A few lifetimes
in one.

Fitness was the first thing that gave me confidence as a teenager, so I went after it hard. Before I ever qualified as a trainer, I spent two summers in San Diego training in the hope of becoming a mixed martial arts fighter. That gym showed me fitness could be a career, so I came home to build one in Ireland, where it wasn't really an industry yet. I did a master's in exercise and nutrition science and set up my first business. It failed.

I went to Dublin chasing a celebrity-trainer career, came home to Galway ashamed, and worked in a pizza shop while teaching classes on the side. The classes took off, and I became one of the first trainers in Ireland to take fitness online at scale. Between 2012 and 2016 it grew from 5 clients on my local beach to 20,000 clients around the world.

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg singled out how we used social media, and I did national TV and radio and wrote bestselling books.

It was never just about the workouts. We brought the biggest team Tough Mudder had ever seen, more than 500 people. We raised over €250,000 for local charities and built a school in Nepal. The values underneath all of it were community, growth, contribution and reciprocity.

So I walked away from fitness, more or less completely, and started again. First I had to face something that terrified me: public speaking. People are often surprised to hear I’m an introvert. Because I put myself out there online and on stages, they assume I’m naturally confident. The opposite feels truer. To get over the fear, I set out to give 100 free talks in a year. That turned into hundreds of workshops for the public and for companies, and national tours around Ireland speaking to rooms of up to 1,000 people about mental, emotional and relational health.

I spent a couple of years going deep on personal development: coaching, logotherapy, NLP, hypnosis and mindset work. My book Upgrade Your Life came out of that time, and over a couple of years I recorded 260 episodes of my podcast, which passed 3 million downloads. Listen to the archive → It helped. It was also almost entirely in my head.

After all that success, I was seeking. I climbed mountains all over the world, ran marathons, did Ironman 70.3 Barcelona, walked the Camino de Santiago and took on World’s Toughest Mudder, 24 hours through the desert outside Las Vegas. Looking back, I was trying to meet myself.

All of it made me more self-aware. I could name my patterns, trace them back to the root and explain exactly what I was doing. But knowing the pattern and changing it are two different things, and that gap is what sent me looking somewhere else.

From the outside, things were going really well. Inside, I couldn’t slow down or enjoy any of it. I was moving frantically through life, and looking back it was high-functioning anxiety. Then, at a festival in Costa Rica, I did my first breathwork session, and for the first time in my adult life my mind went quiet. That was about ten years ago, and it sent me after the emotional side of things. I studied relationship models and trained with the Imago and Gottman institutes, and with leading teachers in bodywork, trauma release, body-based psychotherapy and breathwork. In a lot of ways it’s been a 15-year apprenticeship with some of the best people in the world.

Just before Covid, my events were bringing in up to 1,000 people. I enjoyed it, but it was starting to feel more like a performance than the work I wanted to be doing. I noticed I got far more from working with small groups over a longer stretch of time, so after Covid that’s where I put my energy.

My greatest passion over the last few years has been Journey the Breath, the facilitator training I built on my own lived experience. It’s a real, immersive deep dive: you learn to hold this work for others by going through it yourself first.

I’ve trained over 120 facilitators from more than 20 countries, from GPs and psychotherapists to people with no clinical background at all. It’s the thing I’m proudest of. About the training →

I’m grateful to have a very integrated life now. I get up early and walk Nova with Nandar, and we talk and connect. Then I train jiu-jitsu, and the rest of the day goes to study, teaching, building courses and content, and coaching. In the evenings I see good friends, stay active and lift. When I’m not working, I’m playful.

On the surface, my life doesn’t look a million miles from what it did ten years ago. The felt experience of it is completely different. Ten-plus years on the mats and a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu have a lot to do with that.

What I bring

A big toolbox. My own lived experience, plus education across mental, emotional, relational and physical health and nutrition. I’ve had mentors continuously since I was 22, and I’m two years into a three-year training in Core Energetics, a body-based psychotherapy.

Teachers and influences along the way include Joe Hudson, Robert Masters, Paul Chek, Byron Katie, Debbie Ford, Stanislav Grof, John Demartini, Wim Hof, David Berceli, Charles Poliquin, and the Gottman and Imago approaches to relationships.