I Built Something I Was Proud Of and Lost Myself Inside It
At some point between building something and running it, most people lose themselves inside it.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Quietly. And the terrifying part is that by the time you notice it's happened, you've been someone else for quite a while.
I was forty two when I finally looked up and realised the version of me that had started all of this was a very long way from the person standing in the building every day.
This is the story of how that happens. And more importantly, how you get back.
Three Versions of the Same Person
To understand what I lost, you need to understand what was there to begin with.
In my twenties I had dreadlocks. I lived at festivals. I read voraciously about philosophy, religion, quantum mechanics, and alternative thinking. I believed in human potential, in higher purpose, in the idea that we could call what we wanted into being. I was open, curious, and genuinely full of wonder at the world.
Then in my late twenties and early thirties something shifted. Still confident, still full of belief, but channelling it differently. More entrepreneurial. Taking risks oriented toward financial and personal growth. Building things. That was the version of me who bought a one way ticket to Mexico, came home with a guitar and a comic book collection, and built a restaurant anyway.
Both of those versions were recognisably the same person. Grounded in a clear sense of who he was and what he believed.
And then the years passed. Covid happened. The industry changed. The pressure accumulated. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the thread connecting me to those earlier versions of myself started to fray.
The wonder disappeared. The belief in potential was replaced by fear of failure. The person who had stood at festivals thinking the universe was on his side started to feel like a stranger.
I didn't notice it going until it had already gone.
The Gradual Erosion
The erosion was quiet. It didn't announce itself.
I became expert at something that sounds almost like a virtue but is deeply corrosive. I became brilliant at moving straight from one achievement to the next without letting anything land. Win an award, have a great service, get a brilliant review, and I was already three problems ahead before the good feeling had a chance to exist.
Day after day, small dismissal after small dismissal, I was training myself out of the ability to feel good about anything.
The most telling sign showed up in the conversations with my wife Siobhan. I would feel the anger building over something that in the cold light of day didn't deserve the energy I was giving it. And the worst part wasn't the anger itself. It was that I could see myself doing it. The voice inside my head would be saying this isn't you, this isn't right, stop. But I couldn't stop. And not being able to stop made me angrier at myself. And that came out again in the wrong direction.
I remember thinking in the middle of one of those moments: this isn't me.
Not as a consolation. As a recognition. The person I was showing up as was not the person I actually was. And the gap between those two things was growing wider without me knowing how to close it.
The Recovery of Self
The way back didn't come from one breakthrough. It came from a series of small, deliberate, unglamorous acts of reclamation.
The morning routine came first. Protecting the first part of the day before the business could claim it. Not an elaborate ritual. Just the decision that for a specific window of time each morning I existed as a person rather than as an owner. Breathwork. Quiet. No phone. Just arriving in the day as myself before anything else arrived to tell me who I needed to be.
Then the 3D printing. Several hours a few times a week dedicated to printing and painting models. Something absorbing and creative that had nothing to do with hospitality or pressure or identity. My nervous system, for the first time in a long time, got to settle. The fight or flight response that had been running at a low hum in the background for years finally had enough space to come down.
It reminded me what it felt like to be inside something I loved. To lose time in a good way. To come back to myself in the quietness of making something.
The third shift was the structure I built around the week itself. Treating each day with intention. Deciding in advance what the hours were going to be put toward rather than letting the business fill every available space by default. Health and fitness as a non negotiable. Time with Siobhan. Time for the creative work. Time at Ojo Rojo that was bounded and deliberate rather than endless.
Those non negotiables became identity anchors. Moments in every week where I existed as a person with a life rather than only as an owner with a business.
And the confidence to delegate came alongside all of this. Because when you have things outside the business that matter enough to protect, you get better at protecting them. You start to trust your team with the things you would previously have absorbed yourself. You start to understand that your presence in the building is not the same as your value to it.
The Stepping Stones You Can Only See Looking Back
Here is something I want to say about all of those versions of myself I've described.
For a long time during the darkest period I saw the distance between the person I had been and the person I had become as evidence of failure. As proof that I had gone wrong somewhere.
I don't see it that way anymore.
I see stepping stones.
When you are on stepping stones they are small and unsteady and you are looking down trying to keep your balance. You can't see the journey that led you there and you can't see where the path is going. You are just trying not to fall in.
But every now and then you can stop and look back. And when you do, you can see how all of those stones, even the shaky ones, even the ones that almost tipped, aligned to bring you to exactly where you needed to be.
The free spirit in his twenties who believed the universe was abundant. The entrepreneur in his thirties who channelled that belief into action. The man in his early forties who lost the thread and found it again the hard way. They all contributed something essential. They all left something behind that I carry into everything I do now.
I couldn't do what I do without all of it. Including the worst of it. Especially the worst of it.
What To Take From This
If you are running a hospitality business and you're feeling the distance growing between who you are and what the business needs you to be, I want you to hear this.
You haven't become someone else. You've gotten distracted and lost your way. Those are different things.
The person you were before the business, the one with the energy and the curiosity and the belief and the life outside of work, they haven't gone anywhere permanent. They're just buried under the accumulation of pressure and the relentless demand of a role that asks everything of you if you let it.
The way back is small and deliberate and unglamorous. Fifteen minutes in the morning before the business gets you. Something that absorbs you completely and has nothing to do with work. Non negotiables in the week that exist regardless of what the business is doing. The confidence to delegate properly and trust the people around you.
None of those things will feel urgent. The business will always feel more urgent. That is the nature of the trap.
But every day you spend a little time being a person rather than only being an owner, you are making a deposit into the account that everything else draws from.
And that account is worth protecting.
If this resonates, come and find us in the Lead Well Community. It's free and it's full of hospitality leaders who are working through exactly this.