Here’s the full transcript of mental health and LGBTQ+ speaker Ben Smith‘s chat with Jane Farnham of Great British Speakers:
00:00:07:44 – 00:00:18:21
Jane Farnham
Hi, I’m Jane Farnham from Great British Speakers, and I’m here to chat with the award winning fundraiser and motivational speaker Ben Smith. So, Ben, good morning. Thanks for joining us today.
00:00:18:43 – 00:00:19:12
Ben Smith
Morning.
00:00:19:48 – 00:00:26:00
Jane Farnham
So meeting you today hardly seems like you’re the same person I’ve read about. So tell us a little bit about your formative life.
00:00:26:45 – 00:00:28:21
Ben Smith
Wow, straight in there.
00:00:28:58 – 00:00:31:14
Jane Farnham
Yeah, let’s get to the nitty gritty shall we.
00:00:32:15 – 00:00:59:02
Ben Smith
Yeah, you’re right. My life has changed dramatically over the past ten years. I suppose the pivotal moment when my life changed was back. It was about nine years ago now, and I was sat at work one day and literally, just like you clicking your fingers, I lost my sight. I lost my hearing. I lost the ability to move my left arm and I lost the ability to talk.
00:00:59:27 – 00:01:21:05
Ben Smith
And, you know, this wasn’t there wasn’t any build up or anything. It just happened. And obviously, it was a huge shock. I was taken to the hospital in the center of Bristol, which is where I live, and I was diagnosed first time with having had a stroke. And this was at the age of 29. So you can kind of imagine the impact that that then has on, on an individual.
00:01:21:06 – 00:01:44:18
Ben Smith
But when you actually think about it, I was in quite a bad state. I was actually 17 and a half stone. I was a 40 a day smoker. I drank myself under the table near enough every single night, because I was depressed, I was in a relationship that I shouldn’t have been in, doing a job 80 hours a week, working my socks off in a career that actually wasn’t right for me.
00:01:44:34 – 00:02:05:24
Ben Smith
So all those boxes that you automatically think that somebody that has a stroke would tick I did. And I suppose that sounds a lot, I was with my life at the time, but that was my past life. I then set out on this kind of journey to kind of turn that around, and I’m happy to say that I’ve kind of done a whole 180 on it.
00:02:05:24 – 00:02:08:16
Ben Smith
And yeah, I’m, I am where I am now.
00:02:09:10 – 00:02:16:30
Jane Farnham
That’s amazing. Crikey. So how did you cope mentally with the physical change?
00:02:17:52 – 00:02:39:52
Ben Smith
Well, to be honest with you, I think a lot of, a lot of my issues started kind of early on in my life. You know, I was severely bullied at school and that had a huge, profound effect on my confidence and my self-esteem. And I grew up in a military family. We moved all around the world. I had two parents absolutely loved me and wanted nothing but the best for me.
00:02:40:49 – 00:03:02:40
Ben Smith
But yeah, I went away to school at the age of ten because my parents settled down in Germany. So I came to school here in the UK and I suppose the kids that I went to school with, they had a very different approach to life than what I did. I was brought up by my folks to kind of take charge of my own life and value people, whereas they kind of cared more about the materialistic things.
00:03:03:25 – 00:03:20:52
Ben Smith
So it’s like they were speaking a foreign language, and that singled me out. It made me, in their minds, a freak, somebody that was different and somebody that could be targeted. And as I said, the bullying lasted a long time and it was debilitating. You know, I felt I couldn’t talk to anybody. And unfortunately, that left me at the age of 18 to try and take my own life.
00:03:22:37 – 00:03:48:32
Ben Smith
At 13, I realized that I was gay, but felt I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t be who I was because, again, it was another point of difference. So all of this kind of culminating with the suicide attempt at the age of 18, going to uni, doing a course that I didn’t want to do, leading that life right the way through to the age of 29, where I got married, you know, I was in a job I didn’t want to do and let myself go physically and mentally.
00:03:48:59 – 00:04:11:54
Ben Smith
Yeah, the stroke itself, which thankfully was downgraded to a TIA, was, was at that point. And I suppose the after effects of that I felt I didn’t have a choice other than but to change. But unfortunately it wasn’t like I had all the answers. It’s, you know, how could I uncondition the way I’ve been thinking for 20 years.
