OLLY ALEXANDER BRANFORD COACHING
Create deep inner change with the
Transformative Life Coach (TLC)
Dr Olly Alexander Branford
MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
We Get the Role. Then It Gets Us
You Impressed Everyone: So Why The Emptiness?
The Desolation at the Destination
Good to meet you. Thank you for reading. This is our first held encounter. I am afraid we are going to talk about the felt bad weather inside first. This is not a beige page. Later, there will later be lighter moments, some Wildean wit if I can reach those heights. Humour cuts to the Truth. And that will always be delivered with love, even if it feels like it's a velvet sledgehammer. Perhaps a little insolence, and of course evidence for those who want it. There is a cathedral of experiential observations to share with you. But that can wait. It will be worth it I promise you.
How you may feel right now, I may have felt it too. I see you. I see the highest in you. I will hold that.
But first, recognition, and perhaps resonance. If there is, then you are in the right place.
You reached the destination. So why the desolation?
In the image above, one tower is crumbling. The pain of climbing, competing, performing, achieving, thinking of reaching the top. Of course, that keeps you going.
The other tower is the ‘Hero’s Journey’: Sure, there is the ‘Dark Night of The Soul’, there is on every Hero's Journey. But hey, as King Solomon said:
"This too shall pass."
And as Julian of Norwich, possibly her nom de plume, who wrote the earliest surviving English-language book attributed to a woman, 'Revelations of Divine Love', stated:
"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
Those two phrases will carry you through everything. It’s always darkest before the new dawn. But the dawn will come. It always does. And what a view: The sun on your face. The lotus, the butterfly, the shell: The most recognised symbols of transformation. Lifted by energy, by airfoils, your own helicopter. Ready to give you a cosmic view for all the guidance you will ever need.
But back to the collapsing tower. A house of cards. Built without foundations. Storms brewing. The climb: Pure pain, felt as a pressure in your chest. Surely that's drive, grit, determination? It must be. While you are still climbing you are hoping - one more rung and I will be happy. When I succeed life will be amazing. I will reach the pinnacle of the tower. Then the worst emotional pain in the world: Getting to the top, exhausted, out of gas, looking around and realising:
“I don’t want to be here. I don't like the view.”
You put your ladder against the wrong life. But it wasn't your choice. Forgive yourself: We all do it.
You impressed everyone. You achieved what people around you still call 'the dream'. But inside, there is a different weather: An emptiness, deadened, emotional pain that is physical pain, burned out, a loss of passion, yet a striving, a craving. Anxiety, depression. All you can think about: Success. But there are different kinds of success. Millions? Billions? Some come with joy. Some do not. Some are limited. Others are not. But what if we burned our lives to win? What if we abandoned everyone before they could abandon us. Why do we fel lonely? Disconnected? How much money do we need to feel loved? And, as the fabulous singer, songwriter, and of course actress, Tina Turner sang 'What's Love Got to Do with It?' Why does everyone keep talking about love. And the lyrics:
"Oh-oh, what's love got to do, got to do with it?
What's love but a second-hand emotion?
What's love got to do, got to do with it?
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?"
But no-one is going to break my heart. They will love me, when I reach the penthouse. And yes Tina, love is a second-hand emotion unless you can buy it with millions! A transactional paradox.
That emptiness is not failure. It is a signal. Bleakness is a sign. The deadened feeling is pointing at something, anything. But what? You have not climbed too little. You have climbed the wrong ladder, against the wrong tower.
What the world calls success is often a very short ladder: Roles, prestige, admiration, being chosen, being seen to win. It looks impressive from below. It can feel strangely bleak at the top. Who are we without a CV? The role is there. The proof is there. The applause, if one is lucky, is there. And still the old emptiness sits in the room as an uninvited but persistent guest.
I will never ask you to refurb your subjugate the 'stealth wealth,' the 'second kitchen' (you know, the one you never use) sell your Ferrari and the sports cars for each day of the week, the private jet(s), the second, third, fourth, and fifth holiday homes (who wants to pack for a holiday anyway - that's what the butler is for of course), the spare summer house and the winter house (who likes the cold/heat/weather anyway), sack the other staff that keep the hedonic treadmill going (someone has to look after the kids as you are never at home), or dismiss hedonic adaption itself (It's tragic that our happiness returns to baseline very quickly in sometimes seconds, minutes, or a few days - especially when you do 'win' that trophy that you were sure would always bring you happiness - in fact which you have devoted the first half or so of your life to it). Why does life 'do this to us' anyway?
