Two Lives TLC3 Ltd, Portland House, Belmont Business Park, Durham (2026)

11/02/2026

Another great review. As Bob Hoskin’s used to say “It’s good to talk”. You must be of a certain age to get that reference!!

06/02/2026

What makes me credible?

After 30yrs in the asbestos game, I knew my stuff and was canny credible, and had a successful business with annual sales of £4m. Then I sold it.

And now I’m in the men’s wellness & coaching space, so what gives me the credibility to help you?

Well I’ve got the qualifications: Counselling degree, NLP Practitioner, Mental Health First Aider etc, they’re all important, especially in an unregulated industry. And I’m proud to be a MBACP registered counsellor too.

However it’s more about the credibility that comes from being about to hit 50yrs old and my lived experience - my own “before” and “afters, such as:

Raging pisshead, to over 16yrs sober
Existing and self-medicating, to enthusiasm for my days
Pretending I was okay, to actually being okay
Judging others, to helping others
Feeling like there was a hole, to feeling whole.
Hedonistic hits, to happy to be sober me
Twice divorced, to a happy husband
Too selfish to want kids, to a blessed Dad of 3
Zero self worth, to real self confidence
Anxiety & panic, to Aim & progress
Out of shape knacker, to great shape
Hating mirrors, to liking what I see
Lonely, to loving me some alone time
Trapped in my own business, to freedom to explore new things
Business owner, to Business seller

Since binning the booze in 2009, and getting some coaching & counselling, it’s all been a personal transformation, and it’s the ultimate unfinished project I get to work on.

It all started with admitting to myself that the current life I’d created wasn’t the one I wanted to rinse and repeat anymore.

So now I help other men make sense of their lives and create their own changes.

Reach out if your own unfinished project needs a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at it and help you carve out your own changes.

A chat. No hard sell. Maybe some truth bombs. Then do with that as you please.

Carry on…

(Pic: wrote this post on the plane this morning so that’s why the photo!!)

04/02/2026

Sometimes you have to raise a glass (don't worry, no booze was consumed, I'm still 16yrs sober AF).

A client has just moved from weekly sessions to every 4 weeks now, and I find it so fulfilling to support someone and see them make progress.

I asked for a few words as a testimonial:

"I wasn’t sure what to expect, but counselling has genuinely helped.

I’m a lot calmer, more aware, less anxious and more positive plus I feel like I’m in a much better place now.

Gary is great at what he does and I highly recommend him.

This is coming from someone who always felt I could heal and help myself alone."

So on that note and those beautiful words, there's a new weekly slot opened up for anyone out there who may be suffering in silence.

At least reach out for a chat...

30/01/2026

Sorry for the Velcro experience.

There’s a local restaurant that’s had a grand refurb, a new name and the McKendrick clan have been three times now.

We’ve all loved it- the food, the decor, the staff, the playlist. Their ribeye steak is tremendous (see pic: had it 3 times now).

They’ve now got the best marketing tool in me. I’ve been back 3 times, and we’ll go again soon, and I’m recommending to everyone.

But this week someone told me that they’d been and had a crap experience. Apparently the manager blew a gasket at their table about allergens and intolerances in one of the dishes that had just been served. He was shouting and bawling so they just walked out and paid nothing. Never to return and never to recommend. And maybe write a scathing 1star review. Or post about it all over socials.

Now the guy might have stuff going on at home, or just been having one of them days. But that’s no excuse when you’re in hospitality.

These diners had a crap experience; like velcro, it’ll stick with them. Whereas a positive experience is more like Teflon because as good as they are, they slip away easily. You need a much higher volume of Teflon’s to outweigh the Velcro’s.

Reputation takes years to build yet minutes to destroy.

Fellow diners were horrified too. And now I may think twice about returning. The ripple effect for one moment of madness.

Heightened emotions = Lowered intellect.

Emotional stability is something I help my clients with.

That’s my ramblings for today.

Here’s Tom with the weather…

28/01/2026

Advance or Retreat?