00:04:11:54 – 00:04:31:13
Ben Smith
I couldn’t do that overnight. And it was frustrating. It was, I became angry. I became very impatient. And actually it was about a year after the TIA, you know, I came out, I got divorced, you know, So some big changes in my life. A friend of mine pulled me up and said, you know, you need to do something about this.
00:04:31:13 – 00:04:35:04
Ben Smith
Why don’t you come and join my running club? And it all changed then.
00:04:35:49 – 00:04:38:34
Jane Farnham
Is that where the 401 challenge started?
00:04:39:10 – 00:04:58:03
Ben Smith
Yeah. Well, not right then On the day, you know, 17 and a half stone, a 40 a day smoker. Because none of that had changed about a year after the TIA. Still doing all of that. And you know, I rocked up to a running club in a hoodie and tracksuit bottoms and, you know, thinking, I’m never going to be able to do this.
00:04:58:03 – 00:05:16:10
Ben Smith
You know, I used to look at runners, you know, I used to drive past them at a cigarette hanging out of the car window thinking there were a bunch of weirdos. And that was my relationship with running. And I’d never been part of the kind of sports teams, really, because my buddies were sports people and I didn’t really want to put myself out there in that situation.
00:05:16:10 – 00:05:30:46
Ben Smith
So rocking up at this running club, I had all those kind of feelings of, I’m going to fail, they’re going to laugh at me, I’m going to get left behind. I actually had the, you know, unreasonable thought of the fact that I was going to die. My heart was going to beat so fast that I was going to die.
00:05:30:48 – 00:05:54:01
Ben Smith
But that night I joined the couch to five k group. And, you know, my timing has never been great. They were doing the five k that night, so I, I hobbled around the five k course and I remember coming back and my ankles and my knees and my hips, everything around me hurt. But that kind of feeling, that pain that I felt, for the first time in 20 years, it made me feel alive.
00:05:54:01 – 00:06:18:12
Ben Smith
And that’s what kind of made me realize that I felt so numb for so long. And that’s what hooked me in. It wasn’t the love of running, it wasn’t anything like that, that grew over a period of time. That’s reality at the end of the day. But the friends I made, the confidence that was built, you know, it sounds cheesy, but every step it was like my confidence just grew, my self-esteem grew.
00:06:18:12 – 00:06:40:03
Ben Smith
I kind of almost cured myself, almost. And nobody judged me. Nobody cared how much I earned, nobody cared the type of person I was. We were all just doing the same thing. And, you know, I ran my first half marathon, I ran my first marathon. I then went and ran marathons around the world and they were never quick, you know, I just did it because I enjoyed it, the social aspects of it.
00:06:40:33 – 00:07:00:52
Ben Smith
And then running gave me the chance to pluck up the courage to go and talk to somebody about the things that had happened to me. And at the end of the counseling that I went through, I said to myself, do you know what, I’m going to use this? I’m going to take it and use it for something. I don’t know what it’s going to look like yet, but I’m going to do something.
00:07:01:57 – 00:07:21:12
Ben Smith
There is a reason why I’m here, and over a period of about three or four months before the 401 challenge kind of grew, which for those people that don’t know what it is, I decided to go and run a marathon every single day for 401 days all around the UK to raise a quarter million pounds for two anti-bullying charities.
00:07:21:46 – 00:07:50:47
Jane Farnham
Are you absolutely crazy? See, I’m fascinated with running cause I, I run, but I’ve got very little legs, so I run very, very slowly. I don’t particularly enjoy it. But when I finish, it’s exhilarating. It’s that exhilaration that you feel and that, the, the inner confidence that you get out of it, you know, no matter how fast or slow you run, it, it’s brilliant just to see people out doing it, no matter what shape or size, what demographic they’re in. It’s brilliant.
00:07:51:16 – 00:08:16:53
Ben Smith
I called it my filing time. Mind, my brain would be almost mush. And you know, we all suffer from busy brain at the best of times, especially in the kind of past year and a bit, you know, lots of things can be very overwhelming. And I found that running for me was that thing that allowed me to kind of take a step back and just almost sort out and file stuff in my brain, and especially through building the challenge as well.
00:08:18:16 – 00:08:28:50
Ben Smith
You can imagine I had all these amazing ideas and all these big harebrained ideas, you know, and there was no limitations to anything that we were trying to develop at the time. So that was quite overwhelming. So going out to.
