Resilience
Garth Delikan on Starting Again After Everything Falls Apart
The lifestyle expert explains how losing his agency and his marriage in a single week led him to a mind-first method for rebuilding health, confidence and direction.
The Helen Winder Show - Garth Delikan Interview 20th February 2015
Video from Helen Winder.
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Where do you start when your business, marriage and health collapse at once?
Start with the mind, then the body and the plate. Garth Delikan argues that emotions, exercise and nutrition feed each other, so a low mood drags everything down while a fix at the root lets the rest follow. He rebuilt his own life that way after losing his agency and his marriage, then trained to teach others.
In February 2015, Garth Delikan sat down with Helen Winder on The Helen Winder Show to explain what it means to call himself the lifestyle guy. His answer was not a list of qualifications. It was a life story that runs from buying a first Ferrari at 22 to living in his mother's home, unable to face the world.
Delikan spent about 15 years at one of the biggest advertising agencies in London before opening his own multimedia agency on Carnaby Street. Around three years in, he found that his business partner, who was also his financial director, was not what he seemed. The situation was serious enough that he had to close the business that same week.
When he rang his wife of twenty years to break the news, she told him she had fallen out of love and no longer wanted to be married. Clinical depression and about two years of recovery followed, and then a slow rebuild that became the method he went on to teach to individuals and companies.
Key takeaways
- Garth Delikan rebuilt his life after losing his agency and his marriage in the same week, then turned that experience into his coaching.
- He works on three levels at once: the unconscious mind and emotions, the physical body, and nutrition, because each one shapes the others.
- Low mood, poor eating and skipped exercise form a loop, and he argues the lasting fix starts by finding the root cause in the mind.
- He usually caps coaching at six sessions so clients do not lean on him as a crutch and instead leave ready to move forward alone.
1. From a first Ferrari to starting over
Delikan traces his drive back to his eighteenth birthday, when he had just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Education of a Bodybuilder and wrote down his own life goals in a flat in North London. He wanted his own business, a Ferrari and marriage. He reached all three early, running his own business and buying his first Ferrari at 22, and he credits hard work and focus.
As a freelance graphic designer he joined one of the biggest advertising agencies in London and helped set up and run its internal design studio. He stayed around 15 years. By his own account he had everything, from a lovely wife and children to cars, motorbikes and holidays, yet he was bored, so he left to build a multimedia agency of his own.
That move is where the collapse began. When his business partner proved untrustworthy, the agency closed within a week, and his marriage ended on the same day. Delikan describes coming closer than ever to a physical and mental breakdown, living with clinical depression, and moving in with his mother for about two years because he could not face people.
2. Rebuilding one qualification at a time
The way back started with something he already loved. Delikan had always trained in kickboxing and weights, so he began teaching kickboxing commercially, then qualified as a personal trainer and nutritionist in Twickenham. His first client was a psychotherapist in Kensington, who summed up their partnership neatly: she fixed her clients' brains, and he fixed their bodies.
Personal training soon became something more. Clients confided in him about everything good and bad in their lives, and he felt he had the experience to advise them but not the qualification. So he trained as a life coach, earning a certificate and then a diploma, and began coaching several of his training clients alongside their workouts.
Still looking for better ways to help people change their patterns, he qualified as a practitioner in neuro-linguistic programming and later as a clinical hypnotherapist. He says this is why he calls himself a lifestyle expert: he has known the heights of running a business, the crash that followed and the reinvention, and every technique he teaches has worked in his own life first.
3. Why the fix starts in the mind
Delikan compares his approach to a roadside recovery van that carries every tool needed to get a stranded driver moving again. With each client he looks at three levels together: the unconscious mind and emotions, the physical side, and nutrition. Depending on the person, that could mean limiting beliefs, goal setting, weight loss or simply eating more healthily.
He sees the three as a vicious circle. When people feel low or unfocused, they stop exercising, and when they stop exercising they stop eating well, which makes them feel worse again. His answer is to go straight to the root of the problem rather than treat the symptoms, because once the mind is settled, exercise and nutrition tend to follow.
He is equally clear about limits. Change has to be a two-way street, and he cannot make anyone change who does not want to. He rarely works with a client for more than six sessions, because beyond that people can start to use a coach as a crutch. His aim is to be the catalyst that sends them forward on their own.
