Firewalking can increase sales, boost incomes and expand creativity, Irish instructor tells Daniel Hickey.

They walked across hot coals in their bare feet, broke inch-thick blocks of wood with their hands and bent iron bars with their necks.

But it wasn't mystics or martial artists performing these feats, it was 130 employers and employees from businesses around Mayo, Galway, Sligo and Roscommon, attending a seminar entitled "Unlocking the potential within".

Brian Moore, who hosted the event, is the only firewalking instructor in Ireland. For 16 years he has worked in management consultancy and sales in blue-chip companies. As the director of Peak Potential Ltd - a company he set up in 2003, based in Ennis, Co Clare - he specialises in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) training courses and coaching throughout Ireland.

NLP is a personal development system created in the early 1970s.

Its core idea is that an individual's thoughts, gestures and words interact to create one's perception of the world and that these observations can be changed by applying a variety of techniques.

"When I worked in Cable and Wireless [ in the UK]," says Moore, "it was all about how to use NLP to get increased results at work, in sales and customer service and development, to train other people within the organisation to understand how to get more out of themselves, to help customers."

The philosophy of NLP could be summarised by the mantra repeated by Moore throughout the seminar. "If you change your beliefs, you change your behaviour. If you change your behaviour, you change your results. If you change your results, you change your life.

"By changing one's outlook," he says, "a person can improve their attitudes and actions." It was one of NLP's main advocates - American Tolly Burkan - who signed Moore's certificate in firewalking.

Originally part of religious ritual and associated with mystical powers, it is now more frequently used as the grand finale of a modern motivational seminar.

In the car park of the Breaffy International Sports Hotel in Castlebar, a majority of the 130 people attending the seminar walked across the hot coals in a ceremony once undertaken as a test or proof of faith.

In the United States, firewalking is part of the "New Age religion" of self-empowering motivational activity. Now, according to Moore, it can be used to "increase sales, boost incomes, increase output, expand creativity, enhance problem-solving, find more balance or improve customer service".

It has become contentious as to whether there is a legitimate scientific basis for participants not being burned regardless of their mental state or whether their apparent invulnerability is the result of an extraordinary mental strength or spiritual power.

Despite its popularity - particularly in the US - NLP continues to be controversial. Its techniques remain scientifically unvalidated and it has also been criticised for lacking a defining and regulating body to impose standards and a professional ethical code.

Moore maintains it is rooted in science rather than in religion or spirituality. He says he hopes the seminar does not come across as a strange marriage between business and quasi-religious ceremony.

Although he acknowledges that it has "no practical application whatsoever", he maintains that the challenge of walking barefoot over hot coals can be seen as "a metaphor for life, for the challenges we must face and try to overcome".

Moore was invited to Castlebar by Learning West, a network of private enterprises based in the west of Ireland, set up to promote and facilitate training and development in the region.

Horkan's Garden Centre - with branches across Connacht - is among the 85 companies in Learning West's network.

Owner and managing director Seán Horkan walked the coals not once, but twice, an experience he described as "exhilarating".

While he acknowledges the confluence of flipcharts and martial arts is perhaps a strange one, and that the focus of such seminars on New Age philosophies is open to scepticism, he does believe the ideas advocated by Moore, as well as the firewalk and the bending of iron bars, can have a positive effect on the workplace.

"I'm very much into trying to challenge yourself and trying to stretch yourself," he says. "This spectacular firewalk at the end, it's putting it up to you and that comes down to everybody to challenge yourself. And if you can do this, then maybe the obstacles you hit during the day aren't as bad.

"I'm looking forward to next week, on the job," he says, "to see are the people a little bit more peaked up."

Although currently hosting only one or two seminars a month, Moore envisages a market emerging in Ireland for the type of training he offers.

"Companies are so sick of the same old, same old," he says.