Joanne Lockwood Podcast Transcript

Melody Moore:
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to the Secret Resume podcast, hosted by me, Melody Moore. In this podcast, we explore the people, places and experiences that have shaped my guests, those which have influenced who they are as people and where they are in their work life. Today you can listen in as we have a rich exploration of often unexamined and undiscussed, but very important aspects of their lives. Or as I like to call it, their secret resume. So I’m very excited today to introduce my guest, Joanne Lockwood. Joanne, your story, I know, is going to be fabulous for people to hear, so please, can you just, before we dive into everything about you, can you just tell. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Joanne Lockwood:
Hi, Melody. Absolutely wonderful to be here. So, who am I? Joanne Lockwood. My pronouns are she and her. I have this very deep voice, as you can tell, for Joanne. So just to put that in context, I’m transgender. I’m in my very late fifties. I’m so late in my fifties I can almost see being 60 in a couple of months time.

Joanne Lockwood:
I’m an inclusion belonging specialist, or the inclusive culture experts, as some people may refer to me. So I work with organisations throughout the UK, Europe and further afield, promoting positive people experiences in organisations to create cultures where people can thrive. Married. Been married for 37 years next month and two fantastic children in their thirties. So, yeah, life’s good at the moment.

Melody Moore:
Fabulous. And you were telling me you’d just been to the gym this morning and you’re off to the cinema after we speak. So it sounds like you’re getting a very good balance between work and life as well.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yes, we’ll talk about this in my journey, but a little bit in a minute. But I think it’s important not to have a work life balance, but to have a life, comma, work balance, where you. You’re not living to work, you’re working for sufficiency to keep allowing you to live the life you want to live. And I recognise that maybe I was gluttonless for much of my life, acquiring and trying to want bigger, better, faster, whatever it may be newer. And now I’m very much more content with sufficiency and what do I need? It does create a couple of clenchy bum moments when the cash flow is a bit tight because I haven’t got buckets of cash in reserve. But we have a good life, we have a good life. We’re not poor, but, yeah, sufficiency is my kind of motto of my late fifties.

Melody Moore:
I love that sufficiency we’ll come back to that. So I’m going to ask you to jump right back to the beginning to, as you said, year old you and what was going on for you at that time.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, I mean, I was, to all intensive purposes, your average little boy, really. My parents were school teachers, my father had been in the navy for 22 years, I think. And so I was in, I was around ten years old. So that was mid seventies, no Internet, it was punk, it was rockers, it was kind of mods, kind of era. Um, it was way before the new romantics. I can’t, I can’t remember who was, you know, it was kind of those old school music type stuff. So I was living in a very vanilla, very kind of ordinary middle class, well, lower middle class family, teaching family. And I think I was about 1011 years old.

Joanne Lockwood:
I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but my mum, for some reason, decided to buy me a book. It was a ladybird book called how to make a transistor radio. And it was so because my dad, I think my dad was working away at the time, so me and my mum used to go out quite often together on exploration, shopping trips and things. So she took me to this local electronic component shop. I guess it was radio spares, ir’s or something like that, maplin’s or whatever the equivalent is today. And so we bought all these little components and what you do is you get this block of wood and some brass screws and you, you wind the resistors around the screws, screw them down, then you put your transistors in and screw them down and you wind the copper coil around this graphite rod and poke that in there. And, yeah, you plug it all together and you put your headphones in your ear and nothing works, you know, absolutely nothing. So that was the crystal set we started with.

Joanne Lockwood:
Then we progressed and we, we built one with batteries in it. And so somehow, somehow electronics became my kind of hobby. And that’s how I kind of started it with this book when I was ten or eleven. And when I got to leaving school five or six years later, somehow, somehow electronics became my career choice. I left school at 16. With hindsight, I messed up my old levels a bit in those days. I did some GCE and some. What’s the other one? Old school? Cses.

Joanne Lockwood:
Cses, yes, I did.

Melody Moore:
I was the last year to do those.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, and I underperformed, you know, I got two b’s and three c’s. Maths and physics as b’s and I got chemistry. No, no, I didn’t get chemistry. I blew that biology, woodwork and geography c’s, and I failed english language, I failed economics and I failed French. And these weren’t just little failures, these were kind of e’s and f’s and ungraded sort of stuff. So I had a very polarised brain. I was either all in or all out. And, yeah, I was good at the technical stuff.

Joanne Lockwood:
And for some reason, I say, I joined the Royal Air Force to become a radar radio communications technician as an apprentice. And back in the eighties, early eighties, went to RAF Swinderby for my basic training. Where’s RAF Crossford? Swinderby is Lincolnshire. Newark? Somewhere around there somewhere. An aria of Cosford was just outside of Wolverhampton, just off the M 54. I remember when they were building the M 54 motorway off of the. I think it was the m six. We used to run up and down it as aircraft technicians with telegraph poles on our shoulders, running up and down it, using it as our kind of fitness lane.

Joanne Lockwood:
And, yeah, so the motorway became our kind of field of torture in those days.

Melody Moore:
Still is enjoying stuck in traffic, it is.

Joanne Lockwood:
We were going to Wales the other week and Shrewsbury, we’re going, and we drove down the m 54 and I thought, I can’t. I remember running around. This is the bit we used to run down with our telegraph poles and doing our star jumps and stuff on the motorway before it opened. But, yeah, so, yeah, there I was, 16 years old, joined the Royal Air Force to become this technician. And again, a bit like school. I was either all in or all out in this sort of thing. And I think what it was is I just didn’t really get it. I could read a map, I could follow the instructions, I could screw transistors to a block of wood with a brass screw.

Joanne Lockwood:
But when it comes to really understanding it, it just went straight over my head. I could learn it wrote, I could look at something and learn everything about what it did. But if you told me to design it or to think about why, I could repeat why, but I couldn’t think about the why, how it worked. And for one reason, I was. Me and the RAF, we party company.

Melody Moore:
How did you find the structure and doing what you were told?

Joanne Lockwood:
I had no. I had no problem with the forces mentality, the discipline. I was not a rebel against authority like that. I was just a kind of a. I think today you probably say I had some kind of neurodiversity, all in, all out. I mean, I would never say I am neurodiverse, but I certainly didn’t. I don’t like doing things I don’t like doing. I’m very, very, very polarised on that.

Joanne Lockwood:
But yeah, we partied company. We were incompatible. I did some naughty things, nothing terrible, just not compatible, and end up leaving after about three and a half years. As to what naughty things you did, naughty things. I was. My cigarettes were a bit too amsterdam flavour, if that makes sense, which is not. It’s not. Not compatible with the forces and way before I was ever exploring my gender identity or sexuality or anything like that, it was way before I was in that sort of thinking terms.

Joanne Lockwood:
But yeah, yeah, it was, yeah, I’m not proud of it, but it was one of those things that we. Few parties went out and someone saw us and reported us and next thing we know we’re up in front of the station commander, marched in with our hats on, saluting and getting sentenced to 21 days detention. In our. Colchester was the military detention centre in those days. I think it maybe still is in Essex. And yeah, I spent 21 days in there. I got sentenced to 28, but 21 days with good behaviour and things and there I was. Got back on leaf sweeping duty for a couple of weeks until they sorted me out and they hoofed me out and said, bye bye, we don’t want you anymore.

