Tim Bauers Vice President of Allied Restoration:

A Professional Water Restoration, Mold Remediation and Fire Damage Restoration Company

Allied Restoration is a great place to work for a number of reasons, but what I find most rewarding is being able to guide people through an anxious, scary time in their lives. When a family goes through a home disaster, they are understandably shaken. At Allied, we work hard to alleviate stress, establish a plan, and transform a difficult experience into something positive.

This is a journey I empathize with because it’s one I’ve traveled myself. For the first 31 years of my life, I struggled mightily with obesity. At my heaviest, I weighed well over 400 pounds. In 2010, I committed to getting healthy for real, without shortcuts or easy solutions. Over the next 14 months, I managed to shed 225 pounds, though I prefer to think of it as losing one pound 225 times. I say it this way because change — real, lasting change — is an incremental process, rather than a finish line you cross one time.

Everyone has issues they hope to improve, and the first step is always staring the problem in the face. For far too long, I made excuses for my weight and evaded the fact that I was engaged in a wildly unhealthy lifestyle. Only once the blindfold was lifted could I approach my weight problem with the resolve needed to succeed. Denial might allow us to escape our problems momentarily, but they will never really go away until we are willing to recognize that they exist.

Another thing inhibiting me was a crippling fear of failure. Our society demonizes failure when really we should celebrate it as a crucial part in the process of growth. Ironically, perfectionism can be something that stifles instead of inspires us. It makes us act conservatively rather than reaching for what we truly aspire to become. When we set goals, which a lot of us are doing at this time of year, too often we quit at the first setback. During my weight loss, every day was not a victory, and there were days when I felt horrible. Those moments, however, were as important to my long-term success as the most triumphant ones. After I accepted that my path to health would not be one of constant progress — that I would take steps back along the way — I developed the willpower required for meaningful, permanent improvement.

My ambition of achieving a healthy lifestyle also became possible when I started doing it for the right reasons. A lot of people decide to lose weight because they want a “beach body” or because it’s an obvious New Year’s resolution. The truth is that these motivators rarely work. We should strive for self-betterment for its own sake. When I realized that I wanted to lose weight to feel better, both physically and emotionally, suddenly my desire grew. I stopped seeking external motivation and relied on the internal power I knew I possessed, however long it had been buried.

Facing the thing I feared most about myself gave me the strength to know there is nothing I cannot accomplish. When we use trauma as fuel for transformation rather than something to run away from, it’s remarkable what we can conquer. Ships that stay in the harbor rust and grow barnacles because they aren’t meant to languish in one place. We should all be willing to set out on a great voyage this year, regardless of what looms on the horizon.

After I accepted that my path to health would not be one of constant progress — that I would take steps back along the way — I developed the willpower required for meaningful, permanent improvement.

These improvements in my mindset allowed me to jump miles in my professional career. I went from primarily chasing fires to doing every type of restoration service available including water damage restoration, mold remediation and reconstruction.