Ash, Dylan, Dusty: Mindset coach Ben Crowe explains how he makes our best better

This story is part of Good Weekend’s best cover stories of 2022.See all 13 stories.

It’s an otherwise stunning day in Byron Bay, but things are far from perfect. And, frankly, I don’t need Ben Crowe, Australia’s most in- demand mindset coach, telling me what I should be thinking. I know, I know! Embrace imperfection. Yesterday, after I was bumped off a flight and spent three grinding hours in an airport queue, Crowe texted to say the airport was a “primary location” for his clients to practise “two of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves”. Can I do anything about it? If so, take action. If not, can I accept it? “Having said that, they do hate those 2 questions haha ,” his text read.

I lack the zen-like mindset of Crowe’s most famous client, champion tennis player Ash Barty. But I accept this setback. This morning I accepted Uber cancelling my 4.30am booking, too. I also accepted being briefly bumped off my 6am flight (not graciously; I did cry).

Finally, after I reach Byron, Crowe and I are riding old bikes to the beach when my voice recorder bounces from the back basket and hits concrete. I accept this, too. But I just can’t accept that my interview questions – printed on three A4 sheets – have also escaped and are now floating somewhere around town like empty chip packets in the breeze.

Madly, I set off, retracing our route on a wonky bike. Crowe, wearing shorts, mint-coloured thongs and a black T-shirt that reads “Embrace your weird”, catches me on his bike. He helpfully ascertains the wind direction and is kind, empathetic and generous (as clients, friends and family universally describe him). Indeed, spending a day with Crowe, 53, reminds me of the 2019 Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in The Neighbourhood, which was based on a real-life magazine profile of American children’s TV host Fred Rogers, who disarmed a hard-bitten writer with his kindness. (On the beach later, Crowe says: “Let’s wander back and get you out of the sun, Mel, I’m worried you’re getting burnt”.)

In the original Esquire profile, writer Tom Junod described Fred Rogers’ “unashamed insistence on intimacy”. Within 30 minutes of meeting up with Crowe, fresh from his morning surf, he wants to know my “not-enoughness” or “shame” stories. This is core Crowe philosophy: identifying and letting go of when we’ve told ourselves we’re not “good enough, or loved enough, or smart enough”. I’ve been doing his app-based mindset course called Mojo Crowe, so I’m all for identifying my not-enoughness, but sharing it with an interviewee is confronting and mired in another big part of his method: vulnerability.

Crowe (right) with Ash Barty’s coach Craig Tyzzer and Dylan Alcott.Credit: Courtesy of Ben Crowe

Ben Crowe is asking Australians to be more vulnerable, kind and connected. To love ourselves unconditionally, cut ourselves some slack, and unshackle from expectation and shame. He wants us to identify what’s within our control and stop fighting what’s outside it. Find purpose and serve others.

As a happiness recipe, none of this is new. Crowe points out that the Stoic philosophers talked about control and acceptance 2000 years ago. But Crowe, who bowerbirds wisdom from all corners – including investor Warren Buffett, Buddhism, US academic Brené Brown, Dr Seuss and his grandmother – packages these messages in a way that’s finding a growing audience with a deep thirst to listen. “If you believe in his message, it’s really powerful,” says Macquarie Bank executive Nick O’Kane, a Crowe client. “It’s a bit intoxicating and it frees you up from a lot of different things.”

Crowe’s success is partly due to his charisma, communication skills and willingness to be vulnerable himself (although this profile veers into territory he’d prefer to avoid). But it’s also about his ability to use sport to promote emotional intelligence through the hero-power of his athlete clients. These are, most notably, Barty – “Crowey, you’ve changed my life immensely” she said after winning the 2019 Newcombe Medal – but also Trent Cotchin and Dustin Martin, the captain and star player respectively of AFL team Richmond, wheelchair tennis great Dylan Alcott and world champion surfer Stephanie Gilmore.

