How to Start Over at Any Age: An Inspiring Story of Letting Go and Rewriting Your Life (Encore)

He's the author of the book called Life Without a Tie, a book that is more than just an enjoyable read.

It's a book here to help set you free, to show you happiness, joy from a man who took a chance, who had everything disappear.

But again, instead of choosing to break down, he chose to break free.

And maybe if nothing else, today's conversation is your inspiration to think about doing the same in your life.

I'm your host, Kevin Lowe, and this my friend is episode 395 of Great Grace and Inspiration.

It is my amazing interview with today's guest, Ray Martin.

I hope you enjoyed, and more so, I hope that something said today makes an impact on you.

Well, you can put it into action in your life starting right away.

Here is my interview with Ray Martin.

What is going on today?

Welcome back into Great Racing Inspiration.

Today I have the pleasure of being in the studio with Ray Martin.

Ray, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Kevin.

It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_04: Yes, man.

Well, well, Ray, I'm excited to get to dive into this amazing story that you have today.

But before we get to go traveling around the world with you, we might as well start back in the year 2005 when kind of everything started coming unraveled in your life.

And so I would love it if we could start our conversation by you kind of taking me back then, giving me an idea of kind of life before everything started coming unraveled.

And then, of course, the series of events that happened.

SPEAKER_05: Sure, yeah, I'd love to do that.

So let me, oh, I have to think back to 2005.

It's now 20 years ago, if you believe it.

Exactly.

It feels like yesterday in some ways, but it feels like a love a lifetime ago in others.

But back in 2005, I was the CEO of a business I founded, a management consulting business based in London, England.

And my co-founder and business partner was my wife, the woman I was married to.

And we were a sort of very successful husband and wife management team.

And we grew our company.

And in 2002, I'd been the recipient of a very prestigious award in England, the Daily Telegraph Business Leader of the Year Award.

So I was sort of following the blueprint that most of us were taught when we were at school to get a really good job and a really good career and a great partner and a great home and start a family and have kids and all those sorts of things.

I was sort of doing that to the letter, and it was all sort of working really well.

But I had this strange sense that somehow I was on the wrong track.

I didn't know why.

Just used to gnaw away at me.

I sort of felt I was living someone else's life in some ways.

And one day my business partner went off to a meeting and came back and very shockingly and suddenly said, This was after about 12 years together, said, I'm leaving you and I'm leaving the company.

And it was and it was massively shocking to my system in a way I can't describe.

At the same time, round about the same time, my father got very ill and he went into hospital with all sorts of heart problems.

He died shortly afterwards.

And so within a very short space of time, I was sort of facing being out of the business I'd created with her, out of my home, out of my marriage, and my father gone.

And it was hugely disorientating.

And this was all happening at the back end of 2004 and early 2005.

Wow.

Yeah, that hopefully gives you a picture.

And I was a broken man at that point, yeah, completely lost.

I wasn't prepared for anything like that in my life.

I'd never suffered anything so shocking.

I just felt really broken.

I didn't quite know what to do.

SPEAKER_04: So when your wife came to you with that, you had no idea.

SPEAKER_05: Well, I knew that I wasn't feeling a hundred percent right about life and how it was unfolding.

But I just assumed that everyone had similar thoughts and just sort of normalized it and sort of thought, well, everyone must have some kind of degree of discontentment about these things.

I'm I need to be grateful for what I have, and surely it will all work itself out in the end somehow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just sort of just never really, never really confronted it fully.

SPEAKER_04: Of course.

Of course.

Now, how old were you at this point?

SPEAKER_05: I was 44 then.

Yeah, 44.

SPEAKER_04: Wow.

Now you lost your father.

Was your mom still alive at this point?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and she she still is, in fact, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: She is amazing.

Amazing.

Wow.

So your your wife comes to you, tells you she wants a divorce, but you guys are also business partners.

So what does that do to the business?

SPEAKER_05: Well, it's you know, it raises a lot of questions, and I looked at that closely because you know, had the possibility of continuing running the business without her and finding a replacement.

But I sort of felt that we were like um akin to something like if you were an ice skating pair or something like this.

There was a creative dance between us, which I felt I couldn't replicate with anybody else because of the relationship we had.

And the idea of being just a sort of straightforward business part with someone else, just I didn't have the energy for that, and it didn't appeal to me.

And I thought, you know, I've been in this field for 20 years and I'm ready for something else.

I don't know what, but I'm ready to do some reflection and explore what else could come next for me, but I don't want to continue down the same path.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, now before I get into this, my next question, I want to clarify, did you guys have any children together?

SPEAKER_05: No, we you know that was one of the things that was certainly making our breakup easier because it was a matter of you know, our home and our finances needing to be shared, but that was pretty much it.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

Wow.

So here you are, 44, you're now divorced, business is gone, you just lost your father.

And I can't even imagine, honestly, your your mindset at this point of thinking what in the world to do.

But somebody, I I think it was somebody, or maybe you thought of on your own, said something about a sabbatical.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.

A good friend of mine had Julie Parker as her name.

She obviously knew what was going on, and she said, you know, why don't you consider taking a some six-month sabbatical?

It might give you a chance to get some new inputs into your thinking.

If you go to a different place or somewhere different in the world, you might be able to reflect on everything that's happened and see it from a different perspective, and you might start to get some sort of ideas emerging about what's next for you.

And at first, when she said it, I thought that's ridiculous.

I've got all these bills to pay at home, an expensive lifestyle to maintain, there's no way I'm taking six months off, I can't afford to.

