13/09/2026
Four Books, One Mission: Clint Hoffmann’s Unconventional Approach to Mental Wellbeing
Clint Hoffmann probably never set out to become a mental-health author.
He is a Chartered Accountant, entrepreneur and educator by profession — someone whose instinct is to look at complicated problems, pull them apart, find the patterns and then build something practical that people can actually use. Yet, almost a decade after establishing the IFProject, Hoffmann has quietly accumulated something significant: four very different books about mental wellbeing, trauma, recovery, relationships and the messy business of being human.
They don’t form a conventional book series. One begins with Rudyard Kipling. Another examines the catastrophic trajectory of his younger brother’s life. A third captures conversations with a clinical psychologist over cups of tea. The fourth is an illustrated story about two tiny dogs.
Yet together, they tell one much larger story.
They document Hoffmann’s evolution from a bloke trying to help his mates, to a brother trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, to a trauma survivor learning to understand his own brain, and finally to a man prepared to tell his story with tenderness, humour and vulnerability.
More importantly, they reveal the philosophy behind the IFProject: mental wellbeing resources don’t have to look or sound like mental-health resources.
Book One: The IF Guide — giving blokes a language
The journey began with tragedy.
After losing his close mate Twinkles to su***de, Hoffmann began thinking seriously about the way Australian men talked — or didn’t talk — about what was happening inside them. The original IF Guide describes his frustration with simply telling men that they needed to talk more. Hoffmann wanted those conversations to become deeper and more constructive, and he wanted to demystify what actually happened when someone sought help.
His answer was characteristically unconventional.
Together with his long-time therapist Barry Hogg, Hoffmann used Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If— as the architecture for a practical mental-wellbeing program. The poem became a framework through which they could explore 12 areas of life, including keeping your head, backing yourself, patience, dreams and reality, the highs and lows of life, resilience, humility, mateship and self-mastery.
But Hoffmann didn’t simply write a book.
He approached it as an EdTech project.
Renowned Australian artist Geoff Todd AM contributed artwork. Musician Michael Maher curated songs reflecting the themes of the sections. Videos and conversations with Hogg were incorporated into the digital experience, while legendary Australian actor and IFProject patron Jack Thompson AM voiced Kipling’s poem. The intention was ultimately to put the tools Hoffmann had personally received from Barry into people’s pockets through digital technology.
The philosophy was captured in one memorable line:
“No psychobabble. No bu****it. Just blokes helping blokes.”
That sentence arguably established the design principle for everything that followed.
The objective wasn’t to replace clinicians. It was to create a bridge to them — translating ideas about self-awareness, regulation, responsibility, relationships and asking for help into language ordinary people could understand.
Book Two: My Brother Ben — reverse-engineering a tragedy
Years later, mental health stopped being something Hoffmann was helping mates navigate from the sidelines.
It crashed directly into his family.
My Brother Ben: The Little Black Dog is the darkest and most forensic of the four books.
Here Hoffmann’s accounting, audit and risk-management brain becomes part of the storytelling method. He describes how, as an international risk-based auditor, he had spent his professional career reviewing systems and processes and understanding that catastrophic system failure is rarely caused by one mistake. Usually, multiple failures compound. That became the framework through which he tried to understand what happened to his brother.
In effect, Hoffmann reverse-engineered his brother’s life.
The book works chronologically through 17 interconnected subjects: childhood, ADHD, possible developmental factors, family breakdown, adolescence, substance abuse, incarceration, recidivism, rehabilitation, parole, medication, healthcare, custodial care and ultimately the terrible events that ended four lives and left countless others affected.
Importantly, Hoffmann does not present the book as an attempt to excuse his brother’s actions. He explicitly acknowledges his perspective as a brother, writing that it is his version of the truth and that others may hold a profoundly different one.
The question driving the book is instead brutally simple:
How did a little boy arrive there?
Geoff Todd AM returned as illustrator, this time replacing the human figure with a little black dog. Across the pages, that dog changes: sometimes vulnerable, sometimes lost, sometimes trapped, sometimes menacing. The visual metaphor allows the reader to examine a human tragedy without reducing the story simply to photographs of a perpetrator.
Hoffmann describes the intention as identifying possible causal factors and lessons that might be relevant to other people and families.
It is simultaneously memoir, systems analysis, family reflection and a plea for learning.
The opening makes the motivation unmistakable: if any meaning can emerge from something so senseless, Hoffmann hopes it lies in understanding what happened sufficiently well that something similar might one day be prevented.
That is a very different mental-health book from The IF Guide.
But the underlying instinct is identical: take something impossibly complicated, make it visible, and create a framework through which people can talk about it.
Book Three: Cups of Tea with Carmel — turning therapy into tools
The third book changes direction again.
