The lovely Noel talks about what it's like being a peer support worker all the way from Milton Keynes, crisps, imposter syndrome and how hard it is to be pinned down to just the one uplifting tune. This is the fifth episode of Peers in a Pod- the podcast all about Peer Support work. Who are we? what do we really DO ? how did we get here? In Season 1 Peer Trainer Fiona Eastmond interviews peer workers from across the NHS to find out what makes them tick. Sporadic releases.
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Twitter (@FionaThePSW)
The lovely Noel talks about what it's like being a peer support worker all the way from Milton Keynes, crisps, imposter syndrome and how hard it is to be pinned down to just the one uplifting tune. This is the fifth episode of Peers in a Pod- the podcast all about Peer Support work. Who are we? what do we really DO ? how did we get here? In Season 1 Peer Trainer Fiona Eastmond interviews peer workers from across the NHS to find out what makes them tick. Sporadic releases.
Patreon (donate £1 a month)
Ko-Fi (donate any one-off amount)
Twitter (@PeersinaPod)
Twitter (@FionaThePSW)
Hi, my name is Fiona Eastmond and this is peers in a pod. about peer support working who are we? What do we do? Most importantly, what are our favorite biscuits? I'm here with Noel Wynder would you like to introduce yourself, Noel?.
Noel:Yes. So I am Noel. I am a peer support worker in the community, mental health hub in Milton Keynes, it used to be the community mental health team, but now it's the hub
Fiona:And you have been a peer support worker for 10 months. You were saying.
Noel:10 months. I started in at the start of August last year.
Fiona:Fantastic. So question one, what is peer support?
Noel:People ask me this question quite often, and I really struggled. But I had a bit of a think about this before we got together today and I tried to get it in as few words as possible. And the sentence that I came up with is Like-minded people coming together to support and help each other grow, which I quite like. It reminded me the question itself might be a few days ago. Somebody told me that alcoholics anonymous is an enormous peer support organization. It's almost like the prime example, the fundamental peer support organization, where people with alcohol issues in the past and currently get together and. Support each other through their alcohol issues. And that really resonated with me. That was, I find that a really good way of describing peer support.
Fiona:Thank you. That's really simple. And to the point as well, which I really like one of the reasons why I put that question in is because it became this job title where people were just like what is that? And I thought there were no other job titles in the NHS like this. And then I realized that there were. Occupational Therapists get asked as well. And of course, there's all those amazing memes with the little pictures on, what society thinks I do, what my friends think I do, what my family think. I do, what the newspapers think I do, and then what I actually do, I've always wanted to do one of those for a Peer Support Worker.
Noel:I think we can collaborate on that.
Fiona:That'd be good. We should do that. Should be the cover of the album, when the band get back together. So in the next series, we're going to be interviewing some staff and somebody said to me that I should call it Staffing is Cause it makes it sound like we're cooking professionals. we're also staff and we're also professionals.
Noel:such imposter syndrome when somebody says that we're professionals, of course I've had training and I've had quite a bit of experience working with patients now, but I still feel like an imposter and lot of the time
Fiona:it will come actually, because I felt that for a very long time. And when I finally got the band five role, the imposter syndrome was heavy after some encouragement and after some good feedback and some good supervision sessions and people. Literally coming up to me and saying, I'm so glad you joined the team. I finally thought, I can do this. And that moment will come.
Noel:Fantastic.
Fiona:It will. I promise you So second question, and this is a big one. What is"Recovery" anyway?
Noel:is a big one.isn't it, is such a loaded question in the first instance, I think because everybody's got a different idea of what it is. And I suppose that kind of brings me to my definition of recovery. Now, of course, being a peer support worker, I have had mental health issues myself. And for me personally, recovery is being comfortable with where I am in my life. Whether or not I'm taking medication or suffering mental health symptoms or engaged with health services. It's about feeling content with the progress I've made in my past, feeling content with myself in the present and feeling hopeful about the future as well. And about having the mental tools to deal with the ups and downs of life without leaning on my old behaviors. Which helped get me through the ups and downs of life, incredibly unhealthily. So I guess that's recovery for me, but ultimately I think it's what ever somebody wants it to be. I guess it's an idea really it's an embryo ready to be nurtured and grown into whatever somebody wants it to be. Everybody's personal definition of recovery is different. I don't know if I've explained that particularly well, but it's that's how I feel about it personally.
