Brain Software Podcast 37: The Riders of the Hypnotic Storm

Brain Software hypnosis podcastEpisode 37 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel is now live! This podcast covers a lot of really cool hypnosis material, and is bound to entertain you while it educates you!

Here are the show notes for this episode

  • We recorded this one week after launching the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy, which is going incredibly well so far.  This is by far the best online hypnosis training you can get anywhere.  Check it out at https://MikeMandelHypnosis.com/academy and listen to the AMAZING testimonial we got from our former student, David (Thanks so much, David, for sending us your thoughts)
  • Mike and Chris conducted a “Live on Air” Google Hangout discussing a real life example of hypnotic language in business.
  • Did you know fireman in France are using emergency hypnosis?  This is awesome, because it shows so clearly how different it is from classical  hypnosis. It’s really much more of a conversational technique,  but it’s conversational in the context of an emergency.  This is hypnosis for high stress situations.
  • Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR Induction) – any regular podcast listener knows that Mike and Chris find this induction to be unbelievably dursative (that means BAD).  We discuss this in quite some details, because what Mike uses on his CDs is not PMR.  Relaxation alone does not create a hypnotic state!
  • We got a fantastic email from a listener asking about how she can overcome her apparent limitation in achieving financial comfort.  Through some email dialogue it turns out there was an obvious secondary gain at play.  Not having money was helping her in a strange way.  Listen to this and you’ll understand why Mike often says, “How does that belief serve you?”
  • Make sure to sign up for the September 7th handwriting analysis course (also in Toronto, a one day course). You can get all the details at https://MikeMandelHypnosis.com/handwriting

 Empowering Question: What neglected talent or skill have you been wasting … and how are you going to use it to improve the lives of others?

Closing metaphor: Earl Beatty Public School and Norm Yates.  Hypnosis students:  Email us and tell us what you notice in this metaphor.

Please leave a rating for this podcast in iTunes!  Go leave a rating in iTunes, and send in your questions by emailing questions (at) MikeMandelHypnosis (dot) com.

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Raw Transcript

Chris: Hey everybody this is Chris Thompson and welcome to session number 37, brain software with Mike Mandel. He’s sick of airports, he loves the brachial stun and has anatomically perfect feet. Here is the hypnotic storm rider, Mike Mandel.

Mike: Yes Christopher here I am in Toronto, Canada, the very epicenter of global hypnosis where we teach, we find the rest of the hypnotic world sadly wanting and we will not end our quest riding the storm of hypnotic confusion, we are the riders of the hypnotic storm. Not ending our work until the last script has been burned and the last script reader is hung from the bridge by his ankles (he’s joking, relax).

Chris: Oh so we are just so – this is hilarious but we’re recording this one week after the launch of the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy and we did a live webinar and I’m assuming a lot of you listening were probably in that webinar if you’re listening to this around the same time, mid-June 2013 and you introduced us on the webinar with the same joke.

Mike: It was the riders of the storm.

Chris: [laughs] which makes no sense whatsoever. So, which is part of the humor right? So we’ve been deconstructing Mike’s humor a little bit. Well, Mike and I have.

Mike: I don’t want you to deconstructing it.  Then the humour disappears. Yeah real funny.

Chris: One of the things that just saying something with such intention and such congruence-

Mike: even though it’s content free, even though it’s context free. No point to it.

Chris: It means nothing just like manufacturing the word dursative

Mike: Or glanative. Now listen, I really like when you said I’d like the brachial stun because I do. It’s one of my favorite attacks. I love to split someone’s inside punch, smack them on the lateral surface of their neck right at the carotid sinus and the ventral ramus. We’re talking T1 to T3, we have glossopharyngeal, hyperglossal nerve maybe, a bit of vagus nerve involvement as well and this causes an immense shock to the person’s circulatory system. The carotid sinus signals the brain that the blood pressure has spiked wherein the brain starts the heart and the person falls at your feet and is unconscious for about eight to 30 seconds and it is awesome.

