Never Confident, Always Optimistic - with Neil Taylor

Author, trainer and branding guru Neil Taylor, the man who named Ocado, shares his fascinating adventures in words this week. Becoming aware of his Lancashire accent a small child, Neil’s fascination with language, accents and communications led to studying Linguistics at Cambridge and on to a successful career in branding. We discuss how language has evolved from the secret language of teenagers, to emojis to the weird phrasing of AI, to tone and radical honesty and the rules of engagement for different formats. He now helps people with public speaking and how to inspire, engage and persuade through words. He says his biggest bugbear is with the word ‘professional’ as it’s not what’s interesting or different about people. A music lover, Neil brought one of the two old singles he tracked down recorded by his Dad’s band Marianne and Mike, who supported the Beatles in the sixties. He also brings a cherished tape of his grandmother chatting, which he recorded as a student as part of a linguistic study. He’s a Dr. Who fanatic and brings one of his collection of Tardises and talks about how his love of the show has shaped his life. His mantra is: Never confident, always optimistic. He says you can never know where life is going, but you can always assume things are going to go well.He has a side hustle making dead pan greetings cards that tell the truth at www.deadpancards.com You can find out about his training at www.thisisdefinition.com and his books including 'Brilliant Business Writing' and 'The Name Of The Beast' are available on AmazonTo view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s breast cancer awareness month and we’re joined by the inspirational podcaster, author, journalist and food writer, Laura Price who tells us about her own breast cancer journey and how it has led to her living her best life. When Laura was first diagnosed at just twenty-nine, she wrote a list of all the places she wanted to go whilst she was in the chemo chair. She re-qualified as a magazine journalist, before unexpectedly landing her dream job working for The World’s Fifty Best Restaurants. She spent her thirties profiling some of the world’s most incredible chefs, sampling the top tasting menu spots around the globe from Bogota to San Francisco. She reveals that one of her favourite restaurants is a high-end Mexico, Kol in London. Her novel, Single Bald Female was inspired by her dating experience, when, having gone through treatment, she wrote an honest dating profile and found some wonderful matches as a result. In 2022, Laura was promoting the book on the Breast Cancer Now podcast, but she said it was the day before her hospital appointment that revealed that after ten years, her cancer had spread. She describes receiving the devastating news alone and how it felt to explain it to her future husband who was outside in the car. She was invited back to be the podcast host for The Breast Cancer Now podcast, which is widely considered to be the go-to podcast for people going through treatment, and Laura, who loves her job, says she’s met some wonderful people, including actor Lisa Riley and Sir Chris Hoy. She explains the challenges of living life the full whilst also planning for the future, but despite her diagnosis and the statistics she’s outliving, says she’s living a beautiful life full of hope, joy and optimism. Laura brought some special pieces to show us, including a cherry necklace from Portugal, a stack of precious airmail letters from her year off in Brazil, the medals she’s collected from her charity fund-raising events and a very special memento from the living funeral her friend who set up the charity Coppafeel. She says you can’t live every day like it’s your last, but she spends less time sweating the small stuff. When faced with an uncertain future, it’s important to find a way to make your dreams happen. Find Laura on instagram @laurapricewrites and The Breast Cancer Now podcast. Catch up on previous episodes of her podcast Life In Food with Laura Price.To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Publisher, successful author and a Swiftie, Harriet Evans joins us from Bath to tell us about the origins of her literary life and how being a catastrophist has helped her tell the stories that have earned her awards and legions of loyal readers. Regaling us with stories from the heyday of publishing in the 90’s, Harriet talks candidly about her love of books, her total lack of snobbery when it comes to a good story and how it feels to have insights as both a publisher and a writer.Describing herself as talismanic, and always taking pleasure in small things, Harriet was inspired by her glamorous American mother-in-law to write The Treasures, the first in the Seven Stones trilogy. It’s a sweeping, gripping tale of romance and secrets and starts with the main character’s daughter uncovering some hidden treasures, which is why Harriet is such a perfect podcast guest.She brought some for her own treasures to show us, including a heavy gold ring that she describes as wearing a Barbara