In the last blog, I talked about becoming a father, taking on responsibility, and not being prepared for being a real estate agent. Part of my failure at being an agent was that I was a bit too honest about things and stopped some of my clients from making poor financial decisions. This was another high stress time in my life, and I had other people tell me that I probably would have done better with another broker. I have friends in the business and I’m glad that they could have a career in that field, it’s just not for me.
I also started finding that mindset was something that was the key to success. I just wouldn’t fully realize it until later. Feeling entitled had been a downfall of mine in my younger years, and I was now just trying to support my family. By the time I had gotten to my security job, I was finally making more money than Sarah was, and we started to do better with our lives.
As someone who had never done a thirteen hour day, and the kind of work that security was a difficult task, and by the third day, I was ready to quit. Yet there I was, sticking it out, getting sunburned, watching the sunrise, and set all while doing my job. Thirteen years in that environment and I made some of the best connections ever while there.
Once I got used to the job, the pacing wasn’t so bad. There were good people I had to deal with, and then some of those who are just miserable as it is. Yet for the first time, I had a “real job” and Sarah and my life was working towards something better. It would be about a year into the job that life would take an unexpected turn.
Sarah, who had been making decent money had lost her job, and my thirteen-hour-work-days had gotten reduced to ten-hour-days. We had taken a loss of two-thirds our income at the time. We had to make some decisions, and then we would find a way to make things work. While the loss of pay was bad, I will admit that the reduced schedule made life a bit easier to manage, and not feel like I was wasting a full-day at work.
Between the loss in pay, a major shift in protocol at work, Sarah and the kids fighting, and the fact that the new procedures were making customers, a bit more than unhappy; it became over whelming, and I had a break down a few years after this started.
2013 was the year that everything came to a head, I had been miserable, and I felt that I didn’t deserve better, I wanted to run away and hit the reset button. I had almost taken my life. So how does this apply to building a better me? If you’ve been following me for sometime, then this story is already familiar to you, and I don’t really want to get back into that struggle, just for the sake of telling it. So, I’m going to tell you why this is important.
In order to improve myself, I had to stop letting ego get in the way. I had to have that break down, reassess things, and figure out where I wanted to be in life.Symbolic to tearing down a building, and building something bigger, stronger. This is the way of the world. There are many who would share that their darkest hours where what forged a better tomorrow, just look up articles, look up Youtube videos. It’s really a common story. It’s that rough point that helps cement the foundation for something bigger.
2013 wasn’t the year I was ready for that, in fact, I wouldn’t be ready for that for a few more years. However, this was the start of the tear down, even before I knew it. I felt that I had made changes between the years of 2011-2013. They weren’t the easiest as I’ve already stated, but it was for sure some of the best for realizing that I needed help.
When I had started the CK Project in 2011, it was about holding myself accountable for weight loss and hoping that it would inspire people. I had made many friends while in Weight Watchers, but depression took me out of it. The plus side was that my brand had started a fan base. That fan base stuck by me even as things morphed into something else. It just took a few years before the CK Project became about mental health and my struggles with it.
There was the rebuilding of the foundation, in telling my struggles, it helped me sort out my feelings and I had found that other people that I had known had suffered similar issues as well. My first blogs had been on Facebook and it was in 2015, that I had converted over to an official blog site when things really started taking off. It’s funny as I’ve gone back to those first years and realize that blogging was also an exercise to help me improve my writing. I remember that I wanted to do at least 500-words-per-blog, only to find myself struggling to come up with more than 200-words.
At that time I thought that this was going to be the hardest thing to do. As the years went on though, I found that it had become easier to write, and while I write in a casual, conversational stye, it’s also helped me to improve my script writing, which is a different style all together. It was at this time that I started to realize that I could serve more than one purpose when doing things, blogging was just a way to improve upon my creative writing skills.
I guess as I look back, as I was starting to find the momentum to improve myself in 2015, 2017 was the time that things really started to take off. I had gotten so clumsy in my weight gain that I had lost all my balance and I would fall everywhere. This was that moment I needed to realize that I was ready to get my act together. I just needed to figure out how.
Well, that’s about it for this blog(which has taken a few weeks to write), so stay tuned as I go into getting into the gastric sleeve surgery and how my weight loss journey really took off. I’ll get into where my mindset had changed even more, and how that seemed to inspire even more people. This is the director, and that’s a wrap.
The CK Project 