Joanne Lockwood:
And there I was back at home with my mum and dad, who weren’t impressed, obviously, with. They thought they’d got rid of me forever. And there I was bouncing back after three years. But I bounced back a bit more independent, bit more of a rebel, less willing to be compliant with their discipline. And I ended up moving out quite quickly after that and living in a. Living in a bed sit in Portsmouth. Actually it was a. I said to remember paying twelve pound a week for a bed sit.

Joanne Lockwood:
It was a very big room. It was a bed, it had a. The water heater for the whole building was in my bedroom, so I never had to heat it. In fact, if anything, it was too hot in some time. And I lived there for about three or four years. Met my wife Marie through a friend, probably around 1985. So I left the RAF in tail end of 84, got a job working for Plessies, who are a defence contractor. And actually the reason I got the job there was because I had the RAF background.

Joanne Lockwood:
They thought I was an asset and then they realised that I was actually trained on some of the equipment that they were producing. So, yeah, they saw me as an asset in their post design laboratory because I knew electronics, I knew the radio. Their PTR 175, it was. And there was PTR 1751. Yeah, cheque me out. I can still remember that. That’s very impressive. But, yeah, the same.

Joanne Lockwood:
Same happened. I just didn’t get it again. I was kind of like. It was just. I was just going through the motions. I blagged my way into it. Then I found myself getting more interested in the test equipment. So it was.

Joanne Lockwood:
Where were we? We were 1985 86. The IBM PC had just come out. Plessy’s been using something called a DEC digital equipment company Corporation, a VAX VMS system for their CAD and their engineering computers that used to run chip simulations, and they used to produce chips and microelectronics. They used to run simulations on this computer. And I got quite friendly with the computer manager and he said, tom, do you want to come and work for me? So I jumped out of electronics into computing in the mid eighties, and my brain suddenly found something. It got and understood and was really good at it and really passionate about it. And I was being 20 at that time, hungry for knowledge. I flew.

Joanne Lockwood:
Everybody else around me was in their thirties. They kind of like, what’s going on here? They’re all electronic engineers, so it didn’t take much before it became my thing. It turned from a bit of a hobby.

Melody Moore:
What was, do you think, between it and electronics? That one you just suddenly, you know, found that that really worked for you. What. Why do you think that was?

Joanne Lockwood:
I don’t know. I don’t know. A lot of it started, you know, my parents bought me a Dragon 32 computer, or I say, me. Me and my siblings, my brothers, we had to share it in those days. We used to plug it into the telly and we then got books of basic code and we type it all in, or we’d. And I guess somehow I was able to figure it out. Yeah, it just. It was a language, you know, programming language.

Joanne Lockwood:
It was a language I was. Even though I didn’t do very well in French and German at school, I was. Always had an aptitude for languages. I just didn’t apply it. I just couldn’t be bothered. But so computing, whether it was basic programming language, Fortran, C, system programming, did a lot of system programming. I was doing some deep stuff on the systems, not just applications. So, yeah, I was more infrastructure and more systems than I was applications or products or things like that.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I was kind of one layer above the hardware, if you like, sort of that sort of side. The operating system side. Yeah. I just. I don’t know. I really don’t know why it ticked, but whatever it was, it ticked and, like, PCs came along, the first Apple Macintosh computers were there and everyone just saw me as the go to expert. And then suddenly I left the plessies and got a job with a. It was an insurance company, a life company called NM, Schroeder Financial Management, which was part of Schroder Life, then got bought out by National Mutual Australia.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I worked there for a few years, about four years, progressing my way up, and I actually became the chief architect, reporting directly into the head of it at that, at that career. And I was 29 ish at that point. So, yeah, it really got it. I mean.

Melody Moore:
Architect. Now my guess would be you designing the whole.

Joanne Lockwood:
Technical architect. Yeah, technical architect. It was the consultant, the ideas person around the infrastructure and architecture. Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m just looking at my timeline that I sent you. That job didn’t end well either, actually, because Nm got bought out by friends provident. And look, I’m giving all my confessions here, all my naughty school things and friends provident for buying a and M out. And what they were looking to do is outsource the it department from the old NM, the Schroder life site, because French Providence didn’t want to absorb it.

Joanne Lockwood:
They wanted to outsource us and cut us loose without taking us on. And they had two people bidding. One was a company called Hoskins. I’m not sure what they call themselves these days, but they were called Hoskins in those days. And there’s digital equipment, the company I’d trained on, the vaxes and the vms and some of the stuff I’d done when I was younger and got to know that company quite well. It just so happened by my boss, who I used to work for at Plessy. So it’s now working for digital equipment. And it just so happened he was in their bids and outsourcing department.

Joanne Lockwood:
And he phoned me up one day and said, look, we’re doing, I’m doing the bid to outsource your job. I went, oh, is it different? A cup of coffee or me? And I went, oh, yeah, I’ll have a cup of cup of coffee with him. And we just got chatting and we just talked about the merger and you, how it would be a good opportunity to get me into digital equipment and be really good. And I just, for some reason I said, oh, I’ve got a copy of all of our budgets and finances with everyone’s salaries in it. Would that help? And, oh, I’ve also got a copy of the other people’s bid. Was that any good? Could you use that? And he went, can’t say no, but can’t say yes. So I ended up passing him a brown envelope with all of this proprietary information, if you like. And for some reason I must have shared this with a colleague.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was doing this and my colleague was actually on the other side of the fence. He was more interested in the Hoskins bid. It wasn’t in a overly competitive way, but for some reason he decided that I was being jolly unfair. It just wasn’t cricket. And so he reported me to internal audit.

Melody Moore:
Oh dear.

Joanne Lockwood:
So next thing I know is I’m. I come back from Christmas holiday. I think it was the. I know exactly when it was. Actually. My daughter was born. On my daughter’s birthday is the 11 January, and it was her birthday party with all those little two year old school friends around. So it’s this 1994, it must have been the 12 January, the day after her birthday.

Joanne Lockwood:
Must be the Sunday, this is the Monday. So my wife’s there with all these little kids and their mom and the mums and everyone having a little two year old birthday party celebration. And I come home in the afternoon going, what are you doing? I think I’ve just been fired. So. Well, I wasn’t. I technically I wasn’t fired. I attended my immediate resignation, which was immediately accepted. So I managed to escape.

Joanne Lockwood:
I escaped without being fired by falling on my sword very quickly. And. Yeah, so there I was, out on the street again, feeling very disappointed with myself. I need to get my act in order here. But fortunately the person I used to, this person at digital equipment who is my old boss, who would. I wouldn’t say instigated, he catalysed this problem. So I felt some responsibility to this situation. I know some recruitment agents, some contract agencies, I’ll do my best to try and find someone to get you a job pretty quickly.

Joanne Lockwood:
And the next thing I know, I’ve got a job working for an IT reseller in Burgess Hill, I think it was. They were called Michael business systems. Wow, this is going back a bit. And they placed me into Coots bank as well as their subcontractors. So there I was, about a week after I’ve been fired, keeping my lips very tightly shut. I’m now working for Coutts bank in their development centre in Slough, travelling 60 miles each way every day, but I’m on contractor wages, so suddenly I’ve been going bumbling along at 20,000 a year and suddenly I’m on 40,000, I’m cashing it in 350 pounds a day.

Melody Moore:
You fell upwards, didn’t you?

