Tyneside’s ‘unstoppable’ motivator now in print
From the brink of suicide to self-help guru, Paul Mort’s story is quite a ride
Paul Mort, who I spoke to after a recommended cold shower (he’s partial to ice baths in the garden), is one of those guys who make you inclined to say: “I’ll have whatever he’s having.”
Just about every utterance radiates positivity, and the “gift of the gab” being something else you’d say of the man from South Shields, there’s no shortage of utterances.
He’s a prolific source of boosterism, as surely befits one who has been named UK Mastercoach of the Year not once but twice. (And if you’re wondering, it’s a title bestowed by an organisation called UK Coaching).
I’m chatting on the phone to Paul, whose website explains why he is ‘unstoppable’, because he has just achieved one of his aims (one of many). He has written a book, a “real book”, which apparently can be found in the WH Smith outlet at Newcastle Airport.
“I wanted to have a book on sale where my kids could see it,” he explains.
Someone he knew contacted him to say they’d seen it there and excitedly he requested photographic evidence. Job done!
I tell him it’s the sweariest self-help book I’ve ever read (not that I’m an expert – maybe they’re all like this), to which he replies cheerfully: “I’ll take that as a compliment.” The man finds the good in everything, you see. He’s an inspiration.
Actually, he confides, quite a lot of swear words were excised from the manuscript on the advice of Richard Waters, who helped him with “unravelling and unscrambling my thoughts and philosophies over endless hours on the phone”.
Rightly, as it happened, he thought the publishers might have concerns. Quite a lot survived the cull, though, and that’s probably a good thing since it better reflects Paul’s style.
His book is called Upgrade, or rather UPGRADE, and it’s subtitled The No-Bullsh*t Guide to Levelling Up Your Life. That, incidentally, is the only coy asterisk you’ll find inside.
Rather than Sergeant “Would you mind awfully?” Wilson of Dad’s Army, it’s the literary equivalent of those SAS guys who holler at people struggling through mud with fridges on their backs.
“Thank you for buying this book,” his introduction concludes, “now let’s kick some dick!”
Beneath the tough talk, though, lies genuine concern for those he informs, instructs, inspires. His kickings, wherever aimed, are administered with a slippered foot.
He really, really wants to help, urging, persuading, cajoling and channelling every atom of his considerable personality into making us believe we have the potential to be “bigger, better and happier, whether that be as a parent, husband, sibling, friend or boss”.
Laying his cards on the table right on page one, he says: “I’m going to help you sort your head out so you can power-flush your mental U-bend, which if you’re feeling negative, is likely blocked with old crap and outdated self-beliefs that are now obsolete and stopping you living what I call a fully electric life”.
His own fully electric life sounds enviable in many ways.
Much in demand as speaker and mentor, he tells me of the time in 2022 when he gave a talk called Paul Mort Will Change Your Life to a rapt audience at the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle.
“Afterwards I got a call from a guy in Puerto Rico who said, ‘I’d like to fly you over for a week’. I thought he was joking at first. But he flew us over and paid $5,000 for a 30-minute talk.
“I thought that was amazing until I found out the keynote speaker was getting $300,000.”
If you’ve got what it takes, there’s money to be made in motivating.
Paul, who describes himself as a life transformation coach, has clearly transformed the lives of many people, men mostly but women, too, directly and indirectly.
He says 50% of his online followers are female and suggests many of them are keen to haul an associated male out of whatever rut or pit of despair they’ve fallen into.
And it is to a woman, wife Lesley whom he first met when he was 16, that he owes everything – along, of course, with his mam who once got so tired of hearing at school parents’ evenings of his class clowning that she told him she wouldn’t be attending again because she was ashamed of him.
Pivotal in Paul’s story – and he relates it himself in a video which has been viewed more than five million times – was the moment back in 2014 when he stood on a cliff in South Shields having determined to end it all.
As he writes in his book: “You really have to have lost total belief in yourself to go that far, because thinking of stepping off a cliff only happens when you feel worthless and have given up on you and the world around you.”
Luckily for him, Lesley hadn’t given up on him. Secretly she had followed him and she talked him out of it.
“Think about the kids,” she told him.
“I am thinking about the kids,” he replied, “and they are better off without me.”
“Okay, then,” she retorted, “imagine them being referred to as the kids whose dad killed himself. How do you think they will feel?”
That did it. Paul stepped back from the brink and lived to tell the tale.
But how did he reach such a point of abject despair?
He tells me a cautionary tale of squandered opportunity and misplaced ambition, of how leaving school with two GCSEs (albeit in French and Spanish) ruled out college and the sports journalism he’d fancied and led to a mechanical engineering apprenticeship which his father, who believed in hard graft, had fixed for him.
After sticking it for three years, and having got in shape and learned about nutrition, he announced his intention of giving up job security and becoming a personal trainer, falling out with his parents in the process.
His new calling proved profitable and in search of a lifestyle befitting his newfound success, he moved with his wife and baby son to Marbella where his daughter would be born.
But mounting dissatisfaction, with solace sought in drink and drugs, ensured it would all go wrong.
“I didn’t know how to deal with success,” he reflects now. “I was living a party boy lifestyle as a dad of two.”
Having been diagnosed as bipolar, he was susceptible to highs and lows, a condition exacerbated by having moved from a place with people he knew to one lacking a support network.
It led to that precarious clifftop moment and the process of recovery is the backdrop to the book in which each chapter, with titles such as We All Need an Animal to Slay – Having a Purpose and Top of the Morning – Finding Good Habits, ends with an exercise for readers.
“With coaching, my job isn’t to give people advice but rather to ask them great questions,” he tells me.
“Ask someone, ‘What are you most excited about today?’ and just thinking about it can make you excited.”
His documented path to recovery embraces the value to be found in sport – in his case jujitsu and football (an avid Sunderland fan, he and Nick James have a football podcast called Heads and Volleys) – and in his journal where he keeps himself on his mettle with daily jottings.
And those cold baths, too. No pain, no gain. Above all, though, he urges positivity: “Taking charge of your story is the first step in taking control of your life.”
Recently, he says, this one-time class clown whose friends include comedians Chris Ramsey and Russell Kane, has dipped a toe into stand-up. He did a gig with Lee Ridley, Lost Voice Guy.
Never, I’m thinking, could Paul Mort be called that.
UPGRADE: The No-Bullsh*t Guide to Levelling Up Your Life is out now, published in hardback, ebook and audio by HarperNorth.