I think, but it's all much shrunken in, partly as my, like my, kids are in their 20s, they wouldn't buy a magazine. It would be completely foreign to them to go to a newsstand and buy a magazine. Why would they do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love it, mate. And it's interesting what you say about accessibility to porn. A brilliant example is this only gets put out in audio, but you can see in the background my Christmas decorations and my kids are nine and eight. But you can see in the background my Christmas decorations and my kids are nine and eight. No-transcript in holland. And when can we go on holiday there? So it is knowing what sex is, because we've had that conversation, because we wanted to be able to again present a part of the picture rather than just what he's being fed from his friends at school who've got older brothers, who've got access to mobiles and who knows what they they see. That is really interesting that. That. It shows me the like you're talking about how things change in kids. And then the next night, my daughter, eight year old, crying because a friend of hers said that father christmas doesn't exist and she thinks that that's true. I'm so, yeah, prostitution to father christmas and isn't.
Speaker 1:Isn't that a yeah? Isn't that modern society, society and kids these days, having to deal with both of those things?
Speaker 2:I think we're in a moment, though, aren't we? Because I'm sure in 20 years' time we'll look back at this and think remember that bit where we just allowed social media to run wild and didn't control it? That was crazy, wasn't it? Imagine that. I'm sure that will happen.
Speaker 1:Phil. What was the catalyst then for Lads Mag starting to fold on themselves?
Speaker 2:Well, this is much debated, but people tend to attribute it to porn moving online. But that's actually not historically accurate. So porn was online up and running very healthfully at the time that we did a lot of the Lads Mag stuff. It was really the culture changed and that the as it does it swung the other way. So it was. It was away from that very laddy um, casual sexualization of women to being much more sensitive and interesting. If you look at the way um a good barometer. If you look at the way um, football is not really my thing, football, but um way footballers behave now, as opposed to the stars of the 90s, they're just so much more kind now. They project themselves as people you might want to have a drink with, and in the past they were crashing their Lamborghinis and getting into trouble in nightclubs and that whole culture for men just seems to have either gone away or gone underground.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but it's moved on in preparation for our discussion today, phil, you sent me an article that you wrote a long time ago, um for the garden, in terms of what happened to later magazine um and and the setback that, the personal setback you you had around that. Could you talk to us a bit about that story, because there's some really interesting things that come out in in in the article which I thought we could talk about a bit today thing yeah.
Speaker 2:So context I've come off of men's health, which is a big success, and I was poached to launch this. They want to launch a new um kind of men's mag for the older guy, by which they meant guys in their 30s who probably having kids and and stuff. Because FHM was a big success and men's health had been a big success and they figured that young dads wanted something a bit different. So I developed this thing. So if you develop a magazine, it's quite a few months in the doing. Actually, you have to find all the different slots and work out and research it with people. You're in a secret room because it was very competitive, so you quietly beaver away with a small team of trusted people who have all signed secrecy deals and then it emerges into the air and this thing, it just didn't take off. And the situation is it was a monthly and with each month's sales I could see it was drifting further and further from target and they spent a lot of money launching it. It had posters up, it was advertised and it was failing and I got more and more and more stressed.
Speaker 2:Um, and I was in an office on my own. I'm the editor, I'm the boss. Only I have access. The figures are kept a secret because if anyone, advertisers get a whiff of it not doing well and eventually they're published twice a year and so it's a kind of agonizing slow death because you wait each month for the disappointing figures to come in. It's a downward trajectory. You get occasional glimpses of hope, but essentially it's not selling and I really started losing it.
Speaker 2:So at I was um, what I would do is go down to the smiths on my way into work and see how many physically how many copies of the magazine were on the shelf. Obviously that's mad, because someone could be refilling the shelves. I knew that, but at the same time I couldn't help myself. It was a compulsion. If I went near the office with my family at the weekend, it would stress me or trigger me just seeing it. I worked in a big, tall tower by the Thames and just seeing it would send me down a path of anxiety. So we had to avoid that part of London. And then finally I got to the point where there was a big family birthday and I was there with my parents and the kids and everything and I was just sitting around the table. I don't know if I can swear on this thing, yeah go for it, parents and the kids and everything.
Speaker 2:And I was just sitting around the table I don't know if I can swear on this thing, but I'm sitting there in company, like with my mom and stuff and I suddenly thought about how work was going and I said out loud oh fuck, and I didn't know, I'd said it out loud and everyone turns to me are you all right?
