About Sam
The work started with a question Sam could not put down.
Sam Murgatroyd is a mindset coach and author. His work is rooted in identity, honesty, belonging, and the gap between who people have learned to be and who they actually are.
Sam grew up feeling like he never quite fit in. He saw the world differently to the people around him and spent years wondering if that was something to fix. He was what he describes as a “why” kid, someone who could never simply accept the way things were because that was how they had always been. That feeling of being slightly outside of everything, of observing the world rather than just living in it, was uncomfortable for a long time.
He started writing at twelve years old, not because he had ambitions to be a writer but because he could not keep what he was thinking bottled up any longer. Writing was the only place it made sense.
That curiosity eventually led him into work that most people would find difficult. Psychiatric hospitals, probation services, children’s care homes, SEN schools, drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Years spent working alongside people across almost all of those environments at their lowest points and darkest times. What he saw across the board was the same thing. People who had spent so long becoming who they thought they had to be that they had completely lost sight of who they actually were.
At some point Sam recognised that story in himself too. The performing, the adapting, the slow drift away from his own instincts in favour of what seemed more acceptable. That drift took a real toll. Losing touch with who he actually was left him feeling low, lost and disconnected from everything that had once felt natural and his own. It was one of the hardest periods of his life.
But it was also the most important. Because understanding why it had happened, really understanding it at a level that went beyond surface realisation, changed everything. And the moment it landed, two things became clear. He needed to keep writing. And he needed to help other people find the same thing.
The books came from that place. The coaching came from that place. All of it is rooted in something real, something lived, not something learned from a course or lifted from a textbook. That is why it works the way it does.
Experience behind the work
Years of frontline work shaped how Sam sees people and problems. The thread running through all of it: change is rarely about adding something new. It is about helping someone see clearly.
- Psychiatric hospitals
- Probation services
- Children's care homes
- SEN schools
- Drug and alcohol rehabilitation
How Sam works
Sam does not deep-dive issue by issue the way a therapist might. He takes a wider view. Instead of unpicking each problem in isolation, he works at the level of perception, the lens you are looking through, because almost everything else downstream of that is a symptom.
The work tends to suit people who feel quietly stuck despite a life that looks right on paper. The numbness, the burnout, the sense that something does not sit right. Those are the signals that the lens is no longer your own.
Coaching is one-to-one, honest, and direct. Sessions move at the pace of the person in front of him. Nothing scripted, nothing recycled.
Beyond the coaching
Sam is the author of three books: Alienated, Robin’s Bench and The Policy, all Amazon bestsellers. The fiction sits next to the coaching for a reason. The same questions about identity, belonging and self-trust run through both.
He also writes regularly. Long-form essays, reflections and breakdowns of the patterns he sees in his work, published in the journal on this site and on Substack.