Hepworth sculpture on her finger, and doubles as a fidget spinner, as well as the beautiful Swiss watch she bought herself when she got her first book deal. It’s a reminder to her and to her young daughters that it’s important to be financially independent as a female, but also to remember to buy yourself treats.Harriet tells us the emotional story behind the precious gold bird necklace that was secretly gifted to her by her scary boss after she published her first book. She also sports a Taylor Swift friendship bracelet and tells us why it annoys her that Taylor gets criticised when she’s so massively talented.Obsessed with Golden Age of crime and Dorothy L. Sayers, Harriet’s second crime novel, Murder on The Royal Crescent is out at the end of October and is a perfect novel for Christmas. Harriet says that her mantra is to walk towards the joy and to make sure to try to do things that make you happy.To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Meet Lee Cooper who says it’s great to be a slashie and describes himself as a- fashion art director - slash- filmmaker - slash screenwriter slash author. Lee says he’s always been a story teller, and as a fashion marketeer has opened stores for many famous brands including Jigsaw and The White Stuff. After a film making course, Lee has pivoted into film making. His documentary ‘Maisie’ follows the oldest performing drag queen in the UK. Drawn to his long, colourful life, Lee says Maisie was still performing into his 80’s and Lee had unprecedented behind the scenes access and make a beautiful, powerfully honest film about a man dealing with cognitive decline and ageing. HIs latest project is ‘Backstairs Billy’ - another project Lee describes about being as another saucy old queen. It tells the story of the late Queen Mother’s most trusted servant. Lee regales us with some great stories about what actually went on in Clarence House.Lee says he’s a collector of stuff - or a ‘curated hoarder’ - but brought some fascinating pieces to show us including pictures of Bonnie and Bo his beloved Lhasa Apso dogs. The second caught Alice’s attention - a rubber replica of Salacious Crumb, the space monkey from the Star Wars films. Since seeing the first Star Wars film as a child, Lee says he’s been a secret Star Wars nerd. His loft is crammed with figurines that he hopes to use in a future film project. Lee says his great love is the ceremony of breakfast, done properly hotel-style, with a tea pot, china and toast rack - only eaten at midday. He brought his treasured old butter knife picked up in a vintage store and a little pot of jam.He says living in a post truth world, story if more important than ever. It’s so easy to get caught up in the everyday, so his mantra is to not sweat the small stuff. Find Lee on Instagram @leecoopercreative. To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Career guru, Sunday Times bestselling author and podcast host Helen Topper says that she was always so independent that she didn’t even tell her Mum she was leaving for Uni until the morning she went.Convinced that learning is always the way forward, she'd done back-to-back graduate training schemes when she met her business parter, Sarah at a work placement at Boots. They started chatting about a side project involving helping other people with their careers. Their idea was simple: Wouldn’t it be amazing if more people enjoyed their jobs? Soon their business Amazing If was born. Now she’s evolved the business and having really studied the way in which careers are changing and are much less linear and more squiggly. Her work resonates with organisations and individuals alike, and her Squiggly Careers podcast dealing with all sorts of career conundrums has millions of downloads. Helen’s life is very busy, training over 10,000 people a week, but she works from home in her Squiggly studio the woods which keeps her grounded. Her favourite keepsakes included examples from her wall of framed menus and her iconic red lipstick. She says we’re all doing our own thing in our own way and it’s important to forget competition and comparison and to run your own race. Find out more about Helen’s work @HelenTupper on LinkedIn and The Squiggly Careers podcast and search for Squiggly or Lobsters to find her books.To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously - with Mia DrennanDown-to-earth EY UK Winning Women Entrepreneur Of The Year Mia Drennan left school with two ‘O’ levels, but has gone on to found a business worth over a billion pounds. She tells us her fascinating story of working her way up from a temp job, through the city, to New York where she got passed over for promotion. It gave her the impetus to set up a business in the UK, where she got a taste for being an entrepreneur. After the crash in 2011, she spotted a gap in the market helping businesses get their money back. With only £6,000 of capital she knocked on a lot of doors and soon her business GLAS took off. She now has over 500 people working for her.  