Thinking positively:
Jimmy Roos was physically, verbally and emotionally abused as a child and those traumatic days left an indelible mark on him, so much so that when he became an adult he struggled with his self esteem and as a result always second-guessed himself.
But he never gave up as there was always the inner person who wanted an opportunity to blossom and contribute to the world. This later led Roos into a teaching career. But as much as he loved teaching, he yearned for more since he saw many people like him who had great potential but lacked self belief, which hampered their development.
“I grew up with an aunt and I had been abused and ill treated and made to feel unwelcome, so I suffered rejection and this actually affected me in my life… I had low self esteem and I felt unworthy, that I wasn’t good enough and because I struggled with that it became this sort of mission…” Roos said in a recent interview with the Sunday Stabroek.
And so after a degree in psychology it felt natural for Roos to take life-coaching studies, which he did in the United States, and which is a practice that helps people identify and achieve personal goals. As a consequence, today he is a certified life coach. He said because he struggled with low self esteem he is able to see the symptoms in others, and had the desire to help others because people helped him.
Today hundreds of miles away from his home country, Namibia, Roos wants to set up shop in Guyana, but because life coaching is a relatively new phenomenon here he said he has not had many clients, although he sees the need for someone like himself in this country.
“People in Guyana don’t really know what a life coach is, and if you don’t know how something can benefit you, you would not see the need to take out money and pay for it…”
His wife is Namibia’s official representative to Guyana and for the last five years they have been here Roos said he has been giving motivational speeches in churches and some other organizations, but he wants his services to be utilized as too many persons lack self-motivation. He recently started a weekly television programme on Channel 6 on Fridays at 9.30 called ‘Destination Success,’ and he is hoping that his profession would soon kick off because he teaches his viewers on the programme.
“Some [people] may know about the term motivational speaker, but not really what a motivational speaker does and how we can benefit them,” Roos told the Sunday Stabroek.
His view is that he is meant to be in this country because he does not really “see anybody doing what I do” and he said he is thinking about remaining in Guyana for the long term. While he and wife are here their three children are in the United States.
“I feel I was meant to [come to] this country, I mean when my wife got the job here we didn’t even know where Guyana was…” he said.
And it is not just the individual a life coach can assist, but businesses too can tap into the services he offers, he said, and they could see a return on the investment they make by paying for the services. He observed that someone can be very motivated but over time they may lose their focus and drive and would need some booster.
“I can help people to see that there is a way out, even when they think there is no way out; they can change their lives and you start by changing their attitude,” Roos said, and that the mistake people were making is to say, “thoughts are just thoughts.” For him, in contrast, thoughts “are things” that are very important to the direction a person’s life takes.
“They [the thoughts] affect what happens in your life; they affect what you accept into your life and you would find that no matter where you go, doctors would tell you that you must be positive after you had an operation, you must believe that you can be helped,” Roos said.
There have been examples of people who are job searching, and the person with the positive outlook lands a job faster than the person who has a negative attitude.
“You can make life work for you or you can make it work against you by your attitude, and that is what I can do for individuals, for businesses, by helping people change their mindset by speaking to them because many of them don’t know any different.”
He made reference to the saying, knowledge is power, and with knowledge, he continued, people can do so much more than when they lack knowledge, as they would think that they have no power and that everyone and everything is against them. But once they have knowledge “it is like the blindness has been taken off of your eyes” and they would realize that they can make the change to improve their lives.
And he said it is not just about changing the mindset of people, but giving them practical strategies that they can work with, and he usually instructs his TV audience to get a pen and paper and make a commitment to view the show and take notes and practice what he teaches.
“So many people spend money; they buy books that they spend a lot of money for but they don’t apply…” he noted.
Since he has been in Guyana, Roos said he has been coaching people from the UK and US and other countries via Skype. And while he has had a few local clients Roos said they have not really benefited from his services as they have not applied the information he gave to them to their lives.
“When you pay for something and you don’t use it, it is like taking your hard earned money and just throwing it away,” was what he told one of those clients as he went on to tell them that people need to be held accountable. He said once he starts working with someone they give him permission to hold them accountable, because if they do not use the information effectively then both he and his client would be wasting their time.
“If you come to me it’s because you have realized that you need some help, and when you are at that place it means you don’t have any discipline and you do whatever you want, and usually when somebody comes and tells you something you become defensive… but if you start working with me you would have to be held accountable,” Roos said.
Roos sells himself as a person with an analytic gift, and according to him he can look at someone’s life and be able to tell why they may be having a problem; “I think that is a strength that coaches have.”
From a very young age he realized he had the ability to critically analyze situations and apart from that, Roos said he also has the ability to break down complex concepts in teaching in a way that it becomes easy to understand.
For him now he just wants to help Guyanese who may have lost their sense of direction and who just need someone to help them to think positively.
