Walter Bellin - My Mentor

By Robert Meredith

I first met Walter Bellin sometime in the mid 1970s. He had come to live in London, and was travelling around giving talks on meditation. Wherever he went his reputation grew, and I felt honoured when sometime later he asked me to join him as a speaker on the lecture circuit.

You can’t be around Walter without being impressed by his knowledge and intelligence, but Walter is a natural teacher, and I found spending time with him was a constant source of inspiration and learning.  When, much later on, we studied teaching and training methods, we discovered that all the skill sets and strategies we were learning, Walter already displayed quite naturally.

Walter is also someone who creates and initiates. When he and his wife came to Australia, they founded The Self Transformation Centre, one of the first personal development organizations in Sydney. Within a short time, 150 people a month were coming to Walter’s courses, fascinated by the mixture of psychology, spiritual philosophy and emotional intelligence.  But the real ‘difference that made a difference’, was the powerful, personal experiential content that Walter brought to his programmes.

So much of the work that back in the 80s and 90s was thought of as ‘left field’, gradually became drawn into the mainstream and into corporate training, where ‘emotional intelligence’ has become a business essential. As a pioneer in the field, Walter now works at the highest level of organizations, and as he has always done, helps people find the best in themselves, and to bring that out both for themselves and the people they work with.