Now is the time for men to pivot their focus and follow their hearts and take action.

If you have lost your job or have a business that has been impacted by the current crisis you are not alone and you don’t have to carry the burden all by yourself.

Now is the time to get really clear on the type of work you want to do and the difference you can make in your family and your community.

As men, we have been taught from a young age that it is our job to work and provide for our families and if we lose our job or fail in business our natural tendency is to tie our work to our self-worth.

I discovered this for myself In 2012. In 2010 my wife and I had a dream of opening up a Wellness center, rented office space in our local community and began offering weight loss and health coaching, invested all of our retirement money trying to make it work only to be forced to close the doors on August 31st, 2012. I remember spending that entire day moving all of our equipment from our office to our townhouse garage, cleaning the office space and calling the landlord and leaving a message that went something like this “Hi this is Mike Stewart at Crossroads Wellness we currently rent from you and we have closed our business, the space is empty, we’ve cleaned the space and we would like to meet with you to give you the keys.” After leaving that message I was bombarded with so many fears of what our landlord would do because we still had 1 year left on our lease, they could take us to court and demand we pay them the remaining balance of the lease which would be approximately $27,000. I felt defeated, I reached the lowest point in my life.

Not knowing how we would pay the September rent on our townhouse or put food on the table in we went down to the Social Security office and applied for Food Stamps. I remember sitting with the clerk and filling out the paperwork with $10 in our bank account and 25 cents in my pocket praying “Please let them accept our application, we have nowhere else to go”  We were so grateful they accepted our application which gave us some security but we still needed to figure out how to pay our rent. I was fortunate our landlord agreed to allow me to pay part of the rent and make arrangements to pay the balance by selling equipment from our business.

For the next 3 months, I looked for work in applying for jobs and reaching out to all my old employers and daily waited patiently for an answer but my confidence was very low, I remember sitting on my couch hearing a voice say ” who would want to hire a failure like you?”  I was plagued by those negative thoughts every day until I was hired by my old boss on December 12th, 2012. This job was a new start for me but the negative self-talk did not stop, each project I worked on that negative voice plagued me and tried to zap my confidence and for a moment I would give in to it but I knew if I was going to make this new job work I had to combat these thoughts with my previous victories. I had to tell myself “you have 10 years of success doing this work and completed several projects and this project is no different.”

I share my story with you today because I know how you feel having been fired, your income is gone or you are struggling with thoughts of feeling like a failure. Don’t let those feelings identify you!  Let me explain. Just because you lost your job it doesn’t mean you are a failure, it is just what happened, it is our past conditioning I mentioned earlier that has us feel less than whole because we are not working.

You need to realize You are in control of your future no one else! It is time to learn how to take back your life by spending some alone time and determining what is important to you what lights you up and make a commitment to yourself to never give up on your dream.

.It is time for men to rise up and take control of our thoughts, our destiny and never give up on our dreams to be leaders in our work, our families, and our communities.

I am committed to helping men regain their confidence and create new ways to build a prosperous future that will fulfill a need in our society and provide a lasting legacy for years to come.

Leave me a comment on how I can support you at staying focused on achieving your dreams, goals and discovering your passion and purpose for your life.