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Michelle:
Welcome to this wonderful space that I'm still figuring out, but is how I've technically created. Why don't you go ahead and give us an introduction about yourself. Feel free to be as long as you want.
Damien:
Sure. Yeah. Well, I'm Damien. I still am a doctor of archeology, but I kind of left that world behind, and these days I help people recover from pain and also teach kung fu as well. Doesn't mean I've gone full on Indiana Jones as people always used to ask me about when I was an archeologist. I'm not out there fighting Nazis or anything,
Just kind of means I basically had a childhood plan to become an archeology lecturer, and I kind of gave it up to go and do something that I think is a little bit more fulfilling. Taking my background in martial arts, fitness, and indeed academia and kind of inspired by my own battles with chronic pain and what I saw elderly relatives deal with, I realized that I could actually help an awful lot of people out there to live happier, healthier lives. And one statistic I like to throw out there quite shocking, really, is that 1.5 billion people, so 20% of the world live with chronic pain, which is insane. So I thought, well, so yes…
Michelle:
Exactly. And I'm part of the statistic. Yeah,
Damien:
Yeah. So I thought, well, why not? Rather than exploring this dream that I had that I don't think is actually right for me, why don't I go and do something else and try and help as many of those people as I can, or at least do my bit for the few of them that end up coming to me. I mean, I started working as a professional archeologist before I started my PhD and then kind of went back to it whilst I was doing my PhD part time. And as part of the PhD I was teaching students teaching practicals and enjoying that aspect of teaching. Something that I've always enjoyed, and it's one of the reasons I love teaching kung fu so much, but through the PhD process, which I think we'll probably get onto a little bit later, I came to the realization that actually this maybe isn't something that I want to be a part of. So it's like, well, I guess commercial archeology is just going to be my career path, but I wasn't hugely happy there. I think a lot of careers, you go in and you're doing all the cool stuff and then you progress through your career and you get to management level and then you're like, oh, everyone else does the cool stuff. I just have to deal with disgruntled staff, annoyed clients that don't actually want to pay us for what we're doing. And I thought, you know what? This is not what I want to do with my life. So I decided to go out on my own and start doing coaching, but that was a slow process, like you say, it's not like a translation course. You can do archeology to business owner.
So I started just doing a little bit of research, putting a bit of time into it, weekends, evenings, and then gradually started lowering my hours with my day jobs so I could commit a little bit more time to it, start getting clients. And I was planning on that being a long process, maybe three years or something like that with the attention of one, getting my feet wet a little bit and learning the ropes and not just cutting off my salary instantly, having that safety net. But also, as much as I wanted to move on, I was proud of what I'd done in my career and I wanted to make sure that I left the department that I was running in a good place. That second half kind of happened a little bit faster than I expected, and then my wife got offered a job in Australia. We'd never been there before, but we thought, Hey, why not? Let's go and go. I kind of realized, well, if moving across the world and having to give up the job that I've got already anyway isn't kind of kick out the bum to just jump all in. I dunno what is, so yeah, I left archeology pine when I moved to Australia four years ago and went a hundred percent in on the business and learned by doing or failing sometimes happens.
Michelle:
Yeah, you and I are speaking English right now, but you and I don't speak the same type of English. And I think if you asked anybody, they'd say, oh, well they're clearly both native English speakers. And then if you asked somebody, which is the true native English version, it depends on that person's education for how they would respond. It's something I, whoa, I'm trying to push back on a lot. Right. But yeah, why don't you, because Australia is another sort of sphere.
Damien:
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's probably worth prefacing this slightly. With a brief side note about the way I speak English. Obviously I'm from Britain, I have a British accent, but actually I would say I'm an oddity in the way that I speak, not because the way I speak in itself is very weird, but I've got quite what we'd call an RP or received pronunciation accent. And neither myself nor my family have any idea how I ended up speaking like this. So although I'm in the south, I come from an area that has a slight separate accent, a lot of dropped letters, a lot of using the F sound rather than a T sound, for example, in kind of the urban areas where I live in a county called Dorsett. Whereas in the more rural areas, you have almost what we'd call a west country accent, kind of like far mirror. I talk a bit like this, but a lot more clipped. So for example, rather than saying Dorsett or Dorsett,
If you are from Dorsett and you live in the country, you say Dorsett. So my grandparents on one side talk like that. My grandparents on the other side come from Birmingham in the Midlands, which is a completely different accent. And then my parents grew up around here, so they're kind of a little bit of a blend. No one in my family talks like I do. So that's a little bit strange. I dunno how I ended up like this, but it's the way I speak is what people would generally equate with being posh, maybe upper class. And when I went to university, for example, everyone I thought I was really wealthy, really posh, and I was like, Nope, I'm as working class as they come. I just for some reason speak like this. So then when we went to Australia, because my accent is quite distinct in this way, it's very clearly the ideal.
