By God Does Our Species Need It
I couldn’t help her. I’m 22 years of age, and it’s the worst morning of my life.
I’m at my mother’s house, under the ruse of having breakfast together. The doorbell rings.
I know who it is. She doesn’t.
Mom opens the door. Horrified, she’s greeted by powerful-looking men dressed in white coats.
I’ve betrayed her. They were there at my request… because my mother is clinically deranged.
She turns to give me a look I’ll never forget. One which left an indelible scar, not just on my heart…
…but on my very soul.
Mom had enjoyed great success as a model for the likes of Chanel, Lancome and Charles of the Ritz. Now, she was a very different woman.
I was 12 when symptoms of her menopausal condition first emerged. Little did I know back then it was only the beginning.
Her work dried up as the dark descent into evermore concerning degrees of mental illness followed. The nonsensical deranged letters to friends, family and teachers. The absurd phone calls. Her acute paranoia. My constant embarrassment.
She won’t accept help. Her condition deteriorates.
No one around me helps. No one can. For all their well-meaning sympathy and understanding, I was on my own. I had to act. I had to do what, for a loving son, and only child, was unthinkable – because I knew if I didn’t, she wouldn’t survive.
I beg a renowned psychiatrist to weigh in. He agrees to visit with his team. He spends 120 seconds in a conversation with my mom in her living room. He returned to me in the kitchen to decare, “Your mother is gravely ill.” “Tell me something I don’t know”, I replied.
Reluctantly she voluntarily goes into the psychiatric unit. Less than 24 hours later she checks herself out and goes to the other side of the city to a relative’s house. That relative calls me to tell me how she thinks I’m a disgrace to do such a thing to my mother.
Twenty four hours later, she calls back to apologise. “Just send my mom back home and never speak to me again”, I reply.
I’m a helpless young adult not knowing what to do, clutching at straws. But then, a few weeks later…
… my mother’s spotted walking in the middle of a busy highway, traffic swerving to avoid her.
Then her neighbour watches her sprinkle prescription pills over the garden fence where kids are playing – an inconceivable act for the woman I knew my mother to be.
She was that lost.
I now had the means to do the inconceivable thing. She was now a danger to herself and others.
So I make the call. The call no son should ever have to make. The call to have my mother sectioned (committed to a psychiatric ward) under the Mental Health act. I was 22.
Events of this ilk have consequences.
Resiliently, I carry on. No time off work, no hiding from commitments or responsibilities. I bury myself in work. I party hard in booze- fuelled weekends. All an unconscious defence mechanism to bury years of trauma and pain.
Worst of all, I lack the self-awareness to heal.
I’m damaged. I just don’t know it. Yet.
Then in 1996, I started reading, then studying, self-improvement material. Three years later, in 1999, I stumble across a website describing Coaching…
… and one line lit me up like a Christmas tree: “The answer is always in the individual.”
It’s a light-bulb moment. I’d inherently always moved the needle for others because it was my nature to take a genuine interest in them. My experience had shown me that people knew the answers to their most pressing problems, challenges and difficulties…
… even when they didn’t know they knew.
I dive into a year-long Coaching accreditation, and become a father for the first time.
I’m then introduced to my greatest fear: projecting my unresolved issues into my child.
I shed 74 pounds (33 kg). I stop drinking. I stop smoking.
Yet still I’m haunted by limiting beliefs, and I resist the dream to step out and run my own Coaching business.
“Who’d want to be Coached by you, anyway?”
“What kind of husband and father puts his young family at financial risk?”
“And what’s wrong with the six-figure salary, two holidays, lovely house, and Merc on the driveway?”
This psychological loop sabotages the dream for four years, festering away like a cancer, undermining any courage I mustered to break free of the corporate chains.
Then our chairman learns of my skills and hears of my plans to leave. He asks me to deliver a leadership development initiative in return for which “he’d see me right”.
I seize the opportunity. I cut my teeth in the toughest way possible. In a birth of fire, I Coach those who, by organisational hierarchy, lead me.
I experience my true craft, and in the process, recreate myself anew.
2006, I finally break the corporate shackles, heading blindly and naively into the entrepreneurial venture of a Coaching business.
18 months clueless. All cash burned. £106,000 ($145,000) gone, and the coffers all but empty.
Then providence moves. Two connections bring two corporate Coaching contracts worth £330k/year ($445,000).
I’m living the dream… or so I thought… but my quality of life is deteriorating. And I’m exhausted.
I’m trading time for money. I’m away from family most of the week. And when home, I’m not present.
It hits me, I own a job, not a business.
