He belongs fair and square in the Australian mythical tradition where people squat around campfires and yarn into the night. This unassuming Canberra man I met in the past year uses narratives to save lives. This one can set the scene: In a Canberra hospital ward, a young man sits beside a bed where his exhausted 12-year-old son lies propped up on pillows. Signs of burst blood vessels stain his body beneath the opaque dry paper of the skin. His cancer is in its ninth month, and has been joined by a blood infection after chemotherapy.

During their vigil the pair have conspired to deny the cancer the power to drive the situation. The boy will control events, choose his own pain-tolerance level and activate the relief-giving morphine drip. He has spoken of a dream: "They came for me last night, Dad; they said they want to help me, but I won't let them." Time ticks on and, waiting quietly together, the pair forges a bond stronger even than their 12 years together have built. Ultimately, his moment arrives and the struggle is over. The man says, "Ted, it's time." In an affirmation of trust and love, the boy slips away in triumph, and a father's searing grief begins.

Today, that experience drives an extraordinary individual, whose work as a coach and "teacher" has begun to augment the impact of formally trained counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists. His almost ludicrously simple techniques have plucked desperate young people from suicide.

The outcomes of his efforts surprise, shock and change the counsellors who are learning to trust him and call on him when their methods seem inadequate. Some in private, business and public-service areas adapt their techniques , within the limits of the professional constraints and their personal appetite for change.

Exceptional Talent

A qualified professional with a long career in counselling (I'll call him "Stuart") describes this man's talent as "palatable and exceptional". But if Stuart stepped on to a box in Civic Centre and sang his praises, he would risk more than a blast of official displeasure. This Randall Clinch fellow is someone who would never quite fit. He is a larrikin, and a survivor of many falls, a former bricklayer who could neither read nor write till he was 32. At first meeting, you could mistake Clinch for a scar-free middleweight boxer or an impish bodgie in the wrong era. A Ginger Meggs type, but with dark, modishly cut hair and Nikes. That first impression lasts and, along with his self effacing manner in one-to-one encounters, wins trust especially from his younger clients. It adds special flavour to his professional style and story-telling.

His grin is no fake. He probably still remains a "bad lad", despite his encounters with professional elites, and despite his confrontations with death. At Deakin Primary School, few seemed concerned if the lad "went missing". When, at age 12, he decided it was time to pack his swag, the school principal's relief was clear. "Don't worry about the paperwork, son!" he beamed and ushered young Randall to the door. Free from school, Clinch found a job, labouring with and for a mate. He learned to lay bricks, after a year cleaning building-site toilets and doing odd jobs.

"I decided to strike out for a better life," he says. "Laying bricks seemed the way to get to it." He learned the rudiments of a brickie's craft, and once led a crew that laid 4000 bricks a day and 40 barrows of mortar trundled across the site, up ramps to the work levels. He was soon laying more bricks than he was paid to, and graduated to running his own work gangs. Despite early success, he avoided work situations where he might have to write something. He couldn't read and he could only write his name with difficulty.

Before he reached age 27, bricklaying proved backbreaking. The work had found his physical limit, but lacking other income-earning skills, he plugged on for five years in spite of the pain. He wore a back-brace, crawling at times on the site and at length, aged 32, he collapsed and was immobilised for a month. Today he says his reason for pressing on was simple: with two children and a wife and a parent to support, he was driven by the survival urge and: "I was determined to go fishing with my boys."

A self-administered regime for recovery from the crippling injury included swimming: "I dreamed of being able to kick my feet in the water, but for a long time they just dragged along behind me." He rolled in and out of the pool. "One day I discovered myself kicking." Ignoring tears as he practised walking, he discarded the medication that had kept pain at bay. In step with his recovery, Clinch was teaching himself to apply the power of his mind to quell back pain. Return to school was also part of the program.

He enrolled in Reid TAFE, and that year learned to read while reclaiming his ability to walk. Those achievements installed the foundations of his approach to helping others. Attitude was the foundation: "It was not so much pain that held me back at the time. It was the fear of it. There was and still is a mind component involved. Conquer the thought or change it, and the rest is easy. Fear immobilises you. You have to make your pain your friend, and then you walk."

By the end of that productive year Clinch was still in strife. He had no health benefits and a mortgaged house. But he could read and he was ready to find a job, no longer obliged to conceal his lack of basic skills. The first new employment involved selling house extensions. He found a talent for "helping the boss make the decisions". Another prosperous period, along with immersion in a power structure and its attendant lifestyle, enveloped him. It seems that a large proportion of the success went to his head; his personal life faltered and then collapsed.

One day he "saw the bus" - his own image for his destruction. He obeyed an inner voice that suggested he "do a runner", surrendered his company directorship and headed for Queensland - or, as he puts it. "three gas tanks north". When he returned, it was to no family, zero dollars and just the shelter of Macquarie Hostel.

Generous Heart

Climbing back from this fresh disaster took six months. Someone he met one day while cycling along one of Canberra's tracks engaged him in a chat that he was obviously "ripe for". He set out to hone his skills and intuitions: "one on one, two hours a day". That routine is now his coaching pattern: longer periods over a few sessions. Watching and listening, he learned to see how "directed thought" and "dominating thought patterns" were expressed by troubled individuals and in groups. Story-telling is central to his approach. It arises from an open, generous heart - something as clear as it is disarming for the listener. His stories quickly bridge to the predominant thoughts of the floundering people he faces. He will mention persistence - how he pursued the rich and famous about the keys to their "success".