Joanne Lockwood:
I fell upwards big time. Yeah. We just had our first child, Marie wasn’t working, so we were kind of broke as a family. And suddenly I’ve got. I’ve got cash. Yeah, we’re kind of loaded, so. And I worked at Coutts for four years doing their it development. And then I got onto their global deployment.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was working around the world with them. Some glamorous locations. La, San Diego, Beverly Hills, New York, Miami, Vienna, Cannes, their nice. We went. I ended up in Athens as well, Hong Kong, Singapore. So I was on their global deployment team and I spent a week in the Bahamas, week in Cayman Islands. We were jet skiing off the beach. It was, you know, on banking expenses and having an absolute roaring time.

Joanne Lockwood:
But I’ll be really honest, we were working really hard. This was kind of a twelve hour days and then six hour party and then whatever’s left to sleep. And it was like we were literally coming in at three in the morning, crashing out, waking up, going back into work, doing the same thing day in, day out for weeks. And it was like, yeah, you can’t do it in your thirties, couldn’t do it now, but, yeah, absolute blast.

Melody Moore:
And, and your wife, Marie, at this time, was at home.

Joanne Lockwood:
One, he was at home. We had two children at this stage. Yes, we had two children. We just bought a big four bedroom detached house because, you know, we were cash rich. We had loads of money coming in to. Just bought myself a BMW 325, I car, she had an Audi something. So, yeah, we were kind of in our young, in our thirties. Yeah, loaded at this point here.

Joanne Lockwood:
So, yeah, things were good. Things were really good, yeah.

Melody Moore:
And you’ve mentioned in, like you said, what you sent to me before, that you were involved in the round table. Is that around that time as well?

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, it was, yeah. So I back the age of 26, so it’s before. So whilst I was still working at this, the life company, before I went to coats, I joined. In fact, a colleague of mine introduced me to someone. I was working with that company and we joined at the age of 26. And I remember turning up to this first meeting in awe of it. It was at the Waterside club in Port solon near Portsmouth. And it was walking down, it’s all the local bank managers, the solicitors, barristers, estate agents, all of the kind of the movers and shakers in the Portsmouth area.

Joanne Lockwood:
And I walk in there and think, blimey, look at all these gods. Gods of commerce, if you like. Gods of society. And for those of you who haven’t heard of the roundtable, it’s a men’s club. It was founded in 1927 to be a club for young men to network, socialise and give back to the community. So I joined. Yeah, I joined the man table at the age of 26 ish. It became a bit trickier to say committed when I was flying around the world, but I’d always come back here, there and everywhere and go to our second and fourth Thursday meetings and go to our dinners and conferences and things and, yeah, it was a massive part of my life.

Joanne Lockwood:
I became the chair or the president of my local club back in 99. 2000 millennium. Yeah, it was doing stuff, it was giving back to society. There were a really supportive group of people. If you’re having good times and bad times, you have people around you. And also business networking. I’ve got some business through it as an it person. But also when I had this industrial espionage encounter when I was at the life company, one of my friends in Roundtable is a solicitor and I was able to phone him up in tears and say, look, this is what’s going on, this is what’s happened.

Joanne Lockwood:
So prostrate myself down the phone to him and he said. And he was the one that said to me, just resign, just go for it. Write my letter, say you leave now. And often that works. You just get out without a black mark on your book. So. But, yeah, the person we bought and sold a few houses over the years, a solicitor is always around tableau. I’ve got my best friends, architects, people like this.

Joanne Lockwood:
So, yeah, it just became. It gave me that. Us as a family, actually, because it wasn’t just me, my wife, our children all were involved with the families of other people. But it kind of made you feel connected and empowered. Knowing that you’ve got a solicitor, knowing you’ve got this, you’ve got that. You got. So suddenly these people who you would maybe be scared or apprehensive or have no relationship with were suddenly your friends. And so you knew you were.

Joanne Lockwood:
You were going into battle if you had to. Knowing you had a whole defensive army around you. You felt incredibly. I felt incredibly empowered to do things because. And that’s what led me to start a business, actually, and I left coats. So, yeah, it was just before the year 2000. I remember getting a memo from the head of it. Kevin something.

Joanne Lockwood:
His name was Kevin something. He wrote me. He wrote everyone’s letter saying, your bonus is on the line if we have any year 2000 y two k issues, then your bonus is on the line, blah, blah, blah. And I just read it and thought, I don’t need that shit. I don’t need someone talking to me, inviting me this letter, you know, I’d spent so many years as a contractor, I was permanent at this point. I thought, I. I don’t want to be an employee and be treated like your porn, like your thing. So I just.

Joanne Lockwood:
And about that time, a good friend of mine, a chap called Ian Cox, who was my accountant when I was a contractor, said to me, and they used to call me manners in those days, and the reason I got that nickname was because I didn’t have any manners. So they called me manners or something. And he said, look, I want to. My accountancy practise is growing and I want someone to come help with my it. But I also think we can get together and build an it company in Portsmouth. I went, okay. So now I am. I’m tracking my global head of system development, head of system support.

Joanne Lockwood:
I think it was in codes. I’m chucking that career out the window and jumping myself back onto the street and saying, right, okay, here I am. Nothing again. No business, no nothing apart from him. As my client won, and another roundtable friend I had who ran a printing company booked me to go and install a new server and get him up and running. So I had probably. That was probably two and a half grand worth of business. And I had.

Joanne Lockwood:
My accountant was guaranteeing me, like, three or 400 pounds a month. So there I was, May 20, no, May 1998, there I was, two gigs. And my accountant said, I’ve got people I can introduce you to. We’ll get something. Just. Just trust me. We’ll make it happen. And it kind of did.

Joanne Lockwood:
It kind of did. We had some good times. We drank a lot, we went to the chinese restaurant a lot. And I did a lot of business. And, yeah, that culminated in I somehow, luckily, I got involved with a cable tv company on the Isle of Wight. They were called white cable, I think, at the time. I’m not sure what they’re called now. I installed a lot of their head end, which is where they put all the equipment, all of their equipment in for their network, their infrastructure, their cable modems, the Internet connection over your cable.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was interfacing between the people who produced the walled gardens, the EPG. It’s the electronic programme, guys. The bit you interact with on this Sky TV, the bit that moves up and down and you’ve got all your channels and you’ve got your bonus content. I was interfacing with all these people, putting all this together. I was winging it big time. I really was winging it big time. But so were they. They were quite happy that this it person who understood IP.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, Internet protocol, TCP IP, I kind of got all that stuff and PCs and servers and Linux and some workstations, all this, I kind of got it all. And we’ve just put all this stuff together and we just. I don’t know, I probably did a couple hundred thousand, maybe two or 300,000 over the course of a few months. And then that project came to an end and things got a bit tight for a while. And then one of the people who was on this white cable said, phoned me up and said, do I fancy doing it again in Scotland? Me and a few friends, we’ve got this, we’ve got some seed funding, we’re going to put a cable tv company up in Scotland. I went, okay, you want me to come and do all the it stuff again? Yeah, it’s the same thing. We’ve got the same, same billing platform, same people producing the wall garden, same people doing the content, same people doing the cable modem. So you mean the old crew are back? He said, yeah, basically just, we just need to come to Scotland for a year or so and just make it happen.

Joanne Lockwood:
So, yeah, that was like, that was even more. Have a feeding frenzy. I turned over 3.8 million.

Melody Moore:
Wow.

