A psychologist and former marketing executive believes that ancient healing practices and voodoo drumming can help to keep staff happy, which in turn leads to a successful business. Lorna Siggins reports
Picture a large company which has decided to move into a new premises . . . a well-known newspaper, for instance. Not just any old move, but one that becomes a public relations opportunity for "progress".
For Ross Heaven, the money spent on that hard sell is "pointless" if that company ends up "shoehorning in old management structures which are not inculcating a sense of purpose and wellbeing in employees".
He believes that a happy staff makes for success. If that sounds like basic common sense, Heaven is in the business of working with those who don't trust or cannot rely on same.
A psychologist, author, therapist and television, radio and magazine contributor, Heaven's particular motivational specialities include shamanism and voodoo drumming. These practices have "been with us for thousands of years", he says, and he intends to outline some of the concepts at a Network Ireland conference later this week in Galway.
As his company website indicates, he knows how to speak the corporate language, as he was formerly a copywriter for marketing and public relations firms including Shandwick and Countrywide.
"Ross has done for shamanism what Deepak Chopra did for complementary health," said one review of Spirit in the City, which he published in 2002, while his first book, The Journey to You, was described on Amazon as "the most important book on shamanism in years".
Heaven's thesis is that ancient healing practices and voodoo techniques can be used as a means of spiritual healing and personal development. His Four Gates Foundation is named after the four stages of a typical life cycle, from birth to old age. "In the middle years, the third stage, the mind and vision become much more important, and that's why people often have mid-life crises which allow them to find a new vision," Heaven told The Irish Times. The fourth stage is "fatigue, wondering was it really worth it, and that can also be turned around and applied as a rebirth", he says.
"I apply this model to companies, which have passed the four tests if they are alive and successful," he says. "If companies can't reinvent themselves and haven't a vision, they wither and die. In Britain and the US, businesses are waking up to the fact that stuff they've been doing for years is not working for them, or for the planet as a whole," Heaven says.
"Standard Life, for instance, initiated a project where it wanted to do something for the environment. It promised to plant trees for the first several thousand customers who reduced use of paper and used e-mail instead to communicate with them."
Shamanic thinking allows for such creative concepts, he says. In his workshops, he often involves participants in a "shamanic journey", where he uses the steady beat of a drum to inculcate a "relaxed way of thinking, because the drum is like the heartbeat in a mother's womb".
While meditation, flotation tanks and massage can also induce relaxation, such techniques do not allow people to move into a fully-altered state where their subconscious is working for them, he says. "There is then a window of about three minutes, when participants are moving out of that unconscious state, where I ask people to write down whatever comes to them in a stream of consciousness style.
"They must then close their notebooks, and I put them into pairs to discuss what they've come up with. You often find they have come up with similar concepts, and comparing same helps them to validate their experiences."
Heaven says he became interested in the benefits of altered-state thinking while studying psychology at university. He applied it to his career in marketing and found clients asking why his team was so happy.
"I ran a few seminars for people, which eventually grew into a full-time career," he says. That career now extends from workshops to life coaching to therapy. Life coaching has been the subject of some recent sceptical comment, with US journalist Steve Salerno describing it as a type of "dodge city" in his new book, Sham (Self-help and actualisation movement): How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless.
However, Heaven believes that life coaching has an important role in helping people to set agendas and goals. He is also aware that the people and companies who might benefit most from life coaching are not always the ones who pick up the telephone.
"You do end up preaching to the converted a lot of the time," he says. "You'd expect a phone call from Virgin, for instance, but not Barclays Bank. And, of course, that's reflected in the fact that people know that Virgin is very forward, pioneering, where a company like Barclays might be still very stuck."
To hear Ross Heaven speak at the Network Ireland conference on October 20th at the Galway Radisson SAS Hotel, book online at www.networkgalway.com or tel 091-770522/091-795963.