Episode 3 Plus One Podcast Lollie Mancey

Hi, my name's Joe Houghton and this is the Plus One Podcast. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome a lady that I've been hoping to be able to interview for a good while, Lorraine, or Lolly, Mansi, who is a doctor, Lorraine Mansi. And in my current network of teachers and innovative educators, whenever I keep asking people, well, who should I talk to? Who should I go and interview? Yeah, Lolly's name kept coming up. And even though we both do work with the Innovation Academy at UCD, and I've been connected with that for getting on 2 years now, we still never met. So today is our first time to e-meet. So it's lovely to meet you, Lolly.

You too, Joe. Thanks a million. I'm very humbled by that. Thanks.

I don't know about that, but But yeah, it's great to kind of actually be able to connect. So, I always send off a pre-interview questionnaire, and one of the questions that I popped into that was, describe yourself in 2 words. And Lolly's description of herself was educational provocateur, which I love. I love that as a description. So, you do work with the Innovation Academy.

Yeah.

You present a radio show on Southside Radio, An Entrepreneur Like You, I think is the show, isn't it?

Yeah.

You train celebrants and you do weddings and funerals and major kind of life events and stuff. And you have 3 degrees, including your PhD in sociology and anthropology. That is a mix, isn't it? That's a real— but you can't bake banana bread.

No. Well, neither did I walk, and neither am I walking out of this time a stone lighter, and neither can I bake banana bread. All of those things that we thought might happen. No, none of that. But yeah, I'm the living example of a squiggle career, which is having no linear career path because I never knew what I wanted to do. And then of course, retrospectively, it's easy to see how all roads led to this, but they were just multitudes of different things that have just converged and keep changing, which is very exciting.

That's amazing. It sounds like you come across to me kind of from when I hear about you and you know, with that kind of an introduction, you're like Peter Pan. It's kind of like you never quite grew up, you know, you're still full of the joys of life and trying all these different things.

I've got a very can-do attitude, which I think, you know, is important. Now, not all of the time, no superwoman, but, you know, but a lot of the time I really enjoy what I do, you know, to the, you know, I will, I love what I do. And I love being in business. I also, and I'm a very accidental entrepreneur as I see it, but In all honesty, I kind of found my thing, albeit accidentally. And then the other thing I absolutely love is education. Now, I don't always love it in its current format, but I am a huge fan of the education system in all its myriad forms and very excited about where it might start to go from now onwards. Yeah. So that keeps me excited.

Yeah. Well, I mean, given that this is called the Plus One Podcast and it's about innovative education, let's start with education, but we'll come on to the other, the businessy stuff as well. Because I mean, that's another fascinating side of it.

But that's also education.

Yeah, and that's education as well because you're educating celebrants, aren't you? So talk about Innovation Academy to start with then because that's probably where our key initial touchpoint was. So what do you do with or at the Innovation Academy? What do you teach? How has that come about? Yeah, talk to us about that.

Yeah, so I'm currently teaching and I'm the module coordinator, which means I get to make changes, which is lovely, and I'm the facilitator for the Postgraduate Certificate in creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Right.

So students would come to us when they— they're generally mature students, so sort of 25 to about 70. Our oldest would be sort of plus 65 that's come through our cohort. And most people are coming to us because they would like to sort of try on what entrepreneurialism is, but they're not really sure. They might not have a business idea. It's definitely not a start-your-own-business course. It's more, let's take a snapshot of where you're at. Let's remind you of what playfulness is and creativity is, because adulting seems to push that out of us. Or we feel that we have to let that go for somehow, some reason, or just life is complicated. And then also they get to, they get to upskill in terms of entrepreneurialism, innovation, we network them and help them link into other people with current trends of what's going on. But more importantly, as I see it, the course has morphed into being much more about developing robust confidence, or sometimes known as resilience.

Hmm.

Because these are people who also have had squiggle careers, predominantly unemployed, coming to us through the Springboard funding, which is phenomenal by the government. And what we do is we kind of pull them together into a group and we prove to them that they can do things that they don't think they can do. So we— it's a lot of peer-to-peer learning. It's a lot of emergent learning right from the get-go. Day 5, they're plunged straight into it. Here's an actual life problem an actual organization in the actual world is facing, and we would like you to solve it. Here's your team that you've never met before, randomly ascribed. Off you go.

Okay.

So just throw them in there. Yeah, just throw them in there. And what that does is it's phenomenal for our host projects, you know, which is often startups and often people in the social enterprise sector who don't have funding for consultants or all the rest of it. And they have a problem they're facing, might be startup problem, might be mid-level or scaling or marketing or something. They tell us what they think the problem is. And then our students work around that to say, okay, is that problem really the problem? And then they delve into the company, delve into the research. And it brings— they don't have time to second-guess themselves. And this is the point of it. They learn more about how to work in a team than possibly about anything else. But they also upskill and become an expert in that sector of that organization.

Right.

Over the month, they know more about that, you know, floristry, for example, than they, you know, ever would've known before because they're sort of pushed into it. They drive themselves very hard. They find it difficult. They kick back, they get very worried about, am I performing and everything else? But I pass the whole thing over to them and I just am like the conductor of the orchestra. So we ascribe them with— so I say to them, you just need 5 minutes to decide out of your 6 people, who is a decider, who gets the deciding vote if you're at a crossroads, who is the facilitator, that job is to make sure everyone has an equal voice, who is the timer, and everyone else is the stitcher, pulling it together at the end.

Yeah.

Now, what that does is it either enables them to make a choice themselves of, I'm a natural facilitator and I'll step into that role, or the opposite, I've always facilitated and I'm gonna step back. And so they're trying it on for size to see what these roles feel like. And then I'm there, you know, just motivating them, geeing them along, obviously offering advice, you know, as we go. But ultimately what they then present, they have to do a video presentation to the hosts 4 weeks later. And what they present over and over again is A, disruptive, B, creative, but C, very much a collaborative thing of people that had never previously met. So they know their own skill sets more, they know each other's. Some of them never want to see their team members again.

