Project Possible with Rich Leigh

This week’s guest is Caroline Donoghue, better known as the LoveMud Dog Lady. You might know her from the dog-grooming videos. The dog voices. And the obvious love she has for the animals in her care. But before all of that, Caroline had a marketing career she thought she’d never leave. Then she was made redundant. We talk about losing a job that had become her identity, starting again, and the mu...

This week's guest is Dr Dawn Harper. You’ll probably know her from Embarrassing Bodies . But I didn’t just want to speak to Dr Dawn. I wanted to get to know Dawn. Dawn talks about the mistake she once made that still haunts her decades later - and the responsibility of having someone’s life in your hands when you’re exhausted and barely out of medical school. Then there’s her own diabetes diag...

This week's guest is magician James Phelan. His uncle was Paul Daniels. His aunt is Debbie McGee. So you’d assume he grew up being taught every trick in the book. Nope - Paul only directly taught him one. But he did give James a piece of advice that stuck: “You’ve got to be the first you, not the second me.” James talks about building a career beyond a famous family connection, the years of wo...

This week's guest is adventurer, world-record holder, author and filmmaker Sean Burch. Sean has climbed Everest solo, set eight world records and made first ascents of 140 previously unclimbed mountains. He’s also won National Geographic’s Ultimate Survival Alaska and spent decades testing himself in some of the world’s most extreme environments. But there was something all that achievement co...

This week's guest is the Queen of Cooking for Kids - Annabel Karmel MBE. Annabel is the UK’s number-one children’s cookery author and one of the most trusted names in baby and family food. She has written 50 books, sold millions of copies and built an international brand that has helped generations of parents feed their children - including me. But, before any of that, Annabel was a profession...

For this special milestone episode 100 of Project Possible, I look back on a year of throwing myself at the podcast, and the impact these conversations have had on my life, my outlook and my hope to be of service to others. I talk about why building and selling a business didn’t leave me feeling fulfilled, learning to enjoy life again after losing my brother Jordan to suicide, fatherhood, health,...

Claire Sisk is a content creator, disability and accessibility advocate. You might recognise her as ITV’s This Morning's first blind chef. She's built a large and loyal following online as Can See Can’t See, showing people how she accomplishes daily tasks others might take for granted, having lost her sight at the age of 37. I sat down with Claire to talk about having two strokes at 29, be...

Loz Antonenko is a mindset coach, dubbed The Mojo Mentor, entrepreneur and author of Get the F*** Unstuck . After losing her first husband to suicide, Loz began questioning a life built around achievement and other people’s approval. In 2024, she sold the business she’d run for 17 years, describing it as “the safety net that strangled me”. We talk about grief, family estrangement, losing friendshi...

James Constantinou is the founder of Prestige Pawnbrokers and star of Channel 4’s Posh Pawn. Expelled from school at 15 and told he’d never amount to anything, he spent nights sleeping in a car boot. Years later, he was lending £1 million against a collection of art and artefacts. We talk about building businesses, taking risks, spotting a con, the fear of being poor again, raising children with m...

Liberty Mills has lived about five different lives. She was an international model, a young single mum, a woman so badly affected by lupus that she needed a Zimmer frame, a health coach and author who rebuilt her life, and then, at 44, a woman who became pregnant naturally after being given around a 0.7% chance of conceiving with her own eggs. She talks about the darker side of the modelling indus...

Dr Leah Totton is a doctor, entrepreneur and winner of The Apprentice, where Lord Sugar invested £250,000 in her medical aesthetics business when she was just 24 years old. She talks about being dismissed as “Dr Barbie” by the press. She talks about journalists following her to and from work, and how reporters would approach patients and colleagues while she was working in A&E in a bid to get...

This week, I’m joined by Pete Cohen. Pete is best known as The People’s Coach, having spent more than a decade as the resident life coach on ITV’s GMTV, with regular appearances on This Morning. For 30 years, he has helped people imagine a better life for themselves. Then life forced him to face the one thing none of us can think our way out of: losing someone we love. After his wife Hannah was di...

