Chapter 3: A new world is visible, but i’m not in it yet

A Being Entrepreneur embraces all aspects of the self, even the ones that we may wish to avoid or overcome. In my case it was my sensitivity. For most of my life I experienced it as a nuisance until one day it became the greatest gift.

I have a vague memory of a period in my life, I was probably 11 or 12 years old, when I would pray every night before going to sleep. In my prayers I would vividly bring to mind all the people who I could imagine suffering in the world. Some of these images came from the evening news reporting on wars around the world and others might have come from friends or family members who I knew were struggling at home. I easily picked up on other people’s pain and my way of processing it at the time was to hold all of it in my awareness and simply ask the “higher powers” for help.

Many years later, somewhere around 2007, I was introduced to the concept of HSP, which stands for Highly Sensitive Person. I didn’t know at the time, but these three letters would eventually bring tremendous chaos as well as tremendous meaning into my life. The friend who had seen some HSP characteristics in me gifted me the following book: The Power of Sensitivity, by Ted Zeff.

I remember having a profound feeling of coming home when reading it. It didn’t take long before I was fully absorbed in this highly unusual way of describing a certain segment of society. The author understood the deepest layers of my Being. He was able to put into words and make sense of the rich, but often confusing, inner world that was at the source of how I was experiencing life. My soul was starting to be exposed and as a result I now had more awareness on what had given spark to the magical moments described in chapter two.

What I had previously thought of as moments of enlightenment or peak experiences, were now a natural consequence of my inner being shining its light. This was a profound awakening. It helped me realize that as human beings we often have more power than we think we do to create wonder-filled lives.

Even though this awareness was helping me to connect dots that previously seemed random, my day-to-day reality was still lagging behind. Whenever I was around a lot of people, I would quickly feel overwhelmed. My senses could not handle the sheer quantity of stimulus coming my way as part of working in an open space office environment. My attention was constantly being drawn away by the busyness of all the people around me. It seemed like I was the only one not thriving in this fast-paced, doing-focused workplace. My natural response was to hide in the nearby meeting or huddle rooms. This helped me focus but after a while I also felt isolated and disconnected from my colleagues.

During performance review time, the feedback would invariable be about not speaking up enough and needing to be more effective at engaging others. It boiled down to “leadership”. No matter how hard I tried, the impulse to speak up and stand out from the crowd would never last long. It wasn’t me and therefore reinforced my sense of inadequateness. Rather than open up and motivate me, it actually closed me down even further. I remember times when I simply wanted to be invisible and disappear. I had found one or two toilets, removed from the busy zones of the office, where I could sit in stillness and darkness. In these moments I would find some momentary peace.

Another coping mechanism was to “sneak” out of the building and go on an extended walk, sometimes for several hours in a row. I think I had gotten quite good at being invisible because I would rarely get questions from my colleagues about where I was. I guess that’s the advantage of working in a big company. I was a small fish swimming in a big pond so as long as my work got done, there seemed to be a lot I could get away with. Of course, feeling inadequate, and often quite useless at the end of the day, was a high price to pay for this seemingly relaxed work arrangement.

Finding out about HSP made me feel better. It helped me understand that there wasn’t anything “wrong” with me. Acknowledging that I was OK was a first important step. I wasn’t quite ready to see it as a gift yet but at least now I wouldn’t beat myself up for retreating into the dark toilets or going on an extended lunch walk around the office. I could see these as important self-care activities so I could better handle the busyness of the workplace. I also stopped driving into work and instead made walking a part of my daily practice. The 45-minute walk was the perfect way to get inspired in the morning and then unwind in the evening. Incorporating these habits into my life is what allowed me to survive, and at times thrive, in this corporate environment.

