Two men called Octavius and Seb, wearing lime green polo t-shirts. Can they really be the solution to life's problems?
These are the faces of the Mind Gym, a corporate psychology training routine turned book. They promise to bring academic rigour to the accessibility of the self-help book market (which sounds a lot like what all the other self-help books say).
Anyway, they do a good conflict resolution exercise to tackle the "no, but" of pointless argument. "And anyone who was at the Economist debate last night would have seen a good example of that," chips in Octavius.
Best tip was how to give up (for example) smoking: simply think of something that would be more painful than not giving up. In one of their past consultations, a smoker was forced to write a cheque for £250, ready to be posted off if he ever touched another cigarette, to the one person in the world that the group decided least deserved their money. That person? Michael Winner. Well, you'd never smoke again…
