Well, like all great entrepreneurs, I set out to solve a great problem:
I really needed money.
I was 27 and married with two kids.
And most of my cash had just gone up in flames with the first company I’d started. Everybody Helping, it was called. Formerly ehco™ – an acronym for The Entertainment Helping Company – which I actually trademarked because that’s what real businessmen did, I thought. And long story short, it didn’t work out.
It did, however, bring my whole life’s worth of trauma to the surface, and I didn’t really respond great to all of that – so then I spent like 10 years in therapy dealing with it all, which is why I nearly became a therapist in the first place.
Believe it or not – all that woo-woo, hippie-dippie, shrinky, self-help, wellness, tough love bullshit worked for me – and I learned who I was and everything else I needed to know and then I set right back out on my path to actually help people in this world.
Because beneath all of my narcissism disguised as altruism and my suppressed abandonment wounds being projected onto myself and my career in software and business – the core goal was to actually help people.
You see, since I was a child, I really struggled with a rather acute awareness of how fucked up the world is in ways. Call me a powerful empath. Or someone who experienced a lot of trauma as a child. Or maybe just someone with eyes, but the pain of the world always felt pretty overwhelming for me, and eventually I had no choice but to submit to the truth and channel my energies in doing what I could about it.
Spreading some love, you could say.
Healing myself and then others. Growing. Maximizing real badass, joyful output. Optimizing performance initiatives – striving for more strategic success – whatever linguistic version feels best to you, but that’s my thing. That’s why I’m here. And what I learned in those precious years in therapy is that I don’t have to be a famous billionaire tech CEO to do it. Sure, that can be a path for such a thing – it’s just not mine.
So, despite my mentor’s push to become a therapist myself after years of humbling to the practice, I dropped out of my Masters in Counseling program and I started charging for the coaching work I’d already been doing in my own network for years.
Also, I couldn’t really see the value in paying another $200k to then work for free for two years, when I could start serving clients and making money much sooner. And not that that’s not an extremely important, valuable path for some – again, it just wasn’t mine.
I learned by doing. Out of necessity, at first. And then by choice.
Because that’s what every great operator I’ve ever known has done. That’s what every great leader and mentor I’ve ever known has done. And that’s what every great Father and Husband I’ve ever known has done. There’s no manual for life. For parenting. For healing. For marriage. For navigating hard times and tough transitions. For relationships. For starting a business and growing a life. It’s something you have to do. Fail at. Suck at. Learn from. Get better. And then repeat again and again and again.
And while I didn’t plan on it, I am so glad that my path led me to therapy, led me to sitting with pain and with real challenges – because that’s where I learned to focus and to grow, no matter what was happening around me. And while it sounds a bit corny to say, that’s exactly what I help my clients do now – no matter the circumstances.
Scott McElroy is an executive coach for high-functioning leaders in real estate, tech, and finance. If something here hit home, that’s the work we do together — book an intro call.