Episode Overview
What happens when outward success masks inward exhaustion? In this episode of Real Talk with an EOS Implementer, Mark O’Donnell, Visionary at EOS Worldwide, sits down with EOS Implementer Tim Harris to explore a journey that spans high-stakes financial trading, personal burnout, radical reinvention, and a 3,000-mile row across the Atlantic Ocean.
Tim shares how a 24-year career in oil broking led to mounting stress, physical warning signs, and the realization that achievement without alignment comes at a cost. After stepping away from the industry, retraining as a coach, and searching for deeper impact, Tim found EOS through an unexpected connection. Along the way, he committed to one of the most physically and mentally demanding endurance events in the world, rowing unassisted from the Canary Islands to Antigua, an experience that reshaped his understanding of resilience, teamwork, and perspective.
The conversation dives into the lessons forged at sea and how they directly translate to entrepreneurial leadership: discovering you always have more in the tank than you think, the necessity of vulnerability within teams, the power of shared vision and values, and why perspective changes everything when the waves hit. Tim also reflects on how EOS mirrors the disciplines that carried him across the ocean and why helping leadership teams navigate their own “crossings” now fuels his work.
Key Takeaways
- Burnout isn’t a personal failure but a signal your life is out of alignment: Tim’s story shows how ignoring physical and relational warning signs compounds the cost, until a change becomes non-negotiable.
- Leaving the “right” career can be the first real leadership decision: Walking away from status, income, and identity created space for Tim to re-engage with family and choose work that matches his values.
- One-on-one support helps, but teams are where impact scales: Coaching CEOs was meaningful, but EOS offered a path to shift entire leadership groups, not just individual behavior.
- You usually have more capacity than you think: Especially when someone else is counting on you: The Atlantic row reinforced a truth leaders need in hard seasons. You can keep going longer than your mind claims.
- Teams don’t become teams through intent: They become teams through vulnerability. Tim and his rowing partner didn’t truly connect until they admitted they were struggling, and everything improved once honesty replaced “toughing it out.”
- Perspective resets endurance when pressure feels personal: Encounters like the migrant dinghy and wounded veterans reframed discomfort, making it easier to stay steady and keep moving forward.
Full Episode Transcript
From Trading Floors to the Atlantic to EOS
0:01
Mark: Hi everyone, welcome to the show. Today I have with me Tim Harris, who is a Professional EOS Implementer. Welcome to the show, Tim.
Tim: Hey Mark, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Mark: Good to be here with you. You have just such a unique story about how you got here, so I’m looking forward to the conversation. So let’s just dive in. Tell us your story. How did you come to become an EOS Implementer?
Tim: Okay, so I’ll rewind a little back to my early career. I got a degree in Land Management with a view to becoming what’s called, over here, a chartered surveyor, which is a property term.
Mark: When you say “over here,” where do you mean?
Tim: Sorry, I’m in the UK. Sorry, that wasn’t clear. I’m in the UK. So, I was going to become a chartered surveyor. My father was one. One of my brothers was also one. And without any other great calling, I thought I’d start there.
Tim: There was a recession when I came out of university, and property was on its knees. My eldest brother, meanwhile, was making a lot of money trading, so I followed the dollar and I became a trader.
Tim: So I then started a pretty natural career progression right from a chartered surveyor to a government bond option trader. It’s a well-trodden path, right? It’s on property, really.
Tim: I started trading Italian government bond options, backed by a Dutch merchant bank. Couldn’t handle the stress. Hated running positions over weekends. At the time, I think Italy had had 55 prime ministers since the Second World War, and barely a weekend went past where someone in the Italian cabinet wasn’t up to no good. So, it was a pretty volatile product.
Tim: So, I left the trading scene. At the same kind of time, my mother sadly passed away from a disease called lupus, which is an autoimmune disease. I was very close to her. I didn’t handle it very well. As with most things back then, if I wasn’t liking the situation I was in, I pretty much turned to alcohol.
Tim: There were too many painful memories around just after her death in the UK. So, having obviously, at that age, not worked out that you can’t just run away from your problems, I tried to run away from my problems. I looked for a job in Sydney, couldn’t find one, found a job in Singapore as an oil broker. So I went over there for about six months. Didn’t enjoy that. Wasn’t very good at it either.
Tim: Came back to the UK, and the guy that had initially hired me took me to the UK arm of another oil broking company. I stuck with oil for 24 years after that.
Mark: Stuck.
