Pictures: Nicola Edmonds.
There were many years during her stellar radio career when broadcasting legend Polly Gillespie simply couldn’t have imagined doing anything else. Radio was her home. It was where she felt most at ease, and where her ability to entertain and connect with listeners cemented her as one of the industry’s finest talents.
Yet after a rollercoaster few years, Polly has stepped away from the mic, relaunching herself into a new career and finding true fulfilment in the process.
“I’m a happy little soldier,” she tells us at our photoshoot in her hometown of Wellington. There, she introduces us to her beloved grandkids, Roseanna, seven, and Malone, two.
It’s been a big few years for the inimitable star. She proudly shares that she’s traded in the airwaves to become a qualified counsellor and therapist. While the prospect of reinvention was daunting at first, Polly feels she’s landed right where she’s meant to be.
“What I’m doing now feels very meaningful,” she reflects. “I’ve always been interested in therapy, I’m certainly no stranger to trauma and I just love people. I love hearing their stories and being of some help. And I’m genuinely at peace that my radio days are possibly over. I never say never, but I have no regrets.”
Polly’s change in direction came after the shock 2023 closure of Today FM, the talk radio station where she hosted a popular evening show. She was upset to lose her job overnight, but not hugely surprised given it was her third redundancy in about as many years.
If anyone understood the tenuous nature of the media industry, it was Polly, who’d earlier been made redundant from More FM and lost a regular writing gig thanks to the COVID shutdown.
“I’d got pretty good at losing my job,” she says with a wry laugh.
Polly – whose career began in the ’80s alongside her then-husband Grant Kereama – adored working in radio, but she decided “enough was enough”. Instead of joining the long queue of journalists and broadcasters on the job market, she took the opportunity to reassess where she wanted to head in life.
She turned her mind to what really interested her and the answer was simple – people. So, Polly enrolled in an online university, where she studied papers in psychology, counselling and therapy. Soon, she found herself hooked.
“It’s such a fascinating subject,” she enthuses.
And now, with an exciting new role at Trauma Recovery Aotearoa – where she travels the country to help workplaces understand trauma and how it affects people’s everyday lives – she feels like she’s making a real difference.
At the same time, she’s setting up her own private therapy business and is looking forward to taking on clients. But Polly brushes off any suggestion that switching careers and retraining at this stage of life is a brave move.
She insists, “Sometimes you don’t have any choice but to stand to attention, switch your brain on and go, ‘Right, what am I going to do?’
“It’s a good reminder we can do hard things and make big decisions. It’s never too late for a fresh start.”
And there’s no doubt Polly will have plenty of experience to call on when it comes to helping others. She’s open about her own mental health struggles, telling us she’s battled anxiety since her teens and that therapy has been an enormous help.
Along with some huge highs, Polly has also suffered some crushing lows in her adult life, including her heartbreaking 2015 split from Grant and periods of extreme workplace stress. The most traumatic experiences came with a late-term miscarriage when she was in her thirties. Then, the devastating death of her sister Jeanette from flu complications followed in 2000.
Polly says she was cut from “that stoic UK cloth”, where asking for help was seen as a failure. “It was a matter of, ‘Chin up and box on!’”
Instead, she found herself turning to alcohol to help numb the pain at times – “never a helpful approach”!
She gave up booze five years ago and began seeing a new therapist, who helped her to understand her feelings and embrace them. She’s channelling this experience into her own work now.
“I remember telling him, ‘I don’t get angry.’ He asked, ‘Why don’t you get angry?’ He said we shouldn’t be afraid of feelings and that everyone has the right to be angry. It’s about how we use that anger.
“We really got into my hang-ups, like being an unfortunate-looking teenager, and looked into how that continues to affect me. I’d never talked about it before and it made a huge difference. There’s still a stigma around going to therapy and talking about mental health, but there shouldn’t be.”
