Michael Garner

Michael has two mottos he lives by. The first is the name of his property, an organic farm located in Hin Lek Fai, which is called Medah, an acronym for “Make every day a holiday”.  The second is an exhortation to take personal control of your life, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me”. What Mr Mike Garner does best is arguably his life-coaching, which is based on empowering people to help themselves.

The young Michael was a bit of a daydreamer, who although he had impeccable behaviour at school, never managed to impress his teachers with his dedication to his studies. That young man would never have imagined, even in his wildest dreams, that he would find himself married to a Thai woman and enjoying the wonders of life in Hua Hin.  Indeed, unlike most Western men married to Thai women, Michael had not travelled to Thailand before his honeymoon in 2001, after meeting his wife while working in London.  He built his first Thai home in 2003, in his wife Chayar’s home province of Udon Thani.  The pair, now married 21 years, later lived in Chiang Rai for a number of years before buying their sizeable piece of land in Hin Lek Fai in 2015 and moving to the property, buildings still under construction, in 2017. Michael felt the area’s name, which means “earth, metal, fire” in English augured well for the numerous projects he was proposing to undertake. What Michael most likes about the local area is that people are relaxed, whether they are Thai or farang, and that translates into the friendly demeanour they display in their daily lives. If only the airport in Hua Hin were to host daily flights to more destinations, Hua Hin would be the perfect place for Michael and his family to live.

Michael’s life began half a world away in Manchester, England, and like the true Manchester lad that he is, Michael still regularly hankers after the full English breakfast with a nice cup of tea and enjoys playing pool and chess. His most recent working career has seen him engage with prominent people worldwide, but more of that later.  Michael was surrounded by superb role-models in his own family, and cites his father as the person he most admires. Michael’s father was an engineer and draftsman, a mathematics teacher at night school, whose claim to fame was completing the technical drawings for the ejector seat of the Avro Vulcan bomber operated by the RAF.  When Michael and his sister Janet, 4 years his senior, were young, Michael’s mother stayed at home, but when Michael reached his mid-teens, his mother began working with autistic and otherwise challenged children in a children’s home, even returning to mature-aged study to enable her to get additional qualifications.  As well, as an adult, she learnt to drive. 

Having such a close-knit family has undoubtedly framed much of Michael’s own family relationships.  He recalls a very happy childhood, walking the family dog with his father, playing badminton in the garden with his mother, going on picnics and days at the beach and having shared Friday cinema nights.  Michael was a musical and creative child who was not stimulated by his secondary education in an all-boys Grammar School, where he was the subject of bullying.  Even then, his peers identified him as somehow slightly eccentric, a bit of an outlier, someone not afraid of having a unique approach to his life. Not particularly enjoying his formal secondary education, Michael quit school, eschewing O Levels. A fan of Quincy M.E, an American drama series, Michael had flirted with the idea of becoming a forensic scientist, but without O Levels followed his father’s recommendation that he secure his future with some type of indentured apprenticeship.  Michael undertook a mechanical apprenticeship with Gordon Ford, Stockport and found he had a real interest in, and aptitude for, things mechanical, as evidenced by the fact he admits to being a bit of a petrol-head to this day, and loves to ride his motorbike often.

The bulk of Michael’s initial work-life was with the English Automobile Association, where, as a patrol man, for 32 years from the age of 19 before retiring, he assisted people when a breakdown of their car left them stranded.  He now jokes that with his career as Mr Mike Garner, he is still helping people in breakdown situations, but in a completely different context. Although the AA offered Michael opportunity for career advancement at several points, he was not interested in a managerial role, preferring to remain “on the spanners” as it gave him opportunity to feel he was helping people and making a genuine difference in their time of need. Whether you encounter him as Michael or Mike, he is a quintessentially social being.

Life has a strange way of presenting people with the unexpected, and that came for Michael in 2007 in the form of a back injury along with a cracked coccyx that saw him unable to walk for three years after he slipped and fell while pushing a car.  Although the prognosis was not favourable, Michael found ways of dealing with the pain with minimal use of prescription analgesics, preferring meditation over medication. Rather than wallow in self-pity at his inability to walk, Michael seized the opportunity to return to study, and undertook a degree in psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, which underpins his work today as Mr Mike Garner. Michael began his first consulting company, Mind Focus Groups (his initials being MFG) over twenty years ago now, in 2002.

Michael is a born communicator and empath.  He listens to people and hears what they tell him as well as divining what is actually happening beneath their words. He is a master at using humour to put people at ease and is direct and honest in his dealings with everyone.  He is a multi-tasker, who at times wishes he could focus on just one thing at a time, but this is outside his nature.  A self-confessed jack-of-all-trades, Michael sometimes wonders what it would be like to be a virtuoso in a single musical instrument, rather than a talented, enthusiastic dabbler in numerous ones.  Yet, his desire to keep learning new facts and skills is what has driven him to be engaged in his work as Mr Mike Garner, who has a large and growing social media footprint.