Tim: Yeah, but during that 24 years, I had two breaks from burnout. Clearly didn’t listen to my body, and after each one went straight back into the same industry. I managed, finally, about four years ago, as I was approaching my third burnout, to start listening to my body and my family.
Tim: So I exited that industry, having been global head of that department for 12 years. The stress, basically, the juice no longer became worth the squeeze. I was an absent dad. I was an absent husband. Very reliant on alcohol. Not an alcoholic, but kind of a functioning alcoholic. And yeah, it was not a great way to be living.
Tim: So I got out, which is great, and I will never regret that because I’ve had three to four fantastic years reconnecting with the family, spending a lot of time with my kids, reconnecting with my wife. After I left the City, I retrained as a business and personal coach. I got a business and personal coaching accreditation from the International Coaching Federation, the ICF.
Tim: My view was to go back into the City and try and help leaders like myself who were just crumbling under the pressure, reliant on alcohol or other things to get them by. There are so many of them. I did go back in, and I coached several CEOs. It was pretty gratifying work, but I didn’t feel like I was making a big enough impact, coaching one-on-one.
Discovering EOS & Finding a Bigger Impact
Tim: I went to a workshop called Living with Purpose where I met Brandon Harris. For those of you that don’t know, I’m sure you all do, Brandon is an EOS Implementer over here. He has been for, I think, four years.
Tim: Brandon heard this story and took me aside and said, “I’d like to introduce you to EOS because I feel that I have enormous impact on people’s lives.” I loved listening to the story of working with leadership teams who were potentially struggling or who wanted to grow, were frustrated, nothing was working.
Tim: I loved what he was saying. Also, what I’d found with the coaching was that, having been for 24 years in an industry that was contracting around me—and what I mean by that is it was getting more and more congested with other brokers, a lot of the trading was going screen-based, and the product that we were broking was being regulated out of existence—it was kind of a perfect storm, and we kind of squeezed the last life out of it.
Tim: So when I qualified as a coach, I was thinking, “This is great. You can never be the perfect coach. It’s something I can work on forever.” And I thought there weren’t that many actually out there, and I was very wrong. It seemed that every other person I met was a coach. So when Brandon mentioned EOS and said, “Oh, and by the way, there are only 16 of us in the UK,” I just went, “I’m in.” So that was how I found EOS.
Rowing the Atlantic & EOS Coming Full Circle
8:32
Tim: But weirdly—and I love this part of the story—after I did my coaching qualification, I signed up for an endurance event because I felt like, in those 24 years in the City, I had done nothing but push money around for people whose values no longer aligned with mine. I hadn’t actually created anything other than having a nice foundation for a good lifestyle with my own family.
Tim: So I signed up for this endurance event, which was rowing unassisted across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua in the Caribbean. That was a really interesting campaign. I met some fantastic people. But when I went back to speak to my coach, having found EOS—the coach that taught us to row—he said, “I used EOS in our training. I just never referred to it as EOS.”
Tim: I remember the training. He talked to us about our vision and our values, and literally right person, right seat. We only had two seats in the boat. And I love the fact that it’s kind of gone full circle, and that effectively EOS got Simon, my partner, and I across the Atlantic in a six-meter rowing boat.
Mark: So, I have a lot of questions about this.
Tim: Yeah.
Mark: So you spend all this time in the oil industry. You’re getting beat down to the ground, moving money around for other people. I’m sure you learned a lot through those experiences. Generally speaking, I’m sure you worked with a lot of entrepreneurial businesses and entrepreneur-minded people. So you’re wanting to transition out. You become a coach, and you’re like, “Oh, I haven’t really been doing much with my life. I’m going to sign up for a small little endurance event, and I’m going to row across the Atlantic.”
Mark: I mean, most people would try like a 5K first. Maybe start a little smaller as opposed to row across the Atlantic. So what kind of boat is this? I mean, how long did it take? Tell me about that.
Tim: So, a bit of background there. I had been watching this race for about, well, 15 to 20 years, so it wasn’t random. And I think each year I’d been watching it, it had maybe been percolating. Could I ever do that? Could I ever do that?
Tim: It was one of probably the only real epiphanies of my life. It was December 2019, just before COVID. I was miserable at work, and I’d had shingles twice that year, which was just stress-related ailment. Actually, one morning on the way to work, I was so stressed that I threw up on the train. I finally thought, “Okay, something’s not right here.”
