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At some point in our lives we all get scared – of making the wrong decision, of not being a good parent, or that everyone will figure out we’re just making it up as we go.
I’ve spent years helping leaders work through fear, stress, and uncertainty. Now I’m making a podcast about how they face their fears and come out stronger.
It’s for founders, leaders, and business owners who feel like they’re constantly fighting uphill and not finding the balance they need to be effective at work and present at home.
Sally-Anne: 00:00:16 I'm Sally-Anne and welcome to Fearless Forward, the podcast that asks leaders how they've faced their fears. Today, I'm in conversation with a man whose multi-faceted 20 year career has led him to a vitally important but little known professional niche. Ivor Williams is a healthcare design consultant who specialises in palliative, end of life and death care. Ivor began his career working on video games before moving into graphic design, working on everything from artist catalogs to building signage. He won multiple awards and today he still enjoys designing books. But then a year's residency for young creatives at a design research centre in Italy changed the direction of his career, taking part in experimental design projects exploring death and dying. He found his vocation and later founded one of the first design studios dedicated to redesigning the death and dying Experience. Death involves everyone, he says. Design accordingly. In the 12 years since then, Ivan's range of activity and output has been prolific, including co-founding Humane Engineering, a tech for good mental health startup which produced Cove, one of the first apps available on the UK's National Health Service, used by over 270,000 people worldwide.
Sally-Anne: 00:01:40 He's also designed and developed a range of other products, now also used widely throughout the NHS. Ivor is currently working on long term projects with hospices and has founded an online community and group programme. He calls mortals to cultivate mortality awareness in order to live better and more joyfully. So, Ivor, how does mortality awareness help us live better and more joyfully.
Ivor Williams: 00:02:14 Yeah, it seems like a bit of a paradox on the face of it. I think it's entirely human nature to want to avoid thinking about death. Well, as far as we know, we're one of the only species that is aware of our own death. You see a dead animal in a field. Other animals just wouldn't think much of it. They'll just think that's a dead animal, avoid it. But we're I think as far as we can tell, the only species that can go. Yeah, that'll happen to me one day. And that's what they call like the existential terror psychologist Sheldon Solomon and a couple of others with a great book called The Worm at the core.
Ivor Williams: 00:02:49 And it's like, at the core of us is this little worm of existential anxiety that we're going to die one day. So I'd preface that whole question with the idea that it's a uniquely human thing, that we worry about what happens when we die, what happens after we die, the fact that we die. Tolle and Ernest Becker, a great writer who influenced me a lot. His thesis was it's that awareness, anxiety. But death actually drives most of what we do as humans, that sort of seeking forms of immortality or trying to manage the anxiety. In most cases, just denying it is the driver to what we do as humans. So it's a pretty lofty, potent core thing to us. So with that context, like, why would you want to become more and more aware of it? And I think, simply put, like most wisdom traditions, indigenous cultures and contemplative practices have at their core the idea that mortality and death is almost like the ultimate meditation. And engaging with it is getting to the core of awareness and consciousness and sort of one's own life.
Ivor Williams: 00:03:58 So again, it's at the core of a lot of things around meditation, such so. The good news is that there's lots of things to help us do that. And that's kind of what I've done in creating a program called mortals, pulling on all the kind of threads that I've discovered and used and engaged with over the last 15 years or so to make it a lot more accessible and hopefully a lot more desirable thing to do, which is especially doing it in groups, not by yourself. Because I think that's the tension that we have in our society just now is that we're very atomized, individualized and expected to kind of figure everything out by ourselves. And as a natural extension, we and I say we all kind of preface this sort of Western European context. We feel like this is our singular solo experience to kind of reckon with. And it's just obviously not like everyone goes through it. So it's a bit odd that we kind of leave it to our, like the dark tea time of the soul to engage with it.
