From Pain To Purpose

For the purposes of my Transformation Coaching practice doing business as AVID Coaching Services, I am going by the title ”coach TJ”. Who am I? Particularly for those of you who do not know me personally or perhaps are not as familiar with me, I want to share a little bit about myself with you. 

Firstly, and most importantly for what we are doing and will be seeking to through this book, I am a recovered self-hater.  At the start of July 2020 while I was putting the slides together,  for the series of Master Classes based on this book, my son Zaken’Asiel was with me and he came and sat on my lap,  He started reading from the screen. He read what I had there – ‘recovered self-hater’ and he had this puzzled look on his face.  He then said “so Daddy what does that mean?  What exactly does that mean?” I started explaining it to him, “so wow! so, daddy, there was a time when you didn’t like yourself?” I said, “yes”. 

There it is. I am a recovered self-hater. The term hate certainly is strong and many persons may actually be surprised by that choice of word, but there is indeed a kind of a continuum in terms of the extent to which we dislike ourselves.  One may say we can talk about self-dislike. We can talk about self-hating.  We can talk about self-loathing, which is even stronger than self-hating.

This post is an excerpt from the opening chapter of my book, I Love Me: 30 Days To Greater Self-Love. Currently in E-Book format only. To order your copy send me a whatsApp by clicking WHATSAPP TEDDY or email me by clicking here

I literally hated myself and I need to bring this out and I placed it intentionally at the very top; the very first thing about me in the context of this, because it is a very important part of how I even came to focus on book because it allows me to share my story, and how I overcame. The fact that my wound; the way in which my father-wound manifested itself demonstrates a common antecedent of self-hate.  The very reality of persons not loving themselves or not loving themselves enough, invariably can be traced back to incidents and experiences from childhood.

In my case, the absence of my father and the lack of that formative relationship with him, to speak words of affirmation and words that would communicate that I am good enough. One of the things that I focus heavily on as a life-coach is the ‘GE dilemma’ or what we call in NLP, the GE dilemma; the ‘not good enough dilemma’. In my life, it took a remarkably interesting twist.  

The thing is, I was always naturally brilliant and so I was a straight-A student in primary school. I was a straight-A student in high school. I was a straight-A student at the Tertiary level, pretty much. Even at the post-grad level currently, predominantly is. But it wasn’t until in early college at Seminary that I came face to face with the reality of the extent to which I disliked myself and how much the father-wound was impacting me negatively. So even though I was performing at that excellent level, in my case that excellent level was still not my best because I never believed that I was capable of greatness.

So the interesting twist in my story is that my excellence was tantamount to mediocrity because I was capable of far greater but I did not know it, I never believed it because even when other people saw it in me, I refused to accept it. After all, I had that deficit from the father-wound. But thank God, you notice I have there I am a recovered self-hater because God placed my mentor, who became my spiritual father in my life.

There was a specific day when there came the breakthrough as he worked with me through many tears and real emotional turmoil to confront that deficit. Further in the book I will say more about how exactly that breakthrough came. So from that point, I recovered from that self-hate and in the course of my career as a Lecturer, as a Guidance Counselor, as a Minister of Religion, as a Community Transformation Practitioner, as a practitioner of restorative justice and now in life-coaching, my eyes are being open to the extent to which this matter of lack of self-love or insufficient self-love is prevalent and the multiple ways in which it manifests itself in different persons. 

So I come to this subject of self -love not from theory, but I come to it from the depth of personal experience which I wish to share with you and that’s why I am so passionate about this. As I indicated, I’m a life coach and I am a published author. I have two published articles in established Theological journals and author of ‘Let’s Major in the Minors’, which was launched in December 2018 and I am also a public Theologian.

All of this I see as a divine conspiracy of training.  All of those training areas, all of those experiences of vocation were all the opposite of what I wanted. And again the self-hate played a part in the direction that I wanted to go as opposed to what was divinely ordained for me; hence my use of the term, the divine conspiracy. All of those areas of expertise are now blending like a tapestry, informing the coaching practice.  My brand’s logo is ‘BDWVNI’ which stands for Building Dreams Watering Visions and Nurturing Ideas.  I see that as the personal expression of what I am placed on earth to do; to help build people’s dreams, to help water their visions and help nurture their ideas, so that they can be all that they can and should be.  So that’s coach TJ and here I am ready to serve you through AVID Coaching Services. Take advantage of your complimentary (Yes Free) self-discovery call with me by making an appointment here.