The Author
I turned the worst night of my life into the direction for the rest of it.
I’m Maher Kaddoura. Civil engineer by training. Consultant by profession. Father, first and always. Bouncing Forward is the book I wish someone had handed me in that hospital corridor in Amman, in January 2008 — long before I had a framework, a model, or any idea that the worst thing that had ever happened to me would become the thing that gave my life its fullest meaning.
Where it starts
“Not going back to who you were. Going forward to who you are capable of becoming.”
At fifteen, I explored Europe with a sleeping bag and a restless curiosity. I studied Civil Engineering at Nottingham University, then found my calling in management — working with the US Army in Jordan, helping establish Accenture’s Middle East practice, and building consulting firms of my own. I have visited ninety countries and two hundred and fifty cities, and sat with people of every faith and tradition along the way. In all that traveling, I found one truth that crosses every border: the person who knows they are not facing the dark alone can endure almost anything.
The turning point
The call came at 2am.
Before I picked up, I already knew. You develop a sense for it. My son Hikmat — seventeen years old, full of life, at the edge of adulthood — had been struck by a car in Amman. The driver fled. My wife and I raced to the hospital. She wept. I prayed. Both of us suspended between hope and its opposite.
I didn’t know it then — but in that hospital, in the days that followed, and in the years of work that came after — something was being given to me. Not instead of the pain. Alongside it. A direction. A reason to keep building when everything in me wanted to stop.
I call it Bouncing Forward.
What I learned the hard way
Acceptance isn’t surrender.
I am not going to rearrange the furniture of my son’s memory as though he never existed. Acceptance meant acknowledging the full truth: Hikmat was here. He was taken before his time. That fact will never change. The question I had to answer every morning wasn’t “how do I go back?” It was “who am I, carrying this, going forward?”
That question gave birth to the Hikmat Road Safety Program — a project that has since built over 1,200 playgrounds, marked 260 schools in high-risk zones, and identified 1,800 dangerous locations across Jordan’s roads. It taught me that real acceptance isn’t giving up. It’s saying: this is where I am — now what can I build from here?
I am not unique in this. The same capacity lives in you. If I could turn my worst chapter forward, so can you.
Why Bouncing Forward
Because no one hands you a map for this part.
Everywhere I look, I see people carrying a loss they were never given the tools to face. Not because they lack strength — because no one ever handed them a compass, or told them there was a path at all.
I wrote Bouncing Forward to hand you both — and a practical way to use them. Not platitudes. Not a five-step cure. A framework, grounded in a real hospital corridor and a real road in Jordan, built to be used in the middle of real life. Because the most dangerous thing about loss isn’t the pain. It’s letting the pain be the only thing that ever gets built from it.
Hikmat did not die for nothing. His name means wisdom, in Arabic. He earned it.
Take a moment. Ask yourself, honestly:
Why did this happen?
What does this ask of me?
You don’t need the answer yet. Just the courage to ask.
Download your 7 Step Journal
Seven steps. Seven honest prompts. One small step at the end — free, downloadable, yours to keep. With it comes one note from us a month. No noise, and easy to leave.
Ready for everything? Go All In →