You may be saying to yourself at this point "Oh God, he is perhaps a little insolent and tongue in cheek, but he knows my weather."
Yep, I know it, very well.
What do you have left when you lose everything? Well, you only have YOU. And that, dear reader (thank you for reading so far-it will all make sense in a minute, but we have to go through the clouds as we jet up through to the blue skies to freedom, clarity, awe, and yes, abundance. I don't mean abundance as in the yadah yadah he wants me to get a one-way ticket to the Himalayas and sit in a cave meditating until i find that I have everything that i want. I mean success beyond your wildest dreams. I have met billionaires who had it all - way more than my impertinent list above, and yep, they were deeply empty and suicidal. "What the heck?" Some might say. "There must be something wrong with them!" Well there was. They mistook having for being. I realise that you might be thinking - this dude is a bit unusual, but in a minute he is going to ask me to buy a first class ticket to the East. Nope. Sell my Ferrari? Nope. What if you want 7 Ferraris in different colours? One for every day of my working week (even though no-one is going to see you leave at 5 am and get at 11pm every day and you have done for years). Sure, you can have that. But isn't that a bit small for someone like you? Why not have more material success. "What is this guy on?" Bear with me: It will be worth it.
Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist Monk, ok he was a monk, but monks do have something to say, when they are not taking vows of silence. He called it the "Peril of success", by which he was not referring to heli-skiing or buying a Harley. He wrote about the 'false self- the public mask built to satisfy parental and society's expectations, often as the opposite of the 'True Self':
"Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling towards some prize just beyond my reach, but accepting the treasure of True Self I already possess."
Some might say to that "Ok I get where you are going, so you are saying, sitting in my (crumbling) tower saying this is high enough, I am the woman/man/they them want, and I should settle for that! All you have said it pretty 'monkish'" No way, hosé! That's not enough! I am not saying anything. I do intuit that monks have wisdom. We are pretty happy with knowledge. Data. And of course we should be. But isn't knowledge a little bit, if you pardon my saying, small? Knowledge is not Truth. Knowledge is a little spotlight thinking it's the sun. It's contracted consciousness. And yep, CEOs, the ones who change the world, and even our world view, don't live in boxes. Why, because boxes are not abundance. Boxes are scarcity. They are lack. You can't fit trillions, quadrillions, or zillions, bazillions, and gazillions for that matter, in a box.
Boxes are fear.
Ok, you have read my 500 articles. This Olly guy is pretty deep. But what does he know about abundance? Been there done that. And yes, I was bloody miserable. I was empty, dead, had a couple of suicide attempts as I din't see anything other options. My first therapist said "Who are you without you CV?" Fair point. I started spouting a list, an organised, structured list, as you would in an invited 'Ted-Talk style' talk to 12,000 people. He asked again:
"Who are you without your CV? All of that's on your CV."
He wasn't being mean. He was being real. But in that second I realised that I was my CV. Damn - how had that happened? How did who I was become a printout? How had having become my identity: My very BEing.
I suddenly felt pretty emotional, for the first time in over three decades (actually wasn't it almost five - half a century-I hadn't had an emotion since I was 7-years-old). That's a bit weird isn't it? A bit unusual? Or is it?
I replied to the therapist:"There is no me."
His reply was nothing I would ever had expected, as he smiled, knowingly:
"Well, there is a you. You just haven't met him yet. You don't just know him yet."
And then he spent the next 12 weeks unravelling like a ball of wool, tugging at this thread and that. Or like an onion, peeling off layer and layer of onion skin, yep, making my eyes water like an onion. That's one way of doing it I suppose. And I don't knock it, truly. But where does that leave you? Unravelled, no clearer to the 'centre of the onion' - I am not an onion. I needed someone to ravel me back up.
Anyway that's more than enough about me. This is about you.
