Podcast #66: Chris is a “bast”, Alacrity, Incarceration, and Dennis Bryce-Morgan in the studio!

CHRIS: This is session number 66 of Brain Software with mike Mandel and I’m Chris Thompson.

Welcome fellow storm riders. You are officially a rider on the hypnotic storm, yet again. He stayed in Toronto with his wife and cats this past Christmas. He’s been cracking his own neck for almost 50 years even though it’s bad for him and this month marks 41 years of full time hypnosis as a career if you can call it that. (Mike laughs) Please welcome to the center of the Hypnotic epicenter, the man who has all of the mastery skills, Mike Mandel. (Mike laughs)

MIKE: Chris, you’re such a bast. (Chris laughs) “if you can call it that”. I know what you mean by that, you mean because it’s been so much fun.

CHRIS: Well, exactly.

MIKE: Why would it be a career? Right.

CHRIS: Well, You’re motto in life is that life should be..

MIKE and CHRIS: effortless, enjoyable and vaguely annoying to..

CHRIS: ..others. MIKE: ..other people.

CHRIS: and yeah, other people or others, right. And so..

MIKE: No, not “others”.

CHRIS: other people.

MIKE: other people. Yes. Get it right.

CHRIS: There is that correctness thing.               

MIKE: I know.

CHRIS: So, Yes, you’ve had a career for now. This marks 41 years..

MIKE: Wait, wait, when you say “you’ve had” the implication is that I’m almost in a frikkin’ coffin.

CHRIS: ( Chris laughs) It’s over, it’s over.

MIKE:  My career’s been successful for 41 years as, actually, the 29th of January, so it’s kinda be kind of cool.

CHRIS: Because it was 1975.

MIKE: 1975. Did my first show, 29th of January in Edmonton on the Tommy Banks show. It was a TV show and never looked back. It’s been so wonderful doing hypnosis all the time.

CHRIS: So you have been enjoying in continuing the joy … this career … that most people … You always joke.

MIkE: The kind of career most people only dream of.

CHRIS: Now, The reason I joke about it “If you can call it that” is primarily because …

MIKE: We’re back to the “If you can call it that”. This is gotta be a new line.

CHRIS: If you can call it that.

MIKE: I’d like to ask you a question. If you can call it that. Write that down.

CHRIS: Actually that is a really good one. It’s a new one. You know we didn’t plan this at all.

MIKE: No. We never do.

CHRIS: (continues) But let’s also mention but one of our other favorite line is “Is that what you’re calling it these days?”

MIKE: or “Is that how you’re calling it these days?”

CHRIS: So when somebody ‘refers?’  “Oh,I am going to order a hamburger at the restaurant. Is that what you’re calling it these days?”

MIKE: Is that what you’re calling it these days? And saying it with a chuckle implicates some deep horrible sexual perversion. Speaking of which Chris, we just got back from an amazing lunch.

Chris: We did.

MIKE: at a restaurant at Port Perry Ontario. It was fantastic. There’s this really lovely young woman, it’s that waitress there all the time and really nice girl, and we just decided to name her Jessica because we don’t know her name.

CHRIS: We don’t, but that’s her name now.

MIKE: So we just shared that with you.  If you’re in a restaurant at Port Perry and you see a very attractive woman with a lovely smile, call her Jessica and she wouldn’t have a clue what the hell you are talking about.

CHRIS: It would be hilarious.

MIKE: Right. Carry on.

CHRIS: Alright. So..(Chris chuckle)

MIKE: I hate … I am cracking my neck man. I’ve been cracking my neck since I was 14 years old since a nightmarish evil teacher made me do a neck spring I could not do in gymnastics, I sprained my neck, I got acute torticollis, had to have deep heat treatments to unlock it and my neck has been destroyed ever since and it cracks like a bag of popcorn Chris, like a veritable bag of snails.

CHRIS: You almost said “bag of Pykthos”

MIKE: I almost did. Yes.

CHRIS: Hey let’s talk about the holidays since they just ended.

MIKE: Let’s do it.

CHRIS: You stayed in Toronto.

MIKE: I did.

CHRIS: I enjoyed an amazing time down south with my family.

MIKE: Oh you’re wife Vorolaya and two children.

CHRIS: We talked about some last podcast.