Following the trauma surrounding his brother, Hoffmann began working with clinical psychologist Carmel O’Sullivan. Over the following years, their sessions developed their own language.
There was the Trauma Brain. The Trauma Truck. Adjustment Island. The wonderfully Australian Fwit-Free Zone*. The Wheel of Life. Self-Care Rules. Stress Busters. And Carmel’s Codewords.
Rather than leaving those ideas inside a psychologist’s consulting room, Hoffmann recognised something potentially valuable: Carmel had an unusual ability to turn complex psychological ideas into memorable visual metaphors.
So they captured them.
Cups of Tea with Carmel: Eight Tools for Recovery, Regulation & Real Talk is explicitly presented not as a textbook or traditional self-help manual, but as a conversation between clinician and client — combining metaphor, methodology and memory accumulated through years of therapy.
That distinction matters.
Hoffmann calls Carmel “Aunty Carmel” because the experience doesn’t feel to him like being lectured by someone with a clipboard. It feels like sitting down with someone wise, having a cup of tea and working through a problem.
The book therefore digitises the cuppa.
It captures Carmel’s eight principal tools visually and in writing and complements the chapters with recorded conversations, allowing readers to listen to the stories and thinking behind them.
Perhaps the most powerful idea comes near the end.
Hoffmann recounts the story of a man trapped in a hole. Another man jumps into the hole with him. When asked why, he replies, in essence: I’ve been here before; I know the way out.
For Hoffmann, that is what the book represents — not a lecture from above, but someone who knows the terrain sharing what helped. He describes Carmel’s tools as “buckets of water” brought back by people who have already been through the fire.
Book Four: MiMi & Mukoy — the children’s book for grown-ups
And then come two little dogs.
If My Brother Ben is the most confronting of Hoffmann’s books, MiMi & Mukoy: A Journey of Healing may be the most disarming.
Hoffmann describes it as something like a children’s storybook for adults.
Beautifully illustrated by Janette Lucas, the book follows Hoffmann through relationships, childhood wounds, career success, loneliness, trauma, family and recovery — but does so through the companionship of his two little dogs, MiMi and Mukoy.
The simplicity is deliberate.
The story begins with the outwardly tough bloke — the footballer, entrepreneur and high achiever — and gradually reveals what was happening underneath. Hoffmann writes about discovering that material success had not eliminated loneliness and that his dogs offered something his possessions couldn’t: companionship, responsibility and unconditional love.
Then the story darkens.
His brother’s catastrophic episode becomes the darkest period of Hoffmann’s life. He describes being devastated, isolated and without a playbook for what had happened.
Into that story come Carmel, his family — particularly his laving wife Martina and LJ — and the two little dogs.
The book traces a journey from survival back toward connection and family. Jack Thompson AM, in his introduction, describes it as a story about resilience and the impact of unconditional love and companionship, and as offering hope to people dealing with the invisible wounds of trauma.
The dogs eventually become a metaphor for something larger.
They don’t diagnose Clint.
They don’t analyse him.
They don’t ask him to explain himself.
They are simply there.
And sometimes, that is precisely what a dysregulated human being needs.
By the final pages, Hoffmann makes his purpose explicit: he wants people to understand the role dogs and companionship can play in mental wellbeing and uses Janette Lucas’s illustrations to make that conversation accessible.
From information to connection
Viewed separately, these are four unusual books.
Viewed together, they reveal something much more interesting.
The IF Guide asks: How do we give men practical tools before crisis?
My Brother Ben asks: How can a human life go catastrophically off course, and what might society learn from it?
Cups of Tea with Carmel asks: How can the wisdom inside a consulting room be translated into memorable everyday tools?
MiMi & Mukoy asks perhaps the simplest question of all: What helps us feel safe, connected and loved when words aren’t enough?
There is also an unmistakable progression in Hoffmann’s willingness to expose himself.
The first book uses Kipling as the doorway. The second uses his brother. The third uses the therapeutic relationship. The fourth finally places Clint himself at the centre of the story.
That progression matters.
Because the IFProject’s innovation has never really been about writing books. It has been about finding different doors into the same difficult room.
A poem can be a door. A painting can be a door. A playlist can be a door. An app can be a door. A psychologist’s diagram can be a door. A podcast can be a door.
And sometimes a scruffy little dog can be the best door of all.
Hoffmann’s professional instinct has always been to turn complexity into frameworks. What these four books demonstrate is how that instinct has increasingly been applied to the most complicated system he has ever tried to understand: the human being — including himself.
Almost a decade after the IFProject began, that may be the thread connecting everything he has created.
Not pretending to have all the answers. Not pretending that trauma disappears. Not pretending that strong men never struggle.
But continually experimenting with better ways to make difficult conversations possible — one poem, one black dog, one cup of tea and one little Yorkie at a time.
