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.
You may be saying to yourself at this point "Oh God, he knows my weather."
Yep, I know it, very well.
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?
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.
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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.
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I have been on a personal journey of Self-discovery full time for over five years in order to serve you.
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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
