An Interview with Colin Turner

By Colin Whitby

Editor’s Note:-

It must have been sometime during the year 2000 that I was given Colin’s book Shooting the Monkey which for me was a revelation. Here was someone speaking about spiritual matters in the context of our workplace, the very thing I had been struggling with for some years.

Quite early in his book Colin discussed the tendency for us to focus on the negative, rather than the positive, and used our analysis of risks as an example. Typically we would use the SWOT method, looking at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. In reality we would spend far more effort on looking for weaknesses and threats, which he calls the Seek Weaknesses Only Test.

Far better to use our time and effort focusing on the positive, using the SOM method, by carrying out a Strengths, Opportunities and Merits analysis. When we focus on our strengths our weaknesses do not count, something that I would certainly subscribe to.

So when Colin agreed to be interviewed I was delighted, here is someone who lives his truth to the full, I hope you enjoy.

Colin Whitby - Shooting the Monkey was published in 1999 and I think I must have read it very shortly afterwards, possibly in 2000. When did you start writing?

Colin Turner - I started writing in 1993 with a book called Born to Succeed which did very well, it got to number 6 in the UK and number 1 in Japan and sold over a million copies, and I’ve now written a total of 15 books.

Shooting the Monkey had a dramatic influence in Japan and because of that I changed it slightly and have re-launched it under the title of The Teachings of Billionaire Yen Tzu, I decided to give a less enigmatic name to it, and have tightened it up more into bullet points. It’s now one of those books that wherever you open it you will find a thought for the day.

I changed it because I wanted to open it up more as one of my goals was to get spirituality thinking in to the business world.

Over that period I was also doing a lot of consultancy with a number of businesses including Pfizer, where I helped them launch Viagra, and get them to number to one in the world and a whole host of large major FSTE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations.

At that time I had a farm in Somerset which I sold just before the outbreak of foot and mouth in 2001, which was fortunate timing, and moved to the south of France. Shortly after that I moved to Monaco which has a wonderful climate and is a very safe place to live. I’m also very close to Nice so can travel and meet with global clients from here.

I have been writing books but unfortunately people buy books but they do not read them. So I then I wrote very small books by condensing things down, and I find it’s actually harder to write short books than longer ones, it’s a bit like the Blaise Pascal story ‘the lack of time prevented this letter being shorter’. These smaller books went very well for conferences.

I had an idea that another way of presenting this material would be through iPods, although I was a little ahead of my time with that. This idea has led to another area of interest, I am also president of Future Media PLC in the UK, where we do e-learning on a whole host of different subjects.

As a further digression I have started to write adventure thriller fiction, I write under the name of Emerson Cole, where I have written GodSword and Nemesis Circle, GodSword has just been launched in paperback in the UK.
http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1492.html

Colin W - Well your books certainly provoke change, and one of the classic problems when introducing change is that people can attend courses or read books that can change their lives, only to find that when they bring these new ideas into the workplace they are told ‘we don’t do things like that here’.

Colin T - Yes well our subconscious knows our Achilles heel so well, we strive to remain consistent with what we are most familiar with even if it is leading us away from what we really want. One of the things I wrote about in Shooting the Monkey was how to be in the right place at the right time and how to draw things to you and I use this a lot.

For example on the 24th July I was launching my book GodSword and we were doing a bit of TV and Radio. I met with my son who has a part in a new film Mamma Mia! produced by Tom Hanks and starring Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep. We had met at the Sofitel and we had a reporter come along to discuss an article.

During the discussion it was suggested to get the book into the hands of Pierce Brosnan. However I would not like to exploit this kind of situation, perhaps if we focus on this idea we’ll see what happens.

The reporter then left and my son and I had another cup of tea, although we should have left ourselves. Later when I stood up to leave I turned round and bumped in to Pierce Brosnan! Now this was an example of instant manifestation. Once you are focused like that these things happen quite a lot.

The secret is that most of us know what we don’t want, and we hope what we don’t want doesn’t happen, which of course it does. It can be hard as we have been programmed not to, but we must focus on what we really really want.

You know from basic Gestalt, if we buy a new car we begin to see them everywhere, but usually we only see them after we have bought the car. If you know exactly what you want, right down to the detail, then it will materialise.

For example when I was looking for my farm in Somerset I wrote down exactly what I wanted in absolute detail, where it should be situated, the lie of the land and so on, although I did not detail the inside of the farmhouse.

An agent took me to a property that he thought would fit the bill and although some of the features were hidden and had to be uncovered, everything I wanted was there. However, we had to gut the whole farmhouse and rebuild the inside, and this was the area I had not visualised.

What I do now is I use what I call the 1% solution. A day comprises of 1440 minutes, and 1% of that day is 14 minutes, so if you focus on what you want for 1% of your day, the other 99% takes care of itself. This is detailed in my book Passion vs Pension or Lead to Succeed. Nothing can be materially accomplished until first it is mentally accomplished so we must visualise it.

However people are so busy doing their job they are not actually living their dream. So when we get bogged down in low energy it is because we are allowing all the other energies to distract you from things.

Colin W - Yes I can think of an example where something similar happened to us, where we had detailed exactly what we would like in a caravan, and had written it down clearly. When we went to a caravan show we stepped into the first van we came to and knew that it was the one. The strange thing was we then went round the exhibition to see some of the others, just to make sure, because we couldn’t believe it was that easy.

Colin T - That is exactly an example of where we question it and then doubt our own energy, however if we could stop rationalising life becomes much easier. People often say, hang on you’ve got to be realistic, but in effect most of the important things that happen in our lives happen after a period of chaos, and the same word for chaos in China means opportunity. Sometimes events need to knock you off the spot because you are not in the flow, when you are in the flow, things just seem to happen to you.

It’s easy to know when you are in the flow, if you make a decision and it feels heavy, then it’s not in the flow, there should be a sense of euphoria about what you are going to do. So when you sat I the caravan and felt it was right, in there was no need to look at anything else, and you would also avoid seeing something else that would make you think you made the wrong choice, but we do it to ourselves.

Colin W - Have you been noticing a shift in large organisations over the years in their approach to the way they work, with regard to the kind of teachings you have been giving.

Colin T - Yes most certainly, people are finding they are able to express their vocation within the business area, in fact this is probably the best area in which to do so. The most important thing in life is to make people feel valued, and in business where people do not feel valued they do not perform, if customers don’t feel valued they wont buy. So over the last 5 years HR has now raised it’s level and a lot of HR directors are now sitting on the board, whereas before they were policing. There are 4000 corporate universities in America, and 400 in the UK, which is increasing, and they are all interesting in the value of the individual.

There is still some way to go but there has been a huge change, people now know so much more, access to the internet and such like gives people much more understanding, and they know if someone is ripping them off. So there has been a raising of consciousness and awareness in that the only way to serve yourself is to serve others; Executives are now aware that in order to get on they need to be professional and creative in order to achieve excellence, and if they work from that centred place they provide role models for others.

The key message is follow your heart, know what your heart is and channel your Godself.

Colin W - Colin thanks so much for your time, it has been a pleasure speaking with you.