Alright Trainwrecks its been a while since I wrote something specific to the direction of the overall project: Beautiful Trainwreck so I’d like to share some specifics.
What is a Beautiful Trainwreck?
Well a beautiful trainwreck is essentially any action performed with the absolute best of intentions in the world, but upon delivery everything just falls apart for various reasons (piss poor planning to name one). During different phases of my military career I encountered this phenomenon and could not quite accurately put a label on it. While flying in a Blackhawk helicopter from one location to another during my time in Iraq we had to make a stop at a SAM (surface to air missile) site. These are always very small locations with a handful of service and support personnel.
En route to our location, I saw the results of good intentions and bad execution. I saw the result of avoidable destruction. A door gunner who had been in country for about 5 months filled me in on the horrible sight below by screaming in my ear as best as he could. I looked down and heard the story of a lack of communication between people who did not speak the same language or understand the true intentions of the other. I heard how because neither side understood what the other wanted or needed and because of the lack of communication, neither party’s true intentions could be presented. I thought about how often a lack of focus and communication occurred in my own life and I could only imagine how at this grand scale of destruction below me, such action would lead to what we flew over. I remember hearing him scream something about it looking like a trainwreck and asking WTF he meant. He told me “sometimes shit happens, even when no body wants it to – STBY right?” All I could do was nod my head and admit he was right.
What does this mean to a civilian? Well, ever see an accident scene or a trainwreck? Its strangely intriguing to look at, realizing how much destruction took place over a few simple mistakes. Its hard to look away and not think about what could be learned from what happened. None of us look at tragedy because we want to be embroiled in it. We all look on with true curiosity, wondering how it happened and with the desire to find out how we can avoid this from happening to us
This may sound weird but sometimes we perform actions in such a state of oblivion and ill-placed belief, we can only look back at our mistakes afterwards in disbelief. All we can do is stare at the awesome destruction and realize the beauty in our perfectly stupid mistake. Our mistake just couldn’t have been any more worse-placed could it? Any more beautiful. It’s a beautiful trainwreck isn’t it? Good intentions and bad execution.
What is this website all about?
Well, this website is first and foremost a parking spot for different aspects of psychological work I am exploring. I share information in the form of articles, videos and random entries detailing information I study further and conduct research on. I have been studying human behavior in one form or another since the day I took my first Psychology class while working on my criminal justice degree in 1999.
I share details about my personal experiences and my work through these articles and entries. My first book, Beautiful Trainwreck: Off the Rails is about my life from childhood to my life during war and on to retirement. I hope to detail how I experienced ups and whole lotta downs and made it through to the other side by believing in myself and my will to live a better life than the one I was living. I also want to discuss how I lost my ability to cope with stress over my circumstances and how I fell. When I fell, I fell HARD. I would like to share my experiences as a narcotic-addicted alcoholic who allowed negative circumstances to take over his life when he lost his ability to cope with growing circumstances.
More than explaining how that happened to me, I want to explain how I was able to change all of that and somehow end up on the other side living a life so precious sometimes I simply cannot believe I ever decided to take it.
But I did decide I was going to take my life. And I am slowly sharing the “why” as I can. It is not easy for me to explain but it is important to me that I try to help others understand the “why” and how people like me come to that permanent solution to an otherwise temporary problem. I need to share exactly what drove me to the insanity I experienced. It is important people understand what it took for someone like me to walk back from that edge I went to. If I am successful in nothing else, I need to communicate to others how I overcame my struggles and literally anyone can too if we just start learning from our mistakes and changing our circumstances.
PLEASE if nothing else, learn from my mistakes and try to avoid those pitfalls yourself. It gets better if we just let it. I PROMISE.
What exactly is it that you are currently doing?
Well above everything else, I am trying to do what a lot of people say they wish they could do which is to better understand other people and for what reasons they act the way they do toward each other. I’m trying to understand why people love, hate, ostracize, seek out and even destroy each other simply because of the way they act toward one another. I’m trying to share what I have learned with others so we can make better choices among each other and learn to work together in a more effective way. We cannot work together if we don’t understand one another enough to even care WHY we are different let alone what those differences entail. Appreciating our differences brings us together in our communities. Focusing on the things that make us even slightly different does exactly that – drive us apart.
What is it you would like to do with this in the future?
I think if I take the time to share what my experiences were in a variety of situations, I might be able to assist someone else in making some difficult decisions regarding their life and their organization. There are significant behavioral cues within each human interaction which can largely determine the effect and outcome of that interaction if correct understanding of the overall situation can occur. Largely understanding differences of perspective and interpreting behavioral responses to circumstances can reveal a lot of how a difficult situation occurs. People respond to stimuli based on what they think THEIR best response is, not what WE think it should be. Understanding how our behavior and language affects others is paramount in effective communication among organizations of people. It is my goal to help individuals working within their life and for their organization to better understand how to interpret their environment.
Throughout significant times in my life I have come to understand it is the fault of no one but myself when I do not understand a situation and the context of critical communication. That is all based on social behavior both inherent in our genes as well as whatever learned behavior has been picked up since birth. In my case, I developed a rather jaded view of the world as a teenager because of my particular living situation. I would visit my friends and family and notice how different their families interacted with each other.
Since this was not a typical situation to me in most of my own life, I simply did not develop many social norms that successful young men and women developed. I did not understand what to do with my anger and aggression. I knew what I was experiencing was not correct yet I did not develop ways to redirect that rage until I was much older. Because of that I experienced things most other children did not as a result of my antisocial behavior. I would yell, throw things, insult people and in general I would act like your typical asshole kid screaming for attention and not knowing what to do with it when I actually got it. Like many other young men, I had piss poor male role models close to me and very few choices to select from until I joined the military. I believe I am like many other young men and women in this situation and I feel I can properly speak their language, if they are willing to listen.
