Jim Lawless: The Bloke Who Tamed His Tigers
From lawyer to freediver, jockey to global keynote speaker, Jim Lawless is living proof that life is never too short to pack it all in- and still survive.
Whether he’s dropping to 100 metres under the sea on one breath, or standing solo on stage before thousands of execs, Jim’s message is simple: don’t wait for life to test you — dare yourself first.
Jim has inspired over a million people across five continents, written the bestselling Taming Tigers, and become one of the most in-demand performance speakers on the planet. He’s the first Brit to freedive beyond 100 metres, became a televised jockey within a year of first sitting on a horse, and has advised everyone from Apple to the Swiss Olympic Team. His new book, DARE, lands in 2026, and it promises to teach readers how to thrive under pressure when the stakes are sky-high.
Following false reports that he’d pulled out of a speaking event in Kyiv “out of fear,” Jim doubled down on his commitment to Ukraine, announcing a self-funded return with all proceeds going to local charities supporting traumatised children and injured soldiers.
Last year, during Ukraine’s prestigious Lviv BookForum, Jim spent the night in a bomb shelter as the city took the worst Russian attack in its history. “The noise and vibrations were quite astonishing and terrifying,” he wrote on Instagram. “But the resilience of the people there is beyond words,” he reported.
A free diver, helicopter pilot, and former lawyer, Jim’s not your typical self-help bloke. He’s a man who tests every rule he teaches — and if he says he’s going to “go where it’s scary,” he bloody means it.
Interview
Jim, you’ve gone from lawyer to freediver, jockey, and keynote speaker. Which one gave you the biggest adrenaline hit—and which one scared the life out of you?
I’ve gone from lawyer to performance advisor. Along the way I raced and dived to experience, test and prove my approach. I don’t understand advisors who haven’t walked the path.
Being loved by my children, hearing them laugh, seeing them healthy and happy is, honestly, my biggest adrenaline hit.
Next is when I have crossed “outside my comfort zone” and hit the target I committed to hit, whatever it is, especially when everybody thought it was something I couldn’t do and when I was massively unsure that I could do it. But suddenly the big day came and went and it is done!
In terms of scaring the life out of me, well how long do you have? Each adventure had its moments.
The first time I descended on a freediving sled I was in tandem with my teacher Andrea, {the legendary freediver Andrea Zuccari who died in 2022]. We only went to -10m on that first dive but it honestly felt like demons had grabbed my body and were dragging me down to the underworld.
The speed was such a surprise! I tensed up – which prevented my diaphragm from moving up into my chest as my lungs were compressed. That made me spasm and gag underwater as the increasing vacuum in my chest pulled against the tense muscles in my belly.
The speed of descent is immense on a sled, so the pressure change is very fast. Whilst I was trying to work out what those spasms were, I was having to also concentrate on equalising my ears faster than ever to avoid bursting my eardrums.
But all these things are a safe and controlled push at the edge of my envelope. Before we went down, Andrea told me what to expect and what to do. Of course, it was all so fast and the pressure so incredibly real that I couldn’t do it. Nobody could.
He knew that; that’s why he came with me in tandem on the sled. You can’t learn this stuff on YouTube. You need a teacher. You need humility and you need a beginner mind.
At the surface, he explained it all again and reassured me. He helped me relax my diaphragm and belly and explained the cause of the spasms. Believe it or not, by listening to a master and doing what I was told I was solo on the sled and diving to 30m with a big smile by the end of that session.
You hit 101 metres on a single breath—first Brit to do it. When you’re that deep and your body’s screaming for air, what keeps you from bolting for the surface?
A freediver has three skills to master. Master the skills - and push your limits slowly - and you don’t do any bolting for the surface. I think that is the same in any sphere of life. The danger today is thinking you have an entitlement to high-performance results and rewards before building the skills to deliver performance and value. We even see that with freedivers now, going too deep too fast to get likes. They get hurt, make out its all heroic and ‘dangerous’ and that brings the sport into disrepute.
Emotional regulation is the primary skill. I am going to enter the world’s most hostile environment (also its most beautiful in my opinion). I am going there alone. To return to safety, if something goes wrong, will take time. I cannot jump onto a scuba rig at 100m if I don’t like it, scuba gasses at 100m bring me a whole world of complexity and danger.
So, I need to be serene and in control and whatever my emotions throw at me, or however short of air I may become. I need to be able to smile at fear and walk on past it without my heartrate changing.
Freediving is a window to your soul. The sea doesn’t lie to you. She finds out who you who you are and she will send you home with your tail between your legs if you have not prepared yourself mentally and emotionally to dance with her.
