A Single Conversation Sparked A Trip That Changed How I Communicate

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Hello and welcome to today's podcast.
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Lovely to have you here.
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I hope you're well.
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I hope you're having a great week, whatever you're doing.
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And today I'm going to tell you a little bit about my trip to Africa and what I learned from a perspective about communication and also some of the what I would call life-changing things that I saw, that I heard, that I'm going to be able to do moving my life forward.
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So I'm excited to be here.
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I'm excited to share this time with you.
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And if you would like a subject covered in one of these podcasts, key moments of conversations, have how to have life's toughest conversations, those most difficult conversations, then please just message us at info at the communicationcoach.co.uk.
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I'll say that again with my teeth in.
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Info at thecommunicationcoach.co.uk and let us know.
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Also, please like and share and subscribe.
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The more people that do that, the more people we can reach.
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And our mission is to help as many people as possible to have those difficult, challenging conversations that play on our minds, that can take over our life, and how to manage that with minimal conflict and how to deal with conflict if you have it.
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So, welcome to this week's podcast.
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Now, for some of you that listen in on a regular basis or follow me on social media, I'm pretty easy to find either Nikki Perfect or Nikki Com's coach.
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You'll know that I have just returned from an amazing trip to Tanzania to a very small village, about 40.
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Well, it was a 14-hour coach journey and a four-hour car journey from the airport to get us to the village.
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And I went out there because of a conversation, and this is what I say about conversations, they're very powerful, and when you reflect on them, you can see the conversations that have changed your life.
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And this was one of those conversations.
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It went a little bit like this.
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Oh, I've just spoken to Sandra and they need some laptops in the village that she's working with, and I think I'm gonna go.
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Great, that was my other half telling me this.
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Well, when are you going?
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Well, I'm thinking uh it's in September.
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Do you want to come?
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Great, yeah, I think I do want to come.
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So the story unfolds that our friend has been working with the village through her church diocese for the last year, went out last year, asked different parts of the community what would really help them to still function independently as a community, very important, but that would just help them.
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So, for example, the health centre asked for some baby weighing scales and a printer.
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The one of the villages didn't have anywhere to cook for the community.
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Well, they did, they had a kitchen, but they didn't have much.
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And this was one of Sandra's projects to take that on.
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There is a school, uh, there isn't a school, sorry, there's a village community without outer school, and there was a nursery school where there was some sponsorship of children to be able to go to the nursery that would fund the nursery school and allow the parents to go out to work to earn money.
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So there was lots of different projects going on, there were different choirs, the mother's union, lots of different aspects of the community helping within the community, the avocado plantation as well.
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So lots going on.
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So off I went, and honestly, I didn't really know what I was going to expect or how I was going to feel or the impact it was going to have on me.
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I just felt somewhere in my soul that it was going to have a big impact, and it did.
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Of course it did.
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So we arrive, I won't go into the details about the journey on the on the bus, but it was an overnight bus ride.
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It was a long journey.
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We were only there for 10 days.
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So it was quite a short period of time, but we did a lot in that period of time, and I learnt a lot.
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The first thing I learnt was community is powerful.
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So when we arrived, despite being absolutely on our knees exhausted, we were met by the choirs, they'd all dressed up, they were singing, they were dancing.
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The energy, honestly, I cannot describe the energy of the feeling of the well.
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In fact, I can feel it giving me tingles now of the feeling as we got out of the car exhausted.
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Now, bearing in mind, we'd done a 14-hour overnight coach journey.
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Driving is interesting.
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I'm just going to leave it there in Tanzania.
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Most of the time, I had my eyes shut and plugged my headphones in and tried to get some sort of sleep.
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And then we had a four-hour drive along.
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I can't even call it a dirt track because it's not as good as a dirt track.
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But where the road ended and the dirt track began, there was a notable difference.
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I mean, we're talking potholes, big, large potholes, to the point where we had to stop several times to make sure that the underside of the car hadn't actually fallen off and that the spare tire was still intact.
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But we got there safely.
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It was slow, but it was, you know, it was okay, and we got there safely.
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So we're exhausted.
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And I I remember Sandra had said, When you get there, you'll get carried along.
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And I was like, I could really do with some sleep.
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But she was right.
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When we got there, it was just the oh just the most amazing feeling of the of the people within the community, and they all had come out to welcome us, to see us, to show us their dancing skills.
