You can only meet someone at the depth to which you have gone to that place in yourself.

“I chased success for years while carrying fear and shame I could not name. The outside world called it discipline. At other times it named it the complete opposite. All of it was avoidance.”

I have lived inside professional sport since I was eighteen. From the outside, some of those years looked like drive. Others looked like the opposite — like laziness, like a man who had stopped trying. Neither reading was right. It was all the same thing wearing different clothes.

It looked, at times, like a full life. Travelling. Practising. Competing. And underneath it I was managing something I had no words for, and drinking was how I managed it. Discipline is the one costume nobody questions in this industry. It took a long time, and a fair amount of falling apart, to understand that what I was calling strength was the thing keeping me from myself.

What I have come to understand since is that almost everyone is carrying some version of this. Fear and shame, in some measure. And we have no idea how deep underneath it runs, or how much of what we call choice is actually being decided by it.

It is how a person goes from loving something to quietly hating it. How the thing that once gave them freedom becomes the thing they feel imprisoned by. Nobody decides for that to happen. It happens underneath, over years, while everything on the surface still looks like commitment.

Since then I have taken this work wherever it has been needed. Across the United Kingdom and Europe. Into the United States, inside Division I programmes and college environments. To Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East. Alongside national team head coaches, professional footballers in the men’s and women’s game, tour golfers, executives and people with no title at all.

Some of it has happened in performance centres and staff rooms. A great deal of it has happened on the phone at strange hours, in the days after a defeat, or in the weeks when someone’s career was quietly coming apart.

I do not hand out answers. That is the whole method. I ask the question you have been walking around for years, then stay in the room while you answer it.

What I have learned is that I can only take someone as far as I have been willing to go myself. That is why this never stops being personal. I keep going back down, so that there is somewhere further to meet people.