Ex-con life coach says psychopathy fueled his $25M

Lewis Raymond Taylor, who says he is a psychopath and was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder as a teenager, built an online life coaching education business valued at $25 million. After years of prison sentences for crimes including drug dealing an

Lewis Raymond Taylor remembers the moment the business and the biography stopped lining up.

For years, he says, he lived by a harsh internal script. Then. while he was serving time in prison. a friend pointed him to two photos of him taken outside the same courthouse seven years apart with the caption: “Nothing changes.” Taylor told this story with the blunt clarity of someone who believes in consequences.

In his cell, he said he stared at his reflection in a scratched piece of metal and realized something he still repeats now: “I realized I was the problem,” he said. “But I’m also the solution.”

Today, Taylor helps aspiring life coaches through The Coaching Masters, an online education company he co-founded. The business is valued at $25 million and has 15,000 students across 87 countries.

He will also be the first to say his success came from traits he describes as psychopathic—and from a past he insists he has to keep working to understand.

Before entrepreneurship, there were multiple prison sentences. Taylor served time for crimes ranging from shoplifting and vandalism to drug dealing and violent assault.

He attributes his behavior to what he describes as an emotionally difficult childhood, abuse, and underlying psychopathic traits. He says there is no formal diagnosis for psychopathy in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. but he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder as a teenager—an overlap he says includes lack of remorse. impulsivity. low fear. and emotional detachment.

“I’ve always displayed every single symptom,” Taylor said. “I still display it now, but I’ve been able to channel it.”

He and his co-founder, Liam James Collins, built The Coaching Masters as a place to teach others how to coach—and how to execute.

Taylor says his early life in Kings Langley, England, set the stage. He says he was expelled from secondary school and grew up in a home where his father frequently told him he would never amount to anything. He also describes an emotionally abusive relationship with his father.

By his late teens and early 20s, Taylor says he became addicted to cocaine and alcohol, fighting often, and leaning into a reputation for being reckless and dangerous.

“When I was fighting, I was fighting to hurt, to win, to feel powerful,” he said.

In 2014, the pattern hardened into a clear breaking point. Taylor says he punched a man during an altercation, leaving the victim with a brain hemorrhage and in a coma for several days. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for grievous bodily harm and served nine months behind bars.

After the conviction, rehabilitation and education became part of his new routine. Taylor said he attended rehabilitation programs and studied math and English. A prison tutor convinced him he was capable of going to university, encouraging him to complete an access course where he earned top marks.

Soon after leaving prison, he began volunteering in recovery programs.

What surprised Taylor, he said, was not simply that his criminal behavior had stopped—but that the traits tied to his diagnosis were still there.

“A lot of people ask me how I’m successful,” Taylor said. “I just figure out what I want to do and then I make a plan of one, two, three, and then I take steps one, two, and three.”

He believes emotional detachment lets him make decisions without fear, insecurity, embarrassment, or self-doubt slowing him down. While he says many people get overwhelmed by uncertainty, he can focus on execution.

He also reframes other traits that outsiders might see differently.

What some might call manipulation, Taylor says he considers persuasion. “I am very manipulative, but to help someone,” he said. “I will persuade you to think better about yourself and live your life beyond your wildest dreams.”

What some might call impulsiveness, he says he treats as a willingness to take risks. “My lack of fear enables me to not be burdened by it.”

And what some might view as emotional bluntness, he describes as strategic thinking under pressure. “I seem to be very methodical and strategic in my way of kind of taking very simple steps one after another with no emotional burden pulling me back,” he added.

But Taylor does not present the story as a simple transformation.

He acknowledges the traits that fuel his drive can strain his leadership. He becomes frustrated with employees who, in his view, do not see solutions as quickly as he does. He describes himself as a more directive leader than a nurturing manager.

“I don’t have much of a tolerance to support them emotionally from that real strong leadership perspective,” he said, adding that, “I become more of a dictator sort of leadership style.”

Even after years of therapy, rehabilitation, and self-reflection, Taylor says he still doesn’t know exactly how much of his personality is rooted in biology and how much was shaped by upbringing.

Whatever the origin, he rejects the idea that those traits must determine someone’s future.

“The things you’ve done are not the person you are,” Taylor said. “Your identity is something that can mold and adapt and change.”

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