I understand my life as a series of unlocks.

One day in 2004, for the first time in my life, I feel self-conscious. I’m wearing a blue beanie hat to hide my bed-hair.

“One day, poetry will explode into your life,” my father says. I hear a Bob Dylan CD in the car a few weeks later. I think of little else but the women in the songs throughout my schooldays. For reasons I don’t understand, I am the butt of the joke with boys I had considered friends.

I feel relief arriving at the University of Manchester in 2014, ready to reinvent myself. I am desperate to escape from what feels like the crushing weight of the London private school social bubble – the source, I believe, of my troubles. I libertine through the next two years.

That summer, I go to Rototom Festival in Benicassim and hear a sound system for the first time: music rooted in what I understood as music, presented with weight and treble. I don’t hear the Word, but I feel the Sound and the Power.

The same evening, an old-school raver, my neighbour in the camping zone, cuts through my bullshit and feeds it back to me. I sleep well that night. The next day, I hear something of the Word. I forget about it.

In 2019, after completing my MA, I get a job teaching English in Valencia, Spain. I meet my wife.

Our worlds collapse in on each other, and every part of me knows I have to be ready for this forceful, gifted, passionate, vivacious bombshell of a woman. I’m not.

Our daughter arrives soon after. It’s the happiest day of my life. But I’m not ready for her, either. What should be so right feels so, so wrong.

In 2020, I stop teaching to set up my business as a communication coach to provide for my family. I help 100s of clients express themselves.

I start making up for lost time. I unlearn what I need to unlearn: a need for validation, dependency, and fear. I take responsibility for my reality and start to live according to principles that work. Every aspect of my life transforms.

Many of these clients want more. I begin coaching them on the possibilities of where they communicate from.

Shirley and I are married on 27th July, 2023 – the 2nd happiest day of my life. She is the most amazing woman, and the most incredible blessing.

Today, I know exactly where I come from and exactly where I am going.

I coach people to do the same, and live beyond the possibilities they have created for themselves.