Yes.

Others can't wait to go on and create more with those team members, you know? So, and then it's over and we move into a second module. That one's about ideating a business idea of your own. Might be a social enterprise, might be, you know, might have no funding at all. you know, attached to it, but might be something that's been burning in the back of your mind for a long time or not, or just a problem that you see now to be solved and you'd like to give that a go. So then they have another 5 or 6 weeks to pull that together, but on their own, but in class. Yeah.

Wow.

And, and, and by proving to them that this is A, the entrepreneurial mindset, the peaks and the undulations, I always call them the peaks of enlightenment and the troughs of disillusionment. You'll have them on a daily basis. You've gotta keep yourself going. They're all mature. Most of them have families, they've got children, they were going through homeschooling and everything else, and they do it and they get there. And the sense of achievement is enormous. But also they've tried on what it's like to be an entrepreneur, which is unpredictable, unexpected. Um, the highs are very high, the lows can be absolutely frustrating.

Yeah.

But they also don't have to take that business into actuality at the end of the time. They might just say, okay, I, I, I researched it. And actually, you know, there's too many other people doing it, or it's not a good idea, or I need €100,000, or whatever. So we teach it from an agile mindset. Start small, you know, lean marketing, you know, what can you do now to get out and test that product? But mostly as well, you know, most startups will— 70 to 80% of startups will fail because nobody wants the product or the service. So they absolutely engage with design thinking to say, I'm like, prove to me that people want this. If people want this, then let's then take this forward and see what it is. And then they decide whether or not they're gonna go with it. The 3rd module and the last bit I think is the hardest, but probably the most enjoyable for me, is then they have to create a future plan of accountability for themselves post-course. So I have accountability buddies who check in with them 1 month, 3 months, 6 months. They're friends from the course. You know, I check in with them at the 6-month period. So does the Innovation Academy. And we say, where have you gone and what have you done? And we would have a lot of people going into employment but becoming intrapreneurs, which is fabulous. So innovating within their businesses, a small number starting their own businesses, but more than that, they go off and either do decide on future education or, I love this sector, so how can I be a team member in something that's to do with something innovative? So it's, it's a lot about planting seeds, and for each of them it'll be different growth. And, and for some, we, we never know the metrics truly. We don't know what they do in a year or 2 years or where this has taken them. But I am— I, I would say that it's not like other courses. It's a little bit more challenging on a personal level, potentially. It's, you know, where I'm sort of challenging them to say, okay, give me 3 adjectives that describe you. What is your brand right now with all, you know, not who you were or who you thought you were, but right now. And then they always undersell themselves. And we do a lot of group work around how others see you and what your skill sets are. And they come out, you know, with, yes, new skill sets, but a different version of themselves, which is a more confident version to say, whatever life has for me, I know that I did this at a time when I was at my worst. You know, I was just made unemployed or redundant, or, you know, COVID has hit us incredibly hard. We'd have a lot of people from travel and hospitality with enormous skill sets. And I'm like, let's look at what you've got and where that's transferable to. This is the workforce of the future.

Yeah.

The workforce of the future is looking at a squiggle career. And most people think that's the opposite of what they need, but multiple things that you've done done, where you've proved how you've achieved or how you've overcome something that you couldn't achieve. And I think that's invaluable and that's why I love it.

Yeah. And I mean, it comes through that you love it. And it's really interesting actually, because I do a little bit of work with Springboard as well. And I very often find that, you know, the first session with Springboard cohort, particularly if they're early on in the program or whatever, they're still finding their confidence.

Of course, all the way through the 6 months.

One of the things I do is I build them a tribe. I try and kind of make them a tribe and stuff. I also teach a module on the Master's in Project Management, which kind of echoes your first course there, because I bring in 6 or 8 companies with some challenge. And then I set the student teams to do a kind of feasibility stroke business plan with working with that company. And that's just always an amazing transformative experience for the students because it's practical.

And it's also something they can put on their CV that, you know, they've got a gap, like kind of what are you going to put on that you were doing, you know? And I would find it so many students over and over again say, all the interviewer wanted to talk about was the Innovation Academy and what I now know. They don't want to discuss my CV at all. They just want to know what I was looking at. And so I think from that point of view, it's also giving them the vocabulary, whether we like it or not. There's a lexicon of innovation, you know, words like pivot and disruption, you know, maybe disruption might be leaving us. I kind of, I've kind of gone against disruption a little bit because we've been so disrupted by COVID. I don't want to use it in the innovation space anymore.

We're too disrupted, yeah.

You know, so, but I think it's marvelous. And the other thing also is they sometimes come on this course because they don't know what else to do. They didn't particularly choose it because it's their life's calling. They just go, I got funded and I'm here and I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all of this, but I, I'm prepared to give it a go. And so, you know, all I, all I ask of them is they trust me or they learn to trust me and that, you know, we have a lot of fun. Uh, one of the, one of the fun things we do is, um, do you remember when, uh, when COVID first hit, Airbnb released the Airbnb Experience?

Mm-hmm.

So you could pay to go to, I think one of them was in Hon— I think it was drag queens making cocktails in Honduras and it was €15 and you apply, you make cocktails with them and you have a fantastic evening. The days when we enjoyed Zoom.

Yeah.

