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.

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

Honest accounts of living with chronic illness. Practical thinking on mindset, beliefs and habits — grounded in NLP and neuroscience, never in wishful thinking. Conversations with people who rebuilt after their own catastrophes. 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.

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