Today marks a threshold for me.

After a five-year hiatus, a deep journey into business leadership, some life-changing events, and several months of preparation, I’m re-opening my coaching shop.

I feel so grateful and happy to be here once more.

But to explain why, I need to tell you a story.

When you drift off track

Have you ever noticed that life has this way of helping you out when you drift off track? It throws stuff at you to help you find the way again. The twist is that the help doesn’t always feel helpful at first. It can fuck things up, make it harder.

And yet help it is, and back onto the path it ushers us, whether gently or forcefully.

Over the last year, I’ve been given a deep lesson in this principle. Because boy did I drift off track.

It’s easily done. And in fact (and perhaps infuriatingly) it turns out that drifting off track is also the path too. Because all the detours you take and the circles you spin in, are of course part of the journey. We have to go off track to rediscover the track.

It was in 2020 when I finished up with my last coaching client. I knew I needed to step back for a while. I loved my clients. They were feeling deeply served. Yet, somehow I couldn’t fit myself into the same box anymore, and didn’t know what the new box was.

So I stopped coaching. And I stopped writing.

I always planned to come back to it when things settled down and got easier. Which (spoiler alert) never came!

This was the same year I stepped in as co-owner and co-leader of Coaches Rising, a company two friends of mine had founded together, and for which I’d run the marketing since 2014.

Coaches Rising is an amazing company. It was an early pioneer in online programs for coaches, creating advanced coach trainings on transformational topics, led by world-class faculty. Thousands of coaches take its training programs every year

Growth and divorce in business

2020 and covid turned out to be a big year for Coaches Rising. As the world sheltered in place and turned to the internet for social connection and deeper experience, our programs exploded.  And my coaching fell firmly out of sight as the workload increased.

Then in the autumn of 2021, one of my partners (and co-founder of the company) told us he wanted to step out of the company and move onto new things.

None of us had expected this, and we went on a steep learning curve as we learned how to do “business divorce”.

One of the things divorce means, is a difficult negotiation of value where the party that’s leaving inevitably thinks the company is worth more than the party that’s staying.

Alongside this is the emotional letting go, and the gaping hole that this person leaves behind in the work of the company.

This takes months. And meanwhile, there’s still a company to run. Any business owner who’s been through this experience knows how hard it is.

We made it. We remained friends on the other side. We all moved on.

Which for me and Joel (the remaining co-founder) meant the challenge of taking the company into a new phase.

I should say who Joel is, because he is not simply the founder of Coaches Rising, he’s my soul brother. We moved to Amsterdam together in 2008 in search of “conscious community”, and we’ve long been each other’s first phone call when the shit hits the fan.

Business leadership and soul pain

It was a big change for both of us.  We took on new roles and responsibilities, we started to revision the company, we hired new people for our growing team.

Some people say you should never go into business with your friends. I feel the opposite of this. I only want to do it if I can do it with friends.

But it does come with its challenges! And Joel and I had them.

We had wins, we had losses. We navigated challenges. We matured parts of the company that greatly needed it.

I learned more than I can write here. Things like…

• How to create and read profit-and-loss statements, so we keep our fingers on the financial pulse of the company.
• How to lead a team – empowering others to do the work allowing me to direct from higher up (rather than just doing everything myself).
• That I have a tough and resilient soldier inside who doesn’t stop and will give everything for the cause.
• How to turn off the worry voice when I get up at 3am for a piss, so I can get back to sleep rather than lying awake stressing.
• How to take stinging feedback without collapsing or defending (so you can actually hear it and grow from the experience).

I grew immeasurably, learned deep embodied and practical lessons about the art of business. I discovered strength I never knew I had.

And then I burned out.

First I got sick, and couldn’t shift it for weeks, kicking around in bed feeling guilty about all the other people who were running the ship.

I went deep. I asked for guidance, I had a long hard look at myself. I listened to the answers I received. I hired a new person to run the operations of my marketing team — I started to create more space for myself.

