Archive for the 'My Story' Category
At last I come to the final part of my story. At the end of part 11 which was just a few months ago, I was hurting once again from the breakdown of a relationship just six months after being devasted by the same thing.
Going through this twice in six months was harsh but I knew I had to learn and grow as a result of the experience. At first I decided that I wanted to try to protect myself from going through that kind of pain again. I had thoughts such as “I must get better at this LoA stuff so I only attract good things into my life”, and I figured I’d need to attract a relationship that would last my whole life time.
It didn’t take me long to figure out how absurd this idea was. What if I found the perfect person and then she got run over by a bus? It was at this point that I realised that LoA is just one law in this Universe of many and it exists within other laws and most importantly, it only creates our own experience and it doesn’t allow us to control other people. This pain I was going through was due to a relationship with another person and whenever you are involved with somebody whether that’s romantically, professionally, a family member or whatever, you can’t control them and you can’t create their reality for them so if you drift out of alignment then that relationship will suffer or breakdown and that is just life.
It was at this point when I realised that the most valuable thing I could do from this point on is to learn how to deal with the challenges that life throws at us. I had been holding LoA as some kind of saviour but it doesn’t work that way. You can attract great things into your life (and I still haven’t mastered that) but unless you cover every detail of life you will also attract by default on many subjects and that means that everynow and then the Universe will just clobber you around the head! I felt like I hadn’t learned my lessons the first time around so the Universe clobbered me again a second time and said “hey wake up! we’ve something to teach you here!”
Also, life is temporary, people die, companies shut down, friends move away - things change all the time and even if you manage to attract the perfect vision of life into your reality the chances are that it won’t stay that way for long. Therefore I decided that it was far better to learn how to be flexible, how to adapt to changed circumstances, how to deal with pain, how to move on from past hurt and so on.
The last 5 months have been a time of tremendous learning and growth. I read books, I read blogs, I listened to audios, I watched DVD’s and online videos - for several weeks I did virtually nothing but absorb good feeling material into my life. I have now put my life back together and I’m working again, socialising again, and so on but I have chosen to make learning, personal growth and spirituality a permanent part of my life and not a day goes by that I don’t read, watch or listen to something inspiring - usually for at least an hour a day.
I soaked up so much stuff in such a short space of time that I began to feel overwhelmed and felt as though I needed to talk about it. I had questions, I had aha moments and insights. I kept feeling a burning urge to write but I didn’t have a place to write so at first I just journalled but I had a feeling in the back of my mind that I didn’t just want to write for me I wanted to write publically, to invite others to comment, in other words - to blog!
I already had my Internet Marketing blog but that simply is not the place to discuss these kinds of topics so I knew I needed to start a new one but there was something that didn’t feel right, I couldn’t think of a name for a start. I decided to let the Universe guide me and I figured that when the time was right I would know it and I would also know the name.
So I stopped thinking about it for a while. Another thing I did during this time was go for lots of walks - it was summer time and in Essex in the UK where I live there are lots of country parks and coastal areas to explore. All the photos I use on this website are photos I have taken on my walks. I tend to choose remote locations where I can be alone with my thoughts and I would go over in my mind the stuff I had been reading about, listening to and so on.
One day I was in a country park mulling over life, the Universe and everything and feeling somewhat frustrated. Why was life always so hard, why was it always a struggle? I mean, surely life is supposed to FEEL GOOD isn’t it? I stopped dead in my tracks - the name of my blog hit me like a brick and it felt right.
This blog is born…
So that is the end of my story and the start of a new phase of life. I’ve got a lot to do, there are many things I want to change but I am now committed to changing inside as much as the outside. I will never again take things for granted, I will always be grateful for what I have. I will never stop learning and evolving and I will never again be so naieve as to think that ‘happiness’ lies anywhere but inside of me.
I’m not exactly sure where life wil take me but as I learn and grow I’ll be sure to share the journey here
The bliss that I found with my new partner was very temporary. Only four months later she decided that she no longer wanted to be with me. She gave me some story about her ex but I didn’t really take any notice of that. All I could think about was pondering the question, how did I attract this?
Unlike six months earlier when the breakdown of my relationship came as a complete shock, this time I felt very differently. I didn’t want us to split up but I didn’t fight it at all. I trusted that it was happening for a reason but I was still very confused. I could understand why my previous partner and I had split up because over the course of 10 years we had become very different people but of course that was not the case with this new relationship - nothing would have had a chance to change in just 4 months.
