Yubbie

Book excerpt: Brutally honest in its telling, readers will find themselves engrossed as Joe shares a penetrating insight into the possibilities of transformation, using his own life's painful trials and ultimate success as examples. Joe was an easygoing and sensitive "fat" kid who fell victim to merciless bullying. Humiliation turned to anger and towards a life of "looking out for number one". For most of his teens and early adulthood he became a self-absorbed cheater, drug abuser and alcoholic who cared only for himself and his pleasures. He learned that his abuses came at a high cost, losing his first professional job and unable to maintain any enduring relationship. Then, in 1982 he was critically injured in a car wreck, landing in a chronic pain clinic, barely able to move his body. Lying there in the hospital bed paralyzed by pain he had an epiphany that the key to happiness was not the self-oriented life he was living but on helping others. Slowly, he refocused his mind on healing his broken body, an effort that took almost seventeen years. He transformed himself from near-cripple to a Black Belt in martial arts, long distance bike rider and personal trainer. His transition was not complete, however. He was only able to repair his body because he was able to repair his mind. His thinking changed his physical life, and then went to work on the outside world. He started with fostering troubled gang members and over fourteen years he and his wife helped more than 100 children adolescent teens navigate through troubled upbringing. He then started to share the philosophy of his holistic, mind-based, life-changing system that transformed him from an "everyday Joe", into a happy, caring individual who embraces life and works everyday to help people do the same.