The Dr Louise Newson Podcast - 27 - Elizabeth Day on The Cost of Not Believing Women

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Why are women still not believed when they describe their symptoms? And what happens when stories of pain, struggle or resilience are dismissed by healthcare professionals, families or even society?In this episode, Dr Louise Newson is joined by award-winning author and podcaster Elizabeth Day for a conversation that cuts to the heart of these questions. Best known for her podcast How to Fail and her new novel One of Us, Elizabeth brings both personal experience and cultural insight to a wide-ranging discussion about fertility, perimenopause and the ongoing stigma around conditions like PMDD and menopause.Together they explore how women often minimise their own symptoms, how fertility treatment can mask or trigger later hormonal issues and why mental health struggles linked to hormones are so easily overlooked. Elizabeth also shares how fiction, vulnerability and social media can create unexpected spaces for recognition and empathy, helping women feel less isolated.LET'S CONNECT  Subscribe here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@menopause_doctor Website 👉 https://www.drlouisenewson.co.uk/Instagram 👉   / @drlouisenewsonpodcast  Download balance app 👉 / https://www.balance-menopause.com/balance-app/ LinkedIn 👉     / https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlouisenewson/ TikTok 👉   / https://www.tiktok.com/@drlouisenewson Spotify 👉 https://open.spotify.com/show/7dCctfyI9bODGDaFnjfKhg LEARN MORE Join me on my upcoming theatre events in London, Birmingham and Glasgow 👉 https://www.nlp-ltd.com/dr-louise-newson-qanda/ Listen to Elizabeth’s podcast, How to Fail 👉https://open.spotify.com/show/4m7U7kNne0iu35HK571Ui8 Follow Elizabeth on Instagram 👉https://www.instagram.com/elizabday/ Buy Elizabeth’s new book 👉https://lnk.to/OneOfUsElizabethDay Take my online education course, Hormones Unlocked 👉 https://www.learningwithexperts.com/products/hormones-unlocked-dr-louise-newson Sign up for my Confidence in Menopause Course 👉 https://www.drlouisenewson.co.uk/education---confidence-in-menopause  

So for World Menopause month in October, I'm going to be coming to three theatres, the 5th of October in Glasgow with Kay Adams, the 12th of October in Birmingham with Liz Earle, and the 19th of October in Kingston near London with Emma Barnett. I'm going to be doing a Q&A, so these women will be questioning me, asking me about my background, my work, and also about hormones. And the second half will be audience asking questions. So there'll be lots of opportunity to put your questions across. You can ask me anything, of course.

And I really look forward to meeting some of you there. My podcast today is with Elizabeth Day, who's an award-winning author and podcaster. She runs the podcast How to Fail. Her most recent book is One of Us, and we talk a lot about this. We talk about some of the characters. But the main thing that's we've through our conversation

is about women not being believed, or listen to how we need to change it. We need to improve conversations for women and we need to empower them so they can really be the best version of themselves going forwards. So Elizabeth, Louise. I'm very excited. Dr Newsom.

I'm so excited because I feel like I've been stalking you for such a long time and just like I just love how transparent you are, how open you are. And it is sometimes can. go the wrong way that people share too much and it can be a bit sort of over the top but it's not you just have this sort of air of gracefulness but also what you do is so inspirational as well because you're allowing women mainly a space to just say it's okay to not be wonderful it's okay to have shit times it's okay to be really good as well and i think that's really important for conversations

isn't it? Well, thank you so much. What a compliment coming from you. Because I could say all of the same things back to you. But I think you're completely right. There's something so powerful and so connecting when we take the risk of being vulnerable and saying this thing happened to me. Does anyone else relate? And I'm sure you've experienced this too. I was so bold over by the response any time that I did that. Something that felt so uniquely personal and maybe a little bit niche, for instance, fertility when I started about fertility. And this wave of response that I got

from a community that had been so marginalised and wrongly stigmatised and silence for so long was one of the greatest gifts of my life in a way because then it makes you feel less alone as well. Absolutely. And it's weird, isn't it? Because we've got social media, we've got our phones on our fingers,

but we still can feel really lonely and really vulnerable. Yeah. And I think this is where conversations are changing more than like when I was a junior doctor. We didn't have internet. We didn't have social media. So our patients hung on to every word we said in our consultations. And we were a bit more godlike as doctors. Whereas now I love it because patients are central to the conversation and the consultation.