I was quite resistant to the idea at first, but then as a bit of time passed, I suddenly thought, ooh, you know, that's actually that's actually quite a good idea.

I think that's what I'm gonna do.

What tipped me over the edge was that I went out to Australia to look after a friend who was unwell, who had breast cancer, and I said I'd go up and stay with her for a month and look after her while she was being treated.

While I was in Australia, I got offered the chance to act in a play, which was something I'd never ever done or dreamed I'd ever do in my life.

And the experience of doing that was so new and fresh and so outside of anything I could have ever imagined I would do.

I loved it, to be honest, Kevin.

I absolutely loved being Ray an actor in a play for two or three months in Australia, instead of Ray the businessman in London, which was the character I'd been playing all my life.

And it just made me think completely differently because I realized in going into the play and focusing on that for a couple of months, I'd actually learned how to become a character that I had to play.

He had a certain name, he wore certain clothes, he had a certain voice, certain things to say in the script.

And I thought, yeah, there's no difference between that character, George's name was.

There's no difference between George and Ray the businessman, who's just as much a character.

I'm not Ray the businessman is not really who I am, it's not me.

It's a character I play, and I thought, I don't really want to play that character in in life anymore, at least not for now.

So I decided after the play to quit and do the sabbatical because it seemed like quite a good idea now, because even the period just before thinking about it had started to crack my hardened reality that there wasn't any other option.

Wow.

SPEAKER_04: That is fascinating that a trip to go help a friend suffering from cancer leads to you doing something you've never even done before, acting in a play, and then that kind of setting off this realization of I just have to change the character I'm playing.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I wrote I mean I wrote about this story at length in a book that came out a couple of years ago, and I and I so there's a lot more I said about it in there.

But but essentially the idea for going to see my friend in Australia was because I was so depressed and darkened by what was going on, so stuck in the mire of all of that suffering.

That a friend of mine said to me one day, do you know what, Ray, if you can't see a way through this and you're feeling bleak and you can't see a way out of it, one of the things you could do for a while would be to find someone else and just go into service a hundred percent to them and just put all your troubles to one side and just go and help someone else for a while, and that might open a chink in the universe and sort of create a crack in the in the impossibility that you're

looking into.

And that's why I went to Australia because of that piece of advice, and it was a great piece of advice, just go and help someone else for a while.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, absolutely.

So would you consider the time in Australia?

SPEAKER_05: Was that part of the six months sabbatical or was that prior to prior, prior, because what that did was as I was coming back to England, I decided to put my house up for sale in London.

And what that meant was I was free of any financial burden because all the work that I was doing was mainly to service the debts on the property I was living in.

Yes.

And I didn't quite know what I thought I would do because I lived in a very big house and was married, and we were going to have a family, so it was big enough to accommodate all of that, but that dream had gone.

And so I thought, well, I'll sell my house in London and maybe trade down to a smaller apartment just for myself, something small that I can I don't need so much space.

But I'll do that when I finish this six month semantical.

I'll sell the house, put the money aside, and then I'll buy something when I return, because I don't want to do that before I go.

I'm not quite sure where to go.

And that's what I planned to do.

I I got rid of everything that was in the house.

I I minimalised.

I read the book by Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus, the minimalists.

I was totally blown away by their take on minimalism.

It really fascinated me.

And I also read a book called Stuffacation by James Warman, who talked about how trends in life are changing away from values based on materialism, which was the generation I grew up in as a baby boomer, towards values based on experientialism was the word he used.

So that millennials and Gen Z are valuing much more the experiences that life offers rather than the material possessions that life offers.

And I saw I resonated with that immensely.

And so I left myself with just one bag of clothes and a laptop after I sold my house and gave away all the stuff in it.

SPEAKER_04: Wow.

Did family and friends think you were out of your mind?

SPEAKER_05: Maybe for a few seconds.

When we talked it through and I said what my thinking was and why I was doing it, they realized that you know it wasn't so much of a risk because I had all the money from the house sale set to one side, and I certainly had all the expertise and experience I'd always had.

So they knew I could re-enter the world of Ray the businessman and take up any role I wanted to if I if it all went wrong.

And so there was nothing to be lost and everything to be gained because I was searching for new inspiration and new insight and new perspective.

So I think the risks were really minimal, to be honest.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.

No, I mean it makes sense.

So here we have Ray entering kind of Ray 2.0, a new character, a new character in the play of life.

He's now sold his house as since he burned the boats as he storms the island, and there's no turning back.

So how does one begin to plan out six months traveling the world?

I mean, what was your plan?

SPEAKER_05: Well, I was quite lucky in that respect because around about the time I made this decision to take the sabbatical, I'd started to have a couple of dates with someone I met in London.

And she was also in her own life, you know, going to live abroad, but not we hadn't planned it to do it together initially.

But the more we hung out together, she was she had a fixed date to leave, and she was leaving to go to Thailand in Asia.

And I sort of was saying, Look, let's just hang out while you're here.

And the day she came to leave, I said, Well, have a nice life, you know.

I'll see you what maybe never, you know, maybe one day.

And and then I went off and did a couple of other things for a few weeks, and when I got back, she was still in London.

And I sort of said, Yeah, why aren't you gone?

She said, Well, I had some problems with my apartment, which I wanted to rent out, but there were some plumbing issues, and I've I've had to stick behind and get them all sorted, and now I'm ready to go, and now I am gonna go.

