For a long time I thought I didn’t have it. I thought nobody loved me. I was militant. Stole cars. Broke into homes. Then I worked out that if I did things people liked, they’d love me. But that didn’t last long. Once I started doing what other people liked their list became longer and longer. Usually until I failed. It was then that I decided to become a world champion. I chose footy, but after four years of hard training, and getting to the top, it was like hanging onto a brick wall with my fingernails. I was good enough to get there, but not talented enough to stay. I burnt too many matches getting to the top to stay there. And besides, my lovability index was still hovering around 2/10. I tried finding someone to love me too. Quite a few. I even married one so she couldn’t leave. Or so I thought. When we don’t feel worthy of something, we sabotage it. One way or another, I was stuck at 2/10 for lovability. I built a business, made money but with my lovability index so low, my unworthiness for those success’ turned me into a desperado. By the time I made my first $1mil, my score was down to 1/10. (Although you could be forgiven for thinking it was 10/10 from all the fun I was having.)

I didn’t want to die poor. A 1/10 lovability score is absolute poverty. Money I had plenty. Success coming out my ears. All the houses, cars and holidays a man could dream of. Happy and blissfully ignorant children. So what did I do about it? I became a monk. I practiced meditation, yoga, fasting, oral cleansing and colonic hosing (clean from both ends). I didn’t eat meat. I put my plastic in the right bin and saved a few whales. The sun shone out my bum. I was so spiritual you could eat breakfast off my halo. But my not so karma, snarling dogma did a poop on my magic carpet and I stepped in it.

After ten years of this mung bean eating, yoga doing, meditation mastering, alternative monk in the Porsche lifestyle I’m so pleased to say that my lovability score rose to 2.1/10. A massive .1 rise in ten years. A miracle? A shot of grace from heaven? A transcendental transformation of human consciousness? No, simply a conversion from a good Aussie bloke with low self esteem into a self-righteous, incense burning, Buddha worshiping, hippie dickhead. I was so up myself in spiritual enlightenment my karma overtook my ego. I was so fucking enlightened light shone from my ears. Thousands of books, years of my life, sitting on my butt, feeling like shit. Oh, year, beam me up scotty. But no. I still needed to pay the rent, feed the world, go for a job and make love on about enough macroneurotic, genetically unmodified, organically grown, hand raised, individually washed in mountain spring water chanting virgins, dahl. I swear, on that diet I could have found employment as the jet stream in a wind tunnel for testing formula 1 race cars. Gas is good we used to say. But I doubt that now.

So with a prime lovability score of 2.1/10 and ten years in the bank studying Zen, Yoga, Meditation, Healing and Ayurveda and three more marriages caught in the tsunami of it all, I started on another adventure. I started writing books. Book writing is so cool. You can be a total legend in your own lunchbox. You can write to your heart’s content. I can be totally shit, totally blissful ignorance but if it’s working for you in this window of time in your life, you can write it without fear. Ahhh book writing. So confident was I in my book writing lovability experiment that I withdrew my entire superannuation at some significant loss to pay for the development of my five new books. I had many titles in my mind for these books but “stupidity gone wild” might have been the most fitting. It took me twice as long as I predicted to draft them, twice as much as I estimated to pay for editing, twice as hard to get them published and twice as many people as I hoped walking right past them on the bookshop shelves. Damn, naivety! Only to realise that my book coach had predicted all this on day one. He’d successfully published ten books, by writing them, launching them, relaunching them with a different cover and title, relaunching them a third time without changing the contents with another cover and another title to create ten best selling books. He warned me that book writing has nothing to do with the contents. He was right. Shit, the cost of experience again.

Still my lovability score rose from 2.1 to 4. The grind and commitment I made to something I wasn’t good at but loved doing was rewarding in itself.

Today, I write this with a lovability score of 10/10. What happened between the book writing era of the late 90’s early 2000’s and now is something you’ll need to hear personally in a coaching session or keynote. In the meantime, why not do your own lovability scores on the chart below?