July 2nd, 2005

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for me mentally.  After returning from the trip I went to work developing the new business aspect of Adjusters Reference Manual.  Things aren't happening as quickly as I was expecting.

I hired two people, both of which I practically interviewed while on the trip.  Willie Hyde and Tammy Neal.

Tammy Neal is a friend of Billy and Cynthia Pratt and was referred to me by Cynthia.  She is a single mother of 1 and was previously working for Stafford House painting here in Highland.  She was viciously unhappy and knew there was no future in that current position.  When I hired her I was certain that attaining one sale a day would not be all that difficult, and my business plan and my income schedules for her matched my certainty of this.  So she quickly and easily took the position and left her other position.  Well I can't even say I really offered it to her, she followed up with me so relentlessly I was forced to do it.

Willie Hyde answered the ad in the newspaper and lives in Yucaipa.  Most recently a handyman, a shoulder injury put him out of business and he was forced to look elsewhere for work.  I wasn't certain when I first met him because his phone voice was not the most alluring, but Willie showed determination.  Both in his interview and in his follow through.  The test in my interview is pretty simple.  After the interview is over I tell them that I have a few other candidates to interview and that I should get back to them by the end of the week, if I don't call them they should follow up with me.  The ones that follow up get the job, the ones that don't miss it.  Beyond the handyman, Willie had experience developing small owner operated companies in to much larger profitable businesses.  Although the past has been riddled with disappointment and times where his hard work was abandoned rather than rewarded, Willie still believes in this small to big mentality and I see in him the potential to develop the company well.

It's been almost a full three weeks of pounding the phones and working the leads that came through, Tammy is one full day up on Willie but effectively we have invested 180 hours between the two of them and have made exactly three sales totaling a little less than $1,000.00.  Not the sale a day I had expected, and not even in the scope of my worst case scenarios.  Due to this I started to spiral into a negative, perilous, mentality where i was certain of failure in the second week. 

I was sleeping and tired, and frankly would just have easily have slept as done anything else, I couldn't think clearly and many morning I woke up nauseous over the anxiety.  It got so bad that I knew I was destined for failure soon if I did not implement some of the resources that made me successful in the first place.  Fortunately, my library is pretty powerful, filled with the likes of Og Mandino, Norman Vincent Peale, Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, just to name a few.  I went to my library and pulled out a book of Mr. Peale's I picked up at a used book store in downtown Riverside but to this day have never read.  It's entitled "Enthusiasm makes the difference."  

I purchased this old hardback for two reasons, first somewhere along the way years ago I picked up a tape series of Dr. Peale's (now many years deceased) called "The Power of Positive Thinking" it was abridge and recorded by one of his students who continues on his legacy through additional tapes, and books based on Dr. Peale's principles.  These tapes impressed me so that I lent them out whenever I could trying to spread this powerfull message, unfortunately this lead to the downfall of my tapes as they were either damaged or never returned, to this day I believe I only have 1 or 2 left of the 10 tape series.  Secondly, I have never been one to spend a lot of money on books, and this was a great deal on this well preserved, and obviously never read hardbound.  The inside panel told me it was given as a gift, then obviously set aside as gifted education often is, finally to end up in a garage sale and many other journeys before being awarded a space on the shelf of the quaint bookstore where I purchased it.

Now today I pick it up in my desperation to set aside my agony, grief, and anxiety.  Knowing it would hold keys to my future success, and a way to deal with the negativity that had creaped in so relentlessly into every part of my being.  Before I go any further let me just say that in know way am I saying after only a few days of  reading and thinking better am I cured of this anxiety, or depression.  It pounds on me in the morning and occasionally throughout the day.  The closest explanation I can give you is post traumatic stress syndrome, those few days of misery were so intense that although most of the initial shock is over the feeling of despair and visions of absolute failure stop me in my tracks and send me searching for a sense of stability and reassurance.  Both of which there are plenty of with my wife.

Regardless, I am doing better. No solutions to the problem but I have a new outlook on the problem and am working on the enthusiasm to find the solution, at least the book inspired me to outline the problem and how I will be dealing with it, emotionally and physically.  I wrote a little step by step procedure based on the book called MY PROBLEM.  

The next step was this, journaling, writing down my thoughts and emotions in an unformatted, non grammatical, open format that I may reference at another time and observe my emotions from a different part.  Today is day one, and it is a reflection of where I am at.  One of the things I wanted to get down tonight is my feelings on the last step of My Problem steps.  And it has to do with faith.

I have been an Atheist for 6 1/2 years.  Shortly after losing our daughter Madison, I was sitting there thinking about God and religion, mostly my religion of Christianity but taking in some others as I was searching for something to ease my pain and I snapped on two points.  1. If every group of humans on the earth has answered the question of where we came from and where we are going in different ways then it must be inherent in our genome to have an answer to this question, God is the easiest answered, all knowing, all seeing, and all doing being that at a flick of the fingers has created us and has a plan for us.  2. I couldn't bear the thought that there would be a place where my daughter was and I wasn't allowed to go, and depending on your views of the bible, even when I did arrive there's likely a chance I would not know her.  This allowed me to create my own views of faith and the impact it had on me during those many years where I had faith in religion and God.

I set up a belief system based on the principles of the subconscious mind. "What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve."  In Dr. Peale's book as a support to his other principles, but this was part of my backbone.  Of course faith works, it is the foundation of positive thinking, faith that you can succeed, either from faith in your mind to find the answer subliminally, or in faith of an omnipotent being that will guide to the end result is very similar.  Both requires you to give up some of your concern to some other force that will 'Take Care' of the problem, and have absolute faith that it will work out.  Anyway, that was easy to believe when you aren't at your worst, and last week I was at my worst, and in a lot of ways still am.

So now I find myself yearning to call out to the God that got me through the hard times, if only for that selfish reason, of peace of mind.  I am definitely conflicted, raised in this belief it would be very easy for me to simply go back, however, choosing to not believe was a defining moment in my life, as much or more so as accepting Jesus into my life in my time of despair.  It leads me to ask if FAITH is not something of 'a need for change' that occurs in man's desperation to change their attitude and put their mind at ease during their most difficult times.  The best part about this, is there is no "Finding the answer" as there is for my other problem, this is a personal decision that every person must make and live their life by.  I suppose that would give that person the right to change their decision at any point they like, when the mood suits them.  I don't think so, or maybe they do, that would explain the many fence sitters I've lived with in my life. 

Fence sitters are 'believers' in whatever religion they like, but they do not live their life as their religion.  Instead they choose to mirror the practices of all the other fence-sitters out there and simply state they believe in God, or Something and go about their life doing whatever "They, themselves" want with no regard to the will of the God they so intend to believe in.  Although, I have been in this category I would say I have been a little less than most, I believe that if I am wrong there is a special spot in hell reserved for the people who choose to believe and then choose not to follow.

Kari, Jacob, and I are healthy loved and capable, can you really ask for anything else?