And they're really empowered. And it might not all be with right information, but they've got this knowledge that they'd never been allowed to have before. So to share experiences both good and bad is really important, I think, isn't it? I totally agree. And actually, social media for all of its flaws and for all of its ills, one great thing that it does is it can reach out through the screen and help a bullied child in a remote community in the UK who is struggling with their sexual or gender identity.

entity, it can help them be seen and find their community through the power of a hashtag. And that's an incredible thing. And obviously it can be manipulated and used for bad ends. But I don't think we should ever forget that. No. No, I mean, I started by Instagram. My daughter actually made me do it because she was in her early teens and I was coming home from just doing my clinic. say oh my gosh I've seen this lady she just told me she'd been hit by a bus the symptoms came on

overnight she'd flawed she stopped working blah-da-law she's like right you put a picture of a bus up and just explain I was hit by a bus people will get it and I was like that's a bit abstract and this was about 12 years ago and she was right and then I started to get DMs from people and I remember one quite soon after opening my social media and she said I'm 28 I'm in Canada I'm crying reading your message because I realise this is me or it could be me, but I don't know how to get help. And it was just really struck me that something that you can write very quickly

while you're making a cup of tea can have such an impact, but actually change her future life. Now I'll never meet her, I'll never talk to her, but she's now empowered with knowledge that she can take to wherever she wants. And that's incredible. Definitely.

And I think there's a broader context here if we're talking specifically about women, because women have been conditioned for millennia wrongly to believe that their stories aren't important. And part of that conditioning has relied on the notion that we are the only ones experiencing it. So we're a bit odd, we're a bit weird, and we should feel shame for it. And similar to you, I did an interview recently on my podcast How to Fail with Vicki Pattinson. And she spoke about having PMDD. and I had never heard of PMDD

until I watched Married at First Sight and there was a contestant on there who had PMDD and who spoke about it. Then Vicky came on my podcast and spoke so unbelievably eloquently about what she goes through every single month and that social media clip is one of our most popular ever

because it caused this crescendo of recognition amongst other women who had felt uniquely unseen and I think there's something so potent about that. And it's why I'm really glad in a way that I'm living through this era at this age in our society. And I said to you before we started recording, I'm so grateful for the work that you do and other women like you because I did not have a clue about the menopause. I mean, I knew it would happen, but I didn't know how it might show itself. And because of the work that you do, I was able to recognise those symptoms and I was able not to feel shame

or weird or like I was losing it or becoming quote unquote unhinged or and that's incredibly helpful and powerful. Yeah, but I sit there listening about PMDD and I feel really sad actually because I see a lot of women with PMDD in the clinic and it's really easy to treat because you just give hormones. There's a big drop before the period, especially of progesterone but often of estrogen dial, sometimes testosterone as well. And when I started doing my work, I thought I would just do menopause and of course perimenopause comes in. But now the most transformational work is seeing people with PMDD because some figures say it's 5% of women have PMDD. That doesn't sound much, but that's one in 20 women. That's a lot. But then 90, 95% will have PMS premenstrual syndrome

where we're told it's just normal to feel a bit rubbish before your periods. You can just feel a bit flat. But it's not normal, actually. Our home winds are dropping. But women with PMDD have a high suicide rate. They have lots of intrusive thoughts. And I've spoken to a lot of women in their early 20s who literally don't go out the house for three days a month.

One lady said to me, I go into Tesco's just to remind myself that are people living because I can't cope with the thoughts in my head. but the rest of the month she's worrying about those days coming so we know it there's a big decline in hormones so what do I do I give her hormones for three days a month and she's like is this legal I've never felt so good in my life and it's like this is so sad like it's great you know

all these women are coming out of the woodwork almost but then as a doctor we're really failing women because it's such a simple treatment for a lot of women you know sometimes it's fine tuning making sure the hormones are right looking at everything else as well. Can I ask you a slightly strange question? Yeah, of course you can. In the olden days, when life expectancy was much shorter, so in the medieval ages,

did that mean that women were dying without having gone through menopause or was menopause earlier? Yeah, it's a great question, actually. So there's a couple of things there. Women's life expectancy was less. It was about 57, whereas now it's in its 80s. So we live longer, 30 years or so longer. But our average menopause was more in the sort of mid-50s.