I think you should Retreat.

Some say you should always advance—otherwise, you’re stuck, stagnant, or frozen.

But in a military sense, a retreat isn’t a defeat; it’s a tactical repositioning.
It’s regrouping to strategise your next move.

I know how it feels to be always advancing without a break. To feel worn out already, and it's only January.

So, I have the retreat for you.

When: Friday 6th March – Sunday 8th March 2026

Where: The Wisp Retreat, near Hawick, Scottish Borders, TD9 0LP

Duration: 3 days / 2 nights (arrive Noon Fri, depart 3pm Sun)

Private en-suite room. All food included.

Price: £390. (Apparently, I’m meant to call it an ‘investment,’ but that’s lame. This isn't about buzzwords.)

What this ISN’T:
No boo-hoo crying circles. No yoga-infused cold-dipping. No "alpha-beast-mode" SAS I'm a Celebrity nonsense.

What this IS:
Time away from your daily busyness to pause, think, and breathe. Get off the laptop, put the phone away, and connect with other fellas.
Zero booze. Do a weekend sober and see how it actually feels.

Return to your life feeling reset—like when a device glitches and you just turn it off and back on again. This is "Back to Basics."

The Schedule:
There is one, but nothing is mandatory. If you need 48 hours of solo time, take it (just show up for meals so I know you're okay).

Based on last November’s sold-out retreat, we’ll likely:
Hike the Wisp
Walk the scenery
Do a bit of morning exercise
Eat together
Have a pub quiz, and a laugh with an actual comedian
Optional 1-2-1 coaching sessions
And plenty free time for the venue’s gym, sauna, and library, or just catching up on your sleep.

"A change is as good as a holiday."

Or, "Don’t knock it 'til you’ve tried it".

DM for details to register.

Or just keep on advancing...

23/01/2026

That’s ma boy!!

This is one of my favourite photos of our Harry. Just look at the way we’re looking at each other, it’s cute AF.

You can see that we’re mirroring each other. And that is such a reminder that your kids will copy what you do, not as you say, but as you do. They model your language and behaviours; you are their role model.

So this photo also pains me because if you look closer, what’s that device on the arm of the chair? Yep, it’s my mobile phone, always by my side, never out of sight or reach. What message does that send to a toddler?

The photo was taken 6 years ago, and these days, I’m much more aware of the habit, and I put my phone out of sight and out of mind to get things done. But I’m nowhere near as good as I want to be with it. It’s definitely a habit to keep working on, to reduce the screen time, be more present and focused with work and crucially with my family. To show them a better way than the way I have been showing them.

It’s like the saying, if you want your kids to be avid readers, let them see you avidly reading.

I remain very aware that all 3 of our kids have developed their own bonds (addictions?!) to their own devices. The eldest two have an ipad and a phone each. While the perk of being the youngest is that our Harry got an ipad when he was 5.

Is that bad parenting? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m human like you, don’t judge. All I can do now is recognise the signs, the habits, the consequences, the potential damage; and try to recondition their minds. Starting with my own and the example I set. It’s such a work in progress.

So the point of this post is to share that we all have taught our kids some bad habits. But if we’re more careful, instead of careless around them, we can influence our impact on them in better ways.

Oh the irony, you’re doom scrolling now when you should be….

22/01/2026

Michael Balzary - you probably know him, don’t you?

But you’ll know him as Flea.

He’s, of course, the bass player with Red Hot Chili Peppers.

That’s how most people will know him.

What many don’t know though, is how many films he’s been in, such as:

Back To The Future (parts 2 & 3)
The Big Lebowski
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
The Outsiders
My Own Private Idaho
Baby Driver
Inside Out (and Inside Out 2)
Toy Story 4

But to most, he’ll always be Flea from the Chilli Peppers. I’m sure he’s okay with that too, his bank account certainly will be. Mind, in my opinion, they peaked in ‘91.

Anyway, Flea got me thinking about identity because it's something I cover with my client’s work.

