My intention in writing this book is to share The Way with you: The Way to bring more joy and happiness into your life; The Way to more contentment; and The Way to feel fantastic!
The Way is about you and how you feel. It is about taking where you are today in your life, and opening up more exciting possibilities and potential, so that you can live your life to its fullest extent. By taking small steps each day, you will be taken on a fabulous journey to a more energetic and fulfilled way of living that will stay with you forever. The purpose of this book is not only to get you feeling fantastic, but also to create a structure and an awareness that will allow you to self-manage how you feel, and create happiness from the inside–out.
The Way is a philosophy that evolved over my many years of working as a personal and business troubleshooter, helping people to successfully overcome periods of adversity that were impacting both their business and their personal lives. During this time, I discovered that by getting people who were experiencing great hardship and stress to feel happier, my chances of then saving their company from collapse were greatly increased.
In order for me to understand a situation more, I felt that I needed to become deeply involved mentally, emotionally, and physically in a client’s crisis: to know how they were feeling, and what I would do if I were in a similar situation. In essence, I became my client’s partner – feeling their stress, experiencing their anguish, and living their ups and their downs with them. It was not always a particularly pleasant experience, but the desire to help them, and the challenge of saving their companies, drove me on.
When a company was in crisis I saw that a business owner usually had nowhere to turn for help, often losing friends and relationships in the process. I wanted to be there, to be able to dive in head first with my sleeves rolled up, and fight alongside the owner to save his or her company.
And this is how I led my life for many years, gaining knowledge from my direct experiences along the way. The downside to living a life involved with crisis management, however, does take its toll.
As each case finished, the release of pressure left me feeling exhausted and in need of recuperation. Many times, depending on the severity of a case, I became ill. But I felt that it was worth it to help people recover from being on the verge of losing everything, and seeing them confident and happy again was very rewarding.
One day, on the suggestion of my wife, Collette, who was concerned about me taking on all this stress, I decided to see if I could get my client to ‘feel’ better during their crisis, and so put them into a better mental state to save their company, while having less of an impact on me personally. To achieve this, I started to ask my clients to take certain actions, depending on what their emotional experiences were at the time. Client conditions ranged from anger, depression, anxiety, and marital problems, to lack of self-worth, and even suicidal tendencies.
When they were re-introduced to the elements that were lacking in their lives, everything just started to turn around for them. As they became happier from the inside their companies improved, and a positive impact was felt in their external lives as well.
I realized that I had a natural gift for seeing what was missing in people’s lives and, by using my intuition, my clients started experiencing more personal happiness and contentment. This still allowed me to empathize, while staying more centered in my own energy. The more in touch I became with my feelings the more intuitive I became. I would sense an issue with a client, and then connect to their energy to feel what they were going through while being able to keep my energy raised. This gave me more clarity, and my intuition gave me the answers to their problems.
This is how I discovered that there were nine actions (elements) that consistently help people to improve how they feel. I put my findings into a philosophy, which has developed through finding solutions to people’s life and business problems.
The 9 Elements are the foundation of this philosophy, which I call The Way. It evolved because I wanted people to have a simple way of regulating how they feel and moving forward with their lives. These nine simple actions are based on what was missing, and also out of Balance, in many people’s lives. Once they introduced these elements, they became happier and more able to cope with their difficulties.
Over time, I began to realize that the special moments for me came less from saving the companies from crisis, and more from seeing my clients smile again – just to see the sparkle return to someone’s eyes was priceless.
This book is about the 9 Elements and The Way to feeling fantastic.