I am often asked by my students how I came
to be involved in coaching memory techniques.
I came to London in the early
90’s, with the newly found "freedom" of a redundancy cheque. I was offered a ‘job’ which turned out to be multilevel marketing.
However, I thought the product was good so I decided to give it my best shot. I quickly discovered that although I had all the necessary
management skills, I was at a complete loss at any form of public speaking. Dipping into
the redundancy again, I joined a Dale Carnegie course and was delighted over a
period of 12 weeks to win 2 plastic pens, to learn that you did not die if you
got up to speak in public and lastly - the magic of Sun, Shoe, Tree.
I was so interested in memory techniques that I read up all I could from such authors as Tony Buzan (link) and Harry Lorayne and practiced
my new skill on subjects that interested me - Art, History and. Italian.
I now had a new partner who brought to the
relationship 3 guitars, a sofa-bed and a celebration box of Trivial Pursuits.
For the first year, the guitar and the sofa-bed were all we needed for amusement,
but in the second year, he dusted off the Trivial Pursuits, proudly proclaiming
that it had been a gift from his family as he was an acknowledged champion. We
settled down to play and he won.It was himself crowing about his victory that irritated me. I
swear if there had been a dunghill in the room, he would have climbed on top
and flapped his wings! So I took action.
My kids said I was cheating but I didn’t
see it that way. How do you get information? Either you see it, or hear it or
read it. All I did was read it - straight from the cards. I literally learned
all the answers from all the Trivial Pursuit cards – well I'm competitive!
A few months later we sat down to play again. It was all rather sad – I threw the dice
and won the first turn – and that was it: the poor champion never got to
throw the dice much less flap his wings. Needless to say, the game was returned to the shelf, never to be opened again –
but – our relationship survived!
So at first my memory skills were used for
recreation and in the war of the sexes.
The coaching workshop skills came from a
venture with the above partner. I had
spent 3 years developing an art process that was – to quote a review - 'a
revolution in painting’ and 'breathtakingly beautiful' - did I mention I was an
artist? The good news was that in those 3 years, I finally cracked the technical
difficulties, the bad news was that I’d run out of money. We were searching for
something I could do to fill the coffers when my partner remembered an idea
that he’d once had. He was in the building trade and knew first hand the
frustration on site that a poor secretary could cause. The
idea of working on a building site with all the dirt and cold and no proper loos, was
appalling for most secretaries but for some girls, the camaraderie, casual dress and sense of
achievement from running an office efficiently, was worth the
inconvenience. All I had to do was find the right girls. It was a niche market
and although I knew nothing about the construction industry and nothing about
recruitment, I knew I could do it.
I also wanted an opportunity
to introduce people to their own possibilities. When I came
down to London I was uptight with a rigid set of principles and beliefs, but then I was
introduced to a seminar called The Landmark Forum . I will admit that I disagreed
with much of stuff around it, but the essential Forum changed my life for the better and forever. I can
still recall the forum leader marching across the
stage and throwing off his
jacket and letting go of a chair – “if it doesn’t fit you, drop it” and I’ve
lived by that ever since – trusting in what I feel about things
rather than what other people tell me I should feel. However, I noticed that
most of the people at these seminars were teachers, consultants, social workers. Where
were the secretaries, the receptionists, the shop girls? Were they at seminars
being taught how to answer the phone rather than how to change their lives? I
decided that if I ever had the opportunity I would pass this knowledge on, and
here at last was my opportunity. We held our first
workshop above a pub in Southwark just a few months after starting the business and we had only 6 delegates, which was our
entire workforce, plus my loyal daughter. But it was there that I held my first seminar on Goal Setting and so I continued almost every month until 2003.
In 2003 I needed to find new work. I
searched around for what I could do. I would like to refer you to a blog post by Scott
Adams here . You don’t need to be brilliant, just become very good at two or more things. I was good at art but it could not be done without
a very large workshop and a show place which needed money. I had managerial
skills, but I was too old to be of interest to employers. What else did I have?
Aha! I had memory skills, seminar and coaching skills – and that is how I
started.