In that, the life we build around the work we do can become who we are. Sometimes this can start to feel meaningless when it's all work, work, work. Or when something changes, through choice or events, then there’s a lost identity, and a sense of grief for it.

Identity is certainly something I’ve had to redefine since I sold Omega, and exited a 30yr asbestos career, into the entirely new arena of men’s well-being.

It struck me that a big part of my identity was based on being the business owner, the Managing Director, the boss, the asbestos expert, and when I exited the business, I suddenly wasn’t wearing those hats anymore, and felt a bit lost.

A similar thing happened when I stopped boozing; I was faced with discovering who I was going to be, I didn’t really know who I was once the booze-mask was removed.

So I’ve re-identified in different ways over the years, from a personal and a professional point of view. That’s why I’m good at helping others do it now. Lived experience becomes the strongest part of your CV.

How did I pivot from Flea to this? I really don’t know. My head just starts with a seed of an idea, and I see where it’ll take me. There’s another lesson there - stop overthinking and just start something, put it out there, and see where it’ll take you. I help my clients start too!!

In conclusion, I invite you to rediscover the Chili Peppers when they were good, listen to the albums up to and including ‘Blood, Sugar, S*x, Magic’ - go no further than that because then all the songs become about ‘California’ and are a bit beige.

And lastly, perhaps consider your own identity, what do people know you for, and is that who and what you want to be? Or do you need to reach out and work on expanding your horizons in 2026.

I’ll leave that, and a joke, with you.

How do you measure how heavy a chili pepper is?
You give it a weigh, give it a weigh, give it a weigh now.

21/01/2026

Roads; where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Look at this: my first car. An A-reg (Mk2) Vauxhall Cavalier. It cost me £250. And £600 to insure.

It was a 1.3 petrol, 4-door saloon hot-rod, in light blue, and had little dolphin stickers on it from the previous owner (I took them off, but the paint had faded so much that the dolphin shapes remained).

I really wanted the SRi, because that stands for ‘Some Radgie Inside’, but £250 wasn’t getting this radgie inside of anything other than the dolphin-mobile.

But this car was still epic. It was sheer joy to pass my test and own a car. No more buses or Dad’s taxi. That £250 bought me freedom and adventures.

What was your first car? Can you remember how it felt and what it meant to you? And all the fun you had? (Maybe it's why your first born is called Astra?!!).

Now consider your current car and how this feels. I know how sometimes it can feel like we’ve traded in our youth and freedom for a sturdy Volvo, to commute through the obligations of ‘adulting’.

And hey, I’m all for Volvos; they’re great cars, we actually have an XC90, but my point is that in our quest to get through just another week, we’ve lost our sense of joy and freedom.

And I get it, being an adult does bring obligations - you’re the husband, the leader, the manager, the parent, the friend - but that doesn’t have to feel like a sacrifice.

We just need to get a little more creative and intentional to make the fun happen. Whether thats carving out some time for you, your gym, your hobbies, or a lunch date with the wife, or a city break, or a roadtrip with your mates - there’s so many options, they just need more effort to make them happen because they’re not as spontaneous as they once could be.

In the words of the criminally underrated 90’s boyband, ‘MN8’ -

“I got a little somethin’ for ya. Naa, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na”.

I’ve created an online workshop to help you stop, recalibrate, and reclaim that sense of fun and adventure for 2026. And it’s not some recycled SMART goals slide show; it’s a practical framework to get you feeling back in the driver’s seat of your dolphin-mobile.

It’s £95. It’s online, and live with me. Just 1 hour a week. Over 3weeks.
And it’s for the men who are tired of just "getting through the week."

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Just a laptop or a phone, and a desire to find that ‘Radgie Inside’ again.

Drop a "Dolphin" in the comments if you’re interested.

20/01/2026

Sunderland does have some canny places…

This is me at one of my favourite places - Penshaw Monument. It was built in 1844, in memory of the 1st Earl of Durham.