MIKE: Clymnestra and Allistrate

CHRIS: Tons of beach volleyballs

MIKE: Well, you still can.

CHRIS: Yeah and I played volleyball with my 8 and 11 year old daughters on the beach which was fantastic.

MIKE: Nice.

CHRIS: (continues) and I had a good time. And you know Mike, did we ever talked into podcast about our words for the year for 2016?

MIKE: No I don’t think we did.  It’s a great thing to do.

CHRIS: So let’s talk about that real quick. So you brought this up, you found a website.

MIKE: My wife put me onto it. It’s a really cool thing. Instead of a New Year’s resolution, you choose a word for the year and it’s always, gonna be a nominalization, it’s a noun you cannot put in a wheelbarrow and you just …

CHRIS: We should just explain what that means. For people who’ve never heard that before.

MIKE: Carry on, I’m just gonna lean back on my chair.

CHRIS: For people who never heard that explanation before. A noun you cannot put in a wheelbarrow would just mean that a noun being person, place or thing, and in this case it’s usually a thing right, so a thing can be a concept like happiness. Happiness is a thing but you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow.

MIKE: Whereas,

CHRIS: Underwear

MIKE: Hedge clippers, you can.

CHRIS: Palm trees, If you have a sufficiently large wheel barrow.

MIKE: Right.

CHRIS: You can put them in a wheelbarrow. So yeah, your word for the year to focus on.

MIKE: It’s gonna be a nominalization. and instead of, and this really works amazingly well all kidding aside guys. Last year my word was alacrity and alacrity means a cheerful, immediate compliance and …

CHRIS: Is that what we’re calling it these days? ( laughs)

MIKE: (with Chris) “..what we’re calling it these days”, yeah. Yes, Jessica. My wife would say to you that as a typical husband I’m failing at many counts because it’s just what women say. If she would say Mike would you clean the cat litter, the Egyptian Mau has just degraded it with some sort of toiletic extrusion.

CHRIS: I’ll get around it …

MIKE: I would get around to it and she would get furious with me. Well once I chose the word alacrity and say “with alacrity!” Uh-huh! Hurrah!

CHRIS: I’d do it right now.

MIKE: I’d leap up and it made my marriage better. It made my life better. So the key is I’d keep the word alacrity for 2016 but add a new one and my word for 2016 is “Transformation”.

CHRIS: Which is awesome.

MIKE: Which is personal and other people too because you know Chris, I work with a lot of people online, I work with a lot of people, some  people one-on-one, and we help people transform,  transform their lives, transform their very beings so they have better lives. So every morning I wake up now and I say “Transformation” and I imagine I’m slipping out in a yet another cocoon to another state of being, greater fitness, greater health, greater wellness, greater humor, greater brilliance, greater hypnosis, greater damn well everything!

CHRIS: Right! And it’s important to keep in mind that this word is really personal. So what does “Ttransformation” mean to you is gonna be perhaps very different than somebody else who’s picking that same word.

MIKE: Absolutely.

CHRIS: And so my word for 2016 which leads back to our discussion of holidays and being on the beach and all that, My word was balance and one of the things that I really wanted to spend more time doing in 2016 is balancing my life so not just spinning a lot of time in the front of computer, building our business and running all the marketing and the technology and the product creation and editing the podcast and all that stuff, you know. Because I have transformed my life significantly.

MIKE: You have transformed your life significantly more than anybody I know. Maybe we are gonna mention that for a second because it’s an interesting thing.

CHRIS: Yeah , let’s do that right now. I think we were planning on talking about that a little bit later.

MIKE: Let him be a model for all of you.

CHRIS: So it comes back to, I don’t remember what year exactly, but many years ago after,

MIKE: I think it was 6 years ago.

CHRIS: Probably, something like that. After our Jiu-jitsu class we would head out to the pub and I would usually be the one of the first to leave because I would say “ Ugh! I’ve gotta get up at 5:30 tomorrow, I would get to work.”

MIKE: And we thought he was just an infant.

CHRIS: And then Mike would look at me, one evening you looked at me and you said “Well, it’s the choice you made” and I have never forgotten that because it really truly was not that just a choice, I think we talked about it on another podcast, It wasn’t just the choice I made, past tense, It was the choice I was making.

MIKE: Currently making at a daily basis.

CHRIS: It was the choice I was continuing to make.

