His Life Fell Apart… So He Walked Away for 14 Years

What would you do if your entire life collapsed all at once?

When Ray Martin’s marriage ended, his business unraveled, and his father died within the same period of time, he found himself emotionally shattered and completely lost. What was supposed to be a six-month sabbatical turned into a 14-year journey across Asia, Europe, and deep into himself.

In this fascinating conversation, Ray shares how a successful CEO with all the “right” badges of success slowly realized he was living a life built around other people’s expectations—not his own.

Along the way, he:

•  Ran marathons for charity 
•  Worked with elephant sanctuaries and orphanages 
•  Learned meditation in a silent Buddhist retreat 
•  Became a leadership coach in Asia 
•  Randomly auditioned for — and landed — the lead role in a stage play with no acting experience 
•  And ultimately rebuilt his life around meaning, freedom, intuition, and service 

This episode is about far more than travel or reinvention.

It’s about what happens when you finally stop asking:
 “What am I supposed to do with my life?”

…and start asking:
 “What actually feels true to me?”

If you’ve ever felt stuck, restless, burned out, or quietly disconnected from the life you built, this conversation may hit very close to home.

To learn more about Ray Martin, his book, coaching, and his journey of reinvention, visit:

Website:
https://lifewithoutatie.com/

Linkedin: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachraymartin/

Contact us:   againstthenorm.net

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

What would you do if your entire life fell apart all at once? Your marriage ends, your business collapses, and then your father dies. That's exactly what happened to Ray Martin. And instead of rebuilding his old life, he walked away from it completely. What was supposed to be a six-month sabbatical turned into a 14-year journey across the world. And somewhere along the way, he realized something that most people never do. The life he was living was never really his. This was one of the most powerful reinvention stories I've ever heard. So take us back to that first moment. I mean, your I guess your partner was your wife and she wanted to divorce you, and of course, that probably meant the dissolution of the not only the marriage, but the company as well. And then your father died. And so then you kind of said, I'm going to leave for six months. But what was your mindset behind all this that said, I'm going to leave? I I I'm not going to continue the.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yeah, yeah, to put it into one sentence, I the best way I could describe it is to say I just felt broken. I felt so broken by the events that unfolded. Like I just couldn't understand why it would happen to me, you know, all at the same time. Um, particularly the purse I, you know, when I got married, it was forever. I I I I had to in my heart and soul, I was fully committed. And we chose to combine our talents to run a business together, which is a rare thing, but we were like um, I don't know if you remember that skate skating couple Tor Vindean, you know, they were such a great ice skating pair, but they weren't married, they were married to other people, they just came together to do that thing. Uh and and my business partner and I were very skillful together as a team. So when when it all unraveled unexpectedly, and I certainly wouldn't be something I'd have chosen, um, and it was painful, it was really painful because that one relationship breaking was the the end of the business really and and the end of my home life as well as the end of the marriage. So and then when my father got really ill, it was like it was like the straw that broke the camel's back, it was just too much. And I felt I felt really broken. Um and then for a year I paralyzed in the grief of it, it didn't do anything. I just lost all momentum, didn't even really want to get up in the morning or anything. And and friends, close friends who could see what was going on and cared about me, you know, rallied around. And one of them said, you know, take a sabbatical, get yourself away from all of this enough a way that you can look back with some kind of space and reflect on what's happened and see if you can do extract some meaning sense and get a sense of where you're where what the next phase of your life could look like. And I I'd read a book by uh Bronnie Ware, which is often talked about in you know various conversations I've listened to. It's called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Oh, interesting. And it's a very it's a very famous book. Sold millions of copies. She's a hospice nurse in Australia, and she has interviewed people in the last days and weeks of their lives. She asked them all the same question what is it you most regret about your life? And she said, from all the thousands of answers she's listened to, she could say they all say the same five things, Norman. Really? And the top one is I wished I'd lived my life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me. And that was exactly what I was grappling with because I was the CEO of a company and I I had been an award-winning CEO in Britain and I was successful and I had all the badges, but I never felt it was quite the right role for me in life. I I felt I was living up to others' expectations of me when I was a kid, you know, you've got to be successful, get a good job, and that sort of stuff. Um so I'd done all of those things and got all the badges for it, but I never felt really fulfilled, and I knew that I had this underlying feeling for quite some time, which I think was one of the reasons the the marriage broke, because I wasn't really fully great about it all.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