You want leadership and mentoring advice? Sure. Let's start there. Not becasue I am a business coach by 'trade'. That's all a bit limiting. You have a 'goal', they tell you what to do, you do it, you might get a good outcome. Then the next problem comes along, carrying its knuckles on the ground. No worries, I'll call that mentor again. Fine. You can do that, ad infinitum. But doesn't that say something about them, more than it says about you? They don't arrive with a Satnav saying "Here you can have this, and then you won't need me anymore. That's not a good business model for them (they want to keep you coming back for more - that's their business model." What if they did give you one and they said "It's a magic compass." You would think, sure, does that come with free crystals and some bath salts?
Ok, just one more quick thing about me before we get all evidence-based, supported by business gurus and actual gurus, (no - not snake oil peddlars or more robes-in-a-role).
Let's bring in a few key 'witnesses' if we are going to be forensic about it, and, with your permission of course, yes we are.
Well, let's start here. According the business and leadership coaching guru Janet Hagberg, CEO and consultant to many of the leading Fortune 500 companies and to government.
The Hero got Hurt: Climbing the Wrong Ladder
You impressed everyone. So why the emptiness? They all want to be you. But you don’t.
We will be wild in vision for your life, deeply grounded in evidence.
One hand in the Earth, the other in the sky.
The dream life that looked like arrival, like winning, with accolades galore, and the door out of the profession-become-prison to the ‘Bridge’ still unseen, yet open. Unlocked, opening inwards, and you unable to do the same. The seven-year-old you, petrified, unseen, unheard, perhaps loved, but not for who you really were. Expectation. Conditional love. That’s childhood Trauma with a capital T. You didn’t need to be punched to be fractured. None of us did. Plaster of Paris doesn’t work on the psyche.
You climbed impossible heights: Ladders, towers, mountains. You got the role, and it got you. Life got you. But you still don’t quite get it.
Maybe you run. Great hobby. But you have to run 10Ks. Yep, then marathons. Life becomes a competition. But you can never outrun yourself.
You swam upstream in relentless torrents. You did it. That pressure in your chest: The motor that never stopped, never allowed to savour the moment, felt like drive. But what if it was fear pretending to steer?
That is the feeling this page begins with: Desolation, emptiness, anxiety, deadened, craving, sleeplessness, caffeine addiction, and workaholism.
Impressive, admired, and still somehow untouched by your own life. Does your Soul fit your role?
‘Thinkaholism,’ catastrophising, ‘awfulising’, addiction to external validation? We all have them. Do you need distraction, compulsion to numb the pain? No one ever healed with anaesthesia.
The Mechanism Beneath the Feeling
So, what happened? That is not at all a criticism. I am referring to the mechanics of life. There is a mechanism beneath the human condition. One that I have rarely heard about in its entirety. There invisible cogs are turning. Everybody is looking for external validation, no matter who we are. That is not vanity. It is the human condition: Craving affection, recognition, proof, approval, love. Yet we never get it from the outside. We always need more.
Real love is invincible. Imitation love is insatiable. It’s the perfect drug: It almost works, not quite, but almost. Gambling's 'near-miss' gives you more dopamine than a win. So, we go back for more; always more. If it was enough we wouldn’t need more. If it didn’t work at all we wouldn’t bother. A near-miss in any behaviour triggers a stronger, more addictive, and sometimes paradoxical surge of specific neurotransmitters—primarily dopamine—by acting as a high-value, 'rewarded' event. Our brains treat a near-miss—a loss—as a 'near-success.' We are chasing near-success. We are not chasing real success. And that is where real love comes in. But what is real love? How do you define love, precisely: Think about it for 10 seconds...
Imitation love, or 'fake love', yep, that 'chemical rush', is shallow, inauthentic, immature, transactional, disingenuous, fake, painful, distraction-seeking, lonely, void-filling and numbing at the same time. And it leaves you wanting more. It's conditional.
As Greg Baer wrote in his book 'Real Love: The Truth About Finding Unconditional Love & Fulfilling Relationships' that:
"With real love, nothing else matters; without it, nothing else is enough".
So, what is real love? Well, it's unconditional.
When you have real love, you feel fundamentally joyful, at peace, safe, and fulfilled, whereas, without it, no amount of money, success, or attention is ever sufficient. Imitation love is a drug. But we want it. We must have it. Because when we will have it, because of success, we will be someone.