Fiona:No, I think you have explained it really well. I think recovery is such an individual thing. It's really difficult. And especially for peer support workers actually to say this was my recovery and I'm here to help you recover. And you're looking at someone who's got a completely different life from you, completely different lifestyle. They're different age. They have a different diagnosis and they're just like okay, so you recovered. How is that helping me right now? And so the kind of the generalization of recovery I think it often gets very generalized and not individualized enough and, I think where the peer support worker works their magic is getting to know the person; is having the time that other staff often don't have through no fault of their own to get to know what a person's recovery might look like. And then help them towards those goals.
Noel:Yes.
Fiona:co-produced recovery journey for want of a better word, but it's a co-produced treatment. Yeah.
Noel:I think there's some mileage in not really defining it too closely as well. When I first got into this role, my manager gave me some. Anti recovery model resources to look at, to balance out how we approach it from the medical world and balance out how other people around the world feel about it, perhaps not in necessarily in positive terms. There was a wonderful resource called recovery in the bin
Fiona:I love recovery in the bin. love them.
Noel:it's they set. So
Fiona:so much.
Noel:activist, and really honest and forthright about how they feel about recovery and the fact that it's just another tool for the NHS to impose on people. And that's, I guess helped me with that over the course of the past 10 months to not necessarily trying to fit into the model, but encourage people to make a bit of recovery, what they want to make of it.
Fiona:a lot of pressure I think, to fit in. That's quite global really, isn't it. There's a lot of pressure to fit in, hang on weight in society and your job in homework and everything. And I love recovery in the Ben. Have you come across Mad COVID? Oh, you would love them. They do a podcast. It's fantastic. They're very articulate, intelligent bunch who really speak for. The suffering that's happening, particularly and specifically over the period of the COVID pandemic, specifically to people who are, or were under mental health services. And it's hard to hear but really true and really good.
Noel:That's a fantastic recommendation. I should definitely look out for
Fiona:Please do. And I would encourage every single one of my listeners both of my listeners, in fact to look up Recovery In The Bin who are awesome and Mad COVID who are fantastic. And we cannot ever forget that we came from grassroots organizations like that. Sanitized and as smoothed over and corporatized, as we can sometimes feel those guys are really at the spiky end. So after slightly fan-girling over reasonably anti peer support organizations, which may surprise you. I need to ask you another recovery question. What is your most often used recovery tool?
Noel:Yeah, that is most likely good old fashioned focused, empathic, active listening. I have throughout my experiences going through various therapies and speaking to lots of different medical professionals about my condition, I've always appreciated being heard and coming out the other side of therapy with with an idea that. I'd quite like to learn some of those skills that people use with me to direct and help conversation flow and to elicit information. A decade ago, before I even thought about taking any kind of role in, peer support or any kind of psychology role, I looked up that active listening and done some learning on that. But it's something I use every day, whether that's with a colleague or a member of the public or a service user within our organization active listening and the empathy that kinda comes along with that. Focusing, giving somebody an opportunity to be heard and to let their fears and hopes and dreams and difficulties and ideas for change. Come out. I get a lot out of that part of my job is the listening side of things.
Fiona:And how about keeping yourself? Without wishing to medicalize you, or assume that there's some awful inner monster that you're battling what's your most, every day thing that that keeps your head above water.
Noel:It's a really pertinent question. And I don't think it's negative in any way because of the nature of our role and the nature of our past. It's important for us to stay on top of our mental health and maintain kind of things that do still go on in our heads. Wherever our diagnosis is, I think we can all benefit from nurturing activities and from keeping ourselves so that we can help keep up as well. Self care, indeed. The one thing. I wish it was one thing, but it's probably three, but the one thing out of all of those is the PlayStation. I have been a long time gamer since I was five or six years old way back at the start, the eighties, I started off on the very early PCs, the spectrum, 48, K 32 K BBC computers all the way back in the day.
