A cynical Sean Coughlan is surprised to find himself among the converts.

If Anthony Robbins were a fictional character, you probably wouldn’t believe in him. In fact, if he were in a film, you’d probably guess that his story had been written at a rushed script conference in which the whole star-spangled American Dream had to be worked into a single character.

After a proud-but-poor childhood in a family that couldn’t afford to buy a Thanksgiving Dinner, Anthony Robbins now lives in a Californian castle, flies his own helicopter, runs his own business empire and has given the benefit of his advice to such casual name-drops as President Clinton and Princess Diana.

This isn’t any old advice this is the kind of advice that has made Anthony Robbins a multi-millionaire. With go-get-‘em titles like Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within and Unleash the Power, Robbins is one of America’s biggest successes in selling personal motivation books, tapes, television shows and seminars, all proclaiming a message of endless personal growth, in which everyone and anyone can achieve their dreams.

And the example which Anthony Robbins most often uses to prove that this is possible is, well, Anthony Robbins. Built like an American footballer (six feet seven) with a jaw the length of a stretched limo, the clean-cut 35-year- old has transformed himself from being an overweight janitor in 1980 into today’s million-selling author, television personality, a man with a smile like a row of undipped headlights, who owns a large chunk of Fiji. And if you’re looking for redeeming vices, he’s happily married with four children and says that “the smell of alcohol on anyone’s breath nauseates me”.

None of which necessarily makes you think of Sheffield. And it might seem an abrupt leap of imagination to step from Robbins’s folksy tales of Notes from a Friend and Giant Steps to the Yorkshire city, but Sheffield wants a slice of what Robbins is selling - self belief, self confidence and a sense of purpose. If you play a little word association with Sheffield, you won’t get much of the Robbins sales-pitch of sun tans and success. Instead you’ll get out-of-date images of dour industry, steel, coal, mills, back-to-backs, struggling football teams in baggy shorts - all images that nag at a city trying to develop a modern, post-industrial future.

“Sheffield always seemed to be a mould in which other people made money, ” says Peter Marsden, a technology teacher at Yewlands School, a comprehensive in the city attended by David Blunkett’s two sons. “I’d previously seen it as a series of dark Satanic mills I’d accepted the propaganda. But now I see it as a fabulous city, a place which is our own.” This change in attitude, he says, owes much to Anthony Robbins’s involvement with the city, and his own attendance at Robbins events.

The Sheffield connection with Robbins began two years ago, when a leading city businessman brought the self-styled “world’s number one speaker” to talk to community leaders and representatives of the city council, as part of a broader urban re-generation programme. As a follow-up to the meeting, Robbins held a free public seminar at the Sheffield Arena in 1994, in which thousands of people turned out to hear his philosophy of self improvement.

Among the teachers hearing Robbins in Sheffield was Yewlands’ deputy head, George Fewster, who saw that the messages about raising self-worth and setting personal goals had very specific applications for schools, particularly those with an intake of students traditionally turned-off by education. “So many pupils come with such low expectations, have such low horizons and have such low self esteem. They fail because they expect to fail, or else they won’t even try because they think if they don’t try, they can’t fail,” he says.

At Yewlands, the social background to this self-fulfilling pessimism is a school roll with 45 per cent of pupils on free school meals and 38 per cent from families with no earned income. Five years ago the school had suffered two serious arson attacks and in 1991 only 11 per cent of its GCSE pupils received five or more grades A to C.

Now the GCSE league-table figure stands at 21 per cent, a reflection, George Fewster believes, of both the efforts made and the uphill struggle that still exists to get students to make the most of their potential. And as one step towards breaking the cycle of failing, and at the risk of being considered unorthodox, he has incorporated some of the Robbins’s concepts into Yewlands, trying to kick start the sluggish process of learning.

This November, he brought one of Robbins’s motivational gurus to work directly in the school, without payment, providing a day’s worth of inspiration to Years 8 and 9, in a project designed to coax shy and easily-embarrassed adolescents into thinking and talking about themselves and what they want to do with their lives.

Any such attempt to employ psychological techniques with young people will immediately raise hackles, so to offset parental fears letters were sent home and the seminar was optional rather than compulsory. But in practice, the experience proved to be benign, and a far cry from the tub-thumping adult version of a Robbins seminar, in which punters pay Pounds 500 for a weekend of pumped-up emotions and “the psychology of success conditioning”.

While videos showing Anthony Robbins working a stadium crowd are cringe- making, his representative on a cold morning in a Sheffield comprehensive was positively heart-warming. While Anthony Robbins looks as though he’s spent too much time in the gym; his representative Jim Zawaski, I’m reassured to see, looks as though he might know his way around a McDonalds menu (presuming he isn’t vegan like Mr Robbins).

