Staring Into The Abyss Of Death?
What you should do if you feel like you are staring into the abyss of death and life feels hopeless, so you can get through it and succeed like never before.
In this video coaching newsletter, I discuss an email success story from a guy who started following me about two years ago. He came home from a weekend trip to find out that his wife of eighteen years was leaving him and their two kids. He says he contemplated ending his life several times, because life seemed hopeless and he was in dire financial straits.
He shares how my work helped him to get through it and turn his life completely around. He is doing million-dollar real estate deals, started dating a new girl, his confidence is back and his kids are doing well. In these difficult times, it’s a great story to give you hope that no matter how bad things may seem right now, there is light at the end of the tunnel if you keep taking relentless, consistent action and moving towards what you really want in life. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.
*Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. An affiliate link means I may earn referral fees if you make a purchase through my link, without any extra cost to you. Thank you for your support.
We’ve actually got an email success story here from a guy who had a really difficult time. He had some dark times in his his life, and he’s been following me for about the last two years. So, what happened was he came home from a trip and his wife of eighteen years was like, “See you later. I’m out of here.” She left him and his two kids.
Obviously, that was a pretty traumatic thing, but on top of that, he was in dire financial straits, and he admits that he contemplated ending it all numerous times. But at the end day, he had two young kids that he was responsible for and he’s like, “I can’t let my kids down.” And so, it’s a good success story of why you can’t ever quit, and you’ve got to put your head down and focus on the process of achieving your grandest goals and dreams.
And especially now, with everything that’s happened with all the lockdowns globally, because I’ve got clients all over the world. I mean, it’s just amazing what I just see in my own stats, whether it’s my YouTube channel or my website, just everything. You could see that human interactions globally ground to a halt. Now you’ve got different countries and different states locking down in the process.
I was walking down the street yesterday where I live, and there’s tons of retail space and restaurants. And the thing that’s shocking about the whole thing is there’s so much empty space now from businesses, whether it’s retail or restaurants, that just went out of business. And even when I go into the restaurants, because I’m in South Florida, this is the season when you get a lot of the snowbirds coming down here. Plus this time of the year, you get a lot of people come from all over the world to vacation here and stay here for the winter. And it’s like, I go in restaurants that I remember this time last year I was sitting in, and they were packed and they were on a wait. And now, they’re like ghost towns and it’s the middle of the season, which is crazy.
As an American, it’s infuriating to see that, because these policies of the politicians have just basically put these people out of business, and they got a $1,200 check for their troubles. I mean, that’s completely unfair. I know millions and millions of people are hurting all around the world. And the people that seem to be wagging their fingers at everybody are people that are working from home, and they’ve still got their steady paycheck.
But everybody else, especially anybody in any kind of hospitality, restaurant or an entertainment type of industry, they’re out of work. Even the cruise ships, which I used to see all the time, coming in and out of the ports, because I could see them from my my building, it’s like, they’re not even there. They’re gone. And it’s like that.
That’s a lot of a lot of people. We’re talking billions and billions of dollars in cash flow, just like musical chairs, just stopped. And so, it’s easy to look around in society and go, hey, everything seems fine, but we don’t know the struggles that the people next to us, or maybe the person in the car next to us, or sitting in the table next to us, what they’re actually going through. It’s really difficult.
So, if you’re one of those people that has a good paying job and you’re working from home or whatever, you should definitely be counting your blessings, because a lot of people, millions and millions of people, have had their lives destroyed and their families destroyed. And when you get financial stress and you lose your business, it puts a lot of stress on the family.
One of the biggest reasons why people divorce and break up is due to financial stress. And so, this whole process, we have millions of families that are being destroyed. Millions of divorces are going to happen. Families are going to break up because of this, and people are going to be changed forever. A lot of people are going to give up on their goals and their dreams and never really stretch beyond their comfort zone, because of the traumatic experience that they’re going through right now.
And I’ve been through this many times in my life. I wrote about it in my second book, Mastering Yourself, which you can read for free at UnderstandingRelationships.com. And it’s like, how do you get through the difficult times? When you really want to accomplish big dreams, you’re looking at 10, 15 years at a minimum.
