Paul Michael Love
Rebuild Confidence | Restore Control | Reclaim Self-Trust

Heavy shoulders
Shorter patience
Slower decisions

You've been tired for so long and you don't know what to blame apart from your age.

One of the kids had his head bitten off over nothing this week and you hated yourself before finishing the sentence.

The thing you swore you'd start on Monday is thirty Mondays old.

Watch the four minutes

Watch this first

By the end of this you'll know why you've gone numb

Paul Michael Love. A four minute video goes here.

You got sold the gym, the diet, the app, the self help books, the coaching, the therapy, and the calm lad on Instagram telling you to talk more. Every one of them worked for a fortnight.

The doctor offered little more than asking, yet again, whether you'd had any thoughts of self harm. (well I didn't but if one more person asks me I might...)

So now you think you're the problem.

You're not the problem. The fire's gone out, and nobody sells a fix for that because nobody names it.

Four minutes and you'll know why it went out, why it was never your age, and why every fix you bought was aimed at the wrong thing.

Video going in here shortly. Straight from me, and I'll not waste your four minutes.

First, the truth

We box shit up

The polite word is compartmentalise. Every man reading this knows it, because we all do it.

Something doesn't sit right, so we do what we always do. Seal it. Shove it down. Crack on.

Then the next thing. Box it. Seal it. Crack on. We call it coping. We call it being men about it.

From the outside we look fine. Better than fine. We've got so good at the boxing we've half forgotten the boxes are there.

They're there.Stacked.Sealed.Full.

We let things slide that betray our very make up because underneath it all we're too afraid of being pushed aside.

The mates thin out to three memes a month and we file it under what happens to men.

Every January we swear this is the year, and every year the story about how fit we used to be gets another year on it and the lottery ticket still gets bought with the last bit of 'anything's possible' belief we have left.

This time next year Rodders...

A man sat on the floor with a mug, head resting on his hand, surrounded by stacked cardboard boxes marked DOUBT, ANGER, REGRET, FAILURE, SHAME, GRIEF, PRESSURE, ANXIETY and EMOTIONS? NAH MATE, with things bursting out of several of them and flames on top

What I believe

The thing is never the thing

The drink, the temper, the fuse that's got shorter every year... none of that is the problem. They're what a man reaches for when he's lost, and he's been lost so long he no longer sees it.

He invests all his spare time, his thoughts, his energy, and worst of all his whole self-worth, into things that seem honest and brilliant. His kid's success on the pitch. How much of his relationship is still rooted in that hot fire his wife and him built the whole thing on.

His lad plays a blinder on the Saturday and he's ten feet tall all week. A bad school report lands on the Tuesday and he's flat for days and couldn't tell you why it hit that hard, because on paper it's a nine year old and his spellings.

She reaches for him and he's a man again. She doesn't, and something goes quiet that he'd never say out loud. Yes, it's about the sex, of course it's about the sex, but it's more than that and he knows it. It's about still being the one she picks.

He tries. She's tired. He tries again tomorrow, and the day after, and one day he stops trying. So he sees to himself downstairs, fifteen years old again. Married, and on his own.

Up and down, up and down,on a scoreboard thathe doesn't even own

Over twenty years I've watched men go at the thing. Nowhere more than in myself. The drink, the belly, the job, the temporary physical fix in the gym. It was never enough.

It's why I've gone into this work so hard. For me and my one chance at this life, and to stop the mistakes of the past repeating again on my kids.

So we go at it the other way round. Energy first, because there is no such thing as a motivation problem, only a man too knackered to start. Then your word, rebuilt small enough that you cannot argue with the evidence. Then the man, and the negotiating stops.

The way back is quieter than anyone wants it to be, and it's nowhere near where we've been looking.

If any of that sounds like you, this whole thing is my invite

The corner man

The man in your corner has one of his own

Italian restaurants at fourteen. Doors at university. Then over twenty years standing next to men while they rebuilt themselves, long before I had the words for what was actually being rebuilt.

I chased the top of the personal training game and got there. Most qualified, most clients, most hours. Then found out Personal Trainer was never who I was. It was one of the caps I wore, and my whole worth was hanging on it.

There was a Sunday in the middle of all that where I climbed the stairs on a hangover with a plate I hadn't needed, caught a fat and unhealthy personal trainer in the mirror on the landing, and stood there lonely in a house full of people who loved me.

The men in front of me taught me the rest. They'd fly for three weeks and then hand me a list of reasons because they were unique. They weren't. I'll say it again because it's pivotal, the thing is never the thing.