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And I'm telling you, I mean, in my spare time, I teach an over 65s gym class.
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I'm a qualified personal trainer, and I I love taking those sessions, and community has always been important to me.
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When I left policing, I bought my local village garage and ended up setting up a community gym and a community coffee shop.
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Those two things have now merged into one and are run by the community within the village that I live in, still, so which is incredible and an amazing legacy, I guess, to have left.
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And still, I'm I'm going down there in a couple of hours and walking in there and feeling the sense of community still makes me smile and and feel uplifted.
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Anyway, back to the dancing.
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So I tried to do a bit of dancing.
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Now, anybody that knows me knows if I move my legs and my arms at the same time, that that is a disaster.
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I can do one or the other.
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And after about five minutes, I was absolutely exhausted.
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But they kept going, you know, and and there were some some older members of the community, definitely over 60, probably over 70, and I would say some of them even over 80.
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But they were moving.
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Oh my word, were they moving?
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And that was their obviously how they keep fit and how they how they move.
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But the energy of it and the passion of it and the welcome of it just moved me deeply, and I saw how important community was the whole time I was there.
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That bringing people together to work in collaboration, you can do amazing things, amazing things, and the things that they've done in the years since Sandra was last out there were incredible.
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We were very well looked after.
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We stayed in a house that was a lovely house.
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The guy that owned it lived in Tanzania, and so he wasn't there, and I would say it was one of the better houses in the village by quite a long way.
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So we were very lucky and privileged to be able to stay there.
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And there were a few days where we didn't have water, a few days where we the electric was on and off, but all of all of those things manageable because you change and adapt and you get used to a new culture.
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But the community spirit and the community energy and that collaboration really stuck with me in how you can achieve things when you work together in collaboration, when you talk to each other, when you inform each other of what you would like to do, but you also listen to what they would like to do and how powerful that is and how you can move things forward.
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The second thing I'd like to share with you, which is very close to my heart, because I work with a lot of schools, I work with a lot of head teachers and a lot of trusts in having difficult conversations and managing conflict, was this.
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We went to visit a secondary school.
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And during that time that we were there, everybody was following us around because we're quite a a novelty to be going into the schools, and young people have are often curious, and some of them spoke brilliant English, and some of them were too shy to speak brilliant English.
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Uh, good morning was a very good one.
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Good morning, how are you today?
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So proper English, which was great, and um, people in the village would come up to us and say, Good morning, how are you?
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And we would have those conversations.
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I only spoke two words of Swahili, one was hello, and the other was thank you.
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So I need to work on that before I go back.
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But whilst we were at this secondary school, we were doing this uh uh quiz, and my partner said that uh she would ask some questions, and she asked this question, and I laughed and said, They'll never know the answer to that question.
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Why are you asking them this?
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But she asked this who said this?
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Who said education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world?
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And when she said that, I thought, well, that's a great quote, I really like that.
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And I honestly didn't know who had said it.
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And a young man stuck his hand up at the back and he said, That was Nelson Mandela, which is the correct answer.
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And I was like, wow, that was impressive.
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But it it got me thinking, it got me thinking a lot that we take education for granted a lot of the time in this country because it's oh uh we have access to education, and some of the villages that we went to they don't have access to education.
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In fact, uh, to even get to a school, they have to walk two and a half hours to get to a school, and there's certainly no nursery where they can start using and yet where the nursery was in place, the kids could count to 50 aged uh under four, these kids were.
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They counted to 50 in Swahili and in English, and they could also say the alphabet in Swahili and in English.
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That was impressive.
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I was impressed anyway, and so it started me thinking, okay, what are the practical things that I can do as a human being that might help other people who don't have access to education?
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Something that I've taken for granted, not always enjoyed, I have to tell you.
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Going to school was a bit of a drag, but it's got me to where I am now, and if I can't actually imagine my life without education, and I love that quote.
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And so I'm I'm committed to helping them to fund a teacher in this village by using some of the money that I receive when I educate educators.
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Does that make sense?
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That was very South London as well, wasn't it?
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Educate educators.
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Let me say that.
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And mum, if you're listening, I apologize.
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When I educate the educators, I help them to manage conflict and have difficult conversations.
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I will be putting some of that money towards funding a teacher in that school.
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That's something I can practically do, and I'm pleased to be able to do that.
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But I love that quote, and I'm going to say it again, and I'm sorry, Jules, I laughed at you originally.
