INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT 

Making Conversations Count – Episode Fifty-Eight

Wendy Harris & Mike Pagan

25th November 2021

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction 
00:02:00: Self-reflection 
00:03:39: Your team 
00:06:25: Long term as we get older 
00:09:32: Emotional connection 
00:12:43: Self-care 
00:15:11: Four areas of support 
00:16:55: Mike vs the Channel 
00:19:16: Active mindfulness 
00:22:33: Mike’s pivotal conversation 
00:25:46: Anti-academia 
00:27:52: Final thoughts 

Interview Transcription 

Wendy Harris: Welcome back to Making Conversations Count with me, Wendy Harris.  Today, we are going to be making conversations about mental wealth count. 

What’s new Wendy Woo?  Well, we’re continuing to get wonderful feedback and I just want to take this opportunity to highlight that every guest writes a letter to listeners inviting you to carry on the conversation with them directly and often they are gifting us free downloads and resources and special offers for you.  There’s also links to books if our guests have written something on their topic, so please do go check out the website www.makingconversationscount.com and go to the Guest Offers and Resources Page. 

Today’s guest comes at it from a slightly different perspective, and you know me, I like to bring you all the different variety of perspectives that I can, because I know that that’s what helps me, so if it helps me, it’s likely to help others too.  Now, Mike Pagan is better known for swimming the channel in a relay, in the fastest time, in the highest tides and that’s our connection, that’s how we got chatting because of the swimming angle.  I’m going to let him explain more about the conversations that he has had that has led him to the journey that he is on. 

I think the listeners really want to know a little bit more about Mike and how those conversations come about in the first place, because I’m guessing that a lot of people have a bit of resistance to change; want the transformation and want the end results, but maybe don’t like the how they have to get there and the things that they’ve got to do, so I thought that would be a good place to start. 

Mike Pagan: It is that fine line of the necessary graft, the necessary research, the planning and all those things.  I had a meeting recently with a gentleman who refers to himself as a visionary.  He starts stuff. 

Wendy Harris: He never finishes anything. 

Mike Pagan: We need people in our lives that are completer finishers if we’re visionaries and we need people who are visionaries if we’re very, very good at making stuff happen.  Part of that is the self-reflection and knowing what sort of person you is.  I intentionally did that in my best English. 

Wendy Harris: Do you know what, my eldest daughter would say, “I is someone who has lots of ideas and sometimes the ideas come so thick and fast that we can’t actually get through them”.  But I think, in some respects that’s a process of your brain working out getting to the best outcome, and of course that’s why I’ve got my daughter helping me, is because she can keep up with me usually and can help cut out those bits to get it done.  It’s the difference, isn’t it, between us having ideas and then beating ourselves up because we’re not finishers and having good ideas and getting people to help us finish it for us or with us. 

I’m old, I class myself as old now, when you get to 30-plus years in career, if I look back 30 years, anybody that was over 40 was old, so I’m being generous! 

Mike Pagan: To be fair, ancient I think would have been the phrase I’d have referred to! 

Wendy Harris: Yes, that’s it, but I think that’s the wisdom that comes, isn’t it, with that period of time to give you a reflection to test and measure on things.  We seem to be in this society and there’s this perception that we, on our own, in our own being and in our own skin, can be the everything that we want to be.  The misconception is that you can’t do it on your own, you can’t do absolutely everything on your own.  I don’t know anybody that can do it on their own, that’s why we have families.  That’s why you have male and female roles, that’s why you have people that are good at one thing and good at another. 

Mike Pagan: This is why I get so passionate about my mental wealth team, that support network, because we can’t do it all.  Whether you are the best entrepreneurial mind in the world, the casualties, it’s like the Cruella de Vil blowing through a room and leaving debris behind and people having to clear up, and everything else that goes with it. 

Just the dynamics on one side of the spectrum and the graft is on another but everybody in between, we cannot do this thing called life successfully in isolation on our own, because in isolation it kills creativity, prevents decision making and then can have a detrimental effect on our mental health.  It’s so important to have those right people around us, challenging, provoking, cajoling, because they get more out of us. 

