is 

Title: Guerrilla Poet

Gender: Male

Age: 40

Sun Sign: Leo

Chinese Sign: Earth Monkey

“Not all those who wander are lost.” - Tolkien

I keep a regular blog at www.claylowe.com

30 Second Commercial
 I'm the managing director of a truly inspiring personal development company called  Ascent.  Our core venture is creating experiential learning experiences for individuals, groups, and organisations.  We use the environment to stimulate thought and create a catalyst for inspiration.  It's a true mind, body, and spirit experience.

I believe the most important thing we do at Ascent is re-awaken people's minds - to “unplug” from the “system”, so to speak, and embrace the infinite possibilities the universe has to offer. 

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Learning and growing massively as an individual whilst making a huge difference to the lives of people within the

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Begin to appreciate the enormous sense of achievement you will experience from being part of a programme that challenges you physically, mentally and emotionally.

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Imagine how you will experience the privileged opportunity of supporting a Gambian village that needs our help.

Anticipate the benefits that you will gain from immersing yourself in working closely with four of the UK’s leading experts in the field of personal and professional development. Look forward to experiencing inspired training, mentoring and coaching from masters who have dedicated their lives to helping people like you to experience and achieve more of what you want and deserve. (Find out more)

Personal Note

I write and I coach.  My topics of passion are self-development and personal change.

Who am I? Gee, that's a loaded question. I've been a lot of things. I've been a soldier, jumping out of airplanes and blowing things up. I've been a financial consultant, selling stocks and bonds. I've been a manufacturing engineer, building generator excitation devices and motor control centers for steam and gas turbine engines. I've also been a training manager for a large bank, imparting knowledge and reducing barriers to help people be better at their jobs. And more recently, I've turned my hand to building my own personal development business. But are all those things really who I am? Hmmm, I wonder?

I would like to believe I am a good natured guy - pleasant, friendly, enthusiastic about life, maybe a little a bit mental, but otherwise harmless. You are just as likely to find me climbing a mountain as you are to find me with my nose in a book.

I've sky dived over New Jersey, parachuted over Georgia, jumped into the New Mexican desert. I've driven an M60 tank and rode shotgun on a Russian T-72 tank. I've fired M16's, AK47's, anti-tank missiles - blown a claymore or two. I've travelled to 27 countries and lived abroad in two different countries. I once ran naked in a public place, killed a rabbit and a chicken with my bare hands for food, bungee jumped in a lake somewhere in Canada. I've been lost in the middle of nowhere, been caught in a snowstorm, been stuck on a cliff face. And most recently, I've been scuba diving in the red sea. In short, I've had a lot of fun. And if the Creator be willing, I hope to have tones more fun as the world turns.

A Personal Story
The corporate world scares me. It scares me because so many people's dreams are tied up in the illusion of safety and security of the so called “steady pay check.” If I do a good job, so the story goes, the company will take care of me. I'll save some money, contribute to the company pension plan, and retire. And then, when I'm old and no longer of any use to any one, I'll finally be able to live my dreams.

In my profession, such as it is, I hear that story a lot. It's like a reoccurring nightmare.

I had lived that same nightmare for 20 years, until one day, on the top of a tall mountain, in the middle of a Malaysian jungle, I suddenly realised what those adverts had been trying to tell me. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. Once the light goes out, the show is over. And if I don't pursue my dreams now, when will I?

**

The system will let you down, as I found out on a cool autumn day. The day had started out like any other normal business day. I was pleased to be on my way to work. It had only been a few short months since I'd left the belly of manufacturing to go work for a well known investment bank as a senior technology trainer. I turned up the radio to an unacceptable level of loudness, put my foot down on the accelerator, and heading for the open road. I hadn't felt this good since my days as a young infantry lieutenant fresh out of West Point.

We were scheduled to have a town hall meeting with the CEO of the company. The stated agenda was meant to be the future of the company. There had been some rumours of a possible restructuring, which is a polite way of saying lay-offs, but we figured as the business innovation team of training consultants we would be safe in the hands of progress.

We shuffled into the auditorium like lambs to the slaughter. The CEO, dressed in his best suit and power tie walked onto the stage with a measured gait, his stride brimming with confidence. What he said left me in shock. The company, in order to protect shareholder profit, needed to return to its core business and any department that didn't fit into those parameters had to go. And in my experience that meant if you didn't bring any money into the company, you were a prime contender for being cut loose, let go, sent packing no matter how important your job title sounded or how many years you had invested in the company.

This was my first experience with redundancy and it wouldn't be my last. The 11 years I'd spent in the army hadn't prepared me for this. I could hear the gods of big business saying, welcome to the civilian world where profits mean more than people. I'd learned a valuable lesson that day. No one is safe and sooner or later, the system will let down. I needed to find a way to escape from the system.

