Allow me to introduce myself...
Hi, I’m Ken Jackson, life coach, ordained shaman, #1 International Best Selling Author, public speaker, fitness coach, and online entrepreneur. My coaching is certified through the AUNLP, where I’m also certified in LOA and am currently pursuing certifications in NLP and hypnosis. Its my mission to help others rediscover their passions, overcome hardships, and create lives they truly love and enjoy, and I bring to the table more than just theory.
Experience, not theory...
To reach the point where I am today, my journey has been anything but a straightforward path. Physically and emotionally abused as a child, I grew up facing the challenges of depression and low self-esteem. Because of these challenges, I struggled to find solid employment with stable companies. While my bosses always valued me for my work and work ethic, often making me foreman or dept. head, I found himself constantly bouncing from one low paying job to the next. It was after getting laid off as the result of a merger that feelings of not being able to make forward progress in my life and career prompted my first suicide attempt.
While physically and emotionally abused as a child in his own home, Ken was exposed to healthier environments at sitters’ homes while at a young age. While the abuse did leave Ken with some hurdles to overcome, it also gave him a personal understanding of the impact of hardship and inner conflicts. Meanwhile, the contrasting positive influences instilled in Ken the value of compassion and as well as the ability to sympathize with experiences and viewpoints that were different than his own.
Out of the Abyss...
After attempting suicide again a couple years later, I decided I had to make seriously changes to my life or I’d probably succeed at killing himself next time, (After all, isn’t the third time supposed to be the charm?) but when I sat down to figure out what changes I needed to make, I realized that I didn’t have any idea what direction I wanted my life to take. I knew what I didn’t want. I knew I didn’t want the insecurity of having someone else having the say over what I was going to do for a living, so that meant becoming self-employed, but I didn’t have a clue what business I wanted to pursue. I had spent so much time trying to make others happy that I had pushed my dreams off to the side for so long, I had lost touch with what they were.
What followed was a period of exploration,
. While I had already begun to pursue a different religion than the one I was raised in, I began developing an eclectic faith drawing on beliefs and practices with which I identified. Career-wise, I continued standard employment while I experimented with various businesses and business models and even taking some courses in pursuit of a business degree.
While exploring real estate as an option, I was introduced to online and affiliate marketing. I soon realized that this was a model that best fit what I could see myself doing, but I didn’t have the needed skills. Learning the skills was slow-going. Sure, all the information was out there, but I didn’t even know what I needed to know. I was getting absolutely nowhere on my own.
So, I sought mentoring. I tried several courses. While most had some value, I kept finding the formats insufficient for handling the full range of questions my lack of experience left mt with, and worst off, two of the biggest names in the industry burned my very badly, one even failing to provide my with access to the training and then refusing to refund my purchase.
In spite of this, I continued to try to make something happen, slowly making progress. Eventually, both my business experiments and my spiritual studies lead me to the same spot: LOA.
really began to examine what was wrong with his life. Career, While Ken did choose to embrace compassion rather than violence, In addition to my current occupation(s), I’ve taught auto mechanics (even across a language barrier), been a production engineer, programmed robotic punches and laser cutters, operated a press brake, done siding, HVAC, cabinetry, worked in produce, and even tested rods for BowFlex machines. No matter which field I work in, I frequently find myself to be soon in a supervisory or foreman position.
In addition to my various employments, I’ve also studied business, CAD, machining, comparative religions, hypnosis, computer tech, and I’ve also taken leadership courses, and I’ve been certified as a Law of Attraction “practitioner”.
I enjoy traveling, camping, biking, four wheeling, and classic cars. Side hobbies include history and religious histories, crypto-biology, archaeology, “lost” civilizations, drumming and playing the flute.
Future plans include RVing around the US to explore sites of natural or historic interest, studying bio-chemistry, and learning to play guitar.
While today I’ve racked up a few accomplishments and have a life that just keeps getting better, a large chunk of my life was completely different. You see, I was a battered child. I have several memories of things like being woken up by being thrown through a wall, and being kicked in the chest until my ribs cracked. I know of at least three times when it was my father’s intent to kill me. Do/be good? Do/be bad? It didn’t matter. I was going to get beaten anyway.
But as bad as the physical abuse was, it didn’t cause near the long term damage nor take as long to heal from as the emotional abuse. You see, my mother was a saint. Literally. She was sainted at least twice and I believe also a third time by her church. Meanwhile, in her eyes, I was the “Spawn of Satan”. (Hey! Don’t blame ME!! You’re the one who married he guy!) Nothing I could do was ever good enough for her. Not even taking care of her and my father when he became disabled and she had had her second stroke. Until the day she died, she considered me “evil”.
Meanwhile, my grandmother kept preaching her philosophy of “Don’t try. It’s not worth the effort.”
Into the Abyss
As mentioned, I’ve had several different jobs. The reason for that is because of my having a critically low self-esteem, I would always take the first job that would take me. Now, all of my bosses liked me and my work ethic, but many of my jobs were with unstable companies or I’d get laid off in a merger or something similar.
It was after one such loss due to a merger that I was feeling so unable to have any lasting positive influence on my career, and thus, life, that on February 2nd, 2000, that I made my first attempt at suicide. A second attempt was to follow about a year later.
White knuckling it
A year after my second attempt, I began feeling that I was in yet another downward spiral, and so I finally decided to get help. Why didn’t I get help after my first or second attempts? Because of the stigma attached to it. My self-esteem was low enough as it was. I didn’t want people thinking that I was some sort of mental case, too.
I’m not going to lie. The road out of the Abyss was not an easy one. We were never able to find an anti-depressant that worked for me that didn’t have debilitating side effects. Medications weren’t going to be my answer. I was put into a Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) group, and there I learned to basically maintain a fairly stable level. I could survive, but I wasn’t happy, nor was I stable enough for a serious emotional hit.
The hit came in the form of slanderous accusations and the betrayal of all but one member of my religious group at the time. I was preparing to make my third suicide attempt when I was interrupted by a friend stopping by to visit.