Speaker 2:What's that, what, what? And I, oh you know and I just didn't mean to utter those words out of my mouth that was supposed to be going on internally and I really had got far too stressed and finally it closed and we're all made redundant and there were tears and you have to sort of administer the redundancy Literal tears from the staff who will lose their jobs, obviously. And the other thing was and where I've got to be honest about my own response is a huge part of this was humiliation. So this is like it's a magazine that's closed. It's not. It's not like being quietly made redundant from the accountancy department. Everyone in the industry knows all the people who hate me, know all the people who, like me, know Um, and I felt really embarrassed and disgraced and shamed about the whole thing and dealing with that was probably the toughest single moment in my working life and taught me loads of interesting lessons.
Speaker 1:What were some of those lessons, Phil?
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of it was around. I'd over-invested in the job. So, because I'd sort of given birth to the magazine and I'd worked on it, it was very personal to me and I hadn't put any barriers between my view of myself and my view of the success of the product that I'd worked on it. It was very personal to me and I hadn't put any barriers between my view of myself and my view of the success of the product that I'd created. And, um, I, I identifying so closely with your work was been fine up to then because it all gone very successfully for me. And suddenly, um, I had to sort of find some way of dealing with it.
Speaker 2:Initially and again this is a very charming thing to reveal about myself I blamed everyone else but me. So initially it was closed because they didn't market it enough, because the celebrities didn't want to be on the cover frequently enough, all sorts of things. But then of course it has to be me, because I literally employed every member of the team. No word went into that magazine without my approval. It was me. I'd made terrible errors of judgment. So you start to see your value in your mind and your value in the labor market are connected and also your literal value goes down. So every day you're made redundant and everyone in the industry knows. So I've gone from being a super hot editor that someone wanted to poach from Men's Health to being the guy that just closed that magazine after only two years, during a magazine boom, which takes some doing.
Speaker 2:And then I just think, oh man, you know, you sit down with people looking for your next job and I needed the next job because I had a mortgage and two small children and you're kind of the shrunken figure, your bargaining power is reduced and the inner dialogue can turn quite dark, I have to say. It's about what you're capable of and what you should do next and where this is all going. And it really did. And I managed to rebuild myself and the the key thing that I was thrown was a lifeline by people I've worked with in the past who trusted me, who gave me opportunities, despite the fact that I'd had a blow and I'd had a defeat. And they said I'll, you know, go and do this. And I found that the skills I had was still there, they hadn't disappeared, and um, I was able to at least project enough confidence confidence to lead a team and um eventually clambered back into some kind of editing career um, but it was um a very, very gloomy, difficult time yeah, I bet me.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting there what you're saying. There's so many things that resonate about having identity wrapped around a thing or a result. Um rings true for me, and probably a lot of people as well. If you were to go back, phil, what although the time, initially you blamed everybody else and then accepted the responsibility, well, what might be one or two things that you do differently because, as your, your next employer saw, that it's, it's just a thing, it's not you that's failed, and you've probably taken some really valuable lessons there from a work perspective that you're not gonna, you're not gonna um ignore a second time around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the main thing I did was I became very focused on the actual targets of the job I was given rather than my own personal, private agendas, and I'm thinking here about ego. So a lot of the stuff I was doing I was very taken with the idea that it was going to be original and different and an exciting new invention, which is all about ego. The readers weren't that bothered about how different it is. They wanted what they wanted. People out there are going I just bought this really different magazine. You're not going to buy a magazine that's very different about mountain biking. You're going to buy one that's good and has the right bikes in, and I lost track of that.
Speaker 2:So that was from then on. It was always going to be focus on the audience, focus on the audience. And then it was going to be remember, it's a job and what counts is is my wife, my family and my friends, and the job isn't a friend. It appears to be a friend in the short term, when you're doing well, and then when the person says, oh, you're no longer going to be here next month you probably won't need to reorder any any fresh business cards. Don't get those printed up. You're fine on that front because you're not going to be here. Your desk where you buy your lunch, that's all gone for you now. Your family's still there. My wife was still there, my kids were still there, but that's not your mate. It's a job and that's the relationship. That's the underlying reality of being employed.
