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This Week's Personal Development Article

THE CASE FOR INTER-PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE FIGHT AGAINST WHITE COLLAR TERRORISM

I provide my personal development clients with a number of what I describe as ‘mental exercises’ – simple meditations to enable them clear and focus their minds. After all, a clear mind is the gateway to an effortlessly happy life. However, I recall one of my clients telling me that he couldn’t bring himself to explain to his wife that he was meditating and, consequently, would do his exercises whilst locked in the toilet – God knows what his wife thought he was doing! Now, I know that personal development is just that – personal – but I cannot understand how anyone would be ashamed about wanting to better themselves and their lives and, in doing so, maybe even bettering the lives of those to whom they are unprepared to reveal their secret!

Perhaps it’s time for personal development to become inter-personal, for like-minded people to actually stand up and be counted for who they want to become – leaders of their own lives and a positive influence on the lives of those that they love. The world needs such positive action in the face of an unprecedented disempowerment of the ordinary people who are just trying to make the most of their ordinary lives. I’ve just glanced through the latest news on Europe-wide protests against the austerity measures being introduced by European governments to ensure that the markets’ faith is restored in sovereign debt and the euro. But ‘the markets’ are run by the financiers who created the burden on sovereign debt in the first place.

For example, Ireland’s sovereign debt market standing is tarnished to say the least – ‘the market’ requires it to pay almost three times the rate of interest on its borrowings that Germany pays. Ireland’s sovereign debt is burdened by the State’s rescue of Anglo-Irish Bank – a bank, according to Ireland’s Finance Minister, that is of no intrinsic worth but is systemically important because of its size. In the same way that financial powerbrokers the world over cozied up to the political powerbrokers, so Ireland’s banking and property development elite were given free rein to create a monster of such proportions that it has destroyed Ireland’s international financial standing, destabilized the euro-zone and knocked cents off the currency’s value on the money markets. Anglo is an Irish story with European implications – but it’s one of many such stories. Royal Bank of Scotland, Lehman Brothers and a whole plethora of US banks. And those banks that are still standing, often as a result of the taxpayer bailing them out, are not lending to re-ignite the economy and are, in the words of one consumer watchdog, ‘fleecing’ the ordinary bank customer with extortionate interest rates and charges.

Now, a quick question. Which has had a greater day-to-day affect on the ordinary lives or ordinary people, 9/11 or the economic crisis? With 23m people unemployed in Europe, with double-digit unemployment in the US, Osama Bin-Laden need not have bothered. The real terrorists are wearing Armani suits and they’ve still got their hands on the levers of power. Like all terrorists, they are fundamentalists – driven by a deeply held belief and love. But it’s not love of God that’s the driving force here but a deep and abiding love of large sums of money – your money, my money.

What has all this got to do with personal development? Well, it was Gandhi who said that if you want to change anything that you have to be the change. And it was that same little man, who spun the material for his own clothes, who pulled the rug out from under a super-power that once ruled one third of the world. It was Martin Luther King who had a dream that was, perhaps, fulfilled in Barack Obama’s election to the Whitehouse – a victory driven by small donations from large numbers of people who believed the slogan “Yes We Can”. Whether Obama’s election was real change is highly debatable – but that’s because it took place in the context of a political system that doesn’t care about all those grassroots people. On the other side of the Atlantic, who, during the Soviet era would have believed that a Polish shipbuilding worker could initiate the domino effect that toppled a whole world power bloc? A quarter of a century ago who would have ever even considered that South Africa might be ruled by the majority of its people?

Ordinary normal people in Europe and the US are, just like my friend, cowering on the seats of their toilets, praying for change in their own lives, too ashamed to stand up and be counted collectively as the people who really matter. Personal development and self help books make up a constantly growing major sector of the book market – yet all their readers are closet converts. Sure, you can change your own life for the better – you can be unemployed but happier, you can be up to your eyes in debt and on lower wages, but full of the joys of life. But, as I say to my clients, if you don’t have concrete results to show for your personal development (and that is not a pun on the concrete mixer that was driven through the front gates of Ireland’s parliament!), you’re fooling yourself. And, at present, it strikes me that there are just too many fools around.

Personal development is about making a difference – first in your own life but then in the lives of others. Personal development is not about keeping your focus or your single-mindedness to yourself. Remember, you’re supposed to love your neighbour as yourself – that means you first and then them. Personal development is about making your life better – and the lives of others too. Personal development needs to be interpersonal. And when it becomes a force for change in its own right, we may well witness a real and holy war on terror.