Some of them have a vested interest because they’re family; others, they’re employees, but it’s selecting those people that really help us step up and raise our game. 

Wendy Harris: It’s interesting, because I did watch the new Emma Stone version of Cruella over the weekend with my 13-year-old and what you’re saying there is absolutely right.  While she comes across as this real rebel, visionary in fashion, there were key people behind her that actually helped lift her up.  Even if she didn’t see that, as an outsider watching we could see that, the dynamic of that relationship.  Of course, the last 18 months has shown us evermore so that isolation and decision-making can’t be done in isolation.  To be positive about it, because I like to always try and stay positive about things, we can still get on even in a really difficult and challenging environment, can’t we?  We can still do business and have relationships and make decisions. 

Mike Pagan: Totally, I will focus on people that I work with on specific ways of building that support team so that it’s fit for purpose for the way forward.  That’s a key demarcation line, fit for purpose for the way forward, because I learned this with the work I did with professional elite sportsmen and women, transitioning to their life after sport.  Obviously, that is very poignant at the moment with Olympics and Paralympics and everything else been going on recently. 

Wendy Harris: Sure, yes. 

Mike Pagan: When the guillotine comes down, and you are retired, those 35 people that kept you on the track, in the pool or on the pitch yesterday are no longer fit for purpose for what you’re going to do next.  Most of us, our transitions are not as draconian or absolute as that, but we transition from being a student at school to a sixth-former, from a sixth-former to an apprentice or a student doing a degree or whatever the equivalent, to the first time we buy a home, to having a partner, a life partner, becoming a parent, having a dog, whatever it happens to be.  The way through to all of these bits through our lives, we transition from being on the shop floor to getting our first managerial role, when we go from management to executive, whatever that journey. 

Every time we transition, the team we need around us has to adapt and there will be certain people that we leave behind because they are no longer fit for purpose, we need 2.0, we need 3.0 and everything else of that person, because they’re going to help us achieve more because they’re going to ask the better questions than we ask of ourselves.  That’s where the key to all of this comes from, is where you’ve got people asking better questions of ourselves because then, we can really uncover the magic. 

Wendy Harris: That analogy of sports people I know that I have a couple of past guests that have been on like Steve Judge, he was a Para-triathlete.  He’s now a professional speaker and he inspires through Scouting and the different activities that he does.  David Smith, “Smithy” is actually currently as we’re recording this, in Tokyo winning his battles from his wheelchair doing Boccia.  It’s interesting because they have this mentality, that they have always got this forward plan of plan B as such. 

They are totally in the moment in terms of what they’re doing now, but they have always got in mind what is next.  They know the journey is just a chapter, I suppose, in what it is that they’re doing.  Not a lot of business owners see that longevity, see that plan.  They might think, “Business plan, five-year goals”, but are they prepared for a curveball that’s like a pandemic.  It’s been trying for us all, hasn’t it? 

Mike Pagan: It’s that short-term thinking versus medium- and longer-term thinking.  As a child, you do short-term thinking the whole time, because you can’t see past lunchtime, you can’t see past next Tuesday, whatever it is.  There’s no long-term thinking, then eventually you start to realise, actually I need to plan out my work so that I don’t fail my exams, so that I can go on.  It’s what we do, as we get older, to have the people challenging so that we’re not only reacting to a catastrophic medical diagnosis to make us give up the self-sabotaging habits that we have that are preventing us from being awesome more of the time, most of the time. 

The foundation of all behavioural change is an emotional connection.  Anybody who says they want to give up smoking for example, that’s not going to happen, very rarely does that happen with a click of a switch, unless you have managed to get some brilliant hypnosis technique that works, and for some it can work.  More often than not, it’s a diagnosis that scares the whatsits out of you that makes you clear on that decision. 

