If you’re reading this, you probably know the feeling.
Treatment is done. The oncologist cleared you. You’re back at the desk, back leading the team, back functioning at a level that makes everyone around you think you’re fine.
But the body being back is not the same as the person being back.
That gap — between medically cleared and actually rebuilt — is what nobody prepares you for. The oncologists discharge you. The therapists stabilise you. And then you’re on your own with the hardest part: reconstructing the identity that the crisis erased.
I built a system for that. Not in a lecture hall. During 8 months of chemotherapy, tested across 330km of open water.
This page is my story. Read it as a blueprint — not a biography.
I dropped out of school and went all-in on what mattered to me: water polo. Not because I was reckless. Because I had a target, and I refused to let the wrong environment slow me down.
After military service I moved to Innsbruck with one bag and one goal. What followed was years of building — simultaneously.
Construction worker by day. Evening school by night. Water polo training after a full shift. Maths textbooks at 23:00 with burning eyes and a sore back — not because it was easy, but because I’d decided.
That stubbornness earned me a law degree from the University of Innsbruck, a career in corporate leadership, and nine national water polo titles.
I became a husband. A father of five.
I was exactly where I had fought to be. Then the call came.
When Life Knocks You Down, Set a New Goal
The diagnosis arrived in March 2016. Eleven days later I married the woman I love. Two days after that, chemotherapy began.
Three of the most significant moments of my life, compressed into thirteen days.
I went from leading and training at Bundesliga level — to a body that could barely walk 500 metres. But the physical loss was almost the easier part.
The harder part: the version of me I had built — the athlete, the leader, the man who always found a way — went quiet. Not on pause. Gone.
Nobody around me knew how to talk about that. They spoke about treatment, about fighting. Nobody spoke about the grief of losing the identity you’d spent your whole life constructing. The loss of not recognising yourself in the mirror — not because of how you look, but because of who isn’t there anymore.
I had to work that out without a system. So I built one.
During treatment, I set a goal that most people thought was irrational: win my 10th national water polo title — not despite cancer, but alongside it.
Not because the trophy mattered. Because I needed a direction that had nothing to do with the illness. A Why that was outside the therapy, outside the hospital, outside the question of whether I would survive.
I stood on that podium in June 2017. Not as a patient. As an athlete who had also survived cancer — which is a very different thing.
What followed was years of testing what the rebuilt identity could actually do — different sports, a trail marathon, and eventually the decision that defined everything: swim Lake Constance. All 65km of it. Non-stop. Without a wetsuit.
That decision — and the system I’d been refining since 2016 — is what this entire project is built on.
Over time I refined what I learned into the SWIM framework — the backbone of my book ‘Against the Current’:
S — Self-Leadership: Know your values and identity when the external ones disappear.
W — Why: Build a why that outlasts the days when motivation fails.
I — Inner Belief: Find steadiness in the middle of uncertainty — not passive hope, active certainty.
M — Momentum Together: 5% capacity is still 100% of what you have. Use it.
This isn’t motivation. It’s an operational system built inside a crisis, tested in extreme conditions, and designed for people who are past the worst of it — and have not yet rebuilt the person.
I needed to know the system actually worked — not just in a hospital, but at the edge of what a human body can do.
So I started The Alpine Seven: seven complete crossings of Alpine lakes across Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Over 330km total.
I’m still a manager. I train before and after work.
Lake Attersee — brutal elbow pain two and a half hours in. I kept going.
Lake Constance — 65km, non-stop. First Austrian ever. 6th person on earth.
Wörthersee — after a full week of gastroenteritis. I started anyway.
Still to come: Lago Maggiore (66km — 2nd person ever), Lake Lucerne (39km), Lago di Garda (59km — 2nd person ever), and Lake Leman in Geneva (73km) — the finale.
These details aren’t about toughness. They’re about what the system allows you to do when conditions are never perfect — because they never are.
That’s what 5% capacity, applied consistently, produces.
I’m not a theorist. Everything I teach I’ve lived, then studied, then tested in extreme conditions.
Education
Law & order
Coaching & Human Systems
Performance & Resiliance
Mindset & Psychology
This is for high performers — managers, leaders, competitive athletes — who have been through a serious health crisis and are now on the other side of treatment.
Specifically: people who are medically cleared, professionally functional, and personally lost. People who are back at work, back delivering, back showing up — but doing it from inside an identity that no longer fits.
This is not for people still in active treatment. This is not therapy or crisis support. If you are still in the medical system and need stabilisation, please reach out to the appropriate professional support — and come back here when you are ready.
The SWIM system is the rebuild that comes after the recovery. It requires enough functioning to engage with structured work. Most people find it most useful 3–18 months after being cleared — when the medical chapter is closed and the identity chapter is still unwritten.
I write and work with people who are on the other side of the diagnosis — cleared, functional, and in the process of rebuilding something nobody around them fully understands.
Not motivation. Not inspiration. An operational system for the specific work of putting yourself back together after something real took you apart.
If that’s where you are, I’d be glad to have you along.