And that's partly because women used to spend a lot longer pregnant. If you think in Victorian times, you'd probably have about 10 pregnancies. You might have seven live births. But you'd be pregnant a lot and breastfeeding a lot. So when you're pregnant, you have really high levels of hormones in your body. And people often feel great. But you're preserving your ovaries. You're not producing an egg every month.

Do you see what I mean? So your ovaries would last longer. So then when you're not pregnant and you're, or you finish because, coming pregnant, whatever, then that's why people have menopause at a later age as well. But then people say, well, maybe women are winging more, maybe women are feeling more symptoms. Well, let's look at how many women were locked up in a silence. Exactly. And also, exactly that.

More women, therefore, are experiencing this at a time when more women feel that they are emboldened to speak. Yeah, not enough, but more. Absolutely, but it's just being called different things. You know, look at the word hysteria and hysterectomy. You know, there's a reason that the hist is the womb bit, of course. So, you know, we used to think, we as in doctors, used to think that it was a wandering womb. The womb was to blame for our mental health. And before they realized about hormones, they knew something changed when our period stopped.

And I've read some books from the 1800s, and they used to try and cut women because they knew bleeding would help their mood. So they would cut women under their breasts or in their ankles. And I get why they did it. They were trying to help because they knew that bleeding, as in having a period, mental health would improve. But if a woman had stopped her periods, i.e. menopausal, they thought naively that bleeding would help their mood. So we've known it for so long, but even now we know about hormones, we know this hormonal dip. There are millions of women globally who are not even allowed to have hormones they've been given antidepressants or been told it's just part of being a woman it's really sad isn't it yeah well i have been on hrt for a year and when i started experiencing

symptoms last summer i although i didn't realize it was automatically minimizing them so i was feeling heightened anxiety but i thought well i've had a really busy year and i'm now on holiday so it's all coming my stress is sort of coming and being let by those Victorian surgeons metaphorically so that's that I had a blurred vision I was like well that's just age I probably need reading glasses all this sort of stuff and I hadn't had a period for seven months but I was like well again I've had lots of fertility treatment maybe that's the issue all of that and I was having several hot flashes a day and during the night and I was like well obviously I am that's a symptom of perimenopause but I'd had them before and they'd gone away again.

I was like, it'll probably be fine, I'll sit it out. And then I thought, actually, these hot flashes are really unpleasant. So I am going to go and see a gynecologist, which I did. And she was amazing. She said to me, are you experiencing? And then she listed the things that I've been experiencing, but I hadn't put in one category. And one of them was blurred vision.

I was like, yes, I have. And she said, have you experienced any dryness down there? I was like, no, absolutely not. Like, zero complaints. and she said well we can't judge hormones from blood test because I'd also had a blood test from a male GP and he's like no your hormones are fine and so we have to go over symptoms she's like looking at these symptoms I have absolutely no doubt that you are perimenopausal if not menopausal and is your sleep affected I said no no I have actually always been a very good sleeper she's like but the hot flashes

are waking you up I said yes she said so your CB is being afraid I was like okay yeah technically And then I went next door because she taught me through the options and I decided to get fitted with the coil and so she examined my vagina and she's like, you are on the verge of atrophy I was like, how dare you?

She said, we don't want you getting UTIs I mean your urethra is dangerously exposed and I genuinely I had not noticed and she said this fascinating thing that was always stuck with me she said in my experience women who've gone through fertility treatment

they tend to minimise their symptoms because they're so used to feeling dreadful on hormones and she was also the first person who said to me you've had HRT before when you were having your rounds of IVF that was HRT and it all started making a kind of sense to me and then of course

I got fitted with a coil I had my eastern gel within three days my hot flashes are gone and my vision had actually got back I had an eye test afterwards. And I'm so grateful for that interaction. But even me, having had these conversations, knowing what was being talked about,

even I needed that help. Well, it's the whole thing about joining the dots. And I think we don't do it enough as women, as patients, but also as doctors as well. And, you know, I'm staggered by the number of women I see have come from fertility clinics.