This alchemy of sport and self-help makes his message more accessible, to men in particular, but it’s also brought a deluge of demand: a mentoring wait list of more than 100 CEOs, senior executives, athletes and teams; 7500 people having taken his app-based mindset course ($240 subscription); offers of “insane” book deals and speaking fees; and approaches from the majority of AFL clubs following his work with Richmond. Now he’s working with the Brisbane Broncos and is on the verge of going global, with an English Premier League team and a US National Basketball Association club recently asking for his help. “I’m just trying to make sense of it all,” he says.

But for the moment we’re not focused on answers, we’re still looking for questions. Riding alongside me, Crowe says: “From a client perspective, Mel, I’d be telling them to ask themselves two questions …” I know! I know! I’ve listened to every podcast Crowe’s done and seared into my brain is his oft-repeated line: “Focusing on something you can’t control but want to control is the definition of anxiety or stress or pressure or worry.” Within a few minutes we find the pages, flat against a sports-ground fence. Huzzah! We return to the beach, where I take out my recorder.

It is unresponsive.

“Do you think this whole interview is more about what it is teaching you than me?” he asks. Perhaps, I say, panic rising. “Well the good news is,” he says, as we sink our toes into the Byron sand, “I can help you with all that.”

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We’d started the interview earlier, on the patio of Crowe’s holiday rental, a slick two-storey close to the beach, with fresh white interiors and disturbing art pieces that are half-human, half-bunny. When he’s home, which is infrequently, Crowe lives in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburb of Glen Iris. But Byron is his “spiritual getaway” and he’s rented the house for several weeks, in part to contemplate these new demands but also to recuperate from six months of emotionally heavy client work: mentoring Barty and Alcott through their retirement decisions and supporting Dustin Martin after his father’s death in December. In a few days, his wife Sally Grace and their three sons Harry, 23, Sam, 21, and Ned, 19, will join him for the Byron Bay Bluesfest.

Concentrate on “the human being, less so on the human doing”, says Crowe, who recommends writing a “to-be list” rather than a to-do list.Credit: Paul Harris

At a table outside, where the bamboo hedge knocks in the wind, Crowe plays music on a portable speaker – Coldplay, Dusty Springfield, radio pop. I already know about key parts of his childhood from studiously watching a video on the Mojo app where he draws his life story (he encourages clients to do this to better understand themselves). In the clip, Crowe draws a long line of shortening stick figures and puts himself at the end: he’s the youngest of six, with two brothers and three sisters (parents Daniel and Marianne Crowe were committed Catholics).

Crowe was resourceful, quite cheeky and liked to cut corners. In musicals at Whitefriars College, his Catholic boys’ school, the gun flautist would often play Crowe’s solos for him, and Crowe would stand up and mime his flute, pretending it was him. For a primary school assignment about the moon, he copied a whole section from the out-of-date encyclopaedias in the family’s Nunawading home in Melbourne’s outer east. “The last line was something like: ‘Who knows, one day man might even land on the moon,’ ” remembers middle sister Louise Crowe. “We used to enjoy teasing him when he got caught out with these things.”

Schoolmate Peter McCarthy says Whitefriars’ blokey culture would have treated Crowe’s current philosophies with some scepticism. But the seeds for his stellar career were evident, even back then. “Crowey was very good at sport and music, he was very social and he ended up being school captain, so it was always natural that he’d go into a leadership role.”

If the family was out and lost sight of their adored youngest child, Louise says they often found him talking to strangers. “He’s got a great gift with people, Ben. You see it now, it’s very innate.” Louise remembers her parents struggling to pay the bills, mostly due to the heft of private Catholic school fees for six children, but overall it seems a sunshiny sort of childhood: annual trips to Jan Juc beach on the Bass Strait coast; loud and boisterous family meals; a larrikin dad who ran a small cleaning company.

But one night in 1985, when Crowe was 16, everything changed. Woken by Marianne’s screams, Crowe ran into his parents’ room to find Daniel mid-heart attack. Crowe and brother Danny kept him alive for about 20 minutes, using the CPR they’d learnt as young lifesavers. Eldest brother Patrick, by then a doctor, soon arrived, but it was too late. At 57, Marianne, who had never worked outside the home, took over Daniel’s cleaning business. Not long after, Crowe remembers holding her in the Jan Juc car park for 10 minutes as she sobbed in his arms. “Oh my god, the pain and emotional release in that moment,” he says, eyes welling. “I cried in the back seat all the way home.”