I know in my family, my wife would love to have talked to her mother at the age of 40 and told her to give up smoking, because that was going to take her life early and she wouldn’t therefore have a relationship with her grandchildren.  It’s one of those conversations, well that’s an emotional connection which changes the game.  Once we’ve made that, then everything from self-care, losing weight, nutrition, all the things that we need to do to help us perform better, we will go and seek the support of the right person who is going to help us do that, because uite often we can’t do it on our own. 

Wendy Harris: There’s something a little bit self-sabotaging about society as well, isn’t there, because we know that we’ve got a fantastic NHS, although it’s under pressure right now, that if we have something that happens to us, we’ll go and they’ll kind of fix us.  There’s not enough emphasis I think on the preventative stuff that we can do for ourselves, is there?  Like, being able to look ahead and go, “Do I want to be around for my grandkids?  Yeah of course”. 

I remember I had two sets of grandparents, one that couldn’t really get out the chair and the other one that would run round on a football field with us.  Two completely different physical grandparents, so our relationships were completely different, so the question to ask yourself is what kind of grandparent do you want to be? 

Mike Pagan: That’s an easy question but the answer is not simple, “Yeah, I want to be the fun one”. 

Wendy Harris: Yes, I want to get my revenge on my children. 

Mike Pagan: Yeah, exactly.  “What do you mean you shouldn’t feed them these sweeties?”  You talk on the medical support and that difference between reactive and proactive and preventative, we make choices and obviously illnesses and afflictions and so on aside, we still make choices that make the probability of things more or less likely.  Obviously, we want to live a life so that means that you will have scars, you will have bruises, you will have things going. 

One of the things I find that’s very interesting, I lived in Australia for a number of years, in their GP practices, in their medical centres, they will have their GPs, but they also have a whole load of preventative non-medically approved systems in place. 

Wendy Harris: Alternative and holistic approaches. 

Mike Pagan: Surely not, yes, and they’re under the same roof. 

Wendy Harris: Yes. 

Mike Pagan: One is reacting to a problem or a situation or a diagnosis or an illness and the other one is trying to feed the soul, the body and everything else, to make sure that at they put less of a burden on the other one because people are taking better care.  It’s something that doesn’t happen in the UK yet, but I’m sure that hybrids like that will build. 

It comes back to that whole thing of self-care and for me, self-care is the first step of building that mental wealth team.  When we’ve got the self-care in place, we’re doing it proactively, rather than just waiting for something horrible to go wrong, that we’ve got to fix the tyre now. 

Wendy Harris: It’s that kind of heart, soul and mind, isn’t it?  Sort of analogy, that sometimes the emphasis is put too much on just one thing.  Whereas our mind, if you get a chance to listen to Rob Begg blew a lot of our listeners’ minds, because he was talking about how ego reads the same books, talks us out of doing things that are bad for us.  It’s the knock-on effect that that has to you, your emotions as well as physical self, so there’s a lot to be said for trying to bring that 360 approach into living a great life. 

Mike Pagan: For me, I would talk about having a coach because coaches for me get more out of you than you do on your own.  It’s giving people permission to really have your back and knowing the difference between those who are just social noise, versus people are that are truly supportive of you and will call you out when you need it, but you can call them out.  You can be open, honest, transparent, naked with them as you ask for that support. 

Asking for help has always been historically that sign of weakness and that’s not how it should be.  Asking for help is just part of getting other people who know something better and different to you.  There’s 1,001 analogies we can use on it, but the reality is other people have more stuff, more intuition, more experience of a particular environment, fine.  Why wouldn’t you invest 30 minutes in learning from somebody else who knows what you’re about to go into better? 

Wendy Harris: It’s an interesting point that you make there really, Mike, because there are so many coaches out there that it is really hard to wade through who you should be dealing with.  I think the best coach for you is somebody who has usually been through a very similar experience that you’re in right now.  That’s the homework that needs to be done, isn’t it?  That if you can see some alignment with that coach there’s got to be that real connection to what you do. 

