It’ll be Just Like Starting Over – John Lennon

We closed everything down

December 2011 saw Chris and I close the Beautiful lifestyle centre we owned, the various joint venture partners weren’t pulling their weight and we couldn’t carry them anymore and we consolidated all the monies we owed. In the article “Overcoming the Shame and Guilt of Failure” I go more into the financial details with you. We had become the masters of “Keeping up Appearances” as we were treading water while we worked out where to next?

There was money due to Bob Proctor

We still had outstanding monies due to Bob Proctor and Life Success in Canada. Bob and his CEO in Canada had set us certain challenges to meet that would alleviate some of this debt. We had been enrolled in the latest Thinking Into Results Facilitators Training at no cost, but we were expected to attend all the night time classes, many being early morning due to time zone differences and graduate in 16 weeks. We were working and studying day and night and we were expected to attend Bob Proctors’ signature event The Matrixx in February 2012.

This was a huge ask, we had been complimented for the cost of one of us to attend, but we had to pay in full for the other one, a cool $ 15 000 USD. We would then need to pay for flights to Toronto from South Africa, and for our accommodation and meals. Chris had one last policy that he could cash in and I still had my contract, and it had been said that this would be extended for another 6 months, giving us the breathing space to get through this financial bottle neck.

We had mortgaged our dream property at the lake to raise a substantial amount of funds to repay a large portion of the money we’d borrowed from family and friends. We put our home on the market as there was equity in the house. I sold my car to raise more cash. I then purchased another car on terms to replace the one I sold. All this money was used to service the creditors for Bob’s project. It was a huge stretch but we were beginning to make headway.

We had to get to Toronto for The Matrixx

February came and we travelled to Canada for The Matrixx. At the event Chris and I had quite a few individual and collective aha moments. We were putting things together in our minds and we returned from Canada with a plan for our business, what we wanted to do and how to start doing it. We appointed an International Online Specialists who was one of Bob’s experts at the event to handle our full online presence in order to boost our business and start making some much needed turnover and profit.

Our house sold quite quickly and just six weeks before we were about to move we were hit by a curve ball.

At the last minute my contract was cancelled

At the final moment, the day before my contract expired, I was told that the company had changed its mind and it wasn’t going to be renewed. I was officially unemployed. We had to set aside some of the funds we’d raised through the sale of our house in order to keep our heads above water now. We were strictly in survival mode now and very much in panic mode. I had taken a year lease on a rather large home, and we were going to have to take it as the lease was signed. The night before we moved my Aunt contacted me to tell me in the strictest confidence that my mother had been diagnosed with cancer and that I was not to be told. One after another these events were stacking up, and I was beginning to feel like a punch drunk boxer, wishing for the bell sounding the end of the round, to ring.

The house we moved into had a toxic energy

The energy in this house was toxic. During the build the construction company had cut every conceivable corner, so much so that the house would have never have passed a proper building inspection. Every fitting and fixture was sub-standard and at night the most appalling stench came up through the pipes in the kitchen filling the house with a stench of decay.

Given what was happening in our lives at that time isn’t it quite incredible to think that circumstances had forced us to move, and we attracted a house which although new, was rotting from the foundations up.

Cyber sabotage, how could this happen?

We were excited for the launch of our new website and cautious at the continuous delays that we were experiencing. Chris and I are Get it Done kind of people. Our US expert disappeared off the radar screen. She wouldn’t respond to email and Skype messages, and eventually we had to contact Bob Proctors offices to get her to respond. We received excuse after excuse, and eventually we took over the half finished website and locked her out of the project, or so we thought. We researched what we needed to do and painstakingly built the rest of our site. The evening before a big South African Rugby final we celebrated having finalised our SEO. The next morning we awoke to messages on our smart phones to say that there was a problem with our email server passwords. I logged on to our service provider to find nothing in my account. No cloud server, no domains, no hosting, no backups, nothing. We had experienced some malicious cyber sabotage from the US, done by the very same expert we had appointed and paid  USD $ 20 000 to at Bob’s event. We exposed her lack of delivery and she was livid. Our almost $ 65 000 investment in to a bespoke IT platform created for the Bob Proctor project, and our new site had been wiped off the net. I will never forget the shock when we realised that it was all gone. We had exposed this supplier for the fraud she truly was, and in retaliation she deleted our cloud server through a backdoor she set up when they put the site onto the server. We knew it was her when the IP address traced back to Laguna Beach, in California.

