Conrad Hall

There is something in all of us that is supposed to be nurtured by the love of Mom and Dad. I have been accidentally blinded twice in my life. My experience is it’s easier to deal with blindness than it is to grow without the essential emotional nutrition of parental love.

Trapped With Pretended Love

When I asked to live with Aunt Geri and Uncle Harold on their horse farm, the answer was telling. After I had the audacity to catch her in repeated lies, my mother rather hotly explained saying “She raised Fran’s kids and Anne’s kids. I’ll be damned if she’s going to raise one of mine.”

Growing up rejected by my parents made me believe everyone would feel the same way. After all, who is going to love you when your parents don’t, right? My first understanding that my father’s dislike for me was intense came during a ride home in the family station wagon.

The ride home came the summer after starting school, and my now five year old mind latched onto reading road signs for entertainment.

Everything was fine until my older brother hit a couple signs he was unable to read. After I read a couple signs my brother missed, my father got angry.

My mother defended me at first. Unfortunately, she was a teacher. It made complete sense to her that she should explain how younger children often make rapid progress in learning to read. That enflamed my father and incited him to lash out at me.

Aging Sometimes Makes Vinegar

That emotional battering progressed as I aged. It gradually led to me transforming from a cheerful, friendly boy to an angry teen.

I have lived on both sides of the law with considerable skills as a thief and faltering skills as a drug dealer. I’ve also served honorably in the military, ran a carpentry business, been married, worked in high-rise construction, and am a father.

Through it all, I lived with a private stupidity. My stupidity was combining the expectation of rejection with every subsequent rejection, and thinking it all proved my parents were right; I’m not worth loving.

No one should be surprised when unloved children grow into adults who behave in ways that prove their parents right. Everyone loves the result when we get a professional athlete, successful entrepreneur, or effective activist. But we blame the person who is anti-social, cruel, or rude.

To my credit, I started breaking free around age 19. I had always been rebellious, but childhood and teenage rebellion are different from consciously assessing what you’re doing, and your reasons for doing it.

My reasons have led to great choices that resulted in employment success, achieving wealth as a business owner, a wide base of learning through continuing education and reading, and some wonderfully, temporarily, happy relationships.

My choices have also led to bankruptcy three times, being homeless, spending time in jail, and living through more than fifty years without forming a single long-lasting relationship.

The Jerk – More Than A Steve Martin Movie

At this point, you might be thinking I am quite the jerk. That’s okay. I have been a consummate jerk in my lifetime.

It took a lot of learning, and a long time, to realise two things:

1. All we have is the reality in front of us; and,

2. A lot of people are desperate to avoid reality.

You can see the truth of it in everyday life by watching people who accept wage-slavery (their reality) and then complain about having no control (avoiding responsibility for their reality).

I have invested an incredible amount of time listening to business owners, parents, and young adults as they defend their bad choices, and, more importantly, as they change course for better choices.

It is stunning to see how deeply the desire to be accepted as right, in the face of all opposition and contradiction, permeates our society. Even more amazing is seeing the relief that washes through someone when they succeed in fixing a mistake.

When you add up all the hours of listening and coaching, it turns out to be decades of experience. Parents concerned about their children. Children angry with their parents. Business owners confused about leadership and customer relations. The experiences of listening, accepting, caring and encouraging, smoothed the rougher edges left from an angry, abused, and rebellious young man.

Those experiences, and a life-altering divorce, led me to pull back, look honestly at myself, and strip away my private lies and pretentions.

From Riches to Rags

I was running a successful business when the divorce hit. Six books were written – including two international bestsellers and another a case study in every mistake you can make when putting a book together. Two others were moderate successes and the sixth was a lead generation tool. They made for a great education in what works and what flops.

Business owners were lined up to pay premium fees for my advice and guidance to make their businesses stronger and their customers happier. So much so, I came home in November 2012 with six clients lined up and $265,000 in first year billings, plus commission on sales copy.

This is in addition to having gone from being a single copywriter living in Toronto, Ontario (almost 4,000,000) to being married with three children living in a small town of 12,000 in Illinois. What could have been a culture shock was significantly softened by finally having come into being part of a family.

My wife filed for divorce a week later.

During the divorce, I slept in churches around town in the Out Of The Cold program and spent my days in the library.

I made my way home to Canada after the divorce. The kid who grew up in a family that never loved him was now a man. A man whose dream of finally having a family had been shattered and torn from him.

Cranium Ex Rectum

My life motto today is simply Cranium Ex Rectum™.

Yes, pull your head out of your arse and face the reality in front of you. You can tell when people get it because they laugh

The whole point of the phrase Cranium Ex Rectum™ is to play on the pretentions of erudition. It sounds lofty in Latin and turns out to be simple, even crass, advice.

But the meaning is a little deeper, too. The cranium is really just the part of the skull enclosing the brain. Cranium Ex Rectum is about getting your brain unstuck from bad thought habits.

And If you know anything about me, you know I’m big on PEP (Personal Empowerment Practices) over POOP (Personally Obstructive Offensive Practices). So it really strikes me as appropriate – Cranium Ex Rectum – get your brain free of the POOP in your life.

Discovering My Cranium Was Buried

I learned a lot of POOP as a kid. Then I heaped more into my life as a teenager and young adult. I put on a real show of lying, being changeable, threatening, and criticizing. Anyone who thought I was a massive jerk had good reason to think so.

Being that person taught me a lot. Does that sound trite? Ooo, the big bully learned a thing ot two, did he? But I mean something rather different.

There was me, Conrad, a very caring, honest, accepting, encouraging, and supportive person. I hid myself away inside a shell of threatening, lying, and blaming because people terrify me. In my life, people have been incredibly, often violently, poopy toward me. You know how it is . . . You get hassled or tormented enough and you grow a shell as a last ditch effort at self-protection.

But I learned something surprising. That shell never provides protection. It only serves as your custom made prison. I met a lot of kind and generous people in the Out Of The Cold program. Talking with them helped me come to terms with two very important parts of reality:

1. The internal conversation we all have every day is the most important conversation of our life; and,

2. Adults get to choose who participates in, or influences, that conversation.

Getting My Cranium Ex Rectum

From the time I arrived home in Canada in August 2013 to the end of 2020, I read more than three hundred books from Jack Canfield, John Maxwell, Dan Kennedy, Dr. Terry Lynch, Thomas Joiner, Dr. William Glasser, C.S. Lewis, Dale Carnegie, Sarah Millican, Robert Plank, Gary Chapman, and dozens more authors. They all write about choices, self-image, and the power of personal responsibility. It was seven years of intense, PhD level education, in addition to a half century of lived experience.

My adult life – all the good and all the bad – is the direct result of choices I’ve made. I have learned a lot about myself, making and fixing mistakes, and how other people behave as a result of the choices I’ve made. The best way to share that learning is writing it down, yes?

The Power of Self-Image

Have you ever heard the phrase “When you find yourself in a hole, put down the shovel?” Well, it’s fair to say I started life in a hole of negative self-image. I made that hole wider, longer, and deeper by holding onto rage and being cruel to people around me.

Eventually, I put down the shovel, fashioned stairs to leave that hole, and built a strong, positive self-image. Was it all roses and honey? No. And I make no claim to having a perfect life.

And make no mistake, the hole is still there. There is nothing that can replace love and support that was never present. However, real effort can transform a crappy, dingy crawl space into a warm, light-filled, friendly, finished basement.

I’m just a man who has learned to stand on his own two feet, makes the best choices he can, and accepts responsibility for those choices.