I sat in my car in my garage at my home of twenty years and just cried. Truth be told, cried is an understatement. Sobbed is a closer to an accurate description, but either way it definitely felt like I was having a breakdown. I sat looking at a wall of banker’s boxes stacked up in front of me in the garage. It was what was left of my files from my office, a collection of not only my years of being CEO at Venchurs but the accumulation of files representing significant projects and knowledge from my career. The stark reality pierced me almost like a physical pain. It was the same feeling I got the first time that I drove into the Venchurs compound and there were no cars or trucks there. It just could not be true. It was like a nightmare, but I couldn’t wake up and make it go away.
“Was all this striving just worthless?” I thought to myself. I tried so hard to be a skilled, hardworking, accomplished CEO. Now Venchurs was gone and the loss seemed unbearable. I recalled again the morning that I opened my laptop and read the words, “we have decided to go in a different direction. We will continue to de-source you.” It just did not seem real. I had tried to steel myself in case it happened, but I could not get over the shock of it. How could this have happened after all the money and effort that was put into avoiding it. I poured all the wisdom and energy available to me after a lifetime of learning into getting us through this, but it was all for nothing. I felt that I had failed in the most disastrous way possible and everyone was affected by it. I wanted to just disappear. I was ashamed and embarrassed, and I couldn’t make the pain stop.
Early in my life I learned that I needed to “make something of myself”. I needed to make myself valuable through hard work, grit, and determination. It had been a lifetime of achieving. I strove to give everything to be the best at whatever I was doing. It wasn’t just a value to be the best. I felt like I was actually “less than” others. I knew that some people, looked down on me as a Hispanic. As a defense, I had a chip on my shoulder. I would prove that I was acceptable by being better…any time I felt ashamed or unworthy, I would allow myself to get angry about it and throw myself into “showing them”. It was a desperate attempt to make myself fill that fear inside myself that maybe they were right. This “having something to prove” led to the aforementioned lifetime of achieving. Nothing was ever enough. Any win was barely celebrated as I brushed it off in a frantic need to get onto to the next goal. The need to feel like I was somebody, the need to be admired, the need to feel wanted was like a pain that never went away. In the most diabolical form, in the back of my mind I thought, “if I can’t make them want me then I will make them need me…I’ll be that good.”
My first job out of college was with working with junior high and high school students with Youth for Christ where I had the largest Campus Life programs in the country. In addition, I became the Junior Varsity basketball coach at a local high school. After that I got my Master of Communications graduating first in my class at Wheaton Grad School. I started my own consulting and training firm which I called J Matthew Wyatt Consulting (a takeoff on J Walter Thompson which I thought sounded cool). Needing work, I took on anything I could, motivational speaking, team building, continuous improvement teams, management training; I never turned a job down. I soon was hired to join the American Bar Association (the world’s largest professional association they liked to say) as the Director of Training and Organizational Development. I had never done that before, so I had to learn how to be a director of training. I contracted a friend of mine who had been International Director of Training and Development for YFC, Jim Galvin to help me set up the program and coach me up. I won trainer of the year for associations a couple of years latter.
Eventually I became fascinated with Total Quality Management trend that was sweeping the country as the auto industry failed to be able to keep up with the Japanese. TQM and re-engineering were the interventions that America focused on to try and combat a lack of productivity in manufacturing. I studied with Dr. Joseph Juran, and attended lectures by Dr. Edwards Deming, two of the most notable founders of TQM. I dove into studying the Baldrige Award for Quality Management to learn how the best organizations were structured to be successful. Out of that study I designed the ABA Quality Award. Although it never took off as the lawyers went on to the next shiny thing, I had the incredible good fortune to get an inside look into how great organizations worked spending weeks in personal sessions with organizations like the Ritz Carlton, USAA and Corning Glass TPD.
From there, I went to one of the hottest technology companies at the time, US Robotics to design their TQM approach. It was exciting to be there in the middle of scrum that was the race to build the internet. USR merged with 3Com and I went from designing TQM to designing and implementing a cutting-edge marketing and strategy system we called Customer Value Management. Again, I had to learn a half dozen new competencies and interventions. I hired Dr. Brad Gale, who literally wrote the book on Customer Value Management to design our program and coach me up. It was exhilarating and tremendously hard work…like getting a PhD. I worked globally and across the multiple functions of the organization from the lowest to the highest levels.
Then I came to Michigan to work with my father who was a serial entrepreneur. He was ill and knew his time was limited so he poured his experience into me. I started Nuestro which we launched as a minority owned business and within two years, I became President of Venchurs itself. I became a CEO at 38 years old. While at Venchurs, I started three divisions including a global division located in China, and two aftermarket divisions. All three were entirely new competencies for the organization. In the process I guided the organization from the first-generation ownership/founder and management team to the second-generation ownership and the management teams. We had quite a track record for 20 years. We grew the company from a $65 million company to a $150 million company the year before we had to wind down. We made it through the Chrysler bankruptcy without laying off a person. In the midst of it, I got an eMBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan which was ranked number one in the world at the time I entered the program.
