Welcome to Episode 54 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson! We’re back with another info-packed session. Make sure you check out the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy
Here are the show notes for this episode:
- Mike will be presenting at the Hypnothoughts Live conference in Las Vegas during August 2015. Come on out! All of the education sessions (including Mike’s) are included in the very reasonable conference fee of $289. Chris and Mike would love to hang out with you!
- Jeff asked us to explain two seemingly contradictory statements that we’ve made on this podcst: 1) Hypnosis can’t make someone do something that violates their moral code; 2) Mike was able to hypnotize a waiter to take a library card as payment for lunch. We explain how this all makes sense, and Mike talks about the concept of a hidden observer in hypnosis.
- Eric sent us in a question asking about how best to use embedded commands in everyday conversation while helping people and without sounding weird. Mike tells a funny story about a guy who left a very heavy-handed voice message with insane levels of analog marking. Chris talks about how to do this by engaging the interest of another person and coming up with embedded commmands unconsciously as you talk.
- Another listener question: Is the stuff Mike talks about with respect to handwriting analysis (grapholoyg) real? Is it based on actual data? It sounds so unbelievable. Mike answers this in thorough detail.
- Can you become a hypnotherapist without having a psychology degree? This was another question from a listener and you’ll really enjoy the way Mike frames the answer.
- Mike discusses one of his newest protocols, the Mandel Ego State Integration protocol. He talks about ego state theory, and how to deal with vaded (damaged) ego states. Fascinating stuff! Tidbit to take away: Anytime you say you want to do something but behave in a different manner to what you say you want … it means you have a conflict between two ego states.
Closing metaphor: Camping trips
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: Welcome fellow storm riders; you are officially a rider on the hypnotic storm. Welcome to session number 54 of brain software with Mike Mandel and I’m Chris Thompson. He has a new Egyptian cat, he’s presenting at HypnoThoughts live in Las Vegas this coming august and he despises people who are educated beyond their intelligence. Welcome to the centre of the virtual hypnotic octagon, Mike Mandel.
Mike: Yes Chris, it’s good to be back as always. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girl and rich people out there – I don’t know why I said that, just looking for another thing to say and for people as well who can’t afford computers and podcasts.
Chris: I thought you said enrich. Enrich.
Mike: Enriched.
Chris: People who are going to be enriched by our discussions.
Mike: Well we are back is the bottom line. Yes, I do have a new Egyptian cat. He’s an Egyptian Mao and some people consider to be the oldest species of cats. He was 12 weeks old when I got him. He’s about 14 weeks old now and he’s the best friend of my Bengal cat. The two of them are friends together and being in a [unclear 1:07] it works very well over here. Also, let’s talk about HypnoThoughts Chris in Las Vegas. Do you want to explain what this is?
Chris: Yeah definitely. I mean this is something kind of cool so we have taken note that over the last couple of years, Scott Sandland who is the founder of HypnoThoughts.com which is I would say the biggest hypnosis discussion forum in the world and it’s a good site and he’s been putting together a conference that’s been growing in leaps and bounds and it’s very reasonably priced – i.e. like 300 or something for three days and you get all of the training that’s included in there with the price and a few meals and etc and it’s done in august I should say. in august, in Vegas where flights to Vegas are cheap and hotel rooms in August of course are incredibly cheap.
Mike: So let’s explain why they are.
Chris: Because it’s so hot. It’s really hot, it’s not the ideal tourist time of the year to go there. So it’s a great time for people who are on a budget to save some money and go to a conference. Anyway, all that to say, Mike and I have taken notice of the growing popularity of that conference. We support the idea of giving away great quality information so we put your name Mike as a speaker and you’ve been asked to present for two 1-hour sessions and we’re going to do that and were going to have a lot of fun and we’re going to give away stuff for people to show up to the [unclear 2:31] as well.