MIKE: To get up at 4:30 in the morning.

CHRIS: 5:30 I think, but yeah.

MIKE: Drag your sorry Polish butt downtown to serve the banking system when you could have been having a lot like now! Hurrah!

CHRIS: So that led me to making some significant changes to my lifestyle. Today, where I work primarily in this business here, MikeMandleHypnosis.com, and we run a lot of trainings, we do online stuff and it’s a blast. We really do have an awesome life and in dealing with this stuff. But here’s the thing, it wasn’t just a question of moving away from something that I wanted to leave behind.

MIKE: Here’s the key folks.

CHRIS: Let’s say you have a corporate job, ‘cause a lot of people listening do and they wanna make a change, and if all you’re doing is thinking “Well, I wanna move away from this corporate job.” Then what are you moving towards? You know, the joke we came up this morning, you are moving towards cleaning windshields with a squeegee?

MIKE: Living in a cardboard box.

CHRIS: I think what I just said specifically is that I realized it wasn’t just moving away from a corporate job, it was knowing what I was moving towards because if I wasn’t moving towards something that I picked, I would be just moving towards bankruptcy.

MIKE: Right. So you can move away from a corporate job and move towards financial disaster.

CHRIS: Right. It’s not what you wanna do,If you don’t plan it, that’s the way it might turn out. So you need to come up with a specific plan and if you were– anyone listening to that has a copy of Mike’s program The Navigator System, already knows this.

MIKE: Use this stuff guys.

CHRIS: Because when you install the Navigator, you now give yourself compass statements which are in the form of towards something and away or less of X and more of Y.

MIKE: Which works as acquisition of opposites, a hypnotic principle.

CHRIS: Right, and less is away from and towards can be thought of as more of, right? So more happiness less stress, or and away from that stressful job and towards that new fulfilling career or whatever it is.

MIKE: If you don’t have the Navigator system check it out on our website MikeMandelHypnosis.com under products.

CHRIS: Right. Now we will also say, Mike and I spent a couple of hours this morning planning what’s going on for 2016. We’ve actually got some pretty exciting stuff.

MIKE: It’s gonna be a huge year guys.

CHRIS: Can I spill the beans on this?

MIKE: You do it, Go ahead.

CHRIS: So in 2013, We put together the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy for those people who wanted to learn hypnosis but couldn’t come to Toronto or whatever. Well, we realized now that there’s quite a lot of people that don’t necessarily wanna learn hypnosis but they do wanna learn a lot of the Brain Software transformative approaches that Mike teaches.

MIKE: Sort of the peripheral skills that are very useful.

CHRIS: Yes. We’ve finished shooting and we are on the process of finalizing all the editing and assembly of a product called “The Personal Development Academy” which will be … It actually include a lot of bonus stuffs so pretty much everything that is personal development product on the website right now will be included and the Personal Development Academy is gonna probably be on the market by February or early March, I’ll strive to hitting March as the absolute latest, But keep your eyes, if you’re not on our email list already folks, head to MikeMandelHypnosis.com.

MIKE: One L in Mandel.

CHRIS: Yes, opt-in to MikeMandelHypnosis.com I think we got on our homepage somewhere, there’s a link that says signup to get a free

Brainsoftware ebook. Signup for that at a very minimum, it’s totally free and that way we will hear about the Personal Development Academy when we launch it because it’s gonna be super valuable and super easy stuff, I’m going through a lot of the editing right now and it just amazes me how useful some of this content is and when I think about going, when I go through this material like editing the videos and I realized how much of it I already applied in my own life that I didn’t know about.

MIKE: You really have.

CHRIS: I didn’t know any of it 15 years ago.

MIKE: You’ve applied it more than anyone else I know. You really have.

CHRIS: It’s shocking to look back.

MIKE: You know yesterday, I lectured to Landscape Ontario a huge conference at the Toronto conference Center or Congress Center and people came after me afterwards, I just taught them two things out of that PDA, Personal Development Academy, people came up to me and said this is life transformative, this will change my life.

CHRIS: Yeah.

MIKE: And they got it. They understood. So we give you good stuff guys. We Overdeliver.

