How Comeback Road Began

A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM THE FOUNDER

THE STORY OF HOW IT ALL BEGAN

By Rev. Patrick Kelly, Founder

In the following story I want to take you on a sometimes painful personal journey down the road of my life and share with you how Comeback Road Life Achievement Seminars was formulated from my life and experiences. There are some parts of the following pages I would prefer not to publish for I am a private person. I would rather not give the details of the painful parts of my life. However, if you are serious about achieving more in life by joining Comeback Road Life Achievement Seminars then you may wish to know something about me, about my beliefs, and about how Comeback Road came into being.

For over thirty years, I have been giving small group, life achievement seminars, courses, and workshops. During that time over one thousand six hundred people have delved into what makes life work and how they can achieve more in the pursuit of their goals, objectives, hopes, and dreams.

My Childhood

I was born with a facial deformity in the mid 1940's and fortunately for me, I came under the care of a pioneering plastic surgeon by the name of Dr. Harold Trussler in Indianapolis. My deformity was partially repaired by Dr. Trussler and his assistants over a period of twenty-three years. When I was twenty-one, a researcher from Indiana State University in Terre Haute interviewed me and wanted to know how I avoided being institutionalized. You see, in the 1940's, kids with deformities were either institutionalized at birth because their parents did not want them or because they could not live with the shame and humiliation of being so different. I do not recall what I told the researcher who was working on his doctoral thesis. In the last seven or eight years I have come to realize I survived "in the outside world" because of my church, my family, and my classmates at my small school in my small home town in Indiana. In addition, my church and my Christian faith were the bedrock of my life. It is for this reason and many others that in your seminar we discuss the issue of faith in life. We do not discuss a particular theology. However, we do use the word "God" and we do discuss the importance of faith in God in all aspects of life. Also, if you look deep into the seminar material, you will see the spiritual underpinnings of everything you do in life.

Of all the positive influences in my life, the church was the shelter. The church that gave me a chance to find out how much God loved me and cared for me. The church people I knew showed me acceptance and understanding. They showed me how important acceptance and understanding are to every person on earth. If you become part of the Comeback Road family by joining as a member, if there is one thing you do, it should be to show everyone in or outside of your group you understand them and accept them. For even if you love someone and you never show them understanding or acceptance, they never know you love them.

Although I was living in a trauma most of my growing up years as a result of my deformity, I was somehow able to dodge and weave around the trauma because of my church. The experience of the trauma has been sealed over by Christ and His love for me. I treasure the schoolmates and friends I had. I treasure the Sunday School teachers, the schoolteachers, and the adults of my little town. I treasure my family members who lived with fear I would not make it in the world. I consider myself a truly lucky and fortunate person because I have had a chance to live and give back to others what I was given. Perhaps you will be able to take some of what I have been given and pass it on to others. In your seminars, we talk a lot about winning. In life, you win not when you stand over a person showing how much stronger you are. In life, you win when you defeat the darkness desiring to take you down. In life, you win when you help someone who has been defeated to learn how to win again.

What the church people in my boyhood church may not have known and what you need to know is how important your life is and how important you are to the world. What they and you need to know is we can all heal people as I was healed from the hurts and scars of psychological trauma. As you walk down the comeback road of your life, you meet people who need your healing touch. You, just an ordinary person, have the power to give away to others the substance to help others fill up their life. The people of my youth planted seeds in my life. These seeds are still sprouting and growing. Some of these seeds I want to pass on to you in your seminars so you can pass them on to others.

My Teen Years

I could not wait to grow up when I was a boy for I perceived the world of adults as being free of my trauma. However, when I was in high school, I began to have attacks or seizures of fatigue or sleepiness. As I grew older, these seizures grew worse and more disabling. Although I have been severely disabled due to this seizure condition called narcolepsy for many years, my God is good and He has blessed me with a wonderful wife and son. Although I live in daily physical pain, only God could bless me with what I have and enable me to reach out to persons like you who may in turn pass on what I have been given to pass on to others.

