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| Sunday Herald, The: Seeing The light; Despite serious illness, bereavement and divorce, |
WHEN Jack Black was a child, living in Cumbernauld, his mother Jessie would rise early on his birthday and bake him a cake before going to work. On returning home she would add the icing. Then when it grew dark, his father, also called Jack, would say, "Right, go on son, blow out the candles. Go on son, make a wee wish." It's an important memory for Black. "A wee wish," he says now, italicised with indignance. "Not a big wish but a wee wish."
Jack Black doesn't do wee. He does massive. And he doesn't do wishing. He does goal-setting. The whole idea of a wee wish is anathema to him. Black is in the business of "personal performance improvement" and with his company, MindStore, which he launched in 1990, has been remarkably successful at selling his ideas to some of Britain's leading companies, organisations and individuals including Motorola, Strathclyde Police and the actor Denis Lawson. He is neither life coach nor corporate guru; he's a salesman, with a briefcase full of psychological bells and whistles, and has grown very rich by convincing people that he can show them how to ring positive changes in their lives.
I decided to meet Black and figure out whether I buy his message, and more importantly, whether he truly believes it himself. He used to live in a castle, but moved out when his marriage ended, and now stays in a large house in the countryside outside Glasgow. He used to be really acquisitive, mad for status symbols such as the stately home and a boat, but says that those things don't matter to him now his 50th birthday is only a few months away. That said, one corner of the living room is dominated by a television so large I feel I should prostate myself in front of it and start speaking in tongues.
Black is wearing a pink shirt and black trousers. He has steel grey hair and a square jaw, and looks like Joe Broon made good. We settle down in his conservatory to start the interview. There's a New Age vibe. Dried flowers are arranged in a vase marked 'Serenity', a large wooden Buddha observes proceedings, and a book lying on the table, by the Indian guru Parahamansa Yogananda, is called The Law Of Success: Using The Power Of Spirit To Create Health, Prosperity And Happiness. To the left of Black's chair, a leprechaun figurine gestures at a pot plant.
"When I first started, journalists would have a laugh at my expense," says Black, straight off the mark. "They thought I was off my head. But nowadays this stuff is mainstream." He's right. Britons bought 40 million self-help books last year, and we can buy Chinese herbal medicine in modern shopping centres, so nobody is going to look askance when Black starts going on about alpha waves pulsing in the brain. In the early days of MindStore he would get audiences of two or three; now he speaks to 2000 people at a time, and the business has an annual turnover of (pounds) 1 million.
He has always believed it would happen. "I knew I would fill the Royal Concert Hall one day," he tells me. "It wasn't even built at that time, but I used to say, 'When they build that bloody building, I'm going to fill it.'" He is still terribly ambitious; when I joke that with his preaching style he could enter the priesthood, he laughs that it is out of the question, but he might consider the role of pope.
MindStore's teaching is based on four basic areas: stress- management, positive thinking, goal-setting and balancing the cerebral hemispheres, the analytical left brain and creative right. For almost 15 years, Black has taught courses and given private coaching based on these areas, and most of his work has come from businesses who want him to talk to their staff. It seems to me that companies must hire him because they hope to increase the productivity of their workforce, that it's ultimately all about profit, but he denies this.
"There's a sea change going on in business," he says. "By and large, they want to give their employees skills and techniques that they can use not only in their jobs but in their lives generally." If a company wanted to hire him simply as a corporate cheerleader, there to whip the drones into a frenzy, he wouldn't work for them. He sees himself as doing something higher than that. "Missionary work" he calls it at one point, "magic" at another.
One evening, a few days after our interview, I see Black address the Institute of Quality Assurance in a lecture room at Strathclyde University. Colin Sansome, chairman of the west of Scotland branch, introduces him by telling the audience to "expect to go out of here this evening with an entirely new perception of life".
Lately, Black has become less keen on merely improving performance and more interested in teaching people how to live more meaningful lives. He has developed three new courses - MindStore Accelerate, The Island and The Line In The Sand. Accelerate is for the business community, but The Island is intended for a general audience; it's a two-day, non-residential course for (pounds) 100, which is intended to help people, through "a series of guided visualisations", identify areas of their lives that are making them unhappy and make decisions about how to fix them.
The Line In The Sand is a five-day retreat for top executives, retailing at (pounds) 4750 a pop. "It's really profound," says Black. "It takes people down through a process of really getting to know themselves." It was during the testing of this new programme, while on retreat with friends and colleagues in the spring of 2001, that Black had an epiphany.
"I realised that something in my life was uncomfortable and I wasn't sure what it was. Then as time went by, my wife and I were separated, and I think we just realised " He trails off. "In my case I realised that, although I loved her, I wasn't in love with her. It's a kind of interesting difference. It's to do with just feeling right about it.
"We had 25 fantastic years of marriage, we did more than most couples ever dream of - two fantastic kids, both of us running successful businesses. I just think that in times gone by couples traditionally stayed together because that's what you did. I found myself in a situation where it was time for a change, and we kind of helped one another to make that separation. She was particularly helpful to me in finding a flat so she would have the space of the home while we found a way through."