So did that mean that I had attracted the split or did I attract the wrong person in the first place? It slowly became apparent that I had done both. The Law of Attraction can be very complicated at times and when you get it wrong it can hurt! Through a lot of deep reflection I learned many things both about myself and about LoA in general.
Make Sure You Know What You Want
There is no doubt that I got exactly what I wanted. This new partner was everything I imagined beforehand. Also, there were some similarities with my previous partner in that she had a child so all the family stuff that I had been attracting before also manifested. The trouble is, I am not a natural with children. I am not maternal and that was a big problem in my previous relationship.
But here is the major mistake that I made that I didn’t understand for quite some time. When in my previous relationship, in my efforts to ressurrect it I wanted to do more as a family because I knew that was what she wanted. That was my life at the time - we had a child and I had a committment to them. I would never have walked out on them no matter how bad it got. But that was a mistake because I was not happy and I never would have been. Not everybody wants kids, and it turns out that I’m one of the people who doesn’t.
However, I had been attracting a family life and I got it again. My new partner had a child and at first I thought it was exactly what I wanted but I started to notice many problems. I ignored them though as I was so happy with the relationship itself. But a relationship is not just with one person, especially when children are involved. They come as a package, you can’t have the parent without the child.
I had attracted exactly what I asked for, but it turns out that I didn’t really and truly want what I asked for - only bits of it. As I started to look again towards the future I had difficulty fitting in my new partner and her child. We were so very different and at first our differences were fun but after a little while I began to see things differently but of course, I tried very hard to ignore them.
I remember having conversations with friends saying that all that matters is that we love each other and that nothing else matters. I was kidding myself - that’s not all that matters at all!
Be Specific In Your Asking
Many of the differences between us were things that I just hadn’t thought of. My previous partner and I were very similar in lots of ways and that’s probably why we stayed together for so long - we just kind of thought the same way, liked the same things and so on. But I took all this for granted, and when I was busy doing my LoA workshops trying to attract a new partner I never even considered many of these things.
The universe responds to your vibration but if you are not putting out a specific vibration then you are attracting by default. This is why bad stuff happens to good people - they didn’t necessarily attract something bad because they were being negative, they were just plodding along, minding their own business and letting life happen to them.
Everything that I specifically imagined manifested itself in the relationship. It was quite spooky in a way. Even certain decor in her house! But there was so much else that I had given no consideration too. For example, she was messy and I was tidy. I had never even considered this as my ex had always whined at me for being messy! So I got what I asked for, but there was so much I missed out.
This time around I spend time thinking about every little detail. Some things are more important than others of course - being messy isn’t really a big deal but when you have a whole bunch of little things like that they all add up.
The Universe Wants To Teach You
If I hadn’t had that second relationship, I wouldn’t have finally figured out that kids are just not for me. I had had a really good time for 4 months and then I had some pain which was excruciating for a while but it didn’t last. I learnt so much and in my final post in the series next week I’ll talk some more about that but what is clear to me is that this experience, even though it hurt like hell for a while, has put me in a better place now.
I have now got very clear about what I really want from a relationship and when I reflected I noticed that in the 17 years in which I have been in long term relationships, I was only truly happy for 2 of those years. For the other 15 I was settling. That’s just crazy. Why would I do that to myself? Again, the reason was very clear - I have always been quite weak in this area, scared to be alone. I have always stayed in a bad relationship because it seemed easier than being alone. The trouble is that life is too short to do that and I have now promised myself that I won’t do it again.
I very much want a relationship but only with the right person - somebody who really does tick all the boxes. If I hadn’t had this second breakup wake me up I wouldn’t have made that decision and I might have found myself wasting another 10 years with the wrong person.
I am almost at the end of my story. We split up in May and I started this blog a short while later. Join me next week for the last installment!
The breakup of my relationship that I described in part 9 hit me very hard. It was more than just the loss of a relationship – it was almost everything I had known for 10 years and that included my home, my cats (I have them back with me now), social clubs in the area and so on. Thankfully the one thing I had that remained constant was my business. If I had had to face quitting my job as well it would have been too much to take.
