My Path to The Path
By Martin Stepek – June 2025
A Life Less Linear
Some people – the lucky ones – get a relatively straight path through life: a happy childhood, a stress-free adolescence, a clear thought about their preferred career and how to attain it. Then follows a chance but wonderful meeting with the person of their dreams, they marry, their house is their home and their place of safety. They progress in their career, then they happily retire, and enjoy the freedoms of those who have sufficient income in later life.
Most people don’t quite get it that good but still overall, they can’t and don’t complain. Their path in life was, on the whole, straightforward and fulfilling.
At the other end of the scale there are those for whom it seems, Fate has targeted them for pain and sorrow. Poverty, loss of loved ones, illnesses, wars, or accidents befall these unfortunate people, and their path, even if clear, is simply to survive and to help the ones they love survive too.
Then there are those like me who seem to wander through life trying this thing and that, enjoying aspects of life but never seeming to quite find the perfect path, a path that satisfies them, a path that fits perfectly. Yet, eventually, even I found my path. Sometimes if you just keep looking, searching, learning, and observing, you find the path, or maybe the path finds you.
Born Into Business, But Seeking Something More
I was born in 1959 into a family that has just made a remarkable turnaround from poverty to wealth. My parents – one a miner’s daughter, the other a survivor of the Soviet Gulag slave labour system – set up in business in 1949, initially repairing radios, with Dad doing the repairs and Mum the business’s financial management and books. In 1955 they made a decision to risk everything by opening a shop in Cambuslang, Scotland, to sell televisions, radios, record players, and electrical appliances.
It worked. By the time I was born they had four shops. By the time I was ten they had more than ten shops. And so it went on, onwards and upwards.
The Escape: From Law to the World
I was good at school and I was good at sports. When I left school to go to university I had the opportunity to become a professional footballer, but something inside me didn’t want that. How ironic, as most young men of my age would have wanted that more than anything else.
I studied law at university because it had a status attached to it; only medicine seemed to be better. I got my degree, and a post-graduate diploma in legal practice, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I don’t know why, but something deep inside me said I would be trapped in that profession, all suited-up, highly-regarded, well paid, but trapped in a way I still can’t quite describe.
So, not knowing my path in life, I invented a temporary path. I travelled. Nothing unusual in that per se; a gap year is commonplace, though it wasn’t in 1983. Nor did it usually stretch to four years, not that I had intended such a long period abroad. But it satisfied me, at least to a great extent, and far more than studying law or the prospect of becoming a solicitor or a footballer did.
I worked cleaning dishes, repairing roads, feeding a donkey, and taking hay from farm to harbour. Then I worked laying pipelines for a gold mine in the vast, beautiful desert, and laboured on a building site, picked tomatoes and oranges, packed those oranges into boxes in a factory.
It started to get a bit wearing. Not the work. That was fine, effortless, with no need to think or suffer from great responsibilities, and the jobs paid a lot more than my meagre necessities cost.
I didn’t lack intellectual interest or absorption. I read a lot, a combination of highbrow non-fiction and Nobel Prize winning novelists and poets. I read Hesse, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Undset, Hamsun, Bertrand Russell, Yeats, Joyce, Paz, Colette, Brecht, Jung, and so many more.
But travelling, and seeing so much beauty, nature and great architecture every day eventually became numbing and I felt I wanted to settle somewhere. I thought of doing it in New Zealand, a country of great beauty and lovely, friendly people.
Returning Home, Reluctantly
I decided to go home to Scotland for a few months, work hard, earn some more money and go for one last long working trip, to South and Central America. I had two things in my mind when I got home; earn enough to sustain me for a good while in Latin America; and don’t get involved in any relationships as that might disrupt my plan.
And I did and it did. I met my now-wife Christine in June 1986, fell in love, and persuaded myself – or she persuaded me – that a year instead of two, in South and Central America would suffice for my last voyage of true freedom.
So it was that, a year later and still in love, I resigned myself to a future as an ordinary person and came home. My brother John, the successor to my father as head of the family business, gave me a job. It felt like a rehabilitation process. We still have the photo of me in a suit going to my first day at work in the business in the summer of July 1987.
Within a year we were married, had a mortgage, and I had a steady job as marketing manager. And that was it. I had at face value found my path. Only I hadn’t really.
Success on the Surface, Restlessness Within
We had a wonderful, friendly, informal and highly effective culture at work. I proved to be good at my job, and was made a director a few years after I started, a proper director too, with real responsibilities and authority, unlike many “promotions” in the world of family business.
However, under the surface I was still not satisfied. My interests remained broad and deep and searching. I was writing poems. I was studying climate change and the damage human activity was causing to the planet and the biodiversity that lives here. I was marketing to the general public the “wisdom” of buying a new washing machine even though your old one was still working perfectly well. We achieved the second-most memorable advertising campaign of the 1980s and 1990s in Scotland, second only to the ingenious Barr’s Irn Bru Snowman animation.
I was unhappy and it was affecting my relationship at home too. I felt trapped, just as I thought football and law would have done to me. But I stuck it out, loyal to family, loyal to my colleagues in the business, loyal to my wife and two young children – still unaware of what I could happily do as an alternative.