CHRIS: Now I wanna segue us here because I just got a Facebook message and my phone beeped here and I am just taking a look at it .Just as you were talking about this and it is something on our agenda. We just got a message from Richard Clarke from … he is one of  Scott Sandland’s partners at Hypnothoughts.com, he is helping organize the Hypnothoughts Hypnosis Conference in Las Vegas, August 26-28th this year 2016, where we will be and we want to make sure that if you are interested in learning more about hypnosis, hanging out with us and other awesome hypnotists, you gotta come!

MIKE: You gotta check it out. Chris and I went last year for the first time, Scott and his business partner, they are fabulous guys, They had an amazing conference. It’s the best hypnosis conference in the world, without any doubt. We showed up with all kinds of people in “Hypnotic Storm Riders” shirts we had a blast and we wanna promote this because we think that if you want to learn hypnosis, this is the place to be. And it’s inexpensive to go to Las Vegas in August because it’s a billion degrees but you just stay at the hotel, and at the casino, you hang out with us—It’s an absolute blast.

CHRIS:That’s what they do in Vegas because it’s cheap usually to travel to Vegas, and  the hotels, especially the venue that they’ve picked is slightly off  The strip so it’s a very low cost something like $50 to maybe $80 a night depending on whether it’s a weekend or a weekday. This whole conference I think they priced it somewhere around, I can’t remember what the exact detail is, but I think it’s like 329 USD for 3 full days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

MIKE: It’s an absolute bargain.

CHRIS: It includes your lunches.

MIKE:It’s world class because there we met William Woods and we met a bunch of other people.  We met Karl Smith from England. Some great teachers, Larry and Cheryl Elman and guys if you are interested in Hypnosis for any reason, you gotta check it out. We are gonna be pushing this in every podcast. What were you gonna say about the message that came in?

CHRIS: I got the message from Richard so he’s obviously messaged me on Facebook and I thought let’s talk about Hypnothoughts on this podcast.

MIKE: And let’s talk about Mindscaping.

CHRIS: The reason why we’re mentioning the Hypnothoughts live conference is because we are in the midst, and that’s probably why Richard is messaging me right now, is we’re setting up  either a pre or a post conference one day teaching on Mindscaping. So this is Mike’s Mindscaping course taught at Hypnothoughts. So people are already are interested in hypnosis and probably somewhat educated on the topic, can get and learn this in one day rather than the typical two day weekend that we teach in Toronto.

MIKE: Right. We do an Intensive, and this has been used for all kinds of things, immune system support. Chris, you know,  we got an email two weeks ago from a man who wanted to help his son who is writing his SSAT to get to a private school, he was scoring 30 percentile – 50 percentile … that was it. He had no idea about anything to do with hypnosis, bought our online Mindscaping course, used it in his own son and he was suddenly scoring 80 percentile.

CHRIS: Yeah that’s why he wrote us immediately.

MIKE: Amazing testimonial, we’ve heard this again and again and again, people’s lives have been transformed.

CHRIS: Mindscaping is a great tool and if you are going to be thinking about coming to Hypnothoughts anyway, like I said, get on our email list because we’re working on a really cool promotion special where we’re, I’m not gonna spill the beans yet because I don’t know all the details yet, we’re hoping to arranged something pretty interesting for you, I ‘ll just leave it at that. Get on our email list.

MIKE: You’ll get a deal.

CHRIS: But even if you don’t’ attend our Mindscaping thing …

MIKE: Go to Hypnothoughts anyway.

CHRIS: Just come to the conference, it is a fantastic conference, it’s a great deal.

MIKE: You’ll meet some lifelong friends, interested in hypnosis from street hypnotists to hypnotherapists to everything in between, you’ll have a blast.

CHRIS: There’s another thing going on here, Mike. We are at the end of a first week of a four week coaching period that we do a few times a year called “The Wellness Academy”.

MIKE: We do.

CHRIS: And we were thinking about this today over lunch because it’s quite a week, right? We just saw the death of David Bowie at the age of sixty-nine…

MIKE: Right, Alan Rickman…age 69

CHRIS: Right and Alan Rickman, both died from cancer but I don’t know what types of cancer but I think David Bowie was a smoker so it’s suspected that he died of lung cancer and Alan Rickman we don’t know. Cancer is a horrible disease it seems to be affecting a lot more people…we really don’t…We can’t say we know entirely what causes it but there’s a lot of suspicions.

