Development

Training and development is vital for personal continuous improvement, and most businesses have a self-contained training and development team. But not everybody is fortunate to work for a business that sends you on free training courses. For those of you who are out of work, self-employed, or work for a company that just doesn’t care, then I believe you should treat yourself as if you are a business. Each year you should create a series of goals, which include training and development to ensure to continually improve. Last weekend I was transforming my life at the Landmark Forum. There are a number of lessons to learn about my attendance at this wonderful event that I didn’t plan to attend. If you check my goals there is no mention of the Landmark Forum. Training courses cost money and this is why you should plan them in advance – so you can budget accordingly. The Landmark Forum cost me £805 of un-budgeted income. (Course=£375, Hotels=£380 & Food=£50)  If you ran your business this way you would find yourself unemployed very quickly, so don’t behave this way when you are your own business.

Action: Each year you should decide what your training and development budget is going to be and plan accordingly. If you want to attend the Landmark Forum then plan to do so and save the money. Do not randomly attend courses midway through the year because you feel like it. This is how you get into debt.

Destitution

In last weeks Pick of the Week: Debt and Divorce I told you that I found myself £1,400 overdrawn. It was the first time that I have been overdrawn since I retired from the rail industry and it scared me. I have since read two excellent finance books Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez and The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsay and am midway through my third, I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi. I have taken the best advice from the first two books and have so far created 16 actions. I am going to be sharing each action with you on this blog, but in the meantime just focus on this solitary point.

Action: Stop spending money! Financial independence starts by understanding that you are the reason you are destitute. A picture says a thousand words – over to you Will Smith.

In a previous blog post Pick of the Week: Love and Blood I wrote about the death of my Nan. During her final weeks on this earth, and in the wake of her death, the family was beset with worry and stress. In fact there was so much worry and stress that when she died there was more relief than actual grief. Obviously the worry and stress cannot be eliminated completely, because by the mere nature of illness and death there is going to be a reaction, but part of the problem lies behind the uncertainty. Nobody really knew what to do when my Nan fell ill, and trying to organise everything in the wake of her death was exactly the same.

There is not much to be certain of in life, but one thing we can be certain of is the fact that we will all die. Yet despite this fact people still refuse to discuss death. But until people start to discuss it, and plan for their eventual demise, people the world over will continue to be dragged through this emotional minefield.

The other thing that bothered me this week was the funeral itself. Funerals are such dire affairs and yet they don’t have to be. I believe it should be a celebration of life, but instead we all stand and sing hymns we don’t even know the words to. It was a Christian service and yet my Nan was not a Christian and neither were most of the people in attendance. So why were we all saying prayers and singing hymns? I had a vision of my own funeral and people were telling stories about my life. Everyone was having a good laugh and a good cry as they took time to share their memories. Then the needle fell off the funeral dream record because unless I pull my finger out of my arse, it will be two hymns and a few prayers to a God I don’t believe exists.

Action: Wake up and smell the death. We are all going to get old and we are all going to die! Make arrangements for your care when you are elderly. It costs money, so make sure you have saved for it. Make sure you have a will so if you should fall severely ill or die people do not need to fret or worry. Last but not least, make sure that you make arrangements for the type of service you want and place it into your will.

Death Photo courtesy of TheTim (CC & Flickr)

I was panting hard. The cold had not yet reached my legs because I had just stopped running, but it wouldn’t be long. There was a lot of noise but none of it was discernible because I was watching three young boys play-fighting on the grass. One of the boys feigned injury and his friend stopped dead in his tracks to ask if he was ok. Being an ex play-fighting champion I could see that he was being duped, and sure enough the compassionate lad was soon on his back getting the play-fight booted out of him. A smile widened on my face as I appreciated the brief show of compassion from the boy.

“I am going to meet my God forsaken mother.”

Noises were now transforming into words because there was something I wanted to hear. It was a child, no older than 11-years of age, and he was talking to his friend about his Mum. As each child emerged from the door I could see that they were each looking much older than I remembered. As each one breezed into the life-light I couldn’t help but wonder how each parent would influence their upbringing. Which children felt abandoned, unloved, unwanted, different, special, strange, spoiled or starved. I was seeing people very differently today, and children more differently than adults. I had just finished my Landmark Forum and now everything – and everyone -looked different to me.