She said, And by the way, I've been thinking a lot about you and our bus being together, and I wondered if you might be willing or interested to to join me on this trip.

And she said, I'm scared to ask you because I feel like I hardly know you, Ray.

And I said, Well, that's interesting.

I feel the same, I hardly know you, but something tells me it's feeling good.

I said, Why I've just made a decision independently to sell my house in London, and I think it's gonna take about two or three months for that sale to go through.

Why don't you move into my house with me for those two or three months and we'll live together and we'll find out if we're gonna make it work or not?

And it was really spontaneous and it was really risky because I I but I had a good feeling, I just had a good feeling, and I've learned from a lot of spiritual teachers when you follow that good feeling, often it works out really, really well, and that's your wisdom speaking to you.

I had a good feeling, she said yes, and then the rest is history.

We embarked then together to go to Asia.

Oh my goodness, Ray!

SPEAKER_04: Man, 2.0 is going off the charts.

SPEAKER_05: Um, I sometimes I some days I felt like I was in a film, a movie.

It was like it was so surreal, I couldn't believe it was my actual real life.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

So timeline from the time that those three months we talked about in 2005 when things started coming on rabble, how long before you would set off on the trip to Thailand?

SPEAKER_05: Well, uh I did the trip to Australia in April of that year.

SPEAKER_04: Okay.

SPEAKER_05: And I finally sold up and left and got everything out.

I left on I think it was the 14th or 15th of November to go to Thailand.

And the girl I was going with, she went out about a week before to get the first space set up for us.

SPEAKER_04: Okay.

Wow.

Now, prior to this trip to Thailand, had you ever done any extensive travelling like this?

SPEAKER_05: No, nothing.

I mean, I'd been a I'd been a sort of consumer of package holidays, you know, whether where you get a flight and a hotel, and you just get taken from the airport to the hotel, and you enjoy that and then you get shipped back to the airport and maybe do a couple of tours.

But it's all sort of organized and laid on for you.

So that was really the main type of travel I'd consumed, but no independent travel, which we weren't really going to do, where you just plan your own routes, get you you make your own arrangements, you go, you move and change as you feel like it, and you stay longer if you want to, and things like that.

And it's budget, you know, you're staying in straw huts on a beach rather than in a hotel.

SPEAKER_04: Exactly.

SPEAKER_05: Oh my gosh, that was all new.

It was like being Robinson Crusoe for a while, you know, it was completely new.

SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.

I know.

I I in my head, I'm like, I can't think of anywhere more opposite than to go all the way to Thailand.

So so talk to me about that experience.

You're setting off on this six-month sabbatical.

Yeah.

You you're starting off in Thailand with a new person in your life.

What was that experience?

SPEAKER_05: Well, it was mind-blowing.

You know, like every day was it was like a massive learning curve because you know, in Thailand, the language is different, the climate's different, it's humid, everything's designed in a different way, the streets, the vehicles, the way that people move around.

Even in restaurants, you know, they don't serve meals in the same way that they do in England or in America.

If you're in a restaurant with someone, you might get your second course first, one person, the other person gets nothing, or they might get their meal before you ten minutes, and they finish by the time yours arrives.

You know, it's like it's completely like there's no all the expectations we have about how things should be just don't operate in Thailand or any country in Asia for that matter.

Um, unless you're in Hong Kong or Singapore, where it's a bit more westernized.

But uh a lot of it's very, very basic and there's no ego involved, you know, so you can't sort of sit in a restaurant thinking to yourself, God, don't they know who I am?

Don't they realise how important I was in England?

You know, you just have to be humble and just know that you're an absolute nobody, and then that's how it is.

SPEAKER_04: And I would almost think, though, in a sense, especially in this point in your life, that had to almost be freeing in a way.

SPEAKER_05: I was, yeah.

I mean, I was loving it.

I loved the anonymity of the life I was in.

I was wearing flip-flops and shorts and t-shirt every day of my life.

I never had a shirt or a tie or a suit or any clothes at all like that.

I had 20 kilos of clothes for the whole of my journey, and I loved the simplicity and anonymity of it all, and I didn't have to worry about my image at all.

I mean, it was quite psychologically challenging in some ways, but I loved it in the most for the most part.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

So how long would you stay in Thailand for before moving on somewhere else?

Or did you?

I don't know.

Maybe you stayed there the whole time.

SPEAKER_05: Uh, for quite a few months because it's a big country, and me and Annie, the lady I was traveling with, we wanted to see a lot of it.

So we did quite a few different trips and tours just between the two of us.

We even did a 10-day silent retreat in a Buddhist monastery, a silent meditation retreat with Buddhist monks in what's known as a vipassana retreat, because after four or five months of being abroad, I was in paradise physically.

But inside myself, emotionally, I was still feeling a bit of a wreck.

I felt guilty about being a crappy husband.

I felt a lot of shame about the failure of my life that I'd left.

I felt scared about the future, very anxious that I wouldn't be secure financially and things like that.

So I had a lot going on inside me that was troubling me.

But when I spoke to other travellers about it, one or two said to me, Have you ever thought of doing a meditation retreat like a vipassana?

And I said, I don't even know what a vipassana is.

And they said, Well, you go into the monastery, you sit with the monks, you do silent meditations for ten days, and they teach you about the Dharma, which is the Buddhist teachings.

They said, I think it could really work for you.

I think you get a lot from it.

And so in the end, I decided to go for that, and it changed my life doing that.

It absolutely was a game changer for me.