You were searching, maybe you were searching for something that she wasn't, and you needed to find whatever that was.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Yeah, I just knew I was being sort of called to to deeply look at what I really wanted to do with my life. And when this happened, I was in my mid mid-40s. And so the idea of taking a sabbatical to take some time out to reflect and set a new path, if you like, felt like a really good idea because another book I'd read by Steve Biddolf called Manhood strongly recommended that every man take a sabbatical when he reached age 40 and reflected on the first half of his life and used that to decide how to course correct in the second half of his life. And I I'd read it and I thought, oh, I'd love to do that, but I was always too busy, too many business meetings, too many things going on. So when it all came to an end, I had now had the space to do the sabbatical. Um and so it really made sense at this point.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Yeah, yeah. And so I assume that you had enough money to be able to say to yourself, okay, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna take these six months off.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yeah, I'm very fortunate. Yeah, because I'd you know run a successful company, it'd been profitable, and um I I did have enough that I could last a couple of years without having to think about more income. Um, and and so I took advantage of that. I did. I was very fortunate.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so during those 14 years, Ray, was there a time when you actually said, okay, this is what I'm really my life is really all about. This is what's fulfilling me at this point in time. This is my purpose, this is where I should be. I found myself. Now, did it take 14 years? Or did you kind of figure it out after the first six months of what happened?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I I could describe it a bit like a board game. You know, when you play a board game of dice and cards, it kind of the game goes through stages, you accumulate things in the game and then you go to the next level and the next level. And it was kind of like that, if I'm honest. So the first couple of years, all I did was be a tourist. You know, I literally had a backpack and I traveled and visited tourist sites and enjoyed those things. You know, I just it was the first time in my whole life where I'd ever had no work to do or no other obligations to anybody, I had no to nothing to get up for any day. So I just was a tourist for a couple of years, and I really enjoyed that. But there came a moment where I thought, you know, I'm done with this. And at that moment, um, I was taken to a couple of places near to where I was staying. One was an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. Wow. Um, and it was a beautiful place. And I I when I was there, I was very moved by the work they were doing to rescue elephants and stuff like that. And I got talking to the founder, a lady lovely lady called Lek Chialet, who's well known in America actually. And um, I asked her about how it ran, and she said, Oh, it's all done but through donation, we don't get any government support or anything like that. And it and then from that day on, I started to think, how could I help them? How could I help them raise money or do something? And then I went to an orphanage in Nepal in the Himalayas and ran a picnic for 60 children because a friend of mine had done a voluntary step stretch there. She said, Would you go and do a picnic for the kids? I'd really appreciate it if you would. So I did, and I saw how much joy and lightness that brought to those kids who really have very different lives than the ones we know. And I started added that to the pot, and I thought, how could I do something to help that orphanage in the elephant sanctuary? And then a close friend of mine in London died from cancer.

SPEAKER_04 8:18

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

And then I sort of became aware that you know this is something that you can do a lot to help the research and support. And I just started thinking, what could I do? I've got time on my hands, I don't think being a tourist is quite enough for me. I don't want to finish this journey yet, but I've I've got to do something. And then, but randomly, this is honestly true. I didn't plan this. I met a guy one evening, and he and I said, What do you do for fun? Then he was like a software guy or something. I said, What do you do for fun? He said, Oh, I I run. I said, I run marathons. And I said, He was 10 years younger than me. I was 48 and he was 38. His name's Matt. I said, What's that like, Matt? You know, running a marathon. And he described it to me and he described how it felt. And as he was speaking about it, I could feel my body tingling. It was like a weird sensation. I can't describe it easily. But I knew what he was saying was really important. I needed to hear it. So at a certain point in the conversation, I said, Matt, do you think I could run a marathon? Because I was thinking that would give me a chance to fundraise for these things, and I could do it as a fundraising thing.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yes. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

And he said, he looked at me, he said, Well, you look quite fit. Um, let's go for a run tomorrow around the lake. It's two or three kilometers, and I'll measure, I'll see. And his assessment was, yeah, I think if you trained yourself properly, you could run a marathon. Because he knew what I was trying to do. He said, I'll tell you what, Ray, you stay here in Chiang Mai for six months, I will train you to run your first marathon. I'll put the program together, I'll coach you. And I had the time. So I said, Yeah, okay, I'll do that. And then I had the opportunity to launch a formal fundraising organization called Calling The Angels, and I had hundreds of business contacts from my days as a businessman. Sure. So I started to do a campaign to raise money. And to cut a very long story short, I ran the New York Marathon on the 1st of November 2009 with Matt's support, got ready for it, and raised $15,000 US. Oh, good. And I took that money in cash and I took it a third to the elephant sanctuary, a third to the school, uh to the orphanage in the Himalayas, and a third I gave to a cancer research charity in the UK.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Wait a minute, you were holding $15,000 in cash, not in checks or no.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

I had it in travelers' checks initially, but then I took it because I was going to give it in, I wanted to give it in the currencies locally, so that they could actually deploy it and not lose any through bank charges or pilferage or anything like that. So and I and I was just doing this all on my own because I didn't I didn't I wanted to make sure that every penny got used for the what the money was for, you know. And so so this then became that project alone took me nearly two years. Wow, wow, and and so then I would be on the road by the time this finished, it was 2010. I'd now been on the road for five years. And I was going, I don't, I I really and there's something fulfilling about this life of service, about getting involved with these local communities, not just being a tourist, but getting involved, really involved with them. And I thought, how could I stay out in Asia? But I need to earn some money because I'm my money's running out. By the way, if you need to stop me telling me, I love the story.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

This is exactly where I want the whole podcast to go. I love the story, Ray.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

So I I thought, you know, I'm done with this first round of fundraising. I'm not gonna run another marathon for another year or so. So in the meantime, I want to dip my toe back into the world of business because that's the world I know. I thought, how can I work part-time as a leadership coach in Asia? I didn't know a single person in Asia or business, so I didn't know how I was gonna do it. And not only that, it was 2010, and this was well before virtual working existed conceptually.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

No Zoom, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Yeah, if you wanted to coach someone, you had to fly to where they were and do it in person.