A bit more and weren't so sort of Zoom-phobic. And I said to my students, okay, what can we do to, if you're gonna make a sort of an experience, you get, you know, maybe I think I gave them an hour, go around your house and sell an experience that you're gonna do in your house to other people. And I didn't know how it was gonna work. And there's a lot of experimentation and make a 30-second to 1-minute video to upsell your particular thing. And it was phenomenal. And the reason it was phenomenal was it was that moment And I hit upon, albeit by luck, I think, that juxtaposition of creativity and innovation. And so, what they did was they looked again at where they live and they said, okay, one lady took us down a hidden bunker in her garden. Somebody else showed us how to make the perfect omelet. And I think my absolute favorite was the girl who, she took us around all her dead plants in her house and gave us the reason for why they hadn't done so well. And, you know, this one was from my ex-boyfriend, so I never watered it. And they were amazing. It gave— I realized then, okay, what was missing moving from being in person and UCD to suddenly being online was we don't know enough about each other.

No.

So we suddenly got this beautiful insight into how quirky and humorous and, you know, wonderful each other were. And then that we flew from that point. So now, of course, I work that through every group, you know, so, um, and I I particularly love that. We don't play enough as grownups and we don't daydream anymore. We're on whatever devices or emails or whatever. Our productivity has gone up under lockdown, but obviously everyone's talking about sort of how we manage mentally with this sort of isolation and lack of sort of connection to people. And I think one of the things we've lost is the ability to sort of just sit and be bored and daydream. We're in a strange place at the moment. I read the New York Times the other day called it languishing. And I thought that was just perfect. We are languishing at the moment. We, you know, it's not that we have to be either depressed or flourishing. We're obviously always somewhere on that sort of spectrum. But we're languishing at the moment with this kind of a general global malaise of just, oh, still, still doing this.

Yeah.

And now what we had potentially, you know, we had potentially a time for daydreaming, which brings creativity, you know, and being bored is a good thing in terms of creativity and innovation, because you're letting your mind wander. to now we're languishing. So we— it's very difficult for us to be innovative and creative when we're languishing because we're in this sort of liminal space where we're not, we're not enthralled by things. We're tired. We're mentally exhausted.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I'm often, you know, sort of saying, you know, to translate a course that was in the classroom from 9:30 to 1:30 to Zoom for 9:30 to 1:30, it cannot work. And the same with online education in the schooling system. It cannot work because you are, you're, you're, you know, you're on in a completely different Even the way that, you know, we're talking now. I'm not looking at you on my screen. I'm looking in the little yellow, the little green dots, you know, to try and keep eye contact with you. That's not, you know, that's not the way we normally operate. We're not getting those physical cues from each other. And that's very tiring. So I think people are being a little hard on themselves in terms of trying to transform. And I'm trying to be as gentle as I can with my students to say, listen, this isn't easy. If you need a bit of time or, you know, you want to chat, then, you know, we're here for each other as a group. And as you say, as a tribe moving through this.

Yeah.

this. My first group online called themselves the group of COVID-19 instead of calling them by year. And then I said to them, you know, you'll remember this time as the first guys to ever, you know, move. And we're probably staying online for this course because we have a greater remit in terms of who we can get. I have a student in Vietnam, I have a student in LA, I've got one in Donegal, before everyone had to come into UCD. So, you know, it's, it's, it's better for equality reasons, but also So as long as we can remember that we need that personal connection as much as we can, you know, and not just about, this is about curriculum and about you guys fulfilling tasks, you know, there's got to be more that we get from each other. But now I got one. Okay.

Yeah, I got an email from a student who's, who's been with me this semester, and he sent it yesterday, and I think it's probably the best email I've ever had from a student after a course, and he said, like, you know, thanks for the course. You've enabled me to grow, and as a result of the course, I've started to exercise. I'm eating better. I'm now seeing a counsellor to work through some issues that I had, and stuff like that. And I thought, oh my goodness. You know, he didn't mention project management.

Right.

Yeah. But I don't care. I didn't care. Yeah, but he was in a safer, better place at the end of the course than he was when he started. And he was more confident.

You kept him from isolation, Joe. This is the thing, you know, sometimes we don't really know, you know, the impact that we definitely don't know the impact that we have. And, you know, and vice versa. Some days my students are the only people I talk to. And as a consequence, I come offline, I'm like, wow, that's great. I connected with people today. And, you know, the rest of the time is— I don't feel quite so sort of isolated, you know. So it goes— it absolutely goes both ways. I get enormous energy from seeing what my students do and create, you know. And if— and I see my role as the conductor of the orchestra, the facilitator of events.

Right.

I'm, you know, in— if you go back to the— to the sort of the etymology of the word education, it can— I wrote this down so don't get it wrong. It's ducere in Latin. And it translates directly as to lead. And the educator's role initially was to lead out what lies dormant in the student, not to hit them on the head with enormous amounts of work. I love that. It's to pull out their essence. And I— that's it for me, you know, in a nutshell. I'm like, each of these people will have their own ability and their own uniqueness. that they can bring to whatever field they decide to go on to do it with. And as long as they're feeling that they can be 100% themselves and authentically themselves, then they will go on and they will prosper. But my role as an educator is to help them find that thing that's inside of them all of the time. It's there anyway. I just need to just nurture it.

So, so you don't subscribe to the sage on stage concept then of telling people what they should know and No, I couldn't be.

I mean, obviously. I mean, if I was the kind of— I mean, I was delivering a course prior to coming to Innovation Academy in UCD. I was an occasional lecturer. I was delivering a course on gender and development, which I loved. And that was more around sort of how gender impacts upon development and aid, you know. And I was able to change that course into looking at things like policing sexuality and sort of, you know, other, you know, education for girls and sort of rape during peacetime and, you know, in refugee camps and all sorts of other very impactful things. And I really never knew where it fit in their curriculum. It was an elective, you know, what else they were doing. I had very little engagement with the students apart from the lecture. So the lecture then became a lecture and tutorials, and then that became compacted due to hours. So that was one lecture and one tutorial. It was all in the same kind of 2-hour system. And we never had time to just find out about each other. And a couple of months ago, I got it. I got an email from a student saying, I took your elective about 4 years ago. And I haven't stopped thinking about it. And I thought, come on. You were the first person to ever talk in the university system about things that were affecting me on a daily basis. And I was like, wow, Oh, wow.