Greg Baer is a surgeon. "Whaaaat?" you might say. "What's a surgeon doing writing a book about unconditional love? Despite professional success, he felt empty, leading him to become a drug addict, which included injecting narcotics, and nearly committing suicide. Tina Turner again: What has love got to do with it?
We all make the same mistake: We confuse having with BEing.
We are taught to live backwards.
Having → Doing → BEing
That sequence is ‘Identity Fracture’. Get the status. Do the work. Become someone. That someone will be loved. Sure. Keeping saying that. Having defines you. But it doesn’t. But it never quite works, because the Self (note the capital S for True Self) cannot be manufactured out of proof.
‘Re-Collection’ begins when the sequence is restored. Re-Collection brings your fractured psyche back together. Painful at first. Brave at first. But it dissolves your fears. It takes away your limiting beliefs. Re-Collection is a remembrance of who you really are. And Re-Collection is Truth with a capital T. 'Prefigurative Re-Collection' is a method. This isn't therapy. It's the radical act to start living, enacting your whole, healed Self right now. The 'Will to Love' is a bridge. Well, it's more 'The Bridge'. It's beyond psychology. It starts where psychology alone cannot go. It's beyond philosophy. It's beyond metaphysics. I have the map. I have the method. I have the tools. I can show you 'The Bridge'. But it's a bit too soon to go there.
BEing → Doing → Having
The wisest metaphysical equation ever spoken is:
Woman or Man Minus (Ego) Mind = 'God'
But we don’t believe in 'God'. That doesn’t matter. Healing is not for those who believe in 'God', it is for those who like to think they are God. Religion is for those who fear going to ‘Hell’, metaphysics is for those who have already been there. Begin with who you are in Truth. 'God', love, the Universe, 'the law behind every Natural Law', is that force that is within you: Your True Self. We will learn to harness it. Act from that place. Let life give what it gives. Let go of the outcome. Let go of the rope. The only way to win a losing battle is to surrender. Not wave a white flag, surrender the part of you that resists reality. That is not passivity. That is real reality. That is freedom from the wrong ladder. You can fight reality, but you will lose, but only 100% of the time. Reality is what has already happened. And we don’t have time machines. But we do have time. And there is no time like the present. In fact, the present is all there ever is.
The Petrified Child Wearing Armour
The petrified child wearing armour: “You’re hired”. Aristotle said:
“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”
Why do we always choose our 7-year-old selves to run our lives? No wonder we are petrified. No wonder we put on armour.
Beneath the climb, beneath every life, the same mechanism is at work: The child who learned that love was conditional and authenticity was too costly. Two essential needs. Attachment must win to survive outside: But we die inside.
That child does not disappear in adulthood. They learn to perform. They learn to please. But people-pleasing doesn’t please anyone. They learn to achieve. They armour up. There is the human condition in a nutshell. A world full of children, scared and fighting.
What most people call ego is not real power. It is not power at all: It is fear, overdressed: False Evidence Appearing Real: The ego is the petrified child wearing armour, trying to win in adult life what was never safely given in childhood.
That structure builds roles, careers, institutions even. Lives that look enviable from the outside. What it cannot build is peace. Or joy. Or love.
We choose our petrified seven-year-old self to run our lives. We hire them. Then we wonder why the grown-up life keeps feeling frightened.
Tina Turner had experienced childhood Trauma, abandoned by her mother when she was 11, severe domestic abuse with broken burns and burns, both her sons died, broke, cancer, kidney failure: She turned her painful experiences into a source of immense strength, becoming a stellar solo superstar. Why can't we all do that? Why do we want to so badly?
Who This Work Is For
For Those Ready to Be Powerful, Abundant, Joyful, Fearless, and Free
This work is for the person whose outer life may look stronger than their inner life feels.
It is for the one who has kept going so well that the world may never have guessed how little joy was left inside the performance. From the outside, the life may look enviable. From the inside, it may feel airless. There may be money, reputation, responsibility, admiration, or the long-awaited evidence that you really did become someone. Yet the felt weather is not joy. It is pressure in the chest. It is a deadening behind the eyes. It is the peculiar loneliness of having arrived somewhere that your younger self once dreamed of, only to discover that your Soul does not want to live there.
