E37- Liz Bradford

My journey into adulthood. I guess I'm going to go quite a way back because I grew up quite so. You would be amazed how easy it is to go off the rails in Wiltshire to be honest. Certainly, certainly 30 odd years ago so people would let you drink in pubs. Pretty young.

Hello grown ups and welcome to this week's episode of A Beginner's Guide to Being a Grown up. With me, your host, Sam Cooper Gray. This week we are joined by Liz Bradford. Liz is going to take us on an international journey, starting in a remote farm in the, moving to Australia, to Hong Kong and then back to the UK and her both her personal and her business journey while she navigated the world of being a grown up. So please join me in welcoming Liz to the podcast. So Liz, welcome and my first question as ever is tell us a little bit about your journey into adulthood.

First of all, thank you for having me. My journey into adulthood I guess I'm going to go quite a way back because I grew up quite fast. Well compared to some of your guests, maybe not, but it seemed that way at the time. I probably had to start growing up quite quickly when I was about 10 years old. Between that time my parents, I'm the third child of four which is why I'm so trappy. But big family, not the happiest of marriages, I think it's fair to say they had some challenges and as a result the environment in which we were growing up wasn't particularly stable or secure. So I was the third child but also the eldest daughter and so have that combination of them feeling very, very accountable for everything and everyone. So yeah, so I started to grow up pretty fast at that point and then as many I think young adults feel felt I could take on the world and everything else. But actually I grew up on a farm in the middle of Wiltshire. I didn't know that much. Probably ended up going quite quickly off the rails and learning a lot about the world. So yeah, so I would say very fast into adulthood and then I've probably carried some of that, I don't want to use the term recklessness but certainly risk appetite through with the rest of my career so far.

So grew up quite remotely. Tell us a little bit about going off the rails then.

So you would be amazed how easy it is to go off the rails in Wiltshire to be honest. Certainly 30 odd years ago. So people would let you drink in pubs pretty young. There's actually quite an active drug scene for recreational narcotics out in the countryside because there isn't a great deal else to do and then just you know, all the usual stuff of hanging out with bad boys and being driven around in their cars when they were several years older than me at school. So yeah, so going off the rails was kind of like really pushing the boundaries but because from a parental perspective the boundaries weren't even really there. It meant you could really push the boundaries. So it probably wasn't like looking back far from ideal but did give me a set of life skills and always the confidence I would be able to take care of myself I guess.

So that was your teenage self. So tell me a little bit more then about kind of finishing school, what you did first.

So finishing school by that point I was really kind of honestly I'm so grateful to my school because I should have been expelled about three times. I was getting into so much trouble on campus. I was running like a whole business of we had a boarding and a day school and I was day and I would basically phone up and put on a voice to be the parents of the boarders to get them out over the weekend and stuff. I got caught doing that. I found my school reports the other day because I was cleaning out our house and found all of mine and my siblings school reports and just some of them are so scathing about me and I feel really bad for my teachers. Like the time when I got caught smoking and so that my punishment was to write an essay and the complaint to my parent was the essay was about how to not get caught in the future. Nothing to do with feeling bad about smoking at all. My English teacher said Elizabeth has a very sharp mind. I only wish that on the time she chooses to engage with us her tongue wasn't even sharper. So I was clearly just a massive handful school wise I got predictably bad A level results. I got an E for chemistry and then retook it and got an E again at which point I gave up. But I then decided to go traveling for a little while and that's. I went traveling on my own and I look back on it and I think that's actually quite interesting because I've done a lot of travel in my career since but the first place I decided to go as a 19 year old, 18 year old in fact sorry was South Africa on my own and spend two months traveling up the garden route. So again like just fairly fearless. I think because things so rough at home you were kind of like well I can take anything, how bad can it be? But it really taught me to be more independent. It was the first time I'd actually had to like, sort all of my travel budget for myself, do all of that stuff that you just take for granted as an adult, but unless someone teaches you when you're younger, you really have no real idea. And so that taught me a lot of life skills and a lot of appreciation by the time I got back for the stability, however limited, that there was back in the UK and home and everything else. And at that point I decided, well, stability is fine, but I'm going to go move to London now and go to university. So I went through clearing into university, studied IT and industrial revolution, which now seems very fortuitous because obviously AI and transformation. But at the time I was just following the money because it was just before the dot com bubble burst. So I went into it thinking that's where the careers would be. About halfway through uni, the bubble burst, but I'd spent all of my student loan, obviously, and it was actually genuinely very interesting. So I decided to stay on, then fell into banking after that. My first job was working at Swift, the banking infrastructure, and it was to get all of the member banks from an X25 phone network onto the Internet and then, yeah, banking thereafter for 21 years.