And then I got even sicker—a reoccurrence of a chronic condition I thought I was over. One evening a year ago, it all came to a head. I still remember it vividly…

I’m on the floor of my cabin, using all my spiritual and somatic skills to try and surf the extreme pain and fear I’m in.

I surrender. I let myself fall, all the way to the bottom of the well.

And there amongst the pain, I hear the truth.

“Ewan, you have to stop.”

She said it with deep love and great urgency.

I heard it in the centre of my heart, and it broke me open. I was burned out. And I had to stop.

This was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to admit.

I thought I was immune to it. Too self-aware and self-sovereign to fall foul of such a thing! Right up to the point I realised I already had.

But admit it I did, which lead to some vulnerable conversations with Joel and the rest of the team. I felt ashamed – like I’d failed. And I felt completely and utterly exhausted.

So, I took time off.

The first months took me so deep. Into the core of myself and all the knotted trauma that I was oblivious to. My practice got deep too. I spent many hours on the mat. I faced some of my most hidden and vulnerable parts. I learned how to unwind my clenched and exhausted nervous system. Which involved lots of body practice, lots of baking, and lots of playing around the house with my son.

Most importantly, I began to see the elephant that had been standing in the room all along.

Truth that sets you free

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you might know that I see the entrepreneur as being made up of (at least) 3 core archetypes – the Artist, the Merchant, and the Seeker. This is a map that came out of me, and also one that guides me.

It was my business mentor Rand who helped me see the elephant.

We were talking one afternoon. I was messy. Confused.

“What led you to this?” He asked.

I fumbled around for a while before he turned my own map upon me.

“You’ve overdosed on the Merchant, and you’ve suppressed the Artist.”

The truth. I’d been killing myself for the cause, being a business leader. And I’d left my art behind.

Our conversation gave me the most powerful of experiences—like I was caught and freed at the same time. I couldn’t escape the truth. And yet it opened the way.

I knew I couldn’t go back to the same thing– soldiering on, hoping one day to have enough time to get back to “my work”.

I knew I had to reclaim and recommit to my own art – my writing and coaching.

Joel and I had some difficult and very honest conversations when we met to talk about the future. It was a process that took us both deep into truth. And at the end of it we agreed to part ways.

So, we went through another business divorce.

But this time it was me leaving. It’s challenging enough to go through this with any business partner. It was made so much harder for me when the person I’d normally call to counsel me, is the one sitting on the other side of the negotiation table.

These things are rarely easy, and it takes time, but we did it with generosity, honesty and grace.

So indeed, life has this way of helping you out when you drift off track. It’s just that the help doesn’t always feel helpful at first.

Back on the path

From burnout to break up. And then back onto the path. But of course, everything is different now. As Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

I feel different in (seemingly) paradoxical ways. Stronger, and also more sensitive. More driven, yet more relaxed. More confident, and also humbler.

And as I said earlier, the thing about drifting off the path, is that it’s also part of the path. My detour took me through a deep period of Merchant training. My knowledge of business has tripled during the last 5 years. And I feel blessed to be able to bring all that experience into the work I do helping entrepreneurs.

The irony is not lost on me. The fact that I repressed the deep call to coach people, by running a company that trained coaches.

And yet, over the last few months as I’ve re-visioned my work, put pieces together, re-written this website, and started writing and coaching again, a feeling has returned that I feared was lost.

It’s the feeling of being where I’m supposed to be. “This is why I’m here.”

Back on the path.

And so, it’s with great delight and deep gratitude that I can say…

My shop is open for business again

What does this mean?

I’ll be publishing regularly here on this blog (if you want to know when new stuff comes out, make sure you’re signed up on my mailing list below).

And I’m opening my coaching shop again.

So if you’re interested in coaching (or know someone who is), I’m taking on new clients.

If you don’t know what kind of coaching I do, I coach entrepreneurs—freelancers and founders. I work at the intersection of business, spirituality and creativity. I’m part guide, part advisor, and I help you walk your path, growing your work and business in the way that calls you.

You can read more about coaching here.

If you made it all the way to the end here, thank you. Your presence means a lot to me.