Ivor Williams: 00:04:57 So this idea of becoming more aware of it, my perspective is doing it with other people is frightening, is triggering in a way is difficult, but actually what it taps into is, I think, a part of us that yeah, is innate and is kind of core to who we are, but actually has this catalyzing or metabolizing effect where basically what people with terminal diseases are at the end of life experience, where everything sharpens. Birdsong becomes a symphony. The dappled light through leaves becomes the most beautiful thing, like it's in its kind of finitude, in its kind of limited ness, that life becomes exceptionally wonderful. And so I guess that's trying to get familiar with that a little bit. So when I talk about mortality, awareness is it's gently becoming aware of mortality as a way of recognizing in a deeper way that, you know, life is a wonderful thing. You know, it's a sort of thing that youth is wasted on the young type thing. You know, it's like when you get older, I'm only 41, but it's well documented.
Ivor Williams: 00:06:05 People talk about it a lot. If you ask an eight year old what they would advise a 14 year old, it's like, just go live. You know? You know, enjoy your knees. These types of things. And so it's all part and parcel of that. And I think just on a personal level, it's my way of trying to affect a kind of cultural change or a social change, because I think it's in the UK where we've kind of outsourced that experience and we've displaced it into lots of different things. And so it's never done explicitly. And so my proposition is let's do it explicitly.
Sally-Anne: 00:06:40 And I love that if I may. Well I do love it as I, as I said love I thought love but now I do I love the idea actually that the proximity of death makes living or life more vivid. And if we know that to be true, why wait until then? So for me, what I'm hearing, that's kind of at the heart of this idea that you have spent many years translating into something tangible and practical and helpful, and you do that throughout your work, don't you? In many different ways.
Sally-Anne: 00:07:14 So you've talked about your program, and I mean, at heart, you're a designer. So your design experiences around this and you work with people who are about to die and their families. So this has become your life. Is that accurate? So could we talk more about that. Most certainly in a moment and explore that more deeply. But you just take us on the journey a little bit you know. How did you get to this point. How did you step into this whole world that you're creating for you and others?
Ivor Williams: 00:07:50 If I look back on the road, I can see lots of different waypoints or kind of paths that have taken me, and it's a whole mix of things. You know, I think about where I grew up as one component of it. You know, I grew up in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is such a funny city because it's a very old city and when you learn about the city, it's just full of death. It's just like, you know, when the city is like inhabited for, God knows, over a thousand years in quite a small location.
Ivor Williams: 00:08:17 It's not a sprawling city. It's quite a concentrated city. The old town where you have the castle, and then you have the high street of the Royal Mile, and you have these kind of tenements, these medieval tenements, these high rises, basically, you know, we had these have any of these alleys which are called cloisters and there's like was a famous one called Maida King's Close. And it's famous for being, I think, in the whenever it was 1500s or 1400s, there was plague, the bubonic plague in Edinburgh, and they just basically had a tenement full of people, hundreds of people, and they just basically bricked it up and just left them to die in it. And so now it's this like hotbed of paranormal activity and strange things that happen in it. You know, it's very funny because Edinburgh University had like the first paranormal psychology unit or something like that. It was like they had legitimately a Ghostbusters in there. And, you know, we had like, Burke and Hare, these guys who would be famous for because Edinburgh University was pioneering in this sort of 17th, 18th, 19th century.
Ivor Williams: 00:09:09 And these guys, Burke and Hare would, like, dig up bodies and sell them to the university for autopsies and stuff. So like this idea of like macabre, esoteric history was just like what I grew up around, which is just a bit odd. And then like Edinburgh, like there's a lot of private schools, fee paying schools. And I went to one that was famous for being founded in like the 1500s or something for fatherless boys. So basically orphans. So it was like a, yeah, a sort of school for fatherless children, but it still continues today. So basically, if you've lost your dad, if your dad has died, you can get free education like a private school education if you've lost a dad, which is pretty unique. And so going there when I was about 11 or 12, like he quickly learned, you don't ask like, what do your parents do, like? Or who's your daddy? Where's your dad? What does your dad do? Because a lot of kids just didn't have that.
Ivor Williams: 00:09:58 And it was something that I kind of realized that when I was older was I don't know if this was true for everyone, but I certainly picked up and it was like, you can basically spot them. They were called foundation chairs. You know, that was like the foundation of the school was built on this education for them. And I just noticed she could just kind of spot these boys and girls because they just had a sadness about them, which is, as you might imagine, if you lost your dad by the time you were 12 or even younger. Like, yeah, there are different. They were marked out as different. Not in a bad way, but like an inclusive sort of supportive way. But you could just feel that they were missing something. So I guess being sensitive to that was something that made a big impact on me, was the amount of loss that kids had gone through at my school. Wasn't a lot of them, but it was just enough, you know? I mean, like, and you wouldn't otherwise know.
