It’s late at night and I’m in my car driving towards work, the usually dark rainy night in Scotland. I start to think about what the night has in store for me, delivering a death message, talking someone off a ledge, I wonder who is going to attack me tonight, maybe tonight is the night I don’t make it home.

I am pretty sick of thinking like this, see if I just yanked this steering wheel really hard, that will be it, game over. No more thoughts, no more pain, I’m probably going to fuck up my kids lives anyway. My parents were pretty shit, I’ll probably make the same mistakes as them, may as well do everyone a favour.

And then just like that I snapped out of at and thought, nah fuck this, time for some help. These feelings weren’t new for me as I have dealt with thoughts of suicide many many times in my life and thankfully a few failed attempts.

This time felt different as I remember back to a video I had recently seen and it was of a little girl, her mum was explaining to her why daddy wasn’t coming home and it was fucking gut wrenching.

As heart-breaking as the video was I am glad the lady shared it because I always have in my mind, that the damage from me completing suicide would be so much greater than making a few “mistakes” as a parent.

Now if something happened at work and I didn’t come home then there isn’t a lot I can do about that, that’s outwith my control. Whereas choosing to keep living, is down to me, that is within my control.

This was just the start of me understanding more about my own responsibility. Yes, there were many other traumatic events leading up to that point, none of which I had control over. But what I could control was how I dealt with them, which up until now I hadn’t and that was MY responsibility, MY fault that I hadn’t previously sought help.

That’s a very uncomfortable realisation to have, to understand that I could have prevented this many years ago if I had just reached out and said “hey I’m not ok, I would like some help, bad things happened to me, I want to talk about them so they don’t affect my life anymore”

I then began a 3 year journey of self development and challenged my mindset daily and am very proud to say I am in a stronger place mentally than I have ever been, but that also started with me taking ownership over MY mind and MY thought process.

And then because I was in such a stronger place mentally I was able to properly process various points in my life and understand “the reason I felt this way, is this event happened, that no longer applies in my life so I no longer need to feel that way”.

Before all that, these events would be unnoticed, just floating around in the subconscious space. When I brought them to the front, they were easier to deal with. All the fears, the hang-ups gradually were no longer a problem

I developed a really good understanding of how these things affect us on a daily basis without realising and they bleed into our business. It is why we won’t go live, won’t send a message, won't post a certain piece of content. It’s why we have fear of failure, fear of success or heaven forbid a fear of happiness.

My view is that nobody is a lost cause and that nothing should stand in the way of our success, especially OURSELVES.

That is why I have made it my duty to make sure others get out of their own way just like I did