Episode 38 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel is now live! This podcast episode was fun and (as always) hilarious. I think Mike outdid himself with the whacky ending.
Since we’re moving into full transcripts (always available under the podcast tab at MikeMandelHypnosis.com the show notes will be very condensed.
Here are the show notes for this episode
- We spend a lot of time talking about flow states, and how to get into them.
- We discuss the power of TV and the Internet to cause you to enter the wrong kinds of trances, taking you out of a flow state.
- Mike explains how you can steal states (very cool)
- Learn the power of a anchoring through the hilarious “Whiteout” story
- Discover the power of congruence (and some misdirection) with Mike’s hilarious iPhone password hacking app story “Cracker”
- 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 stories have you been telling yourself even though they’re not true. And how is this affecting you?
Closing metaphor: Your computer has a virus!
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 38 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel. He admits he eats too much pizza, thinks London is the greatest city on Earth and hopes that he his wisdom tooth never descends. He is the center of the hypnotic world epicenter, the rider on the hypnotic storm. He is none other than Mike Mandel.
Mike: Yes Chris here we are podcasting from the realms of enjoyment, the very center of the epicenter of global hypnosis, Toronto, Canada and we are bringing you the stuff that matters, the stuff that will change your life free to you and at our own cost because we care more than anyone else.
Chris: That’s right. So, we’ve got a bunch of stuff that we want to talk about today.
Mike: Yes, we do.
Chris: Now the fact that you eat too much pizza is okay because you admit it [laughs].
Mike: I admit it so it’s okay. I don’t know man. I love Indian food and I love pizza and I really have trouble cutting the pizza down despite the wheat and the GMO and all this stuff.
Chris: Well, I guess you’re not at threshold.
Mike: I guess not.
Chris: [laughs] All right, let’s talk about Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy.
Mike: I’d like to address that whole wisdom tooth thing first. You know guys the reason I think London’s the greatest city on Earth and it’s up against some huge competition with New York and Paris especially and Sydney, Australia I love as well but London… It was the great Samuel Jones who said when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life for all that is needed can be found there or words to that effect but he’s dead but he can’t complain if I got it wrong.
Chris: I guess he can’t.
Mike: The wisdom tooth Chris. I only got one wisdom tooth and don’t make jokes about my intelligence or anything based on that but it is in the upper right. It never emerged and not only is it not even close to emerging.
Chris: It never emerged or it never awoken? [laughs]
Mike: Never awoken. Yeah thank you. But this stupid wisdom tooth, you look at an x-ray, it’s so high up it’s practically in the parietal lobe of my brain.
Chris: It’s almost part of your brain.
Mike: Almost. They said when I was in my 40s, it would descend and they would have to go in with scalpels and excavating crews and cut that sucker out of there but it’s not descended praise God. So, it’s still there as a personal friend and almost a pet.
Chris: Excellent. All right. Let’s talk real quick because the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy.
Mike: language police …quickly.
Chris: Quickly …has been out. The Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy has now been on the market for over a month.
Mike: Yes and we’re getting a great response Chris. As you know we have students in Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Ireland.
Chris: Germany.
Mike: Germany, Norway, Bahrain in the Middle East. All over North America.
Chris: United Kingdom.
Mike: Interacting with each other. Just having absolute blast. We’ve got one in Luxemburg as well.
Chris: Yes!
Mike: Which is fantastic and we are pressing on and seizing the hypnosis world by storm. Check out our online training. We are absolutely doing our best to make it the best online hypnosis training anywhere.
Chris: So here’s my very short commercial for it. we just wrapped up the July architecture of hypnosis class here in Toronto and we had many people from all over the world come out and of course…
Mike: Czech Republic, first time.
Chris: Yeah, Eric.
Mike: Hello Eric.
Chris: Hello Eric and how’s your pinky doing? We’ll talk about more on that later. [laughs]
Mike: More about that later yeah.
