Heavy shoulders
Shorter patience
Slower decisions

You've been tired for so long and you don't know what to blame apart from your age.

One of the kids had his head bitten off over nothing this week and you hated yourself before finishing the sentence.

The thing you swore you'd start on Monday is thirty Mondays old.

Is this you?

Rebuild ConfidenceRestore ControlReclaim Self-Trust

I went numb and I didn't know why

Every picture in this is me. Good years, bad years, and a few I'd sooner have left in the drawer, none of them touched up the way the lads you follow touch theirs up. I've just made them talk.

Every fix you've tried lasted about a fortnight, and you stopped telling anyone which one you were on.

The doctor offered little more than asking, yet again, whether you'd had any thoughts of self harm. (well I didn't but if one more person asks me I might...)

So now you think you're the problem.

You're not the problem. The fire's gone out, and nobody sells a fix for that because nobody names it.

You'll know why it went out, why it was never your age, and why every fix you bought was aimed at the wrong thing.

Press play. It's 3m36s and you'll know by the end if I'm talking about you.

Download Relighting The Fire

What you get

An obviously simple way to claim back
your mornings and your evenings, in a week

A few minutes a night. Every evening for seven evenings a message from me tells you the one thing for tomorrow, so there is nothing to plan, nothing to remember and nothing to be strong about.

You do it or you don't, and by the weekend you know which man you are. Here's what the week leaves you with.

Your mornings are yours again, before the phone gets its hands on them.
A system to finally start ‘the thing’ you've told everyone you're gonna do, before they stop asking.
A way to kick ‘the noise’ that makes you flinch and knocks you off track, each and every day.
A firm return to the simple things that set us up for the day way back when, a proper night and a clean start.
A private online clubhouse away from the usual social media traps, beside men just like you who say what they did and what they didn't, nobody keeps score, and every one of them wants the very best for you.
An end to the energy draining negotiation before every single decision.

Not a new you. Not an old you. You with the fire lit.

Start the free 7 day reset

Relighting The Fire, the seven day reset protocol, shown on a tablet

First, the truth

We box shit up

The polite word is compartmentalise. Every man reading this knows it, because we all do it.

Something doesn't sit right, so we do what we always do. Seal it. Shove it down. Crack on.

Then the next thing. Box it. Seal it. Crack on. We call it coping. We call it being men about it.

From the outside we look fine. Better than fine. We've got so good at the boxing we've half forgotten the boxes are there.

They're there.Stacked.Sealed.Full.

We let things slide that betray our very make up because underneath it all we're too afraid of being pushed aside.

The mates thin out, then it's only three memes into a whatsapp group a month, and then it's nothing, radio silence. We file it all under what happens to men.

Every January we swear this is the year, and every year the story about how fit we used to be gets another year on it and the lottery ticket still gets bought with the last bit of 'anything's possible' belief we have left.

This time next year Rodders...

A man sat on the floor with a mug, head resting on his hand, surrounded by stacked cardboard boxes marked DOUBT, ANGER, REGRET, FAILURE, SHAME, GRIEF, PRESSURE, ANXIETY and EMOTIONS? NAH MATE, with things bursting out of several of them and flames on top

What I believe

The thing is never the thing

The drink, the temper, the fuse that's got shorter every year... none of that is the problem. They're what a man reaches for when he's lost, and he's been lost so long he no longer sees it.

Anger is easier to sit in than the pain.

He invests all his spare time, his thoughts, his energy, and worst of all his whole self-worth, into things that seem honest and brilliant. His kid's success on the pitch. How much of his relationship is still rooted in that hot fire his wife and him built the whole thing on.

His lad plays a blinder on the Saturday and he's ten feet tall all week. A bad school report lands on the Tuesday and he's flat for days and couldn't tell you why it hit that hard, because on paper it's a nine year old and his spellings.

She reaches for him and he's a man again. She doesn't, and something goes quiet that he'd never say out loud. Yes, it's about the sex, of course it's about the sex, but it's more than that and he knows it. It's about still being the one she picks.

He tries. She's tired. He tries again tomorrow, and the day after, and one day he stops trying. So he sees to himself downstairs, fifteen years old again. Married, and on his own.

