ROOT & CROWN Grounding and expansion

You do not know me yet. But I think I know you.

You have promised yourself it would be different. Tomorrow. And tomorrow came, and you were the same man.

You have believed you were finally through it. Then a year went by, and you were back at the beginning.

Maybe you are building something big while something inside you is breaking. Maybe your body is begging you to stop, and you keep going. Maybe you lost someone, and you feel nothing at all.

I know, because I have been every one of those men.

Three times the ground has opened under me.

The first time it took one day. My company. My best friend, who was also my partner. My relationship. My home. Gone between morning and night.

The second time it took six months. Three years after I had built it all back, a company and a relationship went again.

The third time it took what I loved most. The woman I believed I would marry. The woman I believed would be the mother of my children. That one hurt more than all the rest together.

And never once did I stop.

I built through four and a half years of stress and anxiety. I built with a nervous system burnt to ash. I built when stress took my sight. I built through operations. I took care of my family through all of it. And in the deepest grief of my life, I built two new businesses.

Somewhere along the way I lost someone very close to me in my family, and I felt nothing. The grief only came years later.

I know what it is to fail yourself.

I know what it is to break your own word, again and again.

I know the voice that says tomorrow. Tomorrow I change. Tomorrow I break the pattern.

I know what it is to think you are healed, and watch it all fall three years later.

I know what it is to think you have finally made it, and a year later stand where you began, because you never looked yourself in the eye.

I know what it is to heal your inner child alone, and feel like you have no one in the whole world.

For years I went looking. I travelled into the jungles of South America and across Europe to live with coaches, shamans and spiritual leaders. I sat through more than 50 retreats. I read Jung. I learned from mentors for nine years.

And still I walked around knowing everything and changing nothing.

The third fall is what finally broke me open, and this time I let it.

This is what got me out.

I started working with my feelings. Not thinking about them. Feeling them.

I started keeping my own word.

I started working with coaches and mentors, instead of doing it all alone.

I started treating myself like my own best friend.

I cried out my grief and my shame.

That is how I healed the boy inside me.

I became a safe man.

Today I have made it. My life works. I wake up at peace.

So hear this from someone who has been there: you can take care of the people you love while you are burnt out. You can build while you are anxious. You can rebuild yourself after the breakup that broke you. It is possible. You just have to keep going long enough.

I have coached since 2015, and I have worked with a lot of men. You do not have to do it alone. I did it alone for years, and I would not wish that on anyone.

Tell me where you are. I have been there, and I know the way out.