Yeah.

You know, and he's gone on to become an activist in his area. And he said, you know, I just felt that of all the things that sort of, you know, it kind of nothing resonated with me. Now, I'm not saying all of us have to resonate with everyone all of the time, that would be exhausting. And it would be, you know, a bit of a God complex. But, you know, ultimately, we don't ever really know. I'll give you another example. I had a student came through the Innovation Academy in the last iteration, And she said to me, I'm an artist. And I came onto this going, oh, don't make me all businessy because I don't like any of that. And I actually don't want to do, you know, I want to survive, but I don't want to develop a business mentality or whatever she defined that as.

Hmm.

And she said to me, what you gave me was you allowed me to be myself. Now she developed as her business idea, a swing. There was a standalone swing and it kind of had this garden around it. And it was something you could go into. She didn't know where it was going to go or what it was for, but it was kind of like almost like a fairy garden. And you just sat on the swing in this kind of corner, installation, really. And she said, and it was, she made it, it was absolutely beautiful. She prototyped it and she said, I have no idea what I'm going to do with this. And I said, I know exactly what you should do with it. The Lara Lynn Foundation would need something like this. Everyone needs a little corner where they can just be a kid, you know, or whatever else. And, and so from then on, she sort of started saying, okay, yeah, I could make them and gift them. I'm like, absolutely. Like, you definitely could. This was sort of ticking all of her boxes. It wasn't a business. But what she said to me was, you know, So what you did was you redefined what's possible in the sort of the business world. And you actually also gave me, and this is my favorite line anyone's ever said to me, fire and glitter. And I was like, oh my God, it doesn't get better than that.

No.

You know, so, but that was a different experience than someone else in her class, you know, on her own project. So, you know, we're there to lead, we're there to help, we're there to hold them up, we're there to be a listening ear, we're there to, invigorate them and motivate them. We're also not there for toxic positivity, which is you're going to be fine and everything's okay. On days when it's not, it's okay for it not to be, you know, and for them to know that sort of we, we are there to help, you know, help them nurture themselves in whatever they need. And, you know, and then that's ongoing. I have all of my students on— we have a class WhatsApps. And I'm still— I've been in the Innovation Academy 3 years. And I, I still am at, you know, they're all active on their own groups. And I just see they're all still chatting about innovation. And, you know, even though they've passed the course and come through, they're all still offering each other ideas and helping each other out. Back to your thing about the tribe, you know, that's me in a nutshell as an anthropologist. Find your tribe.

Oh yes, I've forgotten about that.

I found mine in the Innovation Academy. I love this organic approach to teaching. I'll very often change what was meant to be coming up. I schedule by Trello what's meant to be coming up tomorrow. I wanna do something completely different now. I've decided based on what they're telling me and what they need. And it may not be something curriculum-based. It may be, you know, something more creative. creative or something more challenging that I've read about or seen. Or another example, if I may, last one. I'll let you ask the next question. This is great.

Carry on.

This is fantastic. I had these fireside chats, which I love. And it's actually probably my favorite bit of the whole thing really, which is where I bring in entrepreneurs to talk to the students. The point of it is actually why I got the radio show is because I, and I called it An Entrepreneur Like You because people don't realize that entrepreneurs come in every shape and size at every stage of life, in every walk of life. They think they're all Elon Musk and Richard Branson, and they're not. Of course, you know they are the outliers, and they all tend to be white male narcissists for some reason. Mike, edit that out. I don't mind if you keep that in. Moving on. So I I had one yesterday, and and he was getting his. He was from up north, and um he said to me all of a sudden, "I can't make that scheduled time. I'm gonna have to change. I'm so sorry, but I've got my vaccination date," and I'm like, "Well, lucky you." So no, you keep going with that. So I'm I've got 24 hours notice to find somebody. to come into the classroom, or we just, you know, don't have that segment. So, I jumped on LinkedIn. The very first thing that pops up to me when I'm scrolling through all these people is this woman who says, I'm doing a— I have a cleaning company and I pivoted my cleaning company. Well, she didn't use the word pivot. That's our terminology. I changed my cleaning company into becoming crime scene cleaners in the last 12 months.

Wow.

And I immediately contacted her and said, that's fascinating. I talked her into it. She came into our class yesterday as the very first one. We were her first ever interview. And she's absolutely amazing. Her name is Deirdre Murphy. She had a contract cleaning business. She was bringing in amazing money for Airbnb cleaning. So, that was what she did. Of course, that was gone overnight, like so many people's businesses. She'd done a course 2 years previously after watching CSI on the television.

Yeah.

On crime scene cleaning in the UK. She had it in her back pocket. She was already upskilled and she just pivoted the whole thing into this. Now she's got another couple of offshoots and tangents since then, one working with landlords and another business completely unrelated. So she's, you know, and she said to me, you are the first person to ever call me an entrepreneur. And I'm like, well, of course you are.

She's a serial entrepreneur.

Of course she is.

That's an entrepreneur.

Yeah. But at the same time, she, she said, oh, I don't do, you know, I don't talk in front of people. I'm not very confident. And my students were just blown away because she was 100% herself. Yeah. And they were all messaging her afterwards on LinkedIn saying, you were amazing. You were wonderful. She was just herself, and she talked about, yeah, I love what I do, and I'm just, you know, and I said, what's the hardest thing? And she said, getting up in the morning. If you can get up, you can do anything after that, but you just got to get up. And I was like, I love it. And she's absolutely right. For all of us, including myself, who is seen as a very positive person, there's days where I'm like, I just can't. I just can't, you know, and you do, you have to. to. You have to get up and just see what the day has for you. Be very gentle with yourself. But, you know, I just, I loved that. And I loved the fact that also, she had the courage to trust me enough, not knowing me at all, to come in and see what it would be like not being comfortable with public speaking at all, or any of those things. And she's a marvelous woman. And I'm hoping that, you know, to help her network with other people that I know to sort of perhaps you know, assist her as she moves forwards. And that's it. It's a tribe. And people that are in this space, you know, need to know they're not on their own. They're, you know, we're all there in whatever shape or format, you know, around and about to help each other.

