About Us

Joseph Mevlanna Pritchard

As a youth all my spare time had been spent playing football.  Not that I gave it much thought; it was just something I did.  We were Yorkshire Champions when I left school.

After studying Management Science at Manchester University I went to work in London.  Ideal as a young man.  The Kings Road, Chelsea - as opposed to Harrogate (my home town) - was still swinging.  Part of my job was to visit the trade outlets of my employer, Watney Mann and Truman Brewers, on the Kings Road.  Nice work if you can get it!

Work was a shock - and not for the obvious reasons: getting up early every day, working five days, then evenings, then promotions at weekends; I welcomed these.  Cooperation that was the shock.

Or the lack of it.  Grand Metropolitan had merged two brewers (Watney Mann from the West End and Truman from the East End).  Brewing can be tribal but this was war, an emotional war about people, under the guise of beer.  Lives were ruined; it was distressing to be part of it.

This was my first proper job and I didn’t know any better. (Two of the older men took me under their wing; one later committed suicide.)  But it seemed alien to me.  At the time, I never thought about teamwork.  It is just something you do as boys, when playing football, otherwise you don’t win.  We had to cooperate to win. This message had not got through.

For ten years I continued to give it a go.  From the outside, it looked good.  Advertising agencies in Greek Street, Babmaes Street, and Knightsbridge were fun - parking tickets aside.  And my parents loved my duplex in West Kensington.  But I was dying inside.  And drinking a lot didn’t help, but everybody did it!

The decade of reckoning came in my early thirties.  I wanted to be alive again.  Proper alive.  I wanted to work with a sense of trust again, and honour my own sense of self , not someone else’s.  And for first time since football, I started to enjoy me in my own life.  And the more it happened the more exciting life became.

It wasn’t easy.  I was wedded to the working class hero dream, so the initial risks - giving up quite a successful career - looked counter-productive.  But, with lots of support - and retraining myself to pay attention to my own experience - it worked.  Of course, that is just the beginning of the story.  Since then I have worked for a further thirty years, been to Ashridge business school, made many businesses lots of money, and created reality from ideas alone.  But, the overriding impression is about the prize:  for a person to be true.  This gets them what they want.

We all have our travails, even in the peaks of our creativity, but the most successful people I have met can look themselves in the eye and smile, knowing that they are being true to themselves.  And form follows spirit, not the other way around.  It just takes a bit of courage; that’s been true for me too.

So, the work we do allows an individual to find themselves (their purpose, and their direction, and their decision making faculties).  It is exciting, rewarding and definitely gets results.  It’s a personal development experience, developed over thirty years from our own experience, which we call Zetetic Pioneering Strategies.

Elizabeth M Pritchard

When people ask me how I got into ‘all this’, I take ‘all this’ to be my interest in the internal lives of me and other people.

When I was 16, Julie and I escaped games lessons to read poetry behind the coats in the cloakroom at Bath Convent. We’d also stay up all night sometimes - talking and wanting to understand things about how life worked. Julie went on to become an artist and I went to Manchester University to study English & American Literature. Why American? Because some of the American poets seemed to say it in a real way about that internal experience I was getting very excited about. Why Manchester? Because I came from a farm in Wiltshire and I’d seen Coronation Street on TV, and I thought that people Up North were sort of gritty, direct and honest.

Back in Wiltshire after University, a young widow with a daughter, I became an English teacher, and signed up for an Introduction to Counselling course in Trowbridge. This time the people exploring thoughts and feelings were not friends, just people who’d signed up to the course. I was fascinated, and, of course, carried on talking deep to my friends as well.

Then Colin came to rent a room at the farm. There was something very direct about the way he talked to people. I was fascinated - again - and determined to find out what it was, what he’d done. He’d done a 3 day seminar called The Exegesis Programme (one of the Large Group Awareness Trainings of the early 80s). This was even larger groups of people talking about deep stuff. I was even more fascinated. Eventually a business grew out of this seminar – window cleaning was considered but telephone marketing was chosen.  This meant that I was now studying ‘this kind of thing’ full time, and I did for 14 years.

Now, Joseph and I work in this way full time, and keep training and collaborating with other people who are interested in ‘all this’. I suppose I am aspiring to my outside reflecting my inside. I know I may never get there, but I am as interested in ‘all this’ now as I was when I was 16.