Max Latimer · About
I didn't work this out. I got taken apart.
Twelve years, two coaching companies, one business I shut down, and three months of quiet that changed the direction of all of it.
Who I am
Coach. Breathwork practitioner. Vision quest guide. Father of two.
I live in the Northern Rivers with my wife and our boys. Over a decade of coaching, and more than a thousand people through one to one work, group sessions and extended retreat settings.
The whole story, in my own voice.
How the programming gets in, why fixing things on the outside only works up to a point, what it cost me to find that out, and what I'd guide you to see instead. About sixteen minutes.
It isn't your fault
From very young, like all of us, you get imprinted with a way of being in the world so you can fit in and stay part of the tribe. To gain love. To be of value. To be seen and heard by your parents and the people around you.
So you build mechanisms to go along and get along. You don't speak up, because depending on when you grew up, children were meant to be seen and not heard. Fine for a kid trying to fit in. A terrible thing to keep being for the rest of your life.
And it works. Right up until it stops working. Then the way your body calls you out is that internal driver, the weird feeling that you're somehow off track. That's the calling.
Ninety five per cent of how we show up in a day isn't conscious. It's the same reason you can drive home from work and not recall the trip. You've got a groove and you just line up in it.
Trackers know this. They find the ruts animals wear into the ground, the same paths over and over, and they sit and wait. A path is efficient. Keep using the same one and eventually it's your undoing.
How I got here
I felt my own groove start to waver in my twenties. I just didn't have the language for it. So I did what a lot of us do. I moved. Job to job. City to city. Chasing the feeling that there had to be more to life than I was being shown, like it was someone else's job to hand me the answer.
Just before my thirtieth birthday I let go of the fear of what if I'm wrong about this feeling, and I jumped. What I found, slowly, through small actions that honoured a voice I could barely hear, was that the more responsibility I take, the more free I become.
I spent four years inside one coaching company, as a coach and then head coach, and three years at another. Both existed to help people build their businesses. What I kept seeing was that the business was never the thing. The people in front of me were out of alignment with themselves and burning out chasing something that was already available to them, and nobody in the room was talking about it.
So I left, to build my own version. And I made some really good things. And then I went out of alignment again.
I'd started working with a coach and it was going well. I made my first twenty thousand dollar sale and earned the money back inside three months of a twelve month agreement. Then I started to backslide. I went chasing the hows and drifted further from the why I'd started with. I'd never gone deep enough to know what I actually wanted my life to look like. I was copying the people around me in the coaching world, building versions of their businesses, chasing a number to hit and a status to hold, without ever once asking what I wanted for myself.
I was being imprinted and programmed from the outside again. Only this time I was thirty four, thirty five, thirty six.
The sign
I told my coach I was closing the business down. But before I did, I had one last crack at realigning, this time around dads in business. I started a podcast called the DAD As Fuck podcast and interviewed over ninety dads in about eight weeks.
It was one of those dads who told me a story about falling in love with himself for the first time. He'd found that part of himself through ayahuasca. That story caught me. I asked if we could talk more, he said yes, and put me onto someone who could help. While I waited to hear back, over the next twenty four hours I had three more random encounters, all pointing me toward plant medicine.
The uncanny part is that I hadn't heard the word in years. I knew almost nothing about it. I'd spent six months travelling South America in my twenties and never once come across it. And if I had, I'd have said no. I wasn't remotely ready for that kind of call.
The real tipping point was telling Jacquie. I'd been a heavy pot smoker right through my twenties and we had history around my lack of control with substances. I'd long since made my peace with it, course corrected, and built my life on firmer ground. But this was a left field request and part of me braced for her to be thrown by it.
She met it straight away.
That would be great for you.
Jacquie is always the first to feel where I'm really at, before almost anyone. So when she gave me her blessing, she wasn't only saying yes. She was acknowledging how far I'd come, and quietly naming the pressure I'd been putting on myself to succeed.
In that experience my grip let go of all the things my mind had told me were imperative to my survival. The job. The status. The money. The properties. The stories I kept repeating to myself, the very ones that had once saved me from an earlier version of myself.
Nothing was added that night. Things came off.
All I wanted from that moment was to move slowly. Not long after, I shut everything down. I finalised every coaching agreement in good standing, closed all my social accounts and emails, and left the city. The only thing left standing in front of me was my family. My wife, and a baby who was three months old.
I gave myself three months. I turned everything off to hear myself think, because I couldn't see what was holding me back and what was driving me forward. I had to let go of all of it in order to understand it better.
What I found was that I didn't need anything outside of me to be happy. Honesty was the key. I had to be deeply honest about who I was, who I am, and who I've been.
In hindsight, I probably could have figured this out without shutting my business down.
That's not regret. It's the reason I do this work the way I do. There's a far more aligned way through it than the one I took, and it's one you can integrate into the life you've already built.
What it costs to cross
The outside world never follows immediately. You change on the inside first, and everyone around you is still relating to the version of you they were trained on. That's why the transition is the most turbulent part, not the decision.
If you go and build something from a dream you've never told anyone, you're going to rub up against the old version of you that lives in other people's eyes. It isn't their fault. If you've ever read Who Moved My Cheese, you've moved theirs, and they can't rely on you the way they used to.
There's a saying out there that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and that you therefore need to cut people out. I've never found that to be true. I'm not going to sit someone down and tell them we're no longer aligned. It's a natural division. You gravitate away from the people who no longer fit, and the ones who still fit come along in some way, shape or form.
Your job isn't to convince any of them. It's to be yourself, and to let go of the attachment to bringing everyone with you.
What I do now
I'm still unpacking this. Almost five years on I understand it implicitly and I'm still finding layers of it, and the deeper ones are the hardest to see. It's a slow process. Integrating any of this takes time. There is no ninety day program.
What I've got now is a decent set of legs under me. I can plant my feet and know what's for me and what isn't. That's what I help people build, so that whatever you point yourself at flourishes because of who you're being rather than what you're chasing. The business, the relationship, the health.
The more I'm willing to go within, the more traction I get, because I'm coming from somewhere rather than trying to get to somewhere.
The lineage
Initiated vision quest guide in the Stalking Wolf lineage, by Steve McKenzie and Katie Rydge. Level 2 accredited breathwork facilitator, trauma informed. IPHM accredited practitioner. Over a decade of coaching and more than a thousand people. I sat my own Quest on my fortieth birthday, in March 2024.
As Steve, my vision quest teacher and close friend, reminds me, everything is connected and everything is a teacher. All you have to do is let go just enough to let the teaching take root.
If you're in it right now
If you feel like you keep learning the same lesson, or you're getting the same feedback from the world and you can't break out of it, look within. Be brutally honest with yourself.
It might be as simple as going for a walk, getting out in nature, taking a pen and paper, and spending quiet time on your own. The more time you spend alone and in your own company, the better off you'll be. As a resource, not as a way to escape.
You can't possibly know yourself as well as you think you do.
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