I was caught up in extreme anger for quite a while. I felt as though my partner should have given us more of a chance. At the time I didn’t see that we’d already had 10 years so a few more months wasn’t going to make any difference. I refused to see any alternative to a future with her, I refused to accept that maybe we had been making each other miserable for far too long and splitting up was the best thing for both of us.
I did not behave very well in this time. I constantly phoned her up, begging her to take me back, then I’d go into rages and say terrible things, I would cry and beg and I just became a pathetic wreck.
One day about 5 weeks after the split I hit a particularly low point and that evening I decided to make one last ditch attempt to get my partner back. I phoned her up and used absolutely everything I could think of to get her to change her mind. Then something strange happened, rather than just saying no she hesitated and said it was too much to think about and that she needed some time and would have to call me back.
As soon as I put the phone down I knew I was making a mistake. Suddenly I was faced with the actual possibility of a reconciliation and I saw it in a very different light. Too much damage had been done, I was very hurt and she was in love with somebody else. There was absolutely no way we could go back and I knew it. I felt sick for about an hour and then phoned her back, apologised and said that was the end of it – no more, it was over.
Finally I felt some relief, I was able to accept that it was over and had to figure out how to move on with my life. I figured that much of what I wanted out of life could be had with friends and that a relationship was not all that important – especially when it was in the state that ours had been in.
The next morning for the first time since the split I knew that I was going to be ok. Then something very, very strange happened – I met the person who I was going to fall in love with and have a wonderful new relationship with!
Within 24 hours of releasing all that negative emotion and just letting go, my new partner came into my life. That moment really cemented within me the idea that the Law of Attraction is real. 24 hours!!
My new partner, I’ll call her ‘A’ was wonderful and I felt things that I had not felt in many years. Before my previous partner, (I’ll call her ‘E’) and I had split up I had been visualising a future that involved my partner and our child and how I wanted life to be. I felt the emotions I wanted to feel and I saw us doing things and going places and having fun as a family.
At the time I had wanted to experience that lifestyle with E but it could not happen because we were not in alignment with each other but Law of Attraction brings you experiences that match what you are thinking and feeling about. I couldn’t get that with E but that is exactly what I attracted with A. She had a child too and it was almost as if I had replaced one family with a new one.
Unfortunately, my new-found bliss was to be very short lived, only 4 months in fact. Tune in next week (oh gosh I sound like a radio show!) to find out how it all went horribly wrong and why I think that is! I’m close to the end of my story now… :-)
In the last installment of my story I was on a high after discovering the Law of Attraction and I had spent two months visualising the new life I wanted to create for myself but this high did not last.
Just two months later my partner of 10 years announced (seemingly out of the blue) that she wanted us to split up and my whole world collapsed. I knew we had problems but I thought that we were on the brink of resolving them. I couldn’t understand how what had manifested was actually the complete opposite of what I was trying to attract. I’m not going to re-hash the whole story but at the time I was utterly devastated and it turned my life upside-down. I moved out, went to live with family, and later sold my half of the house to her.
After some of the pain subsided I began to question it. My first thought was that this Law of Attraction thing was just a load of <insert rude word> but I had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that it wasn’t and that somehow I had attracted this. I began to wonder what I had done wrong. I had been so clear in my visualising - I had seen us as a family, doing things together, going places, getting on better than we had before and I just couldn’t see how I could have been attracting the exact opposite.
Underlying this was another thought that kept creeping into my head and I kept pushing it away. I began to wonder if we had simply reached the point in our relationship where there was no hope and so this future that I was visualising could not possibly be with her. You create your own reality but when that reality involves another person then you both need to be in alignment with each other. We had been growing apart for many years and we were clearly heading in different directions. I didn’t want to accept this at first because I was vigorously fighting against the split and constantly trying to get us back together but over the next few weeks it became obvious that this was indeed why we’d split up.
This whole experience was painful and confusing but it started to teach me more about Law of Attraction. The first lesson is that you cannot attract a particular person. Think about it logically - if it worked that way what would happen when thousands of people all attracted the same hot celebrity for instance? The way it works is that your vibration emits a certain energy that attracts other things that match that vibration.
When you want an experience with a particular person, it is not the person that matters, it is the experience and the feelings that go with it. It’s very easily to be confused about this. In my case I was tempted to assume I wanted to be in a relationship with my existing partner because we had been together so long but what I really wanted was what that situation gave me - familiarity, that feeling of knowing each other inside out, getting on with all your partners friends & family and so on.
