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Your interactive study will lead to the spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices that make life the best it can be. This program, when piloted some hundred times in business organizations, churches, career associations and universities, often received a standing ovation from the many participants. The authors won an incredible 3.68 evaluation with it on a one to four scale for years. If you or a loved one has career, relationship, emotional or spiritual challenges that leave you dissatisfied and feeling stuck in life, worried that life itself and other persons are passing you by, that your life is bereft of meaning, this can be the most valuable single experience of your life. It can and will assist anyone seeking consistent fulfillment in many special ways -- that is, helping the reader find satisfying sources of meaning in those places of the heart where he or she belongs.

 

For a generation we, Jard and Roberta DeVille, have written such psychology books and courses as NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST, LOVERS FOR LIFE, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP, LEADERSHIP POWER (Japanese), LOS BUENOS TAMBIEN GANAN (Spanish), THE PASTOR'S HANDBOOK ON INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WITNESSING and others. One global religious denomination, virtually the fastest growing church organization in the entire world, used our PASTOR'S HANDBOOK and WITNESSING as study guides for many thousands of American and foreign pastors. LEADERSHIP PSYCHOLOGY was the lead-off book in the Executive Growth Series offered by New American Library, a major American publishing company. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST is an American classic while LEADERSHIP POWER was extremely useful to executives and managers throughout Japan. Obviously, we are not novices and we now offer you our best growth programs.

In one of our earlier Fulfillment seminars, at the University of Arizona for the Affiliated Women's Clubs of the Western Region, a charming and successful woman unintentionally made our point about success and satisfaction. Catherine Hendricks spoke about several major problems that are caused by living too secular a life-style in this period of swift, destabilizing and often disconcerting change. Catherine lamented;

I'm one woman who did everything well. I stayed out of trouble in school, married the right guy and joined a great company when it started taking women seriously. I've made sound business decisions along the way and shall surely become a V P before I'm forty. I live in a home my parents think a mansion and have two beautiful children. I do a job thousands envy. Obviously, I have everything. Right? Wrong! Much of my life feels incomplete and caught up in trivia.

My kids are rebelling with sex and drugs and I'm almost certain my husband is having an affair with a little twerp. I feel deeply dissatisfied at the most inopportune times, as if nothing counts except for my sixty hour work weeks and paying for the house and the Mercedes. There must be more to life than this but when my therapist asks what's missing, I can't even tell her. I worry that I'm going mad to feel this way despite my accomplishments in the company and my prestige in my community. What do I do when I've won everything I've ever wanted and it isn't enough to keep me happy?

What, indeed -- and what of the many persons who fall short of her achievements, who fear life is passing them by, who feel stuck in their careers and frustrated in their relationships? They are not mentally ill but virtually always spiritually maladjusted through their secular values, negative attitudes, low expectations, immature beliefs and irresponsible choices. Many are left wondering how they can find consistent satisfaction. This course answers Catherine's troubling questions along with a great many more. Our emphasis is on joyful living through ethical values (or spiritual virtues), positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices. We have learned as Viktor Frankl, Karen Horney and Karl Jung taught, that the unfortunate souls who are suffering from neurotic ailments and existential frustration, are those persons who have failed to find a consistent sense of meaning that assures their satisfaction through life's several stages. We have also learned that few persons are going to simply get lucky and have fulfillment handed to them. Life is filled with quid-pro-quos in which we must do our part wisely and well to have life become consistently satisfying as a by-product of our choices.

Obviously this means that those persons doing the best they can -- while still feeling stuck in their careers, dissatisfied with their love relationships and anxious that life is passing them by, must discover better ways of managing their existence. Of course, that is what this seminar is all about!

Fortunately, life can become deeply meaningful for loving persons who are maturing, who meet the needs of their spiritual unconscious that Frankl wrote about -- which is as vital to satisfaction as our psychological unconscious that Freud discussed. It is this spiritual unconscious that is so often neglected by persons who live with secular values and too pragmatic choices -- which is why we combine the psychological and the philosophical in our work. After all, every society from primitive clans with be-feathered shamans chanting spells around a campfire, to building towering European cathedrals, and even attending Billy Graham's relational campaigns, has been trying to meet the spiritual yearnings deep within every human soul. These crucial hungers are universal and repressing or neglecting them causes what we call spiritual bankruptcy or what Viktor called existential frustration and alienation.