Mike: Yes, we will. And let’s say Scott Sandland does a great job with this. He’s drawing in people from all over the world. HypnoThoughts Live is growing by leaps and bounds and we applaud his forward thinking in bringing together people from a lot of different hypnotic backgrounds, a lot of different theories and schools and you will be literally able to see a couple of dozen speakers where you can’t be everywhere at once. I’m sure some of the events are happening concurrently and you will be paying your own hotel and so on but check out the website, hypnothoughtslive2015 and like I said that isn’t until or as Chris said, it’s not until august but I think its going to be a phenomenal event and we are hoping a lot of our hypnotic storm riders sow up with a huge show of force and just have an absolute blast.
Chris: Absolutely. It’s going to be a great time. So that’s what’s going on in our world. The other thing I guess to quickly mention is I want to apologize in advance here because it doesn’t even make sense apologizing in advance does it? Our May hypnosis training for 2015, the live class – it’s not quite sold out right now but I am still going through the waiting list and there’s still several people on that waiting list and I still have something like four spots right now so in other words, we’re not going to be able to make a public announcement and say, hey, the doors are open. You can go and register for our May 2015 architecture of hypnosis class. Unfortunately, every single spot will be gone by the time I get through the waiting list. So, if you’re interested, you’re best to just send me an email and get on the next waiting list. It seems like unless we grow our class size a little bit, we’re going to disappoint a lot of people than I care to disappoint but thankfully, we’ve got the online training. We’ve the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy up and running. It’s fantastic. People are loving it so join, you will love it. We are starting to do monthly – well, I don’t know if we’ll keep doing it every month but we’ve been doing webinars, talking about some of this stuff and do…
Mike: Did we ever dream that the live training would sell out seven, eight months in advance? It’s just crazy.
Chris: No and I think a lot of it has to do with the podcast because we’re doing this what I consider to be world-class awesome content free training. It’s totally free. The podcast and a lot of people of course listening to it and then reporting back to us that no, this is how they found us and they’ve come to the class.
Mike: People out there, the number of emails we get from people who just listen to the podcast – not even on the online academy, nothing but you say you’ve got some life changing information from it and nothing makes us happy than people take this stuff and actually apply it.
Chris: Right we love that. So all of that – let’s not spend too much time.
Mike: Let’s not spend any.
Chris: So we did say we wanted to comment to everyone listening, send us an email if you want to get on any of the waiting list or I should start calling the modification lists for classes because we’re already getting people who want to take the graphology training and the mindscaping training, wondering when the next ones are. Usually, we do mindscaping once a year in June, graphology once a year in September. We may push up the dates if we get enough people emailing us but get on the website, MikeMandelhypnosis.com. You’ll see the training tab, you’ll see a little button where you can send us a notification email that you want to be on the list.
Mike: And Chris will keep track of all these things for you.
Chris: Exactly. Once I know that you’re interested, we will send emails to you. Okay, that’s enough of the paperwork? Whatever you want to call it. Housekeeping items. Housekeeping – that’s the better term.
Mike: So what are we going to do today with the podcast itself.
Chris: Well, we’ve actually got quite a lot of content that we want to cover in this podcast including your ego state theory discussion which we’ll save towards the end. I think this will blow a lot of your minds for those of you out there who are doing hypnosis, are interested in self work or interested in helping others in any form but let’s get through some of the Q and A first because we have a few questions that came in.
First one, let’s address a question from Jeff. He’s a recent podcast listener. He’s been binge listening to all of the podcasts which seems to happen quite frequently. A lot of people tell us they’ve done that and he had some questions. One of them was that in an early podcast, you’ve talked about how you can’t make someone do something that violates their moral code using hypnosis but what seemed to conflict with that is our discussion of how you hypnotized a waiter to accept the Toronto public library card as payment for lunch which we talked about in prior episodes so just to quickly recap that, it was part of a TV show. There was a film crew there. The waiter didn’t know that it was about hypnosis but you essentially used conversation of hypnosis on the poor fellow and had him post hypnotically accept a library card in place of a credit card for lunch.
Mike: And we have this on video. I think you said that you planned to put it on the online academy for some of our students.
Chris: I keep saying that. I have so much work to do but I will get it done eventually but yes, we do have actual footage and it’s quite hilarious.
