Yesterday was an eventful day to say the least – it all started with a pre-organised session at Radio 1 where I was asked to be on a panel helping listeners with their career-related problems (not a music session, Live Lounge is next week…!). I didn’t really know what to expect although I knew the panel was made up of myself, Shaf Rasul (entrepreneur & online dragon from Dragons’ Den) and Kavita Oberoi (entrepreneur, featured in Secret Millionaire).

So I arrived at Radio 1 towers, cup of tea in-hand and I’m waiting in reception when I hear two voices I recognise; Chris Moyles & Aled Jones (who by the way didn’t go to university!). I didn’t know what to do; should I speak to them? Should I corner them for quotes for the website? Should I ask them about their views on what we could be doing to reduce NEET rates? Well anyway by the time I thought of what I would do (smile & say hello, by the way) it was too late and they were gone…

Eventually I was escorted up by Newsbeats’s Jim Reed before being plonked down in a seat in a Dragons’-Den-style setup. The concept was that one-by-one 6 listeners would walk into the room in front of us, introduce themselves and their problems before we gave them some advice on what they could be doing (we had copies of their CVs etc.).

What became apparent was that each of the six people we were presented with had huge potential & talent but they just couldn’t express themselves properly through their CV and perhaps in their presentation. Each CV opened (no joke) with the words “I am a hard-working, enthusiastic individual…”. I don’t know what was so popular about those words precisely but they were always used, but the thing that first struck me was that the employer receiving that CV would be screaming out “WHY?!” – that’s if they hadn’t put it aside already. This inspired me to try and release their potential so much so I think I’m going to have to write another post about it!

Back to the story anyway, and once the panel had finished we all agreed to go out for a coffee to chew the fat together. So we all left the Radio 1 building seeing the light of day again (and also Chris Tarrant’s big face on the side of the LIVING TV building opposite) and headed over to the nearest Pret. I turned on my phone again and was presented with a dozen messages from a random 0207 number. I listened to the message (it must’ve been about 3.20pm) and it was from someone at the good old Beeb saying they wanted me ASAP over at Millbank to join a global panel on BBC World News live!

I leapt into the first cab I could flag down, despite having no cash on me & a tube ticket, and headed over to Millbank to be on live at 4.30. It would’ve been so much easier jumping on the tube…the journey took 40 minutes!

£16 (which I didn’t have) lighter and I arrived at Millbank, headed up to the BBC offices and was ushered into a small room with a big camera and about 10 TVs. And then I went global!

The topic we were debating was on whether we are overeducating people on a global scale; they told me the topic of the debate before I went in, but what they didn’t tell me was that from that little room in the centre of London I was addressing millions of people around the world! Queen’s speach eat your heart out!

Here’s the video…