The Grounded Leader
Are you ready to start living from a place true to who you really are?
- In your relationships
- In your business
- In your life
Start a ConversationSelf-Assessment
Twelve questions · about five minutes
You don't need to throw the life you built out in order to live true to yourself.
You can begin living from that truth now.
The video that explains the whole thing.
Why building the business part misses the life part, and leaves a gap where you thought it was all supposed to land. What I got wrong doing it the other way. And why the first thing that changes won't be your business.
If fourteen minutes feels long, that's useful information. This isn't quick work. If you're looking for another strategy or tactic, you're in the wrong place. This might not be for you.
You've been using all the doing as a way to say I love you. A way to be of value. To be acknowledged. To be seen.
You've created a wonderful life and become someone people turn to in times of need.
Now it's time to put yourself first. To turn inward. To remember the power you have isn't in the doing - it's who you choose to be while you create.
Who this is for
Coaches and practitioners
You're good at the work and lost in the business of it. Somebody told you to pick the niche, build the funnel, run the system, and somewhere in all that the thing you were actually good at got smaller.
Founders and business owners
You built it and it worked. Now your relationships are getting brittle, you don't see your partner much, and you wish you could spend more time with your kids.
In transition
Already left, or about to. Out of the job, or the practice, or the role that fit you once. You haven't got the language for what's next yet, and everyone around you keeps asking what the plan is.
Twelve questions · about five minutes. There's no score and nothing to compare yourself to.
Why me
I was only ever building the business part.
I spent seven years inside two coaching companies. Four years at the first, coach and then head coach. Three at the second. Both existed to do one thing, help you build your business, and both did it one size fits all. First-time coaches, CEOs, healthcare practices, everyone handed the same version of how.
What neither of them did was see the human behind the doing. They went surface level deep on how to get the thing you say you want, as though you'd already given enough thought to whether you wanted it. I thought I had.
Then I made the same mistake in my own practice. I was only ever building the business part of what people were building. I didn't see the life part. I was using the business in order to live a better life, instead of creating the life I wanted and using the business as the vehicle to support it. That inversion is the work.
So I shut it down and went to ground. I needed that at the time. I'm not suggesting you do it, and knowing what I know now, you don't have to.
What I've become world class at is seeing this in people, because it's in me too, and then finding the language for it. Language created by you, not by me. My role is to agitate your thinking, to stop you skimming the surface you're so used to skimming from, and to not be the person in your life who says yes.
In their words
I've been building businesses and lives from borrowed blueprints, wondering why the life we once loved now feels soulless, despite doing everything “right.”
Katy Green · CEO and Co-Founder, Centred Excellence
I wanted a flourishing business and life. But who I was was a ‘sales dog’. I was constantly chasing and not closing. Max helped me realise this, and ever since that day it has become my creed, my way of being.
Nikhil Kumar · Founder, Bulletproof Teams
I became not just a better coach, but a better human. I'm a completely different man, husband, father, son, brother and friend because of the time I've spent with him.
Vaughan Paynter · Head Business Coach, The Expert Project
I realised the issue wasn't specifically with business — you can always find another tactic or approach. It was more mindset, it was how I was showing up to the table.
Daniel Taylor · Founder, Morgan Capital
I'd thought I needed to find something new, but it was actually an act of letting go of old stuff that opened me up to a love like I've never known before.
Tess Milton · Founder, UnearthHER
The way he allows you to self-navigate and explore things without giving you the answers is both frustrating and great, because it allows you to dig deeper and really do the work.
Michael Fordyce · Sales and Marketing Manager
The Three Capacities
Knowing what to do was never the problem.
You stall because you haven't built the capacity to do it. Not the knowledge, the capacity. These are the three internal muscles this work builds, and they build in that order.
- PresenceCan you feel it? You can't change what you can't feel. This is the ability to drop out of your head and into your body, and to stay there when the pressure is on. High achievers live in their heads. They have been rewarded for it their whole lives.
- PatternCan you see it? The awareness that comes before choice. Seeing the inherited programming that has been making your decisions for you, in real time, while it is happening. Sorting what is actually yours from what you were handed.
- PathCan you walk it? Creating from alignment rather than force. This is not about doing more. It is about creating from overflow instead of emptiness, which is the difference between the thing energising you and the thing draining you.
Being is the whole thing.
If all you changed was who you're being, and brought it into line with who you already know yourself to be, your life would change overnight.
Being isn't a fourth capacity. It's the ground the other three stand on. Worth that isn't earned by output.
Three ways to work together
You'll know which option is calling to you. You'll feel a mixture of excitement and fear.
The Session
There is one question you are carrying (maybe you've been carrying it quietly for years) that you've never said out loud. You leave with a more powerful question we'll create together, and a clear next step to begin to live from that question the moment the session finishes.
Three hours, plus a half hour a fortnight later
The Season
You're transitioning through something big. Something life changing. Something real. You're building something, ending something, or dealing with a life change that needs a steady set of hands, a new set of eyes, and someone who isn't going to diminish what you're going through with more shit to do. You are here for a fundamental shift in your Being.
Three months, two to three sessions a month, plus WhatsApp and email between
The Crossing
For someone who has already left. Not standing at the edge deciding. Already in the air. Around month three the excitement wears off and nobody's asking how it's going any more, and that's where most people quietly go back. Long enough that somebody's still there when it does. It includes two nights in person, just you and me, away from everything you'd normally be reachable through.
Five months, including a two-night retreat in person
Why there's no guarantee
Everyone in coaching dangles one. Get to X in ninety days or your money back. It lowers the barrier and it moves all the risk onto the person selling.
I don't offer one, and it isn't because I don't back the work. It's because a guarantee hands you a way out before you've started. It's a false way of being.
If you're sitting there thinking I might not be the right person, or that this might not work for you, then don't choose it. That's a real answer and it costs you nothing. But if you're ready to go all in on what you say you want, you won't need one.
You're the sort of person who looks at your life as something happening for you. Everything is an opportunity. Everything is a lesson. Everything that happens is another chance to be the person who shows up and creates the opportunity through who you're being.
That's what no guarantee actually looks like. The outcome you get is the one you need, not the one you think you should have got. I can't guarantee how the world is going to show up, and neither can anyone selling you one. What you can own is who you're going to be, and who you choose to be at any given moment.
So instead of a guarantee there's a dual commitment. Agreements we create together, and a container built through them that serves who you're choosing to become. And it isn't a one-way street. You saying yes to me is only half of it. I've still got to say yes to you.
What's the fear beyond your need for a guarantee?
This only ever starts with a conversation. An hour, and there's no charge for it.
My purpose in that hour is to draw this out of you. To go beyond the thing you say you think you want, or the thing you think you should want, and go deeper to that thing you've never told anyone before.
So when you're ready… let's have a conversation.