We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Allen Brokken. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Allen below.

Allen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

If you’ve only met me professionally, you might not know I’m a husband and father of three. Early in our careers, my wife and I decided that one of us would stay home to care for our children. When our daughter was born in 2000, who would stay home became a simple math problem. My position was in IT, and my salary had a higher earning potential. So, I became the breadwinner.

When we had our third child, I was dreaming about the future I wanted for my family. I envisioned fun family vacations, paid college tuition for my kids, and a comfortable retirement. However, I knew working in IT at a state university couldn’t possibly provide the kind of future I was picturing. So I took the plunge into graduate school at night while working full time and got an interview for a job as a consultant for a major tech company.

In the final meeting with the hiring manager, he asked me, “What do you think is the most important thing for this job?” Without missing a beat, I said, “Integrity. From what I understand, you will send me by myself to work with customers with multi-million-dollar contracts, and you will have to trust me to do the right thing. I think that requires a lot of integrity.” There was a pregnant pause that I thought might lead to a discussion, but then he changed the subject, which left me hanging. Was that the correct answer?

A few days later, my integrity was challenged when I got offered the position. Was my traveling across the country four days a week the right thing for my family? There were some assurances that if I were willing to move to a metro area where the company had a lot of clients, I might stay local. But was moving the best thing for my family?

This decision required a great deal of prayer and counsel from others. But I’ll never forget a warning from one of my mentors. “Great men rarely make great fathers.” His point was that if I focused on my career alone, I would likely lose my wife and kids despite trying to provide a better life for them.

However, he wasn’t saying that I should walk away from the opportunity. He just wanted me to remember “always to keep the main thing the main thing.” So my wife and I concluded if God opened this door and it was going sideways for us, he’d help us find another door. We just needed to keep our minds open to all the opportunities around us, and we’d find the right path.

Our faith was quickly tested when my boss called me on a Monday and said, “I need you to go to corporate for three consecutive weeks on the other side of the country. You leave tomorrow.”

It was a complete shock to my system. Was I going to leave my family behind for a full three weeks on short notice? It took a bit to process, but then I recognized that this was what I signed up for, so if I was going to put my best foot forward, I needed to jump on the opportunity.

I quickly made arrangements and headed off to corporate, leaving my bewildered family behind. The training was a mix of a Tony Robbins seminar and some of the best professional development training I’ve ever taken, but it was grueling. The training lasted from around eight in the morning to eight in the evening, and we had Saturday work too. Plus, I was now in a different time zone, so I sweated having to navigate the schedule to still connect with my wife and kids.

Then disaster struck. In the middle of the coldest February in decades, our furnace caught on fire. My wife was overwhelmed by the enormity of the emergency. Years later, I still remember her desperate cries on the phone and being powerless to help her. Luckily, her parents lived in town, so they had a place to stay while it got sorted out, but that kind of event wasn’t something I had even considered when I took the role.

That was just the beginning. The week after training turned into a regular grind traveling out on Monday morning, often before sunrise, and returning late on Thursday. A new normal developed, and a pattern emerged when I would call home. One of my kids would get on the line, and I would hear,

“Daddy, what did you do today?”

…

…

“Daddy?”

I had nothing. I was literally out of words. After a brutal travel day, verbally jousting with customers, and the challenge of managing corporate expectations, there were just no more words in my brain. Besides, my kids didn’t want to hear about how I spent my day discussing the comparative encryption strength of RSA vs. AES algorithms.

So, day after day, I found myself in the same place…leaving my family hanging on the end of a dead phone line because I’d run out of words. On more than one occasion after the call ended with a weak “Love you” I just sat there alone in my hotel room, completely broken with grief.

What kind of father can’t even hold a five-minute conversation with their family?

With a lot of prayer, mentorship, and a fair amount of creativity, I found a way through to where my adult kids call me “The Cool Dad Everyone Talks About,” So I’m sharing my experience to help other Dads overcome similar circumstances.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

One day while I was traveling for work, I found myself leaving my child hanging… again … with nothing to say. I hated these moments. Before I was a traveling consultant, I used to cherish time with my kids every night. We would sit and read picture books. I would tuck them into bed and help them say their prayers. Then, in those moments far from home, I couldn’t even think of something to say.

One night, on a whim, I asked one of my kids what their stuffed animal did that day, and I got a silly story. As they went on, I kept asking “and then what happened?” It was only four words, repeated six or seven times in a conversation, but it was something. I started to connect despite everything going on around me.

That worked for a couple of calls, then my kiddo caught on and turned it around. “No, Daddy. You tell me what happened.” I drew a blank and stalled by saying I’d have something the next day. My child was disappointed, but I could tell they were hopeful about hearing a story the next day.

