Alexander Everett is considered one of the founders of the human ability development system.
The basis of Everett’s original seminar, first held back in 1962, was the following idea: “As a person thinks of himself, so he is.” In that seminar, Alexander demonstrated how the mind affects emotions, and emotions affect the body.
Alexander Everett pursued the goal of increasing the number of people in the world for whom the task of self-development is dominant and for whom self-development really helps to solve all other life tasks. In his mission there is no scientific scholasticism and religious mysticism, no thirst for superprofits and no need to create societies, parties, sects. This is a scientist who sees his task not only and not so much in writing tomes that no one except colleagues and students will read, but in ensuring that his knowledge already today serves people with different education, income, social level, for whom the most important the instrument of achievement is or may be self-improvement.
Here is what Alexander Everett himself says about his programs: “I never thought about all the decisions that led me to success, I just knew them. They were given to me by intuition. The techniques that I offer you will help you develop your intuition – then it will guide you, help you. Where does intuition come from? Nowhere. Buddhists say: when you enter into nothingness, you know everything.
Personal Growth Training offers a learning environment in which, through sensory exercises, the participant can uncover and become aware of those underlying attitudes and interpretations that directly affect the outcomes they create in life. Very often in life we act automatically, based on our experience, hoping to achieve results that can be called unprecedented. Albert Einstein said this very accurately in his time: “The consciousness that created this reality is not able to perceive another.” In other words, we often hope that, using old knowledge and experience, we will be able to create something new and extraordinary in our lives, what we often call our dream or main goal. At the same time, however, we forget that our perception of the new through the prism of the old will make this new very similar to what we already know. What’s unique about personal growth training is that no one tells you how you should live your life. Participants themselves discover how otherwise it is possible to see themselves and the life around them and make valuable discoveries through this. Through this process of discovery, the participant gains access to new levels of freedom of choice and personal power required to create a future that has nothing to do with the past.
During the existence of the program, Alexander Everett has trained several trainers who have become leaders in this educational movement. The most famous of them – John Henley and Werner Erhard – later became the founders of the well-known training seminars Lifespring (Layfspring) and est.
For example, Erhard’s Seminar Training (EST) draws on the best practices from various religious and psychotherapeutic disciplines. Its goal is to give people a unique experience in two weekends that will transform their lives. During these sessions, participants are yelled at, bossed around, insulted, lectured on, and put into various “processes” (observation exercises in altered states of consciousness). As a result, they begin to share intimate experiences, discover hidden aspects of themselves, and eventually come, as if by magic, to the experience of “getting it”, that is, finally seeing what their life really is and how to make it work. .
Personal growth training is terrifying for professional psychologists: the technologies and psychotechnics that are used at such an event can cripple the unstable psyche of a person who is in a state of undiagnosed mental disorder. Cases bordering on cruelty in personal growth training are also not uncommon. Depending on the author, the training differs in one way or another from the classic – the Everett method. Because on Russian soil, that training simply would not have been understood “without translation”.
The organizers of personal growth trainings are faced with the task of filtering out those who need, rather, the help of a psychiatrist or individual psychotherapy. The organizer usually informs about this: we do not treat anyone!