Mike Pagan: It’s that chemistry bit.  I always talk about the four areas of where you can get support from, so the consultant who comes along, they investigate what the issue is and the challenge is, they give you a report and a bill and then you can ask them to implement it and if it’s successful it was your choice, if it fails it was the consultant’s fault, obviously. 

Counselling, by contrast, is sort of deep dive, going into the background, the personal, the everything from childhood to psychology.  There is so much of a different approach there, with a medical vein to it.  The mentoring I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve built it, learned from my mistakes, let me share with you my cleverness and my knowledge along the way.  But for me, the coaching is actually a blank piece of paper.  Where are you trying to get to?  What are the options available to you?  How can we help you build those?  Which of these angles that we’ve been discussing are you going to commit to acting upon?  It is not about telling somebody what to do.   

Quite often we will coach people totally outside of my sphere of knowledge and experience as far as the product or the industry, because if they wanted that from me, then they’d want mentoring or they’d want a consultant.  They need somebody who is going to help them lift and raise the bar.  That comes from finding their goals and their challenges to the point that when you meet them again in the next session, if they turn round and they haven’t done A, B or C that they said they were going to, then why did they commit to it in the first place?  We did all the graft around you wanting to do that, so what’s changed?  What was missing?  Why isn’t that working?  How does that come together? 

Again, it’s back to that raises the game, be that in a performance, in business performance, on a stage, or performance in a swimming pool, whatever it happens to be. 

Wendy Harris: I’m so glad you brought swimming up, because that’s really how we got chatting in the first instance, wasn’t it?  We’re both swimmers.  I can’t claim to have swum the Channel though. 

Mike Pagan: Let’s be fair, I’ve only swum bits of it, because I did a relay not a solo, which means I’m mad not stupid or stupid not mad, I can’t remember which one it is. 

Wendy Harris: You didn’t do it at the best time of year either with the right tides and things and so you really pushed. 

Mike Pagan: We got on a spring tide rather than a neap tide, because mother nature was not letting us go.  We set off in thunderstorms over Northern France, and it was swimming in a washing machine filled with all sorts of beauties, and dark and rain.  The second half of the swim, the tides changed, it went very flat because it was a spring tide, the tide was huge.  It’s 22 miles in a straight line from Dover to Calais, and on the swoosh, we did 35 miles, but we were the fastest men’s relay team, full relay team that year, when we did it, 2015.  At one point, I was swimming for an hour, and I was swimming faster than Michael Phelps.  I did 7.2 kilometres in an hour.  Apparently, there’s a tide involved that helped me. 

Wendy Harris: I was going to say I’m not going to call out Michael Phelps, I’m going to put it down to Mother Nature’s helping hand. 

Mike Pagan: Mother Nature was certainly helping, I was flying.  It was brilliant. 

Wendy Harris: What was the best experience?  What was the key highlight for achieving that challenge? 

Mike Pagan: There’s two sides, I’ll give you the cynical one first and the real one afterwards.  The cynical one is more people have climbed Everest than have swum the English Channel.  I’ve got bragging rights for life. 

Wendy Harris: Yes. 

Mike Pagan: True, so I’ve got that one.  The more personal one was sitting on the boat coming back afterwards and just all of us just sitting there with that sense of pride and glow of what we’d achieved.  We’d taken two years to learn how to swim in open water, we’d never done stuff like that before.  Just getting used to cold water swimming, because you are just swimming in budgie smugglers and a hat.  Learned so much about myself, fell in love with this active meditation or mindfulness, as I refer to it nowadays. 

Wendy Harris: Yeah, I love it, yeah. 

Mike Pagan: I can’t sit still and sing Kumbaya in my head and go on, and I know that’s totally being dismissive of people that are very much into the world of meditation and mindfulness, but for me swimming long distances or longer distances in open water just plodding along, that repetitive nature of the stroke after stroke.  You get out the water and it’s so cathartic and if it’s cool or cold water then utter invigoration as well and that proud glow about you, “Look at what I’ve done, I’m feeling really good”. 