Chris: The feedback has been phenomenal so I really love that we got email from people who joined the online training after they did the live training and they said this is some of the most organized and most delivered and structured content they have ever seen online.
Mike: I know Chris and it’s true and the interesting thing is these are people who have already done the training and have paid into the online stuff to keep reviewing it and having fun with it.
Chris: yeah which is really, really awesome. so anyway, that’s it for our little short commercial. https://MikeMandelHypnosis.com/academy will get you to the sign up page to become an amazing hypnotist and not only that, learn how to have a really interesting and fascinating conversations with people and learn how to control the conversations and build rapport and use language patterns.
Mike: And just have a better life.
Chris: Absolutely.
Mike: And why not guys?
Chris: Yeah if it’s not worth doing… if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.
Mike: Exactly.
Chris: All right let’s talk about the importance of flow state.
Mike: Oh flow state. Yeah this is interesting because this is one of the human givens. The idea that we all need to get into a flow state and a flow state is one of those remarkable situations where we become unaware of time and we’re doing something and are fully absorbed by it. We all have a need to be able to do this and it’s really good for our brains when we do. It could be while you’re gardening or playing a musical instrument or something or you know writing material. Whatever it is, that flow state is a very, very powerful thing and it’s also very important for your mental health and I’ve discovered over the years how crucial it is for me when I’m working on any project to ensure I go into the flow state without interruption because I’ve got so much stuff in the RAM of my brain all the time. While I’m speaking now, I’ve got little ditties playing in the background and stupid music and stuff. My brain is always like that and in order to create or work, I have to shut down all that internal noise and static and to do so, it takes me about 10 minutes and then I get into a flow state. The worst thing for me at that point is to be interrupted. If you’re a person who hates interruption, make sure you don’t get interrupted. It wrecks everything for me and when I was a kid.
Chris: Oh can I ask you a question?
Mike: Yes by all means.
Chris: No I’m just interrupting you [laughing].
Mike: Ah. It’s okay I wasn’t in the flow state but when I was a kid… when I were a lad, my parents sort of got this but they never understood what constituted an interruption. So they thought it meant if they were loud, they were interrupting me and if they whispered, they weren’t. So I’d working on a school project, I’d be finally on the zone and the flow state getting stuff done you know Aztecs and Incas and where they are over central America and I’m drawing this thing and my mom would come in and whisper and say, “I don’t want to bother you. can I get you a nice cup of tea or something?” thinking that by whispering, it’s somehow not affecting me. She yanked me right out of the flow state and I go, “No, mom. I’m fine. Just leave me alone.” “Okay. I just didn’t want to interrupt you.” You’ve interrupted me mom. just please, I love you. Go away. stop whispering at me which is why I hate whispering to this day. any kind of interruption would draw me out and it would take me several minutes to go back in the flow state. It’s the same right now and when I’m on stage, if I’m doing a presentation or a stage show, it takes me a few minutes to get my brain into that flow state and the worst thing for me is being surrounded by people who keep talking to me with incessant chatter. Every time I have to answer them, I’m yanked back out of the flow state and have to reset and start trying to get back into it again and it becomes trying because I’m not getting there as easily and my wife didn’t use to understand this, Chris. She used to say, “Oh I know you’re working so much. Get Paul or Bruce to go with you. it would be a nice break if you have someone to talk to.” I’m saying, “I don’t want anyone to frikkin’ talk to”.That’s the problem. I need to zone out and get in my zone. but the weird thing about this and then we’ll tie it in with our listeners is you need to be in a flow state on vacation too and that’s what happens when…
Chris: Good point.
Mike: Yeah. If you’re really busy with your job and you need a vacation and you take a week, most people find it takes them a couple of days to get into that groove, into that flow and until then, they’re still carrying the baggage of their work week and all this stuff. They finally get in the groove and then they start thinking about going back to work and they lose the flow state and all the anxiety of going back to work comes in so they get about two days out of a week which is their actual vacation. So you got to remember, structure these things into your life. Let your breaks be flow states where nobody interrupts you. Let your vacations be flow states where you leave your work behind and when you’re working on anything, don’t let people jar you out of that. You need to be in that state to function well.
