And not in a bad way, either. The subtle pressure was gone. The familiar urgency to be somewhere, to do something, to become something, gone. I lay there for a moment, not quite sure what I was feeling.
It settled later that morning, sitting in a café in Bali in front of my laptop. My mum had just called. Nothing significant was said. And yet something confirmed itself, quietly and completely, in a way I had never felt before.
For the first time in my life, I felt okay. Not accomplished. Not validated. Not on my way to somewhere better.
Just okay. Enough. Here. As I was right now.
It sounds simple. But it wasn't. It had taken thirty-something years to arrive at that feeling.
And most of those years had been spent running in the opposite direction.
I woke up and realised something was missing.
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I had learnt that I had to win.
I grew up in a small town in New Zealand. My brother and I were raised by our mum, seeing our dad during school holidays and weekend motocross trips.
On the track, we were naturally gifted, competing nationally and winning against riders with bigger budgets and better bikes.
At school, the story was similar. I won a state math championship and was a scholarship to a private school. My mum turned it down because she didn't want me to be "the poor kid" at school.
Looking back, I can see what that taught me: that I could do more with less. That I could win anyway. That I had to.
My dad showed love through sport. Showing up on race day, helping with the bike. At some level, I knew that I was loved, but there was something else missing that would take years to name. I just knew that when I won, I felt good.
What neither of us could see was what I was quietly learning underneath it. That performance was how you earned approval. That doing more, winning more, was how you became enough.
I carried that programme for thirty years without knowing it was running.
My mum was different. Curious about people, about why they do what they do and what drives them. That curiosity found its way to me early. I was meditating, practising yoga, and journaling before I could legally drink (and I was doing plenty of that too).
The inner curiosity was always there. The external searching was just louder, and it often took the form of self destruction or the pursuit of pleasure.
At nineteen I dropped out of university and moved to Australia. And once I'd ticked that box and saved enough money, I was onward to Europe.
The Euro dream got cut short when I broke my ankle after a big night in Amsterdam. I ended up back home with an empty bank account.
I went back to university and got a job at a bank with plans to get rich. A few months later, my manager looked me in the eye and said: "Sam, you should be out in the world chasing your dreams."
I packed my bags and I never looked back.
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On the surface, it looked pretty good. But something was off.
I started a tourism business in Amsterdam in my early twenties with nothing but total conviction and a thousand dollars in my bank account.
What started as boozy boat tours quickly morphed into a "tech startup". A travel booking platform for flights, hotels, boozy boat trips and everything in between. It was exciting.
After a year of playing the role of tech founder and CEO at my failing startup, I found myself in Iceland running a second one at twenty-four.
It was all going quite well and I felt pretty cool. One thing lead to another, and I was selected for a Silicon Valley startup accelerator program, landing in the same neighbourhood as Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs.
What followed was years of hustling and fast living. Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Paris. My foot was on the gas pedal and the treadmill was spinning faster than ever. One day I was standing on stage in one of Napoleon's palaces in France, receiving a fancy award, and another day, my logo on Wall Street in New York
I loved being in those places. It scared the shit out of me, and it inspired me just as much. The little boy in me felt a sense of enough-ness in those moments.
I liked living on the edge. I liked the intensity and the intoxication of not knowing how it would all land. I was learning a lot, doing a lot, and I was proud of it. Proud that I had backed myself and pursued the life I thought I wanted.
But through all of it, something was off.
I wanted to be great.
I read everything I could find on psychology, business and elite performance. I followed all the gurus. I tracked habits obsessively. I even designed an app, trying to engineer my way to wholeness by optimising everything I could measure.
I wanted to be great, and I don't think that's a bad thing. The drive to grow, to improve, to become, that's not the problem. It just really matters where it's coming from.
For a while, it worked. The businesses grew, and the recognition came. But despite the successes, the goal posts kept moving and my inner critic and fear were never far behind. Burnout was inevitable.
In late 2019, the world caught COVID, and everything came to a grinding halt. The travel, the deals, the dopamine and the momentum.
My romantic relationship got caught in this mess, too. After a five-year sprint on the treadmill, in the midst of burnout, I started burning it all down.
I ended my relationship. Left a startup I'd spent five years building and shut down another. Got rid of our cosy home in Amsterdam. The life I'd spent years trying to build, gone.
It took me years to understand that it was my inner world that needed updating. Not the relationship, the businesses, or the city. It was "me".
What followed was a year of wandering, bouncing between depression and empty adventure. Searching without knowing what I was looking for.
I circled the globe a couple of times and after years of fast-paced living, I ended up in Bali to figure out what the hell had just happened.
I tried many things, with each letting in a little more light.
I leaned on my network and moved into consulting roles, from ghost-writing for CEOs to private equity advisory. This work felt important, but more importantly it gave me space for my endeavours to start yielding meaningful results.
I opened my mind and tried to surrender more. I tried many things. Silent meditation retreats. New relationships. Ego dissolving plants. Breathwork. Qigong, more yoga, more reflection.
Each thing let in a little more light. Inching closer, but still missing the parts I couldn't yet name. I didn't yet understand why I was doing any of it. Not really.
Apparently conscious self-improvement and running from your shadows can look very similar from the outside. As Jung put it: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."
In other words, your greatest ambitions might be born from your greatest wounds.
The moment everything changed.
It was during a particularly dark season that I finally found my way to an NLP practitioner. Those sessions unlocked everything.
I came to Julia with complaints about scarcity mindset and a quiet sense that I was doomed to fail. Classic presenting problems. Logical, rational, all Mind.
What we found underneath was something else entirely.
In an expanded state, I watched my childhood again. I saw a little boy. Not some poor kid comparing himself to others as I'd always assumed, but simply a kid whose needs weren't being met. Not through neglect or malice either. Just small moments, accumulated over time, that told him he wasn't enough.
I sat in silence and cried for him. And then I did something I'd never done before. I put my arm around him and I told him he was enough. I looked at him with pride at how far we had come.
Everything I had been chasing, the money, the self-improvement, the awards, had all been trying, unconsciously, to give that little boy what he needed.
When I finally gave it to him, the chasing stopped and the the pressure eased.
What happened next is difficult to put into words. A bit like a psychedelic trip. You can try to describe it, but the felt sense is something else entirely.
I had spent every moment of my existence with a nervous system wired a certain way. The shift was so foreign, so complete, that I didn't quite know what to do with it.
And I still don't, fully. But I know what it feels like to live on the other side of it.
It wasn't magic. And your story will be different.
That café moment in Bali wasn't magic. It was the result of years of practice, honest inner work, and a willingness to stop running long enough to truly see myself.
Your story will be different. You don't need to go to Bali, or chase dizzying heights and fuck it all up, to find out what's driving you.
Most people I work with haven't hit rock bottom. They've just arrived somewhere and quietly noticed it doesn't quite feel the way they thought it would.
That feeling is exactly where this work begins.
Now, I help people to change their story.
After a decade of chasing, I trained as an NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis practitioner.
The work draws on all of it. Twenty years of practice alongside a decade of building, and the ongoing reality of operating at exec level. I work with a small number of founders and high performers at any one time.
The patterns that quietly drive most people were never chosen consciously. And they can be changed.
If this resonates, the wheel is yours. Take it.
Sam
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