Yes, MENtal® is a lifestyle, health, and performance platform supporting men’s personal growth, professional development, and mental health. And it’s so much more. It’s a new age, next-generation mission-driven lifestyle environment and sustainable, value exchange ecosystem.
This isn’t just our story, it might be yours in some way too.
MENtal® is the dream I carried for a long time and didn’t even know I was carrying. It is the race I have been running in my head since I was four years old. I always knew there was something I was meant to bring to the world, something significant and impactful, but I didn’t know what it was. It just felt huge and meaningful. Some even said too big when I was growing up and would try and tell adults how I felt.
I always had the sense that I wanted to do things that would both help and influence people. It comes from me being the person, the boy, the young man, the teenager, and the adult who needed what MENtal® offers and provides. Or at least needed what we now offer.
My story in some way is everyone’s story and it is no one else’s story at the same time.
Divorced parents. Working class. I am a high school dropout. I didn’t go to university. I didn’t feel like I had a lot to give. Some days I felt like I was king of the world and other days like I was always trying to fit in, belong and catch up with everyone else. My world became cold and isolating and lonely.
My parents did the best they could with what they had, I get that, and I don’t want to embellish this into a sob story. I just want to tell the story.
So much happened growing up. I was certainly an angry young boy and child. I left home at 17 years old. When I was 26, my best friend was murdered in Johannesburg.
I have experienced the death and loss of many friends and acquaintances growing up in South Africa throughout my 20s. I have been on the receiving end of home invasions, a business robbery, and multiple violent incidents growing up.
And, I have had a lot to find my way back from in terms of finding balance and understanding my own masculinity and where I fit in the world and what emotions meant to me and how I regulate them.
I have felt suicidal, depressed, anxious, angry, shameful and lost, and I’ve felt joyous, strong, purposeful, intentional, excellent and mature.
I got very addicted to alcohol and class A drugs. I started at a very young age and continued through my twenties and into my early thirties. I lived in a way that didn’t allow me to tap into my full potential.
I was homeless a few times, bounced from place to place. In intimate relationships, I thought shouting was conversation. It took years to learn that conversation isn’t about volume, it’s about presence, and that safety is felt, not forced.
Genuinely my life was chaos, I lived making very few meaningful connections.
After losing my business in South Africa and breaking my right leg in nine places in a drunken drug-fuelled haze, zooming in and out of traffic on a 150cc moped that crashed, I hit rock bottom properly, literally and figuratively.
Out of desperation more than anything else, I dove headfirst into recovery and the twelve-step programs. On that path, I soon discovered personal development. I was introduced to a men’s organisation that delivers experiential emotional development and maturity trainings.
None of that made any sense to me at the time. But I stuck with it. I kept showing up. I kept learning and growing and then came to understand these strange things called life coaching, psychology, and personal development, that allowed people to somehow appear as if they understood things that others didn’t. I was dumbfounded and confused initially by how I was being met by patience, acceptance and empathy no matter what state I was in. Of course at that time I had no clue what any of those things were. I was 33 and starting to learn. That experience totally began a journey of curiosity and transformation.
Over the last ten years, I have sacrificed immediate gratification. I have volunteered, dug in, built, worked hard, helped people, reflected, listened to books and kept learning more about myself and what interests me.
I want to bring not only what I have learnt to the world, but also what I know others have to offer, and I want the people who can benefit from that collective wisdom to experience that value and the belonging and purpose fulfilment that comes with that.
I dabbled at a few business things over the years, I’ve never fit into a specific career or professionalism job. I created the largest free online resource platform for men and boys in the UK across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I served as a Public Health Senior Advisor on Male health and Wellbeing, and now, at 44 years old, I live in a blended family of 5, with a 2-year-old daughter of my own.
From someone who, more than once, nearly didn’t make it and knows what hopelessness and despair feels like. If it happens for me, it can happen for you. You may not want exactly what I have, but, you can realise your dreams and achieve your heart's desire if you want it.
MENtal® is an ecosystem and environment built to support men first, with space for everyone.
There is a lot more to MENtal®. Our long-term vision includes early education, edtech, and more exciting developments that I will not reveal here.
We are life-stage specific. We pay attention to detail. Value matters to us. So does quality and individual identity. We do our utmost to remain transparent, and values aligned.
Our team has already grown. If we count everyone involved in some capacity and ready to go, we have over thirty people, all aligned with life experience relevant to MENtal® and what we are bringing. And we are just getting started, by the time we launch, certainly our team will have grown and so will our practitioner community.
What we are creating is a reciprocal, sustainable ecosystem. There is the business-to-customer public-facing platform. The business-to-business offering. And the values-aligned practitioner community.
MENtal® gives men a space to breathe, to reflect, to learn, and to lead their own development, at their own pace, in their own way. What we’ve built is a lifestyle and performance ecosystem that meets you where you are, respects who you are, and supports who you’re becoming.
As a coach for the last ten years, I know what it is like to try and build a business. I recognise that people who come to this work do so because they want to bring something to the world. They want to help people.
At MENtal®, we give practitioners a space that values them. Not just a directory to be listed on. Not just a therapy platform expecting them to work too hard for too little. We are offering them real value. Real values. A community they can grow with. One that nurtures them and looks after them and helps them grow a business.
Our B2B offering, while we focus on male-dominated industries, is gender-inclusive. Our practitioner community is gender-inclusive too, for lots of reasons. One of them being that men do not only need men to work with. Men, women, and everyone in between have value to offer. Everyone’s life experience matters. And all the people who identify as male may not have from birth, we want that to be reflected.
Then there is the Foundation. I am a product of foundations and charities. When I needed it, and when I started learning, my first few certifications were through charities.
I made working arrangements with them to pay back what I had been given and to pass it on.
A lot of my learning and leadership has come from volunteering with charities and growing with them. It has given me exposure to people, leadership, and education and an understanding of service.
Yes, I have had education since then, and it matters to me that I feel purposeful in life. That I am balanced. That I am not affected by the social noise about what a man is supposed to be and how he is supposed to act.
I think we have still got it wrong in the media, in public spaces, and at government levels.
Well for starters, every man is different, what works for one may not work for another, and understanding that complexity of preference is knowing that it’s our differences combined that create the best outcomes.
I believe that men like me want to learn. We want to grow. We want to give back. But we do not want to do it under the label of needing therapy if we don’t, or under someone else’s idea of what we should be or where we might have gone wrong.
We just want to be ourselves. Be the best version of ourselves. Grow at our own pace. Without apology. And if something needs an apology, we will give it.
That is MENtal®. That is who we are. That is where we come from. That is where we are going.
We are here to stay. We are here to become one of the biggest players in the men’s health, wellbeing, and performance space on the planet.
The impact will not just be on individuals. It will ripple into families, partners, wives, friends, mothers, fathers, brothers, communities, companies, and the world.
We are gaining traction, and the first version of the platform will be launched soon.
Ultimately, MENtal® is love for ourselves and each other.
You decide what’s next.
We’re building the space - now it’s yours to explore.
If this speaks to you, join us - as a member, a business, a practitioner, or a foundation contributor.
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