Can you talk a little bit more on

that? Yeah, so motivation, let's think about it like this.

It comes and goes.

It's a bit like petrol.

You throw petrol on the fire, you get a massive bit of heat for a few seconds, and it's gone.

Motivation never lasts long.

We want to have burning desire, like this really deep-seated fuel that never burns out.

hmm

He says,

excuse me? Yeah, I've paid a small fortune for you to coach me.

I'm not leaving.

I said, no, you need to.

Like, I'll see you next week.

We'll start with the same question.

So most of us start with, you know, what's your financial retirement number? What does ideal amazing health look like to you? If you start with them, you don't really know.

What do you do fitness-wise?

So the first things

first, most people don't know what they want.

Most people start with, I think I want this.

So I always ask people to get radically clear before you start working out harder, investing your money, whatever it might be, reading books, just get clear on what you want.

So I had a friend, John, who grew up in New Zealand, and he had a solo mother.

She was raising three kids.

She fled Nazi Germany, and her entire family was exterminated except for her.

Is there a dark side to that optimization? We're not going to go into all of the things that are perhaps controversial, but in general, have you had to coach people out of a pattern that they think they were doing for optimization, but they were really harming themselves physically, mentally, and perhaps their environment? What is your experience with the most popular sort of optimization kind of processes that people are going through, be it through, you know, peptides or any deep or whatever it is that people are going through? Have you had instances where you've had to coach people out of these or give them better direction in general?

He says,

excuse me? Yeah, I've paid a small fortune for you to coach me.

I'm not leaving.

I said, no, you need to.

Like, I'll see you next week.

We'll start with the same question.

So most of us start with, you know, what's your financial retirement number? What does ideal amazing health look like to you? If you start with them, you don't really know.

What do you do fitness-wise?

Yeah.

So when I was starting up my business, I probably was anywhere between 70 to 100-hour weeks and didn't care.

Like, it was awesome.

It was exciting and, as you say, dopamine and all the fun stuff that comes with it.

Lack of sleep, who cares? And I started to get some issues.

So I discovered, like, a lump in my chest and I was like, "Ooh, what's that?" So ended up discovering I had, like, a hormonal stress response.

So I could still operate and thought it was fine, but my body was starting to say, "Actually, no, you've got too much cortisol in your system all the time.

Yeah.

ireland the troubles the troubles indeed

100%.

So my headmaster got me into drumming.

At 13, I became the world champion, solo drumming champion.

At 14, I won it again.

And I seen that as my ticket to get out of Northern Ireland.

And very fortunate that there was a couple of opportunities, one in Vancouver, Canada, one in New Zealand, and a little bit of an opportunity in Sydney, Australia too.

Tell the listeners what this is all about.

So thank

you.

Yeah, no problem.

And an example, probably in my life, go back six years, it's COVID.

And my partner and I were watching Game of Thrones almost every day because, you know, we can't leave our house and we're drinking red wine.

I was like, this is amazing.

We get to stay at home.

Yeah, of course.

yeah, yeah, no, I could be.

And he says, look, I really want to start as soon as possible.

I said, look, I'll see you next week.

So he rocks up and I say, first question.

And this is the, as people are listening to this, I want them to answer the question for themselves.

I said, what do you want? And he goes, um, uh, I says, look, I'll see you next week.

He said, what? I said, I'll see you next week.

If I was going to tell anybody today has been through what I've been through, uh bankruptcies all kinds of things financial issues you name it i've been there i would say look for joy first and whatever the hell it is you're doing because if you're not you're looking in the wrong place

Can you recall a client that really benefited from that from you? You know, might've been identifying something they needed to do, and then what was their path in terms of adopting that, and then the, the end results?

Yeah, great question.

I had actually a, a client from the US, and this is maybe about six or maybe seven years ago.

And he came to me because he was an insurance broker and wanted to really nail it, top 10 in the US.

He's super duper driven.

So that's initially why he come to work with me.

"I wanna be a high performer in my career." It's like, cool.

What have you found is the best way to address that with a business person, a sports person, to get them back on track?

Yes.

Okay, so a long way from Ireland and a long way from New Zealand.

So I'm going to ask you to complete this sentence out loud and see if you can finish it.

So...

Money doesn't grow on...

Trees.

Trees, right? So there we go.

So how do you stay, like, how do you ignore the noise? And how do you even know what's the right noise? What's the wrong noise? How do you get that tunnel vision?

Mm

... behind that amygdala? What are you feeding it? You know, often it's, "I'm not enough.

I'm scared.

I'm gonna screw up.

People might laugh." Well, that's all fine, but can you just rewire that? "Hey, I'm good enough.

I've spoke to other humans before in my life.

I can do this.

Can you tell me more about that, how people work through that?

i'm interested in something you mentioned in passing just before and i'd love to dive into it because when we had a seeds podcast conversation we went into quite a lot of depth so we're not going to go into as much depth as the podcast but you mentioned alcohol can you tell us a little bit about the role that alcohol plays within our society and then what have you found the results have been of abstaining from alcohol what's that journey been like for you

Look, as an Irishman, this is an interesting conversation to be having, to be fair, right? Alcohol is certainly a big part of my life, my upbringing.

It's a way to celebrate, a way to de-stress, a way to mourn, a way to connect, a way to entertain clients.

I had so many different parts of my life that alcohol was a part of.

And One of my mentors said, James, you realize that it's attractively packaged poison.

I said, what on earth are you talking about? He says, look at how beautiful the marketing is and the branding and look at all these adverts and films and alcohols kind of woven into every part of society quite subtly.

I was like, yeah, I know, but I enjoy it.

Okay,