Excellence can be defined in a number of ways. If we speak about excellence here, we have in mind

• the innate (e.g. humane) qualities of an individual
• his personal qualities (traits)
• his professional qualities
• the performance of an individual in a certain area (knowledge, skills, etc.)
• his past, present or perspective achievements
• his usefulness to a social group, company or institution
• his ability to play his roles
• his conformity to our expectations,
• his conformity to his/her expectations,

but other aspects of excellence can also be defined. An individual may be an excellent learner, but a poor performer in "real life". One person may be an early achiever, another a late achiever. All this may depend on the match of the person’s personal pattern of learning or performance style with the demands of the environment (home, school, employment, society).

Do peak performance and excellence have a correlation equal to one? Can peak performance be made constant? Is peak-performing the function of internal qualities of individuals, or do outside conditions also play a key role?

It would be preposterous to declare that a fully satisfactory answer to such questions can be made. Situations tend to attract people who are property-wise linked with the given type of activity and some of them are peak performing, others have a supportive role and some play the part of obstructers. The emergence of a peak performer within a set-up (e.g. a task to be completed, a job to be carried out, a mission to be fulfilled) is an event that needs the appearance of co-creators and co-performers. Thus one needs to have the "feeling" enabling to get close to situations that may transform one to peak performer and to have sufficient excellency to inspire others to acknowledge one's leading position and to support one.

How to develop the capacity "to be in the right time at the right place"? How to develop the capacity to accept the type of responsibility that enables one to become a peak performer? In facilitating such achievements, the training for excellence uses auto-ecology as well as neuro-technological methods [1] alongside with techniques like neurolinguistic programming [2].

Another question to be looked at is whether successful, "peak-performing" people are excellent personalities. Experience shows that some are, some are not. Some of the "peak-performers" are people disliked by their colleagues or co-workers (due to their personality traits), aggressive, "macho" or crooked type personalities. Some ambivalent and crafty personalities can also be "peak-performers", when properly motivated. Many of the peak-performers are however positive personality types.

Thus - often - what is usually called "success" (outwardly manifested peak achievement) cannot be said to be the direct result of personal excellence.

If we define peak performance or success as continued life satisfaction based on a level of personal (and professional) excellence possible for a given individual, backed by a balanced mentality (and social relationships), training for personal excellence has a unique place in educating people for a life that satisfies.

Life satisfaction and systemic happiness should go hand-in-hand. For this, training in excellency in life-style is appropriate.

When looking to an individual’s life, we have to acknowledge that it is very rare for one to perform equally well in all of the areas where one has to play roles. Thus the personality of an individual tends to be asymmetric. This asymmetry is a source of tension that usually increase the stress level in the psyche and has inhibiting effects on life performance. This tends to significantly inhibit also the sustainability of the individual’s lifestyle. Because human psyche is strongly non-linear in responses, it has to be noted that a tension or stress that inhibits one, may motivate another to higher achieving. But everyone has types of tensions that inhibit one's performance. To learn how to manage and heal the inhibiting tensions is also a rewarding task for training in excellence.

What is an excellent character and how is it affected by education? Such questions seem to be too abstract to tackle within a quality management environment, but from the point of view of ecology is of great importance, as it affects the degree of sustainability of one's behaviour.

Character is a property, which seems to be affected both by innate personal traits and by the biological, physical, social and spiritual environment which sustained the individual in the pre- and post-natal period, in childhood, during the period of adolescence and adulthood.

As we know about excellent characters that were uneducated, ill-educated, reluctant to be educated, indifferent- or enthusiastic about education or who were highly educated, evidently it is not an automatic process and many lines of events and influences have to meet if education is to affect character. Let us note, that we are not speaking here about behavioural patterns, but character.

Still, in order to bring forth some aspects of character, education can be of utmost help. This is so through learning about the known and expectable results or impacts of certain ways of processing or managing life, through the interaction with people with certain life experience, through being confronted with open questions regarding world-views, life-values or aims of life, etc.

Excellence of character should include also excellence in emotive responses (culture and richness of feelings) and emotional intelligence [3].

Education gives also certain strength to cope with challenging life-situations. To withstand, however pressures with moral or ethical implications, experiential training opening up for oneself the deeper levels of the human structure is necessary. This usually gradually opens up the way to aspirations for excellency of spirit, too. Training in auto-ecology comprises also this type of training.

Mental excellence can be perhaps defined as a capacity to be ideally and creatively responsive to analytical and synthesising needs in task management, problem-solving and management of life situations (on a personal or professional level). To cultivate a mental excellence is a demanding task, but here education is of utmost value. To achieve optimal results, however, the term of education has to expand beyond the one usually understood frame. This is so because the prevailing educational systems work with the human mind in a black-box manner and the learners are rarely provided with the clue as how to increase the coherence or creativity of their mind.

Presently, ancient and new "neurotechnologies" provide a richness of training possibilities in the area of increasing the level of mental excellence.

One may characterise performance as an ability to cope (efficiently and) successfully with the allotted tasks within a given framework (professional, social or other). Performance tends to be the "most frequently needed" type of excellence in the present industrial society. It means "value for money spent" by the family, employer or other "beneficiary". Peak performance often leads to "workaholism" (and by reflection sometimes to ”learnaholism”, too). Such type of excellence seems to contain the greatest risks to the various aspects of life of the individual, including its sustainability.