“When you lose your dad, your greatest role model, so young, you think about what lessons you can learn.”

His father’s death, says Crowe, was “easily the heaviest crucible moment in my life”. He went “off the rails” in year 11, but it also sparked a philosophical curiosity in him about life’s purpose. “When you lose your dad, your greatest role model, so young, you think about what lessons you can learn. ‘How do I move on from this adversity, and how do others move on and find purpose in the face of adversity and tragedy? And where do you find the joy?’

Looking back, I definitely found love and compassion through my mum, my brothers and sisters, and the idea of treating Dad like an angel and dedicating a part of my life [the helping-people part] to my dad.”

Crowe studied philosophy, anthropology and literature as part of an arts degree at Monash University. In 1987, his first year at university, he met his future wife through university friends at a pub. Sally Grace, who grew up in nearby Mount Waverley and was studying occupational therapy, remembers Crowe’s attire: green denim boat shoes, pink paisley pants and a Garfield windcheater. “I remember thinking, ‘He looks a bit of all right, but oh my god, look what he’s wearing,’ ” she tells me.

Crowe with his son Harry and wife Sally Grace. Credit: Paul Harris

They got together later that year, both 19, and married in 1994, aged 25. This was despite – again rather cheekily – Crowe featuring in Cleo’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors list the same year (he had no public profile, but guesses he was picked because of an advertising relationship between his then employer Nike and Cleo). The article depicts him as a wholesomely good-looking 25-year-old whose interview answers are less cringeworthy than those of the other blokes. Describing his biggest turn-offs, he says: “Racism, sexism and getting your willy stuck in your fly after a cold surf.”

Finishing university in 1989, Crowe was weighing further study in journalism or teaching when, in 1990, he landed his first full-time job at the Australian Hockey Association, in promotions. In that job, he secured Nike sponsorship for the men’s hockey team and suggested publicity ideas to Nike for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The following year Nike offered him a marketing position, based in Melbourne. “It was more by luck than design that I started in sport,” he says. “And I think Nike was less interested in my knowledge of sport than my interest in storytelling.” Either way, it was his dream job.

At Nike, which Crowe calls a “story-telling platform” rather than, say, a global sportswear manufacturer, his job was to enlist Australians as brand ambassadors. He signed the future Olympic gold medallist Cathy Freeman, long-distance runner Steve Moneghetti and AFL footballers Wayne Carey and Garry Lyon. He also signed, and became close to, the late Shane Warne. Crowe fondly recalls taking Grace to Shane and Simone Warne’s house for dinner. The planned bolognese sauce was a disaster, so the two couples ate pancakes, drank strawberry Quik and played PlayStation for three hours. “It was the most delightful evening,” Crowe laughs.

His rise at Nike was meteoric. On his first overseas trip, in 1994, Crowe found himself at dinner after the Miami Open with Nike co-founder Phil Knight, along with Andre Agassi, his then-wife Brooke Shields and Pete Sampras, among others: “I was shitting myself, you know?” Knight, who is worth about $US45 billion ($65 billion), offered Crowe a lift on his private jet to Nike’s headquarters in Oregon. The young Australian so charmed Knight on the plane that Knight ended up carrying one of Crowe’s bags into head office, much to the astonishment of the company’s long-termers. “Somehow I ended up having quite a close relationship with him,” says Crowe, who became Nike’s then youngest director in the Asia-Pacific, based in Hong Kong.

At Nike, Crowe started thinking about how to help athletes live better lives. “I’d seen so many athletes go off the rails with really bad advice and not getting perspective on what’s important in life,” he says. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Nike transferred its Asia-Pacific executives to American soil. But Grace was pregnant with their first child and Crowe didn’t want to take the family further from Australia. He reluctantly left Nike and spent two years as marketing manager of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, before the family returned home to Australia in 2001.

Crowe’s message is that we’ve lost the art of living. We’re too hard on ourselves. We’re too busy pursuing perfection, trying to meet other people’s expectations.

