Every human being has his or her life journey. It can last from a few seconds or to the longest lifetime of all. Everyone life experience is unique and special and we all have a different purpose towards the journey.
Coming from my personal experience, I had so much to learn from my past and so much to look forward in the future. However, there is one thing for sure that there are still a lot of things that I don’t know and I am eager to learn and explore until the end of my life. Relationship is one of them.
From the beginning of my childhood, relationship has always been a subject that triggers me the most. When I was young, my parents were divorced and I was always ashamed of the situation in front of my friends or my classmates. I remembered there was an incident in my teenage years that I invited a bunch of my friends to come over to my apartment for a soccer game in our parking lot. However, I never allow them to go up to my apartment because I have a fear that they would find out my parents were divorced. Why do these life events leave such a big influence on my behavior or actions?
The answer is fear and shame. In human psychology, human has always wanted to avoid pain and gain pleasure. This has been in existence since the creation of human civilization and lasts until now unless there is a conscious change in human psychology that our ultimate fears “we are not enough” and “we are not being loved” are non-existence. Having said that, relationship can always create these painful and happy experience for us because what else in this world light us up more than anything in life, including money, fame, identity, etc.
So I believe firmly how relationship plays an important role in our lives and often times no one teaches us about relationship in schools, colleges or workplaces. Not to mention our parents could be a bad influence on our relationship stories or they just don’t know how to teach their kids.
From my experience since birth up to now, I had personally witnessed many challenges and stories towards my purpose on relationship today. I had made a very firm key decision when I was young that I will always treasure, appreciate my future marriage and will put a lot of effort to make it work. When you were so young to make this key decision, actually we don’t really have much clue what it means. However, I still remember this vividly because that is what I asked myself when I was influenced by my parent’s divorce.
As years went by, I got married and started a family. During those 10 years of marriage, it wasn’t easy at all. I went thru financial troubles and at the same time had to deal with the loss of our first child. But there was so much that I could learn from these painful experience as to GROW myself to become a better person, a better husband, and a better man. And God always has his PURPOSE, he chose to take my late wife away and end her suffering on cancer in 2008. At the same time, I was dealing with my mother’s passing before so I was handling double “grief” during that year.
People often asked me, how could you handle all the PAIN and SUFFERING? My answer to them was “I was not OK”. I could not sleep for a few months and lost over 20 pounds and more so thought I was also having cancer. But often times, whom we surrounded with makes all the differences in the world. I remembered every single thing that my mentor Tony Robbins taught me at the time and all the support from my friends, I made some firm decisions.
1) What am I focusing on?
2) What does the event mean to me?
3) What am I going to do about it?
Because of these 3 important questions, I had answered all of them. Instead of focusing on grief, let’s focus on how to begin a new life and taking care of my very young child. The passing of my family members made me stronger in terms of dealing with all kinds of challenges and made me a better individual. I can always start a new journey in life with a new relationship, new business and use my life experience to empower others.
Now the rest is history. After numerous years of bad dating, result-less relationships, and learning how to understand relationship better as a masculine man, I now got married last year and began my new love journey with my beautiful wife Carmen. As I said previously, I am still learning the essence of great relationship every day and respecting the differences between two people. Tony Robbins once asked me, what dimension of relationship are you operating daily? I have a very honest answer towards his question, I operate daily as a taker, a matcher, and a giver. However, I choose to devote more of my time and effort to become a giver and treasuring my partner’s needs more than anything.
David Yeh Junior
Cheif Empowerment Officer