Sailing point

The best and the worst in people becomes evident when they are out on the seas, sailing. Peter Barclay believes that - and he should know. A life coach by profession, he has steered companies through troubled waters.

Peter Barclay has the air of an explorer about him - a Christopher Columbus or a Vasco da Gama, perhaps - and when he speaks about sailing, you can hear the yearning for adventure in his voice.

"Wind in my hair and gliding over the liquid skin of the earth - there's a feeling of complete freedom ... [you experience] the power of nature, glory of the wind, the sound of the ocean," says Barclay.

But this 60-year-old man isn't a skipper. Instead, he is an expert at helping to keep businesses afloat and has sailed into uncharted waters more than once in his professional life. A life coach and chairman of Coaching and Mentoring International Ltd, which has an office in Dubai, his career has tacked from electrical engineering to financial services to life insurance to a brief retirement then management coaching and training.

For Barclay, sailing is both a passion and a means of gauging people's capabilities. He sponsors a team for With Integrity, a yacht which takes part in ocean racing. The vessel has, on occasions, even helped him in his management coaching and training sessions. Indeed, Barclay has been known to take trainees out on it - no, not to scrub the decks, but to teach them life training skills.

"Sailing brings out the best in people - and also the worst," says Barclay.

"It's interesting to see who brings the bucket [when somebody has a bout of seasickness] and who laughs. Those who bring the bucket and laugh are the ones who go on to be winners in life.

"This has been my experience with using sailing as a coaching and mentoring tool," he says.

With the wind in his sails, Barclay visited Dubai recently to launch the first batch of life coaching students at the Dubai arm of Coaching and Mentoring International Ltd, (CMIL) located in the Knowledge Village.

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Meeting Barclay is an electrifying experience. While chatting with him, you may have a light bulb moment - or a series of them - even though the topic of conversation may sometimes be as mundane as the weather in England.

Based in Wolverhampton, UK, Barclay runs a consultancy business, Barclay Corporate Consulting Ltd. He also chairs CMIL.

While Barclay hasn't always been a life coach it's perhaps the diverse range of jobs that he has done that made him aware of the importance of professional development.

He was responsible for starting personal development seminars in the English Midlands in 1970.

He also founded the Aberdovey Waterski Marathon in 1982, introduced the TV Gladiators to the Royal Tournament in 1997 and sponsored With Integrity in two Whitbread round-the-world races.

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After completing his training as an electrical engineer with the Midlands Electricity Board, Barclay worked as an electrical distribution engineer from 1967 to 1970. But he was looking for more challenges so moved into financial services and soon became sales director for Capital Management Services.

Three years later, in 1973, he turned his hand to life insurance and, aged 26, became chief executive of Capital Life Insurance Company, where he worked until 1978.

Around this time, Barclay acquired an investment business, Chapelash Securities. It was also around this time that he first encountered life coaching.

In 1980, he started Barclay Corporate Consulting, which further developed his interest in management and training.

During the same period, he set up Cornhill Financial Services, which he sold to Citibank in 1989. It was renamed Citibank Financial Services and he continued to work at this company until 1993, before retiring at the age of 48.

I felt I had everything that I needed and so decided to retire, he says.

The novelty of retirement soon wore off, and in 1998, Barclay decided to return to the world of business. He became chairman of Business Building Breakfasts, a business networking group in the UK.

"But all along, I had been keen to harness human potential and co-founding the UK College of Life Coaching in 2001 gave me the opportunity to realise my dream," he says.

The college (renamed Coaching and Mentoring International Ltd in November this year) encourages what Barclay calls "the non-directive approach" - helping people to think through issues themselves and come up with their own solutions.

It now has offices in the United States, Brussels, Dubai and will soon have one in China. "It has been a wonderfully satisfying challenge. At one of our graduation ceremonies, Dr Patrick Williams, who is on the accreditation committee of the International Coaching Federation, said we have the best course he's ever seen," says Barclay. "That's the reward for me - to have created something good."

I

I believe humility is to clear-sightedness what arrogance is to blindness. Some time ago, when I attended a coaching exchange led by another group, I was surprised to hear them claim that they invented coaching. To my knowledge we've only been doing coaching for a few years, but ? Socrates was asking questions 3,000 years ago so I think he was the original life coach.

There's such fantastic wisdom in parts of the world that has been ignored.

I believe Mahatma Gandhi achieved more with his gentleness and humility than all the leaders of the superpowers put together.

I have been influenced by three people? my father, my parish priest and my headmaster. My father gave me a sense of right and wrong. The priest taught me the courage to follow a path within the boundaries of honesty, truth and decency and my headmaster gave me a sense of pride in achievement.

I enjoy watching other people achieve things they thought were out of their reach.

I believe in the power of persuasion as opposed to the power of force.

I will always remember my [daughter], Jane, coming out of the operation theatre [after her delivery] with her little girl, Emily.

Me

Me at the age of 10:

I was a rebel. I thought teachers were boring. I wanted to be an airline captain and go to the moon.

Me and getting married:

I met my wife, Dorothy, when I was 20. While studying engineering, I worked at night selling shellfish in restaurants in Birmingham to save enough money to buy a car. [Then one night] I saw her and - bang! - that was it. I was gone.

(I still am!)

The following week she was helping me sell shellfish.

Dorothy is beautiful inside and outside. Very stable and sensible, she comes from a large, loving family.

