Coach Ben

Coach Ben I coach overwhelmed self-employed men who feel stuck in a life dominated by work to take back control of their lives and be excited to live again.

09/09/2026

Loneliness in business doesn’t always look like having nobody around you. It can look like being surrounded by clients, suppliers and staff, yet having very few relationships in which you are not expected to know the answer.

That becomes particularly relevant for self-employed men because competence is often part of how we establish our value. We become the person who solves problems, carries responsibility and keeps everything moving. Asking for help can therefore feel like admitting we aren’t capable, so we continue working things out alone.

The irony is that always appearing capable can make it harder for people to connect with us. They may respect what we do, but they are never given much of an opportunity to contribute to our lives or feel properly involved in them.

This is what I find useful about the Ben Franklin effect. It suggests that when somebody does you a small favour, they may feel more positively towards you afterwards. But I don’t think the value is in treating it as a psychological trick. The more important point is that asking for help changes the relationship. It tells someone that you trust their judgement, value what they know and are comfortable enough to let them see that you don’t have everything sorted.

There is also a difference between genuinely asking for help and disguising a transaction as connection. Don’t invent a favour because you want somebody to like you, and don’t immediately rush to cancel it out with “I owe you one”. Receive the help, thank them properly and let their contribution matter.

Then follow up. Tell them what you did with their advice or how their help made a difference. That turns a single favour into an ongoing conversation rather than another brief exchange.

So the challenge is not simply to ask anyone for anything. Think of somebody you would genuinely like a better relationship with and identify one small area in which you respect their knowledge or ability. Ask for their input and give them the opportunity to be useful to you.

If running a business has trained you to handle everything alone, rebuilding connection may require practising the opposite.

08/09/2026

When self-employed men feel stuck, they often look for a large change: a new service, a better system, another member of staff or a complete change of direction.

Sometimes the first thing that needs to change is simply the routine that keeps recreating the same working life.

You wake up, work in the same place, follow the same order and respond to the same demands. That routine helps you keep everything moving, but it also makes it difficult to question whether the way you are working still makes sense. The familiar becomes automatic, including the parts that are exhausting you.

Try deliberately changing one part of your week. Work somewhere different for a morning, rearrange when you take calls or protect some time before opening your messages. You could also spend time with somebody outside the business who will ask questions that your usual environment no longer prompts you to consider.

The point isn’t to make your life inconvenient or chase novelty. It is to interrupt the pattern long enough to notice what you have stopped seeing.

If you are desperate for change but keep repeating the same week, the routine itself may be part of what is keeping you stuck.

04/09/2026

One of the first questions I ask the self-employed men I work with is: “Who are you when we remove work?”

It sounds simple, but it is often incredibly difficult to answer. They can tell me what they do, what the business needs from them and which responsibilities they carry. But once we remove the job title and the problems they solve, things become less clear.

That is understandable. When you run a business, you invest far more than money into it. You give it your time, energy, judgement and reputation. Eventually, the line between you and the business can begin to disappear. When it succeeds, you feel successful. When it struggles, it can feel like a personal failure.

Work can then become the place you go to feel useful and important. This is why a quiet weekend or the beginning of a holiday can feel strangely uncomfortable. You are so accustomed to being needed that, when nothing requires your immediate attention, you are not quite sure what to do with yourself.

Meanwhile, other parts of your identity receive less investment. You may genuinely value family, loyalty and friendship, but you keep missing birthdays, cancelling plans or sitting with the people you love while part of your mind remains inside the business. Your values have not necessarily changed, but the way you are living no longer reflects them.

This is why the question matters. The business was supposed to support your life, not replace your entire understanding of who you are.

Ask yourself: "if my business disappeared tomorrow, what would still be true about me?”

If that is difficult to answer, think about who you were before work began consuming so much of your life. Choose one neglected part of yourself and begin putting some time and energy back into it. That might mean becoming a mate who turns up again, returning to something you used to enjoy or being properly present with your family.

You don’t rediscover who you are by thinking about it endlessly. You do it by participating in the parts of life that remind you.

The danger isn’t simply that you have invested too much in your business. It is that you may have stopped investing in every other part of yourself.

03/09/2026

If you work for yourself and the business is consuming more of your life than you want, it is easy to assume that the answer is more discipline.

Get up earlier. Plan the week better. Stop procrastinating. Work through the list.

I understand why. Discipline is probably one of the things that helped you build the business in the first place. It is certainly something I have relied on.

But discipline is only useful when it is pointed at the right problem.

If your pricing requires you to take on too much work, every decision still depends on you or the same problems keep returning because nothing has been systemised, a better morning routine will not fix that.

You simply become more efficient at maintaining the conditions that are exhausting you.

