James helps leaders and teams make high performance repeatable. He delivers keynotes at conferences and summits, runs half-day and full-day leadership workshops and multi-date series for executive teams, and works one to one with a small number of private clients each year.

He was mental skills coach to Canterbury Rugby and took an underdog New Zealand team to a history-making world championship. He has worked with PGA tour professionals and elite athletes, prime ministers, and CEOs of billion-dollar companies — and has delivered sessions everywhere from conference ballrooms to Antarctica.

His argument, in every room he walks into: high performance isn't reserved for a select few. It's built, and it can be taught.

A phone call from Vancouver

James grew up in a small town in the north of Ireland. He found drumming as a boy, and by fourteen he was a two-time world champion.

Then he stopped. Around fifteen he drifted - from school, and from the drums. Winning early, it turns out, is no protection at all against losing interest.

What brought him back was a phone call. He was seventeen when a band in Vancouver asked whether he'd come and play their summer season. It was a long way from a small town in Ireland, and he'd already walked away from the thing once. He said yes. The other five world titles came after that summer.

His twenties took him around the world on the back of a business he built from nothing, then to New Zealand, the Christchurch earthquakes, and a steady job in the education sector. By thirty he had seven world titles and a property portfolio. By any reasonable measure he had made it.

It was also the flattest stretch of his life.