Chris: So let’s give people some tips on how can you get in like let’s say someone is about to go on vacation, they know that they are going to have to bring their smart phone with them and keep in touch with the office and all the other crap that goes along with having a job and being on vacation at the same time where you’re expected to deal with people back at the office. Telling someone they need to get into flow state is certainly truthful. How do they do it?
Mike: Very, very good question and you got to remember, it’s not easy for a lot of people but there are certain strategies you want to use. One of them is limit your contact with your work and with the outside world when you’re on vacation. When I’m up at our family cottage this summer, I’m not checking my email all day or available on text messages. I’ll have the dinger turned off so I’m not hearing the text come in, not hearing the emails come in and I will check the email when I get up in the morning with morning coffee and I’ll check it in the evening before bedtime and anything that needs to be attended can be done on those two checks. Give yourself that 10-minute window and that’s it and you say to yourself, I’m not going in there again. The rest of the time, I’m going to enjoy where I am. If the world ends, I will find out about it without checking with the media and breathe your stuff away. So when you’re going on vacation, put all of your stuff, bundle it up in your mind, set it up on the side of the platform or at the side of the check-in at the airport or at the gate when you’re getting in your plane. Just set it there in your mind and breathe deeply. Exhale and leave it there. It’ll be there when you come back. You’ll be functioning far more efficiently and effectively if you leave the work behind.
Chris: You know, this is a really good point and it makes me think about the discussions we’ve had about TV and people watching too much TV and we talked about this morning when we did the creativity webinar for our online students. The whole idea of TV is it drops you into a trance that isn’t very effective because it’s the television that’s controlling your trance.
Mike: Well it’s not a very useful one. It’s really effective from their point of view.
Chris: Yeah that’s true, yeah. Not effective for you as the watcher or listener shall we say and in much the same way, the internet is going to put you, is going to guide your thinking, guide your conscious bit of information and what you’re focused on in a way that isn’t necessarily useful and if you just shut it off, you don’t have those distractions. The internet is very much a distraction just like your mom coming in interrupting you doing your homework.
Mike: Oh for sure it is, Chris, and when I am away, I have to do a bit of writing because I’m writing and completing the course we’re teaching on September 7th, the graphology course. Now I want to organize it, make it really good but I will have to go there at some point during my vacation but I’m not going to be working on it every day. I’ll structure some time to work on it and then I’ll choose that time and then I’ll put the laptop away. I’m not going to be spending my whole vacation on that. I want to be out on a kayak and sitting on the beach and looking at loons and drinking a glass of wine and relaxing.
Chris: Right that’s true. I know as someone who checks email pretty religiously. When I take my kids to the park, if I leave my phone at home, it is the best thing I could possibly do and to me, that’s the same thing as shutting off the TV.
Mike: Yeah it’s hard to do.
Chris: Yeah get in the flow state of enjoying playing with my kids or get in the flow state of enjoying you know whatever it is that you’re doing. you can’t be in that flow state if you’re being interrupted by the internet, by someone else, by thoughts of work, whatever it is. So-
Mike: Learn to get there and stay there for protracted periods of time. Your mental health will benefit immeasurably from it and while we’re on this, so just say as an aside, Chris, which was so funny. The demo you gave me when we did a video shoot the other day with Adam Sutherland and [Name] , your daughter, watching a movie on Netflix and you said, look at the trance she’s in. She was exhibiting all sorts of external trance indicators, flaccid muscles, eyes staring, slow blink reflex and Chris said, “Watch this. [Name] you know I’m going to let you take this catalog and go order all these different things in this catalog” and she never looked up and you said, “I’m going to do this and this and you’re going to get to go to such and such.” and she never looked up, she didn’t hear and then when they said, “we got to go” and she closed the laptop and you said, “And I’m going to triple your allowance” and she spun around and went, “What? What did you say?”she finally heard you. It broke the state yeah.
