Month: March 2025

In the aftermath of the first major conversation I’ve had on my coaching journey, I’ve talked about making things simple. 

But my goodness, what is really apparent to me now is just how frightened and nervous and weak-willed we have become as a people.

We truly have greatness in us.

Tremendous power to do incredible things.

Divine will to overcome what seems impossible.

Let’s live bigger.

Let’s live more beautifully.

Let’s live to our true potential.

Let it Rip!

It can feel like the efforts you’re making are worthless. YOU can feel worthless.

I’ve just had a blissful and cathartic conversation with a chap who contacted me through a link he found on my YouTube channel offering up my coaching services.

Oh, so you had a convo, big deal.

To me it is.

It is proof that the process works of putting myself out there and getting real life feedback.

It works! 

But of course, it only works when I work. Experiences like these are edifying because you feel the mirror effect of getting feedback.

Most of social media is a private and personal echo chamber. You might not see anything for weeks, months or even years and the beautiful thing in this case is he contacted me. There was no chasing, there was no panic or hurry, it was highly organic and I love that.

The universe is listening.

God is listening.

However you want to put it but ask and you will receive. I want to be a coach and this chap wants to be coached. Willingness on both sides, a fabulous learn experience on both sides, symbiosis on both sides.

Believe in yourself.

Trust yourself.

Put yourself out there.

It works – with effort and time.

Life’s an inside out process. 

You get what you ask for.

You also get what you don’t ask for – if you don’t make it clear how you will accept being treated.

You have to speak up and speak out for yourself.

Believe me when I say, you cannot rely on people’s common sense. Common sense is the biggest myth going.

As patronising as it sounds, you have to spell things out for people.

I have been hectored and pressured and pushed and jabbed at my entire life. I’m not joking. Long before lockdowns, I had isolated myself voluntarily to breathe my own air. When lockdowns happened, I developed a “fuck you” attitude, frankly.

So, when I accept a Twitter message request and the first greeting is “Hello Brother.” I now respond, verbatim, “Would people stop calling me brother!!!” You have to train people.

You may call me fussy, you may see me as reacting ungenerously to a stranger calling me brother but to me it’s just wrong. I get it, they’re trying to endear themselves but we don’t have the same parents, so it’s not brother. It’s not “bro”, it’s not even “Sir”. 

Call me by my name. I do often wonder how language has changed so dramatically, maybe it’s a generational thing, but being referred to as ‘man’ or ‘bruv’ but none of it is English talk or European talk.

With Americanisation rank in discourse, language and understanding have been watered down.

Make things clear to people.

Feel good about demanding standards.

Let people know what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Wowzers, just had a nap as I was wiped out from my gym session. One of things you forget about training is you end up very hungry and quite tired when you get back into it.

Shock to the system!

During said nap, I had a dream and in it I heard the old phrase “how do you end up doing the opposite?”

Even in the dream, I refute this.

I get it. It always looks like I choose the opposite from everyone else. I definitely believe in souls, that intrinsic part of us all that transcends time, that has been around forever, seen everything, experiencing ‘flesh and blood us’ in real time.

I’m an old soul, I know it, I feel it. Countless people have even said it ‘you have wisdom beyond your years, Martin.’, ‘you have an old head on young shoulders’. They feel it too though but are afraid to admit it. 

Now, I joke that there are old and new souls and arseholes but most people don’t think their own way to the decisions they make. They do it because they’re told to, they believe it’s the right thing to do, they want to fit in.

I think things through.

Quite simple really.

And it doesn’t really take much to think independently but it’s a massive hurdle to jump because we all want, on some level, to be liked. Of course, you and I know this is a trap.

Freedom is being able to choose your own path.

Freedom is thinking for yourself.

Freedom is not needing to be liked for every single detail.

This is what independent thought does.

I’m starting to realise just how much pressure I’ve felt from people and how much I’ve inflicted on myself.

My life has felt very tight! Being squeezed, feeling tense much of the time.

I have described much of people’s behaviour as “killing things with questions.” – a relentless need of everyone around me to know each and every single detail of my life in minute.

Another phrase that has gained more significance in recent history, particularly with my ex-boyfriend, is “death by a thousand cuts.” This mode has involved much questioning too but on a more subtle level.

The phrase that particularly griped me was “what’s wrong with that?”. The annoying aspect about this was its coded nature – he wouldn’t just come out and say, honestly, “why don’t you do it like me?”

He really didn’t like me being independent. Even down to when we ate out he got annoyed when I ordered a different drink from him, that I wanted a different starter. Everything uniform! And very restrictive. I realise now that “he” was another prison I put myself into.

Of course, I’m painting a picture, whenever I speak of him, that it was all bad. There were absolutely needs and desires that were fulfilled for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have tried so hard to make it work but, frankly, from the start there was a bluntness and a hardness that had set in within him that was nothing to do with me. It was all very “take it or leave it.”, dismissive and nothing collegiate about it.

He asked many irritating questions but found it almost impossible to talk about anything meaningful and he found it very uncomfortable to take real questions from me so conversation was out of the window very early on.

All this to say, take from life what you will, in other words, take what is useful. Despite my age, on the verge of turning 44, he was my first serious relationship and a very impactful epoch of my life.

Now, no matter what the relationship I go into, whether business or personal or professional, I serve my needs. It is uncomfortable still but I embrace the discomfort more and more. The dragon hides the gold, the Knights of the Round Table, in search of their Holy Grail, entered the forest at the point which they feared the most.

Believe me, the stark irony of associating my ex with danger and fear is not lost on me. I am starting to laugh at it now that I made so many decisions to stay when the obvious choice was to run away.

But we do things for bizarre reasons and, sometimes, we just have to go through the mud to get to the clear, free-flowing stream.

Cherry-pick, my friends, not everything will serve you but you’ll learn to exclude it as you go.