I need to be able to manage the pressure change too. I am going to around 33x the pressure change you feel when you land at the airport. But I am not doing that 33x over a 30-minute descent in a pressurised commercial jet. I’m doing it in 60 seconds in an open cell neoprene wetsuit! I need to learn and then master the skills or managing that pressure change on my body.
At 100m under the surface of the ocean I am, quite literally, being hugged by our beautiful planet. She is holding me, squeezing me. Can you imagine anything more moving and sensual than being hugged by the world herself?
Finally, you need to be able to hold your breath. That’s just disciplined training. You must show up. I had a five-minute breath hold by the time I took the British record. The dive took 2 minutes and 7 seconds. If you watch the film, I am not gasping for breath when I surface at all. The day before the successful record day, I had my first attempt. I made errors, failed the attempt and was underwater for 3 minutes 40 seconds. That felt a little less comfortable but through the prep, even that was manageable.
If you have emotional regulation skills, have trained yourself to cope with pressure to an elite level and have trained your breath hold, there is no screaming for air and so no bolting required.
You’ve built a career on facing fear head-on. Do you think blokes today are getting too soft about risk, or are we just wired to play it safe?
Hmm. A dangerous and huge topic.
We are all wired to play it safe, we always were. That’s human. We all have to learn when, and how, to overcome that to truly live. That’s a timeless story.
Change starts with an event. Nobody teaches us that.
Whether you’re watching Star Wars or Paddington in Peru: it’s the same story. You get thrust into adversity by a big event and then you face your fear, overcome it and grow up - to survive Darth Vader or get past Olivia Coleman dressed as a nun outfit and find Aunt Lucy.
But characters have scriptwriters to give them big events. You don’t. And the world is not giving men in the UK so many events that demand risk and growth.
So, you must create the event.
Walk into adversity and fear – one random day (you’re never ready). If we stay comfortable, waiting for somebody else to provide our adventure for us – we remain ‘soft’. A boy.
But I need to be clear. I discomfort and adversity isn’t about taking a cold plunge in your parents’ shower at 5am every day and posting about it. We grow through learning we can do hard things. So go find a hard thing and learn to do it. Commit to a hard project at work and then deliver it with zero excuses for failure. Stop doing drugs and get sharp. Whatever your hard thing is.
Now you are exposed, vulnerable, committed, struggling outside your comfort zone and REAL.
Take risks to add value. Make things better because you were a part of them. People pay you (even if you own the business) because you add value to the world. So do you?
Take risks to take on responsibility. Put your neck on the line. Reflect on why your team’s results are not great and then change your behaviours after reading deeply and asking advice humbly.
Learn to perform consistently, even when you’re tired, when you don’t like the client or boss, because that is who you are and what you do.
Commit to complete: no excuses. That’s risky! Lean to look at the mirror at 3am wondering what you are doing in this situation and how you’ll manage to resolve it.
In Taming Tigers you lay down ten rules for taking control of your life. Which rule do you break the most yourself?
I really struggle with Rule Three – Head in the Direction of Where You Want to Arrive: Every Day.
I live my life 100% through my Taming Tigers principles and my DARE Loop. I create my life through my Decisions and my Actions every day. These create Results. If I have a high-performance mindset and a high level of humility, I can Evaluate and go again but better.
New Results mean new Decisions and Actions. But my calendar is already full.
Change happens in your calendar! The challenge is deleting stuff to ensure you do the things that deliver your results for you.
Saying no to a shiny new project or an invitation to speak at a great event that will pay the bills, to change my world tomorrow, is the hardest thing for me.
You’ve had vicious abuse online after the Kyiv rumours. How do you personally deal with that kind of negativity while staying true to your message about courage?
An event organiser booked me to speak in Kyiv. They cancelled the event for reasons only they know and publicised that it was due to fears for my safety. In Ukraine, my book ‘Taming Tigers’ was re-titled “Go where it’s scary’.
So far as a Ukrainian citizen is concerned, some author in the UK writes about ‘going where it is scary’ and then the media says he is too scared to go to Ukraine. Too scared to go to the city where my wife and children are living and going to school each day whilst I’ve given up my career and family life to defend our borders in a trench being bombed by an invading army.
Naturally, I got a kicking. Coward, self-help quack, etc. My personality and life’s work were being attacked because of things I had not decided or done myself.
Of course, I knew nothing until my social media and emails lit up with abuse. That was a very new experience for me and truly took me by surprise. But it didn’t take long to understand the emotion.
But it got worse, Taming Tigers is a book based on trust. It says: I tested these things in horseracing and freediving, they are scary to do, but I promise you they work. When readers thought I was a fraud who was too afraid even to visit their homeland, many were really shocked and hurt. Some of the worst emails were not vicious at all, they were just full of disappointment in me as a human being from people who had spent time ‘with me’ in the book and taken bold decisions because of evenings spent at home in my company.