For a few weeks I was a complete mess but I wanted to get myself out of the hole I was in and the only way I had of making myself feel better for a few moments was when I managed to concentrate long enough on an alternate future that felt good. Thankfully, my intense misery only lasted 5 weeks as relief was just around the corner.
At the end of part 7 I growing increasingly dissatisfied with my new job and my desire to quit and go back to self employment was burning stronger and stronger. I was becoming deeply engrossed in Internet Marketing and then in the summer of 2007 I heard of something called the Thirty Day Challenge. Funnily enough, the last post I wrote on my IM blog was the wrap of the 30DC for 2008!
Anyway, in a nutshell the 30DC is a course about Internet Marketing and I took the course but there several special things that happened to me during the challenge. First of all, there was a special something about the guy behind the challenge - Ed Dale, I couldn’t put my finger on it but I knew I wanted to meet him. He lived in Australia and I live in the UK but never mind. The other thing was that I got really excited about the challenge, or the potential that it held.
I knew, just knew from my very soul that I could make a living online. I didn’t know if the 30DC techniques were the vehicle (they’re not, as it turns out) but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t stay in the day job any longer, and on the 22nd August, before the challenge was over and before I even earned a single dollar I handed in my resignation!
A week later, Ed Dale came to London to meet up with local challengers, I jumped on a train and got to meet him! At the time I didn’t see the significance of this but now I know that was Law of Attraction working for me. Stranger still, it was at this meet up that I learned about Law of Attraction.
There were about a dozen people there and I spent quite a while chatting to a guy called Mark Attwood. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me at all but I will always remember him because that conversation I had with him changed my life more radically than anything that came before it. I had actually heard of LoA in passing a few times but I didn’t know what it was.
We were talking about money, online business, success etc and he just asked me, “so, do you believe in Law of Attraction?”. “What is that? I’ve heard of it…”, I asked. He asked me if I had read the book Think and Grow Rich. My jaw almost hit the floor - that was the book that had started my first transformation 5 years earlier. I remember reading it and thinking that I never understood “the secret” that it was supposed to contain. Mark told me to watch the movie, “The Secret” and said it was a modern day explanation of Law of Attraction.
The true realisation didn’t come for another couple of weeks because after the meet up I forgot all about it. However, I had been set on a path by then and a couple of weeks later I came across something about The Secret and then I remembered our conversation. I got the DVD and when I watched it I felt the most amazing series of AHA moments I had ever experienced!
Everything suddenly made sense - I looked back at everything that had gone wrong (and right) in my life, my drinking, the loss of my career, the depression, the dodgy Internet business, University and I could see with such clarity exactly how I had attracted everything that I had ever experienced.
At first I felt a bit angry at myself because knowing this meant that I was responsible but of course, I knew this already because I had already started to take responsibility a few years earlier since reading the books on personal growth. But after I stopped beating myself up I watched the movie again (I’ve watched it lots now!) and then I started to dream…
I spent the the next two months thinking intensely about every aspect of my life and decided exactly how I wanted it to be. I thought about my family, and how I wanted the relationship with my partner to improve. I thought about my relationship with our son and what our family could look like in the future. I thought about my work and business life and of course, money. I thought about what money could buy - travel, adventure, a nice home. I thought about the time I wanted to spend with friends, the sports I wanted to do, the sights of the world I wanted to see and on and on.
Every day I spent time just day dreaming, visualising this future and it felt really good. Finally I felt as though I was in control. I had let go of all my past demons, I had completely changed as a person, I was deliberately choosing my life and I felt as though nothing could stop me from getting everything I wanted.
So you can imagine my shock, disbelief and total confusion when just two months later my world collapsed…
… because you might just get it!
I had spent 7 years wanting to get my career back and finally I had done it. But as well as my job, there was something else that needed addressing.
On graduation day I decided that I had to leave my hospital drama behind me. It had haunted me in many ways for a whole year. I had gone into hospital on the 7th July 2005 (the day of the London Bombings! What’s with all this significant stuff happening on the same day as disasters??) and I graduated on the 6th July the following year. My new job began on the 10th.
During that year I had become incredibly unfit (it was three months before I could walk up the stairs without getting out of breath after coming out of hospital) and I was at my heaviest. I decided that I had to stop feeling sorry for myself and start doing something about it. I vowed that as soon as I started my job I would start a diet and would find a gym and start exercising.