SPEAKER_04 12:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

So I put this wish list together in my own mind, and then I wrote it down on a piece of paper. I want to work 20 hours a month, not a week, a month. Because I I thought that would give me enough money to pay for my rent and lodgings and food in Asia. Yeah. And I can carry on the fundraising and stuff like that in the rest of the time. And if at all possible, I want to be able to do my coaching via Skype because I'd been on my using Skype to phone my mum and stuff like that. I thought I'd and but I didn't know anyone that would permit that or who was doing it. So I then saw a guy in Bangkok who was head of the coaching association for Asia and said, This is what I was looking for. Could he help me? And he said, Yeah, I think I can. He sent my profile to a company in Singapore who had just opened there. They called me straight away the next day. They said, Gosh, we've got loads of clients, so much coaching work, but we don't have enough English-speaking coaches. We'll grab you by the scruff of the, you know, we'll take you straight away.

SPEAKER_04 13:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Even at 20 hours a month. Obviously, we wish you could do more, but if that's all you've got, we'll take them. And um, I said, Great. They said, Well, there's one thing you might not like, right? I said, What's that? They said, We're only doing coaching over Skype, we're doing it virtually, we're not doing it in person. Is that all right with you? I said, Are you kidding me? No, I I said that's been my dream in my head. I said, I can't believe I found in two or three steps without any effort, the one company in Asia that's doing virtual coaching. Amazing. I mean, you couldn't make it up. I mean, yeah, so I I really was lucky.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

Yeah, very, very looking forward to it as well. But you know what's I'm curious about, and this is so fascinating. You were a CEO of a company and you had business experience and things like that. And then the transition phase is you started doing things that were different, unique, very new to you. And so how did you it just kind of uh transition there and it kind of happened? You chose to do something different. Now, for my listeners who are maybe in their 50s or 60s or 70s, where or how did you feel your way through that those changes of making the difference and doing or becoming something different than you had done before? You were never a fundraiser, you never ran marathons, you you never helped out in in a in a uh elephant uh sanctuary or anything like that. That's right. How did you choose and continue with those lines of of activities?

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Yeah, I'll answer the question in a roundaboutish way, but it'd be even an answer. After six months of leaving the UK, I was in a different physical environment, being in Asia apart uh aside from London, it's totally different, wearing different clothes, eating different foods, sleeping in different guest houses. So at the physical level, everything was different, but on the inside, I felt agitated, scared about the future. I still felt like in my mind I was the guy in London. I just moved my body to Asia, but I hadn't psychologically shifted it in a way. And I was I was worried about that, and I could see it, and I talked to someone about it, and they said the best way you might help yourself right now is to go and do a vipassana meditation retreat in a monastery. Oh, it's a 10-day silent meditation retreat you do with Buddhist monks. So I listened very carefully to that advice and I thought about it, and I decided I'd do that. So I did. So I came out of that 10-day silent meditation retreat. I didn't know what meditation was, I had no previous experience of it. I'd read a book or two about it, but I really didn't know. Yeah, it was it was a massive game changer for me because I noticed that if I'd had a dial on the side of my head, like a volume knob, and the white noise volume was a 10 out of 10 when I went in, when I walked out of those 10 days, it was like had someone had turned it down to one out of ten. I felt really calm, very quiet inside, very grounded, and I was seeing things in a very different kind of way, very matter-of-fact kind of way, but in a very with a lot of inner peace and can you know, without that agitation and noise that I'd experienced for the first six months of the journey. Sure, sure. And that enabled me to then develop a mindfulness practice, a meditation practice, which I did every day. And the more I did that, the more I could feel myself tuning in to what intuitively felt like the right thing for me. Interesting I was I was depart when as a businessman, as a CEO running a company in London, I depended massively on my rational, logical mind to make decisions, especially financial ones and business ones and strategic decisions for the company. I was not in the habit of using my intuition at all. But over those next six months after I did the meditation retreat, I I noticed I'd I started to shift and mix how I made decisions from purely rational, not at all to purely intuitive, but to st I started to bring my intuition more to it.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Yeah, it was because of metamorphosis. But yeah, what what's interesting here is that you know I was a former CEO as well. Yeah. I owned a big business, a big mortgage company, and I I know a lot of people who are CEOs, and yeah, they have this tendency to deal only with the rational mind. And so in your particular situation, how did you make that transition of saying, okay, I'm gonna go from never meditating to a 10-day retreat? It's kind of like going from never going on a marathon ever, never running, to all of a sudden running the New York City 26.2 mile marathon. This is yeah, well, it's quite unusual. Tell me more about that.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

