[TRANSCRIPT] [0:00:00] (Craige Hardel): A warm welcome to another episode of The High Achievers podcast. I am your host, Craige Hardel, and today we have quite a special guest. And with The High Achiever podcast, we profile and interview experts from various fields who have overcome quite a bit and who are now willing and ready to share their life stories, their journeys, their transitions, be the people that they are and to serve as a guiding light for others who are on their paths as well. [0:00:32] (Craige Hardel): Today we profile none other than Ian Westmoreland. Let me say this over, I will cut it out. Today we feature a very special guest by the name of Ian Westmoreland. I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly and a brief biohair. Ian has spent 42 years working with the Australian and New Zealand telecommunications and energy industry as an It Project manager. In 2013, he had a life changing moment where he decided to retire from work and now and begin as a volunteer. [0:01:09] (Craige Hardel): He has done that among with many setbacks to now having two companies. And one of these companies is a foundation that is called Mentoring by Men and also another one called Kint Sugi Heroes. And Ian has also been married for 40 years, has four children and twelve grandchildren. A very large family. So, with that said, without any ado extra ado, I'd like to welcome Ian to our podcast. Welcome Ian, to the High Achievers podcast. [0:01:45] (Ian): Good morning, Craige. How are you this morning? [0:01:49] (Craige Hardel): Doing awesome. It's interesting because literally on other ends of the world, by the way, listeners, ian is all the way in Australia, and I am actually on an island called St. Lucia in the Caribbean. So literally, at opposite time zones, at the time of recording, it's five or 07:00 p.m.. So this will make for an interesting conversation. So, Ian, now that I've more or less introduced, you tell our listeners essentially who you are and give them a bit of a background as to what led you to be the person you are today. [0:02:28] (Ian): So my background I was raised in Melbourne, in Australia. I'm one of four kids. As a young kid growing up, I lacked a lot of confidence. I struggled with self confidence. In fact, one of my early goals was to be average. Craig, I'm getting a lot of feedback here. [0:02:58] (Craige Hardel): My settings. Okay, say something. [0:03:04] (Ian): Testing, testing. 1234. [0:03:06] (Craige Hardel): I can hear you. [0:03:08] (Ian): Is that hold? Just testing, testing. There's nothing coming back here. [0:03:13] (Craige Hardel): Okay, yes. [0:03:16] (Ian): So I grew up in Melbourne, one of four kids. All right. Okay, so I grew up in Melbourne, in Australia, one of four kids. And as a teenager growing up, I lacked a lot of confidence. In fact, one of the goals I set for myself, if only I could be average later on. And one of the ways I compensated for that, I was very good at sport, I played a lot of tennis and squash, and I became quite competitive and I felt that made me more of a desirable person if I was actually good at something like that. So I came from, I guess, a fairly low base, confidence wise. [0:04:03] (Ian): I also went from being ducks of primary school to failing my way in year twelve at high school. Again, through lack of confidence, peer pressure. All of my mates failed as well. And so I took the first job I could get, which was working for the Australian Government as a clerk. But I always felt there was something better for me within that. So I started setting up businesses on the side. I used my sporting ability. A lot of people come and watch me play squash and tennis, so I started importing and selling squash rackets and tennis rackets. [0:04:39] (Ian): And then years later, when I met my wife, we actually bought what we call a milk bar or a general store in Melbourne, which we made quite successful. All the time I was doing this, I was still working full time. In the early years of marriage, we struggled financially. We had four kids. We had the first three kids very quickly, and again, always looking to make money on the side. But gradually I managed to work my way into better and better paid positions and moved into the It space. [0:05:17] (Ian): There's a huge step forward. In 1995, when I quit my job with a major telecom company in Australia to take up a contract position in New Zealand, I went to two and a half times the pay that I'd been on, and that started to really set us up. My wife, who'd been cleaning houses and disbutting plants for one of her brothers, was able to stop work and become a mum and also get her own sporting career going. [0:05:48] (Ian): And I was able to leverage off that experience in New Zealand to come to Sydney in Australia to take up an even higher paid position. So my career was taking off, I was getting well paid, I was delivering software changes. And then in 2013, I started to think there's more to life than just making