SPEAKER_04: Okay, you're gonna have to tell me more about this because I'm I'm very intrigued and also very confused about a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

What is involved besides my envision of you just sitting like cross-legged in silence?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well, you're you're basically there to learn.

That's the really fundamental thing.

It's a learning experience.

And so what you're learning is external information in the form of Dharma talks.

So one time each day, one of the monks, only one of the monks, will speak to the group and impart wisdom and teachings from the Buddhist texts and explain different parts of their principles and thinking.

So you're being taught about life.

And so, for example, one of the things that I was taught about, which has massively influenced how I think ever since and still does, is what the Buddhists call the cycle of craving.

Because in the Buddhist way of looking at life, life contains suffering.

Suffering is a part of life.

And we create our own suffering because in our thinking mind, which is where most of us live most of the time, in our thinking mind, we think about how we think life should be.

We have expectations of things we would desire, how life should be.

And yet at the same moment we look at our actual real life in that moment and realize that our life as we see it is not as it should be or what we expect, and there's a gap.

And the gap between what we expect and what's actually really happening, that gap creates suffering, a feeling of suffering, like a hole in yourself that you can't fill.

And people try and fill that hole through all sorts of things, you know, drugs, tea, coffee, beer, alcohol, shopping, working a lot.

But everyone who's in that sort of discomfort in that gap is trying to fill that gap, make that feeling go away.

And then something you get some, let's say you get a new relationship, or a new boyfriend, or a new girlfriend, or some some new car or something like that.

For a few minutes or a few days, the suffering stops.

You've got what the Buddhists call temporary cessation.

So it stops for a bit, and then that the effects of that start to wear off.

And so you start clinging to finding something else, which will then take the suffering away.

And then you have new desires and a new cycle of suffering begins, and so it's called the cycle of suffering.

And we're all subject to it, every single one of us.

And I didn't I wasn't aware of that.

I was I was what they call ignorant, ignorant, you know, not seeing it basically.

I didn't have this understanding of life before I did the meditation retreat.

And when it came out, I had that understanding and many, many others that they taught us as well, and it really started to shift how I was thinking about life and me in it.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

So that explains it.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's fascinating.

Now, what was kind of the outcome after those 10 days?

SPEAKER_05: Well, at first of all, I felt hugely calm inside my own mind.

So when I went into the monastery on day one, if I had a volume knob on the side of my head for the thoughts, the crazy agitated thoughts in my mind, it would have been a nine out of ten, you know, very loud, very noisy.

And then when I came out, it would have been a one or two out of ten.

So it's like someone had literally turned the volume down of my crazy thinking, my agitated thinking.

So I felt very calm, very grounded, very peaceful.

And uh it created in me a desire to build on and continue my mindfulness practice and develop that.

So I then was looking for a place where I could go and stay for a while, where I could regularly meditate in a group.

And now I chose a place called Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand, which I knew had places like that.

And I joined a mindful community and I started to meditate every week with them to develop and build on my own practice.

That's what happened next.

SPEAKER_04: Wow, wow, amazing.

So I guess what I'm kind of wondering is I mean, six months can pass pretty quickly, and yeah, me knowing the the little bit of the behind the scenes, at some point in time, six months turned into 14 years.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_04: So what was the point when you realized I'm not done?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I think it was after sort of the end of the first six or seven months I knew I wanted to stay longer, and I didn't quite know how long or what or what was keeping apart from this desire to keep growing and learning.

And uh, you know, I had no kids in England, no property to look after, no stuff to look after, no job.

I was self-employed, so no job.

So I had nothing to rush back for, literally nothing at all to come back to England for.

And so I just decided to continue, and then you know, life took on a sort of I can kind of life flowed in its own way.

Like, for example, I about after one year I got taken to a place called the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, where they rescue, you know, elephants that are injured or distressed, and they give them a new home in the wild again and look after them.

It's a beautiful place.

I've written much about it in my book, it's just lovely.

And I was very moved by seeing the work they were doing there, which they were doing on a shoestring.

You know, they had no government funding, no budget or anything, and they're relying totally on donations, and I started to think, God, I wish I could do something to help them raise money, because that would really help them.

And then I did some trekking in the Himalayas in Nepal, and I came across an orphanage in Pokhara where I organised a picnic for about 60 kids, and I saw the light that that brought to their lives, just spending$20 and organizing a picnic for an afternoon, and it started to make me think, gosh, you know, I wish I could do more for them.

Look at this, you know, what look what could they do if they could get everyone here a place in a good school and stuff like this.

And I started to have all these thoughts about what I could do, and then by chance on my travels, I met somebody called Matt Campbell, an Englishman, he was living in Thailand with his wife and kids, and he'd run six marathons, he was about ten years younger than me, and he and I said, What's it like running a marathon?

And he told me, and as he was describing it, Kevin, I was my body was tingling with excitement and curiosity.

I knew that my body was telling me there's something in this, so that I'm curious about this.

And so I I listened carefully, and I then I said to him, Look, I've been trying to wrap my brains to think of something I could do to raise money.

I said, Do you think I could do you think I could run a marathon, Matt?

He said, Have you run before?

I said, No, never, not even behind.

He said, Well, he looked at me physically and he said, Well, you look quite fit, and I guess you know you probably could.

But I'll tell you what, you know, I know what why you're asking me.

I mean, if you decide to stay here in Chiang Mai for six months, I promise I will train you to run a marathon if you want to do that, but you've got to stay here until I can work with you closely and we'll do it together.

And I said, Okay, and I shook his hand and said, I'm gonna do that.

