Prem stood in front of 150 Year 9 boys and held their attention from the first sentence to the last. What struck us most was the structure — this wasn't a motivational chat, it was a genuine framework the boys could use immediately. Several form tutors told us pupils were still referencing "the toolkit" weeks later in PSHE lessons. Exactly the kind of mental health input we want more of in schools.
We brought Prem in expecting a feel-good session. What we got was a working session that actually changed how the team operates. Three weeks on, "name the input" has become a genuine phrase in our Monday meetings. If you want a workshop people actually use afterwards rather than forget by Friday — book him.
Prem didn't just deliver his usual talk and hope it landed — he adapted every tool for our students. Slower pace, more visuals, more repetition, real warmth throughout. Two of our most reluctant communicators stayed back afterwards just to ask questions, which almost never happens. This is what genuine inclusion in mental health education actually looks like.
Young people are being handed a mental health diagnosis instead of a toolkit. The numbers demand a different response.
Mainstream media fixates on the output: relentless coverage of bad mental health, crisis statistics, breakdown stories — a generation defined by what's going wrong with it, with little guide on the solution. The Stamina Club exists to change the input — because if the output we're all fighting for is better mental health, the only way there is by changing what goes in.
The mind is the strongest muscle in the human body — and the one nobody ever taught you how to train. Neuroplasticity is the brain's proven ability to rewire itself, and The Stamina Club exists to put that science to work: reinforcing the mind, repetition by repetition, until it's stronger, steadier, and harder to break.
We help people build a metaphorical toolkit — so when life's highs and lows arrive, they've already got it in their back pocket, ready to deal with whatever's in front of them.
That might be the lows: exam stress, bullying, the weight of school, the pressure of university, the early-career grind. Whatever the struggle, for a child, a teenager, a student, or a young professional — this scientifically backed toolkit is built to help.
The same toolkit works in reverse, too. Nothing worth achieving comes easy — and whatever you're building towards, this is what gets you there in one piece, not just in survival mode.
It is learnable. It is trainable. And once you build it, no one can ever take it from you.
Not trends. Not fads. Not bullshit.
Tap "THE SCIENCE" for evidence.
Assemblies, PSHE sessions, exam-season intensives, staff CPD and bespoke programmes for SEND and neurodivergent cohorts.
From freshers' week to finals — the transition moments where young people need this most.
Graduate schemes, apprenticeships and early-career programmes. Invest in people before they burn out.
Universally accessible e-Training. A digital platform — free or low-cost, self-paced and designed with neurodivergent learners in mind.
Think of it as your prehab. You don't wait until your body breaks down to start taking care of it — so why wait until your mind does? The Stamina Club hands you the tools before the storm hits, so when life comes for you, you're already ready.
The Stamina Club isn't a quick fix and it isn't a cure. It's a commitment to yourself — a decision to face the mental health crisis of our generation head on, with real tools, real community, and a movement that is done pretending everything is fine.
The deep end, for me, was university — economics, first year, University College London. Towards the end of that year I realised I was entering a very deep pit. It was the first time I'd ever felt truly overwhelmed: the negativity, the anxiety, the depression. I had no idea, before that point, about mental health, or what could go wrong with it. It was eye-opening, and it was the start of my Mental Stamina journey.
And here's the part that matters most: I had no toolkit. No framework. Nothing to reach for. That absence is exactly what I spent 2018 to 2020 building — through therapy, CBT, and then a long stretch of self-directed study, learning and testing the tools that now make up The Stamina Club. I'm still practising them today, not just for the storms, but for the ordinary, day-to-day challenges life keeps bringing.
I spent years proving my worth through traditional measures — the right university, the right qualification, the right firm. I achieved them all. And none of it touched the thing I actually needed to build: the Mental Stamina to sustain a meaningful life.
Before I built a method for Mental Stamina, I had to find a way through. This is not a story of someone who had, or has, it figured out. It is a story of someone who hit bottom, recognised it, and chose to build something better.
My grandparents and parents moved across continents to build a life — India, East Africa, England — carrying very little except the determination to give the next generation more than they had. My father grew up on a council estate. His early jobs were the kind nobody glamorises: cleaning toilets at Harrods, working in a sweet shop, standing behind the counter of a dry cleaners. That's the foundation everything else was built on.
What wasn't talked about, in those years, was what was happening underneath. Bipolar disorder, on my mother's side, in an uncle and a grandmother. Depression, on my father's side, in a grandmother. Alcoholism, in an uncle and a grandfather. At the time, in Indian culture especially, mental health wasn't just under-discussed — it was taboo, something to manage quietly and never name. I spent ten years living with and caring for my grandmother, which is where I first learned, up close and without a textbook, what Alzheimer's, dementia, and anxiety actually do to a person and the people around them.
I didn't understand it then as a pattern. I understand it now. A family that crossed oceans to build something better was, generation after generation, quietly carrying a mental health burden nobody had given them language for, let alone a way to train against it.
Since founding The Stamina Club, I've spoken to hundreds of families about their own mental health — in keynotes, in workshops, in one-to-one conversations after the room has emptied out. The pattern repeats almost everywhere I go. What's missing isn't awareness — it's architecture. A blueprint people can actually follow, the way you'd follow a training plan for the body, built for the mind. That's not a metaphor for me. That's the entire reason The Stamina Club exists.
Days where getting out of bed felt like a physical impossibility. The kind of low that makes everything feel permanent.
An obsessive, hyperactive mind that never switched off — working against me until I learned to work with it.
I have been to that place. I say that not for shock value but because it matters that the person building the architecture has needed it. If you're struggling right now: Samaritans — 116 123 (free, 24/7) · Shout — text 85258
Chronic comparison, deep insecurity, a constant feeling of not being enough despite external achievements stacking up.
When the pain got loud, I leaned into things that made it louder: surface-level, external quick fixes.
Eventually, I became acutely aware that something had to change. Not just aware — committed. That decision is where The Stamina Club was born.
BBC News — "Swimmer to cross English Channel"
Local press feature — "Channel deep, mountain high"
Old Merchant Taylors newsletter — "Project Stamina: from MTS to the English Channel"
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