My College Years

I went to college twice. The first time I went to college I earned an associate degree I didn't really want and have never used. I was also, at that time, more of a bug on the wall than a college student. I was shy, never did anything but go to class and go home.

However, the second time I went to college I was determined to be different. The second time I went to college I was determined to be more, do more, and get off the wall to achieve more. Where I was attending classes, there were no student organizations. So, I decided to start a student academic club. I had no life experience starting anything. However, I talked to a classmate and asked him if he would be interested in starting an academic club and he said "Sure". Then I asked a few other people and they all said the same thing. Now at that point I am beginning to get out of my trauma period. Nothing heals trauma like courage and success. There isn't anything more healing than starting a group where people show up because of your efforts. We had a first meeting…then a second meeting…then a third. Now, 35 plus years later, over 40,000 students have been members of that club. It took no special training or expertise…just the courage on my part to start it.

Out Of College

I graduated from college and headed to Florida where I thought I had a job waiting in Tampa. However, when I got to Tampa the job opening had been closed and in 1969, in Tampa, there were few openings for new college grads. However, I did meet a psychologist who had started a new teaching and training center using advanced educational materials and electronic presentation equipment (high tech for that era). I was mesmerized, excited, enthralled, and obsessed. After numerous inquiry calls that drove the psychologist's secretary truly insane, I secured an interview with the founder. However, there was no job offer because there was no opening. The company was just starting and had relatively no staff. Giving up on the new start-up company, I returned to Indiana where I had job contacts and started a new position. However, I was still obsessed with securing a position with the start-up company in Florida. Through written correspondence, a written business plan I prepared, and my phone calls, I tried to persuade the founder of the new start up in Tampa that Indianapolis would be a great city to place his second teaching and training center. He was not convinced but his major investor heard about me. The major investor requested I come to their next board meeting in Tampa. So here I am, new college graduate, (I looked like I was still 18) meeting with big money, cigar-smoking, Texas oil men. My meeting with them lasted not more than fifteen minutes. During those fifteen minutes one of the board members came up with the idea of sending me back to Indianapolis to set up a dinner meeting of community leaders to see if the community would have an interest in this new teaching technology. As I accepted this assignment, it was my first impression I was being given the brush off. Perhaps none of the members of the board of directors even remotely believed this kid (myself) who looked 18 would even try to do such a thing. However, they did not know I had already started a group. They did not know how badly I wanted to be a part of their company. To cut it all short, I did go back to Indianapolis and in three days had set up a meeting with thirty of the most prominent people in Indianapolis. The psychologist came to give a presentation and the major investor came with him. The psychologist was scared witless and the major investor was VERY impressed. I got the job! All from setting up a meeting. However, the new start-up company failed and folded but the experience I had 38 years ago is now part of what is called Comeback Road. My experience in setting up the meeting is a part of what we do in Comeback Road. In addition, the methodology that produced fantastic results in the education and training programs used in Tampa have been implemented in many parts of your Comeback Road program.

Seeds Of Comeback Road Are Planted

While I was in Florida I met a very nice businesswoman whose initials are MB. She gave me a copy of a written motivational course. I had read motivational books but this was a motivational course. Not only did she plant a seed from which you receive the fruit, she also showed great faith in me as a person and great faith in my abilities. What is now Comeback Road has been made possible, in part, because of what she did.

Presentations

During one of the shutdowns of the Florida company before it folded, I needed to move back to Indiana because of a death in my family. However, my seminar days were not over. I started doing seminar presentations using the underpinnings of motivational literature, interactive design technology, and other fields of study.