Speaker 1:Never forgot that yeah, yeah, no, I bet and and again, like I say, alluded to there that that separation thing is is so important. So for me, in the work that I do and even in my own life thing, when things have gone well, I mean I've made that, mean I'm good, I'm, I'm valuable, I'm valid, I'm lovable, and when they don't. So this year has been quite tough and challenging in terms of clients, but I still feel, thanks to some incredible people and support and, yeah, a lot of challenging questions and some tears. Recognising doesn't mean a thing about me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great to hear you say that, especially on that. When you're doing something that's there's not even a team effort, you're doing that yourself, so it's even more easier to mistake for something that's really you.
Speaker 1:100 and this isn't the first time I had to learn this, and so for me, it's a lesson it will probably repeat and repeat, and repeat and and, yeah, it's just something that I get to hold in my awareness and and, like you, I've got certain things that I I've I've learned from that. Um, it's much more emotional based. How can I generate those feelings of success now? And for me I know that it looks like feeling what I feel irregardless is that that's good or or heavy, or negative, or stressful, um doing the things that I love with the people I love. So for me, that's like you said they're spending time with the family, um, but also getting out in nature, riding my bike, um, and to continually take those gentle steps towards what I want to do, or know that I want to do, for the people that I I have got in my life and work with, be those friends, clients or family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what you said about that, because I always keep an iron routine. Now, whatever job I'm in, I always have my gym routine and that's the rails in which I construct my life. Really Stay on those rails, because when I was in very stress and work was very busy, you tend to sort of let the boundaries go either way so I can work on this at 12 at night. I might not work out today, it's only just this once, or maybe it's tomorrow as well, just this once, and then the whole thing goes to shit and um, you'll find yourself just kind of beaten up by the job. I also think there's an element where employers sometimes try and blur the boundaries deliberately. And I look back and when I've been an employer and you kind of go, come to the, come to the softball party you're throwing in the summer and, um, join the chess club or whatever, and we're all coming for tequila night and it's to create that impression that you're in a gang of mates and friends, you're an employee, you're being paid.
Speaker 1:When it doesn't make sense to pay you anymore, you're gone yeah, yeah, you know, I think the thing is to recognize that isn't it, and learn to value ourselves for who we are yeah, it's not it's not an immoral system.
Speaker 2:Being paid for your, for your work is totally fine. Just don't lose track of what's really going on this. You get all the scenery, all the dressing. Then you've got to tweak the scenery. Oh yeah, I see, it's just the.
Speaker 1:It's just really that bare framework underneath the scenery that they've created yeah, and it's something that you mentioned it there a brilliant distinction that I that came across a while ago about the difference between giving it all and giving your all. So giving your role is nine to five, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. In the military you say dig out blind, do as much as I can, put all my effort and focus and time into it, but five o'clock, or the equivalent of the laptop, gets closed, the phone goes off, go home to me, my things, my family, right, like you say, otherwise it starts creeping. Um, yeah, so it's a really interesting distinction that I think giving it all versus yeah, I, I found.
Speaker 2:I found that my workouts changed. I don't know if you've ever done this, because I going just lifting weights alone wasn't enough to distract me. When I was right in the middle of this nightmare situation, I went to a kickboxing club and what I found was that, um, it was the sparring, and I'm useless at this, and I've always been useless but then people punching me in the face, um, albeit fairly gently, if I'm honest, but it was enough to distract me, pretty much the only thing that could distract me from thinking about work all the time in a situation that was essentially out of my control. Um and um. I've always gone back to this. That's always a gear you can go to is something quite extreme and physically real.
Speaker 1:Takes you out of your head yeah, no, definitely, and I wonder if it takes getting punched in the face, though, or I think there's quite a few things we can learn to do before that. But for me it's very connected to movement. When we're in our body, we're out of our head, and for me that's like I give the example all the time of jumping into the sea on holiday we feel like we've been reborn when we get out, because I think we're connected to our physical. So if we're not into if people aren't into meditation or aren't particularly spiritual, it's because that that is accessible quite a lot more than people realize. Those sorts of feelings you have to be practiced. But it's why, when we get out the sea that we feel the warmth of the sea, probably taste the salt in our mouth, um, from the sea, um, and you know I mean that we feel the sun on our face. We're physically connected to the feel, the physical feeling in our body, rather than making it mean something in our head yeah, I'm still not good at this.
Speaker 2:I'm still, um, trying to learn how to be better at that. I'm a big overthink. I'm always. I'm often in the past or in future consequences and not in the moment, and, um, it's a habit I've always had. Sometimes it works to your advantage when I'm writing and stuff.
