The Mind Mentor really began long before it had a name.

In 2016, I was serving as a police officer when I was assaulted on duty. Afterwards, something wasn’t right. Everyone understandably assumed it was the assault itself that was affecting me, but for me, a large part of what began to trouble me was what happened afterwards.

I’d always been somebody who was there for other people, so I think there was almost an assumption of, “Marcus has got this. He’ll be fine.” In a way, I understand that. I probably gave people every reason to believe it. But something felt off.

I did what we’re encouraged to do and told somebody I was struggling. My perception at the time was that it then raised questions about whether I was deployable. So I did what a lot of capable people become very good at doing: I buried it, put on a mask, carried on working, and tried to cope.

From the outside, I probably looked as though I was managing. Two years later, I wasn’t. I reached a suicidal crisis, was sectioned, and admitted to Redwoods Centre in Shrewsbury.

The staff who cared for me were brilliant, and I will always make that distinction, but I found the experience itself incredibly difficult. There were assessments, explanations, and systems designed to support people in crisis, but internally I still felt lost because nobody seemed able to answer the question that mattered most to me: “Why do I feel like this?”

Logically, what was happening to me didn’t make sense. That question ultimately changed my life.

I started exploring different ways of understanding our thoughts, emotions, automatic reactions, and the patterns we develop through our experiences. For the first time, I began making sense of what had happened rather than simply trying to manage how I felt. Ultimately, I found the root cause.

Within around three months, I was back on duty. But something in me had changed. I’d become fascinated by what can happen when somebody finally begins to understand their own experience.

Eventually, I realised my future lay outside policing because, unfortunately, whilst there is a lot of talk around wellbeing, there is very little innovation. With a very heavy heart, I left the service in 2020, just before the pandemic, and launched Make Your Life Count. That eventually developed into the brand people know today as The Mind Mentor.

The mission behind it is simple: Understand. Choose. Change. I want people to understand themselves better so they can make informed choices about what they need and how they want to move forward when life gets difficult.