Ivor Williams: 00:10:40 But they were called foundations and they do their own thing sometimes, you know. And then my best friend died when I was 17 at school. So that kind of really shaped me. Basically. I feel like that was the thing that shaped me the most, was losing my best friend to suicide and sort of having to Reckon with that has taken me half my life to get to process it through in a way, because it's a sort of have my own development disrupted through that sort of bereavement. You know, I'm a sort of curious. I ended up being a designer, you know, like I'm a curious or a person. I like to think about things and engage with things. And so, like it was, I kind of felt like I had to engage with death in a way that was not desired. It was foisted on me. So that kind of made a big impact. And then just, you know, again, like losses through my life, you know, losing grandparents and then losing other friends to cancer before I was 30, like all these little waypoints along the road kind of have given me like shaped different parts of my resolve to work on it.
Ivor Williams: 00:11:40 There's so much to it. So this idea of living with loss as just the sort of background to my life, I think, has made an indelible mark. And so I think part of that is then is my ability to stick at it and stick with it and continue in it. Having then moved into palliative and end of life care about 20 1514. It was interesting to read about clinicians and nurses and doctors who work in the field. You know, they have like the highest rates of burnout behind emergency department doctors. You know, like it's a very hard field to work in. And most people don't work in it for more than ten years. A lot of people transition out of it. It's just very hard work. And obviously caregiving and having to really care for dying people is very hard. So I recognize that there's a sort of marathon esque ability to kind of stick with it, because I think I've just been so familiar with it.
Sally-Anne: 00:12:33 Gosh, in all of the examples you've shared with us, what's coming through to me quite strongly is your capacity, curiosity initially and capacity subsequently, I imagine, to turn towards it.
Sally-Anne: 00:12:48 So many of us turn away. I think, you know, right back at the beginning you shared an example of finding a dead animal in a field. I think, he said. And how that might remind us of our own mortality. And I found myself thinking, gosh, does it actually. Do we think, gosh, I'm going to die one day when I see a dead animal? I found myself being curious about that, and I thought, actually, I'm not totally sure I do. I think I might think, oh, how awful did I do? I'd feel empathy or sympathy or something. I'd feel something. Compassion? Possibly. But I don't think in that moment I think about my own mortality. So you've raised my awareness, and I'm guessing that next time I find an animal in a field, that's probably what will happen, because you've brought that thought to me. So when that desperate tragedy occurred when you were 17, with your best friend dying in that way, a huge jolt I imagined to your experience.
Sally-Anne: 00:13:42 And you, if I may put it this way, engaged with it. Is that right? You allowed yourself to explore how you were feeling. Not everyone would do that, I don't think. Do you mind talking a little bit more about that?
Ivor Williams: 00:13:57 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the period after his death was so strange because suddenly nothing really mattered. Like, I was right in the middle of, like, my final year, or we were in the middle of our final year of high school and sort of, you know, Scotland, we'd kind of done our equivalent of A-levels. We'd already done them. So it was like the final years of an interesting one. You can kind of do more, you can do more, obviously, to private school. It's like do more, achieve more or whatever it might be. And so I kind of was doing some additional subjects. And when he died, I was just like, well, these don't matter at all. None of this matters.
Ivor Williams: 00:14:31 And it was I can't believe, you know, it's so funny. I thought, you know, thinking about it now, I don't know at what point I either asked to do it or was allowed to do it, but I think as an adult now, I can look back and I think the school, they basically let me give like a speech or something to this whole school.
Sally-Anne: 00:14:49 Gosh.
Ivor Williams: 00:14:50 And, as an adult now, I'm like, well, it probably would have sounded better coming from one of the pupils as opposed to one of the adults saying like, okay, this has been really difficult. And, I basically gave this talk when I was just like, none of this matters. You know, it didn't really matter. Like, you just, you know, do what you want. It doesn't matter if you get an A, B, or C. Like, I just realized that this is all a bit arbitrary. You know, just do what you want. They didn't ask to see it before.
