The Limitless Podcast with Nick Jonsson

A helicopter over the roof. Tactical response police through the front and back doors. Shotguns in the corridor. None of that changed him. What changed him happened the next day, at a children’s soccer match across the road from his house.

Peter Lyndon-James, founder of Shalom House in Western Australia, had got out of lockup that morning. The dads stood in a circle with their legs apart, and when a kid put the ball through, the father would roll around on the ground making his boy feel like something. Watching them, he thought that if it happened to him he was leaving. His son kicked the ball through his legs. He turned around, walked off and started crying.

He says he spent 26 years in prisons and institutions, starting at nine, and that he had committed no crime when it began. He kept running away from foster placements, so they put him in a boys’ prison alongside a hundred other children whose stories matched his. Sixteen primary schools. Bread with the mould picked off for breakfast. Sexually abused at eight by a relative of a boy he had befriended that day.

“Even when I wasn’t in prison, I was still in prison.”

What followed the soccer match was a prayer, cutting off everyone he knew, six weeks detoxing in a caravan park, and changing his plea from not guilty to guilty so he could go back to jail. Then theology, five years as a volunteer prison chaplain, ten unpaid years living on his wife’s income, and Shalom House in 2012.

The people who come to him now, he says, include pilots on 600 thousand a year, CEOs and lawyers charging 900 dollars an hour. The root cause, in his view, is almost always the same. The drug is only a blanket over it.

For anyone who got out years ago and is still living inside it.

If this raises anything for you, please talk to someone. In Australia, Lifeline is available on 13 11 14.

👇 Connect with Peter Lyndon-James
Website https://peterlyndonjames.com.au/

Explore more: https://www.nickjonsson.com

The damage did not arrive as a breakdown. It showed up as protectiveness — the trait any team would praise in a leader, and the one that quietly drove decisions that were not the right ones, because he could not stand the thought of anyone else feeling what he had felt.

Chris Hossfeld spent 27 years as a US Army infantry officer, four of those deployments in combat, the first as a company commander in Iraq. On Christmas Eve a vehicle-borne IED knocked him out. He was not thinking straight, and on his first patrol back out he missed something. One of his soldiers was killed. Seventeen were wounded. He helped carry that soldier out.

It was very late in those 27 years before he got help for what followed. He lost two soldiers during his time in command, roughly twenty to thirty days apart, and he names what he carries without softening it:

“My name is Chris, and I have survivor’s guilt.”

What he has done with it is the part worth sitting with. He is not trying to resolve it. He runs on Saturday mornings to music played at the memorial services, keeping them in mind on purpose rather than waiting for a post from a former soldier to do it for him. And he has pointed the guilt outward: he realised he had been only one commander with a whole team he had not fully invested in, and building leaders became the work.

For anyone who has quietly turned a bad outcome into a personality trait.

👇 Connect with Chris Hossfeld
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-hossfeld-635a80105/

Explore more: https://www.nickjonsson.com

She went to a mindfulness coach the way a capable person approaches any problem: asking for tactics. She did not get any. What she got instead was the slow, unwelcome work of noticing what sorrow actually feels like in the body.

Maria-Katarina Johannesson runs Links & Maria from Stockholm, building backlinks and digital PR for businesses that want to be chosen rather than merely seen. Six years ago, a relationship ended with no warning. One day the person she had built her life around decided he was done.

The loss was not the hard part. The hard part was that she had no idea where he ended and she began — she was the relationship, as she puts it — so when he said he did not want her, it landed as the world not wanting her.

She calls the place she went into the maze, and she is precise about why that word fits. It was not somewhere she was trying to escape. She had stopped believing there was a way out, and concluded it was simply where she belonged. The world carried on in colour while she moved through it as a shadow, functioning at work, present to no one.

Nobody knew. Her explanation is unsentimental: grief is heavy, people are busy, and she does not blame anyone for not wanting to know.

"try to trust the pain enough. To be able to walk through it."

For anyone functioning perfectly well on the outside who has not told a single person.

👇 Connect with Maria-Katarina Johannesson
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/linksandmaria/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/linksandmaria/

Explore more here: https://www.nickjonsson.com

A cardiologist in Singapore told him his heart was fine and the chest pains were probably stress. He heard that as clearance to carry on.

