The first time Dominic Forth surfaced from under the raft, he was calm.
He’d swum the Alcatraz race a few months earlier. He’d hiked volcanoes. He’d done whitewater before, in New Zealand. The Zambezi was moving fast, so his first thought was simple: swim with the river and outswim the raft.
It didn’t work. The raft had folded around him. He went back under.
The second time he came up, something changed. Not panic. Clarity. “I knew exactly what I had to do. I was swimming with the current and it wasn’t working. I’ve got to fight like hell and swim the opposite direction and break free.”
Knowing it was the easy part. Doing it, underwater, blind, with a collapsing raft on top of him and the river roaring like thunder in his ears, was something else. “I’m running out of oxygen. I don’t have a fourth attempt in me. I cannot do this one more time.”
He got to the edge. Got the raft off. Came up into complete silence.
Three and a half, maybe four minutes. That’s how long it took. And it would take him nearly a decade to act on what he understood in those four minutes, which is the part of the story that matters most for anyone who has ever known exactly what they should do and not done it.
Class V, No Guidance, a Hissing Raft
Dominic and his wife were on their honeymoon. They’d done a safari in South Africa and finished at the Zambezi River, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, where the falls are. Rafting was meant to be the adrenaline finale.
The warning signs were there before the raft touched water. A friend’s wife heard hissing from the raft and tried to get the guide’s attention as they pushed off. He wasn’t listening. Once on the river, the guide gave no direction. The other rafts were being steered through specific lines. Theirs wasn’t.
They hit the first rapid and the side of the raft crumpled. Some people were thrown clear. Dominic went under and stayed under.
“I never thought something as simple as water could kill me. It just never appeared, and so quickly.” He’d always imagined a near-death experience as an endurance event: an avalanche, a broken leg, a week of foraging and flares. Not four minutes.
Calm, Clarity, Courage
Dominic has replayed those minutes many times since, and he’s pulled a three-step sequence out of them that he now calls the Zambezi Survival Mindset. Calm. Clarity. Courage. In that order.
The calm wasn’t a choice. It came from preparation he didn’t know he was doing. “Because I’d swum Alcatraz a few months before, I felt like, I’ve got this. If I can swim Alcatraz, I can get out of this.” A harder thing you’ve already survived makes the current thing survivable. Your body remembers even when you don’t.
The clarity came second, and only because he was calm enough to receive it. “If you’re not calm and you’re stressed, you can’t make good decisions. You can’t get to that sense of clarity.”
The courage was the differentiator. “Knowing what to do and actually doing it is really challenging. The courage, actually being able to execute, that was what really made the difference.”
He’s careful to say this is an extreme case. But he argues, convincingly, that the same three steps run in a boardroom, a conflict at work, or a startup that’s about to miss payroll. The stakes are lower. The sequence is identical. And most people who fail don’t fail at step one or two.
What a Founder’s Version Looks Like
Dominic works with startup founders, and he sees the same pattern without the water.
One founder described his company as a train about to go off the tracks. He knew the cash position. He knew the expenses coming. He could see the brakes weren’t going to work. Dominic asked what he did. “We just had to sell our way out of it. That train isn’t going to stop. So we had to keep selling and keep selling.” They got out.
Jana has been in that seat, with a half-million-dollar payroll to make and not enough in the bank. The temptation is to do something reactive: fire the bottom performers, cut deep, make the panic go away. “You have to make the best decision based on the information you have at hand,” she says, “not clouded by fear or reactionary feelings.”
That’s the calm step, and it’s not a personality trait. It’s physiology.
Calm Is a Skill With a Technique
Dominic didn’t expect to be calm under the raft, so afterward he went looking for why, and for how to reproduce it on purpose.
He landed on an ancient yoga practice, nadi shodhana, or alternate-nostril breathing. His version: in through the left nostril for six seconds, hold for six, out through the right for eight. Five or six cycles before a big meeting or a stage. Some people do twenty or thirty. He finds a handful is enough to center him.
“It’s easy to say to someone, just be calm. If you’re calm, you’ll be fine. So it’s like, how can I be calm?” His answer is holistic and unglamorous: the breathing, exercise in the morning, less caffeine, a sport that gives the fight-or-flight response somewhere to go. He recently cut sugar, dairy, and alcohol and dropped twelve pounds in two weeks, mostly from the sugar. Jana pushed back, fairly: plenty of people cut alcohol and notice nothing. Dominic’s point is broader than any one variable. Founders abuse their bodies with long hours, caffeine, no sleep, processed food, and then wonder why they can’t think clearly at 4 p.m. on a bad day.
He’s not immune. A vendor recently watched him wind himself up over a shipping delay and said: Dominic, you’re not following your own advice. Go do your breathing. He did.