This week, I’m joined by Roger Clark, the actor behind Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, the third best-selling video game of all time. We talk about his life and career. The years of struggle before his secret audition with Rockstar, losing his mum at 15, creating Arthur over five years, performance capture, and why the character still means so much to people nearly eight years later. This...

Is it possible to turn hope into loss - and even comedy? This week, I'm joined by US comedian Sam Morrison for a conversation about love, grief, comedy, and the show that changed his life. Sam is the creator of Sugar Daddy, a critically acclaimed solo show about losing his partner Jonathan to Covid, being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and somehow turning the most painful period of his life i...

Today’s guest is entrepreneur and former rugby league player James Laithwaite. Describing himself as one of rugby league’s ‘unluckiest’ players, James Laithwaite broke the same leg four times, broke his neck - it was the first time his now-wife watched him play - and lost the only career he had ever imagined. At 27, he went from playing professional rugby league in front of tens of thousands to la...

Dan Goodwin, better known as Spider-Dan, is a legendary climber, daredevil and high-rise safety campaigner. In 1981, aged 25, he climbed the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world, wearing a homemade Spider-Man suit and using equipment he had designed himself. He later climbed the World Trade Center, among a dozen skyscrapers, free-soloed both sides of the CN Tower and developed an un...

Hilary Henriques MBE is the founder and CEO of Nacoa (National Association for Children of Alcoholics), a charity she established more than 35 years ago after discovering the profound impact parental alcoholism can have on children. We talk about growing up in chaotic homes, why children so often blame themselves for their parents' drinking, the hidden effects of childhood trauma in adulthood,...

Cam Whitnall was once dubbed the World's Youngest Zookeeper. When his grandparents bought a dilapidated zoo, once known as the worst in the UK, and brought it back to life, they also created a home for their family. Cam grew up on the grounds, now known as Hertfordshire Zoo, in a bedroom overlooking the tiger enclosure. His childhood playground, where he and his brothers would play hide-and-se...

Chris Grace is a comedian, actor and writer. We talk about growing up as a gay Chinese kid in Texas, why he's never felt like he truly belonged anywhere, losing his siblings, partner and parents in just a matter of a few short years, and what it takes to keep pursuing a dream for more than three decades. Chris shares why improv might be one of the most important life skills you can learn, the...

Dr. Niamh Shaw is an engineer, scientist and storyteller who has spent more than a decade chasing an extraordinary dream: to become a citizen astronaut. Along the way, she's spoken at NASA's Johnson Space Center, covered launches from Kennedy Space Center, trained for space, lived on a simulated Mars mission and experienced zero gravity aboard the infamous "Vomit Comet". We talk...

Richard L. Blake is a psychologist, breathwork researcher and author. This is a conversation that begins with breathwork, but quickly becomes about therapy culture, trauma, resilience and why Richard believes we've fundamentally changed the way we think about mental health. We discuss whether therapy can sometimes make people worse, why family estrangement is becoming more common, the science...

My guest this week is BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award-winning writer and producer Jocelyn Stevenson, whose extraordinary career includes Sesame Street, The Magic School Bus, Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam and creating Fraggle Rock alongside Jim Henson. We talk about the lessons Jim Henson taught her, why he believed children's television could help stop war, the responsibility of creating stori...

Fair warning: this is a solo episode. If the thought of me talking for getting on for 40 minutes with only a loose structure makes you want to jump headfirst into fire, flick back through the other 80+ episodes for one you haven't watched or listened to, or come back on Monday, when I'll have another incredible guest. Since September last year, when I brought this podcast back, I've be...

Courtney Pine CBE is one of the most influential figures in jazz. A pioneering saxophonist, composer and broadcaster, he's spent four decades redefining the genre, sharing stages and studios with everyone from Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and Gang Starr's Guru to Kate Bush, Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry. But you don't have to be a jazz fan to enjoy this conversation. We talk about why h...

Lily Silverton is a mindset coach, speaker and author of Prioritise This. We discuss self-improvement, therapy culture, ambition, loneliness, social media, productivity, work-life balance and why so many people feel overwhelmed despite having more information than ever before. We also explore whether people can become trapped in cycles of self-development and self-analysis, the pressure to become...