We had to start our website over again without any money. We learnt how to barter and trade exchange our services for services we needed to keep the business going but the lack of financial resources was coming to a boiling point.

Chris and I were doing the best we could do under the circumstances to keep everything going and it was tough going. We moved, but we never felt settled or felt at home in that house. We were closer to my daughter’s school and it was her final year. She was the Head Girl of her school and our focus was on getting her through the year. She attended a private school and the fees were steep and Chris borrowed money from his parents to gets us through the last five months of the year. Had they not loaned us the money my daughter may have faced embarrassing questions from her school around our financial position.

How would we afford my daughters dress for the Prom?

As my daughters High School Prom neared I wondered how we were going to afford to dress her the way she deserved to be dressed, she had worked very hard to be voted as Head Girl and her preliminary graduation results were very good. During the move to this house a piece of furniture that I loved very much was damaged. It was a specialist piece, and I had, had to take it to a restorer for repair. It had been there for several months when they let me know that it couldn’t be repaired and would have to be replaced. Under those circumstances my insurance company paid me out, a little over $ 1000 USD and I put the money aside for my daughter’s prom dress.

We managed to get my daughter through her final exams without the wheels falling off completely. We were getting small projects here and there but we were running out of credit and piling up more debt. At this stage all our friends had exited our lives completely, we had a very quiet Christmas with my daughter and Chris’ cousin.

I have no recollection of seeing the New Year in

I just know that 2013 arrived, and on the 12^th of January my mother succumbed to the cancer that had ravaged her lungs. As you will have read in Bringing up Douglas, when she died, I had was no choice I had to go right away. My  ex-business partner and her husband had moved back to England in 2012, and they had spent quite some time with my mother. With my mother’s death the last connection between the three of them, and me was broken. She called me on the Sunday to instruct me on how I must come over, and how I owed it to my mother. I was quite pleasantly surprised at how neutral I could be to her instructions, and how the realisation that I owed my mother nothing came to mind. I ended the conversation quickly. Never again would she speak to me around matters that were absolutely nothing to do with her.  I have in fact, never spoken to her again.

Helping the one left behind

I had enough air miles for one leg of the return trip and my Dad came to my aid and lent me enough money for the flight and a few days in England. Chris was quite concerned about what I would be walking in to when I arrived and he was quite right to feel this way. I was most grateful to my aunt and her partner for everything they had done for my mother and Douglas while they had lived in England. Aside from the support I could give Douglas and my aunt in the short time I was there, what upset me most, was that due to terrible winter storms across the UK, I couldn’t get down to see my Dad, and I was left feeling devastated.

I returned to South Africa knowing that, for what it was worth I had been disinherited, and deeply saddened that had she not done so, she would have repaid me all the money I had lent her over the years which would have placed Chris and me on a different path back then.

Some good things did happen to Chris and me

We were approached by a very successful radio station and asked if we would like to have a weekly radio show. We knew nothing about radio, but we wanted to share what we had learned with as many people as possible and we jumped at the idea. Our journey was making us grow as individuals and as a couple. Through our radio show we were approached to interview the speakers and teachers appearing at South Africa’s first multi-speaker personal development event, with Richard Branson as the headline speaker. These included some of the top teachers in the world, two of whom had appeared in the movie The Secret. This was big news for a community radio show. We interviewed most of the speakers over the next few weeks and attended the event at the beginning of March.