It is, it is, but you know, when I read the book that Bronny Ware had written about top five gets a diamond, I realized I needed to do something reasonably radical, because if I just did a tiny little bit of change, I'd just be a on a slightly altered version of the old Ray. I, you know, I I was quite open, to be really honest with you. I was quite open to experimentation and really radically trying things. I thought if I try that and I hate it or I don't like it, I can just stop. I don't, I'm not just because I've chosen to do it, if I I don't need to make it my life, it's just an experiment. I tried, I've made a decision, I made these 10 guiding principles, which I wrote about in a book I later published. Um, and and one of the guiding principles was to be not attached to any outcome, which meant adopting a very experimental mindset. And in fact, there's a book that just came out a year or two ago called Tiny Experiments by Anne Le Kumpf. Oh, I'm and it's so one of the best-selling books in the business world at the moment. There's loads of people talk about it. And you know, when you don't really know what you want to do instead of something you're doing, you don't you know you don't want that, but you don't quite sure what you want, the best way often is to just experiment and try three or four things and see which one feels like energetically pulling you the most. Yeah, and I I thought, well, that's a that's a really good way for me because I've got no time constraint, I can take as long as I need, and I can support myself, you know, while I'm doing it, and I I'll then I'll know from my lived experience what's right rather than from what I think in my head is right, because I spent my whole life living from that, and it had got me into the situation where my life had fallen apart, so I didn't trust that anymore to be honest.

SPEAKER_02 19:34

So now you're speaking after and post 14 years away, but during that initial time frame where you were given the idea of taking a 10-day retreat, yeah, did you have the same mindset or were you scared?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

I was terrified, yeah. I was terrified.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

Tell me more about that. What what was the process of overcoming that fear?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Um, I thought, well, when when we when we learn and grow in any situation, there's some discomfort. You know, you you don't learn and grow in the comfort zone as psychologists refer to it. You have to go out of the comfort zone and into the stretch zone, which is the zone that surrounds it. So I thought that's true for me here. If I want to expand, if I want to become a bigger person, a more improved version of myself, yeah, I need to be willing to tolerate some discomfort in what I'm gonna learn and try out. And so I that I knew that. I knew I'd never sat for more than 10 or 15 minutes in silence. I thought, God, I'm never gonna be able to do this. But what I realized when I talked to the monks on the day of registration for the program, and they said what the ground rules were for it, etc., I thought, wow, I don't need to be as worried about this as I thought, because there is massive support in these ground rules that prohibit you from making any mistake or going off the rails. You know, you weren't you had to surrender all your phone and tablets and devices when you entered.

SPEAKER_04 20:57

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

You you were not allowed any creature comforts, no blankets and pillows on your bed and stuff like this, just the basics, no talking at all in the dormitories and not at all with any of the other participants at any time, all all meals in silence, everything like this. So these rules were set out, and you had to take a vow to follow them if you wanted to be part of it. And if you couldn't do that, that you were asked to leave. So I the support was there to help me navigate that that and observe what and the whole point is to see what your mind does when you're in that situation where all the normal creature compass and distractions are removed. And you notice how crazy your mind goes, and it does go a bit crazy, and but that's the whole point. You're there to observe that in order to learn and see how to separate yourself from you know, so and and and I I found that because they actually encouraged me in that way, I found it just brilliant. I found it past that. I just surrendered to the teaching, right? Because that was what I did. I mean, like Michael Singer is a brilliant teacher in this field. The Untethered Soul is one of my favorite books of all time. I've heard of that one. And and he, you know, he talks a lot about living in surrender. And when you live in surrender in a moment like that, you just go, okay, do you know what? I'm just gonna hand over authority to these guys and just do whatever they tell me. Just trust it's gonna be for my own good. And I did that, and it was absolutely brilliant. Didn't mess around with it in my own mind, you know.

SPEAKER_04 22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:26

Now, had you never gone on your sabbatical or had these events, your father dying or your wife divorcing or leaving the business, had that never have happened, would you ever consider a 10-day retreat? Or was this just happenstance that this is how everything evolved and you're the better for it?

SPEAKER_00 22:46

I'd say it's happenstance. It's very it's very difficult to honestly sit here and say, if I wasn't that guy, would I? I don't I honestly don't know.

SPEAKER_04 22:53

Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

It's just happenstance. But but I don't know. You know, some people take the view our lives are fated, they're pre-scripted. You know, there's a wonderful film called The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and you know, and oh, yeah. This film depicts these guys with trilby hats who are following every living person, making sure they stick to their life plan.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

And some people have that view, and other people say no, it's completely random. There's no life plan at all. I mean, there's loads of people in between on the spectrum. So I don't know what's true, Norman. I'm not we're gonna find out, aren't we, when we leave the body? We'll find out.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Yeah, yeah, I think we all will. It's it's very clear that we will.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

But um, now when you got on, I want to go back just a little bit to the very first part of your your sabbatical, so to speak. Sure. You got on a plane, it was maybe a year after everything happened in in London or in England. You got on the plane. Was there ever a moment during those first few weeks where you said, Holy shit, did I make a mistake? What is going on with my life?

