How come so many Success Gurus and Thought Leaders in the field of Human Development seem to come from La Jolla, California?
Carl Rogers, Denis Waitley, Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson, Brian Tracy, Paul Hersey, Grant Cardone, Jim Cathcart, Tony Alessandra, Todd Duncan, Bill Bachrach, Rick Barrera, Phil Wexler, Warren Farrell, Ichak Adizes, Pamela Stambaugh, Janet Lapp, Layne Longfellow, and many more including Tony Robbins. All have spent serious time in La Jolla.
Is it something in the seawater? What is the cause of so many motivational leaders having roots here?
For one, it is surely the climate. La Jolla has arguably the best climate in all of North America. Not nearly the best, Clearly the best. That attracts lots of people from all disciplines to San Diego and its beachside community of La Jolla. But there is more than that.
Many locations have served as breeding grounds for leaders of various movements. New York City has fostered many. One notable group was The Algonquin Roundtable, a gathering of authors, journalists, philosophers and thinkers who shaped the early 20th Century. Aspen has had its day. The San Francisco Bay Area spawned the New Age movements around Haight-Ashbury and the Silicon Valley breakthroughs in technology.
But La Jolla fostered a different vibe. It was intellectual but humanistic. Free thinking rooted in tapping one’s natural potential.
Dr. Carl Rogers is the founder of Humanistic Psychology. He was one of the founding fathers of Psychotherapy and differed from his colleagues such as Sigmund Freud In that his approach included a non-judgmental unconditional positive regard of others. It was called Client Centered Therapy and led to Student Centered Learning, Customer Centered management, and more societal evolution. One of his students Thomas Gordon created the influential Parent Effectiveness Training. Rogers is widely considered the preeminent psychotherapist of the 20th Century alongside Freud. Rogers and Abraham Maslow pioneered “Humanistic Psychology.” He became a resident at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla and then founded the Center for Studies of the Person. (I didn’t know Dr. Rogers but I’ve coauthored books with a colleague of his who knew him well. Dr. David Ryback.)
Dr. Denis Waitley is best known as the author of The Psychology of Winning and his work with returning Vietnam War Prisoners and US Astronauts. I knew him via Nightingale Conant corporation, our audio publisher. Denis and I did a lecture tour of many cities as “A Day For Winners.” My morning seminar was How to Think like a Winner. Denis’ afternoon program was The Psychology of Winning. I’ve appeared on his program stages and we are friends still today.
Dr. Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, MD coauthored The One Minute Manager in the 1980s and became world famous for that concept. Ken Blanchard Company went on to license their concepts worldwide. Dr. Johnson remained solo and wrote many even more successful books such as Who Moved My Cheese. I collaborated with him on his book Yes or No: The Guide to Better Decisions. Each of us, Ken, Spencer and I have been in each others homes and spent valuable time together. I was hired by Ken Blanchard to deliver a speech to his company in Southern California.
Brian Tracy heard me speak at a NSA conference in New Orleans and asked what it was like to be based in La Jolla. He flew to San Diego and had lunch with Tony Alessandra and me at George’s in La Jolla. Shortly after that he moved his whole operation from Canada to Lomas Santa Fe near La Jolla. Now he’s a US Citizen and long time Californian. He even ran for Governor at one point Brian is one of the first to receive the Certified Professional Expert, CPE from Cathcart Institute.
“The La Jolla Mafia”.
Upon moving to San Diego in early 1983 I leased an office in La Jolla Shores, just one block from the ocean and that iconic beach. Dr. Tony Alessandra left the University of San Diego to join me. Cathcart, Alessandra & Associates, our partnership, became the focal point for many collaborations. John Grinder, of Bandler & Grinder, founders of NeuroLinguistic Programming “NLP”, came by to chat with us. Dr. Layne Longfellow became a dear friend and fascinating colleague in our collaborations. Dr. John Lee from New York joined in as well. So did Dr. Sheila Murray Bethel from San Francisco. Philip Wexler, Rick Barrera, Lee Shapiro, Nan Pratt, Sandra Schrift, Pamela Stambaugh, Michael O’Connor, James Arthur Ray and others joined us in that beachside office for collaborations. We doubled our business each year and became known worldwide. I became president of the National Speakers Association while based in La Jolla.
C.A.L.L. was Cathcart, Alessandra, Lee & Longfellow. We and later Sheila Bethel advertised ourselves as Southern California experts in motivation. We had 2 billboards on the San Diego Airport concourses (including Scott McKain), put ads on the inside front page, back cover or inside back cover of major publications of the American Society for Training and Development (now ATD), American Society of Association Executives, Meeting Professionals International and other meetings industry publications. Someone dubbed us “the La Jolla Mafia” and the moniker stuck. But as everyone knows, “There is no such thing as ‘the mafia’.” 😉
Todd Duncan and Bill Bachrach were building training companies in Mortgage Sales and Financial Advisor businesses respectively. They were in La Jolla and often seen at our offices or a favorite breakfast spot collaborating with us. Both of them went on to world leadership in their field.
Warren Farrell is an American political scientist and author of several books on Men’s and Women’s issues. (Dr. Farrell has been a good friend of mine for decades. I gave him his first back seat motorcycle ride one day in Del Mar, California long ago.) He has been known and influential in the human potential movement in the area of society’s attitudes toward gender issues and how many myths are accepted as truths. He has collaborated with Ken Wilbur, John Gray, and Richard Bolles among others. John Lennon once attended one of Warren’s retreats. He is a frequent speaker at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast. Though not technically a La Jolla resident, he has been active in the circles centered there.
I spent 20 years in La Jolla before moving to Thousand Oaks, California and Sherwood Country Club, thus commencing a bold new chapter in my career path. Those were some of the most treasured times of my life. Each time I return there, from my current home in Austin, Texas, as I did last week to attend my granddaughter’s graduation from San Diego State University, I ask myself, “Why would anyone ever leave this place?” It is truly a paradise of geography and climate, plus a place that fosters deep reflection and robust conversations about how to make life even more rewarding for everyone.
If you have not spent a few days in La Jolla, put it on your list now for travel. Have a relaxed outdoor breakfast each day, walk on the beach each afternoon, savor the sunsets over the ocean and think about what you could do to make the world like this for everyone.
I’m not in La Jolla right now, but you can collaborate with me anytime by visiting Cathcart.com.