And then…
The 2009 recession hits, and I get two phone calls in six weeks, “You’re done.” For reasons outside of my control, the two fat corporate contracts are gone.
Two young kids, two mortgages, and not enough money to pay a huge tax bill I should have foreseen. And because I’m “the success Coach,” my downfall is doubly embarrassing.
Months later, my business goes under.
Then, for different reasons, my marriage crumbles. I was no longer the man she married. It’s a soul-destroying act of love to walk away…
In the depths of this darkness, I look at my business failure and I’m quick to blame the unethical financiers and incompetent politicians… anyone, but myself.
But after a seven-day pity party, the unforgiving mirror draws a revelation…
… I’m the problem.
Not the business, not the economy, but me – and the quality of thinking I was bringing to my business.
That was the moment of truth. That was the moment I truly woke up to practise what I preach.
With the application of a new level of thinking, my Coaching business went from zero to a million in less than four years
Today, life is very different. I live a healthy, fit and what many would consider a truly successful life free of the life-detracting habits which once controlled me.
But I’m not free of the deep-seated damage of my history. In fact, I’m more conscious of it now than ever.
That’s why I continue to face my demons. It’s why I’ve embraced psychotherapy for years. And it’s why I not only embrace, accept and own my darkness…
… I celebrate it in recognition of how it serves me and my body of work.
Without it, I’d never have developed the deeply transformative Coaching ability for which I’m renowned. And I certainly wouldn’t enjoy a worldwide reputation for my ability to teach others to Coach at a mastery level.
My mum passed away in 2001. I was in my 30’s when it dawned on me that her suffering, and my experience of it, sowed the seeds of my work in the world.
Coaching, in its true form, matters. Far more than the vast majority of humanity is aware.
Yes, it’s a murky profession blighted by the untrained, unqualified, and unfit-for-purpose telling people what to think instead of teaching them how to think…
… but when done correctly in the hands of those who are taught, trained and mentored to be superlative in their ability, it’s unparalleled in its power to transform life.
No other intervention gets near. No other intervention raises consciousness like Coaching in its true form.
The answer is always in the individual, they’re just not conscious of it…
… yet.
This is why my life is dedicated to bringing elite-level, conscious-raising, transformative Coaches to the world.
By God does our species need it.
Christian Simpson...
I’m a globally acclaimed Coach, tutor, trainer and mentor to the Elite Influencers of the Coaching profession, and the founder and creator of the Conscious Coaching Academy™ – an industry-leading, award-winning, boutique training provider offering the world’s only Elite Influencer Coaching Accreditation™.
To date I’ve personally trained over 40,000 Coaches in more than 170 countries to the highest standards in the profession.
My team and I not only provide the highest possible calibre of training in Coaching ability to our Elite Influencers, we equip them with the know-how, methods and strategies to build highly profitable, fulfilling and rewarding careers with healthy six and 7-figure, leveraged businesses.
The outcome? A career of far more reach, influence, impact and income.
I share none of this to brag in anyway.
On the contrary, I’ve been in this industry since the turn
of the century, and I’ve made every mistake in the book:
- I’ve been the “wannabe” Coach who had a corporate career and wanted to step out and create my own business, but was full of fear about doing it.
- I’ve been the Coach who thought he had this entrepreneurial game licked because I won a couple of juicy six-figure corporate contracts from the old boys network.
- I’ve been the practitioner who constantly sought to add more and more professional qualifications and “tools” to my toolkit, falsely believing it made me more attractive to the marketplace.
- I’ve been the Coach who traded time for money, totally unaware of the crippling limits I was putting on my business and the income, wealth and prosperity it could bring me.
- I’ve been the professional qualified Coach who spun out of corporate life with zero idea of how to build a business - yet I thought I had what it takes.
- And I’ve been the Coach who led his business into liquidity because he thought like a practitioner not a profit-maker: when those two six-figure contracts went south on me for reasons outside of my control, I had no effective marketing engine feeding my business.
Not exactly a bed of roses, huh?
I know the pain of every aspiring and struggling Coach out there, because I’ve lived it.
I’ve also lived the turnaround.
Because I’ve also been the Coach who picked himself up, went and found highly successful 7-figure entrepreneur who could teach him how to run and grow a real business – and sold the roof over his head to raise the money to pay the eye-watering fee he commanded.
As a consequence, I became the Coach who took his business from
zero to a million in less than four years.
And I’m the sought-after Coach hired by some of the biggest names in the personal growth/self-improvement in the industry – including the late Bob Proctor and John C. Maxwell.
And it all started many years ago when I came face to face with acute mental derangement… find out more by clicking the button below.
