A Blog to Help You Become the Best You, You Can Be.
Welcome to Becoming Scrooge…
I am very happy to welcome you to my blog. It really is my honor you stopped here to check it out. I hope you make Becoming Scrooge a part of your weekly routine. Becoming Scrooge is a personal development site written with the hope of helping you become the best you possible. This blog came about as I was watching A Christmas Carol and had an epiphany that I liked the story so much that I would base a blog around it. This timeless story, when taken to heart, can propel you to a quality of life you previously only dreamed of. The blog will also provide links to Ted talks, You Tube Videos, books, and other resources to help you in your journey.
This blog is a platform for leveraging the countless life lessons available from the book A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This blog is about me helping you to find ways to become the best person you can be. Ultimately, the blog is my way of trying to help you break out and become happier, become more productive, become more resilient, become more creative… become that which you desire to be. I want to help you avoid all the pain and struggles I went through and take the lessons I learned along the way and leverage them for you to come to answers and methods that work… for you!
Who am I….
My name is Carl Berendsohn. As we go through this journey together, I will try to add tidbits about me and my background into each episode of the blog. I struggled for decades with trying to understand why I am here. What is the purpose of my life? At times I became so frustrated that I would walk out into the woods and scream into the wilderness asking for a sign, plead to God for a clue, struggle with looking for my place in the world. I constantly would tell myself that there had to be more than “this”. I had a good life, a good job, had a good family but there had to be “more”. My brain was constantly looking to answer the questions: Why am I here? What am I specifically unique at? After countless hours of pondering, the answer actually came to me in an instant. The answer is actually quite simple. I am the only… me. That may seem too easy to some of you. We are bombarded with messages, images, expectations and desires others have of us. It is easy to lose track that we are here to be our best selves. The next step was figuring out what made me, me. That step is what led to this blog and several book projects I am working on. More on that later…
Beginning our journey, together…
If you want to achieve anything, then you will need an intimately clear vision of what you want to be, have and do. If you don’t consciously work on becoming the best you, you will become what someone else wants of you. To find the answers to these life questions, I have to be me, and you have to be you. This is not as easy as it sounds. I talked with a rep’ about signing up for one-on-one coaching from a “certified coach” from the company founded by who is perhaps one of the largest names in the industry today. As I talked to the coach, they sounded just like Mr. X and kept telling me if I go through the program I will learn to be like X. I told him, actually no I don’t want to be like X, I want to be me and trying to be him feels phony.
After much thought and introspection, I came to realize that at my core, I am a storyteller. I see the story behind everything. Objects, people, events, movies, things, buildings, businesses… what is the underlying story? Who did what? Why did they do it? What message did they want to send? Why here? Why then? Who founded the company…For me, the list of questions goes on and on. I enjoy uncovering the story behind things. That is just part of who I am.
In my journey to understand who I am, why I am here, and what I want out of life, I sat down countless times to reflect on things I have done in life, consider what brought me joy, inventory what skills I have, ponder the vision of life I had as a child, and contemplate what other people accomplished to see if I could find a role model who had traits, skills, knowledge and abilities that I wanted. It was a long process, but in the end, I landed at an interesting point. I decided the person that had an inspiring journey to becoming their best, and the person that had values and beliefs that would help me obtain the life I want to have is…. Ebenezer Scrooge. That idea led to the creation of this blog. Becoming Scrooge. I have lived the lessons I share with you thru this blog. I transformed my life with the lessons I will share with you here. As stated earlier, my hope for this blog, is by leveraging the universal lessons of A Christmas Carol I can help you become your best you.
…”He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew. …it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”