Staying true to the message was the only way I knew how to deal with the abuse.
Firstly, I took time off work and arranged to go to Kyiv under my own steam to speak. Then I was invited to attend the prestigious Lviv BookForum when the organisers learned that I was heading to Kyiv.
Secondly, I also sought out the abusive messages and answered as many as I could. I don’t think that is conventional. The advice is not to do that, you’re supposed to ‘be above it’ but it was important to me not to be ‘above’ people in pain and who doubted me. I only responded with facts – the cancellation had nothing to do with me - and with empathy and kindness. I invited many of the writers to come see me in Kyiv or Lviv later in the year and have a coffee. Almost every person apologised, publicly in the comments, and explained they were just under a lot of pressure and that the media had been inflammatory.
It was an extremely moving episode and taught me that when fear and a sense of abandonment is, understandably, high, love, honesty and respect can defuse tension quickly.
You’ve flown helicopters, dived oceans, and stood alone on stage before thousands. Which feels more dangerous—the extreme sports or the boardroom full of execs?
HA! Good question. As a younger man, the execs. I saw them as ‘better than’ me and my imposter syndrome lit up. I thought they ‘knew’, partly because they exuded such confidence!
As I have grown older, the execs have become just another talented and dedicated human doing their best.
All my extreme activities are just the tip of an iceberg of preparation. I have very low risk freediving because I have built the foundations. I am pushing my limits, but only by a meter or two in any dive – not by 20. That’s insanity.
You only get to fly a helicopter solo after hours of training and being signed off as ready by a mentor who has seen a hundred people reach ‘ready’. That said, they tell you that you take off on your first solo helicopter flight as a boy and return as a man. And that is 100% true! It is a big ordeal and it changes you.
Believe it or not, standing onstage feels - and is - the most dangerous. I could control it and play safe, but that would be untrue to me, to my message and to the men and women in my audience. I choose to jump off the cliff and trust I can make something unique and wonderful happen.
And that is extremely exposing and dangerous!
You’re vegetarian, teetotal, and training alongside your 11-year-old daughter. How much of your discipline is about being a role model for her?
There is one question that is only asked, after speeches, by men.
One day we will be ready to discuss the pressures on men. Until that day, increasing male failure, poor performance at school, are largely ignored. Male suicide rates and mental health crises are often dismissed as preventable if ‘men could just talk about their emotions’.
The question? “Is it not very selfish to do these things as a parent when you should be at home being a father or out working? You are letting your family down.”
My answer is, as a parent and a role model to my daughter,
- I love showing her that parenting, and masculinity, is not about surrendering who I am and all my own life ambitions for other people’s needs. I cannot be whole for her if I half myself!
- My primary role is to provide and protect and I have done that more effectively by taking risks and expanding my boundaries than I could possibly have done without.
- We discuss a lot – that life includes risk. Risk – for a specific result and taken with attention and support – is the whole game. I show her that in action and she now takes bold risks too.
- I hope I have shown her the value of lifelong growth and learning – I have almost as many teachers as she does! And she meets them and learns from them too.
SO yes, I have tried my hardest, and with failures, to be a good role model.
You’ve said imposter syndrome is a good thing. When was the last time you felt like an imposter—and how did you use it to your advantage?
Imposter syndrome is the entry ticket for growth. The last time I felt like I was an imposter was receiving a high stakes assignment to work with a well-known and high performing executive team to build their performance level. My old insecurities rose up. Who was I to assist these people?
Just like everybody faced with imposter syndrome, I have a choice. Use it to power my growth, prepare better, seek advice and mentorship to rise to the challenge – or use it as the excuse to run away.
Your new book DARE lands in 2026. What’s in it that’ll make the average bloke stop scrolling and actually change something in his life?
The promise that we’ll have taken action together by the end of the first chapter to begin the journey.
The promise that I will share the precise map I use with myself, my family and global clients to deliver ambitions results.
The promise that we won’t use social media trends like morning routines (you may decide to have one to help you – but it’s not necessary’.
The promise we won’t spend time asking you to study ‘science-backed reasons’ why your ‘trauma’ drives ‘your anxiety’, etc. We’re going to take ownership and make sh*t happen using what new Results always took:
The courage to take new Decisions and Actions and the humility to look in the mirror and Evaluate.
You still head out to see James every summer. After everything you’ve achieved, is live music still where you go to feel human again?
Nope. Honestly, I feel very, very human and alive in a freedive or onstage. But nothing quite beats being anonymous in the crowd as Tim, Chloe and the band remind a screaming O2 that “Life’s a F**ing Miracle”!
Instagram: @jim_lawless