Several people have asked me recently what it's like to work for yourself, to run your own business, and so I thought I'd kind of talk about that a bit today. I've been running my own businesses, or starting businesses, since about 1995, and at that point, my then wife and I had two small children, one on the way. It was a decision in a way that was forced on us at that point. My employer had just been taken over by its largest competitor, and we were basically shut down. The whole business was closed, so I was made redundant along with all of my colleagues. So I had to do something, and to me at that particular moment in time, starting my own business seemed like the only sensible option, which was fine, except I really had no clue what I was doing. So if I was to look back on that now, I'd do loads of things differently. But since then, I've started lots of businesses of my own, and been involved in several startups with other people, and one of the worrying things that you hear...

Check out Ellyn's website at https://coachellyn.com/

- And on this episode of the Great Escape podcast, I'm talking to Ellen Chinke, who describes herself as a former biomedical researcher turned lifestyle management and transformation coach. Go on Ellen, I love that intro. Tell us about the life before and then we'll come into the life after.

- Yeah, how did you go from doing biomedical research to coaching? Well, actually, when I tell the story I like to start when I was in high school, because I was that kid who was told, you know, you're so intelligent, you need to do something with that. But, even at that time I was also the kid who I was singing in choir, I was playing soccer, football. I was doing all of these different things, but that was kind of the thing that everybody told me this is your future. This is what's gonna make you successful so you need to do something great with it. And I'd always really enjoyed science as a subject. It actually was probably my worst...

And a little bit of light relief today.

Yesterday something really strange happened. I was walking down the corridor in the office building where I have my office and I could hear my voice coming out of one of the other offices, and I stuck my head in and there were the group of people. I know they work in the next office down the corridor and said "Hello". And they said "We're listening to your podcast." And then followed a conversation about how much they were enjoying it, and how they thought it was going but it seemed very very strange to me that randomly a group of people who physically, quite close, would be listening to something that I had recorded a few weeks ago just as I was walking down the corridor. And it got me thinking about the whole concept of serendipity, Of things that happen when you're not really expecting them to. So coincidence is just things that happen at the same time. Turning up at a place and bumping into an old friend that you didn't know was going....

After last week's conversation with Dawn Apuan, and the last couple of weeks have actually been pretty tricky for me from a work perspective. I took the funeral last week for a 24 year old, who had taken his own life, and it was a real challenge to bring some sense of comfort, and meaning to his family, and to the 150 plus people at the crematorium, at the ceremony to say goodbye to him. And the tragedy of the whole situation really was that he knew, because he said so, that if he'd reached out for help, there would've been any number of people who would have been there for him, but somehow the state of his mind, his mental illness, his depression just meant that he was unable to reach out for that help, unable to find connection with another human being, and that just really left me very, very saddened about the state of society where people are so isolated. So my thought for today is really don't ever feel that you are completely isolated, because that's almost never the case. In...

Still to this day I remember texting my sister, "There's no hope." And setting my phone down on the kitchen counter and just weeping.

Dawn's free resource for Great Escape listeners

- And on this episode of Great Escape Podcast, I'm talking to Dawn Apuan, and Dawn said that her husband and she worked for an organization that provided a fully furnished house with paid utilities, two cars, insurance, and of course, employment. Lots of security, but no freedom. Dawn, welcome to the podcast.

- Hi Stuart, I'm so excited to be here today.

- You're very welcome. So tell us what it was that made you decide that this lovely, secure employment environment had to change, that this was, you needed more freedom?

- Yes, throughout the time, as you mentioned, the job, we were in ministry, and it provided a lot of security for my husband and I. And we had been in a city and in a community for five years, and at that point we had an annual review with our leadership, who basically told us that we...

- I was never actually present, I was, just felt completely lost, completely defeated, completely overwhelmed, all the time.

- This is the Great Escape Podcast.

- We are going for liftoff in T minus 30.

- All systems are a go.

- Hit it.