Chris: so you have both ends of the spectrum here folks. You have hypnosis and you have jiu jitsu.

Mike: Hypnosis as a martial art and yes, I do have anatomically perfect feet. Every girl I ever went out with went, “Oh look at your nice feet.” Yes, the structure of my feet is flawless. I don’t have this second toe like a werewolf that’s way too long and I know some of my listeners do so avoid the silver bullets and you’ll be all right but my feet are flawlessly perfect.  I have nice arches. It makes up for the fact that I’ve got this enormous nose.

Chris: Now flawlessly perfect, we should call the redundancy police?

Mike: Absolutely we should. [laughs] Carry on, what do we got today Chris?

Chris: Oh let’s talk about first thing I want to do. So this last week, we were out at the pub after jiu jitsu and we had told the story on the last podcast. In fact, it was a reframing situation that I had delivered.

Mike: Yes and you had told the story I think Chris.

Chris: Yeah, I’ll take the blame/responsibility for this one but I had essentially listened to a friend of mine say you know this work situation is unbearable yada, yada, yada and my reframe was something to the effect of and how are you going to feel next year when we have this exact same conversation again … and she quit her job.

Mike: ,[jokes] And so did hundreds of listeners that are now destitute and in the street because of Chris.

Chris: Now Mike had made the comment on that podcast that she had the resources to do so, to quit and he didn’t mean emotion… I guess you did.

Mike: I didn’t mean become a lay about and just everybody run out from their job.

Chris: Yeah what we meant is that in her particular case, she had the financial resources to not be working for the next three or four months and it wasn’t going to bankrupt her so we wanted to make sure that people don’t misunderstand the message there. So enough said there.

Mike: You weren’t just arbitrarily telling her to quit her job. No.

Chris: Absolutely not.

Mike: It’s something she hated and she had the resources. Okay moving on.

Chris: With that said, I mean I got an e-mail last night from a guy who clearly is having a big disagreement with his boss.

Mike: Which obviously came out because of your story you told.

Chris: Maybe yes.

Mike: He’s looking to you now. He’s looking to you for vocational advice.

Chris: Well and the thing is you’re not just going to go and quit your job if you have no other plan but if you’re unhappy and whatever it’d be, it doesn’t have to be a job but if you’re unhappy in some aspect of your life, just start thinking about how you’re going to change the direction of your life rather than thinking how am I going to get back at this person or whatever. Reframe the argument, don’t start worrying about how you’re going to-

Mike: Make it useful.

Chris: How you’re going to get revenge here. Just how am I going to move forward in life that will serve me for the long term.

Mike: Yeah revenge is never an option unless of course it’s in the realm of hilarious practical jokes.

Chris: Oh absolutely and thousand fold retaliation which is one of the favorite lines that I learned from you.

All right, let’s talk about the webinar that we did on Friday – the live broadcast you and I did on – we’ve been messing around with these Google hangouts the “Live On Air” Google hangouts.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: Which are kind of fun ways of producing interesting content but I had on Friday morning, I believe it was Friday morning read about Tesla Motors, the car company, and the brilliant double bind that I noticed the CEO Elon Musk deliver in his presentation. So there’s a YouTube video on this and Mike and I talking about it but let’s recap it quickly.

So electric car company, people are always concerned about things like how far can I go, how long will it take me to recharge and long story short, they unveiled this really cool way of swapping out the battery on the car which is like over a thousand pounds and they swap it out in 90 seconds and they’re going to do it at these supercharging stations and so people can have the choice, as the CEO put it of-

Mike: Paying for the new battery to be swapped or getting a free supercharge that takes 20 minutes.

Chris: Yeah and so he delivered this beautiful double bind. He said so, effectively when you pull into a Tesla supercharging station and that’s his presupposition when you pull into the station which is as soon as you bought the car. Your choice will be do you prefer faster or free. Now, what a beautiful double bind.

Mike: Wonderful double bind because either one means you’ll have a  Tesla.

Chris: Yes and so we just wanted to point out to everybody that-

Mike: they all just ran out and bought one.

