I suffered from cerebral palsy when I was 4 months old and became partially paralyzed. I went through many traumatic incidents when I was young and had difficulty adjusting myself to society, suffering with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and borderline personality disorder.

So I was a troublemaker in junior high and got involved in left-wing student activism in high school. The counterculture, hippie culture and rock culture of America’s West Coast influenced me when I was in high school and they shaped how I live.

It took me two years after graduating high school to enter a university and I repeated a year at university. I wrote my graduaton thesis in French about Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time.” I think university days were the most barren time in my life.

Upon graduation, I went to the Sahara Desert and worked as a French language interpreter for three years. Then I became a disciple of an Indian guru and lived on the West Coast of the U.S. I moved to London when I got married.

I lived in London for about 20 years, working as a cross-culture communication consultant, coach, interpreter and translator. My clients during that time included relatives of Winston Churchill, Princess Anne, top management of F1, the Church of England. Meanwhile, I learned NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), which is an approach of communication psychology, directly from its founders and gained qualifications. In that process, I overcame my own traumas completely. I came back to Japan in 2002 after getting divorced.

Since I became a disciple of an Indian guru, I had been continuing spiritual striving. At the point I mastered the NLP and overcame my traumas, which I thought would be extremely difficult, I felt that I had achieved self-realization ? in other words, I became ready to die anytime. Then I decided to come back to Japan to spread the method that helps people achieve self-realization.

Since I came back to Japan, I have been holding many NLP coaching sessions, training sessions, certification courses. I established Office Kitaoka in June 2009 to engage in full-scale consulting work.

I would like to widely spread this cutting-edge communication psychology of the West, which I found is applicable to anyone in any level and type of work, to the businesspeople in Japan. Especially, I am concerned with the NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) issue in Japan and want to contribute to reducing the number of NEET people using this psychological method. Further, I would like to bridge the West and Japan as a cross-cultural communication consultant.