Chris: Yeah she was totally tranced out and what I’d said to her is “You can have the American girl catalog and you can pick everything that you want and I will buy it for you.” I knew she wasn’t paying attention because she was totally tranced out. It’s hilarious.
Mike: I couldn’t believe it. This is amazing.
Chris: Yeah it was very, very funny. So, let’s yeah you know what, I’ll close off on that subject also by saying that in 2011, when I took my family to France for10 weeks.
Mike: Show off!
Chris: We did something unusual which was I needed to have…
Mike: [Jokes] you rented a TV when you were there.
Chris: I needed to have internet access at least some of the time while I was there and I was buying these prepaid passes that would work for 48 hours unlimited. So we would basically binge consume or download whatever it is that we wanted include videos and stuff for the kids to be able to watch at night time they relax and I would check my emails during those 48 hours and then we would go three days without any internet connection at all.
Mike: And how were the anxiety levels?
Chris: It really weren’t bad at all. The first three days I was like oh you know getting hooked up and stuff, getting everything working, I was like oh I hope I’m not missing any you know disasters that I need to fix whatever and then everything just became this flow state of it can wait three days. no big deal.
Mike: Nice and it really can.
Chris: Yup and it was fine.
Mike: You know what I wanted to address and we haven’t got this on our list, how about that really cool email we got from that guy in Slough, England. He was an engineering technician. Forgive me, I can’t remember his name right now but so cool. Gave us an interesting personal history.
Chris: I’m going to grab the email.
Mike: Yeah. It’s like he’s got a name like Renford or something, Renton or something. It’s really cool but he told a great story about how he has been listening to our podcast and he listens to a lot of personal development stuff and he’s enjoying the podcast.
Chris: Renford.
Mike: Renford. And in Slough, and he talked about how he determined he was going to use the quarter experiment we mentioned many podcast ago because he’s just waiting through them now and where you focus intently on a quarter, you imagine vividly you’re going to find one on the ground and usually within 24 hours, you’ll find one as though someone has placed it right in your path. The last time I did this Chris, it so freaked me out. A couple of weeks ago, I did the quarter experiment, imagined vividly I was going to find one lying on the ground and the next day, Heather and I were walking down the distillery district in Toronto, you know where I mean. We took a shortcut from our car and I was on one side of the sidewalk, she was on the other and right in front of me was a nice, shiny, new quarter. In front of me, not in front of her. As I bend to pick it up, there was a second one. I said this is insane. Well Renford has written to us and said that he did the quarter experiment even though he lives in England.
Chris: And he’s never been to the States.
Mike: Never been to the states, never been to Canada.
Chris: And he never had American money.
Mike: Never had American money and he changed it in his experiment to a 20p coin. In his mind, a 20 pence coin, 20p and forgot about it and the next day, he was paying for something in the door and in the change that was in his pocket, he found a quarter.
Chris: A very strange coin.
Mike: A quarter. Not even the 20p. There was a quarter.
Chris: An American quarter.
Mike: So I’m saying do the quarter experiment. Make it a Canadian one though. Anywhere you are and see if it shows up.
Chris: I love the absolutely bizarre things that happen to people and then they email us. It’s fantastic. So, Renford, awesome. It was a totally awesome email. Send more like that people. Let’s talk about. Mike, let’s talk about stealing states.
Mike: Oh yeah
Chris: Borrowing states from world class sports.