Fiona:When I was at school in the final year of primary school, there was one computer in the whole school and it was in my classroom and I used to be able to write three or four line programs in BASIC that made the computer go purple or a word over and over again on the screen. And the teacher didn't understand how to stop it doing that, which gave me an extraordinary sense of power
Noel:At quite a young age that must've been very liberating.
Fiona:pretty amazing
Noel:the last year of primary school. I was asked by the teachers to load the games and the programs that they were using on their computers. When I was eight years old. Yeah.
Fiona:Yeah. So PlayStation what's your favorite game?
Noel:I've just finished playing a game called"Days Gone" which is a post-apocalyptic zombie stealth shooting thing that I've just really enjoyed the exploration aspect of, and of course blowing up zombies. So I finished that yesterday after probably about 50 hours total over the past couple of months, I use a PlayStation as a tool; when I come home from work is probably one of the first things I do want to get in after taking my shoes off, stick the PlayStation on for half an hour. It lets me escape and unwind. And in fact, I bought it for the month following the, getting this job after a little bit of a pay rise cause I knew it was going to be a tool to help me unwind at the end of a difficult day. And it always has been I visit it pretty much every day.
Fiona:So I've got a question for you about the PlayStation when you're playing, do you lose track of time?
Noel:Very easily,It's an almost drug-like escape without the hangover. I don't know whether it's been because I've played them since I was very young, but I have always in the same way. In fact, the books allow me to escape. And I still read a lot now. Games really do help me to escape the realities and the ups and downs of everyday life and give me a different place to be a new world, to explore a different person to be perhaps as well. And I do quite often lose track of time, fortunately, because it is after work. And because then I go on to make dinner, which is my next self-nurturing activity. I really enjoy cooking too then. So I do have a limited amount of time that I can spend on the PlayStation. Otherwise I probably would spend all day.
Fiona:But the reason why I asked that is because there is a known brain state called flow. And I was wondering if it is a flow activity for you.
Noel:That's funny. That's the second time I've heard that word this week in relation to brain activity and yes, I think it is. I find the same thing with playing guitar as well. I play guitar and have done for many years. And when I'm there in that moment, in that zone, there is nothing else in the world. That's just me and my guitar. And I feel very similarly with most of the games I play on the PlayStation.
Fiona:You have this real you know, it's almost a sort of disciplined routine of boundaried flow activities.
Noel:I think it has to be boundaried and disciplined because a lot of my old behaviors involved spending hours and hours playing the PlayStation.
Fiona:Really nice. That you've been able to return to that in a really healthy way.
Noel:Absolutely. Yeah. I'm quite proud of that aspect of it.
Fiona:Yeah. so you should be. How did you get into your current role and what is it?
Noel:So I'll answer the second half of that first, I think that it is a peer support worker role. I've worked in a community mental health team with a couple of different sub teams within the overall team the diagnosis and conditions management team, which looks after the vast majority of the mental health community patients in Milton Keynes and the assertive outreach team, which looks after some of the more difficult to engage and less, engageable members of the team. And so I worked with AOT once a week, and it's a fabulous environment. I really get on with the dynamic and quick changing nature of the team. But the vast majority of my patients are with a diagnosis and condition management team and they will be sufferers of schizophrenia disorders, psychosis, and depression and substance issues. Some of my colleagues where the team worked with personality disorders and some focus specifically on psychosis or a particular a particular illness, but yeah, that's my role. And so the first part of that question was how did I get into my current role? I. Was out of work for a fair while. About four years ago, I was out of work for about a year and my partner worked in the NHS. She's a registered nurse. And I was, I started looking on NHS jobs and I thought, okay, I'm sure there were lots of opportunities and routes to get into mental health. I've always wanted to get into mental health in one way or form. And I've never had the opportunity or the finances or the time or the motivation to go out and get a bachelor's degree in some form of psychology and then go out, applying for jobs. I looked on NHS jobs and over the course of a couple of months, I applied for a few the one that actually got me into the NHS was working in the sterilization units at Milton Keynes General reprocessing surgical instruments. My backup line to that is always, I was scrubbing bits of people off bits of metal.
Fiona:Wow.
