026 John Vincent MBE: Right Life, Right Now
Chief exec/co-founder of Leon, author of Winning not Fighting My guest in this final episode is like no-one in business I’ve ever come across before. As co-founder of the sustainable and naturally fast-food chain Leon, John Vincent MBE has been at the forefront of a movement to change the way we think about our food and where it comes from. In addition, he’s been part of a campaign to get schoolchildren eating better food, and more recently helped to feed a million front line NHS workers during the pandemic. But it's his book Winning not fighting: why you need to rethink success and how you achieve it with the ancient art of Wing Tsun that really prompted me to speak to him. In it, he draws on the ancient Chinese martial art of Wing Tsun to challenge some of the accepted norms that are preventing us from being truly happy, either at home or at work. “We tend to define success as something which we've achieved in the past, or something that we are striving for desiring for the future. So, ironically, the idea we have of success takes us way out of the only place that we can ever really live in, which is the present moment.” John’s own story is one that involves freeing himself from stress, chronic pain and the sustained fight or flight mode that our modern lives have created, by using the principles of Wing Tsun - a practice that speaks to the idea of living in an instinctive way, focusing on the unity that we share with each other and nature. I believe that what he has put together in Winning not Fighting is a practical handbook for uniting human wisdom, business and physical movement in a way that could truly bring about change. "I think that what we've done is we've, we've got caught ourselves up in a bit of a vicious cycle around feeding the side of us which is around ego and fear, as opposed to feeding the parts of us, which is about connection, love, and wholeness." It's a wide-ranging conversation: we talk about these practical steps, but also gut health, personality tests, and The Littlest Hobo - and I do hope you enjoy it.