MIKE: It’s contributing aspects.

CHRIS: Right. Things that you eat, how you move your body, your stress levels, all kinds of things are suspected to affect …

MIKE: They are all contributory.

CHRIS: And so we wanna make sure people know we really advocate living a healthful lifestyle. We run the wellness academy a few times a year,  four week coaching program, it includes a lot of awesome stuff. You can find it from our website from the navigation menu, if you’re interested in going further, it’s all I’m going to say about that right now because the doors are closed and we’re on the midst of running it. But live a healthful lifestyle folks, think about what you can do to make your life better and make the lives of other people that you love better. What else do you wanna talk about? Do you wanna move on to.. we had our agenda here, we wanna talk about trauma, and using..whether it be hypnosis or not. So this is a podcast where it always comes back to hypnosis in some ways.

MIKE: Hypnosis, NLP, language, personal development.

CHRIS: Right. But it’s interesting because this is a podcast that fascinates people who never planned on learning hypnosis, had no interest in it and maybe didn’t really even understand it but sometimes they listen and well this is cool stuff. Because we don’t only talk about hypnosis, it’s a Brain Software podcast, it’s not a hypnosis podcast but we are hypnotist, we do come back to it a lot. From the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy we have a private Facebook group, and one of the ladies in our group posted an interesting comment and it was really…

MIKE: Oh yes … elucidate this.

CHRIS: We’ll keep the details fairly private here obviously names and some of the specifics out but the group is used often to solicit advice so look I’m gonna be dealing with this subject  and this is the problem and anybody have any ideas what I’m thinking that I am open to new ideas and other potential tools for helping this person make the change that they wanna make. Anyway, in this case was a woman whose personal friend was going through serious problems with insomnia that was the presenting problem that she brought up.

MIKE: Very interesting case though.

CHRIS: This woman could not sleep in her own bed. But if she was travelling let’s say in a hotel, no problem, no insomnia, ever. But always at home, always at her bed, insomnia, and then she disclose that not only this person was dealing with insomnia but she had previously been dealing with alcoholism and stress and all kinds of horrendous anxieties, she had a very abusive relationship with a past husband that she ended up leaving, and so only after a couple of paragraphs of explanation did it quite become evident to anybody reading and probably to the woman posting this herself , she knew this as well that the real problem wasn’t insomnia, the real problem was trauma. In fact, this woman who had a heterosexual marriage, started having relationships with women afterwards.

MIKE: And we so can tie all of this in to this past trauma with this hideous man, and Chris and I are a big believers, and it’s only our opinion, but if you are in an abusive relationship, get out. Get out. The chance the person changing is remote. Gavin de Becker talks about poor women who are under the thumbs of these controlling, violent men, and he says “Get out or you’re gonna be murdered!”

CHRIS: Right. So I think the reason it comes into play with the insomnia,the reason the trauma is important, is because this woman,I guess she, in the past she would wake up in the middle of the night and her husband would have his hands around her neck or something like that. So the trauma was happening in her sleep. Now you wonder why that can result to insomnia, well it’s the protection mechanism from the unconscious mind. Right?

MIKE: Yeah, She’s not asleep so she can protect herself and if she’s in a hotel she’s fine.

CHRIS: Right. And now she’s not in this relationship anymore, she’s probably been through other several relationships since then and this isn’t a recent issue for her. But her body is still, her unconscious mind is still protecting her by giving her this insomnia and the alcoholism, let’s say that could easily be just a vaded state that is taking the executive…that thing being pushed out so that this … why don’t you say it … what am I trying to say…

MIKE: The thing is, Chris, is any kind of addictive behavior, alcoholism, smoking dope, whatever, are means of dealing with stress without getting to the root cause. They all do the same thing. They prevent the vaded state from getting to the executive.

CHRIS: We think this is an important thing to talk about on this podcast for everybody, because whether you are a hypnotherapist, psychologist, or whatever, or just someone who deals with people, we need you to understand that the wound on the outside that cut might put the band-aid over it and hide it and think it’s gonna go away.

MIKE: But it doesn’t fix it.

CHRIS: If the real issue is that you know someone keeps scraping their knees or some , this is a bad metaphor I need a better one.

MIKE:  Terrible one!

CHRIS: You know I’m not getting it right.

MIKE: Possibly the worst metaphor.