Tim: I was thinking what I could do. And then that Christmas, it literally just came to me—the row. I’m approaching 50. I was 49 at the time. It was one of those moments where it just slotted straight into place. I didn’t even need to write down the pros and cons. It was just, “I’m going to row.”
12:44
Mark: You’re just going, “I row.”
Tim: Yeah. So I signed up thinking that somebody would join me to make a pair because I didn’t really want to do it on my own. I asked 12 of my friends and they all—they didn’t just jump on it like, “Yes, let’s do that.” Literally, they’re like, “Why would we do that?”
Mark: That’s a perfectly rational response.
Tim: Yeah. In the end, I asked a lovely man who I hadn’t known that long. He was the father of one of the kids in my kids’ school. We were in a pub one evening, and it was a real throwaway comment. It was just, “Hey Simon, I don’t suppose you want to row across the Atlantic, do you?” And he just went, “Yeah.”
Mark: Sure.
Tim: Okay, and that was that. He’s just one of life’s good people. He’d slot right into the EOS community. We worked so well together, and we’re super close friends now. It’s a hell of a bonding experience.
Mark: Yeah, I bet. There’s just that knowing look when you see each other.
Tim: Yeah. And you see each other stripped—literally stripped bare—but you see each other mentally and physically stripped bare by the elements, and at your lowest and at your highest. So it was a real privilege to share that experience with him.
Tim: Actually saying that now makes me realize how tough that must be on the solo rowers, having nobody to share it with. But that’s another challenge altogether, one which I haven’t discounted.
Mark: So are you going to do it again? Is that what you’re saying?
Tim: I don’t know. I think I’m looking through rose-tinted glasses. There are days, with my abundance mindset, I remember the good parts. Great. But it was brutal.
Mark: Oh, I bet. How long did the row take?
Tim: Fifty-two days. It took us just under 52 days. Some quite good stats—I love these stats. We worked out that we must have rowed a million and a half strokes. We did 300 two-hour rowing shifts back to back, without showering, through the night. It was extraordinary.
Tim: The sleep deprivation was unbelievable. It was surreal. We were hallucinating, genuinely. Some of the other teams had stories of rowing and they could see tentacles coming over the side of the boat and trying to steal the oars. Some people were chatting with members of their family that they said they could genuinely see sitting opposite them.
Tim: For me, I kept seeing plates of fresh fruit and salad on the boat because the food was so awful. I really missed fresh veg and fresh fruit. I would just see it like a mirage on deck, and I would find myself scratching the deck.
Tim: Simon’s was a bit more extreme. Simon kept seeing hotels floating past, so I’m guessing he wasn’t enjoying the cabin.
Tim: The cabin stank for a start. It was about 40 degrees in the cabin during the day. It was only two meters by a meter and a half wide. Your legs went into a tunnel, and then your waist and your torso and your head were in that one-and-a-half-meter by two-meter space. So it was pretty claustrophobic.
Safety, Self-Sufficiency & the Reality of the Ocean
17:29
Mark: And you now—was there like a boat that was following you that you would sleep in at night and carry supplies and stuff, or are you out there by yourself?
Tim: A bit of both. To get the badge of an unassisted crossing, we had to be self-sufficient. We took enough food—we knew we’d be around 50 days—and the regulations were that we had to take enough food for 65 days.
Tim: There were two sailing boats that were on the Atlantic at the same time, but you never knew where they would be. They quite often sailed near the back markers because they were the people perceived to have the biggest probability of an issue. So if we had an issue, they could have been three or four days’ sail away from us.
Mark: Oh jeez. I mean, that’s not really close by.
Tim: No, it’s not good. But what happens is you have these emergency beacons called EPIRBs. If there’s a proper problem, you set the EPIRB off and it’s monitored globally. It’s kind of the rules of the sea that the nearest boat to you has to come to your assistance.
Tim: Last year, one of the boats capsized and they couldn’t—most of the boats capsized last year in storms—and one of them didn’t right itself. They got picked up by a passing tanker that was going from Nigeria to Quebec. They ended up in Quebec and had to leave their boat floating upside down.
Mark: Wow. Now how many boats were going at the same time?
Tim: The year we did it, which was ’21 into ’22, there were 34 boats, I think.
Mark: Okay, and how many made it?
Tim: We didn’t see any of them. The year we did it, 33 made it. Some were very late. They sort of unofficially say that you need to come in inside of 60 days for it to count, but it’s unofficial. It still counts if you make it.
Mark: I mean, yeah, you made it, I think.
