When Venchurs needed to be wound down I was utterly shocked. Although I knew there was clearly the possibility that it could happen (like the sword of Damocles hanging over my head), I just did not believe that it would happen. It was not in the best interest of the customers, the bank, anyone. When I read the email from Ford saying that they were going to de-source us, I thought to myself or perhaps as an objection to God, “in what universe are things better with no Venchurs in it?” it seemed surreal like I was in a nightmare. Surely there would be divine intervention or something. It was the first step of grieving, denial.
It was obvious that this era was over in my life and I was going to need find a new job. It quickly also became obvious that I was not well prepared to do that. I thought that I was going to grow Venchurs and sell it as a portfolio of customers and cash flows and then begin an “encore career.” Although I was selling off our facilities which were owned by a separate company (Wyatt Real Estate Investment Trust), most of that money was going to go to paying off the bank. Much of my portion (divided equally with my four siblings) was going to go to taxes. The tax bill was going to be huge. In other words, after the taxes I was a 61 year old man who was no where near having enough to retire. Yes, panic set in.
I brushed off the Designing Your Life book that I had worked on a couple of years earlier to look for the “encore career” I anticipated after selling Venchurs. I recognized that the future was now…like right now. Although the next few months were mostly taken up by winding down Venchurs by the end of the year I began to get serious about what I could do next. Originally, I thought that I could find a Board seat since I am Hispanic (a lot of Boards are now looking to diversify) and a former CEO, I had looked forward to providing sage advice, doing some good and making some money. I was quickly disabused of this notion by friends and colleagues who informed me that no one wants someone who “lost their business” on their Board. As one person put it, “you’re damaged goods, you are going to need to be rehabilitated”.
I thought that maybe I could be a consultant given my CEO and life experience. Again, I was educated on the fact that at 61 years old I was too old to be considered by most topflight consulting firms. Unless I had been a consultant earlier, was an acknowledged industry expert on some specific topic or I was a “rainmaker” (could bring in new business) it was going to be difficult to find a position. How about the private equity guys, they seem to need experienced CEOs as Operating Partners, I thought? The response was, “How many successful exits have you had?” Nada. I spent 20 years keeping Venchurs afloat in a hurricane but that simply didn’t count. As the COVID lockdown hit, opportunities to be hired at another C-suite job dried up. I kept hearing the same thing, “we love your resume, but we don’t have anything “right now.”
Clearly, this was going to be more difficult than I thought. As my cash flow ceased (I was a contractor to Venchurs during the wind down then summarily dismissed by the Assignee for the Benefit of Creditors in our first meeting in January), I began thinking that I needed to press the reset button. I needed to dig deeper into what I could bring to someone that wasn’t an obvious option. I had looked at getting another C-suite job, doing consulting or being an Operating Partner and these were dry holes. So, I asked myself, “what was my unique value proposition”. In true Designing fashion I began to line up informational interviews and explore what I was out there that I could fit hand in glove with.
I came to believe that I truly was a transformational leader as I had studied this for 30 years, wrote about it consistently in my journal (always explored leadership and my mission in the first 22 pages of every new journal) and had 21 years of experience leading various transformational projects. Even before that I led the ABA Quality Initiative, US Robotics Total Quality Management Initiative, and 3Com Carrier Systems Division Customer Value Management program. It was always about organizational change and leadership.
Still, this was not unique enough. I began to realize that I really needed to rethink not only what my capabilities and competencies were, I needed to rethink where I was in my life. There must be something that truly fits where I am in my life, the education and experience I have and the transformational leadership capabilities that I sought to use. I was looking for a “calling” (literally vocation comes from the Latin term “vocare” meaning to call). As the COVID lockdown deepened and everything ground to a halt, I kept hearing that I would need to keep building my network and hope that something turns up later. I was feeling desperate. As weeks turned into months, the ability to keep emotional momentum was harder and harder. It began to feel like everything that I thought I accomplished was a mirage. I needed to have some faith to keep my energy up and depression at bay. I felt like I was slipping into a very dark place and I could not stop it.
Trying to be helpful, people would say, “it will all work out” or the corollary “everything happens for a purpose, it will all end up ok.” But I thought to myself, there were all the times that it didn’t work out: multiple initiatives at Venchurs that looked promising but repeatedly ran out of gas either on funding or just bad timing. On what basis do I think it will it all work out? Honestly, I felt like there was no reason to believe that miraculously things were going to work out this time. Unless there was in fact, a larger purpose I did not see.
