by Pratt Bennet, Life Coach
When did it start, my slow-but-seemingly-unstoppable decline? Was it when the love went out of my 20-year marriage? When we separated? Divorced? When the job I had loved for 19 years started turning into a micro-managed corporate nightmare? When my loving father’s decades of poor health and loneliness led to a fall, then open-heart surgery, several operations and rehabs, and a tragic 5-year struggle with dementia?
I don’t know. None of it made any sense to me. Each blow hit me unprepared and incapable of rebounding. As a coach and professor, I was a great success at helping others not only survive, but thrive. I helped them get new degrees, promotions, start businesses, change careers and countries, even build new relationships. As a husband, father, and son, however, I was a total failure. I couldn’t keep my marriage going. I couldn’t spare my incredible daughters the unbearable pain of their parents’ estrangement, separation, and divorce. I couldn’t help my father get better, or feel at home in any of a string of assisted living facilities he had to move into and out of as his mobility and coherence declined.
Paralyzed and confused, I shut myself down. I stopped playing sports or exercising- it was too ridiculous to really care where the ball went or who had it. I cut off contact with most of my friends –what must they think of such a total failure? I stopped making any real plans for the future- I clearly wasn’t capable of building anything lasting. I just plain stopped, and stayed stopped for years. I put all my energy, focus, and attention to helping the people I was coaching and teaching to move forward. After all, they had a lot better chance to succeed than I did!
Several years into my paralysis, however, it was a client who showed me the way out of it. “What are you doing here?” she asked me one day. I had just helped her transform her small-focus, part-time job into a position as a global spokeswoman for a multi-national corporation. “Why aren’t you out there, doing this on a bigger scale?” I told her the truth: I loved helping people like her create incredible, exciting new careers. “Yeah, but you could do this for yourself, just like you did it for me, one small step at a time!” she said, smiling and shaking her head at how thick I seemed to her.
At the time, I laughed and told her she didn’t understand. And she didn’t. I was convinced that I had had my chance- several, in fact, and had blown them all. I’d be lucky if I could just hold onto this job. That’s why, even when the company started passing policies that were bad for our clients, that put profit above progress, and that literally tried to control what I did each minute of the hour, I stayed there, telling myself it couldn’t get any worse, and I couldn’t do any better, anyway.