When I look at my life from the time I was 18 until I achieved the pinnacle of success in the real estate, mortgage and the construction industry that I was in when I was like 33, 34, 35, and we’re talking 15, 16, 17 years from that. And then in 2006, I decided to become a full time life coach, and I’m still another almost 15 years in in this particular part of my life and what I do for a living, and it’s just taken me a long time to get to where I am.
And most people, because they’re they’re seeking that kind of inner peace, they want to just be able to pay their bills and have some certainty. If you want to accomplish big dreams, big goals, you have to be able to learn to master your mindset, and that’s what I thought was great about this guy’s email is that he did that. He’s been through hell in the last couple of years, and he’s got multi-million dollar deals happening now. He’s in the real estate industry.
And so any of you that may be struggling right now, or maybe you know somebody that’s struggling right now, you could share this video with them and give them hope. Share my website, UnderstandingRelationships.com. Everything’s for free, so people can’t go, “Oh, I’m broke, I can’t afford anything.” All you’ve got to do is put your name and your email address at UnderstandingRelationships.com, and you can read Mastering Yourself for free and my first book How To Be A 3% Man totally for free. All it’s going to take is your your email address, and you can be reading it instantly in your browser, because these principles work. And here’s just yet another success story of a guy who was going through a difficult time, found me, applied what he learned, and he’s come out on the other side now, two plus years later.
My second book, Mastering Yourself, is a book of self-reliance, learning to master your mindset. And also, I wrote about just countless examples over the course of my life of applying this wisdom, of applying the fundamentals of the science of high achievement on a daily basis, because that’s what it is. How do you get through it when it feels hopeless? Like when you’re really feeling those pangs of frustration, like it’s never going to work out, and it just seems like ending it all might be an easier way to go. Remember what Dale Carnegie said, “Inaction breeds fear and doubt. Taking action breeds confidence and courage.”
So, getting busy being productive, trying to do something productive to move your life forward, that’s the best medicine. Whenever you’re feeling like crap, other than going and working out and doing something to take care of your body, eat a healthy meal, go spend some time with somebody you care about. Or if you can’t, because you’re locked down, pick up the phone, do a Skype call or a FaceTime chat, whatever it happens to be.
Focus on doing things you enjoy and be busy being productive. Maybe that means banging the phone, sending out your resume and following up with those resumes. The other thing I talk about Mastering Yourself is how to get any job you want. It’s all laid out in there.
And I know a lot of people, millions of people around the world, have lost their jobs because of this, and having a great strategy that will give you a leg up on your competition, you can set yourself apart from everybody else that’s trying to get a job and be the one that gets hired. All that stuff, again, is in Mastering Yourself. And again, you can read it for free. It doesn’t cost you anything, because once you see that it works, I know you’ll come back and buy a paperback, or a hardcover or the audio book.
Viewer’s Email:
Corey,
Man, this one was a doozy. I started listening back in 2018. At the time, my wife of 18 years decided after me and our then 2-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl got home from a weekend camping trip, she had packed up and was leaving me and our kids. Yeah, fuckin A.
Well, you know what bro, she can hit the bricks. You know why? Because she belongs in the streets!
These mugs are just selling. Out of all the mugs I’ve done over the years, this one seems to be the most popular, the ‘She Belongs To The Streets!’ mug. You can get it at Teespring.com at the Coach Corey Wayne store, or you can go to UnderstandingRelationships.com and click the link there.
Oh, and by the way, if you want to get the audio book version of either one of my books from Audible for Free, when you go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, just scroll down the page until you get to where the my my book listings are, and usually the top one, there is a link that’ll take you right to Audible. And if you go to Audible and do an Audible free trial, you can get my audio book totally for free. So even the audio book is free. Just go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, scroll down, look for the one that says free audio book, whatever book you want to get. But like I said, either one of my books, if you want to get the audio book for free, do a free trial with Audible.
I spent the following month in a daze, tried to maintain normal life duties of kids and work, learned how to cook, burned the rice every fucking time, didn’t sleep and could’ve doubled for “the walking dead” over the insomnia for months.