Ten Years of Calm and Clarity Without Courage
Here is the uncomfortable center of the story.
Dominic came out of the Zambezi with a clear realization. “I was only under probably less than four minutes, but you realize how fragile life is. I realized that my stories would have ultimately been lost.”
He’d spent ten to fifteen years in media by then: journalism in the UK, training at the BBC, a master’s in the US, then NBC in Kansas City, Hearst in Tampa Bay, the number one station in San Francisco, a rebuild in Tulsa that took a station from fourth to neck-and-neck for first, and NBC in Denver. From there he moved into research and strategy, consulting to over forty TV stations, sitting in focus groups in city after city, listening to people tell their stories.
And he’d lost his own. His mother died suddenly when he was twenty-four, a fall at home. His brother died three years later after a car accident. A later accident left his father disabled and unable to communicate. “I’d lost all this family history. But we’re just one family. Think of all the other families out there.”
So the mission was clear on the riverbank: help people tell their stories, and tell his own. “The graveyard is one of the most expensive pieces of real estate, because there goes all the untold stories, all the unfinished books, the million-dollar business ideas that get buried.”
He had calm. He had clarity. He did not start the business for the better part of a decade.
“We all live with the two-week paycheck, don’t we? It’s comforting, but it also prevents you from taking this risk.” And underneath that, imposter syndrome. “I never felt like I could run my own company. How would I even know where to begin?”
Christopher Quigley, on an earlier episode, came out of a brain-stem stroke and built an organization within eighteen months. Dominic’s story is the more common one. Most people who get a wave of clarity from a brush with death go back to work on Monday. The clarity is real. It just isn’t sufficient.
The Powder Keg
What finally moved him wasn’t a bigger realization. It was three practical pressures arriving at once.
First, COVID. Everything went remote and his productivity, in his words, went through the roof. He could be in four cities in one day. That’s how the portfolio grew to forty stations. Then the pandemic subsided and the stations wanted their consultants back on planes. “Didn’t we just prove this works more effectively remote?” They were paying for consultants; they wanted them in the room. He understood. He also had a two-year-old daughter, and he’d already lived the version where he came home after four days and she didn’t know who he was.
Second, a friend with a book coming out on psychedelics. No station wanted to touch it; aren’t psychedelics illegal? The book argued that certain kinds aren’t, and that the research on PTSD and anxiety was serious. The friend just needed someone who could explain that to producers. Dominic had producers’ numbers all over the country. He got him booked on three stations. The friend said: this is amazing. You should build a business around this. Have you ever thought about that?
“Actually, yes. I actually have.”
Third, and this is the part he’s honest about, that sentence from a friend was the courage step. “I had the calm demeanor, I had the clarity, but I didn’t have the courage. It almost took that moment where he said, you should build a business around this. That was the external validation I needed.”
He wishes it had come sooner. “There’s so many lessons you learn in business that you have to go through. I almost wish I’d learned these lessons in my twenties. You’re going to have to learn them anyway. It’s hard for everybody. So why not do the hard things now so you can have easier times later?”
That’s the same math Art Morrison ran from a different angle: the price of regret is higher than the price of failure. Dominic paid it in years, not dollars.
Four Yes, Two Maybe, Four No
Once he decided, he did a small piece of validation that every founder will recognize, and that turned out to be almost useless in the way founders’ validation usually is.
The offer was direct access to producers. Traditional PR firms pitch by email and hope. Dominic could call a producer and ask what she thought. He did exactly that for a client with a payment app for teenagers: the producer said one of her hosts had two teenage boys and no idea what to do with them over the summer, and could interview the founder herself. That’s the product. Relationships, not distribution lists.
He surveyed ten people in his entrepreneur organization. Four yes, two maybe, four no. “Almost 60% of people want this. This is going to be awesome.”
He launched in October, really November once everything was running. Terrible time of year. Everyone who’d said yes said, in December, now’s not a good time. January, nothing. February, nothing. The next sale came in March.
“Out of those ten people, those four people never came on as clients, by the way.”
The survey didn’t validate the business. It validated his decision to start, which is a different thing and, in hindsight, the only thing it could do. The actual validation was four months of finding the right people for the offer, one at a time.
“You Could Just Quit and Go Back”
He’d always worked for big names: Fox, NBC. The name carried weight even when the four-fifteen meeting was mandatory and his time wasn’t his own. Running his own company gave him freedom and cost him status. “The amount of respect really dropped.”
He describes the crabs-in-a-bucket effect: people quietly not wanting you to succeed, because if you do, what does it say about them? And at home, his wife wanted stability. He’d taken the leap partly for the family, to stop taking calls at 8 p.m. across four time zones while trying to get the kids to bed. But the early days were hard, and one night she said what a reasonable person would say. You could just quit and go back to your old job.