I do not say all of this as an exercise in ego, but as an illustration that I gave everything I had to be “good enough”. It was a single-minded lifetime obsession to learn and grow into an accomplished professional. I had worked so hard to “be the man, the whole package” as my friend (who had been a professional football player) put it. My fixation with achieving was almost all-consuming. In many ways, it was who I was and what I was. And now, what was staring at what was left of all of that effort in bunch of banker’s boxes in my garage. I was without a company and without a job. My reputation was in shambles because of the wind down and my retirement funding in question. I thought, how could all that work just be worthless?
I gave it all I had but it seems like it has all turned to crap. This was more than having a pity party or being overly dramatic. It was a realization that what I had invested much my energy in, my identity in, my mission in, was simply not worth it. I had been an evangelical Christian through much of my life. I always thought that money and achievements are not what counts. And I believed that. Luckily I made a mid-course correction and invested in my relationship with my kids and a few others. So I knew that I raised four great kids (which was the most important thing) and that I had also done some good along the way. But the reality was that what I had poured my life into and where I received my energy did not get me where I wanted.
The best news was that I also knew, really for the first time in my life, that I had family and friends that genuinely loved me. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful for all I had in my life. I was thankful for all the incredible experiences and people that I met along the way. No one needed to tell me that “well, at least you still have ___.” I know that I have been fortunate…far more than I deserve.
This feeling was something quite different and somewhat hard for me to explain. It was more like Brene Brown trying to explain her nervous “breakdown/spiritual awakening”. Or maybe having a mid-life crisis only it was not mid-life, and I did not need a sports car or a hot girlfriend. The life, the me that I had invested so much in seemed to have come up short. Worse than that, I felt like that me was not really me after all. “Being the man” was It was more like a persona, a role that I aspired to. The truth was at that point I had no idea who I really was. Even if I could go back to being a successful business leader (which was not clear that I could), I did not know if I had it in me anymore. It did not feel like it was worth it. At least not the way I did it or for the reason I did it previously. What you pay for it is not what you can get out of it. I spent my life with something to prove. Now I realized what I had actually proved was nothing.
I kept finding myself thinking, “Stop whining and get a job.” or “Just do something else then!” But this time around it just felt empty. I could not just get a job to make money. It was not in me to get a passion-less job that I cared nothing about. Then I picked up a book called, “Falling Upward.” In it, Father Richard Rohr makes the argument that we have two lives that we live. The first one is like a starter life. In it we find our vocation, make money, buy homes, raise a family, create an identity. Then we have the chance to start a second life where we find who we really are, what our life is about, connect with the divine and find a different kind of fulfillment. I remember hearing about this as “the hero’s journey” in college lit. class. I remember our professor broke down and wept in class while telling the story of Odysseus. Yeah, I thought it was odd but touching. Latter I heard the same story from Joseph Campbell talking about the power of myths because they articulate our human stories. There is a catch.
Seldom do we find the second life without loss, failure, or suffering. Something brings us to our knees, and we get clarity. My first life was not in reality, worthless but it was not ever going to live up to the hype. The good news is that it can be redeemed. As I take on the task of transformation, all that life can mean more than its face value. In addition, although that identity that I worked so hard at was not truly me, it is a version of me. What went into it and its value is somewhat discounted as my financial colleagues would say. The good news is that it is not all worthless, the bad news is that I know experientially it will never be enough. It cannot be. Our soul cannot be transformed by effort of that sort. It can only grow by surrender.
I feel like I finally understand this journey I have been on. Starting out as a scared, impossibly lonely little boy who was afraid that nobody seemed to want him to the exhausted, confused man weeping in his garage while staring at a wall of banker’s boxes containing what is left of his professional life. It is a journey to finding yourself. It is also about finding intimacy with our Creator. Rohr says that there are no direct flights from the first half of life to the second half, we all must go through this portal. Jesus said that he who seeks to keep his life, shall lose it but he who loses his life will gain it. Rohr came up with a novel translation of Jesus’ statement in Matthew 22.14, “all of you are called but so few of you are willing to be chosen.” I didn’t earn it, I surrendered to it.
A friend characterized this moment of my life as, “you’re in the middle of an identity crisis where you are leaving your old beliefs, feelings and actions behind. You are in the process of becoming the new person.” She told me to, “Nurture your vision of your future self”. That is the next up on the agenda. What if you don’t know what the vision of your future self is? How to find yourself once you lost yourself, or at least misplaced yourself? I realize that I am finally on my way home. The question is am I the Prodigal Son or Moses coming out of the wilderness? Am I a failure and a disgrace or someone who is finally ready to make his contribution?
Contrary Winds 