Home Introduction
Publications Resume Ultimate Vision Goals
Articles Awards
You Tube
News Releases
Introduction to Charles E. Betterton
When I was just 16 years
old, my Mother gave me a copy of The Power of Positive
Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. She was hoping (and
praying) that something would get through to me and help
me make better choices than I was making. I had dropped
out of high school, started drinking and smoking
cigarettes (and occasionally other things . . .) and I
was wasting my life.
Fortunately, the gift of
that book did set into motion a series of “discoveries”
over the next few years that led me into a life-long
interest in personal growth and development. In recent
years, my focus has shifted more toward stewardship and
spiritual enlightenment and I have been blessed to have
experienced some of the world’s top experts and trainers
and coaches on successful living.
But first, more of the
background on how a high school drop out graduated Summa
Cum Laude with a Masters in
Community Economic
Development from Southern New Hampshire University and
became the co-founder of several non-profit
organizations and cause-oriented companies involved in
personal, organizational and community development
My first real job was
through an unsolicited grant in 1969 from the American
Friends Service Committee. The grant was to develop a
Community Development Center in Greenville, Mississippi
to support desegregation of the public schools. Through
a number of unexpected circumstances over the following
years, I found myself working as a disaster relief
specialist for HUD,
the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
After six years of helping
disaster victims deal with and recover from natural
disasters such as floods, tornadoes and earth quakes, I
was asked to take some assignments in a different kind
of “man made” disasters. That led me to serving HUD for
another few years in “troubled offices” such as Detroit,
St. Louis, Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois.
In 1978, my then wife and
our two young children moved to the intentional
community of
Stelle, Illinois about an hour and a
half south of Chicago to focus on our interest in
personal development and spiritual awakening. I was
still working for HUD in the Chicago Loop and my daily commute was about five
hours. Just imagine that drive in a Midwest blizzard in
the flatlands . . .
Someone gave me a copy of Lead the Field, the classic
audio cassette tape program by Earl Nightingale. I
listened to those six tapes every weekday for many
weeks. The results were so amazing in terms of my
increased positive outlook, my sense of being in control
of my destiny and overall well-being. I started buying
and consuming more tapes by Brian Tracy, Norman Vincent
Peale, Jim Rohn, Les Brown, etc. (Here's a link to a 3
minute clip on You Tube telling this part of my story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eupILT823zs ).
After a few months of
enjoying my “mobile success University”, the changes in
me and in my life were so profound and obvious to
friends and family that I kept getting asked what I was
doing that was producing those improvements in my
attitudes, happiness, effectiveness and productiveness.
As a result of sharing all the resources on success
secrets with other members of my community, I was
inspired in 1980 to create a 16 week class on PST!
Personal Success Techniques.
After two-years of the
daily commute from Stelle to Chicago, I retired early
from HUD and increased my focus on various personal and
community development projects. In 1998, I was asked by
HUD to accept the position as Director of Community and
Economic Development for the City of Kankakee, Illinois.
Kankakee was in fact a “disaster” in many ways which the
Fantus Organization attributed to several decades of
racial, political and geographic divisiveness. What a
perfect assignment for a disaster relief specialist.
After spending most of the
first few months helping resolve some issues between HUD
and the City, I was free to start experimenting with my
vision of combining personal and community development
in ways that might “expand the circle of success.” By
then I had learned from experience as a distributor for
several of the leading development training companies
that they focused only on the top 10% to 13% of the
population.
When the Presidents and
CEO’s of those companies would tell us to ignore the
other 87% of the population, I was always one of those
who got in trouble by pointing out that those folks
lived in my community . . . that we are only one people,
with one future and one economy.
As I interviewed the
psychologists and psychiatrists in Kankakee County, I
learned that the two major conditions they were treating
were negativity and depression, largely due the massive
impact on the County of 100,000 losing about 8,000 union
jobs. After convening a task force of community leaders
to brainstorm what could possibly be done to provide
help in that environment, we decided to produce a
Community Unity Event. Our objectives were to promote
positive thinking, personal and community empowerment
and appreciation of multicultural and geographic
differences.
In that situation, who else
would we bring in but Dr. Norman Vincent Peale to speak
on The Power of Positive Thinking and Les Brown to share
his exciting and motivating messages on the Power of a
Larger Vision. That was only the beginning of my
“graduate level work” on myself and the organizations
and communities I was involved with
Over the next few years, I
was blessed to be able to produce major events with Les
Brown several times, with Brian Tracy, Mark Victor
Hansen, Jim Rohn, Bonnie St. John and several others.
Many of the individuals and companies that had sponsored
our Community Unity Celebration became close friends and
advisors as we developed a Community Development
Corporation, spearheaded the successful renovation of a
22,000 square foot National Guard Armory building into
an award-winning Community Resource Center.
We also
co-founded Kankakee County
CAN DO!
as a vehicle for promoting positive thinking within and
about the area and YOUth CAN DO!
We developed several
non-profit organizations and created a model for smaller
communities to learn how to come together and co-create
a shared vision and discern how best to pool resources
and meet common needs. At that time, before 9 11, most
of the large scale development training events were
mostly produced in cities of a million or more
population by for-profit promoters from out-of-town who
put on a one day show and took home the dough.
We have developed and are
now sharing with the world through
CAN DO!
and the
Ultimate Destiny University, a template for smaller
communities to be able to provide the same caliber of
world-class training to benefit their residents. And in
our model, the local community gets to keep most of any
proceeds to facilitate personal and community
development when, where and how they feel is most
appropriate for their community. ( A short clip of
Ultimate Destiny University is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m26uOB2SmsQ&feature=related
).
We refer to the shared
vision and overarching mission of all these projects as
an ARK to helping people Awaken to spiritual
identity, Realize more of their potential and
Know how to fulfill their ultimate destiny. For more
of an overview, you might enjoy
Ultimate
Destinyland and
Universal Stewardheirship.
For more information about
me, see my
Resume,
My
12 Golden Goals and my
Publications. I especially like the
Strategic Marketing Matrix diagram that shows all of
the programs, projects and publications I am working on,
with and through.
Email
Contact:
charlesbetterton@gmail.com
|