Mike: Yes. Now we’ve talked about on the one side, on the one hand about getting people in the zone so that when they’re doing sports of any kind, they’re at their absolute peak but we’re now talking about doing the reverse. Borrowing or stealing states from world class sports and here’s what I mean. If you have a team you like you know Oakland As or whatever in any kind of sport or Manchester United. Woo! Go Red Devils or trying to make beliefs, not likely. When you have a team you really like, if they’ve ever had an occasion that they made it into a championship or very decisive game and they were doing well, you know what kind of state you were in when they were doing great. It was a highly empowered state, you were congruent, you were breathing well, you were moving well, you were totally focused on the locus of the screen or the sports arena if you’re there live. I want you to think back now to your favorite sports team if you like that sort of thing or your favorite gymnast or someone at the Olympics who you followed and really liked and who did spectacularly well and as you think back to that person and that occasion, enter fully into the state you were in when they succeeded and you felt awesome and see what you saw or the nearest approximation of it you can make and feel everything you felt and hear all the sounds of the cheering or whatever was there and now breathe it in and make it your own… feel it again and keep it… That’s right…
Chris: Awesome. So basically, you can either go back to a peak state or create a peak state for a sports event or whatever or you can borrow one that somebody else has experienced.
Mike: Well if someone else has experienced, it’s going to be more difficult because you don’t have a vested interest in the team right?
Chris: Yeah sorry. What I mean yeah…
Mike: What we’re doing is….
Chris: Associating yourself into-
Mike: Yeah associate yourself into it but we’re saying this is essentially revivification so but we’re going right to a specific moment where they knew what it was like and how they felt and breathe it in to the depths of your being down to your toes and feel how great your felt then now.
Chris: It’s interesting to talk about sports teams in particular because I think it was Cialdini who did it in an experiment with this where there is this feeling of belonging to the team if the team wins. And so, I think the situation went something like this and it’s in his book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, that people would let’s say after a game like maybe a university football game or something like that, people would call and ask you know how do you feel about how the team did in the game and if they had won, if the team had won, they would say WE you know WE did blah, blah, blah whatever it was and if the team had lost, it was they.
Mike: Those filthy swines.
Chris: It was much more common. It was a loss they said THEY (lost).
Mike: None of this is surprising because one of the human givens is the need to belong to a tribe, the need to belong to a social group like those of you who right now are listening are part of our online hypnosis community. You’re part of a tribe now. Storm riders, you’re storm riders. You’re winners. Now, having said that, HG Wells documented this very early. He was a futurist in a lot of ways. He might be on the time machine, a lot of his other writings, he saw the concept to the new world order that could be fashioned and whatever one thinks of that, the interesting comment was he was one of the first I believe, if not the very first to talk about building huge stadiums so people could go and watch sports. Prior to that, nobody watched sports Chris. People participated in sports. Now we do it vicariously. We belong to a tribe that we’re not actually part of and we get it vicariously by watching hockey games and football games and soccer matches and all these things.
Chris: Yeah a lot of people will ask me because I don’t have a cable connection at home anymore. “Well how do you watch sports?” I say, “Well you know what? I don’t.” “Well what do you mean? You don’t like sports?” “Well no I love sports. I’d rather just actually do them than watch them.”
Mike: Right, right.
Chris: No one can disagree with me when I say that.
Mike: Well you can apply that to porn in a lot of things if you really consider it, can you?
Chris: [laughs]
Mike: So, we’ll edit that out. Next…
Chris: That has to be the funniest we’ll edit that situations.
Mike: Yeah and you know, we will leave it in.
Chris: Yeah of course. It’s just a joke.
Mike: It’s too damn brilliant. Okay…
Chris: All right let’s move on to… how much time do we have left?
Mike: Oh we lost time Chris. We’ve got about 10 minutes.
Chris: We’ve got loads of time. So we have, I think we should talk about whiteout.
Mike: Oh man. Whiteout’s a really interesting phenomenon. Hang on. let me do a Gerry Kein here. [coughs] Whiteouts are really interesting phenomenon. They are the opposite of a high performance state. A whiteout creates about the lowest – stop laughing! – about the lowest performance state you can possibly create is a whiteout and this is an accident.