Four days previously I had taken my seat next to a young woman. I chose a young woman deliberately because I knew it was going to be four days where I would tell my most intimate secrets to people I had never met. I find it much easier to remove my mask in front of a woman. At least I know if it is a woman they will listen to what I have to say. For the next four days I went through a gamut of emotions. At times I felt like I was being forced to watch the Bridges of Madison County on a loop. Clint Eastwood was stood in the pouring rain, Meryl Streep with her sweaty hand on the car door handle…go on Meryl…push down…run…run…run…set yourself free…you only have one life….go Meryl….go. She never did push down on that handle and I never did stop crying.

The Landmark Forum is a place where even the secretive of people can be free. People who would never dream of talking to one stranger, suddenly finding an outstretched arm reaching for the stars, desperate for the coach to pick them so they could tell their most intimate tales to 200 complete strangers. Old men, young men, gay men, old women, young woman, gay women, 25-Slovaks and 15-Russians. The Landmark Forum had people of all sorts, and the plan was to transform every single one of them in just three days.

So what did I learn from the Landmark Forum? The Landmark Forum promised that anything I wanted for myself, or my life, would be available out of my participation. My purpose is to use my experience, passion and drive to teach and inspire others to excel in their work and family lives. I want to touch millions of people. I am at my happiest when I am making other people happy. What I learned is that the human race make it extremely difficult for me to achieve my life purpose. I believe that the Landmark Forum have transformed me but I still have a lot more to learn. I struggle to reach into a person’s soul and give their heart a much-needed rub. I get frustrated and the frustration reverts me to type. I am like the Incredible Hulk except I am yellow, not green and the only muscle I have sometimes resides in my head.

You are making me revert to type, you wouldn’t like me when I revert to type

I have a manipulative, charming and persuasive personality. These strong suits are why I have been so successful in my life, but they also leave a trail of destruction behind me. I have tried to control, dominate and win every argument I have ever had and every relationship I have been involved with. All of this behaviour emanates from a moment when I was 8-years old. Landmark got me to see that. People were calling me names and saying that I was Chinese. My young brain couldn’t compute this abuse because as I looked around my family, everyone one of them had round eyes. I asked my Mum if we had any relatives who were Chinese? I did not want to be different and I wanted the one person in the world, who knew how to manage my heart, to tell me what I wanted to hear. My Mum asked me to sit down and started to recite a stream of words that she had no doubt dreaded for 8-years. She told me that my biological Dad was Chinese and he had left her while I was still floating around in amniotic fluid.

I didn’t want to be Chinese. Being Chinese confirmed that I was different. The one person in the world who is supposed to tell me everything will be ok didn’t do her job. She should have told me I was perfect just like everybody else. Why did she tell me I was different? Life is absurd. Life is lysergic acid diethylamide. An incident that occurred when I was 8-years old transformed me into a manipulative, charming and persuasive personality. I did this so I could fit in. I did this so I could be the same as everyone else. I wanted to belong. I needed to belong.

As my son finally emerged from the shadows of the corridor, his smile mirrored mine as he saw me waiting for him. I hugged him, kissed him, put my arm around his shoulder and walked off with him beside me, all the time thinking how my divorce was going to help shape his strong suits and be the bedrock of his life, and it scared the shit out of me.

Do you remember the first time in your life when you thought, “something is wrong?”

Give me a topic that I think can transform my life, include some easy to follow steps and some real-life success stories and I am anybody’s. I don’t care who you are, this book has all three and it ranks right up there as one of the most influential pieces of literature I have ever read. If you want to transform your life then you need to have your financial house in order and this book addresses just that

In my last blog post The Pick of The Week: Debt and Divorce I told you that debt had been dominating my thoughts and this book is the reason why. I have been in debt all of my life but when I created my 2012 goals one of them was to become debt free. During my quarterly goals review I wrote this:

Create a debt free 2012

In order to remain debt free I needed a financial plan. I needed clarity of income and expenditure so I knew how much I had to spend each month and in what areas. I created the plan at the beginning of the year and so far it has been a huge success. I have been debt free for the first three-months of the year, although I still have some work to do with respect to my spending habits.

On Target / Off Target = On Target!

Please read the sentence highlighted in red once more. Do you remember how I advocated the need to investigate and identify root cause when I wrote the blog post The Five Whys? Well this is a classic case of not practicing what I preach. Before I became debt free the root cause of my debt problem was me, or more distinctly my spending habits. No amount of financial planning matters if you do not change the root cause. In order to change my financial situation I had to change my behaviours and the way I approached money. When I recently found my current account to be £1,400 overdrawn I panicked. During my check-in with my girlfriend she told me about a great website called Man vs Debt. I went on there to have a look around and found a blog post called 24 Quick Actions You Can Do Today That Can Change Your Financial Life Forever. In Action 19, Man vs Debt creator Adam Baker, listed his top three financial books that have helped him achieve a debt free lifestyle and so I bought all three of them.

