About The waugh rooms
About paul
The Waugh Rooms in association with Lighthouse International Group is the fruit of my humbling entrepreneurial and servant leadership journey spanning the last 25 years of my life.
Quite simply, I whole-heartedly feel that we cannot consider ourselves as a progressive and successful global family until we are taking responsibility for the millions of human beings, both young and old alike, who still lack the basic qualities and opportunities of life. My life’s work is unequivocally devoted to creating human and global solutions to our most critical social challenges through the empowerment of the human being and uniting them in a genuine state of family and community.
I find and invest an immense amount of joy and pleasure in the simple things and am a passionate Liverpool supporter and love cricket.
Paul’s journey…
Pioneering thought-leader Paul Stephen Waugh sharing his insights and wisdom on various topics:
Growing Up Searching For Mentors
Since I was a young boy struggling just to get through the day with an alcoholic father and dysfunctional family, I asked the question “How can I be happy and successful?”; I was struggling at school and failing dismally. I knew deep down that the teachers and adults around me were struggling in their own way to achieve the same thing I was. I knew that they were not who I was aspiring to be in my life. I knew that their dogma that school was everything to me and my future was not true. I knew it was important to me in some way, but not to the degree they were pitching it at me.
I started in my angry, rebellious and critical way to undo the lie that I felt I was being sold. I did everything in my power to challenge every teacher and adult that I met, generally through disrespect. Mostly I would challenge their emotional
intelligence and capabilities because to me this is where the truth of who they were really lay. I realised already back then that most of my teachers and parents were not really just adults among us kids, but really kids among the legitimate
adults. I had been treated badly by adults and my trust and respect for them was low or non-existent.
“But where were the men? Where were the adults I could respect? Who would teach me, mentor me, wisely care for me, look out for me, lead me, love me even? I was a deeply intuitive child who would feel more and think less. Most of what I’m writing here is now more a case of me verbalising what I was feeling back then than what I was actually thinking. I could feel that things were not right with school and society. School and society looked at me often with as much resentment for me as I had for them and would think “not all is well with this boy.”; We were a mismatch and I was not backing down and nor was society. Then I had my first real life realisation that I could be more without being mainstream!
The Journey To Fulfillment
My mother who adored me, despite my challenges to her and others, tried everything to inspire me into believing in myself and society and showed me an article in a popular magazine for South Africans at the time. It was about a businessman in South Africa called Tony Factor. Tony Factor had severe learning difficulties as a child and was chronically dyslexic. He could not read or write at all, but he was one of South Africa’s most successful business people. He had a large family of seven children I think it was. The light came on for me. “I knew it”, I declared to my mother indignantly, “see he can’t even read and write and look at what he has achieved in his life.”; I now had a real life case, my hero Tony Factor; who I could throw at all and sundry selling me on societies do’s and don’ts. I must confess I became a bit of a nightmare from that moment onwards. Encumbered with low self-esteem and very little if any discipline I ran away, got involved in the wrong company and got into trouble with the law.
However Tony Factor was never far from my mind. I knew I was capable of more. I had this feeling both within myself and with people all around me that there was this thing that everyone was lacking. That people including myself as a child had this deep inner hunger, this personal yearning for something more. The need to be happy. To always have enough or hopefully to have vast amounts of whatever we were looking for in money, fame assets, respect, recognition, admiration, appreciation and to be important or valued.
This has been my life’s work for the last 40 years, the fruits of which I will be sharing through The Waugh Rooms and speaking to other experts and professionals to shed light on these crucial areas of life.
“The fruitages of the spirit are what life is truly made of: human life, it’s the makeup, the DNA, the constituent parts of human living and life.”
– Paul Stephen Waugh