Chris: Here we are seeing as Mike said on the live broadcast we did. The actual use of hypnotic language in the business community.

Mike: And in a huge aspect of the business community. I mean this is a huge company.

Chris: Yeah. It’s a very, very big. I think it’s like $12 billion market capitalization company and this guy’s a very well respected CEO.

Mike: Yeah you did a really great job with that talk too.

Chris: So super interesting. Now-

Mike: To us at least.

Chris: Now we very quickly skipped over when we talked about the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy launch. I do want to just say this, so as I hit the record button on this podcast, it is June 25th, 2014.

Mike: Six months to Christmas.

Chris: It’s one week. Yeah it is wow, it’s one week after we opened the doors and we said we were going to close the doors to the online training which we have done and so if you go there now, https://MikeMandelHypnosis.com/academy, you’re going to be directed to a sign up page just to get notification e-mail when we open the doors again.

Mike: And were not doing this as some sort of ploy. The reason we’ve shut the door is we said we were going to an event, we wanted to get our rush of initial students In and then determine how many we can handle because Chris and I believe in excellent customer service. We want to make sure you’re going to get follow up from us, your questions are being answered, we’re going to be swamped with more people when we can deliver to.

Chris: Absolutely. So, by the time you’re listening to this. by the time I publish it, chances are we’ll have opened the doors again if everything’s gone smoothly which I fully expect it will unless we run into a situation.  Visit https://MikeMandelHypnosis.com/academy and it says that the doors are closed, sign up for the notification list when we reopen it, you’ll get a notification e-mail and you can sign up. People are loving the content. I just want to, I want to shout out to David because he gave, I won’t read the last name right now.

Mike: Oh yeah fabulous.

Chris: David in California. So this is the guy that drove to our last Toronto course from San Francisco. Super guy and after the course was over, he loved the training and he said you know, I want to start working as a hypnotherapist but obviously to do hypnotherapy you need to have certain credentials, you need to be qualified under the state law as a hypnotherapist to be able to be call yourself that rather than saying consulting hypnotist or something like that.

Mike: Right, right.

Chris: And I can understand some people want to have the actual title and Mike does not give you a title that says you’re a hypnotherapist.

Mike: No I’m an educator. I’ll just teach you how to do great work.

Chris: It’s usually a regulated term in most areas of the world. So anyway, he wanted to get this certification, decided that he was going to go and take some training at another school which would give it to him.

Mike: It would be 120 hours.

Chris: A long, long course and so he just e-mailed us last week and he said, somebody in effect of, I went to the first class and it was a two-hour long class or whatever and that the instructor just used so much filler language and just seems so boring that he just resigned from the class right then and there.

Mike: He said he couldn’t face it.

Chris: He said I’m just going to go and start using what I’ve already learned. I have not been able to find any training that matches the quality of the training that I got from Mike in Toronto.

Mike: That’s great, that’s very kind of you David. We do our best to deliver the goods.

Chris: So commercial over. Let’s talk about firemen in France using hypnosis.

Mike: Yeah this is interesting Chris. Anybody who’s followed this on the news, we tend to keep up on all this stuff and firemen in France are using what’s called emergency hypnosis. This is nothing new to me. I read the article and I saw they’re doing essentially what I’ve been doing for 15 years. I started teaching emergency hypnosis to I taught it to paramedics out in Saskatchewan, taught it to Ontario provincial police and I taught it to New York State troopers showing them that when someone is under horrendous stress of an accident, or fire, whatever terrible loss, they’re in a really, really shocked out state and their critical faculty is wide open for suggestion so make sure it’s good suggestion. I applaud what they’re doing in France. I read the article and they’re doing a really good job and they’re fixating the person’s attention saying look at me directly in the eyes, look at me directly in the eyes and breathe and just begin to calm down and feel good and they put the positive suggestions in, even though these things always you know get reworked in articles. It emphasized they were getting fixation of attention, they were grabbing people when they were in shock and not physically grabbing them but getting their attention when they’re in shock, when they’re in distress and then feeding in slower, deeper breathing and positive suggestions.

