In July 2003 I had an acrimonious parting of the ways with my then business partner and decided, once again, to work on my own. However, it wasn't at all clear what I should be doing and I was struggling with this. Fortuitously, in April 2003 I had joined a BNI Chapter near Didcot in Oxfordshire; one of the other members was John Harris, who owned the Success Motivation International (SMI) franchise in the UK. SMI is the vehicle by which the personal development programmes developed by Paul J Meyer were sold and delivered in the field, and John had been trying to persuade me that this was just what I needed.
At the time it appeared to me that this was some kind of flaky American scam, and I was deeply sceptical. However, partly to get John off my back I agreed to go to an event at which some of his existing and previous clients were to talk about the impact SMI had had on their lives. The event was not what I expected. The speakers were solid, feet on the ground business people and, in some cases, had signed up because their careers were at a crossroads. To a man and/or woman, they all explained that they had decided to do a programme to improve their businesses but had experienced major improvements in their personal lives too.
I was persuaded. I signed up for a programme called The Dynamics of Personal Goal Setting (DPGS). I cannot say that I found it easy. Some of the suggested activities seemed trivial (they are not); the printed material is also provided as a recording and I found it very difficult to listen to this as it was read by an actor with a strong American accent. I fought the programme all the way but, having paid a significant sum of money for it, I stuck with it, and did it again. And again. And again.
I still read and listen to it now. More significantly, I still routinely carry out the exercises recommended in the programme, and have raised my goal setting and completion to an art form, at considerable benefit to my lifestyle.
Three years later, I signed up for another programme, The Dynamics of Personal Time Control (DPTC). The way I explain the difference between the two programmes is that DPGS is about effectiveness (doing the right things) and DPTC is about efficiency (doing things right).
I am definitely a product of the product, and am a very different person from the person I was in 2003.
Thank you Paul J Meyer. And thank you John Harris.
I first met David WG Howe ("Dick") in ICL; he was the Area Manager of a sales area based in Harrow, Middlesex, in about 1975. As ICL was then organised, there were separate reporting structures for sales and support staff which converged at divisional level; the thinking behind this was that it insulated professional support staff from pressures from the sales force to cut corners and deliver systems that were short of what the customer thought he was getting. So I worked with the salesmen, and with Dick, rather than for him. Despite this, over the ensuing couple of years we got to work well together and when, in 1976, Dick was head hunted by a technical documentation company to set up and run a software house for them, he recruited me as a member of his team, based in Wokingham. In fact, this was not a good decision, either for Dick or for me, but we worked together for a couple of years and got to know each other well.
I had always felt that Dick was gullible and was inclined to chase after the next intellectual fashion, whatever it was. At the time, he had been reading books by Erich von Däniken, who had a bee in his bonnet about extra-terrestrial intervention in the affairs of the earth. He had accumulated lots of alleged evidence, including the Old Testament book of Ezekiel and some unexplained geological lines in, I think, South America. He had a big hit with Chariots of the Gods
and a number of other books on a similar theme.
Dick and I were having a pub lunch in the garden of the Duke's Head in Wokingham and Dick was expounding one of von Daniken's more far fetched theories. I delivered what I thought was a devastating critique of his alleged evidence and was feeling rather pleased with myself, when Dick said, "In being so narrow minded, you are cutting yourself from all sorts of ideas and concepts; some of them will indeed be rubbish but some undoubtedly will not. You need to give some thought to your attitude to challenging ideas".
This had been said to me before by others. But whether it was Dick, the moment, the weather, the beer or something else, at that moment the criticism went home. It changed me instantaneously and, looking back at my subsequent life, I am sure that I have benefitted from a number of ideas which, before Dick's comments, I would have discounted.
I owe you a lot, Dick. Thank you.
In my third year at Bristol Grammar School 
I was in form 5B, and the distinction between fee paying and scholarship pupils had completely disappeared; we were confident, at ease, having enormous fun.
Our English teacher was Mr Halls - nicknamed "Henry" with no great creativity after "Henry Hall's Guest Night" which was a variety show still running on the Home Service on Saturday evenings. English was not my favourite subject - I was 28th out of 30 and dreaded English lessons when they came. Every week, I think, we had a essay to write on some subject or other; my mother, who had been a primary school teacher before I was born, took a close interest in this and insisted that I should write essays that satisfied her criteria.
About four weeks into the year Mr Halls called me up to talk to him at the end of the lesson. "Austin", he said "is it your mother or your father who helps you with your essays?" Acutely embarrassed, I admitted it was my mother. "Please tell her", he said, "that in future I would like to see your work rather than hers." When I got home the balloon went up and I gave to understand that, under no circumstances, would I accept any interference in future.
I finished the year 2nd out of 30 in English. In my adult life I have written a book, a number of articles and countless essays, papers and think pieces, and writing is one of my two most important creative outlets.
Thank you, Mr Halls.
At the end of my primary school career I took the scholarship exam. To the astonishment of everyone except myself I won a scholarship to Bristol Grammar School, a direct grant school and Bristol's premier boys' school. I wasn't astonished as I didn't understand the achievement.
