In 1987, a 27-year-old Mo stood in Japan.
He had just competed as WA Aerobics Champion, helped open a cardio hospital in Osaka, and delivered fitness classes at a local university. Then an opportunity appeared: study advanced exercise physiology right there, at the university, in Japan.
The door opened.
He stood at the threshold — and didn't step through.
Language barrier. Culture shock. Discomfort. The door closed.
"Within a year of that," Mo says now, "so much happened."
He became president of the Fitness Institute WA at 27. He launched one of the state's first private personal training programs. He was a sponsored Reebok athlete and brand ambassador — a social influencer before social media existed.
The door he didn't walk through led him exactly where he needed to go. He just couldn't have known that at the time.
The Sliding Door Framework
Mo talks about "sliding door moments" — a concept that most business owners and leaders recognise but rarely examine deliberately.
The framework is simple:
The door opens. You stand at it. You look. The door closes. It opens again. Do you step forward? Stay where you are? Or step back?
The insight Mo has developed across more than three decades of building businesses, consulting to corporations, and working in human behaviour is this: you will never know what the other path would have looked like. Never.
"Make a decision and move on," he says. "Even if it's the wrong decision — if you hit a roadblock, pivot. I'd rather fail, pivot, fail, pivot, and get somewhere than stand still."
This is not a dismissal of consequences. It's a recognition that the paralysis of indecision — the state of standing permanently at the threshold — has its own enormous cost.
What Sliding Doors Actually Look Like in Business
In our conversation on the Roadblocks, Risks & Resilience Podcast, Mo's story surfaces four distinct sliding door moments that reshaped the trajectory of his career:
The Japan moment (1987). Didn't step through. Lost the immediate opportunity. Gained an extraordinary year back home that launched his career.
The business partnership exit. Five years building a business with two co-directors — blood, sweat, and tears — before the partnership collapsed. Mo's pivot: approach the major client directly, propose becoming their internal consultant rather than an external vendor. The client's response? "We don't have a relationship with your business. We have a relationship with you." He walked through that door.
The redundancy at 50. Made redundant in the worst mental health episode of his life. Rather than going into victim mode, he spent three months rebuilding — and created the next chapter of his career. "My lawyer said: reinvent yourself. That's what I did."
The Happiness Co encounter. Mo "looked over the fence" at what Julian and the Happiness Co team were doing in community wellbeing. He introduced himself. Said he'd be on the board when they set up a charity. He was. Three years later, he stepped down from the board into a hands-on strategic role — because he realised that's where he could do the most good.
Each of these moments required a decision made without complete information. Each one carried risk. And each one, in retrospect, was exactly right — even the one where he stood still.
The Real Cost of Not Deciding
What Mo's story illustrates — and what the research on decision fatigue and opportunity cost supports — is that non-decisions are still decisions. Every day you stay in a business relationship that has run its course, every conversation you avoid, every pivot you know you need to make but keep postponing — these are all choices. They're just choices made by default rather than by design.
Mo frames his business partnership exit as one of the clearest examples. The partnership was draining the central business to fund side ventures. The relationship between his two co-directors was deteriorating. He could see the trajectory clearly.
"I wasn't going to continue delivering falsely," he says. "I didn't want to be part of it. I had gotten to a point through all these micro traumas — exhaustion was coming in. Burnout was on the horizon."
He chose to exit. He negotiated his position. He took three months to rebuild. And from that exit came a contract with the same major client — on his own terms.
How to Recognise Your Sliding Door Moments
Most people miss their sliding door moments not because the door doesn't open, but because they're too busy (there's that word again) to notice.
Mo offers a few signals worth paying attention to:
A conversation that unexpectedly redirects you. A chance encounter that turns into a collaboration. A door that seems to close — but then reopens six months later in a different form. An opportunity that feels too uncertain, too uncomfortable, too unfamiliar — and therefore, probably worth serious consideration.
"The door opens," Mo says. "You look. The door closes. The door opens again. Each time — what do you do?"
The question isn't whether you'll face these moments. You will. The question is whether you'll be present enough, and self-aware enough, to recognise them when they appear.
And then — whether you'll move.