Education can very significantly contribute to the excellence in performance. The present demand for "all-round" or "adaptable" skills and performance cannot be fulfilled without perpetual-, continuous- or life-long education and learning. No aspiration for career development, personal achievement or for that matter career redesign can be fulfilled usually without a considerable investment into learning and training.

Training in "mind management" can further increase the ability to perform, but one has to be careful not to exceed the innate output capacity of the given person as that may undermine the health of the individual.

Lifestyle is a very rich area for discussion. Lifestyle comprises learning style, creative style, work-style, communication style, social style, nutritive style and a number of other styles related to life. With the increasing demand for sustainable lifestyle it is also important to define a "sustainable character" [4].

One could define excellence in lifestyle as a lifestyle that fulfils the need of the individual and also of the milieu in which he/she functions in a best possible manner. It should be a synergy of one’s personal aspirations and of the aspiration of the social units he/she lives in (home, workplace, community, society, biosphere, environment). In case of optimal lifestyle one incurs the least possible amount of harmful stress, damage to one's health and achieves the best out of one's life. What is the "best of one’s life" is a question much wider than one that could be discussed here.

It is important to mention here the transferable-, humane-, as well as professional skills as they are a key factor to make the rest of the team (sensu lato) or society to understand what we want to communicate or do or make them to do. It implies also the capacity of conflict-resolution.

Lifestyle is very much depending on learning and one can be educated to optimise lifestyle. Lifelong education is an ideal ground for fostering excellence in lifestyle. It is so because at the earlier stages of life one tends not to realise the importance of optimising one’s lifestyle.

Professional excellence is directly linked to learning and workplace skills. It can be defined as a capacity to solve professional problems in the best possible way at a given time. It may include individual effort, facilitating team effort or participating in team effort. The concept of "team" may be expanded to corporate, national or transnational entities. But this type of excellence is by now quite well defined, so does not need further clarification here.

As usually knowledge gained in the primary, secondary or tertiary education becomes obsolete at an ever increasing pace, lifelong education is a truly key factor in maintaining or gaining such excellence.

Training for excellence has a number of schools. The one we use starts by mental and physical training. One of the basic tools is the stress management program, the “Learning to learn” program, creativity enhancement program and the auto-ecology program. All these form the “Human potential development program” of the Institute of lifelong education of the Technical university, Košice [1,5].

Stress management deals primarily with de-stressing (relaxation techniques) and with increasing stress-tolerance. As presently the learning culture at the educational institutes is usually left on an intuitive basis, here techniques for efficient learning best suited for a given personality are taught. The creativity enhancing programme relies heavily on neurotechnology and mental modelling techniques.

Auto-ecology (ecology of oneself) is a set of techniques that facilitate the re-creation of a positive, creative and well working mental inner environment and the optimisation of one’s lifestyle. It contains both physical and mental procedures. As our mind has a key role in achieving excellence, it trains for a better perception of “Working space of mind” – the modelling space in which the mind synthesises all outer and inner information. In this way it is possible to achieve greater perfection of mind usage.

The basic practices comprise psychophysical exercises, dynamic and static (physical as well as mental) relaxation, training for mental discipline [6] and relaxed capacity to be one-pointed (increased mental coherence), self-understanding (mapping of one’s personality and potentials), training of emotional intelligence, techniques for optimising interpersonal communication and time management [7].

Neurotechnology (cf. [8]) is an interdisciplinary field aiming at technological support of brain/mental training. The basic types of neurotechnological tools comprise biofeedback, light/sound machines (audio-visual brain stimulators) that use the frequency following response of brain, special audio-, visual- or kinaesthetic techniques (e.g. techniques employing the binaural beat phenomenon), cranial electrostimulation, structured sensory deprivation (floatation tanks) and others. They all aim at facilitating learning how to tune the mind into most productive and effective working regimes. Neurotechnology is used in programs aiming at improvement in learning, creativity enhancement, relaxation and self-motivation (self actuation).

In order to foster self-development leading to excellence one has to learn more about oneself and to optimise all levels of his physical and mental activities. The techniques used in auto-ecology training help considerably to achieve sustainable excellence. The interest in ”Auto-ecology” and ”Human potential development” courses indicate that these techniques offer a much needed answer to the problems of individuals in our present-day society.

[7] Black R. 1991: Getting things done, M. Joseph, London

[3] Cooper R., Sawaf A. 1998: Executive EQ, Orion business booksm London, 358pp

DECENT workshops, CCE ILLE TU Košice, 1996/8, pp. 78-85

[2] O´Connor S., Seymour J. 1990: Introducing neuro-linguistic programming, Mandala, London, 234pp

[6] Popper P. 1981: A belso utak konyve Magveto, Budapest

[4] Szabo Š. 1996: Sustainable personality, In: G.M. Timčák (Ed.), Proc. International

[8] Valuch J.M. 1996: Neurotechnologie, mozek a souvislosti, Gradior Praha

G.M. Timčák graduated at the Technical university Košice in 1964. He received his PhD at Imperial College, London in 1974. He is presently the acting director of the Institution of Lifelong Education (ILLE) of the Centre for Technology Transfer of the Technical university Košice. The questions of auto-ecology started to interest him professionally in 1974. Apart from technically oriented further education he thus underwent also training in a number of auto-ecology oriented fields. It was only in 1990, however that he could offer auto-ecological subjects to students of the BERG Faculty of his university. Presently he manages also the Human potential development courses of the ILLE TU.