Lived Experience, Leadership and Purpose | Paul McAnulty | S04 E02

It's hard, isn't it? Because this is what we work with survivors who, you know, understanding complex trauma, it teaches you not to judge.

You know, hindsight is always going to be 20-20.

When you make a decision that you can later look back on and go, oh, maybe I should have done the other thing.

I think what it's instilled is that It sounds really sort of, I don't know, conceptual, but I believe that everyone is exactly where they're meant to be.

And I believe I'm exactly where I'm meant to be because I think at any given point in your life, you've got the information that you've got available and you make what you think is the right decision.

So it is the right decision.

It doesn't matter what comes 10 years down the line looking back on it and going, yeah, that was stupid.

there's no point in doing that because it's counterfactual and it's just holding you in your past but you know if I could say anything I think he did great at 17 years old and you can't it's hard because I've got two brothers who were left behind and had to stay with my dad and I think there's an assumption there that they probably think I had it easy Because they don't know about the rough sleeping.

I've not told them and I don't really want to expose them to that.

Whereas it's easy for me to assume that they had it easier for me as well.

So there's like a sense of like resentment that could grow from that.

So I just think it's important just to like avoid that kind of counterfactual what if, what if kind of thinking and just accept that we're all exactly where we're supposed to be.

There's something quite stoic about that, isn't there?

My grandad was a stoic.

Ah, there we go.

So maybe that's where it comes through.

My grandad used to read Marcus Aurelius and things like that.

And a lot of Rudyard Kipling and stuff.

So that's probably rubbed off.

I think stoicism has kind of been rebranded lately.

I think it's bordering on just raw dog your way through horrible trauma.

And that's not what it's about.

For me, it's more about if you can find peace, contentment and happiness with what you have now... none of the comparative stuff, none of the conditional stuff can really get to you because you're happy and fulfilled and then everything else is like this juicy bonus as opposed to constantly chasing something or comparing yourself to others.

And there is that bit of perspective though, isn't there? And I think sometimes it's a really difficult thing to go.

Actually, someone's been through all of this.