We will now fast forward to 1998. I now live in Tucson and I had an opportunity to do presentations to groups of persons we shall call hostile. In thirty years of doing presentations, I had never given a presentation to a hostile group. The hostile people in Tucson were ordered to attend the seminar against their will. They did not want to be there. They were convicted felons, addicts, pushers, alcoholics, the mentally ill, and generally angry homeless people. Before the first presentation I was very nervous and had reasons to be so. The seminar bombed. I don't mean it just did not go over. I mean it bombed! As many times as I had been in front of people giving the same basic presentation of the same basic material, the seminar had never bombed. The anger came out and they directed their anger out at me. The arrangement was that I was to do this seminar every week. After the first week, I had big doubts but thought it was just the first group. I thought maybe I just had a bad group. So, I did the seminar the second week with a new group with the same result…angry people…angry at me…not good. After the seminar was over, I decided to give the seminar a going over. I put in new illustrations, stories, examples… really spiced it up. The third week, bombs again! At that point, I had given up. These people, I decided, were beyond any hope of building anything toward any kind of life achievement framework. This was on a Friday. By Saturday, I decided to give it one more shot.

During the week, I decided to use a common ordinary analogy to life to explain how life works. (When you come to one of our meetings we will reveal to you the common ordinary analogy I used. The analogy clearly demonstrates to everyone they already have personal management assets.)

HOW I WAS STUNNED, SHOCKED, AND AMAZED

The fourth week I go in expecting the worst. The seminar starts and I use the new analogy to life. The group gets positively involved. An hour later, after presenting the same material to the same kind of people, they leave shaking my hand and THANKING me! I was shocked. I was stunned. Using this new analogy to life was a defining moment.

There are some moments in life you will not forget. I remember Nov. 22, 1963 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I remember Christmas 1980 when we walked into the kitchen of our home with our new-born son. We all remember 9-11. On the same level of those events is the event of seeing angry homeless men, persons right off the street, go from being hostile, hateful, and antagonistic, to being involved, excited, thankful, hopeful, and hungry for the truth about life and how to achieve more in life. On that day, when the sky opened and these men and women turned around in their attitudes and life, I finished up the seminar in a state of stunned disbelief. As people left the room they shook my hand and thanked me. It was one of the most humbling and moving moments of my life. I walked to the car but did not feel the ground beneath me. I opened the car door and sank into the car seat trying to process what had just happened.

We will use the same analogy in your seminar, I saw a fantastic turnaround. So profound were the changes in attitude in the attendees in regard to their life, I even did a scientific survey. In working with these homeless people, I could see the look in their eye when I gave them the truth. There was a hush in the room because of the truth imparted to them. Mind you, these people had just come in off the street or were in a homeless shelter. To give the truth about how life works and to have the truth about how life works gratefully received, is a humbling experience for the presenter.

To make sense of the dramatic turnaround in these people who had no hope but found hope, I told myself I would do the seminar the same way again, and the next time we would be back to "normal" meaning more anger, more hatred, more desperation, and more hopelessness among the participants. The next seminar time arrived and I anticipated the same negative reactions I had seen in the first weeks. But I was happily stunned again.

In this next seminar group there were also more turnarounds, more hope, more promise, and more enthusiasm. When the seminar ended, the attendees shook my hand, thanked me, and I was as pleasantly shocked and stunned again. This time I knew what the analogy I had discovered was no fluke. I knew with the analogy, I had discovered a way to reach into the heart and soul of a person using personal management assets or wisdom already known to the person.

What also amazed me and what will amaze you is everything we discuss in your seminars is already known to you. The management wisdom we teach is not new, but is buried within you and is generally unknown until you see it. This old wisdom within you, with our help, will be applied, explained, and given to you in new ways and presented in a new manner.

The following years were filled with hostile groups every week, but the use of the analogy as an illustrative technique, has in every instance, tempered the hostility and communicated truth, understanding, and a wisdom we all possess.

About Content

Over the years, as I have presented seminars, courses, and workshops, my files of seminar content grew. Today, the amount of material is so large we may never use it all. As persons, we are so often assaulted by the problems, adversities, difficulties, and responsibilities of our personal, business, and professional life we can lose a common sense perspective on things. People want common sense truth about how things work in life. Our every intent every week is to bring you guaranteed common sense truth in the form of management success strategies that work for life, every time, all the time.

Here are a few words about ethics and success and how we view these key factors as being linked together [Read More On The Next Page]

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