Speaker 1:It's it's good for that.
Speaker 2:But um, it's um. It's not good for me or for people around me. I'm now. Now my children are older. If they're around me, they can sense when my mind's drifted off into some weird stress tunnel. I'm going. Where have you gone? What's going on?
Speaker 1:We've seen that guy before. Phil.
Speaker 2:After that, the closure of that magazine, how did you, or what did you do to get yourself back onto track, or I? I found the best way was to plan for something wildly ambitious. It seems really bonkers, but um, my technique to get myself out of it is if you're um, I've dropped down sort of 17 levels, as it were. Um and um. I could have planned for one level up and just resign myself to being down there, but instead I thought I'm going to make the most ambitious and crazy plan Um, I'm going to launch another magazine, I'm going to edit another magazine, I'm going to this is going to be a sell really well, I'm going to do brilliantly.
Speaker 2:And worked on that basis and I literally sat on my computer making plans and tried to show people and and um move on that way, making plans and try to show people and and um move on that way. And that's what. What helped me is that you kind of um, you you kind of have the ambition of someone who hasn't just had a massive blow to the solar plexus and see if you can build from that. And I managed to do it. Whether, whether I could have taken many more blows like that without dropping down, I don't know, but it worked on that occasion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's something you mentioned in that article that confidence and I think that's another really interesting thing. Sometimes, when we're in those situations, if they're new. For me, confidence is a byproduct of doing something. Lots of times, so if we've never finished or may be made redundant and we're not going to feel confident in that space because we've never experienced it before, the self-confidence things comes in, which is what I hear you saying, of saying, well, I'm going to keep on working on this and not going to let it become part of me about, certainly in my line of work, is that the culture out there, the feelings out there, that's much more important, much more influential on your success than your individual actions.
Speaker 2:So I would challenge someone to go and launch the kind of magazine I was working on then. Now it would die a death because it'd be the wrong thing at the wrong time. So you kind of exaggerate your own significance in in your. You're just floating around on the waves of of culture and history and whatever's happening at that moment in time. You catch the right wave, you do. Well, it's not really about you. Either way, the success or the failure definitely wasn't about me. They weren't that great. Those magazines that were really successful and the ones that flopped weren't that bad. It's just, uh, that's the way it went, that's the way the wind was blowing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, love it, there's loads of different nature metaphors there. It's a terrible thing for a writer. I think I had waves and I'll get clouds in a minute. I don't know where I'm going.
Speaker 1:We've separated, you've broke, you've parted the cloud there, mate, so you can see where you're going. Thanks. Going back to something you talked about right at the beginning, of staring off into space and waiting for the lightning bolt of creativity to hit you, phil, when you are working on something, do these publishers get in touch with you and ask you to write something, or do you offer them certain pieces of your work, from stories or experiences yourself, mate?
Speaker 2:it's a mixture of the two. Um, my, my pitching game isn't that strong, so I'd say probably one out of every five of my pitches makes it through. Most of them are politely declined. Uh, and I have to work on my pitching resilience, um. And then, because I've now got a shtick around being like older fitness dude, mainly they come to me with stuff about mid, which is laughably called midlife. I'm 60 years old. It's not very mid in mathematical terms, but it's probably like those military phrases it kind of slightly disguises an uglier truth. But yeah, so they come to me.
Speaker 2:For those I'm the go-to guy. That's a double-edged sword and it can be slightly limiting, but it's also good to have a brand that you're known for. So I've built that up and and it is a genuine. For me, fitness is a genuine passion. I'm obsessed um and um. Every single um fitness expert I speak to, I believe 100 in what they say and I adopt their program for about a month. Then I go into the next person's program and every time I'm completely sold on animal movements or pull-ups or whatever it is. It's going to change my life.
Speaker 1:Love it, and sometimes it does, though I bet, not often.