And that, yeah, and I agree with you with the Innovation Academy. I think that's the feeling I get with everybody that's kind of involved with the Innovation Academy. There's this feeling feeling that everybody's there to help each other. They're all positive. But I want to come back to what you just said, and it harks back to what you said a few minutes ago as well. So, you know, you're human like all the rest of us. Yeah. So how are you gentle with yourself when you do wake up and you just don't want to get up and you've got one of those days? Yeah. How do you look after Lolly when you're not feeling happy? I will And, you know, bubbly.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm myself in class. So, you know, some days I'm a little— I'm not quite as ebullient as others. I used to be more performative in class and not anymore. And I think that's great. So that takes some of the pressure off, but also, you know, again, sort of pushes back against this idea of toxic positivity, which is, hi guys, everything's amazing, you know, all of the time, which is exhausting. You know, sometimes that's nice, but not always. Other times I would be very aware of the fact that— so I don't schedule anything on a Wednesday morning. I teach Monday, Tuesday, and then my other group starts Thursday, Friday. I don't have anything before 12 o'clock on a Wednesday. That's a day of just allowing myself to stay in bed just that little bit longer. Now I'm on my laptop, perhaps I'm reading things, I'm looking at things.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not completely switched off. But apart from that, also then same as everybody else, you know, trying to get the exercise in, you know, a 5K. And that's another that's done very well for us, I think. You know, most of us knew we should probably be doing a 5K walk most days, and most of us weren't. Now we are for our sanity and our very, you know, basic existence, and I intend to keep that on. Um, and then it's, you know, reaching out to people and knowing, um, knowing that you can just be you whenever you need to be. You know, I think this pressure to constantly be okay is exhausting.

It is.

Um, you know, and I, I would have 2 or 3 incredible friends around the world, we where I know that, you know, they know that if I'm calling them and I'm not feeling great, they'll just talk to me and hear me. They won't say, you'll be fine, or any of those sort of platitudes. They'll just say, God, that's, yeah, that's a bit rough right now, you know? And then I find that it just sort of disappears and off I go again. So it's undulations like everybody else.

Yeah.

I like to be connected. And when I'm doing new things, that gets me excited. So I'm aware of the fact that sort of, I possibly do quite a lot compared to most people. And so there's times when I absolutely then can't take on anything more. And then I know, okay, this is a time where I need to kind of take to ground a little bit more. And this is another reason why I talk to entrepreneurs about their real story, their authentic story, because I remember a wonderful entrepreneur in his late 20s, very, very successful. had been— become a millionaire by the time he was 27. He was Irish. I won't tell you what business he was in because it'd be too obvious. But he said to us in the end, when we brought him in for our fireside chat, when he got to a certain amount where everyone was going, oh my God, that's incredible. He'd scaled to 100 different countries, like phenomenal rise. He said that on that particular day, he remembers standing in the shower and crying into the shower so nobody would hear And I just was like, I absolutely get that.

Mm-hmm.

Because it's everyone else's perception of you of, oh my God, your life's amazing. Look at what you've achieved and how much you have to work to get to that point and how lucky you have to be and how connected you have to be and all of those different things that at the time when the rest of the world thought he would be the happiest he ever could have been, he was actually at his most despondent. And I, you know, so I try to dispel the myth Myth of the fact that everything's fabulous all of the time, because it absolutely isn't. But when you do get something, and I call it alchemy, when you've created something out of an idea yourself, you've tested it, and you haven't put your life savings into it, and you think it's going to work, and you know you've got a bit of you know you've got a customer discovery and empathy behind you, so you know that people want it. There is nothing more exciting or more invigorating for me as an entrepreneur than. it happening, you know, and it working and people engaging with it. You've made this out of nothing, you know.

And sales are coming, sales are coming in and people want this. And this was my idea and people want it. It's magic.

People want me. People want me. And this, this is the thing. And, and so, you know, whilst, whilst on, on the course, the students are, are reticent to believe me sometimes. What happens is afterwards when, you know, some of them will go off and do it and all sorts of amazing things will happen to some of them, a few of them, not all of them, a few of them.

Yeah.

You know, I've seen one student with great traction about Rethinking Rural Ireland initiative that came through last iteration of the course. Phenomenal. Immediately he was sucked up by RTE, you know, Ireland's Eye nationwide. And I knew it anyway when he was there on the course, you know, a year before he'd been overseas doing aid work in Afghanistan. He'd come home because of COVID didn't want to be home, you know, potentially.

Yeah.

You know, it hadn't been in the big plan of things. And he was quite rural. And his whole trajectory now of what he's doing has changed. So, you know, it's that, it's transformatory, which is very, very exciting. But again, you really have to watch out this idea of giving everything 24/7. Nobody can do that. And you have to decide what to do, what you're going to do. I see the signs now I just get a little bit like kind of more emotional perhaps, or a little less interested in stuff.

Hmm.

And then I'm like, okay, I gotta take a little bit of a break. Um, and, and the other thing is entrepreneurs don't take, don't take breaks. We don't though. The work-life balance is an absolute misnomer. There isn't one. We always qualify it by saying, oh, I love what I do. It's not work, but you have to, have to step away from it. You know? So at some point or another, I will hopefully be down in Lahinch with my daughter this summer in surf camp, Third year— well, I attempted 3 years ago to put it on my bucket list approaching 50. I'm going to learn to surf. So many— I haven't managed to get on my— even on— I could get on the board. I can't even get up onto my knees on the board, but I will do, you know.

