It was 22 years since we’d spoken.
My first real business mentor.
Tim popped up on LinkedIn, one click and we were connected again.
We made a time to chat and then over the next 1.5 hours we talked. The man staring back at me on Zoom looked nothing like the one I knew all those years ago. He had aged backwards.
“How did your life go?” I asked him. He laughed and said that he had dealt with his demons. He quit smoking, lost 25 kilos, left his business and founded a new one, finally met the love of his life, had children and found peace doing less work but with a more exclusive group of clients he loved. He carved out a niche he saw himself working in forever.
I knew him pretty well back in the day and boldly asked him, “ok so what changed? How were you successful making these changes when you’d failed so many times before?”
“I changed my view of myself. I always thought of myself as the fat, witty smoker. When I gave up smoking that identity shifted and I inched towards better health. Eventually the weight dropped off because I became convinced of the possibility of a better version of myself and I became it.
It was like a domino effect, healthier body, mind, attitude, decisions, choices, friends and hobbies – until I arrived where I am now, the happiest I’ve ever been. Even Covid didn’t dampen my joy,” he said.
I left our encounter realising he was still teaching me.
Six weeks later I was contacted by a mutual friend. “Lou I thought you should know, Tim was killed in a motorbike accident last week.”
Who knew that conversation would be our last forever?
Beyond the shock and grief, a sad insight dawned on me. He died with his story still in him – his insights, lessons, philosophies and wisdom. This man taught me all I knew about investigative questioning and writing with discernment. Such an irony our last encounter was his sharing of his story, and one he thought he’d have more time to enjoy.
Little did I know it at the time, but that one conversation changed the trajectory of my life. What if I could help people capture their stories and wisdom in a letter? What if I could take away all the constraints of time, language and baggage? What if I used my skills to facilitate and write mirror letters so that people could see themselves more clearly, as the main character in their own amazing story? And so that is what I did.
“Tomorrow is promised no-one,” is the popular adage. We spend our lives accumulating stuff, but fail to capture the wisdom along the way. This lack of reflection can mean we fail to appreciate the wonder of our journey, lessons learned and progress made.
How are you different from five years ago? What would you tell your 20 year old self? Who has made the biggest impact on you and why?
The power of a facilitated conversation around lessons learned, is that it helps you capture thoughts that would otherwise be lost in the daily minutiae of life. Even journals, while therapeutic, are rarely designed to be read by someone else. I believe that a story shared can ignite the life of another. And that is my commitment to you.