There is also a point where working longer produces less and less in return. You become more tired, more reactive and less able to see the business clearly. Ironically, the harder you work to solve the problem, the less capacity you have to recognise what the problem actually is.

This is why some of your best thinking can happen while walking, exercising, talking to somebody outside the business or properly taking time off. There is even a name for part of this: the incubation effect. Temporarily putting a problem down can help you return with a different way of seeing it.

That doesn’t mean booking a holiday and hoping the business fixes itself.

It means loosening your grip long enough to recover, get some independent feedback and ask:

“What am I repeatedly compensating for with my own time and effort?”

Then return and make the structural change you have been avoiding.

The time you believe you cannot afford to take away from the business may be the very thing that allows you to stop wasting so much time inside it.

02/09/2026

If you work for yourself and only seem to become properly productive when a deadline is looming, a client is chasing or the coffee kicks in, you may have conditioned yourself to 'need' stress before you can perform.

I recognised this in myself.

As an example; I barely drank caffeine before starting my own business. Once I discovered coffee, I called it a super-drug because of the energy and focus it seemed to give me. But I eventually noticed that some of my most anxious days were also the days when I drank the most.

This isn’t about caffeine being 'bad', nor any of the other things I mentioned in the video like deadlines, pressure from clients, fear of running out of money. All of them in isloation, at the right time is good and helathy. But if these things feel like a constant and unchanging, it’s about recognising what you have become accustomed to using as fuel to get you do to stuff. 

Pressure, urgency, fear and adrenaline can all help when something genuinely needs your attention. But they’re like a backup generator: useful for short periods, but a bloody expensive way to power your entire working life.

When you rely on them constantly, 'calm' can begin to feel unproductive. Quiet periods can make you feel flat, restless, scared even until something goes wrong, and then suddenly you can focus again.

So try something different tomorrow and on repeat. 

Take time away from the business without your phone, emails or a podcast. Walk outside and sit somewhere still and give your system an opportunity to come down into rest and recover. Doing this on repeat will create a new conditioning. One that isn't dependent on stress or things going wrong. 

Here, you’re teaching yourself that action doesn’t always have to begin with fear, pressure or another coffee.

Use the backup generator when you need it. Just don’t make it your only source of power.

01/09/2026

Part 2: When you run your own business, protecting what you have built can quietly become more important than creating what you actually want.

You watch the money closely, work hard to keep every client happy and hold on to responsibilities because trusting somebody else feels risky. You delay the hire, investment or change that might make the business less dependent on you because the possible downside feels more immediate than the future benefit.

None of that makes you irresponsible. Quite the opposite. You have worked hard to get the business this far and you don’t want to lose it.

The problem is that protecting the business can gradually consume all your energy. You become excellent at preventing things from going wrong, but stop making meaningful progress towards the freedom, enjoyment or direction you started the business to create.

Francesca and I once realised that, when I was particularly stressed, we were supporting each other’s fears and managing each other’s hopes. The fears received lengthy conversations, planning and action. The things we wanted were questioned, reduced or delayed until they felt safer.

We needed to reverse that. And I started applying to my business. 

This isn’t about ignoring genuine risks. It is about deciding what reasonable protection looks like, putting it in place and recognising when you have done enough.

Then choose one thing you genuinely want to build over the next 90 days and give it proper support. Allocate time to it. Put money behind it if necessary. Create a plan and involve somebody who will hold you accountable. See my previous video (Part 1) about segmenting time to do what is most effective for the business. 

Otherwise, your business may remain 'safe' while the life you wanted it to provide stays unexciting and unmoving. 

If you are interested in 90 Day Planning. I run a mothly workshop for business owners called the 90-Day Plan of Action. 

Comment "PLAN" and I’ll send you the details.

01/09/2026

Part 1: We know this feeling well. You can finish a day having answered messages, sorted problems and completed plenty of work, yet still feel as though you haven’t moved anything important forward.

A few months ago, I learnt about Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. It gave me useful language for something many self-employed men experience.

There is no natural end to running your own business. There is always something else you could be doing, so the business can fill every hour with maintenance.

The difficult part is that maintenance feels productive. You are solving real problems and completing work that genuinely needs doing. But if that consumes all your time, the business never becomes easier to run.

So here is the task.

Put one uninterrupted 60-minute block in your diary this week. Before that time begins, write down the problems that repeatedly take up your attention.

Then ask yourself:

**“Which recurring problem, if solved properly, would remove the greatest amount of future work from my business?”**

Choose carefully. It may not be the loudest or most urgent problem. Look for the one that creates other problems or repeatedly brings you back to the same place.

Use the hour to begin creating the longer-term solution. That could be a system, template, boundary, process or piece of automation.