What a learning curve. Thousands of South Africans filled the convention centre, hungry for success and willing to spend. We watched as millions of Dollars were spent as people ran to the back of the room to get in on these special coaching and training offers. Now, although not exactly the same, this is what we had wanted to achieve from Bob Proctor’s visit to South Africa – thousands of South Africans filling a room to learn success principles from a grand master. In so many ways Bob’s teachings were light years ahead of what was being offered by some of these younger less experienced experts. Alas we were just 18 months too soon! Shortly after this event came another international group with bigger budgets and bigger name speakers, and we interviewed many of them on our show. In a few short months we had interviewed Greg Secker, Andy Harrington, Scott Harris, Robert Allen, Loral Langemeier, and hosted Dr John Demartini live in studio for an hour. We interviewed Les Brown, T Harv Eker, Doug Nelson, Raymond Aaron, Mac Attram, Tom Hopkins, James Caan, Chris Gardner, Courtney Smith, Mike Douglas, Blair Singer and many, many more. We were learning how to build something from nothing and what a precious lesson this has proven to be.

We experienced surreal events whilst going through this traumatic time. I was invited to be on the judging panel for one of the entrepreneurial categories for the Shoprite Women of the Year Awards. The small stipend they paid for this helped to cover my expenses of getting to and from the venue for the judging sessions. We were invited to the Gala Dinner and had an overnight stay in a luxury hotel. In September 2013 we were appointed as ambassadors for South Africa’s Marriage Week Initiative and launched the Love Bridge in September 2014.

Everything must go!

But at the same time we didn’t have enough money to keep paying our rent. We had sold on auction most of the contents of our lifestyle businesse, more than $ 75 000 worth of equipment and all we got for it was $ 2500. I started selling off original artworks, at far below their value and raised another $ 5000, and that would keep us going for another month or two. There was very little left that we could sell, when we bought our land at Waterlake Chris had cashed in his shares to pay for his half of the land. Then when he left the bank in 2010 he had also invested a huge tranche of money into our lifestyle business thus changing the distribution of our marital estate as per our pre-nuptial agreement. At the time having no knowledge of what we were getting in to, I signed over the contents of our home to Chris in lieu of the funds he was investing.

Chris was prepared for us to sell everything though in order to keep going. We got a company in to value the contents of the house for what they call an emigration sale, this is the way they sell up the contents of houses for families moving to other countries. I was stunned when they offered us $ 3500 for everything. The contents of our home had cost tens of thousands of Dollars, our lounge furniture was worth more than that alone. We declined the sale and continued to sell off individual pieces as best we could, each time scrapping together enough money for another month. We made it like this through to May 2013, when we realised we wouldn’t be able to sell much more as there was nothing of great value was left that would sell at a reasonable.

Diamonds aren’t a girls best friend

We had no choice but to take my beautiful jewellery and see how much we could sell it for. We gathered up my 1 carat platinum and diamond ring. My 2 carat platinum and diamond all around eternity ring, the one I used to get married to Chris until he bought me my engagement ring. My most precious platinum ring with the 42 diamonds I had, had made for my 42^nd birthday. My 1 carat diamond studs. My tanzanite tennis bracelet. My diamond pendant with a 1.5 carat princess cut diamond and two off 0.5 carat trillion cut diamonds. I took it all, everything I had bought for myself and we went to the diamond district in the heart of down town Johannesburg. Our first three offers from the dealers for everything, was less than $ 4000. This jewellery over the years had cost me in excess of $ 50 000. We were feeling sad, desperate and dejected. I called the dealer who made my jewellery and she explained how because of the economy the second hand market was awful at this time, but she put us in touch with someone who she said would be more sympathetic. We went straight to his office and put my jewellery down on the table, a sad moment for us both. What a kind and sympathetic man. He explained everything about the industry, how it worked and how a dealer buys back. He then weighed and sized each piece and gave us the best offer he could, which was $ 5 500.00, we accepted and the deal was done.

For a while I was shocked by this transaction. All my hard earned money gone, as were the diamonds bought with my thinking that they were an investment. Never again, will I buy the real thing. If I ever buy jewellery again I will buy laboratory grown diamonds in pretty settings.

