My father left when I was two years old. I don't remember his face.

I was raised by my mum until I was six, and then by a stepfather who made it clear, in every way a child can understand, that I wasn't wanted. That lasted twelve years. There was abuse — the kind I still don't talk about in detail — and there was no version of "safe" in that house.

By ten, I was smoking. By thirteen, drinking. By seventeen, into things a lot harder than that. I failed college. I fell in with the wrong crowd — the kind your mother warns you about, because I was one of them. None of this is a badge of honour. It's just what happened.

At eighteen, I left Poland for the UK, chasing the promise of a few weeks' work and a car I never got. What I found instead was a caravan with no heating, a job that paid a third of what I was promised, and a toilet made of stacked tyres. I didn't see it as a tragedy at the time — I saw it as an adventure, because it was mine and nobody was controlling it.

My mum eventually found out how bad things were and got my cousin to pull me out. He and his family took me in. That's the moment everything actually started — not the moment I "found myself," but the moment someone gave me a roof and I finally had room to think.

I worked. I saved. I brought my mum over. I built something out of very little, one uncomfortable decision at a time.

None of that fixed what was underneath, though. For years I carried it quietly — the defensiveness, the inability to sit still with discomfort, the anxiety I didn't have a name for yet. Success on the outside. Unfinished business on the inside.

The real work started later — sitting with the parts of myself I'd spent years running from, instead of outrunning them again. Getting sober. Losing 20kg. Learning to actually regulate my own emotions instead of being run by them. Becoming a father to my daughter, Thea, and realising I was no longer just responsible for surviving my own life — I was responsible for what she'd learn about how a man carries himself.

Writing The Art of Becoming came out of that process — not as a business plan, but because I needed to write it before I could fully live it. It became the foundation for the way I coach now.