Once you know what the solution requires, allocate a regular amount of time to it until it is finished. That might be an hour every morning or two protected hours each week. Put it in the diary and make it a genuine priority.

The important thing is that you are no longer hoping to solve it when you happen to have some spare time. You know that, even if progress is gradual, the problem will eventually be dealt with properly.

And don’t allow that protected time to become another opportunity to catch up.

This is the difference between spending another hour efficiently maintaining the business and spending it effectively improving it.

Part 2, coming next, looks at why the problems, risks and possible threats so often win that competition for our attention.

31/08/2026

PART 2 OF 2: Shutting her out isn’t protecting her.

When I began to recognise that too much of my work stress was landing on Francesca, my instinct was to keep more of it to myself.

In my head, this was considerate. If I dealt with the problems alone, I wasn’t asking her to carry them. I thought I was protecting her from the pressure of my work.

The problem was that she could still feel when something was wrong. I might have been physically at home, but I was quieter, distracted or still mentally somewhere inside the business.

By saying nothing, I hadn’t kept the stress out of our relationship. I had simply removed the explanation for it.

That can leave your partner wondering whether your mood has something to do with her, or feeling that you are deliberately keeping her at a distance.

The middle ground has been learning to find support elsewhere while still being honest with her. Friends, other business owners and professional support can help carry the detail. Francesca doesn’t need to hear every problem or become responsible for fixing it, but it is still important that she understands why I might not be quite myself.

Sometimes the high-level truth is enough: work has been difficult, I am dealing with it and I have support, but I want you to understand how I’m feeling so it doesn’t come between us.

Part 1 was about asking your partner to carry everything.

Part 2 is about trying to carry everything alone.

Neither is particularly good for the relationship.

31/08/2026

PART 1 OF 2

I’ve been guilty of this myself. When work was at its most stressful, Francesca was often the main person I spoke to about it. I would come home carrying whatever had happened that day and, because she was the person I trusted most, that was where it all landed.

At the time, I saw this as part of having a close relationship. I wasn’t bottling everything up and trying to deal with it alone. Surely talking to my wife was the healthy thing to do?

What I hadn’t fully recognised was how many different jobs I was asking her to do. She wasn’t only my wife. She was also becoming my counsellor, business sounding board, personal assistant, closest friend and the person expected to help me feel better when work had overwhelmed me.

There was also an imbalance between us. Francesca had friends, colleagues and family she could speak to. Her emotional support was spread across several relationships, so she didn’t rely on me in quite the same way. Mine was becoming increasingly concentrated on her.

I think a lot of men fall into this without consciously choosing it. We are sold the idea that finding our romantic partner means we have found “our person”. Once we have a wife or long-term partner, it can feel as though the relationship part of life is sorted. Job done.

We don’t necessarily decide to abandon our friendships. We simply stop investing in them with the same care and consistency. Work gets busy, home takes priority and seeing mates becomes something we’ll arrange when life calms down.

Then, slowly, the person we love becomes expected to replace friendship, community, colleagues and every other form of support we have allowed to disappear.

The answer isn’t to stop leaning on your partner. She should be somebody you can turn to. But she shouldn’t have to be everybody.

One useful place to begin is by asking whether she sometimes feels responsible for too much of your emotional life and the stress you bring home. Then listen properly to the answer.

This is Part 1 because there is an easy mistake to make once you recognise this pattern. You can overcorrect and stop letting her support you at all.

That's Part Two.

30/08/2026

When you work for yourself, the working day rarely has a clean ending.

You might close the laptop or leave your office, but you carry the unfinished work, client problems, financial worries, unread emails and decisions home with you.

By the time the evening comes, you may not simply be looking for something enjoyable. You may be looking for relief. For some men, that is a drink. For others, it is food, p**n, gaming, shopping or spending the evening on their phone.

I don’t think the point is to judge any of these things. They change how we feel, which is precisely why we return to them. The concern is when they stop feeling like a choice and become automated behaviour, something we need every evening just to make life feel manageable.

HALT is a simple tool I learnt from friends in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Before automatically reaching for your usual form of relief, pause and ask whether you are:

- Hungry,
- Angry,
- Lonely,
- Tired.

You may need some proper food. You may need to acknowledge who or what you are angry with. You may need to call somebody. You may simply need to go to bed early. Respond to the actual need first. You might find that you no longer want the quick fix quite as much.

Trying to become more disciplined around the habit might help briefly. But it won’t address the pressure that keeps creating the need for it.

If you regularly need to escape how you feel at the end of the working day, it may be worth looking at what your business and your life are asking you to carry.

The habit might not be the real problem.

It may be what you are using to cope with it.

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