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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Kia ora and welcome to Grey Areas. Thank you for all your superb feedback this season. It's so appreciated. And if you're willing and able to show your appreciation with a donation, then please go to our website, greyareas.nz. We are made by a not-for-profit and your support means the world. This episode of Grey Areas is brought to you by Genora. Beautiful skincare and delicious supplements.
From their famous hot chocolate flavoured sleep powder to marine collagen for hair, skin and nails to perimenopause support. Designed by women who needed it first. Made right here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. You get 15% off your first order with the code GREYAREAS at genora.co.nz Offer ends June 30, so get in quick. Kindness is not niceness.
Kindness has got a steely spine to it because sometimes being kind can be having a courageous conversation with someone about the way they might be behaving. You stop worrying about what other people think about you and then you realise they weren't thinking about you anyway. Marriage ain't easy at times.
No, it's not.
And at times it's, you know, you're wondering, are we really up for this? Yeah. Nau mai haere mai to grey areas with me, Petra Baggist. This is the last episode of season nine and what a cracker of a season it's been. If you've missed any, make sure you check them out before their best before date, which is never hopefully. Today, I'm joined by Sir Ashley Bloomfield.
Now, back when he was a doctor, he had a great love of public health and melded that to public service, finding ways to help all of us as a population be more healthy. His specialty, non-communicable diseases, you know, the ones you can't catch like diabetes, heart disease. Well, that was until a global pandemic a few years back.
Of course, we know him as the Director General of Health during the COVID season and those 1pm live television stand ups in which he became an unlikely heartthrob. Well, now he's a knight of the realm and back into public health and spending time outdoors. Today we look back at his childhood as well as how we look back as a nation and how to stay well and married in midlife. Here's Ashley.
So Ashley Bloomfield, it's lovely to have you on Grey Areas. Thanks for joining me today.
Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.
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Chapter 2: What lessons did Sir Ashley Bloomfield learn from leading during the COVID-19 pandemic?
How do you feel? Yeah, well, it's an interesting situation because one of the things that got me through that period was my friends, obviously family, but also friends who just knew me pre-COVID and I was just Ash, their mountain biking mate or person they ran with on a Saturday morning. And that was really important and still is.
And then there's this new aspect of my life that's off the back of the COVID period, which is every day.
recognize me and come up to talk and I guess it's a bit like the it's not the celebrity thing but it's just people think of you as someone familiar to them because over 300 stand-ups you know I was it's such a challenging and memorable period in our history I was part of the sort of the media the compulsory media viewing every day And it was so condensed.
I mean, it was 300 stand-ups sort of in a row vibes. Like there might have been a break or two. I think you did take a week off somewhere there. But it was the sense of you're in the right place at the right time doing that role. Yeah, it didn't necessarily feel like that, especially initially. It felt like at the wrong place at the wrong time.
And then I realised it was the right place, maybe at the wrong time, but that was me and I was in the role and I had fabulous people I was working with and I just needed to I just kept this cricketing analogy in my mind, which was go out, walk out to the crease and just play your best shot to whatever comes down every day.
And some days it was a pretty tough wicket, but other days, well, actually it was a tough wicket every day, but we just had to go with it. Some days you got a couple of sixes in, though. You knew you were batting a six, perhaps, like if there was good news, like nobody dying or, you know, like there were days, I guess, when... Yeah, and with the difficulty with something positive.
Yeah, I think that's something I reflect on, and especially now because there's a bit of looking back, and we've had the two inquiries sort of reviewing our response. And often we're our own harshest critics, so we look back and say, oh, I could have done this differently. We tend to have this running commentary with ourselves. And
in this case I look back and I think actually I know what it was like at the time and in each moment we were doing the best we could and if you look at the overall you've got to look at the big picture and say we set out to kind of protect people and save people's lives and save our health professionals in our system and stop the virus getting to the Pacific and we more or less achieved that and we did well and the thing I'm most proud of and the thing I think of every day is
how it was a team effort everybody did their bit and that's the bit that gives me hope for Aotearoa is that when the chips were really down this is a one in 100 year pandemic this was the biggest global disruption since the second world war this country sort of acted collectively in each other's interests and got as good a result as you can get when that sort of situation arises.
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Chapter 3: How did Ashley's childhood shape his leadership style?
And the lockdowns did become less enjoyable. That first lockdown, we were afraid. It was also summer. It was also novel. If your unit was healthy, the pressure potentially just held or enhanced the health. If you were in trouble as a unit, it was a different kind of a pressure. But as the lockdowns went on, people's experience of them was more negative, I guess, or more strained.
And yet, you know, I mean, I hear Aucklanders just be so, so bemoaned the fact that we were locked down more than anyone else. And yet I've just talked to somebody who their children didn't go to school for two years or their entire family was locked down for a year. And I'm like, wow, we don't think in the context of somebody else's life on another side of the world.
Yeah.
Yeah, a couple of observations there and just picking up on your latter point. And again, I've just talked about this with the students at the University of Auckland. If you look at what Oxford University developed, a stringency index. And actually, if you look at the duration and intensity of the lockdowns,
overall, we were lower in stringency than many other countries, including Sweden, which was one that was highlighted as one that didn't resort to government mandates or lockdowns. So that doesn't mean they didn't put, there weren't restrictions on their citizens. And we had the best, I think, of both worlds, where we actually ended up with relatively shorter lockdowns.