I guess some people would class it English, it's the English that you hear and the TV and the radio with news reporters, everyone was like, oh yeah, you're from Britain very clearly. And my whole time there, people recognize that I was from Britain. My wife who grew up in the same area, she doesn't have quite the same accent as me. She's still very well spoken, still a little bit rp, but she tends to creep a little bit into, do it a little bit more, drop a few more letters, a little bit more. They would always ask her, well, where are you from? And then eventually, maybe after about two years, she got a little bit of that Aussie twang, and then people just stopped asking her where she was from and they just assumed she was Australian, which her, and that's because interestingly, we moved to Sydney, and the Sydney accent is really quite mild. It is, I would say a southern English accent with a slight uplift, the kind of question tone at the end. And if you hear in Sydney someone that sounds what we'd think is quintessentially Australian, you're like, oh yeah, you're not from around here. You're from Western Australia or Southern Australia or something. And that was quite interesting, going to Sydney and expecting to hear Australian accents. And then everyone spoke quite normally from what we're used to the extent that I actually met an awful lot of British people over there
Who I assumed were Australian just because the accents were so mild. So that was quite interesting. There are certain things that Australians will say in a certain way, and you're like, okay, that's a telltale sign. They often elongate O sounds, for example. So rather than saying no, it'll no, some of them will annunciate Ws as well. So rather than saying shown, they would say shoan or no one.
Michelle:
Oh, okay. Yeah, I never picked up on that one. Yeah,
Damien:
Yeah. It is not common, I would say, but it's a thing that a reasonable number of Australians do. So yeah, there's all these little weird things that we'd pick up listening to people. And why do you say it like that debut, for example, most Australians will say debut. So there's just these little things that as a native British person, English speaker, and the fact that obviously Australia's a very multicultural society, but I guess it's core, it was a British colony. So when you hear people that you think should be talking your version of English, just doing things slightly differently, you're like, why are you saying it like that? That's not the way you say it. You have to try and not judge, but I think you are right. What is the right version of English? Your English, my English, their English, they're all English. They're all different.
And I think they're all equally valid and we just have to learn to accept that. But yeah, just generally it was a great experience. We never expected to go out there and enjoy it as much as we did, but really loved living in Sydney. And aside from words and accents, one thing that we really picked up on the language front was certain slang and phrases that you would never here in England. And I think it's fair to say that a lot of that subset of language doesn't necessarily make sense anyway, but because we become so used to it, we just ignore that. But then when you're exposed to this slang fresh as an adult and you haven't grown up with it, you hear things and you're like, that doesn't make sense. Why are you saying that? And it really jumps out to you. I think that's an interesting thing about different ways of using language that what you grew up with, whether it's correct, whether it's logical or not, you just assume it's true. That's okay, that's fine. To use a really good example, I think in British English, I dunno if you use it in America, is the phrase, long time no see.
Damien:
And when you actually think about the words in that phrase, it kind of makes sense, but it's a weird way to construct a sentence. It doesn't really work as an actual sentence. It, it has been a long time since I've seen you. And then in Australia, the one that people always use, especially in cafes, restaurants and things, after you give your order, they'll say too easy.
And they're like, what do you mean it's too easy? I can make my order harder for you, if you like. And to us, it always jumped out at us. It was like, this doesn't make sense, why are you saying that? But obviously there, it's part of the slang, it's part of their language culture, and they don't even think about the fact that dramatically it doesn't, or logically it doesn't really make sense. So yeah, all these things that kind of jump out to you and you get you thinking about actually how we use language that you would never probably have even thought about if you just stayed where you grew up, or at least in the country
Michelle:
That you grew up or even, I mean, we're picking up on a few things, but even if you stayed in the country, if you don't change your region, if you don't, I mean regional accents and all of that, it's a whole topic. Oh, we're in dialect versus language territory. We're going to just knock. We don't have time for that. But the fact that there's almost as if the world treats, let's say US English, and then first of all, UK English, that doesn't mean anything because really there's so many different versions. But even just British English, the amount of times I've heard people say that British English is the ultimate English and not realize how many accents and how many because they think that, I suppose it's RP that they're having in their head as the standard, but then also kind of disregarding the fact that there are so many different native speaking countries that we also don't have. It's not like the French language where there is an overseeing governing body, the academy that is like, this is French, this is not French. You will not add these words, stop doing this. Young people, they are.