Tim: No doubts. But yeah, there were some brutal stories. One lady, many years ago, lost her rudder 200 miles from the finish. So, had been rowing for two months and then couldn’t finish.
Mark: Wow.
Tim: One couple tried it and the husband bailed out within a week. The wife carried on and rowed it solo. They got divorced.
Mark: Well, I bet. Can you imagine that? Him going, “Darling, I don’t like this. I’m getting out. See you. Good luck to you.”
Tim: So yeah, a great thing. I now do quite a bit of public speaking on the journey from corporate life to burnout to retraining as a coach to the row, and now to EOS.
Tim: It’s a great story. We just learned so much about ourselves in that journey, in the whole campaign. But in the boat, we learned so much about resilience, teamwork, perspective—perspective in particular.
Perspective in the Middle of the Atlantic
21:44
Tim: We passed about 500 miles off the coast of Mauritania. We passed an empty migrant dinghy just floating empty. The Coast Guard had told us before we left that if you see a migrant boat, you must not approach them.
Tim: We saw this dinghy and we thought, “That just isn’t right. That can’t be right. How can we not approach to see if there’s anyone lying down that we could give water to, or food to, or even take with us?” As it happened, because of the currents and the winds, although it was probably only about 600 yards away from us, we couldn’t have got to it. These rowing boats are really slow, and they’re heavy, and you can’t row them into the waves or into the wind. So we couldn’t have got to the dinghy anyway.
Tim: But it left us for a couple of days reflecting so deeply on—you know, I think Warren Buffett called it the ovarian lottery—just how lucky we are to be in the positions we are in. The row was totally voluntary. We had water, we had food, we had communication, and we had the choice.
Tim: Obviously you sit there and you see these dinghies and you think, wow. Can you imagine being the father and knowing, probably for a month, that you’re going to play Russian roulette with your family’s lives and scrape together enough money from your village, give it to a ruthless gang who are going to give you a dinghy that’s probably full of holes, and they’re just going to push you off from the coast of Africa in the hope that you hit that needle point that is the Canaries or the Azores. It’s almost certain death.
Tim: So yeah, without dragging the tone down too much, it really made us feel very lucky.
Mark: Yeah, I bet.
Lessons Leaders Can Use
24:08
Mark: So you mentioned quite a few lessons there—resilience and grit. If you had to, for someone listening to this, what were the top three lessons that you think came out of tackling such a difficult, challenging experience? What would be those top three?
Tim: So to me, easily, the top three is that you always have more in the tank than you think you have. We constantly dug. We constantly thought we were done. We would—“I cannot get up again and row. I have nothing left.” And 300 times we managed to just find a way to get up.
Tim: A lot of it was to do with not wanting to let down your teammate. You still have to do it. You have to own it. You have to not make excuses and just dig deep. And that’s where things like seeing that dinghy really helped, because it gave you perspective. When you’re thinking, “I’ve got nothing left,” actually you still got it. We’ve got water, food, and the choice. Who am I to complain? It was our choice to be here. So yeah, we’ve always got more in the tank is my top one.
Tim: After that, I would say it is teamwork. It’s really weird. We spoke about it right at the end of the row. We planned this for two years, this row. We’re both empathetic guys, so we said we should be okay on that front. “I’ll understand how you’re feeling.”
Tim: We said to each other, “We must talk. If there’s anything going on, I need to know everything that’s going on with you because it’s just the two of us for two months.” But even with all that planning and all that intent to be honest with each other and tell each other when we were low, when push came to shove, we couldn’t. We just didn’t want to let the other one down or let them think that we were a weak link.
Tim: I spoke to a polar explorer called Ben Saunders, who’s the youngest man to have ever walked to both poles, and he said that he and his partner had the same problem when they walked to the South Pole—that neither wanted to tell the other one how much they were hurting because they didn’t want to let the other one know how much they were struggling, because they were struggling too.
Tim: But actually what everybody needs is to be open and honest and vulnerable. We worked that out on Christmas Day, which was about 13 days into the trip. For all our planning, we had become obsessed with not letting the other guy down.
Tim: So we were just row, eat, sleep, clean, row, eat, sleep, clean, and there was hardly any communication. We just passed each other on the deck, checked the other one was okay—superficially. “You’re breathing, huh? Yeah, you’re breathing. Have you got everything you need?”
Tim: Then on Christmas Day, we worked out we were so lonely because we’d contacted our families and they were all at home opening presents and eating real food. They had a real flushing toilet instead of what we had. Yeah, we both just burst into tears because we were hurting, because we hadn’t slept, and the food was terrible, and we were missing our kids.
