Today, I’m engaged and living in Scotland, running two businesses, and halfway through a two-year, master’s-equivalent training in Jungian Depth Coaching for Men. I train in Judo. I lead transformational coaching experiences and in-person men’s work that’s rooted in emotional depth and real change.
But 15 years ago, things looked very different.
“It looked like I had everything. Inside, I was lost."
If you’re a capable man who feels like something’s still missing — I’ve been there.
Career. Home. Holidays.
But inside? I was anxious, emotionally confused, and constantly second-guessing myself.
Like so many men, as a boy I didn’t have a man who could teach me how to be one.
Not emotionally. Not relationally.
My father had his own challenges.
So when life got messy or when I got hijacked by feelings I didn’t understand…
Emotionally, I was a teenager in a man's body.
So I built a mask.
I spent 25 years in the corporate world.
Career? Solid.
Three different companies. Great people. Lots of learning.
Nice flat in a stunning village. Long holidays. Romantic gestures for the women I dated.
I cooked dinner, kept the home spotless, booked weekends away.
I ticked all the boxes of what I thought I needed to do to impress them.
In truth, I didn’t know how to be a man. I was people-pleasing without understanding what that was.
But I knew fulfilment wasn’t possible in corporate, so I just buried the 'is this all there is?' and kept running on the hamster wheel because I had no other options available. What else could I do?
Across my life there were key moments that cracked me:
A serious car crash
An armed robbery
A mugging at knife point
Sexual abuse, masked as play, when I was a child in the Scouts
I never told anyone about the last part. I didn’t know how.
Instead, I built a life around pretending that I had it all sorted.
But the truth is I was barely holding it together.
While I on the surface I pretended things were ok I was overwhelmed and often second-guessing myself.
Relationships were the hardest part.
I kept thinking I was doing everything right. Romantic gestures, holidays, being the “good man.”
But I kept ending up in chaotic cycles of fights, shouting, withdrawal followed by bouts of anxiety and feeling broken.
I’d be told I was either needy or emotionally unavailable. I figured out that maybe relationships weren't for me.
I genuinely didn’t understand what was going wrong.
And I tried everything to figure it out:
CBT and counselling
Every book under the sun
Hours of podcasts and self-help workshops and courses
Mindset work that felt good at the time but didn’t create lasting behavioural and emotional changes
Underneath, I still felt like a boy trying to act like a man - my self-trust was low.
I changed careers. I became self-employed, teaching yoga and meditation, and it was incredibly fulfilling for years … until it wasn’t.
What really changed things for me
Yoga was where I started to understand my emotional world. I learned about stress relief, about breathing, and I stopped having nightmares for the first time in my life.
Finally I started to sleep well. This was the beginning of me falling in love with what life could look like.
But I was still people-pleasing. I struggled with external validation; seeking it, basing my sense of worth on how much money I made, how many people signed up for workshops and retreats.
And I still struggled with boundaries and communication, especially in sticky moments, where I felt disappointed or the stakes and emotions were heightened.
What really transformed me was when I stopped trying to understand it, and started feeling it. I stopped trying to buy more books and gain more knowledge.
In 2018 I'd already begun a 12 month coaching qualification after being coached by a genius woman. What I learned from her changed so much about my relationships and I use a lot of this work still today.
The biggest shifts I experienced happened through conscious connected breathwork, which I trained in in 2020.
Not just a tool to completely change your energy and release deeply buried emotions and give you inspiration, but a way to finally connect with my body, my grief, my shame, and the things I’d buried for decades.
And not just solo sessions - this was deep, connected work facilitated by men who weren’t afraid of trauma, rage, shame, or grief.
Men who could meet me emotionally and mentally.
That was the first time I really felt my body tell the truth.
It cracked something open.
And it woke something up.
At the same time (literally) I met the woman who would become my fiancée. The woman I would move to a different country to live with, closing down my yoga business and leaving friends and family behind in the process.
It was breathwork that led me to create my first men's groups and that experience of strong male facilitation led me to seek out man-specific coaching and mentoring (not from an influencer or mindset guru) but from a man who was a highly experienced therapist, neuroscientist, and self-made millionaire of 20+ years.
He saw straight through the performance.
He called me out, yelled at me, challenged me, broke me down and took me through a series of rites of passage which called me forward, and didn’t let me hide.
That’s where everything shifted fundamentally to a whole other level. And it's still going.
That’s why I do this work.
Because most of the men I work with are versions of who I was:
High-functioning
Smart
Capable
But disconnected from their emotional truth
Running on autopilot in a life they built without ever asking what they really wanted
They’ve done the reading. The therapy. The growth work.
And still… something feels off.
If that’s you, this work isn’t about burning it all down.
It’s about finally facing what you’ve been papering over with productivity and performance.
It’s about remembering who you are underneath the masks and burning the masks.
And building a life, and relationships, from that place, while you watch the masks burn.
🎥 Click on the picture below to watch a short video on why capable, intelligent men can still feel something’s ‘off’, and what it takes to break the cycle.
Book a free Wake Up Call
No fluff. No pitch. Just a real conversation about what’s going on beneath the surface, and how to start changing it.