Chris: I would’ve assumed that all right, I do assume that this was taught in French and I thought that the articles, the English version articles of course that we read were so well-written and so well explained and what you guys should listening or guys and gals, Google firemen in France using hypnosis and around the June 13, 2103 timeframe, you’ll find the same articles. It was so well explained that this isn’t classic so called I’m going to use the air quotes around it “hypnosis”.

Mike: But no and yeah, they were doing that really well Chris. I completely agree. It’s the whole idea that when you’ve had a car accident or there’s a fire in your house or something, you’ve got this massive PGO spike of the reorientation reflex inspired. You’re in shock and you’re looking for resolution and stability and clarity and that’s what they are feeding back. I gave the example in my course of an Ontario provincial police female constable north of Toronto, first officer on the scene of an accident. I believe that one person was killed, another person had a broken leg, leaking blood from the femoral artery, she put her thumb in the artery, stopped the bleeding, he looks down sees his broken leg, goes into shock and he says,” I’m going to lose my leg, they’re going to amputate, they’re going to amputate.” I’m going to lose my leg and she looks and says, “Remain calm” and he went, okay. He calmed right down. She was able to get the positive suggestion in instead of don’t panic which of course is nightmarish causing him to elicit a panic state but beyond that Chris, one of the things I taught is let’s say the person has an arm broken at the elbow that’s bent right backwards from you know fall off a building or something. The way I would teach them to use this is we fixate their attention and we say first thing we tell them is reassurance even if they’re at death’s door. You say, “Oh my brother had this even worse and he’s fine now” so he said that foundation and then, I say, “I’m going to examine you” or we get the paramedic to say, “We’re going to examine you now. Tell me, does this hurt or is it okay?” and they start far, far away from the injured limb, touch the right hand and say, “How’s this?” “That’s okay.” “How’s your wrist here?”  “That’s okay.” “What about your forearm here?” “That’s okay.” They never get to the broken limb. I just keep reinforcing that’s okay, that’s okay, that’s okay and it calms the person right down.

Chris: Yeah Mike in the Dominican Republic just this March I had a similar situation where I had a chance to use some emergency hypnosis and it was just a grandmother who had fallen. She was in the lobby of the hotel. She was distracted because there was all kinds of entertainment going on.

Mike: I remember this yeah.

Chris: I think I told you about the story and so she stepped out of the lobby towards the steps not realizing there was a step down, lost her balance, fell. The long story short, she broke her wrist. It was quite obvious. I was probably the 10th person on the scene, the first nine were just kind of standing around wondering what to do. I have lifeguard training from my background so I immediately just said to her you know what’s her name, got her to calm down, used the yes set and stuff to get her to talk to me and immediately just sent someone off to go get her daughter who was down at the beach, an adult daughter of hers because it was quite obvious she had broken her wrist, she needed medical attention. So while we were waiting for the daughter to get back from the beach and take her mother, this grandmother to a hospital, I had the chance to speak in a hypnotic voice for her. I just noticed that she was very uncomfortable, very nervous, very embarrassed, in pain and I just started pacing her experience, telling her that I knew she was feeling uncomfortable right now and that she was feeling a bit embarrassed about how she’s fallen and that it would be all better and that her daughter would be here soon and that she would start to feel better and when your daughter gets here and we’d get you taken care of, we’re going to get some ice. The ice is going to help your arm start to feel better and your breathing will slow down and you’ll be able to just calmly breathe and you can tell me all about what happened before this happened.

Mike: And were you calibrating the shifts happening with her as this happened?

Chris: Her breathing changed within about I would say about 15 to 20 seconds of me starting to talk to her and it was all very quick, very simple. I just needed to change her emotional state, I just needed to fixate her attention on my voice and then give her something else to do other than panic.

Mike: Wonderful. You’re distracting her from the problem, fixating her attention because you’re taking advantage of the fact that her critical faculty is extremely permeable because of the stress she’s under and she’s looking for resolution. Excellent work.