28:59
Tim: We had a big cry and a big hug and just said, “You know, we haven’t spoken for two weeks. This is insane.” I say in my talks that that was the day we became a team. After that, we conversed all the time, really checked in on each other.
Tim: I’m changing my talk at the moment because there are so many parallels to EOS.
Mark: Oh, for sure. I mean, honestly, I can’t wait till it’s finished because, I mean, talk about an issues list. You had one. I mean, we really had to dig to find the root cause of some of those issues.
Tim: Yeah. We just became a team that day, and we decided that we would have breakfast together every morning so that we had—it was like a daily L10. It was amazing.
Mark: That’s awesome. So what would be the third lesson?
Tim: The third, I think—although I mentioned it within probably both the first and the second—I think the third is perspective. It’s a really tricky one because we all know that it has to be relative. We can’t wake up on a daily basis and think about the poor people of Ukraine or the famine in Sudan, because it’s not relative to us. It doesn’t actually make us feel any better about problems we’re facing.
Tim: But actually seeing that migrant dinghy, and also there was another—again, I have a photo in my talk—of these four veterans who did three tours of Afghanistan and they all lost limbs. They rode in the same race as us as a four-man team. One of them had no legs. They were all missing a limb, and they rowed across the Atlantic.
Mark: Wow.
Tim: There were times when we signed up for it—I like to think I’m a relatively humble guy—but there was definitely a bit of swagger once I’d signed up for this. “Hey, did I hear you’re rowing the Atlantic?” “Yeah, I’m rowing the Atlantic.” Feeling pretty good about myself. And then I see these veterans without limbs and they’re doing it, and I’m thinking, “Okay. Now. Right. Cool.”
32:26
Tim: So I think those are the top three. Sorry, I’m going to make the list longer, but goal setting is another massive one. We really set our sights high. There was a massive possibility that we would fail, and we were at peace with that. We just said, “Look, let’s set the bar high, and if we don’t make it, we’re not young. Half of these teams are in their 20s. If we don’t make it, we’ve had a good crack. We’ve met some fantastic people. We can say we got halfway.”
Tim: And that’s how you learn, right? You learn from doing, trying, falling over, getting back up.
Mark: Yeah, which I’m sure you experienced daily during that adventure.
Tim: There’s a great Japanese saying: fall down seven times, get up eight. Yeah. We did. There were learnings every day, and Mark, honestly, there’s not a day that goes by where I do not think about the row.
Tim: For the last two days, I’ve been networking at a conference at the NEC in Birmingham. Biz dev can be pretty brutal. A lot of doors getting shut in your face, and you have to keep maintaining this abundance mindset. After a day and a half, you’re thinking, “My resilience is wearing thin.” At that point I just thought, “I rowed the Atlantic. I can have another conversation.” Rowing the Atlantic’s not going to pay the mortgage, but I’ll be all right.
Mark: Yeah, for sure. It’s good. I mean, what an amazing story. I appreciate the lessons there, and I’m sure everyone else will too.
Tim: Yeah, I hope so. I always worry that it can come across as quite preachy, but honestly they’re just my personal lessons. People will take them or leave them as they will.
Tim: Yeah, it was a journey. It still is a journey. Everything is an EOS journey.
Resilience, Perspective & the Long Game
35:07
Mark: That’s right. I mean, it’s really the same as you said, is that for entrepreneurs growing their businesses, when you think you’re done, you’re not done. It requires tremendous amount of teamwork, and you’ve got to have perspective because if you don’t, and you’re comparing yourself to these billion-dollar unicorn businesses, that can be like, “There’s something wrong with me. I’m not good enough.”
Mark: But the reality is you’re on your own journey. It’s not about the comparison game. It’s about just getting up, being 1% better, or in your case, just get up, have breakfast, row for two hours, and then do it over again until at one point you’ll reach the goal.
Tim: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I couldn’t agree more that there are so many analogies with entrepreneur organizations. You feel like it’s constant, constant waves. Occasionally you get one that you surf with, but most of the time you’re getting hit by them rather than enjoying them. Every now and again, you know, there’s a tsunami. You just have to keep getting back up, staying positive, and like you say, being resilient, and eventually you get there.
Mark: Amazing. Well, on that note, Tim, I appreciate the time and the story, and we’ll see you until next time.
Tim: Yeah, thanks Mark. Good to speak.
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