Ivor Williams: 00:15:19 And I remember afterwards, the head teacher was like, well, that was an interesting. You know, I was like, well, that's how I feel about it. They're like, all right, fair enough. You know.
Sally-Anne: 00:15:27 Excellent.
Ivor Williams: 00:15:28 That was 2002. So about five years later, I was in a house party in Glasgow. I went to the art school in Glasgow, I was in a house party, and this young guy came up to me and he was like, are you IRA? I was like, yeah, he's like, you gave this talk at school. That totally changed my life. I just never thought about this. I was like, oh my God, I didn't think anyone's actually listening. I just, I did it for myself, you know, like. So there was a bit of a nihilistic quality to sort of like, well, none of this matters and who cares? And, you know, I was very angry for many years. And by the end, I basically, you know, went to art school, I think, for therapy.
Ivor Williams: 00:15:58 I basically did for years of art therapy at art school. I had a lot of fun as well, obviously, like it was perfect for me. I realized I was dyslexic afterwards and wasn't really great anything else, and I really enjoyed other subjects, but I was just naturally quite good at art and design stuff. So I went to art school, study design and and I think it was in that thing of being aware of from 17, like there was a tension that I think maybe we all hold, but I definitely hold, which is now is the time sort of carpe diem, sort of seize the day, which I've since learned. There's an older reading of the word phrase Carpe diem is not seize the day, but it seize the flower. It's like, grab the flower just when it's perfect. There's a point in time as well. It's not just about seizing the day and making the most of everything in this sort of weird. Sort of like I have to optimize and capitalize on absolutely everything.
Ivor Williams: 00:16:48 It's just the idea that to grab the moment as it passes, grab the moment. So I've always held that to be true. So it's almost like a sort of strange muscle that I can kind of activate in terms of like, okay, so it'd be like, I've got the last year of my last six months of art school. This is it. This is it. Like, what am I going to do? And I ended up sort of I was like, okay, I want to do some work around death. And so I wrote my dissertation on what happens to an atheist when they die.
Sally-Anne: 00:17:13 Oh, oh. And the answer is no.
Ivor Williams: 00:17:20 But it was, you know, it was good. It's good explorations. And that's what kind of was the seed for me to do this kind of design work.
Sally-Anne: 00:17:26 Gosh. Absolutely fascinating. Either a real sense that you tune into your feelings and you allow yourself to follow them. I mean, you may not think of it as allowing you just kind of do it, but you don't resist that, do you?
Ivor Williams: 00:17:41 It's interesting.
Ivor Williams: 00:17:41 Yeah. I again, it has a tension in it, which is being a bit at the mercy of your feelings. You know, and in my experience giving too much weight to feelings in terms of if a feeling is strong it must be right. And I've had to kind of process that a little bit in terms of sometimes true, but also can also be a negative influence. Simply because I feel it strongly doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do.
Sally-Anne: 00:18:11 So I guess if we kind of think about balance, you know, feeling, thinking, doing that kind of thing can be a helpful framework. But turning back to you, do you mind sharing with us a time when you noticed that you were being driven so strongly by your feelings that it and it's something, perhaps another feeling or some kind of feedback told you that it wasn't quite true or it wasn't the whole truth.
Ivor Williams: 00:18:39 Well, again, it's that sense of recognizing crossroads when they appear. I think it's that sensitivity to a baseline that I grew into as an adult was like, there isn't a whole lot of time.
Ivor Williams: 00:18:51 There isn't an infinite amount of time, it's not open ended. And I don't know in my sense, but all labored. But that kind of that feeling of like, well, this might not come around again, you know? And that can be both paralyzing and also incredibly useful. So there's something about the kind of fear of holding back and the fear of just jumping in, knowing that there's a sort of sliding doors moment where you're kind of like, if I hold or go, I'm going to choose very different paths that turn up in like relationships with people or turn up in sort of life decisions in terms of should I live here or should I live there? Or should I stay here? Or should I, you know, go or. And I suppose the orientation that I would try and abide by is like, does this make me feel more alive or not? I'm kind of reckoning that a little bit, but I think at the time it would be that intuitive sense of like, does this make me feel like I'm using my time or I'm living more? Or does it feel like I'm kind of calcifying and kind of intuiting myself a little bit? Yeah.
