S2 E1: Season 2 Ep 1 – The Pain Free Living podcast is back and this time it’s personal…

I chose to do positive psychology rather than counseling and clinical therapy.

And positive psychology is very much about starting where you are now, today and then looking forward.

We use a lot of scaling, sort of between 1 and 10.

So the idea is, if you're feeling around 2 or 3, how do we get you up to a 3 or a 4?

Or if you're on a 5, how do we get you to a 7 or an 8?

I spent 20 years in it, going from an analyst programmer to project manager, delivering sort of decent sized projects and really enjoying that role.

And then after 15 years, the IT department got outsourced to a different company, went home one night, sat down with the family and said, right, okay, I have two young children.

And said, right, okay, I want to do osteopathic.

That is the thing that I want to do that I was born to do.

So I said it was a five year part time course every other weekend initially, but by the fifth year it was two days a week in Oxford, which is where the university was, and still every other weekend.

Hardest thing I've ever done, best thing I've ever done and the worst thing I've ever done.

Hello and welcome to season two of the Pain Free Living podcast with me, your host, Bob Allen and Claire Elsbie.

Hope you've had a great summer.

We have.

We've not been doing podcasting, we've been doing other things that are fun, more fun.

And yeah, we're back with season two.

Welcome to the first episode.

There will be a bit of a change in format, so there will be a few episodes that are kind of going to run through together.

So the first one we're going to do is to look at what happens when you go to a therapist, whether it's an osteopath like myself, a physical therapist, or you go and see a therapy coach like Claire.

What we're going to do today is we're going to talk about how we got into what we do.

We did have a chat about this earlier on and I think Clare's going to go first.

Right, okay, that's absolutely fine, Rob.

My training is in positive psychology and I'm also a neurodiverse inclusive therapy coach.

What on earth does all that mean?

I chose to do positive psychology rather than counseling and clinical therapy.

And positive psychology is very much about starting where you are now today and then looking forward.

And with the idea of we use a lot of scaling sort of between 1 and 10.

So the idea is if you're feeling around 2 or 3, how do we get you up to a 3 or a 4, or if you're on a 5, how do we get you to a 7 or an 8?

What makes that difference?

What steps do you need to take to get from, you know, feeling not the greatest to actually in a wonderful world to flourishing?

That's what positive psychology is all about.

But my taking from positive psychology and really my personal feeling is that I wanted to help people that were very much on the ones to twos and then get, hopefully get them up to like a 3 or a 4 so that they have a better day and feel better about themselves.

And that's where my therapy coaching comes in.

And that's also where my training in neurodiversity comes in.

So that's me in a little nutshell.

I've known you for a while and I know you are still a practicing accountant, but you're transitioning from being an accountant to moving to therapy coaching.

So what kind of made you decide to go for that difference?

I know we have covered this in a previous episode in a lot more detail, but I thought as this is where we're talking about how we became what we, what we do, I thought it might be interesting to just a little recap on why that transition, what made the change.

It was really the pandemic.

I think the pandemic made a lot of people rethink what they were doing with their lives.

Yeah.

And because I was working in are still do with the firm of chartered accountants, my role is much more in the background.

So I am much more working with the employees.

So I was responsible for all our HR and I was responsible for the.

That during the pandemic.

So working with people, trying to make sure that we were supporting them remotely and then understanding all the issues that people were having, whether they were working in their bedrooms, whether they were working when they had children who were having to be homeschooled, all those extra things.

And it made me realize that actually the HR that we have at the moment, the legal, the employment rules that we have at the moment aren't necessarily suitable in commercial business.

I don't feel might be a controversial opinion, but I don't feel they're particularly appropriate, especially when you throw neurodiversity into the mix.

And I don't think there's a huge amount of support there.

I don't think there's a lot of businesses that understand neurodiversity and the impact that it's potentially having on.

On how their employees work and how actually if they understood it More, with some very few tweaks into what they actually do, they could create a better environment, a more productive environment, a more engaged workforce.

So it was really the pandemic that made me realise that actually HR is a bit of a hammer to crack a nut.

And I'm a real people geek.

I like to know how people think and what motivates them and therefore I wanted to find out more.

So I used the time in the pandemic to, to train and study and that lent me, led me to positive psychology and then everything else that I've done since and like private client work.

That.

Yeah, that's me in a.

In a nutshell.

So, Bob, I know you have also changed career.

I have.

So what made you do that?

Why do you do what you do?

Why do I do what I do?

There is a question and a half.

I left university many, many, many moons ago with a degree in applied biology and decided that I would then go into it instead because it paid better.

I spent 20 years in it, going from an analyst programmer to project manager, delivering sort of decent sized projects and really enjoying that role.

And then after 15 years, the IT department got outsourced to a different company.

So, yeah, good old outsourcing.

And then my role changed.

So instead of being a project manager, I became more of an accounts manager.