She says she’s a bit like Madonna and keeps re-inventing herself. She’s much more strategic these days, rather than being in the day to day running of the business. She says for her it’s about leadership and giving people the confidence to do the best they can.  Her life sounds like a movie, buzzing between Davos and Monaco, but it's lonely at the top. She's found mixing with other entrepreneurs going through the same thing a great comfort. It’s led her to launch a podcast The Lonely Female Founder Podcast to share their stories. A petrol-head since being a child, F1 and motor racing remains her hobby outside of work and she shows us her prized signed orange McClaren baseball cap. She also has a beautiful letter from Sir Kir Starmer wishing her luck for the European Entrepreneur awards. She says that being near and on water as much as possible, calms her and she loves her dogs. She says it’s important to remember that every day above ground is a good day. Find out more about Mia https://www.linkedin.com/in/miadrennan/And on Insta @mia_founderTo view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Season 11 and Alice and Josie are embracing that fresh start September back-to-school feeling they both love. They have a lovely catch up after their summer breaks. Josie describes her chilled-out summer in the heat of the Spanish countryside, whilst Alice has been flat on her back after a bad back injury on holiday. She's feeling grateful to be back on her feet after a stint in a wheelchair - although being parked in a garden centre was not her favourite moment of the summer. Apart from the pain, Alice says it was good to slow down and to take stock, although her Vinted habit got a bit out of hand! Josie says that for the first time she's learnt the power of being still and 'being' rather than 'doing'. However, they're both raring to go and happy to be back in the studio. They have a season full of exciting guests and new surprises, so tune in every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and follow us @showusyourbitspodcast on Instagram. There's also extra show notes and pictures on our Show Us Your Bits Substack.To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our stylish guest, Lauren Bravo, is known for writing on fashion, food, pop culture, travel, and feminism for outlets including Sunday Times Style, Grazia, Cosmopolitan, Stylist, and The Guardian. Lauren's first book, 'What Would The Spice Girls Do?', is a pop-culture look at girl power and 90s nostalgia. She says they weren't given much credit back in the day, but were so influential for a generation of girls like her growing up. She's always been obsessed with a second hand aesthetic, which she says she inherited from her parents and iconic grandmothers. She's always rocked a flamboyant style and says she was that kid going to sixth form with a vintage pillbox hat with a veil, so it was a natural progression for her to write a book called 'How To Break Up With Fast Fashion' — after taking on a year-long shopping ban in 2019, the book was published in 2020. She shares plenty of her tips for shopping on Vinted and successful charity shop bargain hunting, including looking for natural fibres and seeking out older brands. Learning how to layer is the key, and not being afraid to wear things out of season - a little summer dress with a roll neck underneath, for example. She says she finds that the men's section can often yield better quality jeans and shirts. Her novel 'Preloved' draws on her experience volunteering in a charity shop in London, where she encountered people from all walks of life. She is fascinated with the stories behind objects and the new life they get after they are bought in a charity shop, so this was fertile turf for her characters. She says her glamorous granny and nanny lived opposite each other and were great friends, and it was why her parents met in the first place. She says both of them were style icons and bought great quality pieces from charity shops. Lauren has inherited their coats and jewellery and brought her granny's cocktail ring to show us. It's a knuckle duster of a ring, given to her by her parents and made out of her great-grandfather's tie pin. Lauren wore it on her wedding day and any time she wants to feel fancy. A small round compact mirror from the Dubarry perfume company has a local link. Her parents gifted it to her as a graduation present. Coming from Worthing to Brighton on the train to sixth form, Lauren used to pass the art deco perfumery in Hove, and used to fantasise about living there with her friends, so this thoughtful gift from her Dad, tracked down on Ebay, means a lot to her. A match-box sized little green box revealed a suffragette brooch shaped as a letter 'C'. Her daughter loves to look at it, as her name begins with a 'C' too. It's made with peridot and an amethyst on a white stone background - the colours of the Suffragettes. People used to wear them to signal to other women they were fighting on the same side. Her last piece is from her thoughtful husband, Matt. He made her a book of all of her Worthing Herald columns, which she wrote weekly from the age of fourteen to twenty-six. She says most people commit their embarrassing