I thought I would always be this way. I was wrong.
One hour did what ten years of trying could not. Come and feel it for yourself.
I am James. I run expansion works®. Most people who find me have already tried a lot. They understand themselves well. They can name the pattern, explain where it came from, and describe it accurately. And they still do it anyway. I understand the frustration in that, and how much work you have already put in, and how much you have already tried. That gap is what this work is for.
I will be honest with you.
Most people have some judgment about what a coach is, and fair enough. Amongst all the mysticism, and all the wonderful ways people promise they are going to help you, what you actually care about is whether anything changes. Not the method. The result.
I will let you in on something. I tried a lot of it myself. Years of it. Some of it helped. A lot of it was not right for me, and some of it promised more than it ever gave me. That is not a swipe at anyone doing good work, and there is plenty of it about. It is simply where I was standing when I found this, and it is why I am careful now about what I promise you.
You may not even know this is something you need right now, and it might not be. What I can tell you is that there is another way. That feeling that keeps you stuck can shift. That event that still governs you does not have to. I know, because it was me, and I had tried everything.
I had settled for it, in fact. I had decided this was simply who I was, and that I would go on living a life run by worry, self-judgment and feeling unworthy, while everything looked fine from the outside.
So I am not here to sell you a far-fetched idea, a magic promise, or even neurocoaching. I am here to tell you, as somebody who never thought change was possible after trying everything, that you have a choice and you can move forward. I am not here to win over the sceptics, because I was one. All I ask is that you turn up curious. Here is my story.
Why does this exist?
Because I lived it. I did not read it in a book, or take some online course, and decide I could guide other people through it. I was the one having anxiety attacks, carrying beliefs I could not shift no matter what I tried.
Then I found something I did not know was available. I did not know I could feel like this. I did not know I could just move forward. That is the whole of it.
And I could not keep it to myself. Whatever stage of my life I have been in, the mission underneath it has been the same, long before I had words for it: create space, and empower the person in it. My why is to empower, and it goes a long way past me and past my business. What gave me lasting emotional freedom, and a peace nobody can take, was never meant to stop with me.
If somebody who used to drop to the floor with anxiety attacks can go and build the life he actually wanted, then the ceiling was never where any of us thought it was.
“James bridges the gap between self-awareness and change.”
T.E.
Before any of that, there was a man in a pub.
I met him in a pub in Stoke Newington. I had no idea who he was or what he did. We just became friends. He turned out to be a management consultant at LVMH at the time, and he ran workshops called Fashion Burnout.
He saw something in me. That pain. And he took me under his wing. He showed me that change was possible, and he took me on the path of personal development. I explored all the different types of therapies, alternatives and coaching, and slowly the anger and the hurt started to settle.
I needed him the most and he appeared. I am forever grateful, and he is one of the reasons I do this today.
What I was carrying still did not go away. It sat in a place I could not reach.
What made me try it?
I was burnt out. I had left London because I was completely consumed by the rat race, and I stopped working for three months.
I was reading Nora Hibbard’s book about changing your inner world in order to change your life. I remember thinking: I know. Trust me. I have been trying to do exactly that for years.
A lot had changed. And I was still repeating the same beliefs, the same cycles, the same patterns.
When I was a bit stronger I went looking for a local hypnotist. I told her there were beliefs I could not seem to shift. She said she was training in a new method and I should try it, and she offered me a discount.
I had not worked in three months. I thought: f**k it.
It felt like an invisible cage. I know now that the cage was my own perception.
I thought it was bollocks.
We started with something small, which is how I still start with everyone. Somebody had run their car down the side of mine. The car was a week old and it was the first one I had ever owned.
She kept telling me to bring focus and follow my breath, and my logical mind was going: shut up, how is this working, let me solve it.
By the end of the session it felt distant. The damage was real and it was not a cheap car. I still cared. The anger I was feeling stopped, and so did everything my mind had been spiralling into: the pointless conversations, the scenarios, the analysis of something that had not even happened yet. I could just look at it for what it was.
So the next session I brought the real one. I am unworthy. The one I had spent a career trying to disprove, and the one that kept burning me out.
