The boy who wasn't supposed to speak.

I was four, maybe five. A plastic tube — the ordinary, harmless kind — tore through my soft palate and shredded the back of my throat. A blur of panic, a rush to the hospital, immediate emergency surgery. When it was over, the surgeons sat my parents down and told them, gently, that I might never speak again.

My gran had other plans. Every day, patiently, she sat with me and coached me — sounds, syllables, words, sentences. She never once treated the prognosis as a fact. It was simply an opinion she happened to disagree with. And she was right. I recovered completely. The doctors called it remarkable; she called it Tuesday.

You don't nearly lose your voice at that age and come away indifferent to words. How could mere sounds, drilled gently into a broken little throat, rebuild what surgery couldn't promise? That question never let go of me. It became a lifelong obsession with communication — with what language does to a brain, a belief, a life.

Your voice. Nothing stopped mine. Nothing should stop yours.

Thirty years of chasing the question

In my early twenties, an uncle came back from the UK carrying something called neuro-linguistic programming. I was captivated. Three decades later I'm an NLP Master Practitioner, an Ericksonian Hypnotherapist and a Master Coach, and I've spent my working life studying the machinery of change — the psychology, the neuroscience, the language patterns that actually move people. That work became a book, Cracking The Influence Code, and it runs underneath every conversation on this show.

Then my body changed the subject

Watts Involved began as an interview show — entrepreneurs, authors, survivors, scientists. Two hundred and forty-five episodes of other people's stories. Then I was diagnosed with CIDP, a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the peripheral nerves, and suddenly the subject I'd spent thirty years studying — how the mind responds when life gets hard — was no longer academic.

So the show evolved. I turned the microphone on my own story: the hospital stays, the treatments, the pain, the days the body simply refuses. Not because my story is special, but because I know how alone a diagnosis can make you feel, and because everything I've learned about mindset and resilience is now being tested where it counts. If it doesn't work on a hard Tuesday in a hospital bed, you won't hear me recommend it.

What you'll find here

Conversations with entrepreneurs, authors and interesting people about the moments that tried to silence them, and how they found their voice anyway. Alongside them, my own solo episodes: thirty years of communication, NLP and neuroscience, the book, and an honest account of life with an autoimmune illness — boiled down to one tool you can use. And a running answer to the question my gran settled a long time ago: a prognosis is an opinion, and determination is allowed to disagree with it.

Some solo episodes are narrated by my AI voice — a digital copy of my voice I use so the show keeps going on the days I can't record. Each one says so at the start, and its title ends with “(AI voice)”, so you always know which is which.

I record from Pretoria, South Africa. If you'd rather read than listen, the written companion to this work lives at Quantum Self Development.