The book is a way of life for thousands of people worldwide. It is an institution on how to change your behaviour and let your money worries float away. I have decided to personally complete the nine steps that are contained within the book and share my progress with you. I will accomplish this by writing nine separate blog posts in the form of a series. These nine blog posts will be based on my own personal financial situation as I take the nine step program. I hope through my honesty and transparency that readers will be inspired to make the same changes I do.

Have you found your way through a mire of debt? If so what plan did you follow?

So what has been going on the world of Lee Davy this week? What can I drag out of my life and lay bare for people to learn from? There have been two things that have dominated my thoughts. At the start of the week my thoughts were on nothing but debt and then as the week tailed off my thoughts turned to divorce.

My earliest memories of money are not ones that I am proud of. When I was my son’s age I started stealing money from my parents. I would wait until they were drunk and steal £2 maybe 3 from them. I thought that they would never notice because they were inebriated and I was right. So why did I steal money? I am pretty sure that a part of the methodology behind the act was a cry for help (another post in itself), but mainly it was to keep up with the Joneses.

Deciding at the cherubic age of 10 that I needed to keep up with the Joneses has led to a lifetime of debt. What did debt bring me? It brought me a lot of materialistic things. I had cars, expensive electronic gadgets and all the best designer clothes. I used to think I wanted them for my own personal pleasure but it was all a lie. I now realise the truth. I now realise that the only reason I bought those items was to satisfy my ego. I had a good job with a good salary and I wanted everybody to know. Instead of telling them all (which I am sure I also did) I displayed that vanity all over my house and my person.

I only started to change when I went through my divorce. I moved into my mother’s spare room and had to decide what to do with all of the stuff my credit card had bought. I remember standing in my old house and everything I owned had been moved into one room waiting for me to clear it out. I rung my friend up and told him to shift it all and either sell it, keep it or dump it. When I used to ponder the thought of divorce, one of the excuses that my mind used to keep me at home was my material possessions. I really was worried about how we would divide everything we owned between the pair of us. Yet when it came down to it, I found it very easy to just let things go.

Now I own hardly anything I can gauge my levels of happiness both with material goods and without material goods. I can tell you that the material goods did not provide me with happiness. Like so many things in society it was an illusion and a very clever one at that. When I checked my bank account this week I noticed that I was £1,400 overdrawn. This was the first time this had happened since I managed to clear my debt. I had outstanding invoices and money in my other accounts, so I wasn’t technically in the red, but it was a clear warning sign.

LEE, YOU ARE HEADING FOR FINANCIAL MELTDOWN

A bit dramatic? No, not really. You see I now understand how much misery debt piled onto my life and I never want to have those feelings ever again. It was time to act and act quickly and this is why debt has been my focus this week. I have finished my first financial book (which I will review next week) and have started a nine-step financial program (I will share every stage with you). I am so excited right now. My brain is pumping away with thoughts about frugality, tithing, saving and living a wonderful life and I hope to share all of this with you, so you too can learn about the woes of debt.

In last weeks Pick of the Week: Love and Blood I wrote about my experience with grief after the death of my Nan. I was confused because I wasn’t grieving and wrote about my lack of experience in the grieving department. I was wrong in that assumption because ever since my ex-wife and I decided to end our 15-year marriage I have been grieving. I once read that going through a divorce is more difficult to deal with than death. With a divorce, the person whom you loved so much is still very much alive and this is even more difficult if you share children. We live in a very big world, yet on times trying to co-exist with my ex-wife has been so very difficult.

At the end of this week the divorce process finally ended and I am no longer a married man. The act of the final dissolution forces your mind to think about your marriage. There is nothing you can do about it. Try as you might, your mind will just keep going back to the same old thing. I feel very sad, angry and disappointed with myself. You see when I write about my debt and the way that I allowed myself to be hauled through that illusion, the fallout of my behaviour was felt by ex wife and my son. When I talk about learning to communicate better and become a better partner for my new girlfriend, my ex-wife and my son felt all my failings in the past. I keep crying because I feel like I was responsible for giving them both a great life and I screwed it up. They both looked up to me and gave me their lives and I let them both down. I know that I am going to have to forgive myself one day but when that day is I do not know.

Photo courtesy of Vectorportal & o5com (cc @ flickr.com)

My mind has been swept away so often in the past few years that I really do need to start being careful. I can get carried away with the words of an author to such a degree that I become an instant believer. I then have a tendency to believe I have then been chosen to pass the information onto as many people as I can. I try to become a master of knowledge that I haven’t even comprehended myself. Then sometimes I come across differing opinions and I get confused. Who is right and who is wrong? Of course, often, there is no right or wrong – simply opinion. The beauty of which is summed up marvelously in memories of two very different books sparked by the death of my Nan.