As you've pointed out, there were many parts of the US where
children did not go to school for two years and people didn't go into their offices for a year or 18 months or longer but the second point I made of course we were all over it and especially once the vaccines were available and people went out and got vaccinated and they started to feel frustrated with the delays in achieving that high rate we did end up achieving and
which was important for everybody, but it was particularly important for our most vulnerable groups and our Māori and Pasifika population. So there was grumpiness around that. And on top of that, of course, was the sense of the Aucklanders that they were taking one for the rest of the country. So we lost that sense of solidarity, which I'm not surprised about.
And also, maybe it's really hard for us to do stuff on behalf of vulnerable people. Maybe when we don't value people, elderly people, ethnic minorities are traditionally not valued as much as the majority, then it's hard to take one for them.
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Chapter 4: What values does Ashley emphasize in his leadership philosophy?
But I decided in my second to last year at medical school that I would follow in his footsteps. Why? I did my territorial officer training. I'm still not sure, but by goodness me, I really enjoyed it. Take a step. You're at medical school. Yeah. Look, you know, I know about you. You went to Scots College. You went there for intermediate and you liked it, you and your brother.
And so you stayed on. And that's a good environment to learn. And you ended up as head boy and ducks of the school. And you went to med school. That makes some sense. Like, what do you want to be, a doctor or a lawyer? Was it discussed? I decided pretty early on that medicine was the route I was going to go down. My brother went down the law route. How's he turned out? Well, exceptional.
He's an exceptional human being, of course. Brilliant. Glad to hear it. So here you are, and you're in medical school, and you pause the whole thing, do you? I did. I took a year off after third year because I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue. And I felt I'd been, you know, I was 17 when I started medical school.
I'd been, you know, it had been a pretty tough academic road through medicine, through school and medicine. So I took a year off and that was the best thing I did. And I
did all sorts of different things hitchhiking around Europe worked on a dairy farm in the UK I helped sail a yacht back from Australia to New Zealand just these are not sequenced but I also learned it was a time of growing up you know I was 21 and it was a time when I sort of looked at my life and what I wanted to do came back with renewed enthusiasm for and energy to finish medicine and
But then I also decided in my fifth year, yeah, I would, actually during my fourth year, that I would do the officer training, partly because I saw it as a challenge and another thing to do, and I guess partly influenced by my father as well. My brother thought I was completely mad. He said, I've no idea why you want to do that. But it was an incredibly enjoyable experience.
very very challenging training and one of the things I'd reflect on is it really was the first time in my life I really got pushed mentally and physically to my limits and realised that they were a lot bigger than I might have imagined they were and that was really helpful through COVID because I had been stress tested really quite significantly during that training.
There's something about the physical with the psychological testing, isn't there? There's something about that combo that's pretty profound. It is, yes. It really is. And I found I was pretty good on the physical side. I've always been quite fit. And actually, I had deliberately got fit because I knew I was coming in off what was called civvy street, so I hadn't had any training.
So I had a lot of catching up to do. And so...
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Chapter 5: How does Ashley define public health and its importance?
Yeah, that's something that really, really drives me. Every person, every time, every interaction is important. How do you maintain that? Every person, every time, every interaction. Is it second nature or are you, I mean, it must be subconscious, right? It's subconscious, but I don't always get it right and none of us does.
And particularly when people are confrontational or it's a tricky situation. And of course, this is the challenge of leadership. And I talk about leadership as a lifelong journey in self-awareness.
and the best leaders we know are the ones who have that high emotional intelligence and that's not an innate thing it's a practice thing and reflecting back on okay how did I respond in the moment did I respond emotionally and if I did did I respond appropriately where I was thinking of what am I hearing here what's this person experiencing
Chapter 6: What public health achievements is Ashley most proud of?
It's a work in progress of course as it should be for all of us but I do find that generally I love people, I'm interested in people and just sometimes the smallest interactions can be really important in someone's day. As you said before, you never know what's happening in someone's life. And a smile, a kind word, an inquiry, just generally being a decent person can make a big difference.
And I just want to share one thing, and this is slightly back to COVID, but I was walking along the terrace in Wellington last year and A chap hopped out of a car that he had parked and caught up to me and he fell in beside me and walked alongside me and he said, I know who you are. And of course, you're never quite sure where that sort of conversation is going to go.
But he said, I just want you to know that when the COVID pandemic came along, I was in a really dark place and I was thinking of taking my own life. And he said, the reason I am here is the way that you and Jacinda led through the pandemic with kindness and care for people, that gave me hope. And I thought, well, it was all worth it just to hear. And I hold on to that.
And I guess this goes back to the people who are still disappointed and despondent or bitter even about what we did. And I reflect on that and I think, well, we were who we were. We led authentically. We led, and some people might criticize us, might say, well, this wasn't very kind to do that or kind to do this.