Memories, judgements, beliefs, all of it came up in front of me like a file of facts. I observed it. And it faded. Not just the belief, but everything sitting around it.
I had tried hypnotherapy before, to quit smoking, to install new beliefs. It always faded back. This did not. Here is what is actually happening in there.
“My resistance at the start was 10/10, if not 12/10. After an hour, more like 2/10.”
Jez D · Consultant
Some sessions felt like taking off a pair of tinted glasses.
I had all of it. So why leave?
Because it belonged to an old identity, and I had finished it.
I have the notebooks. When I started my agency, Art Engine, I wrote down that I wanted to turn over seven figures, and I wrote the names: Prada, Google, Pop, De Beers. My dream office. The photographers and makeup artists I wanted to work with. Years earlier I had written down Emma Thompson, and worked with her two weeks later. We did all of it.
Photography by Dafydd Jones. Clip via the Daily Mail.
I am not going to sell that to you as magic. Getting clear on what you want and then creating from flow, rather than forcing it, is the most reliable approach I have ever used. Flow is not the absence of work. I worked hard for every bit of it. I just was not fighting myself the whole way, and that turns out to be most of the difference.
I will not promise you the same results, because your life is not mine. I also did not start from nothing. I had already spent a lifetime in one of the most competitive industries there is, and it was hard and stressful the entire way. When I started the company I put the first overheads on a credit card. It was an informed decision. I would never tell anyone to do it.
You can have the career, the names and the money. They are nice. They did not touch what was underneath.
This is not the first time I have built a community.
Art Engine was more than the client list. I made a little winking bear with a wrench, put it on caps and tee shirts, and the people who built it with me wore them everywhere. London parks. New York streets. Film sets in the sun.
Nobody was told to wear anything. That is what a real community looks like: people carrying something you made, because being part of it meant something to them.
expansion works is the same instinct, pointed at something that matters more. This time, what we carry together is the work itself, and what people get to set down.
The day I walked into the snow with Daniel Lismore.
I had moved to London and I knew nobody. I did not go to university: the London College of Fashion told me to go and get real experience and come back for a master’s, which is easy advice to give and hard to take if you cannot afford it. So I had a job in a retail store, a camera, and evenings spent messaging people on the internet.
I came across Daniel Lismore on Twitter, of all places, and I sat there thinking I would love to work with him. So I wrote it down, and I wrote down that I wanted to do a proper black and white shoot. Then I followed him, with almost no portfolio, having shot nothing but amateur models.
A week or so later he messaged me. He liked my work, and did I fancy shooting sometime.
I screamed. Then it snowed, and every train stopped, so my friend and I walked two hours through it carrying suitcases and lighting, because we were getting those shots either way.
It is still my favourite shoot I have ever done.
Nothing in life goes in a straight line.
Stop believing that your path has to be linear. The lowest moments have a habit of turning into the highest ones, and you usually only see how when you look back at them. So stop listening to anybody who tells you that the way forward is straightforward. It never was, and that is not a fault in you.
However you landed here is exactly right. It does not matter what stage you are at, how old you are, what you have overcome or what you have been carrying. All of it is what brought you here, and here is where you get to set it down. Your path is yours and nobody else has walked it. I am thankful for every part of mine, because without it I would not be the person I am. What was your biggest challenge has a habit of becoming your biggest asset.
I am still the same person.
What once made it feel unsafe to be visible now puts me in front of cameras. I was taught early, and then again all the way through my career, that if I made myself visible I would be bullied and criticised for it.
What once made me feel unworthy, because I was told I should not exist, is now a deep knowing and a trust in myself.
What once put me on the floor with anxiety now excites me.
They are the same situations. What they do to me is not. I stepped into my most authentic self, and I did that as somebody for whom being authentic had been genuinely dangerous.
The biggest gift was self-trust.
Of everything this work gave me, that is the one I would not hand back.
Before it, every decision went through a committee. What will people think. What if I fail. What if they judge me for even trying. Judgments of myself, judgments from other people, and judgments about the judgments.
None of it was irrational. I had learned it. I was bullied heavily and for a long time, for nothing more than existing, and a mind that has learned the world is watching does exactly what mine did. It kept me safe by keeping me still.