When my Nan was recently admitted to hospital after suffering a heart attack I assumed that her sand was slowly disappearing down the glass. I was morbidly curious about how she was feeling. I really wanted to know if she feared death, welcomed it or didn’t even think about it? Did she think she was going to meet up with her late husband of 58-years or did she think she was going to close her eyes and that would be that?

I went to visit her in hospital and she was in fine fettle. She was chirpy and joking about how gorgeous her doctor was, so I took the opportunity to ask her some questions about her heart attack and her brush with death. She told me that she never felt any pain when she had her attack, but she did experience some strange hallucinations. I asked her if she wanted to die and she told me that she wanted to live for at least another ten years. I told her that in order for this wish to come true she would have to pull her finger out of her arse. Sitting in a chair watching TV all day long was not going to provide her with the ten years she needed.

In my blog post The Pick of the Week: Blood Lines and Love Lines I wrote about her death. Prior to her second admittance to hospital the spritely Nan who held that conversation with me was gone and she had been replaced by a lost soul. When I went to see her at her home I could tell than she had given up. It was the clearest case of life energy leaving a body that I have ever seen. Her human body had become a shell and all her life and gone somewhere else. I went to Monte Carlo and heard that she was admitted to hospital for the second time and I was happy. Then I was told she was being discharged because, medically, there was nothing wrong with her. She died on the day of her discharge. Her life energy looked into the future and didn’t like what it saw. There was no hope, no enjoyment and no life. She simply gave up and her life slowly drained away.

In The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle there is a chapter called Moving Deeply Into The Now. In this chapter Tolle talks about the delusion of time. He questions people’s beliefs that time is precious because Tolle doesn’t believe time even exists. In Tolle’s own words.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion

He believes that the more you focus on the past and the present the more likely you are to take your mind off the most important thing – the now. He says that nothing ever happened in the past and nothing will ever happen in the future. Instead everything happens in the now. If you think about what he is saying from a purely logical standpoint then he is correct and I don’t dispute what he is saying. What I do find fascinating is his view that the mind creates an obsession with the future as an escape from an unsatisfactory present, and an obsession with the past to secure identity. But did my Nan die because there was no future? When she looked into her own illusion, was her salvation remiss by its absence? What if the illusion of the future had provided her with something to live for? What if the future (that does not exist) was enough to keep her alive for another ten years – wouldn’t that have been a great illusion?

When talking about his life in the concentration camps of World War II, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl explains in Man’s Search For Meaning.

Any attempt at fighting the camp’s psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or psycho-hygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward.

He then went on to tell the most amazing (and true) tale of life, hope, despair and death. His Senior Block Warden confided him one day. He told him of a strange dream where a voice had told him that he could wish for anything and it would come true. The man wished for the war to be over (for him) on March thirtieth. Frankl said that the Senior Block Warden seemed full of hope that his dream would come true, until the time drew closer and it became apparent that the war would not end. On the 29^th March the Senior Block Warden suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On the 30^th March – the day his prophecy told him his war would end – he lost consciousness. On the 31^st March he was dead. To all outward appearances he had died of typhus, but Frankl knew that this mans loss of faith and subsequent disappointment lowered his body’s immune system sufficiently enough for the typhus infection to have fatal consequences. His lack of faith that his dream would come true eventually killed him. In a strange twist his prophecy actually came true – his war did end on the 30^th March.

Photo courtesy of Sean MacEntee (CC & Flickr.com)

Before his death in 1997, Viktor E. Frankl was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. He is the author of thirty-two books, the creator of the psychotherapy known as Logotherapy and survivor of the World War II concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

The book is divided into two halves. The first deals with his experiences of life in the concentration camps, and the second covers Logotherapy (in a nutshell). Dr. Frankl lost his father, mother, brother and his wife in the very camps that he managed to survive for three-years. During those three-years, not only did he lose most of his family (his sister did not die in the camps), but also he was starved, beaten, frozen and threatened with extermination on a daily basis. Throughout these horrific experiences how did he find life worth preserving? Dr. Frankl had to somehow see through the senseless suffering and find meaning in life. This is how logotherapy was born.

The following quote encapsulates the first part of the book in much better words than I can describe, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” In this, Dr. Frankl leads by example, because no matter what set of circumstances you are currently going through, one doubts that it could be much worse than the World War II concentration camps.  If you read this with an open mind, and create plenty of affirmations along the way, it really can help you put your own problems into perspective.