Your daughter will show you how to do it. Yeah, of course.

You know what I mean? So I'm going to keep trucking away at that. And, you know, that hopefully then will stand me in good stead for what's coming in September, you know.

I love— but even though you obviously work hard and you've got lots of things going on, I love your Wednesday morning thing. I do the same with Monday morning. I mean, I normally teach Monday afternoon and Monday evening and then maybe Tuesday morning as well and stuff. So Monday mornings, I very rarely put anything in the diary. And so you've got to have kind of intention, haven't you? You've got to set aside little blocks. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a whole day. It could just be a few hours or whatever. But that's a block.

Yeah, it is. It's absolutely fundamental. I do remember someone, whether it's true or not, I don't know, someone telling me that Winston Churchill used to sit in bed one day a month, smoke a cigar and drink whiskey. I was like, I mean, you know, I'm not a whiskey drinker or a cigar smoker. But that just sounds marvelous.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah. One day a week. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't one day a month, you know, but, you know, in terms of when you need to do that. I remember also telling somebody who was a new mom, and she was also an entrepreneur. And she was like, I just don't know how I'm going to cope with that. And I said, you know, once— I said, once you've got your childcare sorted out, I said, you know what you need to do? Once every couple of weeks, or even once a month, make a date with yourself. I used to go on a Friday afternoon. So probably 1 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, I'd go see a movie by myself. And I would have it scheduled in my diaries and meet And I felt ever so guilty at the beginning. And I was like, why do I feel guilty for taking time off to just be here? And I love going to the movies by myself. It just feels such a treat. And you don't have to sit by anybody munching popcorn. That's one of my pet hates.

Yes, I love that. So, I mean, the education stuff is amazing. What about, what about the other stuff, the radio show you've kind of touched on, but tell me about this other side of Lolly, the celebrant bit, because that's a completely different kind of— but I suppose I can see the connection. But where did that come from?

Well, it came out of some work I was doing. So I was in the Department of what was called Social Justice, it's now Social Policy in UCD. I was doing some research on the marriage referendum or the upcoming as it was, marriage referendum in Ireland. And no, I have very little business experience myself. So I was going for— I was doing a PhD. So you only do that predominantly if you want to lecture in university. It's the key to that door. That's what I wanted. And so I was jumping through the hoops I needed to do to make that happen. I was also teaching. I was in Trinity. So I was also teaching 5 years on a class in sociology and anthropology there as a teaching assistant. So I was busy with all of of that, moved over to UCD with a new role teaching gender and development, and then was doing some extra research. The research that I was doing was interviewing people qualitatively around what they thought the referendum was about, what marriage meant to them, and all sorts of other things, you know, from all echelons of the society, so both gay and straight. And so what they were saying to me was, there isn't really any alternative. So the registry office is the poor sister to the church as they saw it, you know, it's kind of not as nice, it's kind of no bells and whistles, no big reveal down the aisle. There's, you know, there's no participation really. And, you know, it's kind of just a bit clinical.

Yeah.

Um, and so then there's the church with all the amazing acoustics and all of, you know, the rest of it, the pomp and the ceremony, of course. And I started looking at this gap in the middle. And I started thinking, God, you're absolutely right. And then what I found out was, there is no group that will marry you or can marry you without putting their own philosophy into the heart of it. And that really got me interested because as somebody that champions equality, I was thinking, wow, so, you know, even if you're having a secular society with the humanists, they're still talking about humanism, kind of, you know, promoting what they do and what they have. There is no group that just tells your story, albeit, you know, your love story or your journey to and through your love story as a couple, or in a funeral, your life tribute or your eulogy.

Yeah.

Everyone is putting their own spin on it. What about if you were completely just about the couple or the deceased or the family and how that would look. And so at the time, I wasn't thinking about funerals. But so a small seed of an idea was planted. Then I got through my viva for my PhD, started the hard job of looking for work in a recession in 2008.

Yes.

And went, okay, great. Now I'm unemployable in a, you know, completely all of this was for nothing. I'm doing what everyone else does. I'm moving to Canada. So I started looking at Canada, was offered the only job that I haven't, you know, I just basically hadn't published, so it was complicated. So, you know, I had the PhD, I had the teaching experience. So a university in northern Manitoba, which is the very, very snowy part of Canada, said to me, okay, we'll, you know, we'll interview you. It's the closest I ever got. And then I got the fear of, oh my God, I don't want to leave Ireland. It's home. You know, I don't want to live somewhere that's freezing cold. I don't want to wear checky shirts. I don't want to. All the way through to Ski-Doos to work and everything. else. And so I, from, I just kept thinking about this idea of what about if you could just have your wedding as the way you wanted it? So anyway, I came up with the idea. And then I do a bit of competitive storytelling. I really like to tell a good story. And I'm all right at it. I've done quite well in it. So, and I'm still, I'm still competing even now. So I did, I was at a competitive storytelling night, and I saw someone tell a story that was just phenomenal, had everything, made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And I went up him afterwards and said, I've got this idea in my head for storytellers to do weddings, you know, and tell the story of the couple as the heart of the ceremony. And, you know, would you be interested? I don't know what you do for a day job, but would you be interested? And he said, I'd be interested in hearing more about it. So we met, and I did what I now know to be my first pitch. Of course, at the time, I didn't know I was pitching. Told, you know, what I wanted to do. And then he looked at me after about 20 minutes and said, how are you funding this? And I said, I have no idea. I've got debts. I've just come out of a PhD. I have no work. I have no idea. I think I'll go to the LEO and, you know, see, see what the local enterprise office can offer me, you know, as an idea. Also, you know, not knowing anything about that process either. And then he said to me, I'd be very interested in making you an offer for 20% of your business. And I had one of those moments where you're like, do you remember Candid Camera?