But
Damien:
Even that's relatively modern. It was, gosh, what, maybe 200 years ago that they started doing that, I
Michelle:
Think two, 300 years ago. And I think the way that it depends. I think if you consider, hold on, I'm going to look it up right now because I don't want to be wrong, but I forgot the actual, I hate the academy phone so much that I can't be wrong on this. We're cutting this part out, but I have a whole section on how, sorry. Okay, so the academy was created in 1635, and it was, that's what I mean. It was this group, this elite group first, and then it kind of evolved into what we know now as the system they have now. But there's a fair amount of people who would also argue that the academy has really no real power over the language because nobody has power over how language evolves. And even if they want to make it this institution that then dictates for the entire country or for how the language is spoken in the country, you can't control in a kind of free world how people are using it. So the amount of English words that have now managed to enter the French language is the academy doesn't approve of it. That won't stop people from using it. Right? Yeah. I want to triangulate this. So we have the us, we have Britain, which by the way, great Britain versus England. Do you just call it Britain because you're from England? Because I stopped using Great Britain a while ago,
Damien:
So it gets complicated. So Great Britain is the island and it's made up of England, Scotland and Wales.
The United Kingdom also includes Northern Ireland, so that's one governed region. They're separate countries, but they all essentially are run by the same government, though they do have regional governments as well. I usually just say I'm from Britain or from the uk. Those terms, although technically different, tend to be used interchangeably even on official documents and things, you are more likely to hear Welsh and Scottish people saying, I'm from Wales, I'm from Scotland, because they got quite proud about their heritage. And a lot of them like to think of themselves as a little bit independent, even though we've been part of the same kingdom for a very, very long time. But yeah, I always just describe myself as British generally, and I mean, I was raised in England and I am mostly English, but I do have Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestors as well. So I'm a bit of a mix anyway. But yeah, I guess that's another language thing. The term you use to describe yourself can have a lot of political undertones. If I went into Scotland and said, oh yeah, I'm Scottish. Most people would probably disagree just on the way I talk, but my surname is actually a Scottish surname. Well, it's two Scottish surnames put together, and my great granddad was from Glasgow. So I could quite legitimately go to Scotland and say, yes, I'm Scottish descent, I'm Scottish, but because of the way I talk, almost everyone there would probably say, no, you're not. You're
Michelle:
English. So you'd never use English for yourself when self describing,
Damien:
Very rarely, very rarely. I might every now and then say English, but it's not through any conscious choice, which is what happens to come out of my mouth at the time. Usually I'd just say British. I think I feel like it's a better description of both who I am from an Ancestry's point of view, but also how I feel about this as a country. I think we work well together. I think that I would say I think we should stay together, although there are getting into politics there, there's a whole,
Michelle:
I was going to say we're going to put this in
Damien:
The private section, whole host of other things to go into there. I'm staying within the union, so I use that term for those reasons.
Michelle:
Well, I think no one can what I mean, you're entitled to have your own opinion no matter what politic politics ends up kind of giving us in the next century. But I will say that most people I've met, it's really, really interesting how this kind of changes. So just like how we have these, what do I want to call it, over generalized oversimplified categories of language. So like US English or American English as people say, British English and then Australian English and Canadian English, it's like, so number one, we have all this diversity and variety inside of our own countries. And what you asked me just now on longtime No Sea, I answered yes because in my experiences across most parts of the country, we are familiar with it. I would not be surprised if someone listening to this from an area I've never been to or you know what I mean? I don't know. Because there are maps made and they're like, what do you call soda? Because it's like pop in some regions and soda and others. Yeah, I would not be surprised if people didn't know this term simply because they weren't raised with it. And so this idea that whatever we were raised with becomes the truth that we hold around a language, a culture,
The social aspects of it too, how you interact with people, things that feel right or wrong. I don't know that there's enough conversation on that topic. I do see a lot of people out there saying, don't you realize there are so many different accents and dialects and ways that the English language is used? I don't think realize as a world that number one, we can't control language. You can try to put the academy, but it's not going to work clearly. Number two, that you call yourself, it's not even just about language, how you talk about your language or how you conceptualize in your head the terms that you use, the reasons why all of that is specific to you. If I put you in a room with the other British people I've met across Europe, you would all have different things to say, I am English is what I've heard a lot.
