Can You Find the Pathway Back To You?

Hope & Inspiration

Hope is key to preventing certain people abandoning themselves. Hope is at the core of the language that is needed for sustainable healing. Today, I find myself less fixated on things that are irrelevant and have learnt to let go of those things through healing and growth. I am conscious that my mind is separate from who I am so every day I work on not allowing my mind upset me. I hope that, undergoing a journey to reconnection with myself, I can inspire and motivate others. 

The Journey

To explain how I arrived at this point, I need to describe my journey. As a child and young man, I suffered from phobias, lack of self-esteem and gut-wrenching sadness and loneliness. From late teens I found alcohol as an accessible camouflage for my fears and anxieties, blanketing my self and situational awareness.

Against my unconfident expectations, I left school with very good grades. I went to university and took up a career in law. With hindsight, I entered that career for the wrong reason, namely to satiate my ego. I was not confident enough to make my own pragmatic decisions as to who I was and what I really wanted from life. However, my inner drive and resilience resulted in my becoming a tri-qualified international commercial lawyer. I have subsequently been an entrepreneur, building and selling out of a number of start-up companies. I have also been a C-suite executive and sat on boards across business, homeless, education and media not-for-profits in a number of different industries and four continents over 26 years. I have written three business books, two of which have been foreworded by world number 1 leadership thinker, Marshall Goldsmith. My work as a leadership coach, consultant, trainer, lecturer, author and speaker, in driving growth for businesses, leaders and brands, has been featured on the BBC and endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith himself.

Despite my public persona, I have punished myself with alcohol in the past, experienced a debilitating imposter syndrome and catastrophic fear induced anxiety. Only those very closest to me have known that I was burning up inside, that I experienced what I call a ‘hole in my soul’.

The Pathway Back

The pathway back to me began in 2005 when I joined a recovery and wellness program. 14 years later, I am a proud long-standing member of this program. The program, and its fellowship, have given me structure and the human connection that I always felt I missed. I have also been blessed to spend some years in Australia working at senior executive level in the Indigenous economic development space. I was privileged, during that time, to have worked with some amazingly spiritual Indigenous people from around the world.

After returning to Ireland from Australia at the end of 2016, and having suffered a recent traumatic business journey, which unleashed the debilitating fears in me, I felt that I desperately needed something extra to show me the full pathway back to me. In early 2018, I met Justin Caffrey who, similarly, had experienced a successful career and also his own major traumas, including the loss of his second son. Justin is an elite leadership and mindset and mindfulness coach. He was initially a patient of, then trained as an understudy to, one of the global leading lights in mindfulness-based psychology - an Indian psychiatrist.

Justin and I started out as friends. I was then privileged to be coached by Justin and to have been taken through a wonderful journey of meditation, mindfulness practice and mindset recalibration. As an ongoing pupil of Justin’s teachings, balance in everything is now my mantra and I today experience the best clarity of thought and calm I have ever experienced. Today, aged 52, I am increasingly being asked to talk at conferences, on radio, on podcasts and in publications about my life and work. Organisations and individuals engage me because I have been there, and driven through with deeper knowledge and a strong awareness of resilience, purpose and high-performance mindset capabilities. I have broken the shackles of restrained self.

Mindset & Mindfulness

I look forward to working with Justin on delivering this message of hope and inspiration through mindset and mindfulness growth work as I continue walking my pathway back to me.