Wounds

Nine wounds. One way through.

The book is dedicated to the six-year-old me, the year my dad left. It opens on the floor of my office in April 2019, the best year of my career on paper and the day my body quit taping it up. In between are nine chapters, one wound each, told the way they happened: Route 91, the divorce, the lies, the selfishness, the failure, the church that hurt me. And under all of it, the framework that got me out.

Acknowledge the hurt. Realize the effect. Unlock the greatness.

That is the Wound Analysis Framework. It is the first four weeks of everything I do with men, and it is the reason a wound, faced, becomes the thing you build with instead of the thing that runs you.

April 2019. The corner of my office.

IN APRIL 2019, I EXPERIENCED WHAT WAS DIAGNOSED AS MY FIRST anxiety attack. Sure, I’d felt anxious before. I’d had dark and lowly days. But something about that day was different. The weeks leading up to that moment weren’t the best. I’d lost out on a pretty significant business opportunity that would have paid me very well over the course of the year, and I was walking through a very difficult situation with a friend regarding his marriage. Those two challenges were capped off by my most significant stressor: my business. I owned a consulting and coaching practice, and was helping a client redevelop their sales process while also coaching four of their salespeople to exceed revenue goals. This particular client was my largest, with a monthly five-figure contract. And I was on the verge of losing them. When I woke up that day, knowing I would receive a call from my client later in the morning, I went dark. Doubt set in about my true calling, my capabilities, and even my self-worth. I tried to fight through it. I imagined retired Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner David Goggins telling me to stop being such a little bitch, but it didn’t work. It was difficult to drive the three miles to my office, but I had work to do, clients to help. I got through one coaching call…barely. But as I got closer to talking to my client, to losing that contract, my thoughts spiraled. How will my family pay our bills? How quickly will we be right back to 2013, when we lost everything? What will I tell my family? What might other people think? I cannot stomach another failure like this.

I sat in the corner of my office and curled into a ball. My body was shutting down. Physically, I felt the energy was being sucked out of me. Mentally, I had a hard time engaging the logic of what was happening. And spiritually, I cried out to God in what felt like faint whispers. I had one last option in the moment. I called my wife and begged her to pray for me. I told her what was happening and how I was feeling. She prayed on the phone with me, and she continued to pray for me throughout the day. By God’s grace, I made it through that day. My wife’s prayers, along with God’s Spirit, brought comfort to my soul. It also helped that when I got the call from my client later that day, it was only to discuss reconfiguring the execution of our work, not to adjust the fees or cancel the contract. In the days and weeks to follow, through lots of prayer and discussion with others close to me, I analyzed what happened to me that day. Was my anxiety attack simply the culmination of too much bad news in a short period of time, or was there something deeper? Because circumstances can trigger events like the one I experienced, I realized my anxiety attack was the result of a wound… well, many wounds actually. You see, my stress over the potential loss of the client wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to me, far from it. The potential loss was simply the emotional hit that opened up a host of old wounds. The wounds I speak of are not outward, physical cuts, scrapes, or bruises to the body. They are long-held emotional injuries that, when left untreated, fester and worsen over time. Every human being on this earth has been wounded. You picked up this book because you understand that. Wounds deep down inside of you have been bandaged over in hopes that they would just heal on their own. But bandages do nothing for deep wounds created the moment a parent walked out of your life or when a loved one was tragically killed without notice. The self-inflicted wounds from drug and alcohol addiction don’t go away just because you wish

they would. And the wounds that come from familiar people and places, like church, seem particularly difficult to forget no matter how hard we try. One might think we would be expertly equipped to deal with wounds, considering the brokenness of this world and the constant afflictions we face. From the time I was young, like many boys, I incurred visible wounds, like deep cuts and broken bones from playing sports and crashing my dirt bike. I was often told to get up, shake it off, tape ’em up, and keep going. This is the norm, especially for boys, isn’t it? So, it’s no wonder that when the wounds are mental and emotional, as we grow up, we attempt to use the same prescription. I was conditioned to believe I could just dust off the hurt from my parents’ divorce, bury the loss when my business nearly failed shortly after its launch, and bulldoze through the death and destruction I witnessed during the Las Vegas mass shooting. “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” becomes the war cry for most Christians who attempt to try harder and push through trauma. But that doesn’t work in the same way as resetting a broken bone. Worse, most emotional wounds are more severe than a broken bone. They are more like a compound fracture of the femur that has blown right through the thigh. And our answer to that mess is to clothe our inner turmoil in a T-shirt with Philippians 4:13 written on it. But we keep bleeding right through that shirt, continuing to writhe in pain. Many look to anything that might take the pain away, turning to self-preservation or self-medication. Some might read another book on grittiness, watch a motivational talk about mindset, or drink until the pain numbs. None of those tactics works in the long term. The wound is left untreated, and every attempt to make the wound disappear becomes a potential contributor to one’s absolute destruction. In my case, as I got older, my wounds got bigger. And the bigger my wounds got, the harder it was to shake them off. I couldn’t make them go away. Past wounds came back to haunt me, leading to more

That is the first part of the introduction. The rest, including the three steps and how to run them, is in the free download.