I have many stories I could tell you about my life, but there was one particular week when I finally realised just how deep the hole I had dug for myself had become. It wasn’t one single event that destroyed everything; it was years of avoiding things, distracting myself, working harder and constantly telling myself that eventually everything would change. That week, however, all of those things seemed to come together at once, and suddenly there was nowhere left to hide from the consequences of the life I had created.
At the time, I was living in Sydney, Australia, as a hard-working father of two in an immigrant family, trying to build a better future for us. Like many people living in Sydney, we wanted to buy our own home, but property prices were so high that it seemed almost impossible in a place that my wife liked enough. So I did what I thought a responsible man was supposed to do: I worked more. I was regularly working twelve-hour days, around 65–70 hours a week, driving heavy vehicles, which had actually been a childhood dream of mine. From the outside, I was working hard for my family and doing everything I could to get ahead, but underneath it all, my life was slowly falling apart.
The exhaustion eventually became dangerous. There were a couple of nights when had two very close calls because I was so tired that I was struggling to stay awake and focused. Basically I fell asleep at a traffic light, at another time I woke up in the emergency lane while driving. At the same time, the physical demands of the job were destroying my shoulder. After a few years, the damage had become so serious that I was facing either shoulder replacement or steroid treatment, and neither option looked particularly attractive. I remember thinking that financially I was finished, physically I was finished, and yet somehow I still believed that the answer was to keep pushing harder.
For more than four years I had also been trying to build a business from home because I desperately wanted to escape that life. I wanted to work less, be there for my children, have more time with my wife and eventually create a life where I wasn’t exchanging almost every waking hour for money. But despite all the time, energy and money I had put into it, the results simply weren’t coming. Four years had gone by and I had very little to show for it, but I refused to give up because I had convinced myself that successful people never quit – the idea came from doing a lots of personal development trainings. I kept telling myself that I just had to find the right answer, work a little harder and somehow make it happen.
The problem was that while I was trying to build a better future for my family, I was losing my family in the present. My wife and children hardly had any time with me, and the little connection I still had with my boys was often reduced to reading bedtime stories. Even that became difficult because I was so exhausted that I couldn’t stay awake while reading to them. In an attempt to somehow keep myself conscious long enough to finish the stories, I actually allowed my two naughty boys to slap me in the face whenever I started falling asleep. Sometimes they did it, and sometimes I would still end up crumpling onto the floor and falling asleep from sheer exhaustion.
What is difficult for me to admit even today is what I believed about myself at that time. Somewhere inside, I genuinely felt that I deserved those slaps because I believed I was a loser. I had tried so many things and nothing seemed to work, so I had started to believe that perhaps I simply wasn’t good enough and didn’t deserve anything better. I would sometimes cry when nobody could see me because the guilt and shame had become overwhelming. I wasn’t only exhausted physically anymore; emotionally, I was completely done, and I could feel myself becoming increasingly disconnected from the people I loved most.
There was another painful layer to all of this that I didn’t understand properly at the time. Without consciously realising it, I was recreating parts of my own childhood. My father had worked six days a week, and he was struggling with himself and with his own life. I grew up feeling that he wasn’t really there for me and that he didn’t love me in the way I needed a father to love his child. I had carried anger and hurt about that for years, and yet here I was, repeating the same pattern with my own children. I was becoming the father I had once resented, even though the reason I was working so hard was that I desperately wanted to give my children a better life.
I had also spent more than $100,000 on personal development, different therapies, courses and attempts to change myself. For more than ten years, I had been searching for something that would finally make a difference, but nothing seemed to last. There were always new promises, new ideas and new attempts, followed by another disappointment. Eventually the failures started to mean more than just the money I had lost. The worst part was that my family had stopped believing my promises that things were going to change.
For years I had told them that I would eventually be able to work from home, that I would work fewer hours and that we would finally have more quality time together. But the future I kept promising never seemed to arrive. At some point, my family stopped believing me, and if I’m honest, by then I had stopped believing myself as well. I was continuing to work and continuing to try, but deep down I no longer had any real confidence that I could create the life I kept talking about.
Then there was my volunteering with the Rural Fire Service. Every Sunday, I would go and volunteer as a local firefighter because I wanted to be a good citizen and contribute to the community. Looking back now, I can also see another side of it. I think a part of me wanted to be a hero, perhaps because being needed by other people made me feel valuable. But whatever the reason, it was another commitment that took time away from my wife and children. I was giving more and more of myself away while telling myself that I was doing all of it for the right reasons.
Then one morning, my wife asked me a question that felt like a kick straight in the stomach: “Are we getting divorced?” I didn’t want to hear it, but somewhere inside I knew that I had created a situation where she had every reason to ask. Then she said something even more painful: “You have to stop this madness. You are never here for us, so it’s not going to make a big difference really.” I could have become defensive, blamed the circumstances or told her that she didn’t understand how hard I was working, but there was a part of me that knew she was right.
I asked her for 48 hours to think everything through. I needed to step away from the constant noise in my head and finally look honestly at what I had been doing with my life. I had spent years asking myself, “What do I need to do?” I had worked harder, studied more, tried more therapies, started businesses, taken on extra responsibilities and kept pushing myself further and further. But suddenly I realised that perhaps I had been asking the wrong question all along.
After those 48 hours, I came back with what, at the time, probably sounded like the stupidest answer imaginable. It wasn’t another business strategy or another personal development program. It was something much simpler and illogical, something that completely changed the direction of my life and, ultimately, the future of my family.
And that is the part of the story I want to tell you next.
Have you any tips about what happened? Keep your eyes peeled for the continuation of this story… I will give you the link once I have the second part here…
Your Doctor of Self-Worth
Endre Hoffmann
PS: If this resonates with you, you can explore more about self-worth and personal transformation through my self-help resources, or book a conversation with me to explore what may be holding you back and shift Asap!