No excuses!
Born in Brooklyn, New York. Never liked school very much (did anyone?), but I did spend a lot of time at the library. To earn some pocket money I babysat and delivered Newsday door-to-door, 7 days a week, for 2 1/2 years. The hardest part (plus Sunday mornings) was collecting the money. A 14 year old kid having to track down customers to get the company’s money… Obviously mobile phones were a thing of the distant future. Kids don’t deliver newspapers anymore and payments are all digital now. Go figure.
This hard-earned adolescent income was mostly spent on my baseball card hobby, which eventually became a small business (google “old baseball cards”) – wheeling & dealing at collectors’ conventions, mail order, but always collecting, accumulating (at least 100,000 cards) by the time I was 16. I credit my bad eyesight with reading, memorizing and categorizing those cards. What can I say, it kept me off the streets. I gave it all up when I left for college and it would later finance an extensive book collection and those early trans-Atlantic flights. My parents keep complaining to get rid of the rest of those cards; I’d love to, but that would be a pain in the butt.
They probably would have thrown me out of school if I hadn’t scored so high on the state exams, especially maths. I knew how to ace exams with minimal effort.
I was more than ready to leave home at 18 to go and attend the ‘exclusive’ SUNY-Binghamton. For the first two years, we could choose our own subjects, so I tried everything, both intra- and extracurricular, searching for educational passion. I got into Taoism and meditation, even student government, and attended more parties than anyone can remember. My favorite subjects were Literature, Philosophy and Linguistics. When we had to choose a major, I added up my credits and had the most points in English. I chose Lit+Rhetoric as concentration and, against the odds, that has proven useful. They say the richer your vocabulary, the more you can express yourself both in speech and in your mind.
In 1988 (age 22) the travel bug bit and I went to London for a semester (PNL). In addition to my courses, worked both in the college cafeteria and a typical English pub to earn some quid. Of course I had a bicycle and quickly found my way around town. I’d have to say that that was the most fantastic experience of my life; a yankee tooling around London, hitchhiking up to Liverpool, on my own like never before.
When that semester was over, it was winter and too cold, I felt, to activate my trans-European train ticket. Holland was the nearest country, so I decided to spend the winter there. I ended up in Deventer, a small medieval town, and on the first day, managed to rent an apartment off the square. A week later I was volunteering at the student club, learning Dutch, enjoying European women. What else was I going to do there all winter long?
The 2-month train trip around Europe was a fantastic journey. I can remember it as if it were yesterday, though I haven’t yet dared to look at my old journals…Remember, this was before internet, before couchsurfing.
In May, I flew home for graduation. I remember I was not looking forward to being back there. I went back to my old summer job, delivering liquid oxygen (heavy!) to cancer and AIDS patients in homecare. Thanks to my familiarity with the roads, comfortable bedside manner and willingness to drive around NYC with highly flammable materials, I met a lot of dying people and earned enough money to return to Europe.
In order to rationalize another trip to Europe, I decided to get a Master’s degree somewhere over there; so, I set out to visit the universities. Lucky for me, that was the time the students took over the faculty buildings in Italy and I became, albeit briefly, intimately involved in the Movemento Pantera.
I chose University of Amsterdam (UvA) because the library had the most English books of anywhere I’d visited. I even passed the entrance exam in Dutch (not required anymore!). It was not my intention to remain in Holland, but I was enjoying myself to no end, and was up to a challenge.
Among the various jobs over the next 9 years in Amsterdam were trying to open a salad bar (luckily I never got it off the ground: working 7 days a week is not for me); cooking in restaurants; tending a (Hell’s Angels) bar among the red-lights; a small business making resumes (CV’s) for people; volunteering on the board at Sauna Fenomeen; delivering sandwiches to office buildings, all without ever having a residence permit.
One day, just at the right time, my yoga teacher mentioned a teaching job he’d heard about. Well, I had never wanted to be a teacher, but desperately needed a job. I got myself an interview at a polytechnic of finance, wooed the coordinator in his own language and got a job offer on the spot. On the first day at work, not knowing at all what to expect, I got a thrill speaking to a room full of students. I think I decided on that very day to become a great teacher.
After those two years at the Amsterdam Academy, I’d reached a certain disturbing level of comfort, plus a need to be more in nature, and felt an urge to shed the anchor, explore new territory. I chose Prague, a place I’d been enchanted with for years. The deciding factor was that the Czech Republic was the closest country to pick up a Slavic language. And the nature was much better than what I was used to in Holland.
I started teaching intensive English courses all over the country, adopting the Suggestopedic method, which I’d been experimenting with. I was lucky to find a mentor in Lonny Gold, Suggestopede extraordinaire. In 2002, he invited me to join him in Hainan, China for a 2-month program. I took instantly to the tropical island, learned how to drink tea and coconut milk, eat mangoes, and enjoy just about every method of personal transport ever imagined.
After spending 3+ months in China, I returned to my lovely Prague and threw a tea party. My friend Giuseppe looked over my bookshelves and said to me “Ty vole you learned all that magic from books!” Giuseppe was and is very perceptive. He asked me to give a course in communication techniques to his colleagues at Fiat. Suddenly I was a Management Trainer. As I’d never attended such a course before, I didn’t know what to do; I just put together a program I thought they would like. They loved it, hired me again and recommended me to their partners. Since then I devote my time to developing and leading training courses for firms big and small. These communication and personal development workshops are a new sense of pride for me: when I have the privilege of training real professionals in their livelihoods, the feeling of satisfaction is tremendous. In putting together the program manuals, I’ve had to study books and books of materials. It’s made me into an information junkie; wanna trade?
In early 2007 I travelled around India, discovering even more methods to deal with people from different cultures. In India you need to be very firm about what you want and, even more often, don’t want. As I usually travel alone, it is necessary to remain flexible at all times. I conducted a few 1-day workshops in New Delhi and was delighted to find that Indians are demanding; they ask a lot of questions and require a lot of practical demonstration. I wish all participants were so alert and challenging.
I occasionally teach exam preparation in China. In Summer 2009 I taught a 10-week IELTS course in Nanjing, China. The results were 95% passing scores, so they organized another course. I spent free time shopping and learning Chinese.
Now, back in Prague, I am writing a blockbuster book, more news when that’s ready. These days my most popular course is the Presentation Skills. Please explore my site to see how I can help you communicate better and be more (ethically) persuasive!