Chicago Based Professional Speaker Paul Calhoun is a Published Author, 3rd Generation Power Broker and Mental Health Advocate. His experiences include working with a wide range of industries such as filming, trucking and the medical field. After reaching the height of his success, he retired. All this, and more, before his 50th birthday. Although he wasn’t born affluent, how he reached his level of success, is a story in, and of, itself.
Paul was raised in a unique environment compared to most. His mother was a loving mother, his father was psychologically abusive, and his brother was mentally handicapped. Both of his parents were highly effective power brokers – someone who greatly influences others to act toward a specific desired result – and raised him with the very actions that would become the foundation of his successes later in life. At the age of seven, while attending a private school, he started his first business. A business he still claims was put out of business by the Dept. of Nuns.
In high school, being an intellectual teenager, he failed most of his classes. When they investigated why, they discovered he was failing merely because the material being taught wasn’t challenging enough for him to willingly participate. Once they challenged him intellectually, he made the Dean’s List. Taking a few classes at a nearby college, he was also inducted into the National Honors Society, Alpha Sigma Lambda. A teenager living in the 80’s, he was highly effective in using ‘out of the box’ approaches to get his desired results. That is until his brother tragically passed away suddenly. It was then Paul fell into his own personal hell. This began his climb. His climb From The Pits of Hell, to The Heights of Heaven. And as every climber knows, when you begin climbing a mountain, you always start at the bottom.
Paul was a teenager when his brother passed away. He began isolating himself while fighting Depression and Anxiety on a regular basis. Being a latchkey kid in the 80’s, he wanted to deal with it in his own way. Out of the box. This resulted in him being in and out of group homes and constantly breaking the law resulting in a few juvenile incarcerations. He was in multiple failed relationships and couldn’t get a good hold on life. Throughout it all, he received a plethora of guidance from multiple mentors that would later aid him in rebranding his life. He endured this prolonged storm for nearly 25 years until an event in 2005 caused him to go about things in a whole new way. A disengagement. It was then that all the mentoring he had received came into clearer view. He wasted no time and worked fast and hard at what needed to be done for him to reach the summit of his climb. He already knew what worked, what failed, and what needed to be done. One step at a time, he kept his climb. Without any assurance, without any absolute, he kept looking up at the peak and kept his climb.
Once he applied the very principals he learned from his countless mentors, his climb began taking on a whole new level of success. Since then, he’s become a successfully published author, met countless celebrities, survived cancer and was able to retire before his 50th birthday. When he was a teenager, he couldn’t even afford to take the bus and now he travels internationally on a regular basis. All because he applied what his mentors told him and successfully made the climb. The climb From The Pits of Hell to The Heights of Heaven. Once at the summit, he never looked back. Now a philanthropist, he greatly enjoys working one of his greatest passions, helping others break out of their sick and tired.
“Climb the mountains in your life. I guarantee you, it’s well worth the view.”
Paul Calhoun