Speaker 2:They're pretty much all good, to be honest. You just have to mix them up. But it's just that they often have a kind of very absolute what you want to do is pull-ups. Everything else is a waste of time. Is it very absolute? What you want to do is pull-ups. Everything else is a waste of time. Yet is it all right? And it turns out not to be the case. But their pull-ups are good that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really interesting because I just finished a session before I came to speak to you, but I'm I had that insight again, um, and it reminds me almost a bit like a relationship. It's just I am with my wife because it's a choice. She's not the best woman in the world, but neither am I the best bloke in the world. There is a connection and it's a lot of work and it's just like a, the trainer that I'm with um andy mckenzie I'm not sure if you've spoken to or not actually, but um is his the system, the best system in the world? Maybe, maybe not. He, he doesn't say it is, but it works for him and it definitely works for me. So it's finding it and working, working that plan, because it's definitely sexier stuff that I would sometimes rather be doing, as as you've alluded to there. But if it gets the, if it gets the results, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And also I've got I'm confronting being 60 and um. I've got a lot more interested in mobility and balance. Um, still quite vain, uh, and I lean into that. To be honest, I still like my arms to look good in t-shirt in the summer. I say look good. I mean you know I'm 60, so how good they're going to look slightly wrinkly but muscly arms.
Speaker 2:I want to look the. The measure is, which my wife always loves me about. Good for a man of his age. That's what I'm aiming for. I don't want to about good for a man of his age. That's what I'm aiming for. I don't want to look 23. Good for a man of his age. And no beer, gut and stuff. So I work on all that and it gets you through. But you have to change your whole workout. I remember back squatting in my 20s and then having to sort of half crawl to a and e because I I'd slipped as I was putting it back on the frame. My technique was rubbish and I hadn't warmed up properly and then, going in, I could hardly breathe. You know when all the. I don't know if you ever had it, but everything goes. All the tendons are like stretched out and every breath was painful and they said there's nothing I can do for you. Just like you know, sleep on a hard mattress. Good luck, take a pill.
Speaker 1:I haven't. Luckily, mate, Luckily I haven't. But going back into staring off into space and creativity, it would be rude not to talk a little bit about that process, given again the myths that there are around creative types. Having all this ideas and insights into writing, what are some of the things that you teach or talk about or even practice yourself, phil, when you know you've got to produce a piece of writing um to set yourself up?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, the first thing that that usually people do wrong and that I can do as well is they try and write something in a writing e-way so that you, when they sit down to write, they're not thinking about the way they speak, the way they communicate to a friend, they're thinking I'm now doing a piece of writing. It's a sort of weird performance and I have to use a whole other set of language, vocabulary and rhythm that I'm not used to. Instantly you sound unnatural and odd and it's quite hard to think like that because it's not really you. So I usually when people are going to write something. So I usually when people are going to write something, say, imagine your audience. You've got to walk into a pub. You don't know anyone and you've got to walk up to a table. You've got to get their attention and explain what you're on about before they look back at their pints and carry on talking so they don't know you. That's how quick and easy to understand this has got to be If you're going to get their attention. That's how it's got to be. And then that sort of calms people down and clarifies it a bit.
Speaker 2:The smoke and mirrors around creatives I hate. I hate the word creatives, because if you say I'm a creative, that implies that it's intrinsic to you as a person. You are doing some creative work. You are not a creative because that defines the person in the other department as an uncreative or a non-creative, and they can't do it, of course they can, so sweep that away. The thing that freaks people out most, I think, is that there is a non-linear relationship between hard work and success in writing and creative work generally, in that I'm pretty sure if I wanted to learn how to be a bricky, the more hours I put in to laying one brick on top of the other, I get better and better at building that wall, whereas it doesn't quite work like that when you're writing, because it's that whole thing of. I have my best ideas in the shower. It's because you're in the shower, you're not trying to, you can't do anything in the shower, so your mind's freely flying around without the stress and without the achievement at the end. Then bang, oh god, I know what I've got to write and you quickly drive and run, run to the computer, start writing. That's the state you're trying to create. So people get anxious because they know they can't grit their teeth through creativity and work it and it's gonna. It's gonna come out brilliantly and that freaks everyone out. I don don't blame them. It is a problem.
Speaker 2:The other tip is to think about the absolute truth of what your audience wants and what you really really think about everything. So a typical exercise I'll do with people if I'm doing a writing session is to say the worst holiday you ever had. And what people do is they go on holiday jokes, holiday jokes. I've got diarrhea, got the plane not turning up, and what they're doing is they're referencing previous jokes and things that they've read or seen in movies about holidays going wrong. They are not thinking back into the absolute truth and detail of their worst holiday. Where were you Precisely? Which bit of Italy were you in? What was the building site like next door? What did the building site really sound like? Was it really pneumatic drills? It wasn't, was it? You're exaggerating, aren't you? The truth will be funnier. The truth will be better.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, that's really really interesting. Yeah, and in terms of this is going to be a pause on my, I'm going to make a note of this. I'm going to edit it out myself. I had something. It's gone, oh sorry, no. No, no, it's going, it's fine. I was so caught up in what you're saying. A question came and I held it too long. It's around writing, writing the truth, and there's. So I something, I some sort of formula or structure to help practice, practice that. I think that's what it was. How can we? So? Yeah, there you go. So what's a rough structure we can use? Yeah, let me come back. So what's a rough structure that people could use then, if they are writing?
