Even the sceptical are being swayed by the advice of mind guru Jack Black, writes Gabrielle Monaghan

Ireland's business community has a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to self-improvement. There may be the odd copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People stashed behind The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on the bedroom bookshelf but, by and large, self-help gurus are better known for their late-night air-punching infomercials than for their influence in the boardroom.

Yet Scottish mind guru Jack Black has been holding motivational seminars in Ireland since the dawn of the Celtic Tiger.

The founder of personal development company Mindstore counts Irish Life, Bank of Ireland, Supermac's and even a pub-chain owner in Galway among his clients. He also gives open seminars in Ireland at least twice a year.

He estimates his sessions have been attended by a quarter of a million people, including staff from half the companies on the FTSE 100, since he created Mindstore in Glasgow 16 years ago.

"The Irish are fairly good at scepticism, but I've been coming here for 10 years and big companies send large groups of people to the seminars all the time," Black says in a telephone interview from his second home in France. "A lot of people come because their colleagues recommend it. Irish audiences have a tremendous willingness to learn."

His latest course, the New Mindstore for Business, will be held at the Stillorgan Park Hotel on September 28th and 29th. The seminar is based on Black's five secrets for success - managing stress, being positive, having a sense of personal direction, using both the left and right sides of the brain, and resisting failure.

"The fifth characteristic is relatively new to the course," the business guru explains. "People who have negative emotions, fear or anxiety will miss out on the opportunities presented to them and can fail, for instance, at doing their best during an interview or winning a new contract because of their own insecurities. I have harnessed new discoveries and techniques to tackle that."

According to Black, the stress element of his course has a growing resonance in Ireland because so many people are employed by US and British companies, that are putting ever-increasing demands on their staff and causing them to burn out.

Black knows all about stress. After working in education and social work in the underprivileged east end of Glasgow for a decade, three people close to him died within a fortnight of each other from what he believes were stress-related illnesses.

His boss had a fatal heart attack before the age of 40; two days later a colleague died from what turned out to be a brain tumour. Then Black's mother suffered a stroke and passed away.

When Black himself tried to build a skiing business and began working up to 80 hours a week, he collapsed in a hair salon one day. "I was in my late 20s and I thought I was superhuman," Black recalls. "I got a real fright from all of this and went looking at stress management courses. I came across a whole world of stuff that no one seemed to know about." Mindstore was the culmination of his findings.

Now, Black is recognised as one of the UK's leading authorities on personal development and often speaks to 2,000 people at a time. Mindstore employs 10 people and has expanded into books, CDs and franchise opportunities, generating a reported annual turnover of more than €1.5 million. It has an office in Germany, is opening one in Spain, and is considering a presence in Russia.

Another challenge Black deals with here is old-fashioned Irish "begrudgery", a trait that has become all the more commonplace as Irish people accumulate greater wealth.

"The most destructive issue in Ireland, and indeed, Scotland is envy," he says. "We like the idea of people doing well in the Celtic Tiger but because of our cultures, and history probably, envy rears its ugly head.

"What happens is that people are subconsciously sabotaging their colleagues by, for instance, not passing on information to them. They may not even realise they are envious of them. The first thing to do is to recognise envy and, once they have the techniques to deal with it, the company will get a better performance out of them."

Black promises to help participants in the workshop develop clarity about their goals and career direction, and to encourages them to use the more creative right side of the brain.

"I teach people how to programme their brains to trigger creativity, passion and excitement about their career," he says.

"Also, because of the education system in Ireland and the UK, the left side of the brain is dominant and people use the right side very little. In 1981, two scientists won the Nobel Prize for discovering that the left side is the reasoning and logical side, whereas the right side is the one responsible for creativity and imagination."

The publicity for Black's upcoming seminar in Dublin claims company directors, salespeople and executives will be "eating out of his hand" after witnessing his style of explaining techniques to help them combat fears and set ambitious goals. The sessions "merge eastern wisdom with westernised quantum physics", as well as the "very latest psychological technologies and recent breakthroughs in performance psychology".

How does this go down with an Irish audience? "Quantum physicists are now working in areas that were before thought to be wacky," Black says. "But western science is now accepting of eastern wisdoms . . . 25 years ago, if someone was told to get needles pinned to certain parts of the body to treat a condition, they were thought of as off their heads. Now you can get acupuncture on the NHS."