A health challenge in his 20s led the chair of TRIB3 and CEO of Holmes Place Brands to seek a different way of living. He talks to Kath Hudson about how cultivating inner happiness has given him a new level of resilience

In your career one of the worst challenges you can face is ill health, because it reduces or even destroys your ability to perform. This was the experience I had when I was 25 and as a result I learned the most important lesson of my life, which I’ve been implementing ever since.

I’d been asked to turn around a failing business in sports fashion and having achieved profitability, was at the point where I was going to raise capital to bring it to the high street, when I started getting a disturbing pain in my heart. It came out of nowhere and lasted for months and not when it was under strain, but at odd times, like the middle of the night.

There was something inside me that didn’t want to seek medical advice, feeling that I would get led down a medical pathway and end up with some drastic intervention, such as heart surgery. Instead, I took some time out to assess on a diving trip.

Out at sea I had an epiphany and realised my body was telling me that if I continued to do what I was doing, the way I was doing it, I’d be dead within 10 years. It’s hard to articulate, but it was a really clear understanding. It felt as though I was accelerating into a brick wall.

I made the decision to radically reorientate: sold the business, ended the lease on my apartment, ended the relationship I was in and went travelling to reassess the way I was living and look for people who could guide me on how to approach life differently.

To cut a long story short, over a period of several years I was essentially a student of philosophy and studied with a variety of people who eventually led me to establish a lifelong connection with a meditation teacher in South India – Dr Shankaranarayana Jois, a Sanskrit Professor at the Mysore Sanskrit College – who opened the door to an understanding that I have continued to work on for the intervening 25 years. The heartache went away over the course of a couple of years and I never looked back.

Internal happiness
I realised that I’d been ambitiously and energetically looking to achieve a sense of happiness and fulfilment externally, from my activities and achievements. However, when happiness and fulfilment are cultivated internally it gives tremendous resilience that in turn makes challenges seem smaller. Conversely, when you’re reliant on happiness and fulfilment coming from external factors the joy is always transient, frequently followed by an anticlimax.

If you’re able to reduce the activity of your mind, through meditation, then you’ll increasingly experience this inner happiness. It will start with you feeling a slight sense of peacefulness and expands into something quite extraordinary.

My experience has been that tapping into inner happiness is superior to any other external experience.

A valuable life lesson
I learned that what I’d been doing wasn’t essentially wrong, it was how I was doing it that was causing pain, so when I set about rebuilding my external life, I did it from a different perspective, making sure that my fulfilment and happiness weren’t reliant on it.

Those learnings – which I continue to cultivate by meditating every morning and evening – have honed my ability to deal with every challenging opportunity that has come along since.

They’ve also fed into my successes, although my definition of success is having an increasing sense of contentment – it isn’t measured by external achievements in the way it was when I was a young man.

Patience and confidence
In 2020, the day everything got shut down, I said to my father [Holmes Place founder, Allan Fisher] that it was 50/50 whether we would survive the pandemic. It was concerning, because we’d spent decades building the business, yet I knew I’d be absolutely fine either way.

The prospect of losing it all did make me feel a little hot under the skin, but my deeper understanding and conviction was that it wasn’t a problem. It wouldn’t be able to threaten the thing that’s most important to me, which is continuing to be able to develop contentment and fulfilment in the way I live my life.

As a result, I was able to work in a very conscientious, determined, resourceful and creative way, without panic, in order to navigate the challenges that sprung up as a result of the pandemic. My resilience and resourcefulness were hugely increased by not being dependent on the outcome for my happiness and as a result, I was a free agent to navigate the course, which continued way beyond the lockdowns.

If I could give my younger self some advice I would say be patient and have confidence in what you’re doing. Those two qualities support each other: the more confident you are the more patient you can be and the more patient you become the more confidence will develop.