Joanne Lockwood:
In eight months. We were supplying all of their PCs, all of their high end servers, all their switches, all their data, everything. If it wasn’t bolted down, we supplied it and shipped it in and set up. I had a team of six people up there working all hours, but, yeah, obviously partying hard at the evenings. But we’re putting this stuff in. And I remember we had this deal with HP, Hewlett Packard, where we were putting these leading high end corporate enterprise switches in for their Ethernet background. And I remember we went on a training course in Grenoble in France, paid by HP because we were such an influential customer at the time. These things were 150 grand each.

Joanne Lockwood:
These switches, the size of a big suitcase, you put them in this rack. And I remember we were buying five or six of these. And the guy that worked for me at the time, who did my purchasing, just phoned up. Our HP account manager said, is there anything you can do on the price? And they went, oh, go on. We give you another 40% off. And 40% was like 100k extra discount. 100k. Obviously we didn’t pass that on to the customer, we just absorbed that.

Joanne Lockwood:
We just took that raw profit for him saying, is that the best you can do? And we became HP’s best customer in a quarter for selling the warranty packs. When you buy a PC you can buy a warranty upgrade on it. We became HP’s record selling company, selling these care packs on HP equipment in one quarter. And we were. I don’t know, I don’t know how many maybe didn’t sell that many. We must have sold a couple of hundred and. But yeah, it was. We were just printing money at that stage.

Joanne Lockwood:
It was back in the yuppie days.

Melody Moore:
The good old days. So why here? There’s some really interesting themes I think, so far. There’s something, there’s kind of an undercurrent of rebellion quietly going on there in terms of some of the things that you’ve done. There’s also some quite hard partying by the sounds of things.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah.

Melody Moore:
And this may be sort of slightly boom and busta, you know, sort of more up and down income wise as well. That doesn’t continue though, does it? So you had some more tricky times maybe as you went into your forties.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah. So that it company doing the cable tv stuff in Scotland, the cable tv company went bust by 911. So flew some aeroplanes into a building and in America and that destabilised the whole us economy or their investments. So a lot of the investment this cable tv company had were us based and they basically pulled out. That meant that I. They effected into administration when they go into administration and I had about 100 something k in debt, they owed me in. I was offering credit to about 100 something k. And the worst about it was I’d already bought the equipment, I already paid all the staff that I had on contract there.

Joanne Lockwood:
So it wasn’t like this was profit. I mean, okay, I’d taken out the profit before and spent it, obviously, but now I was sat with 100k plus fat that just kind of. And they just went, sorry, no can do. We can give you a penny in the pound if you’re lucky, maybe in a year’s time. So I went back home, went back to the it company, which I still had running in the background. So 20 or 30 odd staff running that. But when you suddenly take away the 60 7100 thousand pounds a month income that’s coming in from the cable tv company, the underlying business wasn’t viable really. I was financing the growth of the other business and realising we didn’t shut it down quick enough, and that business went bust.

Joanne Lockwood:
I tried starting up another business, another IT company, and it was never quite the same. That bumbled along for a couple of years, and I ended up closing that down. Emerging, actually, as it happened, with the person I used to work for at Plessies, the person who got me into it in the first place. I merged with him and his son, and so he ran up his IT company from around 2005. So I’d have been best path, well, 40 ish, give or take. So he started that, and I ran that with them for about 15 years. Twelve to 15 years, but. And, yeah, we had some good times.

Joanne Lockwood:
We were turning over 1.2 million at the end. We had twelve staff. No, probably back to 20 staff by then, a couple of business partners. But it wasn’t the same. It was. I don’t know, it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t my business. It was kind of our business.

Joanne Lockwood:
And I never felt like I had ownership of it. And whilst we got on all right, I just didn’t really enjoy it. It was. I could just tell it wasn’t me. I was getting really, really bored with it. I mean, I love the projects. I love the wing in it. I love just jumping in and seeing what happens.

Joanne Lockwood:
But this was becoming. My PC doesn’t work. My backups failed, my servers crashed, and I’ll be sitting in computer rooms at 02:00 in the morning trying to reload tapes and systems. I thought, I don’t need this. I don’t need this anymore. I’ve had enough of it. It was just. It was just becoming a young person’s job.

Joanne Lockwood:
And I just thought, I want to. I want to be strategic. I want to be out there. I want to be going in and doing stuff. And I just worked with Inmarsat once, you know, the satellite, satellite company. They got me on contract to turn up into their office in London. I turned up and had an issue, and I just went in and did a few things on their screens, and within 15 minutes they go, wow, you’re incredible. I remember charging a thousand pound a day, and it was actually 15 minutes work, and it was kind of, yeah, I thought, I can do this.

Joanne Lockwood:
I want to get back to that seat of the pants stuff again. It’s much more fun. Anyway, so, yeah, I got to the end of my forties and I thought, and all my life, and I mean all my life that I can remember is I’ve always had this nag in the back of my head about my gender identity. Six, seven years old. I remember being a. Being a Cub scout, you know, cute little cub scout with a green pulley on, little. Little flat cap and my badges on my arm like you do. I remember going to church parade, because I used to go once a month, first Sunday of the month, church parade.

Joanne Lockwood:
I remember sitting in the. In the aisle, and in front of me were the guides and in front of the guides were the brownies. And I just always felt that was in the wrong lane. I was in the wrong queue, I was in the wrong aisle. I should have been at the front there. And that feeling, that disconnect with my sense of self was always in my head. Always in my head through my teens, when I was in the RAF, when I first got married. And of course, when you’re busy, when you’re doing stuff, your mind is engaged in that.

Joanne Lockwood:
But I always found that if I went into neutral or took my. Took my. Took the pressure off my brain would always go back to it. And it was, I think, what happened. I got to my forties, where the children left home, were becoming empty nesters. We lived in this big four bedroom house, nice cars, big garden, but we were living different lives. My wife and I were in different rooms. I was in my office, she was in the kitchen.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was in the lounge for brief times. And it’s not. We weren’t getting on, we just weren’t doing stuff together. We just drifted apart. And I think what happened was we went through a trial separation, and it actually coincided with the London Olympics. I remember it was the opening ceremony that night there. We had an Olympic breakup. It was that enormous.

Joanne Lockwood:
And that lasted all the way through to the end of the Paralympics, because it was literally, it was begin, it was the opening ceremony through the closing ceremony of the Paralympics. And as part of that, we kind of managed to re baseline who we were and said, actually, we both want to be together. We both want to be together forever. That’s our motto. Be together forever. We both want back what we had when we met 30 odd years ago. And it got to that point where, when we started talking about it, we both realised we went to the same thing. But at that time, I also shared about my gender identity and my gender confusion and what’s been going on in my life.

Joanne Lockwood:
And we laughed and joked about a few things, that this. My wife kept finding a dress. She found a dress in the spare wardrobe. And then I come home one night and found this dress on the back of the. On the back of the spare bedroom door, thinking, oh, my God, she’s found my dress. What’s going to do now? She’s found my dress. Panic, panic, panic. I thought, okay, I’ll just pop the dress back in the spare wardrobe again.

Joanne Lockwood:
And then carried on. And then next couple of days, it reappeared. Oh, God, she’s got it out. I’ll put it back. She hasn’t mentioned anything. I’ll just put it back, see what happens. And this carried on for, I don’t know, on and off for a week or so. It would appear.

Joanne Lockwood:
I put it back. It would appear. I put it back. She kept saying to me, do you keep putting that dress away? And I said, yeah. I didn’t know what it was. She said, it’s funny. She said, I don’t remember buying this dress. She said, I’ll put on the back of the door.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I was going to try it on, but I don’t remember buying it. I went, oh, really? And a few days later she said, I tried it on. Doesn’t fit. I’m not sure why I would have bought it. I said, oh, okay, fine, whatever. And we were joking about this, this event. And she went, wow, I’d never known. I said, I know.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was absolutely terrified being discovered.