So we met while you were based in Australia, which is quite a few years ago now.

Here's a while ago, isn't it?

So tell me the story of how you got from Swift, which I'm assuming started in London to Australia.

So I started at Swift. I was there for maybe three, four years. I moved over into a couple of other firms. I ended up in an American bank which was very fast paced, moving very quickly, typically quite cutthroat. And for the first, for the first bit of it, I really thrived. I loved it. And then I found that I was succeeding. So they started to fast track me, but I was just really not getting any energy from the job. And then one day my husband came home and just found me at the table in the kitchen, just in tears. And he was obviously very worried. He's like, what's wrong? What's wrong? And I just said, oh, they've told me they're promoting me. And he said, this is exactly what you wanted. This is like, you know, this is. You were very driven and ambitious and everything else. And I was like, I just can't do it for another two years. I just can't keep going in there with my game face and going into war for two years. And so we hatched a plan. We had like a year left that we could actually get to Australia age wise and visa wise. I applied for the visa, we did all of that stuff. And then so yeah, I packed up my life, my husband, everything else, and he was maybe 50, 50 on whether he wanted to go or not, moved us to the other side of the world. And that's when I started at hsbc and I think I met you maybe a year or two years after that.

Wow. So I mean that's so again, I think as you said, maybe the resilience you got when you were younger, definitely having an impact on just picking your life up and going to Australia. You've then worked across the world and you're now back in the UK working for yourself. So tell me a little bit about that transition out of a big global corporate to running your own business and what you do.

So when I joined hsbc, like I think we would all recognize now that what had happened when I was in London was burnout. But this is long before anyone ever talked about burnout or even knew that that was a thing. Right. So I'm dating myself here, but that was 2011. I moved to Australia, joined HSBC. I was like, well, it's a British bank, commercial bank. I'm in Australia, I'll be on the beach by 4pm Everything will be super chill. It'll basically be retirement, right? And of course it didn't work out that way at all. After about 18 months I sort of got to this precipice where I was like, I realized I was burning out again and I realized it can't possibly be the environment. It has to be something to do with me now. At the time I was lucky enough to have been put onto a leadership development program and they gave me an executive coach as part of that who specialized in resilience building. So this was my first experience of any form of coaching and I was just blown away. So she taught me about physical well being, mental well being and connected well being and how those are the foundations, how those are the pillars of resilience. And that had just never occurred to me before. And like if I were to fill up those as buckets, I realized I was really low on all of them. And that was what was driving me to feeling so de energized and so burnt out. Now a type that I am, I got really into the physical side of it first because that's tangible and accessible. Trained as a personal trainer, had a side hustle, then running boot camps on the beach, other burnt out bankers, and then cycled into work and did my Job at the bank. But then over time that evolved and grew and I got more and more into the coaching side as well. So qualified as a coach, ran executive coaching programs and wider coaching programs, as you know, through the bank, and then evolved the side hustle into that. So during that time I also moved to Hong Kong. My husband and I got divorced and it felt better to give him the continent of Australia and I would move. So I moved to Hong Kong and then had a great six years there. Absolutely fantastic place. But came back to the UK just over a year ago and saw that my mother was very unwell and decided to resign from the bank and make the side hustle, the main hustle, so that I would have the flexibility to take care of her. And that had been an idea and a discussion with the bank as well for a long time because that was where my passion lay. And the bigger and bigger my jobs would get at the bank, the less time I could spend even on the internal program. So, as you know, we met because you very kindly roped me in to a global employee resource group. And that's where, you know, I would actually credit that with a large part of my success in my career because that's where I learned the real value of networking. That's where I had the ability and the platform to really experience what making an impact feels. So I'm obviously eternally grateful to you. But it also showed me that there was more to life than the paycheck.

