I want to be upfront with you before you read any further. This is not a tactics blog. There are no three-step frameworks for landing clients, no content strategies, and none of the usual stuff. If that’s what you’re after, there’s plenty of it elsewhere on this site.
But if you have the patience to sit with this one, I genuinely believe it could change how you think. And changing how you think, as I’ll explain, is the single most important thing that has led to everything I’ve built.
Over the past several years, I’ve generated just over £14 million, which is roughly $18 to $19 million USD.
I live with my partner, Sandy in Dubai. We travel almost every month, and I’ve been fortunate enough to take my parents to New York at Christmas and attend Formula 1 in Abu Dhabi with my team every year for the past five years.
I share that not to brag, but because I want you to understand the starting point before you decide any of this was inevitable or handed to me.
It wasn’t.
My Background Is Probably More Like Yours Than You Think
Nobody in my family has ever run a business. Not a grandparent, not a parent, not a sibling. My dad is an aeroplane mechanic at British Airways. My mum is a teaching assistant. My stepmum sells skincare products. My stepdad works in HR.
Four completely normal people who worked normal jobs, took one holiday a year to Spain, and got by. We weren’t poor, but we certainly weren’t wealthy.
I had a difficult childhood that I won’t go too deep into, but both my dad and my stepdad were physically abusive at different points, which eventually led to me being moved between homes and schools.
I left school with one fewer GCSE than everyone else because I wasn’t even allowed to sit my French exam. No A-levels. No university. Predicted D’s and U’s, scraped through with C’s and D’s. Nothing remarkable.
Then, at around sixteen or seventeen, I had both my legs surgically broken due to a condition I’d developed, spent eight weeks in a wheelchair, and lost the rugby and football that had been my entire world up to that point.
That’s what led me to the gym, which eventually led to personal training, which eventually led to everything else.
I’m also 5’6 on a good day, introverted, terrible at networking, don’t have a big personality, and have been told by everyone who knows me that I have the personality of a teaspoon.
I’m not the controversial, quick-witted, larger-than-life character that you might associate with building a big audience online. None of that has ever been me.
I share all of this because I want you to look at your own so-called limitations and realise that most of them are stories, not facts. Here are the mental models that have shaped how I think, and by extension, how I’ve built everything.
Mental Model 1: Why Not Me?
When I was seventeen and working in a gym earning around £850 a month, I told my girlfriend at the time that I wanted an Aston Martin one day. She laughed and told me that people like us don’t drive those cars.
I wasn’t offended. I was just genuinely curious. I remember thinking, well, somebody has to. Why can’t it be me?
That single question has become one of the most useful things I’ve ever asked myself. When I see someone travelling first class, or living somewhere incredible, or building a business that does numbers I’ve never hit before, my instinct isn’t envy or dismissal.
It’s curiosity. What are they doing? What do they know that I don’t yet know? How do I learn that?
When I was twenty-six, I sat in an Aston Martin showroom and gripped the steering wheel. At twenty-seven, I owned one. I had literally told someone a decade earlier that it was going to happen. Somebody has to. Why not me?
Mental Model 2: What Are They Doing That I’m Not?
A few years ago, I was walking into a gym car park with a friend and there was a blue Ferrari parked up outside.
The first thing my friend said was that the owner must be dealing drugs or evading taxes, because there was no other way someone like that could afford a car like that.
I found out a few months later that the owner had been born to an immigrant single parent, was one of six or seven siblings, worked a normal full-time job, took a risk, set up an IT consultancy, landed some big contracts, and built it into something serious.
Two people looked at the same car at the same time and had completely different reactions. My friend’s brain immediately went to what must be wrong with this person.
My brain went to what I can learn from them. That instinct to look at successful people through a lens of curiosity rather than suspicion is something I’d encourage you to develop deliberately, because it changes who you become over time.
Mental Model 3: What If It Does Work?
I’ve invested hundreds of thousands of pounds into mentors and coaches over the years, and I started doing it very early.
Every time I’ve told someone about an investment I was making in myself or my business, the default response has been some version of, ” But what if it doesn’t work? What if they’re a scam?”
My response has always been the same – “What if it DOES work?”
I’ve been on calls with people who are applying to join us at Online Trainer Education, people who are clearly a brilliant fit, who are passionate about coaching, who want to build a business that gives them real freedom, and they talk themselves out of it because of that one little question. What if it doesn’t work?
Here’s how I reframe it. The worst-case scenario if you invest in yourself and it doesn’t go perfectly is that you learn a lot, you waste some time, and you move on.
The best-case scenario is that your life changes completely. That you travel when you want, that you earn more than you ever have, that you build something genuinely yours. Surely that upside is worth more than the comfort of never having tried.
Mental Model 4: Money Isn’t Bad
I onboarded a guy into the program about eight months ago and asked him what he wanted to achieve.