teenage stories to their private diaries, but hers were all out in public. Still writing as a freelance journalist, Lauren's latest novel is 'Probably Nothing', about a woman named Bryony who gets drawn into her late boyfriend's family drama while dealing with worsening physical symptoms she keeps dismissing, exploring modern wellness culture and people-pleasing. When it comes to life hacks, Lauren says she's a born people pleaser and tries to remember her friend's mantra: "Don't put your name on stupid lists." She says the best piece of advice she ever got was from her granny, which she's passed onto many friends starting their first day at a new job: "Don't be scared. All you need to know is where the toilets are and how to get out." Follow her on social media @laurenbravo and subscribe to her Substack newsletter for her chatty pieces: Nobody Wanted This. To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fresh from the tennis at Eastbourne, Alice and Josie are joined by bestselling author Erin Kelly for a summer special. She talks glossy-mag capers, getting drunk for free five nights a week in nineties London, and writing The Poison Tree in six months once motherhood made freelancing impossible. Plus her new novel The Night Stairs, a chilling tale of fainting, hysteria and secrets at a Yorkshire Moors convent school.And her bits: a nameplate necklace from her mum that made her cry, a silver-and-onyx ring worn smooth since the sixties, an Italian gold cross that captures her love-hate relationship with Catholicism, a bead bracelet made by her thirteen-year-old, and — for the self-confessed Tudor geek — a replica Anne Boleyn necklace, with an E instead of a B. Find Erin on Instagram @erinjelly, www.erinkelly.co.uk and on Substack @mserinkellyTo view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The entrepreneur who solved the problem of non-biodegradable balloons, CEO and co-founder of Bioloon, Charlotte Melia joins us from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to tell the astounding story of her discovery.Her story starts with humble beginnings on the Isle of Wight. As a child she dreamed of becoming an actress, but after returning from a theatre tour pregnant, she realised she couldn't fulfil that dream and be a mum. Instead, she started a children's party company as a side hustle, dressing up as princesses at weekends. It quickly took off and, by 2018, Dazzle & Fizz had become the go-to company for ultra-high-net-worth individuals, royals and A-listers, with offices in London, New York and Saudi Arabia.She shares some hair-raising stories from parties for the ultra-rich, including transforming The Dorchester ballroom into New York City for two-year-old twins. The average spend on a three-year-old's birthday party? £55,000.Although fiercely environmentally conscious—banning single-use plastics long before it was fashionable, upcycling sets and redistributing food waste—Charlotte says party balloons remained a huge problem. With thousands being used and discarded after just a few hours, she became increasingly troubled by their environmental impact.The latex balloons she bought claimed they would biodegrade as quickly as an oak leaf. Charlotte jokes that, despite only getting a double B in science, even she knew something didn't add up. After conducting some "cowboy science" of her own, she discovered they definitely weren't biodegrading.Digging deeper, she uncovered years of greenwashing and found research proving latex balloons don't biodegrade as claimed. Instead, they contribute to microplastic pollution and are responsible for the deaths of around one million seabirds and 100,000 turtles every year.Determined to find a solution, one of Charlotte's shareholders introduced her to Professor Jason Hallett at Imperial College London, who suggested funding a PhD student to develop an alternative to vulcanised latex.With her party business losing 95 per cent of its revenue during Covid, while raising a son with special needs and going through a divorce, Charlotte risked the last of her money to fund researcher Juliana Cumming. Three years later came the call she'd been waiting for: Juliana had found the winning formula.The result is a material that is both biocompatible and biodegradable, with the potential to replace vulcanised latex across the $40 billion industry—from balloons and gloves to medical devices and condoms.Charlotte also shares the three objects that matter most to her: Rabbit, the soft toy she's slept with since birth; her well-travelled passport, which represents the freedom and purpose she finds in exploring the world; and Terrance, a small turtle attached to her backpack that reminds her every day why she's doing this work.Her life hack? Turning her stubbornness into her superpower and swapping her morning coffee for functional mushrooms.What a remarkable woman.Find out more about Bioloon at @wearebioloon on Instagram and connect with Charlotte on LinkedIn at @charlottemelia.To view our guests' special bits, please follow us on Instagram @showusyourbitspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.