And so I started a fundraising foundation called the Calling All Angels Foundation.

I started to train for my first marathon, which I ran in New York in 2009, and I managed to raise$15,000 in donations from that effort.

Wow.

And uh and I took it and I took that money and split it between the Elephant Nature Park, the orphanage in Nepal, and a cancer charity.

And I I went back to those places in person with their share of the money and distributed it and used it to buy building supplies and get school fixed and buy computers and and I did this, it's all made up off my own bat.

I was doing it purely alone.

I had no team, no staff, no admin, or anything.

I was literally doing it all myself.

It took me two years to do that.

SPEAKER_04: Wow.

Do you realize in the story just let's set aside the amazing fact of the money that you were able to raise and then give to these different organizations?

But I couldn't help but think of the most wild thing of you decide that you're gonna run a marathon, which is like who does that?

Then you you start training in somewhere like Thailand, and yet your first marathon is in New York City.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I think there's always a reason behind these choices.

You know, it's funny, isn't it?

Because in 2007, which was two years before I even met Matt Campbell, I happened to go to New York for a week to visit a friend.

Okay.

And we were we were walking around Central Park, and it just happened to be the weekend of the New York Marathon.

I didn't go for that reason, it just happened to be on.

And so at that time there was a British athlete called Paula Radcliffe, who was the world record holder of the marathon for women, and she was from the UK, and I said, and my friend's from the UK as well.

So I we we said, Should we go into the Central Park and watch Paula Radcliffe sort of take the tape and finish the race?

It would be really exciting to do.

We said, Yeah, let's do that.

So we went there, we sort of got a place in the crowd and watched her finish.

And my friend Angie said to me, Do you think you'd ever run the marathon ray?

I said, No chance.

I said, But if I did, it would have to be this one because this is the biggest marathon in the world.

And I was standing there and I was feeling the excitement of it.

I said, I'm never I'm not gonna run a marathon, but if I ever do, it would be this one, or I wouldn't bother.

So when Matt Campbell said to me, I'll train you to run a marathon, he said, What marathon do you want to take part in, right?

You know, where would you like to do it?

I said, That this is gonna sound ridiculous, honestly.

I feel silly even saying it, but I'd really like to do New York.

He said, He said, Okay, he said, Well, you're gonna have to go in the ballot because you can only get a place in the ballot by luck, you know, by draw.

And so I put my name in the ballot and I got a place first time, and I knew that was a confirmation signal.

And I'm I write a lot about confirmation signals in my book because this is something that started to I realized life gives you these confirmation signals that you're on the right track.

And so I got a place in the New York Marathon, and then my brother stepped in because he worked for British Airways, and they managed to get me like a kind of really super deal for some tickets to New York on the airline, which meant I could divert all the funds to the causes I was raising for.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, wow, absolutely fascinating.

Yeah.

So when you run the the marathon, New York City marathon, you you raise fifteen thousand dollars.

Yes.

And then you you take that, you you go back to these different places.

Yep.

How did that moment impact how you viewed success?

SPEAKER_05: Oh, that's a really great question.

I'd sort of seen success as being target-driven type achievements, you know, achieving certain revenues and profit margins in the business and things like that, and having a certain status.

But what was really great about these projects was that I was feeling successful every night I went to bed because every day that I was doing this, I was feeling that my life was really worthwhile and I was living out a purpose that was of meaning.

And so I felt successful every day of my life.

And going to bed, I put my head on the pillow thinking, I'm the happiest man in the world.

I don't, you know, I don't need it's not about money.

I'm just I was just so happy, and it started to make me sort of think a lot about the meaning of success and what it does mean.

And I I came to the realization that the richness in life I was experiencing was not to do with how much money I had, which had been the main driver, it was to do with how much free time I had to use it in a way that was meaningful to me.

And I I really was really making that distinction clear for me.

I thought the rich man is the man who has a hundred percent discretion over what he does with his time.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.

I love it so much.

It kind of boils down to almost freedom.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, freedom, yeah.

That's that's what to me what being successful is.

Yeah, absolutely.

That doesn't mean you don't do anything to help anyone, it just means if that's what you really want to do, you can do that as much as you want.

Exactly.

SPEAKER_04: Exactly.

Powerful, powerful.

Wow, yeah, so amazing, so to kind of I don't even know.

I I started to say to summarize 14 years span of your life.

What what other kind of destinations or experiences, adventures, moments kind of stand out that maybe we could touch on over the rest of this time traveling?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, sure.

I mean, I still continue to travel, but each time I traveled now, there was some reason for doing it.

So the distribution of the funds from that marathon took me to the sort of midway through 2010.

So by now I'd been about five years since I left England.

And I loved I loved doing it all, and I hadn't earned any money for myself for five years.

You know, I've just been living off my savings.

And I saw that in 2008 with the global financial crisis, that I started to have some fear again about having enough money personally and stuff like that.

So I thought, you know, I need to I need to engage with the world of work again, just a little, not not full-time, but I need to earn some money.

And so after the 2010, I started to think I'd like to dip my toe back in the world of business.

And I wanted to do some coaching, which is the kind of work I did in England, but I wanted to do it in Asia, and you'll laugh.

But in 2010, I really wanted to find a way of doing it virtually over Skype.

I didn't want to do it in person and sit in a room with someone because you have to travel and you needed business clothes for that and things like that.

So I kind of wrote down, I suppose, a prayer, if you want to call it something.

I wrote down a description of what I was looking for on a piece of paper, just sort of stuck it on the wall and would pray in front of it each night saying, Universe, universe, help me with this.