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Yeah, often I had that kind of circular thinking. What am I doing? Why am I where's this gonna leave me? That this is just gonna keep me away from the world of business in London. I'm gonna get out of date with what's going on. If it all goes wrong, I'm gonna become obsolete, blah, blah, blah. I had that kind of what I call sort of mental, negative mental chatter almost constantly.

unknown 24:22

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

And and that is why, you know, after five or six months, when someone said a vipassana meditation treat will help you work with that.

unknown 24:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

That's why I was so eager to take it, because I had lived with it, it was a bit like living with a roommate, in if it was physically a person who never stopped talking and everything they said was negative, and they just complained about everything. And um, if that had been a real person I was living with, after a week I'd say, Do you know what? I'd like you to move out. I can't stand you being around anymore.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Right. You're not my friend anymore. Enough of that.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Because it was my own voice inside my own head. I couldn't say that, or at least I didn't think I could, but I then discovered I could do some version of that.

SPEAKER_02 25:01

Right, right, right. So the meditation retreat helped you kind of remove that that self-talk, that negative self-talk.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

Or relate to it in a different way. Because you can't stop it, it's part of you, but you can direct your attention towards it or away from it much more easily once you're aware of it and what and understand what's going on. Yeah. And you know that your thoughts aren't you.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

And you can recognize that that's necessarily not the truth, it's just part of you that's saying, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

Your mind's like a computer, it's a survival mechanism. Yeah, so your survival mechanism voice mind is gonna give you all lots of bad news and tell you to prepare for the worst and look out for danger and all these things, and without understanding that.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Or say you shouldn't have eaten that candy bar while you were getting yourself at least.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

And I and I a lot of this I didn't really understand until I until I got there.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Right, right, right, right. Yeah, it's so interesting. Wow. Now, so many people, uh, and maybe you did this as well, maybe not, maybe this was part of your decision in leaving, but so many people romanticize the idea of taking a sabbatical, taking a year off, or you're in your case, six months or 14 years.

SPEAKER_03 26:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

So what would you tell people about this? Was it all that romantic romanticized? Was it all that great, or was it just something that you needed to do, you had to do? And what is it, what part of uh going away do people not see? Like what are the bad parts?

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Yeah, it's it's a really good question. I think we could do a conversation just on that alone. But really, in summary, I think I could say for me it was essential to take time away from what I considered my normal life. Right. I thought I can't really look at this surrounded by the sort of people that are just like me because I know my thinking won't be different, it won't change. I need a very different perspective and different way of thinking. So that was for me a necessity. The second thing I can say about it is if anyone's experiencing being stuck in their lives or being feeling like they're on a path that someone else expects, but it's not really feeling right for them or anything like that, the way to start unlocking that is by looking at what your thinking is doing. It's nothing to do with the outside world. And this is something I learned from this journey. It's what you're habitually and unconsciously thinking is the is what's keeping you stuck. And unless you've got a quiet space to reflect on that wisely, or some wise person helping you understand that and helping you examine your own thinking, you're never going to get unstuck. Now, for some people, they can do that where they are, they don't need to go somewhere else. For some people, a couple of months in another country or on a beach or something. The physical part just helps them unlock the mental part. It's it's it's it's down, it's very much down to personal taste and preference and things like that. Yeah. I would say in the main, you know, I've I I've seen many, many people take a complete break for a for a few weeks or a couple of months in a different environment and come back, you know, quite rejuvenated.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

Yeah, it's kind of like you can't see the forest through the trees.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Yeah, it's like a retreat condition because when you when you want to see things in a new and different way, you've got to remove yourself from the habitual thinking and inputs that are coming into you every day. You just got to break with those for a bit.

SPEAKER_04 28:38

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Yeah. Now, do you think you need meditation in order to understand or hear those habitual thoughts, those negative um ideas?

SPEAKER_00 28:48

I don't I'd probably say no, you don't need it because I know lots of successful and happy and contented people. My my own brother is a great example. He's lovely, he's such a beautiful spirit and very content guy. He doesn't meditate, he doesn't do it, he's just able to sort of follow his own path in his own way, lives by his values, he makes decisions through his own principles and he's very consciously you know kind to others and stuff like that. You know, so so not in every if I think about all the people I know, some many of them don't do any formal meditation. I just find it helps me calm down when my mind is agitated, you know, because I'm a v I'm a kind of anxious type, if there is a type. I don't know. I I I have exact anxiety in my thoughts most days. Yeah, and when I sit down in the morning and just spend 20 minutes just sitting with my eyes closed, just breathing, looking into the garden, focusing on my breath. I just notice my anxiety quiets down a lot. So and then I've got some space to think.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

So you gotta talk to you more about that.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Yeah, you know, so for me, it's for me it works. And I know people that don't do meditation, but they may if they feel like that, they go for a a swim for an hour. Sure. And just swimming lengths in the pool gives them the same result, or other people go for a walk in the in the forest, you know, or something like this. Everyone's got their uh their way of calming their nervous system, basically.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

And that's the key. That's the key.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

That's the key thing. You we the we live in a very toxic world, full of bad news, full of chemicals, full of everything. And these days we we really have to be conscious that we have to calm our nervous systems because the media and the social media and all these things are designed to keep you on hyper alert all the time. That they're that that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to literally make you feel you're in danger every second.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