Noel:That wasn't the core part of the job. It is part of the job. It was taking instruments from theaters and cleaning them up, putting them through industrial washers, checking them, making sure they're all in good working order, laying them up for the next procedure auto-claving them, and then returning them to theaters. Certainly it was a very active job. I was on my feet all day running around the hospital. You regularly did 10 or 15,000 steps a day. Learned a lot about surgical instruments. I could probably name, I dunno. 10 months ago I'd probably have named a couple of hundred, probably get away with 50 or a hundred now. But that was how we got into the NHS. And then after. So two and three quarter years working there. About a year ago now I saw the role of peer support worker in the inpatient unit in Milton Keynes come up applied for that. I didn't get an interview and I got in contact with the chap asked for a little bit of feedback about my application. Is there anything that I could change? And he said, the only reason that we didn't give you an interview is because you don't have experience as an inpatient. So cause I've never been, I've never been an inpatient in mental health services. I've always been either a CPN or Therapy and that kind of thing. Yeah. A week or so later, I noticed that there was a community peer support worker role came up on NHS jobs. So I got in touch with the same chaplain. I said, is it worth me applying for this? He gave me a little bit of advice on my personal statement. I applied, I interviewed, I got the job and here we are 10 months later. Absolutely zero regrets. I really enjoyed the team that I worked with at the hospital. They were wonderful people. As soon as I read the job description for this role, I knew it was for me. I ticked 95% of the boxes. It really excited me and I've never been excited about work ever. I've had loads of different jobs and I've never been excited to get up at eight o'clock in the morning and travel to go to work. This is the job for me. And I knew it at the moment. I read the job description and the person specification yeah, it's a good fit for me and I feel like I'm a good fit for it
Fiona:I think you are too. it's a great feeling, not just wanting to go to work, but knowing that there's a difference that you're making somehow. And the flip side of that is awful days when you feel like you haven't made a difference, when you feel like you've made some kind of awful mistake. And of course the fact that we're positioned in the NHS, just reflecting a little bit on the language used is that we're not really in mental health teams are we we're in mental illness teams and everything seems to be quite focused around diagnosis. And split up and boxed off into little sets of problems that fit criteria and things. One of the most important things about peer working is to help that it is almost to model. The fact that it's possible to be a whole person. And not be a diagnosis. And it's quite fun to ask people to guess what your diagnosis was seeing as it supposedly defined you as a person for all those years.
Noel:quite like idea of actually prancing and superhero Cape walking through our mental health team and going look I've recovered. I used to be really quite severely mentally ill. Look at me now.
Fiona:the chances are of course, because of the stigma that there was a couple, at least a couple of other people in the room. Who've been through something quite similar, but literally aren't allowed to talk about it and especially not to patients. Oh no.
Noel:Absolutely.
Fiona:And that can be really hard, but in that way we're trailblazers also in that way, we are co-opted into a system and that's hard too.
Noel:It's really hard because feel somewhat like I'm a driver for change and. I hope that I inspire a little bit of hope, not just in my patients, but in CPNs and professionals that I work with, the commissioners, I shared my story with a fair number of my colleagues at work. And I think being able to tell somebody that I was right at the bottom, I've had real bottom of the barrel moments in my life. And to actually be able to go into work and to. Hopefully inspire a little bit. Hopefully my colleagues really mean something to me as well as it does with service users. I think that the being a driver for change in hopefully a generation where opinions will start to swing slightly more towards the person-centered and the understanding the empathic, the less medically dependent idea; that we can all get to a point that we're comfortable with and happy with in our lives. And it doesn't have to be medication and extended inpatient stays. It can be more than that. And hopefully peer involvement in the NHS as a growing phenomenon will help drive that change over the next decade or so
Fiona:I really hope so to be um, the outliers can be a very difficult place to be in. But I think we're filling it well, have to say, So question five, this is always a really quick one. Describe your typical working day using only five words.
Noel:I tried to have a think about this before we got together and I really struggled then, and I think I might struggle now, but let me see if I can bring them off the top of my head. Driving, listening, Admin Empathy and. Completeness.