Chris: I’m as big fan of just dropping a lot of embedded commands telling people that they can start to feel better when this kind of stuff happens.

Mike: Nice. Yup. Excellent. What else we got here?

Chris: Oh let’s look at our agenda again. I know there’s more on here. So I want to talk about progressive muscle relaxation. I want to go… I know. I want to go a little bit of depth on this because so here’s the back story for anyone listening. Mike and I had many podcasts here where Mike will say something like you know anything other than that horrible progressive relaxation induction. And so, people will sometimes e-mail in and  say something like “Don’t you use a progressive muscle relaxation induction on your stress relief CD or your peak performance CD” or whatever and it’s not the same thing and we’ve explained this. So maybe just cover that again and then let’s go into a bit more depth on what we actually do.

Mike: Okay well on my Brain Software series, I have to use a generic broad spectrum approach. It’s going to hit most people so there is relaxation utilized as a doorway into trance but it’s not dragging it out endlessly and I’m layering on embedded commands and metaphors and sound effects and everything to keep it moving. It is when people depend on this progressive relaxation or progressive muscle relaxation induction. You know I’m talking about you know just feel your face relax and I go on for 10 minutes about the muscles in your face and on and on. I’ve seen people do this for 45 minutes and they’ve only got a light trance and this is purely an indication of lack of confidence. There are way better ways of getting the person into it. I do not use progressive relaxation one on one ever. Now if I did, it would only be if the person had expected that, if it had worked well on them in the past or they had requested that but I can’t imagine any of that being the case so I stayed away from it just because relaxation is a doorway into trance. It isn’t trance and a lot of hypnosis schools confuse the two. They think that being relaxed and being in trance are the same. I heard one hypnotist repeatedly say and I’m going to put them back into the relaxed state. Well, relaxation alone will not give you hypnosis. You can lie in a hot tub and be extremely relaxed but you won’t be in a trance.

Chris: So essentially what you’re saying is even if you have this super fast way of causing relaxation, you could warp time and do the progressive muscle relaxation part in like let’s say a minute, cover the whole body, your eyelids are relaxed all the way down to the tips of your feet, tips of your toes whatever. You still need to do something else right? You still need to fixate their attention and-

Mike: Fixate the attention internally or externally yes. Without that, without wrapping the mind around the idea as (Dave) Elman said, you will not get trance. This goes back to Maxwell Maltz … a lot of it in the late 60s, early 70s where he had a lot of great models for getting people to relax but unfortunately that has become the same as hypnosis in some people’s eyes and I find it to be largely a waste of time.

Chris: Otherwise booze would help people going to hypnosis.

Mike: Oh that’s a good one Chris.

Chris: [laughs] Very relaxed.

Mike: [jokes] Last week, you’re telling everyone to quit their jobs and now you’re telling them to be alcoholics.

Chris: [laughs] You want to relax? Just have a few shots of tequila and all of a sudden, you’re in hypnosis.

Mike: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Chris: Obviously not. Okay-

Mike: So it was certainly at it that else.

Chris: [laughs] Well we’ll just add about that right. Progressive muscles relaxation, I wanted to ask you now… I’m thinking of one particular organization, large organization that we won’t name but when people learn this induction, are they really just handed a script and told okay read this at each other.

Mike: All sorts of hypnosis schools hand people scripts. It’s just… it’s the way they operate because it is a lazy way of doing hypnosis. You don’t have to interact with the person, you can just read this piece of paper at them, you don’t have to teach your students weak, you just have to give them a stack of scripts. If they smoke, do this you know. if they’re afraid of alligators read this at them and principles are so much better than freaking scripts. It drives me raving mad which is why we are taking the hypnosis world by storm with Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy.

Chris: Okay so if one was convinced that they were just really comfortable with the idea of using relaxation based beginning of an induction. I really want to go deep into this because there are tons of people who are saying whoa, I do a progressive muscle relaxation 90% of the time and what I discovered in reading of some of the debates going on in the online forums is that what people are calling progressive muscle relaxation isn’t necessarily the same. In fact, it’s vastly different in many cases.

