FORMER railway worker and Thai-boxing champion, Rich Cadden, has been going to Thailand twice a year for the past 14 years learning from the performance of elite Thai-boxers and bringing those skills back to the UK.

Now he’s using the skills of expert communicators to pass on their knowledge through his coaching business, Star Performance Mind Coaching.

Rich, twice Thai-boxing world champion, set up the business in August 2009 to help sports people and business people reach their potential through Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and other behavioural techniques.

The 33-year-old from Acomb, who also used to play professional rugby for York RLFC, was made redundant in May 2009 from his job as a technical engineer for FastLine.

This pushed him into pursuing another interest, he said. “I have always been interested in learning styles and psychology and things like that.

“I learned at the railways that people had different communication styles and different learning styles. It directed me towards the NLP course and it was like the missing piece of the jigsaw.”

Rich completed his qualifications in August and is going through masters training to increase the depth of his work, adding timeline therapy and hypnosis techniques to his belt.

He says mental preparation techniques and single-minded determination he learned in Thailand have helped him in his career and he wants to pass this on to others.

“I’m fighting top European and international-level competitors, who are professional full-time fighters and I fit in training around my normal working day. I used the techniques and it shows that the transition between the physical game in Thai-boxing and the mental approach is pivotal.”

Rich Cadden fights for Bad Company Gym in Leeds and also runs his own Thai-boxing gym in York, called Chokdee Muay Thai.