Back in Byron, Crowe is locking up the house and talking about the Bluesfest line-up. He mentions Missy Higgins and casually drops in that he might do a catch-up session with her while he’s here. I wonder to myself if there’s any high-achiever in Australia this guy isn’t mentoring.

I first met Crowe before Byron, on a morning in late March. Delivering a keynote speech to leaders of health insurer Bupa at the Novotel in Melbourne’s CBD, he’d arrived early and started chatting to some female Bupa employees. He was fully engaged: direct eye contact, listening intently, telling jokes. There’s nothing peacocky or stiff about Crowe; he’s at ease in his own body, with himself.

On stage, he captivates. No one fidgets. Crowe’s message, essentially, is that we’ve lost the art of living. We’re too hard on ourselves. We’re too busy pursuing perfection, trying to meet other people’s expectations, or chasing extrinsic goals such as money, status or celebrity. We keep a mask on, hide our emotions and fear vulnerability and shame, which disconnects us from the people around us. In trying to numb these bad feelings – through alcohol or Netflix or consumerism – we numb joy as well as pain. So – and here, he borrows heavily from Brené Brown – we’ve become “the most addicted, medicated, in-debt, obese adult cohort in the history of the world”.

Crowe’s solutions involve focusing on “the human being, less so on the human doing”. To concentrate on your “to-be list” rather than your “to-do list”. He reminds clients of the brain’s negativity bias: “it’s got Velcro for negative, Teflon for positive”. He encourages reframing thoughts with gratitude: instead of thinking: “I’ve got to pick up the kids from school”, say “I get to pick up the kids from school”. It’s your decisions, he says, “not the frickin’ conditions” that determine your mindset. Put another way: “You can’t control the waves but you can learn to surf.” (He’s a walking bumper sticker at times.)

He gets clients to answer basic questions like “Who am I?“, “What do I want?” and “What kind of human do I want to be?” A loving soulmate, grateful son or mischievous mate? He asks them to tap into their earliest happiest memory, to work out what lights them up, to identify the “not enoughness” stories and to turn them around to self-acceptance and unconditional self-love.

Part of this involves coming up with “courage mantras” that you say every day, or when you need to do something hard. (Cathy Freeman’s was “Do what I know”; before the Bupa event, Crowe’s is: “I’m imperfect but I’m worthy and I’ve got something to say.“) You need, he says, to take control of your own story, because otherwise “the three biggest storytellers on the planet” – the news media (“predicated on negativity”), the advertising industry (“predicated on shame”), and social media (“predicated on social comparison and perfectionism”) will do it for you.

He also talks about a “connection mindset”, that we’re neuro-biologically hard-wired to connect – with other humans, animals and the environment – and that’s why we’re here. He teaches clients to be interested, not interesting, to ditch “vertical relationships” where you put yourself above or below another person, and to find a sense of purpose, to dedicate your life to something or someone. “To make their day, to serve them, to love them,” he says, “unlocks this extraordinary sense of contribution and meaning and fulfilment.”

At the Novotel, Crowe asked the Bupa leaders to take their pens and paper and write down three words in big bold caps: “I AM ENOUGH”. Dutifully, rows of seated executives bent their lanyarded necks and wrote these words. As did I. It was uncomfortable. Afterwards, over coffee, Crowe looked exhausted. It’s been a big six months.

Crowe with surfer Stephanie Gilmore, one of his first mentoring clients.Credit: Courtesy of Ben Crowe

To understand Crowe’s success we must rewind to 2016. Crowe, a lifelong Richmond supporter, saw that the team’s president, American-born lawyer Peggy O’Neal, was being undermined – and, he believed, bullied – by a blokey AFL culture uneasy with the league’s first female in that role. “It was like, ‘Who’s this woman? Who’s this American woman?’ ” says Crowe, a rare anger in his eyes. He could see that O’Neal needed a mentor who knew the AFL’s “City Hall”. (The uber-connected Crowe knows the “City Halls” of most Australian sports, especially, he says, cricket and tennis, in addition to AFL).