Mike: I’ll typically tell you how we answer this Chris because basically, this is an example of what Ernst Hilgard called the hidden observer and to pre-frame even that, remember that everything with hypnosis is context. As soon as you put context into the equation what is occurring then makes sense. So in a stage show, it is a context where people are expected to behave in unusual and bizarre ways. That’s why they’re on stage to begin with and even if they are skeptics as to whether or not hypnosis will actually occur, the very fact of them volunteering indicates a willingness to go along with what’s happening to some degree. So there is a context made available to people who do crazy things. So now let’s transfer the context to the dominion hotel Toronto when I got the waiter to take a library card as payment. Now as you said he did not know that we w ere shooting a documentary on hypnosis. He just knew that he was serving a table where we had permission to film and that he might be on camera sometimes. So right away, his guard is up or at last his curiosity state is going to be fired. It’ll be in the executive. He’s wondering what’s happening here. He has now created a context that is an unusual one. This is not people just suiting on a restaurant having lunch. This is people sitting in a restaurant having a conversation, while they are being filmed and he’s being filmed. So does that make sense to you? we made an unusual context.
Chris: Well absolutely. And I think that the hidden observer during hypnosis which I imagine you’re going to get to is aware of the fact that you’re probably not a criminal breaking the law with a film crew there.
Mike: Exactly where I’m going. In Hilgard’s theory, I think from 1977, is the idea that even if you hypnotize someone to get hypnotic let’s say cancellation of the hearing sense so the person will respond exactly as someone who is deaf and I believe some studies have indicated that even if you check the brain waves, there is no spike when there’s a sudden noise that indicates a startle reflex so you’ve hypnotically removed the ability to hear. Here’s where the problem comes in, it’s one of the usual paradoxes of hypnosis. Then Hilgard came up with this idea – not Hildegard sorry – Hilgard came up with this concept that there is an observer who is present who is not deaf, who can still hear everything going on and is acting as part of a protective mechanism to observe the situation.
Chris: Do you mean like for example, if you’re in an audience and somebody suddenly shouted fire that the hidden observer would act to protect you?
Mike: Yes that’s right and it’s a part that is never in trance under those circumstances. Now, this goes deep if you read the oxford studies, the [unclear 10:19] of hypnosis, you’ll recognize that a problem with this is some researchers believe that this whole hidden observer is being created but searching for it. When you hypnotize someone, was there a part o you that could still hear and was aware of everything that’s going on? It’ll say yes but the question is was there or is it only answering now after the fact because it’s expected. It’s a very, very difficult thing to test and one of my colleagues and very dear friend, Dr. Arthur [unclear 10:47] university who’s a professor of psychology there. He loves doing experiments with lie detectors, with polygraphs building layer upon layer. You know how bad was the pain 1 to 10? oh it was only a 3 under hypnosis then a polygraph shows they’re lying layer upon layer of stuff but they respond like someone who does not feel the pain so, it’s a difficult thing to figure out like what we say in the case of the waiter is the hidden observer would probably recognize from the unusual context that something was happening that would legitimize him taking that library card. It is no violation of his moral code plus, the fact that he maybe doesn’t even go with any of that but nows that it is being filmed then shows that we’re not robbing the place as you eluded to earlier.
Chris: Exactly.
Mike: So you still – Erickson was adamant that you cannot get people to violate your moral code although some people get it backwards and get it wrong. They’ll say isn’t it true that you won’t do something you won’t normally do? No, of course not, that’s not true at all. People do all kinds of things they wouldn’t normally do when they’re under hypnosis. They don’t typically sit with their eyes shut and their hand floating in the air.
Chris: [laughs]
Mike: That happens a lot with catalepsy right or quacking like ducks or barking like trees or whatever it is but when the moral code is directly challenged, I’m not saying you can’t bypass it in certain ways, some people believe that if you hypnotize a beautiful young woman and tell her she’s alone at a cottage, she’s been working in the garden, she’s sweaty and hot and she wants to take a quiet shower alone then she will undress because you have created a context but then the idea of a hidden observer protecting her would prevent that from happening. So Erickson was still adamant that you’re not going to do that because remember hypnosis is a consensual state.