- And on this episode of the Great Escape Podcast, I am talking to Lex Wooldridge who is a mindset and lifestyle coach, and her specialization is for women who are struggling with internal battles. Lex, welcome to the podcast.

- Thank you for having me here.

- You're very welcome. Now, obviously I've looked into your story a little bit, and tell us what life was like before you made changes, 'cause it sounded like it was pretty grim.

- Yeah, I mean, I kind of always struggled with self-confidence and self-esteem issues, kind of my whole life. But it was all made so much worse after I had kids. I struggled for three years to actually become pregnant. It was a, it was something that I really wanted, I really wanted to have kids, but in this struggle to...

:- [Stuart] This is the Great Escape Podcast, episode 23.
- [Intro Announcer] We are go for liftoff in T minus 30. All systems are go.
- [Stuart] And today on the Great Escape podcast, I am talking to Kenyon Zitzka, who left a factory job and now has his dream job out on the ocean. Kenyon, welcome to the show. And tell us about that escape.
- [Kenyon] Well, thanks for havin' me, first off. And yeah, like you said, I recently, well, couple years ago I, you know, made a leap, moved from upstate New York down to Charleston, South Carolina to get back out to sea. I'm a military veteran, I just retired from the Navy as well. And you know, I was in upstate New York working that, you know, quote unquote American Dream job at a factory, you know, the place where you're supposed to put 20, 30 years in, get that retirement, then sail off into the distance. But, you know, workin' that job I found myself pretty miserable. I was drivin' one hour one way just to get to that job. My wife and I, we...

- [Stuart Morris] This is the Great Escape Podcast. Episode 22.
We are go for lift-off in T-minus ten
All systems are a go
Hit it
- Yesterday was a tough day. For lots of reasons but primarily because we said good-bye to an amazing lady, one of my longest standing friends, Ann Collins. She has been fighting cancer for 10 12 years and kept bouncing back. But the thing that's really stuck with me is how everybody who was at the funeral spoke of how she was always positive, always finding beauty in the world, always trying to sow something of joy, or some uplifting thought. And that reminded me of something that when I'm teaching Celebrants, I think it's the last slide of the course, is to think about our legacy. What is it we want to leave behind? When somebody else is writing our eulogy, what three things would we want them to say about us? And yeah, we're not perfect, we're all human, we're all flawed people, we all have good days and bad days. But overall, what is the sense that...

- [Stuart] This is the Great Escape Podcast, Episode 21.
- [Recorded Voice] We are go for lift off in T minus 30. All systems are a go.
- [Stuart] And on this episode of the Great Escape Podcast, I'm talking to Mike McDonnell, who runs the Business on the Beach podcast, which is a good listen too. And his podcast is all about, well, working from the beach and building a business. So Mike, welcome to the podcast.
- [Mike] Thanks, Stuart. Thanks for having me on.
- [Stuart] You're very welcome. Now, tell us about your life before you decided to run your business from the beach. And I'm very jealous because Mike's in Lanzarote, and I'm guessing it's sunny.
- [Mike] It is funny. Looking out the window now, I don't think there's a cloud. But we did have a storm yesterday, so it was a bit windy, trees were blowing everywhere. I didn't leave the house because I thought I might not make it back. Because it was pretty furious outside, as we're recording this. But some back story is I wanted to...

As you know, one of the things that I do, amongst the many, is I take funerals for people who don't want a church ceremony. And I've had the opportunity, in the last few days, to explore the funeral industry in Melbourne, particularly, in Australia. And it's been a really interesting experience to meet other celebrants and people involved in the industry, to see their perspective on the way a funeral should be taken or prepared, and how the interaction with the family is interestingly different to the way that we do it, and the way we teach in the UK. And that got me thinking, once again, of something that I mentioned in last week's Little Escape, the way our brains get entrained in particular ways of doing things. And I think it's really important that sometimes we step outside our own experience of how something should be done, or our own tradition, if you like, and go and experience the way other people do it. Sometimes, the way other people do things may be really uncomfortable...