Speaker 2:pieces, be that on LinkedIn or an email or even a story or something. Phil, to roughly give that sort of framework to their piece, if it's very generic, yeah, I always picture myself crashing through a few layers of of kind of um, false, um, false perceptions around what I'm going to write about and get to the the number of it. What's it really really about? So I wrote a piece about ageism for the times recently and then, when I really got down to it, the most tricky bit of dealing with ageism at work is reporting to people who are much younger than you and how uncomfortable both parties can feel about that. So now, at 60, it's not uncommon for me to be taking instructions from people who are the same age as my kids. I can be older than their dads and that can make them feel weird and me feel weird. I can have some ego in that. See, that's the truth of it.
Speaker 2:But it took me quite a while to realize that all the stuff about ageism prejudice. It's not really a conscious, but I don't think people hate working with 60-year-old men. There's something. And then I've got oh, of course, I've got to tell this guy what to do. He's older than my dad. How weird is that? And that set me going. Then I knew I got it, so I had to crash through quite a few other layers of my general obvious thoughts about ageism to get there, so yeah, so what I'm hearing is it's a case of starting and keep on going until you find that what, what really is driving that story?
Speaker 1:because, yeah, I completely understand that and it's the discomfort of oh is yeah in, if they're. If a 20 year old's telling you what to do, will he say no, who am I to do that?
Speaker 2:imposter syndrome, maybe almost from from there well, it's a complicated relationship because if you then argue back to the 20 year old, you're sort of are you being that guy? Oh, it's that old dick, pompous old dick, you know he thinks he knows it all, then sometimes I will and disagree. It makes every. It just puts a whole other light on everything when you've got that big age difference. Um, and that's what I wanted to write about. But it's, you're right, though it's the discomfort, so it's. I was trying to find the root of my own discomfort about ageism and that's right at the core of it. Not from where there's the discomfort, people a interested, because discomfort is always interesting to read about.
Speaker 1:And b there's usually a truth in there yeah, which goes back to yeah, like what you're saying, they're right, right about the truth and what's true for you. Yeah, yeah, which is probably gonna help me with my, my linkedin posts and my newsletters, mate. So thank you very much for those tips. I'll take those on board. A little mini master class there. Brilliant. Thank you, phil, as we're going to start to to round it up fairly shortly, mate, is there anything else that you would like to mention, or or finish off this podcast with me?
Speaker 2:only to say that, um, I don't want it to appear as though, um, I have answers to all these things. So I want to be real with people. So I always think, um, there's so many people on podcasts and things sounding wise, and I've accumulated accumulated some skills and knowledge. The reality of my day is, um, I'm probably going to pitch something this afternoon. I'll get really anxious about it. If I'm rejected, I'll feel sour and sore and and and sad inside for quite a while and I have to rebuild myself. I'm still struggling with all these things and if anyone else is also struggling with it, I'm with you all the way. It's hard doing this stuff Pitching, success, failure, all these narratives we live with, especially as men, really hard, and I struggle with it all the time Macho, bullshit, ego, the whole thing. Not, I haven't escaped from any of it. So, um, you're looking at the very much the work in progress at 60 rather than any any finished articles here no 100 out of that, and I think that would.
Speaker 1:I'd summarize that by saying welcome to the human experience. I don't, if I'm brutally honest. I don't think many of us escape that at all, and the ones that that do are still stuck in FHM from the 90s and living back in the good old days.
Speaker 2:They're in deep trouble.
Speaker 1:Phil, listen. Thanks ever so much for your time today, mate, about your open conversation and insights, mate, and even those tips about writing that it's going to be really useful. So thanks, mate, great, uh, great to speak to you again, um, and really appreciate your time and conversation there, pal total pleasure, real honor.
Speaker 2:Really enjoyed every second of that. Thank you very much, cheers mate.