Confidence and Reinvention
Where to start again when business and marriage collapse at once
Garth Delikan lost his company and his marriage on the same day. He explains how he rebuilt, why he prices with confidence, and why visualising a better life is useless without action.
Lifestyle Expert Garth Delikan - Confidence
Video from Anna Scheller.
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How do you rebuild confidence after your business and marriage collapse at the same time?
Start by doing something physical and concrete rather than waiting to feel ready. Garth Delikan rebuilt by committing to teach classes before he had a system, then retraining step by step. He argues that confidence comes from faith, discipline and delivering more than you promise, and that a clear goal only works when you act on it.
Garth Delikan spent twenty years building a design studio inside a London advertising agency. He then left to start his own multimedia agency in Carnaby Street. Two years later he discovered that the figures he had been shown were not the real ones, and he had to close the company down that same day.
The same phone call home ended his marriage. In a conversation on Black Belt Selling with Anna and Stephanie Scheller, he describes the clinical depression that followed and the two years he spent living with his mother. He says plainly that he crashed and burned quite spectacularly before anything began to change.
What he built next became The Lifestyle Guy, a coaching practice that blends fitness, nutrition, life coaching, NLP and hypnotherapy. His story is useful because it is practical. He explains how he found a first step, why he refused to compete on price, and why action matters more than any vision board.
Key takeaways
- Commit to a concrete first step before you feel fully ready, then build the skills to deliver it.
- Price from confidence and overdeliver on every promise, because people buy from those they know, like and trust.
- Most stalled change is a lack of direction, so set a clear destination, even a bite-sized one.
- Visualisation only works when it is followed by action, because momentum creates action and action creates results.
1. When everything falls apart on one day
Delikan had trained in gyms and dojos for most of his adult life, and he says the gym floor was where he left the pressure of agency work. When his business partner's hidden figures surfaced, the company owed tax and National Insurance for fifteen employees. He had put ten thousand pounds of his own money into the business, and he had no choice but to close it.
He describes losing both business and marriage as fighting a war on two fronts with his whole support structure gone. Legal battles with his former partner and his former wife followed. For a grown man to move back in with his mother, he says, was a measure of how little he could cope with at the time.
His way back began on a Friday. He walked into a London gym and offered kickboxing classes with a system and music he did not yet have. The gym gave him three classes a week from Monday, so he built a complete course over the weekend. Within a short time he was teaching in gyms across London.
2. Confidence, price and the people who trust you
From kickboxing he moved into personal training, qualifying as a trainer and nutritionist at St Mary's University in Twickenham. His first client was a well-known Kensington psychotherapist who told him she would fix her clients' minds while he fixed their bodies. Within a short time he had a client base across Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair and Knightsbridge.
He set his fees well above the going rate, as he had done years earlier as a freelance designer. His reasoning is that people assume an expensive professional is a very good one. He is clear that the price only holds if you are genuinely good at what you do and deliver more than you promised, every time.
He also refuses to study his competitors. Marketers kept asking who his competition was and what they charged, and he told them he did not care. People come to you because they know, like and trust you, he argues, and no amount of competitor research replaces that relationship or the confidence that earns it.
3. Three mirrors and the missing ingredient of action
Training wealthy clients showed him that people who seem to have everything are often deeply unhappy. That led him to study life coaching at Newcastle University and then NLP and hypnotherapy. He compares The Lifestyle Guy to a breakdown service such as the AA or the RAC, which turns up with every tool needed to get you back on the road again.
His method rests on three unconscious mirrors: physical, mental and emotional. The physical mirror covers how you look and feel, the mental mirror covers goals, schedules and work-life balance, and the emotional mirror holds anger, sadness, fear, guilt and anxiety. Whichever mirror a client starts with, he says, the work almost always leads back to the emotional one.
He believes in creative visualisation, but he says most people miss its essential ingredient, which is action. A captain never sets off without a destination, and goals can be small to begin with. He asks clients three questions: are you where you want to be, if not why not, and what are you doing about it?
