My life path was not a straight and simple one.
Instead of a normal education I began as an apprentice in a printing works,concluding with an external examination in typesetting by the Chamber of Trade.
Subsequently, I studied business management for my mother’s sake and psychology for my own. My interest lay not so much in the therapeutic aspects of psychology so much as its related fields: philosophy and religious studies. Life’s larger questions have always fascinatedme.
Yet after my studies I was no more savvy than before: I had acquired knowledge, but was not a single step closer to the feeling of truth or wisdom.
It was an exciting time, nevertheless; alongside my studies I made short films and commercials, wrote screenplays and directed a product campaign for a cosmetics company.
I was interested in everything, restless, unsuited for a single job at a company or all the hierarchy the rat race entails. All that remained for me was the final leap to independence.
My first business was a disaster: I bought a decrepit print shop from an inheritance. It was a struggleto come out without losses, because business was so bad that we had no capital, even for smaller investments. 1991 was also the year in which DTP (desktop publishing) arrived. At first it was no more than a toy, the graphics industry could not figure out what to do with it. With two partners and some additional borrowed money, I founded a start-up which set out to link the old world of print settingto the new one.
Three years later I held a number of patents in Germany and the USA, and had opened a branch office in Chicago. Through this start-up I learned how to build a business, acquire world-wide distribution channels, the depths of patent and trademark law – not to be forgotten – and at least five different programming languagesand, of course, crisis management of every variety. By 1997 I had had enough and sold the business to an international group of companies.
With all the experience I had gathered, my next step had already become clear: an entry into the world of business advice and, five years later, self-employment as a contracted manager.
I re-organized businesses, put them back on their feet, closed them down, built them up. I was responsible for projects ranging from 3 to 300 million euros, but by 2006 I had lost interest in the constant change and the same old hotel rooms and airplane lounges.
Throughout this period, another part of me continued to call, however. I used my free time for further education in psycho-therapy and coaching. I visited encounter groups and began with men’s work in 1999. The book Pain or Passion arose from that work and more books followed soon thereafter.
I, too, fell into a crisis, and was forced to confront the question: Who am I?
The successful, often unapproachable manager or the open author and coach who at times acts as a spiritual guide? Economist, psychologist, or author?
Since then, I have learned that I was all that and much more, and that a fixation on one role or another only limits you.
In hindsight, my books and training as a coachwere the inevitable outcome of my winding path.