He had breakfast with O’Neal and immediately decided to help her for free. Prior to this, he’d had two big-name mentoring clients: his friend and Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson and multiple world-champion surfer Stephanie Gilmore.

Richmond was going through dark days in 2016: a small, angry and wealthy supporter group was trying to overthrow the board and coach Damien Hardwick’s job was on the line. The team finished 13th. Amid this, O’Neal and CEO Brendan Gale suggested Hardwick contact Crowe for mentoring. Hardwick then recommended that captain Trent Cotchin, also at a low point, do the same.

“He changed my life,” Cotchin tells me. “To some degree, he almost saved it. I didn’t know whether I wanted to play footy any more.” He embraced Crowe’s message of vulnerability and told the players he struggled with life too, that he wasn’t perfect, that he wanted to lead in a different way. This, Cotchin says, encouraged team connection and, as Crowe likes to point out, connection is impossible for an opponent to attack “because they can’t see it”.

After a 37-year drought, Richmond went on to win three premierships: 2017, 2019 and 2020. How much influence did Crowe’s work have on this outcome? Amid so many other success variables – player-list depth, strategy, once-in-a-generation stars like Dustin Martin, the strength of the competition – it’s impossible to know. But when I ask Cotchin whether he could quantify Crowe’s influence, he says: “Just being a fulfilled person in life helps you be happy. And if you’re happy, you can execute as well as you possibly can.”

From left, Crowe with some of those he has mentored: Richmond players Dustin Martin and Trent Cotchin, Ash Barty, and Richmond coach Damien Hardwick.Credit: Courtesy of Ben Crowe

It was via Richmond that Crowe connected with Ash Barty, a Tigers fan herself. She knew Cotchin and asked him about Crowe. Separately, her coach Craig Tyzzer and manager Nikki Mathias also approached him. At Wimbledon in 2018, Barty was playing Russian Daria Kasatkina when she became distracted and crashed out of the third-round match with 24 unforced errors. Says Crowe: “She got quite upset and said, ‘This is not who I am.’ ” She flew straight to Melbourne and spent “a few emotional days” with him. The pair continued with regular sessions, often attended by Crowe’s spanador Molly; Barty loves dogs.

In 2019 Barty took her first grand slam singles title, the French Open, and was soon world number one. Winning the Newcombe Medal that year, she said, “I can’t thank you enough for helping me become the woman I am today, for helping me realise the person I want to be off the court. You changed not only my life – my mum and dad, my sisters Ali and Sarah … I’m very lucky to have found you.”

Father Rob Barty has said the difference Crowe made to his daughter’s life and tennis was “just incredible”. (Crowe also took on Dylan Alcott. The champion tennis player and 2022 Australian of the Year says that while he’d considered himself totally comfortable with his disability, Crowe helped him identify that he didn’t have to win everything to be worthy. “Once I let go of winning everything, you know what happened? I won everything. It sounds a bit woo-woo but it’s real”.)

Crowe started talking to Barty about trying to find motivation after she’d achieved her dream, last July, of winning Wimbledon. Part of him is “genuinely sad” about her retirement: he’d love to keep watching her play tennis. But she was clearly no longer motivated by extrinsic factors such as more money, titles and fame. Whatever she does next will primarily be about intrinsic motivations, her dreams from within, says Crowe, as we edge around roadworks on our way to lunch in Byron. (“I reckon we stay off the tar. That would be just your luck, Mel, your shoes will get stuck and you’ll have to go to lunch barefoot”.)

Extrinsic goals aren’t inherently bad, Crowe points out: we need money to live on and it’s good to be recognised for our efforts. But when extrinsic motivations dominate, “we might achieve, but we won’t feel fulfilled”. This part of Crowe’s work is fascinating when applied to elite athletes. I imagine an old-school, winner-takes-all coach – beetroot-faced and setting alight one of Crowe’s life plans – shouting: “I don’t care whether your motivations are extrinsic or intrinsic, just bloody win and keep winning!” After all, elite sport – and most other fields of high achievement – have always been fuelled by people trying to avoid the shame of failure, secure parental approval or heal childhood scars.