We got married a year later (in 1965), so I had to focus on earning a living and building a career. Marriage meant having responsibilities and a wife to support; it changed my whole outlook on life.

If I hadn't got married I would have carried on doing crazy things all my life.

Me, my children and their in-laws:

Dorothy and I have been blessed with two children - Jane and Stephen.

They married a brother and sister.

We get on like a house on fire with their in-laws - David Brown, a fast bowler, who did some damage to the Indian side in the 1960s, and his wife, Trish, who is a licensed jockey.

We have four grandchildren - our daughter has two girls and our son has two boys. So Dorothy is a full-time grandmother now.

Me and life coaching:

As an engineer with the Electricity Board of Birmingham, I worked with a crew that used shovels and picks to look for [underground] cables. I had to keep them motivated even as I was trying to sort out the problem with the cables. It was here that I honed my motivational skills.

[In the late 1970s], after my stint with Capital Life, just when I was feeling a bit bored with life in general, I met [motivational trainer], a gentleman named Paul Werner who was Dale Carnegie's personal assistant.

He was in his eighties and had a licence to run Dale Carnegie workshops in England. When he shared with me the principles Carengie and he had been practising, I realised that they were the same which I was using in my mentoring programme.

To this day I don't know whether I should have read Dale Carnegie's books first, and saved myself time on reinventing the wheel, because he had it all written down and his technique matched what [my company Chapelash Securities] was doing.

We ( Chapelash Securities, Barclay's investment business) bought Llugwy Hall, an old building with 60 rooms in the Snowdonia National Park, in Wales, and used this as a management training centre. We trained top personnel from several reputed companies such as Kellogg's and Barclays Bank. While we covered customer relationship techniques and memory enhancing exercises, we also employed inspirational leadership techniques. [For instance], if I thought you were good I'd chat to you about where your career was going. I'd try and find something that you were scared of and had never done before and help you get over that.

It was during this time that I bought Great Britain II, which I renamed With Integrity and began using it [as a place where I could conduct] personal development courses and corporate entertainment programmes.

I would take my trainees on ocean racing [expeditions] to combine management training skills with life training skills.

So, life coaching had become a natural component of what we were doing, although we never used the term until much later. I had an e-mail the day before I came to Dubai from someone who had attended these training workshops. He said, "Thanks for what you did 20 years ago." I'm really chuffed about it.

The turning point in my life:

Getting back in touch with technology was a turning point in my life.

[During my retirement period] I had lost touch with technology, with the price of bread and with reality. A few people asked me if I would [join forces with] the Coaching College [UK College of Life Coaching], as it was known then.

While on my way from home with my granddaughter, Lois, who was three, she took the car keys out of my hand and said ?Mine open the car, Grandad', and she opened the car. I was amazed that though her language skills were not fully developed, she had a good sense of technology. She could open the car.

And here was I with a lovely home office with a computer, a secretary and a slide rule (which was technology at the time when I graduated) on my desk and not knowing how to use the computer.

I put the slide rule in my drawer? I learnt how to turn on the computer, about Windows and all the technology that my granddaughter would learn in her life. If I hadn't tuned into modern technology at that time and [become involved] in the college I'd be going downhill now.

Myself

When successful people make a statement, it becomes a formula for success. What about the not-so-successful people? Who will listen to them?

It's absolutely true. When Bill Gates says something people sit up and listen.

To a degree there's a kind of blindness. People start to follow a successful [formula] without analysing [whether it is good or bad]. So who will listen to the unsuccessful?

A member of parliament [in the UK] was accused of swindling and [sent] to prison. Now he has repented and has admitted he shouldn't have stolen the money and I think it's worth listening to the consequences of arrogance.

The world is full of successful people, yet the world is not a success in many ways.

I don't agree. If we look historically [at] how the world has changed and developed, it is so much better than it ever was, [although] it isn't perfect by a long way. We should have clean drinking water everywhere in the world [but] we don't. But look at the way polio and other killer diseases have been eradicated.

There have always been wars at any given time. But we are coming closer, step by step, to resolving our differences. The likelihood of Russia ever going to war with the United States is almost zero. That was a big possibility when I was young. Now if the Middle East and South America can achieve peace, the world will be a great place. We are slowly but surely getting there.

Next year the Wolverhampton Chamber of Commerce will be 150 years old [and we have] decided to adopt a cause: ?Let's make poverty history'. Everything we do next year will be [with this motto in mind]. At the core of all progress is economic activity - it's the only true means of measuring a decrease in poverty.

If there is a single green leaf on a bare, withering tree, should the tree be chopped down?

Depends on where the tree is. If it's in a meadow, leave it alone. If it's in a park where it could kill children if it falls over, chop it down.

You have mentored many people. Who is your mentor?

By far the most obvious person I turn to if I've got something on my mind is my wife, Dorothy. A lot of people have inspired me. Dale Carnegie's assistant [Paul Werner] for one.

He didn't know he was mentoring me but he did just that because I was sucking his brains out.

Love begets love. It follows then that we live in such an ?I love myself-world' that we should all be one big happy family.

I think we are getting better. The interpretation of loving oneself, that's the bit that's wrong.

It's people putting themselves first so they are going to be served first.

I can't imagine some of the great people we have talked about [ eg, Mahatma Gandhi] ever acting as if they loved themselves.

It's easy to love charming people but what about the bloke who upsets me? How can I love him?

Very difficult, but that's the whole point. Do the difficult thing.