The second part of the book was what really garnered my attention, and in truth I think I would have enjoyed a whole book on logotherapy, rather than the split-format of Man’s Search For Meaning. Part Two is entitled Logotherapy in a Nutshell but I think Dr. Frankl did an excellent job of crushing his form of psychotherapy into such a tiny space. I for one took the little sip offered and it has left me thirsting for more. Logotherapy focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as mans search for such a meaning. This interests me because this is all I ever think about!

Here is my Man’s Search For Meaning in a nutshell. I struggled to stay interested in the first section purely because I have read so many accounts of concentration camp life in World War II. The second part of the book was exceptional, but I would have preferred to have read an entire book on logotherapy and not just part. It was a good book but I reckon there are a lot more out there that are better, because it hasn’t really made a lasting impression on me.

My lower back was killing me as I tried to focus on my breathing, but each breath I took made my stomach fall closer to the ground. I was in the plank position, trying my 4-minute challenge – today I was attempting 4-minutes and it was a struggle. I heard my phone buzz and as my data roaming was off I knew it was a text message. My phone was just inches away from the sweat dripping from my forehead and I glanced at it to see how much time I had to hold this stupid pose for.

Text: 3:59-mins…Thought it better not to ring you incase you are abroad. Nan died this morning.

I fell flat on the floor in unison with the chiming of my alarm. I reached forward, switched it off and sent a message back to my sister.

Text: Ok thanks.

I was planning to meditate next and so I got onto the bed, assumed the position and closed my eyes. I couldn’t concentrate and so I decided to think about my Nan for the next twenty-minutes. The first thought that entered my mind was the last time I saw her. My mum had told me that she had collapsed at home on two separate occasions. Each time she had lain there overnight, immobile and scared. She could no longer answer the door and so my Mum gave me a key. I took Jude with me and as I opened the door her dog, Benji, came running up to me.

“Nan…Nan…Nan?”

I knew something was wrong. The door was ajar and I could see she was not in her chair and I remember thinking, “what if she is dead? I have never seen a dead person in close proximity before.” I told Jude not to move from the door and I walked into the room. She was lying in my Granddads chair in an unusual twisted pose. The dog was now sat obediently by her swollen feet surrounded by bits of cereal, pills and an overturned bowl.  I walked over to check her pulse and she was cold, clammy and white. Then within seconds of my touch, she woke up; and although she wasn’t dead, the shock very nearly killed us both! I called Jude into the room and tried to talk to her but she was in a very strange state. She couldn’t keep awake for any longer than a minute and kept muttering strange, senseless sentences – almost like she was hallucinating. I made her a cup of tea but had no idea how she would drink it. After about twenty minutes I covered her up with a quilt and left her alone to sleep. I remember thinking if she had not woken up…if her pulse had not jumped to the beat…I would not have tried to revive her.

I am in Wythenshawe, Manchester, and she is just ahead of me. She has a satin scarf covering her brown mop; a knot pulling against her chin as the wind tries in vain to pull it from her head. She is dragging a tartan shopping trolley behind her and my little legs are running trying to keep up. Now I am in a caravan, and there are wasps next to my window. She starts to spray them with hairspray and I can taste the toxicity as it fills my throat. Then I am trying to sleep but I hear strange sounds on the caravan roof. I am crying and she is telling me to be calm.

“It’s just squirrels dancing,” she says as she strokes my hair.

I come out of my meditation and I have a few tears. I text my ex-wife to tell her the news and ask her not to tell my son until he finishes his holiday. She rings me, and it is nice to hear her voice. When you separate from your wife your families are just innocent bystanders. They never wanted it to happen. Your in-laws are still your in-laws and your Nan is still your Nan. The one thing I will say about death is it does put your current strife into perspective. Next I ring my Mum and tell her I love her. Then I pack my things and leave my hotel and head for the airport. For the next 8-hours all I think about is death.

I am on the plane in a trance-like daydream. I am experiencing the worse turbulence I have ever had and yet I am unmoved. I see lightning from the corner of my eye and decide to brave the vertigo and scan the skies looking for the forks. The clouds look heavenly and I laugh to myself that as a child I used to think this was heaven. I didn’t have to die to get here after all; I just needed to climb on board a little Fokker. I think about grief and wonder whether or not I should be ashamed because I don’t feel like I am grieving. When my Mum was 19-years old she gave birth to me. A single Mum in 1970s Manchester was not the in-thing. I lived with my Nan and Granddad, and to the day he died he would often refer to me as son and call my Nan my mum. My mum told me this evening that when I was being raised I would often call her Pat and refer to my Nan as mum.

