The beginning.
I was adopted at eleven weeks old, and for most of my life that fact felt like something I carried rather than something I understood. I didn't know why I was given away, I didn't ask, and I didn't talk about it much.
But it left something behind. Even as a kid I felt out of place, like something was off and I couldn't name what. My adopted mum was beautiful and kind and gave me everything, but it didn't change the feeling that something wasn't right.
The character.
By fifteen I'd built a character to cover it. A version of me that could walk into a room and command it with bravado and performance and the ability to turn it on when I needed to. That character got me expelled from school for selling weed, and I ended up in a room with my mum, my dad, two police officers, and the headmaster. I'd been playing a role and I got caught.
My adopted mum died when I was nineteen and I started using drugs quite heavily after that. Clubs every weekend, MDMA and cocaine, steroids because I felt wrong in my body and thought I could reshape it. But the thing I was most addicted to wasn't the substances, it was the after parties where me and my best mate would stay up until 6am talking about our dead parents, because the drugs made us feel safe enough to say the things we couldn't say sober. That wasn't really a drug story, it was a story about how disconnected I was from my own emotional life.
The corporate years.
I spent nine years in corporate sales after that. Good money but the work meant nothing to me, and I was using cocaine most weekends to escape a life I didn't want but didn't know how to change.
When lockdown hit in 2020 I couldn't run from it anymore. I was living on my own, about twenty grand in debt, drinking alone and smoking weed. The usual coping mechanisms were gone so I moved back to my dad's, and we argued constantly. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I bought a coding course for two and a half grand that turned out to be rubbish. I explored Airbnb management. I was grasping at anything.
The crack.
A close friend I'd grown up with, our mums were close and we'd been inseparable since our early twenties, had been pushing me to do a self-authoring programme for months, and I'd been resisting it. Eventually I gave in and started working through it, twenty minutes a day, past, present, future. Something opened up. For the first time I was actually looking at my own life honestly.
One thing that came out of it was realising the only thing I actually wanted to do more of was mountain biking. I researched the best places in the UK, found Wales, and moved there. I ended up lodging in a house with a Japanese woman called Yogi who was one of the wisest people I've ever met.
While I was there I started reading a book that had been meant for someone else, a guidebook covering direction, goals, values, health, everything. Working through it, I came to the realisation that I wanted to train as a therapist and help people with addiction. That same friend paid for my deposit and I started training with Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy while I was still in Wales.
Around the same time, I'd started becoming aware of this sharp, concentrated ball of energy in the top of my stomach. It was always there and I didn't know what it was. I described it to Yogi one day and she looked me in the eye and said: Dan, that's probably because of the trauma you've got. The adoption stuff, the fact that your mum died. You've probably not processed it yet. And she was right, I hadn't.
One night I was lying in bed with no music, no TV, no stimulation, and for the first time ever I tried to feel what was going on inside my body. I focused on that ball of energy in my stomach and it moved. It shifted up through the centre of my body. And I thought: I have the ability to change how I feel.
Before I left Wales, I had a return-to-work meeting with my boss. I'd been an account manager after being demoted from business development director because they'd figured out the bravado. He looked at me and said: the person I hired and who went on furlough is seemingly completely different to the person sat in front of me right now. I don't know who Dan is anymore. I felt it in my throat, that choking feeling, and something enormous was confirmed in that moment. A part of me had died, and the character I'd been running for fifteen years didn't work anymore and there was nothing behind it yet.
The work.
I moved to Manchester around October. The first thing I did the day I arrived was go out and get drunk on my own. I went out a few more times after that, did drugs a couple of times with new people I'd met, and then from early November through to December I just felt broken. My whole body was incredibly heavy, no motivation, suffocated by my own emotion. I got tested for COVID, got blood tests, everything came back inconclusive. I didn't know what was happening to me.
That same friend said: sounds like you need therapy, buddy. Even though I'd been training as a cognitive hypnotherapist for seven months at that point, I'd never actually done the work on myself.
I found a therapist called Hugh who specialised in somatic, body-informed addiction work, and we started weekly sessions. Very quickly we got into the adoption and I started to realise that was the root of everything: not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy, not feeling like I belonged. It had been running every major decision I'd made since childhood and I'd never once looked at it directly.
That therapy changed my life. I built a practice off the back of it, addiction and performance, using the same approach Hugh had used with me: cognitive hypnotherapy, NLP, and somatic therapy. Go back to the event that installed the pattern, resolve it at the root, and the present-day behaviour changes because the thing driving it is gone.
The pattern.
The practice did well, but then I started noticing something I hadn't expected. I'd joined a mental performance coaching company called TMP as a senior coach, working with business owners on the performance side, and the people I was meeting there were stuck for the same reasons my therapy clients had been. One was sabotaging deals she could close, another held on to control because letting go felt like disappearing, and a third had built a business that needed him for everything because being needed was the only identity that felt safe.
We scaled TMP to seven figures. I delivered over 100 transformations with business owners across three years, and the pattern was consistent: the constraint was never the strategy, it was always the person.
I outgrew the addiction label because that's where I'd started but it wasn't where I was supposed to stay. The work I do now is broader and deeper than addiction recovery. It's about resolving whatever got installed in the past that's still running decisions in the present, and connecting that resolution directly to how someone operates in their business.
The letter.
In June 2025, my dad walked into my bedroom holding an orange Sainsbury's bag, crying. Inside it were my adoption papers and a letter from my birth mum. I didn't read it straight away and the bag sat there for months.
When I finally read it, everything changed. The letter explained my birth mother's background: her dad was abusive, her mum left when she was six and became an alcoholic. She was twenty-one when she had me, and she and my birth dad were young, wanted to travel, and knew the system she'd grown up in would damage a child.
For thirty years the story I'd been carrying was that I was given away because something was wrong with me. The letter showed me it was never about me. She didn't give me away because I was broken, she gave me away because she knew what her system would do to a child and she chose to break the chain.
Why I do this work.
I do this work because I watch it change people in ways that nothing else they've tried has been able to.
One client came to me because she couldn't close deals she was perfectly capable of closing, and within a few weeks we'd traced it back to a belief about her own worth that had been running since childhood. Once we resolved it, she started selling without the performance and raised her prices without the panic she'd always felt before.
Another client described himself as two different people: the professional version that showed up to work every day and the real version he kept hidden. He'd built an entire business around the mask and it was exhausting him. By the time we'd finished, the gap between those two versions had closed and his content, his sales conversations, and his relationships all shifted because he wasn't performing anymore.
One of my clients told me halfway through our work that "these sessions are a lot harder than the business strategy ones." I took that as the biggest compliment he could have given me, because the discomfort meant we were in the right place. The business stuff is easy. Everyone can Google how to scale a service business. The identity work is where the real constraint lives, and that's the work most people never do.
I've worked with people who couldn't post on social media because being visible felt like being exposed. People who knew exactly what to do in their business but couldn't make themselves do it. People who were holding on to control because letting go felt like disappearing. And in every case, the thing that was getting in the way wasn't a lack of knowledge or skill or strategy. It was something that had been installed a long time ago that nobody had ever addressed directly.
That's what I'm here for. That's the work I was put on this earth to do, and Sovereign Mind is how I deliver it.