What if the life you worked so hard to build… wasn’t really yours?

In this preview from the upcoming episode of the Life & Leadership Connected Podcast, I sit down with Ray Martin— award-winning former CEO, leadership coach, mindfulness teacher, and author of Life Without a Tie.

Ray shares how his life fell apart — losing his marriage, company, and father in the same season — and how that crisis opened the door to a 14-year journey across Asia in search of purpose and alignment.

In this clip, he reflects on the danger of climbing life’s ladder only to find it leaning against the wrong wall — and why true leadership always begins with leading your own life well first.

🎙️ Don’t miss the full episode — coming in just a few days on Life & Leadership Connected.

You find more information of Ray Martin here:
www.lifewithoutatie.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachraymartin/

David Dahlén D'Cruz
Life & Leadership Connected
https://lifeleadershipconnected.systeme.io/32644969

Transcript

0:00

I was an English businessman in my late 30s, early 40s. And I was living what I would now describe these days as an off-the-shelf life story. I had no particular vision that I'd had to pursue a certain line of work or something. I took the kind of societal conventional advice which is, Ray, if you want to be happy, what you've got to do is got to marry a good woman, get a good job, get a house, get a mortgage, have some kids, you know, those things equals happiness. And I never questioned that and just followed that plan. But I noticed more and more as time went on, even as CEO of the company that I co-founded with my business partner, I could do the job and I did it really competently and really well because I received an award for doing it. It really weirdly didn't feel like it was my real true life. I always felt like I was living the life that others might have expected of me but not really what I wanted to do and it just gnawed away at me. Subtly and quietly in the background just really could never make sense of it because every time I tried to, I then shut myself up because another part of my voice would go"stop complaining, you're very lucky, you've got a lovely wife, you've got money, you're okay, you've got lovely home etc, what are you complaining about." Something like this, so I could never really explore and really get to the bottom of what that was about. So within three or four months, through no choice of my own, essentially, I was out of my marriage, out of my home, my company was changing, my dad had gone. Life just didn't look or feel the same. I used to describe it, I think I described it in a book as "standing in a bomb crater", and turning 360 degrees and just seeing rubble all around me, know, like life had gone. And I was on the floor, I was desperately unhappy, I was down low. And that was the beginning because in that time a friend of mine said to me, why don't you take a sabbatical? And I laughed and said, you're kidding, I'm not wasting my life traveling around the world doing that. That's the last thing I think of doing. But then a couple of other events happened and eventually my thinking came back to that idea and I didn't take the sabbatical. Obviously as a businessman in London, I've got a very particular routine. I'm living every day. I've got targets, goals, obligations. I'm driven by the needs of the company. Very, very focused on delivering results and pushing away and aside anything else that seems not important or not relevant. Whereas when I got to Thailand, I wasn't in a suit, I wasn't wearing a shirt and tie, I didn't have any goals or targets, no routines, no obligations, nothing to take care of, just empty space and time to fill with nothing. And so this was extremely disorienting for me. And it made me feel guilty that I wasn't part of the taxpaying workforce back home because all my friends were still working hard and I felt like I'd escaped or something. And that didn't feel so good and I felt purposeless, drifting, not really sure, know, obviously scared because leaving a marriage and a known life and a work life without any knowledge of what's coming over the horizon, you know, completely unknown. So that was scary too. So I was just sitting in a lot of fear and anxiety and guilt and shame most of the time I was in Thailand. was about halfway through the book in 2019 when I returned to the UK after 14 years. I'd started writing it in 2015. So, you know, three or four years of effort, was halfway there. And I knew in my guidance from my meditation was when you get back to England Ray, your main priority is to get the book finished and get it out into the world. That sort of took over my life for about a year and a half or two years until I got to the vinyl manuscript. And then the book got launched and I've spent a lot of time ever since then talking to people about the wisdom that's sort of chronicled in that book. I give lots of talks, I go to book fairs to meet people who've read the book, I coach people who are interested in wanting to move their lives in that way but want some help. I can't overstate it David. I mean if you're not prepared to commit to a life of greater self-awareness you have no chance of being an exceptional leader. Look, zero. It's the foundation of leadership. You've got to know how to lead your own life well first. If you cannot establish... a way of doing that, you're going to be really struggling to help others lead their lives in the way we're talking about. And so what is in that foundation? There are a few particular things. What's my purpose as an individual? What's my vision for myself? What is the picture that I want to paint of my life that I want to head towards? And to what extent am I moving in that direction? Because there's nothing worse than climbing a ladder in life to get to the top and then going, my God, I put my ladder against the wrong wall.