Transcript

00:00:06 Introduction

Welcome, you are listening to Links at Bain and Gray. A catalogue of podcasts centred on all things business support in the workplace. Our aim is to bring you interesting and relevant content that will keep you up to date and thriving in your role.

00:00:22 Emily

So good afternoon, Jess.

00:00:25 Jess

Hello

00:00:26 Emily

It's absolutely lovely to have you on board with Links. Thank you so much for agreeing to be involved in our podcast catalogue.

00:00:37 Jess

It's a pleasure. It's really nice to catch up.

00:00:39 Emily

Well, I was just thinking actually Jess, I think it's 10 years, nearly since we first met.

00:00:46 Jess

Yes, it doesn't feel like ten years, but it is.

00:00:50 Emily

In some ways, it feels a lot longer and in some ways, a lot shorter doesn't it?

00:00:53 Jess

Yes. Yeah, a lot has happened in 10 years.

00:00:56 Emily

You have achieved an awful lot in in a very short space of time. I'm so excited to talk to you about Run Talk Run and I really feel the content of Run Talk Run is going to be extremely interesting and captivating for our audience. But before we start talking about your brilliant initiative, I want to talk about life before Run Talk Run, which is when I met you, and I want to find out what you were doing with your life. I know what you're doing, but our audience would like to know. What were you doing before you set up Run Talk Run?

00:01:35 Jess

Yeah, of course. So my career before Run Talk Run had nothing to do with mental health, I went to a secretarial college and went straight into a secretarial career. I started off working at Bain and Gray in a sort of office management position, which had a lot of front of house and a lot of admin involved, and carried on that office management career, even when I left Bain and Gray and started working for an acoustic consultancy. So career wise, yeah, my life took a 360 when it went into mental health with Run Talk Run.

00:02:18 Emily

And before we talk about exactly what Run Talk Run do, what provoked you into setting up Run Talk Run? What were you going through at that time of your life, which sort of pushed you into this?

00:02:35

Yeah, so it makes sense I guess, to give a bit of context to my own mental health, I find it hard to pinpoint where my struggle with mental health began. I was always a very shy child, which was largely brushed under the carpet, wasn't an issue, but as I grew into my teenage years and early 20s, that shyness was a lot more intense then perhaps I let on it was a social anxiety, really. I'd get incredibly shaky, sweaty, very, very fearful and paranoid about talking to people and my way of coping with that intense anxiety was sadly through an eating disorder, because I wasn't communicating what I was experiencing. I was trying to cope with those emotions on my own. And so I was in this sort of vicious cycle between anxiety, bulimia and depression. For most of my teenage years and early 20s, and I experienced another long period of depression in 2017, and it was that experience on the back of trauma and all sorts of life experiences that made me realise that I needed to find myself a space to talk about my mental health and to talk about how dark my thoughts were getting. I struggled to open up in therapy, I felt that quite a hard space to be vulnerable because there was -

00:04:15 Emily

I was going to ask that, because you'd obviously gone down the sort of what I call the classic routes prior to getting some support. And you just claimed you found that difficult, did you?

00:04:29 Jess

I really did because I found that whenever I was in a bad place with my mental health, my social anxiety came back and so to talk to someone and maintain eye contact and to be vulnerable in a closed room felt way too far out of my comfort zone.

00:04:51 Emily

Probably actually made it much worse, I'd imagine?

00:04:55 Jess

Yeah, yeah, I found that it kind of closed me up even more, which I didn't think was possible but it did, and I was paying a lot of money for the privilege of not actually telling my therapist anything. So it wasn’t working.

00:05:11 Emily

I know from when we worked together that you were always into your running. So when was the sort of light bulb moment for you, talk me through that. Was it someone who started running with you, or did you just feel that your mental health could be kept under check from doing exercise, is that is that was sort of the first, the first realisation?

00:05:38 Jess

Yeah, I think prior to 2017, I had used running as a means of managing my mental health. It means of sort of escaping negative thoughts and gaining some perspective on life, and it was very much a solo activity up until that year. But I found when I was depressed in 2017, I was trying to escape London as much as I could, which meant I was going home to see my mum quite often. My mum would take me out and runs whenever I went home and it was running with her that I realised that it could be an alternative space to therapy for me a much easier space to talk about life’s harder experiences and I found that it was a lot more honest when I was running, so that was the light bulb moment really was those runs with my mum.

00:06:36 Emily

And how did you take those lovely runs with your mum, when you're in an open space, and also perhaps not looking at somebody but being side by side, somebody how did you take that on to the next step?

00:06:53 Jess

Well it was a gentle nudge from her really, from my mum, Wendy. She encouraged me in the way that only a parent can to go and find some friends that I could do this with in London. She was probably very bored of me coming home every week and I looked at the running scene here in London and there was a lot on offer. All of the crews looked so high energy and so positive and good vibes only that for a depressed girl I felt so intimidated, and I became more and more frustrated that everyone was telling me to talk about my feelings and everyone was telling me to go to a running club. But that space wasn't there. I was looking for it, but it wasn't there. So Run Talk Run was largely born out of that frustration that I couldn't find what I needed and decided to start it myself.

00:07:53 Emily

And for somebody, who was suffering so much, and I know how much you were suffering, that's incredibly brave, I mean, that's a really brave step. Anyone setting up anything, whatever scale, what size is terrifying. How was your first run? And who was your first running partner?

00:08:12 Jess

Oh yes, so the first run I was joined by just one girl and she never came again. Yeah, so -

00:08:24 Emily

You fixed her in one run, Jess!