Guy Ofek, founder and Chief Business Officer of the Singapore advisory firm Molinari, spent twenty years climbing — junior attorney in 1997, then the corporate world, then thrown into Asia — while treating a failing marriage as the ordinary cost of two careers. The warnings were not subtle. He ignored them one at a time.

The relocation to Seoul, the separation and the job loss landed close enough together to arrive as a single event. He woke in a four-bedroom apartment with nobody in it and nothing to get up for. For years he had complained about never having enough time. He had been handed all of it.

Then came the part he calls the wow moment. He went looking for someone to call and found there was nobody. An executive in title only, as he puts it — the job had been doing the work his identity should have been doing, and when the job went, so did he.

The first call he made was to a rabbi he barely knew. Not for answers. The rabbi told him to come and take a walk, and they walked through a cold Seoul morning while Guy talked. He still sees him today.

"There's not gonna be a plan. There is no recovery. It's just a step."

For anyone whose title is currently doing the work their identity should be doing.

👇 Connect with Guy Ofek:
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/guyofek/

Molinari website https://www.molinari-sg.com/

Explore more here:
Website https://www.nickjonsson.com

Yamila Libutti started working at fourteen. She was the eldest girl in a Cuban household in the US, paying rent and helping raise her younger sister — fourteen going on forty, as she puts it. There was no straight path into college and no traditional route up. She began in paper medical records, kept asking why the systems were so painful for elderly patients and for the staff serving them, and that curiosity carried her into IT before most people had a word for it.

Early in her leadership career, someone told her she would not get far because she was too kind. She told them that was exactly why she would.

What she did not account for was what was running underneath all of it.

"I became so good at taking risks and moving things forward in my professional life, that I didn't realize that in my personal life, there were aspects that were atrophying."

Her marriage of nearly thirty years ended. She describes it as a gut punch that took the wind out of her, and it was the first problem of her life she could not solve — because the fix was not hers alone to build.

What she did next she calls her version of Everest. She walked into a ballroom dance lesson: a woman who had spent years downplaying her femininity in male-dominated rooms, now being watched physically rather than for her mind. She got in the car afterwards and told herself she was never going back. A week later she returned and signed up for a competition two months away. Eight dance styles.

For anyone still delivering at work while quietly holding something together at home.

👇 Connect with Yamila Libutti:
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/yamilalibutti/

Explore more:
Website https://www.nickjonsson.com

Seline Shenoy gave her life away in pieces, and each piece looked reasonable at the time. She had a career path mapped out in the United States, visa and sponsorship in place, and she let it go to move back to Dubai for the man she was seeing. She stopped mentioning the books she read. She stopped bringing up the research on human behaviour she found fascinating. At parties in his affluent circle, she left her brain at home.

Seven years in, when it ended, she looked in the mirror and did not recognise the person there.

What I did not expect is that she had known for a long time. Friends had warned her. She could see what the relationship was doing to her. What she lacked was not insight but someone to walk her out, which is eventually what a relationship coach did — after first trying to save it, then telling her plainly that it was not healthy and she needed to end it.

The real work came after. Two years without dating anyone, spent looking for her own part in what happened rather than cataloguing his.

"You have to do that inner excavation. You must."

That excavation became The Dream Catcher, the blog she started in 2014 while she was still raw from it, and later the podcast she has run since 2018.

For anyone who has quietly edited themselves down to fit somewhere they do not belong.

Connect with Seline Shenoy to collaborate:
LinkedIn https://ae.linkedin.com/in/seline-s-shenoy
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@SelineShenoy

Explore more:
Website https://www.nickjonsson.com/podcast

Scott Lester Woods was robbed on his 25th birthday. He was living in a Buddhist temple at the time, and someone walked into his room and took everything he owned. What he remembers is not the loss. It is that nobody there offered him sympathy. They felt sorry for the thief. Then they spent the next day asking him why his happiness was cheap enough that a stolen laptop could carry it off.

He had gone to the temple after a moment on Koh Phi Phi, sitting in the most beautiful place he had ever seen and realising he had brought the same miserable version of himself along with him. That misery started at nineteen, through roughly two years of depression, when he decided some people are simply born with a happy brain and he was not one of them.

What moved him was not a technique. It was a reframe:

"I'm not broke, I don't have a broken brain, I've got a hunter-gatherer nomadic brain, that's been now plonked in a society that it doesn't recognize."

