Hi, I'm Sam.
Your coach.
I grew up in Glasgow.
When I was ten, my mum was diagnosed with cancer. Around the same time, my dad left. Almost overnight I became the "bad kid" — or the "weird kid", depending on who you asked. Restless, difficult to reach, impossible to settle. Nobody called it ADHD back then. They just called it a problem.
I learned early how to manage. How to perform. How to make it look like everything was fine when it wasn't. I got so good at it that for a long time I didn't even notice I was doing it.
At twenty-one, with £5,000 and not much else, I opened a coffee shop in Glasgow. Built it from the ground up, figured it out as I went, made something real out of nothing. It meant a lot to me. Then COVID hit, and it was gone.
I went back to study psychology — not for a career plan, but because I needed to understand myself. What made me tick. Why certain patterns kept repeating no matter what I changed on the outside. What was actually going on underneath a surface I'd spent years perfecting.
Then, at twenty-seven, my mum's cancer came back. She'd beaten it once. This time was different.
I submitted my final psychology assignment while she was still here. I managed to tell her I'd submitted it. I never got to tell her I passed.
She died four days later.
I've hit rock bottom more than once. That part doesn't have a clean ending — and I'm not going to pretend it does. But what I have now, and what I didn't have for most of my life, is a baseline. A stable place to work from. Somewhere to return to when things get hard again, because they always do.
That's what this is. Not a story of having it all figured out. A framework built from the inside out, by someone who needed it badly enough to build it himself.