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But education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
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And then there's another quote around education, and it's this about personal development, which is key to me and my values and my beliefs, and it's this education is the great engine of personal development.
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It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, and that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation.
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I love that because it's true.
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Because education is key to doing different things with your life if you choose to do so.
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And and some of us have the opportunity to do that, and some of us don't.
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So it's about creating those opportunities.
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The third thing that I'd like to share with you, and I won't keep you much longer, maybe another five minutes.
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But the third thing I'd like to share with you is this.
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I've had the privilege of teaching hostage and crisis negotiation across the world to many places.
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I've never been to Tanzania before, but to many places.
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And what I have found is this that we might not always look the same, we might not always dress the same.
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We might use different words for different meanings.
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But what we do have in common is our emotions.
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And that generally across the world, we all experience similar, stroke the same emotions, you know, anger, frustration, love, hate, jealousy.
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And never underestimate the power of an emotion.
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And whilst we were there, whilst we were staying out in Tanzania, there we uh one of the girls in her early twenties who was helping with the cooking and the, you know, things that I take for granted of putting the oven on or putting stuff in the microwave, everything boiled on a gas stove or on charcoal in the in the kitchen.
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Water has to be warmed through or collected, depending on uh we ran out of water in storage and there was no water coming down off the mountain because it's not rainy season at the moment.
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So they had to go and fetch water for us, which was very kind of them.
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And whilst we were there, one of the people that was helping us, something happened within her family unit, and she was very worried.
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She was very worried about one of her family members, to the point where by you could see it was playing on her mind, and you could see the emotions that she was going through.
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Now, she did speak English, some of the translation got lost, and often I would say to her, Do you understand me?
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And she'd go, Oh yes, oh yes, and then it was absolutely clear that she didn't understand me.
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And we say that we say that all the time.
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If you think about times in your life where someone says, Do you understand?
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You go, Yes, because for whatever reason you don't want to look stupid, or you're not sure how to clarify, or perhaps you think you can do something similar, or maybe you've got the gist of it.
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But we often say yes when we're like, No, actually, I don't understand.
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So that was another thing, but it really came home to me.
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She but she was upset, and I said, you know, would you like a hug?
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And she said, Yes, I get.
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We gave her a big hug, and she was quite emotional, and she was tearful, she was tearful during that that period of time, and my heart went out to her as she was trying to find out what was happening.
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Because it's not as simple as you know going to the doctor, it's it's quite a journey to get to the hospital that is open, and how to get there across those roads, and most transport is via motorbike.
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So it's difficult and challenging.
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It's that it's something they're very used to, but it was something that I considered whilst I was there and thought about that.
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And we shared in a moment.
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And I always say, as a hostage and crisis negotiator, it was a privilege to share in the moments in people's lives where they were going through the toughest times, the most emotional times.
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And I was able to use my skills in just a listening capacity, even when the translation of English broke down, or even when I might not fully have understood what she was saying, or she might not fully have understood what I was saying, but we were still privileged to share that moment with her, and it just reminded me of what a wonderful experience to be a negotiator it was, and that now having those skills, I can use them in a variety of different circumstances to help people and to still share in those moments of crisis that we all experience.
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Sadly, we all do experience those moments of crisis, and that when we can listen to other people, no matter what the language, we can use still tone, we can still use body language that can bring laughter.
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I mean, I cannot tell you the amount of laughter I shared with people when we both clearly didn't have a clue what the other person was saying, but you can share those experiences and you can get by, even with my poorly pronounced Swahili.
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So they're just the three things I wanted to share with you, really, about my incredible trip to Africa and to Tanzania and to meeting some wonderful, wonderful people, and there are wonderful people wherever you go in the world.
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And often I think that we get caught in the doom and gloom trap of the you know, watching the news and hearing all the negativity, but actually, you know what?
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There's some incredible experiences and some incredible people in this world.
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Sometimes we just have to stop and find them.
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Was to stop and be more grateful for the things that I have.
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I get very busy sometimes in my life, I get very caught up in what's going on, and I forget to stop.
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I forget to stop and go, wow, actually, this is quite amazing.
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And not and I forget to enjoy the experience, and it's reminded me to do that.
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So I hope you've got something from today's podcast.
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Thank you for listening.
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Again, please like and share if you think it would help anybody else, and have a great day.
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If you have in any way been affected by today's podcast episode, there are numbers at the end of the transcript which you can contact.