Mike: You must define your terminology.

Chris: Yes so we’re putting this label on it called PMR, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, and the way I label it isn’t necessarily the same way that someone else would label it and therefore they’re going to think my argument is totally wrong. I’m going to think they’re totally wrong and we’re not talking about the same thing at all.

Mike: I’m talking about this long drawn out equating relaxing every single muscle taking minutes and minutes and minutes to do this as the equivalent of a hypnotic induction. It is not.

Chris: Now in contrast to that, if you use some pacing statements. You’re lying there on that chair and you’re beginning to feel more and more comfortable… well, pacing and leading. That’s a leading statement the second one but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using a bit of relaxation and then dropping the embedded suggestions using metaphor.

Mike: Of course not, no there’s nothing wrong with relaxation. I mean it’s good for you.

Chris: It shouldn’t be a script.

Mike: Right, it just shouldn’t be a script, it shouldn’t be confused with hypnosis. It can be part of hypnosis but it doesn’t have to be at all.

Chris: That’s right. So it’s your in road and you must shift to the occupation of their critical faculty –

Mike: We have to distract or subvert the critical faculty and depotentiate the conscious mind.

Chris: Right.

Mike: Without that, it’s not hypnosis.

Chris: What I should’ve been saying there is we need to relax their physical body as step one and then as Elman would’ve put it, you need to relax their mental…

Mike: Their mind as well.

Chris: The mental, their mind has to relax as well. So then you’re shifting into all of the Ericksonian language patterns or whatever else that you’re doing.

Mike: Yeah you’re right and there’s nothing wrong again with relaxation. It’s just this confusion that relaxation and hypnosis are the same thing. If I can get someone relaxed, I’m now a great hypnotist. Not necessarily.

Chris: Right so to end this whole debate, if all you do is-

Mike: Please do.

Chris: If all you do is relax… relax even deeper… relax even deeper… relax even deeper, you will no longer smoke. You are not a smoker anymore. Wide awake now. You’ve missed a big part of the therapy right?

Mike: Right, right. It’s juvenile beyond belief which is unfortunately where it seems most and most is only 51%, most of the hypnotic world is stuck.

Chris: That’s it. The people who are saying that they use this PMR, it sounds like-

Mike: You said you were finished with the topic. You just opened the lid again.

Chris: When you bring up, when you ask someone to explain what they do, it’s not the same thing as what we’re just talking about. Anyway, I really think people shouldn’t use that terminology anymore. Let’s talk about secondary gain. I’ve got a really interesting e-mail from one of our listeners. I’m not going to use her name. She specifically said it’s okay for you to relay this story but please don’t use my name. She had asked what product of Mike’s would help me overcome my seemingly unconscious belief that I shouldn’t have money. She wants more money and she believes that after having tried everything that somehow there’s something stopping her from having more money on-

Mike: Well there are two things come in mind right now Chris, can you imagine what they would be?

Chris: Well no but before we talk about-

Mike: Yes but I mean give me a before, before.

Chris: I’ll finish this story.

Mike: I thought you were done sorry.

Chris: No, I told her look you know, peak performance is probably the most suitable one. I wanted to answer her question and then we don’t have a product that teaches people how to make more money but peak performance gets you into peak states and that’s a great product to use for generally the things that you want to get better at in life. What I said to her though is as an example, let me just refer to my notes here. I said to her, look regarding the issues that you’re looking to solve. First you need to ask yourself an important question. You need to be totally honest, what is not having this resource, which in your case is money, helping you to avoid or helping you to accomplish in life. So for example when I shift it away for money, I said not having good health can give someone in a bad relationship a way to hang on to his spouse and knowing that as long as there are health issues, the spouse is going to feel too guilty to leave. Now I purposely gave her this non-money example to get the point across.

Mike: Right, right.

Chris: Now this was the interesting part. She fired back a response saying ,“Wow, thank you for saying that because it’s interesting that my relationship is not great and one of the reasons that I haven’t left him is because I don’t have enough money” … and so, she started realizing oh, there’s actually something going on here where maybe I don’t really want to leave and as badly as I think I do. And therefore if I don’t have money, I can’t leave.