The whole conversation was on my mind as I went to bed, and the next morning it was like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, as I did my daily bible reading and devotional work. At the time, I was reading A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. This was a book given to me a few years earlier that I had tried to read many times but couldn’t get into. However, the solitude of hotel life removed the distractions around me and let me focus in a way that allowed me to dig into the subject.

I learned many things about the Christian faith and the reality of the holy spirit. The more I studied, the more I wanted to find a way to share these insights with my kids. However, it took years for me to get into the right frame of mind to study these things. So how would I get these points across to my kids, ages four to nine? As I got to thinking about it, I realized I might be able to solve two problems at once.

What if I took ideas from my kid’s tales about their stuffed animals and put them into a fantastic story? I could also use that story to share some of the things I was learning in a way that would make sense to my kids. It was a pretty bold idea. I’m no C.S. Lewis, but my kids liked it when I made up a story. So why not?

So, I started taking things from my devotions and doing a mash-up with my kid’s animal stories. Then, I would jot down a paragraph over coffee before heading off to my customers for meetings.

That was the ideal, but it was often as difficult or more than my day job. Quite frankly, not every day was an inspiration, and I often wanted to blow off the whole thing. But that line about great men rarely making great fathers kept rolling around in my head. So I had to find a way to put in the effort to be a great father, or I needed a new line of work.

So, I had to come up with something I could be sure to discuss every day regardless of how creative I felt that day. It took a little work, but I found a few things my kids were interested in and added them to a news app on my phone. With that, I could grab a fun fact of the day or a joke, even if I didn’t have a story.

Once I figured this out, I no longer worried about what I would say at the end of the day. So over time, I collected these stories, refined the content, and ended up with the core of the book that would become Light of Mine.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Before I started being serious about writing, my career was in IT. It was about shipping the product quickly, getting feedback, and then shipping again with updates. So I went into writing with the same mindset. As they say, I just pushed the button and put my first book out on Amazon.

Quite frankly, it was trash. I can’t begin to describe all the structural errors, not to mention a cover my 11-year-old designed, which was the highlight of the first edition. That said, when I got the message that my baby was ugly, I took it in stride and got help to rework it into a much better product. After that, I was sure a small publisher would pick it up.

To make that happen, I went to a writing conference and scheduled a meeting with a publisher I thought was a perfect fit for my story. I even took the time to attend her break-out session on the industry before actually meeting her. In that session, someone asked, “What advice would you give a new writer?”

Her answer still rings in my ears, “What I’m about to say the majority of you are not going to take seriously. I know because I’ve been in this business for years, and 80% of the time, people fail to listen to this advice, and it’s straightforward. If you ask for advice, take what’s given and DO IT! So if you ask someone what to do and then don’t follow that advice, why’d you bother asking.”

The rest of her talk was also really insightful, and I felt like I’d gotten to know her enough to be able to pitch to her. Nope, not even close. I completely blew the pitch. She was not interested in what I was pitching. Having worked professionally in sales, I knew how not to take no for an answer, but she wasn’t having it. When I finally turned off the pitching, she said something that cut me to the bone. “Not only is this something I don’t think I could market, but you need to take a few months off from this and consider if this is worth moving forward with.”

She not only told me that the story I’d been working on for the past seven years was garbage but that I needed to rethink my life. I was devastated. I remember walking around the conference center in a daze—all that effort for nothing. I was crushed. I met one of the conference organizers in line for pizza and had a good chat that at least snapped me out of the daze. After talking to her, I knew the publisher was right, and I needed to take her advice. So I put everything on the shelf and let it sit for six weeks.

When I returned to it, I hired a creative team that had worked specifically on the type of books I was writing and did some hard work reading how to write. Finally, after all the rework that added up to 18 revisions, I ended up with what has now become the Mom’s Choice Awards winning Light of Mine.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding part of my creative work is hearing stories about families enjoying my stories together. As much as I want kids to connect and relate to them, I intended for them to be family read-aloud stories—something everyone can enjoy together. So when I get feedback in a social media post or comment that shows the whole family got into the tale, it warms my heart.

One of my favorite stories was for a launch campaign; I sent samples to many families. As their feedback came in, there was a pattern where families commented about how they liked that the youngest child in the story called oatmeal oaka-meal. It was so endearing that their family started using the word. I got such a kick out of it that I took the time to write up a recipe for “Ethan’s Original Oaka-Meal” and shared it with my followers. They, in turn, made it and shared pictures of their breakfast. That kind of connection makes me feel like I’m achieving my mission of families connecting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://towersoflight.net
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/allenbrokkenauthor
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/allenbrokkenauthor
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/towers-of-light-christian-resources-llc
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/allenbrokken
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgCH5760tU–QQs7k_eA2Xg
• Other: tiktok : https://tiktok.com/@allenbrokkenauthor pinterest: https://pinterest.com/allenbrokkenauthor

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