I realized that not only did finding a job depend on it, maybe my emotional health depended on answering that question, do I think it will all work out? I felt like I was on the edge of despair and hopelessness. What if I cannot find another job? What if I need to sell everything? What if no one wants me…if I am worthless? That is exactly how I felt, worthless. I needed to know the answer to get up every morning and face another day of what was becoming litany of rejection. Why should I believe that it is going to work out?
In retrospect, I look at this kind of like Brene Brown’s “breakdown/spiritual awakening” in her influential TED talk. She describes her experience as both hitting a kind of wall but also hitting a deflection point for her life to head in a different direction. I think I was unraveling as time went on with little opportunity in sight. I felt worse and worse. Those old feelings of “what is wrong with me?” and “why doesn’t anyone want me?” were becoming more difficult to silence or set aside. This was clearly more than trying to find a new job. I needed to address some longstanding issues in my life; unhealthy beliefs, self-condemnation, perfectionism, among other things. This experience, made worse by the isolation of the COVID lockdown, was breaking me. I knew I was falling into depression. I needed a handhold, something to grab onto to stop the spiral.
I started with faith. I needed to face whether I did genuinely believe that a higher power was at the back of things and therefore, “things will work out.” After years of working through being a born-again Christian, then an agnostic, then an atheist, then an agnostic again, it was time to commit. Did I or did not I believe in a “higher power”? This was going to be difficult because I could not just say I believed and then act like I believed. My mind does not work that way. I had to honestly believe it (not because I needed to believe it to get a hold of myself) and move on.
I began digging in deep, getting past objections and fears from years of toxic experience. To make a long story short, I eventually came to the fact that I can’t help but to believe that there is something more. To put it a different way, it is harder for me to believe that there is nothing but me, than to believe that there is no higher power in the universe. It would mean that I would have to look past all the experience of years of coincidences and tender mercies. Someone has been looking out for me, in fact guiding me.
The truth is that I have always been a deeply spiritual person. I intuited that there was something or someone more than what I saw around me. Since I was that heartbroken kid who wondered what was wrong with me, I have wanted to feel ok. I wanted to be happy and have a “normal” life. The truth is that I did not feel that I even deserved to be here. I was not wanted, and I was not necessary to my family or those around me. All the achieving was really about wanting to be wanted and feel like I deserved to be wanted. I wanted to feel “legitimate”, but I did not know what normal is for people. Brene Brown says that we all need love and belonging. The “wholehearted” feel that they are worthy of it. I want to be loved, and I wanted to feel that I was worthy of it. I also thought that there was someone with me all the way on that path. When I looked back on my life, there has always been help along the way just when I needed it.
I realized that I just do believe. To remain agnostic was to be inauthentic. At that moment, serendipitously it seems, I came across a book from Richard Rohr called, Falling Upward. It described the “first half of life journey” turning into a “second half of life journey” through the initiation of a traumatic experience like a death, failure or some kind of unprecedented loss. He likened it to Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”. The myths recounted in the Iliad and the Odyssey tell of Odysseus’ journey to return home from the Persian war and then needing to take a further journey to be truly home. For the first time I could really look at what had been a catastrophic loss and see it differently. I knew I not only needed to reframe what had happened to get out of the toxic bitterness I was feeling, I needed to see it as a door to enter a different kind of life that I always wanted. The failure was necessary to get me into the right space to consider my life and unfinished business. I needed to choose what I wanted my life to be and what I wanted for myself. I needed to choose for this experience to be transformational not just tragic.
I realized that I was no longer looking for a job, I was making a change of identity and purpose. In fact, I was on a forced sabbatical. In most sabbaticals, someone pays for you to take time off and study to recharge yourself. Yes, it was about finding my calling and understanding my contribution in the world that is trying to emerge, but it was more. I am in the “fourth quarter” of my life. I needed the time to rest my over-wrought nervous system depleted by years of striving but more importantly, I needed to find my true self. I am not just a father, brother, or CEO. These are all roles and identities that I live. But there is a deeper me underneath all the building, achieving, and providing.
I was on a sabbatical in the journey to discover (or maybe rediscover) that me underneath it all. It was time for me to accept that this was a deflection point that will help me achieve the true transformation I was so desperately seeking and needing. What I thought was about finding a new job, then about understanding my unique contribution to this world was really a journey to entering a new place in my life. Actually, kind of an old place, a familiar place but one that I had not actually been before at all. For years I had been writing the TS Eliot line in the front of every journal:
“And at the end of all our exploring, we shall come home again and know it for the first time.”
I think I understand now that it was time to come home as Rohr would say.
Contrary Winds 