Mark Charley’s work with Uncommon Results has taken him from prisons to boardrooms.He created the Island’s Mirrors programme on the back of that success and has found Bermuda’s children a pleasure to work with.“I love working in Bermuda,” said Mr Charley, CEO of the US group.“The young people in Bermuda are full of possibilities. They’re so ready for it, and so respectful as well — these are young adults that most communities would die for. You guys have got great children, even the ones who are tough. I wish we could work with children like that all the time.”Variations on Uncommon Result’s Mirrors programme have sprung up around the globe.Mr Charley was the top management executive of a programme for at-risk youth in the 1980s and built up a portfolio of experience in subsequent years. In 1996, he founded Uncommon Results.US physician Rodney Ellis introduced Mr Charley to former Premier Ewart Brown.“By 1997, there was a group of people in Bermuda who wanted the programme. They all chipped in, and bought me a plane ticket. I flew to Bermuda, and we met with everybody who was somebody — from the Premier down. We brought people for a presentation at the Elbow Beach hotel. Everybody was saying it was great, and they wanted to do it. It fizzled out. In 1998, I came again.”It became a familiar cycle. Mr Charley said he had never before struggled for so long to set up a programme.“I stayed at Dr Brown’s house each time. And it went on for nearly ten years. You wouldn’t believe it.”He said: “I watched the changing of Premiers — everybody kept saying they’d do it. Dr Brown became Minister of Transport and then of Tourism. Then he became Premier, and he sent me a message saying ‘If we can’t do it now, we’ll never be able to.’”Asked why Bermuda had proven such a difficult sell, Mr Charley said: “It just seemed to be a threat in some ways, maybe too good to be true. I remember [PLP backbencher] Dale Butler flew to England to see it. He was still saying, ‘Well, I don’t know …’ I said, ‘The only way you’ll know is if you do it.’”Mr Charley has worked in Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, Holland, the UK, the US, Bermuda, and Kosovo with Uncommon Results.He said: “You tailor it to cultural needs but human beings are essentially the same at the level of transformation. People confuse transformation and change. Change is about process. If I want to change something, I alter something that’s already possible. Transformation is to fundamentally alter your being in order to create something that is not possible in your reality. We are working on the ontological level of being, as in a human being.”He is now able to tap into the source of how human beings construct realities.Even with the Premier on his side, Mr Charley still encountered resistance to the method. His first workshop lost almost half its participants in three days.He wasn’t at all surprised.Once Dr Brown started the initiative, Mr Charley said, “I told him, give me a year. I’ll do three professional workshops for adults. The first workshop we do, people are going to run out kicking and screaming. Because that’s going to shake things up.”The workshops were a prerequisite for would-be volunteers. Mr Charley laughed at the memory of the first.“A lot of people didn’t react well,” he said.“People will tell you that anything is possible. But then all you’ve got to do is ask them to come up and do a five-minute speech. You’re addressing what they don’t think is possible. It could be anything, such as to have a relationship with your family. To get at that, you have to get to the ontology. It’s not just perceptual, it’s deep-grained belief. It’s a reality. You transform on the inside, not the outside.”Numbers quickly improved: the third workshop had 50 participants, with 46 completing.“People were getting it,” he said. The Mirrors programme began, and the first residential session went ahead in November, 2007.“Amazing,” he said. “There was never a doubt about it. I have delivered 300 or 400 residentials, dealt with thousands of people across the world. And the Willowbank was a perfect setting for the course. I’ve never seen such a perfect setting for a course — and I’ve done at least ten in Hawaii.”In the distraction-free environment, Mr Charley said, many participants seemed to forget they were in Bermuda.Asked if the programme was capable of tackling the crippling effects of gang violence, Mr Charley replied: “It’s multipurpose. I often say transformation is available to everybody, but not everybody is ready for it. You can’t force-feed it. It’s too much about choice. You don’t use Mirrors to do anything. It’s an opportunity for people to take a serious look at life. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. The question is, are you satisfied, or do you want more? Most people would say yes, they want more.”As an example of the programme’s capabilities, Mr Charley said one of worst-ranked college football teams in the US “went from place 113 to 60-something” after five days of training programme with him.The Mirrors programme in Bermuda thrived after a full decade of struggle. Mr Charley’s only tone of regret came when he was asked about cuts in Government funding.Funding was reduced by more than one-third in the 2011/12 Budget.Mr Charley said: “That shocked me. Yes, there have been cuts all over the place but I didn’t expect a cut that big. In fact, some places have expanded. In Belgium, we have delivered three residentials this year, and there will be four next year.“I guess I was more shocked at the last-minute change when they postponed the residential that November. I was prepared for some cutback, but not for that enormous amount. But I’m not political, and I don’t know the reality of the Budget.”In the wake of cuts, he said, “Mirrors is gone more preventive, less interventional.”One of the main aims of The Royal Gazette’s fundraising campaign is the restoration of the residential aspect for males aged 19 to 24.“That got cut when the budget got cut,” Mr Charley said. “The New Beginnings Education Trust has decided to bring it back.”