Unlock Your Potential Through Healing Your Past (feat. Doug Dane)

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Hi, I'm Susan Drum, and welcome to the enlightened executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. This episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we help strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. Go to maritageleadership.com to learn more. Today we're talking about breaking free from adverse experiences from our past and how to thrive both personally and professionally. And I'm grateful to introduce my guest, Doug Dane. After a traumatic past filled with emotional, physical and sexual abuse, Doug beat the odds to find success in his own life, experiencing freedom, healthy relationships, and the abundance he always wanted. Inspired by his troubled childhood and the steps he took to overcome the typical trajectory for someone in his shoes, his first novel, Mistaken Identity, paints a pathway to personal freedom and provides 30 simple life lessons that can help anyone begin their journey to break free from a traumatic past, helping them find a better, happier life, both personally and professionally. So welcome, Doug.

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Well, I'm very curious to hear your story and I think it'll add a lot of color around how our past shows up today or how we can actually make sure that we start over and rebuild so that it doesn't influence us in ways that we don't want it to.

Right? Yeah, definitely. We dredge up the past, too.

Yes.

Yeah. Well, where do you want to start?

Well, tell me about your journey. Right. What. Where were you then? Where are you now? And what was most impactful along the way?

Yeah, I mean, in the context of what we're talking about, in the work you do, I grew up in a. A very. I'd probably, I guess I'd say a poor family. Parents were both violent alcoholics. It was a really dark place. I landed, I landed this family. I got adopted as a six month old baby. And so for the first number of years of my life, it was experiencing, witnessing trauma, emotional abuse, physical abuse, watching all kinds of violence with my parents, police visits. I mean, it was. It was a dark time. And then 13 through 15, I end up in this ring of pedophiles and sexually abused for two years that ends at. In a kidnapping at 15. And then, you know, like all people, you know, you turn to coping mechanisms. So I turned to drugs and alcohol and I was working in a factory at the time. And I just, I'm watch, I'm looking around and I got these ideas that I'm sharing with my buddies. In the factory about, I want to start a business and you know, I want to be in sales. And they're all looking at me like I got, you know, three heads, you know, and they're teasing me and. But I kept working there and I'm watching people really struggle. I go, this isn't for me. So I quit that and I got into business and failed miserably. I had no, I had no experience, no acumen, no nothing, no education. I mean, I barely made it into grade 10. I quit grade nine three times, barely got into grade 10. And so no, no, nothing to start out but just a. I don't know where the desire came from. And anyway, I started a couple of business, went bankrupt within a year and racked up a bunch more debt. And then I landed on my feet. And then I went to a, a seminar with a guy I'd never heard of. His name was Bob Proctor. And that seminar changed the course of this fledgling business career. And I learned a few things, primarily about success and earning money because I had just gone bankrupt. I had failed miserably. And I didn't understand why I couldn't earn it. I read a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And there's a, there's a promise in the book. He says it's mentioned no less than a hundred times. If you figure out the secret, you'll be swept on to success with that. I'm going to make a million bucks by the time I. I'm 25. And of course I was bankrupt. And so that seminar got me understand why I wasn't earning money. I had no idea had anything to do with where I had come from. So fast forward, you know, I was 23 at the time. I think when I started in the business, 39 age 39, my marriage breaks down. I wrecked it. I was very bad in relationships, very successful in business. I've always been a fairly intelligent guy on the outside. You know, I looked like I had it all together, was doing well. I was enjoying life and you know, nice home, nice car, nice trips, earning a lot of money, most, more than most people. I was a leader in my field here in the industry. I was in, in Canada. And by all accounts I was, you know, successful and I was a leader. I was in leadership positions at the time. And the marriage falls apart. I go for counseling and the lady suggested me from my family history questions that maybe there's something my past that was traumatic and abuse. I go, so everything I told you up until now was all blocked out. It came out at age 39, through this counseling. And I put the story together. I hired a private investigator, I got social services records, police records, school records, interviewed family, friends, neighbors, and this whole story just came out. And then I went public with it. I was in the front page of the national news here in Canada, was on television and some other TV shows and books and I just had a, I had a real passion to speak about it because when I went public first off, actually when I, when I got the story straight and clear in my mind, there was so much evidence right there to go. Well, no wonder, yeah what I was doing, no wonder I was feeling the way I was feeling towards my, myself and why I was, I was struggling with all the emotional and physical problems that came as a result of that. And that just gave me great understanding and it was really cool because my perception on the story was now clear. And so my perception towards me changed very fast. And it's like literally the, the shame, the trauma, all the negative feelings, all the negative feelings towards my parents, towards the pedophiles and sort of everything, it just almost like fell away. It was, it was miraculous. And then I carried on and I kept going and became more and more successful, but there was still, there was still something eating at me and I didn't know what it was. And then it took me a number of years to figure it out. And then I figured out and what I coined or call a mistaken identity. So I had a very mistaken viewpoint about myself and I was still carrying around in my subconscious and in my conscious still doubt, worry, a lot of second guessing, stuff like that. So I hadn't eliminated everything. So I went from here to here and then from there to here, but I was still stuck from back here, you know, and like I said, dredging up the past and others dredging up the past for you, they like to do that. So that's kind of the. Now here I am. The book came out in April and I've spent, you know, 30 years mentoring and coaching salespeople, managers, leaders, been a leader myself. And now I wanted to help other leaders and entrepreneurs and just everyday people understand why they're mistaken about themselves. They are mistaken about themselves. They've made mistakes, they're mistaken about what they believe, they're mistaken about the way they operate and it's causing them problems and they think there's something wrong with them and there's not, there's just something wrong with what they believe or wrong with the way they're, they're operating.

So they're telling themselves, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me, could you crystallize for me? What was your mistaken ability? What did you believe about yourself then and what do you know now?

So I. I was in a. I just got goosebumps with that question. I was in this guided meditation with a couple of clients. They wanted to speak at one of my seminars. I go, I'm not having you speak unless I know what this is. I'd never done one. I'm going, all right. I'm going to do this silly guided meditation, right? Because I didn't. I grew up in the corporate world, and, you know, we didn't do this kind of stuff, and so I was in this meditation.