That's what Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook is all about.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

And so I, you know, you get not many people are sort of really understanding if you look at the deviousness behind the design of a lot of those platforms, they're there to steal your attention, and nothing steals your attention better than fear.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Right, right. And that's the negative talk that you have all the time.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

And they're selling that attention for money to advertisers. And so there's a whole even people who worked inside that industry have come out and said how evil it is, you know. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a different topic. We're going off off PC. No, I know.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

I love the topic. But you know, one thing that that I'm interested in, a lot of people, I mean, in many ways you are fortunate in that you these events happened in your life, you didn't have any strong, you know, family ties necessarily, like for example, children that you mentioned at the very beginning of the podcast. So you you had the opportunity to say to yourself, I'm gonna leave for six months. But what would you tell somebody who's 65 years old? A guy who's either retired, semi-retired, or kind of thinking about what happens next. He has children, grandchildren, mortgages, uh, his second home, you know, a portfolio that he has to take care of. What would you say to him that he doesn't have the opportunity to take a huge amount of time off, but kind of is thinking, well, what's next? What would what kind of advice would you give to him?

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'll answer it in two parts. First is I I wouldn't tell anyone what they should do. I would probably I would probably have a conversation and say for you to end up in a place where your thinking has shifted and you feel like a sense of possibility and excitement about the future, etc. You know, what do you see as your options? What kind of options do you have? And then I'd say, well, should we look at each of those and try and say which one you feel is the best one for you in this in this time? You know, let's let's sort of see if we can reevaluate each option. And that conversation usually un unlocks a lot of thinking that is not conscious to the person. So that's number one. Uh-huh. And then the second thing is if I had to be a bit more prescriptive, I would say the best place I think to start is to try and create at least a picture on paper or in your head of the vision of the life that you are trying to move towards. Right. So what's in that picture, even if it's just imaginary, because we've all got an imagination and it's free to use. So it doesn't cost any money. And um, I would say, you know, if you were to imagine what you would consider a perfect life would it look like, what would we see in that picture? And someone would say, Oh, I would see my partner, I'd go to be doing a I'd be doing work every day that excites me. I or I'd be doing no work, you know, I'd be retired, you know, whatever it would be. Uh, I'd be eating good food, I'd like learn languages or whatever they've I can't tell the answer, but everyone's got that picture. But to actually start to build that and put that in place is the most important thing because once you've got that, you can see what the gap is between your life as it actually is now and that picture. And then that creates a series of little stepping stones that give you little steps that you can't see before you have the picture.

SPEAKER_02 34:01

Yeah, yeah, no, that's exactly the truth. And it's interesting, in your particular case, it seemed like you faced your fear of getting to that picture. And a lot of people, there's so much fear in trying to get even step one or step two or step three to that picture. Yeah. You overcame that. How would somebody who's a little bit afraid kind of make that first step or make the second step? What processes did you use to overcome that fear?

SPEAKER_00 34:34

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think the process would change. It's just that you've got to make sure that the first step is small enough that it's in it's enough. Like you know, if the first step was for a real this could be a real one for someone, to to just read a book that someone had uh written, that would be enough. It's just the first step's got to be the right size. Just don't don't choose anything that's just a bit too far. Just don't do that.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

A little bit, yeah a little bit at a time, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

Yeah, just what you can handle because um when you have two spin two circle spindles, you put a rubber band around them. You if you if you pull the the spindles apart, the band gets too tight and it will s snap. Yeah. But if you push them too close together, the band sags in the middle and it doesn't go. You're right. It's not a wonderful. There's an optimal stretch that that you know that for each person could be they'll feel into it that each person's got their own stretch. So it's not the same for everyone.

SPEAKER_02 35:42

Yeah, not the same. So now now that you mentioned that, I'm curious, during that year afterwards where your wife divorced you and your father died, was that the process that you were going through?

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Sorry, say that question again.

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Well, okay, so all the events of you know pre-taking the sabbatical happened. And then uh within about a year later, that's when you left. You didn't leave immediately after your dad passed away. I didn't you took some time, your friends were telling you to do certain things. So were you taking those little steps along the way to decide to say, oh, okay, maybe I will do that. Maybe that's what I ought to do.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

I love this question. Um, you'll laugh when I tell you the answer. At first, when the person who suggested it to me said it, I said, That's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Sure, of course, that's what I figured.