So now I do the work underneath. I've dedicated my life to being the corner man.

None of this was written from the outside. My best work has always been what I needed for myself, and this was no different. I went first, which puts me one page ahead of you and not a step further.

My own life got turned over, and I'll not be dressing that up for a website. But the simple fact of life is that we can't fix what wasn't ours to fix. We can only do what we need and must do for ourselves and our kin. This was the living map for me to do it and it began where it should've, by relighting the fire.

The corner man has a corner man. I invest in myself, and so should you. A man who tells you he's finished is selling you something.

What I'm after isn't complicated. Peace in my own head, energy that's still there at six o'clock, provision for my kids and the drive to keep the presence of mind to make the tough decisions as I strive to be a powerful gentleman. I'm not sure any man will ever reach that level of truth, joy and love but that's not the point. The power is in the going.

It's been said I can be a bastard. It's true. But I'll be your favourite bastard.

I'll ask the question you've been avoiding asking yourself, and I'll sit in the silence after it.

Paul Michael Love

In their words

It's not just you

  • “I hit a bit of a ceiling in my 40s where I just thought, you know, you're supposed to feel shit.”JC
  • “You come in at night and you open a beer, or a can of Coke and a Mars bar 'cause you're feeling knackered.”Nathan Bulch
  • “I felt like I'd lost myself. I was just sort of a bit of a phantom walking around.”James Gee
  • “You are making choices without even realising.”Tim Wilkinson
  • “It gives a man back whatever he had lost.”David Hope

Two minutes. Count how many of them are you.

Men like you, in their words

Six men describe losing energy, direction and control, then finding their way back.

The way in

Seven days
Four rules
Your word back

It starts smaller than your pride would like.

Seven days. Four rules that a man keeps. A tracker with your name at the top and nowhere to hide from your own handwriting.

It isn't a course and there's nothing to binge at midnight so you can feel productive about doing nothing. It's four promises, kept for a week, in front of yourself.

Day one feels almost insulting. That's the design. Small on purpose, because proof starts small or it doesn't start at all.

By day seven you've done something you haven't done in years. You said a thing and then you did the thing.

Not another plan starting. A man coming back.

Relighting The Fire, the seven day reset protocol, shown on a tablet

A 50 page protocol, on your phone the minute you ask for it. An email from me every evening for seven nights, arriving about the time a man starts talking himself out of tomorrow. Read it tonight, start it in the morning.

Start the free reset

The list of everything

You've bought the something else before

The jab that doubled in price and handed the weight back the minute you stopped. The unfinished book holding a door open somewhere. The gym direct debit that never missed a month, just cheap enough not to cancel, but the cost per visit, too embarrassing to quote.

The app tracker that counted the decline in beautiful detail. The swiped notification halfway up the stairs. The accountability lad who flaked the same week you did, which neither of you has mentioned since. The therapy where you told the truth about everything except how you actually were.

The 75 Hard that wiped thirty seven kept days over one missed photo. The podcast protocol you couldn't remember by Thursday. The bloods that came back normal, and somehow that made it worse.

None of it was a con. They all did the job it said on the tin, and every one of them worked on the something.

Not one of them ever met the man who bought it.

Remember: The thing is never the thing

Read this bit honest

You'll know by the Monday speech

Every man has one. The little address he gives himself on a Sunday night, third one this month, about how tomorrow it all changes.

If you're sick of the sound of your own speech, this is for you.

It's for the man who runs the job, the mortgage, the school runs, the lot, and somewhere in the running of everything stopped running himself.

It's not for the man after a six week shred for Marbella. There are a thousand pages for him, with countdown timers and men holding their own t shirts up. Some of them do a fine job of it.

Nor is it for the man who wants it to happen to him. Nothing here happens to you. You do it, or it doesn't get done.

If the top of this page felt like I'd been inside your noggin and was reading a blow by blow account of your life lately, you are the man this is for.

If it lands, stay. If it doesn't, leave.

Paul Michael Love on the gym floor

Your move

The reset is free
The only catch is
You strike the match

Seven days, one small thing a day, done the way you said you would. Nothing to survive.

By the end of the week you've unearthed something you haven't had in years. A short run of promises you made to yourself and actually kept. It won't look like much from the outside. Neither does a lit match.

It's free because it doesn't need selling. It needs doing.

If a week of small and doable sounds beneath a man like you, then it might be worth remembering that the big fix has been starting Monday for years now.

Start the free reset

Strike the match

Start the free reset

Seven days. Four rules. Your word back.

Your move

Still not sure? Click here to read the full story of Relighting The Fire first. Then decide.