And I wrote on LinkedIn to a couple of people to say, I'm trying to find this, would you help me?

And one wrote back and said, I'm gonna connect you with this guy, Warropat, in Bangkok.

He's the best person to speak to.

And they did, and I called him.

He said, Are you down in Bangkok in the next week or two?

I said, and I by chance I was.

I said, Yeah, he said, Come and see me.

So I did.

He said, I talked to him and he asked me lots of questions, and he said, I think I know someone who's the right person to connect you with.

He connected me with a lady called Danielle Marchant in Singapore, who had just opened a new coaching business from the UK but in Singapore.

She said, Ray, we've got loads of clients in Asia, that's not a problem.

But we don't have enough coaches here in Asia, and we'd love to have you on the team.

And she said, But there's one thing I need to tell you.

I don't think you're gonna like it, Ray.

I said, What?

She said, We're not gonna do coaching face to face in our business, we're only gonna do it virtually using Skype.

I said, I said, You've got to be kidding me.

Tell me, pinch, punch me, tell me this is real.

Because I didn't tell her this, she just said that's what they're gonna do.

I said, I can't believe it.

Because I'd said to her that I only wanted to work, you're gonna I feel embarrassed admitting this to your listeners.

I said, I only want to work 20 hours a month, not a week, 20 hours a month.

And she said, That's no problem, we'll take all 20.

SPEAKER_04: Wow, wow, amazing how the pieces can fall into place.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I found that.

I that's one of the when I wrote the book about this journey, my editors who are brilliant, they said, Could you summarize in the last chapter the wisdom that you've learned from this entire journey?

Because we really want to know what that is.

And one of the things that I realized is that when you literally start living in alignment with your values, your truth, and doing things honestly, what you think other people want to hear about saying honestly what you really actually want, no matter how embarrassing that is, like in my case, 20 hours a month.

If you start actually admitting and living honestly according to those values and principles, the universe gives you way more luck and serendipity than you ever would have without it.

It's a it's I've noticed that.

It just like lots of things start falling into place that you can't you go, how is that possible?

That's just a fluke.

How could that happen?

It happens for me a lot.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

Wow.

So you get started coaching.

How was that experience for you?

SPEAKER_05: Oh, I loved it.

I absolutely loved it because I'd been coaching in the UK, but I hadn't done any for five years.

Okay.

But I had a lot of experience as a business leader, so I had a lot to offer and a lot of value to bring to people in the business leadership roles I was helping.

So and I just really enjoyed the routines and the disciplines of doing some work, you know, because you know the your mind does go a bit soft around those things if you don't do any.

And uh and I also liked when I was in the team of coaches that I was virtually a part of, I was hanging out with bright, smart, interesting, learned people.

So I was always learning things, hearing things that were interesting.

I you know, I love being part of good teams and good communities, and it helps me to grow, helps me stay relevant and learn new stuff.

So I loved it, I'd to be honest.

And I was traveling around Asia for various training events and workshops that I got invited to by the company to learn more.

So I was now traveling around Asia, but now it's being paid to be traveling, it was great.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

Wow, absolutely incredible.

Now I read something, and I'm wondering if this ties into your role as a coach.

Is that you described yourself as a torch bearer for human consciousness?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's once I got asked a question one time, I can't remember who it was now.

And they said, you know, if you had to describe your purpose for being here, because purpose is for me, is like, why are we born in this incarnation?

Why are we actually here?

What have we put on planet Earth to do?

And no matter what I've done over my life, there's one thread that runs through everything.

I was the same at school and uh afterwards in all the jobs I've done.

I've always been someone who's interested in how you can get the best out of yourself and others.

So it's always been of interest to me.

And the more I become more conscious and aware and self-reflected on who I am as a person and what fundamentally drives me, the more consciousness I've gained about myself, the more I feel happier and contented.

And so whenever I meet people, I feel like I'm encouraging them to do the same.

So I'm a kind of torch bearer for the idea of being more conscious about yourself.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I absolutely love that description of yourself.

I think that's amazing, so powerful.

So I guess my my next question is you end up living this sabbatical type lifestyle, traveling, doing this for a total of 14 years.

Yeah.

How do you decide to stop?

SPEAKER_05: That's a great question.

Well, first of all, in 2011, I was told by my guidance from the universe in a very funny way.

I was I was basically getting this message from the universe, which is I needed to write a book about the journey, even though I was still in it.

Because lots of people who I met kept saying to me, You laugh this, but they'd sit down with me for a cup of tea or a beer or something, and they'd they'd say, How did you start this?

And I'd tell them the stories I've told you, and they'd always say, Wow, it's fascinating listening.

They said, if you ever write a book about this, would you tell me?

Here's my email address.

I'd really like to know.

Because if you do write a book, I'm definitely going to read it.

And I used to laugh and say, Oh, you're kidding.

No, I'm not doing any of this to write a book.

That's not my intention.

I'm just doing this for me.

But after about 50 people said that, I thought, Mmm, I can tell I'm getting this message over and over.

I need to write and start writing a book.

And as I was thinking that, I found on Facebook some big shot from New York, a literary superstar, was coming to Chiang Mai for five days to run a five-day writer's course.

And I contacted her and said, Can I can I do this?

And she said, Yeah, it's fine.

I knew that was a confirmation signal I was meant to be on that course.

And so in about 2015, after I went on that course, I started writing the manuscript properly.

