We’re a global consultancy serving clients in over 60 countries and 22 languages.

The Pacific Institute® Zimbabwe is an affiliate of The Pacific Institute®. For over 30 years, The Pacific Institute® has been successfully helping individuals unlock their potential, and enabling organisations to transform their culture and improve business results. We are dedicated to creating a significant impact on the wellbeing, efficacy and leadership of the individuals, private and public sector organisations and communities we work with.The Pacific Institute® believes that everyone has tremendous potential but that most of us do not achieve all we are capable of. Using the principles of cognitive psychology, we have created programmes and processes which develop, support and, most importantly, equip individuals and organisations to enable them to transform this potential into actual performance.

Our team has the commitment, dedication, and experience necessary to help our clients achieve their goals.

“You know how you get an idea in your head, and it just won’t let go? That’s how I felt when I was introduced to the research from the cognitive scientists in the mid-60s. I knew it was important, but I also knew someone needed to make it accessible for the rest of us. The idea that I might be able to do that, well, that idea just wouldn’t let go.”

And as Lou Tice related it, the rest is history – the history of The Pacific Institute®. Taking what he had learned in a masters-level course at the University of Washington, Lou “digested” the research and applied language that made it easy to understand. After first testing it on himself, he tried it out on his high school football teams. They went from the bottom of the league to the top, and soon their parents were asking Lou to present to their organizations. Giving up his “dream job” of being a football coach, in 1971 Lou and Diane formalized the education and began The Pacific Institute®.

While in-person seminars were a way of life in the early 70s, by 1976, Lou realized that his and Diane’s vision of getting the education to the entire planet was not going to happen one seminar at a time. Acting on an idea revolutionary at the time, they put Lou on camera and video, creating the first of its kind video-based education with Achieving Your Potential®. There was no turning back.

The 1980s saw the expansion of The Pacific Institute® beyond North America, with the opening of an office in Perth, Australia shortly followed by an office in London. By the end of the decade, The Pacific Institute®’s influence had spread further throughout Europe, south into Central and South America, and into South Africa. (The Institute suffered challenges in the media for going into apartheid-dominated South Africa, but like Lou said at the time, “When apartheid ends, as it surely must, what is going to fill the vacuum? The black South Africans need to know that they are capable of flying the airplanes, not just washing them.”)

While Diane codified the education and co-created the audio assimilation course, still an exception in the world of cognitive education, Lou touched ever larger audiences with Investment in Excellence® being translated into multiple languages. He authored three books in the 90s, and Smart Talk for Achieving Your Potential has been translated into Spanish and Japanese.

International conferences introduced client audiences to the scientific “who-saids” upon whose work Lou and Diane based the Institute’s programs: Dr. Albert Bandura of Stanford; Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Gary Latham of the University of Toronto, Dr. Alec Dickson, former U.S. Representative Jack Kemp, Dr. Kathleen Hawk Sawyer (U.S. Bureau of Prisons), and General Colin Powell (USA, Ret.) before he became Secretary of State, graced the stages provided by the Institute.

The 1990s also saw The Pacific Institute® grow into Asia with offices opening in China and Japan, with Investment in Excellence® translated into both languages. The last few years have seen the Institute’s influence growing in Korea and Southeast Asia. Thought Patterns for High Performance 3.0® is now in Chinese and Korean.

Neither Lou, nor Diane, have been the type to turn away when they saw a need. Lou boldly entered Northern Ireland in the late 80s, during the height of “the troubles” and proceeded to create an atmosphere where conversation between the two sides could begin. He and Diane helped inaugurate the first integrated (Catholic and Protestant) school, the first of many. Lou was asked to come to Guatemala, after the Peace Accords had been signed in 1995, to help facilitate a common language for the new government and the former rebels to come together.

The Mission Statement of The Pacific Institute® proclaims that the Institute will continue to get its education out “by all means just and appropriate.” According to Global President, Jack Fitterer, that will not change as the Institute moves into the next 40 years and beyond. “As Lou was a pioneer in video-based education, The Pacific Institute® will continue to push the boundaries in getting its life- and performance-enhancing education to the world. It was always Lou and Diane’s goal, and it will continue to be so for all of us at The Pacific Institute®.”