Twelve years on, Scott is a clinical hypnotherapist and identity coach working with founders and high performers at the level of identity rather than willpower — the difference, as he puts it, between becoming a non-smoker and being someone who quit.

When I told him the executives listening are on calls sixteen hours a day, he did not reach for a routine. He said they are one belief and one skill away from changing it.

For anyone who has changed the job, the city, or the relationship, and found they brought the same person along.

Contact Scott to collaborate:

Website: https://scottlesterwoods.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottlesterwoods/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottlesterwoods/

Patrick Engasser had the best excuse available to anyone in outside sales. He was born blind. He cannot drive. The work means walking into companies you have never visited, asking for the decision maker, and reading a room you cannot see. Two years in, he was ranked somewhere in the 500s out of roughly 615 sales professionals in his organisation.

What makes this conversation worth your time is that the blindness turns out not to be the story. Patrick describes those two years as time spent looking out of the window for someone to blame, with reasons good enough that nobody would ever have challenged them. That, he argues, is the more dangerous kind of excuse, because you are never forced to defend it.

“The problem with excuses is they’re very expensive. And a lot of times, the invoice doesn’t show up until later.”

He hired a business and sales coach at the end of that second year. Fourteen months later he was his company’s top new account closer, then a trainer, then district manager for the next decade. But he is careful about where he puts the turning point, and it is not the coach. It is a decision he made before hiring one, and it is the part of this episode I keep coming back to.

We also get into why he thinks confidence works in reverse of how most people are taught, what he means by the difference between vision and sight, and the client who told him her life was over.

For anyone sitting in the 500s right now, quietly running out of reasons to keep going.

Contact Patrick to collaborate:

Website: patrickengasser.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-engasser-645860217/

Ask most people to define healthy masculinity and you get adjectives. Yana Fry gives you behaviour. A man who is stable and consistent. Who does what he said he would do, shows up when he said he would show up, and finishes what he starts.

She had to go and find that definition, because nobody handed it to her. Her parents divorced when she was eight, after her father spent twenty years married to her mother and then fell in love with her mother’s best friend. Her older brother could not carry it, and the drinking that started around then has gone on for decades. Yana spent years, fifteen of them in therapy, working out what she had never been shown at home.

Which is exactly why her position on angry men is worth sitting with. She has watched the comments fill with hostility beneath a reel about women and marriage after forty. She has looked into where the loudest voices online came from and kept finding the same house: an absent father, or a violent one, and pain nobody ever named. When I asked what she would say if one of those men sat across from her, she did not reach for an argument. She would ask how he is doing.

We also get into something I run into constantly in my own coaching work — men who will tell me things they will never tell their wives. Her answer to that was not the one I was expecting, and it puts the responsibility somewhere uncomfortable.

For anyone who has stopped believing this conversation can still be had honestly.

Contact Yana to collaborate:

FREE 9 Love Archetypes Quiz™️ https://links.revenuetide.ai/widget/quiz/hO7ES6jvOk383RFQTRRW

Website: https://yanafry.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanafry/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yanafry/

In this episode of Limitless, I sit down with Aoife Leggett, mindset and performance coach, Master Breathwork Teacher, and founder of Three Sixty Coaching in Ireland, for a conversation about burnout, identity, breathwork, and the moment life forces you to stop pretending everything is fine.

Aoife works with high performance athletes, riders, business owners, and individuals who want to perform at their best without losing their health, happiness, or sense of self. But her path into this work did not come from theory. It came from living through a season where, on the outside, she appeared to be functioning, while inside she felt lonely, unmotivated, burnt out, and disconnected from herself.

After years in the equine world, Aoife found herself in a role and relationship that looked right from a distance but felt deeply wrong up close. Then one day, while driving to work, she could not catch her breath. Looking back, she recognized it as the moment her body stopped whispering and started sounding the alarm.

What stayed with me was her honesty around one hard truth: “No one’s coming to save you. It’s your life.”

We talk about performance, nervous system regulation, breathwork, career uncertainty, relationships, rock bottom, and the courage it takes to move home, rebuild routine, ask for support, and begin again.

This episode is for anyone who looks capable on the outside but knows they are no longer living in alignment. Sometimes taking your life back starts with admitting you cannot keep going the same way.

Contact Aoife to collaborate:

Website: https://www.threesixtycoaching.ie/LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/aoife-leggett-3033b9166Instagram: @aoifeleggettcoach

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