Every time I go there, I think to myself, ‘I love it here, and I must come more often’. It’s a combination of nature, history/culture, and nostalgia from my childhood visits.

I stand on the lower platform and admire the views, then wander around the woods and say hello to random folk, which sometimes strikes up a conversation, and sometimes gets me nowt in return.

On the day of the photo, I’d said ‘Good Morning’ to an old fella with his 2 dogs. We ended up having quite a chat. He was called John.

He seemed a bit low, so I asked how he was doing. He told me he used to have 3 dogs but he’d had to have one of them put down the previous week, so he and the other 2 dogs were feeling it. And he went on to say that his friend had committed su***de, jumping off a tower block, due to an alzheimer’s diagnosis.

I listened. And we talked about life, death and grief, and also work, family, hobbies and plans for the week, and plans for the future. Then we wished each other well and said we hoped to meet each other here again.

As I walked away, I felt grateful for the connection made, and hoped that I’d helped him in some way, and that perhaps I was meant to be there at that exact moment to help him.

It was a solid reminder about how you just never know what’s going on behind the curtains. We’ve all got ‘stuff’ to deal with, we always will have, that’s life. And that sometimes a simple ‘Hello, how are you’, can be all someone needs to open up, and be heard.

It’s a reminder of having a solid circle of support around us and the need to commit to looking after ourselves more. To do more of what our well-being needs, then to schedule everything else around that. I’ve definitely been guilty of filling my diary with work and leaving nothing but the dregs for me and my family.

For 2026, I’ve made a commitment to get back to Penshaw more frequently. I’ve been back once since the photo was taken, and I’ve got the next one scheduled for next Friday.

Otherwise, if it’s not in the diary, life just sucks me back into its vortex of busyness, and I miss out on the things I actually love to do.

What’s your version of Penshaw Monument, and how often are you doing it?

What do you need - daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually - to refill your cup and maintain enough zest for your life?

It’s January, you have the whole year ahead of you, so now is the time to take stock of where you are right now, and what you need more of, and less of, in your life.

Otherwise 2026 will be a carbon copy of 2025. Only you know if that’s a good thing or not.

I’m doing a live training course soon covering my BASICS Framework, helping you to take stock and reset for a corker of a 2026.

More details shall follow. But if this sounds interesting to you, then DM me.

19/01/2026

What a f*cking p!sshead.

I sometimes wish I could go back in time and give my old self some advice. Some words of wisdom about my very destructive relationship with the booze.

In this photo, it’s Christmas 2005, I think, and I’m in the state I'd normally be in every weekend, not just going my ends for the festive season.

I’m completely bladdered, thinking I’m a charming, funny, party-boy, a real hit with the ladeez, but in reality, I was a sad bellend of a man. The red-faced drunk, falling about all over.

I was peppered with self-doubt, low self-worth, raging self-criticism through a body dysmorphic lens, disordered eating, and hated my own company. But on the outside, I always had a laugh and had a progressive career, so I was fine, and so it worked.

In my chase for the superficial goals of career & money, whilst pretending I was fine, I’d keep sacrificing my physique, my emotional stability, my confidence and self-worth. And two marriages. And life just started to feel very meaningless despite what onlookers may have thought.

What was my solution? Yep, continue to mask it with the booze & silence because us men don’t talk about such things. But by aged 33, I finally realised that I’d been chasing the wrong things.

The real solution that worked for me was to get sober. Now I know it’s apparently cool AF these days to not drink, but even I’m sick of seeing all the posts of, ‘Look at me, I’m 263 days no alcohol now, and I’m in the gym at 6am’ - just bore off with all that man.

Joining the sober brigade doesn't have to be part of the solution if it's not part of the problem. Your solution to your current problem will be the one that works for you - no s**t sherlock!!

So, you therefore need a process to discover what’s going on and what solutions are going to stick. A process to go into yourself and your inner game, to allow you to change your outer game.

If you’re feeling a bit like I used to - superficially successful but silently broken - then I’ve got something to help you coming very soon.

