Project Love

Our childhood home is our first school, and our parents are our first love teachers. Our capacity to love grows out of our first interactions with our parents and caregivers. Project Love is a systematic analysis of why most life crises have the issue of love at their core. It is based on a proven psychological concept that our childhood experiences become the blueprint that we use as adults to navigate our love relationships and the world. Our beliefs about love is a family inheritance, which has been passed down through many generations. Making a transformational change involves honest examination of our worldview that is essentially made up of our learned beliefs. This book offers new possibilities for happiness, which is nothing more than removal of what stands in the way of our natural ability to experiencing love.

Our collective yearning to love and to be loved has childhood roots that lie deep within the hearts of people of all ages, cultures, faiths, and backgrounds everywhere on our planet. Our deep human desire for love is a childhood phenomenon that follows us into adulthood and is our main drive for getting married and having a lifelong companion. We all have heard the saying, "If you can't love yourself, you can't love anyone else," yet we are not born knowing how to love ourselves or anyone else. Our capacity to love, as well as our impairments around love, grows out of the first interactions with our parents. Learning about love is just like learning a language: If we learn it in our homes when we are children, it becomes our native language that we use to express ourselves effortlessly. For most of us, love becomes a second language that we need to consciously learn as adults. Having come to the United States as a teenager from my native country of Iran, I know all too well that the later in our adult life we learn to speak a language, the harder it is to learn and the heavier our accent! I never expected to write a book about love because I have been struggling with it all my life. As much as I genuinely desired to love, I was miserably unhappy in my marriage. This book was born out of the dissolution of my marriage, which compelled me to explore the mysteries of love relationships. In a world that seems to have gone mad with mass shootings and public incivility, I share my life story to inspire hope that the foundation of love is built on the shoulders of loving parents. The essence of this book is to remind us all about the importance of love in all aspects of our lives, which is the foundation for a happy life that I plan to teach my children. Experiencing love may seem like a straightforward thing, but it is a skill that has to be acquired. School systems do not teach children about the most important topic in life, which is love. This must be learned in our homes. True love begins in our homes with our parents—if we were lucky—or with our children once we become aware of our enormous responsibility as parents. No parent can adequately articulate the experience of holding his or her child. The future of the world depends on parents' ability to teach their children how to become loving and respectful human beings, because all distressing habits of humankind are acquired after birth. There is nothing more powerful than the power of love to change the world by raising the next generation of our civilization who will not allow race to disconnect them, religion to separate them, or wealth to classify them. One mistake we can make is thinking that we, as parents, cannot make a difference.

Payman Fazly is Co-Founder of Parent Footprint, the first generation of interactive online training for parents simulates the experience of sitting down with a therapist. Payman has over twenty-five years of experience in translation of business strategy to execution plans and has spent twelve years at Cisco Systems leading the design and deployment of Cisco's project management framework. Prior to joining Cisco, Payman was in charge of consulting services at three start-up software companies, senior manager at Accenture and director of Information Technology at AT&T. Payman received an Executive MBA from Golden Gate University, and a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from California State University, East Bay, has completed Stanford University's advanced project management program, and has received Stanford Certified Project Manager (SCPM) and was a professor of MBA program at Golden Gate University. For more information visit www.paymanfazly.com.