About me

I almost suffered an early death due to the amount of boredom endured at school. Later, as a labourer in Canada, I tended to foresee where the gravel should be unloaded from the dumper. Not eager to be dumped myself, I kept my mouth shut and shovelled diligently for days. Working as a language teacher, I couldn’t quite understand why people want to study an idiom instead of speaking it. ’How could we get them to open their ears?’ I kept wondering. Because they might then produce sounds vaguely similar to those of the natives. And when I got involved with NLP, I made a perplexing discovery: the methods that open up anyone’s inner world are hardly used to explore cultural patterns.

I think this is how Lingeon was born. I love people, the worlds of different groups of people, their social atmosphere, the intonation and the logical structures. I like to learn new things, and I discovered that a happy attitude aids this process considerably. Coercion, boredom and the sacred cows of educational institutions do not.

In the last 30 years I have lived in 5 different countries, initially only absorbing languages by instinct. Then the topic came to interest me on a more conscious level, and I started to experiment. I made journeys into new cultures; by train, hitchhiking, walking, always talking the local lingo with the locals. I studied full-time travellers, my friends and other exceptional people who were supposed to have ’talent’ for languages. Instead of their beliefs, I investigated what they actually did and uncovered interesting patterns. The most I learned from children.

As a trainer of communication I am well aware that anyone can easily enter the worlds of new cultures making friends with new languages rapidly and with joy. I have even discovered a number of things about how to do this. What I still find challenging is convincing people to change what has never worked for them, and get them to do something that actually achieves results.

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