Wendy Harris: It’s amazing, isn’t it?  I know that it’s being in tune with my breathing that really helps settle my mind and then my mind just goes off on all sorts of places, so the repetitiveness that you mention is in swimming and when I do the ironing.  I’m sure everybody’s going to love that I’ve shared that, but just that doing something, I know how to do that without really putting my brain into any gear as such.  It is much the same as swimming, I can do that without putting my brain into too much of a gear, so the thoughts that come out from that activity, I would say, even if it is that you’re washing the car or mowing the lawn. 

Mike Pagan: It’s the cumulative effect of a repetitive action.  That’s where I would put active mindfulness or active meditation, again dependent on which badge sits better for you.  Walking up a hill, going climbing when you’re going through deep snow, or whatever else.  Or as you say ironing, anything that is ongoing, repetitive.  When I was a child, obviously there was a lot of people still did hobbies and whether that be from whittling to making stools and whatever else. 

Wendy Harris: Bobbins. 

Mike Pagan: Absolutely.  Part of the skill of when you were doing hobbies, was just tuning out.  Tom Daley doing his knitting, at the Olympics. 

Wendy Harris: Yes. 

Mike Pagan: That’s a repetitive action that is just ongoing, ongoing versus nowadays where we’re just being stimulated by a screen and everything that’s going on there and he said/she said, FOMO nonsense and everything else in between.  The ability to switch off is so much harder now.  We are allowed to get bored, and understanding boredom helps you understand yourself more, but if you never, ever get bored because you’ve always got a phone.  The advert comes on, on the TV show you’re watching, what does everybody around you do?  Picks up their phone and checks their social media again, because of course it’s so important.  You missed out on nothing in that timeline, but we do it, so we don’t allow ourselves to switch off. 

Wendy Harris: No, I’m laughing because that’s exactly right.  “Go make a cup of tea, go fetch the treats”, that’s the other one, isn’t it?  We’ve had a hard, busy day; we’re going to reward ourselves now.  It can teach you an awful lot, boredom I think, and certainly those children that have been doing home-schooling, I do hope that they learnt some other lifelong lessons like how to cook for themselves, or just by helping out because the added pressures and things.  You never know we could have a really good generation for the next Bake Off in ten years’ time, I don’t know! 

It brings me to that point really then, Mike, where I ask every guest the same question but of course, I don’t know what the answer is, and that is the conversation that has created a turning point for you in your life, and what happened next.  Are you happy to share with us what that was? 

Mike Pagan: The conversation that created a turning point for me, this is a slightly long story, but I will keep it succinct.  My father lived in Singapore for a number of years, in the 1950s and early 1960s, and whilst he was out there, he made a lot of friends.  These were his bachelor years.  Long story short, one of his best mates that was there then lived in Thailand and I stayed with him when I went travelling as a backpacker. 

I met this chap and that was one of those “I’d met this person”.  When I moved out to Australia at the age of 29, my father was still chatting to his friend in Bangkok who said, “Well, Mike’s going over there.  Tell him he needs to meet my mate, Newton, we did some land deals back in the early 1970s, he’s a really top guy”.  Long story short, I moved out to Australia, I get this random bloke, my father’s ex-drinking mate he used to do deals with 30 years previously.  We’re knocking on the door of this very affluent area and this guy answers the door.  “Hi, I’m Mike”.  “I’m Newton.  I’m feeling a bit crook mate, just had my first dose of chemo, but come on in, let’s have a chat”.  I just don’t know where this is going. 

He then starts talking about a business that he was considering investing in, but he said, “They don’t have any commercial skills and from what you’ve been describing, could be a good fit for you”.  Long story short, he didn’t put the money in, he put me in.  So I joined this organisation that I was with for several years, then when I moved back to the UK, they bought me out several years later.  I did further studies because of the people that I met through that organisation, which was totally transforming the way I worked and what I did. 