Yeah, you can just imagine what that’s like. Your wife’s left basically saying, “Hey, I’m not going to participate in the family anymore, and you get to raise the kids from here on out.” That’s pretty traumatic. And on top of that, you’re struggling financially. That sucks.
Nights were spent with my Colt 45, and I must’ve cocked that trigger a hundred times thinking, if I ate a bullet it might not look good for the kids to find dad doing a “Jackson Pollock” on the wall… so I didn’t.
After the shock wore off, the reality set in my financial situation was in dire straits. Savings from recent real estate sales were dwindling, I had no leads and no business because I was depressed, and two kids didn’t help getting back in the swing.
So, what happened there? He became overwhelmed at the problem. He started looking at the problem and focusing on the problem, and so what happened was he took himself out of the present moment and obviously wasn’t taking any action because he was depressed. He felt like shit, it felt hopeless. And so he wasn’t taking any action, and therefore he wasn’t being productive.
Success is making progress in life, and if you don’t feel like you’re making any success and you see no measurable success, like when you’re not doing anything and taking no action, it feels hopeless and overwhelming. What’s happening is, now you’re living in the future. You’re worried about something that may or may not happen in the future. And obviously, in this case, he’s not doing anything to help himself. And so, he’s just there with his thoughts, instead of being busy banging the phones and trying to get leads and make things happen.
So that’s the importance of taking action, because if he was busy being productive at that time and taking action, even though he didn’t feel like it, he would see incrementally that he was starting to make a little progress. The phones are starting to ring again, some leads are starting to come in. It doesn’t matter whether they turn into sales or not, at least he’s got leads coming. He’s got progress coming. He sees progress, because he’s taking action. That’s the most important thing.
That’s hardest part in all this is that you’ve got to have an emotionally compelling reason why you want what you want. Because when you feel depressed and sad, lonely, it’s hopeless, whatever — in his case, he’s got two children that are depending on him, because the mom who loves the streets has left the family. So it’s all on him at this point and what he’s going to do, how he’s going to manage his mindset to get himself to take action. So, he had two really emotionally compelling reasons why he needed to turn this around, obviously, his children. Because his ex-wife wasn’t doing anything.
So, inaction breeds fear and doubt, taking action breeds confidence and courage. What can I do right now to move my life forward? Is it pick up the phone call? Maybe it’s making a list. Maybe it’s writing out some goals. Maybe it’s making a list of phone calls to make tomorrow. Whatever it happens to be, you’ve got to do something.
Like Tony Robbins says, never leave the scene of setting a goal without taking some kind of action towards its attainment, even if it’s just making a list or pulling out your your smartphone and going into a notes app and writing a bunch of notes down of things or a to-do list. That is something that helps you be productive. And while you’re actually doing that work, you’re in the present moment, because you have to focus and concentrate on what you’re typing on your phone or your computer or what you’re writing down, and then that gets you out of living in the future, which is not here yet. You’re now focused in the present moment.
And when you immerse yourself in doing that for several hours, at the end of the day you’re like, “Wow, I got a lot of work done today.” You feel productive, you feel good about that, because you’re doing something to move your life forward. This is a daily discipline, day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. There’s ebbs and flows in life.
You know, at the beginning of the year, things were really going well in my business. I was excited about what a great year I was going to have. And then the coronavirus happened, and I’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars in the stock market. One of the companies I had invested in went fucking bankrupt, which I’m not happy about. These are the kinds of once in a lifetime black swan events that you just can’t plan for. They’re just going to happen. Everything seemed to be going well, and then you’ve got to make adjustments.
And another thing, with some of my advertising, what’s interesting is, “The 2nd Amendment” documentary that I have and the one on “Socialism & Capitalism,” those are part of my advertising campaigns. What’s interesting is, those two videos do really well as far as people watching them, going on my website, and subscribing to the newsletter. In other words, the cost per lead is like the lowest out of all the different documentaries that I’ve done. But because of the election and the fact that YouTube and Google want to put their thumb on the scale, they’ve changed their algorithms to be overly sensitive to anything political.
And so, what would happen is my ads would start running, they would update their algorithm and boom, they would get disapproved. Then I’d have to get on the phone to call their tech support, and talking to people in India to do that. They would get it fixed, they would run fine for a few weeks, and then same thing. And then it would take a couple of days to get it fixed. Then I’d get it fixed and then would run for a few days and then sometimes they’d get disapproved again.