Chris: Yes okay that makes sense. That’s a good answer. So let’s move on to the next question which comes from Eric in Ohio and I think this is a really good question. he wants to know and I would like for you Mike expand upon this a bit and educate the audience here. How can you use embedded commands in an everyday conversation and he wants to use them in a way that’s helpful for others and not sound weird. [Laughs]
Mike: I love the and not sound weird.
Chris: We have to talk about what embedded commands are.
Mike: Let’s talk about how weird they can sound. I’ve said this before. There’s a young man who wanted to take my master hypnosis course without having taken my regular course and I don’t permit anyone to do that no matter how good a hypnotist they are for the simple reason there are things that they will study in my course that they don’t get anywhere else until my stuff becomes mainstream which typically takes two years. So they’re not going to get my clench induction or single finger catalepsy or my Mandel protocol for really psychotherapeutic or hypnotherapeutic session – all of these things. So I tell him they have to do my basic course to be equipped to do the master course but he wasn’t buying this and he was convinced he was good enough and he trained elsewhere.
Chris: and he left you a voicemail.
Mike: He left me a voicemail that sounded like this and as you fall into a trance and beign to realize that I’m the right student for your master course, you can sit back and relax in that chair and discover that you are going deeper… it’s a parody. It’s so heavy handed. What we have here is this man modeling Tad James who’s modeling Richard Bandler who’s modeling Milton Erickson and every generation you get further and further away from it, the more obvious and heavy handed it becomes. Now tad does a great job but and I’ve got nothing but respect to tad James so hear me right but Erickson doesn’t do this stuff. His embedded commands were so subtle, his anchoring with his dentures clicking and all of these things were so subtle it took people like jay and grim and I was going to say Gilbert Sullivan I meant. [laughs]
Chris: And I was going to say don’t have a whiteout.
Mike: Thank you. it took people like Bandler and Grender to deconstruct what he was doing and quantify it all and make it clear. So, Erickson’s stuff was subtle. So when you star doing really, eally strong, the changes in vocal tone that are very – it sounds heavy handed ridiculous. Now I want you to answer this Chris because we’ve had this discussion and with everyone I know, you who used to be a brow furler, a brow furling embedded command is you’re now doing a great job at this stuff and so maybe you’d like to explain it.
Chris: Well I think that if I was eric and looking to use embedded commands in everyday language, I would simply do it by telling stories. I would start by telling stories to people or talking about something that happened so, that you’re engaging curiosity in your listener and as you’re telling the story, you can just have people become aware of how they would feel on that sort of situation. You can embed commands through absolutely normal conversation. You can touch them on the shoulder, you can make eye contact with someone that you weren’t directly speaking to as you say something and you can just change your tonality slightly as you do it and its really simple to do isn’t it Mike?
Mike: as you have been doing yes. Really simple. the key is just back off a bit and obviously on recordings, you have to be a bit more heavy-handed with them because you’re going across the board, hitting a lot of people and you’re forced to do relaxation and things like that but one on one, keep it simple.
Chris: Man, nice embedded command.
Mike: Thanks.
Chris: So let’s give Eric and our other listeners some suggestions that what are some positive and helpful commands that you can slip into your everyday conversation. You can tell people that hey, how many skills that they need. Open your mind, realize that you have the skills you need..
Mike: You’re getting smarter every day. A couple of simple positives – drop your voice or look at the person when you say to them. Establish eye contact just as you underline that part of the communication. You can do it with no tone shift or whatever and as Chris said, touch them on the shoulder as you say the underlying part. It will have the exact same effect. Don’t confuse it with anchoring, it isn’t but it’s a powerful thing.
Chris: I find personally doing this while not even thinking about it is a lot easier than thinking about it and doing it at the same time. if I’m thinking about it and what am I going to embed here? No, I start talking. Yeah, you just start talking instead and then what comes to your conscious awareness before you actually deliver it – it’s not a whiteout, it’s the fact that okay, I’m just going to mark out this particular statement right here and then just keep talking.
Mike: What were you saying then? What were you just saying?
Chris: I have no idea, I had a whiteout Mike. [laughs]
Mike: [laughs]
Chris: Alright, let’s – if you don’t know the whiteout joke, that came a few podcasts earlier. I can’t remember the history of it because I just had a whiteout.