00:08:29:06 – 00:08:33:14
Jane Farnham
So just tell me, just remind me how many marathons you ran for, how many days?
00:08:33:30 – 00:08:59:47
Ben Smith
So we, we, I run 401 marathons in 401 days. So that’s what, ten and a half thousand miles. So from here in the UK to Sydney in Australia. So yeah, it’s, it’s kind of the, the first time anybody’s really kind of done that type of thing. There was a couple of claims of people doing more, but you know, it wasn’t so much the fact of doing it for the recognition or fame or anything like that.
00:08:59:47 – 00:09:24:09
Ben Smith
It was, the reason behind it was to raise the quarter of a million pounds for two anti-bullying charities that, that emotive connection to make sure that you know, that stuff didn’t have to happen to the kids growing up now that happened to me, and we raised £330,000 and it made a difference to hundreds of thousands of people. We had 13,500 people that came out and ran with us all around the UK.
00:09:24:34 – 00:09:40:10
Ben Smith
You know, we ran in 309 locations between Land’s End and John O’Groats. It was, it was incredible. It was an amazing adventure, you know, with its highs and its lows, of course. But yeah, it was something that changed my life. I think it’s fair to say.
00:09:40:28 – 00:09:51:59
Jane Farnham
Well I doff my cap to you. I don’t quite know how that’s physically possible. But then so obviously that was a huge change for you and such a positive thing. So then how did you get into speaking?
00:09:53:09 – 00:10:24:10
Ben Smith
By accident. To be perfectly honest with you. I’ve always liked to chat. You know, you can’t shut me up sometimes, but I think I. I never really saw myself as a speaker because I always thought, you know, you used to see motivational speakers and inspirational speakers, and I thought, I’m not that, You know, I’m just a normal guy with a story. And actually what I realized was that actually that’s what most people are, just normal people with a story, and it’s how they put it together and how they put it out there.
00:10:24:10 – 00:10:43:24
Ben Smith
And it’s how they make people feel when they hear it. And for us, the income that we generate from, from the talks actually goes back into the global challenges that we, we build. So it kind of, it came about by accident. But I absolutely love it. I really do. I hope you can tell.
00:10:43:24 – 00:10:52:40
Jane Farnham
I can, you’re buzzing. I’m buzzing from just listening to you. So tell me about the topics that you’re covering in your talks, because obviously they’re quite varied depending on who the client is.
00:10:52:40 – 00:11:18:48
Ben Smith
Yeah, yeah. Well, the great thing about the talk is that it’s completely unscripted, so I don’t script my talks at all. It’s my story told in lots of different ways, dependent on what it is that the client wants. You know, the topics that we cover are so vast, to be perfectly obvious, because it’s a life story. And, you know, we all look back at our own lives and honestly, we could cover every topic.
00:11:18:49 – 00:11:34:13
Ben Smith
Known to man, to be perfectly honest with you, but things like the LGBTQ community, anti bullying, mental health, building confidence, goal setting, logistics planning, just to name a few. Overcoming challenges.
00:11:34:38 – 00:11:41:45
Jane Farnham
Yeah, you kind of got it nailed on the topic side, I think. What gives you a buzz about speaking?
00:11:44:16 – 00:12:03:25
Ben Smith
Oh what gives me a buzz about speaking? I just like to tell the story. I think, you know, a lot of people, we grow up as, as kids where, you know, we walk around like almost little unconscious minds where anything’s possible. And then over a period of time, as we grow up into adults, we start to limit the things that we do.
00:12:03:59 – 00:12:34:10
Ben Smith
And actually, you know, we start to have self-doubts and be something or can’t do that. And you know what I get a buzz out of talking to people about is to show them that they can. You know, anything is possible. If I can go from 29 years old at 17 and a half stone and a 40 a day smoker, having had a TIA to, you know, going and running 10,500 miles, raising all this money for charity and being able to change my life and feel all the better for it, actually find the thing that makes me happy in life, then it’s possible for anybody.
00:12:34:44 – 00:12:37:48
Ben Smith
So that’s what I get from my talks. That’s the buzz that I get.