“I was expecting her to say, no, you’ve got this, you’re a champion. And she’s like, well, you could just quit. And that was fuel for me. No chance.”
A couple of weeks later a friend visiting from Texas asked how revenue was going. Dominic told him: they’d hit half a million quickly, and taken eighteen months to reach a million, and he felt like a failure because he was working so hard and everyone around him was shrugging. The friend stopped him. It took me three years to be cash-flow positive. You did what in eighteen months?
That conversation changed who Dominic listened to. “I need to get in some mastermind groups, get better mentorship, get people who are walking the same path, and not listen to the next-door neighbor or someone that doesn’t understand media and business.” Drea Lynn reached the same conclusion from the other side of a franchise: the person you need to talk to is the one who has crossed the same gap. A neighbor’s opinion of your first year is a data point about the neighbor.
The Big Guys Don’t Show Up
Two more things he wants founders to hear, because nobody told him.
Chase Bank turned him down for payment processing because his business was too new. He’d been a customer for eight years. “No, but your business.” The institutions you think will help you when you start don’t, and some of the people who offer partnerships are there to take your clients. He knows because his clients have called to tell him: this happened, and by the way, we’re loyal to you.
And the other side of the same coin, which he saves for the end. The people who do show up come out of the shadows over time, and they’re not the ones you expected.
Fear Into Fuel, Then Into Focus
Jana asked what was at stake when he finally jumped. His answer isn’t about the downside. It’s about what he did with the fear.
“There’s a huge fear because I don’t have the client retainers, the book of business, any of that. But that’s in the future. The fear I had of the future is something I can’t control. Focus is what I needed. I can only control the next hour, the next day, the next week. If I focus on what I do today and tomorrow, that’s going to dispel the fear, because the fear may never happen.”
Jana’s summary, which he accepted: the fear wasn’t “can I do this.” It was “will it work.” And the antidote to that fear is action, because action is what produces outcomes.
Then the discipline that follows. Shiny objects. Other businesses that look easier. “Then you realize, wait, there are no shortcuts. Everything’s hard. It may look easy because someone else put six years into that, and here was me at six months, comparing myself to someone five and a half years ahead of me.” Head down. Do the hard things. Earn the easier days.
This is the difference between the clarity step and the courage step in practice. Clarity tells you what to do. Courage does it today, without waiting for the fear to leave first. Indecision will kill you not because you don’t know the answer but because you keep asking the question.
The Principle: It’s Not the Client. It’s the Cause.
Asked for the first principle behind leaving corporate, Dominic doesn’t give a business answer.
“If you always put other people first, help people get what they want, you’ll ultimately get what you want. But you have to do it from an altruistic perspective. For me, it’s not helping promote the client that has the app to help children with mathematics. It’s about helping the children with the mathematics.”
That was already the instinct on the riverbank: not “I should tell stories” but “other people’s stories are being lost, and I can do something about it.” The research job served forty stations and six to eight projects each. Thought Leaders America could serve causes globally. Two weeks before this recording his team was covering an Ebola outbreak, a hantavirus case on a cruise ship, hospice nurse shortages, math apps for struggling K-12 students, homelessness and affordable housing. “Sometimes all of this is in one week. I say to my team, you should be really proud.”
Nobody sees the beginning. That’s fine. The beginning wasn’t the point.
What Do You Truly Want, and What Will You Pay?
Dominic’s advice for anyone reconsidering their trajectory starts with a question, not a plan.
“Start with heart. What is it that you truly want? Because time only gets faster as you get older. It just accelerates away. And then, what is the cost you’re willing to pay to get there?”
Then the packing joke, which is also a warning. When you pack for a trip, take half as many clothes and twice as much money. Same for a business: there will be expenses you didn’t imagine. Be prepared. And still go, because for Dominic, the reward is the thing he named as the reason for leaving in the first place: “Nothing is more important than being able to control my day. If I have a sick daughter or a school function, I’m in complete control. Nobody owns my time.” Jana’s definition of success is the same word. Flexibility.
“It’s not easy. It looks easy. You see everybody else’s highlight reel.”
The Courage to Get on the Train
The one thing Dominic wants to leave with the audience is the step he was missing for ten years.
“Having the courage to pursue that life you really feel you’re capable of. And the best thing is, there’s people all around you that will come out of the shadows to help support you. You don’t see it at first. Often you see the negative.”
Then the image he closes on. Life as a train ride. Some people are on board at the start and get off at the first stop, and that’s okay. At the next stop, more people get on. Some ride one leg. Some ride the whole way. “As long as you’re aligned with who you are and the destination of where you’re going, you wake up in the morning knowing you’re on the right tracks, you’ve got the right people on board, and even though it’s going to be hard work, when you get to that destination it’s going to be worth it.”
“But you’ve got to have the courage to get on the train.”