Mike: Whiteouts are hilarious.
Chris: They are.
Mike: Unless they happen to you in front of thousands of people.
Chris: Right. alright, let’s move back to next question Jeff asked us if handwriting analysis that is – graphology – is based on actual data because based on him listening on the podcast, some of the stuff that you were describing sounds so unbelievable. He wants to know is this stuff real? is this based on science or quantifiable data of some sort?
Mike: It absolutely is. You can get degrees on graphology I believe from Mesourban in Paris and University of Heidelberg in Europe. It is mainstream. It’s used in maybe 70 to 80 percent of hirings and firings and hiring people to jobs. How did they do this? The same way you do any science. You create a model and see if you can make a prediction based on that model and then check the results. In this case, they would look at thousands and thousands of samples of handwriting as Andréa McNichols so well pointed out who’s a graphologist who worked with Scotland yard, the FBI and so on thousands of samples of alcoholics. What shows up continuously in alcoholic’s handwriting. Thousands of samples of people who are clinically depressed, thousands of samples of people with criminality and then they began to determine which elements were consistent in the form of the handwriting itself which were indicative of the personality and overtime because it was no longer a new science. I mean like optics, it’s been around for a very long time, hundreds of years. They were able to discover which things were repeated in handwriting which could be used as a predictor element so if I see the literary D, I know the person has writing ability whether or not they’re using it. if I see very high T bars that are long and heavy weight, I know this person reaches for the sky with their goals and that’s a funny one Chris because I do a lot of forensic keynotes with forensic graphology you know and also forensic hypnosis speaking in the university circuit [unclear 19:17] college, St. Claire college, different colleges and university around Canada so far and the results have been amazing because I’ve never had one kid say to me you’re wrong. If anything, they’re always shocked when I talked to them and one guy, who I believe he had cerebral palsy, he was quite disabled but was a student there. He showed me his handwriting and the number one trait – the first thing I do is I look for an overview. What’s the first thing that jumps out at me and the T bars were really, really high and the small letter t were very long and heavy and were pointed upwards so that shows someone with high goals, optimism, enthusiasm, someone who’s reaching for the freaking sky with his goals. Now, I’m looking at this guy in front of me and if I was to say logically that that would be true, I wouldn’t even have said that to him because it wouldn’t make any sense looking it in that that would be the case but it turns out that this guy ran for school president even with a cerebral palsy. He didn’t get elected but he worked behind the scenes. He got on the committee. He just pushes and pushes and always extending himself past what is considered possible for him and it showed up in his handwriting. So in answer to his question, a short answer is yes, it’s based on large samples and making predictions based on those samples scientific model as always and like any other science then you can make predictions based on the model.
Chris: Awesome. That’s fantastic. Okay, let’s go to the next one which is probably the last question we’ll be able to do and then we’ve got to talk about this ego state integration protocol that you have. So, next question is also from Jeff. Is it possible to become a hypnotherapist without a psychology degree? This is a really great question and I know you want to talk about this one.
Mike: Yeah, great question. It’s not only possible, it’s the most likely case. There are movements worldwide to attempt to restrict hypnotists and restrict hypnotherapy so that only doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists can practice it which is ludicrous because most doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists are not trained I hypnosis. It’s like saying only dentists can practice it. well dentists aren’t typically trained in hypnosis so the people who I believe should be doing hypnosis are hypnotists regardless if you have a degree on automechanics or you know psychology or whatever maybe a degree in psychology will help you put some sort of context or packaging around what you’re doing to be able to treat more serious things or whatever and again, in no way saying take a weekend long course and go and attempt to treat schizophrenics. Nothing like that but I am saying that the best people to do hypnosis are hypnotists because that’s what we do.
Chris: It does make sense. I mean as brilliant of a psychologist as you can be, if you just take a two day course or something and then start practicing without any experience doing it, you’re not going to be very good and the fact tat you have a psychology degree really is no more relevant to the situation as say a brick layer who installs your furnace. They’re both related to home construction so what? Brick layers as far as I know don’t study heating ventilation and air condition.