16/01/2026

When life gives you traffic cones…

This is me and my mate Ernie, he’s a cool kid, I’ve known him since I was 13. At school, he was the first to get p***s and a girlfriend, and he wore his trousers really high up on his waist, way before Simon Cowell ever did.

Anyway, on a recent road trip to Glasgow to see the Australian Pink Floyd, we like to do ‘coffee & culture’, so we visited the Gallery of Modern Art. One thing I love about this place is that the statue of the Duke of Wellington, outside the gallery, has got a traffic cone on his head!!

Apparently, it started in the early 1980’s, a drunken prank. And the council tried to stop it for years - they’d remove it (at £100 per call out they claimed) but a cone would return days later. The police got involved too but they didn't manage to stop it either.

The council then proposed to raise the statue’s plinth but public outcry and a petition prevented that from happening. So, in the end, they accepted it. The people had spoken and they wanted it. And it just became a thing. These days, the art gallery even sell traffic cone merchandise.

What was once an annoyance has been accepted, and reframed as a positive, and also monetised. I think that’s brilliant, the people of Glasgow got what they wanted, and also the reminder of how we often can’t change what’s happened or what is currently happening, but we can change our perspective of an event or situation.

Life can throw a lot of proverbial traffic cones at you, which can hit you instantly hard or be a minor annoyance that won’t go away. I’ve certainly had many of them, especially in business, with losses and mistakes being made aplenty. You can rant & rave, and blame, or work to get through it, learn through it, improve the people and processes to prevent a repeat.

Is there anything going on in your life right now that feels like an annoying traffic cone? How easy is it for you to accept it and start working on reframing it as some new opportunity for growth.

The acceptance & reframing of a situation is of course, a skill to be learnt and continually practised. I may have something appearing soon to help with that.

Until then, go and grab your best mate, get a roadtrip booked in, and have a memorable time.

Or just get drunk tonight and put a traffic cone on your head.

15/01/2026

You’re a Dad, but are you really their Hero?

See this family photo, I’m wearing a ‘HERO’ sticker because I got a hole-in-one at the crazy golf.

This got me thinking about how our kids see us Dad’s. We’d like to think we actually are their hero, their role model, their inspiration and the elite example.

But are you acting like it?

I actually asked my kids if they thought I was their hero, and they said yes. Cool, I passed the test!! Maybe it was just because I put them on the spot, or they thought they’d get something for a yes. But I’d like to think I’m more of a hero than a zero in their eyes. It definitely got me thinking.

Us Dad’s should be living a life that makes our kids look forward to becoming adults. Adulthood shouldn’t be something that they fear because of how we do it.

How do you and your life look to them? Do you identify with any of these:

Overweight or out of shape, physically & mentally?
Lacking confidence and self-belief?
Too much self-doubt and worry?
Eating endless junk?
Spending excessively?
Depressed, anxious and self-medicated?
Overwhelmed, aimless, joyless and lacking any sense of meaning and purpose?
A totally depleted business owner, whose always working, and when you are at home, you’re either flaked out on the sofa, or still in work mode glued to your phone? Because work is actually one of your addictions.

OR, does this resonate more:

You feel rich in all the truly important things in life that matter - health, fitness, self-confidence, composure, peace of mind, resilience, being your authentic self, love with people who matter to you, enthusiasm for your life, making your impact, with purpose-driven actions and progress.

If you’re nowhere near the above, then whose to blame? And once you’re over playing the blame game, what are you going to do about it?

I didn’t write this to make you feel s**t; I say this because I’ve been there and I know how it feels. I had a Dad-bod before I even had kids, and a raging booze problem, and two divorces by the age of 25 because I was married to the booze and to work.

I help my clients sort their s**t out, like how I sorted mine out.

Only you can decide how much of a hero you are.

Keep your eyes peeled for something I’ve created that will help you.

Or carry on as you are, hoping that things will magically just get better on their own…

Two Lives TLC3 Ltd

11/02/2026

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