The Freedom Project

Tom Foxley, Mental Fitness Coach for Business Owners

Do you crave freedom & want to hit peak mental fitness? The Freedom Project is here fore those of you who live for adventure and freedom. Your host, Tom Foxley, is a mental fitness coach, former Royal Marines Commando, a freedom seeker, skier, mountaineer, and climber who lives for adventure. Tom has been coaching elite performers for more than a decade. In The Freedom Project, Tom aims to uncover what it takes to hit peak mental fitness for freedom seekers. Once per week, Tom will also get highly tactical and teach you strategies you can deploy into your own life. If you want to learn peak mental fitness, and love creating freedom, this is the podcast for you. www.instagram.com/tomfoxley

  1. May 11

    The GP's Mouthwash — Why Business Owners Keep Treating the Wrong Problem

    For about a month, Tom Foxley's tongue felt like it was housing a  small mammal.   He knew from the start he should go to the dentist. But she's  expensive and her waiting room has a specific combination of clinical  smell and Radio 2 that he finds miserable. So he went to his GP  instead — easier, more accessible, felt like doing something.   The GP prescribed medication and a mouthwash. His tongue didn't  improve. His teeth started staining. He'd created a new problem by  treating the original one incorrectly.   When he finally booked the dentist, she physically recoiled at what  he'd been prescribed. Thirty minutes later: teeth back to white,  actual solution in hand. Salt water with a pinch of bicarb. Free.  Thirty seconds. Perfect for the problem.   All of it avoidable if he'd just gone to the right person at the start.   In this episode, Tom maps that experience onto the pattern he sees  most consistently in business owners — something that's been off for  a year or longer, that they know is there, but instead of addressing  directly they reach for the accessible option. Podcasts, books,  breathwork, meditation apps. All decent things in the right context.  But for the specific problem of having outgrown the operating system  running the business, they treat the surface. They don't touch the  thing underneath.   Topics covered: - The tongue story — and why it maps perfectly onto how intelligent    business owners avoid their real problem - What it actually means to outgrow your operating system - Why the drive, focus and ability to push through become less    reliable over time — and what that signals - Why reading about this problem won't move anything — and what does - What a proper diagnostic conversation looks like — and what it isn't

  2. May 8

    2am, a Wet Giraffe and What It Clarified About Resilience

    2am on a Tuesday. Daughter sick. Bathroom dark. Boxers. Wet stuffed  giraffe. 18-month-old supervising from the doorway with the expression  of a senior consultant reviewing a deliverable. In the middle of it, Tom had a very clear view of his month. Product  launch. Upcoming heart surgery. Ultra marathon training. The business.  Being present at home. None of it relevant. This was the job. In this episode he talks about the version of himself that would have  handled that night very differently — not in the bathroom, but in  the days that followed. The familiar pattern of pushing through on  nothing, white-knuckling the day after, patience thinning, quality  of thinking dropping, recovery taking longer than it should. That's resilience. Absorb the hit and keep going. And it sounds like  toughness — until you notice that absorbing hits repeatedly without  anything actually adapting just means accumulating damage you haven't  fully accounted for yet. Tom learned resilience in the military. In that context, it's exactly  right. But running a business while training, while being a husband  and a father and refusing to let any of those things become just words  — that's not the military. And grizzing it out every time something  goes sideways doesn't build anything. It just costs you slowly until  one day the engine is less reliable than it was. This episode is about what he's been building instead. Topics covered: - Why resilience is armour — and why armour has a weight limit - The difference between absorbing pressure and being built by it - What it looks like when decisions get cleaner under load rather    than murkier - Why the hard week ends and you're not carrying the residue into    the next one - Why understanding this concept changes nothing — and what does - The question worth sitting with about what happens to your    performance after pressure lands

  3. May 6

    Emotions Are Data — What the Most Successful Operator Tom Knows Does Differently

    Last weekend Tom Foxley had dinner with the most successful man he  knows. Not just commercially — though the numbers are serious. What made him  different was the combination: the external success and a genuine  internal ease. Good health. A marriage that works. In his 60s and  moving through life in a way that's rare enough that you notice it  immediately when you're in the room. After dinner he gave a speech about his wife and the people around  him. Mid-speech, in front of twenty people, he let a few tears fall.  Didn't push through them. Didn't apologise. Just let them be there. The next morning, walking in the Yorkshire Dales, Tom brought it up.  Started to say he thought more business owners should be able to do  that, because — The man stopped him. "Because they'd make better decisions, wouldn't they?" This episode is built around that line. Because the path to building  something real tends to reward suppression — push it down, stay  logical, don't let it get personal. And for a while, that works. But  somewhere it becomes the ceiling. Not the strategy, not the market,  not the team. The fact that the operator has been overriding their  own signal for so long they've lost the ability to read it. Emotions aren't the thing getting in the way of good decisions.  They're part of the data set. Topics covered: - The dinner, the speech and what it means to have nothing to prove - Why suppression doesn't produce better decisions — it produces    incomplete ones - What anger, fear, shame and frustration are carrying that logic    alone cannot generate - Why the hire that doesn't sit right usually isn't right — and what    happens when you stop overriding it - What shifts when operators learn to read rather than suppress - The first rep to start building this as a skill this week

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Do you crave freedom & want to hit peak mental fitness? The Freedom Project is here fore those of you who live for adventure and freedom. Your host, Tom Foxley, is a mental fitness coach, former Royal Marines Commando, a freedom seeker, skier, mountaineer, and climber who lives for adventure. Tom has been coaching elite performers for more than a decade. In The Freedom Project, Tom aims to uncover what it takes to hit peak mental fitness for freedom seekers. Once per week, Tom will also get highly tactical and teach you strategies you can deploy into your own life. If you want to learn peak mental fitness, and love creating freedom, this is the podcast for you. www.instagram.com/tomfoxley

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