Ivor Williams: 00:19:54 And it kind of show up through my 20s. I was like, I think I need to go at this relationship is not making me feel very alive. It's making me feel pretty dead. And or this job is really. And so I'd feel more able to just jump because I'm like, what's the worst that can happen?
Sally-Anne: 00:20:13 Well, we're covering that in this conversation. I suppose if we think of the worst being death, and maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Thank you for sharing that. And I think it gives us all. You know, those of us listening a little bit of perspective and insight into who you are, this person doing this extremely important but rather unusual work It just is unusual whether it should or shouldn't be. Another question, but it just is right. So bringing that awareness to your life experience, your way of looking at things, your own relationship with your feelings, what you've learned from all of that into what you do now in your design, in your palliative care work, in your program.
Sally-Anne: 00:20:57 Tell us a bit more about your approach to all of that. Well, I guess you've covered that. Actually, I've what I heard just now is that you're driven by what brings you alive. What has life in it for you? So in this work around designing for palliative care and death and in your mortality awareness program, what has life in it for you?
Ivor Williams: 00:21:25 There's kind of consistent sentiment that I think cuts across the engagements the way that I work with people. If I'm working with a hospice on redesigning their care model, on how they engage with communities or the mortals program, which is quite, very small and intimate. It might be 6 or 8 people and, you know, sort of five week journey or the kind of products or things that I've worked on that have a particular goal and outcome to try and achieve is people would say in various ways at various times like this is helping me like get unstuck or this has opened up something for me that I knew was stuck or I didn't know was even there, you know? What I really love about hospices and working with hospices, and this is the design challenge for me almost at the moment, is everyone who goes through a hospice goes, oh, why did we not come here earlier? And that is such an interesting reflection for me in terms of why people who might be living with life limiting or, you know, terminal diseases or conditions would not want to engage with the people and organizations that are there to help them through it, and I think it's a totally normal.
Ivor Williams: 00:22:39 It's not a judgment on them not engaging earlier, but it's a really interesting question about like, well, why is that? You know? Is it because we don't want to think about it until it's absolutely necessary? Do we build these systems and organizations and structures that kind of prohibit us engaging with it early? Is it literally the way that people talk about? Is it a brand and marketing thing almost, you know, like, what is it? I think it's all those things sometimes that's like an active question for me in terms of the work I do at the moment. And then when people have gone through the program, the master's program, what I find most gratifying was people would be like, I've been trying to put my finger on this for years. I've been trying to give myself the permission to actually feel this, or to connect the dots between disparate feelings. And it almost goes back to the idea of like the animal in the field. Like on some levels, we're not aware of the effect of mortality like it's subconscious or unconscious, but nevertheless it plays out in our desires, our fears, our dreams, you know, our motivations that we may or may not be able to articulate.
Ivor Williams: 00:23:42 And so there's something deeply gratifying about just holding space for that. You know, I don't think I'm doing particularly anything difficult. You know, I'm not a trained therapist. I'm not someone who has the sort of training and education and background to be so explicitly in that opening activity. But I think we'd benefit from this if we just create a space for this. And sure enough, people say like, this has really helped me out. I wish I'd done this earlier. So I find that incredibly gratifying because, again, it's that paradox of engaging in it and becoming aware of it. Just let some other things just fall away. A lot of the rubbish just fall away and gets back to what matters most. And what matters most is usually very simple. The challenge is then working with the wider world that basically is constructed to tell you the opposite, that all the other stuff matters, you know? So the distracting, addictive things that are competing for our attention and whatnot are more important. It's like, no, they're really not important.
Ivor Williams: 00:24:43 You know, what really matters is. And I think that's in terms of my work or my career, is that I'm interested in that transition from things or objects to relations and relational ways of being, because I think that when you drop the other stuff, all that's left is like how you relate to other people and how you can express yourself with other people and be with people.
Sally-Anne: 00:25:07 Yeah. Which feels, as you said, far more important. So the sense that in the space that you hold for people, you enable them to surface their fears, become aware of their fears, and in that process, release something.
