My Story

It’s funny when I look back at how all of this started because there was never really a plan to do what I do now. I certainly didn’t grow up thinking I was going to work with World and Olympic Champions or become known as The Athlete’s Secret Weapon. I was just an average martial artist who knew there was something missing in my own performance.

Taekwondo was my sport and physically I was pretty good. I was fast, strong, flexible and technically I could do everything I needed to do. Training wasn’t really the problem. I could train incredibly well and know exactly what I was capable of, then competition would arrive and somehow I wasn’t quite the same athlete anymore. That was probably my first real experience of knowing there was more inside me than I was actually able to access when it mattered.

Eventually I did what most people do when they can’t work something out… I spoke to Mum. I was fortunate because my mother happened to be a hypnotherapist, as well as a naturopath, and my father worked in that world as well, before he passed when I was 24. I had grown up around it, I now know it is in my blood. Although that didn’t mean I necessarily understood it or believed that sitting in a chair with my eyes closed was going to make me a better martial artist.

I remember sitting there for about 90 minutes thinking, how can this possibly work? I wasn’t training, I wasn’t getting fitter, I wasn’t practising kicks or combinations and nothing I would normally associate with improving performance was happening, so from my perspective I was just sitting in a chair with my eyes closed while Mum did whatever Mum did.

Then I competed the next day.

The best way I can describe it is that I felt 10 feet tall and bulletproof. I stepped onto the mat and for the first time I felt like the athlete I knew I was in training. Everything seemed slower. I could read my opponent, I trusted what I was doing and my body simply responded. I hadn’t learned anything new overnight and I certainly hadn’t become physically better in 24 hours. The only thing that had really changed was what was happening inside my head, yet once that changed, my body followed and my performance changed with it.

At the time I thought the result was becoming a better martial artist. Looking back now, that was probably the least important thing that happened.

There were experiences later in my life that I don’t talk about publicly and probably never will. There are things only one other person and I know about, and I’m comfortable leaving them there. What I can say is that at one stage the training and understanding I had developed around the mind and My Tae Kwon do became far more important than sport. It saved my life.

That changes your perspective on something.

What had initially fascinated me because it changed the way I competed had suddenly shown me what it could mean when the stakes were considerably higher than winning or losing. I understood personally what it felt like when your own mind was working against you, and I also knew what became possible when you could change that relationship.

Then my son was about to be born and that created another change in direction. I was travelling for work at the time and I knew I didn’t want to continue doing that with a young family, so I started thinking about what I was actually going to do with my life. I remember asking myself what I knew, what I loved and what I could genuinely see myself doing every day without it simply feeling like another job.

Sport was obvious. I loved it. I understood athletes because I had been one. I understood the frustration of knowing you were capable of more than your results were showing, and by then I had experienced firsthand how powerful the mind could be in changing that.

So sports performance hypnosis just made sense to me.

I didn’t sit there with some grand business plan about working with Olympians. My thinking was much simpler. If I could help an athlete get to the top by understanding something I wish I had understood earlier, that would be pretty special. If I could also help someone avoid some of the things I had experienced personally along the way, that would mean even more.

So that became the direction.

Here we are more than 20 years later and I sometimes have to stop and look at where that decision actually went. I’ve worked with thousands of athletes and more than 50 World and Olympic Champions. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around some extraordinary performances and to have conversations with people at moments in their lives and careers when what happened next mattered enormously.

People naturally see the successful part because that’s what sport shows us. They see the Olympic medal, the World Championship, the result, the celebration and the athlete standing there having achieved something extraordinary. I get to see a very different part of that story because quite often I knew that person before the world saw that moment.

I knew what they were questioning. I knew what they were frightened of. I knew what had happened when nobody was watching. Sometimes I knew how close they had come to walking away. There have also been people I’ve worked with where the most important result had absolutely nothing to do with sport, and over the years there have been situations where the work that once helped save my life has played a part in helping save someone else’s.

That probably means more to me than any statistic I could put beside my name.

Of course I’m proud of the 50 plus World and Olympic Champions. How could I not be? There are moments when I see somebody standing on a podium while the world is celebrating them and I know a little bit about what it took for that person to get there. I know about conversations nobody else will ever hear and changes nobody watching will ever see. I get to quietly sit somewhere in the background knowing I was part of their journey, while the moment belongs completely to them.

I think that is why The Athlete’s Secret Weapon has always fitted me so well. I’ve never needed to be the story. I love being part of what helps somebody else create theirs.

When I trace all of that back, though, it still starts with me sitting in a chair wondering how the hell any of this could possibly work. That experience changed my performance. What I learned later helped save my life. Becoming a father gave me the reason to turn it into a career, and for more than 20 years I’ve been able to take that understanding and use it to help other people create moments in their lives that I sometimes have the extraordinary privilege of watching the rest of the world celebrate.

I couldn’t have planned that career when I started.

I’m very glad I sat in the chair.