Awesome at Being Awesome: A Self-Help Book for People Who Hate Self-Help Books

By Danny Pehar

When you were a kid you dreamed of building spaceships and being a superhero. Everything was magic, everything was awesome. But then you suffered disappointments: weight issues, relationship problems, money troubles, career troubles. Eventually the impossible was no longer possible. You lost your awesome.

But what if you could get it back? You can. Through funny, informative and inspiring stories from his life and work experience, Danny Pehar shows how strengthening one aspect of the three main parts of your life – mind, body and soul – will help you strengthen and balance the others.

And the results? You will learn to do an awesome amount of awesome things – from weight management to career management, from saving money to saving relationships, from building the perfect résumé to building the perfect speech, from getting through the toughest job interview to getting through the toughest day.

PRAISE FOR AWESOME AT BEING AWESOME
“Danny is a good boy.” –Danny’s dad

“This book is awesome.” –Danny’s friends

“Danny has great hair.” –Anonymous (but probably Danny)

“This book is better than the last one you read.” –Danny’s sure someone said this

“This book is better than ice cream.” –Danny’s almost positive he heard this one guy say this

“This book is like a hug, combined with a high five and a GPS through life.” –Someone really cool said this

“You know that helpful friend that comes over and is funny, easy to listen to, gives great advice and tells good stories? That’s what this book is.” – Someone very insightful said this

“You are already awesome. Now learn how to be awesome at being awesome!” –Danny Pehar

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPS Books
• Release date: Feb 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772360301

Danny Pehar

Having to wear his older sisters’ clothes to school because his parents felt that saving a few bucks was worth his utter humiliation, Danny Pehar learned to get through tough times by putting a comical spin on things. Danny began his corporate life by taking an entry-level job so entry level he was told he needed to be promoted just to reach the bottom. Working his way up from underneath the bottom, he has sold and worked on multimillion-dollar projects as an entry-level employee, a manager, a director and an entrepreneur. In addition to his business success, he is also a mixed martial arts enthusiast, a children’s book author and a stand-up comedian with fans in Canada, Australia, Europe and the United States. Whether he has succeeded as a champion or taken a brutal beating, Danny has a story to tell that will make you laugh, make you think and make you awesome!

Book preview

1

My First Life Lesson

I grew up with Eastern European immigrant parents. We didn’t have much, but most of the time we were pretty happy. Sometimes, however, it outright sucked.

Like many kids in similar situations, all of my things were hand-me-downs, which I suppose isn’t too bad, except for the fact that I had two older sisters. No, I didn’t wear any dresses to school, but, yes, on occasion I did have to wear clothing originally meant for them. Every now and then this was very bad news for me – but great news for kids who wanted to make fun of me.

One of the most dreaded T-shirts in my hand-me-down wardrobe, clearly meant for a young girl, had the caption I love Bon Jovi with a picture of his face in the middle of a huge pink heart. Wearing it was my way of telling bullies, If you’re not feeling creative today, don’t worry about it. I’m gonna make this really easy on you. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you it’s pretty hard to muster up the strength to fight back and prove your toughness when you’re wearing an I love Bon Jovi T-shirt.

Worse than the shirt were my skates. My school had an ice skating program, and my parents insisted I didn’t need to buy my own skates for it. They figured, like always, I could make do with something previously used by my sisters. The fact that all girls’ skates were white and all boys’ skates were black didn’t matter to them if it meant saving some money.

At first I didn’t think it would be so bad. After all, the white skates certainly went well with most of my other teen girl outfits. Besides, what else could the kids in school possibly say to me that they hadn’t already said? What I didn’t take into consideration, however, is that growing up in Canada, a place where we love our hockey (everyone but me, for obvious reasons), means you can’t be a boy with white skates.

Now, even without the girls’ T-shirts, pants and socks, I was horribly uncool. But the skates put things over the top. After repeated begging on my part, my parents felt bad that all the kids were making fun of me. But they thought it would be crazy to part with cash just because of color. They repeatedly said, Color doesn’t matter. All that matters is what’s inside. Sounds like a great line for race relations, but they said it only because they were incredibly cheap.

To shut me up without spending any money, my dad painted my skates black, which I thought was brilliant. I went around school bragging to anyone who had ever made fun of me that my parents had come into a bunch of money and bought me new skates. I even threw in a comment about how the only reason I was still wearing the I Love Bon Jovi shirt was because I really did love his music, not because my family was insanely poor.

This strategy worked until I stepped on the ice. I wasn’t a very good skater at this time. All of my skating experience had been with white skates, and, as you can imagine, it’s hard to learn something like skating when you’re desperately hiding your face from certain embarrassment. Of course, as my new skates hit some of the boards, thanks to my lack of skill, the paint began to chip off.

Now, I’m no doctor, but I’m telling you, those kids must have had amazing eyesight, because they were able to spot a tiny speck or two of white from all the way across the rink. Cue the laughter and pointing. In that moment, no amount of Bon Jovi music could have helped me.

