Self-Help Guru Tees Off on the Self-Doubters
We are on the driving range at the Ojai Valley Inn, where eight business people and myself are flailing away at golf balls. Never having held a golf club until today, I mostly swing and miss.
But when I connect, J. M. Perry is jazzed. “You see that? Gee, maybe there’s something to this, huh?”
Clenching his fists, he shouts, “Yes!”
“Yes!” I shout back, clenching and humoring.
Then I miss some more golf balls.
Welcome to the Perry Performance Classic, which purports to use golf to teach business people Perry’s “mental technology” for “peak performance.” I took the course last week, graduating with a framed certificate attesting that this writer “has unleashed his performance to its greatest potential.” No doubt regular readers of this column have already noticed the improvement.
No? Well, if I am a failure, my teacher is not. Amiable, mustachioe J. M. Perry is a Stockton psychologist whose eponymous firm will gross $1.3 million this year selling corporate-training services up and down the state using golf, sailing, rafting and cross-country skiing (as well as more conventional techniques) to help people reach new heights of cost-accounting, inventory control and so forth.
At the Perry Performance Classic, for example, companies have been paying $2,500 per person (it’ll be $3,000 in 1993) to have employees spend most of three days at a classy resort listening to a message that boils down to: “Banish doubt.”
“ Recover from doubt,” Perry corrects me later.
Perry himself seems immune. A bandleader in his youth whose physician-grandfather headed the American Medical Assn. and treated Al Capone, James Mitchell Perry became a psychologist, but found that just listening to people’s troubles didn’t satisfy his need to perform. So he launched a career several years ago doing corporate training.
Now, at his seminars, Perry does voices, tells stories and gives pointers in golf, a sport he only recently took up and already plays well.
By now Perry’s clients have included Ernst & Young, Citicorp, Coldwell Banker, Pacific Gas & Electric, AT&T;, IBM, NEC Technologies, Marriott and others, which is striking when you consider some of what he offers.
The classwork portion of our days here in Ojai is mostly a mixture of jargon, generalization and pop psychology, although one important message seems indisputable: Most people can choose a more positive outlook. There’s also some Orwellian stuff about language, which we’ll get to later.
But people seem to like it, and the food is terrific. Besides, it’s a great way to learn golf. Perry contends that the game is 90% mental, and thus offers a way for people to put into action his ideas about overcoming self-doubt. So for three days running we spend a lot of our time out on the links, where golf pro Mike Reasor displays the patience of Job with the neophytes among us.
If golf really is 90% mental, my deficiencies are frightening. After the usual beginner’s luck--I’m creaming the ball, and I’m sinking putts--my play soon finds its own level. I fan a lot, or my big swing nicks the ball just enough to make it dribble off the tee. One of my best shots, a soaring drive, slices so far right it slams the second story of a building next to the course.
I blame it all on my “Critical Adviser,” Perry’s allegorical name for the psychological back-seat driver who says you can’t do things. Another Perry bete noire is the phrase, “Seeing is believing;” he prefers “I’ll see what I believe,” which is probably too true of too many of us.
The idea seems to be to have faith in yourself. Perry points to nature: “Does everything in the forest seem to be OK with itself?” he asks rhetorically.
All right then. To achieve peak performance, Perry stresses what he calls the “Hands-Free” method, sort of a Zen approach for keeping bad old Critical Adviser at bay. And Perry insists on the language of “inclusion,” by which he means eschewing negative words. By the end of our three days, class members were jumping through hoops to avoid using the word “not.”
“I’m having a problem excluding exclusions,” admits Jerry Carpenter, a vice president at International Rectifier Corp., a semiconductor company in El Segundo.
Perry also exhorts us to avoid “Two-Option Polar Thinking,” in which the world is seen in binary form (e.g., right/wrong, success/failure, them/us). Yet the stuff we get to make sure we don’t backslide includes a plexiglass stand (of the kind listing early-bird specials at diners) with a card listing two columns of “inclusions” and “exclusions,” a nakedly polar setup.
We also get a hat, a cotton sweater, a dozen audiotapes and a wallet-size card, nicely laminated, exhorting us to “Surge, Recover, and Surge!”
Oddly enough, most of the group seemed to get something out of the experience. Toward the end, we were asked what we’d learned.
“I’m going to be a whole lot more excited, and I learned I can choose to be excited and optimistic,” said Craig Vinsky, a vice president at the bank card division of First Interstate Bank of California, in Simi Valley.
Gregory D. Beltran, a partner with Andersen Consulting in San Francisco who specializes in computers, said he was still “very uncomfortable celebrating my successes,” but added: “I feel better than I did when I came here.”
Scott Nutter, a Roseville, Calif., mortgage broker and an accomplished golfer, said: “ ‘Not’ is a thing that’s dominated my speech, and therefore my thought, for a very long time.”
Cheryl J. Rickleffs, an administrator at Produce Exchange Inc., a San Ramon, Calif., fruit and vegetable wholesaler, said she discovered that “my Critical Adviser’s been in control for a long time.”
“I used to concentrate on doubt,” added Saul Pinon, who works for the same company in Nogales, Ariz. “Now I just smile. It seems to be working at this point.”