Lou Tice
Past Chairman and Co-Founder
1935 – 2012

At a gathering of associates, just a few weeks before his passing, Lou charged the group with carrying on the work of The Pacific Institute®. With his own voice failing him, Lou told the group, “You must be my voice now. It is you who will carry on the legacy.” As dear as his family and friends were to Lou, he wanted to make sure that the path he and Diane had chosen over 40 years ago would continue, far beyond the next 40 years. Born in the middle of the Great Depression and growing up during WWII, Louis Earl Tice was an unlikely candidate for international renown. With three brothers and a sister, the family struggled when Lou’s father died; Lou was about 13. While the family got by on welfare, Lou spent summers working on relatives’ ranches in Eastern Washington. He learned resiliency and persistence from the plainspoken cowboys, and a lifelong love of horses and the American West.Lou met Diane Bailey at age 16, and they were married after graduating from high school. Lou needed permission from his mother, as he was not yet 18. While they both attended Seattle University, with the goal of becoming school teachers, they raised Lou’s three younger brothers. After college graduation, Diane became an art teacher, while Lou fulfilled his dream of becoming a high school football coach. “We lived the high life, with two teachers’ incomes. I drove an MG and we drank good wine.” Then came the first of what eventually would be six adopted children. “We went from fast cars and good wine, to old beaters with the doors wired shut!” as Lou used to tell his in-person seminar participants. He would relate, “I went from running around like someone with a funnel in his mouth, waiting for others to fill me, to realizing that I needed to do my own filling.” While studying for his masters in mental health education at the University of Washington, he came upon a course being offered by a visiting professor. It was about the then-breakthrough science of cognitive psychology, and Lou found a connection that would define the rest of his life. Translating results from pure research and putting them into practical, easy-to-understand and even easier to use concepts and principles became the hallmark of Lou’s education. Trying them out on his high school football team to great success (“Little did they know they were my lab animals,” Lou would relate), he graduated to presenting the materials to their parents’ companies. Eventually, Lou quit teaching high school and expanded his classroom to the world. In 1971, he and Diane formed The Pacific Institute®. Realizing that doing one seminar at a time was not going to get the education to very many people, Lou became one of the first to put this type of education on video, while Diane codified the education and created the manuals.

By 1980, the Institute had grown beyond the United States and Canada, and began its march into the international arena. Today, the education of The Pacific Institute® has been presented in over 60 countries, on six continents, and translated into over 20 languages. “We didn’t know anybody,” Lou used to say. “We’d just set the goal and find the people we needed.” The first 40 years of The Pacific Institute® saw presidents of companies and countries become his students. From generals to privates, airmen, and able-bodied seamen; from students to teachers to administrators; from sports figures to moms and dads – all benefited from the education that Lou created and presented for over 40 years.

Each of the millions of people who learned from Lou over the years would take the information he delivered, and then translate it into their own lives and experiences. Once, while he and Diane were touring a SmithKlineBeecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) production plant in the UK, Lou noticed a group of women wrapping surgical bandages. When asked what they were doing, one responded with, “We’re relieving suffering.” Each had made a greater connection with the job they did to the ultimate purpose – not only of the bandages they were wrapping, but with their own lives. It was a theme that would be repeated over and over, all around the world.

Often presented with, “Lou, you saved my life,” Lou would typically reply, “Actually, you saved your own life. I just gave you the tools to use.” People found confidence in themselves and their own abilities because of the education Lou taught, as well as his rock-solid belief in them.

At the same time, he wasn’t afraid to ask the hard questions. In 1989, while in Northern Ireland to tape a special program, Lou was asked to speak to the citizens of Derry (or Londonderry as it is sometimes known). The opposing forces of “the troubles” agreed to not bomb the Rialto Theatre while Lou spoke, and Lou agreed to no speaking fee. He made a deal with his audience: if they liked what he had to say, then the only payment he wanted was for them to sing “Danny Boy” to him.

Earlier in the day, Lou and Diane had been given a tour of the bombed-out city. “They weren’t even bothering to clean up, because they knew buildings would just be bombed again,” he would relate later. So that night, at the Rialto Theatre, Lou described what he had seen that day. And then he, famously, asked, “Is this the kind of Derry that you want?” The silence was deafening. Nobody had ever asked that question before. “I finished up my speech and wasn’t sure if I would need to be hustled from the stage,” as Lou would tell the story. “But it must have been OK, because they stood up sang me the most beautiful rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ I had ever heard.”

Lou’s official Pacific Institute biography has often called him a “catalyst for change.” Perhaps it was not Lou himself that acted as a catalyst, but the education he and Diane created so long ago that has allowed individuals and organizations to free themselves from self-imposed restrictions and move forward to achieve goals never before thought possible. “It’s 'freedom for’ rather than ‘freedom from’,” Lou would often say, and the results achieved around the world, in millions of lives, would agree.