Chris: I completely forget what a whiteout is.
Mike: Oh probably because you’re having one now.
Chris: [laughs]
Mike: Years ago, on stage, I had a moment that air traffic controllers called losing the picture which is terrifying if you have 30 planes at varying altitudes and different vectors and you have to land them suddenly. So they have someone jump in frantically and take control. They have lost the picture.
Chris: Nice metaphor. Whiteout.
Mike: It is. So I was on stage and was working with a bunch people and I suddenly became aware that instead of being in a flow state in uptime, I was in downtime. I was self-aware, I was listening to myself talk.
Chris: Critical voice.
Mike: I was … no not even critical, just self-awareness and aware people are looking at me and listening to me and I lost the freaking picture. I didn’t know where I was, what was going on. It was kind of funny actually. I didn’t really mind it and after a few seconds, it dissipated. so I was working with this guy on the road for six years. We met in Colorado, he’s another Brit and could talk backwards into a number of memory feats and it was a laugh at the time and anyway I told him, I said, “I’d get these things occasionally called whiteouts. Have you ever had one?” And he said, “No. What’s that?” So I described it to him in considerable depth while he started getting them.
Chris: [laughs]
Mike: And he was furious with me because he said even though they existed then he’d be on stage and this little voice inside his head would say, don’t listen to me, don’t listen to me like watch the audience, don’t have a whiteout. Don’t… and it got so funny.
Chris: Notice the language. Don’t have a whiteout.
Mike: Don’t have a whiteout.
Chris: Try not to have a whiteout.
Mike: So I didn’t realize how severely this was affecting him. I just found it hilarious because I didn’t mind when I had them because they seemed to last forever but they’re really only a few seconds. So we had an event somewhere and I got someone in the audience to hand him a note while he was in the middle of his act. he’s doing a memory act and it said, don’t have a whiteout.
Chris: [laughs]don’t have a whiteout.
Mike: It’s a total stranger handing him this which is of course instantly triggered a whiteout didn’t know where he was, what he was doing.
Chris: What a [22:29] a pattern interrupt.
Mike: Howling with laughter yes. A pattern interrupt that plunged him into the very colon of a bad state. So it got even funnier. He was doing his memory act and we used to have a big rolling blackboard provided at each event and I would, we’d cover it with a big blanket they’d also provide and he’d write you know multiple digit number she’d hear from the audience and they’d be covered with a blanket and then at the end of the show, he’d turn his back and uncover it and he’d say them all from memory many minutes later backwards. So I prepped the blackboard before he got to it.
Chris: With whiteout.
Mike: Yes but written with this side of the chalk like in giant letters with multiple exclamation marks and he’s okay. He says talking backwards, he’s in the freaking zone and he grabs a blanket and whips it away and sees the word whiteout and he stood there in shock and horror. His face … you’d think he was staring at a multiple car accident with…
Chris: Fighting back layers of trance…
Mike: Layers of trance. That’s why he’s looking like staring at a car accident with multiple fatalities beyond his control and his whiteout was just I thought was hilarious. Well he chided and he freaked afterwards and he said, “Never mention them to me again, never! Serious! Don’t ever do it again.” which of course made it funnier for me. I laid off mentioning it but I had told a couple of friends about whiteouts and sure enough, Paul Moyer, his company had hired this guy to come in to a corporate event.
Chris: Can we use his last name?
Mike: We can. We just did and when the guy went onstage, Paul said to him, went up to him whom he barely knew, just met him at the events and he said, “Don’t have a whiteout”, thinking he was making a joke and Paul said he looked at him with just the shock and horror and then he announced him and he went up stage, picked up the microphone, put it back down and walked off stage.
Chris: I could see Paul just doing this just…
Mike: Came back, picked up the mic again. Paul starts laughing and he said the guy just went nope put it back and stay away. Four failed attempts to start his act. His whiteout was so severe. Absolutely true story.
