1: An Introduction to Pollyanna and the Be Glad Movement - a podcast by Pollyanna Charnley

Hello and welcome to the Be Glad Movement, my name is Pollyanna and I’m on a mission to bring you as many stories as possible of good coming out of bad and reasons to be glad.

This podcast is going to be full of inspirational stories from people just like you and me who have overcome their hardships and gone on to lead even more successful and fulfilling lives. It’s a safe place where I hope those of us who are in the thick of a tough situation can come and hear how other people survived and in some cases now even credit their hardships as being the best thing that could ever have happened to them. It’s hard when you are in the middle of a crisis and it can feel lonely, you have to allow yourself to have the odd pity party, to cry, get angry, vent, process and move through the emotions. Everyone will have a different time line for doing this. The B eGlad Movement podcast is an effort to sit with you in solidarity during those dark times and then when you are ready, and only when YOU are ready, we’re all here together to help lift you up and uncover the good that can come from each adversity, to inspire you to seek out a way of using your own hardships to either your own advantage or to help others. You can follow along on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram by searching @begladmovement

So first let me thank you for listening into this introductory episode. Pollyanna and the Be Glad Movement podcast is somewhat late on the scene as the YouTube version has been up and running for a little while now. You can see all the episodes to date uploaded already at www.youtube.com/beglad BUT by popular request, for those of you who want to listen to inspirational stories while chopping your veg, walking the dog or driving to work I have launched the podcast version too.

So what can you expect? Firstly I’ll be sharing a good chunk of the original 100 stories I collected during the initial challenge in 2018. So that should get the ball rolling and give you a good selection to choose from up front. Please note, I’ll be numbering the podcast episodes for easy reference but they wont be appearing in the same order they were originally recorded. Moving forward I will be recording new interviews and interspersing these with some of the vintage episodes.

So to give you a little bit of information about this voice you are listening to up front before I delve into the reason why I started the Be Glad Movement. Most people call me Polly, Pollyanna somehow seems like a bit of a mouthful, having said that though it hasn’t stopped people from calling me all sorts of variations, from Pollster, Pollcat, Pollybean, Pollfish and Pollatron to name but a few. I’m a mum, a military wife and we have a boxer dog called Brunel. My favourite colour is yellow and my lucky number is 2, which is why I wanted to launch on the 2nd February 2020, I also like symmetry!

On a more professional note I am a coach, NLP practitioner and I also carry out time line treatments but more on that another day, or maybe in a completely different podcast once I’ve got the hang of this.

I’m a firm believer in the amazing benefits of the ‘helpers high,’ I only recently found out this was what it’s called but basically I love volunteer work and I volunteer for both the Samaritans as a listener and the Princes Trust for the young entrepreneurs who have successfully completed the enterprise programme and business launch group. I truly believe that you get so much more out of volunteering than the time you supposedly give up. That said, we’ve all got to eat right, so don’t worry if you don’t have any ambitions to save the world, you have to save yourself first and that happens one day at a time. Like they say on aeroplanes, put your own gas mask on first before helping anyone else.

So what are the origins of the BeGlad Movement concept? Well, my mum named me Pollyanna after the book and then the popular Disney film Pollyanna in which the little girl plays the glad game. Pollyanna is an orphan who is sent to live with her austere Aunt in a pretty unhappy township but she teaches them all the glad game and cheers them up. The glad game was taught to Pollyanna by her late father as a tool for overcoming disappointment. It’s essentially looking for all the positives you can find in any negative situation. In coaching circles we call it reframing. So, when I was growing up, my mum would always say to me, now come on Polly, play the glad game if ever anything didn’t go my way and then I would have to list off all the positives I could find in that negative as well as listing off all the things I was grateful for and lucky to have in my life. Now it’s important to be clear here that my mum wasn’t trying to deny me my feelings, it was her way of brining me back down onto a stable bedrock of gratitude for what WAS going my way so I could look to build from there again when I was ready. I think there are a lot of misconceptions around gratitude, that it can be misconstrued as ‘staying stuck with what you’ve got’ but that’s so wrong, gratitude really is a bedrock for healthy growth, if you can feel stable with what you already have you have a safety blanket underneath you as you reach for more, and you can more easily tune into what you really want next from life without getting sidetracked by other peoples ideas of success. In my opinion, Gratitude is a tool for growth.

Anyway, back to the story, so you could say my mum taught me how to gratitude journal in the moment and it’s a strategy for living that has served me so well over the years I wanted to bring it to a wider audience. I originally had the idea back in 2015, and it was actually the words of one of my favourite coaches, an American lady called Marie forleo, that inspired me. At the end of all her videos she says, keep pushing for your dreams because the world needs that special something that only you have. As a budding coach I spent a lot of time pondering what it was that I had that maybe the world needed and it took a long time for the penny to drop until one morning that penny did drop and I promptly set up the Be Glad website and made a few videos of my own but I never got round to interviewing anyone, life got in the way, I got married moved house a couple of times got a dog and had a baby.

Then, at the end of 2017 when my son was only a year old, I tragically lost 2 friends to cancer, Sharon and Buffy had died. While contemplating the injustice of it all, they were both remarkable and talented women who had so much more to give the world if they hadn’t been snatched away from us, I found myself wondering what I would regret not having done if I had been the one to get the diagnosis, if I only had a few short months to live. It was in that moment I knew I had to get the Be Glad Movement out of my system, I needed to start it properly and see what would happen, I thought at the time to get it out of my system, but I know now, even though I did get the ball rolling with the whole my names sake idea thing, it’s not my ball, it’s 100% not about me, the Be Glad Movement is about all the fantastic contributors and the people who are helped by their stories, most of which I will never have the privilege to know.

Once I had the realisation that I needed to do this though I set about setting myself some SMART goals. I announced to the world, well, my friends on social media, that I was going to collect 100 stories of good coming out of bad and reasons to be glad by the end of 2018 while raising money for charity. I’m pleased to say I hit my story target and also raised one thousand and forty pounds which at the time was split equally between the Samaritans and Action for Happiness. Side note, never set yourself a challenge which finishes around Christmas, #stressful.

So if you want a healthy dose of positivity, kindness, self helpyness and opportunity for reflection and personal growth, stay tuned, subscribe and I will look forward to responding to any comments you may have along the way. I really want to make this community about nurturing and supporting each other and lifting each other up. After all together we can achieve so much more, together we are stronger.

The Be Glad Movement Podcast is free to listen to but if you did want to support me in raising money for the Samaritans then I’d love you to head over to the website www.beglad.co.uk and follow the donation link. Any help will be so gratefully received and appreciated.

And while you are on the website why not sign up to my mailing list, don’t worry, you won’t be bombarded with emails as I’m only a one woman band at the moment and I’m not that disciplined to write them, but when I do it will be worth your while as I’ll keep you in the loop about any events I’m holding or attending and share any insights that I feel may help you as we figure out our way through life together.

With so much love, I hope you enjoy listening to me, Pollyanna and all the wonderful contributors to the Be Glad Movement.

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Further episodes of The Be Glad Movement from Pollyanna

Further podcasts by Pollyanna Charnley

Website of Pollyanna Charnley