Release the Brakes.

The story, to read.

A few years before 2022, I lay in bed one morning, awake long before I wanted to be. On the table next to me were bills. Under them were late payments and eviction notices. A voice in my head told me it was all my fault. It said I was a bad person, and a useless one. I was dreading the day. At night nobody called, so I wished one night could last a whole week, just so I could rest.

Years before that morning, I had written A Happy Pocket Full of Money, a book about manifesting abundance, and it became an international bestseller. I had been the Creative Consultant on The Secret. People all over the world wrote to thank me for the good in their lives. I saved every message. And there I was, broke and broken. How could I help so many people manifest abundance and still be stuck?

It wasn’t only that season, either. Every time I got close to success, something pushed back, like running through molasses. I would build something, and right when it was ready, I would tear it down and start again. I called it “iterating.” I settled for less, and I walked away from more. And I couldn’t even see it.

The answer was in a house in Kenya. I grew up walking on eggshells at home. My father worked hard, and we never went hungry. But our home felt cold and scary, when it should have felt warm and safe. When I was a little boy, I said out loud that I wanted to be a speaker one day. My father said, “Who would ever come to see you!?” He made fun of me until I cried. That’s how dangerous dreaming was in that house. And the boy grew up, and the lesson came with him.

So I tried harder. I read more, learned more and practised more manifesting, and nothing moved. Then one day I gave up for a while and watched videos about ants. No single ant runs an ant colony. The colony grows out of thousands of tiny ants, all doing their small part at once. And it hit me. A whole life grows out of the whole person, not out of one part. I didn’t need to learn how to manifest better. I needed to learn how to get out of my own way.

Here’s the picture I use now. Imagine driving a car with the parking brake on. You can push the accelerator to the floor, and the engine will scream, and you’ll still crawl. Most of us have a brake problem, and we keep treating it like an accelerator problem.

A brake is an old pull that slows us down right when something starts to matter. Many people call it self-sabotage. But that part of us has been working for us all along. It’s still trying to keep us safe in a dangerous world that no longer exists. It just hasn’t been told that the road has changed.

So the question changes. “Why do I keep doing this?” only brings more shame. The question that works is, “What is this protecting me from?” One evening when I was fifty, the old fear came back, hard. This time I sat with it instead of running. And I saw it clearly. The feeling was real. The story was a lie.

I also learned that one kind of help is never enough. A brake lives in more than one place. So I look at three: the business itself, the mind and heart, and the purpose underneath it all. The brake is usually hiding in the one we’ve spent the least time on. And it lets go more easily around other people. For me, healing needed other people too.

In May 2025, I finally told my whole story. Something let go, like a bubble popping. For years, certain people had made me feel seven years old. That feeling went, and I felt capable. In my twenties I had a vision of a clean sheet of paper, then the same sheet crumpled into a ball. I knew one of my purposes was to smooth myself back out and leave a record of how I did it. Every crease still shows. But the paper is flat, and it’s whole, and you can write on it again. That’s what I am now. I now live in Brisbane, Australia.

And my work has grown, from manifesting abundance to releasing the brakes that hold it back. I help conscious entrepreneurs with adverse childhood experiences get out of their own way and release their brakes — so they can multiply their income and magnify their impact. Because manifesting is as natural as breathing. It is already running, and it is already obeying the conditioning it was handed. So the work is releasing the brakes, rising above that conditioning, and building real structure and flow around abundance — the mindset, the financial plumbing, the entrepreneurial steps.

If that’s you, come and do this work with us in my community, Abundance GPS, on Skool.

Your engine has been fine this whole time.