Over the last 33 years I have placed my fingerprints on many business ventures. Buying and selling, starting some from scratch and ending some abruptly with many stories of success and failure along the way.

You could split up my business journey into 2 halves. The first 19 years leading up to the GFC (Global Financial Crisis of 2008) and then the 14 years after it.

I thought it was over for me, we nearly lost everything. After 19 years in business under my belt I was feeling “successful”. From the outside looking in, it would seem things were going well…. But the 2008 GFC nearly destroyed me…

The threat of losing our home broke my heart… as did the thought of having to uproot my 2 girls from school where they were thriving and bundle them down the road to another school. It was difficult realising my world was falling apart but worse, unbearable that I was causing the lives of my family to be disrupted through no fault of their own.

I pushed through the agonising sleepless nights, running on pure adrenaline, feeling disconnected from my work, and not knowing where the next mortgage payment was coming from while hustling to make ends meet.

I felt trapped, thinking do I give this all away and get a real job or do I persevere and try and make it through.

On reflection it was courage that got me through. Something I now value extremely high.

It took me 3 years to get back on my feet after losing a lot of money, equity, and confidence that I could make it work.

I now know that the GFC was the catalyst that helped me find a new pathway forward. It turned out that it wasn’t the 2008 GFC that nearly destroyed me but an external view of my business world…. I created.

Over the next few years, I was influenced to look inwardly for the answers to my business and personal challengers. I wanted to know how I got into that mess in the first place.

I became obsessed with finding out the answer to this burning question.

Why don’t we get what we say we want?

Since 2011 I have been looking deeper to find more sustainable answers to business growth problems by challenging myself to answer this question.

This led me to spending a lot of time studying the engineering of human behaviour and why we often don’t get the results we set out to achieve.

The more I learned the more I realised I didn’t know. I took on coaching, studied high performers, listened to experts from around the world and invested in myself at every opportunity my resources would allow.

As I implemented what I was learning the results started to flow and so I doubled down on it. The result was exponential growth in a systematic way that at a previous time, I didn’t believe was possible.

The big lesson was that looking exclusively externally will never get you to what you really want. It’s when you reflect internally to what is driving your behaviours and actions you become truly self-aware. Its then things change, and the magic happens.

I learned this from listening to the stories of high performers around the world and started to hear this was a common thread and my own evidence of transformation was convincing.

Throughout my journey, I discovered we are all a product of our positive & negative childhood experiences…

It’s the emotions from those events that drive us.

It’s these feelings we are not paying attention to, that are delivering what we get.

We can either fight against them our entire life, and fall into unconscious cycles of self-sabotage and burnout that leads to unfulfilled dreams ...

Or harness that power to our advantage, to be calm within the storm, and make better decisions.

Make no mistake when we focus on our internal world…our external world shifts automatically.

Today I still have a successful real estate company I established in 2007 and with the help of a great team I only need to invest minimal hours per week …

I’m living the dream I always imagined, not trapped in doing too many roles in the business...

I learned to delegate and get to choose how much I do and don’t do and am free to pursue my true passion of helping business owners transition through the valleys on the ascent to their personal Everest.

I’m living proof, as business leaders, we don’t have to be at the mercy of the next looming storm, economic downturn, global crisis or recession…

And can get back in control of our vision to achieve the financial freedom which provides abundance for our loved ones.

My framework of helping others evolve centres around the foundational block of personal leadership. Self-reflection leads to self-awareness. When you understand yourself at depth the by product is we understand the people around us better and this creates connections that take us to our desired outcomes.

I have developed the skill to help people focus on these areas which have the biggest impact on what they say that want, but yet blind to it.

When I am not pursuing my purpose of helping other business leaders evolve themselves to who they need to become and veraciously learning about new ways of answering my burning question of “why don’t we get what we say we want”

I’m relaxing with my family and friends and being grateful for what I got.

My wife Tami, daughters Olivia and Claudia are the reasons I get inspired each day to make a difference to their lives and the lives of the people around us.