52. A Man Without A Father’s Praise (Never Feels Successful Enough)

Have you struggled to feel successful (enough)? Have you struggled in relationship when you were professionally unfulfilled? Did you know that a dad’s essential gift to a child is to instill both the drive to succeed, and the understanding that you’re already (always) successful? My father’s in town. Now I love my dad, but like most men, particularly those who grew up with their father mostly not present, and even many who grew up WITH their father present, we have a complicated relationship as adults. As I said, I love the man, but I also harbor a deep-seated resentment, even rage, that really I know now just covers over a profound sadness that may never be healed. In fact, I believe the way I have lived my entire life, particularly as an adult, has been shaped by my roller coaster relationship with my overwhelmingly absent father, and in some ways that surely have served me well, such as my endless drive to accomplish whatever I set my mind to because I know no one else is gonna step in and do it for me, and yet in other ways that have been just utterly debilitating, such as my endless pursuit of some measure of success that has eluded me, and I know will continue to elude me, forever. Today I’m diving into one of my recent popular blogs, A Man Without A Father’s Praise (Never Feels Successful Enough) My dad is a brilliant man, a man who’s spent the last 40 years of his life working alongside my step-mother to make energy medicine technologies into real and viable products we can use today to help the human body heal. These technologies aren’t too far off from the kind of thing you’d see in a sci-fi TV show like Star Trek. I worked with them back in 2003 to help grow one of their signature products into a 50 million dollar company. Oprah Winfrey loved that product, and featured it twice on her famous favorite-things audience giveaway shows in both 2003 and 2005. She even invited us on her show to talk about this technology, and when our Public Relations spokesperson completely miffed on one of Oprah’s questions in front of a live audience, I immediately stepped in and spent the next few minutes talking to Oprah about mind-body energy science, how our thoughts and feelings can affect the rhythm and beat of the hearts in our chests, and how we are all connected to our environments, and to each other, through invisible electromagnetic fields that have real impact on us – and I know this all may sound a bit woo-woo to you, and to some degree the science of it all still is, but I’ll tell you, in the words of our vice president who was sitting next to me that day on the Oprah Show, and whose primary character trait was shrewd observer of everything … I had Oprah enraptured. After the show, I spent another few minutes back stage talking with Oprah – you can see the picture of us taken that day on my website on my story page. On our way back to the hotel that cold day in Chicago, our Vice President told me she was going to make me the International Spokesperson for our company. Something I had no training for, because up until that point I’d mostly spent working on other aspects of the business. As the technology research the director for the company, I worked with the Miami Dolphins football team for a year. They had agreed to let us study how our product impacted the performance of their players. I also served as the head of customer service, building up our customer service department essentially from nothing. Oprah featured our product just 6 months after we launched it. Especially in those days, when Oprah featured your product on her show before you were ready for big sales numbers, and before you had a customer service department, well, it was too late to get ready. Building that customer service department even as Oprah promoted it...