So I did not get much done. I would stop before I started, then put myself down for stopping. And when I did achieve something, I was too busy scanning the room to feel it.
Now I make a decision and it is quiet. That is the whole of it. No committee, no rehearsal, no aftermath. I just do it.
And here is what I found on the other side, which I wish somebody had told me much earlier. Almost nobody is thinking about you. Not unkindly. They are busy being the centre of their own lives, exactly as you are. The audience I was performing for was never really there.
I am not here to con you out of your money.
This is real life for me. I care about it, and I gave up a life to do this and start again, because I believe in it that much.
There is a lot that goes on in this industry that I want no part of. People selling a route to a life they have never lived. Free downloads that exist only to sell you the real one. Promises and destinations that leave people poorer and feeling conned. There are also a lot of people doing real good in this work, and some of them helped me, so it is the intentions I am naming and not the job.
Everything on this page is my life from long before I did this. I built that. It was not a scheme, and it was not somebody else’s promise. Which is why I know it is possible: it was available to the person I was.
I cannot promise you what you will create. That is yours to do. What I will promise is that you leave a session lighter than you arrived. And I am not here to convince you I am the right person for you. I am, or I am not, and either is okay. My job is not to convince. My job is to help people move forward.
That was the first time I noticed it.
I had always looked up to Rankin, and ended up shooting in his studio for his magazine. I wrote down Emma Thompson because I loved portraiture, and worked with her two weeks later. Then it kept going when I became a producer. Vogue. Julia Fox. Liam Gallagher. Raye. Later I wrote down the agency, and the names, and we did all of it.
I am not telling you I magicked any of that out of the air. What I noticed was simpler and more useful than that: when I got clear on what I wanted, set an intention and actually started walking, I got to places I had only ever imagined.
There is nothing special about me. That is rather the point. Whatever your version of that list is, it is not further away than mine was.
Nobody can transform your life. You do. You hold that power.
Anybody who claims to hold that power over you, and wants you to follow their endless journey, show them the door.
A kid who was told he thought about everything wrong.
I am dyslexic and I am creative. My mind does not work the way most minds work. I think in twenty solutions at once and I see patterns other people miss. Trying to conform to the normal way of doing it created most of my anxiety, and for a long time I thought I needed fixing. I did not, and neither do you.
What makes you different is usually the same quality that makes you a changemaker. I was talking to a friend recently about the people who tried to shut us both down when we were younger. That spark in us set something off in them. It is also the reason we both went on to do what we do. It was never about us, and what we were made to feel bad about was what was special.
That is where the word comes from, and it is not a nice label to hand out. I am here to create real change. If you clear what is going on for you, you act differently, and that reaches the people around you, and your community, and it does not stop there. Especially now, when so much of it feels dark. That is what I think this is actually for.
What can I not do?
- I cannot fix your life. I cannot fix you, and there is nothing about you to fix.
- I am not going to give you a magic formula, because that would be somebody else’s and not yours. I will bring my founder experience to the table, but your path is deeply personal, and it is about what works for you.
- I am not your guru. Nobody should be. If a coach makes you feel small, leave.
- I am not a therapist. I have had a lot of therapy, I rate it highly, and I am not trained in it. If you are having it, keep having it.
People make psychology sound difficult and mystical, because that makes it sound special and unique to them. It is not. We are fairly basic in our makeup, and many factors contribute to feeling well and moving forward. I work on one of them.
We call it neurocoaching because it is the best description of what happens, and the science behind it is on that page. But nobody really cares about the method. You care about whether anything changes.
You still have to go out and do the work. Life will still be hard sometimes and good sometimes. Anyone selling you a life without that has never had one. And we only go as far as you want to go. I say that before you pay me, never afterwards.
It is not for anyone looking to get rich quick, or anyone who wants to be handed a fix. It is not for the bros or the hype men. Nothing wrong with them. Just not me.
It is for people who can feel something holding them back and cannot quite name it. People who are not sure change is even possible for them. My clients tend to be creative, entrepreneurial, often neurodivergent, often people who have never fitted the mould. I like the quirky and the difficult and the people with a story. The stranger yours is, the more I want to hear it.