The image above, 'The One-Storey Penthouse', shows the strange poverty of a life that appears to have everything except connection and unconditional love. The woman has reached the rooftop, but the 'penthouse' is only one storey high: A beautifully designed ceiling, what I call in my grammar an 'unlidded box of fear', mistaken for the sky. Around her are the trophies of egoic success and egoic imitation love — the modern designer house, the closed glass doors, the closed front door, the bar, the martini glass, the Ferrari, the helicopter, the city below — yet none of them opens into real abundance. The Ferrari is especially revealing. It is not on a road, not moving, not serving freedom, not even facing her. It sits on the roof like a prize, an accolade, a captured symbol of possibility that has become unusable the moment it was acquired. A beautiful form of imitation love trying to define who she is because of an inner felt sense of lack, driven by the fear of low self-worth. This is beyond the ‘Quest For Love’ in material form: This is the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia: The imprisoned ego that causes us to feel trapped in a life that we wanted but that doesn't quite fully numb our emotional pain. The accumulation of substitutes that promise arrival but deepen the sense of absence. The barman, though close enough to serve her, faces away; even in the place of pleasure there is no meeting. She feels alone, very alone, when all she wanted was connection and real love. The cocktail in her hand resembles a chalice, the V-shaped Holy Grail that she thought that she would find in the Temple. But the chalice is filled with anaesthetic rather than communion with her True Self. The lotus sits quietly beside her, a small witness that transformation is latent even here: Possible even, if only she would choose, but not yet chosen.
The French-born essayist and author who trained in psychoanalysis, Anaïs Nin, known for her deeply introspective writing and psychological exploration, who had many affairs with both men and women, including her father, wrote:
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
The central theme of Nin's work was to find the courage to move through fear and pain to achieve self-realisation.
The woman in the image above is very close to that point. And there are two ways she will go: Try and find more imitation love in all its forms: But like any drug or behavioural addiction, the craving always intensifies until our lives become totally unmanageable and then we crash. It's not a question of if, but when.
Behind her, the image opens into the deeper choice the ego cannot quite see. The red helicopter waits with its unused accoutrements - the visor and flight helmet, ready to give the cosmic view on her life choices. The guide sits calmly in a comfortable chair, the 'Seat of his Soul', not rescuing, not persuading, not intruding, not fixing (no-one can 'fix' anyone else, and certainly not through transactional 'imitation love' - which is always transactional in all its forms) simply available. Beyond the guide are the 'Bridge of Awakening' and the open 'Field of BEing', under a clearer sky. Unseen by the woman.
The image therefore does not condemn wealth, ambition, beauty, or success. It asks a more exact question: what happens when the outer life has risen but consciousness has not? We remain contracted in fear, with contracted consciousness: Knowledge, not wisdom. The city side is heavy with cloud because achievement without love remains weather-less inside; the field side is brighter because the way out is not further acquisition but the mode of BEing. The doors are closed because limiting beliefs, which are always the result of egoic fear, (fear is the the language of the ego) have become architecture. The house is modern, expensive, and small, with only one story, because ego can build luxury while still living inside contraction. She has reached the limit of her 'Real Personal Power', mistaking it for the 'top of the ladder'. Everything she thought would prove abundance has become a curated prison, while the real route to freedom sits quietly behind her, already prepared, requiring only the first turn of attention. This is the universal human condition before higher Truth becomes simple: The person has climbed to the roof of the wrong building, holding the wrong chalice, surrounded by prizes that cannot love her, while the bridge Home waits in plain sight. Her ladder is leaning against the life she was told to strive for. When she arrived at the top and looked around, she could see that the ladder had been leaning on the wrong life: Someone else's dreams of self-worth, not her dream of unconditional love.
That is the wrong tower.
You climbed well. The discipline was real. The sacrifices were real. The intelligence and courage were real. But the tower may have been built from a dream that fear designed before love had a chance to speak. A child can dream from lack. A teenager can dream from shame. A young adult can call ambition what is really a strategy for becoming safe, admired, untouchable, chosen, or finally enough.
That moment is often devastating. It is also merciful.
It does not mean you were wrong to achieve. It means the dream may have been real while the source of the dream was wounded. It may have been born from the need to secure love rather than from the freedom of BEing love. It may have been an attempt to obtain from the world what only the return to Self could ever give.
This work is for people who no longer want fear to be the engine of their abundance.