So you would think that my emotions should show a little bit more gratitude in the form of tears and sadness, but they are not playing ball. A good friend once asked me if he had to love his mother? There are some things in life that people just don’t talk about and this question is one of them. I told him that society demanded that he loved his mother because she raised him. If he did not tell people that he loved his mother he would be viewed as strange, unethical and uncaring. Then I told him that he did not have to love his mother at all. Lot’s of people do not love their parents, they just prefer to ignore the fact and would rather pretend to keep playing happy families. Every family has them and you can spot them a mile off when the funeral procession begins. For me it is all about relationships and intimacy. Blood has nothing to do with it. If you don’t have a warm and loving relationship with someone then how can you develop the emotion of love? Just before my Nan died she told my mother to give me an old Chinese doll. She had taken care of this doll for 37-years. It looked familiar, like I had known it all my life. My mum told me that it was a present from my biological father. The only material thing in this world connecting him to me. I have his blood running through my veins and yet if I saw him tomorrow I would see straight through him. He would be a ghost to me. Like I said, the red cells do not contain love, they just contain blood. Slit your wrists and it will just seep out and run down every nook and cranny. Love is something different. It needs to be earned and develops over time. It doesn’t try to run away like blood does.

In a few days time everybody who used to know my Nan will turn up at the funeral to pay his or her respects. There will be a few tears, including my own, but how many people will be there because they want to be, and how many will be there because feel that they need to? So no I don’t feel ashamed that I am not emanating more grief than I should be. Over the years, especially when I started my own family, my visits to see my Nan were sparse. This meant we didn’t form the loving bond that needs to exist for grief to rise. So if you have recently lost somebody and are not feeling how you think you should be, then you are not alone, and more importantly there is nothing wrong with you.

Photo courtesy of bedrocan (cc @ flickr.com)

In my last blog post I wrote about the new book I had been reading called Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation by Steven Levenkron (LINK). I purchased the book because one of my friend’s is a Cutter and I realised that I didn’t know anything about this dark and secretive illness. Everyone has a lack of understanding in something, but if you are close to someone who is a Cutter then you are running the risk of adding to his or her problems through your own personal lack of education.

There were a number of key learning points in the book for me, and I want to share one with you today. If you read my previous blog post you will know that I wrote about some of the key factors that lead to the development of this mental illness, and one of them involves the way you were raised as a child. I have written about this many times before, but I will say it once again, when you become a parent for the first time you do not know what to do. As with anything, your instincts kick in and these instincts are developed from memories that exist from your own upbringing.

Drawing from memories of how you were raised means that it is important that you were raised in a normal and healthy environment. But what constitutes normal and healthy and do you ever stop to think about it? If you belong to a business then you will be used to goals, objectives and review. This is how you earn your money and how you understand if you are doing a good job or not. The review mechanism is important because it is this feedback that allows you to change your behaviour (if needed) in order to make sure you achieve your goal. If you didn’t have the review mechanism then it is very likely that your sub-conscious would work this out anyway, but the tangibility of the review, the date in the diary and the one to one discussion followed by written documentation, imprints it on your mind more emphatically.

Being a father, I was drawn to the part of the book that said that there was evidence to suggest that Cutters developed their behaviour due to an imbalance of nurturance or authority in their parenting. When I reflected on this I realised that there was an event in my life that was causing an unhealthy shift in my parenting style. I am of course talking about my divorce. I have gone from a parent who lives with his son to a parent who sees him only a few times per month. The lack of everyday touch has created an almost childlike desperation in me. I am jealous and envious of the intimacy he has with his mother, and demand equal parity as his equal parent. These emotions, triggered by my ego, cause me to behave in a way that will transmit upset and sadness to my son. I tell him that I miss him and I get angry with him when he doesn’t communicate with me as often as I would like. This happens because I compare his lack of communication with me to his intimacy with his mother.

By behaving in this perfectly rational yet unhealthy way, I have turned from parent to child. This reversal has the same effect on my son, who now adopts the unwanted role of parent. Look at the way I have been behaving from my son’s point of view: -

My father sends me messages of love every day. If I don’t reply to them or tell him that I love him constantly then he is going to get upset. He cries to me sometimes because he misses me so much. He seems desperate, sad and lonely.

