Resilient Seeker Coaching | Ross Raymond Nunamaker

My Story

My collapse from heat exhaustion was the trigger that made me realize I had to substantively change how I was living. I never had experienced helplessness like not being able to stand after I had just been walking and listening to a performance. It woke me up. I decided to begin taking a deep dive into who I had become and who I wanted to be.

The heat exhaustion exposed a lot of underlying issues related to my nutrition and physical well being. The nutritional imbalance was a combination of my diet and alcohol consumption. I’ll address this in more detail in a future post as it was revealed and detailed at the end of August and not when I had the IV’s.

At this point I only knew I was dehydrated, probably suffered from heat exhaustion, and was told to listen to my body, keep fluids up, eat more balanced meals, take it easy and I’d have a follow-up at the end of the month.

There was more than my physical health in play. For context, the trigger was August of 2024. In May of 2022 I told my wife of 26 years I was filing for divorce. This was a decision I’d given progressively more thought to for the previous ten years.

In late October or early November 2022 she said she was moving out for the holidays.

My older daughter, who was working from home following the completion of her Master’s Degree, went with her. My younger daughter was in college completing the final year for her undergraduate degree.

After the holidays they didn’t return and she eventually gave me a date when she’d be getting what she was taking from the house.

To this day I haven’t seen my daughters or had any communication with them, though I’ve tried. I knew it was going to be hard on everyone and I knew this was a potential consequence, but when I came to the realization I couldn’t continue living the way I was, it was a risk I had to take. I had to trust they would eventually come around and at the very least speak with me about it.

Living on my own, having to revamp my nutrition, I was also trying to figure out what I wanted to do professionally in the long-run. I had taken a position at the local school district in October of 2023 as an Associate Teacher working with special needs and at risk students.

I really enjoy the work, the kids, and the people. It is stable work, close to home, with fixed hours, and good benefits. The only drawback is the pay.

I pretty much had a blank slate to work with.

Lessons Learned

I took this as an opportunity to rethink everything about myself. It is something I hadn’t done before as an adult, and should have. I’d encourage everyone to do this every few years.

Previously, when I lost a job, I typically scrambled to find the next job in order to provide for the family. I didn’t think “is this the job that I want to be doing?” I simply needed to do something. I was working on contract, so it was random based on the company determining if they wanted to continue spending on a project or not. You never got notice and it took about three months to get a new position. My wife only started working recently and it was part time at a preschool with no benefits, so it was up to me to provide.

Question to Consider

In hindsight, I should have filed for divorce earlier, but I thought it would be better to wait until the kids were out of the house. I almost, but didn’t quite make it. It probably made things worse by waiting and having issues escalate.

Have you put off taking action thinking the delay would result in a better outcome? Did it?

Preview

In my next post. I’m going to talk through how I began to rethink everything. To do that I began to develop a framework to help me outline my plan to progress from who I was then to who I want to become.