Fiona:I like
Noel:that I think, yeah, I could probably go back and explain each of those admin because I don't want to be doing admin I'd much rather be sat with patients and running groups and doing development work and all of that kind of thing. Actually sitting down in front of a computer that is not my most enjoyable pastime. And I know that's pretty much an exclusive across the board with most of the NHS Completeness. I come home at the end of the day and I actually feel like I have achieved something. Even if, as you said earlier on you don't necessarily always feel like we've made a difference, but there's something about the role and about the interactions and the interventions that we have with service users, which is empowering for me. And it really gives me a sense of achievement at the end of virtually every day that I am doing what I'm doing now. And the role itself encourages me to take that up and it encourages me to help people then. Yeah. What more can I say about that one? What the other one's driving, I love driving anyway. I drive to, and from work 25 minutes each way and listen to a podcast. And then when I'm going between patients' houses as well, I usually cover that between five and 30 miles in a day, and we've already covered listening. I get a kick out of being that person that somebody can hopefully open up to and using just little gentle, subtle skills to be able to keep the conversation, going to draw different themes out to reflect back to people. And yeah just give people the satisfaction of being heard by someone who is interested. Because that means quite a lot to me.
Fiona:That is in an absolute nutshell. That's my favorite thing you've said so far. Honestly, is that we're interested and it might even be the first time that a person approaching mental health services has met someone who's interested. And I don't know yet whether that's because we're fresh and not yet burnt out, or whether it's because we have come from lived experience, whether it's because we're fundamentally amazing or whether it's. It's just a combination of all of those things really. And I think there's a real value in that lived experience. Point of view. As opposed tobook-learnt points of view. There's nothing wrong with learning, nothing wrong with books and there's nothing wrong with getting to know things from the background of eminent psychologists and all kinds of different people that have come before you. But there's something about lived experience and specifically lived experience of recovery that it's really right there in front of you.
Noel:Definitely. I kind of like the analogy of. You could tell somebody how to put up a shelf by reading it in the B&Q DIY manual. But if you've put up 30 shelves yourself, you're much more able to help get the shelf put up. I don't know whether that's a suitable analogy, or not, you could, read a recipe and you can tell somebody how to make lasagna but if you've made a hundred lasagnas you've got all the tips and tricks, the ins and outs, you know what temperature to put the oven on. You've got everything there and you've practiced it a lot.
Fiona:Probably got a secret ingredient and you know what the right tomatoes and you've got the pasta right and, just when to pop it in there's something about that. That is irreplaceable really?
Noel:definitely. There was one more word Empathy. So if it was going to be six words, occasional pain as well with the empathy comes sometimes the realization that either I've been in that position before myself, and that's reminded me as a bit of a trigger or you listen to somebody and that they're having a particularly bad day, they offload onto you. And you soak it up and it becomes part of who you are for the half an hour or so. And that empathy can be pretty difficult sometimes. And you mentioned the word burnout earlier on, and I'd like to think that in all of our teams across the Trust that we work for, the supervision structure and the help and support that we've got in place hopefully is in the most part up to scratch enough so that we've all got somebody to turn to. We've all got somebody to chat with and we can all offload and voice our concerns. And that's important for me on a regular basis. Being able to offload get rid of some of that rubbish that we absorb yeah.
Fiona:Yeah, very important. You're quite right. Kind of five words to describe your day could be extended 10 words to describe your week. And one of those words would be supervision or certainly reflective practice.
Noel:Yeah, reflective practice and the reflective part of supervision and the work that we do, is really important to me. I went through a lot of therapy. I found that a little bit of navel-gazing was really beneficial to me or helping me process and understand myself and my place in the world and my behaviors. and apply logic to emotions occasionally, and it really helped me work out things and having somebody to bounce off groups as well, we have group supervision that's a wonderful thing. In the most part, to be able to have lots of different peer worker's opinions and ideas about how to get past a particular issue or in some of the groups that we're doing we've got one or two people who are challenging and like to challenge the authority and the model and almost the establishment. yeah, I find it really refreshing. I'm not a particularly challenging person myself. I'm a bit of a sheep. always go along with what everybody wants us to do, but at the same time if something feels like the best thing, then that I most likely to go along with it, but I'm quite happy when other people contribute and say, no, hang on a minute why is it right? Why is it wrong? Why might it be what could we do differently? And I don't always do that.