I do, I do. That ages me, doesn't it?

Is someone playing a joke on me?

That's right, where's the caveat?

And then I said to him, who are you? What do you do? And he told me, and he said, I'm an angel investor. Of course, didn't even know what that was, so now I do. And he said, I'm always looking for small businesses. It was just fate, fortune, whatever it was.

It was just like that.

And I said to him, but 20% of nothing is still nothing. It doesn't exist yet. And then he said, um, I actually, I think whatever you turn your hand to, I actually think that I'm buying into you. So whatever it was that I talked about with the passion that I talked about it with, that was what he wanted. So, you know, he believed that I could make something work. So 2 weeks later, this is such a crazy story and not the way most people get into this. 2 weeks later, no contract, nothing. He passed me a check in a cafe in Dublin and said, and a handshake, check and a handshake.

Yep.

With that check, I launched the company, registered the company, went to Radio Nova and put almost all of what he offered on a year's advertising. 'Cause I just thought, go big or go home.

Yeah.

That was Marry Me, Ireland, my first business. By 3 months in, I remember hearing it the first time on the radio, driving a little old battered up Polo, nearly crashing into the lamppost, going, oh my God, I'm— that's me, you know? And we were so inundated with calls, you know, people contacting us that, you know, and to say us, you know, I was like, I'm gonna need some more people to do this. So very quickly we were booked for 50 weddings the first year, uh, all over the country. I then said to people I knew who were actors, I'm going to need people. So I started looking at what that might look like. Then I said, of course, from my work, you know, creating courses, I know we need to standardize all our training is the same. I'm gonna start a training college. And that was 6 months later. So I started the second business, the Irish Institute of Celebrants, 6 months later. I wrote all the courses. I found all the trainers, a lot from performative arts, because it was never taught in that way before in any other country. Still isn't. It was always taught sort of, you know, as curriculum. I teach it very much as a production piece. You know, you are— you're authentically yourself as a celebrant, but you're performing the story for the couple. We then moved into funerals at the bequest of the Irish Association of Funeral Directors. And yeah, it's going brilliantly and I love it. And I teach Love Story Masterclass one Sunday a month and the rest is all online now. So yeah, I love it.

I love it.

It's my— I mean, you know, when people talk about their babies as their business, do you know what I mean? It definitely was for a while. I've moved away from that mistake now a little bit, I think. But at the same time also, So it's been amazing. I meet incredible people. In the last funeral group that I had, I had an ex-Carmelite priest in his 60s who'd loved his pastoral care, but came out as gay as an older man and wanted to carry it on. So he trained with us to do funerals. And, you know, I just— it's that. That's— it's this that gets me so happy, makes me so happy, you know, seeing people going off then into their communities to take over the role potentially that there's a gap where the church is perhaps receding for people. You know, as we become more secular in Ireland, we are not throwing out Catholicism. We are very unique in that. You know, we are still identifying predominantly as Catholic, but we are reconfiguring what that means to us. We might not be going to church anymore, but we still need those rituals. So yeah, both businesses came out of ritual, one out of ritual and education, And then the Innovation Academy found me.

Yes.

And now I'm here.

The ritual thing is fascinating because I remember the first day of the Diploma in Creativity, and I was fortunate to do it in the shack in the O'Brien Building at UCD with Alan Morgan. And unbeknownst to me, it was Alan's first day teaching that.

Okay.

We gave him such a hard time. We didn't realize it was his first time out. But he took us through this thing where we had to kind of step into the program and we actually literally had to step over the rope and kind of invited us in. And I reflected on that later and thought that was a really good bit of theatre and a good bit of kind of—

Right.

Wasn't it? And it made Yeah.

And it's also about commitment and—

Yes. Being true to it.

Physical movement.

Yeah.

It's a physical commitment. Yeah. I mean, we teach choreography as part of the, the, you know, the wedding service. And, and, and people just like, what is there to choreograph? The couple come up, the couple sit down, you know? And I'm like, if when you're, you're facing everybody and everyone's looking at you and you have to deliver authentic With warmth, a script that you've co-written with the couple, and you have to make it look seamless as to where they go and what they do. It looks so easy when you— before you try it, and then when you break it down into the parts, it's actually quite complex. You know, it's a dance. It's beautiful.

Yeah.

My favorite thing I've ever— I mean, it's ever been said to me, um, was actually after a funeral, which is someone said to me, how long had you known Mary? And I went, I never matter. And then I was really happy because they, they really thought I knew her so well by what we'd been able to do in the consultation with the family, you know, and tell her story truly lived authentically, you know. Um, oh, we've all been to ceremonies, especially funerals, where we don't recognize that person from what's said. Oh, the eulogy's an afterthought, or it's not even allowed, or, you know, all of those things. This is a life story. When do we get to tell an oral history these days. Very rare.

It's gone, hasn't it? So you're almost a shanachie, you're almost taking that bardic tradition.

And I just think it's fundamentally important for us as a society to tell our story, you know, at whatever stage. And this is where my love of storytelling comes from. We don't own our story.

I didn't know you were— I didn't know you had that love of story. It's one of my questions that I don't need to ask it anymore because, I mean, it's just— and I want to, when we've finish today, I want to hear more about competitive storytelling because I love that idea. That's fantastic. I think it's great.

I mean, the way that it works, I do a lot of my work with Dublin Story Slam, who came out of a group from the States called The Moth. It's moth.org. And they have true-life authentic stories. And what they do is they put out a theme, and then you have to think of a story, and sometimes there's a week to do it. Think of a story. It's got to be said with no script, but you can obviously memorize it or rehearse 5 to 7 minutes, and it's got to be true. And the stuff that comes out is just phenomenal. Yeah, I love it.