Chris: Now this is an anchor.
Mike: It’s an unresourceful state. It’s hilarious.
Chris: So the state has been anchored to the phrase whiteout. Don’t have a whiteout. If you’re driving right now, please remember where you’re going.
Mike: That’s right. Stay safe.
Chris: All right, that’s pretty funny. We’ve got a couple more funny stories. I don’t think we’re going to get thrilled in this podcast so let’s save some for the next.
Mike: Let’s do that.
Chris: Let’s do one more. Let’s do one more. Let’s do this one. I want you to talk about the power of congruence and the joke that you played with your friend with the fake iPhone app.
Mike: Oh yes this was just a couple of weekends ago.
Chris: I freaking love this one.
Mike: I was at a friend’s house, Ken Walton. Ken Walton’s a really cool guy. He’s a hypnotist, NLP practitioner, a fine artist. I mean his paintings look absolutely gorgeous. He’s a kung fu master. I mean a real master, grand master. He studied for years and years and he’s got a great sense of humor as well and he’s Irish. He’s one of my best friends in the world. Having said all that, him and his wife, my wife and I and another couple, Wane and his wife, Fern, were all over, we’re having dinner together and barbecuing in the pool and was just a blast and Wayne is looking at his iPhone all the time as we do and I glanced over his shoulders as I passed and I saw him input his code.
Chris: Password.
Mike: His password … and I just remembered it and he never saw me pass and I waited several minutes until through time misdirection, it wouldn’t even have occurred to him I was there when he logged on with it and he’d already put it down.
Chris: As opposed if he had launched into the joke right away.
Mike: Right which would’ve put his guard up. So, we’re sitting there and we’re talking about different apps and I have a lot of apps that I really like and I say, “Hey, have you seen Cracker? And he said what’s Cracker and I said, “Oh you can crack open the…”
Chris: Password.
Mike: Thank you. I’ve got a whiteout.
Chris: Are you going to have a whiteout?
Mike: “Crack open the password on any iPhone. If you have an iPhone, I can tell what it is.” He said, “Shut up, it’s not possible.” I said “It is.” I said, “I turned it on and walked through the mall and a little arrow with a compass points indifferent directions and as it is, it’s flashing and bringing up the passwords of people I’m going to past.” I said it totally congruently like it was this most amazing thing and he would love this app. I said, “It’s nearly five bucks.” Again, putting a price on it seems real. He said, “Well, show me. Show me.”I said, “Okay, hold your iPhone in front of you.”
Chris: So you didn’t have him actually – he wanted to see the app on your phone and you somehow misdirected him to not…
Mike: Misdirected him. I’ll show you how it works.
Chris: Got you.
Mike: Your iPhone, is it turned on?
Chris: Yes, it’s on sleep.
Mike: I said okay. So I’ve got mine in my hand and I stood facing everybody feet away and I said, “Okay, I’ll just activate the app. Okay it’s search – okay it’s found your I-“ interrupting myself and said, “Okay, it’s searching. Oh it’s found your iPhone.” And he goes, “It has not.” “Okay, I’m just doing a check. It takes a while on the last couple- okay, I’ve got your first number.”
Chris: And you’re reading out?
Mike: No I didn’t read anything and said, “I’ve got the second one” and he’s like smirking, “yeah, you do” and I said, “Third one, it sometimes takes – oh no! I’ve got them all.” He said, “Get lost!”I said, “Hand me your phone.” So he does and I sort of unlocked it and handed it to him. He said, “That is amazing. what’s it called?”
Chris: And he never looked at your phone.
Mike: He never looked at my phone because I was so congruent and because I interrupted myself as if the phone had interrupted me in the process, it seemed believable. Congruence, guys, will get you almost anything.