His wife, Norma, hadn't been on the retreat, and I'm amazed at how civilised he makes the end of the marriage sound. I think if my spouse had returned from a week of naval-gazing, announcing that they had seen the light and that we had to split up, I might have been pretty angry. "Well," he says, "the two of us were agreeing to do that. It was part of an unfolding process. And the kids were brilliant about it. It's been a lot easier than people might imagine."
Can it really have gone so smoothly? "I'm not going to say that it wasn't, at times, emotionally challenging and quite raw to face up to the truth. But I'm fortunate that my wife's a very, very talented woman, very skilled at her work and walking her talk. So we were lucky because we were able to get through it with abilities that other people don't necessarily have."
Norma Corlette was a partner in MindStore with Black, and since 1998 has run her own company, The Learning Game, aimed at helping children to become confident learners. I asked for her side of the story but she declined. Black is now in a new relationship, with a work colleague. "It's great to be in love again," he smiles.
JACK Black is not his real name. John is. But school friends started calling him Jack, after his father, and it just stuck. Anyway, as he says, "It's a fantastic brand. People remember it." It's a name that sounds forged in focus groups. I like that it's the opposite of blackjack, suitable for a man whose ethos is that you make your own luck in this world.
But who exactly is Jack Black? He was born in Glasgow, living first in Possil then Easterhouse before doing most of his growing up in Sixties Cumbernauld, where his father worked as a life assurance salesman. "I never perceived money to be as important as drive," he recalls. "If you imagine aspirational working-class families all pioneering together in a new town, imagine that dynamic - that's a great community spirit there; everybody wanting good things for their kids, wanting them to do well." That atmosphere cut across traditional divides so, although Black was Catholic, he never encountered religious tension.
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His father was very confident, had to be in his line. His mother was a hard worker, full-time at the Co-op. His paternal grandfather had owned shops. Getting on in life was in Black's blood. When he was 11 he started a paper round, but actually buying the papers and selling them, rather than simply taking a wage from a shop. As a young man he started attending auctions. He once bought a box of Wrangler jeans, but when he got the box home he discovered that only the top pair were Wranglers; the rest were bell-bottoms and he couldn't sell them. Another time he bought a box of Adidas trainers, all odd. This was a steep learning curve. He was screwing up then so he wouldn't screw up later.
He went to Jordanhill College to study teaching but decided it wasn't for him, so went into social work and education for Strathclyde Regional Council, working back in Easterhouse where he had once lived. He was committed to this work and gave it a decade of his life. But he grew unhappy. His career was stalled, he wasn't making as much money as he would have liked, and he began to feel that he and his colleagues weren't doing much more than papering over the cracks in a smithereened community. Then the deaths began.
His boss, a "caring, almost loving" man, admired by everyone who worked for him, had a heart attack and died before the age of 40. Another of Black's colleagues complained of a headache and two days later died of a brain tumour. Then Norma's mother suffered a stroke and passed away. All this within a fortnight. Black realised that stress had played a role in these deaths, so he decided to change career. Unfortunately the transitional period where he tried to build a ski-trip business while continuing with his old job was even more stressful than before.
"I was working 70-80-hour weeks, thinking I was superhuman," he says, "and I collapsed in the hairdressers, just dropped down. I realised that I was getting my first and last warning." He began to read up on stress-management, a learning process which led him to create MindStore.
The start-up money was (pounds) 500, borrowed from a loan shark. Three people came to his first event. He was "peeing against the wind", had to go to England to find an audience. "It was a long road and there were times I couldn't feed my kids." He kept at it though. By 1993 he was averaging 60-100 people in Glasgow. Someone told him they could get 1000 people in Dundee and he believed them. He hired the biggest hotel and filled the ballroom with chairs. Forty people turned up and spread themselves all over the room. Black struggled on and ended up falling through a trapdoor on the stage, skinning his shins. But once it was over, a man who had been sitting right at the back walked up to him. "You were up there for an hour and 20 minutes," said the man. "I've never seen anybody take such a beating and keep going. Will you come and talk to my staff?" That was the start of a relationship with Allied Dunbar. Other companies swiftly followed and Black grew to embody his own message: you will become what you believe you will become.
There have been setbacks, of course. First and foremost there has been the problem of overcoming public mistrust. Ten years ago, the whole idea of personal development was nowhere near as widely accepted. And even now there is cynicism. Think of the way self- improvement coaches are portrayed in films - Patrick Swayze sleazy in Donnie Darko, Tom Cruise maniacal in Magnolia. This year's Perrier award was won by the comedian Will Adamsdale for his motivational guru spoof, Jackson's Way, proving that as self-help culture continues to infiltrate the mainstream, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to satire.
And then there is outright hostility. One website records some scathing impressions of a MindStore event and describes Black as a "hired corporate brainwasher". He is accused of using hypnotism techniques to encourage positive feelings toward the firm paying his fee.
