The Reclaimed Man

I sat through seminar after seminar where someone stood on stage and said, “You’ve got to find your calling.” Thenthey’d tell the story of the moment it all became clear. I read the books too. Eckhart Tolle. Byron Katie. The night everything changed. The morning on the floor. I’d pay a milliondollars for an aha moment like that. Mine hasn’t come. And I think wai...

For most of my career, neediness was quietly running my life. It took me a long time to see it. From the outside it looked like success. A busy practice. Twice voted Chiropractor of the Year. But underneath, I needed my patients to like me. I could take a stand for my whole profession, and still step back the moment I had to back myself. This is Part 2 of the Reclamation Triangle: Lost → Wort...

When I say every man should be dangerous, I don’t mean violent — I mean capable: force in you, and the control to choose what you do with it. The opposite of dangerous isn’t safe. It’s harmless. This is Part 1 of the Reclamation Triangle: Broken → Dangerous. Not the how — the map. Where you are, and where you’d like to be. I talk about what broken actually...

For thirty-five years, I was proud of being the bloke who never got angry. Then it started showing up in traffic, on the golf course, and while walking the dog. In this episode of The Reclaimed Man, I share how a childhood moment in my dad's shed shaped what I believed about anger—and what it cost me to keep burying it. Through the end of my first marriage, conversations in therapy, and the...

I've realised I don't need to hit those numbers." There's nothing wrong with that sentence. That's the problem. A mate told me he'd learnt to be happy with where his business was. And he meant it. But he wasn't telling me his numbers — he was explaining them. He'd got so good at the explanation that he'd stopped hearing it as one. So this one isn't about the dream you lost. It's about the st...

When I was seven or eight, I talked to God every night. Lying in bed in our house in Colac, with the dog asleep down the end of it. I'd tell him about my day — what went wrong at school, what I was worried about. Nobody taught me to do it. We weren't a religious family: no church, no Bible in the house. Then somewhere in my late teens, I stopped. Here's the part it's taken me nearly forty ye...

For about three months of my life I woke at two fifty-eight in the morning. Not roughly. Two fifty-eight, two fifty-nine, three-oh-one — every single night, inside a three minute window, like something had set an alarm I didn't know about. That was the stretch after my marriage ended. My back had gone as well — two disc bulges, proper pain. And I was short with everybody. I'm a chiropr...

Last September I was told I had cancer. Within about a week I'd changed how I ate, completely — straight to ketogenic, sugar out, no wavering. Give me a hard thing to do and a reason that big, and I'll do it. A few months ago some of my bloodwork moved, and it was put to me that it might be worth trying ninety days eating entirely plant-based. I'm in the middle of it as I record this, and I...

A mate texted me last week. Three words: how are you? And I sat there with my thumb over the screen for longer than I want to admit — because I'm good ends the conversation, and there was a part of me that wanted the follow-up. Nothing dramatic happened. I typed I'm good , he sent back something about the footy, life went on. But I caught it — and what I caught myself doing has a name....

Should a man still open the door for a woman? Should he still pay the bill? Thirty years ago most men answered without thinking. Now most men freeze — caught between two cartoons: the testosterone-fuelled hard man, and the softened, apologetic one. Nobody told them there was a third option. Ten months ago I had to find that third man for real. My cancer feeds on testosterone, and the treatme...

For forty years I ran on a sentence a ten-year-old boy heard from his mother. It became an operating system. Prove yourself. Prove it again. Earn the right to be loved. It produced a lot. It nearly destroyed me too. In this episode I want to make a claim: you are unconditionally worthy, and nothing you achieve or fail at changes that. Then I want to go deeper — because that claim on its own...

Life can be hard. I get it. Work that matters. People who depend on you. A family you love. It's a lot to carry — and most days you carry it well. So most evenings — almost before you've decided to — you reach for a beer. Turn on the sport. Pick up your phone. You've earned it. There's nothing wrong with switching off. And there isn't. That's the thing. But somewhere underneath t...

Dublin Airport. August 2022. One of the proudest moments of my life — watching my son play at the World Championships — and my first panic attack hits out of nowhere. That was the beginning of two years I didn't see coming. Debilitating anxiety. Intrusive thoughts. A stage four prostate cancer diagnosis with metastases in my pelvis. And one idea that held me together through all of it:...