00:12:38:24 – 00:13:19:39
Jane Farnham
I think it’s so amazing to tell people and inform people how remarkable we are and we can be and that, you know, everything’s within our reach as long as we just, you know, hard work and determination and resilience, all these tools that, you know, our kids should be learning. And yet sometimes, you know, their experience doesn’t really lend it, lend them to taking those on board. So what you’re doing is so valuable, well done to you. But your new supercharged life then, what are the highlights of it, apart from obviously feeling wonderful physically? What are the things that you take away from this new lifestyle the most?
00:13:20:00 – 00:13:38:43
Ben Smith
Well, well, look, don’t get me wrong, I have down days, you know, I’m only human. You know, life is a, life is basically ups and downs, isn’t it? And I still have those, but I think what flows through my life right now is, is a level of congruence. You know, the way I feel and the way I act is, is, is the same.
00:13:38:43 – 00:13:54:01
Ben Smith
It didn’t used to be. I felt I had to put a face on. I have to be somebody that everybody wants me to be. So that’s a difference in the life that I lead now. You know, I’m married again. I have an amazing husband. We live in a lovely location in the South-West and I have a great life.
00:13:54:01 – 00:14:16:48
Ben Smith
And with it comes challenges, of course. But I live my life every day based on the fact that I get to create something, I get to talk to people about my past experiences. I hopefully get to inspire and motivate people and, you know, get them to think about how they can possibly change the way they’re leading their lives, whether or not it’s massive like I did, or just a tiny little change.
00:14:17:42 – 00:14:21:48
Ben Smith
But also I get to plan amazing global challenges like the one that we’ve got next year.
00:14:22:19 – 00:14:25:06
Jane Farnham
Oh, yeah. So tell me what’s coming up next for the 401?
00:14:25:51 – 00:14:50:43
Ben Smith
Well, I, as well as the 401, I actually head up a mental health charity, a national mental health charity here in the UK called the 401 Foundation. And I’m actually going to be going to the US next year. It was supposed to be in 2021, this year, but we all know why that couldn’t happen. But yeah, I’m going to be going in May next year and I’m going to be running a marathon in every one of the state capitals of the US, all 50 US states, including Alaska and Hawaii.
00:14:51:23 – 00:15:19:22
Ben Smith
But then I’m going to be cycling between them. So it’s 14,000 miles, about 4,000 miles more than the last one. And this time it’s in 104 days rather than 401. Is completely unaided. But we’ve brought on board about 35,000 young people. The project is going to have an impact on 180,000 people around the UK. There’s a huge education program around it just to kind of inspire a younger generation to show that anything’s possible in life.
00:15:20:36 – 00:15:33:43
Jane Farnham
Wow. So just out of curiosity, before we wrap up. On your last challenge around the UK and around the world, the global challenge that you do, roughly how many hours would you be running a day?
00:15:34:39 – 00:15:46:30
Ben Smith
So I think our average was around about 5 hours a day. The quickest was 3:23, which was my 398th marathon in Bournemouth. But I think that was because I was flanked by two cyclists.
00:15:47:06 – 00:15:48:43
Jane Farnham
You tried to keep up with them.
00:15:49:06 – 00:16:09:21
Ben Smith
Yeah. But yeah, it wasn’t so much about time in the last challenge. You know, as I said before, we had 13,500 people join us and of that 13,500, ,1500 of those people ran further than they’d ever run before, and 500 of those people ran their first marathon or ultramarathon. And that was what it was about.
00:16:09:54 – 00:16:30:25
Ben Smith
It was about bringing the fun into it. It was about slowing it down and it was about allowing people to go at their own pace. So, you know, seeing that look in someone’s eyes when they crossed that line, having done something they never thought they could do before, it was, it was infectious. It was yeah, it was what the project became about to be perfectly honest with you.
00:16:30:55 – 00:16:39:36
Jane Farnham
Well, I tell you what, you’re infectious. You’ve been totally inspiring to chat to today. Thank you so much Ben. It’s been really wonderful. I really enjoyed chatting to you.
00:16:40:19 – 00:16:40:48
Ben Smith
Thank you.
00:16:41:20 – 00:17:06:41
Jane Farnham
Now, I really hope that people will see how they can benefit, too, from your talk today. And well, if you, if they book you for their teams to not only be motivated but informed about their body and what we’re capable of. So to book Ben, simply contact myself or Steve at Great British Speakers on 01753439289 or you can email bookings at bookings@greatbritishtalent.com. Thank you very much for watching and thanks once again to Ben.
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Ben Smith, mental health and LGBTQ+ speaker at Great British Speakers
