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.