My first day was great! I arrived early with so much enthusiasm I thought I was going to pop! The guys were lovely and they took me to the pub at lunch. I was a bit worried that there might be trust issues due to my past but as my interviewer (who was now my boss) had told me, it simply wasn’t an issue. The higher management were aware of it and nobody else needed to know.
Finally, I put my demons behind me - a cloud lifted, I felt a release… seven years of guilt and shame was finally laid to rest!
I threw myself into my work. I stocked up on all the latest programming books and spent every spare minute studying. On the second day I found a gym 5 minutes from the office and joined and from that day onwards I went every day. It was really tough at first but I just kept at it and built up very slowly. I started dieting too.
After 4 months I started karate again which is something I had quit at the age of 19 and had always wanted to take up again! My fitness grew, the fat dropped off, my confidence grew, my life was getting better.
Something Not Quite Right
You’re probably wondering about the title to this episode, I got what I asked for and I was thrilled wasn’t I? At first yes I was as I desperately needed to put my past behind me, to forgive myself and move on. I had to get that job to prove to myself that I could do it, that I was worthy.
However, after about 6 months in the job something started to shift again only this time it wasn’t in the right direction. My enthusiasm waned, I started to feel bad for seemingly no reason. I began to dislike the job! I couldn’t understand it - all that struggle, all those years, I got what I wanted so what on earth wasn’t I happy any more?
The problem was that I had been so utterly obsessed with the idea of getting that career back that in those seven years I never stopped to ask myself if that was really what I wanted and as it turned out, it wasn’t! As you know I had been self employed for many years. I began to resent having to be somewhere at 9am every day. My boss started to whine about me going to the gym every day at lunch time and that was something I was not willing to compromise on.
I resented having to ask for time off - I was used to doing just what I wanted, when I wanted. I remember one day Evan had an accident at nursery and he needed surgery. I rushed over to the hospital (he was fine - can’t see the scar now) and the next day my boss demanded that I book that day as holiday. This whole idea of having to do what other people told me was really starting to grate!
Internet Marketing
I still enjoyed development but I just didn’t want to do it for somebody else. Now at some point there is something hazy in my memory. Around this time I discovered Internet marketing again but in a different area to that which I had worked in before. I discovered people like Darren Rowse & Yaro Starak who were the good guys. I honestly don’t remember how I got started but my enthusiasm grew and grew until something very special happened in the summer of 2007…
When I started University I had no idea what the Law of Attraction was - I wouldn’t find out about that for another 4 years but looking back now this is one of the clearest examples to me of it working.
My University Goals
I had had almost a year to think about University before I actually started it. I was very clear about exactly why I was going - it wasn’t to get a degree (that was just a side effect), it was to get my career back, or start a new one I should say.
I had two very specific goals. First of all I wanted the highest grade possible. There was absolutely no point in spending three years of my adult life at University with no income to get anything less than a First Class Honours degree. Furthermore, not only did I absolutely make the decision that I was going to get that grade but I never doubted it - well only occasionally at the end!
When you know what you want and you have absolute faith that you will have it, the Law of Attraction says that it MUST manifest. The second goal was to impress the staff in some way. I wanted to be able to come away from University with references that would allow me to get a job.
Three Wonderful Years
I had a fabulous time at Uni! Two weeks into term I turned 32 so I was obviously one of the more mature students but I seemed to just fit in. My dreams of studying in a big library were granted and what a library it was! I would spend hours in there wandering around all the rare books, the scientific periodicals and all sorts of weird and wonderful collections. Occasionally, I actually did some study in there (in between the day dreaming and the sleeping!)
There was only one tiny little hump to deal with - my partner decided that she wanted a baby! It was something we’d talked about a couple of years earlier and I had decided against but she really wanted one so we went ahead and tried. Being two women, the natural option wasn’t available so we had to have fertility treatment.
In the first year of uni we had all the treatment to deal with. This was quite emotionally draining as we had a few failures which my partner took very badly. However she got pregnant and I must say the pregnancy was wonderful. Our son Evan was born on the 26th December 2004 (the same day as that awful Tsumani!) and so the second year was somewhat marred by sleepless nights!