And then I was halfway through the book, and I by now I was living in Warsaw in Poland, because I'd met someone from Poland who I was sort of fell in love with, and we were living together in an apartment in Warsaw, writing those days, and then that relationship came to an end after a while.

And so I sat in my grief about that on my own for a bit and asked the universe, where do I go?

What's my guidance?

And the universe said, Well, the main thing you've got to do right now is go back to England for a while and get the book finished.

Just that's your first priority, just finish writing that book and get the story into the world, and uh then we'll take it from there.

That's what you need to do next.

So that's what I did.

I came back to England and got on with writing the book.

SPEAKER_04: Wow.

And so what year did you end up publishing this book?

2023.

Okay.

Wow.

So were you back in England when the pandemic hit?

SPEAKER_05: Yes, I do I came back just before it started, yeah.

Okay, okay, wow.

So I guess I was lucky to be in my home country while that was going on.

SPEAKER_04: Exactly, exactly.

Um amazing how that worked.

Talk to me a little bit more about the book.

Remind me the name of the book, where we can find the book, and kind of more importantly, I think like who do you hope reads this book?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a good question.

The book is called Life Without a Tie.

And I don't just mean the tie of me as a businessman.

That was one part of that picture, but also the four ties of life that identify all of us are the ties we have to our partner or spouse, the ties we have to our career, the ties we have to our physical house or home, and the ties we have to our community of family and friends.

Those are the four big ties of life that define us.

So I was writing about breaking ties with all of those.

What is life without a tie really, really like?

I wanted to write an account of it, not to say, oh, it's all amazing, you know, it's all brilliant.

It has its fair share of crappy days, I have to say.

It's like any life, isn't you only see the edited highlights usually on social media of someone's life, so you don't get to see the really bad days.

But it's just a different life, and I wanted to share what it was actually like for anyone who was thinking of making similar decisions.

And the subtitle of the book is called Finding Your Path Amidst the Noise, Chaos, and Pressure to Conform.

How do you find your own path in life that's unique and belongs to you and it is truly the path that you want to walk on, even if no one else is living exactly that life and you're the first person?

How do you do it?

So that was really the essence of it.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

Wow.

Now, in this this book, is there any type of maybe specific insights?

Because I know from my understanding there's different lessons you teach, and and and I would love to hear a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, there really is.

I mean, first of all, in the early Early stages of the book when I've been travelling a few months, I wrote about this phase where I was feeling psychologically quite disturbed before I did the vipassana retreat.

And so I wrote I just I created ten guiding principles for myself that I was going to follow in order to keep my keep my my mental health in good shape.

And so I chose principles like the principle of being present with presence.

I thought no matter what happens, I'm going to learn from it and be deeply changed.

And I committed to being fully present in each experience in the moments they were happening, accepting each one, and being grateful for what was happening rather than thinking, oh this shouldn't be happening or something like that.

So being present and without judgment.

Self-acceptance was a principle I decided because I'd beaten myself up a lot when I was in England going through the divorce, and I thought, no, I need to be kind to myself and accept that I'm doing my best and I'm growing and I'm in a learning journey.

And started to accept myself more.

The principle of wisdom, lightness was a principle because I'd had a heavy time before I left and I wanted to bring much more light and joy into the world.

So I had these ten guiding principles that I was following on a daily basis as much as I could.

And then another thing, and I've written all those out in the book and what they are.

And then in the end of the book, under in the section called What Did I Learn or Looking Back, I penned what has become known as my six rules for happiness.

And these are the six rules to follow if you want a happy life.

And they're not easy to describe in one sentence, but they are things like build a strong foundation of self-awareness.

Without self-awareness, you're really, really sucked.

Become your own observer.

You know, if you cannot step out of your own thinking and observe yourself from a distance, that's going to be quite troublesome.

So there's a difference between being in an event in which you get really angry and you're consumed by the anger.

You're just you are the anger.

And you being in that event going, I notice right now, I'm noticing that I am feeling angry about what's just happened.

I'm noticing I've got the anger rising in me.

And I'm noticing I've got some choices here about how I behave in response to that anger.

What's the wisest choice I can make right now?

That's quite different from just being angry and reacting from that.

So those are two examples of the six rules.

But one of them is about physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

One is about being courageous about what you learn in life and how you be remain courageous.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, amazing.

Now, for somebody before we move on, somebody interested, where's the best place that somebody can can find your book at?

SPEAKER_05: Oh, it's the easiest place is Amazon.

You know, it's on Amazon.

I've got a website called lifewithout a tie.com.

And the only reason I mention that is for two reasons.

One is that a lot of readers who read the book say, Can we see photographs of all these places that you went to and things like that, and the foundation and the elephants and the blah blah blah.

And so the website has pictures that represent each of the stories in the book because the book doesn't have any photos.

And then the second thing is if anyone wants a signed copy of the book, they can buy that directly from my site and I can send it to them.

SPEAKER_04: Okay, fantastic.

Well, I will be sure that both options are in the show notes, linked to the website and Amazon, of course.

Super.

Yeah, now we spoke earlier about purpose, and and I find that there's a lot of us who struggle with that.

Do you feel like throughout our lives, depending upon kind of what chapter of life we're in, do you feel like our purpose changes, or do you feel like there's always an underlying purpose that ties it all together?

SPEAKER_05: That's a brilliant question.

And I'm actually struggling with this in my own life at the moment.

So I do think it changes over time in terms of how it gets enacted or how it gets expressed.

So coming back to your question earlier, I've always been someone who wants to represent or shine the light of greater human consciousness.