Mike: That’s interesting Chris because that’s where we’re right back to the heart of when Chris and I say “How well does that belief serve you?”

Chris: Exactly.

Mike: And but you now believe that …boy I need more money or I can’t get more or I can’t leave this relationship or I can’t stay in this relationship, whatever it is, what does that belief do for you? What does it prevent you from doing? Those are the questions.

Chris: So what were you going to say before I finished telling you the story?

Mike: Oh I can’t remember. Some stupid comment.

Chris: It was something about people who have an unconscious limitation to getting money or getting something.

Mike: Oh no. I was only talking about the product and the peak performance state of mind and also the navigator systems and negotiate around it.

Chris: Yeah or take the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy to learn about hypnosis. You’ll love it.

Mike: Our time’s going really quick.

Chris: So we have a few more. This is flying by this podcast but this is a good one. It’s fun. Let’s end… we have a closing metaphor. We have an empowering question. Anything else we want to touch on? I don’t think so eh?

Mike: No.

Chris: All right, let’s do it. Closing…

Mike: What about the empowering question?

Chris: let’s do that first.

Mike: Okay listen carefully. Here’s your empowering question for today. Let your unconscious mind dwell on this and then answer it and apply it.

What neglected talent or skill have you been wasting? Let me say that again, what neglected talent or skill have you been wasting… and how are you going to use it to improve the lives of others? What neglected talent or skill have you been wasting… and how are you going to use it to improve the lives of others?

Chris: Awesome question. I could think of some good answers that apply to me. All right, and let’s hear your closing metaphor.

Mike: When I was a kid, I went to Earl Beatty Public school when we came to Canada from England and I was there initially in kindergarten and stayed there grade one, two, three, skipped grade four into grade five. I was there for the beginning part of grade six and my best friend at the school was norm Yates who I met because he pushed my head into a tree in a street fight when we were little kids and I told my parents and they had words with his parents and it was all sorted out and we went to cubs together, the 133rd cub scout pack, Monarch Park and hung out with all these great kids like Ken Hunter and went on trips including camping trips and just had a general blast including the game we would play in schoolyard back then. We get two huge rival games and attack each other. Now we were little kids. There’d be 50 or 60 kids in each game. There were two gangs, there’s the blue raiders which was Norm Yates’ gang which I belong to and the bad kids were in the Black Trotters, supposedly knights in armor on horseback, all black horses. Ian Somerville, our friend, was in the Black Trotters. I could never understand why such a nice kid was in such an idiotic gang and we’d stand on different parts of the schoolyard and the two groups of 50 or 60 kids would charge each other frantically yelling and then once we ran into each other, we’d fight with invisible swords and each claiming were wounded or destroyed the other one. It was great fun at the time and you can learn. I mean really learn so many things from your youth and apply all these things in your adulthood in ways that will change your life and will help you continue to learn and get better … and the gangs would split up and run to the other sides of the schoolyard and it would all happen again and I’d see old Ian Somerville across the schoolyard thinking why is he with those Black Trotters on those black horses when he could be a blue raider with us? I never really understood it but cub camp was a blast and all through school hanging out with Norm Yates thought back to that day he pushed my head into the tree and how the friendship all started at that time joining 133rd cub pack, how we moved into that area and I went to Earl Beatty Public school in the first place right back to kindergarten where it all began.

Chris: Thanks everybody for tuning in and listening to Brain Software with Mike Mandel. I’m Chris Thompson. This has been session number 37. Hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you head over to iTunes and leave a rating for the show. Write a review. We want to get more people writing reviews for the brain software podcast so head over to iTunes and do that and of course, if you’re interested in learning more about hypnosis and communication and a lot more than just hypnosis, you want to check out the Mike Mandel hypnosis academy and you can check that out by visiting https://MikemandelHypnosis.com/academy. We’ll talk to you again in the next podcast.