Abundance is not the enemy. Achievement is not the enemy. Power is not the enemy. The question is whether the life you are building is flowing from freedom or being dragged out of the abandoned part of you that still believes the next attainment will finally settle the question of worth.
A fear-born life can be extremely productive. It can work late. It can charm rooms. It can win cases. It can build companies. It can keep families functioning. It can make the world clap. It can look like drive and be praised as discipline. Yet the body often knows the difference between aliveness and contraction. Fear-driven achievement presses from the chest. It narrows the breath. It makes rest feel dangerous. It treats the present as a corridor to the next proof.
The Will to Love feels different. It has energy, but the energy is lifted rather than clenched. It can work hard without turning work into emotional anaesthesia. It can create without making creation a plea for approval. It can earn without asking money to become a parent. It can lead without needing followers to confirm the leader exists. It can succeed without handing success the throne.
This is why the old sequence must be restored. Fear tries to live backwards. It says: have enough, then you can do what matters. Do enough, and perhaps you will finally BE enough. That sequence is exhausting because the final step never arrives.
The real sequence is BEing, doing, having.
BEing is the source. Doing is the expression. Having is the outcome that may gather naturally when life is no longer organised around fear. This does not make life effortless in the childish sense. There may still be discipline, difficulty, courage, risk, sacrifice, and hard work. The difference is that the work is no longer powered by self-betrayal.
This is where abundance becomes larger than the version fear once imagined. Fear does not dream wildly; it negotiates anxiously. It dreams within the permitted range of the family, the profession, the market, the tribe, the wound, or the role. It calls those dreams ambitious, but often they are only domesticated versions of longing, tamed by the very fear they are trying to escape.
When abundance begins from BEing, something different becomes possible. You are no longer trying to achieve someone else’s approved version of a good life. You are no longer building inside a cage whose dimensions were set by childhood, status, shame, or the need to be acceptable. You become free to create from the deeper imagination of the Soul: not the borrowed dream that kept you safe, but the wild, truthful, love-led abundance that could only appear once fear stopped writing the brief.
This is for the high-functioning person who has done well inside the box and has begun to feel the box closing around them. The box may be beautiful. It may be well paid. It may be admired. It may be exactly what other people told you to want. That is why it can take so long to notice that it is still a box.
The work is not to make you less powerful. It is to free power from fear.
It is not to make you less ambitious. It is to release ambition from the wound.
It is not to make you less successful. It is to let success stop being a substitute for love and become an expression of BEing.
This is for people who want a full life, not a spiritually anaesthetised miniature of one. It is for people who want abundance without self-abandonment. It is for people who want achievement without chest-pressure. It is for people who want freedom without collapse and joy without denial.
It will come from a different centre.
The person who is ready for this work may still want to do extraordinary things. They may do more extraordinary things once fear is no longer wasting their brilliance. The difference is that the doing begins to feel like expression rather than prosecution. The life is no longer a case being argued before an invisible judge. It becomes a creation flowing from a deeper authority.
This work is for the person whose Soul is no longer willing to let fear call itself ambition.
It is for the person ready to discover that the life beyond fear is not smaller, paler, poorer, or less alive. It is more powerful. It is more abundant. It is more joyful. It is fearless and free because it is no longer asking the world to provide what only love can restore.
That is where success can finally become beautiful: when it is no longer the costume of the wound, but the natural radiance of a life returning to BEing.
You Built the Penthouse
You Built the Helipad
The 'Hierarchy of Wants'
Inside the sealed boardroom, success is still being taught as a pyramid: Another rung, another target, another polished way to prove that you are enough.
Outside the glass, the real movement has already begun. The guide guides you back to your inner guide. You may have climbed the wrong tower, like we all do. But it gave you altitude. You may have reached the penthouse: You built it. You found the helipad: You made it. You just needed the cosmic view. Then you activated your own Satnav. The guide was present, but he did not tell you what to do, and he is not flying for you. The helicopter is yours. And now so too is the sky.
The work is not to upgrade your seat in the passenger cabin. It is to become the pilot of your own life.
The world is very good at teaching you to climb. It will give you ladders, hierarchies, targets, models, seminars, bonuses, titles, strategies, and ten thousand laminated ways to improve the 'prison' furniture. But very few people ask who is climbing, why they are climbing, and what part of them was abandoned in order to reach the top. Inside the glass, the room is still being instructed in the ‘Hierarchy of Wants’: How to rise without ever leaving the sealed system of proof.
