Introduction
Josh Connolly opens by naming the thing most interviews skip past: how close he came to leaving the world entirely, and how dark that world got before it changed. He grew up around his father's alcoholism, spent his teenage years chasing belonging through gangs and football violence, and by twenty-four had four children, a broken marriage, seventeen thousand pounds of debt, and a foldout bed in his mother's living room. Nine months into sobriety, he planned to take his own life.
He didn't. What he built instead, a book, a men's community, a corporate resilience practice, and a very different relationship with his six children, is the subject of this conversation. None of it reads like a tidy redemption arc. It reads like ongoing work.
Working hard to be lovable
Josh describes his younger self, the smiling, caring, overly thoughtful child in old photographs, as someone working hard to earn a sense of being lovable rather than simply feeling it. He grew up with a father in the grip of alcohol addiction and a mother absorbed by managing that. He's careful to frame this without blame: the want to be loved is simply part of being human, he says, but when a child has to work for it rather than receive it freely, it becomes a problem that follows them into adulthood. That dynamic, and years of supporting other people with similarly difficult starts, became the basis for his new book on toxic parenting.
Rethinking forgiveness
Asked directly about forgiveness, Josh pushes back on the way it's typically framed. He calls it an overused, over-glorified term, particularly when someone is still being actively harmed by the parent or person in question. His view: forgiveness isn't something you can will into existence on command, and treating it as an obligation often leads people to bury emotions rather than process them, then call that burial forgiveness. In his experience, forgiveness sometimes arrives as a byproduct of doing the harder work of freeing yourself from someone else's harm, not as a prerequisite for it.
Anger is not the problem
One of the clearest reframes in the conversation is Josh's view of anger. For years he insisted he wasn't angry about his father, while being angry at his children, his friends, and the world at large, anger leaking out sideways because it had nowhere honest to go. He now distinguishes sharply between anger and rage: anger, understood and expressed, is one of the most important human emotions, credited by Josh with driving the suffragette movement and Martin Luther King's civil rights work. Rage, by contrast, is what happens when anger is held in and never mobilised, pressure with nowhere to go. He describes staying accountable to his own "righteous anger" through regular self-inventory with people close to him, checking whether he's being led by love or by fear.
Gangs, violence, and a father figure at eighteen
Between twelve and twenty-four, Josh describes years defined by a deep need to belong and to matter, met first through what he calls, loosely, a gang: older boys in Swindon who gave him purpose, structure, and a father figure in a man barely out of his teens himself. He smoked cannabis daily from age twelve, and at fifteen was kidnapped and held at gunpoint as an initiation into selling Class A drugs. At seventeen, after many of those involved were imprisoned, he found the same dynamic of purpose and belonging in football violence instead. By eighteen he was drinking heavily, his first daughter was born, and he was already, in his own words, recreating the very home environment he had been trying to escape.
The weekend everything changed
Josh stopped drinking on 14 May 2012 and has not had a drink or drug since. But sobriety alone didn't resolve the deeper crisis. Nine months in, at twenty-four, he seriously planned to take his own life, and went to see his children one last time to say goodbye. Because he knew what he intended to do, he says the past became irrelevant and the future stopped existing, and for the first time he was fully present with his children. That presence changed his mind. What followed was a recognition that trying to be the man and father he thought he was supposed to be had nearly killed him, and that the only way forward was radical honesty about who he actually was.
What actually made him stop drinking
Josh is specific about what tipped the decision: drinking had simply stopped working as a way to feel better, and his mother's words stayed with him, that his own father had tried and failed for years to moderate his drinking, and that if Josh ever reached that point himself, he should try complete abstinence instead. He credits that piece of advice, planted long before he was ready to use it, with playing a direct role in the decision that likely saved his life.
From factory floor to national platform
The turning point in his career came from the same discomfort that had once driven him toward addiction: an unbearable factory job. With no formal qualifications, he started volunteering with what he refers to as the National Association for Children of Alcoholics, looking for purpose rather than a career plan. Within months he was on BBC Breakfast discussing a campaign for children of alcoholics, then speaking at conferences, and eventually realised people would pay him to speak, which let him leave the factory for good. His current corporate resilience work grew out of a similar willingness to take rejection after rejection in an environment, corporate wellbeing six years ago, that wasn't yet ready for the conversation he wanted to have.
Redefining resilience and leadership
Josh is candid that his understanding of resilience has changed. In his twenties, he believed it meant pushing through no matter what and never showing struggle. Now he defines it as knowing himself well enough to recognise when he's struggling and to get his needs met appropriately. His definition of leadership follows the same logic: the leaders who shaped him created a safe space for him to simply be himself, and inside that safety he was able to grow. He now tries to build the same kind of space for the men in the community group he runs monthly, deliberately shoulder-to-shoulder rather than top-down, using breathwork to help quiet minds that talk therapy alone couldn't reach.