I am obviously second guessing my sons thoughts here but I won’t be a million miles away from the truth. In a parent/child relationship it is important for the child to be able to be nurtured, but it is also important that they feel that they are being looked after. It goes back over 50,000 years ago when they were hoping you would protect them from the predators of the Savannah. It is built into our very genes. Does my son believe I am here to protect him or is he protecting me? I have created a relationship where my son is afraid to talk to me about his issues because he feels I may get upset. So if he cannot speak to his parent about an issue where does he go? What does he do? How does he release?

Being more mindful means I can change the way that I behave and install the authority back into my relationship. Over time my son will grow to realise his father is back. The father who tells him he loves him, kisses and hugs him but also leads through authority and demands respect. The book was like my business review. That tangibility that I believe is critical to make sure we don’t wander off point. But there is no parenting rulebook. Nobody goes to school to become a better parent and it is not taught in the schools that we do go to. Our parents are the only people who teach us to be parents, but who says that is right? What if our parents battered us both physically and mentally? What if they did their best but it just was not good enough? How do we become the very best parents we can be? How do we improve so the children of the future improve?

I have decided to something about this and in the following months and years I am going to develop this blog to help parents become better parents. In the meantime, if you are a parent yourself then schedule some time to hold a little review of your own, reflect and be more mindful about your behaviour and remember that your children depend on you, as do your children’s children.

Are you doing a good job as a parent? Where do you believe you can improve? Is there an area that bothers you? Talk about it here (anonymously) – it really does help.

Photo: My son using his parenting skills to look after his little cousin

Are you mad! Are you stupid!

Thinking back to the time that I said those two offensive sentences I actually had great belief in the words as they poured scorn out of my mouth. I did think this person was mad and I did think that they were stupid. Why else would anyone take a razor blade, puncture their skin and drag deep until the blood trickled down the arm turning the elbow into a crimson waterfall? Why would somebody plug an iron into the wall, wait until it clicked OFF and then place the tip onto their arm until the pungent smell of fried skin drafted upwards and into their nostrils?

It wasn’t just me who reacted in this way, in fact everybody close to this person behaved the same. We were so naive, so uneducated, and so ignorant. We loved this person and yet when they reached out for help we pushed them into a dark cupboard and closed the door. Years passed and I just hoped that the madness and stupidity would just go away…but it never did. Then my life started to change. I had realisation after realisation that my ego was keeping my mind locked in a prison. I have battled quite successfully to free myself and have had a few successes. Abstaining from alcohol and cigarettes, giving up my job and dealing with the break up of my marriage. All of these so-called problems were just cheap parlour tricks created by my ego. Once I realised that I controlled my brain – and not my ego – then I was able to change my beliefs and therefore my actions.

So would this new man be able to help The Cutter? I tried to reach out once more. I saw the glint of hope sparkle in the corner of their eye as they believed this new and improved Lee could help. Once again I got it all wrong. This person was convinced that their problem was hereditary. Something biological. Something that was beyond their control. I was convinced that it was all in their mind. It was SELF-harm, meaning the mind told the body to inflict pain upon itself. As this person controlled their own mind then it was within their control to just stop. Unfortunately, as with most things, all my exuberance and willingness to help came to naught, as I lacked the skills to really make a difference.

It was then that I decided to turn to literature once more. I searched the Internet and came across this book. I told The Cutter that I was going to read the book in order to learn more about, what I called back then – The Cutters problem, and I could see that this was the most positive thing anybody had ever done for them in regard to their problem. I have deliberately used the word problem because I want to make the important distinction that before I read the book that is all I thought it was. Thanks to Steven Levenkron I now understand that this person is suffering from a severe mental illness, one shared by millions of people and even high profile people such as the late and great Princess Diana.

Reading the book was an uncomfortable experience for me. Since I was the victim of a stabbing around 18-years ago I have always found it difficult to watch, read or talk about anything to do with a blade. When I have these thoughts I get an uncomfortable physical feeling in the back of my legs, buttocks and gut and they were present throughout the reading of this book. But as with most things in life the more I read the more desensitised I actually became. I had the strangest experience while reading this book as I would find myself staring at it, lying on my bed, horror personified. The stories that were contained in the book were horrifying because they were real. Then there was the guilt. I just couldn’t shake it, after finally realising the reality of the situation. Here was someone that was very dear to me, scared to death with life and all the time under the very nose of someone who felt he was placed on this planet to help people. I felt like a fraud, a failure and it saddened me greatly.

If you know anybody who is a Cutter then I recommend that they take a look at this great book. I have also appended a few helpful links that people can visit below to get more educated on what is a very serious mental illness.

Mind for Better Mental Health

National Self Harm Network

Shakti Rising

I have not followed my own advice!