Jumperish, good humoured and laid-back in a very American manner, Jim Zawaski could have had a career as a children’s television presenter, judging from his performance in Yewlands. Although he said that he had never given a seminar to a school group before, he seemed to make an easy transition from hyping-up Chicago sales teams to teasing responses out of an introverted group of 70 Yorkshire adolescents.

After an energy-boosting surge of pop music, Jim Zawaski warms up his audience with a few simple exercises - clapping in unison, looking who you’re standing next to, introducing yourself, closing eyes and listening. Then to develop trust and to nudge along the confidence-building, the group are put into pairs, with one pupil wearing a blindfold and the other giving directions for walking up and down the corridor, so that co-operation, listening and communication are encouraged.

At first there is awkwardness and uncomfortable giggling, a reflection on Britain as much as adolescence, believes George Fewster. “There is a deep fear of humiliation and embarrassment in this country,” an instinct he says that holds back both young people and adults, making it easier for people to do nothing rather than risk making fools of themselves.

As the morning developed the group relaxed into the idea of trying something different, with written exercises set to make the pupils think about how they work with other people, how they might appear to others, how different attitudes encourage different responses and how they might approach their work in a more positive light.

In a practical exercise, Jim Zawiski tried to make the group do the impossible enjoy tidying up. After littering the room with paper, he tried to lull the group into thinking that it could be a fun activity to tidy up, by using lots of music and a strong sense of teamwork. This, he was none too subtly suggesting, could be an approach to homework and subjects that seemed difficult.

Peter Marsden and George Fewster both use similar techniques in their teaching, using music and exercises to grab attention and to focus young minds on the task in hand. Both teachers, pupils and exam grades benefit from the process, they believe. George Fewster’s science pupils’ GCSE results are now near to the national average, an achievement when contrasted to the disadvantaged backgrounds of the intake.

Self-confidence is central to Jim Zawiski’s presentation, and in the later stages of the half-day session, he works on encouraging his audience to speak up for themselves and to think about how they present themselves. Although much of the Robbins philosophy is wrapped in psycho-jargon, the message being given to the pupils at Yewlands is curiously old-fashioned some of it could be described in more Victorian terms as elocution and deportment. When Jim Zawiski gets a painfully shy lad up behind the microphone, he gets him to stand up straight, put his shoulders back, and the class looks at the signals sent out by different postures. When this is established, the boy moves a step nearer to overcoming the teenage trauma of speaking in public, with another discussion about the importance of the way in which things are said. And Jim Zawiski, playing agony uncle, says that if you can’t think of anything to say, then why not be prepared by memorising a few jokes, giving yourself a head start in the conversation stakes.

It’s oddly moving then, when the boy who began hunched in embarrassment and as red as a beetroot, loudly announces that he wants to “ask people more stuff”. It might not be the most articulate speech ever made, but it represented a real act of courage. And when the session was over, and the hall emptied, the boy in question sidled up to Jim Zawiski and muttered his thanks for helping him speak in public, something he said that he thought he could never do.

There were other votes of support from the young participants. Andrew Moxon, 14-years-old, who is in classes that have used the motivational techniques said that he was “loving it. It gets everyone laughing, feeling better. If you haven’t got confidence, you haven’t got the guts you need for exams. I used to think that I’d fail at some subjects, but this has really helped.”

Peter Marsden sees the morning as being “mostly common sense, something that teachers are probably already doing. And in teaching children to think about thinking, George Fewster believes that it can make a difference to how they address the whole range of school work.

Although I began with cynicism, the morning was distinctly disarming, as the young people began to examine their own motives and their own self image. As George Fewster points out, at this age some young people are full of self-loathing and greatly in need of support, with the evidence appearing in the morning’s written work one girl had written that she hated everything about herself and how she looked.

Perhaps it is with such teenage groups that such motivation exercises work best, because the more of Anthony Robbins’s books for adults that you read, the more banal and unconvincing they become. Their essential key to success is in flattery, by their insistent message that every one of us can be an achiever, and that even if our lives are in a rut now, deep down we know we have the makings of greatness. It’s very much in the style of an exercise manual, suggesting that we can build up a set of muscles for happiness or success. When his promotional material promises that his Unleash the Power weekend seminar will bring a “balanced, energy-filled, disease-free lifestyle”, it’s difficult not to imagine the vulnerabilities to which this is appealing.

Nonetheless, the work being carried out at Yewlands is addressing a definite need. When so much of academic achievement is linked to the expectations of school and family, many schools struggle to find ways of instilling the self-confidence that will help pupils through exams and beyond.

For generations, parents have been buying private education because it gave their children “confidence”. Perhaps they should have saved their money and instead followed Jim Zawaski’s instructions to jump up and down shouting: “I’m absolutely unstoppable.”