And many people when they come to France, they actually change. I think their way of explaining things. And it's of course influenced by the French language as well. In French society. It's just like, can we stop pretending that there is a singular unified, because the language world, the industry has really made a lot of money selling these books on how to become you, right? And how to become me. When I say that, I mean in terms of accent, but that doesn't, I don't know your thoughts on accent classes, but it's something that really I think makes me, not just bothers me, but makes me sad because I see people who English is not their first language. They just didn't, who chose this? I didn't choose to be born into the us. It just happened that I was raised inside of this language. And so now all these other people who didn't by chance happen to be born into an English speaking country who have to take in the language, also have to decide which accent they want to use. Apparently they can't just speak with their own accent, but then now they're told like, okay, no, you have to go for the most elite sounding because of the prestige that comes with it. So I actually want to ask you if you think media played a role in your accent development because it is the one that you hear a lot on the news?
Damien:
Well, that's actually a good question. I'm not sure. I would say maybe to an extent I do think there is in English media, British media, a I say English media and British media because they are distinct things. There are some channels that are only on, in England, only on in Wales, only on in Scotland. Obviously ones in Scotland and Wales don't get exposed to, unless I'm in those countries. They do quite well at having a diverse range of people represented in terms of people from all over the country, because there are actors from all over the country. News does tend to be quite rp, especially when it's B, B, C, for example, other broadcasters, channel four ITV, they tend to be a little bit more varied, but potentially that was some form of influence. It certainly wouldn't have been conscious, but again, I'm not sure. It's not like we watched an awful lot of news. So I'm not sure how much that would be the case.
But I do think you touched on a few things there, that idea of what is the right way of speaking, what's the right accent? And indeed what's the right language. If you've grown up you use in different areas, you use different words. Even beyond that, just who you grew up around can have an effect on what language you use. On an extreme example, you see children sometimes creating their own language in their own slang just to use with each other. But this is a bit of an odd example, but my wife and I grew up 15 minutes drive away from each other, never actually met until we went to university, but everyone that I knew growing up would use and know the term jiggery pokery. When I first said Jiggery pokery, I can't remember what the context was, my wife was like, what are you all about? I was like, oh, Ji degree, pokery like having a fiddle, trying to sort something out.
Michelle:
I'm sorry. Can you use jiggery pokery in a sentence? It sounds absolutely easy to this with my words.
Damien:
So let's see. Yeah, say something like broken and it needs fixing, but it's a bit awkward and you just need to kind of maybe wiggle it around a little bit. You might say, oh, it just needs a little bit of jiggery and it will be
Michelle:
Fixed like finagle. Do you use that?
Damien:
Yeah, a bit like that. We wouldn't usually use that word very much in Britain, but some people would. But yeah, my wife was like, I have no idea what you're on about. This is not a word. You have just made this up. And it wasn't until one, I'd asked my dad about it in her presence, and he was like, yeah, that's definitely a word. And she's like, oh, well, it's clear. Just a Campbell Bell family thing.
Michelle:
Yeah, it's your family.
Damien:
And then it wasn't until a couple of other people said, oh yeah, that's definitely a word. She was like, okay, well, I have never heard this in all of my years. And so who's right at that point? What is real English? You probably wouldn't find that in the dictionary, but it's still a valid way of communicating within the English language, but it's just maybe context dependent to a certain extent. You could use it with some people and they'd have no idea. And you can go more extreme than that. You talk about dialects, there are lots of dialects, there's still valid versions of English, and sometimes very small tweaks, but enough that people still might not really understand what you're talking about, but it's still valid. It's just you've grown up in a different context. And the same with accents. You can say the same words in such a different way that people just have no idea what you're saying.