Chris: And it’s way funnier when you’re [laughs]
Mike: It’s way more funny when you’re doing stupid jokes and you’re very congruent. So he said, “What’s it called?” I said, “Cracker.” So I’m at the barbecue with Ken telling him. We we’re having a good laugh and I look, Wayne’s trying to find it in the… iTunes store. He said, “It’s not in here.” I said “Oh it’s spelled with a K.” He’s like, “oh” picks his phone up and starts all over and then finally, I told him the truth.
Chris: Which is just like the words glanative and dursative … people just assume they’re spelling it wrong.
Mike: Have some fun with it. good grief!
Chris: Oh that’s so hilarious. All right, that pretty much wraps up the time we have for content. Well as if the closing metaphor and empowering questions aren’t.
Mike: What about inquiry and question, yeah. they’re not.
Chris: Let’s do the empowering question.
Mike: Okay. Here’s my empowering question for you today and I want you to let this resonate and let it change you. “What stories are you telling yourself even though they’re not true?” let me ask that again, “What stories are you continuously telling yourself even though they’re not true and how is this affecting you and the quality of your life?”
Chris: Just let that resonate for awhile.
Mike: That’s right.
Chris: And on the next podcast, we’ll have a story to share that relates to this. Mike, do we have a closing metaphor. I believe we do.
Mike: We do. This is an interesting one that goes back a number of years and it’s another practical joke but it’s a good metaphor as well and it ties in to the empowering question you just heard. A very good friend of mine is grand master, Garry Foo. Garry Foo is the head of the (unclear) system of Martial Arts and I study with him and I earned a red belt in it and then went on to do other things but he’s an excellent teacher and I modeled a lot of his teaching style but Gary is also very funny to joke with because he’s got a great sense of humor. Except when the joke’s on him, which I guess we canal say that about ourselves. So one day, I got into his computer in his office and he didn’t know and he just left it on and I went to the autocorrect in Windows in Microsoft Word. So you can take any particular word and have it changed into something else every time it’s typed. So if you put Mike, it always capitalizes it if you didn’t, etc. You know what I mean. So I took the autocorrect and I took a particular word, I think it was their. It was the t-h-e-i-r their as in their money, their house which I knew he probably wouldn’t be typing on his computer in the very near future and that way, I would not be seen as being connected with it at all and I changed their to autocorrect to something in like a 24 point font in red letters saying, “Your computer is infected. You have a virus! Shut down immediately!” and I forgot about it and I found later it was absolutely hilarious. he’s working on the computer on serious important stuff for a manual he was writing late at night and he’s just saying you know, and he got to their abode… and then you have a computer virus! Your computer’s screwed up and he freaked and he shut it down and then he put up-to-date antivirus in and it ran a scan and it found nothing and he panicked and he used a different antivirus software and that found nothing and so he kept typing again and it came up again so now he’s in full panic mode and he called his father-in-law and he came around with software. His father-in-law did computers for the Royal Bank of Canada and was really up on this and they worked on this damn thing until two in the morning and never found the virus, never found the autocorrect and were just baffled by it and he didn’t find it nearly as hilarious as I did but he kept telling himself the story that there was something wrong with his computer.
Chris: I’m Chris Thompson and this has been episode number 38 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel. I hope you enjoyed the show. We will be back with episode 39 before you know it. More awesome content coming your way. In the meantime, please head on over to iTunes and leave a rating for the show and leave an honest review for the show. The more reviews that we get, the more people that we can get this podcast out to. The whole world is listening and loving the content. We want to get more and more people involved. Also, make sure that if you’re interested in learning more about hypnosis, conversational techniques, write through to therapeutic techniques, the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy is your way to become an amazing hypnotist. https://Mikemandelhypnosis.com/academy and finally, if you’re interested in being here in Toronto on September the 7th and taking a handwriting analysis…
Mike: You will love it.
Chris: You will. Then you can head on over to https://MikeMandelhypnosis.com/handwriting and you will – your mind will be blown. That’s it everybody.