SPEAKER_04 36:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

I said there's no way I'm wasting my life. I just what do I think I remember saying? The random mind has got to work. Going around the world with a backpack. What's the point of that? You know, yeah. Um but then I really in that year of grieving the loss of all those things, I was so kind of stuck and dark. A friend of mine said, you know what, if you can't see a way out of this and you don't look like you can, one of the things I recommend you might consider is just go and find someone else who needs help and focus a hundred percent on them for a while. Just forget about yourself. And and at the time I thought that was a great bit of advice, and so I did start thinking about and looking for someone, and what I discovered was that a friend of mine who had been a really good friend in England, but she'd left, emigrated to Australia with her husband, and she'd had a young child while she was there, she had breast cancer, and I'd shared a house with them both, and I really liked them, and they you know we were good old friends, and I I called her and I said I'd like to offer to come out for a month and just look after her and Matt and Pete, her son, and just be part of the family, just take care of anything they need while she was having chemotherapy and stuff like that. I thought that would give me a chance to to be in service and forget about myself. I can't solve this, seems so. I did that, and not much change, to be really honest. I thought, oh, that's that advice is rubbish, you know. I'm I've done this and now there's no change.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

Nothing, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

But the advice didn't say how long it would take for a change to appear. It just I imagined it would be instant, but it wasn't. I then went up to Cairns in Queensland, in Australia, to see another friend before I flew all the way back to England, which is halfway around the world.

SPEAKER_02 38:19

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

And she said, We're going to when I got there, she said, Me and my mum are going to the theatre. Do you want to come? I said, Yeah, okay. And so I went to see this play live at the theatre, and I in the halfway interval, I was reading the programme with the actors in and stuff, and I saw this little notice in the page saying, We're auditioning for the next play, and we're calling people forward who want to be in it.

SPEAKER_02 38:41

No, don't tell me you auditioned for a play.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

So, yeah, so I look I turned to it, it was a play called Out of Order, which is a British play about Parliament, a member of Parliament.

unknown 38:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Because I am British, I turned to my two Australian friends and said, I should be in that. I've got the perfect accent. I'm not an actor, I had no experience. I was just saying it for a joke, really.

SPEAKER_04 38:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

And they looked at me seriously and said, Well, we know the director of the play, and if if you want to go to the audition, we can put in a good word for you. I said, Don't be crazy, come on, I'm not an actor. They're all going to be real actors and they're much better, and I'm never going to get off with a big part or anything. They said, Well, why don't you just do it for fun? You're going to be here, and you're, you know, it's before you go home.

SPEAKER_04 39:18

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

I said, okay, I'll do it for fun. So I went and did that audition just for fun. Well, when they arrived at Heathrow in London two days after, I got a call from a friend Julie, who put me up to it. He said, They've called in and I want they really want you to be in the play. I said, Well, what part do they want me to play? They said, they want you to play the leading character in the play, George Pigdon. He's the central character, he's an hour and a half on stage, 400 lines. He's got to do, got to move a dead body, kiss two women, you know, blah, blah, blah. He's got to do all this stuff. I said, You're kidding me. I couldn't believe it. Anyway, my sister-in-law is actually a professional actress. So I called her straight away. I said, Do you think I could handle this? Because I've got no experience at all. And she said, Yeah, I think you could. There's a way you could make this work. So I called the director back and said, Are you mental? You know, why are you asking me? You could, I've got no experience. They said, We know, we know, but we think with our support, you would be absolutely brilliant in that role. And we really want you to do it. So I then I then um thought the only barrier about going back now is the clients I've got I've committed to work with. I thought, how can I, how can I deal with that? And so I I thought, do you know what? I'm just gonna call each one and be really honest and tell them what's happened. And if they say, Yeah, go ahead, I'm gonna take that as what I now refer to as a confirmation signal that I am going in the right direction, even though it feels crazy. And so I called each client and said, This is what's happened. I went to this audition, you know, I promised you I'd work with you when I got back, but now I'm back. I I feel like God wants me to do this or something like that. I said, But I'm only gonna go if you give me your blessing. I said, I'm if you don't give me your if you want me to stay, I will stay it. No questions. I'm I'm a man of my word, I won't go. Yeah, and they went, each one went, Do you know what, Ray? I think you should do it. I'll give you my blessing. Wow, and and that was my confirmation signal that I was meant to go back. And I did, and I went back and I was three months in the play, and it was a massive success. So I was reviewed in all the press, and that was a game changer. And then after that, I thought, I'm gonna go and take that sabbatical. This is it.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

Amazing, truly, so you did take those little steps along the way.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

Yeah, I did, yeah, led you to the next one and the next one and the next one, and you and it was real in real time, Norman, because I still didn't know what the meaning of all that was as I was flying home after the play. Sure. I still thought I I just when I was flying back to London after the run of the play, I thought, why do I feel so much dread? I felt really dread and anxiety in my body. I sat in the flight and I thought, why am I feeling like that? And then I thought, you know why? Because I I'm going to have to be Ray the businessman again, and I don't really want to. And then I went, oh my god, Ray the Businessman is a character in a story that I've been playing for 25 years that I created, and I just didn't, I'd never thought of it like that.

SPEAKER_04 42:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

And the moment I had that insight, it was like a flash of lightning, and I knew in that moment I didn't have to be a businessman anymore. I just knew it. And I knew it was time to let it go.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

What a story. I mean, you can see that there's you have a lot of courage to take each step along the way. Now, not everybody has that, but if, as you mentioned, if you take that little step, that first little step doesn't require that much courage, just a tiny bit, and a tiny bit more, and a tiny bit more. And ultimately you get to those 14 years, and you say, Okay, I'm a new person already.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Well, yeah. It's funny how it all unravels because as soon as I had that insight on the airplane, I thought, yeah, I don't need to, you know, Anthony Robbins, the coach, the US coach, he says, You're not just the actor in your story, you're the script writer and the director. So you can rewrite the character.