Ivor Williams: 00:25:26 Yeah. I think it goes to the active ingredients almost of the program, which is, I kind of call it existential load bearing structures of a group of people doing it, because I think if you do it by yourself, if you do a meditation or a role play or a thought exercise around what we do in the program, which is what those kind of things are, you know, they're usually quite short prompts, as it were, for discussion and dialogue is is kind of overwhelming to do by yourself because it's like facing oblivion alone, which is somewhat ironic because we actually all have to do that alone at the end.
Ivor Williams: 00:26:00 And that's kind of, I think partly what people find so terrifying is this idea of practicing it with other people is a good inoculation against the fear of it. And yeah, just people would describe in one session we go through this kind of exercise of being diagnosed with a terminal condition, giving you, I think it was 3 or 6 months to live, and there was one person that just got really angry and she was really quite surprised at how much anger she had about it. And it's really interesting that to me about it was instructive on what emotions we keep locked up that when given a sort of splash of cold water to the face, like what a core emotion might be. And it was okay. Like it wasn't so uncontrolled or, you know, uncontainable. It was just oh well that was interesting. Oh why am I so angry. And that was really useful for them to kind of experience something that they didn't really have much control over.
Sally-Anne: 00:27:01 And may have been subconsciously, perhaps, or unconsciously, controlling or distracting themselves from possibly hard to know.
Sally-Anne: 00:27:09 Right. But it happened. And may I ask, you know, when that person experiences unexpected emotion of fear, you know, the feeling of fear. And then it passed. I imagine at some point it passed. So was there some kind of insight that came from that? Or do you remember?
Ivor Williams: 00:27:26 I think it was around the death of a parent, and I think it was about the unresolved emotions. And I think that's core to it is I mean, it's all my work as well. And my argument would be like, it's all our work to engage with that kind of stuff. There was a great Pam Hogg, who was a Scottish fashion designer, died wee while ago. She was only in her 60s. And Irvine Welsh, the writer of Trainspotting, kind of wrote an obituary for her in The Guardian. And I loved it because I knew her work, obviously, and she's very it was really flamboyant and really gregarious and super outgoing and super colourful and, like, not very logical.
Ivor Williams: 00:28:03 And he had this phrase which has stuck in my head since reading it, which was like basically like Pam didn't leave anything on the table. And I felt like that if there's any kind of orienting statement for how I want to live is like, I don't want to leave anything on the table. And so he was saying like it's really sad that she's died but she lived. And there's something about those emotions that say like that anger like that was being left on the table that was just sitting there whether they knew it or not. And from my experience, they can come back. They can come back at the end of life because the nature of how you might approach it and the situation, you might have time to reflect on your life and those things can become. That's the sort of unfinished business, almost as like, okay, what was that about? I'm driven by that from my my oh my my my grandmother, my German grandmother, because she left her life in like a huge amount of denial and like a huge amount of anger because she had a very difficult, a very difficult life.
Ivor Williams: 00:29:14 She embodied it in a way, because she was it's a very unknown, very little known part of European history, post-war history of the largest migration of human history was the millions of Germans that were forced to flee, and we'd now use the word ethnically cleansed, but didn't use it back then, out of East Prussia, where my family's from. And, they were lucky to be early. But it's a very, very, very dark history, and it's shrouded, obviously, by the atrocities that the Nazis committed. And so it's not to undermine that, but it's it's a denied history. And so she kind of embodied that denial and the loss. And I think that's also a contributing factor to my, you know, as I get older, I can kind of see it, the color or the texture of our family's histories of loss. You know, her culture was completely wiped out. It was explicitly wiped out. It was an objective of the allies to erase Prussia from Europe. So her entire culture was wiped out.
Ivor Williams: 00:30:12 So that kind of anger and that sadness and that denial was like she died with it. She would refuse to talk about it. That was just like, I never want to be in that position. I don't have that same story. But like, that is very difficult to think of. Leaving and having to hold that seems deeply unfair.
Sally-Anne: 00:30:31 Because in the last, I don't know, 40 plus years or so, the term PTSD has become widely known and is most often attributed. Isn't it, to particular life events that are consciously experienced? Easy to describe? No, not easy, but evident in our life that we can then, if we choose to confront and move through. What I'm hearing in your grandmother's case is that, first of all, the term didn't exist back then. All of that stuff was extremely poorly understood. And also this, as you say, sort of hidden, really, it wasn't exposed. So all of that denial that she absorbed. And, you know, the intergenerational potential, intergenerational impact of that has consciously, perhaps subconsciously, unconsciously influenced your work, I'm guessing.