The work is not to climb a 'better' pyramid. It is to recover the part of you that can see, choose, love, and fly. That is a totally different hierarchy altogether.
Abraham Maslow, the pioneering founder of humanistic psychology, whose work shifted the focus of psychology toward human thriving, never drew a pyramid. He never reduced human becoming to a coloured-in triangle. His truest line, from his paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, resists corporate reduction, remaining that:
“What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call Self-actualisation.”
Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs' proposed that people are motivated by their needs. What if our most basic need, our deepest, was also our highest? Well, it is. And that need is love. And that is what we need to achieve our highest potential. And this, as Maslow described, is our "peak experience".
Thinking Got Us to the Moon. It Did Not Get Us Home.
Thinking got us to the moon. It did not get us home. The ego mind (OK, we will use the abbreviation ‘mind’ from now on) is brilliant but limited. Yet it pretends not to be. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." The moon is 400 thousand kilometres away. The nearest star (after our sun) is 4 light years away. Doesn’t sound like much. That’s 40 trillion km. Sorry Neil Armstrong. Not such a giant leap after all. We love tall ladders as children. But they are pretty short for a man. But we still whoop and back slap.
We make it to the moon. But we cannot see the stars: The ones inside us. The ones of consciousness. Science reduces. It uses words only science can understand. I have a PhD in Natural Sciences. All disciplines are contracted identikit boxes using knowledge as control. It makes me laugh when scientist and religions argue as they are built in the same way, and fight because they only know conflict and they are both built on dogma, pretending to protect us, to serve humanity, but dogma becomes more entrenched rather than liberating. Science ignores what we cannot measure: It turns a blind eye, and it focuses its beam of observation, smaller like a desk lamp, when Higher Truth, in other words ‘real reality’ is like the sun.
Like the legal system, like psychology, takes you to prison but stops at the door out. I know, I have a medical degree and a Master’s degree from Cambridge in the history and philosophy of science and medicine. We can master systems, roles, careers, arguments, evidence, strategy, language, law, science, medicine, success. We create economies. We build civilisations. And then we criticise them. And still, we may not know how to come home to ourselves.
Knowledge belongs to ‘what’ and ‘how’. Wisdom belongs to ‘why’ and ‘who’. There is only one question to ask your Self and to answer in life. Wisdom, which quite literally means ‘love of wisdom’ is the intuition that arises when we ask:
“What would love do now?”
Love is your internal Satnav, guiding you at every fork in the road, always taking you home to your Self: The totality of you. It never takes a wrong turn. Wisdom lifts the lid on our boxes of fear: The ones around us and our fractured psyche, the ones around every discipline and institutions, and around civilisation. We don’t need to tear these down. What is the point of an empty prison? The most rigid institutions will collapse first. That is why ‘resilience’ is in essence, a load of old ‘merde’, if you will pardon my French. I am half-French, so I reserve the right to drop it in here. Resilience, and resilience training at a weekend workshop has no effect: It is just a mandate for passing the blame ‘downwards’. Projection is always due to fear. You cannot mandate healing. Only we can heal ourselves. We created the institutions, then they took on a life of their own. We can leave at any time and return to visions of utopia: This is our gentle revolution. None of us must change our work, sell our house or our Ferrari in some cases and become monks. We very simply need to practice what we do from a different place. Then we not only become whole ourselves, but others inevitably heal too. That means you and humanity. Healing means ‘to make whole (what I call Re-Collection), sound, well, and healed. Gotta love etymology. Healing becomes the process, in other word the journey. Wholeness is the destination: That’s where we are going. You will get there for sure, as you have found this page. But we all need a guide. That’s where I come in. I have maps to guide us.
The Map
William Blake wrote in ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ that:
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
Aldous Huxley wrote in ‘The Doors of `Perception’, centuries later, where he expanded this vision, writing that the ego-mind functions as a ‘reducing valve’: Filtering out the immensity of the infinite so that we might survive the ordinary. When the valve opens, even for a moment, we perceive what he called the “Real reality,” the unfiltered field and divine order of consciousness itself.
