나는 당신이 동기부여에 이제까지 상상할 수 있던 각 세미나를 및 훈련, 긍정적인 정신자세, NLP, 명상, 영성 및 옆 생각 참석했다. I read every book published by Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and Earl Nightingale available on the same subject and I listened to hundreds of tapes on achievements while hoping to find the true formula for success.

From Tony Robbins to Brian Tracy to Jack black to Wayne Dyer, to Deepack Chopra to Tom Peters to Tony Bozan to Edward de Bono to Zig Ziglar to Stephen Covey and many more, you name the speaker or the training or the book or the tape and I have been there.

Please don’t take me wrong, these great masters and their seminars are great and most enjoyable. They may also work for you, but after a while I wondered if this stuff was the true knowledge of success and if the great and the mighty in business used this stuff to achieve the success we all hear about?

This Motivational training definitely served my employer well. Somehow it pushed me to work even harder and deliver more to my employer and with a pleasant attitude of course. But success of the kind I dreamt of still deluded me.

After ten years of working with very slow progress, I joined the House of Fraser group as manager future technology. Good step with huge potential… again I worked my socks off using all my PMA, NLP, lateral thinking etc to impress and deliver great results.

During this time I saw things in my division that I didn’t agree with and I made the fatal mistake of voicing my “opinion” loudly and without any consideration for the people around and above me. I was basically reacting emotionally to a situation rather than thinking before acting.

Then… on a one cold Friday morning in February I was called to an office given a letter and a check of £300 for the three years I worked, while being told that my services is no longer needed. I was escorted outside the building with a nice goodbye.

To tell you the truth, I felt every possible negative emotion you could ever imagine at this moment.

Despite all my training and for few months to follow. I felt Sadness, shock, horror, fear, anger and of course great disillusionment and frustration were the order of the day and my life to come.

I moved on and searched hard for the following three months and finally got a reasonable job at the AA for half the salary I was earning but I had no choice during the early nineties recession.

I continued to search for the true knowledge of success, I began to think differently. PMA, NLP and so on are new phenomena in this day and age that certainly made fortune to its promoters while they didn’t answer my question.

How did people succeed in life and how they built great fortune before “think and Grow Rich” book was published in the twenties and before all these training and seminars on success flourished based on this one book.

Till one day .. I read a book that shocked me to the routes and opened my eyes to a whole new world of “conscious thinking” and Achievements. “Thick Face Black Heart” by Chin-Ning Chu. What shocked me was a statement she made: “success through negative mental attitude” which basically meant that, against the going wisdom, WE CAN SUCCEED THE WAY WE ARE!

Chin-Ning used many quotes from great and timeless treaties like the Tao Te Ching and Sun Tzu the Art of War. I started in earnest to study both treaties and the culture behind them… and my life was not the same again.

I learned that most people (like me) react to challenges using their “natural” Fight or flight response. I learned that Nature is not fair; it sides next to the strong against the weak as we can see around us all over the world, in other words “survival for the fittest”.

I learned that twenty five hundred years ago, the great General Sun Tzu discovered a “loophole” in Nature. He found a way that the weak can triumph over the strong. Hence his treaty was only available throughout history to the ruling classes of China and not to the ordinary people like me.

When this treaty was first translated in the west by a French scholar, it landed at the hand of a French soldier, he loved and studied carefully. He went on to conquer Europe.. His name was Napoleon.

I read so many biographies of successful people all over the world, and found nothing related to NLP or PMA that led them to success. What I found was one of two things, either Sun Tzu wisdom was mentioned explicitly or their strategies and tactics for success were all derived from this famous treaty.

I discovered that Sun Tzu had two basic issues to explain and to solve. First, what is your “position”? and second, how to “advance that position”?.

Sun Tzu treaty far from being on War it actually encourage us to avoid war or conflict by using strategy to bend others and to bring them to our side instead.

From there onward my progress in the last 10 years was stunning; challenges and change were my source of gaining new ground and achieving more success in life. Self-discipline and thinking “introspectively” and “consciously” before any challenge were keys.

The last 5 years of my career I reached the position of Chief Commercial office at a FTSE 30 company. I had enough security and financial freedom to decide at the age of 51 to become independent strategist and trainer. Decided to focus on my long held dream of becoming a Motivational Speaker and trainer on Sun Tzu the Art of War strategy in Business and in life.

I simply wanted to share and train people on acquiring this knowledge and help them avoid years of painful trial and errors before they are forced to discover this truth.

Thank you for reading my article.