Our podcast guest today is herself a podcaster – Adriane Berg.

Adriane has a fascinating background and has spent much of her life in front of a camera, microphone or in a courtroom as a lawyer; radio presenter, and a tv presenter. She was a pioneer of elder law, worked on US syndicated radio and hosted one of the first money programmes on CNN.

Less than a year ago she and her husband of 52 years set up The Ageless Traveler, which is born out of Adriane’s passion for travel and wanting to make lifelong travel easier for us all. She strongly believes that travel, tourism brings us to life no matter what our age, and wants to enable people to continue to travel throughout their life.

She shares how she was involved in one of the first TV shows to talk about financial planning, helping people to learn how to save for their retirement. Although she doesn’t like the word ‘retirement’ as you’ll hear.

Adriane explains various things people can overcome – one being how other people impose their fears on you.

We talk about how technology can be used to enhance the Ageless Travelers’ experiences. We also discuss how the travel industry needs to wake up to the fact that there will be 1.6 billion trips taken by people over 60 in the next 25 years – yet the focus of marketing is generally aimed towards younger people.

You can contact Adriane on her website: https://agelesstraveler.com/
Her free eBooks:

https://CaregiversTravelGuide.com

https://luxurytravelforless.info

You can contact us at the following:

Dr Carol Sargent: https://sargentgroup.consulting/

Dr Tom Adler: https://getbide.com/

Our guest today is Louise Hunt Skelley PLY, a Paralympic wheelchair tennis athlete, who now has developed an exciting portfolio career. She is involved in a range of many different things, including commentary, tournament directing, consultancy, working with young people, and public speaking – all with a focus on disability, inclusion and sport.

Recently she has launched a new company, Enable Rise with another friend, Samantha Bullock, also a wheelchair tennis player. Louise talks about how their passion around inclusion in various areas made them realise they could join forces and work towards making everywhere inclusive.

Having been involved in sport from a young age, Louise talks about how taking part in tennis helped her socialise and made her feel both powerful and capable. Later it gave her opportunities to travel the world and meet other amazing people.

She talks about how her involvement in sport has opened many, many doors in her life in terms of her own confidence, but also in terms of raising her profile.

Louise also talks about her passion for tennis, explaining why she loves this sport specifically.

We talk about the gender gap in sport when Louise’s passion is that sport is for everyone. She thinks that boys and girls should have access to the range of all sports at school, from a young age; for example, not only girls play netball and only boys play football.

Whilst talking about the challenges involved in making sports more inclusive, we discuss how in fact people playing disabled sport need to have much broader skill sets to be able to play at an elite level. And then go on to talk about how these skills can be transferred to the workplace.

Louise explains very clearly what inclusion means to her; everyone should have the same experience, but for wheelchair users and people with disabilities, some adjustments need to be made. Therefore, it’s about managing a situation, so you get to the same outcome and the same experience.

You can contact us at the following:

Dr Carol Sargent: https://sargentgroup.consulting/
Dr Tom Adler: https://getbide.com/

You can contact Louise at:

Mobile: 07733021123
Email: louiseannhunt55@gmail.com
Website: www.louisehunt.co.uk
Linked in: Louise Hunt Skelley PLY

Today’s guest, Gavin Neate, joined Guide Dogs for the blind, where he served as a mobility instructor for 18 years. Previously, he had spent 10 years as a military policeman.

During his time working as a mobility instructor, where he worked on people’s independent mobility, he became very involved in the entire process of helping clients find ways to interact with society. He recognised the many day to day challenges facing people and he wanted to help find solutions to those issues.

We discuss how much of the problem solving should be left to the problem holders. Gavin talks about how history is full of people who have invented solutions that didn’t necessarily answer problems, therefore, when it comes to inventing solutions to help people with their mobility problems, it is crucial that they are involved.

His has great advice to young innovators who want to help people: dedication, commitment, belief and the ability to keep going even if you have to give everything up because you truly believe in what you’re doing.

Gavin’s innovation is the WelcoMe app. The font of the last two letters of the word are changed so that when reading it, people see it as, welcome me. The reason behind this is that when it comes to customer service, and interacting with other humans, disabled people often feel they aren’t welcome.

He talks about how as a mobility instructor he would run ahead of whichever venue his client was visiting and talk to the people in that venue – telling them how to welcome that client. He would give them 5 bits of information that meant when the client walked through the door, they felt welcomed into the venue, and that the venue understood their needs

The WelcoMe app means people can communicate with staff members before walking through the door of a venue.

We talked about our focus for this week being Disabled Access Day and asked Gavin why he thought we needed the day? Part of his answer was it should be every day, not just one day and he sees the day as one where you should be looking at what you’ve done in the past year and what you are planning to do this coming year.

You can contact us at the following:

Dr Carol Sargent: https://sargentgroup.consulting/

Dr Tom Adler: https://getbide.com/

You can contact Gavin at Website https://www.wel-co.me/

Links https://linktr.ee/welcome.cs

Gavin Neate https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-neate?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app