Here’s a blurry picture that he took of me next to his Lamborghini in his parking garage. See the angled object to the left? The doors open up to reveal the steering wheel and car’s interior. It’s one powerful beast of a car to ride in.
I remember the day he told me that he “got it.” While driving after a team meeting, the words he’d been hearing woke him up. His imagination creates his world, and he controls his imagination. That was his turning point.
Joining one of my first Success Teams in 1995, he was so brilliant then that I sometimes took notes when he spoke.
He started as a small business owner and then moved out-of-state where he built an empire valued around $100 million in a cutthroat industry. His personal monthly take home, not including his business profits, was $40,000 a month.
Looking to pass on techniques that created his success, he flew me in to train his salesmen. Sitting at one end of the conference table, he introduced me as the reason he achieved what he did.
There’s a 1970’s commercial that says, “When EF Hutton talks, people listen.” When he finished talking, not only did everyone turn 180 degrees to hear what I had to say, I literally heard the swish as their heads swung in my direction.
That month, he hit his first million dollar month.
However, his focus changed, and he wanted to be free to fulfill… well, anything he wanted.
After that, we lost contact for three years. It wasn’t until his lifestyle behaviors, let’s say of wine, women, song and ego gratification, created such heavy, negative consequences that he reached out to me again.
Being very conscious of his physical appearance, he worked out a lot. He told me later that he knew alcohol put on weight… so he started to use cocaine instead.
With dramatic personality changes, he felt that as long as he paid people well, including close family members who worked for him, he could be verbally abusive and treat them however he wanted.
As time went on, things became very bad. That’s when he contacted me to fly in and work for him.
Once, while looking for validation, he said to me, “Come on, Virginia, I’m your most successful client. Right?” For him, money was the penultimate symbol of success.
The drugs rewired his brain, and I slowly began to acknowledge that he wasn’t the same man I once knew. Too slowly. I still bought into his reasoning, his excuses.
I still saw him as the awesome man he used to be. I’d known this man for decades and saw him through that filter. Even after I bailed him out of jail. Even as I was asked to sit outside his office the next day when I went to work and discovered the law put on locks to bar entry.
His family staged clever, false, illegal strategies against him. However, the way he reacted and handled it nailed his own coffin.
There was always an explanation that it was someone else’s fault. This included when he railed against the judge in a long letter to all his clients that the judge was in cahoots with the other side.
We were shopping in Whole Foods when he told me that, earlier in the day, in a court in another state, a judge officially stripped him of it all. His $100 million empire — gone.
This occurred during the time I invited him into my home to offer a safe haven and supportive modalities to help him get back on track.
At least, that’s what I thought was happening.
That week, I watched him sit in a chair in my living room, lost in a world of his own, angrily and vulgarly name-calling siblings who did him wrong.
On the fifth day of his visit, his welcome abruptly ended when he viciously shouted at me like a repeating rifle, in my own home where he was a guest, accusing me of trying to get him killed. How much were they paying me? How could I betray him like that? Why was I lying?
With a drug-addled brain, his former good discernment was replaced with a dark and out-of-control imagination. Earlier in the week, he shared with me how he was paranoiac, afraid and suspicious of people.
It reminded me of when I walked behind a man on a sidewalk in Times Square, New York City, who was having an angry conversation with someone who didn’t exist physically but was very alive in his head, like an endless, repetitive loop of a broken record.
My client, my friend, became a cherry on top of my life lesson of the year, ranging from business to an intimate relationship:
See people for who they are and how they’re showing up NOW — not how they used to be, not who their words tell you they are, not as a fantasy of how you’d like them to be.
I realized how I did this in a relationship, too. I saw a man that I was dating not for how he was showing up in the world. I believed the image he was projecting to me.
The worst part is that he believed his own lies.
Once, I told him, “I don’t trust you.” He replied, “You don’t trust yourself.”
He was redirecting my attention so I would doubt myself, but I think he believed he was communicating some insightful truth. Later I realized: yes, he was right. I didn’t trust myself that he wasn’t a man to be trusted.
Not long after he spoke those words, drama from his emotional dishonesty overflowed into my life.
When I asked one of my teachers what those experiences were all about, he told me, “People hear and believe what they want to believe.” He added to see people for how they’re showing up, not how you want them to be or their potential.
That was my HUGE wake-up call!!
People Hear and Believe What They Want to Believe.
I wasn’t paying attention to what is but living out of past images that were!
I see the same things in today’s world.
When politicians’ true colors start to show, some people remain in denial. They won’t separate their wishful thinking about who they thought the politicians were from how they’re actually showing up. Evidence to the contrary be damned.
May you wake up to SEE. May you have the courage to set aside your filters, those oh so comforting protective mechanisms, to see whatever there is in your life that would benefit from your clear sight.
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