His first response was to tell me it wasn’t really about the money, and that he’d be happy to be realistic and just earn around £2,000 a month.
I understand where that thinking comes from. There’s something very British about feeling uncomfortable saying that you want to earn serious money, as though ambition is something to be ashamed of. But I want to push back on it directly.
Money doesn’t buy happiness. But it does buy freedom. It removes financial stress from the table, and financial stress is consistently cited as one of the leading causes of relationship breakdown and divorce.
Earning well doesn’t just benefit you. It benefits your partner, your family, and people you’ve never even met. I have a team of over twenty people whose livelihoods come from this business.
When Sandy and I travel, we use independent transfer services, tip generously, and eat at independent restaurants.
Earlier this year, my mum had a plumbing issue that was going to cost around £2,000 and she was in tears about it.
We were able to just transfer the money across the same day and remove the problem entirely.
Being wealthy is not a character flaw. Wanting more than you currently have is not greed. Earning well, building something real, and having genuine financial freedom is something that creates a positive ripple effect far beyond your own bank account. Stop apologising for wanting it.
Mental Model 5: Don’t Drift Through Life
Something I’ve said on webinars since 2018 is that my biggest fear is waking up at sixty years old and wondering how I got there.
Think about the people in your life, your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles. And ask yourself honestly: do you think they’re living a life they actively designed and chose?
Or do you think they just drifted into it year after year, decade after decade, clocking in and clocking out, building someone else’s business, and never really stopping to decide what they wanted their own life to look like?
Most people don’t drift because they’re lazy or stupid. They drift because they never believed it was possible to do anything else. They never sat down and asked themselves where they actually wanted to be in five or ten years. They never gave themselves permission to want more.
I think about this constantly. How do I want next year to look? Where do I want to be in five years? How do I want to spend my days and who do I want to spend them with?
These aren’t indulgent questions. They’re the most important ones you can ask.
Mental Model 6: Next Level Beliefs
Whether you like Elon Musk or not, the man genuinely believes he is going to colonise Mars. Scientists with serious credentials say it’s essentially impossible. And yet he has built an entire organisation, SpaceX, full of people who share that belief and are working toward it every single day.
Now contrast that with what you’re considering. You want to earn £3,000 or £5,000, or £10,000 a month from online coaching. You want to leave your job or quit the gym floor and build something that gives you freedom over your time and your income.
That is not colonising Mars. That is something that thousands of coaches have already done before you, many of them starting from zero followers, zero clients, and zero experience in online business.
We have worked with over 3,500 people at Online Trainer Education and we have coaches in the program doing £5,000 months, £10,000 months, and well beyond.
You are not being asked to believe in something impossible. You are being asked to follow a process that has already worked for thousands of people ahead of you. That is not a leap of faith; it’s just deciding to try.
Mental Model 7: Override Your Inner Thermostat
Think about how an air conditioning system works. You set it to twenty degrees. If the room gets too warm, the fans kick in and cool it back down. If it overshoots and gets too cold, they switch off, and the temperature rises again. The system constantly pulls the room back toward that set point.
Most people have an equivalent of this running with their finances. There’s a number, usually just enough to cover the basics with a little left over for the occasional meal out or holiday, where they feel okay. And when they reach that number, something switches off. The urgency disappears, the drive softens, and they stop pushing.
I see this regularly with coaches who join us. They start with nothing, work hard, hit £3,000 or £4,000 a month, their basic needs are covered, and then almost without realising it they take their foot off the gas. They wonder why they’ve been at the same income level for six months.
The answer is that they hit their thermostat and stopped. The work is to keep raising the set point. To let basic needs be met be the starting line, not the finish line.
Once you’re comfortable, the question becomes, what’s next? What would an amazing life actually look like, not just an okay one?
Mental Model 8: One Shot on This Dust Bowl
We have one life. One shot at this. And it is very easy, especially in the UK, to settle into the idea that having a steady job, a paid-up rent, an okay car on the drive and a holiday once a year is enough.
And maybe it is enough. But only if it’s what you actually chose, rather than what you drifted into.
When you see people living the kind of life that makes you feel something, whether that’s the way they travel, where they live, or how they spend their time, the instinct is often to dismiss it as something that’s only for certain people. A certain type. Not for people like us.
But somebody has to live that life. Somebody has to be on that flight, in that hotel, building that business, working from wherever they want in the world.
The only question worth asking is whether you’re going to give yourself permission to try for it, or whether you’re going to let the little voice that says it won’t work for you make that decision on your behalf.
You have one shot. The worst that can happen if you go all in is that you tried. The best that can happen is a life you didn’t think was possible.
If any of this has resonated and you want to find out what it looks like to actually build that life, head to the top of the page and click Free Training to get started.