However, off I went to BGS. It was an amazing experience - a huge school (well, I thought so at the time - 1200 boys) with amazing facilities and all these posh boys with posh accents. However, as a result of a combination of laziness and indifferent health, at the beginning of the second year I found myself in 4β (beta), which was a kind of sink form, the lowest of five forms in the second year. The form master was Mr East, nicknamed Ichabod after Ichabod Crane, a character in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". Why the nickname was chosen I never discovered. In our first form period, Mr East set out his manifesto.
I paraphrase but what he said, broadly, was, "There are two kinds of boys in this form. Some of you find school work really difficult, and I am going to do my very best to help you get to grips with it. Some of you are idle, and I am going to give you a very difficult time until you pull your fingers out and start working. In a couple of weeks I shall tell you which I think you are, and then the fun will start."
The couple of weeks passed and then he called us up individually to tell us his diagnosis. "You, boy", he said to me, "are idle. Not for long".
He was as good as his word. He was our maths teacher; if I got less than 80% on a maths test I had to stay in after school (not a detention - these were awarded rarely and were seen as a disgrace) and if I got less than 90% I had to do extra homework. This was all done with good humour - on one occasion, when I got a homework question wrong he wrote, in red ink, "Ha, ha! Got you that time!"
Being of a systematic turn of mind, I learned how to flick pellets with a 12" ruler and became very skilled at it. On one occasion, just as Mr East came through the door, I let go of a pellet at someone on the far side of the room, and the pellet hit the door frame more or less level with his nose. He was about to take a Divinity lesson (RE as it sometimes called) and gave me 100 lines to be delivered on the following morning. I have never forgotten the sentence I had to write. It was, "The study of ballistics, whilst interesting, does not form part of the divinity curriculum." I had to look up "ballistics" and "curriculum" before I could start.
I imagine that his educational policy was transmitted to our other teachers too - I did a lot of extra work. But at the end of the year I went up to the second class of the five.
What did I learn? If you put in the work, you achieve the success.
In my final year at Knowle Park Junior Mixed School, my primary school, I was taught by Mr Wheaton. This was regarded as a privilege; he was one of the few male teachers in the school.
The only other apart from Mr Proudlove, the Headmaster, was Mr Warburton, who was the art & handicraft teacher. I had a very poor opinion of both of them; Mr Proudlove talked about "Americker" and "Africker" whereas, as a good Bristolian, I knew the correct pronunciations were "Americle" and "Africle". And Mr Warburton used to bang on about "cutting knives"; I was unaware of any knife that wasn't used for cutting so I regarded him as stupidly verbose.
Anyhow, Mr Wheaton was well thought of by the children, one of these teachers who never had a problem with discipline although he never appeared to do anything about it. However, despite his best efforts and my immaculate behaviour, we had a run-in. I was unjustly accused of talking in the line whilst we were waiting to go into assembly. I wasn't talking, so I denied it. When we got back to the classroom, I was again accused of talking and again denied it. Mr Wheaton stood me in the corner of the classroom whilst he got on the with the class and every ten minutes or so, he gave me the option to change my mind. I declined. When we got to break he said, "Alright, you clearly aren't going to admit you were talking" and I said, "That's because I wasn't", so it was declared a draw. Or, in my mind, a clear win for me.
What did I learn from that? Well, when I'm certain of the rights of my case I am very determined or, as even my friends would say, stubborn.
I grew up on a housing estate in south Bristol and went to Knowle Park Junior Mixed School, the local primary school.
In my second and third years - I can never work out how this relates to the current year number convention - I was taught, in a class of 50 children, by Miss Headington who must have been around 50 years old at the time. She had a reputation, probably undeserved, of being a harridan and, although I was a quiet and obedient child, I had a couple of run-ins with her.
The first had to do with punctuation. We wrote with fountain pens and I made full stops with the point of the pen - in consequence, they were small. Unfortunately they were too small for Miss Headington, who assumed that they were absent. After a couple of differences of opinion about this, Miss Headington made me sit in class - my recollection says a whole morning but I suspect it was probably half an hour - with a large full stop on a piece of paper hung around my neck. The point was made; for the rest of my time in her class I made sure there was no mistake - my full stops were the size of peas. I know this to be true - I still have one of my exercise books from the period. When I moved up to Mr Wheaton's class (see the next post), I reverted to making them with the point of the pen; Mr Wheaton's eyesight must have been better, as I had no further problems.
The second had to do with male rights! Hymn books for assembly were distributed by hymn book monitors before we walked across to the hall for assembly. The hymn book monitors were all girls, so the girls got the decent hymn books and the boys got the hymn books with missing covers and torn pages. One morning I was shouted at for failing to sing in assembly; the reason, as I explained, was that the relevant page was missing from my hymn book. This was not accepted as a valid excuse. I was incandescent at the unfairness of this and, when we returned to the classroom, I went up to Miss Headington's desk and complained about the appointment of hymn book monitors. To my surprise, Miss Headington accepted the unfairness of this and appointed some boys as monitors. It will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that I was not popular among the girls.
So what did I learn from these experiences? Well, for the whole of my life since, I have been moved and angered by unfairness, and it still informs and influences my political opinions. And also, I realised in retrospect, despite my quiet and reserved demeanour, I am quite prepared to take on authority to get things changed if I think they need to be changed. But, despite my lack of popularity with the girls at the time, I have remained firmly heterosexual!