And so I just went through that this past week, and every time that happens, every time these get disapproved, I’ve got eight documentaries that are running in these ad campaigns. And what’s frustrating about it is that when you have to change these, what happens is it goes back into learning, and it takes two weeks for the algorithm to learn. And so it’s just wasting your money for like two weeks where your cost per lead goes through the roof, because the whole thing tries to learn the optimization again.
And then you’ve got the system constantly shutting them off, because they’ve obviously created an algorithm to look for certain types of ad campaigns just to shut off. And you get somebody to manually redo it, they fix it. And so it costs money and it’s frustrating. And then when you get eight videos running and they’re all advertising to the same audience and then two of them shut down, it affects all the campaigns negatively. And so that’s very frustrating from an advertising perspective, because even though there’s nothing wrong with these videos, this algorithm is too sensitive and just keeps pulling these videos off the ad campaign.
And then, you know, nothing happens in a few hours. It’s like, I’ve been working all this week to get these things running again. They were running yesterday, and I woke up today and one of them is not running today. And it’s incredibly frustrating because, it’s pissing away. They’re literally burning up my advertising dollars.
And it’s just because this whole virus thing, and this political thing. Because a lot of people, the powers that be at YouTube and Google, they hate Trump’s guts. And you have a lot of people that work there that also hate his guts, and that’s negatively impacting me, because of these algorithms that are written. But that’s life. You know, nobody cares.
At the end of the day, we’ve all got problems and other people are glad that we have them. Especially if people don’t like us, or people think we’re doing well, or people that we think are our friends think that we’re doing better than them. It’s like, they like it when they see you suffering, because then they don’t feel so bad about their shitty lives.
So, you’ve just got to put your head down. I mean, it’s incredibly frustrating for me, because I’ve had this ad campaign running for over a year now — because these documentaries are a year and a half, two years old — and every few months I keep going through this. Especially in the last two months with the election. You can tell, every time they change their algorithm, it impacts my business.
And this is a microcosm all of us have to deal with in our lives. This particular guy, he’s dealing with his wife leaving and saying, see you later. So he goes through a period of depression, and then he stops doing those little things that made him productive and successful. And so really, one of the greatest things you can do is learn to master your mindset. I’ve talked about extensively. It’s my title. That’s why the title of my book is called “Mastering Yourself,” because that’s really what it’s about, how you can master getting up every day and being productive even when you don’t feel like it.
Fuck, my life looked bleak. She was seeing a younger dude she met at church. I was dealing with stabilizing my kids, house, food. We had the power shut off, the water, I jerry-rigged it a few months.
As 2018 rolled into 2019, I started noticing I was able to gets kids to school on time and start grinding every day, knocking on doors, calls, Lyft, anything.
So it sounds like he was even driving for Lyft being a taxi driver or whatever it took to be able to put food on the table and feed his kids.
I woke up at 5:30 a.m., got the kids’ lunch ready, cleaned the house before they woke up, dropped them off and grinded at work. I got hopeless at one point, but I didn’t have a fucking choice. I have 2 kids, so not today? Okay fuck it, I’ll grind 2 times harder tomorrow, and I did. I got a lawyer to help with the house and managed to pull a sale together to just tread and keep things floating, but I had to keep grinding and I did.
The way I look at, just the way the universe tends to test you, it’s like if you’re having problems in your dating life, it’s the same thing. If you’re getting rejected, rejected, rejected, or you go out on one date after another, and you’re like, “Man, I don’t click with any of these girls,” you just have to keep doing it and just trust that something better is right around the corner.
You know, you have to take action. You have to continue getting leads into your personal or your professional life, whatever it happens to be, so you can keep moving forward. That’s the important thing, is staying motivated when we’re surrounded by people that want to give up and are trying to convince us of why we need to give up. Because the reality is, most people around us, they’ve given up.
Things started to change. I didn’t think about the ex as much, focused on the kids, had a girl I was seeing, got confidence and wasn’t afraid to say I got left.