Melody Moore:
So this was before 2012, then. The dress, the water dress.

Joanne Lockwood:
This would have been five, three or four years earlier. Probably three or four years earlier. So, yeah, 2008, 2009 ish. Yeah.

Melody Moore:
And you’re, you know, one thing that struck me about the professions that you’d chosen or fallen into in some cases, they’re quite blokey, masculine kind of professions. Do you think that was a conscious, unconscious choice? How did that feel? Or is it irrelevant, do you think?

Joanne Lockwood:
No, I think. I don’t think it’s. I don’t think it’s. I wasn’t doing it to mask or anything like that. And I fell in. It kind of resonated with me. I look back on it now and I had a great life and I had a great time. I wasn’t making conscious choices to try and fight myself.

Joanne Lockwood:
It was just I was getting swept up in the momentum of opportunity. And one of the sayings I often say to people is, no great adventure starts with a no. And so people always say to me, if we ask you, you’re going to say yes. Yes, of course. And I also say, if I’ve got two choices, let’s do the first one, because then we can do the second one as well. But if you say no, if you say no to the first one and you like the second one, you’ve missed the opportunity. To do the first one. So I always say, do the first one, then you can always do both.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I was very much more. I’m happy to exist in chaos, I suppose. Getting kicked out of the RAF, getting fired from an insurance company, being thrown out of the house by my dad at the age of. After I got out the raft, living this bedset, I kind of. I was kind of happy living in chaos. I’m also fairly resilient, adaptable and able to sort of, I don’t know, build relationships with people. Be likeable, if you like. So nothing.

Joanne Lockwood:
Not, not. Not an ass or a dick or anything like that. So it means that, yeah, I quite easily get in with people. So. Yeah, no, but there was no conscious decision to match myself up or anything. It was just opportunity moments. But don’t forget, I was born up in. Brought up in the sixties and seventies.

Joanne Lockwood:
There was no Internet, no tv, transgender, transsexual gender identity. It just. It wasn’t a thing, you know, it was in my head and it just. It stayed in my head. It was just something in the background. It was something that. But I suppose what happened in my forties. Facebook came along in 2007.

Joanne Lockwood:
Okay. Became popular in 2008, 2009, sort of thing. And I suddenly realised that there was other people out there who had a very similar narrative, very similar story, all having masked and hid this for all their life. And they were bankers, they were professionals. They were high in pimple in society. In fact, one of my RAF classmates came out as trans about six months before I did. I remember. Remember sending her a Facebook message saying, oh, you bitch, you beat me to it.

Joanne Lockwood:
I got photographs of me and her in photographs in the RAF of both there together. You’d never guess from those 14 young men that two of us would be trans and at least one would be gay or bi, that lot. So. Yeah, yeah. No, it wasn’t a conscious hiding or masking. It was just there. It was always there. And I inside out, too.

Joanne Lockwood:
The film’s just come out, isn’t it? And I remember when I saw it inside out, the first one. And sort of the metaphor or the analogy I use is that I was being driven by the little red angry man character all my life. You know, it was being. Driving me in the same way that in the inside out, the red angry man drives the young child for a while. And then what happened was, when I started to open myself up to this, guess what happened? Joy took over. And suddenly I’ve got feminine energy, I’ve got joy in my life and I’ve almost got the angry man strapped, cellotaped and gaffer taped to a chair. And joy is now driving my head. And it was a.

Joanne Lockwood:
I can’t explain it. All I know now is that instead of having two voices, a conversation in my head, an argument, a confusion, double thinking things, I’ve now got silence. I’ve now got clarity. I’ve now got one voice, one purpose, one thing, and I’ve just got so much more clarity than I ever used to have and is I can’t explain it. I can’t explain whether it was a complete change of career. So selling my it company in 2017 to my business partners, chucking all that in starting this new career as inclusion, belonging, trans awareness, is what I do now. I went bust properly. I didn’t end up doing an IVA in 2018.

Joanne Lockwood:
We got a bit carried away with tax planning in the business and HMRC wanted, I don’t know, three or 400,000 pounds off of us as a business, because we’ve been doing everything that Alistair darling, the then chancellor, made retrospectively illegal. We were doing all this, you know, you heard about Rangers football club and Jimmy Carr and all these people doing all these dodgy tax planning deals and, yep, that was us. We were doing that as well. So, yeah, HMRC wanted 300, I think, after company. They wanted some of that from me personally. Then, due to incompetence on my part, I can’t blame anybody else. When I sold the shares in the business, it wasn’t done tax efficiently. So instead of expecting, I think, a ten grand capital gains tax, they wanted to tax me somewhere 70,000 pounds.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I had this share of this APN advanced payment notice for the HMRC, for the business. My share is 100,070 grand for this tax bill, for the share sale. Plus I’ve been fast and loose. Cars, credit, all this kind of stuff like you do, you end up this bankroll in this massive, great big bit of debt you carry around all your net, your life as an adult these days. So I had all this going on. So eventually, I did an IVa in 2018 for quarter of a million pounds. Actually, in the end, it turned out. So when it was free myself, I know involuntary in.

Joanne Lockwood:
I don’t know what’s it stand for, involuntary arrangement. And I can’t remember the I stands, but it’s only about voluntary arrangement. Basically, you do a deal with your creditors to avoid going bankrupt, so you make them an offer. You make them an offer. So I was offering them in the same way that the cable tv company made me an offer of a penny in the pound. I. I made my credit offer of something like eight p in a pound or ten p in the pound for the 250,000 I owed in total across HMRC and all the other creditors on my loans and cars and stuff. So, yeah, I just.

Joanne Lockwood:
I woke up on the. I think it was about the 18 July or something like that. I was 250,000 pounds better off, effectively, because. Yeah. So whether it was. Whether it was the freedom and that. That wasn’t easy, because we had. We ended up having to sell our flat.

Joanne Lockwood:
We had a beautiful flat apartment, if you like, on. On the waterfront of port solo at the marina. Beautiful views. So we had to sell that. So I had to put 50 grand into the deal to buy my way out of the IVA, and we had to move into rented. We’re still in rented now. So, yeah, I haven’t gone back to where we are.

Melody Moore:
So was that pro pre or post you transitioning?

Joanne Lockwood:
It’s almost like, simultaneously. So when I sold the business in 2017, I often say that the 1 March 2017 was the day I kind of transitioned, because I left my old career and my old self on that dotted line, if you like. I sold it as the old fella and stepped off as me and. But that took that. This kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. It took me probably six months or so to get used to myself, really, because you’re test driving something, it’s not until you get out of the showroom and into the world that you try and figure out how the gears work and things. So it took me a while. I went through bouts of depression, moments where I couldn’t get out of bed.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was in tears all the time. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t do anything. And whilst I had the money from the share sale sitting in my bank, coming in every month, so I wasn’t desperate for cash at the time, but, yeah, I was pretty much functionless. I would have functioned for about six months until I had a kind of epiphany about, I’ve just got to get on with this. I can’t just sit here licking my wings, feeling sorry for myself. I’ve got to. I’ve just got to get on with life. And so that was 2017.