We used the money to pay our outstanding rent, and an outstanding car installment too. We gave notice on the house we were renting, as all our resources were now depleted and I borrowed money from my youngest son to pay for what we had left to be packed up and put into storage.

We were fundamentally homeless.

Chris, me, our two cats, Thunder and Lightning and our two Chihuahuas, Peaches and Cream no longer had a home. In August 2013 we moved in to the maids’ room at Chris’ cousin’s house.

The living area and bathroom was around 225ft² [21m²]. It had rising damp, paint was peeling off the walls and the door was missing planks at the bottom. That said, it was a roof over our heads and we were extremely grateful for this. The shock of being jobless, and homeless started to sink in. All that Chris and I had was each other, and the stress of the past 24 months had taken its toll on both of us mentally, emotionally, physically and sexually. We were in both processing the enormity of what had transpired over a very short period of time for us. Chris was adamant that we would not be staying in that little room indefinitely and as such refused to allow me to hang our curtains up at the window. It was a strange feeling to be exposed in that way, but in reality that is exactly what had happened, we had been exposed for the choices and decisions we had made.

We carried on learning

We continued to study, attend seminars and work with the international experts that were flooding into South Africa. We bartered and traded services in order to be able to continue our education and work with these successful teachers. We worked at our success every day, we worked on being of service to others, and we continued teaching and interviewing experts in various fields for our weekly talk radio show. Sometimes the frustrations of not seeing the fruits of our labour would bubble up, after all we are only human. After the outburst, we would again work on the lessons we were learning and then start applying them.

For better or for worse

This was the moment when we fully understood the meaning of our marriage vows “For better or for worse”. when you have made that covenant before your God, the Universe, or maybe even a Marriage Officer, all you are thinking about is the “For better” part. How did we stay together? It’s simple really, we had no other choice. How many promises had I broken in my life, and how many had Chris broken? Now was the time to pay for all the broken promises, and to keep this one. I had put everything on the line, legitimately, for a great life for Chris and me, for a new home and business for us, and I had lost it all. As I began writing my story Chris and I talked at great lengths about what I would be sharing and why. He shared so many beautiful insights into our relationship and I really understand why he tells people that one of the things he is most proud of, is our marriage.

This was a life or no life situation for us. If at any stage Chris decided that we were through, and that he couldn’t take it anymore, he knew that I had absolutely no where to go, and no one to turn to. He said that for the first time in his life he was going to do the right thing and stay. Yes, there were moments when he wanted to flee from me, but he didn’t. He gutsed it out and it was tough. In the past he would have played the blame game, laid it all at my feet and done a runner. But with everything we were learning at the time and because of the shift in the levels of our awareness, he knew that there was no way he could abandon me.

Being confined to that tiny room and being together 24/7, 365 was going to be the make or break test. It was like being in a pressure cooker, waiting to see if the steam would release, or would the lid blow? Would it fuse us together or blow us apart? Christmas 2013 dealt me a difficult hand and serious blow, when my last vestige of self-esteem was whipped out from underneath me. Firstly Douglas attempted suicide, and when we prevented it, he became violent. Then for reasons unknown to me then, or even now, my daughter and I became estranged, and for the first time in 20 years she wasn’t with me for Christmas. I was emotionally broken right there. It was the straw that broke this camel’s back and I actually felt like I wanted to die so that the pain could stop. Chris had invested a great deal of love in to his relationship with her too, and he was heartbroken. We went in to Christmas and the New Year broke of spirit and money, we had less than $ 20 in our account.

We only had each other

Neither of us had anyone else to turn to. I had lost almost all of my close friends and confidants along the road. We were the only friends we had at that time, save that Chris’s closest friend and his wife never judged us and kept us close. I struggled for a long time to come to terms with this. I had been a very good friend to my friends and in my darkest hours, only once or twice did someone pop me a message and ask me if I was ok?