Thankfully, I didn’t need to work very hard at Uni! I was at a distinct advantage because most of these kids were 18 and had no experience and of course I was already an experienced software developer so most of the classes in the first couple of years literally sent me to sleep. I slept quite a lot at Uni, particularly in the second year when I wasn’t getting so much at home!
A Medical Setback to Test Me
At the end of the second year a couple of days after getting my results (straight A’s whoohoo!), I started to experience severe abdominal pain. I’ll cut this story short as well - a cyst on my ovary had ruptured. I had surgery. Something went wrong. I ended up in intensive care. 11 days later I came out of hospital sporting 15 inches of surgery scars - I had a second op whilst in intensive care. Something wasn’t right. I had contracted MRSA in hospital and a couple of weeks later I had to go back in for treatment. I was in there for another 11 days.
Something happened to me during that time. I was left with not only two major operations to recover from but all sorts of other weird and wonderful conditions. Over the next few months I had just about every illness going - tonsilitis for 3 weeks, a cold that lasted a shocking 8 weeks, a 3 week neck cramp, and lots of other things. Walking around campus was extremely tiring and I found myself sleeping in lectures even more than usual only this year was finals, it was tough and I needed to stay awake!
To make matters worse, 3 months after coming out of hospital I lost my voice. It turned out to be caused by the intubation tubes from intensive care. This went on for three months and made Uni extremely difficult. Strangely, it cleared up all on its own before I could get treatment.
In the year following those surgeries I was tested to the limit. The surgeries themselves took much longer to recover from than I had imagined - over six months. I couldn’t exercise and my weight ballooned to an all-time high. Evan was 9 months old and it was a difficult age, I really wasn’t coping with the whole baby thing all that well. The University work was extremely hard and of course I was starting to think about graduation - would I be able to get a job?
Faith Is The Key
There were times when I felt down, when I was so tired, when I hated myself for allowing myself to get so fat, when I started panicking that all this struggle would be for nothing if I couldn’t get a job anyway but I persisted. I must have faith and I wouldn’t allow those thoughts to linger, I was stronger than that now.
My faith paid off and there was of course a happy ending to this story.
Not only did I get my First Class Honours degree (straight A’s in year 3 too!) but I was also voted the best student in Computer Science! Now this really did look good on the resume! A few weeks before the end of the final term I confided in one of my lecturers about my dark past. A couple of weeks before graduation she sent me an email telling me of a job that looked like exactly the job I was looking for and this was with a company that she had worked closely with for 10 years.
She agreed to speak to one of the managers on my behalf about my situation. She did and they agreed to give me an interview. I was so nervous! At last after 4 years of effort here I was at what seemed like judgement day!
The interview was weird - I waited for the dreaded questions about my past and what I had done but they never came. After about 20 minutes I started to panic - what if there had been a communication breakdown and this guy didn’t know about it? I plucked up the courage to ask “um, are you aware of the situation with my last job?”, the response floored me - he said quite flatly “yes, we’re aware of it and it’s not an issue”!!!!!!
That was it! 2 minutes later I had a job offer - I had reached my goal. I can’t begin to tell you how good that felt. All those years of work, never taking my eye off the goal, never doubting (well very occasionally) that I would reach it and it was mine!
Well, for a while anyway…
In true soap opera fashion tune in next week to find out what happened and why my new job turned out to be so short lived! :-)
After applying to University, I wondered what to do next. There didn’t seem much point continuing with the programming study as anything I did then would be almost 4 years out of date by the time I graduated. My Internet business just gave me really bad vibes and I felt like I needed to get out of the house.
Practicing An Attitude
In the few months since starting to read all my books and doing my study, I felt that I had really changed as a person. I now took responsibility for my actions that led me to getting fired and I could start to see so clearly how my bad attitude had lead to my downfall.
In these books I was reading many principles of success and of how to live in general but what I noticed is that most of it revolved around how to interact with other people. Being sat at home all day on the Internet there didn’t seem to be many opportunities to practice so I decided to just ditch the Internet work and do some temporary work - you don’t need stunning references for that.
My First Temp Job
The first booking that I got was for 3 days of data entry work (plugging numbers into Microsoft Excel) for a drainage company that did contract work for the London Underground. I remember being greeted my the guy who would be my boss for the next 3 days. He seemed a nice enough chap but oh my gosh the offices were awful! I had never seen anything so grotty!
