Growing up
I should say first that I had a good childhood. We lived in a nice area and regularly went on foreign holidays. But as I got older, I started to notice my parents arguing after I had gone to bed, and I am not sure they realised I could hear them. There were numerous conversations and raised voices about things that probably were not intended for younger ears.
My parents split up when I was fourteen. Mum was a nurse and my dad had worked in the drinks industry for many years. After the separation, he took on his first pub, a very busy student pub in Preston. Mum was on her own for a while before eventually meeting a local guy. He was lovely and charming when he was sober, but when he had had a drink, he became a very different man and not someone I wanted to be around as it would bring drama. I clearly carried more hurt through those years than I let myself admit at the time. I wanted to earn my own money so I was not a drain on my mum, which is a fairly specific thing for a teenager to be organising his week around, and it set something running in me that took decades to notice.
Finding the nightlife
I moved to Preston, studied music, art, and media studies at college, and worked shifts in my dad's pub alongside it. I was already out raving, deep in the nightlife industry that would end up running through the next three decades of my life. I started DJing around 1989 or 1990. A friendship with a lad called Jamie Lloyd turned into a DJ partnership. We pooled our record collections, moved in together at eighteen, and built a name for ourselves in Preston's house music scene. That is really where the thirty years of reading rooms started: standing behind a set of decks, watching a room's mood shift track by track, learning to read what a crowd needed before it could tell you.
From decks to networks
From there it widened out. Running bars. Audiovisual and electronics in the nightclub world, sound, light, the technical end of making a room work. Then sales. Then networking, cyber security and telecoms from 2008 onwards, which was still very much sales-led and consultative work. My job was never really about the kit. It was about understanding people, identifying the problems they were actually sitting with, and working with them towards a resolution.
At some point I noticed the two worlds, nightlife and tech, were asking the same question in different accents. How do you understand a pattern well enough to work with it, instead of just reacting to it? There was a deeper connection too, one that only clicked into place later. Networks are a lot like nervous systems: they carry signals and information between different points, quietly keeping everything connected and in flow. When a network is healthy, information moves freely and things just work. When something is blocked or misfiring, the whole system starts to struggle. People are no different. That idea of connecting dots, whether in a room, a network, or a person's story, turned out to be the thread running through all of it.
The book that started the noticing
During lockdown I read Life Remixed, by fellow DJ Mark Wilkinson, and recognised parts of my own story in its pages. That was the first time I looked at myself properly rather than just getting on with things. It planted a question I could not put back down.
The health scare
Not long after, I ended up in hospital for a week with a suspected brain haemorrhage. I had already carried my share of pain, loss, grief, and stress by that point. The hospital stay made me re-evaluate everything, properly, not in the vague way people say that. It is one thing to think you should look at your patterns. It is another to be lying in a hospital bed with nothing else to do but actually look.
The long goodbye
A couple of years ago my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's and dementia. I go and help look after him a couple of afternoons a week now, to give my stepmum a break. What people call "the long goodbye" is exactly that: watching someone's mental and cognitive function dwindle week after week. It is heartbreaking, and it makes you think hard about your own life and your own patterns while there is still time to do something about them.
Starting over, more than once
I have been through two relationship breakdowns, and had to start my life over again both times, more or less from scratch. Been there, got the T-shirt from relationship breakdown. Looking back, with more honesty than felt comfortable at the time, I can see patterns and messages I either did not notice, or noticed and chose not to act on. That kind of reflection is uncomfortable. It is also where most of the useful learning turned out to be.
The change
Almost three years ago I made a conscious decision to remove alcohol from my life. Not because I had a drinking problem. I could always take it or leave it. What I did notice, though, was that when alcohol was involved, it often had the potential to bring unnecessary drama. For me, choosing not to drink was simply a deliberate decision to remove something that wasn't adding anything positive to my life.
It has been 1,000 days since I chose to give up alcohol. Not that I'm counting! The only reason I know is that it closely aligns with my 50th birthday.
What sobriety surfaced
Stopping drinking made a lot of things visible that had been comfortably out of view. An old memory came back into focus: being bullied as a kid, made to dance in front of the whole playground and ridiculed for it. It is probably not a coincidence that dancing became such a big part of my adult life, and it took me a long time to notice why. I have only recently recognised that throughout my adult life, whenever I went out dancing, it was normally accompanied by a bit of Dutch courage. That goes all the way back to the bullying and how that experience affected my confidence, though I could not see the link at the time.
It also helped me see something about my mum that I had not let myself look at directly before: that she had likely spent much of her life numbing pain that started long before I came along, in her own childhood. Alcohol had quietly shaped more of my family's story than any of us ever properly talked about.
Sobriety started me asking harder questions about the patterns I was carrying. Where they came from. Which ones I had actually chosen. Which ones were just running on their own.
That search led me to Belief Coding, Love Languages, and E-Colours, the three approaches I now bring into this work. Not because I set out to become a coach. Because I could not put the questions down, and eventually I wanted to sit across from other people asking the same ones.
Finding my person
After stopping drinking, and starting life again, I met somebody completely by accident: she needed a website and a booking system built for her holistic therapy business. Not long after, we started seeing more of one another and even did salsa lessons together, dancing properly, sober, for what felt like the first time in my life. Through her I got curious about sound therapy, gong baths, yoga, and qigong, all the things she was already deep into.
We have been together for nearly three years now. Our lives are unusually aligned. We have both done the inner work, both stopped drinking, and both chosen paths that involve helping other people, though she has been at it a lot longer than I have. We now run events together: breathwork, sound therapy, qigong, movement, and somatic release. These things matter to us more than most.
Honesty about where I am
I am a Belief Coding® facilitator in training, not yet fully qualified, and I have an informed interest in E-Colours rather than formal facilitator certification. I say this plainly because I would rather you hear it from me than wonder. I do not claim qualifications, licences, or certifications I do not hold, and I will not promise to fix everything. No honest person can. What I can do is hold the structure and keep the conversation honest.
Connection Worx Group Ltd
I founded Connection Worx Group Ltd, and it works across several different areas. One side of the business focuses on technology and communications: business connectivity, telephony, Wi-Fi, cybersecurity and related services. Another side is focused on people, whether that is individuals within businesses or people from private backgrounds working with us one-to-one.
The coaching side of the business exists to support people who may be facing challenges, have been through difficult experiences, feel stuck, want to make a change, shift their mindset or achieve more in their lives. That is a big part of why I created it. I stay highly involved in everything delivered under the Connection Worx banner, including the coaching. In most cases, you work directly with me. If that changes for a piece of work, you will know before it happens.
There is also a network of trusted partners across specialist areas, brought in where a piece of work needs expertise beyond my own scope. This is always disclosed clearly. It is not a formal management structure, and it should never be implied as one.
This is reflective coaching, not therapy, medical treatment, or psychological diagnosis. If you are in crisis or need clinical support, please contact a qualified health professional or a local emergency service.