Eugene Moreau - Blog & Contents Page

Eugene's latest columns...

Other Articles

Seven Lessons I Wish I Had Learnt Before I Was Thirty

The Parable of Maybe and Might

Outlook on Life

How Can I Forgive What You've Done To Me?

Are You a Thermometre or a Thermostat?

Dare To Dream (Sneak Peak)

Happiness Is A State Of Mind

Are You Building A Brick Wall Or A Cathedral?

Pssst! I'm Over Here!

The Importance of a Vision Worthy of Pursuit

Introducing Eugene Moreau

Moving Beyond Sadness

Moving Beyond Sadness & Regret (Part One)

Seven Ideas For Moving Beyond Sadness (Part Two)

How to Overcome Regrets

The Tragedy Of Living Your Life Looking Backwards

No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets

Addicted to Tomorrow Series

Are You Addicted to Tomorrow? (Part One)

Are you Addicted To Tomorrow? (Part Two)

Dream Busters Series

Beware of the Dream Busters (Part I)

Overcoming The Five Dream Busters! (Part II)

Your Dream Must Have Legs Or It Will Die! (Part III)

Enemy Called 'Average' Series

Defeating the Enemy Called 'Average' (Intro to Four Part Series)

Being Focused (Part 1)

Pursue a Worthwhile Mission (Part 2)

Replace Hope With Purpose (Part 3)

Stay On Track (Part 4)

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Sadness Became Real and Personal For The Moreau ‘Community’ Last Week

I write this blog post for my family but I make it available to you so that what I say can help those of you who need it…… those who are experiencing the pain of sadness.

Let me start by saying our family suffered a tragic loss just a few days ago. In between the writing of the first article and this one, the second, on the subject of Moving Beyond Sadness, our family has experienced a profound, life changing event. I want to briefly tell you about it and then give you seven ideas for helping you move beyond sadness.

Sadness Comes Over Our Family

A family is a unit of humans linked together as a community, relating, interacting, and connecting. The family is a living organism and as such it is exposed to the many debilitating frailties that can often accompany humanity……. such as busyness and taking for each other for granted just to name a couple.

Over time a family can find itself slowly, imperceptibly, day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year – drifting away from each other into their own little world, eventually finding itself disconnected and apart.

Now, don’t get me wrong, as a family it may still love one another, and value each other, but it can simply be lulled, over time, into an a existence best described as ‘disconnected’.

This kind of explains our family. We deeply love each other but over the last several years, we’ve slowly drifted apart…..kind of ‘disconnected.’

Until this past week.

This past week an event took place that has brought us all back together…… connected again. Trauma, tragedy and sadness can bring a family back together in a very demanding, harsh and brutal way.

For Me, It All Started With a Phone Call.

It all began when my brother called to say he and his wife would not be able to make the ‘it’s taken so long to arrange’ Sunday lunch with our Mum, my sister, her husband, Chereen and myself.

In a very sober voice he told me their youngest daughter, my 19 year old niece, was having to terminate her baby at 18 weeks into the pregnancy and it would happen on the day of our scheduled lunch.

It was at that precise moment I felt the sadness enter.

Up until the afternoon they heard the news my beautiful niece and her partner had been experiencing the wonderful, and some not so wonderful joys, of expecting their first child.

All the classic symptoms were there – the glow of motherhood, the tiny but growing tummy, the sickness, the mood swings, did I mention the sickness?……..the excitement, the trepidation. If you are a parent then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Well, on that fateful afternoon, at the doctors for a routine scan, they were told complications existed, the kind that would mean the baby would not be able to complete the full term and that the only real option was to terminate. While they could, if they wanted to, take the option carrying for the full term, it was 99% certain that the little baby boy would not be born alive. They went on to say that in the unlikely ‘1%’ chance the baby was born breathing, it was 100% certain he would not live, without some form of assistance, for no more than two weeks.

Now, obviously there was a little more to this story than what I’ve shared, but that is the essence of it.

So, on Sunday afternoon my niece entered hospital and began the process of terminating the baby, the dream, her and her partner had created together. Twenty four hours later a tiny 13 cm, 100 gram baby named Dallas was delivered into this world, without life, and our family entered a penetrating, sobering and painful season of sadness with my niece and her partner.

It Is Difficult To Describe What It Felt Like Standing Over This Little Grave

We gathered around the beautiful garden spot, viewable from the kitchen window at one of the grandparents house, and laid this precious little baby boy to rest – one week to the day from when the sadness first entered.

The ceremony was both beautiful and heart wrenching. My niece and her partner held on to each other tightly, and the family wept unashamedly as we closed ranks and held each other. Various family member shared from their heart and eventually the matriarch of the Moreau side of the family, my mum, spoke a poignant, simple prayer and then we let balloons, with special notes attached, rise up into the beautiful blue sky, carried on a sure and fast breeze.

As I stood there staring at the little hole in the ground with this little box wrapped in love and a beautiful Island cloth……… it is difficult to describe what I felt.

I reflected on the blog I had just written about moving through sadness and to be quite frank, I was ashamed with what I had written…… simply because it seemed so frivolous and inappropriate when compared to what was being experienced in that moment.

I asked myself a couple of serious and penetrating questions: How does one cope with such a tragic loss? How can we move beyond the kind of sadness that accompanies such an event?

This is not the time to write some coaching theory in the hope that it will entertain and capture a reader for a moment in time. This is not the occasion for random, shallow thinking – the kind that can often go into a blog. This is a very real and painful season of sadness.