As I mentioned previously, in my blog post Goals Quarterly Review – Finance, I had created a financial plan that had allowed me to enjoy myself without going into debt. Things had been going well until I went on vacation to Thailand. Not only was that vacation unplanned, but I also spent far too much while I was out there. Don’t get me wrong, money cannot buy the amazing experiences that my girlfriend and I had, but it really isn’t the point. What is the use of a plan if I don’t follow it?

The other area where I have overspent is in my poker. I have been backing a good friend of mine when he plays in the World Poker Tour (WPT) and European Poker Tour (EPT) main events. Unfortunately, my friend has not been cashing and I have been dipping into my ordinary account to pay for these deficits. I have decided to cease this activity immediately because not only can I not afford it, but also I feel like I have climbed back onto the gambling escalators and the only way is up.

I am in Monte Carlo working at the European Poker Tour (EPT) Grand Final this week, and I decided not to take my usual 5% of my friend’s stake. He was in 7^th place at the end of the combined day ones and with a €1,500,000 first prize I started to bemoan my bad luck (5% of €1,600,000 = €80,000). Then I realised that I needed to stop thinking in that way. It’s like my girlfriend said, “If he wins it, then you give him a big hug and a kiss and say well done as he is your friend.” The problem with being a gambling addict is just one bet stirs up all of those old feelings. Once I started backing my friend I simply couldn’t stop.  I was terrified he would win something during the time I had stopped backing him. It felt like the dread you have when you forget to put your lottery numbers on one week. My friend is also going to help me by not asking me if I want a my usual 5% stake, which I really appreciate.

I am sharing a room with my friend at Monte Carlo and last night we got embroiled in a conversation about money that I wanted to share with the readers of this blog. Let me first start out by giving you some facts. The vast majority of poker players, who travel the world, eating in the fanciest restaurants and seeing the most amazing sights are broke. Most of them have financial backing from a small contingent of winning players in the game. As the player being backed, it is easy to run your debt into six-figures in a relatively short period of time. In the poker industry this debt is known as make-up.

The age differences in poker is far and wide, but there are a huge number of them between the ages of 20-25. For this age group, this lifestyle is all they know. When I worked on the railway we had a saying that we would use when referring to people who had worked on the railway all of their lives, “They have not lived in the real world.” This statement can be applied to this young bunch of poker players.

The conversation my friend and I held last night was over loans made in poker circles. He believed that it was perfectly fine for someone to owe you a four and even five-figure sum, for as long as a year, if taking it meant they could not play. This is despite the fact that the person handing out the loan may need the money to play themselves. I argued that this way of thinking is flawed. Another classic case of societal conditioning, this time narrowed down to the niche of poker. In his view, this is an unwritten poker rule, but I think it is a rule that has grown out of control. Why should you act the way that everyone else acts? Step up and be a game changer. I believe it is a question of values. If you lend money then there should be specific terms on how the repayments occur. You should insist on this before the transaction is made and you should also behave in the same manner when you are receiving the loan. Simply, if you want your money back promptly then make sure you deliver your returns in the same manner.

I have my own values when it comes to money. I step out of line sometimes, but it’s because I have values that I know when I have stepped out of line (take this overdrawn incident as an example). I sometimes find myself loaning my poker friends £20 or £50 and I don’t get it back unless I ask. The reason this happens is because of this poker conditioning. They are so used to getting something for nothing, which is what happens when you are in $100,000 of make up, that the way they think about money changes. They are so used to vast sums of money changing hands in loans of this kind, that when a muggle (poker term for a non-poker person) like me comes along and lends them £20 it doesn’t even register with them that they need to give it back. My friend believes that this is normal behaviour within the poker community and I was last night arguing that it needs to stop, using my friend as an example of someone who should stand up and be counted.

This is not a poker problem. This is a fundamental values issue. These people do not value money. They have gotten so used to receiving large sums of money, losing it at the tables and then going back for more that it has screwed up any values that they once had of money.

Everyone should re-assess his or her values from time to time. Do they have integrity? Do they have a sound system for managing their values? I mentioned in the start of this post that I have waivered from my own set of values and need to get back in line. People in the poker industry need to take a long hard look in the mirror. They need to start paying people back. If they owe somebody £7,000 it doesn’t matter if the person they owe money to goes and wins £1 million. You still owe them £7,000 and you should pay it back. It is not your money. You should not buy yourself a pair of shoes, eat in Claridge’s or travel to Monte Carlo – you should pay what you owe first. If you don’t then you seriously need to question your integrity and whether or not you have any values at all.

Photo courtesy of 401k (cc@ flickr.com)