How to Master Your Mindset with Benjamin Owen | The Power of Confronting Yourself

In this episode, we’re meeting the formidable Ben Owen from the 10X Tribe – a global community of entrepreneurs who are hungry for growth, as business leaders and humans.

For those of you who haven’t heard about Ben, let me take you back to his early days as one of North Wales’s most in-demand fitness coaches. At a relatively young age, he found himself at the helm of a massive gym empire, helping people transform their bodies and hit their performance goals.

But he was more than that. Clients often opened up to him about their darkest, most shame-inducing feelings and behaviours – their struggles with body confidence, motivation, their financial fears, their frustrations with their partner, their unsatisfying sex lives.

“People say you tell your barber everything, but I think you tell your personal trainer even more,” says Ben. “All these influences have a massive impact on a person’s performance in all areas of their life. I’ve worked with men and women, but guys in particular didn’t have anyone else to talk to about these things, and training became a safe space for them to do that.”

“No more Mr Nice Guy”

So how did he go from personal trainer and sex confidant to coaching some of the most successful business leaders in the world? I was hoping you’d ask.

Let’s rewind all the way back to the days of Ben’s bricks and mortar gym. From 5am every morning through to 7pm every night, you’d find him there between the benches, slogging his guts out and struggling to keep his head above water.

While he preached to his clients about the importance of work-life balance, he had none himself – and that irony isn’t lost on him. Crushed by the pressure of running a business, paying staff, motivating clients and maintaining his personal life, everything started falling apart.

The stress seeped into his marriage, and after going through a painful divorce, Ben had a life-changing realisation: he’d become a workaholic to avoid dealing with the feelings he was struggling with.

“Maybe I wanna try something different?”

“I wasn’t coping well, as a man or as a leader. I had so many repressed emotions. I was a nice guy, a people pleaser – I wanted to be liked. But after reading No More Mr Nice Guy, I understood that most guys are conditioned not to show their emotions, especially not anger.”

One day he walked into the gym and saw that someone had left all the lights on. He was fuming, but having grown up with an emotionally unavailable father, he hadn’t learned how to express that emotion in a healthy way. So he bottled it up, painted on a smile and cracked on.

“I think so many men – also women but mostly men – want to be seen as this happy, smiley, positive person, which I am. But I’m also angry and aggressive and all the things a normal human being can be. And I didn’t know how to confront that, so I was masking those feelings with work.”

Then the pandemic began. Government safety precautions meant that only a few people were allowed inside Ben’s 350-capacity gym, and he was forced to shut down the whole operation for two years. That’s when the magic started to happen.

“People were still coming to me for coaching, and I thought ‘hang on, I’ve been calling myself a personal trainer for 15 years, maybe I wanna try something different? And without that bricks-and-mortar tie, I started wellness coaching online and just really enjoyed it.”

“I was met with love and acceptance”

He even pivoted into corporate wellness, working with leadership teams at local businesses with over 600 staff to develop health and fitness strategies during lockdown. That’s when he discovered that healthier leaders built healthier teams.

But to be the best coach he could be, Ben knew he had a lot of demons to confront. One day, he woke up and sacked all his clients overnight, knowing he was in the wrong headspace to help others (“I just said to them: ‘I’m sorry but I can’t coach you while I’m in this space’”).

It was the old life jacket analogy – he needed to help himself before he could really help anyone else. So he reprised his role as MD of the gym, and went back to work – literally and metaphorically.

“I didn’t realise how much I needed therapy until I was in a room with a group of men sharing stuff that was really deep and dark. And the guys would just say ‘yeah, I’ve been through that too’. Until then, I felt so bad about myself for feeling the things I felt, but they met me with love and acceptance. That was massive for me.”

“Only so many times you can talk about a calorie”

It wasn’t long until he resumed his online coaching career, and business quickly took off. Instead of having three clients at the gym, he found himself with 300 online.

But something had changed. He’d seen the impact his work had on the clients who’d got into peak condition and become elite versions of themselves – in life and at work – and he started wondering how to replicate that impact in the corporate world.

“I looked at that ripple effect of how one fit and healthy person could impact their whole team, and I wanted to make that ripple bigger,” says Ben. “That’s when I decided to work solely with business leaders who manage teams. Plus, by that point I really couldn’t talk about calories anymore. Like, there’s only so many times you can talk about a calorie!”

Having been through his own journey of personal growth, Ben was interested in much deeper conversations. That’s why he called his programme The Mile Deep Mastermind; his clients must be willing to go down into the depths and learn about themselves.

“Because you won’t experience the success you want in your life or your business until you’ve got everything else right in yourself – like strong boundaries, good communication skills, the ability to have difficult conversations. Creating your best business means becoming your best self.”

“So yeah… we moved to Dubai”

The success of his coaching programme soon led to another lightbulb moment. “I thought: ‘wait a minute, I could actually do this from anywhere’. And around that time, I was driving back from a buddy’s house who was about to move back to Dubai. As a joke, I said to my partner Poppy: ‘Imagine if we moved to Dubai’. And she loved the idea. So yeah… we moved to Dubai.”

It was a monumental identity shift for a guy who was born and bred in North Wales, who went to Tesco and used to get recognised as the guy who’d trained half the town. His popularity was such that 100% of his clients came through word-of-mouth.

Moving to Dubai, of course, changed that, and he’s had to learn about marketing the hard way; through trial and error. But everything he’s learned about marketing, about business and about life has led him to become one of the most sought-after leadership coaches in the market today – and he wouldn’t have done it any other way.

If Ben’s story resonates with you and you’re ready to shift into a growth mindset, you can join the wait list for Ben’s Mile Deep Mastermind programme. In the meantime, here are five micro-actions you can implement right now to get out of your own way and live more authentically:

Five micro-actions to help you get out of your own way

#1. Don’t fight your emotions. You’ll never be comfortable in your own skin until you accept every part of yourself. You might not be the kind of person who goes out looking for a scrap, but you can also accept that emotions like anger and aggression are sometimes a part of the human experience and part of who you are.

#2. Mark your boundaries. Ben’s first partner told him he had zero boundaries. At that point, he didn’t even know what a boundary was. All he knew was that he let people walk all over him and gave his time too freely. Establishing your boundaries is essential in life and in business.

#3. Stop trying to please everyone. It harms your growth. Lots of leaders are people-pleasers, they pacify others, and it gets them to the point where the business can be successful but then they become the bottleneck. They become so resentful, so f***ing angry, and it turns into passive-aggression. You can build a six-figure business through people-pleasing, but seven figures? No way.

#4. Start the difficult conversations. People are scared to talk about things they perceive as shameful or difficult, in their personal lives and with their businesses. As an example, a lot of men would rather cheat on a partner than end the relationship because it’s a difficult discussion. Don’t be scared to have difficult conversations, and don’t be ashamed to talk about things you’re struggling with. Nothing and no one is perfect.

#5. Vulnerability is a superpower. Being a great business leader is about showing up as the absolute best version of yourself, day after day. But it’s also about simultaneously being open and vulnerable about the natural dysfunction of being a human being. You may repel people who don’t like that kind of vulnerability, but they’re not your people.

Connect with Ben over on Insta at @coachbenjaminowen or head over to his website to explore his one-to-one mentoring programmes and discover more about the growth mindset.

Don’t miss the next episode of Stay Hungry – we’ll dive into straight-talking insights on business marketing, growth mindset, and the realities of running a business. And if you want to take the hassle out of your marketing, we’ve got you covered with our done-for-you service.

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