00:08:26 Jess

You can argue I fixed her, she yeah, she realised that she didn't want any of her friends or family actually knowing that she was going to a mental health specific running group, which actually only added fuel to my fire because I was so angry that even she was experiencing stigma that meant she wasn't going to come back. So yeah, the first run was the success of sorts because it made me realised just how much it was needed. But yeah, at the same time it was a very slow start.

00:09:05 Emily

Mm, slow burn. And how did you, maybe this is a good point actually, before I ask you another question for our listeners, tell me in your words what Run Talk Run is.

00:09:17 Jess

Of course. Yeah. So the very first run that I've facilitated is the same as Run Talk Run is today. It's a gentle 5 kilometre jog that takes place on a weekly basis and the intention of these jobs is to facilitate a space to talk about your mental health, a space to talk about some of the harder things that you might be going through in life, whether that's a bad day with your boss or an argument with your boyfriend or something more severe, like you've been diagnosed with, a mental health condition and it's all very new to you, so the runs are all facilitated by volunteers with lived experience, and yeah, they're a safe place for people, to be honest.

00:10:08 Emily

Amazing. And am I right in thinking that you've now got 170 groups worldwide?

00:10:14 Jess

Yes, yeah, it snowballed massively from that first year.

00:10:19 Emily

It's absolutely incredible and that just shows that not only was there a need for this, but how successful such a simple idea has actually been, so successful in helping so many people. So what was a major milestone that that stood out after you sort of you launched such and I'd imagine a lot of it was word of mouth, but what was the sort of major milestone that stood out for you?

00:10:47 Jess

I think one of the biggest turning points for Run Talk Run was just over a year into running this thing. I had a lady from Peterborough reach out to me, she had sadly lost her dad to suicide and she was wondering how she could go about setting up something similar in Peterborough. Now at this point I have no ambition for Run Talk Run, to be anything massive, but I said very casually well, why don't you just call yours, Run Talk Run as well and we can do this thing side by side and help each other with it. What I didn't realise through letting this lady start her own Run Talk Run I had, I guess give him permission for other people to reach out about doing the same. As soon as people saw that, it wasn't just a London thing, they were inspired to bring it to their own hometown. And so social media really allowed us to take off and grow into different corners of the UK.

00:11:53 Emily

Absolutely amazing. And I saw, I don't know how many years ago this was, but didn't you set up in the States, wasn’t it in New York?

00:12:00 Jess

Yeah, so we do have several runs in the US, which is really exciting. So two years in to Run Talk Runs existence, we had a run start in North California so that was really special and I was able to visit them a year into them starting.

00:12:21 Emily

It's absolutely incredible. I'm so impressed and so and so proud of what you've achieved, Jess, how many people today or in the last count are actually signed up now to Run Talk Run?

00:12:34 Jess

Oh, it's hard to say. We have thousands of runners running weekly because there are so many groups, there's over 300 volunteers, which to be honest is the number that blows my mind the most. You know there's over 300 people that give up their time to listen to others every single week, and they do that so consistently and diligently and compassionately and that to me is a real success.

00:13:03 Emily

But I suppose as well in terms of what we've described about people needing this, you know people are giving up their time volunteering, but they're getting as much out of this as the people that are talking, the volunteers and the listeners are getting as much out of it, it's sort of cyclical, isn't it? I suppose that's the way, that Run Talk Run has been set up. What are you most proud of to date with what you've achieved?

00:13:33 Jess

I think for me it is learning a lot more about myself, if I'm honest along the journey it's increased my self-awareness massively. It's allowed me to feel connected to other people. It's allowed me to feel more connected to myself, to the city that I live in. It has honestly transformed my own mental health, and so I guess the reward is seeing that impact that it's had on myself whilst watching other people on that journey as well.

00:14:04 Emily

Absolutely, and you should be proud of that. And how do you get your support, Jess? Outside of Run Talk Run, because obviously, mental health has been part of your life for a long time. How do you get support elsewhere?

00:14:19 Jess

I think what I've learned over the years is that I need to access support in a variety of ways, right, I don't rely on one thing, I take antidepressants, I go to therapy now and it it's way more successful than it was before, I journal daily, and I have a great support network, you know, a partner that listens and a solid group of friends that are open to talking about mental health and that that's the real difference.

00:14:52 Emily

I think it must be amazing to wake up every morning and know that you genuinely created a space for so many people who where you've had an impact on changing their lives and I mean that must be an incredible feeling, I'm so I'm so in awe of what you've achieved, Jess and I think Run Talk Run sounds absolutely fantastic and I know that you've got exciting news as of a couple of weeks ago with your with your business, and would you like to share that?

00:15:26 Jess

Yeah, absolutely. So Run Talk Run now belongs to a mental health charity, Sport in Mind. So yeah, I sold the trademarks, and I'm able to be involved from a distance now, so not so consumed by the day-to-day management of it, but able to enjoy it for what it is.

00:15:47 Emily

Well, I think your story is so enlightening on so many levels. A, how you started your career and how you've navigated through to where you are today, and I know you're now working for another mental health charity and which you're absolutely loving and I'm so thrilled that you could be part of Links and that you could share your story. And I know that this is going to provoke many listeners who probably want to get in touch with Run Talk Run ask how you can become a leader or join. So we'll make sure your details are on our website but Jess thank you so much, and again, I think you should be incredibly proud of what you've achieved and it's so nice to see you in such a happy happy place.

00:16:34 Jess

Thank you very much, thanks for indulging me.

00:16:37 Emily

That's my pleasure.