Fiona:One of the things that's really important and really good and beneficial about group supervision, especially the group supervision that we have is that it is all those very different peer support workers getting together and talking to each other and being really different in their work because we bring so much of ourselves to our work. Another question. What are you most proud of in your work? And I've put here one amazing story, but it could be two.
Noel:One amazing story, actually. I related this story today because we did have group supervision as it happens. I worked with a service user. He was one of the first five people on my caseload after I finished my training. His name is George, shall we say? We built rapport really quickly, very easily reasonably similar, recent past our first meeting, we went out and grabbed a coffee and went and sat in a park and shared each other's most recent mental health history. yeah, just found it really easy to get on with him and that kind of continued over the course of our next seven or eight sessions, A lot of listening, a lot of gentle challenging, finding out what it was that he wanted to change and trying to help put the building blocks in place for making those changes. We finished our work on a good note. He'd make good progress and was pretty stable. He was looking for a new job because he'd realized that his current job was not ideal and it was bringing some stresses into his life that he wasn't comfortable with. A few weeks after I discharged him from our part of the service anyway I saw that there was a role coming up in our team as a peer support worker. And. Somebody mentioned that, can you think of anybody who might be suitable for this role? And George was the first person that jumped into my mind. Now George had engaged with our employment team and at the individual placement service within our mental health team. so I let them know that the role had come up. And I said, I don't know whether George is interested in this, I don't know. But if you let him know that it's there, perhaps he could think about applying for it, he did apply for it. Unfortunately he didn't get it. Just to add a twist into the story there. He interviewed and he didn't get a job a week or so later. An inpatient role came up inpatient peer support worker here in Milton Keynes. I gave the employment service, a nudge. They gave George a nudge. Via the employment service, actually his employment advisor and myself, and he met on zoom for half an hour, a couple of days before his interview, he asked some really interesting and quite involved questions. And I gave him some very subtle and gentle guidance and he interviewed on his birthday and got given the job
Fiona:wow. Happy birthday.
Noel:Happy birthday indeed. So one of my former peer support patients is going to be effectively on my wider team as a peer support worker in the inpatient unit, just up the road from us.
Fiona:Incredible.
Noel:It's not, it is incredible. And it gave me such a boost when I heard about it. And it has actually carried me for quite a couple of weeks now, because did some work together. He's seen what I do and how I do it. And he's. Perhaps taking a little bit of inspiration from me and the work that we did together, and if I achieved nothing else in my peer support life then that's already my highlight. It's absolutely superb. I'm chuffed to bits with George and good luck to him in his new role. Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet up as professionals sometime soon.
Fiona:yes. There's a bridge still for you to cross between viewing him as a service user and viewing him as a professional colleague. So there might be some meetings to be had about changes of language and even changes of body language, and also what I call moving through the magic curtain which is seeing upstairs in the community mental health hub or seeing behind the little curtain somebody was talking on the radio earlier on about when Toto pulled back the curtain from the magician, by the stage at the end of wizard of Oz spoilers. Sorry. And I realized that's where the phrase behind the magic curtain comes from. But it's a bit like that. It's seeing the inner workings and not necessarily being disappointed, but being amazed at how ordinary they are.
Noel:Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I had a little bit of that when I joined. I wasn't actually I didn't go through the Milton Keynes team. But actually going into a building and seeing all these medical professionals and sitting down in an MDT meeting they're all just normal people, regardless of their banding or their experience or their qualifications, they're all just happy to have a chat. And I'm very approachable and that's the way it should be very, quite actually quite different from the hospital. The hospital environment for whatever reason was quite hierarchical and not as comfortable as I'd like to call our team.
Fiona:There are really big differences between inpatient and community teams that are sometimes necessary, but sometimes potentially too marked. I put this to them actually about a job share. They said, no, they're very wise. But they said, no a job share as a senior peer between inpatient and community. So the person would be working in both with literally one foot in both, but there'd be one person in each role, but each role would be split. So you'd spend some of the week in community and some of the week in-patient and the other person would spend some of the week in- patient and some of the week community, because I thought that would really improve the communication and things like that between the teams. Let's we'll wait and see, we'll see if somebody ever comes up with a role like that. We also thought it would be really stressful because it would effectively double your caseload, double the amount of members of staff that you have to learn the names and the roles of, and they keep changing and stuff as well. And also double the amount of complicated language that you have to learn. All teams have their own unique languages and yeah the last two questions without wishing to trivialize a very serious role I find these particular questions really important in getting to know somebody and also with these questions, I'm making a peer support playlist on Spotify. what's your favorite listening when you need a boost?
