Winds Of Change
Breaking Free From Addictions And Habits
As 2007 approached, I eventually realized that I held some habits that weren’t serving me any longer, such as smoking and drinking. I set the intention to move towards a better future with more possibilities.
Even though I was in between two worlds, I was beginning to create more space for opportunity. There was a sense of hunger to achieve more success. I was working construction initially as summer work. However, I somehow landed myself in telemarketing sales for lawn care services.
The Self Help World
I was offered a base pay with commissions on every sale I made. What I didn’t realize was that my whole life would change from that moment. I was naturally very good at building connections with people over the phone.
Soon enough, I started to break sales records nationally and even started winning awards for hitting the highest numbers repeatedly. This was the first time in my life I felt like I was good at something, which fueled my need to make more improvement.
This was when I discovered the field of “self-help.” Back then, self-help wasn’t as big as it is now. I initially wanted to exponentially increase my sales, which led me to learn from teachers like Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar. I would grab anything and everything I could.
I would somehow find books and audio programs in libraries or order them from the internet. Some of the programs were over 20 hours of material on self-mastery. I planted the seeds for success and opened my mind to the wisdom that would change my life forever.
When I’d be driving around during summer, the car would be stacked with many audiobook programs and CDs everywhere. I often accumulated a long list of late fees from the library because I didn’t want to return the books and audio sets.
As I continued to clock hours of audio programs in the car, I continued to sell more lawn care services and exponentially accumulate more knowledge than I could ever imagine.
Brian Tracy often described this process as having a “university on wheels.” He explained that listening to audiobooks for as little as two hours a day is equivalent to a degree. Although it was debatable, I blindly accepted that as fact and went with it.
Breaking Benders
Sometimes I would slip back into habits, whether having a weekend bender of ecstasy and alcohol or still smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Life was forgiving enough to allow me to pick the pieces back up. There was momentum on my side, but the clock was ticking.
I made friends during my stint in telemarketing sales. One of those friends didn’t make it back to the office after one weekend. He had ecstasy that weekend and passed away. I went to visit him one more time at the funeral. I will never forget the feeling as I saw his body.
As a young guy, I kept wondering to myself. Decisions can take you in one direction or another. From that moment on, I never took ecstasy ever again.
A perfectly timed book fell into my lap one day. It had always been sitting on the shelf of my parent’s home in Richmond Hill, Ontario. I had tried to pick it up when a few years earlier; however, the fact that it was over a thousand pages of dense material probably swayed me away from it.
Fortunately, this time I was ready. It was an old edition of Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins. The book is literally a program on shifting your mental, emotional, physical, financial habits. I went through the book like a crazy person.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from the book was Neuro-linguistic Programming. Just the notion that you could literally shift your brain’s network of neurons and reprogram them to have better habits was exactly what I needed to quit smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
I had tried everything up until that point, from nicotine gum and patches. This time around, I developed an approach that shifted the way my brain imagined cigarettes.
Up until then, I craved cigarettes because of how good they made me feel. So I replaced that craving with the smell of rotten cigarette buds mixed with a bit of water in a bottle. Every time I felt a craving, I took a sniff of that bottle. Soon enough, I didn’t want the cigarettes any longer.
This experience made me a fan of Tony Robbins, attending many of his events. Once I even slept on a friend’s floor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, because there was an event happening in the city. He had just gotten a new puppy that wouldn’t stop pooping on the kitchen floor, which was just a few meters away from me.
The tide was finally beginning to turn. I was beginning to feel a sense of gratitude for all the possibilities. Even though there was so much exploration, I felt like a whole world was opening up to me and that I had only scratched the surface. I was ready to shift gears and open new doors.
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