And some of them have been successful. Some of them haven't. But lots of women have had round after round after round of IVF. And they've often had mental health symptoms, but the anxiety, the low mood is because they can't get pregnant. Some of it will be, but what about their hormones? But they've also had physical symptoms as well,

sometimes skin changes, palpitations, muscle joint pains. But the focus has been on becoming pregnant. And I know when I set up my clinic about eight years ago, I phoned, I won't tell you who, somebody who runs a lot of fertility clinics because I wanted to ask him what education do you give to women coming to your clinic especially those with recurrent miscarriages

or problems with the IVF about hormones and perimenopause because they're more likely to have hormonal issues a lot of women will have low progesterone and these hormones we know because they're natural can improve fertility so I said what do we don't do anything it's not our domain we're fertility and he was getting quite cross on the phone I said but I do a lot of education

I do a lot for free, for healthcare professions for women. And he said, don't give me that. I don't believe that. If you're doing private medicine, it will be about making money. And I said, I'm in charge of several petitions. Yes. Wow. I said, no, I haven't phoned you for any financial advice.

I have phoned you because I'm worried about these women. They have nowhere to go. And I remember it very distinctly because my husband came in the study and he was whispering, you're okay, because it was a bit of a hostile conversation. And I was really shocked. He said, don't give me all that. He said, you might be saying, you're doing it for free now, but you'll change

and it'll be different. And I said, no, I went into medicine to help as many people as possible. And I was really shocked, but we see it time and time again. And, you know, I'm not slowing fertility clinics with the same brush because there are those that are amazing and there are those that seem to do a lot of tests, give a lot of treatment, and they're not even asking women about their lifestyle or anything. It's all about the hormones. And it's sort of, but the women are just sort of left a bit

you know and it might not be any of their symptoms are due to hormonal changes but the stats are they're more likely to have an earlier perimenopause or menopause so it would have been I don't know if you had any information about these are the symptoms to look out for no now that you say that I hadn't and I agree with you that there are some incredible fertility practitioners out there when I was going through it so I spent 12 years having unsuccessful fertility treatments and recurrent miscarriages. And so I had lots of different experiences of treatment and I went to lots of different clinics. Overwhelmingly I was seen by men. And again, there are some wonderful male medical practitioners out there. My father is one of them. He's a retired

general surgeon. But it's more difficult for a man to understand if they have never been through a period or a miscarriage, how to communicate or how that experience might shape you. You can understand on one level and you can practice empathy, but you will never fully know or embody it, literally. And it was so noticeable to me that the one time, actually, I was treated by a woman twice, and both times it was revelatory to me. And the first woman I was treated by, she runs a fertility clinic in Greece that I'm sure many of your listeners might have been to. And I had a bichorneal uterus, which it means you know this, but it's a heart-shaped womb. So you have a septum at the top. And although not enough research has been done into it, because not enough research has done

into miscarriage full stop, there are some schools of thought that believe it could trigger earning miscarriage, which was always my issue. And I had always been spoken to by male fertility. doctors as if it was something that either, oh, well, we don't need to bother about that. It's probably not that. Or it was a kind of deformity that, you know, I just had to grin and bear it. But that was, it was a failure, I felt that I internalized, sort of bodily failure. And Penny was the first person who described my womb to me using really compassionate terminology. And she said, I remember it forever.

It was the first phone call I had with her. She said, your womb is like a beautiful room and it's got these two pillars and it's got this wall here and we just think for a baby to be comfortable we might renovate it slightly and we might. It was such lovely language because

it didn't feel that it was my responsibility alone and that was very noticeable to me and one of the things I'm so passionate about is not only having these conversations, conversations, as we said at the very beginning, because so many women and men feel so alone in this journey, but also giving voice to the female experience in a way that makes other women feel compassionately understood. And I think I bring that, I hope I bring that into every kind of work that I do. So it's not just the podcast, it's also my writing. And I've got this new novel out, one of us. And it was the first time I had written a perimenopausal character when I was going through parimenopause. And it made me realize that I haven't seen it that much in fiction. No.

It's not been spoken about enough. If it is, it's been trivialized or almost made fun of, a bit like PMS. You know, it's a bit of butt of jokes. Yes. But I want to talk about this, one of us, I'm very lucky because I have read it. And I really enjoyed it. But I also felt sad and I felt frustrated for some of the characters. Some of them I wanted to just take them home and mother them.

some of them are just like just be honest with each other and I'm as a doctor like one of the first things I learned I had some really great trainers was about listening and believing people and it's belief and I'm very and I've done it with my children I've always said to them if you get yourselves into trouble I won't judge you I'll help you but be honest this through the book

I'm not going to give anything away but there's a lot of people that aren't honest with each other But there are also, one female character in particular, has tried to be really honest and not being believed. Yes. And that saddens me even more, actually, because as women, why aren't we believed? Why aren't we believed by our doctors?