Joanne Lockwood:
I remember sitting. I was at a training course, actually on, in January 2018 is when I found out about the tax issue. That was, again, a pretty traumatic time, having to sell our dream home with my wife and just that kind of self imposed stigma and shame, really, and feeling a failure that was kind of, you know, I got burned a few times, but this was kind of wrecking everybody’s perception. So, yeah, that was a tricky time. And in parallel with this, we’re also doing a Channel four documentary, which is, you know, if we didn’t have enough going on. So in 2016, this is before I told my work colleagues, before I told my children. Obviously, my wife knew. At this point, we both decided to take part in Channel four documentary about.

Joanne Lockwood:
Which followed mine, our hour, gender transition, and that of seven, seven or eight other. Other couples or other people. And that was a three year project in total. So from 2016 to 2019. So they were coming out, filming us, filming me, filming my wife interviewing us around. Yeah, they stick a camera in your face, say, how are you feeling? How’s life? What’s going on? What are you doing? They’d follow us to the supermarket. They follow us to the theatre, they follow us going, buying, buying stuff and going out for wait A’s and having dinner with our friends. Like, the camera crew would show up.

Joanne Lockwood:
But it did up. Yeah, it did annoy a few of our friends occasionally. So Joe’s here with the camera crew again. Sort of, kind of annoyed them a bit because they’re never truly a fly on the wall. They do disrupt things. They did cause a bit of a problem, but I would look back at it as a good thing because they. They became our marriage guidance through that period. You know, you’ve got this independent person with a camera on their shoulder.

Joanne Lockwood:
Emma, her name was. She became a real deep personal friend and someone I could talk to and confide in because she knew our story. She’d been there almost at the beginning of this phase. She was there before I sold the business. She was there when I was selling the business, when I had a mental health breakdown, when I was seeing the doctor and being referred to the gender identity clinic. So she was there, the camera in my face, asked me the questions, but also she was listening, and so. And the same was with my wife. She was listening to my wife, asking my wife the question.

Joanne Lockwood:
So it became very cathartic to have that. That person in our lives who was there more than just to counsellors. She was our friend and she was independent. She was completely independent of us, but able to be our good friend. And, yeah, she really helped, but, yeah, and it was. It was a hectic time, you know, quite a lot of anxiety and pressure being filmed, speaking from the heart. You know, I’ve told you, I’ve told a lot of stuff today, but in those days, the difference is speaking from the scar. Speaking from the wound.

Joanne Lockwood:
I was speaking from the wound. It was open, it was raw. There’s blood pouring out. In those days, I hadn’t really got my shit together at that point. I was still trying to figure stuff out. It’s much easier now. I look back, it’s history. I’m healed.

Joanne Lockwood:
Life is good again. So, yeah, it was a tricky time. And being passed national president of roundtable. I didn’t tell you that bit. I became national president in 2008, 2009 of a man’s club, black tie dinners, travelling the country, travelling over the world, actually, standing up in front of drunk men in black tie, drinking port and wine and doing stupid stuff. And then they looked at me a bit funny. So you’re saying as national president roundtable, you’re now saying you’re a woman? Yeah.

Melody Moore:
I was just going to ask you about. You know what, obviously it’s a man’s club. So then you’re not able to be a member, presumably.

Joanne Lockwood:
Well, I’d already left due to the age rule, because it’s a club for young men. So the age cap is 45. There is a. There is an ex roundtable club called 41 Club or X Table. But strangely enough, their rules say the only. The only. The only requirement in their rules is you must have been in roundtable. So technically it doesn’t say you have to be a man, it just says you had to be in roundtable.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I watched Roundtable as a man. I was now in 41 club, and I still am, actually, as a woman, which kind of like. Yeah, it rubs a few people out the wrong way, I’m sure, but most people kind of just look at me, shrug their shoulders and go, I don’t get it. And I just smiled back and said, I don’t get it either. So don’t worry about it. We’re fine, we’re cool. And they kind of. Yeah, it’s kind of okay.

Joanne Lockwood:
And, yeah, I went to their conference this year, actually. They invited me to talk to their national conference on AGM in Bournemouth, and I gave a talk about basic Edi and how they could think about Edi in terms of their membership and developing their club. And I also did a presentation to Lady Circle, which is the sister club around table, and presented to their AGM around basically a trans 101, talking about gender identity, because they, as a club, had been targeted by two sides. One side saying you should be more inclusive of trans people, and another side saying you must never be more inclusive of trans people. They end up caught in the middle between these two factions. And I ended up just giving a very pragmatic 101, not, not, not instruction on what they should do or should or shouldn’t do. Just these are. This is who I am.

Joanne Lockwood:
This is what makes me happy. This is what makes me sad. And if you. If you want to find out more, let’s talk. And it was kind of. That kind of. That approach is how I normally take it, is you have the choice how you want to make me feel. If you want to make me feel unhappy, that’s your choice.

Joanne Lockwood:
I can’t stop you. But if we can work on a way by, everyone feels happy. That’s the objective here. So, yeah, times healed, a lot of those things. At the beginning, it was quite raw because also I had a camera crew, remember, at times I was going to these roundtable events for the camera crew, which that caused probably more problems than my gender transition, to be honest. Having a camera in their faces when they paid to be at dinner. But, yeah, it was. Yeah, it’s been an entertaining.

Joanne Lockwood:
Nearly ten years. Nearly ten years. Yeah.

Melody Moore:
I noticed you said our transition when you were talking about. Rather than your transition, you were talking about you and your wife. That transitional period.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, well, it’s quite a selfish thing, you know, and the definition of selfish, you do it, I, for your own self, for your own reasons, for you. But it did dawn on me very early on that I was trying to do a selfish thing in the least selfish way possible. I also recognised that in order to be. Have respect of the family, I had to be worthy of respect in order to be loved. I had to be lovable to all these things. Most of this started with me. It was how I showed up and how I presented and how I lived my life and how I interfaced with others. It was very much about personal responsibility.

Joanne Lockwood:
But what I also realised was I’d known this story has been in my head for, at that time, 30 or 40 years, I’ve just woken up and this is giving it to people for the first time and expect them to just get over it and get used to it. So, for me, transitioning was like spinning on a sixpence. For everybody else, it was like this massive, great big arc. And, you know, if you think about dropping a pebble into a pond, the ripples in the middle are the most. The most violent, if you like. So the people who are closest to me had the biggest trauma from them. Our daughter, our son. My mum had to get used to it.

Joanne Lockwood:
Marie’s parents had to get used to it. My close friends, people know me 30 or 40 years. They had the journey. I was just pivoting. I was just going, hey, it’s me. Figure it out. So I always say the transition is less about me and more about other people. How society, you know, we talk about the social model of disability, how it’s the society that disables or removes access to people.

Joanne Lockwood:
It’s society that has to accept me because I’m just me. And society has to blip in the time space, time continuum, ripples out. Everybody else has continued. So, yeah, it most definitely was our transition. Marie had to get used to me. She had to. She had to come out as someone who was a woman married to a man, who’s now a woman married to a woman. People would question her sexuality.

Joanne Lockwood:
How does she describe me? Am I her wife, her partner, her husband? So all those things that change of language that I enforced enforce on her, I created scenario where she felt forced to have to change or not or walk away. And that was one of the conversations we had. You know, we had a saga back in 2018. I had a hair weave fitted, part of the tv documentary. And if you. If you ever find it on googlebox or on the other channels, you can see where I had this hair. We fitted, and it. Because it completely changed my.