Well, the reality is anybody that hears a woman just leaves her husband and her kids and is like, “See you later. I’m going to go party and hang out with a younger dude,” it’s like, whatever. She did you a favor, because she belongs to the streets! Hit the road, Jack, don’t you come back no more, no more, no more.
I kept grinding. I started out with 1 ball then 3 balls then 5, then 7 balls… fuck I handled everything. I knew I could handle anything. In October, I closed a $2 million sale for which I represented both sides and made a cool $50k. I also invested in the rehab of my client’s house which we will list in February for $2.1 milion, and I’m an investor and listing agent. The only fucking reason why this happened is because I didn’t ever quit.
You’re only a loser when you quit trying. That’s the bottom line. So if you’re still trying, if you’re still grinding, if you’re still making an effort, you’re not a loser. You’re just waiting for the worm to turn, if you will. You’re waiting for that one little victory, that one little sliver of hope.
You know, back to my ad campaign, talking to somebody, you go up the chain of command and you finally find somebody that can go in, you know, the right engineer that can fix the code. I had this problem about a year and a half ago with my Instagram profile. People started messaging me, saying, “Hey, I went to your Instagram and I put in ‘Coach Corey Wayne’ and I couldn’t find you. All I was finding were these fake accounts.” Because something in their system didn’t like my posts, they just hid my profile.
And because I was an advertiser, I was able to get in touch with my rep at Facebook, and it took her three weeks to find the right engineers at Facebook to fix my Instagram profile so it was available in the search again. And it’s like, I’m an advertiser, I’m paying these people and they’re hiding my fucking profile. Or an algorithm hid my profile. And undoing it was not something that was easy.
But you know, what if I hadn’t been advertising on Facebook? I would have been out of luck. I couldn’t have done anything about it. And it happens to lots of people. It’s just, those are the things you have to deal with in business, the black swan. This just stuff happens.
Back in 2006–2007 in real estate when the market crashed, luckily I sold my last piece of real estate in 2007 in the commercial business literally six months before the commercial market tanked, and I was just getting out of that business altogether. It wasn’t because I was some genius and I saw what was coming at the time. I had just made major life changes.
And I was so grateful, because if I if I had waited six months or a year to do what I did, it would have been too late. I would have lost everything. I wouldn’t have had the seed capital to start the business that I’m in now, because I would have lost all of my equity that I had in real estate.
I may have lost, but I’m not a loser. Only he who gives up truly is lost. Any great success has 1,000 losses behind it. Tell that guy to dust himself off and lose the ego. The humbling is a great lesson for doing life better.
Yeah, that’s one thing I wrote about in “Mastering Yourself.” It was a very humbling experience to be thirty-nine years old and waiting tables at a really busy, kind of crappy sports bar after making a half a million a year, and having my own company, and being on TV and advertising. It’s like, I didn’t feel very successful at the time.
And people that knew me, you know, other than my close inner circle, people that were acquaintances were like, “You’re an idiot, dude. You should go back into the construction industry. You should go back into the real estate industry. Give this up. It’s not going to work.” Look at all the lives I’ve been able to touch because I kept at it, and because I did it, and I showed other people the way through my example. Look at this guy.
Life ain’t fucking fair. Either get busy living, or get busy dying.
Thanks Corey. I hope you help get these beta male orbiters in check and let them know they’ve gotta move to get shit done.
Yours Truly,
Bob
Again, remember, inaction breeds fear and doubt. Taking action breeds confidence and courage.
“The universe does not give you what you really want and the dreams you really crave very easily. Striving to reach your full potential is a long, hard, arduous journey that usually lasts many decades and involves overcoming tremendous failure, hardship and setbacks. Human beings will do more to avoid pain than they will do to gain pleasure and reward. It’s natural to want to seek inner peace and avoid hardship. However, to reach your full potential, it requires mastering your mental mindset, so you can endure unpleasant and unavoidable circumstances that life always seems to surprise you with when you least expect it. Taking action is always the best medicine for fear, worry, doubt and uncertainty. You must lose yourself in the process of achieving your grandest goals and dreams, because being busy taking action frees your mind from fear, worry and doubt, and replaces it with the feeling of satisfaction by being productive.” ~ Coach Corey Wayne