Michael started by stating he is a hypnotist, but not in the entertainment version of the word.  He uses hypnotism for therapeutic benefit with his clients. Michael is skilled in using the many platforms of social media to promote the wide-range of services he can provide to potential clients. Client confidentiality prevents him from naming some of the high-profile people he has engaged with, but it is publicly available information that he has worked in consultancy roles with the English National Health Service, NHS, and with the military in treating people afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder.  In his public persona, Mike has an extensive LinkedIn profile.  He has been the originator of a variety of projects to equip people to live their best and most productive lives. In 2012, Mike began the “Genesis Programme” which aims to provide skills to allow people to re-invent themselves to create the life they’d always dreamed of.  2013 saw the beginning of “The Power Hour” program of gatherings, hour-long meetings to encourage positive personal and community relationships based on self-understanding, self-esteem and self-respect. These were internet-based programs where Mr Mike Garner engaged with many online clients all over the world.

Another significant program initiated by Michael was “Beyond the Game”.  It was a corporate program written for the Manchester City Football Club to help them keep their stars away from activities which might call the club into disrepute.

A more recent innovation is the weekly “Mind Body Spirit” group that Michael founded here in Hua Hin in January this year, to address a community desire to share spiritual and personal development, healing, mindfulness and meditation, among other things, in a relaxed and supportive group atmosphere. The group now meets on Monday evenings at MY Honeypie. Michael recalls receiving many compliments about his work in life-coaching, but these pale into insignificance when he sees people noticing the changes in their lives that they have been empowered to make through their interactions with him.

Michael has a strong connection with children and believes he relates to their stories.  He has two of his own from a previous marriage, an adult daughter and son, and is the proud grandfather to their children, aged 4 to 11 years old.  Facetime keeps his connection with his family strong, although they are geographically distant. Michael admitted he couldn’t currently live without wi-fi, but since Chayar was in close proximity, quickly changed that to his wife. Despite the many other high moments of his life, Michael, without hesitation, names raising his children, Kathryn and Steven, as a single parent, as his greatest achievement. Michael and Chayar have also been in a loco-parentis relationship with several children in need here in Thailand, and currently share their home with an engaging 9-year-old Thai girl who 5 months ago spoke no English, Chayar’s 92-year-old mother, as well as a pair of delightful Jack Russells. It would be Michael’s constant upbeat demeanour and sense of fun that resonates so well with young people. He has an ongoing commitment to volunteering with a local school, and rather than accepting payments from clients, encourages them to make donations to the school. Mike’s commitment to the school is with the full knowledge and approval of local authorities, who have provided him with an exemption to volunteer.  Indeed, Michael has a long history with working in this capacity in organisations, and was once Scout Master to a troop including brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, of Oasis fame.

At its most broad, Michael’s approach to life is to say yes to everything.  He remains unfazed by the thought of his death, which he describes in term of “surrendering to everything there is.” Indeed, given the ability to offer advice to his teenage self, his sole encouragement would be to “have no fear, embrace everything”.

While much of what Michael does in his day-to-day life is to do with the mind and spirit, there is a very distinct physical side to this man as well. As a result of his childhood bullying, Mike took up martial arts as a young man and in only 5 years, as a result of great application, rose in the ranks.  He currently holds a 4th-dan Black Belt in Ju-Jitsu, so is very likely no longer the subject of physical bullying! Michael has quite a few tattoos, though none below the elbows or where they can be seen when he wears trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. He states that he doesn’t like tattoos, but each one represents a significant person or event in his life.  One is in commemoration of becoming a Reiki Master.

Michael and Chayar’s own Hua Hin oasis is their organic farm, which has three allotment-holders who work the land and share their bounty with the couple.  Prior to the Covid pandemic, the pair also ran a “farm-to-plate” restaurant, which they closed. The premises on Soi 88 now homes a dog grooming service.  The pair still own the property housing CM Massage, a government registered massage clinic run by a professionally Wat Pho-trained therapist. As previously stated, Michael really does have his fingers in many different pies. His current guilty pleasure is undertaking new courses of study as often as he can find the time, in an attempt to quench his thirst for knowledge and understanding of how this world works. Michael sees the “family of the world, friends you haven’t met yet” and makes people happy in an effortless way, by making them feel important. He recommends people pay limited attention to broadcast media as it is a killjoy, so full is it of negativity. Simple pleasures such as a good cuppa or surrounding himself with his much-loved crystals are sure-fire mood boosters for Michael.