This was also the time when I first discovered coaching. Of course, I was familiar with the idea of a sports coach, but a life coach was a totally new concept to me. I loved that it was different from mentoring or counselling. It immediately made sense to me that answers to all our deepest questions lie within us rather than with somebody else, no matter how wise or experienced the other person is. Like HSP, this was another piece of the puzzle. It validated something I had felt deep inside but the world around me mostly told a very different story. At school, 90% of the learning is sourced from textbooks and dependent on a well-defined curriculum. Very seldom are we encouraged to trust our own inner knowing to navigate and make sense of the world. Coaching might not be the optimal way of learning maths or history, but it certainly is the way to go if we want more clarity on our own values, principles and purpose in life.

But how do we transcend all the noise and past conditioning on who we SHOULD be to reach that pure level of inner truth, a place of unequivocal clarity about who we are and why we are here? And how do we then resculpt our life around this deep inner knowing?

In my case it meant finding a coach who could support me in this process. My search across the world wide web led me to an HSP coach based in California. Right from the start of our six-month program, the coach took me on a visualization into the future. In this deep meditative state, I was introduced to my future self - the person I had become five years in the future. It wasn’t just a linear projection of who I was today, instead it was a version of myself that had grown exponentially into his greatest potential. I literally had the opportunity to sit down with my future self for tea and ask him anything I wanted.

In this process I got a deeper glimpse into who I had become, the environment I was in, the people I was around and the overall energy of the moment. I remember feeling welcomed by a very peaceful and calm person, somebody who exuded a great confidence and had found a way to integrate his deeper self in all aspects of his life. Although all the impressions were very subtle in nature, I knew it was in the realm of possibility. Nothing felt more true and real at that moment in time. Even now, ten years later, I can still relive that experience as if it happened yesterday. The culmination of these six months led to the crystallization of my life purpose, an aspirational statement that I knew was mine but, at the time, had no idea how it would manifest.

These magical months of coaching opened up a whole new world for me. In addition to my current life of work, family and responsibility, I now had this other parallel life of possibility, connection and deeper truth. At the time I remember having to hold these very carefully as two separate realities - an outer one and an inner one. All of these new discoveries about my true self were so precious and fragile that they remained safely guarded to the outside world. They needed nurturing and strengthening before I could even consider a cross-over into my “other” life.

Over the course of this coaching journey my true self started to shine brighter. I became more aware of the conditions that were creating the tensions in my life, whether it be at work, with friends or at home with the family. Most of it came down to not being able to reconcile the rational world I was operating in and the sensitive inner qualities I was in the process of recognizing and claiming for myself. My intuitive abilities were yearning to come through, but I could not find an effective channel for that in the corporate environment that valued data, logic and reason above all.

Also, at home I was struggling to see how I could be more of my true self with my wife who prided herself to be highly rational and a “genius with numbers”. Whenever I started a sentence with “I feel...” I would be met with a confused and slightly uninterested look. So as a result, I kept most of that to myself, assuming that these two worlds - the world of the head and the world of the heart - had to be kept separate. Even my whole journey into coaching was not known to many people. It was too difficult to explain what it was and why I was doing it. Most of the calls I had with my West Coast coach were done late at night in the quiet and confidence of my car.

It didn’t take long before living this separation started to take its toll. It wasn’t that different than living a lie. More and more my outer life started to feel like one. I could not imagine a way forward in the long term without a significant upheaval on all fronts, including both work and the home front.

During this period of inner clarity and outer turmoil only a handful of people felt trusted enough to share my inner process. As I confided in them, I could feel the momentum to take action slowly build. The energy that was rising within me was that of a warrior. I was going to show myself to the world no matter the consequences. If it meant being fired from my job, so be it. If I was going to lose some people along the way, then that was a price I was willing to pay. I realize now that I was very much living in the either-or paradigm. Either I be true to myself and accept the consequences or I continue to suffer feeling disconnected with the world around me. Within all of this there was one nonnegotiable - the wellbeing of my wife and two children Oscar and Audrey who, at the time, were 4 and 2 years old.

I knew the next step of showing myself to the world was near. I also knew that significant change was on the horizon. I had no idea though what the new configuration would look like once the dust had settled. Under normal circumstances the fear of the unknown would have led to inertia but, fueled by this warrior energy, I was ready to move through it.