CHRIS: What is the root cause of the insomnia? In her case, it’s clearly a trauma. And how are you gonna fix the insomnia and all of the other issues this woman is facing is by detraumatizing by healing that past trauma.

MIKE: You gotta get to the initial sensitizing event Chris, as you know, unless you heal that vaded state, the one that is hurting, the problem is never gonna go away. But the beauty of it is once you access that vaded state, the one that is suffering and in pain and is stuck in the timework, acting as though it’s still going on even though she no longer has any connection with the husband, when you heal that, the miracle is the problem’s disappeared, the alcoholism, all of these will go away.

CHRIS: Yeah. And you know let’s say you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking “Well, okay. This doesn’t apply to me. I haven’t had this kind of trauma in the past so why are you guys talking about this?”. Well just think about this on a simplistic level, something like, I have a spouse who always comes home from work and is complaining about these horrible people that she has to deal with at work and so she’s stressed that she wants to know she can cope with this stress. Guess what? Maybe if the root is this horrible people and you can find a way to not hang around this horrible people, you don’t have to deal with the stress anymore. Right? So instead of bandaid-solutioning the whole thing, deal with the root problem.

MIKE: You have to get to the cause and here’s a metaphor for you. I told Chris this one over lunch. Perfect example actually. About a year ago, my blood pressure was spiking really high and I could have just go on a blood pressure medication like my medical doctor wanted me to or I could get to the cause. And I went to work with (inaudible doctor’s name) in Toronto, who’s a homeopath, he said,after doing a very very complete personal history with me, he said it’s sleep disturbance and sleep disturbance will spike the blood pressure. I’ve never heard this in my life but it’s true because we had a new Egyptian Mau kitten, that is intent in waking me up at 5:30 in the morning by standing on me and meowing and knitting and driving me crazy and I have to be awake and I have to get up and feed him and do all the stuff. The cat was dictating the timing. Now, my wife gets up with the cat, which is a little bit later because he’s older, I sleep in until 8:30, my normal wake up time. My blood pressure is essentially back to normal. Why? Because I dealt with the cause instead of mitigating a symptom. And it’s gotta be the same at every case guys, when you got a problem unless you deal with the cause, you’re wasting your time. You’re just suppressing something.

CHRIS:Absolutely, you know this is just way too serious, we need some humor in here, Mike, say something funny. (laughs)

MIKE: Suppose I just make a humourous sound …

CHRIS: Our last few podcasts had been really hilarious…

MIKE:  to us.

CHRIS: Yeah, to us at least. And all of a sudden we got this really serious this conversation about this past trauma, living the life that you want to live … It is really important stuff, People dying of cancer, which is… celebrities,

MIKE: David Bowie was an original..

CHRIS: Absolutely

MIKE: …and Alan Rickman, he’s an amazing actor. What do you do? Kim Mitchell is in the hospital right now. Those of you who don’t know, if you’re not in Canada, if you are in Canada you know Kim Mitchell, if you’re not Canadian and haven’t got a clue who he is,

CHRIS: “Might as well go for a soda”

MIKE: That’s right. Kim MItchell, he is probably the greatest guitarist Canada has ever produced, an absolute guitar wizard, I remember they played …

CHRIS: … Patio Lanterns. I remember that was the big slow song played at every party when I was a teenager.

MIKE: You’re a lot younger than me but I… Max Webster was his band and apropos  of nothing because there was no person called Max Webster. But they opened for Richie Blackmore who was the guitarist for Deep Purple in Montreal and just blew him off the stage. And so he’s such an amazing guitarist. He’s had a heart attack, he’s in a hospital in Toronto. Kim, we worked together many times, my heart goes out to you, I hope you’re feeling better,

CHRIS: And what better reason to encourage people to think about things they can do to live a healthier lifestyle and we’re not gonna get into it.

MIKE: A lot of it’s a mental game though isn’t it, Chris?

CHRIS: A lot of it is. In terms of diet and exercise component. We do have a blogpost on that. You’ll find it at MikeMandelHypnosis.com if you click the blog link and maybe scroll back one or two pages at this point in January 2016 and you’ll find a  blogpost called “8 Tips to be Strong, Lean and Happy”…

MIKE: Nice!

CHRIS: Something to that effect.

MIKE: Hurrah!