The Glaswegian accent is a classic example of people hearing glaswegian speak normal English with very few slang words, and they're just like, I have no clue what that person said at all. But if you've got experience with that accent, you start to be able to understand it. That doesn't mean it's not real English, it doesn't mean it's not valid. Yeah. Which accent do you choose in order to model your English on? I would maybe say that one reason why RP British or an American accent are, or at least a relatively neutral American accent, let's just say a neutral accent in general.
One reason why maybe it is a positive thing to try and model that is because it's more widely and easily understood, because there's not a strong inflection on any of the words. But even then, you're going to have your own slang and your own phrases that potentially other people aren't going to understand, and you're still going to have to explain yourself. So yeah, I don't think there is, there's no valid version. It's just what are your aims? What are your goals? Can you kind of direct yourself to better achieve those? And if you are going to try and move to Glasgow,
Learning to speak for the Glaswegian accent might be beneficial. If you are going to try and live internationally, then probably having a more neutral accent is going to be beneficial because it'll be maybe a little bit easier for people to understand you. But then you go into whether you are dropping letters, the speed that you're talking, the words you're using, there's so much to language that it's hard to pick it all apart. And yeah, I don't think any of us should be elitist about it. Nothing is better than anything else. It's just what purpose are you trying to achieve and how do you want to go about it?
Michelle:
Yeah, I think the policing is so unnecessary on this, number one, because imagine if we policed each other, that would be ridiculous because where would that come from? And I think between English speakers, there is this sense of what if you do something like this, if you kind of cross that line, it's like, okay, well, you're not somebody I would talk to then. So then when we go into, and that's between native speaking English people. So it's something that I, no, I do think it's a personal choice. So for me, for French for instance, I was really clear that I would never try to sound Parisian. I would never try to match whatever textbook wanted me to because I don't want those expectations coming my way. I dunno if you've ever thought about this, but that sort of, yeah,
Damien:
I have actually in kind of from two perspectives. One is that in general, I'd say English people, British people are quite bad at picking up foreign accents to go with their foreign language. So you tend to get people speaking French, for example,
Michelle:
With a British
Damien:
Accent, with a British accent, and it's very clearly, it kind of sounds awful, really. I like it actually. But I guess some of our regional accents are so strongly ingrained that they can be hard to get round. And one of my friends, he lived in China for, gosh, 14 years or something like that. And to hear him speak Mandarin, he still has a little bit of an accent, even though he's fluent in Mandarin, he's fluent in Shanghai knees, but he still has a little bit of a Yorkshire twang to him.
Whereas another one of my friends, he moved out to rural Nan and lived there for a very long time, kind of come back for a few months each year and then go back and he learned the local dialect and had started to pick up a little bit of the local accent. So seeing a tall, white, blonde guy walking down the street and then suddenly turning around and speaking like dung, fun style mandarin people would be shocked to hear it. What? Just because you kind of don't expect it. So yeah, some people managed to really assimilate quite well, I think into the local culture and other people, local language and other people, it always seems like a layer on top of what they already have. And I think that's going to vary by person, by how people's brains work. Some people are just really gifted for language. One of my sister-in-laws, she's fluent in Portuguese and picked up really quickly and can do a really good Brazilian Portuguese accent. And she, even with British accents, molds herself and picks up the local accent quite quickly. Whereas I will admit that I'm absolutely terrible at languages. So whenever I try and speak a foreign language, I definitely got a British accent and I find it quite difficult to pick it up and to learn and keep the stuff in my head, just I'm not really wired that way. When
Michelle:
How's your singing? Actually? Sorry, just to,
Damien:
I'd say it's okay.
Michelle:
Okay. Because trying to find the pattern, because I think that I have a theory that, and I don't know, there's probably research on this, but the people I think who are able to mold and able to, and it really, really depends on the language. Sometimes I lose, even in my French, I'll lose it because I have a sinus infection and my nose just can't do it anymore. You know what I mean? French people have sinus infections in it and they can speak, so I can't where I push from, but I feel that some trend that I see sometimes is when people are able to pick things up quickly, it might be because of their background in voice or music or something that because their ear is attuned to hearing the sounds in a certain way.
