The Quote That Changed My Life

After the renewable energy company I co-founded failed, my girlfriend at the time and I decided that Mexico would be a good place to relax and reset. 

Due to my dental hygienist making a small mistake and clipping my gum though, I was put on antibiotics forty-eight hours before we went away: the ones you strictly can’t drink alcohol on. Less than ideal when I was off to the land of Tequila!

A few nights in, we went to a place called CoCo Bongo, a cross between a West End show, a circus and a nightclub. My girlfriend got drunk – really drunk – and I carried her home at 4am as she had passed out over my shoulder. 

The next day, she was too hungover to leave the room. If I hadn’t been on antibiotics, I may have been in the same state, but sober, I certainly wasn’t going to sit in a room when it was a beautiful 35°C outside.

Off I went to the pool with my book of choice, Hero by Rhonda Byrne.

It was while reading this book that I had the second lightning moment of my life. In it, Rhonda Byrne talks about a guy called Mastin Kipp, author, speaker and creator of Functional Life CoachingTM, and how he gained his business momentum by posting a daily motivational quote on Twitter. 

One day, he went from 1,000 to 10,000 followers overnight when he was retweeted by reality TV star Kim Kardashian. From that moment, his career took off. 

I instantly gained clarity about what to do next, which led me to tears of inspiration. 

Deep down, I had known what I truly wanted to do for some time – my North Star of empowering others – but what had stopped me starting was a lack of clarity. 

I needed to know what the first step was – the first intelligent action. With inspiration from Mastin Kipp, I realised I could begin with something as simple as posting a motivational quote on social media each day.

Upon returning home, I was plagued with doubts. 

What would people say? What if they didn’t like it? What if I felt like a fraud? 

I reached out to some people who were already doing what I wanted to be doing and they gave me a different perspective: how many people would miss out on benefiting from what I had a deep desire to do if I didn’t act? 

This was enough to dissolve my fears and help me regain clarity. I took the intelligent action I had been inspired by while on holiday and to my delight, it was well received.

Posting one quote wasn’t going to make much of a difference to anyone; what I needed to do was act consistently, so I did exactly that. 

In fact, I did a little more than that. It was like pulling a thread on an old jumper, making the whole jumper unravel.

I started with a quote a day.

This was the first quote I posted, it felt pretty apt at the time, especially after the failure of the renewable energy company:

Then a week later expanded to two a day. After two weeks, I set up a website. After three weeks, I wrote my first blog. Three months later, I had reached my ninety-day goal of a 10,000-strong social media following.

In the fourth month, I ran four personal development discovery evenings, one a week. My month’s goal was to provide value and showcase my one-day event by getting fifty people to come to each free evening, packed with content. How hard could it be? The first event was attended by thirty-six people, the second sixteen, the third twelve and the fourth thirteen, so yeah, harder than I thought.

You may have heard the saying: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’. I realised other coaches and trainers must face the same challenge, so why not all work together? 

No one reads just one author, so why should they have just one coach?

With this, The Evolve Network was born, running personal-development networking events in multiple cities around the UK each month. During the pandemic, we grew The Evolve Network to become The Evolve Academy, an online membership to give you tools, resources and accountability to take action on your North Star.

A few years on, after 5,000+ coaching hours, having run over 350 events and spoken internationally, I’ve now written a book – North Star Thinking: Master Your Mindset and Live a Life You Love 

All of these things are what I wanted when I had my lightning moment and decided on my North Star. They have happened because I reverse-engineered my North Star to empower others and took my first intelligent action of posting a quote on social media.