And it was the same for me. I mean, I remember being told, very genius, that getting involved in this diversity stuff would be career limiting. And the absolute opposite was true because the network it creates and the people you get to meet and you know, we used to talk to people all over the world all the time and just the knowledge you would get from that was amazing, wasn't it? So you left the organization, came back to the uk, looked after your mum, you've got your, your coaching and kind of business. I'm going to take you back a little bit before we move on to the next question. Tell me a little bit and only because I know you created this and I think it's one of the best programs we ever ran. Talk to me about coaching circles because I think that is something that just epitomizes the approach you take to helping people when it comes to coaching.

So coaching circles. First of all, I co founded it, so I wouldn't want to take full credit for it at all. So I co founded it. But the concept really is around giving leaders within the organization, coaching capabilities. So we can all recognize. And this was pre Covid. It was just at the beginning of sort of lockdowns and everything else. But we all know that leadership requires different styles and flexing now, but also that a lot of leaders are burning out because they don't have the ability to coach. They're just being very directive, their leadership. So coaching circles was a way of us helping them develop coaching skills, but also, more importantly, giving people. We effectively wanted to democratise every talent program we'd ever had access to and make that available to anyone who was willing to give the time. Because fundamentally, we have to recognise that a meritocracy is flawed as a concept. So even I came up in my career in the time when people were very much trying to get females into leadership positions and realised we didn't have the pipeline. So I was extremely lucky in that regard. Respect. I shamelessly grabbed that opportunity and I do not apologise for that. And I felt that, yes, that was fine, but I looked around and everyone else on that program looked like me, whereas it meant that a lot of people were being left behind. And there's this phenomenon called the broken rung, is that once you start getting put onto those talent programs, you get the skills, the network and the confidence. That means your trajectory accelerates at an almost exponential rate. And everyone else who didn't get put onto that program kind of bumps along, but has a much lower thing. And what we wanted to do was close that gap by making it accessible. So, yes, we took all of the kind of the skills and the concepts that you'd get on a talent program and we put them into a program. They were packaged up beautifully by one of my co founders and delivered very well. But primarily what it meant was within that coaching circle, you had a peer circle of six to eight people and you had a senior leader that you had access to once a month and you would go through those topics around things like personal branding, core values. I'm trying to remember it now. It's been a while. Networking, stakeholder management, all of those of the human skills that help people get ahead as leaders. But really what we built was the ability to network as well. So you naturally had this organic network and a reason to be speaking to people. So, yeah, I mean, we never expected it. I never expected it to be as successful as it was. One of my co founders was particularly ambitious about it and it's now at over 35,000 people, which I think is an incredible impact to have had bearing in mind. It cost like $248 for a SharePoint license. Yeah, it was all volunteer work and

I remember being a coach on it and as a, as a coach it was amazing. I learned so much because I got to coach people and work with people and watch people grow that I'd never talked to before that were in different bits of the business. So I think it genuinely did make a difference. As you say, it's over 30 odd thousand people have been through it now, which is phenomenal. Let me take you back then to your younger self. Just going to go back to that 18 year old self. She'd been a bit of a rebel. She'd somehow managed not to get kicked out of school, which I think is quite impressive. I see a theme because you, you touched on the fact you'd already started a little bit of a side hustle business at school, which you got caught for and then you did a side hustle in Australia as a pt. So there's a theme, there's definitely a theme here. But if you, if your 18 year old self could see you today, what would she recognize in you?