And as an accounts manager, you spend a lot of time juggling the accounts, looking at the numbers and not working with the people.

And that's one of the things that I really enjoyed about the job is building a team, working with that team, delivering a project.

So that all changed.

I managed to stick it out for another five years.

Hated.

The first couple of years were okay.

Ish.

And then I just really didn't like the job.

A family member was not getting on particularly well with the nhs.

They needed more support than the NHS could offer.

So I took them to, on somebody's suggestion, took them to an osteopathic and that's kind of where it came from.

So the osteopaths treated them.

I found it fascinating.

It worked really, really well.

So I asked lots of questions to the osteopath and he just said, well, yeah, come along to a couple of treatment sessions and, you know, just to get a better idea of what I do.

So I did got totally hooked, went home one night, sat down with the family and said, right, okay, I have two young children and, and said, right, okay, I want to do osteopathy.

That is the thing that I want to do that I was born to do.

So I Said it was a five year part time course every other weekend initially, but by the fifth year it was two days a week in Oxford, which is where the university was, and still every other weekend.

Hardest thing I've ever done.

Best thing I've ever done best and the worst thing I would have done.

And that is when my business started.

Initially called Solace Healthcare, Solace being Latin for total.

So it was all about Total Healthcare, which is kind of where I was coming from.

And then changed the name last October to Pain Free Living because I never had to explain what the title meant.

So Solace Healthcare, what's that?

Osteopathy.

Not sure what that is.

And then I changed the name to Pain Free Living and now everybody knows that the name is on the tin.

So that's kind of what got me into osteopathy.

Along the way I've done lots of qualifications in things like Otago, which is an exercise program for older adults, shockwave therapy, dry needling, kinesia tape and a lot more.

There are the traditionalists that will say that osteopathy is manual treatment, that's all it is.

But my view is that if there's a treatment approach that works, it's part of my osteopathy, it's part of what I do.

Not totally conventional in terms of traditional osteopathy, but it works.

So you know, if it works, what's wrong with it?

Well, exactly.

If it works, keep doing it.

No, but I get what you mean because it's almost like you get to a point where you don't know what you don't know, so you keep learning and bringing in all these.

I have the same in my role and particularly with neurodiversity.

There is so much to know about that and there's been so much research and even in the last couple of years that it is all coming to the foreign.

There's a much greater understanding of what it means for people and how people can deal with it and what strategies they can adopt.

And I, I do feel that the medical profession, they call it a, you know, they actually use the word, you know, deficit and disorder.

And I, I really rile against that.

I feel it's much, much more positive than that.

And I'm not comfortable with the labeling and therefore I feel very passionate that people feel supported that actually it's not a deficit, it's not a disorder.

It might be an explanation, but it's certainly not a disability.

Yeah.

And I think that's because that neurodiversity is becoming better known, more better researched.

People that kind of like to stay ahead of the curve, have a better understanding of what it is and what it means.

Whereas people, there are people out there who will be using definitions that came about 20 or 30 years ago or longer and still using those definitions.

They just haven't moved on.

And that's one of the reasons I love what I do, because it's constantly evolving, it's constantly changing.

He was very instinctive and he was very much a.

He knew his anatomy, his physiology, he knew a lot about the body and he applied all of that to osteopathy.

Now in his world, he only ever taught one to one.

So it was a.

It was a very small group of people all the time because everybody treats differently, everybody understands the body in a slightly different way.

A technique that might work for me may not work for you because you're a little bit shorter, you know, so you adapt how you treat to the person that you're doing the treating.

But he had to change that because there were lots of medical schools coming up around the same time and they were one to many.

So the institutions decided that they had to formalize osteopathy and formalized treatments.

So that a technique that I would use, you would use or somebody else would use, so you could teach it to a class or a number of people rather than his approach, which was very much tailored to the person he was teaching.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

How do we get onto that?

I don't know, but I see that in my world as well with what I would call cbt, Cognitive Behavioral therapy works really well.

I've seen it work really, really well.

I've practiced it.

But it doesn't work for everyone.

Yeah.

And therefore it's all about, for me, same as you, is having that person centered approach.

What is going on for that person sitting in front of you and what is going to be the best thing that's going to work for them?

Yeah.

What do they need?

Yeah.

So it's not one, one approach, you know, suits all.

Yeah.

So yeah.

And then we could go right into the nhs, et cetera, et cetera.

But we're not going to do that.

No.

So I think we've kind of come to the end of episode one of season two.

In the next one we are going to be talking about what happens if you go and see an osteopath or a therapy coach.

So please stay tuned.

Join us for that one.

If you've got any comments on this episode, then please leave them below.

Give us a like, give us a share.

If you know somebody who may need our services or the services, an osteopath or a therapy coach, then, yeah, point them in our direction and then we can help find them somebody who may be more appropriate.

So that's it.

See you in the next episode.