Nationality USA Name John Selby | Role Psychologist Spouse Birgitta Steiner | |
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Full Name John Selby Smith Born December 28, 1945 USA Occupation Teacher, Author, Psychologist Known for psychological research, meditation books, corporate training Residence Santa Cruz, California, United States Education University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University Profiles | ||
John Selby (born 1945) is an American psychologist and author. Other professional titles include executive counselor, videographer, and meditation innovator. He is the author of over two dozen self-help, spiritual-growth, business-success. and psychology books published in 14 languages, with half a million books in print, published during the last 35 years by New World Library, Warner Books, Bantam/Doubleday/Dell, Random House, HarperSF, Droemer Knaur Verlag, DTV Verlag, Rowohlt Verlag, Sterling Books et al.
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Biography
Selby was raised on cattle ranches in California and Arizona. He attended Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and the Radix Institute.
Selby is currently married to Birgitta Steiner of Waldassen, Bavaria. They have 2 sons, Kibo and Jesse. John also has an earlier son, Shon, by another marriage. John and Birgitta lived in Europe for 5 years, Santa Barbara, California for 2 years, Kauai for 21 years, and in 2011 moved to Santa Cruz, California.
John’s father Walter Smith was a musical inventor. Selby carried his father’s ‘there must be a better way’ attitude into his psychological career by refining new therapy and meditation techniques. While based in Europe, Selby ran eight experimental test groups for four years duration, conducting 160 three-day experimental-technique seminars. He then published an extensive 'cassettebook' self-therapy series with Droemer Knaur Verlag and Bauer Media Group Verlag based on those studies. Later, eight of those original German-edition programs were later released as English-language books (see bibliography section).
Career
Selby is an innovator in cognitive-shifting psychological techniques, having done mind-management research for NIH at the New Jersey Neuro-psychiatric Institute working under Dr. Humphrey Osmond MD. He also pioneered the development of and has apparently coined the term Focus phrase for inducing particular cognitive changes.
In the early 1980s Selby moved his operational base to West Berlin to guide further psychological studies with Manfred Henschell at the Free University of West Berlin on the emotional-healing techniques of Wilhelm Reich. During this period he initiated the use of self-help and meditation audio cassette-books in the German language, published by Droemer Knaur and Bauer Verlags.
Selby returned to the States in the 1990s and helped co-found The short lived 'BrightMind Network'. A company that was not able to reach its full potential and dissolved after several months.
Selby has also worked as an awareness-management consultant with companies such as CitiBank Europe, the Allianz Group, the American Airlines Pilots Association, and Senn-Delaney Leadership. His three corporate-training texts, Executive Genius, Take Charge Of Your Mind, and Listening With Empathy emerged as part of that corporate work.
In 2007 Selby launched BedRock Productions to produce a new series of awareness-training programs including the latest movie and book of the same name, Tapping the Source. focused on experiential video content using what he says is an advanced patent-pending video formula designed to encourage a meditative quiet-mind state of awareness using special visual and audio inputs. Through his company he has also produced many psychological-guidance DVDs and audio-training CDs. Selby has also appeared on over 60 radio-interview programs where he leads the audience through what he calls 'live-guidance' using his alertness/awareness programs.