She would recognize. It doesn't occur to me that I cannot do something. And this is, it's something I see all the time in clients, particularly female clients when I'm coaching them. It's often the biggest hurdle they need to get past is the limitation that they place on themselves. And in many ways my upbringing, which was marred by depression and alcoholism and suicide attempts, it taught me at a very young age no one owes you anything, so you can't and it's not the healthiest. And my therapist who is still making a fortune out of me would always get me to say, it's not great to say I don't need anyone, but it taught me that actually if you give something a go, at the very worst you're going to learn something. But there's a very good chance you will succeed. And I think we really set limitations on ourselves that if you look back how far you've come, you would never have believed it at the time because you didn't know what you didn't know. And the only way to find out is to give something a go. So she would definitely recognize that. I'm probably still ridiculously naive about whether something is doable or not,

but, and I love that because you know, as your therapist says, you know, if you, it's, you're looking back on the skills that you learn, even though that was, you know, probably quite traumatic to go through and that's what you took from it. Whereas I think some people were taken. Well, I'm just not going to try them because I don't want to put myself out there. But what you took away from your upbringing and the challenges that had was, you know, it can't be worse. So I might as well give it a go, right? What would she be blown away by? Like if you're 18 months, I can see you know, herself now and she'd recognize that give everything a go, not occur that you, that you, that you won't achieve something. What would you go wow at?

I think it never would have occurred to me. She would be like you've lived on four continents. Like this is now my fourth continent. I'm 44 so I'm like ticking off one a decade now, so obviously I'm going to run out. But I think she would be blown away by just how much I'm still willing to pick myself up and throw myself into a situation I do. And I absolutely credit the coach that I met that taught me about resilience for that. I obviously had a decent amount of grit before that. And then the other thing I think that she would really not recognize or be blown away by is self compassion. I had none when I was that age and I didn't know any better. But one of the things I've learned over time is it really makes you actually one of the strongest people alive. If you can have self compassion you can be empathetic to others and if you can be empathetic to others you can really push through and find the right outcomes for people. Whereas if you've just got that like black and white view without self compassion I think it's very, very hard to do. That's what makes people brittle.

So tell me say to you what is self compassion? So tell me a little bit more because I think that's really fascinating.

I think self compassion for me, well it's realising no one is perfect. My 18 year old self and even beyond certainly the first sort of decade of my career I would have said I was constantly striving for perfection because I thought if everything was perfect then no one could take it away. And I was completely in a bubble and I was independent. If it was perfect, self compassion for me is more recognizing that no one is perfect and we all have doubts and we all screw up and we all, you know, make mistakes or say the wrong thing or hurt someone's feelings or hurt our own feelings. But actually when you realize, well that's just a fundamental part of the human condition. It makes it much easier to let other people in, but it also makes it much easier to understand other people a bit better.

So, Liz, I love that self compassion piece. I think it's so important and I think, especially as women, I think we're really bad at it. I think we're really good at judging ourselves over everyone else. And the, the adage that comes to mind is the one on the airplane where it says, you know, you've got to put your own oxygen mask on before you try and put someone else's on. I'm going to move us on now to a question around decision making. And you've made lots of decisions to go and do lots of stuff in loads of different places. Not, not least all your side hustles. What's the best decision you've ever made?

So I'm going to answer that in two ways, but it's all interconnected. So the very best decision I've made, and maybe I've got recency bias, is to resign from my job and go home and take care of my mum. And I know that that sounds a bit sloppy, but honestly, that's time that you couldn't get back. But what that has in common with every other best decision I've ever made or secondary best decision is going against the grain. So all of the decisions that I've made that people either said were like career suicide, which is what everyone said when I went to Australia, or,

you

know, going against sort of stigma and everything when I got divorced and then moved to Hong Kong and everything else, like there were a lot of decisions that I made in my life that people would not have made because they would have been worried about going against the grain and even leaving a very stable job, going to take care of my mum. But you only get one life, that's my belief anyway. And in that life you have like just 4,000 weeks on average. I plan on having a few more, but 4,000 weeks, and I just don't ever want to look back and think, I wish I hadn't made the safe choice. Then what if

I think that's really powerful? Because I think, you know, no one lies on their deathbed and says, I wish I'd worked an extra hour, right? Like, no matter how hard families are, you know, to rock up at a time of need is, is a really important part of who we are. Whether it's, you know, your biological family or your friends who are your family. You know, I remember when I lost my husband, just people just appeared out of nowhere and you really knew who your friends were and everyone was just. And, and you just think how lucky you are that you're in a position to, to take the time out to be able to do that. But I also love your going against the grain thing because I think that is, I think that does define you and what you do quite well, which is, don't I. That what I would say is, is I don't think I'd ever tell you you couldn't do something because I think you'd get that look in your eye and you do it anyway just on principle.

