Build Your Bridges
I have a problem.
In many ways I’m a very patient person. But in one very important way, specifically the area of my life progression, I am a very impatient person. I’m also a big-picture, visionary type of guy and those two qualities don’t do well together in close quarters.
At any given moment I can think about an area of my life or work, see clearly how I want it to look at it’s zenith, what it can and should be when full-grown, and feel frustration that it isn’t there yet. This has caused me to begin, and abandon, many, many projects, even relationships, over the years. It’s not something I’m proud of and is one of the most well-defined areas of growth that I face.
This has come into full focus between the years of 2018 and the present time at which I’m writing this, in a good way. And though I still have a long way to go in this area of my own personal/professional development, I feel I’ve taken giant strides over the past four years, and it’s all because I’ve discovered an amazing truth and have learned a new life art.
The Art of Building Bridges
In a previous article I spoke about the need to burn some bridges in our lives. In this article I want to share something with you that I’ve stumbled across and now view as a universal truth.
The route from where we are to where we want to be, internally, professionally, spiritually, relationally, socially, isn’t just a long stretch of road with twists, turns, roadblocks and detours. It’s also a series of bridges. And sometimes we’re building bridges to our preferred future, without realizing that’s what we’re doing. I’ll share with you an example from my own life.
I remember being 23 years old, living in the first home my wife and I ever purchased. It was a single-wide mobile home, in a trailer park, in Winona, Minnesota, that I bought for $4,000. I needed a loan to buy it. It was disgusting when we moved in having been occupied by an odd, eccentric, and filthy middle-aged bachelor. I worked in retail. I made about $7.00 per hour. I had abandoned my college education and plans to become a history teacher, then professor, then department head at a university, then politician in my latter years. Instead, I oversaw a team of people unloading trucks, in the middle of the night, in the back of a Walmart store, and putting bottles of shampoo on shelves. My goal at that time was to be promoted into management.
In our little trailer was a bookshelf. And on that bookshelf were a handful of books about home-based businesses. Every time a new one came out, I bought it and devoured it. In a stack by the sofa were several copies of Entrepreneur magazine. I had a very strong work ethic, instilled in me by both of my amazing parents and my first boss when I was 16. But I was also a dreamer, and I had very vivid dreams of owning my own businesses, succeeding or failing on my terms, having no boss, deciding on my own how to spend every day, and being financially free.
Business ideas come to me almost as easily as oxygen and ice cream. They drop into my head while I’m showering or sleeping. I find them, often, everywhere, like pretty stones lying on the path I’m walking. And over the decades since those years in that tiny mobile home, I’ve welcomed, and tried, and abandoned many of them.
I had the idea for a job placement service like indeed.com before anything like that existed.
I had the idea for an online business directory like Yelp before anything like that existed.
I created new systems in my day job that others then took and created multi-million dollar companies out of.
The list goes on.
For almost 30 years I lived as a frustrated visionary very good at starting things, and very bad at finishing them, and suffering extreme bouts of discontent along the way.
I couldn’t figure out how to get from here to there.
There always existed a wide valley between the life I was living, and the life I envisioned. I wanted more. I knew I could be and do more. But I lacked certain knowledge and skills necessary to get me from here to there. And my impatience kept me perched on my side of the valley, looking at the other side in the distance, wishing I was just there, without having to conquer all of the things necessary to get me there.
I spent my 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s incredibly frustrated and discontented, working for companies I did not enjoy, doing work I honestly cared nothing about. My work ethic led to promotions, raises, and a comfortable financial lifestyle, but those feelings turned into a slowly simmering internal anger. And that had a corrosive effect on everything else in my life.
I had a vision by a swimming pool in Orlando.
It was 2006. My wife and I took a vacation to Orlando. One day we were sitting by the pool at the resort. Adults were sunning themselves, children were frolicking, music was playing, my job and its demands were a million miles away. Out of nowhere a picture dropped into my mind that is still as vivid today as it was then. In that picture I saw a different life. In that life, I spent my days traveling around the world teaching and helping people through speaking events, conferences, workshops, published books. Remember when I abandoned my plans to be a teacher in my early 20’s? That life was born again, in a different context, by the pool that day. And I felt a wave of peace and contentment, just from the vision of that life, that I don’t think I had ever felt.
I’d like to tell you that I returned from that vacation and began building that life. But I’d be lying. What I did do was return from that vacation and spend the next 12 years doing the same thing I’d been doing for the previous 16 years. Sitting on one side of the valley, looking at the other, hating where I was, wishing I was over there, and not knowing how to get there.
Those next 12 years ended up being the most difficult years of my life, and I almost didn’t survive.
In 2017 I decided I’d had enough.
I was recruited by a media company in the Detroit area for a business development executive position. I was given the biggest compensation package I’d ever earned. Mentally and emotionally I began that new position already checked out. It was a job. It was a paycheck. A big one. That was it.
I began working with that company having already decided that I would pay off everything I owed, put money in the bank, start a business, retire in two years, and get out of Detroit to live somewhere warm and beautiful. I had no idea what business I would start. I wanted to be living that life I envisioned by the swimming pool in Orlando, but had no idea how to get there.
It was Christmas in 2017. I was sitting at my mother’s house in Illinois watching television. I saw a commercial for a company that allowed you to let other people rent your vehicle, like AirBNB but for automobiles. I decided to give it a try by putting my 2015 Scion TC on the platform, hoping to make $300 or $400 each month. The first month I ended up making closer to $900. That’s when I knew what business I would begin to allow me to retire. I built a fleet of 20 vehicles in 15 months, almost completely replaced my six-figure income, and retired from the industry right on time, almost to the day of my 2-year plan.
Owning a car rental company wasn’t the plan.