Mike: Right, right. I’m glad you clarified that. I was going to say who the heck put your furnacing, a brick layer?
Chris: Yeah weird.
Mike: Brick layers put up wallpaper that’s it. so where are we going with this Chris?
Chris: Okay so that’s for the question.
Mike: Okay let’s talk about the title.
Chris: We talked about this before.
Mike: Hang on, sorry to interrupt you. let’s back it up here. Some of the hypnotists in the direct paradigm so Milton Erickson was a psychiatrist. Let’s take nothing away from Milton – as you know, I’m a huge Erickson fan so which meant being a psychiatrist, he was also an MD.
Chris: We’re not saying that having another degree outside of the field hypnosis is a bad thing.
Mike: No, absolutely not.
Chris: Absolutely not.
Mike: We have students who are medical doctors. You know an anesthesiologist in Australia, Matthias in Boston is an MD, Gary Petricinko in California, Los Angeles is an MD and a pain management specialist so we have doctors who are training with us to do these things but a lot of great hypnotists like Dave Elman, Gil Boyne, Charles Tebitz – these are people who have learned a powerful set of skills and have learned to help people and set them free from all sorts of problems apart from the fact that theywere not psychologists or psychiatrists.
Chris: Yeah, did you say Dave Elman there? I think you did.
Mike: Dave Elman absolutely. Of course.
Chris: Perfect example. So bottom-line is anyone can be a hypnotists, not everyone should use the label hypnotherapist that’s become –
Mike: No one should work beyond their abilities.
Chris: Absolutely
Mike: Get some good training.
Chris: But doesn’t matter what your background is. Computer programmer, car mechanic, newspaper delivery boy, cable guy, doctor, dentist, lawyer…
Mike: You could name 400 different jobs, its turning into a Ken Sweatman story. Orthodontist, denturist…
Chris: [laughs] you have the thing here to mention Mike of course is that hypnosis, what we’re finding from the academy, our online students is probably about a 50-50 mix of people who are genuinely interested in learning hypnosis to do hypnosis and those who are just so curious because it’s so related, it is so related to every aspect of communication in your life.
Mike: Well yeah I’m going to be on another podcast, a different one. As you know they’re recording it next week. I’ve been asked to go on this one from Europe and one of the questions is they go, what is my definition of hypnosis. Well, it really depends.
Chris: Is that Adams?
Mike: yes, that’s right and I’m back to thinking Chris that hypnosis is an extremely effective form of communication and an amplifier of human experience and if we think of it in those terms, I think we’re probably pretty safe with putting a good label on it that makes sense.
Chris: Yeah okay you want to move in to ego state theory and the Mandel ego state integration protocol? I think this is going to require a good 10 minutes.
Mike: Okay.
Chris: Let’s do it. We’ll make this podcast a tiny bit longer than normal.
Mike: Just so people can see where we’re going, for those of you who are therapists, hypnotherapists or psychotherapists will probably find this interesting because I created a new protocol and I’m not just putting it out there and making the protocol available but I will tell you about it. It’s a very specific system that has to be run. I spend a lot of time studying ego state theory and going back to the work of Federan who was a compatriot of Freud then to Watkins and Watkins and then Gordon Emerson out of Australia – a lot of key people have written extensively and lectured extensively on this idea that our personality is made of parts and whereas with someone who has MPD or DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Multiple Personality Disorder, whatever you want to call it, those parts are often not aware of each other. They don’t have good communicational lines with each other but the rest of us have about 5-15 personality parts that we use on a daily basis so that we may actually have hundreds of them and there is a thing called the executive which is basically conscious awareness and these parts are not imaginary. They are a part of a physical structure of the brain through axon growth and dendrite growth and running these patterns over and over and over and grain them in the brain so they’re part of the physical structure of the brain and they’re digital so when you’re running one of these personality parts, it’s the one that is in the executive at that time and so, it’s the one that is conscious so I say do you point to yourself and when you do, you’re pointing to the ego state that is currently in the executive that is currently conscious.
