Epiphany: A New World is Born

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Beginning in 1999, I really began to reinvent my life and to engage in a quest to understand the answers to my new question about natural action.  I was working as an attorney for the state and had begun studying in the field of coaching taking training at Coach University and Corporate Coach University.  Later, I also studied the work of the Gallup organization on talents and strengths and the work of David Cooperrider who invented a field of study known as Appreciative Inquiry.  I started my own part-time coaching practice and sought every opportunity I could to train, coach or consult in my job with the state.

Then in 2002, I had an epiphany and a whole new possibility was born for me. 

My epiphany didn’t come about in the most expected of ways.  I always imagined such an experience, if it happened to me at all, would happen while calm, in the space of love or enlightenment.  Instead, it came in the space of anger and rage.  I had been in my boss’ office and to be honest with you, I don’t even really remember exactly what we were talking about.  All I remember was when I left, I was mad, raging mad.  I went back to my office and threw the file we had been working on across my desk.  I don’t know what compelled me, but I pulled up a blank email.  I stared at that blank email – the nothingness of it provoked me.  There was all I was experiencing in that moment and then there in the email, there was nothing.  Nothing – the space of creation, the space where something new is born.  Nothing – a concept I had learned about at Landmark.  There it was staring me in the face saying “Choose.”

I began to write, and I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.  I wrote like I was reaching for something.  At the same time, I felt like something was writing through me.  Something happened to me that day.  I’m not even sure what.  It’s not as if some calm came over me or I stopped hating my job, but I articulated the future, what I saw was possible in life in a way that I never had done before.  Later, I shared the email with my wife and her response was simply, “This is a whole new world.  I can see a whole new world in this.”

I’ve spent the last 7 years refining the world that was born that day.  In fact, I still refine it, but the best articulation you’ll find to date is my book A Life Worth Living.  That email became a seminar that my wife and I led for a couple of years that then became the book.  Funny thing is, I didn’t even see a book in that email at first.  It took two years, until 2004, before it hit me that the email was the basis for a book.

By the end of 2004, I had officially transitioned into the training field.  In the sense that I had a full-time paying job working as a trainer for the same state agency where I worked as an attorney.  I took a pay cut to make the move, but I felt it was a measured risk.  New York State Civil Service rules provide for a “hold” on a former job for one year so I always had the option of going back.  During that year, I almost went back to legal a couple of times, but I just couldn’t do it.  How could I go back?  I was making the best of my job as a trainer, but they weren’t interested in transformation.  I felt like at least I was in the ballpark.  It just had to be a step forward.

Turns out, it was.  In March of 2005, I gave a presentation to an association of state trainers.  My presentation was on Appreciative Inquiry and the possibility of using such an approach in state government.  At the conclusion of my presentation, a man, Alan Alcon, approached me and said he really liked my work.  He was from the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and said they were doing some work he thought I’d be interested in.  I was so clueless at the time that I didn’t even get he was hinting at the possibility of a job for me.  By the fall of 2005, I was working for the DEC and a little over a year later after both of my bosses retired; I was promoted to the position, Director of Training and Organization Development.

Is what I’ve accomplished extraordinary?  I don’t know.  Some tell me it is.  It doesn’t really matter to me as I stand at the cusp of a new beginning.  The one thing I will say about my journey is I live what I’ve written about and discovered.  I’m not claiming that what I’ve written is the answer to life.  I’ve discovered as much if not more since completing the book as I did in the 4 years or so it took to write it.  Is my life perfect?  Not even close.  I still hate getting up on Monday mornings like I have for my entire life.  There’s still plenty of room to grow.

So what’s different?  Understanding is no longer my default choice for living.  Yes, I still ask questions and I still seek to understand.  I still get stopped by old habits and confronted by new fears.  The biggest difference for me is I’ve taken what I’ve learned and I’m living it.  And it’s not even that I’m living “it” that’s significant.  What’s significant is that the future that’s in front of me is to really live fully, participate fully in life.  It took me 39 years to understand that the only thing worth understanding is nothing, and then from nothing, you really can invent your life.  I can’t wait to see what else I invent; what else you and I invent together.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my story.