Secrets of Self Empowerment – Author’s Introduction

Welcome to the Secrets of Self-Empowerment podcast.

My name is Phil Chandler, and I wrote the book, Secrets of  Self-Empowerment, while I was working with people who were trying to get back into work after a period of disability or illness.

Some of these people had been out of work for several years, and a few had pretty much given up on ever getting a job again. It wasn’t that they were incompetent or incapable of learning new skills – they had just stopped
believing in themselves. They had lost their self-confidence, and they felt
powerless.

When I started this work, I was taken on to teach these people how to use
computers. Now, of course, that’s a useful skill – pretty much everyone
these days has to use a computer at some time for their work – but in those
days (this was in the early 1990s) there were plenty of people who never
came into contact with them until they started some kind of training course. Computers were not in every home in those days.

The biggest problem I found in teaching many of the people referred to me was that their feelings of low self-esteem were getting in the way of learning anything new. They didn’t have the confidence to switch on an unfamiliar machine and take on board a completely unfamiliar set of instructions.

It quickly became clear to me that if we were going to do an effective job at helping these people, we would have to address this issue of self-confidence before we attempted to teach them new stuff.

So I set out to learn everything I could about the psychology of self-empowerment – what makes people able to put their past in perspective, deal effectively with the present, and plan for a better future.

I read everything I could get my hands on, and looked around for a teacher.

Eventually, I found a man called Willie Monteiro, a highly qualified consultant psychiatrist, who taught me about a new branch of behavioural
psychology called neuro-linguistic programming. I studied with him to Master Practitioner level, and fed back everything I learned into my work.

The effect was dramatic: we achieved far better results with our clients than previously, and I extended our reach to four counties across southern England, where we ran group events for two days a week over three weeks that we called SHAPE groups – for Self Help And Personal Effectiveness. This title later became Self Help and Personal Empowerment, and that course was the basis for this book – Secrets of Self-Empowerment, which I have now made available for anyone who finds it useful.

If you believe in yourself less than 100%, or feel that you don’t have the confidence to really go for what you want in life, or you are challenged by
the thought of applying for a job you really want, then I invite you to study this material, and listen to these podcasts, and know that by doing so you are – more than you may imagine right now – feeling more in control, more able to succeed and more conscious of your own real power than you ever knew.