Fantastic.

Wow.

Right. Couple of, couple of off-the-wall questions for you. Yeah. Nothing to do with anything we've talked about so far.

Okay.

Why do you follow Jacinda Ardern on LinkedIn?

My ex-boyfriend was Māori. And I started to look a lot more at New Zealand politics.

Right. Okay.

That's the bottom line.

So that's the bottom line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was— I'm very, I'm very interested by the, by the fact that we always put that word female, female, female politician, female leader, you know, just a leader. Yeah, just a leader, you know. Um, that, you know, there was, there was quite a few things that came, have come out over the last sort of 18 months around female leaders around the world and what they've achieved and what they've done. And I would love to move to a place where it's just, look at this amazing leader.

Yeah.

And look at her style or his style.

Or why does it always have to be a female entrepreneur or whatever, as if that's a different beast to a male entrepreneur? Yeah.

The only time that that really comes into play is in the numbers. So we would have probably 80% male to 20% female in Ireland of entrepreneurs. And then when you look at founders and high-level CEOs, even less. And that's got to come down to culture. And that's got to come down to second shift, third shift, and all sorts of other things culturally that the education system, primary system finishing at halfway through the day.

Mm-hmm.

Because when it was conceptualized, it was mainly stay-at-home mothers. Even with that, and this is another one of my bugbears, I don't know how I've gone there from Jacinda Ardern, but at the school gates, what you will find on almost every primary school is probably 90% women.

Yes.

And if you actually talk to those women, they're professional, most of them. So aren't they therefore just taking a half day or working just mornings? So what, you know, and I know that it's a negotiation between you and your partner as to, you know, who does what and where you're doing it. doing it, why is it still weighted that way? I'd love to see it 50/50, you know, or whatever configuration needs to be done.

Yeah, why aren't the guys there?

Yeah, you know, or in fact, let's have the school day finishing at 4:30 so we can actually all, you know, do what we need to do. I mean, I don't know very many stay-at-home moms. I don't know people that can afford to have that privilege or to do that, you know. I remember a class of mine at Trinity actually reminding me just before I moved over to UCD, which is probably probably 6 or 7 years ago now. I remember asking my students, undergrads in sociology, you know, who here will leave Ireland? Now, don't forget, we were prior to, just prior to the recession at this point. And, you know, everyone's hand went up. I'm leaving Ireland too, you know, it's terrible. I was trying to sort of gauge where they're all going and what they were doing. And I remember one girl, and she said, no, not me. And I said, oh, great. What are you, you know, what are your intentions? And she said, I intend to just stay here. I want to have And there was an audible ooh in the class, which I was really shocked from because, you know, these students were 19 or 20 years old. It was actually almost unacceptable that she had said that in this day and age, you know, when you're meant to be—

Yes.

Ascribing—

Going for a career or whatever. Yeah. As if children aren't a career, kind of. Yeah.

As if that's not work.

Yes, indeed.

You know, I guess, yeah. I found, I found that really surprising, that just the way that that generation was, was seeing it, or was, was feeling it, you know. So other people saying— and I remember she said to me afterwards, someone had said to her, why did you bother coming to university? Now there's one. As if learning is just from the qualification. Now we could have a whole other podcast about that.

Hey, okay, we're almost out of Now, the podcast is called Plus One, and that you probably know comes from UDL and this idea of just doing one thing differently. And your plus one was try something different every day. So in the last couple of weeks, what have you done differently?

Yesterday, I started putting Dijon mustard in scrambled eggs, and it was transformative.

Oh, there's a business here.

Yeah, honestly, there's actually a cafe in Dublin doing it, and that's where I stole the idea from. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean that with any, you know, in seriousness. Let's not drive ourselves any further. You know, let's not go, I need to have to, you know, I need to do something different or I need to be more creative. Let's just be. Let's just be, you know, and let's just talk more. Let's just— I think if we can authentically represent ourselves more, if we can care less, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, about all the things that don't really matter, likes and dislikes on Instagram, Or, you know, the little— we could be more resilient to those little knocks. I think that's really important. Trying something different every day might be just deciding, okay, this 15 minutes is mine.

Yeah.

That's it. You know, it could be as simple as that. It doesn't have to be baking brownies. And I'm no chef or cook, by the way, you can probably gather. You know, it's— I don't— I think it's taking the pressure off you. Take the pressure off you completely. You're doing an amazing job just to still be here, you know. And I'm actually— I'm recording a podcast in half an hour called How to Stay Sane in a Pandemic. And I've actually said, can I actually just reconfigure that to say that actually, I think we should all be a little more insane. We should care a little bit less. We should just be— if you look, my favorite quote in the world, Oscar Wilde, be you, everyone else is taken. You know, when you step in, when you step into who you are, I'm not saying look in the mirror every day and tell yourself you love yourself. That's, you know, that's not it. But what I am saying is you're stuck with you whether you like it or not. One way or the other, we come in and we go out of this world alone. So if you can't find someplace where you have acceptance, and by trying something different, it might just be that. It might just be take a deep breath and go, I'm okay right now. And that's probably a good place to finish.

Or I'm not okay right now. And that's okay.

Absolutely. And if you're not, reach out to somebody.

Yes.

And you will be. Everything changes. That's all we know. You know, it's a very Buddhist, you know, philosophy, but it's true. None of us could have seen this coming. You know, we have lived through a global pandemic. Imagine how our great-grandchildren are going to look back at this, you know, the same way we might look back to things, you know, 100 years ago and go, how did they live through polio or the famine or, you know, all of those things. We have got there. If we are— if you're hearing this, you're still here. And that means that you've done a good job. That's enough.

Thank you so much, Lolly. This has been— this has been a fantastic hour. Thrilled that we managed to connect. So thank you so much for coming on today.

Pleasure, Joe.