Damien:
Yeah, I would say I've got a good musical ear. I'm quite good at hearing a bit of music and working out how it actually goes without having any sheep music or anything and singing. I say I've got a reasonable control of tonality and pitch. But yeah, just some part of my brain struggles with language and I learned German and French at school. Most of that's gone well, here's a good example actually for our honeymoon. My wife and I went to China. We went to Swan and Yunnan and I speak a little bit of Mandarin through Kung fu teaching, but that's obviously a very specific vocabulary,
But understood the different tones and what have you. So took some of that knowledge and then went, okay, let's do an intensive introduction to a Mandarin class. Let's do some online learning. And got to the point where we're like, okay, we should be comfortable getting directions and getting ourself around the country. And just because, well, not just because partly because I'm rubbish language unless it's English, but because we were in quite a rural area and they spoke a dialect of Mandarin, we found it almost impossible to understand and be understood, which was quite a difficult introduction to China for our first few days. And yeah, you're like, I should be able to understand what you're saying. I should know these words. I think I know what you're meant to be saying,
Damien:
I actually have no idea. And that's quite a disorientating experience really. And when you think that you are saying the right thing and they kind of just look blankly at you and you're like, okay, I'm really confused now. But again, it's because there is no one way of speaking that language. Everyone's taught this is official down the middle of the road, Mandarin, every single local area has its own dialect.
Michelle:
And by the way, I can't understand most of the dialects in mainland China. It has nothing to do with not understanding the language I can. It's just they vary because especially for a tonal language, you need the structure of the tones and you need the set pattern. But what do you do when the tones change? And
Even, I'll take Taiwanese as an example, Taiwanese Chinese, there are certain, it's closer in a sense that I can definitely understand what's going on. It's not about sling, it's not about word choice. It's not about sentence formulation, it's just literally about how it sounds. And I will at times have a moment of where does this go in my head? Because the tone that there's a lot of fourth tone basically that comes out that we don't use inside of mainland Chinese or Mandarin. I actually don't think people realize, I mean, China is just one example. Chinese is just one example. But in the same way that people struggle to understand each other, I'm sure in your area of the world, in my area of the world, all this stuff is normal. All this stuff happens, but it's just when you're taught the language or when you try to go and you see all these materials and it's like Mandarin is like this, and you have to do it like that, or else people won't understand and you're like, well, we already can't understand each other sometimes as native speakers. So
The amount of times I've told my British friends here, I'm like, I'm so sorry because it's, I'm not trying to be that person who's like, oh, I can't understand what you're saying, but I'm like, you just spoke words that I can see in my head. They're all English, I get it. The way that you put them together is very different from the way I would put it together. Can you reformulate so that I can better understand because I, and it's over, you're having a beer and someone says something and you're just like, I don't know the right reaction to have to this. Was I supposed to support this or continue the thought? Yeah,
Damien:
And sometimes even speaking to your spouse, for example, if you are both native speakers speaking the same language, you can still say something and be completely misunderstood, even with someone that you're very intimate with. So doing it with a complete stranger in a different language, in a dialect, it becomes very difficult. And I think actually kung fu terminology is a really good example of this where because mandarin is a tonal language and you have quite a lot of words that are different words from the character perspective, but sound identical when spoken, especially in certain regional dialects, you get an awful lot of confusion about what things actually mean. And as it gets passed down generations, the original meaning can get lost. I practice shalin kung fu, so from the temple in Nan, and there's a very famous form called seven star fist. So Xi being seven and ching, star twin fist, but chi and G sound very, very similar to each other in the Hannan dialect. And there's kind of been retroactively placed this idea that it's called seven star fist because the shape that you make as you do it is a bit like the Big Dipper. It's got seven stars. It doesn't really, and actually if you look back at some of the techniques and things in it, it was probably actually originally G rooster or chicken. But now we've got this whole manufactured history
That's come about just because at some point someone misunderstood what word was being said, and that's now kind of the internationally accepted standard. But you almost lose something of the history and actually lose something of the meaning of the movements by having that word change, which kind of seems maybe overblown, but the distinction can actually be quite important when it comes to applications of kung fu movements and things. So it's very interesting, just that's slight quirk I guess, of the language can have such a big effect over many years.