Guaranteed way to motivate me to do anything is go, oh, you couldn't do that. It's like, hold my beer.

Yeah, it's. It's something I recognize in myself, very much so because. And I think it is linked to that kind of resilience and, and grit, however you get it in life, which is, don't tell me I can't do something. So on that, on that theme, I think we get given a lot of advice. Some good, some bad, some we listen to, some we don't. What's the best advice you've been given that you have completely ignored?

This one has been haunting me for decades. But the best advice I was given repeatedly by multiple people that I respect and I chose to ignore because I just didn't want to do it was network. Build genuine network. Now I'm super introverted. I would hide in the toilets at events. That's how much I would try and avoid. Like this is before the days of mobile phones. Now my mobile phone is my best friend because I can just sit like that in a corner and pretend I don't need anyone. But honestly, it was, it was definitely after I met you and it was through the work that we did that I realized how much I had short circuited my own potential impact and delayed it. Because I realized that network is not that hideous transactional thing of swapping business cards that I used to think it was. It's about building an authentic and organic network of relationships where you are adding more value than you're taking out. Ideally. But that will then reward you with opportunities and exposure and fulfillment. I mean, to your point, around people just appearing from nowhere to be around you, I spent a large part of my life just really wanting to be alone and protected and isolated because that felt safe to me. But actually it's. Once you put yourself out there, we're a tribe species, right? So being connected to other people is what drives us. We can't survive without it even now. And so I really wish I had listened to those people. Some of them know who they are because I've gone back to them and apologized. But they were absolutely right and I give that advice and I know full well that people are ignoring me when I say it. But it's the one piece that's haunted me for a long time.

Do you think it's partly because especially when we joined the financial services industry, you know, 20 for me almost, you know, 24 years ago that we. It was talked about in a way which is it wasn't supposed to be enjoyed and it felt like it was supposed to be mercenary. You must network. Whereas the way you've articulated exactly where I feel about networking is I always refuse to network with people I didn't think were part of could be part of my tribe. And, and it definitely had a knock on effect because I was like not going to network with people I don't like or I don't think I'm going to have something in common with just for the sake of networking. I think maybe when we were younger it perceived as you have to go network with these people because they'll be useful to you rather than building your tribe which I think is what true valuable networking really is. Yeah.

And I think it's one. It felt very transactional. It felt very salesy and like you were selling yourself or at least trying to get something out of someone else. It felt very zero sum game. Whereas now and the one thing I'll challenge you on in what you just said and I'm I don't know if it's still your perception now but I would struggle to find a single human that I couldn't find common ground with. And that was a real revelation for me around like there may not be a natural clique for my tribe but we all, you know, we all have the same three fundamental needs. To be loved, to belong and to be worthy. Like it's however like from whatever background providing you could get over the language barrier which my AirPods apparently magically can now do. It's hard to, it's hard to not find a point of connection if you really try.

Yeah.

But I would not, I would never have believed that 20, maybe even 10 years ago.

Yeah. And I think that's fair. I think there were some people I would now consider part of my tribe that I definitely wouldn't have even considered that would potentially even be part of my tribe 10, 20 years ago. So I think you're right and I think it is that networking piece. I definitely did the same. I ignored that advice earlier in my career because I didn't like the idea of it. It looked really hard. I never knew the right thing to say the minute someone like introduced themselves to me. And it takes real work. But once you get. It's like everything right. Practice makes stuff a lot easier to do. You get practice and you see the value in it. It's. Something just becomes more natural as you get older, I think.