Noel:I struggled with these questions. What's your favorite movie? What's your favorite music? Because. With all of these things, I can't nail it down to just one thing. I was given access to music by my mother from a very young age, like possibly when I was still in the womb. She always told me that she put speakers either side of my cot when she brought me home from the hospital and played the Beatles to me. So I've had loads of different influences over the years from my family and friends and the media and radio and the charts and that kind of thing. I have got dozens of Spotify playlist that I've created for different moods. So if I'm hyper and I want to relax, then there might be some chilled beats. If I'm a bit down and might need uplifting there's drum n bass. There's hip hop in there, Sea shanties there's house music. all levels of rock from the top to the bottom. Not necessarily the sort of easy listening or the screaming stuff, but my guilty pleasure is. Absolute top of the line pop and every year or so, there's a song that comes into the charts. that kind of grabs me by the ears and shakes my head around and won't let go. So the one song that I've chosen for your playlist and some will love this and some will hate it. what I consider to be the most uplifting pop song of the last decade, which is shake it off by Taylor Swift. Yeah.
Fiona:that on the playlist straight away.
Noel:That individual song is by no means representative of what I listen to on a daily basis. But that is, it is one of those songs that if I need to bounce and feel uplifted, then I will chuck it on top volume and bounce and be uplifted.
Fiona:that's really lovely. I like that. Thank you. I want to hear that now. So finally, but by no means least what is your favorite biscuit and why
Noel:crisps
Fiona:coming from left field? Okay. What flavor?
Noel:What flavor? My gosh, I can't do it. I can't choose one specific note. It's all about mood. It's all about what kind of texture or flavor I want at the time. If it was a desert island flavor, okay. That'd be prawn cocktail something or other
Fiona:A Walker's prawn cocktail, or those funny little pink sort of puffy thing prawncocktails.
Noel:Do you mean quavers and that the men.
Fiona:That's what I mean. Yeah.
Noel:Yes, Skips, there we go, Skips. What's the best prawn cocktail the best prawn cocktail actually is. Seabrooks yeah. In fact, they're the best crisp around if you go for any flavor, I think
Fiona:Seabrooks smooth or crinkly.
Noel:crinkly every time.
Fiona:Seabrooks crinkly,prawn cocktail
Noel:yeah.
Fiona:You heard it here first
Noel:I could talk for hours about crisp s it's definitely, that was one of my old behaviors as well, was snacking, and munching and crispy stuff. Ever since I was in my teens, they've been that kind of naughty little party snack, but I can have after school.
Fiona:There could be of course, a crisps podcast. I'm trying to get everybody who comes on the podcast to have an imaginary or indeed, eventually real spinoff podcast. We've got Miriam's MixTapes perhaps we could have the best crisps of the century with no winder.
Noel:Yeah, I'm going to have to come up with a catchy name, yeah. Watch this space.
Fiona:It's been absolutely lovely speaking to you. Has the time flown? Have we been in Flow?
Noel:If we have been in Flow that has absolutely flown past.
Fiona:I'm really looking forward now to seeing you in group supervision at some point, which I might do, peer support workers keep moving around. Have you noticed that recently, like
Noel:Yes.
Fiona:CNWL's peer support workforce, like a Rubik's cube at the moment. And I think that's a good thing. I guess it's what it's like a Rubik's cube. This game bigger and bigger somehow keeps changing. I'll drop this analogy now. Anyway, thank you so much for being on Peers in a Pod
Noel:it's been a real pleasure. I'd love any opportunity to chat with like minded individuals.
Fiona:Don't forget to follow me on@FionaThePSW on Twitter. Upcoming episodes include all sorts of very interesting people. And I very much look forward to having you as my listener again thank you