About Kofi Josephs
The person behind the performance.
Kofi Josephs is a professional basketball player, former Great Britain international and speaker whose work brings mental health, inspiration and aspiration into the open. To understand why he does it, you have to understand the experiences that shaped him.
Birmingham and the flight
An ambition, and a day that changed it.
Kofi grew up in Birmingham with a clear ambition: to build a career in basketball. That meant leaving — going to America on his own as a teenager to chase a future the city could not yet give him.
Hours before that flight, he learned that his dad had been murdered.
He got on the plane anyway. There was no time or space to grieve and mourn properly, and no pause in the plan he had worked towards. He arrived in a new country carrying something he had not been able to put down.
The weight behind the dream
Ambition and illness can share the same room.
In America he broke his hip twice within eighteen months. The future he was working towards suddenly felt conditional, and the recovery periods were long, isolating and uncertain.
He was also studying for a psychology degree, and carrying the pressure of wanting to be great and not let everybody down — family, coaches, the people at home who had watched him leave.
During this period his mental health deteriorated. He experienced suicidal thoughts, and feelings of not wanting to be here any more.
Discipline, talent and opportunity did not protect him from that, and neither did what he was reading in lectures. It is one of the reasons he now says plainly that struggle can sit inside a life that looks, from the outside, like it is going to plan.
What success could not fix
Winning is not evidence of wellness.
Later in his professional career, Kofi had a panic attack during a game. He stepped away from basketball.
He has also spoken about feeling at his lowest a week after winning his first championship — a moment that, on paper, should have been among the best of his working life.
He shares these experiences because they make a point that is easy to say and hard to believe: public achievement tells you very little about how a person feels inside. The scoreboard is not a status report.
Kofi is still an active professional player. The story is not finished, and he does not present it as a completed journey.
The question he asked himself
Why Not I?
It did not begin as a slogan. It began as a question Kofi put to himself when he needed a reason to keep the door open — to accept that the thing he wanted might still be available to him.
How he spoke to himself mattered. He came to understand self-talk as something close to a self-fulfilling prophecy: what he repeatedly told himself shaped what he was willing to attempt.
Asking Why Not I? let him believe possibility remained, and then commit to the work that possibility asks for. Belief and action together — neither one alone.
It is not a claim that belief fixes grief, mental illness or the structural barriers that make some paths harder than others. For Kofi it meant refusing to close the door on his own future, and being willing to take the next step.
Being the exampleBeing the example
Show it, rather than say it.
Kofi speaks about his own experience so that other people find it easier to speak about theirs. Honest conversations about mental health tend to start when someone goes first.
He wants young people and wider audiences to see inspiration and aspiration in a real person — someone recognisable, still competing, still working things out — and to recognise that a step is available to them too.
That is also why the work is not only words. He speaks across very different settings, creates community initiatives, and keeps pursuing his own ambitions in sport and beyond. A walking, talking example rather than instructions issued from a stage.
The work today
Three parts, one thread.
Sport, speaking and building — each one feeds the others, and each one keeps Kofi close to the experiences he talks about.
Active athlete
Kofi remains involved in professional basketball. He previously represented Great Britain’s senior men and Team England at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. The career is still going, which keeps the conversations he has with audiences current rather than retrospective.
Speaker and advocate
He speaks from lived experience about mental health, identity, pressure, resilience, inspiration and aspiration — in schools, sport, healthcare, workplaces and community settings. His BSc in Psychology informs how he thinks; it does not make him a clinician, and he does not present himself as one.
Founder
Kofi founded the Why Not I movement and is building Why Not I Ltd, a separate company developing preventative mental performance technology for elite sport. He also works in modelling and creative projects, which sit alongside — rather than replace — the sport and the speaking.
Where this goes next
Kofi cannot take anyone else’s next step.
What he can do is speak honestly, create opportunities where he finds them, and keep showing — through his own actions, in sport and outside it — what it looks like to keep giving yourself a chance.