CHRIS: So read it because it can change your life. If you’re at threshold and if you’re looking to make a change..

MIKE: This can help you.

CHRIS: There’s a great, great advice for you. So we have talked, Oh, there’s one of the topics here that Mike wanted to talk about, this is again, around living a better life. So mobile technology, do you remember a podcast somewhere in the 20’s I think in the Brain Software podcast #25. And I think you said something like..

MIKE: “I will never send a text message in my life.” Obviously, three years ago I got drawn in and I got an Iphone.

CHRIS: And you have that sort of flip phones. Just a regular phone.

MIKE: Yeah. It burned coals it was so old …

CHRIS: And so you got yourself an Iphone,

MIKE:  Three years ago.

CHRIS: You started sending an email, text messages and getting your email on your phone.

MIKE: But the difference is Chris is I don’t text while I’m driving. I watched this, I watched people walking across traffic lights texting, driving, texting and a weird thing happen you see, there’s an interaction with the phone, and this little smug self-satisfied smile appears on their face.

CHRIS:When you get a texts.

MIKE: Lisa Carnwith, our friend who’s an engineer and a scientist, teaches “Scientists in Schools” … she agrees with me … Master hypnotist.

CHRIS: She’s teaching at hypnothoughts this year.

MIKE: Yes. It’s a dopamine release, it’s a reward chemical. You find a 50 dollar bill on the street, dopamine is released. It’s reward chemical. That’s why we feel good about it.

CHRIS: It’s like you’re a mouse in a experiment. Yeah. You press a little button and a pellet comes out. A food pellet.

MIKE: Right or you’re a missing person in an Argentinian prison. What are you talking about?

CHRIS: It’s a reward right?

MIKE: They give you a grilled cheese sandwich instead of gruel and you’re thrilled, right? But yes, I’m with you on that. I see people, I think they sent a text and when the reply comes in there is a dopamine release. I think this is the addiction. I think this is why it causes an addictive behavior. I sat with dinner … Chris, I’m doing it right now I got my iPhone..

CHRIS:You sat with dinner?

MIKE: I sat AT dinner with a friend of mine … that was good jumpin … you you’re starting to sound like me … but I’ve disregarded it already so let’s drop it … having dinner with a friend of mine, and he’s sitting at dinner like this, I’m holding my iPhone …

CHRIS:  You have to explain to the people what you’re doing.

MIKE: I’m holding my iPhone in my hand..

CHRIS: Staring at it.

MIKE: Nah, just sort of glancing at it .

CHRIS: Intently staring at it.

MIKE: He did this during dinner and the woman whose house it was says “ are you expecting a phone call?”. And he oh. It had just become so much an extension to his brain ..

CHRIS: Yeah it really has, so the reframe, I’ll offer the reframe and maybe you can explain what reframe means.

MIKE: Carry on.

CHRIS: What I wanna offer for you all listening is, Is technology running your life or is it helping you run a more effective life?

MIKE: Or …

CHRIS: Because they are two very different situations, right? And I will be the first to admit probably about  sixteen years ago, I had a job where I had a BlackBerry. I was like the first few people who had BlackBerry. It was not super popular, it hadn’t hit the consumer market, it was still very much a professional tool. So if you are in a corporate job and you needed instant email and stuff, You have BlackBerry. I wasn’t even married then, I was about one year away to getting married with no kids yet and I remember being on a dinner with my wife and I held this BlackBerry under the table just to, you know, check my emails and she caught me and called me up and said “Put the thing away”. So I did. And then very quickly, early on, I learned you know that it was just not cool.

MIKE: Well Chris, I have been speaking at corporate events where they pay me thousands and thousands of dollars for an hour of my time.

CHRIS: And everybody’s staring at their phones.

MIKE: Well not everybody. I see the odd person. His hands are at the edge of the table, he’s got a phone, does he really think no one can tell?

CHRIS: Yeah, exactly.

MIKE: And I was calling from the platform, and I was saying “I wanna thank you who are in the audience who are so deeply spiritual, keeping your heads bowed, your hands down and you’re praying for me right now.” And everybody stops.

