As a business owner, your livelihood is dependent on your business. But what happens when your personal life begins to fall apart, impacting your business? How do you handle the challenges that life throws at you and still keep your business afloat?
Warren Broad, the co-author of the #1 Amazon Bestselling Book It’s The Landing That Counts: Finding Peace, Happiness and Prosperity When Your Life Falls Apart, shares what do when things fall apart in your life outside of the business, whether that is a personal, financial, or relationship crisis.
He shares strategies, tools and techniques to manage your life and keep your business alive when you get the rug pulled out from under you.
Let’s jump in…
Joshua Sprague: How are you doing Warren?
Warren Broad: I’m doing great Joshua. Thank you so much for having me on.
Joshua: Absolutely. Well, Warren, as we dive into this and try to peel back the layers of how people can move from, as you guys love to say in your book “from free fall to freedom”, and ultimately find this peace, happiness and prosperity that we’re all really looking for, can you tell us first off just a little bit about yourself and your background? Who you are and what you do, but more importantly, how did you really become involved with helping people move from free fall to freedom and what kind of experiences in your life lead you to that?
Warren: Well, I imagine that’s a pretty loaded question, but I am a clinical hypnotherapist and a life coach and counselor. I do a lot of work in addictions and compulsions, as well. What brought me to this career was a lot of personal experiences that I went through as a young man and as a child. I was confronted with quite a few – to use our terminology – quite a few free falls in my life and a fair amount of adversity. So helping others with the adversity that they are going through has come quite naturally to me since I was quite young. I was always one of those people that people would come to, to have somebody listen to them. I suppose that was one of the early skills that I was imbued with pretty quickly and that was to listen to others, listen to the experience they might be going through, and also watch for what kind of internal dialogue they were having. This is something we talk about a lot in the book and I talk about a lot in my practice on a very regular basis – what internal dialogue is going on with the individual that we can reframe and help change.
Joshua: And I want to talk about that here in a minute as that is so important, especially as business owners and entrepreneurs. I know you kind a wear both hats which is cool, but that can be one of the things we struggle with, you know. There’s a sense of being alone or being isolated or when you have all these things that are going on in your life, personally, you know, crisis or free fall, however you want to say it, it can sometimes become very difficult to feel like you can have somebody to talk to and you’re battling that internal conversation all the time. So before we jump into that though Warren, what would you say were one or two of those key things in your own life that really got you on the track of saying, first off, “Holy cow I’m in this free fall place”, and then ultimately, “How would I get out of it?” What would be some of those experiences if you don’t mind sharing them?
Warren: Sure. Well really the most dramatic I suppose cognitive challenge that I went through was shortly after my mother’s passing. At the time that my mother passed I was in transition. I was moving out of the big city of Toronto to the business that my wife and I took over a couple hours North of Toronto. Unfortunately my mother passed away right during that transition and I wasn’t able to really grieve at the time of her passing, so much was going on with just obviously her passing and her illness, but also in my own life and my wife’s life, that we were moving from one place to another. And then it hit me about a year, year and a half after her passing where I hit a real crisis point. I sank into a deep depression and anxiety, and really became quite dysfunctional for about a 3 month period. That I would say, other than the depressions that I experienced as a kid and as a young man, that was one of the biggest ones where I felt this sense of being in a free fall and having no idea what so ever when I was going to land or when I was going to stop falling per say.
Joshua: This is such a crippling and debilitating time. I know I’ve had experiences like that in my own life where you feel like you can’t do anything for a few months. So what would you say were some of the things that helped you move forward?
Warren: Well, a lot of it is whatever kind of support networks you have around you. My wife played a fantastic role of trying to hold the fort for me and I had to be aware of the fact that this was going to be a process. That I was not going to wake up one morning and then it would all be done. I realized that I was in a position that I was going to have to climb out of step-by-step. Because when we think of it, we are confronted with issues of that size. My mother’s passing was not just about my mother’s passing. It helped a lot of other components, so the growth out of it and recreating myself, was a process and it was not going to happen overnight. One of the most important things was to force myself back into functionality when really part of me wanted to stay dysfunctional.