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We have found in a hundred or so presentations, that range from hour long church forum lectures to three day summer college classes, that participants are fascinated with our concepts. And while we are not entirely unbiased, we feel this interest is the result of our addressing vital human needs that are seldom considered in commercial seminars or even religious programs despite their importance to each human soul. We are dealing in applied Logotherapy -- the daily healing of the human spirit within a secular society.

We have long researched the emotional and spiritual aspects of satisfaction, drawing from brilliant existential psychologists of whom Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, Viktor Frankl, Laura Perls, Rollo May and Carl Rogers are representative. And while Wayne Dyer isn't yet a legend in psychology, he remains a contemporary existential seminar leader seen often on Public Television, we find his approach to sound spiritual health an excellent one. We learned beyond a shadow of a doubt, that fulfillment is never won directly but always the result of a maturing life-style. We didn't stop with mere concepts, however, but hammered the issues of life out in the real world, getting down into the mud and blood of existence with people experiencing differing degrees of emotional and spiritual failures. We have also discovered that human existence can indeed be filled with purpose and permanence for perceptive women and men. However, there is a major Catch - 22 in the search for consistent satisfaction. There is nothing automatic or universal about succeeding in our quest. There is no single kind of Fulfillment with a capital F that meets every person's needs. Each one of us has to open personal channels by applying his or her powers along lines of excellence. We must move beyond the theoretical to the practical.

Despite the assumptions of so many persons, our search can seldom be for happiness per se. Happiness is a fleeting emotion that will always fade and eventually vanish. We all need times of joy, obviously, but it is far more satisfying to create lasting sources of meaning in our lives -- in those places of the heart where we belong, connected to persons with whom we share love, acceptance and support.

We all hold values, attitudes, expectations and beliefs and make choices that are relevant to our lives. These key aspects of life affect us according to our inherited traits, environmental experiences and formative choices. Naturally, not one of us is exempt from civilization's pressures. All men and women inherit homosapien angst and rage, resist childhood socialization, struggle to break the apron strings during adolescence and have emotional scar tissue in the unconscious aspects of our minds. We are indeed forced to deal with the tragic triad of suffering, guilt and death. It doesn't end there, fortunately. We are pleased to report that despite many existential frustrations, spiritually-minded persons who convert their earthly meanderings into purposeful, love-filled quests, can enjoy consistent fulfillment. Women and men who cultivate faith, hope and love do find joy even as waves of complex change batter society relentlessly.

We recently had this confirmed by an unlikely source in an entirely unexpected setting. The carnival barker on the Minnesota State Fair Midway didn't look like a philosopher. His fingernails were ragged and dirty and a broken tooth gave him a cynical and somewhat sinister leer. Tough Tony Gallo seemed too rough-hewn a man from whom to learn much about a meaningful life. Nevertheless, Tony went right to a major aspect of fulfillment when he said;

Life's sorta like ridin' a bicycle uphill. Ya gotta keep pedalin' along or ya gotta stop and get off. There ain't no reverse gear and ya gotta keep yer balance.

How marvelously well expressed! There you have it -- much knowledge and wisdom in a nutshell! Tony had just relieved Jard of six dollars in a futile attempt to win a stuffed panda for a granddaughter at his milk bottle toss game. Neither Jard's arm nor his aim is what either was in his youth but he was delighted with the transaction. After all, in these days of expensive psychotherapy, that was a bargain price for such excellent counsel about living successfully. As our philosophical friend with dirty nails so succinctly said, a satisfying life has an ongoing flow that must be embraced if we are to find consistent sources of meaning and belonging with the powers God through nature has given us to invest in spiritual growth. To sum this up even more than Tough-Tony did, we use this simple equation;

PERSONAL FULFILLMENT = f (Heredity x Environment x Choices)