We stumbled along, doing everything that we could do to get our business off the ground. We wrote several books, Chris shared his story in an eBook, Looking Back Over My Shoulder and I wrote an eBook Afr-iCan Entrepreneur Rising. We published our first book together, Put The I Back In Team, and we were contributing authors to the Best Selling Leadership 2020 book, In The Beginning. We spoke on stages, had TV interviews and features, taught in communities, and coached our hearts out.

But still the money wasn’t coming in

We had designed and written a spectacular coaching seminar taught on a 5 star Safari experience, we presented this to a high powered sales team in the media industry in the magnificent Thornybush Game Reserve. The feedback was phenomenal, and the media company gave us a massive advertising campaign to promote it and…… Still nothing took off.

Chris even considered getting back in to the work place. We sat and talked long and hard about him going back into the corporate world. There were logistical issues about this, and then there were commitment issues about it too. From a governance perspective Chris wouldn’t have made it past the Human Resources departments’ credit checks, as he had been blacklisted and sequestrated before, plus our credit record had been destroyed by the business failure. Logistically we only had one car, and South Africa’s public transport system is limited. Finally Chris felt very strongly about the commitment he made to me when he left the corporate world, to build a business together. On my side the logistics, governance and commitment held true too, but I had the added disadvantage of not having a high school diploma or post graduate qualification either. I am sure many people thought we were crazy and should just get a job, but it “just” wasn’t that simple.

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Against All Odds

We were desperate for a break. We tried everything and when it failed, we tried even harder and failed again. Every failure though was met with dogged determination and we got up and tried again. What we hadn’t realised though was that we were drastically reducing our value, and when projects came a long we would accept whatever money was being offered to us. This behaviour continued until one Friday afternoon in June 2014. Whilst getting ready to teach a group of young aspirational people in the film and TV industry, I was tapped on the shoulder by some very big and burly repo men. They were here to repossess our car because we were two payments behind. Despite the fact that we had made arrangements with the finance company and paid the money that day, they were taking the car. Standing in front of those young aspirational film and TV production people, I shared with them what had just happened, but that we had made a commitment to teach them that day, and so we would. It was amazing to receive their tears, applause and hugs at the end of our session.

This was a turning point for us in terms of how we kept reducing our own value. We were now working for less than $ 2000 per month collectively. Shame and guilt are robbers and thieves, they rob you of your happiness and steal your soul. I go into this in more detail and you can read about it in Overcoming the Shame and Guilt of Failure. Every day was a challenge, and every day we faced them, stepping closer and closer towards at least seeing the light at the end of this dark tunnel. It was a daily grind, one foot in front of the other as the next idea failed to get off the ground. We’d regroup, look at what that failure had taught us, and start the process all over again.

We taught in clothes that had been mended more than once.

There were times when we were coaching and training large corporate clients when on our way home Chris and I would burst out laughing, because we had spent a day teaching high earning company executives standing in clothes that had been mended and shoes that were falling apart. That said, our training was so impactful that none of the brand lable wearing audience ever noticed our clothes, quite the contrary, they were blown away by our teachings and said that we had opened their minds to previously untapped potential.

We always kept focused on the GOAL

I will tell you here that the Goal has never changed, from the minute when we became very clear on what we wanted and deliberately created our GOAL, we have never wavered on what it is that we want. We have had to change the how, as we have found hundreds of ways that haven’t worked.

No matter the hardships we endured, every night when we got into bed there was a great deal of love in our little room. By this stage Chris’ cousin’s old tortoise shell cat, Phoebe, had adopted us too. Each night Chris and I lay snuggled up on a tiny part of the bed, the remainder now occupied by Thunder, Lightning and Phoebe, with Peaches and Cream curled up in their little bed in the corner. Day by day we were creating a Mastermind Marriage. We were growing in our awareness and consciousness of what it is to be individuals and collective. Completing ourselves to complement each other. I could sense this whenever we spoke at events and functions or taught on the radio. We are both strong and powerful teachers separately, but together we are a gift.

