THE ROAD™ Personal Development Course

THE ROAD™

Counselling & Personal Development

"....one of the most innovative and effective counselling services available
and a wealth of resources for your own reading and personal development...."

Personal Development Course

THE ROAD™ offers a very special interactive course in personal development - a course in finding your own road. The course is divided into 16 parts and covers three broad areas: personal discipline and problem solving; love and relationships; spiritual / personal growth.

The wisdom contained here is a gift, a resource we may all use in our life's journeys.

What's more, the course is interactive. Each part consists of course notes and an Exploration and Discussion, usually a few questions so you can respond and show your understanding, feelings and insights. You can cover the material in your own time.

The 16 parts of this course and each part's accompanying Exploration and Discussion are available free of charge on this Website. THE ROAD™ offers them for your personal use only, as a resource for your life's journey, because we believe everybody can grow to be the truly magnificent person you are. Alternatively, you can Download Course as a PDF.

When do we read a book that changes our lives even we are not looking for it? This happened to Alec Gore with M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled (Arrow, 1990). He was given a copy to read during a mountain vacation in the Philippines. Maybe he was in a welcoming frame of mind. Undoubtedly, many of the themes in the book rang true with what he already believed and had experienced in life. But, it was more than that.

Peck's book was described in a Washington Post review as, "....not just a book but a spontaneous act of generosity written by an author who leans towards the reader for the purpose of sharing something larger than himself". He sets out a psychology of spiritual growth based on his experience as a psychotherapist.

The book is divided into parts on discipline, love and grace. Discipline provides us with tools to accept responsibility for our lives. Love is the will to extend one's self for our or another's spiritual growth. Grace is the means by which we realise spiritual growth.

This series of studies is Alec's own condensation of Peck's psychology. It remains substantially Peck's work. Alec has merely edited some of his language and re-arranged the order of ideas in some of his narrative sections with the following aims:

  • to give coherence and clarity to the significant themes;
  • to provide a more natural progression of ideas; and
  • to make the language (originally written before 1978) more inclusive, preferring "we" to "some individuals" and "human beings" etc. emphasising his idea that the road to personal and spiritual growth is one we can all travel.

(Material under the headings Exploration and Discussion is for personal or group use and is loosely based on Exploring The Road Less Travelled (Arrow, 1990) by Alice and Walden Howard, with additions.)

Why presume to condense such a remarkably profound book? It is because we have found that many people who would benefit greatly from the insights it contains do not take the time or opportunity to study and develop them. Yet they are too valuable to miss out on. Most of us can benefit from psychotherapy, but it is incomplete unless it accounts for spiritual as well as psychological development.