This kind of sadness feels more like what the writer of old penned, “My strength drains away like water, all my bones are loose. My heart has turned to wax and melts within me. My mouth is dry as a clay pot, my tongue sticks to my jaw.”

This sadness hurt! This sadness penetrated! This sadness consumed!

Read my Seven Ideas For Moving Beyond Sadness

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LEAVING ALMOST UPDATE: Finding Your Economic Engine

In Leaving Almost – Dare To Dream Again, I write about how Oliver, the wise sage in the story, tells Alex Andrews, the middle aged man who is leaving a place called Almost, to ‘design the world he wants to live in and then build it’. When you say it fast it…… sounds easy. In fact, it’s even easy to write about it!

However, let me assure you according to my own experience, it’s extremely challenging to actually do it!

A few months ago I wrote about how you can have an incredible, awesome mission for your life, and you can even have an inspiring dream, but without an economic engine your dream will die (see ‘Your Dream Must Have Legs Or It Will Die). I received several interesting emails and phone calls from people who agreed with me. In fact, that blog post inspired several lengthy and incredibly worthwhile conversations.

Well I am extremely glad to tell you that after four years of my journey in leaving Almost, we have finally started to see and experience some sustainable traction – and it all started when we found our economic engine.

BACKGROUND

For those of you who are not aware of it, let me give you a little of my story to help you gain some context for the bottom-line of this blog post.

In 2005 I set out to seriously design the world I wanted to live in and then build it. This has been the single most difficult endeavor I’ve ever set out to accomplish. When I say ‘design’ – what I really mean is ‘redesign and realign’ every aspect of my life…… which included relationship, friends, social network, economic engine, life purpose, mission and dream.

At times it has been a lonely and isolated journey. Sometimes I’ve made decisions that were wrong and have had to recover from the painful consequences of them.  While at other times, I’ve made decisions that were right… just wrongly timed and as result nothing has happened.

Sometimes I’ve even confused myself and grasped at opportunities that seemed to have promise in the hope that they would be the ‘vehicle’ we needed to help us go where we wanted to go. While some of them showed great promise none of them ever delivered. Nothing changed.

This has been a challenging and frustrating season in my life and I’ve often wondered at the sanity of my decision to start this journey four and half years ago.

There have been times I’ve despaired that it would ever end… until about two months ago.

Several years ago I worked with New Zealand Home Loans as an external consultant, helping them with certain aspects of their sales process, consultant and business owner development. About two months ago, while in a meeting with them I was presented with an amazing opportunity that I felt was worthwhile investigating further and low and behold – the economic engine I had been looking for was right there……in front of me. It had been there for several years but I simply could not see it.

I guess there is something in timing after all……… anyway…… I’ve never had a ‘vehicle’ so perfectly designed, already proven and made available to me, that could actually deliver what I’ve set out to do with my life.

As many of you already know Chereen and I have embraced the ‘life mission’ of helping men and women unlock a fresh vision for their life and to equip them to build safe relationships that transforms lives and grows great communities.

Until now we have not had the economic engine to deliver this mission. Now we do.

So about four weeks ago I made the commitment to work with John Erkkila (The CEO of NZH), along with two other Auckland based partners (Mike Pedersen and John Bishop 3) to build a significant NZHL business in Auckland. We will be identifying, recruiting, leading and growing a number of NZHL business owners to help us achieve our vision. Who knows, one of them may be you!

If you want to find out more about our business and how it works, here’s a couple websites to fill you in:

http://www.afewhometruths.co.nz

http://www.nzhomeloans.co.nz

This is an exciting stage in our journey out of Almost and now we are able to literally help hundreds of people become debt free and dare to dream again!

If you live in Auckland and you would like to meet with me and talk about how you can take your life to the next level by using the New Zealand Home Loans ‘Debt Management System‘ – then call me or send me an email.

Until then…… Dare To Dream!!!

Eugene | unlocking vision. inspiring passion.

eugene@eugenemoreau.com

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Are You Addicted To Tomorrow?

It’s been a few weeks since I've has had a chance to finish this blog post…. but I promise I have a great story… of which he will spill the beans on in another blog post.....soon........he promises!

Meanwhile, in the last article, Iintroduced you to ‘Emma Hooked’ who, we discovered, was addicted to the destructive habit called 'tomorrow'.

Here’s a quick review. For over 15 years Emma has held on to the hope that tomorrow her life will change. Maybe tomorrow things will change. Maybe tomorrow she will change. Maybe tomorrow her boss will change and maybe tomorrow she’ll start to feel she’s living her dream instead of simply surviving.

Maybe tomorrow she’ll wake up and find that somehow, through some miraculous way, all her debts and relationship identity problems will have been solved. Maybe tomorrow she will have a sense of living a life of fulfillment and purpose. Here’s the bottom-line - Emma is addicted to tomorrow!

So, how does Emma go about overcoming this addiction?

We introduced the first two steps, which were Clarify the Dream and Think Small Not Large Steps. This week I will outline the last two steps: Narrow The Focus and Work On The Dream.

You can read the latest instalment in the Addicted to Tomorrow Series here: Part Two


Also, next week the podcast 'Are You Addicted To Tomorrow' - both Part One & Two, will be abvilable.....so keep an eye out for it.

Until next Eugene's post… DARE TO DREAM!!!!!


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Podcast of the 'Defeat the Enemy Called Average' series

You've been reading the series 'Defeat the Enemy Called Average' - now you can listen to them online.

You can download the Defeat The Enemy Called Average Podcast right now!
No waiting!
No more reading!
Just pure listening!

I invite you to click here and go straight to the Podcast Page on my site and start downloading right now.
 
Cheers.......Eugene

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