Is this it? It was a simple question, but one that quietly echoed through my mind back in 2019. At the time my life had become a relentless cycle of work. From the moment I woke each morning until the second my head touched the pillow at night, my mind was consumed with it. There was little exercise, little rest, and very little space to simply breathe. My thoughts raced constantly through endless to-do lists and problems that needed solving. Looking back now, I can see the warning signs were everywhere. I was making mistakes on orders, something that had rarely happened before. There were tight pains in my chest, a constant feeling of unease, and mood swings that I struggled to control. Stress had become such a normal part of life that I barely noticed the weight of it anymore.
At home, life was busy too. My wife had a demanding career of her own and together we were raising three wonderful children. I believed I was trying to balance everything, but the truth is that work had tipped the scales so heavily that everything else was left with what remained. My family received scraps of my time and attention, and my own physical and mental wellbeing was quietly slipping away in the background. It was a slow, slippery road that eventually led me to burnout, though at the time I could not see just how close I was to the edge.
The moment that finally cracked something open in me came from a simple question my wife asked one evening. She looked at me and said, “If you sold all your machines, what would you do?” Without even pausing to think, the words left my mouth. “I think I could fly.” The moment I said it, something inside me broke. Tears that had been trapped for years suddenly poured out. In that instant I realised how trapped I had felt, how long I had carried the weight of expectations, responsibilities, and pressures without ever allowing myself to stop.
Walking away from a multi-award-winning company that I had spent years building was not an easy decision. That business had been a huge part of my identity and my life. But sometimes life begins to whisper to us long before we are ready to listen. A book, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, found its way into my hands at exactly the right moment. One day as I loaded a digger onto a truck, my back aching from years of hard work, I remember feeling something I can only describe as a quiet whisper on the wind telling me it was time to step away from the life I had built.
Of course, fear was never far away. The fear of change. The fear of the unknown. The fear of leaving behind something that had defined so much of my life. But deeper than the fear was a longing to be present for my family, to be a better father and husband, and to rediscover a sense of peace within myself. I realised that if I was going to build a different life, the foundation I had been standing on was no longer strong enough. As the saying goes, if you want to build a hundred-metre building, a foundation designed for two storeys simply will not do.
So I began again, quietly and slowly, by rebuilding that foundation. Exercise became part of my daily life. I started nourishing my body with better food. Meditation entered my world and gave me moments of stillness that I had not felt in years. Coffee, alcohol, and the constant noise of the news gradually disappeared from my routine as I stripped life back to its essentials. It was not about becoming perfect. It was about becoming whole again.
A mindfulness teaching course became one of the most powerful turning points in that journey. Through it I began to face emotions and memories that I had buried for most of my life. I realised how deeply the experiences of my childhood had stayed with me. Growing up at 6’7”, I stood out everywhere I went. When you do not fit into the neat boxes society expects people to fit into, you quickly learn that difference can attract cruelty. I had been stared at, laughed at, and bullied simply for standing out. Those wounds had followed me quietly into adulthood, shaping how I saw myself and the world around me.
Soon after, I completed a life-coaching course, and from that EMC Coaching was born. For the first time, my work was no longer about machines or contracts. It was about people. It was about helping others navigate their struggles and rediscover their own sense of direction. Slowly, my happiness began to return. Family life flourished again. The constant noise in my head — which I often describe as a wild stallion — finally began to slow its pace. I started noticing the small, beautiful details of life that had once passed me by unnoticed.
Yet starting a completely new path was not without its own challenges. The world of coaching was very different from the trade work I had known all my life. Building something new takes time, patience, and belief. My plan was simple. I would keep a few landscaping contracts each year and gradually reduce them as the coaching business grew. At the end of each year I would let one contract go, trusting that the new path would slowly replace the income.
But life rarely unfolds exactly as we plan.
The landscaping contracts gradually disappeared, but the coaching business did not grow quickly enough to fill the financial gap. I was pouring my energy into the work, into personal growth, and into building something meaningful, yet the financial return was small. Over time the pressure quietly returned.
Around that time, a friend asked if I would consider writing a book with kindness as its central theme. I began writing, but I could feel myself slipping into old patterns again, pushing and forcing things to happen rather than allowing them to unfold.
One morning after dropping the children to school, I drove to Mountshannon in East Clare. I cannot fully explain what I was feeling that day. There was a deep heaviness in my chest and a sense of worthlessness that had slowly crept back into my thoughts. I stood at the harbour looking out across the water and, in one dark moment, the thought crossed my mind to jump in.
Thankfully something inside stopped me.
The tears came again as I sat down and poured my thoughts into my diary. That moment became another beginning, another turning point where I chose to face the unknown rather than run from it.
And somewhere within that unknown was a story waiting to be written.
I finished the book.
Life has a strange way of guiding us when we are willing to listen. About a year later I found myself back in the same harbour, sitting quietly with a coffee in my hands. As I looked across the water towards Holy Island, something stirred deep within me. It felt as though the island itself was calling me.
A few days later I stepped onto its shores.
That island became a powerful source of inspiration, and much of its magic found its way into Book Two of the Erica’s Light series, which has recently been published.
As I sit here today, writing these words on a cold, wet spring day, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Gratitude for the moments when I did not give up. Gratitude for the strength to keep walking forward when it would have been easier to stop. Gratitude for the light that somehow found its way through the smallest cracks when darkness feels closest.
People often see the finished books or the destination you eventually reach.
What they rarely see are the storms you walked through, the valleys you sat in, and the mountains you had to climb just to keep going.
Book Three in the four-book Erica’s Light series is already whispering to me.
Soon enough I will pick up the pen again.
But for now, if there is one thing I have learned on this journey, it is this — be kind to yourself, and be kind to others. You never know what quiet battles someone may be fighting, or what turning point they may be standing at.
And if you listen closely, you may just hear the whispers of the universe guiding you gently towards the path you were always meant to walk.