money and delivering software. I thought there was more meaning. And this thought occurred to me for several months. [0:06:15] (Ian): And then on the 10 September 2013, I got on the train to come to work and I continued reading a book that my youngest daughter had given me. And when I turned the page that morning, what I read just deeply impacted me. It resonated, it queried the meaning of my life in a way that left no doubt that there was a greater purpose for me. And in May 2014, I quit paid work. So since that date, I've been a full time volunteer. [0:06:51] (Ian): I initially started, I felt called to mentor young kids in Sydney high schools. So I was mentoring at multiple schools, incredibly fulfilling. The feedback I got, the impact that I was having just by being a listingeer, just by being someone on their team, supporting and encouraging, became clear to me that this is a good thing to do. So in addition to that, I started mentoring kids in primary schools through a different mentoring program. [0:07:22] (Ian): And I also became a coordinator for yet another mentoring program aimed at families. And then in 2018, I was mentoring a young guy at one of those Sydney high schools. And in the first meeting I had with him, he shared that his father had suicided. His mother was an addict who was in and out of rehab. He was living with his grandparents, which he hated. And then he just turned and looked at me, looked straight in my eyes, and he started crying. [0:07:53] (Ian): And he said, Ian, help me. What can you do? What can you do? And I debriefed with a program counselor later on, I guess, looking for advice. And she said to me, Ian, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I'm okay. And she asked again, and I just started crying about the situation. And I was flat for a couple of months. And it took me that long to realize I actually wanted to have a mentor just like these young people that I've been mentoring. [0:08:24] (Ian): And I should explain, mentoring is such a broad term for most people in business. Mentoring means someone with skills, experience, knowledge, guides, and advises someone else. I call that business mentoring. But what I'd been doing and what I felt I needed was life mentoring. And life mentoring is predominantly listening, actively listening. It's supporting, it's encouraging. The people that we're mentoring aren't broken. [0:08:55] (Ian): They don't need fixing. They just need someone to validate them. So I looked around for an organization where men supported men through life mentoring and was surprised and incredibly disappointed to find there was nothing that suited what I was looking for. So it motivated me to write a proposal to establish an organization called Mentoring Men. Now, there's a whole lot of events that happen along the way, and miracles, I guess, that led me along this path. But in November 2018, Mentoring Them was officially launched. [0:09:39] (Ian): My wife and I put our money into funding it. I got the local federal MP to be an ambassador for the program. I'd met him because I went to a community event where he shared about his father's suicide. And I saw parallels between what I was doing, which mentoring Men is essentially one of the key parts of suicide prevention. And so he got on board, and the organization grew rapidly. I totally underestimated how much work was involved in doing this. [0:10:13] (Ian): I didn't have all the skill sets. I knew very little about social media. Mentoring Men were set up as a company. How do I produce a constitution? I needed legal expertise, but it didn't stop me. I just kept going. And a number of people came on board. The purpose just resonated with them, and the organization grew and grew and in 2020, at the end of 2021, there were sufficient finances from donations, from grants, from philanthropists for me to step aside as the CEO and to appoint a paid CEO and a paid team. So there's now a team of about ten people who run Mentoring Men. [0:11:01] (Ian): I continue as a director on the board. Obviously, I'm talking about it now. I'm an ambassador for the program. But the program just is going from strength to strength. So at its core, we train up volunteer men in Australia through our own mentor training course and also through suicide prevention, and then we carefully match them to another man who may be going through life challenges like job loss, relationship breakdown, loneliness, isolation, addiction. [0:11:32] (Ian): And the relationship is a long term, one to one mentoring relationship. And we're saving lives, we're transforming lives through that program. [0:11:45] (Craige Hardel): Just to wrap up, because I wanted to delve into take a pause and delve into again, your story is quite extensive in terms of where we were and really what led you to, first of all, founding Mentoring Men, and now, like you said, stepping aside and having an actual paid team and start running it. But I wanted to pause a bit for someone who