Up and down, up and down,on a scoreboard thathe doesn't even own

Over twenty years I've watched men go at the thing. Nowhere more than in myself. The drink, the belly, the job, the temporary physical fix in the gym. It was never enough.

It's why I've gone into this work so hard. For me and my one chance at this life, and to stop the mistakes of the past repeating again on my kids.

So we go at it the other way round. Energy first, because there is no such thing as a motivation problem, only a man too knackered to start. Then your word, rebuilt small enough that you cannot argue with the evidence. Then the man, and the negotiating stops.

If any of that sounds like you, this whole thing is my invite

The corner man

The man in your corner has one of his own

Italian restaurants at fourteen. Doors at university. Then over twenty years standing next to men while they rebuilt themselves, long before I had the words for what was actually being rebuilt.

There was a Sunday in the middle of all that where I climbed the stairs on a hangover with a plate I hadn't needed, caught a fat and unhealthy personal trainer in the mirror on the landing, and stood there lonely in a house full of people who loved me.

The men in front of me taught me the rest of it. They'd fly for three weeks and then hand me a list of reasons because they were unique. They weren't.

None of this was written from the outside. My best work has always been what I needed for myself and this was no different. I went first, which puts me one page ahead of you and not a step further.

My own life got turned over, and I'll not be dressing that up for a website. But the simple fact of life is that we can't fix what wasn't ours to fix. We can only do what we need and must do for ourselves and our kin. This was the living map for me to do it and it began where it should've, by relighting the fire.

In their words

Men like you

“I felt like I'd lost myself. I was just sort of a bit of a phantom walking around.”

“The most important thing for me is making sure that the people I care about feel that I'm in the room. When I was in that place a few years ago, I wasn't. I'm in the room now.”James Gee

The list of everything

You've done the something else before

The something else is the next fix. The one you went and got instead of the thing underneath.

The jab that doubled in price and handed the weight back the minute you stopped.
The unfinished book holding a door open somewhere.
The gym direct debit that never missed a month, just cheap enough not to cancel, but the cost per visit, too embarrassing to quote.
The app tracker that counted the decline in beautiful detail.
The swiped notification halfway up the stairs.
The accountability lad who flaked the same week you did, which neither of you has mentioned since.
The therapy where you told the truth about everything except how you actually were.
The podcast protocol you couldn't remember by Thursday.
The bloods that came back normal, and somehow that made it worse.

None of it was a con. They all did the job it said on the tin, and every one of them worked on the something.

Not one of them ever met the man underneath.

Read this bit honest

You'll know by the Monday speech

Every man has one. The little address he gives himself on a Sunday night, third one this month, about how tomorrow it all changes.

If you're sick of the sound of your own speech, this is for you.

It's for the man who runs the job, the mortgage, the school runs, the lot, and somewhere in the running of everything stopped running himself.

Usually 35 or over, but the age isn't the thing.

It's not for the man after a six week shred for Marbella. There are a thousand pages for him, with countdown timers and men holding their own t shirts up. Some of them do a fine job of it.

Nor is it for the man who wants it to happen to him. Everything works. The thing that decides it is whether you work, or not.

If any of this lands, stay. If it doesn't, leave.

Your move

The reset is free
The only catch is
You strike the match

Seven days. One rule, then another on top, until all four are running. Nothing to survive.

By the end of the week you've unearthed something you haven't had in years. A short run of promises you made to yourself and actually kept. It won't look like much from the outside. Neither does a lit match.

It's free because it doesn't need selling. It needs doing.

There's a paid one after it. Tough 28, if you want it when the week's done.

Strike the match

Start the free reset

It's simple on purpose but it's monumental if it begins...

Your move

It costs nothing

If today isn't the day, get on the emails instead

It's a piece of writing most days, and never just to fill the slot. For men who are tired of being lied to about how this actually gets fixed.

It is not weekly wellbeing tips. It is not coaching dressed up as content. It is not me stroking your hair while you explain why Monday is cleaner.

Read it for free. Decide later.

One field. No ‘first name’. No ‘how did you hear about us’. Just in.

Heavy shouldersShorter patienceSlower decisions

Rebuild Confidence | Restore Control | Reclaim Self-Trust

An obviously simple way to claim backyour mornings and your evenings, in a week