Finding Language for the Inner Turmoil
As I was increasingly pondering potential alternatives, we, as a wider family, enrolled in the Centre for Family Enterprise’s series of workshops at Glasgow Caledonian University and studied there from 1995-2001. It was eye-opening, not least the fact that other people felt as lost and alienated in their family business as I did. Finding that you aren’t suffering alone is no cure for the pain but it does somehow help.
A New Direction: The ABPWC Model
I started thinking of what I could realistically do outside the business as a career. I came up with a five-letter acronym, ABPWC: standing for Arts, Business, Politics, Wellbeing, and Culture. I reasoned that I could slowly create a portfolio career comprising each of these five interests, and I started to network and meet people in these circles and got involved with the sectors.
Looking more closely at the acronym, they stood for Poetry (rarely an income-earner), family businesses (helping them deal with what we as a family were going through), environmental or green politics, mindfulness and wellbeing from an eastern philosophical perspective, lately explored in research and found to be effective at helping people’s mental health; and a mix of social enterprise and my Polish culture, of which I knew very little.
A Sudden Change: Administration and Freedom
In some areas I was making good progress: I became a member of the National Executive of the Scottish Green Party, then briefly its leader. I qualified as a teacher of mindfulness, and started delivering sessions and courses to various organisations. I started to interview my father and his two younger sisters about their childhood in Poland and the tragic deportations they endured during WW2.
Still, all this was very slow moving and I don’t think I would ever have had the courage to leave the business. Fate decided to help me. The business went into administration in 2002, propelling me out of the family business and into the new world of finding a career. I was forty-three years old.
Building a Purposeful Life
It was a shock to be out in the cold but for the first time in my life I had some real ideas about what I wanted to do as a fulfilling and deeply connected working life. Writing came into it; so did helping family businesses; the politics aspect didn’t fit so I walked away from it, though my concern for the world remains to this day; my understanding of my Polish heritage grew apace. Most of all, though, it was mindfulness that gave me the understanding and the practical tools to settle my mind and help me slowly but surely drive forward in a new, fully satisfying direction.
Within a decade I had not only been a leader of a political party with representation at local and national level, but I had started helping family businesses deal with their inevitable issues; I had published my first volume of poetry and delivered well-received readings from it, and it won an award in the USA; I delivered talks about my father’s early life in dozens of venues; I spoke about the issues our family faced in our family business; and I taught mindfulness to university students, to primary school children, to prisoners in the highest security prisons in Scotland. And I was getting paid to do these things.
It wasn’t perfect but it was so much more fulfilling, so much more “me” than anything I had done before.
A Seed is Planted: The Scottish Family Business Association
In 2005 my friend and sometime co-attendee at the Centre for Family Enterprise, George Stevenson, came up with the idea of a kind of trade association for family businesses, and our mutual friend, Ken McCracken suggested that I could run it. So I set it up and launched the Scottish Family Business as a registered charity Association the following year. I did so on a part-time basis so that I could continue my other strands of work.
Much of this work was uplifting, helping families in business understand the issues they would be facing one day, and soothing them with the realisation that they were not alone in their challenging times. But some of it I didn’t like – the sycophantic approach I needed to take as if all family businesses were beacons of values and propriety, which isn’t the case.
The Unexpected Connection: Meeting Russ
Then seven years ago I received an email from someone I didn’t know. Russ Haworth was his name. Russ had just started out on his new career as a family business consultant and a podcaster on the subject. I was recommended to Russ by another family business advisor and I did a podcast episode for him on the subject of mindfulness and family business. Up until that point I had kept the two subjects separate even though I instinctively used mindfulness in my work with families in business.
Russ and I hit it off. Soon afterwards we agreed to do two other podcast series. One was about my life in family business, the other about the deeper ways that mindfulness can fit within and help family businesses. We arranged to meet online every Friday because we sensed we could do something new, innovative, and practice sharing our linked expertise. At these meetings we kept each other informed of news and ideas, and we slowly started to get a feel for how we could work together as well as help each other.
The Team Grows: Enter Alec
A few years later, in 2022, Russ was contacted by a young family business director, Alec Broadhurst, who, perhaps a little like me decades earlier, was trying to clarify his own future direction and options. Russ referred him to me and I subsequently mentored Alec. It quickly became clear to me that Alec brought a related but unique perspective to the matters that Russ and I were exploring every week.
Creating The Path
A year later, with Alec now seeing great potential in working to help fellow family businesses, and having been trained in mindfulness by me, we came up with the idea of a course that would combine understanding mindfulness and its effectiveness at helping people in family businesses. From that point, November 2023, we have worked on honing this concept. Good things take time.
Now, in June 2025, we are ready to launch.
A Path Worth Sharing
For me personally it has been a very long path, but with our new venture, The Path, I really feel that this fits my personal need for meaningful and purposeful work, which is my measure of whether something should be done or not.
Russ and Alec feel the same. The Path will bring significant clarity and insight to those who do the course. Of this we are certain. We believe that doing this course will help others find their own true path and move along it in a much faster and more effective way than I had to do to find mine.
Martin Stepek
19 May 2025
