The time came when I wanted to be a better person. It started when I was fired from my first long-term relationship. She was 21, I was 35. She moved into her first home, and we tried to be friends, but it was never going to work. So I was fired. Later, I found out she was seeing someone from work. I was the sponsor of the Ladies Hockey team she played on, and I got to meet the new man in her life. With hindsight, we had very little in common. I was running my own successful graphic design/illustration company, and she was in the corporate automotive industry. She would sleep all the way from Solihull to Cumbria in silence. Another experience that happened in the future too. Also, my mother rarely speaks.

As a lot of my customers at that time were management development companies – Shared Vision run by Rob Bernstein, Broadwater Training by Adrian Bennett, also Group 4 Securitas Training. I asked them to tell me what was wrong with me, and all I got back was “I was a nice person”. Which really pissed me off. So I had to go deeper and take all the personality tests I could find. Still of no real help.

So I had to find more….How I was saved…

HINDSIGHTS: As it turned out, I was never here to leave anything behind when I left for the last time. So the relationship ended because she wanted a family and knew I was never going to give her this. She now has two wonderful children. It turned out as it should have.

There are times we need to look deeper into things before we react. But that awareness really does take time and experience.

My relationships have always followed my mother’s behaviour. I also now know that my life has been tightly confined until I reached the right level of awareness and enlightenment. How I was saved…

Emotions do not go away, they just change in frequency and impact. The more we fight against them, the more intense the pain gets, until we learn the lesson.