But Crowe says you can succeed at elite level and be a more balanced human. “If you assess my work based on the extrinsic level, then I like to think my clients have been successful performers. But that’s not how I see success in my work. It can’t be measured today. I am passionate about how my clients turn out five, 10, 15, 20 years from now: what kind of husband or wife, brother or sister will they be? If I can inspire them to be good human beings first and great athletes second, then I’m not going to apologise for that.”

Crowe with Cathy Freeman, Ash Barty and Evonne Goolagong Cawley.Credit: Courtesy of Ben Crowe

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The Ben Crowe life story, as told by Ben Crowe, often jumps from his dream job at Nike to working with Richmond and Barty. But mindset coaching came relatively late in his career. “It’s taken me 53 years,” he jokes, “to work out what I want to do when I grow up.” Before finding his groove, he spent 15 years running several sports marketing businesses, and it’s this part of his life, I discover, that he’s a little uncomfortable talking about.

Over lunch, for example, I bring up James Hird, the Essendon coach who became embroiled in the club’s supplements scandal. Hird was an equity partner in Gemba, the sports and entertainment marketing company Crowe co-founded in 2002. They had big clients – Tennis Australia, Toyota, Reebok – and big plans; they wanted to create a tennis World Cup. But, in 2010, Hird took the coaching job at Essendon. “It was amicable but emotional,” is all Crowe will say reluctantly about the split with Hird.

Then there’s Unscriptd, a company Crowe co-founded in 2011 with fellow former Nike executive Brent Scrimshaw and a friend called Todd Deacon. It developed technology that enabled athletes, via an app, to access previously inaccessible content – such as photos and video highlights of themselves – to help create their own personal stories to distribute to their social media audiences. Unscriptd then charged sporting bodies, broadcasters and brands subscriptions to access the athletes’ audiences. A few of these athlete storytelling platforms sprang up in quick succession, notably The Players’ Tribune, founded in 2014 by US baseball player Derek Jeter. They aimed to disrupt traditional sports media by directly connecting athletes to fans and sponsors.

Unscriptd seemed to go well, at first. It raised $10.5 million in private investment from big names: Andre Agassi, who Crowe knew from Nike ($1.8 million), his wife Steffi Graf ($663,000), Stephanie Gilmore ($274,000), Cathy Freeman and her husband James Murch ($419,000) and former Brisbane Lions great Jonathan Brown ($276,000). The biggest shareholder, with a $4 million investment, was Unscriptd’s chairman and former IOOF chief executive, Ron Dewhurst. The company signed a deal with nine AFL clubs and briefly flirted with floating on the Australian stock exchange.

But in 2017, amid a crackdown on the misuse of R&D tax incentives in the software industry, the Australian Taxation Office deemed such an incentive paid to Unscriptd, worth $610,000, “invalid” and asked for it to be repaid. The company appealed the decision. The following year, in November 2018, Unscriptd sold its business assets to The Players’ Tribune for stock in the company. But when Tribune was later sold for a bargain price to another outfit, Unscriptd’s investors were left holding worthless Tribune shares. The liquidator appointed to voluntarily wind up Unscriptd in 2020 found the company had an unpaid ATO debt of about $610,000.

Crowe has come to mentoring late in life: “It’s taken me 53 years, to work out what I want to do when I grow up.” Credit: Paul Harris

The outstanding debt and the investment losses of some high-profile names hasn’t been reported before; it’s buried in Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents and the liquidator’s report of an obscure company called ACN 153 220 225, which, it turns out, was Unscriptd rebranded. So when, one evening on the phone, I ask Crowe about it, he is unprepared. “I don’t want to talk about it, to be frank,” he says.

He’s still on good terms with the investors who’d lost money that he personally knew – Agassi and Graf, for instance. He still mentors Gilmore, and Freeman is a “very, very dear friend” (Freeman and her husband Murch decline to comment). And he doesn’t see how this is relevant to his current work. He’ll come back to me, he says.

