Former rogue trader Nick Leeson is happy if people learn from his experience but he tells Kate Holmquist he's no preacher.
You've done the crime (the more spectacular the better), then you've done the time (try a few years sleeping on the rough cement floor of a Singapore penitentiary). Now get ready for a lucrative career in motivational public speaking and book-writing, with film rights thrown in.
As career paths go, nothing is more exciting, dangerous and potentially lucrative than the nerve-wracking life of the contrepreneur - the ex-con turned self-help guru with an internet home page that reads like a thriller. Mobster Michael Franzenze, homeless double-felon Anne Kelly, bank robber Troy Evans and drug dealer Steve Arrington have all cashed in on the US self-help circuit.
The original, 19th century sales-pitch guru Elbert Hubbard once said, "A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience." Lost in the Irish Sea along with the Lusitania in 1915, he wasn't able to cash in on that particular blunder, but thousands have followed his example since.
Among them is the "comfortably off" Nick Leeson, who earns £5,000 for an after-dinner speech and whose book, Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress, written with psychologist Ivan Tyrrell, has just been published.
But Leeson himself is an avowed self-help cynic, although he was helped by Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul when he was coping with colon cancer and chemotherapy in the isolation of a solitary cell in the notorious Tanah Merah prison, Singapore.
Today he does voluntary work with an holistic cancer charity in Galway, works as commercial manager of Galway United and lives quietly with his wife, Leona, two step-children and the couple's one-year-old son.
Apart from the occasional Chicken Soup book, his aversion to self-help means that he's the last person you'll see reading The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, partly because what society defines as success is what led to his downfall.
After being released from a four and a half year sentence six years ago, Leeson got a 2.1 in psychology at Middlesex University. This university education, the first in his life, helped form his healthy cynicism of quick fixes.
"I don't want to be a guru. Being in the position of table-banging, motivational speaking would not sit well with me. I have to be true to myself. I'll tell my story and if somebody learns something from it or it motivates somebody, fine. Anything else would be very false," he says.
He refuses to give advice, already breaking one of the major rules of guru-hood, which is to tell others how to live their lives in 12 simple steps or less.
His function in the book is to provide an example of the crash-and-burn fate that awaits anyone who thinks that they can live long term with unreasonable stress without paying for it.
Much of the book is presented in a discussion format between Tyrrell and Leeson, with Tyrrell outlining the practical psychology in a mercifully psychobabble-free style, while Leeson shares his life, warts and all, painting himself as anything but a saintly role model.
Tyrrell, who is principal of MindFields College and director of the European Therapy Studies Institute, has previously published work on what he terms human givens.
These include the needs for physical nourishment and exercise, as well as spiritual consciousness, status and emotional/physical intimacy.
If not met within an emotionally and physically balanced lifestyle, needs become greeds, resulting in alcohol/drug abuse, promiscuous sex or the kind of poor judgment that can drive a 200-year-old merchant bank to extinction.
Tyrrell adds that in the corporate world, one in five managers has sociopathic tendencies - seen as strengths in a risk-taking, money-focused culture. High-status managers who belittle their employees deprive them of deserved status, thereby driving employees into chronic depression and other negative behaviours.
Whether the stressed executive is at the top or the bottom of the ladder, if he or she continually over-rides human needs in the cause of success, then the risks of heart disease, cancer and addiction are extremely high.
Tyrrell's original ideas, which he supports with research, have been described by New Scientist magazine as "a quiet revolution" and by BBC's All in the Mind programme as "absolutely the right way forward".
Leeson's runaway greeds were extreme, but they mirror the falls from grace that occur commonly, such as the executive workaholic who survives on alcohol and sex until he's arrested for drunk-driving, fired from his job, left by his wife and diagnosed with liver disease; the politician who flies high on public opinion until his hidden corruption is exposed; and the emotionally neglected housewife who puts on a glamorous face at the golf club until she is hospitalised for depression.
Leeson says that he was never consciously aware of his need for status. "I thought it was pride that kept me from stopping, going to someone before it was too late and telling them how I was hiding losses. But it was actually my status in Barings that prevented it because everyone around me - not just at Barings but in my personal life as well - had bought into my success."
As long as the bank appeared to be making money and high bonuses were paid, Barings Bank never questioned the wisdom of giving a 25-year-old carte blanche and a blank cheque to gamble the bank's money. It didn't detect Leeson's serious alcohol abuse (blackouts, lost weekends) and his addicted gambler's temperament, which led to Leeson's continued hiding of losses - both his own and others' - in the now infamous 88888 account.
Leeson says his tactic of moving monies to avoid detection is not unlike people's tendency to shift unmanageable debts from one credit card to another.
As long as Leeson was Barings's golden boy, he could do no wrong - much like a rock star or soccer player who has gone off the rails but can still produce the goods on stage or on the pitch.
While he admits that alcohol abuse and a gambler's temperament contributed to his failure to seek help before Barings collapsed, Leeson is characteristically un-gurulike in his belief that moderation, not abstinence, is the healthy way forward for him now.
Leeson still drinks socially in moderation and limits his gambling to "spare cash" once a month, preferring poker and a flutter on the stock market. His circumstances today are completely different, so he no longer has the need to tune out through an addiction. "Abstinence is difficult to maintain and that's why relapse levels are so high. Changing your behaviours over a long period of time is more effective. So I try to stay on a middle ground," he says, speaking in a soft tone of voice mercifully free of the usual evangelising ego.
He admits that having done the time for his crime was the saving of him, freeing him to move on with his life in what he hopes is a healthier way.
Leeson's development as a human being capable of self-reflection occurred while he was in prison, where he was diagnosed and treated for colon cancer while chained to a hospital bed. He began to realise that he was fortunate to have been caught and sent to prison before his behaviour led to sudden death by heart attack or some other means - but he never found God, unlike your average contrepreneur.
Prison was such torture - the 120 degree heat, the dry bread, sleeping on a rough floor and being surrounded by gangland psychopaths, some of whom had gone mad from incarceration - that the only way he stayed sane was to visualise that he was somewhere pleasant, to exercise vigorously in his tiny cell in whatever way he could and to give up trying to control things he couldn't - such as the fact that his wife, Lisa, had gone off with someone else and wanted the marriage to end.
"I've learned that acceptance of things you cannot change is the key to handling stress," he says.
These simple coping mechanisms, born out of despair, are, in fact, psychologically recognised as the most effective stress-beaters there are. It's what people do when they are put in an intolerable situation from which there is no immediate escape.
While Leeson learned them in the worst circumstances possible, his book is a cautionary lesson in how important it is for highly stressed executives to use them before they get sick, physically or mentally.
Back from the Brink is a useful book that will appeal to the most hardcore self-help cynic, perhaps because it was written by one.
Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress (Virgin, £12.99).