I'll Be Present When Things Settle Down — The Most Expensive Lie in Business

About this episode

Tom Foxley discusses the importance of being present and how mental scatter affects business performance.

This morning Tom Foxley sat in the garden watching his daughter look at something in the grass. Just there. Fully. Nothing lost. That sounds unremarkable. For a long time, it would have been impossible — because Tom is by default a distracted person. Anxious head, always moving, obsessive about progress in a way that doesn't switch off when he leaves the desk. For years he told himself it was just how he was wired. The price of being driven. The honest version looked like: phone out mid-conversation. Wife talking, part of his brain somewhere else. And the quiet, persistent belief that he'd be present when things settled down. When the business was more stable. When this particular pressure lifted. Things don't settle down. You just keep deferring the version of yourself you actually want to be. In this episode Tom traces what changed — the moment he saw clearly what kind of father he'd become if nothing shifted, the training that followed, giving up twice, and what it eventually built. Not just at home. In the business too. Because the weeks where his mind was most scattered tracked directly with his worst decision-making, his most deferred conversations, his most avoided work…

People in this episode

Host: Tom Foxley

Topics covered

• presence
• mental fitness
• business performance
• anxiety
• parenting
• self-improvement

Keywords

• mental fitness
• presence
• business decisions
• anxiety
• self-improvement
• parenting
• distraction

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