Family is everything to Polly, whose three children, Tom, 31, Katherine, 29, and MacGregor, 26, all live nearby. She feels lucky to be so involved in their lives and says being a grandma to Katherine’s two kids, who call her “Minnie”, is her greatest role yet.
“They are the lights of my life,” she says. “I’m a better Minnie than I was a mother because I have so much fun with them. I go down the slide with them at the playground, we craft together and we go to the dairy for treats. It’s a joy.”
While she’s currently single, Polly says she’s far from lonely and admits she’s having a great time on the dating scene. She’s not a fan of dating apps, instead preferring to meet people as she goes about her everyday life.
“Dating is a lot of fun – and I’m not talking about sex!” she laughs. “I’m talking about going for dinners, concerts and fun things like that. I’m meeting lots of lovely, interesting people.”
She admits she’s been guilty in the past of falling in love too fast. This time, though, she’s keeping her options open.
“I’ve learned that putting your eggs in one basket doesn’t always work out. Perhaps I’m getting sensible!”
Certainly, she’s feeling fulfilled and happy. Polly grins, “I’m safe, I have a great family and friends, and I’m about to launch into something I really believe in. There’s a lot to be thankful for.”
‘I’ve made some poor choices’
In her own words, Polly shares some precious life advice
In the immortal words of the great Frank Sinatra, “Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.”
OK, well, maybe I have a few more regrets than Ol’ Blue Eyes. But there’s something I don’t regret and that’s doing a complete pirouette in my career. Admittedly, I really had little choice. Or rather little choice that I felt inspired by.
So a couple of years back, I chose to study in a field I’d never studied before – psychology, counselling and therapy. Part of me felt convinced that my brain would resist. I worried I no longer had the neuroplasticity to study, retain and regurgitate information, and sit exams.
Oh, how wrong I was! I found fairly quickly I was a better and far more diligent student than I was when I was 20. I studied harder and got far better grades. How could this be?
I was on Facetime with a dear friend in Alaska this morning. He was actually my college boyfriend. Oh, boy, I screwed that up! We’re still close friends, though. God bless his forgiving heart!
Anyway, Jim studied as a musician and actor in New York. Somehow through fate and his fluent Japanese, he became a big-time entrepreneur. Now, he’s a business coach to high-flying superstars.
We were chatting about how much our lives had changed and not only did he invite me to Alaska to hang out with wild grizzly bears, but he also told me his mentoring catchphrase: “Just get your arse in the inner tube and float down the river!”
He went on to explain that so many of us are trying desperately to swim against the current that we lose our joy. We get caught up in fighting the many ways the world has changed that we waste our lives. He added, “While you’re sailing down the river in the inner tube, if you try to grab things out of your reach, then you’re simply not meant to have those things right now.”
How did he get so smart while I floundered my way around making some truly disastrous choices? The truth is, there are things out of my reach. Would I love to still be in radio? Yes. Are their opportunities for me right now? No. Radio is out of my reach.
Is that my fault? Quite possibly. I burnt bridges and I made some poor career choices, but radio’s changed so much. There are no longer a tonne of opportunities and maybe I’m just too weird for it now.
So instead of drowning while trying to swim up river and reaching for things out of my grasp, maybe doing something completely different is exactly where I need to be.
It took me a while to stop struggling, to stop feeling lost and a little desperate, but then it all made sense. I could either wait for a gig in radio that might never come or take a risk and retrain in a field I had a passion for. I must add that I also have a passion for cheese and fine fragrances, but neither seemed as important as helping people struggling with trauma.
Years ago, I read about a guy who decided to become a doctor at 55. People thought he was crazy. Turns out he became the best doc in New York. Why? Life experience. He had gathered so much understanding of people that his bedside manner was off the Richter.
If you want to do something new, just feel the fear and do it anyway. Get your arse in the inner tube and float down the river. I’m still a little unsure about the grizzlies, but why not? I’ll just make sure I’m with someone older and less fit than me, just in case the bears decide to chase us!
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