Dear Romeo:

Welcome back.

You wrote that it struck your heart when your Real Estate mentor told you that you are “lazy and not proactive enough”. You wrote, “my efforts are simply not enough to create the results I wanted. But I felt that I was really pushing myself to the limits already. And also I know deep down if I really want to do something I would do it with all my heart… I started battling with myself again, am I just lazy or is it I’m not that into this job”.

Based on our past extensive communication, this is my input today:- this is the early life experience that greatly formed you (those formative years of childhood form a lot of who we are lifetime): “my family was really struggling. My parents failed their business as my mom were betrayed by her siblings… it caused them a huge debt. My mom was really broken back then as well as my dad. But my mom was more in pain in my own perspective, as I saw her crying and constant breakdowns“.

The young child that you were did all that he could to rescue his mother from her struggles, from her despair, to make her happy. Maybe he handed her a napkin to dry her tears, maybe he handed her his favorite toy so to make her happy, maybe he did his best in school, but ALL his efforts failed day after day, m0nth after month, for years.

This young child learned that indeed all his “efforts are simply not enough to create the results” he wanted. He really did push himself “to the limits already”. And he did try “with all (his) heart”.

It wasn’t that this young child was lazy, that is not why he failed  to make his mother happy. He was too young to be able to  produce the money required to pay her debts, too young to take her siblings to court, if that was at all a possibility… too young,  only a child.

But he didn’t know about his limited powers. Children are not aware that their powers are limited, they imagine themselves achieving great things, not knowing yet what  is possible and what is not possible for them.

This early experience of repeated, ongoing failure to achieve what you wanted so intensely and for so long, led to you to believe that you are not capable of success, that you are incompetent.

Fast forward a bit, later in your life: “I was a very timid and awkward individual. Being skinny and small, always being called a stick”, you managed to go to the gym, eat more, get into fitness and health and you succeeded, looking bigger and stronger, “my confidence grew”, you wrote. But later that confidence was gone: “I realize I wasn’t that strong after all even though I have a big body. I was weak in the mind and heart, still that timid kid inside of me”.

In your romantic relationships with women you felt confident when you felt that you were “their beacon of hope, their rock and shoulder to lean on when they were going  through their tough times. I felt good and manly to be able to be that person who was besides them supporting them… I do feel in control as I felt like a ‘real man’ helping them and being their rock. It gave me some sense of achievement which almost felt like a drug or something that fuels me as a person”.

Nothing fuels you more than the old desire, your most intense and persistent desire- to be your mother’s rock, to be her strength, to take away her pain and to make her happy.

It doesn’t matter that she is doing better now, no longer in debt, perhaps. What matters is that your heart still wants the same thing as intensely as it did before. When you attempt this or that job, be it bartending or real estate, your confidence is low, you are not motivated because you expect failure.

Life will get better for you, much better, once you realize, deeply understand that indeed you didn’t fail as a child, that indeed the job you had then, to help your mother, to be her rock, was an impossible job for any child. You didn’t fail. If you can deeply understand this, on a deep emotional level, then “Changing my course of life” will be made not only possible, but highly probable.

anita