Sally-Anne: 00:31:28 Do you sense and feel that?
Ivor Williams: 00:31:30 Yeah. I mean, again, it's like when things aren't talked about.
Ivor Williams: 00:31:35 As a child, you get a sense of like something not being said in this room basically, you know, and.
Sally-Anne: 00:31:39 You had that feeling as a child.
Ivor Williams: 00:31:41 Yeah, yeah. For sure. I mean, it was like, you know, my grandfather, my Opa was in a gulag for five years in Siberia. Like, gosh, he was deeply traumatized. I mean, he survived. I don't know how he survived, but like he did. And, yeah, my mom was a refugee. She was born in a refugee camp. So, like, the challenge of that kind of history is like, the Germans don't like talking about her. And like everyone else in the world goes, well, you deserved it, you know? And it's deeply nuanced. There's no right or wrong in any of it. Like, it's all flawed. You know, the whole period of time is deeply difficult.
Ivor Williams: 00:32:16 So. And then because I grew up in Scotland, so I've got some friends who are also half German, and it's an interesting sort of thing to grapple with because it's like you don't live in it, but you're affected by it. Nevertheless, yes, certainly.
Ivor Williams: 00:32:29 Like growing up in Scotland, it's like, well, the Germans are the baddies. I'm just like, all right, okay.
Sally-Anne: 00:32:34 Let's simplify things, shall we?
Sally-Anne: 00:32:36 Yeah, yeah. No oversimplify. Maybe reading too much here. Neither. But I'm just wondering and again, thank you for sharing these aspects of your heritage. There's such richness from what you shared with us at the beginning and what you're now expanding further in terms of your lived experience, in terms of what you've been born into, so much is leading me to wonder, gosh, you know, did you even have any choice over this life's.
Sally-Anne: 00:33:07 Of yours? I mean, let's not get into free will, but, you know, it really does point in this direction, doesn't it? All of this.
Sally-Anne: 00:33:16 It's almost as if there's your work is somehow healing.
Ivor Williams: 00:33:20 Oh, yeah. I do hold a bit of weight to that. You know, there's something about, almost just my own sort of self-development. I think there's something about, again, as a way of trying to discover a positive aspect to my own heritage was when I was at art school, I was really into the Bauhaus, you know, the sort of interwar, Weimar era modernist art school in Germany. It resonated with me so much because I was like, oh, man. Like, you know, because there's aspects of German culture that, you know, was there that I grew up with and it spoke to this very idealistic period in time, like between the wars and obviously led to modernism in terms of design and art, that I was being informed by art school and they were super esoteric. They're wild. They kind of pioneered a lot of stuff. But one of the things that really stuck with me and has really embedded in and was This term Lebens praxis, which kind of translates to living practice.
Ivor Williams: 00:34:15 And what I loved about it was just it expresses itself in very simple terms and in terms of the art school in the morning, they'd do like exercises, they'd do like breathing exercises and meditation and, you know, stretching and running and all kind of stuff in order to get ready for painting. And the painting would be, you know, exercises in form and explorations, and then they would have lunch and they would, you know, they'd all live on the campus and they would be deeply intertwined with each other, almost like a lot of them in relationships to each other, like not in a sort of a commune, but just in terms of it was a culture and something I've kind of, I think, again, I've been able to better articulate over the last ten years is like, well, that's what I want to have is a living practice that everything I do can feed into itself in a living way. You know?
Ivor Williams: 00:35:04 That my work and my life are harmonious. They can feed each other in positive ways, that the people I spend time with generate the same feelings in me, like it just feels right to me to have that kind of holistic approach.
Ivor Williams: 00:35:19 So I don't think I could do it any other way, because I found having other jobs and parts of careers at the time just deeply unsatisfying. It's like it doesn't feel right at all. You know, I've worked in big companies and small companies and done other things, and I don't like this. You know, I'm very fortunate. I've got the sort of capabilities or privilege or whatever it might be to kind of be able to pursue it. You know, again, it's not easy, but it's like it's a choice. And I've chosen not to do things I don't like, basically.