“James inspires the trust a real shift needs.”
Ursula W.M. · PhD
Always follow the advice of your doctor or your therapist. This is neurocoaching, not therapy, crisis support or mental health treatment. It is not suitable during a mental health crisis. If you are in one, please speak to your GP, a mental health specialist, or Samaritans on 116 123.
I truly believe anything is possible. Once you are free of your own limitations, you can go and create it.
It takes more than any one approach. Where I meet you is at the barriers creating the tension that holds you back, so you can finally be free and move forward.
It is not too late.
You are looking at somebody who decided to burn it all to the ground and start again at thirty-six, with no real plan. I knew what I wanted, and I am here creating it.
You can start early. You can start a lot later than I did. Plenty of people have. What matters is your happiness.
You do not need to wait for that to arrive with the next promotion or the next big achievement. You can have it now.
What do I actually want for you?
The same peace I have.
For me that means trusting myself. It is a word coaches throw around and I never really understood it until I had it. There are so many opinions coming at you, from media, from family, from everywhere, that second-guessing yourself becomes the default.
I do not do that now. I am in flow most of the time. When things go wrong I look at them pragmatically and deal with what is in front of me, without the dread underneath. The bad days still come. My relationship to them changed.
“This work has changed my life. I am making my way forward as the person I always thought I could be.”
Phie M · Founder
I meet you exactly where you are. This is not rinse and repeat. It is your life, and it needs to be treated like that.
This work builds trust in yourself, and that trust is what lets you take action. It is exactly what I did, and all I wanted, and now I am here to help you do the same. To feel confident in who you are. To feel free. To feel at peace. To build a life you love, however you see fit.
How you define freedom is entirely up to you. I define mine as peace, balance, and time with my friends. Somebody else defines it as building a company. Somebody else defines it as being able to be seen at all. I am not here to tell you what is and is not right. I am here to help you get to whatever yours is, by clearing your own limitations.
I did not believe that was possible either. If you want a read on what is holding you back, start here.
You are not broken.
And it frustrates me that so much of this industry keeps telling you otherwise.
That line did not come out of a marketing meeting. It came out of being irritated. There is a whole business built on persuading you that something in you is faulty, and that the repair is a long road with somebody else leading you down it. That idea does more harm than most of what it claims to treat, because being told you are broken is a weight in itself, and then you are carrying two.
Let me be clear about the exception, because it matters. Serious mental health conditions are real, they deserve proper care, and if that is you, please go and seek medical or psychiatric support. I still do not think you are broken. Just as with any other health condition, what you need is help and treatment, and that is what matters. Health first, and everything else after it. I wish you the speediest recovery, and perhaps we will meet further down the line.
For everybody else, and in the sense we are talking about here: you are not broken. You are unique, and you are perfect as you are. What we do is help you get free of your own limitations so you can move forward. Nothing is being repaired, because nothing is faulty.
I work with plenty of people who are in therapy right now, or who have had years of it, and I am glad they did. It is a different job from mine. Therapy helps you understand what happened. I do not need you to understand it, and I am never going to ask you to explain it. We find where it is being held, we clear it, and we set the path so you can get on with your life.
That is the whole of what I do. We clear it, you get the choice back, and you move forward.
One last thing, and then I will leave you to it.
Even if you read this page and do nothing else, I want you to know that you are worthy, that you deserve more, and that you can have what you are actually after. I say that as somebody who was once certain he could not.
It starts with us, and then the world, because we are the ones holding a spark for change. It can feel hopeless at times. Change is still possible. Just remember: it starts with you.
That is the short walk.
There is a longer version, where I answer all eleven of the questions people actually ask me, including the ones about what was rubbish and how you know when something has really cleared.
Read the whole conversationWhenever you are ready, the door is open.
Start with why it stays, and find the number for yours.
Start hereComplimentary account. No credit card needed. Coaching, not therapy or crisis support.
1:1 with JamesThe quotes on this page are real clients, used with their permission and credited as they asked to be credited. Nothing here is a promise of a result: it is my own account of what happened to me, and what other people have said about their own sessions. For education and reflection. This is not therapy, a diagnosis, or mental health treatment.