The job trained you to perform. Fatherhood asks you to be there.

Creative work asks you to be "on": sharp, likeable, dependable under pressure, whoever the room needs you to be. Most men in these industries get good at it. The cost usually shows up somewhere else, at home, once the performance is supposed to stop.

This isn't a course, and it isn't therapy. It's coaching built around the specific shape of a creative career: the feast and famine income, the identity that's fused to your last credit, and the difficulty of switching off "client mode" in time to actually be present for bath time.

Sound familiar?

• The gap between the version of you clients get and the version your family gets at 7pm
• Income that swings between too much work and not enough, and what that does to how present you can afford to be
• An identity built around your next job rather than a real awareness of your value
• Being better at reading a room of strangers than reading your own child

What the work moves toward

• You get clearer and more aware of boundaries, so your children get you, not the leftover adrenaline from the day
• Your sense of who you are holds steady between bookings, and you find motivation in the fallow periods
• You're more able to be yourself at both work and home, spending less energy on masking at work, and giving more of yourself at home

I've lived the gap I help men close

I've spent twenty five years in advertising and film: freelance, project to project, always the reliable professional face. For a long time I performed brilliant "front of house," while my "backstage" was in disarray, and I paid for that gap in exhaustion, isolation and depression.

Alongside that career I've done fifteen years of men's work, therapy and coaching, and now train and coach other men. Through this work I found space to sound out what is really important to me, how I wanted to show up in both my professional world and my family. And it's work that continues, I am not a finished product, but I know how to bring others on this journey that offers so much. I work with men whose careers look like mine did, and who want to find flow and joy both in their careers and home life.

Since the word "creative" gets used loosely