Michelle:
And I think it's funny when people are like, oh, it's so beautiful, this story, and you're like, you just dig a little deeper into the history. I don't know. I'm not familiar with this particular movement. I dunno what to call it. The way that we want to believe. I think the language being used can sometimes be, it's not only over romanticized, but it's like we would love to believe that there is one perfect accent or one beautiful thing to aspire to. And I do think I get why, because you have a goal, you have a target, you have something that you can work towards. I think the land of nuance is very difficult for language learners for this reason, because it kind of, I mean, why do people want to learn a language? Oh, I want to learn French because the French sounds so beautiful and whatever. And then they come to France and they realize, okay, wait, hold up. There's a whole world of sound happening that may not actually match what I saw in my own country. So I think it's great to talk about these things because I think without talking about them and there's really no conclusion, no. Okay, so go buy this cd. We found the best way. Sorry, no one
Damien:
Use. I've got all the answers.
Michelle:
Yeah. Oh God.
Damien:
Just 9 99 I can fix.
Michelle:
Yeah, exactly. I know what is it? But act now and I'll throw in two more for free. Right, so $4,000
Damien:
Of value.
Michelle:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's just the point. And really it's the point of the podcast, it's just to have conversations on these different topics that we come across in every aspect of our lives. You didn't study. And even from my degree, formal education is not in linguistics, but we come across all of this because we live things, we travel, we move, we go in different parts of the world and you process them. You think about it right when you're talking with people. So I want to give you time, by the way to plug your business before we go.
Damien:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, as I said, the main thing I do is helping people get out of pain. So if someone's had an injury or they're just dealing with some form of pain that's stopping them from being comfortable in themselves or doing the things that they want to do, whether it's high up a hill or just get down on the floor and play with their kids, I essentially try and help people get better, help them reduce their pain, gain more function, gain more strength so that they can get back to living life on their terms. I like to say I try to get people fit for life, fit for the life they want to lead right now, but also fit for the rest of their lives so they can continue to be active and healthy into old age. And mostly that's one-to-one coaching with people, customized programs for their particular needs, their particular problems.
I have an intense dislike for all those things you see on YouTube and Instagram, like this one exercise to fix X problem. It's like, well, S back pain, say back pain can be caused by so many different things. One exercise is one, not good for everyone, and two, not necessarily going to fix your particular issues. Trying to really assess what the problem is with the person and then try and address it to make sure that they get to a place because yeah, having been in chronic pain myself, I was born with a congenital knee issue where my femur and my kneecap don't fit together properly. So it slides around all over the place, which was aggravated through a rugby injury. I spent years not being able to walk up the hills walking along and my knee just giving away on me. Going to doctors that all put credit to them, they're trying to help people, but then specialism isn't musculoskeletal issues saying that's not really anything wrong.
Have you tried resting? And it's like I've been resting for five years. And yeah, eventually found a really good physio that set me on the path I'm on now with terms of how I do things and wanting to help other people and having managed my own pain and got to the point where actually my knees don't hurt 99% of the time and I can do stuff that people would look at and go, whoa, your knees are so strong. How have they not exploded? And it's all through the kind of thing that I help other people do. So yeah, I basically just say to people, if you're in pain, unless it's actually caused by a specific medical issue that might have underlying causes that you can't fix or help with targeted exercise and what have you, then yeah, don't give up because so many people do. Just try and try and fix yourself. Try and get yourself better. There are pass out pain. It doesn't have to be with me, but if you've listened to this and thought, oh, he's quite a cool guy, reach out and maybe I can help.
Michelle:
Yeah. Where can people find you?
Damien:
So I am on Instagram at @kung.fit. It's probably the best place to find me. And then it's very easy to strike up a conversation and talk about your situation. Or you can go to my website, Kung Fit Coach.
Michelle:
Very, very, very nice, very, I like the play on words a lot. It. Great.
Damien:
I should probably also say as well, actually, I think you're going to put the link in the show notes, but I've got a little guide that's about all the different types of pain treatment you can get your hands on and some recommendations of what's kind of a bit naff and you should probably not bother with and things that might be worth trying and might be worth trying for different conditions. So you can take a look at that and maybe get some advice, even if you don't want to work with me, it's something to help you fix yourself.
Michelle:
Fantastic, thank you. Thank you for sharing and thank you for being here. Thank you for, I know you have to go, so we're just going to wrap this up. Is there anything you want to say before we sign off?
Damien:
Be nice. Don't judge people for their accents, whether in a positive or a negative light. I think it's fair to say that there is no one right way of doing things and just accept everyone for what they are and don't feel like you aren't speaking English well enough because most British people cannot speak your language at all.
