Jack Canfield grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and spent 42 years teaching self-esteem and success. He moved from inner-city classrooms to corporate training, built the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise, and learned neuroscience, NLP, and tapping along the way.
Chapters
You know, I mostly grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was a state when there were only 48 states, had the 48th worst educational system in the country. My mother was an alcoholic, my father was a workaholic. We were the classic dysfunctional family. And I decided when I was in college, I took a course in psychology and realized I'd found my life purpose. I love to figure out how to help people be happier, have more success, have better relationships and fulfill their dreams. And literally, Since I've been 23 years old, I've been involved in this work. I'm 65, so what is that? 42 years that I've been doing this work. And I love helping people discover who they really are and then step into the full expression of that in their life. I started out as a high school teacher in Chicago, and I was working with inner city kids. And I very quickly realized they weren't motivated to do what they would they needed to do. And I just wanted to learn everything I could and these kids didn't. And so I realized they had self esteem issues. They didn't believe that they could have what they wanted in their life. And so I became an expert in self esteem. And literally I would have kids that were on probation, that were not allowed in school, that were suspended, they would sneak into school to come to my classes because they were that inspirational, motivational and educational. And so I literally went from that to training teachers how to teach self esteem. And then one day this person said, you know, my husband's company needs what you teach. And I said, well, I haven't worked in a corporation before, I don't know. She said, they're just big kids in suits come over and do the work. So I did and I loved it and they loved me and we had a great experience. And over the years, I became more and more proficient at working with people from every walk of life, whether they were athletes wanting to improve their performance, or whether they were musicians wanting to get recording contracts or authors wanting to get their books published, whatever it was, salespeople wanting to be the top salespeople, entrepreneurs wanting to double their income. And so I have spent every day of my life literally exploring how to be more effective in this work. I am constantly taking seminars, learning the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience and quantum physics and nlp, eft, tapping, you name it. I'm always looking at how can I help people break through their limits faster and go further with less effort. And I believe that's possible for everybody, no matter where they are in their life that they can begin to take it to the next level. So I am passionate about this. I've been a psychotherapist many, many years ago. I was doing individual work with people for years, and then group work with people and then coaching people, training trainers. There's not an aspect of this work that I haven't been involved with. In addition, you know, I'm not one of those people who teaches success because I read a lot of books about success and decided to become a success trainer. I'm someone who's built a company that had over a billion dollars in sales with the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I've successfully built over three companies in my life and sold one of them tens of millions of dollars. So when I speak about success, I come from my own experience and the experience of coaching and training literally tens of millions of people around the world in over 40 countries. So if you want to work with someone who can take you to the next level, I believe I'm that guy. I'm committed to you. The question is, are you as committed to you as I am?