Why aren't we believed by our friends or family or relatives? You know, this was really awful what happened to her. And she tried to tell someone in her family and they didn't believe her. Yes. And that changed probably the shape of her future, didn't it? Yes. I'm very interested in the courage of truth tellers in systems that don't reward that. And so one of us is about a family system that doesn't reward that, which is this aristocratic, elite, privileged, Fitzmores family, embedded in English tradition.

So that idea of not being honest in your communication is very much part of their social class. the character you are talking about strives to tell the truth, but her family members don't want to be confronted with the truth because it means that they would have to confront with honesty who they really are. And I think the reason that so many women in this book aren't believed is firstly because of the systems and it's also a political system. So one of us has this political theme running through it as well. Like why do we keep falling in love with the people who damage us? and why do we keep electing them? Yes.

But I think one of the reasons that women aren't believed is because we have been so conditioned by the patriarchy not to believe ourselves first. So there's a sort of lack of self-worth and self-belief that means that when we do gather up the courage to tell the truth, we're still doubting ourselves. And we can crumble very quickly. And the character that you mentioned,

and the reason we're not talking about her by name is because we don't want to give any spoilers. But she is a woman of a certain age. So we meet her in this book when she's 50, 51. And that age really fascinates me. I'm 46, so I'm a Gen Xer slash elder millennial. But I think for Gen X women, we have been given so much mixed messaging.

And there is so much embedded trauma in what we went through. simply to grow up. And I think that this character is also struggling with all of that. There's a fundamental question of identity. Who is she if she doesn't belong? And very sadly, her family

has made her into the black sheep. So she's grappling, trying to find belonging. And that's ultimately the path of her destruction. Yeah. And there's a bit in it where there are some drugs involved and a lifestyle that, you know, wasn't great and we see it a lot in all sorts of people I did a survey looking at addictive

behaviours in women who are perimenopausal or menopausal so we looked at alcohol gambling drugs and I was just rereading it last night and it was a free text comments that are the ones that really struck me and one lady said I've I've never taken cocaine before but I needed to get some sleep and I needed to get some of these intrusive thoughts out of my head. My doctor didn't help me. I didn't know where to turn to and I had to escape from this cage of doom. It's really, and this cage of doom is something that people do feel very trapped in their bodies when their hormones aren't right. Not everybody, but some people get catastrophic mental health symptoms and I've seen it so often, there's no pattern recognition. There's not always, it's not

always people that have had mental health issues. Some people, it's gradual, some people, they literally fall off a cliff, and a lot of people have PMDD. But it's like, as a doctor, as a society, medical society, we are failing women if they're having to go to class A drugs to treat a hormonal problem that they can't get help for. Yes. And this character, I'm sure didn't do it for that reason, but she was 50. Yes.

So she was either menopausal or perimenopausal. And I really love that you pick up on that. And I do think that her addiction absolutely stems from what you're describing, which is fear of being left alone with how you're feeling. And if how you're feeling is suicidal because of your hormones, or if how your feeling is not believed by your own family when you tell them this awful thing has happened to you. then I can completely understand the impulse that you have to blot it out. And actually you're just making me think of someone I know who has ADHD

and struggles so much with the aliveness of their thoughts that they turn to ketamine for a period in their life. Yeah. Because it quote unquote chilled them out. Yeah. And obviously there's also ketamine being used now for depression therapy and all that. But I do also, knackers your bladder.

Yes. I, yes. All good. I know. When I say it's someone I know, it's not actually me. Yes, it does. And that was made clear to this person. But it did really make it so obvious, like how much pain people are in and what they seek to do to numb that pain. Yeah. I mean, we had over a thousand responses for this survey.

But a lot of people that's smoking ganipus, again, just to try and calm their brain. And I'm very interested in the role of hormones in the brain, but the brain in general, how it works. You know, there's so many things that can affect our brain. And there's so much that, especially in women, it's about us having trauma, us having personality disorders,

us having all these different conditions. I don't hear about men with their trauma. You know, we all have had traumatic experiences, some worse than others. And of course it's going to affect our cortis. and affect our progesterone and everything else. But it doesn't mean we just blame that and not look at other reasons why we can help people feel better.