"That's absolute crap," he says when I mention the website. "I find it quite funny and bizarre actually. I often say to the company that employ me: 'I'm not here to work for you, I'm here to work for your people.'
"The argument about hypnosis implies that I'm doing some kind of manipulation and abuse of people. I think if I'd been doing that I'd have been found out a long time ago. I mean, we've worked with over 50 per cent of the FTSE100 companies; our client list is second to none. So I think if I was some sort of fraudulent idiot using some bizarre technology I would have been found out."
JACK Black is on stage. For an hour he has stalked back and forth, talking and talking and talking, working himself and the audience up, once actually making a little half-jump into the air. He is much more animated here, in the Strathclyde University lecture hall where they teach basic psychology, than he was when I met him at home. There he seemed surprisingly flat, even a bit nervous; he's clearly more comfortable in front of large groups.
It's interesting to watch how he works. He constantly asks the crowd for permission. The first thing he does is ask whether we mind if he takes off his jacket. At one point he even says, "So I'm massively proud of my background. Is that alright?" He shares intimacies, telling us that his first son was born nearby in the now- demolished Rottenrow Maternity Hospital. He does sincere: "Nobody gets out of bed on a Monday morning with a passion for a realistic achievable goal." And cheeky: "Looking around the room, I can see some of you are fairly well on." He makes a joke about breasts. He tells us that he was sitting in the toilet before his speech, listening to what people were saying about him. He says, "People in Scotland are terrified of success" and some of his acolytes write it in their notebooks: "We fear success."
After his talk, he takes questions. A woman called Donna Gallagher puts up her hand and says she just wants to thank him for what he did for her. I talk to her afterwards. She spent a long time working in retail but went through a period of anxiety and depression. MindStore helped her deal with that and she is now studying social work at university. After she talks to me she goes up to Black and says hello, eventually walking away with tears in her eyes. Her husband Gordon has come with her tonight. He has repeated one MindStore course eight times: "I went for the first time five years ago, and it's absolutely changed my life since then."
A man with a moustache asks Black about times in his life when he has been down. Black replies that he has struggled with a "life- threatening" illness but doesn't go into detail.
Intrigued, I later phone him up and ask about this. He's reluctant to talk about it ("I don't want people thinking I've got an illness. I don't need that projection on me") but eventually does. He contracted the condition ten years ago, underwent five years of treatment and is now in perfect health.
"I developed lumps just underneath my chin, around my throat and neck area, and elsewhere on my body," he explains. "They grew and grew and grew to the point where they were like golf balls either side of my throat." One day he was at Ibrox and the Rangers doctor insisted he get it checked out. "That was on the Saturday. I went to see my doctor on the Monday and he basically told me that I had cancer and that I had to get it seen to immediately." He went to hospital for tests, and it emerged that he didn't have cancer but sarcoidosis, a disease that causes inflammation of the body's tissues. The eyes, lungs and heart can all swell up, he was told.
Steroids are often prescribed as a treatment for sarcoidosis but Black initially resisted taking these. "Eventually I gave in and took them, and I blew up by two stone. You get that steroidal face, that red, fat face. It was a challenge to me doing my job." To put it bluntly: nobody is going to be convinced that an overweight, unhealthy looking man is the very chap to motivate their employees.
The reason this period in Black's life is worth talking about, and not simply an invasion of his privacy, is that he practised what he preaches to get through it. He used positive thinking and goal- setting. He "dug deep" into his own self-belief and strength of mind. It would be an exaggeration to say that he healed himself (sarcoidosis has no specific cure and must simply run its course), but he certainly convinced himself that one day he would be well again, and thus was able to get on with his life and work rather than being becalmed by illness. This, I think, is the final proof that Black really does believe his own message. I have never been convinced by the power of positive thinking, but I find it more plausible coming from a man who has used it to cope with the breakdown of both his body and his marriage.
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He certainly seems relentlessly cheerful and on-message. Whenever I asked him, at the start of a conversation, how he was, he replied, "Wonderful!" And he never referred to "problems" only "challenges". I personally prefer a little shade with my light, and I'm sure he must have his dark moments like all the rest of us. In fact, it's quite a relief to learn that he is so fed up with Scotland's awful weather and its pessimistic culture that he is planning to move to France.
It'll be interesting to see what the French make of Monsieur Jacques Noir, the king of positive thinking. For his part, Black is a self-proclaimed futurist, always carrying his top seven goals around in his head, and not one to dwell too much on the past. Nevertheless, looking back, he is happy with what he has achieved to date. "The vast majority of people have got genuinely good stuff out of what I've done," he says, that Joe Broon jaw relaxing into a smile. "It's fine that the odd person thinks I'm a nutjob."u MindStore Accelerate is at the Bridgewater Halls, Manchester, December 16. The Line In The Sand is in Munich in February. The Island is planned for early next year in Glasgow and London. For details visit www.mindstore.com
Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
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