Joanne Lockwood:
My Persona, invisible identity. It meant that I couldn’t just take the wig off at night. You know, I’d go to bed, wake up in the morning, wander around, make my breakfast, watch telly without a wig on. Now, I was Joe 100%. The time I was. There was no. There was no way people could gatekeep me and tell me how I had to show up. It was like, it’s stuck on.

Joanne Lockwood:
It doesn’t come off. And that. To recall that we call that period of hair gate, that was our kind of hair gate. And we almost broke up. I say we almost broke up. I never thought we would, but we were going through some really tricky times. Lots of conversations. And I probably owe it to the fact that we’d been through this in 2012 with our olympic breakup, that we kind of knew how to shout and argue, but we also knew how to hug and cry and look into each other’s souls, and we were able to keep connected with.

Joanne Lockwood:
Our shared objective was be together forever. All we had to try and do was try and figure out which bits were tricky, which bits weren’t tricky, which bits were doable, which bits weren’t, and how we. I had to adjust my pace and speed because, you know, if you rush too quickly, you leave people behind. If you leave people behind, they become disconnected or detached. And so it’s very much a case of trying to. Two steps forward, one back, two steps forward, one back. And, yeah, salami slicing, taking very small slices to make, to move forward and recognising sometimes that, yeah, we had to pause and take time and I think that helped people get used to it. And again, I focused on the be likeable, be lovable, be worthy of respect.

Joanne Lockwood:
And people will respect me, they will love me, they will want to spend time with me, but if I’m a dick, then they would treat me like a dick sort of thing. So that was kind of how I. How I kind of framed it, that it was. I had. I had. I had the power to show up in a way that people would like me and love me and that’s why I took personal responsibility for that. So I had to share my burden, my in on the. Maintaining the relationships and, yeah, it was, again, another challenging time in our lives.

Joanne Lockwood:
But, yeah, we got through it. We got through it. We’ve done the iva, we’re in the middle of that. We’re doing the Channel 4 documentary in the middle of that. We’re changing my career, going through depression, coming out, telling everybody else. Of course, the trouble with the Channel 4 documentary is we were avoiding telling the kids. We were avoiding telling my mum for a while, but then you think, hang on a minute, they’re gonna be broadcasting this in a few months time. We can’t.

Joanne Lockwood:
Can’t keep it a secret.

Melody Moore:
So why are these cameras hanging around all the time?

Joanne Lockwood:
So once I had the hair weave and all that sort of stuff, it became. We had to kind of. Again, that created tension where Marie had to sort of tell her parents and. And fair play to my father in law, my mother in law, rest in peace. My mother in law passed away last year. But my mum is one of my biggest advocates and she’s, you know, I think when we talk about setting this session up today, you have influential people in my life. My mum, she took a few months to get used to it. She had a few tears.

Joanne Lockwood:
She couldn’t. She was a bit confused. One of the challenges, actually, is, you know, you go to all these websites, download material to help the parent of a trans child cope with this. And I can guarantee you none of the documents are for 75 year old woman with a. With a. With a 50 year old child. It’s all. It’s all pictures of young people and stuff.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I printed all this stuff out gave all the PDF’s and bless her, she read it all she’s really got. Yeah, she must have read it cover to cover several times, because after a few months she became a massive advocate and she was fine still. Yeah, you could still tell behind the eyes she was a bit confused, but superficially she was absolutely fine. And I remember she was in hospital about 18 months ago, she had a bit of an anxiety stress attack. She was in hospital for a few days and I was going to visit her and I was thinking, when I go into the ward, what am I going to say if someone comes up to me and says, who are you? Was the question. You can’t go and visit your, this person unless you’re a relative relic or so. And so as I imagined, I was going to get gatekeeped and said, oh, who are you? How? Yeah, and I thought, what do I say? I’m a child. Am I this? Am I? I just couldn’t find the adjective to describe myself because I’d never, I never had that conversation.

Joanne Lockwood:
And I walked into the ward and my mum saw me at the other end. She says, oh, my daughter’s here to see me. And I almost burst into tears at that moment. I sat down on the side of my mum’s bed, held her hand, said, you called me. Your daughter said, well, yeah, you are. I see you as my daughter. I tell my friends, you’re my daughter. And I just, I was just.

Joanne Lockwood:
Tears rolling down my cheeks. In fact, if you could see me now, I’ve got tears developing my eyes and welling up now because it was just an incredible thing that we’d never spoken about it and for her to say that. And we go out shopping today, you know, these days, we went around Whiteley outlet village a little while ago and she wanted, she’s having this goes for this phase at 85 where she wants to go and buy nice dresses and stuff. So we went to sea salt. We were going into next and going into fat face and she’s trying all these dresses on, giving her the dresses and we’re trying stuff on. It’s like absolutely superb. We were just having a coffee, we bought matching hats. It was like absolutely, really fun.

Joanne Lockwood:
So, yeah, I’ve reconnected my mom in a way I’d never would have imagined. So, yeah, it’s really, really, everybody else has been amazing, but for your mum to do that, it is so powerful. And one of the things I said when I told her, I was talking to other people about this and I said, if you can’t tell your mum the truth, you’re lying to the world, sort of thing. I really had this belief that if I couldn’t tell my mum, I wasn’t being honest with everybody else, you know, so mum. I didn’t really want my mum to take the brunt of that, but I felt I had to be in order to be honest and open and truthful with the world. I had to tell my mum. If I kept it secret from my mom, I was still lying to somebody. And that’s part of the empowerment I found from this, is I went from a life where I probably had secrets, hiding stuff about my gender around other things, finances and everything else.

Joanne Lockwood:
I now live in a world, but I’m a completely transparent open book. If you try and blackmail me, I just go, what is there you could blackmail me about? I mean, there is nothing. And it’s like, for the first time, so maybe it talks about, this is one person in my head, one story, one voice, one everything. I don’t have anything in my head I’m ashamed of. I don’t have anything in my head that I have to hide my head I. I can’t talk about. And I feel much more empowered to speak my truth but also be accountable for that truth, you know, I don’t speak truth without the accountability, knowing how it impacts somebody else.

Melody Moore:
Tell me about what’s next for you, what’s going forward. As you said, you are at the end of your fifties birthday in January.

Joanne Lockwood:
January, yes. Yeah. 60 in January. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t have a game plan. I tried to have a game plan, then Covid came along and I realised that game plans are kind of overrated. You know, I always say to people who try to sell me business coaching, I said, I’ll be your worst coachie ever because I don’t have a business plan.

Joanne Lockwood:
I don’t have this. But I say that I know what I’m trying to achieve. I’ve got big long term goals. I do procrastinate, I do mess around, but I like shiny things and I like to zip if and lift there. I like stage speaking, I like going to big conferences, standing on stage. I like travelling a bit. Not too much, a bit. I love the human connection.

Joanne Lockwood:
I love standing in front of an audience, either as a workshop or 100 people in a room. I love it when they come up to me afterwards and give me a hug and say, oh, wow, Joe, that’s really inspiring. So that’s what feeds my beast, if you like that, the change in others, how I can move people with my words, my voice, inspire people or give them a different perspective. I quite the. My, my techie background won’t leave me. So Covid was because I had a hobby. Photography, videography were hobbies, obviously, computing. Mix that together, suddenly I can support myself online speaking, delivering.