Yeah. And I think also the minute we realize the switch of. Rather than when we're meeting someone thinking about what are they think, if we actually just focus on them and how they feel and what they need, all of that pressure goes away and suddenly we're connecting. Whereas if you're just always thinking what am I going to say next and how am I going to impress this person? Then it's just. It's never going to really work.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that whenever I get asked for advice, I always say I wish my younger self would have known is stop worrying about what other people think because they're all too far, too busy worrying about themselves. They're not, they're not thinking about you at all. So don't worry about. Just go in there and be you and you know that will work with someone not with other. And that's okay. So moving on from the advice piece, I want to talk to you about a personal challenge. So we like to set our listeners every week a little personal challenge from each of our guests. So if you could set your.

Each.

Each of our listeners something they could do to challenge themselves, what would it.

So I'm gonna. It's gonna have to be about physical well being, I'm afraid.

That's okay.

That's where I start with all my clients and most interactions as well. Because it's the foundation of everything. Right. So our physical body determines it and how we move it and what we do with it determines how we feel, how we interact, how we show up in the world, how long we live, how healthy those years are. So the challenge I would set is what is one thing this week you can do to take care of yourself. It doesn't have to be burpees, it doesn't have to be training for a marathon. It could be yoga or some breathing exercises or some meditation. But how are you going to take care of yourself and your body this week?

Excellent. We're going to set that as a challenge and I'm going to tell you my thing this week. Is I've just found this great thing which doesn't take very long, which is just body movement that gets your lymphatic system going in the morning and you look like a crazy person. At least I do because I did it in the mirror this morning. I looked hilarious. But it just gets. Gets you moving and it gets your lymphatic system awake. And you know what? I've now done it three or for three or four, four days now. And the energy I feel in comparison to 5 days ago is crazy. And it literally takes a couple of minutes. So that's the one I've started with.

That's amazing. Maybe you could link to that and people could all try it. You could start a whole trend.

It is very funny. Maybe I won't video me doing it because I think I look slightly ridiculous, but maybe one of the people that I found on one of those social media. I know, I'm not sure I want that to go viral, but. Yeah. So we somehow come to the end of the episode and we've covered such an array of. Of areas from your growing up and the grit that, that gave you the. The first early showings of being a businesswoman as a teenager with your. With your side hustle and that common theme of always wanting and having something on the side that. That potentially gave you more meaning than some of the day job stuff through to, you know, the really meaningful stuff of, of coming home to look after your mum and, and the. And the business that you now run, which I know is very much based in your absolute passion to help others and help them be the best that they can be. So, last question we always ask in the podcast is if the Beginner's Guide to the Grown up actually became a book.

What's the.

From everything we've talked about today or something else that you haven't touched on yet? What is the one piece of advice that you would want me to put in that guide?

It always come for me, comes back to the 4,000 weeks. So if you are. If you map out 4,000 weeks onto a wall chart and you cross one off every time, I can assure you you are going to be more conscious of how you give your time to other people and what you're doing with your time. Because being focused on why we're here, for each of us, it's different. And what we can give is possibly the most rewarding thing and it will open up avenues of opportunity you never knew were there. So my advice would be always be aware that time is your most valuable commodity and spend it wisely.

I'm not sure I can add anything else to that. I think that's the perfect ending. So, Liz, thank you so much for being interviewed today. I've really enjoyed going through that journey, and even though we do know each other quite well, I've learned a few new things about you, mostly how much of a hustle you did at secondary school. So thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you today and learn a little bit more about your story and listen to your advice and your challenge.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Sam. I'm honestly really honored to even come on the podcast. I'm a longtime listener and a huge fan, so thank you very, very much.

Brilliant. Thanks. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of A Beginner's Guide to Being a Grown Up. Please do like, follow and subscribe wherever you listen to or watch your podcasts. Next week we have Helen Gibson MBE joining us. She's going to talk to us about her international career, becoming a TED speaker and an author, and also about getting involved in her family business later in life. So please join us next week to listen to her story.