Yes. Because women have just left on their own a lot. And I was just writing something recently at the weekend and about women being called malingerers. They're more likely to, this is by doctors. This is what term they're using, these heart sink patients. Women are more likely to attend a doctor. and one of this was in a medical journal that said because they have more time

because the men are busy working of course wait sorry recently it was in a medical journal like in the last 10 years oh my goodness but it still we taught this at medical school and it still filters down that women and it's like no every woman that comes to my

surgery and they you know is a GP for many years as well they they have a genuine need and just because I can't help them if I can't diagnose something it doesn't mean they're making up their symptoms I've never met someone who's made up their symptoms. You know, like your blurred vision,

you would have gone to the, if you had gone to an optician or an ophthalmologist, they would have said it's normal. And then if no one had thought about hormones, you would be thinking, well, maybe I am making it. Maybe it's stress. You know what I mean? And you can see how this happens more and more with women.

And that's where the power of being able to educate ourselves in different ways is really important, actually. Definitely. Because we're not always getting it from conventional ways. Yeah, and I think that's also, I'm not meaning to bring it back to this book the whole time, but I do think that's the power of fiction. Yes, it is. I obviously write nonfiction as well, which I really enjoy for different reasons.

But the wonderful thing about fiction is that it is a vehicle for the imagination, which sparks empathy. Yes. And you can use it to examine issues that a reader might not have first-hand experience of. But if you're doing your job as an author, you can help them understand it. So my previous novel, Magpie, I deliberately chose to write about fertility. But I wanted to make it into a riveting,

sort of psychological, psychologically thrilling book. I wouldn't describe it as a thriller. Very, there aren't any dead bodies. But I think it, I hope it's compelling and there's a big twist in it. Which my husband told me, by the way. Oh, did he?

That was so annoying of him. He listens to books and I read them. But how do I sit in to read it at the same time? Well, I didn't know he'd read it, you see, because he's, he listens in the cart. So when I had your book and he goes, oh, that's really good. And then he tells me that, and I'm like, have you seen that I'm this far forward? Well, I'm so appreciative that you read it, though. That's great because so many men don't read books by women, which is also frustrating.

So thank you, Mr. Newsom. But yes, I wanted to make it so compelling for someone to read that they would read it. And along the way, they would learn. what miscarriage might be like. And I really think fiction can be so powerful for that. And this is great because it's not actually, I'm not throwing anything, but it's not all about menopause or peri-menopause.

In fact, I hope it's funny too. Oh, I love it. But it's very relatable. But it's just great to weave in and think. And obviously, the way I've thought about hormones, effects of these characters, they're even different to the way that you have thought. But that's the beauty of fiction.

Exactly. We can take what we want. Exactly. I want to see it as a film, though. really want to destroy. Well, so one of us is a companion piece to an early novel I wrote called The Party and the party is actually being adapted. So that's very exciting. Great. And so hopefully one of us will be as well. Oh, I hope so. But you don't need to have read The Party to read one of us. It's a standalone as well. No, it's just brilliant. So I'm really grateful for you coming,

but I always end on three take-home tips. Yes. So this is the hardest bit sometimes. Three things that you think going forward will make it easier for women to be believed? Number one, know that you are never alone. In whatever you're experiencing, I promise you, the thing you think of as the most personal will turn out to have universal resonance. If you can take that first brave step of choosing to share, I promise you that that is so, that. That is so, powerful and the more women know that and the more that we use our voices the more we end up being believed i love that i think the second thing is what you said louise about you in all of your years in medicine as a gp have never met anyone who is making up their symptoms so if you are on the

receiving end of a woman telling you something that is clearly painful to her to share, I would ask that your default position is belief until and if that's proven wrong. I think your default position, and I think this in all areas of life actually, your default position should be generosity of spirit and should be extending the benefit of that generosity and that belief. So that's the second thing I would say. It all comes back to listening, really, doesn't it? So I think the third thing I would say is both listening and acting. As an interviewer, I know that the most powerful thing I can do is not to ask the question, is to listen. And that's why I don't, when I do my podcast, I don't have a pre-prepared list of questions.

I have various areas I want to discuss, but I'm always aware that someone might say something that is interesting and unexpected. and if I'm listening carefully, if I'm actively listening, it will take the conversation somewhere it needs to go. And then there's a sense that once you have listened to someone's story, acting on that in one small way to make things better for the next person, that can set off a really meaningful chain reaction. Yeah. And that's so important.

And thank you so much for sharing because listening and believing are so important and it's happening but it needs to happen more yes but thank you so much it's been great thank you i've loved it i've learnt so much oh great thank you for having me no thank you for coming