How are you going to accomplish this?
Many of us have experienced these things in our lives to varying degrees thus, I believe just about anyone has reached a point in their life where they realized things they were doing and saying were not completely reflective of what their true intentions were. Many of us have realized what we once thought was a proper coping mechanism resulted in adverse effects. I know I have and learning from those misunderstandings has resulted in my life moving back in the direction of happiness. Through my education and experiences I would like to assist people and organizations in examining the possibilities of improving focus in these areas.
I am currently writing my first book, Beautiful Trainwreck: Off the Rails to explain how I ended up where I did and in what manner simply because of the way I interpreted and interacted with my environment in the curious and sometimes jaded view I developed. I really do believe we are the product of our environment and the people we surround ourselves with. I was able to seek out and surround myself with certain people at certain times through choices I made, and I in turn was able to influence my own circumstances and improve my situation. I hope this first book can help give others a glimpse into the reality that we all live a different life with all the possibilities in the world available to us if we just get up and try to do something significant. I told myself from an early age I was going to be someone who touched the lives of others in significant ways. Now as a civilian it is my desire to do that as significantly as I did in the military. I understand now better than ever what it takes for people to work together as well as why they do and say what they do, influencing them to drift apart.
In the end, this website is an open scrapbook and collection of information I’m assembling for my Doctoral Dissertation. I mean, organizational behavior and corporate coaching are what interests me so what better place to develop the material and skills to deliver this information than on an open website already subject to criticism and the rare compliment right? Would you ever consider me an expert in human behavior if I wasn’t willing to share what I have learned and am learning? I think a major part of this site is credibility. It is so much easier to take someone serious when you can see what they “have done,” not just “what they are trying to do.” Lets be honest what do we care about more- what someone is trying to accomplish or what someone has accomplished? And when we realize an accomplishment has occurred in someone else’s life we want to know what it took.
In the short-term, the website is going to change again in a few weeks to hopefully improve the layout and delivery of my content. I am slowly learning things about social media that probably come as second nature to a lot of these young men and women I wish to reach out to, so I feel it is important to present my content in as best way I can learn to. As e Gen-Xer, I was (until recently) resistant to some aspects of the technological boom of the 2000s. I still remember the world without the internet.
This website does not just chronicle my writing, my videos about social dynamics and my little dog; but soon I will begin sharing my journey toward finishing my Doctorate in (hopefully) two and a half years. This website will soon chronicle my journey in my formal coaching instruction. Hopefully I will be able to expand my coaching and eventually help support this expensive-ass PhD goal of mine. As I said, everything that is seen on this blog will one day support my Dissertation.
And what is a Doctoral Dissertation? I’m going to encourage you to Google the term for a more accurate description but I will say it involves a lot of research, theory and application in the real world which is then subject to formal academic examination. It is likely one of the most difficult things I will ever do in my life but when I am finished I will be accepted into another level of accomplishment I never thought possible. In fact, in my early 20s I was once told by a military supervisor I would never get past the dreaming stage of this journey. That same person is now a janitor for a truck stop. From my perspective, his journey long is over. However, mine gets properly redefined every year or so.
I am already doing things in my life right now I once accepted would no longer be possible so I will admit to a little bit of arrogance and say I already know how my dissertation will be written, on what basis my theories will begin and the instruments I will utilize to deliver my work. I am not a Youtube star. Quite the contrary, I could give a shit less about Youtube to be honest. However, Youtube is not just a form of entertainment, is a search engine. There are not very many videos on Youtube in regards to the social dynamics and psychology I discuss, therego I have an excellent algorithm to push my content to a wide audience very quickly. Every new click on my content improves my algorithms.
In two or three years all of this will probably make better sense to people.
What are your current plans?
Currently I am beginning classes this Fall and I must attend a conference for school in Orlando. I begin professional coach training in a few short weeks and I am working through a webinar on how to improve my multimedia content. I have learned the actual delivery of my content whether in-person or virtually is just as important as what my content contains. I wish to one day provide my services in exchange for financial compensation. I believe this is the goal of every inspired professional. I will only accomplish this by becoming the best speaker I can become, so I am slowly exploring speaking opportunities as they come available. I have a list of goals in several folders I keep with the appropriate content within. I try to keep task lists for each goal and as each task is crossed off I get one step closer to accomplishing my goals. This is rarely natural behavior so like anyone, I must constantly remind myself what I am working toward so I can eliminate unnecessary Bullshit in the form of mass-media. I also have a bit of a problem with memory so I write down absolutely everything important and practice things a hundred times just to get it right once.
This is why martial arts are so incredibly important in my life. I will never have the ability to remember my moves as well as others and that is fine with me. Instead, I must learn to cope with my limitations in karate the way I must develop skills to adapt in real-life outside my Dojo. I am in an environment where it is okay to fail. I am around other students and instructors who want to see me succeed, which is helping me instrumentally in other areas of my life as well. Lets be honest given my training in my former career, my size and strength as well as the fact I carry a firearm I train regularly with, I probably do not need the self-defense as much as others. But I need the discipline, accountability and positive environment more than I can ever express to others. Aggression, rage and anger used to be my weakest areas and now they are my strongest. Discipline is how I learned to control myself to the point of realizing how to become successful. If we are not seeking discipline from a higher order at a level we wish to achieve and others do not, we are not working under our most effective and efficient manner to “ourselves” because then we are just settling for what everyone else is doing. And that is boring.
Do you offer Life Coaching?
Yes, I am available for new clients and you would be surprised how low my rates are. For now. I do offer no-cost coaching for certain circumstances. Please contact me at: DJBeautifulTrainwreck@Gmail.com
You’re Welcome. Internet.