Joanne Lockwood:
I’m big into AI automation. I’m spending a lot of time now creating content for myself, multi purposing stuff. So I’m actually enjoying some of the production side for my own content, but not doing it for anybody else, just doing it for me. But I also share what I do. I’m quite good at collaborating, showing other people what I do. Look at this shiny toy.

Melody Moore:
And I have, oh, you gave me so much great advice. When we initially spoke, I wrote loads of notes. I’ve gone and trained chap GPT to sound more like me now. That was because of you. So, yeah, you definitely made something was confusing me. Very accessible.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, but I’m kind of determined. Every so often I think I could earn a living on this. I could become an AI speaker, I could become an automation speaker, I could become a content creating speaker. And I thought, do I want to? No. I ended up doing this with electronics. A hobby turned into a career, that I ended up doing computing, a hobby turned into a career. I just want to. I want to talk to people about what ignites my passion.

Joanne Lockwood:
The icky guy. What do people want? What’s the world need? What are you good at? What can you make money out or whatever the other one is. I want to live in that, in that centre box of the ikigai. And what brings me joy. And I think if I’m not careful, I’ll end up turning a hobby into a career again and I’ll lose my joy because playing with AI and that sort of thing, I enjoy it. It’s a distraction. It’s something that I can really get into. But do I really want to do it for somebody else full time? Not really.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, not really.

Melody Moore:
Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

Joanne Lockwood:
Exactly. That’s another one of my sayings. Yeah, just because you can doesn’t mean as they should. I think that that is so true. Yeah. And it’s about finding joy and being sustainable.

Melody Moore:
What about.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, keep doing this.

Melody Moore:
I’m just conscious of time. I don’t want to keep you too long, but what advice would you give to your younger self?

Joanne Lockwood:
People often ask me this. I’m a great believer that you are who you are because of who you were. You know, it’s. I wouldn’t be sat here today with two fantastic children who I love to be a mum, who loves me, a wife and everybody around me. And see having a conversation with you. If it wasn’t for everything I’ve got wrong, everything I’ve got right, all of those twists and turns, every decision I’ve made, we’re here today having a conversation. So I wouldn’t want to change anything. But what I would say is without, without distorting the space time continuum is just when it’s dark and it’s hard to see a way through, it’ll figure itself out.

Joanne Lockwood:
When you think you can’t, you will, and you can. And please don’t ever smoke again. Very nice advice if you had. I don’t drink anymore. I gave up. My wife and I both gave up alcohol 950 days ago. I think it’s give or take. I drank far too much for far too long, and it was part of my own personal culture.

Joanne Lockwood:
And I looked back on it and thought, I don’t want on my gravestone to someone to write Joanne. Bit of a pishead, but great laugh. I don’t want to be remembered as being that person who was always drunk. Our children have got so many stories of me being drunk here, there, and everywhere. On parties, my friends, we’ve got so many stories. And it’s always about me being drunk and being silly. Yeah. And I think I look back, I don’t want that to be my legacy.

Joanne Lockwood:
So I think if I. If I. If I could erase that part of my life, being a drunk and smoking without changing the space time continuum and having everything else, that would probably. But I suppose mostly I just say you’re okay. Yeah. You’re gonna be 60 soon. Don’t worry about it. You had some good times, you had some bad times, but your life’s been good, I think.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah.

Melody Moore:
What about books? Any books you would recommend to the listeners?

Joanne Lockwood:
I’m not really a book reader. It’s. I’m a. I tend to use audible if I’m listening to things. I’ve got. I’ve got a whole shelf to my left over here, which you can’t see because we’re on audio only. But I’ve got a whole lot of books. I buy more so I can hold them up and say to people, this is a great book.

Joanne Lockwood:
I buy books that friends write and, yeah, I support them. But I am going to be writing a book and actually two books, and I’m trying my work. The working title is a 99 ways not to be a dick.

Melody Moore:
I should definitely call it that.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah. I might change it to 99 ways not to be a jerk or something that is going to be easier to search and decide to get blocked. And the other one I’m going to write is something called podcast poetry, volume one. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken, I’ve got 130 odd episodes of my podcast recorded, and I feed it through AI, and it generates a poem for each one. So I’m going to publish podcast poetry as generated by AI, volume one, because that gives me peniscope for volume two, three, four.

Melody Moore:
It’s gone forever. Yes.

Joanne Lockwood:
So those are my two books. Yeah. I want. I want to do something. I want to leave a mark. I’d be known for something.

Melody Moore:
Yes. And what about a title for your story? Has one come to mind, as we’ve been talking?

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah, we talked about this, I think, when we were planning this session a couple of weeks ago, and the tv documentary was called the making of me, which, I don’t know, it’s kind of opportune still. It’s still the case that the story of my life, and I think. I think we’re all making ourselves until the. Until the microwave goes ting and we’re done and they put us in the ground. So, yeah, I think the making of me is still relevant to our. My story because my wife was a co contributor to the making of me. So it is like the making of us. So, yeah, I’m happy with that as a working title until something better comes along.

Melody Moore:
And you told me that you have a theme tune for your life.

Joanne Lockwood:
Yeah. In my younger days, I was kind of a reluctant heavy metalist. So my friends, we were my close friends, they were big into some of the real heavy stuff. We used to end up going to concerts and saw the stranglers a few times, saw deep purple with a clash, strangler, status quo, ac DC, those sort of bands in the seventies and eighties. But I was always reluctant. I was always probably more contemporary. I got into the new romantic stuff, but I didn’t have the strength of character to stand up and say, this is. This is what I enjoy.

Joanne Lockwood:
And I was probably too overly influenced by the rockers when I. When I gender transitioned about ten years ago. I kind of adopted Taylor Swift, 22, as my kind of anthem at the time, because it really, even now when I. If it comes on, I sing along to it. And that’s how I felt that. That second puberty, that second opportunity to live that life carefree again. But then I realised that I was married, two children, responsibilities, and I couldn’t be 22 again. And I realised that I didn’t want to be 22 again.

Joanne Lockwood:
I’d been through that phase and I had to. I had to grow up. And I then. I then remodelled myself on the Sainsbury shopper. Yeah, the average shopper. Insanes. We’re not the one that wears tracky bottoms and crocs, but this kind of ordinary and plain and just a middle aged woman in her fifties. It’s kind of where I wanted to go back to find my own comfort, because I was trying to chase this idea idealised version of femininity, stereotype of femininity, and realised that everybody I knew was running the other way.

Joanne Lockwood:
Every woman I knew was running away from this. I said, hang on a minute, why am I chasing this? So I realised I wanted to find my own version. My own. My own me. Which is why my current anthem, if you like, is Paloma faiths. Make your own kind of music. And again, that’s that. That really sings to me, that, you know, I’m here making my own kind of music.

Joanne Lockwood:
And love me or hate me, it’s my tune and I’m going to sing it. And the lyrics to that really, really deep down sum up where I am today, that joy from just making my own kind of music.

Melody Moore:
Perfect. Jo, thank you so much for this has been so fascinating. I’ve written even more notes than last time that we spoke. But thank you so much for your time today. I’ve really, really enjoyed talking to you and thank you.

Joanne Lockwood:
I haven’t told the story in that way that deep for many, many years. I know it’s been really, really interesting to analyse myself and share that with you. So thank you so much.

Melody Moore:
Brilliant. Thank you. This podcast is brought to you by liberare consulting, with editing provided by Hawkins Social. If you enjoyed today’s episode, why not click on the subscribe button? So you are the first to hear about new episodes. We look forward to welcoming you back soon.