Sally-Anne: 00:35:46 Or things I guess, that don't align with this beautiful concept of a living practice. I love that I can relate to it later in my life than you like. Grateful I came to it later, but yes, certainly resources me. And speaking of resourcing, you given the field in which you work and given you mentioned earlier that, you know, high degree of burnout and people working in palliative care. How I'm imagining your living practice resources you enormously.
Sally-Anne: 00:36:15 But do you know, how do you look after yourself through all of this work? Keep yourself alive in the aliveness sense.
Ivor Williams: 00:36:24 I guess there's like pre children and post children because I think pre children, I would just kind of throw myself into it and just be marinating in it. And that was really fruitful in a way because it deepened my sense of things. And again, it's that orientation of like, if not now, when. And so things would come up and it'd be like, well, this is a non decision really. I'm just going to do these things. Which meant I was skint a lot of time or peripatetic and moving around a lot, but it was kind of orienting to sort of just doing what feels right, as opposed to what I should do or what is expected of me, almost. But that doesn't quite reconcile when you have children, because you kind of have to stay in one place a bit, and you have to kind of have a bit more stability and predictability and such.
Ivor Williams: 00:37:08 So like my oldest is five now, so like five years of shifting emphasis on how to manage it. And it's like simply put, like for me it's just like five minutes with my daughter or daughters is like enough to just replenish me. Being under five and such. It's like they've got none of the hang ups that we have as adults. And so like just being able to sort of observe and participate in their world is just like hugely refreshing and sort of rejuvenating. And, and it's interesting because it's like that would express yourself and like just being silly, remembering how to be silly, you know? Yeah, it's very difficult because it was me, my friend, who died, like we were very silly together. And it's something that I've kind of struggled to kind of reconnect with. And just having children was the has been the best way to reconnect with that because it's like, yeah, basically being a kid again and getting to enjoy being around kids and being kid like is such a good way to feel alive.
Sally-Anne: 00:38:07 What a gift. So I have a such a fascinating conversation. I have so many additional questions, actually, so many more things I want to explore. And I feel it is time to bring this conversation to a close for any listeners listening in. Curious about IRAs work, then you know, there'll be in the notes links to that for you to follow up with him directly. But at this point, when you look at where you are now over with all of the ideas, I'm sure you hold. And as you look ahead into your life, what does Fearless Forward mean to you?
Ivor Williams: 00:38:45 There's a phrase that orbits my awareness periodically that I'm reminded of, and I'm like, yeah, and it's this line attributed to, Krishnamurti. The scene is I'm going to butcher the kind of context. But, you know, he's giving a talk and people are like, how are you so wise? Or what's your secret? And he goes, I don't mind what happens. And it's like I find that such a rich position because it's in myself.
Ivor Williams: 00:39:20 I'm like again, it's that nihilistic. It could be seen as nihilistic. I don't care, but it's this idea of like I don't mind what happens. Like I'm not attached to it, you know. And there's something very relaxed about that. You know, and I think you can't be scared if you're relaxed, basically. And so, yeah, I think it's to try and be as relaxed as possible and not minding what happens is the best way to be fearless.
Sally-Anne: 00:39:52 On that note. Thank you Ivor.
Ivor Williams: 00:39:55 Thank you.
Sally-Anne: 00:39:58 Mortality awareness is less about death and more about life. It's about attention. About stripping away the noise and seeing more clearly what matters. While there's still time to do something about it. Simple, but not easy. Instead of confronting our own mortality, we treat it as remote, private, or too uncomfortable to name. We stay busy. We distract ourselves. But the reality is that what we refuse to face doesn't disappear. It often just goes underground and shows up as anxiety, anger, or control and ways of living.
Sally-Anne: 00:40:37 That may look fine from the outside but feels strangely deadening from within. Ivor insists that this is not work we're meant to do alone. And in his program, mortals, he offers a space for shared reflection, honesty and relationship. Not all fear is a signal to stop. Sometimes it signals that something unlived is waiting for our attention. Some unresolved grief, some truth not yet spoken, some anger still waiting to be expressed. Perhaps the invitation here is not to become fearless about death, but to pay attention to the unattended parts of our own life.