Ascent with Tom Foxley

A client of mine works sixteen hour days. Up at four, in the office by seven, laptop still open at eleven at night.

I asked him to rate the quality of that work out of a hundred. He said fifty. Maybe sixty.

So we did the arithmetic together. Fifty percent of sixteen hours is eight hours. He's producing one working day and paying for two.

Every endurance athlete already understands this pattern. You run every session at the same middling pace, too slow to build the aerobic base and too fast to build speed, and after eight weeks you're tired and no quicker. Coaches call it junk volume.

Business owners do junk volume at the desk, and fatigue makes it feel like something happened.

In this episode I break down why sixteen hours at full quality was never available to you, what the research on deliberate practice says about the real ceiling, and what changed for Dean McMahon when he stopped working more and started working on far less of the right stuff.

Two sets and reps at the end. Find your three hours, and write your not-to-do list.

If you recognised your own week in this, book a Mental Performance Blueprint Call at tomfoxley.me. Thirty minutes, no pitch, and if it isn't a fit I'll be the first to say so.

A client showed up early to do a job that wasn't his anymore. Nobody asked him to. He couldn't stop himself.

In this episode I break down what was running underneath that habit: busyness as identity, the quiet competitiveness that creeps in between a leader and their own team, and the four-word framework I now use for saying a hard thing without softening it into nothing.

If you've ever done someone else's job before they had the chance, stayed visibly busy so nobody would question whether you were working, or softened feedback because you needed to stay the good guy in the room, this one's for you.

In this episode:

Book a Mental Performance Blueprint Call at tomfoxley.me.

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

2am on a Tuesday. Daughter sick. Bathroom dark. Boxers. Wet stuffed 

In the middle of it, Tom had a very clear view of his month. Product 

In this episode he talks about the version of himself that would have 

That's resilience. Absorb the hit and keep going. And it sounds like 

Tom learned resilience in the military. In that context, it's exactly 

This episode is about what he's been building instead.

Topics covered:

Last weekend Tom Foxley had dinner with the most successful man he 

Not just commercially — though the numbers are serious. What made him 

After dinner he gave a speech about his wife and the people around 

The next morning, walking in the Yorkshire Dales, Tom brought it up. 

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 

Emotions aren't the thing getting in the way of good decisions. 

Topics covered:

This morning Tom Foxley sat in the garden watching his daughter look 

Just there. Fully. Nothing lost.

That sounds unremarkable. For a long time, it would have been 

The honest version looked like: phone out mid-conversation. Wife 

Things don't settle down. You just keep deferring the version of 

In this episode Tom traces what changed — the moment he saw clearly 

Presence isn't a personality type. It's a capacity you build. And you 

Topics covered:

A few years ago, lying in a tent in the Hindu Kush with destroyed legs 

and altitude-split lips, Tom Foxley found himself in a conversation 

about Everest.

Why it pulls at people. And why, despite that pull, he realised he 

didn't want to climb it — not the way most people climb it. Fixed 

ropes from base to summit. Guided queues. Infrastructure rebuilt every 

season so that people reach the top regardless of whether they were 

truly ready.

His climbing partner said something Tom has been turning over ever 

since: everyone gets to the top, but everyone who knows the mountain 

knows how they got there. That's style.

In this episode, Tom maps that principle onto the two kinds of operator 

he sees every week in business. The one who moves constantly but 

struggles to name what they actually built today. And the one running 

what looks like a similar business — similar revenue, similar team, 

similar pressure — but where decisions don't come back, problems stay 

solved, and calm is a trained state rather than a lucky one.

The gap between those two operators isn't information, discipline or a 

smarter model. It's training. And almost nobody does it — not because 

they don't want to, but because nobody told them it was available.

Topics covered:

- The Hindu Kush, Everest and what mountaineering style reveals about 

  business operators

- The two kinds of operator — what actually separates them

- Why masterminds, accountability and systems are the fixed rope 

  version of building a business

- The difference between engineering around your gaps and closing them

- What it looks like when the internal architecture does the work the 

  external structures used to do

- The question worth sitting with this week

Last weekend Tom paid a Michelin Star bill without flinching.

That sounds completely unremarkable. For a long time, it wouldn't 

He'd told himself that was just being sensible. Knowing where he'd 

In this episode Tom unpacks that pattern — and three versions of it 

None of it is weakness. It's a pattern that formed somewhere, for a 

The problem: you can't see it from inside it. Until someone helps you 

Topics covered:

You hired a business mentor to shortcut your path to growth.

Now you've got a generic to-do list, a sales system that makes you 

feel fake, content bringing in the wrong leads, and advice that doesn't 

account for the complexity of your life, your model, your clients, or 

your strengths.

In this episode, Tom Foxley makes the case that most business coaching 

doesn't work — not because the strategies are wrong, but because they 

belong to someone else. Coaches teach what built their business. That 

is almost never what will build yours.

What you're really buying from most business mentors is an illusion of 

certainty. The social proof, the testimonials, the case studies — those 

are the people who naturally aligned with that coach's model. For 

everyone else, following the blueprint produces an imitation. A Russian 

doll of someone else's business.

The real competitive advantage isn't a better system. It's deeper 

self-knowledge. Knowing yourself thoroughly enough to build something 

that only you could build — and that fits you so well it stops feeling 

like work.

Topics covered:

- Why generic business advice produces generic businesses

- The illusion of certainty that most coaching is actually selling

- Why copying a business model makes you an imitation of your mentor

- Naval Ravikant — do what feels like play to you but looks like 

  work to others

- Two real client examples of business owners who scrapped the 

  standard model and built their own

- Why self-knowledge is where real business growth starts

One of his employees slept with his most profitable client. Less than a month into the job.

That was years ago. But he was still running his business.

In this episode, Tom Foxley breaks down a real client case — a business owner who couldn't step back from the day-to-day, couldn't delegate, 

couldn't trust his team to do the right thing without him watching. 

He micromanaged constantly, hated every minute of it, and was still working the same hours as before he had a team — with more to manage on top.

He hadn't taken his daughter to school in seven years.

The surface problem looked like a management issue. It wasn't. It was a single moment of betrayal that had quietly installed a set of mental blocks around trust, delegation and permission to step away — blocks that no hiring system, management tool or business coach had come close to shifting.

Six weeks after addressing the real issue: 12% added to the bottom 

line. A gym session taken mid-morning while his team ran the business. 

And a plan in place to take his daughter to school for the first time  in seven years.

As one of Tom's clients put it: "It turns out all of my business 

problems were actually personal problems in disguise."

Topics covered:

- Why a single team betrayal can create mental blocks that outlast the event by years

- Why micromanagement is almost never actually about the team

- How guilt and fear combine to keep business owners trapped in the day-to-day

- What changes when you address the operator rather than the system

- Why most business problems aren't business problems at all