George Haymaker - My Story
A photo of me during addiction (left) and after addiction recovery (right).
How did I end up becoming a Neuroscience Coach wanting to help others overcome behavioral challenges?
Well, the answer starts at birth…
I struggled with anxiety, the seeds of which were genetic and were exacerbated with childhood trauma.
I had experienced other related behavioral issues, including anger, lack of empathy, and ultimately an addiction to alcohol and pain pills as an adult. It didn’t help that I had a strong genetic predisposition to addiction in my family. Turns out that the combination of genetic predisposition to addiction, anxiety and childhood trauma makes it eight times more likely someone will become addicted.
As an adult professional I dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur and controlling my own destiny. After several years climbing the ladder in the hotel industry, I went out on my own, building and leading small to medium-sized companies while navigating the pressures of the business world. While I remained high functioning and performing for many years, I used alcohol and pain pills as a coping mechanism for pain management to medicate physical and psychological pain. After hitting bottom from addiction many years ago, I entered rehab and then started recovering, which changed me in profound ways, both personally and professionally.
At that time of my life, I had to take a hard look at myself. I remember sitting in rehab feeling horribly, wondering how in the world it had come to this and how my life had ended up this way. Given how far I had fallen, I felt like my only two choices were to die young, without fulfillment and contribution to the world, or pull myself out of my misery and rebuild my life into something different, as to what I had no idea at the time.
With the help of much introspection, self-education, therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous and a great sponsor, I began to put the pieces of my life back together in a new and different way.
Recovery wasn’t just about sobriety for me; it was also about understanding the root causes of what led to my addiction, learning how to address those root causes, building a new and different life. based on healthier intention and discipline.
There were a lot of behaviors that I needed to change. I developed an insatiable curiosity towards whether and how people can change. I read and studied, realizing that all my old behaviors and the new ones I needed to learn were available to me in my brain. That’s where my fascination with the brain and what it could do started to take hold.
A few years into Recovery, I founded a gut-healthy ice cream brand called ReThink Ice Cream after over-indulging on Haagen Daz during the early years of recovery! Its mission was to support mental health awareness and addiction recovery. I realized that by helping others instead of focusing on myself, I received relief from my anxious symptoms.
The more I shared my story and what I was learning about behavior change, the more people were inspired and wanted to know more. Getting behind an issue bigger than myself and realizing I could make a difference in other people’s lives, suddenly gave me the purpose and meaning in life for which I had been searching. Helping people change behavior for the better would be my life’s calling.
While the ice cream venture was fulfilling, I was spending more time operating the business of selling ice cream than I was helping others with mental health and addiction. I have since wound down that business and turned my attention solely to neuroscience coaching to achieve behavior change.
I’m now a trained and certified Solutions-Focused Neuroscience Coach/Consultant specializing in empowering professionals and organizations to achieve behavioral excellence. In today’s work environment, it is not uncommon to encounter managers or executives displaying disruptive, unproductive behaviors such as workplace conflict, bullying, narcissism, or even addiction.
If you're facing these challenges within your organization, you may be contemplating whether to rehabilitate these individuals or terminate their employment. From a financial and cultural perspective, rehabilitating an employee is most often the more prudent choice.