But, it was the first bridge I intentionally built. It was a bridge to get me from being a discontented employee on one side of the valley, to self-employed business owner on the other side of the valley. At 51 years old I finally accomplished what that 23 year old kid spent many days and nights dreaming about in that little trailer in Minnesota.
Remember that day by the pool when I saw myself traveling around the world helping and teaching people? A few months after retiring I bought a travel agency, which got off to a great start. It was with that travel agency that the vision for creating “coaching in paradise” events was born, with the belief that we are not the product of our possessions, but our experiences, with travel being one of the most life-changing experiences a person can have. Things got off to a great start, with many planned and booked trips. But, another unexpected valley lay ahead, and I, along with the rest of the world, was about to drop off the cliff.
In 2020 I fell into the valley of despair.
Covid. It wrecked lives, families, careers, businesses, and finances all over the world. My travel agency revenue dropped to zero. All of my planned and booked trips for the next year or so were cancelled. After a lifetime of dreaming, and seeing those dreams begin to come true, they shattered into a million pieces. My life fell apart in a dozen different ways.
I had long ago lost the key to the small case that housed my Ruger 9mm. I cut off the lock. Kept it within reach. I picked it up and looked at it many times and wondered what I would feel when a bullet pierced my brain and how quickly I’d be in the presence of whomever was waiting for me on the other side. I always put it back in the case because I was afraid of what pain I would feel.
I found myself googling things like, how to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, or if bourbon and a bottle of Ambien would do the trick in a sleepy, painless kind of way. One day police officers showed up at my house to do a wellness check because someone told them they should.
The more I realized how I was plummeting into my own deep valley of despair, the more I realized I could never help anyone else, be the coach, teacher I once envisioned, when I couldn’t even help myself want to stay alive.
I spent all of 2020 trying to just keep breathing, and wishing I didn’t have to.
My Creator sent me a song.
It was early 2021 when I came across a random song on Youtube. I wept. I watched it again. I wept some more. Over and over, for weeks, I watched, and I wept. And I couldn’t understand why this song, that portrayed a broken relationship between a father and son, affected me so deeply. My father had died in 2017, but we didn’t have a broken relationship. Ours was nothing like the relationship in the video. I couldn’t make the connection between the theme of the music video and the emotions it stirred within me.
One February day in 2021 I watched it again. And this time, I heard as clearly as I’d ever heard anything in my life, an internal voice.
“I sent you this song not to show you something about your relationship with your dad, but to show you something about your relationship with me, the one who created you, on purpose, for this time in history, on purpose, and gave you a purpose to enjoy in this life as you help others understand the same things about their lives.”
Though I continue to have a difficult relationship with organized religion, I no longer have a difficult relationship with my Creator.
And then I built an academy.
I spent the next few months healing, and learning more about myself, my Creator, life, and relationships than I’d learned in 53 years of living. I finally came to understand who I am, why I am here, and how to have the kind of life I’d always dreamed about.
The one thing in my life that did very well during the pandemic was my car rental company. I had spent three years building a successful business featured in news stories both locally and globally, and earning a great reputation within the industry. A young man reached out to me one May day and asked me to have lunch with him to teach him everything I know about the business as he was planning to begin one as well. I recently received this message from him, a year and a half into his successful business.
“Hello William, I hope all is well! I want to thank you again for your mentorship to start this business. Your mentorship was invaluable! I have been able to quickly start, mitigate risk, and survive issues all because of your generosity of helping others! My family and I are forever grateful to you.”
That lunch together gave me the inspiration to begin helping men and women all over the country, just like him, who were trying to get started in this industry. And as a result, I created The Carshare Academy.
I’m still amazed at how this thing took off, and immediately became a nearly five-figure monthly coaching practice that has now helped over 1,400 people across the country with their businesses. I began it not out of a pursuit of income, but a desire to help others. And I learned that when we put people first, our own needs, even desires, end up being fulfilled.
Maybe I can help people after all.
The immediate success of the Carshare Academy built a confidence in me that I’d never felt before, and it reawakened in me the belief that the vision I had by the pool that day in Orlando can, in fact, become a reality. My Creator sent me a song to show this to me. And then He showed me again by inspiring me to just build another bridge.
About three months after launching the Carshare Academy I enrolled in a coaching certification program with the Tony Robbins organization, to begin learning even more about myself, relationships, and life, and position myself to become a certified Strategic Intervention Coach. And then, in 2022, I formally began Illumine Life and Work Formation as the coaching practice that will be the fulfillment of that poolside vision so long ago.
So many bridges from there to here.
As I look back over the decades, I see so many bridges in my life. Some of them were built without me even realizing it at the time. Some I intentionally built. Here are four that come to mind.
Over thirty years of dreadful experience in the corporate world taught me everything I needed to know, from business development, to accounting, to customer service, to public relations. I could not have been successful with opening my own business without the “bridge” of everything I learned in corporate life.
Starting a car rental company was a bridge from corporate life to self-employment.
The car rental company was the bridge to my first successful coaching practice.
My first successful niche coaching practice was the bridge to the vision I had for my life in 2006, which is now becoming a reality as I write this.
The Moral of the Story
I’m guessing you have a vision for your life too, a life that seems far away and out of reach. First, I want to encourage you to see and understand how all of the things leading up to this point can be, and likely are, bridges to the future you’re dreaming about.
Second, I want you to learn to take one step. Just one. Lay that first plank of a bridge from here to there. Don’t be like me, sitting and sulking on one side of the valley, gazing longingly at the other side, feeling helpless until you want to stop breathing and wake up somewhere in the eternal mystic. Do one thing, just one, right now, today, to get you one step closer. And I promise you, if your heart, soul, and mind are open, and if you’re committed to being the best version of yourself, and loving and serving others first, that one thing will lead to another.
And another.
And another.
Until…