I was adopted at eleven weeks old.

For most of my life, being adopted felt like something I carried rather than something I was. Always there. Always heavy. But separate from me somehow.

Even as a kid, I felt out of place. Everyone else had parents who were their own flesh and blood, and I didn't have that. It doesn't mean I wasn't loved. My adopted mum was beautiful, kind and caring, and she gave me everything I could ask for. But it didn't change the fact that something felt off.

"Not wrong in the way that something is broken. Wrong in the way that something doesn't fit."

A belief had been written before I could talk: something is wrong with me. And whenever a feeling got too big to hold, my default was anger. Shut down. Push everyone away. I didn't know what to do with what I was feeling, so I made sure nobody got close enough to see it.

From about fifteen I built a character. A version of Dan who could walk into a room and command it. Bravado, performance, the ability to turn it on whenever I needed to.

The same character later built me a career. Sales, business development, client rooms. Reading a room, anticipating what people needed, performing at a level that made me indispensable. It looked like confidence. It was survival.

Years earlier, it had also got me expelled from school at fifteen, for selling weed. I walked into a room with my mum, my dad, two police officers and the headmaster. I'd been playing a role, and I got exposed.

That room mattered more than I understood at the time. Being seen without the character felt like being caught. Visibility meant exposure, and exposure meant punishment. That wiring stayed with me for decades.

My adopted mum died when I was nineteen, of an aggressive womb cancer that spread fast to the brain. I didn't have the emotional capacity to understand what I'd lost, let alone grieve it.

So my twenties became a decade of keeping one step removed from the feeling in my body. It was cocaine, MDMA, clubs every weekend. I used to think the drugs were the thing I was hooked on. Looking back, it was the afterparties: a room full of people, all of us high, finally safe enough to talk about what we actually carried. That was the one place I could say any of it out loud. I needed a chemical to get near my own grief.

From the outside it looked like a life. From the inside it was distance.

After lockdown I moved to rural Wales, mostly to ride mountain bikes. I didn't watch TV the entire time I was there. And one night I was lying in bed with no music, no noise, nothing, and for the first time ever I tried to feel what was going on inside my body.

There was a sharp, concentrated ball of energy in the top of my stomach that had been there as long as I could remember. I focused on it. And I felt it move.

"Oh my god. I have the ability to change how I feel."

That realisation changed the direction of my life. I signed up to train as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist with Quest, thinking I was going to help other people.

By this point I had climbed to business development director and been demoted back to account manager. The months of stillness in Wales had done something to the character: I couldn't perform him any more. In my return-to-work meeting, my boss looked at me and said the person he'd hired was seemingly completely different to the person sat in front of him. Then he said it outright: I don't know who Dan is anymore.

I felt it in my throat and swallowed it, because I didn't want to appear weak. But something enormous was confirmed in that moment. The character had died. And I had no idea yet who was underneath it.

Seven months into my training, a friend who has known me since childhood listened to me describe how heavy everything felt and said, very plainly: sounds like you need therapy, buddy.

He was right. I'd been learning the techniques and practising them on others, and I had never once sat in the client's chair. So I found a therapist of my own and committed to weekly sessions.

It was the heaviest period of this whole story. And very quickly, the sessions went to the one place I'd spent thirty years avoiding: the adoption, and what it meant to have never felt good enough.

In June 2025 I took my dad to a car show for Father's Day. As I was packing up to leave, he walked into my bedroom holding an orange Sainsbury's bag, crying. It was my adoption papers. And inside, a letter from my birth mum.

I didn't read it straight away. The bag sat there for months. By the time I finally opened it, the belief had already been found and taken apart in those sessions. I wasn't looking for rescue, which is exactly why I could read it.

The letter explained her story. She was twenty-one, carrying a childhood of her own that no child should have to carry, and she made her decision from love. She didn't give me away because something was wrong with me. She gave me away so I wouldn't inherit what she had.

The same bag held letters from my adopted mum, written about how much she loved me. Those were the ones that brought me to tears, over a decade after her death.

"One loved me enough to let me go. The other loved me enough to hold on."

The letter didn't change me. The change had already happened. What the letter did was confirm it: the story I'd built thirty years of my life on was never true.

Every turning point in this story has the same mechanism. Someone sees me. I resist. And then eventually, I let them in. I didn't arrive at a single one of these realisations alone. And holding that mirror up for other people is what I do now.

These days I'm a partner at Total Mental Performance, a seven-figure coaching business, alongside the private practice this site is about. Which means I've sat on both sides of the desk: the one performing, and the one holding the mirror.

And if you're reading this with a business, a team and a title of your own, you might recognise the shape. The ability to read every room. The performance that made you indispensable. The sense that your place has to be earned, over and over. You can be leading a successful company and still be running on a sentence written when you were small.

I spent thirty years believing I was given away because something was wrong with me, and I know exactly what it costs to run a life on a belief like that. Every person I work with carries their own version of that sentence. My job is to hold up the mirror, trace the belief to the moment it was written, and change it there.

It's me and my dog, Pachi. I live in Manchester by choice, close enough to the Peak District to get out on the hills, walk, and breathe some actual fresh air when my head needs the space. The focus is on doing work I love, with people who inspire me, and creating a life of abundance for both of us.

My one real obsession outside all this is cars. They've been a safe place for me for as long as I can remember. Right now I'm slowly turning an old BMW 330Ci into a turbocharged Clubsport, the fast road car I've always wanted. It is taking far longer and costing far more than it should. Everyone needs one project that makes no sense, and this is mine.