But actually that feedback is probably the single piece of feedback that I really hold with me because how we behave towards people with a sense of decency and respect and compassion is, and reflect on our common humanity always, then I think that's a very, very powerful thing. It is a very powerful thing. And it feels to me available to us. I think it's easier for some people.
I'm like you, I love people. I think they're magnificent, complex, crazy, weird, wonderful. We come in all different shapes and sizes, textures, volumes. That orientation, I think, makes it easier for me to open out or to reach out. And yet a smile and or a kind word is almost free. You don't run out of them in a day. You don't have a quota and then it's gone.
You might need to take yourself away and restore. That's fine. There's no problem. You don't have to be Pollyanna. I mean, I'm giving it a nudge, but you don't have to be. No, you're right. And I've just been, I'm trying to improve my French and I'm listening to a French podcast and they're on interesting topics.
And the one I've just been listening to is about the things that lead to true happiness. And it's a very famous Frenchman who is a Buddhist monk as well. He's also a scientist and can't remember his name, but he's written a number of books about And he talks about the eight things that actually do make us genuinely happy.
But one of the key points that the podcaster talks about is actually that happiness and joy are contagious. So deliberate acts of spreading a little bit of joy and of kindness, and kindness itself is, of course, contagious.
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Chapter 7: How does Ashley view the role of kindness in leadership?
Humility is not what people first associate with leadership. And if you look around the world at the moment, it's not... present in all of our leaders. Is there something about humility that you discovered that surprised you? Yes. Humility is important because humility is, first of all, humility should not be mistaken for weakness. Likewise, kindness. Kindness is not niceness.
Kindness has got a steely spine to it because sometimes being kind can be having a
courageous conversation with someone about the way they might be behaving and their impact they're having on others because kindness is about helping people be better and sometimes that requires pointing out to them things that they may not be aware of or they might be aware of but they're ignoring the impact on others so kindness has got a steel to it and humility does as well humility is about
recognizing your own limitations and being open to being better yourself so listening to people caring about people, asking for advice in the case of when you're in the middle of a COVID response, being prepared to change your mind and explain why, fronting up when things don't go right, knowing what you don't know or knowing that there are things you don't know.
And of course, the opposite is, as I say, the other HU word, hubris. And you see hubristic leadership and you see humble leadership. And actually, I worked out when it's a crisis, you don't want the hubristic leader. They can appear attractive on the face of it because they have simple answers to complex problems and they can appear confident.
But actually you want leaders who lead with humility, who will listen and take advice and and will front up day in day out and be prepared especially when things aren't going so well to keep fronting up and so yeah humility was one that really was brought home to me through the pandemic. Yeah, I hear you.
And too, humility can be kind of misdiagnosed as, oh, no, no, no, I'm not very good at this. Like that's false humility, right? That's like claiming that you're not good at things that you might be good at. That's not humility.
Humility, I'm understanding from what you say, is much more about understanding what you know and what you don't know and being willing to acknowledge both of those and not get stuck in what you know is all you need to know. Yes, and I think it also goes back to that not thinking that you're any better nor worse than anybody else.
And that's a really important one because it's about that treating others as equal. We have much more in common than we have that's different, and to me that's a very fine aspect of humility. So accepting that others' realities might be different, but for the most part they're just doing their best. Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What challenges does Ashley face in balancing work and family life?
It's so difficult that we're invited to kind of assess ourselves in relationship to other people all the time. I'm younger, I'm older, I'm taller, I'm skinnier, I'm fatter, I'm better, I'm worse, I'm richer, I'm poorer, I'm no more, I know less, I've got more rhythm, I've got less. You know, we're sliding up and down scales faster than a slidey thing. Well, that's fast, yes.
Yeah, I mean, we do compare ourselves. And I guess that's, I found that's less of an issue the older I get. And it's that old saying, the older you get, you stop worrying about what other people think about you and then you realise they weren't thinking about you anyway. So, you know, just be yourself. And that's quite a release and a relief.
Music
Isn't it such a relief? I love that about getting older. Coming up, we talk about imposter syndrome and the value of self-doubt. You can find me on Instagram. I'm at Petra Baggist. And if you haven't already discovered it, our last two seasons, every single episode is available on video. So check us out on YouTube or Spotify if you're more of a watchy type person.
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Do you think that humble political leadership can work in the system we've got? I think it's essential. This is the thing that worries me is that probably we're seeing a lot of political hubris and the impact that's having on both trust in government and in society
society generally and also I don't think it's necessary leading to great outcomes for countries so I'm a big fan of leading with humility or humble leadership and that's not weak leadership and it's not you know it's not second-rate leadership I think it's actually essential that you know leaders need to know what they don't know and be prepared to take advice and listen
When you meet a leader who is more hubris than humble, how do you deal with that? How do I deal with that? Well, what I advise people is if you find you're working for a leader, and sometimes with hubris comes the sort of self – it can be anchored in a sort of a – as my mother would have said, a high opinion of oneself.
So often there's a high degree of self-belief, perhaps a little touch of narcissism as well. I talk about the benefits of self-doubt. And in my humble experience, self-doubt and even that imposter syndrome is extremely common. And I say to people, if you find a leader that doesn't have self-doubt,
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