**

When I first conceived of the idea of an outdoor adventure coaching program, I was standing on the top of Mount Kinabalu, in Borneo, watching the sun break the horizon. I had just finished a tiring 10 day charity adventure race. We were there to raise money for Raleigh International's youth development program for young urban kids who, through getting tangled up with the wrong crowd, had gone off the track, and were now working hard to get back on the right track and stay on.

During the day, we raced, and in the evenings we'd sit around the base camp and tell stories of our ordinary lives back home. Most of the folks, being city types, had never been in the jungle. They were experiencing nature first hand. And from the folks I'd spoke to, the experience was very close, personal, and intense. This combined with being in a developing country, where people still depended on the jungle to provided nourishment and shelter, shifted their perspective. Many began to question if their complicated lives really needed to be so complicated and contrived. I've always been a nature-boy and know the effects a stunning piece of scenery can be have on a person, yet I wasn't prepared for the impact this trip would have.


We returned to the UK, back to the corporate salt mines, and the daily grind. Some of us had changed forever and our desks would never look the same.

To fight against the constricting walls and ticking clocks, we sent emails to each other to pass the time. Mostly we talked about how Borneo had changed our lives and how we had to escape the quagmire of office life. And more then few folks said that they couldn't continue to do work they found uninspired. The jungle had freed their minds. They had to escape and a few did. One lady left her stressful advertising job in London to go pursue her dream to be a teacher. Two others quit their job and bought around the world tickets and set off to find themselves.

The final straw had been pitched for me as well. I was more determined then ever to make my break from the soul destroying existence I was living. Buzzing from my experience in Borneo, I had a thought, if the jungle was capable of getting people to change without any coaching intervention, how much more powerful would it be, if you added coaching in an outdoor environment? Having a purposeful conversation using nature as a backdrop for inspiration? It was in this spirit that Personal Growth Adventures was born.

I got together with one of my teammates to see if he'd be interested in doing something like that with me. I did some market research and came up with a few coaches doing something similar, but not quite in the same way that I had image. I put together a business plan and tried to bring the idea alive. I wanted to create something magical; something that would change people's lives.

We didn't get very far and the idea faded into the recesses of my computer hard drive as I got swallowed back into the daily grind. The idea went into incubation, and it would be another year before the idea resurfaced.

**

A reoccurring theme in The Alchemist is that the universe conspires to help those who are in pursuit of their destiny. Once a person commits to truly following their dreams, the universe, I am told, will do everything it can to help make the dream a reality. And so it was with me. In Alchemy there is a principle that states every thing touches every thing else. That if a butterfly flaps its wings in Texas; it causes an earthquake in China. I've always found that these things take time. You commit to your dreams, events are set in motion. But this motion has a rhythm of its own and some times this rhythm isn't in time with what we have in mind. We want things to happen quickly. We want them to happen now. I have found that the universe doesn't operate in this manner. Things take time. Forces and events have to be moved around the chessboard in a certain sequence. Timing is everything. Isn't it?

The company I was working for was a partnership between two financial giants - one in investment banking, the other in personal banking. The markets had turned south and one of the partners wanted out of the market, leaving the one company holding bag. Inevitably when these things happen, the fallen out is people lose their jobs. The corporate parlance is restructuring. The guys at the top, the ones pulling the strings, call it restructuring, the guys in the trenches turning the tools call it redundancy.

I had settled back into corporate life and was getting pretty comfortable. A promotion, a new role, more money, things were looking good. My dream of setting up an adventure coaching company was a distant memory - a dream that had fallen asleep.

My wake up call came in the form of a letter from HR. I was facing a redundancy again. This was the fourth time in three years that I found myself in this position. The balance of sums threatened to render my lifestyle apart. The letter was a portent to the possibility of no job and no means to care of all the usual trimmings of mortgage and bills to pay and mouths to feed. But instead of feeling dreadful, I felt oddly calm about the situation. And as I was updating my CV, I came across the old business plan for Personal Growth Adventures. I shook off the dust. Opened it up and had a read. And in an instant, the magic returned. I knew what I had to do.

I volunteered for redundancy. Much to my surprise so did a whole lot of other people. We were fighting to get out! A lot of people wanted to take the money and run. It says something about the state of a company when you have people fighting to get out, actually wanting to be made redundant. So the irony of the situation was that people were actually going to and did get upset when they were told they still had a job. Imagine that!

I was one of the lucky ones. I lost my job. But as one door closed, another opened. I teamed up with Peter Freeth of Communications in Action fame and together we created what has become known as  Ascent.  And with that, I was finally free of the corporate salt mines.