That's never changed.

You know, that's a constant throughout my all my years.

I've wanted to be a torchbearer for being more conscious and more aware, and that's always been what I encourage people to do.

But I've done that as a sales rep, I've done that as a CEO of a business, I've done that as a fundraiser, I've done that as a book writer.

So I'm expressing that purpose in many different forms, in many different roles, in many different ways in each of those.

So the nature of how I do that changes with each vehicle that I take on or we each character I play, but the purpose itself is probably fundamentally the same.

It just gets dispensed in a different way.

Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_04: It does, absolutely.

SPEAKER_05: That's the best way I can answer that.

So I like right now, I do most of my influencing around purpose through leadership coaching that I do.

I've written the book that's had a certain impact on the world, and now I coach one-to-one leaders and and do it that way.

I might start running workshops or seminars in the future and do it that way.

You know, I don't know.

I I haven't I can't see it all entirely clearly at the moment.

But I'm thinking about that a lot myself because I turned 65 this year, and so I'm I'm getting older, you know, I don't want to work at the same frenetic pace that I have done before, and I've got those things are coming into play, other parts of my life are calling for attention and parts of me that I want to dedicate to that in my family, for example.

Yeah, so so so things are shifting, but even if I'm spending more time with family, guess what?

I'll be picking them up on how conscious they are about themselves.

So I'll still I'll still be living my purpose, but just with different people in a different way.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, absolutely.

That's that's absolutely beautiful.

Is there any part of you at this point in your life now that would love to set off traveling again?

SPEAKER_05: Well, funny, I've just I've just spent two and a half months in Asia.

I literally got back two days ago, and I loved it.

I absolutely loved it.

I went with my partner and we had a lovely, lovely time, and we went to three, four countries.

We went to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, and it was brilliant.

Yeah.

So I and I've never been to South America at all and certain parts of the world, so there's still many places I would really like to see before I leave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Amazing.

Well, yeah, well, Ray, I want to say that you you have so much wisdom that you have gained in your life.

Yeah.

And I truly thank you for sharing just this little snapshot with us today.

And I guess what I would love is for the person listening today who maybe they're at a point, maybe where you were back in 2005, but maybe maybe they they because of obligations, they can't think about setting off and traveling the world.

Do you have any bit of advice, any uh sense of hope that we can leave them with?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I do, and it's a great I get a question I get asked a lot.

You know, the the truth is you do not need to go physically traveling in order to change the way the world looks and feels to you.

The main thing that is required is a change in your own thinking.

So what conditions do you need in order to be able to examine your current thinking and shift to a more useful and helpful type of thinking?

And it doesn't mean you have to travel to a foreign country.

It could take a couple of days to retreat where you live, you know, and just hang out with some different kinds of people who think in a different way to you and start to look at things from a different perspective without doing it.

What the travelling does do is it takes you out of your usual routines and usual methods and habits of thinking and starts to open up new ways of looking at things.

So it's useful, but it's not essential.

So I would say the main focus in the journey I've described is not the geography.

That is nice, but it's not the focus.

The focus is how do you escape from the confinement of your habitual way of thinking?

And that's really the question.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, powerful.

Ray, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you here, man.

Uh, thank you so much for for taking the time to sit down with me today and share your story.

You're an awesome guy with a killer story, and even more meaningful is just the insights you have to share.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, thanks, Kevin.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, absolutely.

For you listening today, I hope you're coming away with as much as I did.

A whole new mindset on life, a whole new way of thinking about things.

All thanks to today's amazing guest.

Please be sure to take this interview today to the next level by grabbing Ray's book.

Again, links are in the show notes for easy access.

And hey, until next time, maybe start thinking about life like Ray.

How can you start living life a little bit differently, a little bit better, a little bit bigger?

Until next time, I'm your host, Kevin Little.

And this, of course, is Grit Grace and Inspiration.

SPEAKER_00: I will not fear the storm, well, the fine.

I walk my faith, not my sight.

I want fear of time rising higher every day.

Oh doubt, let me hide, because I got grit.

Grace and inspiration on my mom.

SPEAKER_04: Hey, awesome.

You're still here.

And since you were cool enough to listen all the way to the very end of today's episode, I have a special surprise for you.

The story you just heard, I turned it into a song.

Now, how is this possible for a guy who can't sing nor play an instrument?

Well, my friend, it's called Today's Modern Technology.

It is amazing.

And what I did was I took the essence of the story you just heard and turned it into a full song.

And that's what you're just about to hear.

Now, if you're curious to know how this works and if I can make a song for you, well, head on over to KLOMusic.com.

That is K-L-O-W-E-Music.com to have your own song created.

But until then, I hope you enjoy this song.

SPEAKER_02: Had a plan, had a path, had a pretty good view.

But the map caught fire and the sky turned blue, lost my grip on the wheel, drifted out with the tide, thought my whole world, and turns out it just changed size.

That was the day I let go.

The way that did it oh, I've been holding so close.

Traded my time for the softening breeze.

Learn to can heal if you don't feel free.

Yeah.

And I started That was the day I was chased in the version here.

Built a cast on deadlines, but it felt like it's too Then I heard something channel in the crash of the waste.

Saying life's not a loss, it's just been a real rain.

That was the day I let off the jump fans and the hearty go.

Explain, and no one knows where I'm head.

I rich, but I'm finally breathing in a life that don't need saved.

That was the day I let go of men in the mute.

Still learning to flow.

Here's to the days You finally let go.