The office I was working in was shared by an extremely heavy smoker - this was 7 years ago before the smoking bans that are in place now. This guy smoked cigars all day long. Most of the people I was working with were drainage engineers which was hardly what I was used to as a software engineer. My boss, James, showed me what I needed to do. I had to look through lots of plans for underground sewage systems and put ID numbers of something called a ‘catchpit’ into a spreadsheet.
As I sat there the negative thoughts began to creep in… I’m 30 years old with advanced computer and business skills and here I am typing numbers into a spreadsheet for some guy who works in drains! It was 9.05am. At that point I made one of the most important decisions of my life.
I figured that I could sit there feeling sorry for myself and could spend the next three days feeling utterly miserable or, I could find a way to enjoy this.
A Miracle Happened With a Single Thought
I chose the latter and what a difference that made! I’m pretty good with computers and these guys were not. They had hired me for three days because that’s how long it would have taken one of them to do the work. I actually found the engineering work to be quite interesting and quickly figured out some shortcuts to get the work done quicker. I got on with it and worked hard. I was done by 2pm - on the first day!
I feared that I might have worked myself out of a job but that was not the case. Temporary work has a rule that if an employer makes a booking they have to honor it so thankfully they had to find me something to do for the next 3 days. I told them that I had a lot more skills than just typing! They found me jobs to do and I demolished them - everything they threw at me I completed very quickly. Working as hard and as fast as I could became like a game.
On the second day I started a project that involved a database that had been written in-house. I knew a lot about databases from my work as a developer. It was horrendous - the developer obviously had no clue what he was doing. I started to fix some stuff and showed my boss who was suitably impressed.
To cut a long story short, 3 days turned into a week which turned into 3 weeks, which turned into 11 months and a doubling of the money I was earning. In the next 11 months I built them a new database from scratch and created reports that could give them information at the click of a button that had previously taken them 3 weeks of manual work to produce.
In the last couple of months before starting Uni my employer was so grateful for my work that he contacted my temporary agency and they secretly entered me into a competition for outstanding temporary workers in the UK. Out of one million entrants, I was one of the 12 runners up!
It’s All In Your Attitude
This experience showed me that I was on the right path. For the first time in my life I realised just how much your state of mind affects your whole life. Working harder, working smarter, being nice to people, being helpful really IS the best way. Whining, complaining, feeling sorry for yourself is NOT! My life had changed for the better in a permanent way and I would never again go back to the person that I used to be.
Finally the day came when it was time to start University! Read all about that next week…
After spending some months reading many self-help style books I really started to experience a shift in my mind. For the first time in years the dark cloud of depression began to lift and my thoughts turned to that of my career, or lack of it and I began to wonder if I could really begin to start moving forwards.
Refreshing My Skills
One of the things I always liked about software development was that it was always at the cutting edge of technology - the industry moved quickly and there was always something new to learn. However this worked against me because having been out of the industry for three years all my previous knowledge and experience was essentially worthless.
My partner was also a software developer and I remember around a year or so after losing my job she asked me a programming question and I realised that I simply couldn’t answer it - my programming days were over.
However, it wasn’t all bad news as I had been self-taught in the beginning and I have always been a quick learner so I immediately hit the books and began spending most of my time with my head in programming books. This in itself was highly theraputic as it gave me purpose, something to work towards. I now know that this is probably my highest value in life. If I ever get to a point in life where I feel as though there is nothing left for me to work towards I would be lost!
A Bold Move & Massive Setback
For a few months I studied and studied and studied but in all that time I didn’t really think about how I was going to go about actually getting a job. You need references and I knew that any reference taken from my previous employer would be terrible so I didn’t know what to do. After a lot of thought I decided that I would contact my old employer, ask for forgiveness and ask for a reference.
I remember the phone conversation so clearly… I was shaking and sweating as I made the call. The line manager I had still worked there and she remembered me. I told her what was happening and how after three years I really wanted to start over and I asked her if she could put the past behind her and give me a reference. She refused flatly. She was so cold my hands could have frozen around the phone receiver.
It was a massive blow, I didn’t know what to do and for a while I could feel the depression creeping back in. However, I had come so far I couldn’t just give up now!
A Brand New Hope
Sometimes when we look for a solution it can turn up in ways that you never would have thought of yourself. I spoke to my partner about the situation and one evening she said to me, “why don’t you go to University?”. At first I thought she was crazy. In the previous three years I had blown through a massive amount of the equity in our house and University would mean another three years without an income.
