Unlocking Your Potential: The Power Of A Growth Mindset With Co-Founder, Ciaran Byrne

“I wish I was like you”. It’s something that my mother often says to me on those days, when I’m in good form, usually a Friday afternoon. I’ve always been an optimist, and I guess it’s an important trait to have if you are an entrepreneur, but what surprises me is how so many of us have a fixed mindset, stuck in a belief that it’s just who we are and there is nothing about it that we can change. 

If there’s one thing to take away from this blog, it’s this... We all have the capacity to grow, to change our mindsets, and to realise our full potential, but only if it is something we do as a conscious action. It takes awareness, and it takes courage but as a life coach I know that we all have potential within us, ready to be unlocked.  

If you don’t know my story, it goes something like this. I am a serial entrepreneur but back in 2019 I was working hard in my software development business living a life of constant burnout. Together with my wife Denise, we very much moved from one day to the next without any awareness of the stress we were consistently putting ourselves under. It changed the day I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia and was given potentially just weeks to live.  

When I was in hospital I had several bone marrow aspirations, lumber punctures, 60+ bags of highly toxic chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, hundreds of pills, and a long physical and mental journey after. Thankfully, I’m back to full health, but that journey was transformational both for myself and Denise. You know, it’s true what they say. When you are lying there contemplating your life, the last thing you say is “I wish I had of worked harder”.  

I always found that what worked for me was my positive outlook. I surrendered to the medical team, I didn’t bother reading about the illness or outcome. Instead, I focussed on my mindset. I set out my goals, I went about my day from my hospital room, I reached out to my friends and I laughed a lot. I’m not saying that my outlook saved me, the stem cell transplant saved me, but I certainly believe it helped. But, what struck me, is how certain people carry things, and how the medical team remarked that my approach was unique. I observed plenty of people struggle under illness who developed a pessimistic disposition. And in the time since, I’ve become curious about how people view their life situations and how little they do to change their mindset. 

We founded The Head Plan, or more it found us, because we needed to make a fundamental change in our lives. After my illness journey, myself and my wife Denise realised that we need to make a very conscious life change. We needed to make our personal development something that happened every day. We needed a path forward with clarity on a new life, and the balance we needed in it. We founded The Head Plan because we needed a plan in our lives, and we quickly found that others needed one too.   

We call The Head Plan your personal development companion, and our mission is to make personal development something you look forward to everyday, and not just a January 1st activity. It’s a change in mindset brought about by conscious actions. For me, that meant a change in career at the age of 40, a change in perspective, having a baby, and a more holistic approach to living. The Head Plan is now a thriving business, with 100,000+ Head Planners across 60 countries, and strong sales growth every year. We also appeared on Dragons Den this year, and now have Peter Jones on board as an investor. And most importantly of all, our baby Charlotte turned 1 last week. 


I’ve always had a keen interest in what is it that drives us as individuals but over the past 5 years, through The Head Plan, and in my role as mentoring and coaching others, I’ve learned some things that I’d like to share. 

Would you believe that it’s only in the past 50 years with the advent of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and fields such as positive psychology that we have developed a new understanding of how our brains work, how we learn, and how we can develop our mindset.  

We know now that right through adulthood we have the capacity to both form new neural pathways and prune old ones, a term that’s called neuroplasticity. Just like you can grow muscle through physical exercise, you can change the inner workings of how your brain works. It turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks. But, just like physical exercise there is a caveat. Change, real change only comes about through conscious effort and action. 


I have a garden, with some lovely flower beds, and for the past three years the same pattern repeats. I plant the beds, the bindweed arrives, strangles everything, and eventually the flowers die. The next year I pull up the bindweed, plant the bed again, and the same thing happens. The bindweed arrives, strangles the flowers, and the cycle repeats. It dawned on me one day that the solution wasn’t to pull up the bindweed, it was to change the soil.  

To make real change, requires a big change, you need to change the soil. To make exercise a lasting habit, to eat well, to be an early riser, to achieve life goals. It takes conscious effort to change your mindset, and it takes the courage to change. If we believe in our minds that we are not capable of change, if we believe that our life position is permanent then it will be. We need to prune those neural pathways and replace them with new pathways that reflect our new view on life.  

So, how do you do this? Here are some tips. 

1. You need to be honest with yourself. Have the courage to look at yourself and reflect on what it is that you want to change, and why you haven’t changed this. A great way to do this is to write a letter to yourself. Be completely open, honest, and vulnerable. And then if you like, tear it up. You don’t need to share it with anyone. 

2. Recognise that the only person to be accountable to is yourself. What I mean by this is that too many times we pin our inability to do something on others. Maybe your partner doesn’t want to go for a walk, maybe their eating habits are poor, maybe your friends have a particularly negative view on life. Stop It. Take ownership of your life. Don’t wait for your partner to get up at 5am, do it yourself. Don’t wait for your partners eating habits to change, get cooking!

3. Get clear on what you want to achieve. I’m not here to tell you what your goals and ambitions in life are, that’s up to you. Use techniques that hold you accountable, whether that’s SMART goals or some other framework. Set your goals and align your actions every day, every week and every year.
   The Head Plan Journal is a great place to start, it is our best-selling productivity and wellness journal, that guides you in setting your goals, aligning your actions and creating balance in your life. What we have found, and this is increasingly backed by peer reviewed science is that the people who consciously set their goals, and regularly reflect make real progress. This isn’t something new, elite athletes having been doing this for years, but The Head Plan is our attempt to bring these tools to everybody. 

4. Cut down on the distractions. Your phone and social media are an evil pairing which are engineered to addict you. All those little red notifications, all micro distractions that require a context switch. Your brain needs to switch context to deal with the notification and then switch back to what it was doing. This is a perfect way of knocking you out of your flow. Here’s what you do, switch off every notification on your phone. Move frequently used apps off the Home Screen. Switch on screentime and treat it like a weight loss program. Get those hours down every week and watch how much time you get back.

5. Reflect and fine tune. Every day, every week and every month, reflect on your progress. Develop your sense of awareness. Ask yourself the question, is this bringing me closer to my goal. Why not, what am I doing wrong. Be aware of your words and thought processes.

Remember, you can unlock potential and develop your mindset, but it is a conscious action. I often say ‘a dumbbell is just a piece of metal’ it’s how you use it that counts. So, grab your journal, align your actions and have the courage to go after those goals. As we say in The Head Plan...