I thought I was going to die, but not only did I survive, I survived with a great story to tell.

This is when I learned my first life lesson.

Some of our best stories come from some of our worst experiences, so whenever I go through something rough, I try to think about it as a story I will tell one day. I learned at an early age to ask myself, Is there something good, however small, that I can take from this bad?

It’s been said that the hardest struggle is the caterpillar’s attempt to break free from its cocoon. If you saw this struggle, you might want to cut the cocoon to free the young butterfly. But if you did, the butterfly’s wings wouldn’t be strong enough and it wouldn’t survive. Struggle is nature’s way of preparing us for what’s coming.

Pretty deep, eh? I got it from an episode of Lost, but if anyone asks, let’s say it came to me on a mountaintop while I was helping a goat deliver its baby. Anyway, regardless of where it came from, it speaks to my first life lesson, that struggle doesn’t have to be such a bad thing. Approaching life with this attitude can help us deal with many of the things that come our way. The idea is to find out what that good is and focus on it until we get through the bad.

So there I was, a very uncool young boy in elementary school with very little money, white skates and girly T-shirts. But I was also armed with my first life lesson, a boatload of good stories and a relatively positive attitude.

In addition to helping me have a good attitude, my first life lesson gave me an appreciation for life lessons in general and for tips of any kind. I was always on the lookout for how to do things better. If I saw someone getting into great shape, I was the first guy asking, How did you do it? If someone was really good at something I wanted to be good at, I hounded them for advice. I learned early on that the difference between winning and losing can come from the smallest of tips.

And that’s what I’m here to explain to you through a series of stories, guidelines and strategies to make you better and to make your life easier. Consider this book your quick guide to being awesome at being awesome!

2

The Secret to Everything Awesome

AFTER I graduated from college my mother got pretty sick. She had cancer for eight years, and the chemo really took its toll. Eventually she was admitted to a department of the hospital where, unfortunately, patients don’t leave because they’ve gotten better.

I was incredibly depressed during this time. I tried to channel my first life lesson and focus on the good, but I just couldn’t see any. I had just landed my first office job and had started off well, but my work began to suffer because of my mother’s situation, not to mention I was eating my feelings and getting incredibly fat. The extra weight was an extra problem I certainly didn’t need.

One day my cousin came to visit my mom in the hospital. He had moved to New York a few years back and was kicking some serious butt in business. Thanks to my long-standing instinct of asking for advice, I mentioned I was on the verge of getting fired from my job and asked for any tips he might have.

He looked me up and down and said, You’re looking pretty out of shape. When was the last time you were in a gym?

This, of course, insulted me and somewhat confused me, so I fired back at him. What does that have to do with what I’m asking for? What does my being out of shape have to do with my job if I work in an office?

My cousin went on to explain that it is all connected, that the way to happiness and success is through balancing body, mind and soul. He certainly didn’t invent this way of thinking. Disciplines like Tai Chi and Yoga have promoted this for centuries. However, for many of us, the words body, mind and soul conjure up images of hippies sitting around and listening to music. Sounds like fun, but when it comes to a way of life, not realistic.

But let’s step away from those images and look at things from a practical point of view. Think about the last time you were nervous about something and felt sick to your stomach. Something in your head made you physically ill. Now think about how good you felt after an empowering workout. Something in your body improved your mood. There is no denying the connection between our body, mind and soul.

The way my cousin looked at it, our body represents our health, strength and weight and how we feel about our appearance. Our mind represents things like our career, our finances and our education. Our soul represents everything else: our family, our relationships, our hobbies, our social life, our adventures, our charity, our connection to something spiritual.

Some people look at multiple successes in the same category and feel they have a balanced life. For example, they may say, I have an expensive car, an expensive house, expensive clothes. Why do I feel like something is missing? The reason is that their successes are all in the same category. There is no balance with anything else. How many times do we hear of someone who seemingly has it all but ends up incredibly depressed or even suicidal? We need to balance all the pieces that go into being human.

Sometimes we may want to intentionally unbalance ourselves. Maybe we just got a new job and need to spend most of our time on that, so we temporarily pull away from our family and other important things. Maybe a family member is sick, so we temporarily pull away from our jobs or school to take care of them. Or maybe we’ve gained a bunch of weight on vacation, so our main priority when we get back home is to lose that weight. It’s okay to unbalance ourselves, as long as we know it’s temporary and we’re eventually going to balance things out again.

The bad news is that all it takes is for one of the categories of body, mind and soul to be off and it can drag the other two down. In my case, my mother’s sickness was hurting my career and my health.

But the good news, as my cousin explained to me, is that success in one category can help pull the other two back up and help turn everything around.

That’s why he asked me about the gym. When I told him work wasn’t going well and I was on the verge of getting fired, he knew my mind category was not strong. With my mother being sick, he knew my soul category wasn’t strong either. His goal was to give me success in the easiest category for me to