However there was something about the idea that felt really good. I love to study and I had always wanted to go to University - the idea of holing myself up in a big library studying seemed very appealing! Plus just the idea of having a degree was something I have always wanted. The real question was whether or not getting a degree could help me get back into the software industry.
The problem I was facing is that I had been a self-taught programmer and so with no good recent job references and no formal education there was nothing on my resume that gave anyone an incentive to hire me. I figured that if I went to Uni I could attack the problem in two ways - firstly, I could make sure that I got the highest grade possible and secondly, the University staff would know nothing of my past and so they would only know me as I was then, and I was sure that they would give me excellent character references.
So, I applied!
The Waiting Game
I didn’t know much about Universities it turned out! Semesters start in October and this was November! I had to wait almost a whole year just to start! Plus even if I got in (which I did), I would then have three years of study. That meant that my career would still be another four whole years away, ugh! But you know what, I didn’t care. Having hope, knowing that there was a possibility made all the difference. I wanted it badly and I was prepared to pay the price. Now all I had to do was figure out what to do for the next eleven months…
Part 2 of my story concluded with my darkest hour. On the odd days where I actually tried to do some work, one of the techniques I started to learn about was multi-level marketing. This is a somewhat dubious practice that promised great riches with very little effort - just the kind of thing I was drawn to at the time!
I had ordered some magazines about MLM though they had been sitting on a shelf for months as I actually did very little work in that depressed state. However one day out of boredom more than anything else I picked up one of the magazines and began to read it. It contained a series of interviews with many successful business people and one of the questions that these people were asked was to name a book that had been influential to their success.
Think and Grow Rich
Many of them said The Bible but a close second was “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. That title rang a bell to me, and I was sure that I owned it from when I was a teenager. In fact the book I owned was a different book called, “Talk and Grow Rich” which was obviously a copy-cat book. However I was intreagued so I ordered it from Amazon.
I didn’t understand it when I first read it. In fact, I had a really hard time reading it at all because of the language that was used. The book was originally written in 1937 so the style of English was not what I was used to.
But there was something about the book - something that kept me reading until the end. What was this secret that the author had mentioned? I didn’t find it but I knew he was onto something. Perhaps more importantly, in the couple of days that I had spent reading it I felt okay. I wasn’t depressed when I was reading - for a while, I didn’t feel so bad.
A Bookworm is Born
One nifty feature of Amazon (that was fairly unique to them at the time I think - this was about 2001 if I recall) is that when you buy a book it shows you others that you might be interested in. I ordered a whole bunch of books. More from Napoleon Hill (I was hoping that they wouldn’t all be so cryptic!), Og Mandino, David Schwartz…
Over the next month or so I just read and read and read. In a way I suppose I used the books in the same way that I had used alcohol. It gave me a distraction and numbed the pain. But of course the big difference was that reading books about personal growth was not destructive to myself or to anybody else unlike the drinking which had returned.
I was hearing the same messages over and over in different ways… Go the extra mile, have an attitude of service, be nice to people, think positive, think big and so on. All this stuff was literally the opposite of what I had been living and of course I was not alone - so many people are completely engulfed in a world of negativity - woe is me, the world is out to get me, do the least amount you can get away with, expect the worst so you’re not disappointed, look out for number 1 and so on.
An Amazing Realisation
Whilst reading all of these books a tiny little voice in my head said something that I really didn’t want to hear. It told me that we are each responsible for our own lives and we are where we are because of the choices that we have made. I didn’t wan’t to acknowledge that. Surely it couldn’t have been my fault that I had got mixed up in bad things that caused me to throw away my career? It was them, it was their fault!
But the voice didn’t go away and it slowly dawned on me that I was the only one responsible for my actions. For the first time in years I accepted that responsibility and when I did I felt a sense of peace, of relief. I began to let go of the guilt and shame that had consumed me for all of those years and decided that it was time for a change!
Looking back now it pains me to think that I spent three years in this state but of course if I had not picked up that magazine that day I might still be there! It makes me wonder now how to reach out to other people who are in that place, that state of mind. That is one of the questions that I want to try to answer as I move forward in life.
I set out to actively lead a life that truly feels good in the Spring of 2008 after a series of setbacks in my personal life. My aim is to spread whatever I learn about feeling good to others through this blog.