It’s a tricky and confusing moment because, of course, he’s the one telling us to own our imperfect bits, warts and all. An hour later, at 8pm, he texts, apologising. I’d caught him off-guard and exhausted. “You’re right … I will speak about that chapter.” A week later we talk again, but – having been reminded by Ron Dewhurst of a non-disclosure agreement – he makes only this on-the-record comment: “I can say hand-on-heart that I was excited by the opportunity for Unscriptd’s technology and excited by the sale to The Players’ Tribune. But obviously disappointed with the end result of the investment.”

Crowe doesn’t limit himself to mentoring in sport. He has, for example, collected a number of high-level banking clients ripe for some soul-searching in the wake of the banking royal commission. “There is a whole generation of 50-plus, alpha males who have woken up and they’ve achieved but they are not fulfilled,” Crowe says of this cohort. “They’ve been extrinsically motivated – money, fame, status, and made an enormous amount of money – but [now] their kids are all adults and out of home and they are thinking, ‘Shit, what’s happened to the last two decades?’ ”

That’s certainly not where Nick O’Kane, 49, Macquarie Bank’s group head of commodities and global markets, would like to end up. The top banker – who earned a tidy $36 million in the past 12 months – started working with Crowe in August 2020 after seeing him at a Macquarie conference. O’Kane thought the vulnerability stuff “self-evident” but he did learn to accept the uncontrollables, embrace authenticity and understand his core values. “We focused on the individual first rather than the job, which is different to how some other corporate coaches might approach things,” he tells me.

“The only thing to be a little careful of is that he’s carving out a new niche. He’s not a psychologist or someone that’s a skilled health professional.”

Another client of Crowe’s is top plastic surgeon David Chong, 52, who is based at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital. Chong waited almost a year to talk to Crowe about a professional dilemma. He was becoming less fulfilled in his private work in adult aesthetic plastic surgery – noses, faces, eyelids – and wanted to focus on fixing facial differences and cleft lips and palates in places like Morocco, Senegal and Madagascar.

“After talking to Ben, I realised [the overseas work] is what I enjoy and maybe it’s why God put me on this green earth. Part of me thought that I should be trying to earn more money and status and just do more aesthetic surgery because that’s what’s defined as success.” Crowe also helped Chong get over his FOPO (Fear of Other People’s Opinions). “Worrying what people thought of me made me a really good surgeon. But I can still be a really good surgeon and not let that be my driving force.”

Chong says Crowe’s talent is in recognising people’s behavioural patterns. “The only thing to be a little careful of is that he’s carving out a new niche. He’s not a psychologist or someone that’s a skilled health professional … he comes from the school of practical human experience, coupled with an innate gift to understand people.” (Crowe acknowledges this: “I’m not trained in mental health in a medical sense. I work in emotional health in a personal leadership sense.” )

In 2019, another Crowe client, comedian and producer Ryan Shelton, created The Imperfects podcast with two mates, in which successful people share their imperfections. Their episode with Crowe – their high priest of vulnerability – was one of the podcast’s most popular episodes, and Shelton noticed his male mates sharing it on their WhatsApp groups. These were footy-loving, beer-drinking men Shelton thought would never listen to his show. “Messages about spirituality or self-help have often had a bit of stigma attached, especially for men,” he says. “But Ben makes it very accessible and reframes what being manly is and makes it okay ... For men, it’s just literally life-changing. And, often, I’d say, life-saving.”

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Ben Crowe came to Byron Bay to slow down, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. “I’m in such a hurry to get these principles out,” he says over lunch at the Balcony Bar & Oyster Co. He wants schools to be “less obsessed with external expectations and more focused on the intrinsic joy of learning”. He wants to reach more men, to encourage them to have more self-compassion, to stop comparing themselves to other men. And – stressing this is outside his expertise – he wonders if these emotional health messages could impact levels of domestic violence and male suicide, issues he thinks about constantly. “The number one fear for men is not being strong, looking weak. The number one fear for women is body image. I believe men may need this more than women.”

He’s freaked out about “where the world’s at”. He’s freaked out about the demands on him and distracted by the future and what he needs to do for his clients. “I’m really struggling with being present,” he admits. The mindset coach, it seems, needs a mindset coach. And that’s fine because even Ben Crowe is human – just like the rest of us.

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