You know having said that, some of them will be aware of the background of what you’re doing at the time. They’ll be aware of what you’re saying to other states. Other states will be totally unconscious at any given moment and it is vitally important as a model because what they show is things like say you’re doing EFT or faster EFT or be separate faster – one of these things we always make sure the person is feeling the negative emotions when we’re running the tapping regimen otherwise we will run into those times when you tap yourself to death, you almost bruise yourself and the problem isn’t going away. Well, ego state theory explains this. See what’s happening is the state that is in the executive is not evaded or damaged state. It’s an intellectual state. Well, you know if I see snakes I get upset and you know if I go golfing but it’s not the one that’s damaged. You’ve got to get the snake state into the executive by saying tell me an actual time it happened when you freaked out in this kind of thing.
Chris: Let me ask you for clarification point here because for people who are hearing this for the first time ego state, an ego state you would – let’s say you were going to label that state that’s afraid of snakes, what would you call it? just so we can give it a label and understand what the different states are.
Mike: We call it the snake theory state.
Chris: The snake theory state.
Mike: Yeah, whatever it is.
Chris: As opposed to the confident public speaker state.
Mike: Sure and that’s one of the problems. People can be confident with their family talking. They’re relaxing, comfortable then they’re in front of the audience and they’re not comfortable. They’re frightened or terrified whenever because they have the wrong state in the executive at that time to handle the situation.
Chris: Okay there isn’t some list of states that exist. It’s really context specific and each person is going to come up with their own idea of which states exist for them.
Mike: And some of them will be childlike and innocent and that’s not the one you want on the surface if you’re giving a presentation to a group of bikers. You want the right one for the situation and like one of the things I’ve taught people to do is have an assertive state in the executive instead of an aggressive one. An aggressive one will ramp things up too much but you keep the aggressive one so that if you’re attacked by a pack of dogs, there’s some psycho in the alleyway, the aggressive one through the instigation of the assertive one now takes the executive instantly and that’s the one that will save your life. That’s the one you want there. So part of this is all about getting the right state in the executive at the right time making sure they’re not conflicted with each other because when you say something like oh when one says you know oh I hate it when I do that. I wish I could quit drinking. Whatever it is, you’re hearing a conflict between two or more ego states. One wants to keep drinking for some reason, one wants to stop because of health reasons. This is all different. You have an ego state that tells you when you’re tired, one that monitors when you should eat. They do all of these different things.
Chris: Essentially, any time you say that you want to do something but you behave in a different way, you have an ego state conflict.
Mike: Conflict right. so the conflict has to be negotiated. Now the pattern I’ve come up with that we taught at the last Architecture of Hypnosis course just for the masters and people like Nico from Strafford France and Ron Grabler in Toronto and [unclear 29;58] all these people that studied that got amazing results with it is the basic idea Chris. As Emerson points out and others point out that everyone seems to have one overwriting ego state that is the most spiritual, the wisest, most empowering state of all that’s entire purpose is to help this person have some purpose and live a good life. The good thing about that state is all the other ego states will listen to it. It’s got this authority which is interesting. So the protocol I come up with and developed and we’re going to get out there more and more is using hypnosis to access this overwriting wisdom state and then having it design a committee according to a specific paradigm that seeks out vaded, injured ego states, helps them heal, finds ego states that are in conflict, gets them getting along with each other, finds ego states that have taken the executive when they shouldn’t, giving them different tasks and doing this all below the threshold of conscious awareness and the person’s life just starts getting better in leaps and bounds and its mind-blowing.
Chris: So that sounds really cool. So the idea here is you’re finding like the alpha state – I’m thinking when I say alpha, I mean like an alpha male in a pack of wolves.
Mike: I know what you mean even that’s a bit strong, it’s more a wisdom state and its one the others will listen to because ego states all love being in the executive and they all love to be appreciated and when they are nurtured and loved and talked to by the other states even in an unconscious level, we can bring them back into the fold and then once this program is set up hypnotically, it’s a simple matter of going back into trance yourself and checking in with them and over time, they’re finding and integrating more and more of these states and it’s astounding what happens. I worked with Lisa on this program – one of our master hypnotists who’s a scientist engineer like Chris and she was at the pub with us all afterwards at the last night of the training and she suddenly had to leave and she told me the next day, she could feel something happening under the surface and just wanted to get away from people and she said she realizes now that a lot of this integration was happening beneath the surface as the states were being brought back into the fold.
