Ready for the next episode
I was nervous before posting my blog: ‘Allow me to reintroduce myself’ last week.
I’d written and rewritten it many times, over getting on for a month. Was I ready to be back out ‘there’, wherever that is?
After my brother Jordan’s suicide in February last year, and the selling of Radioactive PR in May - an agency I’d founded at 27 and ran for more than 10 years - my life became a series of falls.
Tumbling, painful, bruising, whiskey-sodden falls. Until I realised I’d fallen as far as I could.
Rock bottom, as they say.
Without my brother, and having foolishly thought I and my family were through the worst life could throw at us, I felt something I’d never before felt, in a life I’d otherwise positively dedicated to breaking generational cycles - I felt hopeless.
It wasn’t until a few months after I went public with my podcast Project Possible* that, while patting myself down and assessing the damage for the first time - you don’t really have time or the inclination to care if you wake up the next day as you’re careering headfirst - I realised that I still had a need to create.
It was the first sign of the old me, in late 2025/early 2026.
A sign I initially hated and wanted to reject out of hand, because that meant healing. And I didn’t want to heal. As irrational as it is, and grief can be beyond irrational, if he couldn’t ever heal, how dare I? So, the budding seeds of hope became immediately resentable. I wanted to stamp and piss on them.
In the months after I started to release the podcast, with some of the most incredible guests, each supportive and with the most incredible stories, and as the grief ‘firsts’ began to come and go, I started to breathe out. I began to scrape myself off the floor.
And, in the last couple of months, I realised I could look up from the place I’d fallen to. I could see the bloody rocks I’d collided with on my way down, but also, I could see a path beside them. Steep, but a path upwards no less.
And last week, sharing that blog - and I appreciate I’m nobody important here, and that grief and the life’s arrows take aim at us all - I took my first steps up that path.
One handhold, one foothold after another. And while I’m not quite at running-up-the-stairs-on-all-fours joyful climbing yet, and that this particular grief will forever snipe at me, cruelly nodding at the space he should still inhabit, I know that I’m not where I was.
That I can, as my 15-year-old son put it, opt to play New Game+.
A chance to start again, carrying the experience, the scars and the lessons from the first play-through.
And Christ, that’s something.
*I still almost always initially typo it as Pissible, which makes me smile like a naughty kid every time
Here’s to opportunity knocking
Appropriately taken from my chat with Derrick Evans MBE - otherwise known as fitness icon Mr Motivator
I shared in the blog that I’m open to opportunities.
That while the podcast is my passion, and gives me an enormous sense of purpose (and as I push towards episode 100 and millions of viewers and listeners to date, it’s building a wonderful audience of Possibilists) I feel capable of a bit more.
Public speaking. Being an agent for talent and other speakers. Selective advisory work for business leaders, teams and PR industry suppliers. Car-washing. I don’t know.
And just a week on, I’m so excited by what’s come my way. Alongside some of the loveliest messages I could have imagined receiving, for which - I am incredibly grateful, and you’ll know who you all are, I’ve been contacted with opportunities.
The opportunity to talk to a company about sponsoring the podcast.
The opportunity to advise and support a business and entrepreneur I’ve long been incredibly impressed by.
The opportunity to be an agent for a couple of high-profile recent guests on the podcast - people whose stories scream positivity, possibility and success through adversity.
The opportunity to take what I’m already doing, and build it into my own conference.
Each of these is a hand reaching out to me, pulling me up and out.
I always endeavoured to be supportive to anybody and everybody I could help on my way up the first time, as best as I could. Certainly never because I ever expected anything in the future, but, because I knew it was the right thing to do.
Well, it just shows how much community matters, because it’s more than heartening to feel the kindness of many of those same people now.
I’m a lucky man. And I’m hopeful.