We knew that we couldn’t stay in that room indefinitely. Chris’ cousin’s acceptance would eventually turn to resentment as he would quite rightly want his house back. He had begun a new relationship, and he needed his space. Chris and I needed to get back into an environment whereby we had a home. In December 2014 we made up our mind and set out an affirmation of where we wanted to live. We had a retainer with great clients, whom had become our friends. We decided we wanted to be closer to them and set the affirmation accordingly. Every day several times a day we would say;

“It is the 1^st of March 2015 and we are so happy and grateful now that we are living in a tranquil, peaceful home close to our clients. We are safe and our pets are safe to, and we have our belongings around us.”

We began saying this affirmation in mid-December, and in mid-February we were feeling a little concerned, we hadn’t found anywhere yet and Chris had told his cousin we were moving out at the end of the month. We kept our faith and continued looking and on the 17^th February we found our peaceful tranquil home.

Bob Proctor teaches, that if you are not growing you are dying. I am not the same woman that Chris married, and he is definitely not the same man. We have grown together to this point, to where we are now. We continue to grow and learn every day. Our relationship is not the same as it was six months ago when we moved out of that little room, and it has grown again and will continue to grow.

Love in the modern day commercial sense is all about ego. The beauty, the body, the material attributes and status that goes with it. The person who is the most keen to get married, is the person who has the greatest to gain, the most reward over risk and the most advantage over disadvantage. This is the “for better” and often doesn’t last. Divorce is easy these days no matter where in the world live. There are fewer places than ever now where you can’t easily get out of a failing marriage and relationship. I know now that love, real love, the love that has a depth of connectedness and feeling, where you know, that you know, that you know you have something worth living for, only comes when you weather the “for worse”.

Through Starting Over, I hope I’ve made you aware of the importance of persistence, because were it not for persistence and a burning desire to see our huge, audacious goal (visible to only us in our mind’s eye) become our visible, future reality, we’d have quit ages ago and settled for an easier life. Napoleon Hill writes in his classic book Think and Grow Rich that “The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.” He then goes on to add this “Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do. More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.” Then, he gives what I believe is the most perfectly crafted summation of why persistence is key if you want to win big, which Chris and I do and will, when he writes “The majority of people are ready to throw their aims and purposes overboard, and give up at the first sign of opposition or misfortune. A few carry on DESPITE all opposition, until they attain their goal. These few are the Fords, Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Edisons. There may be no heroic connotation to the word persistence, but the quality is to the character of man what carbon is to steel.”

Question:

What price are you paying for not persisting with the attainment of your most beautiful dream?

Exercise:

1. What’s your most beautiful dream / goal?
2. Have you given up on this desire?
3. If yes, why and how does this make you feel?
4. Given what Hill teaches, have you got it in you to still go after what you desire?
5. If yes, are you prepared this time to do whatever it takes to achieve your goal?
6. How will your life be when you attain your dream?
7. Is that significantly different from how your life is right now?
8. Which life do you want, your current one or the one of your dreams?
9. What would achieving this do for your self-concept?
10. Aside from your gain, what do others stand to gain from your great success?
11. How does this make you feel?
12. Here, to help you along, is a talk radio show podcast all about Persistence.
13. Make your decision now and if you’re going to play all in, go out and buy yourself a copy of Think and Grow Rich, study it and apply its lessons as if your life depended on it.

My profound lesson:

From a very young age I had learned the importance of persistence. Had I not, I would have gone hungry, often. That said, what Chris and I experienced year after year for what has been 5 long years now, tested my persistence and resolve to win, to the very limit. Yes there days when I just wanted to pack it all in and go and live a nice, quiet life somewhere far away from South Africa, far away from anyone who knew me. However, my inner voice would never accept this as the solution and so each day I found the wherewithal to keep going. There were times when I have no idea how I did this as everything was a blur, but if you set huge goals and want them more than anything, then no matter how lost you might feel, as long as you never ever give up, a way will be show to you. Suzanne.