In a naive way, he had sought those keys in order to pass them on. He scratched letters to Alan Bond when Bond was at the peak of his achievement and national acclaim; applied his charm and cunning to encourage Bond's secretary to place one of his letters on the Man's desk. He wrote, reminded, pressed. He eventually intercepted his target in Sydney and received one answer: "I did something because it was there to be done." That was useful, but the story about acquiring the comment belongs in his narrative armoury.

One individual in crisis that Clinch encountered with his special tool-kit of life skills was a teenage student we will call "Jim". In 1995, heroin addict Jim was a client of the counsellor Stuart, and had been diagnosed as seriously clinically depressed. He was well known in Canberra Hospital's psychiatric ward. He had a history of multiple suicide attempts, drug use and severe lack of self-esteem. The family from whom he'd parted to join the street kids was, according to Stuart, "fatalistic about his prognosis". "Prematurely shrunken and stooped, he appeared to be stumbling towards demise.

By the time, Clinch had become an object of mild curiosity in counselling circles, through challenging them with his ideas. He eventually encountered Stuart and said, "Give me your worst kid." A cautious but desperate Stuart agreed to allow Clinch to test his approach under "carefully controlled and monitored conditions". Young Jim was to continue medication and his counselling regime with the health services while he worked with Clinch. It didn't take long. After four sessions of two hours, Stuart was astonished to be presented with a "different boy" and in 12 weeks the young man had completely reversed his behaviour, was drug-free with few signs of depression. His parents observed that he seemed to have grown taller in the first month. (He was merely lifting his head after a long time.)

Gradually, anti-depressant drugs were removed and Jim returned to his family and resumed his studies with very satisfactory outcomes. Many people who later attended his 21st birthday celebration had not expected him to survive so long. What had occurred? What can be observed without academic training is that, to use Clinch's words, "Jim had found different tools with which to deal with his life". There had been no magical conversion. When a person contemplates suicide, Clinch spies a special moment, where that individual stands at the gateway to his or her greatest potential.

Memories of the dead son Ted emerge here. "Ted taught me the power of changing thoughts," Clinch says. "He dropped the level of his need for pain-killing morphine by deciding to. His doctors could not account for it. In his worst times we chose an imagined safe spot; a place teeming with bird life, a favourite mountain scene. He escaped there for moments of tranquility." In the event the master became the apprentice. "I came to teach and I learned from him," he says.

His method is to "use what is there. Find the tools that work for that individual, dust them off and to propel the person into motion." Extending the car analogy, he says that while our personal "vehicle" of life is always the same, unchanging, motion makes all the difference. "As a person moves past things (grief, horrors, doubts, pain), in hindsight he or she sees them in a different light."

Powerful questioning and metaphor (the car, the toolbox, and the familiar journey to a safe place, for instance) unearth triggers that the individual can always return to. His coaching is jargon-free, though his approach, according to Stuart, would fit solidly into what is called "cognitive behavioural psychology". He may well fit a theory, but clinch himself is not preoccupied with it.

A Little Learning

Perhaps here is a case where a little learning is not a dangerous thing, for, as Stuart affirms, the professionals in his field tend to be immured in the past, and in their counselling sessions tend to dive into it. "That often delays progress and, although it isn't relevant in many cases, we just can't help ourselves." Not that Clinch ignores the past and experience. As an attitude coach, working with managers or individuals, he can put a good spin even on bad or good, leading the person to rejoice in both. Horror memories are to be returned to the person's control, and then progressively stripped of their old harmful power.

When I met Jim for help on this story, I found him (two years down the track) a 21-year-old beset with the trials that face most people of his age: finances and personal relationships. Free of the dependencies that grow on some helpers, Jim now makes no desperate night phone calls for a "battery recharge". He buzzes with ideas, and as he looks into the future, it shines back brightly. A deal of Clinch's work is done with individuals and groups in the public service and commercial companies, where his basic techniques work to bring about sustainable attitude changes, lift workplace performance and sometimes stimulate lifestyle choices.

Attitude change is indeed the thought you choose to entertain. Clinch says, "The events of life are themselves neutral. We give them power by letting them develop it. By reversing the process we can remove that power. The very worst becomes the finest moment. It is a matter of choosing." Clinch summarises his technique with the slogan "attitudes by choice". The technique that is proving itself still faces a long journey to official recognition. I asked if he saw himself as a "people motivator". "The person involved does the motivating," he said. "They use the tools, they have discovered that they had at hand all along."

A future challenge is the possibility of what officialdom might see as disaster, the loss of a suicidal client. The medical and psychiatric professions enjoy (and pay for) recourse to their society registration and protection. But Clinch's view about the dreaded chance is not out of character: "I have to balance things out," he says. "Finding and helping a hundred human beings while losing the one is a reality that has to be faced. If I continually fear losing one, how could I ever help the 99?". Stuart the Counsellor, despite his faith in Clinch's skill and integrity, is less optimistic: "If he loses one, there will be a queue of conventional practitioners poised to condemn - overlooking the lives he's already helped turn around. If he continues successfully and charges more for his work (sometimes subsidised as a service, by corporate consulting company ASK Solutions) he could end up living comfortably."

Whichever way it goes, this unique storyteller is not looking over his shoulder. It's not his way.