But what is 'real reality'? What is Truth? How do we achieve authenticity, clarity, joy, freedom, abundance, and healing? How do we start? Where have we been until now? Where are we? And where are we going?
Well, we need a map.
I have the map. More precisely, I have the maps: A map of the human condition, a map of the psyche, its fracture and its Re-Collection, a map of the mechanics of every life, and a map for crossing the ‘Bridge’, the return to BEing. I didn’t find it. I lived it. So, it drew itself. The maps do show treasure, even when that treasure is the darkest cave, but the maps are the treasure. But a treasure always requires a journey. And it requires a new way of seeing. True seeing. Without the ego’s illusory perception.
The maps that I will gladly give to you are not abstract diagrams for clever people to admire. They are maps made from pain: My pain, your pain, and the pain that people share in quieter moments, in their chambers, in their consulting rooms, in their board rooms, in their dressing rooms, in their bedrooms, when the performance has finally become too exhausting to maintain. There is blood on them. But they show us where we came from, and they show us the way forward. And seeing, is healing.
The maps show the mechanism under every life: How conditional love, childhood Trauma, attachment, external validation, our ‘Quest for Love’, craving, achievement, preference, thinking, control, and emotional anaesthesia can become a life.
And they show the way back: Through awareness, expanded consciousness, wisdom, feeling, perception, clarity, intuition, Truth, love, Re-Collection, and the ‘Bridge of Awakening’. The maps are just too good, too precise, not to share.
The maps are a treasure worth more than diamonds.
What Working With Me Is
This is not conventional coaching. It is not advice. It is not mentoring. It is not performance optimisation with a spiritual accent. It is not therapy by another name. We are unravelled. We will ‘ravel you back up.’ This is real ‘Personal Power.’
This is a guided return to your Highest Self.
I will hear and see the highest version of you until you can hear and see it for yourself. You already know the answers, but you will only hear them when you say them in the right kind of presence.
As you walk through the corridor of wisdom, which is equivalent to the ‘Bridge of Awakening’ in the map of the landscape of the human condition, both of which I will describe to you during coaching sessions, you become increasingly able to truly see and truly feel. This is beyond the five senses. This corresponds to increasingly expanded consciousness, to clarity, intuition, unconditional love, joy, authenticity, and Truth. The illusion of a fear-driven life disappears, agency is restored, and you become your own guide.
There are many tools for this. And I will give them to you. You will heal, become whole, and your fractured psyche will Re-Collect.
Come walk with me. I know the way.
Primary Invitations
Start Here
Read the map of the human condition and the way back to you.
An Invitation
Begin a conversation about the Bridge, the tools, and the return to your Self.
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How may I serve you?
We will explore your inner world of core values, fears, desires, and limiting beliefs in order to use the obstacles that seem to be holding you back in life to your advantage and create greater possibilities for your ways of BEing.
I serve you with compassion, and create a safe space for you to be vulnerable and open up, as that is where the real deep healing occurs, so that you can finally release the fears, shame, and stories that hurt you and hold you back from being your true Self and shining your light.I bring strength, courage, wisdom, and the ability to empathise and show compassion that most people can’t understand and that you will not have experienced before.
This is way more than coaching, it's co-creation.This is Deep Coaching, Super-Coaching & Transformative Life Coaching: And Yet it's more than those too.
I am the person who guides others to guides others to become their own guides.
Click here to read my 500 free articles all about transformation.
I have been on a personal journey of Self-discovery full time for over five years in order to serve you.
I coach 1:1 in person in and around London, UK and on Zoom Worldwide.
What does coaching with me look like?
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You will experience a deep transformation and character shift on your journey to Real Personal Power, Self-realisation, manifestation, and abundance.
You are the doorway to infinite possibility.
I will hear and see the highest version of you, holding that space for you, until you do so your Self.
It is from that place that you will effortlessly create your life.
Creating a space that is expansive enough for your Soul. Providing a cosmic view on your life
Don't wake up in fear: Awaken to fearlessness, freedom, and abundance.
This path will lead you from your pain to peace.
“Change your thoughts and you change your world”
Norman Vincent Peale
All Videos
All Videos
Carl Gustav Jung - "Face to Face" (BBC 1959/better quality!)
Gabor Maté – Authenticity vs. Attachment
Carl Jung and the Shadow: Integrating the Hidden Power of Your Dark Side