The sad part of the story is, three months after I met Newton, he died.  It was just that snapshot of time going back to my dad getting drunk in the late 1950s in Singapore with his friends at the cricket club.  If I’d not been there at that time, I wouldn’t have met Newton, who wouldn’t have then introduced me to these other people.  Talk about quantum life-changing directions and everything else, was utterly huge; and to this day, the people I used to work with in that organisation I still count as friends, and I’ve literally just introduced them to somebody else who is moving out that direction who I know that they can complement through the universities and other work that they do. 

Wendy Harris: So, it’s kind of gone full circle then that the help that Newton and your dad have given to you, you’re now passing on as well. 

Mike Pagan: Absolutely. 

Wendy Harris: That’s fantastic. 

Mike Pagan: Beauty of making your network, work. 

Wendy Harris: Yeah.  Have you ever thought what would have happened had you have not been in that snapshot of time, what you’d be doing? 

Mike Pagan: I’d have probably landed up getting a job when I moved out there, that would have been a very different journey in my time that was there.  As a result of that, when I came back to the UK, I took commercial skills into businesses, which nowadays would be called business coaching, but at that time it wasn’t.  So, yeah, it’s sort of unlocked all sorts of things, and my father, he was a very emotionally intelligent, clever man who was 100% allergic to academia. 

Wendy Harris: There’s a few that could probably relate to that, yeah. 

Mike Pagan: I think he got 2% in his geography O Level, because he spelt his name right on the piece of paper they said. 

Wendy Harris: But he knows where the pub is, that’s the most important thing. 

Mike Pagan: He got himself to Singapore. 

Wendy Harris: It’s fascinating isn’t it, because an academic life is not for everybody and I’m not discounting it.  I know I’ve joked before about Gary Vee and how he says, “Save yourself $40,000, $50,000” or UK pounds or whatever, because it is an expensive education; but for some it just doesn’t work, does it?  You’re better off getting the foundation of a job and earning a small crust and learning on the job as you go. 

So, I’m with your dad on that one, that’s exactly what I did.  I didn’t do academics either, but it’s fascinating. 

Mike Pagan: By contrast, I have gone on and done things in academia, but my writing natural style is the way I speak, which grammatically is not the way it should be. 

Wendy Harris: Phonetics darling, phonetics. 

Mike Pagan: Absolutely, I married a grammar queen, so she rips apart a lot of what I write, but for me I’ve published four books now, but that’s not because I’m a flowing Bronte, Jane Austen author whatever, but I write in a very conversational style.  It’s very real, it’s very humorous.  That’s the only way I can do it, which obviously for some people works perfectly, for others it doesn’t float them.  That’s great, that’s the whole point.  It’s finding the writing style that works for you. 

Wendy Harris: Not trying to be something for an audience that you don’t know. 

Mike Pagan: Exactly. 

Wendy Harris: Mike, I’m going to have to check out your books.  When it comes to carrying on the conversation, because I always encourage listeners to reach out to guests after the show, where’s the best place for them to find you? 

Mike Pagan: Two simple bits: the joys of having a surname like Pagan, there aren’t many Mike Pagans out there.  If you find the one who lives in Hawaii and does lots of surfing, that’s not me.  Just saying, I do occasionally get some information.  So, www.mikepagan.com is the absolute simplistic way or stalking me via LinkedIn.  But please, if you do want to connect and chat to me via LinkedIn, share a message in the connection request. 

Wendy Harris: Mention the show. 

Mike Pagan: Exactly, make it work. 

Wendy Harris: Yes, make it relevant absolutely.  Mike it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting to you, thank you so much for being my guest. 

Mike Pagan: No problem, thank you for your time and your faith in inviting me to come and share – I was going to say pearls of wisdom but that’s a bit conceited; nonsense stories of travels and joy. 

Wendy Harris: It’s been wonderful, thank you. 

Will that conversation that Mike and I had affect you in a way that you can start to look at the relationships that you have in the real world in a different light?  I do hope so.  Next week, it’s a young man who I met a decade ago, who was the Young Entrepreneur of the Year.  He’s made his name in chocolate and gone on to do all sorts of other incredible things.  His name’s Louis Barnett.