SPEAKER_02 43:09

And you're the critic, too.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

And and and he said, you know, so you can either change the character or you can kill off the series, you don't have to have it. And so I then I thought, if I kill off Ray the businessman, there's no need for the fancy house in West London, which is massively expensive, you know, to run. Yeah. I thought that character needs that house, but Ray the tote Ray the traveller doesn't need that. Yeah, yeah. So I I was able to then to make I made the decision to sell my house in London. And that removed all of my financial obligations, you know, completely.

SPEAKER_02 43:40

Right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

So you killed off Ray the the executive, the CEO, and you became with that lifestyle and all the trappings that came with it, because it was a it was an incredibly expensive life to run every month. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Mm-hmm. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

And I wasn't enjoying it.

SPEAKER_02 43:55

Yeah, yeah. And did you ever regret making that decision? Never, never. Never.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Not not for one second.

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Wow. So I'm curious as to how you reintegrated into life in England or work life after those 14 years. I mean, I mean, maybe you maintain connections with your business contacts and things like that, but new job. Like what's going on?

SPEAKER_00 44:19

Well, I've all I've been self-employed since the early 90s, and I was for years before I left. Yeah. I've never I've always been the kind of person that wanted to work for myself and be responsible for creating my own money. You know, I I didn't want to be dependent on a salary, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so so I had that way of thinking already. But what happened in in 2000, the mid-2000s, it was after I ran the London marathon around about time I ran the London marathon to raise money, it was of 2014. I'm I was back in Thailand, which was my base temporal base while I was in Asia.

SPEAKER_04 44:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

And I met a lady from Poland who came there for a holiday, and we sort of connected and started a relationship. And so we were sort of together, and after a couple of years, I I said, I want to move to live with you in Poland, you know, and start a life together.

SPEAKER_04 45:11

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

So so I lived in Warsaw in Poland for three and a half years with her. And as soon as I would had moved to Warsaw, it was only like an hour and a half or two hours flight time from London. Sure. So that then literally opened the door for me to accept a piece of work to do in London for a couple of days where I knew people and fly back, you know, within the same day to commute. You can commute from Warsaw easily. Yeah. And so I started doing that. I started taking on pieces of coaching work and leadership development work through an associate relationship I had. And uh and it just developed from there, and I sort of found my way back into the field of work I was in when I left.

SPEAKER_02 45:54

Wow, that's amaz just an amazing story, amazing transition and a transition back. And so my last question for you, and this has been so fascinating, Ray, for somebody who's in their 60s. What would you what kind of and they're like I said, they're drifting before, they're drifting now. What would you tell them is the first step that they should make to see where they might want to go? Everybody's individual, but how would you suggest that they do something like that?

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Yeah, there's this I think one of the most revealing areas is to know more about one's own values. What's most important to me on a daily basis? Um, you know, my values are things like love, freedom, exploration, and um integrity. You know, if I don't if I'm not making decisions every day where I'm embodying those things, right? I feel really lousy. I don't I don't feel happy. So knowing your own values, I think, is one of the critical building blocks because it then enables you to start making even the smallest decisions more in line with values. So when someone says, We're all going out tomorrow to this place, and you just it just doesn't resonate with you, you'll say, That's thank you for asking me, but I'm gonna say no because it doesn't feel right for me. Yeah, whereas you might just normally go, Oh, yeah, all right then, and and not really want to go, you know. Yeah, uh, so you know that that's so that's one small thing, but very has a big impact is knowing your values. Now there's lots of ways of exploring one's values, you know. You can do it yourself, you can work with a coach or a buddy. Um, there's lots of ways of doing that. And then the second one is we were talking about earlier, is to try and imagine what your daily life would look like, you know, if it was ideal, if you could if you could wave a magic wand and set it up in a certain way, what would it look like? What would be different about the life you have now to the life that you could imagine? Yeah, and just just and just start using your imagination to to actually bring to the surface images of things, yeah. And then you what you'll find if you if you do it to the right depth, let's say, if there is such a thing as to the right depth, it sounds sounds awful. But but what you'll find is that you'll start to remember things from when you were much much younger. I that's what happened to me. What what what I did as well is I after about it was 2011, I got I got the message from the universe that I needed to write my story down in a book. And I wasn't a writer or anything like that. So I went on a writing course and I committed to writing a book, and the book got published a couple of years ago, and um that forced me to have to be very articulate about what I'd learned and what I'd discovered. And as I was writing that book, I remembered a lot of things from my childhood that had sat dormant in inside me for years, but the process of digging it out made it come to the made me remember it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is important.

SPEAKER_02 48:58

Wow, Ray, what a life. I I'm so glad you were persistent. Like I started, I like I knew the story was gonna be phenomenal. So I and I'm sure my listeners are going to really, really love this. So, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna turn off the recording right now because I want to talk to you a couple of things after the recording. But this has been thank you very, very much.

SPEAKER_00 49:19

Oh, my pleasure, Norman.