CHRIS: And so this is the reason we’re bringing this up is, becoming more and more a problem, and kids are growing up with parents who are buried in their phone or tablets their entire childhood life, these kids are entirely growing up with parents that are essentially not …

MIKE: Largely absent

Chris: Because they are busy getting that little food-pellet reward example that I talked about, busy getting those dopamine responses, posting on Facebook, Twitter or getting an email or text message or Snapchat or whatever it is, whatever the next thing is. It IS addictive and you have to be aware of it and you have to think about whether that technology is making your life better or whether you are becoming someone who’s life is run by it and that’s not cool.

MIKE: Let’s go beyond that  Chris because that’s so brilliant what you are saying. What about having a life? Instead of a virtual life?

CHRIS: Go out and talk to real people. Interact with actual people.

MIKE: And you know with the Virtual Reality Goggles and all that … It’s only gonna get worse.

CHRIS: It is.

MIKE: It’s gonna get worse. I think they’re wonderful in certain settings to be able to have someone who’s a cancer patient lying on a hospital bed to be able to put the goggles on and wander through a forest or something, it’s an amazing, interactive, and empowering experience.

CHRIS: Well, or even in education … to be a surgeon in training and be able to put  on this virtual reality goggles and learn how to perform surgery, let’s say. There’s all kind of great uses of technology.

MIKE: Or even to put on these virtual reality goggles and see the next generation of virtual reality goggles is coming down the pipe. (Chris and Mike laugh)

MIKE: I’m a comic genius!

CHRIS: (Laughing) There are uses, very worthwhile uses, and there are abuses. In terms of it affecting your life.

MIKE: Don’t let stuff run your life. So Chris we are ready for our empowering question. Why don’t you deliver the empowering question?

CHRIS: So the empowering question..

MIKE: (mimics Chris)

CHRIS: I have a hard time talking. The empowering question today is “Who is the most important person in your life? And what are you going to do today to make the quality of their life even better? “

MIKE: Wow.

CHRIS: “Who is the most important person in your life? And what are you going to do today to make the quality of their life even better?”

MIKE: Brilliant man. That’s a great one. That’s a really good one. I wanna give you today’s metaphor. It’s an empowering metaphor and again drawn from my own experience. It’s a true one.

CHRIS: Don’t sound so excited.

MIKE: Oh thanks man. It’s actually pretty heavy. In 1977, my mother is dying of cancer, she was  diagnosed early in the year my father told me I think in May and by July 5th she passed away. She did not want to go to the hospital and undergo Chemotherapy or radiation treatment. She knew it was terminal. She wanted to sleep and pass away and die gently at home, essentially surrounded by those who loved her. And so my father arranged for a hospital bed to be brought to our townhouse 1227 York Mills Townhouse 49 and she was comfortable, we had home help come in, we had a nurse come in, and she was given Morphine or whatever towards the end and gradually not Morphine, I think Mandrax  and sleeping pills. Gradually slipped away and died on July the fifth. The interesting thing about it though, Chris, is that summer I had known from May that she was dying. I took time off work from doing hypnosis shows and I looked after her. I stayed home with her when the nurse wasn’t there. I was just there for two months. But the weird thing is I have about forty seconds of memory of that entire time. It’s just gone! Even though I was in my twenties, I wasn’t a little kid, the time has vanished. I can remember her looking out the window, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon, I can remember a couple of minor things but the time is essentially gone. And I started using this and thinking back and realized, when we lost our orange cat, who I had from 1960 to about 1975, our cat, Honey, because he was honey-colored. I can’t remember what happened to him. Even though, probably I was 21 when I lost him. I can’t remember. Did we have him put to sleep? Did he die quietly at home? And I carried it back further Chris, I used to have rats in the cage, healthy happy rats. Harris, an Irish hooded rat. I have no idea what happened to them. Even though I was a teenager. Where had those memories gone? I don’t go digging around. My unconscious clearly just don’t want me to remember.

CHRIS: Thank you for listening to Brain Software podcast episode number 66 with Mike Mandel and I’m Chris Thompson. We encourage you to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, visit our website, MikeMandelHypnosis.com, subscribe to our email list and get the Brain Software ebook, it’s right on our homepage. And leave a rating or review for this podcast if you enjoyed this, or you can share it with more people. If you think it deserves a 5-star rating, then by all means, give it to us! Thanks everybody!

MIKE: Thanks again!

CHRIS: Have a great day and make your life better and Make the life of other people around you better and have an awesome life.