Selling success: the art of self-promotion

Shirley Schoonmaker is the founder of Beatons, an organisation best known for schooling girls in the ways of high society, offering courses that range from How To Walk In Heels, to Elegant Entertaining ('a one-day workshop on dining etiquette, flower arranging and table arrangements'). But she is now turning her gimlet eye on the male of the species with Gentlemen's Classes ranging from First Date Success to Leadership Secrets. So I had pictured a rather sterner version of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha forcing me to balance books on my head and mouth 'The rain in Spain', not a girl of around my own age - early thirties - who made me weak-kneed every time she laid a hand on my hips to correct my posture.

Schoonmaker looks like a young Julianne Moore, fine red hair spilling on to the shoulders of a tight black jersey dress. Her voice is a soft Scottish lilt and her manner somewhere between a favourite teacher and a progressive prison warden. After a career in television and radio, and a brief foray into the world of business, Schoonmaker moved into what she calls 'personal branding' - the tricks that enable us to sail through even the most daunting social situations. This she does, first by demolishing any sense of self-worth: 'There's something kind of ordinary about you... You look like someone who works in a really dull job where he's pushed around,' she told me. ' Everything about you says low status to me.' 'OK,' I thought to myself. 'That's the bad stuff out of the way. Now the "but", now the moment she tells me all of things that make me brilliant.' There was no but. 'Your jumper is just dreadful. It sticks out your gut, makes you look like a sack of potatoes.' I flinched. My wife says this sort of thing to me regularly. But from a stranger it really hurt.

Attempts to get some picture of this woman's past, to reveal exactly what qualifies her quietly to eviscerate my character, are met with friendly warnings from her PR lady. So later, sporting a deerstalker (I think Schoonmaker would like what it does to my profile), I turn detective. Shirley is married to Tim Schoonmaker, a radio entrepreneur. Shirley (maiden name Renwick) was born in Ayrshire and worked as a presenter on Channel Five and a producer on Radio 5 Live before leaving to run magazine company Emap's television business, looking after Kerrang! TV, Smash Hits TV and Kiss. In an early interview in her new role, Shirley commented that 'the one thing Scottish people don't do is believe in themselves'. Perhaps her move into social schooling reflects this earlier lack of confidence. She seems to have left Emap soon after her boss, a certain Tim Schoonmaker, departed.

That morning I had pitched up at an elegant Georgian terrace on Wimpole Street, furtively scraping baby food from the leg of my suit. Buzzing on an unmarked doorbell, I muttered the name 'Shirley' as I had been instructed and climbed a winding stairway. I was there to attend Promote Me Secrets, a course that promised to help me sell myself and influence others. Schoonmaker greeted me and showed me into an attic room: two low sofas at right angles, a desk in the corner, a television sitting on the floor beneath windows that look out across the rooftops of W1.

The first step in the ritual humiliation that was to follow was to parade in front of Schoonmaker's video camera. I felt very awkward. I am not the most graceful of creatures under normal circumstances and became suddenly aware of my stumbling stride, my slouch. I stood up as straight as I could, forced back my shoulders and thrust forward my hips. I was marching now. I felt like a sexy Nazi. I sat down as Schoonmaker played the video. 'What does this person do?' she asked in her Scottish purr. 'What job does this person have?' I looked at myself. I had really made an effort that morning, had dressed in front of a mirror (a rare event). But on the screen I saw very clearly the odd socks, the bobbled jumper, the food stains raking down my leg. 'He's probably in a home of some kind. Or he's a maths teacher.' The monster in the frame slouched towards me like something coming out of a lake. 'And look at that walk.

Hideous.' She then replayed several times the noise that the sofa had emitted when I sat upon it. It was the dying sigh - whumph! - of a felled elephant. 'It's teenage, it's just a bit depressing,' this cruel, beautiful woman whispered. I held my head in my hands.

What is miraculous about this course is that she picked me up from there. Like some Eastern religion that has to slough off all traces of its proselyte's ego before he can embrace enlightenment, Schoonmaker reduced me to a quivering wreck of insecurity before boosting me slowly back up. 'If a lion is number ten, what is number one?' This exercise was like something from a youth theatre workshop. We ranked the animals by their social status and then leaped across the room in character. 'How would a mouse knock on the door?' I couldn't imagine many of my City peers doing this. Perhaps it would give me the edge. Perhaps it was a bit too George Galloway.

The final step was to work on my style. I had given up caring about what clothes I wore sometime in the late-1990s and I had to fight off a shudder of instinctive manly distaste when Schoonmaker told me that my baggy jumper was hiding a 'pleasantly youthful figure'. But she spoke with energy and passion, and I must confess that I took myself off to Oxford Street that very afternoon to buy some 'Art Deco colours' for my 'cool complexion'. I left the class with my shoulders back, my back straight, a golden thread holding me up and a yacht rope pulling me forward from my solar plexus (both rather movingly specific metaphors, I thought).

Most of the people who go on Schoonmaker's courses - she has offices in London and New York - are City boys and self-made men. Even the ladies' courses see more businesswomen than debutantes. What Schoonmaker holds out is the promise of a quick-fix primer in the arcane rituals that no amount of money can buy. Manners and etiquette are a tool employed by the ruling classes to ensure that their grip on power isn't challenged by arrivistes waving chequebooks. Schoonmaker helps her students look their peers in the eye, allows them to attend white-tie dinners and aristocratic garden parties without the chest-crushing fear of social humiliation hanging over them.

As a survivor of the City bloodbath, one who has remained more-or-less gainfully employed while friends and colleagues were sent to the back of the dole queue, I can understand why Schoonmaker's business is flourishing despite the downturn. Those personal idiosyncrasies that were just a bit of local colour during the boom years are potential job-losers in these darker days. Our slouches, our tics, our stinks, all must be eradicated in the new era of leaner, meaner City life. It's rather depressing that corporate necessity will turn us into homogenous straight-backed drones, but Schoonmaker's courses at least make the learning process an amusing one.