By Penny Legg

The Anguilla Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACOCI) is proud to announce that Morton Patterson, of Morton Patterson and Associates, London, will be the keynote speaker at the 2009 Annual General Meeting taking place at the Overlook Restaurant on Wednesday 28 January between 12.30 pm and 2.30 pm.

Morton Patterson

Patterson, braving the British chill to speak in an exclusive interview with Penny Legg at the Royal Festival Hall in London, said that he is ‘grateful for the opportunity’ to speak and ‘is looking forward to it.’

Patterson is a Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and Facilitator, specialising in working with business owners, managing directors and senior management who feel overwhelmed, need someone to help them clarify their business vision and plan a way forward. He works with clients who are submitting major tenders for developments across East London, the Thames Gateway and the 2012 Olympic Games.
He was last on Anguilla three years ago, when he was interviewed on Radio Anguilla about the successful workshop he ran in St Kitts, ‘How to Get the Best Out of Your Team.’

Born in London of Guyanese parents, Patterson spent his childhood in Guyana. He studied Information Technology at Hull University in northern England and worked for Ernst and Young for six years before leaving to found his own audio books business, Books Talk Too. A strong advocate of personal development, he attended a workshop on how to better communicate with his clients and impressed his instructors so much that he was asked to retake the workshop as a Supporter. A Toastmaster for many years, he decided to combine his love of speechmaking with his acknowledged skills at dealing with people. He trained as a Neuro Linguistic Programming Coach (NLP) and to be a professional facilitator. NLP teaches practitioners to look at what works and to model on that.

‘I have an interest in business and working with business people,’ he says. ‘I read voraciously about business and business people and worked in the business area for many years.

‘I think that the essence of the NLP Practitioner is that coaching is, effectively, modelling success. You see someone who does something really well and you model it. What happens in the course of our lives is that we grow up where there are certain behaviours and habits, which come to us from our environment, family and so on. That becomes the way you live and sometimes that might not be the best way. If you want to change that, you would look at what it is that is in the way of you living the way you want to. You would model it on the person who is doing it the way you would like to be doing it.

‘My training has been in being a speaker, in public speaking and Toastmasters; being a facilitator, which is how I deliver the workshops because I have trained to be a professional facilitator and I have done that in the business environment as an IT trainer; and in coaching. I have trained as a coach, in how to build relationships with business and help them to understand the problems they are facing and how they could resolve them.

‘I help businesses to look at their business strategy and to review the problems and the challenges that they are facing. So I work essentially with businesses facing internal and external challenges: What is happening in the economy? What do we do? How can we look forward? What is the best way we can go? Business people go through lots of challenges and a lot of the time it is confidence. They need someone to listen because often there is no one to talk to. There is no one to let it all out without feeling that it is going to come back, so I am very good at being that listening ear because part of my training has proved that the client has the answer. Sometimes they don’t know, which is when I would guide them, but the essence of it is that if I meet someone who has been running a business for years I believe that most of the time they know the answers. Where I am effective is I help them to look at things differently by asking questions about areas that he has not thought of.’

He stresses that he has no magic wands to fend off the global credit crunch and is not coming to Anguilla with a cure-all for the varied problems of the business community.

‘My intention is not to fly in to Anguilla, completely oblivious and ignorant of the state of play on the island and be insensitive to the situation that is there. But there will be some people who are still doing business, people who are still coming into the island, some who are still fighting. Maybe there is a way we can look at this slightly differently. For those are getting up in the morning and still trying to do business, maybe I can say something that will help them.’

Patterson will be running two half day workshops entitled, ‘Business Breakthrough Planning and Goal Setting,’ for members of the business community and senior managers while he is on Anguilla. These are on Thursday 30 January at the ACOCI office at the Old Police Headquarters in The Valley, and can be booked by calling ACOCI on 497 2839.

Patterson also writes a monthly newsletter, ‘How to Bring Out the Best in You and Your Team,’ which is available by email by contacting him on info@mortonpatterson.com

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