I’ve just returned from a fabulous walk in the sunshine.
It was so nice to get outside again – to fill my lungs with fresh air and feel the autumn sun on my face.
If I can’t get out I’ll walk on my treadmill instead, but it’s a poor substitute for being in nature.
Storm Babet has kept most of us inside for the last few days.
How awful it was, and how tragic that people actually lost their lives because of it.
My heart goes out to the families concerned.
Most of us can move on now it’s all over and enjoy the wonderful calm and sunshine again, but not those families.
Life will never be the same again 🙁
There’s no denying it, storms can cause chaos.
But not all storms come to disrupt our life; some come to clear our path.
Sometimes our lives NEED a shake up.
A shake up that we would never have initiated ourselves.
Sometimes the worst things that happen to us turn out to be the best things, further down the line.
These are things that we could never have predicted…because we don’t have the big picture.
Often, we can’t see the wood for the trees so we get bogged down and stuck in a rut.
A storm (breakup/job loss/illness) is sometimes what’s needed to break us out of that rut.
Steve Jobs was right when he said “We can only join the dots looking backwards”.
I spoke with a former client of mine this week.
Let’s call him Jim.
Jim and I previously worked together in February 2021.
I’ll never forget our initial phone call.
Jim was probably one of the unhappiest people I’ve ever worked with.
He sobbed all the way through that first call and talked about ending his life.
(This is not that unusual, as a lot of guys need to be in that very dark place to actually dial my number).
His wife had asked him for a divorce – she had fallen out of Love with him and in Love with someone else.
His teenage children wanted nothing to do with him and were 100% in their mother’s camp.
Jim was devastated – his heart was literally breaking.
He told me that although they’d had their ups and downs it was actually a great marriage.
They’d been together for over 25 years.
As is often the case for a lot of men, the breakup of the family is just as painful, or more painful, than the breakup of the relationship.
In our subsequent sessions it came to light that things were not as they had initially seemed.
By his own admission, Jim was a workaholic.
He ran the very successful family business and was always at work.
Often he was gone before his children woke up in the morning and only returned in the evening when they had gone to bed.
He’d had a troubled childhood himself and found it very difficult to express his emotions.
He could often be cold or angry.
He’d always struggled emotionally, so for him, it was easier to go to work, leave the parenting to his wife and just be a great provider.
Him and his wife had met at University and married young.
As time had gone by, apart from the children, they had less and less in common.
They were mainly doing their own thing and just going through the motions.
This was never openly discussed or worked on in anyway.
It was all just swept under the carpet and buried under exotic holidays, expensive toys and bigger houses.
As Jim and I had more sessions, he started to see, that actually, it hadn’t been a great marriage at all.
He didn’t even really like his wife and she didn’t really like him either.
The poor children were just caught in the middle.
As all of this dawned on Jim more and more, he got a lot stronger.
He completely threw himself into developing himself emotionally.
He held his hands up and admitted that in many ways, he’d not been a great husband and father.
We drew a line under the past and worked on healing his childhood wounds.
He’d had no idea that they were having such an impact on his life 40 years later.
Jim became an exemplary client.
He gave his all to his coaching.
He took on board absolutely everything we did together.
He always took copious notes and was very committed to his emotional development.
He did his utmost to grow and change.
Consequently his self-esteem started to soar.
He was blossoming before my very eyes.
His relationship with his children slowly started to improve.
He was patient and understanding and gradually they started to come around.
After a time he told me that he’d met a wonderful new lady…a widow with 2 young children.
He wanted things to be different this time.
On my advice, he took things very very slowly.
Fast forward 6 months and Jim went from being one of my unhappiest ever clients, to one of my most happy, fulfilled, open, optimistic clients.
His love-life was thriving.
His relationship with his children was thriving.
His overall health – mental, physical, spiritual and emotional was thriving.
His work-life, always his strongest point, had improved even further.
He worked a lot less hours, but loved his time in the business.
He’d even started to make a positive difference in the lives of two small children who had lost their father.
It was a wonderful turn around.
I couldn’t have been more proud of Jim 🙂
The storm that came and rocked him so badly had well and truly cleared his path to a life of Love and happiness that he could never have previously imagined.
Jim invested time, money and effort into his growth and it all paid off exponentially for him.
So why has he now returned 2 years later?
Because an unexpected argument with his ex-wife and daughter has thrown him for a loop.
He recognised straight away that he needed to handle this carefully or he could undo some of his great work.
Traces of “old” Jim had resurfaced in the row and he wanted to nip that in the bud.
He was very hard on himself when we spoke.
I reminded him of the huge strides he’d made since we first met.
He really didn’t deserve to be so hard on himself.
We are all a work in progress.
I don’t believe anyone is ever the COMPLETE and perfect version of themselves.
We all make mistakes.
We all mess up sometimes.
We all get hungry, tired, emotional and/or hormonal.
We all handle situations in a less than perfect way sometimes.
It’s how we deal with that in the aftermath that counts.
Do we stop and acknowledge that things could have gone better, so that we learn from our mistake/misunderstanding and grow?
Or do we compound the situation further and only make things even worse?
I call this throwing the baby out with the bath water.
All isn’t lost just because of one mistake.
We’re all human.
Apologise, do some damage limitation and then get back on your horse.
Just learn from what has happened so it doesn’t happen again.
Experience, knowledge and a deeper understanding of a situation lead to greater wisdom.
As long as we learn from it and act accordingly, nothing is wasted.
It’s important to acknowledge that any progress is progress no matter how slow.
We must just make sure that we keep trying and never give up.
If we do this, eventually we’ll get there 🙂
If you’d like to shorten your journey considerably, just like Jim did.
Much Love
Christina xx