Under the Zambezi, he found the courage on the third attempt because there wasn’t going to be a fourth. On dry land, it took a friend saying five words for the same thing to kick in. The framework he teaches now exists to close that gap for other people, so calm and clarity don’t sit unused for a decade waiting on permission.
You already know what you’d do if there were no fourth attempt. That’s the clarity. The question is whether you’ll do it while there still is one.
Stay unstoppable.
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Key Takeaways
Calm, clarity, courage, in that order, and most people don’t fail at the first two. Dominic had calm within seconds and clarity on the second surfacing. The courage to execute is what got him out of the river, and it’s what took ten years to show up in his career.
Calm is physiology, not personality. Breathing (his version: six in, six hold, eight out, alternating nostrils), sleep, exercise, less caffeine, cleaner food. You can’t reach clarity while stressed, and you can’t will yourself calm without a technique.
Preparation you don’t know is preparation still counts. Alcatraz made the Zambezi survivable. The hardest thing you’ve already done sets the ceiling on what feels impossible.
Clarity is not sufficient. Dominic knew his mission on the riverbank and stayed on the two-week paycheck for the better part of a decade. A realization changes nothing until something forces the courage step.
Courage often arrives as external validation, and it’s worth going looking for. One friend saying “you should build a business around this” did what ten years of internal knowing couldn’t.
Founder validation validates the founder, not the business. Four of ten said yes. None became clients. The first real sale took four months of finding the right fit.
Fear about the future isn’t controllable, so convert it into focus on the next hour, day, and week. Action dispels fear because action produces outcomes. And there are no shortcuts; the business that looks easy is someone else’s year six.
Choose who you listen to. A neighbor’s read on your first year is noise. A founder who took three years to cash-flow positive can tell you eighteen months to a million is not failure.
About Our Guest
Dominic Forth is the CEO of Thought Leaders America, a national media and PR agency that helps founders, CEOs, and innovators build credibility through strategic media exposure, investor access, and storytelling. A UK-trained journalist who studied at the BBC before moving to the United States, he spent more than a decade in American broadcast media, including roles with NBC affiliates in Kansas City and Denver, Hearst in Tampa Bay, and the top-rated station in San Francisco, before leading a research and strategy practice serving more than forty TV stations. A near-fatal rafting accident on the Zambezi River became the foundation of his Zambezi Survival Mindset, a framework for calm, clarity, and courage under pressure that he now applies to leadership and entrepreneurship. He is an Ironman finisher and marathoner, and publishes the Authority Brief newsletter on media, speaking, and storytelling.
Connect with Dominic: ThoughtLeadersAmerica.com · LinkedIn · The Authority Brief
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Dominic Forth? Dominic Forth is the CEO of Thought Leaders America, a media and PR agency that secures broadcast and press coverage for founders, CEOs, and mission-driven organizations. A former broadcast journalist and media research consultant who worked with NBC, Hearst, and more than forty TV stations, he developed the Zambezi Survival Mindset after nearly drowning in a rafting accident on his honeymoon.
What is the Zambezi Survival Mindset? It’s Dominic Forth’s three-step framework for acting under extreme pressure: calm, then clarity, then courage. Calm is a physiological state you can train through breathing and lifestyle. Clarity is the decision that becomes visible once you’re calm. Courage is executing that decision before the fear has gone. He derived it from the sequence he experienced trapped under a collapsed raft in Class V rapids, and applies it to founders facing cash crises, conflict, and high-stakes decisions.
What is the breathing technique Dominic Forth uses to stay calm? Alternate-nostril breathing, from the yoga practice nadi shodhana. His version: inhale through one nostril for six seconds, hold for six, exhale through the other nostril for eight, and repeat five or six cycles before a high-pressure moment such as a major meeting or speaking on stage.
Why do people who know what they should do fail to act? In Dominic’s account, because clarity and courage are different steps. He knew his mission after the Zambezi and stayed in salaried roles for close to ten years, held by the comfort of a regular paycheck and by imposter syndrome. What finally moved him was a combination of practical pressure (post-COVID travel demands, a young daughter at home) and external validation from a friend who told him to build a business around what he’d just done.
How do you turn fear into fuel as a founder? Dominic’s approach is to separate fear about the future, which you can’t control, from focus on the next hour, day, and week, which you can. Action on the near term dispels fear because it produces outcomes, and the feared future often never arrives. He also warns against comparing your month six to someone else’s year six; every business that looks easy is hard, and there are no shortcuts.
How long did it take Thought Leaders America to get its first clients? Dominic launched in October and November, and after a December of “not a good time,” made his next sale in March, roughly four months later. Of the ten entrepreneurs he surveyed before launch, four said yes and none became clients. The company reached half a million in revenue quickly and a million in about eighteen months.
