12 Steps to Career Freedom: (Book 2) A Career Planning Guide for Today's Job Market

CHAPTER 2

2

After a successful business trip to Dallas, I realized I was still in trouble, and sought out professional help. Through several counseling sessions over the next two years, I again looked to my father’s goal setting strategies. It was a struggle, but I did the planning and goal setting I knew had worked in the past. In 2002, I had the best year ever in the history of my business. The executive search business is like that—almost as if each placement is akin to a fix that an addict needs. The fees would typically come in large chunks with most of them in the range of $30,000 to $50,000. At one point during that time, I was averaging over $26,000 per month in income. It was a lot of money, but we were burning through it, too. My father used to tell me, “It’s all relative, Paul.” He was talking about a building for his business he had purchased a number of years earlier saying that he wished he didn’t own it. His income was much greater than mine, but he also spent a lot more. 

In late 2002, I was alone on a much-needed fishing trip to the Florida Keys. It was sometime during the latter part of the surge I was experiencing with my business. I forced myself to go despite all the work I was involved with at the time. During the trip, I decided to start writing again. This time I was camped out on a cheap lawn chair that I had purchased at Wal-Mart, sitting on a beautiful stretch of beach in the Bahia Honda State Park. I had made it, I thought. My business had never been better and here I was, on an island in the Florida Keys, writing a novel. I knew the Keys well since my father had purchased a condo on Key Vaca in the town of Marathon. We had vacationed there many times before. My father had sold his place and ironically, I found a condo to rent in the same town not more than a mile from his old place. I didn’t catch a lot of fish on that trip but I did get a significant amount of writing done. 

All of my planning and goal setting was working once again. I was at that moment doing exactly what I had set out to do. Run a successful business to help fund my passion of writing and live a comfortable life style. It was all working well.

A year later, depression set back in as I realized I could not sustain the level of business and resulting lifestyle. Once again, I had successfully burnt myself out. Thoughts of my daughter’s death continued to haunt me and I started to take another dive. This time it would have dire consequences. In 2004, I separated from my wife of nearly twenty years. She took our four kids and moved out of our five bedroom house. I was alone and the silence was maddening. No kids screaming or dogs barking. As I walked up the long staircase to my bedroom on a cold evening in December, I thought of the old Ebenezer Scrooge movies and felt that all I needed to complete the scene was a candle in my hand. I continued on with my counseling. Although painful at times, it helped. The martial arts had been a passion of mine for many years and I stayed active working out and continued to teach. I started writing in my journal once again. 

In 2005, I divorced and promptly sold or threw out almost everything I had accumulated over my life of 47 years. It was a real cleansing. Shortly afterwards I moved in with a karate buddy of mine who had also gone through a divorce. Nearly everything I still owned was now stored in a 10x10 storage unit. It was an uplifting but at times painful transformation. I had moved from a 3,100 square foot house into a small upstairs bedroom, which my friend graciously provided. This situation lasted about six months until we both about killed each other and I knew that it was time for me to move on. 

I struggled with my recruiting business over the next few years, only doing a couple of searches. In the meantime, to sustain myself and my family, I took on a few jobs, including one that was rather significant as the Director of Sales with a plastics company. Despite the fact that it was a great opportunity and paid well, it lasted three weeks. I quit, realizing that sales was no longer something I wanted to do.  

At the end of February 2011, I would finally stop working my executive search business. Up to that point, I had been involved with the business for twenty-seven years. A search that I had taken on a few months earlier became nearly impossible to complete due to the lack of cooperation by the client. We parted ways and it was the last time I did anything significant with my business. The idea of returning to it kept plaguing my mind because of the large sums of money I had made in the past. I needed another fix, I thought. This time was different though. I knew that I wasn’t going back. “It’s like sticking your wet finger into a light socket; you know what’s going to happen,” my therapist explained to me. She was right, and the toll of what had become a cycle of having left the business only to come back into it a number of times over a period of several years was having an adverse effect on my entire life and health. 

The year before I stopped working my business I had started to rewrite a career book that I self-published a few years earlier. My father had a lot of influence over me throughout the years and well into my business career. I was on nearly the same path he was with a similar philosophy of whoever has the biggest pile of money in the end wins. At the time I believed that was the path to prosperity and ultimate happiness. I was working hard to achieve that goal. Until I woke up, that was. My new book advocated making a plan and implementing goals to get you to where you want to go in life. However, until I sat down to rewrite my book, I had not done any real planning since 2002 when my business was flourishing. I knew the program I had developed worked. 

I realized that I wasn’t following my own advice. Not completely anyway. All the elaborate planning and goal setting had worked and was part of the reason I had started writing a book in 1994. It was one of my goals. I discovered after looking over all my goals that nearly everything I had set out to do I had in some way accomplished it. Maybe it wasn’t to the exact level I had envisioned, but it was a work in progress. My father’s original goal setting programs were very involved and something he did on a yearly basis. I modified his system to work better for my purposes, incorporating my many years of experience in the recruiting business. I called the plan, Intuitive Personal Assessment or IPA.