G-0PEXN4B5CS Matt - Six Years Sober and Still Not Settling for Average - The Brave Man Project with Hamish Niven

Episode 7

Matt - Six Years Sober and Still Not Settling for Average

Published on: 5th August, 2026

Matt Evans — Six Years Sober and Still Not Settling for Average

There's a photograph of Matt taken a few weeks before his arrest. He's in the kitchen with his kids. He is smiling. You can see it is half-arsed.

6 years later, he has built a life the old him could not have imagined, and he still refuses to call it finished.

Sound Bites

  • "I was literally in the shadow of myself going, I should be more."
  • "It's soul-destroying, mate. It's Jekyll and Hyde in your own brain."
  • "I don't want to ever settle for average, and I don't want her to settle for average."
  • "Sometimes burning stuff to the ground and rebuilding it can be the most perfect option."

Matt Evans spent years being the man everyone came to when something needed fixing. Life and soul of the party. Always happy. When it all came apart, the guys who worked for him said the same thing — we would never have known. Six years sober now, and the difference is not that he stopped drinking. It is that he stopped performing.

This conversation is about what comes after. Rebuilding trust with a wife who had heard the promises before. Writing down who you are on purpose, because the old story was written for you. And refusing, point blank, to settle for an average marriage, an average life, an average anything.

What We Explore

  • Why white-knuckling isn't sobriety, and what "eyes wide open" actually costs
  • Cognitive dissonance; screaming inside while telling the world you're fine
  • Rebuilding trust when your word already has a track record, and why "just because I said it" changed nothing
  • Identity as a conscious choice — declarations, not affirmations, and clearing the old judgement first
  • Growing up with no masculine role model, and what his daughter absorbed about who pays the bill
  • Burning down a charity event five months out and rebuilding it from nothing

Mentioned in This Episode

  • The Ultimate Coach — the book about Steve Hardison that Matt credits with shifting his life more than getting sober did.
  • Les Brown — the quote Matt leaned on in early sobriety "Find someone to believe in you when you find it hard to believe in yourself"

Connect with Matt

Matt's coaching lives on LinkedIn. Facebook and Instagram are just his life, as he put it, "they're not like my coaching world, they're just me."

Linktree: linktr.ee/mattevansdfc

LinkedIn: mattevansdfc

Facebook: matt.evans.3517563

Instagram: @matt_lovin_life

Website: differentfocus.co.uk

A little about Hamish Niven

For 25 years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside. Inside it was falling apart, and I was throwing fuel on the fire — addiction, alcohol. I was on a steep path to self-destruct.

November 2018. I chose life, and had to change everything.

I built The 13th Room because nothing like that existed when I needed it.

The Brave Man Project — this podcast. It is about men, but not just for men. Men who broke under the weight of their own performance. Men who rebuilt and climbed so much higher.

The 13th Room is a space for the successful man who needs to change and knows it. 13 sessions, you and me. No fixing. Pure witnessing. Starts with a free 20-minute conversation.

Podcast website: thebravemanproject.com

Hamish's website: hamishniven.com

YouTube: @TheBraveManProject

LinkedIn: hamishniven

TikTok: @hamish.niven

Instagram: @hamishniven

Facebook: facebook.com/hamishniven

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About the Podcast

The Brave Man Project with Hamish Niven
Stories of men who have fallen and climbed higher.
This is not a podcast about fixing yourself. You are not broken machinery.

The Brave Man Project is for the man who is brilliant at his job and dead behind the eyes - the one everyone swears is fine. Raw, unedited conversations with men who wore the mask so long they forgot their own face, and men who took it off and found the world in Technicolour.

No formulas. No five-step plans. No burnout experts. Just the truth about what falling cost them, and what it actually took to build something real.

The show moves through two lenses.

The Mirror reflects the lie you've been telling yourself: "I'm alright, mate." Men who were Captain of the Universe, who loaded bricks onto their backs until the weight turned lethal - the heart attack at thirty-seven, the iron mask worn through a marriage, the three drinks needed to sleep. Then they fell. And they chose to look. Their story is your story, a few years back. And they got out.

The Window expands the view. Men who woke up and saw in colour - not because their circumstances changed, but because they did. They don't reflect your collapse. They prove you were never broken to begin with. The Mirror asks, "is this you?" The Window asks, "could this also be you?"

Your host, Hamish Niven, spent twenty-five years filming other people's lives while avoiding his own. Professional, reliable, the man who always showed up - all of it a performance. When addiction brought him down, he didn't find recovery. He found the man buried alive under his own competence. He holds the space here the way he wishes someone had held it for him: no judgement, no advice, no applause.

This is for the man tired of the noise and the bullshit. The man exhausted from carrying a mask. Whether the universe is currently kicking you into the foetal position, or you're simply sick of the black-and-white grind.

The performance is over. The real work starts now.

About your host

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Hamish Niven