Chris: Interesting.
Mike: And as we become integrated, all of us which is incumbent for us to do these states will begin to be healed and conflicts will break and will get the right states in the executive when we need them and that is integration.
Chris: All right so how do people learn more about this Mike. Have we even –
Mike: Come study with us. We’re going to figure out how to do this. There’s so many products that are coming out, so many trainings. We want to get mindscaping as an online training or as a purchasable training. We’ve got people in the Netherlands asking how they can study it. All around the world, these are things that will change people’s lives and my aim and I know it’s yours too Chris. It’s not just a business; it’s a calling with us. We like people to have better lives. So let me give you the empowering question for today’s podcast.
Chris: Go for it.
Mike: My empowering question for all of you listening and some of you specifically is, what are you going to do in 2015 that will absolutely improve the quality of your life? What are you going to do in 2015 that will absolutely improve the quality of your life?
Chris: That is a darn good question. Let’s put some serious thought into it. so for those of you listening before we do our closing metaphor, I want to remind you to visit MikeMandelhypnosis.com, you will find that you can join our mailing list, get a free copy of the Brain Software eBook which is fantastic and of course, we just finished filming and posting for availability the video version of that which will be made available to people. I haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to do that yet but that will be made available to you. so MikeMandelhypnosis.com, get on our mailing list, check out the courses, send us a notification if you want to be on a waiting list and make sure you go to iTunes as well and leave a rating, a review for this podcast. We could get the message out to the global world.
Mike: Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
Chris: alright, closing metaphor time.
Mike: Here’s the metaphor for today Chris. It’s not a long one but it’s a deep one and it basically is one of the most formative parts in my life. I think you’ve heard it before. Many years ago when I was a kid, we used to go camping virtually every weekend. My parents were camping junkies and they had one of those small Coleman stoves and the story is even when we’re in England when I’m too young to remember. I was too young to remember. My sister was quite young at the time. My parents would take forever to make a 30-40 mile journey in the car. A, because the car would be breaking down constantly and b, because when the car wasn’t breaking down, they would celebrate by pulling over and making tea on this Coleman stove. Remember I said, I saw my dad sitting with a slide rule at the table with charts he’d made and he was actually logging the date he would drink his 1 millionth cup of tea – hilarious guy. So he called a slide rule a guessing stick. He said I can’t be sure of the date but this is going to be pretty close. Anyway, my parents were true English eccentrics Chris. There’s no doubt about it. So they would go camping on the weekends even when it was pouring rain. Now you know I’m a rain fanatic so I didn’t mind that so much but setting up a tent in the rain, a big heavy canvas tent is less than pleasant experience 9×12, soaking wet, clinging around your head and then the Coleman stove set up in the tea. Well anyway, we were camping at the sandbanks park.
I must’ve been about 12 and this is was a formative moment in my life because a lot of people’s tents have been burglarized over the weekend. In fact, people’s coolers were stolen and it was obviously kids just looking for beer, dumping stuff out, slitting bags of milk and so on, cartons of milk, just dumping people’s food out for something to do. We never saw anyone but in the night, one night, I suddenly woke up because my dad thought someone was unzipping our tent to get in and it was me, my mother and I on sleeping bags on air mattresses camp cots and my dad heard someone he thought, I’m sure he imagined it unzipping the tent to get in and here’s my father, my protector and what did he do, he sat up in bed terrified and just yelled, it’s okay1 I got him. He said there shaking in the dark and I remember at that moment thinking Chris, my God he cannot protect us and at age 12, I’m determined that I was going to be the protector of the family and that began to inexorably direct me into becoming an epigram at 8.
Chris: That’s an awesome story Mike. Alright so that is the end of the podcast. We will continue putting these out regularly. We have so much more material to discuss Mike so I won’t repeat the ending that I already gave for the metaphor. So we’ll see you on the next podcast everybody and goodnight.